Victoria Miro is delighted to participate in Frieze New York (Booth B5) with works by Doug Aitken, Jules de Balincourt, Hernan Bas, Varda Caivano, Ilse D'Hollander, Christian Holstad, Chantal Joffe, Yayoi Kusama, Alice Neel, Maria Nepomuceno, Chris Ofili, Jorge Pardo, Celia Paul, Conrad Shawcross, Do Ho Suh and Sarah Sze.
Composed of hand-carved foam and acrylic, New Land, 2015, by Doug Aitken appears to exist between abstraction and representation, its high-sheen, industrial- looking surface pitted rhythmically to reveal a substratum of inscrutable whiteness. A connecting thread in Aitken's work is a sense of the industrial, urban and environmental entropy that defines twenty-first-century existence. While certain aspects of his practice possess an exterior toughness akin to that of the commercial landscape, his art moves beyond surfaces, often breaking down into abstraction in order to demonstrate the nature and structure of our media-saturated cultural condition. Doug Aitken is currently featured in Future Shock at Site Sante Fe (until 10 June 2018).
Always rich in colour and technique, Jules de Balincourt's work is a bountiful confluence of reality and fantasy, where references to society, politics, or popular culture are never less than equalled by free association and painterly invention. In Cave Country, 2017, figures huddled within a glowing cave seem to speak to the idea of sanctuary or shelter, though the cause of this impromptu gathering is ambiguous. Speaking about this work, de Balincourt notes: 'even though the idea of a cave seems impending or doom-like, there's still a sense of positivity and warmness. There's the warmth of the cave but at the same time you don't know what they're sheltering from.'
Following a period of research while in residence at Jesus College Cambridge in 2016, Hernan Bas developed new subject matter including fabled Cambridge societies, rites and traditions. Charon of the River Cam (Slain Swans), 2017, reveals the ways in which Bas' practice is intrinsically linked to an exploration of history and literature and stems from the artist's interest in figuring historical and mythological narratives within the imagery and iconography of popular culture, fashion, queer culture and mysticism. A career-long narrative weaving together cults, sects and secret societies, nihilistic romanticism, youthful abandon - and its flipside, introversion - is further enriched as Bas turns his attention to hothouse varsity life. Hernan Bas will be the subject of a solo exhibition at CAC Málaga, opening in May 2018.
Inviting prolonged scrutiny, two Untitled paintings by Varda Caivano repay with intimate evocations that shift and grow with each viewing. Caivano's painting are undeniably of themselves yet they are also, unavoidably, touched by and suggestive of the wider world. In reference to her handling of painting, the artist has spoken of an affinity with the writer Georges Perec's poetic litanies of the everyday tasks of dwelling, their layers evoking the textures of experience: 'cleaning checking trying out changing fitting signing waiting imagining...' Varda Caivano is featured in Surface Work, a celebration of abstract painting by women, at Victoria Miro, London (until 19 May 2018), and The Divine Joke, curated by Barry Schwabsky, at Anita Rogers Gallery, New York (25 April–2 June 2018).
In her short life Ilse D'Hollander (1968–1997) created an intelligent, sensual and highly resonant body of work. Her often small-scale canvases, such as the three Untitled works on display here, are charged with references to the everyday. D'Hollander drew upon her impressions and experience of place, particularly the Flemish countryside where she spent the last, highly productive years of her life. Yet, enlivened by an expressive, though always economical, touch, her work resonates just as strongly as a sustained, self-reflexive enquiry into the act of painting: what it might take to bring an image into being on a bounded, flat plane. The Estate of Ilse D'Hollander is represented by Victoria Miro. Her work is featured in Surface Work, a celebration of abstract painting by women, at Victoria Miro, London (until 16 June 2018). A solo exhibition of works by the artist will be held at Victoria Miro Mayfair in November 2018.
For Christian Holstad it is the artificial, constructed environment, rather than natural world, that is the source of infinite and potentially terrifying beauty. Working with hand-cut paper collage, in Breeding Stars, 2014, Holstad builds up his material in layers. The work features a goldfish caught in the involuntary confines of the aquarium or, perhaps, the fishing net. Holstad's fish appear to exist primarily to be observed. However, they provide a lighter, more lyrical take on his ongoing interest in borders, boundaries and constraints in our environment.
