CHICO DA SILVA
October 27 – December 16, 2023
520 W. 20th St., New York
Panel Discussion with Gabriella Angeleti, Rodrigo Moura, and Darienne Turner, moderated by Ana Lopes: Thursday, October 26 | 5 – 6 PM
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 26 | 6:30 – 8 PM
We are pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Francisco (Chico) da Silva (b. circa 1910. d. 1985), the first time that Chico's work has been featured in a solo exhibition in New York, at our W. 20th St. gallery. Join us Thursday, October 26 at 5 PM for a panel discussion moderated by Ana Lopes, artist liaison at David Kordansky Gallery, with Rio de Janeiro-born writer Gabriella Angeleti, El Museo Del Barrio chief curator Rodrigo Moura, and Brooklyn Museum curator of Indigenous art Darienne Turner, followed by an opening reception at 6:30 PM. Work by Chico will also be included in our upcoming Paris+ par Art Basel presentation.
At once fantastical, dark, joyous, and mystical, Chico da Silva’s signature lines and virtuoso patterning introduce us to a world of the artist’s own making. Born to an Indigenous Peruvian father and a mother from Ceará in northeastern Brazil, Chico quickly established himself as one of twentieth-century Brazil’s most prolific, important, and controversial artists. Chico’s known engagement with art began with his creation of murals on the exteriors of fishermen's homes in Fortaleza in the 1940s—a typology for which he quickly became known. This work attracted the attention of a European art dealer, after which Chico's work was shown extensively across Europe and he was invited to represent Brazil at the 33rd Venice Biennale in 1966. The artist created a studio employing various assistants who were empowered as artists in their own right, effectively creating an artistic community in Ceará. This show presents a selection of Chico's work from the 1960s through the mid-1970s and examines questions of authorship, autonomy, authenticity, and xeno-fantasy.
David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to announce our representation of Martha Diamond. Diamond will be included in our upcoming group presentation at Paris+ par Art Basel in October. The artist's first solo exhibition with the gallery will be presented in Los Angeles in March 2024. Read more about Diamond’s work and career in ARTnews.
For more than fifty years, Diamond has created paintings and works on paper that capture the essence of the metropolis. Beginning in the late 1960s, Diamond immersed herself in the downtown Manhattan art and poetry communities of the New York School, finding direct inspiration from her lived experiences and from such earlier painters as Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Jackson Pollock. While the city has become her signature motif, her work exhibits a keen sense of exploration, placing her on a trajectory that has taken her far beyond the Manhattan skyline and into the realm of abstraction. Her deft command of her materials produces rich greens and blues, vibrant reds and yellows, rendered in bravura brushstrokes that demonstrate an intuitive understanding of color and light as well as structure and shape. The textures and colors that characterize Diamond’s work—more commonly associated with sweeping landscape vistas—encourage contemplation, meditation, and a deep engagement between viewer and canvas. While Diamond admits to connecting through her art with the outside world, she also responds directly to the materials she works with. “If I express anything, it's how the brush works,” she has said. “Not my emotion.”
Diamond has had solo exhibitions at the New York Studio School (2004), Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Maine (1988), and Portland Museum of Art, Maine (1988), among many others. She has also participated in important group exhibitions, including Beautiful, Vivid, Self-contained (curated by David Salle), Hill Art Foundation, New York (2023); Visionary Painting (curated by Alex Katz), Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine (2017); Changing Soil: Contemporary Landscape Painting, Nagoya/Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Nagoya, Japan (2010); Invitational Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture, American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York (2001, 1991, and 1990); Inventing the American Landscape: A Dialogue with the Visual World, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh (1998); Whitney Biennial 1989 (curated by Richard Armstrong, John G. Hanhardt, Richard Marshall, and Lisa Phillips), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1989); American Painting Since the Death of Painting (curated by Donald Kuspit and presented in association with the USSR Union of Artists), Kuznetsky Most Exhibition Hall, Moscow (1989); and MetaManhattan, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1984). Her work is in the permanent collections of many institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine; Guggenheim Museum, New York; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. The recipient of an Academy Award for Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2001), Diamond has taught at the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Madison, Maine. For thirty-six years (1982–2018), Diamond served on the Skowhegan School’s Board of Governors.
FRED EVERSLEY & DEANA LAWSON
Frieze London – Booth E01
The Regent's Park, London
VIP Preview: October 11
Public Days: October 12 – 15
Visit us at Booth E01 at Frieze London 2023 for a presentation of sculptures by Fred Eversley and new large format photographs by Deana Lawson. This presentation prominently features three of Eversley’s Cylindrical Lenses, a major new typology that relates back to the Cylindrical Section sculptures exhibited in the artist’s first solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970. Made of tinted polyurethane and formed into cylindrical geometrical masses with a diagonal surface shaped as a parabolic arc, these floor-based tapering monuments utilize the plano-convex surface to focus parallel rays of light to a single line, resulting in parabolic shadows, reflections, refractions, and distortions. The artworks’ capacity to both extend into—and absorb elements of—their surrounding environments activate their contours and interiors with chance effects. With multiple viewers, Eversley’s work results in any number of visual fluctuations made possible by the synergetic presence between the viewers seeing and being observed in new, dissolved, and transformed ways through the medium, thereby becoming an active part of the work. More than fifty years later, the artist’s return to this project is a testament to both the remarkable continuity of Eversley’s oeuvre, and the enduring spirit of curiosity that animates his investigations of shape, color, light, and their interplay.
