Leonardo Drew
Number 264, 2020
Wood, paint, and cotton
34 x 37 x 7 inches (86.4 x 94 x 17.8 cm)
In this new work, Drew depicts an abstracted landscape of white and black squares, arranged in a formal checkerboard grid. The artist transforms raw material to articulate overlapping themes with emotional gravitas; the use of cotton is an immediate reference to the labor history of African-Americans in the US. At once monumental and intimate in scale, his work recalls post-Minimalist sculpture that alludes to America’s industrial past. Currently, Drew is the subject of three solo museum exhibitions at the Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; and the Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art, Bloomington, Indiana.
Günther Förg
Standomi 71, 2001
Watercolor on paper
14 1/8 x 18 1/8 inches
36 x 46 cm
« Standomi un giorno solo a la fenestra… » is a verse from Petrarca that Günther Förg chose for the title of a series of watercolours with an identical format, produced in 2001 for an exhibition at Galerie Lelong in Paris. This title aptly encapsulates the artist’s attitude: he stands at the window and he observes. He paints what he sees: a field, a cloud, a fence, the horizon, a country road, a tree. He paints what he thinks of: lines, marks, abstract signs. He even paints the window itself. And always with the light touch, the suppleness and the grace for which he is renowned.
Today, seven years after the artist’s early demise, his work is the focus of great interest around the world. Two museum retrospectives, in Amsterdam and Dallas, recently left their mark, showcasing the richness and cohesion of his body of work.”
Ficre Ghebreyesus
Untitled, 2011
Acrylic on canvas
36 x 24 inches (91.4 x 61 cm)
Framed: 38.5 x 26.5 x 2 inches (97.8 x 67.3 x 5.1 cm)
GL13520
As an Eritrean native and refugee who later settled in the US, the late artist Ficre Ghebreyesus often depicted subject matter that referenced the culture of his home. In this shifting landscape work the idea of memories and dreams is evoked. Water and sea were frequent subject mater in the artist's work, the boundless sea and sky as an entry point to the unknown. "And much of his work — semiabstract, opaquely autobiographical — has a dreamlike cast" says Holland Cotter in the New York Times of the artist's first solo exhibition in New York City, Gate to the Blue, recently staged at Galerie Lelong.
Samuel Levi Jones
Apparatus, 2019
Print portfolios on canvas
60 x 65 inches (152.4 x 165.1 cm)
GL12801
This work is from the first group of works Jones made with art print portfolios, an important series for the artist with significant changes in composition. These protective objects, once at the peripheries of the artworld, have been recontextualized into an artwork. Jones's continued interest in examining and disrupting established systems is explored with his broadened scope of unmaking and remaking objects to question their moral and ethical implications.
Ana Mendieta
Butterfly, 1975
Super-8mm film transferred to high-definition digital media, color, silent
Running time: 3:19 minutes
In a brief yet prolific career, the Cuban-born artist Ana Mendieta created groundbreaking work in photography, film, video, drawing, sculpture, and site-specific installations. In the film Butterfly, 1975, Ana Mendieta incorporated a 16-channel video processor to add a high-contrast, polarized graphic-effect to images of herself with what appear to be feathered wings. This film demonstrates the artist’s technical innovations and singular approach to film, revealing aspects of her practice that have been increasingly brought to light.
Jaume Plensa
Ines, 2019
Granite
74.8 x 25.59 x 29.53 inches (190 x 65 x 75 cm)
(GL14548)
Ines continues Plensa's exploration of contemporary portraiture in a recent material for the artist, granite. His use of new materials constantly evolves to inform his life-long search for a universal depiction of a reflective inner world. His models are specific but also anonymous and universal in their dream like and contemplative state.
