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475 Tenth Avenue
New York, NY 10018
212 239 1181

Also at:
Sean Kelly, Los Angeles
1357 North Highland
Los Angeles, CA 90028
310 499 0843
Since its inception in 1991, Sean Kelly Gallery has been internationally regarded for its diverse, intellectually driven program and a highly regarded roster of artists. The gallery has garnered international attention for its high caliber exhibition program and collaboration with many of the most significant cultural institutions around the world.

The gallery opened its first public space at 43 Mercer Street. During these formative years, it established a reputation for diverse, intellectually driven, unconventional exhibitions. The original list of artists represented; Marina Abramović, James Casebere, Callum Innes, Joseph Kosuth and Julião Sarmento (1948-2021), all of whom are still represented by the gallery today, exemplified the Gallery’s commitment to presenting important and challenging contemporary art.

In 2001, Sean Kelly moved to a converted 7,000 square-foot industrial space on 29th Street in the Chelsea gallery district. The spacious location enabled the Gallery to mount increasingly ambitious, museum-quality exhibitions to great critical acclaim. The Gallery's roster of artists expanded to include Rebecca Horn, Frank Thiel, Laurent Grasso, Peter Liversidge, Anthony McCall, Alec Soth, and Kehinde Wiley.

In October 2012, Sean Kelly opened its current 22,000 square foot space at 475 Tenth Avenue in a historic 1914 building. With the gallery’s expansion into the new space, Sean Kelly added internationally acclaimed artists to its roster; David Claerbout, José Dávila, Candida Höfer, Ilse D’Hollander, Idris Khan, Hugo McCloud, Mariko Mori, Liu Wei, and Sun Xun.

Sean Kelly has continued to expand its program to include a new generation of exceptional contemporary artists such as Dawoud Bey, Julian Charrière, Landon Metz, Sam Moyer, Shahzia Sikander, Janaina Tschäpe and Wu Chi-Tsung.

Over the course of more than thirty years, the Gallery has become a symbol for high quality, thought-provoking contemporary art and conversation, most recently with the launch of Collect Wisely in May 2018. Collect Wisely is a provocative media campaign designed to encourage lively conversation around topics of collecting and connoisseurship. At the heart of this initiative is the Collect Wisely podcast, a series of interviews in which Sean Kelly discusses with collectors their passion for art, artists, and a passion for collecting and connoisseurship.

On September 17, 2022, the Gallery will open a major new space in Los Angeles. Located in Hollywood at 1357 N Highland Avenue, the 10,000 square foot space will be led by Thomas Kelly, Partner and Director, who has recently moved to Los Angeles. The inaugural exhibition will feature a solo presentation of new works by Idris Khan.
Artists Represented:
Marina Abramović
Anthony Akinbola
Dawoud Bey
James Casebere
Julian Charrière
David Claerbout
Jose Dávila
Awol Erizku
Laurent Grasso
Candida Höfer
Ilse D'Hollander
Rebecca Horn
Donna Huanca
Callum Innes
Idris Khan
Joseph Kosuth
Peter Liversidge
Anthony McCall
Hugo McCloud
Landon Metz
Mariko Mori
Sam Moyer
Shahzia Sikander
Alec Soth
Sun Xun
Frank Thiel
Janaina Tschäpe
Kehinde Wiley
Wu Chi-Tsung

 

 
Sean Kelly, Gallery views. Photography: Thomas Mueller. Courtesy: Sean Kelly, New York.
Sean Kelly, Gallery views. Photography: Thomas Mueller. Courtesy: Sean Kelly, New York.
Sean Kelly, Gallery views. Photography: Thomas Mueller. Courtesy: Sean Kelly, New York.
Sean Kelly, Gallery views. Photography: Thomas Mueller. Courtesy: Sean Kelly, New York.
Sean Kelly, Gallery views. Photography: Thomas Mueller. Courtesy: Sean Kelly, New York.
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Online Programming

The Exhibition - Collect Wisely



The Exhibition - Collect Wisely, is a virtual presentation. Like the Collect Wisely podcast, the exhibition exists outside the aegis of the gallery and the artists it represents. Instead, it is centered around artworks from the collections of our podcast participants, among them Marieluise Hessel Artzt, J. Tomilson Hill, Rodney Miller, Howard Rachofsky, Gary Yeh, and Tiffany Zabludowicz. The online exhibition includes images of work selected by each collector accompanied by comments explaining their choices. Collect Wisely is a provocative media campaign launched by the gallery on May 2, 2018, designed to encourage lively conversation around topics of collecting and connoisseurship. Collect Wisely’s aim has been to question the art world status quo and its increasing preoccupation with short-term monetary interests, and to refocus the dialogue around core values central to artists and the art they create. It is a call to action, a far-reaching initiative bringing together individuals, institutions, and galleries interested in building a vital community as well as inspiring future generations to focus on a wide-ranging and meaningful investment in culture. A cornerstone of this initiative is the Collect Wisely podcast, a series of interviews in which Sean Kelly discusses with collectors their passion for art, artists, and the core values of why they collect. Twenty-one episodes have been recorded to date, touching upon topics ranging from what it means to be a collector today; how that has changed over time; and where the future of collecting is headed, to what it means to live with and think about objects deeply and critically? Two years on, the world as we once knew it has shifted irrevocably; the future uncertain. The good news is that the world—and by extension, the art world—will survive the COVID-19 pandemic. In this interregnum, we have paused to reflect and think more intently about not just what we value, but our own core values. With galleries, museums, cultural, performing, and visual arts institutions shuttered, we believe strongly that art will continue to inspire and sustain us, perhaps now more than ever. To reflect upon and explore this conviction more widely, we have turned to the collectors featured in the podcast and asked them how recent conditions have affected their current thinking about art. In particular, is there one work of art in their own collection that they have been contemplating deeply in this moment of self-isolation and quarantine? Or is there a certain work in their collection through which they have discovered new meaning, or rediscovered passion, given the challenging and unfamiliar circumstances in which we find ourselves? Considering the extraordinary circumstances in which we now find ourselves, it seems that the moment for such an exhibition could not be more propitious. We hope it will provide encouragement and inspiration for the entire art world community.

Digital Programming



As we are all currently socially isolating for the greater good, one of the greatest losses we feel is the strong sense of connection we have with you, our community of artists, friends, collectors, and institutional colleagues. To keep the conversation vital during these uncertain times, we have introduced an ongoing program of new digital initiatives accessible through the gallery’s Instagram and social media accounts. We hope you will find these programs, engaging, entertaining and enlightening. Please follow us @SeanKellyNY and skny.com/news-events every day to stay connected. Each day’s program in this ongoing weekly series will focus on one of the artists, their art and practice, our collective histories, and plans for the future. Tuesday is #InTheStudio In these brief videos and/or photo essays, we check in with one of our artists in their studio to see what they are working on and what is currently motivating and inspiring them. Wednesdays we go #InDetail This program will provide a deep dive into a singular work by one of our artists, discussing how it fits into their oeuvre, context, career, and its significance culturally and art historically. Thursday takes us #InTheArchive For these programs we will be mining the gallery’s own history, revisiting memorable and iconic moments from past exhibitions, projects, performances and events sampled from our thirty-year history. Friday’s are #FilmFridays We will live stream a film by one of our artists for 24 hours each Friday on Vimeo. To increase our sense of community during this time and to have some fun, we are encouraging viewers to post pictures of their at-home screening set up and tag @SeanKellyNY. The person judged to have submitted the best picture of them screening the film will receive a signed copy of a catalogue of the featured artist. Saturday is #StaffPicksSaturday Each Saturday a member of the SKNY staff will select a work by one of our artists to feature, explaining how and why it has sparked their interest and is of particular significance for them. We look forward to welcoming you back to the gallery in person as soon as possible, but in the meantime, we want to stay connected with you digitally through social media, our website, and email. We wish everyone good health and safety in the coming days and look forward to hearing from you and seeing you again soon. For more information on the gallery's artists and programs please visit skny.com For all inquiries please contact info@skny.com

 
Past Exhibitions

Jose Dávila

Photographic Memory



January 20, 2024 - March 9, 2024
Sean Kelly is delighted to announce Photographic Memory, Jose Dávila’s first exhibition at the Los Angeles gallery. Photographic Memory is comprised of a series of Dávila’s signature cut-out works, which reference Richard Prince’s solo exhibition at LACMA in 2018. The exhibition features large-scale photographic works in which Dávila has removed the main figure of Prince’s influential Untitled (cowboy) series. Challenging conventional connotations and limitations of photography in today’s image driven society, Dávila’s cut-outs interrogate originality, appropriation, and the truth behind an image. There will be an opening reception on Saturday, January 20, from 5-7pm. The artist will be present.

