Avant Garden Art Auction 2019

In his practice John Armleder (Switzerland, b. 1948) plays with the humor, irony, and inventiveness that characterized the Fluxus movement. The artist’s universe takes shape through canvases and installations that create a whimsical and glittering atmosphere, questioning the boundaries between art and design, figuration and abstraction. His early association with the Fluxus movement has provided the springboard for an ever-evolving array of projects and conceptual approaches––he has produced performances, music, sculptures, and installations as well as paintings––each of which leaves room for the operation of chance. These qualities posit Armleder as one of the most representative artists of his generation, and as a key figure in the story of Swiss art.

Armleder’s Pour Paintings focus attention on the movement of paint across the canvas as it is thrown. In each he privileges sweeping, calligraphic arcs (complete with the drips that fall from them), channeling the energies of abstract expressionism and action painting. And yet, as is often true of his work, these paintings somehow replace the solemnity of their modernist predecessors with a light-hearted appreciation for the ingenious nature and innate visual interest of their materials, not to mention the very act of creating and looking at energetic splashes of color.

Armleder lives and works in Geneva. He has been the subject of solo shows at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2019); Aspen Art Museum (2019); MUSEION, Bolzano, Italy (2018); Museo MADRE, Naples, Italy (2018); Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2014); Swiss Institute, New York (2012); Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (2011); Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland (2010); Kunstverein Hannover, Germany (2006); Tate Liverpool, England (2006); and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2006); among many others. In 2018, the gallery Massimo De Carlo gifted Armleder’s 1998 Spot painting to the Walker’s collection.

Trisha Baga (US, b. 1985) combines video, painting, sculpture, and found objects in immersive compositions that flood spaces with light and sound. Alluding to ways in which technology alters perception, Baga uses 3D projections and the rhythms of online browsing to produce installations that suggest shifting chains of association. To create the piece on view here, Baga has doctored a lenticular print—an image with an illusion of depth or ability to change when viewed from different angles—with dabs of paint, bringing together gestural painting on a mass-produced, kitschy surface.

Baga lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Mollusca & The Pelvic Floor, Greene Naftali, New York (2018); Biologue, Gallery TPW, Toronto (2018); Trisha Baga: CCC, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2017); Greene Naftali, New York (2015 & 2011); Zabludowicz Collection, London (2014); Gio Marconi, Milan (2014); Peep-Hole, Milan (2013); Societe, Berlin (2013); and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2012). In 2019, the Walker’s Collector’s Council gifted a work by Baga to the Walker’s collection. Her work is also included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Zabludowicz Collection, London/New York/Sarvisalo; Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Aïshti Foundation, Beirut; and Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto, Italy.

Matthew Barney’s (US, b. 1967) hybrid installation practice, which unites performance, unorthodox materials, and moving images, has resulted in a universe composed of a wildly complex pantheon of figures and forces, each of which overflows with narrative connotations and sculptural possibilities. His singular vision foregrounds the physical rigors of sport and its erotic undercurrents to explore the limits of the body and sexuality. Barney’s ritualistic actions unfold in hybridized spaces that at once evoke a training camp and medical research laboratory, equipped as they are with wrestling mats and blocking sleds, sternal retractors and speculums, and a range of props often cast in, or coated with, viscous substances such as wax, tapioca, and petroleum jelly. Drawing has been central to the evolution of his evocative and labyrinthine iconography. This print, which depicts two bees above a hole in the ground, was published on the occasion of the Walker-organized exhibition Cremaster 2: The Drones’ Exposition, which premiered the artist’s film Cremaster 2 within the context of a site-specific sculptural installation.

Barney lives and works in New York. He has had major solo exhibitions organized by Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut (2019); UCCA / Ullens, Beijing (2019); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2015); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2014); Art Gallery of Ontario (2014); Schaulager, Basel (2010); Fondazione Merz, Turin (2008); Sammlung Goetz (Goetz Collection), Munich (2007); 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan (2005); Living Art Museum, Reykjavik (2003); Guggenheim Museum, New York (2004); and Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst, Oslo (2003). The Walker Art Center featured the artist in the exhibition Quartet: Barney, Gober, Levine, Walker (2015). Barney’s iconic Cremaster Cycle is part of Walker’s collection as one of the few museums to house the full cycle.

