Igshaan Adams
Byron, Jamie, Dustin, Lynette, 2023
Cotton twine, polypropylene braid, wire, wood, plastic glass, stone, crystal, semi precious gemstones and shell beads
105.11 x 96.85” / 267 x 246cm

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Igshaan Adams’ (b. 1982, Cape Town, South Africa) multidisciplinary practice combines weaving, performance, and installation in an intersection of generational and personal histories, familial traumas, and tradition.

For Art Basel 2023, Adams presents Byron, Jamie, Dustin, Lynette (2023), a wall-hanging tapestry that memorializes the footwork of four members of Garage Dance Ensemble, a dance troupe based in Okiep, a town in the Northern Cape province of South Africa. In preparation for the work’s pattern, Adams laid down a blank canvas atop an ink covered sheet of plastic. As the group traveled across the flat surface, imprints of their individual dance steps recorded on the reverse of the canvas. The resulting image is a collage of scattered footprints, each conveying a unique life story through personal narrative. Within the work’s textured surface, typographic images oscillate in and out of focus as sandy patches of beads enmesh with deeper hued threads, stones, shells, and pearls, all of which are locally sourced. Gemstones scatter throughout, visually echoing the corporeal movement of dance and the markings of the body on canvas. By intuitively choreographing their own movements, the dancers reveal the body as a location of trauma and the holder of memory.

Adam’s work is currently on view at institutions globally including the Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; LACMA, Los Angeles, CA; and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. This fall, Adams will participate in The 35th Bienal De São Paulo: Choreographies of The Impossible, as well as Lynne Cooke’s traveling exhibition, Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction.

Igshaan Adams, Byron, Jamie, Dustin, Lynette, 2023 (Detail)

Igshaan Adams, Byron, Jamie, Dustin, Lynette, 2023 (Alternate view)

Kevin Beasley
Site XXXV, 2023
Polyurethane resin, raw Virginia cotton, housedresses, confetti t-shirts, altered t-shirts, Virginia soil, guineafowl feathers, fiberglass
46.75 x 74 x 1.5” / 118.74 x 187.96 x 3.81cm

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Kevin Beasley’s (b. 1985, Lynchburg, VA) practice spans performance, photography, sculpture, and sound. With each medium, he offers reflections on the woven histories of landscape and contemporary material culture. Works are assembled from a variety of matter including garments and dyed raw cotton harvested near a century-old property in Virginia that has been owned by the artist’s family for generations. The property is a place for family gatherings, and its surrounding cotton fields have become a primary material source for Beasley who connects his familial origins with the complex, shared histories of a broader American experience as it relates to the production of cotton and Black land ownership in the South.

Abstract, transparent color fields of dyed resin and cotton in Site XXXV (2023) offer a view into and through the surface of the work created for Art Basel 2023. The kaleidoscopic work’s opacity permits viewers to see the space behind the artwork, through the artwork. This interaction with the wall urges a consideration of the viewer’s physicality within the setting that they witness the work. The artist’s own body is also present as an inscription since he manipulates the resin for only as long as time allows before the polymer hardens. There are other bodies present as well—absent bodies of those who once wore the encased clothing, and those who were intended to wear them before they were redirected to the studio. This work simultaneously explores the echoes of the body and physical space. A site, ground on which to build upon, connotes a future happening. The works’ fog-like atmosphere foregrounds what was and what can be. Through this exercise, Beasley keeps us in tune with our own histories and our mutual efforts to keep truth.

In an effort to keep, Beasley’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery, is on view at Casey Kaplan, New York, through July 28, 2023. Beasley is also included in a number of current and upcoming institutional exhibitions including Ecstatic, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (June 10 – August 27, 2023); Inheritance, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (June 28, 2023 – February 2024); and Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility, Guggenheim Museum, New York (October 20, 2023 – April 7, 2024).

