Sahara Longe joins Timothy Taylor

April 5, 2022

Timothy Taylor has announced the representation of British-Sierra Leonean artist Sahara Longe (b. 1994, London, UK). Combining atmospheric naturalism with velvety panes of abstract colour, Longe’s lifelike portraits combine the gravitas of an Old Master with a deep sense of psychological disquiet. The gallery will present a solo booth of Longe’s painting at Frieze London 2022 this October.

Using a rich visual lexicon ranging from the paintings of Anthony van Dyck to Agatha Christie’s mysteries, Longe’s black subjects embody subtle emotional angst while provoking powerful questions about the absence of non-white figures from Western canons of portraiture.

‘Sahara Longe conjures up lost languages of painting with an emotional intensity that feels particular to our time. Her remarkable ability to step out of one history and into another is the hallmark of a great artist who is only just beginning. We are delighted to support her burgeoning career.’ – Timothy Taylor

Tolarno Galleries announces representation of Hannah Gartside

April 4, 2022

Tolarno Galleries announces the representation of Hannah Gartside (born 1987, London, UK; lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne).

Gartside is currently on view at Primavera 2021: Young Australian Artists, the annual Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney showcase of Australian artists aged 35 years and under. Her five kinetic textile sculptures each represent an iconic female figure of the past, including Artemisia Gentileschi, Tarot card illustrator Pamela ‘Pixie’ Colman Smith, and actor Sarah Bernhardt. Made from 19th and 20th century clothes and fabric, the works were designed with their subjects’ personal histories in mind – splays of red velvet evoke the violent scenes of Gentileschi’s renowned 17th century paintings, a sail of pink silk crêpe honours Loïe Fuller’s pioneering stage lighting designs and moving fabric costuming.

Embedded in feminism and material culture, Gartside uses vintage and found textiles to create installations, sculptures and costumes. Skills of dress-making, patchwork quilting and fabric dyeing accrued during her former career as a theatre costumier at Queensland Ballet are elevated to the conceptually rigorous. Both deeply personal and fiercely communal, Gartside’s works engage fundamental experiences and emotions of our human condition: longing, tenderness, connection, desire and wonderment.

"She uses deadstock fabrics, clothes found in skips and op shops or given to her by friends, garments of dead relatives and fur from pets. For the artist, clothes are psychic objects that not only have history (a faded menstrual stain, the scent of a beloved) but presence; material has its own life... In this sense, the sculptures are about fabric itself, the singular way in which material is able to articulate the immaterial – a current of air, an undertow of desire. Fabric also has its own sound world and Gartside is listening to what it is saying, 'pulsing, sighing, calling to us'." – Hannah Fink, catalogue essay, Primavera 2021: Young Australian Artists, Museum of Contemporary Art.

Hannah Gartside is a finalist in the upcoming Ellen José Art Award at Bayside Gallery, Victoria, a $15,000 non-acquisitive award to a female visual artist aged 18-35 years, on view from July 2022. She will next exhibit in the June 2022 group show Text Tile, a showcase of textile based practices of over 50 artists within Australia and New Zealand, at Caves Gallery in Melbourne.

Tolarno Galleries will present a solo exhibition by Hannah Gartside in 2023.

photo: Ilona Nelson

Cecilia Vicuña next Hyundai Commission in Tate Modern Turbine Hall

April 2, 2022

Lehmann Maupin announces that Cecilia Vicuña has been selected to create the next Hyundai Commission for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Opening in October, this site-specific installation will continue Tate Modern’s twenty-plus year legacy of showcasing memorable and acclaimed works of contemporary art in their entranceway, drawing millions of museum goers annually.

