David Nolan Gallery

In fact, the more mundane the object, it seems, the more appealing it was as fodder for Artschwager's fertile imagination, and none were more banal than the six - Door, Window, Table, Basket, Mirror, Rug - that together ignited a multi-decade obsession beginning in the 1970s. His Six Objects series, highlighting these staples of the everyday, began in the early 1970s and became a central vocabulary in Artschwager's drawing, sculpture, and painting until the end of his career. Through drawings, paintings, objects and multiples, he generated hundreds of permutations of these domestic objects, variously exaggerating perspective, surface, and scale to often surreal and comic effect. Artschwager's highest devotion, perhaps, was not to art but to the art of looking, and looking long enough to see the world as it is: strange, weird, funny, and wonderfully confounding.

Richard Artschwager has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Artschwager's work is held in public collections such as The Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Tate Modern, London; Tate Britain, London; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Detroit Institute of Arts; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

 The work of Enrico Baj encompasses Dada and Surrealism and masterfully subverts mainstream artistic conventions. The work is seriously political, but also absurd, in sympathy with peers like Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and Francis Picabia. With a passion for the eccentric and a strong iconoclastic impulse, Baj was one of the central figures of the Italian Neo-Avant-Garde. Born in Milan, his art and writings played an instrumental role in influential movements, from Dada and Surrealism to Art Informel and CoBrA, as well as the Nuclear Art movement, which he cofounded in 1951. 

Heir to the Surrealist-Dadaist spirit, and an experimenter in original styles and techniques, Baj departed from gestural abstraction in the mid-1950s and honed an idiosyncratic iconography for his paintings, drawings, collages, objects, and sculptures, defiantly embracing figuration and kitsch symbols and subverting conventions. He used so-called low-brow, everyday detritus objects to infuse his surfaces and content with sophistication.

Ever since his participation in the Venice Biennale in 1964, Baj's art has been exhibited in all the major European museums and frequently in the United States since 1960. Baj will have an upcoming retrospective celebrating his centennial at the Palazzo Reale, Milan.  Baj's work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX; among others.

 An ideologically committed painter, George Grosz started out as a caricature artist with a socially critical style that became more mordant as a result of the traumatic experience of World War I. Driven by his disillusionment with the society that surrounded him, he joined the Berlin Dadaist group and became the foremost practitioner of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). During the 1920s, Grosz's artistic style expressed his disgust with postwar Germany. The modern metropolis became the recurring theme of his work and, like a contemporary Bosch with an incisive critical tone and keen sense of observation, he captured his surrounding environment in works with a moralizing intent. He was perhaps the artist who provided the most reliable chronicle of Weimar Republic Germany. 

Grosz's fame began to spread internationally and he was soon hailed as one of the leading German artists. He was invited to be a guest lecturer at the New York Art Students League in 1932. Following the advent to power of the National Socialist party in Germany, he settled permanently in the United States in 1933. During his American years, Grosz created landscapes, nudes, and highly political works he called "images of hell." In these works, Grosz gave up beauty for the sake of drastic imagery, conjuring up the end of civilization. He reacted with artistic rage to the torture and murder of his old friend Erich Mühsam by the Nazis and to the stories told by the writer Hans Borchardt after his release from a concentration camp. The longed-for end of the war brought with it the recognition that humanity was threatened with a nuclear apocalypse. The Stickmen, post-nuclear creatures without bodies, was Grosz's last major group of works, culminating in the haunting Painter of the Hole (1947). He bade farewell to America with a group of collages, a joyful return to a technique of the Berlin years: "You stay Dada all your life," he remarked. Grosz died in July 1959, only a few months after returning to Berlin.

The Das Kleine Grosz Museum in Berlin is solely dedicated to Grosz's life and work. Solo exhibitions of Grosz's work have taken place at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, NY; Dallas Museum of Art, TX; Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Germany; Broehan Museum, Berlin; and The Arts Club of Chicago, among others.

 David Hartt creates sensitive and concise portraits of contemporary societies, exploring how historic ideas and ideals persist or transform over time. His art is based on extensive historical research, connecting the past to the present through themes of race, culture, identity, and migration. For him, “place” is a way to investigate community, narrative, ideologies, and the intersection of private and public life. The subjects and stories of his oeuvre are presented through many media, including video, photography, architecture, music, and sculpture. For many years, Hartt has utilized photography to produce monumental tapestries of great visual and surface complexity. His truly unique sense of photography allows him to deftly investigate social and cultural situations and create site-specific installations that draw from the idiosyncrasies and histories of their locations. Hartt’s juxtapositions of 19th- and 20th- century environments question what it means to live on our planet and share a common history.

