Kohn Gallery is proud to present a diverse roster of historical, emerging, and established artists. This exhibition, in particular, unites and examines dichotomies of specificity and anonymity; representation and abstraction; the celestial and quotidian.
Representing the Gallery’s historical roster are internationally recognized West Coast artists Lita Albuquerque, Martha Alf, Sharon Ellis, Bruce Conner, Joe Goode, and Wallace Berman. Albuquerque, whose work will be seen at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, September 2023, will be represented by a rare stone sculpture with pigment as well as her classic “Auric Field” paintings that combine gold leaf and raw pigments. A second woman artist we will focus on is Martha Alf, whose Estate Kohn Gallery represents. Alf (who studied at UCLA in the 1960s at the same time as Vija Celmins) was best known for her critically acclaimed toilet paper roll or “cylinder” paintings, which were featured in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 1975 Biennial. We will include in the booth a very rare example from the same series.
Sharon Ellis is an established Californian artist, known for the “Transcendental” character of her pantheistic landscapes. Ellis was included in the opening exhibition at the new Orange County Museum of Art in October 2022.
Bruce Conner, Wallace Berman and Joe Goode will be represented by rare and early works: a Conner assemblage, Berman verifaxes and a 1960s Goode work. Conner’s film “CROSSROADS” was acquired by the Carnegie Museum of Art and MFA Houston in January 2023.
Contemporary works by Ilana Savdie, Chiffon Thomas, Kate Barbee, Jinbin Chen, Heidi Hahn, Sophia Narrett, Nir Hod, Alicia Adamerovich, Li Hei Di, William Brickel, Alanna Fields, Ricardo Cabret, Siji Krishnan, and Faris Heizer expand upon the Gallery’s exceptionally diverse and international program of emerging and established artists. In their examinations in dis/figuration, bodily expression, and layers of identity, Savdie, Hahn, Thomas, Barbee, Brickel, Chen, Fields, Krishnan and Heizer command their materials and practices to create works wherein these ideas play out to surprising and poignant ends.
Savdie’s electrifying, hot-colored surreal works use the body as a stage to explore themes of invasion, control, and defiance, and will be recognized in a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in July 2023. In her bold, form-forward paintings, Hahn portrays wavering expressions of the self in the arena of the public and private. Similarly, Brickel approaches figuration as a means of interrogating the coexisting phenomena of the self and the other. Through his renderings in the tradition of figurative painting, Heizerportrays the grip of structural capitalism as he observes it in behavioral and performative gestures of the individual and collective.
Barbee, Narrett, and Thomas, who were showcased in recent group shows at the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art and Craft Contemporary in Los Angeles, merge notions of identity with process, excavating fragility and emotionality through traditional materials in the disciplines of craft, sculpture, and embroidery. Thomas in particular, who will enjoy institutional exhibitions at the Krasl Art Center and Aldrich Museum as well as a solo show at Kohn Gallery later this year, traces the process of self-identification by illuminating moments of metamorphosis and decay through a wide selection of materials including Bible pages, fabric, and steel. This multidisciplinary and specific utilization of media is also present in Fields’s practice, who employs photographic archival source material to examine and narrativize identity and human relationships within each of their unique practice. Though Krishnan’s approach resembles Fields’s in her sensibility towards the subject, her delightfully uncommon and richly contextual practice of meticulously layering handcrafted rice paper to create portraiture is most certainly not.
Nir Hod’s chromed, reflective canvases collapse the distinction between object and subject, and are figureheads of his recent solo exhibition organized by Kohn Gallery in March 2023. Heavily influenced by religious history, Hod inverts traditional associations of figuration with his approach to compositions and perspectives, posing questions that consider migration, foreignness, familiarity, and the interstitial arenas revealed through their examination.
These liminal spaces are where Adamerovich’s works are also conceived: surreal forms and imagery fearlessly traversing the pictorial and subconscious landscape. Later this year, Adamerovich’s sensuous, dream-like work will be on view at Museum Krona in the Netherlands as part of a group showcase of female artists. Born from a similar interest in creating imagery and worlds wherein the ephemeral can be explored, Li Hei Di’s otherworldly paintings capture richly imagined and earnestly rendered depictions of the transient elements of sexual impulse: longing, anticipation, and desire. Not entirely abstract though not nearly figurative either, Cabret’s subjects, too, are developed and flourish in the in/visibility of abstraction, both revealing and concealing the tensions between technology, humans, and the natural world.
Collectively, these contemporary artists have been exhibited and acquired by the esteemed permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Hammer Museum, RISD Museum, MCA San Diego, ICA Miami, Brooklyn Museum of Art, MFA Boston, High Museum of Art, New Orleans Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.
Kohn Gallery’s presentation serves as a dialogue between the ordinary and elevated, the figurative and abstract, the self and other, the old and the new. This showcase of artists highlights a uniquely diverse employment of materials, relationship to subjects, and skillful ideological expressions while complimenting and contributing to the greater art historical atmosphere of the fair and beyond.
