Artists for Ukraine

For nearly four decades, Uta Barth has made visual perception the subject of her work. Regarded for images that range from painterly abstraction to extreme precision, the artist carefully renders cropped frames and the natural qualities of light to capture incidental and fleeting moments. Barth presents images that exist almost exclusively within our periphery. 

This work by Martin Boyce features wood-grain patterns made from timber shuttering cast in jesmonite (similar to concrete) resembling modernist architectural fragments. These linear patterns serve as background for a wooden panel with the phrase "An Inn for Phantoms” carved in angular letters. 

This signature font created by the artist stems from the concrete trees designed by French sculptors Joël and Jan Martel for the 1925 Exposition Internationale Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris, which have long been a source of inspiration in Boyce’s practice. For Boyce, these Cubist trees “represent a perfect collapse of architecture and nature.” 

The title of the piece and the text reference Boyce’s outdoor commission now on view at Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute, Scotland entitled An Inn For Phantoms Of The Outside And In which borrows its title from a line in Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Reverie: “Sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms.” 

Throughout her career, Sandra Cinto has developed a rich vocabulary of symbols and lines to create lyrical landscapes and narratives that hover between fantasy and reality. Using drawing as her point of departure, the artist renders intricate and mesmerizing environments of turbulent seascapes, violent rainstorms, and celestial skies that frequently engage with the surrounding architecture to a disorienting effect, creating the illusion of a weightless, spiraling universe. Evoking stories of human hardship and redemption, these fantastical landscapes serve as a metaphor for the human odyssey, while also pushing the limits and possibilities of drawing.

Created for her solo exhibition Landscape of a Lifetime at the Dallas Museum of Art in 2019, this painting demonstrates the power of making bridges. 

This work is from a series of photographs Phil Collins took of young people living in Belgrade shortly after the Serbian democratic revolution in 2000 and the overthrow of Slobodan Milošević’s regime. Cropped tightly on the subjects’ faces and depicting the figures lying in the grass, these portraits are intimate and deeply personal. Against the sensationalist media representations prevalent at the time, they emphasize the sensual languor of youth and nature, with the subjects dappled in sunlight and resting, while uncertainty about the surrounding social and political climate is implied but not directly depicted. In this photograph, Caca's expression is inscrutable and somewhat ambiguous, possibly conveying relaxation, exhaustion, sorrow, or tenderness. This complexity points to the breadth of human experience, resisting the inclination during times of strife to portray individuals only in the framework of conflict and violence. 

Other works from this series are in the collections of the Tate Gallery, London, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. 

Mark Dion’s work investigates systems of knowledge production and presentation, including how disciplines classify information in order to view the world through a lens of rationality. In this drawing, Dion creates a catalog of modern-day bogeymen that are inspired by the hybrid, imaginary creatures found in the margins of medieval manuscripts. Darkly comic, the work balances a sense of whimsy and absurdity with a sharply critical eye to the contemporary political landscape. The word "plague," once associated primarily with medieval illness but newly resonant in the 2020s, also can be used to refer to a wider variety of non-medical ills that afflict society. 

Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg's sculptures of whimsical birds sucking on fantastical flowers, create a forest-like landscape - bringing their animations to life and into real space. Rendered through dark humor, with a hint of the absurd, Djurberg and Berg’s work explores an emotional gamut of fear, innocence, power, greed, and shame. The formal qualities of the work—seductive colors and visceral textures—enhance the emotional dimension and challenge our way of seeing. In dissolving our perspective of morality and bias, Djurberg and Berg invite the viewer to consider our own fears and fantasies.

In Flatland light, panes of colour-effect-filter glass form a large, luminous quasi brick. The quasi brick is a three-dimensional space-filling form developed by Eliasson together with one of his long-time collaborators, Icelandic mathematician Einar Thorsteinn. The quasi brick’s form was inspired by Thorsteinn’s research into naturally occurring quasicrystals, which exhibit both four- and fivefold symmetry. The shape is a space-filling polyhedron – identical copies can be arranged together to ‘pack’ space, leaving no space between the individual members. The quasi brick’s combination of regular and irregular faces suggests an organic growth, but its geometric dimensions have been precisely tuned to achieve its unique properties.

