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 Trust Me, Be Careful, I Like Your Shoes, Zipora Fried’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. Bringing together four bodies of work; large works on paper, new intimately scaled drawings, ceramic sculptures, and a monumental hanging drawing, this exhibition highlights Fried’s mastery of mark-making and her continued exploration of the transformative, manipulative potential of form, color, and gesture. Simultaneously an overview of her oeuvre and a step into a new, dynamic phase of her career, the exhibition captures a shift in Fried’s practice toward heightened energy and a more liberated, expressive engagement with her materials. There will be an opening reception on Saturday, March 15, from 5-7pm. The artist will be present.

Sean Kelly is delighted to present Subject to change, Sam Moyer’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. Featuring a dynamic body of new work, the exhibition features Moyer’s latest stone paintings, highlighting her distinctive combination of reclaimed stone and painted canvas, as well as oil on panel paintings and handmade paper works produced as artist in residence at Dieu Donné in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. There will be an opening reception on Thursday, May 1 from 6-8pm. The artist will be present.

“A work of art is a kind of proposition presented within the context of art as a comment on art.” – Joseph Kosuth, 1969 Sean Kelly is honored to present Future Memory, a landmark exhibition celebrating the 80th birthday of Joseph Kosuth, one of the most influential and pioneering figures in conceptual art. This unique exhibition, his seventh with the gallery, distinguishes itself as a presentation about the work of Joseph Kosuth, rather than one conceived by him and features works from every decade of his career. Future Memory encapsulates Kosuth’s lifelong engagement with the fundamental questions of art, meaning, and language. There will be an opening reception on Thursday, March 6, from 6-8pm. Beginning with ‘One and Three Mirrors’ (1965) Kosuth established his lifelong commitment to investigating the production and role of language and meaning within art. Meaning is embodied in the relationship between the three parts that make up ‘One and Three Mirrors’, image, object and text. By placing a commonplace object, such as a mirror alongside its image and definition within an art context, two of Kosuth’s abiding influences, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Marcel Duchamp are strikingly clear. Wittgenstein’s contention that meaning is use is an abiding concern throughout Kosuth’s career as he continues to question the function of art; a question first posed by Marcel Duchamp. In the most recent work in the exhibition ’The Question (G.S.)’ (2025) Kosuth continues his personal and philosophical reflection on time. Here he both begins and ends with a question positioned on a clock whose hands mechanically carry on, oblivious to the human lives and narratives beyond their measure. Joseph Kosuth’s practice redefined the role of the artist, challenging traditional notions of art as object, artist as curator, language as art, and elevating the importance of ideas and critical thought. Future Memory highlights the continuity within his oeuvre and the profound impact of his inquiries into perception, memory, and the processes of thought. By employing language as both medium and message, Kosuth’s work continues to defy artistic boundaries, inviting viewers to rethink art’s place in culture and society. Joseph Kosuth has influenced generations of artists, philosophers, and cultural thinkers. His work is featured in major private and public collections worldwide including the Museum of Modern Art, NYC; the Tate Gallery, London; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NYC; the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC; the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Louvre Museum, Paris; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome amongst many others worldwide. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including the Louvre Museum, Paris, France; the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow, Russia; the Kunstmuseum, Thurgau, Wrath, Switzerland; Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, Switzerland; and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, Australia amongst others. He has also been invited to participate in numerous installations, museum exhibitions, and public commissions, including Documenta and the Venice Biennale on multiple occasions. In 2019 Kosuth installed a permanent public installation at the Miami Beach Convention Center, Miami, FL and the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, San Francisco, CA. To honor this milestone anniversary, Sean Kelly, New York, Sprüth Magers, London and Lia Rumma, Naples, are dedicating three unique solo exhibitions to Joseph Kosuth in 2025: Sprüth Magers, ‘The Question’, January 24–March 15, 2025; Sean Kelly, Future Memory, March 7 – April 18; and Lia Rumma, ‘The Question’, April 10 – May. These exhibitions collectively reaffirm Kosuth’s enduring international importance and the ongoing influence of his work worldwide. For press, please contact Adair Lentini at Adair@skny.com For all other inquiries, please contact Cecile Panzieri at Cecile@skny.com

Sean Kelly is delighted to announce Alec Soth’s fifth exhibition with the gallery, Advice for Young Artists which presents a curated selection of images from Soth’s recently completed body of work of the same name. Photographed during visits he made to twenty-five undergraduate art programs across the country from 2022 to 2024, the resulting pictures, interior studies, still-lives, and self-portraits depict Soth engaging with his subject while also reflecting, obliquely, on his life as an artist. There will be a reception on Thursday, March 6, from 6-8 pm. The artist will be present.

