Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Porzellan Manufaktur Allach, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Robert Russell on view at 6150 Wilshire Blvd, March 9 – April 22, 2023. This is the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. An opening reception will take place Thursday, March 9 from 5 – 8pm.

Please join us Wednesday, April 12, at 6:30pm for a conversation at the gallery between Robert Russell  and Charles Gaines.

Robert Russell is a conceptual painter whose work returns to ideas of memory, iconography, and mortality in a personal painting language that is attentive to beauty, the history of art, and the role of photography. His newest series depicts Allach porcelain figurines produced by forced labor in Nazi concentration camps and factories. This exhibition follows recent presentations of his porcelain ‘Teacup’ paintings and broadly continues explorations of Memento Mori and Vanitas, but “touches on something more personal.”

The Allach Porcelain Manufacturing company was established in 1935 just outside of Munich. The factory was funded by Henrich Himmler of the German Reich in order to produce the finest porcelain objects celebrating purity, Aryanism, the occult, and Germanic culture to give as gifts to the SS Soldiers. As the war progressed, the factory lost its labor source and moved production to the Dachau concentration camp where Jewish prisoners, amongst other slaves, were forced to continue their production. Until they were liberated in 1945, these prisoners, living in unimaginable circumstances created figurines of such things as puppies, sheep, rabbits, and perfect aryan children.

Russell places these subjects against vacant horizonless backdrops, the result is compositions that are hauntingly still and breathless. The figurines are also marked by a distinct soft focus indicative of the tenderness and emotional depth with which he approaches these loaded objects. On the surface the beautiful imagery provides viewers with the opportunity for quiet reflection, while the reality of their origin turns thoughts to the nature of evil.

Russell based these works on auction lot photos of the few remaining and exceedingly rare figurines. Originally destined to adorn Nazi tables and shelves, this reclamation unveils a sinister story. In his own words he explains, “I wanted to take these objects back for myself, to reclaim them as a Jewish artist, to paint them vastly larger than life, exposing them as the monstrous creations they really were.” At this monumental scale, once tiny creatures tower over the viewer, deer and puppies transform into monolithic memorials of genocide. 

Robert Russell (b. 1971, Kansas City, MO) completed his MFA at The California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), Valencia, CA and his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Providence, RI. Russell has had solo exhibitions at galleries including Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA;The Cabin, Los Angeles, CA; Burrard Arts Foundation, Vancouver, B.C., Canada; LA><ART, Los Angeles, CA; François Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; BIg Pond Artworks, Munich, Germany;and OSMOS Station, Stamford, NY. His work has been exhibited in group shows including Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, CA; Material Press MOCA LA, Los Angeles, CA; M+B Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Susanne Vielmetter, Los Angeles, CA; and Gavlak Projects, Palm Beach, FL. Russell lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Aria, a solo exhibition of new work by Los Angeles artist Soo Kim on view at 6150 Wilshire Blvd, March 9 – April 22, 2023. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. An opening reception will take place Thursday, March 9 from 5 – 8pm.

Soo Kim’s photographic works employ techniques of cutting and layering in order to introduce areas of absence or disruption. For Aria, Kim produced a suite of photographs depicting the process of arranging a bouquet of red, yellow, and blue flowers. Riffing on a Bas Jan Ader film Primary Time from 1974 wherein the artist rearranged vases of flowers to be exclusively yellow, then red, then blue—Kim’s elegiac series moves beyond conceptual notions of maintenance and formal implications of color, and into themes of care, touch, comfort, and reflection.

Moved by the terminal diagnosis of a friend, this series of still lifes was sparked by the desire to memorialize, to offer a tenderness. Notably, it marks an inward turn for Kim’s practice; contrasted by previous bodies of work, which drew the artist outside of the studio and into cityscapes and nature, these photographs were shot inside the artist’s studio and are imbued with a sensitive intimacy.

The works are at once additive and extractive, while a pair of hands arrange and adjust the blooms considering the passage of time, Kim’s surgical-like process of cutting and removal interrogates building blocks of formalism through composition and color juxtapositions. Flowers are a powerful symbol of life’s sensual pleasures. Fragrant eye candy, their presence can mark a range of occasions conjuring images of weddings (celebration), funerals (mourning), or hospitals (birth, illness, and recovery). Operating like Dutch still lifes and vanitas paintings, the works in Aria reach for something permanent, offering their beauty while reminding us of the cyclical qualities of nature and the impermanence of life itself.

As a compliment to this new series of works, writer Sarah Shun-lien Bynum contributed a poetic text installed inside the exhibition.

Soo Kim’s (American, born South Korea, 1969) work has been the subject of solo and group exhibitions at The Pasadena Museum of California Art; Pomona College Museum of Art; the Getty Center, Los Angeles; The 2002 Gwangju Biennale, Korea; Weatherspoon Art Museum, North Carolina; the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach; Architecture and Design Museum, Los Angeles; Art Sonje, Korea; Islip Art Museum, New York; the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego; Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, New York; Seoul Museum of Art, Korea; and the Honolulu Museum of Art, among others.

Kim’s work is in public collections, including The Getty Center, The Broad Foundation, The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, North Carolina Museum of Art, and The Escalette Collection of Art, Chapman University. A monograph of her work, A Week Inside Two Days, was published in 2018. Kim lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Falling Together, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Molly Lowe. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. An opening reception will take place at 2660 S La Cienega Blvd, Saturday February 25 from 3 – 5pm.

At once abstract and figurative, the paintings in Falling Together channel a way of observation that seeks balance within states of limbo, straddling reality and imagination. Lowe begins from assorted everyday images, combining anonymous online imagery and personal photos, she slices, dices, mixes, and mutates these sources until she arrives at scenes that expose the awkwardness of life in a human body—physically and emotionally.

Unconventional assemblages of color, these oil on linen compositions emerge from a palette that skips, jumps, and flicks you on the nose. In moments she leaves behind clues to specific scenes or possible narratives, yet the overall effect of the work requires viewers to relax their gaze, untether expectations and let the pictures untangle themselves through the flow of her expressive improvisational gestures.

