ARTIST NEWS
The Observer Most Influential People in Art: Theaster Gates and Alex Katz
Nov 19, 2024
Featuring GRAY artists Alex Katz and Theaster Gates, Observer’s Business of Art Power List spotlights the bold innovators steering today’s art world through shifting markets, new collector dynamics and cultural reinvention. From market disruptors to institution builders, these visionaries are redefining influence, expanding access and setting the course for art’s global future.
IN DIALOGUE
Torkwase Dyson and Rinaldo Walcott
Nov 23, 2024
On the occasion of the exhibition, Torkwase Dyson: Of Line and Memory, GRAY is pleased to present a gallery conversation with interdisciplinary Black Studies scholar, Rinaldo Walcott, and internationally celebrated artist Torkwase Dyson.
The Art Institute of Chicago
Curator’s Choice: Worldviews in the Franke Reading Room
Oct 29, 2024
Worldviews features GRAY artists Ellen Lanyon and Alex Katz in the Franke Reading Room. For the first time in over 20 years, the Franke Reading Room welcomes a new rotation of works into the space.
Theaster Gates
Christian Petersen Design Award
Oct 25, 2024
Theaster Gates is the recipient of the 2024 Christian Petersen Design Award presented by the Iowa State University College of Design. The artist will be recognized as part of Iowa State’s homecoming celebration at the ISU Alumni Association’s 93rd Honors and Awards Ceremony on Friday, Nov. 1.
Alex Katz
National Medal of Arts
Oct 21, 2024
Alex Katz has been awarded the 2023 National Medal of Arts by the United States government. The National Medal of Arts is the highest award given to artists and arts patrons by the federal government.
Torkwase Dyson
OF LINE AND MEMORY
Nov 8, 2024 – Jan 25, 2025
GRAY is pleased to announce Torkwase Dyson: Of Line and Memory. For the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, Torkwase Dyson debuts a pair of monumental sculptures, new paintings, and constructions in glass and wood.
Torkwase Dyson
Superfine: Tailoring Black Style
May 10 - Oct 26, 2025
The Costume Institute’s spring 2025 exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art Superfine: Tailoring Black Style will have the conceptual design for the exhibition designed by GRAY artist Torkwase Dyson.
Alex Katz
Theater and Dance
Oct 12, 2024 - Feb 2, 2025
Alex Katz: Theater and Dance at The Baker Museum, Naples, FL is the first comprehensive exhibition to explore the inventive collaborations of Alex Katz with choreographers, dancers and avant-garde theater ensembles over six decades.
Chicago Exhibition Weekend
Oct 3-6, 2024
GRAY is pleased to participate in Chicago Exhibition Weekend 2024 (October 3-6), celebrating our newly expanded space with a solo presentation of Evelyn Statsinger's work alongside selections from the gallery's program.
Gallery Program
Art & Tennis
Oct 6, 2024
On the occasion of Chicago Exhibition Weekend, GRAY and DOCUMENT are excited to co-host Art & Tennis, an afternoon of mixed singles and doubles tennis on Sunday, October 6, from 1 - 4 PM.
Jaume Plensa
Mirall
Sep 19, 2024 - Feb 15, 2025
Now on view at La Llotja, Jaume Plensa’s exhibition Mirall reflects on the dualities of the world: body and soul, matter and spirit, light and darkness, opacity and transparency, past and future.
Theaster Gates
When Clouds Roll Away: Reflection and Restoration from the Johnson Archive
Sep 12, 2024 - Mar 16, 2025
Rebuild Foundation, the non-profit organization founded by artist Theaster Gates, will present an exhibition featuring a suite of new works both inspired by and sourced from the Johnson Publishing Company (JPC) archive. Exhibited alongside Gates’s “Facsimile Cabinet of Women’s Origin Stories,” this will be the first time the work is shown in its entirety in the United States, and notably, the first time the work is shown in Chicago, the former home and headquarters of Johnson Publishing Company.
The Butler Institute of American Art
Alex Katz: Collaborations with Poets
Sep 15 - Nov 17, 2024
Alex Katz: Collaborations with Poets opens at The Butler Institute of American Art on September 15, 2024, taking an intimate look at the painter Alex Katz’s long engagement with poets over time. Spanning works created over the past 60 years, the exhibition includes print portfolios, editioned books, portraits of poets, and unique cutouts, all centering on poets and poetry.
Peter Marino Art Foundation
McArthur Binion
Jul 20 - Sep 28, 2024
Twelve paintings by Chicago-based artist McArthur Binion (b. 1946) highlight the mid-summer show at architect Peter Marino's Foundation in Southampton, NY. Highly influenced by language and music, Binion combines collage, drawing and painting to create complex autobiographical abstractions of painted minimalist patterns over an “under conscious” of personal documents and photographs.
McArthur Binion
Palimpsest
Jul 30 - Aug 24, 2024
McArthur Binion is featured in a summer group exhibition Palimpsest on view at Mariane Ibrahim from July 30 through August 24, 2024. Palimpsest sparks dialogue between hegemonic and emergent histories, private and public iconographies, mythologies, and fantasies.
David Hockney
Hockney and Piero: A Longer Look
Aug 8 - Oct 27, 2024
Hockney and Piero: A Longer Look opens at The National Gallery in London August 8, featuring two Hockney paintings, one showing his mother and father and the other depicting his friend, curator Henry Geldzahler. Hockney’s works are displayed with the thread that ties them together, Piero della Francesca’s ‘The Baptism of Christ’.
Theaster Gates
Le chant du centre
Jun 30 - Nov 3, 2024
Theaster Gates' project, Le chant du centre (The song of the center), transforms the Grande Halle at LUMA Arles into a clay manufacturing workshop where visitors enter a site of Gates’s production and sculptural research. He has created a sacred space around the Temple, a central installation made from pottery ware-boards that hold his personal vinyl collection, a sake bar and other artworks.
David Hockney
Paper Trails
Jun 18 - Sep 10, 2024
David Hockney: Paper Trails showcases a captivating survey of 110 works on paper by the artist. This exhibition marks the largest of Hockney’s works on paper to date, presenting a wide-reaching selection of works spanning his career, from his famous Pool Series and intimate portraits to his recent digital works created on an iPad.
Upcoming
Forman Arts Initiative announces a new permanent campus
Jun 4, 2024
The Forman Arts Initiative announces a new permanent campus in Philadelphia's West Kensington neighborhood and a multi-year partnership with artist Theaster Gates to develop city-wide programming.
For Immediate Release
Judy Ledgerwood Joins GRAY
Jun 4, 2024
GRAY is pleased to welcome Judy Ledgerwood to the gallery’s roster of artists. In a painting career spanning four decades, Ledgerwood has confronted and expanded the history of abstract painting by decentering perceptions of its neutrality and prioritizing visual engagement and pleasure.
Alex Katz
Seasons
Jul 4 - Sep 8, 2024
Alex Katz: Seasons, the upcoming exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, includes four monumental paintings that chronicle the changing of the seasons, from the vibrant colors of spring, summer, and fall to the stark palette of winter.
Theaster Gates
The Gift and The Renege
May 17 - Oct 20, 2024
Theaster Gates presents The Gift and The Revenge at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, featuring large-scale paintings, sculptures, and installations that highlight the seen and unseen dynamics of Freedmen’s Town in Houston’s Fourth Ward.
Gallery Program
Jazz Brunch
May 11, 2024
Inspired by the interdisciplinary exchange between avant-garde music, painting, and photography, GRAY is pleased to host Isaiah Collier and The Chosen Few in conjunction with McArthur Binion and Jules Allen: Me and You, on view through May 31st, 2024.
Theaster Gates
Afro-Mingei
Apr 24 - Sep 1, 2024
Theaster Gates presents Afro Mingei, his first solo museum exhibition in Japan, opening on April 24 at the Mori Museum of Art in Tokyo. Marking the twenty-year anniversary of his first artistic encounter in Japan, Afro-Mingei demonstrates Gates’s deep investment in the ceramic legacies of Japan which began in 2004, when Gates participated in the International Workshop of Ceramic Art in Tokoname.
Jaume Plensa
Janus
Apr 19 - Sep 30, 2024
Jaume Plensa's Janus, the upcoming exhibition with Fondazione Berengo in Venice, looks to the double-faced Roman god in a site-specific installation presented throughout the 15th-century interiors of the Chiesa di San Gallo.
Exhibition
CALDER
Apri 18 - Jun 21, 2024
GRAY is pleased to announce Calder, an exhibition of sculptures by Alexander Calder from the 1950s and 60s. The decades at mid-twentieth century were especially significant for the artist, whose objective to create space and movement at ever more immersive scales is expressed by the range of work in the exhibition.
Upcoming Exhibition
Four Chicago Artists: Theodore Halkin, Evelyn Statsinger, Barbara Rossi, and Christina Ramberg
May 11 - Aug 26, 2024
GRAY artist Evelyn Statsinger (1927-2016) will be among four key Chicago artists highlighted in an extraordinary forthcoming exhibition at The Art Institute of Chicago, opening this spring: Four Chicago Artists: Theodore Halkin, Evelyn Statsinger, Barbara Rossi, and Christina Ramberg.
Exhibition
McArthur Binion and Jules Allen: Me and You
Apr 12 - May 31, 2024
GRAY is pleased to announce McArthur Binion & Jules Allen: Me and You, a two-person exhibition featuring eleven new paintings by McArthur Binion and a survey of gelatin silver prints by New York-based photographer Jules Allen.
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Theaster Gates
Jan 27, 2024 - Jan 1, 2025
Theaster Gates: Wonder Working Power, is a site-specific installation by the Chicago-based multidisciplinary artist and professor on view at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
Torkwase Dyson
Whitney Biennial 2024
Jan 25, 2024
GRAY congratulates Torkwase Dyson on her forthcoming participation in the 2024 Whitney Biennial: Even Better Than the Real Thing. For the exhibition Dyson will debut a sculpture installation on the 5th Floor Terrace.
Jaume Plensa
Endless at the University of Notre Dame
Nov 2023
To mark the occasion of the installation of Jaume Plensa's Endless, 2023, commissioned by the University of Notre Dame’s Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, the artist joins Director and Curator Joseph Becherer in conversation.
Vincent Scully Prize
Theaster Gates
Nov 3, 2023
The National Building Museum recognizes Theaster Gates, world-renowned artist and social innovator, as the twenty-fifth recipient of the Museum’s annual Vincent Scully Prize.
Jaume Plensa
Self Portrait III in Atlanta’s Freedom Park
Oct 23, 2023
Organized by the Renew Atlanta Infrastructure Bond’s Landmark Public Art initiative, Jaume Plensa’s Self Portrait III, 2017 has been installed in Atlanta’s Freedom Park. The 10-foot-tall stainless steel sculpture features letters from nine different languages, a reflection of Atlanta’s rich, multicultural history.
Theaster Gates
Altar for the Unbanned
Oct 5, 2023
Conceived as a sanctuary for banned books, artist Theaster Gates’ Altar for the Unbanned is a sculpture that embodies Chicago’s cultural resilience and resistance and has become a haven for creativity and critical thinking. Altar for the Unbanned is commissioned by the Chicago Public Library and the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events as part of the Library’s Book Sanctuary initiative that collectively declares all of Chicago’s public libraries as Book Sanctuary.
Exhibition
So Be It! Asé! Photographic Echoes of FESTAC ’77: Roy Lewis, K. Kofi Moyo, Bob Crawford
Oct 26 - Dec 22, 2023
GRAY is pleased to announce So Be It! Asé! Photographic Echoes of FESTAC ’77: Roy Lewis, K. Kofi Moyo, Bob Crawford. Curated by Romi Crawford, the exhibition unveils visual documentation of one of the most significant, yet lesser known, cultural events of the twentieth century: the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, held in Lagos, Nigeria.
Torkwase Dyson
THIS TOO IS A MAP
Sep 21 - Nov 19, 2023
The 12th edition of the Seoul Mediacity Biennale, THIS TOO IS A MAP, features Torkwase Dyson's newest installation, I Belong to the Distance 3, (Force Multiplier), 2023 at the Seoul Museum of Art.
Alex Katz
Autumn
Sep 8 - Oct 28, 2023
Alex Katz: Autumn is the artist’s tenth solo exhibition at GRAY and the first exhibition of large-scale landscapes since 2018. The exhibition follows his lauded career retrospective, Gathering, which opened at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in the fall of 2022. Across eleven monumental canvases, Katz depicts the vibrant foliage, sweeping fields, and windblown trees of the changing season.
Torkwase Dyson
Choreographies of the Impossible
Sep 6 - Dec 10, 2023
Torkwase Dyson is featured in the 35th Bienal de São Paulo, choreographies of the impossible, curated by Diane Lima, Grada Kilomba, Hélio Menezes and Manuel Borja-Villel.
Theaster Gates
A Monument to Listening
Sep 1, 2023
Commissioned by the Mellon Foundation, A Monument to Listening is a permanent public installation work in Memphis along the Mississippi River at Tom Lee Park. The installation is conceived of 32 functional sculptures made from honed basalt, representing the lives Tom Lee saved.
Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo
David Hockney
Jul 15 - Nov 5, 2023
Organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, the exhibition David Hockney is on view from July 15th to November 5th, 2023. This is the first large-scale solo exhibition in Japan in 27 years devoted to British artist David Hockney, regarded as one of the most innovative artists of the postwar era.
Theaster Gates
Min | Mon
July, 2023
Min I Mon marks the beginning of a longer engagement between Luma and Gates, during which multiple forms central to his ongoing explorations will manifest in Luma’s spaces in Arles over a period of years. 民 (Min), meaning “the people” in Japanese, and 門 (Mon) meaning “gates,” define the conviviality and cultural hybridity that are often at the heart of Gates’s historic projects.
Jaume Plensa
La Part du Sacré
Jul 1 - Oct 8, 2023
Beaux-Arts Mons (The Museum of Fine Arts of Mons in Belgium) presents La Part du Sacré (Something Sacred), a walking exhibition through the city of Mons that leads a discovery of nearly twenty sculptures by Jaume Plensa on view from July 1 to October 8, 2023. La Part du Sacré forms a narrative path between the Grand-Place and the Sainte-Waudru Collegiate Church, connecting historical sites of civil and religious power.
Torkwase Dyson
uMoya: The Sacred Return of Lost Things
Jun 10 - Sep 17, 2023
Torkwase Dyson's Liquid is a Place, 2021, is on view at Tate Liverpool as part of the 12th edition of the Liverpool Biennial, is composed of three striking structural objects, which appear as both static and fluid simultaneously.
Venice Biennale of Architecture 2023
Laboratory of the Future
May 20 - Nov 26, 2023
Black Artist Retreat: Reflections on 10 Years of Convening (2023)—Theaster Gates's feature-length documentary—chronicles a decade of Gates's celebrated convening of Black artists. Started in 2013, the Black Artists Retreat (B.A.R) brings together artists from all over the world to create space for a community of Black artists to engage with each other outside of the institutional environment.
NEW RELEASE
Alex Katz: Collaborations with Poets
May 2023
GRAY is pleased to announce Alex Katz: Collaborations with Poets, a hardcover monograph published in conjunction with the eponymous exhibition at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. The first comprehensive survey of Alex Katz’s collaborations with poets—including some of the most acclaimed American writers of the 20th century—this 208-page book features portraits, book and journal covers, and unique artworks from the past 60 years.
