Acclaimed Korean artist Do-Ho Suh’s First Solo Show in Hong Kong
Featuring life-size fabric sculptures of domestic objects that explore the idea of home and memories of personal space

Lehmann Maupin is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in Hong Kong of acclaimed Korean artist Do-Ho Suh, who is best known for his fabric sculptures that recreate the spaces of his homes and the domestic objects found within. The exhibition is on view until 25 January 2014 at 407 Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central, Hong Kong and coincides with the opening of Suh’s installation Home within Home within Home within Home within Home at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in his native Seoul in South Korea. Lehmann Maupin Gallery has represented Do Ho Suh worldwide since the beginning of his career and gave the artist his first gallery show in 2000.

For the exhibition, Suh explores the idea of home and memories of personal space by reproducing, in actual scale, objects from his former New York City apartment. Whether it is a light switch, doorknob, refrigerator, or bathtub, Suh believes an individual’s particular memory of space can be captured by these everyday objects, and that the physical contact and mental memory of an item’s place and form within the home creates a familiarity within one’s spatial dynamic. Similarly, these objects are a way for Suh to remember the New York City apartment he occupied from 1997 to 2011. The fabric sculptures include a true-to-life radiator from the corridor of his building in red fabric, and a medicine cabinet, bathtub, refrigerator, stove and toilet from the interior of his apartment in blue fabric. Also included in the exhibition are smaller objects from the artist’s former home in Berlin in green fabric in addition to similar items in red and blue from his New York home. This collection of translucent sculptures is a continuation of Suh’s ongoing Specimen Series, which the artist has ambitiously expanded for the Hong Kong exhibition by turning his attention to larger and more complex objects, and presenting them in new and innovative ways that utilize light to highlight their transparency.

Demisch Danant is pleased to announce the exhibition Michel Boyer: The Rothschild Bank, Paris 1970, dedicated to the celebrated decorator’s designs for the Rothschild Bank on rue Lafitte in Paris. On view through January 18th, 2014 at the gallery’s New York City space, the exhibition will present rare and important works designed for this landmark commission, as well as works by artists with whom Boyer collaborated. The Rothschild Bank is widely regarded as leading exemplar of French style of the 1970s. For the project Boyer designed furniture and interiors in his signature contemporary style — works that art coveted today.

The exhibition at Demisch Danant comprises several major pieces designed for specific areas of the Rothschild Bank. On view will be a unique desk in stainless steel and walnut, designed by Boyer for Elie de Rothschild’s private office. Sleek curved steel and the designer’s deft interplay of solids and voids make this desk an iconic example of the aesthetic that established Boyer as an influential figure in postwar European design. Boyer’s molded fiberglass chairs, conceived for the bank’s cafeteria, will be presented in an environment that evokes the original room and includes a re-creation of the original mural that artist Guy de Rougemont painted for the space.

In addition to these works, Michel Boyer will present Prayer Rug by Sheila Hicks, a now-celebrated American artist who has lived in Paris since 1964. Commissioned by Boyer for Elie de Rothschild’s private collection, this highly textural work – the only one of Hicks’ celebrated prayer rugs to include mohair – employs recognizable forms and techniques that characterize the seminal early years of her career.

Michel Boyer began his practice as a decorator and designer by specializing in office furniture, corporate offices, and banks, while employed by the architect Pierre Dufau. He designed contemporary furniture channeling the progress-loving postwar spirit and utilizing the materials of his era: stainless steel, laminate, fiberglass and lacquer. In 1965, Dufau entrusted Boyer to design the interiors for a building meant to temporarily house the Rothschild Bank. After revealing innovative designs for the temporary building, Boyer was commissioned to develop contemporary interiors for the final structure, which was designed by American architect Max Abramovitz, designer of Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall in New York City. The Rothschild Bank building was completed in 1970, setting a new standard for refined, contemporary French style.

The Hole is proud to present The Black Box, a solo exhibition by New York artist Stefan Bondell. Opening November 29, Black Friday, the exhibition will run through the end of the year in our Gallery 3 exhibition space. This is Bondell’s first exhibition at the gallery.

The Black Box is conceived as an exhibition about the secrets paintings can contain. Like the black box of an airplane or the expression as applied to covert ops, insider trading or government surveillance, the painter thought of this installation as his own black box, where his concerns and opinions are thrashed out in each of the paintings. Four ten-by-ten-foot paintings are installed in the room, each a deep black gouache and oil on canvas, and through the suggestion of shapes in each work, a narrative emerges.

