Petzel

Petzel is pleased to present Painting as Model, an exhibition of multidisciplinary works by British-American artist Malcolm Morley (1931–2018). On view at the gallery’s Chelsea location at 520 W 25th Street from June 20 to August 2, 2024, the exhibition spans over 50 years of the artist’s oeuvre in 32 works created from 1959 to 2014. Organized in close partnership with the artist’s estate, Malcolm Morley: Painting as Model will be the first comprehensive survey of Morley’s work in over two decades.

Petzel is pleased to present MORTAR (the cute ones shouldn’t go unnoticed), a selection of paintings by Berlin-born artist Stefanie Heinze. The show marks Heinze’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, and will be on view from May 3 to June 8, 2024, at Petzel’s Chelsea location at 520 West 25th Street. Following the artist’s relocation from Berlin to New York this past year, Heinze’s newest suite of works investigates systems of knowledge and truth, challenging received notions of representation.

Petzel is pleased to present NOSEBLEED, featuring the work of Los Angeles-based artist Nikita Gale. The show marks Gale’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery, and will be on view from May 2 to June 8, 2024, at Petzel’s Chelsea location at 520 West 25th Street. NOSEBLEED expands Gale’s ongoing research on live performance, considering the spatial, social, and embodied phenomenon that occur within large-scale venues of spectacle.

Petzel Gallery is pleased to present Soliloquies, a group exhibition of sculpture by 18 artists, on view from March 14 to April 20, 2024 at Petzel’s Chelsea location. Comprised of exclusively freestanding sculpture, Soliloquies opens multiple vantage points for the encircling viewer, uniting multi-disciplinary artists who all use sculpture in their practices: Walead Beshty, Cosima von Bonin, Keith Edmier, Derek Fordjour, Nikita Gale, Georg Herold, Sean Landers, Allan McCollum, Rodney McMillian, Malcolm Morley, Jorge Pardo, Joyce Pensato, Seth Price, Stephen Prina, Jon Pylypchuk, Tschabalala Self, Raphaela Vogel, and Heimo Zobernig.

Petzel is pleased to present Mashber, a selection of new paintings by New York-based artist Ross Bleckner. The show marks Bleckner’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, and will be on view from January 18 to March 9, 2024, at Petzel’s Chelsea location at 520 West 25th Street. Using floral motifs, modes of erasure, and abstract landscapes derived from brain scans, Bleckner stages a range of emotional allegories through stylistic, iconographic, and painterly conditions central to the artist’s practice.

Petzel is pleased to present In the Expanded Penalty Box: Did You Happen to See the Most Beautiful Fox?, an interdisciplinary exhibition of new works by Berlin-based artist Raphaela Vogel, in which she unfolds her enigmatic form repertoire beyond aesthetic orthodoxies. The show marks Vogel’s first exhibition with the gallery, as well as her first solo exhibition in the US, and will be on view from January 11 to February 17, 2024, at Petzel’s Chelsea location at 520 West 25th Street.

Petzel is pleased to present SCORE, an interdisciplinary exhibition of new works by New York-based artist Derek Fordjour. The show marks Fordjour’s second exhibition with the gallery and will be on view from November 10th to December 22nd, 2023, at Petzel’s Chelsea location at 520 West 25th Street. SCORE, the multivalent title of Derek Fordjour’s sprawling new three-room exhibition, encapsulates several layers of meaning: to cut and scrape–a reference to his distinctive process of excavation in painting; to gain points in a competitive contest, a constant allegory in Fordjour’s work; and to compose as he has in collaboration to create a choreographic performance. Furthermore, the content of his newest works mines his lived experience to build a painterly score of seminal moments, exploring the zeitgeist of his formative years and grappling with a host of sense memories in his most personal body of work yet. Spanning the entire ground floor of Petzel Gallery’s Chelsea outpost, this exhibition typifies the artist’s continued practice of presenting various modes of representation, medium, format and display. Fordjour’s SCORE combines a suite of new paintings and sculpture by the artist (South Gallery) with a multilevel, indoor architectural installation (East Gallery) and custom-built performance space (West Gallery). The South Gallery presents the latest of Fordjour’s signature two-dimensional works, displayed within the traditional white cube, paired with a new, monumental floor sculpture, Flock. Blending the two and three-dimensional, the static and the mobile, SCORE incorporates familiar artistic forms with new collaborations that build upon and connect back to Fordjour’s established practice. Flock presents a collection of upturned legs and wheels clustered in a tight gaggle, speaking directly to Fordjour’s enduring interest in questioning agency and autonomy in the face of stagnant conditions, social or otherwise. Through spectacle and peculiar arrangement, Flock evokes a profound tension, echoing many of the smaller sculptural propositions displayed in Wunderkammer, a site-specific installation in the East Gallery. Exemplifying the multitude of ways inequities are systematically sustained and supported within traditional art museums and galleries, Fordjour’s multilevel East Gallery installation is the heart of the exhibition. Upon entering Wunderkammer, visitors ascend the stairs of an architectural structure to encounter a series of corridors lined with a series of wall insets, displaying Fordjour’s sculptures as a “cabinet of curiosities.” Featuring ambient lighting and carpeting, this space invokes references to the world of luxury retail and high-end presentation. The innermost room is abuzz with two kinetic dioramas circulating on a rotating belt that incorporate miniature murals. Painted in Fordjour’s signature style, the murals create a backdrop for sculptural elements engineered to perform synchronized movements. Following the dioramas, visitors descend downstairs into the dank conditions of a basement. Not dissimilar to an artist’s studio or a retail warehouse, this environment presents a stark contrast to the upstairs. Largely obscured or hidden from view, the guise of luxury is often inextricably linked to the gross inequities of capitalistic enterprise. Situated far from the limelight of the floor above, in what the artist refers to as a theatrical fragment, two live actors perform pedestrian tasks as laborers powering the dioramas above. By casting the visitor as spectator, witness and audience, Fordjour’s SCORE offers a peek behind an opulent curtain, animating questions of power and conspicuous consumption. In SCORE, Fordjour debuts his latest collaboration, Arena, an original ensemble movement piece, jointly composed with renowned choreographer Sidra Bell, founder of Sidra Bell Dance New York. Arena will be performed twice daily in the West Gallery. With live musical accompaniment from Hannah Mayree of The Black Banjo Reclamation Project, five dancers will animate the space, performing the original choreographic score atop a packed dirt floor, within a built environment, which includes a sculptural seating structure and custom tent. Informed directly from the artist’s paintings, original costume and lighting design infuse theatricality into the artist’s oeuvre. Arena grapples with notions of performance and abstraction through live action in a kaleidoscopic exploration of labor, history, power and race.

