Andrew Kreps Gallery

February 7, 2024 – Andrew Kreps is pleased to announce co-representation of American artist Raymond Saunders (b. 1934) with David Zwirner. A two-part solo exhibition curated by Ebony L. Haynes will open on February 22 at David Zwirner’s 519 and 525 West 19th Street galleries in Chelsea and Andrew Kreps’s gallery at 22 Cortlandt Alley in Tribeca. Titled Post No Bills, this expansive presentation will span four decades of the artist’s work. Including paintings and works on paper, many of which have never before been seen, this exhibition offers visitors insight into Saunders’s singular and influential practice.

‘I have spent my whole life in revolt against convention, trying to bring colour and light and a sense of the mysterious to daily existence. One must have a hunger for new colour, new shapes, and new possibilities of discovery.’ Andrew Kreps Gallery is thrilled to announce the first major US presentation of the work of Eileen Agar (1899-1991), curated by Laura Smith, and on view at the gallery’s 22 Cortlandt Alley location from January 12 through February 10. Celebrating the central role that Agar played within the evolution of cultural languages in Europe in the twentieth century, the exhibition will include painting, collage, assemblage and photography, spanning fifty years of the artist’s remarkable career. Agar’s abiding interest was in the synthesis of two of the twentieth century’s most significant artistic tendencies: Cubism and Surrealism. Through bringing together these two sources of inspiration she developed a unique style that offered a moving commentary on society over a period of tremendous social change. Having lived and worked through two world wars, the rise of global industrialization, the civil rights and post-colonial movements, and a ‘cold war”, Agar channelled the anxieties and tensions that such events engendered into her work – and yet she always sought a positive outlook, ever on the quest for joy. She was fascinated by classical art, ancient mythologies, the natural world and sexual pleasure, and she mined these subjects for the forms and content that filled her works, combining order and chaos and fusing vivid abstraction with figurative references. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1899, Agar, a rebellious child, was sent to boarding school in England at the age of six. She made Europe her home, remaining on the continent until her death in London in 1991. Europe afforded Agar new freedoms and her artistic talents quickly brought her to the fore of the artistic avant-garde in London where she worked and shared ideas with Paul Nash, Gertrude Hermes and Henry Moore. And in Paris where she became associated with Surrealists such as André Breton, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Lee Miller, and Paul and Nusch Éluard, while simultaneously undertaking painting lessons with Cubist František Foltýn and famously refusing to become Pablo Picasso’s muse – instead taking him for her muse in a feminist role reversal that inspired a number of her most fêted works. One of the few women to be included in the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition held in London, Agar was a determined believer in artistic freedom, her own self-image and in forging her own path. In so doing she rejected canonical ideas of proportion and beauty and instead rejoiced organic forms, natural disorder and the joy of color. Coinciding with the 2024 centenary of the first Surrealist Manifesto, written by André Breton in 1924, this exhibition will highlight Agar’s distinct and spirited style, revealing her as one of the most dynamic, bold and prolific artists of her generation. Throughout the exhibition, works from every decade of Agar’s career are presented, from her early interests in Surrealism and photography, to the impact of the Second World War, and her late blossoming with acrylic paint. Works from two of Agar’s most significant series of work straddle the exhibition’s chronology, spanning 1936 to 1985. In 1936, following her inclusion in the International Surrealist Exhibition and wanting to escape its surrounding commotion, Agar travelled to Brittany, France landing by chance in Ploumanach after choosing to disembark from the train there when she saw ‘the fantastic rocks … like enormous prehistoric monsters sleeping on the turf above the sea: a great buttock ending in a huge thumb, or a gigantic head tuned with organ pipes, a crowd, or a foot rearing up like a dolmen, all sculpted by the sea, that master-worker of time.’ Keen to explore her belief that the surreal is formed by nature, Agar quickly realised a camera would be an artistic necessity so the following day she travelled to the nearest town and purchased a Rolliflex that would become her trusted companion for years to come. The photographs she took in Brittany of the Ploumanach rocks were to become an enduring source of influence – first as photographic works in their own right and then, years later in 1985, they influenced a series of hallucinatory rock paintings ‘based on photographs I took fifty years ago in Brittany… images so strong they imprinted themselves on my unconscious, to surface decades later as urgent themes.’ These late paintings, with their bold, dreamlike sunset pinks and blues and their post-impressionist style brushstrokes almost anthropomorphise the rocks as if she is ‘reading’ them anew. They are thus a striking expression of Agar's unique aesthetic sensibility, looking back to past lives while demonstrating a self-conscious reflection on the force of imagination. The Second World War had enormous impact on Agar’s artistic activity, as it did for many artists of her generation, inhibiting her imagination and emotional explorations, and limiting her, and her works’ travel. Though a pacifist, she remained in London and enlisted in the war effort, volunteering in a canteen and also serving as a Fire Watcher, While remaining in London allowed Agar to keep her studio, she was little able to paint: ‘I felt it impossible to concentrate on painting when you could turn to look out of the window and see a Messerschmitt flying low over the tree tops.’ As such she turned to collage with its more political foundations. Over the next ten years Agar, still ‘aware of a sense of despondency… and threatened by morbidity’ sought to blur the divisions between collage, drawing and painting and she began to experiment with several key Surrealist techniques such as frottage, automatism, and decalcomania to pull herself out of her gloom. Some of Agar’s most striking uses of automatism, or spontaneous painting, can be found in a small selection of poured paintings from the 1940s. Here she uses oil and enamel paints to create portraits in loose outlines, fluid and liquescent drips, and swirling backgrounds. Agar enjoyed this process and the use of a new paint: ‘I like working with enamel paint because it is so free.’ Portrait, c.1949, is one of the most expressive of these ‘poured paintings’ – its twisting drips and trails are thick and tangled, marbled and puddled, with hectic overdrawing. The central figure – which could likely be Agar herself – somehow resembles an ancient Greek Tanagra ceramic. Tanagra figures were appreciated for their naturalistic and expressive features, they depicted mortal women – rather than goddesses – lightly wrapped in cloaks and silks often holding wreaths. Through this reference, Agar presents herself as earthly and human, her eyes, simple spirals, looking out of the painting with bright intent to a more hopeful future. Other works presented reveal Agar’s ongoing acuity when combining painting, drawing and collage, for example Landscape, c.1950s and Ondine, 1972. Agar’s early collage experiments with layering, the juxtaposition of disparate forms, and the application of varying transparencies had greatly influenced her artistic style. In these two works, elements of pattern and geometrical planes are combined with deconstructed figurative features. The geometric forms in both works also grant the content clarity while Agar’s recurrent use of black balances the works. Ondine, also known as Undine, Undin or Undina, derives from the Latin word unda (wave), and is used to describe a whole host of mythological female creatures including nymphs, nereids and mermaids. The Greek myth of Ondine, actually refers to one such water spirit who became human after falling in love with a man, marrying him, and having a baby. The tale likely inspired Hans Christian Andersen’a The Little Mermaid as well as Agar’s own morphing face and fish-tail shown here. In 1958, Agar moved into a house in West London with a large studio, here, for the first time she could paint at a scale she had never really been able to before. Another painterly discovery happened soon after when, in 1965 she was introduced to acrylic paint. She found acrylic to be ‘very versatile, it can be used as impasto, with a palette knife, or a thin wash, and gives wonderful glazes, in acrylic I had found what I considered to be an ideal medium, and I wanted to both master and stretch it.’ The large scale, acrylic paintings that she made during the 1960s and 70s are tightly composed, layered works that emulate collage but are created entirely in paint. The now characteristic Agar motifs appear – shells, birds, fossils, flowers, hands, silhouetted forms and foliage - skilfully woven into her carefully arranged canvases. Several works presented her reveal this skill but perhaps one of the most striking is the work that grants the exhibition its title. Flowering of a Wing, 1966, deftly demonstrates Agar’s skill and dexterity with the medium of acrylic. Within the tight but harmonious composition passages of bright gradient meet blocks of opaque blacks, reds and greens, as well as geometric stripes, cross-hatching and zigzags. The large central figure – with its owl-like, heart-shaped face – seems to both peep through, and become the flower, revealing the enduring joy that Agar found in the natural world and its continual influence on her. For the final years of her life, Agar continued to paint and draw every day and the exhibition includes a selection of her late and rarely seen felt-tip-pen-drawings in which we can still see her persistent curiosity: ‘life’s meaning is lost without the spirit of play. In play all that is lovely and soaring in the human spirit strives to find expression. To play is to yield oneself to a kind of magic. In play the mind is prepared to accept the unimagined and incredible, to enter a world where different laws apply, to be free, unfettered and divine.’ Despite her mercurial approach to making, the fundamental elements of a work by Agar endured throughout her career; the natural world, foliage, seeds, shells and watery transparencies are layered with abstracted classical figures, faces in profile and mythical symbols. All the while following the two parallel paths of abstraction and Surrealism: ‘the two movements that interested me most […] I see nothing incompatible in that, indeed we walk on two legs, and for me, one is abstract, the other Surreal – it is point and counterpoint.’ - Laura Smith

Andrew Kreps Gallery is pleased to announce Post Atlantic, the gallery’s first exhibition with the Oakland-based artist Dewey Crumpler (b. 1949, Magnolia, AK). In his work, Crumpler employs a lexicon of motifs through which he examines how the systems of our globalized world both carry and alter meaning, as well as the felt traces of racial violence that are imbued within everyday life. An encounter with a documentary photograph of an item described as an African slave collar in the 1990s sparked an ongoing, decades long engagement with the object, often occurring in repeated and abstracted forms in dense compositions. First interested was the collar’s ovoid shape, which immediately suggested the absence of a body, or wearer, Crumpler later discovered the object’s original function as a sacred object employed in ritual ceremonies, which was only recast when brought to the New World. The collar would then become a bridge to investigate how the extraction of objects and concepts from their original context, and their subsequent appropriation and colonization, fundamentally alters their resonance and purpose - an inquiry that permeates the entirety of Crumpler’s practice. Simultaneously, the hulking container ships that dominate Oakland’s port would emerge as a parallel project, as the stacked shipping containers both carry and conceal the apparatuses of commerce, often utilizing the same Transatlantic routes that emerged in the 15th century. These works, while representational in approach, similarly explore how these systems can be understood through abstraction, whether it be the vivid alternating colors of the containers, or the formal ridges of their corrugated exteriors which engage in a play of light and shadow. Often depicted as being in a state of peril, either crashed or burst open, they display the spoils of a commodity-based culture. These include bananas, meats, clothing, all items that while at first appear banal and familiar, often carry with them a history of exploitation that is obscured by the time they arrive at their destination. In new works, Crumpler has introduced an anthropomorphized, empty hoodie, which has been the subject of its own body of work since the 1990s, further investigating how the memory of an object merges with its present, to shape a new experience of time and reality. Dewey Crumpler began his artistic career in the Bay Area in the 1960s. Having studied mural painting in Mexico alongside Pablo O’Higgins, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, in 1974, he was commissioned to paint the now-iconic murals at George Washington High School, which formed a direct response to Victor Arnautoff’s controversial “Life of Washington” works. In 2022, the Richmond Art Center organized Crossings, an expansive survey exhibition of Crumpler’s work including over 100 works. Additional past solo exhibitions include The Complete Hoodie Works, 1993–Present, Cushion Works San Francisco, 2021, and Of Tulips & Shadows, California African American Museum, 2008, among others. Crumpler’s works are held in the permanent collections of SFMoMA, San Francisco; The DeYoung Museum, San Francisco; the Oakland Museum of California; the Triton Museum of Art, CA; and the California African American Museum. From 1989 to 2022, Dewey Crumpler was a professor in the painting department at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he additionally taught classes on Jazz and African Studies.

