Wild at Heart by Marlborough Gallery

WILD AT HEART

Cover Image: Ran Ortner, Element No. 2 (Double Wave), 2013-2021 (detail)

Copyright © 2021 Marlborough Gallery 545 West 25th Street New York, New York 10001 Telephone (212) 541 4900 Edited by Marissa Jade Moxley Book design by Dana Martin-Strebel Typset in Adobe Caslon Pro All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems without permission in writing from the publisher.

WILD AT HEART Ahmed Alsoudani Alice Aycock Ivana Bašić Chakaia Booker Enzo Cucchi Inka Essenhigh Jonah Freeman & Justin Lowe Ron Gorchov Justen Ladda Le’Andra LeSeur Ran Ortner Beverly Pepper

July 14 — September 11, 2021

545 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001

WILD AT HEART

Hypnosis is a way to connect with the subconscious rather than the conscious mind. The mind accepts what the subconscious creates, however bizarre. Among these artists there is a common thread of a relentless, even myopic, focus on work so personal that its intrinsic value is much greater for the artist than for the audience. Their bond lies in their obsessiveness, idiosyncrasy, and disregard for the mainstream. Following a period of repressed travel and social contact due to COVID-19, we are acknowledging a surging desire to “re-engage.” For the summer months, Marlborough New York is pleased to present an interpretive exhibition embracing a number of interpretations of physical and mental engagement. -Douglas Kent Walla, CEO

ALSOUDANI

Ahmed Alsoudani is known for his vibrantly colored surreal canvases which evoke bodily forms. The appearance of textures in charcoal and colored pencil, or of rigidly defined geometric shapes in solid, undifferentiated hues gesture toward the Alsoudani’s interest in draftsmanship, as well as in art-historical antecedents like André Masson, Max Ernst, Francis Bacon, or Philip Guston. Like the automatism of the Surrealists, Alsoudani considers his own practice as one which collapses thought and execution into one swift instinctive act, an activation of the unconscious wherein his internalized passion for works of fiction and poetry—especially those conveying the experiences of the historically occupied and exiled—is translated directly to the painting’s surface. Ahmed Alsoudani was born in 1975 in Baghdad, Iraq. Alsoudani received his MFA in Painting from Yale School of Art in 2008, and also holds a BFA from Maine College of Art. Alsoudani represented Iraq in the 54th Venice Biennale (2011), the country’s first presentation

in thirty-five years; during this time, he was included in The World Belongs to You at the Pinault Collection’s Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2011). Institutional solo exhibitions include MATRIX 165 at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT (2012), and Ahmed Alsoudani: Redacted, which traveled from the Phoenix Museum of Art, AZ to the Portland Museum of Art, ME (both 2013). Group institutional presentations include Told / Untold / Retold at The Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha (2011), Maine Collected at the Bates College Museum of Art, Lewiston, ME (2015-16), Artists in Exile: Expressions of Loss and Hope at Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT (2017), and Chaos and Awe: Painting for the 21st Century, which traveled from the Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN, to the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA (2018-19). Presently, a retrospective on Alsoudani is on view at Palazzo Cipolla in Rome, Italy, with another solo museum exhibition opening in November 2021 at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA, following a two-year residency there.

Ahmed ALSOUDANI (b. 1975) Pit, 2016 acrylic, charcoal, and colored pencil on canvas 77 x 175 in. | 195.6 x 444.5 cm 7

AYCOCK Alice Aycock is notable for her monumental sculptural works that explore concepts of fantasy, science, and imagination. An early influence of Aycock’s was Rem Koolhaas’s Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. She studied with Robert Morris and the art historian Leo Steinberg at Hunter College where she received her MA. Aycock’s first large-scale architectural work Maze (1972) was created upon finishing her studies at Hunter College in 1971. Her subsequent early show at 112 Greene Street and her association with Gordon Matta-Clark put her solidly in touch with many of the prominent downtown artists of the seventies, such as Mary Miss and Jackie Winsor. Aycock entered into an intense relationship with Dennis Oppenheim and remained lifelong friends, and along with Vito Acconci, were frequently associated by their mutual interests and even greater differences, as shown in the 1979 three-person exhibition at the ICA in Philadelphia entitled Machineworks. By the late eighties, Aycock began to initiate a new phase of ‘shape shifting’ with monumental and permanent pieces such as her work at Storm King entitled Three-Fold Manifestation II (1987). Alice Aycock’s recent major exhibitions and installations include a retrospective at the Sprengel Museum in Hanover, Germany (2019); Park Avenue Paper Chase (2014) New York,

