Anton Kern Gallery

Anton Kern Gallery is pleased to introduce a special group of works on paper by Margot Bergman, created between the 1980s – 1990s. Historically, teacups and other tabletop vessels have been depicted as static objects within a still life composition. In Bergman's works, the common cup is recast as the subject. Each cup is packed with its own unique personality, bursting with joy and motion. No longer relegated to the background, these wild forms dance with bold color and individualized adornments.

Anton Kern Gallery is pleased to announce The new, the old, and the hole, the Brazilian artist Yuli Yamagata’s first solo exhibition at WINDOW, opening Friday, September 8. This new body of work, which includes fabric paintings, Ikebana sculptures, and ceramics, was developed over the course of Yamagata’s summer residency at Lacasapark in Gardiner, New York

Anton Kern Gallery is delighted to announce the Scottish artist Andrew Sim’s forthcoming solo presentation at WINDOW, featuring new paintings and works on paper. Here Sim presents new variations on their signature motifs, including werewolves, Santa Clauses, sunflowers, daisies, and monkey puzzle trees.

This latest hometown presentation of oil paintings and gouache works on paper highlights the artist’s continual engagement with the physicality of painting and her sophisticated understanding of color.

Anton Kern Gallery is pleased to announce Lara Schnitger’s seventh solo exhibition with the gallery, featuring larger-than-life dancing sculptures, heroically-posed fabric collages, and a series of portraits inspired by songs. In the new works, the artist draws from her personal biography, social history, current events, and pop culture to reflect on experiences of womanhood.

At 91 Walker Street, Lloyd Foster utilizes the storefront format to recreate Covenant International Grocery & Fabrics, a local West African market located in Laurel, Maryland, which he frequently visited growing up. Here the viewer encounters a sculptural simulation of a small grocery store, complete with a store attendant, a scale for weighing produce, an ATM, a meat counter, advertisements and signage, and an inventory of various specialty food products.

The title of my show, Pluto Is My Master, connects with the symbology that characterizes Pluto, the god of the underworld and afterlife in Greek mythology. In the Roman translation of the myth, Pluto was also the god of wealth because of the minerals and the seeds that sprout on earth from the underground.

Foster engages with a myriad of materials, including paint, insulation foam, sapor sponges, fabrics, netting, and much more, but photography is at the center of his practice. During his travels, the artist takes photos of people engaged in their daily activities, of vehicles, signs and buildings, and food and beauty products he sees in local shops.

Anton Kern Gallery presents "Friends & Family" at WINDOW, a selection of works from artists we love who are part of the gallery's extended community.

Familiarity as information Digital communications Ideology is the mechanism that harmonize the principles that you want to think you hold and what advances your material interest You ask me what time it is and I tell you how to make a watch I hate when People cant decenter themselves while listening The culture sometimes bigger than the charts The liquor store closer than the mosques People come in with the platform for their own questions more than to sit and listen The art lies in concealing the art Public squalor and private opulence Painting in the service of ideas Socializing risk/privatizing profits It was all a dream Toxic beauty standards that are only attainable through money and surgery Architecture as spatial financial form not as shelter or cultural manifestation Buy land they not making it anymore Work comes out of work There is other ways to be punitive you dont need to throw people into jail To survive to trive to procreate Stories we tell ourselves about ourselves Perform gratitude Disruption innovation Too much money chasing too few deals Bearly breathing believing life is a prison Im not angry at them im angry at the system There are no distinct races of the species homosapien A culture of immediate gratification How long do you get to call yourself on the side of science and be continually wrong about the science Bad faith identity politics Manufacturing this case Distributed social action Dont use the time that im speaking to think about what you’re going to say next Your listening? Questionable move considering the historical perspective Hey Here is your fun fact about trees you know there are more non-deciduous trees in Norway than all of Africa- One thing I don’t like is something I take serious taken as a joke People wanting what they think they are owed Y’all say what you feel but not what you mean I dont even address loses to me is a lesson when you feeling like ur losing it feels like there is a lesson to be learnt Maybe its just time for others to eat Risk-free rates is probably gonna get to 5 percent Our stories will be replaced by the narrative of science

On the gallery’s third floor, Anton Kern Gallery is excited to present Teresa Farrell: Permeation Quirk Activation While Getting Hoodwinked In The Wrackzone (not recommended). Invited by Alvaro Barrington as a continuation of their long collaborative process and numerous joint exhibitions, both shows relate to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy. Farrell’s presentation hones in on the Rockaways, where Sandy was particularly destructive, and where she has hung out and lived on and off for many years (and currently does live and work). The artist has a deep affinity for the area, and an acute understanding of the local culture, which she both pokes fun at and celebrates. The exhibition is a dystopian psychedelic installation, filled with Rockaway personalities, figures, symbols, and found detritus, all fucked with through Farrell’s unique vision. Comprised of paintings, sculptures, and various collage works, the show is an homage to the neighborhood. In one sculpture, a child-sized figure with a bowl for a head wields a machete and skates, wearing a shirt Farrell designed that mimics the logo of the only deli that will still be open for a late-night bite after an evening out. In another sculpture, two disembodied gloves push a wheelbarrow full of dirt and flowers to a coffin. Titled Live Fast Die, the work commemorates her recently deceased friend Pirate Pete, a wild soul whose years in Rockaway left an indelible mark on the many who knew him (the title refers to the words that were tattooed across his chest). American flags–a prominent fixture on many Rockaway houses–are here repurposed into warped collages with other symbols of American culture–Ronald McDonald, Cookie Monster. Another sculpture, fondly referred to as a scarecrow, rises out of a trash can like a deranged phoenix, wearing a dressing gown announcing to the viewer, “I’m Fine.” The immersive installation is a wild journey. Though incredibly specific to a particular place and culture, Farrell’s strength lies in turning the local into the universal, allowing viewers to enjoy and embrace the quirky. The artist herself says it best: It’s about freely quoting, embracing accidents, experimenting with mutations and accretions of detail over time, making lived-in things. It’s an “anything goes” approach to making, incorporating elements of the local culture as I find them -- the seasons, the stray cats, the good, the bad, the sexy and the not sexy. Interspersed within the work is a touch of allegory, direct confrontation and autobiography -- a freewheeling narrative for the viewer to go into or resist. There’s a series of triggers and surprises, favoring humor and poetry over opinion and prose. Pride, myth, lore and beachtown gossip are all smudged with my thumb, real and metaphorical.

In time for the holiday season, Ryan Wilde’s Circus of Solitude debuts at WINDOW, mimicking the decked out windows of 5th Avenue and playfully poking fun at the long American tradition of consumerism as a holiday pastime, particularly in New York City. Wilde’s circus, however, presents a different tone: a more melancholy, reflective experience that delves into the theatricality of sartorial identity; and explores the notion of the artist as performer, using a number of art historical references throughout this body of work. A former milliner who worked in high fashion before switching to a career as an artist, Wilde is acutely aware of the performative nature of our outward appearance and how we sculpt and choose to present ourselves. The circus has always fascinated the artist: ringmasters and acrobats as unabashed entertainers, the honesty of its pure theatricality. Part of the impetus to create her own circus was as a mirror to her own experience as an artist and as a woman: masking the internal struggles and pain to present desirable sculptures and paintings; the expectation to be a beautiful wife and mother, perpetually performing for society. The isolation of the pandemic changed her relationship to the original ideas that drew her to the circus theme. Forced to separate her from the “prettier” half that had been on an outwardly facing stage, she wondered: without an audience, is a performer still a performer? In this internal, personal shift, her art historical inspirations also shifted. Abandoning the dazzling images of Chagall, Degas, and Seurat that had swirled in her head, she opted instead for the solemnity of Picasso’s Saltimbanques; the solitude of Ugo Rondinone’s clowns; and the dynamism and edge of Calder’s circus. What happens to the performer without an audience? Has life simply pivoted to a more mundane performance for herself, for her family? Alone in the studio with this cast of characters, Wilde wondered if that other part of her disappeared entirely, put out to pasture as in Rilke’s Fifth Duino Elegy (another important inspiration for this body of work). Is this Circus of Solitude perhaps where the lost performer has gone to rest?