I’m a Restaurant is a show by Uri Aran. The exhibition and its constituent pieces speak in a voice that is both singular and plural, confounding I and we. The artworks do not strive for seamlessness or convincing artifice. Instead, Aran leaves exposed the threads of the mysterious, unstable process by which parts turn to wholes, by which a thing becomes that which we call it (a sculpture, a chair, a restaurant). To do so, he draws from the traditions of assemblage, ready-made, and process art, but remains untethered to any particular mode of making. An attitude of unfixity likewise characterizes the works’ expression of meaning: they are ambiguous and ever-shifting, changing with each viewer, with each viewing. Language runs throughout Aran’s works - explicitly so, in the forms of text and recorded speech, but also invisibly, as a structure and subject. His sculptures, paintings, and videos draw from a broadly defined alphabet of forms and gestures, an idiosyncratic vocabulary of things. They seem to reverse the typical semantic flow, in which a word stands for a thing. Instead, familiar objects function as stand-ins for their own names. This phenomenon results from a confoundingly frank treatment and presentation of materials: the things in his works are familiar, unadorned and utterly themselves, and yet completely stripped of context or use-value. They ask but do not answer: what does it mean to mean? The show moves through a knotty emotional register, rife with dissonance. A sense of comedy, both slapstick and deadpan, permeates the exhibition. But melancholy easily coexists with playfulness: a silly or cute moment can also feel heartbreaking. And of course, everything resonates differently depending on a person’s own history: if your dog died recently, a puppy showing off his intact testicles will move you differently than it would someone else, who might find it simply funny or strange. The dog is a screen for individual projection, the viewer’s personal subject - and may thus become charged with seemingly contradictory sentiments. Aran destabilizes a fundamental hierarchy, moving the non-human to the level of the human: where an actual dog can only hold one feeling at a time, people have the unique ability to experience discordant emotions simultaneously. This sly act of anthropomorphization transfigures not only the animals that recur throughout his work, but his inanimate subjects as well, which also become nebulous and sympathetic. The works’ unvarnished appearance belies Aran’s meticulousness and attention to craft. Drawing is the essential mode of making for his practice, and he strives to maintain its sense of quickness - its closeness to an idea or impulse - in all his works. He moves freely across genre and media: within paintings, a reference to Cezanne still life sits comfortably and quietly in a field of abstraction, while graphite streaks overlay layers of oil. The sculptures have a casual grace, dancerly in their balance and seeming effortlessness - but close consideration reveals the care and ingenuity with which they have been contrived and constructed. Likewise, the videos’ home-movie aesthetic is at odds with the painstaking production process of stitching together and editing found and original audio and footage. The works’ lack of gloss and meanness of material makes them familiarly welcoming, as well as semantically and emotionally democratic: each piece invites viewers to connect and engage on their own terms, rather than those dictated by the artist. A man in a neat dark suit places himself front and center amid a restaurant staff. The waiters are all dressed in white, the maître d’ in black. Each faces the camera, with a plate shoulder-height and horizontal atop his flattened right hand. The man in the suit is diminutive and middle-aged, physically unremarkable. He moves with overstated precision and an ironic soldierliness, an absurd drill sergeant. He proffers a command: a sharp burst of French followed by a double kiss noise and gesture towards the pianist, stationed stage left, who begins to play a light, sweet tune. But It is a false start and the man reprimands his player before counting off. The waitstaff begins their dance, and the tune starts anew, on cue this time. The dancers are inexpert and a bit out of sync, but nonetheless they move as one - stepping out tight circles, kicking their feet, and tossing their plates hand to hand. A perilousness underlies their effete movements, and the sequence is interrupted when a dancer loses control of his plate, which crashes and breaks on the floor. The man in the suit brusquely dismisses him and the dance begins anew. The piano music grows more raucous, as does the dance, and all at once the plates are hurled to the floor, crashing and breaking. It turns to a decidedly French take on a typical Cossack dance: the men erupt in rhythmic shouts, stomps, and claps, linking arms and flailing legs. The already imperfect synchronism grows steadily rougher, but the sense of unity does not falter - in fact, as the chaos builds, so does our impression of these restaurant dancers’ interconnectedness and unity. (Le Grand Restaurant, dir. Jacques Bernard, 1966.) text by Tommy Brewer Uri Aran lives and works in New York. His work has been exhibited extensively, with recent solo exhibitions including: Take This Dog For Example, The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, The Fastest Boy In The World, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, in 2021, Eggs For Breakfast and Bird In A Blanket, The Club, in Tokyo, 2021, House, Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York, 2020, Tenants Like These, Sadie Coles HQ, London, 2019, Mice, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, 2016, Two Things About Suffering, Sadie Coles HQ, London, 2016, Sensitivo, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, 2014, Puddles, Peep-Hole, Milan, 2014, Five Minutes Before, South London Gallery, London, 2013, here, here and here, Kunsthalle Zürich, Zurich, 2013, among others. Aran additionally participated in 2014 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2014, A Needle Walks into a Haystack, Liverpool Biennial 2014, Liverpool, and The Encyclopedic Palace, 55th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale, Venice, 2013, as well as numerous group exhibitions, which include: 100 Drawings from Now, The Drawing Center, New York, 2020, Platforms: Commissions and Collection, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2019, Take Me (I'm Yours), Jewish Museum, New York, 2016, Question the Wall Itself, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2016, among others. Uri Aran received an MFA from Columbia University, New York in 2007, and additionally studied at Cooper Union, New York and completed a Bachelor of Design at Bezalel Academy Jerusalem, Jerusalem in 2004. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island, Israel Museum, Jerusalem, The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Chicago, among others.

