WangShui
WangShui is an American artist, based in New York, who explores aberrant structures of perception. Primarily focusing on video, sculpture, painting and installation, their works examine the psychological and irrational ambiguities that shape our experience and relationship with the world around us. Liminality transformation and spatial perspective are key aspects of WangShui’s work, which offers a hallucinatory fantasy of hidden spaces, detailed images and materials that take us into a mysterious realm between the knowing and unknowing. Experimenting with AI-generated imagery, WangShui says their “paintings are, in a way, physical gestural expressions of the algorithms that I embody”. Their works are a reflection of our symbiosis with the technologies that are now determining our lives and which can be understood as an extension of and communication with the body.
Oliver Bak
Oliver Bak, a Danish artist from Copenhagen, transforms chromatic backgrounds into abstract landscapes teeming with figures, animals, and natural elements. His forms emit a ghostly energy, mysteriously shimmering through layers, blurring within their environment. This interplay creates an eerie yet soothing ambiance. Drawing from art history, Bak references symbolist artists like Odilon Redon, Gustave Klimt, and Kai Althoff, known for profound human psychology in enigmatic narratives. Bak's art breathes cosmic spirituality, muting space while expressing emotions, offering a fresh take on Romanticism with sensual, dreamlike atmospheres.
Dustin Emory
The prime focus of Atlanta based artist Dustin Emroy is painting. A self-taught artist who started painting during covid, he works in black and white to explore the human response to confinement. His strict palette and unconventional perspective, challenges the viewer to consider how imposed limitations can create an endless platform for representation. His subjects provoke constant introspection, with the interplay of light and shadow and monochrome palette heightening the emotions embodied in the expression and posture of his figures.
Emily Kraus
During her time at the Royal College of Art in London, Emily Kraus revolutionised her approach to making art by creating a metallic cube with a rotating canvas loop. This innovative approach reshapes spatial boundaries, defying traditional canvas painting. Kraus immerses herself in raw materials and oil paints, fostering spontaneous mark-making that prompts movement and disorientation. Her technique involves layering paint onto rollers to create organic patterns reminiscent of nature. Influenced by meditative practices, her method blends paint to produce an aesthetic resembling technological glitches and audio wave systems. The constrained cube dimensions compel her to construct the painting's appearance throughout the process, holding onto surrounding marks while focusing on the present moment. This process encourages reflection on the convergence of digital and physical realms within her work.
Matthew Angelo Harrison
Matthew Angelo Harrison's sculptures blend anthropology, sci-fi, and industrial design, delving into "abstract ancestry". Using African wooden sculptures and bones, he explores ancestry, authenticity, colonialism, and the interplay between African and African-American cultures. He encases these artefacts in acrylic resin, plexiglass, and industrial clay, sculpting them with CNC machines, typically used in car part fabrication. This technical experimentation re-imagines motifs, merging them with the present. In his 'Dark Silhouettes' series, figures and spears rest within sleek resin blocks on stainless steel mounts, while 'Dark Povera' involves scanning wooden objects to create low-resolution replicas via a 3-D printer. Harrison's work reflects diaspora, identity, and displacement, hinting at the ambiguous origins of these artefacts, which he feels have "lost the energy that was originally in them." His pieces invoke complex implications where 'cutting edge technologies are still haunted by the ghosts of modernity'. In 2024, Harrison will have a solo exhibition in Zurich.
'Tom Wesselmann' at Fondation Louis Vuitton
In 2024, for the first time, Fondation Louis Vuitton will present a major exhibition dedicated to the work of the American painter Tom Wesselmann. The artist was associated with American Pop Art and is best known for his ‘Great American Nude Series’ and ‘Standing Cutout Pieces’. Wesselmann joyfully re-imagines traditional genres of still life painting and the representation of female subjects. Bringing our attention to a new intimacy of close detail and perspective. He once said, “the prime mission of my art, in the beginning, and continuing still, is to make figurative art as exciting as abstract art.”
Opening date: Spring/Summer 2024, TBC
'Jenny Holzer: Light Line' at the Guggenheim, New York
Since the 1980s, American neo-conceptualist artist Jenny Holzer’s iconic use of written word has captivated audiences around the world and reinvigorated the representation of art. This exhibition will present a re-imagination of Jenny Holzer’s landmark 1989 installation at the Guggenheim. The site specific work will transform the building with a display of scrolling texts from her earliest series of truisms and aphorisms to more recent experiments with language generated by artificial intelligence.
Opening date: May 17 – September 29, 2024
'Anthony McCall' at the Tate Modern
Anthony McCall is a renowned British-American artist known for his pioneering work in the field of light and space working with film and installation experimentation. McCall gained prominence in the 1970s with his series of “solid light” installations, his work makes visible the immaterial qualities of cinema, including light, space, and duration.
In summer 2024, The Tate Modern will feature a dedicated exhibition of immersive works by McCall, including the seminal Line Describing a Cone from 1973, a captivating thirty-minute art piece by Anthony McCall and key work in the Tate’s collection. Visitors will be able to enter and explore the large-scale sculptural forms created from McCall’s thin mist and slowly evolving planes of projected light.
Opening date: June 24, 2024 – April 25, 2025
