Lehmann Maupin is pleased to announce a solo presentation of new work by Shirazeh Houshiary for the inaugural Frieze Los Angeles (Stand D16). Houshiary is recognized for her intensive, process-oriented practice, and the works featured will represent her most detailed and laborious to date. These paintings and sculptures use gesture, color, and form to expose typically hidden natural phenomenon in order to alter viewers’ perceptions of time, space, order, and chaos. Lehmann Maupin has represented Houshiary since its inception in 1996, when the artist was associated with British sculptors like Anish Kapoor and Richard Deacon. In the decades since, Houshiary has distinguished herself by her exploration of the intangible, which has evolved to include works across media such as painting and animation.
Houshiary’s approach to painting often takes on a sculptural dimension; she works on canvas placed directly on the floor in order to achieve a fully multidirectional viewpoint. Her methodically produced line work is repeated as the artist moves around the canvas, imbuing each painting with a multidimensional illusory effect that undulates and vibrates across the surface. This drawn gesture is replicated in her sculptures, like Lunate (2018), in which she layers glass bricks in an organic yet strictly ordered shape reminiscent of a helix or vortex. Each layer of bricks precisely replicates the one previous, continuously rotating the form until it has reached the maximum degree before becoming structurally unstable. Her most recent sculptural series, including pieces such as The Oracle (2018), deftly emphasizes the signature line work of her paintings, minimized to a few isolated gestures tangled in delicate balance. Taken together, these works capture the fluid energy and conceptual duality—micro and macro, interior and exterior, formation and disintegration—exemplified in Houshiary’s work.
Though based in the language of abstraction, Houshiary’s works rely upon formal elements established in Renaissance painting such as composition, rhythm, structure, and depiction of light. Her affinity for the aesthetically ancestral influence of past artists often plays out in homage, as in the strict color palate she has selected in these works. This includes hues that Houshiary has never before used, such as a pistachio green attributed to paintings by Chaïm Soutine. Soutine, an early 20th-century artist who placed emphasis on texture, shape, and color over explicitly representational figures, is an apt predecessor to Houshiary’s own practice, which realizes an intangible boundary between the physical and immaterial world.
Alongside this presentation, Lehmann Maupin has also commissioned a major, never-before-seen installation by Do Ho Suh for Frieze LA that includes four new works from the artist's Specimen series. The installation continues one of the Korean artist's most influential and well known bodies of work, in which, using colorful, translucent fabrics, Suh creates exact scale replicas of architectural and domestic objects from his past and current homes and studios. Through the shapes, lines and volume of the fabric, Suh explores the notion of memory and conveys an idealized, otherworldly reproduction of the architectural space. The works explore the notion of home in a nomadic, global society. He is particularly interested in the way “home” can be articulated through an architectural structure that has a specific location, form, and history, as well as how the term also conjures a psychological space that holds memories, personal experience, and sense of security regardless of geographic location. The Specimen series is directly related to Suh’s large-scale, immersive installations that recreate an entire apartment or house, such as Apartment A, Unit 2, Corridor and Staircase, 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, USA (2011–14), recently gifted to LACMA and scheduled to be on view in November 2019.
About the artists
Shirazeh Houshiary (b. 1955, Iran; lives and works in London) graduated from the Chelsea School of Art in London in 1979. Solo exhibitions of her work have been organized at Espace Muraille, Geneva, Switzerland (2016); Tate Liverpool, United Kingdom (2003); SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico (2002); the British Museum, Islamic Gallery, London (1997); and Camden Arts Centre, London (1993). Select group exhibitions featuring her work include Regarding Spirituality, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO (2018); Phantom Bodies: The Human Aura in Art, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, FL (2016); Reductive Minimalism: Women Artists in Dialogue, 1960-2012, University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, MI (2014); 50 Years of Collecting Islamic Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2013); Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London (2012); Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2006); Happiness, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2003); and Thinking Big: Concepts for Twenty-First-Century British Sculpture, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (2002). Houshiary has participated in multiple biennials, including GLASSTRESS 2017, 57th Venice Biennale (2017); GLASSTRESS 2013, 55th Venice Biennale (2013); The 1st Kiev Biennale, Ukraine (2012); and the 17th Biennale of Sydney (2010). Houshiary’s work is in numerous international public and private collections, including the British Council Collection, London; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato, Italy; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Tate Modern, London.
Do Ho Suh (b. 1962, Seoul, Korea; lives and works in London, New York and Seoul) works across various media, creating drawings, film, and sculptural works that confront questions of home, physical space, displacement, memory, individuality, and collectivity. Suh is best known for his fabric sculptures that reconstruct to scale his former homes in Korea, Rhode Island, Berlin, London, and New York. Suh is interested in the malleability of space in both its physical and metaphorical forms, and examines how the body relates to, inhabits, and interacts with that space. He is particularly interested in domestic space and the way the concept of home can be articulated through architecture that has a specific location, form, and history. For Suh, the spaces we inhabit also contain psychological energy, and in his work he makes visible those markers of memories, personal experiences, and a sense of security, regardless of geographic location.
Suh received a BFA in painting from Rhode Island School of Design in 1994 and an MFA in sculpture from Yale University in 1997. Solo exhibitions of his work have recently been organized at Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, The Netherlands (forthcoming, 2019); ARoS, Aarhus, Denmark (2018); The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY (2018); Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, TN (2018); Towada Art Center, Towada (2018); Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC (2018); Cantor Arts Center, Stanford, CA (2018); Bildmuseet, Umea, Sweden (2017); Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, WI (2017); NC-arte, Bogotá, Colombia (2016); Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA (2016); Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH (2016); Singapore Tyler Print Institute, Singapore (2015); Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, OH (2015); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2015); Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, Bristol, United Kingdom (2015); The Contemporary Austin, TX (2014); National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul (2013); 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan (2012-2013); Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan (2012); Stuart Collection, University of San Diego, California (2012); Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2012); and Tate Modern, London (2011). Select group exhibitions featuring his work include, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art & Culture City of East Asia, Kanazawa, Japan (2018); Shelter in the Storm, A Look at the Exile in the MUSAC Collection, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y Léon, León, Spain (2018); 16th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice, Italy (2018); Art of the Senses, Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY (2017); No Place Like Home, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem (2017); Apparitions: Frottages and Rubbings from 1860 to Now, The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, traveled to the Menil Collection, Houston, TX (2015); Beyond and Between, Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2014); Shades of Time: An Exhibition from the Archive of Korean American Artists, Part Two 1989 - 2001, Queens Museum, NY (2014); Homebodies, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2013); Dislocation, Daegu Art Museum, South Korea (2012); and Peppermint Candy: Contemporary Korean Art, The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, South Korea (2009). Suh has participated in multiple biennial exhibitions, including the Singapore Biennial (2016); the 9th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2012); the 6th Liverpool Biennial, United Kingdom (2010); the 12th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice, Italy (2010); the 8th International Istanbul Biennial (2003); the 13th Biennial of Sydney (2002); and represented Korea at the 49th Venice Biennale (2001). His work is in numerous international public and private collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Tate Modern, London; Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection, Vienna; Museum Voorlinden, Netherlands; Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul; Art Sonje Center, Seoul; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC.
In 2013, Do Ho Suh was named Wall Street Journal Magazine's Innovator of the Year in Art.