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    A New Show at MCA Denver Reins in the Myth of the Cowboy With Works by John Baldessari, Amy Sherald, and More

    Hold onto your cowboy hats. This is no ordinary Western art show.
    The simply titled “Cowboy” opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver on September 29 and it’s sure to garner major attention in the Western U.S. and beyond.
    The show, organized by curators Nora Burnett Abrams and Miranda Lash, takes aim at the mythic figure, which they describe as “one of the most fraught and persistent figures in contemporary American culture.” The show raises questions such as how the myth of the cowboy exists today and how this archetype of masculinity shaped how we think about gender now. It further delves into cowboys’ relationship to the land through a series of broad perspectives and aims to debunk the homogenous concept of the cowboy as a white male.
    Karl Haendel, Rodeo 11 (2023). Image courtesy the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles, Mitchell- Innes & Nash, New York, and Wentrup Gallery, Berlin
    “There is no mythic figure who is more grand and complicated than the cowboy,” said Burnett Abrams in a phone interview. Originally, she said, she was looking into the history of the Black cowboy, but over the course of years of conversations, the concept was broadened.
    “We approached it from all angles,” said Lash, including very much from the side of satire and critique, but also from the perspective of “homage,” with artists incorporating the stories of their own family members. “The stories range from the deconstructive impulse to the very personal. Cowboys are just so much more diverse than what gets depicted in the mainstream media.”
    While the show starts with some classic blue-chip names and works like a John Baldessari (The Space Between Hat Rock and Shadow), Richard Prince’s famous Marlboro Man photo, and Andy Warhol’s film of a horse, it quickly delves into the contemporary and ultra-contemporary realm with 27 artists spanning 70 works.
    Stephanie Syjuco, Set Up (The Broncho Buster 2) (2022). Image courtesy the artist, Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco; RYAN LEE Gallery, NewYork; and Silverlens, Manila.
    Take for instance Stephanie Syjuco’s photographs of Frederic Remington’s famous bronze sculptures of bucking broncos in the Amon Carter collection that depict them being measured with tape and alluding to the popularity of—and poking fun at—the sculptures and replicas on CEO desks across the country as symbols of bravura. “She jokes about how it’s such a popular bronze on the desks of corporate executives because it connects so deeply with this idea of the rugged individual, the entrepreneur, the man who sets his own terms,” said Lash.
    The two curators said the tagline for the show could be: “This is not your grandfather’s Remington.”
    Another topic that the show tackles is the “very problematic binary of the cowboy versus Indian, which is just an invention,” said Burnett Abrams.
    Grace Kennison, I Remember Being Alone (2023). Image courtesy the artist.
    One of the artists included in the show is Oklahoma native Nathan Young, whose art delves into his family history with parents who are of the Pawnee and Delaware Tribe. The multi-disciplinary artist delves into Pawnee rodeo culture in this series of work in the show.
    And four contemporary artists, including Rafa Esparza, Young, and Colorado-based artists R. Alan Brooks and Gregg Deal were commissioned to make work for the show.
    “There are those who are Native American or are of Native American descent who actively participate in cowboy culture,” said Lash. “There is not that distinction or binary.”
    Burnett Abrams said: “Our ambition is to expand the story and I think that for those who are ready to be a part of that, it’s going to be amazing.”
    “Cowboy” is on view at MCA Denver, 1485 Delgany Street, Denver, through February 18, 2024.

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    A Show at the Louvre’s Satellite Space Brings Together Artistic Depictions of Mythical Creatures, From Lion-Headed Eagles to Unicorns. See Them Here

