Regen Projects is pleased to present Amalgam, a selection of artworks that speak to our present moment. This diverse grouping is unified by an approach to verbal or visual form that presents the unitary as the fragmented, the whole within the detail, and the sum within the parts. Loosely referencing the title of Theaster Gates’s 2019 exhibition at Palais de Tokyo and Tate Liverpool, Amalgam also has inspired this compendium. Literally an amalgam is the union of disparate objects merged into something new, a chemistry that mixes and blends. 

Representing a large variety of media, scales, and formats, the artworks on view are unified by the differing means through which they present both content and form at once to make meaning from the material ’stuff’ of vision, language, and the world, and in doing so wrangle numerous individual elements into a singular composition. Whether through the graphic fragmentation and repetition of language employed in Doug Aitken’s REALITY FRACKING, 2020, the three dimensional collage of Elliott Hundley’s Mirror, 2020, the many distinct elements reflecting a piece of the same image in Anish Kapoor’s Random Triangle Mirror, 2014, language wrought as the wreckage of letter forms in Glenn Ligon’s Study for Debris Field #29, 2018, the many techniques and styles of painting fused into composition in Christina Quarles’s Get Lifted, 2020, or the very amalgam of historical objects and meanings framed as one in Theaster Gates’s Malaga Vitrine #6, 2019, the artworks presented here address our historical moment as something fragmented and disconnected, but nonetheless united and whole in our common experience of dissonance and harmony together and all at once.

Concurrent with the run of the fair, selected works from the OVR will be on view at the gallery. To make an appointment with a sales director please click here.

One of the most influential sculptors of his generation, Anish Kapoor’s work combines the formal concerns of minimalism with concerns for the material and psychical nature of both the object and the self. Known for creating objects that test the phenomenology of space, his highly polished stainless steel sculptures reflect and refract an illusion of the world onto their mirrored surfaces and confound and enhance the viewers’ relationship to the space around them. 

“In 2009, I visited the exhibition Picasso and the Masters at the Grand Palais in Paris, which included works by artists like Caravaggio, El Greco, Paul Cezanne…all of whom influenced Picasso. But there was not a single African mask. We know that African masks clearly influenced Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon and the work of some of his contemporaries such as Georges Braque. Omitting them from this exhibition was an insult to the traditional art of Africa. 

In response to this exhibition the first thing I did was to make a work that simply showed to the audience how Cubism was invented. I took an old mask that I found in a market in Dakar–not a Senegalese one but a copy of a traditional Dogon mask. I plastered on mirror pieces following the angles of the mask. After I had put on five pieces, I looked at the mask and saw myself completely fragmented, so I continued to cover the whole surface. This mirror mask is showing everybody who looks at it a Cubist portrait of themselves. Its reference to the influence of African art on Picasso’s art is very simple and direct.”

–    Kader Attia from “Kader Attia and Ralph Rugoff in conversation” in Kader Attia: The Museum of Emotion, published by Hayward Gallery Publishing, London, UK, page 17

Glenn Ligon’s wide-ranging multimedia art practice encompasses painting, neon, photography, sculpture, print, installation, and video. Perhaps best known for his monochromatic and highly textured text paintings that draw their content from American history, popular culture, and literary works by writers such as James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Gertrude Stein, and Jean Genet, among others, his work explores issues of history, art history, language, cultural identity, and race.

Ligon’s Debris Field paintings mark a departure for the artist. Rather than generating the work from a specific text, Ligon focuses on letter forms themselves, using images of his own etchings and stencil-and-ink drawings to create silkscreens, which are then printed in etching ink on canvas, and sometimes further redacted in ink marker. Each screen is overlapped to create a dense pattern of letter-based shapes, resulting in an improvisatory, cumulative abstraction.

Flags is a new body of artwork by Doug Aitken. It is a series of handmade wall hanging works, with layers created out of fabric cut from the artist's clothes and collaged into words, sentences, and abstractions. The works explore language and create a new visual topography of ideas of the future. The phrases contemplate themes of our relationship to the landscape around us and the tactility of the fabric underscores the coexistence of the natural and man-made worlds. They investigate how the individual synchronizes with the present and how we are moving into the future as both individuals and as a society.

