A collaborative journey into the world of Denis Villeneuve’s DUNE and DUNE: PART TWO.
Curated by Oscar-winning cinematographer Greig Fraser and Oscar-nominated actor Josh Brolin from their exploratory artistic memoir DUNE: EXPOSURES. Their remarkable ode to the art of filmmaking combines evocative photography and vivid prose to provide unique behind-the-scenes insights into the creation of director/storyteller Denis Villeneuve’s DUNE and DUNE: PART TWO.
TIN MAN ART presents Logical Absurdity, an exhibition of work by Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood. Following the work that Donwood and Yorke made collaboratively for The Smile’s first three albums, Logical Absurdity will feature over 20 works, including screen prints, linocuts, lithographs, paintings by Donwood, a painting by Yorke, and paintings and tapestries made by the pair working together.
The pair have worked in tandem for 30 years, creating a vast archive of visual material for Radiohead’s album covers, books and internet projects. The exhibitionwill also chart the magical nature of repetition and how a decades-long collaboration changes and responds to outside influences.
HdM GALLERY presents Island of the Fay, a duo exhibition of works by painter Marcel·la Barceló and sculptor Apollinaria Broche. The show is curated by Nick Hackworth.
The exhibition brings together Marcel·la Barceló’s dreamlike, chromatic paintings that depict often solitary figures in otherworldly landscapes, with a collection of bronze and ceramic sculptures by Apollinaria Broche of lush, surreal, human-sized, flowering plants and diminutive, sylvan creatures in various states of metamorphosis. The meeting of the works by these two artists with their sympathetic thought-worlds casts the show as a portal to a fairytale-like place where human and more-than-human life and the mythic intermingle as part of a dynamic, abundant and numinous whole.
Lehmann Maupin is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by pioneering Japanese artist Mr., marking the artist’s debut solo presentation in the United Kingdom. Across a new body of work, including painting, sculpture, and works on paper, the exhibition harnesses the Japanese aesthetics of anime (presented with motion and sound) and manga (presented in a print medium) as a means of examining Japanese culture, fusing high and low forms of contemporary expression. The works on view continue Mr.’s longstanding interest in the circulation of popular imagery and its role in fantastical or escapist world-building that stems from postwar Japanese youth subculture.
N/A present a solo show of work by Seoul-based artist Muyeong Kim. Kim's practice is steeped in the seduction and discipline of theatre. His films and photographic works stage slippery relationships between observer and observed, where affectations of desire, compulsion, guilt and boredom are worn like heavy, opulent costumes. Servant School is Kim’s study of willed passivity and its violent ruptures.
The exhibition’s title comes from the Quay Brothers film Institute Benjamenta – a film Kim once described as so perfect that he almost didn’t want anyone else to see it. In this collection of recent works, a similar desire for control over the eyes of others plays out in carefully choreographed environments and image-making techniques.
Artwin Gallery presents Vladimir Chernyshev's first solo exhibition in London, curated by Alesya Veremyeva. The exhibition delves into Vladimir Chernyshev’s varied methodologies, showcasing the documentation of land art projects, monumental mural drawings that will cease to exist after the display period, newly created objects, and paper works. The artist emphasises themes of decay and transformation, reflecting on the act of creation itself—a vital aspect of earlier art epochs where time plays a significant role.
Chernyshev's projects explore the contrast between the intrinsic world and the human (and non-human) experience, employing a mix of studio practice, land art, and installations. His choice of materials—wood, tar, soot, wax, and rosin—often highlights the tragedy of their subtle erasure, inviting viewers to contemplate the cycles of creation and dissolution. The artist's work resonates with the enduring themes of existence, encapsulating the tension between permanence and impermanence.
Vadehra Art Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by leading Indian contemporary artist Sudhir Patwardhan – the artist’s first solo show in London. The show titled Cities: Built, Broken features a curation of recent work, including large and small canvases and a suite of drawings. The artist will simultaneously have a substantial body of work on view at the Barbican Centre, London, in a group show curated by its director, Shanay Jhaveri.
Sudhir Patwardhan’s oeuvre seeks to illuminate the moving obscurities and shared resonances of the human condition, molded by and manifesting in a variety of discursive worlds: from the cityscapes of Thane and Mumbai in India, and the unexpected hamlets of foliage that sometimes punctuate urban development, to the atmospheres of constructed spaces that seem to reveal the interiority of the people who inhabit them. Patwardhan’s tremendous empathy for his surroundings inclines him to tell the veiled yet supple stories of his protagonists – a subaltern, rising middle class rooted to the locales they occupy through varying intensities of emotion.
