Galerie Lelong & Co.

Opening Thursday, March 31, 2022, 6:00pm – 7:00pm Artist talk: Saturday, April 23, 2022, 11:00am in the gallery and on Zoom Galerie Lelong & Co., New York is pleased to announce the opening of Andy Goldsworthy: Red Flags, previously exhibited in 2020 for Frieze Sculpture at Rockefeller Center. For this exhibition, Red Flags (2020) has been recontextualized in the gallery space, creating a new understanding in the process. The flags will be shown in their weathered states, having been subject to rain, sun, and wind whilst installed at the Center for a month. Red Flags will be accompanied by two film works originating from the piece. During his visit to Rockefeller Center in November 2019, Goldsworthy observed the U.S. state flags flying in place of the customary flags that represent the countries of the United Nations. In response, he proposed to replace these with flags colored with earth from each state. Having worked for many years with red earth found near his home in Scotland, he was aware of the remarkable staining qualities that result in vibrant and permanent colors. While red earth is a familiar material, the artist also considered the significance of the material in the context of a flag as most often flags denote land that was fought over. Goldsworthy has also referred to red earth as the earth’s veins, its iron content being the same reason our blood is red. According to the artist when proposing the work, “Collectively I hope they will transcend borders. The closeness of one flagpole to another means that in certain winds the flags might overlap in a continuous flowing line. My hope is that these flags will be raised to mark a different kind of defense of the land. A work that talks of connection and not division.” With the arrival of the pandemic, the project at Rockefeller Center was delayed by several months. The September 2020 unveiling of Red Flags witnessed the flags both still and moving during a period of uncertainty. Goldsworthy said in advance of the installation: “Red Flags may not have been conceived as a response to recent events, but it is now bound up with the pandemic, lockdown, division and unrest.” said the artist. “However, I hope that the flags will be received in the same spirit with which all the red earths were collected—as a gesture of solidarity and support.” A set of 50 flags will hang vertically in a linear form along the walls of the gallery. As the viewer walks this line, different qualities of red emerge, referencing the embedded layers of the landscape and the people who have gone before. The line is a constant investigation in Goldsworthy’s practice, and it appears once more, with the flags becoming a single flowing work of canvas, earth, color, stillness, movement, and humanity. The original reds of the flags have also been changed by the weather conditions they experienced; an additional layer hidden but always present. By examining the contexts of flags and their connections to land and geography, their inherent and potential meanings are evoked in these varying qualities of red earths. Accompanying the flags are two film works that are informed by or evoke the passage of time, a central theme of Goldsworthy’s art. The first film is a compilation of each flag flown and filmed at his studio throughout the pandemic’s confinement. The movement of the flags—sometimes calm and slow, sometimes furiously waving—brings opposing feelings of peace and distress. The second film captures a flag stained with earth from all 50 states of the U.S. flown in Scotland from November 3 to 4, 2020: a period beginning with the U.S.’s Election Day and ending as presidential results were being released. To date, the flag remains flying and will only be taken down by the artist at the next election. In this specific event and in his overarching practice, Goldsworthy notes our heightened awareness of time; a provoked and abrupt change in our minds set against the everyday reality of time steadily passing in nature. In commemoration of Earth Day, the artist will be in conversation with Brett Littman, director of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum and curator of Frieze Sculpture 2020, on Saturday, April 23, 2022, in the gallery at 11am ET. The event will also be livestreamed on Zoom.

Galerie Lelong & Co., New York and Paris, are pleased to present Discovery of Immediacy, a solo exhibition of the late artist’s recent work that will encompass both gallery locations. The exhibition will present new paintings and leporellos, completed in the past year before Adnan passed away on November 14, 2021.

