Kasmin

Jan-Ole Schiemann’s second solo exhibition at Kasmin will present new paintings and works on paper from April 27 – June 3, 2023 at the gallery’s flagship location, 509 West 27th Street, New York. Schiemann’s energetic constructions are characterized by boldly abstract figures, vivid cumulous color clouds, and an assertive, instinctive use of shape and line. The artist’s most recent compositions meld fragments and echoes from his former visual vocabulary with new devices that together push the language of gestural abstraction into new territories.

Daniel Gordon: Free Transform presents a new series of richly-detailed, large-scale photographic prints alongside the debut of the artist’s three-dimensional vessel sculptures. Spanning the exhibition is the seven-panel Panoramic Still Life (2023), which extends 23 feet in width and functions as a single site-specific installation while allowing for its alternate presentation in individual works or groupings. Pushing the limits of both scale and dimensionality, Gordon expands the viewer’s visual experience to allow for an immersive ambulatory exploration of the exhibition space and, by extension, his constructed universe. As his subjects and objects glitch through multiple mediums, Gordon occasions a slippage that speaks to the camera’s capability to transform as well as document.

Kasmin is pleased to present Pataphysics and Play, an exhibition of sculpture by Barry Flanagan (1941–2009). Including never-before-seen work from the artist’s estate, this presentation will focus on the importance of the imaginary realm in both the tenets of play and the philosophy of ’pataphysics as coined by the French writer Alfred Jarry. Absurdity, Flanagan proposes, is equally as justifiable as profundity.

Spanning the years 1976 to 1981, The Beginning brings together the earliest works of acclaimed American photographer Tina Barney (b. 1945). Featuring images largely unseen by the public, the exhibition chronicles a period of technical and artistic development that would lay the foundation for the complex and incisive tableaux that ultimately established Barney as a key figure in international photography. While quarantining during the Covid-19 outbreak, Barney began to sort through her archive of thousands of 35mm negatives, discovering long-forgotten images that reanimated her memories of life as a young artist: “The photographs in this book seem like X-rays of my mind,” she has said. Concurrent with the exhibition, a book of fifty of the works will be published by Radius Books.

The first exhibition to focus exclusively on Jane Freilicher’s rarely-seen large-scale abstractions will go on view at Kasmin’s 509 West 27th Street space from March 2 – April 22, 2023. Demonstrating the expansiveness of Freilicher’s visual language and underscoring her contribution to a generation of New York City painters, Abstractions offers an opportunity to discover a series of work by an artist known primarily for her distinctive style of painterly representation. This is the third solo exhibition of work by Jane Freilicher to be staged at Kasmin, and it will be accompanied by a fully- illustrated catalogue featuring an introduction by Mary Gabriel, author of Ninth Street Women, and an essay by writer and scholar Erin Kimmel.

An exhibition of work spanning seven decades by Argentine-Italian artist Leonor Fini (1907–1996) explores themes of transformation, masquerade, and performance through paintings, sculpture, and works on paper sourced primarily from the artist’s estate. Fini’s deeply personal practice melds coded autobiographical references to her childhood in Trieste, Italy, with those spanning Shakespeare, Greek mythology, Egyptian and medieval history, and opera. The exhibition, which focuses on figurative depictions of subjects from drama, folklore, and dream, is the first solo presentation of work by Fini at Kasmin and will include costume and sculptural works recently exhibited in The Milk of Dreams: The 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia.

Featuring Diana Al-Hadid, Theodora Allen, Ali Banisadr, Bianca Bondi, Brendan Fernandes, Barbara Kasten, Lap-See Lam, Zoë Paul, Ana Pellicer, Naama Tsabar, and Sif Itona Westerberg. Kasmin is pleased to present Shades of Daphne, a timely survey of painting, sculpture, installation, and film by a group of 11 international and intergenerational contemporary artists, many of whom have not previously exhibited in the United States. Bringing together recent and historical works spanning over three decades from the 1990s to the present, the exhibition includes new commissions, site-specific performances and installations that respond to the architecture of the gallery space.

Alexander Harrison’s Big World will bring together fourteen enigmatic and intimately-scaled new paintings by the artist whose dreamscapes and object-symbols blend illusion and fantasy with archetypes from cultural history. This is Harrison’s first solo exhibition at Kasmin. Harrison sets up his paintings as portals into a vivid universe of elusive narratives brimming with searching, loneliness, escape, and entrapment. Scenes set at dusk or early morning capture the border between light and dark when the sky is at its most chromatic and stars punctuate a backdrop of deep blue. Paired with a conflation of seasons, Harrison renders an unreality that he compares to a fever dream, loaded with ambiguous symbolism, personified flowers and birds, trees in multiple forms, and figures that resist being seen in their totality. Working directly from an inner consciousness, Harrison brings myriad metaphysical references into his compositions, loading the work with an ineffable talismanic quality especially present in the artist’s intimately-scaled work.

Three large-scale sculptures by multidisciplinary artist Brendan Fernandes (b. 1979, Nairobi, Kenya) will be installed in the Kasmin Sculpture Garden from January 12 – April 1, 2023. Presented as an extension of Shades of Daphne, which runs from January 12 – February 22, 2023, at 509 West 27th Street, the exhibition employs deconstructed impressions of the body as a framework for institutional critique, addressing issues of race, queer culture, migration, and collective movement. The exhibition will be activated by site-specific, commissioned dance-based performances that blend elements of traditional ballet, improvised dance movements and queer club culture, manifested with the surging collective energy of political protest. Costumes designed by Nobis.

In collaboration with the Estate of JB Blunk, Kasmin presents the first exhibition of the artist’s jewelry, alongside a selection of paintings, ceramics, and wooden sculpture, to go on view at 514 West 28th Street in concurrence with NYC Jewelry Week. Many of the works on view were made by Blunk for his partner and muse Christine Nielson, as well as for family friends, in his studio on their property in Inverness, California. They include earrings, necklaces, bracelets, rings, and belts, all realized with the material and formal character of the artist’s much larger sculpture. Informed by an unfaltering reverence for the natural world and his interest in ecology and primordial landscapes, Blunk took forms from antiquity and mysticism, reimagining them instinctively through sourced and salvaged natural materials.