While combining allegiances to Pop, Conceptual, and Op art with wry humor, Thomas Bayrle (Germany, b. 1937) created works starting in the mid-1960s based on the serial repetition of the same pattern, formal compositions indebted to the seriality of the then-emerging Minimal Art movement. In doing so, he invented a unique visual language through the production of collages, paintings, sculptures, films, and books. Untitled, Fußballer is a collage composed of prints that Bayrle made with the Atari computer. The artist started experimenting with Atari in the late 1980s. With the help of one of his then-students at StädelSchule in Frankfurt, he developed a program that enabled him to elaborate and distort miniature motifs, out of which he then created his so-called “Superforms,” long before computer programs existed to achieve these effects. This piece is an important example of Bayrle’s work: it stands at the threshold between analog and digital, using software to digitally produce elements that are then manually combined and fixed onto canvas.

Bayrle lives and works in Frankfurt. He was a professor at the Städelschule from 1975 to 2005. His work has been shown in some of the world’s most important exhibitions, including documenta 3, 6, and 13 in Kassel, Germany (1964, 1977, 2012); the 50th and 53rd Venice Biennales (2003, 2009); and the 4th Berlin Biennale (2006). He has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at MAK – Austrian Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art, Vienna (2017); Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2016); Lenbachhaus, Munich (2016); Institut d’art contemporain, Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes, France (2014); WIELS, Brussels (2013); MADRE, Naples (2013); BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK (2013); Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2009); Musée d’art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva (2009); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2008); and Museu für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2006).

Andrew Dadson (Canada, b. 1980) heightens the relationship between painting and the surrounding physical world by experimenting with painting’s foundational components (color, texture, medium, and support) and by bringing awareness to the body and its modes of perception.

The pieces in Dadson’s ongoing series Re-stretched are created by scraping layers of paint toward each of the four edges of a canvas. When the paint dries, Dadson removes the canvas from the stretcher and mounts it on a larger frame, such that the excess paint forms a ridge in relief. Thus, the untouched linen that was stapled to the back of the stretcher becomes visible and pushes the thick band of paint that had accumulated at the edges onto the front of the composition, becoming sculpture-like.

Andrew Dadson lives and works in Vancouver, BC, Canada. He had solo shows at Galleria Franco Noero, Torino (2017, 2013, 2007); CAG, Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2017); Contemporary Art Gallery, New York (2017); David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles (2015); Vancouver Art Gallery (2015); ReMap, Athens (2013); Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2012); and Seattle Art Museum (2011).

When Jasper Johns’s paintings of flags and targets debuted in 1958, they brought him instant acclaim and established him as a critical link between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. In the ensuing 60 years, Johns (US, b. 1930) has continued to astonish viewers with the beauty and complexity of his paintings, drawings, sculpture, and prints. Today, he is today considered one of the 20th century’s greatest American artists. From the beginning of his career, Johns’s working method has been based on theme and variation. His motifs range from what he calls “things the mind already knows”—flags, numerals, the alphabet—to fragmented body parts, the color spectrum, common objects, and preexisting images. Once he adopts a motif, Johns reworks it in as many ways as he can conceive in order to find out how changing one aspect of a thing alters how we experience it. Given these preoccupations, it is not surprising that Johns was attracted to printmaking, a medium that lends itself to extensive reworking and variation. He made his first print in 1960, a scribbly lithographic rendering of a target; he has since made more than 400 editions using dozens of techniques.

Johns lives and works in Sharon, Connecticut. The artist has been the subject of dozens of solo exhibitions in museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the National Gallery, Washington, DC; Centre Pompidou, Paris; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Walker Art Center. In February 2020, the Walker presents An Art of Changes: Jasper Johns Prints, 1960–2018, which surveys six decades of Johns’s practice in printmaking through a selection of some 100 works drawn from the Walker’s complete collection of the artist’s prints. Among Johns’s many awards are the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale (1988), the National Medal of Arts (1990), and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2011), the highest honor given to civilians.

Mark Manders (The Netherlands, b. 1968) is best known for his installations for which he uses a variety of materials, including wood, iron, plastic, rope, sand, paper, and even teabags. He places familiar elements—a human figure, a chair, a table, a cat—together in mysterious compositions and leaves their interpretation to the viewer. Manders also produces drawings, sculptures, films, and poetry. His works represent the flow of his own ideas and meditations. In June 2017, the Walker unveiled a major commission by Manders as part of the reopening of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. For his first permanent outdoor work in the United States, the artist created September Room—an environment of six sculptures, positioned within one of the Garden’s original formal quads. Combining human forms, architectural elements, and everyday objects, his grouping of sculptures suggests a dreamlike place at once ancient and new.