David Hartt has had solo exhibitions at the Olana State Historic Site, Hudson, NY; Cincinnati Art Museum, OH; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles;  Glass House, New Canaan, CT; Art Institute of Chicago;  Graham Foundation, Chicago;  Art Institute of Chicago; LAXART, Los Angeles; and Or Gallery, Vancouver. His work is in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Jewish Museum, New York; The Studio Museum in  Harlem, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; The Cincinnati Art Museum, OH; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA; The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Hartt lives and works in Philadelphia.

 Over the course of five decades, Mel Kendrick has established himself as a preeminent American sculptor, pushing the boundaries of the medium through a rigorous and sustained commitment to discerning a work through the process of making it. Kendrick's thoroughgoing practice has involved the use of cast bronze, concrete, a variety of woods, rubber, resin, and investigations with cast paper. He ultimately addresses philosophical, conceptual, and fundamental questions around sculpture: namely, the relationship between the object as we experience it and the clearly evident means by which it was created. With a material ingenuity and formal inventiveness, Kendrick transforms single blocks of wood into optical puzzles, carving parts from the whole only to reassemble them atop or alongside the excavated base. In this elegant economy of both form and material, nothing is ever wasted, nor is anything added; each block is a question that contains its own answer. The result is something akin to a visual fugue: independent geometric systems are built up within a single composition to create a complex and dazzling harmonic whole, celebrating and complicating their own material and conceptual logic.

Self-contained and self-referential, Kendrick's works bear the evidence of their own making and, crucially, the struggles, errors and mistakes inherent in that process. Graphite marks, paint drips, saw cuts, and fingerprints are all layers of information, markers along a timeline, as if the sculptures were not so much finished pieces as they are stopping points at particular moments within the continuum of creation. And while the wood grain always remains visible, even under a layer of Japan paint, each step in Kendrick's process of assembling, carving and reassembling the wood blocks seems to further remove the material from its ecological origins and push it toward a uniquely physical (rather than theoretical) abstraction.

Mel Kendrick was recently the subject of a major retrospective, Mel Kendrick: Seeing Things in Things, at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, NY, and the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, MA. Kendrick has also had solo exhibitions at the St. Louis Art Museum, MO; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, OH; Tampa Museum of Arts, FL; Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH; and The Drawing Room, East Hampton, NY. In 2009, five massive sculptures by Kendrick were displayed in the heart of New York City in Madison Square Park.

Jonathan Meese was born in Tokyo and moved to Germany in the mid-1970s. His studies in Hamburg with performance artist Franz Erhard Walther influenced what Meese is now known for: performances, sculptures, paintings, assemblages, drawings, photographs, artists’ books, poetry, stage design, costumes, opera librettos, and choreography.

Meese’s practice addresses certain uneasy aspects of German political history and seeks to adopt ideological symbols and empty them of meaning. His work explores themes of politics, history, cultural memory, primordial myths, and literature, and draws inspiration from a variety of sources, such as movies and books. A core tenet of his practice is his belief that without culture, society is dead. Meese's forms are often distorted and unsettling, using irony and humor to confront traditional ideas of art. The artist constantly explores and re-explores these forms, revisiting them so they take on an archetypal quality between individual likeness and commonality. 

Meese’s work is featured in several private and public collections internationally, including Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Hall Art Foundation, New York; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Musées de la Ville de Strasbourg, France; Rubell Family Collection, Miami; De La Cruz Collection, Miami; and Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.), Ghent, Belgium. Meese lives and works in Berlin and Hamburg.

After attending the Slade School of Art in London from 1928-31, Moynihan started a pioneering movement in painting called Objective Abstraction, a precursor of Abstract Expressionism, concerned with the medium itself and emphasizing painterly strokes. During the war, Moynihan was recruited as an official war artist through the support of Kenneth Clark, Director of the National Gallery in London. This established Moynihan as the premier portrait painter in the United Kingdom and led to his appointment as the head of painting at the Royal College of Art soon after the war. Under his auspices, the Royal College became the hub of the British art world, as Francis Bacon occupied Moynihan's studio, and Leon Kossoff, Frank Auerbach, Peter Blake, and David Hockney were students. Always restless and never comfortable being pigeonholed, Moynihan would oscillate between abstraction and figuration with a distinct fluidity as Gerhard Richter and others would later do.

