Lehmann Maupin returns to FOG Design+Art for its second consecutive year with a special presentation of new paintings, sculptures, photographic works, and installations by gallery artists who explore the use of innovative techniques and non-traditional materials within their practice, including McArthur Binion, Lee Bul, Teresita Fernández, Shirazeh Houshiary, Liza Lou, Catherine Opie, Helen Pashgian, Robin Rhode, Do Ho Suh, Cecilia Vicuña, and Nari Ward.
Liza Lou—who recently built a studio in Joshua Tree, California—responds to the backdrop of the California high desert as her newfound home and surroundings through intricately hand-sewn painting and sculptural work using hundreds of thousands of glass beads. On view at FOG Design + Art is Not Dark Yet (2021), where wave-like patterns draw a conceptual connection to landscape and become pictorially charged with changes in natural light over the course of the day.
Shirazeh Houshiary attempts to visualise the boundaries between water and air through precise compositions of pigment, and line drawing, and where movement is free suggesting both order and chaos united. From a distance her paintings are reminiscent of a cosmos, but as the viewer draws close the meticulousness of detail and hidden Arabic script that make up the amorphous surface begin to unfold. Houshiary states that there is ‘a desire to grasp the indefinable aura of atmosphere for it only to decay and escape. Yet we try to preserve it in our memories.’
Widely celebrated for his sculptural installations of found objects, Nari Ward often uses the discards of consumerism, mostly found in his neighborhood in Harlem, in ways that reveal the emotions inherent in everyday objects. In I’LL FLY AWAY (2021), from his signature shoelace series, the artist renders an excerpt of the eponymous gospel song written and copyrighted in 1929 by Albert Brumley, a white Southern man whose father owned a cotton farm. Ward was drawn to the song because of this complicated narrative, which highlights questions around authorship and racial inequality due to unequal opportunities and access. Ward's use of the phrase is an act of reclaiming this untold history, leaving the viewer to reconsider the importance and power of historical representation.
Other works featured in the booth include Helen Pashgian’s Spheres and Lenses, which are concurrently on view in the survey Helen Pashgian: Presences at SITE, Santa Fe, NM; Do Ho Suh’s intricate fabric works, parallel to his recent solo presentation at Lehmann Maupin Palm Beach; a selection of Cecilia Vicuña’s Precarios, ahead of her solo exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; and a new work from Lee Bul’s acclaimed Perdu paintings.