David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to announce our Art Basel Hong Kong presentation featuring new paintings by Lesley Vance and a selection of works from the 1960s and '70s by Czech artist Anna Zemánková (1908–1986). The fair will take place May 25 – 29, 2022. Art Basel Live: Hong Kong, a series of online viewing rooms, will run concurrently with the in-person show.
The presentation will not only mark the first time that these two artists have been shown together, but will also be the most focused exhibition of each of their respective works in Asia to date. It will also call attention to visual, art historical, and philosophical correspondences that unite their projects despite the generational divide that separates them, revealing parallels in patterning and compositional intensity, but also—and perhaps most importantly—in emotional and intellectual impact. The booth will provide a sensitive and illuminating introduction to the work of two genre-defying artists, as well as a springboard for new critical approaches to the development of twentieth- and twenty-first-century painting.
Vance's and Zemánková's respective approaches to abstraction can be read through interpretive frameworks associated with abstract expressionism, surrealism, and other canonical legacies, as well as the lenses of individualist and idiosyncratic visions that are entirely their own. The work of both artists is filled with forms whose organic modelling offers clear parallels to the natural world; their non-objective subjects carry the weight and presence of real things, even as they exude an alien unlikeliness that prevents them from being mistaken for representational images.
Lesley Vance (b. 1977, Milwaukee) has been the subject of solo and two-person exhibitions at the FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2012); Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Bowdoin, Maine (2012); and Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California (with Ricky Swallow, 2012). Her work is in the permanent collections of the Dallas Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Milwaukee Art Museum; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, among many others. In 2019, Gregory R. Miller & Co. published a monograph surveying the last five years of Vance's work. Vance lives and works in Los Angeles.
Originally trained as a dentist, Anna Zemánková (b. 1908, Olomouc, Czechoslovakia; d. 1986, Prague, Czech Republic), exhibited her artwork during her lifetime in solo and group exhibitions in Czechoslovakia. In 2017, she was the subject of a solo exhibition at Collection de l'art Brut, Lausanne. Anatomia Metamorphosis, a 2011 solo exhibition that originated at Museum Montanelli, Prague, also traveled to Saarländische Galerie, Berlin; Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, Japan; and Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan. In recent years, she has also been included in many shows dedicated to art brut and outsider art, as well as international survey exhibitions such as Il palazzo enciclopedico, 55th Venice Biennale, Italy (2013), and solo exhibitions at galleries including Cavin-Morris Gallery, New York and Christian Berst Gallery, Paris.
David Kordansky Gallery represents these artists: