FEATURES
18 An Ecological Sculptor
Celine Chouven is an ecologically conscious sculptor who finds inspiration in everyday materials.
26 Living Sculptures
A master wood sculptor, Stefanie Rocknak switched her focus after a year abroad in Italy.
38 Rhythmical Sculpting
Eva Hild uses her understanding of three-dimensional work and its impact to create sculptors with rhythm.
52 Botanical Printing
Mirta Arbini designs prints inspired by nature and looking at the world through the eyes of a five year old.
In Each Issue
5 small talk
6 news
14 exhibits
62 artist & ad index
©2023 by Vika Visual Arts Association
Cover photo courtesy of Stefanie Rocknak. Photo courtesy of Eva Hild.After a brief hiatus, I am happy to say that ArtDiction is back in production! In this first issue of 2023, we interviewed four artists in the worlds of sculpting, ceramics, and printmaking.
One of my favorite parts of interviewing artists is discovering what I can learn from each of them. This go ‘round, I noticed these women all started on a certain path, but made adjustments as they discovered what was most true to them.
Celine Chouven first began molding
with clay, but later discovered the creative and practical benefits of molding with paper. Sculptor Stefanie Rocknak first studied 2-D art but later realized that art in 3-D was what she wanted to create. Eva Hild pursued a career in physiotherapy before pursing ceramic art fulltime. And Mirta Arbini worked as a historian before she made a career in printmaking.
As a woman in business and an arts advocate, I find these shifts, whether subtle or large, inspiring. My takeaway is this: Pivot. Reset. Rest when necessary. But always keep moving forward.
Devika Strother, Editor in Chief devika@artdictionmagazinecom
Noteworthy Art from Frieze Los Angeles 2023
Frieze Los Angeles was held February 16–19, 202. There was plenty of great art to see. Here are a few of the standout artworks in the fair this year.
Jennifer BartlettThe Comedian as the Letter C for
a freer, looser hand, the artwork depicts a human skeleton standing in an abstracted domestic setting engulfed in flames, surrounded by sequences of playing cards, dominoes, wooden chests, game boards, and squares of tartan plaid. Never before displayed in California, where Bartlett was born, this painting has doomy local resonance in a time when
Today, Bartlett occupies a funny place in the art conversation. She’s not a household name, but she’s not exactly under-recognized. Her market has been evolving steadily. The January opening of her posthumous show of drawings at Boesky’s New York gallery was jam-packed with her artist and critic fans. But has she gotten her due? One almost hopes that someone from the tech community will see her paintings at the fair, recognize a kindred spirit in the pursuit of that quasi-mystical intersection of data and everyday life, buy some work, tell their friends, and make her into a real phenomenon.
Lee Bae
Issu du feu (1998)
Max Gordon (1990)Those familiar with the artistically and intellectually potent work of Jennifer Bartlett, the painter who died last year at age 81, may be surprised by her work at the fair. Whereas she is best known for her rigorously structured, mathematics-derived canvases—the kind of work that led Roberta Smith, her great critical champion, to call her a “conceptual painter on vast scale”—the central painting on view at Boesky’s booth is explosive, frightening, almost cinematic. Stemming from a shift in which Bartlett transitioned away from her acclaimed aluminum-plate sequences of the 1970s toward
one year of massive wildfires has been replaced by one of cataclysmic rains. It wasn’t so different during the artist’s youth. As her friend Joan Didion wrote, “Children [in California] grow up aware that any extraordinary morning their house could slip its foundation in an earthquake…. Jennifer Bartlett’s most persistent imagery, her apprehension of the potential for disaster in the everyday, derives from her California childhood.” Of course, the artist’s interest in systems and pattern-making is present amid the chaos: the games and plaid strewn around the painting are instances of math made quotidian, things you can find around your home.
With unaccountably luscious surfaces that darkly shimmer in the light, the artist Lee Bae’s charcoal paintings draw you in for closer inspection to discern how they do what they do—it’s no wonder that the dealers at Johyun Gallery have come to call them “people magnets.” The mystery somehow only deepens when you learn that these paintings are not made with charcoal, laying it down on paper or canvas, but rather from charcoal, with the artist slicing thick slabs of burnt pine and then inlaying it like black mother of pearl to create the surface.
