HURVIN ANDERSON’S “BARBERSHOP” series belongs to a long tradition of painterly fascination with the spaces of social interaction that reflect both the physical realities and ideological aspirations of society at large. Anderson’s exhibition “Salon Paintings” at England’s Hastings Contemporary, organized in collaboration with the Hepworth Wakefield, also in England, and Kistefos Museum in Jevnaker, Norway, brings together a body of work he produced between 2006 and 2023 that portrays, albeit in the loosest sense of the word, men’s hair salons.
View of “Time Travel: Italian Masters Through a Contemporary Lens,” 2023–24. From left: Ross Bleckner, Day and Night, Hour by Hour, 2023; Josephine Halvorson, Smiley Face, 2023. Photo: Jason Mandella.
“Time Travel: Italian Masters Through a Contemporary Lens,” a group exhibition that featured a selection of Renaissance paintings alongside works created by present-day artists, was a type of paragone, except that the debate was not whether painting or sculpture is the superior art form, but whether these historical pieces—executed at a time when grand themes and exquisite craft, among other criteria, determined their value—are better or worse than objects made by artists now, when such antiquated metrics seem well beside the point.
Artforum Magazine (December 5, 2023) – The latest issue features Fifteen Artists reflect on 2023, “Manet/Degas” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, The Top Museum Exhibitions of 2023, The top ten art exhibitions of 2023, and more…
“MANET/DEGAS,” the fall blockbuster at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, begins with an unabashed, double-barreled bang: Édouard Manet’s last great self-portrait, paired up alongside one of Edgar Degas’s first. The juxtaposition provides a thrilling object lesson in the stolid compare-and-contrast curatorial methodology that defines the exhibition, but if it’s meant to show the two artists on an equal footing, it doesn’t stage a fair fight. Forty-six years old when he executed Portrait of the Artist (Manet with a Palette), ca. 1878–79, Manet is at the height of his painterly power, looking backward and forward at once.
Lauren Halsey, the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I), 2022, glass-fiber reinforced concrete. Installation view, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2023. Photo: Hyla Skopitz.
To take stock of the past year, Artforum asked an international group of artists to select a single exhibition or event that most memorably caught their attention in 2023.
KENTURAH DAVIS Lauren Halsey (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) Emerging onto the Met’s rooftop, I’m greeted by sphinxes with faces carved in the likeness of the artist’s loved ones. These figures surround and protect a large architectural monument, its surfaces engraved with coded inscriptions that pay homage to the people and energy of South Central Los Angeles. The structure forgoes the exuberant color I’ve come to expect in Halsey’s work, making me think about the ways Egyptian art and architecture have changed over time—once colorfully embellished, and now animated purely by shadows. In this way, Halsey’s sanctuary suggests that it’s been standing there for millennia, transformed by the sun and communing with the cosmos.
Annette Frick, Ein Augenblick im Niemandsland (A Moment in No Man’s Land), 2010, twenty-one gelatin silver prints, each 15 3⁄4 × 11 3⁄4″.
VAGINAL DAVIS Annette Frick (MARTa Herford, Germany) You can easily get royally preggers if you stand too close to the hairy eyeball of Annette Frick. For more than forty years, the Berlin-based photographer-filmmaker and consummate artiste has been known mainly for her captivating chronicles of underground queer scenes. At her retrospectacle “A Moment in No Man’s Land,” was enchanted by her sensual large-format self-portraits and stunning nude cycle “Aus dem Wasser” (Out of the Water), 2007–2008, referring to mythological figures such as Ondine and Lilith. I had never seen her architecture-portrait hybrids and was mesmerized, wondering just what else she has hidden in her voluptuous archive.
Saâdane Afif, The King Coal Laments, 2023, coal sculptures by miners, UV prints on aluminum, wood, aluminum trusses. Installation view, Wilhelm Hallen, Berlin. Photo: Andrea Rossetti.
