Peter Freeman, Inc.

Opening Reception: Tuesday, 10 September, 6–8 pm Peter Freeman, Inc. is pleased to present Julije Knifer’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, taking place in the 100th year of the anniversary of his birth and 20 years since his passing. “Chronology and order are irrelevant in my work. I have probably already created my last paintings, but maybe not yet the first ones.” Julije Knifer, Notes (1977) Widely considered one of the most important and influential Croatian painters of the 20th century, Julije Knifer helped found the neo-avant-garde Gorgona group, an influential Zagreb-based collective active from 1959 to 1966 whose main ambition was the search for artistic and intellectual freedom. He dedicated the majority of his artistic career, from 1959 until his death in 2004, to the exploration of a geometric and rhythmic form known as the meander in pursuit of an “anti-image” that eschewed all expressive content. Appropriating this historic motif transformed Knifer’s approach to art into an ascetic exercise of endless variation and reiteration in which time and evolution becomes relative, a journey he described as “without progression or regression.” This retrospective exhibition includes paintings and drawings from 1950 to the early 2000s, examining Knifer’s strategic use of reduction and repetition as a means of achieving liberation. A mural on the largest wall in the gallery demonstrates the potential of the rigorously prescribed meander removed from the canvas or paper to become a fully integrated architectural element. In POLIPTIH 1–4 (1976), the meander extends across four panels, while the 13-feet-wide JK F HC 91 1 (1991) invites total immersion in its symphonic movement. A rich selection of works on paper chronicles his meditative use of repetition, from his seminal self-portrait series (1949–1951) and a group of early 1960s sketches mapping the gradual distillation of the meander to several highly saturated graphite drawings from later decades. These drawings provide unique insight into the artist’s working process and overall conceptual concerns. His notebooks, which he referred to as his “Banal Diary,” include entries written in horizontal and vertical blocks, taking on the form of the meander and illustrating the extent to which Knifer's artistic practice was inextricably linked to his daily life. Recent solo exhibitions of Julije Knifer’s (b. 1924, Osijek, Croatia; d. 2004, Paris, France) work have been mounted at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb (2024); Neue Galerie Graz, Austria (2020); Museum der Wahrnehmung, Graz, Austria (2020); MAMCO, Geneva (2018); and Haus Konstruktiv, Zürich (2017). He represented Croatia at the 49th Venice Biennale (2001) and his work has been featured in recent group shows at Museo Nacional Centre de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2022–2023); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Netherlands (2022–2023); Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Austria (2022); Tate Modern, London (2019); and Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2018). His work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

Opening reception Wednesday, 22 May, 6–8pm David Adamo, Richard Deacon, Cameron Jamie, Alicja Kwade, Heinz Mack, Mike Meiré, Mai-Thu Perret, Otto Piene, Heinz-Günter Prager, Norbert Prangenberg, Thomas Schütte, Rosemarie Trockel, Paloma Varga Weisz, Rose Wylie, Anna Zimmermann Peter Freeman, Inc. is pleased to present Made in Cologne, a selection of ceramic sculptures all produced in the atelier of Niels Dietrich. In the early 1980s, Niels Dietriech studied ceramic design at the Hochschule Niederrhein in Krefeld, Germany where he met artist Norbert Prangenberg, who had just been awarded the Mies Van Der Rohe scholarship at the Museum Haus Lang. Prangenberg came to him with a desire to explore ceramics and, through their resulting collaborative relationship, Dietrich went on to establish his own atelier in 1984. The artist then introduced Dietrich to Thomas Schütte, whose series Black Lemons was the first project realized after the workshop relocated from Krefeld to Cologne in 1989. The series will be included in Schütte’s upcoming retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Now, forty years later, Dietrich has established an essential workshop used by some of the most important contemporary artists. As one of the only ceramics ateliers dedicated to fine art, the workshop is distinguished by its capacity to produce significant works of unique quality and scale. The atelier has had a profound influence, elevating ceramic art within the Rhineland and beyond. This is the first exhibition to highlight the breadth and impact of the atelier. In addition to Prangenberg and Schütte, featured artists include the founding members of the ZERO group Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, both long-time collaborators with the workshop. New ceramics from Alicja Kwade and Mai-Thu Perret embody a visceral materiality, while a kind of structured abstraction is found in works by Richard Deacon and a series of terracotta slabs by Heinz-Günter Prager. Familiar objects recreated by Rosemarie Trockel and David Adamo take on new functions as ceramics, whereas the graphic interpretations of everyday items by Rose Wylie and Mike Meiré reveal playful meditations on the nature of visual representation. Other exhibited works include organic forms by Cameron Jamie and Anna Zimmermann, and figurative works by Paloma Varga Weisz.

Peter Freeman, Inc. is pleased to present Robert Moskowitz’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, curated by Dieter Schwarz, who writes: Robert Moskowitz created an oeuvre that is painterly through and through, and at the same time possesses immense pictorial power. The selection of paintings and drawings in this exhibition makes it possible to trace some of Moskowitz’s motifs over an extended period of time. In contrast to the imagery of Pop Art, Moskowitz’s images have a completely private character. Even the twin towers of the former World Trade Center, which he first painted in the late 1970s and revisited over the years, became a personal metaphor for him. Through his painterly treatment, Moskowitz would reduce the image to its essential form and to its essential content, creating a particular physicality. This can be seen, for example, in the relationship between the image transformed into a silhouette to the color and format of the horizontally or vertically expanding picture surface. The image is embedded in it, waiting to be discovered by the viewer. Moskowitz’s images possess a density and intensity that allowed him to reproduce them in ever new forms over the years—be it on paper or on canvas. The subtle variations of medium—oil paint, pastel, graphite—and format express subtle variations of mood through the same image. In his studio, Moskowitz installed a large number of drawings, which mainly show iterations of the twin towers and the Flatiron Building. This wall of drawings, which is impressive due to the range of tonalities, has been reconstructed for the exhibition. The room of paintings features a small selection of motifs: the Wrigley Building from Chicago, which Moskowitz painted from an advertising image, the Red Cross he glimpsed in a film with Bill Murray whom he admires, the Tsunami wave, and finally the man jumping into the depths from a mural in Paestum, Italy. Moskowitz chose these images intuitively. In the course of his practice, which took on obsessive traits through repetition and duration, both their physical presence and their enigmatic appearance became clearer. But the material beauty of the surfaces is only an attractive illusion because, as Moskowitz said in an interview, the images are existential: “what the picture is saying is not beautiful. It’s about being here.” Robert Moskowitz (b. 1935, Brooklyn; d. 2024, Manhattan) started to show in 1962 with Leo Castelli Gallery, later showing with, among others, Daniel Weinberg Gallery, San Francisco; Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles; Blum Helman Gallery, New York; and Lawrence Markey, San Antonio, Texas. Notable solo exhibitions include The Clocktower, The Institute for Art and Urban Resources, New York (1977); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1981, touring to: Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, New York); Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (1981, with Susan Rothenberg and Julian Schnabel, toured to: Frankfurter Kunstverein, Germany; Louisiana Museum of Contemporary Art, Humlebæk, Denmark); University Art Museum, University of California at Berkeley (1986), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (1989, toured to: La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, California, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York); and Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada (1989). Group exhibitions include The Art of Assemblage, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1961); Black, White, and Grey, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut (1964); New Image Painting, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1978); and An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1984). Dieter Schwarz (b. 1953, Zürich) was the director of Kunst Museum Winterthur from 1990 to 2017. He is now an independent curator and author, based in Zürich.

