In a photographic project spanning five decades, Bernd and Hilla Becher documented the soon-to-be-forgotten architectural forms of industry. Systematically photographing each structure, the artists examined their shared qualities and categorized the images into grid typologies or displayed them individually. The Grain Elevators presented here have a somewhat haphazard appearance, an amalgamation of different materials and surfaces, with their sculptural qualities enhanced by an obsessively formalist, technically precise and instantly recognizable style. The structures here are primarily from the United States, but a few are shot in France and Germany, presenting a language of heavy industry that developed independently across borders. The artists’ taxonomic eye, indebted to the German Neue Sachlichkeit movement of the 1920s and its drive toward an expressionless, non-subjective style, is enhanced by their use of a large-format camera and strict criteria that carefully governs what can and cannot be included in each frame. Their work is a testimony to the engineers and architects of heavy industry, as well as to the generations of people who used them; as a requiem for a lost world, these functional structures achieve a great beauty.

George Condo’s interest in portraiture dominates his oeuvre, and many of his works consist of “invented” portraits that create enthralling characters in guises reminiscent of stereotypical roles. This intimate work on paper is part of a group of works made on sheets cut from a roll of hot-pressed Aquarelle paper, done in ink and graphite. Its particular subject, “the reporter,” evokes an old-fashioned concept of the male journalist figure – clad in a suit, with balding hair, he appears to clutch a notepad or smoke a pipe (or both). In yet another example of his “psychological Cubism,” Condo endeavors to depict numerous emotional auras at once, and his unique approach to portraiture strives for the depiction of character without the need for traditional figurative representation. Moreover, the intimacy of the medium subtly yet powerfully conveys the flair of Condo’s draftsmanship, and his innate ability to combine the beautiful with the grotesque.

Across many artistic mediums, the work of Georgian artist Thea Djordjadze concerns itself with poetry: of space, of material, of aesthetics, of memory. She combines a variety of methods and materials—often industrial and unconventional—to produce works full of contrast and complexity, despite their outward simplicity. Untitled (2020) is a plaster work whose pigment is incorporated both into the physical makeup of the work, as well as layered onto the surface. It has a palpable physicality, as Djordjadze gouges, scratches, layers and bores into the surface in order to create the composition. The artist’s plaster paintings are therefore marked with the physical and psychological presence of the artist; their gestural quality connotes sweeping movements of the arm, while their size and textural quality is somehow corporeal. Untitled (2020) finds inspiration from the monstera deliciosa or Swiss Cheese plants found in Henri Matisse’s studio.

Untitled is located in London. Please contact us if you would like to arrange a viewing.

Since the early 2000s, Jenny Holzer has researched redacted US government documents released to the public under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), using them as source material for silkscreens, watercolors and paintings. The documents themselves concern the global War on Terror, US military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and, more recently, Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential election. Each painting is true to the original: the source document is enlarged and the content carefully reproduced to emphasize the traces of censorship and concealment within the text. A stunning and rare instance of a diptych among this body of work, mission-essential warfighting (2020) comes from an original report about military cyberspace operations. The canvases’ vibrant geometric fields of color make clear Holzer’s early affinity for the abstract paintings of Kazimir Malevich, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. Yet despite the regal expanses of blue, crimson, gold and silver, the difficult context of Holzer’s source material comes through via her emphasis on its textual redactions and strikethroughs. In so doing, she highlights how these documents share or conceal information about the tactics of power and war.

Jenny Holzer’s primary medium is text, and since the late 1970s she has presented her penetrating phrases in various forms, including on benches and footstools whose stone surfaces exude at once physical and symbolic weight. This work is made of green Labradorite whose stunning surface is at turns translucent and iridescent, with flecks of blue, teal and gold. The text—IT IS MAN’S FATE TO OUTSMART HIMSELF—comes from Holzer’s Truisms, whose pithy statements distill difficult and contentious ideas into a seemingly straightforward fact, making the reader pause for thought and call into question the power of language itself. The sentiment here touches upon the innate human desire to achieve and exceed, as well as the possibly negative ramifications and consequences of this drive. Considering Holzer’s long-standing presence at the forefront of feminist art and thought, the gendered nature of “man” and “himself” in the sentence may also suggest a critique of a society still disproportionately governed and dictated by men. But as in all of her texts and works, Holzer avoids any overt or easy interpretations, letting the object’s presence and context speak for itself.

Known for his distinctive gloss-on-aluminum paintings, Gary Hume has over the past three decades become recognized as a restless innovator and a supreme colorist. While his geometrical “Door” paintings established the artist as an important voice among an ambitious generation of British artists, he has since become renowned for a richly varied repertoire of traditional painter’s subjects such as the human figure, birds and flowers. Two Blooms, Grey Fields (2020) is one of a group of symmetrical flower paintings Hume made in 2020: all three featured in the gallery’s online exhibition, Double Bloom. The artist has compared his flowers to people, and indeed Two Blooms, Grey Fields readily brings to mind a couple deep in conversation. The sense of intimacy between the two flowers is also a reminder that one of Hume’s favorite artists is the Mannerist Bronzino. The Madonna and Child with Saint John the Baptist and Saint Elizabeth, in London’s National Gallery, depicts Mary and the Christ child suspended forever in a moment just before their faces touch. As with Bronzino’s mother and child, the flowers in Two Blooms, Grey Fields are suspended forever, loving yet hesitant, on the verge of an intimate connection.

