Luhring Augustine

Luhring Augustine, in association with Francesca Galloway, is pleased to present Court, Epic, Spirit: Indian Art 15th – 19th Century, a show of historical artworks from India opening on January 26 at Luhring Augustine Tribeca. The showcase marks the first time Luhring Augustine has partnered with the London-based gallery Francesca Galloway, internationally renowned in the field of Indian art. Court, Epic, Spirit will present a variety of artworks including textiles, paintings, and courtly objects. Grounding the works in their historical context, the selection will offer insights into artistic and cultural movements in India during this time. The title of the exhibition refers to three key lenses through which to view the multi-faceted and extraordinarily inventive arts of India: court, epic, spirit. With these organizing principles as a guide, the exceptional and iconic works of art in the installation can be more fully considered and understood. A fine and rare 17th century panel from a lavish royal tent will be among the exhibition’s featured objects. The panel is part of an important group thought to have been originally commissioned for the Muslim rulers of the Deccan, a region of central India. For both Rajput and Mughal rulers, tents were immensely important, especially to the latter given the nomadic lifestyle required to govern their vast empire. Indian painting is above all a storytelling medium, created to illustrate epic texts. These narratives, and the paintings that accompanied, them were an integral aspect of the region’s cultural traditions throughout this period. A work of particular importance in the exhibition is a recently discovered 16th century painting from the early Imperial Mughal manuscript of the great epic, the Hamzanama (‘Story of Hamza’), one of the supreme achievements of Indian art. Commissioned by a young Emperor Akbar, it is the only known folio depicting this episode and represents a significant addition to the scholarship, not least because it was painted by Dasvant, a master artist in the Imperial atelier. Also significant to the artistic output of the region were artworks focusing on the idea of worship – some depicting and enabling acts of revery, and some imbued with spiritual power. Hindu ragamala paintings depict verses that in turn evoke a mode of music. Through a very unusual group of 17th century ragamala paintings, most likely from the northern Deccan, the connection between sound, image, and spirit can be explored. The wild sense of colour and proportion coupled with stark architecture and sumptuous textiles, lend these paintings an assured and individual aesthetic. Another highlight of the show will be a masterpiece of painting on cloth illustrating Dana Lila, or Krishna playfully demanding a toll from the gopis. This type of Deccani pichhvai, a painted cotton temple cloth, is rare, with only a handful of examples in museum collections around the world. Court, Epic, Spirit: Indian Art 15th – 19th Century will be on view through March 19, 2022 and will be accompanied by an illustrated catalogue.

Luhring Augustine and Sam Fogg are pleased to announce The Medieval Body, the third in a series of vanguard exhibitions that places medieval masterpieces within a contemporary context. The first two collaborative projects were met with much acclaim, Of Earth and Heaven was presented in 2018 and Gothic Spirit in 2020. Opening January 21 in Luhring Augustine’s Chelsea location, The Medieval Body will be on view through March 12, and is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue. The title of the exhibition refers to both a literal thread of figuration that runs throughout the works in the presentation, as well as the complex and often shifting symbolism of the human body in the medieval period. For thinkers and artists of that time, the human body served as a rich source of religious and philosophical significance, one that was in a constant state of flux between idealism and disfigurement. While the early Middle Ages reserved representations of suffering bodies to the margins of their world, the later Middle Ages displayed wounded bodies in the most central spaces of public life. The crucified body of Christ and the wounded bodies of saints assumed important positions as they were displayed on altars, in processions, and on the exteriors of churches. Representative of this, The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian by Jörg Lederer gives prominence to the late medieval trend of displaying a suffering human body at the altar, while Saint Quentin being tormented portrays a vivid murder scene meant for the façade of a church - the gruesome episode is palpable in the intricately sculpted depiction. The intimate belief in the inextricable connection between the body and the soul, whether in life or in death, also led to the worship of saints’ body parts. The enormous sacrament houses created in late medieval Germany were meant to ostentatiously display and stage Christ’s transubstantiated body. The exhibition features a work attributed to Lorenz Lechler and dated to 1502, a rare Monumental Drawing of a Sacrament House which was designed to stand over 70 feet tall. The Medieval Body tells a unique story about the human form as both a physical entity and a recognizable metaphor. Presenting works spanning the course of a thousand years, this exhibition offers insight into the body as an essential image-making tool with far-reaching implications for the development of art in the European Middle Ages.

