Gloria Klein was an American abstract painter whose mature works are rooted in repetition and systemic order. She came of age in 1970s New York, amid rapid aesthetic and cultural shifts. Guided by an enigmatic and self-determined logic, her 1970s works feature patterned fields that push against the limits of comfort. Repeated diagonal strokes form dense frequencies evoking psychological or urban chaos: the jostling of bodies in a crowd, visual overload of signage, or coded language of digital information. Color is the carrier and distributor of meaning; she visualizes the complexity of people and society – its problems and solutions, movements, feelings, and experiences – through pure abstraction. She pulls viewers into an environment of order and disruption. Klein’s obsessive pursuit of order exposes a tension between the cool authority of a system and the messy realities of lived experience. Formulas falter and the rigidity of the grid yields to the stress testing of her palette.

Gloria Klein (b. 1936, Brooklyn, NY; d. 2021) began her adult education with a BA in Economics at the Brooklyn College, City University of New York. Following which she attended the Brooklyn Museum School of Art, the Art Students League of New York, and finally in 1970 she enrolled at Hunter College where she took classes with conceptual artist Robert Barry and Robert Swain. She obtained her MA in art from Hunter College in 1973. Klein exhibited widely in group and solo exhibitions throughout the 1970s and 80s including at Hunter College, New York, NY; The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; The Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, CT; P.S.1., Long Island City, NY; 112 Workshop, New York, NY; and A.I.R., New York, NY, among many others.

During her lifetime, Klein was awarded several awards, including artists’ residences, scholarships, and grants such as the International Women’s Year Award (1975-76); Studio Space at Vermont Studio School, Johnson, VT (1988); Honorable Mention, Turchin Center for Visual Arts, Boone, North Carolina (2005); Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant (2005), and Pollock/Krasner Foundation Grant (2007). Her work can be found in many private and public collections and corporate. Among the institutions, we can mention The Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin. Some of the corporates include Chase Manhattan Bank, Chemical Bank, Citibank, Lehmann Brothers Corporation, Sherman and Sterling, Swiss Reinsurance Company, and Texaco, to name a few. In 2024, Anat Ebgi presented the first solo exhibition of Klein’s work in Los Angeles.

 

Anat Ebgi is pleased to present a focused survey of artworks by American artist Tina Girouard (1946-2020). The selection draws from works made during the 1970s including Sky Above, Earth Below (1974), major works from Walls Wallpaper and Test Pattern drawing series, along with a selection of performance documentation, highlighting works the Girouard created in Europe during this period. This presentation marks the artist’s first solo exhibition in Europe since 1984 and a return to Basel since Holly Solomon Gallery presented her work there in 1977.

Sky Above, Earth Below comprises four bands of ‘Solomon’s Lot’ fabrics suspended across the ceiling and four cut sheets of patterned linoleum flooring arranged below it on the ground. Engaging minimalist concerns with materiality, volume, and perception, Girouard delineated a cube within the exhibition space. However, her use of domestic materials—airy, floral fabrics and decorative home flooring—also links the installation to experiments in post-minimalism and provisional architecture. The work echoes the wall-bound arrangements in the booth that also address the domicile as a subject.

Girouard grew up on a farm in Louisiana “between De Quincy and Lake Charles […] a place that has no name.” Her work can be situated in a similar nonplace, permeating several art historical movements. Girouard’s practice is connected to the post-minimalists and is also deeply associated with the Pattern and Decoration movement in New York. Intertwined with feminist art history, are Girouard’s considerations of domestic space and the “women’s work” such as washing, cooking, sewing, and sweeping, that has become indicative of her practice. Reworking art into something increasingly unpredictable and uncategorizable, ever close to life itself, Girouard exploits the porousness of her materials and conceptual classifications. 

Though Girouard is best known for her use of found patterns from mass-produced materials, she was also interested in drawing patterns of her own. These drawings, divided into quadrants, were called her ‘test patterns.’ Abutted at the edges and corners, the works test the relationships of different colors, shapes, and lines as they meet. Small, like quotations or excerpts, they point to the artist’s desire to use symbolic gestures to make statements about people, places, and energy. 

As an important member of the SoHo art scene, Girouard was a founding participant of 112 Greene Street Gallery, The Anarchitecture Group, Clocktower Gallery (now MoMA PS1), the artist-run FOOD restaurant with collaborators Gordon Matta-Clark and Carol Goodden, Holly Solomon Gallery, Creative Time, and The Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia. In addition to her own projects, Girouard was involved in films, videos, and performances by her artist peers including Keith Sonnier, Richard Serra, Lawrence Weiner, Nancy Holt, Laurie Anderson, and the Natural History of the American Dancer, among others.

Girouard’s participation in and influence on the SoHo art scene of the 1970s represents an elusive social energy of the period—marked by the spirit of collaboration, and a willingness and commitment to dispense with limitations: aesthetic, conceptual, and political. She countered the austere minimalist art being made at the time with exuberant color, eclectic compositions, and unorthodox materials. Eschewing any kind of media specificity in her performances, videos, paintings, and installation pieces, Girouard’s work incorporates anything from silk fabrics, tapestries, wallpapers, to rolls of linoleum and pressed tin tiles. Her work is as varied as her imagination. Her ideas about the potential of art and life making are charming and accessible, ordinary and profound, revealing the genius and magic of her mind.

