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4 East 77th Street
New York, NY 10075
212 988 1623
Michael Werner opened his first gallery in Berlin in 1963 with the premiere exhibition of Georg Baselitz. In 1969 Galerie Michael Werner was established in Cologne, in 1990 Michael Werner Gallery opened in New York City, and in 2012 Michael Werner Gallery opened in London. Over five decades Michael Werner Gallery has remained committed to working with some of the most important artists of the twentieth century, including Marcel Broodthaers, James Lee Byars, Enrico David, Peter Doig, Jörg Immendorff, Per Kirkeby, Markus Lüpertz, A.R. Penck, Sigmar Polke and Peter Saul.
Artists Represented:
Kai Althoff
Hurvin Anderson
Georg Baselitz
Marcel Broodthaers
James Lee Byars
Aaron Curry
Enrico David
Peter Doig
Jörg Immendorff
Per Kirkeby
Eugène Leroy
Markus Lüpertz
Ernst Wilhelm Nay
A.R. Penck
Gianni Piacentino
Sigmar Polke
Peter Saul
Don Van Vliet
Works Available By:
Hans Arp
Joseph Beuys
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Wilhelm Lehmbruck
Piero Manzoni
Francis Picabia
Kurt Schwitters

 
Current Exhibition

Markus Lüpertz, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes

Markus Lüpertz - Pierre Puvis de Chavannes



November 14, 2024 - February 1, 2025
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.

 
Past Exhibitions

Joseph Beuys, Marcel Broodthaers and James Lee Byars

Everyone is an Artist



September 20, 2024 - November 9, 2024
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.

Florian Krewer

strike the dust



September 14, 2024 - November 16, 2024
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.

Francis Picabia

Francis Picabia: Femmes



September 5, 2024 - November 23, 2024
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.

Markus Lüpertz, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes

Markus Lüpertz - Pierre Puvis de Chavannes



June 22, 2024 - September 7, 2024
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.

Ker-Xavier Roussel



June 5, 2024 - August 23, 2024
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.

Raphaela Simon

Raphaela Simon: Phantom



May 17, 2024 - September 14, 2024
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.

Per Kirkeby

Per Kirkeby: Paintings on Masonite and Bronzes



April 10, 2024 - June 1, 2024
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.

Francis Picabia

Francis Picabia – Women: Works on Paper 1902-1950



February 23, 2024 - May 11, 2024
Michael Werner Gallery, London is pleased to present Francis Picabia – Women: Works on Paper 1902-1950, an exhibition of over 40 works on paper spanning 50 years of the iconoclastic French artist’s career. Gaining notoriety as a leader in the Dada movement only to later reject it, Picabia’s contemporary Marcel Duchamp described the artist’s work as a “kaleidoscopic series of art experiences.” Always a step ahead of his peers, Picabia produced an extraordinarily diverse body of work that deeply impacted countless generations of artists. Art critic Dave Hickey writes, “more engaged with making works of art than with constructing an oeuvre or articulating an ideology, Picabia wore out styles like a baby wears out shoes.” Regularly shifting styles, the artist’s interest in rendering the female figure remained steadfast. Culling imagery from sources as diverse as ancient Roman sculpture, paintings by Ingres, popular erotic magazines and Hollywood studio portraits, Picabia’s drawings of women illustrate the artist’s expansive and often contradictory interrogation of image-making itself. The drawings range from personal portraits of lovers and friends to stylised, anonymous icons of femininity. For Picabia, representations of women were both an artistic end and a means of aesthetic exploration. Continually reinterpreting this classical subject throughout his career, Picabia produced a portfolio which moves with agility and wit between beauty and bad taste, the avant-garde and the kitsch.

Piero Manzoni



February 7, 2024 - April 6, 2024
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.

