Yossi Milo Gallery

Yossi Milo is pleased to announce Labyrinth, a solo exhibition of new mosaic works by New York-based artist Cameron Welch (b. 1990; Indianapolis, IN). The exhibition opens with a reception on Friday, September 6 from 6-8 PM, and will be on view through Saturday, November 9, 2024. Labyrinth is Welch’s second exhibition with the gallery, and coincides with the release of the artist’s debut monograph Mosaics, co-published by Radius Books and Yossi Milo. Built around mazes, spirals, and garden motifs, the exhibition reframes the chaos of contemporary life through tropes and stories from ancient art history, taking the Labyrinth as both its theme and structure. The frenetic scenes Welch creates — made up of thousands of pieces of hand cut marble, stone, ceramic, and glass — cast a collision of modern and archaic elements that unfurl within the mire of an unruly garden maze. The artist’s material and literary combinations result in a distinctive pictorial intensity, a visual language whose commotion mirrors that of the modern era. Continuing his exploration of contemporary tumult through story and archetype, the artist hones his focus on the meandering paths of the mythical Labyrinth as a setting for this new body of work. In ancient Greek legend, the Labyrinth was an ingenious maze designed by the architect Daedalus to house the Minotaur, a monstrous half-man, half-bull creature. Theseus, the heroic prince of Athens, volunteered to enter the Labyrinth of Crete to slay the Minotaur, and was gifted a spool of golden thread to follow his path through its winding passages. Referencing Theseus’s golden thread, Welch weaves spirals and tendrils across these new works composed of glass tesserae that are gilded with gold leaf, knotting together abstracted figures and scenes with their glimmering forms. This reference to ancient liberation becomes a guide through the twists and turns of the artist’s cacophonous world. To be featured in Labyrinth is the new mosaic “Orpheus in the Garden” (2024), in which Welch places another Greek hero within this Edenic locale. The legendary bard, musician, and prophet Orpheus appears at the work’s center, surrounded by figments of the Underworld from which he sought to rescue his wife Eurydice. The surface of the mosaic is inlaid with innumerable twisting forms, repeating swirls that resemble Vitruvian scroll motifs and the distinctive spiral of the golden ratio. The work also shows the spiral forms of labyrinths that exist today as tools for meditation: flat, looping paths walked by those who seek tranquility through a circuitous journey. In this contemplative tool, the artist represents a reflective, winding path through the density of modern confusion. In Welch’s hands, ancient history and mythology join the modern day in a synchronous view of time, and in this context the labyrinth takes on a similarly multivalent existence. The maze becomes a trap, a metaphor, and a tool by which awareness is achieved through change. Overgrown with plant life, tied with golden threads, and populated with heroes and monsters alike, Welch’s labyrinthine world is a place of confusion, yet it is also a space rife for growth and exploration. ABOUT THE ARTIST Cameron Welch's work has been exhibited at Gagosian, Beverly Hills, CA; Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles; Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago, IL; Harper’s Books, East Hampton, NY; Rental Gallery, East Hampton, NY; Jack Hanley Gallery, New York, NY; Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Carl Kostyàl Gallery, Malmö, Sweden; and the Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort, Netherlands, among others. Welch presented his debut solo exhibition with Yossi Milo, RUINS, in 2022, which received a glowing review by Roberta Smith for The New York Times. Work by Welch is held in the collection of the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI, and The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO. The artist earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; and an MFA from Columbia University, New York, NY. Welch currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. ABOUT MOSAICS Mosaics is Cameron Welch’s debut monograph, co-published by Radius Books and Yossi Milo. The volume collects highlight mosaic works from across Welch’s oeuvre. An introductory essay by Alexis Belis, Assistant Curator of Greek and Roman Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, contextualizes Welch’s work alongside artistic practices from ancient history. Mosaics also contains an interview between Welch and painter Joel Mesler, who together discuss the creative process, the contexts of the art world today, and the evolution of Welch’s practice over the past several years.

Yossi Milo is pleased to present SURFACE TROUBLE, a two-part group exhibition of artists from the Yale Painting and Printmaking MFA class of 2024. SURFACE TROUBLE will take place in two phases. The first part opens with a reception on Thursday, June 27th from 6-8 PM, and will be on view through Friday, July 19th, 2024. The second will open with a reception on Thursday, July 25th from 6-8 PM, and will be on view through Friday, August 16th, 2024. Featuring artists from the MFA program’s graduating class, SURFACE TROUBLE showcases a diverse set of approaches to the problem of painting as a contemporary medium, with a range of treatments and “troubles,” each as singular as the individual artists themselves. The exhibition takes Cyborg Feminist Donna Haraway’s use of the term “trouble” in Staying with the Trouble as a jumping off point. In the text, Haraway states, “our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places.” Amid times of trouble, the artists of SURFACE TROUBLE trouble their own forms. What is the role of image and surface at this time? What functions as the release of a societal pressure valve, and is it trouble itself? — SURFACE TROUBLE presents works emanating from multiple vantage points, a sectional survey of artists who are approaching the politics of everyday life and art historical precedent via research, abstraction, spirituality, technological critique, process, and figuration. Many of the artists in SURFACE TROUBLE explore the technical aspects of what is called “painting” in the contemporary moment, while grappling with the state of the digital. Nadir Sourigi’s complex tiled works utilize meticulous methods of screening and masking to achieve disorienting yet pleasurable discrete units of aesthetic sensibility which reference the ever-shifting landscape of the internet, painting, and life. In her work, Haleigh Collins uses material contradiction and mimicry to challenge the legibility of process and painterly gesture. Each operation – spilling, embedding objects, silkscreening – speaks to a different sense of control and temporality. The contemporary meaning(s) of process and painting – in tandem – are further extrapolated upon by several artists who engage with both the historic and aesthetic legacies of geometric abstraction, troubling the normative requirements of the category. Through a cross-disciplinary practice, Michael Cuadrado Gonzalez uses perceptual manipulation to rethink the formalism and propositions of universality endemic to the Modernist forces of the 20th century. Cuadrado navigates a “circuit of fraught desires,” examining his disidentifications with painting and the institutions which surround it through the lens of academics such as José Esteban Muñoz. Lauren Klotzman engages a geometric sensibility in the context of technological “process painting” within a media landscape saturated by electronics. In navigating both the synthetic and the organic, the painterly and the mechanical, Klotzman generates static paintings which are contrasting yet complementary “spin-offs” from a rigorous abstract and lens-less moving image process. Laura Camila Medina works between painting and a complex video practice. In thinking about the translation of scale endemic to our culture of personal devices, Medina draws from Andean miniatures and technological nostalgia to create bio-mythographic portable worlds that utilize excavated imagery from her personal familial archive. Her interest in the “small” scale is not only limited to our contemporary moment, as she also draws from the trends of miniaturization in the 90’s-00’s: Tamagotchi, Polly Pocket, and the Video Now player, among others. In contrast to Medina’s focus on the handheld, Mike Picosengages with a technological nostalgia via meticulous stenciled landscapes that emanate from screen desktop environments of the 80s and 90s. In Window (Lights Out), Picos creates a fictitious mapped landscape, where both painted forms and encaustic casts render virtual space (graphic icons and 3D objects) uncanny by situating and confronting these virtual elements within large-scale painting. Both of these artists work through a nostalgia mediated by early childhood experiences on the internet in order to negotiate the ubiquitous presence of technology in our culture and how it feeds back into the work of painting. Approaches to abstraction, feeling and landscape can also be seen in the work of Earthen Clay, whose delicately balanced, yet harshly adhered sculptural arrangements of objects and materials – still bound to their previous states of being – are brought into a new ensemble toward a liberatory alternative purpose or function. Justin Emmanuel Dumas utilizes the material conditions of a post-industrial landscape in order to gather and collage fragments, creating works which exist between painting and sculpture. In doing so, Dumas contextualizes the body and architecture in terms of boundary and container, enacting a metabolic studio process which engages across scalar differences, as architecture and the body become slippery containers, boundaries, and occupied spaces alike. The very notion of objectivity becomes “troubled,” interrogating the boundaries of what we perceive or accept as “truth.” V Yeh’s works interrogate the (un)disciplined boundaries of the viewer, the art-science object, and art-science subject—where body, paint, and text intra-act to disrupt their tenured service to scientific empiricism. Eloise Hess’ multi-layered mediation of photography, painting, and printmaking troubles the act of seeing. The surface trembles in and out of resolution and dissolution of figure and ground, dislodging the stability of subject and object. SURFACE TROUBLE presents a productively troubled perspective by approaching painting in non-linear ways: the artists not only “stay with the trouble,” they further trouble it. These artists approach the politics of everyday life and art historical precedent via research, abstraction, spirituality, technological critique, process, and figuration. Ultimately, the exhibition puts forth a set of challenging approaches to painting in the here and now. In presenting the work of Yale’s class of 2024, this small survey is a microcosm of the state of painting’s trajectory forward, however troubled it may be, given our troubling times. Text by Lauren Klotzman in collaboration with the Yale Painting & Printmaking Class of 2024.