Ana González

VERDES



January 20, 2024 - March 9, 2024
Sean Kelly is delighted to present VERDES, Ana González’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. Through her artistic practice González captures the duality of the natural world – its fragile state due to humanity’s extraction of natural resources and the political and spiritual power inherent to it. Drawing upon the landscapes of her native Colombia, and her collaborations with the indigenous communities that protect them, González’s work serves as both a warning of the gradual disappearance of a vital, historic ecosystem and a celebration of its sensual power. Occupying Sean Kelly, Los Angeles’ third-floor space, the exhibition features paintings, textiles, works on paper, and sculptures. There will be an opening reception on Saturday, January 20, from 5 – 7pm. The artist will be present.

John Guzman

Drowning in Harmony



January 12, 2024 - March 2, 2024
Sean Kelly Gallery is delighted to present John Guzman’s solo exhibition Drowning in Harmony. Guzman’s visceral artworks deconstruct the body to navigate the unpredictable, unusual, and at times, unbearable moments of life. Featuring a compelling series of new large and small oil paintings and works on paper, the exhibition delves into the complexities of the human experience. There will be an opening reception on Thursday, January 11, from 6-8pm. The artist will be present. Drowning in Harmony presents Guzman’s distinctive style and thought-provoking narrative to explore his unique visual language. His innovative approach to painting serves as a form of documentation, revealing the transformative nature of the body by reducing it to textured lines and muted colors. Drawing from lived experiences in the Southside of San Antonio, Texas, Guzman’s paintings abstract the human figure to reflect the unrecognizable transformations of the body resulting from stress. Guzman’s mastery of form, color, and conceptual depth is evident in this new series of works which demonstrate his ability to push artistic boundaries. The works on paper further highlight Guzman’s versatility, translating intricate concepts into a more intimate medium. Positioning his figures within domestic architecture, Guzman intricately weaves links between the environment and its inhabitants. In his paintings, Guzman assembles distorted, tangled figures confined in cramped domestic spaces, creating a visual language for the condition of existence at the edge of survival. The exhibition creates a link between the environment and its inhabitants as Guzman explores space, style, subject matter, and line, addressing the fragility of the psyche and altered landscapes. John Guzman received formal training from the Southwest School of Art, San Antonio, TX. In June 2022, he had his first museum solo exhibition, John Guzman: Flesh and Bone at Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, TX. He is a graduate of NXTHVN’s Fellowship Program in New Haven, CT, which had its culminating exhibition, Undercurrents at Sean Kelly, New York in June 2022. He currently lives and works in New Haven, CT. For additional information on John Guzman, please visit skny.com For media inquiries, please email Adair Lentini at Adair@skny.com For all other inquiries, please email Janine Cirincione at Janine@skny.com

Julian Charrière

Buried Sunshine



January 12, 2024 - March 2, 2024
Sean Kelly is delighted to present Julian Charrière’s Buried Sunshine, the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery in New York. Capturing the delirium of the petroleum industry and the burning of lithic landscapes, Charrière brings his film Controlled Burn together with sculptures and a new series of heliographic photographs to unearth the ‘fossilized sunshine’ upon which the mythos of Los Angeles was built. Examining the material reality of hydrocarbons and how our modern world is organized around the energy they provide, the exhibition draws parallels between the image-making machine of Hollywood and our dependence on fossil fuels, both of which exert gravitational forces that bend our perception of reality. There will be an opening reception on Thursday, January 11, from 6-8pm. The artist will be present. In his new photographic series Buried Sunshines Burn, Charrière reveals the City of Angels as a special anomaly: a place built not only by hydrocarbons, but on top of them, with 5,000 active oil wells beneath the second largest city in the United States. Employing heliography, one of photography’s oldest techniques, first developed by French inventor Nicéphore Niépce in 1822, Charrière uses a light-sensative emulsion incorporating naturally occurring tar collected from the La Brea, McKittrick, and Carpinteria Tar Pits in California to create photographic imprints of local oil fields. Shot from a bird’s eye perspective, the images–printed on highly polished stainless-steel plates–survey some of the state’s largest reserves, including the immense Kern River Oil Field in the San Joanquin Valley, the Placerita and Aliso Canyon Oil Fields in Santa Clarita, and the giant Inglewood Oil Field situated in the heart of the city. Charrière’s film Controlled Burn invites viewers on a cosmic journey, soaring through an aerial landscape of imploding fireworks. Filmes using a drone, this disorienting voyage takes place in open pit coal mines, discommissioned oil rigs, and rusting cooling towers. Amid whirling smoke and fire, implosions are intercut by flashing images of primordial ferns and fluttering moths–beings that evolved during the carboniferous geological period. Charrière cites these organisms as spirit guides and living tokens for the vitality of fossil fuels, and markers for how the agency of coal, oil, and tar has come to haunt our contemporary imagination. Linking celebratory pyrotechnics with architectures of extraction, explosive momentum, and technological obsolescence, Controlled Burn stages the fantasy of a dramatic return to sources of energy via implosion. Also featured in the exhibition are two obsidian sculptures, Thickens, pools, flows, rushes, slows. Made from large pieces of polished volcanic glass–colled magma which has erupted from the Earth’s core. Charrière draws on this material as an ancient means of divination. A readily available resource in Mesoamerica, both Mayan and Aztec civilizations believed obsidian to unlock doors to other times and realms; the hardness of the glass made it one of the earliest materials to be traded across vast distances. In the present, the dark vitality of obsidian is eerily reminiscent of our technological black mirrors, themselves questionable portals beyond the present. As an exhibition, Buried Sunshine expands upon Julian Charrière’s ongoing inquiry into how our species inhabits the world, and how it in turn inhabits us. Charrière combines a unique industrial history with a historic form of image-making, creating an immersive landscape where our most urgent ecological concerns can be addressed. Utilizing photography, film and sculpture, Buried Sunshine investigates sense of place through the lens of geological time, in the process urging viewers to reflect on how our relationship with the materials we appropriate as fuel comes to inform how we perceive the world around us. Julian Charrière’s work has been the subject of solo presentations at major international institutions, including SFMOMA, San Francisco; Langen Foundation, Neuss; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; MAMbo, Bologna; Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; Parasol Unit Foundation, London; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne; and Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris. Charrière has also been prominently featured at the 59th Biennale di Venezia; 57th Biennale di Venezia; the Antarctic Biennale; the Taipei Biennial; the 12th and 16th Biennale de Lyon; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Sprengel Museum, Hannover; Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Aarhus; SCHIRN Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London; and Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Julian Charrière is a former participant of the Institute for Spatial Experiments, an experimental education and research project at the Berlin University of the Arts led by Olafur Eliasson. A nominee for the Prix Marcel Duchamp in 2021, in 2022 Charrière received the 14th SAM Prize for Contemporary Art. For additional information on Julian Charrière, please visit skny.com For media inquiries, please email Adair Lentini at Adair@skny.com For all other inquiries, please email Lauren Kelly at Lauren@skny.com

Ilse D'Hollander

A Harmony Parallel to Nature



November 11, 2023 - January 13, 2024
Sean Kelly is delighted to present A Harmony Parallel to Nature, the first solo exhibition of Ilse D’Hollander at Sean Kelly, Los Angeles, and her first exhibition on the West Coast. Spanning the entirety of her career 1989–1997, the exhibition presents a survey of paintings and works on paper drawn from the artist’s estate including To Goethe, 1991, one of only three known serial bodies of work made by the artist. This remarkable selection of paintings emphasizes the lyrical and metamorphic character of D’Hollander’s oeuvre ¬— qualities inherent to the processes found in nature that influenced her approach as a painter. There will be an opening reception on Saturday, November 11, from 5-7pm.