Peter Freeman, Inc. is pleased to present Elisabetta Benassi’s first solo exhibition in the United States, The Drowned World. Benassi uses a range of media, including installation, sculpture, photography, and video, to question modernity through the materials of its artistic, cultural, and political dimensions. The Drowned World features all new works conceived and created specifically for the occasion to present an archaeology of the future, an excavation from which the fossils of a vanished world emerge as metallic bones of animals exterminated by man. The exhibition functions as a landscape to be traversed within the gallery. At the entrance is Study for Michelangelo's Head, a life-sized giraffe skull in bronze resting on a workshop stool and the first iteration of a forthcoming work recently selected for commission by the Museo Nazionale Romano to be installed in Michelangelo's Cloister at the Baths of Diocletian. In the larger gallery space hangs a first edition copy of J.G. Ballard’s 1962 eco-fiction novel The Drowned World, the source of the exhibition's title, pierced by a fishing spear modelled after the historic patterns of tribal harpoons. The harpooned text is accompanied by four enlarged animal skulls on metal foundry carts – Fixator I (Dugong), Fixator II (Puma), Fixator III (Rhinoceros), Fixator IV (Mole) – each bearing the marks of trauma and suspended within their own cage-like frames reminiscent of the external fixator devices used in the medical field to keep fractured bones stabilized. The various irregular, prismatic shapes connect the inner form to the outer structure, presenting self-referential imagery reflective of its own construction and materiality. The center gallery is occupied by The Feast of Skulls, in which two Morse lamps mounted on military tripods use an electronic controller to translate the chapter titles from Ballard's book into Morse code communicated through intermittent flashes of light projected through the space. Benassi engages material and metaphor to expose how the construction and destruction of ideologies can unfold through the artifacts and archives of our various local and global histories. With investigation and query, Benassi’s work finds forms with which to challenge both how and whose modernity ultimately perseveres. Elisabetta Benassi (b. 1966, Rome, Italy) has had solo exhibitions at the Museo Nazionale Romano, Crypta Balbi, Rome (2022); the Fondazione Adolfo Pini, Milan (2021); Galerie Jousse Entreprise, Paris (2018); Collezione Maramotti, Italy (2017); Magazzino, Rome (2016); and CRAC Alsace, Altkirch (2013). She has been featured in the 2011, 2013, and 2015 editions of La Biennale di Venezia and her work can be found in the collections of the Castello di Rivoli, Turin; MAXXI, Rome; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; The Philadelphia Museum of Art; and Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna. The artist lives and works in Rome.

Peter Freeman, Inc. is pleased to present American artist Charles LeDray’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, comprised of nine new sculptures and drawings made in New York, primarily over the last three years. Shiner S.A.M. Spool’n: How My Mother’s Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life* Revolution Men Man Woman Women Backward Suit Hope Chest Cone Cube Sphere Briefs How Long Should Memories Last? Charles LeDray uses a multitude of techniques including carving, casting, drawing, painting, printmaking, sewing, and throwing. The artist recreates existing objects, transforming them through uncanny manipulations of scale and re-combinations that suggest narratives about history and society. Here, containers – from pockets, to pallets, cigar boxes, chests, and vitrines – hold collections of individualized yet related objects: things we amass to remember, or to project who we are, where we have been, need, or want to go. Born in Seattle in 1960, Charles LeDray moved to New York in 1989 and has exhibited regularly since 1991. LeDray’s work is in numerous public collections including The Museum of Modern Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Art; and Smithsonian Museum of American Art. *Arshile Gorky, How My Mother’s Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life, 1944, oil on canvas, 40 x 45 inches (101.6 x 114.5 cm). Collection Seattle Art Museum.

For green holotrope, Hendl Helen Mirra shares a selection of new and revised works. Explicit in the project is a possible answer to the existential question of how to meet things. Objects, sounds, and methods fold and realign; prior works get edited, put into new arrangements, or remade with a method of subtraction that sometimes looks like addition. Here, a compelling case is made that less is not more, nor is it less. When works and thoughts return, it is in the visible cycles of their repetition, and the space generated between occurrences, where we might find patterns for holding future and past equally within the present. For example, a new series of canvases revise a number of earlier signature line works. Resetting the delicate and precarious banding of the prior works onto linen rectangles condenses the initial experiences for more compact and pliable consideration. The 2005 sound piece Green break, with its three methods of amplifying the breath (whistling, bass harmonica, and mouth harp) rearranged, is not unlike a bird adapting its song for a changing ecological niche. Four segments from Sky-wreck, unseen in the United States since their initial presentation at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago in 2001, are indigo-dyed cotton scale model pieces of the sky, if the sky was a geodesic dome. Twenty-two years ago the sculpture in its larger iteration was interpreted as an abstractly elegiac gesture. Reappearing today, the fractured expanses of soft geometry seem to act as a harbinger of our biosphere’s collapse that more of us can hear. For Hendl Helen Mirra, who wrote a manifesto of sorts in 2019 to address environmental concerns relative to received artmaking and exhibition practices, revisiting and remaking past works is an obvious move. Attending to things as artifacts of change keeps decisions and methods close at hand. This looking again and anew and again at the works assembled for green holotrope reveals an effortless focus on the primacy of gravity and the intrinsic qualities of unrefined materials, relative scales, and simple structures. The objects philosophically bounce and physically echo, vibrate, turn, weather, and open as material integrity allows. The foreground and background flip and flap. Because really, what is the difference between the hole in a donut and the hole in a bagel? Hendl Helen Mirra has been represented by Peter Freeman, Inc. since 2004. She lives in West Marin, Northern California. Her work Harmless mistake is currently on view in Spora, at Swiss Institute, New York.

Peter Freeman, Inc. is pleased to present Misunderstandings, a group exhibition curated by Erik Verhagen, that explores the paradoxical nature of photography, its physical and indexical qualities that link it to reality, and its constructive potential, so amenable to cross-fertilization and manipulation. The title, borrowed from Mel Bochner’s Misunderstandings: A Theory of Photography (1970), highlights the ambiguous nature of photography, its capacity to be informed and also deformed by the historical and sociological tensions inherent to image (re)production.