 In the early 1970s, he began making a series of still lifes comprised of tools of a painter's trade haphazardly strewn on tables and shelves. Of these works the artist said: "It was especially important to me not to arrange the still life so as to form a pictorial grouping-a picture. I wanted the objects to be found…so that the dictionary words of describing an object disappear. I wanted to paint them because they looked like that-without my intervention-having arranged themselves like that in that particular light."  His  main focuses in the 1970s and 1980s were self-portraits and studio still-lives that are innovative and astoundingly fluid, hinting at the artist’s admiration for Chinese landscape painting in the gentle whips of translucent paint.

Rodrigo Moynihan's work is in the collections of the Tate, London; Royal Academy of Arts Collection, London; National Portrait Gallery, London; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., among others.

Although Jim Nutt's name remains indelibly linked with “Hairy Who,” the group of Chicago artists exhibiting in the late 1960s and early 1970s and known for their perverse, surreal, and humorous psychosexual aesthetic, his work over the past four decades has had an almost singular focus: representations of a single imaginary figure. At a moment when the art world was dominated by New York abstraction, Nutt presented a provocative alternative that depicted lurid, malformed figures engaged in acts of violence, sexual perversion, and scatological humor with exacting precision. While the work unwittingly succeeded in challenging the reigning visual aesthetic, Nutt has insisted that the exhibits were simply “an enthusiastic response of wanting to make something.”

Nutt’s earlier works on paper often functioned as preparatory sketches for his luminous, portrait-like paintings; his recent drawings stand as complete works in their own right. They are a quietly virtuosic display of the artist’s exquisite and perfect control of line and form. Nutt draws in graphite on cold pressed paper, its toothy surface utterly unlike the smooth plexiglass on which he painted his earliest works. The paper’s rough texture is visible even in Nutt’s thin and exacting lines, some so light and delicate that one starts to wonder whether they are actually present or simply a trick of the eye. Erasure marks are apparent, too; tactile evidence that the artist remains as fastidious a draftsperson as ever, committed to the iterative process required to achieve his own standard of perfection.

Nutt’s work is included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Ball State Museum of Art, Muncie, IN; Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, MA; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, WI; Morgan Library & Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; amongst others. Jim Nutt lives and works in Chicago.

 Over the past four decades, Paulo Pasta has quietly established himself as one of the most revered and consistently engaging contemporary painters of his native Brazil, demonstrating his mastery of form and color within the two-dimensional plane. Though highly abstract, Pasta’s paintings retain architectural references; one senses the artist constructs his elegant geometries of posts and beams with the purpose of heightening the subtle chromatic variations among them. Whether pale pinks, blues and yellows or more intense, saturated crimson, indigo and ochre, the colors of Pasta’s palettes vibrate and shift in relationship to each other, evoking powerful associations that resist any particular definition or meaning. 

Light figures prominently in each work, slowly revealing the paintings through soft tonal gradations and imbuing them with a gentle but constant rhythm. Pasta’s paintings can feel as if they are making themselves in front of the viewer, in their own unhurried and deliberate fashion. At the same time, they never quite arrive at their destination, their colors and composition evolving almost imperceptibly with the passing hours of daylight. This temporal suspension acts to bring the viewer into the canvas and its empty, timeless spaces of contemplation; in this way, Pasta’s works reflect atmospheric or metaphysical landscapes more than any actual physical places.

Pasta has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Museu de Arte Sacra de São Paulo, Brazil; Simões de Assis Galeria de Arte, Curitiba, Brazil; Instituto Tomie Ohtake and Anexo Millan, São Paulo, Brazil; Galeria Carbono, São Paulo, Brazil; Palazzo Pamphilj, Rome, Italy; Galeria Millan, Anexo Millan and Museu Afro Brasil, São Paulo, Brazil; Sesc Belenzinho, São Paulo, Brazil; Fundação Iberê Camargo, Porto Alegre, Brazil; Centro Cultural Maria Antonia, São Paulo, Brazil; Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil; among others. He had his first solo exhibition in North America with David Nolan Gallery.

His work is featured in various collections, such as the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil; Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, Brazil; Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de la Universidad de São Paulo, Brazil; Museu Nacional de Belas Artes do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, New York, USA; and Kunsthalle Berlin, Germany, amongst others.

Dorothea Rockburne has been at the top of her game for half a century. Ever since her first solo show at the Bykert Gallery, New York, in 1970, she has made inventive, provocative, confident, seductive, and imaginative art. She has worked with materials as disparate as crude oil and gold leaf, chipboard and vellum, secco fresco, and sign painters enamel paint. She has created shaped canvases, constructed lines with colored pencil and copper wire and folded paper, and made work in sizes that are as small as 4 by 6 inches and as grand as 35 square feet. 

