March 13 - September 4, 2016
Los Angeles
Beginning 13 March 2016, Hauser Wirth & Schimmel is pleased to present ‘Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947 – 2016,’ the inaugural exhibition at its new complex in the heart of the downtown Los Angeles Arts District. Through nearly 100 works made by 34 artists over the past seventy years, this ambitious undertaking traces ways in which women have changed the course of art by deftly transforming the language of sculpture since the postwar period. Works on view reveal their makers inventing radically new forms and processes that privilege solo studio practice, tactility, and the idiosyncrasies of the artist’s own hand. ‘Revolution in the Making’ explores multiple strains of artistic approaches, characterized by abstraction and repetition, that reject the precedent of a monolithic masterwork on a pedestal, employing such tactics as stacking, hanging, and intertwining, to create an intimate reciprocity between artist and viewer. The exhibition examines how elements that are central to art today – including engagement with found, experimental, and recycled materials, as well as an embrace of contingency, imperfection, and unstructured play – were propelled by the work of women who, in seeking new means to express their own voices, dramatically expanded the definition of sculpture.
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Please join us for the Grand Opening of Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles and a celebration of the exhibition ‘Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947 – 2016.’ Valet parking available ($10 cash)
Please join us when catalog essayist and art historian Anne M. Wagner leads the gallery’s inaugural walkthrough of the exhibition ‘Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947 – 2016.’ This event is free. About Anne M. Wagner Wagner is a modern and contemporary art historian, critic and teacher whose work focuses on sculpture. She holds the faculty position of Class of 1936 Professor Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley and is now based in London, where in 2013-14 she was Visiting Professor at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Other positions held since her move abroad include Henry Moore Foundation Research Curator at Tate Britain, 2010-11; Visiting Distinguished Professor at the University of York, 2010-13; and Mellon Residential Fellow in Arts Practice and Scholarship at the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for the Arts and Inquiry at the University of Chicago, 2012. Her books include ‘Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux: Sculptor of the Second Empire,’ 1986; ‘Three Artists (Three Women),’ 1996; ‘Mother Stone: The Vitality of Modern British Sculpture,’ 2005; and ‘A House Divided: On Recent American Art,’ 2012. Her articles and essays have appeared in such journals as Art History, Representations, October, the London Review of Books, and Artforum. Sheila Hicks, Banisteriopsis II, 1965 – 1966 / 2010. © Sheila Hicks. Courtesy The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; gift of the artist in honor of Jenelle Porter, 2012.26. Photo: Charles Mayer
Please join us for a talk with Shinique Smith who is featured in our current exhibition, ‘Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947 – 2016.’ Born in Baltimore MD, 1971, Smith creates vibrant installations based in fiber, using found, discarded, and gifted clothing as raw materials that are inflected with notions of belonging at all levels: social, cultural, and psychological. These works are a departure from her earlier compressed fabric sculptures, riotous subversions of minimalist forms. Her sculptural works are often site-specific, making use of architectural space and working in tandem with abstract wall drawings to form the installations as a whole. Smith earned her BFA (1992) and MFA (2003) from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore MD. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston MA (2014); and the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville TN (2015). Smith lives and works in New York NY. This event is free, but reservations are required. Click here to reserve a space.
The University of Chicago Press + Artbook / D.A.P. @ Hauser & Wirth invite you to celebrate the publication of ’25 Women: Essays on Their Art’ and for a discussion with author Dave Hickey, introduced by Dr. Julia Friedman. Calloused, insightful, cantankerous or illuminating, Dave Hickey’s writing does nothing if not illicit a visceral response. On the heels of his recently published collection of essays ’25 Women: Essays on Their Art’ (2016, University of Chicago Press) and to celebrate the landmark exhibition ‘Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture By Women 1947-2016,’ Artbook and Hauser & Wirth are pleased to welcome Dave Hickey Thursday 12 May, 7 pm for a discussion of ’25 Women’ with an introduction by Dr. Julia Friedman and book signing to follow. More than a collection of essays, ’25 Women’ constitutes a body of work that reflects Hickey’s deep and prolonged engagement with influential contemporary artists including Roni Horn, Mary Heilmann and Revolution in the Making artist Lynda Benglis. With his trademark wit and raucous eloquence, Hickey’s writing cuts to the heart of deciphering the creative process, questioning institutional accountability and criticism’s role in generating thought provoking discussion through controversy. ‘…I am an adept of difficulty,’ Hickey writes in his introduction. ‘I love the mystery of gazing across the craquelure of gender gaps that still deploy themselves like canyons across our provisional utopia.’ ’25 Women: Essays on Their Art’ crystalizes that gaze into a shimmering collection of writing by a critic who has spent his 50-year career in constant conversation with women. Dave Hickey is a distinguished American art and cultural critic and the author of ‘Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty’ (1993), ‘Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy’ (1997), and ‘Pirates and Farmers’ (2014) and ’25 Women: Essays on Their Art’ (2016). He has served as executive editor of ‘Art In America,’ a contributing editor for the Village Voice and as the arts editor of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Hickey was Professor of English at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, and Distinguished Professor of Criticism for the MFA Program in the Department of Art & Art History at the University of New Mexico. Julia Friedman is a Russian-born art historian, writer, and curator. Her book ‘Beyond Symbolism and Surrealism: Alexei Remizov’s Synthetic Art’ was published by Northwestern University Press in 2010. She recently compiled two collections of Dave Hickey’s digital writing ‘Dust Bunnies: Dave Hickey’s Online Aphorisms June 2014-March 2015’ (2016) and ‘Wasted Words: The Essential Dave Hickey Online Compilation’ (2016), both from PCP Press. This event is free, reservation is required. Click here to reserve a place.
