Gallery News
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Taka Ishii Gallery announces the opening of a new space in Hong Kong
March 14, 2023
Opening on Saturday 18 March, the new viewing space will be dedicated to exhibiting works that represent the gallery program of contemporary art rooted in the photographic. Since its founding in 1994, Taka Ishii Gallery has organized exhibitions and publication projects with the objectives of presenting international contemporary artists domestically and acting as a platform for emerging and established Japanese artists. In 2018, the gallery set down roots in Hong Kong with the launch of SHOP Taka Ishii Gallery, an experimental art space.
The reborn Hong Kong space will periodically host exhibitions and curated programs, bringing to viewers the work of international artists whose practices transcend existing frameworks of contemporary art.
Outset announces the recipients of six grants, focusing on community-building and togetherness
March 10, 2023
Outset Contemporary Art Fund, the leading independent international arts charity, today announced the recipients of six grants in the major arts funding programme from its accelerator unit, Outset Partners.
In their fourth Cycle of funding, totalling £275,000, Outset Partners have awarded a Transformational Grant of £150,000 to African Artists’ Foundation for their major project Dig Where You Stand - From Coast to Coast which explores the regenerative potential of art across the African continent, in dialogue with the world. Five Impact Grants of £25,000 each were awarded to AT The Bus (UK), Fondazione ICA Milano (Italy), Forma (UK), Locus Athens (Greece) and LACMA (USA).
The projects are responding to loneliness across cultures, depleting self-confidence in school-aged children and growing inequalities amongst marginalised groups, with the ambition to rebuild communities by harnessing the power and connectivity of culture.
Candida Gertler OBE, Co-founder & Co-Director, and Nicolette Cavaleros, Co-Director, Outset Contemporary Art Fund, on behalf of Outset Partners:
“For Outset Partners, each year brings a new insight into the arts sector as we gain an ever-expanding perspective of the challenges faced by cultural institutions around the world; some are longstanding and continue to be felt across the sector, whilst others seem to have rapidly risen in urgency. This cycle shed light on the unparalleled value of community - from spearheading conversations around decolonisation; to connecting marginalised identities; uplifting young children in schools; examining shared experiences of loneliness globally; challenging systemic gender inequities and shining a light on overlooked diasporic voices. Outset Partners believe that the six grant recipients will make powerful and transformational societal changes, and these issues will be addressed as communities are built and connections rebuilt, with art at the very core of this journey ahead.”
Established in 2018, the Outset Partners are a diverse group of leaders who have a marked international profile, including individuals from Brazil, France, Colombia, Germany, Greece, Mexico, Japan, the Philippines, South Africa, Taiwan, the United States of America and the United Kingdom. All are experts and entrepreneurs in their respective fields of philanthropy, education, the art market, fashion, finance, museums, architecture, and jewellery, amongst many other activities, committed together to championing brave and intelligent projects to provoke discourse and transformation in the creative sector.
The Outset Partners Grants Programme has raised over a million pounds to date, providing essential support to the international cultural ecosystem.
photo: Oliver Frank Chanarin, Marine Academy (Year 10), 2023. C-type print, 10 x 8 inches, unique artist proof (#2913902964). Commissioned and produced by Forma, in collaboration with eight UK organisations. Supported by Arts Council England and Art Fund
Mennour announces representation of Elizabeth Jaeger
March 8, 2023
Mennour has today announced representation of the American artist Elizabeth Jaeger (1988‑).
Her work was shown for the first time at the gallery in 2022 for a “Carte Blanche” alongside Camille Henrot and Estelle Hoy. Elizabeth Jaeger’s dissonant yet poetic sculptures pose a challenge to binary systems, revealing them to be arbitrarily organized and driven by a hidden affective order.
“My working process is to take logic to its illogical conclusion, or a rational to its irrational end.”
Born in San Francisco (1988-), US, Elizabeth Jaeger lives and works in New York.