Petzel Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Tokyo-based artist Tomoo Gokita, in his debut solo exhibition with the gallery. Works included mark a new era for Gokita, as he expands his practice toward innovative techniques and striking color palettes. Internationally renowned for pushing the boundaries of figuration, particularly in his high-contrast grayscale paintings, Gokita has shifted toward novel source imagery and materials. The artist was struck by a booklet found near his studio of simple illustrations of everyday objects. Created for patients with dementia, these objects are used in an exercise that puts forward the question, “What is this?”. Gokita has developed this imagery to create colorful, fresh compositions. Influenced by Pop Art, kitsch aesthetics, and music, Gokita’s crafted canvases are covered with multiple layers of paper for the first time, including paper sleeves of various vinyl records into the layers of his paintings. In doing so, the artist connects his latest series of paintings to a natural fluidity that underscores his versatile drawing practice. The hand-made ethos of his layered canvases also reflects Gokita’s longstanding affinity for vintage magazines and pulpy, printed ephemera, with his own Neo-expressionist, abstracted twist. Across this suite of recent paintings, Gokita appropriates this mnemonic exercise, in which elderly patients with dementia are asked to recall the name of an object with the image, just as children often are. In this way, the artist bridges the chasm between the signifier and the signified in these vibrant, evocative creations while playing with varying levels of contact: the physicality of layered paper on canvas, the familiarity of his subjects, and the foundations of signification itself. Approaching these paintings, the viewer brushes the moment of discovery, akin to Gokita’s chance encounter outside his studio, through engagement with his refined, exuberant impressions. Through both high and low, legible and concealed references, Gokita invites the audience to explore this liminal space and to ask themselves, “What is this?”.

Charline von Heyl presents her first solo exhibition since her presentation at the 2022 Venice Biennale, opening September 8th at Petzel’s Chelsea location. Over the past three decades, von Heyl has made paintings that upend conventional assumptions about composition, beauty, narrative, design, and artistic subjectivity. For her new exhibition, von Heyl explores new visual idioms in daring ways, reflecting on painting’s limits and potential.

We might imagine that the bright red handrails, flat white walls, and the brute emptiness or starkness of the gridded courtyard captured the artist’s attention when encountering the photograph from which Plaza A derives, tropes resonating with his long-standing fascination with the “faded modernism” of the 1970s. Here are visual markers of an architectural modality now so ubiquitous as to undermine temporal and geographical certainties, of a space so banal or ordinary that it also confounds easy understanding of its possible function or modes of occupation. The courtyard could be in Asia, the Middle East, or North America, it might have been built in the late 1970s, or five years ago. It is at once contingent and generic. If we can recognize legacies of architectural gestures at work—like Hans Hollein’s Media Lines for the 1972 Munich Olympics, colorful railings later coursing through James Stirling’s Neue Staatsgalerie Stuttgart of 1984 to become familiar handrails within a commercial vernacular—any shift in register is not cast as a devolution, but mobilized for aesthetic tension. Yet one thing seems clear, at least initially: if Plaza seems haunted by histories of social and collective formations, we are looking into a private enclave, at a private space masquerading as a public one, as suggested in the unstable constellation of awkward ramps, flamingo pink awnings, surveillance cameras, potted plants, trash bags, uniformed staff, and fountains. But lament at the forlorn appearance of this “plaza” is not the artist’s game, the paintings don’t judge in this sense. Rather the site’s ordinariness functions as a gambit through which radical ambiguities and thus potentials come to the fore, uncertainties of use and of disposition that are amplified by Eggerer’s formal gestures and careful visual recalibration as the photograph (found online) is expanded and transposed into a massive painting, Plaza A, and its haunting, darker doppelganger, Plaza B, the latter a more self-contained twin that amplifies the unsettling nature of the first, while harboring its own uncanny qualities. Eggerer spoke of Plaza as performing an “economy of withdrawal,” and indeed the experience of encountering the paintings might be best characterized as an initial, intellectual recognition of what the paintings depict and reprise—an ordinary courtyard, whose emptiness foregrounds a vast grid, and with it flatness and other modernist conceits—followed by an irreconcilable perceptual undoing or dissolution of spatial and temporal logics. Its irresolvable formal components keep your eyes moving, exposing the viewer to a tense battle with an impossible perspective that incites a type of visual scanning, only to be thrown off balance, again and again, as any markers of certainty withdraw. Plaza, that is, invites and repulses, launching a one-two punch, packed at once with cognitive failure and a visceral disorientation that together call for an open-ness to rethinking what the space might harbor, despite or possibly on account of its banality and refusal to declare a use, its lack of instructions. The functional indeterminacy of the courtyard and its grid channels, in the first instance, a flexible character designed to serve economic goals not social ones, pointing to its affiliations with capital’s privatizing, globalizing mandates. Eggerer does not celebrate this privatization, but mines its inherent vulnerabilities: for such spaces remain open to constant reinvention, to refusal, to what he situates as a mode of queering. The paintings do not offer answers to these difficult tensions they craft, but situate the viewer firmly in their grasp, reminding us that such environments seek to condition our bodies and psyches, but cannot entirely do so. “It is not possible to stand up in this space,” the artist suggested in a recent conversation. And, indeed, to reiterate, the paintings do not resolve into an inhabitable space, or a knowable time; they do not seek veracity but a calculated avoidance of it. The plaza is tilted to be vertical, reminding us to attend to its operations within the picture plane. The shadows, which serve to hold the right edge of the painting, to give it form, are not accurate according to the dictates of sun angles. Unnecessary details are edited out, reminding us again of the many modes of withdrawal at work, of the paintings’ manner of stepping back not only from techniques like the grid and perspective but from a real world out there, of its abstraction. And yet the fountains perform as if according to the laws of gravity; they appear to be caught in an endless loop of propelling water up and capturing it as it falls, offering an allegory of the temporal tautology at work. The beautiful congregation of garbage bags, which Eggerer so cogently likens to Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais, also play on gravity, as it might operate within the space of painting: they are neither standing nor lying down, he suggests, they occupy and hold a liminal space between the picture and world beyond, challenging the emptiness, exposure, and abstraction of the grid. Moreover, in their filling, tying, and placing, they point to the presence of labor, of practices of maintenance proper to the rules of a space occupied by something like a collective: something has taken place here. A toppled potted plant serves as another ambiguous referent either to neglect or to a buoyant activation of the courtyard—a party, fight, flash mob, or skateboarding perhaps. Plaza B pretends to be more obedient: trash cans are available, figures are grafted into the picture, a plant is upright. Yet it remains unclear whether this painting comes prior to or after its lighter twin. The walls are yellow, the handrails turned to orange, the canopies strangely more mauve, but there is no indication of whether such shifts are merely nocturnal lighting effects or markers of the passing of a longer duration like years or decades. If the paintings refuse narrativity, or something like a telos or timeline, and if the location and function of Plaza remains uncertain, the elements occupying the plaza indicate that things can happen within such faded modernisms, that lives are lived, that things take place, wherever and whenever they might be. While not declared as such, and harboring no instruction or answers regarding function or how to perform as an actor in the world, Plaza reminds us that we are not simply governed by private enterprises that seek to colonize so many aspects of our subjectivity and of our social lives, that uncertainties and ambivalences can be taken as preconditions for unscripted social interactions to emerge, as invitations to reinvention, even to collective forms of refusal. It would be hubris to reduce Plaza to a cynical image of social or aesthetic degradation. Life takes place in such spaces all the time, their potentials shimmer between the visible and in the invisible in the manner of subcultural codes. Despite the architecture, that is, anything could happen in Plaza, or nothing. —Felicity D Scott