https://www.antonkerngallery.com/exhibitions/402-marcel-odenbach/

Anton Kern Gallery is delighted to announce the Polish artist Paweł Althamer’s first gallery exhibition in the United States. After 30 years of exhibiting throughout Europe, Africa, and Asia and participating in numerous international biennial shows, as well as in Documenta and Skulptur Projekte Münster, it is nothing short of a sensation that the acclaimed sculptor and performance artist has chosen this moment to stage a large-scale exhibition in New York. The artist’s previous appearances in the city were a solo exhibition at the New Museum in 2014, and a performance project at the Wrong Gallery in 2003, a one-square-meter pretend gallery space curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Ali Subotnick, and Maurizio Cattelan. For the installation at Anton Kern Gallery, Althamer has intertwined four distinct bodies of sculptures into a network of figures that sprawls over the first and second floors. The viewer will find: a group of five life-size dancers; a group of three small figures on found vintage furniture; three ceramic sculptures depicting the artist’s son Kosma; and eight ‘sleeping bag’ portrait sculptures. All works were created in Warsaw over the last year and a half. For all the differences in material and process, these four groups are held together by the common thread of the communal experience, for which the theme of the dance creates the fitting, overarching key and vision. This motif, found throughout the ages and in all cultures, has been on Althamer’s mind since high school days, when he first saw Matisse’s Dance during a class trip to the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. Since then, the artist has made numerous sculptural and performative renderings of the subject. The ancient and universal theme of dance as a ritualistic, communal, and Dionysian (ecstatic) experience of vitality as well as of suffering and death finds a way into Althamer’s strikingly concrete and contemporary language, without the heavy burden of (art)-history and arcane symbolism, but with the dexterous, agile, and lively manner of a contemporary storyteller.

Anton Kern Gallery is pleased to host two simultaneous presentations of the work of Merlin James, featuring new works among paintings from various points over the last four decades of his practice. James has created an expansive solo exhibition entitled FAR AND NEAR for the gallery’s third floor space, and a concise two-painting installation for WINDOW in Tribeca. The gallery wishes to thank Sikkema Jenkins & Co. for their kind collaboration. Reflecting on the two presentations, James writes: My exhibitions often show recent works alongside ones dating back years, or decades. I might work on individual paintings over equally extended periods. At WINDOW I’m showing ‘Castle (Red)’, a canvas from c.1985, when I was a postgraduate at the Royal College of Art in London. It’s juxtaposed to a new work, ‘Painting Castle (Red)’, which appears to depict my young self, making the earlier picture. Ruins, and buildings or interiors of a certain vintage recur across James’s work. The exhibition includes Toll Booth from c.1986, depicting an archaic turnpike building, and Interior with Dried Flowers (1990) with its ‘period’ furnishings and air of a time preserved or frozen. Several smaller paintings in the show are recently reworked fragments from a large early ‘90s interior painting. Cropping down compositions is a frequent strategy for the artist; also adding to and enlarging works, with cuts, seams and other evidence of re-stretching being common.

…Green, how I want you green Big hoarfrost stars come with the fish of shadow that opens the road of dawn. The fig tree rubs its wind with the sandpaper of its branches, and the forest, cunning cat, bristles its brittle fibers… –Romance Sonámbulo, Federico García Lorca, 1928 Somnambules is Julie Curtiss’ third solo exhibition with Anton Kern Gallery, and her first in the main exhibition space on 55th Street. Somnambules is the French word for “sleepwalkers”; the works in this exhibition evoke an in-between state, almost trance-like, where the lines between the real and surreal collide. The title is also a reference to the Federico García Lorca poem, wherein a shared sensibility between the two artists can be found in the juxtaposition of things that don’t normally belong together, a mainstay of Curtiss’ approach. Somnambules consists of new paintings, works on paper, and sculptures, all demonstrating a marked evolution in the artist’s practice: the introduction of watercolor in her drawings; new materials in the sculptures; and ambitious undertakings in the paintings–including a large diptych depicting a scene in Times Square. This exhibition is a particularly personal one for the artist. Plagued by insomnia and grappling with processing the toll the past few years have taken, Curtiss often felt like a sleepwalker herself while creating this body of work–day and night, light and darkness running into each other in a blurry timeless vacuum. In one painting, Nuit blanche, we see a woman struggling to sleep through the night. She attempts multiple sleeping positions and in the end, sits upright in palpable frustration. In another painting, Faisceaux, we see a woman’s back in a setting of shadows and light. Shape and color intersect in an eerie confluence, where time seems not to exist. Is it a dream? Is she standing in morning light or the light of the night moon? It’s impossible to tell. That in-between space is the subject of yet another painting, Waiting Room – where three women of various ages sit in a doctor’s office. One leans forward, her head in her hands: the process of waiting, the perpetual state of stasis, is agonizing.

Anton Kern Gallery is pleased to host two simultaneous presentations of the work of Merlin James, featuring new works among paintings from various points over the last four decades of his practice. James has created an expansive solo exhibition entitled FAR AND NEAR for the gallery’s third floor space, and a concise two-painting installation for WINDOW in Tribeca. The gallery wishes to thank Sikkema Jenkins & Co. for their kind collaboration. Reflecting on the two presentations, James writes: My exhibitions often show recent works alongside ones dating back years, or decades. I might work on individual paintings over equally extended periods. At WINDOW I’m showing ‘Castle (Red)’, a canvas from c.1985, when I was a postgraduate at the Royal College of Art in London. It’s juxtaposed to a new work, ‘Painting Castle (Red)’, which appears to depict my young self, making the earlier picture. Ruins, and buildings or interiors of a certain vintage recur across James’s work. The exhibition includes Toll House from 1984, depicting an archaic turnpike building, and Interior with Dried Flowers (1990) with its ‘period’ furnishings and air of a time preserved or frozen. Several smaller paintings in the show are recently reworked fragments from a large early ‘90s interior painting. Cropping down compositions is a frequent strategy for the artist; also adding to and enlarging works, with cuts, seams and other evidence of re-stretching being common.

"The original concept behind Chapeau! was as a sequel of sorts to the Shoo Sho that Julie Curtiss curated last year–riffing on the notion of an elegant hat shop downtown, and also playing with the congratulatory French phrase. But as I began to organize the artist list, news of the leak from the Supreme Court broke and my intention with the exhibition shifted. I started thinking about the many different hats women are expected to wear–and particularly had to wear over the past few years in the exacerbated chaos brought on by the pandemic. Now, overturning one of the last bastions of a woman’s autonomy in this country is a startling reality–forcing us into taking on even more, and in increasingly frightening ways. The artists in this exhibition represent a broad cross section of generations and experience. They are all women I have long admired and respected, as artists and as humans. A few of them remember life before 1973. To these painters and sculptors, and to all of you, I tip my hat and hope you enjoy this show at WINDOW, on view 24/7." --Brigitte Mulholland

Photographic Pictures takes Jiro Takamatsu’s 1972/73 series Photograph of Photograph as its departure point. The exhibition’s title is taken from the lyrics to Depeche Mode’s 1981 song Photographic: “I take pictures / Photographic pictures.” For Photograph of Photograph Takamatsu commissioned a professional photographer to make photographs of some fifty snapshots taken from Takamatsu’s family albums. The resulting uncanny images are literally “photographs of photographs.” Despite the project’s conceptual origins, Photograph of Photograph is not, to my mind, a precursor to the appropriation strategies of the late 1970s and 1980s. Instead Takamatsu’s images-within-images are more elusive and less didactic: they operate almost as if still lifes, where a photographic print – and whatever imagery it might contain - is the ostensible subject of the work; staged and documented in an offhand and deadpan manner. Photographic Pictures is, like Takamatsu’s project, ultimately a consideration of photography’s ongoing and self-reflexive relationship with itself: as a medium, as a discipline, and as an idea. It is about the act of looking and how we develop relationships with images. The majority of the works in the exhibition subscribe to the notion of “pictures of pictures”, “images of images” or “photographs of photographs”, in that they document or depict an existing image, whether it be a photographic print, an image observed on a screen, a page of an open book, a newspaper clipping, a magazine cover, or a record sleeve. Somewhere between Takamatsu’s emotional-conceptualism and Depeche Mode’s melancholic-pop there is a thread that I hope runs throughout the works in Photographic Pictures: a kind of aesthetic tone that is at once emotional, psychological, (auto)biographical, and even sometimes sentimental. - Anne Collier, June 2022.