Yossi Milo is pleased to present From Thebes to Cairo, a solo exhibition of new work by Egyptian ceramicist Ibrahim Said. Opening on Thursday, May 2 from 6-8 PM and on view through Saturday, June 15, this will be the artist’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery and first in New York. This exhibition inaugurates a rotating presentation of works in the Forum, activating the gallery’s front window as an exhibition space. Ibrahim Said builds ceramic vessels that take on aerial configurations, suspending voluminous bodies in the air above delicate, yet sturdy bases. Innovative and singular in design, these vessels are nonetheless firmly rooted in an ancient tradition of Egyptian craftsmanship. Said’s practice is steeped in Egypt’s ceramic traditions; since the age of six, the artist often accompanied his father to his pottery studio in Al Fustat, Cairo, an area known for being a center for ceramic manufacturing. Frequently working with the form of the water jug, Said undoes its utility to render an object that is practically futile but conceptually rich. The artist’s vessels are modeled after those commonly produced during Egypt’s Naqada period (4000 – 3000 BCE). With these vessels as his departure point, Said incorporates a feature common during the much later Fatimid Dynastic Era (10th – 12th centuries): the filter. During this period, water jugs were constructed with a fine clay filter fitted into their necks, designed to sieve sediment from drinking water. Said transposes these filters from interior to exterior, carving intricate patterns onto the outer surfaces of his jugs. This effectively transforms the function of the jug, stripping it of its ability to hold water, but inviting a new perspective inward; where, according to Muslim belief, true beauty is found. It is the viewer’s gaze, rather than water, that is filtered through minute designs into the interior of the jug. The “filters” that decorate Said’s vessels follow complex geometric patterns derived from Islamic geometric principles. While such designs were frequently painted onto the surfaces of Islamic ceramic ware and carved into architectural elements during the Fatimid Dynastic Era, they were not prevalent during the much earlier Naqada period. The artist thus engages two distinct ceramic practices that originate from nearly five millennia apart: one from a specifically Egyptian tradition of crafting vessels, and the other rooted in the broader Islamic practice of geometric ornamentation. This fusion imbues Said’s vessels with a distinctly architectural quality. The finely detailed patterns of Said’s filters recall the richly ornamented surfaces of Islamic edifices, forging a link between the two. This quality is enhanced by the immense scale of the vessels in this new body of work, as well as their towering, gravity-defying shapes. Launching his interest in the architectural to new heights, Said will transform the gallery’s exhibition space into a splendid showcase of Islamic design. Standing within this space will be a series of pillars inspired by The Karnak Temple Complex located in Luxor, Egypt. The columns within the temple system reference the forms of papyrus plants, which were used by ancient Egyptians to make paper, ropes, clothing, and other materials. Said celebrates these sacred columns and the history they embody with these new sculptural works. A counterpoint to these pillars will be 99 Names of God, an immersive installation of 100 inverted bowls, each about 12 inches in diameter, that will line the front wall of the gallery. Each bowl is carved with intricate geometric designs and bears one of the 99 names of God as he is referred to in the Quran. These names are written in Arabic script, and include referents such as Al-Ghafoor, meaning“The All-Forgiving,” and Al-Muqsit, meaning “The Equitable.” The 100th bowl is inscribed with Allah, the single, proper name for God in Islam. Installed as hanging fixtures on walls, these works are spangled with ornate patterns, calligraphy, and reflected shimmering light, mimicking the complex tiling and sacred ornamentation covering the walls of Islam’s holiest places of worship. Said also directly engages features of the gallery’s architecture in the Forum’s first presentation with a grouping of the artist’s distinctive Floating Vase works. A selection of vessels will be displayed along the gallery’s exterior-facing wall, creating a visible presence for the artist along Manhattan’s 10th Avenue. Said’s work is founded on a marriage of ancient Egyptian and Islamic art traditions, drawing upon two extensive timelines of visual and cultural histories, separated by millennia and spanning from prehistory to the modern day. These visual languages are the substance from which the artist creates his own, furthering a notion of inheritance that is at once immediate and latent. Thousands of years of art history are concentrated by Said in his levitating vessels, carved filigrees, and buttressed structures — and yet, their very forms are inherently modern, informed by a contemporary sensibility of design and craft. This meeting of historic and contemporary mirrors his own lived experiences, bringing the artist’s familial relationship to Cairo’s ceramic manufacturing centers into conversation with contemporary realities of a culturally informed artistic process. In this way, Said’s work is at once primeval, ancient, and current, an extant element of tradition and an innovation still unfolding. ABOUT IBRAHIM SAID Ibrahim Said has previously exhibited in solo and group shows at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY; 10th Korean International Ceramic Biennale, Icheon, South Korea; Saatchi Gallery, London, UK; Museum of Art and Design, New York, NY, among others. Said’s work is part of public collections, including the Des Moines Art Center, IA; the Colby Museum of Art, Waterville, ME; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, Scotland; Center of Islamic Art, Kuwait; Fustat Ceramics Center, Cairo, Egypt. Said currently lives and works between North Carolina and Cairo, Egypt. ABOUT THE FORUM Ibrahim Said’s solo exhibition From Thebes to Cairo will commence Yossi Milo’s programming in the Forum, a new initiative that activates the gallery’s front window as an exhibition space. Drawing on the classical notion of a central space that facilitates an exchange of ideas, the Forum opens a direct opportunity for works of art to reach the public, making use of the visibility offered by the gallery’s front window. The Forum will continue to offer parallels and counterpoints to Yossi Milo’s ongoing exhibition program, opening new dialogues between works on view in the gallery’s interior and exterior. Through multimedia programming, online components, and nighttime activations, the Forum extends the gallery’s exhibition space outwards onto the street level and opens the program to directly engage with the city itself.