In addition to painting, Lowe frequently works in performance and sculpture, as such, her paintings are events in their own right. Agile, emanating a sense of action, they record mental and physical movement of the artist’s own body; as they evolve, they take on a life of their own. Enigmatic and voyeuristic, the compositions strike at ordinary life and personal “events”—having sex, stretching, smoking a cigarette—Lowe articulates the contours of human experience, stringing up something recognizable while simultaneously slipping from our grasp.

Molly Lowe (b. 1983, Palo Alto, CA) received her MFA from Columbia University and her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). She has had solo exhibitions and performances at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Lilith Performance Studio, Malmo, Sweden; Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY; Suzanne Geiss Company, New York, NY; SculptureCenter, Long Island City, New York; and Performa 13, New York, NY. Her films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY and JOAN, Los Angeles, CA. Lowe has participated in residencies at the Shandaken Project, Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, NY; Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY; Recess Art, New York, NY; and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME. In 2015, she received the New York Foundation for the Arts interdisciplinary artist fellowship award, and she was recently nominated for a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award. Lowe lives and works in New York.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Call Me When You Start Wearing Red, a solo exhibition by Janet Werner on view at 6150 Wilshire Blvd, January 21 – February 25, 2023. An opening reception will take place Saturday, January 21 from 5 – 8pm.

Please join us Wednesday, February 8, at 7pm for an artist conversation at the gallery with Janet Werner, moderated by writer and curator Ashton Cooper.

Janet Werner is an artist known for painting psychological portraits of women. Call Me When You Start Wearing Red, the artist’s second exhibition with the gallery, examines ideas of being divided, dualities of human nature, and inner multiplicity. Werner externalizes these psychological splits within her ‘broken pictures.’ Side-stepping narrative, her subjects present more as ideas—vessels for viewers to pour themselves into. We relate to them through their disruptions—shrinking heads, contorting bodies, flipping figures upside-down, or partial obscuration.

For over two decades, Werner has explored the possibilities of her photographic source material—images of women culled both from fashion magazines and art historical references. Although her work and style continue to eschew naturalism, she has also grown ever-more ambivalent about her subjects-cum-performers, finding increasing satisfaction with her interruptions and “determined more than ever to break them apart and alter them in obvious and aggressive ways, a shift away from the idea of a unitary wholeness.”

Nonetheless the works possess a seductive openness, a vulnerability manifested through the figures’ gazes that allows viewers to project onto them. Werner’s paintings are not just the image, but the encounter, viewer and painting, the hypnotic power between them ignited by the artist’s mature, assured paint handling.

A thread of performativity runs through the works, not just because the models are performing for the camera, but actual references to magic occur in the work—levitation, dressing up, acrobatics, circuses, and clowns—not to mention the roles of femininity on display. As the artist, Werner too is a performer of sorts, and asserts that “if I do the paintings right, the viewer can ‘complete the trick.’”

Often soft and gestural, Werner gives the paintings an edge through color contrasts that are often derived from fashion sources. Garments, shoes, and accessories present prominent and highly delineated opportunities to be expressive and bold with color. Explorations of texture, folds, and shadows, introduce different rhythms of brushwork, broadening her lexicon of mark making in the compositions. Each new painting adds an opportunity for experiments with transparency, high chroma, and patterning ultimately contributing to the sense of mystery, play, and provocation in the overall exhibition. 

Janet Werner (b. 1959, Winnipeg, Manitoba) received her MFA from Yale University, after which she returned to Canada, where she taught at the University of Saskatchewan from 1987 to 1999 and Concordia University, Montréal, from 1999 to 2019. In 2019 Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal mounted a monographic exhibition Janet Werner. Previous to that from 2013-2015 a solo survey exhibition of her work Another Perfect Day, organized by the Kenderline Art Gallery, University of Saskatchewan, toured to five locations in Canada, including the Esker Foundation, Calgary; the McIntosh Gallery, Ontario; Galerie de l’UQAM, Montreal; and the Doris McCarthy Gallery, Toronto. 

Werner has exhibited her work in solo exhibitions at Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA; Bradley Ertaskiran, Montréal, QC; Arsenal Contemporary, New York, NY; Galerie Julia Garnatz, Cologne, DE; and Whatiftheworld Gallery, Cape Town, ZA. Her works are in the collections of the Musée du Québec; Musée d’art contemporain, Montreal; The Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), Toronto; Canadian Embassy in Berlin; University of Lethbridge, Alberta; Winnipeg Art Gallery, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; and numerous private and corporate collections. Werner lives and works in Montréal, Québec.

The recent publication Sticky Pictures, co-published by Griffin Art Projects and Figure 1 in collaboration with the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, surveys the last 7 years of Werner’s painting practice.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Endnotes for Sunshine, a solo exhibition by Jessica Taylor Bellamy on view at 6150 Wilshire Blvd, January 21 – February 25, 2023. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. An opening reception will take place Saturday, January 21 from 5 – 8pm.

Jessica Taylor Bellamy is an artist of juxtapositions: image and text, abstraction and figuration, handmade and mass produced, reality and fantasy, sunshine and noir. A native Angeleno, born and raised in Whittier to an Ashkenazi Jewish mother and an Afro-Cuban father, Bellamy’s practice considers this particular familial history to address notions of home, homeland, and landscape. The artist’s work is rooted in her observations living at the edge of a precarious paradise of shifting ecological tensions.

Bellamy’s multi-layered imagery culls from personal archives of information including newspapers, photographs, and videos. The video-sculpture In view, if not in reach (2023), exemplifies her hybrid approach. Comprising a hand-painted animation of vanity plates layered over video footage of westward drives at sunset, the film loops on a license-plate sized monitor attached to a flaming motorcycle fender. Endnotes for Sunshine draws from the artist’s familial and relational experiences of the California landscape as a way to reimagine our relationship to the environment and examine the structures that strain it.

Engaging with the rich art history of Los Angeles, Bellamy’s work is informed by artists such as Ed Ruscha and Mark Bradford—through a love of place and conceptual process to art making. Although nature informs her somatic color palette, she also borrows imagery from The Los Angeles Times, understanding the newspaper as a chronicler of daily geopolitical and local stories, tragedies, human interest, weather, and trends in culture—a semiotic political thermometer that marks the passage of time.