Chantal Joffe always alerts us to the ways in which appearances are carefully constructed and codified, whether in a fashion magazine or the family album, and to the choreography of display. In recent large-scale paintings - Moll in Pink, 2017, Yellow Sweater and Knee Socks, 2016, and Moll in a Fur Jacket, 2016 - tensions between the scale of the work and the apparent intimacy of the scene depicted heighten already complex narratives about connection, perception and representation that, implicit in the relationship between artist and subject, are extended to the viewer as a series of propositions. Chantal Joffe: Pastels is at Victoria Miro Venice (until 19 May 2018). Personal Feeling is the Main Thing An exhibition of recent works by the artist, will be on display at The Lowry, Salford (19 May–2 September 2018). Joffe will create a major new public work for the Elizabeth line station at Whitechapel. Titled A Sunday Afternoon in Whitechapel, the work will be on view when the Crossrail station opens in December 2018.
Yayoi Kusama's Finding Myself in the Midst of Creation, 2011, is from the artist's important ongoing series My Eternal Soul. Joyfully improvisatory, fluid and highly instinctual, the work abounds with imagery including eyes, faces in profile, and other more indeterminate forms, including the dots for which the artist is synonymous. Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors, the most significant North American tour of Kusama's work in nearly two decades continues at the Art Gallery of Ontario (until 27 May 2018); the exhibition will subsequently tour to The Cleveland Museum of Art (7 July–30 September 2018) and The High Museum of Art, Atlanta (18 November 2018–17 February 2019). Life is the Heart of a Rainbow, the first large-scale exhibition of Yayoi Kusama's work in Indonesia, is at Museum MACAN, Jakarta (until 9 September 2018). Taking place in the artist's hometown of Matsumoto City, the major retrospective Yayoi Kusama: All About My Love is at Matsumoto City Museum of Art (until 22 July 2018).
Intimate, casual, direct and personal, Alice Neel's portraits exist as an unparalleled chronicle of New York personalities - both famous and unknown - and the extraordinary diversity of twentieth century New York City. A woman with a strong social conscience and equally strong left-wing beliefs, Neel moved from the relative comfort of Greenwich Village to Spanish Harlem in 1938 in pursuit of what she termed "the truth" - of her experience and that of others. On display is a 1951 portrait of Sarah Shiller, an important figure in Harlem's social circles who, with her husband, supported left wing artists such as Neel during the period. While candour and empathy are hallmarks of Neel's art, her paintings of women and children, such as Julie and the Doll, 1943, are especially expressive of intimacy and compassion, as seen through the prism of her own experience as a woman and a mother. Alice Neel is included in The Ethics of Scrutiny at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (until 2 September 2018).
Displaying a characteristically dynamic approach to form, two Untitled works by Maria Nepomuceno expand upon the Rio de Janeiro-based artist's methods of rope weaving and straw braiding, in which pre-existing and found elements such as branches, twigs, seed pods, playful ceramic forms and paint brushes merge with the organic forms of the sculptures. Nepomuceno's works are chromatically, culturally and metaphorically rich, suggesting animals, plants, the human body and landscapes ranging from the microscopic to the macroscopic. That the sculptures appear anthropomorphic and organic is essential to a reading of the work: the spiraling central to Nepomuceno's process relates to the spirals occurring naturally throughout the universe, giving shape to entire galaxies as well as the blueprint for existence, DNA.
Chris Ofili's Poolside Magic is a suite of pastel, charcoal and watercolour works on paper, in which a man in coat-tails serves a naked woman beside a swimming pool. In these richly evocative works, Ofili riffs on themes of sexuality, mutability, magic and the occult, making reference to the vibrant and sensuous landscape and culture of Trinidad, where the artist lives and works. Source material for the series includes a photograph of Trinidadian artist Boscoe Holder (1921–2007) at work in his Port of Spain studio.
Celebrated for his use of vibrant colours, eclectic patterns and natural and industrial materials, Jorge Pardo has since the 1990s drawn on the historical intersections of fine art, architecture and design to create a highly individual body of work. Pardo's focus on multiple meanings, purposes and contexts invites constant re-evaluation of objects, images and architectural space. The presentation includes a unique chandelier by the artist that offers an extended consideration of physicality and immateriality, the visible and invisible, and a new painting - a wall-mounted works composed of layers of laser-cut birch wood ply and MDF, milled, perforated and painted so that evocations of colour, form and image seem to shift and dissolve as the viewer moves in front of them.
