For his first solo presentation with Hauser & Wirth in New York City, Gary Simmons will introduce a new body of work advancing his decades-long exploration into issues that haunt our national psyche––race, representation and collective identity. ‘Thin Ice’ debuts sculpture, paintings and drawings––including a sequence of canvases that isolate and re-purpose archetypal racialized imagery from cartoons of the 1920s and early 1930s, and a site-specific wall drawing referencing one of the most iconic films of the 1960s––to capture the instability and disorientation of the current American moment.

Simmons’ art skates deftly between abstraction and representation via his signature technique of erasure. This formal conceit upends the viewer’s sense of certainty; by degrading familiar icons, he exposes latent meanings and ugly truths lurking just behind the surface of popular imagery. For example, Simmons has consistently used Bosko and Honey, a pair of racist cartoon characters first created in 1928, as avatars of institutionalized racism.

Bosko reappears in ‘Thin Ice’ but with a new and unmistakable urgency. The exhibition opens with a painting that depicts him as a fiddle player frenetically sawing away at his strings. This work signals the start of a performance that will unfold across several successive canvases in which Bosko glides on ice skates to execute a single disjointed pirouette. Together the works achieve the effect of a stop motion film or comic strip. Simmons has blurred the contour lines of Bosko’s whirling figure, an expressive tactic that induces a vicarious sense of dizziness in the viewer.

‘Somewhere, My Love,’ Simmons’ new monumental wall drawing, is his first major site-specific work in New York since his commission for The Drawing Center in 2018. Conceived specifically for this exhibition, it alludes to the unique material history of David Lean’s Academy Award-winning epic ‘Doctor Zhivago’ (1965). Essentially an historical romance, Lean’s classic film recounts the vertiginous mix of idealism, duplicity and dislocation created by the Russian Revolution and subsequent civil war. Simmons’ site-specific work adopts one of the film’s most memorable visuals––a lavishly ice-encrusted palace.

Though its narrative is set in pale, frozen locales during World War I, ‘Doctor Zhivago’ was, in fact, filmed primarily during a winter heat wave in a staged Potemkin village erected near Madrid, Spain, where beeswax and dust from a local marble quarry were repurposed as imitation snow and ice. For Simmons, that feint becomes a stand-in for the artifice and seductive deceit coursing through popular culture and media––and, sometimes, by design, in art itself.

‘Thin Ice’ will also unveil a set of studies that offer glimpses into Simmons’ associative gestural processes, and a new sculpture replete with its own unique set of conceptual and physical paradoxes. Constructed from steel, foam and polyurethane, and finished with automotive paint, ‘Black Frosty’ (2024) resembles a snowman cast in obsidian or coal, his neck ensnared by a 20-foot-long, noose-like, hand-knit scarf made of white wool, suggesting an underlying violence often masked by civility.

An adjacent large-scale painting depicts a constellation of black stars streaming across a hazy blue and white sky, mirroring the inverted color palette of Simmons’ snowman. Here, the heavens are punctuated by points projecting the absence of light and ‘Black Frosty’ remains frozen in time, forever on the verge of dissolution.

Gary Simmons: Thin Ice opens on the 2nd of November, 2024 until the 11th of January, 2025 at Hauser & Wirth New York

©2024 Gary Simmons, Hauser & Wirth

Art Plugged

Art Plugged is a contemporary platform inspired by a relationship with the broader arts communities. We provide our audience with curated insight into the world of art, from exhibitions to artist interviews and more.

GR gallery is pleased to present “Enigmatic Glance,” a group exhibition featuring artists Tania Marmolejo, Tatsuhito Horikoshi, Masumi Yamamoto, and TRNZ. This event will showcase 16 paintings, executed with the artists‘ signature techniques with a specific focus on the characters’ facial expressions and gaze. Through ambiguous countenances, the exhibition attempts to convey the magic of a reinterpreted everyday life.

“Enigmatic Glance“ delves into the neutral expression, reinterpreting it as a subtle form of emotional communication. The expressionless face, often the most natural and frequent in everyday life, is presented in this exhibition as a canvas capable of conveying a wide range of meanings. From this perspective, neutrality is not emptiness but a state rich with potential interpretation.