Don Van Vliet

Don Van Vliet: Standing on One Hand



November 23, 2023 - February 17, 2024
“Raven they hold the air like a brush painting with strokes as they go but never grasping for fear of halting their passage through the space” -Don Van Vliet, July 1991 Michael Werner Gallery, London is pleased to present Don Van Vliet: Standing on One Hand, an exhibition of paintings from the 1980s and 1990s by American artist Don Van Vliet (b. 1941, d. 2010). A musician, poet, and painter, Don Van Vliet is famously known by his stage name Captain Beefheart. Throughout the course of his music career, Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band recorded thirteen bold, highly experimental studio albums, securing his place in history as a pioneering and unconventional rock and roll artist. As a child, Van Vliet starred on a weekly local television show as a gifted young sculptor. He painted throughout his life. However, in the mid-1980s, he shifted his immense creative energy away from music and performance, focusing solely on painting. Nature was a source of great inspiration for Van Vliet. The desert, where he spent a large portion of his life, inspired his thick, white painted backgrounds, reminiscent of the desert sun. Van Vliet has said, “The way I keep in touch with the world is very gingerly.” In tune with animals and nature, the artist was also fully engaged with his senses and dreams. Art critic John Yau explains: “Dream, sight, sounds, smell, taste, and touch are inextricable aspects of his experience. For Van Vliet, one of the burdens his paintings must bear is his attempt to preserve the unity of his experience with a fleeting world in which the inner and outer zones mix.” Born in Glendale, California in 1941, Don Van Vliet’s work has been exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide, including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Bielefelder Kunstverein, Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, PS.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, and the Brant Foundation in Greenwich, Connecticut. Van Vliet died at home in Northern California in 2010. Don Van Vliet: Standing on One Hand opens on 22 November with a private view from 6-8pm and will remain on view through 17 February. The exhibition is accompanied by a full-colour catalogue with a text by London-based artist and writer Charlie Fox.

Maki Na Kamura



November 17, 2023 - January 27, 2024
Michael Werner Gallery, New York is pleased to present Maki Na Kamura, the first solo exhibition in New York of Osaka-born, Berlin-based painter Maki Na Kamura. Many critics have highlighted the competing polarities in the paintings of Na Kamura, namely the Japanese and Western influences, the abstract and figurative elements, the fact that she sees herself as a traditional painter and an artist of the 21st century, as well as the harmonious use of both tempera and oil paint, two materials traditionally labeled as distinct. While influence, style, and time are fluid for Na Kamura, she does not see her work as existing in a liminal space. Instead, the polarities are intentional and deliberately provoke the viewer. Comprised of new paintings and works on paper, this exhibition follows a double solo show of Na Kamura’s work at Galerie Michael Werner and Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin. In her new work, the artist continues to champion painting and explores diverse structures, from the compositions of Old Master paintings to the choreography of K-pop. Maki Na Kamura studied at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. She has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions across Europe and Japan. Solo museum exhibitions have been held at Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in Deurle, Belgium (2017); Osthaus Museum Hagen in Hagen, Germany (2017); Bilbao-Arte – centro de arte contemporáneo in Bilbao, Spain (2015); and Oldenburger Kunstverein in Oldenberg, Germany (2014). Na Kamura was awarded the Falkenrot Prize in 2013. Na Kamura lives and works in Berlin. Maki Na Kamura opens to the public on Friday 17 November with an opening reception on Thursday 16 November from 6 to 8pm and will remain on view through Saturday 27 January. A full-color catalogue with a text by John Yau will accompany the exhibition. Gallery hours are Monday through Saturday, 10AM to 6PM.

