Platform: London. A Viewing Room Featuring. London Galleries. April 17–May 15, 2020
April 9, 2020—We are pleased to introduce Platform: London, a viewing room featuring 12 London-based galleries, hosted on David Zwirner Online.
The participants in Platform: London represent a cross section of colleagues, friends, and peers in the city’s gallery community: The Approach, Arcadia Missa, Carlos/Ishikawa, Emalin, Herald St, Hollybush Gardens, Kate MacGarry, mother’s tankstation, Sid Motion Gallery, Soft Opening, Southard Reid, and The Sunday Painter. Each gallery will feature a focused presentation of works by a single artist. In some cases, galleries are presenting artists who were intended to be featured in spring exhibitions or whose shows were cut short by last month’s closures. Platform: London will be on view on davidzwirner.com from April 17 through May 15, 2020.
Platform emerged from conversations between gallery directors about the challenges facing all galleries in this current moment. With physical galleries temporarily closed due to the global health crisis, the art community has increasingly turned to digital spaces to share the work of artists and to engage audiences all over the world.
The inaugural edition, Platform: New York, showcasing 12 galleries from the New York art community, launched in early April and is currently on view on David Zwirner Online. More than 20,000 people visited David Zwirner Online during the opening weekend of Platform: New York, which remains on view through May 1. A future edition will focus on the global gallery community.
© Korakrit Arunanondchai 2020.
Courtesy the artist and Carlos / Ishikawa, London
Platform: London will include:
The Approach, presenting works by Sara Cwynar (b. 1985, Vancouver), a Brooklyn-based artist. In her practice, which includes photography, installation, and film, Cwynar surveys the transitory object-life of visual matter in our time of image infatuation. Cwynar’s first solo show at The Approach, Marilyn, opened in March but was only viewable for a short time before the gallery’s temporary closure.
Arcadia Missa, presenting works by Frieda Toranzo Jaeger (b. 1988, Mexico City), who lives and works between Mexico City and Berlin. Toranzo Jaeger’s paintings reconsider the semiotics of the car as the embodiment of male control by depicting car engines and interiors as spaces for intimacy and queerness. She will have her first institutional solo show at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2021.
Carlos/Ishikawa, presenting works by Korakrit Arunanondchai (b. 1986), part of his ongoing History Painting series, first exhibited at MoMA PS1. This series incorporates stretched denim—tie-dyed with bleach, burnt, and patched up with photographic renderings of the very flames that scorched them—together with different elements appearing over time in and in parallel to his ongoing Painting with History films, most recently exhibited at the Venice Biennale.
Emalin, presenting works by Sung Tieu (b. 1987, Vietnam), an artist based in London and Berlin who works across sound, video, sculpture, and installation. Tieu’s work articulates a psychic imaginary in which ideological demarcation and global instability are entangled with economic vulnerability and personal histories. The works presented are part of the artist’s two concurrent solo exhibitions, In Cold Print at Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, and Zugzwang at Haus der Kunst, Munich. Both exhibitions opened earlier this year and are affected by the institutions’ temporary closures.
Herald St, presenting works by Markus Amm (b. 1969), a Geneva-based artist who constructs his paintings through the gradual buildup of layer upon layer of gesso and oil paint. The result is a hyper-flat surface. The works have a gauzy luminosity, with tissue swaths of color that recall light leaks in 16-mm film and nod to Amm’s earlier experiments with photographic techniques, while also retaining a sculptural, solid quality.
Hollybush Gardens, presenting works by Andrea Büttner (b. 1972), an artist based in Berlin and London. Büttner’s research-based practice connects artmaking and art history with social and ethical issues, such as poverty, labor, religion, and philosophy. Her work is articulated through diverse formats—among them printmaking, painting, sculpture, and video—rigorously conversant with the symbolic and material histories of mediums. Büttner was short-listed for the Turner Prize in 2017 and won the Max Mara Art Prize for Women in 2010. She has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Tate Britain, London; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
Kate MacGarry, presenting works by Florian Meisenberg (b. 1980, Berlin), a New York–based artist whose work speaks to the deconstruction of identity in a digitized world. His new series of paintings evokes fragments of a beleaguered modern brain. His exhibition of new paintings was due to open in April as Meisenberg’s third solo show with the gallery.
mother’s tankstation, presenting works by Jessie Homer French (b. 1940, New York), an artist who has been based in Los Angeles since the late 1950s. She has maintained a fiercely independent and sometimes solitary spirit, with equal passion for painting, fly-fishing, ecology, and polemics—all clearly evidenced in her work. An essentially self-taught artist working daily for more than forty years, Homer French has recently been the subject of three solo exhibitions that have transformed a local following into international attention.
Sid Motion Gallery, presenting works by Max Wade (b. 1985), a London-based artist whose works on canvas are based on sketchbook drawings made from direct observation of everyday objects and scenes. The gallery is working toward his second solo exhibition, planned for September 2020.
Soft Opening, presenting works by Gina Fischli (b. 1989), a London-based, Swiss artist interested in the constructed arti?ce of aspiration and the commodi?cation of material desire via our immediate, domestic surroundings and daily experiences. Her work is due to be featured in the 2020 Geneva Biennial, followed by her ?rst institutional solo exhibition at 80WSE in New York.
Southard Reid, presenting works by Celia Hempton (b. 1981), a London-based artist whose work is both intuitively and consciously bound with the performative act of painting. Connected series reflect the conditions set up in the making of the works, documenting the positioning of her gaze. Paintings are made while viewing and engaging in territory specific to online space—anonymous chat-room encounters, surveillance footage, and images of violence that circulate on the internet. Self-portraits are cropped so close to the artist’s genitalia that they are simultaneously anatomically detailed and verging on abstraction. Hempton treats setting and human subjects with emotional awareness and neutrality—the body and landscape as cartography—acknowledging the explicit or inherent politicization within an encounter.
The Sunday Painter, presenting works by Emma Hart (b. 1974), a London-based artist who makes sculptures that actively confront and manipulate the viewer. Ceramic speech bubbles put words in our mouths, and sculptures often jut out from the wall to encroach on the viewer’s personal space. Hart explores the physical properties of ceramics and glazes to conceptually underpin her ideas. In 2017, Hart won the Max Mara Art Prize for Women. She has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at institutions including Whitechapel Gallery and the Collezione Maramotti, Italy; Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh; the Folkestone Triennial; and the Camden Arts Centre.
Sales from this online exhibition will be managed directly by the participating galleries.
In the coming weeks, David Zwirner Online will announce the next edition of Platform, coinciding with an expanded program of online-only exhibitions.