Sean Kelly, Los Angeles is delighted to present Fading Origin, Wu Chi-Tsung’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. Known for his experimental approach to photography, Chi-Tsung’s work bridges traditional Chinese art techniques and contemporary media, integrating Eastern and Western aesthetics. The exhibition features new works in Chi-Tsung’s signature Cyano-Collage series and marks innovative new developments in his Wrinkled Texture works. There will be a reception from 5 to 7 pm. The artist will be present. Wu Chi-Tsung was initially drawn to the cyanotype – an early form of photography requiring only basic chemicals and sunlight – in response to the rise of digital photography. For Chi-Tsung, what digital photography loses, and what his cyanotypes capture, is the medium’s openness to chance and its connection to the material world, qualities that make each cyanotype unique. Chi-Tsung’s renowned Cyano-Collage series synthesize his dual interests in Chinese landscape painting and experimental photography. This process begins by washing sheets of Xuan rice paper in photo-sensitive materials, which, when dried, Chi-Tsung creases by hand and exposes to sunlight. The subsequent abstract elements are collaged together on aluminum panels. The resulting images are open to interpretation perhaps evoking sublime mountainous landscapes or tumultuous seascapes. With their stunning formal cohesion and classical grandeur, the Cyano-Collages belie the inventive process of their creation. While Chi-Tsung conjures his panoramas through experimental photography, his use of the cyanotype process retains a connection to both the artist’s hand and the natural world. In this way, Chi-Tsung captures the spiritual depth of Eastern painting traditions dating back over a thousand years, while renewing it with a contemporary aesthetic. In the new Wrinkled Texture Fading Origin series the diptych and quadriptych works begin with a single, full sheet of exposed cyanotype paper. This print then becomes the basis for recursive cyanotypes within the same work, with each image becoming the negative for the adjacent sheet. The result is a mesmerizing shift between blue and white tones, where the original image gradually dissipates into a field of color. This process captures the ephemeral and transient qualities of the natural world whilst also emphasizing the slight, irreproducible differences unique to analog processes. By double-exposing the paper and exploring the faded origin of the image, the Wrinkled Texture Fading Origin series reflect Chi-Tsung’s commitment to advancing the medium while preserving the poetic, tactile qualities of analog photography. Wu Chi-Tsung believes his generation is the last to transition from analog to digital photography, a shift that profoundly informs his practice. Unlike digital images, where copies retain perfect fidelity, analog processes embrace subtle variations that reflect their individuality. In his Cyano-Collage series, breathtaking images emerge from the meticulous accumulation of numerous cyanotype prints, while his Wrinkled Texture works explore cycles of emergence and disappearance through innovative multiple exposures. Together, these works emphasize the conceptual depth, material innovation, and aesthetic sensitivity that define Chi-Tsung’s body of work. Wu Chi-Tsung’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Katonah Museum of Art, New York and TAO Art, Taiwan. His work has been included in international exhibitions at institutions such as the Mori Art Museum, Japan; the National Museum Cardiff, United Kingdom; the Long Beach Museum of Art, Los Angeles; the Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’art Contemporain, Luxembourg; the Museo Del Palacio De Bellas Artes, Mexico; the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing; the Shanghai Art Museum and the Minsheng 21st Century Museum, Shanghai, China; the Seoul Museum of Art, South Korea; the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan; the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, and the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan amongst others. Wu Chi-Tsung was the recipient of the Liu Kuo Sung Ink Art Award, Hong Kong in 2019, the WRO Media Art Biennial award in 2013 and the Taipei Arts Award in 2003. His work is included in renowned collections such as the Xie Zilong Photography Museum, the Post Vidai Collection, M+ Hong Kong, The Vero Beach Museum of Art, The Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Borusan Contemporary Art Collection. For additional information about Wu Chi-Tsung, please visit skny.com For press inquiries, please contact Adair Lentini at Adair@skny.com For all other inquiries, please contact Thomas Kelly at Thomas@seankellyla.com

Sean Kelly, Los Angeles is delighted to announce Keep Your Wonder Moving, the West Coast debut of Chicago-based artist Lindsay Adams and her inaugural solo exhibition with the gallery. Titled after a note written by poet Patricia Spears Jones to philosopher Audre Lorde, the exhibition, presented on the third floor, consists of eleven abstract paintings. Keep Your Wonder Moving emphasizes the artist’s longstanding interest in world-building – Adams’ exploration of abstraction as a conduit for expanding the imagination while embedding deeply personal narratives. The exhibition opens on Saturday, January 18 from 5 - 7 PM. The artist will be present.

Sean Kelly is delighted to announce the exhibition, Dawoud Bey: Stony the Road, the gallery’s third exhibition with the artist. The exhibition will feature the artist’s newest photographic series, Stony the Road, (2023), and his related film, 350,000, (2023) which center on Richmond, Virginia, as the historical terrain where African captives first arrived in the United States and were marched into enslavement. Commissioned and first exhibited by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in 2023, Bey’s Stony the Road series is the third chapter in the artist’s ongoing exploration of the deep connections between African American history, the American landscape and the traumas embedded in those landscapes. Dawoud Bey: Stony the Road marks the series New York debut, opening at Sean Kelly with a reception for the artist on Thursday, January 9, from 6-8pm. Bey’s landscape trilogy began with Night Coming Tenderly, Black, (2017) a series which depicted both real and imagined locations in northeast Ohio tied to the Underground Railroad. Bey’s exploration continued with In This Here Place, (2019) which documented the landscapes of plantations in Louisiana. With Stony the Road, Bey turns his lens to the beginning of the African American experience in America: the arrival of enslaved Africans and their first steps on an unfamiliar and unforgiving land. In an intimate, visual dialogue with the past, Bey’s series captures the historical and emotional texture of the Richmond Slave Trail—a well-trodden path of leaves, branches, and waterways that reveal the lingering imprints of the history of enslavement in America. "The ground is still holding its memory and its shape," describes Bey, emphasizing the spirit and tangible presence of the past. “This is ancestor work. Stepping outside the art context, the project context, this is the work of keeping our ancestors present in the contemporary conversation.” Central to the photographic series, the exhibition also features the artist’s film 350,000, which recalls the estimated 350,000 men, women, and children sold from Richmond’s auction blocks between 1830 and 1860. Projected on two large, back-to-back screens, the film takes the viewer on a journey along the Richmond Slave Trail, imagining that landscape as if through the eyes of the 350,000 enslaved Africans. Shot in black-and-white by cinematographer Bron Moyi, the film's visual intensity is amplified by a soundtrack featuring staccato breaths and body percussion, created in collaboration with choreographer and Virginia Commonwealth University Professor E. Gaynell Sherrod. The subtle, rhythmic soundscape, echoes the weight of the journey, resulting in a psychologically poignant sonic landscape that resonates with the sense of history and memory. Together, Bey’s film and photographic works offer a reflection into the psychic and physical landscapes of enslavement in America, and the enduring legacies these sites hold within the American consciousness and social fabric. Through this work, Bey contributes essential Black perspectives and experiences into contemporary discourse about landscape. Bey’s ability to re-envision key historical sites through photography and film offers viewers space for reflection and remembrance. Groundbreaking artist and MacArthur Fellow Dawoud Bey examines the Black past and present. His photographs and film installations have been exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the United States and Europe. Bey’s work has been the subject of numerous solo museum exhibitions, including Dawoud Bey: Street Portraits (2024-2025) at the Denver Art Museum, Dawoud Bey: An American Project organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art (2020-2022), and Elegy at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (2023-2024) and New Orleans Museum of Art (2026). He has been the subject of several monographs, including Elegy (Aperture/VMFA, 2023), which chronicles Bey's history projects and landscape-based work. Bey is the recipient of numerous awards including five honorary doctorates, and in 2024, the artist was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His forthcoming solo exhibition, Dawoud Bey: Street Portraits, opens at the Denver Art Museum in November 2024. Bey lives and works in Chicago and New York. He is currently a Critic at Yale University, where he received his Masters in Fine Arts, and is Professor Emeritus at Columbia College, Chicago.

