Forthcoming Exhibitions in Europe & Asia, Spring / Summer 2023
Press Release
Cindy Sherman
Hauser & Wirth Zurich, Limmatstrasse
9 June – 23 September 2023
Cindy Sherman, considered one of the important American artists of her generation, will debut new work this June at Hauser & Wirth Zurich, Limmatstrasse, coinciding with Zurich Art Weekend 2023. Born in 1954 in Glen Ridge NJ, Sherman currently lives and works in New York NY. Her ground-breaking photographs have interrogated themes around representation and identity in contemporary media for over four decades. Coming to prominence in the late 1970s with the Pictures Generation group alongside artists such as Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince and Louise Lawler, Sherman studied art at Buffalo State College in 1972 where she turned her attention to photography. In 1977, shortly after moving to New York, Sherman began her critically acclaimed Untitled Film Stills—touchstones of contemporary art that continue to inspire and influence the course of art and image-making. Using a range of costumes, props and backdrops to manipulate her own appearance and to create photographs resembling promotional film images, the series explores the tension between artifice and identity in consumer culture, which has preoccupied the artist’s practice ever since. Since the early 2000s, Sherman has continued to channel and reconstruct familiar personas known to the collective psyche with the addition of CGI, capturing the fractured sense of self in modern society which the artist has uniquely encapsulated from the outset of her career.
This exhibition of new work in Zurich will coincide with two museum shows by the artist in Europe: ‘Cindy Sherman – Tapestries’ at ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Denmark, and ‘Cindy Sherman: Anti-Fashion’ at Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Germany.
Gary Simmons. This Must Be the Place
Hauser & Wirth London
26 May – 29 July 2023
Gary Simmons is known for using icons and stereotypes of popular culture to create works that address personal and collective experiences of race and class. For the artist’s first exhibition with Hauser & Wirth in London, Simmons will present a selection of brand-new paintings and sculptures. In these new works, Simmons continues to use erasure of the image as a powerful and recurring theme, a formal and aesthetic breakthrough technique that has informed much of his work and holds deep cultural significance. Used as a form of action painting, Simmons wipes the surface of his work while the paint is still wet in order to smear the image so that it simultaneously emerges and disappears. The tropes of erasure and ephemerality suggest the fleeting nature of memory and histories re-written, particularly in relation to the politics of race.
The first comprehensive survey of Simmons’ work, ‘Gary Simmons: Public Enemy,’ will open at The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago from 13 June – 1 October 2023 and will be the most in-depth presentation of Simmons’ work to date, covering thirty years of the artist’s career.
Gruppenausstellung
Hauser & Wirth Somerset
3 June 2023 – 1 January 2024
‘Gruppenausstellung’ is a celebration of the gallery’s Swiss heritage and family origins through a playful presentation of over 20 artists, including Phyllida Barlow, Martin Creed, Camille Henrot, Richard Jackson, Rashid Johnson, Paul McCarthy, Jason Rhoades, Pipilotti Rist, Mika Rottenberg, Anri Sala, Lorna Simpson, David Zink Yi and many more. The thematic group exhibition is inspired by the notion of a traditional Kunsthalle and will take over the entire site, five galleries, outdoor sculpture and culinary events at the Roth Bar and Grill. The multi-disciplinary programme will feature immersive installations, solo presentations and iconic video works, alongside an evolving events programme and Education Lab that will provide a unique meeting place for discovery and interaction.
The God that Failed
Louise Bourgeois, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko
Curated by Philip Larratt-Smith
Hauser & Wirth Zurich, Bahnhofstrasse 1
9 June – 16 September 2023
‘The God that Failed’ will explore the thematic and formal links among three important artists from the New York School: Louise Bourgeois, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. All three artists knew each other, showed together, and participated in talks and panels in the 1940s and 1950s, and all made the pivot in their work from biomorphic figuration to abstraction and geometry. There is an affinity between the pictorial space in the paintings of Newman and Rothko and the way in which Bourgeois’ sculptures were exhibited as environmental installations. Bourgeois’ Personages from 1946 to 1954 will be placed in dialogue with major works by Newman and Rothko from the same period. The title of the exhibition refers to a crisis in the concept of authority, be it the father figure, abstraction, psychoanalysis, the sublime, or the emancipatory promise of radical politics, and more generally to the postwar atmosphere of existential angst.
