David Zwirner gallery will be reopening globally, with the New York galleries opening their doors to three new exhibitions. Suzan Frecon: oil paintings and Harold Ancart: Traveling Light on September 10th, and Josh Smith in New York and London, concurrently on September 15th.
Harold Ancart: Traveling Light will be on view from September 10 through October 17, 2020 at David Zwirner, 525 & 533 West 19th Street, NYC. The presentation marks the Belgian-born artist’s second solo show with David Zwirner, following his 2018 debut at the London gallery.
On view in one gallery space will be a new series of paintings that depicts trees. These works were painted between Ancart’s Brooklyn studio and a makeshift outdoor studio in Los Angeles, which he traveled to during lockdown. Pointing to references as varied as René Magritte, Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, and Piet Mondrian, who approached this subject matter in distinct ways, Ancart’s tree paintings blur form and color, figure and ground, and figuration and abstraction.
In the adjoining gallery space, there will be two multipanel canvases that situate the viewer between a mountain-scape and a seascape, both monumental in scale. These works are inspired in part by the artist’s encounter with the modernist landscape murals of the American painter Gottardo Piazzoni (1872–1945) permanently installed at the De Young Museum, San Francisco.
The exhibition constructs an immersive landscape experience, and together, the works on view comprise a meditation on the expansive possibilities of painting.
This exhibition is carbon neutral. The carbon footprint of the exhibition was calculated with the assistance of Atelier Ten and offset with a NY State based carbon sequestration program contributing to the capturing of landfill or livestock methane gas.
A fully illustrated exhibition catalogue will be published in 2021 by David Zwirner Books.
Suzan Frecon: oil paintings will be on view from September 10 through October 17, 2020 at David Zwirner Gallery, 537 West 20th Street, NYC. This is her seventh solo exhibition at the gallery.
Frecon is known for abstract oil paintings and works on paper that—as she describes her lifelong practice—“speak for themselves.” Made over long stretches of time, her work embodies the durational activity of painting itself and invites the viewer’s sustained attention: these, she says, “are not pictures that you look at. They are paintings that you experience.”1
In Frecon’s paintings, composition serves as a foundational structure, holding color, material, and light. Her compositions are characterized by asymmetrically balanced forms in precise spatial and proportional relationships. The artist mixes pigments and oils to differing effects, and her almost tactile use of color and contrasting matte and shiny surfaces heightens the visual experience of her work. Colors and surfaces vary in terms of density and reflectivity, and areas in the compositions frequently shift between dark and light. Figure can become ground and ground can become figure, or as the artist prefers to define it, full and empty space.
New works by New York-based artist Josh Smith will open at the gallery’s London location and 69th Street in New York, concurrently. In New York, the exhibition will be on view from September 15 through October 24, 2020 at 34 East 69th Street, NYC.
David Zwirner Gallery will open to the public with a limited number of visitors allowed into the exhibition space at a time. Advance appointments are recommended ~ Here.