Aperture Foundation, in collaboration with the School of Art, Media, and Technology at Parsons the New School for Design, is pleased to present an artist talk with Hank Willis Thomas. Appropriation and juxtaposition are two of many strategies with which Thomas orchestrates his interdisciplinary practice. His series Unbranded (2008) uses advertisements lifted from the pages African-American interest magazines; Thomas subtly reworks them, removing key text, logos, and/or products. The skeletal remains betray immediately the subliminal prejudice common throughout consumer culture. Another series, Branded (2011), adopts a commercial vernacular to decry the commodification of African-Americans, both in contemporary sports and in the historical slave trade. A basketball player dunks into a noose, for example, or a Nike swoosh is branded onto a man’s head. Thomas’s images confront our difficult history through the universal legibility of advertising.
Hank Willis Thomas is a photo-conceptual artist working with themes related to identity, history, and popular culture. He received his BFA from New York University and his MFA in photography, along with an MA in visual criticism, from California College of the Arts (CCA), San Francisco. His work has been featured in several publications including 25 Under 25: Up-and-Coming American Photographers (2003), 30 Americans (2008) as well as his monograph Pitch Blackness (Aperture, 2008). He has exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the U.S. and abroad, and his work is in numerous public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art and Museum of Modern Art, both in New York, and Brooklyn Museum. Thomas is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City.
In gallery space devoted to the permanent collection, the Guggenheim is showcasing its rich holdings of the work of Constantin Brancusi (1876–1957). In the early decades of the twentieth century, Brancusi produced an innovative body of work that altered the trajectory of modern sculpture. During this period, Brancusi lived and worked in Paris, then a thriving artistic center where many modernist tenets were being developed and debated. He became an integral part of these conversations both through his relationships with other artists, such as Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, Amedeo Modigliani, and Henri Rousseau, and through his own pioneering work. His aspiration to express the essence of his subjects through simplified forms and his engagement with non–Western European artistic traditions led to new stylistic approaches. In addition, his mode of presentation, which equally emphasized sculpture and base and in which works were shown in direct relation to one another, instead of as independent entities, introduced new ways of thinking about the nature of the art object.
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum began collecting Brancusi’s work in-depth in the mid-1950s under the leadership of its second director, James Johnson Sweeney. When Sweeney began his tenure at the museum, the collection was focused on nonobjective painting. Sweeney significantly expanded the scope of the institution’s holdings, bringing in other styles and mediums, particularly sculpture. The Guggenheim’s commitment to Brancusi during these years extended beyond its collecting priorities, and in 1955 the museum held the first major exhibition of the artist’s work.
Installation view, Guggenheim Collection: Brancusi, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Ongoing. Photo: David Heald
Thannhauser
Justin K. Thannhauser (1892–1976) was the son of art dealer Heinrich Thannhauser (1859–1935), who founded the Moderne Galerie in Munich in 1909. From an early age, Thannhauser worked alongside his father in the flourishing gallery and helped to build an impressive and versatile exhibition program that included the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, the Italian Futurists, and regularly featured contemporary German artists. The Moderne Galerie hosted the premier exhibitions of the New Artists’ Association of Munich (Neue Künstlervereinigung München) and The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter), both of which included Vasily Kandinsky, in 1909 and 1911, respectively. Kandinsky later described the gallery’s rooms as “perhaps the most beautiful exhibition spaces in all of Munich.” The Moderne Galerie also mounted one of the first major Pablo Picasso retrospectives in Germany in 1913, thus initiating the close relationship between Justin K. Thannhauser and Picasso that lasted until the artist’s death in 1973.
An ambitious businessman, Thannhauser opened a second gallery in Lucerne in 1919 with his cousin Siegfried Rosengart (1894–1985). Eight years later, the highly successful Galleries Thannhauser—as the Munich and Lucerne branches were collectively called—tested the waters in Berlin with a major special exhibition before permanently relocating its Munich gallery to this thriving art center. The Galleries Thannhauser officially closed in 1937, shortly after Thannhauser and his family immigrated to Paris. Thannhauser eventually settled in New York in 1940 and, together with his second wife, Hilde (1919–91), established himself as a private art dealer.
The Thannhausers’ commitment to promoting artistic progress paralleled the vision of Solomon R. Guggenheim (1861–1949). In appreciation of this shared spirit, and in the memory of his first wife and two sons—who might have continued in the family’s art trade had they not died at tragically young ages—Thannhauser gave a significant portion of his art collection, including over 30 works by Picasso, to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1963. From 1965 until Thannhauser’s death in 1976 (when his collection formally entered the Guggenheim’s holdings), the Thannhauser Collection was on long-term loan to the museum. A bequest of 10 additional works received after Hilde Thannhauser’s death in 1991 enhanced the legacy of this family of important art dealers.
The Thannhauser Collection is organized by Megan Fontanella, Curator, Modern Art and Provenance.
Installation view, Thannhauser Collection, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Ongoing. Photo: David Heald
Dozie Kanu, Juelz Santana, 2019. Found handlebars, steel, spray paint, concrete, 30 × 16 × 22 1/2 in. Courtesy the artist and Salon 94
Dozie Kanu: Function presents Nigerian-American artist Dozie Kanu in his first museum solo exhibition. This exhibition maps out the arc of Kanu’s practice over the last three years, exploring the tensions between form and function, African and African-American, and art and design as embedded in the act of object-making.