Bae began working with charcoal as a signature material three decades ago when, living in Paris, he found lumps of it for sale in a store and realized that it not only reminded him of his native South Korea, where it is a staple of daily life, but that it was a cheap and plentiful material he could count on. Furthermore, its status as a tree that had become fire and then a carbonized relic ready to become fire again appealed to him as having a certain circle-of-life poetry to it.
Now 67, Bae is a superstar in South Korea with long waiting lists for his work, but his gallery is intent on expanding his market into new territories. Last year, they brought his paintings to the Armory Show in New York, where one was bought by a “famous collector” right away. Here in Los Angeles, another one—
from the School of Visual Arts last year and now has come to a place where her work is for sale at the Frieze art fair.
The paintings on view here meld her talent and story. Based on poems she wrote about her family’s ordeal and photographs from her and her sister’s childhood, the scenes show her conjuring an imaginative space of comfort and home amid instability: making a play fort in one painting, riding a barren mattress like a gondola through a sea of colorful disco balls in another, or here, in this one, cheerfully riding her bike amid barking dogs and unsavory characters as her family members watch with concern.
threads, imbuing the scenes with a colorful feeling of hope. Called “Ça va aller,” or “It’s Going to Be Okay,” the body of work won her France’s prestigious Prix Pictet in 2019.
and they range from $100,000 to $250,000—sold to a prominent U.S. collector in the opening hours of the fair.
Veronica Fernandez
I Don’t Want to Die (2023)
As an artist, Veronica Fernandez is something of a miracle: she is only 24 years old (she was born in 1998), has only been painting for about three years, and is clearly a supercharged talent, using the brush both gesturally and with precision to create riveting, dreamlike scenes. And, in an art world filled with nepo babies (and grandbabies), Fernandez experienced an impoverished upbringing, spending much of her youth changing homes and facing eviction in New Jersey with her family—and still, through her talent, was able to earn a BFA
Fernandez paints quickly and with urgency, laying down her memories and imaginings in a way that creates a definite mood. In her largest canvas at the fair, figures of adults and children trudge through a wasteland, tied together by ropes looped around their waists. They are on a long trek, the ones in the front carrying forward the ones behind. Maybe Fernandez’s art can lighten the load.
Joana Choumali
Silence, Too, Is an Answer (2022)
Based in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, Joana Choumali used to go to the beach resort of Grand-Bassam with her family as a child. After a 2016 attack at the resort left 19 people dead, unsettling the shaky peace following the country’s civil wars, she returned there to make art in an attempt to make sense of the atrocity, memorialize the victims, and heal wounds. The resulting series consists of photographs that she took of lonely figures in desolated settings and then printed on canvas, allowing her to embroider the figures and their surroundings with lustrous
This caught the attention of Angela Westwater, the fabled dealer and cofounder of Sperone Westwater Gallery, which is best known for its work with Bruce Nauman and postwar Italian artists like Carla Accardi, but which in recent years has been bringing on a younger generation of talents. On a trip to London, Westwater saw a magnificent triptych by Choumali in a 2021 group show at the Royal Academy. That piece, plus the fact that the Victoria & Albert Museum had acquired a work, led to a series of Zoom calls with the artist and now gallery representation—despite the fact that Westwater and Choumali
have not yet met in person, a lingering product of the pandemic.
At the fair, the artwork on display by Choumali—from her “Alba’hian” series—has wow factor to spare. Stemming from photographs the artist takes on early-morning walks in Abidjan and then prints onto canvas, this surface is then enlivened by a solitary portrait she cuts out of a separate shoot and then stitches on top, painstakingly overlaying the lines of her imagery with thread before finally covering the whole composition with a diaphanous piece of tulle. The gauzy effect comes across well in
“Fernandez paints quickly and with urgency, laying down her memories and imaginings in a way that creates a definite mood.”
a photo, but in person it’s hypnotizing. Next up? Another Zoom call between Westwater and Choumali, and then, if all goes well, a show at the New York gallery by the end of the year.