The Daffy Formula: To be a Daffy, a character must first and foremost be like Daffy. Not only must they be congenitally selfish, devious, grandiose, and craven, but all of these characteristics must be magnified to grotesque proportions due to the pointed cruelty of the universe. Church of Daffy opens at Petzel’s Chelsea location at 520 W 25th Street on Thursday, June 8 from 6pm to 8pm with thonk piece, a performance by Toronto based drag queens Mary Messhausen and proddy produzentin. They are performing unscripted and underprepared, celebrating the 10 year anniversary of their favorite delicacy, the Cronut. Recording artist and producer Macy Rodman will join for a special guest performance. Thonk piece is available as a live stream by Oliver Husain on drip-drop.tv.

Petzel Gallery presents Ardomancer, an exhibition of paintings by Seth Price that brings AI-generated imagery and 3D graphics to traditional gestural painting. This is only the second time in nearly a decade that Price has presented an exhibition of new work in New York. Price writes: Making art with extremely different tools and media helps you take control and lose it, back and forth, over and over. I work on these paintings with brushes and pens and fingers, and sometimes my feet. Recently I’ve also been suggesting words to an AI, and we go back and forth until I get an image I like. I apply it to the painting using a reverse-transfer technique often used for shirts and stickers: I print the image on film and lay it face-down on liquid plastic poured on the painting, and when I lift the film the image transfers into the liquid, usually a little raggedly. While it’s wet I can finger paint in it, or tilt it to let it run, or blow on pigments and powders. Then I go back in with a brush. When the painting starts to feel like a problem, I photograph it and put the photo in a 3D cinema program, where I add simple virtual objects like planes, tubes, hemispheres, and algorithmic patterns. I print these back on to the real painting at a large industrial facility. This is risky because one error can destroy something I’ve worked on for months. It happened to two paintings that were supposed to be in this show. I’m dwelling on the technical side of things here because when I make work that’s pretty much my entire focus. Art lets all the big questions stow away for the ride while it goes about its business addressing immediate and tangible and formal matters. I started painting because I want to feel the intuition and immediacy of my body and also the distance and unpredictability of the machine. Contemporary painting offers a very refined way to bring human time and machine time into one artwork. You don’t need painting to do that, though, or brand-new tools; the combination of bodily gesture and technical process already appeared in ancient techniques like printmaking and casting. It hit another level with photography, which preserves a human gesture only through registration and development and printing, thereby putting human time and machine time into a single state so uncanny that it once unnerved people. These days, AI does the same thing. Painting, being ravenous and syncretic, saw photography’s power and reached out and took it. Since then artists have collaged printed matter to canvas, screen printed on painted grounds, traced projected images with oils, and hand-manipulated inkjet prints. I like working in this lineage, where the tools of the moment get at the feeling of the moment, and the tools of all time get at something deeper.

Petzel Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new collages by British artist John Stezaker. The work forms part of the series Double Shadow which is a continuation of the artist’s career-long engagement with film stills and publicity portraits dating from the age of classical Hollywood cinema. For some years, Stezaker has been cutting out the actors in publicity photos and pasting the remainder onto a dark ground to create hollowed-out silhouettes. The works on show are made by doubling this technique, superimposing one negative silhouette on top of another in a way that transforms both. The resulting images recall the paranoid, shadowy world of German Expressionist film and film noir. Their complex play of light and shade, part photographic, part produced by the collage technique, recreates the richly textured chiaroscuro of noir films, while the silhouettes themselves recall the dramatic effect of back-lighting. The age and obsolescence of Stezaker’s collection of found photographs estranges them from normal waking reality. He regards his collection “as an underworld of images liberated from their ties to legibility. Abandoned to disuse, they took on the dark aura of fascination.” They became for him a “nocturnal underworld”, “a world of spectres and shadows.” His collage technique renders them even more obscure and fascinating. Because the Double Shadow collages merge two negative silhouettes, they often convey a sense of psychological capture by a double or possession by a revenant. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze once remarked that “the cinematographic image is never in the present.” Films, such as Hitchcock’s Rebecca or Vertigo, often thematize film’s ability to superimpose past and present and remind us that consciousness is never in the present, either. Stezaker’s Double Shadow collages both depict this kind of haunting and awaken it in the viewer. —Margaret Iversen

Petzel is pleased to present Adrift, Sean Landers’ seventh solo exhibition with the gallery, on view March 9th to April 15th, 2023 at 520 West 25th Street in Chelsea. Featuring over twenty new oil paintings by Landers, this largely allegorical exhibition illustrates the complexity of artistic mortality using four protagonists: dogs—depicted in single portraits and alone in rowboats unmoored at sea; lighthouses; the ocean; and sperm whale skeletons at rest on ocean shorelines. Each subject represents the dichotomy of freedom and trepidation involved in the act of releasing art to an unknown fate. “...a bit of the artist remains in their paintings, so in that way, a painting is like an artist adrift in time and space,” says Landers in an interview with writer Johanna Fateman for the exhibition catalogue. A cornerstone of inspiration for Adrift is Landers’ long-term interest in the work of American painter Winslow Homer (b. 1836—d. 1920) and in particular Homer’s ocean paintings. The vast and unpredictable ocean marks time and space, a preeminent symbol used throughout the years in Landers’ paintings and art history. Homer’s style is emulated by Landers in paintings throughout the exhibition including Northeaster, Summer Squall, and Yellow Dog. Each of these subjects can be seen as a character existing within the vicissitudes of artistic practice. The dogs, at attention and alone in their boats, symbolize the vulnerability of art against an unknown future. These works also parallel Joachim Patinir’s (b. 1483—d. 1524) painting Charon crossing the Styx in which a human soul is being transported by boat into afterlife. Landers sees this as symbolic for what a painting is—a vessel for the artist into afterlife. Two lighthouses, Portland Lighthouse, US and Sunderland Lighthouse, UK, are both welcoming and warning beacons, allegories for institutions that signal to the public what art is worth preserving. This ruling system will determine the dogs’ fate as they head into the unknown of art history. The bare whale bones, epic in their repose on the sandy shore echo the finality in the lifespan of an artwork. Such relics are epitaphs and beginnings, a sentiment imparted in We Hover, where Landers’ text painted over a fierce ocean reads: And then we hover in between existence and nonexistence in our paintings and that is both terrifying and reassuring. For Landers, Adrift is the everlasting reminder that the artist, like Patinir’s soul, is forever navigating the here and hereafter.

