Fair Use: What’s Mine is Yours brings together artists working at this moment, in disparate locations, using markedly different styles, but all indebted in some way to the practice of appropriation. Together their works point to the critical and ongoing artistic practice of questioning existing power structures and challenging value systems through the strategic use of borrowed and reproduced visual material.

Fair Use: What’s Mine is Yours is a project born of conversations between Alison Gass, Executive Director and Chief Curator at the ICA San Jose and her brother Andy Gass, partner at Latham Watkins and Copyright law expert. As Ali gave Andy a crash course in the history of appropriation and pastiche in modern and contemporary Western art practice, as he prepared to represent the Andy Warhol Foundation, the idea was born for an exhibition looking at the various ways these legacies extend into artists practice today in relevant and critical ways. The theme felt like a natural fit for the Altman Siegel gallery program with a few additional artists. “Working with Claudia and the artists in her program to explore these themes has been an exciting way to test this exhibition idea. The response of artists to the prompt of thinking critically about themes of appropriation, borrowing, scavenging and scraping, made me realize there is something here that deserves further attention!” Alison explains.

Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Paul Kremer / UV, an exhibition of recent paintings and works on paper by American artist, Paul Kremer. This show marks Kremer’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The show will be on view from September 9 through October 9, 2021.

Paul Kremer, best known for his abstract paintings of simplified forms in bold yet minimalistic colors, frequently paints hard edge shapes with precise lines and angles. In his newest body of work, the artist has focused on decidedly more organic shapes, those reminiscent of blooming flowers and animals in motion, objects that evoke pleasure and contentment in the artist. UV, at its heart, is Kremer’s exploration of hopefulness and ebullience through color and shape during a time in the world when everything can feel difficult and complex. While discussing this new work, the artist shared, “I want to make paintings that make me feel better. When I stand in front of them, I want to feel for a moment that life is less stressful, less chaotic. I want to stir curiosity by the simplest means and add some positivity while I’m alive.” Kremer’s playfully refined works challenge viewers to see delight and expansive movement through autonomous forms and color.

Kremer explores this sentiment of positivity through a process that bridges digital experimentation and physical materiality. In this most recent body of work, he began by creating hundreds of drawings, settling on forms that evoke feelings of harmony and curiosity within him. After refining his shapes, Kremer tests varying color combinations until he finds engaging connections that aesthetically balance. Finally, Kremer renders his shapes onto the physical canvas giving them physical expression.

A self-taught artist, Paul Kremer was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1971, and lives and works in Houston, Texas. Recent solo exhibitions include Windows at Louis/Buhl & Co., Detroit; Hovering at Maruani Mercier, Knokke, Belgium; Layer Hooks at Alexander Berggruen Gallery, New York.

In her recent work Klea McKenna uses analog light-sensitive materials to reanimate objects from our contemporary past. Her subjects (found clothing, textiles and amateur paintings) bear the marks of devotion and contact with our human bodies; flaws, fingerprints and damage that accumulate through time. In darkness, she embosses these charged objects into photographic paper then casts light across the resulting textures. She then adds color with fabric dyes and photographic toners. This unruly process subverts photography’s intended use by making touch more primary than sight and generates images that contain a confounding blend of evidence and fiction. Her tactile way of reading the world reveals broken patterns, and imperfections everywhere – our stories recorded in the surfaces we live with.

Klea McKenna (born 1980, Freestone, CA) is a visual artist who also writes and makes films. She is known for cameraless photography and her innovative use of light-sensitive materials. Her work is held in several public collections, including SFMOMA, LACMA, Getty Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the US Embassy collection and The Victoria and Albert Museum in London. She studied art at UCLA, UCSC and California College of the Arts. Klea is the daughter of renegade ethnobotanists who raised her in Hawaii, California and on the road. She now lives in San Francisco with her partner and their young children.

Instagram: @euqinomgallery, @klea_mckenna, @ansleywestrivers
Website: Euqinomgallery.com / kleamckenna.com / ansleywest.com

Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to present a survey of the work of Carrie Mae Weems examining her extraordinary achievement over four decades. WITNESS traces Weems’s exploration of history, identity, and the structure of power, in photographs and video from many of her most important bodies of work. Weems’s inaugural show celebrates the gallery’s recently announced representation of the artist.