Anton Kern Gallery is pleased to present British painter Mike Silva’s first solo exhibition in New York. The exhibition features eleven new oil paintings depicting domestic interiors and portraits of men. Each painting is based on a photograph selected from the artist’s personal archive. By bringing these images, and the memories and feelings they conjure, into the present and translating them into the language of paint, Silva eternalizes moments from his past and creates new meaning. The men depicted in Silva’s portraits are members of his inner circle. He provides their first names as the artwork titles, inaugurating the viewer into his milieu. There is a fraternal comfort and vulnerability between the artist (as the creator of the image) and the subject, which is expressed through their posture and proximity. The act of looking is emphasized in these compositions: first the artist framing the subject with his camera, then carefully rendering their bodies in paint, while the subject looks away into the distance. Silva’s wet on wet technique lends a dewey gloss to the paintings’ surfaces. Using oil on linen, the texture of each painting is perfectly smooth, perhaps representing the kindness of memory when one looks back in time. Silva’s interiors are intrinsically intimate spaces; be it a roommate’s bedroom, a shared bathroom, or the study in his mother’s house. The casual unkemptness laid bare in each scene suggests that the viewer is a friend, a lover, or family. While devoid of a human figure, evidence of human touch is present through crumpled bed sheets, or objects such as toiletries, a Sri Lankan mask, an open can of beer, an iron set on a counter. Without a human subject, light becomes the main protagonist, which the artist captures in his application of white paint. Silva’s scenes are bathed in natural light let in through a window, or in Jason (Hyde Park), from the sun in open air. Kitchen Interior memorializes the temporality of long cast shadows of flowering plants animating an otherwise bare wall. Positioning himself behind the lens or with a brush in hand, Silva makes the decision to represent his experience through personally significant people, places, and emotionally charged objects. Laboriously faithful to subtlety of light and color, he communicates an excess of feeling; whether happiness, melancholy, or longing. Each of the works on view is a lasting document of an exact moment of living; a quiet perfection that will never again be.

Anton Kern Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of Frank Diaz Escalet works on the second floor. The project has been conceived in collaboration with Andrew Kreps Gallery (New York) and kaufmann repetto (Milan). As part of this joint programming, a solo show of his work is also on view at kaufmann repetto in Milan from April 13 to May 23. A mostly self-taught artist, Frank Diaz Escalet (b. 1930, Puerto Rico - d. 2012, Maine) spent over forty years devoted to making paintings and inlaid leather compositions–a radical and vibrant alternative to canvas that evolved from Escalet’s work as a successful leather craftsman. His paintings are often deeply personal: depicting scenes of the immigrant experience; his attempts to escape the Spanish Harlem ghetto of his youth; portrayals of overlooked laborers; and engaging with a visionary perspective on modernist abstraction. The exhibition at Anton Kern Gallery is focused on his figurative works, highlighting Escalet’s acute understanding of humanity and his desire to make visible the unseen. Populating the gallery’s second floor is a cross section of humanity: a peasant woman, a father buying his son ice cream on a warm summer day, men working in a field, a couple in an erotic embrace. Escalet’s empathy for his subjects is evident through his intuitive sense for shape, form, and composition. Each is treated with a quiet dignity, and a clear devotion to the meaningfulness of including them in his artistic expression. The works are intimate portrayals of both real and imagined scenes and people, and have a subtle emotional impact through their masterful craftsmanship. Escalet relished in the possibility of leather to act as both his canvas and his composition: stretching, painting, and uniting cut out shapes to form vibrant scenes. His vivid palette is reminiscent of his roots, influenced by both the tropical colors of his early Caribbean upbringing and the multicultural diversity of New York City. The compositions are often blended with abstract lines and shapes to form a ground or to exaggerate a specific feature, the artist joyfully playing within – and expanding – the possibilities of the unique combination of his materials. Frank Diaz Escalet was born in Puerto Rico in 1930 and moved to Harlem with his family at the age of four. Escalet quit school at a young age in order to work and support them, eventually joined the army and served in the Korean War. After his return, he worked as a mechanic, then a metalworker and jeweler, until he eventually found leatherwork. In 1958, he opened the House of Escalet in Greenwich Village, dedicated to fine handmade leather wares. The shop and Escalet quickly rose to high acclaim, securing custom jobs from celebrities such as Aretha Franklin and The Rolling Stones. The Museum of Modern Art commissioned furniture from him as well. In a quest for more tranquility and stability for his family, Escalet moved to Maine in 1971. In 1974 he began making the inlaid leather compositions that would encompass a large part of his artistic output. Though Escalet never enjoyed major success for the artworks in his lifetime, he did exhibit regularly in university museums. In 1989 he was the subject of a 30-minute episode of La Playa, a program that showcased Hispanic culture, broadcast by an affiliate of PBS. In 1990, 135 works by Escalet were featured in a traveling one-person show that opened in Prague and traveled to seven other countries in a “World Peace Tour” that lasted for five years–traveling behind the Iron Curtain, which Escalet considered an important diplomatic mission through his artworks. Now, ten years after the artist’s death, the three galleries are proud to present his works in the context of the fine artist he was, with pieces that resonate strongly in their artistic vision and message, with significance both in their lifetime and in the contemporary world today.

Anton Kern Gallery is thrilled to present Hein Koh’s first exhibition at the gallery, On the Edge of a Precipice, on the third floor. The show consists of new paintings, drawings, and a hand-painted bronze sculpture. Cast in the largest scale of bronze by the artist to date, the figure is a carrot sitting, smoking, and thinking. Koh’s exhibition is one of deep psychological investigation and catharsis, with her cruciferous characters as the vehicle for expression of humanity’s – and especially women’s – experiences. A female Broccoli character is the protagonist in Koh’s paintings and drawings, embracing a sexy defiance of her fundamentally healthy nature and the expectations that come along with it. Koh returned to painting in 2020 after a long sojourn as a sculptor. Two years later, the expressive narrative of her two-dimensional work has evolved into increasingly complex compositions and scenarios. The Broccoli woman is partially autobiographical, but also represents more universal themes on womanhood and motherhood. Broccoli woman dons knee-high boots, smokes and drinks–while grappling with insomnia; contemplating her place in the universe; sleeping alone in an empty bed; and facing her own hidden inner world, desires, and fears. The fun, cartoonish nature of the character is a foil and metaphor for what she represents–the contemporary complexities and dichotomies women experience; a variety of joys and difficulties. The Broccoli woman is a vibrant green with lush red lips and nails. Her distinct coloring is a slightly unnatural shade of green and becomes another level of metaphor for the unnatural expectations placed on women. Her face is strong but neutral: a kind of everywoman akin to a mannequin. The emotional expression of the paintings and drawings plays out in the variety of situations Broccoli woman is placed in. Her neutrality, much like a mannequin’s, lets the viewer picture themselves in these scenarios, allowing both a projection of one’s own feelings, as well as offering an opening to empathize with her experiences. Each painting and drawing finds her navigating emotional depth, death, and chaos. Sometimes joining the Broccoli woman in this body of work is a new character, The Shadow. It acts in multiple ways: as both a partner for her to interact with; in the Jungian sense of one’s own shadow (and facing it); and as a metaphor for the idea of aging and becoming a shadow of one’s former self. The darker nature of the work is grounded, however, in a fundamental optimism. The Broccoli woman accepts, even embraces, her shadow. Likewise, Koh is unafraid to express the fear and uncertainty of middle age, the disillusionment that can come with all that goes on in the world today, and the existential questions that arise as a result. The Broccoli woman is on the edge of a precipice, but there seems to be something new and exciting beyond it.