Carroll Dunham
Untitled, 3/29/22, 3/30/22 (2022)
That the painter and printmaker Carroll Dunham is one of the greatest artists of his generation still seems to be something of a secret, which is funny because he has all the hallmarks: an instantly recognizable hand, distinctive subject matter that provides timeless pools of mysterious reflection, and a career’s worth of work that shows continual evolution. In recent years, he has been working with an enigmatic male figure dubbed “the Wrestler” (the successor to the female “Bather” of his earlier work), who has a habit of engaging in primeval combat with doppelgängers of himself but also getting lost in what appears to be deep, philosophical thought.
In Los Angeles, Gladstone Gallery has transformed its office space into a showroom for a series of monoprints in the latter, contemplative vein, while the the base canvas for the series is on display at the fair. It shows the Wrestler from a rear three-quarter view, colored green like some ancient chthonic entity, long hair and beard falling from a body that is limned with thick, decisive lines. His brow is furrowed and his gaze trained on the center of a red vortex in the background. Around him is a Bacon-esque cage—are those red lines below him are flames?—the lines and squiggles give the setting a pulsating feel, like he’s traveling between dimensions.
Who is this green Wrestler, and what is he up to? A clue, apparently, is that Dunham has a longstanding interest in science fiction. What’s certain is that he
furnishes a perfect opportunity for the artist’s formal explorations, and the series of prints that arose from this base canvas—produced at Two Palms press in SoHo—are wonderfully weird, with blottings of diluted ink creating a hallucinatory effect. Right now, Dunham’s prints are also the subject of a major survey at the National Gallery in Oslo (where the Queen is an avid printmaker herself), and this May, Gladstone will unveil a new series of drawings in New York that will introduce a never-before-seen formal element to his work.
Ernie Barnes
Protect the Rim (1976)
It was in the early, scary, lonely days of the pandemic when the art dealer Andrew Kreps was googling some artists he was interested in and fell down a rabbit hole of overlooked American painters that led him, search query by search query, to Ernie Barnes. A fascinating
figure whose life story strikes as movie-ready today but which didn’t quite make sense to the art establishment of his time, Barnes had wanted to be an artist ever since he was a kid, but as a Black child in segregated Durham, North Carolina, that path was not really open to him—whereas football was a path that, as a gifted athlete, he could run down at full speed. So he got a full athletic scholarship to attend the all-Black North Carolina College, where he majored in art while dazzling scouts on the football field, leading him to a pro career first with the Baltimore Colts, then the New York Titans, then the San Diego Chargers, then the Denver Broncos. Throughout his football career, Barnes made art, sketching even during team meetings—something his Denver coach would fine him $100 for when caught—and earning the nickname “Big Rembrandt” among his teammates. (He and the Dutch master share a birthday.)
After playing for five years, Barnes became eligible for a pension and quit to do art full time, painting in a style inspired by Thomas Hart Benton, Andrew Wyeth, and other midcentury American regionalists that he dubbed “Neo-Mannerism.” That expressive, elongated style is on full display in this painting of two basketball players leaping into a sky reminiscent of a brighter El Greco, framed by raw wooden planks that somehow manage to simultaneously evoke a southern shack and a Renaissance icon. He quickly found success—his first post-retirement show in New York sold out, he became the “official artist” of the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, he won celebrity collectors in the Black entertainment world like Richard Roundtree and Berry Gordy, and his art was featured in seminal pop-culture contexts from a Marvin Gaye album cover to (most famously) the set of the TV show Good Times. But,
during his lifetime—he died in 2009—the fine art world kept its distance.
Suffice to say, all that has changed. In 2020, the UTA Artists Space in L.A. gave Barnes a solo show, Kreps mounted a show in 2021, and momentum began to grow behind his market until, bang, his 1976 painting The Sugar Shack woke everyone up when it sold for $15.3 million at Christie’s in May 2022. Since then it’s been off to the races, and Kreps and Ortuzar Projects’s booth at Frieze was the equivalent of a touchdown dance in the end zone, with the artist’s family hanging around in “Team Barnes” sweatshirts and stars like Lionel Richie and Tyler the Creator coming by to pay respects among artworks ranging from $2.2 million (for a painting titled Street Song) to works on paper in the $60,000-to-$125,000 range. And just think: UTA, the eminent talent agency that brought Barnes into the present-day spotlight—and which is currently displaying Sugar Shack at its West Hollywood art space—is mainly interested in his life rights for film and TV projects. Expect Barnes’s fame to only grow from here.