Man-size Calculation Casting Shadow is an edition of hand-assembled collages, each one unique. The top element is a lithograph, showing two reclining figures that are the genesis for the artist’s aforementioned Walker commission for the Garden. The lithograph is fixed to a collage of prints from the artist’s Fake Newspaper series, composed of fictional, custom-made broadsheets with nonsensical combinations of words that the artist culled from the English-language dictionary. To create this piece, Manders carefully layered and collaged the newsprint to create unique, hand-made variations.

Manders lives and works in Ronse, Belgium. In 2010, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles opened the major retrospective Parallel Occurrences/Documented Assignments, which later traveled to the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Dallas Museum of Art, through 2012. Other significant solo presentations include Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia, Italy (2014); Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea in Santiago de Compostela, Spain (2014); Carré d’Art - Musée d’art contemporain in Nîmes, France (2012); and Carrillo Gil Museum of Art in Mexico City (2011).

Drawing on such varied sources as archaeology, philosophy, history, and literature, Los Angeles–based artist Matthew Monahan (US, b. 1972) creates sculptures that breathe new life into the symbols and relics of ancient civilizations. Monahan’s work often presents a futuristic archaeology, featuring artifacts both familiar and strange. The artist alludes to a contemporary spirituality, where beauty and brutality coalesce as virtual monuments, filtering historical mythologies through his own personal system of reference.

In works such as the assemblage Riker’s Island, Monahan adorns his vitrine with hand-crafted “relics” in wax, paper, and plaster, which take on barbaric forms, their temporal media humorously suggesting timelessness. Through his sculptures and assemblages, the artist offers a dark mysticism, where material trickery and abstracted forms seem to resurrect forgotten primal instincts. With the gentle features of its masklike face and outstretched arm beckoning to the viewer, the figure of Monahan’s 12-foot Hephaestus (2013), on view in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, appears both proud and derelict in its portrayal of the Greek god of fire, metalworkers, and craftspeople.

Monahan lives and works in Los Angeles. His solo shows were organized by the Rabo Art Collection, Museum Kranenburgh, Bergen, the Netherlands (2018); National Roman Museum, Palazzo Altemps, Rome (2016); Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2012); Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2011); Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2010); and Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, (2007).

The work of jazz pianist, composer, and interdisciplinary artist Jason Moran (US, b. 1975) is grounded in musical composition yet bridges the visual and performing arts through stagecraft. Moran’s experimental approach to art-making embraces the intersection of objects and sound, pushing beyond the traditional staged concert, sculpture, or drawing to amplify ways that both are inherently theatrical. Moran’s charcoal drawings from his ongoing Run series are intimate and immediate. Giving material presence to sound, the artist tapes elongated pieces of paper, at times vintage player piano rolls from his collection, to the keys of a piano or keyboard. Capping his fingertips with charcoal, he improvises music and the paper catches the movements of his playing. The results are imprints that move between images of piano keys, ripped surfaces, and black or blue accumulations.

In 2018, the Walker presented Moran’s first solo museum exhibition, which tours to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. The show complements the Walker’s long and meaningful history in the performing arts with Moran, which began in 2001 and includes a residency and five engagements to date. Born in Houston in 1975, Moran earned a degree from the Manhattan School of Music, New York, where he studied with Jaki Byard. Named a MacArthur Fellow in 2010, Moran serves as the artistic director for Jazz at the Kennedy Center and also teaches at the New England Conservatory.

Olivier Mosset (Switzerland, b. 1944) first became known in France for having been part of the BMPT group, alongside Daniel Buren, Niele Toroni, and Michel Parmentier. Since then he has been associated with a multitude of art-historical movements, involving himself in both the European and American artistic and critical contexts. In anticipation of many artists, who in the 1980s would use appropriation to critique Modernist authority, Mosset called into question the painter’s gesture and signature by sharing styles and dissolving authorship to reach a “degree zero” of painting. He has remained committed to questioning painting as a historical object by, paradoxically, continuing to paint, turning to monochrome works on canvas and walls.

This silkscreen is a unique piece and was executed in 1991. The artist has colored the square cardboard setting with a warm yellow tone, which is structured by three brown lines at regular intervals. This not only reflects the minimalistic character of his oeuvre but also a stylistic proximity to the “stripe” works by artists such as Michel Parmentier and Daniel Buren.