NY; a Sotheby’s exhibition at Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, UK (2013, 2014); a traveling retrospective of her drawings and small sculptures at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, NY, coinciding with the Grey Art Gallery, New York (2013-2014); Whirlpools, an 80-foot long entrance sculpture for MGM National Harbor, Forest Heights, MD (2016); a permanent outdoor installation at Pier 27, Toronto, Ontario (2017); and Blickachsen 10, a contemporary sculpture exhibition in Bad Homburg, Germany (2015). Aycock’s work is held in numerous major collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, NY; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, KS; and the Sprengel Museum, Hanover, Germany. A traveling retrospective was organized by the Wurttembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart, Germany (1983) and a retrospective was held at Storm King (1990). She has exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Documenta VI and VIII and The Whitney Biennial.

AYCOCK

Alice AYCOCK (b. 1946) Wavy Enneper, 2011 fiberglass, aluminum, and acrylic 84 x 116 1/2 x 102 in. | 213.4 x 295.7 x 259.1 cm 12

BAŠIĆ Ivana Bašić’s work addresses the vulnerability and transformation of the human body and its matter. Bašić combines more traditional sculptural materials, such as wax, glass, steel, and alabaster with immaterial substances, such as breath, pressure, torque, and rigidity, which lend her sculptures posthuman qualities. The resulting forms resemble fleshy bodies that seem to be on the verge of losing their corporeal shape. Upon the first encounter, the forms in I too had thousands of blinking cilia, while my belly, new and made for the ground was being reborn (Position III, #2) and (Position III, #3) (2020), evoke heads with staring faces suspended from the wall. Yet upon inspection, it is revealed that the sight of the face is a mirage. The pieces employ mimicry as a protective strategy—like the eyespots butterflies wear on their wings to resemble a larger animal. Behind the wings, a chrysalis-like entity is revealed facing the wall, held up by two stainless steel rods that seem to bore into its chest. Its head is equipped with breathing apparatuses. Out of the white, deep blue, and flesh-colored folds of skin emerges a shiny metal armor, protecting the new body in a fragile state of transformation. From an opening in its back, under the armor, its breath —represented by white and black glass drops in different versions of the sculpture—comes oozing down towards the floor. The drops are elongated as if about to fall, but frozen in their earthbound movement. Similarly, the metamorphosing body from which the secretion emerges is caught in a not-quite-human-nor-fully-insect in-between state.

Stefanie Hessler writes of Bašić’s chrysalis pieces in Flash Art: These pieces belong to the second out of four stages of transformation Bašić has identified as key processes in coming closer to a conceptual notion of immortality. From a first stage of stone and dust as the material everything is made of, which binds us to the ground; to a second one in the shape of a chrysalis, in which bodies liquefy with the help of the acid the larvae use for digestion; to a third phase in which a semi-organic, semiandroid body emerges, integrating the metal and other inorganic materials it formerly rejected; to a fourth and final moment in which the breath represented by glass vessels is all that remains, leaving the limitations of a material body behind. This transformation from human to insectoid reflects the Russian cosmists’ quest for immortality through metamorphosis, and follows their conceit that the evolution of humans—and other creatures for that matter—means to move beyond any earthbound material state, closer to a state of formlessness—an ideal spiritual state of being. Ivana Bašić was born in 1986 in Belgrade, Serbia. The artist completed her M.P.S. at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, in 2012. She has exhibited widely, mounting solo and group presentations at KUMU Museum, Tallinn, Estonia; The Whitney Museum, of American Art New York, NY; 6th Athens Biennial, Athens; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-onHudson, NY; 57th Belgrade Biennial, Belgrade, Serbia; Center for Contemporary Art Estonia, Talinn, Estonia; La Panacee Museum of Contemporary Art, Montpellier, France; Künstlerhaus Halle für Kunst & Medien, Graz, Austria; Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, NY; Loyal Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden. Her work is in the permanent collection of The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. The artist lives and works in New York.

