Watch L.A. Dance Project’s David Adrian Freeland Jr. Perform ‘It Could’ve Been Me...It Could Be Me'

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After a year of dormancy brought on by the pandemic, Hauser & Wirth’s dynamic, multi-use space in Downtown Los Angeles was revived with a special collaborative performance featuring L.A. Dance Project's David Adrian Freeland Jr. His powerful choreographic work, ‘It Could’ve Been Me...It Could Be Me,’ was performed throughout the gallery’s outdoor spaces and within ‘The Great American Fact,’ Amy Sherald’s first West Coast exhibition. The performance, captured by Trevor Tweeten, can be viewed here. Debuting online as part of Ursula Magazine, the performance was created during the uprisings against police brutality and the killings of unarmed Black Americans.

Choreography & performance: David Adrian
Videography: Trevor Tweeten
Music: Joel Thompson’s ‘Seven Last Words of the Unarmed’. 
Audio recording by Michigan State University Men’s Glee Club, 2016. Conducted by Eugene Rogers

Jenny Holzer Presents "A Little Knowledge" @ Hauser & Wirth In Gstaad, Switzerland

For more than forty years Jenny Holzer has presented text emblazoned on T-shirts, carved in stone, painted on canvas, scrolling on LED signs, and luminously projected onto buildings and landscapes. Beginning in the 1970s with posters wheat-pasted throughout New York City and continuing through recent light projections, her practice rivals ignorance with humour, and violence with kindness and courage. Holzer’s texts address oppression, gender, sexuality, power, and war, and by presenting them in media more commonly associated with advertising, news reports, and public information, she adeptly provokes reflection and challenges expectations and prejudices. A Little Knowledge is on view at Tarmak 22 in Gstaad-Saanen Airport, on view through 22 January. photographs courtesy of Hauser & Wirth

To Exalt the Ephemeral: Alina Szapocznikow, 1962 – 1972 @ Hauser & Wirth New York

In a brief but explosively inventive career, Alina Szapocznikow (1926 – 1973) radically re-conceptualized sculpture as a vehicle for exploring, liberating, and declaring bodily experience, from the ecstatic, to the harrowing, to the uncanny.

Through her material experiments, Szapocznikow generated a series of lamps, exemplified here by the ‘Lampe Bouche (Illuminated Lips)’ (1966) works, functional sculptures of glowing female lips extending from elongated stem-like bases. Although the artist lived and worked in Paris at the time, her focus on malleable material as a proxy for the body firmly positions her among contemporaries practicing in the United States, including Eva Hesse, Hannah Wilke, and Lynda Benglis, as well as noted friend Louise Bourgeois, to whom Szapocznikow dedicated and gifted two of the lamps on view.

An integral component of Szapocznikow’s practice was her mastery of new materials and techniques. Thus, she produced most of her work in her own studio rather than outsourcing fabrication to a factory. By focusing on an intimate, tactile relationship with her mediums, Szapocznikow was able to push the experimental boundaries of artistic gesture, resulting in such works as Souvenirs. On view on the gallery’s second floor, these sculptures, radically integrate polyester resin, glass, wool, and photographs that capture both personal and collective histories – images ranging from a picture of Alina as a child, to a photo of a female victim of a concentration camp, to a portrait of ‘60s icon Twiggy. The Souvenirs suggest mementos – or memento mori – for an ambiguous new era.

To Exalt the Ephemeral: Alina Szapocznikow, 1962 – 1972 is on view through December 21 @ Hauser & Wirth 548 West 22nd Street New York.

Mike Kelley: Timeless Painting @ Hauser & Wirth New York

Over the course of his four-decade career, Mike Kelley generated a remarkably diverse oeuvre in an array of media, conflating so-called high culture and low culture, critiquing prevailing aesthetic conventions, and combining traditional notions of the sacred and the profane. The exhibition, organized in collaboration with the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, features paintings from different series created over a 15-year period, between 1994 and 2009, spotlighting the breadth of the artist’s engagement with the medium of painting.

The Timeless Painting exhibition and publication contribute new perspectives to the discourse around the artist’s work, challenging conventional readings by exploring Kelley’s own meticulously documented intentions as a point of departure; resituating these works within the larger formal context of his oeuvre; and expanding traditional definitions of painting.