Anton Kern Gallery is pleased to present Margot Bergman’s third solo exhibition at the gallery, now bringing focus to the artist’s collaborative paintings created between the mid-1990s and 2010. During this pivotal period of her practice, Bergman appropriated paintings that she discovered in Chicago thrift shops, and overpainted the strangers’ works to create uncanny portraits. In hindsight, both the artist and viewer can recognize this series as an important bridge to her portraits of women, which have become the mainstay of her practice in recent years. When encountering amateur paintings in a thrift shop, Bergman empathized with their creators; how they would have felt to see their work abandoned in a jumble and cheaply priced. After rescuing the works and enjoying their company for a time in her studio, the artist came to recognize that there was something contained in each one, waiting for her. A new creative impulse was unlocked. Where the former author’s work ended, Bergman’s began. As is evident across the eighteen small-scale collaborative works on view, Bergman’s level of intervention varies from canvas to canvas. In some cases she leaves the majority of the original work unaltered, while in others only a small area is still visible. Utilizing her exacting visual prowess, she repurposes representational objects within a landscape or still life, turning them into facial features. She deftly makes use of negative space too. Eyes emerge from flowers and a boat becomes a smile. Animals become humans, and humans gain an alter ego with a second face engulfing their own. In Ginger Al, for example, a rendered three quarter view of a woman’s face becomes the center of a double portrait, with Bergman’s thickly-applied fleshy paint surrounding it with an additional pair of eyes, bright red lips, and cascades of orange hair. In addition to overpainting faces, the artist would find herself repeatedly masking out the shape of a rabbit. In examples such as Peony and Chucky, the outline of a rabbit crouched on its hind legs creates a window into the underlying composition, a floral still life, and a scene of a mother and son at the park, curiously shifting the foreground and background. For over six decades, Bergman has operated as an independent force within the Chicago scene, working rigorously with limited feedback from the outside world. This insulation brought her focus to the interior, and enabled her to hone a sophisticated and peerless style. In the freedom of Bergman’s compositions, one can sense a spiritual affinity with the breakaway 20th Century European art movement COBRA, or Art Brut. Her works possess raw unadulterated vitality, and an embrace of pre-conscious or unconscious instinct. Bergman’s painting process, automatically finding faces where there are none, is strange even to herself. Seen together, these psychologically stirring paintings are an expression of the lifelong search to understand the actors within her own psyche that shapes her experience of the world.

Anton Kern Gallery is proud to present SPEED LIMIT, Nathalie Du Pasquier’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. As done previously in the third floor gallery, the artist now exercises her masterful understanding of color and space to transform the first and second floor galleries into a dynamic trail of intuitively sequenced paintings and drawings. Across the two floors, Du Pasquier integrates representational paintings dated from 2002 - 2007 with purely abstract works dated from 2013 - present. The representational paintings are faithful depictions of objects bathed in the natural light of her studio. Each composition is based on a real life model that the artist carefully constructs on a tabletop. In the translation of the arranged objects to the painted surface, Du Pasquier isolates them from their inherent domestic context and focuses on rendering their geometric forms in space. The interplay of shadows and reflections, the active brushstrokes, the cropping and perspective animates the works. Household objects such as a domino or a rubber glove, become more open-ended, and extend an invitation toward abstraction. The abstract paintings are arrangements of a different sort; they are varied combinations of colors and forms that have persisted in the artist’s repertoire over the years. Freed from the task of representing any real objects or lighting conditions in front of her, Du Pasquier spontaneously flexes her imagination and the cumulative knowledge of a lifetime of analyzing shapes. The exhibition title’s allusion to time, distance, and forward motion is emphasized by a continuous red racing stripe painted down the gallery’s long walls. Periodic pauses in the line, expressed through staccato horizontal dashes at varying heights, a diversion around a coupling of canvases, and stable blockings of color (which become illusionistic plinths), instruct and pace the viewing experience. Complementing the paintings, the artist presents a suite of framed drawings inside a specially constructed square cabin, its exterior painted in red and white vertical stripes. The selection of drawings includes abstractions as well as plant still lifes paired with painted geometric symbols. The addition of a colorful patterned rug on the floor (designed by Du Pasquier) underscores the domesticity of the small room. The balanced combination of the various elements, both flat and three-dimensional, asks us to consider the relationships between the objects within this intentional environment. Throughout the exhibition, the artist stretches the boundaries of what a painting is, where it physically begins and ends, and where the process of creating a work begins and ends as well. As the curator Luca Lo Pinto explains, in Du Pasquier’s world, a painting “exists as object, space or environment, in which any distinction between the work of art and its display structure has been erased. (..) The device of the exhibition is a dynamic tool that allows her to use her works as raw material with which to build other, new creations.” Indeed combining and recombining works from different periods of her career complicates the distinction between past, present, and future, and situates her work in a state of constant potential for transformation.

Chris Martin’s fifth solo exhibition at Anton Kern Gallery takes place on the first floor, presenting eleven new paintings. Five line the entrance, leading viewers into the back atrium where five eleven foot paintings are hung, creating a chapel-like experience. One small painting, a tribute to the late Lance De Los Reyes, presides over the exhibition, hung high and greeting those who enter and exit. Images and depictions of the cosmos are a uniting thread among all of the paintings: inky night skies, planets, constellations, stars, and moons. The five paintings in the gallery’s back atrium are all atmospheric skyscapes—some seeming to directly depict the constellations and night sky of the open woods and fields. It is not only nature found in these works, but the influence of Brooklyn, music, and pop culture are also evident—in Telescope Sphinx in Outer Space, for example, Martin’s painted galaxy is populated by collaged images of Greta Garbo as the Sphinx, sailors, mushrooms, frogs, birds, musicians, and pot leaves—among others—creating humor and play in all of the cosmic.

A drawing is always naked. — Georg Baselitz For the first time in its twenty-five-year history, Anton Kern Gallery is dedicating a solo exhibition to the work of Georg Baselitz. A painter, sculptor, printmaker and draughtsman, Georg Baselitz is one of Germany’s most celebrated living artists, with a distinguished career spanning over sixty years. Made from memory in one sitting over the summer of 2021, the thirteen experimental and dynamic compositions in red and black India ink reconsider past bodies of work in addition to specific, individual images. Some are loosely based on the seminal portrait of Baselitz’s wife, Portrait of Elke I (1969), which marked the beginning of the artist’s inversion of his images and was recently donated by the artist to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. His choice to rework Elke repeatedly over the years in the same familiar poses represents an ever-renewing declaration of love, as well as an intimate reflection on change and stability, on the inevitability of ageing, and on the function of portraiture. New self-portraits and depictions of Elke are on view alongside a drawing derived from the well-known painting Schlafzimmer (Bedroom) (1975). Diverging from his recent black ink drawings, the vibrant flesh-red palette of many of the new works is inspired by Henri Rousseau’s 1895 lithograph La Guerre (The War) and intensifies the fragility and sensuousness of these portraits.

Anton Kern Gallery is proud to present Marcus Jahmal’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, Mining, on the third floor. Jahmal is a self-taught painter, born and raised in Brooklyn, with familial roots in Louisiana and Texas. Jahmal’s paintings are surreal, symbological narratives that exist as documents of our current moment, yet also embody a mythological timelessness. The title, Mining, takes on a number of meanings— mining for materials like silver or gold; mining for oil (a particularly personal meaning as his great grandmother owned an oil well in Texas); Also, the notion of mining within one’s own psyche. The heavy use of black oil paint references this idea throughout each of the paintings, and the work is charged with an intuitive sense of image and color to evoke the ways in which the personal belies larger implications of the universal and the mysterious. Jahmal does not prepare studies for his paintings, but rather goes at the canvas directly. He begins by grounding them with a simple color. In his own words, “setting a mood.” From there, figures and icons emerge—a man, a barbecue, a car, trees, a bird, a lasso, a horse—existing in an almost frozen dreamlike state. The burning red-orange that runs throughout these paintings is reminiscent of the sky of dwarf sun planets, red due to their close proximity to the sun. That feeling of intense heat and fire is palpable here, radiating off the canvases. The orange, black, and otherworldly green that populate the works serve to create dystopian psychological scenes told through landscape with symbols, images, and color.