Kevin Beasley, Site XXXV, 2023 (Detail)

Kevin Beasley, Site XXXV, 2023 (Alternate view)

Matthew Brannon
“Mouth-to-Mouth, Set & Setting” - Character Study, Set 03: Foreign Correspondent, Saigon 1968, 2023
Silkscreen on paper with hand-painted elements
59.25 x 79” / 150.5 x 200.66cm
Framed: 63.75 x 83.5 x 2” / 161.93 x 212.09cm

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Matthew Brannon’s (b. 1971, Anchorage, AK) distinctive visual language is imbued with wit and historical expertise. Developed through traditional silkscreen printing techniques as well as hand-painting, hundreds of screens overlap to form an intricate network of boldly colored objects. Image and language intersect in evocations of dual meanings and underlying narrative.

In recent years, Brannon has focused almost exclusively on the time period of the Vietnam/American War as a source of inspiration—conducting exhaustive research with this generation-defining trauma. Often focusing on interior scenes that depict, from a first-person perspective, the desks of past presidents or the vanities of first ladies, which make use of subtle environmental clues found in personally significant possessions, Brannon creates visual narratives that speak to the life and psyche of his implied or defined subjects.

Matthew Brannon, “Mouth-to-Mouth, Set & Setting” - Character Study, Set 03: Foreign Correspondent, Saigon 1968, 2023 (Detail)

“Mouth-to-Mouth, Set & Setting” - Character Study, Set 03: Foreign Correspondent, Saigon 1968 (2023) can be understood as a still in the artist’s imagined neo-noir film about an international romance during extreme global conflicts. As in Brannon’s other ‘desk-based’ works, the artist includes artifacts a protagonist would have used or interacted with as a means of signifying their identity. The spines of a stack of books—an English dictionary titled Anh Viet Tu Dien (literally translated into English Language), Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin, and a Foreign Affairs Journal dated 1968—indicate a character’s location and interiority, offering a timestamp. A centrally placed camera rests below a black and white photograph of actor Errol Flynn which presents an unassuming clue into the character’s occupation or research—the actor’s son, Sean Flynn, was part of a renegade group of photojournalists that habitually inserted themselves into dangerous situations (a pattern that for Brannon reveals an addiction to danger). Brannon hints at clues that form a constellation of an era and the protagonist’s place within.

A commitment to historical accuracy is stitched with an infusion of personal narrative. The gray-hued rotary phone with a three-digit number on its face is contextually plausible and is rendered with direct inspiration from the artist’s own travels to Vietnam. Meanwhile Pnin, which is an antidote to much war-driven content, is also a ‘campus novel’ (a genre favorite of Brannon’s). These objects inject new chronicles into the work and encourage a reconsideration of history through an acknowledgment of storied personas and colliding narratives.

Matthew Brannon, “Mouth-to-Mouth, Set & Setting” - Character Study, Set 03: Foreign Correspondent, Saigon 1968, 2023 (Alternate View)

Jordan Casteel
Albert and Malenda (Top Taste), 2023
Oil on canvas
94.25 x 80” / 239.4 x 203.2cm

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The sensory influence of a landscape has the capacity to connect or divide us, to inform our movements through space and the manners in which we relate to our surroundings, and to one another. Jordan Casteel (b. 1989, Denver, CO) sources her subject matter from her own photographs of the people of color who share and shape an environment, directly informing her own accessibility to the collective experience.

For Art Basel 2023, Casteel presents Albert and Malenda (Top Taste) (2023), a monumental portrait of the chef-owners of an esteemed Jamaican restaurant near the artist’s residence in Upstate New York. The two figures share a relaxed posture and direct gaze, which, as in many of Casteel’s portraits, is fixed in the viewer’s direction. The individual halves of the couple are rendered in distinct palettes—Malenda exhales a sense of modest pride through shifting tones of magenta and purple while stately and content Albert glows blue-green—demonstrating their distinct narratives that are centered by a subtle touch. Seated at a table like diners in their own establishment, Albert and Malenda are engulfed by a motley of graphic signage and art. An aerial view of the island of Jamaica, the “Land We Love,” hangs above a grid of menu options offered on-site. The hero and heroine of Top Taste, nominated together twice thus far for Best Chef in New York State by the James Beard Award, draw our implicit focus. The eatery, encapsulating immense love and pride for their communities in Jamaica and New York, is the backdrop that bears witness to their bond.