    When the animal kingdom met the artistic imagination, the result was a whole zoo full of fantastical creatures from dragons to unicorns, phoenixes to sphinxes. These strange mythological beasts haven usually taken on symbolic significance, and reappeared time and again in art made by different cultures across time, as shown by an ambitious new survey of more than 250 objects opening this fall at the Louvre-Lens.
    This wide-ranging, whistle-stop tour starts off in the Bronze Age. The oldest surviving fragments of cave art are proof enough that humans have long been driven to depict the wonders of the natural world, but it wasn’t long before we started taking a bit of creative license. One of the show’s earliest exhibits, a Mesopotamian seal cylinder that dates back to 3300–3000 B.C.E., features a lion-headed eagle.
    As pagan beliefs died out in favor of modern religion, biblical tales still kept audiences in awe by having their brave saints slay the same dragons that had once been popularized by ancient Greek mythology. Majestic, make-believe beasts were not always our adversaries, however, but often had magical powers of healing or protection.
    The exhibition won’t leave visitors in the dark ages, but instead goes on to explore how mythological creatures have continued to enthrall new audiences. It turns out that the wild visions of Romantic artists like Henry Fuseli and the Pre-Raphelite painter Edward Burne-Jones have plenty in common with the science fiction and comic books that are so popular today.
    “Fantastic Animals” is on view at Louvre-Lens, 99 Rue Paul Bert, 62300 Lens, France, from September 27, 2023 through January 15, 2024.
    Preview artworks from the exhibition below.
    Jean Gargot, Big Ghoul (1677). Photo: Christian Vignaud, © Musée de Poitiers.
    Nicolas Buffe, Peau de Licorne (2011) Photo: © Cité internationale de la tapisserie, Aubusson, © Nicolas Buffe.
    Jean-Auguste-Dominqiue Ingres, Roger freeing Angelica (1819). Photo: Franck Raux, © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre).
    Figurine of the demon Pazuzu (911-604 B.C.E.). Photo: Thierry Olivier, © Musée du Louvre, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais.
    Will Cotton, Roping (2019–20). Photo courtesy of the artist and Templon, Paris-Bruxelles-New York, © Will Cotton © ADAGP, Paris 2023.
    Henry Fuseli, Thor fighting the serpent of Midgard (1790). Photo: © akg-images, Royal Academy of Arts, London.
    Molding of a relief depicting a mythological scene, (c. 1200-1100 B.C.E.). Photo: Raphaël Chipault, © Musée du Louvre, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais.
    Paolo Uccello, Saint George Fighting the Dragon (c. 1440). Photo: Agence Bulloz, © RMN-Grand Palais.
    Thomas Grünfeld, Misfit (flamingo-pig) (2005). Photo: © Galerie Jousse Lothar Schnepf © ADAGP, Paris, 2023.
    Gustave Moreau, The traveler or Oedipus the traveler (1888). Photo: René-Gabriel Ojeda, © RMN Grand Palais.
    Walter Andrea, Dragon-serpent on Ishtar Gate (1902). Photo: Andres Kilger, © BPK, Berlin, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais.
    Cylinder seal depicting lions and an eagle (3300-3000 BEC). Photo: Franck Raux, © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre).
    Edward Burne-Jones, The Doom Fulfilled (1884-1885). Photo: Paul Carter – Bridgeman Images, © Southampton City Art Gallery.
    An acquamanile (vessel). Photo: Jean-Gilles Berizzi, © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre).
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    See Kehinde Wiley’s New Suite of Presidential Portraits That Depict African Heads of State With an Ornate ‘Vocabulary of Power’

    A new series of presidential portraits by Kehinde Wiley just went on view in Paris—but you won’t find Barack Obama’s face among them. On view, instead, are ornate paintings of Macky Sall, Nana Akufo-Addo, and other African heads of state. 
    These make up Wiley’s “A Maze of Power” series, which the artist has quietly been working on since 2012—years before he was tapped by President Obama. The new artworks are, in Wiley’s words, an effort to look at the African presidencies through the lens of Western European art history. 
    “What happens when we use the language of aesthetic domination in the context of Africa in the 21st century?” the artist said in a short film he made to accompany the project. “Is it possible to use the language of empire, as it related to painting, in an African context, and arrive on the other side with something completely new? This body of work supposes that there is.” 

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    The portraits debuted today in a Galerie Templon-sponsored exhibition at Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac. Among those depicted in the show are Olusegun Obasanjo, the former President of Nigeria; Hery Rajaonarimampianina, the former leader of Madagascar; and Félix Tshisekedi, the current President of Democratic Republic of Congo.  
    Wiley, who initially set out to paint all 54 African presidents, visited each of his subjects on their own turf, in sites of their choosing. He brought with him a book of aristocratic, noble, and military portraits from the 17th to 19th centuries, introducing what he called a “vocabulary of power that each one of the presidents could choose to work with, or choose to ignore.” 
    Installation view of “Kehinde Wiley: A Maze of Power” at The Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac museum in Paris, 2023. Photo: Julien de Rosa/AFP via Getty Images.
    The “Maze of Power” referred to in the show’s title is one that exists between Wiley and his subjects, the artist explained. “‘The Maze of Power’ is the maze that’s being run by me the artist, but also by the sitter—the sitter deciding how they want to be seen, me responding to their set of decisions,” Wiley said in his film. “Each one of us are responding to a received history of image-making, power, and the ways in which art function within that dynamic.” 
    Portrait of Denis Sassou Nguesso, President of the Congo’s Republic (2023) on view at “Kehinde Wiley: A Maze of Power” at The Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac museum in Paris, 2023. Photo: Julien de Rosa/AFP via Getty Images.
    In producing his series, Wiley made a point not to talk politics, just pictures. The series, he explained, is not a “celebration of individual leaders,” but a “look at the presidency itself.”  
    “The very act of creating a set of portraits in Europe, and now using that language in Africa, creates an… interesting provocation,” the artist went on. “This is an invitation for the viewer to expand the possibilities of what it means to look at art in Africa, about Africa, and about power.” 
    “Kehinde Wiley: A Maze of Power” is on view at Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, 37 Quai Jacques Chirac, Paris, France, through January 14, 2024.