Girouard’s first comprehensive retrospective SIGN-IN is currently on view at the Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City through September 14, 2025. The retrospective debuted at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans in 2024, and subsequently travelled to the Center for Art, Research, and Alliances (CARA) in New York last fall. The travelling exhibition is curated by Manuela Moscoso, Executive and Artistic Director of CARA, together with Andrea Andersson, Rivers Founding Director and Chief Curator, and with Jordan Amirkhani, Rivers Curator. A forthcoming book of unpublished images, artist ephemera, and archival materials will be published in October 2025 by Dancing Foxes in collaboration with Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought.

Girouard mounted performances and installations across Europe including international art events such as Documenta V and VI, Kassel, DE; 10th Paris Biennale, Paris, FR; International Performance Festival, Landhaushof, Graz, AT; and the Venice Biennale in 1980. Between 1976 – 1982 she performed at Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva, CH; Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris, FR; The Orangerie, Kassel, DE; Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels, BE; Zagreb, Croatia (former Yugoslavia); and De Vleeshal, Middleberg, NL. 

Girouard had a 1983 mid-career survey mounted at the Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City and has exhibited widely at museums and institutions including Stedelijk Museum, Gent, BE; Mumok, Vienna, AT; MOCA, Los Angeles, CA; Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, NY; ICA Miami, FL; ICA Philadelphia, PA; Ludwig Forum for International Art, Aachen, DE; Palais des Beaux-Arts Brussels, BE; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; and the Kitchen, NY; among others.

Girouard’s work is in the permanent collections of the Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA; Ludwig Forum fur International Kunst Aachen, DE; Rufino Tamayo Museum, Mexico City, Mexico; and Stedelijk Museum Actuele Kunst, Gent, Belgium.

Since 2019, the artist Estate of Tina Girouard has been represented by Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York. The gallery presented an historic restaging of one of her important performances Pinwheel (1977) in curatorial partnership with Lumi Tan and The Kitchen, NYC for the inaugural Meridians sector at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019. The following February in 2020 the gallery presented the first solo exhibition of Girouard’s work in Los Angeles, the last presentation of her work prior to her passing. In fall 2024, Anat Ebgi presented I want you to have a good time, a solo exhibition centered around the re-performance of Girouard’s Sound Loop from her Time and Distance series (1970), an examination of the artist’s use of layering, seriality, language, and performance as an approach to world building.

Completed in 1982, Faith Wilding’s Natural Parables is a 12-piece work that comprises pairings of large watercolor-drawing hybrids with corresponding oil on masonite paintings shaped like seed pods. The six illuminated parables fuse two branches of her practice – highly detailed imagery inspired by nature as a metaphor for transformation. Commingling handwritten script and visual iconography, Wilding creates an apparatus of verbal and visual notation to explore specific ideas about women’s transformation; the metamorphosis of the natural world through human intervention and destruction; and the body and nature as a codependent political site. The creation of Natural Parables marked the culmination of years of research into female mythologies, paganism, English Romantic poetry, illuminated herbals, bestiaries, and alchemical manuscripts.

Faith Wilding (b. 1943, Paraguay) has nurtured an art and activist practice to address the deterioration of the natural world, spiritual exuberance, and biopolitics. Her experience of growing up in a pacifist commune in Paraguay (as part of the Bruderhof Anabaptists) with little contact with the outside world had a tremendous impact on her. Ecstatic childhood experiences of wild nature, studying the South American jungle forests and waterways planted early seeds that would inform her work upon arriving in the U.S. at age 18. She quickly combined these experiences with her research into connections between women and nature, examining the ecological, in-spirited philosophies of ecofeminism to bring old truths back into new vision.

Avowed ecofeminist, Wilding emerged at the forefront of Feminist Art in Los Angeles during the late 1960s and 1970s. As a student at Fresno State, Wilding and fellow artist-activist Suzanne Lacy organized consciousness raising groups and participated in the formation of the first Feminist Art Program. She subsequently attended CalArts where she was the graduate teaching assistant for the Feminist Art Program and gained recognition through her oft-cited contributions to Womanhouse (1972): both the performance Waiting, a 15-minute scripted monologue condensing a woman’s entire life into a monotonous, repetitive cycle of “waiting for life to begin” while serving and maintaining the lives of others, and the installation Crocheted Environment, referred to popularly as “Womb Room,” a web-like fiber installation that now resides at the Institute for Contemporary Art / Boston, brought into the collection in 1995 by then Chief Curator, Helen Molesworth and was recently installed at Haus der Kunst, Munich for the exhibition Inside Other Spaces. Environments by Women Artists 1956-1976.