The dialogue across materials, objects, and actions here surfaces urgent questions: “What is an art object?,” “How can art function?,” and “What does ‘functional art’ look like?” Responsive to these queries, the artist looks to the notion of “pragmatic sculpture” as a means of blurring boundaries, situating his work at the intersection of fine art and utilitarian design. Kanu places these objects in dialogue within the rigidity of the traditional art historical canon. Ultimately, arguing toward new ways to engage with art objects through touch, sense, and perception.
Dozie Kanu: Function is organized by Legacy Russell, Associate Curator, Exhibitions, with Yelena Keller, Curatorial Assistant, Exhibitions. Special thanks to Curatorial Fellows Makayla Bailey and Jasmine Wilson, and Curatorial Intern Sami Hopkins.
Rich in idiosyncrasies, Arlene Shechet’s latest works combine disparate mediums, from ceramics to wood and metalwork, with playfully ambiguous titles that prompt endless associations. In Art21 series.
Jennifer Guidi creates paintings notable for their luminosity, texture, and sculptural presence. Her swirling, mandala-like compositions oscillate in color and texture, inspiring shifts in perceptual awareness to forge new sensory horizons. Each painting is methodically executed through a unique process—at once systematic and organic—which reflects the connection of her painting practice to strains of Minimalism that privilege attention to detail and repetition. Her sculptural markings evoke an intensely meditative sense of narrative and spiritual votive. Guidi’s richness of palette and trademark use of sand as a medium link her mode of abstraction to tactile experiences of the natural world, from light permeating the landscape at dawn to the hazy atmospheric conditions of the West Coast.
Guidi was born in 1972 in Redondo Beach, California. She received a BFA from Boston University and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Guidi’s work is included in many important public and private collections worldwide. Selected solo exhibitions include Field Paintings, LA><ART, Los Angeles (2014); Pink Sand, Harper’s Apartment, New York (2016); and Visible Light/Luce Visibile, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Villa Croce, Genoa, Italy (2017). Recent group exhibitions include The Afghan Carpet Project, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2015), #crowdedhouse, Harper’s Books, New York (2015); No Man’s Land: Women Artists from the Rubell Family Collection, Rubell Family Collection, Miami (2015, traveled to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC, through 2016); Unpacking: The Marciano Collection, Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles (2017); and Generations: Female Artists in Dialogue, Part 1, Sammlung Goetz, Haus der Kunst, Munich (2018).
Lehmann Maupin is pleased to announce Found Buried, Lari Pittman’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. For this body of work, the Los Angeles-based artist will present a series of new paintings and works on paper that combine the genres of landscape, portraiture, and still life. Pittman continues to address the histories of identity, violence, class, and human nature through the polemicized lens of decoration, decor, and the decorative embodied in the memento mori and other forms of commemoration. Pittman is best known for his unique visual aesthetic that has established him as one of the most significant painters of his generation. In this exhibition, he continues his signature, densely-layered painting style that includes a lexicon of signs and symbols, a compilation of varied painting techniques, and a clear homage to the applied and decorative arts. There will be an opening reception with the artist on Thursday, March 5th, from 6 to 8 PM at 501 24th Street, New York, NY 10011.
During the mid-1970s, Pittman attended California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California, completing a BFA and an MFA. The institute’s strong feminist arts program challenged the devaluation of art forms traditionally associated with craft, and it was his engagement with this program that inspired Pittman’s interest in undermining aesthetic hierarchies and embracing the decorative arts. Pittman’s strong affinity for the decorative can be seen throughout his many bodies of work and it has contributed to his singular visual style. While Pittman’s early works were informed by the socio-political struggle resulting from the AIDS epidemic, racial discord, and LGBTQ+ civil rights struggles that defined the last two decades of the 20th century, his later paintings evince more subtle political gestures through a focus on interior spaces, including domestic and psychological subjects.
The title of the exhibition, Found Buried, relates to ideas of excavation—personal, political, and historical. This alludes both to the way one experiences his work as well as Pittman’s approach to painting. For each work, Pittman builds complexly layered compositions that mediate the tension between color, text, and imagery; figure, landscape, and decoration; and chaos, order, and clarity with remarkable dexterity. He has an innate ability to give each element within a painting equal space and significance. This creates multiple entry points for the viewer, who is invited to do their own excavation of sorts, reading and interpreting the various layers of each work in their own way.
The works in the exhibition feature symbols such as pomegranates (which are often connected to power and imperialism) and tools related to labor and potential violence, as well as decorative objects such as vases, chalices, lamps and an assortment of objets de vertu. Human figures are adorned with theatricalized, imaginary garments and insignia that destabilize expectations of Colonial American, European, and indigenous cultural aesthetics. By merging these seemingly opposing signifiers, Pittman complicates our understanding of colonial identity and its contemporary legacy. In one painting, Piittman portrays a scene comprised of three figures adorned with indigenous headdresses and colonial era garments, fragmented and rendered amidst abstracted patterns of pomegranates and chalices. This painting presents a conceptual reading of violence—self-imposed, physical, and psychological—surrounding oppositional identities, class, and place. In his works on paper, Pittman depicts tools of labor in relation to decorative objects that signify wealth and power. In one work, the image of a hammer is superimposed against a patterned background of chalices, allowing for two seemingly oppositional realities (labor and wealth) to exist simultaneously. Taken together, the works in Found Buried are literally and figuratively a practice in uncovering (i.e. unburying) the codex of signs and symbols Pittman has developed over the course of his career that give unique perspective into past and present political realities.