Yossi Milo is pleased to announce Nebulous, Orit Hofshi’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery, and the artist’s first to be held in in New York in over two decades. Nebulous opens to the public on Thursday, March 14, and an artist’s reception will be held the following week on Thursday, March 21, from 6 – 8 PM. The show will coincide with the inclusion of Hofshi’s work in The Anxious Eye: German Expressionism and Its Legacy, a group presentation at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. On March 23, 2024, Hofshi will participate in a conversation with Shelley Langdale, the National Gallery’s Curator and Head of Modern Prints and Drawings, which will draw connections between the artist’s practice and the historic 20th century works on view. Orit Hofshi creates her monumental works through a laborious combination of mediums, taking a purist, traditional approach to each. Hofshi’s works on paper are often immersive in size, verging on the scale of installation. In the studio, the artist begins by drawing directly onto pinewood panels, which she herself then carves with hand tools. Hofshi engages in a deeply physical dialogue with pinewood through this process, forming a collaboration with the natural qualities of her materials. The artist prints these woodcuts by hand, rubbing the back of large sheets of handmade paper with a wooden spoon, forgoing the use of presses or assistants. This solitary and labor-intensive process exists as a performative extension of the works themselves. Hofshi’s methodologies encompass not only this distillation of traditional printing technique, but expansions on it. The artist shifts strategies of transferring ink from each woodblock, moving between printing, rubbing, and offsetting, often working in bold, saturated colors. Hofshi also adds drawn elements, incorporating layered movement and texture. These differing techniques play into a sense of alienation and displacement of the complex relationships within and between humankind and the natural world. Her frequent depiction of solitary figures draws on the artist’s philosophy that humanity must overcome adversity, and that growth only comes through reflecting upon one’s own held values, while facing the consequences of their decisions and actions as individuals and as part of society. Hofshi has maintained a "library" of her carved wood blocks since early on in her career — one that she continually revisits in the creation of new work. The artist deploys recurring imagery of people, structures, and natural landscapes, reconfiguring them into an elliptical, nonlinear narrative in which the drama of the human condition plays out in the open. One particular recurring figure is a self-portrait of the artist, an avatar by which she locates herself within her work’s ongoing allegorical struggle. Hofshi’s own likeness makes clear that these reappearing forms are not just a pictorial strategy, but an existential situation. This replication of imagery throughout the artist’s oeuvre forms a dreamlike logic: a language of symbols that form cycles in an inescapable space, representative of a seemingly endless universal psychic state. These large-scale works on paper relate natural phenomena with mass social and political events. Drawing from the artist’s experiences witnessing conflict in the Middle East and across the world; the lasting effects of the Holocaust; and crises across history, Hofshi cautiously populates her compositions with expressive subjects engrossed in mysterious yet urgent activity. Mired in uncertainty, they are caught between searching, finding, and intently looking on. She situates these figures in imagined landscapes that are seemingly forever devastated, yet dotted with evidence of former human life. The exhibition shares a title with one of its central works: Nebulous, a monumental polyptych that realizes a nearly life-sized moment of stillness from an epic narrative. The work shows Hofshi’s distinct, desolate landscape ringed by craggy mountains under a low, gray sky. Rising behind a ridge is a lone architectural fragment, a specific element that recurs throughout a few of the artist’s works. Its form is derived from a synagogue that once stood in the town of Holešov in the Czech Republic, where Hofshi’s mother lived before being displaced in the Second World War. Destroyed in 1944, it now echoes through this body of work as a ghostly reminder of what is lost to time through conflict. In its shadow, figures examine the earth and look off into the distance, engrossed in silent communion with the land. Hofshi’s self-portrait appears among them at the work’s right side, sharing and observing this state of mourning and confusion. A pair of crossed lines separate the viewer from the scene, seemingly barring them from entering this unsettled universe that branches from our own. Nebulous refers to, and portrays, the uncertainty and precarity created by violence, and the lack of clarity Hofshi sees in humanity’s search for resolution. Hofshi’s practice renders a shared universe connected by its reappearing figures and landscapes, and each image acts as a glimpse from a single infinite timeline. Taken together, the artist’s body of work shows the eternal nature of humanity’s search for a lasting sense of peace and order, indicating a deep tension in its unresolved narrative cycles. At the heart of Hofshi’s oeuvre is a preoccupation with the phenomenon of time, from personal experiences of its passing to a broader perspective of its persistent unfolding on a geologic scale. This fascination is further evident in her material processes, which are themselves massive in scale and intense in effort. Mining materials and references from across history, the artist grapples with the past in an acknowledgement of an unknown future, creating realms that contain both the darkness and complexities of past turmoil, while envisioning potential in the open expanses of eternities to come. Orit Hofshi has mounted solo exhibitions of her work across the globe, including at Danubiana Meulensteen Art Museum, Slovakia; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; The Philadelphia Museum of Judaica, PA; Hoch+Partner, Leipzig, Germany; Shulamit Nazarian Gallery, LA; and Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, PA; among others. Hofshi’s work has been included in prominent group exhibitions, including at The Janet Turner Print Museum, CA; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum, Philadelphia; Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK; International Print Center, New York; and Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel, among others. The artist’s work is represented in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Art Collection of the German Bundestag, Berlin; and Israel Museum, Jerusalem, among others. The artist studied at the Neri Bloomfield Haifa School of Design and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, after which she received her MA in Arts from Leeds University, UK. She currently lives and works in Herzliya, Israel.