BAŠIĆ

Ivana BAŠIĆ (b. 1986) I too had thousands of blinking cilia, while my belly, new and made for the ground was being reborn (Position III, #2), 2020 wax, breath, bronze, glass, oil paint, weight, stainless steel, pressure 50 x 12 x 16 in. | 127 x 30.5 x 40.6 cm 16

BAŠIĆ

Ivana BAŠIĆ (b. 1986) I too had thousands of blinking cilia, while my belly, new and made for the ground was being reborn (Position III, #3), 2020 wax, breath, bronze, glass, oil paint, weight, stainless steel, pressure 50 x 12 x 16 in. | 127 x 30.5 x 40.6 cm 18

BAŠIĆ

Ivana BAŠIĆ (b. 1986) Breath seeps through her tightly closed mouth (Position II: Swelling #1), 2019 breath, glass, stainless steel, torque 30 x 12 x 5 in. | 76.2 x 30.5 x 12.7 cm 20

BAŠIĆ

Ivana BAŠIĆ (b. 1986) Breath seeps through her tightly closed mouth (Position II: Swelling #2), 2019 breath, glass, stainless steel, torque 50 x 9 x 6 in. | 127 x 22.9 x 15.2 cm 22

BOOKER

Chakaia Booker’s oeuvre is embedded in the use of her signature material: rubber tires. Booker finds infinite methods to ascribe new meaning to the form, constructing sculptures that range from robust to monumental to figurative to delicate. The rubber serves as a politically evocative vessel, furthering Booker’s thematic exploration of the climate crisis as well as racial and economic disparities, conflicts, and issues. Chakaia Booker was born in Newark, New Jersey, and lives in the East Village and works in New York, NY and Allentown, PA. Booker has been featured in retrospectives at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA (2010), and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MI. Booker has completed public art commissions for Millennium Park, Chicago (2016– 2018); Garment District Alliance Broadway Plazas, New York (2014); and National Museum of Women in the Arts New York Avenue Sculpture Project, Washington, DC (2012). She has participated in group exhibitions at the National Museum of Woman in the Arts; National Art Museum of China, Beijing (2013); and in The Whitney Biennial, New York (2000), among many others. In 2002, Booker received a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and in 2005, a Guggenheim Fellowship. Currently, Booker is the subject of a major survey exhibition, Chakaia Booker: The Observance (2021), on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL.

Booker’s work is held in the public collections of numerous notable museums, including the The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Birmingham Museum of Art, AL; Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, MI; The Newark Museum, Newark, NJ; the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C.; New Orleans Museum of Art, LA; Queens Museum of Art, NY; Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, NY; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY, among many others. Distinctive and idiosyncratic, her oeuvre transcends the material’s utilitarian vocation and belies its uniformity. The sculptures can be robust and monumental, or finely detailed and uncannily tender. Some are almost figurative, the rubber cut, flexed and positioned in layers or strands to evoke the human body or more cryptic forms. -excerpted from Siddhartha Mitter, “For Chakaia Booker, Whose Medium Is Tires, the Art Is in the Journey,” The New York Times, 2021 Click here to read the full article

BOOKER

Chakaia BOOKER (b. 1953) Just a Minute, 2005 rubber tire and wood 23 x 29 x 20 in. | 81.2 x 73.6 x 50.8 cm 26

BOOKER

Chakaia BOOKER (b. 1953) YES, 2006 rubber tire and wood 28 x 33 x 17 in. | 71.1 x 83.8 x 43.1 cm 28

BOOKER

Chakaia BOOKER (b. 1953) Institutional Fantasies, 2005 rubber tire and wood 38 x 30 x 18 in. | 96.5 x 76.2 x 45.7 cm 30