2023 Isamu Noguchi Award
Theaster Gates
April 28, 2023
Marking its tenth year, the 2023 Isamu Noguchi Award will recognize artist Theaster Gates as a recipient. Established in 2014 and presented annually, The Isamu Noguchi Award perpetuates Noguchi’s legacy by acknowledging highly accomplished individuals who share his spirit of innovation, unbounded imagination, and uncompromising commitment to creativity.
Counterpublic 2023
Torkwase Dyson
Apr 15 - Jul 15, 2023
On the occasion of Counterpublic 2023, Torkwase Dyson presents Bird and Lava (Scott Joplin), a commissioned, immersive architectural and sonic installation. This new sculptural work is inspired by the legacy of pianist and composer Scott Joplin and the musical freedom Joplin found in ragtime music, which is credited as the first truly "American" musical form - a syncopated blend of classical piano and African polyrhythms with mathematical precision.
For Immediate Release
Jaume Plensa: Forgotten Dreams
Apr 7 - Jun 3, 2023
Widely celebrated for public sculpture that engages the human form, architecture, poetry, and language, Jaume Plensa presents recent work in the exhibition Forgotten Dreams at GRAY Chicago. For his 10th exhibition at GRAY, the exhibition includes two large-scale works in cast aluminum: a series of twenty-one doors, titled Forgotten Dreams, 2020; and Where Are You?, 2022, a body of freestanding sculptural portraits. Additionally, Plensa displays a series of drawings as well as sculptures in marble and granite.
Drexel University
The Monument We Make: Performance and Symposium with Theaster Gates, Elizabeth Alexander and Paul Farber
Apr 3, 2023
During a one-day symposium and performance on April 3 titled “The Monument We Make,” Gates, along with Mellon Foundation President Elizabeth Alexander, PhD, and Monument Lab Director and Co-founder Paul Farber, PhD, will dive deeper into the meaning of memorials, using Monument in Waiting as a launching pad for discussion. The sculpture will also serve as a site of performance. “The Monument We Make” is presented in partnership with Ars Nova Workshop and GRAY.
Coachella Valley
Desert X
Mar 4 - May 7, 2023
Desert X, the recurring site-specific, international art exhibition, opens its fourth edition today at sites across the Coachella Valley, California. Curated by Artistic Director Neville Wakefield and Co-Curator Diana Campbell, the exhibition will activate the desert landscape through 12 installations by artists from Europe, North America, and South Asia, whose poetic and immersive works span sculpture, painting, photography, writing, architecture, design, film, music, performance and choreography, education, and environmental activism.
Jaume Plensa
Macbeth
Feb 16 - Mar 3, 2023
GRAY is pleased to announce Jaume Plensa’s re-envisioning of Giuseppe Verdi's opera, Macbeth. The artist's newly designed sets and costumes and reimagined stage direction bring new shape to this production of Shakespeare's tragedy. Verdi's Macbeth runs through March 3, 2023 at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona. To honor the continuity of Verdi's vision, The Liceu invited Jaume Plensa to again make the production of Macbeth out of the ordinary. In addition to sets, costumes, and staging, the artist incorporated his own sculpture into the production, redefining the performance space and creating a dynamic visual world for Verdi's opera.
David Hockney
Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away)
Feb 22 - Jun 4, 2023
In a cycle of six animated chapters, the viewer is immersed in the artist’s oeuvre and creative process guided by a recorded commentary from the artist himself and accompanied by an exhibition-specific score composed by Nico Muhly. A continuation of the artist’s material expansiveness, Hockney’s voice surrounds viewers, providing insight into his practice as he experiments with perspective, uses photography as a way of 'drawing with a camera' and captures the passing of time.
Poetry Foundation
Alex Katz: Collaborations with Poets
Feb 18 - May 20, 2023
Alex Katz: Collaborations with Poets takes an intimate look at the painter Alex Katz’s extensive collaborations with poets, followed by a poetry reading by his son, Vincent Katz. Spanning works created over the past 60 years, the exhibition includes print portfolios, editioned books, portraits of poets, and unique cutouts, all centering on poets and poetry. Organized by the Poetry Foundation with guidance from the artist and his son and with support from GRAY, the exhibition offers a unique opportunity to experience Katz’s deep interest in an art form whose forms and tactics he considered “more stimulating than painting.”
For Immediate Release
GRAY at 60
Jan 26 - Mar 11, 2023, Mar 31 - May 26, 2023
GRAY is pleased to announce GRAY at 60, an exhibition and accompanying book commemorating six decades since the gallery’s founding in 1963 by Richard Gray (1928-2018). The exhibition features works by sixty historical and living artists whose practices have been integral to the gallery’s vision. GRAY at 60 presents the legacy and future of one of the United States’s longest running galleries. The exhibition will open at GRAY Chicago on January 26, 2023 and remain on view through March 11, and will be on view at GRAY New York from March 31 through May 26.
Pride Park, Miami Beach
Jaume Plensa's Minna
Nov 30, 2022
GRAY is pleased to announce the unveiling of Minna, a monumental sculpture by Spanish artist Jaume Plensa, to be revealed on November 30, 2022, at 10 AM in a dedication ceremony. The steel mesh portrait, located in Miami Beach’s Pride Park, explores the concept of the invisible in everyday life. Minna was commissioned as a gift to the City of Miami Beach by philanthropist and businessman Norman Braman, one of the visionaries who helped bring Art Basel to the convention center two decades ago.
Guggenheim Museum
Alex Katz: The Gathering
Oct 21, 2022 - Feb 20, 2023
Across eight decades of intense creative production, Alex Katz (b. 1927, Brooklyn, New York) has sought to capture visual experience in the present tense. “Eternity exists in minutes of absolute awareness,” Katz stated in 1961. “Painting, when successful, seems to be a synthetic reflection of this condition.” Whether evoking a glancing exchange between friends or a shaft of light filtered through trees, he has aimed to create a record of “quick things passing,” compressing the flux of everyday life into a vivid burst of optical perception.
New Museum
"Theaster Gates: Young Lords and Their Traces"
Nov 10, 2022 - Feb 5, 2023
Taking place across three floors of the museum, this exhibition will encapsulate the full range of Theaster Gates’s artistic activities, featuring artworks produced over the past twenty years and site-specific environments created especially for this presentation. Gates has titled the exhibition “Young Lords and Their Traces” in honor of the radical thinkers who have shaped his home city of Chicago and America as a whole. This survey exhibition will comprise a choreography of works including paintings, sculptures, videos, performances, and archival collections that work together to memorialize both heroic figures and more humble, everyday icons.
For Immediate Release
David Hockney: 20 Flowers and Some Bigger Pictures
Tue, Oct 4, 2022
Five of the world’s leading galleries are coming together to present 20 Flowers and Some Bigger Pictures, an unprecedented international exhibition by David Hockney. The global exhibition will be jointly presented this fall and winter at Annely Juda Fine Art in London; Galerie Lelong & Co. in Paris; GRAY in Chicago; L.A. Louver in Los Angeles; and Pace in New York. The exhibition at GRAY Chicago (2044 West Carroll Avenue) will open with a public reception on Friday, November 4, 2022, from 5-7 PM CDT, and be on view November 4 – December 23, 2022.
NEW RELEASE
The Staples Jr. Singers: When Do We Get Paid? (In Full)
Sep 2022
Released on the occasion of the exhibition Citing Black Geographies, GRAY and Luaka Bop jointly present When Do We Get Paid? (In Full), an EP by the Staples Jr. Singers based on their record originally released in 1975. This limited edition record was produced to play within the exhibition at GRAY Chicago, and fills the gallery with gospel music.
GALLERY PROGRAM
Black Arts Movement School Modality: Dance + Movement Course by Darlene Blackburn and Atiba Walker
Sat, Oct 1, 1-2 PM CDT, GRAY Chicago
On the occasion of the exhibition Citing Black Geographies, GRAY presents a dance and movement course led by dancer and choreographer Darlene Blackburn and accompanied by Atiba Walker on drums on Saturday, Oct 1, 2022, from 1-2 PM CDT, as an activation of the Black Arts Movement School Modality.
Colby College Museum of Art
Alex Katz: Theater and Dance
Aug 16, 2022 - Feb 19, 2023
Since the late 1950s, Alex Katz has painted dancers and designed sets and costumes for theater and dance productions, and yet this will be the first comprehensive museum presentation of Katz’s highly collaborative and playful work with choreographers, dancers, and members of avant-garde theater ensembles. Organized by the Colby Museum with the guidance of curator Robert Storr, the artist himself, and a curatorial team, Alex Katz: Theater and Dance will offer an unparalleled opportunity to experience Katz’s designs and his process.
The Brooklyn Museum
Leon Polk Smith | Brooklyn Abstraction: Four Artists, Four Walls
Aug 12, 2022 - Aug 6, 2023
This installation of works by Maya Hayuk, José Parlá, Kennedy Yanko, and the late Leon Polk Smith—four artists with strong connections to Brooklyn—creates a dynamic environment through four distinct, visually immersive experiences. Animating the monumental architecture of the Museum’s Beaux-Arts Court, each artist transforms the iconic space with brilliant and subtle colors, intriguing surfaces, and wide-ranging materials.
Aichi Trienale
Theaster Gates
Jul 30, 2022 - Oct 10, 2023
Theaster Gates is an artist and social innovator. Through the expansiveness of his approach as a thinker, maker, and builder, Gates expands the role of the artist as an agent of change. His performative practice, and visual works find roots in Black knowledge, history, and archives. Gates studied sculpture, ceramics, and urban planning, and he has received acclaim for projects that have contributed to the revitalization of neighborhoods on Chicagoʼs South Side. This residential building in Former Earthenware Pipe Factory (Maruri-Tokan), has been dormant since 2017. Gates has converted this vacant space into The Listening House, a platform for music, wellness, and ceramic research.
Yorkshire Sculpture Park
Jaume Plensa: In small places, close to home
Jun 18 - Oct 30, 2022
“As a sculptor, I always need to collaborate with other people to bring my work to life, but when I draw, my work flows directly from my brain and my heart onto my hands and the paper. Drawing is an incredible laboratory where you can develop intuitions – I feel much more free than when I am working with sculpture. Drawing is a place for freedom.”
Kunstmuseum Luzern
David Hockney: Moving Focus
Jul 9 - Oct 30, 2022
The focus is always moving in the work of David Hockney (*1937). Great Britain’s greatest living artist does not allow himself to be defined by one particular style and, irrespective of the medium, is constantly reinventing himself. His paintings are meticulously naturalist, then again completely abstract, and more recently he paints with a preference for the iPad.
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza
Alex Katz
Jun 11 - Sep 11, 2022
For the first time in Spain, the museum is presenting a retrospective on the American painter Alex Katz (born New York, 1927), one of the key figures in the history of 20th century American art and a forerunner of Pop Art who continues active today.
Palm Springs Museum of Art
Leon Polk Smith: 1945-1962
Mar 26 - Aug 28, 2022
This exhibition presents the work of the innovative painter, Leon Polk Smith (1906-1996), whose significant contributions to twentieth-century art are becoming increasingly recognized. This presentation focuses on paintings and works on paper from the 1950s when Smith’s mature style began to flourish.
For Immediate Release
Theaster Gates’s Monument in Waiting Unveiled in Philadelphia
Jun 30, 2022
Installed on Drexel University’s campus in University City, Theaster Gates’s public sculpture, Monument in Waiting, prompts viewers to reconsider historical figures and monuments that reinforce systems of oppression.
In Dialogue
Dan Nadel, Melissa Brown and Marie Lorenz on Evelyn Statsinger: Currents
Tue, May 17, 2022, 3 PM EDT / 2 PM CDT
On the occasion of Evelyn Statsinger: Currents, GRAY New York is pleased to host the exhibition curator Dan Nadel in conversation with artists Marie Lorenz and Melissa Brown. In their live-streamed conversation, Nadel, Brown and Lorenz discuss Evelyn Statsinger’s practice—one that was informed deeply by forms in nature—and her unique approach to painting and drawing.
Torkwase Dyson
Hall Art Foundation
Sep 3, 2021 - May 15, 2022
The Hall Art Foundation is pleased to announce an exhibition by American artist Torkwase Dyson to be held at its Schloss Derneburg location. In her paintings, drawings and sculpture, Torkwase Dyson explores relationships between bodily movement, geography and architecture, with a focus on the ways that black and brown bodies perceive and negotiate space.
Art Busan
Booth C26, Busan, South Korea
May 13 - 15, 2022
GRAY is pleased to participate in the 2022 edition of Art Busan, with a presentation of works by artists from the gallery’s Modern and contemporary programs, including McArthur Binion, Jim Dine, Jean Dubuffet, Sam Francis, Theaster Gates, David Hockney, Hans Hofmann, Alex Katz, Pablo Picasso, Jaume Plensa, and Leon Polk Smith.
For Immediate Release
David Klamen: Life Trophies
May 5 - Jun 24, 2022
American artist David Klamen debuts a recent series of twelve ceramic sculptures in the solo exhibition Life Trophies. Constructed over the last several years, Klamen’s Life Trophies are an accumulation of visual fragments, mementos, and experiences that bring material reality to personal or forgotten history. David Klamen: Life Trophies opens at GRAY Chicago (2044 West Carroll Avenue) on Thursday, May 5, with a public reception for the artist from 5:00–7:00 PM, and closes June 24, 2022.
EXPO Chicago
Booth 239, Navy Pier, Chicago
Apr 8 - 10, 2022
GRAY is pleased to participate in the 2022 edition of EXPO Chicago, presenting major works from its program of eminent contemporary and Modern artists, including McArthur Binion, Suzanne Caporael, Jim Dine, Torkwase Dyson, Theaster Gates, Rashid Johnson, Alex Katz, Ellen Lanyon, Jaume Plensa, Richard Serra, Evelyn Statsinger, and more.
National Gallery of Canada
Rashid Johnson: Capsule
Feb 26 - Nov 13, 2022
As part of its Contemporary Projects initiative, the National Gallery of Canada approached Rashid Johnson to create a major work for the building’s glass-domed main entrance. The resulting work, Capsule, is the largest pyramidal steel sculpture Johnson has produced to date.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Evelyn Statsinger: Currents
Apr 8 - Jun 18, 2022
GRAY is pleased to present the work of American artist Evelyn Statsinger (1927-2016) in the solo exhibition, Currents.
THEASTER GATES
Black Chapel Serpentine Pavilion
Jun 10 - Oct 16, 2022
Today, plans were revealed for Black Chapel, the 21st Serpentine Pavilion designed by Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates. Black Chapel is realized with the architectural support of Adjaye Associates and will open to the public on Friday, June 10, 2022.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
What to Send Up When It Goes Down
Jan 18, 2021
GRAY, Congo Square Theatre Company, and Theaster Gates’s Rebuild Foundation are proud to jointly present the Chicago premiere of What to Send Up When It Goes Down, the critically acclaimed play by award-winning playwright, Aleshea B. Harris.
Stony Island Arts Bank
Artist Theaster Gates Teams Up with Gallerist Easy Otabor to Showcase Black Artists
Jan 21 - Feb 27, 2022
Rebuild Foundation and Anthony Gallery today announced a yearlong partnership to present a series of exhibitions spotlighting the importance of Black space, Black art and Black artists at the Stony Island Arts Bank in 2022.