For her paintings, Bellamy cuts, scrunches, slices, dissects, and rearranges the newsprint which is then rephotographed and converted into large-scale silkscreens. This labor-intensive process includes transferring the images to canvas with oil paint. Everything about Bellamy’s use of silkscreen is unconventional—including her intentional misregistrations. What results is an absurdist and found poetry superimposed over her softly rendered palms and sundrenched horizons.

Throughout the exhibition, considered mashups of words and images lead to provocative and humorous new meanings that point to the absurdity of our times and address a pervasive sense of reality upturned. In moments when the text is most abstracted, one’s mind wanders to the declining popularity of print media and how quickly the day’s news is discarded for secondary uses, for kindling, or washing windows, or the irony of wrapping a bouquet of fresh flowers in war reportage.

Jessica Taylor Bellamy (b. 1992, Whittier, CA) received an MFA from the Roski School of Art at the University of Southern California in 2022 and a BA in Political Science from the University of California in 2014. Her work has been featured in exhibitions with UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles, CA; WOAW Gallery Hong Kong and Make Room LA; Superposition Gallery hosted at Ochi Aux, Los Angeles, CA; and Lyles and King Gallery, New York, NY. Bellamy lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

 

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce AURORA, a solo exhibition by Caleb Hahne Quintana on view at 6150 Wilshire Blvd, November 5 – December 17, 2022. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery in Los Angeles. An opening reception will take place Saturday, November 5 from 5 – 8pm.

The exhibition title refers to the largely suburban city neighboring Denver where Hahne Quintana grew up. Making home his subject, he approaches tenderly, showing a sense of care in capturing the personal and familiar. Across portraiture, landscape, and still life paintings, each work depicts someone or a specific place known personally to the artist. As he explains, “Everyone is from some place. I used to wish I was from somewhere else. This show is a homecoming of being grateful and proud of where I am from.” 

In addition to paintings, AURORA includes a selection of colored pencil, ink, and gouache drawings on paper presented together in one gallery. The artist whose process begins with drawing describes it as a “liberating act which precedes the more arduous act of painting.” Hahne Quintana also produced a soundscape for the exhibition featuring field recordings from specific locations such as parks or shopping centers. The audio component, like a movie score, adds a sensuous layer of texture to painted memories, transporting viewers to Aurora. Like his paintings, the artist elevates the mundane to the profound, the overlooked to the monumental through his reflections on place as an emotionally charged subject.

Scale operates as content in this exhibition. A suite of intimate snapshot-size works seem to express the desire to hold memories as if they are objects—portraits of friends, the artist, his cat, etc. A still life of a Columbine, the state flower, contrasts against a much larger work depicting a heroic young male, a 21st century cowboy, leaning on a forest green 2000s Jaguar; both are treated with wonderment, charged and innocuous. Those familiar with the pure tones of dawn and dusk in the high desert will recognize such sensitivity in the radiance of light in these works. Through his nostalgic exploration of place, Hahne Quintana proves that environments can encapsulate specific states of mind, and states of being through meditative, nuanced observation.

Special thanks to musician Rogelio Montes for his contributions as collaborator on the exhibition soundscape. (Listen Here)

Caleb Hahne Quintana (b. 1993, Denver, CO) received a BFA in Fine Arts from Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design. He has exhibited his work widely in group and solo exhibitions at Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; albertz benda, Los Angeles, CA; Alexander Berggruen, New York, NY; 1969 Gallery, New York, NY; Carlye Packer, Palm Springs, CA; Kunstraum Potsdam, Germany; Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA; PM/AM, London, UK; and The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY. His residencies include 1969 Gallery Residency, The Cabin LA, ShowPen, RedLine Contemporary Art Center and Adventure Painting. His work was recently acquired by the Denver Art Museum, High Museum of Art, and the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami where his work is currently on view in their collection exhibition Fire Figure Fantasy. Hahne Quintana currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Low Fidelity, a solo exhibition by An Te Liu on view at 6150 Wilshire Blvd, September 17 – October 22. Low Fidelity is the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. An opening reception will take place Saturday, September 17, from 5 – 8 pm.

For Low Fidelity, the artist presents a collection of bronze, ceramic, and steel sculptures composed and cast from foam packaging materials, sports equipment, and other relics of the artist’s childhood. Liu’s sculptures take their origins from everyday objects designed to protect and enhance and, through his interventions are transformed into sensual biomorphic forms that are at once familiar yet uncanny.

Several works in the exhibition draw upon early memories of the artist’s upbringing in Taiwan. Two suspended works, Sukuda and Mikado were cast from the body of a 1964 Vespa VBB — the same model of scooter the artist’s grandfather and parents rode. These crescent-shaped figures hover in the gallery like apparitions; artifacts of his childhood. Similarly, the rhizomatic Over Time derives its mysterious coral-like form from a deconstructed Nerf football — the first piece of sports equipment Liu recalls owning. In this way, the child’s plaything metamorphoses into a scholar’s stone.

These allusions to the excavation of personal history and altered casts of sports equipment and armor continue to echo throughout much of the exhibition. Citing the history of Modernism and its hubristic desire for purity and refinement, Liu’s transgenerational signals of the body and memory mutate and devolve. These works serve as a means for the artist to explore progress, improvement, and provocations of what it might mean to achieve one’s peak physical form or “optimum condition” through time.

This connection is furthered in a related group of works Mola Mola, IO, and Omatic. These ceramic sculptures take their forms from heads of massage guns, designed to release tension and improve flexibility. Turned upside down, their gleaming forms assume the appearance of helmets; their enlargement amplifies Liu’s ruminations, transforming them into idols or something to venerate. In a comical turn, the artist has given a parenthetical title to this series, Verschlimmbesserung, a German noun describing an attempted improvement that only makes things worse, suggesting that despite earnest attempts to become fitter and better, this is perhaps a losing battle.