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    What I’m Looking at: Michael Rakowitz Makes a Meta-Monument, the Debate Over ‘Art Without Men,’ and Other Things at the Edge of Art

    “What I’m Looking at” is a monthly column where I digest art worth seeing, writings worth reading, and other tidbits. Below, thoughts from the end of August and the beginning of September.
    Tower of Power
    The favorite thing I’ve seen recently is this sculpture by Matjames Metson, shown solo in a back room at George Adams Gallery in New York (on view through October 28). A Tower (2023) is a seven-and-a-half-foot-tall garage-art labor of love, made over the course of 14 years. It has a funk-and-junk aesthetic, but with a flair all its own, bringing a Joseph Cornell-esque interest in antique photographs and psychically charged bric-a-brac to the alter-like object.
    It’s full of scrappy flourishes: little pocket knives displayed in tiny windows, details made of pearl buttons, rows of sharpened pencils that resemble Gothic ornament, collaged bits of old love letters salvaged from estate sales. A Tower seems to be a structure almost literally built out of memories of a world of tactile creativity. It’s just very fun to spend time circling it, looking for all the little secrets Metson has nested within all its crannies and compartments.
    Matjames Metson, A Tower (2023) at George Adams Gallery. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Matjames Metson, A Tower [detail] (2023) at George Adams Gallery. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Catching up to Kené
    I only know about Sara Flores’s abstractions what I read in the gallery material for her show, “Soi Biri,” at Clearing (on view through October 22): that the artist hails from the Shipibo-Conibo people of the Peruvian Amazon; that the artworks draw on kené, a visual language of intricate, all-over, maze-like designs; that the vibrating patterns connect symbolically to the characteristic hallucinations seen in an ayahuasca ceremony; that the finished paintings are meant to have healing properties; that their medium, “vegetal pigments on wild cotton,” also suggests a closeness to nature.
    The backstory is important, though I think that if you look at Flores’s artworks, you do feel immediately that they are more than just patterns. The works I like best at Clearing are those like Untitled (Shao Maya Punté Tañan Kené 1, 2023) (2023), where the individual areas have the most differentiation, while still maintaining the impression of a total repeating whole. In general, their effect lies in a first perception of a rigorously harmonious overall order that, upon closer examination, reveals itself to be constructed using a grammar of individual marks that do not repeat. That particular balance does feel like it naturally reflects a particular intuition about the cosmic order.
    Sara Flores, Untitled (Shao Maya Punté Tañan Kené 1, 2023 (2023) at Clearing. Photo by Ben Davis.

    A Monument to the “Monument Conversation”
    At Jane Lombard, Michael Rakowitz’s Frankenstein’s Monster of a sculpture, American Golem, is a gawky anthropomorphic assemblage formed of fragments of other sculptures, models, maquettes, and artifacts all related to public artworks. On each element, Rakowitz has scrawled some graffiti, noting facts about the various public artworks, their materials’ origins, and the debates they are caught up in. As a whole, it’s a memorial of the heated debates over what gets celebrated in public, turbo-charged by the big protests of 2020.
    You might do a reading of American Golem where the didactic, late-conceptual graffiti elements aren’t just commentary on the past but also one more layer in a critical history of how monuments express power in the United States. The “monument conversation,” after all, has been both a needed reckoning with history and a way for liberal metropolises to deflect attention away from more intractable issues and into conciliatory public art commissions.
    Maybe that’s me reading against the grain of Rakowitz’s interests—although the accompanying sculpture Behemoth, a black tarp that ceaselessly inflates into a monument-sized mass and then deflates, does convey a low-key ominous sense of a conversation stuck in a loop.
    Michael Rakowitz, American Golem (2023) at Jane Lombard. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Michael Rakowitz, American Golem (2023) at Jane Lombard. Photo by Ben Davis.

    Cinema of Forgetting
    I just missed writing about Let’s Talk at Brooklyn’s experimental art hangout Kaje before it closed—but it’s still worth remarking on because Simon Liu is one to watch.
    His fragmentary images may feel a bit hard to orient yourself within. It helps to know the project Liu has been working on in previous works: to capture, via a kind of memory-collage effect, how images of Hong Kong are remembered, forgotten, and change meaning as the actual texture of the city itself shifts in the wake of the recent political crackdown. If you keep that framework in mind, the unmoored quality of Let’s Talk‘s floating fragments becomes more and more poignant.
    One thing about Liu’s work that rewards your attention is how the multiple video channels of his installations repeat the same images across different surfaces—but also diverge at moments. Suddenly, if you’re paying attention, one channel seems to be leading the other, or an alternative version of a scene starts playing out, sometimes almost without you realizing it. That’s another way that Let’s Talk feels like being inside the mental process of trying to reconcile multiple images from the past into one thought, even as its meaning slips away.
    Simon Liu, Let’s Talk (2023) at Kaje. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Simon Liu, Let’s Talk (2023) at Kaje. Photo by Ben Davis.