As a man of medicine, Patwardhan displays a profound understanding of the human figure, including its mental distortions and physical vagaries, with early inspiration from Cézanne and Picasso refining his intent. In this recent body of work, Patwardhan’s well-regarded visceral realism explores various dialectics and asymmetries, including class struggles, tensions between the material and spiritual and the emotional theatre of community. The shifting deportment of his figures across a series of charged slice-of-life scenes offers a moving portrait of the bustling annals of cities, where capitalist consumption, gentrification and the erosion of natural spaces are but few of the contested arguments about what constitutes as urban progress. He brings us a visual meditation on the geometric correspondences between various kinds of structures growing out of anarchic infrastructural development – often referred to colloquially in India as jugaad, or a kind of organized chaos. Moreover, by prioritizing the psychology of his subjects within their contextual parameters his compositions impress upon us landscapes, both real and symbolic, shaped by human tactility and dominance.
CYLINDER is pleased to present Eunsil Lee's solo exhibition Treachery Skin, which explores the psychological interplay arising when suppressed desires clash with societal norms. Employing architectural structures and perspective of Korean paintings, Lee contrasts these desires with conflicts that permeate human existence. Torpor, sorrow, and despair bare their tender flesh in moments of exposed vulnerability—an image akin to an unfinished building. Lee focuses on these moments to scrutinise dismantled human nerves and unstable psychological states from varied angles and with meticulous precision.
Nerves, the conduit for all interactions within Lee's work, transform into sinuous serpents symbolising writhing human desire, then into a wrinkly human brain, evoking a sensation of something crawling in one's head. The dark green nylon stretched over the supporting panel echoes the ambivalent human desire to both conceal and reveal. Fuzz on the layers of Korean paper meld with Lee’s subjects and add pulsating tension against the taut nylon.
In the dim pre-dawn hours, at a time suggestive of an impending event, the snakes elusively wriggling low across the ground and weaving between screens, with a series of scenes depicted on their skins, prompt observers to question whether they are depictions of a conceivable reality or illusions conjured up by the mind. As if concealing something, they disappear swiftly into the illusion, stirring the depth of one's sensual imagination.
ALMINE RECH is delighted to present Memories of the Future, an exhibition curated by Marco Capaldo, creative director of British luxury fashion house 16ARLINGTON. An expression of Capaldo’s longstanding enthusiasm for contemporary art, the exhibition is also the natural culmination of a years-long relationship between Capaldo and ALMINE RECH.
Drawing on a seed of inspiration first planted by an ode to memories written by Rafael Pavarotti for Vogue Italia in December 2021, Memories of the Future showcases 14 visionary artists, each of whom was asked to respond to Capaldo’s premise – that memories are not immutable experiences existing only in our past, but rather ever-evolving experiences that continuously shape and inform our future.
The collected works encompass a range of artistic mediums: paintings from the likes of Rhea Dillon, Remi Ajani, and George Rouy, sculptures by Jesse Pollock and Sandra Poulson, photography courtesy of Francesca Woodman, and an installation in the form of John Giorno’s seminal Dial-A-Poem ‘free poetry service’, first shown at MoMA in 1970.
We have no record of them ever meeting, Leyly and Manoucher. At least one person suggests they might have, in 1970, when he spent an extended season in the land of his birth. She was a granddaughter of Mohammad Mossadegh, the ill-fated Iranian nationalist leader removed from power care of an Anglo-American coup. He was the descendant of a long line of cultured public servants and merchants. Both of their lives were marked by foreign itineraries. Both of them set out to be artists who went against the grain.
Yektai’s art studies began at Tehran’s newly formed Faculty of Fine Arts, colloquially referred to as “Honarkadeh,” where he encountered modern European painting for the first time care of the school’s Beaux Arts curriculum. Some Honarkadeh students staged rebellions against the prevailing pedagogy and Yektai was no exception, energetically arguing with a professor one day over his right to paint a cucumber red. He left school without graduating, in 1944, and headed to New York, where he took classes at the Art Students League and fatefully encountered Jackson Pollock’s work in an issue of LIFE magazine. His ultimate destination, though, was France, where he planned to study with the Cubist painter Andre Lhote.
Matine-Daftaryleft Iran even earlier, at 13, to study at Cheltenham Ladies College in the UK, where she indulged in theater and painting. At 18, she enrolled at the Slade, where her professors included Lucian Freud. Freud introduced her to the palette knife and may or may not have influenced her future work in other ways; the angularity that characterized the portraiture of Freud and his London School compatriots find echo in Matine-Daftary’s later portraits, which often feature striking geometries demarcated by the use of color.
Meanwhile, France was a disappointment for Yektai—its arts education stodgy and conservative. He returned to New York, deep in the throes of a new movement called Ab Ex, and began developing what would become his signature style: heavily impastoed, almost sculptural, canvases which took still lives, figures and landscapes as their point of departure—a legacy, one might suggest, of his classical arts education in Tehran. The work felt both familiar and new, kicking the quotidian into another dimension— formally, spiritually—while always teetering between figuration and abstraction, never giving in to either and defying the art historian’s persistent call for “purity.”
“Yektai,” the renowned poet John Ashbery wrote in 1961, “wants to render us conscious of our existence from second to second, of the joy of breathing, of the rapid changes of things.” Soon, he began to be counted among the Ab Exers and the New York School, to which he said, “I don’t like to be considered part of any group,” memorably insisting that his work was “stateless.” When his fellow artist Larry Rivers asked him if he’d ever deviate from still-lives and paint the likes of an airplane, he replied, “I want to paint an apple until it flies!”