Inspired by religious and history paintings as much as the current vicissitudes of the contemporary art world, these works were produced from years of meditation in the world’s museums on masterworks by Goya, Friedrich, Delacroix and Velasquez amongst many others. In the manner that old masters like Velasquez were employed by the court and were prescribed to paint what they were told in a style that was considered acceptable, but filled their paintings with hidden and even subversive content that could be deciphered by clues or hints in the canvas, so too does Bondell hope to address issues and ideas popular painting shies away from through his imagery or the juxtaposition of elements.

The four paintings feature silhouetted shapes painted meticulously in graduated oil paint against a deep flowing back background, whose aqueous pigments look like sand or water or dust and clouds, mist, a kind of dark ether. The silhouetted shapes are filled with mercury-looking illusionistic droplets that the artist sees as the building blocks of the universe, a visual representation of the energy and unity in the world. Some of the shapes are more ambiguous, an oceanic oil derrick for example looking like a strange satellite, while others have more specific cultural signifiers like a drone, a skeleton or a praying figure.

The floor of the gallery will be covered with over a million dollars of shredded US currency. In tiny fragments barely recognizable as money, these bills will be crushed under your feet and muffle the sound echoing in the space. In a moment where skyrocketing auction prices distract the compassionate art viewer from looking at and engaging with art, this show puts the financial side of the art market like so much waste underfoot, instead of infecting the paintings themselves. Conversely, the paintings could be seen as addressing the way money ties together the various cultural signifiers in each work, but that may be perhaps one of the secrets inside this Black Box.

The exhibition The Black Box will host one of Bondell’s well-known poetry readings that he has been organizing around the city for years, where he will read his poem “Black Box” alongside other poets Jonas Mekas, Bob Holman, Lizzi Bougatsos, Suheir Hammad and many others on December 12th.

Bondell (b. 1981 NYC) has exhibited this past year in “White Collar Crimes” at Acquavella Gallery “DSM-V” curated by David Rimanelli, and “Xstraction” here at the Hole. He has also been in exhibitions at Agnès B and “Pax Americana” and “Oil Kills” at the New York Marble Cemetery, as well as group exhibitions in Miami, LA and Italy.

Pearl Lam Galleries is delighted to present the first solo exhibition in Hong Kong by renowned British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare MBE; Dreaming Rich, opening on 19 November. The exhibition continues Shonibare’s exploration of colonialism and post-colonialism with a series of all new works commenting on Hong Kong’s modern day relationships with labour, power and wealth.

Dreaming Rich is a characteristically exuberant and colourful critique of wealth, which simultaneously acknowledges society’s complicity with it. Shonibare’s questioning of cultural and national definitions is a pertinent one for Hong Kong, whose identity has been affected by the conflicting influences of Chinese and British colonialism. The exhibition offers a social commentary on Hong Kong’s fascination with luxury commodities, and how those have come in part a medium for social identity.

Cakeman, the centerpiece of the exhibition, is a life-sized sculpture of an aristocrat dressed in elaborate Victorian dress made out of Shonibare’s trademark Dutch wax African batik fabric, which through its Indonesian design references Asia and the continents’ colonial practices. The material references European colonial practices in Africa and, in the context of Dreaming Rich, draws a comparison between the perspectives of colonial wealth and power in Africa and China. Cakeman subverts an act of heavy labour into an image of decadence by depicting a man bent double carrying a precariously balanced tower of colourful cakes on his back. In this figure Shonibare re-imagines a reconstruction of the trappings of power, bringing into sharp focus the contradiction faced by all societies which aspire to do well and “get rich”; where the process of creating vast amounts of wealth relies on the hardships of a labour class.

The artist is interested in the point at which survival turns into greed and excess. The individual Champagne Kid sculptures that can be seen cavorting, or swinging from chairs attached to the walls of the gallery, develop Shonibare’s recent line of enquiry into the corruption, excess and debauchery that have in part lead to the current economic crisis.