The artists highlight the inherent beauty of stillness and invite curiosity about the emotions or stories that might lie beneath. Through their works, the exhibition reveals the delicate boundary between emotion and calm, offering a glimpse into the hidden rhythms and mysteries of facial expressions.

Tania Marmolejo captures ambiguous female facial expressions characterized by large eyes, aiming to evoke emotional empathy in viewers. Her work invites audiences to connect deeply with the feelings conveyed.

Masumi Yamamoto draws children adorned in ethnic clothing, infusing her illustrations with a mystifying beauty that explores the originality found across diverse cultures. Through her art, she navigates the enigmatic space between the world and her own experiences.

TRNZ seeks to blur the boundaries between two realms by presenting familiar objects in unfamiliar contexts. His work transforms everyday situations through unique gestures, highlighting the distinctiveness of ordinary items.

Tatsuhito Horikoshi focuses on melancholic expressions drawn from memory and imagination, creating poignant portraits of boys and girls that resonate with feelings of nostalgia and reflection. His work, influenced by manga storytelling techniques, captures the subtle nuances of emotional experiences within the context of societal expectations.

Enigmatic Glance: Tania Marmolejo, Masumi Yamamoto, TRNZ, Tatsuhito Horikoshi opens on the 21st of November, 2024 until the 28th of December, 2024 at GR gallery

©2024 GR gallery

Art Plugged

Art Plugged is a contemporary platform inspired by a relationship with the broader arts communities. We provide our audience with curated insight into the world of art, from exhibitions to artist interviews and more.

Our November exhibition rundown features legendary masters alongside emerging figures reshaping the art world. First up is George Rouy’s Bleed, Part I at Hauser & Wirth London. Rouy presents a new body of work that continues his exploration into collective mass, multiplicity, and movement. The exhibition reflects the emotional extremities of our time, inviting us to contemplate identity and embodiment in our globalised, technologically-driven era.

Next on our list of Five Exhibitions To See In London In November 2024 is David Hockney: Living in Colour at Halycon, showcasing one of the world’s largest collections of Hockney’s graphic works, featuring more than 150 pieces spanning six decades of Hockney’s career, dating from 1961 to 2018, this promises to be a feast for Hockney lovers.

Then, head over to bustling Brixton for one of Britain’s foremost contemporary artists, Frank Bowling‘s Selected Prints at Brixton Library. The exhibition showcases sixteen special edition prints by Bowling in collaboration with DACS and the Sussex-based art publisher King & McGaw. These sixteen giclée prints of Bowling’s masterful abstract paintings, ranging from 1968 to 2020, include his ‘map paintings’ that trace and layer stencils of countries and continents and ‘poured paintings’ where acrylic paint is poured directly onto the canvas.

Next stop on our Five Exhibitions To See In London In November 2024 is American photographer Gregory Halpern’s King, Queen, Knave at HUXLEY-PARLOUR. King, Queen, Knave presents fourteen photographs from Halpern’s latest body of work, photographed over the last two decades, mostly in and around his hometown of Buffalo, New York. The series extends beyond a portrait of place, celebrating the poetic idiosyncrasies of everyday life.

The last stop on our Five Exhibitions To See In London In November 2024 is A Journey through Ancient Inspiration in Modern & Contemporary Art at Mazzoleni, London with Mythology Reinterpreted. The exhibition strives to reinterpret the ancient through the lens of Italian artists Giorgio de Chirico, Salvo, and Giulio Paolini, and Mexican artist Jorge Méndez Blake. Guiding this revaluation of the ancient and drawing us back to the point of inspiration, a series of Roman artefacts will invite us to embark on a journey through the annals of art history while simultaneously demonstrating their continual relevance in contemporary visual culture.