Mosset lives and works in Tucson, Arizona. Since his emergence in the 1960s with BMPT, he has exhibited extensively in museums worldwide. Recently he has been the subject of a solo exhibitions at Jean Paul Najar Foundation, Dubai, United Arab Emirates (2017); Hunter College Art Galleries, New York (2016); the Power Station, Dallas (2015); Musée regional d’art contemporain Languedoc-Roussilon à Sérignan, France (2013); and Kunsthalle Zürich (2012), among others. A retrospective of his work was presented at Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland, and Kunstverein St. Gallen Kunstmuseum, Switzerland (2003). Mosset’s work has been included in several group exhibitions, including Manifesta 10, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia (2014) and the Whitney Biennial (2008). The artist represented Switzerland in the 44th Venice Biennale (1990).

Bruno Munari (Italy, 1907–1998) described himself as an “artist, writer, inventor, designer, architect, and illustrator,” a list that is nowhere near exhaustive. Much of Munari’s work is characterized by a pedagogic interest and a radical vision of expanding humankind’s understanding of the world through the development of new forms of visual communication. Prolific in output throughout his life and tirelessly inventive, his work defied categorization and includes some of the earliest experiments in what Munari himself would term “programmed art,” as well as light art, installation art, projection-based art, and photocopy art. His experiments with the Xerox 914 Machine began in 1963 and would continue throughout his entire career.

The two examples here from 1968 and 1969 are documented in his seminal book Xerografia: Documentazione sull’uso creativo delle macchine Rank Xerox (Xerography: Documentation of the creative use of the machine Rank Xerox). Published in conjunction with Munari’s participation in the 1970 Venice Biennale, to which Munari contributed a Xerox machine to an experimental laboratory within the show, the book provides instructions on the many ways to subvert the commercial copier’s function to create original images and artworks. Ranging from abstract to figurative, Munari’s photocopy works distort the original subject as he moved images across the surface of the device for the duration of the scanning process.

Born in Milan, Munari spent most of his childhood in Badia Polesine, in the Italian region of Veneto. In 1925, at the age of 18, he returned to Milan, where he worked as a graphic designer with Riccardo Castagnedi (Ricas) (1930) and for Mondadori (1938–1943). It was during this period that he contributed propagandist collages to magazines as well as created sculptures and abstract geometrical works, while strengthening his love for writing and publishing. Throughout his work, Munari viewed technology as a democratizing force within art, citing the potential for an “art by all.” Munari exhibited extensively throughout his lifetime, including a two-person show with Alvin Lustig at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1955) and a solo exhibition at the Howard Wise Gallery, New York (1966). Munari also participated in major international exhibitions, such as Documenta 3 (1964) and Documenta 4 (1968), Kassel, Germany, and nine editions of the Venice Biennale.

Bruno Munari (Italy, 1907–1998) described himself as an “artist, writer, inventor, designer, architect, and illustrator,” a list that is nowhere near exhaustive. Much of Munari’s work is characterized by a pedagogic interest and a radical vision of expanding humankind’s understanding of the world through the development of new forms of visual communication. Prolific in output throughout his life and tirelessly inventive, his work defied categorization and includes some of the earliest experiments in what Munari himself would term “programmed art,” as well as light art, installation art, projection-based art, and photocopy art. His experiments with the Xerox 914 Machine began in 1963 and would continue throughout his entire career.

The two examples here from 1968 and 1969 are documented in his seminal book Xerografia: Documentazione sull’uso creativo delle macchine Rank Xerox (Xerography: Documentation of the creative use of the machine Rank Xerox). Published in conjunction with Munari’s participation in the 1970 Venice Biennale, to which Munari contributed a Xerox machine to an experimental laboratory within the show, the book provides instructions on the many ways to subvert the commercial copier’s function to create original images and artworks. Ranging from abstract to figurative, Munari’s photocopy works distort the original subject as he moved images across the surface of the device for the duration of the scanning process.

Born in Milan, Munari spent most of his childhood in Badia Polesine, in the Italian region of Veneto. In 1925, at the age of 18, he returned to Milan, where he worked as a graphic designer with Riccardo Castagnedi (Ricas) (1930) and for Mondadori (1938–1943). It was during this period that he contributed propagandist collages to magazines as well as created sculptures and abstract geometrical works, while strengthening his love for writing and publishing. Throughout his work, Munari viewed technology as a democratizing force within art, citing the potential for an “art by all.” Munari exhibited extensively throughout his lifetime, including a two-person show with Alvin Lustig at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1955) and a solo exhibition at the Howard Wise Gallery, New York (1966). Munari also participated in major international exhibitions, such as Documenta 3 (1964) and Documenta 4 (1968), Kassel, Germany, and nine editions of the Venice Biennale.