Wilding has exhibited extensively since the late 1960s including museums such as The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hammer Museum, The Drawing Center, Documenta X, Kassel, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, the Singapore Art Museum, the Reina Sofia Museum, and the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow. A retrospective, Fearful Symmetries, traveled to five venues across the United States. Her work was also included in the seminal survey WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, organized by Cornelia Butler, which traveled from the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles) to the National Museum of Women (Washington DC), PS1 Contemporary Art Center (Long Island), and the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Her work is in the collections of the Hammer Museum, The Art Institute of Chicago, Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston, Minneapolis Institute of Art, RISD Museum, University Club of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and her papers were acquired by the Getty Research Institute Library.

Wilding is Professor Emerita of Performance Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and taught at Cooper Union, New York University, the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Art Institute, and Carnegie Mellon University where she was a co-founder of the cyberfeminist collective, subRosa. 

Wilding’s book By Our Own Hands, catalogs this important era of experimentation and collaboration that defined west coast Feminist art during the early 1970s. Wilding was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009 and has been the recipient of numerous grants for the past five decades. In 2014, she was awarded the prestigious Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award. Wilding lives and works in Massachusetts.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to present a Kabinett of new works by Los Angeles based, American artist Alec Egan. This presentation continues Egan’s ongoing depictions of interiors and landscapes, and arouses a bittersweet and deeply personal poignancy following the total loss of his home and studio full of artworks to the winter wildfire disaster in Los Angeles. For nearly a decade Egan has tackled the psychology of the domestic interior space and expansive nature through his quietly cockeyed scenes leading viewers to the razors edge of idylls. A custom, floral patterned wallpaper, lifted from his paintings, will create an illusionistic continuum of the canvases onto the booth walls.

Egan’s paintings describe an ordinary world, calling forth vistas and dwellings both intimately known to the artist and those conjured from his imagination. Stuccoed apartment buildings, heaven-crowning palms, and calm seascapes of coastal Los Angeles, his works evoke something familiar, yet dreamily private and personal, veiling his visions in pattern and color. His vivid and at times thickly impastoed application of paint and wallpapers chosen for their peculiar buds, blooming bouquets, or fruit-patterned fabrics intricately come together as mediations on the domestic, natural beauty, and fragility of life.

Vibrant sunsets, crashing waves, or clean bright bedrooms are subtly askew and hauntingly deserted; human narrative is inserted through architectural elements such as windows or parking lots and personal objects such as furniture and decor. Despite the banal status of his subjects—from waxy oranges resting on a windowsill to a sock on the floor, Egan’s humdrum daily settings are a colorful feast of dense pattern and thick impasto, whose mysteries yield through prolonged looking.

Egan’s approach to beauty is expressed through conflicting and layered wallpapers, fabrics, flowers, and foodstuffs; the clash is surreal and psychological. Floral wallpaper has a long tradition within the decorative arts, having survived many cycles of popularity. For this reason, a wallpapered room can be complicated to identify with a specific time period and within Egan’s paintings willfully play on tropes of nostalgia and memory. Wallpaper also allows one to put a skin over something; it unifies a space, enclosing and enveloping it, which he uses to maximum effect. Vibrant blooming motifs coat his world with individuality and playfulness, signifiers of taste and cultural values of the (never seen) occupant-decorators of these habitations.

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 Drawing Room at Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, Brattleboro, VT; Blue Setting, Charles Moffett, New York, NY; Look Out, Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA; and Miro’s Corner, MAKI Gallery in Tokyo, Japan. His work has also been exhibited in group and solo exhibitions at Almine Rech, Paris, France; Dubuque Museum of Art, Dubuque, IA; California Heritage Museum, Santa Monica, CA; Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA; Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles / New York; Charles Moffett Gallery, New York, NY; MAKI Gallery, Tokyo, Japan. His work was acquired by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. Egan lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce our participation in Art Basel Hong Kong 2025. The curated selection of works for our booth include a cross-section of the gallery’s program; it is intergenerational, international, and marries conceptual practices with meticulous workmanship.

Participating artists: Caleb Hahne Quintana, Sarah Lee, Jenny Morgan, Jordan Nassar, Soumya Netrabile, Meeson Pae, Neil Raitt, Gideon Rubin, Sigrid Sandström, Sarah Ann Weber, Ming Ying, Alejandro Cardenas, Anna Freeman Bentley, Marc Dennis

 

The Palestinian-American artist Jordan Nassar presents Rivers of Eden, an installation that evokes an imagined domestic space as inspired by the Garden of Eden, overlooking the fantastical expansive vista through embroideries-as-windows.

Nassar’s hand-embroidered textile pieces address an intersecting field of language, ethnicity, and embedded notions of heritage and homeland. Presented together, this suite of embroideries acts as windows, revealing a continuous panoramic scene that unfolds from one landscape into the next. These landscapes are fictional; collapsing distance, they cast the gaze toward imagined, utopic horizons. Nassar’s collaborative embroidered pieces present a dialogue between his own position as a young member of the Palestinian diaspora alongside a group of women in the West Bank, who he has closely partnered with in their creation.