Luhring Augustine is proud to present "Toma," Tomm El-Saieh’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and the artist’s first in New York. Presented in our Chelsea location from November 5 through December 22, the show will feature new paintings by the Haitian-born, Miami-based artist. El-Saieh’s dense and rhythmic paintings derive inspiration from myriad sources, ranging from the history of international abstraction to Haitian Vodou traditions, such as trance-induction and percussive music. Obsessive markings—notations, shapes, scratches, and erasures—saturate the surfaces of his canvases, creating fields of bursting, complex color. The synesthetic, all-over compositions that El-Saieh produces through his meticulous process are at once sublime and sensual, mystical and direct, chaotic and restrained. While firmly planted in the realm of abstraction, El-Saieh’s paintings also suggest complex networks, sprawling cities, or molecular structures. Within the clustered code of his brushwork, figurative associations emerge and recede. This new body of work oscillates between the personal and the cultural, as alluded to in the exhibition’s title. “Toma” is a reference to both the artist’s childhood nickname, and to "Ayiti Toma," the Revolution-era moniker given to Haiti by its people, who by denominating it with a first and last name instilled the nation with a sense of personhood or divinity. El-Saieh’s meditation on Haiti’s rich cultural history and its devastating and complex current state of affairs are intertwined with his own lived experience as a refugee and immigrant, and brought to bear in the creation of these recent works. The paintings pay homage to, and are enkindled by, the indefatigable sense of resourcefulness and ingenuity intrinsic to the acts of creating, making, and forging ahead in Haiti.

Luhring Augustine is delighted to announce a special exhibition of prints by the renowned artist Georg Baselitz, opening in our Tribeca gallery on October 15, 2021. The presentation will feature prints from the 1960s, a decade marked by growth and discovery for the artist. It was during this period that Baselitz first traveled to Italy and was introduced to Mannerist prints and techniques. Spawning a profound fascination with this style, the experience heavily influenced his then burgeoning career as a printmaker – a part of his practice that is regarded as of equal significance with his celebrated paintings. This exhibition will showcase a selection of prints that display the range of methods that Baselitz employs. Highlighted among the works are his “Hero” or “New Type” imagery of singular male figures depicted in heroic stances rendered with dramatic contours and wild gestural lines, their valor is subverted by their weary expressions and tattered clothing. These subjects challenge common perceptions of masculinity, and reference Baselitz’s childhood experience of violence and destruction during the war and post-war era in Germany. The exhibition will underscore Baselitz’s impressive skill in a diverse array of printmaking techniques, focusing on his woodcuts, drypoints, and etchings. The range of methods reveals the artist’s acute interest in the physicality and laborious nature of printmaking processes. Baselitz has discussed in depth the charge he finds in the resistance of printmaking tools on the surfaces of printing plates, which creates a kind of symbolic power that is translated into the compositions of the finished print. By deviating in small ways from traditional printmaking techniques he developed his own distinct methods, these include the use of oil rather than printer’s ink, and the occasional addition of paint by hand to a completed print.