ANRI SALA Saâdane Afif (Wilhelm Hallen, Berlin) It’s difficult to express the poetry and poignancy of Saâdane Afif’s exhibition “The Coalman,” part of the artist’s larger endeavor to give form to a heptahedron. Here, the artist installs his personal collection of coal sculptures handcrafted by miners in their spare time alongside Is it possible that you have no coal left?, 2023, a facsimile of a letter from French composer Claude Debussy to his coal merchant, penned during the particularly severe winter of 1916–17. The repurposed missive serves as a coda to the exhibition as a whole, posing a question that resonates in manifold ways in the present (perhaps even applying to a shortage of new forms).
Ken Kiff, Man and Blue Mask, ca. 1975, oil on panel, 31 7⁄8 × 24″.
Gagosian Quarterly (Winter 2023) – The new issue features Annie Cohen-Solal who writes about the exhibition A Foreigner Called Picasso, at Gagosian, New York, detailing the genesis of the project, her commitment to the figure of the outsider, and Picasso’s enduring relevance to matters geopolitical and sociological. Connecting the dots among the Surrealist milieu, including Picasso, a conversation on the underrecognized photographer Lee Miller sets the stage for a New York show about her work, friendships, and collaborations with fellow artists.
Cocurator of the exhibition A Foreigner Called Picasso, at Gagosian, New York, Annie Cohen-Solal writes about the genesis of the project, her commitment to the figure of the outsider, and Picasso’s enduring relevance to matters geopolitical and sociological.
By Annie Cohen-Solal
I have been interested in the issue of immigration ever since I entered the art world. I began my career as an intellectual historian: I was a scholar of Jean-Paul Sartre and wrote his first biography. It was quite unexpected that I would fall into the orbit of the art world, let alone so fast, but two days after I arrived in New York City, in 1989—I had just been nominated cultural counselor to the French Embassy in the United States—I met Leo Castelli at a dinner. Out of the blue, Leo told me, “You don’t look like your predecessors.” (I was the first woman in the position.) “You’ll take New York city by storm and I’ll teach you American art. Come to the gallery tomorrow, I have a show with Roy [Lichtenstein]. Come for the opening and stay for the dinner.”
The American Surrealist photographer Lee Miller is the subject of the exhibition Seeing Is Believing at Gagosian, New York. Here we present a conversation on the stewardship of Miller’s legacy, her photography and writing from the frontlines of war to the pages of Vogue, and the intertwined lives of her friends, lovers, and the many artists she knew.
Hauser & Wirth – Art Gallery (November 11, 2023) = Gerhard Richter, born in 1932, is one of the most important and celebrated artists of our time. His works can be found in international collections and have been exhibited in numerous museums and galleries in Europe and the United States. Richter first vacationed in the Swiss Alpine village Sils, located in the Upper Engadin region, in 1989, a location he has regularly visited during both summer and winter holidays for over 25 years.
Curated by Dieter Schwarz and presented across three venues in the Upper Engadin—Nietzsche-Haus, the Segantini Museum and Hauser & Wirth St. Moritz—this momentous exhibition is the first to explore Gerhard Richter’s deep connection with the Engadin’s alpine landscape. More than seventy works from museums and private collections—including paintings, overpainted photographs, drawings and objects—are testament to the artist’s fascination with the Upper Engadin. Opening 16 December 2023, ‘Engadin’ will be on view through 13 April 2024.
The work connecting the three exhibition venues is a steel sphere that Richter had produced as an edition, on view at each site. He first presented it at Nietzsche-Haus in 1992, in an exhibition curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist. Each unique sphere bears the name of a mountain in the Upper Engadin. The matte, subtly reflective, almost surreal sphere delicately reflects all that surrounds it. It symbolizes the sublime yet inhospitable manifestations of nature, which are especially conspicuous in the mountains.
On view at the Segantini Museum and Hauser & Wirth are paintings that Richter created from photographs taken during his hikes in the Upper Engadin. These works mark a new chapter in his landscape painting—a genre that had always appealed to him for its supposed untimeliness. Richter’s Engadin landscapes are exemplary of the ambiguity in his painting, oscillating between a seductive transfiguration of nature and a reflection of its alienness. Particularly noteworthy is the painting ‘Wasserfall (Waterfall)’ (1997) from Kunst Museum Winterthur, a work that clearly traces Richter’s engagement with 19th-century painting, from romanticism to realism. The artist later overpainted some of the Engadin motifs, including depictions of Piz Materdell and Lake Sils, transforming them into abstract paintings with a melancholic atmosphere that responds to impressions of the landscape.