Intricate details from the cityscapes depicted in Sabine Hornig's commission for LaGuardia Airport are featured in individual photographs, digitally composed images that integrate succinct quotes from former mayor Fiorello La Guardia. Having famously described New York City’s unique image as “the entire world in microcosm,” La Guardia becomes a figure in Hornig’s work who embodies how leadership shapes our shared environment. 

In this glass and resin sculpture, Jónsi subtly references coincident epidemics. While the use of glass pipes is a direct nod to an ongoing crisis with opioids, the structural resemblance to corals alludes to their endangered status in various parts of the world due to rising human activity. Nature and its therapeutic effects play a significant role within the artist’s oeuvre. Despite its static composition, Kóralblóm (Coral bloom) has a teeming, burgeoning quality reminiscent of a living organism or virus.

Throughout the past three decades, Carla Klein’s work has explored the relationship between photography and painting as well as the layers of mediation involved in both creating and interpreting images. Using her own photography as a point of departure, Klein’s paintings push the original image towards abstraction in ways that reveal inherent flaws in processes of representation. Many works illustrate artifacts of the imaging process – white borders on the canvas suggest cropping, drips of paint reference scratches on the surface of the negative – which the artist describes as the “abstract consequence” of the photo. Enlarged from negative to snapshot, and from snapshot to canvas, her sublime landscapes become real objects, far enough removed from their subjects that they take on new and different meanings. 

Kurant is interested in the transformation of post-industrial societies to what is known today as cognitive capitalism. Her projects often relate to ‘the economy of the invisible”, intangible and conceptual phenomena that can bring an avalanche of social change. Her projects analyze the exploitation of social capital— such as “likes” on Facebook and Instagram— by corporations and governments collecting data to impact production. Collective Rorschach Test is inspired by a 2017 social experiment on Reddit called Place. In this virtual canvas-territory, over a million people worldwide cooperated virtually to create collective forms such as flags, fictional characters, works of art, portraits of politicians, slogans, cults within the span of a few days. For Kurant, the most interesting collective form resembled an organism, such as a virus, slime mold, or Rorschach test which are examples of collective intelligence in nature. Collective Rorschach Test depicts the evolution and mutations of memes- ideas and behaviors that are passed between individuals within a shared cultural system. 

Laura Lima’s Wrong Drawing 2052  is composed of natural cotton woven with pieces of charcoal; over time, the coal begins to dye the works. In a continual state of fluidity the works are dated far into the future, suggesting an eventual time when they may reach completion. Charcoal as matter is comprised of carbon, the building block of life and all living constituents. Casting the works as a memory of the future, Lima again explores the mutability of her artworks by setting the stage and directing the action of the matter to translate and execute her will.

The drawings are beautiful pastel on top of manipulated photographs of the Los Angeles landscape. Long refers to the mysterious figure that appears in each drawing as a "Monad," a term coined by philosopher Gottfried Leibniz to describe elemental substances that according to the artist are neither beings nor ideas, but independent objects. Long's work of the past 20 years has very often been inspired by an interest in new processes and materials, which has resulted in forms that are unique and in many cases without external reference. In this case, Long works stem from the artist's thoughts about the deep past and the history of the earth, as he ponders essential questions about the mystery of creation, the larger context of geological time, and how consciousness has manifested from or through the physical world. The ordinary landscape photograph from which the image is sourced is commonplace as far as subject matter, but rotated and altered becomes more profound, as the hovering form contextualizes the earth. In this drawing, the banality of prosaic, everyday experience is transformed into something significant and wondrous.

Executed with opaque washes of mossy greens, indigos, muted grays, or pale glowing yellows and often divided by a stark horizon line, the world Lundqvist’s figures inhabit is one of subdued meditative hues and pure economic geometry. Reduced architectural or natural elements at times adorn the landscape adding a dreamy air of sublimity to the works’ overall surrealist atmosphere. The figures are always meticulously rendered, each with his or her own thoughtfully assembled outfit and subtle facial and gestural expressions, implying a variety of personalities and myriad internal nuances. Each composition provides just enough mesmerizing and curious hints and clues, tempting the viewer to assemble their own narrative interpretation through close observation and careful contemplation.