“Cecilia Vicuña has been an inspirational figure for decades, with the relevance and urgency of her work rightly underscored by her forthcoming Golden Lion Lifetime Achievement award. As a tireless champion of ecological awareness and social justice, as well as the creator of stunning and powerful works of art, I am delighted that Tate Modern will be working with Cecilia Vicuña on our next annual Hyundai Commission - I can’t wait for its unveiling this October” - Frances Morris, Director, Tate Modern

The commission will further Vicuña’s decades-long practice exploring pressing issues of ecology, community and social justice. The Commission is curated by Catherine Wood, Senior Curator of International Art (Performance), Tate with Fiontan Moran, Assistant Curator, International Art, Tate, and will be accompanied by a new book from Tate Publishing.

Dhewadi Hadjab represented by kamel mennour

March 31, 2022

click for Press Release in French

kamel mennour announces the exclusive representation of Dhewadi Hadjab.

Surprising and disconcerting, the paintings of Dhewadi Hadjab are of intriguing beauty. Photography and pictorial practice are both at the center of his work. All of the artist's canvases begin with photographs of models that he places in positions of extreme discomfort, constraint, in danger. It is then, in the extremely meticulous execution of the painted surface and in the development of a powerful realism that he accentuates the smallest details of the bodies and gives them a strong sculptural intensity.

These vibrant, intense and unique paintings, between gravity and grace, are an invitation to transcend the sensitive and the fragility of uncertainty.

Born in 1992 in M’Sila (Algeria), Dhewadi Hadjab lives and works in Paris. Graduated from the École supérieure des beaux‑Arts d’Alger, the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art de Bourges and the Beaux‑Arts de Paris, he was awarded several international prizes such as the Prix des Amis des Beaux‑arts “Prix du portrait Bernard de Demandolx‑Dedons” in 2020.
In 2021, he was the laureate of the Rubis Mécénat production grant and was invited to present a solo exhibition at the Église Saint‑Eustache in Paris. His work has been shown in group exhibitions at FRAC Franche‑Comté, Besançon (France), at Poush Manifesto, Clichy (France) and at the Beaux‑Arts de Paris.

The gallery will present his work at Art Paris.

kamel mennour annonce la représentation exclusive de Dhewadi Hadjab.

Surprenantes et désarçonnantes, les peintures de Dhewadi Hadjab sont d’une intrigante beauté. La photographie et la pratique picturale sont conjointement au cœur de l’œuvre de l’artiste. Toutes les toiles commencent en effet par des photographies de modèles qu’il place dans des positions d’extrême inconfort, de contrainte ou de mise en danger. C’est ensuite par le biais d’une exécution minutieuse dans l'œuvre peinte et la mise en place d'un réalisme puissant que l'artiste accentue les moindres détails de ces corps en mouvement, et leur confère une grande intensité sculpturale.

Cette peinture vibrante, forte et unique, entre pesanteur et grâce, est une invitation à transcender le sensible et la fragilité de l'incertitude.

Né en 1992 à M’Sila (Algérie), Dhewadi Hadjab vit et travaille à Paris. Diplômé de l’École supérieure des beaux‑Arts d’Alger, de l’École Nationale Supérieure d’Art de Bourges et des Beaux‑Arts de Paris, il a été récompensé par plusieurs prix internationaux tels que le Prix des Amis des Beaux‑arts « Prix du portrait Bernard de Demandolx‑Dedons » en 2020.
En 2021, il est le lauréat de l’aide à la production Rubis Mécénat et est invité à présenter une exposition personnelle à l’Église Saint‑Eustache, Paris. Ses œuvres ont été montrées dans des expositions collectives au FRAC Franche‑Comté, Besançon (France), à Poush Manifesto, Clichy (France) et aux Beaux‑Arts de Paris.

La galerie présentera son travail à Art Paris.

Perrotin announces co-representation of Jean-Marie Appriou

March 30, 2022

Perrotin announces its co-representation of the French artist Jean-Marie Appriou.

A new sculpture by Appriou will be presented at the gallery’s Art Paris booth in April 2022, and a special presentation of a new series of works will be featured at Art Basel in June 2022. Appriou’s first solo exhibition with the gallery will take place in Shanghai in November 2022.