James Lee Byars, Seung-taek Lee

Invisible Questions That Fill the Air: James Lee Byars and Seung-taek Lee



September 21, 2023 - November 18, 2023
Michael Werner Gallery, London, in collaboration with Gallery Hyundai, Seoul, is pleased to present Invisible Questions That Fill the Air: James Lee Byars and Seung-taek Lee, an exhibition of works by American artist James Lee Byars (b. 1932, d. 1997) and Korean artist Seung-taek Lee (b. 1932), curated by Allegra Pesenti. This exhibition marks the first time the works of these two artists are brought into dialogue, highlighting a like-mindedness of vision and spirit. Both artists were born in 1932. Byars in Detroit, an industrial town struggling during the Great Depression. The early, formative years of his career were spent in Japan, where he immersed himself in the study of the ceramic arts, papermaking, calligraphy, Noh theater, and the aesthetics of Shinto and Zen. The cultural traditions and ceremonies of Japan greatly shaped his artistic development and concerns around beauty, truth, and the concept of the perfect. Lee was born in a small town in the Northern province of a then unified Korea under Japanese rule. Japan had an outsized influence on Korean culture due to the occupation from 1910 to 1945, but Lee subverted this influence, seeking to create art that was distinctively Korean but also in conversation with international art movements. Lee’s “non-sculpture” utilizes natural materials and Korean folk objects, including tree branches, stones, briquettes, and earthenware jars. Placed on a pedestal or bound and hung with rope and wire, the objects are removed from their original function and elevated to the status of art. Byars and Lee never met, but the aesthetic similarities in their art warrants closer examination. Invisible Questions That Fill the Air: James Lee Byars and Seung-taek Lee will present six decades of work by the two artists. Rooted in nature, history, philosophy, and tradition, each artist created vital work that continues to inspire generations of younger artists. 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). Upcoming exhibitions include a major survey that will open at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan in October 2023 and travel to Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid in April 2024. A pioneer of the Korean Avant-Garde with a career spanning over a half century, Seung-taek Lee’s work is held in the collections of museums worldwide, including the Tate Modern, London; the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), Seoul; the M+ Museum, Hong Kong; the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi; the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney; and the Seoul Museum of Art, among others. Lee’s work has been included in major recent group exhibitions at the Gwangju Biennale (2023); the MMCA, Seoul (2023); the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2022); the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (2019); and the National Gallery, Singapore (2019). In 2020, a major retrospective survey of Lee’s work was held at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul. Upcoming exhibitions include Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s-1970s at the Guggenheim in New York.

Aaron Curry



September 14, 2023 - November 11, 2023
Michael Werner Gallery, New York is pleased to present an exhibition of new sculptures and paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Aaron Curry (b. 1972 in San Antonio, Texas). In his new work, Curry expands and hones his unique visual language. Known to draw inspiration from classical sculpture, 20th century modernism, comic book illustration, science fiction, as well as skateboard and BMX culture, the artist uses these diverse influences to develop what he calls a “visual toolbox.” Curry elaborates, “Instead of thinking of art through an avant-garde lens, where ideas are a reaction to what came before, it’s more about building on top of those ideas and discoveries.” For this exhibition, Curry is looking at a vast array of masters of modern art, including Kurt Schwitters, Isamu Noguchi, Pablo Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh, Alexander Calder, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and Francis Picabia. With all these artists in mind, Curry creates a new, distinctive body of work that furthers his reputation as one of the most singular and notable artists of his generation. Aaron Curry has exhibited his works throughout the world, including solo exhibitions at McNay Art Museum, San Antonio; The Bass Museum, Miami; STPI Gallery, Singapore; deCordova Sculpture Park, Lincoln; Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah; CAPC Contemporary Art Museum, Bordeaux; Lincoln Center, New York; High Museum, Atlanta; Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin; Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover; Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo; Ballroom Marfa, Marfa; The Ranch, Montauk; and Gamma Galeria, Guadalajara.

Alvaro Barrington, Nathanaëlle Herbelin, Kaiso, Florian Krewer, Christoph Matthes, Andy Robert, Raphaela Simon, Pol Taburet

Birds Follow Spring



June 24, 2023 - September 9, 2023
Michael Werner Gallery, New York is pleased to present Birds Follow Spring, a summer painting show featuring the work of eight artists. On view will be work by London-based, Venezuelan artist Alvaro Barrington (b. 1983); Paris-based, French-Israeli artist Nathanaëlle Herbelin (b. 1989); Düsseldorf-based, Japanese artist Kaiso (b. 1986); Bronx-based, German artist Florian Krewer (b. 1986); Düsseldorf-based, German artist Christoph Matthes; Brooklyn-based, Haitian-American artist Andy Robert (b. 1984); Berlin-based, German artist Raphaela Simon (b. 1986); and Paris-based, French artist Pol Taburet (b. 1997) Birds Follow Spring opens to the public on Saturday 24 June with an opening reception on Friday 23 June from 6 to 8pm and will remain on view through Saturday 9 September. Gallery summer hours are Monday through Friday, 10AM to 6PM.