CUCCHI

Enzo Cucchi emerged in the late 1970s as a leading figure in Transavanguardia, an artistic movement first named in 1979 by the Italian critic and curator Achille Bonito Oliva, who likened its members to nomads moving throughout time and history, synthesizing their individual mythologies with a collective, cultural imagery. By the 1980s, the movement was affiliated with the expansive Neo-Expressionist movements of West Germany, New York, and Italy. Cucchi’s work revives figuration and symbolism with suggestive forms that relate to nature, mythology, and the history of his home region. He employs strong gestures, rich colors, textured surfaces, and instinctual lines to his images and objects. Untitled (Italy) is comprised by black iron laid over an iron stretcher. Michael Brenson wrote of the piece in The New York Times: The black shape we are looking at is Italy. With its boot shape and intimations of a face built into the western coastline, the country is not an abstraction but a living organism. Through

the painting the artist has cut five holes the shape of teardrops. This is on one level an obvious painting about grief. But the teardrops also suggest bombers. And this is the blackness of a country where light has been extinguished. Enzo Cucchi was born in 1949 in Morro d’Alba, Italy. Cucchi has exhibited widely, mounting exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Tate Gallery, London, UK; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Guggenheim Bilbao, Bilbao, Spain; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. In 1986, Cucchi mounted his first major retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Cucchi lives and works in Rome and Ancona.

CUCCHI

Enzo CUCCHI (b. 1949) Untitled (Italy), 1988 iron on iron stretcher 114 1/8 x 175 1/4 in. | 290 x 445 cm 34

ESSENHIGH

Inka Essenhigh is known for her dreamlike, surrealist paintings, where people, nature, and sprites are imaginatively depicted through a vibrant color palette and swirling art noveau inspired representations. Drawing inspiration from graphic novels and early animations, Essenhigh portrays a mischievous world where objects anthropomorphize into nightmarish, whimsical, sometimes grotesque fantasies. The artist began her exploration of imaginative work in the 1990s. Both Dawns Early Light (2019) and Forms from Deep Underground (2019) exemplify this continued investigation of the fantastical. Oscillating between dreams and reality, abstraction and figuration, Essenhigh’s work invites the viewer to celebrate this duplicity that exists in the artist’s playful painted environments. Essenhigh says of her work, “My paintings are absolutely meant to give pleasure. They are meant for beauty. They are meant for your delight…because I believe that if you make delightful, beautiful things, that in fact you make the world a more delightful and beautiful place.”

Inka Essenhigh was born in 1969 in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania. Essenhigh received her BFA in 1992 from Columbus College of Art & Design, and her MFA in 1994 from School of Visual Arts. Her work is held in numerous notable public collections including Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Tate Gallery, London, UK; Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA. Recent solo exhibitions include Inka Essenhigh: Manhattanhenge at The Drawing Center, New York, NY (2019), A Fine Line at Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Virginia Beach, VA (2018). Notable group exhibitions include FIXED CONTAINED at Kotaro Nukaga, Tokyo, Japan (2019); the Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY (2019); Le Nuove Frontiere della Pittura at Fondazione Stelline, Milan, Italy (2018). Essenhigh has participated in several biennials including the 2nd Berlin Biennale in Berlin (2001), SITE Santa Fe Biennial in New Mexico (2005), and the Bienal de São Paulo in Brazil (2004). Inka Essenhigh lives and works in New York City.

ESSENHIGH

Inka ESSENHIGH (b. 1969) Dawns Early Light, 2019 enamel on canvas 40 x 50 in. | 101.6 x 127 cm 38

Image courtesy of the artist and Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY

ESSENHIGH

Inka ESSENHIGH (b. 1969) Forms from Deep Underground, 2014 oil on linen 54 x 64 in. | 137.2 x 162.6 cm 40

Image courtesy of the artist and Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY

FREEMAN and LOWE

Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe have been working collaboratively since 2007 both in New York and Los Angeles. Drawing on fictional and historical narratives, the artists compose expansive, alternate worlds that reimagine culture through subjects such as rogue science, psychedelic drugs, mega-conventions, and hypertrophic urbanism. Together, the artists have created large-scale immersive installations, architectural scenarios and carefully selected artefacts, prints, and films. The Real Estate Odyssey (2011), Slipstream Paintjob (2011), and The Teeth, The Tom, and The Game (2011) are examples of such artefacts, functioning both as works in an exhibition as well as props in a constructed environment which a viewer occupies as a “set,” each component signaling specific functions and locations that hover just outside of our lived experiences and expectations. Here, the photographs depict dramatically lit debris hovering in mid-air, shrouded in mist and smoke, their weightlessness suggesting that a portal to another place, perhaps even another dimension, has been opened, one that is both unfamiliar in its lack of a discernable environment but familiar in terms of the objects that inhabit it. Similar imagery appears in their films, The Floating Chain (2014), Scenario in the Shade (2015), and Mercury City (2016), collectively entitled The San San Trilogy.