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse
Nov 5, 2021 - Feb 6, 2022
Bethany Collins, Theaster Gates, and Bob Thompson are featured in The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.
Jaume Plensa
Utopia, 2021
Nov 30, 2021
Gray is pleased to announce the unveiling of Utopia, Jaume Plensa’s latest major sculpture, commissioned by Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park. In the words of the artist, “Utopia is our human landscape, a space to embrace humanity and our collective dreams.”
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Torkwase Dyson Joins Gray
Nov 11, 2021
Gray is pleased to announce our representation of Torkwase Dyson, joining Pace in representing the artist. Gray's first solo exhibition with Dyson will take place in Chicago in the fall of 2023.
In Dialogue
Michael Auping, Phong Bui, and Joan Jonas
on Susan Rothenberg: On Both Sides of My Line
Oct 28, 2021
On the occasion of Susan Rothenberg: On Both Sides of My Line, Gray is pleased to host distinguished curator Michael Auping, and artist Joan Jonas for a live dialogue moderated by Phong Bui, Co-Founder and Artistic Director of the Brooklyn Rail.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Alex Katz: The White Coat
Oct 22 - Dec 17, 2021
One of the most influential American artists of the last half-century and a leading figure of contemporary figurative painting, Alex Katz presents a new series of eleven large-scale portraits in a focused solo exhibition titled The White Coat.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Jaume Plensa: Water's Soul, 2020
Sep 9, 2021
Gray is pleased to announce the unveiling of Water’s Soul, a new site-specific sculpture by internationally renowned artist Jaume Plensa.
Live Performance
Majel Connery + Sky Creature
Sep 25, 2021
Gray is pleased to announce a live performance on by multi-hyphenate musician Majel Connery + Sky Creature. Connery, a New York-based vocalist, composer, producer, and former opera singer joins Matt Walsh (of The Forms) in their duo, Sky Creature.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Susan Rothenberg: On Both Sides of My Line
CHI | Sep 10 - Oct 9, 2021 / NY | Oct 29 - Dec 10, 2021
Gray is pleased to present On Both Sides of My Line, a solo exhibition celebrating the life and work of renowned American painter Susan Rothenberg (1945 – 2020) through key examples of her most iconic series: the profile horse paintings.
Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College
Closer to Life: Drawings and Works on Paper in the Marieluise Hessel Collection
Jun 26 - Oct 17, 2021
Rashid Johnson's work is featured in Closer to Life, an exhibition celebrating the 30th Anniversary of Bard College's illustrious Center for Curatorial Studies.
Barbican
Jean Dubuffet: Brutal Beauty
May 17 - Aug 22, 2021
An exhibition celebrating French artist Jean Dubuffet is on view at Barbican, London through August 22.
Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver
Leon Polk Smith: Big Form, Big Space
May 14 - Aug 22, 2021
Big Form, Big Space, on view through August 22, 2021, expands the dimensions of Leon Polk Smith’s place within art history.
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse
May 22 – Sep 6, 2021
Theaster Gates is included in The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse at Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
The Royal Academy of Arts
David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020
Aug 11 - Sep 26, 2021
David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020 includes 116 iPad paintings creating by the artist to capture the unfolding of spring in the midst of a pandemic.
Colby Museum of Art
Bob Thompson: This House Is Mine
Jul 20, 2021 - Jan 9, 2022
This House is Mine, a post-humanous exhibition highlighting the work of Bob Thompson, is currently on view at Colby Museum of Art.
Frye Art Museum
Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem
May 22 - Aug 15, 2021
Artists Rashid Johnson and McArthur Binion are featured in Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem at Frye Art Museum. The exhibition illuminates The Studio Museum in Harlem's unprecedented collection of works by artists of African descent and further cements it as the premiere institution for the study, presentation and preservation of such work.
Washington State University
Art & Healing
May 7 - Aug 7, 2021
Jim Dine is featured in Art & Healing at The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Washington State University (WSU). The exhibition is on view from May 7 - August 7, 2021 and was curated in collaboration with WSU students and Pullman Regional Hospital.
Artist Talk: Dieter Roelstraete and Theaster Gates
on Theaster Gates: How to Sell Hardware
Jul 30, 2021
Please join curator and professor Dieter Roelstraete in conversation with Theaster Gates on the occasion of Theaster Gates: How to Sell Hardware.
Documentary Premiere
"How to Sell Hardware"
Jul 26, 2021
Gray is pleased to host the premiere of “How to Sell Hardware”, an experimental documentary by Theaster Gates. Made in conjunction with his solo exhibition, How to Sell Hardware, at Gray Warehouse, the film will be introduced by curator and scholar, Romi Crawford.
The Centre Pompidou
Jim Dine, Sawhorse Piece, 1968-1969
Jun 4, 2021
Jim Dine’s Sawhorse Piece, 1968-1969, is now on view at the The Centre Pompidou in Paris on the occasion of the installation of its permanent collection.
Indianapolis Museum of Art
Private Eye: The Imagist Impulse in Chicago Art
May 21 - Dec 5, 2021
Evelyn Statsinger is included in Private Eye: The Imagist Impulse in Chicago Art, a group show centered on the Chicago Imagists on view at the Indianapolis Museum of Art through December 5.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Theaster Gates: How to Sell Hardware
Tuesday, May 11, 2021
Gray is pleased to present Theaster Gates: How to Sell Hardware, the artist’s latest installation in Chicago and third solo exhibition at Gray.
Storm King Art Center
Rashid Johnson: The Crisis
Apr 7, 2021 - Nov 8, 2021
Presented for the first time in the United States, Rashid Johnson’s monumental sculpture, The Crisis, is currently on view at Storm King Art Center.
TANK Shanghai
Theaster Gates: Bad Neon
Mar 19 - Aug 29, 2021
Theaster Gates: Bad Neon is on view at TANK Shanghai from March 19 to August 29. Transforming one of TANK’s monumental buildings into a 1980s disco-themed roller skating rink, Gates's nexus of art, music, and neon lights invites exhibition visitors to skate within and around an electric installation.
Prada Rhong Zhai
Theaster Gates: China Cabinet
Mar 11, 2021 - May 23, 2021
China Cabinet, Theaster Gates' recent exhibition project, is on view at Prada Rhong Zhai in Shanghai, with the support of Fondazione Prada.
Lubeznik Center for the Arts
Theaster Gates in Lost and Looking
Jan 30, 2021 - Jun 5, 2021
Lost and Looking, Theaster Gates’ recent group show, is on view through June 5, 2021 at the Lubeznik Center for the Arts in Michigan City, Indiana.
The New Museum
Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America
Feb 17 - Jun 6, 2021
From February 17 to June 6, 2021, the New Museum will present Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America, an exhibition originally conceived by Okwui Enwezor for the New Museum. Grief and Grievance will be an intergenerational exhibition, bringing together thirty-seven artists, including Theaster Gates and Rashid Johnson.
The Heard Museum
Leon Polk Smith: Hiding in Plain Sight
Feb 5 - May 31, 2021
Leon Polk Smith: Hiding in Plain Sight opens at the Heard Museum on February 5. The exhibition explores the importance of geography and culture on Smith's practice, starting in Oklahoma Territory where he was born and raised surrounded by Indigenous people and culture, and ending in New York City where he would later move and become a founding icon of mid-century modern art.
Detroit Institute of Arts
McArthur Binion and Rashid Johnson in Experience & Expression
Jan 30 - Oct 3, 2021
The Detroit Institute of Arts presents Experience & Expression, a group show curated from a selection of works acquired by the museum over the past decade. Works in this show, including those by McArthur Binion and Rashid Johnson, reflect each artist's personal experience of the world.
Utah Museum of Fine Arts
Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem
Jan 23 - Apr 10, 2021
Featuring one hundred works by nearly eighty artists, including gallery artists McArthur Binion and Rashid Johnson, Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem surveys nearly a century of creative achievements by artists of African descent.
Gray Viewing Room
Hockney in Normandy
Jan 14 - Mar 19, 2021
Gray is pleased to present Hockney in Normandy, an online exhibition open January 13th to March 19th, 2021.
Artforum
Review: McArthur Binion at Gray Warehouse, Chicago
Jan 4, 2021
David J. Getsy reviews McArthur Binion’s solo exhibition at Gray, DNA:Work and the Under:Conscious Drawings, for Artforum's January/February 2021 print edition. In his review, Getsy offers special insight into Binion’s lesser-known Under:Conscious Drawings.
ARTnews
Art Basel’s Virtual Miami Beach Fair Gets Off to Bullish Start with Flurry of Sales
December 2, 2020
Maximilíano Durón and Angelica Villa recap the start of this year's Art Basel OVR: Miami Beach, including a quote by gallery Director Raven Falquez Munsell.
The Chicago Tribune
Chicago Visual Arts in 2020: Time to Make New Work and Right Past Wrongs
December 2, 2020
Tribune journalist Steve Johnson writes the impact of this year's pandemic on artist's practices as well as on the broader art world, including excerpts from his interview with Paul Gray.
Theaster Gates: Every Square Needs a Circle
2020 STA 100 Judge's Choice Winner
November 20, 2020
Theaster Gates: Every Square Needs a Circle won the Society of Typographic Arts' Judge's Choice Award.
University of Michigan Museum of Art
Monumental Outdoor Sculpture by Jaume Plensa to Change the Face of U-M Museum of Art
November 9, 2020
Jaume Plensa’s monumental sculptural portrait, titled Behind the Walls, is now permanently on view at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. The 25-foot tall sculpture debuted in May 2019 at the inaugural Frieze Sculpture festival in Manhattan, where it was on view in Rockefeller Center before moving to the Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico City in October 2019.
Museo Novecento, Florence
DUEL. McArthur Binion | Modern Ancient Brown
October 10, 2020
The Museo Novecento in Florence, Italy presents a solo exhibit of McArthur Binion's work, Modern Ancient Brown. Modern Ancient Brown, curated by Lorenzo Bruni and organized in collaboration with Massimo De Carlo gallery, is open to from October 24, 2020 until February 11, 2021.
Frieze Masters 2020
Webinar with Shelley Rice on Rashid Johnson: Seeing in the Dark
October 9, 2020
Art historian Shelley Rice speaks on Rashid Johnson’s pivotal Seeing in the Dark photography series in a Zoom webinar. Rice discusses Johnson’s use of antiquated nineteenth-century photographic processes to create dignified portraits of Chicago’s homeless, as well as the series’ historical and conceptual context.
Artist Interview: Jaume Plensa, Dreaming, 2020
Oxford Properties Group
October 5, 2020
Gray is pleased to announce the unveiling of Jaume Plensa's latest public work, Dreaming. Located at the Richmond-Adelaide Centre in Toronto’s Financial District and organized by Oxford Properties Group, the monumental sculpture transforms the downtown plaza and stretches over three stories high.
The Morgan Library and Museum
David Hockney: Drawing from Life
October 2, 2020
The Morgan Library and Museum presents David Hockney: Drawing from Life, a solo exhibition of David Hockney's portraits on paper. Featuring about 100 drawings, the exhibition is one of few to investigate the evolution of his drawing practice over the years.
In Dialogue
Jim Lutes and Hamza Walker
September 25, 2020
On the occasion of EXPO Chicago's EXHIBITION Weekend, Hamza Walker and Jim Lutes join for a virtual gallery tour and intimate discussion about Solo, No Solo, Lutes's recent exhibition at Gray. On view at Gray's Michigan Avenue gallery, the artist's latest suite of paintings will be examined and discussed.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Gray New York Relocates to New Space
September 22, 2020
Gray is pleased to announce the relocation of its New York gallery to the second floor of 1018 Madison Avenue. Established in 1996, Gray’s Upper East Side outpost has been located on 1018 Madison Avenue’s fourth floor for the past 23 years. Gray will now occupy the building’s second floor, which has been newly redesigned by the architecture firm &fold.
Recycling Warehouses: 25 Adaptive Reuse Projects
Arch Daily
July 25, 2020
Victor Delaqua considers the role of warehouses in the contemporary revitalization of urban planning. He goes on to summarize twenty five examples of old or abandoned warehouses being readapted to accommodate new purposes and businesses. Included in his overview is Gray Warehouse, reimagined as Gray's exhibition space from an old warehouse space in West Town, Chicago by Wheeler Kearns Architects in 2017.
The Parrish Art Museum
Jim Dine: The Wheatfield (Agincourt) and The Hooligan
Aug 20, 2020 - Aug 31, 2020
Field of Dreams marks the first appearance of two bronze sculptures by Jim Dine: The Hooligan, 2019, and The Wheatfield (Agincourt), 1989-2019. Standing at nearly nine feet tall in Parrish’s Entry Meadow, The Hooligan draws inspiration from the iconic Venus de Milo. Exhibited in the Great Meadow is Jim Dine’s The Wheatfield (Agincourt). First conceived in 1989 and reworked in 2019, this monumental assemblage expresses a life’s work of collected signs and symbols.
The Parrish Art Museum
Theaster Gates: Monument in Waiting
Aug 20, 2020 - Aug 31, 2020
Exhibited for the first time in Parrish Art Museum’s inaugural sculpture exhibition, Field of Dreams, Theaster Gates debuts his latest outdoor work, Monument in Waiting. Gates’s timely installation responds to the current political moment and public reckoning of historical figures and monuments.
The Parrish Art Museum
Jaume Plensa: The Oak Series
Aug 20, 2020 - Aug 31, 2020
The Parrish Art Museum debuts four bronze portraits by Jaume Plensa: Carlota (oak), Julia (oak), Laura Asia (oak), and Wilsis (oak). Assembled together in the Great Meadow, the four sculptures welcomed visitors to walk among them. By depicting his subjects with closed eyes, Plensa seeks to evoke a sense of silence and stillness—a concept central to the artist’s practice
The Parrish Art Museum
Field of Dreams
August 18, 2020
Gray is pleased to announce that works in sculpture and installation by Theaster Gates, Jaume Plensa and Jim Dine will debut in Field of Dreams, the Parrish Art Museum’s inaugural sculpture exhibition. The extensive outdoor installation, which responds to the landscape and architecture of the museum’s 14-acre grounds in Water Mill, New York, opens August 20, 2020, featuring ten artists of international renown.
Jim Dine interview with Wanted in Rome
Wanted in Rome
May 19, 2020
Wanted in Rome interviews Jim Dine about his work as the focus of a major exhibition at Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome.
Jim Dine as Poet
Live Poetry Reading by Jim Dine
June 20, 2020
Please join us as Jim Dine performs a live poetry reading on Gray's Instagram Live this Saturday, June 20th at 11 AM CST.
Art Basel Online Viewing Room
June 17, 2020
Gray is pleased to participate in Art Basel's Online Viewing Room, open for VIP viewing June 17th and June 18th and open for public viewing from June 19th to June 26th, 2020.
Jaume Plensa: Invisibles
Gray Viewing Room
June 17, 2020
Gray is proud to present Jaume Plensa: Invisibles in a new online viewing room, open from June 17th to July 18th, 2020.
Theaster Gates: New Work
Gray Viewing Room
June 17, 2020
Gray is proud to present Theaster Gates: New Work in an online viewing room, open from June 17th to July 18th, 2020.
Review: Can You Hear Me?
Cineuropa
May 21, 2020
Cineuropa reviews Jaume Plensa's documentary Can You Hear Me? directed by Pedro Ballesteros, which explores how Plensa's deeply rooted principles and thoughts about abstract subjects inform his practice.
