Galerie Lelong & Co.

A solo exhibition by Samuel Levi Jones that highlights the artist’s practice of abstraction as a means of transformation. Featuring works composed of pulped encyclopedias, law and medical textbooks, and US flags, the exhibition critiques authoritative systems. Image: Samuel Levi Jones, Conscious Intuition, 2023. © Samuel Levi Jones Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co.

Galerie Lelong & Co., New York is pleased to announce our second solo exhibition by the late artist Ficre Ghebreyesus (b. 1962 – d. 2012). Tracing the impact of Ghebreyesus’s experiences as a refugee and immigrant on his practice, "I Believe We Are Lost" will present paintings and pastels in rich and bold palettes that demonstrate Ghebreyesus’s evolving definition of home, the majority of which will be shown publicly for the first time. Image: Ficre Ghebreyesus I Believe We Are Lost, c. 2002 Acrylic on unstretched canvas 113 1/2 x 118 1/2 in (288.3 x 301 cm) © The Estate of Ficre Ghebreyesus Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co.

Opening Thursday, February 23, 2023, 6:00pm – 8:00pm Galerie Lelong & Co., New York, is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Nancy Spero dedicated to works created between the mid-1990s and the early 2000s, the final two decades of the artist’s life. Throughout a career spanning over five decades, the New York-based artist Nancy Spero (b. 1926 – d. 2009) foregrounded women’s experiences, challenging systems of authority and subverting aesthetic conventions in the process. Frustrated with the pervasive silencing of women’s voices in society, Spero was an activist who devoted herself to the advancement of women in the arts through hosting and participating in discussion groups, many held in her SoHo loft. Beginning in 1976, Spero made women the sole subject of her work to elevate their status from “other” to protagonist. In celebration of Spero’s unapologetic advocacy for the presence of women in the arts, the exhibition will coincide with Women’s History Month. A selection of works on paper demonstrative of Spero’s signature styles of collage and printing will be featured. These works are populated by female figures originating from diverse cultures spanning time and space; women with origins in pre-history, classical antiquity, and modernity are seen alongside one another. Nancy Spero began amassing the collection of plates she used to handprint these figures in the 1980s and they swiftly became a core component of her practice. Early examples of these printed works show Spero printing colorful figures directly onto white paper. By the 1990s, Spero’s printing practice had evolved to include bold, colorful backgrounds. Hues ranging from vibrant and bright to dark and muted take on a variety of forms, from multi-colored checkerboards to monochrome strokes, adding a rhythmic quality to the narratives Spero’s “stock company” present. In Spero’s own words, “these collages of handprinted figures are superimposed in fast rhythms to increase the tempo of actions of women in narrative/history.” In the largest work on paper in the exhibition, Relay (2000), Spero arranges the sweeping narrative in a series of smaller vignettes. Figures appear repeatedly against an ever-changing background; variations in color and pattern alter the viewer’s perspective and create a sense of dimensionality within the work. The size and spatiality of Relay reflect Spero’s unique approach to her signature medium, paper. Spero observed that painting was “too conventional, too establishment” and relished the freedom she found in the ephemeral quality of paper. The works on paper will be complemented by a sculptural work, Sheela-Na-Gig at Home (2000). This work places the Celtic goddess, who is symbolic of female fertility and is a common figure in Spero’s works, in a distinctly modern context: on a clothing line amongst contemporary women’s undergarments. The conceptual basis of this work first appeared in a 1995 performance in which the artist pins images of Sheela-Na-Gig and various women’s undergarments to a clothesline while remarking “A woman’s work is never done. This is the ancient Celtic goddess Sheela-Na-Gig. I also have to hang my laundry up, too; I don’t have a dryer. Well, I have to do the dishes now.” This performance was accompanied by directives for a recreation of the work, calling upon “women who wish to invigorate the feminine demiurge in the home and to expel male presences” to join Spero in the act of pinning Sheela-Na-Gig’s likeness to a clothesline. The work creates space for a critique of the expectations placed upon women in the domestic sphere and a rebellion against these notions. Works by Nancy Spero are currently on view at the MoMA, New York—the epic work on paper Notes in Time (1979) is on view in room 416; at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. in the exhibition Put it This Way: (Re)Visions of the Hirshhorn Collection; and at the Tate Modern, London alongside the work of her husband, Leon Golub, in a focused presentation within the Artist and Society collection display. Spero’s mosaic installation, Artemis, Acrobats, Divas and Dancers (2001), is on permanent display at the 66th Street-Lincoln Center Subway Station in New York.