Teo Nguyen’s (US, b. Vietnam, 1977) meticulously detailed paintings focus on the sweeping vistas and roadsides of the rural Midwest and are inspired by impressions from his travels throughout the region. While his hyperrealistic landscapes appear to be based on photographs, many are in fact made from memory or from the artist’s sketches. His paintings capture the spaces in between civilizations—farms, fields, abandoned structures, and most of all, the vastness of land and sky. “As an immigrant and an artist,” he has said, “I have learned to embrace the American spirit of freedom that says if you see a road that interests you, go ahead: venture down it. Even so, I am always a stranger to what I see; always slightly outside, finding in what is ordinary to others something tender and strange.”

Nguyen lives and works in Minneapolis. He studied art and design at De Anza College, San Francisco; Fresno State University, California; and École des Beaux-Arts, Paris. His work has been shown in exhibitions at the Minnesota Museum of American Art, St. Paul, (2018); the Plains Art Museum, Fargo (2016); and the Soap Factory, Minneapolis (2008) and is in a number of public collections, including the Minneapolis Institute of Art; Weisman Museum, Minneapolis; Minnesota Museum of American Art, St. Paul; North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks, North Dakota; Minnesota History Center, St. Paul; and General Mills Corporate Collection, Minneapolis.

Paulina Olowska (Poland, b. 1976) has worked across performance, sculpture, painting, neon, and fashion to reappraise history and bring recognition to underappreciated artists. Her wide-ranging artworks result from her dedicated exploration of the historical avant-garde, traditional crafts, and experimental theater. Olowska’s fascination and acute understanding of history, particularly the modern artistic and design traditions in Poland and other former Soviet countries, has consistently influenced her work. In a 2016 series of paintings, she combines portraits of women from gardening magazines with elements from Slavic mythology and folklore.

At the heart of Olowska’s artistic practice is her collaborative work, lending a platform to her contemporaries who are underrepresented. Demonstrating the disjunction of time and cultural impermeability of Eastern Europe, Olowska’s multifaceted oeuvre establishes a dialogue with the past; she calls upon forms recognizable from multiple collective histories of modernism to adhere with an invented contemporary environment. Within her practice, industry, leisure, and socialist symbolism occupy the same visual and cultural space. Her realist paintings, drawings, and collages borrow imagery from Eastern European and American popular culture, creating a cross-cultural reference evident throughout her practice, while engaging with the concepts of consumerism, feminism, and design. The outward appearance of Olowska’s female subjects is equally as important as the historical memories interwoven seamlessly throughout her collages and paintings.

Born in Gdansk, Olowska lives and works in Rabka-Zdrój and Krakow, Poland. The artist has had solo exhibitions at Tate Modern, London (2015); Ludwig Forum for International, Aachen, Germany (2014); Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw (2014); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2014); and Kunsthalle Basel (2013). In January 2017, Olowska presented the ballet Slavic Goddesses—A Wreath of Ceremonies at the Kitchen, New York. Her new performative work will be premiered at the Walker as part of the exhibition The Paradox of Stillness: Art, Object, and Performance (2020).

Sylvia Plimack Mangold (US, b. 1938) lives and works in Washingtonville, New York. She was born in New York City and studied at Cooper Union and Yale University. The artist began exhibiting her paintings in the late 1960s and her work has been the subject of more than 30 solo exhibitions, including three museum surveys, each accompanied by a monograph, at Madison Art Center, Wisconsin (1982); Wesleyan University, Middleton, Connecticut, and University of Michigan (1992); and Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York (1994). The exhibition Solitaire (2008) was presented at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, and a solo show of Plimack Mangold’s work was shown at Alexander and Bonin, New York (2017)

Many of Plimack Mangold’s most significant paintings are held in museum collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Dallas Museum of Art; Detroit Institute of Art; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Indianapolis Museum of Art; Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City; Milwaukee Art Museum; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City; Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University; and Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland.

Pope.L (US, b. 1955) is a visual artist and educator whose multidisciplinary practice uses binaries, contraries, and preconceived notions embedded within contemporary culture, to create artworks in various formats, including writing, painting, performance, installation, video, and sculpture. Building upon his long history of enacting arduous, provocative, or absurdist performances and interventions in public spaces, Pope.L applies some of the same social, formal, and performative strategies to his interests in language, system, gender, race, and community.

