Tag: artist

Spanish powerhouse Alzueta Gallery has announced its first location outside of Spain, where it operates four locations in Barcelona, Madrid, and Casavells. The new gallery is located in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood in Paris, just one block from the Seine.

On April 3rd, the Paris gallery will be inaugurated with the gallery’s new “Tête à Tête” exhibition series. The gallery describes this program as a “Dual Dialogue” exhibition series, which features pairs of artists invited to explore and discuss their creative processes and methodologies, allowing their works to interact, bringing both contrast and harmony. This initiative is exclusive to the Paris location and will highlight diverse artists.

The initial opening exhibition will feature Barcelona-born sculptor Luis Vidal and Spanish artist Xevi Solà Serra, running from April 3rd to 30th. Vidal’s ceramics are characterized by unsettling juxtapositions, and occasionally include an animal head on top of a colorful vessel. A selection of Vidal’s work will be in conversation with Serra’s figurative oil paintings.

The inaugural two-person exhibition will be followed by a further “Grand Opening” exhibition, which will be part of the same series. This show will feature the works of Spanish painter Hugo Alonso and Finnish sculptor Kim Simonsson. Alonso is known for his monochromatic, photorealistic acrylic paintings, often portrayed in a hazy, warped style. These will be paired with Simonsson’s figurative, fairytale sculptures of children in lime green ceramic and other media. This show will run from May 7th to May 31st.

Founded by Miqual Alzueta in Barcelona, the gallery has a long history in the Spanish gallery scene, operating for more than 25 years. Coinciding with the inaugural show this week, the gallery is presenting a group presentation featuring Bruno Ollé, Manolo Ballesteros, and Imi Knoebel at Art Paris.

Spanish powerhouse Alzueta Gallery has announced its first location outside of Spain, where it operates four locations in Barcelona, Madrid, and Casavells. The new gallery is located in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood in Paris, just one block from the Seine.

On April 3rd, the Paris gallery will be inaugurated with the gallery’s new “Tête à Tête” exhibition series. The gallery describes this program as a “Dual Dialogue” exhibition series, which features pairs of artists invited to explore and discuss their creative processes and methodologies, allowing their works to interact, bringing both contrast and harmony. This initiative is exclusive to the Paris location and will highlight diverse artists.

The initial opening exhibition will feature Barcelona-born sculptor Luis Vidal and Spanish artist Xevi Solà Serra, running from April 3rd to 30th. Vidal’s ceramics are characterized by unsettling juxtapositions, and occasionally include an animal head on top of a colorful vessel. A selection of Vidal’s work will be in conversation with Serra’s figurative oil paintings.

The inaugural two-person exhibition will be followed by a further “Grand Opening” exhibition, which will be part of the same series. This show will feature the works of Spanish painter Hugo Alonso and Finnish sculptor Kim Simonsson. Alonso is known for his monochromatic, photorealistic acrylic paintings, often portrayed in a hazy, warped style. These will be paired with Simonsson’s figurative, fairytale sculptures of children in lime green ceramic and other media. This show will run from May 7th to May 31st.

Founded by Miqual Alzueta in Barcelona, the gallery has a long history in the Spanish gallery scene, operating for more than 25 years. Coinciding with the inaugural show this week, the gallery is presenting a group presentation featuring Bruno Ollé, Manolo Ballesteros, and Imi Knoebel at Art Paris.

In his paintings and pastels, the artist-activist turned to symbolism, metaphor, and memory to convey a world where savagery and distress are rampant.

This exhibition of works from the Neumann family collection takes a unique approach, bringing University of Pennsylvania art students into the curatorial process.

Paddy Cohn’s cloud-gazing, Cathy Wysocki’s unforgettable remembrance, an autobiographical group show, and much more.

There was very little uplifting art world news in the fall of 2020. However, the release of USPS Forever stamps honoring Japanese American artist Ruth Asawa was one celebratory occasion. Close-up photographs of her diaphanous, gravity-defying loop wire sculptures graced a series of ten stamps. Not only was the postage beautiful, but the occasion inspired renewed interest in the pioneering artist, leading to widespread recognition of her enduring contributions to art seven years after her death. She’s since received the National Medal of Arts and been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including “Ruth Asawa Through Line” at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 2022, her biomorphic wire forms were showcased in “The Milk of Dreams” at the 59th Venice Biennale.