Sean Kelly, New York is delighted to present Bruma, Ana González’s first solo exhibition in New York. The paintings and prints on fabric in Bruma depict the flora and fauna of González’s native Colombia and represent the ecosystems under threat from industries seeking to exploit them for their natural resources. González’s practice opposes the disappearance of these habitats, not only warning us of what will be lost in their destruction but proposing new ways to relate to the natural world. Bruma engages with the vast ecological and human history of these landscapes encouraging the viewer to see our environment in a new way. There will be an opening from 6 to 8 pm. The artist will be present. The works on view in Bruma were developed in response to González’s travels through the cloud forests of Colombia, an isolated region in the Andes Mountains which is both incredibly biodiverse – only an estimated ten percent of its species have been cataloged – and endangered by deforestation and climate change. In González’s paintings, the wax palms and other plants native to the Andes Mountains emerge from washes of white paint, referencing the mist that gives the forests and the exhibition their name. These landscapes reappear in the artist’s Devastations series, textiles onto which the artist prints photographs of Colombia’s vulnerable ecosystems. The monumental five-part work, QUIMBAYA offers a panoramic view of the cloud forest, capturing in monochromatic green the verdant abundance of the forest at an immersive scale. Here, as in all her Devastations works, González has partially unraveled the work, disrupting the coherence of the image and physically representing the ravaging of these sites. In her work González reflects upon the writings of 18th century German geographer and naturalist, Alexander von Humboldt, who revolutionized the way we understand nature by presenting it as an interconnected web of life. Humboldt observed, “If one thread is pulled, the whole tapestry may unravel,” a metaphor that resonates powerfully with González’s work. Her unraveled Devastation series poignantly embody this concept, suggesting that the destruction of even the smallest part of an ecosystem can threaten the stability of the whole. Devastations presents two possible futures for the ecosystems they depict: preservation and destruction. González asks viewers to see both possibilities at once – that while the abundance of life contained within these images is in immediate danger of being lost, there remains the potential for conservation if humanity reprioritizes its relationship with nature. As much as González’s practice is concerned with the future, it is equally attentive to history. This is most apparent in González’s decision to title the works in Bruma in the language of the Muisca, the indigenous civilization that inhabited the Colombian Andes from 600–1600 CE. Referencing a pre-colonial past, the titles invoke the spiritual importance that the Muisca placed on the environment, implicitly contrasting them with our contemporary culture of accumulation and consumption. The large-scale work ANGAPACCHA (“Powerful Waterfall,” in the language of the Muisca) spills off the wall and into the gallery space. According to Muisca specialist, anthropologist and ethnobotanist Wade Davis, “Waterfalls were seen as places of origin, liminal places, doorways to the divine.” ANGAPACCHA performs a similar function within the exhibition, inviting viewers to engage with the natural world as a sacred space. González’s works in Bruma are at once a return to the past and a reimagining of the future, reactivating ancient ways of interacting with the environment at a moment when they are urgently needed. Ana González is a graduate in architecture from Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. She pursued advanced studies in Art and Gender at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, and completed a Master’s in Arts and Media, focusing on Photography, Printing, and Publishing, at both the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts and the École Supérieure de Commerce de Paris in France. Her work is part of significant private and public collections, including the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection, the Havremagasinet Länskonsthall Museum in Sweden, the National Museum of Colombia, the Bogotá Museum of Modern Art (MAMBO), the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA, the JP Morgan Chase Art Collection, NY, the Bancolombia Art Collection and the Museo de la Universidad de Antioquia, Medellín, Colombia. González has engaged extensively with Colombian Indigenous communities, implementing social and humanitarian projects with the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta communities, the Nukak people of Guaviare, and Misak women in Cauca. She is currently collaborating with the Amazon Conservation

Sean Kelly is pleased to present Europa / America, Candida Höfer’s first solo exhibition at the Los Angeles gallery, curated by renowned architects Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee of the Los Angeles-based firm Johnston Marklee. Inspired by German-Prussian architect Erich Mendelsohn’s 1929 publication, Russland Europa Amerika: Ein architektonischer Querschnitt (An Architectural Cross Section), Johnston and Lee have selected fourteen photographs taken by Höfer between 1993 and 2015. Through Höfer’s carefully composed photographs of interior spaces primarily intended for entertainment, study, and worship, Europa / America explores sites that convey social significance in North American and European society. This novel grouping reveals a compelling impulse throughout Höfer’s oeuvre: to capture how architecture illuminates the cultural histories of a particular time and place. There will be an opening reception on Saturday, November 16, from 5 to 7 PM. The artist will be present.