Petzel is pleased to present Yael Bartana’s narrative film Malka Germania (2021), on view March 9th to April 15th, 2023 at the gallery’s Chelsea location. Malka Germania investigates the longing for collective redemption for German and Jewish histories as a response to an age of anxiety. Malka Germania is Hebrew for “Queen Germany.” The name references a female designation for the Messiah: Malka Meshichah, or the “Anointed Queen.” In Bartana’s film, a new androgynous Messiah, Malka Germania, joins forces with the Israeli Army to liberate Berlin from its collective traumas, memories, and inherited pasts. The 3-channel video portrays Malka as she walks through Berlin’s haunted landscape, revisiting historical events that seamlessly blend with contemporary scenes. The film weaves subconscious elements through surreal hallucinations, the biblical and mystical to leave questions of redemption, national myths and collective identities for the viewer to contemplate. Malka Germania, 2021 Three channel video and sound installation, 43:00 min Director and Editor: Yael Bartana Producer: Naama Pyritz Producer: Martina Haubrich Actor: Gala Moody Director of Photography: David Stragmeister 2nd Unit Camera: Mick van Rossum, Matan Radin Costume Designer. Yael Shenberger Art Director: Karin Betzler Choreography: Hagar Ophir Editor: Daphna Keenan Sound Design: Daniel Meir Research and Story Consultant: Itamar Gov Story Consultant: Sami Berdugo, Mille Haynes Additional Production: Anja Lindner Additional Camera: Marcus Pohlus, Itai Vinograd, Walter Solon Drone Operators: Michael and Florian Basche Voice: Susanne Sachsse Storyboard & Illustration: Hadar Landsberg Make-Up: Monique Bredow Color Correction: Simon Veronig Special Effects: snowball studios Commissioned by the Jewish Museum Berlin and made possible by the Friends of the Jewish Museum Berlin, the Mondrian Fund and Jan Fischer (Light Art Space, LAS)

Petzel is pleased to announce a series of new paintings by Berlin-based artist Corinne Wasmuht, on view at the gallery’s new Chelsea location from October 8 to November 12. The show marks Wasmuht’s fifth exhibition with the gallery. Building upon an infinite archive that is at once mnemonic, ephemeral, digital and physical, Corinne Wasmuht’s paintings are experienced in a manner akin to that of waking from a psychedelic dream. What begins as digitally sketched photographs taken by Wasmuht herself as she navigates the landscape of a communal zone or interior structure, such as an airport terminal or a pedestrian sidewalk, are then realized concretely in the form of intricate, labor-intensive paintings in which these spaces are reworked almost to the point of being indiscernible. Converting the colors of her original photographs to achieve a visually stimulating X-Ray effect, Wasmuht hints at barely-there figurations; ghostly silhouettes of corporeal forms emerge from a computerized negative space, like a void or a gap. Digital meets analog on surfaces under which lies the humble foundation of wood, a medium lauded with tradition that points to Wasmuht’s range and mastery of a unique and complex technique, one which involves layering translucent coats of paint and capturing a quality of light that seems to glow from within. Developing upon previous works such as those seen in her most recent solo exhibition with Petzel—Alnitak of 2015—Wasmuht’s work serves as an ever-growing, forward-moving evolution of her trademark style. It is the concept of perception—the perception of a room or a space, and how we move within it—that is at the forefront of what unifies this series. Along with perception comes the disorientation of time and memory; the way that our brains select certain fragments and images of memories, permanently impressing them upon us for reasons that remain unclear. This selection and repetition is interwoven in the countlessly shredded and reassembled layers of Wasmuht’s paintings, where details big and small are plucked from one painting and duplicated in the next—a tiny fraction of a rainbow, a window, chairs in the waiting area of an airport terminal. As explained by Wasmuht, it is painting itself that is at the core of what inspires her work, and every painting she composes serves as source material for the next, with one image or particle standing out from the rest and thus presenting her with a new idea, a new design for a future composition.

Petzel Gallery is pleased to present Heretic Lace, Emily Mae Smith’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery, opening on Saturday, October 8 at Petzel’s new Chelsea location at 520 W 25th Street. In 2014, Emily Mae Smith introduced a broom figure into her developing lexicon. A descendant of the sweeper in Disney’s Fantasia (1940), it might suggest a proxy for the artist. (Set to The Sorcerer’s Apprentice by composer Paul Dukas, which was based on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1797 poem of the same title, Mickey Mouse appears as the apprentice who unleashes forces beyond his influence.) Through this surrogate, Smith refuses the masculinist pretension of using the female body as a catalyst for formal experimentation while preserving its potential for mutability. Indeed, beyond the variability of its costuming—eyeless rods sport full skirts or pantaloons fashioned out of gathered bristles—brooms behave differently, most conspicuously laboring or refusing instrumentalization. They enact such roles within elaborate pictorial spaces. Representational orders organize within windows or recede behind proscenium curtains. These portals maintain optical fantasies of illusionism even as they redouble the physical limits of the support; they also further Smith’s critical manipulation of traditional framing devices. In this recuperative possession of the phallocentric tools of vision underpinning so much Western art, she none too subtly claims the privilege of meeting the viewer on her own terms. In Beholder, for one, Smith makes over Louis-Léopold Boilly’s A Girl at a Window (c. 1799), a scene that stages conditions of visibility and displacement. As is not uncommon for Smith, she takes another artwork as the basis for her own, appropriating in the case of Boilly’s precedent a black-and-white trompe l’oeil rendition of a print seemingly imitating a now-lost painting (which, in a kind of infinite regress, itself makes over earlier Dutch genre scenes). Smith keeps hold of this artifice, its performance now a usurpation not only of mastery but also of agency. If the source assumed the naturalizing of control over its centered ingenue, Smith’s rejoinder sets the encounter within the studio, from which the broom emerges, seated on a niche, and turned to the picture plane. The various prosthetics—spyglasses and binoculars, and even the amplifying power of water in the conspicuous orb of a fishbowl—suggest the reciprocity of encounter, or at least the terms of its possibility. Like so much of Smith’s art that queries the medium’s histories as well as her place within it, Beholder is a painting about painting, perhaps an allegory of making as well as regarding. It finds company in related pieces that eschew the abstract language of self-reflexivity endemic to modernism, perversely extending its logic of auto-critique through symbolist imagery. Painters Quarry makes this clear. An oversized instance of Smith’s mouth architecture—now greyscale stone rimmed with blunted Chiclet-teeth—bears the inscription “THE STUDIO,” and in it is an ossuary. Bones are piled nearly to the top, leaving little space left to fill. Very differently, Precarious Persuasion, a stand-off between a treble hook, diminutive mouth agape, and a menacing school of fanged-teeth fish, models for Smith the interactions between elements within indirect painting. (Smith uses this method to achieve shifts in hue and color adjustable independent of value and form: first working in monochrome and layering transparent washes through which light will pass—a twinned effect of seeing into fictive but also literal depth.) For the namesake Heretic Lace, Smith reprises (and here enlarges) a 2019 painting of the same name. In both, a flesh gradient is cleaved by a garter belt, pulling taut a stocking patterned with rodents and sheaves of wheat. It, too, nods to process in analogizing the sheer legwear and transparent glazes that constitute it. Heretic Lace II also extends Smith’s recent interest in the gleaner, the subject of drawings, watercolors, and paintings made since 2018. Characterized as someone who picks up grain or corn left in the field after the harvest, the gleaner has served as a symbol of the dispossessed from the Old Testament (in the books of Leviticus and Ruth, the Hebrew Bible encourages allowances for the poor to glean in lands already harvested); in Smith’s hands, it becomes a way to get at her position, gathering and repurposing what remains. Smith’s protagonists recall the farmers of Pissarro and Jean-François Millet, and more broadly, a 19th century imagination of what work the bodies of women might be asked to carry out and the rights to self-determination they lack in so doing. Based on Pieter de Hooch’s A Woman Nursing an Infant with a Child and a Dog (c. 1658-1660), A Candle Makes its Own Fuel substitutes the breastfeeding caretaker for a broom slumped in a tufted desk chair set upon casters but going nowhere. A Klein bottle—emblematizing a non-orientable surface—sits atop a makeshift pedestal; a pitchfork hangs on the wall by a fireplace. Absent de Hooch’s roaring blaze, Smith conceives of its consumptive energies as an act of self-immolating combustion at the broom’s extremity. The other light source suggests all is not well outside, either, as the gridded leaded glass windows at the painting’s right burn a sulfurous yellow. One can invoke by way of description Smith’s use of contre-jour, where the light source appears to come from behind the subject in the painting. As with the other works on view, this technical-cum-formal conceit implicates the canvas in the environment beyond its edges. –Suzanne Hudson