For her second exhibition at Anton Kern Gallery, Berlin-based artist Ellen Gronemeyer chose nineteen paintings: sparkling, densely painted, with turbulent surfaces, dark yet luminous compositions. Their motifs have slowly grown out of layers of heavy paint, and the viewer can discern not just shapes and figures but also fields of crusty paint that have become just as alive as the paintings’ protagonists. The paint itself has taken on an active role in these narratives. Areas of restless brush strokes and craggy paint skin set the paintings’ mood. Byzantium purple, golden yellow, teal, and black; canary yellow, dark orange, sky blue, and black; hot pink, electric blue, turquoise, fuchsia, and black. The viewer feels immersed in the sounds of an imaginary color organ. Black strikes the keynote and sets the rhythmic structure, secondary and tertiary colors build the harmonic system, tints with white create space, movement, and speed. The new paintings redirect the metamorphic energy of her previous work, the focus having shifted from interaction between protagonists to depictions of single figures: a dog, a reclining youth, a snake, a drinker, a mermaid (or is it a merman?), a melting ice cube, and a couple of close-up faces. The figures seem still, pensive, sometimes melancholic, at any rate content and in unison with their slightly shadowy environment. Perhaps the mermaid seems a bit at odds with its awkward position in the painting, her horizontally outstretched body balancing on the cusp of an enormous wave of deep dark paint. The question of transformation lies at the core of Gronemeyer’s work. Obviously, transformation is what painting can do: mess with the rules of nature, create unlikely scenarios. The artist seems to suggest something more, however: that these changes are possible, that they can be observed in real life, or at least nearly witnessed, glimpsed at for just a second. The surprise and shock of these paintings result not just from the improbability of their scenarios or the artist’s vocabulary of metaphors, but from the way they are made. Paint and brushstrokes merge into the figures, and figures dissolve into flickering surface patterns. Figure and ground seem barely separated — occasionally by a soft back light. A bouncy red creature appears at the very bottom of a large, almost entirely figure-less painting. It stares with friendly enthusiasm at a disembodied toothy mouth beyond a wall of paint-flames into a vast, dark shimmering surface of paint, a space of seemingly endless associations. A dark-chocolate-colored dog, gently back-lit, stares attentively right past the viewer. At first glance the animal seems awkwardly situated, but within the logic of Gronemeyer’s paintings, it comfortably settles into a ground of orange, green, and pink paint. The dog seems so convincingly at home in the painterly color-space that the viewer starts to read that space as natural and plausible. Herein lies Gronemeyer’s magic. It is her ability to transform metaphor into paint, so that the physical works themselves become the protagonists in her world of open possibilities. An illogical world for sure, but one where seriousness and profundity are contained in the interplay between the artist’s cast of characters and her color-trembles and humming, gnarly brush marks — a world in which the original, biological meaning of metamorphosis, i.e. the transformation from an immature stage to an adult stage, is played out and, most astonishingly, suspended for a time and even reversed. A liberating act.

Anton Kern Gallery is thrilled to present Sean Landers at WINDOW, opening Friday, November 5. Landers will exhibit four new paintings; each a portrait of an animal with a short aphorism scrawled across the top. Furthering his tradition of using the personal as the universal, the accompanying texts to the lynx, dog, raccoon, and deer resonate with the artist’s own history and point of view, while also tapping into the current political, social, and cultural climate. The pairing of these sayings with each animal, and the expressive nature of both beast and text, deftly convey Landers’ sharp and witty insight into humanity. With thanks to Petzel Gallery for the kind collaboration.

Anton Kern Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by the New York-based artist Anne Collier. This will be Collier’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery. Over the past two decades Anne Collier has developed a complex body of work that considers our social and cultural relationships with images and with the medium of photography itself. Central to Collier’s ongoing project is a consideration of the emotional and psychological attachments we develop with images, and how these (auto)biographical narratives relate to photography’s inherent relationship with memory, melancholia and loss. At Anton Kern Gallery, Collier will present – for the first time in New York - works from her most recent series which has the collective title Filter (2019-). Collier’s Filter works expand upon her long-standing consideration of the analog photographic process and the mechanics at play in the production, construction and distribution of images. In the Filter works Collier starts with a greatly enlarged detail of an image of an emotionally distraught woman sourced from a vintage romance comic book. She then applies a Kodak Color Print Viewing Filter on top of these images, to create a series of ‘frames’ around the recurring or repeated images. The Kodak Color Print Viewing Filter was a pre-digital technical device designed to assist with color correction when making photographic prints in the darkroom. Collier’s resultant Filter works depict sequential images that suggest a liminal space somewhere between the photographic and the cinematic: between a still and a moving image. In foregrounding the photographic process in these works, and through her privileging of seriality, framing, cropping, and chromatic shifts Collier makes evident the manipulations inherent to the medium of photography itself. Alongside the works from the Filter series Collier will also present new works that further explore her interest in the aesthetics, language, and modus operandi of the self-help industries, as well as recent works from her ongoing Woman Crying and Woman Crying (Comic) series. Writing about the Woman Crying (Comic) series in 2018 the art historian Tom McDonough observed: “With these works we are in the realm of the extreme close-up … At this level of engagement, we become engrossed by the details of the printing process itself, with its separation and overlay of cyan, magenta, and yellow dots and its inky black that sits on top of these colors, defining contours and the dense thickets of eyelashes and brows. We even glimpse the grain of the cheap paper on which these panels were printed, losing ourselves between the heightened emotional state depicted, its stylized representation, and the mechanical means by which it has been reproduced.” Shot in the studio using a large-format analog camera, Collier’s work is informed as much by technical and commercial photography as by the work of the artists associated with the ‘Pictures’ generation. Throughout her work Collier seeks to privilege the relationship between gender and image-making, whilst simultaneously maintaining a tension between the ’objective’, almost forensic-like depiction of her subjects and the often fraught and highly emotive nature of the images and objects that she re-presents. Writing on the occasion of Collier’s 2018 survey exhibition at Hannover’s Sprengel Museum, curator Stefan Gronert summarized Collier’s approach thus: “Collier demonstrates the staging function of photography by way of deliberate enactment: with this duplication and enhancement she reveals the power of the image and the cultural channeling of the eye.”

Anton Kern Gallery is pleased to present Sweet Dreams, Nosferatu, the Brazilian artist Yuli Yamagata’s first solo exhibition in New York. Yamagata’s concept for the exhibition is activated in two parts and across two geographic venues. Part one is hosted at the gallery in New York, and part two is staged at Passion For Beds, a mattress store located in Basel, Switzerland, as part of Art Basel Parcours. While Yamagata’s Nosferatu will be “sleeping” in a bed at the Basel mattress store, his dreams will spill out into his bedroom, and come to life at the gallery. A sculpture of a store-bought chicken with a chopstick antenna will inhabit both locations and act as a portal between the two time zones. The gallery exhibition consists of twenty new works, which operate as manifestations of Nosferatu’s unconscious desires and fears. Throughout the space are nine undulating fabric paintings, two wall-based reliefs, two wall-mounted sculptures, and seven freestanding sculptures supported by flexible aluminum armatures. Yamagata’s choice of materials provides sensory pleasures, with juxtapositions of batting-stuffed Lycra, velvet, and silk intermixed with found materials such as eyeglasses, corn husks, and dehydrated shrimp coated in resin. The body - both animal and human - is consistently referenced in the forms of bones, feet, claw-like hands, stuffed socks, intestine shaped coils, chicken parts, and fake eyeballs. Her fabrics act as skins, sometimes pierced or adorned with jewelry. Through her hyperbolic use of food and body parts in her sculptures, these elements become sympathetic characters, their positioning and colors evoking different emotions such as anger, sadness, excitement and foreboding. Bode (The Rolling Stones), the largest fabric painting in the exhibition, is inspired by a fan’s cover art for a remixed version of the group’s 1973 album Goats Head Soup. In the painting, a close-up of an evil goat head simultaneously repels the viewer and invites them to pet it. Disc shaped fields of tie dye patterns occupy the right half of the composition, creating an opposing force, contending to reach a balance. Yamagata plays with these dualities – drama and harmony, attraction and repulsion, sweet and sour – throughout the show. Yamagata’s sinuous free-standing sculptures evoke freehand drawings in space. Plant-like forms emerge out of resinous puddles conjuring visions of humans and monsters, a limbo environment between the mortal and immortal. The anthropomorphic Mr. Mister sculpture is a seated figure made up of bones and stained marijuana leaf patterned socks. Its green hand makes a beckoning gesture inviting us in for a closer look into a bowl of mysterious stew balanced at the top, where his head should be. In the green plaid fabric painting Teenagers, two mouths are entwined in a French kiss. Intermingled in the passionate scene are unsettling elements such as a bloodshot eyeball made of felt, and a cut-out portion of the canvas shaped like a drop of blood. A stuffed fabric coil draped over the top of the painting serves as a frame. The oil painting entitled Sweet Dreams, Nosferatu acts as a counterpart to the piece. Its film still composition portrays the erotically frightening moment just before Nosferatu sinks his teeth into the neck of a beautiful woman. Yamagata’s playful use of Pop culture references defangs the horror in her work, allowing the viewer to indulge in the absurd possibilities of dreamscapes. Her impure use of the vampire legend, dosed with a psychoanalytical approach and filtered through a psychedelic civ, addresses the pathos, humor, and hypocrisies of modern life. Through the framework of a dream, Yamagata provides a safe outlet for exploration of our dark fantasies without the consequences of reality. For additional images and information, please contact: press@antonkerngallery.com. Yuli Yamagata was born in São Paulo in 1989, where she continues to live and work. The artist graduated from the University of São Paulo with a BFA in sculpture, and has exhibited nationally and internationally since 2015. Yamagata will be featured in the 2021 edition of Art Basel Parcours, presenting a multidisciplinary installation in which she imagines Nosferatu’s bedroom and a night of wild dreams.