Jonah Freeman was born in 1975 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Justin Lowe in 1976 in Dayton, Ohio. Freeman and Lowe have mounted exhibitions with Marlborough, MOCA Los Angeles, Deitch Projects and Ballroom Marfa, and were featured in the 2013 and 2016 editions of Art Basel Unlimited in Basel, Switzerland. The artists’ installation Scenario in The Shade (2015) has been exhibited widely; first exhibited in 2015 at Red Bull Studios in New York, the installation has since traveled to the 15th Istanbul Biennial, curated by Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset (2017), Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen, Denmark (2018) and the Museum of Art, Architecture, and Technology in Lisbon, Portugal (2018). The artists’ work has also been featured in the Borås International Sculpture Biennale at Borås Museum of Modern Art in Borås, Sweden (2018) and the Taipei Biennial, hosted at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum in Taipei, Taiwan (2014). Their most recent installation, COLONY SOUND (2019) traveled from Marlborough Gallery’s London location to the ARos Aarhus Art Museum in Aarhus, Denmark (2020-2021).

FREEMAN and LOWE

Jonah FREEMAN and Justin LOWE (b. 1975 | b. 1976) The Real Estate Odyssey, 2011 custom pigment print, edition of 5 43 x 34 3/8 in. | 109.2 x 87.3 cm 44

FREEMAN and LOWE

Jonah FREEMAN and Justin LOWE (b. 1975 | b. 1976) Slipstream Paintjob, 2011 custom pigment print, edition of 5 43 x 34 3/8 in. | 109.2 x 87.3 cm 46

FREEMAN and LOWE

Jonah FREEMAN and Justin LOWE (b. 1975 | b. 1976) The Teeth, The Tom and The Game, 2011 custom pigment print, edition of 5 43 x 34 3/8 in. | 109.2 x 87.3 cm 48

GORCHOV

Ron Gorchov was an American artist noteworthy for his distinct ability to delicately merge painting and sculpture. In 1967, Gorchov completed his first “saddle” painting, works which depict vibrantly colored abstract shapes atop a concaved canvas. For the next fifty years, Gorchov would continue developing and redefining his distinct visual language. Gorchov was born in Chicago in 1930 and studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1951, the artist received a BFA from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His work was selected for inclusion in The Whitney Biennial (1975 and 1977), and subsequently the artist held prominent exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and The New Museum.

Ron Gorchov’s work is held in the permanent collections of significant museums, including The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Wadsworth Athenium, Hartford, CT, Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, MN; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, NY; amongst others. The artist lived and worked in Brooklyn until his death in 2020.

GORCHOV

Ron GORCHOV (1930-2020) Adversary, 1985 oil on linen 55 3/4 x 73 in. | 141.6 x 185.4 cm 52

LADDA

Our times have demonstrated what it means for the gates of the underworld to be opened. Things whose enormity nobody could have imagined…turned our world upside down. - C.G. Jung Justen Ladda is a conceptual artist whose work is constructed around the theoretical framework of major themes such as change, transformation, balance, and illusion. Always concerned with the viewer’s perspective as they move through the space, his work is frequently brought to life by the changing vantage point of the viewer. Ladda was born in Buettgen, Germany and in 1978, moved to Ludlow Street in lower Manhattan and has since exhibited widely with distinguished painting and sculpture projects resulting in immersive installations, notably in the Colab organized The Times Square Show (1980). The exhibition, held in an abandoned massage parlor, was a testament to the

democratization of art and catalyzed the careers of over 100 emerging artists. Subsequent to this revolutionary and avant-garde exhibition was The Thing (1981), an installation work presented at P.S. 37, The Bronx, NY. Early projects were followed by his installation for the Museum of Modern Art’s Projects 3 in 1986. Numerous public projects followed these early alternative installations. Justen Ladda’s work is held in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Osaka Culturarium at Tempozan, Osaka, Japan; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; AlbrightKnox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; amongst others. Ladda has completed several public art commissions, including for P.S.7, The Bronx, NY (1986-1991); P.S. 72, The Bronx, NY (1995); Osaka Culturarium at Tempozan, Osaka, Japan (1996); A llen Street Mall, New York, NY (2008); amongst others.

