Gallery News
for exhibition openings and closings, events and auctions,sign-up for the essential GalleriesNow weekly Newsletter here
Georg Wilson joins Pilar Corrias
March 21, 2025
A spirit of place informs Georg Wilson’s practice. Drawing inspiration from ancient English folklore, poetry and painting, the artist depicts bountiful landscapes that exceed the natural; devoid of human presence, they are instead inhabited by wildling creatures that live harmoniously with the land. Wilson’s world-building is enriched by her unique approach to texture and mark-making that unifies all surfaces, forms and beings.
Painting with the seasons, Wilson’s work captures the cyclical rhythm of our existence, where birth meets growth, growth meets death and death awaits resurrection. Vibrant reds and bright greens shift to vivid yellows and deep browns as the seasons turn, and the land that was once overflowing with abundance is ready to lie dormant as the year comes to an end.
“Georg’s practice is deeply rooted in exploring the politics of ecology and history, translated through folklore and her personal experience. Her magical paintings offer a vision of the English countryside that transcends our everyday existence. We look forward to working with Georg at this exciting moment in her career.” - Pilar Corrias
Wilson’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, The Last Oozings, opened at Pilar Corrias Conduit Street on 31 January 2025 and runs until 22 March.
photo: Nick Whitworth
Timothy Taylor announces representation of Marina Adams
March 19, 2025
A new painting by Adams will be included in the forthcoming Art Basel Hong Kong 2025, which will be the artist’s debut presentation with Timothy Taylor, and a solo exhibition of her work is planned in the gallery’s New York space in September 2025.
Adams paints kinetic abstractions that explore the power of pattern. In her vibrant canvases, shapes engage energetically. Brimming with intense colour, her paintings are at times muscular and sculptural, at others sinuous and ethereal. Each distills the artist’s physical energy as she works—at once steady and responsive. Working between New York and Parma, Italy, Adams also paints small format gouache works on paper in the hills of Italy that inform the work she makes in her studio in New York. She modulates her hues with varied modes of paint application and layers of translucent pigment. Comingling and juxtaposing unlikely combinations of colour, she creates chromatic relationships that lend an uncanny luminosity to the paintings. Adams draws inspiration from commonalities, rhythms, and resonances across historically and geographically diverse cultural materials. In addition to her dialogue with her predecessors, Henri Matisse, Joan Mitchell, Alma Thomas, Willem de Kooning, and Hilma af Klint, she returns to the designs of Moorish mosaics, Indigenous American Southwest pottery, and Uzbek textiles, among other artistic traditions. Within these sources, she finds patterns that emerge from the foundational aspects of the natural world. With titles that reference the artist’s deep investment in poetry and music, these paintings welcome the engagement of other senses and of the viewer’s interpretive powers. Adams works with the belief that painting can open up context for reflection and transformation.
“What we call abstract painting is about creating a space for thought, a way to open the mind up and allow space for the other senses… When you look at them, you absorb an experience” - Adams
“We are delighted to be working with Marina Adams. I have long admired her distinctive approach to form and colour and the energy of her vibrant paintings. I look forward to presenting Marina’s work for the first time in Hong Kong next week and then later this fall at our first exhibition together in New York” - Tim Taylor
Adams will continue to be represented by Galerie Thomas Schulte in Berlin and von Bartha in Basel and Copenhagen.
photo: Jason Schmidt
Lee Bul joins Hauser & Wirth
Hauser & Wirth has announced representation of acclaimed Korean artist Lee Bul, in collaboration with Seoul-based gallery BB&M.
Known for a pioneering interdisciplinary approach honed over the course of four decades, Lee has created a body of work spanning sculpture, installation, performance and painting. She first gained international recognition in the 1990s for a provocative, genre-defying art that interrogates themes of utopian ideals, technological transformation and the fragility of human ambition. For early performances and soft sculptures that challenged societal norms, she often incorporated cyborg imagery to explore posthumanism and gender politics.
Over time, Lee’s practice has expanded to encompass large-scale immersive installations utilizing mirrored surfaces, organic-mechanical hybrids and architectural structures to engage viewers in a multi-sensory experience of space and perception. Deeply influenced by philosophy, literature and experimental architecture, her oeuvre examines the intersections of technology, history and speculative futures. Concepts of freedom and liberation are deeply embedded in Lee’s work, both thematically and formally.