From archaic ages to futuristic civilizations, between dinosaurs and child astronauts, Appriou produces visions on the edge of psychedelia, mixing pop culture and mythologies from Greek and Egyptian antiquity to science fiction. His sculpture combines the allegorical and the sensual, leaving his fingerprints visible on the material. He weaves a paradoxical narrative that unites the past and the future, the ideal and the perceptible, in a series of hallucinatory ecstasies.

Appriou’s work has been exhibited at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Fondation Lafayette Anticipations, Paris; the Fondation Vincent van Gogh, Arles; the Abattoirs museum, Toulouse; the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; the Consortium Museum, Dijon; and the Biennale de Lyon. He was invited by the Public Art Fund to present a group of sculptures at the Doris C. Freedman Plaza at the southeast entrance to Central Park in New York, at the Château de Versailles and at the Vienna Biennale. His works have been the subject of solo gallery exhibitions at Jan Kaps, Cologne; Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich and New York; Kaikai Kiki Gallery, Tokyo; and C L E A R I N G, New York and Brussels.

Photo: Claire Dorn

Courtney Treut joins Sean Kelly as Senior Director, Los Angeles

LA-based Courtney Treut has joined the gallery as Senior Director, alongside current partner and Director at Sean Kelly, New York, Thomas Kelly.

Treut previously worked as a Director at Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles and prior to that, was a Director with Anton Kern Gallery, New York, where she worked closely with several California based artists.

Sean Kelly, Los Angeles will open in early fall with a solo presentation of new works by Idris Khan in a new, Toshiko Mori and Hye-Young Chung Architecture-designed space in Hollywood at 1357 N Highland Avenue.

“Personally, I very much look forward to working with Courtney; I know she will contribute significantly to the gallery’s development, roster of artists, presence, and profile in the LA scene.” - Thomas Kelly

“I am thrilled to join Sean Kelly Gallery in building a dynamic new space and program in LA at such a pivotal and exciting moment for contemporary art in this city. I have long been inspired and energized by the unique art community in Los Angeles and have been fortunate to work with some of the many talented artists here.” - Treut

“The opening of the LA gallery is an exciting moment for us and our artists. It also represents a generational evolution as Thomas moves to LA to head up our west coast initiative. We are thrilled that Courtney is joining us; I know Thomas and Courtney will put together an exciting and dynamic program in Los Angeles, that builds on and furthers the legacy of our New York program.” - Sean Kelly

Lisson Gallery announces representation of Lucy Raven

March 28, 2022

Lisson Gallery has announced exclusive, worldwide representation of Lucy Raven. Following her major solo presentation at Dia in 2021, the artist will present a new work for the postponed Whitney Biennial, opening 6 April, ahead of Another Dull Day at Wiels Centre d'Art Contemporain Brussels (27 April - 18 August) and A Divided Landscape at The Momentary at Crystal Bridges, Arkansas (14 May - 25 September).

Lucy Raven’s distinct and methodical practice combines an extended and interdisciplinary enquiry into the form, function and apparatus of the moving image – whether animated, digital, mechanical or cinematic – with an ongoing appreciation for the landscapes, labours and myths surrounding the American West.

Lucy Raven (born 1977) is originally from Tucson, Arizona. She lives and works in New York City. She received a BFA in studio art and a BA in art history from the University of Arizona, Tucson, in 2000, and an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, in 2008.

Jennifer Mora appointed Senior Director at Lehmann Maupin

March 24, 2022

Rachel Lehmann and David Maupin are pleased to announce that Jennifer Mora is now Senior Director at Lehmann Maupin. Mora has spent over a decade at the gallery, starting in 2010 as a gallery assistant.

Since then, Mora has developed deep relationships with artists, collectors, and curators, and her new position recognizes her leadership, along with her strategic guidance of gallery relationships with such notable artists as Hernan Bas, Mr., OSGEMEOS, Calida Rawles, Do Ho Suh, and Erwin Wurm.