Within Low Fidelity, the new suite of sculptures become anachronistic actors upon a dramatic stage orchestrated by Liu. The reverberations of time and formal memory the works emit are distortions of originals yet reanimated through their transference. Whereas the concept of fidelity imparts a near moral sensibility, Liu ascribes value to loss. It is in the valley Liu creates between the original and its echo that his works garner their character; specters of someone, something, somewhere that once could be known.

An Te Liu (b. 1967, Tainan, Taiwan) received his Masters in Architecture from the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles and his BA in Art History at the University of Toronto. Working predominantly within sculpture and installation, Liu’s work has been exhibited in venues including the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Ursula Blickle Stiftung, the EVA Biennial of Ireland, the Venice Biennale of Architecture, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. 

His works are included in the permanent collections of The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Louis Vuitton Foundation, The Art Institute of Chicago, The National Gallery of Canada and The Art Gallery of Ontario. Liu lives and works in Toronto, Canada.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Time To Leave, a solo exhibition by New York based painter James Bartolacci on view at 6150 Wilshire Blvd, September 17 – October 22, 2022. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and in Los Angeles. An opening reception will take place Saturday, September 17 from 5 – 8pm.

Time To Leave consists of six oil paintings made by Bartolacci throughout this past summer. Known for their intensely colorful documentation of queer nightlife in New York City, this exhibition focuses largely on the atmospheric elements of nightclubs and afterparties. Many works zoom in on details around the DJ booth or abandoned drinks as well as their ongoing portrayals of glistening clubgoers on the dance floor. The paintings in this exhibition take on ‘light’ both as a material investigation as well as a conceptual one—considering temporality and the passage of time. 

Concentrating on expanding their painterly lexicon for this exhibition, Bartolacci explores new brush techniques in these works. Experimenting with silicone wedges and comb tools the resulting compositions emote a sonic energy. Scratching and scraping at the canvases releases hidden subtleties of their palette of technicolor greens, blues, and magentas, creating a sound wave or ripple effect. The subjects are cast in halos literally emanating light. Evocative of strobes, solid matter appears liquid in these paintings, destabilized, at the precipice of vanishing.

Bartolacci’s color sense and bold aesthetics go outside of what is considered ‘good taste.’ But this is part of the point, a decision meant to reject what is palatable, easy, or expected much like queerness itself. Through the works in this exhibition, Bartolacci seeks to elaborate on and offers a larger description of, what can be found in queer community and nightlife, and what might happen when it’s time to leave.

James Bartolacci (b. 1988, Easton, PA) received an MFA in painting and printmaking from the Yale School of Art and a BA in art history from Brandeis University. Their work has been exhibited in group and solo exhibitions at Galerie Perrotin, New York; Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles; and Taymour Grahne Projects in London. Their work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Frieze, and California Art Review among others. Bartolacci lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Sunrise Doesn’t Last All Morning, a solo exhibition of new work by German artist Fabian Treiber on view at 6150 Wilshire Blvd, July 9 – August 20. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in the United States. An opening reception will take place Saturday, July 9 from 5 – 7pm.

 

Treiber is an artist dedicated to questioning perceptions of reality through depictions of interior and exterior spaces. He makes decisions about the compositions formally, rather than narratively and in so doing produces the effect that is at once constructive and dissolving, as Treiber describes, the works “seem not quite right, but are just right.” The windows and doorways provide glimpses of landscapes and morning skies, while the staircases and halls expand the pictures, giving the cinematic suggestion of a camera panning across the room. This sense of movement and elongation is heightened in Treiber’s multi-panels paintings.

 

His works begin with untreated nettle canvas, a soft textile with a practically invisible woven structure. Proceeding slowly, he applies glazed surfaces of paint, then adding lines that overlap to arrive at shapes which form his interiors and finally the objects that “inhabit” them. This process takes place in countless thin layers and with a variety of brushes, airbrushes, and palette knives, sometimes resulting in very thickly painted sections. Treiber avoids making precise allusions to realistic perspective, instead his imagery shifts—at times flat, stretched out, or collapsed.

 

Playing with the gallery’s architecture, Treiber designed a wall to divide the gallery in half, leaving a narrow opening in the middle to temp visitors to peer through into the next room or cross the threshold. The unusual in-betweenness of this gap in the wall underscores speculative spacial situations depicted in his work, which together are fed by memory, improvisation, and questioning reality.

Fabian Treiber (b. 1986, Ludwigsburg, Germany) studied fine art at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design. His work has shown in solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Nürnberg; Kunstverein Ludwigsburg; Museum zu Allerheiligen, Schaffhausen; Ruttkowski;68 Gallery, Cologne and Paris; KANT Gallery, Copenhagen, Haverkampf & Leistenschneider Gallery, Berlin and Galerie Mark Müller, Zurich. Upcoming exhibitions include a group exhibition at Kunstmuseum Singen and solo exhibitions at Ruttkowski;68 Gallery, Dusseldorf and Municipal Gallery of Ostfildern (DE). He was awarded the Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Scholarship for his work up to 2018 and was granted by the Kunsthalle Nürnberg with the Marianne Defet Painting Scholarship the same year. In 2021 he was a finalist for the Große-Hans-Purrmann Prize. Treiber lives and works in Stuttgart, Germany. 

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Lunch at Sunset, a solo exhibition of new work by Korean American artist Justin Yoon on view at 6150 Wilshire Blvd, July 9 – August 20. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. An opening reception will take place Saturday, July 9 from 5 – 7pm.

 

Lunch at Sunset consists of six paintings made by Yoon during the first half of this year, following his debut with the gallery last summer in the group show It’s Much Louder Than Before, which explored various communities and aesthetics of queer nightlife.

 

Through ongoing episodic depictions of three queer, Asian heroes—‘Marge the Space Queen,’ ‘Blue Dream,’ and’ Fivepound’z,’ the Shih Tzu, Yoon’s neon idols satirize and invert staged depictions of heteronormativity in popular media. He is interested in exploring a queerness not tied to sex, rather the trio shares a platonic intimacy through his high camp capture of scenes from ordinary life. Whether they are viewing television, going out to dinner, or taking in the sunset, each painting suggests a cohesive, but never-ending narrative like a tv sitcom. There is a tongue-in-cheek irony to these characters and their ‘costuming,’ Blue Dream always appears oiled up in tiny briefs like a go-go dancer and Marge wears a gown regardless of the occasion.

