FIAC ONLINE VIEWING ROOM

Catherine Opie
Untitled #4, Richmond, Virginia (monument/monumental)
2020
Pigment print
Framed Dimensions:
67 x 45 1/8 x 2 inches (170.2 x 114.6 x 5.1 cm)
Image Dimensions:
66 x 44 inches (167.6 x 111.8 cm)
Edition of 5, 2 AP

In the summer of 2020, Catherine Opie set off from Los Angeles in an RV to begin a cross-country trip across the American South. She documented her travels, bearing witness to the many people, monuments, and movements she encountered along the way. Untitled #4, Richmond, Virginia (monument/monumental), 2020, pictures the Robert E. Lee monument in Richmond, Virginia after its transformation in the wake of protests against police brutality and racial upheaval in the US. Covered in a thick blanket of graffiti, the Confederate tribute has been reclaimed as a site of activism. Of this new and already momentous body of work, Opie stated, “I am examining what is present before us but also the fragility of the land and country in this moment in time, and the recognition of racial injustice that is embedded within this extended visual poem.”

Doug Aitken
Real/Unreal
2021
Fabric, wood
102 inches (259.1 cm) diameter
3 inches (7.6 cm) depth

Doug Aitken created Real/Unreal during lockdown when, searching for materials inside his home, he began to cut clothes and fabrics. From these materials he created shapes to articulate words and phrases that spoke of a shifting world in continuous change. Conversely, the physical process of creating these works was a study of stillness.

The work provokes reflection on the nature of reality and visions of the future: fragmented phrases appear like handcrafted digital glitches, composed of letterforms broken apart and sewn back together to recompose language as an amalgam of shape and color. Aitken creates space for turning inward to explore the subconscious landscape during a time of heightened isolation from the physical landscape of the exterior world.

Doug Aitken’s exhibition Flags and Debris at Regen Projects is on view through March 13, 2021.

Daniel Richter
Einzelgespricht
2021
Oil on canvas
91 5/8 x 68 x 2 1/2 inches (232.8 x 172.7 x 6.1 cm)

Working from the lineage of post-war German painting that includes artists such as Werner Büttner, Martin Kippenberger, and Albert Oehlen, Daniel Richter’s recent methodology prioritizes the gestural and improvisatory possibilities of painting to create colorfully bold and graphic compositions that evoke images of spectral silhouettes and quasi-figures that abut and collide at times violently and at times with an elegant passion. Utilizing a wide variety of techniques in oil on canvas, Richter’s work can evoke the technical appearance of infrared photography, informational mapping, and our modern visual culture as much as the long history of figurative and abstract painting that serves as his inspiration and reference. In Einzelgespricht, 2021, fragments of a body can be seen through a pictorial space of indeterminate depth where organic forms outlined boldly in black and red never quite cohere into outright figuration. Thick strips of dark mauve and acid green rise from below as though the image is caught midway through a digital scan, while the contrast of rapid gestural marks and palette knife work testify to the painting’s materiality.

Theaster Gates
Plinth and Shoulder
2020
High fired stoneware with glaze, reclaimed pine
Artwork Dimensions:
20 x 22 x 22 inches (50.8 x 55.9 x 55.9 cm)
Plinth Dimensions:
5 1/4 x 36 x 19 inches (13.3 x 91.4 x 48.3 cm)

For Gates, sculpture – as a derivative of the minor arts, craft, or the decorative and plastic arts – has been an important historical invention. Throughout Gates’ artistic career and especially during his time at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, the need for divine acts to have material and human vessels has undergirded his investigations.

Plinth and Shoulder represents a new sculptural process using high fired stoneware. By utilizing bricks with a strong manganese content and firing them to an extremely high temperature, the sculptural materials are pushed to their limits, transcending from basic elements into sacred vessels. Trained as a potter in the United States, South Africa, and Japan, Gates approaches the vessel as a symbolic and complex object of ritual significance. Influenced by sacred rituals and traditions such as tea ceremonies, Gates has shown how ceramics can serve as an impetus for communal gathering throughout the context of his artistic practice.