Peter Freeman, Inc. is pleased to present Ernst Caramelle: actual size, the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery and his second at this New York location. Austrian conceptualist Caramelle regularly engages wall painting, drawing, photography, video, publishing, and interventions with architecture. This exhibition features a generous selection of his works on paper and board spanning decades, alongside publications and a video. Regardless of his choice of materials, Caramelle’s concerns remain consistent: production, or keeping things going; reproduction, or transforming things through duplicating and publishing; and perception, or finding the most improbable things through direct observation. Formally trained as a glass painter, Caramelle’s work across all media is characterized by a lightness of touch and humorous play with scale, flatness, and depth. Whether it is in the speediness of a wine spill forming a landscape or the slow burn of the sun blanching the colors of construction papers, he guides his forms into focus. Given his openness to processes that are only moderately controllable, the studio is a constant and crucial space for keeping transformations manageable and ongoing. As a site for daily routine, with the day-to-day doodles, the focused planning, small accidents, and sudden miracles accumulating, even his studio table tops become works. The proposition in the title, actual size, allows Caramelle’s use of marginalia and framing devices as tools to open an elastic relationship between abstraction and illusion—after all, how can a thing be anything but its own actual size? This is a gesture reaching across decades to previous Caramelle projects. For example two publications from 1990, the catalogue Panorama der Retrospektiven (Rainer Verlag) and the artist’s book Grandeur nature (Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris), each feature basic geometric forms paired with labels to identify them as precise objects or spaces, playing the actual size of the images off the imagined scale of their identifications. Ernst Caramelle sets in motion a steady approach to making and observing. Even when keeping things to their actual size, the artist’s oeuvre is an ode to the process: shifting perception and form by keeping open to changes of direction. Ernst Caramelle (b. 1952, Tyrol, Austria) lives and works in Frankfurt and New York. Notable solo exhibitions include Museum moderner Kunst Siftung Ludwig, Vienna (2018); Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht (2016); La Salle de Bains, Lyon (2014); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2012); Bloomberg Space, London (2010); Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck, Austria (2008); Museu Fundação Serralves, Porto, Portugal (2005); the National Gallery, Berlin (1990); the Kunsthalle Bern (1986); Portikus, Frankfurt; and Wiener Secession, Vienna (1993). Group exhibitions include the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart (2020); MIT List Art Center, Cambridge (2018); Städtische Galerie, Karlsruhe (2015); South London Gallery (2010); Sammlung Generali Foundation, Vienna (2005); Documenta IX, Kassel (1992); and Musée d’Arte Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1990). A reception with the artist will be held on Thursday, 20 April, 6-8pm. Caramelle will give a talk and walkthrough of the exhibition on Saturday, 22 April at 4:30pm.

Sunday, August 9, 1908 Is the title of my exhibition at Peter Freeman opening on Thursday, March 2, 2023 I have been using comic images in my work since 1973. I was interested in the details of the comic image and I cut out parts of comic books depicting the physical elements of water, air, gravity, food, light, beds, cars, shadows, etc. I was interested in depicting The parts of that world that Support life in the pictured world. This became Details from an Imaginary Universe. I was interested in entering the picture. Also in 1973 I was experimenting with light patterns and light sources. The differences between the light patterns as perceived in comics and real life seemed arbitrary. If all I see are light patterns where is life within those patterns? Little Nemo in Slumberland was in the New York Herald on Sundays from Oct 15, 1905 – July 23, 1911 by Winsor McCay Nemo’s world was in his dreams and at the end of every page Nemo would wake up, mostly by falling out of bed. The page that my show depicts is from August 9, 1908. There are 12 frames in the story It starts with an invitation to have breakfast. Nemo and his friend are served by Nemo’s mother (in Slumberland). A kind of oatmeal was served and Nemo and Flip noticed that they were getting fatter and heavier!! The more they eat the heavier they get! Next the furniture collapses! And pretty soon they are falling thru the floors of the house. The entire picture plane is collapsing falling apart, becoming abstract, deconstructing!! This is in 1908!! Cubism, abstraction and fauvism all happening far away from the Sunday funnies in the USA. Also all of this deconstruction was happening in a dream!! So pointing towards surrealism! I’ve added two elements to each frame. 1st 16 circular details of each picture in exactly the same location as in the big picture. 2nd I changed the color in every outlined area creating an abstract pattern. This relates to the idea of “All I see are light patterns” Both the details and light patterns refer to aspects of the work going back 50 years! Thus making this show a kind of an anniversary. Happy birthday, Glenn! – Matt Mullican, 2023 Peter Freeman, Inc. is pleased to present Matt Mullican’s fifth solo show with the gallery, his third in New York in addition to two previous shows at our Paris location, featuring a new series of paintings and drawings. Matt Mullican (born 1951, Santa Monica, California) earned his BFA from the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles in 1974 and has since exhibited extensively in Europe and the United States. He recently had a series of retrospective exhibitions presented by the Possehl Foundation in Lübeck and was the recipient of their 2022 Possehl Prize for International Art. Other solo exhibitions have been held at the Musée des Arts Contemporains au Grand Hornu, Belgium; de Young Museum, San Francisco; Skulpturenhalle, Neuss, Germany; Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan; and Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland. Mullican’s work can be found in the collections of several major institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tate, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museo National Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; and National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Matt Mullican lives and works in Berlin and New York. For reproduction requests and press inquiries, please contact: anna@peterfreemaninc.com

Peter Freeman, Inc. is pleased to present The Circus Animals’ Desertion, an exhibition of works on paper by Paul Anthony Harford (1943–2016) selected by Cecily Brown. Originally trained as a painter, Harford drew almost every day of his life. Over the years he produced hundreds of highly finished drawings but resisted opportunities to exhibit them, remaining virtually unknown until after his death. This is the first Harford exhibition outside of the United Kingdom. Like William Butler Yeats’s narrator in The Circus Animals’ Desertion, Harford found inspiration in the debris and “refuse” of everyday life in the sleepy coastal towns of Southend-on-Sea and Weymouth where he lived. A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can, Old iron, old bones, old rags […] Drawn to the permanent residents of these British seaside enclaves, many of whom were plagued with addiction and sickness, he was fascinated by their complicated relationships with the resort towns that, on the surface, promise an escape from the larger world. His crisp, meticulous graphite drawings challenge this aspirational characterization of these otherwise declining areas, depicting a sedate world that is punctured by a sense of unease and the uncanny. In one drawing, a seagull flies above a man who appears to be falling into his car, his body contorted into an almost impossible pose. Another drawing takes this even further, depicting an anonymous pair of legs essentially melting into the pavement and detached from any other identifiable body parts, while other distorted images of wrecked cars embody a similarly precarious, restless quality. And yet unexpected surrealist details, like a bed of flowers blooming from an upturned sedan or a pair of wings protruding from the top of another totaled vehicle, reveal moments of tenderness and humor within Harford’s otherwise soberly rendered scenes of mundane life. Cecily Brown has a unique connection to the artist, who was married to her aunt when she was young. In a piece she wrote for the publication that accompanied Harford’s first solo exhibition Other Voices, Other Rooms, she refers to his drawings as an “inspirational presence” throughout her childhood. She goes on to recall the works that stand out most in her memory, including “a figure on a tractor, elongated and torqued like an El Greco saint” and A Return of a Prodigal Son (1966), an early and unusually colorful work on paper included in her selection for The Circus Animals’ Desertion. Born in Weston-Super-Mare in 1943, Paul Anthony Harford studied at Byam Shaw School of Art in London before moving on a whim to Southend-on-Sea in 1963. In Southend, and later Weymouth, Harford worked at times as a schoolmaster, cleaner, bin man, and hospital porter, all while maintaining his prolific drawing practice. His first solo exhibition, Other Voices, Other Rooms, was posthumously presented at Focal Point Gallery, Southendon-Sea, in 2018 with subsequent solo exhibitions held at Sadie Coles HQ, London, in 2018 and 2020.

