The Girl Next Door (2019) is among Sheralds series of large canvases © Amy Sherald Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Photo: Joseph Hyde
New Yorks gallery season kicked off with a bang in September, with Pace opening the doors of its new eight-storey space on West 25th Street. The artists Torkwase Dyson, Loie Hollowell and Yto Barrada were in attendance as the gallerys founder, Arne Glimcher, spoke to the overflowing room beneath Fred Wilsons glorious chandeliers: “The plan was that at the top of the pyramid was the artist… I wanted the artists to be the stars.”
Five floors below, the star was Hollowell, one of the youngest artists on the gallerys roster, with her first solo exhibition in New York. Hollowell has boldly defied the idea that women cant be artists and mothers by creating an entire body of work while she was pregnant with her son. Seemingly abstract yet filled with innuendo, in one canvas, a red leaf shape could be an open vagina, ready to bring life into the world. In another, blue half-circles are attached to curved lines, evoking milk as it comes out of the breast.
Among the best New York shows is the photographer Mitch Epsteins solo exhibition at Sikkema Jenkins. At the entrance of the gallery, Epstein has presented a deliberate portrait of America in crisis. Visitors are hit from across the room by a large-format photograph of an upside down American flag—a signal of distress in the US military—against a blue sky. The banner was raised by veterans who travelled to Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in 2017 to join protests against construction of an oil pipeline that was given the green light by President Donald Trump. The Sioux see the pipeline as a threat to their water supply and ancient burial grounds.
Loie Hollowell, Standing in Light, 2018, Courtesy Loie Hollowell and Pace Gallery
In another photograph, five members of the Sioux tribe march against stark white snow and grey sky in a prayer walk. Across from that image is a photograph of a frail old woman, resting her head on her hand as she grasps a column of the wall that divides Nogales, Arizona, and Mexico. Magnificent landscape photographs on view depict an America untainted—the cactuses that inhabit the pristine Sonoran Desert in Arizona or the Blue Mesa in Petrified Forest National Park. The assembled throng had to confront questions posed by the pictures, like: Whose land is this—the people who lived there long before colonisation, or those who pushed them out and now marginalise them?”
Over at Hauser & Wirth, Amy Sherald, who made everyone sit up last year with her Michelle Obama portrait, unveiled her inaugural solo show. Inspired by the author bell hookss book Salvation, the exhibition title the heart of the matter… also invokes Sheralds heart trouble before she had transplant surgery in 2012. “Its an exploration of myseRead More – Source