LADDA

Justen LADDA (b. 1953) Human Animal, 1981 acrylic on canvas and luan 65 x 98 in. | 165.1 x 248.9 cm Provenance: Galerie Crousel-Hussenot, Paris, France Exhibited: Galerie Nelson, Lyon, 1983 Reality Remade, Kent Fine Art, New York, 1986, ill. in color The Emerging Figure, Norton Gallery of Art, West Palm Beach, 1989, cat. no. 4, ill. p. 12. Curated by Bruce Weber and Douglas Dreishpoon. Traveled to the Edith C. Blum Art Institute, Milton and Sally Avery Arts Center, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York Notes: Related to Ladda’s The Thing exhibited with Fashion Moda, P.S. 37, The Bronx, NY, 1981. 56

LESEUR

Le’Andra LeSeur is an artist working primarily with video, installation, photography, painting, and performance. LeSeur’s work celebrates blackness, contemplates the experience of invisibility, and seeks to dismantle stereotypes surrounding black female identity, among other subject matters. I bled until I freed myself challenges the extreme conditions and circumstances endured, with the eventual goal of emancipation. Focusing on the experience of Black women, this work evokes the question of if one must die in order to experience freedom. between me and the rest of the land… is a durational piece in which LeSeur will build black cinderblocks to produce a monolith, accompanied by the raw captured sound of LeSeur’s breathing whilst arranging the structure. Over the course of 10 consecutive days, LeSeur will perform Breathing, taking one cinderblock from the monolith and standing atop the brick for two hours, reciting words from a written onepage passage. This work – a disruption of space - explores physical struggles, and transcendence through endurance.

LeSeur has received several notable awards including the Leslie-Lohman Museum Artists Fellowship (2019), the Time-Based Medium Prize as well as the Juried Grand Prize at Artprize 10 (2018). LeSeur recently appeared in conversation with Marilyn Minter at the Brooklyn Museum, presented by the Tory Burch Foundation and has lectured at RISD Museum of Art, Providence, RI, and SCAD Atlanta, among others. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions at The Shed, New York, NY; Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta, GA; A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Assembly Room, New York, NY; Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Anacostia Art Center, Washington, D.C.; SITELAB, Grand Rapids, MI; Arnika Dawkins, Atlanta, GA; and others. Residences include NARS Foundation, Marble House Project, and Mass MoCA. LeSeur is represented by Microscope Gallery.

LESEUR

Le’Andra LESEUR (b. 1989) I bled until I freed myself, 2021 kodak lightjet print, edition of 6 33 3/4 x 60 in. | 85.4 x 152.4 cm Image: still from Maybe rainbows do exist at night, 2019 60

LESEUR

Le’Andra LESEUR (b. 1989) between me and the rest of the land…, 2021 cinder block monolith and sound piece Image: original monolith built as part of the project brown, carmine, and blue, 2018 62

LESEUR

Le’Andra LESEUR (b. 1989) Breathing, 2021 durational performance and reading for 10 Consecutive Days, unique (10 Total) portfolio box of original writing/documentation on rag paper Image: Build Day 51610 (For Aiyana), 2018 durational performance performed as part of the project brown, carmine, and blue, 2018 Image courtesy of Joshua Solas Performance Dates: Wednesday, July 14th, Opening Day, 5pm-6pm Monday, July 19th, 3pm-5pm Tuesday, July 20th, 2pm-4pm Wednesday, July 21st, 1pm-3pm Thursday, July 22nd, 12pm-2pm Friday, July 23rd, 11am-1pm Monday, July 26th, 12pm-2pm Tuesday, July 27th, 2pm-4pm Wednesday, July 28th, 11am-1pm Thursday, July 29th, 1pm-3pm Friday, July 30th, 3pm-5pm 64

