Eva Presenhuber

09/29/2022

We are delighted to announce an online viewing room of the exhibition 'Goodnight Light‘ by New York-based American painter Amy Feldman. Our online presentation views the gallery’s first Zurich exhibition with Feldman (.Feldman), which is still on view until November 26, 2022.

Echoing Feldman’s exhibition ’Mothercolor’ last year at the gallery’s New York space, the variously-scaled gray paintings highlighting her unique visual language contain silkscreen elements, as well as the artist’s own fingerprint touches with thick paint. This novel addition of tactility, an urgent act of the hand, signals the artist’s duello with the physical and formal aspects of abstract painting.

The surfaces of Feldman’s recent works are enlarged and exaggerated facsimiles of raw canvas over pristine gray fields. In this presentation, Feldman introduces a moiré effect within her printed fields. The moiré that appears as another new direction furthers Feldman’s relationship with tonalities as well as her conversation with the viewer. Imbuing the paintings with a reverberating—almost mercurial—finish, this coloring on the surfaces signals an exploration of both light rays and light’s absence.

Installation view, , Goodnight Light, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Waldmannstrasse, Zurich, 2022
© Amy Feldman
Courtesy the artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber
Photo: Stefan Altenburger Photography, Zürich

09/28/2022

New York—'Sculptures By‘, featuring works by Doug Aitken (), Walead Beshty, Martin Boyce (), , Valentin Carron (), , Liam Gillick, Mark Handforth, Matthew Angelo Harrison, Wyatt Kahn (), Justin Matherly, , , Oscar Tuazon () is at Eva Presenhuber, New York, until October 29, 2022.

The exhibition Sculptures By at , New York, brings together works by artists who started to develop their positions in the early 1990s, who have established themselves over the last 30 years and who continue to shape the current language of the medium of sculpture along this trajectory. In this exhibition, recent and historical works are combined with specific works by artists of following generations, which take on the spirit of that time in their individual approaches.

Installation views, Sculptures By, Eva Presenhuber, New York, 2022
© the artists
Courtesy the artists and Galerie Eva Presenhuber
Photo: Lance Brewer

Image 1, L to R: , , , ,

Image 2, L to R: Oscar Tuazon, Matthew Angelo Harrison, Oscar Tuazon, Eva Rothschild

Image 3, L to R: Matias Faldbakken, Oscar Tuazon
Image 4, L to R: , , ,

07/20/2022

SPORTS CLUB NEW YORK, an exhibition by SARAH ORTMEYER, is at , New York, until July 29.

The monumental piece LE LOVE is on view, entering the space of friendship, radical connections, and fantasy love. Deep, surprising, uncanny, and intimate interconnections and interrelations between super-talents.

connects the world as a utopic and universal plan through new alliances of love between BARBRA STREISAND & BOBBY FISCHER, PEGGY OKI & TONY ALVA, JESSE WILLIAMS & SANDRA OH, among others.

What have these immensely gifted persons shared and found in common?

Installation views, , SPORTS CLUB NEW YORK, Eva Presenhuber, New York, 2022

05/20/2022

Karen Kilimnik's 'Early Drawings 1976 – 1998' is at , New York, until June 18. 'Early Drawings 1976 – 1998' is presented jointly with Sprüth Magers in London, with the New York show featuring over 50 previously unseen early works on paper.

For more than 40 years, Kilimnik has navigated an inexhaustible cosmos influenced by the traditions of Romantic painting, portraiture, and landscape painting. Her work gives equal weight to a broad array of subject matter, finding inspiration in such diverse sources as popular culture and fairy tales, Old Master paintings and television programs, films, literature, magazines, advertising, as well as window displays. The result dissolves the distinctions between “high” and “low” culture. This creative mixture appears in some of Kilimnik’s earliest output: after studying art and architecture in Philadelphia, the artist exhibited a series of genre-bending constellations in the mid-1980s and early 1990s; assembled works included paintings, photographs, drawings, sculptures, and films. Her oeuvre explores themes of mythology and femininity, history and fiction.

The accompanying exhibition at in London is on view until May 21.

Installation view, , Early Drawings 1976 – 1998, Eva Presenhuber, New York, 2022



Photo: Lance Brewer

03/24/2022

Valentin Carron's 'And So America Opened Up' is at , New York, until April 23.

