Upcoming Exhibitions

Gretchen Bender – The Perversion of the Visual – Los Angeles

Gretchen Bender
The Perversion of the Visual
May 24–August 10, 2024
Public Reception: May 23, 6–8pm

Los Angeles

Gretchen Bender emerged in the early 1980s in New York as a contemporary of the Pictures Generation. A commentator on the age of television, her work continues its relevancy in today’s privatized and multi-screened cultural landscape – in many ways, even predicting its development. Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are pleased to present The Perversion of the Visual, Bender’s second exhibition with the gallery and her first in Los Angeles since 1989. The show will feature the first of her two immersive and career-defining “electronic theater” works, Dumping Core (1984), shown for the first time on the West Coast since Bender performed it in 1986. Alongside the installation will be newly printed photo-collages that address the horrors of war and the fear of a collective numbness to its reality.

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Otto Piene – The Proliferation of the Sun – Los Angeles

Otto Piene
The Proliferation of the Sun
May 24–August 10, 2024
Public Reception: May 23, 6–8pm

Los Angeles

Artist Page
Andreas Schulze – Inside Out – Beijing

Andreas Schulze
Inside Out
May 24–June 2, 2024
Gallery Weekend Beijing
4F, Building A07, 798 Art District, Beijing

Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are pleased to present Inside Out, Andreas Schulze’s first solo exhibition in Asia, on the occasion of Beijing Gallery Weekend. A key figure in contemporary painting since the 1980s, Schulze has developed a visual language all his own between abstraction and figuration, in which domestic spaces and scenic landscapes take on attitudes and proportions that are humorous, unnerving, and always unique.

Artist Page
John Baldessari – Ahmedabad 1992 – London

John Baldessari
Ahmedabad 1992
May 31–July 27, 2024
Public Reception: May 30, 6–8pm

London

John Baldessari, a pioneer of American Conceptualism, continually challenged clichés and explored the expectations that shape how we perceive works of art. Throughout his storied and influential career, his distinctive approach to painting, photography, source images and texts recontextualized art-historical narratives and rejected traditional boundaries. Drawing from a breadth of sources – advertising, film culture, Marcel Duchamp, and Ludwig Wittgenstein – he created absurdist, complex yet accessible juxtapositions. Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are pleased to present Ahmedabad 1992, a solo exhibition of an alluring series of mixed media assemblages Baldessari produced during his residency in India. For the first time in decades, a selection from this unique period in the artist’s oeuvre will be on view at the London gallery.

Artist Page
David Ostrowski – Parliament – New York

David Ostrowski
Parliament
June 4–July 26, 2024
Public Reception: June 2, 11am–2pm

New York

In David Ostrowski’s paintings, minimal gestures create maximum tension. His spray-painted lines break apart monochromatic backgrounds, both emphasizing and negating the painting’s flatness. Surfaces sometimes built from plain house paint reveal underlayers of studio detritus that complicate the presumed emptiness of his abstract compositions. Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are pleased to present Parliament, Ostrowski’s first exhibition at the New York gallery, which furthers the artist’s relentless questioning of the medium of painting and its constitutive elements via the recurring figure of the owl.

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Artist Page
Jenny Holzer – Paper Works – New York

Jenny Holzer
September 5–October 2024

New York

Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are pleased to present a solo exhibition focused on Jenny Holzer’s works on paper, the artist’s first show at Sprüth Magers’ New York gallery. Holzer’s stonework drawings, which were used to set the text for her benches and sarcophagi, offer a glimpse into the artist’s process, in part through her handwritten notations. Also on view will be tracings of documents from federal agency reports, investigations, military and intelligence operations, and other sources. While these tracings began as process drawings for Holzer’s Redaction Paintings, some have become artworks, with gestural marks in graphite and charcoal adding layers of interest to the artist’s use of material and language. Here are fingerprints.

Artist Page
Oliver Bak – Berlin

Oliver Bak
September 2024
Berlin

The mystical scenes of painter Oliver Bak unite the spirits of the past and future. He constructs enigmatic narratives by conflating different fragments of reality – from fiction and the real, history and the present, mythology and life, to the tangible and the subconscious. Bak’s pictorial worlds are propelled by constant synthesis and anchored in a deep understanding of the medium’s history. His mottled brushwork and magnetic use of color allow plants to sprout on the surface of his canvases and empyrean figures to emerge from leafy areas and flecks of light, breaking down spatial categories. Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are pleased to present both Bak’s first exhibition at the Berlin gallery and the Danish artist’s first exhibition in Germany.