Five Exhibitions To See In London In November 2024

George Rouy: The Bleed, Part I

George Rouy: The Bleed, Part I
​7th October, 2024 – 21st December, 2024
Hauser & Wirth London
​23 Savile Row
​London W1S 2ET

Emerging as a leading figure of the new generation of painters, George Rouy’s debut solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth London, ‘The Bleed, Part I,’ will present a new body of work continuing his inquiry into collective mass, multiplicity and movement. The second chapter, ‘The Bleed, Part II,’ will follow at Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles in February 2025. Rouy’s dynamic and signature use of the human figure, vexed with desire, alienation and crisis, speaks to the emotional extremities of our time, resulting in explorations of identity and embodiment in a globalised, technologically-driven 21st Century

Learn more

David Hockney: Living in Colour

Halcyon is proud to present one of the world’s largest collections of graphics by David Hockney at 148 New Bond Street. “Living in Colour,” which consists of more than 150 works, is also open at its gallery in Harrods. Spanning six decades of his illustrious career, the works date from 1961 to 2018 and include his iconic pool images, self-portraits, portraits of friends, still lifes, and landscapes.

Hockney’s power lies in his virtuosity as a draftsman and colorist, and his appreciation for the everyday. He paints the world around him with bright, bold colors and a restless desire to experiment, epitomizing American modernist Philip Guston’s definition of art as “serious play.”

As an artist, Hockney has always embraced the latest technological innovations. In the 1980s, he harnessed photocopy machines as part of his practice, and more recently, the iPad, which he uses to capture the world as he sees it — through the technicolor guise of the digital age. Visitors will discover various iPad drawings, providing rich insight into his unique exploration of this new medium.

“Living in Colour” also showcases Hockney’s work in the medium of photographic collage, an area of his oeuvre that is sometimes overlooked but in which he was pioneering. In these works, he experimented with unique perspectives and compositions. The exhibition offers a window into Hockney’s personal life: views of his studios, household objects, portraits of friends, family, and his beloved dachshunds — documenting his life and travels from Yorkshire to California.

David Hockney: Living in Colour
Halcyon
10th October, 2024 – 31st December, 2024
148 New Bond Street
London
W1S 2TR

Learn more

Frank Bowling OBE RA: Selected Prints

King & McGaw, the Sussex-based leading art publisher and destination for fine art prints, has partnered with Brixton Library on an exhibition of sixteen special edition prints by Frank Bowling OBE RA, one of Britain’s foremost contemporary artists.

Frank Bowling and DACS – the Design and Artists Copyright Society – began their collaboration with art publishers King & McGaw in 2021. The result is a collection of sixteen giclée prints of Bowling’s masterful paintings ranging from 1968 to 2020.

The collection includes Bowling’s ‘map paintings’ that trace and layer stencils of countries and continents, and ‘poured paintings’ where acrylic paint is poured directly onto the canvas.

Frank Bowling OBE RA: Selected Prints
6th November, 2024 – 31st December, 2024
Brixton Library
Brixton
Oval
London SW2 1JQ

Learn more

Gregory Halpern: King, Queen, Knave

Huxley-Parlour are delighted to present King, Queen, Knave, a new solo exhibition of works by American photographer Gregory Halpern, now open at our Swallow Street gallery. The exhibition will present fourteen photographs from Halpern’s latest body of work, photographed over the last two decades mostly in and around his hometown of Buffalo, New York. The series extends beyond a portrait of place, celebrating the poetic idiosyncrasies of everyday life.

Buffalo acts as a vast stage in Halpern’s series, hosting a cast of people, animals and buildings that pass before the photographer’s lens. At times the city feels outsized for its inhabitants: open spaces appear unvisited; a large factory looms over a solitary figure picking flowers in a meadow; snow- covered streets are left unwalked.

In his photographs, Halpern reimagines the city’s abandoned sites and urban landscape. Once a centre of industry, which has since migrated elsewhere, along with half its population, Buffalo has witnessed significant loss, although a quiet resilience and strange sense of beauty remain.

Gregory Halpern: King, Queen, Knave
31st October, 2024 – 30th November 2024
HUXLEY-PARLOUR
3–5 Swallow Street
London
W1B 4DE

Learn more

Mythology Reinterpreted: A Journey through Ancient Inspiration in Modern & Contemporary Art

Mazzoleni, London is pleased to present the exhibition Mythology Reinterpreted: A Journey through Ancient Inspiration in Modern & Contemporary Art. Opening on 8 October until 6 December, the exhibition strives to reinterpret the ancient through the lens of Italian artists Giorgio de Chirico, Salvo and Giulio Paolini and Mexican artist Jorge Méndez Blake. Guiding this revaluation of the ancient and drawing us back to the point of inspiration, a series of Roman artefacts will invite viewers to embark on a journey through the annals of art history, while simultaneously demonstrating their continual relevance in contemporary visual culture.