Galerie Lelong & Co., New York, is pleased to present our solo exhibition with Jaume Plensa, featuring new sculptures by the artist, including the debut of the new nest series, that explores the innovation of figurative forms in his depictions of contemporary portraiture. The exhibition coincides with the opening of two monumental public-facing commissions: Plensa’s tallest sculpture to-date, Water’s Soul, at Newport Pier Park, Jersey City, and UTOPIA, a lobby of white marble relief located in the new welcome center for the Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Plensa is internationally recognized as one of today’s leading contemporary portrait artists; harnessing the power of this approach to convey our relationship to the world and each other by emphasizing our shared humanity through portraits of individuals. In the nest series, reliefs of contemplative or dreaming faces emerge from alabaster, bridging the classical precept that the sculpture is already contained in the stone with a contemporary use of photography in their production. Plensa is known for seeking out the perfect material and technology for each individual work. In addition to the alabaster sculptures, a grouping of monumental sculptures rendered in stainless steel and marble is also on view. The marble sculpture, MARIA WHISPERING (2021) is divided in layers with lead interspersed, another reference to classical sculpture and architecture. Of particular note is LAMIN (2021), a rare portrait of a young man, among Plensa’s models. Plensa’s portraits reveal a reflective inner world through the models’ expressions—eyes closed and face at ease—a thread of inquiry the artist continues in new and recent works. Historically, the depiction of faces as a point of contemplation has a long lineage in Eastern and Western iconography, from Buddhism to Catholicism, where devotees are invited to gaze upon the face of a figure to reach an emotional understanding and epiphany. Plensa expands that enquiry to the everyday, memorializing the people we encounter in our daily lives to highlight our lived, universal connection. Underlining Plensa’s practice is an ongoing pursuit to evoke the beauty in simplicity, encouraging points of convergence for viewers of the work, which range from architectural landmarks bridging local communities to intimate sculptures. Plensa’s long career with public-facing artworks—seen all over the world from Seoul to Dubai—originates from his belief in the ability of art in public spaces to create inclusive, transformative experiences for a diverse and extensive audience. This exhibition coincides with the unveiling of two public-facing commissions. Opening October 21, the artist has been commissioned for a monumental white resin head sculpture, Water’s Soul, Plensa’s tallest public sculpture to date measuring at 80 feet, to be installed in Newport Pier Park, New Jersey right across from Downtown Manhattan. On November 29, Plensa’s largest indoor work to date, UTOPIA, will be opened to the public, a lobby of white marble relief located in the new welcome center for the Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids, Michigan. On September 29, a permanent sculptural commission, WE (2021), was unveiled at The Shard, London, UK, marking the artist's first public-facing sculpture in the city.

Galerie Lelong & Co., New York, is pleased to present New Prints and Editions, a group exhibition featuring six of the gallery’s artists: Etel Adnan, Leonardo Drew, Samuel Levi Jones, Jaume Plensa, Kate Shepherd, and Barthélémy Toguo. Known for their works in painting, sculpture, and installation, the artists also maintain an active practice with works on paper; experimenting with new ideas, techniques and materials to further investigate thematic issues.

Opening Friday, May 21, 2021, 10:00am – 7:00pm with limited capacity. The artist will be present from 4:00pm. Galerie Lelong & Co., New York, is pleased to present our first solo exhibition with Juan Uslé, entitled HORIZONTAL LIGHT. Over a four-decade career, Uslé has established a distinctive pictorial grammar; gestural brushstrokes systematically applied in tandem with his heartbeat to convey a poetic-fluid landscape. Dividing his time between Spain and New York City since the 1980s, Uslé’s practice has engaged with the various movements and traditions of painting in European and American postwar abstraction. HORIZONTAL LIGHT will present new works as a continuation of his best-known series that began in 1997, Soñe que revelabas [I Dreamt That You Revealed], also known as SQR. To date, Uslé’s SQR paintings have emerged as the largest unified set within his oeuvre, a sequence of mesmerizing chords interweaving explosions of light and color heightened by their towering size. Measuring at least 108 x 80 inches (275 x 203 cm), the work’s verticality is reiterated in its modular strokes. Overshadowing the viewer, Uslé’s landscapes envelop us in their presence—a life-size electrocardiogram charting the momentum of the artist’s brushstrokes and a record of time’s passage. These monumental pieces will be accompanied by the works on paper Notes on SQR, and a selection of vibrant intimate-scale paintings. HORIZONTAL LIGHT coincides with Uslé’s museum retrospective, Eye and Landscape, at the Bombas Gens Centre d’Art, Valencia, Spain, on view through September 12, 2021. “The SQR paintings slow down our looking. Their size demands that we stand at a distance if we expect to take them in, and then, as we move closer, scrutinizing the surface, we physically experience the continuity of their slight changes as well as their sudden shifts of mood and direction… Uslé gives us light, color, and a sense of time passing. He shows us a pulverized, porous world—a state of suspended disintegration… Uslé’s paintings invite us to return to a silence interrupted only by our beating hearts,” writes poet and critic, John Yau, for the museum’s exhibition catalogue.