Lawson makes photographs that explore the Black familiar and its relationship to lore, global histories, and mystery traditions. She transforms observational picture-making into a powerful mode of expression, critique, and celebration. The artist engages her subjects with intention and intuition alike, in staged situations characterized by the piercing directness of the model’s gaze. With their meticulous mise-en-scènes filled with personal artifacts and decor, these portraits underscore the psychological connections between people and their domestic spaces, fusing biography, symbolism, and cultural observation, and creating expansive images of contemporary personhood.
David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to announce our representation of Mario Ayala. View a new work by Ayala in our Art Basel Miami Beach presentation at Booth F19 from November 29 – December 3. The artist's first solo exhibition with the gallery will be presented in Los Angeles in 2023.
Ayala reimagines a contemporary landscape where identity, observation, and the presence of material fact play equal roles. In his paintings, Ayala brings together figures and forms drawn from every corner of his experience living on the West Coast. Ayala's work lends interest in traditions and techniques with strong visual ties to California, such as muralism, tattooing, and industrial techniques used in automobile painting and commercial signage. Ayala's influences also extend into postwar art historical movements such as the Cool School of Los Angeles and Bay Area Funk art. Ayala's highly personal, often surreal, tableaux are vivid representations of the way in which images course through the world, carrying with them fragments of the past, present, and a future still in formation. His creations live as collectively inspired documents that reflect issues, energies, and aesthetics alive in Mexican American, Latin, and Brown communities throughout the region. Ayala's sculptures, site-specific works, and collaborations embody his capacity to envision the local and the global as interwoven phenomena. Like his paintings, they locate surprising—and even unsettling—moments of cohesion in a world defined by multiplicity and rapid, ever-changing flux.
Mario Ayala has been the subject of solo and two-person exhibitions at Jeffrey Deitch, New York (2022) and Ever Gold [Projects], San Francisco (2021). Recent group exhibitions include Hot Concrete: LA to HK, K11 Musea, Hong Kong (2022); Shattered Glass, Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles (2021); and Made in L.A. 2020: a version, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2020). His work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut. Ayala lives and works in Los Angeles.
David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to announce our representation of Jenna Gribbon. The artist's first solo exhibition with the gallery will be presented in Los Angeles in 2024. Read more about the artist in ARTnews.
Gribbon’s oil paintings constitute an important new entry in the long lineage of figurative art, extending its narrative possibilities to explore the act of looking. Her vivid portraits, frequently nudes or partial nudes, depict those closest to her, and sometimes the artist herself, in candid poses, during uncanny moments. Replete with saturated colors—and spotlit in awkward, uncomfortable, or humorous positions—the protagonists are often seen looking directly at the artist, blurring the line between observer and the observed. By including her own image in her paintings, whether it’s her legs brushed up against her partner’s or her dramatic shadow lurking in the foreground, Gribbon becomes both actor and director in an unfolding storyline that is equal parts comedic, tender, fantastical, and dark. She uses scale to decipher between true-to-life and constructed scenes. In her larger paintings, Gribbon employs strategically placed props––mirrors, blindfolds, clamp lights, colored gels, green screens––to explore different types of mediation that affect image consumption and investigate the power dynamics between subject, artist, and viewer. Her recent work most prominently features her partner, Mackenzie Scott, whose recurrence both personalizes and simultaneously establishes her as a kind of avatar; shifting the focus of the painting away from the figure and toward the way the figure is framed. Gribbon’s paintings often begin as a photo taken on her phone, forging a fluid relationship between photography and painting, the real and the surreal, and between the ephemerality of phone photography and the enduring quality of oil paint. By painting otherwise fleeting scenes, the artist adds texture, depth, and a sense of permanency to these temporal images, highlighting themes of pleasure, joy, and expanding the lexicon of queer iconography.
Jenna Gribbon (b. 1978, Knoxville, Tennessee) is currently the subject of a solo exhibition on view through February 19, 2023, at Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy. Recent group exhibitions include Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Masters, The Frick Collection, New York (2022); and I will wear you in my heart of heart, FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2021); and Paint, also known as Blood: Women, Affect and Desire in Contemporary Painting, Warsaw Museum of Modern Art, Poland (2019). Her work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the Kunstmuseum The Hague, the Netherlands; Brant Foundation, New York; Dallas Museum of Art; Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, Las Vegas, Nevada; New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana; Kurpfälzisches Museum, Heidelberg, Germany; Rubell Museum, Miami; and FLAG Art Foundation, New York. Gribbon lives and works in New York.
In collaboration with David Kordansky Gallery, Gribbon will continue to be represented by MASSIMODECARLO and LGDR.