With her early work, Cindy Sherman revolutionized the role of the camera in artistic practice and opened the door for generations of artists and critics to rethink photography as a medium. On 4 May 2022, Hauser & Wirth New York will present over one hundred works from Sherman’s most groundbreaking and influential early series – including the complete set of 70 Untitled Film Stills, Rear Screen Projections and Centerfolds – in her first major solo exhibition with the gallery.
Curated by Legacy Russell, Executive Director & Chief Curator of The Kitchen, ‘The New Bend’ brings together 12 contemporary artists working in the raced, classed, and gendered traditions of quilting and textile practice – Anthony Akinbola, Eddie R. Aparicio, Dawn Williams Boyd, Diedrick Brackens, Tuesday Smillie, Tomashi Jackson, Genesis Jerez, Basil Kinkaid, Eric Mack, Sojourner Truth Parsons, Qualeasha Wood, and Zadie Xa. Their unique visual vernacular exists in tender dialogue with, and in homage to, the contributions of the Gee’s Bend Alabama quilters – Black American women in collective cooperation and creative economic production – and their enduring legacy as a radical meeting place, a prompt, and as intergenerational inspiration. This exhibition acknowledges the work of Gee’s Bend quilters such as Sarah Benning (b. 1933), Missouri Pettway (1902-1981), Lizzie Major (1922-2011), Sally Bennett Jones (1944-1988), Mary Lee Bendolph (b.1935), and so many more, as central to expanded histories of abstraction and modernism.
On 16 November, Hauser & Wirth New York will present a newly discovered, never before exhibited, painting by Arshile Gorky. ‘Untitled (Virginia Summer)’ was uncovered in 2020 during conservation and research for Gorky’s catalogue raisonné. It was discovered directly beneath ‘The Limit,’ attached to the same, original stretcher that Gorky used when the painting first left his studio in 1947. Hidden for over 70 years, ‘Untitled (Virginia Summer)’ is as rich and as vibrant as when it was first created. ‘Beyond The Limit’ will present both paintings to the public together for the first time, along with works on paper directly related to the recently discovered composition, and a new book from Hauser & Wirth Publishers featuring illuminating essays by Parker Field, Managing Director of the Arshile Gorky Foundation, and Pepe Karmel, Associate Professor of Art History at New York University. The exhibition, and accompanying publication, provide fresh insight into the development of Gorky’s practice during the last years of his life, when his abstract imagery and style reached a confident maturity.
Beginning 30 September, Hauser & Wirth will debut ‘Erna Rosenstein: Once Upon a Time,’ the first monographic exhibition outside of Poland devoted to Erna Rosenstein (1913 – 2004). One of the key figures of the Polish avant-garde, Rosenstein’s wartime survival, commitment to Surrealism, and lifelong adherence to leftist ideologies course through a remarkable array of paintings, drawings, and assemblage sculptures, as well as poems, diaristic writings, and deceptively whimsical children’s stories. Steeped in an extraordinary history and responding to the Nazi occupation of Poland, personal traumas suffered in the Holocaust, the postwar sociopolitical upheaval of her native country, and passionate engagement in the intellectual circles of her times, Erna Rosenstein’s work defies simple classification. Her six-decades long career was fueled by the formation of prewar artistic, intellectual, and political affiliations, and is expressed through her continued oscillation between autobiographical figuration and biomorphic abstraction. Grappling with themes of memory, trauma, longing, and loss, she used paint, ink, and found materials to suggest a world tinged with allegory, enchantment, and fairy tale.
Sydney Shavers, Rose Mount Rose, 2021; Acrylic paint, Resin, Raspberries, Blackberries, Sugar, Joint Compound, Flowers, Red Carnations, Red Rose, Food Dye, Canvas, Corn Syrup, Cherries, Pigment, Flax Seeds, Oranges, Queen Anne Candies; 40.6 x 30.4 x 2.54 cm /16 x 12 x 1 in. Photo: Courtesy of the artist, Hunter College and Hauser & Wirth
Hauser & Wirth New York will open its doors to ‘We Were Already Gone’, an exhibition at its West 22nd Street location in the Chelsea Arts District, organized in collaboration with Hunter College. Curated by graduate students in Hunter’s Department of Art & Art History, this exhibition will showcase the work of artists currently enrolled in the school’s MFA Program in Studio Art. ‘We Were Already Gone’ spotlights the diversity and holistic approach that have situated Hunter uniquely among American institutions devoted to higher education in the arts. The show will present an array of works across mediums, with sculpture, painting, and videos that confront the global cultural and political reckoning underway.