Peter Freeman, Inc. is pleased to present Back, a selection of works from an alternative perspective, pushing into view the usually unseen, the hidden, or things thought unimportant. In this exhibition, the works offer opportunities to rethink aesthetic, formal, social, or political assumptions from new positions. Spanning more than 50 years, from Pop art to the present, each work brings the back to the forefront, as in Roy Lichtenstein’s self-referential 1968 Stretcher Frame with Vertical Bar, a trompe l’oeil depiction of the back of the same painting. Or Bruce Nauman’s iconic Henry Moore Bound to Fail (1967/1970), cast from his own physically bound torso, which also looks back to recent art history with ironic intent. Elisabetta Benassi’s new series prints the back sides of historic lithographic stones used by other artists. Her delicate and precise watercolors depict the back sides of archival press photos from major historical and artistic turning points, focusing on the annotated caption descriptions of the actual images which often remain out of sight. An undated 1970s photograph by Alvin Baltrop of the back of a man’s head leaves identity and the relationship to both photographer and viewer ambiguous. Baltrop’s images were often taken at the West Side Piers in Manhattan, a longtime clandestine cruising site, and routinely capture people looking elsewhere or engaged with others in a manner that draws the viewer’s attention beyond the frame of the image. In a similar gesture, Catherine Murphy paints her name written backwards on the inside of a steamed window, a message offered to someone outside the house — outside the painting. Recent sculptural works include Adam McEwen’s CLEAN ME (2018), a pared down linear relief that draws the image of the back of a truck, and David Adamo’s untitled 2014 bronze sculpture of a stretched canvas casually leaning face to the wall — echoing the Lichtenstein nearby. Arthur Jafa’s Ex-Slave Gordon (2017), is a wall relief based on a historic photograph showing the severely scarred back of the former slave. The original photograph was circulated widely by the abolitionist movement as visual proof of slavery’s brutality. Jafa’s sculpture pushes front and center the way this history continues to resonate today despite the historical distance. The histories and references of the works in Back vary in intent, and yet form a connected circle highlighting the importance to look behind, to remember what is often out of view.

Peter Freeman, Inc., is pleased to present Mel Bochner’s ninth exhibition at the gallery. Following his recent drawings retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago (April – August 2022), this is a survey of paintings executed on various surfaces—canvas, velvet, paper, and directly on the wall. These text-based works pulse with a strong vein of irony and humor. Words, and phrases, spill, drip, and accumulate to the point of obliterating themselves in palimpsests of illegibility. They sit on, or recede into the substrate, they also emerge from it, as thickly pigmented forms, and three-dimensional reliefs, reenacting the current state of our national discourse. Mel Bochner was born in Pittsburgh in 1940. He studied painting and philosophy, earned his BFA from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1962, and moved to New York City in 1964, where he continues to live and work. His first exhibition, in 1966 at the School of Visual Arts, Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to be Viewed as Art, is often cited as the first exhibition of conceptual art. In 1976, Peter Freeman, while still a student, invited him to make the cover for the Harvard University campus literary magazine. Thirty years later, in 2006, Bochner joined Peter Freeman, Inc. and has mounted eight solo exhibitions at the gallery since. Bochner has long explored the limits of language, reproduction, and repetition. Speaking to the Brooklyn Rail’s Phong Bui, at the time of his first PFI exhibition, Bochner commented on how people ‘read’ his text paintings and gave the following insight into his larger relationship with language: “a work of art lives by being continuously re-misinterpreted.” Bochner’s work is included in many public collections around the world, including Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tate, London; and Centre Pompidou, Paris. In addition to the drawing retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago, Bochner’s recent exhibitions include a commission from his Measurement series at Dia Beacon (November 2019 – April 2021). He is currently showing a wall drawing as part of a site-specific installation series at the Menil Drawing Institute, Houston, on view until September 2023.

Peter Freeman, Inc. is delighted to present Fernanda Gomes’s (b. 1960, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) inaugural exhibition with the gallery. This is her first solo presentation since her 2019 panoramic exhibition at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo and her first one-person show in New York since 2006. Using a vast range of materials and procedures, she makes artworks either in a traditional artisanal way or by constructing objects from all sorts of items collected from her immediate surroundings. By choosing to repurpose what already exists, she reflects on consumerism, waste, value, and the idea of economy in a broader sense, as a principle and practice. From her first show in 1988 to her latest presentation, Fernanda Gomes treats each exhibition as a work of art in itself, creating ensembles of autonomous pieces and responding to a diversity of contexts and situations. Her work calls into question the very nature of presence, in movement, space, and time. This exhibition features painting and sculpture, playfully stretching its limits and possibilities. It also includes a light specific ensemble—a room built to produce an even light for a group of works that exist fully in relation to the light, the space, and to each other. This is the third ensemble she has made to remain as such, each one with unique qualities. Previous iterations have been shown at the Punta della Dogana in Venice (2016), and at Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo (2017), recently acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Other collections with her work include the Art Institute of Chicago; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; and Tate, London. Select solo museum exhibitions include the Vienna Secession (2019); Fundación Jumex, Mexico (2018); Museu da Cidade, Lisboa, Portugal (2012); Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (2011); and the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto (2006), which holds since 2009 a permanent sculpture in its park.

David Adamo is an American artist (born 1979, Rochester, New York) who lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Primarily a sculptor, he engages with form and materiality, working with wood, plaster, bronze, and other materials to create installations that are both performative and formal in their arrangement. A process of slow removal is central to Adamo’s sculpture. Objects from everyday life take on new forms, revealed by their remains: the fruit after it has been bitten, the balloon after the air has run out. The same is true of Adamo’s wood works—the eventual forms have emerged through the reduction of material.

For his fourth solo exhibition at Peter Freeman, Inc., Jan Dibbets presents a selection of works from his latest series Billions of Universes, shown here for the first time outside of Europe. These large-scale color digital prints demonstrate that there is no limit to image building by means of technology.