Casteel’s work is currently on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Perez Art Museum, Miami, FL; and the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA.

Jordan Casteel, Albert and Malenda (Top Taste), 2023 (Detail)

Jordan Casteel, Albert and Malenda (Top Taste), 2023 (Alternate View)

N. Dash
Untitled, 2023
earth, acrylic, silkscreen ink, string, jute
31 x 80" / 78.74 x 203.2cm
ND2023-001

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N. Dash’s (b. 1980, Miami, FL) paintings are a reflection on the material world and the unseen energies that exist. Integral to the work is an ecological vision, a preserving of the earth, and a commitment to recording the sensory and transformative nature of touch. The paintings incorporate natural and industrially produced materials, such as earth, graphite, paint, plastic bottles, string, Styrofoam, and jute. This juxtaposition and contrast of materials is often presented in multiple panels, creating complex compositions that draw from the languages and methods of sculpture, photography, and printmaking.

For Art Basel 2023, N. Dash presents a new painting, divided into three panels and comprised of earth, acrylic, silkscreen ink, and string. Ink is hand pulled onto the prepared earth ground through a screen of digitally produced rosettes—a floral pattern of dots that is foundational to halftone image-separation technology. Ink rests on the painted surface with intensity and omission. This diffusion appears in cloud-like clusters of flowers, printed in geometric precision or a formless wash of color. On one panel, Dash cuts diagonally across the composition with a line of string, rosettes are imprinted into its ridge but omitted from the surrounding space, leaving the white acrylic exposed, and appearing as a beam of light across a field of violet flora.

N. Dash will present a solo exhibition at SITE Santa Fe, NM, opening October 6, 2023.

N. Dash, Untitled, 2023 (Detail)

N. Dash, Untitled, 2023 (Detail)

N. Dash, Untitled, 2023 (Alternate view)

Judith Eisler
VK, 2023
Oil on canvas
23.6 x 31.5” / 60 x 80cm
Framed: 25.12 x 32.2 x 2.36” / 61.8 x 81.8cm x 6cm

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Using the core principles of painting—line, color, and form—Judith Eisler (b. 1962, Newark, NJ) depicts animals, celebrities, and objects imbued with multifaceted tensions and roles. The artist’s layered and technologically mediated process offers a view into the psychology of an image.

VK (2023) is sourced from Marie Kreutzer’s 2022 film “Corsage” in which Vicky Krieps portrays Empress Elizabeth of Austria. The character is seen in profile and Eisler integrates the figure and their background with moiré patterns of blues, yellows, and pinks. Eisler always photographs her subjects as they appear on a viewing monitor, mid-narrative. Her camera produces a wavy distortion that the artist embraces and then prints onto a 4 x 6-inch sheet of paper. The printed image becomes a physical, hand-held object of reference that signifies a distinct transformation as Eisler takes possession of the image. The composition is then gridded, effectively distilling a moving picture into individual segments that remove subject from context. Form breaks down into studies of color and light as Eisler puts oil to canvas with a preeminent consideration not for figuration but rather for the distilled elements of painting.

Judith Eisler, VK, 2023 (Detail)

Eisler captured this image of Krieps while on a flight from Vienna—where the artist is Professor of Painting, University of Applied Arts—to New York. Inadvertently, the artist documented her own reflection, a fact that only became clear when the work was near completion. As Eisler’s opaque image oscillates in and out of focus in the center of the canvas, new dramas unfold in the space between abstraction and representation.

Eisler is included in Dark Light, Realism in the Age of Post-Truth, Selections from the Salamè Collection, Aïshti Foundation, Lebanon, on view through September 2023.