The artist has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions including Licking the Walls at Callie’s, Berlin; Persona and Parasite at White Space, Beijing; How To Survive at the Sprengel Museum, Hannover; Mirror Cells at the Whitney Museum of American Art; Greater New York at MoMA PS1; In Practice: Fantasy Can Invent Nothing New at SculptureCenter, New York; 99 Cents or Less at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, and Zombies: Pay Attention! at the Aspen Art Museum.
Anna Freeman Bentley joins Simon Lee Gallery
March 6, 2023
Simon Lee Gallery is delighted to announce representation of British artist Anna Freeman Bentley (b.1982, London). The artist’s inaugural exhibition at the gallery will open in November 2023 in London, following inclusion of her new paintings in the gallery’s Art Basel Hong Kong presentation this month.
Freeman Bentley’s practice explores the uncanny within architectural spaces, depicting interiors imbued with a heightened emotional or psychological intensity. The absence of figures enables Freeman Bentley to imply narrative, creating worlds within worlds that contain subtle signifiers revealing the artifice and complex dynamics of manmade environments.
For her most recent series, Freeman Bentley draws inspiration from visiting film sets. This enabled the artist to establish a connection with a determined, temporary site in order to make work that chronicles her relationship to it. The works are heavily influenced by Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, a complex space in which different worlds seem to overlap and interact at once. The series raises questions about displacement and replacement, change and transformation, seen and unseen, aspiration and desire; themes that run throughout Freeman Bentley’s wider practice.
Alongside her conceptual exploration of sentience and architectural interiors, Freeman Bentley’s paintings can be viewed as thoughtful investigations into surface, tension, and the variations in atmosphere evoked through composition. Marrying a diversity of fluid and expressive brushstrokes with a confidence of colour and a masterful understanding of light, Freeman Bentley’s paintings interrogate the emotive and dramatic potential of interior space.
photo: Peter Mallet
Josef Albers, preceding the Square
March 1, 2023
Josef Albers, Mitla, Mexico, 1936-37
Two exhibitions at the David Zwirner gallery in London - “Josef Albers: Paintings Titled Variants” and “Black Mountain College: The Experimenters” - take a deeper look at Albers’ work and life, concentrating in particular on the period that lead up to the start of his classic “Homage to the Square” series.
To help navigate just a few of the notable achievements of Albers’ long and highly influential career, we put a few questions to Nicholas Fox Weber, Executive Director of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation about the man, the work, and his influence.
Can you tell us more about the works on display in “Josef Albers: Paintings Titled Variants” and how they fit into the arc of Albers’ artistic development?
This exhibition, in emphasizing Albers’s Variants, presents work from his first large series. In the 1930s, with his Treble Clefs, he had taken the idea of using a number of similar layouts with very different variations of color; now he went even further in using a carefully conceived geometric structure for a range of works in differing palettes. The Homages to the Square, which he began just a few years after he started the Variants, would be the summa of this approach.
We are especially interested by the “double-door” motif he uses and, if it is connected to a specific house, whether it represents a bridge to the abstraction of the subsequent “Homage to the Square” works?
The idea of the double-door Adobe house is by no means connected to a specific house, but to a generic sort of structure. Albers was intrigued with the indigenous architecture of the American southwest and Mexico, where the use of asymmetrical rectangular forms had great appeal to him and inspired him to refine the idea as pure abstraction, but these paintings should by no means be considered as literal representations. They paved the way for the Homages in part because the technique of applying paint straight from the tube directly onto a white support, with no overlapping of paintings, and the use of unmodulated color to create a series of illusions, was developed here.
Albers was a professor at the Bauhaus in Germany until it closed in 1933 under pressure from the Nazis. Alongside his wife Annie he then managed, with the help of the architect Philip Johnson, to move to the US and take the role of head of the then newly opened Black Mountain College art school.