An upcoming exhibition of sculpture by French conceptual artist Bernar Venet (b. 1941) will bring together major large-scale works spanning the artist’s expansive oeuvre, including the first New York presentation of Pile of Coal (1963), Venet’s first sculptural work widely recognized as a pioneering example of sculpture without a specific shape. Offering American audiences the opportunity to see several historically significant works in one setting, the exhibition will also include works on paper and documentation of Venet’s earliest artistic gestures hailing from the 1960s. On opening night, Gravity will commence with a performance by the artist. To accompany the presentation, The Kasmin Review will publish the first English version of the essay Bernar Venet: The Hypothesis of Gravity by Maurice Fréchuret, translated by John O’Toole.

Somatic Markings features seven international artists that employ the nude figure to grapple with issues of contemporary corporeal politics. Incorporating feminist, queer, and postcolonial methodologies that are constitutive of the artists’ personal histories, these works disassemble notions of the traditional nude, transforming the figure into a medium for nuanced discussions that develop on and beyond issues of identity or the reclamation of the gaze. Rendered in vivid hues that blur the line between figuration and abstraction, the exhibited works respond formally with a rejection of the binaries that underscore the logical fallacies of many forms of oppression.

Kasmin is pleased to announce vanessa german: Sad Rapper. The artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery will go on view from September 8–October 29, 2022, showcasing ambitious new freestanding and wall-based sculpture in an installation that confronts urgent social and political themes of racial oppression, structural violence, commemoration, and community.

Kasmin is delighted to present Procession, the first New York solo exhibition of work by London-based artist Sara Anstis. Anstis’s evocative paintings and soft pastels on paper mine art history to render a darkly humorous universe defined by its rich layers of meaning and symbolism, its indeterminate, primarily nocturnal landscapes, and a population of deftly lit figures that seem to hark from the realms of folklore, dream, and mythology.

Kasmin is pleased to present Dogville, an exhibition of new paintings by Lyn Liu (b. 1993, Beijing). Liu’s work addresses the psychological tension underpinning relationships between individuals through a sequence of uncanny cinematic tableaux. Comprised of paintings realized between 2019–2022, the exhibition draws from the artist’s personal experiences of alienation, utilizing symbolism and an atmosphere of the absurd to provoke reflections on what Liu considers our oppressive social reality. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition. Conceiving of her compositions as stills in an overarching though dislocated narrative, the artist takes a filmic approach to considerations of light, staging, and costume. Depicting scenes often situated in the evening or at night, Liu’s tightly rendered dreamscapes feature figures whose identities are concealed, masked, presented alongside a doppelganger, or hidden in shadow. This voyeurist instinct—a longing to see without being seen—acts both as a visual strategy and a window into the artist’s experience as a child, when she traveled between cultures feeling like a perpetual outsider. The striking symbols in Liu’s paintings pulsate with a nihilist or existentialist philosophy in the vein of Albert Camus and Franz Kafka, whose work the artist has referenced throughout her oeuvre. In Huggermugger (2022), a rotund, diamond-patterned structure conceals the identity of two bartenders who offer glasses of what might be champagne yet carry the risk of poison. Liu’s interest in the book The Architectural Uncanny by Anthony Vidler further elaborates on the metaphorical potential of buildings and interiors in the work to speak to our modern condition. The artist repeatedly returns to animal subjects as counterparts to her human figures, such as in Conference and Cherry Pie (both 2019). Recognizing both wild and domesticated animals as unknowable, unpredictable, and potentially dangerous, Liu’s use of ostriches, frogs, and kangaroos as symbols occasions a fissure between the cycle of mutual observation found in human society. Employed here, they act to highlight the confusion of spectacle and the sense of alienation that can attend a condition of being observed. Lyn Liu (b.1993) was born in Beijing, China, and is based in New York. Liu works primarily in painting, printmaking, and independent publications. She received her MFA from School of the Arts, Columbia University, New York, in 2022, and her BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, in 2016. Liu also attended École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, from 2017 to 2020. For more information, please contact info@kasmingallery.com For press requests, please contact press@kasmingallery.com