In a wide-ranging practice spanning four decades, postwar Japanese artist Tetsumi Kudo (1935 – 1990) explored the effects of mass consumerism, the rise of technology, and ecological degradation on post- war society through satirical, critical, elaborately detailed and meticulously constructed environments that continue to exert a powerful influence on artists today. Opening 5 May, ‘Tetsumi Kudo. Metamorphosis,’ the artist’s first exhibition at Hauser & Wirth New York, focuses upon the late artist’s idea of metamorphosis which emphasizes the need for personal and collective spiritual evolution beyond the values of Western Humanism, which he believed caused war, racism, and colonialism, and alienated people from the natural environment.
Reflecting the scale and scope of a prodigious six-decade career that has unfolded while criss-crossing the Atlantic Ocean, Sir Frank Bowling’s inaugural exhibition with Hauser & Wirth will be presented in both the gallery’s London and New York locations simultaneously, beginning May 2021. With works on view spanning over 50 years of the British icon’s career from 1967 to the present day, ‘Frank Bowling – London / New York’ celebrates the ways in which one artist’s inventive approach to the materiality of paint has expanded the boundaries of abstraction.
New York… In a 1952 lecture at the Detroit Institute of Arts, David Smith (1906 – 1965) described the inspiration behind one of his recent sculptures, saying ‘My wish is that you travel by perception the path which I traveled in creating it. That same wish goes for the rest of my work.’ Taking its title from his remarks, ‘David Smith: Follow My Path’ will go on view at Hauser & Wirth New York beginning 27 April.
Roni Horn has spent the past four decades questioning accepted notions of identity and meaning, thwarting closure and opening up new possibilities of perception through her expansive body of work across mediums. Beginning 18 February, ‘Roni Horn. Recent Work’ will present the artist’s latest achievements in the realm of drawing, a medium she has described as ‘a kind of breathing activity on a daily level.’
Beginning 5 November 2020, Hauser & Wirth New York will present rarely seen works made by American artist Jack Whitten (1939 – 2018). The exhibition focuses on his practice from 1991 through 2000, a period of intense experimentation during which, deeply affected by tumultuous world events, he strove to incorporate them into his work. Blurring the boundaries between sculpture and painting, and between the studio and the world, the multidimensional works on view combine geometric abstraction and found objects to mine spiritual and metaphysical thematic veins.
Hauser & Wirth will open its doors to ‘Internal Riot,’ an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by American artist George Condo. Made during the quarantine period, these works reflect the unsettling experience of physical distance and the absence of human contact during this prolonged time of so- cial isolation. The pandemic has forced Condo to take his portraiture practice to a new level, with invented cha- racters captured in an abstract web that reveals the humanity inherent in their fractured psychological states.
Now, with New York City in Phase 3, Hauser & Wirth has opened the doors to its new building located at 542 West 22nd Street in Chelsea. The 36,000 square-foot, Selldorf Architects designed building includes a bookshop, crafted cafe and bar, and large flexible-configuration gallery spaces with site-specific artist interventions in such areas as stairways and elevators.
We appreciate museums and galleries offering free content online, along with new virtual gallery exhibitions. Hauser & Wirth New York will launch the online exhibition, Louise Bourgeois. Drawings 1947-2007, on March 25, 2020.
Beginning 20 February, Hauser & Wirth will present the latest body of work by Hungarian born, New York-based artist Rita Ackermann ~ a suite of new paintings in which figures and motifs rise to the surface of canvases, only to dissolve and reappear elsewhere again. Continue reading “Rita Ackermann. Mama ’19 at Hauser & Wirth Chelsea”→
Jack Whitten, Space Flower #9, 2006, Acrylic, pastel, powdered mylar on rice paper. 18.4 x 21 cm/7 1/4 x 8 1/4 in. Photo: Genevieve Hanson. Image courtesy the Jackknifes Whitten Estate and Hauser & Wirth
Hauser & Wirth will open its doors to the first major survey of Jack Whitten’s works on paper, spanning the artist’s six decade career. Jack Whitten (1939 – 2018) made it his mission to disrupt the discipline of art history through experiments with material, process, and technique. He effectively constructed a bridge between gestural abstraction and process art, constantly working toward a nuanced language of painting that employs deeply personal expression. Whitten was also a prolific and powerful draughtsman. The unique body of works on view at Hauser & Wirth testifies to the immensity of his commitment to drawing as a means to make manifest his ideas and advance his methods.
