Lehmann Maupin returns to West Bund for the sixth time with a presentation that foregrounds personal history and identity as the cornerstone of collective narrative. The works on view carefully draw connections between disparate geographies and generations, emphasizing the use of symbolism in picture-making. Highlights include new works by Lari Pittman, whose solo exhibition is on view at Lehmann Maupin New York; Lee Bul’s materially-driven Perdu paintings; plus a focused presentation highlighting two women artists in the program: Chantal Joffe, who is best known for painting intimate portraits of her family and friends, and the late artist Heidi Bucher, whose solo exhibition is on view at the Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing.
Debuting at the fair is a new work by American artist Dominic Chambers, who creates vibrant paintings that simultaneously engage art historical models, such as color-field painting and gestural abstraction, and contemporary concerns around race, identity, and the necessity for leisure and reflection. In a new series of paintings featuring basketball courts, landscape has personal resonance for the artist, functioning as a space to examine and confront past trauma. The court itself is illuminated with a rainbow prism. Here, Chambers renders the prism entirely opaque, emphasizing the lines that outline the court to suggest that the space is performative—one where masculinity is negotiated. Works from this series are included in the artist’s solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis.
Also on view are new works by Marilyn Minter, who creates empowering photographs, painting, and videos that offer nuanced representations of women and the treatment of the female body in popular media. Through her subversion of beauty and glamour imagery, Minter exposes the double standards that influence women’s identities and challenges the historic portrayal of women through images. Looking ahead, Minter will have a solo exhibition at Lehmann Maupin Seoul, in the spring of 2024.
In Lee Bul’s most recent Perdu paintings, composed of organic and inorganic material such as mother of pearl and layers of acrylic paint, the artist’s otherworldly visions of fragmented cyborg bodies are seemingly caught, suspended in space, at various distances and in differing detail. In Perdu CLXXVI (2023) the undefined forms emerge from a multicolor field as if proliferating or expanding, hinting at an unidentified form of life that looms between the biological and technologic. The unfinished state of the forms and overall theme of physical and metaphorical yearning for completeness in the Perdu works is rooted in these past iterations where anagrams, like cyborgs, are formed from reconfigurable parts.
Also on view at the fair is a selection of work by Lari Pittman, which delves into the intersection of architecture and decorative arts while exploring critical issues related to gender, sexuality, power, and identity. His paintings are known for their bold use of color, intricate patterns, and surreal imagery. Pittman's contributions to contemporary art history have been recognized in a retrospective exhibition that traveled to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and to the Jumex Museum in Mexico City. Pittman’s work is also currently on view in a solo exhibition at Lehmann Maupin New York.
In celebration of Heidi Bucher’s current retrospective exhibition at the Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing, our presentation will also include historic work by the late Swiss artist. Bucher is best known for her innovative use of latex to cast large-scale architectural features, including entire buildings. Throughout her life, she maintained an ideologically important yet often overlooked practice, in most part due to her gender and unconventional choice of materials. She is now recognized as a pioneer in the multimedia arts space, evidenced in the work on view, which is made from latex, textile, and mother of pearl pigment.
London-based artist Chantal Joffe is known for her whimsical portraits of herself and of the people she is closest to, including her immediate family, her friends, and her extended family members. By creating tension between the scale of her compositions and the proposed intimacy of their subject matter, Joffe prioritizes the human identities and relationships that undergird her compositions over any kind of painterly realism. This approach heightens already complex narratives around connection, perception, and representation (implicit in the relationship between artist and subject), inviting viewers to reconsider their own interpersonal worlds.