Frieze London

For Frieze London Anat Ebgi is pleased to present new oil paintings by Los Angeles artist Robert Russell and sculptures by Taiwanese-born, Canadian artist An Te Liu.

Robert Russell’s new series of still life paintings depicts yahrzeit candles, small, mass-produced vessels of wax-filled glass. In Jewish tradition, these candles are lit yearly to honor the memory of the dead and burn for 24 hours. Once lit, they are transformed from disposable household items to markers of grief and remembering, crossing a threshold from the ordinary to the sacred. Russell’s paintings immortalize them, as a ritual gesture he describes as “against forgetting.” Freud wrote that mourning is a process of detachment; whereas Derrida argued that grief can never be finished—to truly mourn is to carry the lost within. As such, Russell’s pictures sit between disappearance and presence, between the marketplace and the sanctified.

An Te Liu’s suite of sculptures are inspired by kintsugi, the Japanese art of repair. This philosophical practice of preservation through repairing broken objects, typically ceramics, occurs by mending fractured pieces with lacquer mixed with powdered precious metals such as gold or platinum. Instead of hiding the damage, kintsugi highlights breaks and cracks, thus transforming them into unique and beautiful qualities that become part of an object’s history. Liu’s sculptures isolate these ‘cracks’ casting them in bronze. Starting with a mold taken from a vase or vessel, Liu traces poetically inspired ‘lines’ of his ancestry, which he then hand carves into the forms to be cast. The resulting bronzes explore themes of memory, transformation, and the recovery of occluded histories.

Brought together, Russell’s painted vigils and Liu’s preserved seams propose the act of remembrance as work, something to be tended and maintained. Keeping watch over the flame, giving form to a break, both artists make loss legible and durable; they transform the spent or ordinary object into witnesses that carry the past forward.

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.

An Te Liu (b. 1967, Tainan, Taiwan) received his MArch 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 Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark; Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, Netherlands; Kunsthalle Vienna, Austria; the EVA Biennial of Ireland; the Venice Biennale of Architecture; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA. His works are included in the permanent collections of The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Louis Vuitton Foundation, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, The National Gallery of Canada and The Art Gallery of Ontario. Liu lives and works in Toronto, Canada.