Flint Water Project (2017) was an art installation, a performance, and an intervention that called attention to the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, by bottling contaminated Flint tap water and selling it as an edition at the gallery What Pipeline. During the exhibition, the art installation served as a store, a bottling demo, and an informal information center that provided folks with details about the city’s crisis and serious water issues happening in Detroit, the broader Midwest, and beyond.

Pope.L lives and works in Chicago. Recent exhibitions, performances, and projects have been presented at What Pipeline, Detroit (2017); La Panacee, Montpellier, France (2017); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2015); the Renaissance Society, Chicago (2013); the Art Institute of Chicago (2007); and Kunsthalle Wien (2006). He has participated in major art events such as documenta 14, Athens and Kassel (2017); Whitney Biennial (2017); and the São Paulo Biennial (2016); among others. In 2019, a solo exhibition will be jointly organized by Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Public Art Fund, New York. The Walker has hosted Pope.L’s performances and has acquired his works for the collection, which were included in recent exhibitions such as Less than One (2016) and I am you, you are too (now on view).

The sculptures of artist Kathleen Ryan (US, b. 1984) are visionary, conceptual, and metaphysical, investigating variations on the theme of the classic with pure form, order, virtuosity, and grandeur, while offering poetic and sober praise to the ancient Greek and Roman iconographies. With a bold and innovative manipulation of form and material, including jade, iron, quartz, brass, and granite, her works challenge gravity and appear light and fluctuating. Ryan’s best known works are made of bowling balls, which are often transformed into overscale necklaces or earrings. Names of former owners are inscribed on the surface of each ball, encapsulating an amorous absence between object and owner.

Ryan lives and works in New York. Solo exhibitions of her work have been mounted at the New Art Gallery, Walsall, UK (2019); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2019); CC Foundation, Shanghai (2018); Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (2017). She was one of the artists featured in the last edition of the Desert X, Desert Biennial, Coachella Valley, California (2019).

Multidisciplinary artist Carolee Schneemann (US, 1939–2019) transformed the definition of art, especially discourse on the body, sexuality, and gender. The history of her work is characterized by research into archaic visual traditions, pleasure wrested from suppressive taboos, and the body of the artist in dynamic relationship with the social body.

Schneemann lived and worked in New York. Her retrospective Kinetic Painting was organized by Museum der Moderne Salzburg, in cooperation with the MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main in 2016, and traveled to MoMA PS1, Long Island City in 2017. Other solo presentations have been organized by Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2014); MUSAC, Léon, Spain (2014); Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle (2011); and Center for Curatorial Studies Museum, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (2002), among others.

The photographs of Paul Mpagi Sepuya (US, b. 1982) “breathe new life into the genre of studio portraiture. He is known for staging elaborate scenes that include himself and others partially clothed against a backdrop of his other prints, stacks of books, and other commonplace items. ... In our era of selfie culture, Sepuya’s images reveal the subtle power dynamic of consenting to be photographed” (Hyperallergic). Sepuya became known for his zine series SHOOT (2005–2007) and first monograph Beloved Object & Amorous Subject, Revisited (2008), along with features in BUTT Magazine and involvement in the re-emergence of queer zines culture of the 2000s. He has participated in artist-in-residence programs at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Fire Island Artist Residency.

Sepuya lives and works in Los Angeles. He received a BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2004 and an MFA from UCLA in 2016. Sepuya’s work has been widely published and is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Guggenheim Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the International Center for Photography, New York; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Milwaukee Art Museum; and the Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh; among others. Solo exhibitions include Fotomuseum Amsterdam (2018); Document, Chicago (2018); team (bungalow), Los Angeles (2017); and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York ( 2017). His work was recently featured in group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and the New Museum, New York (2018). Sepuya’s first museum survey opens May 2019 at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.

Subverting the distinctions between abstraction and representation, Joel Shapiro (US, b. 1941) reconsiders the modern figurative tradition, creating abstract geometric sculpture that elicits a sense of movement and engages viewers’ physical and psychological relationships with space. In his recent investigations of the expressive possibility of form and color in space, the artist suspends painted wooden elements from the ceiling, wall, and floor, exploring the projection of thought into space without the constraint of architecture.

Shapiro lives and works in New York. His solo exhibitions where hosted at the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut (2018); Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (2017); Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2016); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2011); the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2001); the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (1999); the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1999); and Haus der Kunst, Munich, (1997), among many others. In 1995, the Walker Art Center presented Shapiro’s solo exhibition in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden.

