GROUP EXHIBITION

Steir’s title for the presentation, ‘Two Pieces in the Shape of a Pear,’ is inspired by French composer Erik Satie’sfamous duet for piano, ‘Trois morceaux en forme de poire’ (1903). Accordingly, the duets that comprise herexhibition pose many of the same questions the artist began to pursue forty years ago in her monumental paintingmontage, ‘The Brueghel Series (A Vanitas of Style)’ (1982 – 84). Comprising 64 panels, each exploring the styleof an artist or art historical movement, this opus allowed Steir to reveal and revel in a compendium of connectionsand deviations between periods and approaches—capturing the often-surprising characteristics that unite anddistinguish them. Steir was interested in comparing these styles not only to one another, but to the times inwhich they existed. Steir has remarked that, ‘All art which endures the centuries can be considered great art—itsymbolizes to us that there is something common among us—to our condition. Art that endures allows us tospeak of the human condition.’ That sensitivity to context and cultural reverberation remains central to her art andthinking today.

By pairing works with similar conditions and subjects for the exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Southampton, Steirforegrounds both similarities and differences in the sensibilities and approaches of her chosen artists. ‘TwoPieces in the Shape of a Pear’ questions the ways in which works of art can express their cultural moment,whether through compositional devices or choice of subject matter. For example, the pairing of Steir’s own poeticabstraction ‘Roman Series (II)’ (1993) with Rashid Johnson’s ghostly ‘Surrender Painting “Pouring”’ (2023) invitesthe viewer to compare and contrast the prevailing cultural contexts and lived experiences of two artists who atfirst glance might seem to exist in unbridgeable parallel planes. Meanwhile, the geometric vocabularies deployedby Mary Heilmann and Martha Tuttle resonate across decades. The figurative and abstract languages that RitaAckermann and Avery Singer use in their paintings reveal the artist’s hand in Ackermann’s work while disguisingit in Singer’s, raising provocative questions about art historical hierarchies. And works by Cindy Sherman andMickalene Thomas highlight both artists’ diverse approaches to photography via their use of different iconography,motifs and even media to embed complex layers of meaning within their pictures.

About the artists

Born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1968, Rita Ackermann currently lives and works in New York. Ackermann’spractice manifests in paintings and works on paper that propose a continuous shift between representation andabstraction. Employing a range of media, including oil and acrylic paint, pastel, wax pencil and raw pigment, herexpression hinges on automatic gestures and opposing impulses of creation and destruction.

Cindy Sherman’s groundbreaking photographs have explored themes around representation and identityin contemporary media for over four decades. Since the early 2000s, Sherman (born 1954) has constructedpersonae with digital manipulation, capturing the fractured sense of self in modern society—a concern the artisthas uniquely encapsulated from the outset of her career.

Influenced by 1960s counterculture, the free speech movement, and the surf ethos of her native California, MaryHeilmann (born 1940) ranks amongst the most influential abstract painters of her generation. Considered oneof the preeminent contemporary abstract painters, Heilmann overlays the analytical geometries of minimalismwith the spontaneous ethos of the Beat Generation, and her works are always distinguishable by their oftenunorthodox—always joyful—approach to color and form.

Born in Chicago in 1977, Rashid Johnson is among an influential cadre of contemporary American artists whosework employs a wide range of media to explore themes of art history, individual and shared cultural identities,personal narratives, literature, philosophy, materiality and critical history. Johnson’s expansive practice embracesa wide range of media—including sculpture, painting, drawing, filmmaking and installation—yielding a complexmultidisciplinary practice that incorporates diverse materials rich with symbolism and personal history. Many ofJohnson’s works convey rhythms of the occult and mystic: evoking his desire to transform and expand eachincluded object’s field of association in the process of reception.

Born and raised in New York, Avery Singer (born 1987) has employed the binary language of computer programsand industrial materials in order to remove the trace of the artist’s hand while engaging the tradition of paintingand the legacy of modernism. Through the use of new technologies to depict past art historical references, shepushes past the limitations of painting. Often reimagining the subject of painting and image-making as the subjectitself, by disengaging with romanticized views, Singer creates her own way of seeing.

Mickalene Thomas (born 1971) was born and raised in New Jersey and lives and works in New York. Herinfluential and innovative practice has yielded instantly recognizable and widely celebrated aesthetic languageswithin contemporary visual culture. Not only do her masterful mixed-media paintings, photographs, films andinstallations command space, they occupy eloquently while dissecting the intersecting complexities of Black andfemale identity within the Western canon.

Born in Santa Fe in 1989, Martha Tuttle is an artist and writer working between painting and sculpture. She isinterested in the intimacies and discourses possible between entities of varying scales and time frames, such asthe human and the mineral, or the pebble and the interplanetary.

Among the great innovators of contemporary painting, Pat Steir (born 1938) first came to prominence in thelate 1970s and early 1980s for her iconographic canvases and immersive wall drawings. By the late 1980s,her inventive approach to painting—the rigorous pouring technique seen in her Waterfall works, in which sheharnessed the forces of gravity and gesture to achieve works of astonishing lyricism—attracted substantial criticalacclaim. Informed by a deep engagement with art history and Eastern philosophy, and a passion for artisticadvocacy in the both the visual and literary realms, Steir’s storied five-decade career—continues to reach newheights through an intrepid commitment to material exploration and experimentation.