Jordan Nassar (b. 1985, New York, NY) earned his BA at Middlebury College. His work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions globally at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston; Asia Society, New York, NY; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ; Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY; Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY; KMAC Museum, Louisville, KY; Center for Contemporary Art (CCA) Tel Aviv; Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA; James Cohan Gallery, New York, NY; and The Third Line, Dubai, UAE. His work has been acquired by museum collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, Rollins Museum of Art, Florida; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; and Rhode Island School of Design Museum, in Rhode Island, among others. Nassar lives and works in New York, NY.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce our participation in Art Basel Miami Beach 2024. The curated selection of works for our booth include a cross-section of the gallery’s program; it is intergenerational, international, and marries conceptual practices with meticulous workmanship.

Participating artists: Marisa Adesman, Jessica Taylor Bellamy, Alec Egan, Tina Girouard, Caleb Hahne Quintana, Karyn Lyons, Jenny Morgan, Soumya Netrabile, Meeson Pae, Gideon Rubin, Krzysztof Strzelecki, Janet Werner, Cosmo Whyte, Faith Wilding

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce our participation in Art Basel Miami Beach 2023. The curated selection of works for our booth include a cross-section of the gallery’s program; it is intergenerational, international, and marries conceptual practices with meticulous workmanship.

Participating artists: Marisa Adesman, Jessica Taylor Bellamy, Caleb Hahne Quintana, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Greg Ito, Jordan Nassar, Soumya Netrabile, Krzysztof Strzelecki, Cosmo Whyte, Faith Wilding

For Art Basel Hong Kong, Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce START OVER PLEASE, a solo presentation of new works by Canadian artist Tammi Campbell.

Taking from her perspective, a decentered feminist lens, Campbell’s work dons the art historical canon as armature and challenge. The artist’s work notes how totemic male artists dominate institutional, collection, and market narratives, despite decades of powerful waves of decolonization and feminist critique.

The presentation is anchored by Campbell’s ‘in-process’ Ruscha text painting, “START OVER PLEASE.” Upon quick glance, the artist appears to have left masking tape on the canvas, but in reality it is another of her signature trompe l’oeil material transmutations. The tape itself is made from cast acrylic paint. Meanwhile the painting’s directive text dominates the picture encouraging close reconsideration of each of the works displayed. Start over, reexamine accepted narratives, begin anew.

Campbell’s practice starts with an extensive research period bordering on forensic. She dives deeply into the materials and processes of the artist she decides to appropriate. For instance, for the recreated Ruscha text drawings, the research led her to track down the actual deadstock paper from the 1970s and pastels he used in order to achieve an exactness, a precision. Each element is obsessively considered. Campbell will go as far as mimicking processes time, foxing, and sun fading before she proceeds to the final step: the wrapping.

The artist carefully “wraps” each work in acrylic paint that has been cast in molds to replicate bubble wrap, tape, and cardboard. Her ability to nearly replicate packing materials out of paint is alchemical. In addition to Ruscha, Campbell continues her investigation of other artists whose work she has learned to imitate, including Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Kenneth Noland. Each is shown with her material reconstructions: faux bubble wrap, cardboard, polywrap, and wood crates.

Campbell’s appropriative practice comes out of a long line of women artists, such as Sturtevant and Sherri Levine, who have employed appropriation to compelling ends. There is a nod to institutional critique in the desire to literally “package up” and put away these works into storage to make room for women or lesser recognized artists, while simultaneously unable to escape the visibility of the canon itself.

There is cheeky humor to Campbell’s works that raises questions about institutional structures, the canon, and systems of invisible labor used to validate those histories.

Tammi Campbell (b. 1974, Calgary, Alberta) received her BFA from the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon. Recent solo exhibitions include Exactly Wrong, MAKI Gallery, Tokyo; Boring Art, Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA; and On View, Blouin Division, Montréal, QC. Campbell has also exhibited her work across Canada and the U.S. including Arsenal, New York, NY; Gavlak, Los Angeles, CA; Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon, SK; Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Toronto, ON; and the Galerie de l’UQAM, Montréal, QC. She participated in the Canadian Biennale 2014 at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, ON, as well as the 30th International Symposium of Contemporary Art of Baie-St-Paul. In fall of 2023, Campbell will return to Los Angeles for her second solo exhibition at Anat Ebgi. Campbell lives and works in Montréal, Quebec.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to present new works by native Angeleno Greg Ito and Paraguayan born Faith Wilding for Art Basel Miami Beach. Though generationally distant these two artists are joined by their explorations of rebirth, renewal, and revitalization. The collaborative installation brings together works that examine family histories, the environment, and cultural upbringing through distinct usage of material and symbology.

The installation transforms the booth into an elemental space, rich painted umber walls and carpeting recall fertile soil. Ito’s paintings, articulated with his unique graphic vernacular, serve as windows into a future world born of devastation. Wilding’s totemic sculptures covered in arcane symbology float on elevated pedestals. Flora and earth as subjects hold significance to both Ito and Wilding.