Based in New York, Mora will continue to work closely with the gallery’s executive leadership team to identify and cultivate new and existing artist relationships, liaise with museums and biennials on exhibition planning and production, consult on artist legacy and estate management, and collaborate with the gallery’s sales team to achieve artist and market development goals.

Graeme Todd 1962 – 2022

March 23, 2022

Laure Genillard Gallery has today announced the passing of artist Graeme Todd.

The gallery has worked with Graeme on several occasions, in a group show in 2008 and a solo exhibition in 2018.

In a statement, Laure Genillard said: “We found him an easy and inspiring artist. Graeme's work was related first of all to the question of painting itself and the formal aspect of what that actually means. What is a surface? What is an illusion? His approach developed directly as a result of a deep understanding of art history and artists such as Courbet, German masters and East Asian paintings, to cite a few examples. We will miss him dearly.”

Whitstable Biennale 2022 announces the title and theme for its 10th edition

Whitstable Biennale 2022 Afterwardness takes place between Saturday 11 June - Sunday 19 June 2022 and will be presented at locations across Whitstable.

This year’s festival borrows its title from Mimi Khalvati’s evocative poem, Afterwardness. Through the eyes of ‘an eleven year old boy from Aleppo’ the poem explores loss, trauma and the concept of ‘afterwardness’, a term originally coined by Sigmund Freud to describe the belated understanding of events that comes with the passing of time.

Both directly and indirectly, ‘afterwardness’ connects to the themes of this and the last two editions of the festival, touching on ideas connected to global movement, exile, how we find ‘home’ and a way to tell our own story, and on the complex and uncertain place we currently find ourselves in, in the wake of major global events.

Continuing the festival’s strong tradition of programming some of the most exciting and experimental visual art being made in the UK today, Whitstable Biennale 2022 will weave film, performance and sound into the fabric of the town, and create direct, and often intimate, opportunities for local people and visitors to engage with contemporary art and artists.

Participating artists confirmed to date are:

Aimée Zito Lema, Alicia Radage, Anna Barham, Anna-Maria Nabirye, Arianne Churchman, Ben Judd, Dipesh Pandya, Jade Montserrat, Jennet Thomas, Lou Lou Sainsbury, Madeleine Ruggi, Mimi Khalvati, Nicole Bachmann, Chromatic Agency (nnull and Sandy Rompotiyoke), Olivia Furber, Sarah Craske, Savinder Bual, Sonya Dyer, and Webb-Ellis.

This year’s festival is curated by Cement Fields’ Artistic Director Sue Jones, alongside Associate Curators Emma Leach, Jas Dhillon, and Keira Greene, and Poet in Residence Dzifa Benson.

Jennet Thomas, The Great Curdling, 2022. Photo: Paul Tarragó

John Dilg is now represented by Galerie Eva Presenhuber

March 18, 2022

Galerie Eva Presenhuber announces the representation of the American artist John Dilg.

Dilg's paintings were exhibited at Eva Presenhuber, New York, as a special summer project in 2021, which was reviewed in The New York Times by Jason Farago - “Like Emily Dickinson with her straitened meter, like Miles Davis with his muffled trumpet, the veteran Iowa-based painter John Dilg knows the power of a whisper; his small landscapes, done in a restricted palette of thinly applied cool colors, have an intimate beauty that can only be born from restraint. Fourteen sparse, imagined views of land and water, each recently painted, each hardly bigger than a legal pad, each in murmuring tonalities of sky blue and camel and artichoke green, are now on view at Presenhuber, in a show called “Flight Path.” Together they’re as intimate and engrossing as a private chamber music concert.”

Dilg’s paintings feel like landscapes rather than being such. Dilg paints metaphors and abstractions using what he calls a mental archive of essential visual forms, drawing on memory and tonalities of color and the sensations they can convey to create an enthralling, symphonic whole that emphasizes stillness and the continuum of time. The subjects of these works are not the objects that occupy the paintings but the representation of a moment in time in itself.