Sean Kelly is delighted to announce Artificialis, Laurent Grasso’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery. Grasso’s oeuvre blurs the line between temporalities, combining historical references and futuristic anticipations to create new, ambiguous, realities. The exhibition features the US premiere of Grasso’s films, ARTIFICIALIS and Orchid Island, along with two groups of new paintings related to each film. One of the series draws inspiration from the prominent 19th century American artist Frederic Edwin Church’s evocative landscape paintings of the Hudson River Valley. The exhibition confronts the rapid changes and existential challenges of our world where human cultural impact on nature is now indelible; it places viewers in a realm where distinguishing between the real and the artificial is questioned. There will be an opening reception on Thursday, October 24, 6-8pm. The artist will be present. The film ARTIFICIALIS originated from an invitation from the Musée d’Orsay, in Paris, France, asking Grasso to produce a large-scale work in response to the museum’s exhibition centered around Darwin’s legacy and the perception of nature. Both exhibitions were on view at the museum simultaneously in 2021, creating a dialogue between the historical and contemporary perspectives on exploration and our understanding of the natural world. Grasso’s film examines how 21st-century explorers document the world using modern tools, merging real and virtual worlds to envision a post-Anthropocene future. Produced with advanced vision instruments like LIDAR scanners and hyperspectral cameras, ARTIFICIALIS generates images that blur reality, nature, and artifice. The film challenges the possibility of exploration in a hyperconnected world, mapped by satellites and compressed in space and time, questioning traditional notions of exoticism. Described by Grasso as a “film-machine,” it evolves like a code, drawing information from the world as a database to spotlight areas where nature has mutated due to human impact. Musician Warren Ellis composed the soundtrack while watching the film in real-time, adding a dynamic layer to the film, while graphic creations by M/M lend a futuristic dimension. Part of Grasso’s process involves creating films that serve as the basis for other art forms, such as paintings and sculptures, resulting in a cohesive yet multifaceted oeuvre. New works from his Future Herbarium series, paintings of double-headed flowers, draw upon imagery from ARTIFICIALIS which are reproduced in oil and palladium leaf on wood. The mutations are transformations from a future that exists only in the artist’s imagination, creating “a sense of strangeness where beauty and anxiety intertwine,” states Grasso. Orchid Island, 2023, examines the idealization of nature in art history juxtaposed with contemporary climate issues. Set against Taiwan’s seemingly pristine landscapes, the film introduces a mysterious, levitating black rectangle, which casts its shadow on the area over which it flies. The film questions Western representations of exotic, imaginary settings, oscillating between archive footage and futuristic projections. With this work Grasso seeks to “activate an altered state of consciousness similar to that of hypnosis.” The music, composed by Nicolas Godin, blends an ethereal melody with the subtle pulse of a synthesizer, casting a surreal and otherworldly tone over the film. The accompanying paintings, part of Grasso’s series Studies into the Past, incorporate natural or supernatural phenomena – most often borrowed from his own films – into apparently historical canvases, creating an uncanny feeling of déjà-vu. Inspired by one of the most widely recognized painters of the Hudson River school, Frederic Edwin Church, Grasso’s paintings closely recall his idyllic nineteenth-century landscape paintings. Church was significantly influenced by the Prussian explorer and scientist Alexander von Humboldt, whose seminal work Cosmos articulated the interconnectedness of science, the natural world, and spiritual concerns. Humboldt’s dedication to landscape painting and his belief in the artist’s role in scientifically portraying nature, deeply impacted Church. This historical context aligns with Grasso’s interest in the sciences and his artistic exploration. By introducing a discordant element such as a large black rectangle into these idyllic landscapes, Grasso disrupts the traditional perception of nature. Without delivering a direct message, he invites the viewer to engage in a space for projection and reflection on our current fears. Grasso’s new Studies into the Past paintings also continue his long-established exploration of time travel and the viewer’s perception of reality. Laurent Grasso is the recipient of the Meru Art*Science Award in Bergamo, Italy, the Chevalier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and the Marcel Duchamp Prize. Grasso’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at international institutions, including the Abbaye of Jumièges, in France, Tao Art in Taiwan, the Collège des Bernardins and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Centre Pompidou x West Bund Museum in Shanghai, the Jeonnam Museum of Art in Gwangyang, South Korea, the Palais Fesch, Musée des Beaux-Arts in Ajaccio, France, the Hermès Foundation in Tokyo, the Kunsthaus Baselland in Switzerland, the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Montréal, the Jeu de Paume and Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Bass Museum of Art in Miami, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C. amongst others. He has also participated in several international biennials, such as the 21st Sydney Biennale, Australia; EVA International, Ireland; the Kochi Biennale, India; the Gwangju and Busan Biennales, South Korea; Manifesta 8 Cartagena/Murcia, Spain; the Sharjah Biennial, UAE; and the Moscow Biennale, Russia. Laurent Grasso has recently created several permanent installations in public spaces including Solar Wind on the Paris ring road, and a group of sculptures entitled Roots of the Future, which was installed for the 2024 Paris Olympic Village. Grasso was also commissioned to create a permanent site-specific installation for the ceiling of the new train station in Châtillon-Montrouge, as part of the Grand Paris project.