Whereas Wilding’s pieces reference her growing up in the jungles of Paraguay and lost knowledge of indigenous plants and language, Ito’s work draws from personal and family history as a Japanese Americans, including his grandparents’ experience of being forcibly relocated to an internment camp during World War II. Ito’s latest works, created for Art Basel Miami Beach, meditate on shifting family roles, birth, death, and generational turnover with memories passed on and others lost to time. Among his repeating symbols: flames, cocoons, and the moon, gingko leaves especially draw a personal connection to his family’s origin—symbolic of longevity and used for medicines. Suggestive of narrative, the works marry themes of life’s dualities such as the cycle of destruction and regrowth.

Wilding’s papyrus sculptures harken back to a series of ‘cocoons’ she made in the 1980s which were burned and filled with dirt to sprout seeds. Similar to Ito’s burning vistas, Wilding utilizes fire as a symbol to insist on renewal—a chance to begin again. In this new body of work, the chrysalis or bodily form and metaphoric sprouted seeds turn outward to the viewer. As archaeological forms they present a tactility, something akin to a fetish or effigy. The runes and text incorporated within the sculptural objects speak of the loss of the natural environment within the anthropocene. The ritualized objects suggest transformation and power through knowledge and poetics of the earth—a recurring motif of Wilding’s ecofeminist practice. Through fusing written word and visual iconography, Wilding’s works create an apparatus for the viewer to engage with an alternative way of seeing nature and its forces.

Greg Ito (b. 1987, Los Angeles, CA) earned his BFA from San Francisco Art Institute. His work has been exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions including at Institute of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA; Maki Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA; SPURS Gallery, Beijing, China; Lyles and King, New York, NY; Jeffrey Deitch, New York; NY and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), San Francisco, CA. Ito’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami. Ito lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Faith Wilding (b. 1943, Paraguay) has exhibited extensively worldwide since the late 1960s. A 2014 retrospective of Wilding’s work, Fearful Symmetries, travelled to five venues across the United States. Wilding’s work was also included in the seminal survey WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, organized by Cornelia Butler, which traveled from the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles) to the National Museum of Women (Washington DC), PS1 Contemporary Art Center (Long Island), and the Vancouver Art Gallery. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of Womanhouse, an influential Los Angeles exhibition, installation, and performance space organized through the CalArts Feminist Art Program. At Womanhouse, Wilding’s Womb Room fiber installation and performance, Waiting, are some of the best known and highly influential works of the 1970s Feminist Art Movement. Wilding’s book By Our Own Hands, catalogues this important era experimentation and collaboration that defined west coast Feminist art during the early 1970s.

Wilding has exhibited at museums such as The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; The Drawing Center, New York, NY; Documenta X, Kassel, Germany; the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, MA; the Singapore Art Museum, Singapore; the Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid, Spain; Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, Scotland; and the Bronx Museum of Art, New York, NY. Wilding is Professor Emerita of Performance Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has taught at institutions Cooper Union, New York University, the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Art Institute. While teaching at Carnegie Mellon University in the 1990s and 200s she was a co-founder of the cyberfeminist collective, subRosa. Wilding was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009 and has been the recipient of numerous grants for the past five decades. In 2014, she was awarded the prestigious Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum, The Art Institute of Chicago, Minneapolis Institute of Art, RISD Museum, University Club of Chicago, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Wilding lives and works in Rhode Island.

For Art Basel Hong Kong, Anat Ebgi is pleased to present Out Look, a solo installation of new paintings by Los Angeles artist Alec Egan. This presentation is a continuation of works presently on view in his solo exhibition Look Out at the gallery’s location 6150 Wilshire Blvd from May 21 – June 25, 2022.

A large painting Fruit Bowl with Bird anchors the booth, combining Egan’s use of interior scenes, still life painting, and atmospheric landscape. Drawn from his own memory and imagination, the fictitious interiors, and scenic 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.

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. Egan lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

TINA GIROUARD

DECEMBER 1 – 4, 2021

BOOTH S16

 

Anat Ebgi is pleased to present a selection of historic sequin tapestries by Tina Girouard at Art Basel Miami Beach. This solo presentation precedes a career retrospective of Girouard’s work, which will open at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York in Fall 2023.

Within Girouard’s oeuvre, the sequin works represent the collaborative nature of her approach to making art and her interest in examining cross-cultural influences. After many years researching Haiti’s connection to her native Louisiana, Girouard traveled to the country for the first time in 1990. On this first visit, she met master sequin artist Antoine Oleyant; the two developed a friendship and artistic partnership. The following year, she set up an auxiliary studio in Port Au Prince, where she worked and researched in cultural exchange with Haitian artists for several years. To further promote understanding of these artists and Haitian culture, she authored the seminal book Sequin Artists of Haiti in 1994.

The sequined Vodou prayer flags beckon and pay tribute to Iwa, or “invisibles” in Haitian Creole, spirits who bring messages of faith and hope. Much like Vodou itself, the flags represent a coming together of different cultures and consciousnesses. Reflecting on the time working in Haiti Girouard wrote: “Never intending to appropriate a traditional Haitian art form, my desire was to come to a point of collaboration naturally. Open to sharing our separate ideas, techniques, and cultures, we wanted to achieve that goal spontaneously by working side by side.” Throughout this period Girouard shared her Pattern and Decoration sensibilities while they taught her about Iwa iconography. The earliest sequin pieces were a continuation of her 1980s painting practice including stenciled and repeated patterns with motifs drawn from her home state such as alligators, ants, rifles, and saxophones. The spirit of collaboration in this body of work is underscored in Desir (1998), where names of her collaborators are incorporated in glass beads into the work; exchange was not only part of Girouard’s process, but an essential part of her work’s content.