curated by Branka Stipančić From Scratch brings together five artists whose activities were associated with Zagreb and Bratislava – two especially active artistic centres – who incorporated into their work the idea that art should proceed from the basic, elemental, and essential. The exhibition emphasizes the conceptual thread in the works, created between 1949 and 2020, of Mangelos, Julije Knifer, Július Koller, Goran Trbuljak and Mladen Stilinović, in which they foregrounded their distancing from modernism, which they found insufficiently challenging, and their aspiration to find their own artistic positions. The oeuvres of Mangelos, Knifer and Koller were created along the lines of existentialist philosophy and anti-art, striving towards a conceptual practice, and Trbuljak and Stilinović followed somewhat later, when the relations in the artworld had already changed. Mangelos's Tabula Rasa is an introduction into the exhibition in which each of the artists finds their way to symbolically "start from the beginning." For Mangelos (1921 – 1987), this means "learning the letters" of the Greek, Latin, Glagolitic and Cyrillic alphabets, runes, and others, and tying them to words. He used to explain that writing on Tabula Rasa was related to the motif of a new beginning, but also to the negation of painting. He sought to "negate the picture by writing it with words, to negate the word by painting it." He used words to redirect the process of looking towards thought and function, and away from the emotional. In the 1970s, he wrote a number of manifestos containing his propositions on art and civilization, some of which he also wrote on globes. The exhibited globe entitled Energy, flowing along the equator in different languages and scripts, is a metaphor for the world and its operating forces. For Julije Knifer (1924 – 2004) – who, like Mangelos, was a member of the neo-avant-garde Gorgona group (active in Zagreb 1959 – 1966) – focusing on what's essential meant reducing the visual to its basic elements. He believed that by using minimal means and extreme contrasts he could achieve a form of anti-painting. He always painted the same symbol – meander – composed of black and white, vertical and horizontal lines. His work reflects boundless patience and asceticism. Repeating the same motif over and over again from the Gorgona period until his death, he proved himself to be a modern Sisyphus and his early works (1960s) are closer to existentialism than the neo-constructivism of the New Tendencies under whose auspices he started exhibiting. Július Koller (1939 – 2007) is included in the exhibition primarily for his works featuring question marks, through which he demonstrated his artistic and political positions and his reaction to his country's socio-political instability. Koller worked in completely different circumstances than the other artists in this exhibition. Unlike Yugoslavia – which wasn't behind the Iron Curtain, which had a more moderate form of communism, where citizens could travel freely to both the East and the West, and which had embraced modernism already in the early 1950s so as to distance itself from the Soviet Union – Czechoslovakia was much more rigid in regard to artistic freedoms. Nevertheless, the neo-avant-garde appeared in exhibitions and artists's studios as early as mid-1960s. Koller, one of Slovakia's most radical artists, introduced words into his paintings, and this semantic transformation of the canvas and its conversion into text contained a compelling critique of painting. He developed the idea of "anti-happening" and "anti-painting" and wrote manifestos. He started using question marks in 1969, a year after the military had suppressed the Prague Spring. Koller would paint question marks on different materials, on everyday objects, on architecture, he would place them in different locations, and perform them in different ways in nature. For him, the question mark was a universal sign of communication, doubt and uncertainty, a symbol that examined the relationship between the individual and the collective, the relationship with the social situation, and man's relationship with the cosmos in general. Goran Trbuljak (1948), a prominent conceptual artist, started his career with street actions in the late 1960s and went on to produce an extensive, nuanced, and intriguing oeuvre. An Artist's Exercise is a series of works which ironize and reduce to absurdity the idea of artistic skill that is necessary for creating a masterpiece. The artist exercises his eyes and hands by writing dots in school arithmetic notebooks, trying to put them right in the middle of the squares. His other "exercises" include writing straight parallel lines and the process of copying. The artist exercises as if waiting for a time when he will be ready to make his work in the future, and he's been practicing this for over forty years. The artistic work of Mladen Stilinović (1947 – 2016) is largely concerned with the idea of the relationship between ideology and the man who resists it. Stilinović tackled some of the key linguistic, existential and artistic subjects such as work, time, money, power, and particularly pain. He saw pain as opposed to power, but also as a product of power. Like Mangelos, he liked the alphabetical order, and used the dictionary to equate the meaning of all words with the word PAIN, since "you learn the concept of pain with language" (L.Wittgenstein). The visitor is invited to play the Pain Game in which, however you throw the dice, the result is always the same. Because pain is universal. One of his films is named after a school textbook, Primer 1, 2, 3, in which he asks the audience to read aloud what they see in the film: shop signs, then to compose his poem – which had dissolved into words and letters through the frames, and to connect words and images in a fable in order to reveal the moral. "The vocabulary" of Stilinović's works, and of the other works in this exhibition, is associated with school: reading and writing. Notebooks, books and a globe, geometric elements and rhythms, dots and lines, and the symbol of the question mark all point to learning, repetition, a pursuit of perfection, and perseverance accompanied by the hope of discovering and creating something new, of knowing how to pose the right questions and perhaps find the answers. Despite being present on the local and, sporadically, from the early 1970s onwards, on the international art scene, their work got its due recognition only much later. Their professional careers began in the early 1990s, following socio-political changes in Eastern Europe, when an interest in artists from this region had emerged. Since then, they've regularly shown their work at numerous important exhibitions, biennials, solo and group exhibitions around the world. Gradually, they acquired a reputation, and today their works are part of world-famous museum collections such as MoMA, Centre Pompidou, MUMOK, Van Abbemuseum, Tate Modern etc.

Peter Freeman, Inc. is pleased to present Dove Allouche: Primordial Soup, the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery in New York, bringing together works from three recent series: Absorption Lines (2018-2019), platinum photographic prints of the sun’s absorption lines enlarged to the point of abstraction, Repeint (2019-2021), unique Lambda prints of paint samples from Renaissance paintings, and I.R (2016-2018), more than 100 small format drawings made after Isaac Robert's glass plate photographs of the sky. Allouche works with photographic processes, but also with drawing, printmaking, and scientific means, to bring light to natural phenomena that are otherwise invisible to the naked eye. Throughout his work, he has created a “syntax of reproducibility” (as critic Philippe-Alain Michaud has written) in which he masters and reinvents various mechanical processes, parsing them out step by step or slowing them down for examination. The means of representation become subjects in themselves, poetically intertwined with what is happening within the images. Dove Allouche does not see making the invisible visible as a way to seek the beyond elsewhere. It is not a metaphysics but a physics of bodies that determines the relationship to objects and steers the process by which images are revealed. Applying a filter to the as yet unseeable is how he makes discoveries and adjusts the scale of visibility, to obtain a new image of something that had no prior visible appearance. —Tristan Cormier, “Dove Allouche: making marks on a new scale” (2021), text written on the occasion of this exhibition Dove Allouche was born in 1972 in Sarcelles, he lives and works in Paris. Recent projects include a public commission for the library of the INHA – Institut national d’histoire de l’art – in Paris, solo presentations at Le Grand Trianon, Galerie des Cotelle, Château de Versailles (May 2019), as well The Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2018), and inclusion in Préhistoire et Modernité, Centre Pompidou (Paris, May 2019). His work has previously been the subject of solo exhibitions at Fondation Ricard, (Paris, 2016), and Centre Pompidou (Paris, 2013). His work is included in several museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Centre Pompidou, Paris. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, 13 January from 6 to 8 pm. For reproduction requests and press related questions, please contact the gallery at +1 212 966 5154 or madeline@peterfreemaninc.com. Read the full exhibition text by Tristan Cormier below In English: https://bit.ly/3zGUQzk In French: https://bit.ly/3qeyF0c

