Petah Coyne
Petah Coyne
Untitled #884 (Stream Monk, Monk Series), 1997
Silver gelatin print
20 x 24 inches (50.8 x 61 cm)
Unique AP2
(GP2664)
“Black and white photograph, Untitled #884 (Stream Monk, Monks Series), 1997, captures a steady procession of Japanese monks. Like rushing water, their path from left to right is revealed in the residual blur of activity.” – courtesy Petah Coyne Studio
Petah Coyne
Untitled #1459 (Yōko Ogawa: The Memory Police), 2019
Black sand from pig iron casting, artificial feathers, acrylic polymer, paint, chicken-wire fencing, barbed wire, annealed wire, steel, cable, cable nuts, cable thimbles, quick-link shackles, jaw-to-jaw swivel, 3/8" Grade 30 proof coil chain, silk/rayon velvet, Velcro, thread, plastic
40 x 35 x 37 inches (101.6 x 88.9 x 94 cm)
GL14191
“Untitled #1459 (Yōko Ogawa: The Memory Police), 2019, is a black sand sculpture inspired by Japanese author, Yōko Ogawa’s 1994 novel of the same name. The novel takes place on an island, with one of the main characters living on a moored boat. It is fr casting om this vantage point, that the ebb and flow of the tide, which underscores themes of isolation and imprisonment, is witnessed.
Untitled #1459, with its black, feathery tendrils is both delicate and aggressive in form. Like the sea at daytime, the feathers move with turbulence following the air’s current within the room. And when they settle, they mimic the practically still, glimmering surface of the sea at night. With an open silhouette, this sculpture is light and free flowing, yet its countless, knotted limbs resemble the jagged edges of barbed wire.” – courtesy Petah Coyne Studio
Ficre Ghebreyesus
Untitled, 2011
Signed lower right
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
Ficre Ghebreyesus’s paintings are influenced by the colors and memories of his childhood and adolescence in Eritrea. This late landscape combines the bright colors of memory and the reality of a New England, probably Maine, coastline.
Andy Goldsworthy
Red river rock Dumfriesshire, Scotland 19 August 2016, 2016
Digital video. Colour, sound
Running time: 9:44
Edition of 6 with 1 AP
(GP2354)
Andy Goldsworthy has often investigated earth’s remarkable staining qualities and has worked for years with the iron-rich red earth and stone found near his home and studio. In Goldsworthy’s nine-minute film, a river stone that he has rubbed with red earth “bleeds” color into the water.
Jane Hammond
Nine Days Later, 2015
Selenium toned silver gelatin print
16 x 20 inches (40.6 x 50.8 cm)
Framed: 24.1 x 28.1 x 1.6 inches (61.3 x 71.4 x 4.1 cm)
Edition of 8
GP2076
Jane Hammond uses collage as an intellectual and formal exercise. The photograph is work of fiction, culled from multiple sources and printed as if it were a vintage photograph. As in her paintings, the meaning of an image depends upon its context.
Alfredo Jaar
Untitled (Water) E, 1990
Double-sided lightbox with two color transparencies, five mirrors
Lightbox: 43.5 x 43 x 9.5 inches (110.5 x 109 x 24 cm)
Mirrors, each: 12 x 12 x 2 inches (30.5 x 30.5 x 5 cm)
Overall dimensions variable
(GL8906)
In Alfredo Jaar’s Untitled (Water) E (1990), an image of a turbulent South China Sea conceals the face of a Vietnamese refugee on the other side, revealed through five strategically placed mirrors that implicate the viewer in the global refugee crisis.
Rosemary Laing
Wildflower, 2017
Archival pigment print
39 x 79 inches (100 x 200 cm)
Framed: 40 x 79.5 x 3 inches (101.6 x 201.9 x 7.6 cm)
Edition of 8
(GP2247)
“The arrival of people, throughout history, shifts what happens in land, challenging those who have left their elsewhere, and disrupting the continuum of their destination place. A disruption causes a reconfiguration. It elaborates both the beforehand and the afterward.” – Rosemary Laing
Laing's Buddens series was photographed near Shoalhaven’s Wreck Bay in New South Wales, a site known for its many maritime disasters and rescues that have occurred over the last 200 years. A river is suggested through Laing’s placement of used, red-toned clothes which seem to flow seamlessly on the ground. The color red signifies life as much as death; marking the vitality and mortality of the human lives that have passed through the location over time. This particular photograph Wildflower references shipwreck stories and rescues by Aboriginal people.
Cildo Meireles
Aquaurum, 2015
Two crystal glasses, titanium, gold, and water
Each cup: 6 11/16 inches (17 cm) high
Like many of Meireles’s works, Aquaurum (2015) is in response to specific political situations. Meireles’s native Brazil produces approximately 12 percent of the world’s fresh water, however, there is a chronic shortage in the country’s most populous city, São Paulo. The cleverly titled Aquaurum, which combines the Latin for “water” and “gold,” is comprised of two crystal glasses. The first is filled with gold, appearing as though it is the lining of the glass itself, the other filled with water.
