For The Armory Show 2022 Anat Ebgi is pleased to present a curated selection of works made specifically for the fair, drawing from the gallery’s program to include pieces by artists with current and upcoming exhibitions. The presentation examines contemporary portraiture, landscape painting, and works with strong connection to craft practices.

ALEC EGAN, ALANNAH FARRELL, TINA GIROUARD, JAIME MUÑOZ, JORDAN NASSAR, NEIL RAITT, ROBERT RUSSELL, SIGRID SANDSTRÖM, COSMO WHYTE, FAITH WILDING

SEPTEMBER 9 – 12, 2021

BOOTH 230

 

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce a curated selection of works by ten artists for The Armory Show 2021. This presentation represents a cross-section of our varied and interconnected program that fosters emerging and historic artists including Alec Egan, Alannah Farrell, Tina Girouard, Jaime Muñoz, Jordan Nassar, Neil Raitt, Robert Russell, Sigrid Sandström, Cosmo Whyte, and Faith Wilding.

Among the featured works are historical collaborative sequin works of Tina Girouard, a largely overlooked, but key artist within the New York post-minimal and Pattern and Decoration movements. Connected to Girouard’s collaborative craft, is Palestinian-American Jordan Nassar, whose work with traditional forms of embroidery and craft ruminates on issues of the diaspora, cultural authenticity, and political activism. His collaborative embroidered pieces for the presentation present a dialogue between his own position as a young member of diaspora and the women of the West Bank. 

Issues of diaspora and cultural hybridity are also echoed in Cosmo Whyte’s work, the artist renders imagery of historic protest and black activism in semi-abstracted charcoal on paper works. Avowed eco-feminist Faith Wilding’s vibrant watercolor and ink drawings are dense with nature-infused imagery and express interconnectedness, while exploring visionary iconography of the energy and force of growth. For the first time we are also presenting works by Los Angeles artist Jaime Muñoz, whose visual language is focused on aspects of identity, the commodification of labor, religion, and critiques of Latin American colonialism and Modernism.

Thick impastoed paintings by Alec Egan are premised on fictitious memory, willfully playing on conceptual tropes of nostalgia as well as formal concerns such as pattern, color, and light. Each of Alannah Farrell’s portraits are a protest, an exercise in safety, community building and nurturing intimacy against the alienation, anxieties, and violences of modern queer life. The surreal landscapes of Neil Raitt address the function of painting in an era of digital art, his compositions exist as a suspension of illusionary space and traditional senses of perspective. Robert Russell’s ‘Teacup’ series addresses ideas of memory, iconography, and mortality in a personal language that is attentive to beauty, the history of painting, and the role of photography. Sigrid Sandström’s elusive abstract paintings of non-inhabited places call forth a range of associations from landscapes to cosmic forms—the raw canvas ground against a playful and expressive color palette.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to present new works by Amie Dicke and Janet Werner. Each of these artists practices use photography as a means to investigate gesture and abstraction as well as feminine portrayals and expectations. The works for The Armory Show 2020 direct focus to topics such as spectatorship, female power, hidden suffering, glamour, and sensuality.

Amie Dicke rose to prominence in the early 2000s after a period of living and working in New York City that saw her literally de-facing the advertising imagery of Madison Avenue, obscuring the features of famous models and driving nails through glossy publications – some of which subsequently commissioned Dicke to contribute to their pages. For The Armory Show she presents her newest series of ‘ONE-LINERS,’ the name of which refers to a striking new technique whereby she uses a continuous, meandering incision to slice into aluminum plates bearing composed fashion portraiture. As she follows her line around the immaculate bodies, the artist maps the touch of her hand and eye around the image, then bends new shapes into the metal. “Nothing is really removed, nothing is lost, just opened,” she notes. By adding space where there was none, and creating work that elides the conventions of two- and three-dimensional forms, Dicke continuously distorts and realigns the possibilities of our visual experience. The artist also completed new sandpaper abrasion works, where prints of images from various sources—from fashion magazines to Bauhaus catalogues—are charged with a sense of physicality, revealing alternate and undetected associations through judicious removal.

Janet Werner’s distinct brand of fictional portraits has been developed over a practice spanning thirty years. The works trade in multiple, fragile personalities culled from both fashion magazines and art historical sources. Werner’s raw material is cut up, recombined and transformed via a gamut of operations into something resembling a painterly exquisite corpse. The resulting, composite characters are abstracted from multiple references and devoid of one, singular identity. Despite their representational qualities, each subject remains ambiguous and fluid. The works, through gestural tension and the deceit of traditional beauty, address issues of gender and representation, ideological conditioning and psychological vulnerability, while simultaneously appealing to humor, fantasy and seduction. Werner’s characters, flattened against tenebrous, watery voids or indeterminate architecture, stare openly into space. They may appear abstract at close glance and are, at times aggressively rendered suggesting crisis or emotional slippage. The works invite the viewer to look beyond the predicament of the frame, mirroring the onlooker’s gaze, and bending the reading back to the viewer herself.