In 2024, Lee was commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, to create sculptures for the niches of its landmark Fifth Avenue facade. ‘The Genesis Facade Commission: Lee Bul, Long Tail Halo’ opened on 12 September 2024 and remains on view until 10 June 2025.
The artist’s first exhibition with Hauser & Wirth will take place in New York in 2026.
photo: Yoon Hyung-moon
UK government extends tax-free period for art import
March 13, 2025
The UK government has announced an extension to the “Temporary Admissions” (TA) period for fine art and antiques, meaning that as long as they are exported within four years they will not be subject to import duties.
In what is widely seen as a fillip for the UK art market, exchequer secretary James Murray announced earlier this month that the TA period has been increased from two years to four. Dealers will now pay no import tax on pieces imported into the UK, as long as they are exported again within four years.
The adjustment is likely to affect London in particular in its position as one of the world’s three largest international art hubs, especially as New York and Hong Kong do not levy comparable taxes.
“Our art market is bigger than the whole of the rest of the EU art market put together and we want to keep it that way. We pledged that we would take action to help the British art market and that's precisely what we're doing.”
Chris Bryant, minister of state for the department of media, culture and sport
Katy Moran joins Pippy Houldsworth Gallery
March 5, 2025
Pippy Houldsworth Gallery is delighted to announce representation of British artist Katy Moran, whose first solo exhibition with the gallery, Let’s get some AIR, will open on 2 May 2025. The exhibition represents a shift in Moran’s practice, which has undergone striking developments in scale and technique since her last solo presentation in London.
Known for her compelling abstractions that explore form, colour and surface, Moran enlists a spectrum of mark-making in the expression of different atmospheres. While some of her paintings suggest traditional land or seascapes and conjure figurative associations, they are essentially records of the intangible and are deliberately engaged in sensation, as opposed to representation. Much of Moran’s inspiration comes from her transcendental meditation practice and ideas for paintings are incubated during these sessions.This connection with her unconscious allows for an intuitive approach that prioritises the autonomy of paint as medium. The incident of coincidence in dialogue with the artist’s hand guides the development of each of Moran’s paintings, which employ experimental methods in their facture, from drips and pours to body painting. By allowing the nature of paint to inform the painting process, Moran is antithetically liberated from the bonds of materiality.
Katy Moran (b. 1975, Manchester) lives and works in Hertfordshire. She completed an MA Fine Art in painting at the Royal College of Art, London in 2005.
photo: John Shard
South London Gallery receives a major new grant from The Bukhman Foundation to fund Art Block
March 4, 2025
The South London Gallery (SLG) is delighted to have received a major new grant from The Bukhman Foundation. The grant will secure the future of Art Block, the SLG’s innovative free creative space for local children and families on its neighbouring housing estate, for a two-year period, providing the necessary funding for staff costs and artists fees, materials, activities and events.
Art Block is a purpose designed, inclusive space on Sceaux Gardens estate located directly behind the SLG. It is a place for local children and young people to make, play and be creative. It opened in 2017 and was built on the SLG’s long-term work with residents of Sceaux Gardens and other neighbouring housing estates. Sceaux Gardens Estate is within the 20% most disadvantaged areas nationally. Many children live in areas with limited access to spaces to play and ongoing issues of anti-social behaviour, with 71% of children living in the immediate vicinity of the SLG eligible for free school meals, over double the Southwark average.
The Bukhman Foundation was established by Anastasia and Igor Bukhman to support breakthroughs in medical research for Type 1 Diabetes, as well as celebrate the arts and culture, and access to education. The foundation’s work within arts and culture is centred on broadening and improving access to creativity and arts education through the support of pioneering institutions, complex and ambitious artistic projects, and ground-breaking young and emerging artists.
Margot Heller, Director, South London Gallery said: “We are immensely grateful to The Bukhman Foundation for their generous support to enable us to continue our work at Art Block. We very much look forward to this new chapter in the history of Art Block and to seeing its continued positive social impact and the creativity it will nurture.”
Palmer Gallery launches The Door, marking the gallery’s first anniversary
February 28, 2025
To celebrate the first anniversary of the gallery, Palmer Gallery is launching The Door, a new programme hosted in the annexed space at the back of the gallery. Functioning as a pseudo-project space, The Door is dedicated to supporting artists who work in less commercially-driven practices, offering them a platform to create immersive, experimental, and conceptual environments. This new initiative will feature a series of solo exhibitions running alongside the main gallery programme but with a sharper focus on experimentation, worldbuilding, and sensory engagement.