For this exhibition in New York, Swiss artist has brought together a series of works created since 2009. The works on view include reconstructions of modernist reliefs, sculptures, stained glass pieces, a vast ensemble of brass instruments that have been brutally reduced to decorative elements, wrought iron gates, two videos, and a Giacometti-style iconic, provocative hand. All works are gathered together under the title, 'And So America Opened Up.' At a very special moment in his artistic career and in a context whose future no one yet dares to predict, Carron has allowed himself a courageous and uncompromising retrospective vision toward his oeuvre.

Installation views, , And So America Opened Up, Eva Presenhuber, New York, 2022



Photo: Lance Brewer

02/28/2022

NYC―Last days to view our Louisa Gagliardi and Yves Scherer show at , New York, before it closes on March 5.

’s paintings exist as reflections: internally, of artist and viewer, and of the rapid acceleration of technology in our visualized and socialized worlds. Their liminal status, as both digitally rendered images and physically confronting objects, speaks as much to contemporary concerns of self-mediated personas as they do to the compositions and narratives of the classics of art history.

The work of confronts the integrity of existence, in a manner that originates in antiquity and continues into the now. In both sculptural form and his lenticular works, different realities are blurred to be presented as one. Complexity orbits simplicity, encapsulated by avid desire. Perception, both biological and cultural, is questioned and dismantled as viewers reevaluate notions of depiction itself. The work is grand in both scale and means, but intimate and almost whimsical when it comes to the feeling it evokes.

Installation views, , , Eva Presenhuber, New York, 2022



Photo: Kyle Knodell

02/07/2022

Louisa Gagliardi’s paintings are alongside works by at , New York, until March 5.

One of the great successes of the exhibited work is the way it analogically captures the backlit glow of the screens that fill our lives. With a mix of digital composition and color theory and the physical additions that break and deepen their silky surfaces, the paintings emit a collected radiance that speaks to the sublime as much as the iPhone. Like a magpie, collects lustrous objects and images and assembles them in presentations of the singular and the group, almost always at moments that suggest recent or oncoming chaos. It is a balance of strength and courageous vulnerability. By dealing with personas and open narratives, Gagliardi speaks to the curation of oneself both online and off. In doing so, she reaches for the timeless, how all figures interact in any form of society where one must be an individual within a whole. For a narrative as old as civilization, it feels incredibly prescient.

, Reflecting, 2021
Gel medium, ink on PVC
180 x 150 cm / 70 7/8 x 59 in
© Louisa Gagliardi



Photo: Kyle Knodell

02/03/2022

We are thrilled to return to Los Angeles with a presentation of works by Amy Feldman, Wyatt Kahn, and Tschabalala Self. We look forward to seeing you at Booth D9 from February 17 to 20, 2022.

Amy Feldman (.Feldman) is recognized for her iconic painting language and commitment to large-scale gray-on-gray abstractions. Feldman’s investigation in the color gray highlights the significance and potential that can be found in neutrality—how something can appear neutral but is, in fact, charged with great power of expression.

Working with linen, sheets of lead, oil stick, and shaped stretchers, Kahn constructs what can be considered, for lack of a better term, “specific objects.” Neither painting nor sculpture, in the strict sense of the art forms, they are both, and more.

In process and presentation, ’s work explores the agency involved in myth creation and the psychological and emotional effects of projected fantasy. Self has sustained a practice wholly concerned with Black life and embodiment, with an intended audience from within that same community.

, Infinite Intimates, 2021
© Amy Feldman
, Rainbow Bronze Sun Kissed, 2021
© Tschabalala Self
, Pile of Crescents, 2021
© Wyatt Kahn

01/23/2022

Yves Scherer’s sculptures and lenticular works are alongside paintings by at , New York, until March 5.

In equal measure across media, ’s pieces presented here examine how we interact with each other and how we view ourselves within others. The basic blocks of naive figuration and private life stories compete against celebrity and the spectacle. There is an evolution and display of emotional life: the works may hold poignancy but, more so, moments of wonder, joy, and love. Scherer’s reality is very much like our own, only skewed towards faithfulness as it warps, dreams, and engages.

, Laetitia, 2021
Painted aluminum
160 x 65 x 58.5 cm / 63 x 25 5/8 x 23 in
Unique
© Yves Scherer



Photo: Kyle Knodell

01/21/2022

Louisa Gagliardi’s paintings are alongside new works by Yves Scherer at , New York, until March 5.

insists on the importance of the physical as consistently as she reaches back into the past for its motifs and themes, moments of drama that are indirectly repositioned in her contemporary mix. In a big way, this is work about portraiture and, therefore, exists at a line of the past meeting the total present. Her reinvention of this genre comes at a time when every camera on earth has made its amateur holder a professional at the presentation of self. These paintings adapt social mores to comment on the now while seemingly erasing individual and collective divisions. They are portraits of no one specifically and, therefore, are allowed to be of anyone the viewer imagines. Like avatars in the metaverse, they are empty vessels on which viewers place their own anecdotes, personal chronicles, dreams, and hang-ups.