Remarkable in execution and detail, Untitled Head is produced through an intimate logic that has now become signature to Manders' practice. Rendered entirely in cast bronze, the work appears to be soft clay mid-way through the process of becoming a sculpture.  In casting the sculpture in bronze, the artist freezes a very specific moment in time, highlighting the fragility of every moment that passes. The manipulation of material generates a sense of puzzlement and awe, masterfully creating a sense of timelessness— while the sculpture seems to be just made, it is at the same time enigmatically atemporal.

This recent work is another example of the myriad ways in which Ernesto Neto’s works redefines the relationship between artwork and viewer, and how it can bring human beings together.  Designed for direct interaction, amor nós (we love) connects viewers’ hearts, physically and spiritually, as it channels the pulse of life from one person to another and back again. A biomorphic sculpture of crochet and spices, amor nós (we love) continues Neto’s career-long inquiry into the sculpture, body and the natural world.

À espreita is a series of black and white works on paper that reflect an evolution of the artist’s exploration of childhood fears and anxieties. Simple drawings by children were abstracted and converted by the artist into silhouettes, projected as oversized forms in previously exhibited installations. Transformed once again into more intimately framed works on paper, these shadowy forms have been inverted as white figures onto a black ground, appearing as ghosts or spirits. “À espreita” is a term in Portuguese which means to be “on the lookout”, or “watching”.

This new photographic work brings together salvaged asphalt roofing — sourced from naturally occurring intersecting fault lines — with images Olivier took in Trinidad (where the artist was born). In Bystanders, an image of a dilapitated parking garage, partially converted into a homeless shelter was taken in Trinidad during Carnival, an annual tradition deeply embedded into the culture and community. The contrast between the masqueraders celebrating in the street and the onlookers, quietly sitting and standing against the backdrop of a stark gridded structure feels uncanny and arresting. The asphalt itself is a reference to Trinidad’s Pitch Lake, the largest natural deposit of asphalt in the world. Having visited Pitch Lake as a child, Olivier was immediately drawn to the material and its multiple meanings.

In this work, Oppenheim explores celluloid film, the foundational medium that revolutionized commercial photography and motion pictures possible. She uses her signature smoke technique to signify celluloid’s ultimate downfall. The same combination of camphor and liquefied nitrocellulose that made it so successful as film also led it to combust over time. In this series, the artist crops found photos of fires or explosions and solarizes the prints by exposing them with the light of an open flame, marrying the subject with means of production: images of smoke, exposed by the light of the fire. The works’ title, Photograph of Nitrate Film Vault Test, Beltsville Maryland, was taken from the caption accompanying the archive image Oppenheim sourced from The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. As nitrate film fires became a known hazard, various agencies pursued safe storage methods in order not to lose entire inventories and archives, and explosive field tests were carried out to determine the extent of their stability. In Oppenheim's abstraction, celluloid's disappearance is both reinforced and reversed. A record of its imminent extinction— now absence— is materialized in the present.

In this series of work, each painting takes their name from the individual titles of John Dowland’s (1563-1626) Lachrimae; a collection of instrumental music produced by the composer in 1604.  Considered his signature work, Lachrimae - or Seaven teares figured in seaven passionate pavans as it is also known - was written for the viol and lute, and is based upon the motif of a single falling tear. Each of the seven pavans (dances) reflects on a different type of weeping, including old tears, sighing tears, forced tears and lovers tears. For example, Lachrimæ Gementes (Sighing Tears).

Philipsz made these paintings by submerging screen-printed canvases into baths of salted water and leaving them there for a varying number of days. The resulting surfaces are richly encrusted with layers of salt crystals, and evoke the tears suggested by Dowland’s music.   

In recent years, Amalia Pica has engaged in an ongoing investigation of bureaucratic structures and traditional office culture, purposefully using form in a playful manner to explore and counteract the tediousness of everyday work life. While working from home over the last several months, she was intrigued by the randomness of objects that accumulated as the boundaries between her professional and personal lives blurred. The paperweight sculptures consist of recognizable yet disparate objects such as children’s toys, studio supplies, sports equipment, and items collected from nature that have been arranged in dynamic compositions. These encounters among objects seem whimsical or surreal, yet demonstrate how material culture provides an accurate account of real life. 