Galerie Lelong & Co., New York is pleased to present Color Effects, a group exhibition featuring works by Candida Alvarez, Jose Dávila, Liz Deschenes, Terence Gower, Carmen Herrera, Alfredo Jaar, Rosemary Laing, Ana Mendieta, Hélio Oiticica, Yoko Ono, Pamela Rosenkranz, Kate Shepherd, Tariku Shiferaw, Michelle Stuart, Mildred Thompson, Charisse Pearlina Weston, and Amanda Williams. Taking as an entry point the color theories espoused by Bauhaus artists, designers, and thinkers, the exhibition touches upon the relativity of color’s perception, claims of its transcendence and universality, its ability to elicit emotion, and draw attention to pressing social and political issues. Drawing upon the historical legacies of Color Field painting, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Conceptualism, this exhibition presents an international roster of artists from different generations working across many media, all using color in highly personal ways. For many of the artists in the exhibition, color and geometric form work hand in hand to produce stunning visual effects. Preferring to use primary colors in her late works, Carmen Herrera creates a visual frisson with 5 Squares, 4 Rectangles (2017) by juxtaposing blue and red. An early progenitor of what came to be known as hard-edged abstraction, Herrera’s use of color complements her rigorous geometric forms. A red Relevo Espacial (Spatial Relief) (1959/1994) demonstrates how Hélio Oiticica liberated color into the participatory realm. His hanging wood constructions echo the sentiments of his earlier work, where flat planes of vibrant color shift according to the viewer’s position in order to encourage an active looking process. Oiticica became fundamental to the formation of the groundbreaking Neo-Concrete Movement (1959–61), which sought to impart the extreme rationalism of Concretism with emotion, sensuality, and subjectivity. Kate Shepherd balances color to induce a heightened emotional and visceral reaction as well as a reading of space while the glossy surface of the enamel reflects the painting’s surroundings. Jose Dávila’s Homage to the Square (2019) is a playful take on the iconic series by Joseph Albers. With this work, Dávila expands the two-dimensional square into a three-dimensional phenomenon, with the turquoise green edges of the mobile shifting in and out of focus in space. An all-over, gestural use of color is represented in works by Ana Mendieta, Mildred Thompson, and Candida Alvarez. In the film Butterfly (1975), Ana Mendieta incorporated a 16-channel video processor to add a high-contrast, polarized graphic-effect to images of herself with what appear to be feathered wings. This film demonstrates the artist’s technical innovations and singular approach to film. In her painting Radiation Explorations (1994), Mildred Thompson considered the theory that magnetic waves were yellow when seen on an ultraviolet scale and radiation waves blue, using color theory to juxtapose contrasting and complementary colors to represent the invisible phenomena. Candida Alvarez’s large, two-sided painting Walking in Blue, from the Air Paintings (2017-2019) (2018) is part of a series made in the wake of the devastation of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. Using colors drawn from her everyday surroundings and memory, Alvarez produces a swirling visual experience. A selection of Alvarez’s Air Paintings is currently on view in no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria at the Whitney Museum of American Art until April 23, 2023. Color can transcend the personal to enter the realm of the cultural and the allegorical. In her photograph Drapery and wattle (2017), Rosemary Laing adds a stream of brightly colored used clothes to the forest floor in her native Australia; the clothing is representative of the incursion of European settlers on the land, displacing the nature that was there before. On The Low (Burna Boy) (2022), is a continuation of a series of paintings by Tariku Shiferaw entitled One of These Black Boys, where each work is titled after music from genres originating in Black communities and features an expressively painted sky-blue background marked by bands of varying shades of black, representative of the spectrum of Blackness. Shiferaw’s work calls upon the many meanings evoked by the colors black and blue. In Pamela Rosenkranz’s Alien Blue Window (Loim, Via San Tomaso 53) (2017), the blue light emitting from the vaulted window shaped lightbox evokes the primordial ocean, the skies prevalent in medieval painting, as well as the digital hue of computer screens. The decline of analog photography is the subject of Alfredo Jaar’s Bye Bye Photography (1988), a work that consists of a melancholic, single, red lightbulb. According to Jaar, “I created this work the day I purchased my first digital camera in 1988. It was a way to mourn the era of analog photography, the hours I had spent in a dark room printing my own photographs.” For her series Color(ed) Theory, Amanda Williams repainted and photographed eight vacated and condemned houses in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago, drawing attention to the issue of underinvestment in African American