Christie’s Will Auction More Masterworks, Expecting to Surpass $144 Million
Masterpieces from the estate of late Condé Nast tycoon Samuel Irving—or “S.I.”—Newhouse Jr. will hit the auction block at Christie’s this spring.
Set for a yet-to-be-announced date in May during the auction house’s marquee sales week, the dedicated evening sale will include 16 pieces owned the late media magnate, who was widely recognized as one of the most influential collectors of his era. The announcement signals the Newhouse estate’s vote of confidence in the market off the back
of the record $1.5 billion sale of the estate of Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen last fall, which demonstrated the ongoing appetite for blue-chip fare of esteemed province.
Among the highlights are Willem de Kooning’s 1947 black-and-white collage, Orestes, which Newhouse acquired at Sotheby’s for $13.2 million in 2002, and which is now estimated to exceed $25 million; Francis Bacon’s distorted 1969 Self Portrait, expected to surpass $20 million; and Pablo Picasso’s L’Arlésienne, a 1937 abstract portrait of American photographer Lee Miller that is similarly predicted to bring in more than $20 million. (Exact estimates for these particular pieces in the auction are “available upon request,” per an announcement from Christie’s.)
Other artworks set to be included are pieces by Lee Bontecou, Jasper Johns, and Roy Lichtenstein. In
total, the sale is expected to top $144 million. A specific date and time for the event have not yet been announced. “S.I. Newhouse’s brilliance was undeniable and his art collecting held a rare quality of excellence,” Alex Rotter, Christie’s chairman in 20th and 21st century art, said in a statement. “As a collector, he bought and sold with the deepest levels of consideration and intention—which over decades, led to the evolution of a singular collection.”
Works from Newhouse’s collection have been trickling into the market since Newhouse died, a strategy that helps to avoid flooding the market with certain artists who Newhouse collected in depth. In 2018, the auction house sold Bacon’s Study of Henrietta Moraes Laughing (1969) for $21.7 million, just surpassing the artwork’s pre-sale estimate of $14 million to $18 million. The following year, the company offered 11 pieces from the Newhouse estate, including Jeff Koons’s stainless steel sculpture Rabbit (1986), which set an auction record for a living artist when a bidding war pushed the purchased price to a staggering $91.1 million.
The heir of Samuel Irving Newhouse, Sr., founder of the umbrella media empire Advance Publications, Newhouse Jr. oversaw glossy magazines for Condé Nast—Vogue, Vanity Fair, and the New Yorker, among them. In his world-famous collection were pieces by generation-defining 20th-century artists such as Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Lucien Freud, among others.
By the time of his death in 2017 at the age of 89, Newhouse was estimated to be worth more than $9 billion.
U.S. Museums, Universities Still Hold Remains of Indigenous People
ProPublica’s “Repatriation Project” has revealed that several museums and universities across the Unites States. are still in possession of the remains of Indigenous people in their permanent collections 30 years after a United States law was passed requiring their return. Conducted jointly with NBC News, the project includes a public database cataloging an nearly 100,000 Native American remains that are held in collections including museums, universities, and government agencies.
The investigation examines an apparent lull in national repatriation efforts after the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was passed in 1990. This legal move forced museums in the United States backed with government funding to review their collections for Indigenous remains and initiate their returns. The investigation revealed that some museums have made use of a legal loophole in the NAGPRA act that allows requests for items labeled by museum officials as “culturally unidentifiable” to be indefinitely stalled.
News of the project’s findings came a few months after the U.S. Interior Department released proposed changes to the 1990 legislation following a years-long consultation effort with more than 600 U.S. tribes. The proposal, issued in October 2022, is focused on shifting the 30-year-old standard by asking museums to defer to tribal representatives when it comes to the significance of unidentified materials that are the subject of return requests.