The practice of Jim Shaw (US, b. 1952) spans a wide range of artistic media and visual imagery. Since the 1970s, Shaw has mined the detritus of American culture, finding inspiration for his artworks in comic books, pulp novels, rock albums, protest posters, thrift store paintings—his ever-growing collection of found artworks has been the subject of its own exhibition on several occasions—and advertisements. At the same time, he has consistently turned to his own life and, in particular, his unconscious, as a source of artistic creativity. Providing a blend of the personal, the commonplace, and the uncanny, Shaw’s works frequently place in dialogue images of friends and family members with world events, pop culture, and alternate realities. Often unfolding in long-term, narrative cycles, the works contain systems of cross-references and repetitions, which rework similar symbols and motifs, allowing a story-like thread to be perceived.

Shaw lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent exhibitions have been organized at the Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, East Lansing (2018); Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles (2017); the New Museum, New York (2016); MASS MoCA, West Adams, Massachusetts (2015); LACMA, Los Angeles (2012); BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK (2012); and CAPC, Musee de’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux, France (2010).

Through simple yet meaningful interventions with everyday objects, Gabriel Sierra (Colombia, b. 1975) presents viewers with an anthropological study of the language of architecture. His work evidences a keen interest in the social codes that govern our interaction with built environments, with a particular focus on how these norms can be changed or subverted through the manipulation of architectural dynamics.

This work is from a series of rectangles made of pressed straw and plaster, which pose as paintings and make reference to hay as a vernacular material for construction. As the artist describes: “I’m really interested in hay as a vernacular material used by humans to modify nature and adapt to the environment. There are several examples of vernacular architecture in which hay is used as a thermic and aural insulator. For example, during winter hay was spread through the floors of houses to create this insulating effect. It was also one of the first materials to be used as furniture filler and packing components to transport glass and porcelain. But really these pieces work as autonomous objects are metaphors of constructive processes which, in one way or another, ironize modernism.”

Sierra lives and works in Bogotá, Colombia. Recent solo exhibitions include Vienna Secession, Austria (2017); the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, (2015); SculptureCenter, New York (2015); Kunsthalle Zürich (2015); Peep-Hole Art Centre, Milan (2013); KADIST, San Francisco, (2012); Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil (CCBB), São Paulo, Brazil (2012); CAC Brétigny, France (2006).

The work of Gary Simmons (US, b. 1964) explores racial, social, and cultural politics, interrogating the ways in which we attempt to reconstruct the past via personal and collective memory. Central to his practice is the act of erasure. In his “erasure drawings,” the artist uses his hands to blur white chalk on pigmented panels or in situ wall installations, leaving a spectral residue that evokes a sense of loss while simultaneously conveying the power of memory. By expunging only fragments of images or text, Simmons demonstrates the impossibility of eradicating racial and cultural stereotypes from our shared conscience. Inaugurated in the early 1990s, the series has expanded to include works on paper, painted canvas, and murals, all of which mimic the effect of smudged chalk.

Mining the iconography of American popular culture, Simmons’s work often takes its subjects from cartoons, films, pedagogical settings, or musical sources that identify with the legacy of racial hierarchies. His early sculpture powerfully invoked symbols of racial oppression, including the white hoods and nooses associated with the Ku Klux Klan. The politics of racial identity are a principal focus of the artist’s practice. His work is fundamentally occupied by the unfixed nature of a past that remains open to the vagaries of memory, and its role in the construction of the character of contemporary America. He notes, “I am concerned with figuring absence, with negotiating between the static vocabulary of race, gender, and class stereotype and the invisibility of the dimension of human history in the objects I create.”

Simmons lives and works in Los Angeles. He has had solo shows at the Drawing Center, New York (2016); the Perez Art Museum, Miami (2014); Museum of Modern Art of Fort Worth, Texas (2013); Bohen Foundation, New York (2006); Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2002); Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2002); St. Louis Art Museum (1999); Kunsthaus Zürich (1997); Lannan Foundation, Los Angeles (1995); the Fabric Workshop/Museum, Philadelphia (1995); and the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC (1994).