    Peak Pike
    I can’t get these raw wooden sculptures by Shana Hoehn at Jack Barrett Gallery out of my head (they are on view in a two-person show called “To Look is to Eat,” alongside Yan Xinyue, through October 21). Honestly, how great is Pike II (2023), this image of a folded woman’s body draped impossibly across a swan’s neck like a scarf? This kind of folk-surrealist carpentry vibe is just very fun to watch an artist play around with.
    Shana Hoehn, Pike II (2023) at Jack Barrett. Photo by Ben Davis.

    The Story of Art Without Men Lacks More Than Just Men
    Worth clicking into: critic Jillian Steinhauer’s balanced but sharply deflating review of Katy Hessel’s The Story of Art Without Men from The New Republic. Steinhauer finds a certain impressionistic quality to the facts within Hessel’s much-touted counter-history. She also points out that the origin story for Hessel’s entire Instagram-account-turned-podcast-turned-book—a visit to a 2015 Frieze Masters where Hessel says she was stunned to realize that “not a single [artwork] was by a woman” turns out to have a certain exaggerated-for-effect, Hassan Minhaj quality to it (Louise Bourgeois, Carmen Herrera, and Bridget Riley were all big sellers that year).
    But really, Steinhauer is using the reception of The Story of Art Without Men to get at something bigger: the relationship—or non-relationship—of pop feminist art history to the robust, complex, critical, decades-long legacy of serious feminist art history, and the question of how much is being lost in the meme-ificiation of its insights. (Who can forget the high-end “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” fashion line of a few years ago?) Steinhauer argues that the way that Hessel treats artists’ stories, through a lens “tinged with the boosterism of girlboss feminism,” means that they all start to sound the same, even as consequential differences among women go untalked-about. And basically, she just thinks we should demand more, after a half century of feminist scholarship, than this.
    Katy Hessel attends the Mango Loves London celebration of the new London flagship store on November 11, 2021 in London, England. (Photo by David M. Benett/Dave Benett/Getty Images for Mango)

    The “Painting, Painting, Painting” Moment
    If I told you I went to the Armory Show earlier this month, looked around, and mainly thought “wow, that’s a lot of painting!”… well, I would only be repeating exactly what Jerry Saltz said earlier this year about Frieze New York. The fact that we’re stuck with this thought is part of this problem, but it’s true. If you walk around all the galleries right now, what you will see overwhelmingly is painting, painting, and more painting—and mainly mid-sized, colorful paintings.
    You can say that there’s always been lots of painting. Painting is the ur-gallery art. True—but the present state of affairs is kind of analogous to how, for a long period, people were complaining about how Hollywood was putting out so many sequels and superhero films—and then suddenly there was a moment where it really was like, wow, everything really is a sequel or a superhero movie, and anything riskier than that does feel like it’s shriveling away.
    Don’t get me wrong, I like painting. Painters are cool. Every time I go out, I see painting I like. But art’s an ecosystem, and ecosystems need species diversity.
    What does it mean? My guess is that it represents a flight to the safety of the easiest sales pitch: art as investment-grade décor. Given the deep economic queasiness behind the scenes in the art world right now, that is how I am interpreting the “painting, painting, painting” moment, rather than as a real renaissance of contemporary painting. It’s an odd effect—all this genial, colorful painting expressing all that nervousness underneath.
    Luce Gallery at the 2023 Armory Show VIP Preview at Javits Center on September 07, 2023 in New York City. (Photo by Sean Zanni/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)

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    Artist Carmen Winant’s New Show Turns an Intimate Eye on the Subtle—Even Banal—Realities of Abortion Care