Andrew Kreps Gallery is pleased to announce Go Placidly, an exhibition of new works by Clare Rojas (b. 1976, Columbus, OH) at 22 Cortlandt Alley. In her work, Rojas employs a deeply personal visual language as she moves freely between dense figurative scenes, and minimal, abstract compositions. Rojas approaches both with a consistent, lyrical sensitivity as she interjects totemic references to her own life, and the Northern Californian landscape that surrounds her studio, seeking to distill fleeting memories and experiences into concrete shapes. Throughout her work, Rojas looks for new forms to communicate narrative, drawing on her interest in languages shared throughout the natural world, particularly that of birds that are capable of recognizing human faces through geometric forms. The resulting works are akin to a musical arrangement, mixing symbolic elements, formal decisions, as well as autobiographical allusions, and play on our instinctive desire to decode, and comprehend images. For her first exhibition with the gallery, Rojas presents a series of interconnected paintings that follow a central female figure, and her search for home. In The Sacred Bird Tree, she sits within a densely layered landscape, having found peace in the natural world. Functioning both as a remedy to her search and a rubric, the work represents a macro view of the subsequent paintings in the exhibition, which focus on the fleeting moments from life’s cycles - from sickness to health, entrapment to freedom, and birth and rebirth. Moving from interior scenes, to urban, and rural settings, each environment demonstrates its own challenges and dangers, from natural elements, to predators, and the accidental, suggesting the precarity of both our interior worlds, and the world we inhabit.

Andrew Kreps Gallery is pleased to announce Almost Perfect, Hadi Falapishi’s second solo exhibition with the gallery at 22 Cortlandt Alley In Almost Perfect, Falapishi divides the floors of the gallery into conceptually distinct spaces, interweaving personal narratives, with historical references, and current events. Falapishi uses media omnivorously, including painting, sculpture, and photography, and throughout employs a consistent cast of familiar characters. Humans, dogs, cats, and mice playfully upend the hierarchies typically embedded within their relationships between each other, as the figures seem to grasp, hold, and help one another within ambiguous vignettes. Almost humorous in nature, these scenes in turn become a vessel for a larger exploration of themes of displacement, isolation, and entrapment. Rendered in a child-like vernacular, and often adorned with stuffed animals in varying states of distress, each work elicits a sense of nostalgia, exploring the often blurred boundary between memory and imagination. While Falapishi previously left these narratives open-ended, allowing the viewer to project their own desire, and interpretations, here, these are paired with the concrete references to real life, and appropriated imagery, allowing his work’s own inner worlds to take on new, tangible meanings. A monumental painted banner displaying circus scenes is adorned with the artist's own repeated likeness, and occupies the main gallery, which has been titled “The American Room.” Functioning equally as a back-drop, and an activation of space, the banner additionally imbues the surrounding works with the artist’s own autobiography, allowing for an exploration of the artist’s own meditations on the space between his adopted home of the United States, and his native Iran. In the gallery’s double height space, Falapishi directly comments on the ongoing Iranian protests, filling the walls with a wallpaper that alternates with a drawing of the artist dreaming, and a hung Ayatollah. A reference to Robert Gober’s seminal 1989 work Hanging Man/Sleeping Man, the work also highlights an ongoing tension within Falapishi’s work between passivity and violence. Seen together with an intimate, realistic painting of two female Iranian activists eating with their hair exposed in a cafe, Falapishi examines the different ways in which revolution can manifest in image, and how fleeting images can be immortalized through reproduction. Hadi Falapishi (b. 1987) lives and works in New York. In 2022, CCA Goldsmith’s London presented the first institutional exhibition of Falapishi’s work in Europe, As Free As Birds. Additionally, In 2022, Power Station, Dallas presented the solo exhibition Young and Clueless. Falapishi’s work was recently included in the 2022 Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, Greater New York 2021, MoMA PS1, New York, 100 Drawings from Now at The Drawing Center, New York, 2020, In Practice: Total Disbelief, SculptureCenter, Long Island City, 2020, and Open Call, The Shed, New York, 2019. Falapishi received his MFA in Photography from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York in 2016. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and MoCA, Los Angeles.