Some institutions have responded to the investigation’s findings. New York State Museum has said it is currently in talks with Indigenous
tribe representative in New York to carry out its returns under NAGPRA. The Brooklyn Museum said it holds two remains that are potentially of Native American heritage, but that they are culturally unidentified, according to a report by Hyperallergic. The American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan reportedly holds the largest number of Native American
the number of returns they’ve made since the 1990 legislation. The university pointed out that the ProPublica report does not account for the number of remains that were returned outside of the NAGPRA purview. Stanford, which oversees an anthropological lab that housed the remains, says it returned more than 1,000 remains prior to 1990.
The project’s findings come as calls for the decolonization of Western institutions have increased in recent years. Along with that trend has come a renewed focus on institutions that hold human remains.
The Pitts River Museum in Oxford, England, for example, holds a large collection of ethnographic materials, and has recently removed human remains from display. Since 2020, it has been disclosing obligations to Indigenous communities in public texts. Other advocates have called for university museums to deaccession holdings of the remains of enslaved people.
remains in New York, with 3,500 sets of remains in their collection. Universities have responded as well. Stanford, which reportedly holds 36 Native American remains, contested ProPublica’s presentation of the data on
Renowned Washington artist named to create likeness of this Indigenous leader for U.S. Capitol
Haiying Wu has been chosen to design a statue of Billy Frank Jr. for display in the nation’s capital,
The investigation revealed that some museums have made use of a legal loophole in the NAGPRA act that allows requests for items labeled by museum officials as “culturally unidentifiable” to be indefinitely stalled.
according to the Washington State Arts Commission.
The renowned Seattle artist who designed the Seattle Fallen Firefighters Memorial in Pioneer Square, will create a likeness of Frank for Statuary Hall at the Capitol Building, where each U.S. state can display two statues. Wu, a China native, has created public art throughout the Northwest and sometimes uses the “socialist realist” style that glorifies the working class.
He is also known for creating memorials to labor activism, including the United Auto Workers strike of 1934. Ron Allen, Tribal Chair and CEO of Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe, praised the selection of an artist to honor Frank.
“Our Northwest Indian nations raise our hands to this commitment and look forward to seeing it in the Hall of Statues and, hopefully, in our State Capitol,” Allen said in a statement. Frank, an environmental activist and treaty rights advocate, died in 2014 and was recognized posthumously by President Obama with a Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. In Statuary Hall, Washington state currently has likenesses of Northwest missionary Mother Joseph and doctor and missionary Marcus Whitman.
Frank’s statue is scheduled to replace Whitman’s, possibly as early as 2024. Debra Lekanoff, D-Bow, sponsored the law to commission a likeness of the late Indigenous rights leader, whose activism is credited with ensuring the Boldt Decision, which gives Washington state tribes half of the annual fishing harvest. “I am honored to witness the collaboration of the Billy Frank Jr. Statue Commission with the Frank family and Nisqually Tribe,” Lekanoff stated.
“They are united in their dedication to ensure that the artist can convey to the world the boundless salmon spirit of Billy Frank Jr., who represents the best of who we are in Washington state — and who we strive to be,” said Lekanoff, one of the Legislature’s three Indigenous members.
Her 40th District includes southern Whatcom County and part of Bellingham.
2023
Baltimore Museum of Art Names New Director
The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) has appointed Asma Naeem as its new director. Her tenure began February 1, making her the first person of color to lead the institution.
BMA Board of Trustees named Naeem the museum’s 11th director after a 10-month search following Christopher Bedford’s resignation in June 2022. Naeem has worked at the Baltimore museum for five years, starting as its chief curator and most recently as interim co-director; previously, she was a curator in the prints and drawings department at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.