Sean Kelly is delighted to present Staring at the Moon, Brian Rochefort’s first exhibition at Sean Kelly, Los Angeles. Rochefort will present new sculptures in an installation that will reconfigure the architecture of the gallery. Rochefort’s mixed-media sculptures incorporate a variety of different textures, surfaces and colors to create rich, otherworldly forms. Referencing his travels to some of the most remote parts of the planet, such as the Amazon Rainforest, the Galápagos Islands, and the Ngorongoro Crater, in Tanzania, Rochefort internalizes and translates his experiences in these secluded, ancient landscapes into potent sculptural forms. There will be an opening reception on Saturday, September 14, from 5pm to 7pm. The artist will be present.

Sean Kelly is delighted to announce a sky filled with clouds and the smell of blood oranges, Janaina Tschäpe’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. This exhibition marks an exciting evolution in Tschäpe’s artistic journey, emphasizing a profound personal exploration, with a focus on the scale and fluidity of mark-making that characterize the artist’s vigorous abstractions. Coinciding with the exhibition, a major new monograph on Janaina Tschäpe’s work, featuring an erudite and informative essay by distinguished art historian Joachim Pissarro, is being published by Hatje Cantz and Sean Kelly. There will be an opening reception on Friday, September 6, 6-8pm. The artist will be present. Tschäpe’s latest body of work underscores the artist’s fascination with the emotional and poetic potential of art. In this exhibition, she explores the interplay between scale and intimacy, featuring works in oil and oil stick on canvas and works on paper in various scales, including multi-paneled paintings. In the diptych, Lion colored hills, 2024 and triptych, Walking through fields (Passeando no tempo), 2024, each painting functions both independently and as part of a unified narrative. Tschäpe’s artistic expression intertwines the sublime vastness of German landscapes with the vibrant essence of Brazilian culture, blending philosophical tenets from polymath Friedrich Schiller, the inspiring poetry of Octavio Paz, and the concept of observing and celebrating nature advocated by geographer Alexander Von Humbolt. Tschäpe’s works become sites of intense emotional and intellectual inquiry—the space between passion and reason—where the act of painting is both a meditation on and a resistance to its constraints. The paintings in this exhibition compose an environment in which each work converses with the next, fostering a continuous and evolving narrative. They showcase Tschäpe’s mastery harnessing the fluid dynamics of painting to depict a landscape that is both internal and external, mirroring the complexities of human emotion and perception. As Joachim Pissarro states in his essay, “Tschäpe’s canvases serve as arenas wherein the visible intermingles with the visceral, inviting us to traverse conceptual depths through layers of paint and memory that subtly insinuate rather than explicitly reveal.” Her paintings transform nature’s experiences into abstract movements, where air and light become extensions of her gestures. Each piece, rooted in layered memories of landscape, uncovers new connections and energies across the canvas. a sky filled with clouds and the smell of blood oranges highlights the different types of mark-making and media Tschäpe has incorporated throughout her work, spanning bold and dynamic brushwork to fine, drawing-like strokes and expansive, gestural applications of oil paint and oil stick. The exhibition also features her delicate watercolors and pastel works, creating a dialogue between different media and enhancing the interplay amongst her works. Inspired by the evocative, dreamlike qualities of August Strindberg’s landscapes, Tschäpe titled some of the new works with names influenced by the Swedish playwright and painter, such as flowers by the shore (after Strindberg), 2024. Strindberg’s ability to evoke the ethereal and the mystical in his depictions of the natural world resonates deeply with Tschäpe’s vision. Blending elements of lyrical abstraction with themes drawn from the natural world, Tschäpe’s use of color and form creates a visual language that is both deeply personal and universally resonant. Janaina Tschäpe’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Den Frie Center of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, Denmark; the Sarasota Art Museum, Florida; the Musée L’Orangerie, Paris, France; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson, AZ; Kasama Nichido Museum of Art, Kasama, Japan; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland, and the Contemporary Museum of Art, St. Louis, MO. She has been featured in numerous group exhibitions at venues including NCA Taipei, Taiwan; Whitechapel Gallery, London; TBA21-Augarten, Austria; CCBB, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Centre D’Art Contemporain de Normandie, France; 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan; Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C.; Ronnebaeksholm, Denmark; Museum of Fine Arts Boston, MA; and Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, Taiwan. Her work is found in important public collections including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Harvard Art Museum, MA; Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, Austria; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, amongst others. Published in conjunction with the exhibition, a major new monograph, Janaina Tschäpe, extensively documents Tschäpe’s work over the past seven years, alongside installation images of her museum and gallery exhibitions worldwide. This publication documents a prolific period of creativity and boundary-pushing use of media. For additional information on Janaina Tschäpe, please visit skny.com For press inquiries, please email Adair Lentini at Adair@skny.com For all other inquiries, please email Cecile Panzieri at Cecile@skny.com Image caption: Janaina Tschäpe, Walking through fields (Passeando no tempo), 2023, Oil and oil stick on linen, overall: 92 x 222 x 1 1/2 inches Each panel: 92 x 70 x 1 1/2 inches © Janaina Tschäpe Courtesy: the artist and Sean Kelly, New York/Los Angeles