Mythology Reinterpreted: A Journey through Ancient Inspiration in Modern & Contemporary Art
8th October, 2024 – 6th December, 2024
Mazzoleni
15 Old Bond Street
London
W1S 4AX

Learn more

Art Plugged

Art Plugged is a contemporary platform inspired by a relationship with the broader arts communities. We provide our audience with curated insight into the world of art, from exhibitions to artist interviews and more.

Huxley-Parlour are delighted to present King, Queen, Knave, a new solo exhibition of works by American photographer Gregory Halpern, now open at our Swallow Street gallery. The exhibition will present fourteen photographs from Halpern’s latest body of work, photographed over the last two decades mostly in and around his hometown of Buffalo, New York. The series extends beyond a portrait of place, celebrating the poetic idiosyncrasies of everyday life.

Buffalo acts as a vast stage in Halpern’s series, hosting a cast of people, animals and buildings that pass before the photographer’s lens. At times the city feels outsized for its inhabitants: open spaces appear unvisited; a large factory looms over a solitary figure picking flowers in a meadow; snow- covered streets are left unwalked. In his photographs, Halpern reimagines the city’s abandoned sites and urban landscape. Once a centre of industry, which has since migrated elsewhere, along with half its population, Buffalo has witnessed significant loss, although a quiet resilience and strange sense of beauty remain.

Eschewing the straightforward approach of traditional documentary photography, Halpern seeks to encapsulate the contradictions and nuances that coalesce in the quotidian. In his compositions, the ‘ugly’ and the ‘beautiful’ coincide: a gable-roofed house is mirrored by its abandoned counterpart that leans precariously towards it; nature reclaims the hollowed out shells of disused spaces and the mundane is transformed into the otherworldly.

Time moves cyclically through the work, slowly unfolding across seasons as palettes of white and grey subside to warmer tones. Stretching time in this way, Halpern’s photographs probe the slippages between entropy and renewal, discerning an inherent hopefulness in our ability for regeneration.

Gregory Halpern: King, Queen, Knave open on the of 31st October, 2024 until 30th November, 2024 at HUXLEY-PARLOUR

©2024 HUXLEY-PARLOUR

Art Plugged

Art Plugged is a contemporary platform inspired by a relationship with the broader arts communities. We provide our audience with curated insight into the world of art, from exhibitions to artist interviews and more.

Gallery 1957 proudly presents Keeping Time, curated by Ekow Eshun and Karon Hepburn. The exhibition opens on the 26th of October in Accra. Keeping Time is a group exhibition that significantly brings together both international and Ghana-based artists from the African diaspora, exploring notions of Blackness, being, and time.

By presenting artworks that are both dream-like and speculative, abstract and figurative, the exhibition questions and disrupts our sense of being in the world through African diasporic perceptions of time.

Keeping Time is presented as a sequel to Gallery 1957’s monumental 2023 group show, In and Out of Time, curated by Ghanaian-British writer and curator Ekow Eshun. The exhibition is a highlight of Accra Cultural Week, taking place from the 24th to the 28th of October 2024—a series of interconnected, intimate, and public events encouraging deeper engagement with Ghana’s vibrant contemporary art scene, spearheaded by Gallery 1957.

The show introduces artists who are exhibiting with Gallery 1957 for the first time, such as Okiki Akinfe, ruby onyinyechi amanze, Alvaro Barrington, Winston Branch, Kenwyn Crichlow, Kimathi Donkor, Ibrahim El-Salahi, Lyle Ashton Harris, Andrew Pierre Hart, Che Lovelace, Sola Olulode, Sikelela Owen, Ravelle Pillay, Elias Sime, Lina Iris Viktor, and Michaela Yearwood-Dan. It also features returning artists such as Gideon Appah, Rita Mawuena Benissan, Amoako Boafo, Phoebe Boswell, Godfried Donkor, Modupeola Fadugba, Julianknxx, Arthur Timothy, and Alberta Whittle.