Gaston Chaissac



June 23, 2023 - September 16, 2023
Michael Werner Gallery, London is pleased to present Gaston Chaissac, an exhibition of paintings, drawings, and collages by 20th century French artist Gaston Chaissac (b. 1910 in Avallon, France, d. 1964 in La Roche-sur-Yon, France). The first major, comprehensive exhibition of Chaissac’s work in the U.K., it spans the entire length of Chaissac’s career from late 1930s until his death in 1964. Born into a French rural working-class family, Chaissac was an autodidact. In the late 1930s, his neighbors in Paris, the artists Otto Freundlich and Jeanne Kosnick-Kloss, convinced him to become an artist and promoted his career. A decade later, Jean Dubuffet championed his work as Art Brut only to later exclude him from the Art Brut collection, saying that Chaissac had become “an educated man, in touch with cultivated circles...more or less a professional artist.” Chaissac lived remotely in the coastal town of Vendée and cited unconventional influences, including prehistoric art and the art of children. At the same time, he was also extremely aware of contemporary ideas of abstraction, Cubism, and Surrealism and incorporated them into his work. He kept in touch with established critics, artists, and writers through extensive letter writing. In 1947, he wrote to Picasso, “more than ever, I’m a Picasso in clogs, Picasso’s student, student by correspondence course.” Chaissac earned a remarkable amount of international recognition during his lifetime with exhibitions across Europe and the U.S. Artists such as Georg Baselitz have cited him as an influence. Today his work is held in the collections of Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne; Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Abbaye Sainte-Croix, Les Sables-d’Olonne; Espace Chaissac, Sainte-Florence, Vendée; amongst others. Gaston Chaissac opens on 23 June with a private view on 22 June from 6-8pm and will remain on view through 16 September. The exhibition will be accompanied by a full-colour catalogue.

Florian Krewer

Florian Krewer: light the ocean



May 5, 2023 - June 17, 2023
Michael Werner Gallery, New York is pleased to present Florian Krewer: light the ocean, an exhibition of new paintings by German-born, Bronx-based artist Florian Krewer. With the New York night as his muse, Krewer paints all the vastness, liberation, and uncertainty it has to offer. Derived from lived experiences and fantasy, the artist creates a seductive world of drag queens, sex scenes, and magical encounters set against the staged backdrops of imagined landscapes and interiors. Primal needs, longing, and precarious interactions are transmitted to the canvas with the greater intention of revealing our collective vulnerabilities. Florian Krewer (born in Gerolstein, Germany in 1986) studied painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Solo exhibitions include Es liebt Dich und Deine Körperlichkeit ein Verwirrter, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; ride or fly, Michael Werner Gallery, London; Eyes on Fire, Michael Werner Gallery, New York and Tramps, New York; Car Park Godiva, Michael Werner Gallery, London; and pinkflavor, Tramps, New York. The artist is a recent recipient of the Prix Jean-François Prat awarded by the Bredin Prat Foundation and the subject of the solo exhibition everybody rise opening May 2023 at the Aspen Art Museum and then traveling to M WOODS Museum in Beijing. Florian Krewer: light the ocean opens to the public on Friday 5 May with an opening reception on Thursday 4 May from 6 to 8pm and will remain on view through Saturday 17 June. A full-color catalogue will accompany the exhibition.

Maki Na Kamura



April 21, 2023 - June 4, 2023
Michael Werner Gallery, London is pleased to present Maki Na Kamura, an exhibition of new paintings by Osaka-born, Berlin-based artist Maki Na Kamura. Given her background, many critics highlight the competing polarities of Japanese and Western influences in her paintings, but the reality is more complex. Japanese art has long informed European painting. Na Kamura elaborates, “Hokusai compensated for his lack of knowledge of perspective with his pictorial inventions. Sesshu built his pictorial space into the painting. Had Cézanne known about this, he would have been spared his labours.” Furthermore, Na Kamura does not categorize. She sees her work as both figurative and abstract and that these styles, often thought of as distinct, developed in tandem throughout the history of art. Dichotomies do not exist to Na Kamura, and style and time are fluid. Seeing herself “as both a traditionalist and as a painter of the twenty-first century”, for the new works on view, the artist pulls structure from as diverse sources as the paintings by Italian Renaissance master Luca Signorelli and the choreographed gestures of contemporary K-pop dancers. She is communicating with the art of the past and with the viewer in the present: “As long as I produce pictures that are seen, they remain communicative. They’re open.” Maki Na Kamura (b. Osaka) studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. She has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions across Europe and in Japan. Solo museum exhibitions have been held at Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in Deurle, Belgium (2017); Osthaus Museum Hagen in Hagen, Germany (2017); Bilbao Arte – centro de arte contemporáneo in Bilbao, Spain (2015); and Oldenburger Kunstverein in Oldenberg, Germany (2014). Na Kamura was awarded the Falkenrot Prize in 2013. Her work is in the collection of Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France. Na Kamura lives and works in Berlin. Maki Na Kamura opens on 21 April with a private view on 20 April from 6-8pm and will remain on view through 4 June. The exhibition will be accompanied by a full-colour catalogue with a text by Travis Jeppesen.