Born in 1926, Asawa, along with her parents and six siblings, was confined to Japanese internment camps in California and Arkansas during World War II. There, she learned to draw with both hands, using whatever media she could find. The experience afforded the young artist an anti-hierarchical approach to materials that she maintained throughout her career. Asawa believed her lines could “go anywhere.” They led her from finely limned sketches, calligraphic ink paintings, and patterned, geometric abstractions, to her signature tied- and looped-wire hanging sculptures. While she is best known for her voluminous, cascading lobed forms, Asawa never stopped drawing—the medium she described as both “the greatest pleasure and the most difficult.”

Desert Plant (TAM.1560, From the Portfolio Flowers (Tied-Wire Sculpture Drawing with Six-Pointed Star Center)), 1965
Ruth Asawa

David Zwirner

Both Asawa’s drawings and sculptures borrow from natural forms like spiraled snail shells, latticed insect wings, spider webs, and light refracting through morning dew. No matter the material, her work is consistently characterized by meticulous detail, repetition, and a sense of levity that defies common perceptions of weight and gravity. “An artist is not special. An artist is an ordinary person who can take ordinary things and make them special,” Asawa once said.

The artist’s first posthumous survey, “Ruth Asawa: Retrospective,” opening at The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on April 4th, gathers more than 300 works that span her six-decade career. The presentation traces Asawa’s career from her illustrations, to her sculptures, and back again, illuminating her enduring influence on artists across media and movements.

Here are six contemporary artists Ruth Asawa enthusiasts should follow.

Mari Andrews

B. 1955, Dayton, Ohio. Lives and works in Emeryville, California.

Aquatic, 2022
Mari Andrews

Maya Frodeman Gallery

Copper Mitosis, 2019
Mari Andrews

Maya Frodeman Gallery

Mari Andrews considers her ethereal sculptures “three-dimensional drawings” that continue her lifelong drawing practice. Composed of steel wire, metal panels, branches, and various found objects like pine cones and honeycombs, they visualize the artist’s enduring relationship with nature’s overlooked forms and materials. These lyrical abstractions combine elemental shapes in novel configurations that simultaneously register as ancient and contemporary. Similar to Asawa’s suspended lobes, Andrews’s sculptures cast shadows as vivid as holograms that oscillate along with the light throughout the day. In this way, both artists set static objects in motion, imbuing matter with the capacity for continuous transformation.

Andrews earned her BFA from the University of Dayton, Ohio, and her MFA from Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. She has been awarded an NEA Fellowship and several residencies, including the Djerassi Resident Artist Program in Woodside, California, and the Cold Press Gallery in Norfolk. Her work is held in the collections of the de Young Museum in San Francisco, the San Jose Museum of Art, and she is represented by Maya Frodeman Gallery.

Nnenna Okore

B. 1975, Australia. Lives and works in Chicago.

Things that meet the eye, 2017
Nnenna Okore

October Gallery

Raised in Nigeria and now living in the United States, Nnenna Okore converts organic materials into mesmerizing, vibrantly colored sculptures. In these works, Okore turns ethically sourced burlap, paper, jute rope, and bioplastics into three-dimensional gestures that appear to burst from the wall. The intricately sewn, richly textured shapes unfurl and intertwine like root systems, capillaries, or flowering vines. Through her use of natural materials and forms, the artist hopes to draw attention to conservatism and sustainability. Like Asawa, Okore relies on iterative, labor-intensive techniques in her practice, such as tying, twisting, teasing, and weaving. Both artists represent nature’s cyclical processes by creating forms that appear to have no end, looping back in on themselves and beginning again.

Okore has a BA from the University of Nigeria in Nsukka, an MA and MFA from the University of Iowa, and a PhD from Monash University in Melbourne. She is a professor and the head of the Art Department at Chicago’s North Park University. Her work has been featured in several major exhibitions such as “Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary,” at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; “We Face Forward,” at Manchester Art Gallery, U.K., and “Africa Africans,” at Museu Afro Brasil, São Paulo.

Marcy Chevali

B. 1982, Cleveland, Ohio. Lives and works in New York.

Venae Cavae, 2022
Marcy Chevali

Aicon Contemporary

Circumference V, 2019
Marcy Chevali

Aicon Contemporary

Instead of renouncing the feminine connotations traditionally assigned to craft techniques, Marcy Chevali embraces the textile practices once dismissed as “women’s work.” By applying processes borrowed from knitting and weaving to lampworking and wire-tying, she creates enthralling, biomorphic-shaped nets that are freestanding or suspended from the ceiling. These illusory glass and wire grids reinterpret delicacy as complexity and fragility as strength. Chevali, like Asawa, is interested in permeability and creating boundaries that visually expand and contract. While her webs define and demarcate space, they don’t obstruct it, making it possible to see through them from every angle. For both artists, freedom is a formal and political ideal.