 

Reappropriating 1950/70s Hollywood tropes from fashion to interiors, Yoon blends them with his own early childhood memories of American junk food, late-night movies on TV, and listening to jazz during long family drives. He transforms these memories into a world of nostalgia and over-the-top plastic glamor. Unified by their playful vaporwave palette, washes of pink and blue acrylic, gouaches, and glitter seduce us into Yoon’s world of solidarity and friendship.

 

Justin Yoon (b. 1991, Los Angeles, CA) received his BFA from Parsons School of Design, New York, NY. His work has been exhibited at Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA; Shelter Gallery, New York, NY; Hannah Traore Gallery, New York, NY; and Taymour Grahne Projects, London, UK. Upcoming shows include a group show with Museum of Sex, New York, NY; and a solo exhibition with Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami, FL. His work has been featured in publications including Math Magazine, Less Magazine, and Artsy. Yoon lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Look Out, a solo exhibition of new work by Los Angeles artist Alec Egan on view at 6150 Wilshire Blvd, May 21 – June 25, 2022. This is the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. An opening reception will take place Saturday, May 21 from 6 – 8pm.

This exhibition, Look Out and Egan’s concurrent solo presentation for Art Basel Hong Kong (May 26 -29), inversely titled Out Look, continue the artist’s sequence of exhibitions that depict a new portion of a singular imagined home. Drawn from his own memory and imagination, the fictitious interiors, and vast atmospheric landscapes speak to tropes of nostalgia, Americana, and the profundity of the mundane.

Egan’s large interiors, decorated with lavish floral patterns, repeatedly use typical domestic items such as furniture, books, and footwear as symbolic motifs that harken back to personal histories while conjuring hypothetical narratives about the absent residents. In the smaller works, object motifs reappear, such as the bowl of spaghetti in Bowl of pasta with flower poster, or the mirrored palms in Green room (waiting room), and underscore a reflective tone in the exhibition, adding emphasis to these symbolic gestures within the works.

The natural world is not confined to Egan’s landscapes of sun drenched skies and wave paintings, rather the lush wallpapers of peculiar buds, blooming bouquets, and fruit-patterned fabrics intricately come together as meditations on the domestic, natural beauty, and fragility of life. Rich with art-historical references ranging from Van Gogh to Hokusai, Egan’s sentimental dreamscapes are simultaneously faithful and inventive engagements with painterly tradition.

In the gallery viewing room will be a painting by LA artist Hopie Stockman, a friend of Egan’s, whose work explores shared themes through still life painting, patterns, and domestic space.

Alec Egan (b. 1984, Los Angeles, CA) completed his MFA at Otis College of Art and Design in 2013, and received a BFA in creative writing and poetry from Kenyon College. Recent solo exhibitions include Miro’s Corner at MAKI Gallery in Tokyo, Japan; The Study at Charles Moffett Gallery, New York, NY; and August, Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA. His work has been exhibited in group and solo exhibitions at Dubuque Museum of Art, Dubuque, IA; California Heritage Museum, Santa Monica, CA; and the Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA. Anat Ebgi will present a solo booth of work at Art Basel Hong Kong in the Discoveries sector May 26 – 29. Egan lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Lost Hours, a solo exhibition by New York artist Mark Ryan Chariker on view at 6150 Wilshire Blvd, May 21 – June 25, 2022. This is the artist’s first exhibition in Los Angeles. An opening reception will take place Saturday, May 21 from 6 – 8pm.

Lost Hours consists of five oil on canvas paintings made by Chariker during the first half of this year. This new body of work depicts figures caught in moments of stillness and contemplation. Golden and radiant light in his work evokes a frozen-in-time quality, achieved through many applications of glazing and tonal shifts. Although highly intuitive, in the sense that the artist does not work from studies or preparatory drawings, one has the impression that everything in the works has fallen into a precise place from a supernatural reality.

Rife with detail, each section of these angular spaces is active, pulsing with little brush strokes, creating a visceral sense of emotional containment. In Ghost Mantis, this psychological claustrophobia is highlighted by the presence of closed terrariums and a figure sitting in the corner surrounded on all sides by elaborate furniture. Embellishments on clothing, labels on bottles, imaginary text on the spines of books, Chariker’s gothic settings are as mysterious as the characters within them. Through this layered approach, each vignette activates the imagination to conjure its own narratives.

Mark Ryan Chariker (b. 1984, Spartanburg, SC) received a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University in Boston, MA. His work has been included in numerous exhibitions, including Exhibition 15, PM/AM, London, UK; I have an idea!, 1969 Gallery, New York, NY; Platform, presented by David Zwirner Gallery, New York, NY; Red Root, Green Root, The Valley, Taos, NM; and Home Alone, ATM Gallery, New York, NY. Chariker has completed residencies at PM/AM Gallery in London, RAiR Foundation in Roswell, New Mexico, SÍM in Reykjavik, Iceland, and NES in Skagaströnd, Iceland. His paintings have been featured in Artforum International, Artnet News, and Art of Choice. Chariker is represented by 1969 Gallery in New York, NY and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Los Angeles artist Jay Stuckey titled One Sock at a Time. This will be the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery and will be on view at 6150 Wilshire Blvd, April 2 – May 7, 2022. An opening reception will take place Saturday, April 2 from 6-8 pm.

Stuckey knows his archetypes. The jester. The romantic. The outlaw. The superhero. The everyman. He uses these characters—captured in a distinct pop and comic style—to marry ideas and emotional states that operate within a dream-logic. His pictographic paintings convey both tenderness and amusement, satire and critique about daily life, human nature, and the inexplicable. With a slapstick zaniness and an eye on the ordinary, Stuckey’s paintings pilot a passage to the profound.

An artist unbound by distinctions between high and low, messy and contained, important and irrelevant, primal and civilized, his work expresses an emotional and complex psychology in which innocence, melancholy, suffering, and exuberance are inextricably mixed. Building up the initial surfaces of his paintings with collaged images clipped from newspapers, penciled shopping lists, and drawings mined from his daily dream diaries, Stuckey bestows each painting with its own mood and subconscious.

