An established platform for artists operating with an international mindset, Jane Lombard Gallery was founded in SoHo in 1995 as Lombard Freid Projects. Supporting a range of emerging and mid-career practices in many media, the gallery’s programming emphasises artists whose works display a socio-political awareness of the world. These artists have received international acclaim, acquiring many awards and participating regularly in numerous biennials; in the recent past roster artist Squeak Carnwath was named recipient of the Lee Krasner Award for a lifetime of artistic achievement (2019), and earlier (2017) Michael Rakowitz was selected for the prestigious Trafalgar Square Fourth Plinth Commission.
Read MoreAfter a brief hiatus, Jane Lombard Gallery reopened in 2015 and continues today to present a consistently high-calibre range of practices from its Chelsea gallery space and via art fairs further afield.
Jane Lombard Gallery Artists
Jane Lombard Gallery represents 17 artists of local, national, and international origins, including well-known names such as Lee Mingwei, whose social practice has earned him world-wide acclaim. Lee’s interactive works in which the viewer is co-creator of the experience often focus of forming a level of intimacy between strangers; in The Mending Project (2009), for example, a docent or the artist himself occupies the gallery space, mending clothing the viewer brings while they talk.
Jane Lombard Gallery’s artists represent a range of disciplines, most engaging with more than one media on a regular basis. In Carmen Neely’s practice, for example, explorations of her identity as a young black female artist take shape in both gestural abstract paintings and found objects. Two collaborative practices are also included on the gallery roster: Lucy + Jorge Orta, who have been collaborating since 1991, call on a variety of media to address a range of social and ecological concerns; while Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens’ complex practice also calls upon a range of materials in order to consider the way frameworks can translate across languages, and the degree of success such translations may or may not hold.
Art fairs and exhibitions
In 2015, Jane Lombard Gallery introduced its new name to the world with Sarah Dwyer’s Sunk Under (14 May–27 June 2015). In this solo exhibition, Dwyer presented nine paintings inspired by the Seamus Heaney poem Bogland, which compares the swampy Irish landscape of his childhood to the wide open prairies of the southwestern United States. More recently the gallery has held solo exhibitions by other gallery artists including Teppei Kaneuji (Plastic Barricade, 2019) and Carnwath (Not All Black and White, 2019).
A recent group exhibition of both roster and affiliated artists, Speaking Power to (Post) Truth was curated by Sarah Raza and featured works by Ergin Çavuşoǧlu, James Clar, Mounir Fatmi, Nadia Kaabi-Linke, and Shahpour Pouyan. Though diverse in their approach, each artist exhibited uses their practice to interrogate human consciousness and truth or post-truth from a range of angles including history, the literary world, and politics.
In addition to its internal programming, Jane Lombard Gallery participates in a range of art fairs throughout North America, including Dallas Art Fair; Seattle Art Fair; EXPO CHICAGO; and The Armory Show, New York.
Yorkshire-born businessman Howard Bilton is the founder and chairman of the Sovereign Art Foundation, established in Hong Kong in 2003. The Foundation focuses on both recognising the abundance of artistic talent in Asia and bringing the benefits of art therapy and education to underprivileged children. In both endeavours, the Foundation...
Elizabeth Schwaiger sets in motion a cacophony of styles, ideas, colors, and movements in this dense show spread out over two floors. The Texas-born, Brooklyn-based artist who unites architecture and still-life painting, portraiture and nature, draws viewers into her vision of the world, her mind, history, art history, and her studio, in stunning...
The day after a mob stormed the United States Capital, Elizabeth Schwaiger's painting Palimpsest (2020) takes on particular resonance. Almost eleven feet wide, and rendered in lush, deep shades of ochre, burnt sienna, tangerine and amber, the painting depicts, in confident, loose brushstrokes, a grand hall where some kind of meeting is taking...
Koki Tanaka How did you first encounter the work of Nam June Paik? I think it was through TV Buddha, but not sure which one. I just googled it now, and find out there are so many different versions of TV Buddhas by Paik...
Michael Rakowitz, the Chicago-based, Iraqi-American artist known for producing powerful works that often address complicated histories and events, such as the death of Tamir Rice—the twelve-year-old boy who was fatally shot by a Cleveland police officer in 2014—and ISIS's systematic campaign to destroy cultural heritage, has been named...
The artist Teppei Kaneuji and Reiko Tsubaki, Curator at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, discuss the artist's recent sculptures and performances. Kaneuji investigates the mass consumption of contemporary Japanese culture, sourcing materials from everyday life, found objects and manga characters to create sculptures that are at once playful and...
Guernica in Sand is a recreation of Picasso’s famous painting Guernica (1937) through the medium of sand. The public is then invited to engage with the work by walking on it, in a painstaking performance that Lee says is “about transformation”: "I’m going to finish the last part of the sand painting, while one...
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