Please join us when catalog essayist and art historian Elizabeth A. T. Smith speaks about the exhibition, ‘Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947 – 2016.’ Smith is an American art historian, museum curator, writer, and presently the executive director of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation. She was a curator at MOCA, LA, from 1983 – 1999 and chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago from 1999 – 2009. Her catalogue essay for the exhibition, ‘Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947 – 2016,’ addresses the show’s earliest works by Ruth Asawa, Lee Bontecou, Louise Bourgeois, Claire Falkenstein, and Louise Nevelson in terms of process, materials, and narrative in the 1950s. This event is free, but reservations are required.
Isa Genzken has long been considered one of Germany’s most important and influential contemporary artists. Born in Bad Oldesloe, Germany, Genzken studied at the renowned Kunstakademie Düsseldorf whose faculty at the time included Joseph Beuys, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh and Gerhard Richter. Since the 1970s, Genzken’s diverse practice has encompassed sculpture, photography, found-object installation, film, drawing and painting. Her work borrows from the aesthetics of Minimalism, punk culture and assemblage art to confront the conditions of human experience in contemporary society and the uneasy social climate of capitalism.Genzken is best known for her sculptures, gaining attention for her minimalist oriented Hyperbolos and Ellipsoids in the late 70s, and architecturally-inflected works such as her recent epoxy resin windows and skyscraper Columns from the 90s. Genzken’s practice is incredibly wide-ranging, but her work remains dedicated to challenging the viewer’s self-awareness by means of physically altering their perceptions, bringing bodies together in spaces and integrating elements of a mixed media into sculpture.
Australia-born, Zurich-based artist Rachel Khedoori poses provocative phenomenological questions in her work that merges installation, sculpture, film and photography. Khedoori gained international recognition with her first comprehensive solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel and Kunstverein Braunschweig in 2001.
Born in 1936, Eva Hesse was one of the icons of American art in the 1960s, her work being a major influence on subsequent generations of artists. Comprehensive solo exhibitions in the past 30 years as well as a retrospective that toured from the San Francisco MoMA to the Museum Wiesbaden and finally to the Tate Modern in London, have highlighted the lasting interest that her oeuvre has generated. Hesse cultivated mistakes and surprises, precariousness and enigma, in an effort to make works that could transcend literal associations. The objects she produced, at once humble and enormously charismatic, came to play a central role in the transformation of contemporary art practice.
For almost 60 years, British artist Phyllida Barlow took inspiration from her surroundings to create imposing installations that can be at once menacing and playful. She created large-scale yet anti-monumental sculptures from inexpensive, low-grade materials such as cardboard, fabric, plywood, polystyrene, scrim, plaster and cement. These constructions were often painted in industrial or vibrant colors, the seams of their construction left at times visible, revealing the means of their making.
Anna Maria Maiolino is one of the most significant artists working in Brazil today. Born 1942 in Italy, Maiolino’s practice expresses a concern with creative and destructive processes. Working across a wide range of disciplines and mediums—spanning drawing, printmaking, poetry, film, performance, installation and sculpture—Maiolino relentlessly explores notions of subjectivity and self.
Mira Schendel is one of the most significant artists to emerge from Latin America during the twentieth century. Born in Switzerland in 1919, Schendel emigrated to Brazil from Europe in 1949, ultimately settling in São Paulo in 1953, where she swiftly occupied a leading place in the country's vibrant post-war artistic scene.
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