Sean Kelly is delighted to announce Seeds of Time, James Casebere’s ninth solo exhibition with the gallery. Continuing Casebere’s ever-evolving exploration of form at the intersection of architecture, sculpture, and photography, this new body of work celebrates three fundamental principles: biomorphic design, social responsibility, and environmental sustainability. Through a meticulous process of artistic reinterpretation, Casebere transforms architectural designs into striking two-dimensional images. There will be an opening reception on Wednesday, June 26, 5-7 pm. The artist will be present. The exhibition delves into contemporary architectural trends, using water as a central theme to evoke an awareness of climate change. Each structure in Seeds of Time is surrounded by water, often a symbol in Casebere’s work for the unconscious, the passage of time, and memory. These new works internalize the urgency and emotional context of the climate crisis and celebrate human ingenuity. Drawing inspiration from Indian-born Pritzker Prize-winning architect Balkrishna Doshi (1927-2023), the photographs Balconies and Stairs, are based on Doshi’s vibrant color drawings of his low-cost housing development, The Aranya, in Indore, India. Unlike many public or low-income housing projects in India, which were often bleak, Doshi’s designs were lively and intended for modification by their inhabitants. Casebere intensified the colors in his works to echo the transformations made by residents. Both Cavern with Skylights images reference Amdavad ni Gufa, an underground art gallery designed by Doshi. The concept was to create an open building that blurs the boundaries between formal and informal spaces while increasing interaction with nature. These images emphasize the natural geological forms to highlight the biomorphic qualities of the architecture. Casebere further explores biomorphic forms in Patio with Blue Sky and School to create works that focus on the integration of natural and synthetic elements, in an interpretation of Burkinabé-German architect Francis Kéré’s (b.1965) “Startup Lions Campus” in Kenya. Greenhouse, extends the bio-morphic design language by merging sculptural forms with natural foliage, creating a living sculpture set within a pond. Beach Huts (Day) and Beach Huts (Night), draw on Kéré’s innovative complex in Burkina Faso. These photographs depict colorful huts that explore themes of community and the needs of marginalized populations, a testament to the dynamic relationship between individual creativity and social group dynamics. Likewise, Chulah Cookstove is inspired by Pakistani architect Yasmeen Lari’s (b.1941) innovative design, which highlights the need for elevated outdoor stoves designed to mitigate flooding and improve health in impoverished areas. The exhibition showcases James Casebere’s unique ability to intertwine artistic vision with pressing contemporary issues. In Seeds of Time, Casebere reflects on the potential of architecture to foster sustainable and socially responsible solutions. His use of water, both as a symbol and a material, underscores the delicate balance between human innovation and environmental stewardship. This body of work not only celebrates architectural ingenuity but also challenges us to consider our role in shaping a sustainable future. James Casebere was the winner of the American Academy in Rome Abigail Cohen Rome Prize Fellowship for 2019-20 and has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, including three from the National Endowment for the Arts, three from the New York Foundation for the Arts and one from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. His work is permanent collections of institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England, among many others. In 2016, Casebere was a New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame Honoree and the subject of important survey exhibitions: Fugitive at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, curated by Okwui Enwezor; Immersion at Espace Images Vevey in Switzerland; and After Scale Model: Dwelling in the Work of James Casebere, at the BOZAR/Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels, Belgium. James Casebere lives and works in New York. Shou Sugi Ban A Series of Sculptural Work by James Casebere will open at ‘T’ Space in Rhinebeck, NY, during Upstate Art Weekend (July 20 – 21). The exhibition will present a new series of large-scale wooden geometric sculptures that engage notions of synthetic nature: bio-design—or self-generating forms that suggest organic or inorganic growth. The exhibition will be on view until October 13, 2024. For press, please contact Adair Lentini at Adair@skny.com For all other inquiries, please contact Cecile Panzieri at Cecile@skny.com

Sean Kelly is delighted to announce The Color of Shadows, the fifth solo exhibition of Ilse D’Hollander with the gallery. Spanning the latter half of her career, the exhibition includes a selection of oil paintings from the artist’s estate, including To Goethe, 1991, one of only three known serial bodies of work made by the artist. This exquisite curation of intimate paintings emphasizes the harmonious and transformative essence 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 Wednesday, June 26, from 5-7pm. Drawing inspiration from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s “Theory of Colours,” 1810, D’Hollander’s suite of four oil paintings titled To Goethe anchors the exhibition. In his research, Goethe theorized the complexity of color and how human perception and psychological experience influence its interpretation. In her series, D’Hollander’s color associations exude a poetic and sensitive quality that invites the viewer to be an active participant by completing the work with their own interpretations. “The viewer who turns [their] gaze on my paintings remains even more fundamental,” stated D’Hollander. It is with a skillful hand and delicate approach that D’Hollander’s masterful interplay of hues evokes profound connections far beyond the spectrum of color. As a painter, D’Hollander’s intuition led her to arrive at a practice that combined total abstraction with discernable elements of the natural world. Found within her paintings are the flourishing landscapes of the Flemish countryside rendered with bursts of thick pigments, resulting in a geometric precision that documents her quaint studio life. D’Hollander’s canvases offer an immersive experience, where each layer of brushstroke reveals nuanced shifts in hue and delicate lines of color, illustrating a deep engagement with the dialogue between representation and abstraction. Her refined palette and minimalist compositions underscore a tangible and sensual exploration of the medium, imbuing each piece with a profound humanistic touch. In her sole written reflection, D’Hollander observed, “A painting comes into being when ideas and the act of painting coincide. When referring to ideas, it implies that as a painter, I am not facing my canvas as a neutral being but as an acting being who is investing into the act of painting.” This philosophical approach enabled D’Hollander to traverse seamlessly between subtle representation and pure abstraction, harmonizing her internal and external artistic realms. Her work invites deep contemplation, serving as a remarkable testament to the fundamental and generative nature of painting. D’Hollander’s legacy continues to captivate and inspire, offering a poignant exploration of the interplay between form, color, and emotion. 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. For additional information on Ilse D’Hollander, 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