Andrew Kreps Gallery is pleased to announce I know the mystery that mother suffers, an exhibition of paintings by Bertina Lopes (b. 1924, Maputo, Mozambique, d. 2012, Rome), spanning three decades of the artist’s career. The exhibition marks the first solo presentation of Lopes’ work in New York. Beginning in the 1950s, Bertina Lopes developed a singular body of work that intimately reflected her own political activism and social criticism. Born in Maputo to a Portuguese father and Mozambican mother, Lopes left to study in Lisbon where she was first introduced to Modernism. This exposure to contemporary European art movements had a deep impact on her work, as she would begin to meld these international styles with African iconography. Returning to Mozambique in the early 50s, Lopes became an influential professor, while simultaneously engaging with the country’s poets, writers, and political activists. As her antifascist and anti-colonialist views strengthened, and the country’s political situation became more tumultuous, Lopes was forced to return to Portugal in 1961. Prosecuted by the PIDE (Portuguese International and State Defense Police), Lopes soon after fled to Rome, where she would spend the rest of her life. Here, Lopes’ work took on new meanings, reflecting a desire for independence, and an end to colonialism, while also demonstrating an acute awareness of her own African Identity. Lopes’ work would remain tied to current events in Mozambique, from the country’s independence in 1975, to the subsequent civil war, lasting more than a decade. Her final works made after the war’s end in 1992, denoted a newfound freedom, characterized by gestural abstract marks, and bold color. While it was difficult for Lopes to gain recognition for her work in Italy, she became a vital figure within Rome, as a cultural attaché to Mozambique’s embassy. She would additionally represent her home country in important, international exhibitions, including two editions of the Venice Biennale. In spite of the barriers she faced, Lopes had several significant exhibitions of her work during her lifetime, including two exhibitions at the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, 1973 and 1979, an exhibition at National Museum of Modern Art of Baghdad, 1981, as well as major retrospectives in Rome at Palazzo Venezia, 1986, and Palazzo della Cancelleria Apostolica, 2002. Following her death in 2012, Archivio Bertina Lopes was founded in Rome to preserve her legacy, as well as her home and studio.

Andrew Kreps Gallery is pleased to announce an expansive, dual-part exhibition by Cheyney Thompson staged across two venues, in collaboration with Lisson Gallery in New York. Presenting four distinct, ongoing bodies of painting and drawing, both exhibitions evince Thompson’s thoughtful practice, featuring the connective strands of control, combination, and constraint. At Andrew Kreps Gallery, Thompson continues his Displacement series of paintings, each of which also begins life as a homage to the standardized grid. After laying down this regimented ground, a series of custom-made silicon tools are employed to disrupt the stillwet, gridded surface and impose the abstracting, chaotic force of the artist’s interventions. Making drags and smears across the surfaces of these works, as though swiping a hand across a screen or tablet, Thompson rearranges the five-millimeter, pixelesque black squares into glitched, attenuated forms, stretching and bending the grid back through and beyond itself into three and perhaps four dimensions, if you allow for the passage of time through these spaces. A transparent, x-ray quality is evident in these Displacement works, which are richly layered with spray-colored bands that mark a regular half-meter interval with irregular gradients. The lozenge supports bisect and measure the feature wall of the gallery, setting the basis for a repeating unit that fills and nearly exceeds the architectural container. Multiple measuring systems slip in and out of phase with one another, allowing the canvases to function as ‘displaced’ elements from a larger, nested set of determining structures. Also exhibited at Andrew Kreps, are 13 new drawings in Thompson’s TouchTime series that feature elements of Houdon’s Ecorché, a skinless figure used in the teaching of anatomy. These drawings are executed using a custom built touch-sensitive surface, where a microcomputer records exactly 10 seconds of contact time between implement and paper. By restricting his involvement to minutely recorded, and constrained bursts of transient mark-making – either long, slow lines, or rapid-fire, staccato stabs – Thompson can quantify his artistic labor and rationalize the production of knowledge. TouchTime relates to both this interactive limit to the drawings production and to the durational concept of Takt time that is used to organize work hours to meet demand in manufacturing. Far from the mechanical universal clock time that helped discipline the wage relation, the infinitesimally small unit of the compute cycle utilized in the TouchTime drawings allows for far more flexible, pervasive forms of capture. At Lisson Gallery, Thompson shows a series of new paintings, collectively titled Several Bellonas. Each is a life-sized detail from a larger Peter Paul Rubens panel in the Louvre, Apotheosis of Henry IV and the Proclamation of the Regency of Marie de Medici (1625). Rather than simple, studious copies of an Old Master, however, these multiple reinterpretations are akin to radiographic scans, in which Thompson goes beyond the surface of the original, breaking it down into its constituent parts, before building it back up again. Mimicking the process of image production associated with printing presses, Thompson paints in successive layers of black, cyan, magenta, and yellow. In reducing painting to an act of transcription of decomposed elements, there is room for deviations and differences to emerge and multiply from the original and across the series as a whole. Here, minor variations in densities of color cascade to produce differences across the surfaces of each painting. Unlike the shifting light in Monet’s haystacks, which charted time, in Thompson’s series, this shift comes from slips of attention and an approach that indexes and amplifies errors in navigating an increasingly confused technical image. This technique attends to both the impossibility of refuting technology through handwork and of stripping back the Rubens painting to a mere set of instructions, or lines of code. Paul Cézanne drew Rubens’ Bellona ten times over the last twenty years of his life, creating a series of drawings that would become a point of reference for Thompson starting in 2005, while working with artists Sam Lewitt and Gareth James on a fictional journal concerning drawing, titled Scorched Earth. For Thompson, Cezanne’s drawings of this allegorical figure of war held together reflections on the role of museums, the motif, and shifts in technologies of image-making. In 2018, Thompson began his series Toolpaths for Bellona, in which the Cézanne drawings were redrawn, line by line, as Bézier curves. These parametric curves allow them to be fed through a CNC machine to faithfully reproduce mechanical versions of varying scales and materials, even replicating the pressure of Cezanne’s pencil. Having established a data set for each of Cezanne’s drawings, Thompson produced forty-five new unique works, derived from the forty-five possible pairs of drawings within the set of ten. While containing elements from each of the “parent” drawings, their offspring would resemble neither, using techniques from data science and machine learning to ultimately generate new compositions. Thompson then subjected these forty-five new drawings to the same process, leading to an exponential growth, and an exploded population of 990 unique derivations. While typically, similar techniques of data synthesis are geared towards a supposed optimization of the information at hand, Thompson looks towards systems that produce results, rather than conclusions. This focus on sequence over culmination calls to mind the processes by which newness, originality, and our contemporary fascination with gilt-edge novelty are generated by the technological. The culmination of a project started in 2018, these 990 drawings arrive now, alongside an exponential burst of expansion and public access to new forms of artificial intelligence. They are presented here frame-mounted and color-coded to visually identify each drawing its place within the combinatorial sequence from which it was produced. In the Spring of 2023, Lisson Gallery and Andrew Kreps Gallery will co-publish a catalogue of Cheyney Thompson’s recent work, including essays by Benjamin D. Piekut and Jennifer Nelson.