Each presentation will showcase artists whose practices emphasize multi-sensory installations, site-specific work, and the transformation of space into immersive and thought-provoking environments. The name The Door is drawn from a poem by the Czech modernist Miroslav Holub. The poem is about stimulating intellectual curiosity through endeavour, while feeling and responding to reality through an appreciation of the present. It encourages readers to embrace change and uncertainty by stepping into the unknown, suggesting that even the act of opening a door can lead to discovery, renewal, and possibility. The name also highlights the physical partition between the main gallery and The Door space, serving as a gateway into the artist’s world - a portal that can be shaped and reimagined with each new presentation.
The programme launches on 6 March with a solo presentation by Daria Blum, a performance artist and Royal Academy Schools alumna.
Dr Flavia Frigeri appointed new Curatorial and Collections Director at National Portrait Gallery, London
February 26, 2025
Dr Flavia Frigeri has been appointed Curatorial and Collections Director at the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Dr Frigeri will take up this new role in April 2025, following the departure of Dr Alison Smith, who until June 2024 served as the National Portrait Gallery’s Chief Curator. As Curatorial and Collections Director, Dr Frigeri will oversee the Curatorial, Collections Management, Archive and Library departments, leading on acquisitions and commissions, Gallery displays and interpretation of the Collection from the Tudors to the present day.
Dr Frigeri is currently the CHANEL Curator for the Collection at the National Portrait Gallery, leading a major partnership project, supported by the CHANEL Culture Fund, aimed at redressing the gender imbalance within the NPG’s Collection through acquisitions, research and site-specific commissions. As part of Reframing Narratives: Women in Portraiture, Dr Frigeri was instrumental in doubling the number of portraits of women on the walls of the NPG’s post-1900 galleries ahead of its reopening in June 2023.
Dr Frigeri’s previous roles have included Curator of International Art at Tate Modern and Lecturer on modern and contemporary art at UCL, London. She has recently guest curated the group exhibition Beyond Form: Lines of Abstraction, 1950-1970 (2024) at Turner Contemporary in Margate and All Our Todays (2025), a survey of international contemporary art at MARe in Bucharest, Romania. Dr Frigeri is a widely published author, most recently she co-edited Women at Work: 1900 to Now (National Portrait Gallery, 2023) and a volume of collected essays New Histories of Art in the Global Postwar Era: Multiple Modernisms (Routledge, 2021).
Dr Frigeri studied art history at the University of Chicago and John Cabot University, Rome and the holds a PhD in art history from UCL. She held the Hilla Rebay International Fellowship at the Guggenheim museums in New York, Bilbao and Venice and is a trustee for the Association for Art History (AAH).
“I am delighted to appoint Dr Flavia Frigeri as Curatorial and Collections Director of the National Portrait Gallery. Flavia has already made such a significant impact on our Collection, and her ideas, passion and expertise will be vital in shaping our work and our impact in the years ahead. I am looking forward to working closely with Flavia in this new capacity as we develop our plans for the future.” - Victoria Siddall, Director, National Portrait Gallery
photo: © David Parry
Alison Jacques now represents Maeve Gilmore
Alison Jacques announces representation of the Estate of British artist Maeve Gilmore.
Maeve Gilmore (b.1917, London; d.1983, London) carefully constructed an interior world, replete with Surrealist imagery and centred on portraits of family, placing domestic scenes centre-stage. ‘I always seem to have been able to paint when there is intense life surrounding me,’ Gilmore wrote in 1968. ‘Despite the eternal meals, the fights of one’s children, and the constant demands of domesticity.’ Her paintings ‘made alone and imperatively,’ are a reflection of a romantic life, punctuated by war and illness and equally devoted to art-making as it was home-making and motherhood.
Gilmore’s paintings and writings reflect the selfless care and love with which she lived her life. Though she is now considered one of the twentieth century’s ‘known unknowns’, for her, there never was a contradiction between womanly domesticity and a lifelong commitment to the arts. ‘I have never been able to divorce myself aesthetically, to decide between life and painting,’ Gilmore wrote. ‘My mainspring has always been the heart and not the head’.