Through Stuckey’s paintings, an expansive world emerges capturing the rush of life and evoking a hot allegory for the madness of right now. His union of opposites—the humorous and sinister, the abstract and representational, drawing and painting—generate a tension that makes the hair on the back

of your neck stand up, but reminds you that we all put our socks on one at a time.

Jay Stuckey (b. 1968, Washington, D.C.), received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute, Chicago, and BFA from Brown University. He has exhibited his work internationally at Deutscher Kunstlerbund, Berlin; Institut Franco- American, Rennes; Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles; Anna Zorina Gallery, New York; Minnesota Street Project, San Francisco; Blank Projects, Cape Town; Goethe Institute, Johannesburg; Green Papaya Art Projects, Manila. His work is included in the public collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA and Collection Majudia, Montreal. Stuckey lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to present the first Los Angeles solo exhibition of Melissa Brown, titled West Coast Paintings. The show will be on view at 6150 Wilshire Blvd, April 2 – May 7, 2022. An opening reception will take place Saturday, April 2 from 6-8 pm.

Mining personal experiences and daily life for metaphysical and symbolic content, Brown depicts scenes that could be lifted from anybody’s memories—a jacaranda tree reflected in a skyscraper or listening to the radio on a road trip. Anonymity is further expressed in these paintings when the figure or face appears; it is obscured, fractured, consumed by its surroundings, hiding the personality of the subject from the viewer—in a cool, detached, and powerfully atmospheric way.

Brown’s work has a diaristic directness that stems from her practice of making plein air oil studies while travelling, which she uses to record color, light, and compositional elements to use in her paintings. Familiar landscapes, interiors, and still lives are transformed into surreal tableaus that straddle multiple realities and perspectives. Her imagery comes together through a collage of techniques, including screen-printed digital photography, oil, and airbrush. The artist invites viewers to peer through the window of her world, simultaneously holding a mirror up to our own. Although place and landscape have always informed much of Brown’s practice, this is the first time she is focusing on California as a subject.

Melissa Brown (b. 1974) received her MFA in Painting from Yale University and a BFA in Printmaking from Rhode Island School of Design. In 2000 she completed the Skowhegan School of Painting program. Recent solo and two person exhibitions include NYNY2020, and Between States, Derek Eller Gallery, New York, NY; Melissa Brown and Jamie Bull at Dodd Gallery at University of Georgia, Athens, GA; Going AWOL, Biggins Gallery, Auburn University, Auburn, AL;Tennis Elbow, Journal Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Past Present Future, Magenta Planes, New York, NY; Paper Fortune, CANADA, New York, NY; and Roberto Paradise, San Juan, Puerto Rico. She has participated in group exhibitions at Mass MOCA, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, Klaus Von Nichtssagend, Musée International Des Arts Modestes, and Jeffery Deitch, Los Angeles. In 2012 she was awarded the Joan Mitchell Painter’s Grant and a residency at the Joan Mitchell Center in 2019. Her work is in the permanent collections at the Whitney Museum of Art and the New York City Department of Education. She is an associate professor in art at Lehman College, City University of New York and an organizing member of the artist-run gallery Essex Flowers. Brown lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to present A Sun To Come, our third solo exhibition by Palestinian-American artist Jordan Nassar. The exhibition will be on view at 6150 Wilshire Blvd, February 12 – March 26, 2022. An opening reception will take place Saturday, February 12 from 4-6 pm.

In recent years, Nassar’s embroidery-focused practice has expanded to include furniture, metal, and glasswork drawing from techniques and materials used throughout the Arab world. Though materially varied, these bodies of work are unified by the artist’s depictions of imaginary Palestinian landscapes as well as his painterly approach to specific craft practices. Alongside Nassar’s vibrant embroideries, this exhibition debuts his new series of wall-mounted landscapes made from wood and hand-hammered brass, bedazzled with mother of pearl inlay.

The new inlay landscapes collectively titled ‘Third Family’ continue the artist’s interest of incorporating craftwork inspiration from the Levant and Palestine. A triangle, rectangle, pentagon, hexagon, and heptagon form a sequence, exploring ideas of geometry, seriality, reconfiguration, and decoration. The specificity of the woods, each one named in the materials, reads like a list of paint colors: Paradox Walnut, Spalted Big Leaf Maple, Purple Heart, Swiss Pear, Avocado, Jatoba, Padouk, Loquat, Olive. 

Fraught with emotional entanglement and personal longing for place and permanence, the artist considers these landscapes, “versions of Palestine as they exist in the mind of the diaspora, who have never been there and can never go there. They are the Palestine I heard stories about growing up, half-made of imagination; they are dreamlands and utopias that are colorful and fantastical—beautiful and romantic, but bittersweet.”

Meticulously fabricated by hand, with hundreds of thousands of individual stitches in each composition, the embroidered skies and atmospheric horizons in A Sun To Come seem especially remote, rural, and dreamlike. Together the pieces in the exhibition extend provocations of his work to the pan-Arab diaspora in general. By incorporating traditional forms with his unique interpretations, Nassar continues the ways in which these traditions have changed over time, bridging geographical, political, and historical expanses.

Jordan Nassar (b.1985, New York, NY) earned his BA at Middlebury College in 2007. His work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions globally at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; BRIC, Brooklyn, NY; Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY; Abrons Art Center, New York, NY;  Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY; Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA; James Cohan Gallery, New York, NY; Evelyn Yard, London, UK, Exile Gallery in Berlin, Germany, and The Third Line, Dubai, UAE. His work was included in the group exhibition Making Knowing: Craft in Art, at the Whitney Museum of American Art. His work has been acquired by museum collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), Dallas Museum of Art, the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, and the Israel Museum, Tel Aviv. Nassar lives and works in New York, NY.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Sea Swallow, an exhibition of new work by Los Angeles artist Zoé Blue M.. On view at 6150 Wilshire Blvd, opening Saturday, December 11, 2021. This is Blue M.’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Blue M’s paintings address characterizations of Asian women in both western and eastern popular culture drawing upon a range of source materials from Anime, advertising, art history, and ukiyo-e, as well as personal memories and photographs. For this exhibition, Blue M. examined Jorōgumo, a supernatural entity of Japanese Yōkai folklore.