These life-sized drunken aristocratic youths seen alongside Cake Man construct an image of wealth and the sense of an over-indulgent party into which the gallery visitor is immediately immersed. Following a recurring theme in his work Shonibare has removed the figure’s heads, calling to mind the guillotined fate that awaited the excessive and corrupt French aristocracy in the 18th Century. Here globes displaying monetary data take the place of faces, which combined with the exuberant poses of the champagne-swigging youths, build a powerful commentary on the excess of anonymous financiers across the globe that contributed to the 2008 financial crisis.

The exhibition’s exploration of the contemporary worship of commodities is further elaborated in a newly created Bling Painting wall installation measuring six meters wide and containing 27 round paintings. Each of the circular canvases painted black and gold with toys collected from Hong Kong attached by black and gold wires. Shown alongside five new large-scale collage works on paper that use gold leaf, cuttings from the Financial Times, batik fabric flowers and luxury magazine covers, Shonibare’s reflection on the Hong Kong economy and its desire for luxury goods is a poignant reminder of the cycle of contradictions surrounding wealth and power, poverty and danger; dare to dream rich and you may lose your head, fail to dream rich and risk dying of poverty.

Althea Viafora-Kress, International Gallery Director, Pearl Lam Galleries, said

Casey Kaplan is pleased to present an exhibition by Liam Gillick and Louise Lawler until December 21. Lawler’s work provides a critical examination of the way art is displayed, documented and reprocessed. Gillick uses many strategies to examine the tension between modes of production and the legacy of abstraction.

This exhibition marks the first time that Gillick and Lawler have shown together, and is the result of a simple idea: to have two artists show alongside one another in the same space. Here, Gillick and Lawler operate in parallel – Lawler occupies the walls and Gillick hangs his work from the ceiling. The dates of the exhibition determine its parameters. The artists then produced two extensions – one via text and the other through images – that both address time without resorting to time-based media. Working with others is vital to both artists’ practices, producing a welcome shift in their individual focus and concerns. Lawler has worked most notably in the past with Allan McCollum and Sherrie Levine. Gillick recently produced an exhibition with Lawrence Weiner, A Syntax of Dependency, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp, Belgium.

Lawler’s work takes two significant images from her archive and stretches them at eye-level around the perimeter of the gallery space. Both images are of institutionalized artworks. The first is focused on the space between works by Carl Andre, Richard Serra and Gerhard Richter. The second image is of an Edgar Degas sculpture of fourteen year-old ballet dancer, Marie Geneviéve van Goethem, photographed and cropped from behind. Once placed and pulled, they transform into smeared abstractions, occupying a new time and space that is disconnected from the photograph’s originating moment.

Gillick’s large-scale, text-based installation,  Övningskörning (Driving Practice Parts 1-30), describes a scenario conceived during a site-visit to the town of Kalmar, Sweden where Volvo had first instituted its socialistic approach to auto-manufacturing in a now-defunct factory. Formatted as an outline for a book, the work consists of key sentences from the text that are cut from aluminum and suspended from the ceiling. The narrative imagines how production could be controlled following the breakdown of organized systems. Its compressed reading can only be had while moving through the gallery, following the blurred and stretched images on the walls.

Liam Gillick (Born 1964, Aylesbury, United Kingdom) lives and works in New York. Gillick’s work is currently the subject of an exhibition at The Contemporary Austin, Texas (through January 5, 2014). Additionally, his work is included in 9 Artists, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (through February 16, 2014) and ANYWHERE, ANYWHERE OUT OF THE WORLD, a survey of Phillipe Parreno and his collaborators, Palais de Toyko, Paris (through January 1, 2014). Past solo exhibitions include: Liam Gillick: From 199A-199B, curated by Tom Eccles, Hessel Museum of Art, Annadale-on-Hudson, New York (2012) Liam Gillick: One Long Walk – Two Short Piers, Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik, Deutschland (2009) and the travelling retrospective Three Perspectives and a Short Scenario, Kunsthalle, Zürich, organized by Beatrix Ruf (2008), Witte de With, Rotterdam, organized by Nicolaus Schafhausen (2008), Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, organized by Dominic Molon (2009). Texts that function in parallel to his artwork include: Proxemics (Selected writing 1988-2006), JRP- Ringier (2007);Factories in the Snow by Lilian Haberer, JRP-Ringier (2007); Meaning Liam Gillick, MIT Press (2009); and Allbooks, Book Works, London (2009).