Amie Dicke’s (b. 1978, Rotterdam) work has been exhibited internationally in venues such as Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany; Tate Modern and Project Space 176 in London; FLAG Art Foundation, New York; and Art Centre Silkeborg Bad in Denmark. Her work is included in several major collections including Gemeentemuseum The Hague, Collection Rob Defares, Direct Art Collection, the Zabludowicz Collection, Collection Rik Reinking, Takashi Murakami and the City Collection of Rotterdam through the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen. Recent solo exhibition history includes: EENWERK, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Granpalazzo (with Anat Ebgi), Rome, Italy; GEM Museum of Contemporary Art, The Hague, Netherlands; and Hiromi Yoshii Gallery, Toyko, Japan. Recent group exhibitions include: Anat Ebgi at Minnesota Street Project, San Francisco; Centquarte, Paris; Marres (House for Contemporary Culture), Maastricht; Castrum Peregrini, Amsterdam; Museum Kranenburgh, Bergen; Grimmuseum, Berlin; Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart Tasmania; and Murakami Takashi Kaikai Kiki Collection,Taipei. Dicke lives and works in Amsterdam.

Janet Werner (b. 1959, Winnipeg, Manitoba) received her MFA from Yale University in 1987, 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. Her work was included in Painting Project at Galerie de l’UQAM (2013); Oh, Canada, at Mass MoCa (2012); and in the Prague Biennale (2003). Recent monographic exhibitions include Janet Werner, (Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Montréal, QC, 2019); What Time Is It, Mr. Wolf? (Art Gallery of Guelph 2019); Another Perfect Day, (touring exhibition to: Kenderdine Gallery, Saskatoon; Esker Foundation, Calgary; Galerie de l’UQAM, Montréal; MacIntosh Gallery, London, 2013); and Is Anything Alright? (Art Gallery of Windsor, Windsor, 2009). Her work is in the collections of the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec; Musée d’art contemporain, Montréal; The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, The Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), Toronto; Owens Art Gallery, Sackville; Canadian Embassy, Berlin; University of Lethbridge, Alberta; Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Mendel Art Gallery; McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco, and numerous private and corporate collections. Werner’s work is currently on view in the group show The Sacred Vessel, Arsenal Contemporary, New York. Werner lives and works in Montréal, Québec.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce a two-person presentation with An Te Liu and Neil Raitt at The Armory Show from March 8 – 11, 2018 in New York City.

The sculptures of An Te Liu are at once sensual and amorphous, Modernist designs conjuring both the historical and futuristic relic. An ongoing investigation into material and form, Liu’s sculptures are transmuted, contemporary totems on concrete pedestals, beginning as industrial packaging detritus and metamorphosing into illusory, patinated casts.

Neil Raitt’s oil paintings boast vignetted compositions of natural scenes, each meticulously detailed in endless repetition. The tiling of these mountain motifs reference a mechanical reproduction which borders on abstraction. Conceptually borrowing from Bob Ross’ The Joy of Painting and “magic-eye” stereograms, the intricate landscapes drift and grow, both denying and embracing kitsch as each horizon line multiplies ad infinitum.  

Raitt and Liu’s practices explore the impossible through their respective formal rigidity. Raitt deconstructing the traditional figurative landscape, Liu’s material interventions questioning notions of canonical purity. Both artists actively re-mix, challenging the viewer through clever, humorous techniques.

Martin Basher’s painting and sculptural work is situated in the lineage of display-based artistic practices. Working with the languages of retail and advertising, Basher explores the emotional charge of common objects and images. From his trademark paintings of gradated stripes and photo-real beaches to sculptural installations serving as displays for consumer goods, Basher activates spaces of sublimated psychological desire, at once familiar and strange for the altered retail scenarios they present. In these complex displays, Basher invokes unspoken drives, and the mundane and exclusive, the highbrow and lowbrow, and the public and private impulses that inform us as consuming individuals.

Martin Basher was born in 1979 in Wellington, New Zealand and lives and works in New York. The artist received his MFA at Columbia University. He has shown internationally at public institutions including University of Connecticut, Art In General, Auckland Art Gallery, and The Public Art Fund. Recent solo exhibitions include Starkwhite, Auckland and Saatchi & Saatchi, New York. Basher has been included in group shows at 179 Canal, Tracy Williams, New York and Brand New Gallery, Milan. Basher has an upcoming solo exhibitions this year with Starkwhite, Auckland, and the University of Auckland and will present a solo exhibition at Anat Ebgi in early 2018

Traditional black-and-white photography is grounded in the principle that photographic truth is only revealed through the darkroom process where prints are submerged in baths of organic chemicals. Working exclusively in grayscale, Margo Wolowiec’s two double-paneled pieces re-approximate the experience of darkroom photography in the conversion between the digital image and her physical weaving.

Wolowiec has sourced images that attempt to replicate traditional modes of black and white photography in a digital space. Using the hashtag #blackandwhite as an archival tool to find the images that comprise her works, each digital photographsourced is an inexact representation of true black and white images. Wolowiec’s weavings interrogate the perceptive qualities of color and the artifice of online imagery. As her process involves conversions of images from RGB to CMYK color profiles the resulting range in palette simulating the absence of color reveals the imprecise nature of translated digitalinformation.

Pier 94
New York, NY