Black Mountain College ran from 1933 to 1957 in North Carolina, USA. Like the Bauhaus the College was to prove highly influential, with teachers and students including luminaries such as Ruth Asawa, Walter Gropius, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Buckminster Fuller and Willem and Elaine de Kooning
Looking at the companion exhibition (“Black Mountain College: The Experimenters”), how was Albers influenced by his experiences at not one but two of the most renowned and revered arts education institutions in history?
Those institutions gave Albers a chance to work independently in the company of like-minded, sympathetic, and supportive people. They encouraged independence and experimentation. But he was adamant that they not be glorified; in both places, there were financial troubles as well as the complexities of internecine personal politics. Albers was grateful above all for the wherewithal to pursue his own work.
Arguably, Albers is now best known as a painter, however is it fair to say that he was equally influential both as an artist and as a teacher?
His influence as a teacher and writer is inestimable.
“Josef Albers: Paintings Titled Variants” and “Black Mountain College: The Experimenters” are on show at David Zwirner, London until April 15.
photo credits: © 2023 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/DACS, London; © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, Courtesy The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and David Zwirner; Harvard Art Museums
Sky Glabush joins Stephen Friedman Gallery
February 27, 2023
Glabush’s practice subverts traditional painterly archetypes and presents landscape, still life and portraiture through an historic lens. Primarily figurative, and often underpinned by abstraction, these large-scale surreal paintings tell a story as they shift in and out of focus. Critic Sarah Milroy wrote of the aritist, “Narrative has long been deemed inessential to the art of painting, but Glabush seems to invite the storytelling impulse as we inevitably set about the task of supplying meaning”.
Milroy goes on to say that Glabush’s paintings investigate “the legacies of art, expressing a special connection to the European traditions of Der Blaue Reiter and Die Brücke, in particular the work of Nolde, Kirchner, Munch, Kupka and Paul Klee”, and that “these historic works combine in his imagination with some of the influences from his own lived experience, raised as he was in a variety of alternative, back-to-the-land communities on the west coast of British Columbia.”
Glabush’s paintings are underpinned by a rigorous drawing practice and exist as a meeting point for different ideas and approaches. “The architecture of the drawing is embedded in the materials”, Glabush says, “all the paintings have gone through this process of getting the structure up through the drawing, breaking it down and rebuilding it through colour”. The artist often mixes sand into the paint to build texture and to erase but not conceal the labour in his work. This rich surface is a magnet on which bold pigments vibrate and infuse Glabush’s paintings with a humming energy.
The artist is also represented by Philip Martin Gallery in Los Angeles.
photo: Martha Glabush
Marian Goodman Gallery in New York to move to historic building in Tribeca
February 24, 2023
Marian Goodman Gallery in New York is to open in a new home in downtown Manhattan in mid-to-late 2024.
The Gallery’s new headquarters - the historic Grosvenor Building in Tribeca at 385 Broadway, between White and Walker Streets - will feature approximately 30,000 square feet of space, including two floors of open galleries, viewing rooms, a library and archive, art storage, and administrative offices.
Originally built in 1875, the five-story building will undergo a restoration and renovation by studioMDA, the New York-based architectural firm known for its work in the cultural sphere.
The move to a new, expanded location in New York City marks a pivotal step for the Gallery under the leadership of President and Partner Philipp Kaiser, Managing Partners Emily-Jane Kirwan and Rose Lord, and Partners Leslie Nolen and Junette Teng.
The Gallery’s plans for its new home in New York comes as it continues preparations for a new venue in Los Angeles, scheduled to open this year.