“You have to start from somewhere, and you start from the subject which gradually, if the thing works at all, withers away and leaves this residue which we call reality.” —Francis Bacon, Interview with David Sylvester, 1982–1984 “We dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig from early morn ‘til night We dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig up everything in sight.” —Frank E. Churchill, Heigh Ho Petzel Gallery is pleased to announce Adverb High Command, Xie Nanxing’s first exhibition with the gallery and his first solo show in New York, on view from May 6 until June 25. Nanxing will present two recent bodies of work—The Dwarfs’ Refrain (2019–2020) and Shadows of Painting (2020–2021)—introducing an expansive and demanding practice that has constantly evolved since his work was first presented internationally at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999. Xie Nanxing has written recently of his admiration for Georges Didi-Huberman’s What we see looks back at us (Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde). The book opens with a discussion of “the ineluctable scission of the act of seeing (l’inéluctable scission du voir),” drawing on a famous passage from James Joyce’s Ulysses. Ruth Noack, who included Nanxing’s work when curating documenta 12 in 2007, used a similar phrase to describe his paintings, suggesting that they provoked a “crisis of spectatorship.” This might be the only serious initial response, for Nanxing’s paintings are full of frictions and contradictions that the viewer must navigate—between figuration and abstraction, between painterliness and conceptual de-materialization, between ironic detachment and existential longing. “The target,” Nanxing insists, “is figurative painting,” but this is obscured by the means employed. In The Dwarfs’ Refrain No. 1, Nanxing uses a process that has been a part of his practice since the mid-2000s: the painting, built up carefully with layers of thinned-out oil paint, departs from a photograph of a video of a heavily backlit oil sketch. In this instance, that delicate, multi-layered surface is disrupted by black lines, almost abstract or even gestural in appearance but also evocative of a net. The original oil sketch is based on a small illustration by Nanxing’s father, one of several that Nanxing commissioned him to make in the cartoonish style of their childhood drawing lessons, which Nanxing hated. The “dwarfs” of these illustrations, clearly visible in The Dwarfs’ Refrain No. 2, now provide the source material for this new series of paintings, which sees them distorted in various ways: they are collaged onto garish children’s fabric, they are molded with clay, they morph into a traditional Chinese landscape. Each of Xie Nanxing’s Shadows of Painting begins with a seemingly abstract grid. Looking at Shadows of Painting No. 5, in which the grid gives way to reveal a curiously humanoid dog, we realize that these are in fact all rooted in figurative source imagery. Nanxing calls this new approach in his practice “马赛克.” A transliteration of the English mosaic, it can also mean pixelation. Is the image here being censored? Or should we look back further to the roots of the word, that it is the work of the muses? The layers painted on top of these mosaics both guide and mislead the viewer. They range from clear if fragmented figures (a man holding a syringe, a creature breathing fire) to abstract lines of rich impasto that seem to have seeped between the cracks in the grid and, in several of the paintings, to Chinese words. At the bottom of Shadows of Painting No. 1 a rendering of quickly scribbled text reads: “插图和美术史关系” (“the link between illustration and the history of art”), while in Shadows of Painting No. 6 we see the characters “叽” and “吱,” onomatopoeia of chirping and squeaking/creaking sounds. So far so opaque. In Shadows of Painting No. 4 the grid, already overflowing, is interrupted by a stark yellow line with black writing on it. The painting becomes a crime scene (a theme in Nanxing’s practice that goes back to the 1999 Venice Biennale paintings), and this is the barrier forcing us to keep our distance. But the text across it reads “孤独孤独孤独”—“lonely lonely lonely.” Perhaps this could offer some enlightenment as to the images that have been pixelated (or perhaps not—it also works as a pun on the sound of bubbling water in Chinese). An earlier abandoned title for the series hinted at one key source that draws from Nanxing’s printmaking background—a reworking of Dürer’s Melancholia. An attempt at interpretation leaves the viewer with more questions than answers. All the layers, the convoluted methods—is this virtuosic post-modern play, designed to hold us at the level of intellect? Or could this be Nanxing’s way of approaching something more fundamental, even something true? Didi-Huberman returns to Joyce: “Shut your eyes and see.”

“The mind is like a garbage can. Full of ideas. Not only from this life, but from previous lives. There is a lot of stuff in that mind. But in truth, there is no mind. Everything is unborn. Take a tree for instance. What gave birth to a tree? A seed. Where did the seed come from? Another Tree. There is no answer. Worms. Bugs. Human Beings. Who gave them birth? Flowers. The Moon. The Sun. The Stars. I tell you, none of these things exist. There is no birth. No death. It is all nonsense. Do you know what anything is? For instance, a cat. What is a cat? It was here when you arrived. It is all imagination. A dream. The first rule is divine ignorance. Nothing Actually Exists.” —Sri Robert Adams Petzel is pleased to present Bhoga Marga, an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Joe Bradley, on view from March 3rd to April 30th at the gallery’s Chelsea location. The show marks the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, and his first in six years in New York City.