Following Gilmore’s first institutional show at Studio Voltaire, London in 2022, Alison Jacques will present a solo exhibition of the artist’s work from 21 March until 3 May 2025, spanning 42 years of Gilmore’s practice.
photo: Maeve Gilmore, Child with Model Bird, c.1950 © Estate of Maeve Gilmore
Michelangelo Pistoletto nominated for 2025 Nobel Peace Prize
Michelangelo Pistoletto’s nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize recognises his lifelong commitment to championing art as a tool for significant social and environmental awareness and change.
Born in in 1933, Pistoletto has for six decades forged a career that defies categorization. In his work across mediums, he mobilizes and explores the dynamics between self and community, space and duration, and reality and representation. He first presented his foundational Quadri specchianti (Mirror Paintings) in 1963 at Turin’s Galleria Galatea; these paintings include the viewer and their surroundings in the pictorial space of the work, melding the definite and the infinite. The series brought Pistoletto international recognition and led to his inclusion in major exhibitions of Pop art and Nouveau Réalisme. In the mid 1960s, he responded to the socio-political turmoil in Italy by harnessing quotidian and ephemeral materials in his sculpture series Gli oggetti in meno (The Minus Objects, 1965–66), which is considered integral to the emergence of Arte Povera. In the ’90s, he placed social change at the heart of his practice. His most recent artistic phase, Terzo Paradiso (Third Paradise), is dedicated to encouraging artifice—science, technology, art, culture, and politics—to reinvest in nature.
In response to the nomination, Pistoletto stated: "I do not see my nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize as a personal recognition for what I have done so far, but as a commitment to future work."
Michelangelo Pistoletto: To Step Beyond, an exhibition of new painting and sculpture organised in collaboration with Galleria Continua, is on view at Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York, until Saturday 29 March.
photo: Pier Luigi Di Pietro
Frieze New York announces exhibitors for 2025 edition
February 19, 2025
Frieze New York returns to The Shed from May 7 - 11 with more than 65 of the world’s leading contemporary art galleries and the acclaimed Focus section led by Lumi Tan.
The 2025 edition brings together some of the most renowned names in the global art world, presenting a wide array of artistic practices. Among the participating galleries are A Gentil Carioca, Carlos/Ishikawa, Esther Schipper, Emalin, Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, Gallery Hyundai, Goodman Gallery, Kukje Gallery, kurimanzutto, Victoria Miro, The Modern Institute, mor charpentier, Stephen Friedman Gallery, Perrotin, Mendes Wood DM and White Cube.
These leading international galleries will stand alongside key figures from New York’s vibrant art scene. Showcasing the breadth and depth of the city’s creative landscape, the fair will welcome Miguel Abreu Gallery, Canada, Chapter NY, James Cohan, Tina Kim Gallery, Gagosian, Alexander Gray Associates, Hauser & Wirth, Casey Kaplan, Karma, Anton Kern, Andrew Kreps Gallery, Ortuzar, Pace Gallery, and David Zwirner. These will be joined by spaces from across the US including Gray, François Ghebaly, Night Gallery and Matthew Brown.
Frieze’s celebrated section for young galleries, Focus, features 12 exhibitors each showing solo presentations by emerging or under-appreciated artists. Overseen for a second year by curator and writer Lumi Tan, the section sees an increased international presence while maintaining a spotlight on New York’s vibrant young spaces. Seven new galleries – Champ Lacombe, G Gallery, King’s Leap, Management, Public, Voloshyn Gallery, Yeo Workshop – join Central Galeria, Company Gallery, Gordon Robichaux, Madragoa and Mitre Galeria.
photo: Casey Kelbaugh, courtesy of Frieze and CKA
Alison Jacques announces representation of Emma Amos
February 11, 2025
Emma Amos (b.1937, Atlanta, Georgia; d.2020, Bedford, New Hampshire) was an American artist, educator and activist whose paintings and prints interrogated gender and racial inequity in the art world and in the United States more broadly. Amos’s works often included Black bodies—men’s, women’s, her own—to make a statement about the way people of colour are considered and consumed in American society. Amos was deeply concerned with memory; she used her own likeness to communicate an anxiety about the erasure of Black female artists in the art historical canon, while taking a defiant stance against this structure. ‘It’s always been my contention,’ Amos once said, ‘that for me, a Black woman artist, to walk into the studio is a political act.’
The artist's inaugural exhibition at Alison Jacques will open on 11 July, and continue until 13 September 2025.
photo: Emma Amos, London Bridge is Falling Down, 1991 © Emma Amos
Gabriel Orozco awarded Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
January 24, 2025
Galerie Chantal Crousel has announced that Gabriel Orozco has been elevated to the rank of Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by French Ministry of Culture. This prestigious award celebrates his entire career.
