Lehmann Maupin returns to Art Basel Hong Kong with a selection of new and historic works that emphasize our institutional exhibitions around the world—from Seoul to London to Boston. Spanning painting, sculpture, and mixed media, the works on view demonstrate the gallery’s commitment to a diverse and global program.
Highlights include a new, large-scale painting by Tammy Nguyen, whose first solo exhibition with the gallery opens March 23 in Seoul. Nguyen joined the program in 2022, and shortly thereafter received much critical acclaim for the works she debuted at the Berlin Biennial. In The Gape (2023), Nguyen reimagines the Lusail Stadium in Qatar, where the 2022 World Cup took place. Nguyen’s composition suggests the stadium as more than a structure, reanimating it as both a spaceship and a dragon to explore the other-wordly nature of the architecture and blur the lines between fantasy and reality. The artist has long experimented with intentionally confusing her subjects by overlapping seemingly disparate entities. In her forthcoming Seoul exhibition A Comedy for Mortals: Inferno, Nguyen draws a parallel between Dante’s Inferno and the Cold War-era Space Race in order to explore areas of moral ambiguity and ethical confusion. This August, Nguyen’s first solo museum exhibition will open at the ICA/Boston.
In conjunction with the opening of Heidi Bucher’s retrospective exhibition on March 28 at Art Sonje in Seoul, our presentation will also include historic work by the late pioneering artist. Bucher is best known for her innovative use of latex to cast large-scale architectural features, including entire buildings. Throughout her life, she maintained an ideologically important yet often overlooked practice, in most part due to her gender and unconventional choice of materials. She is now recognized as a pioneer in the multimedia arts space, evidenced in her work Gloria (1975), which is made from latex, textile, and mother of pearl pigment.
A new painting by Chinese artist Liu Wei will also debut at the fair. Here, the artist used computer software to generate complex patterns of vertical and horizontal lines in bright, acidic color palettes that call to mind apocalyptic cityscapes and urban sprawl, audio visualizers and frequency charts, and graphs and data sets. Whatever the viewer might see in the painting, the artist assigns no specific meaning to the colored striations, calling into question the idea that there is only one way to understand the world.
London-based artist Chantal Joffe is known for her whimsical portraits of herself and of the people she is closest to, including her immediate family, her friends, and her extended family members. By creating tension between the scale of her compositions and the proposed intimacy of their subject matter—like in Ishbel on Pink (2018), an emotive and expressionist portrait of a woman against a blush backdrop—Joffe prioritizes the human identities and relationships that undergird her compositions over any kind of painterly realism.
A new painting by New York-based artist Marilyn Minter, whose work offers nuanced representations of women and the treatment of the female body in popular media, will debut at the fair. Through her subversion of conventional and mainstream imagery around beauty and glamour, works like Quarantine (2020–21) expose the double standards that influence feminine identities and challenge the historic portrayal of women in media. Looking ahead, Minter will open a solo exhibition at Lehmann Maupin Seoul in November.
Lehmann Maupin’s booth will also include new works by the acclaimed conceptual duo Gilbert & George, whose foundation—The Gilbert & George Centre—opens at the end of March in London; as well as new works by Billy Childish, Tom Friedman, Nicholas Hlobo, Lee Bul, Lari Pittman and Nari Ward.