Zilia Sánchez
Mirar que pasa despues de todo [Look at what happens after everything], 2019
Titled, signed, and dated on reverse
Acrylic on stretched canvas
42 x 46 x 10 inches (106.7 x 116.8 x 25.4 cm)
(GL14176)
During a return trip to Cuba from her travels abroad in the 1950s, Sánchez witnessed a bedsheet that had been hung out to dry form a taut shape as the wind blew it against a pipe or tube. This passing scene effectively became the catalyst for a staggering six decades of work thereafter. Mirar que pasa despues de todo [Look at what happens after everything] is a recent work that continues to investigate this form.
Tariku Shiferaw
Broken Clocks (SZA), 2020
Acrylic on canvas
72 x 60 inches (182.9 x 152.4 cm)
(GL14789)
Shiferaw is known for his practice of mark-making that explores the metaphysical ideas of painting and societal structures. This formal language of geometric abstraction is executed through densely layering material to create “marks,” gestures that interrogate space-making and reference the hierarchy of systems. This new work comes from the artist's ongoing series “One of These Black Boys."
Kiki Smith
Woman on Snake, 2010
Ink on Nepalese paper
71.26 x 59.45 inches (181 x 151 cm)
(GL14840)
Kiki Smith’s art is a symbiosis between a sensitivity to matter, a taste for texture, and a rich and vibrant dream world, taking its source both from the artist's intimate imaginary world and from the memory of the tales and mythologies which shaped her. Woman and Snake is a large recent drawing on Nepalese paper, a traditional handicraft support she has often used. The female figure is also characteristic: it is at once a self-portrait and a portrait of a woman per se. She is seen here taming a snake, evidently, a phallic one. A similar drawing can be found in the collections of the MNAM Centre Pompidou Museum. After having been shown in American museums, these last years, Kiki Smith’s protean body of work has been the object of seminal exhibitions across Europe: Haus der Kunst, Munich (2018), Monnaie de Paris (2019), Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne (2020).
Antoni Tàpies
Crochet, 1982
Mixed media and collage on fabric
76.77 x 66.93 inches (195 x 170 cm)
(GL14841)
Painter, sculptor, engraver, writer, Antoni Tapiès died in 2012, leaving behind him a colossal body of work the scope and depth of which have yet to be fathomed. Often reduced to its matterist character, the work of Tapiès is first and foremost poetic and spiritual. The object, often used in his compositions, as here, in this work, the embroidered material, is at once a trace of the real and a pictorial element. At the center of the canvas, the letter ‘J’ evokes the sign itself but also refers to the hook’s shape which gives the work its title. This dark sign, both curved and pointed, brings a dramatic intensity to this, as often, erotic composition.
Galerie Lelong & Co. (Paris and New York), are pleased to participate in Art Basel "OVR: Miami Beach" from December 2 to 6, 2020.
Our presentation includes works by Leonardo Drew, Günther Förg, Ficre Ghebreyesus, Samuel Levi Jones, Ana Mendieta, Jaume Plensa, Zilia Sánchez, Tariku Shiferaw, Kiki Smith, and Antoni Tàpies.
Highlighting mid-career and established artists from the gallery's international roster, the selected works are diverse in origin and form, demonstrating the artists' experimentations and innovations of their respective subject matter, technique, and media.
Many new and recent works including pieces from Leonardo Drew, Samuel Levi Jones, Jaume Plensa, Zilia Sánchez and Tariku Shiferaw reveal the artists' latest developments in their practices.
VIP Preview from Wednesday, December 2, 10am EST / 4pm CET / 11pm HKT. Public access from Friday, December 4, 10am EST / 4pm CET / 11pm HKT.
Many of the works are currently on view in our New York gallery. Email us at art@galerielelong.com to schedule an appointment.
![Zilia Sánchez Mirar que pasa despues de todo [Look at what happens after everything], 2019 Titled, signed, and dated on reverse Acrylic on stretched canvas 42 x 46 x 10 inches (106.7 x 116.8 x 25.4 cm) (GL14176)](https://img.artlogic.net/w_2020,h_1160,c_limit/exhibit-e/57eac8ed87aa2c6e4b7d0574/d1071f23763b06da9bfc909ab8ef4191.jpeg)