Andrew Kreps is pleased to announce Churros and Rain, an exhibition of new works by Erika Verzutti. Tactile in its approach, Erika Verzutti’s practice rests between sculpture and painting, drawing on a wide range of references from nature to popular culture. Shapes derived from fruits or vegetables recur alongside familiar objects, self-referential gestures, and images culled from social media to form a new vernacular. Firmly rooted in studio practice, Verzutti’s work revels in its process and explores how disparate ideas and perceptions take on a physical form. A series of works that reference the totemic form of the Venus of Willendorf occupy the floor of the gallery. Varying in scale and executed in bronze and papier mâché, Verzutti's Venuses are comprised of fruits, both molded from the actual object and shaped by hand from memory. Precariously stacked, each work in turn performs a form of “Venus Yoga”, standing upside down to support their own weight. For this exhibition, Verzutti has broadened the works' original referent allowing for new configurations that are more bulbous, and less organized, and benefit from the Venus’ innumerable iterations throughout history. This free, and playful engagement with art history permeates Verzutti’s work and continues in a new series of variegated papier mâché works dripped and splattered with paint in a manner reminiscent of Jackson Pollock, simultaneously pre-meditated and accidental. Verzutti applies extruded forms, which she refers to as churros, onto the surface arranged in varying configurations to suggest landscapes and changing weather cycles, that are further conjured by the works' individual titles: Churros and wind, Umbrellas in Chaos, Churros and turbulence, among othres. This fluidity between abstraction and figuration is also embraced in wall-based bronzes, which are driven by the process of their making, exhibiting the unaltered vestiges of Verzutti’s own hands and fingers. These immediate marks and decisions are used as both a guide and a challenge for the completion of the work, as paint is applied in methods that waver between gestural, illustrative, and suggestive. Seen together, Verzutti’s work looks to conflate personal history with shared, universal experiences, and explore how material can continuously be recombined, reused, and reconfigured to forge new outcomes and ideas. In 2021, MASP, Sao Paulo, presented the most extensive survey of Verzutti’s practice to date, titled The Indiscipline of Sculpture. Other past solo exhibitions include Nottingham Contemporary, 2021, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2019, Venus Yogini, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, 2019, Swan, Cucumber, Dinosaur, Pivô, São Paulo, 2016, Swan with Stage, Sculpture Center, New York, 2015, and Mineral, Tang Museum, Saratoga, 2014. Erika Verzutti’s work is currently included in the 3rd Geneva Biennale - Sculpture Garden, on view through September 30, 2022. Verzutti has additionally participated in numerous major exhibitions, including the 2019 Bienal de Arte Contemporanea de Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal, the 57th Venice Biennale, 2017, 32ª Bienal de São Paulo, 2016, 2013 Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, 2013, among others. Her work is held in the permanent collections of Tate Modern, London; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo and Pinacoteca do Estado, São Paulo, among others.

Organized in Collaboration with Alex Glauber June 30 - August 12 Opening Reception: Friday, June 30, 5 – 7 pm Andrew Kreps Gallery is pleased to announce On The Nature of Things, a group exhibition that surveys and traces key moments in the history of Assemblage as seen through the work of over forty artists spanning nearly eighty years. On the Nature of Things looks to curator William Seitz’s landmark 1961 exhibition The Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art as a starting point that traced the origins of the medium from the early 20th century to the early 1960s, where it gained an increasing foothold across a variety of movements and styles. As Seitz said in the exhibition’s press release, “Every work of art is an incarnation: an investment of matter with spirit. The term ‘assemblage’ has been singled out with this duality in mind, to denote not only a specific technical procedure and form used in the literary and musical as well as the plastic arts, but also a complex of attitudes and ideas.” On The Nature of Things brings together several artists from Seitz’s 1961 exhibition including John Chamberlain, Bruce Conner, Joseph Cornell, Jean Dubuffet, Louise Nevelson, Alfonso Ossorio, Anne Ryan, Kurt Schwitters, and Lucas Samaras, while also exploring how the medium has been adopted and pushed in the years since the exhibition. In considering how artists speak with and through extant materials, On the Nature of Things includes works by a broad range of artistic voices from around the globe including significant loans from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, which champions the work of Black Artists from the American South. Throughout the exhibition, Assemblage demonstrates a unifying impulse to decode, and understand material culture, which transcends the societal and economic factors that have historically barred artists from receiving formal education, and artistic acceptance. The works included demonstrate the myriad ways artists have used found objects, and the traces of daily life, to not only address aesthetic concerns, but also form immediate responses to their own lived environment. Through a series of nearly alchemical processes, these materials are stripped, combined, transformed, and revised, remaining tied to their unique social contexts, while simultaneously accruing new resonance and meaning. Seen together, the exhibition suggests an ongoing, and open-ended history of a medium that remains foundational to the human experience, and at its most successful, creates a site where invention and authenticity can coalesce. Artists Included: Terry Adkins, Yuji Agematsu, Uri Aran, Leilah Babirye, Darren Bader, Hannelore Baron, Mary Bauermeister, Chakaia Booker, Robert Bittenbender, John Chamberlain, Willie Cole, Arch Connelly, Bruce Conner, Joseph Cornell, Michael Dean, Thornton Dial, Jean Dubuffet, Jimmie Durham, Tony Feher, Isa Genzken, Nancy Grossman, David Hammons, Bessie Harvey, Lonnie Holley, Mr. Imagination, Kahlil Robert Irving, Gerald Jackson, Mike Kelley, Ronald Lockett, Liz Magor, Joe Minter, Louise Nevelson, Cady Noland, Alfonso Ossorio, Anne Ryan, Lucas Samaras, Raymond Saunders, Elias Sime, Judith Scott, Kurt Schwitters, Emmer Sewell, Michael E. Smith, Jessica Stockholder, Rosie Lee Tompkins, Philadelphia Wireman, Haegue Yang