    The title of Carmen Winant’s new exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, “The last safe abortion,” does not really describe the thousands of archival photographs that line its walls.  
    Set in women’s health clinics, Winant’s pictures don’t depict the procedure, but the behind-the-scenes work that makes it possible. Shown are staffers answering phones, filing paperwork, scheduling appointments. Far from the sensationalized propaganda peddled by right-wingers, these images are, by design, downright banal. 
    In compiling the photos, which she culled from clinics, universities, and local historical societies throughout the Midwest, Winant said she was thinking about the “visuality of abortion care” and “what it would mean to countermand right-wing efforts to traumatize.”  
    “For me,” she explained, “that meant meeting it with images of care, however ‘unphotographic’ they may be.” 
    A photograph on view in Carmen Winant’s “The last safe abortion” at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Courtesy of Iowa Women’s Archive, University of Iowa.
    More than a photographer, Winant is an accumulator. For works like My Birth (2018) and Pictures of Women Working (2016–22), she amasses huge troves of found images and other printed material, then displays them without adornment or manipulation. Only occasionally does she include her own photos, and even then she doesn’t draw attention to them. Preservation is a fundamental facet of her practice; so is the simple gesture of showing events and people that we know but rarely consider. 
    Both imperatives are at the heart of “The last safe abortion.” So is an undeniable sense of urgency: the show arrives at a time when access to abortion and other reproductive services is rapidly being curbed throughout the country following the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe vs. Wade last year. Health facilities were shuttering even as the artist visited them. 
    The name of the exhibition reflects that precarity. It came from Winant’s conversations with clinic physicians and directors who offered—“almost verbatim,” she noted—the same shared pledge: “We will provide the last safe abortion.”       
    “It really struck me as so powerful. It felt at once so resilient, so resolute and determined, but also, at the same time, so elegiac.” For these facilities, she pointed out, “it was not a question of if, but when.”  
    Installation view of Carmen Winant’s “The last safe abortion” at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, 2023. Courtesy of MIA.
    Move close to museum’s walls and you’ll begin to pick out recurring faces and places and rituals. Beyond the logistical work, we also see clinicians mingling, drinking, sharing smiles and slices of cake at staff birthday parties. Quickly it becomes clear that what’s at stake in a reversed-Roe world is not just access to abortion, but also the livelihoods of the people that enable it. 
    In another artist’s hands, you might wonder if the use of so many pictures undermines these subjects’ individual stories. Does the quantity of the work depersonalize it? Would a few good pictures make for a more potent portrait of the issue at hand than thousands of them?  
    Winant, to her credit, doesn’t sacrifice intimacy through scale; she uses scale to embody intimacy. You can walk into her installation, let it surround and hug you. Ultimately, what’s on view is not a portrait of individuals, but of communities, coalitions, and groups united in a fight.  
    A photograph on view in Carmen Winant’s “The last safe abortion” at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Courtesy of Special Collections, Cleveland State University.
    Volume is not just an artistic strategy for Winant. It’s also a political one.  
    “I have thought so much about what it takes to build social alliances,” she said, noting a long-held interest in the history of radical movements and the tried-and-true grassroots formula of disseminating information as widely as possible. “That’s what it takes. Much like working in an abortion clinic and answering the phone, there’s something that’s so unglamorous about it,” she added.
    “If you’ve ever done any work in organizing, you know it’s endless spreadsheets and meetings. That’s how shit gets done.”
    “The last safe abortion” is on view at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, 2400 3rd Ave S, Minneapolis, through December 31.

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    A Stunning Show of Portraits by Barkley Hendricks Has Opened at the Frick, Where the Artist Was Once Inspired by Old Masters

