Commission

Pamela Rosenkranz
Old Tree
High Line, New York
Through September 2024

Sprüth Magers congratulates Pamela Rosenkranz whose monumental sculpture Old Tree was selected for the third High Line Plinth commission in New York, to be unveiled in spring of 2023. The bright red and pink imaginary tree animates a myriad of historical archetypes wherein the tree of life connects heaven and earth while also closely resembling the complex networks of the human circulatory system. Located on the High Line—an urban park built on a relic of industry—and selected from among over 80 international proposals by artists from 40 countries, Old Tree raises questions about the real while simultaneously highlighting a breakdown of the boundary between nature and artifice.

Publication

John Baldessari
The Story Underneath
Published by Sprüth Magers

The Story Underneath documents Sprüth Magers’ homonymous exhibition, curated by Nana Bahlmann, that explores the process behind John Baldessari’s pictorial reinventions. Collecting images and manipulating them in various ways, Baldessari examined their complex and ambiguous narrative potential. Produced as preparatory works and sketches for his celebrated large-scale pieces, the artist’s rarely-shown maquettes – artworks in their own right – from the early 1980s to the 2000s pull back the curtain on how mundane visual signals are re-appropriated and transformed into complex meditations on the construction of meaning within and through images. The catalogue, designed after one of the artist’s notebooks, grants extraordinary insight into his particular way of seeing, thinking and composing, with many of these works on paper revealing the sources – film stills, lobby cards and found photographs – for the vast trove from which he drew inspiration over the course of his influential six-decade-long career.

142 x 162 mm
174 pages
68 removable images with works by John Baldessari
Text by Nana Bahlmann
50 USD (excl. taxes and shipping)

The catalogue will be available in all Sprüth Magers galleries. Please inquire onsite or by email.

Exhibition

Cao Fei
O futuro não é um sonho
Pinacoteca de São Paulo, São Paulo
Through April 14, 2024

Cao Fei: o futuro não é um sonho is the Chinese artist's first solo show in Latin America and presents four groups of works with themes that analyze how the rapid societal changes of the 21st century, fueled by the intensive use of technologies, has been affecting subjectivity and human experiences.

The overarching themes of the exhibition are: “Manufacturing and globalization”, “The past and present of the virtual world”, “Memories of socialism and sci-fi” and “Urbanization and dystopia”, with the objective to introduce Cao's practice to the Brazilian public with a range of works spanning the past 20 years of her career.

Exhibition

George Condo
Humanoids
Nouveau Musée National de Monaco – Villa Paloma
Through October 1, 2023

In George Condo’s own words, “the humanoid is not a science fiction monster, it is a form of representation that uses traditional means to bring out the inner emotions onto the surface of a person”. Over the course of six sections, the exhibition traces the continuity of a profuse body of work that ranges from “space beings” to Who’s Who, from Guido Reni to Bugs Bunny. Featuring too new paintings produced for the show, the exhibition offers a glimpse of the artist’s process of invention – as crazy as it is erudite – of humanoids.

Exhibition

Cyprien Gaillard
Cyprien Gaillard: Nightlife
Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal
Through November 5, 2023

Cyprien Gaillard’s 3D film Nightlife (2015) weaves together a visual narrative among four seemingly unconnected moments in time and space to create an immersive installation that takes the viewer on a voyage from Cleveland to Berlin to Los Angeles. Filmed entirely at night, and devoid of all human presence, the film is nonetheless imbued with the political, social, and natural impacts of human actions and interactions. The meditative soundtrack and slow-motion camera lull the viewer into a hypnotic state.

Exhibition

Gilbert & George
THE PARADISICAL PICTURES
The Gilbert & George Centre, London

Opening this spring, The Gilbert & George Centre will provide a permanent home for an unrivalled artistic legacy and will be a place for visitors to convene from across the globe to experience pictures by Gilbert & George. The inaugural exhibition will be THE PARADISICAL PICTURES, exhibited in London for the first time, following their debut presentation Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles, and subsequent presentation at Sprüth Magers, Berlin. Gilbert & George commented: “We will start with THE PARADISICAL PICTURES because we realise that most people think of paradise as ‘the after party’ and we think of this as the pre-cum party.”

Exhibition

Andreas Gursky
Visual Spaces of Today
MAST, Bologna
Through January 7, 2024

Drawing inspiration from the acronym MAST—which stands for Manifattura di Arti, Sperimentazione, Tecnologia (Arts, Experience and Technology)—, the visual spaces in the works selected for the exhibition by Urs Stahel and Andreas Gursky mirror these thematic worlds. The artist’s powerful images disclose new views on work, the economy, and globalization. They reveal concrete visions of production plants, goods handling centres, temples of consumption, transport hubs, energy and food industries, and financial centres across the world.