Marcy Chevali has a BFA from the University of Ohio, and an MFA from the Maine College of Art. Her work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, among others. She won a Ron Desmett Memorial Award for Imagination with Glass from Pittsburgh Glass Center and has received grants from the Queens Council of the Arts and FST Studio Projects.

Gjertrud Hals

B. 1948, Finnøy Island, Norway. Lives and works in Molde, Norway.

Terra 8, 2021
Gjertrud Hals

browngrotta arts

Eir, 2019
Gjertrud Hals

Galerie Maria Wettergren

Inspired by her childhood on a tiny island on the northwest coast of Norway, Gjertrud Hals crafts sculptures that entwine the story of her hometown with the history of the world, braiding personal narratives with social mythologies. Hals’s formal training as a tapestry weaver is evidenced by her signature netted vessels and hanging sculptures that recall crochet lace, traditional basketry, and fishermen’s nets. After transitioning from textiles to fiber in the late 1980s, she began spinning and casting her signature forms from cotton and paper pulp. These womblike, volumetric shapes echo Asawa’s aesthetic vocabulary of transparency and negative space, suggesting a similar ethereal weightlessness.

Hals studied at the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art among other institutions. Her work is in collections such as Zentrum Architektur Zürich; Museum of Decorative Art, Lausanne; the National Museum of Oslo, and the National Museum of Decorative Arts, Trondheim.

Naomi Wanjiku Gakunga

B. 1960, Gacharage, Kenya. Lives and works in San Antonio.

First Fruits, 2011
Naomi Wanjiku Gakunga

October Gallery

Mizigo – Burdens, 2014-2016
Naomi Wanjiku Gakunga

October Gallery

A trip to Mexico at 21 introduced Asawa to basket weaving—an experience that transformed her artistic practice. Kenyan artist Naomi Wanjiku Gakunga, however, learned the craft from watching her grandmother fashion baskets from fibers native to their village. Today, Gakunga blends traditional materials like the rope her grandmother spun from migiyo shrubs with unexpected elements like steel wire and mabati, a galvanized sheet metal used for roofing. Her metallic, crocheted wall-hangings emulate the pliancy and airy lightness most often attributed to textiles. While some recall tapestries and gossamer curtains, others seem to fall like lace or float like the hem of a dancer’s skirt. In her basket-inspired series, Gakunga interlaces wire with patterned fabrics and brilliant yarns to create amorphous vessels with striking, contemporary proportions.

Gakunga studied at the University of Nairobi in Kenya and the University of California, Los Angeles. Her work has been included in exhibitions in the U.S., U.K., France, Brazil, and Poland. In 2013, October Gallery presented her first solo exhibition entitled “Ituĩka – Transformation.” In 2021, Gakunga’s sculpture, Wetereire – Waiting (2016), won the Charles Wollaston Award at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.

Chiharu Shiota

B. 1972, Osaka. Lives and works in Berlin.

Trauma, 2010
Chiharu Shiota

Curator Style

State of Being, 2023
Chiharu Shiota

KÖNIG GALERIE

Since the mid-’90s Chiharu Shiota has been creating immersive installations that envelop everyday objects and architectural spaces in red, wool yarn and black thread. Her chaotic, cocoon-like environments visualize the invisible interconnections that bind all things. Shiota shares Asawa’s interest in representing absence. However, whereas Asawa uses abstracted forms and geometric shapes, Shiota employs human artifacts—like beds, suitcases, and children’s toys. The similarities between the two artists’ aesthetics are clearest in their illustrations. Both women are preoccupied with radiating spirals, interlocking circles, and complex, quadratic patterns. In Shiota’s densely packed lines, much like her thickets of crisscrossing strings, she suggests the unlimited entangled possibilities that life presents.

Shiota studied painting at Kyoto Seika University, Japan. She moved to Germany in 1996 and continued her studies in Braunschweig, then later in Berlin, where she lives today. She has received notable prizes, including the Philip Morris K.K. Art Award and the Audience Choice Award at The First Kyiv International Biennale of Contemporary Art. Her museum exhibitions include MoMA PS1, National Museum of Art in Osaka, and the private foundation La Maison Rouge in Paris, among others.

There was very little uplifting art world news in the fall of 2020. However, the release of USPS Forever stamps honoring Japanese American artist Ruth Asawa was one celebratory occasion. Close-up photographs of her diaphanous, gravity-defying loop wire sculptures graced a series of ten stamps. Not only was the postage beautiful, but the occasion inspired renewed interest in the pioneering artist, leading to widespread recognition of her enduring contributions to art seven years after her death. She’s since received the National Medal of Arts and been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including “Ruth Asawa Through Line” at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 2022, her biomorphic wire forms were showcased in “The Milk of Dreams” at the 59th Venice Biennale.