Dilg’s work is represented in the public collections of institutions including the Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock, AR, US; the Figge Museum of Art, Davenport, IA, US; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL, US; and Museu d’Art Contemporani Vicente Aguilera Cerni, Villafamés, ES.

Almine Rech represents Oliver Beer

March 17, 2022

Almine Rech announces the representation of British artist Oliver Beer in Brussels, New York and China.

His first collaboration with the gallery will be a 24-hour performance and subsequent interactive installation at the Conservatorio di Musica for Parasol Unit and the 59th Venice Biennale.

Beer trained in musical composition, before studying fine art and then cinematic theory. His diverse artistic practice reflects these studies through the intense sonic experiences he creates in many of his immersive live performances, vocal compositions, films and installations.

His artwork extends from performative art to sculptures and paintings. While his relationship with musical composition is apparent in his powerful live performances and films, further musical elements can also be found in his visual art. We can see this in the sculptures that he makes by cutting through everyday objects ‘just like in an ultrasound scan’; or his Resonance Paintings, created by literally using ‘sound as his paintbrush'. His installations, such as his celebrated Vessel Orchestra exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, play with notions of resonance and the innate musicality of the human experience.

Beer’s work has been exhibited internationally at museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA PS1, New York; Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo and Palace of Versailles, France; and the Biennales of Sydney and Istanbul.

Photo: © Jae Kim

Lisson Gallery to open permanent space in Beijing

March 15, 2022

Lisson Gallery is delighted to announce the opening of its first permanent space in Beijing, housed within the Blanc International Contemporary Art Space, where earlier this year the gallery presented 'Double', a pop-up exhibition by the French painter Bernard Piffaretti, from October 2021 to January 2022.

Dedicated to contemporary art, Blanc International Contemporary Art Space is located within the Tianzhu Free Trade Zone, Shunyi District and to the northeast of the city’s urban centre. Spanning 780 sq. meters, Lisson Gallery Beijing occupies the fourth floor of the building, featuring a main gallery, multiple viewing rooms and office space. The space has been renovated by Studio HVN, the Beijing-based design practice.

Lisson Gallery Beijing will be inaugurated with a solo exhibition by Anish Kapoor, presenting a series of new paintings. The show follows Kapoor’s major two-part exhibition in Beijing in 2019 across the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) Museum and Taimiao Art Museum of the Imperial Ancestral Temple, and coincides with the artist’s much-anticipated presentation across Venice’s historic Gallerie dell'Accademia and Palazzo Manfrin during this year’s Venice Biennale.

The Beijing gallery is directed by David Tung alongside Lisson’s Curatorial Director, Greg Hilty and CEO, Alex Logsdail.

Tolarno Galleries announces the representation of Wanapati Yunupiŋu

March 6, 2022

Tolarno Galleries announces the representation of Wanapati Yunupiŋu (born 1989, homeland Biranybirany; clan Gumatj, Rrakpala group; moiety Yirritja).

Wanapati recently presented his debut solo exhibition at the 2022 Melbourne Art Fair. “... the stunning set-up for Wanapati Yunupiŋu’s first ever solo exhibition (Melbourne or otherwise), sets a special corner of the [Melbourne Art] Fair on fire. The south looked jealously to the Northern Centre for Contemporary Art in Darwin late last year when the exhibition “Murrŋiny” surveyed eight artists from Yirrkala, all working in the medium of engraved “steel” (found metals). Now we get a piece of it ourselves, with Yunupiŋu’s murrŋiny paintings that overlay images of marine life (from deep and shallow water) with ancestral designs of fire. These works do appear both hot and cool. The exposed aluminium twinkles innocently, but I wouldn’t touch the murrŋiny surface; cut with a rotary drill, I bet it’s sharp as hell” - Victoria Perin, MeMO Review, February 2022.

Wanapati is the son of deceased artist Miniyawany Yunupiŋu, a senior artist and ceremonial leader within the Gumatj clan at Biranybirany. Wanapati has inherited rich ceremonial instruction from his father, and was trained while living between the outstation communities of Waṉḏawuy (his mother's clan land) and Biranybirany.