“Our new home will support an expanded program, serve a larger audience, and enable greater impact for our artists. We have long considered a possible move downtown and the opportunity to move into this historic building in Tribeca, with its flexibility of space, its light, and engagement with life of the city, was a critical factor for the Partners in advancing the Gallery’s global profile and presence” - Kaiser.
view the current exhibitions here
Chinese art now
February 15, 2023
Hao Liang: Sad Zither @ Gagosian, London
“With no one coming in or out of the country for three years these exhibitions provide a window into one of the most significant periods in recent Chinese history” - Nick Simunovic, Gagosian’s Director, Asia
Two simultaneous though very different contemporary painting exhibitions at Gagosian - one in Hong Kong and the other at the gallery’s Grosvenor Hill space in London - give insight into what artists in mainland China have been thinking about and creating over the last three years.
In London, Hao Liang’s exhibition “Sad Zither” presents intricate colour gradations and subtle, semi-abstract, narrative compositions.
“in traditional Chinese painting there was never pure figuration or abstraction” - Hao Liang
Hao Liang: All things
The fourteen works were made in Beijing over the last two years and explore themes and symbolism from literary sources such as Dante and Borges and Chinese poets Tao Yuanming, Du Mu and Li Shangyin - the last of whose poem gives the exhibition its name.
Liang uses the methods and motifs of traditional Chinese ink wash painting, giving them a distinctly contemporary angle. We see his perspective on the localised physical changes in the seasons, with fleeting moments and details of light placed within the grander scale of history, geography and the psychological realm - “the complexity of time and space lead to a need to look at a more metaphysical way of looking at the world” says the artist. The works have a physical and emotional depth and a degree of psychological uneasiness.
Yang Zi: Uncanny Valley @ Gagosian, Hong Kong
In Hong Kong meanwhile there is a shared sense of unease and dislocation in an exhibition where guest curator Yang Zi (former curator and head of public programs at UCCA, Beijing) has brought together new works by Chinese artists Owen Fu, Jiang Cheng, Li Hei Di, Li Weiyi, Nabuqi, Song Yuanyuan, Su Yu-Xin, Wang Haiyang, Wang Xiaoqu, Wang Xingwei, and Zhang Zipiao.
Li Weiyi: Panorama Study
The exhibition’s title “Uncanny Valley” is inspired by the theory proposed by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970 that a humanoid object bearing either a very high or very low level of resemblance to a real person will prompt feelings of affinity, while one distinguished by a close but flawed similarity may instead provoke uneasiness or revulsion.
The exhibition explores the emergence of these themes in contemporary paintings, sculptures, and videos by Chinese artists. These works endow the human figure with psychological, existential, and symbolic significance, combining an embodied intimacy with an intentional and specific lack of cohesion that stands apart from most art historical representations of the human form.
“At first, when you look at the works from afar, they might seem perfect, but if you look closely, you’ll feel this creepiness ... every piece in the exhibition has this quality, especially when you look at the details. I think it also relates to the past three years, where the artists have felt this [sense of uneasiness]” - Yang Zi.
Both exhibitions are welcome opportunities to see Chinese art after too long a break.
picture credits: Sad Zither installation view © Hao Liang. Photo: Lucy Dawkins; All things © Hao Liang. Courtesy Gagosian; Uncanny Valley installation view. Photo: Martin Wong, Courtesy Gagosian;Panorama Study © Li Weiyi. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian
Frieze Los Angeles
The 2023 edition of Frieze Los Angeles runs 16-19 February, and takes place across multiple sites at their new location of Santa Monica Airport.
This year the Fair is showcasing an expanded line-up of over 120 galleries from 22 countries, including 20th-century art for the first time, as well as a newly expanded Focus section.
Also promised are ambitious activations, collaborations with nonprofit organizations, and pop-ups from some of Los Angeles’ most beloved restaurants.
16 Feb, Preview (invitation only)
17 Feb, Preview
18-19 Feb, Public days
Click here for Fair tickets, and here for the GalleriesNow Los Angeles Gallery Map with Frieze.
Mai 36 Galerie now represents Irma Blank
Mai 36 Galerie is pleased to announce the representation of the Italian, German-born artist Irma Blank, in collaboration with P420.