Donna Huanca

VENAS DEL CAPULLO



November 9, 2023 - December 23, 2023
Sean Kelly is delighted to present VENAS DEL CAPULLO, the highly anticipated, inaugural exhibition by Donna Huanca at Sean Kelly, New York. This multi-sensory exhibition expands upon Huanca’s continuing exploration of themes including the body, the cycles of life, and the chaos of the natural world. This site-specific installation, in which the gallery space is enveloped in a recyclable membrane, includes large-scale paintings on canvas and sculptures in stainless steel and mixed media, as well as sound and scent. There will be an opening reception on Thursday, November 9, from 6–8 pm. The artist will be present. Donna Huanca (b. Chicago, 1980) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores the human body and the natural world through mark-making, raw materials, immersive environments, and singular structures. Encompassing painting, sculpture, and live performance, Huanca’s installations are characteristically created for, and integrated with, the architectural spaces in which they are presented. Her art is deeply invested in communal practice, exploring ritual at large as a means for transcendence, meditation, and transformation. Since 2012, Huanca has collaborated with performers, inviting them to improvise and interact with her surrounding sculptures and installations as their painted skin becomes a major element in the composition. Each of Huanca’s installations is a new and experimental environment, drawing on previous bodies of work, but responsive to its specific context and site. With the exhibition’s title, VENAS DEL CAPULLO, Huanca references a state of both waiting and construction inherent to the creative process. She states, “With the installation and title, I wanted to respond to the art gallery being a place of commercial transaction and transform this space into a lab: a place that honors the creative process rather than the finished product.” For this exhibition, Huanca envelops the walls of the gallery with a translucent, biodegradable membrane, which she likens to a “womb space that functions like a petri dish in which primal sensory signals proliferate.” The gallery is punctuated throughout with large-scale paintings and various sculptures. Each of them unites natural and synthetic materials and carries traces of the human body that reflect the interactive nature of her performances. Huanca’s sinuous, abstract paintings extend the life cycle of her performances by merging the transience of performance art with the permanence of painting. The surfaces of her paintings are built upon images of bodies photographed during these performances, printed onto canvas and overpainted. Camouflaged by oil paint of vibrantly colored hues and tantalizing textural dimension, Huanca’s hallucinatory kaleidoscopes are distinguished by the intermixing of oil pigments with sand and other natural materials. Installed throughout the main gallery, the exhibition also features chrome and metal sculptures, ranging from highly reflective pierced mirror silhouettes to totemic aluminum castings alluding to the constant metamorphosis of the human body. The organic shapes, contours, and impressions of these sculptural works take on an anthropomorphic quality, both welcoming visitors into the space and standing as totems for those absent. Embracing her Bolivian heritage rooted in Indigenous rituals, Huanca adorns her sculptures with ornamental piercings and braids, the latter referencing the quipu, a knot-based record-keeping device of the ancient Incan civilization’s system of communication, bringing traditional practices into a contemporary framework. Concurrent with her inaugural exhibition at Sean Kelly, Huanca is the subject of a major exhibition, titled SCAR TISSUE (BLURRED EARTH), at the Faurschou Foundation, Brooklyn, New York, October 21, 2023–July 14, 2024.

Julian Charrière

Buried Sunshine



September 14, 2023 - November 4, 2023
Sean Kelly is delighted to present Buried Sunshine, Julian Charrière’s highly anticipated first solo exhibition at Sean Kelly, Los Angeles. Buried Sunshine explores the entangled histories of Los Angeles and the discovery of petroleum there in the late 19th century, a catalyst which industrialized the region and transformed LA into the second largest city in the United States. Capturing the delirium of the petroleum industry and the burning of lithic landscapes, focused through the lens of Los Angeles—the world’s largest urban oil field—Charrière brings his film Controlled Burn together with sculptures and a new series of heliographic photographs, to unearth the ‘fossilized sunshine’ upon which the mythos of the city was built. Examining the material reality of hydrocarbons and how our modern world is organized around the energy they provide, the exhibition draws parallels between the image-making machine of Hollywood and our dependence on fossil fuels, both of which exert gravitational forces that bend our perceptions of reality. There will be an opening reception on Thursday, September 14, from 6-8pm. The artist will be present.

Awol Erizku

Awol Erizku: Delirium of Agony



September 8, 2023 - October 28, 2023
Sean Kelly is delighted to present Delirium of Agony, Awol Erizku’s first solo exhibition at Sean Kelly, New York. With this exhibition, Erizku examines the construction of cultural iconography through the lens of contemporary hip-hop, street culture, art history, sports, and entertainment. Occupying the entire gallery, the exhibition features paintings, neon installations, photographs, sculptures, and works on paper. A series of basketball hoops are transformed into a pan-African flag; a coffin into a human-sized mouse trap; and an ancient Egyptian bust into a gleaming disco ball. There will be an opening reception on Friday, September 8, from 6-8pm. The artist will be present. Erizku transforms the linguistic conventions surrounding music, popular culture, and sports symbolism into images and sculptures that offer an alternative to the Western gaze. By remixing cultural signifiers, he weaves together different narratives that interrogate the canons of art history, philosophy, and linguistics, creating unexpected connections that highlight the artist’s interest in contranyms found within the hip-hop vernacular. A recurrent theme throughout Erizku’s practice is the questioning of Eurocentric standards of beauty and art historical tradition, to create work that represents a uniquely Afrocentric aesthetic, one the artist refers to as “Afro-Esotericism.” Riffing on forbears as varied as Marcel Duchamp and David Hammons, Erizku uses a postcard of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, 1503 as his point of reference. Informed by Duchamp’s infamous readymade, L.H.O.O.Q., 1919—comprised of a similar postcard upon which the artist drew a mustache and beard on the Mona Lisa—Erizku in his work depicts the infamous subject with a zipper adhered to her face, also a knowing reference to artist David Hammons’ iconic Fly Jar, 1996. Appropriating the presentation of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, Paris, Erizku similarly encases his work behind thick bulletproof glass, drawing attention to the value placed upon the original within the canon of Western art history, while simultaneously addressing issues of race, representation, and value in the arts. The exhibition also includes a series of large-scale paintings featuring the insignia of popular sports teams. Erizku’s paintings are derived from the addition, removal, and obfuscation of logos associated with individuals found within street culture. Again, mixing visual emblems, tropes and metaphors from disparate cultures, such as ancient Egyptian manuscripts in which the original writing is removed, yet traces are left behind, in these works Erizku borrows his aesthetic from Los Angeles’ urban culture. As acclaimed writer, Doreen St. Félix, has observed, “as much as Erizku is drawn to creation, he is also thinking about obliteration as a means of reflection.” By creating a palimpsest of urban history and youth culture, he informs and shapes local identity. Inspired by the fantastical coffin culture of Ghana and the duality of hip-hop language, the exhibition also features two traditional fantasy coffins and a sculptural installation created in collaboration with celebrated Ghanaian coffin maker, Paa Joe. The coffins take the form of a bottle of promethazine cough syrup (otherwise known as “Lean”) and a mouse trap. In these hand-carved and painted works, Erizku remixes and expands the implications and connotations of words beyond their initial meanings. Each of the sculptures acts as a catalyst that plays on slang language and the underpinnings of grim realities that infiltrate the hip-hop industry. Incorporating symbols, imagery, and references, Erizku portrays stories, emotions, and subjects prevalent in the music genre, making them visually accessible and relatable to audiences. In doing so, he highlights the rich histories and nuances of these communities, creating a medium that blends the auditory and visual, while also acknowledging and preserving vernacular heritage drawn from African and African American diasporas. Awol Erizku’s newly released first monograph, Mystic Parallax was recently published by Aperture. This comprehensive monograph spans Erizku’s career, examining his studio practice in tandem with his work as a highly in-demand editorial photographer and cultural commentator. The publication features essays by critically acclaimed writers Ishmael Reed and Doreen St. Félix, curator Ashley James, and interviews with artist Urs Fischer and critic, curator, and writer Antwaun Sargent. There will be a book signing of Mystic Parallax with the artist at the gallery on Saturday, September 9, from 2-3pm. Born in Gondar, Ethiopia, in 1988, Erizku attended The Cooper Union before receiving his MFA from Yale University. He has had solo exhibitions with the Public Art Fund, New York, and The FLAG Art Foundation, New York. His work has been exhibited at prominent institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Studio Museum Harlem, NY; the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, Bentonville, AR; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto; the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco; and the FLAG Art Foundation, NY, amongst others. His work is in the permanent collection of many institutions worldwide, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; the Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach, FL; The FLAG Art Foundation, NY; the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA; LACMA, Los Angeles, CA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, and The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY. Erizku will be the subject of forthcoming solo exhibitions at The Momentary at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and at Savannah College of Art and Design. For additional information on Awol Erizku, please visit skny.com For media inquiries, please email Brandon Tho Harris at Brandon@skny.com For all other inquiries, please email Lauren Kelly at Lauren@skny.com or Thomas Kelly at Thomas@seankellyla.com Image: Awol Erizku Courtesy: Sean Kelly

Anthony McCall

New Solid Light Works and Early Drawings



July 14, 2023 - August 25, 2023
Sean Kelly is delighted to present New Solid Light Works and Early Drawings, Anthony McCall’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. Occupying the entire gallery, the exhibition features two new ‘solid-light’ installations on the first floor, and a survey of black and white photographs, works on paper and preparatory drawings that span McCall’s career on the third floor. There will be an opening reception on Thursday, July 13, 6-8pm. The artist will be present. Anthony McCall is widely recognized for his solid-light installations, a series he began in 1973 with the ground-breaking Line Describing a Cone, in which a volumetric form composed of projected light slowly transforms in three-dimensional space. His new solid- light works show how McCall has progressed this format, evolving his work over time through innovative installations and configurations. Upon entering the main gallery, visitors encounter McCall’s Split Second (Mirror) III, 2022, a single projection in which the “split” is created by interrupting the throw of light with a wall-sized mirror. The plane of light is reflected onto a double-sided screen hanging in space to create a triangulated viewing field, enabling the viewer to pass through and see the shifting volumetric form from both front and back. The second half of the main gallery features McCall’s vertical installation Skylight, 2020. This smaller-scale piece stands alone with a gradually morphing light sculpture projected from above onto a four-foot plinth, which allows the viewer to walk around the cone of light and observe it from all sides. This work is accompanied by a sound element by acclaimed composer and musician David Grubbs. Echoing throughout the space is the sound of a distant thunderstorm accompanied by the intermittent flashes of an electrical storm. As with all of McCall’s light installations, the works evolve slowly, yet quickly enough for the viewer to clearly perceive its movement and progression. The third-floor gallery space features a select overview of photographs and preparatory drawings illustrating the arc of McCall’s career, offering the visitor context and insight for a fuller understanding of the artist’s oeuvre. Anthony McCall currently lives and works in New York. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Mieres Centru Cultural, Mieres, Spain; The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; the Denver Art Museum, Colorado; Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, New York; The Hepworth Wakefield, United Kingdom; Lismore Castle Arts, Waterford, Ireland; EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Tate Modern; London, UK; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Serpentine Gallery, London, UK; and Artists Space, New York. McCall’s work has been exhibited at the Institut d’Art Contemporain, Villeurbanne, France; Musée de Rochechouart, France; SFMoMA, San Francisco; Hangar Bicocca, Milan, Italy; the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, Portugal; the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Germany; the Faena Arts Center, Buenos Aires, Argentina; LOK | Kunstmuseum St Gallen, Switzerland; LAC Lugano Arte e Cultura, Lugano, Switzerland, amongst others. McCall’s work is represented in numerous collections, including, Tate, London, England; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany; Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; SFMoMA, San Francisco; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; and the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC.