    It was two years ago that curator and writer Antwaun Sargent first floated the idea of a show on Barkley Hendricks when he and Frick research associate Aimee Ng were discussing a good contemporary artist candidate for a show at the museum’s temporary home on Madison Avenue in the famous Breuer building.
    “It was not an artist that I knew very well,” admitted Ng. “I’m a specialist in Italian Renaissance painting,” she said during their opening remarks at the packed press preview for “Barkley Hendricks: Portraits at the Frick” that opened yesterday (September 20).
    In the two years that ensued, leading up to the show, Ng, Sargent and other staffers learned plenty about the pioneering Black artist, including the influence of Old Masters on his own painting and the extensive time he spent in front of these works during his travels in Europe and of course at one of his favorite museums, the Frick. The result is the series of vivid portraits that he became famous for, ranging from family and friends to random people he encountered and photographed on the street. The show also marks the first-ever exhibition the Frick has dedicated to a Black artist.
    The show of just over a dozen stunning portraits is hung on the Frick’s fourth floor galleries, surrounded by historic portraits by James McNeill Whistler and Joshua Reynolds. Visitors stepping off the elevator on the fourth floor are greeted by a 1969 Hendricks portrait, Lawdy Mama, of his relative Kathy Williams that was inspired by Byzantine and Italian Renaissance paintings. Like those painters before him, Hendricks taught himself the painstaking process of applying gold leaf after a trip to Europe in 1966. Meanwhile the title was inspired by the lyrics of Nina Simone. Lawdy Mama sets the tone for the show, with the striking painting flanked by 18th-century white marble busts.
    Barkley L. Hendricks, APB’s (Afro-Parisian Brothers) (1978). Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund. Artwork: © Barkley L. Hendricks; courtesy of the Estate of Barkley L. Hendricks and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
    The artist “was a voracious museum-goer with a keen eye for historical techniques, styles, and solutions, and he transformed his borrowings and emulations into something utterly new,” wrote Ng in the catalogue accompanying the show. “Hendricks showed a way to productively engage with the complex legacies of historical European art while honoring people largely excluded from its visual record.”
    Barkley Hendricks, Misc. Tyrone (Tyrone Smith) (1976). The George Economou Collection. Artwork: © Barkley L. Hendricks; courtesy of the Estate of Barkley L. Hendricks and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
    The 1976 painting Misc. Tyrone, wrote Sargent, is a prime example of the unique portraits that resulted from Hendricks roaming the streets armed with his camera. The inspiration was the “street session” with Tyrone Smith, who was decked out in what Sargent calls “farmer chic,” a crisp white collared shirt under blue jean overalls, who struck a series of dramatic poses. The final portrait sports “a baby-pink background replaces the urban vista,” wrote Sargent in the catalogue. The artist “seems to have developed this strategy of using flat, pared-down backgrounds of vibrant solid color—like Manet and Courbet before him—to counter the over-politicization of his subjects.”
    Though Hendricks’s star in the art world is still on the rise and his work is being exposed to a wider audience, the artist has already proved to be a major influence on a younger generation of artists. In addition to Thelma Golden, the current director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, who was one of the first curators to put Hendricks’s work in a major show when she included him in the seminal 1994 Whitney Museum show “Black Male” and penned the introductory essay to the catalogue, artists including Derrick Adams, Nick Cave, Awol Erizku, Rashid Johnson, Fahama Pecou, Mickalene Thomas, and Kehinde Wiley contributed to the catalogue.
    Gallery view of “Barkley L. Hendricks: Portraits at the Frick.” Photo by George Koelle.
    Major works have been loaned by the Chrysler Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Harvard’s Fogg Museum, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Yale University Art Gallery, the Whitney, and several private collections.
    In remarks at the press preview, Frick director Ian Wardropper said the exhibition shows us what Hendricks “learned from the Frick, and how he challenged what he was looking at. This, too, is a show that challenges us as an institution.”
    The Hendricks show builds on the museum’s continued embrace of contemporary “interventions” rather than adding contemporary art to the historic collection. For example, under an initiative labeled “Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Masters,” the museum invited contemporary artists who identify as queer to respond to works in its collection. Over the course of a year, sought-after artists including Doron Langberg, Salman Toor, Jenna Gribbon, and Toyin Ojih Odutola created paintings responding individually to works by Holbein, Vermeer, and Rembrandt. The resulting works were displayed near the originals.
    The Frick’s move to its temporary home at the Breuer building, while the original Fifth Avenue mansion at 70th Street is under extensive renovation, allowed it to obtain a special dispensation where some works could be loaned to other institutions, as it did for the blockbuster Vermeer show at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam this past summer.
    Gallery view of “Barkley L. Hendricks: Portraits at the Frick.” Photo by George Koelle.
    This past spring, the Frick announced it will be closing the Breuer space on March 3, 2024. It will spend the next several months winding down operations and preparing to return its Old Master art collection and operations to the mansion. Though no exact date has been specified yet, museum leaders revealed for the first time to Artnet News that they will reopen the mansion to the public in late 2024. The Hendricks portrait show will be one of the last to take place at the Breuer outpost.
    Barkley L. Hendricks, Ma Petite Kumquat (1983). Collection of Ben and Jen Silverman. Artwork: © Barkley L. Hendricks; courtesy of theEstate of Barkley L. Hendricks and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
    “That the Frick was one of [Hendricks’s] favorite museums is perhaps unsurprising, given the strength of its portraits,” Wardropper wrote in the catalogue. “Fifty years on, representation of individuals and issues of race remain a critical concern, particularly to Black artists, for whom Hendricks is today a shining example.”

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    Frieze Sculpture Opens, Unveiling 30 Stunning Artworks in London’s Art Oasis at Regent’s Park