communities around the city. The artist painted the buildings in a palette of colors found in products and services marketed primarily toward a Black audience. Works in the exhibition also point to the absence of color. Terence Gower’s El Muro Rojo (Barragán) (2005) features a black and white photograph on a red wall. The photograph is Gower’s version of one of Armando Salas Portugal’s iconic 1953 photographs of the home of Luis Barragán, now known as Casa Barragán. These early photographs were instrumental in establishing the Mexican-born architect’s international reputation though they are devoid of the vibrant color that made Barragán so well known. The cadmium red of the wall behind the photograph is the same color as the darker wall depicted in the roof wall photograph, allowing the viewer to complete the color with their imagination. White, Yoko Ono’s preferred “color,” allows the participant to be the main aesthetic value in the work touch me (edition) (2008), while Charisse Pearlina Weston uses smoky black glass in her sculpture entitled plained dreams (2021) to obscure. Underscoring the use of clear, transparent glass in carceral architecture for surveillance, Weston presents a fragile, precarious work of enfoldment and refusal. Weston’s first solo museum exhibition, of [a] tomorrow: lighter than air, stronger than whiskey, cheaper than dust, is on view at the Queens Museum through March 5, 2023. The materiality of color itself is central to works by Liz Deschenes and Michelle Stuart. Deschenes’s sculpture Untitled (LeWitt) #2 (2016) pays homage to Sol LeWitt, specifically a series of Polaroids the artist took of streets of the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1979. Over the years, the Polaroids faded, leaving magenta the dominant remaining color. In Deschenes’s sculpture, a framed sheet of acrylic printed with magenta ink cured by ultraviolet light, the process of making the work contrasts with the subject of the work: the destructive nature of light. Michelle Stuart’s Quirigua (1980) is titled after the site of an ancient Mayan city in Guatemala known for its sandstone ruins. A pink pigment is rendered from the dirt and stone gathered from the site by Stuart, who embeds fragments of the stone into the paper by pounding and rubbing; the color of the work is inextricable from the site from which it is collected.

Opening Thursday, October 27, 2022, 6:00pm – 8:00pm Galerie Lelong & Co., New York is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Ursula von Rydingsvard, presenting new sculptures and drawings by the artist. Celebrated for her monumental sculptures in outdoor and indoor spaces, von Rydingsvard rigorously innovates her visual language in movement and intensity, her practice—that now numbers more than five decades—is suffused with a rich synthesis of form and emotion. The gallery’s exhibition follows a tour de force in Poland; a major retrospective to three museums that marked von Rydingsvard’s homecoming. The artist was born to a Polish-Ukrainian family that was deported for forced labor in Germany during World War II and emigrated to the U.S. after. At the crux of von Rydingsvard’s desire for complexity is a profoundly vulnerable search and remembrance of places, people, and events. Grounded by her intuition, the artist has increased the depth and recurrence of thin, intricate crevices within the work’s interior, a technical accomplishment that rewards careful looking—an impression of a large mass accrues texture upon discovering gaps, punctures, and orifices smaller than a human hand. “The transitions claim a kind of movement, and I have the privilege of detouring these movements, making some larger than others. The movements for which I have an infinite amount of admiration are those on the surface of the ocean; for all of the world’s ocean surface, no one wave is like any other,” von Rydingsvard has shared. In addition to the works’ physicality, von Rydingsvard places the pieces in subtle tension with the surfaces they encounter. The largest wall-based work, OBUDOWAĆ (2020-21) evokes the language of painting through the artist’s creation of negative space achieved by leaving four-by-four cedar beams—the material she has been working with for over 50 years—untouched. Von Rydingsvard gives Polish titles to a majority of her sculptures, and OBUDOWAĆ [“rebuild”] is the first large sculpture produced after von Rydingsvard’s brief absence from the studio due to the pandemic. A new human-scale bronze work will be on view for the first time. Cast in bronze from a wood model, Bowl with Fingers evokes a form familiar to the artist’s oeuvre while the bronze compels von Rydinsgvard to consider the surface as a painting with each brush of the patina. Von Rydingsvard’s bold assertion in commandeering any available space is similarly expressed in her drawings which has evolved to become a large part of her practice over the past two years. As von Rydingsvard never drafts her sculptures on paper before carving them on wood, these rarely exhibited works rendered in charcoal and graphite on paper stand alone as a refulgent imprint of the artist’s expanding curiosity; a raw wonderment that recalls the artist’s roots in Post-Minimalism.