For her third solo exhibition at Peter Freeman, Inc., Catherine Murphy (b. 1946) presents thirteen recent paintings and drawings. These still-lives, landscapes, and self-portraits are all carefully witnessed or imagined scenarios, and all rely on direct observation. As Catherine Murphy’s work embraces this close observation, it simultaneously considers the intellectual, emotional, and abstract nature of painting, and humor. Over the extended time it takes to make each work, Murphy employs a thousand instances of looking, transforming seemingly isolated and fleeting moments into representations of passing time, meditating on reality as a place of constant and inevitable change. By grounding her imagery in the everyday, she loads her representation of familiar places and objects with narrative potential. At the same time, Murphy magnifies the tension between representation and abstraction by organizing visual information through a unique geometric lens. Forms, patterns, and grids dominate compositions and create connections between works with otherwise distinct subject matter. They are each, in their own way, studies of light, color, and reflection. The form created by two dramatically lit plastic trash bags, filled with clothes and piled on an office chair, echoes the shape of a man’s torso. A figure shrouded in a beach towel works as an interpretation of a landscape within a landscape. Her depiction of plastic buckets filled with water looks at figure, ground, and merging picture planes. Each surface reflects a distinct image of light filtering through the treetops above, while the details combine to form a single dazzling whole. “In Catherine Murphy’s quietly beautiful paintings, the everyday tips into the transcendental” – The New Yorker (2018) Catherine Murphy (b. 1946, Cambridge, Massachusetts) lives and works in Poughkeepsie, New York. Following her inaugural show at Peter Freeman, Inc (2013) the gallery, in collaboration with Skira Rizzoli, published her first major monograph, written by John Yau with a foreword by Svetlana Alpers. Murphy studied at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine and received a BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1967. She is a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and has work included in numerous museum collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

For his sixth solo exhibition at Peter Freeman, Inc., Thomas Schütte (b. 1954) presents a selection of new sculpture, print works and drawings that investigate figurative expressiveness, scale, and material. Schütte’s latest works are being shown here for the first time outside Europe. One of the most acclaimed artists of his generation, Schütte’s real and invented forms, often distorted and unsettling, explore themes of cultural memory, existential struggle, and human striving for an impossible utopian ideal.

Peter Freeman, Inc., is pleased to announce a retrospective of Alex Hay’s work, with new dates of 6 March – 29 May 2021. Originally planned for April 2020, what was the occasion of the artist’s 90th birthday last year, this is the artist's sixth exhibition with the gallery, and his first retrospective anywhere since the New York Cultural Center’s 1971 Alex Hay: Recorded and Performed Activities since 1962. The exhibition includes paintings, sculpture, and drawings from 1963 to 2020, with loans from the Archives of American Art, The Lowe Art Museum, Weatherspoon Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Peter Freeman, Inc. is pleased to announce an exhibition of Matt Mullican’s work, running concurrently with his retrospective Representing the Work at Musée des Art Contemporains au Grand-Hornu, Belgium. The exhibition brings together several themes and mediums from the multi-pronged practice Mullican has been developing for more than forty years, exploring perspective through banal and specific documentation of his own environment, at a particular place and time: Berlin ‪at 2 a.m.; descriptions of distinct moments from throughout the entire span of a woman’s life; and quotidian, abstract ideas expressed by “That Person,” his alter ego accessed through hypnosis. Universal Perspective focuses on new works: rubbings on painted canvas, sculpture, including modified objects from the turn of the century, a twenty-foot square banner, and watercolors on wood panels, a medium Mullican is showing for the first time. In Untitled (64 images from the Cosmology), new and existing signs, some of which have been present in Mullican’s visual vocabulary from the early ‘70s, depict life, death, heaven, hell, angels, demons, fate, and the soul. Their execution in watercolor on wood captures the artist’s spontaneous approach and receptiveness to the myriad possibilities of medium and materials, and highlights his ability to find new forms within a singular narrative. The exhibition borrows its title from a large-scale rubbing on view: Universal Perspective and Details presents a found image of a classic perspectival drawing technique in its entirety and in isolated details. This rubbing serves as a metaphor for the macro and micro themes present throughout the exhibition. Mullican explores representation, perception, and how meaning is created and communicated in real life and in real-time versus through media. Treating his impulse to organize information as a subject, and acknowledging this impulse as primeval, his artwork anticipated our current reliance on interfaces and signs. Matt Mullican was born in 1951 in Santa Monica, California. He earned his BFA from the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles in 1974, and has exhibited extensively internationally since, while also teaching, most recently at Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, Germany from which he retired in 2018. Representing the Work is on view at Musée des Art Contemporains au Grand-Hornu (Mac’s), Belgium ‪through 18 October 2020, a catalogue is available. Other recent exhibitions include Between Sign and Subject, de Young Museum, San Francisco (2019-2020); Banners, Skulpturenhalle, Thomas Schütte Stiftung, Neuss, Germany (2019); Representing the Work, NC-arte, Bogotá, Colombia (2019); The Feeling of Things, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan (2018); The Sequence of Things, Camden Arts Centre, London, England (2016); and Nothing Should Exist, Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (2016).

Peter Freeman, Inc., New York is pleased to announce a retrospective exhibition of Franz Erhard Walther’s work in sculpture and drawing from over a period of 50 years. Curated by Erik Verhagen and Susanne Walther, Migration of Forms 1956-2006 also marks 50 years since the 80-year-old German artist’s inclusion in the iconic Spaces exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1969. The curators chose the works on view to highlight the mobility of forms in Walther's works, both over time and through modes of exhibition. Long recognized as a key originator of participatory art, Walther’s works allow multiple exhibition possibilities, primarily with regard to their activation/inactivation. Polymorphic, the work can be hung or leaned against the wall or placed on horizontal supports, or even stored in receptacles or fabric membranes. The more than 250 Gouache Drawings (1961), usually presented in stacks, will here be exhibited for the first time on the wall. Trial Sewings, confined for many years in purgatory to "preparatory work," have been transformed into works in their own right. From one period to another, and from one family of works to another, certain "configurations" reappear or give rise to subtle variations: a survival of forms exists (calling to mind the concept of the Nachleben, as outlined by art historian Aby Warburg). In this respect, drawing constitutes a formidable reservoir for the artist, allowing him to generate countless matrices that can be used infinitely. For instance, the Workdrawings from the 1960s and 1970s compose a repertoire of forms for Walther, upon which he has drawn repeatedly. These works are the heart of the exhibition, testifying to the intertextual quality of Walther’s migration of forms. Walther, recipient of the Golden Lion for best artist at the 2017 Venice Biennale, was born in 1939 in Fulda, Germany, where he now lives and works. Walther gained recognition in the 1960s for his experimental sculpture and was included in important group exhibitions of that era such as When Attitudes Become Form (1969, curated by Harald Szeeman at Kunsthalle Bern, recreated for the 2013 Venice Biennale). His work is in many public collections, including Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Dia Art Foundation, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. Recent solo exhibitions include those at Fundacion Jumex Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City (2018); Ludwig Forum, Aachen, Germany (2017); Reina Sofia, Madrid (2017); Power Plant, Toronto (2016); and Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2015-2016).