Orozco’s work has been exhibited at Galerie Chantal Crousel since 1993, when he created La DS, to his recent project Diario de plantas in 2022. The gallery will host his new exhibition in October 2025.
In conjunction with this honor, the exhibition Politécnico Nacional at the Museo Jumex in Mexico City will open on 1 February 2025.
photo: Ana Hop
Perrotin to inaugurate London gallery with an exhibition of works by JR
January 22, 2025
Perrotin is pleased to present Outposts by French artist JR, the inaugural exhibition of its new gallery in London, opening on 14 March.
Through more than twenty works, the exhibition presents two series of recent ongoing projects of JR: Deplacé-e-s (begun in 2022) shares the stories of refugee children from around the world which giant portraits enlarging on huge banners visible from the sky give these children back their lost identities, and Les Enfants d’Ouranos (Children of Ouranos), building upon Deplacé-e-s, explore through white silhouettes on black painted wood panels the tensions between the visible and invisible. Alongside these series, the exhibition showcases two video screenings that document the series of Deplacé-e-s.
Situated in the heart of Mayfair, Perrotin London features 350 m2 of completely refurbished space in Claridge’s, a true British landmark. Located on Brook’s Mews, the gallery will be next to Claridge’s ArtSpace Café and offer a program created together with its artists to coincide with the city’s major cultural events, such as Frieze London, where the gallery has participated since 2004.
“London has always been a special city for me as it’s the place where I’ve had my first gallery show back in 2008. I’m honored to be the first artist to be showcased at Perrotin's new space!” JR
photo: JR, Déplacé.e.s, Andiara #2, Colombia, 2022 ©JR. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin
Ana González now represented by Sean Kelly
January 21, 2025
Sean Kelly Gallery is delighted to announce representation of Ana González.
González’s artistic practice celebrates the landscapes of her native Colombia and her partnerships with the indigenous communities dedicated to their preservation. Her work serves as a vibrant tribute to the sensory richness and cultural significance of these environments whilst highlighting their crucial role in historic ecosystems. Her oeuvre bridges multiple disciplines, including painting, photography, and sculpture.
In her work, González references the 18th-century naturalist Alexander von Humboldt and his exploration of the interconnectedness of all living systems. Her Devastations series features textiles onto which the artist prints photographs of Colombia’s vulnerable environments which she then partially unravels by hand. The works preserve these spaces as sites of power, abundance, and renewal while referencing the slow disappearance of ancient ecologies.
González had her debut exhibition with the gallery in January 2024 at Sean Kelly, Los Angeles. Her current solo exhibition, Bruma, is on view at Sean Kelly, New York, through February 22, 2025. Inspired by her travels through the cloud forests of Colombia, Bruma features monumental works such as the five-part work QUIMBAYA (SACRED HOUSE) and ANGAPACCHA, which cascades off the wall into the gallery space. The exhibition invites viewers to engage with the spiritual and ecological significance of these biodiverse, endangered regions. On joining the gallery, González said, “As a Latin American artist, I am deeply honored to be part of Sean Kelly Gallery. It’s not only their remarkable program and visionary approach that inspires me, but also the incredible team behind it. I’ve had the privilege of building meaningful and enriching relationships with them, which makes this journey even more special.”
González has worked closely with Colombian Indigenous communities, leading social and humanitarian initiatives with the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta communities, the Nukak people of Guaviare, and Misak women in Cauca. In collaboration with Cartier and the Amazon Conservation Team, González founded a health and social project in the Colombian Amazon. In November 2024 they completed a healthcare center in Murui Muina, Umancia, an indigenous settlement positioned at the intersection of three key regions: Putumayo, Caquetá, and Amazonas.
photo: Juan Moore
Art Paris returns to Grand Palais for its 27th edition
January 15, 2025
From 3 to 6 April 2025, Art Paris returns to the Grand Palais, where the newly renovated nave and balcony spaces will allow the fair to host 170 exhibitors from 25 different countries. At this edition, the fair’s events programme will be even more ambitious with new themes, exhibitions, prizes and panel discussions. The Art Paris VIP programme, a regular feature, provides a choice of 31 exhibition visits and tours reserved exclusively for guest collectors and art professionals, highlighting the effervescent Parisian cultural scene.