The Baltimore institution has been the subject of controversy in recent years. In 2020, the museum drew criticism for its plan to sell three paintings by Brice Marden, Clyfford Still, and Andy Warhol and use the estimated proceeds of $65 million to fund staff salaries, equity programs, and new
“Our Northwest Indian nations raise our hands to this commitment and look forward to seeing it in the Hall of Statues and, hopefully, in our State Capitol.”
acquisitions. Former presidents of the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) sent a letter to then-board chair Clair Zamoiski Segal urging the institution to reconsider, and a group of former BMA trustees and other museum supporters signed an open letter in protest. Additionally, artists Adam Pendleton and Amy Sherald resigned from the Board of Trustees during this period, though neither cited the deaccession plan as the reason. Eventually, the sale was terminated hours before two of the paintings by Still and Marden were slated to go under the hammer at Sotheby’s (the Warhol was to be sold privately).
Despite the sale’s cancellation, the institution announced that it would continue to pursue its “Endowment for the Future” initiative, set in motion by a $1 million lead gift from philanthropist and collector Eileen Harris Norton in February 2021 that would help fund new acquisitions by artists of color, among other projects.
Over the course of her career at BMA, Naeem curated exhibitions such as Candice Breitz: Too Long, Didn’t Read, Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love, and the forthcoming The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century.
Too Long, Didn’t Read, which ran from March 15, 2020, through November 15, 2020, displayed two multichannel video installations by Breitz, a South African-born artist, that reflect on internet and celebrity cultures. The Salman Toor exhibition featured the Pakistan-born artist’s reinterpretations of historical works, such as Sir Anthony van Dyck’s “Rinaldo and Armida” (1629) featuring brown, queer figures, and is traveling to other institutions such as the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis
University and the Tampa Museum of Art. No Ordinary Love also included a catalogue with essays by writers such as art critic Evan Moffitt and magazine editor and novelist Hanya Yanagihara.
The upcoming show she co-curated, The Culture, celebrates the influence of Hip Hop culture on contemporary art on the 50th anniversary of the global movement’s birth.
In a statement to Hyperallergic, Naeem hinted broadly at her vision for the institution. “Art does not conform to geopolitical boundaries,” Naeem said. “We are seeking to show visitors how interconnected cultures are and to surface Non-Western influences that permeate the historical art canon.”
Princess
Diana’s
Strapless Gown Sells at Sotheby’s for Over $600,000
A deep purple strapless gown designed by Victor Edelstein and worn by Princess Diana recently sold for more than six times its estimate at a Sotheby’s auction.
A buyer went well past the high estimate of $100,000, winning the 1989 dress and its tulip-shaped stiffened skirt with a bid of $480,000 ($604,800 with fees). This is a new record for a Diana dress sold at auction.
The dress had been previously sold by Christies New York on June 25, 1997, as part of a charity sale of nearly 80 dresses on behalf of the AIDS Crisis Trust and the Royal Marsden Hospital Cancer Fund. The dress, which was designed for Diana and also owned by her, was worn by the princess in two photo-
Over the course of her career at BMA, Naeem curated exhibitions such as Candice Breitz: Too Long, Didn’t Read, Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love , and the forthcoming The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century .
graphs and was also featured in a painting of her.
An official portrait was taken by Antony Armstrong-Jones, the first Earl of Snowdon in 1991, and was widely published in magazines like Life and Hello. That same year, British painter Douglas Hardinge Anderson depicted Diana in the gown in a namesake artwork. The painting now hangs at the Royal Marsden Hospital where Diana visited and served as president.
Finally, in 1997, Diana wore the dress as part of a photoshoot with photographer Mario Testino for a Vanity Fair cover story. It took place only five
months before her death. Several of those photographs were also included in an exhibition at Kensington Palace in 2005.
This is the second Diana-related item that has gone for top dollar at auction recently. Earlier this month, a similarly colored 1920s amethyst cross that was worn several times by the former Princess of Wales was purchased by Kim Kardashian from another online sale by Sotheby’s in London. mcny.org
re:mancipation
February 6–Jun 25, 2023
Chazen Museum of Art re:mancipation is a collaborative project that has undertaken a two-year study of Emancipation Group and its complex history, while cultivating a more nuanced understanding of our nation and ourselves. On February 4, 2023, the Chazen Museum of Art, artist Sanford Biggers, and MASK Consortium debuted the results of this intense examination as an exhibition, documentary, and website that will provide audiences with an intimate look at the project’s directive to address social justice and equity through artistic interpretation. re:mancipation encompasses the reimagining of the Chazen’s problematic Thomas Ball sculpture Emancipation Group, the repositioning of additional objects in the museum’s collection, creation of a new artwork by Biggers, as well as new research, archival, and educational material.