Anish Kapoor
Mirror (Black to Magenta to Yellow)
2019
Stainless steel and lacquer
53 x 53 x 6 1/2 inches (134.5 x 134.5 x 16.7 cm)

Anish Kapoor’s work combines the formal concerns of Minimalism with an attention to the material and psychical properties of objects. Highly polished stainless steel sculptures such as Mirror (Black to Magenta to Yellow), 2019, confound spatial preconceptions and heighten the viewer’s awareness of their own physical and relational presence to the object. The concave disc reflects and distorts its surroundings while refracting the light in grades of magenta, yellow, and black back upon those surroundings.

Christina Quarles
Always (Get Me Down)
2021
Acrylic on canvas
66 x 62 x 2 inches (167.6 x 157.5 x 5.1 cm)

Christina Quarles
Always (Get Me Down) (detail)
2021
Acrylic on canvas
66 x 62 x 2 inches (167.6 x 157.5 x 5.1 cm)

“Christina Quarles paints one of the most traditional subjects in art: bodies in familiar settings. Her handling of this subject, however, is anything but traditional. Deliberately disorienting, her works invite a reconsideration of genre painting and, in turn, the real-world conditions that lead to an understanding of what it means to exist within a body and the environments we inhabit. Historically, those conditions have been shaped by the long-standing modernist fantasy of a universal body–one that is decidedly white, masculine, and heterosexual. Against this paradigm, Quarles sets forth an alternative vision, one realized by her virtuosic painting as well as attention to the specificity of her own identity and lived experience. Rather than playing into timeworn corporeal tropes, Quarles engages with the body as a shared point of departure through images that consider how our actions and movements shape and are shaped by the spaces we inhabit.”

— Grace Deveney in “Forming Touch,” Christina Quarles, 2020

Raymond Pettibon
No Title (For American imperialism)
2020
Ink and acrylic on paper
50 x 38 inches (127 x 96.5 cm)

Raymond Pettibon’s distinctive style combines pen and ink figuration with hand-inscribed text and collage elements to create incisive works that probe into American culture. In No Title (For American imperialism), drips and splatters in ink and acrylic contend with constructs of modern art and the artist’s own relationship to that legacy. Taken with the inscription, ‘For American imperialism,’ the work is suggestive of Cold War era foreign policy, which proffered Ab-Ex art stars like Jackson Pollock as champions of American individualism.

Kader Attia
Mirror Mask
2020
Wooden mask, mirror fragments, black pigment
Artwork Dimensions:
22 x 8 1/4 x 6 1/4 inches (56 x 21 x 15.8 cm)
Overall Dimensions:
70 x 8 1/4 x 10 inches (177.8 x 21 x 25.4 cm)

“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 Les 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 in “Kader Attia and Ralph Rugoff in conversation,” Kader Attia: The Museum of Emotion, 2019

Marilyn Minter
Red Hots
2020
Enamel on metal
48 x 36 x 2 inches (121.9 x 91.4 x 5.1 cm)

In Red Hots, Marilyn Minter continues her interest in the art historical trope of the bather. Poised between abstraction and figuration, this painting is meticulously constructed using many layers of enamel paint. Slowly built up layer-by-layer, its sensuous surface is finished by fingertip to eliminate traces of brushstrokes, resulting in a softened, tactile quality. Minter challenges the problematic treatment of women in art, depicting her subjects as empowered subjects of desire. A pane of steamy glass creates an opaque, abstracted surface through which Minter's model is simultaneously hidden and revealed.