Christina Quarles, ...From this Squeeze (Save Me, Save Me, Save Me), 2022, Acrylic on canvas, 127.6 x 104.8 x 5.1 cm / 50 1/4 x 41 1/4 x 2 in, Part of the exhibition ‘In 24 Days tha Sun’ll Set at 7pm’ at Hauser & Wirth New York 22nd Street, 8 September – 29 October 2022 © Christina Quarles. Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Pilar Corrias, London. Photo: Thomas Barratt
Portrait of Christina Quarles © Christina Quarles. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Tara DarbyChristina Quarles
Hauser & Wirth Menorca
18 June – 29 October
This summer, Los Angeles-based artist Christina Quarles will unveil new paintings and works on paper across the 18th-century walls of Hauser & Wirth Menorca—her first exhibition in Spain following the presentation of her work in last year’s celebrated exhibition ‘The Milk of Dreams’ at the Venice Biennale and coinciding with a major exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. Quarles’ critically acclaimed canvases and drawings typically display fragmented, polymorphous bodies embedded in rich, textural patterns, a singular approach to figuration unique to the artist’s visual rhetoric. Alongside the exhibition, Quarles will develop a dedicated Education Lab, complemented by events and learning activities throughout the duration of the show.
In her initial approach to the canvas, Quarles begins by making marks that evolve into line drawings of human forms and body parts. She then photographs the work and uses Adobe Illustrator to draw the backgrounds and structures that ultimately surround the figures. In a reversal of the conventional layering of a composition, Quarles’ figures precede and even dictate the environment that they come to inhabit. Quarles’ fascination with the subject of bodily experience and identity is illustrated by the ambiguous figures that populate her practice. Tangled arms and legs emerge in her paintings, while perspectival planes bisect bodies, simultaneously grounding and dislocating them in space. The intersection of Quarles’ figures and planes analogize the imagined and prescribed boundaries of identity. ‘Fixed categories of identity can be used to marginalize but, paradoxically, can be used by the marginalized to gain visibility and political power,’ Quarles has said, ‘this paradox is the central focus of my practice.’
Roni Horn. ‘An Elusive Red Figure...’
Hauser & Wirth Zurich, Limmatstrasse
9 June – 16 September 2023
Using drawing, photography, installation, sculpture and literature, Roni Horn consistently questions accepted notions of identity and meaning and generates uncertainty to thwart closure in her works. This June, Horn presents a new work at Hauser & Wirth Zurich, Limmatstrasse, titled: ‘An elusive Red Figure darting about in the Venetian darkness; a red dwarf burning out beyond Saturn; a nasty gang of runts in red snowsuits acting out in a North American suburb; an attractive young Italian woman dressed in red is stalked by a lesbian serial killer; a village girl, the prettiest you can imagine, in a red velvet hood cut from the belly of a sleeping wolf ....’ (2022), a suite of 33 paired inkjet prints.
Phyllida Barlow
Chillida Leku
23 May – 15 October 2023
Chillida Leku will host an exhibition by British artist Phyllida Barlow—her first show in Spain—continuing a series that presents the work of internationally renowned artists within the Zabalaga farmhouse. Barlow has been invited to take over the museum’s first floor in its first exhibition by a living artist. The work of Eduardo Chillida has long held great significance for Barlow. Her pieces will further expand the frontiers of study of Chillida’s work, which will be contextualized by Barlow’s ‘anti-monumental’ sculptures, made from materials such as cardboard, fabric, plywood and cement. Her constructions connect with Chillida’s work in their exploration of fundamental sculptural elements, such as gravity, mass and materiality, and in the intentional visible clues through which Barlow reveals the process of their making.
This exhibition continues the artist’s own fascination with, and respect for, the work of Eduardo Chillida. In 2019, she was invited to select and write about a work from Tate Modern’s permanent collection, choosing his sculpture ‘Modulation of Space’ (1963). In Barlow’s words, this piece by Chillida is ‘a hybrid that fuses the readymade and the invented form. The solid iron bars from which it is forged are themselves readymades. It is a heavy, recalcitrant, inflexible material that requires a great deal of heat to make it malleable and a great deal of strength and skill to twist it into something other than its original lengths.’
An artist at the peak of her career, Barlow has exhibited extensively at international institutions, including Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany (2021); The Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK (2019); and La Biennale di Venezia, British Pavilion, Venice, Italy (2017).
Rashid Johnson. Nudiustertian
20 March – 10 May 2023
Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong
Rashid Johnson is among an influential cadre of contemporary American artists whose work employs a wide range of media to explore the themes of art history, individual and shared cultural identities, personal narratives, literature, philosophy, materiality and critical history. For his first solo exhibition in Asia, Johnson has created brand new works, including Bruise Paintings, Surrender Paintings and Seascape Paintings, alongside his mosaics, continuing to work with a complex range of iconographies to explore collective and historical expressions of longing and displacement, while speaking to the times we live in.
Press Contacts:
Alice Haguenauer, Hauser & Wirth London alicehaguenauer@hauserwirth.com
Laura Cook, Hauser & Wirth Somerset lauracook@hauserwirth.com
Anna-Maria Pfab, Hauser & Wirth Zurich annamariapfab@hauserwirth.com
Maddy Martin, Hauser & Wirth Zurich maddymartin@hauserwirth.com
Marta Coll, Hauser & Wirth Menorca martacoll@hauserwirth.com
Tara Liang, Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong tara@hauserwirth.com