Alex Katz and Peter Freeman, Inc. are pleased to present Downtown Painting, a collaborative summer group exhibition echoing the spirit of the downtown art scene in New York in the 1950s and 1960s. David Adamo, Etel Adnan, Brian Belott, Ellen Berkenblit, Katherine Bernhardt, Judith Bernstein, Forrest Bess, Ronald Bladen, Richard Bosman, Katherine Bradford, Zach Bruder, Ernst Caramelle, Francesco Clemente, Gaby Collins-Fernandez, Enzo Cucchi, Verne Dawson, Federico de Francesco, Jan de Vliegher, Martha Diamond, Steve DiBenedetto, Tyler Dobson, Lois Dodd, Rackstraw Downes, Sally Egbert, Rafael Ferrer, Cy Gavin, Juan Eduardo Gomez, Red Grooms, Marsden Hartley, Al Held, Carmen Herrera, Charline von Heyl, David Humphrey, Callum Innes, Yvonne Jacquette, Merlin James, Bill Jensen, Chantal Joffe, Jesse Kase, Misaki Kawai, Rosy Keyser, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Franz Kline, Udomsak Krisanamis, Justen Ladda, Robert Mangold, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Chris Martin, Andrew Masullo, Emma McMillan, Robert Moskowitz, Matt Mullican, Jeanette Mundt, Catherine Murphy, Nabil Nahas, Lauren Nickou, Alejandro Ospina, Virginia Overton, Philip Pearlstein, Nathlie Provosty, Tyson Reeder, David Rhodes, Kenny Rivero, David Salle, Allison Schulnik, Dana Schutz, Trevor Shimizu, Kim Sloane, Travess Smalley, Eduardo Terrazas, Bob Thompson, Mark Wethli, Wendy White, Franklin Williams, Sue Williams, Nick Wilson, Nicole Wittenberg, James Wolanin Downtown Painting includes 78 artists who are each exhibiting a painting of their choice. These invited artists, as Katz explains, echo ideas conceived in the 1950s and 1960s regarding distinctions between “uptown” and “downtown.” Whereas uptown art is uncontroversial, unproblematic, and more easily commodified, downtown art is intuitive, self-indulgent, and not made to fit comfortably into a home or institution. By working in non-conformist ways, these artists have maintained their initial desires to be free. Katz was a vital presence in the downtown scene of the 1960s, and exhibited work at Tanager Gallery, a co-op space that began its life in a barber shop in 1952. Around this time, other experimental, artist-run galleries also moved away from midtown and all that it represented. Like these galleries, Katz defied categorization and continues to do so today. The aim of Downtown Painting is to celebrate the current moment in painting in all its variations, showing work by artists as widely divergent as Silvia Plimack Mangold and Dana Schutz. The exhibition also includes several historic examples by artists such as Marsden Hartley and Al Held.

Peter Freeman, Inc. is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Silvia Bächli, her fifth show with the gallery, and Eric Hattan’s first. The Basel-based artists have exhibited together regularly for more than 35 years. Bächli’s primary medium is drawing; Hattan’s is video, sculpture, and installation. In their distinct bodies of work, the artists have in common a regard for the beauty in the ordinary; a sense of attention and openness to their surroundings and the movement of their bodies within space; and a spirit of playing with reality and legibility to create images that appear to simultaneously emerge and recede. Improvisation is important too, and place, both where they make and exhibit work. Here, they will exhibit both independent works, and work that they will make together, on-site. Bächli presents drawings made during a recent residency in London; their color, gestures, scale, and compositions reflect her temporary studio space, and the particulars of inhabiting the city. Her installation here reflects a similar sensitivity to the gallery space. She writes, “In an exhibition I try to find a sounding total space with the drawings, placing the sheets in such a way that they relate to each other across the room and across the spaces in between. There are precise places, pauses and clusters, there are repetitions and echoes. This invisible net through the space connects the drawings and makes the space vibrate.” Hattan sourced his materials locally upon arrival in New York; furniture, building supplies, electrical supplies, clothing, packaging, detritus are all possibilities. Spontaneity, coincidence, and a recognition of the mysteries present in even the most banal things play key roles in his thinking and creating; his interventions with materials range from minimal, to active manipulation. Throughout his work, moments of recognition are as frequent are those of disorientation. Silvia Bächli (born 1956, Baden, Switzerland) represented Switzerland at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. Exhibitions of her work have been held at Kunstmuseum, Basel (2018), Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2014), and Centre Pompidou, Paris (2007), among others. Her work is in the permanent collections of many public collections, including Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Dallas Museum of Art; Kunstmuseum Basel; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich. Eric Hattan (1955 born in Wettingen, Switzerland) was awarded the 2016 Basler Kunstpreis in Basel. He has had numerous solo and group exhibitions and performances in Europe and elsewhere, notably Kolumba, Cologne (2017), Centre culturelle Suisse, Paris (2017) Frac Paca, Marseille (2014), Mac Val, Vitry-sur-Sein/Paris (2009). His work is in the collections of Kunstmuseum Basel; Mamco Geneva, Arter Istanbul, CNAP Paris, and FRAC Marseille, among other public institutions. The two artists will be exhibiting together at Kunsthalle Karlsruhe from 12 July to 29 September 2019.

Peter Freeman, Inc., is pleased to present Charles LeDray: American Standard, the artist’s inaugural show with the gallery and his first exhibition of new work in over ten years. LeDray’s body of work comprises hand-made replicas of found or imagined everyday objects whose factual appearance disguises the remarkable means of their creation. LeDray combines these objects (a tie, suspenders, a hotel key, a wedding ring; a stack of industrial bricks, mortar oozing between them; cinder blocks, work gloves, tools; a janitor’s mop) into familiar and enigmatic narratives. The imagery is concrete: eerily detached from reality by scale, yet the artist’s attention to detail renders the works true to life. Some groupings of objects appear as still lifes, each one narrative rich with conceptual complexity and a multiplicity of associations (cultural, historical, and personal). This exhibition includes fifteen new sculptures and eleven new drawings, enlargements of vintage ex-libris plates: symbols of the readers’ pride of ownership and varied self-interests, a theme that weaves in and out of the sculptural works as well, and is implicit in the show’s title, American Standard. In American Standard / Crazy Quilt (2017-2018), a quilt composed of thousands of colorful, irregular pieces of fabric substitutes an American flag hanging on a flag pole topped with a golden eagle. Eagles Softball (2016-2018) proposes a carpenter’s workshop replete with painted silhouettes of absent tools (and their wire attachments) inhabiting a hand-drilled peg board wall. At its center is a banner proclaiming “EAGLES NYC SOFTBALL,” a recreation of a 1980s artifact from a sports team sponsored by the infamous NYC bar. This is attended to by other signifying objects: a catcher’s mitt, a key chain, a horseshoe, a rabbit’s foot. Throughout LeDray’s work, multitudes of forms play as stand-ins for divergent voices that sometimes clash, elsewhere harmonize, as with the books and boxes strewn across a recreated portion of sidewalk in Free Public Library (2015-2019). Born in Seattle in 1960, Charles LeDray moved to New York in 1989. From 2002-2003, LeDray was the subject of a survey exhibition organized by the ICA Philadelphia, which traveled to the Arts Club of Chicago, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the Seattle Art Museum. In 2009, Artangel, London commissioned MENS SUITS, a major installation in a 19th century Victorian firehouse. In 2010, the ICA Boston organized a comprehensive retrospective, Charles LeDray: workworkworkworkwork, which traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. In 2012, the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach presented a solo exhibition. His work was installed at Olana and the Thomas Cole Site as part of the exhibition River Crossings: Contemporary Art Comes Home (2015). In 1993, LeDray received the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, and in 1997 he was the recipient of the Prix de Rome from the American Academy in Rome. LeDray’s work can be found in many major public collections including The Museum of Modern Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Hammer Museum at UCLA; Crystal Bridges; The Des Moines Art Center; The Denver Art Museum; The ICA Boston; Philadelphia Art Museum; Smithsonian Museum of American Art; and Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. The drawings on view here are part of a limited book edition commissioned by the Library Council of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, to be published in November of 2019.