24 Chicago Celebrities Offer Advice, Congrats to 2020 High School Graduates
Chicago Tribune
May 22, 2020
To celebrate the Chicagoland high school seniors graduating during the pandemic this year, the Chicago Tribune asked 24 notable public figures — actors, musicians, comedians, directors and more — to reflect on their own high school careers and offer advice to graduates. Included in the roundup are thoughts from gallery artists Jaume Plensa and Rashid Johnson.
5 Artists on Our Radar This June
Artsy
June 1, 2020
Artsy's “Artists on Our Radar” is a monthly series produced collaboratively by Artsy’s editorial and curatorial teams. Each month, they highlight five artists who have their attention, determined by which artists made an impact the past month, whether through online auctions, art fairs, viewing rooms, or sale inquiries through Artsy. This month, Evelyn Statsinger is included.
Art & Activism: Human Rights Watch and Frieze present Ai Weiwei and Shirin Neshat
Frieze
May 6, 2020
Frieze partners with one of the world's most impactful organizations to raise essential funds. As part of Frieze Viewing Room’s Frieze New York 2020 Edition, a number of works are generously being sold by participating galleries to support the essential work of Human Rights Watch.
Whisky drinking, dog walking and gardening: art dealers' plans for the alternative Frieze New York
The Art Newspaper
May 6, 2020
With the "real-life" fair cancelled due to coronavirus, exhibitors give their thoughts on the event's first online viewing room experience to the Art Market Editor, Anna Brady.
Theaster Gates: Amalgam
Tate Liverpool
December 13, 2019 - May 3, 2020
The exhibition is organised by Tate Liverpool in collaboration with Palais de Tokyo, Paris. A first version of the exhibition was shown at Palais de Tokyo from 20 February – 12 May 2019 under the name Amalgam.
Bethany Collins: Chorus
Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis
September 6, 2019 - December 29, 2019
Bethany Collins solo exhibition Chorus is on view at the Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis through December 29, 2019. The works on view pull at the strings of letters and texts, unraveling a more complex discourse on race and language lying beneath the surface of newspapers, dictionaries, and other canonical documents.
David Hockney’s Yosemite and Masters of California Basketry
Heard Museum
October 28, 2019 - April 5, 2020
David Hockney’s Yosemite and Masters of California Basketry at the Heard Museum highlights the impact that Yosemite has had over time and space on artistic production.
Jaume Plensa: Behind the Walls on view at MUNAL
Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City
October 23, 2019 - February 23, 2020
Jaume Plensa's monumental sculpture Behind the Walls is now on view at the Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico City. The work is on view through February 23, 2020.
Theaster Gates: Black Chapel
Haus Der Kunst, Munich
October 25, 2019 - July 19, 2020
Theaster Gates’s Black Chapel opens at Haus Der Kunst on October 25, 2019. Engaging with the three structural pavilions within the space, the installation stretches throughout the building featuring a multitude of public sculptures, documents, ready-mades and advertising media.
McArthur Binion White:Work
Massimo de Carlo
October 1, 2019 - November 16, 2019
McArthur Binion White:Work on view at Massimo De Carlo, London presents the artist's newest series of paintings. Buidling upon his DNA (2017) series, the works on view depart from the hues prominent in earlier works and instead embrace the subtle overlay of white. The whitewashed works highlight his foundational grid structure, gently enveloping the the form.
Irregular Motion: A Review of Leon Polk Smith at Gray Warehouse
Newcity
September 25, 2019
Caira Moreira-Brown reviews Leon Polk Smith:Endless Space for Newcity. The exhibition is on view at Gray Warehouse through November 23, 2019.
Gallery Talk: David J. Getsy, Jonathan David Katz, and William Smith
Gray Warehouse, Chicago
Saturday, September 21, 2019, 12 PM
Richard Gray Gallery is pleased to host distinguished scholars and curators David J. Getsy and Jonathan David Katz, in conversation with Art in America Editor-in-Chief William Smith. The panel discussion takes place on the occasion of Endless Space, an exhibition surveying the paintings of Leon Polk Smith from the 1950s to 1970s.
EXPO Chicago: Art After Hours + Musical Performance by Majel Connery
Gray Warehouse, Chicago
September 20, 2019, 8-9 PM
Richard Gray Gallery is pleased to participate in EXPO Chicago's Art After Hours program with a performance by multi-hyphenate musician and vocalist Majel Connery on Friday, September 20, 2019 at Gray Warehouse.
Leon Polk Smith: Endless Space
September 13 - November 23, 2019
Richard Gray Gallery is pleased to announce Endless Space, an exhibition examining the paintings and drawings of Leon Polk Smith (1906 - 1996). The exhibition opens at Gray Warehouse on Friday, September 13, 2019 with a public reception from 6-8 PM.
Theaster Gates: Assembly Hall
Walker Arts Center
September 5, 2019 - January 12, 2020
Assembly Hall brings a number of the artist’s collections into a museum context for the first time. The Walker’s galleries are transformed into a total work of art, transposing his collections and studio environment into four immersive rooms, each infused with his own poetic interventions.
Gallery Talk: Theaster Gates, Michelle Grabner, and Zachary Cahill
Wednesday, June 19, 2019, 6:00 PM, at Gray Warehouse
Richard Gray Gallery is pleased to host Theaster Gates, Michelle Grabner, and Zachary Cahill for a panel discussion on the occasion of Theaster Gates: Every Square Needs a Circle at Gray Warehouse. Grabner and Cahill will join Gates to discuss his exhibition in depth as it relates to his larger practice.
Theaster Gates
Artforum
Summer 2019
Michelle Grabner reviews Theaster Gates: Every Square Needs a Circle for Artforum.
Frieze New York
Booth A02
May 2 - 5, 2019
Richard Gray Gallery is pleased to announce participation in Frieze New York 2019. The gallery will present works from its program of contemporary artists such as Bethany Collins, Jim Dine, Theaster Gates, Rashid Johnson, Alex Katz, Jim Lutes, and Jaume Plensa. Additionally, Richard Gray Gallery is pleased to be exhibiting at Frieze Sculpture with the debut of Jaume Plensa's Behind the Walls, a new sculpture to be installed at the Rockefeller Center in New York.
Ewan Gibbs
New York / Chicago
April 25 - June 29, 2019
New York / Chicago presents a recent body of work comprising parallel but distinct series of drawings that are based on the artist's personal encounters in the two cities. Each drawing contains thousands of miniscule pen and pencil marks and pinpricks--a system developed by Gibbs over twenty-five years ago after seeing knitting patterns containing various graphic symbols within a large, organized grid.
Jaume Plensa: Behind the Walls
Frieze Sculpture, Frieze New York
April - June 2019
Richard Gray Gallery and Galerie Lelong & Co. are thrilled to announce the international debut of Jaume Plensa’s Behind the Walls, a monumental new sculpture to be installed at the historic Rockefeller Center on 5th Avenue in New York. Standing over 24 feet tall, Behind the Walls will be unveiled in April 2019 as part of Frieze New York’s inaugural sculpture program, Frieze Sculpture.
Art Basel Hong Kong 2019
Booth 3E08
March 29 - 31, 2019
Richard Gray Gallery is pleased to announce participation in Art Basel Hong Kong 2019. The gallery will present important works from its program of eminent contemporary artists such as Jim Dine, Theaster Gates, David Hockney, Alex Katz, Jaume Plensa and Leon Polk Smith. Also part of the gallery's booth presentation will be a selection of modern masterworks by Alexander Calder, Willem de Kooning, Alberto Giacometti, René Magritte and Pablo Picasso.
Bethany Collins: A Pattern or Practice
Gallery Universities of Illinois State University
February 15 - March 31, 2019
A Pattern or Practice presents thirty Bethany Collins pieces created from 2012 to 2019. In her drawings, prints, paintings, sculptures, and artist’s books, Collins incorporates fractured or illegible phrases, either punishingly erased or arduously rendered. As Holland Cotter recently wrote in The New York Times , “language itself, viewed as intrinsically racialized, is Bethany Collins’ primary material.”
Theaster Gates Amalgam at Palais de Tokyo
February 20 - May 5, 2019
Theaster Gates has initiated an entirely new project that explores social histories of migration and interracial relations using a specific episode in American history as his point of departure to address larger questions of black subjugation. The starting point of the exhibition, entitled “Amalgam,” is the story of Malaga Island in the state of Maine, USA: In 1912, the state governor expelled from Malaga the poorest population, an interracial, mixed community of about 45 people, considered “indolent” by many of the local white inhabitants.
Bethany Collins
Solidary & Solitary Artist Commissions
January 29–May 19, 2019
The Smart Museum commissioned three local artists to create new work as part of the Chicago presentation of Solidary & Solitary: The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection. Bethany Collins, Samuel Levi Jones, and Amanda Williams—who have all participated in Pamela Joyner and Alfred Giuffrida’s artist-in-residence program—enrich and expand the exhibition’s narrative.
Bethany Collins: The Litany at Locust Projects
November 17, 2018 - January 26, 2019
Locust Projects presents The Litany, a new site-specific installation by the Chicago-based artist Bethany Collins. In the center of Locust Projects’ Main Gallery is My destiny is in your hands, a white-on-white flocked wallpaper installation designed by the artist that exists within a “chapel” custom-built for the exhibition. The floral designs on the wallpaper represent official state flowers from the historical South where the artist’s family are from, as well as the state flowers where the artist’s family moved to during the Great Migration of millions of African Americans from the South to other parts of the United States.
The Museum Brandhorst in Munich, Germany presents a major exhbition of works by celebrated American painter Alex Katz. A towering figure in contemporary painting best known for his iconic portraits of beautiful, stylish women, masterfully rendered in bold, vibrant colors, Katz has influenced and inspired generations of artists around the world. Featuring more than eighty works--including some of the artist's most important paintings--the exhibition will offer visitors a retrospective overview of this seminal artist's oeuvre from the 1950s to today.
Richard Gray Gallery is pleased to announce participation in Art Basel Miami Beach 2018. The gallery will be showing major works from the gallery’s program of artists such as Jim Dine, Theaster Gates, David Hockney, Alex Katz, Jaume Plensa and Leon Polk Smith. The gallery is also pleased to announce its participation in the Art Kabinett sector of Art Basel, featuring ”A Tribute to Richard Gray," an exhibition of postwar masterworks on paper from the private collection of the gallery’s founder who passed away earlier this year.
The MACBA exhibition will feature works from the 1980s to the present, in a journey showing the dialogue that takes place between works that represent the human figure and those that are abstract. This tension is the thread that runs through the whole of his work, a corpus that highlights the strength of binomials such as weightlessness/compactness, light/dark, silence/sound, spirit/matter and life/death.
Jaume Plensa: Invisibles at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
November 16, 2018 - March 3, 2019
Opening at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid November 16th is Jaume Plensa: Invisibles. This project is in conjunction with a retrospective at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Barcelona (MACBA) and features works stretching from the 1980s to the present day in a survey which reflects the dialogue, repeated across Plensa’s career, between the representation of the human figure and abstraction.
The Lincoln Trio at Richard Gray Gallery
Saturday, October 20, 2018
Richard Gray Gallery is pleased to present a live musical performance by The Lincoln Trio, a Chicago-based ensemble made up of Desirée Ruhstrat, violin, David Cunliffe, cello, and Marta Aznavoorian, piano. The Trio will perform Las Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas (The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires) by Argentinian composer Astor Piazzolla. The performance takes place at the gallery in a direct correlation to David Hockney’s exhibition Time and More, Space and More… which features the iconic multi-part video installation The Four Seasons, Woldgate Woods, 2010-2011.
In his exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel, which is spread out across two of the museum’s venues, Gates explores the cult of the Black Madonna, examining both its significance in the history of religion and its aesthetic and metaphorical tenor.
Jim Dine
From the Collection of the Pompidou Center
September 14, 2018 - November 11, 2018
The Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow presents an exhibition by the American artist Jim Dine. Works included in the exhibition were donated by Jim Dine to the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, where his retrospective was held to great acclaim in February — April 2018.
Richard Gray Gallery is saddened to announce the passing of noted Midwestern landscape artist Harold Gregor. He was 89. Born and raised in Detroit, Gregor became known for his landscapes after a doctoral program at Ohio State University. Gregor was a recipient of a lifetime achievement medal from the National Watercolor Society, and had a lengthy teaching career at several schools including Illinois State University, where he became a Distinguished Professor and retired in 1995.
JIM DINE: NEW PAINTING AND SCULPTURE
September 14, 2018 - October 27, 2018
Jim Dine shows new works at Galerie Thomas Modern. The exhibition debuted in participation with Munich's Open Art. The show includes 15 large-format paintings and three sculptures, in which Dine combines his characteristic motifs of everyday objects to create collaged reliefs.
Rashid Johnson is this year's recipient of the Aspen Award for Art. In 2019, the artist will stage a solo exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum.
Theaster Gates
A Johnson Publishing Story
June 28, 2018 – September 30, 2018
As part of Art Design Chicago, Rebuild Foundation presents A Johnson Publishing Story, organized by artist Theaster Gates and on view at the Stony Island Arts Bank. The exhibition will spotlight materials from the Johnson Publishing Archive, which features more than 15,000 items donated to Rebuild Foundation by JPC. The archive also includes original furnishings and interior design elements custom-designed for JPC’s downtown Chicago offices by Arthur Elrod.
Sculpture Milwaukee, the outdoor sculpture exhibition on Wisconsin Avenue in downtown Milwaukee, features Abakanowicz's The Group of Five alongside works by over 20 additional artists. Other highlighted works by Liz Glynn, Mel Kendrick, Shana McCaw and Brent Budsberg, Hank Willis Thomas, Bernar Venet and Erwin Wurm are included.
Richard Gray, art dealer and stalwart cultural benefactor, dies at 89.
In Talking Continents, a floating archipelago of 19 cloud-like shapes, by Jaume Plensa will be exhibited at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art.
The Arthur Ross Gallery is proud to announce that Jaume
Plensa, Spanish artist and sculptor, will present the second
annual Susan T. Marx Distinguished Lecture on April 18, 2018.
Gallery Talk with John Yau and Ivy Wilson
Saturday, April 14, 2018
On the occasion of Grass and Trees, a solo presentation of recent landscape paintings by Alex Katz, poet and critic John Yau will join art historian and literary critic Ivy Wilson in conversation to discuss Katz's new body of work. The gallery talk will take place at Gray Warehouse on Saturday, April 14 at 12 PM.
Richard Gray Gallery is pleased to announce Grass and Trees, a solo presentation of recent landscape paintings by Alex Katz. The exhibition opens with a reception for the artist on Thursday, April 12 from 6 - 8 PM at Gray Warehouse, and is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with an essay by poet and critic John Yau. Grass and Trees is the artist’s sixth exhibition with Richard Gray Gallery.
RGG participates in Art Basel Hong Kong at the Convention & Exhibition Centre, booth 3E08. Presenting work by: Alexander Calder, Jim Dine, David Hockney, Alex Katz, and Jaume Plensa.
Jim Dine
Jim Dine: Paris Reconnaissance at Centre Pompidou
February 14, 2018
On the occasion of Jim Dine's significant donation to the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, Centre Pompidou dedicates a unique exhibition to his work. The show features 28 paintings and sculptures produced by the artist between 1961 and 2016, and runs from February 14 through April 23, 2018.