Gagosian is pleased to present A Foreigner Called Picasso at its West 21st Street gallery in New York. The exhibition is curated by the eminent writer, biographer, and historian Annie Cohen-Solal together with art historian Vérane Tasseau. It is organized in association with the Musée national Picasso–Paris and the Palais de la Porte Dorée–Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration, Paris.
Spanning the entirety of Pablo Picasso’s career in France from 1900 through 1973, the exhibition will feature loans of important works from private and public collections in the United States and Europe. It includes early self-portraits lent by the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, as well as Cubist and Surrealist masterpieces from the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel. The iconic sculpture Head of Fernande (1909) will be displayed, as will Man with a Lamb (1943)—Picasso’s forceful response to the aesthetics of Arno Breker (Adolf Hitler’s favorite artist), who exhibited in occupied Paris.
ART VISION TV / C&B JOURNAL (October 19, 2023) – The inaugural edition of Paris+ par Art Basel brought together 156 premier galleries from 30 countries and territories – including 61 exhibitors with spaces in France – in a new flagship event that further amplifies Paris’s international standing as a cultural capital.
A strong line-up of galleries from France was joined by exhibitors from across Europe, Africa, Asia, North and South America, and the Middle East for a global showcase of the highest quality. Reaching beyond the Grand Palais Éphémère, the fair presented an active cultural program from morning to night, all week, and throughout the city, through a robust program of collaborations with Paris’s cultural institutions and its city-wide sector Sites.
Phillips (September 18, 2023) – From Phillips’ London gallery, Specialist and Head of Sale Rebecca Tooby-Desmond provides an expert look into a selection of pop art staples, including Roy Lichtenstein’s ‘Two Nudes,’ Robert Indiana’s ‘The Book of Love,’ and Andy Warhol’s ‘Electric Chairs.’
Pace Gallery (September 14, 2023) – From his studio in Brooklyn, New York, Jules de Balincourt discusses his new suite of paintings on view as part of “Midnight Movers,” his debut exhibition with our gallery in New York and his first solo show in the city in a decade.
Working spontaneously, de Balincourt develops his expressive paintings through an improvisational approach that borders on abstraction. In this new interview, the artist dissects his process and the ways that he explores the natural world, globalization, technology, and psychology in his works.
Phillips (September 5, 2023) – From Phillips’ London photo studio, Head of Sale Rebecca Tooby-Desmond uncovers the masterful manipulation of perspective that characterizes David Hockney’s work.
DAVID HOCKNEYHotel Acatlán: Second Day, from Moving Focus, 1984-85
DAVID HOCKNEYPembroke Studio Interior, from Moving Focus, 1984
Gagosian Gallery Films (September 1, 2023) – Into Nature is an exhibition of new and recent ceramic and bronze sculptures, paintings, and works on paper by Setsuko at the gallery in Gstaad.
Since 1977, Setsuko has resided in the Grand Chalet of Rossinière, close to Gstaad, making this an opportunity for her to exhibit within reach of her Swiss home. Into Nature furthers the bodies of work presented in Into the Trees, Setsuko’s debut exhibition at Gagosian Paris in 2019, and Into the Trees II, a solo presentation at Gagosian Rome in 2022.
On view in Gstaad are new ceramic sculptures, produced at Astier de Villatte’s Paris workshop and made of terra-cotta glazed in white enamel. Setsuko’s renderings of trees, with their delicately modeled representations of acorns, blooms, foliage, and fruit, emphasize the rooted solidity of their trunks to convey lasting strength and emergent growth. Reminiscent of Japanese ceramics dating back to the age of Jōmon earthenware (c. 10,500–300 BCE), these works also refer to the animistic Japanese religion Shintō, to which trees are of central symbolic importance.
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious
Hauser & Wirth – Art Gallery
Phillips
DAVID HOCKNEY Hotel Acatlán: Second Day, from Moving Focus, 1984-85
DAVID HOCKNEY Pembroke Studio Interior, from Moving Focus, 1984
Boomers Daily 