Emancipation Group has been in the Chazen Museum of Art collection since 1976. The sculpture depicts Abraham Lincoln standing over a kneeling freedman. A large bronze version is in Lincoln Park in Washington, DC , and one was recently removed from public space in Boston. Biggers is known for engaging a wide range of artists, disciplines, and techniques in his extraordinary body of work. He believes that the Chazen, a university art museum with a diverse set of audiences on a large Big Ten campus, is the ideal partner for this interrogative project. Over the last several years the Chazen has developed a reputation for activating innovative new approaches to its collection, exhibition programming and outreach.
One of the key elements of this approach is to partner with contemporary artists to better illuminate and understand, in new context, historical works in the Chazen collection. This project is the most significant realization of this approach to date.
Whorled (Here After Here After Here)
February 16–23
April 2023
Somerset House, London Free Jitish Kallat presents Whorled (Here After Here After Here), a new courtyard commission by Somerset House and the Mumbai-based artist’s first major public commission in the UK. This striking outdoor installation, over 30 metres in diameter, comprises two intersecting spirals that echo the signage of UK roads and connect the famed neoclassical courtyard of Somerset House to locations across the planet and distant universe.
Whorled (Here After Here After Here) is conceived as a seismic ripple or a galactic whorl, aligned to the Earth’s cardinal northsouth directions and spiralling outwards from the centre of the Somerset House courtyard. The work draws upon sacred geometry and alchemical diagrams; like much of Kallat’s work, it interlaces the immediate and the cosmic, the past and present. Two vast scrolls, each 168 metres in length,
form interlocking spirals and a continuum of text and symbols follows the visual language of UK motorway signage. As visitors walk through the scrolls, these signs indicate the distance from Somerset House to over 300 locations across the planet and beyond, pointing to celestial bodies, such as the Moon, Mars, and distant stars in the Milky Way.
As Kallat’s work playfully reorients the courtyard in relation to a myriad of destinations, both terrestrial and celestial, visitors are invited to take pathways through the interlaced spirals. Routes through the work map circular movements through space and time. Visitors encounter a continuous shifting of focus as proximate planetary locations border distant and departed supernovae. Several of the places featured in the work have fallen victim to rising sea levels, while others are known to be under environmental threat of submersion within the next thirty years. These place names, accompanied by warning and
Whorled (Here After Here After
Here) continues Kallat’s longstanding critical engagement with ideas of cosmology, transience and the ecological, having drawn on imaginary maps connecting the everyday and the cosmic for over 20 years.
Joyful Show-Offs
February 16–March 13, 2023
Bonner David Galleries
While in the midst of her multi-year museum show focusing on the perils of climate change, botanical artist Jane Jones was photographing a group of orchids, carefully repositioning them so the light highlighted the blossoms perfectly. Then, inspiration struck, as she playfully called these flowers “show-offs.” It was then that she knew she not only had the title of a painting, but indeed the theme of her next solo show, which debuts at Bonner David Galleries New York early in 2023.
feature paintings of some dramatic maroon and Oriental lilies as well as elegant roses that she proudly grows in her garden. For this show, she has chosen to focus on bright colors consciously working to use them in jubilant ways.
African Studies
March 2–April 23, 2023
Sundaram Tagore Gallery
Two vast scrolls, each 168 metres in length, form interlocking spirals and a continuum of text and symbols follows the visual language of UK motorway signage. ArtDiction
hazard symbols, resonate with Somerset House’s own proximity to the River Thames and London’s vulnerability to flooding. With exhibition dates that encompass Earth Day 2023, the cyclical movements through space and nonlinear time prompt a reconsideration of our relationship with the planet, its past and imminent future, and the wider cosmos.
