Art Out: Paul Graham, Carrie Mae Weems, Louise Lawler
Paul Graham WINTER (Hunters in the Snow), Citibank, 399 Park Avenue, 2018 © Paul Graham, courtesy Pace Gallery
Paul Graham The Seasons
PACE 229 Hamilton Avenue Palo Alto | CLOSING October 16, 2021
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 series on view in the exhibition—The Seasons and Sightless—were first presented in Pace’s New York gallery in a show that was abbreviated by the pandemic. Graham’s images will be on view from September 16 through October 16, 2021 at the gallery’s Palo Alto space.
Over the past three decades, 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 travelled widely, producing twelve distinct bodies of work, and has been the subject of more than eighty solo exhibitions worldwide. In 2011, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, acquired the complete set of prints from The Great North Road, the original set Graham had used to print his first book in 1983. Graham’s last exhibition in California, titled The Whiteness of the Whale, was mounted at Pier 24 and included three bodies of work made by the artist in the United States between 1998 and 2011. This fall, Graham makes a highly anticipated return to the Bay Area with his exhibition at Pace.
Graham’s series The Seasons serves as a homage, radical update, and provocative inversion of this seminal group of paintings. 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. This inspired him to honor the structure of The Seasons, exchanging peasant life in 16th century Flanders for the finance world of 21st century New York; the imaginative freedom of painting for the veracity of photography; rural agrarian views for urban sidewalks; and agricultural workers for financial ones.
Carrie Mae Weems Untitled (Playing harmonica), 1990 © Carrie Mae Weems, courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Carrie Mae Weems Witness
Fraenkel Gallery 49 Geary Street, San Francisco | September 9 to November 13 , 2021
“Art has saved my life on a regular basis.” — Carrie Mae Weems
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.
The exhibition begins with early documentary-style photographs from the series Family Pictures and Stories, depicting Weems’s own multigenerational family in a joyful and nuanced vision of Black family life. In her iconic Kitchen Table series, Weems cast herself as a woman at the emotional center of an imagined domestic world, staging photographs that build a rich fictional narrative around her role as a lover, friend, and mother.
In the series Museums, American Monuments, and Roaming, Weems photographed herself in front of institutions and public spaces around the world, dressed in black and facing away from the camera. Weems has described the character she depicts as a witness whose presence invites the viewer to consider how power is inscribed in these spaces and which groups are welcomed and represented in them.
Weems has often used performance marked by highly constructed artifice to explore how history is remembered and created. In Constructing History, Weems worked with college students to re-enact moments of social upheaval from the 1960s, building stage-like photographic tableaux. In the video People of a Darker Hue, Weems addresses more recent history, pairing footage of buoyant city life and solemn protest with a stark, highly stylized vision of oppression, in commemoration of Black men and women killed by police.
Untitled (Sfumato), 2021 © Louise Lawler
Louise Lawler | LIGHTS OFF, AFTER HOURS, IN THE DARK
Metro Pictures | CLOSING October 23, 2021
LIGHTS OFF, AFTER HOURS, IN THE DARK features a new series of works by Louise Lawler in which she has photographed the 2020 Judd exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. These photographs–taken over two evenings with the lights off, after hours, in the dark–offer an alternate view of an artwork’s existence and the abstract potential of an image itself.
Since the 1970s, Lawler has photographed artworks in museums, galleries, art fairs, auction houses, storage, and homes, highlighting the lives of these objects and the contexts in which they are seen. She was the subject of a one-person exhibition, WHY PICTURES NOW, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2017. Additional one-person exhibitions include Adjusted, Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2013); Twice Untitled and Other Pictures (Looking Back), Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (2006); Louise Lawler and Andy Warhol: In and Out of Place, Dia Beacon, New York (2005); and Louise Lawler and Others, Museum for Gegenwartskunst, Basel (2004). She has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; MoMA PS1, New York; MUMOK, Vienna; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the Whitney Museum, New York, which has additionally featured the artist in its 1991, 2000, and 2008 biennials.