Opening Thursday, September 8, 2022, 6:00pm – 8:00pm Galerie Lelong & Co., New York is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, the artist’s first major solo exhibition in New York. I have withheld much more than I have written will feature new works: a large installation and a suite of paintings. The figures in Sunstrum’s works—often her alter-egos—are situated in undefinable landscapes; an exploration of cultural embeddedness within geology that reflects overlapping issues of colonialism, capitalism, and so-called global migration crises. With references to domestic environments, rurality, and systems of control, Sunstrum’s work journeys into processes of disintegration—processes that are at once intimate, violent, sensual, madding, and tender—in the pursuit of home and wholeness. The central thesis of the exhibition recalls the first vehicle for spectacle—Daguerre’s diorama of 1822—with a new installation from which a narrative saga unfolds. Upon entering the smaller gallery, visitors are met with the diptych The Committee (2022), depicting seated men and women in Victorian dress, their appraising gazes looking into the distance past a red projector and an empty red chair. Wooden pews invite visitors to sit and face the same direction as the figures, toward a free-standing installation on the other side of the room. A wooden structure that parallels the architecture of Victorian theatre through the proscenium arch frames a video work containing a living room setting; replete with the chairs and settees of Sunstrum’s paintings and the volcanic landscape from Daguerre’s diorama. Figures appear in the space, their gaze meeting those in The Committee. This atmosphere of surveilling tension seeps into the rest of the exhibition where new paintings are on view, rendered in oil and pencil on linen. As with much of Sunstrum’s oeuvre, the works emerge from a constellation of literary references including Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk (2018) (a quote from which gives the title of the show), and most notably, the writings of Bessie Head (b.1937-d.1986). In particular, Sunstrum references Head’s A Question of Power (1973), a semi-autobiographical work set “amidst the compartmentalization, fragmentation, and preoccupation with taxonomy that characterize and undermine life in Southern Africa.” Exuding a fluidity in her visual poems, Sunstrum layers references and metaphors within each work; a plastic chair ubiquitous in the Global South misses a leg, black and white checkerboard flooring do not offer a sense of place. The figures of Sunstrum’s work stand as a collective; they are often representations of herself through the alter-ego Asme (“as me”) or based on historic photographs of Black ancestors. “Identity, power, selfhood and the political power that comes along with those ideas can never be reduced to a single standing being. My single body is a representative of masses of bodies, whether as community or as ancestry or as collective history or collective memory, of solidarity,” the artist has said. This exhibition is organized in collaboration with Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, Johannesburg, and London. About the Artist The imagery in Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum’s work reflect the diverse genealogies of her experience living in different parts of Africa, Southeast Asia, and the U.S. as well as ongoing research of ethnography, ecology, and quantum physics. The artist’s boundary-crossing practice centers Black female identity in the discourse of postcolonialism and neocolonialism, highlighting the contributions of overlooked historical figures while emphasizing modes of knowledge and communication beyond the status quo. In 2023, the artist will show a newly commissioned solo project at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto and participate in the 15th Sharjah Art Biennale (SB15). Key exhibitions and performances include: Greater Toronto Art 2021 (GTA21), MOCA Toronto, Canada (2021); Born in Flames: Feminist Futures, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York City (2021); WITNESS: Afro Perspectives from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection, El Espacio 23, Miami, Florida (2021); Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum: All my seven faces, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Ohio (2019); Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, South Africa (2019); The Wiels, Brussels, Belgium (2019); Kunsthaus Zürich (2019); The Nest, The Hague (2019); Michaelis School for the Arts at the University of Cape Town (2018); Artpace, San Antonio, Texas (2018); The Phillips Museum of Arts, Lancaster (2018); Interlochen Centre for the Arts, Interlochen (2016); NMMU Bird Street Art Gallery, Port Elizabeth (2016); Tiwani Contemporary, London (2016); VANSA, Johannesburg (2015); Brundyn Gallery, Cape Town (2014); FRAC Pays de Loire, France (2013); the Havana Biennial (2012); and MoCADA, New York City (2011). Sunstrum was born in Mochudi, Botswana, in 1980 and now lives and works in Ottawa, Canada. The artist is represented by Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, Johannesburg, and London.

Galerie Lelong & Co., New York is pleased to announce the group exhibition Open Doors, organized with Welancora Gallery (Brooklyn, New York) and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles. Works by the galleries’ artists: Carl E. Hazlewood, Helen Evans Ramsaran, Chris Watts (represented by Welancora Gallery), and June Edmonds (represented by Luis De Jesus Los Angeles) will be presented in an unprecedented collaboration at Galerie Lelong’s location in Chelsea.