Anton Kern Gallery invites you to visit our WINDOW space, 91 Walker Street at Lafayette, for a playful, slightly naughty peek into Peep Show, a group exhibition curated by Brigitte Mulholland and Kristen Smoragiewicz. Peep Show is visible from the street 24/7 through October 31.⁠

On the occasion of the 25th Anniversary of the gallery, we are excited to present a group exhibition celebrating the past, present, and future of Anton Kern Gallery with Tales of Manhattan, featuring: Pawel Althamer • Nobuyoshi Araki • Alvaro Barrington • Margot Bergman • Ellen Berkenblit • John Bock • David Byrd • Brian Calvin • Anne Collier • Julie Curtiss • Nicole Eisenman • Frank Escalet • Martino Gamper • Ellen Gronemeyer • Bendix Harms • Eberhard Havekost • Lothar Hempel • Richard Hughes • Sarah Jones • Hein Koh • Edward Krasiński • Mike Kuchar • Jim Lambie • Marepe • Chris Martin • Enrique Metinides • Matthew Monahan • Aliza Nisenbaum • Marcel Odenbach • Nathalie Du Pasquier • Manfred Pernice • Alessandro Pessoli • Tal R • Wilhelm Sasnal • Lara Schnitger • Larry Shiveen • David Shrigley • Mike Silva • Francis Upritchard • Erik van Lieshout • Andy Warhol • Mark Grotjahn & Jonas Wood • Yuli Yamagata

Playing with the Anton Kern Gallery WINDOW space peculiarities -- a gallery that can only be seen from the outside and never entered -- and referencing its location in Lower Manhattan near Soho, Julie Curtiss has organized The Shoo Sho, inspired by the Shoe Store window displays that populate the area. With an array of works that riff on the concept of the shoe and its potential materials and display, the exhibition offers a quirky, diverse, and fun opportunity to contemplate the Shoo for both its ordinary purpose and its extraordinary form as a coveted and luxurious accessory.

Anton Kern Gallery is thrilled to debut Erik van Lieshout’s film Art Basel (2019) in his new exhibition on the third floor, Art Basel Art Blasé. The film is accompanied by an installation of related paintings, drawings, collages, and sculptures, as well as a second film, Art Blasé (2020), a companion film to Art Basel that was made as a result of the pandemic, lockdown, and the cancellation of cruise ships, art fairs, travel, and normal life. In 2019 the artist was invited to be part of a special curated exhibition to take place in 2020, celebrating the 50th anniversary of Art Basel. Van Lieshout flew to Hong Kong in March of 2019 to start planning with the curators. One of them, Kaspar Koenig, suggested that he begin by going on a cruise, so the artist made his maiden voyage on the Holland-America line’s New Statendam ship in the summer of 2019, sailing up the coast of Norway for two weeks. The cruise made sense as a parallel to art fairs: the promise of wealth and leisure; a passenger’s only tasks to consume food and drink, walk around, and spend money; the impersonal nature of the ship resembling the booths and coffee stands that line a fair’s aisles. The original intent was to book three cruises around Europe, thus depicting the chaos of the area with Brexit, and especially the ecological protests against the omnipresence of cruise ships. Van Lieshout soon realized that the budget of the project was too limited for such an undertaking, and in the end it was the single cruise on the Holland-America Line’s newest ship, which housed a large art collection and had been baptized by Oprah Winfrey. The edit of the film was finished in February of 2020, and van Lieshout watched the news unfolding slowly...and then that cruise ships were one of the first places of corona infections. He immediately revisited the film footage and began shooting more in his studio. Van Lieshout remembered the towel animals that populated the cruise ship and began making them himself: elephants, swans, and monkeys, that the workers of the ship would leave in guest’s rooms. There had even been an event to teach people on the cruise how to make these towel animals, and an instructional book that van Lieshout had purchased. He made the towel animals, stop motion animations, performances, and collages as he contemplated the lockdown and isolation, and the environmental impact and consequences of all of those flights he had taken—4 days in Hong Kong, 2 days in Venice, 1 week in New York, 1 day in London—and felt ashamed. The resulting footage became a separate film, Art Blasé, a companion to the first film. First the 50th Anniversary exhibition was postponed, as Hong Kong, Basel, and Miami were cancelled. Then the project was cancelled entirely. The gallery is proud to debut the film here instead, in an immersive installation that resembles those art fairs. Says the artist, “It was all fucked up, and now the pandemic is still going on, but in no time the ships and Art Basel will be on track again.” Erik van Lieshout’s work has been internationally exhibited and collected. Large solo and group shows include MMK, Frankfurt (2019), Albertina Museum Vienna (2019), the South London Gallery (2017), Hannover Kunstverein (2017), Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels (2016), TENT Rotterdam, Pauluskerk, Rotterdam (2016), Tessaloniki Biennale, Tessaloniki (2015), Manifesta 10 St. Petersburg (2014), Center for Contemporary Culture - GCCC, Moscow (2014), Moscow Biennale, Moscow (2013), 55th Venice Biennale, Venice (2013), Manifesta 9 Genk (2012), Art Unlimited, Basel (2011), The Museum Boijmans van Beunigen, Rotterdam (2006) and many others. He was the recipient of the Heineken Art Prize in 2018 and a finalist for the Daniel & Florence Guerlain Contemporary art Foundation Drawing Prize 2021.

The fifth exhibition by German artist Bendix Harms at Anton Kern Gallery presents sixteen new paintings. Painted over the last year and a half in his studio in Østerfælden, the artist’s farm in the north of Denmark, they are the outcome of the life shared with his wife Mari, Mamon the cat, and a wide array of birds that settle around the farm. The exhibition will run through June 26 and is accompanied by a new 100-page catalog chronicling six exhibitions and including a dedication-poem by fellow painter Joe Bradley. Sixteen paintings equal sixteen Houses of Content. Harms could not be clearer about how to read his work. The paintings house the content, and the content determines the outcome of the paintings. They are the inevitable consequence of his engagement and, most of all, his close relationship with the subjects he paints. Calling himself a contentist Harms explains: “I am 1000% convinced that personal experiences will create strong relationships to the painted subjects. And from this moment on the motif begins to talk to the artist and the artist has to deliver adequate and art historically relevant answers, because at the end of an artist’s life only one thing matters: the difference of the own work in relation to history.” In an almost Warholian manner, yet completely un-dandy-ish, Harms withdraws from the role of the artist as genius inventor. Rather, he sees himself as an agent or intermediary between his subjects’ actions, the plays continuously acted out in front of his eyes, and the paintings to be painted. As if he was taking precise orders from his motif: do it this way! Østerfælden takes on the role of the factory, birds and cats are the Superstars, the artist becomes their extension, or as Harms put it “an employee of my subjects.” During the act of painting, the motif, rather than the artist, is the decision-maker. Method and content collapse into one! There is no distinction between form and content, and herein lies the extravagance and unmistakable character of Harms’ painting. The viewer will discover: the artist in his barn-studio, his body inhabited by cats, mice, and Mari in Used Contentist; a cat basking in its own outlandish vanity in Salon Mömske; the contrast between a strict government, under which it chronically feels like having one leg in prison, and the Danish Friday-evening-sweets-culture in ØFcatraz; Mamon the cat building a house from its own nick-names in Mamonhaus (House of Names); three painters, Mari, Dana and Nicole taking over the barn in House of Talentos (Mari, Dana, Nicole); Mamon building her house with compelling content: mice in House of Content (Multipuds); a flock of surviving migratory birds celebrating the sun in Fight for your Right to see the African Light; the artist caught in the dilemma of what was the spring of 2020 when the redstart bird arrived from the Sahara at Østerfælden and locked Harms into a prison of responsibility in AL-RED-CATRAZ (Prison of Spring). The recurring compositional device of the barn’s timber structure is a formal blueprint that was gifted to the artist by Rufus, the farm-cat (RIP) and former main subject, by revealing its favorite sleeping places in the beams. This structure, which may initially look like abstract painting, is the perfect scaffold for installing narrative subjects. This anchors the paintings, gives them scale and meaning. Along with the reduced pallet of just two or three colors as well as black and white, this validates the artist’s strong sense of economy of means and restraint from painterly self-absorption in favor of giving his subjects room to talk. It is the role of the artist to bring the subject to speak, adequately. In Harms’ words: “The motif is the conqueror and decision-maker and I’m expecting even more precise orders from my subjects in the future.” Bendix Harms was born in 1967 in Münster, Germany. He received his M.F.A in 1997 from the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg. He has been the subject of solo exhibitions in Europe, LA and New York. His work is currently included in “Deep Blue” an exhibition curated by Katherine Bradford at the Hall Art Foundation in Reading, VT. Harms’ work is part of numerous public and private collections including Deutsche Bank Collection, Frankfurt, Germany; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA. The exhibition Houses of Content will be accompanied by a new 100-page catalog including images of six exhibitions and a dedication-poem by fellow painter Joe Bradley. Harms lives in Allerup, Denmark.