Galerie Lelong & Co., New York, is pleased to present Throughlines: Assemblages and Works on Paper from the 1960s to the 1990s, our second solo exhibition of works by Mildred Thompson and the late artist’s first presentation of this body of work in New York. A selected survey of the artist’s sculptural practice over four decades, Throughlines begins at the moment of Thompson’s first mature body of work. Her Wood Pictures began in New York and further developed in Düren, Germany during Thompson’s self-imposed exile. Thompson’s foray in experimenting with wood continued throughout her life and informed the development of her abstract language, as evinced in her sculptures, works on paper, and paintings. After receiving early recognition during her studies in the US and Germany, Thompson returned to New York in 1961, eager to begin her professional practice. However, her encounters with racism and sexism led her to return to Europe three years later. Over the next 13 years, she worked and participated in notable museum and gallery presentations in Aachen, Cologne, and Düren in Germany as well as in France. Thompson’s intimate reliefs of wood and found material soon evolved to two and three-dimensional collages, including elegantly staged outdoor installations of wood assemblages nailed to trees. For the artist, the material’s texture, shape, and form gave Thompson multiple entry points to create metaphorical connections across history and memory, individuality and universality. Some works, such as Stele, c.1963, reveal Thompson’s early use of color in her practice. Thompson continued to investigate her body of work in wood during her return to the US in the late 1970s. The minimalist works continued her exploration with found and manipulated wood, yet were more often made in a consistently larger scale than her earlier assemblages. Further pushing the medium, Thompson began experimenting more widely in three dimensions. Simultaneously in the 1990s, Thompson began her Music of the Spheres paintings which endeavored to make visible the sound and vibrational patterns found in planetary orbits and astrophysics. The freestanding wood works on view created during this period resemble the inner bodies of pianos and violins hidden from the musician’s eye, their curves and linearities eliciting an emotional tone. Thompson’s works on paper reveal a continuum in her practice through an inquiry of spatial structures. Created in the 1970s, Thompson sought to represent both physical and cosmological spaces in her “architectural studies” etchings, as well as in her silkscreen prints on paper where segmented forms in warm tones of burnt orange, mustard, violet, and forest green parallel the compositions and tonality of her Wood Pictures. In a period when African American artists primarily worked in figuration and representation, Thompson championed a dynamic language of abstraction. The artist’s early experimentation in creating complex juxtapositions laid the groundwork for her signature style—from her Wood Pictures of the 60s to the vibrant paintings of the 90s for which she became known.

Galerie Lelong & Co., New York, is pleased to present Rhe: everything flows; a group exhibition held in collaboration with Galleries Curate: RHE, an international contemporary art platform initiated by 21 galleries as a response to the ongoing challenges of the pandemic. “Rhe,” from Greek for that which flows, centers on the theme of water: its essential significance to life, as a bridge between people and cultures, and its status under threat from climate change. A platform with ongoing projects through May 2021, RHE is coordinated by Clément Delépine, independent curator, writer, and co-director of Paris Internationale. For its contribution, Galerie Lelong will present works by Petah Coyne, Ficre Ghebreyesus, Andy Goldsworthy, Jane Hammond, Alfredo Jaar, Rosemary Laing, Cildo Meireles, Ana Mendieta, Jaume Plensa, Carolee Schneemann, Kate Shepherd, Michelle Stuart, Juan Uslé and Catherine Yass. The exhibition will encompass artworks in a myriad of media that reflect the contextual underpinnings of water through film, painting, photography, and performance art pieces, including the actual physical presence of water in mixed-media works. Water is a resource with geo-political dimensions. In Alfredo Jaar’s Untitled (Water) E (1990), an image of a turbulent ocean conceals the face of a Vietnamese refugee on the other side, revealed through five strategically placed mirrors that implicate the viewer in the global refugee crisis. Laing’s photograph of a cascade comprising discarded refugees’ clothes on an actual dried riverbed speaks to the dual climate and refugee crisis in Australia. The use of gold as a precious metal in Meireles’s Aquaruum (2015) references the scarcity of water for the population in Brazil, a country that supplies 12% of the world’s freshwater. The performative and immersive aspects of Mendieta and Schneemann’s practices are expressed within their documentational photography and works on paper. Mendieta made her silueta (silhouette) in diverse natural landscapes “to establish her ties to the universe” as in her film Silueta de Arena (1978) where her body, portrayed in sand, is gently ebbed away by the water. A contemporary pioneer of performance art, Schneemann sought to depict a weightlessness of the body through the group performance Water Light/Water Needle (1966), with men and women interacting on suspended ropes in a gesture of collective dependency, a response to social and gender norms of the time. Land artists Andy Goldsworthy and Michelle Stuart have dedicated decades of their career to meticulous observations of nature in situ. Goldsworthy has often investigated earth’s remarkable staining qualities and has worked for years with the iron-rich red earth and stone found near his home and studio. In Goldsworthy’s nine-minute film, a river stone that he has rubbed with red earth “bleeds” color into the water. Stuart’s suite of thirty-five photographs Mysterious Tidal Fault (2019) investigates the traces of humanity’s effects on nature through the change in tides. The sound of water from Goldsworthy’s film is accompanied by the ongoing, rhythmic drip from two intimate sculptures by Jaume Plensa. Plensa’s Freud’s Children III and VII are part of a 25-component installation work where vessels of various sizes affixed with a sculpture of a body part (such as faces and hands) are connected by the drip of a pump that supplies and fills it with water, an arrangement akin to closed-blood circulation. Displayed together in this exhibition, all of the artists dwell on the physical and at times politicized qualities of water, reflecting humanity’s unity in our need for the life-giving source yet our division in its care and distribution.