Jonathan Gardner
Statue in the Garden, 2023
Oil on linen
66 x 50” / 167.64 x 127cm

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Jonathan Gardner, Statue in the Garden, 2023 (Detail)

Anchored by 20th century art historical references, Jonathan Gardner's (b. 1982, Lexington, KY) compositions recall figures and objects familiar, yet obscure. Nameless subjects are surreally situated within flattened narrative scenes that thread mystery and wonder. Gardner merges unconscious visions sourced from the depths of his dreams with tromp l’oeil, conjuring the illusionary worlds of: Jim Nutt, René Magritte, Balthus, Henri Rousseau, Giorgio de Chirico, and Henri Matisse.

In Statue in the Garden (2023) a painting within a frame is featured that could also be a hanging mirror or a window revealing an exterior landscape where a female nude stone sculpture reclines on a staircase. Flowering vertical vines ground the figure underneath an ethereal blue sky dotted with gestural and sculptural white clouds.

Jonathan Gardner, Statue in the Garden, 2023 (Alternate view)

Giorgio Griffa
Positivo negativo, 2022
Acrylic on canvas
54.7 x 37” / 139 x 94cm

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Beginning in 1968, Giorgio Griffa (b. 1936, Turin, Italy) developed a painting practice that records “the memory of material,” allowing brush, paint, and canvas to dictate the outcome of his work. By eliminating perspective and narrative, he transcribes the process of painting into simple repeated marks and groups of horizontal, vertical or oblique lines. Starting with unprimed, unstretched raw canvas laid out like sheets on the floor, Griffa works slowly across them, crouching and kneeling on the material in a way that aligns him with his tools: water based acrylic paints, mixed thinly, that seep and bleed upon application. The rawness of the resulting color fields, along with the large areas of unpainted canvas, gives Griffa’s paintings a provisional feel, emphasizing his convictions about the independent life of the materials. The paintings are then displayed unframed, pinned to the wall with small nails along their top edge, and when not exhibited, are folded and stacked, creating an underlying grid for his compositions.

For Art Basel 2023, Griffa presents Positivo negativo (2022), the debut of a new series entitled OCEANIE, marking the most significant shift in the artist’s practice in over a decade. Born from a reflection on Henri Matisse’s work, Oceanie La Mer, Oceanie Le Ciel (1946), Positivo negativo explores the rhythmic occupation of space that mirrors the act of walking with one sign following another in random order. Similar to Matisse’s grid-like, ocean life forms, each sign in Griffa’s painting retains its own identity. Monochromatic, lilac-blue brushstrokes consume more than half of the canvas, revealing irregular falling square and rectangular shapes within a negative or positive arena. As presence and absence co-exist, Griffa captures the cycle of life—as the empty forms cascade, they emerge as positive shapes, revealing a universal birth and death sequence.

Giorgio Griffa’s new series OCEANIE is the subject of his upcoming solo exhibition at the gallery, opening on September 7, 2023.

Giorgio Griffa, Positivo negativo, 2022 (Detail)

Caroline Kent
Not all things are veiled to all people, 2023
Acrylic on unstretched canvas
102.33 x 81.63” / 259.92 x 207.34cm

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Caroline Kent (b. 1975, Sterling, IL) engages in a visual language of abstraction through an instinctive approach to color and form. Her multidisciplinary practice encourages a mutual exchange between maker and viewer by way of invented modes of communication. Through painting, drawing, sculpture, text, and performance, Kent stretches the limitations of language to create a meaningful space for both silence and sound, shape, and empty ground.

Not all things are veiled to all people (2023) is a monumental unstretched acrylic painting on canvas in which vibrant angular forms, informed by the artist’s preliminary process of cutting paper, overlap one another. The resulting abstractions are recognizably architectural—a pink dome textured by a sequence of vertical markings invites the viewer to stand beneath its magnitude and gaze upward. Other vertical elements painted in tones of sunny yellow or sandstone taupe recall columns. Empty spaces within larger shapes function as windows that smaller forms peer out of, while their counterparts in darker tones recede into their black surroundings. Building upon Kent’s existing visual language of deliberate, declarative symbols that draw comparisons to written words, Not all things are veiled to all people offers a glimpse into the shrouded landmarks of a fictional lost city.

Kent’s site-specific installation organized by The Museum of Modern Art, The Modern Window, is on view in New York through October 2023.