Brian Calvin - Calvin Marcus - Marcus Jahmal - three painters with four names between them. I like the way their names fit together - it has a nice sound to it. Seemed like a good idea for a show. I’m friends with these guys - they’re all really interesting people. They are all dealing with the figure and they are all contemporaries. I’ve been in Marcus Jahmal’s Brooklyn studio a few times and there’s always a lot going on. There are paintings everywhere and drawings all over the floor. He paints at night and he knows how to use black. I used to see him on the street in this tiny black car he had with just two seats and I would jump in and continue the conversation and get a ride somewhere. I visited Calvin Marcus’ studio in LA and I remember a painting of horses in intense lime green with this stunning surface. He really knows how to put on paint. There was also this beautifully crafted sculpture of his studio building. Except that the actual building had a big hole in it covered with plywood and I asked what happened there and he said a car had just come racing around the corner and smashed right into the building and the nose of the car had stuck thru the wall exactly where his drawing desk was but luckily he wasn’t there drawing. I have never visited Brian Calvin’s studio in Ojai California but I am looking forward to it. Whenever I think of Ojai I think of Krishnamurti and all my books with photographs of his sublime face - delicate and sensual. Brian’s paintings of faces are powerful slabs of color so that a huge eye and a huge mouth dissolve into abstract shapes of luscious paint and then reappear as archetypal image. They don’t read as specific portraits but somehow they all seem like California kids to me. --Chris Martin

Alessandro Pessoli Carousel April 8 – May 15, 2021 “In this new cycle of works, I tried to find a balance between drawing and painting. I looked for solutions on how to create, in the same image, the lightness of the drawing sketched into the shapes and the stratification of the painting, which is full of memories. These are imaginary portraits of male and female figures. The classic pose of the figures is contaminated by Disney characters and illustrations from William Blake’s Divina Commedia - a reshuffling of iconographies and symbologies. Flowers, apples, birds, skulls, swords, snakes, wings, and talons are some of the elements that accompany and characterize the figures. The title, Carousel, recalls the continuous rotating, going up and down - a play, an entertainment - it represents a way to outline the human condition through symbolic figures and scenes from Western art history such as Adam and Eve, The Expulsion from Paradise, the isolation, the temptation, the fall, and the rebirth. In this new series of works, angels and devils resemble young teenagers or vice versa. The apple and the snake are recurrent in both Jung Adam and Rebel Eva: the apples have eyes, and they look out from their point of view; the snakes are depicted as comic-like, silly worms that come out from a heart or a chest. There’s no drama but amusement, play, vulnerability—something is exceeding or lacking from the classic representation. In Jung King, the figure of a boy resembles a Peter Pan, or young hippie with a guitar, or a Renaissance page lifting his arms laughing. At his feet there are two flowers growing from two skulls (a quotation from Andy Warhol and Picasso). It is a subverted memento mori: once I finished the painting, I realized it made me think of the Pandemic. Drama and comedy, density of significance, vivacity and irony in the association among the various elements—are what move these figures. It’s a Commedia dell’Arte. All of the figures emerge from a backdrop that I painted white: it’s a non-existent space, there’s no environment or location, but a light that makes everything readable, evident, from the small pencil mark to the light spray-painted shades or the spatula mark, dense with color. The light makes evident the drawing and painting work in outlining the warmth and the interiority of the characters. The figures are contained inside a frame with blunt corners that delimit the vital space. This frame has different functions: it is the threshold from which the figures appear, a theatrical space that concentrates the gaze inside this symbolic space. It also has the shape of a smartphone with the images that scroll from social media. Every painting has its title written under the figure, this creates an association with Tarots cards where the figures of man and women are symbols and phases of the climb or the descent, which dispense the various stages of the human life, like in Tarots, where everything is in the movement and change in its own repetition.”

March 26th, 2021—The eighth exhibition by Polish artist Wilhelm Sasnal at Anton Kern Gallery presents sixteen paintings and one film. Known as a painter of individual, lucidly formulated images (rather than of explorations in theme and variation, or in process) and a maker of films that speak a measured and moody language, this exhibition proposes a kind of associative way of looking. A theme or a narrative emerges only slowly. This however, does not suggest capriciousness. Quite to the contrary, these paintings and the film create a generative field of ties and connections that come closer to a nuanced and subtle analysis of the world than any predetermined credo could. There are paintings of figures walking in landscapes, or rather, interacting with nature. There are wide horizons and vast skies, and there are seemingly traditional still-lifes composed of fruits, plates, and flowers. And there is the occasional portrait of a youthful face for example. As has been frequently noted, Sasnal employs various modes of painting, from just about naturalistic to bold and improvisational, supported here by a palette that seems silently artificial. His motifs are based on visual memories, notably of the artist’s stay in Los Angeles in 2019/20, on precise image moments, often recorded with a camera or a mobile phone. These image ideas are directly translated onto the canvas without much preparatory sketching, a process that infuses these distinct paintings with a great sense of freedom. Sasnal sees himself as a painter, not as a creator of mediated images. It is the artist’s touch of the paint-filled brush onto the canvas that activates the work. Sasnal’s paintings are rooted in the desire to dissect the past and to engage with present events. Evidently, two still-lifes in the exhibition are direct allusions to paintings by Cezanne and Mondrian. Why does the artist paint such direct references? Why are there two large canvases depicting well-known artworks by the American land-artist Robert Smithson, “Glue Rundown” and most famously “Asphalt Rundown”? Why does Sasnal paint an alluringly windswept “Roosevelt Park” in Los Angeles alluding to the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the New Deal era of the 1930s and 40s? Why is there a painting depicting the silhouette of an aircraft wing in front of an intensely blue night sky and marvelous reflections of the moon? Why does the skyline of Los Angeles float like an oversized spaceship? Perhaps the unapologetically smiling face of a youth expressing happiness and hope speaks to the notion of faith in reform and transformation alluded to in Sasnal’s paintings. Is it religious faith (there is a rather dark painting of the pope), or spiritualism as suggested by Mondrian, or, towards the other end of the spectrum, faith in progressive politics as exemplified by the New Deal? Now, the two paintings about Smithson come into sharper focus. Smithson, who realized “Asphalt Rundown” in a quarry outside of Rome, the Eternal City, demonstrating what he called the “crystalline structure of time,” arguing that time does not pass so much as it builds upon itself. The resulting sculpture is time frozen, mid flow. An astonishing commentary on Sasnal’s project of making paintings about the interconnectedness of history and the present.

Anton Kern Gallery is pleased to present Hein Koh at WINDOW. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition of paintings. A longtime sculptor, her return to painting came about during the pandemic: a need to simplify her practice, and a desire to have the freedom to make loose, expressive, and emotional work. At WINDOW are four paintings depicting broccoli and carrot characters: figures that represent the high standards of perfection and goodness that women are held to. These vegetables, though seemingly healthy, also want to rebel--they smoke, wear sexy outfits, and push against the boundaries of societal expectations to simply, defiantly, be themselves. On the Walker Street side are three paintings depicting pairs. The artist is mother to a pair of twin girls, but the pairings here also represent couples, soulmates; as well as dualities and even the two sides of one’s self--vegetables that are good for you but also chain smoke. On the Lafayette side is a painting depicting a lone broccoli figure, another arena Koh has lately been exploring and channeling: angst, existential loneliness, and solitude. WINDOW is on view 24/7 at 91 Walker Street, just walk by and see.