Elliott Hundley
10.1.20.1
2020
Oil, oil stick, graphite, and collage on paper
60 x 86 3/4 inches (152.4 x 220.3 cm)

Made during lockdown, this recent work on paper combines physicality and accumulation into lyrical and expressionistic form. Layers of oil, oil stick, graphite and collage forge an exuberant composition moving from dense and layered outwardly moving gestures to wildly loose and colorful space. Hundley’s hand recalls the wild intensity of Cy Twombly combined with the palette of Philip Guston. Collaged elements drawn from Hundley’s archives adorn his freeform lines, expanding the history of automatic drawing he pulls from and grounding the works in his own distinctive history and style. Hundley alchemizes chaos into an intricate and harmonious constellation of new meaning that pulses with the artist’s profoundly personal sensibility.

Theaster Gates
Man Ray on My Mind
2019
Ceramic, steel, metal fencing
36 3/8 x 36 1/4 x 5 1/2 inches (92.4 x 92.1 x 14 cm)

Man Ray on My Mind references Man Ray’s 1926 photo Noire et Blanche, in which a pale skinned model lies elegantly next to a black African mask. Gates upends this Eurocentrism by inverting the mask and placing a photograph of Gertrude Johnson Williams on top. Williams was the Vice-President of Johnson Publishing Company and mother of JPC founder John H. Johnson.

Gates began to choose images of Black women from the Johnson Publishing Company archive to create his own Black Madonna archive during his 2018 exhibition at Kunstmuseum Basel, Black Madonna. Beyond the obvious fact that these are images of Black women, Gates is interested in what he calls the deification of the Black body and how they were able to be widely distributed through the United States, serving as a beacon of upward mobility and inspiration for its readers.

Liz Larner
Asteroid (Fluffy)
2020
Glazed ceramic
16 x 13 x 8 1/2 inches (40.6 x 33 x 21.6 cm)

Liz Larner's work in ceramic refers us to the terraqueous nature of our planet and how it is formed by what seems to be beyond us. Her new series of Asteroid sculptures looks toward the many known and unknown bodies moving in space which contain the real possibility of violent collision, even as their presence and number in our solar system are always being discovered. Continuing her investigation into the means by which material ecologies and geologic timescales inform human experience and cultural forms, Larner’s Asteroids embody a small piece of the heavens as art and ask us to consider our connection to that which is known but is not always seen.

Larner’s newest Asteroids will be on view as part of her upcoming exhibition at Regen Projects, As Stars and Seas Entwine, on view March 27 – May 22, 2021.

Sue Williams
Leggy
2021
Oil on canvas
50 x 60 inches (127 x 152.4 cm)

Sue Williams
Leggy (detail)
2021
Oil on canvas
50 x 60 inches (127 x 152.4 cm)

Throughout the course of her more than three-decade career, Sue Williams has consistently found the point where expressive formal experimentation within painting meets radical feminist politics to create an oeuvre uniquely her own. Witty, irreverent, attuned to both classical beauty and contemporary smut, Williams’s recent work composes bits and pieces of imagery across the canvas in a manner that firmly coheres even as it appears to be a picture about to begin or coming to an end. These relatively minimalistic compositions feature exposed fields of canvas ground punctuated with explosions of color and form that, in the case of Leggy, 2021, conjures thin limbs and appendages in a variety of surreal and incorporeal strolls across and through the painting. Never tilting completely into figuration or made entirely from the raw material of abstraction, Leggy, like all Williams’s recent work dances elegantly and irreverently on the edge.

Raymond Pettibon
No Title (Invader from France.)
2019
Ink and graphite on paper
45 1/4 x 86 inches (114.9 x 218.4 cm)
RaP 8691

Raymond Pettibon’s No Title (Invader from France.) takes as its subject a horse and jockey in mid-stride accompanied by the inscription ‘Winner of the Arch de Triomphe,’ a reference to the annual horse race Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe and also the famous Parisian arched monument. Rendered in black ink and graphite, the simple line drawing intensely captures the grace and sophistication of its subject. The horse is beautifully drawn and illuminated by linguistic mastery — an interplay that is signature to Pettibon’s work.

March 2 - March 7, 2021

Regen Projects - OVR - FIAC - 2021

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