Dana Powell's small-scale oil paintings depict moments of transition and anticipation. They take the shape of night drives, full moons, swimming pools, elevator doors, still lifes with fruit, explosions, and peep holes. Unrelated at first look, these subjects prove malleable apparatus in demonstrating the unsettling power of the ordinary, and emotive potential of small shifts in formal painting strategies. Considered austerity is applied to Powell’s tableaus of the everyday, offering a window to the familiar and its undertow.

Preheim's exquisitely rendered drawings, sculptures and photographs explore themes relating to the transience of life and the cyclical nature of human experience. In this work, Preheim continues her exploration of transformative processes found in nature, photography and drawing. The combination of pressed leaves and flowers and Preheim's signature, small-scale graphite drawings from photographs, powerfully address the distance between public and private worlds, the past and the present, the sacred and secular, the conscious and the subconscious. Regarded for these minute and delicate works on paper, the artist draws from personal, found and historical sources to construct evocative narratives that are at once enigmatic yet accessible, strikingly intimate yet universal.  

Analia Saban dissects and reconfigures traditional notions of painting, often using the medium of paint as the subject itself. This body of work continues Saban's investigations into the relationship between paint, pigment and canvas. Starting with her research into the history of pigments and the composition of paint that she conducted during a residency at the Getty Conservation Institute in 2016, Saban has continued to change the relationship between paint and canvas. In this work, a thin layer of dried acrylic paint is woven through the linen, physically embedded into the fabric of the painting. 

Zonal Harmonic 2N 55/11 is composed of orbits held together through mutual tension. Configurations float in space; arcs seem to bend, recompose and come together like molecular helical structures; inside, the strands entangle tiny universes.

Finding inspiration from multiverse epistemological tensions, the sculpture possesses intricate layers, defining its spatiality and shape. These are intersected with thin filaments that together form a tensegrity model and set forth the delicate composition. Bowed components and linear connections embody the tensions and power balance that together form crescents and spherical orbs. These, in return, lend the conceptual reference to the name of each artwork: zonal harmonics are sets of functions that are invariant under a rotation around fixed axes. The physical dynamics that the artwork conveys extend from microscopic particles to planetary gravitational forces. 

Among the leading German artists of his generation, Thomas Scheibitz has developed his own conceptual language that bridges the realms of figuration and abstraction, at times dissolving them entirely. Drawing from classical painting and architecture, contemporary urban landscape and popular culture, Scheibitz deconstructs and recombines signs, images, shapes, and architectural fragments in ways that challenge traditional contexts and interpretations. While centrally concerned with principles of classification and systems of order, the artist’s paintings, sculptures and works on paper resist traditional categorization.

The books selected for this kebab explore the idea of the Mountain Jews– an early precedent of a warrior Jew, skilled at horse craft and battle, a kind of cowboy Jew of the Caucauss. the book in Hebrew is a monograph of the Israel Museum on the subject and the french book La Montagne du Sang generally adresses the region.  The  book in Russian, Lev Gumilev’s древние Тюрки (Ancient Turks) also points to the influence of the Turks’ battle skills and their nomadic traditions on Jews of western Asia.

For more than 20 years, Starkey has dedicated her practice to representing the experiences of women in contemporary society. Blurring the lines between portraiture, documentary, and mediated reality, Starkey carefully reconstructs glimpses of interior lives capturing her subjects in moments of introspection amid ordinary urban spaces. Developing a new way to capture her gender, Starkey’s photographs defy the myopic identities in which women are traditionally portrayed in the thousands of images we see every day. Eschewing the primacy of the male gaze, Starkey’s subjects are presented as feminine protagonists – neither exploited nor worshipped.

Regarded for his works on paper, Dirk Stewen has developed a rich and varied practice that incorporates aspects of photography, drawing, assemblage, collage, and embroidery. Drawing from his own collection of images, the artist presents unexpected yet poignant juxtapositions of forms, materials and ideas that suggest new associations and narratives. Faded photographs, watercolors, confetti and thread are among the many materials Stewen has recombined into poetic compositions that are at once visually arresting and charged with emotion.