Yossi Milo is pleased to announce Afterimage, Elizabeth Dimitroff’s debut solo exhibition in New York and first with the gallery. Afterimage opens to the public on Thursday, February 8, 2024, and the gallery will host an artist’s reception on Thursday, February 15, 2024 from 6 – 8 PM. The exhibition will be on view through Saturday, March 9, 2024. Elizabeth Dimitroff’s (b. 1995; Chicago, IL) work examines the spaces between memory and truth, anchoring figurative paintings in unnamable emotional sensations that subvert legibility in favor of an immersive dedication to mood. Inspired by cyclical time and shared memories, Dimitroff favors an openness to speculation rather than concrete narrative, pursuing the impressions of memory rather than a perfect reconstruction. In the artist’s work, the lost nature of past events is a point of connection with viewers — audiences are welcomed into her luminous paintings, only to find a softly glowing retelling of an original. An afterimage, like a memory, loses shape and fades following initial exposure, which the artist parallels in the unravelling narrative threads of her work. Open-ended in nature, her work thus allows for parallel reads and associations. The paintings in Afterimage are the result of Dimitroff’s intuitive process, in which the artist layers and blends images from a deep personal archive to create liminal environments, simultaneously sentimental and anonymous. Her spaces are inhabited by figures that bridge the uncanny and the approachable, rendered in soft, warm tones within half-emptied environments. These beings are present, but not fully real, made apparent in their closed or absent eyes. Unable to return their viewers’ gaze, these subjects leave audiences free to look and speculate, and to engage the work’s open-ended narratives. A projection-based form of viewership emerges, and stories appear in ways not unlike methods born of the classic Rorschach test, revealing as much about their viewers as they do their hidden content. Dimitroff’s warm, inviting palette portrays an array of comforting spaces, forming empty beaches, homelike corners, and fragments of furniture. Further study, though, reveals anomalies within each scene, as details are blurred or absent, or identical figures appear more than once. The artist’s work posits that the apparent truth of memory is, in fact, constructed. Time is indelible in its passing, and though a figment left behind may still be present, it has a different, spectral life, animated by rules outside the physical realm. Included in the exhibition is 8AM, a figurative painting that revels in the silence of a still life. Curled on a bench, a figure shies away from a beam of sunlight, which plays in shadows and reflects through to the back of the composition. Shielding their eyeless face, the subject’s refusal of the light mirrors Dimitroff’s concealment of identity, their particulars hidden from the viewer as though the sunlight might reveal this deeper truth. Despite their hiding, the morning sun illuminates muted, radiant colors all around them, enveloping the work in a wash of warmth and comfort. The sensation of the escalating light becomes the central emotive quality as the curled figure holds still, their twisted pose held calm. Initially intended to be a self-portrait, 8AM shifted in identity, ultimately changing from a legible self-image into a ghostly figure and gaining a new life as a presence of its own. Apparitions like these are present throughout Afterimage, animating the likenesses of friends, relatives, and strangers to the artist alike. Ambiguating her relationships to these figures, Dimitroff distills her emotive connection to each scene to the level of sensation. These works draw their power from these points of divergence, which create spaces the viewer fills with their own associations. In this pursuit, Dimitroff’s paintings echo the lauded emotive power of painting itself as a medium — a conduit for connection that is freed from the granular specifics of narrative. A memory is an imperfect image, and so is a painting, demonstrated by the artist in a removal of the specific in favor of singular, affective qualities. The works in Afterimage do not depict lost memories, but rather illustrate this loss, demonstrating this effect in surreal compositions of an elliptical, immersive world. Elizabeth Dimitroff has presented work in group exhibitions at numerous institutions across Europe, including Studio West Gallery, London, UK; Gurr Johns International, London, UK; Truman Brewery, London, UK; D Contemporary, London, UK; Danuser & Ramirez, London, UK; Aktion Raumtausch, Dusseldorf, Germany; and SET, London, UK, among others. The artist earned a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI; and an MA from the Royal College of Art, London, UK. Dimitroff was born in Chicago, IL, and currently lives and works in New York, NY.

Yossi Milo is pleased to announce Monstrum, Linus Borgo's debut solo exhibition in New York and first with the gallery. Opening on Thursday, November 30, 2023 and on view through Saturday, January 20, 2024, the exhibition will present new works reflecting on transcendence, transformation, and transition as physical, aesthetic, and mythological phenomena. Linus Borgo's (b. 1995; Stamford, CT) work is immersive in both scale and content, with his paintings oscillating between sublime depictions of the aftermath of trauma, quotidian moments of daily life in the city and fantasies of other worlds where alternative configurations of the body form and disperse across wild landscapes. Borgo stages gender (and other bodily) transformations as spectacular experiments with form and flesh. The title of this show, Monstrum, merges terrifying forms of mutation with omens of things to come. In it, Borgo traces the etymology of 'monster' all the way back to its Latin origins. The word 'monstrum' translates to "divine portent", formed on the root of the verb monere, meaning to warn. In this exhibition, Borgo imagines hybridized beings that simultaneously nod to the ancient origins of the word 'monster', and look forward towards radically new implications for the term. Included in the exhibition is Borgo's largest work to date, Narcissus at the Halsey Street Oasis (2023). In this monumental work, the artist depicts himself crouching near a puddle underneath elevated train tracks. Borgo wears a pluming fur coat, and peers into a reflective, glowing pool of water that teems with fish and plant life. This luminescent puddle contrasts almost magically with the dim urban space that lies beyond. It is an oasis that offers a moment for quiet reflection amidst a bustling city, and a retelling of the mythical story of Narcissus, infamous for staring at his reflection in water and falling in love with himself. But it also stages a clash of artificial textures - faux fur, puddles, and neon light. Here, the artist steps out of the pastoral and into a world of glittering and plastic surfaces. In Narcissus at the Halsey Street Oasis, Borgo positions himself as Narcissus who, according to myth, became infatuated with his reflection while gazing into a river and remained fixed there for so long that he eventually turned into a flower. By identifying himself as Narcissus, Borgo reimagines a myth that has sometimes figured in homophobic and transphobic theory, one that casts gay and trans people as incapable of normal relations to others and as pathologically fixated upon themselves and their appearances. Borgo thwarts these theories by suggesting that what the artist finds in the pool is not just his own reflection; it is another world, one where aquatic life flourishes, reflections are mutable, and possibilities for transformation are endless. Exhibited for the very first time, Borgo's sculptural works will also be included in Monstrum. These bronze works depict the artist himself as fantastical creatures, such as mermen and angels. The merman is a recurring figure in the artist's oeuvre, meant to embody and sanctify the experience of existing in a liminal state. In Borgo's painted universe, the merman is a protest against dualisms that construct binaries between human and animal; man and woman; mind and body. With these new sculptures, Borgo materializes this dissidence in bronze monuments to the hybridized body, which he celebrates as a new mode of existence that is autonomous and freed from the constraints of the natural physical world. Linus Borgo's work has been exhibited in galleries across the United States, including a solo exhibition at Steve Turner Gallery in Los Angeles, CA, and group exhibitions at the Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, TX; Zurcher Gallery, New York, NY; and Anne Wright Wilson Fine Arts Gallery, Georgetown, KY, among others. He was awarded the Anderson Ranch Fellowship at Rhode Island School of Design the Brevoort Eickemeyer Fellowship at Columbia University and completed a residency at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson. He received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and holds an MFA from Columbia University. The artist currently lives and works in New York, NY.