Ana Mendieta
Silueta de Arena, 1978
Super-8mm film transferred to high-definition digital media, color, silent
Running time: 1:33 minutes
Edition of 8 with 3 AP
(GP1930)
Ana Mendieta made her silueta (silhouette) in diverse natural landscapes “to establish her ties to the universe” as in her film Silueta de Arena (1978) where her body, portrayed in sand, is gently ebbed away by the water.
Jaume Plensa
Freud's Children VII, 2001
Mixed media, water pump and water
11 3/8 x 20 1/2 x 18 1/8 in (29 x 52 x 46 cm)
(GL14862)
Plensa’s Freud’s Children VII is part of a 25-component installation work where vessels of various sizes affixed with a sculpture of a body part (such as faces and hands) are connected by the drip of a pump that supplies and fills it with water, an arrangement akin to closed-blood circulation.
Carolee Schneemann
Water Light / Water Needle I, 1966 / 2014
Hand-colored giclee prints on Hahnemuhle paper
27 15/16 x 40 15/16 inches (71 x 104 cm)
Framed: 34 1/2 x 47 1/2 inches (87.5 x 120.5 cm)
(GP2195)
Following the success of her performance, Meat Joy (1964), Carolee Schneemann received a ticket to attend the 1964 Venice Biennale. ⠀
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Venice's floating city environment inspired the artist: “This mirroring of water and sky introduced my visual concept of bodies moving within an anti-gravitational frame... If Venice’s water is ‘ground,’ duplicating, reflecting the repeated upright rhythms – whatever is above the horizon line is also below the horizon line mirrored in water," Schneemann wrote.⠀
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Between 1964-1965, Schneemann worked on preparatory drawings and notes, envisioning an aerial work comprised of ropes and pulleys rigged across the canal at San Marco in Venice (Italy). Water Light/Water Needle was eventually realized for the first time between March 17th-20th 1966 in St. Mark’s Church, New York, and performed once again in the same year on the Havemayer Estate in New Jersey. Men and women performers skilfully moved within the ropes with a series of rules: when they encountered one another they had to combine intentions to adjust their positions together. In doing so, the body becomes the surface on which discourse of the “body as subject” and “body as object” takes place.
Kate Shepherd
Car Wash, 2020
Screen printed enamel on panel
50 x 42.5 inches
(GL14872)
“The reason I titled this Car Wash is that it captures looking through a windshield as though it were a painting. I made it by manipulating and recording soap and water on a blank enamel panel. The shapes don’t have obvious references to things so the liquid can call attention to the dynamic substance itself. It’s a very active painting created by an actual ‘event’ in time.” – Kate Shepherd
The making of this painting involves multiple steps: Shepherd first paints a blank enamel panel, then photographs the painting (with soap and water on the surface) and using the same enamel paint, finally screen prints this image onto a panel. Born out of this referential loop, this work evinces a dialogue with memory and the act of surveillance.
Michelle Stuart
Dream Collector Carpinteria, 2003/2012
Wood, paint, metal, beeswax, canvas, muslin-mounted rag paper, pencil, and string
8.5 x 24 x 36 inches (21.6 x 60.9 x 91.4 cm)
(GL14873)
Michelle Stuart has described her affinity with water as profound. Though her work is associated with land art, voyage and boats are progenitors of memory and experiences. This boat functions as dream collector, recalling the California coastline of her birth. Dream Collector Carpinteria was exhibited in a major presentation by Stuart at the 57th Venice Biennale: Viva Arte Viva! In 2017.
Michelle Stuart
Mysterious Tidal Fault, 2019
Suite of thirty-five photographs
Approximately: 78 x 80 inches
(GL14863)
“Many of the photographs in Mysterious Tidal Fault are taken off a TV report about the tidal fault off of Valdez Alaska. These photographs are interspersed with photographs Michelle took of ships on the ocean. Without using photoshop, she then altered all the original images by cropping and making them black and white, plus collaging some of them. The images are printed on archival paper and placed on the wall and rearranged many times over in the same way one would work with line, shape, and form in a drawing or painting, and with the same intent of creating a unified composition that moves the viewers eyes through and around it, thus creating the same push and pull one finds in a painting with no traditional perspective, but with depth, pushing back and forward. To some degree chance is involved but it’s harnessed. Michelle has done multiple works on faults going back to the early seventies, including Scanning Sequence (1969-70), collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.” – courtesy Michelle Stuart Studio
Juan Uslé
Soñé que revelabas (Liard), 2019-20
Vinyl dispersion and dry pigment on canvas
108.3 x 79.9 inches (275 x 203 cm)
(GL14565)
The monumental painting Soñe que Rvelabas (Liard) (2019-20) belongs to Juan Uslé’s best-known family of works (1997–ongoing), known for filmstrip-like brushstrokes that are applied on canvas guided by the artist’s heartbeat. The painting is inspired by landscapes and memories both lived and dreamt: vibrations in bustling New York City, the fluidity of rivers and uncharted bodies of water, the colors of childhood in northern Spain. Soñe que Rvelabas (Liard) was created in New York and is titled after the Liard River in North America.