Girouard’s glittering compositions are rooted in her practice as a post-minimalist and Pattern and Decoration artist. Countering austere minimalist art with exuberant color, eclectic compositions, and unorthodox new materials Girouard reflected Louisiana’s diverse local culture, while also looking into the wider world. Her tapestries draw from a range of influences—flora and fauna, technology, the spiritual—and celebrate the power of cross-cultural dialogue, while raising important questions about authorship, ownership, and authenticity that have only become more relevant in our increasingly globalized world.

Tina Girouard (1946 – 2020) has an exhibition history that includes a 1983 mid-career retrospective mounted at the Rufino Tamayo Museum in Mexico City, and international events such as the 1980 Venice Biennale, the 1977 Paris Biennale, 1977 Documenta VI and 1972 Documenta V, Kassel. Girouard’s work has been exhibited widely at galleries and museums including: Leo Castelli Gallery, The Kitchen, Walker Art Center, New Orleans Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Palais des Beaux-Arts Brussels, Holly Solomon Gallery, David Zwirner, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and the New Museum. Her work was recently on view in the exhibition With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972 – 1985 curated by Anna Katz, originating at MOCA Los Angeles, which travelled to the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, NY. Girouard’s work is in the permanent collections of the Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA; Ludwig Forum fur International Kunst Aachen, DE; Rufino Tamayo Museum, Mexico City, Mexico; and Stedelijk Museum Actuele Kunst, Gent, Belgium.

GREG ITO: THE ARRIVAL OF SPRING

For Art Basel Hong Kong, Anat Ebgi is pleased to present The Arrival of Spring, a solo installation of new works by Greg Ito. The presentation title acknowledges the birth of Ito’s daughter Spring, who was born earlier this year. A five-panel polyptych titled Paradise (2021) anchors the booth and lays bare Ito’s language of transition and becoming. A dramatic landscape framed by a continuous row of windowpanes reveals a city with a fire on the horizon as it is slowly engulfed in flames and finally emerges as a space of bountiful blooms and birds taking to the sky.

Using symbols and a visual language that draws upon of his hometown Los Angeles—and the five generations his family has lived there, Ito’s cinematic painting style seeks to explore the precariousness of life and desire for security. The artist is fundamentally a storyteller; he effectuates rumination on the collective through the deeply personal — a desire for an evolution, a cultural reset. Informed by his grandparents’ experience as interned Japanese-Americans during World War II, the sense of “home” as a refuge from the outside world is a fleeting and fragile one.

Ito’s new works are a direct reflection of the past year, where the floods and fires became real experiences. Looking specifically at the cultural shifts following the COVID-19 lockdown and the Black Lives Matters protests and riots, Ito felt as though a veil had been lifted to reveal the injustice and corruption of America that is omnipresent and thoroughly ingrained within the fabric of the culture itself. The fires and destruction from these protests became a global symbol of rebirth — the need to burn down the forest to return the nutrients to its soil. As a forest grows only stronger from its inevitable burning, from the flames comes a new vision of the future.

Greg Ito (b. 1987, Los Angeles, CA) embraces a graphic visual style to create cinematic paintings and installations that address themes of time, love, loss, hope, and tragedy. Ito earned his BFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 2008. His work has been exhibited widely in group and solo exhibitions 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 Anat Ebgi Los Angeles will open Fall 2021. Ito lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to present a selection of works from the 1980s and 1990s by Tina Girouard and Faith Wilding. Each of these artists utilize craft practices and forms and techniques assigned in history to women, such as watercolor or textile arts, as a means to investigate natural motifs and subvert the iconographic canon dominated by white males.

Tina Girouard’s sequins works from the early 1990s were made in collaboration with the Vodou Flag makers of Haiti. The glittering imagery is rooted in her practice as a post-minimalist and Pattern and Decoration artist. Countering austere minimalist art with exuberant color, eclectic compositions, and unorthodox new materials Girouard reflected Louisiana’s diverse local culture, while also looking into the wider world. Her compositions include references to a global range of cultures and the sequins works celebrate the power of collaboration and cross-cultural dialogue, while raising questions about authorship, ownership, and authenticity.

Faith Wilding’s paintings and drawings construct a world where nature and humans are part of each other—creative energies and forms of the imagination that are simultaneously generative and destructive. Her visual language draws from vast sources of inspiration including recurring motifs of seed pods, embryos, thrusting leaves, continents, geodes, and other organic forms suggestive of wombs. Wilding’s work is potent with ideas of genesis, transformation, life cycles, and personal mythologies; her vibrant paintings express interconnectedness and spiritual exuberance.