Louise Lawler (Born 1947, Bronxville, New York) lives and works in New York. A retrospective of the artist’s work is currently on view at the Museum Ludwig, Köln through January 26, 2014. Louise Lawler has had one-person exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (2006); Dia:Beacon, Beacon, New York (2005); the Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel (2004); Portikus, Frankfurt (2003); and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (1997). Her work was included in Documenta XII, Kassel, Germany and the 1991, 2000, and 2008 Whitney Biennials, New York. Lawler’s work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, LACMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Tate Modern, among others.

Curatorial Statement

It is often said that the art produced today should relate to the society we are currently living in; art should be a statement of our time. Meem Gallery’s exhibition, Art Syria, reflects this notion as it relates directly to the artists’ personal experiences within Syria today. Our aim is to bring closer attention to what is happening in Syria to a wider audience, and to give the artists a new platform to exhibit their work.

Since 2010, Meem has initiated a programme looking at art from across the Middle East, with exhibitions like Art Sudan, Art Palestine, Art Morocco and Art in Iraq Today. Art Syria is an essential part of Meem’s ongoing programme dedicated to promoting creative talent in the Middle East. It is the first public exhibition at Meem devoted to Syrian art. Previously, during Abu Dhabi Art, the gallery exhibited key works by the modern Syrian masters Louay Kayyali and Fateh Moudarres; however, this is the first comprehensive display dedicated to the work of contemporary Syrian artists.

Art Syria is an exhibition that reflects what is happening today, depicting the reality of the situation within Syria through the eyes of artists—acting as an alternative means of documenting the bloodshed and turmoil experienced by the Syrian people today. The work is a testament to humanity and the ability to overcome the horrors of war through art.

What I find incredible is that the work has come out of a country that is in the throws of one of the most violent civil wars in recent times. It has been produced by incredibly creative artists based within Syria, who refuse to give up.  As stated by Hala Abdallah, the wife of Youssef Abdelke, to Reuters shortly after his arrest in July 2013: ‘Youssef had made a decision to resist having to leave Syria again. He refused to seek French citizenship when he was in France, he used to say that if someone sees a fire in his house he will try to extinguish it, not run away.’

In November 2011, I sat down with Yaser Safi and Nasser Hussein in Downtown Beirut, after an introduction by Dia Azzawi—while Dia and I were setting up Art in Iraq Today, a co-curated project, at the Beirut Exhibition Center. At that point we were discussing a joint show with Yaser Safi and Nasser Hussein. Because of the civil war in Syria, communication was halted; however, a few months later, in March 2012, an exhibition was launched at Mashrabia Gallery in Cairo, co-curated by Mounir Shaarani and Stefania Angarano, called Artists from Today’s Syria, which included the work of Youssef Abdelke, Heba Akkad, Assem Al-Basha, Tarek Boteihy, Nasser Hussein, Fadi Yazigi, Edward Shahda, Yaser Safi, Abdallah Murad, and Mounir Shaarani. In June 2012 we spoke to Yaser and suggested bringing available elements of this exhibition to Dubai in 2013.

The civil war worsened and there was silence. Then one year later, in June 2013, we were informed that the project was back on schedule; all the works were being put together for shipment to Dubai and we were expected to receive them in July 2013. Two weeks after the works had been shipped from Damascus in July, one of the exhibiting artists, Youssef Abdelke was arrested for his political views by the Assad regime and then released one month later.

‘One cannot but deplore and condemn the arrest of Youssef Abdelke and his two comrades. This mentality, which treats the holder of an opinion as a criminal, has damaged Arab humanity and culture,’ Adonis, a fellow Syrian who is the Arab world’s leading modernist poet, told Reuters following the arrest of the artist.

Depicting the reality of the situation is a key responsibility of the artists, and one that they have undertaken wholeheartedly. I cannot thank enough the artists participating in Art Syria: Youssef Abdelke, Fadi Yazigi, Mounir Sharaani, Abdallah Murad, Yaser Safi, Nasser Hussein and Edward Shahda. You have produced work that is all-inspiring and under the most difficult of circumstances.

I would also like to thank Dia Azzawi for introducing me to Yaser Safi and Nasser Hussein back in 2011, to Yaser Safi for coordinating all aspects of this project, to Kaissar Rizkallah and Badr El Hage for their support with this project and to Stephania Angarano and Mounir Shaarani for initiating the original project in Cairo in March 2012.