Richard Gray Gallery
Art Basel Miami Beach 2017
December 7 - 10, 2017
RGG participates in Art Basel at the Miami Beach Convention Center, Booth A1. Presenting work by: Constantin Brancusi, Willem de Kooning, Mark di Suvero, Jim Dine, Theaster Gates, Alberto Giacometti, David Hockney, Jasper Johns, Rashid Johnson, Alex Katz, Henri Matisse, Isamu Noguchi, Jaume Plensa, Leon Polk Smith, David Smith, Rudolf Stingel, Piotr Uklanski and others.
The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art presents Jaume Plensa: Talking Continents. The exhibition features a collection of suspended steel forms and is on view in the museum's State Street Gallery through April 15th.
David Hockney opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The exhibition offers a grand overview of the artist's achievements across all media, including painting, drawing, photography, and video. Organized collaboratively by Tate Britain, London; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Ginny Van Alyea of Chicago Gallery News interviews artist Jaume Plensa about his latest exhibition Secret Garden. The solo-exhbition features new works in stainless steel, bronze and wood, and is on view at Gray Warehouse until November 11, 2017.
At the Boca Raton Museum of Art, Alex Katz: Small Paintings presents a fascinating and less-explored side of the artist’s practice by exhibiting Katz’s small paintings alongside his iconic large and distinct canvases. The exhibition is on view from November 7, 2017 until April 8, 2018.
Jim Dine
House of Words: The Muse and Seven Black Paintings
October 26, 2017 - February 3, 2018
Jim Dine's House of Words: The Muse and Seven Black Paintings opens Thursday, October 26 at the Accademia di San Luca in Rome. The exhibition will occupy the Accademia's ground floor gallery and will feature the entire black paintings cycle, conceived in 2015 in his Paris studio. Through February 3, 2018.
Jim Dine
Jardin des Tuileries, FIAC Paris
October 19 - 22, 2017
Jim Dine presents Thru the Stardust, The Heat on the Lawn (Claude) at Jardin des Tuileries during FIAC Paris. In 2016, he was invited by the Manufacture of Sèvres + Cité de la Céramique to develop a series of ten clay vessels. Baked and glazed with the expertise and traditional techniques of the Sèvres team, these works integrate Dine's handwritten poems as well as sculpted lids made of tools cast in bronze.
Richard Gray Gallery is pleased to present a live musical performance at Gray Warehouse, hosted by conductor Robert Nordling and performed by collaborating violist Michael Hall and mezzo-soprano Megan Ihnen. The performance will take place amidst the current exhibition Jaume Plensa: Secret Garden.
Richard Gray Gallery is pleased to announce two exhibitions of work by Jaume Plensa. Located at Gray Warehouse, Secret Garden presents recent sculptures in wood, stainless steel, and bronze, in conjunction with a suite of drawings. The exhibition continues at Richard Gray Gallery’s Hancock space with a portrait series carved in alabaster. A second exhibition of historical works titled One Thought Fills Immensity is also on view at the Hancock, featuring works from 1989 to 2002. Through November 11.
Rashid Johnson's solo exhibition Hail We Now Sing Joy, which features new large-scale paintings and sculptures by the Chicago-born artist, opens at the Milwaukee Art Museum June 23 and runs through September 17.
Jim Dine
Jim Dine in Sculpture Milwauke
June 1 - October 22, 2017
Jim Dine's The Heart Called After the Flood is a part of the exhibition Sculpture Milwaukee, curated by Russell Bowman in downtown Milwaukee. Other artists in the exhibition include Chakaia Booker, Santiago Calatrava, Tony Cragg, Michelle Grabner, Sol LeWitt, and Jessica Stockholder. Through October 22, 2017.
Gray Matters is a multifaceted survey of 37 contemporary artists who have explored the practice of grisaille, the French term for working in shades of gray. These artists challenge an all-too-simplistic notion of colorless "neutrality" as they reveal the varegated spectrum of black, white, gray, and everything in between. Artists include Bethany Collins, Roni Horn, Mickalene Thomas, Marlene Dumas, Julie Mehretu, Vija Celmins, and more.
Jim Dine
Primary Objects: Jim Dine in the 1960s, Richard Gray Gallery New York
May 2 - June 10, 2017
Primary Objects: Jim Dine in the 1960s examines Dine's practice from 1960 through 1965, focusing on a formative time in the artist's early career. The works in the exhibition combine painting and drawing with everyday objects like crowbars, hammers, tuxedos, lamps, and axes. The show is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an interview between Dine and Hamza Walker, Executive Director of LAXART.
Brand-New & Terrific surveys the pathbreaking works of Alex Katz in the 1950s through portraits, landscapes and still lifes that display the artist's refreshingly innovative approaches to painting.
Looking at the Present surveys recent directions in Jim DIne's paintings, featuring largescale and multi-panel works that are characterized by thick impasto paints, vivid colors, and fragmented human forms. The exhibition inaugurates Gray Warehouse, Richard Gray Gallery's second space in Chicago. The show is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an interview between Dine and Michael Rooks, Wieland Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, the High Museum of Atlanta.
Magdalena Abakanowicz
In Memorium, 1930 - 2017
April 21, 2017
Richard Gray Gallery is deeply saddened to announce the passing of Magdalena Abakanowicz. The renowned Polish artist, whose fiber, stone, wood and metal sculptures reflect the extremes of the human experience in the 20th century, died Friday April 21, 2017. She was 86 years old.
Featuring works from 1861 - 1967 relating to lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer (LGBTQ) identities, the show marks the 50th anniversary of the partial decriminalisation of male homosexuality in England. Queer British Art explores how artists expressed themselves in a time when established assumptions about gender and sexuality were being questioned and transformed. Features work from John Singer Sargent, Dora Carrington, Duncan Grant, David Hockney, and more.
In the central hall of the Museum, two large faces in steel mesh face each other, massive and light, present and transparent. Realized directly on a wall on a large scale, a head drawn and fuzzy, with melted contours and blurred vision, seems to be diluted in space. Finally, five portraits of girls in cast iron more than 4 meters high rub shoulders without looking at each other. These are emblematic of the recent work of Jaume Plensa.
This exhibition tracks printmaking in America across six decades of turbulent history. Starting with the explosion of pop art in the 1960s, the exhibition includes works by Alex Katz, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, Kara Walker, Julie Mehretu, and more.
This exhibition surveys Alex Katz's black and white works, including portraits of family and friends, renderings of Maine's countryside, and emphermeral still lifes.
Hail We Now Sing Joy includes a new body of work by Rashid Johnson. In the Falling Men series, Johnson uses his signature materials of white ceramic tile, red oak flooring, mirror fragments, and black soap and wax to depict inverted figures falling through the air that can be read as flying heroes or chalk outlines of deceased bodies from crime scenes.
This exhibition gathers together an extensive selection of David Hockney's most famous works celebrating his achievements in painting, drawing, print, photography and video across six decades. The exhibition will travel to the Centre Pompidou, Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
This group exhibition explores how artists use books and language as a form of resistance, putting pressure on the way knowledge is written and shared. Featuring Sadie Barnette, Bethany Collins, Meleko Mokgosi, Xaviera Simmons, Glenn Ligon, Gary Simmons, Kara Walker, and more.
Inventing Downtown presents work from fourteen transformative artist-run galleries, highlighting artists' efforts to create new exhibition venues for innovative works of art, ranging from abstract and figurative painting, assemblage, sculpture, and works on paper to groundbreaking installations and performances.
Richard Gray Gallery
Announcing 2044 West Carroll Avenue
December 14, 2016
Richard Gray Gallery is thrilled to announce its expansion with a 5,000 square-foot converted warehouse space at 2044 West Carroll Avenue. Located in the West Town neighborhood northwest of downtown Chicago, the new building will be designed by Wheeler Kearns Architects. New paintings by Jim Dine will inaugurate the space with an opening on April 28, 2017.
Booth C3. Exhibiting work by, Tauba Auerbach Jim Dine, Milton Avery, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Bethany Collins, Willem de Kooning, Jim Dine, Jean Dubuffet, Jeff Elrod, Sam Francis, Theaster Gates, Ewan Gibbs, Mark Grotjahn, Grace Hartigan, Barbara Hepworth, David Hockney, Hans Hofmann, Alex Katz, Franz Kline, Roy Lichtenstein, Man Ray, Brice Marden, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Joan Mitchell, Henry Moore, Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso, Jack Pierson, Jaume Plensa, Jackson Pollock, Milton Resnick, Richard Serra, David Smith, John Stezaker, Wayne Thiebaud, Mark Tobey, Jack Tworkov, and Andy Warhol.
Alex Katz: Black and White at the American University Museum explores the artist's lifelong interest in stripping color out of his prints, and his attempt to replace sensual pleasure with intellectual design. Accompanied by exhibition catalogue.
Strange Oscillations and Vibrations of Sympathy features works by contemporary female artists that acknowledge or reference women writers. Other artists in the exhibition in Stephanie Brooks, Anne Collier, Moyra Davey, Abigail DeVille, Diana Frid, Kay Rosen, Xaviera Simons, and Carrie Mae Weems.
Bethany Collins
S/Election, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery
October 20, 2016 - January 8, 2017
S/Election at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery addresses issues around citizenship within the context of the 45th presidential election. Other artists in the group exhibition include Aytaam Al Turab, Charles Gaines, Ramiro Gomez, Olga Koumoudouros, Jennifer Moon and Jane Szabo.
A solo exhibition of Bethany Collins's recent work, including A Pattern or Practice, her installation of blind embossed paper depicting the US Justice Department's report on the Ferguson Police Department. The exhibition occurs in conjunction with the group exhibition Seeing | Saying: Images and Words at Van Every/Smith Galleries.
The National Gallery of Victoria presents a major solo exhibition of the work of David Hockney, including more than 700 works from the past decade and drawing from the artist's extensive output of paintings, digital drawings, photography, and video.
John Stezaker's collage work is featured in the group exhibition Flesh at the York Art Gallery, which examines the representation of the body from in the centuries since Peter Paul Rubens.
This group exhibition examines intersections of fashion and art by looking at the unique ways that black women through the African Diaspora construct their lives.
This exhibition uses one hundred objects from the British Museum to explore the history of humanity. David Hockney's etching In the Dull Village appears as a representation of twentieth century social change.
Die Innere Sicht, which surveys Jaume Plensa's work of the past two decades, opens at the Max Ernst Museum, Brühl, Germany, on September 4, 2016 and runs through January 15, 2017.
I draw, I do is the first significant presentation of Hockney's work in Ireland. The exhibition focuses on the artist's formative years in the 1950s.
This exhibition surveys the distinctive Midwestern landscape paintings and prints of Harold Gregor, including work from across the artist's career. Guest curated by David M Sokol.
David Hockney RA: 82 Portraits and 1 Still-life, on view at the Royal Academy of Arts, London from July 2 through October 2, 2016, presents a suite of portraits from the past two years conducted in the artist's Los Angeles studio.
Alex Katz: Small Paintings looks as small-scale oil paintings by the American master known predominately for his large-scale canvases. Exhibition dates are June 26 through August 17, 2016.
Jim Dine: I Never Look Away is a survey of 60 self-portraits from across Dine's artistic output. On view from June 24 through October 2, 2016.
The finalists' exhibition for the 2016 Prix Canson is on public view at the Drawing Center in New York City from June 22 through July 1, 2016. Recognized for their innovative uses of paper in their work, the finalists are ruby onyinyechi amanze, Bethany Collins, Njideka Akunyili Crosy, David Shrigley, and Lucy Skaer.
Phantom Bodies: The Human Aura in Art––organized by the Frist Center for the Visual Arts––explores the relationship between mind, body and spirit through a range of artistic production.
Jaume Plensa: Human Landscape, a survey of Jaume Plensa's work in outdoor sculpture, drawing, and etching, opens at the Toledo Museum of Art June 17 and runs through November 6, 2016. The exhibition was organized by the Cheekwood Botanical Garden and Museum of Art in Nashville, Tennessee.
Richard Gray Gallery
Art Basel 2016
June 13 - 19, 2016
Booth G5. Exhibiting work by Tauba Auerbach, Milton Avery, Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Marc Chagall, Jim Dine, Jean Dubuffet, Dan Flavin, Lucio Fontana, Sam Francis, Alberto Giacometti, Juan Gris, Mark Grotjahn, Alex Katz, Fernand Léger, Roy Lichtenstein, Glenn Ligon, Heinz Mack, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Isamu Noguchi, Pablo Picasso, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Jaume Plensa, Richard Prince, Gerhard Richter, Ed Ruscha, Mira Schendel, Thomas Schütte, Kazuo Shiraga, David Smith, Wayne Thiebaud, Cy Twombly, Günther Uecker, Andy Warhol, Christopher Wool.
John Stezaker is included in the group exhibition Nigel Greenwood Inc Ltd: Running a Picture Gallery at Chelsea Space, London. June 8 through July 15, 2016.
Alex Katz: Quick Light at the Serpentine Galleries examines the painter's recent output alongside works spanning his career. June 2 through September 11, 2016.
Jaume Plensa's Anna, a fourteen-meter tall polyester resin with marble dust sculpture, was unveiled at the Pilane Heritage Museum in Klövedal, Sweden.
John Stezaker has curated the exhibition Turning to See: From Van Dyck to Lucian Freud at the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery. Organized around Sir Anthony van Dyck's last self-portrait, the exhibition takes the notion of turning as its central metaphor. May 28 through September 4, 2016.
In an extended interview, Bethany Collins speaks with WABE's Gabbie Watts about the evolution of her practice and her current projects, including an exhibition at the Hudgens Center for the Arts. Listen on the WABE website.
Magdalena Abakanowicz: Mutations at Richard Gray Gallery Chicago explores sculptures in bronze and burlap spanning 1980 through 2014. The exhibition runs April 29 through July 1, 2016.
Bethany Collins is one of five finalists for the Prix Canson, an international drawing award. The finalists, who also include Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, David Shrigley, and Lucy Skaer, will exhibit together at the Drawing Center in New York City from June 22 through July 1, 2016. The winner will be announced before the exhibition opens.
Lines of Flight at Columbia University's Wallach Art Gallery features Bethany Collins alongside Glenn Ligon, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Emily Kloppenburg, and Wade Guyton, among others. Open through June 4.
Bethany Collins opened the inaugural Birmingham Museum of Art Lobby Project with a collection of work called The problem we all live with. Open through August 7, 2016.
Jaume Plensa at Palau de la Música Orfeó Catalá in Barcelona runs through May 16, 2016.
Poems To Work On: The Collected Poems of Jim Dine is reviewed in artcritical.
Richard Gray Gallery
Art Basel Hong Kong 2016
March 22 - 26, 2016
Hall 3, Booth E6. Presenting work by: Richard Artschwager, Louise Bourgeois, José de Rivera, Jim Dine, Jean Dubuffet, Sam Francis, Alberto Giacometti, Alex Katz, David Klamen, Fernand Léger, Henri Matisse, Isamu Noguchi, Pablo Picasso, Jaume Plensa, and Leon Polk Smith and John Stezaker.
A work on paper by Jim Dine is in the exhibition Marks of Genius: 100 Extraordinary Drawings from the Minneapolis Institute of Art at the North Carolina Museum of Art. On view from March 19 through June 19, 2016.