Perhaps it can be said of all artworks that they affect our perception of time. But in the case of an exhibition of Black artists taking place in Africa, context becomes a significant factor. This exhibition proceeds from an awareness that the experience of time is often a reflection of power relations between societies.

In the Western imagination, people of African descent have historically been seen as the antithesis of Western modernity—considered savage where the West is civilized, ignorant instead of rational, and underdeveloped rather than advanced. Under colonialism, the human-centered perceptions of time that were commonplace in Africa before European presence were subsumed within Western structures of industrial time and order. Indeed, the subjugation of indigenous peoples and their knowledge systems was taken as a prerequisite for advancement into the future.

Against this backdrop of chronopolitics and colonial imposition, Keeping Time explores how the work of artists invites looser and more lyrical readings of time. Conceived as a follow-up to In and Out of Time, the 2023 Gallery 1957 exhibition curated by Ekow Eshun, which was founded on a similar skepticism towards linear notions of progress and modernity, Keeping Time presents works that invoke African diasporic perceptions of time as the inspiration for expansive dreaming and possibility.

These works are conjured on the basis of what the scholar Geneva Smitherman defines as “African People’s Time”: Being in tune with human events, nature, seasons, natural rhythms, not a slave to the artificial time of the man-made clock. Being ‘in time,’ in tune with… the general flow of things [not] being ‘on time’.

To “keep time” in music is to synchronize the work of the individual with the ensemble, all the players tied together by the same rhythm, the same tempo, the same sense of attunement. In the context of this exhibition, keeping time is imagined as a collective act of reaching beyond Western binaries of progress and underdevelopment.

To that end, the exhibition weaves together a lattice of conceptual and aesthetic considerations about the experience of time, spanning intergenerational, geographic, and historical contexts. It gathers works that range from abstraction to figuration, created by a multigenerational span of artists. Senior figures such as Winston Branch and Kenwyn Crichlow, born in the 1940s and 1950s, share the space with younger artists like Sola Olulode, Rita Mawuena Benissan, and Okiki Akinfe, born in the 1990s.

The exhibition also showcases paintings by Caribbean-born artists such as Branch, Crichlow, Che Lovelace, and Alberta Whittle in West Africa for the first time, placing them in dialogue with the work of British and Ghanaian-born artists in a shared exploration of Black diasporic cultural identity as “a state of being and a process of becoming, a condition and consciousness located in the shifting interstices of ‘here’ and ‘there,’ a voyage of negotiation between multiple spatial and social identities” (Paul Tiyambe Zeleza).

Additionally, artists such as Godfried Donkor, Arthur Timothy, and Kimathi Donkor explore the absence or marginalization of the Black figure in Western art history, revisiting the past to offer a reframing of presence and memory that situates Black people at the subjective center, rather than the periphery, of historical narratives. The result is a collection of individual works moving in rhythm and attunement to assert the richness and complexity of Black being and Black movement through the world.

Keeping Time: Curated by Ekow Eshun and Karon Hepburn opens on the 26th of October 2024 until the 11th of January 2025 at Gallery 1957, Ridge – Accra, Ghana

©2024 Gallery 1957

Art Plugged

Art Plugged is a contemporary platform inspired by a relationship with the broader arts communities. We provide our audience with curated insight into the world of art, from exhibitions to artist interviews and more.

Isabel Sullivan Gallery is pleased to announce I Was Carefree, Green, and Golden, a forthcoming group show on view from November 14th – December 31st. The exhibition brings together the work of three female painters: Antonia Caicedo Holguín (b. 1997, Colombia), Joana Galego (b. 1994, Portugal), and Stephanie Monteith (b. 1973, Australia), marking the first occasion some of these artists’ works will be shown in the United States. An opening reception will be held on November 14th, from 6-8 pm at 39 Lispenard Street.

The three artists are linked by a joint interest in and unique approach to the use of color in painting. Each artist draws ideas and images from personal experience, along with the verdant landscapes of their diverse home countries. Overlapping themes include imagination, place and memory, love and connection, everyday life, and the natural world. The title of the show is drawn from the Dylan Thomas poem Fern Hill, a temporal and evocative piece of writing that depicts the pastoral and idyllic scenes of the Welsh countryside, where the writer spent his youth. Collectively, this exhibition invites the viewer to explore their own history and identity, and the spaces we create and inhabit—both past and present, interior and exterior, and empirical and mystical.