NXTHVN Cohort 4

RECLAMATION



June 30, 2023 - August 11, 2023
Sean Kelly and NXTHVN are proud to present RECLAMATION, a group exhibition featuring works that embody the multiplicities of human experience through painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, installation, and performance. This culminating exhibition presents artists from NXTHVN’s Cohort 04 Fellowship Program; Anindita Dutta, Donald Guevara, Ashanté Kindle, Athena Quispe, Edgar Serrano, and Capt. James Stovall V, it is curated by Curatorial Fellows Cornelia Stokes and Kiara Cristina Ventura. These artists have created forms that contradict the viewer’s expectation of recognizable materials and icons, as a means to challenge the perceptible limits of our social conditioning and humanity. Throughout RECLAMATION, each artist interrogates and reclaims the power of Western consumption as it relates to notions of beauty, art history, religion, spirituality, and sexuality. Edgar Serrano's paintings critically confront the canon of traditional Western art and artistic portraiture by critiquing European art's misappropriation of indigenous artistic and cultural traditions in Africa and Latin America. Serrano's works deceive the eye with loose expressionistic brushstrokes and tightly woven embroidery-like patterns that call attention to the surface of the canvas. Through his methodical style and play with optical appearances, his paintings incite reactions of amusement, trickery, and wonder as they slowly reveal meaning. Athena Quispe re-indigenizes the discourse of painting. Rooting her work in Peruvian pre-Hispanic painting and artistic production, Quispe creates sculptural paintings to honor her ancestral bloodline through blood memory and inherited knowledge. This act intrinsically deconstructs European interdictions of pre-columbian art and traditions. Ashanté Kindle utilizes the textures, curl patterns, and styling of Black hair to envision new realities of personal existence that defy standards of conformity. Through her abstract paintings and video work, she challenges easily digestible ideas of Black femininity. By magnifying the hair strand on canvas, accentuated by stylish adornments, the cellular properties of the hair follicle begin to symbolize the infinite space of the cosmos. Donald Guevara constructs vignettes of AFK (away from keyboard) glitch spaces, where images of cultural and religious icons, bodily forms, team sports, magazine ads, and trading cards are twisted, wrapped, layered, and superimposed into complex and, at times, contradictory composites. Guevara utilizes collage, drawing, and painting as visual methods of interrogation into the glitch to explore how dissonant matters can forge a cyborg amalgamation where culture, race, and gender openly coalesce together. Capt. James Stovall V creates a relatable image of Christ and other biblical figures to comment on the relevancy of these idols’ appearance to the spiritual experience. By masking the figure, Stovall V intervenes in the correlation between whiteness and divinity, employing images that contradict the traditional physical appearance of these figures. His compositions also challenge convention as the tag-like drawing style and partially rendered figures refute religious iconographic historical paintings. Anindita Dutta’s sculptural and performance practice centers around reclaiming silenced voices, untold stories, and concealed horrors. Through her new series, "Sex, Sexuality, and Society: Chapter Two," she retrieves the memories of objects that remain silent witnesses to sexual trauma. Utilizing sensuous materials such as used clothes, boots, shoes, rawhide, horns, silk, and velvet, Dutta gives voice and power to these mutated materials in the pursuit of truth and justice for millions of victims around the world. The works included in RECLAMATION remind viewers to be critical of the things we covet as a means of unearthing the systems that prescribe our longing. These artists show us the potential to liberate desire and image from corrupted ideologies that inform our understanding of art, history, beauty, religion, and sexuality. The new forms they create demonstrate to the viewer the necessity for reclaiming power structures to break through into new realms of human experience beyond simple classifications.

Dawoud Bey

Pictures: 1976 - 2019



April 29, 2023 - June 30, 2023
Sean Kelly is delighted to announce Dawoud Bey: Pictures 1976 – 2019, the artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. Surveying five decades of work through the lens of five iconic series—Harlem, U.S.A. (1975-1979), Street Portraits (1988-1991), Harlem Redux (2014–2017), Night Coming Tenderly, Black (2017), and In This Here Place (2019)—this presentation illuminates Bey’s foundational importance to the development of photography as fine art, historical documentation, and social practice in the United States.

Kehinde Wiley

HAVANA



April 28, 2023 - June 17, 2023
Sean Kelly is delighted to present HAVANA, Kehinde Wiley’s highly anticipated new exhibition at the gallery. Featuring new paintings, works on paper and a three-channel film, this body of work is informed by Wiley’s focus on the evolution of Black culture globally. Inspired by two visits Wiley made to Cuba, this new body of work explores the phenomenon of the carnivalesque in Western culture. Referencing artists as diverse as Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, Calder, and Western European depictions of the carnivalesque, the circus, and the power of street performance and dance, the HAVANA paintings focus on the circus as a site of disruption for the rational mind and circus performers who embrace a dynamic and vibrant way of living and being in the world. There will be an opening reception on Thursday, April 27 from 6-8pm. The artist will be present. The works in the exhibition create a timeline in which political realities, economic hardship, artistic freedom, and the thirst for self-discovery become the catalyst for exploring a nation and culture through painting. In his study of art history and artists who were influenced by the circus, Wiley focused on the carnival as a metaphor for an attenuated and heighted state of being. Circuses are often places in which those who are cultural, religious, or social outcasts find their center. Similarly, artists themselves often occupy a space of being both within culture and on its periphery. In Wiley’s view, depictions of the circus offer a type of self-portraiture that many artists have employed over time. “I took that and wanted to expand it into a much larger exhibition that starts to look at the story of self-invention as a means to get to a closer truth about Cuba,” the artist stated. Taken from an African or African diasporic point of view, the circus and the carnivalesque have historically been opportunities for the formerly enslaved to engage in moments of freedom and grace that were generally forbidden. The carnival, Mardi Gras, and street procession were events in which chaos could arise, love could be expressed, and a spiritual embrace of religious traditions could be manifest. During his first visit to Cuba in 2015, Wiley visited the Escuela Nacional de Circo Cuba. Before 1959, Cuba had a strong tradition of circus arts including several family circuses which were nationalized and unified, at present there is only one recognized professional company: the National Circus of Cuba, Circuba. During Wiley’s second visit to Cuba in 2022, he met with performers from Raices Profundas, which is widely regarded as one of the world’s most authentic performing ensembles in the Yoruba tradition. The dancers and musicians have an intense dedication to their company, their art, and its traditions. Wiley’s film, installed in the lower gallery, features interviews and performances by members of Raices Profundas who give insight into the journey through time of Cuba’s rich cultural history, from its deepest Afro-Cuban roots to Latin dance of previous generations and contemporary salsa dancing. Cuba is an important cultural, emotional, and artistic site of exploration at the crossroads between the European worlds of the enslaver and the diasporic worlds of Africa. It maintains a strong commitment to its religious traditions, most often during the carnival season and moments of rapture that occur in street processions and in traditional variations of Yoruba religious practices. Through these interventions, Black and Brown people have historically been able to communicate love and joy in a radical act of defiance. Cuba, for this reason, presents a singular opportunity to explore not only the history of Western representations of the carnivalesque but also a true embrace of Afro-Caribbean culture, representing an indictment of the enslavement of Black bodies and a celebration of the youth, vibrancy, and broader evolution of Black culture. The African aesthetic is woven into Wiley’s work in Cuba, in addition to his oeuvre more broadly. These new works not only take the shapeshifting narrative that underpins African history, but also look specifically at Afro-Caribbean survival strategies and amplifies them. “Black people are survivors, we’re shapeshifters,” states Wiley. “The very delightful and delicious ways in which we survive have created the Blues, and so many other cultural traditions at the leading edge of American creative culture, whether it be Jazz or Hip Hop, soul food, or African American fashion sensibilities.” In HAVANA, Wiley explores those traditions, their power, and abiding influence. Kehinde Wiley holds a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, an MFA from Yale University, and honorary doctorates from the Rhode Island School of Design and San Francisco Art Institute. Wiley’s work is currently on view in a solo exhibition at the de Young Museum, San Francisco. His work has been the subject of exhibitions worldwide, most recently at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice, Italy, a collateral event of the 59th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia (2022); and The National Gallery, London, England (2022). His work is featured in the permanent collections of numerous international museums and public collections. In 2018, Wiley’s portrait of Barack Obama was added to the permanent installation of presidential portraits in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, making him the first African American artist to paint an official U.S. Presidential portrait. In October of the same year, he was honored with Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois medal for his significant contributions to African and African American history in culture and his advocacy for intercultural understanding and human rights. Wiley is also the recipient of the U.S. Department of State’s Medal of Arts and France’s Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters). In 2019, Wiley founded Black Rock Senegal, a multidisciplinary artist-in-residence program that invites artists from around the world to live and create work in Dakar, Senegal. Wiley lives and works in Beijing, Dakar, and New York.