A passionate reader and lover of language, Irma Blank was born in 1934 in Northern Germany. In 1955 she met her Italian husband with whom she moved to Sicily. The gap between the two countries and the two languages was immense – it led her to question the adequacy or rather the inadequacy of any language. She then realized ‘that there’s no such thing as the right word’ – even in one’s mother tongue – to really convey meaning/feeling.
Blank’s entire body of work, that crystallized into series, is based on language and therefore literature – whether emptying books from their meaning or creating a new form of nonverbal, asemantic writing, for instance by creating drawings that mimick the layout of existing books/newspapers or using a utopian alphabet. Closely linked to her personal story, but simultaneously emanating from the migrant and displaced condition, her work is the result of a matured conceptuality, but asserts itself in the corporality of production; it engages with a utopic community of hypothetical readers, but it is also in its nature, a soliloquy.
photo: Gian Sinigaglia
Hauser & Wirth announces representation of Harmony Korine
February 10, 2023
Over the last thirty years, Harmony Korine has cultivated a multidisciplinary art practice that resists categorization and is admired internationally for the improvisation, humor, repetition, nostalgia and poetry that unite the disparate aspects of his output. Working in recent years primarily with painting and photography, his practice is built upon tireless experimentation and a trial-and-error path that produces what he calls “Mistakist Art”. Inspired by material culture, Korine often incorporates everyday items - squeegees, house paint, steak knives, old VHS tapes - into his compositions, which are frequently embellished with distorted language and intentionally misspelled words. Korine’s oeuvre is both deliberate and erratic, figurative and abstract, and, like his films, blurs boundaries between “high” and “low” in ways that simultaneously attract and repel viewers with its hypnotic, otherworldly atmosphere.
Marc Payot, President, Hauser & Wirth, says, “we are delighted to welcome Harmony Korine to the gallery. In his multidisciplinary practice over the past three decades, Harmony has performed a sort of real-time psychoanalysis of contemporary America––and done so on his own terms, fearlessly, without pandering or seeking consensus. Our fixations on youth, material consumption and disposability, violence and romantic anti-heroes, all find their way into his work, from films and writing to drawings and paintings. In this sense, Harmony takes his place among such artists in our program as Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley, and Rita Ackermann. We look forward to collaborating with Harmony in the months and years ahead”.
Among his generation’s most influential filmmakers, Korine rose to prominence after writing the script for the film “Kids” (1995), directed by Larry Clark. Everything he has made since has been guided by memory, emotion, and physical sensation as opposed to strategy and rational thought. Of his art, he has said, “I’m chasing something that is more of a feeling, something more inexplicable, a connection to colors and dirt and character, something looping and trancelike, more like a drug experience or a hallucination”.
Richard Saltoun Gallery announces representation of Florence Peake
February 8, 2023
Richard Saltoun Gallery announces representation of the British multidisciplinary artist Florence Peake (b. 1973).
Peake’s first solo exhibition, with new installations, sculptures, canvases, and works on paper, will be at the gallery’s London space from March 28, 2023. Her first institutional solo exhibition in London will be at Southwark Park Galleries from April 15, and will tour to Towner, Eastbourne and Fruitmarket, Edinburgh.
Peake produces paintings, sculptures, films, and immersive performances rooted in materiality and physicality. She brings together dancers, performers, and communities to create choreographies that encourage a seemingly chaotic relationship between the bodies and the material. The artist’s sculptures and paintings are a result of this interaction and capture the profusion of experiences and feelings recorded within our bodies.
photo: Christa Holka
Barbara Walker elected a Royal Academician
Cristea Roberts Gallery are delighted to announce that Barbara Walker has been elected to the Royal Academy of Arts.