Dissolving Realms, curated by Katy Hessel, brings together works spanning over 70 years in a focused survey of painterly investigations into the limits of representation. The paintings on view incorporate fantastical and cosmological themes to conjure realms that either flicker on the precipice of abstraction or dissolve completely into pure color and form. With an international eye, Dissolving Realms draws widely from both art historical and contemporary practices to reflect on the legacies and impact that 20th century artists—namely those associated with Abstract Expressionism, color field painting and Surrealism—have had on young painters of today. The earliest works on view were realized in 1946 by British artist Ithell Colquhoun (1906–1988), whose interest in the natural world, esotericism, and the occult prompted her to develop a new mode of painting. Teetering between reality and imagination, biomorphic shapes and those typically associated with the female body, Coloquhoun’s paintings verge on the surreal. Her works also reflect the organic landscape of Cornwall, on the South West coast of Britain, where the artist was based. In dialogue with work made in 2021 and 2022, Colquhoun’s paintings spark correlations between representation vs abstraction in a postwar world and in painting today. Leonor Fini represents the epitome of the ambiguity explored in the exhibition—figures in a dense fecund natural environment can also be read as emerging from abstract color play. Her work draws parallels between the representation of landscape’s natural formal ambiguity and the use of abstract plains of pigment in the lineage of color field painting. This element is further heightened by her work’s conversation with Helen Frankenthaler’s Wine Dark (1965) a luscious composition, executed in the artist’s soak-stain technique, comprising crimson and deep-brown organic forms and interspersed with brilliant whites and oranges. Leonora Carrington’s Composition (Ur of the Chaldees) (1950) made shortly after the artist migrated from Europe to Mexico City, is a disquieting moonlit scene, with sphinxlike creatures that morph in and out of the desert landscape. Landscape and water are driving forces in this exhibition: from Tom Anholt’s silent, isolated and moonlit waterfalls, Jake Grewal’s mythical figures set amidst trees or which bath in natural pools to Naudline Pierre’s hybridized bodies that sit between celestial or subaqueous worlds. Nengi Omuku draws on vegetal and cosmological landscape, whereas Flora Yukhnovich’s jewel-like studies look to outdoor parkland scenes popular in the 18th century (referencing, in rococo terms, the ‘fête galante’). Feelings of otherworldliness dominate this exhibition and question the intrinsic ambiguity of certain forms in the natural world. The alchemy of night becoming day, or day becoming night, is skewed by Louise Giovanelli’s discolike painting, Orbiter (2022). Similarly, Antonia Showering blurs the boundaries between which bodies begin and end. Writing with explosive energy, two paintings by Lee Krasner—Icarus and Chrysalis (both 1964)—feel purely analogous to the act of creation itself. Recalling the Big Bang, the compositions’ swooping gestures are reminiscent of comet tails, half-moon crescents, and celestial realms. With a love of the natural world, its colors and complex forms, Krasner often described her work as “organic”. Howardena Pindell’s Space Frame #2, (1969) is a dispersed composition of grids and dashes in pastel tones across canvas. While drawing on a wide range of subject matter, from the personal and diaristic to the social and political, Pindell similarly looked to the recurring biomorphic forms of the natural world: “Circles are an iconic form: the sun, the moon, the Earth, the planets.” Pindell shares an atmospheric quality with Louise Giovanelli, a delicacy and luminosity, challenges the eye by dissolving representation into carefully crafted textures and patterns. With its landscapes of paint and kaleidoscopic scenes made up of shards of glimmering color, this show aims to pinpoint a dialogue between mid-century artists and those working today. Dissolving Realms is the first exhibition in the United States to be curated by British art historian, curator, and broadcaster Katy Hessel. Hessel runs the Instagram account and podcast The Great Women Artists, and is a Curatorial Trustee of Charleston, the former home of the Bloomsbury Group. She has written extensively on the subject of women artists for British Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, and runs the annual The Great Women Artists Residency at Palazzo Monti for emerging artists. She regularly presents arts documentaries for the BBC and her first book, The Story of Art without Men, will be published by Penguin in the UK September 2022 (US publisher to be announced soon). For more information, please contact info@kasmingallery.com For press materials, please contact press@kasmingallery.com

Kasmin is thrilled to present an exhibition of paintings by James Rosenquist, staged in collaboration with the Estate of James Rosenquist, on view at 509 West 27th Street from April 28–June 4, 2022. Realized between 1989 and 1992, the works share several unique formal elements that combine in a compelling exploration of the rapidly changing world of the late 20th century. Blending abstract forms and figuration in a dynamic cacophony of imagery, the works probe both ecological and political themes and can be read as both celebrations of natural habitats as well as elegies to their desecration on a global and cosmic scale. Searingly relevant today, Rosenquist’s approach to image-making tests the possibilities of perception and asks us to consider forms of consumerism and consumption that affect our climate, our natural world, and the space our planet inhabits.

Kasmin is delighted to present Lyric Suite, an exhibition of more than sixty works on paper by Robert Motherwell. Staged in partnership with the Dedalus Foundation, Lyric Suite will go on view at 297 Tenth Avenue from April 28 to June 4, 2022, marking the fifth solo presentation of work by the artist at the gallery. Conceived by Motherwell as an enterprise of free and vigorous drawing, the Lyric Suite series was executed over the course of a few short weeks and consists of identically scaled compositions analogous to an extended series of musical variations. A virtuosic display of Motherwell’s graphic invention, the works possess a significant emotive power and represent a profound meditation on the history of drawing and of mark making itself.

Kasmin is pleased to present Hammer and Hand, a new exhibition of sculpture by James Metcalf (1925–2012) to go on view at 297 Tenth Avenue from March 3–April 23, 2022. Bringing together works spanning almost 60 years and demonstrating the American artist’s startlingly original vocabulary of forms and techniques, the exhibition will be the first at the gallery dedicated to Metcalf’s practice and is staged in close collaboration with his family. A new essay by the artist's biographer, Roy Skodnick, will be published on the occasion of the exhibition. The formal elegance of Metcalf’s oeuvre speaks to his profound mastery of metal. Rendering works splendidly in copper, iron, and brass, the artist blends the biomorphic character of post-war surrealism with an obsession with material and the collaborative world of artisans. His sensibility is grounded by a comprehensive knowledge of Gothic, Romanesque and Medieval art as well as a technical interest in Art Deco and Art Nouveau. Metcalf voraciously studied and drew inspiration from various metalwork techniques, especially those of ancient Greco-Roman civilizations, while engaging stylistically with Celtic art’s surface ornament and proliferation of animal forms. After initially eschewing power tools for manually operated ones, the artist later included machinery and invented implements to coax his stylistic forms, guided by the belief that form should follow material.