Rashid Johnson's installation in Moscow's Garage Museum is a maze-like environment with tropical plants, sculptural elements, moving imagery and sound.
Jim Dine will perform a selection of poetry at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago on March 9 at 7pm. Admission is free and a reception for the artist follows. More information is available at the Poetry Foundation website.
Jim Dine is among the artists represented in the Norton Simon Museum's Duchamp to Pop. The exhibition runs March 4 through August 29, 2016.
Jim Dine is featured in the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum exhibition Thom Browne Selects. Runs March 4 - October 23, 2016.
Richard Gray Gallery
ADAA's The Art Show 2016
March 1 - 6, 2016
Booth D6. Presenting work by Milton Avery, Victor Brauner, Alexander Calder, Marc Chagall, Manierre Dawson, Jean Dubuffet, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Hans Hofmann, Paul Kelpe, Fernand Léger, Knud Merrild, Isamu Noguchi, and Pablo Picasso.
Bethany Collins is featured in the Zuckerman Museum of Art exhibition Art AIDS America.
John Stezaker's collage Double Shadow LIV (2014) is featured in Harper's Magazine's March 2016 issue in the "Readings" section. See it with a Harper's subscription below.
Evelyn Statsinger
In Memoriam, 1927 - 2016
February 15, 2016
Richard Gray Gallery is deeply saddened to announce the passing of artist Evelyn Statsinger. Statsinger, who translated the rhythms of natural forms into fantastical and precise paintings, drawings and sculptures, died Saturday, February 13, 2016 in Chicago, Illinois. She was 88 years old.
River & Rowing Museum presents David Hockney: From the Beginning, a survey of 30 works from across Hockney's career and drawn from public collections throughout the UK.
Jaume Plensa was interviewed in designboom in a conversation that touches on his use of text, the origins of his large scale sculptures, and the collaborations that feed into his practice. Read more at designboom.com.
Evelyn Statsinger is represented in the Smart Museum of Art's exhibition Monster Roster: Existentialist Art in Postwar Chicago, which examines sixteen Chicago artists known loosely as the Monster Roster.
Work by John Stezaker appears in the Krannert Art Museum exhibition Collage: Moving Beyond Paper at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The exhibition also includes work by Nancy Grossman, Robert Motherwell, David Salle, and Frank Stella among others.
Jaume Plensa's Human Landscape is the largest exhibition Plensa's outdoor sculptures in the United States to date. It was organized and debuted at the Cheekwood Botanical Gardens and Museum of Art and the Frist Museum in Nashville in the summer of 2015, and will be on exhibition at the Tampa Museum of Art through May 24, 2016.
The exhibition Evelyn Statsinger: A Gathering has been reviewed in Art in America. Critic Kyle MacMillan describes Statsinger as "an unconventional talent," noting that the exhibition is "a big step" towards the recognition the art deserves. Read the full review at Art in America.
Bethany Collins will appear in conversation with Emeritus U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey at the Birmingham Museum of Art on Saturday, January 9 at 11am. The conversation, which is organized as a partnership between the museum and the Georgia-based publication ART PAPERS, will be moderated by Ivy Wilson, Associate Professor of English and Director of American Studies at Northwestern University. Video of the conversation is available online: here.
Writing in Hyperallergic, critic John Yau dubbed Alex Katz "The Prince of New York City," praising the exhibition Alex Katz at the Met and noting that "the selection highlights the artist's innovative examination of the relationship between the figure and the surrounding space."
Bethany Collins has been profiled in the December 2015 issue of Modern Painters in an article titled "Bethany Collins: An Artist Who Performs Historical Erasures" by Courtney Willis Blair.
John Stezaker's exhibition The Truth of Masks at Richard Gray Gallery was noted in Newcity's "Top 5 Commercial Gallery Shows." Read more at Newcity.
Jim Dine presents his poetry with Dorothea Lasky at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in New York City on December 16 at 8pm. More information is available at the Poetry Project.
Alex Katz has been named one of the Top 10 Living Artists of 2015 by Artsy Editorial, which arrived at the distinction through an array of online data sources. Katz was joined on the list by Theaster Gates, Yayoi Kusama, and Cindy Sherman, among others.
Jaume Plensa has been named winner of a 2015 Global Fine Art Award in the "Best Public or Outdoor Installation" category for his Venice Biennale exhibition Together. His fellow finalists included Anish Kapoor's exhibition at the Palace of Versailles and Chicharu Shiota's Japanese Pavilion, also for the Biennale.
Richard Gray Gallery
Art Basel Miami Beach 2015
December 3-6, 2015
Presenting work by Doug Aitken, Louise Bourgeois, Marc Chagall, Bethany Collins, Willem de Kooning, Jim Dine, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Sam Francis, Alberto Giacometti, Mark Grotjahn, Eva Hesse, Alex Katz, Yayoi Kusama, Glenn Ligon, Jim Lutes, Brice Marden, John McLaughlin, Pablo Picasso, Jaume Plensa, Leon Polk Smith, Sigmar Polke, Richard Pousette-Dart, Richard Prince, James Rosenquist, John Stezaker, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol and Christopher Wool.
An extended conversation between John Steazaker and Stephanie Cristello has been published in The Seen on occasion of Stezaker's exhibition The Truth of Masks at Richard Gray Gallery.
Paintings by Alex Katz are featured in the de la Cruz Collection exhibition You've Got to Know the Rules to Break Them. Other artists in the exhibition include Tauba Auerbach, Mark Bradford, Joe Bradley, Peter Doig, Isa Genzken, Mark Grotjahn and many more. Through November 12, 2016.
Jaume Plensa, Matrix and Multiple opens today at the Museo Casa de la Moneda in Madrid, featuring an overview of recent prints and sculptures by the Barcelona-based artist.
Surrealism: The Conjured Life takes a Chicago lens to international Surrealism, bringing together over 100 works, both historical and contemporary.
John Stezaker is profiled in Newcity Chicago on occasion of his Richard Gray Gallery exhibition The Truth of Masks. The artist speaks with writer Maria Girgenti about his working process and the recent history of his career.
Bethany Collins is featured in the November/December issue of Art Papers in a piece titled In Version After Version, a pairing of Collins's work A Pattern or Practice (2015) with the poetry of Natasha Trethewey, former US Poet Laureate.
Walkers: Hollywood Afterlives in Art and Artifact is a wide-angle exhibition that looks at ways artists have engaged with the twentieth century's most iconic films in photography, drawing, sculpture, print and video. Including Francis Alÿs, Gregory Crewdson, Jean-Luc Godard, Mary Ellen Mark, Yasumasa Morimura, Richard Price, John Stezaker and Hiroshi Sugimoto, among many others. Runs November 7, 2015 through April 10, 2016.
John Stezaker: The Truth of Masks at Richard Gray Gallery surveys recent work by the British collagist. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue documenting the work in the show with an essay by British writer Michael Bracewell. Runs November 5 through December 12, 2015.
Phantom Bodies: The Human Aura in Art at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts is the third in a series of exhibitions about the human body organized by Frist Chief Curator Mark Scala. With work by Magdalena Abakanowicz, Christian Boltanski, Damien Hirst, Anish Kapoor, Sally Mann, Shirin Neshat, Gerhard Richter and Doris Salcedo.
Jim Dine. About the Love of Printmaking at the Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany is a major exhibition of the graphic prints of Jim Dine, spanning five decades through 250 works. Runs October 30, 2015 through January 31, 2016.
Opening October 23, 2015, Alex Katz: This is Now is a major survey of the role of landscape in the artist's work. This is the exhibition's second venue, having debuted at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. Through February 7, 2016.
Homegrown: The School of the Art Institute in the Permanent Collection examines the museum's holdings of work by alumni of SAIC, including Evelyn Statsinger, Leon Golub, Nancy Spero, Ivan Albright and many more. From October 21, 2015 through February 14, 2016.
Evelyn Statsinger
Making Their Mark: Illinois Women Artists, 1940 - 1906, Peoria Riverfront Museum
October 17, 2015
Evelyn Statsinger is featured in the Peoria Riverfront Museum exhibition Making Their Mark: Illinois Women Artists, 1940 - 1906, which examines the contributions and legacies of female artists during a time of important artistic development in the United States. October 17, 2015 through January 17, 2016.
Malia Jensen will screen her film The Bear's Progress on Friday, October 16 in the Santa Fe Independent Film Festival, which takes place at the Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico.
David Hockney: The Arrival of Spring opens at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh in Arles. Featuring work from a series of large-format inkjet prints of iPad drawings and a series of charcoal drawings on paper. October 11, 2015 through January 10, 2016.
Magdalena Abakanowicz's sculpture Abakan Rouge III from 1970-71 is featured in the Whitworth's exhibition Art_Textile, which explores craft, value and the handmade in the digital age. Through January 31, 2016.
Titled Alex Katz at the Met, the exhibition surveys the painter's career in eight works in drawing, print, and painting. October 9, 2015 through June 26, 2016.
Artforum has named Bethany Collins's first exhibition with Richard Gray Gallery, Inquiry's End, a Critics' Pick. Lilly Lampe writes, "Collins's work is a rejoinder that confronts the slippage of lexicon and legacy, which can always be obscured or erased." Read the full review on artforum.com
Rashid Johnson: Anxious Men has opened at the Drawing Center, New York. The exhibition features a new series of black-soap-and-wax-on-tile portraits mounted on a custom wallpaper, and it runs through December 20.
David Hockney is featured alongside Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, and Martin Kippenberger in Picasso.Mania, an exhibition at the Grand Palais Galeries Nationales in Paris. The exhibition focuses on the influences of Pablo Picasso on generations of contemporary artists.
Valerie Carberry
Elected to Art Dealers Association board of directors
October 1, 2015
In their annual meeting, the Art Dealers Association of America has elected Richard Gray Gallery partner Valerie Carberry to their board of directors. Cheim & Read's Adam Sheffer has been elected board president.
In a review in Time Out, critic Helen Shaw praises Chambre as "over it, righteously pissed off and well past giving a fuck…a vicious critique of gilded entitlement and wage slavery." The performance, collaboratively produced by performer Jack Ferver and sculptor Marc Swanson, runs at the New Museum through Sunday October 4.
Jaume Plensa is the subject of the most recent Brilliant Ideas, a video series produced by Bloomberg news that examines "the most exciting and acclaimed artists at work in the world today." In the 24 minute video, Plensa discusses his working process and the ideas that propel his work. Watch the video here.
David Hockney and John Stezaker are featured in the Wexner Center exhibition After Picasso: 80 Contemporary Artists, which tracks the modern master's influence through the contemporary field. Also including works by Jasper Johns, Cindy Sherman, Louise Lawler, Sigmar Polke, Amy Sillman, and Fred Wilson. Through December 27, 2015.
Richard Gray Gallery
EXPO Chicago 2015
September 17, 2015
Richard Gray Gallery at EXPO Chicago 2015: Booth 319. Presenting work by Marc Chagall, Bethany Collins, Jim Dine, Jean Dubuffet, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Eric Fischl, Sam Francis, Alberto Giacometti, Philip Guston, Eva Hesse, David Hockney, Hans Hofmann, Malia Jensen, Alex Katz, David Klamen, Roy Lichtenstein, Glenn Ligon, John McLaughlin, Pablo Picasso, Jaume Plensa, Leon Polk Smith, Ed Ruscha, Mitchell Squire, Evelyn Statsinger, John Stezaker, Marc Swanson, Andy Warhol and Christopher Wool.
This sixty-year survey of the artist’s rich and varied output reveals common threads expressed in her practice over time and across media. Evelyn Statsinger: A Gathering includes drawings, paintings, photograms and small sculpture that range in date from 1948 through 2014.
Bethany Collins: Inquiry's End is the first Richard Gray Gallery exhibition for Atlanta- and New York-based artist Bethany Collins.
Works by Jim Dine and Ellen Lanyon appear in the exhibition Apparitions: Frottages and Rubbings from 1860 to Now at the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas. The exhibition surveys artistic uses of rubbing, and includes a textural, figurative work by Ellen Lanyon and a depiction of tools by Jim Dine. Through January 3, 2016.
Marc Swanson and Jack Ferver will bring their collaborative performance Chambre to the New Museum at the end of September and beginning of October. The work is inspired by Jean Genet's The Maids and takes a kaleidoscopic spin through murder, role-play, fantasy, and celebrity. A version of Chambers was performed at the Bard College Richard B Fisher Center for the Performing Arts in 2014, and this will be its New York City premiere. Marc Swanson's installation space will remain open for viewing during the run of the show. Tickets available at NewMuseum.org.
Rashid Johnson has been recognized inApollo Magzine's "40 Under 40" list, which spotlights notable artists, thinkers, collectors, and executives under the age of forty. The accompanying article on the artist comments on his tactic of "hijacking the domestic" in the creation of his sculptures and exhibition environments. Read more at Apollo Magazine
Bethany Collins has unveiled a new monumentally-scaled installation at Atlanta Contemporary Art Center. The piece, titled This is how the myth repeats, is a 14 x 20 feet installation of toner and graphite directly on the walls of the Atlanta Contemporary Atrium. Drawing from multiple epilogues, ending passages, and final pages of written works concerning race and identity, the piece transforms architecture into a sprawling text of endings woven into a whole.
Brand-New & Terrific: Alex Katz in the 1950s explores a formative decade of work for the painter, excavating the inspiration Katz drew from art historical predecessors, the early innovations in figural depiction, and the first portraits of his future wife Ada. Accompanied by a full catalogue.
Body Building
Richard Gray Gallery Chicago
July 6 - August 15, 2015
Body Building is a group exhibition that examines relationships between the human body and the urban architectural environment. The show draws on works from as early as 1917 to show recurring ways that artists use the built environment to interpret the human form, and how the body in turn becomes a lens for architecture.
Featuring work by José de Rivera, Malia Jensen, Alex Katz, David Klamen, Ellen Lanyon, Jim Lutes, Robert Nickle, Judith Rothschild, John Stezaker, and John Storrs. The exhibition runs through August 14, 2015.
Bethany Collins
Interviewed on NPR's WABE Atlanta
June 29, 2015
Bethany Collins was interviewed by WABE's Jason Parker about her work in the wake of being awarded the 2015 Hudgens Prize. Discussing the broad themes of her work, Collins asked, "how much can language capture about race and identity?" She goes on, "I believe that it can, and I also believe that it is inherently fallible and that it is destined to fail. I'm really interested in that destined-to-fail quality and what then it can reveal about our understanding of identity." Listen to the entire story at WABE and watch a video of the interview on PBS.
Jaume Plensa: The Silence of Thought is an exhibition at the Musée d'art moderne de Céret that consists of three large scale installations by the Catalan artist. The exhibition runs through November 15, 2015.
Jim Dine: People, Places, Things at the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center takes a wide lens to the artist's practice, surveying work from many different series; portraits, nudes, gardens, tools, hearts, robes, and Pinocchio are all represented.
Alex Katz: This is Now at the High Museum of Atlanta, a major retrospective of the development of the landscape genre in Alex Katz's career, features over 60 works including a number of monumentally scaled canvases. Drawing from the past twenty-five years, the exhibition is also accompanied by a full catalogue, with essays by curator Michael Rooks, critic Margaret Graham, poet John Godfrey, critic and poet Vincent Katz, and writer David Salle.