Josh Smith (US, b. 1976) is a painter who also works with collage, sculpture, printmaking, and artist books. He first became known in the early 2000s for a series of canvases depicting his own name, a motif that allowed him to experiment freely with abstraction and figuration and the expressive possibilities of painting. His work has since given way to monochromes, gestural abstractions, and varied imagery, including leaves, fish, skeletons, palettes, ghosts, reapers, and palm trees—as demonstrated in the prints. Upending the conventions of painting while simultaneously commanding a deep awareness of its history, Smith’s art is a celebratory and prolific project of experimentation and refinement. His work is in many ways defined by the artist’s relentless and multifaceted productivity, which is reflected in particular in his embrace of print media. Each print, monotype, or artist book does not function as an endpoint, but rather as a stage in an ongoing and heterogeneous process of image production, in which motifs and materials are recycled, refined, and reimagined through a variety of processes.

Smith lives and works in New York. His work has been presented in numerous solo exhibitions in the United States and abroad, including at the Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, Germany (2016); Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma, Rome (2015); the Zabludowicz Collection, London (2013); the Brant Foundation Art Study Center, Greenwich, Connecticut (2011); Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, Geneva (2009); De Hallen Haarlem, Haarlem, the Netherlands (2009); Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (mumok), Vienna (2008); and SculptureCenter, New York (2004).

Alec Soth’s (US, b. 1969) work is rooted in the distinctly American tradition of “on-the-road photography” developed by Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Stephen Shore. From Huckleberry Finn to Easy Rider, there seems to be a uniquely American desire to travel and chronicle the adventures that consequently ensue. He has received fellowships from the McKnight, Bush, and Jerome Foundations and was the recipient of the 2003 Santa Fe Prize for Photography.

Soth has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including the 2004 Whitney and São Paulo Biennials. In 2008, a large survey exhibition of Soth’s work was exhibited at Jeu de Paume in Paris and Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland. In 2010, the Walker Art Center produced a large survey exhibition of Soth’s work entitled From Here to There: Alex Soth’s America. Soth’s first monograph, Sleeping by the Mississippi, was published by Steidl in 2004 to critical acclaim. Since then Soth has published NIAGARA (2006), Fashion Magazine (2007), Dog Days, Bogota (2007), The Last Days of W (2008), and Broken Manual (2010). In 2008 Soth started his own publishing company, Little Brown Mushroom. The artist is a member of Magnum Photos and is represented by Weinstein Hammons Gallery, Minneapolis.

From mundane objects and materials such as Venetian blinds, theatrical and decorative lights, infrared heaters, scent emitters, and fans, Haegue Yang (Korea, b. 1971) creates complex and nuanced installations that are informed by poetry, politics, and human emotions. In her work, Yang seeks to communicate without language in a primordial and visual way. She often complements her vocabulary of visual abstraction with sensory experiences that include scent, sound, light, and tactility. Combining industrial fabrication and folk craftsmanship, Yang’s visual language extends across various media (from paper collage to staged theater pieces and performative sculptures) and materials (clothing racks, synthetic straw, bells, and graph paper) that are torn, lacquered, woven, lit, and hung.

The ever-evolving graphic series Trustworthies (ongoing since 2010), a large and rich category of Yang’s oeuvre, originated with the artist’s chance discovery of the amazing variety of the security patterns that are printed inside envelopes to keep their contents confidential. Inspired by the aesthetic and conceptual potential of these patterns, Yang began collaging them into geometric compositions: abstract landscapes of simple horizontal lines, at first, which over time have grown into increasingly complex compositions—waves, refractions, windmills, x-shaped or interwoven forms, and kaleidoscopes—incorporating a wide range of materials, like origami paper, sandpaper, holographic paper, and graph paper. They have even amplified on a large scale to become murals.

Yang lives and works Berlin and Seoul. In 2018 she was awarded the prestigious Wolfgang Hahn prize, which was accompanied by a survey solo exhibition at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne (also 2018). She has an upcoming solo show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2019). Other recent solo exhibitions include Kunsthaus Graz, Austria (2018); Zentrum für zeitgenössiche Kunst, Berlin (2017); Kunsthaus Graz, Austria (2017); Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany (2016); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2016); Greene Naftali, New York (2016); Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2015), Glasgow Sculpture Studios, Scotland (2013); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2013); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2012); Aspen Art Museum, Colorado, (2011); New Museum, New York (2010); and Korean Pavilion, 53rd Venice Biennale (2009). She also participated in the 2008 Turin Triennale, 55th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2008), and the 2006 São Paulo Biennial. The Walker’s 2007 exhibition Brave New Worlds was Yang’s first US exhibition. Her work is in the collections of Bristol Museums, Galleries & Archives, United Kingdom; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; M+, Hong Kong; Museum Ludgwig, Cologne; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.