Antonia Caicedo Holguín

Antonia Caicedo Holguín is deeply influenced by her hometown of Cali, Colombia, from the people who inhabit the city to the vibrant salsa music and dance culture of the region. Caicedo Holguín’s exuberant paintings are charged with a kinetic and soulful energy that pulls us into compelling scenes of song, dance, and kinship. “A key component of my practice is the playfulness of writing narratives.

The characters I build hold the charm, depth, and presence of literary protagonists.” She works with a variety of materials, including oil paint and unconventional materials like coffee grounds, coffee dyes, natural Latin American pigments, and found objects. Her work focuses on common settings and everyday actions, with a recurring emphasis on human figures.

Joana Galego

Central themes in the romantic paintings of Joana Galego are memory, moments of gathering, and expressions of connection. Galego combines observational drawing, imagination, and reference photos, often starting from a tender personal experience. “Surprise and mystery are important to me. I look for images that deeply engage the senses, mind, and, for lack of a better word, the spirit. I’m particularly interested in making work that asks questions rather than making statements.” Galego grew up in Cascais, Portugal, between the Sintra Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean—a coastal town whose biodiversity profoundly influenced her imagery and imagination.

Galego created a monumental work for this exhibition spanning 10 feet in length, titled Our Mother’s Cloak, a loose reference to Piero della Francesca’s Madonna of Mercy. Our Mother’s Cloak depicts three childlike figures hiding under a cloak, a powerful symbol of protection, concealment, or escape. She probes viewers to question the nature of innocence, purity, and care in compositions that combine the spiritual and physical realms.

Stephanie Monteith

Stephanie Monteith observes objects, interior spaces, landscapes, people, and animals, and their interactions with one another. She is interested in the wonder and interconnectedness of all life. The paintings in the exhibition are from her Suburban Garden Series, depicting her lush garden on the outskirts of Sydney, Australia. She completes her radiant canvases en plein air. “In the mornings the sun comes into the garden and creates color spaces which I observe. I see differences in tone, light, and atmosphere changing all of the time, and I respond with paint.”

Monteith originally set about making a garden that would be interesting to paint. She selected and arranged native Australian plants chosen for their color and texture among some already established vegetation. Having explored this subject from 2018-2022, Monteith created four new garden paintings in 2024 for this exhibition that capture natural transformation and the mood of a place over time.

I Was Carefree, Green, and Golden featuring Antonia Caicedo Holguín, Joana Galego, and Stephanie Monteith opens on the 14th of November, 2024 until the 31st of December, 2024 at Isabel Sullivan Gallery

©2024 Isabel Sullivan Gallery

Art Plugged

Art Plugged is a contemporary platform inspired by a relationship with the broader arts communities. We provide our audience with curated insight into the world of art, from exhibitions to artist interviews and more.

Izaak Brandt presents No Place Like Home, a new solo exhibition running from 17 October to 7 November 2024 at 96 Robert St. The exhibition investigates ideas of memory, home, and physical embodiment. This is Brandt’s second solo show of the year and his first at this space.

A bold next step following Brandt’s recent exhibition Sporting Goods, No Place Like Home features a new body of work focusing on ghostly, hand-drawn PLA sculptures alongside new large-format sculptures, performance, film, and sound work. With Bristol, Brandt’s hometown, at the exhibition’s core, the artist explores the spaces and images of his youth—city streets and graffiti culture—to produce ghostly sculptures of items that defined adolescence: shoes, bikes, and caps. Likewise, Brandt uses graffiti as a kind of “tattoo” for his trademark sculptures; just as the human figures act as cyphers for greater, non-corporeal meaning, the application of graffiti, which covers a city’s “skin,” is applied here to the sculptural objects.