Nicole Eisenman’s “Maquette” premiered 2018 at FIAC in Paris, the year after the artist’s monumental “Sketch for a Fountain” at Skulptur Projekte Münster had received much attention. Inspired by the fountain yet distinctly different, “Maquette” consists of four bronze bathers in varying positions of repose extending a classical theme to an acutely urgent sense of contemporaneity. The presentation of Eisenman’s paper pulp works is a follow-up to last year Incelesbian exhibition. They combine technical intricacy and sophistication with the instant legibility and punch of the language of posters. A fully illustrated catalog co-published with renown paper workshop Dieu Donné is available.

Anton Kern Gallery is pleased to announce its forthcoming exhibition David Byrd: Montrose VA, 1958 – 1988. The opening date, February 25th, coincides with the late-artist’s 95th birthday. The exhibition centers around Byrd’s original manuscript, of the same title, chronicling his observations during his thirty-year career in the psychiatric ward of a VA hospital in Upstate New York. Compiled during the reflective period of his later years, the artist considered this handmade book his magnum opus. It serves as a crucial codex for understanding Byrd’s personal history, as well as his psychologically stirring oeuvre of paintings and works on paper. Select pages with handwritten texts, sketches, and colored pencil drawings will be displayed throughout the gallery in vitrines, accompanied by paintings, sketchbooks and other archival materials relating to this major body of work. Byrd was intent on bringing his book to the public’s attention during his lifetime, however, he struggled to find the resources to publish. To honor the artist’s vision, the gallery has released a faithful replica of Montrose VA, 1958 – 1988, in collaboration with the David Byrd Estate and German publisher Hatje Cantz. The book is available for purchase at the gallery and on our online shop. About the artist David Byrd was an American painter born in Springfield, Illinois, in 1926. His father, who suffered from mental illness, left the family when David was a young child. When he was twelve, his mother was forced by economic hardship to place him and his five siblings into foster care. In 1942, his mother gathered her children back to her in New York. Working as a ticket seller at a movie theater in Brooklyn, she could barely support them. Byrd left home at age 17 to join the Merchant Marine, and was later drafted into the US Army during World War II. He used the GI Bill to enroll at the Ozenfant School of Fine Arts in New York City, where he studied for two years under the French painter Amédée Ozenfant. Throughout the 1950s, Byrd worked a series of odd jobs-- including janitor, delivery man, movie house usher -- anything that would cover his bills while also (and more importantly) allowing him time to paint. From 1958 - 1988 he worked as an orderly in the psychiatric ward at the VA Hospital in Montrose, New York. Perhaps the regimented setting of a hospital was comfortable for him, having spent much of his young life within institutionalized systems. His daily experiences during this time inspired his most defining body of work. Byrd was a keen observer of his surroundings who painted the people and situations he encountered, past and present, from memory. He also painted scenes from his daily commute-- including mountains, bridges, houses, gas stations, and shopping centers. In 1988 he retired, bought land in the Catskills, and focused full-time on painting until his death in 2013. David Byrd’s work was not publicly exhibited until he was offered a solo show at Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle, only a few months before his death at the age of 87. Since then, and through the establishment of the David Byrd Estate, his work has continued to be exhibited posthumously. The Estate is represented by Anton Kern Gallery.

For the next iteration of WINDOW, we are pleased to present new works from UK-based artist Richard Hughes. Hughes’ practice involves making extraordinarily meticulous facsimiles of objects that most would consider detritus. He instead finds wonder in the discarded, found, and bizarre; sometimes instilling trompe l’oeil messages and images to create marvelous new livelihood in the source material. On the Lafayette side of WINDOW is one such work, Rain or Shine: a sewn recreation of an old, saggy mattress. At first glance, it is easy to perceive the object as something one ought to trash from their childhood bedroom. Look longer, and magic emerges-- the stitching of the topper actually forms a sprawling phrase in bubble letters. On the Walker side is an installation of four works, including a new stitched fabric piece accompanied by a cast mask. Consisting of sourced space t-shirts, Hughes has created a collaged galaxy out of the vintage store mundane; it is accompanied by a recreation of a face mask resting on the floor, the eyes gazing up in slightly melted wonder at the universe. Other works include a cheerfully dirty headboard; a resin cast of a half leg wearing a roller skate; and one of Hughes’ spinning works, in which a deflated ball wearing a cap grins at viewers from a dizzying metal coil. As always, we invite you to visit WINDOW anytime, day or night, at 91 Walker Street. The works are on view 24/7, just walk by.

Sometimes the original beckons for a sequel…Two years after the success of our group exhibition 10, we are pleased to follow up with 11, featuring eleven artists whose work we think scores a perfect ten. Spanning a variety of media—film, installation, painting, collage, drawing, mixed media, and photography—the artists and works presented share a sense of experimentation in exploring uncharted pictorial territory rooted in the personal. Some of the works engage with traditional forms of portraiture and representation, while others run through a grayer gamut of image-making, where memory, image, symbol, avatar, and iconography defy more exacting categorization.

Anton Kern Gallery is pleased to present two special installations by Matthew Monahan and Lara Schnitger at WINDOW. Corner of Walker & Lafayette On view 24/7

Anton Kern Gallery is pleased to present Waiting, Brian Calvin’s seventh solo exhibition in New York. Faces abound, energizing the first and second floor galleries with hyperbolic color, mosaic eyes, and varnished lips. The cool neutrality of their expressions brings an equal and opposite force; a stillness to the space. Otherworldly as they are, this group of 23 new works cannot be untangled from the time within which they were created. These paintings were born out of the global pandemic, which brought life as normal to a halt.

Anton Kern Gallery is pleased to present Jim Lambie: ​Year Unknown​ on the gallery’s third floor. The exhibition features new metal boxes and sunglasses sculptures, and is a decidedly intimate one, with small scale pieces and titles that make connections to personally significant cities and streets. Lambie’s work often references music and art, here resonating in a particularly individual way––subtly invoking the album that changed your life; the concert that blew your mind; the painting that made you see the world differently. Together, the works in ​Year Unknown​ offer a contemplative and dynamic journey, one that is both of this moment but also timeless. Lambie’s transformation of humble materials––lenses, aluminum sheets, industrial paints––into these vibrant odes defies their seeming simplicity. The artist encourages the viewer to relish in color, light, and shape––finding meaning in the things we all see that unite us as humans, and the ways we can still find joy in the everyday.

Anton Kern Gallery is pleased to present Aliza Nisenbaum: Flora, an exhibition of new works on paper on the gallery’s third floor. Image: Aliza Nisenbaum, "Self portrait bouquet" 2020, gouache and watercolor on paper, Paper Dimensions: 30 x 22 in (76.2 x 55.9 cm)

Anton Kern Gallery is pleased to announce its first solo exhibition with Danish artist Tal R. The exhibition will consist of fifteen paintings and twelve bronze sculptures. Tal R is best known for his paintings and their exceptional display of energy and imagination in a colorful and exuberant universe. For the first time, he has also thrown himself into classical bronze sculpture. In Boy Walking and Cinnamon, the viewer can experience the artist’s motifs transformed into three dimensions—a striking parade of figures in patinated bronze. His creatures have arrived in New York with arms and legs, heads and paws, wings and shoes, beaks and eyes. On the first and second floors, alongside the sculptures, Tal R’s paintings unfold to the viewer using a simple compositional device to create his complex, atmospheric worlds. Image: Tal R, "Adidas Boy" 2019, Patinated bronze, 61 3/4 x 10 5/8 x 25 5/8 in (157 x 27 x 65 cm)

Neon is light trapped inside a three-dimensional contained shape. They've got an irresistible and pleasing aspect to them. They've got an interesting quality of being sensuous "vintage technology" which cultivates both melancholy and wonderment in you. It's fascinating how soothing and otherworldly a neon can be. We have also explored their "neurotic" properties when animated and flickering to a programmed “choreography”. Starburst explores all of these possible neon qualities. a very anxious feeling was originally created in 2007. It was conceived as a commentary on that year’s election period, the “long” anxious months before Obama was elected. Words written in neon instigate a "holy" presence, almost like a spell from God. Neons’ frequent use as store signs (selling us “dreams”) contributes to this effect: hypnosis, rapture, worship, magic, prophecy. a very anxious feeling is part of our recurring play with our pseudonym’s initials (which end up becoming exhibition and artwork titles, email signatures, neons, etc). And it’s brought back at another “very anxious” moment in our lives. -assume vivid astro focus