Kasmin is pleased to announce a major upcoming exhibition of work by Dorothea Tanning to go on view at 509 West 27th Street from March 3–April 16, 2022. Dorothea Tanning: Doesn’t the Paint Say It All? brings together canvases and works on paper drawn from the artist’s remarkable oeuvre to present the most comprehensive solo presentation of her work for US audiences in decades. This is the first exhibition at Kasmin dedicated to the work of Tanning, whose pioneering explorations into the space between abstraction and figuration continue to influence vital painters today. Spanning four decades from 1947–1987, and including significant examples on loan from major museum collections and important private collections, the exhibition will trace Tanning’s stylistic arc from its roots in surrealism through interrelated phases of the artist’s career to what became a deeply original and timeless painting practice. Across these bodies of work, Tanning’s unique formal language is characterized by the tension between figuration and abstraction. Her insistence on mystery and enigma encourages an experience of ongoing discovery for the viewer. Dorothea Tanning: Doesn’t the Paint Say It All? takes its title from the artist’s own writing, and on the occasion of the exhibition, Kasmin will publish a fully illustrated, scholarly catalogue, featuring Tanning’s essay entitled “To Paint,” a poetic and impassioned text first published in 1986 that resembles a personal manifesto on her own creative process and the nature of the medium. The book will also include reflections on Tanning’s paintings by three art historians and scholars of surrealism: Mary Ann Caws, Katharine Conley, and Victoria Carruthers (author of the recent monograph Dorothea Tanning: Transformations, Lund Humphries, 2020), with an introduction by Pamela S. Johnson, Executive Director of The Dorothea Tanning Foundation and The Destina Foundation. Both endowed by the artist, the foundations have collaborated in the staging of this presentation at Kasmin.

Kasmin is pleased to present the curated exhibition Surrealist Collaboration: Poetry, Art, Literature, Ingenuity and Life Itself, in collaboration with Timothy Baum. On view at 297 Tenth Avenue from January 20 through February 26, 2022, the exhibition will examine the diverse collaborations between Surrealist artists, with a strong focus on the Cadavre exquis. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue with new text written by Timothy Baum. In addition to over 20 rarely-seen collaborative works, the exhibition will also present archival material that attests to the wide range of projects worked on by multiple artists, including manifestos, group discussions, publications, and films. The Cadavre exquis works, co-created by major figures of surrealism such as André Breton, René Magritte, Yves Tanguy and Remedios Varo, alongside lesser-known artists from the period, are evocative of the integral cooperative aspect of Surrealism burgeoning in New York and Europe, particularly in Paris, from the 1920s and onwards. The dynamic contributions of numerous female Surrealists, including Nusch Éluard, Violette Hérold, Germaine Hugnet, Valentine Hugo, Jacqueline Lamba, and Jeannette Tanguy, are also highlighted. Cadavre exquis evolved as a parlor game in 1925, the design of which is attributed to André Breton, Yves Tanguy, Jacques Prévert, and Marcel Duchamel during an evening of games in Paris. Folding a piece of paper into multiple horizontal panels, each artist would take a turn to illustrate a section with the caveat that they could not look at the other artists’ contributions while producing their own. Once each section was completed, the paper would be unfolded to reveal an inventive and surreal composition. Creases in the paper allowed some continuity, but the rest was left to chance. Play, a crucial component of the Surrealist process, was understood to lessen the instinct for order, engage the unconscious and bring forth otherwise sublimated images. Exploiting the phenomenon of the happy accident, Cadavre exquis culminates in the revelation, once unfolded, of comic, grotesque and nonsensical images, varied in their styles and imagination.

Kasmin is delighted to present a major exhibition of work by Elliott Puckette (b. 1967) to go on view at 509 West 27th Street from January 13–February 26, 2022. The exhibition will debut the artist's sculpture, alongside several new large-scale paintings and a suite of works on paper. Together, they represent a significant development in Puckette’s dedicated explorations into the nature and limits of linear abstraction. This is the artist’s ninth solo exhibition at Kasmin, preceding the publication of her first major monograph in Spring 2022. The elegant simplicity of Puckette’s line belies its complex process. With brisk, confident gestures, the artist etches pirouetting inlets into board washed with layers of gesso and ink. The colored washes create distinctive atmospheres in each work—brooding storm clouds of gray and tumultuous seas of dark purple. Puckette uses a razor blade to draw her arcs, carving out pathways instinctively with exquisite light touch. Later, she returns to deepen the furrows with cross-hatching—a labor-intensive process that inherently slows the line, subtracting it from the painting and delineating its negative space. In recent bodies of work, Puckette has developed her use of line by first rendering it three dimensions, making ephemeral sculptures out of wire. By translating the form of the maquette, Puckette flattens, and thus further abstracts, the line. As such, the works capture a silhouette of their three-dimensional references, a fleeting snapshot of perspective. For the first time, this exhibition presents both large and medium scale sculpture by the artist, inviting further immersion into the language, form, and logic of the line. Cast in bronze, the largest of these works spans nearly 16 feet in length.

In her exhibition GASLIGTING FOREVER, Judith Bernstein presents a series of large-scale paintings that represent the culmination of over a half-century’s commitment to confronting the injustices of power and politics within a sexual lens. Exhibited in the gallery’s 514 West 28th Street location, this explosive series incorporates the artist’s signature use of fluorescent paint displayed under black light and will be presented with a limited-edition silkscreen print entitled Equality (2021), created in the spirit of the artist’s iconic 1995 charcoal drawing of the same title. “Gaslighting” is a term coined by the 1944 thriller “Gaslight,” featuring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. Referencing the movie’s plot, it has since come into popular lexicon to describe a situation wherein an abuser encourages their target to question and undermine their judgment and sanity. Gaslighting is a psychological battleground relating to toxic power dynamics, pervasive across personal and political realms. An insightful subtlety in Judith's series is her intentional misspelling of “Gasligting” in each painting, removing the “h,” so that the viewer is prompted to momentarily question their own sanity.

Cynthia Daignault’s (b. 1978) first solo exhibition at the gallery will open on November 18, 2021, exploring the subject of Gettysburg National Military Park to propose a contemporary response to the genre of history painting. On view through January 8, 2022, the exhibition expands on themes explored in the artist’s earlier Light Atlas and Elegy series, investigating concepts of monument, memory, and the shifting experience of the natural world. As I Lay Dying includes wide-ranging depictions of the battlefields and woodlands of the park, as well as paintings of text drawn from Lincoln’s historic address, and ghostly nocturnes of Civil War monuments. Daignault’s approach is a rumination on the meaning of site and time—time elapsed since the battle, time spent walking its fields, and time shared between the viewer and the work.