Included in the exhibition are 40 images by the artist, dating from his early works (Krefeld, Hühner, 1989) to his more recent production (V&R II and V&R III, 2022), travelling great lengths, from Salerno (1990) to Hong Kong (2020), and combining modern tourism industry (Rimini, 2003) with age-old production processes (Salinas, 2021).

Site specific Installation

Barbara Kruger
ART WALL 13 – Barbara Kruger
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
Through January 28, 2024

For more than 40 years, Barbara Kruger has been a consistent, critical observer of contemporary culture. In the early 1980s, Kruger perfected a signature style of words and images extracted from mass media and recomposed into memorable, graphic artworks. Rigorously composed, her works have occupied a range of media and spaces, including walls, billboards, video projections, and an array of consumer products. Since the 1990s, Kruger has also created large-scale installations of her text-based art, transforming lobbies, elevators, and buildings with her signature aesthetic and pointed content. Continuing in this vein, Kruger will create a brand-new work for the ICA that speaks, as her work has done for more than four decades, to contemporary social and political dynamics.

Exhibition

David Lamelas
I Have to Think About It
Fondazione Antonio Dalle Nogare, Bolzano
Through February 24, 2024

The Fondazione Antonio Dalle Nogare presents I Have to Think About It, the first Italian retrospective exhibition of the Argentinean artist David Lamelas. Since the 1960s, Lamelas’ conceptual practice has ranged from installation to sculpture, drawing, photography, film, video, sound and textual works, addressing the defining contexts and conditions of our perception.

Publication

Reinhard Mucha
Schnee von gestern / Snows of Yesteryear
Mucha im Livestream 1964–1975
Edited by Sprüth Magers in cooperation with Galerie Bärbel Grässlin, Luhring Augustine, Lia Rumma
Published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Cologne, March 23, 2023

The artist book comprises in two volumes the 433 individual pages of the work Snows of Yesteryear – Excerpts from the Big Calendar III, [2020] 1964–1975. It is a strongly autobiographical work that – installed as an image frieze – traces in documents, drawings, and photographs Mucha's path from 1964 to 1975 divided into four episodes that preceded his artistic career. Schnee von gestern / Snows of Yesteryear oscillates between image history, frieze of time, archival material, and space-spanning sculpture.

The book contains early texts by Mucha, published for the first time, which impressively document the artist's approach to the world. Included in parallel are three quotations by Philipp Otto Runge about art.

The artist book is published in a limited edition.

Publication

Reinhard Mucha
Urlaub im All / Holiday in Space
Edited by Sprüth Magers in cooperation with Galerie Bärbel Grässlin, Luhring Augustine, Lia Rumma Gallery
Published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Cologne, March 23, 2023

Urlaub im All / Holiday in Space is an artist book which can be considered as Reinhard Mucha’s personal oeuvre catalogue. It comprises two volumes in a slipcase and is based on Reinhard Mucha's so-called portfolio books that he created for himself over the years, relating his photographically documented works to one another both formally and aesthetically. Nearly 800 reproductions as well as detailed image and work information provide unprecedented, comprehensive insight into both his work and understanding of sculpture. Also published for the first time are 19 letters and texts by Mucha further elucidating his artistic thinking.

Exhibition

Bridget Riley
Bridget Riley Drawings: From the Artist's Studio
The Morgan Library & Museum, New York
Through October 8, 2023

British artist Bridget Riley (b. 1931) is one of the most celebrated abstract painters of her generation. This exhibition—the first dedicated exclusively to her drawings in over fifty years—provides an intimate view of Riley's studio practice, in which the making of works on paper plays a central role. The exhibition includes more than 75 studies from the artist's collection, created between the 1940s and the 2000s. They include early figurative and landscape drawings made during her student years; black-and-white studies for Riley's best known paintings from the 1960s, when she became closely associated with the Op art movement; and a diverse array of color compositions, which have occupied her attention since the late 1960s. Together they demonstrate Riley's unceasing commitment to paper, pencil, ink, and gouache, as tools of exploration and innovation.