Markus Lüpertz

Et in Arcadia ego



February 16, 2023 - April 29, 2023
Michael Werner Gallery, New York is pleased to present Markus Lüpertz: Et in Arcadia ego, an exhibition of recent paintings by the eminent German artist Markus Lüpertz. The exhibition shows the artist at his best, forging a future for his work by invoking the past and reimagining it in the present. Et in Arcadia ego is a Latin phrase that has intrigued classicists, artists, and poets since it was introduced in the 17th century, first in a painting by Giovanni Francesco Guercino and subsequently in two paintings by Nicolas Poussin. The widely accepted translation is “Even in Arcadia, there I (Death) am.” Bringing the ethos of Guercino and Poussin into the present-day, Lüpertz paints the idyllic, mythical utopia of Arcadia in the bucolic landscape of Brandenburg, Germany, where the artist keeps his studio. In tranquil and lush settings, death is present through the inclusion of skulls, the Greek underworld rivers of Acheron and Styx, and sleeping figures culled from the paintings of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. Art historian Eric Darragon has written that “the art world is fragmented and the confrontation between various practices no longer has any meaning,” and because of this Lüpertz “is having a dialogue with a vanished world: that of old painting.” In these recent works, Lüpertz’s own history collides with art history. The artist’s famous looping dithyrambs, apparent in painter’s palettes and Nazi helmets from his provocative German motif series, take shape in memento mori paintings and traditional German landscapes. Lüpertz has said, “Painting confronts the future, which we don’t know, and is aware of the past, which we do know, and this defines the present—not something new, but something individual.” Markus Lüpertz: Et in Arcadia ego presents Lüpertz’s singular vision and remarkable contemporary interpretation of the cycle of beauty, loss, and death in Arcadia. Markus Lüpertz (b. 1941, Liberec, Bohemia) is one of the most important and influential artists to emerge from post-war Germany. In recent years, major surveys have been presented 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.

