Sean Kelly

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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