Frick Museum at the Breuer Whitney, New York.
Barkley Hendrix: Portraits at the Frick
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Whitney Biennial 2024
“Even Better Than the Real Thing”
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York, March 20 – August 11, 2024
Diana Al-Hadid: “Women, Bronze, and Dangerous Things
Kasmin Gallery, New York, November 2 – December 22, 2023
Al-Hadid is a Brooklyn based artist. Born in Aleppo, Syria, Diana Al-Hadid emigrated to the United States when she was five years old, growing up in Ohio. There she received a BA at Kent State and then went on to earn an MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University.
The exhibition work spans a number of media, including rigid board, styrene, bronze, and wax. Commenting on the mythological content of the subject matter, the gallery writes:
“Across Al-Hadid’s use of motifs in this exhibition—which includes figures from Greek mythology alongside protagonists in Islamic and Christian narratives—the artist’s contemporary interpretations intuitively navigate different attempts of reading the future through our past. Constructions in nature such as mountains and caves reappear as emblematic elements of landscape tied to the social, psychological, and religious narratives that have been absorbed into dominant culture over the centuries. Indifferent to where these narratives find their origin in theology, Al-Hadid’s method of retrieving stories both communicate with history and imagine them anew. At once prophetic and autobiographical, Al-Hadid’s sensitive installation across two sites of the gallery’s architecture articulates a realm that manifests, both physically and metaphorically, above ground and below.”
Robert Ryman: 1961-1964
David Zwirner, New York, November 9, 2023—February 3, 2024
Robert Ryman (May 30, 1930 – February 8, 2019) was an American conceptual artist closely identified with the high modernist Minimalist mode of painting in the 1960’s. Interestingly he did not attend an art school or program of art studies at a university. Instead, his visual interests began when he worked as a security guard at MoMA, befriending fellow employees Sol Lewitt and Dan Flavin.
From the David Zwirner exhibition text:
Ryman gained initial recognition for the work he made in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As a result, his paintings created prior to this period remain less well known to this day. Yet it was during the early 1960s that Ryman began to firmly establish the broad parameters of his radical and inventive practice. His paintings from these years reflect how, even at this early point, Ryman was already looking to interrogate and reinterpret the fundamental precepts of painting by experimenting with different supports and materials; deconstructing the relationship between frame and wall; and more broadly, investigating the visual, material, and experiential qualities that define the conditions in which a work of art is encountered. It was also at this time that the artist settled on the square as the primary format for his art and began experimenting with scale, a consequence, in part, of his move around 1961 to a studio space that afforded him the ability to work in larger formats.
David Zwirner Gallery
Mark di Suvero “Nova Albion”
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, May 1-July 31 2010
The exhibition presents Nova Albion, 1964-1965, a monumental 24-feet high sculpture made of steel and redwood logs. Nova Albion is named after the white cliffs of northern California that were seen by Captain Francis Drake on June 17, 1579. The California beaches Drake explored are the same ones where di Suvero built this piece using found drift wood logs. In the title, Nova refers to a star that suddenly becomes a thousand times brighter and then gradually fades to its original intensity, and Albion refers to the earliest known name for England.
-Paula Cooper Gallery