Antonius Höckelmann, Arnulf Rainer

Antonius Höckelmann / Arnulf Rainer



November 23, 2022 - February 11, 2023
Michael Werner Gallery, New York is pleased to present Antonius Höckelmann / Arnulf Rainer, an exhibition of over 70 works by German artist Antonius Höckelmann (1937-2000) and Austrian artist Arnulf Rainer (b. 1929). Featuring a wide array of media, including paintings, sculpture, drawings, photography, and prints, the exhibition provides a unique opportunity to see the works of Höckelmann and Rainer side by side. Working simultaneously from different countries, both artists explored themes of creation and destruction in post-war Europe. Born in Oelde, Germany in 1937, Antonius Höckelmann trained as a wood sculptor in his hometown in the 1950s before studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin. Höckelmann said, “For me, sculpture is at the root of everything”, which is contradictory to the fact that he completed no more than a dozen sculptures in his lifetime, destroying many. Concerned with the way 3-dimensional works interacted with space, Höckelmann ultimately found sculpture to exist in “an artificial world that relies only upon itself.” Drawing also naturally exists in a realm of its own and became an integral part of Höckelmann’s exploration of form. Art historian Julia Garimorth writes of this development: “Though physical contact with material is an imperative for all sculptors, Höckelmann realized that the simple evocation of this material often proved to be more ‘effective’ than working the material itself. He thus experimented with drawing to replace touch by the evocation of touch.” Born in Baden, Austria in 1929, Arnulf Rainer began his first experiments in overpainting at the same time Höckelmann created his first sculptures. Rainer initially started overpainting out of financial necessity but soon found it to be an important catalyst in his creative process. Works were created over a long period of time and in dialogue with the underlying source material that was often completely obliterated. Rainer never saw his work as complete. A pioneer of the Art Informel movement, Rainer describes the movement, “a state in which all was possible and nothing yet pronounced...a pure state of possibility.” It was possibility that excited him as an artist and the resulting impossibility that tormented him. Plagued by doubt, Rainer turned towards rudimentary forms of communication and expression and, like Höckelmann, a tactual method, wherein he used his own body to paint on canvas. Höckelmann had his first solo exhibition with Michael Werner Gallery in 1966. Afterwards, he exhibited in prominent museums including Kunsthalle Bern (1975), Kunsthalle Köln (1980), the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf (1985), and the Hamburger Kunstverein (1986) as well as documenta 6 (1977) and documenta 7 (1982). An exhibition of his work titled “Antonius Höckelmann: All in All” was recently exhibited at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld (2020) and Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck (2020-2021). Arnulf Rainer began exhibiting with the Michael Werner Gallery in the 1960s. He represented Austria at the Venice Biennale in 1978 and exhibited at documenta 5 (1972), documenta 6 (1977), and documenta 7 (1982). Major retrospectives of his work have been mounted at Centre Pompidou in Paris (1984), The Guggenheim in New York (1989), the Stedelijk in Amsterdam (2000), and Kunstforum Vienna (2000). He is the winner of the Austrian National Prize in Graphic Arts (1966) and Painting (1978). A museum dedicated to Rainer’s work opened as part of the Ayn Foundation in New York from 1993 to 1995. Another museum of his work opened in his hometown of Baden, Austria in 2009. Recently, on the occasion of his 90th birthday, the Vienna Albertina hosted an exhibition titled Arnulf Rainer: A Tribute to honor the artist’s career (2019-2020). Antonius Höckelmann / Arnulf Rainer opens Wednesday 23 November 2022 at Michael Werner Gallery, New York and will remain on view through Saturday 28 January 2023.

Issy Wood

Time Sensitive



September 9, 2022 - November 12, 2022
Michael Werner Gallery, New York is pleased to present Issy Wood: Time Sensitive, an exhibition of new paintings by American-born, British artist and musician Issy Wood (b. 1993).

Per Kirkeby

Geological Messages: Paintings from 1965-2015



June 22, 2022 - September 1, 2022
Michael Werner Gallery, New York is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings by Danish artist Per Kirkeby (1938-2018). Taking the form of a small retrospective, the show focuses on the artist’s lifelong engagement with landscape, geology, and the natural world.

Francis Picabia

Women: Works on Paper 1902-1950



April 27, 2022 - June 18, 2022
Michael Werner Gallery, New York is pleased to present Francis Picabia – Women: Works on Paper 1902-1950, an exhibition of over 40 works on paper spanning 50 years of the iconoclastic French artist’s career.

Eugène Leroy

About Marina



November 11, 2021 - January 8, 2022
Michael Werner Gallery, New York is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings by French artist Eugène Leroy (1910-2000). Living most of his life in Tourcoing, France, near the Belgian border, Leroy painted classical subjects such as still-lifes, self-portraits, and the human figure. He drew inspiration from the history of painting, particularly from the work of masters such as Giorgione, Rembrandt, and Hugo van der Goes. Laboring over his paintings for many years, Leroy built layers upon layers of paint until the subjects are obfuscated and only recognizable through painted glints of light. On view in the exhibition are paintings of Leroy’s muse and lover, Marina Bourdoncle, an artist Leroy met in 1986 and with whom he shared the remainder of his life until 2000. Painting from life was a necessity for Leroy. Never static, Bourdoncle posed for him reading Joyce, Rimbaud, and Proust, as well as playing the guitar or flute. While the nude figure, particularly female and often Marina, was a recurring theme in Leroy’s painting, the subject only served him as a vehicle to capture the movement of light. As the critic Barry Schwabsky has written, “his paintings show no concern with either the flesh or its form but only with what might be called a flash of illumination in which both flesh and form are at once dissolved and memorialized.” Works by Leroy are in major American and European collections and have been exhibited at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris; Stedlijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; and Musée d’Art moderne et d’Art contemporain, Nice. He took part in documenta IX in Kassel in 1992 and in the Venice Biennale in 1995. The Musée Beaux Arts Tourcoing was renamed MUba Eugène Leroy in honor of the painter in 2010. Eugène Leroy: About Marina opens 11 November at Michael Werner Gallery in New York. A catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Social distancing is in effect and wearing a mask is mandatory. Gallery hours are Monday through Saturday, 10AM to 6PM.

