Michael Werner

Michael Werner Gallery, London is pleased to present Markus Lüpertz - Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. This groundbreaking exhibition pairs paintings of Markus Lüpertz (b. 1941 in Liberec, Bohemia), one of the most important German painters of the post-war period, with paintings and drawings of 19th-century French master Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (b. 1824 in Lyon, d. 1898 in Paris). Over the course of a nearly seven-decade career, Lüpertz has created an expansive body of work, which art historian Aimée Brown Price describes as “replete with staunch emotional, historical, and personal content.” Lüpertz mulls over, repeats, and recontextualizes imagery with deep cultural and personal resonance, often culling from the work of past artists, such as Poussin, Rembrandt, Goya, and Courbet. Lüpertz has said, “I live with artists I routinely retrieve from the recesses of history, and then they become a part of my everyday life, they are my companions, they exist for me. I deal with them as if they were alive.” Lüpertz has been engaged with Puvis de Chavannes since 2011, connecting himself to a lineage of important, renowned artists who have been inspired by the great French master. During his lifetime, Puvis de Chavannes created a space for modernism and influenced the work of Seurat, Gauguin, and Cézanne. Posthumously, he influenced Matisse as well as Picasso’s Blue Period. Van Gogh called him the “master of us all.” The paintings by Lüpertz in the exhibition date from 2013 and chart his exchange with Puvis de Chavannes over the ensuing decade. At times, Lüpertz pays homage by incorporating objects and figures from Puvis de Chavannes’s paintings into his compositions. Other times, he simply evokes the unique, mystic classicism that permeates the works of Puvis de Chavannes. Lüpertz’s paintings are complemented by an impressive array of drawings and paintings by Puvis de Chavannes, some of which are landscapes, preparatory drawings for commissions, epic scenes, and portraiture. Markus Lüpertz has been the subject of numerous surveys in recent years, including at the Hirshhorn Museum and the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Kunst- und Austellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn; Haus der Kunst, Munich; Gemeentemuseum, The Hague; The Hermitage State Museum, St. Petersburg, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art; and Palazzo Loredan, Venice. Lüpertz is currently the subject of a solo exhibition titled “Sins, Myths and Other Questions” at Heredium in Daejon, Korea through 28 February 2025. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes was called “the painter of France” during his lifetime. His works hang in major museums around the world, including The Louvre, Musée d’Orsay, Petit Palais, Musée Picasso, The Rijksmuseum, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Smithsonian, and Carnegie Museum of Art, to name only a few. Markus Lüpertz - Pierre Puvis de Chavannes opens to the public on 14 November with a private view on 13 November from 6-8 PM. A catalogue with text by art historian Aimée Brown Price will accompany the exhibition. The exhibition will remain on view through 1 February 2025. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10 AM to 6 PM.

