Sean Kelly is delighted to announce the gallery’s inaugural participation at TEFAF Maastricht. In dialogue with the surrounding Old Master paintings and antiquities sections, our stand will showcase contemporary masterpieces by a selection of the gallery’s artists including Marina Abramović, Laurent Grasso, Rebecca Horn, Idris Khan, Shahzia Sikander, Janaina Tschäpe, and Kehinde Wiley.
From the beginning of her career, Marina Abramović has pioneered the use of performance as a visual art form. The body has been both her subject and medium. Marina Abramović made several works utilizing the motif of the skeleton beginning with some of her earliest video works from 1995. Ten years later in a performance, Self Portrait with Skeleton, Abramović confronted her own death while extending her reflection on the persistence of being. This was followed by another series of images from 2008 which depicts the skeleton in relation to several different body poses.
Employing imagery inspired by sources such as art history and cinema, Laurent Grasso works in video, sculpture, painting, and drawing, to recreate phenomena – both human and natural – that set up surreal and ambiguous juxtapositions of time and space. He often intentionally manipulates imagery by imposing unique and unusual perspectives onto his subject matter, thereby subverting the viewer’s instinct to accept what they see at face value.
From 2003-2015, Rebecca Horn produced an impressive group of largescale works referred to as Bodylandscape, paintings on paper that extended her interest in the body as machine into an autobiographical, performative arena. Incorporating pencil, acrylic, watercolor and gouache with text, these energetic works are scaled to the artist’s own proportions, defined by the limit to which her arms could extend when building the sometimes-frenzied compositions through the movements and actions of her own body.
The density and precision of Idris Khan’s compositions, defined by his technique of imposing multiple layers of image, text and music upon one another, allude to the excessive proliferation of information in the technical age whilst simultaneously advocating for a slower, more considered way of looking. Retaining traces of what has gone before or what has been left behind, Khan’s works speak to a layering of experience that harbors palimpsests of the past whilst suggesting entirely new possibilities.
An edition of Shahzia Sikander’s sculpture NOW, 2023, is currently installed on the rooftop of the Courthouse of the Appellate Division, First Department of the Supreme Court of the State of New York as part of her first major, site-specific outdoor solo exhibition, Shahzia Sikander: Havah… to breathe, air, life in Madison Square Park, New York. Rising from the base of a lotus plant—a symbol of wisdom—it is the first female figure to be installed amongst the sculptures of nine male legislators, including Confucius, Justinian, and Moses. With this work, Sikander presents female figures as symbols of power and justice and examines longstanding practices and attitudes impeding the advancement of women.
Janaina Tschäpe’s dynamic canvases and drawings include imagery evocative of the natural world suggesting growth, transition, and metamorphosis. Her paintings contain innumerable layers of information accrued through the meticulous application of media including watercolor, casein, colored pencil, pastel and in her most recent bodies of work, oil stick. There exists in her work a remarkable tension between the loose, luscious forms that pervade the canvas and the precise, powerful systems of markings that often overlay and unify these compositions.
By applying the visual vocabulary and conventions of glorification, wealth, prestige, and history to subject matter drawn from contemporary urban life, Kehinde Wiley makes his subjects and their stylistic references juxtaposed inversions of each other, forcing ambiguity and provocative perplexity to pervade his imagery. Wiley’s larger-than-life figures disturb and interrupt historical tropes of portrait painting, often blurring the boundaries between traditional and contemporary modes of representation and the critical portrayal of masculinity and physicality as it pertains to the view of black and brown subjects.
Building upon our over three decade history, Sean Kelly’s presentation at TEFAF Maastricht, demonstrates our commitment to creating new opportunities and contexts for our artists.
For more information on the artists and works presented please visit skny.com