Andrew Kreps Gallery is pleased to announce An Introcosm, Bendt Eyckermans’ first solo exhibition in New York. In his paintings, Eyckermans employs cinematic lighting and highly mediated imagery to suggest narratives that extend beyond the works’ borders. Drawing on his own life and experiences, he builds his paintings from composite sketches, allowing for various spatial distortions to accumulate as he works. Throughout his compositions, Eyckermans interjects historical references, including those to the sculptural practices of his father and grandfather, who previously used the studio in which he works. Combining these references with traces of contemporary life, the works suggest that modernity and historicity can exist as part of the same continuum, and build on one another to create new visual languages. Eyckermans continues this inquiry in the paintings that comprise An Introcosm, titled after the concept of an inner universe presented in both Julian Jaynes’ 1976 book, The Origin of Consciousness, and David Lewis-Williams’ 2002 archaeological text The Mind in The Cave. Interested in the application of this concept in both a psychological context, and as a way of decoding, and interpreting Paleolithic cave painting, Eyckermans seeks to create works in which abstract feelings and metaphor coalesce with tangible fragments of life. The figures within Eyckermans’ compositions become increasingly anonymous as they are heavily obscured by shadows that serve to highlight and exaggerate their individual gestures. Objects, occasionally banal in nature, are displaced into new environments and imbued with allegorical connotations. While at first, these theatrical spaces appear surreal in nature, they represent the flattening of real, architectural space with the mutable relationships and emotional states that inhabit them, into a static image, in which multiple perspectives exist within the same plane. Throughout, Eyckermans’ interest lies in utilizing visual cues to translate these hyper-specific, often personal references into more universal narratives, encouraging the viewer to project their own connections, and associations onto the work’s internal logic. Bendt Eyckermans (b. 1994) lives and works in Antwerp. In fall 2022, Eyckermans’ work will be the subject of a solo exhibition at TANK, Shanghai. Additionally, his work was included in the group exhibitions Lipstick and Gas Masks, M HKA, Antwerp, 2021, and Fifteen Painters, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, 2021. Past solo exhibitions include Blue shadow, Gallery Sofie Van de Velde, Antwerp, 2019, Yellow leaves, CARLOS/ISHIKAWA, London, 2019, A Stranger’s Hand, S.M.A.K., Ghent, 2018, among others. Eyckermans’ work is held in the permanent collection of M HKA, Antwerp.

Andrew Kreps Gallery is pleased to announce the gallery's first exhibition with Oliver Lee Jackson (b. 1935, St. Louis, Missouri), opening March 25 at the gallery's 22 Cortlandt Alley Location. Spanning five decades of Jackson's work, the exhibition includes paintings made between the 1970s and the present. Jackson has developed a singular body of work over the course of his career, creating complex and layered images in which suggestions of the figure emerge from abstract fields of vivid color. Heavily influenced by American Jazz, Jackson's paintings are improvisational in approach, as gestural marks become intertwined with vivid swaths of paint and color. Building over time, each work becomes a synthesis of disparate references, spanning from Rennaissance painting to Modernism, as well as Jackson's own studies of African cultures. The resulting compositions eschew a single narrative or reading and instead seek to encourage the viewer to form their own emotional response. Creating multiple points of entry within each painting, Jackson states that his work is "for anybody’s eyes. any eyes will do.” Oliver Lee Jackson lives and works in Oakland. Jackson was associated with the Black Artists Group, which was founded in St. Louis in 1968. Earlier this year, Jackson’s work was the subject of solo exhibitions at the Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO, and the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, CA. Other past institutional exhibitions of Jackson’s work include the Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO, 2021-22, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 2019, Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO, 2012, Harvard University, Cambridge MA, 2002, University Art Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1985, University of California Art Museum, Berkeley, 1983, Seattle Art Museum, 1982, St. Louis Art Museum, 1980, among others. His works are held in the public collections of The Metropolitan Museum, New York, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Museum of Modern Art, New York, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Portland Art Museum, Oregon, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Jose Museum of Art, Seattle Art Museum, St. Louis Art Museum, Detroit Institute of the Arts, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco among others.