Two Blooms, Grey Fields is located in London. Please contact us if you would like to arrange a viewing.

In a diverse practice that draws upon the tradition of Romantic painting, Karen Kilimnik utilizes painting, drawing, collage, photography, video and installation to produce nuanced and playful observations of historical codes and symbols. Reveling in both mass and high culture, she depicts places and people both semi-fictional and real, creating her own specific mélange of cultural influence and production. The painting presented here, Secret agent club, London, Mayfair (2017), displays her fascination with British culture and the narratives she creates. The glossed black door of the “secret agent club” could be the frontage of any number of Georgian buildings in the capital, but here ascribed a mythical sense of intrigue, perhaps even snatched from the artist’s beloved 1960s British spy series The Avengers. Kilmnik imagines it as a place where bowler-hatted agents could relax or meet for assignments in a scene that is elegantly and quintessentially London.

Since the 1960s, Senga Nengudi has worked at the forefront of sculpture, performance and photography, using simple materials in unexpected ways in order to evoke the (Black) body, feminist considerations of space and movement, and cultural and religious ritual. She often uses a single idea or moment as a springboard to generate multiple variations of the same work in different mediums, working collaboratively in each; an early example is Rapunzel (1981), a photograph that stems from an outdoor performance work. For In My Backyard, April 2020 (Performance Photograph) (2020), Nengudi staged a performance in her backyard using her own body, everyday fabric, scavenged natural materials and existing land as a basis for this mysterious and solitary ritual. Nengudi continues her legacy of employing photography to capture the action of performance, a practice that has become especially valuable in this time of required isolation. The ephemeral nature of performance requires an audience, and through photography—in this case undertaken by her son—Nengudi allows for her performance to live on.

An exhibition of large-scale installations by the artist is currently on view at the Los Angeles gallery, and a major traveling exhibition opens at Denver Art Museum in December 2020.

Working primarily with material scavenged from airplane “cemeteries” in California and Arizona, Michail Pirgelis alters and rearranges aerospace parts to form a contemporary archaeology that transforms them into cultural objects. By decontextualizing the components, but keeping the aura of the objects intact, he explores the fragility and awe of flying as well as the human desire to defy gravity, meanwhile also making reference to a time when aviation was associated with luxury and exclusivity. Triple Paranoia (2018) is comprised of three glass-less window frames, layered and polished to a mirrored surface, exposing their rivet lines. The work is the only instance within the artist’s oeuvre to use three windows atop each other, and this repeating structure makes clear reference to minimalist sculpture, as do the work’s reflective surfaces and industrial aesthetic. The title and form of the work could not be more apt in a time when planes have been grounded and the process of flying has become seemingly more fear-inducing.

Triple Paranoia is located in Berlin. Please contact us if you would like to arrange a viewing.

With Sexual Power (Viagra Painting, Balmy Thickness) (2018), Pamela Rosenkranz displays her continual willingness to present her physical self as a vessel for artistic production. Each painting in the artist’s longtime Sexual Power (Viagra Painting) series begins in the same way. Rosenkranz ingests Viagra, the sexual stimulant designed for male pleasure, and working on aluminum panels, she applies fluid acrylic polymer with her hands, always using flesh-toned colors. The proportions of the painting are just larger than those of a human, implicating the presence and pressure of Rosenkranz’s full body in the production of the work. The rosy pink tones of Balmy Thickness evoke an oncoming blush or other rush of blood to the skin—similar to the skin-reddening effects of enhanced blood flow, the trademark of Viagra. With this work, the artist transgresses gender boundaries in both the artistic and medical fields: By consuming a drug designed for men, and working in a manner similar to that of the hyper-masculine Abstract Expressionist movement, Rosenkranz claims male territory, power and virility as her own.

For over four decades, German photographer Thomas Ruff has explored how historical and media-driven changes in photography affect our understanding of the relationship between image and reality, often using found imagery as his starting point. His latest body of work considers propaganda images—a subject he has drawn from for many years and which has a firm place in the history of photography—and specifically material from China between 1950 and 1970. Ruff scanned the analog images from books on Mao published in China and from the magazine La Chine (distributed worldwide by the Chinese Communist Party) at an ultra-high resolution that captures the dot matrix of the objects’ original printing processes. In a complex method that involves duplicating these images digitally, translating their dot matrix into a pixel matrix, and then manipulating these layers in multiple ways, scenes of military pomp, artistic displays, jovial comrades in uniform and of course Mao himself acquire an otherworldly feel, as if existing in a parallel world that nonetheless has enormous bearing on today’s political structures and machinations.

