Ocula Conversation Bani Abidi: ‘What you see in my films is what I know’ A group of voices accompanies me in the exhibition. They are singing words I cannot comprehend, yet the warm tunes are familiar: folk songs, love songs, songs of longing. There are letters, too. They speak of the quotidian details of a soldier's life: the hardness of the war, sending money to the family, and longing for familiar landscapes, food,...
Ocula Report Aichi to Okayama: Art in Japan Looks to the Future 11 Oct 2019 : Stephanie Bailey for Ocula There has been a flurry of triennial and biennial art activity in Japan this year. The Aichi Triennale opened in Nagoya this August, sparking a national debate about the shutting down of a display of formerly censored works—the result of public backlash against a burnt image of Emperor Hirohito and a statue commemorating the women forced into...
Ocula Insight | Video Hans Hartung and Art Informel at Mazzoleni London (1 October 2019-18 January 2020) presents key works by the French-German painter while highlighting his connection with artists active in Paris during the 50s and 60s. In this video, writer and historian Alan Montgomery discusses Hartung's practice and its legacy.Born in Leipzig in 1904, Hans...
Exhibition view: Group exhibition, Them, Perrotin, New York (20 June–16 August 2019). © Hernan Bas, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Anthony Cudahy, TM Davy, Angela Dufresne, Louis Fratino, Jenna Gribbon, Paul Heyer, Sholem Krishtalka, Doron Langberg, Maia Cruz Palileo, Ana Segovia, Salman Toor and Perrotin. Courtesy the artists and Perrotin. Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli.
Exhibition view: Group exhibition, Them, Perrotin, New York (20 June–16 August 2019). © Hernan Bas, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Anthony Cudahy, TM Davy, Angela Dufresne, Louis Fratino, Jenna Gribbon, Paul Heyer, Sholem Krishtalka, Doron Langberg, Maia Cruz Palileo, Ana Segovia, Salman Toor and Perrotin. Courtesy the artists and Perrotin. Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli.
Exhibition view: Group exhibition, Them, Perrotin, New York (20 June–16 August 2019). © Hernan Bas, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Anthony Cudahy, TM Davy, Angela Dufresne, Louis Fratino, Jenna Gribbon, Paul Heyer, Sholem Krishtalka, Doron Langberg, Maia Cruz Palileo, Ana Segovia, Salman Toor and Perrotin. Courtesy the artists and Perrotin. Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli.
Exhibition view: Group exhibition, Them, Perrotin, New York (20 June–16 August 2019). © Hernan Bas, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Anthony Cudahy, TM Davy, Angela Dufresne, Louis Fratino, Jenna Gribbon, Paul Heyer, Sholem Krishtalka, Doron Langberg, Maia Cruz Palileo, Ana Segovia, Salman Toor and Perrotin. Courtesy the artists and Perrotin. Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli.
Exhibition view: Group exhibition, Them, Perrotin, New York (20 June–16 August 2019). © Hernan Bas, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Anthony Cudahy, TM Davy, Angela Dufresne, Louis Fratino, Jenna Gribbon, Paul Heyer, Sholem Krishtalka, Doron Langberg, Maia Cruz Palileo, Ana Segovia, Salman Toor and Perrotin. Courtesy the artists and Perrotin. Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli.
Exhibition view: Group exhibition, Them, Perrotin, New York (20 June–16 August 2019). © Hernan Bas, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Anthony Cudahy, TM Davy, Angela Dufresne, Louis Fratino, Jenna Gribbon, Paul Heyer, Sholem Krishtalka, Doron Langberg, Maia Cruz Palileo, Ana Segovia, Salman Toor and Perrotin. Courtesy the artists and Perrotin. Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli.
Exhibition view: Group exhibition, Them, Perrotin, New York (20 June–16 August 2019). © Hernan Bas, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Anthony Cudahy, TM Davy, Angela Dufresne, Louis Fratino, Jenna Gribbon, Paul Heyer, Sholem Krishtalka, Doron Langberg, Maia Cruz Palileo, Ana Segovia, Salman Toor and Perrotin. Courtesy the artists and Perrotin. Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli.