Petzel is pleased to present Traces: Past and Present, an exhibition of three individual projects by artist Allan McCollum, on view in Chelsea, at 456 West 18th Street, from January 14 to February 19. Featuring The Writer’s Daughter, The Shapes Buttons from Oregon, and A Symphony for the Hearing Impaired, this special multi-layered showing marks McCollum’s eleventh exhibition with the gallery and the first time that these bodies of work will be seen in New York. “Many of my projects have involved ‘traces’ of things from the past, reproducing various types of fossils, for instance,” McCollum has said. For Traces: Past and Present, McCollum continues his decades-long investigation into the remembrance and significance of things past. “Attempting to find or construct meaning can involve looking at traces of things that have been lost or only partially remembered and working to integrate them into the way we see the world around us.” An alternate version of The Writer’s Daughter was originally presented at Marc Selwyn Fine Art in Beverly Hills in 2021. McCollum said of the project at the time: “A few years ago, I became hypnotized looking at a page on which a highly intelligent two-year-old named Minu Mansoor-McKee, the daughter of a writer friend and art historian Jaleh Mansoor, had attempted to write letters and words before she fully understood the concept of language and the way it can be written. As with all of us, Minu’s attempt to record meaning on paper took time and effort. Jaleh let me have a page of Minu’s attempts at writing. I have spent years looking at it, feeling enchanted by the way the child searched for meaning and how I continue to try to understand my life. Each one of her 108 different attempts to construct little shapes of letters became symbols for me. Without fully understanding what led me to do it, I started scanning the shapes, enlarging and tracing them onto papers with ink, and framing each one. Framing things invites greater meaning to be discovered in what finds itself inside the frame, and the meaning will evolve more over time.” McCollum began conceptualizing The Shapes Buttons from Oregon, part of his ongoing Shapes project, in 2015, collaborating and communicating via email with Bend, Oregon-based artist and button maker Delia Paine. Throughout this process, produced in the spirit of the WPA, McCollum would send Paine the templates for the buttons, which she made, using colored backgrounds for each separate button idea, at Via Delia, her local shop, and in her studio. “He would create the shapes and bring them to me, and I would turn them into buttons,” Paine has said. Together McCollum and Paine created over 5,000 buttons. The project was previously installed at the High Desert Museum in Bend, Oregon in 2016 and at the ICA Miami in 2020/21. It was inspired by the “Independence Rock” historical site on the Oregon Trail in Wyoming, where thousands of pioneer travelers to the Western frontier added their signatures to Father De Smet’s register, traces of which can still be seen today. In a world premiere at Petzel, and to accompany and enhance these bodies of work, McCollum also presents A Symphony for the Hearing Impaired, a video installation composed of a slideshow of over 1,000 screen grabs from movies and television shows, wherein the closed captions describe music, or traces of sounds that may never be heard again. True to McCollum form, every one of these subtitles is unique.

Petzel is pleased to present Maria Lassnig: The Paris Years, 1960–68, an exhibition of paintings by the Austrian artist that have rarely been seen in the United States. On view at the gallery’s Chelsea location from November 4 through December 17, the show, which includes over 20 important works developed in Lassnig’s studio on rue de Begnolet, covers Lassnig’s formative years in the City of Light. “Though Maria Lassnig only lived in Paris for eight years, it was in her studio on Rue de Bagnolet that she began to fully release herself from aesthetic constraints and developed a sense of freedom that became synonymous with her name. There, Lassnig took up the various isms she explored in her previous paintings—realism, expressionism, surrealism, tachism—and transformed them into something truly autonomous by simultaneously turning more fully to herself, to her sensations, lived experiences, and physical embodiment,” writes Lauren O’Neill-Butler in her essay for the accompanying exhibition catalogue, published by Petzel. Around 1947, as O’Neil-Butler writes, Lassnig “commenced this with drawings called Introspektive Erlebnisse (Introspective Experiences), later developed into Körpergefühlsmalerei (body awareness painting), her term for depicting the parts of her being that she felt as she worked. In Paris, she more fully galvanized a phenomenological approach, developing an awareness that the body and mind are not separate, that whatever manifests on the skin is directly related to one’s thoughts. Lassnig’s turning inward to propel outward became something of a signature style, though her art could never be so neatly pinned down. A line from her 1951/1960 text Painting Formulas sums it up: “Discard the style! You exploit yourself soon enough.” The varied and vital canvases that she made in Paris evince that she was coming into her own, finding her voice, and shedding expectations—you exploit yourself soon enough, so why not put everything on the line, right now? In doing just that Lassnig established her own tradition. Lassnig left Vienna for Paris at a time when she felt there was not space for her in the city’s male-dominated art circles, she proceeded to hold court with contemporaries in France until leaving for her next significant stay, her 12-year residence in New York. There has yet to be much scholarship on this period of Lassnig’s life and work in Paris, and Petzel is pleased to publish the exhibition catalogue, also titled Maria Lassnig: the Paris Years, 1960–1968, which illustrates a portion of this crucial mid-career moment alongside writings from Lassnig’s diaries and letters throughout those years. Additionally, in the Spring of 2022, Petzel will release the English translation of art historian Natalie Lettner’s biography on Lassnig, co-published with Hauser & Wirth.

Petzel Gallery is pleased to announce Cuban American artist Jorge Pardo’s eleventh solo show with Petzel, on view from September 9th to October 30th at the gallery’s Chelsea location. Titled All bets are off, the exhibition will feature over 10 new large-scale paintings, a four-piece custom-built couch, and 7 x 5 foot chandelier, among other works. As is typical of Pardo, these new paintings make one consider the act of looking itself. Each is made up of an accumulation of images, first layered digitally until nearly unrecognizable, and then laser-cut engraved in outline on MDF, and finally hand-painted in acrylic. The resulting objects speak to both sculpture and painting in a signature flamboyant Pardo style. The paintings are abstractions, transformed through the combination of layered imagery, but one cannot call them nonrepresentational, rather, they present distorted forms without the memory of what they represent. No stranger to maximalism, these thoroughly additive works continue an exploration of layered painting that the artist has been developing over many years. Pulled from a wide range of source material, the initial images (typically two to seven layers per painting) are a nonhierarchical amalgamation of personal photographs, works by other artists he admires, or even past pieces of his own, coming to exist in the space between and amongst each other. Pardo is most interested to play with the possibilities, seemingly limitless in this case, as he puts it: “It’s about making them disappear and turn into something else.” The collective patchwork effect allows for just enough difference from painting to painting that they “start to have a dialogue between each other,” says Pardo. Tied to the location of his studio in Mérida, Mexico and Pardo's own Latinx heritage, the works and painting techniques on view also show strong Mexican and Mayan influences, containing frequent references to the cultural aesthetics and materials of the immediate cultural landscape. Other components in the show are a giant multi-colored chandelier titled after gallerist Gisela Capitain, an eccentric couch with painted spine (created through the same process as the paintings) which does not always offer an easy seat, and an unrealized photography project from Pardo’s school years in the late 1980s. Pardo offers that the sculptures are needed so that the paintings act as “photobombs” in the background of the installation. These added objects are reflexive in their own ways – the couch’s unique shape allows people sitting on each side to look at each other but requires them to lay down to do so. The unrealized work is a slide carousel that Pardo had originally planned to apply to Yale graduate school with but never followed through. The application requested candidates to submit their portfolio, yet Pardo wondered, what would happen if you applied with an actual work of art? Instead making a pinhole camera from the carousel with pictures being captured on each slide while traveling within the device. As a whole, the show touches on theories of integration and migration – borrowing from another curious overlap: that of the illusion and movement through space developed in Hans Hoffman’s “push-pull” painting method and sociologist Everett Lee’s Push-Pull theory of geographical migration amongst communities which has helped to define the levels and patterns of human integration. From reusing and repurposing historical material in the canon of painting; to interweaving various forms of image-making; or considering the screen - of the computer, our phones - as a visual problem to work through and from; and the even more human element of relational interaction amongst strangers – Pardo’s goal is to make people engage in the act of looking. The works in All bets are off catch viewers in that process, requiring one to be aware of and rethink how to approach simple acts we do all the time – seeing, sitting, thinking. In doing so, the opportunity for a subtle and accessible confrontation of the history of painting and picture-making itself arises. Alongside the exhibition, there will be an accompanying booklet housing a unique interview between Jorge Pardo and curator Daniela Pérez which follows a format akin to the paintings themselves: developed by repurposing questions originally asked of other artists and posed anew directed to Pardo. As well as the debut of the artist’s newest monograph: Jorge Pardo: Public Projects and Commissions, 1996–2018, a highly anticipated publication that documents over 20 of Pardo’s public works in one volume for the first time. Includes text contributions by Emma Enderby, Maja Hoffman, and Ian Volner, as well as presents twelve of the artist’s never-before-seen “unrealized projects,” discussed in conversation with curator and art historian Hans Ulrich Obrist – available for purchase at the gallery.