Luhring Augustine is pleased to announce Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s fifth solo exhibition at the gallery, which will present three recent bodies of work. The internationally recognized artists, who have collaborated since 1995, are known for their immersive multimedia works that create transcendent multisensory experiences which draw the viewer into often unsettling narratives. In the entrance gallery, the artists present a new group of collaborative works: small oil paintings are encased in wooden frames with two small speakers and a button. The canvases, painted by Cardiff, depict scenes of rural landscapes. When the button is pressed, music, sound effects, or voices emanate, animating the compositions; pressed again, a different track plays, offering diverging perceptions of the picture’s mise en scène. The Instrument of Troubled Dreams (2018) is an interactive installation comprised of a 1960s Mellotron keyboard and twenty-three speakers. Visitors are invited to play the instrument, whose seventy-two keys have each been programmed to play back sounds, music, and vocal tracks: a raven flies through the space, soldiers search a small apartment, a carnival floats past on a barge. Improvising on the keys, each participant arranges a distinct audio odyssey, composing unexpected and vivid soundtracks that evoke changing narratives. In the back room of the gallery, visitors enter a fully immersive installation, Escape Room (2021). The dimly lit room appears to be Cardiff and Miller’s studio, full of worktables scattered with the artists’ projects, tools, and materials. Elaborate dioramas built by the artists are found throughout the space: a model of a cathedral, an apartment building, a factory, a waterfront. Each portrays a mini-dystopia, civilizations that have been eerily abandoned by their inhabitants, leaving traces of something gone wrong, a forced exodus. Sound effects, music, and fragments of narratives are emitted in response to the viewer’s movements, immersing the viewer within the surroundings. At other moments, the illusion is dismantled, allowing the viewer to become keenly aware of the constructed environment and their own voyeurism within it.

Luhring Augustine is pleased to present Plus One, a group exhibition at our Chelsea location on view June 23 through August 6. The installation will feature nine artists from the gallery’s program, each of whom has invited an artist they admire to participate. As New York begins to open following the dark days and isolation of the Covid-19 pandemic, Plus One aims to celebrate interpersonal relationships and community building that were so pointedly hindered during the past year. Each of the invited artists were chosen by their colleagues for a variety of reasons – some chose a friend, others chose someone who inspires them or whose work resonates with their own. Much like a party, the spirit and tenor of the show is reliant upon the invited participants, each of whom will present a single artwork. The exhibition will not be circumscribed to the artist pairings but will facilitate conversations and spark new connections between the artworks and their makers.

Luhring Augustine is pleased to present a selection of new and recent sculptures by Richard Rezac in our Tribeca location. This will be the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery; his first show in 2020 at the Chelsea gallery was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Luhring Augustine is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new paintings by the Dutch artist Emo Verkerk. The presentation, organized by the art historian and curator Karel Schampers, marks Verkerk’s first solo show with the gallery and his first in New York since 1982.

Text by Bradley Kronz “Recent Faces″ is an exhibition of fifteen works by Sanya Kantarovsky, depicting humanlike faces. I was told that most of these faces are not portraits, meaning that most of them are not “real.” Depending on one’s perspective on where art comes from, these could be literal people that exist somewhere not-of-this-world, and it is the artist’s job to make and sustain contact with them. An ideal of this being the painting from Ghostbusters II of “Vigo the Carpathian,” a 16th century warlord who lives inside his own portrait. This is one way of thinking about what an artist does. Conversely, another possibility is that the artist enlists their subconscious to do anything, and then uses their rational mind to make sense of it, in this case as a face. Something like seeing cloud animals, or deciding where to put the carrot on a snowman, but even less than that because there is no carrot. If you have ever made art before, even once, you know exactly what I’m talking about. It is intrinsically linked to the idea of nothingness. Both of these beliefs I find compelling, although most art places possess a strong preference for the former, more seemingly magical possibility, if only because it is hard to make a case for the political and social importance of an often unplanned “trick of the mind.” Also a case I would like to make! Again, the attention to the manner in which these faces appear on a surface could be the way a threshold has made itself visible to us, or simply exercises in a type of efficiency. I can say for sure that the impulse beyond the face, to depict the eyes of a human, tells you that what you are seeing is true. My point being that the need to see a face is a phenomenon of the viewer, but absolutely extends to the artist as well. It provides a form of closure to both, as the artist is also a viewer, especially of their own work. Your beliefs alone inform where that sight comes from.