Michael Werner Gallery, London is pleased to present Everyone is an Artist, an exhibition of major works by three titans of 20th century art, Joseph Beuys (b. 1921 in Krefeld, Germany, d. 1986 in Düsseldorf), Marcel Broodthaers (b. 1924 in Brussels, d. 1976 in Cologne), and James Lee Byars (b. 1932 in Detroit, d. 1997 in Cairo). Contemporaries and collaborators, Beuys, Broodthaers, and Byars adhered to a similar broad set of ideas: art cannot be separated from life, an object can create narrative, and art is activated by the imagination of the viewer. Everyone is an Artist charts and interweaves the oeuvres of these three highly influential artists as they reshaped how art was created and perceived in the 20th and 21st centuries. “Everyone is an artist” is a direct quote from and a guiding principle of Beuys. Coming out of World War II, Beuys cultivated a body of work based on personal history, and potentially myth, about his Nazi plane crashing over the Crimean front in Ukraine and his rescue by a nomadic tribe of Tartars. Through the use of ‘actions’ and objects linked to his personal story, Beuys evoked collective memory and healing. Throughout his life, Beuys believed that art was not a career separate from society, instead creativity and the need to express it are essential to being human. First a poet, Broodthaers launched into visual art in 1964 through his first gallery solo show at Galerie Saint Laurent in Brussels titled I, too, wondered whether I couldn’t sell something and succeed in life, in which he presented his unsold poetry books encased in plaster. Broodthaers’ brief, but consequential, output in visual art used language and everyday objects loaded with societal and personal meaning to question the validity of cultural memory, history, and institutions. The work of Beuys and Broodthaers is transcendent in the work of the slightly younger Byars. Both Beuys and Broodthaers supported Byars’ career, and each participated in his performances. In Byars, Beuys and Broodthaers saw the refinement of their ideas. A shaman-like figure, Byars saw life, and therefore art, as defined by impermanence. To him, objects were vessels to present expansive and existential themes, including beauty, perfection, and death, and the viewer is essential to shaping their meaning. Byars’ work informed the direction of conceptual art in the latter part of the 20th century and continues to resonate with artists today. Everyone is an Artist includes Beuys’ iconic “Jason” and “SåFG”, Broodthaers’ important installation “Dites partout que je l’ai dit”, and Byars’ pivotal “The American Flag” and “The Figure of Death”. The exhibition presents a rare opportunity to see these three seminal artists in direct dialogue with each other. Joseph Beuys’ work had an enormous influence on the development of post-war art and has been collected and shown widely around the world. In 1986, Beuys was awarded the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Prize by the city of Duisburg, Germany. Major retrospectives have been mounted by the Guggenheim Museum, New York (1979); Kunsthaus Zürich (1993); Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid (1994); Centre Pompidou, Paris (1994); Tate Modern, London (2005); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2009); M HKA, Antwerp (2017); and K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2010 & 2021); among others. Marcel Broodthaers created several groundbreaking exhibitions during his brief career, most notably Eulogy of the Subject at Kunstmuseum Basel and The Angelus of Daumier at Centre Pompidou, Paris. “Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles”, a major work that occupied Broodthaers from 1969 to 1972, was included in documenta 5 in Kassel. Broodthaers died in Cologne in 1976, leaving behind an ambitious body of work that would speak to subsequent generations of artists and which remains highly relevant today. London’s Tate Gallery presented the first posthumous retrospective of the artist in 1980. Important posthumous museum exhibitions include Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam (1981); Kunsthalle Bern (1982); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1989); Galerie National du Jeu de Paume, Paris (1991); Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (1992); Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona (1997); Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (2001); Kunsthalle Wien (2003); Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna (2012); Fridericianum, Kassel (2015), The Museum of Modern Art (2016); Museo Reina Sofia (2016); Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2017); and Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2018). James Lee Byars has been the subject of numerous museum exhibitions worldwide, including The Palace of Good Luck, Castello di Rivoli / Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin (1989); The Perfect Moment, IVAM Centre del Carme, Valencia (1994); The Palace of Perfect, Fundaçao de Serralves, Porto (1997); Life Love and Death, Schirn Kunsthalle and Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg (2004); The Perfect Silence, Whitney Museum of American Art (2005); 1/2 An Autobiography, MoMA PS1, New York and Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2013-2014); The Golden Tower, Campo San Vio, Venice (2017); The Perfect Kiss, Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp (2018); and The Perfect Moment, Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing (2021). Earlier this year, a major survey of Byars’ work was on view at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan and is currently on view at Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid (closing 1 September 2024). Byars is also the subject of a dual exhibition titled Invisible Questions that Fill the Air: James Lee Byars and Seung-taek Lee at Palazzo Loredan, Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti in Venice, curated by Allegra Pesenti (closing 25 August 2024). Everyone is an Artist opens to the public on 20 September with a private view on 19 September from 6-8pm.

Michael Werner Gallery, Beverly Hills is pleased to present strike the dust, the first West Coast exhibition of new paintings by prominent German-born, New York-based painter Florian Krewer. Full of rampant desires and fervent dreams, Krewer chronicles his recent travels, experiences, and revelries on the canvas. He celebrates community and love, while at the same time documenting his profound feelings of injustice, isolation, loneliness, and loss. Deeply personal and autobiographical, Krewer’s visceral and impassioned paintings are also universal. They offer up a world in which everyone has the freedom to love without barriers and bask in the fullness of nature and humanity. Florian Krewer (born in Gerolstein, Germany in 1986) has exhibited around the world. Recent solo exhibitions include Nice Dog, M WOODS Museum, Beijing; light the ocean, Michael Werner Gallery, New York; everybody rise, Aspen Art Museum; Es liebt Dich und Deine Körperlichkeit ein Verwirrter, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; and ride or fly, Michael Werner Gallery, London. The artist received the Prix Jean-François Prat awarded by the Bredin Prat Foundation in 2022. Krewer lives and works in the South Bronx, New York. strike the dust opens to the public on 14 September from 10am to 6pm with an opening reception on 13 September from 5 to 8pm and will remain on view through 16 November. A catalogue with text by Hiji Nam will accompany the exhibition. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10am to 6 pm.