Yossi Milo is pleased to announce Idylle und Verderben, a solo exhibition of new work by French-German painter Pierre Knop. Opening on Thursday, October 26 and on view through Saturday, November 25, the artist’s second exhibition at the gallery will feature new paintings of dreamy seaside landscapes and whimsical boxing matches from eras past. Guided by his painterly intuition, Knop spins painted tales of enchanted realms filled with surreal bodies, otherworldly forms, and spellbinding color. The artist gives way to the pull of his various mediums—allowing his hand to lead him as he coaxes compositions from his subconscious. Much of Knop’s imagery comes from the recent histories of his native countries, Germany and France, and the decades of turbulence and shifting paradigms that came to define them. Inspired by the impressionists and expressionists that emerged during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Knop puts forth a contemporary romanticism in his paintings, epitomizing the grandeur of nature and humanity’s place within it. Blending techniques and styles from across recent histories, Knop delivers his own distinct approach to painterly representation. Many of the new paintings in Idylle und Verderben depict the astounding magnitude of nature, set to scale by miniscule human figures that journey among soaring mountains and vast coastlines. Knop paints his landscapes with the reverence of a romanticist, yet imbues the scenery with a twinge of something darker. Applying thick layers of paint, the artist renders spindly trees and billowing skies from impasto, and lacquers mountainsides and ocean surfaces with shocks of deep oranges, blues, pinks, and purples. Individually, Knop’s painted forms can take on a garish quality, but taken as a whole, they constitute the colorful musings of an interior world projected outwards. Like the European expressionists who came before him, such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and James Ensor, Knop is enamored by the bounties of nature and the opportunities for formal innovations they offer. Featured alongside the artist’s landscape works is a new series of boxing paintings, which depict cartoonish figures in the throes of lighthearted brawls. Knop draws upon the writings of German writer Heinrich Mann, whose 1918 novel Der Untertan famously satirized Imperial German society, specifically its premiums placed on hypermasculinity and brute force. Knop locates this history in the traditions of the German Burschenschaft, a system of fraternities that young men join during their university studies. Known for promoting nationalistic and patriarchal values, these fraternities often require their members to partake in fencing or boxing matches. Restaging these scenes in his paintings, Knop highlights the absurdity of these rituals, rendering them in fantasias of exaggerated color, amorphous forms, and tactile textures. In this work, the artist reimagines the restrictive conventions of masculine aggression and domination, recontextualizing them in a gentler, dreamier realm. Juxtaposing the harsh with the soft, the sinister with the saccharine, Knop’s paintings skirt familiarity while inviting viewers into a world of pillowy forms and sumptuous color. Pierre Knop has presented solo exhibitions across the globe, including at Gether Contemporary, Copenhagen, Denmark; Choi&Choi Gallery, Seoul, Korea and Cologne, Germany; and Lyles and King, New York, NY. Work by the artist has been included in group exhibitions at Barbara Seiler Gallery, Zürich, Switzerland; Spazio Amanita, New York, NY; Meyer Riegger, Berlin, Germany; Jack Siebert Projects, Los Angeles, CA; Ruttkowski68 Gallery, Cologne, Germany, and Anat Ebgi Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, among others. Pierre Knop recently completed the CCA Adratx residency in Mallorca, Spain. The artist currently lives and works in Cologne, Germany.

Yossi Milo is pleased to announce Fairies, German photographer Kathrin Linkersdorff’s debut solo exhibition in the United States and first with the gallery. Opening on Friday, September 8 and on view through Saturday, October 21, the exhibition will present work from the artist’s photographic series Fairies. The show will also exhibit video installations showcasing the artist’s process, offering a new perspective of how Linkersdorff’s exquisite photographs are made. The artist’s Fairies series uncovers the microcosmic vastness contained within flowers, and unearths worlds unknown to the naked eye. At the heart of Linkersdorff’s practice is the concept of wabi-sabi : the view that ephemerality and imperfection are integral and even beautiful parts of life. The artist first encountered the principle during the 1990s upon relocating to Japan to study architecture. Traveling the country extensively, Linkersdorff began practicing Sumi-e, a traditional form of Japanese ink painting. While studying the art form, the artist accepted the beauty in impermanence, imperfection, and transience. Today, wabi-sabi is the lifeforce behind her photography practice, which she uses to depict the internal architecture of living organisms in their most fragile state- that between being and perishing. While flowers and bacteria form the subjects of Linkersdorff’s photographs, her practice is not a matter of mere depiction; rather, the organic becomes a visual metaphor for transience as a fundamental life process. For her Fairies works, Linkersdorff collects and dries tulips over a period of several months. Using her own method- cultivated through years of careful experimentation and lively exchange with scientists- the artist extracts the flowers’ pigments, which she re-concentrates into a natural dye. The artist then submerges the dried, translucent flowers into a liquid medium where their petals unfurl. Suspended in fluid, their delicate structures can be observed at a level of intricacy normally hidden from the human eye. Often, Linkersdorff introduces her floral dyes into this very same medium where they diffuse in swirling, colorful tendrils. Building on her previous bodies of work with flowers, Fairies lays unique emphasis on process, showcasing the lyrical dance between the fragile form of each flower, and the natural flow of pigment through fluid space. Alongside her photographs, video documentation of the artist’s process will be exhibited, offering a behind-the-scenes look into the creation of Linkersdorff’s surreal images. In these videos, natural dyes are seen sinking and swelling in sweeps of color, unraveling amongst the flower petals they once filled with life. These videos spotlight the drama of Linkersdorff’s practice, from the first drop of ink, to dynamic crescendos of color, to the final dim of the denouement. During the exhibition’s opening reception on Friday, September 8, the gallery will present a one-night-only ballet performance in collaboration with BalletCollective, a New York-based arts organization that connects artists, composers and choreographers. With Kathrin Linkersdorff as the Source Artist, choreographer Omar Román De Jesús and composer Robert Honstein have created an original ballet exploring themes of probability and chance, an excerpt of which will premiere at Yossi Milo. Later this year, the full ballet will be performed by seven New York City Ballet dancers from October 31 through November 2, 2023. Coinciding with Yossi Milo’s exhibition, Kathrin Linkersdorff (b. 1966; Berlin, Germany) will present her debut solo museum exhibition at Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Germany from October 2023 to January 2024. Linkersdorff’s work has been exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; Galerie Springer Berlin, Germany; Purdy Hicks Gallery London, UK; Kommunale Galerie and Haus am Kleistpark, Berlin, Germany; and Angermuseum, Erfurt, Germany, among others. Linkersdorff’s work is in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA. The artist studied architecture at Brandenburg University of Technology in Cottbus, Germany and The Bartlett in London, UK, as well as photography at Fotografie am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin, Germany. The artist lives and works in Berlin.

