Featuring new paintings and an installation, the exhibition presents three of MADSAKI’s iconic series: his Warhol series, Movie series, and Character series depicting popular cartoons. As a special homage to the city, MADSAKI is exhibiting a series of paintings referencing celebrated scenes from Hong Kong cinema, including Wong Kar-wai classics such as In the Mood for Love and Chungking Express, comedy star Stephen Chow’s Kung Fu Hustle, and more.
With a nod to distinct painting movements in the history of art, such as symbolism, surrealism, and pop art, Emily Mae Smith creates lively compositions that offer sly social and political commentary. Her lexicon of signs and symbols begins with her avatar, derived from the broomstick figure from Disney’s Fantasia. Simultaneously referring to a painter’s brush, a domestic tool associated with women’s work, and the phallus, the figure continually transforms across Smith’s body of work. By adopting a variety of guises, the broom and other symbols speak to contemporary subjects, including gender, sexuality, capitalism, and violence.
The exhibition traces three specific days of work at his studio, from 1973, 1986, and 1989. By displaying diverse works produced on the same day, visitors are able to understand the drastic shifts in technique, tools, scale, and gesture in the artist’s practice.
The exhibition also includes two inks on paper dating from the 1950s. Spanning four working decades, this presentation allows visitors to better understand Hartung’s continuously constructed and renewed work.
Emmanuel Perrotin first exhibited Éric Duyckaerts in 1991 and collaborated with him for more than fifteen years. In 2019, the gallery paid tribute to the late Belgian artist. On this occasion, the gallery showed some of his famous videos, including Conference on the Hand (1993) and Magister (1989), among others.
"The exhibition as a whole evokes a strange museum of natural history that is mainly composed of artificial materials. A unique collection of works that collapse as though disrupted by a storm and cheerful chemical minerals, like a report on the current climate."
The exhibition’s title, Reading Room, is a nod to one of the central theses of Hewitt’s practice, which works to disrupt and complicate entrenched readings of images and art objects as fixed or static, exposing a web or at times a knot of overlapping interpretations. For more than fifteen years, Hewitt has explored the relationship between image, text, and object, but also the influence of repetition, meter, and perspective as an extension of photography’s aesthetic power. Hewitt composes simple shifts and rearrangements by introducing or removing media, textures, or geometries within a single frame, imbuing the overall series with a cadence and unique grammar.
Throughout the duration of the exhibition, Hewitt invites friends, colleagues, and thought partners to activate the space in a series of semi-public gestures in response to the notion of a collective archiving, including curator/writer Omar Berrada, DJ/collagist Ayana Contreras, historian/writer Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, cinematographer Bradford Young, and musician Tariq Trotter/Black Thought.
LESLIE HEWITT - OSMOS MONOGRAPH
Published by Osmos Books, 2018
Edited by Cay Sophie Rabinowitz, with contributions by Nana Adusei-Poku, Lisa Lee, and Eva Respini