, Check, Please, 2021
Gel medium, ink on PVC
115 x 150 cm / 45 1/4 x 59 in
© Louisa Gagliardi



Photo: Kyle Knodell

11/30/2021

Athi-Patra Ruga’s ‘Act One …In Tr****ti .’ is at , New York, until December 18.

The South African artist Ruga transforms contemporary myth-making into a tool of q***r statecraft through his ongoing exploration of Azania. Based on the ancient name used to refer to portions of pre-colonial Africa (including present-day South Africa), “Azania” was repurposed by the anti-apartheid movement as a rallying cry for freedom.

Departing from the artist’s earlier emphasis on the history of colonialism, Ruga’s most recent works give vivid shape to Azania as part of his larger project ‘The Lunar Songbook’ (a trans-media narrative based on Azania that includes performances, an in-process film, and visual artworks). Moving between drawings, paintings, and tapestries, Azania comes into focus as a metaverse of densely layered imagery in saturated colors, where black, q***r, and femme imaginaries are lionized.

, Act One: Scene 2… Nomalizo at Intonjane
From The Lunar Songbook, 2021
Wool and thread on tapestry canvas
132 x 117 cm / 52 x 46 in
© Athi-Patra Ruga



Photo: Lance Brewer

09/08/2021

Join us for the opening of Amy Feldman's 'Mothercolor,' at , New York, on Friday, September 10, from 6 to 8 pm. We also look forward to presenting new works by Feldman , September 9 to 12.

In several works on view, .Feldman has silkscreened digitally enlarged fabric onto exactingly prepared gray canvas, employing the warp and weft of her chosen medium to indicate planar depth while concurrently nodding to the grid patterns reiterated throughout the exhibition. The artist’s gestural brushstrokes and impasto streaks atop the silkscreen create a dissonance between painted and printed that paradoxically render the distinction between the two obsolete, constantly drawing the viewer’s gaze between foreground and recession, immediacy and preparation. In haptic fashion, the triumvirate layers of silkscreen ink, acrylic paint, and impasto invite interrogation of the relationship between ground and figure, plunging the viewer into a unique optic glow only achieved through the studied accumulation of grays.

, Rough Writing, 2021
Acrylic, silk screen ink, impasto on canvas
200.5 x 200.5 cm / 79 x 79 in
© Amy Feldman



Photo: Lance Brewer

06/03/2021

Our special summer project of paintings by the American artist John Dilg is at , New York. We hope you can join us at today's opening at 39 Great Jones until 8 pm.

John Dilg’s paintings feel like landscapes rather than being such.

Dilg paints metaphors and abstractions using what he calls a mental archive of essential visual forms, drawing on memory and tonalities of color and the sensations they can convey to create an enthralling, symphonic whole that emphasizes stillness and the continuum of time.

The subjects of these works are not the objects that occupy the paintings but the representation of a moment in time in itself.

Used as visual analogs, the shapes and hues in the paintings become the framework to depict the world at large and create the narratives inside the paintings.

Paint is used for the conceptualization of ideas encompassing both the empirical properties of nature and its spiritual transcendence: The restorative possibilities of beauty found in a landscape idealized and therefore transformed.

Text by Eneas Capalbo

, Observatory, 2020
Oil on canvas
40.5 x 51 cm / 16 x 20 in
© John Dilg
Courtesy the artist and , Iowa City



Photo: Lance Brewer

04/12/2021

Alex Hubbard’s ‘In the Near Field’ opens at , New York, this Friday, April 16, 11 am to 8 pm.

Contrary to what you might believe, the chief concern in ’s practice is not painting, its possibilities, and its history; nor is it, as in his videos, the production of comedy glittered with despair. Rather, it is technology, the scientific method, and trying to navigate the wreckage of Modernist reason and logic.