Yossi Milo is pleased to present Unpredictable Drawings, a solo presentation of recent electrifying drawings by David Goldes. These new works will be presented alongside the artist's new monograph of the same name, published by Radius Books. Unpredictable Drawings opens Friday, September 8 with an artist's reception and book signing from 6-8 PM. David Goldes' (b. 1947; New York) new body of work addresses the uncertainty of current times, and was largely created during the unpredictable months of the Covid-19 pandemic. These luminous works were created through the artist's unique process that harnesses the power of physics, chemistry, and electricity. Goldes overlays graphite drawings onto paper coated with black gesso, which he then shocks with electric currents. The graphite serves as a conduit, electrifying the drawings to yield erratic trajectories of burnt edges and singed passages of paper. In other works, the artist ignites chemical reactions to tarnish areas of silver leaf with metallic tones of yellow, orange, green, and blue. Tapping into the incredibly vast physical potential of his materials, Goldes' innovative approach centers around invisible phenomena and embraces chance and risk, giving them striking visual forms with his electric drawings. With an extensive background in the natural sciences, including a graduate degree in molecular genetics from Harvard, Goldes applies his expert knowledge of scientific phenomena to the creation of his images. The artist's photographic practice documents the physical properties of various substances and forms of energy, such as water and electricity, through images that record the phenomena of surface tension, combustion, and gravitational pull. The drawings presented in Unpredictable Drawings expand on this practice by allowing natural forces, including electrical transmission and chemical reactions, to determine the physical form of the work. Along with its scientific underpinnings, Goldes' practice makes deliberate reference to artists noted for their contributions to minimalism, such as Ellsworth Kelly and Carmen Herrera. Speaking to the material concerns of post-minimalism, Goldes' drawings can be read with the language of artists who fuse formalist compositional strategies with personal and social concerns. While Goldes approaches all of his work with the mind of a scientist, the social and political upheaval of the Covid-19 pandemic brought his prior epidemiological training to the forefront, leading him to explore the striking similarity of the forms in his work to various cellular and biomorphic structures. Observing these similarities in light of a public health crisis, the artist uncovered a metaphorical significance in his compositions as they relate to representations of infection, protection, isolation, and touch. David Goldes' work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, among others. The artist has been selected for numerous fellowships and residencies including those from the Guggenheim Foundation; McKnight Foundation; Minnesota State Arts Board; Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris; and MacDowell Colony, among others. Goldes received an MFA in Photography from the Visual Studies Workshop at SUNY Buffalo, an MA in Molecular Genetics from Harvard University, and a BA in Biology and Chemistry from SUNY Buffalo. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and a recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. Born in New York, Goldes lives and works in Minneapolis.

Yossi Milo is pleased to present Crusading The Specter, a group exhibition curated by artist and filmmaker Shikeith. The exhibition will present work by Antoine d'Agata, Kevin Beasley, Kevin Claiborne, Justin Emmanuel Dumas, Alanna Fields, Diana Al-Hadid, Allison Janae Hamilton, Y. Malik Jalal, Harold Mendez, Azza El Siddique, Bri Williams, and London Williams. The exhibition will open with a reception on Thursday, June 22 and will be on view through Friday, August 11, 2023. Crusading The Specter is a creative response to a prevailing socio-political state of mourning and remembrance, an ever-increasing loss of societal liberties and privileges, and worldwide environmental devastation. This exhibition delves into the spatial dimension and politics of the notion of ‘a haunting,’ drawing inspiration from the concept of Hauntology as introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1992 magnum opus, Specters of Marx. Hauntology emphasizes that the past is not merely a relic of bygone eras but rather an ever-present haunting force that profoundly impacts our lives. The artists featured in Crusading The Specter embark on uncovering and following traces of the past that shape our contemporary experiences and identities. Through their artistic endeavors, these artists communicate processes of grieving, yearning, recovery, and temporality, shedding light on the intricate interplay between history, memory, and the human condition. Among those featured in the exhibition is Kevin Beasley (American, b. 1985), whose sculpture Fisher (2020) presents a ghostly figure made from worn clothing and a repurposed fishing net, set in form and preserved in resin. The process of creating this work is intensive, with Beasley dipping the garments into resin, and quickly molding and shaping them before they solidify in roughly one half of an hour. The resulting work carries evidence of the cycles of use and disuse, the artist’s body, and the process of its own creation, blurring the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and performance. Azza El Siddique’s (Sudanese, b. 1984) bronze sculpture 7 3/8 (2022) takes the form of a snapback baseball cap mounted to a wall. The work is a replica of a hat worn by the artist’s late brother and artist Teto El Siddique, and captures every minute detail of the original garment. Yet, the cap itself was destroyed in the casting process, speaking to notions of grief, memory, forgetting, and healing. Included in the exhibition is Kevin Claiborne’s (American, b. 1989) Throne (2022). Made from old police barricades, the multimedia sculpture recalls the form of a seat used in BDSM practices. The structure is sealed with a thin layer of shea butter—a uniquely African ingredient used for centuries—and suggests a crossing of boundaries and barriers to assert agency over experiences, identities, bodies, pleasure, and pain. Among the photographic works presented in the exhibition is Alanna Fields’ (American, b. 1990) Come To My Garden (2021). The mise en abyme photograph presents the repeated image of a nude figure seated on a blanket outdoors. Sourced from an archival photograph, the work reframes extant relics of history and memories of the past, transforming how we understand and relate to events of the present. Curator and multimedia artist Shikeith (American, b. 1989) has exhibited across the United States and internationally. His work is in the permanent collections of the 21c Museum, Louisville, KY; Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; and the Newark Museum of Art, NJ, among others. In 2021, the artist presented notes towards becoming a spill, a site-specific performance at the Performa Biennial in New York, NY, and released his debut monograph of the same name the following year. Shikeith has been honored with numerous awards and grants, including the 2022 Pittsburgh Foundation's Exposure Artist Award in co-fellowship with The Carnegie Museum of Art; 2020 Art Matters Foundation Grant; 2020 Leslie Lohman Museum Artist Fellowship; and 2019 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, among others. Most recently, the artist was chosen as a 2023-2024 fellow for the Sharpe-Walentas studio program, and has previously completed residencies at the Mattress Factory Museum of Contemporary Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Long Road Projects, Jacksonville, FL, and Pittsburgh Glass Center, PA, among others. Shikeith holds a BFA from The Pennsylvania State University and an MFA from Yale University. The artist lives and works in Pittsburgh, PA.