Exhibition view: Group exhibition, Them, Perrotin, New York (20 June–16 August 2019). © Hernan Bas, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Anthony Cudahy, TM Davy, Angela Dufresne, Louis Fratino, Jenna Gribbon, Paul Heyer, Sholem Krishtalka, Doron Langberg, Maia Cruz Palileo, Ana Segovia, Salman Toor and Perrotin. Courtesy the artists and Perrotin. Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli.
Exhibition view: Group exhibition, Them, Perrotin, New York (20 June–16 August 2019). © Hernan Bas, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Anthony Cudahy, TM Davy, Angela Dufresne, Louis Fratino, Jenna Gribbon, Paul Heyer, Sholem Krishtalka, Doron Langberg, Maia Cruz Palileo, Ana Segovia, Salman Toor and Perrotin. Courtesy the artists and Perrotin. Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli.
Exhibition view: Group exhibition, Them, Perrotin, New York (20 June–16 August 2019). © Hernan Bas, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Anthony Cudahy, TM Davy, Angela Dufresne, Louis Fratino, Jenna Gribbon, Paul Heyer, Sholem Krishtalka, Doron Langberg, Maia Cruz Palileo, Ana Segovia, Salman Toor and Perrotin. Courtesy the artists and Perrotin. Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli.
Exhibition view: Group exhibition, Them, Perrotin, New York (20 June–16 August 2019). © Hernan Bas, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Anthony Cudahy, TM Davy, Angela Dufresne, Louis Fratino, Jenna Gribbon, Paul Heyer, Sholem Krishtalka, Doron Langberg, Maia Cruz Palileo, Ana Segovia, Salman Toor and Perrotin. Courtesy the artists and Perrotin. Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli.
Exhibition view: Group exhibition, Them, Perrotin, New York (20 June–16 August 2019). © Hernan Bas, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Anthony Cudahy, TM Davy, Angela Dufresne, Louis Fratino, Jenna Gribbon, Paul Heyer, Sholem Krishtalka, Doron Langberg, Maia Cruz Palileo, Ana Segovia, Salman Toor and Perrotin. Courtesy the artists and Perrotin. Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli.
Exhibition view: Group exhibition, Them, Perrotin, New York (20 June–16 August 2019). © Hernan Bas, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Anthony Cudahy, TM Davy, Angela Dufresne, Louis Fratino, Jenna Gribbon, Paul Heyer, Sholem Krishtalka, Doron Langberg, Maia Cruz Palileo, Ana Segovia, Salman Toor and Perrotin. Courtesy the artists and Perrotin. Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli.
'This sight pleased Jules—it was so ordinary and reasonable. Walking alone here, even in his sweaty clothes, he was close to the secret workings of things, the way people lived when they were not being observed. In himself there were no secret workings: he had no ordinary reasonable life.' —Joyce Carrol Oates, Them, 1969
Perrotin New York presents a group exhibition surveying contemporary, figurative painting that seeks to re-examine the romantic embrace. The history of painting is rife with heterosexual depictions of intimacy: couples caught in a tender embrace or in vulnerable companionship. Yet, conspicuously absent throughout, are queer examples of these same behaviors. This exhibition proposes an investigation into sensitive depictions of romance and the poetry of contemporary quotidian queer life.
Homosexual love often eluded the canon, and even when not outright censored, found entrance through the usage of tempered and codified presentation. In the wake of Stonewall, and later, in response to the AIDS epidemic, a stark and necessary political turn was taken. Artists shifted their practices to create iconic, combative works, which acted as virulent retorts to oppressive censorship and the urgency of the times.
Today, with less anxiety, censorship and overt threats, queer artists have begun to fill a gap in the conservative history of painting and propose a prescient romantic vision. The artworks in Them insist concretely on the plausibility for another more just and tender world. Through aesthetics, these works create a conceptual utopianist blueprint for us all. They trade the realities of the here and now for future worlds where the artists' experiences and emotions are fully expressed.1 Respectively, they portray love without apology and bring poetic voice to current perceptions of queer agency and visibility.
And while safety from censorship and oppression is never fully guaranteed, especially in this turbulent political climate, Them recognizes the true power of this art, not as a means to normalize, but a continuance of queer propositions catalyzing alternative visions of social, sexual, personal and creative life.2
Donald Ryan, Director, Perrotin New York
1 Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press, 2009
2 Meyer, Richard. Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art. S.l.: Echo Point Books & Media, 2018.