Exhibition

Ed Ruscha
ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN
The Museum of Modern Art – MoMa, New York
Through January 13, 2024

“I don’t have any Seine River like Monet,” Ed Ruscha once said. “I’ve just got US 66 between Oklahoma and Los Angeles.” ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN will feature over 250 objects—including paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, artist’s books, films, and installations—that make use of everything from gunpowder to chocolate. Exploring Ruscha’s landmark contributions to postwar American art as well as lesser-known aspects of his six-decade career, the exhibition will offer new perspectives on a body of work that has influenced generations of artists, architects, designers, and writers.

Catalog

Andreas Schulze
On Stage
Cat. Kunsthalle Nuremberg, The Perimeter

The catalog On Stage was published on the occasion of Andreas Schulze's solo exhibition On Stage, currently on view at The Perimeter in London, where it traveled from Kunsthalle Nuremberg. Both institutions jointly published the catalog, which contains texts by Ralph Rugoff and Daniel Schreiber.

Exhibition

Marcel van Eeden
Hans Thoma Prize 2023
Hans-Thoma-Kunstmuseum, Bernau im Schwarzwald
Through October 15, 2023

Sprüth Magers congratulates Marcel van Eeden on winning the Hans Thoma Prize 2023. Since 1949 The Hans Thoma Prize honours the work of an outstanding artistic personality who has a focus of artistic creation in Baden-Württemberg or was born here. The prize is accompanied by an exhibition at the Hans Thoma Art Museum in Bernau in the Black Forest, organised by the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe for the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts.

For more than 30 years, van Eeden has been inspired by photographs, magazines, advertising material and postcards to create his characteristic deep black charcoal drawings. Initially more like single images, which he published daily on his blog between 2001 and 2007, van Eeden over time developed powerful series with narrative content, which were linked to aesthetic elements of film noir or the graphic novel.

Exhibition

John Waters
John Waters: Pope of Trash
Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, Los Angeles
Through August 4, 2024

John Waters: Pope of Trash is the first comprehensive exhibition dedicated to the artist’s contributions to cinema. The exhibition delves into his filmmaking process, key themes, and unmatched style. Works on view include costumes, props, handwritten scripts, correspondence, scrapbooks, photographs, film clips, and more, revealing the nuances of independent filmmaking and the ways in which Waters’s movies have redefined the possibilities of independent cinema.

Exhibition

Hanne Darboven
Hanne Darboven – Writing Time
Menil Drawing Institute, Houston
October 27, 2023–February 11, 2024

Hanne Darboven—Writing Time explores the intertwining of writing and drawing that formed the core of the artist’s practice for over forty years. Hanne Darboven (1941–2009), a German conceptual artist, is best known for her immersive installations of individually framed sheets filled with text formulations and collaged images. At the heart of her practice is the question of how to picture the unfolding of history, the passing of time, and one’s experience within both.

The exhibition at the Menil explores three defining motifs of the artist’s work on paper—abstract drawings, date calculations, and monumental installations. The display culminates with Inventions that Have Changed Our World, 1996, an enormous set of over 1300 individually framed sheets that incorporates all the hallmarks of her practice and how they reverberated and evolved over the decades of her life.

Hanne Darboven—Writing Time is curated by Kelly Montana, Assistant Curator, Menil Drawing Institute. The show will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue that features essays by Kelly Montana and Dieter Schwarz, independent curator and former Director of the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland.

Exhibition

Thea Djordjadze
the ceiling of a courtyard
WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Bruxelles
October 7, 2023–January 7, 2024

Thea Djordjadze creates a new body of work, examining and challenging not only the formal and material qualities of the post-industrial architecture of the WIELS building, but also its institutional context. This is a continuation of her interest in display, in presentation devices such as frames and vitrines – which often feature as integral elements of her work – or, more broadly, in the conditions for visibility.

Exhibition

Jenny Holzer
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, New York
May 17–September 29, 2024

This exhibition will present a reimagination of Jenny Holzer’s landmark 1989 installation at the Guggenheim. Climbing all six ramps of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed rotunda to the building’s apex, the new manifestation of Holzer’s electronic sign extends and builds upon the artist’s vision from thirty-five years earlier. The site-specific work will transform the building with a display of scrolling texts from her earliest series of truisms and aphorisms to more recent experiments with language generated by artificial intelligence. Holzer’s iconic use of the written word throughout her career has long captivated audiences around the world and this solo exhibition will feature little known examples of Holzer’s work spanning her career from the 1980s through today.

Artist Talk

Art in Context #56
Er wachte auf und ging ins Bad ­– Andreas Schulze in Conversation with Udo Kittelmann (in German)
Museum Ludwig Auditorium, Cologne
Monday, October 23, 2023, 7pm

Please register online.

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