Regen Projects is pleased to participate in Art Basel Hong Kong 2024. This digital showcase reflects highlights from the gallery's in-person presentation, which brings together outstanding artworks representing the diverse media, styles, and techniques employed by the gallery's artists. 

Featured artists include Kader Attia, Matthew Barney, Kevin Beasley, Walead Beshty, Alex Hubbard, Elliott Hundley, Anish Kapoor, Liz Larner, Glenn Ligon, Marilyn Minter, Rebecca Morris, Catherine Opie, Silke Otto-Knapp, Raymond Pettibon, Elizabeth Peyton, Jack Pierson, Daniel Richter, Sable Elyse Smith, Wolfgang Tillmans, Gillian Wearing, James Welling, Sue Williams, and Andrea Zittel, among others.

Dates 
March 26 – 30, 2024

Address
Convention & Exhibition Centre
1 Harbour Road
Wan Chai
Hong Kong, China

Booth
3D17

In Stranger Study #40, 2023, Glenn Ligon extends an artistic and conceptual project that has defined his career, particularly, the body of paintings he has inscribed since 1996 with passages from James Baldwin’s 1953 essay, “Stranger in the Village.” Here, black text arises atop a black ground, complicating the legibility of Baldwin’s words, pushing toward abstraction, and creating new meanings.

Baldwin’s essay recounts his time in a remote Swiss village, particularly the spectacle of his arrival and developing awareness of himself as a Black subject in an otherwise white community. Baldwin’s essay has become a literary landmark unto itself for its articulation of the complex intersection of race, nation, and history. In Stranger Study #40, Baldwin’s essay affords what Ligon describes as “the ground on which the painting is sited.” Courting black-on-black as an aesthetic provocation as well as a symbolic, conceptual conceit, Ligon explores its capacity to create perhaps more than evacuate meaning—recalling avant-garde touchstones such as Ad Reinhardt or Kazimir Malevich.

In a 2021 profile of the artist for T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Megan O’Grady observed that, “Ligon has in many ways inherited Baldwin’s mantle to become the foremost philosopher on race and identity in America.” Ligon’s pictures of Baldwin’s words are worth, and bear, repeating. Underscoring the difference ushered in by every mark made, Ligon’s Stranger Study #40 materializes a perpetual or generational conversation, a spectral call-and-response between Ligon, Baldwin, and innumerable others that exceeds language as we know it.

In 2023, Regen Projects presented DOUBLE NEGATIVE, an exhibition that featured nine diptychs by Ligon inscribed with the full text "Stranger in the Village” obscured by X’s. Ligon was recently the subject of Post-Noir, Carre d’Art, Nimes (2022); Des Parisiens Noirs, Musée d’Orsay, Paris (2019); and Glenn Ligon, Baltimore Museum of Art (2017–2018.

After attending CalArts in its 1970s heyday, where she studied under John Baldessari, Sue Williams broke onto the art scene in the late 1980s with abrasively political and mordantly funny paintings that combined figuration with feminist cultural critique. Her work has undergone a number of stylistic shifts since then, at times adopting a relatively abstract and lyrical approach in which bright colors and buoyant forms act as foils to darker undercurrents.

The Pink Object, 2002 is a prime example of this approach. Combining spare minimalism and “feminine” pastel hues with massive scale, the large swooping curves and tight curling coils of Williams’ composition are expertly applied to the canvas in a manner as deft as any of the Abstract Expressionist masters whom Williams has often ridiculed in her work. Each element of the painting seems impossibly accomplished in one stroke, suggesting that art can be wrought from the simplest of means, but also that grand ambition and heroic gesture can announce itself with sparsely elegant and understated curves and not always sharply messy geometric bombast.

As Ashton Cooper wrote in ArtReview in 2017, Williams “is showing us the rebelliousness of being a feminist and a formalist.”

Williams has been the subject of numerous museum exhibitions worldwide including Institut Valencià d'Art Modern (2003); Vienna Secession (2002); Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2002); Kunstlerhaus, Graz (1998); and Centre d'Art Contemporain, Geneva (1997); among others.

In her paintings and photographs, Marilyn Minter (b. 1948, Shreveport, LA) evokes and subverts the aesthetic vocabularies of Hollywood, fashion advertising, pornography, and art history, deploying iconographies and aesthetic tropes to explore female sexuality, expose misogynist cultural mores, and question conventional beauty standards. Minter’s recent paintings are meticulously constructed using many layers of enamel paint. Their sensuous surfaces are often finished with a fingertip to eliminate traces of brushstrokes, producing a soft, tactile quality.

Electric, 2023 pushes photorealist painting and the genre of portraiture to the extreme, bringing the viewer face-to-face (even cheek-to-cheek) with a delicate face wearing ruby-red lipstick, heavy eye makeup, and a studded nose ring. Blurred streaks of light and hazily defined lines suggest that this figure and the world that surrounds them are in motion, implicating them—and us, as well—in a causal chain of events, an ambiguous narrative, that can only be partially grasped or known. The dynamic between these two modes of painting—one hyper-detailed and another gestural and equivocal—mirrors human perception, which is provisional, inferential, and always greedy to locate greater meaning in the din of sights and sounds that surround us.

Minter has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at Montpellier Contemporain — Panacée, Montpellier (2021); SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah College of Art and Design (2020); and a major museum retrospective titled Pretty/Dirty, which opened at the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston and traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach; and the Brooklyn Museum.