Charles Pocock

Managing Director, Meem Gallery

Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society

Doha

9 October 2013

Galerie Gmurzynska is proud to present a show of collages by renowned artist and architect Richard Meier. The exhibition will focus on eighty collages produced from the mid 1980s to now. In 2012 a selection of the collages was exhibited in a show of Richard Meier’s work at Cornell University.

Richard Meier is one of the most influential architects in the world, as well as the youngest-ever recipient of the Pritzker Prize. Among his many projects known world-wide are the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, the Getty Center, Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona, the Jubilee Church, Rome and the Arp Museum in Remagen-Rolandseck, Germany.

Like his architecture his collages are very clean and methodical on the surface, the images constrained by constant grit that is not changing. Within the grit however the images range from the erotic to painterly illustration. Painters such as Picasso, Cezanne and Rodchenko make their way into the collages, as do other influences such as film and opera. The works also offer deep insights into Meier’s private life. Often the collages are deeply personal and autobiographical, using everyday collected objects such as theatre and travel tickets to intimate photographs.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with documentary images and an introduction by Richard Meier, as well as an essay by Judd Tully.

Sean Kelly presents Callum Innes: Liminal, an exhibition of the artist’s most recent work from both the Exposed Paintings and the Untitled Lamp Black Paintings series.

In Innes’s work, layers of paint are laid down on meticulously gessoed canvas and ultimately covered in black. Innes then uses turpentine to remove the layers from sections of the painting, revealing the luminous color that lies underneath. The process is repeated several times, alternating between application and removal. In the Exposed Paintings, the residue from this process is left on the canvas’s surface directly below the “exposed” section, creating another layer of color altogether. In the Untitled Lamp Black Paintings, the picture plane is split in half vertically; the colors are painted and left to dry before the black paint is applied and subsequently taken off on one side.

The candescence of these works comes from the initial color itself, altered by the removal of the black. In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, Innes explained “I make a painting and work with the surface, then dissolve it, taking it off with turpentine. In many ways, I am dissolving an image that is in my head…With the paintings, [I] make a black made of many colors…until I dissolve it. Then the colors separate so that color will be revealed.”

Innes has achieved an intense luminosity with the paintings that comprise Liminal, so much so that the works almost appear to be lit from within. The new Exposed Paintings include some of Innes’s largest to date, measuring over seven and a half feet in height. The creation of the works is physically arduous as they have to be completed in a single day. The Untitled Lamp Black Paintings include the eponymously named color, a matte black of particular richness and depth. The muted surface of this matte black on one half of the paintings stands in stark contrast to the ethereal glow of the chromatic intensity on the other half. The resultant works of both series are spare, elegant canvases that combine a formal precision with an intense poetic beauty and conceptual complexity.

Callum Innes has emerged as one of the most significant abstract painters of his generation, achieving widespread recognition through major solo and group shows worldwide. He was awarded the Jerwood Prize for Painting in 2002, and the Nat West Prize in 1998. In 1995 Innes was shortlisted for the Turner Prize.

Recent critically acclaimed museum exhibitions include From Memory, which traveled throughout Europe and Australia in 2008-9, Callum Innes: Recent Work at the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh in 2010 and Callum Innes at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, England in 2013. Callum Innes: Materials and Process, at the Neues Museum in Nürnberg, Germany and Guerlain Donation at the Centre George Pompidou in Paris, France are both currently on view.

In 2012, Innes created a permanent commission for the Edinburgh Art Festival, entitled The Regent Bridge. Innes’s work is included in many major public collections worldwide, including: the Tate Gallery, London, England; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Centre George Pompidou, Paris, France; the Kunstmuseum, Bern, Switzerland; the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, Scotland; the Museum of Modern Art, Ft. Worth, Texas; and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York.

The Third Line is pleased to present Sherin Guirguis’ first solo show in the region. Sherin investigates post-colonial themes of political, cultural and social dogma and feminist activism within the framework of the Egyptian diaspora, both in the public and private spheres. Delving deep into the building blocks of culture and identity, specifically from the approach of a diaspora artist, she presents her interpretation of what it means to be defined by the transformative events of the moment.

For Passages//Toroq, Sherin presents works in two parallel series that address concerns of identity formation, highlighted predominantly in the wake of the mercurial Arab Springs. The title of the exhibition refers to both the literary and historical passages that are quoted in the work as well as the social passageways, or toroq, forged by the revolution. Crucial to its people, the revolution defies the political, social and cultural standards that have been imposed by and grown out of colonization.