Petzel is pleased to present Time-Slip, a group exhibition featuring works by Huma Bhabha, Joe Bradley, Jennifer Paige Cohen, Jason Fox, Daniel Hesidence, Rodney McMillian, Xie Nanxing, John Outterbridge, and Dana Schutz, on view from May 26 – August 7, 2021 at the gallery’s Chelsea location. Time-Slip brings together paintings, video, and sculptures that demonstrate nonlinear time frames; an idea of the past, projected into the future, actualized in the present. The artworks in this show share an explicit relationship with our collective repressed histories, be they arcane and deep, or recent and raw. Each artist demonstrates the ability to engage with multiple time periods at once, oscillating between them with a kindred awareness – the artist as time traveler, and the body as a vessel holding multiple time scales. With immense seed changes in our landscape, the artists that come together in this show offer us the opportunity to experience differential intents, subjectivities, and histories to move us through a slippery sense of reality. Petzel Gallery thanks all the participating artists and their galleries for their collaboration: CANADA, David Zwirner, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, Salon 94, and Tilton Gallery.

Petzel Gallery is pleased to announce Mine, a new exhibition by Simon Denny opening Thursday, March 18, 2021 at the gallery’s Chelsea location. Mine is the culmination of a multi-year project exploring themes of technology, labor, and our relationship with the earth. Denny has been developing this body of work since 2016 with major exhibitions in 2019 at the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), Tasmania (Australia) and 2020 at K21 – Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (Germany). This will be Denny’s fourth solo exhibition with Petzel. Focused on the interconnections between data mining, mineral mining, and the mechanization of labor, Mine brings together a collection of recent works including several large cardboard sculptures imitating giant automated mining machines; a series of wall-mounted paper reliefs and printed vitrines; and a new Augmented Reality sculpture based on a 2019 patent drawing filed by Amazon.com for a delivery worker replacement drone. Denny’s artwork raises questions about the effects of further automation on the limited jobs still left in increasingly mechanized sectors such as mining, service, and logistics. What happens as the labor force shrinks in these traditional industries? How will individuals and worker communities dialogue with those in power in the future? Where will the leverage they once brought now come from? Amazon’s drone design contains a hot air balloon, recalling the speculative balloon-based flying machine epoch of defining technological developments such as hot air balloons, air ships, or Zeppelins, that have become symbols of both achievement and caution in centuries past. Denny's new sculpture projects an animated AR model of a revolving, rocky, mineral-rich, planet Earth onto the drone’s balloon bulge. This vision of Earth-as-resource is borrowed from the advertising materials of one of Amazon’s most prominent data services clients: the multinational mining group Rio Tinto. Spinning inside the body of the Zeppelin drone, the “Earth-rock” transforms Amazon's worker-replacement model into a raw terrestrial globe, without oceans or other representations of life. Embedded in the exhibition is Extractor, a playable board game that also functions as a take-home catalogue. Players collect data in the form of tokens, which they must stack on plastic-molded racks and place in cloud services to monetize what they have mined and thus win the game. The hybrid sculptures-cum-display units presenting the boxed games mirror the dynamics of the monopolistic platform businesses that control much of our internet infrastructure. Denny’s Mine reflects not only upon the near future, but also on the conditions of the present—unearthing real designs for machines that confront us with our own sublime and troubling counterparts. The work continues an artistic tradition of interpreting technological production as keys to understanding our environment and the forces that impact it.