In Liu Shiyuan’s  For Jord photographic series, each intricate composition results from a carefully considered and emotionally driven logic. Embedded in each photograph are a variety of images, from animals and natural landscapes to references of the artificial. Each image builds on this idea of semiotic complexity, how each symbol garners new connotations in unusual contexts. She also incorporates video into her photographs by laying out the video stills frame by frame on the picture surface. Emphasizing the story told by individual images, which is often different than the original film, the viewer is able to scrutinize every transitory moment otherwise unnoticed in a continuous motion picture.

Haim Steinbach's text works investigate the boundaries of language, of feeling versus structure, and of perception, while challenging the audience as to what is being discussed.  The wall texts propose that reading is an act of seeing, and that graphic codes which proliferate our current media culture accustom us to word and image arriving in the same package.  Just as his shelving of found objects reminds viewers that display is an ideological enterprise, his wall paintings of found vernacular text serve also to play with established codes of interpreting what is seen.  

In the Fragment Series, Sze continues her longstanding investigations of sculpture and installation, with a renewed emphasis on painting. Lavender Landscape Standing, the vibrancy of the photographic fragment of the sky contrasts with the fragment of dark, nighttime sky at the base of the work. The improbable path of the dripping blue paint, and the way it interacts with the stones, addresses concepts of gravity and balance to beautiful effect.

Jeffrey Vallance’s reliquary sculptures irreverently sanctify seemingly banal objects of personal significance to the artist in small, intricately crated cabinets that reference traditional Catholic reliquaries. In this work, Vallance presents objects he collected via an informal exchange he initiated with the Kremlin in 1970. The artist sent American political and kitsch collectibles, like Richard Nixon buttons and plastic statues of Uncle Sam, to the Communist Party Headquarters, and an official there responded by sending back Russian badges and flags, and eventually bronze busts of Soviet leaders. Blurring the line between the holy and the secular, the work proposes that personal objects can hav the same transcendent power to access the memories, thoughts, and feelings of individuals as relics have to access the faith of the believer. Not intended to undermine the religious use of relics, Vallance instead hopes his sculptures exist alongside traditional reliquaries, as a new addition to the genre.

Signs that Say What You Want Them to Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You to Say (1992–3), made shortly after the artist's graduation from Goldsmiths College in 1990, was produced by approaching people on London streets, asking them to write something on a card and then photographing them as they displayed it. Private lives and public opinion were given a sudden and revealing exposure that is sometimes comical but often brutally honest and moving.   In a way, this body of work feels more relevant than ever because of today's growing culture of self-exposure and expression. 

Interested in language and its inevitable abstraction, Lisa Williamson leans into the formal considerations of sculpture to create works that are visually precise, physically resonant, and often attune to the spaces in which they are exhibited. The artist’s idiosyncratic practice follows a logic that is associative; compressing internal experience into forms that are both tangible and resistant at once. While there is a significant level of reduction and abstraction throughout the artist’s work, aspects of architecture, landscape and the figure remain visible throughout.

Nicole Wermers’ Seasons combines sand and soil with her own photographs of Parisian outdoor bistro tables into a single frame, expanding on her unique conceptual language that questions the aesthetics of urban environments and gendered design. The artist’s is well known for juxtaposing everyday objects and the spaces that define our built environment to subvert their usual function and in turn the way we understand their definitive role in our private and public lives. Wermers compositions hover between the sculptural and decorative, interior and outdoor, order and nature—  dualities that characterize our modern social and architectural design legacies. 

Wong Ping’s unique storytelling style employs a stream of consciousness and free association that allows for transgressive thought. Many of Wong Ping’s works reveal themselves as metaphors for larger systemic issues, such as immigration, social relations, political control and economic anxieties. 

In I am the last, the text has an intimate rawness to it. The sentiment really captures the fragile moment we are in. This work was on view in Wong Ping’s solo exhibition at the New Museum, Sorry for the late reply in 2021.