Just when you become captivated by her sense of color, you discover an exquisite group of all-white works. Her versatility is astounding. In the end, there is no such thing as a typical Rockburne. When you say her name, it evokes different examples of her art to different people... When you hear the name Dorothea Rockburne, expect the unexpected. - Phyllis Tuchman, 2021

Rockburne’s work is represented in prominent private and public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada; and the Auckland City Art Museum, Auckland, New Zealand, among many others.

Rockburne has been included in significant group exhibitions at the Met Breuer, New York; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center, Asheville, NC; The Geffen Contemporary, Los Angeles, CA; documenta 5 and 6, Kassel, Germany; MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY; and the 39th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, among numerous others.

Vian Sora displays a unique vocabulary of gestural abstraction through her deft handling of form and singular application of color. She initiates each work with a controlled chaos, covering surfaces in a barrage of fast-drying spray paint, acrylics, pigments and inks, using whatever is within arm’s reach — brushes, sponges, paper, nylons, spray bottles or even the force of her own breath — to create passages of intricate texture that might be described as delicate if not for the intensity of color they comprise. The resultant, intensely autobiographical paintings are filled with emotional complexity and tension, bustling with a dynamic energy and struggle that reflect the artist’s personal journey to move beyond the collective trauma of violence and destruction that she experienced firsthand during decades of conflicts in Iraq. Sora’s painting process reflects this search for harmony and transcendence. Though Sora’s paintings are largely abstract, upon closer inspection, they reveal half-hidden figures and suggest landscapes of lush fertility and terrible decay, cycles of life and death, yet infused with hope. Sora uses painting to directly confront the pain of her past and reimagines the cultural richness of her ancient homeland on canvas.

Born in Baghdad, Vian Sora has lived and worked in Louisville, Kentucky since 2009. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally including the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; Contemporary Arts Center (CAC), Cincinnati, OH; Sharjah Biennale, Sharjah, UAE; IMOGA, Istanbul, Turkey; Japanese Foundation Culture Center, Ankara, Turkey; the Baghdad Art International Art Festival in Iraq; the KMAC Triennial, Louisville, KY; and Grinnell Museum of Art, Grinnell, IA; among others. Commencing in 2025, Sora will have a traveling solo museum show at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA; the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; and the Asia Society of Houston, TX. 

Sora's work is included in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; Dar El Cid Museum, Kuwait City, Kuwait; KMAC Museum, Louisville, KY; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; Grinnell College Museum of Art, Grinnell, IA; Ministry of Culture Contemporary Collection, Baghdad, Iraq; Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH; Fidelity Art Collection, Boston, MA, and the Shah Garg Foundation, New York, as well as numerous private collections.

Jorinde Voigt is a leading conceptual artist based in Berlin. From 2014 to 2019, she taught at Akademie der Bildenden Künste (AdBK) in Munich, and today she is a Professor of Conceptual Drawing and Painting at University of Fine Arts Hamburg (HfBK). In her work,  Voigt observes and explores the inner processes of perception in relation to various aspects and subjects such as emotions, imagination, memory, sensory experience, natural and cultural phenomena, scientific data, interpersonal actions, and relationships. She creates complex systems of charts, diagrams, and thought models to depict the intersection of subjective, personal experience with seemingly objective external stimuli. Voigt often uses as her starting point a musical composition or a philosophical text. Throughout her career, Voigt has transformed complex and intangible notions from music, philosophy, and phenomenology into visual models characterized by intricate lines organized into patterns, networks, and entire systems that strike a balance between order and chaos. She often brings together drawing, painting, collage, and sculpture, inviting the viewer to create layers of subjective meaning through an aesthetic that feels at once personal and universal. 

Voigt has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including the Menil Collection, Houston, TX; Horst-Janssen-Museum, Oldenburg, Germany; St. Matthäus-Kirche, Berlin; Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; Kunstraum Innsbruck, Austria; Kunsthalle Krems, Austria; MACRO Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Rome, Italy; Langen Foundation, Neuss, Germany; Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada; Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal, Germany; and Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, Netherlands, among others. 

Voigt's work is featured in prominent public collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago, IL; The Morgan Library & Museum, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; The British Museum, London; Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin, Germany; Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich, Germany; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany; Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland; and UBS Art Collection, New York, among others.