    The art at Frieze London is not just confined to white tents for the eyes of pass-holders only—each year it breaks out into the surrounding The Regent’s Park for Frieze Sculpture.
    This year’s edition boasts large-scale pieces of public art by 20 artists, including Yinka Shonibare, Louise Nevelson, Tomás Saraceno, and Hank Willis Thomas, under the acclaimed curatorial eye of Fatoş Üstek, who was previously director of the Liverpool Biennial.
    Visitors may now be used to seeing striking public monuments among the trees at London’s yearly autumnal art world get together, but this year Üstek has set out to introduce an “expanded” idea of sculpture with elements of performance, painting, and sound. These will challenge assumptions about the boundaries of the medium, and foreground its underappreciated possibilities for movement, multi-sensory experience and ephemerality.
    Ghada Amer, My Body My Choice (2022) at Frieze Sculpture 2023. Photo by Linda Nylind, courtesy of Linda Nylind/Frieze.
    “I curated the displays as an exhibition, bringing artworks in close relation to one another, implementing narratives along the sight lines that resonate poetic, imaginative, humorous, and political undertones,” she told Artnet News. “We have a rich selection of artworks that come from western and non-western traditions of making art. Our coexistence with other—let it be other people, animate, and inanimate beings—are brought to attention.”
    Üstek has also invited a cohort of younger artists to make their very first major public artwork, and commissioned others to make site-responsive works that play with The Regent’s Park’s historical context and the concept of the English Garden.
    “I reflected on the post-pandemic condition of the public realm and the changing nature of our experiences of artworks,” she said.” Hence, I curated a journey for all, embroidered with details, embedded within the silence of the park. I encourage all visitors to open themselves to the works and don’t shy away from asking questions.”
    A public programme of performances, tours and artists talks have been organized to accompany the public artworks, and visitors can also access Üstek’s free audio guide on frieze.com. A special map with activities was also produced for London Sculpture week, which ends this Sunday.
    Check out some of the sculptures below. Frieze Sculpture remains open through October 29. Frieze London and Frieze Masters will take place from October 11–15.
    Tony Matelli, Sleepwalker (2014) at Frieze Sculpture 2023. Photo by Linda Nylind, courtesy of Linda Nylind/ Frieze.
    Yinka Shonibare, Material (SG) IV (2023) at Frieze Sculpture 2023. Photo by Linda Nylind, courtesy of Linda Nylind/ Frieze.
    Li Li Ren, To find a way home (2023) at Frieze Sculpture 2023. Photo by Linda Nylind, courtesy of Linda Nylind/ Frieze.
    Hans Rosenström, Unfolding Silence (2023) at Frieze Sculpture 2023. Photo by Linda Nylind, courtesy of Linda Nylind/ Frieze.
    Holly Stevenson, The Debate (2023) at Frieze Sculpture 2023. Photo by Linda Nylind, courtesy of Linda Nylind/ Frieze.
    Temitayo Ogunbiyi, You will carry dreams, memories, and new beginnings (48 Days) (2023) at Frieze Sculpture 2023. Photo by Linda Nylind, courtesy of Linda Nylind/ Frieze.
    Li Li Ren, To find a way home (2023) at Frieze Sculpture 2023. Photo by Linda Nylind, courtesy of Linda Nylind/ Frieze.
    Amy Stephens, Waking Matter (2023) at Frieze Sculpture 2023. Photo by Linda Nylind, courtesy of Linda Nylind/ Frieze.
    Ayse Erkmen, Model for Moss Column (2023) at Frieze Sculpture 2023. Photo by Linda Nylind, courtesy of Linda Nylind/ Frieze.
    Zak Ové, The Mothership Connection (2021) at Frieze Sculpture 2023. Photo by Linda Nylind, courtesy of Linda Nylind/ Frieze.
    Yuichi Hirako, Yggdrasill / Books (2023) at Frieze Sculpture 2023. Photo by Linda Nylind, courtesy of Linda Nylind/ Frieze.
    Catharine Czudej, Man Kneeling with Flowers (2022) and Josh Smith, Friend (2023) at Frieze Sculpture 2023. Photo by Linda Nylind, courtesy of Linda Nylind/ Frieze.
    Hank Willis Thomas, All Power to All People (2017) at Frieze Sculpture 2023. Photo by Linda Nylind, courtesy of Linda Nylind/ Frieze.
    Louise Nevelson, Model for Celebration II (1976) at Frieze Sculpture 2023. Photo by Linda Nylind, courtesy of Linda Nylind/ Frieze.
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    ‘I Don’t Want Them to Replicate My Work’: Marina Abramović’s First Show After a Brush With Death Tests the Afterlife of Her Performance Art