Born in 1926, Asawa, along with her parents and six siblings, was confined to Japanese internment camps in California and Arkansas during World War II. There, she learned to draw with both hands, using whatever media she could find. The experience afforded the young artist an anti-hierarchical approach to materials that she maintained throughout her career. Asawa believed her lines could “go anywhere.” They led her from finely limned sketches, calligraphic ink paintings, and patterned, geometric abstractions, to her signature tied- and looped-wire hanging sculptures. While she is best known for her voluminous, cascading lobed forms, Asawa never stopped drawing—the medium she described as both “the greatest pleasure and the most difficult.”

Desert Plant (TAM.1560, From the Portfolio Flowers (Tied-Wire Sculpture Drawing with Six-Pointed Star Center)), 1965
Ruth Asawa

David Zwirner

Both Asawa’s drawings and sculptures borrow from natural forms like spiraled snail shells, latticed insect wings, spider webs, and light refracting through morning dew. No matter the material, her work is consistently characterized by meticulous detail, repetition, and a sense of levity that defies common perceptions of weight and gravity. “An artist is not special. An artist is an ordinary person who can take ordinary things and make them special,” Asawa once said.

The artist’s first posthumous survey, “Ruth Asawa: Retrospective,” opening at The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on April 4th, gathers more than 300 works that span her six-decade career. The presentation traces Asawa’s career from her illustrations, to her sculptures, and back again, illuminating her enduring influence on artists across media and movements.

Here are six contemporary artists Ruth Asawa enthusiasts should follow.

Mari Andrews

B. 1955, Dayton, Ohio. Lives and works in Emeryville, California.

Aquatic, 2022
Mari Andrews

Maya Frodeman Gallery

Copper Mitosis, 2019
Mari Andrews

Maya Frodeman Gallery

Mari Andrews considers her ethereal sculptures “three-dimensional drawings” that continue her lifelong drawing practice. Composed of steel wire, metal panels, branches, and various found objects like pine cones and honeycombs, they visualize the artist’s enduring relationship with nature’s overlooked forms and materials. These lyrical abstractions combine elemental shapes in novel configurations that simultaneously register as ancient and contemporary. Similar to Asawa’s suspended lobes, Andrews’s sculptures cast shadows as vivid as holograms that oscillate along with the light throughout the day. In this way, both artists set static objects in motion, imbuing matter with the capacity for continuous transformation.

Andrews earned her BFA from the University of Dayton, Ohio, and her MFA from Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. She has been awarded an NEA Fellowship and several residencies, including the Djerassi Resident Artist Program in Woodside, California, and the Cold Press Gallery in Norfolk. Her work is held in the collections of the de Young Museum in San Francisco, the San Jose Museum of Art, and she is represented by Maya Frodeman Gallery.

Nnenna Okore

B. 1975, Australia. Lives and works in Chicago.

Things that meet the eye, 2017
Nnenna Okore

October Gallery

Raised in Nigeria and now living in the United States, Nnenna Okore converts organic materials into mesmerizing, vibrantly colored sculptures. In these works, Okore turns ethically sourced burlap, paper, jute rope, and bioplastics into three-dimensional gestures that appear to burst from the wall. The intricately sewn, richly textured shapes unfurl and intertwine like root systems, capillaries, or flowering vines. Through her use of natural materials and forms, the artist hopes to draw attention to conservatism and sustainability. Like Asawa, Okore relies on iterative, labor-intensive techniques in her practice, such as tying, twisting, teasing, and weaving. Both artists represent nature’s cyclical processes by creating forms that appear to have no end, looping back in on themselves and beginning again.

Okore has a BA from the University of Nigeria in Nsukka, an MA and MFA from the University of Iowa, and a PhD from Monash University in Melbourne. She is a professor and the head of the Art Department at Chicago’s North Park University. Her work has been featured in several major exhibitions such as “Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary,” at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; “We Face Forward,” at Manchester Art Gallery, U.K., and “Africa Africans,” at Museu Afro Brasil, São Paulo.