Richard Gray Gallery
Art Basel 2015
June 18, 2015
Richard Gray Gallery at Art Basel 2015, presenting work by Jean Arp, Louise Boureois, Georges Braque, Alexander Calder, Willem de Kooning, Jim Dine, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Jean Dubuffet, Eric Fischl, Lucio Fontana, Sam Francis, Lucian Freud, Alberto Giacometti, Gilbert & George, Robert Gober, Philip Guston, Eva Hesse, David Hockney, Alex Katz, Paul Klee, Yayoi Kusama, Wifredo Lam, Roy Lichtenstein, Glenn Ligon, Christian Marclay, Henri Matisse, Joan Mitchell, Henry Moore, Pablo Picasso, Ed Ruscha, Robert Ryman, Kazuo Shiraga, David Smith, Andy Warhol and Christopher Wool.
Bethany Collins has won the Hudgens Prize, a prestigious award given by the Hudgens Center that recognizes excellence in emerging Georgia artists. The prize comes with a $50,000 purse and a solo exhibition at the Hudgens Center in Duluth, Georgia. Collins will have her first solo gallery exhibition at Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago in September of 2015. More information about the Hudgens Prize in this Atlanta Sun Times spotlight.
Alex Katz has curated an exhibition at the Colby College Museum of Art culled from the 450 works of modern and contemporary artworks that have been donated to the museum through the Alex Katz Foundation. "He has such a distinctive vision, and he understands space so well," museum director Sharon Corwin told the Portland Press Herald, continuing, "and he is always right."
In an exhibition spanning two venues, the Cheekwood Botanical Gardens and Museum of Art and the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Jaume Plensa has opened his largest exhibition to date in the United States. The artist spoke with the Nashville newspaper The Tennessean about the show, stating "It will be a very rich show for me. It's a terrific opportunity for people to see my work on many different levels." The exhibitions encompass the artist's well-known monumentally scaled portrait sculptures, as well as a selection of more modestly sized outdoor sculptures and also works on paper. The exhibitions have staggered opening dates, with Cheekwood opening Friday May 22 and the Frist opening June 5.
Rashid Johnson has been commissioned to produce a sculpture for The High Line in New York. Blocks, a minimalist structure in black steel inhabited by yellow-painted busts, is now on exhibition on the High Line at Little West 12th Street. The work will be shown through March 2016, with changing contents over the course of the year.
John Stezaker: Film Works will run May 2 - July 19, 2015 at De La War Pavilion, East Sussex, UK. Featuring three films by the artist, Horse (2012), Crowd (2013), and Cathedral (2013). According to the organizers, “the films are made up of a vast number of Stezaker’s personal collection of film stills, postcards and images from racehorse catalogues. They comprise discontinuous still images which are re-photographed and projected at 24 frames per second, without sound." Find more information at the De La Warr Pavilion website or read this review of the show at the Guardian.
Valerie Carberry
Joins Richard Gray Gallery as Partner
May 1, 2015
Richard Gray Gallery, established in 1963, announces the appointment of Valerie Carberry as Partner. She joins Partners Paul Gray, Andrew Fabricant and Richard Gray.
“Richard Gray Gallery is a standard bearer for quality, expertise and integrity in the field of Modern and Contemporary Art,” said Carberry, who comes to Richard Gray Gallery from over a decade leading Valerie Carberry Gallery in Chicago. “It is an honor to be invited to join the gallery as a partner and to be able to play a role in shaping its future.”
Bethany Collins
Named finalist for Hudgens Prize
April 14, 2015
Bethany Collins has been named a finalist for the prestigious Hudgens Prize, a biennial award bestowed by The Hudgens Center for the Arts in Duluth, Georgia. The prize, which carries a purse of $50,000, is given this year by a jury consisting of Shannon Fitzgerald, Executive Director of Rochester Art Center, Buzz Spector, Professor of Art at Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, and Hamza Walker, Associate Curator at The Renaissance Society. Collins and the other three finalists, Scott Ingram, Orion Wertz and Ryan Steele, will exhibit in a Finalists Exhibition at the Hudgens Center from April 7 - June 27. Bethany Collins will conduct an artist talk there on Saturday May 16.
Jaume Plensa
Jaume Plensa: Together, Venice Biennale
April 14, 2015
On occasion of the 56th International Art Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia, one of Venice's most celebrated landmarks, the Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore, will host Together, a major exhibition of new works by Spanish artist Jaume Plensa. The exhibition will run from May 7 through November 22.
Magdalena Abakanowicz
Magdalena Abakanowicz: Crowd and Individual, Island of San Giorgio Maggiore
April 12 - August 2, 2015
Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz presents an installation of 110 burlap figures in the exhibition Magdalena Abakanowicz: Crowd and Individual, held on the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice. The exhibition is organized by Beck & Eggeling International Fine Art and Sigifredo di Canossa in collaboration with Fondazione Giorgio Cini, and it is curated by Luca Massimo Barbero. Magdalena Abakanowicz: Crowd and Individual runs from April 12 through August 2, 2015.
Jim Dine has gifted 234 prints to the British Museum, a tribute to his longtime friend and London dealer Alan Cristea. The collection, which comprises etchings, woodcuts, and lithographs, includes signature Dine imagery of paintbrushes, bathrobes, tools and hearts. The prints will be on exhibition in the Prints and Drawings galleries at the British Museum from March 3 through mid-June.
David Hockney
Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, Portland Art Museum and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
February 10, 2015
The year 2015 will see a number of museums around the world present exhibitions of David Hockney’s drawings. Two unrelated exhibitions, one in Bristol, UK and one in Portland, Oregon, center on Hockney’s A Rake’s Progress, a suite of sixteen prints from 1965 adapting William Hogarth’s 1735 prints of the same title. Hockney’s version translates the story as an autobiographical telling of his arrival in New York City in the 1960s and his subsequent psychological adaptation to the American metropolis. The suite is on view at the Bristol Museum & Art Gallery until June 14, 2015 and will be on exhibition at the Portland Art Museum from April 18 - August 29, 2015.
A more recent set of charcoal landscape drawings will also be on display at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark from March 19 - June 21, 2015.
John Stezaker: Collages surveys 10 years of the artist's photocollages. The exhibition looks at Stezaker's hybrid portrait collages, where simple cuts, overlaps and juxtapositions have outsized surrealistic effects. From January 24 through May 25, 2015.
Rashid Johnson numbers among seventeen contemporary painters in the Museum of Modern Art exhibition The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World. The show makes the grand argument that the state of contemporary painting is one of historical mishmash, where artists are omnivorous about the genres, styles, and techniques from the past that they use in their paintings. Alongside Johnson, other featured artists include Charline von Heyl, Julie Mehretu, Laura Owens, and Amy Sillman.
For the interdisciplinary exhibition The House is Open at the Bard College Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, Marc Swanson created an immersive sculptural installation in which his collaborator Jack Ferver performed as a masquerade Lady Gaga. Writing in the New York Times, reviewer Siobhan Burke praised the show as "inventive and thoughtfully assembled" in the way it broke down disciplinary distinctions between performance and visual art.
On occasion of his exhibition Shadows at Petzel Gallery, which features the U.S. debut of his film Blind, conceptual collagist John Stezaker has been interviewed by a number of online publications, including artnet News and Interview Magazine.
Jaume Plensa
1004 Portraits, Millennium Park
June 18, 2014 - December 2015
In celebration of its 10th anniversary, Millennium Park opens a special exhibition of work by Jaume Plensa, the world-renowned sculptor and creator of one of the Park’s most prominent attractions, the Crown Fountain. “Jaume Plensa: 1004 Portraits” features four large-scale portraits of young girls positioned in the park such that they complement and expand upon the story of the 1000 LED portraits of Chicago residents that illuminate the Crown Fountain. The exhibition opens to the public on June 18 and runs through December 2015.
Looking Into My Dreams, Awilda, stands at the entrance to Millennium Park (Madison Street at Michigan Avenue); its surreal and majestic presence bridging the frenetic energy and distractions of city life with the tranquility of the park. Magnificent in scale, Awilda’s beauty, power, and serenity encourages people to stop and join the moment of quiet contemplation. In the tree-lined outdoor South Boeing Gallery, located behind the Crown Fountain, three new cast iron heads Laura, Paula, and Ines are exhibited. Despite their great materiality, the sculptures appear like a hologram, with shifting perspectives and illusion rendering the work in perpetual visual motion. Plensa’s serene portraits provide a peaceful counterbalance to the children’s boisterous play in the Crown Fountain.
“These four portraits are each individually awe-inspiring but in this configuration also perfectly extend the powerful grandeur of Mr. Plensa’s Crown Fountain into the surrounding areas of Millennium Park,” said Donna La Pietra, chair of the Millennium Park Foundation. “We are tremendously grateful to Mr. Plensa for allowing Chicago to host these pieces; we can think of no better way to celebrate our 10th anniversary than by hosting such an impressive array of works by one of the artists whose contributions to Millennium Park have made it a model for public spaces world-wide.”
The exhibition is co-presented by Millennium Park Foundation with the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, and is sponsored by The Boeing Company, with support from the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation.
The Seattle Art Museum recently welcomed Jaume Plensa's Echo to the Olympic Sculpture Park. The 46 foot sculpture was a gift to the museum from the collection of Barney A. Ebsworth, and was originally commissioned by the Madison Square Park Conservatory in New York, and was installed in the park previously in 2011.
"Echo will be a spectacular and iconic new addition to the park and Seattle’s waterfront," said Kimerly Rorschach, the Illsley Ball Nordstrom Director of SAM. "This is an incredible gift to the city from Barney Ebsworth and Echo will become a beacon for the hundreds of thousands of visitors to the park each year."
"Many times we talk and talk," Plensa stated previously for an interview with the New York Times, "but we are not sure if we are talking with our own words or repeating just messages that are in the air. My intention is to offer something so beautiful that people have an immediate reaction, so that they think, ‘What’s happening?’ And then maybe they can listen a little bit to themselves."
Jaume Plensa
Lecture at the Art Institute of Chicago
June 16, 2014
Jaume Plensa will give a lecture on his extensive body of artwork in public spaces at the Art Institute of Chicago on June 16th. The event is free and open to the public. The lecture is organized in conjunction with Plensa’s exhibition of outdoor sculpture in Millennium Park 1004 Portraits, celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Park. Four monumental sculptures will be installed near the Crown Fountain opening June 17, 2014 and running through the fall of 2015.
Jaume Plensa
Skulpturenpark-Waldfrieden
April 12 - June 22, 2014
The Tony Cragg Foundation presents a solo exhibition by Jaume Plensa on view at Skulpturenpark-Waldfrieden in Wuppertal, Germany from April 12-June 22, 2014. For the exhibition, Plensa has focused on one particular gestalt in his expanding family of work—the kneeling figure on a boulder.
The FLAG Art Foundation (New York City) presents Roy Lichtenstein: Nudes and Interiors, curated by Ewan Gibbs and Hilary Harkness, and organized in cooperation with the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation. The exhibition includes 37 works by Lichtenstein, including drawings, collages, and sculpture, as well two original works created by curators Gibbs and Harkness in conjunction with the show. The exhibition is on view from February 8-May 17, 2014, and an illustrated catalogue will be available.
In this exhibition, Gibbs and Harkness invite the viewers to take a glimpse into the world of Lichtenstein’s interiors and his nudes. A world packed with the indelible marks of a career that spanned decades and integrated a variety of artistic influences. Gibbs approaches Lichtenstein’s interiors from a place of comfort and familiarity, having worked directly from photographs of hotel rooms taken from holiday brochures since 1993. It was Lichtenstein, with his use of pictures from comics, phone books and advertisements, who provided Gibbs with a feeling of artistic freedom and confidence to use mass-produced advertising images as source material.
Harkness finds Lichtenstein’s ability to assimilate high and low visual influences into a language that was his own inspiration. For this exhibition, she has chosen to feature Lichtenstein’s late nudes, many of which were painted when the artist was in his seventies- a time when, Harkness observes, he no longer had anything to prove and nothing to lose, which results in works laced with a palpable joie de vivre.
Richard Gray Gallery is pleased to announce an opening reception on Tuesday, February 18, of Jan Tichy's Chicago Cultural Center exhibition aroundcenter. The reception will also be celebrating the release of Tichy's new book, Chicago Projections, published by U.S. Equities Realty and the Museum of Contemporary Photography.
Jan Tichy
Politics of Light, 196 Stanton Street
Saturday, December 14, 2013
"His ephemeral use of raw light and sound lifts one above the polarity of good versus evil, public versus private, privileged versus destitute, and focuses our senses on the necessary ambiguity, the edges of our liminal existence, tuning us in to the peripheral."
-- Huffington Post
Please join us in celebrating the final day of Politics of Light with a salon, mimosas, and a site-specific dance and sound performance.
The salon will feature an engaging conversation between artist Jan Tichy and No Longer Empty Chief Curator, Manon Slome as they lead a tour of the exhibition. Tickets are available for purchase and will include complementary mimosas and an opportunity to meet the artist.
Following the salon, Mike Brown, David Cieri, Nora Fox, and Patra Jongjitirat will perform "It Begins with No End" which lies at the intersection of dance, music and the architecture of light. Inspired by Jan Tichy's Installation No. 18, the piece is an exploration of translation and how various creative forms evoke equivalent or complementary qualities within the other.
Mimosas & Salon Talk: Artist Jan Tichy and Manon Slome
Saturday, December 14 at 2:30pm
Purchase tickets here (Please note, there is a guest capacity of 25 people for this event)
It Begins with No End
Saturday, December 14 at 4pm
Free admission and open to the public
Please no late admittance
All events will take place at 196 Stanton St (at Attorney) in the Lower East Side.
This exhibition is presented by No Longer Empty and Richard Gray Gallery.
Jaume Plensa
Wins 2013 Velazquez Prize
November 25, 2013
Richard Gray Gallery is delighted to announce that Jaume Plensa has won the 2013 Velazquez Prize, awarded by the Spanish Cultural Ministry. Established in 2002, the prize is given to a Spanish artist for reinventing the visual language of sculpture. The jury noted in its decision "the coherence of Plensa's career in which he has thoroughly reinvented the language of sculpture, integrating poetry and conceptualization in designs of great aesthetic intensity." Plensa received two other major prizes this past year including Spain's National Graphic Arts Prize (2013) and the National Visual Arts Prize (2012).
Richard Gray Gallery is delighted to announce an exhibition of David Hockney opening in Chicago on Thursday, November 21. There will be a reception from 6-8pm, and the public is welcome to attend. This will be Hockney's first exhibition in Chicago in over ten years. A corresponding illustrated catalogue is available.
The Thrill is Spatial is centered around eight exceptional paintings and drawings, commencing with portraits of Hockney's lifelong muse Celia Birtwell from the 1970s and culminating with Colorado River (1998), a majestic 15-panel landscape of the Grand Canyon. The exhibition also features The Conversation (1980), an iconic portrait of curator Henry Geldzahler and Raymond Foye; a vibrant still life Gauguin's Chair (1988); and a rare, small-scale pool painting Montcalm Pool, Los Angeles (1980).
The exhibition opens on the eve of Richard Gray Gallery's 50th anniversary. The gallery was established in Chicago in November 1963.