    Proximity to death is nothing new for Marina Abramović. But never was it closer than three months ago, when the 76-year-old performance artist had a pulmonary embolism, and almost died.  
    The Royal Academy’s long-awaited Abramović blockbuster this fall surveys a 55-year career that has repeatedly played out her greatest fears—pain, death, isolation, and humiliation among them—in front of the public through feats of endurance. She has set herself on fire, swapped places for a night with a prostitute in Amsterdam, and walked the length of the Great Wall of China. 
    Speaking at the inauguration of the exhibition, the Serbian artist recalled the aftermath of her health scare earlier this year, which included three operations and ten transfusions. “I was in unbelievable pain, they said it was a miracle I survived,” she told attendees to the press conference, crediting her persistence to the application of her practice. “I used every single knowledge and experience I had doing my difficult performances: breathing, dealing with pain, working with consciousness.” 
    The experience has left her too weak to perform any of her work herself, presenting the true test of the exhibition (on view through January 1), which is essentially an experiment in the afterlife of her performance art. Abramović was a pioneer of the medium and key to bringing the ephemeral art form into the mainstream, and it is clear that she also wants to be active in considering how her legacy and work will live on without her.
    Marina Abramović, Rhythm 0 (1974). Performance; 6 hours. Studio Morra, Naples. Courtesy of the Marina Abramović Archives. © Marina Abramović. Photo: Donatelli Sbarra.
    The show experiments with different ways to chronicle her many performances, through which she has repeatedly tested her own limits, as well as the limits of her audience, in a quest for insight into the nature of being. “We are so afraid of pain. I don’t like pain, but I think that pain is such an important element in human life,” she said. “Suffering is like a kind of gate in order to understand the universe, in order to understand yourself.” 
    Her historic works are shown variously through archival footage, photographic documentation, and installation, as well as the re-performance of a selection of work by performers trained in “the Marina Abramović method” by her eponymous institution in New York.  
    Several static installations are successful at evoking a sense of the original work. A long table installed at the end of one gallery is laid out with 72 objects relating to pain and pleasure, including a rose, scissors, feathers, a bullet, and a gun. It memorializes a harrowing 1974 performance in Naples during which she stood motionless in the gallery for six hours, inviting the public to use the objects on her “as desired,” to see what they would do with the freedom, and just how much she could withstand. What started out as playful interaction soon turned traumatic as her clothes were cut, her body brutalized, and the gun loaded and held to her neck. A slideshow of still images from the performance archives the event in spine-tingling horror. 
    Marina Abramović, Balkan Baroque, June 1997. Performance at XLVIII Venice Biennale; 4 days. Courtesy of the Marina Abramović Archives. © Marina Abramović
    But not all of the archival works included prompted the same reaction. Less successful was the evocation of her 1997, Golden Lion-winning performance at the Venice Biennale, where she sat for days on piles of bloody cow bones trying to scrub them clean, in a statement on the ethnic conflict in her native country, the former Yugoslavia and the Sisyphean task of trying to wash it away. The neat pile of bones in the heavily air-conditioned room did little justice to the grueling performance, which has since become symbolic of horrors of war everywhere. 
    Other failed attempts at capturing the life of her performances include alabaster slabs immortalizing The Seven Deaths of Maria Callas (a cynic might even suggest that these works were more about creating a commercial object than about legacy carving). New age experiments with crystal energy, including a portal of rose quartz, from 2022, feel at best like an Instagram trap and at worst like filler.
    Notably absent from the exhibition was the dead-eyed VR Marina who stared at the viewer through a headset, which she showed at the Serpentine in 2019, a poor extension of her famous 2010 MoMA performance, The Artist is Present, for which she sat motionless in a chair for six hours a day for three months, inviting members of the public to sit opposite her. Instead, that famous performance is captured in a video installation where, on one side of the room, videos of Abramović’s mostly stoic expressions face off with videos of the public, including some famous faces, like Kim Catrall and Antony Gormley. The documentation, showing humans responding to each other and emoting, was a much more moving extension of this work.  
    Gallery view of the Marina Abramović exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, from 23 September 2023 – 1 January 2024, showing Imponderabilia (1977/2023). Live performance by Agata Flaminika and Kam Wan, 60 minutes. Courtesy of the Marina Abramović Archives. © Marina Abramović. Photo © Royal Academy of Arts, London / David Parry
    There is clearly the most potential in the live re-performances, although they carry with them the risk of dilution of the original work, whether that is through bad casting or the limits imposed by health and safety rules. 
    Imponderabilia, a joint work made during her 12-year partnership with the late artist Ulay, where visitors squeeze through a doorway formed by a naked man and a woman, was faithfully re-staged due to a request from Ulay’s estate. Others lived somewhere between that and an homage to the original piece; Nude with Skeleton is performed on top of a video box playing the original performance, for example. 
    “I don’t want them to replicate my work,” she said of the re-performances. “The source has to be mentioned, but the interpretation is personal. You have to have your own experience as an artist, your own stamina, your charisma, and also add some new elements of your own.” 
    She stressed that the acts must be emancipatory for the performer—“you share the pain with others and you’re free,” she noted—as well as inspirational to the viewer. “I’m your mirror,” she said. “If I can do this, you can do it too in your own life.”  
    Marina Abramović, The House with the Ocean View (2002). Performance; 12 days. Sean Kelly Gallery, New York. Courtesy of the Marina Abramović Archives © Marina Abramović. Photo: Attilio Maranzano
    In the same gallery, a three-room house has been constructed, which will be the setting for a re-performance of The House With the Ocean View; for the moment, it contained a video projection of Abramović’s original performance at Sean Kelly gallery in New York in 2002, during which she lived in the construction for 12 days without food, speaking, and only drinking water.
    It is a work that is clearly extremely dear to her. “This performance really actually changed the state of my consciousness,” she noted. “Long performance leads to real transformation. You can’t pretend, you can’t act, you are your true self and you’re vulnerable, and that vulnerability is how you make a true connection with the public.”
    And while the other pieces are performed by a rotating cast of 42 people, Abramović found only three performers she could trust with this work. Performances begin in October.
    Abramović herself is still recovering from her brush with death, but has kept the question open on whether she will perform when she feels better. If she does anything, she said, it will be working with public in the courtyard, rather than in the museum, and it will mark a new phase of her practice, as getting so close to death has changed her outlook. “I’m actually worried, because I’m happy. So how am I going to work now with happiness? This is a completely new thing for me. My work is so tragic,” she said. “Now it’s going to be fun.” 
     “Marina Abramović” is on view from September 23, 2023 to January 1, 2024 at the Royal Academy in London.

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