Sean Kelly is delighted to present It Never Entered My Mind, a group exhibition featuring fifteen artists working in painting and sculpture, curated by Los Angeles-based collector and producer Michael Sherman. There will be an opening reception on Saturday, May 18, from 5-8 pm. Titled after Miles Davis’ rendition of the iconic showtune “It Never Entered My Mind,” each artist in the exhibition takes up the perennial concerns of art making — including place, personal and cultural history, and the body — in their own, distinctive manner, not unlike a great jazz ensemble. Eschewing an overarching theme, It Never Entered My Mind presents the singular talents and conceptual concerns of each artist, many of whom are exhibiting in Los Angeles for the first time. The exhibition brings together artists living and working in disparate parts of the world in a variety of styles and media. In addition to the works on view, It Never Entered My Mind features music direction by Los Angeles-based musician and record producer MELO-X, inspired by each artist’s studio practice.

Sean Kelly is delighted to announce As For Now, Hugo McCloud’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery. Marking a shift in his methodology, McCloud revisits earlier bodies of work armed with a deeper understanding of the materials he employs and how they interact, as well as new insights informed by recent life experiences. He reinterrogates these materials and subject matters, exploring how past events have transformed both him and his artistic process. Occupying the front and main galleries, the exhibition presents new works from his signature plastic and tar stamped painting series, highlighting his fluid movement between figuration and abstraction. There will be an opening reception on Friday, May 10, 6-8 pm. The artist will be present. At its core, the exhibition represents a departure from previous presentations which drew inspiration from external experiences and shifts towards a more inward-looking examination of self, process, and materiality. McCloud’s abstract stamped paintings combine unconventional industrial materials such as aluminum sheeting, silver aluminum butane paint, and black liquid tar on tar paper with traditional pigments and woodblock printing techniques. Transitioning from the elaborate ornamentation of previous works in this series, McCloud has simplified the design to a single, minimal repeating shape. Streamlining this process has allowed for a repetitive, though more nuanced, intuitive approach. This change reflects a newfound confidence in his artistic vision, prompting him to question the necessity of each element within the composition. McCloud also embraces a more vibrant palette inspired by his time in Mexico. As McCloud revisits his Burdened Man series, he finds himself more personally connected to the imagery, seeing his reflection in carrying the burden of life’s experiences within the works. Despite the meticulous and exacting creative process – using hundreds, even thousands, of small cut-out pieces of single use plastic to “paint” the compositions – these new figurative works incorporate abstract elements, embracing a sense of freedom in his approach to representational imagery. McCloud's flower series, on view in the front gallery, were initially begun as a daily meditative practice during the pandemic to document the passage of time. The works are constructed of single-use plastic with oil paint to accentuate the blossoms. There are also watercolors on the wax paper McCloud uses in the fabrication of his plastic paintings. As with all of McCloud’s oeuvre, material regeneration is a prevalent connection within his work. His ability to elevate industrial elements into fine art materials is consistent throughout the exhibition, serving as a linear narrative that underscores his dedication to pushing boundaries and exploring the breadth of his creativity. Hugo McCloud lives and works in Los Angeles. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, The Arts Club, London, and Fondazione 107, in Turin, Italy. He has also been featured in group exhibitions at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Virginia, the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, and The Drawing Center, New York. 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, The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, the Brooklyn Museum, the Mott Warsh Collection, and The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection. For additional information on Hugo McCloud, please visit skny.com For press, please contact Adair Lentini at Adair@skny.com For all other inquiries, please contact Lauren Kelly at Lauren@skny.com