Rebecca Horn

Labyrinth of the Soul: Drawings 1965-2015



March 11, 2023 - April 22, 2023
Sean Kelly is delighted to announce Labyrinth of the Soul: Drawings 1965-2015, a major exhibition featuring fifty years of drawing by Rebecca Horn. This historical presentation, which includes rarely seen works on paper, will open at Sean Kelly, Los Angeles in March following its presentation in the New York gallery in January, two cities in which Horn lived and for which she has a strong affinity. This will be the most significant presentation of Horn’s work on the West Coast since her 1990 exhibition at MOCA, Los Angeles, entitled Driving through Buster’s Bedroom. This significant survey will be the first opportunity for visitors to see many of these critically important works, most of which have never been shown in the United States. The occasion also marks the thirty-four-year professional relationship between Rebecca Horn and Sean Kelly.

Candida Höfer

Heaven on Earth - Curated by Toshiko Mori



February 24, 2023 - April 15, 2023
Sean Kelly is delighted to present Heaven on Earth, an exhibition of work by Candida Höfer curated by award-winning architect Toshiko Mori. Spanning nearly thirty years of Höfer’s practice, Mori has selected images that exemplify the range of spaces Höfer has photographed throughout her career from libraries and museums to public theatres and churches. There will be an opening reception on Thursday, February 23, 6-8pm. Candida Höfer and Toshiko Mori will be present. Toshiko Mori will lead a walkthrough of the exhibition at 7pm. In the text below, Toshiko Mori describes her selection process and viewing Höfer’s work through an architectural lens: It is the ultimate wish of an architect to create an idealistic spatial experience for each project. We compose the aspirations of humanity into the static form of buildings by arranging proportion, detail, materiality, and sequencing into an orchestrated experience. Many times, we aspire to transcend further and transport inhabitants into the realms outside of daily life. These hidden agendas may not relate to the efficient function of buildings, but as architects, we can weave them into the programs of our architecture by adding to the breadth and depth of ineffable elements and creating silent yet visceral experiences of place. Candida Höfer’s photographs distill these moments of architects’ aspiration. To create a sense of ‘heaven on earth’ - moments of sublime spatial experience - our eyes and bodies must ‘feel’ completely, sensing the temperature of a space, smelling it, reading its colorations, and seeking the depths of its chiaroscuro. We may be visiting a concert hall, we may be reading in a library, or we may be in a place of worship; our present is always experienced emotionally and even spiritually. These are the moments which are often difficult, if not impossible, to describe. Candida presents these moments objectively and with detachment. Yet, ironically, her work itself is inviting and habitable. Often devoid of human presence, these images become an empty vessel for our imagination. We enter into Candida’s photographs. We look at her art and imagine being there, vicariously experiencing all of the details, materials, and light within. For the same reason, there is a sense of melancholy and fragility, even of nostalgia, in her work. We do not know how these spaces will survive. Photography captures fluid time as a static image; it is always about a past moment, ephemeral and elusive. The original program and intent of buildings will continue to evolve with our ever-shifting societies. Libraries were once the bastion of protected knowledge; today they have been transformed to fit the needs of contemporary society, becoming beacons of accessibility by providing free and democratic distribution of knowledge. I call this exhibition Heaven on Earth because Candida captures these fleeting moments in a sober light, as if the architectural experience itself is an object to marvel at. While majestic and grand in scale, Candida’s photographs have an appeal that is powerfully personal and intimate. To architects, attraction to her photography is natural, not only because of the transcendent power of her subject matter, but because Candida captures our hope that our buildings act as silent witnesses to civilization, speaking volumes through architecture and light. We hear the voice of architecture through her photographs, projecting architects’ desire to create heavenly moments during our short life on earth. Candida Höfer lives and works in Cologne, Germany. Her internationally recognized work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Paul Clemen Museum, Kunsthistorisches Institut Bonn, Bonn, Germany; Museum of Photography, Berlin; Hall Art Foundation | Schloss Derneburg Museum, Derneburg, Germany; the Kunsthalle, Basel; the Museum Folkwang, Essen; the Louvre, Paris; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; and the Kunstmuseum, Luzerne. Her work has also appeared in group exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Power Plant, Toronto; Kunsthaus Bregenz; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao; and Documenta XI, Kassel. Höfer represented Germany at the 2003 Venice Biennale. Her photographs are included in major public and private collections worldwide. Toshiko Mori is the principal of Toshiko Mori Architect, and founder of VisionArc, a think-tank promoting global dialogue for a sustainable future. She is the Robert P. Hubbard Professor in the Practice of Architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design since 1995 and was chair of the Department of Architecture from 2002 to 2008. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her recent awards include the 2022 MASterworks Award for Best Restoration for the Brooklyn Public Library Central Branch, the Isamu Noguchi Award in 2021, the Louis Auchincloss Prize in 2020 from the Museum of the City of New York, and the AIA/ASCA Topaz Medallion for Excellence in Architectural Education in 2019. Mori was featured in a 2022 film by ArchDaily titled Women in Architecture, a semifinalist at Cannes Film Festival, and is the guest editor for Domus: the Magazine for Architecture, Design and Art in 2023.

Janaina Tschäpe

Restless Moraine



January 14, 2023 - February 4, 2023
Restless Moraine, Janaina Tschäpe's first solo exhibition in LA opens at Sean Kelly, Los Angeles on Saturday, January 14, 2023. This new body of work presents Tschäpe's intricately layered abstract landscapes featuring imagery evocative of the natural world, suggesting growth, transition, and metamorphosis. Created entirely with oil paint and oil stick, these new paintings expand Janaina Tschäpe's investigation of the relationship between gesture and painting. Her dynamic yet carefully nuanced canvases evoke associations with nature that at times suggest both sea and land, as her atmospheric images shift subtly between representation and abstraction. Image caption: Janaina Tschäpe, Chorale, 2022, oil and oil stick on canvas, 110 x 130 in.