Michael Werner Gallery, New York is pleased to present Francis Picabia: Femmes, an exhibition of painting by the French modern master Francis Picabia (b. 1879 in Paris, d. 1953 in Paris). Starting in the 1920s and extending into the 1950s, the exhibition charts the last three decades of Picabia’s career through the singular, classic, and favored subject matter of women. Picabia famously wrote, “In order to have clean ideas, change them as often as your shirt.” Throughout his career, Picabia shifted rapidly between styles. Founding and then rejecting almost every major artistic movement of the early 20th century, paintings of women remained at the core of Picabia’s practice. Due to the long historic, academic tradition of painting the female body, women were the perfect subject matter for Picabia’s endless efforts to upend, subvert, and reinterpret modern painting. Francis Picabia: Femmes includes masterpieces from Picabia’s many experimentations in painting, including his frenzied “Monster” series, revolutionary “Transparencies”, and proto-Pop portraits of pin-up models and actresses. Picabia’s work defies our conventional understanding of modern art. Extremely influential to succeeding generations of artists, Picabia’s oeuvre, on view in this exhibition of paintings of women, provides an alternative, more open, narrative of 20th century art. Francis Picabia: Femmes opens to the public on Thursday 5 September. A catalogue with text by Dave Hickey and an “Interview with Colline” published in Journal des Arts in 1945 will accompany the exhibition. Gallery hours are Monday through Saturday, 10AM to 6PM.

Michael Werner Gallery, Beverly Hills is pleased to present its inaugural exhibition Markus Lüpertz - Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. This groundbreaking exhibition pairs paintings of Markus Lüpertz (b. 1941), one of the most important German painters of the post-war period, with paintings and drawings of 19th Century French master Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898). Over the course of a nearly seven-decade career, Lüpertz has created an expansive body of work, which art historian Aimée Brown Price describes as “replete with staunch emotional, historical, and personal content.” Lüpertz mulls over, repeats, and recontextualizes imagery with deep cultural and personal resonance, often culling from the work of past artists, such as Poussin, Rembrandt, Goya, and Courbet. Lüpertz has said, “I live with artists I routinely retrieve from the recesses of history, and then they become a part of my everyday life, they are my companions, they exist for me. I deal with them as if they were alive.” Lüpertz has been engaged with Puvis de Chavannes since 2011, connecting himself to a lineage of important, renowned artists who have been inspired by the great French master. During his lifetime, Puvis de Chavannes pushed forward modernism and influenced the work of Seurat, Gauguin, and Cézanne. Posthumously, he influenced Matisse as well as Picasso’s Blue Period. Van Gogh called him the “master of us all.” The paintings by Lüpertz in the exhibition date from 2013 and chart his exchange with Puvis de Chavannes over the ensuing decade. At times, Lüpertz pays homage by incorporating objects and figures from Puvis de Chavannes’s paintings into his compositions. Other times, he simply evokes the unique, mystic classicism that permeates the works of Puvis de Chavannes. Lüpertz’s paintings are complemented by an impressive array of drawings and paintings by Puvis de Chavannes, some of which are landscapes, preparatory drawings for commissions, epic scenes, and portraiture. Markus Lüpertz has been the subject of numerous surveys in recent years, including at the Hirshhorn Museum and the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Kunst- und Austellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn; Haus der Kunst, Munich; Gemeentemuseum, The Hague; The Hermitage State Museum, St. Petersburg, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art; and Palazzo Loredan, Venice. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes was called “the painter of France” during his lifetime. His works hang in major museums around the world, including The Louvre, Musée d’Orsay, Petit Palais, Musée Picasso, The Rijksmuseum, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Smithsonian, and Carnegie Museum of Art, to name only a few. Markus Lüpertz - Pierre Puvis de Chavannes opens to the public on 22 June from 10am to 6pm, followed by an opening reception on 22 June from 6 to 8pm and will remain on view through 7 September. A catalogue with text by art historian Aimée Brown Price will accompany the exhibition. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10am to 6 pm.