Jan Tichy
Panel Discussion for 'Politics of Light', 196 Stanton Street, NY
November 9, 2013
Please join Richard Gray Gallery and No Longer Empty for Jan Tichy’s panel discussion with the artist, Nicola Trezzi, US Editor of Flash Art International, and Mabel O. Wilson, Cultural Historian Professor of Architecture at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.
The discussion is free and open to the public, and the exhibition is on view at 196 Stanton Street, NY through December 14. Please RSVP for the discussion at rsvp@nolongerempty.org.
Barcelona based conceptual artist Jaume Plensa has produced a rich body of work over the past 30 years and is best known in Chicago for the Crown Fountain in Millennium Park. Plensa discusses his practice and engages in a dialogue with moderator Reed Kroloff, Director of the Cranbrook Academy of Art and Museum, about art and architecture.
The Architecture Is Art talks series examines the intersections and blurred boundaries between the professional practice and creative process of architects and contemporary artists. The series explores how architects and artists identify their work, where they turn for inspiration, how their process and presentation materials are interpreted, and when it is useful or necessary to distinguish the disciplines of art and architecture for viewers.
Presented in collaboration with Chicago Architecture Foundation and the Museum of Contemporary Art
Time: 6:00 pm
Cost: $8 CAF & MCA members / $10 non-members / $6 students
Location: MCA Theater, 220 E Chicago Ave
Register by calling the MCA Box Office at 312-397-4010 or buy tickets online.
For further information, please visit the MCA's website.
Jaume Plensa
New Sculpture by Jaume Plensa Unveiled on the Occasion of Frieze Sculpture Park
October 15-20, 2013
For Frieze Sculpture Park 2013, celebrated artist Jaume Plensa will present Chloe, a seven-meter tall sculpture in the center of London’s Regent’s Park. Continuing Plensa’s tradition of re-imagining and re-presenting the human figure, Chloe’s presence encourages the viewer to enter a state of serenity and contemplation. In a return to a favored medium from early in Plensa’s career, Chloe is formed in cast iron, creating a contemporary sculpture with a timeless aesthetic, which has become a hallmark of Plensa’s unique practice.
At the end of May, Jaume Plensa presented Rui-Rui in the heart of Venice for the exhibition Glasstress: White Light/White Heat, a collateral event during the 55th Venice Biennale. In June, eleven sculptures were installed throughout the public spaces of Bordeaux, France for the exhibition Jaume Plensa in Bordeaux. Plensa has also been active in England in recent years – in 2007 he created Dream, a twenty-meter tall sculpture installed in St. Helens near Liverpool, and in 2011 the Yorkshire Sculpture Park held a widely acclaimed exhibition by the artist. Jaume Plensa. Talking Continents will open on November 1st at Galerie Lelong, NY, and will run through December 14.
Richard Gray Gallery and No Longer Empty are pleased to announce Politics of Light, an exhibition of installation, video and site-specific work by Jan Tichy. The exhibition is located at 196 Stanton Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. This will be the artist's first exhibition in New York and his second exhibition with Richard Gray. An opening reception will be held October 10 from 6:00-8:00pm, the public is welcome. Tichy will discuss his work with Nicola Trezzi (U.S. editor of Flash Art) and Mabel Wilson (Professor of Architecture, Columbia University) on November 9th at 5pm.
Politics of Light is a moody paean to light and shadow, to the ebbs and flows of what light reveals and what darkness hides. Tichy’s installations are a fluid integration of diverse media incorporating animation, film, photography, and sculpture, all invested with the presence of mechanical light – be it a projector or a TV monitor – fulfilling light’s role of enabling vision.
Tichy has created a site-specific installation around the physical conditions of the raw, main commercial space at 196 Stanton Street. Installation No. 18 will debut in the exhibition and joins Tichy’s impressive list of major site-specific installations including Installation No. 16 (Ando) in the Ando Gallery at the Art Institute of Chicago (2013) and Installation No. 14 (Austin) at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (2012).
Installation No. 6 (tubes) and 1391 will also be shown in Politics of Light. In 1391, Tichy created an architectural paper model of a secret military base located in Israel close to the Israeli-Palestine border. Not visible on any map and erased from aerial photographs, its existence not officially acknowledged, it is often referred to as Israel’s Guantánamo. Video installations in the exhibition include 100 Raw, Pictures, and Recess, a single vantage exposure of a public school playground over many hours that reveals a rather chilling view of the range of human emotions exhibited by children at play.
Richard Gray Gallery is pleased to announce Alex Katz Virtual Reality, the inaugural exhibition of the gallery’s new space on the 38th floor of the John Hancock building. Virtual Reality centers on Katz’s iconic portraits and landscapes from 1985 to 2012 with a focus on recent paintings from the past five years. This will be Katz’s fourth exhibition at Richard Gray and the artist’s first exhibition in Chicago since 2008. An illustrated catalogue with an essay by Michael Rooks, curator of High Museum of Art (Atlanta) is available.
Jaume Plensa will have a major solo exhibition in Bordeaux, France opening on June 27 and remaining on view until October 6. There will be an opening reception on June 27th at 6pm; the artist will be present.
Over a dozen sculptures will be exhibited at several outdoor sites throughout the city. Artworks will include two new sculptures made in cast iron that stand 21 feet tall, the monumental icon House of Knowledge, and several new works continuing Plensa's exploration of the human figure created through language and symbols. An illustrated catalogue of the exhibition will be published.
Rui Rui, a seven meter sculpture by Jaume Plensa, will stand at the crossroads of Accademia and San Marco as part of the exhibition Glasstress: White Light / White Heat. Glasstress is curated by Adriano Berengo and James Putnam and coincides with the 55th Venice Biennale. Plensa’s Rui Rui will be premiered at the Palazzo Cavalli-Franchetti from June 1 - November 24, 2013. There will be a vernissage on May 31 at 6pm, the public is welcome and the artist will be in attendance.
Rui Rui (2013) will be installed in the garden of Palazzo Cavalli-Franchetti on the north side of the Accademia bridge. Though fabricated in cast iron, the sculpture appears like a hologram, fugitive despite its great materiality. The sculpture continues Plensa’s focus on the human figure, specifically the head, a subject he explores in awe-inspiring scale such as the majestic Echo (2011, Madison Square Park, New York) and Dream (2009, St. Helens, Liverpool, U.K.). Rui Rui is captured in silent meditation, her eyes closed in a dream. The sculpture invites a similar moment of quiet contemplation for all who encounter the work, as they pass through Venice’s labyrinthine canals and streets.
Jaume Plensa’s monumental Wonderland has been unveiled in Calgary, Alberta, Canada in the front plaza of Foster + Partner’s skyscraper THE BOW. Standing twelve meters tall, Wonderland is Plensa’s largest work to date created from bent-wire mesh. Encana Corporation and Cenovus Energy commissioned the sculpture.
Wonderland is the portrait of a young girl who lives in the artist’s native Barcelona. Depicting only her head, the portrait represents humanity as well as our human potential created and fostered by our dreams. The transparent mesh creates a visual bridge between Wonderland and THE BOW as Plensa strives to link together art, architecture and society. Contrary to its commanding size, the sculpture’s transparency creates an ethereal sense of fragility, mirroring and celebrating the fragility of human beings. People are encouraged to enter the sculpture through openings on either side of the head, an invitation for visitors to physically experience Plensa’s metaphor of the mind being the sanctuary for dreams.
Jan Tichy
Moving Image New York
March 7-10, 2013
Richard Gray Gallery presents Jan Tichy's Bats, 2002-2007 at Moving Image New York, the contemporary video art fair. The fair coincides with the Armory and ADAA art fairs and runs from March 7-10, 2013. Located at the Waterfront Tunnel in the Chelsea District, Moving Image is dedicated to single-channel projects, video sculptures, and large digital installations. Tichy's Bats is one of only four installations invited by the Moving Image Curatorial Advisory Committee to be exhibited at this year's fair.
Jan Tichy has been featured on ARTMargins Online in a profile piece by Susan Snodgrass, titled "Jan Tichy: Light Source".
Jaume Plensa
In the Midst of Dreams, EMMA
January 2013
A solo exhibition by Jaume Plensa "In the Midst of Dreams" continues at EMMA (Espoo Museum of Modern Art) in Helsinki, Finland through January 27, 2013. The artist will give a lecture at EMMA on January 22. During the darkest time of the year in Helsinki, Plensa created an exhibition centered around the theme of light. Over forty artworks are on view created from steel, synthetic resin, glass, iron, bronze, alabaster, paper and light. An illustrated catalogue with essays by Carsten Ahrens, Pilvi Kalhama, and Jaume Plensa is available
Richard Gray Gallery is pleased to announce Jan Tichy's site-specific Installation no. 16 (Ando) currently on view at the Art Institute of Chicago. The artwork is installed in Japanese architect Tadao Ando's eponymous Ando Gallery, created for his first American commission in 1992. Composed of numerous visual 'movements', Tichy's single video projection runs on a continuous 23-minute loop and utilizes time-based light projections. Installed in one of museum's darkest galleries, Installation no. 16 (Ando) exists in perpetual motion as light appears and disappears, engaging and responding to Ando's architecture as well as the surrounding exhibition of contemporary Japanese fashion Material Translations: Japanese Fashions at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
This fall, MoCP presents 1979:1 — 2012:21: Jan Tichy Works with the MoCP Collection, with an opening reception on Thursday, October 11 from 5-7pm. For a one-year period, Jan Tichy is collaborating with the Museum of Contemporary Photography to organize a museum-wide exhibition based on the museum’s collection of more than 12,000 images and objects. The exhibition opening in October will serve as the first stage of this project, and specifically focus on the public's access to the museum's online digital archives.
Jaume Plensa
Poets in Miami, Art Public | Art Basel Miami Beach
Richard Gray Gallery and Galerie Lelong are pleased to announce Jaume Plensa's Poets in Miami, opening on December 5th in Collins Park at Art Public | Art Basel Miami Beach.
"Two silent figures are dreaming and talking with colors. They are sharing a silent conversation in the sky of Miami – a conversation from their hearts," explains Jaume Plensa about his new, site-specific installation. Two identical, internally-lit, resin figures symbolically converse by constantly changing colors – green, blue, yellow, purple – twenty feet above the busy traffic and noise of South Beach. Similar to Plensa’s family of totem works, the forms were inspired by holy ascetics and philosophers who contemplated humanity and preached to crowds seated atop pillars during the Byzantine Empire. Spirituality and the soul have long been areas of exploration in Plensa’s artwork.
Poets in Miami presents a modern-day space for meditation to the South Beach community and invites visitors to look inward to find a common universal truth: an idea at the core of Plensa’s practice.
Richard Gray Gallery is exhibiting in Booth C3 at Art Basel Miami Beach.
Jaume Plensa
Wins 2012 National Visual Arts Award of Spain
Barcelona-based conceptual artist Jaume Plensa has been awarded the 2012 National Visual Arts Award of Spain, organized by the Ministry of Culture. The award recognizes artists whose work represents outstanding and innovative contributions to the Spanish Cultural Heritage.
This fall, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston presents Arlington National Cemetary, a solo exhibition focusing on the work of Ewan Gibbs. Arlington National Cemetary includes 18 drawings by Ewan Gibbs that were produced after photographs taken while visiting the iconic military cemetery. Along with these new works, the exhibition also includes 36 photographs taken from the MFAH collection by specific artists that have served as inspiration for Gibbs.
Marc Swanson and Jan Tichy
Artist Talk with Marc Swanson and Jan Tichy
September 21, 2012
Please join us at the Chicago gallery on Friday afternoon, September 21 at 2pm for an Artist Talk featuring Marc Swanson and Jan Tichy, coinciding with the exhibition opening of Muse: Exploring Inspiration. This artist talk serves as part of the public programming for Gallery Weekend Chicago, and the exhibition will be on view from September 21 through December 1, 2012.
John Stezaker
Awarded Deutsche Börse photography prize
September 3, 2012
John Stezaker has been awarded the Deutsche Börse photography prize, an internationally acclaimed photography award. Stezaker was announced the winner on September 3, 2012, and awarded £30,000 at the ceremony in London. Stezaker serves as the 16th winner of the prize, and was nominated along with four other photographers including Pieter Hugo, Rinko Kawuchi, and Christopher Williams.
Jaume Plensa
Gegenbürger, Moderne Kunst im Dom
July 13 - November 4, 2012
From July 13 to November 4 , 2012, Jaume Plensa will be a part of the group exhibition Gegenbürger at Moderne Kunst im Dom, Bamberg, Germany.
Richard Gray Gallery, in partnership with The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), is pleased to announce People vs. Space, a student exhibition that is the culmination of an intensive summer course led by Jaume Plensa, world-renowned Spanish sculptor and creator of the Crown Fountain in Chicago’s Millennium Park. The exhibition opens Friday, July 6 and runs through July 20, 2012. The artworks on view in People vs. Space were conceived and created by 11 SAIC undergraduate and graduate students, as well as two visiting international students. Throughout People vs. Space, students worked directly with Plensa to develop project proposals for public works integrating contemporary media with the core concerns of objects, spaces, communities, and interactions. This exhibition features the detailed models and proposals developed by class members.
For the purpose of the class, Plensa asked the students to concentrate on the roles of both the artwork and the artist in public spaces and how they are understood in contemporary contexts. Students were encouraged to explore the multiple ways in which artists can create new kinds of connections between people and space, art and society, and art institutions and communities.
Plensa is the current William and Stephanie Sick Distinguished Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Established in 2006 by a generous gift from William and Stephanie Sick, this distinguished professorship enables internationally renowned artists and designers to visit and teach at SAIC. People vs. Space is the second course taught by Plensa at SAIC that has culminated in an exhibition through Richard Gray Gallery. This summer, Plensa’s co-teachers are SAIC faculty members John Manning and Bo Rodda (SAIC MFA 2010). “We are proud to recognize the contributions that Jaume Plensa has made to the cultural landscape of the city of Chicago, and we are thrilled that SAIC students have the opportunity to use their talents to work with Plensa on proposals for major new public art works in our great city,” stated William and Stephanie Sick.
Jan Tichy
Skyscraper: Art and Architecture Against Gravity, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
June 30 – September 23, 2012
This exhibition includes contemporary works of art focusing on architectural forms and structures, specifically concentrating on the skyscraper. Many different forms of art focusing on this concept are included within this exhibition, including sculpture, film, painting, and photography. Also included is Jan Tichy's Installation No. 3, featured in the image above.
A lecture by Jaume Plensa focusing on several significant public works of art, starting with the Crown Fountain.
This spring MCA Chicago presents Rashid Johnson's first major solo museum exhibition, surveying the first ten years of his career. This exhibition includes examples from ongoing bodies of work such as Cosmic Slops, The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club, recent shelf sculptures featuring found objects, early examples of his photographs, and a special commission that will cover a gallery floor.
Magdalena Abakanowicz
The Group of Ten acquired by Davidson College
March 29, 2012
Richard Gray Gallery is pleased to announce the acquisition of Magdalena Abakanowicz’s The Group of Ten by Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina. The commissioned artwork consists of ten figures, cast in bronze and slightly smaller than life size--a rare scale in the artist’s body of work. The Group of Ten continues the artist’s creation of anonymous, strong, defiant figures, which confront viewers without apology or explanation. Abakanowicz’s use of found burlap cloth in her first sculptures remains present as a shadow of texture on the rich, heavy bronze, a material rendering the figures as powerful forces of universal human kind.