Rebecca Horn

Labyrinth of the Soul: Drawings 1965-2015



January 7, 2023 - February 18, 2023
Sean Kelly is delighted to announce Labyrinth of the Soul: Drawings 1965-2015, a major exhibition featuring fifty years of drawing by Rebecca Horn. This historical presentation, which includes rarely seen works on paper, will open in the New York gallery in January before traveling to Sean Kelly, Los Angeles in March, two cities in which Horn lived and for which she has a strong affinity. Horn’s first exhibition with the gallery in nine years, this significant survey will be the first opportunity for visitors to see many of these critically important works, most of which have never been shown in the United States. The occasion also marks the thirty-four-year professional relationship between Rebecca Horn and Sean Kelly. This extraordinary exhibition, which includes 55 works on paper, is the first dedicated exclusively to this aspect of Rebecca Horn’s practice, and the most extensive presentation of her work in the United States since her major retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1993, curated by Germano Celant. From her earliest stages as an artist, drawing has been foundational and informed every aspect of Horn’s multi-faceted oeuvre, ranging from performances, which utilize bodily extensions, to feature films, poems, dynamic sculptures, and site-specific installations. Throughout her career, drawing has occupied a central role, with Horn working serially at different moments to create specific bodies of work, ranging from smaller, more intimate pieces to the later, large Bodylandscape works on paper. The earliest works in the exhibition, dating from the mid-1960s, evince Horn’s concern with the human form, bodily appendages, states of transformation, mechanization, and machinery, making evident her dedication to the aesthetic form of performance. In 1968, Horn was hospitalized for a debilitating lung condition brought on by certain sculptural materials she was using. A subsequent period of convalescence at a sanitorium inspired a series of sculptures concerned with the body, isolation, and physical vulnerability. These themes became the artist’s subject, and her proposals for sculptures are documented in these early drawings. Other works, from the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, demonstrate the myriad approaches Horn has taken to the form, with each cycle of drawings having a distinct tempo, like the cadence of the poetry or rhythm of the music that have continuously inspired her. For her smaller drawings, Horn often worked simultaneously across multiple sheets of paper laid out before her, adding marks and details as she moved delicately and quickly, fluttering across the paper’s surface like a butterfly, touching down on each sheet at various intervals to make her marks. From around 2003-2015, Horn produced an impressive group of large-scale works referred to as Bodylandscape, paintings on paper that extended her interest in the body as machine into an autobiographical, performative arena. Incorporating pencil, acrylic, and watercolor and gouache with text, these energetic works are scaled to the artist’s own proportions, defined by the limit to which her arms could extend when building the sometimes-frenzied compositions through the movements and actions of her own body. Horn’s progression from attaching performative apparatus to her body in her early work, to creating mark producing automatons and sculptural machines, is synthesized in these stunning works, which replace the replicant machine with the body of the artist, bringing the arc of her career full circle. In 2015, Horn suffered a devastating stroke, which sadly left her unable to continue making drawings, resulting in these psychologically charged works being among the final and finest works on paper that she produced. Following the New York installation of Labyrinth of the Soul, the exhibition will travel to Sean Kelly, Los Angeles, marking a homecoming of sorts for the artist. Rebecca Horn lived in Los Angeles from 1972-73 and was active with a circle of artists including John Baldessari and Eric Orr, amongst others. This will be the most significant presentation of Horn’s work on the West Coast since her 1990 exhibition at MOCA, Los Angeles, entitled Driving through Buster’s Bedroom, which was curated by Elizabeth Smith. Labyrinth of the Soul will provide viewers newfound insight into the artist’s practice and offer intriguing discoveries regarding Horn’s formal and informal relationships with artists ranging from Joseph Beuys, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Tinguely, Méret Oppenheim, Willem deKooning, and Hans Bellmer, amongst others. Horn has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at venues around the world, including the Museum Tinguely, Basel; Centre Pompidou-Metz, France; Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg, Germany; Tate Modern, London; the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow; the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), New Delhi; the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge; Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; MOCA, Los Angeles; the Neue National Galerie, Berlin; the Kunsthalle Wein; the Serpentine Gallery, London; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva; the Kunsthaus Zürich; and the Anthology Film Archives, New York, amongst others. She has been included in group exhibitions at institutions including LACMA, Los Angeles; MoMA P.S.1, Long Island City, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, Germany; and MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, Bologna, Italy amongst others. Horn’s work has been presented at this year’s 59th Venice Biennials, as well as the 47th and 42nd editions and at documenta 5 and documenta 9. Her work is included in public collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; the Tate Gallery, London, United Kingdom; Van Abbenmuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, Turin, Italy; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; and the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville, Spain, to name a few. She has been the recipient of numerous awards including the 2017 Willhelm Lehmbruck Prize, Lehmbruck Museum; the 2016 Ordre pour le mérite des Arts et des Sciences, France; the Grande médaille des arts plastiques from the Académie d’architecture de Paris, 2011; the 2010 Premium Imperiale Prize, Japan, and the 1988 Carnegie Prize. For press inquiries, please email Adair Lentini at Adair@skny.com For all other inquiries, please email Cecile Panzieri at Cecile@skny.com

Shahzia Sikander

Radiant Dissonance



November 19, 2022 - January 7, 2023

In collaboration with Ulysses De Santi

Zalszupin 100



November 19, 2022 - January 7, 2023
Sean Kelly, Los Angeles, is delighted to announce the first exhibition in our third-floor project space. Zalszupin 100, presented in collaboration with Ulysses de Santi, celebrates the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of legendary Brazilian modernist, Jorge Zalszupin. While working as an architect, Zalszupin designed several important buildings and iconic homes in São Paulo, however, it was through his practice and contributions to Modern Design that he became so widely known and venerated. Zalszupin is recognized for creating sophisticated furniture of exceptional quality, incorporating tropical woods and an originality that spanned generations, cementing his reputation as one of the greatest designers of the 20th century.

Callum Innes

Tondos



November 4, 2022 - December 17, 2022
Sean Kelly is pleased to announce Callum Innes’ exhibition Tondos, his eighth solo exhibition with the gallery, which introduces a remarkable new development in his oeuvre. The exhibition presents Innes’s iconic Exposed Paintings, Split Paintings and Shellac Paintings in an entirely new format. Made on plywood panels, these circular and oval paintings mark a dramatic departure from the artist’s rectangular format and invite a range of new interpretations, both psychologically and formally. The tondos, presented in the main gallery, will be accompanied by a group of new works on paper in the front gallery.

Idris Khan

The Pattern of Landscape



September 17, 2022 - November 5, 2022

Landon Metz

A Different Kind of Paradise



September 8, 2022 - October 22, 2022
Sean Kelly is pleased to announce Landon Metz’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. This new body of work reflects Metz's ongoing enquiry into the relationship between form and its absence. Paintings are the primary vehicle through which Metz invites a heightened awareness of presence, one mirrored in both the execution of his work and the viewing experience itself. His visual language is a mediation on the relativity of experience, emphasizing the connection between polarities: subject to object, figure to ground, and materiality to immateriality. The opening reception will take place on Wednesday, September 7, from 6-8 pm. The artist will be present. Metz’s works both inhabit space and address the construction of space. His process, how the dye he uses responds to the conditions of its pour, the surface tension of the canvas, and the pigment’s absorption into the fibers of the canvas to produce an image, are as intimately considered as the installation of the works in the space itself. A Different Kind of Paradise is as much a ritual space as it is a contemplative one. Visitors are greeted by a two-panel work flanking the entrance to the main gallery. Taking inspiration from a nijiriguchi, the small, square portal through which guests enter a traditional Japanese tea ceremony room, Metz has created an environment, without physically altering the gallery’s architecture. His installation centers on the relationship between the viewer and their surroundings, embodiment and opticality. The largest work on display, is comprised of eight panels and a multi-colored palette. Metz has discussed this work’s format in relation to Monet’s Water Lilies, referencing their historical legacy and panoramic presentation which engulfs the viewer in the work. This painting immerses the viewer within pictorial space, whereas the more intimate entry diptych incorporates the empty volume of the gallery’s passage into its composition. Within the matrix of the show, the smallest panels, of which there are three, are counterpoised by their scale and material density. With these spatial and optical compositional strategies, Metz extends ideas that have long driven his practice. A Different Kind of Paradise offers viewers an intimate experience, providing moments of meditative respite and contemplation from the otherwise frenetic landscape of daily life.

Anthony Akinbola

Natural Beauty



September 8, 2022 - October 22, 2022
Sean Kelly is delighted to announce Natural Beauty, a solo-exhibition of new work by Nigerian- American, Brooklyn-based artist Anthony Akinbola. This presentation, occupying the front and lower galleries, includes the artist’s signature Camouflage paintings, single and multi-panel works that utilize the ubiquitous du-rag as their primary material. Universally available and possessed of significant cultural context, the du-rag represents for Akinbola a readymade object that engages the conceptual strategies of Marcel Duchamp and other significant artistic predecessors. The opening reception will take place on Wednesday, September 7, from 6-8 pm. The artist will be present. Born in Columbia, Missouri, Anthony Akinbola, is a first-generation American raised by Nigerian parents in the United States and Nigeria. His layered, richly colored compositions celebrate and signify the distinct cultures that shape his identity. In the front gallery, an array of Camouflage paintings explore the du-rag as both a material for art-making and as commentary on larger issues of identity, respectability, and commodification of African American culture. The subtle variations in color throughout the works were often subject to supply chain availability. Individual canvasses range from subtle variations on a single, subtle tone, to richly contrasting fields of color, evoking artists as varied as Morris Louis and Ad Reinhardt. In the lower gallery, Akinbola will install a single, multi-panel work positioned in dialogue with a taxidermized goat, an action that both pays homage to Robert Rauschenberg’s revolutionary Combine, Monogram, 1955-59—which featured a stuffed Angora goat, engulfed in a rubber tire, standing on a painting—and functions for the artist as a conceptual self-portrait. In Nigeria, goats hold a significant place in the culture and are commonly used for their hides, meat and in religious festivals for ritual sacrifice. There is a ubiquitous fetish associated with goats and their totemic significance. Throughout his work Akinbola unpacks the rituals and histories connecting Africa and America, addressing the power of fetishization around cultural objects.