Kasmin is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Roxy Paine (b. 1966, New York) at 509 West 27th Street from November 4 to December 23, 2021. Comprising an installation of thirteen relief paintings and one of the artist’s Dioramas, the works extend Paine’s epistemological investigations into the interconnected structures that constitute both the natural world and the systems humanity has imposed on it. Obscuring the delineation between abstraction and the representation of landscape, soil, and flora, the works deliberately obscure the scale of their subjects to present simultaneously micro- and macroscopic perspectives of biological and geological phenomena, as well as the maps we use to notate the world around us. Paine’s constructions of these phenomena, including mycelium, molds, and rock material, entangle the dichotomy of beauty and destruction as they draw parallels between the patterns associated with the organic, the industrial, and the digital. Whether cells, bolts, or pixels, Paine repeatedly brings the accumulation of these formative units into absurdity, asking us to question how perception is framed, filtered, and codified. Paine’s exploration into stratigraphy acts to interweave three distinct temporal frameworks: geological, fungal, and human. Time becomes the subject, as well as the perception of time and the way that the understanding of geology forces a different frame of reference. The artist has long been fascinated by fungi and its ability to productively transform dead matter into building blocks that other entities can harness to create new life. Their traditional medicinal uses, to induce perceptual shifts and philosophical epiphanies, is also of interest.

Kasmin is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by painter Liam Everett, who has joined the gallery’s roster of artists. On meeting again will be on view from October 14 to November 13, 2021, at 297 Tenth Avenue, bringing together 11 large-scale works that demonstrate the artist’s distinctive abstract mixed-media painting. Everett’s experiments in the development of a self-sustaining studio practice see him employing a process of steadfast and repetitious application and erasure, using non-traditional methods to apply—and caustic substances to remove—painstakingly developed layers of paint and composition. A catalogue, featuring a conversation with Everett, will be published in tandem with the exhibition.

Kasmin is pleased to announce Balcony, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with Elliott Hundley (b. 1975), which will be on view at 509 West 27th Street from September 9–October 23, 2021. Taking its inspiration from Jean Genet’s 1957 play, The Balcony, the exhibition consists of ten large scale panels as well as a suspended sculpture that together epitomize the artist’s distinctive mixed-media compositional style. The gradual accumulation of imagery for an initially undetermined use is a critical element of the artist’s process. At his studio in Los Angeles, Hundley presides over a vast archive of two- and three-dimensional materials, categorized alphabetically and according to color or mood, and collated from books, magazines, and establishments in his local neighborhood. A cacophony of found images drawn from both 20th century and contemporary sources are brought together by Hundley in impressionistic and experimental panels that meld iconography from mid-century American urbanism with motifs drawn from classical and religious cultures. The artist’s own photography of family and friends appear among the fragments, costumed and posed as figures in relief, conjuring a drama that captures both the reality and fantasy of theater. These layers of meticulously compiled material and mixed-media elements are affixed using industrial fabric pins and interspersed with painterly interventions, creating a melding of foreground and background amounting to a formal distortion. The effect is a boisterous tableau of signifiers that lend credence to the narrative complexities of the artist’s source text, with panels evoking theatrical backdrops, battle advancement maps, or montages of an eternal present. Hundley has described his work as “a contemporary iteration of gestural abstraction,” noting that, “painting is a stage on which I leave evidence of a performance.” Genet’s The Balcony is set among a brothel in an unnamed city experiencing revolutionary upheaval. As patrons cycle through what amounts to a safe haven amid the tension outside, they unassumingly reveal the myriad and complex ways in which power and desire are refracted through our assumptions of social or moral hierarchies. Hundley’s works, which are titled after key characters in the play—Queen, Madam, Thief, Bishop, General, Judge, Rebel, and Sinner—present an abstracted glimpse into its narrative and motifs of fantasy, illusion, and trickery. In Fall 2021, Hundley will unveil a new 40-ft mural as part of contemporary art triennial Prospect New Orleans that investigates the same text. In Balcony, Hundley marshalls the many interconnected aspects that constitute his practice in order to reimagine the presentation of assemblage at a theatrical scale. Chandelier (2021), an example of the artist’s work in sculpture that utilizes found materials and neon, is suspended from the gallery ceiling. Spanning over six feet, the work acts as both a centerpiece of the exhibition and an allusion to the chandelier in Genet’s set design. This project continues the artist’s interest in literature and mythology which has previously informed projects such as his 2011 solo exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio, which travelled to the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, and took on the ancient Greek tragedy The Bacchae by Euripides as its subject matter. In 2006, the artist’s installation at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, referenced Greek figures Aphrodite, Medea, and Penelope, and 2016-17, Hundley presented solo exhibitions based on Antonin Artaud’s surrealist 1933 play There Is No More Firmament. ABOUT ELLIOTT HUNDLEY Elliott Hundley’s work is included in significant international public collections including The Broad, Los Angeles, CA; DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, Turkey; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX; Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. In 2019, Hundley inaugurated the exhibition series Open House at MOCA, Los Angeles, exploring how the visual and material logic of collage has informed artists in MOCA’s collection, as well as his own practice.