Admittedly, a flower cut from its stem has but a limited shelf life. In her gifted manner, Jane Jones captures that momentary beauty in her paintings for eternity. As a talented gardener and artist, preparing for this exhibition altered the direction of her thinking from the concerns of climate change to the wonderment and joy flowers provide in the current instant. She puzzles over aesthetic considerations such as, “Is there a curve that is especially lovely, a flip or roll that lights up beautifully? What is it that this flower has that no other does which makes it so special? Does it look better with other flowers, or is it best as a solo?” One of her recent paintings Tulips for Petey is a collection of flowers arranged to look like a balloon bouquet to celebrate the life of one of her beloved dogs. Jones remarks that tulips are adaptable to numerous expressions. She will
Since the early 1980s, Edward Burtynsky has been photographing industrial landscapes across the globe, documenting in remarkable detail the human imprint on the planet through terraforming, extraction, urbanization and deforestation. For African Studies, premiering in New York simultaneously at Sundaram Tagore Gallery and Howard Greenberg Gallery, he focused on Sub-Saharan Africa, traveling to Kenya, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Ghana, Senegal, South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Madagascar and Tanzania between 2015 and 2020.
Burtynsky’s interest in Africa was sparked 20 years ago while he was working on his landmark 2004 photographic project China, which explores the country’s rapid globalization and the construc-
tion of the Three Gorges Dam
The series, and subsequent award-winning documentary film by Jennifer Baichwal, Manufactured Landscapes (2006), chronicle China’s transformation into the world’s leading manufacturer and depository for its waste. Burtynsky witnessed firsthand the immense environmental—and by extension, human—cost of development, and he predicted Africa would be the next, and perhaps the last, region to undergo major industrial expansion.
They will work with LagosPhoto to establish a new program within the Festival dedicated to emerging and mid-career African artists who are focussing their lens on subjects of globalism, and the environmental, cultural and social impacts of the climate crisis on the Global South.
Presented in large-format photographs, African Studies conveys the fragility of the natural world, bringing together images of lush, undisturbed landscapes and environments irretrievably altered by industry. The series was largely photographed from aerial perspectives, a viewpoint that distills the continent’s diverse topography into graphic patterns and gradients of sumptuous color. The resulting effect seemingly transforms the marks of human infrastructure into painterly abstract compositions. In these images, as in all his work, Burtynsky skillfully integrates critical reporting with sublime visual aesthetics creating a harmonious balance between content and form.
“With this project I hope to continue raising awareness about the cost of growing our civilization without the necessary consideration for sustainable industrial practices and the dire need for implementing globally organized governmental initiatives and binding international legislations in order to protect present and future generations from what stands to be forever lost,” Burtynsky said.
On the occasion of the gallery openings of Edward Burtynsky’s African Studies, Burtynsky and his gallerists have committed 100% of the earnings from the first 39” x 52” print sold at each show — equalling CAD $100,000.00 — to LagosPhoto. They will work with LagosPhoto to establish a new program within the Festival dedicated to emerging and mid-career African artists who are focussing their lens on subjects of globalism, and the environmental,
cultural and social impacts of the climate crisis on the Global South.
African Studies will be on view at Sundaram Tagore Gallery from March 2 through April 1 at 542 West 26th Street and at Howard Greenberg Gallery from March 4 through April 23 at 41 East 57th Street.
African Studies is the subject of a 208-page monograph of the same title newly published by Steidl (2023).
Celine Chouvenc
Celine Chouvenc
Stefanie Rocknak
The Swimmer
Stefanie Rocknak The Biker
Stefanie Rocknak The King
Stefanie Rocknak
The Queen
Stefanie Rocknak
The Queen
Stefanie Rocknak
Ghastly Nights
Stefanie Rocknak Kneeling Study
Stefanie Rocknak
Eva Hild
Eva Hild
Photography by Anna Sigge
Eva Hild
Eva Hild
Eva Hild
Photography by Anna Sigge
Eva Hild
Eva Hild
Eva Hild
Eva Hild
Photography by Anna Sigge
Eva Hild
Photography by Johan Stern
Mirta Arbini Summer Breeze
Mirta Arbini Magnolias
Mirta Arbini
Mirta Arbini