Yossi Milo is pleased to announce Nineteen Eighty-Five, Natia Lemay's debut solo exhibition in New York and first with the gallery. Opening on Thursday, May 11 and on view through Saturday, June 17, the exhibition will present new works exploring psychological, metaphysical, and material spaces of 'home.' Natia Lemay engages her practice as a means of building new notions of home. Hailing from T'karonto (Toronto), Canada, the artist navigated much of her childhood through insecure housing and environments of drug use, impeding a firm sense of home from ever fully forming. This precarious and formative period of the artist's life exists only in the realm of memory, as she possesses almost no photographs from those years. Revisiting and processing these memories as an adult, Lemay paints images and visions of herself at different moments in her childhood, and sculpts miniatures of the furniture from the transient spaces she inhabited. Lemay's paintings and sculptures are the result of this investigative process, allowing the artist to recuperate lost memories, and trace a path of trauma and dispossession beginning with settler colonialism and leading up to the present day. Working across multiple mediums, Lemay steers this path towards a future of healing. The artist's painted worlds of black bring her own visions of home to light, turning the very color of black itself into a paradox of visibility. Of mixed Afro-Indigenous descent, Lemay learned to find refuge in the traditions of her ancestors, from a spiritual reverence for trees, to the form of the circle as a symbolic demarcation of home, referencing drum circles, dream catchers, and beads worn in braided hair. Today, Lemay calls upon these traditions in her art practice to recall memories, trace the generations of trauma inflicted by settler-colonialism, and invoke the embodied knowledge inherited from her ancestors. Included in the show is Untitled (2022), a circular painting depicting two children standing in a barren room. The figures are childhood versions of Lemay herself and her brother, the likenesses of whom the artist referenced from one of the only photographs she has from her childhood. In Untitled (2022), The artist and her brother are positioned at the very fore of the composition with their bodies partially cropped by the curved edge of the canvas, as if being simultaneously pulled into close focus and pushed into the peripheries. Lemay is painted entirely in black, while her brother is rendered in full color. The artist chromatically distinguishes between the two in acknowledgement of the different lived experiences of gender within a patriarchal society. While both are of Afro-Indigenous descent, and both live in the same environment of neglect, the female child slips further into the oblivion of her background due to the social positioning of her gender. The intersecting layers of race, culture, age, and gender are constantly subject to scrutiny in Lemay's work, a process that allows the artist to process and emerge from the traumas that permeated her childhood. Alongside the paintings presented in Nineteen Eighty-Five, Lemay will debut a new body of sculptural works, including miniature versions of stacked furniture made from soapstone. Throughout her practice, the artist returns to furniture for its quotidian yet powerful significance in our domestic lives. Despite their impermanence in Lemay's childhood, the artist regards these objects as permanent fixtures of memory, linking the present to the past through fleeting visions and remembrances. Rebuilding these relics from soapstone, Lemay draws a parallel between the material as something that is at once extremely heavy yet soft, and the transitory experiences of home she had as a child. As members of the Indigenous Nation of Mi'kmaq, the artist and her ancestors have been dispossessed of their land by the European colonial project, which continues to have devastating and rippling impacts today. With her soapstone sculptures, Lemay returns to the land, harnessing the Earth's resources to reconfigure the structural components of homes lost and forgotten. Placed in conversation with painted memories and visions of the past, these sculptures ask the viewer to find both comfort and discomfort as they too are made to grapple with histories manifested in the present, both materially and psychologically. Natia Lemay (b. 1985; T'karonto [Toronto], Canada) has exhibited widely throughout North America, including at Green Hall Gallery, Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT; Mayten's Gallery, Toronto, Canada; and Artscape, Toronto, Canada, among others. The artist was selected for the 2022 Royal Drawing School Residency in Dumfries, Scotland and was the recipient of the 2020 Christopher Pratt & Mary West Pratt Bursary and 2020 OCAD University Diversity and Equity Excellence Award, among others. She received her BFA from Ontario College of Art & Design University in 2021 and is a 2023 MFA candidate at Yale School of Art. Lemay currently lives and works in New Haven, CT.

Yossi Milo Gallery is pleased to announce FACADES III, Markus Brunetti's third solo exhibition with the gallery. Opening on Thursday, March 16 and on view through Saturday, May 6, the exhibition will present new photographic works from Brunetti's ongoing series FACADES. Markus Brunetti's (b. 1965; Germany) most recent work continues his singular mission to document Europe's historic cathedrals, churches, monasteries, and synagogues in immaculate detail. With his partner, Betty Schoener, Brunetti travels the continent in a converted firetruck-turned-photo lab. Together, the two live and work on the road, returning to their subjects repeatedly over a period of several years and taking thousands of photographs of each structure. Brunetti then edits, layers, and arranges each frame to create a composite image that eschews the illusory effects of spatial perspective and provides an otherwise impossible, perfect view of the building's façade. Brunetti's practice is often likened to Bernd and Hilla Becher's serial documentation of German industrialization, yet the artist himself aligns his methods more closely with the tradition of Old Master painting. Like the masters of the Renaissance, the artist offers interpretations of his monumental subjects, not simply by photographing them, but by crafting a view of each structure according to his conceptual understanding of its architecture. Brunetti's images thus offer their own Bildsprache, or visual language, that translates the presence of each building in three-dimensional space into an idealized, two-dimensional image that showcases the finest details of every square-meter of the façade. In this way, the artist preserves the cultural heritage these structures embody, immortalizing them in his impeccable renderings. The unique embellishments and stylistic features of Brunetti's subjects take on new meaning when works from the series are placed in conversation. FACADES III presents images of sacred buildings from similar time periods and architectural movements, yet which differ vastly in their design, material, and construction. Included in the show is Cambridge, King's College Chapel (2014 - 2023), whose construction began in 1446 and was completed in 1515 in England. The church is an exemplar of Perpendicular Gothic architecture, with its clean vertical lines, large windows, and regular geometric embellishments. Likewise built in the latter half of the 15th century, the church depicted in Venezia, Santa Maria dei Miracoli (2006 - 2023) contrasts with King's College Chapel in its luscious, colored marble façade, curved arches, and small rounded windows. The variations in local resources, politics, and culture had immense impact on the construction of buildings that were erected much for the same purpose: as holy sites and testaments to the far reaches of human achievement and artistic philosophy. Brunetti devotes his painstaking process to creating works of art whose detail, effort, and devotion match that of the structures themselves. Since this project began in 2005, Markus Brunetti and Betty Schoener have spent nearly two decades travelling Europe and working ceaselessly to create their sublime renderings of some of humankind's most remarkable achievements. From Lincoln, The Cathedral Church of St. Mary (2006 - 2023) in England, to Lucca, San Michele In Foro (2012 - 2023) in Italy, to Cordoba, Mezquita-Catedral (2013 - 2023) in Spain, the historic sites Brunetti captures have stood the test of time as the world around them changed over the course of centuries, and are testament to humankind's artistry on a monumental scale. The artist's own rigorous and passionate practice translates these accomplishments into modern images, preserving the work of architects and laborers of centuries past, and offering evidence of their glory to contemporary audiences the world over. Markus Brunetti's FACADES have been featured in prominent group exhibitions, including PROPORTIO at Palazzo Fortuny, which coincided with the 57th Venice Biennale in Italy, and the 2015 Les Rencontres d'Arles Photographie Festival in France. The artist has presented solo exhibitions at the Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, WI; Museum of Fine Arts, Le Locle, Switzerland; Axel Vervoordt Gallery, Hong Kong, China, among others. Brunetti's work is held in the permanent collections of the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Le Locle, Switzerland; and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, among others. Brunetti and his partner Betty Schoener live and work across Europe, always furthering the FACADES series.