In collaboration with the Joyce Pensato Estate, Petzel Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition Fuggetabout It (Redux) from January 15 – February 27, 2021 at its Chelsea location, 456 West 18th Street. In 2012 Pensato premiered her installation “Fuggetabout It” at Petzel Gallery on West 22nd Street to commemorate her beloved studio on Olive Street in East Williamsburg, where she had worked for thirty-two years and had lost in a landlord/tenant dispute in 2011. The move after three decades prompted a re-evaluation and packing of hundreds upon hundreds of objects and items of all manner, including: stuffed animals; figurines; posters, books, invitation cards, and other paper ephemera; milk crates; furniture, both broken and intact; paint cans and paintbrushes, among others. Almost every object had been paint splattered by being at one time or another in proximity to the artist’s working space, which shifted from area to area in the studio, a cavernous, stand-alone space that was once a dance hall. Both collectively and at times singularly these objects were the artist’s inspiration, and Pensato found it a fitting tribute and auspicious time to share them publicly as a glimpse into her process. About this decision, the artist told Faye Hirsh in an interview with Art in America “I felt it was time I could say ‘This is who I am.’ I feel confident.” Critics and curators were quick to take notice. Of Pensato’s emptying her studio into a Chelsea gallery, The New Yorker summed up the exhibition: “Other artists have emptied their studios into galleries, but none so fetchingly as Pensato on the occasion of a move from her Williamsburg digs of thirty-two years. Her big, fast, runny paintings of vestigial cartoon faces prove to have emerged amid great, spattered messes of paint cans, orphaned furniture, stapled-up photographs and ephemera and many, many distressed stuffed animals and effigies of characters from Disney, “Looney Tunes,” “The Simpsons,” “Sesame Street,” “South Park,” and with apparent special ardor, “Batman.” Being Joyce Pensato comes off as a bohemian consummation devoutly to be wished.” In 2014 the artist presented a second version of the installation at Lisson, London; and in late 2017 she presented a scaled down version at the inaugural exhibition “The Everywhere Studio” at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. Petzel Gallery is honored to present this version of the installation “Fuggetabout It (Redux)” under the care of the artist’s estate. In addition to “Fuggetabout it (Redux)” on view will be a selection of Pensato’s “eyeball” paintings. Inspired by the cartoon characters Felix the Cat, Krazy Kat, and Sesame Street’s Elmo, among other characters with exaggerated and bulging eyes, the artist usually excised any reference to a body leaving a severed head and gaping eyes to fill the picture plane. In these paintings the eyeballs appear in various iterations as astonished, frightened, diabolical, pleading, paranoid, or befuddled. In an interview with Ali Subotnick in 2013, the artist remarked: “Keep in mind that I am working from images that are already distorted. I also think about the expression I want to use; for example, scary, dumb or sad. The images have to have life. I just keep working and changing the image until it feels right. I erase a lot. It’s like measuring. The expression has to be the way I want. It is like action painting but it’s not just about the action or abstract expressionism.” In a 2008 exhibition review in the Village Voice, R.C. Baker wrote: “The organs of sight figure prominently in all these images, though they are less windows onto the soul than caverns dripping stalactites or, in the case of Homer, a cascade of white rivulets recalling the austere exuberance of Pat Steir’s ‘Waterfall’ canvases.” In her brutalization of these visages, Pensato forewent showing the viewer an inner contemplative life for one perhaps of accusation. Wrenching these characters from their Pop culture lives and into an Abstract Expressionist world, the artist forced the viewer to hold and make sense of two seemingly disparate existences. Finally, the exhibition will present a selection of large-scale works on paper. Petzel is pleased to premiere the 115 ½ x 113 ½ inch drawing “Daisy” from 2012. The character’s iris-less eyes, smiling duck beak, and outstretched arms will greet the viewer upon entering the show. In her works on paper, Pensato often incorporated pastels, a departure from her usual palette of black, white and silver in her paintings. The use of pastels in her drawings had a freeing effect for the artist, and later in her career in her large-scale works on paper, color took on a more prominent role.

Featuring Fly Away, a puppet show experience, with two performances daily. What does it look like, entail and mean to attend to, care for, comfort, and defend, those already dead, those dying and those living lives consigned to the possibility of always-imminent death, life lived in the presence of death…It means work. It is work: hard emotional, physical and intellectual work that demands vigilant attendance to the needs of the dying, to ease their way, and also to the needs of the living. —Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being Petzel Gallery is pleased to present SELF MUST DIE, a solo exhibition event by New York-based artist Derek Fordjour. The show, Fordjour’s first with the gallery, is an offering of creative labor in response to our current moment, a deeply personal and collective state of anxiety around death and hyper-visible racial violence. It examines the nature of martyrdom, vulnerabilities inherent to living in a Black body, performance of competency, and the liminal space existing between autonomy and control. In SELF MUST DIE, Fordjour interrogates the inevitability of actual death, made more urgent by the realities of a global pandemic, and points to the aspirational death of the artist’s ego brought into focus by a burgeoning career. It is both cultural manifesto and personal declaration. The show is comprised of three parts: VESTIBULE, a site-specific sculptural installation; Fly Away, a live puppetry art performance; and a suite of new paintings. VESTIBULE offers a collection of sculptural objects imbued with biblical allegory and the spirit of James Cone’s Black Theology of Liberation. It refashions the gallery as a secular yet sacred space of memorial. Among its features, the small entry compels visitors to undergo a destabilizing bodily shift that elicits an intimate and reorienting experience. A directional light from above slowly combs the entire room, invoking both searchlight and spotlight, ideas central to the recent death of Breonna Taylor. Constructed of bituminous coal and wrought iron, Taylor Memorial hangs from above. Fly Away, a collaboration between Fordjour and award-winning puppeteer Nick Lehane, is performed by a stellar cast, with an original score composed by John Aylward and performed live by oboist Hassan Anderson. The puppet is a Fordjour-designed, hand-sculpted figure crafted by Robert Maldonado. The protagonist’s narrative arc rises and falls along a journey of personal discovery. Larger themes that course through Fordjour’s body of work become resonant. Fly Away performances are scheduled at 2pm and 5pm daily. Tickets are free and available upon request. For additional information on scheduling, COVID-19 safety precautions and reservations, please visit flyawayshow.com. Spanning two galleries are several new paintings, executed in Fordjour’s signature collage technique, representing the latest developments in his studio practice. The first is a suite of paintings based on Black funerary tradition. The second gallery presents a broad range of subjects including several at monumental scale.

The hidden cost of 21st-century convenience is that you are stalked by a muzzy dread, a feeling that everything you do inflicts some distant unseen harm. The extraordinary events of 2020 sharpen focus on the disastrous and racialized consequences of this estrangement. In Shifted Sims, his first solo exhibition at Petzel Gallery in New York, Schoolwerth gives form to the condition of being “remote” and retreating into masks—from the N95 to the quarantine selfie. What’s more, he pressures painting to catch up to the surge of online profiles, identities without bodies, that teem at the surface of this “once-removed” existence. Schoolwerth’s psychoactive tableaus depict CGI avatars let loose in the digital froth: a Baywatch-y beach, a fashion-brand showroom, a furry orgy. He pulls these scenes from screenshots of The Sims 4, the strategic life-simulation computer game where anything goes—or does it? Trailing every avatar is an estranged silhouetted double, snapped into existence by the “shift” of Shifted Sims. Each composition has been superimposed, askew, over the photograph of a handmade 3D relief sculpture of the image. What appears is a shadow realm of vestigial matter, yanked into view on inkjet-printed canvases and parceled in paint. It is a taut braid of formal practice and allegory, one that questions painting’s viability in the age of the internet. In the 2019 monograph Model as Painting, he delineates how these “forces of abstraction” conceal labor and infrastructure under a late-capitalist mirage of frictionless, disembodied connectivity. This schism plunges down to the scale of the individual, pitting avatar protagonist against human penumbra. Western painting tradition, with its claims to authenticity and representation, is pulled into this Thunderdome of online subject-formation. The works in Shifted Sims question expressionism’s historical claims to transcendent interiority. Schoolwerth renders the Sims’ faces with striking impasto marks that “expressionize the avatar,” humanizing these subjects through visibly manual, painterly gestures. But these subjective punctures of the digital network may be fleeting. Appearing on the canvas next to perfectly raked furrows of paint—Schoolwerth’s proxy for repressed physical infrastructure—expressionism becomes one style among many, attenuating its status as exalted painterly communiqué. You’re left with the dark thought that De Kooning’s Woman would make a pretty good Snapchat filter. Scrambling to address the malaise of social distance, a startup recently launched voice-controlled avatars for video meetings, a real-time Sim who wears pants so you don’t have to. Schoolwerth’s paintings of (often pants-less) avatars counter these riptides of isolation, approximating a shared affective experience of the present moment: the monumental, and the berserk. —Lucy Hunter