ORTNER

Ran Ortner was born in 1959 in San Francisco and raised in rural Alaska. Before arriving at a career in art, Ortner worked on oil rigs off the coast of California and raced motorcycles professionally. Leaving Santa Barbara, California, in 1990, Ortner relocated to Brooklyn, spending two decades working in solitude toward a distilled, minimalist vision. Ortner’s work follows an art-historical lineage including the romanticism of J.M.W. Turner, the abstract expressionist poetics of Barnett Newman, and the minimalist optics of James Turrell, to the vastness of Earthworks. As in Michael Heizer’s masterpiece North, East, South, West, Ortner’s meditative Element series opens depths, inviting viewers to experience the sensations of spatial infinity. Very simply, “boundlessness is represented” (Immanuel Kant, 1790). Ran Ortner was awarded the inaugural ArtPrize in 2009, which allowed his practice to flourish in a studio in DUMBO. Notable commissions followed, including a centerpiece for the United Nations’ World Water Day at the World Forum, The Hague,

commissioned by the Dutch government, as well as works in the collections of 7 World Trade Center and Le Bernardin in New York City. His work has been exhibited at Mana Contemporary, Jersey City, NJ (2014), Robert Miller Gallery, New York, NY (2016), and the Phillips Museum of Art, Franklin & Marshall College, Lancaster, PA (2016). In 2018, Ortner received the Berlin Prize and participated in a residency as a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. He has been the subject of reviews in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, BBC News, and NPR. Ran Ortner reflects on his ethos: To dare to see. The audacity to feel. The shock of the incidental. Consolidating oceanic construction recall us to being, to the body, to emotions. To come stripped bare back to a glimpse of this most extraordinary of possibilities: reality. The collapse of each wave a finality. To live the sting of the present, charged by the heft of consequence, fired by the incandescence of beauty. To be all in… to be alive, to see, to feel.

Ran ORTNER (b. 1959) Element No. 2 (Double Wave), 2013-2021 oil on canvas 72 x 234 in. | 182.9 x 594.4 cm 67

PEPPER

Born in 1922 in Brooklyn, Beverly Pepper trained as a painter with Fernand Léger and André Lhote in Paris. After a trip to Angkor Wat, Cambodia in 1960, inspired by temple ruins and overgrown jungle, she turned to sculpture. In 1962, along with David Smith and Alexander Calder, Pepper participated in the landmark exhibition, Sculture Nella Cittá, in Spoleto, Italy. Pepper is celebrated for her monumental achievements in sculptures of steel, iron, stone, and earth, and for her ability to render her metal sculptures to appear weightless, infinite, and most of all, beautiful. In addition to a lifetime of gallery exhibitions, she has had numerous solo museum shows, among them those at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, The San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, CA and the Ara Pacis Museum in Rome, Italy. Pepper has worked extensively with public sites creating numerous land-art works and monumental iron sculptures in the United States, as well as in Europe and Asia. In 2018, the artist inaugurated a 3,000 square meter openair theatre in Italy. Before her death in 2020, she completed work on the Beverly Pepper Park, the first mono-thematic park of contemporary sculpture by the artist in the world.

Pepper’s works can be found in major museums throughout the world including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, Italy; The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museu d’Art Contemporari de Barcelona, Spain; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Museum of Modern Art, Sapporo, Japan; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; IVAM, València, Spain; The Frederik Meijer Sculpture Garden and Park, Grand Rapids, MI and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. Throughout her career, Beverly Pepper received several awards, among those: Doctor of Fine Arts Pratt Institute (1982); Accademico di Merito, Universtiy of Perugia (1987); Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France (1999); The Alexander Calder Prize (2000); Pratt Institute, Legends Award (2003); the International Sculpture Center Life Achievement Award (2013) and Commendatore all’Ordine del Merito della Repubblica Italiana (2015). In 2020, the artist passed away in her adopted hometown of Todi, Italy.

PEPPER

Beverly PEPPER (1922-2020) Curved Presence, 2012 cor-ten steel, edition of 3 91 5/8 x 125 x 58 in. | 232.7 x 317.5 x 147.3 cm 72