Following his father’s death in 2008, he began to paint his clan design on bark, yidaki and larrakitj. During late 2019 Wanapati began working on found and discarded street signs and metal forms, etching his sacred Gumatj clan designs and narratives into their surface using a rotary tool.

In doing so he was part of a group of artists who followed the artistic movement of fellow artist Gunybi Ganambarr. Gunybi stretched the art centre’s guiding principle which required the use of natural media in depicting sacred designs - “if you are going to paint the land you must use the land”. The elders accepted that Gunybi in presenting materials and mediums which he found on or within the land was in fact using ‘the land’. In creating this loophole he became the originator of the “Found” movement in North East Arnhemland that Wanapati continues.

The gallery will present a solo exhibition by Wanapati Yunupiŋu in February 2023, in partnership with the Indigenous art centre Buku Larrŋgay Mulka located in Yirrkala, North East Arnhemland, NT.

portrait courtesy Buku Larrŋgay Mulka Art Centre

The Sunday Painter announces representation of Jennifer J Lee

Lee paints depictions of found photography often sourced from internet forums and online shopping sites. Her work is startlingly photo realistic, rendered in an intimate scale that invests familiar objects with a psychological depth. Lee portrays photographs with a sharp self-awareness, painting on thick jute burlap that degrades the mechanical process of photography while perversely simulating it. Lee, a semiotician in a visual sense, chooses her subjects for their availability as collective symbolic objects and deploys them in sequences that produce a kind of quasi syntactical language, hinting at meaning but ultimately resolving themselves into an intuitive poetry. Despite their visual swiftness, these paintings are painstakingly constructed in an effort to pull an image apart and then rebuild it. The slowness and transgression of this process is reminiscent of Warhol's early silent films as well as Vija Celmin's meditative renderings.

Jennifer is represented in New York by Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery

Lace Curtain, (2021)

Perrotin announces the opening of a new gallery in Dubai

March 3, 2022

Located in the DIFC, the heart of Dubai, the new 100-square-meter space will open its doors later this year and present primary market works by artists represented by the gallery, alongside secondary market works.

Already present in six cities—Paris, Hong Kong, New York, Seoul, Tokyo, Shanghai—the gallery continues to expand its reach with the opening of this new permanent address in the Middle East.

The new gallery will create connections and strengthen Perrotin’s ties with the Arab world, which have been developed over many years to promote its artists in the region; whether through participation in the Dubai and Abu Dhabi art fairs, or with large-scale projects such as Murakami-Ego at ALRIWAQ in Doha or Jean-Michel Othoniel’s Alfa installation at the National Museum of Qatar.

Simulation / © Photo: Altamash Urooj

Kevin Choe joins Petzel

February 28, 2022

Petzel welcomes Kevin Choe to the gallery as Director.

Choe, who holds a BA in Art History and French from Vassar College, joins Petzel from Mitchell-Innes & Nash.

“I am delighted to join Petzel Gallery, which has remained at the forefront of contemporary art for almost 30 years and which, I believe, is ideally positioned to play an ever-larger role in the current remapping of the art market,” says Choe.

“We are excited to have Kevin join Petzel," says Andrea Teschke, Partner at Petzel. "His talent for facilitating sales is outstanding and his skills greatly complement the expertise of our team. We can’t wait to have him aboard.”

what’s on at Petzel

Inaugural Director announced for Zaha Hadid Foundation

The Zaha Hadid Foundation (ZHF) has announced the appointment of Professor Paul Greenhalgh as its inaugural director. He is an art historian and museum director with considerable international experience, a curator and scholar of art, design, and architecture. His previous roles have included Director of the Sainsbury Centre (UK), Director and President of the Corcoran Gallery of Art and College of Art and Design (Washington DC), President of NSCAD University (Canada), and Head of Research at the V&A Museum (London). He has curated many major exhibitions internationally, and published widely on art, design and architecture in the Modern period.