Reality Fracking, 2020, is composed of letterforms broken apart and sewn back together to recompose language as an amalgam of shape and color. In a reference to the process of extracting fuel by the destructive process of fracturing the earth, this artwork textually redefines the word to abstractly encompass and reform our ideas on technology and how it is reshaping our way of understanding information. 

Inspired by commercial advertising, folk art, and decorative traditions, Lari Pittman’s meticulously layered paintings utilize both abstraction and figuration to create scenes fraught with complexity, difference, and desire. Conveying themes of romantic love, societal violence, and mortality, and referencing myriad aesthetic styles from Victorian silhouettes to social realist murals to Mexican “retablos,” Pittman’s open-ended narratives and opulent imagery reflect the rich heterogeneity of our diverse and increasingly global society, the artist’s Colombian-American heritage, and the distorting effects of hyper-capitalism on everyday life. Untitled, 2020, is unique among Pittman’s oeuvre in its deployment of a straightforward grid depicting individual scenes within each panel that are nonetheless related by a common theme, a style reminiscent of religious altarpieces, graphic paneling, or filmmaking storyboarding.

For close to three decades, Jack Pierson has created a multi-disciplinary practice that utilizes the visual languages of photography, painting, drawing, and sculpture to examine themes of memory, desire, longing, absence, despair, and glamour. 

Pierson’s signature large-scale word sculptures are formed from individual found letters salvaged from vintage commercial signage collected by the artist over the years. The sculptures are comprised of individual letters – each one with a distinct color, surface, texture, shape, size, and font – placed together to create incantations of emotionally charged words and poetic phrases.

Informed by her multiply situated identity as a queer woman of mixed race, Christina Quarles’s seductive paintings feature polymorphous figures arranged in contorted positions in space, rendered through expressive and gestural strokes that teeter on the edge of abstraction and representation. Throughout her work, perspectival planes both situate and fragment the bodies they bisect, in much the same way that fixed categories of identity can paradoxically be tools of both marginalization and empowerment. Like all her work, Get Lifted, 2020, is created from a concatenation of disparate painterly techniques that compose her figures into a world all her own.

Liz Larner’s ceramic slab sculptures evoke telluric interruptions from the geological depths, incorporating naturally occurring breaks, fissures, cracks, and bends. The ceramic forms support richly chromatic surfaces reminiscent of the earth's shifting crust. The resulting objects, hovering in front of the wall, are painterly and sculptural at once.

Exploding with vivid jewel tones, Marilyn Minter’s palette is imbued with the intensity of this moment. Throughout a career spanning more than three decades, Minter has remained steadfast in her unflinching depictions of women’s bodies and sexuality, exploring what the artist refers to as the culture’s “pathology of glamour.” In images that speak to the dichotomy of female agency and objectification, Minter’s paintings and photographs reveal the fraught nature of contemporary womanhood, as mediated through the aesthetics of art, popular culture, fashion, advertising, and pornography. 

Raymond Pettibon’s distinctive style combines pen and ink figuration with hand-inscribed text and collage elements to create incisive works that probe the deeply embedded dualities of American culture. The deep well of sources and influences from which he draws — everything from comics, world history, American politics, and baseball to film noir, literature, and surf culture — coalesce into a lyrical rapture of high and low. His remarkable aesthetic is the result of the brazen approach Pettibon takes to drawing, unconcerned with the slipshod markings and concomitant blots, smears, and retracings that appear in its wake. This outwardly crude manner is underwritten by technical and linguistic mastery — an interplay that has made Pettibon’s work an emblem of countercultural disaffection since he emerged on the art scene in the early 1980s. 

No Title (Charlie Parker. Yardbird), 2020, refers to jazz icon Charlie Parker and his nickname Yardbird. The exuberant jewel-toned octopus splashes into the composition, embodying the accompanying text "Yardbird o’ th’ sea." With his signature wit, Pettibon fuses a jazz legend with the well known advertising slogan "Chicken of the Sea."