Marcy Chevali

B. 1982, Cleveland, Ohio. Lives and works in New York.

Venae Cavae, 2022
Marcy Chevali

Aicon Contemporary

Circumference V, 2019
Marcy Chevali

Aicon Contemporary

Instead of renouncing the feminine connotations traditionally assigned to craft techniques, Marcy Chevali embraces the textile practices once dismissed as “women’s work.” By applying processes borrowed from knitting and weaving to lampworking and wire-tying, she creates enthralling, biomorphic-shaped nets that are freestanding or suspended from the ceiling. These illusory glass and wire grids reinterpret delicacy as complexity and fragility as strength. Chevali, like Asawa, is interested in permeability and creating boundaries that visually expand and contract. While her webs define and demarcate space, they don’t obstruct it, making it possible to see through them from every angle. For both artists, freedom is a formal and political ideal.

Marcy Chevali has a BFA from the University of Ohio, and an MFA from the Maine College of Art. Her work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, among others. She won a Ron Desmett Memorial Award for Imagination with Glass from Pittsburgh Glass Center and has received grants from the Queens Council of the Arts and FST Studio Projects.

Gjertrud Hals

B. 1948, Finnøy Island, Norway. Lives and works in Molde, Norway.

Terra 8, 2021
Gjertrud Hals

browngrotta arts

Eir, 2019
Gjertrud Hals

Galerie Maria Wettergren

Inspired by her childhood on a tiny island on the northwest coast of Norway, Gjertrud Hals crafts sculptures that entwine the story of her hometown with the history of the world, braiding personal narratives with social mythologies. Hals’s formal training as a tapestry weaver is evidenced by her signature netted vessels and hanging sculptures that recall crochet lace, traditional basketry, and fishermen’s nets. After transitioning from textiles to fiber in the late 1980s, she began spinning and casting her signature forms from cotton and paper pulp. These womblike, volumetric shapes echo Asawa’s aesthetic vocabulary of transparency and negative space, suggesting a similar ethereal weightlessness.

Hals studied at the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art among other institutions. Her work is in collections such as Zentrum Architektur Zürich; Museum of Decorative Art, Lausanne; the National Museum of Oslo, and the National Museum of Decorative Arts, Trondheim.

Naomi Wanjiku Gakunga

B. 1960, Gacharage, Kenya. Lives and works in San Antonio.

First Fruits, 2011
Naomi Wanjiku Gakunga

October Gallery

Mizigo – Burdens, 2014-2016
Naomi Wanjiku Gakunga

October Gallery

A trip to Mexico at 21 introduced Asawa to basket weaving—an experience that transformed her artistic practice. Kenyan artist Naomi Wanjiku Gakunga, however, learned the craft from watching her grandmother fashion baskets from fibers native to their village. Today, Gakunga blends traditional materials like the rope her grandmother spun from migiyo shrubs with unexpected elements like steel wire and mabati, a galvanized sheet metal used for roofing. Her metallic, crocheted wall-hangings emulate the pliancy and airy lightness most often attributed to textiles. While some recall tapestries and gossamer curtains, others seem to fall like lace or float like the hem of a dancer’s skirt. In her basket-inspired series, Gakunga interlaces wire with patterned fabrics and brilliant yarns to create amorphous vessels with striking, contemporary proportions.

Gakunga studied at the University of Nairobi in Kenya and the University of California, Los Angeles. Her work has been included in exhibitions in the U.S., U.K., France, Brazil, and Poland. In 2013, October Gallery presented her first solo exhibition entitled “Ituĩka – Transformation.” In 2021, Gakunga’s sculpture, Wetereire – Waiting (2016), won the Charles Wollaston Award at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.

Chiharu Shiota

B. 1972, Osaka. Lives and works in Berlin.

Trauma, 2010
Chiharu Shiota

Curator Style

State of Being, 2023
Chiharu Shiota

KÖNIG GALERIE

Since the mid-’90s Chiharu Shiota has been creating immersive installations that envelop everyday objects and architectural spaces in red, wool yarn and black thread. Her chaotic, cocoon-like environments visualize the invisible interconnections that bind all things. Shiota shares Asawa’s interest in representing absence. However, whereas Asawa uses abstracted forms and geometric shapes, Shiota employs human artifacts—like beds, suitcases, and children’s toys. The similarities between the two artists’ aesthetics are clearest in their illustrations. Both women are preoccupied with radiating spirals, interlocking circles, and complex, quadratic patterns. In Shiota’s densely packed lines, much like her thickets of crisscrossing strings, she suggests the unlimited entangled possibilities that life presents.

Shiota studied painting at Kyoto Seika University, Japan. She moved to Germany in 1996 and continued her studies in Braunschweig, then later in Berlin, where she lives today. She has received notable prizes, including the Philip Morris K.K. Art Award and the Audience Choice Award at The First Kyiv International Biennale of Contemporary Art. Her museum exhibitions include MoMA PS1, National Museum of Art in Osaka, and the private foundation La Maison Rouge in Paris, among others.