Mike Kelley: Timeless Painting is on view through January 25, 2020 @ Hauser & Wirth 548 West 22nd Street
New York

Resilience: Philip Guston in 1971 @ Hauser & Wirth In Los Angeles

Resilience: Philip Guston in 1971 is Guston’s first solo Los Angeles exhibition in over half a century. The exhibition sheds light on a single pivotal year that launched Guston into the final prolific decade of his career, during which he painted what are now celebrated as some of the most important works of art of the 20th Century. On view will be two major series, the Roma paintings and the Nixon drawings, accompanied by a select group of larger works. Created immediately after the overwhelming critical rejection of his new figurative work, exhibited in October 1970 at Marlborough Gallery in New York City for the first time, during a time of social and political turmoil in the United States, these works bear witness to an artist at the height of his powers, exquisitely responsive to his world. Resilience: Philip Guston in 1971 is on view through 5 January 2020 at Hauser & Wirth 901 East 3rd Street Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of Hauser & Wirth

Guillermo Kuitca Presents Two New Series @ Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles

 Evoking the complex geometries and layered information of architectural plans and cartographic maps, Guillermo Kuitca’s theatrical paintings explore themes of dislocation. Presented in the South Gallery, this exhibition will debut two new series rendered with the artist’s distinctive melding of abstraction and figuration: ‘The Family Idiot’ draws from Jean-Paul Sartre’s three-volume study of Gustave Flaubert, while the 18-part wall piece ‘Missing Pages’ evokes the physical process of book printing, specifically the unexpected combinations of images that ensue during pagination. The exhibition will also include new Theater pieces that build upon Kuitca’s long-standing involvement with the dramatic arts through an idiosyncratic integration of architectural features in two-dimensional space.This exhibition by Guillermo Kuitcat will be on view until August 18 at Hauser & Wirth 901 East 3rd Street, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth

David Hammons @ Hauser & Wirth In Los Angeles

This exhibition by David Hammons will be on view until August 11 at Hauser & Wirth 901 East 3rd Street,
Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Alexander Calder's "Nonspace" @ Hauser & Wirth In Los Angeles

Nonspace marks Hauser & Wirth’s first exhibition in LA for world-renowned artist, Alexander Calder. Following the landmark Somerset exhibition From the Stony River to the Sky, the presentation in LA focuses on a radically different facet of the artist’s work with a two-part exhibition of primarily monochromatic, abstract sculptures that simultaneously fill space and coexist with it. Nonspace is on view through January 6, 2019 @ Hauser & Wirth 901 East 3rd Street, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of Calder Foundation New York / Art Resource New York

Mary Heilmann's First Solo Exhibition In Over 20 Years @ Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles

‘Memory Remix,’ Mary Heilmann’s first Los Angeles solo exhibition in over 20 years, is a survey of paintings, ceramics, and furniture in which the artist’s unwavering dedication to abstraction merges with sly references to her favorite landscapes, songs, movies, and Mexican weavings. This preeminent American artist is acclaimed for her unique ability to deploy the analytical geometries of Minimalism with the spontaneous freehanded spirit of the Beat Generation from which her generation emerged, and for her weaving of pop culture influences into a wholly original and pioneering oeuvre. Heilmann’s deft handling of paint and spatially dichotomous compositions have exerted a profound influence upon a younger group of artists.

Grounded in the soul of California, Mary Heilmann’s work draws from her memories of the distinctive colors and lines of the West Coast’s landscape and surf culture. Throughout a childhood accompanied by the radio’s ubiquitous soundtrack, Heilmann often watched the ocean tumble to the shore, rode the ‘mountain waves’ at Manhattan Beach, and read Allan Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and Walt Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass,’ which stoked her great admiration for poetry, jazz, and the idea of the Beats. Under these influences and through the deceptively simple means of painting – color, surface, and form – Heilmann physically manifests nostalgic impulses, memories, and allusions to popular culture that remain accessible on both personal and universal levels. In this way, her work transcends the seemingly opaque structures of geometrical abstraction by infusing it with the content of daily life. ‘Memory Remix’ is on view through September 23 at Hauser & Wirth 901 E 3rd Street Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Kupper

Geta Brătescu "The Leaps of Aesop" @ Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles

‘Geta Brătescu. The Leaps of Aesop’ is the first Los Angeles solo presentation devoted to the 92-year-old forerunner in the field of Romanian Conceptualism. Her diverse oeuvre – comprising drawing, collage, engraving, textiles, and photography, as well as experimental film, video, and performance – mines themes of identity, gender, and dematerialization, often drawing from the stories of literary figures and addressing the symbiotic relationship between art making and working environments. Aesop, the ancient Greek fabulist, serves as a point of departure for this exhibition, which features more than fifty works that span Brătescu’s career. In many ways a fitting avatar for Brătescu, Aesop manifests in the works on view as a symbol of antic irreverence, mocking authority and status. A spirited believer in the role of the artist as that of a disruptor, Brătescu has championed ideas of play and disorder throughout her vibrant practice, remarking, ‘there is much economy and at the same time rebellion in the creation of expression.’ Geta Brătescu "The Leaps of Aesop" will be on view until May 20, 2018.

"A Modest Proposal" Group Show Opening @ Hauser and Wirth Gallery In New York

In 1729, Jonathan Swift wrote an essay offering short-term solutions to Ireland’s dire situation with poverty and starvation. The essay, entitled A Modest Proposal, was simple in its intent: to stave off hunger, the Irish must simply start eating their children. It is that essay and its sentiment satirizing the absurd dilemma of being slaves to our bodies that provided the jumping off point for Hauser & Wirth’s new show, also entitled A Modest Proposal. The show features works from New York-based fine art photographer Lucas Blalock, Los Angeles-based Japanese sculptor and painter Naotaka Hiro, New York-based Russian mixed-media artist and painter Sanya Kantarovsky, New York-based French conceptual, performance, and mixed-media artist Nicola L., Iranian-American Los Angeles-based painter Tala Madani, and Polish painter Jakub Julian Ziólkowski. All the works in the show critique our relationships to our “bodies and the abject,” often with a light (albeit conceptual) touch and a sense of humor. Hauser & Wirth’s curatorial efforts are always spectacular, and seeing these artists interact with another in a gallery space should prove quite a treat. To open the show, Hauser & Wirth staffers put on red plastic onesies that were all connected, connecting the human bodies to one another as they flailed and gasped for freedom. "A Modest Proposal" will be on view until July 29, 2016 at Hauser Wirth, 18th Street, New York.  text and photographs by Adam Lehrer

A Sneak Peek of Hauser Wirth and Schimmel's Inaugural Exhibition At Their Brand New Outpost In Los Angeles

Autre got a chance to check out a private preview of Hauser Wirth and Schimmel's brand new outpost in Los Angeles. The gallery currently presents ‘Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947 – 2016,’ the inaugural exhibition at its new complex in the heart of the downtown Los Angeles Arts District. Through nearly 100 works made by 34 artists over the past seventy years, this ambitious undertaking traces ways in which women have changed the course of art by deftly transforming the language of sculpture since the postwar period. Works on view reveal their makers inventing radically new forms and processes that privilege solo studio practice, tactility, and the idiosyncrasies of the artist’s own hand. ‘Revolution in the Making’ explores multiple strains of artistic approaches, characterized by abstraction and repetition, that reject the precedent of a monolithic masterwork on a pedestal, employing such tactics as stacking, hanging, and intertwining, to create an intimate reciprocity between artist and viewer. ‘Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947 – 2016' will be on view from March 13 to September 4, 2016 at Hauser Wirth & Schimmel in Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Ed Ruscha Screening of "Premium" Starring Larry Bell Screening This Week @ Hauser Wirth New York

One of only two films made by Ed Ruscha over his dynamic artistic career, Premium is a filmic translation of 1969's Crackers, one in an influential series of conceptual photography books created by Ruscha in the 1960s and 70s. Both the book and the film are based on the short story "How to Derive the Maximum Enjoyment from Crackers" written by Mason Williams, a musician and comedic writer for the Smothers Brothers, and a childhood friend of Ruscha's. Featuring perhaps one of the greatest appearances by salad in art history, Premium stars fellow L.A. art icon Larry Bell on a hilarious and absurd late-night adventure. Ruscha's film is an exploration of storytelling and the conventional narrative codes of Hollywood, featuring his signature deadpan humor and keen translation of the contemporary American condition. See Premium this week, March 3rd, 6pm, at Hauser Wirth New York on the occasion of the exhibition 'Larry Bell: From the ‘60s’ RSVP to bell@hauserwirth.com or call +1 212 794 4970