Hubbard’s paintings are material wonders, describing and inscribing the complex processes that eventuate into them as final forms—the mixing and manipulating of various semi-industrial products like resin, urethane, latex, and fiberglass, and the application of semi-industrial processes like UV printing and, in his recent works, the layering of transparent sheets cast from the works topographies’ themselves. In the very latest paintings, Hubbard has turned to applying oil paint atop all this, but that move makes him no less a chemist compared to the typical wielder of sable-tipped brushes.

Excerpt from press release by Domenick Ammirati

Detail © Alex Hubbard

03/26/2021

The artist lost his thumb at Disney World as a child, and opted to replace it with his big toe. He calls this event “the prequel to, or maybe even the cause for” his cut-and-paste aesth…

03/25/2021

Lucas Blalock’s ‘Florida, 1989’ is at , New York, through April 10.

writes for ,
"In his early 40s, Blalock is very much a photographer of his generation — not fully immersed in the fantastical possibilities of digital image manipulation, but not so worried, either, about what those digital fantasies might say about the medium. For him, Photoshop is just one more available tool to be used in constructing large, beautiful, and often confounding still lifes. In 'Haunted Hearth (Witchcraft Advertisement)' (2017-20), a close-up of a stone fireplace at a tacky hotel, he alters the color of the grout and adds in an extra, floating stone, along with its shadow; for 'Blep' (2020), he stuck a lifelike plastic tongue into the mouth of a toy tiger but used no special effects at all.

That dismembered and repositioned tongue isn’t the only visual allusion to the artist’s own missing digit. There are finger-size wooden clothespins overlaid with finger-size black lines, and, in the show’s standout image, 'Reverse Titanic/Hell Is in the Air' (2019), two severed plastic fish heads are locked in a curious embrace. But the real affinity between Blalock’s formative injury and his work is in the overall tone: Like a freakish accident, or a singular trauma, his images are almost too strange and vivid to be made sense of. They must simply be taken as facts."

, Haunted Hearth (Witchcraft Advertisement), 2017 – 2020;
Blep, 2020;
Reverse Titanic / Hell is in the Air; 2019
© Lucas Blalock

03/15/2021

Lucas Blalock’s ‘Florida, 1989’ is at , New York. Blalock’s newest photographs and sculptures can also be explored in the accompanying online viewing room (link in bio).

The show is populated by a bizarre cast of animal familiars and ghostly entities. These kinds of characters have popped up in ’s work before, but they are similarly inflected with new flavors of meaning in the context of this exhibition’s autobiographical turn. For instance, creatures like the disturbingly bulbous-tongued tiger in ‘Blep,’ or the cartoonishly ph***ic squirrel in ‘Squirrel, multigraph,’ seem like they could be members of a troupe like the dwarfs in ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ (1937), if they hailed from a bizzaro Disney universe where libidinal forces were allowed to run wild, rather than remain repressed.

Excerpt from press release by Chris Wiley

, Blep, 2020
Dye sublimation print on aluminum
65 x 47.5 cm / 25 1/2 x 18 3/4 in
© Lucas Blalock

   

Lucas Blalock was ten in 1989, when his thumb was crushed beyond repair in a freak accident on Disney World’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” ride and surgically replaced with his big toe. The procedure was somewhat experimental—only a handful of similar operations had been attempted at the time....

01/13/2021

Tschabalala Self’s ‘Cotton Mouth' at , New York, runs through January 23. We are open Tuesday to Saturday, 11 am to 6 pm.

writes for ,
”... in ’Pocket Rocket,’ a cowgirl in all-American red, white, and blue fires a pistol stage right. Both of these latter images trade knowingly in clichés of gender performance. Yet in the women’s tight smiles, and the ominous suggestion of violence—a small “pocket rocket” handgun is, after all, far more likely to be implicated in urban violence than a stage performance—we feel the sheer, exhausting weight that caricature imposes on the Black experience.

The exhibition’s short but potent title directs attention to this same embodied reality. Self explains it like this: “Cotton mouth is when you can’t speak with ease, or are coerced into sticking to a script that you didn’t write. Cotton mouth is the reality that you’re in, because of repeated damage.” That reality can be seen in multiple contexts, from the socioeconomic to the psychological, but Self is most interested in it as a physiological condition. She is an artist making a material world, after all; she registers racism as a palpable force, an assault on the body as well as the mind.’

, Pocket Rocket, 2020
Digital print on canvas, denim, fabric, thread, painted canvas, dyed canvas, acrylic and hand mixed pigments on dyed canvas
244 x 244 x 4 cm / 96 x 96 x 1 1/2 in
© Tschabalala Self

   


Photo: Matt Grubb