Opening Friday, May 13, 2022, 6:00pm – 8:00pm Artist-led exhibition walkthrough in conversation with Carlos Basualdo: Saturday, May 14, 4:00pm. REGISTER. Galerie Lelong & Co., New York is pleased to announce THE TEMPTATION TO EXIST, a solo exhibition by Alfredo Jaar. For over four decades, Alfredo Jaar (b. 1956, Santiago, Chile) has used photography, film, installation, and new media to create compelling works that examine complex socio-political issues and the ethics and limits of representation. The exhibition is constructed in two moments with two major installations, both presented in the U.S. for the first time. A newly commissioned work by the artist is concurrently on view in the Whitney Biennial (through September 5, 2022). The exhibition’s title makes a reference to a book by Emil Cioran, one of the artist’s favorite writers. A dark, subversive thinker, Cioran was the poet of pessimism. A philosopher who was always on the verge of suicide, he once said: “If I didn’t write, I could have become an assassin. Writing is a matter of life and death. Human existence, at its core, is endless anguish and despair, and writing can make things a bit more bearable. A book is a suicide postponed.” For Cioran, failure permeates everything. Great ideas can be stained by failure, and so can art and the human condition. “No longer wanting to be a man, he is dreaming of another form of failure,” he wrote. “The universe is one big failure, and not even poetry can succeed in correcting it.” For Jaar, art is the impossible answer to an impossible question: how do we make art when the world is in such a state? In the gallery’s main space, an immersive experience is created with a large, red neon work. The words of the stoic philosopher Seneca take center stage—"WHAT NEED IS THERE TO WEEP OVER PARTS OF LIFE? THE WHOLE OF IT CALLS FOR TEARS.” Seneca strongly believed that if we have the essentials and a strong inner spirit, we can radically accept and endure any circumstances. Eschewing the presence of other objects, the room is entirely illuminated with a dense red light, building an atmosphere of poetic uncertainty, mirroring the unease of contemporary times. The philosopher’s emblematic phrase glimmers in the space, reacting to the tyranny of the white box space and filling it with an idea—a model for thinking about the world. Jaar’s second installation in the exhibition fills the second, smaller gallery space with more than 95 works from a diverse group of artists as well as a small selection of his own works. Here, the artist has tried to create what he calls “a space of resistance, a space of hope.” In juxtaposition to Jaar’s own work that was primarily created in resistance to Pinochet’s dictatorial regime in Chile (1973-1989), he has selected works from more than 65 artists who have sought to resist and change the world since the 1960s. The in-progress list of artists include Art Workers’ Coalition, Claudio Abate, Bas Jan Ader, Claudia Andujar, Tanaka Atsuko, Fred Baldwin, Letizia Battaglia, Adolfo Bernal, Dawoud Bey, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, Marcel Broodthaers, Stanley Brouwn, Paulo Bruscky, Giovanna Calvenzi, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Luis Camnitzer, Vija Celmins, Lygia Clark, Hanne Darboven, Gino de Dominicis, Juan Downey, Valie Export, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Gilbert & George, Hans Haacke, David Hammons, Lyle Ashton Harris, Mona Hatoum, Jenny Holzer, Emily Jacir, Joan Jonas, Birgit Jürgenssen, On Kawara, Seydou Keïta, Yves Klein, Joseph Kosuth, Jannis Kounellis, Glenn Ligon, Anna Maria Maiolino, Piero Manzoni, Agnes Martin, Gordon Matta-Clark, Cildo Meireles, Ana Mendieta, Marisa Merz, Marzia Migliora, Daido Moriyama, Zanele Muholi, Shirin Neshat, Yoko Ono, Adam Pendleton, Giuseppe Penone, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Gerhard Richter, Lotty Rosenfeld, Doris Salcedo, Carolee Schneemann, Tomatsu Shomei, Malick Sidibé, Regina Silveira, Dayanita Singh, Nancy Spero, Diamond Stingily, Hank Willis Thomas, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Cecilia Vicuña, Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, Lawrence Weiner, Amanda Williams, Ernest Withers, Francesca Woodman, and Raúl Zurita. These works are brought together by Jaar in an examination of memory and political participation from the last 60 years, revealing the intersection between culture and democratic life. Exhibited in close proximity to each other, the resounding voices of the artists invoke a shared history and reclamation of agency—a “we” that urges to change the world. The artist will hold an exhibition walkthrough with Carlos Basualdo, Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, on Saturday, May 14, 2022 from 4:00pm to 5:00pm in the gallery. This exhibition is dedicated to Letizia Battaglia (b. March 5, 1935 – d. April 13, 2022).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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