The 2025 selection embodies the unique identity of Art Paris, a fair that is both regional and cosmopolitan and, as ever, a place of artistic discovery: 60% of the exhibitors are from France with 40% of international galleries. Moreover, 36% of this edition’s participants are new to the fair. Such figures illustrate how Art Paris showcases the wealth and depth of the French gallery ecosystem, from big name international galleries to unique modern and contemporary art galleries around France. Art Paris is also committed to supporting young galleries, notably with Promises, the sector focussing on emerging artists. This year, Mennour, Semiose and Christian Berst will be joining regular exhibitors, such as Continua, Lelong & Co., Loevenbruck, Meessen, Nathalie Obadia, Michel Rein, Almine Rech and Templon, among others.
New galleries joining the 2025 fair are: Sabrina Amrani (Madrid), Beck & Eggeling and Pasquer (Dusseldorf, Paris), Lange + Pult (Zurich), Senda (Barcelona), Rüdiger Schöttle (Cologne), Tang Contemporary (Beijing), Waddington-Custot (London), Wilde (Geneva) and W&K – Wienerroither & Kohlbacher (Vienna, New York), amongst others.
photo: © Marc Domage
Márta Kucsora at Patricia Low reviewed by Sandrine Welte
January 13, 2025
“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star” - Friedrich Nietzsche
Opened in late November, the current show at Patricia Low’s Venice branch presents an intriguing overview of recent works by the Hungarian artist Márta Kucsora. In direct proximity to the resplendent Ca’ Rezzonico, the gallery introduces Kucsora’s paintings in a fitting setting that displays the canvases in dialogue with the sublime urban architecture against which the artist’s constantly evolving formations of organic abstraction echoes the genesis and nature of the Lagoon city.
Few are thus the places better suited than Venice to celebrate Kucsora’s singular body of works. A city built on water, the so-called “Serenissima” has never ceased to inspire artists from near and far, an imaginary locus too improbable to conceive, too impossible to imagine. Suspended between sky and sea, while hovering across an infinite palette of chromatic hues, the Queen of the Adriatic has exerted her spell since time immemorial, giving rise to centuries of artistic production that stand unique in human history. Composition, movement and colour turned into the elements of a golden age of Renaissance painting, which now find a new artistic language in Kucsora’s oeuvre. Cascading networks of ever-morphing organic impressions, her works suggest allusions to cellular structures and cosmic views, likewise encapsulating the dimensions of life between micro and macro. In their elusive fluidity, the canvases insinuate motion, an eternal becoming, never pausing but always advancing —a metaphorical image of Venice herself. Everything appearing in Less Orderly Ways as the poignant title of Kucsora’s solo show at Patricia Low Gallery promises.
If the laws of nature are said to determine the origin of being, Márta Kucsora has found a way to harness their intrinsic force for painting as she orchestrates creations that are born from a painterly process wholly her own. Conceived in a fluid choreography between chance and control, hers are canvases that speak to an ambiguous, amorphous state of existence to which the artist lends a new visual language through her unique technique of brushless painting. Using diverse chemicals that either attract or repel each other, the finely calibrated layers of pigments unravel as animated topographies, complex tangles of colour and shape whose evocative visual evolution comes as both an invitation and challenge for the beholder to step into a pictorial space of visceral allure.
Pastes, lacquers and paints of varied density and viscosity perform a sublime dance upon their encounter on the linen canvas, thereby entering an impassioned struggle that ultimately results in compositions of rhythmic depth. By this, they reverberate with a creative thrust, an echo from within the intriguing chromatic designs that seem to explode in spontaneous collision. In a world determined by the pretence of linear historiography, Kucsora’s canvases unfurl as clinamina in a nod to Lucretius’ stipulation on the unpredictable swerves of atoms that occur at no fixed place or time. Similarly, her works come about in an innovative process indebted to a degree of serendipitous coincidence, in an unexpected updating of the Surrealists’ dictum of the “chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table”.1 On these grounds, Kucsora’s brushless paintings are evocative of Max Ernst’s vast experiments with the process of image-making across grattage, frottage or decalcomania that would eventually lead him “au-delà de la peinture” –“beyond painting”. In a similar way, rather than enforcing her artist’s self, Kucsora grants autonomy to the final outcome, acting as a mediator and medium for the image-to-be by navigating, guiding, directing the dance of pigments in an intricate conversation between brain and hand as the actual matter takes precedence in the realisation of the work.