Andrew Kreps Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of the work of Hollis Sigler at 22 Cortlandt Alley. Including works made between 1981 and 2000, the exhibition is the first of the artist’s work in New York since the 1980s and is organized in collaboration with Steven Scott Gallery, Baltimore. In the late 1970s, Sigler abandoned photorealism in favor of a naive style, influenced by the unrestrained drawing of her youth, and driven by a desire to shift how narrative was communicated in art. Centered on the experiences of women, Sigler’s works from the early 1980s portrayed domestic scenes set within skewed, nearly theatrical spaces. Figures were often depicted in shadow or absent entirely from Sigler’s compositions, and in their place, opened dressers, strewn items of clothing, and traces of activity would suggest the aftermath of an event. This was often reinforced by the works’ titles and additional text, which adorned the works and their intricate, handmade frames. Sigler viewed the removal of the figure as a way to generate visual tension and further explore more fleeting emotional states, such as passion, romance, desire, as well as anxiety, and fear. Sigler’s work would undergo another shift in 1985 after she was diagnosed with breast cancer, a disease that had also afflicted her mother and grandmother. While Sigler initially kept her diagnosis private, her works became increasingly charged with frenetic brushstrokes and agitated colors. Sigler connected her own fears of impermanence with the natural world, and impending ecological crisis. Tidal waves, earthquakes, and fires created scenes of disequilibrium and imbalance, a world that appeared to be in free fall. After her cancer recurred in 1992, the subject of illness became an urgent fixture within Sigler’s work, as she stated that she “had to incorporate the ‘cause’ because as an artist I have an obligation to say something, to be responsible for my community.” Sigler started her series Breast Cancer Journal: Walking with the Ghosts of My Grandmothers that same year, an intensely vulnerable series of works documenting her experience with the illness. Sigler’s emotional cycles were laid bare in the works’ titles, the tones of which ranged from those filled with despair, like I’d Make A Deal With The Devil, 1996 to triumphant, such as I’m Holding Out For Victory, Winning Is My Greatest Desire, 1998. Despite her waning health, Sigler remained resolute, positioning her work not only as a personal catharsis but also as a way to demystify the disease, as she scrawled excerpts from medical journals, news stories, as well as Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals, on the works surfaces and frames. In her final works, Sigler seemed to grapple with her own imminent death, and defying her physical challenges, adopted a monumental scale. In And Peace on Earth, Goodwill Towards Men, 2000, curtains in the upper corners open to reveal a scene depicting cars driving through a snowy, nocturnal storm with lit houses in the background. Hovering above the street is a triumphant trophy, glowing in the night, suggesting Sigler achieved the victory she sought. Hollis Sigler (b. 1948, Gary, IN, d. 2001, Prairie View, IL) was an artist and educator who lived and worked in Chicago. Sigler earned her Master of Fine Arts from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago in 1973 and co-founded Artemesia Gallery, a female cooperative gallery in Chicago that same year, and rose to prominence as part of Chicago’s vibrant art scene in the years following. In 1985, Sigler was diagnosed with breast cancer, which after a period of remission, recured in 1992. Sigler’s experience with the illness had a profound impact on her artistic work, leading her to publish her seminal book Breast Cancer Journal in 1999. In 2009, the Rockford Art Museum, Illinois mounted the first posthumous retrospective of Sigler’s work, titled Expect the Unexpected, which traveled to the Chicago Cultural Center in 2010. Other exhibitions of Sigler’s work include Breast Cancer Journal, Rockford College Art Gallery, 1993, traveled to National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1993, and MCA Chicago, 1994. Sigler’s work was included in the 1981 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the 39th Corcoran Biennial, Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, 1985. Additionally, Sigler exhibited with Gladstone Gallery, New York (1986 and 1981), Carl Hammer Gallery, Chicago (1998 and 1995), and Steven Scott Gallery, Baltimore (1998, 1996, 1995, 1993, and 1990). Hollis Sigler’s works are held in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Ohio, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Seattle Art Museum, among others.

Andrew Kreps Gallery is pleased to announce the gallery's first exhibition with Raymond Saunders in New York at 22 Cortlandt Alley. Spanning the 1980s to the present, the exhibition is Saunders' first in New York in over twenty years and includes previously unexhibited works from the artist's Paris Studio. Since the 1960s, Raymond Saunders has developed a singular practice defined by an improvisational approach, as he culls eclectic ephemera, signage, detritus, and other materials from his daily life which reflect his living environment. A cult-like figure in the Bay Area art scene, Saunders’ paintings and installation-based works are loaded with rich swaths of paint, interwoven with found materials and his own notational marks, and white-pencil drawings. Blackboard surfaces, left visible through a heavy accumulation of marks and material, tie Saunders’ works inextricably to his role as an educator, as he handwrites simple equations, lettering, and childlike notes onto the work’s surface. Like Jazz, dissonant at first, Saunders' works cohere upon closer view, employing diverse elements to address the dualities present within life - plight and renewal, lack and abundance, innocence, and despair, as well as the individual and the community. Interweaving his own personal experience and anecdotes, Saunders aims to teach this full reality of the modern environment, the losses and victories, as well as the splendor that exists within the everyday. Raymond Saunders lives and works in Oakland, California. In Spring 2021, Andrew Kreps Gallery and Casemore Kirkeby presented the exhibition Raymond Saunders, 40 Years: Paris/Oakland across two locations in San Francisco. Saunders obtained his BFA from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, before moving to California, where he earned his MFA at the California College of Arts and Crafts. Saunders joined the faculty of California State University East Bay, Hayward, in 1968, eventually becoming an arts professor at California College of the Arts in Oakland, CA. Saunders currently holds the title of professor emeritus from Cal State East Bay in Hayward. In 1967, he published his seminal essay Black is a Color, which challenged the perceptions of identity-focused art. He was awarded a Rome Prize Fellowship in 1964, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1976, and is a two-time recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Awards (1977, 1984). His work was recently included in the traveling exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, 1963 – 1983, organized by London’s Tate Modern. He was also included in the traveling exhibition Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960 – 1980, organized by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Saunders works are included in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Howard University in Washington, DC, Walker Art Museum in Minneapolis, Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles, Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, SFMOMA in San Francisco, Oakland Museum of California in Oakland, and the Berkeley Art Museum in Berkeley, among others.