Sean Kelly is delighted to announce our participation in the inaugural edition of the Taipei Dangdai art fair. Our booth, B11, will feature a dynamic, carefully curated presentation of works by Gallery artists that reflects the global diversity and conceptual engagement for which our program is famous. This selection of new and iconic works by artists including Marina Abramović, James Casebere, Julian Charrière, Jose Dávila, Antony Gormley, Ilse D’Hollander, Tehching Hsieh, Callum Innes, Idris Khan, Hugo McCloud, Mariko Mori, Sam Moyer, Janaina Tschäpe, Liu Wei, James White and Sun Xun exemplifie the Gallery’s ongoing commitment to presenting important contemporary art.
We will present significant early work by Marina Abramović. Published by the gallery in 1994 and rarely seen outside of museum context, this work is part of the artist’s early solo performances from 1973–1975. The inclusion of this work at the fair highlights the three-decade professional collaboration between Marina Abramović, internationally recognised as the most significant figure in the history of performance art, and the gallery.
American born, James Casebere is a pioneer in the field of constructed photography. For over thirty years Casebere has created increasingly complex models based on architectural, art historical and cinematic sources. These table-sized tableaux are made of simple material pared down to essential forms. His newest body of work, Pavilions for the Future, imagines hybrid forms of buildings by the ocean.
Swiss artist Julian Charrière, whose work is concurrently on display at Taipei Fine Arts Museum as part of the Taipei Biennial, will be represented by his Metamorphism series. An amalgam of cultural memories incorporated into a geological matrix, these sculptures are displayed in vitrines like topological fragments from a futuristic natural history museum. Charrière’s work draws on ideas about ephemerality, the passage of time and humanities ill-conceived environmental impact.
Born and based in Guadalajara, Mexico, Jose Dávila produces a varied body of work that playfully and critically explores the visual tropes and iconic symbols of modern art, architecture and urban design. Drawing on his formal training as an architect, Dávila creates sculptural installations and photographic works that simultaneously emulate, critique and pay homage to 20th century avantgarde art and architecture. Davila’s work was recently included in an exhibition at the Yuz Museum Shanghai in the fall of 2018.
We will also present important sculpture and works on paper by British artist Antony Gormley, who is internationally recognised for his sculptures, drawings, installations, and public works that investigate the relationship of the human body to space. Throughout his career, Gormley’s celebrated work in all media has confronted the fundamental questions of where human beings stand in relation to nature and the cosmos. Gormley was awarded the Turner Prize in 1994, and many other international awards.
Belgian artist, Ilse D’Hollander (b. 1968–d. 1997) created work during a very brief period, from 1989 until her early, unexpected and tragic death at the age of 29. D'Hollander’s oeuvre exhibits a highly developed sense of colour, composition, scale, and surface, through the use of subtle tones and pared down compositions. An artist’s artist, her canvases and works on paper favor abstraction, yet subtly allude to the everyday, hinting at nature and the landscape of the Flemish countryside where she spent the last and most productive years of her life.
Renowned Taiwanese performance artist Tehching Hsieh, who represented his country at the 2017 Venice Biennale, is widely recognised for his durational performance works which challenge ideas of isolation, security, and freedom. The set of six limited edition posters and statements we will present document the continuous yearlong performances and actions Hsieh enacted in New York City between 1978–1999. These documents trace Hsieh’s abiding and radical interest in exploring conflict in the relationship of the human body to its natural environment.
Internationally renowned Scottish artist Callum Innes is recognised as one of the most significant abstract painters of his generation. Innes’s process involves an interplay between additive and subtractive processes—continually adding and removing pigment—to achieve sophisticated and contemplative abstractions. Concurrent with the fair, Innes will have a solo exhibition of new paintings at the Sean Kelly Asia project space in Taipei.
British artist Idris Khan, produces work that inhabits the space between abstraction and figuration. Drawing on diverse cultural sources including literature, history, art, music and religion, Khan has developed a unique narrative involving densely layered imagery that speaks to themes of history, cumulative experience and the metaphysical collapse of time into single moments. Khan was recently commissioned to create the first site-specific artwork for the British Museum, London.
New York based artist Hugo McCloud will be represented by a work from his Metal Painting series. Inspired by the rawness of the urban landscape, McCloud’s creates rich, large-scale abstract paintings and sculptural objects by fusing unconventional industrial materials—tar, bitumen, oxidized steel plates—with traditional pigment and woodblock printing techniques. His process is instinctive and physical, driven by an enduring desire to uncover beauty in the overlooked.
Japanese artist Mariko Mori will be featured on the booth with a single, monumental sculpture, Plasma Stone I (2017–2018). Mori’s artistic practice explores universal questions at the intersection of life, death, reality, and technology; this sculpture represents her interpretation of the beginning of the universe, a memory of its plasma state following the Big Bang, which is represented throughout the piece in a full spectrum of colour. Other works from this series are in museums worldwide.
New York based artist Sam Moyer has developed a distinctive language of abstraction that considers questions of value, labour, and beauty. Her practice has evolved from its more conceptual and process-based origins to address formal and theoretical issues regarding the construct of painting. In her work, issues of scale and space remain critical. Moyer is particularly interested in the way architecture functions in tandem with her objects to create dynamic visual experiences.
In October 2018, the gallery opened its first solo exhibition of new work by German-Brazilian artist Janaina Tschäpe. Noted for her atmospheric abstractions that blur perceptions of illusion and reality, Tschäpe’s work incorporates themes of aquatic, plant and human life to suggest dreamlike, abstract landscapes. Our presentation in Taipei will feature a selection of works in watercolour on paper and a large-scale painting.
Beijing-based artist Liu Wei’s exhibition 180 Faces, presented at our New York space in May 2018, was the artist’s first exhibition in the United States in sixteen years. His series of 180 'psychological portraits' conjured references as diverse as Velasquez and Van Gogh, Cezanne and Gauguin, Ensor and Brueghel, to depict the human condition. Like his Western forebears Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud, Liu Wei is a master of rendering human flesh and combining figuration with abstraction.
British artist James White is known for his luminous paintings, meticulously rendered exclusively in black and white and the shades in between. White’s commitment to representational painting imbues his work with a fundamental permanence, underscoring the continuity in moments of silence, doubt and repose that have been the subject of art for centuries. White’s masterfully rendered moments of everyday life bear comparison to the quietude of paintings by the Flemish masters and Lucian Freud’s early interiors.
Considered one of Asia’s most talented young artists, Sun Xun’s artistic practice combines exquisite craftsmanship with stylistic experimentation. Blurring the lines between drawing, painting, animation, film, and installation, his work incorporates a wide array of materials and processes. Painting, woodcut and traditional Chinese ink and charcoal drawing are often combined to create his expressionistic, stop-motion animated films.
Venue
Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center
Hall 1 (4th Floor) No. 1, Jingmao 2nd Road
Nangang District, Taipei City
VIP Preview (invitation only)
17 January [Thu] 2pm – 5pm
Vernissage (by invitation or advance ticket)
17 January [Thu] 5pm – 9pm
2019 Public Opening Hours
18 January [Fri] 12pm – 8pm
19 January [Sat] 12pm – 7pm
20 January [Sun] 12pm – 5pm