Caroline Kent, Not all things are veiled to all people, 2023 (Detail)

Caroline Kent, Not all things are veiled to all people, 2023 (Alternate view)

Cindy Ji Hye Kim
Snake Filled Eden, 2023
Watercolor, graphite, charcoal, pastel on silk with shaped birch stretcher bars
68 x 52” / 172.72 x 132.08cm

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Cindy Ji Hye Kim (b. 1990, Incheon, Korea) explores the anatomy of image and its creation alongside mnemonic ruptures and lineages. Her practice which includes painting, drawing, and sculpture is motivated by a poetic tension between what is remembered and forgotten, real and imagined, as well as the truths and fictions that exist between conscious and unconscious states.

For Art Basel 2023, Kim presents Snake Filled Eden (2023). A 19th century map of the Korean peninsula (late Joseon dynasty) is superimposed on the interior of Villa Kreylos, an Ancient Greek revival house built in the early 20th century. The landscape and domestic setting are characters in a threaded narrative that includes images from Greek mythology and invented botanical forms. In weaving eastern landscapes with western iconography, Kim grapples with migration and transference. She seeks to confront the feeble nature of her own memory and the complicated impacts of nostalgia, acknowledging that once unshakable images of her youth and hometown are dissolving into moments increasingly difficult to access. Sigmond Freud’s collection of antiquities are gathered on the left side of the work. For the artist, these objects of mythical figures, gods, and goddesses are imbued with magical power of the past. Collectively, they bear witness to collaged scenes culled from the artist’s consciousness that bridge real and imagined worlds.

Kim’s forthcoming solo exhibition at SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA opens in February 2024.

Cindy Ji Hye Kim, Snake Filled Eden, 2023 (Detail)

Cindy Ji Hye Kim, Snake Filled Eden, 2023 (Left: Detail, Right: Alternate View)

Hannah Levy
Untitled, 2023
Stainless steel, glass
58.5 x 37.5 x 37.5” / 148.59 x 95.25 x 95.25cm

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With spare gestures and skilled execution, Hannah Levy (b. 1991, New York, NY) creates tactile sculptures that provoke sensory experience. The artist appropriates and defamiliarizes commonplace objects, modernist design tropes, and elements from the natural world by using unexpected materials and warping their formal properties. Levy transforms that which is familiar into deeply strange and magnetic works that exist in a fleeting limbo of what the artist calls “design purgatory.”

For Art Basel, Levy presents Untitled (2023), a floor-based sculpture comprised of a stainless-steel armature and a sagging bowl-like element made of slumped glass (a process using gravity and heat from a kiln to shape sheet-glass over a mold). The two elements, slotted together, create a peculiar, furniture-like shape. The rose-colored glass submits to its metal opponent as the cold sterility of the sleek metal armature is offset by the subtle eroticism emitted by the central bulbous bowl. The floral color and velvety finish of the glass highlight the work’s positioning at the edges of manufactured and natural realities—a tension held across Levy’s oeuvre.

Levy is included in an upcoming group exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. The exhibition, titled Moveables, opens August 18, 2023

Hannah Levy, Untitled, 2023 (Detail)

Hannah Levy, Untitled, 2023 (Alternate View)

Matthew Ronay
Bladderphone, 2021
Basswood, dye, gouache, flocking, plastic, steel, epoxy
15 x 16.5 x 14.75” / 38.1 x 41.91 x 37.47cm

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Matthew Ronay’s (b. 1976, Louisville, KY) practice is the embodiment of a masterful handling of materials through a fetishistic pursuit of form. Working primarily with basswood, his sculptures are all made by hand; each component carved, whittled, sanded, pierced, dyed, and jointed together into colorful configurations that visually defy their medium and conjure traditions of non-western art making and American folk art.

Bladderphone(2021) is a totemic sculpture composed of stacked and intersecting oblong and tubular elements. The work is a mosaic of references that are both machine-based and organic. The largest turquoise component is reminiscent of a bagpipe’s hide bag, while the purple-flocked channels evoke a telephone-operator’s switchboard, and the indented block of green at the works’ bottom recalls a field of grass. For the artist, these varied forms and references collate to spark a kinetic energy that is transmitted throughout the work, endowing the sculpture with a charge, and transforming it into a single, self-reliant unit.