Carrie Mae Weems (b. 1953) has been featured in major exhibitions at museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville, Spain. This winter, the Park Avenue Armory will host an exhibition and convocation curated by Weems, and in 2022 her work will be exhibited in a solo show at Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart, Germany, and in a two-person exhibition with Dawoud Bey at the Grand Rapids Art Museum. She has received numerous awards, grants, and fellowships, including a MacArthur “Genius” grant, the U.S. State Department’s Medal of Arts, the Joseph Hazen Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome, NEA grants, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, and the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award, among others. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and The Tate Modern, London.

Three is a magic number. Numerologists say it relates to time – past, present, future; birth, life, death; beginning, middle, end.

Sonata Half Light

There is music. There is measure. There is illumination.

You could say these phrases out loud. Mills told me he came up with that title to create a triptych with words. He is, however, emphatically an oil painter. He is enamored of the medium and its possibilities for image and expression. He paints constantly as a way to work through, and pose questions related to experience and expectations, often resulting in an in-between space. He makes individual panels, compositions that often include curious heads that are hybrid fusions of people, past and present.

Things happen with juxtaposition, there is resonance. Those single panels are eerie, monumental, monstrous, yet expressive of the way history, light, shadow, and experience, compound. Mills speaks of daily habits that include giving thanks to all who came before him. This sentiment has as much to do with family, god, and artistic forebears. He is an artist who mentions Michelangelo, Kerry James Marshall, and Cecily Brown in a time spanning group of inspirational artists. Mills works in a medium that is both ancient and modern, and he treats it with reverence. He lives through it, describing it as a relationship, a marriage that grows richer through commitment and struggle.

Sonata Half Light includes four triptychs—in numerology, four represents stability and balance. Each triptych speaks to each other with iterations of the body, architectural space, and atmosphere. Mills positions each with vulnerability, confidence, and human glow.

— Glen Helfand

Jessica Silverman is pleased to present “Human Geometries,” a selection of works created by Judy Chicago between 1965 and 1984. The presentation features both monumental pieces and potent gems that explore gendered aesthetics, human rights and social justice.

Rendered in clear and colored acrylics, Chicago’s “Dome” sculptures suggest bodily landscapes, bellies and chests, perhaps even an expectant mother in the bath. While the sculptures evoke sensual slumber, the artist’s drawings and paintings of spinning orbs, sometimes called “whirling donuts,” are infused with the electricity of female orgasm.

In “PowerPlay” drawings, Chicago brought a critical feminist gaze to the gender construct of masculinity, exploring how prevailing definitions of power have affected the world in general — and men in particular.

Chicago’s 1980s “Birth Project” series explores the cosmic strength of women and the miracle of new life. In Birth Power (1984), a fiery female figure emerges from a black silk background through exquisite linear needlework. Birth Power is a feminist genesis or phoenix rising from ashes, using a medium – embroidery – historically associated with women.

Pace Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of two bodies of work by Paul Graham as part of the artist’s first West Coast show since his 2015 solo exhibition at Pier 24, San Francisco. The Seasons and Sightless will be on view from September 16 through October 16.

The New York-based artist, who first came to prominence in the United Kingdom in the 1980s with his radical use of color photography, has traveled widely, producing twelve distinct bodies of work, and has been the subject of more than eighty solo exhibitions worldwide.

The series in focus takes its title, The Seasons, from the Northern Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s famed series of six paintings depicting rural life in Northern Europe across the different phases of the year.

In a nod to Bruegel’s series, Graham has created six large-format photographs featuring life around the various bank headquarters on New York’s Park Avenue throughout the calendar year. Graham began photographing the major US banks after the 2008 financial crisis, and once he was immersed in the work the artist began to sense the intriguing connection between his images—with their panoplies of human activity spread across sidewalks and courtyards—and Bruegel’s paintings.

Like all of Graham’s work, these photographs draw directly from life—they are not staged or Photoshop composites. Each image in The Seasons examines the briefest fractions of time—sometimes just 1/1000th of a second—in which humanity is frozen in time. The photographs are large in scale, and though the works are made using the purest of photographic techniques—a single exposure with a handheld camera—their colors and levels of detail are truly mesmerizing.

This presentation also includes the works Capital One and Chase Bank, Flatbush Avenue (1), which are related to the exhibition.