Professor Greenhalgh said: “It is an enormous honour to be leading the Zaha Hadid Foundation in its inaugural phase. We intend to preserve the magnificent creative legacy of Zaha, by making publicly available our unrivalled collection of her works, and presenting these to the world through exhibitions at home and internationally. In the creative and intellectual spirit of Zaha, we will also address the condition of architecture and related arts of our times, through education and research programmes. Zaha loved to teach and to promote understanding of Modern architecture and art. She constantly sought to give access to the world of architecture and design to young people and a wider public. Through programmes of bursaries, grants, and awards, ZHF will operate in this same spirit.”

kamel mennour announce exclusive representation of the work of Eugène Carrière

February 25, 2022

“I appreciate only what is kept by memory” - Eugène Carrière

Kamel Mennour announce the exclusive international representation of the work of Eugène Carrière.

With Véronique Dumesnil‑Nora, Carrière's great‑granddaughter, the gallery follows in the steps of the Galerie Bernheim‑Jeune – his historical dealer who presented a first solo exhibition in February 1903 – to pay tribute and take part in the recognition of this major artist, whose work finds multiple echoes in our contemporary context.

A celebrated artist during his lifetime, equally at home among the Symbolists and the Naturalists, Carrière (1849‑1906) never ceased to elude the stylistic categories of his time, without claiming to belong to a specific movement.

Resisting all classification, this painter, engraver and draughtsman - who was the contemporary of Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon and Paul Gauguin, among others - surrounded himself very early on with the most influential figures of the artistic and literary world of his time: Roger Marx, Jean Dolent, Alphonse Daudet, Edmond de Goncourt, Gabriel Séailles and Paul Verlaine. His friendship with Auguste Rodin marked his pictorial work which, like that of a sculptor, was inspired by tangible reality and the discovery of matter. “For him, as for his masters, painting, which is a work on the surface, gives the sensation of volume and weight. [...] In each portrait painted by Carrière lies the solid and mechanical beauty of a skeleton” wrote the journalist and art critic Gustave Geffroy in 1906.

A modernist before his time, Carrière founded the Carrière Academy in 1890 on the rue de Rennes in Paris. He taught, among others, those who were to become the Fauves: André Derain, Francis Jourdain, Henri Matisse, but also Pablo Picasso who arrived in the capital in 1901, and whose blue and pink periods are known to owe much to Carrière’s quasi‑monochrome painting.

Often compared to Vélasquez, Carrière demonstrated throughout his life a great mastery of chiaroscuro, allowing him to privilege light over colour, and to achieve a complex and mysterious play of transparency and depth. “To embellish life through art is to enrich it with our in‑depth knowledge of the relationship between man and nature”, he said. Like furtive or evanescent apparitions impossible to capture in an image, his figures seem to abstract themselves from a landscape, a background, another time‑space.

“I have only known my trade since the day I discovered that the curved line,
and not the straight line, was the contour of everything. [...]
You see, it must be drawn like the undulating lines of a plant...
And this is how a woman, a horizon, everything must be drawn.” - Carrière

Gagosian opens new shop in London’s historic Burlington Arcade

February 24, 2022

The ground-floor boutique will feature an array of offerings including prints and editions, Gagosian publications, rare books, exhibition posters, and artist-designed objects and apparel such as jewelry, sculpture, and decorative items. Upstairs, on the first floor, a rotation of small exhibitions, artist takeovers, and special collaborations will be presented. Situated just steps from the Royal Academy of Arts, and off of Old Bond Street, the celebrated destination for luxury retail and fine art since the eighteenth century, the space has been designed by Caruso St John Architects, the Stirling Prize–winning architecture firm that collaborated with Gagosian on the Grosvenor Hill and Britannia Street galleries in London, as well as gallery locations in Rome and Paris. The shop will officially launch on March 1 and will be open each week Tuesday through Saturday.

© Caruso St John Architects. Courtesy Gagosian