Kasmin is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Matvey Levenstein. Composed of paintings depicting scenes drawn from the artist’s life in New York City and Orient, a hamlet on the tip of the North Fork of Long Island, the exhibition will go on view at the gallery’s 297 Tenth Avenue location on September 9, 2021. This is Levenstein’s second solo exhibition at Kasmin. The subjects of these paintings are the subjects of autonomy. Atmospheric landscapes that suggest the possibility of the sublime, and domestic interiors with implied privacy and personhood, portray the conditions under which an object of autonomous painting might be possible. Invoking the intersection at which avant-garde cinema meets the tradition of European painting, Levenstein’s work explores and embodies the object-image relationship. Enigmatic by way of their ambiguous temporality, the paintings share some of their distinctive formal qualities with the languorous, single-shot cinematic takes of Andrei Tarkovsky and might be compared to film stills sequestered from the linear sequentiality of an unknown narrative. When brought together in an exhibition, the paintings inflect one another’s meaning to reveal their hidden connectivity. Levenstein’s cinematic discourse collides with the tenets of Caspar David Friedrich in the amorphous storm clouds of Once Again (2020) and the looming crowd of maple trees in After The Rain (2020). Characterized, but not overpowered, by nature’s brooding presence, these paintings play with trespassing the imposed borders between the human and natural world. These are also works of discipline and considered self-restraint, rendered slowly using a starkly limited palette of oil on toned ground applied to wood, linen, or copper. The slowness or perhaps stillness contained and espoused by Levenstein’s paintings invite interior reflections both formal and metaphysical, further emphasized by the mirroring and distortion that recur as motifs throughout this body of work. Composed over many months, the works present scenes that can be better understood contextualized by their half-mile radius in distance from the artist’s home and studio in Orient, New York. Similar to William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County (the mythical region based largely on the author’s home), Levenstein’s locale is fictionalized as it is transformed. His intuitive sense of familiarity with his subject allows Levenstein complete immersion in the material conditions of the painting wherein momentary impressions of rural and domestic life, such as the painter’s wife sitting among myriad reflections of the interior space (Springtime Flowers, 2020), are balanced between representation and presentation. This practice is further exemplified by the artist’s revisiting of certain images in his work, neither attempting replicas nor effectively trying to avoid them from occurring. ABOUT MATVEY LEVENSTEIN Matvey Levenstein was born in 1960 in Moscow, U.S.S.R. and lives and works in New York City and Orient, NY. He received his M.F.A. at Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT, after attaining a B.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, and the Moscow Architectural Institute, Moscow, U.S.S.R. Levenstein teaches at the School of Visual Art, New York, NY. He is included in the 2019 publication, Landscape Painting Now, edited by Todd Bradway.

Stuart Davis in Havana presents ten evocative early watercolors painted in 1920 following Stuart Davis’ brief yet formative trip to Havana, Cuba, where the artist convalesced after contracting Spanish flu.

Kasmin is pleased to present a group exhibition of contemporary painters, all of whom hail from Canada or have spent significant periods of their art education or artmaking career there. Presenting work by Sara Anstis, Jane Corrigan, Holly Coulis, Wanda Koop, Manuel Mathieu, Stephanie Temma Hier, Corri-Lynn Tetz, Tristan Unrau, Janet Werner, Anna Weyant, Chloe Wise, and Matthew Wong, North by Northeast draws a through-line charting the distinctive ways in which artists from the region complicate traditional genres of portraiture and landscape painting.

Psychologically charged and compulsively expressive, Alma Allen’s (b. 1970) sculptures evoke a curiosity regarding the life of objects and the ways in which form and material can circumnavigate the utility of language. Known for his distillation of diverse organic references, the artist’s works simultaneously invite and resist classification. Works by the artist currently span two of the gallery’s locations in Chelsea, New York. On view through August 13, 2021, the presentation in the Kasmin Sculpture Garden constitutes the artist’s first ever exhibition dedicated to large-scale outdoor sculpture. The exhibition continues at 514 West 28th Street with works that function as both articulations of the polymorphous nature of Allen’s sculptural alphabet and as proposals for future large-scale works. By contextualizing these works amongst one another, the presentation demonstrates the variety of embodied forms that find expression through the artist’s hand.

A new exhibition of work by Robert Polidori presents the artist’s large-scale color photographs of the ancient frescoes found among the ruins of Pompeii, Italy. Taken in 2017 and exhibited in North America for the first time, the works continue Polidori’s lifelong investigation into the spiritual and psychological resonance of architecture and interior spaces. The exhibition will be on view at 297 Tenth Avenue in New York from April 22 to May 15, 2021. Depicted in many of the works in the series is the Villa dei Misteri, a well-preserved dwelling on the outskirts of the city famous for its exquisite frescoes clustered in one room. These artworks, originating from 70-60 BC and restored between 2013-15, are among the best known of the relatively rare survivals of Ancient Roman painting and are understood to portray the rites of a young woman as she is inducted into the mystical cult of Bacchus. Polidori has since remarked upon the aesthetic continuity between the pagan rituals represented in the Pompeii murals, and the Christian imagery that defines the frescoes of Fra Angelico, a previous subject of the artist. While our cultures and rituals transform, the iconographic representational style remains remarkably consistent. Utilizing a large-format camera and employing exposures of up to five minutes in natural light, Polidori is able to produce intricately detailed images at scale. As he explores rooms as metaphors for states of being, what at first might be mistaken for elaborate decorative motifs, painted to adorn a wealthy family’s accommodation, are revealed by Polidori to be imbued with a deeper force, acting as iterations of memory systems for whole cultures. Acting as a medium,Polidori reveals to us these interlacing layers of the past. The Roman city of Pompeii, which lies at the foot of the volcanic Mount Vesuvius, has been largely preserved in ash since its eruption in 79 AD, and has been the site of excavation from 1909 onwards. This is Polidori’s third exhibition at Kasmin. The widely acclaimed photographer is most immediately recognized for his career-spanning work at the Château de Versailles, as well as his photographs of the fading grandeur of Havana and the devastating destruction of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. His “Dendritic Cities” captures the rampant and spectacular growth that has appeared in the last decades in cities such as Amman,Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro. Photographs from Hotel Petraillustrate how human interventions and the passing of time are inscribed on the surfaces of walls, and the rooms themselves bear witness to their history. His most recent photographs from the Convento di San Marco in Florence capture the solemnity and sheer force of the 15th Century frescoes by Fra Angelico. In 2020, Polidori was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has also received the World Press Award (1998) and, twice, the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award for Magazine Photography (1999 and 2000). He has had major solo exhibitions throughout the world, including the record-breaking show, “New Orleans After the Flood”, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in 2006. From 2017-18, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles exhibited a body of the artist's photographs commissioned by The New Yorker at the time of the museum’s opening in 1997. Polidori’s photographs are held in numerous collections: the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris; the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Polidori lives and works in Ojai, California.