The works for OVR’s Survey sector direct focus to topics such as domesticity, feminist imagery, nature, and an increasingly globalized world. Both artists seek to supplant male dominated narratives and offer feminist counterpoints to Western art historical iconology.

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce a solo presentation by Jibade-Khalil Huffman for the Art Basel OVR:2020.

The interconnected nature of race, rage, and anxiety inspires Huffman’s newest body of work and begins with the piece Ballot or the Bullet. The title is a reference to Malcolm X’s speech on radical black nationalism that extolls “the type of Black man on the scene in America today [who] doesn’t intend to turn the other cheek any longer.” The figure of X’s speech calls to mind the public rage and uprising following in the wake of continued brutality and murder by the hands of the police— from athletes using their public platform to raise awareness of racialized violence to the literal tearing down of monuments that present oppressors as heroic figures.

The cacophonous imagery relays larger circuitous themes of Huffman’s work. Following the poetic logic of Huffman’s collaged videos and images turns this public sense of rage inwards, revealing the anxiety, exhaustion, and frustration on a personal level.

The selection for Art Basel:OVR includes several works from recently opened museum shows which have been made inaccessible due to the global pandemic. Utilizing the potential of mass visibility with his chosen mediums, Huffman’s projects enter public consciousness and open the doors of shuttered institutions through online visibility.

Jibade-Khalil Huffman’s (b. 1981) received an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University, an MFA in Studio Art from USC, and a BFA from Bard College. He currently has two museum solo exhibitions on view: Now That I Can Dance, Tufts University Art Galleries, Medford, MA and Action Painting, Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, AZ. Previous exhibitions include the Hammer Museum’s “Made in L.A.” (2014); MOCA Los Angeles (2017); Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (2015); The Jewish Museum, New York (2016); LAX ART (2016), The Studio Museum in Harlem (2016); Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (2016); Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2017); Swiss Institute (2017); KMAC Museum, Louisville (2018); Ballroom Marfa (2018) The Kitchen, NYC (2018) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland (2019). His past performances include P.S.1/MoMA (2010), MOCA Los Angeles (2014), ICA, Philadelphia (2017), Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland (2019) and Frieze Projects (2019). From 2015-2016, he was Artist in Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Huffman is also the author of three books of poems: Sleeper Hold (Fence, 2015), James Brown is Dead (Future Plan and Program, 2011), and 19 Names For Our Band (Fence, 2008).

Meridians Sector, Booth M27

Anat Ebgi is pleased to present the historic restaging of Tina Girouard’s Pinwheel (1977) for the inaugural Meridians sector at Art Basel Miami Beach. In partnership with the Lumi Tan (The Kitchen), as Curatorial Producer, the performance will take place each day of the fair December 3-8, 2019.

The near hour-long piece features four performers creating a stage-like environment in four quadrants using silk patterned fabrics. As the action unfolds, each performer incorporates base objects and elements all connected to their given personae of ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, MINERAL, and OTHER. The performers activate the space and enact rituals defined by Girouard’s symbolic language according to a detailed set of instructions and diagrams.

The original staging of Pinwheel, which included Girouard acting as both director and performer, made its debut in the Great Hall of the New Orleans Museum of Art in 1977 as part of the exhibition Five From Louisiana, alongside the works of Lynda Benglis, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Landry, and Keith Sonnier.

Pinwheel is Girouard’s grand finale performance of “Solomon’s Lot,” a durational project of nearly a decade centered around several lengths of uncut Japanese silk from the 1940s with interconnected performances, videos, photographs, and both painterly and sculptural installations. Through each new installation or performance Girouard exposed the way the rigid armature of “Solomon’s Lot” allowed for interpretation, ceremony, and the spiritual through performative action.

Girouard’s work and legacy finds itself in a unique position at the intersection of several movements. Her works are connected to the post-minimal movement through her close association with 112 Greene Street, but also deeply associated with the Pattern and Decoration movement in New York. Throughout both of these movements her work is strongly intertwined with feminist art history with her consideration of domestic space and the “women’s work” that has become indicative of her practice.

The performance of Pinwheel at Art Basel Miami Beach Meridians is produced in collaboration with Lumi Tan of The Kitchen and generously supported by The Miami Beach EDITION. 

Special thanks to Sabrina Talamo for directing, and to the dancers: Brenden Chee, Laura Diaz, Adrienne Khouri, Brianna Miller, Maria Pusateri, and Alonzo Williams.

Tina Girouard (b. 1946, DeQuincy, LA) was an early founding participant of 112 Greene St., FOOD, the Clocktower and PS1, Creative Time, and the Fabric Workshop. Girouard’s exhibition history includes a 1983 mid-career retrospective mounted at the Rufino Tamayo Museum in Mexico City, and international events such as the 1980 Venice Biennale, the 1977 Paris Biennale, 1977 Documenta VI and 1972 Documenta V, Kassel. Girouard’s work has been exhibited widely at galleries and museums including: Leo Castelli Gallery, The Kitchen, Walker Art Center, New Orleans Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Palais des Beaux-Arts Brussels, Holly Soloman Gallery, Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, David Zwirner, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles. Girouard currently has works on view at MOCA Los Angeles for the exhibition With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972 – 1985 curated by Anna Katz and the Ludwig Muzeum Budapest for the exhibition Pattern and Decoration. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA; and the Stedelijk Museum Actuele Kunst, Gent, Belgium. Girouard lives and works in Cecilia, LA.