Sherin references historical developments in Egypt in order to have a clearer insight to the present.

Three large-scale kinetic sculptures from the first series are inspired by Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, which maps the cultural evolution/revolution in Egypt and the breakdown and reconstruction of post-colonial Egypt. Fabricated in the shape of traditional Arabic jewelry, and constructed from materials similar to harem mashrabeyas, these decorative pieces and their rocking movements reference a woman’s body as she walks down a public street. That they only function when interacted with by a viewer, fluctuating from passive and beautiful to flailing and threatening, the sculptures allude to the role each individual has in contributing towards established sexual mores. Qasr El Shoaq moves slowly and methodically on a single axis, rocking slowly back and forth; Bien El Qasrein twirls, rocks and spins erratically and is the most unpredictable; El Sokareya is completely static and deconstructed. Shifts in cultural and political paradigms are embodied in the objects’ formal language, both decorative and minimal, as well as the performative interactions.

The second series is centered on paintings that explore transitional spaces from historically relevant locations in Egyptian feminism – more specifically the life of Huda Shaarawi, a pioneer Egyptian feminist leader and nationalist, and the birth of the Egyptian Women’s Union. By continuing her previous practice of hand cut works on paper, embedded with gold powder and gold leafing, Sherin uses architectural references such as doorways, windows, and arches to convey the significance of the site and the role it plays in establishing a radical ideology. The paintings include a representation of the door to Huda Shaarawi’s house (one of the last functional harems in the country) and the Cairo railway station Bab El-Hadid, where she and her colleague Saiza Nabrawi removed their veils.

As an Arab-American artist, and part of the Egyptian Diaspora for more than two decades, Sherin’s art practice has involved studying important works of Egyptian literature, music, poetry, design and architecture of the past to be able to contribute to this discourse in the present. She has developed a unique style by selecting decorative and ornamental elements from these sources and shaping a critique through associative juxtapositions. By invoking many meanings of Egyptian identities – for example, one man, one woman; one writer, one activist; one work of fiction and one biography – the artist defines the apparent contradictions of cultural identity, and at the same time, points to the similarities of diasporic life that have now become the norm for many Arab artists.

Jenny Holzer is one of the most respected contemporary artists working today, best known for large-scale public projections of text. Influenced by literature, society, and politics, her work explores notions of transparency, sexuality, morality, and power. Her texts take the form of declarations, quotes, and statements from many points of view, often inhabiting complex and controversial subject matter.

For Light Stream, Holzer selected phrases from Truisms, Living, and Survival to present on electronic signs and on stone benches. Truisms comprises over 250 single sentence declarations, written by Holzer at the beginning of her career and crafted to resemble existing aphorisms. Originally printed on posters and anonymously pasted on buildings and walls across New York City in the 1970s, Truisms was Holzer’s first body of text. Living references everyday, visceral topics, such as the body and personal relationships, evoking notions of vulnerability within a fast-paced modern environment and the individual grappling with life-altering decisions. Survival, the first text series written specifically for electronic signs, is a cautionary series where each sentence instructs, informs, or questions in a more urgent tone.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is Holzer’s largest LED gallery work to date and comprises over 25 LED elements. ‘Light Stream’ (2013), also the title of the exhibition, was born of Holzer’s long-time desire to produce a swarming mass of texts in one work, and is realized for the first time with Pearl Lam Galleries. Using selections from all three series, the result is a pulsating, flashing heap of text, with statements layered and wrapped around one another in frenetic light and color. Chinese and English texts appear alongside each other, reflecting and encouraging dialogue within the exhibition.

Describing the work, Jenny Holzer explains,

Holzer’s LED works are individually programmed to pulse at specific rates. By throwing light and colour, the LED pieces map the darkened gallery space. Alongside the LED works, Holzer will present a selection of white marble benches, which were the first works Holzer produced in Chinese. With their connotations of monuments or Classical sculpture, the solid and memorial form of the marble works offers a dramatic contrast to the LEDs. Short statements such as “MONEY CREATES TASTE” and “DON’T PLACE TOO MUCH TRUST IN EXPERTS,” chosen for their particular resonance and impact, are carved in Chinese into the bench seats.

Althea Viafora-Kress, International Gallery Director, Pearl Lam Galleries, said,