All the while, Yektai maintained a vivid poetry practice; his most well-known poem, Falgoosh, an epic about an Iranian folk fortune telling tradition, extravagantly scrambles rhyme and meter—making it a touchstone in the history of modern Iranian poetry. A political parable, Falgoosh was staged at the avant-garde Shiraz Festival of the Arts in 1970 and continues to both bewilder and titillate new generations of readers.
Just as Yektai was habituating to life in America, Matine-Daftarymoved back to Tehran in the late 1950s and began teaching at the Faculty of Fine Arts. She also began to make the work that she would come to be known for—flat brightly rendered canvases marked by a taut and deceptive simplicity. In their conjuring the inner lives of everyday objects, they occasionally evoke Japanese Shijo painting. About their flatness, there is much to say: like écriture plat, which served as an affront to affectation in literature, Matine-Daftary’s paintings can feel like a riposte to ornamentation in Persian painting. She tended toward people and still lives in her art, and yet to characterize her as a mere figurative painter would be misleading; as the artist Fereydoun Ave has noted, her core concern was “the abstract division of space.” Traditional ideas about pictorial space were jettisoned as she used blocks of color in both foreground and background to create new dimensionalities.
The exhibition at hand is an amuse-bouche, a provocation and an experiment, featuring rarely seen works by both artists, comprising landscapes, portraits, and still lives. Both armed with a classical education, both formalists of a sort, they each turned genre painting on its head—making it distinctly their own. Both Matine-Daftaryand Yektai pulled upon things close at hand—friends and fellow travelers, and of course, their immediate environment; Matine-Daftarywas prone to painting the stones (sang-chin), persimmons (khormaloo), and plane trees (derakht-e-chenar) around her North Tehran home, while Yektai often depicted an amalgam of the various topographies he had lived in and around, including that of the South Fork of Long Island, where he settled and spent decades making art of and about subjects as simple as a tomato plant. Notably, both artists resisted the call in Iranian modern art to address a national vernacular, most vividly manifest in what came to be known as the Saqqakhaneh movement. Both resisted being commodified as part of any group; both struck out on their own. Finally, both died in exile— Matine-Daftaryin Paris, in 2007, and Yektai in Long Island, in 2019.
So, strangers. The late sociologist George Simmel defined strangers as distinct from “outsiders” or “wanderers.” Strangers are at once close and distant, intimate and alien. In this way, Matine-Daftaryand Yektai are indeed strangers: impossible to reduce to tidy art historical designations. Perfect strangers, to each other and to traditional art histories, they meet here.
** Perfect Strangers would not have been possible without the support of the artists’ families: Suri Farman-Farmaian and the Estate of Manoucher Yektai in particular. Additional thanks to Ali Bakhtiari, Leila Moghtader, Alireza Fatehie, Ashkan Zahraei, and Karma.
Leyly Matine-Daftary (Iranian; b. 1937, Tehran, Iran—d. 2007, Paris, France; lived and worked in Paris and Tehran)
Manoucher Yektai (Iranian-American; b. 1921, Tehran, Iran—d. 2019, New York, USA; lived and worked in New York)
ThisWeekendRoom are pleased to present Drink Water, the solo exhibition by Berlin and Seoul-based artist Jinhee Kim. 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. Her paintings depict figures caught in seemingly repetitive and mundane routines: a face peering out from a crowd, a figure resting and leaning over a table next to an empty glass, and a seated figure gazing out a café window. However, a closer look reveals that these actions are not universally experienced in the same way. Instead, they are shaped by geographical, political, and social contexts unique to each individual. What may appear trivial to some could mean a great deal to others—a dream they have to fight for or reclaim.
Kim's experience living abroad has shown her that these moments of perceived differences are rarely rooted in some memorable event. It is in the ordinary aspects of daily life—having breakfast, buying water at the supermarket, drinking coffee with a friend, or walking around in the neighborhood—that she senses the differences between herself and her surroundings. These daily routines reflect deeply ingrained values of each individual and, in turn, highlight the diverse ways people live their lives.
Lehmann Maupin is pleased to present Astral Sea, an exhibition of new work by New York-based artist Teresita Fernández. Featuring a series of glazed ceramic pieces and new sculptural paper panels, Astral Sea extends the artist’s interests in the confluence points of the cosmos, land, and water, as seen through the lens of an embodied sculptural landscape.
Throughout her practice, Fernández has concerned herself with the ambulatory viewer, situating her work so that it is brought to life by the individual’s movement around the gallery. With these shifting vantage points, people’s reflections move across the surfaces of the work; depending on one’s location, the artist’s materials either reveal or conceal themselves from view. This physical engagement is akin to how we wayfind in or navigate the world around us, making evident our connectivity to the universe—the stars, tides, and slow time of geology. In this way, Fernández’s works embody the phrase: “Nothing rests; Everything moves; Everything vibrates.”