Michael Werner Gallery, New York is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings, pastels, and drawings by the pioneering late 19th to early 20th century French artist Ker-Xavier Roussel (b. 1867 in Lorry-lès-Metz, France; d. 1944 in L’Étang-la-Ville, France). A founding member of Les Nabis, Roussel, along with his counterparts Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, and Maurice Denis, expanded on the work of their Post-Impressionist predecessors, Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin. Employing flat patches of color, bold contours, and simplified lines, the work of Les Nabis ushered in important 20th century modern art movements, including abstraction and symbolism. Roussel remains less well known than other members of Les Nabis, largely because of his dedication to classical and mythological subject matter after the group’s last exhibition in 1900. Several scholars have recently argued that Roussel’s work was not simply a nostalgic harken towards antiquity. His work was firmly rooted in the milieu of early 20th century France. The northern light and Mediterranean coves in his mythological scenes were inspired by the garden of his house in L’Étang-la-Ville, just west of Paris, as well as his travels to the South of France. Art historian Théo de Luca points out how Roussel’s figures blend seamlessly into the background. Their familiar and iconographic postures underpin the overall expression and evocation of his compositions. Art historian Florian Illies says that Roussel embodies the 20th century or the “century of acceleration,” identifying movement as the main theme in his work: “namely the wind in the trees, the pastel crayon that races across the paper, and above all the libidinous elan that is to be sensed with all his mythological figures.” Ker-Xavier Roussel enrolled at École des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 1888, before going on to study at Académie Julian. He took part in the Salon des Indépendants and La Libre Esthétique and also exhibited his work in prestigious galleries, including Bernheim-Juene, Durand-Ruel, Louis Carré, and Druet. He received numerous public commissions, including the stage curtain for the Comédie des Champs-Élysées in 1913, the staircase for the Kunst Museum Winterthur in 1917, the Théâtre de Chaillot in 1936, and the Assembly Hall of the Palais des Nations, Geneva, in 1937. After his death in 1944, he was the subject of several posthumous retrospectives, including at the Kunsthalle in Bremen in 1965, at Haus der Kunst in Munich and Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris in 1968, and at the Musée des Impressionnismes in Giverny in 2019. Ker-Xavier Roussel opens to the public on Wednesday 5 June and will remain on view through 23 August. A catalogue with texts by George Condo, Théo de Luca, Florian Illies, Raimund Stecker, and Mathias Chivot accompanies the exhibition. Gallery hours are Monday through Saturday, 10AM to 6PM in June, and Monday through Friday, 10AM to 6PM in July and August.

Michael Werner Gallery, London is pleased to present Phantom, an exhibition of recent paintings and sculptures by Raphaela Simon (b. 1986, Villingen, Germany). Throughout her career, Simon has sought to capture the ineffable on canvas. Even when painting a seemingly neutral subject, such as an abstract shape or an inanimate object, Simon is looking for the tension or “the hidden power beneath the surface.” In her recent works, Simon has shifted to painting figures and heads that are subjected to a variety of situations and scenarios. The heads, with their fixed expressions and hollow appearance, are also masks. As a mask, they conceal shame, block madness, and protect the wearer from anger and horror. While they can appear outwardly melancholic, aggressive, or apathetic, they are intended to convey deep emotion. For Simon, they act as a vehicle to give voice to inexpressible needs and suffering. Phantom, the painting for which the exhibition is named, most clearly illustrates Simon’s intention of making the unseen visible. The face of a spirit appears on the body of the painter and dominates her. Dots flow from the eyes, across the shoulders, and down the arms of the painter, as the painter then tries to capture the spirit on the canvas. Raphaela Simon studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. Solo exhibitions have been held worldwide at Fondazione Giuliani, Rome; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin and Paris; Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles; and Michael Werner Gallery, London. Her most recent public exhibition, Raphaela Simon: Die Nachahmung der Rose, is on view at Oldenburger Kunstverein in Oldenburg until 21 April 2024. Simon lives and works in Berlin. Phantom opens to the public on 17 May with a private view on 16 May from 6-8pm. The exhibition will remain on view through 14 September. A full-colour catalogue accompanies the exhibition.