NXTHVN

Undercurrents



June 10, 2022 - August 5, 2022
Sean Kelly and NXTHVN are delighted to present Undercurrents a group exhibition that explores the nuanced relationship between materiality, human longing, and collective memory. This culminating exhibition will feature artists from NXTHVN’s Cohort 03 Fellowship Program; Layo Bright, John Guzman, Alyssa Klauer, Africanus Okokon, Patrick Quarm, Daniel Ramos, and Warith Taha, it is organized by Curatorial Fellows Marissa Del Toro and Jamillah Hinson. There will be an opening reception on June 9 from 6-8pm, the artists and curators will be present. On Saturday, June 11 from 11:30am – 1pm there will be a walk-through of the exhibition led by curatorial fellows Marissa Del Toro and Jamillah Hinson. Featuring a range of media including painting, sculpture, video and photography, the Cohort 03 artists reveal the present undercurrents of poignant topics within the contemporary moment, including investigations of how familial legacies and lineages, cultural hybridity, and collective memory shape personal experience. Through the examination of their material processes, Undercurrents presents notions surrounding transformation and the many ways in which human longing is manifest. Using ubiquitous materials alongside exploratory techniques, the artists layer and mold their media to give visibility to nuanced, depth-filled narratives. This exhibition positions the artists in intimate conversation with one another while examining both the intricacy and range of their practices.

David Claerbout

Dark Optics



April 27, 2022 - June 4, 2022
Sean Kelly is delighted to present Dark Optics, a solo exhibition by Belgium-based artist David Claerbout. The exhibition is the US premiere of Claerbout's two most recent film works, The Close, 2022, and Aircraft (F.A.L.), 2015-2021, alongside a series of works on paper relating to each film

Marina Abramović

Performative



March 4, 2022 - April 16, 2022
Sean Kelly Gallery is delighted to announce Performative, Marina Abramović's ninth solo exhibition at the gallery. Presenting four distinct turning points in Abramović's five-decade career, the exhibition chronicles both the development of her oeuvre and how it has influenced performance art globally. The earliest work in the exhibition, in the main gallery, will feature Abramović's iconic early performance, Rhythm 10, 1973. Also in the main gallery will be Abramovic's acclaimed 2010 MoMA performance, The Artist is Present, represented by a video installation. The front gallery will include a selection of Abramović's "transitory objects," which visitors to the exhibition can use. A screening of Abramović's film the 7 Deaths of Maria Callas, will be in the lower gallery. Presented together, these different bodies of work demonstrate how Abramović has shaped the trajectory of performance art over the last five decades and changed the public's perception of and interaction with this art form.

Alec Soth

A Pound of Pictures



January 14, 2022 - February 26, 2022

Wu Chi-Tsung

jing-atmospheres



November 4, 2021 - December 18, 2021
Sean Kelly is delighted to present jing-atmospheres, Wu Chi-Tsung’s first solo exhibition at Sean Kelly gallery and in the United States. Wu Chi-Tsung’s innovative body of work encompasses a broad range of media including photography, video, installation, and painting, in which he combines traditional and contemporary forms and methodologies to explore perceptions of the physical and natural worlds. This exhibition features new Cyano-Collages, videos, and an immersive film installation.

Dawoud Bey

In This Here Place



September 10, 2021 - October 23, 2021
Sean Kelly is delighted to present In This Here Place, Dawoud Bey's inaugural exhibition at the gallery. Bey's new body of work focuses on plantations in Louisiana, continuing the artist's ongoing examination of African American history and his efforts to make the Black past resonant in the contemporary moment. Widely heralded for his compelling portraits depicting communities and histories that have largely remained underrepresented, these new large-scale images visualize the landscape and built environment where the relationship between the enslaved and America was formed. The exhibition also marks the debut of Evergreen, a three-channel video, which continues Bey's visual investigation of memory and place within the Black imagination.

Janaina Tschäpe

Balancing into the Deep



June 26, 2021 - August 7, 2021
Sean Kelly Gallery Web Version Janaina Tschäpe Balancing into the Deep JUNE 26 - AUGUST 9, 2021 Artist Salon: Saturday, June 26, 3-6pm Sean Kelly gallery is delighted to present Balancing into the Deep, Janaina Tschäpe’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. This bold new body of work features the artist’s largest canvases to date and exuberant drawings. Richly painted using large scale oil sticks in addition to the water-based pigments she previously employed, it marks a fresh new direction in Tschäpe’s oeuvre. This shift in both material and scale allows the artist to “draw” as one would with a pencil or pastel, in addition to painting with a brush, producing a body of work that represents a fundamental move towards larger and more resolute gestures. These new works are informed by the play of color, shape, and pattern found in the environment; observations processed and incorporated within Tschäpe’s visual language illustrate how the formal aspects of her paintings intersect with the natural world. In discussing her process Tschäpe states, “Whether feeling unsettled, surprised, or in awe, I can explore how that feeling becomes a gesture, a color, and an expression. In nature, you expose yourself to the uncontrollable, the sublime; you do not switch off the sun, stop the wind, or silence the noises.” These new works demonstrate a vibrancy and richness enhanced by the use of the oil sticks creating a dynamic and vigorous presence. The immediacy, conviction and confidence of her vigorous, expansive gestures are demonstrable as Tschäpe engages unrestrained actions utilizing these new vivid and conspicuous materials. She presents a series of works that, despite the anxiety and hardships of the past year, emerge as both forceful and beautiful.

Jose Dávila

The Circularity of Desire



May 7, 2021 - June 19, 2021
Sean Kelly is delighted to announce The Circularity of Desire, Jose Dávila’s third solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition is based upon research Dávila conducted during the pandemic into the iconography of the circle and its presence throughout art history in the 20th and 21st centuries. Remarking on the phenomenon, Davila observes, “I’m interested in the circle as the most platonic of forms, it has been a constant human desire. The circle is the symbolic element of human progress.” Comprised of new paintings, sculptures, and silkscreens on cardboard, themes of circularity and the recurrent influence and circular forms throughout art history unite these three interrelated bodies of work. The canvases on view in the main gallery, constructed of silkscreen print and vinyl paint on raw linen, are the largest single presentation of Dávila’s paintings to date. The works contain texts regarding the use of light as a compositional tool, juxtaposed with circular elements appropriated and recontextualized from paintings by artists including Hans Arp, Willys de Castro, Sonia Delaunay and Frank Stella, amongst others. These paintings employ a unique procedure linking images and texts which otherwise would not intersect, enabling the viewer to generate personal connections between what is seen and what is read. Dávila’s new sculptures are focused on themes that prevail consistently throughout his practice; a visual articulation of the force of gravity through precarious balance, and a desire to draw attention to art historical references that have particular meaning for the artist. Expanding upon these two concerns by incorporating the idea of circularity, Dávila has created new vocabulary with which to address themes of balance, poetic intuition, the symbolic nature of materials and important art historical moments. The material nature of Dávila’s works play a central role in his sculpture and allude to human need and aspiration to construct our environment. The volumes, geometry and lines that define his sculptures suggest an alternate, spatial notion of painting and drawing in space. Natural and manufactured elements such as wood, steel, stone, glass and metal coexist; some have been used for centuries to shape our life—others only since the Industrial Revolution. Dávila incorporates all these elements in their primary form with minimal intervention, resulting in compositions that allow for dialogue between the materials in an unfettered state. In the lower gallery are a series of silkscreens printed on found cardboard incorporating existing logos and markings on the material. Dávila’s circular graphics reference pop art and draw attention to the recycling of material and mass consumption.

Ilse D’Hollander

Tension Field



March 12, 2021 - April 24, 2021
Sean Kelly is delighted to present Tension Field, the gallery's third solo exhibition of Belgian artist Ilse D'Hollander (1968 - 1997). The exhibition highlights five remarkable paintings on cardboard, which are amongst the largest works she ever created. Painted in 1991, the same year D’Hollander graduated from the Hoger Instituut voor Beeldende Kunsten, St. Lucas, Ghent, these works have never before been exhibited in the United States. The exhibition will also feature a selection of rare works on canvas and paper. All of D'Hollander's works reveal an acute understanding of the nuances of composition and color. Her larger body of work is distinguished by its subtle tonalities, depicting variations in scale and surface that give her work its contemplative tranquility, ethereal quality, and brilliant, deceptive simplicity. Indeed, the majority of D'Hollander's paintings on canvas and works on paper are typified by a subdued palette and what might be considered a simplicity of form. By contrast, the early mixed media works on cardboard featured here, which incorporate collage, pencil, oil, acrylic, and ballpoint pen amongst other elements, are defined by a vibrant palette of greens and lively tension of form. In his essential essay, Ilse D'Hollander: early and unknown work, Eric Rinckhout observes that, “Ilse D’Hollander’s paintings are one enormous tension field… Falling somewhere between abstraction and figuration, Ilse D’Hollander’s oeuvre is an accumulation of horizontals, verticals and diagonals, of rotated and tilted surfaces, and of curves and waves. Sometimes these evoke the stillness of a room … and, at others, a mad garden of colours.” These extremely rare works reveal that from the beginning, D’Hollander was a remarkably sophisticated—and resourceful—painter. The genesis of this series arose out of highly practical concerns: shortly after D'Hollander completed her graduate studies in Ghent, she discovered a local paper factory planning to discard a sizable number of large sheets of cardboard. Perhaps feeling less intimidated by this modest material, in these works D’Hollander unleashed a freedom of expression, color and scale that had not previously been evident in her work. Born in Belgium in 1968, Ilse D’Hollander graduated from the Hoger Instituut voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp, in 1988, and the Hoger Instituut voor Beelende Kunsten, St. Lucas, Ghent in 1991. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including The Arts Club, London; FRAC Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand, France; and M Museum, Leuven, Belgium. She has also been featured in group exhibitions at the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Sint-Martens-Latem, Belgium; the Provinciaal Cultuurcentrum Caermersklooster, Ghent, Belgium; and the Center for Contemporary Non-Objective Art, Brussels, Belgium amongst others. Concurrent with Tension Field, Sean Kelly is presenting Sam Moyer Tone in the upstairs main and front gallery spaces. For additional information on Ilse D'Hollander, please visit, skny.com For press inquiries, please email Adair Lentini at Adair@skny.com For all other inquiries, please email Emma Karasz at Emma@skny.com