Adding to the exhibition is a new film work exploring communication through dance in urban spaces. Exhibited in the basement of the gallery, the film draws on the legacy of pioneer Jonzi D, using locations from Brandt’s childhood as backdrops for his own dance performance. This is paired with music produced by Brandt himself, his brother Magnus, GUTTR, and Digital Angel. Continuing with this theme of memory and evocation, a performance will take place within the gallery at 19:00 on the exhibition’s opening night, drawing the constituent themes full circle.

No Place Like Home marks the first collaboration between Brandt and curators Jacob Barnes and Jonny Tanna. The exhibition reflects Barnes’ first foray into the aesthetics of hip-hop and breaking, alongside Tanna’s career-long commitment to the aesthetics of hip-hop and Black culture at large.

Izaak Brandt: No Place Like Home opens on the 17th of October, 2024 until the 7th of November, 2024 at 96 Robert St

©2024 Izaak Brandt

Art Plugged

Art Plugged is a contemporary platform inspired by a relationship with the broader arts communities. We provide our audience with curated insight into the world of art, from exhibitions to artist interviews and more.

The Stroll Gallery by Stella A&C (hereinafter called The Stroll Gallery), a Hong Kong-based venue that has been introducing the works of Korean artists, will host Kajin Kim‘s solo exhibition <Sensory Utopia: Between Nearness and Distance> from November 2 to December 7. This exhibition will showcase Kim’s innovative multimedia works that explore the desire for communication and contact among isolated individuals in contemporary society.

The artist notes that while technological advancements have facilitated more convenient and unconstrained interpersonal connections, they have also led to extreme separation and disconnection in our direct, physical interactions. For Kim, this human deficiency translates into a longing for reaching mutual boundaries – ‘touch’. The ‘skin membrane’ then emerges as a boundary dividing the interior and exterior of the body, as well as a device representing the scope of the self. 

Kim gives visual and spatial form to this concept of contact. She casts organic-looking images surrounded by membranes in translucent silicone or transfers them onto resin surfaces, installs them on thermoformed transparent acrylic. The light designed to penetrate these transparent surfaces creates and connects the dual spaces of the interior and exterior, penetrating and connecting to form a new sense of space.

The exhibition will feature three new works being unveiled for the first time, alongside the representative Habitable Dialogue and Embedded Embrace series. The opening event on November 2 will include an artist talk with Kim and a performance by contemporary dance artist Hoi Ling. Guests will enjoy traditional Korean alcoholic beverages and refreshments provided by Kave, a premium Korean traditional liquor and culture platform.

As Kajin Kim’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong, <Sensory Utopia> seeks to capture the various movements that emerge at the boundaries of human connection and the efforts to fulfill this desire. The gallery expresses its hope that visitors will experience new emotional connections and explore existential questions through the exhibition.

The exhibition will run from November 2 to December 7 at The Stroll Gallery. For further information, please refer to the gallery’s official website and Instagram, or visit the gallery during the exhibition period.

Kajin Kim: Sensory Utopia: Between Nearness and Distance open 2nd November, 2024 – 7th December, 2024 The Stroll gallery

©2024 The Stroll Gallery

Art Plugged

Art Plugged is a contemporary platform inspired by a relationship with the broader arts communities. We provide our audience with curated insight into the world of art, from exhibitions to artist interviews and more.

King & McGaw, the Sussex-based leading art publisher and destination for fine art prints, has partnered with Brixton Library on an exhibition of sixteen special edition prints by Frank Bowling OBE RA, one of Britain’s foremost contemporary artists.

Frank Bowling and DACS – the Design and Artists Copyright Society – began their collaboration with art publishers King & McGaw in 2021. The result is a collection of sixteen giclée prints of Bowling’s masterful paintings ranging from 1968 to 2020.

The collection includes Bowling’s ‘map paintings’ that trace and layer stencils of countries and continents, and ‘poured paintings’ where acrylic paint is poured directly onto the canvas.

In Dan & Them, 1972 and Bartica, 1968-1969, palimpsests of silkscreened photographs of Bowling’s family emerge through washes of vivid magenta paint, which offers an insight into how the artist has integrated printmaking into his painterly practice. Prints of later works from 2020 convey the artist’s ongoing explorations in the possibilities of paint, as in As Above So Below, Toothpick Painting and Penumbral Lite. All featured in the exhibition Frank Bowling: Land of Many Waters at Arnolfini, Bristol in 2021.