Barbara Walker was born in Birmingham, England, in 1964. She studied at the University of Central England, Birmingham, and completed post-graduate studies at Wolverhampton University. She lives and works in Birmingham. Her work is informed by the social, political and cultural realities that affect her life and the lives of those around her. Growing up in Birmingham, her experiences have directly shaped a practice concerned with issues of class and power, gender, race, representation and belonging. Her figurative drawings and paintings tell contemporary stories hinged on historical circumstances, making them universally understood and reflecting a human perspective on the state of affairs in her native Britain and elsewhere.
Walker was the 2020 Bridget Riley Fellow at the British School at Rome. In 2019 she was awarded an MBE in the New Year Honours for services to British Art and in 2017 she exhibited at the 57th Venice Biennale as part of the Diaspora Pavilion. In 2017 she received the Drawing Room Bursary Award and inaugural Evelyn Williams Drawing Award in association with the Jerwood Charitable Foundation. She has previously been an artist in residence at Facebook’s headquarters in London.
photo: Chris Keenan
PULPO GALLERY to open second exhibition space
February 7, 2023
PULPO GALLERY are to open a second exhibition space in 2024.
Located in the BERGSON HOME OF ARTS, a former heating power plant, the exhibition program will extend across five floors and offer “a holistic art and cultural experience”.
SPARK Art Fair Vienna’s 2023 edition postponed
February 1, 2023
It has been announced that the 2023 edition of the Viennese fair - which debuted in 2021 - is to be re-scheduled for March 2024.
“The owners, artistic direction, management and organizational team of SPARK Art Fair Vienna have jointly come to the decision to cancel the contemporary art fair planned for March 23-26, 2023 at Vienna's MARX HALLE. Our focus is on the next edition in March 2024.
“Obvious conflicts of interest within the Viennese art scene, in which SPARK has been increasingly implicated, are the reason for this deeply consequential decision. Subsequently launched media reports have also led to great uncertainty among the fair's exhibitors and potential galleries. This has massively hampered the previously successful work delivered by the organizational team and the artistic direction and made a successful realization of the fair, according to our high quality standards, an impossibility in the short time remaining.
“We regret that due to this development we must console both national and international exhibitors, artists as well as collectors and visitors, as they lose for this year an important and so far also economically successful marketplace. However, from now on we will work with full power and commitment on a successful realization of SPARK Art Fair 2024.”
Soulmates in Ceramics: Edmund de Waal and Theaster Gates, Gagosian at artgenève 2023
January 27, 2023
Gagosian often stages presentations at art fairs that are as much exhibition as fair booth. For the 11th iteration of artgenève in Switzerland the gallery has curated a joint presentation by two leading contemporary artists - Edmund de Waal (b. 1964) and Theaster Gates (b. 1973).
De Waal and Gates are both showing ceramics, and presenting the two artists in dialogue offers a great opportunity for the visitor to, in effect, have three experiences - one from each artist individually, and a third from their interaction with each other. It is especially interesting with two artists as close in material, and yet divergent in approach and technique, as Gates and de Waal. Both of the artists are well-versed in the venerable and established traditions of the medium, and yet they have worked to take them in quite different directions.
De Waal’s delicate handmade porcelain objects - often vessels and often presented in larger groupings of small mise-en-scène sets - are in a lot of ways deliberately “presented”, continuing a theme of his work as an examination of collecting and collections. His presentations focus on the experience of, and the appreciation for, the individual objects - though collaboration has been at the heart of his practice for decades. He has said that “clay is poetry” and, perhaps drawn from his education “at the feet” as he says of potters in Japan, he produces work which exudes a transcendent emotion. The result offers an appreciation that goes beyond the physicality of each piece.
Gates - himself no stranger to collaboration - takes a somewhat different route. Producing glazed stoneware which draws its being from African methodologies as well as Japanese folk-craft. Indeed, he has used the term “Black Mingei”. Gates first worked with clay at Iowa State University in the US before going on to train in Tokoname, Japan, a city famous for its pottery manufacture. Fusing various influences, Gates brings together Japanese philosophy and Black identity to produce ceramics that carry a similar delicacy - and import - to de Waal’s while physicalising these facets into bolder individual pieces, the apparent simplicity of which belies their roots in a ritual - he talks of “sermons about ceramics” - significance, which recognises and examines the labor, craft, art, and material experimentation that is inherent in ceramic as a medium.