Matthew Ronay, Bladderphone, 2021 (Left: Detail, Right: Alternate View)

Simon Starling
Recursive Plates (Still Life with Apples and Conkers or Silver Iodine Molecule Model), 2022
Silver plated copper plates produced in a series of three unique works, film holder
Plate: 9.45 x 7.48” / 24 x 19cm Film holder: 9.25 x 12.6 x .79”/ 23.5 x 32cm x 2cm
Frame: 11.125 x 14.56 x 2” / 28.25 x 36.98 x 5.08cm

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Simon Starling, Recursive Plates (Still Life with Apples and Conkers or Silver Iodine Molecule Model), 2022 (Detail)

Simon Starling’s (b. 1967, Epsom, UK) vast practice spans film, sculpture, photography, and installation. Central to his work is an ongoing exploration of how objects are made and re-made, how narratives are constructed and embedded, and how diverging histories reveal unexpected relationships.

For Art Basel 2023, Starling presents Recursive Plates (Still Life with Apples and Conkers or Silver Iodine Molecule Model) (2022). Hybrid in nature, part age-old daguerreotype, part contemporary-composited digital rendering, a ghostly image is made on a sheet of highly polished silver-plated copper. The work depicts apples and conkers aligned to form a molecular model of silver iodine—the photosensitive compound with which the exposure is made. Starling leverages the fruits to construct a self-referential arrangement, and in doing so, the artist visually threads new stories of resemblance and production. An added narrative element is borne from the reflective nature of the work’s surface that results in the viewer being both witness and participant. With polished plates that serve as image carriers and mirrors, individualized work experiences and stories unfold.

Simon Starling, Recursive Plates (Still Life with Apples and Conkers or Silver Iodine Molecule Model), 2022 (Alternate view)

Ella Walker
The Disquieting Muses, 2023
Acrylic dispersion, pigment, chalk and pencil on linen
67 x 35.4” / 170 x 90cm

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Ella Walker (b. 1993, Manchester, UK) transforms art historical iconography and modern-day references into invented scenes of love, drama, and mystery. The artist combines painting and drawing (using a vast array of mediums including tempera, gesso, pastel, and ink) to create shallow, stage-like depths of field and interspersing planes of color that usurp holistic understandings of structure and composition. The resulting meeting of disparate parts challenges viewers’ understanding of the sacred and profane, while simultaneously encourages the rethinking of binaries of old and new, high and low culture.

Ella Walker, The Disquieting Muses, 2023 (Detail)

The Disquieting Muses (2023) depicts the embrace of three figures dressed and poised theatrically with harlequin inspired patterning, cabaret tassels, and ballet posturing. The work takes its title from Giorgio di Chirico’s painting of the same name that was conceived at the height of his enigmatic Metaphysical Period (1909 – 1919). Di Chirico’s work depicts the muses of tragedy and comedy in the ghostly urban setting of Ferrara (an industrial area close to where the artist lived). Like di Chirico, Walker sets her stage on a wide-planked, wooden floor, but instead flattens the perspective of the composition, tethering her muses to the immediate foreground. Walker’s sensibility for archival modes of production extends to her drawing process and application of pigment. Areas of canvas are left unfinished, allowing for the drawing of the subjects to peer through multi-layered sections of color. Washes of nudes, peaches, white, and ochre overlap as a collage of skin and clothing, while purples weeds and surrealist eyes punctuate the figures bodices. In the bottom right, Walker pays homage to the cloaked statue in di Chirico’s composition, a reference to his maquette-like figurines that, when inserted into Walker’s painting, unmoors the group in an unknown and timeless space.

Ella Walker’s first solo institutional exhibition in Europe, Chorus, opens at Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover, Germany on July 8, 2023, through October 1, 2023.

Ella Walker, The Disquieting Muses, 2023 (Left: Detail, Right: Alternate View)

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