Sam Moyer

Tone



March 12, 2021 - April 24, 2021
Sean Kelly Gallery is delighted to announce Tone, Sam Moyer's third solo exhibition with the gallery. This new body of work, featuring a series of intimately scaled paintings and sculptures, is focused on connection, contemplation, and exploring the boundaries of the relationship between maker and material. The artist will be present at the gallery on Saturday, March 13 from 12 – 4pm. Created partly in response to her major installation Doors for Doris (currently on view at the entrance to Central Park on the Doris C. Freedman Plaza), Moyer’s new paintings and sculptures represent a reaction to that work’s monumentality and relate directly to the proportions of the body, with a heightened sense of the corporeal. Due to limitations and constraints imposed by the pandemic, these new works, fabricated in Moyer’s studio, focus on a more intimate scale. Reflecting on the title, she observes, "I liked the flexibility of the word tone, it’s light, it’s color, it’s mood. In the early days of the pandemic in the city, there was a tone. It was so quiet…it was the tone that we couldn't break away from, sort of the intangible experience we all shared." Known for a unique artistic vocabulary in which stone and canvas, painting and sculpture are employed to create powerfully expressive works, Moyer considers her new wall-mounted pieces to be emphatically about qualities of painting, surface light, and layers. The new works bring in a plaster component that references the historic surface of fresco while simultaneously representing construction and stucco, the bridge of materials between the industrial and art. Still incorporating stone remnants as an integral part of the composition, the paintings' surfaces are more intimate, rich, complex and painterly. Building layers with hand-applied plaster, Moyer creates richly nuanced surfaces, thickly impastoed in certain areas, smooth and glossy in others. Moyer relates her creative process to "going with the flow," a journey of acceptance and moving forward. Taking inspiration from external stimuli—the materials she uses and the space between herself and the world—Moyer follows an instinctual guiding force. She states, "It's a relaxation into the given path, but that doesn't eliminate the pain of the terrain.” With these new works, Moyer delves deep to create paintings that reflect a very personal process. The sculptures on view in the front gallery, each composed of joined panels held together by tension visually mirror the act of codependency. The works serve as both complement and counterpoint to the paintings in the main gallery. Juxtaposing forms that alternate between the biomorphic and geometric, they are composed of soapstone remnants from the artist's home and aggregate concrete (similar to terrazzo), partnered with hand-poured concrete segments. The exposed concrete joints reveal an assemblage of stones gathered from beaches along the Long Island Sound. Sandblasted to echo found fragments of sea wall near the artist's home, the markings emphasize the passage of time represented through erosion. Sam Moyer's first solo public art installation, Doors for Doris, commissioned by Public Art Fund, is on view at the entrance to Central Park on Doris C. Freedman Plaza through September 12, 2021. Her works are featured in prominent public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; the Morgan Library, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris; The Aïshti Foundation, Beirut; and the Davis Museum, Wellesley College, Massachusetts. Moyer has exhibited her work at The Drawing Center, New York; The Bass Museum, Miami, FL; University of Albany Art Museum, New York; The Public Art Fund, New York; White Flag Projects and The Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; LAND, Los Angeles; and Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm. Moyer has participated in important group exhibitions, including Inherent Structure, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH; Painting/Object, The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY; and Greater New York Between Spaces at PS1 Contemporary Art Center, Queens. In 2018 she was the subject of a large-scale solo presentation at Art Basel Unlimited. For additional information on Sam Moyer please visit, skny.com For press inquiries please email Adair Lentini at Adair@skny.com For all other inquiries, please email Lauren Kelly at Lauren@skny.com

Hugo McCloud

Burdened



January 22, 2021 - February 27, 2021
Sean Kelly Gallery is delighted to announce Burdened, Hugo McCloud’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. The works in the exhibition—created over the last nine months whilst McCloud quarantined at his studio in Mexico—are composed entirely of the ubiquitous, but overlooked material, single use plastic bags. Another distinguishing element of this new body of work is that it marks McCloud’s first foray into figuration. Occupying all three galleries, this exhibition addresses the human and economic cost of labor worldwide, geopolitics, the environmental impact of single use plastic and McCloud’s preoccupation with finding beauty in the everyday. Hugo McCloud is well known for his abstract paintings which utilize materials often omitted from fine art practices – tar paper, scrap metal, solder, and industrial materials – things the artist refers to as “discarded, disregarded and devalued.” Continuing his interest in working with overlooked materials, this new series is meticulously composed using hundreds, even thousands, of small cut-out pieces of single use plastic, collaged to create the compositions. Using plastic bags as the “paint” that comprises his palette, McCloud carefully constructs the images building layers from varied hues of plastic to achieve the desired result. McCloud uses plastic as a metaphor to understand our similarities and differences as human beings; to connect to our environment; and to highlight the negative impact on our shared planet of our carbon footprint. He addresses the economics of labor through the medium of plastic and how it passes through the hands of individuals at every level of society. Through his process of recycling materials in these works, McCloud questions the politics of down-cycling and its impact upon inequality, migration and the resources available to each of us. Originally drawing inspiration from photographs of people he encountered during his travels, when Covid-19 travel restrictions were put in place McCloud was forced to pivot and source images from the internet. McCloud’s paintings in the main gallery focus on workers performing their daily tasks. His subjects, their gaze concealed or averted, are engaged in labor critical to their survival, whether it be collecting refuse, transporting fruit and other goods, or recycling oil. He states that this new body of work is “about the idea of the person that is burdened in life, trying to survive, or make ends meet. I think in some regards, everybody is burdened in their own way in life.” In the front gallery, McCloud depicts images referencing the Mediterranean refugee crisis, migrants adrift at sea, attempting to make the perilous journey to another country to escape the unbearable conditions in their homeland—risking their lives in the hope of a better future for them and their families. In the lower gallery, McCloud exhibits a series of intimate, elegiac images of plants and flowers that he refers to as his “quarantine drawings.” He notes that as the lockdown continued, we were all bombarded with negative news and as our movements were increasingly restricted, it was important for him to “find a moment in each day for something that was in a sense still beautiful and still light.” In June 2021 McCloud’s work will be the subject of a major exhibition at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Within the past year, his work has been acquired by the Brooklyn Museum, New York and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, North Carolina. His work is in the collections of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.; the North Carolina Museum of Art; the Detroit Institute of the Arts; and The Margulies Collection, Miami. McCloud has been the subject of solo exhibitions at The Arts Club, London and Fondazione 107, in Turin, Italy. He has also been featured in group exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York and The Drawing Center, New York, amongst others. For additional information on Hugo McCloud please visit skny.com For press, please contact Adair Lentini via email at Adair@skny.com For all other inquiries, please contact Lauren via email at Lauren@skny.com

Shahzia Sikander

Weeping Willows, Liquid Tongues



November 5, 2020 - December 19, 2020

Joseph Kosuth

'Existential Time'



March 27, 2020 - May 2, 2020

Julian Charrière

Towards No Earthly Pole



January 31, 2020 - March 21, 2020

James Casebere

On the Water's Edge



December 13, 2019 - January 25, 2020

Loló Soldevilla

Constructing Her Universe



September 6, 2019 - October 19, 2019

Abstract By Nature



June 28, 2019 - August 2, 2019

Idris Khan

Blue Rhythms



May 4, 2019 - June 22, 2019

Alec Soth

I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating



March 21, 2019 - April 27, 2019

Kris Martin

?DO GEESE SEE GOD?



March 21, 2019 - April 27, 2019

Sam Moyer

Naked as the Glass



February 21, 2019 - March 16, 2019

Candida Höfer

In Mexico



February 2, 2019 - March 16, 2019

Anthony McCall

Split Second



December 14, 2018 - January 26, 2019

Janaina Tschäpe

HumidGray and ShadowLake



October 26, 2018 - December 8, 2018

Landon Metz

Asymmetrical Symmetry



September 7, 2018 - October 20, 2018

Sergio Camargo



May 5, 2018 - June 16, 2018

Liu Wei

180 Faces



May 5, 2018 - June 16, 2018

Mariko Mori

Invisible Dimension



March 24, 2018 - April 28, 2018