Catherine Yass
Lighthouse (North), 2011
Photographic transparency, lightbox
50 3/4 x 40 3/4 x 6 1/2 inches (129 x 103.5 x 16.5 cm)
Edition of 3 with 2 APs
(GP1650)
Catherine Yass’s Lighthouse (North), 2011 was captured while making her twelve-minute film of the same name, a dynamic portrait of the Royal Sovereign lighthouse located off the coast of East Sussex, England. The film made its US debut at Galerie Lelong in 2012.
A photographic work in the same series, Lighthouse (North north west, distant), 2011 has been acquired by the Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College. Its director, Dr. Ena Heller, writes: “Yass often talks about photography as language, noting that in order to understand it, one needs to study it, to deconstruct and understand it. In order to do that, she has experimented with the ‘wrong’ materials or chemicals; has shot under different light; has reversed the order of processes, and – as illustrated here – has superimposed positive and negative images.”
Galerie Lelong & Co., New York, is pleased to present Rhe: everything flows; a group exhibition held in collaboration with Galleries Curate: RHE, an international contemporary art platform initiated by 21 galleries as a response to the ongoing challenges of the pandemic. “Rhe,” from Greek for that which flows, centers on the theme of water: its essential significance to life, as a bridge between people and cultures, and its status under threat from climate change. A platform with ongoing projects through May 2021, RHE is coordinated by Clément Delépine, independent curator, writer, and co-director of Paris Internationale.
For its contribution, Galerie Lelong will present works by Petah Coyne, Ficre Ghebreyesus, Andy Goldsworthy, Jane Hammond, Alfredo Jaar, Rosemary Laing, Cildo Meireles, Ana Mendieta, Jaume Plensa, Carolee Schneemann, Kate Shepherd, Michelle Stuart, Juan Uslé and Catherine Yass. The exhibition will encompass artworks in a myriad of media that reflect the contextual underpinnings of water through film, painting, photography, and performance art pieces, including the actual physical presence of water in mixed-media works.
Water is a resource with geo-political dimensions. In Alfredo Jaar’s Untitled (Water) E (1990), an image of a turbulent ocean conceals the face of a Vietnamese refugee on the other side, revealed through five strategically placed mirrors that implicate the viewer in the global refugee crisis.
Laing’s photograph of a cascade comprising discarded orange-red toned clothes on an actual dried riverbed speaks to the dual climate and refugee crisis in Australia. The use of gold as a precious metal in Meireles’s Aquaruum (2015) references the scarcity of water for the population in Brazil, a country that supplies 12% of the world’s freshwater.
The performative and immersive aspects of Mendieta and Schneemann’s practices are expressed within their documentational photography and works on paper. Mendieta made her silueta (silhouette) in diverse natural landscapes “to establish her ties to the universe” as in her film Silueta de Arena (1978) where her body, portrayed in sand, is gently ebbed away by the water.
A contemporary pioneer of performance art, Schneemann sought to depict a weightlessness of the body through the group performance Water Light/Water Needle (1966), with men and women interacting on suspended ropes in a gesture of collective dependency, a response to social and gender norms of the time.
Land artists Andy Goldsworthy and Michelle Stuart have dedicated decades of their career to meticulous observations of nature in situ. Goldsworthy has often investigated earth’s remarkable staining qualities and has worked for years with the iron-rich red earth and stone found near his home and studio. In Goldsworthy’s nine-minute film, a river stone that he has rubbed with red earth “bleeds” color into the water. Stuart’s suite of thirty-five photographs Mysterious Tidal Fault (2019) investigates the traces of humanity’s effects on nature through the change in tides. In the small gallery, Goldsworthy’s and Mendieta’s films are accompanied by the sound of an ongoing, rhythmic drip from Jaume Plensa’s intimate sculpture. Plensa’s Freud’s Children VII is part of a 25-component installation work where vessels of various sizes affixed with a sculpture of a body part (such as faces and hands) are connected by the drip of a pump that supplies and fills it with water, an arrangement akin to closed-blood circulation.
Displayed together in this exhibition, all of the artists dwell on the physical and at times politicized qualities of water, reflecting humanity’s unity in our need for the life-giving source yet our division in its care and distribution.
Visit the Galleries Curate website for information about the platform
Held on February 3, 2021
Watch recording here