Analia Saban works across a broad spectrum of mediums exploring how art objects are conceived, constructed and understood. She approaches her materials with both a conceptual eye and an interest in history—of art-making in general, as well as the history and social function of the materials she employs. Motherboard #1 (2020) consists of a computer motherboard—a crucial part of computer hardware through which all system components interact and connect—overlaid with black printer's ink. The latter material is usually meant to be applied thinly, like with newspaper print; yet when so thickly applied, it dries to form networks of swirling, crinkling patterns reminiscent of brain coral or Richard Artschwager's Cellotex surfaces. Saban has often combined aspects of the analog and digital worlds in her works. Encased by its inky veil and surrounded by a bespoke walnut frame, the motherboard in this case is rendered inert, a byproduct of mass digital culture that usually goes unseen but now appears as a mysterious, portentous object.

For the last four decades, Andreas Schulze has played a key role in contemporary painting. His colorful pictorial worlds, which question our collective social and cultural habits, are the result of attentive observations of everyday surroundings, from domestic spaces to urban scenes to lush, natural vistas. Schulze frequently combines abstract and figurative forms, drawing freely from Surrealism, Dadaism and Abstract Expressionism to produce otherworldly scenes in a style all his own. This strategy is at play in Untitled (Sicilian Hoarding 3) (2014), which presents an array of earth-toned bands of color, reminiscent of a barcode or a barrier, that are pierced by two round zones displaying a seaside landscape. Could we be peering through a rocky façade to the sea behind it? Or are these zones floating surreally across our field of vision? The painting sets up a compelling dynamic between inside and outside that recurs throughout Schulze’s work: He paints an attractive scene that beckons the viewer, only to keep it closed off through compositional and painterly tactics, thereby leaving the viewer always wanting to see and know more.

Untitled (Sicilian Hoarding 3) is located in London. Please contact us if you would like to arrange a viewing.

Over the past four decades, Cindy Sherman has created photographic portraits that are grounded in themes of identity, gender and role-play. Taking on the role of both photographer and model, Sherman adopts limitless guises—housewife, clown, Madonna and man—that illuminate the performative nature of subjectivity and sexuality. This practice, pushed to its furthest boundaries, has made her one of the most influential artists of her generation. In the last year, Sherman has moved her practice in a new direction: the medium of tapestry, producing her first-ever non-photographic series of work (though the content derives from images found on the artist’s much-followed Instagram account). Untitled (2020) features a new version of Sherman, this time purple-faced and pink-haired with bright yellow eye shadow and gargantuan, spider-like fake eyelashes, arm outstretched as though she is taking a selfie against the setting sun. By using an app to alter her appearance, Sherman employs the tactics of social media in order to explore and exploit our relationship with ourselves and show how an image of oneself can contain little truth of real life.

Untitled is located in Los Angeles. Please contact us if you would like to arrange a viewing.

Rosemarie Trockel is a pioneer of conceptual art, providing versatility and a deeply needed female perspective to the genre since the early 1980s. With a focus on craft, Trockel employs myriad media to challenge our narrowly conceived social norms regarding the idea of the male artistic genius, gender roles and political and cultural philosophies. A sense of irony and wit always boil just below the surface of Trockel’s works, providing a subversive humor that often balances the gravitas of her subject matter. A mirror or window in a pale yellow-glazed ceramic form, Dans la Rue (2019) is a cartoon-esque object that looks straight out of a fairy tale or film set. The title inscribed in cursive lettering along its sill appears like a commercial slogan—or is it a reference to the French gilets jaunes protests of the last few years? Curious and obstinate, the wall-mounted sculpture presents itself to the viewer as an inaccessible window, providing no clues as to what could be seen beyond (or what has been covered up). 

Dans la Rue is located in Berlin. Please contact us if you would like to arrange a viewing.

Celebrated for her unsparing look at American history and society, particularly as it relates to the African-American experience and its roots in slavery, Kara Walker has produced a range of thought-provoking and unflinching works since she burst onto the contemporary art scene in the 1990s. Untitled (Head) (2014) takes up the form for which she is best known: The cut-paper silhouette. Two planes of black paper, carefully and gracefully shaped, intersect to delineate the profile of a man. His exaggerated lips and close-cropped curly hair suggest racialized stereotypes of African features, and in the context of Walker's work, which often situates its narratives in the Antebellum American South, he may represent an enslaved man or other figure from the Civil War era. The form protruding from the figure's head resembles the neck of a bottle, recalling ancient anthropomorphic vases and drinking vessels but also evoking the commodification of human beings that defines the institution of slavery. Moreover, the dual-faced nature of the depiction suggests Janus, the Roman god of beginnings, transitions and endings, whose two visages are said to look simultaneously to the past and the future.