“Ceramics hold a special significance in Geneva, especially given the proximity to the Musee Ariana. So this elegant, dual presentation of these two influential artists has been met with great enthusiasm” - Johan Nauckhoff, Director, Gagosian Geneva
Artgenève runs from January 26-29. There is also a video of the two artists discussing their work and their approaches (link here) which is a beautiful way to spend half an hour immersed in their world - as Gates has said “I feel like I have a soulmate in ceramics”.
picture credits: Edmund de Waal “we live here, forever taking leave, I”, 2022 © Edmund de Waal, photo: Stephen White & Co, courtesy Gagosian; Theaster Gates “Untitled (Ceremonial Vessel)”, 2022 © Theaster Gates, photo: Annik Wetter, courtesy Gagosian
Hayal Pozanti joins Timothy Taylor
January 25, 2023
Pozanti’s first solo exhibition with the gallery will open in New York in April 2023 - and will be the first exhibition at the gallery’s new 6,000-square-foot space in the city, located at 74 Leonard Street in Tribeca.
Lush organic forms swirl across Hayal Pozanti’s paintings, which express a vision of botanical growth outside of human exceptionalism. The orbs, curves and lakes in her work seem to contain every hue found in nature: a trumpet-shaped form burns with the fiery light of the Sahara desert; a wavering line vibrates the deep turquoise of a California swimming pool, each shape sealed within a thin hermetic border. Colours echo, reflect and mirror each other at different points across the canvas, leading the viewer’s eye with a strange geometry that reflects an imaginary universe grown from the subconscious and inspired by science fiction. Pozanti’s practice has developed in step with her changing way of life. As an artist working in New York in the early 2010s, Pozanti created a system of shapes and ciphers to translate fragments of statistics and images she discovered deep in the internet, relating our frightening reliance on technology and numbers in bright geometric paintings. Yet with a move to Los Angeles, then Vermont, Pozanti began to paint en plein air, growing sensitive to the animals, spiders, plants and trees living in close range of her easel.
Fuelled by an ethical urgency to discover a different way of life, Pozanti’s paintings broke new ground with a lyrical form of abstraction in clear, jewel-like colours. The original ciphers, which Pozanti describes as “building blocks”, evolved into a rich and more organic abstract universe in which unknown plants and animals flourish and reign. Pozanti looked to ancient Samarian, Sanskrit and Hebrew alphabets to create this broader visual language: links that remind us that it is possible to dream of utopian societies outside of the Western model.
Pozanti follows through on her ecological ambitions in the studio, giving up acrylics for natural oil paints and non-toxic materials. The biomorphic shapes in Pozanti’s work echo the work of Wassily Kandinsky and Jean Arp, both of whom believed it was necessary to create a completely abstract world to distil spiritual longing for the modern viewer.
“In Los Angeles, the smoke, fire and the pandemic felt apocalyptic. I had been interested in investigating artificial intelligence and technology, but I came away feeling that touch, sense, image cannot be mapped and commodified. That’s not how we experience the world ... It comes to seem almost revolutionary in our world to use intuition as a way of making choices” - Pozanti
Hayal Pozanti (b. 1983, Istanbul, Turkey) has a BA from Sabanci University and an MFA from Yale University. She has been awarded large-scale public projects and commissions by the New York Public Library, NY; Public Art Fund, New York, NY and Cleveland Clinic and Case Western, Cleveland. Her work has been presented in institutional solo shows at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York. Her work is in the permanent collections of: Eli & Edythe Broad Art Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); San Jose Museum of Art; and the Hammer Museum. Pozanti had her last solo exhibition ‘Lingering’ in 2022 at Jessica Silverman, San Francisco. Pozanti lives and works in Manchester, VT.