Kasmin is pleased to announce Lee Krasner: Collage Paintings 1938–1981. Presented in collaboration with the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the exhibition is on view at 509 West 27th Street from March 11 through April 24, 2021, accompanied by a fully-illustrated, hardcover catalogue. Featuring several masterpieces from the 1955 debut of Krasner’s collage paintings at the Stable Gallery, as well as significant works from the artist’s 2019–2021 traveling European retrospective, this exhibition provides American audiences with the opportunity to further examine one of Krasner’s most innovative practices. Throughout her indelible career, Lee Krasner’s tireless and fierce self-examination compelled the artist to destroy previous works and reconstitute their elements into new compositions. This practice of reclaiming past works of her own, as well as those of her husband, Jackson Pollock, resulted in many of Krasner’s most novel bodies of work in which elements of painting, drawing, and collage coexist in dramatic compositions. Increasingly regarded as one of the most philosophical and unwavering pioneers of the Abstract Expressionist movement in America, Lee Krasner’s collage paintings represent some of the artist’s most conceptual and emotionally charged works. Included in the exhibition are pivotal works from Lee Krasner Collages at the Stable Gallery, New York, in 1955, which Clement Greenberg would later proclaim as a “major addition to the American art scene of the era.”[1] Reviewing the exhibition, painter Fairfield Porter remarked, “When nature is photographed in detail, its orderliness appears: Krasner’s art, which seems to be about nature, instead of making the spectator aware of a grand design, makes [them] aware of a subtle disorder greater than [they] might otherwise have thought possible.”[2] Stretched Yellow (1955) and Blue Level (1955), which were shown in the Stable Gallery exhibition, are two of a concise group of five works created in the same year in the same imposing vertical scale; the latter of which was also featured in the artist’s recent traveling retrospective. Following the recent close of Lee Krasner: Living Colour, the tour de force European retrospective curated by Eleanor Nairne of the Barbican Centre, London, which traveled to the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, Germany; the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Switzerland; and the Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain, a number of works from the exhibition will also be included in Lee Krasner: Collage Paintings 1938–1981 at Kasmin. With Bald Eagle (1955) Krasner masters the all-over composition and conjures the cut-outs of Henri Matisse, while remaining acutely self-referential in her bold amalgamation of unprimed canvas with parts of Jackson Pollock’s drawings from the 50s. Imperfect Indicative (1976) belongs to “Eleven Ways to Use the Words to See,” a striking series in which Krasner integrated early charcoal drawings that were realized under the tutelage of Hans Hofmann between 1937 and 1940. Executed during the same period of the charcoal drawings, Seated Figure (1938-39) is the earliest known collage painting by Krasner. A formal feat inspired by Picasso’s cubist style, this work reveals Krasner’s burgeoning interest in integrating collage techniques with oil painting on canvas and linen. Another noteworthy example is To The North (1980), made just four years before the artist’s death, which reveals a degree of assuredness in the starkness of its large pictorial components, making this piece one of the most mature and resolved of Krasner’s collage paintings. Lee Krasner (1908–1984) is considered one of the most critical figures in the evolution of American art in the second half of the 20th century. Emerging from the first generation of Abstract Expressionist painters, Krasner committed to a six-decade persistent exploration of novel approaches to painting and collage. This is Kasmin’s third solo exhibition of the work of Lee Krasner, which the gallery has represented through the Pollock-Krasner Foundation since 2016. The Foundation, established in 1985, provides vital support to emerging and established artists nationally and internationally. For more information, visit www.pkf.org. Krasner’s work is held in the permanent collections of major institutions worldwide, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Jewish Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Tate, London; Cleveland Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum, Long Beach; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Philadelphia Museum of Art; National Gallery of Australia, Sydney; Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland; and the Artizon Museum, Tokyo, Japan, among many others.