Yossi Milo Gallery is delighted to present Eurovision, Navot Miller’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The show will open with an artist’s reception on Thursday, February 2, 2023 from 6–8 PM, and will be on view through Saturday, March 11, 2023. With his distinctively vibrant palette, Navot Miller (b. 1991; Israel) draws from the flow of moments and memories in his own life, presenting the landscapes, architecture, and people he sees with fresh, inquisitive eyes. Growing up in a rural Israeli village, Miller found it difficult to express himself and his identity as a young gay person. Upon relocating to Berlin as an adult, he found a community of creatives who opened up new possibilities for self-expression. Among them were curator Joel Mu, who introduced Miller to Berlin’s alternative art scene, and instructors Michael von Erlenbach and Kathrin Ruhlig, who became his most significant mentors. Today, Miller’s bold, colorful palette has become a means of expressing the parts of himself that remained hidden during his childhood. The new body of work in Eurovision presents the artist’s past year living in Berlin and travelling through Europe. Nodding to the hit international singing competition of the same name, Eurovision encapsulates Miller’s experiences while journeying across a continent, collecting memories and forging relationships along the way.

Yossi Milo Gallery is pleased to present Meghann Riepenhoff’s third exhibition with the gallery, Ice. Coinciding with the exhibition, a monograph by the same name will be published by Radius Books in conjunction with Yossi Milo Gallery, featuring an essay by Rebecca Solnit. Ice opens Saturday, September 10, with an artist’s reception and book signing from 6:00 – 8:00 PM. The show will remain on view through Saturday, October 22. For her latest series Ice, Riepenhoff ventured deep into wintry climates to extract photographic records of water in its frozen states. Using the early photographic process of cyanotype, Riepenhoff creates images that not only depict, but are themselves the physical traces of ice in its varied forms. Traveling to various bodies of water across the United States, Riepenhoff immerses large sheets of cyanotype paper directly into the elements, allowing snow, ice, and freezing waters to coat the paper’s surface. The elements are then removed, both by way of the artist’s intervention and the natural propensity of ice to melt: a collaboration between artist and the immovable will of nature. Riepenhoff then exposes the paper to sunlight, allowing the effects of time and chemistry to unearth the intricate microstructures and cosmic vastness of ice normally hidden from the human eye. Works from Ice are richly varied in both color and form: swaths of deep indigo, icy blue, even pale yellow flood the cyanotype’s surface, occasionally punctuated by flashes of bright orange and fluorescent green. At a glance, the dramatic ebbs and flows of these colorful forms are reminiscent of color field painting. Yet, upon closer inspection, thousands of fine crystals become visible. The formation of ice crystals is a highly reactive process, dependent entirely upon the environments in which they reside; the slightest change in acidity, algae life, temperature, or presence of chemicals dramatically changes the behavior of each ice crystal. Cyanotype, a medium that similarly responds in a volatile fashion to its immediate surroundings, fittingly captures the diversity of ice formations, from the fractal minutia of mineral structures, to wavelike flushes of freezing water, to wispy ferns of delicate ice crystals. The myriad forms that populate Riepenhoff’s cyanotypes are testament to the dynamism of ice as a material, a microcosm of sorts that, despite its rigidity, is constantly changing. Change is a driving force behind Riepenhoff’s practice, both its natural progression and its acceleration due to human intervention. The inevitability of change over time manifests visually in Riepenhoff’s work, with the artist studying weather patterns and returning to the same location under identical conditions, yet never capturing the exact same image. For a number of works, the artist visited bodies of water that have suffered the pollutive runoff effects of the photography industry, capturing the effects of change as it happens imposingly at the hands of humans. This tension between natural and accelerated processes of change highlights a constancy in Riepenhoff’s work: the passage of time. Ice captures periods of time wherein water freezes and melts, a cyclical process that will persist through millennia. Meghann Riepenhoff’s (b. 1979; Atlanta, GA) work has been presented internationally in exhibitions across the globe, including at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Denver Art Museum, CO; C/O Berlin, Germany; Aperture Foundation, New York, NY; and Houston Center for Photography, Houston, TX. Her work is held in permanent collections across the United States, including those of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; and Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL, among others. In 2018, the artist was selected as the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow. Riepenhoff earned her BFA in Photography from the University of Georgia, Athens, and her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. The artist divides her time between Bainbridge Island, WA, and San Francisco, CA.

The title grace comes violently is derived from a line in the Greek tragedy Agamemnon that reads “grace comes somehow violent.” For Shikeith, grace is not an unconditional gift, but rather a precarious stage in a stormy cycle of processing grief. In an incredibly thorough process of his own, Shikeith examines the stages of overwhelming loss and pain that precede grace, if it ever comes at all.

Cameron Welch meticulously assembles hand-cut bits of marble, stone, glass, and tile, to produce his monumental mosaics. His intricate compositions recount epic stories of contemporary life in America, laden with references to ancient mythology, art history, and the artist’s identity. Mosaic, the artist’s medium of choice, allows each constituent piece to embody its own history while simultaneously contributing to the work’s grander narrative.

Developing from Hoque’s earlier works, these new paintings are populated with the signature figures of his personal mythology, borne from traditions of his Bangladeshi heritage, birthplace of Rome, and upbringing in southern Florida. However, the pieces presented in Before Sunrise embody growth at their core. Familiar characters, such as cupids, phoenixes, lions, and ceramic vessels, meet novel forms such as the Bengal tiger. Monumental in size, all of these works emanate the sensuality and exuberance of Brown joy.

The Club, 2021

Matthew Brandt’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery continues his experimental processes inspired by the natural world. Featured are black carbon prints, laser-engraved birch plywood pieces, gelatin silver prints doused in liquid silver, and a selection of reclaimed chandeliers from various rooms. Together, these works address the interrelationship of light and dark, and their influence on the subject, material, and observer.

Untitled, 2020

Sarah Perles Gazin', 2015 / 1436 (Gregorian/Hijri)

New work by Kyle Meyer on view at High Line Nine [507 West 27th Street] through February 28.

For her first solo exhibition at the gallery, Sarah Anne Johnson draws inspiration from her sense of intimacy and integration with the natural world, photographing trees in and around her native Manitoba. “Johnson’s transformed woodlands exude calming positivity and genuine optimism,” writes Loring Knoblauch in Collector Daily. “What emerges is a magical kaleidoscope of color nestled in among the trees.”