Sean Kelly is pleased to announce the opening of Turn, Callum Innes’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles in over thirty years. The exhibition features a group of his latest Tondo works, alongside his iconic Exposed Paintings, Split Paintings, and Shellac Paintings. There will be an opening reception on Saturday, March 16, from 5-7 pm. The artist will be present. At 6pm, Callum Innes will be in conversation with writer and curator, Hunter Drohojowska-Philip. The talk will be followed by a signing of Innes’ newest publication produced by Sean Kelly Gallery. From the onset of his career, Innes has created lushly painted and subtly nuanced canvases in a rectilinear format. In 2022, the artist added a striking new format to his repertoire, the Tondo. The catalyst for this transformative shift occurred when Innes was asked to paint the end of a whisky cask for a charity event. With these works, the artist mastered an entirely new set of technical and aesthetic challenges, confronting a format rich with art historical resonances. While his working methodology remains consistent—the repeated addition and removal of pigment in the Exposed Paintings and Split Paintings and the interaction of two different substances in the Shellac Paintings— the Tondos have necessitated a number of important evolutions in the way that Innes makes the work, both psychologically and formally. The materiality of the plywood panels accelerates Innes’s practice, providing a quick, firm surface. He also uses a smaller, rounded brush which introduces a completely different physicality, offering more fluidity and enabling a more direct interaction with the work. In contrast, his previous works on canvas offer a slower, softer surface, inviting a more meditative way of working. The exhibition also includes rectangular Exposed and Split Paintings. The rectangle, with its rational four points and sides, symbolizes elements, seasons, and reason itself, while the oval, with its earthier, sensuous nature, signifies unity and balance. This exhibition makes evident the expansion of Innes’ language and his mastery of technique, materiality, and emotional resonance throughout his acclaimed body of work. Callum Innes’s new publication, extensively illustrated with images from the Tondos series and installation views of key exhibitions, explores how the artist has challenged traditional perceptions of shape and form to create dynamic and immersive visual experiences. A pivotal essay by art historian Éric de Chassey, traces Innes’ encounter with the tondo and its progenitors in the history of art, firmly cementing his breakthrough in the pantheon of important works rendered in this distinctive style. Callum Innes lives and works in Edinburgh, Scotland and Oslo, Norway. In 1992, Innes had major exhibitions, at the ICA, London, and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. In 1995, he was short-listed for the Turner Prize and was awarded the Nat West Prize in 1998 and the Jerwood Prize for Painting in 2002. His critically acclaimed museum exhibition, From Memory, traveled throughout Europe and Australia from 2006-2008. In 2016, he was the subject of a major retrospective survey exhibition and accompanying monograph, I’ll Close My Eyes, at the De Pont Museum in Tilburg, Netherlands. In 2018, his first major solo exhibition in France, In Position, took place at Château la Coste in Provence, with an accompanying publication. Innes will have an exhibition at Kode – Lysverket Museum, Bergen, Norway in 2024. His work is included in major public collections worldwide including: the Tate Gallery, London; the Kunsthalle, Bern, Switzerland; the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Centre George Pompidou, Paris; The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, Fort Worth; The Dallas Museum of Art; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; the Hilti Art Foundation, Vaduz, Lichtenstein; and Deutsche Bank, London, and Sydney. For media inquiries, please contact Adair Lentini at Adair@skny.com For all other inquiries, please contact Thomas Kelly at Thomas@seankellyla.com or Cecile Panzieri at Cecile@skny.com Image caption: Callum Innes, Exposed Painting Sapphire Blue, 2022, oil on Birch Ply, 70 7/8 x 68 7/8 inches © Callum Innes Courtesy: Sean Kelly, New York/Los Angeles

Sean Kelly is pleased to present After…, Idris Khan’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. There will be an opening reception on Thursday, March 14, 6-8 pm. The artist will be present. This presentation coincides with his first major museum exhibition in the US at the Milwaukee Art Museum, opening to the public on April 5. After… showcases several exciting developments in Khan’s practice. The exhibition introduces a process whereby the artist deconstructs art historical masterpieces to rich pallets of color referencing the volume and importance of the original painting’s power. Khan’s newest explorations focus on color and music, and their abilities to contain a world of memories, associations, and emotions which resonate on a universal level. Utilizing technology as complex as it is sensitive and poetic, Khan scans photographic reproductions of these artworks into a sound software that reveals their tone and color density. He then creates separate oil and water-based ink works with the dimensions of each color corresponding to the percentage in which it appears in the original painting. Each artwork is comprised of a grid-like structure of individually framed elements denoting the original work’s specific color palette. Khan also assigns musical notations to each hue and transcribes them to create a score for each painting. The panels are repeatedly stamped, in Khan’s signature style, with each works distinctive notation and overlaid with collaged sheet music, carefully selected for its shape and pattern. With this new body of work, Khan moves from representing a collapse in time to making evident the soundscape of each masterpiece. After… takes as its source iconic paintings so familiar that they now form part of the collective unconscious, including Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, Johannes Vermeer's The Milkmaid, and his Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window. Idris Khan’s oeuvre draws on diverse cultural sources–literature, history, art, and music–to shape a distinctive narrative featuring densely layered images that metaphysically condense time into single moments. After… marks an important evolution in Idris Khan’s artistic practice and pays homage to the twentieth anniversary of Every…, Khan’s MFA exhibition from the Royal College of Art in London. It signifies a compelling shift in Khan's artistic paradigm, inviting viewers to take a nuanced and multi-level approach to how they perceive a work of art. The exhibition includes a selection of new oil and water-based ink works and gesso on aluminum panel paintings, for which Khan is known, incorporating into the work a striking new palette. Idris Khan’s first US museum solo exhibition, Repeat After Me, opens at the Milwaukee Art Museum on April 5, 2024. Featuring major works covering every facet of Khan’s career, the exhibition includes new works that respond directly to paintings in the museum’s permanent collection. The exhibition will be on view through August 11, 2024. Idris Khan lives and works in London, United Kingdom. His work has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at international institutions, including Chateau la Coste, France; The New Art Gallery Walsall, Walsall, UK; the Whitworth Gallery, the University of Manchester, UK; Gothenburg Konsthall, Sweden; the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto, Canada; Kunsthaus Murz, Mürzzuschlag, Austria, and K20, Dusseldorf, Germany. Khan’s design for Abu Dhabi’s memorial park, Wahat Al Karama, was awarded the 2017 American Architecture Prize, and he was appointed an OBE for services to Art in the 2017 Queen’s Birthday Honors List. His work is in the permanent collections of many institutions worldwide, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Albright-Knox Museum, New York; The British Museum, London; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Norton Museum of Art, Palm Beach, FL; the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the de Young Museum, San Francisco; and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France. For additional information on Idris Khan, please visit skny.com For press, please contact Adair Lentini at Adair@skny.com For all other inquiries, please contact Janine Cirincione at Janine@skny.com

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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 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 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