Luhring Augustine is pleased to announce PEOPLE, a presentation of all new sculptural works by West Coast-based Oscar Tuazon, marking the gallery’s second exhibition of the artist. The conflagration of minimalist abstraction and natural elements in these works embody constantly changing morphologies, addressing notions of the natural systems of growth and decay.

Luhring Augustine is pleased to present an exhibition of works by Boyle Family, a British collaborative group comprised of Mark Boyle (b. 1934, d. 2005), his wife Joan Hills (b. 1931), and their children, Sebastian Boyle (b. 1962) and Georgia Boyle (b. 1963), marking the first solo presentation by the artists in New York in over 40 years. On view will be a selection of Boyle Family’s renowned earth works, referred to by Mark Boyle as “earthprobes,” created over a twenty-year period between 1969 and 1990. The probes are studies and recreations of randomly selected areas of the earth’s surface, typically in 6ft x 6ft. sections, made from a combination of resin, fiberglass, and found materials. The earthprobes are but one facet of Boyle Family’s multi-sensory practice, which includes installation, sculpture, photography, film, and performance. Envisioning themselves as presenters and re-presenters of the world, Boyle Family’s visually complex work is revelatory, driven by the principle that art is all-encompassing and all-inclusive.

Luhring Augustine is pleased to announce The Sound Will Tell You, a presentation of new works on paper by Jason Moran, which marks the gallery’s second exhibition with the artist. Internationally renowned as a jazz pianist and composer, Moran’s interdisciplinary and often collaborative visual art practice mines the history of music, and its social, cultural, and political subtexts.

Luhring Augustine is pleased to announce The Last Handshake, an exhibition of new paintings by Jeff Elrod, which will mark the artist’s third solo show with the gallery. Rooted in the tradition of twentieth-century abstraction, Elrod’s paintings employ a unique combination of computerized and analog techniques to depict a flattened “screen space.”

On October 31, Luhring Augustine Chelsea will debut a solo exhibition of Frank Auerbach’s paintings and drawings that will celebrate the mature career of a singular artist. Spanning from the late 1970s to recent works, the selection of his portraits and landscapes on view will underscore Auerbach’s great achievements in painting in the post-war era. The first show of his work in New York of this scale since 2006, the exhibition will be on view through December 19.

Luhring Augustine is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of acclaimed photographer Lee Friedlander, opening in our Chelsea location on September 12. The exhibition is Friedlander’s first with Luhring Augustine and his first New York gallery show since 2013. The presentation will highlight Western Landscapes (2016), produced after the artist’s major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 2005. The second gallery will feature a selection of work from other series, such as the rarely exhibited bodies of work Dressing Up: Fashion Week NYC (2015) and Chain Link (2017), as well as choice photographs from America by Car (2010). An online Viewing Room accompanies the exhibition, featuring videos by Giancarlo Roma, Partner of Haywire Press and Friedlander’s grandson, that provide his unique take on the series of works displayed in the show.

The inaugural exhibition at Luhring Augustine Tribeca (17 White Street, New York, NY) will present the first U.S. solo show of the late London-based, Brazilian-born Lucia Nogueira (1950-1998). Over the course of her brief but remarkable career, the artist created a compelling multidisciplinary body of work. Primarily centered on her haunting and minimal sculptures and installations, her practice also incorporated drawing and video. Organized in collaboration with Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London, this exhibition will introduce American audiences to a seminal and underrecognized artist.

Luhring Augustine Chelsea is now open to the public, Monday-Friday, 11am–5pm. Appointments are encouraged but not required. Visit our website to schedule an appointment.

Luhring Augustine is pleased to partner with London-based gallery Sam Fogg to present for the first time in a contemporary context roughly thirty masterpieces that are among the finest Medieval art to be found in private hands.