September Exhibitions at No.9 Cork Street: Teresita Fernández, Jinhee Kim, and Leyly Matine-Daftary with Manoucher Yektai
Three new shows spanning landscape, figuration and two contrasting 20th-century Iranian artists
Three new shows spanning landscape, figuration and two contrasting 20th-century Iranian artists
Teresita Fernández, ‘Astral Sea’
This September, Lehmann Maupin is presenting this show of new work by New York-based artist Teresita Fernández (coinciding with the exhibition at SITE Santa Fe ‘Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson’). Fernández’s work is characterized by a rethinking of what constitutes landscape: from the subterranean to the cosmic; from national borders to the elusive psychic countries we carry inside ourselves.
‘Astral Sea’ includes two new glazed ceramic works, Astral Sea 1 and Astral Sea 2, made from thousands of tiny glazed ceramic tesserae. Placed directly in the path of the sun, they seem to shift with the light. Other pieces incorporate sculptural paper panels and handwoven nets made from kozo fibres. Freestanding sculpture Tether (Flotsam and Jetsam) anchors the exhibition. The concrete base appears to be pulled upward by rope, from which are suspended nets laden with rock-like crystalline minerals that seemingly hover, yet remain tethered.
6 – 21 September 2024
Jinhee Kim, ‘Drink Water’
In ‘Drink Water’, a solo exhibition by the Berlin- and Seoul-based Jinhee Kim, the artist Kim uses the everyday act of drinking water as a metaphor to contemplate the meaning of identity beyond distinctions of race, culture, gender and language. In this show presented by ThisWeekendRoom, her paintings depict figures in mundane moments: peering out from a crowd, leaning over a table next to an empty glass, gazing out of a café window.
Kim's experience of living abroad has shown her that perceived cultural differences are rarely found in momentous events. Instead, it is in the ordinary actions of daily life – buying water at the supermarket, drinking coffee with a friend, walking around the streets – that she sees most keenly differences between herself and her surroundings. The viewer is not given any clues as to the nationality, age, or occupation of the female figures in Kim’s works, but is forced to focus on the trivial circumstances of each person amid the colours and composition of the painting.
6 – 21 September 2024
‘Perfect Strangers: Leyly Matine-Daftary with Manoucher Yektai’
Curated by Negar Azimi, this exhibition from Dastan Gallery includes still-lives and portraits by Manoucher Yektai and Leyly Matine-Daftary, two legendary Iranian-born artists who turn genre painting on its head, albeit with very different approaches.
Matine-Daftary (b. 1937, Tehran, Iran; d. 2007, Paris, France) spent most of her life painting and teaching outside Iran. At 18, she enrolled at the Slade, where her tutors included Lucian Freud, who introduced her to the palette knife and may have impacted her future work in other ways; the angular portraiture of Freud and the London School compatriots are echoed in Matine-Daftary’s later portraits, which often feature striking geometries demarcated by colour.
Yektai (b. 1921, Tehran, Iran; d. 2019, New York, USA) was also born in Tehran, but left to study in France and the US. Acquainted with many prominent figures in the Parisian and New York art scenes, including Willem De Kooning, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, who greatly influenced his work, he is best-known for his abstracted still-lives, portraits and landscapes which often employ heavy impasto.
6 – 21 September 2024
Further Information
For all the latest news from Frieze, sign up to the newsletter at frieze.com, and follow @friezeofficial on Instagram, Twitter and Frieze Official on Facebook.