Possessing a cunning intelligence and a cold heart, Jorōmugo is a spider-like creature who lives near water and feeds on men. Skillful deceivers, they can shape-shift into beautiful, young women whose mission can often be perceived as to witness the downfall of a man. Though the story of Jorōgumo provided the spine of her thinking, the exhibition breaks apart this story. Blue M. elevates the central character by presenting an open narrative that incorporates moments of innocence alongside scenes of villainy. 

Atmospheric exterior paintings with dramatic skies and water are playful such as the siren-esque girls swimming in No Shipwreck Needed or the girl walking along the seashore in Playcate. These moods are contrasted by the psychological and contained interior compositions of Waiting for Tomorrow or Behind the Fall. Together these depictions, consider the complexities of emotional burdens, family history, adolescence, and depictions of East Asian women throughout time and their stereotyping as a way of making sense of her own multicultural identity.

Zoé Blue M. (b. 1994, Los Angeles) Blue M. received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and has attended residencies at Vermont Studio Center and Anderson Ranch, Texas. Her work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA; Page NYC, New York; The Gallery @ El Centro; In Lieu, Los Angeles (2019) and group exhibitions include Another Scorcher, Martha’s Contemporary, Austin; Three Oh One, Memorial Hall Gallery, Rhode Island (all 2019). Blue M. lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Angel Food, an exhibition of paintings by Los Angeles artist Amanda Wall. On view at 6150 Wilshire Blvd, opening Saturday, December 11, 2021. This is Wall’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Amanda Wall’s sensuous paintings evoke the physicality and gestural spontaneity of Abstract Expressionism, while capturing color and light that feels distinct to Southern California. The self-taught artist frequently depicts exposed or prone subjects giving an air of intimacy and fetishistic quality to her paintings. Using a palette ranging from bright blues and pulsing pinks to deep blacks her paintings have an intuitive intensity that defies singular readings.

In Wall’s recent works, figuration and abstraction are not opposite parts, rather they are complementary elements, which produce a delicate uncertainty; forms, moods, and attitudes becoming something else—pointing to phenomena real or emotional. Energized through mystery and withholding, her repetitive themes and subjects include: cigarettes, glasses of water, cherries, and portraiture. The artist’s use of containment, distorted perspective, and concealment introduces a freshness which heightens the eroticism and psychological spaces she explores.

Wall’s paintings feel instantaneous, like polaroids or snapshots. In this way her works seem to comment on contemporary portraiture, image making, and our ever-expanding digital repository. As viewers, we are made to feel like voyeurs, observing isolated characters, without companions, for our own pleasure or gratification. Her portraits and still lifes are composed of conflicting layers and erected boundaries, subjects revealed through cups or bouquets of flowers, eyes and faces are obscured. These fragments coalesce into a unified whole, addressing sexuality, the body, image making, vision, and a kaleidoscopic range of human emotion.

Amanda Wall (b.1985, Hood River, OR) has shown her work in group and solo exhibitions internationally at galleries including, Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles; The Cabin, Los Angeles; Köning Galerie, Berlin; Almine Rech, New York and Brussels; Nino Mier, Los Angeles; and Gana Art, Seoul. Her work is in the public collection of the X Museum, Beijing. Wall lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Apparition, an immersive exhibition by Los Angeles artist Greg Ito. On view at 6150 Wilshire Blvd, opening Saturday, October 2, 2021. This is Ito’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and follows up The Arrival of Spring, a solo presentation at Art Basel Hong Kong earlier this year.

In six new paintings Ito deep-dives into his expansive cinematic compositions. These works contemplate themes of new life, metamorphosis, and the ghosts we live with—personal history, generational trauma, and the invisible weight of being alive. Among Ito’s subjects are flaming hillsides of Southern California, sprawling city streets surveilled by helicopters, and smoky sunsets; this darker imagery is contrasted by blooming poppies, flittering ginkgo leaves, and butterflies.

In his largest painting to date, a five-paneled work titled Motion Picture, Ito depicts a dramatic and layered landscape framed by arched floor to ceiling windows and billowing burning curtains. Fundamentally a storyteller, the artist is driven by the momentum of narrative and repeating motifs—moons, suns, flames, keyholes, clocks, teapots, and horizons—that operate with a dreamlike logic that is playful with scale, superimposition, and silhouettes.

Prominent in a corner of the gallery is a large house with a pristine facade that visitors can enter. Once inside, it is revealed to be damaged and burned out. The house on fire is a recurring symbol for Ito and functions conceptually as a self portrait. It speaks not only to his grandparents’ experience as Japanese-Americans during World War II and their forced removal to internment camps, but also his own experience as a fourth-generation Angeleno with immigrant roots. For immigrant families, home is both where you are and elsewhere; it is a fleeting and fragile refuge from the outside world, where connection to the past is preserved and hopes for the future are nurtured. The idea of home also takes on a new profound meaning for Ito, who became a father earlier this year, speaking to his desire to build a secure and stable life for his new family.

Two sculptures in the exhibition underscore spiritual and mystic elements of Ito’s practice. Placed outside the house is a floating teapot fountain that appears to be infinitely pouring itself into a stone wishing well. Inside the house, a bowl of ramen with a pair of hashi suspended midair, spin clockwise infinitely on a table. Both works draw attention to metaphysical and oppositional forces—presence and absence. 

Greg Ito (b. 1987, Los Angeles, CA) earned his BFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 2008. His work has been exhibited widely in group and solo exhibitions at galleries including Maki Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA; Division Gallery, Montreal, QC; Arsenal Contemporary, Toronto, ON; Jeffrey Deitch New York, NY; Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago, IL; Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, CA; Et al, San Francisco, CA; and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts – YBCA, San Francisco, CA. A forthcoming solo exhibition at the new Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego will open in 2022. Ito lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce the opening of our new exhibition space at 6150 Wilshire Blvd. The new gallery will more than triple our exhibition footprint and will allow us to mount our most ambitious shows yet. It will be used as a second exhibition space in addition to the Culver City gallery.