The presentation includes a curated selection of portraits and seascapes by Celia Paul, which offer touchstones for thoughts about time, transience, spirituality and mortality. Paul's art stems from a deep connection with subject matter and is quiet, contemplative and ultimately moving in its profound attention to detail and deeply-felt spirituality. She is renowned for her intimate depictions of people and places she knows well, especially her sister Kate - as seen in Kate, 2015-2016, and Kate in White, 2017 - as well as a number of close friends. Paul has also produced a large number of evocative self-portraits over the course of her career. Paul's self-portraits, such as Self-Portrait in the Studio, 2017, open up a painterly and conceptual dialogue between the dual role of subject and artist - caught between self-possession and self-scrutiny - as well as offering an extended consideration of the essential dualities of the medium - its ability to capture qualities of form, light and atmosphere, and its material presence. While markedly different in character to her portraits and self-portraits, Paul's seascapes, such as Winter Seascape, 2017, highlight the painter's challenge not only to capture specific states of matter - water and air - but to attempt to capture the moment. Paul is featured in Tate Britain's major exhibition All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life (until 27 August 2018). An exhibition of paintings by the artist, curated by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Hilton Als, opened recently at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut, and continues until 12 August 2018.
Conrad Shawcross' Plosion 3 (Blue), 2015 is from the artist's ongoing series of Plosion sculptures, which take theories of cosmic expansion and contraction as their starting point. Comprised of aluminium and stained glass, these dynamic works sit somewhere between becoming or coming undone, or, as the artist explains, 'explosion or implosion.' A major site-specific sculpture by Shawcross is being installed in the new Comcast Tower building, designed by Foster + Partners, in Philadelphia. Shawcross will create a major new public artwork for the Crossrail Elizabeth line at Liverpool Street, London. Titled Manifold, the bronze sculpture will be sited at the Moorgate entrance of the new station.
Works by Do Ho Suh disclose and memorialise elements of the artist's former home and studio in New York. Entrance, Ground Floor, 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, USA, 2016, is the result of a new process for the artist, in which Suh's signature architectural pieces, in this instance a doorway, are compressed into large-scale two-dimensional 'drawings'. Using gelatin tissue, the works are sewn in the same way as Suh's architectural fabric pieces. Once immersed in water, however, the gelatin dissolves to leave an image in which the threads appear like a skeletal framework against the coloured form of the object. Residual yet highly visceral, these works draw parallels between architectural space and the body, while continuing Suh's career-long investigation into the porous boundaries of identity. Do Ho Suh will create a new film for the V&A's presentation at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition, in collaboration with La Biennale di Venezia (26 May–25 November 2018). An exhibition of recent Rubbing/Loving works by Do Ho Suh takes place at Victoria Miro Venice (25 May–7 July 2018). Do Ho Suh: Almost Home, featuring a major installation of the artist's Hub works, is on view at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, DC (until 5 August 2018).
Sarah Sze is celebrated for works that are charged with flux and transformation. Disorienting and disrupting our perception, Magenta Stone, 2013–2015 - in fact photographs of rock surfaces printed on to Tyvek and wrapped around aluminium armatures - plays with ideas of gravity, stability and fragility. The grouping of rocks is juxtaposed with a wall work in which the same lichen-covered rock pattern is replicated in a tone that relates to Pantone samples. Further displacements and disorientations of size and scale appear in the intricately constructed Model for a Weather Vane, 2012. While a desk lamp affixed to the wall evokes the sun, the sculpture's multiple arms, supported by a large rock resting on a wooden base, are connected to a diverse range of natural and manmade objects including a cactus and a spirit level. Sze's works have often referred to instruments of measure and mapping as well as the worlds they strive to measure. Preoccupied with conceptions of how we continually locate ourselves within space, they unfold as investigations of the psychological, and even emotional, understandings of our environment. An exhibition featuring new site-specific works by the artist will take place at Victoria Miro, London (8 June–28 July 2018). Sze's major installation, Centrifuge, is currently on view at Haus der Kunst, Munich (until 12 August 2018).
Opening Hours
Wednesday
Preview, May 2 (invitation only)
Thursday
Preview, May 3: 11am - 8pm
Thursday
Private View, May 3: 5pm - 8pm
Friday, May 4: 11am - 7pm
Saturday, May 5: 11am - 6pm
Sunday, May 6: 11am - 6pm