Galerie Lelong & Co., New York, is pleased to present Etel Adnan: Seasons, our second solo exhibition with the artist. The exhibition will show recent works by the artist, including wool tapestries, leporellos, and paintings. Known for her distinctive abstract landscapes conveyed in a harmonious palette, Adnan’s portrayal of forms, shapes, and gestures are explored in multiple mediums. A brilliant colorist, Adnan conceives her works as visual poems, each color carefully chosen in writing a language of her own. The exhibition coincides with the release of her newest book, Shifting the Silence, a rumination on the process of aging. The exhibition takes its title from Adnan’s poem “Surge” (2017) which asks: “Why do seasons who regularly follow their appointed time, deny their kind of energy to us?“ The poem ends with “we deal with a permanent voyage, the becoming of that which itself had become.” Reading Adnan’s poetry, the recurring themes of nature vis-à-vis the passage of time demonstrate a contemplation of one’s journeys in physical and inner spaces. Adnan continues this mode of inquiry in her visual language, containing multitudes within each piece and making room for interpretation and exploration. A highlight of Seasons is Planètes, her new body of paintings depicting planets. During the pause of her activities under quarantine, Adnan reflected on the current pandemic; turning her eye for the landscape upwards as she began painting imaginary planets and satellites in vibrant skies, a completely new subject for the artist whose oeuvre spans six decades. The Planètes series is conceived in a vertical format, with a consistent circle of color appearing in varied forms. In some works, the circle occupies and fills the composition lengthwise and in others, seems to be moving off the canvas, leaving a semi-circle. An element representing an object from our daily lives—a bicycle or an apple—grounds the composition. In the early 1960s, Adnan discovered the mediums of wool tapestry and leporello. When her works were presented at Documenta 13 in 2012, the artist’s distinctive use of these materials was quickly established as key tenets of her practice. In the presentation, a lone mid-size tapestry was laid on a low table as a centrifugal anchor flanked by thirty-eight paintings. Inspired by her exposure to Persian carpets as a child, the artist had sought to realize her early designs over decades, engaging various international weavers before working with the historic Aubusson atelier PINTON. The unfolding of the leporellos included in the exhibition—accordion-folded booklets that reveal panoramic illustrations—immediately draws a kinship to Adnan’s literary practice and the act of reading. “I realized how much materials, for artists, are things that mediate thought… how much they become the elements of one’s expression, and instead of being just a support, they become in a way a co-author of one’s work,” writes Adnan. Upcoming museum exhibitions presenting works by Etel Adnan will be held at the Pera Museum, Istanbul, Turkey; Centro de Arte Contemporáneo C3A, Córdoba, Spain and the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Galerie Lelong & Co. is pleased to present Surveillance, a solo exhibition of new paintings by New York-based artist Kate Shepherd. Known for her paintings of deeply resonant colors achieved through monochromatic layers of enamel, the presentation will reflect the artist’s progression in her exploration of spatial complexity.

Galerie Lelong & Co. is pleased to present Krzysztof Wodiczko: A House Divided…, a new projection-installation work exploring contemporary political polarization in the United States and reflective of the world at large. This exhibition follows the opening of the artist’s most recent site-specific projection, Monument, commissioned by Madison Square Park Conservancy and on view January 16 through May 10, 2020.

Galerie Lelong & Co. is pleased to present Eros, its second solo exhibition of Cuban artist Zilia Sánchez, timed to coincide with the artist’s first retrospective at El Museo del Barrio. Recalling the Greek god of love, the exhibition title encapsulates Sánchez’s uniquely sensual, corporeal approach to abstraction, most familiar from her shaped canvas paintings. While the museum show will survey the artist’s vast oeuvre spanning more than six decades, Eros focuses on about a dozen new and recent works, highlighting Sánchez’s evolving interest in completely free-standing work and includes her first-ever sculptures in marble.