The group of 16 prints also includes Middle Passage, 1970, a rich, warm and vibrant work recently exhibited in the major group show Entangled Pasts, 1768-Now: Art, Colonialism and Change at the Royal Academy of Arts, London.

Founded in Brighton in 1982, King & McGaw exists to celebrate art. The brand supports the work of museums as well as emerging and established artists, to making art accessible to a wide audience. They work with some of the world’s leading cultural institutions including Tate, National Gallery, V&A and MoMa, and are trusted by established artists and their estates, including The Andy Warhol Foundation, Picasso, Matisse and Basquiat.

Frank Bowling OBE RA: Selected Prints opens on the 6th of November, 2024 until the 31st of December, 2024 at Brixton Library

©2024 King & McGaw

Art Plugged

Art Plugged is a contemporary platform inspired by a relationship with the broader arts communities. We provide our audience with curated insight into the world of art, from exhibitions to artist interviews and more.

Curators: Clara Kim, Chief Curator & Director of Curatorial Affairs, and Paula Kroll,
Curatorial Assistant, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in collaboration with Marta Blàvia, Associate Curator at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, with sponsorship from BBK, presents Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom, the artist’s largest survey exhibition in Europe. Featuring over thirty works spanning his career, this exhibition cements Pfeiffer as one of today’s most influential artists.

Born in Honolulu in 1966 and based in New York, Pfeiffer’s multidisciplinary practice—incorporating video, photography, sculpture, and installation—explores themes of spectacle, belonging, and difference. Known primarily for incisive videos derived from a media-saturated world, he questions how images shape spectatorship, posing, “Who’s using who? Is the image making us, or do we make images?”

For over twenty-five years, Pfeiffer has utilized early digital editing tools like Photoshop and QuarkXPress to manipulate footage from sports, concerts, and Hollywood films. Through iterative acts of cutting, splicing, masking, and cloning, his work reveals structures underlying collective memory, evoking repressed fears and desires and anticipating the digital age’s mass sharing of short clips and GIFs. Examining how stadiums and stages have historically functioned as sites for grand spectacles and identity-shaping experiences, Pfeiffer unveils spaces where the body politic—whether of a nation, community, or society—is both defined and contested.

Iconic figures like pop stars, actors, and athletes appear in Pfeiffer’s works, embodying intersections of veneration and objectification that drive mass culture. His use of celebrity culture reflects the global circulation of images, and his works reveal how viewership mechanisms, from architectural spaces to post-production, shape perceptions of self, community, and, at times, nationhood. By restaging collective events where individual identities blur, Pfeiffer highlights how such spectacles foster belonging and identity while underscoring questions of difference and otherness.

In Pfeiffer’s work, shifts from miniature to monumental scale destabilize the “natural” relationship between viewer and object, prompting awareness of our bodies in relation to a broader, constructed world. His iconic early video and photographic works invite close inspection, while recent sculptures and installations immerse viewers in expansive, cinematic experiences.

Inspired by the temporary architecture of a studio soundstage, the exhibition design reflects Pfeiffer’s fascination with Hollywood’s labor-intensive fabrication. His frequent references to filmmaking and the apparatus of the camera evoke iconic scenes embedded in collective memory. The exhibition title, Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom, nods to a pivotal moment in American media history: Cecil B. DeMille’s introduction of The Ten Commandments (1956), an epic that was, at its release, the most expensive film ever made.

Pfeiffer’s biography—spanning childhood in the Philippines and the United States—imparts a transnational perspective on American identity. Deeply engaged with Philippine history and its unique racial, religious, and cultural blend shaped by colonialism and global labor movements, Pfeiffer’s work reflects on diaspora and the complex construction of identity. Through this lens, he investigates a politics of visibility, shaped by mass media, collective entertainment rituals, and popular culture, which, in turn, highlight the intersections of commonality and difference.

Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom opens on the 30th of November, 2024 until the 16th of March, 2025 at Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

©2024 Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Art Plugged

Art Plugged is a contemporary platform inspired by a relationship with the broader arts communities. We provide our audience with curated insight into the world of art, from exhibitions to artist interviews and more.