As a delicate choreography, deliberately geared towards the execution of her works, Márta Kucsora’s gesture equally recalls the basic tenets of Abstract Expressionism with its greats such as Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler or Janet Sobel, whose radical approach to painting pushed the actual performance on canvas centre-stage. Of unprecedented corporeal, bodily investment in the process of creation, the movement promoted a new artistic language, severing ties with a past rooted in figurative traditions. As a consequence, these artists afforded a novel narration liberated from the idiom of graphic representation, breaking free from a mere “pictorial depicting” while at the same time challenging a long-overcome notion of ekphrasis as the meticulous translation of the visual to the verbal. The unspeakable semantics of the image, correspondingly, demonstrated the limitations of language for refusing a literal “reading” of the picture. In the same manner, Kucsora’s mesmerising compositions demand to be experienced rather than merely looked at, sensed rather than comprehended as a singular story. They exist in a multiplicity of the shifting image, an impossible duplicity of always becoming while yet already being. In their complex evolution, the tangles, networks and patterns arrest the gaze, while drawing the viewer into the vortices of colour. Theirs is an invitation to look in an ocular re-enactment of the choreography that witnessed their conception. Each work unfurls as a visual spectacle, a living process that performs itself time and again on the surface of the canvas.
Time then is the marker of their condition, serendipitous formations that build, contract, expand –assisted by the artist whose knowing hand determines the final image. Time arrested, transfixed. The instability of the ever-morphing re-composition of matter overcome. Correspondingly, the thinly executed layers of pigments constitute inter- and surfaces for an archaeology of the canvas. By this, the image unfurls byits carefully constructed and powerfully executed stratae, where the crevices and voids insinuate an in-betweenness and liminality towards new forms of being and becoming. Standing in front of Márta Kucsora’s works thus comes as an intimate encounter, confronting the beholder with their own presence, since offering a look into the micro and the macro, infinity on either end of the spectrum of life. Inevitably, they tear open the fissures of existence to expose the fundamental questions of Being in its barest, rawest form.
From Their Origin (2023), Disconnected From the Rest (2024) or Something Becoming Conscious (2024) are the evocative titles, gleaned from literature, in an extension of the notion of chance. In a motion that mirrors the genesis of her canvases –between chance and control –the artist allows for serendipity to decide upon opening the respective volumes at a random page to find inspiration for the subsequent assemblage of terms into evocative compositions. This extension of her creative practice forges an intricate bond between word and image, furthering the experimental as well as experiential reach of her canvases that stimulate the viewer in both visual and cognitive ways. Associations are set floating, a sensation of fluid thought arrested for the fraction of a moment in Márta Kucsora’s paintings where states of being coalesce, metamorphise, explode.
And here Venice appears again. This time as the liminal state of being, an eternal in-betweenness that translates into a temporal arrest on the surface of Kucsora’s works. The infinite flow of being and becoming, the liquidity and elusiveness of existence inadvertently brought to a halt on the canvas, one moment in time preserved against the infinite number of potential different outcomes.
- Sandrine Welte, art historian, independent curator based in Venice
1 The phrase was taken from Isidore-Lucien Ducasse, who working under the pseudonym of Compte de Lautréamont published his seminal work Les Chants de Maldoror in 1869.
all artworks © the gallery and the artist(s)
A look back on our year at GalleriesNow
December 20, 2024
2024 has been incredibly busy at GalleriesNow, with almost 3,000 exhibitions promoted during the year. We launched the new individual user memberships to give access to extra benefits and functionality - we improved and rebranded the GalleriesNow app to enhance the experience for galleries and art enthusiasts alike. We’ve also forged new partnerships to produce further city-wide print maps with renowned fairs including Westbund Art & Design, SP-Arte, and Art Paris, adding to the ones we already create with Frieze and with Art Basel.
As always we are proud to continue supporting young and emerging art spaces through our Young Gallery Initiative and to be a member of the Gallery Climate Coalition.
As we look ahead to the New Year, we’re excited to continue strengthening our relationships, and look forward to having an even better 2025. Wishing you a joyful holiday season and a prosperous New Year!
Miami & Palm Beach Gallery Map with Art Basel out now!
December 5, 2024
We are delighted to announce the Miami & Palm Beach Gallery Map with Art Basel.
The map guides you around all the best exhibitions to see across Miami and Palm Beach - with over forty-five locations and more than eighty exhibitions featured.
Pick up your copy at the Fair or view it online here.