 

Image: ©2019 Tina Girouard / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Nova Sector, Booth N19

Anat Ebgi is pleased to present works by Jordan Nassar and Cosmo Whyte at Art Basel Miami Beach. Both Nassar and Whyte allow decorative remnants from a colonial history to seep into the aesthetic decisions of their works, allowing the pieces to question and critique identity construction and the representation of colonized and migrant peoples.

The artists follow the trajectory of craft tied to cultural lineages and incorporate these elements in their practice as self-identifying members of diasporas. Nassar’s usage of a traditional form of Palestinian embroidery aligns with his practice with the native history of the region. Whyte’s works on paper contrast Nassar’s by highlighting the syncretic forces of colonization.

Nassar will present a suite of landscape and geometric patterned works which directly reference embroidery symbology of a group of bereaved Palestinian women he works very closely with in the West Bank. Made in direct collaboration with them, this series comprises of works with large sections made entirely by the women, who leave open windows in the embroidery in which Nassar follows their patterning and aesthetic color decisions to make his undulating landscapes. This installation presents the dialogue between Nassar’s own embroidery and its connection to the site and women of Palestine.

Whyte will present a new series of large-scale drawings and a sculptural installation. The works on paper are created with layers of charcoal depicting black bodies obscured with distortion and excessive limbs. Sections of the paper are cut into Spanish lace patterning, and adorned with gold and pitch black glitter. The compositions are based on photographs the artist took of West Indian Carnival, Jouvert, as it is performed in the diasporic communities of Miami. The sculptural installation entitled The Enigma of Arrival in Four Sections: Carry On is comprised of airplane seats reupholstered in a domestic chintz fabric, the tops of which are draped with Spanish lace. The almost allegorical installation reimagines the tumultuous passage of displaced and migrant peoples.

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; Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY; Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY; James Cohan Gallery, New York, NY; and The Third Line, Dubai, UAE. Nassar is the subject of two institutional solo exhibitions in 2019. Jordan Nassar: Between Sky and Earth is Art@Bainbridge at Princeton University’s inaugural exhibition and his major solo exhibition The Sea Beneath Our Eyes opened at the CCA – Center for Contemporary Art Tel Aviv in September 2019. Nassar is in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Marciano Foundation, Los Angeles, CA; Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, RI; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, where he is included in the current exhibition Making Knowing: Craft in Art 1950 – 2019. Nassar lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Cosmo Whyte (b. 1982, St. Andrew, Jamaica) received a BFA from Bennington College, VT and an MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art, MD. He has exhibited work widely within the United States, Jamaica, Norway, France and South Africa. Whyte has won many awards including the Forward Art Emerging Artist of the Year Award (2010), the International Sculpture Center’s Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture (2015), Vermont Studio Residency Full Fellowship (2015), and an Artadia Award (2016). In 2016 he participated in the Atlanta Biennial, and in the recent 2017 Jamaica Biennial. He recently opened a solo exhibition of his work at MOCA Georgia, Beneath Its Tongue, The Fish Rolls The Hook To Sharpen Its Cadence, curated by Allison Glenn, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Whyte is the Visual Art Program Director at Morehouse College in Atlanta, GA where he lives and works.

Booth #S03

For Art Basel Miami’s Survey Sector, Anat Ebgi presents artist Faith Wilding, focusing on specific works from 1969-1979. 

The 1970s marked an explosion of work and research of a purely feminine nature which sought to move beyond male-centric painting and art history. As an early radical feminist, Wilding was a co-initiator of the Feminist Art Programs at Fresno State and California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), a founder of the Woman’s Building, a participant of the seminal “Womanhouse” exhibition, significantly contributing to the discourse of feminist art, especially in relation to Los Angeles.

Faith Wilding’s paintings and works on paper from this particular period often reference the botanical and metaphysical –  floral buds, leaves chrysalises, insects and bodily metamorphoses. Moth Triptych (1974) is an example of the artist’s watercolor series depicting the physiognomy of a moth, abstracted into undulating and delicate geometric forms. Throughout the three compositions, forms shift and unfurl, a gesture echoed by various accompanying graphite drawings of falling leaves and opening buds. Often embellished with gold leaf, Wilding references early medieval herbals, bestiaries, and alchemical manuscripts. Alongside her organic studies, the booth also includes documentation of Wilding’s performance, “Waiting,” The repetitious poetry traces birth to adolescence, wife to motherhood to death— the woman protagonist always in waiting, in service to someone, something. By examining this presupposed passivity, and annunciation of the process, Wilding reclaims her body, motives and time. The “Waiting” performance is the inception of Wilding’s prolific studies on the biological processes of growing and becoming.  

The Survey Sector presentation seeks to re-introduce Wilding’s incredibly diverse and prolific works made during this historic period. 

Positions Sector Booth #P03