Over a prolific twenty-year period, Kaari Upson created a powerful body of work that plumbed the depths of what it means to be a living, thinking body within the complex environment of late twentieth and early twenty-first century America. The influence of her haunting sculptures, paintings, drawings, installations and videos continues to reverberate through contemporary art practice despite her death in August 2021 at the age of 51.

The gallery worked closely with the artist for many years. As Philomene Magers remarks, “My visits with Kaari in her studio were one of the highlights of my career, and they shaped so much of how I experience and understand Southern California, then and now. We are grateful to be able to support her meaningful work and keep its influence alive.” Monika Sprüth states, “Kaari's work is part of a distinguished lineage of artists working in Los Angeles, from Chris Burden to Paul McCarthy to Mike Kelley, and she has shaped artists of a younger generation, too, who worked in her studio or encountered her work in museums worldwide.”

Upson’s deep exploration of everyday objects extended to those from her own biography. For MMDP (My Mother Drinks Pepsi)—the subject of an artist’s book published by Sprüth Magers and an exhibition at Sprüth Magers, Berlin in 2016—she constructed totemic sculptures from cast cans of Pepsi, the daily guilty pleasure of her mother, a German immigrant who idealized her adopted American home.

As her career progressed, Upson expanded the scale of her works to monumental proportions, creating wall-sized drawings and installations filling entire rooms, including at the New Museum, New York, Kunsthalle Basel and the 2019 Venice Biennial. Drawings were fundamental from the start of her career, serving as experimental fields within which she teased out concepts and forms that then cycled back into her sculptures, videos and installations.

From August 6 to October 8, 2022, Sprüth Magers will present an exhibition at the Los Angeles gallery that features a selection of these last works, demonstrating an artist at the height of her creative powers and introducing a new lens through which to understand Upson's larger oeuvre. Conceived alongside curator Ali Subotnick, who organized Upson's first institutional solo exhibition in 2007 at the Hammer Museum, the exhibition will also include earlier works never shown before in the US.

New works will also debut as part of The Milk of Dreams, the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Cecilia Alemani, opening April 23, 2022. This is the second time Upson is included in this prestigious exhibition, having participated in the 58th edition curated by Ralph Rugoff in 2019. Additional institutional projects include Shifting the Silence at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art curated by Eungie Joo (on view April 9–September 5, 2022), which brings together recent acquisitions to the permanent collection by women artists who use the radical language of abstraction to enhance our understanding of the world.

Upson's loss is felt profoundly. Through these and other forthcoming projects, Sprüth Magers looks forward to working together with the estate to share Upson's work with audiences across the world, cementing her important place within contemporary art.