In the last ten years, the boundaries between photography and sculpture, architecture, painting, drawing, media and computation have become increasingly porous. Central to the efficacy of photography today is its relationship to language. Like language, photography is a communicative medium that belongs to every discipline, allowing it to shift from commercial to critical and across media. AND/ALSO: Photography (Mis)represented unites six photographers based in New York whose divergent practices all demonstrate the easy slippage between one medium and the next. Their methodologies contend with medium specific conceptions historically associated with photography, like authorship, deadpan documentation, and chemical composition, to imagine a system of representation that exists in quantum states, oscillating in and out of its own parameters. Taken collectively, the thirteen photographs exhibited make evident that a new approach to formalism is emerging within the contemporary construct, one that is multidisciplinary and upended by new technologies and advanced editing softwares. Using the Clone Stamp and Brush tools in Adobe Photoshop, Lucas Blalock (b. 1978) has devised a mechanized approach to painting within images that transcends the limitations of traditional photographic production. Appropriating the codes and conventions of surrealist and expressionist painting, he applies digitized brushstrokes to otherwise straightforward photographs of everyday objects. Each stroke scores the image, obscuring the object depicted and leaving traces of activity that point back to the absent author. Occasionally, he uses the tools to add figures that appear to occupy empty space. This tendency to breathe life into images is exemplified in his billboard for last year's Whitney Biennial, for which Blalock created an augmented reality application that visitors could download to make the desert landscape three-dimensional and the animals animated. Michele Abeles (b. 1977) manipulates the flow, exchange and disruption of data in photographs that alter, share, and intentionally misrepresent the referent. In her series, Find Out What Happens When People Start Getting Real, Abeles abstracts the human figure and positions it as a readymade object. Taking previously shot photographs of people on the street, she crops into the body and covers up areas of the image by applying ceramic tile and acrylic paint to the surface. In the process, photographs made using a digital camera, and thus intended for reproducibility and widespread dissemination, become unique objects. The configuration of ceramic tiles reference a 1969 work by Marcel Broodthaers and an 1887 poem by Stéphane Mallarmé, both titled Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (A throw of the dice will never abolish chance), which propose that language be liberated from typography. As if to answer their proposal, much of the work of Roe Ethridge (b. 1969) visualizes the coded system of semiology. For example, photographs like Model Prints on Broken Pencil reveal how meaning is produced by laying out the network of signs and signifiers within a series of editorial images. Here, Ethridge uses collage to communicate the denoted and connoted messages behind the final photograph. Less direct, yet still a study on myth making, Chubbs (Celine Horse) depicts a pony displaced from its natural environment now regal against a red backdrop, in concert with pictorial strategies of the Romantic era. Throughout his career, Ethridge has combined a wide variety of source material to make images that collapse historical genres into commercial and critical contemporary photography, drawing attention to the unstable ontology of the medium. Like Ethridge, Farah Al Qasimi (b. 1991) sequences images in nonlinear narrative structures that allow for the cross-pollination of fine art and applied practice. Her work reflects her life, a tandem of culture and commodity from the United Arab Emirates and the United States in photography, performance, and video that speak to a strong-willed, feminine power. For her latest series, taken in Dubai, Qasimi photographed five closed kiosks in Dragon Mart, the world’s largest hub of Chinese manufactured goods outside of China. The flowing fabrics, and what they conceal, reify industrial postwar production while also acting as abstract studies of color, texture and painterly design. Epitomizing abstract efforts in photographic production, Erin O’Keefe (b. 1962) builds dioramas of hand carved wooden blocks and velvet cutouts only to photograph them in compositions that strategically flatten space. Trained as an architect, she pursues spatial relationships with mathematical precision until dimension and depth are difficult to discern. Her work is as much sculpture as it is photography, volumetrically unfolding within the picture plane. A testament to the hybridity of her practice, for the first time in her career, O’Keefe is exhibiting unique photographs. In his impetus to make the ordinary extraordinary, Daniel Gordon (b. 1980) is engaged with the surrealist pedagogy. Similar to O’Keefe, he photographs assemblages he constructs from foundational materials. Paper cutouts and shredded cardboard somehow support large-scale entropic landscapes and still lifes that embrace formalist notions of color, form, line and composition. Once photographed, the two-dimensional made three-dimensional reverts back, forcing us to look at photography rather than through it. Currently, Gordon is working on a monumental outdoor sculpture made of printed images on aluminum sheets to be installed in 2021 at the Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy in Boston. Within these artists’ practices, it is clear that formalism in photography today is not a study of one medium, but rather a study of how one medium can be all mediums. Image: Lucas Blalock, Old Mail, parallax, 2017, archival inkjet print, 48 x 60 1/2 x 2 in, 121.9 x 153.7 x 5.1 cm. © Lucas Blalock, courtesy Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich/New York.

Kasmin is pleased to present William N. Copley "The New York Years," a comprehensive look at the evolution of the artist’s painting during three pivotal decades in New York City. The exhibition, on view at 509 West 27th Street from March 11, 2020, will trace this central period through key paintings from multiple series and a corresponding presentation of photographic, publishing, and research materials drawn from the archives of the William N. Copley Estate. This is Kasmin’s sixth solo exhibition of the artist’s work since the gallery began representing the Estate in 2010.

Kasmin is delighted to announce an exhibition of paper collages by German surrealist Max Ernst (1891–1976). Staged in collaboration with the Destina Foundation, "Collages" will be on view from January 23, 2020, at the gallery’s 297 Tenth Avenue location. The exhibition features approximately forty collages on paper, ranging in both scale and subject matter, and spanning 1920 to 1975. Many of the works, with a focus on the 1960s and 70s, have never before been exhibited.

Kasmin is delighted to present its first solo exhibition of work by sculptor Alma Allen (b. 1970, USA.) Opening on January 23, 2020, at 509 West 27th Street, the presentation brings together 14 large-scale works realized in bronze, wood, and stone. Responding to the architecture of the gallery, Allen demonstrates unprecedented ambition in the works’ scale. Included in the exhibition is his tallest sculpture to date—a bronze measuring almost 5 meters at its highest point. A career-spanning monograph published by Rizzoli Electa and organized by Kasmin and Blum & Poe, who also represent the artist, will include text from Douglas Fogle and Glenn Adamson, and is due for publication in Spring 2020.

Kasmin is delighted to announce an exhibition of seminal work by Keith Sonnier at the gallery’s flagship space in Chelsea, New York, on view between November 21, 2019, and January 11, 2020. Large-scale works from the ongoing series "Ba-O-Ba," which the artist began in 1969, utilize large panes of glass and Sonnier’s signature neon tubing in an abstract composition that forms a confluence between the sculpture and the gallery wall and floor. The neon’s linear quality allows the artist to “draw in space” with light and color, transcending the traditional limits of sculpture in an idiosyncratic visual style now inextricably associated with Sonnier. Based on the Greek mathematical theory of the Golden Ratio, the works are quintessential examples of Sonnier’s ability to masterfully synthesize architecture and light, speaking to a formal inventiveness that has defined nearly six decades of work.

Kasmin in cooperation with the Estate of James Rosenquist and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac (London, Paris, Salzburg), is pleased to announce an exhibition of two important paintings by James Rosenquist. On view at the gallery’s flagship 509 West 27th Street location, both works—"Joystick" (2002) and "The Geometry of Fire" (2011)—reflect Rosenquist’s lifelong fascination with space, real and imagined, and his turn in the last two decades of his career to a new kind of abstraction.

Kasmin is pleased to announce "Elemental," an exhibition comprised of minimalist and post-minimalist painting and sculpture that lays bare the foundational components of these consecutive 20th-century movements. Spanning 1963–1981, each work in the exhibition demonstrates a conceptually robust reduction of both form and content, drawing renewed attention to the nuances of the artistic process, the visceral potential of materials, and the organizational structure of a composition. By way of geometric abstraction, singular motifs, monochromatic palettes and the embracing of repetition, this seminal group of artists eschewed the gestural individualism of mid-century Abstract Expressionism and paved the way for a new understanding of art-making.