Estate of Etel Adnan
Galerie Lelong & Co., New York is pleased to present works by Etel Adnan, Leonardo Drew, Ficre Ghebreyesus, Alfredo Jaar, Samuel Levi Jones, Ana Mendieta, Jaume Plensa, Tariku Shiferaw, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum and Mildred Thompson at Frieze Los Angeles 2022. The presentation will include paintings, sculpture, works on paper, and photography, with a focus on abstractions that posit a counterpoint to art historical narratives, often made in reference to perspectives from the diaspora. Having participated in both Frieze London and New York for multiple years, this will be the gallery’s first presentation at Frieze Los Angeles.
New works by Adnan, Drew, Jones, Plensa, Shiferaw and Sunstrum will make their debut at the fair. From the early 1990s, Drew has been making assemblage-based installations and sculptures in his distinctive abstract language that speaks of life’s cyclical nature. In 2020, a monumental “explosion” installation by Leonardo Drew was on display at the Hammer Museum. For Tariku Shiferaw, who grew up in Los Angeles, working in abstraction entails a re-envisioning of identity and form; the gestural surface in his paintings and mark-making is his reclamation of a space that was denied to many artists. A new large-scale painting will be presented. A multi-disciplinary artist, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum’s drawings take the form of narrative landscapes that appear simultaneously futuristic and ancient, shifting between representational and fantastical depictions
of volcanic, subterranean, cosmological and precipitous landscapes. A forthcoming solo exhibition will be presented at Galerie Lelong in September 2022. A select group of paintings by the late artist Ficre Ghebreyesus (b.1962-d.2012) will debut at the fair. Born in Eritrea during their War of Independence, Ghebreyesus left as a teenaged refugee before finally settling in the US. Operating fluidly between abstraction and figuration, Ghebreyesus’s matte acrylic and oil paintings suggest the non-linear form of dreams, memories, and storytelling. His work has largely been unseen until now. In 2020, The New York Times described his work during our first presentation in New York: “Mixing sources from jazz to Islamic architecture to Coptic Christian iconography and Eritrean folk art, Mr. Ghebreyesus processed everything he saw as a refugee and a global citizen into a kind of ecstatic surrealism.”
The title of Alfredo Jaar’s work Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness originates from the poetry of W.H. Auden and has been quoted by novelist Kenzaburo Oe, who often wrote about the bombing of Hiroshima, Japan. By using a hybrid form of art-making in his practice spanning four decades, Jaar has consistently provoked, questioned, and searched for ways to heighten our consciousness about issues often forgotten or suppressed in the international sphere, while not relinquishing art’s formal and aesthetic power.