Per Kirkeby

Overpaintings



September 15, 2021 - November 6, 2021
Michael Werner Gallery, New York is pleased to present Per Kirkeby: Overpaintings, an exhibition of übermalungen, or overpaintings, by the late Danish artist Per Kirkeby (b. 1938, d. 2018). An accomplished painter, sculptor, writer, and filmmaker, Kirkeby’s career spanned over six decades, making him one of the most influential and versatile artists of his generation.

Markus Lüpertz

Recent Paintings



June 30, 2021 - September 3, 2021
Michael Werner Gallery, New York is pleased to present an exhibition of recent paintings by Markus Lüpertz. Featuring paintings made over the last four years in Italy and Germany, the artist masterfully combines Southern and Northern European painting traditions while creating work that is new, innovative and contemporary.

Peter Saul

New Paintings



May 6, 2021 - June 26, 2021

James Lee Byars

The Milky Way



March 5, 2021 - May 1, 2021
Michael Werner Gallery, New York is pleased to present James Lee Byars: The Milky Way. The exhibition will feature Byars’s most ambitious two-dimensional work. Composed of 100 black silk paper stars, The Milky Way will envelop the gallery. This exhibition marks the first time the work has been exhibited.

Florian Krewer

Eyes on Fire



November 19, 2020 - February 27, 2021
Michael Werner Gallery and TRAMPS present Eyes on Fire, an exhibition of recent paintings by Florian Krewer. Krewer’s new paintings are feverish dreamscapes. Larger than life figures, carried by owls and communing with big cats, wander and brawl at night through empty city streets. Ambiguous, intimate, interior scenes are revealed in the moment as if suddenly illuminated by artificial light. The paintings are intensely personal. Objects, figures and scenes are borne from experience, obsession, fantasy and desire. The artist carries us into his world, providing an alternative way of viewing the one we share. Krewer (born in Gerolstein, Germany in 1986) studied painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Solo exhibitions include boogie nights, Tom Dick or Harry, Düsseldorf; pinkflavor, TRAMPS, New York; and Car Park Godiva, Michael Werner Gallery, London. Krewer currently lives and works in New York. Eyes on Fire will be on view in two locations, Michael Werner Gallery (4 East 77th Street) and TRAMPS (75 East Broadway, 2nd Floor), starting Thursday, 19 November 2020. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue with text by Yair Oelbaum.

Peter Saul

Murder in the Kitchen, Early Works



September 17, 2020 - November 14, 2020
Michael Werner Gallery, New York is pleased to present Peter Saul: Murder in the Kitchen, Early Works, featuring paintings and works on paper from 1959 to 1966. The exhibition charts the artist's development as he emerges as one of the most original voices in 20th century American painting.

Don Van Vliet

"Parapliers the Willow Dipped, Paintings 1967-1997"



January 31, 2020 - April 11, 2020
Michael Werner Gallery is pleased to present Parapliers the Willow Dipped, Paintings 1967-1997, an exhibition of works by Don Van Vliet. Selected by artist Spencer Sweeney, this is the first New York exhibition of Van Vliet’s paintings in more than a decade.

Per Kirkeby

Works on Paper, Works in Brick



November 20, 2019 - January 25, 2020
Michael Werner Gallery, New York is pleased to present an exhibition of works on paper and brick sculptures by Danish artist Per Kirkeby. This is the first time many of these sculptures have been shown since their first exhibition in Europe in the mid-1970s.

Sigmar Polke

Objects: Real and Imagined



September 18, 2019 - November 16, 2019

James Lee Byars



June 27, 2019 - August 31, 2019

Jörg Immendorff

Questions from a Painter Who Reads



February 21, 2019 - April 13, 2019

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes

Works on Paper and Paintings



November 30, 2018 - February 16, 2019

Enrico David



September 8, 2018 - November 24, 2018

Vile Bodies



July 11, 2018 - August 31, 2018

A.R. Penck

Paintings from the 1980s and Memorial to an Unknown East German Soldier



May 9, 2018 - July 3, 2018

Per Kirkeby

Paintings and Bronzes from the 1980s



February 28, 2018 - May 5, 2018