Allison Katz Creates a Cosmos of Disparate Images in Westward Ho! @ Hauser & Wirth

Allison Katz, Truth, 2023.

In ‘Westward Ho!’ Allison Katz creates a cosmos by overlapping disparate images and narratives from visual culture, her own past, and the coincidences that gather around her. The title firmly locates us, with tongue-in-cheek undertones, inside Hauser & Wirth in West Hollywood, California. It was Katz’s specific request to exhibit here, in a desire to engage with its associated cultural mythologies: ‘Hollywood is a big picture and I should like to know what it means to walk the walk, or drive the drive, of the Pacific coast, with its last–resort, up to the edge, atomized light...if this is the birthplace of the silver screen, then it’s a chance to test out painting’s irrefutable material and impure surface, its porous consciousness...’ The title blends historical and literary allusions, tracing back originally to the calls made by Elizabethan ferryman as they navigated the River Thames in search of passengers. As Katz writes: ‘I’m using Westward Ho! as a call out, a whoop of exuberance, a question hollered across time and tradition to see who and what answers, as if to test the idea that painting is a conversation.’

Allison Katz, Sheepish, 2023.

Throughout the exhibition Katz deploys a constantly evolving set of techniques and source materials. Echoes, rhymes and serendipities erupt; meaning is reordered and unexpected genealogies converge. ‘West’ is the neighborhood in which the gallery is located, the direction Katz’s apartment faces in London, a catch-all term for a geopolitical system in the midst of being challenged, and an alias for the pastoral patch of English countryside where she worked in residence (the West Country). While preparing for the exhibition she also visited the ruins of Pompeii (in the context of the institutional program Pompeii Commitment), where the discovery of wall paintings buried under ash continues to play a central role in the origin story of Western figuration.

Allison Katz, Sleeping and Weeping in the Fourth Style, 2023.

Westward Ho! is on view through January 5 @ Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood, 8980 Santa Monica Boulevard West Hollywood CA 90069

Lorna Simpson Presents "Darkening" @ Hauser & Wirth In New York

Debuting a suite of new large-scale paintings, Lorna Simpson’s Darkening finds the artist returning to and building upon themes and motifs at the center of her practice: explorations focused on the nature of representation, identity, gender, race, and history. For more than 30 years, Simpson’s powerful works have entangled viewers in an equivocal web of meaning, drawing upon techniques of collage through the use of found materials, often culled from the pages of vintage Jet and Ebony magazines. In ‘Darkening,’ Simpson continues to thread dichotomies of figuration and abstraction with vast and enthralling tableaux that subsume spliced photos and fragmented text, abstracted beyond comprehension. Equally arresting and poetic, the paintings engage viewers with layers of paradox, capturing the mystifying allure of an arctic landscape in inky washes of blacks, grays, and startling blues. Darkening will be on view through 26 July at Hauser & Wirth 548 West 22nd Street, New York. photographs courtesy of Hauser & Wirth

Luchita Hurtado's "Dark Years" @ Hauser & Wirth In New York

For more than seventy years, Luchita Hurtado has explored connections between the body and its larger context – nature, the environment, the cosmos – in an effort to express universality and transcendence. In her work, abstraction and figuration merge to mystical effect. Her multicultural life and career are reflected in the eclectic mediums and formal techniques of her oeuvre. Born in Maiquetía, Venezuela, in 1920, Hurtado immigrated to New York in 1928 and later lived in Mexico, the American Southwest, and Northern California. Dark Years focuses on the artist’s early works from the 1940s to the 1950s, a period defined by prolific experimentation. The paintings and drawings on view range stylistically from surrealist figuration and geometric patterning, to biomorphic forms executed with expressive acuity. Assembled, they illuminate the emergence of a remarkable visual language and underscore the significance of Hurtado’s unique artistic contributions.

Dark Years will be on view at Hauser & Wirth New York, 69th Street through April 6. photographs courtesy of Hauser & Wirth

Zoe Leonard's Analogue @ Hauser & Wirth In Los Angeles

The landmark, decade-long project, ‘Analogue’ (1998 – 2009) is comprised of 412 photographs arranged in grids and organized into 25 chapters. Originally conceived as a chronicle of the rapidly changing Lower East Side, where Leonard once had her studio, ‘Analogue’ evolved into a parable of cultural production, touching on issues of gentrification and the exchange of commodities as an extension of colonialism. The images in this installation depict storefronts and objects on the brink of obsolescence due to an expanding global economy and rapid technological advancements emerging at the turn of the millennium. An allegory for globalization, Leonard’s photographic series is the result of a peripatetic process that led her from the declining mom and pop shops of New York City to roadside markets in the Middle East, Africa, Eastern Europe, Cuba, and Mexico, tracing the circulation of recycled merchandise. The exhibition is on view through January 20, 2019 at Hauser & Wirth 901 East 3rd Street, Los Angeles. images courtesy of Hauser & Wirth

Julian Rosefeldt's Manifesto @ Hauser & Wirth In Los Angeles

Manifesto (2015), the 13-channel film installation by visual artist Julian Rosefeldt. Manifesto pays homage to the moving tradition and literary beauty of artist manifestos, ultimately questioning the role of the artist in society today. ‘Manifesto’ draws on the writings of Futurists, Dadaists, Fluxus artists, Suprematists, Situationists, Dogme 95 and other artist groups, and the musings of individual artists, architects, dancers and filmmakers. Passing the ideas of Claes Oldenburg, Yvonne Rainer, Kazimir Malevich, André Breton, Sturtevant, Sol LeWitt, Jim Jarmusch, and other influencers through his lens, Rosefeldt has edited and reassembled thirteen collages of artists’ manifestos. Manifesto is on view through January 6, 2019 at Hauser & Wirth 901 East 3rd Street, Los Angeles. images courtesy of Hauser & Wirth

Jack Whitten's Self Portrait With Satellites @ Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles

‘Self Portrait With Satellites’ takes viewers on a journey through the various permutations of abstraction that span the artist’s entire career. The exhibition brings together self-portraits and other paintings from Whitten’s own personal collection, many of which the artist studied on a daily basis, and offers an intimate glimpse into the artist’s core beliefs about art, his deep philosophical concerns, and the people that inspired him.

Complementing the exhibition, Hauser & Wirth Publishers will debut its new book ‘Jack Whitten. Notes from the Woodshed,’ which collects Whitten’s studio writings and other texts from the artist’s six-decade career. Edited by Katy Siegel, this publication provides a window on Whitten’s relentless artistic experimentation in the studio, exploring the way his practice intertwined with his daily life. Alongside transcriptions of Whitten’s handwritten documents are selections reproduced in facsimile, redolent of the studio’s atmosphere and the way the artist’s creative impulses pervaded every part of his world. 'Jack Whitten. Self Portrait With Satellites will be on view at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles Daily from Tuesday - Sunday, 11am - 6pm from June 23 through September 23, 2018. 901 East 3rd Street, Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Kupper