Pozanti will continue to be represented by Jessica Silverman Gallery.
photo: Didem Civginoglu
Flowers Gallery announces representation of Liza Giles
Known for her large-scale abstract paintings, Giles combines a hard-edge approach to line and composition with intuitive mark-making.
Her painting style developed from making smaller collages using found scraps and painted cut-outs. The monumental canvases seen in this exhibition begin with elemental forms that emerged from these collages, transforming the interplay of positive and negative forms through scale and painterly means of expression. At times appearing architectural, the paintings suggest the immensity and solidity of the urban skyline, while harmonious earth tones and feathered edges integrate a sense of light and space.
Giles' first solo presentation with Flowers Gallery, The Shape of Things, opens on Thursday 9 February.
John Akomfrah to represent Great Britain at the 2024 Venice Biennale
January 24, 2023
Lisson Gallery artist John Akomfrah, RA has been announced as the artist representing Great Britain at the 60th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia in 2024.
“Akomfrah is one of the most outstanding artist filmmakers working today... In his moving image works, Akomfrah poetically layers fictitious and factual narratives that compellingly invite us to embrace the complex realities of migrant diasporas. Akomfrah is a truly global thinker. Imaginatively addressing some of our most pressing existential concerns, his work will captivate viewers at the Venice Biennale” - Emma Ridgway, Shane Akeroyd Associate Curator the British Pavilion in 2022 and member of the Selection Panel
Akomfrah is a respected artist and filmmaker, whose works are characterised by their investigations into memory, post-colonialism, temporality and aesthetics and often explore the experiences of migrant diasporas globally.
“It is a huge privilege and an honour to be asked to represent the UK at the 60th Venice Biennale - it is without a doubt one of the most exciting opportunities that an artist can be presented with. I see this invitation as recognition of, and a platform for all those I have collaborated with over the decades, and who continue to make my work possible. I’m grateful to be given a moment to explore the complex history and significance of this institution and the nation it represents, as well as its architectural home in Venice – with all the stories it has told and will continue to” - Akomfrah
NıCOLETTı now represents Nana Wolke
January 20, 2023
Nana Wolke’s series of works usually derives from the study of specific spaces – from hotel rooms and inhabited apartments to architectural complexes and public places –, where the artist records the unfolding of staged situations. The borrowed spaces, or unauthorized sets, appearing in her work are often spaces of transition, historically pushed to the edges of cities or fully operational when most are asleep, which Wolke addresses in relation to the specific temporalities of oil painting, film and sound. Remixing elements of observed reality with fiction, the artist focuses her attention on the fleeting, transitory moments occurring between actions, implementing successive procedures of assembling, editing and cropping to conjure the fragmentary nature of perception and desire.
Nana Wolke was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia in 1994 and lives and works in London. She holds an MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London and received BFA with honors from the Academy of Visual Arts in Ljubljana.
Her solo exhibitions include Wanda’s, NıCOLETTı, London (2022); High Seat, Castor Gallery, London, UK (2021); 4:28 - 5:28 am, VIN VIN, Vienna, AU (2021); Some Girls Wander by Mistake, Fondazione Coppola, Vicenza, IT (2021); and The Naughty Corner, Stekleni Atrij Gallery, Ljubljana, Sl (2019). Group exhibitions include Green Family Art Foundation (2022), Dallas, TX; Marlborough, London, UK (2022); Bangkok Biennial, London, UK (2021); Guts Gallery, London, UK (2021); Des Bains, London, UK (2021); Kiribati National Museum and Cultural Centre, Tarawa, KI (2019); G2 Kunsthalle, Leipzig, DE (2018); and 31. Biennial of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana, SI (2016), among others.
Wolke’s first solo exhibition at the gallery closes on Saturday 28 January, with an event during which she will reveal her film Wanda’s, 2022.