The inaugural show Good Company: Pt. 1, is a two-part group exhibition co-organized by Anat Ebgi and Paul Schimmel and will be on view from December 5, 2020 through January 23, 2021.

The first part will feature works from 15 gallery artists, anchored by important historic pieces: Euronyme & Ophion (1977-78) a painting diptych by Faith Wilding potent with ideas of genesis, transformation, life cycles and personal mythologies, as well as two installation works by Tina Girouard Air Space Stage (1972) a vibrant canopy of silk fabrics suspended over Blue Hole (1971), four cuts of patterned linoleum arranged in a square, countering austere minimalist art with exuberant color and unorthodox new materials. 

Jen DeNike will present Another Circle, a single channel video production depicting a ballerina rotating in toe shoes in what appears to be an infinite pirouette, which debuted in 2010 at The Company gallery in Chinatown. New paintings from veterans of the gallery roster—elusive abstract depictions of non-inhabited places by Sigrid Sandström and Jay Stuckey’s intricate humorous compositions of everyday people in everyday action. And Elias Hansen will present Until I held it in my hands (2012), a sculpture that is part-chemist lab, part-druggie’s coffee table, and part-DJ booth.

Good Company also includes work from recent additions to the roster. Cosmo Whyte will show a sculpture of mussel-covered life vests that continues the artist’s reimagining of tumultuous passages of displaced and migrant people. Sarah Ann Weber will show a suite of four aqueous paintings—one for each season—teeming with Weber’s signature abstract flora and fauna. Greg Ito’s panoramic window painting As The Curtains Close (2020) reveals the artist’s narrative style with each window depicting the same landscape at different times of day.

Landscape painting continues in the watercolors of Neil Raitt, who will have a solo exhibition in this new gallery April 2021. The exhibition features a wide range of painting styles and conceptual conversations from the emotional and psychological figures in Janet Werner’s portraits, to the luminous and soft gradients of Alec Egan’s southern California skies, to the abstract experimentation of Samantha Thomas dissecting the canvas.

The installation is rounded out with a video and vinyl text poem by Jibade-Khalil Huffman, who uses visual language of exhibition didactic material to play with ideas about information and authority; and a teacup oil painting by Robert Russell who will open a solo exhibition of this new series at our La Cienega space in January 2021.

Paul Schimmel is an independent curator and art historian of contemporary art, formerly the Chief Curator for nine years at the Newport Harbor Art Museum (now the Orange County Museum of Art), Chief Curator for 22 years at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, and Founding Partner of Hauser Wirth & Schimmel. Paul has organized and written the catalogue for the exhibition, Sigmar Polke Photoworks: When Pictures Vanish, and contributed to the catalogue of Bruce Nauman’s comprehensive MoMA retrospective in 1995. Most recently, he wrote for the Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibition at Fondation Louis Vuitton as well as Kazuo Shiraga exhibition at the Amagasaki City Culture Promotion Foundation.

 

After four months of being closed, Anat Ebgi is thrilled to announce the reopening of the gallery and AE2 to the public with a two-person exhibition, featuring Alejandro Cardenas and An Te Liu. This exhibition will take place at AE2 2680 S La Cienega Blvd from July 11 through September 5, 2020.

An Te Liu, a Toronto-based sculptor, will present a curated grouping of new sculptures alongside a suite of recent paintings by Los Angeles-based painter Alejandro Cardenas. These artists are linked through their search of form through the shared interrogation of design and architecture. In their respective practices, each borrows, transforms, and recontextualizes the built and designed world with a sense of humor and playfulness that translates into something simultaneously familiar and mythological.

In Cardenas’s newest “Field House” series, melancholic figures populate a modernist glass country house. One has the sense these figures are trapped inside, gazing longingly at blue skies, only to be enjoyed from a distance. In two works Clear Skies at the Field House 1 and 2, sublimating humanoids repose on Mies Van der Rohe chairs, as uncontested monuments to calm and effortless elegance at the time they were designed and now cult objects for connoisseurs. Cardenas’s work juxtaposes the iconic with the abstract and ineffable.

Liu’s work is frequently contextualized in terms of his borrowing forms from consumer objects and packing materials. However, he takes these sources beyond their utilitarian origins to a precarious unknown, imbuing them with a new lyrical narrative. In the case of Talismaic 2000, Liu cast the reflective interior casing of a headlight from his defunct 2000 Honda Civic. Then taking inspiration from Brancusi’s The Newborn—a sleek bronze ovoid—Liu modeled the backside of this piece after an egg. With Aspira, Liu dissected a handheld dustbuster, stretching and twisting it open, and finishing it with copper leafing. Though the vacuum retained its distinct snout, suspended from the ceiling it is graceful and bird-like, the final form resembling an ancient fossil.

Alejandro Cardenas (b. 1977, Santiago, Chile) completed his BFA at the Cooper Union School of Art in 2000. Cardenas has exhibited his work in solo and group exhibitions including at the Hammer Museum (2003), Anat Ebgi (2019), Harper’s Books (2019), and James Fuentes (2008 and 2010). Before becoming a full-time studio painter, Cardenas had a successful career as a multimedia artist, working in illustration, graphic design, and videography. For over a decade, he served as the lead textile designer and art director for the influential fashion label Proenza Schouler. He was also a founding member of Lansing-Dreiden, a New York-based transdisciplinary art collective that produced musical albums, a literary journal, and artworks. Reviews of his art and design projects have appeared in the New York Times, Vogue, and Another Magazine. Cardenas currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

An Te Liu (b. 1967, Tainan, Taiwan) received his Masters in Architecture from Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles and his BA in Art History University of Toronto. Working predominantly within sculpture and installation, Liu’s work has been exhibited in venues including the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Ursula Blickle Stiftung, the EVA International Biennial of Ireland, the Venice Biennale of Architecture, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His works are included in the permanent collections of The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Canada and The Art Gallery of Ontario. Liu lives and works in Toronto, Canada.