[intentionally left blank] In the context of this exhibition, there will be backwards walkings every morning the week of 5 November.

Peter Freeman, Inc., is pleased to announce an exhibition of new sculpture by Thomas Schütte, among the most acclaimed artists of his generation. This is the first time the Düsseldorf-based artist has shown new work on such a monumental scale since his show at the gallery in 2012. Schütte works across various mediums to explore themes of cultural memory, existential struggle, and the human striving for an impossible utopian ideal. His mastery of gesture, material, and shifts in scale are evident throughout his oeuvre, regardless of the medium he chooses. In the current exhibition, a series of new bronzes in four different scales explore new iterations of one of Schütte’s key images, the Mann im Matsch [Man in Mud]. The smallest of these new works to be on view is only some inches tall, and the largest are three individual bronze figures, each of these about 12 feet tall. These largest works introduce a new subject, Man in the Wind, but reference Man in Mud, the subject of which was Schütte’s first figurative work (1982/1983). That image originated with a small plastic toy that Schütte chose to cast in a box up to its knees to prevent it from continually falling over. This technical solution lead to a deeply effective and metaphoric image. The figurine was transformed into a representation of a wanderer stuck in a trackless terrain while attempting to fulfill an unknown assignment. Schütte sees this figure, which is held in by its own material and is thus incapable of moving forward, as a sort of allegory to the failure of the modern fixation on history’s constant progress. Schütte has recently had solo exhibitions at Oldenburger Kunstverein, Germany (2018), Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2017), Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, Switzerland (2013-2014), Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany (2013), and Serpentine Gallery, London (2012). He has had three retrospectives held in Bonn (2010), Madrid (2010), and Munich (2009). His work is included in the permanent collections of major international museums including: Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Tate, London; Dallas Museum of Art; Art Institute of Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Museum of Modern Art, New York. Thomas Schütte was born in 1954 in Oldenburg, Germany; he lives and works in Düsseldorf.

In memory of Geoffrey Hendricks, 1931–2018. Summer, brings together 34 works by 7 artists who combine skeptical clarity with a mindful and at times humor-tinged desire to locate the intersection of spiritual and physical presence in daily life. The natural world serves as a doorway into a highly rarefied metaphysical realm where the sea of consciousness surges against the tangible world. Here all is in flux as distinctions between self and soul, body and spirit, past and present, mortification and bliss, confinement and escape all blur and waver. Summer celebrates the disparate elements of the Earth, while exploring the human connection to nature. – Ugo Rondinone David Adamo (b. 1979) presents a group of "termite mound" sculptures, with their cathedral-like forms that are based on constructions made by a species of insect better known for its destructive nature. These works are representative of his interest in creating sculpture from processes that can be observed in nature. A prominent member of the Fluxus movement, Geoffrey Hendricks (b. 1931; d. 2018) has often explored his fascination with nature through both his performance art and visual art. His Sky Paintings (1965) on view here render the visible invisible and the immaterial material. Shara Hughes (b. 1981), describes her enchanted vistas as “invented landscapes.” They recall picturesque images from vintage postcards, blown up and abstracted to assume a fantastical ambiguity. After an established career in New York as an abstract expressionist, Stephen Pace (b. 1918; d. 2010) shifted to figurative painting in 1962 when he relocated to Maine. There, he found the coastal working waterfronts compelling, in particular the activities of the fisherman: digging clams, setting lobster traps, restocking bait. In her paintings, Emily Mae Smith (b. 1979) plays with legacies of Pop art, in particular its glamour finish and populist appeal. Finely rendered, complex in their psychodrama, they reference classic animation, art history, mythology, and science-fiction kitsch. Ned Smyth (b. 1948) explores the expression of reverence in his work, which comprises both sculpture and public arts projects. His practice is informed by his study of archeological sites, temples, cathedrals, and past structural periods and details. Early in her career, Pat Steir (b. 1940) was loosely allied with Conceptual Art and Minimalism, but she is now best known for her dripped, splashed, and poured "waterfall" paintings that she first started making in the 1980s.

Peter Freeman, Inc. is pleased to present Lucy Skaer: Sentiment, the British artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery in New York. Throughout her practice, in sculpture, print, and film, Skaer mines and manipulates preexisting imagery—from art, from history, and from her own oeuvre and personal history—transforming and destabilizing straightforward readings of the original source material and the resulting works. In this exhibition she explores the role of feeling, emotion and subjectivity in how we experience objects, images, or situations, despite degrees of abstraction or transmutation. In La Chasse (2017), abstract sculptures—comprised of elements like ingots and lozenges, forms that Skaer has used in previous sculptures—are adapted to mimic sentient animals. In refiguring the forms as quarry, the subject that the sculpture depicts becomes both less legitimate and more sympathetic. The idea is based in part on miniature illuminations from the Le livre de chasse, a medieval manuscript on Renaissance hunting techniques from 1331-1391. Those images of observation, capture and slaughter both create and satisfy desire: the hunted animals appear on the page as if they are already tasty morsels on a plate. Using the analogy of the hunt in sculpture, Skaer draws a parallel between creation and death, animate and inanimate, and legibility and abstraction. Each animal reads as a being, but is nearly unidentifiable save one small realistically-rendered body part or gesture that each bears. Also on view is a new series of cast-bronze sculptures, abstract in form and hand-painted to represent the natural elements, rain, snow, and wind for example. Through these representations of fleeting states of weather, Skaer explores how and what can be embodied in form, she plays with how far into abstraction she can venture while leaving some semblance of the thing identifiable, and with that, the sentiment that one ascribes to it from their own experiences. In works from an ongoing project she began in 2012, Skaer uses elements from her childhood home (where her father still resides) such as wooden floor boards, windows and doors and reconfigures them into boxes, cubes, or slabs, embellishing them with fine materials, replacing glass panes with lapis lazuli, and embedding objects from her father’s various collections of disperate objects. She is performing a displacement of memory – her old door is no longer a door and the new door is not the door of her memory. Sentiment in art would seem more concurrent with the year the house was built (c. 1825) than now; however, sentiment in its multiple definitions—as a subjective, deeply personal response, but also as an attachment to an idea that is believed to be true without positive knowledge—has a great deal of relevance in a post-truth era. Lucy Skaer was born in Cambridge, England in 1975. She earned her degree at the Glasgow School of Art, and in recent years has developed a considerable international reputation. Recent solo exhibitions have been mounted at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2017-2018; travelled to Salzburger Kunstverein, 2018), Museo Tamayo, México City (2017), MRAC Serignan, France (2017), Musees Gallo Romains, Lyon (2016), Tramway, Glasgow (2013), Yale Union, Portland (2013), Kunsthalle Wien (2012), Kunsthalle Basel (2009), Chisenhale Gallery, London (2008) and Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2008). Skaer is included in the forthcoming Carnegie International, 57th Edition 2018, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, and has been included in numerous international group exhibitions at venues including Documenta 14 (2017) with Rosalind Nashsashibi, The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2013), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2013), Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2010), Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2010), and K21 Düsseldorf (2010), Tate Britain (2009), the 5th Berlin Biennale (2008), and the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007).