Galerie Buchholz presents a new group exhibition curated by Samuel Hindolo at the New York gallery. The exhibition includes works by Yuji Agematsu, Gilles Aillaud, Cecilia Bjartmar Hylta, Prunella Clough, Curtis Cuffie, Dominick Di Meo, Trisha Donnelly, Claudette Gacuti, Solomon Garçon, Alex Harsley, Henrik Olesen, Patrick Procktor, and Katsuhiro Yamaguchi.

Since 1985, Yuji Agematsu has collected objects from the streets of New York. Here he has hung one true painting – a single piece of road line found on Christopher Street late one November night. The painted line is unaltered, reversible, and attached to the wall with the familiar, speckly white side faced inward, and the aluminum underside out. Agematsu was born in 1956, in Kanagawa, Japan, and lives in Brooklyn, NY. He studied with Tokio Hasegawa, a member of the band Taj Mahal Travellers, and the jazz drummer and choreographer Milford Graves. His next solo exhibition will open at the Judd Foundation in May of this year.

Known for painting animals almost exclusively, and almost always in the context of zoos or in human-made captivity, Gilles Aillaud (French, 1928-2005) was a painter, set decorator, and scenographer active in post-war France. His work has a latent political force in the way it addresses the human engagement with the natural world in the context and confines of late capitalism. His work was the subject of a retrospective titled “Political Animal” at the Centre Pompidou in 2023.

The square-ish slab that shapes Cecilia Bjartmar-Hylta’s “Untitled” is comprised of dust particulates she accumulated from rooms, hallways, and vestibules. These particulates, varying in color, density and sediment, retell the inactions of the sites they were sourced from. They are compressed, sealed and cast into silicone masses. Bjartmar-Hylta was born in 1992 in Lund, Sweden.

In her first decades as an artist, Prunella Clough (British, 1919-1999) painted industrial spaces and scenes of post- war England, addressing “the opportunities they afforded for abstract dynamics symbolic of the energies of ‘modern life’” alongside the figure of the worker as “emblematic of human dignity and honest toil. [...] Prunella Clough looked at the urban and industrial world with a vigorous and unsentimental curiosity. But it was always with that almost instinctive tendency to see it slightly askew, to avoid the obvious, to catch at the unconsidered aspect, to find in it something normally un-observed.” (Mel Gooding, “Prunella Clough: The Poetry of Painting”)

Born in Hartsville, South Carolina, Curtis Cuffie (American, 1955-2002) moved to New York as a teenager and lived transiently, often unhoused, in the streets of Manhattan where he found both inspiration and materials for his work as an artist. Cuffie’s sculptures interpret material street culture in the 1990s and early 2000s, using discarded and found objects assembled and transformed into collaged figures that speak to both the abject reality of urban surplus as well as the magical alchemy of artistic creation. Built by Cuffie outdoors, primarily on the sidewalks around Astor Place and along the Bowery, his sculptures were subject to the whims of weather, police interference, and the sanitation department, as well as his own continued interventions into his work. Friends and lovers, fellow artists, and students engaged intimately with his work. Public recognition ensued, with photographers documenting his ephemeral practice and gallerists and curators presenting his work in more traditional commercial and institutional venues.

Dominick Di Meo (American, 1927-2024) was part of the so-called “monster roster” group of artists working in Chicago in the post-war period. They engaged with philosophical ideas about existentialism, and looked to European Surrealism and Art Brut as a model to forge an artistic practice that left an indelible impact of the arts coming out of Chicago.

Claudette Gacuti’s (born in Burundi) scroll is a roller blind repurposed from and reconfigured in her apartment. It is her latest in an ongoing study on framing, and particularly of landscapes in various moving windows while conflating geologic and domestic scales. She lives and works in New York.

Solomon Garçon (born 1991 in London, where he lives and works) has developed a practice that slips between visibility and vacancy. His sculpture “Crypt” is a curdled, leather sack that shrouds a dormant figure. Its flat-stitched pattern depicts a darkroom with arches modeled after a curved truss from a Victorian English chapel.

Alex Harsley has cast New York City’s unique medley of characters and neighborhoods as the subject of his work throughout a career that spans nearly seven decades. In a recent video montage entitled “Spa”, Harsley commits to a first-person point-of-view of Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue from the window of a bus seat. The slow-motion, mirror edit takes viewers on a nonlinear journey across entangled dimensions of reality. Harsley was born 1938 in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and lives and works in New York City. In 1973 he founded the Fourth Street Photo Gallery, an alternative exhibition space for photography in the East Village.

The overpainted photo collages of the “Companion Species” by Henrik Olesen (born 1967 in Denmark, lives and works in Berlin) use images of real-life examples of interspecies relationships, intimacy across biological lines. Animating themes from Donna Haraway’s “The Companion Species Manifesto”, Olesen inscribes these animals into his expansive exploration of queer subcultures, histories, and politics.

The painting “Lawn” by Patrick Proctor (British, 1936-2003), on view here, is an alternate version of his work “The Guardian Readers”, which was commissioned to be the cover art for Elton John’s 1976 double album Blue Moves. His paintings, often portraits and often in water color, captured images of society, and here it is a depiction of a crowd seen in a kind of intimate pose of homosocial leisure. Proctor was a key figure in the British cultural landscape starting in the 1960s.

The glinting lightbox of Katsuhiro Yamaguchi (Japanese, 1928-2018) reveals stacked refractions of light in a composition that might recall urban architecture and its shining, reflective surfaces. A founding member of the Experimental Workshop, and a key participant in the Tokyo avant-garde of the post-war period, Yamaguchi developed a multifaceted practice that included kinetic sculptures, electrified light sculptures, photography, and drawing.

Samuel Hindolo (born 1990 in Prince George’s County, Maryland) lives and works in New York and received an MFA from Bard College in 2021. In the fall of 2024 he presented “Eurostar”, a two-part solo exhibition at Galerie Buchholz New York and 15 Orient. His first solo show with Galerie Buchholz, titled “Guest Room”, was held in Berlin in the Spring of 2023. Samuel Hindolo’s work will be in included in two upcoming museum exhibitions, “Painting after Painting – a contemporary survey from Belgium” opening on April 4 at S.M.A.K. in Antwerp, and “The Gatherers” opening on April 24 at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, New York.