Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture
2 Marina Blvd
San Francisco, California
Lehmann Maupin returns to FOG with a presentation that foregrounds a wide range of artistic mediums, illustrating the possibilities unlocked by material innovation and intervention. Highlights include new works by California-based artists Todd Gray and Catherine Opie, who skillfully probe the limits of photography. Lehmann Maupin’s booth will also spotlight works from acclaimed series by painter McArthur Binion and multidisciplinary artist Lee Bul—visual:ear and Perdu, respectively—alongside highlights from other gallery artists including Loriel Beltrán, Billy Childish, Tammy Nguyen, and Nari Ward.
Todd Gray is known for his photo assemblages that critically examine ideas of African diaspora, colonialism, societal power structures, and dominant cultural beliefs. On view at the fair, his works fuse seemingly disparate visuals—including architecture, vintage portraiture, landscape, and more—into a layered synthesis that reveals a fuller picture of the sites and subjects he portrays. By stacking found frames on top of one another, Gray deliberately obscures certain elements of his photographs and strikes a delicate balance between revealing and concealing his subject matter. Looking ahead, Gray will have a solo exhibition at Lehmann Maupin New York in early 2025.
Several photographs from Catherine Opie’s latest body of work, titled Walls, Windows and Blood, will be on view at the booth. Opie produced the series during her American Academy in Rome Residency in the summer of 2021, and the works explore the form, history, and architecture of the Vatican City. Also on view at the booth are several photographs from Opie’s acclaimed series From Your Shore to My Shore (2009). Each image depicts a serene seascape, divided equally by the fine horizon line where ocean and sky meet. Hung in succession, the horizon becomes both an equalizing force and a connective thread between photographs, functioning as a feature of landscape that is both immutable and shared. Next month, Opie will open an exhibition of new work at Lehmann Maupin New York, on view from February 8–March 9, 2024.
Paintings from McArthur Binion’s acclaimed visual:ear series are included in the gallery’s presentation. Binion’s multimedia works combine collage, drawing, and painting to create autobiographical abstractions of painted minimalist patterns over an “under surface” of personal documents and photographs. Here, selections from the music score “Black Brown Xl”—a musical composition by Pulitzer Prize winning musician Henry Threadgill about Binion's work—lie below painted grids, their imagery just visible. Layers of thick, expressive marks in oil paint stick create a dynamic surface that reveals physical traces of the artist’s hand and body. In the summer of 2024, Binion will have a solo exhibition at a New York-based foundation, to be announced in the coming months.
Composed of multi-layered organic and inorganic materials like mother of pearl and acrylic paint, Seoul-based artist Lee Bul’s Perdu works depict otherworldly and fragmented cyborg-like bodies that are suspended in space at various distances and in differing detail. These undefined forms emerge from brightly-hued fields of color as if proliferating or expanding; they inhabit a liminal space between biology and technology. The Perdu works included in the gallery’s presentation gesture towards both a yearning for completeness and an unspecified yet proximate process for achieving such a state. In November 2023, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York announced Lee Bul’s facade commission—four new sculptures built for The Met’s iconic niches, which will debut in September 2024.
Other highlights include a new paintings by Tammy Nguyen and Loriel Beltrán, whose debut solo exhibitions in the United Kingdom open at Lehmann Maupin London in March and in May of 2024, respectively; a selection of recent photographs by LA-based photographer and filmmaker Alex Prager; a new painting by British artist Billy Childish; and several copper panel works by Nari Ward, whose major retrospective exhibition at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, will be on view from March 28–July 28, 2024.