Michael Werner Gallery, New York is pleased to present an exhibition by Danish artist Per Kirkeby (b. 1938, d. 2018). One of the most influential and versatile artists of his generation, Kirkeby worked in an astounding array of media. This exhibition presents a rare opportunity to see his paintings on masonite and bronze sculptures together, each of which occupy a unique place in his oeuvre. Kirkeby painted on masonite throughout the entire length of his career. The hard, flat surface of masonite allowed him to play with space. Kirkeby states, “You put a line on a piece of paper or you take a brush or your thumb dipped in some ochre and rub it up on a cave wall and then you have a space. We’re in a space and we make a space. And by making it flat you can handle it.” Kirkeby considered the paintings on masonite to be more personal, and even more dynamic, than his paintings on canvas. Due to the long, storied history of paintings on canvas, Kirkeby felt the compositions needed to be more “crystallized”. In comparison, his paintings on masonite incorporated unconventional materials, such as collage and chalk, allowing Kirkeby to experiment with structure, form, and motif. Kirkeby started creating bronze sculptures in the early 1980s to pull himself out of a brief “artistic crisis”. His career was growing internationally, and Danish critiques of his art accused him of being too commercial. Like the paintings on masonite, the bronzes allowed him to play with space, but in a more tactile way. Kirkeby writes, “It is almost impossible to fixate a sculpture. It is best seen in passing, from the side. Individual details are difficult to get a hold of: they turn away from you. And even the nature of the material is so concrete, so much of this world, that it spurns dreams.” Kirkeby’s bronze sculptures became an important part of his oeuvre. They allowed him to incorporate figuration and the work of his sculptural heroes, like Michealangelo and Auguste Rodin. The sculptures defined him as an accomplished “painter-sculptor” in line with his German contemporaries, Markus Lüpertz and A.R. Penck. An internationally celebrated painter, sculptor, filmmaker, and author, works by Kirkeby are found in many museum collections worldwide including Tate, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Museum of Modern Art, New York, among many others. Important solo museum exhibitions include Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk; Museum Jorn, Silkeborg; the Beaux-Arts de Paris; The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels; Tate Modern, London; IVAM Centre del Carme, Valencia; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Whitechapel Gallery, London; and Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. In 2023, two important exhibitions of Kirkeby’s works were held at ARKEN Museum of Modern Art in Ishøj and Museo Tamayo in Mexico City. Per Kirkeby: Paintings on Masonite and Bronzes opens to the public on Wednesday 10 April. A catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Gallery hours are Monday through Saturday, 10AM to 6PM.

Michael Werner Gallery, New York is pleased to present an exhibition of works by the pioneering post-war Italian artist Piero Manzoni (b. 1933, d. 1963), a key figure in the international development of performance and conceptual art. Over the course of a short life, Manzoni created a revolutionary, multifaceted oeuvre that had a lasting impact on artists throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Three of Manzoni’s most important works are in the exhibition, including his largest Achrome. Experimenting with a variety of media including plaster, felt, velvet, wool, fur, and kaolin, the Achromes are colorless pictures free from narrative. The artist writes, “We absolutely cannot consider the picture as a space on which to project our mental scenography. It is the area of freedom in which we search for the discovery of our first images. Images that are as absolute as possible, which cannot be valued for that which they record, explain and express, but only for that which they are: to be.” Manzoni’s monumental Achrome measures over six feet high and is made with polystyrene and phosphorescent paint, which glows under a blacklight. Breaking down the picture to its purest form, Manzoni does the same with the line in his Linea series. The Linea series are handmade lines of varying lengths, often rolled and sealed in canisters labeled with the artist’s name, contents, date of creation, and dimensions. The viewer does not see the line, which is instead replaced by imagination and belief. Manzoni writes, “The line develops only in length and extends towards infinity. The only dimension is time. And it hardly needs to be said that a ‘line’ is not a horizon or a symbol and it has value not as something beautiful but in the degree to which it exists.” One of Manzoni’s most significant and longest Linea is in the exhibition. Extending 1140 meters long, it is contained in an artist-designed, chrome-plated metal canister. The shiny, industrial finish of the canister is in direct contradiction to the handmade line concealed inside. The tension between the body and art is a recurrent theme in Manzoni’s oeuvre. In 1961, he stages his first Scultura viventi (Living Sculpture) performance, in which he places his signature on people who wish to become works of art by generating a Certificate of Authenticity to mark their passage. Created in parallel with the Scultura viventi (Living Sculpture) performances is Manzoni’s elusive Base magica, a wooden pedestal that is not intended to be a work of art in and of itself. Instead, it is a “machine” that transforms people into living works of art when they stand upon it. Manzoni died of a heart attack in his studio in Milan at 29 years old. Working from only 1956 to 1963, his provocative and radical body of work liberated and influenced many artists, including Joseph Beuys, Marcel Broodthaers, and James Lee Byars.