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ZIPORA FRIED
Birthday Boy: Jubilation and Melancholia
December 14, 2023 – February 3, 2024
PR: “What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding, what if laughter were really tears?”
―Soren Kierkegaard
Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is pleased to present Birthday Boy: Jubilation and Melancholia, a solo exhibition of recent work by artist Zipora Fried. This is the artist’s third solo presentation with the gallery, presenting a recent series of color-pencil abstract drawings and new ceramic works. Birthday Boy: Jubilation and Melancholia will be on view December 14, 2023, through February 3, 2024. A public opening reception will be held Thursday, December 14, from 6-8 PM.
The drawings featured in Birthday Boy: Jubilation and Melancholia reiterate color and line as the most foundational elements of Fried’s colored-pencil abstractions. Rows of pigment are built up line by line, with each stroke of the pencil existing as both a self-contained singular gesture and a constituent strand of a greater whole. As one’s gaze travels across Fried’s chromatic landscapes, lighter hues meld into vibrant saturation, while deeper tones unfurl into areas of shadow. Fried views the length of time devoted to the application of each mark as a process of sustained contemplation, imbuing the drawings with emotion and transforming them into prisms of refracted color and mood.
The exhibition title indicates what becomes the formal and conceptual dichotomy structuring this body of work: the inextricable relation of joy to sorrow, celebration to mourning, and euphoria to grief. Her luminous color fields become abstract articulations of these mirrored emotions, their permeable depth, and the diffuse boundary between them. A common palette of pinks, purples, blues, and greens is alternately shaded and illuminated in parallel tonalities, such as the gradations seen in I Know My Way Through These Woods (2023) and Dance When Your Roots are Torn (2023). Alongside a new group of sculptures, Fried’s color-pencil drawings elude interest in any surety of representational image or language.
Zipora Fried (b. Haifa, Israel) studied at the Academy of Applied Arts, Vienna. Recent exhibitions include Zipora Fried (2021) and As the Ground Turns Solid (2019), Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York; (wordless) at Small Editions, New York (2017); Late October, On Stellar Rays, New York, NY (2016); and Zipora Fried: Some Things Have Meaning, Others Don’t, Marfa Contemporary, Marfa, TX (2015). Her work can be found in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Magasin 3, Stockholm, Sweden; The Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria; and the Austrian Government’s Permanent Collection of Contemporary Art. She lives and works in New York.
KAY ROSEN
Prints and Drawings
December 14, 2023 – February 3, 2024
PR: Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is pleased to present Kay Rosen: Prints and Drawings, on view in the back galleries from December 14, 2023 through February 3, 2024. This solo exhibition features a selection of Rosen’s works on paper along with a new silkscreen print edition. A public opening reception will be held Thursday, December 14, from 6-8 PM.
Since the 1970s, Kay Rosen has been exploring the formal and ontological functions of language as a wellspring of artistic potential. Her unique applications of scale, color, design, and typography shift familiar interpretations of everyday words and phrases, reveling in the mutability of text and image. Language, for Rosen, is seen as “found material,” which can be enabled and activated through minimal intervention on the part of the artist. Wit and levity are integral to the tone of her “verbal shortcuts,” provoking incisive and enduring perspectives on contemporary social and political issues.
Rosen’s new silkscreen print edition, entitled SOUNDTRACK (2023), references an earlier series of work from the 1990s, which similarly employed the compositional strategy of blacked-out text. In this new print, three lines of text displayed across six panels, each with a specific combination of concealed and uncovered letters. The complete message, revealed in the final panel, has been successively “remixed” into six unique conceptual readings. The six unique graphical arrangements evoke multiple associations and emotions, such as the initial “discovery” of the hidden words, the starting and stopping of a music track, a pulsing four-on-the-floor beat, and the revelatory joy and communion that defines disco culture. These significations draw thematic resonance from the 2007 essay “Dance Dance Revolution: Disco as a Clarion Call to Aspiration” by writer and friend of the artist David Scott. As Rosen’s SOUNDTRACK demonstrates, suppression and obfuscation are futile; the language of disco, and its universal spirit, persists.
An interview between Rosen and writer and curator Terry R. Myers will be published in the December-January issue of The Brooklyn Rail, and feature a discussion of SOUNDTRACK within the context of Rosen’s larger oeuvre and current practice.
Kay Rosen was born 1943 in Corpus Christi, TX. Her work is currently the subject of the solo exhibition Kay Rosen. NOW AND THEN at the Weserburg Museum for Modern Art, Bremen, Germany, her first major institutional show in Europe. Her billboard-sized mural HI was installed on permanent public view at the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX, in March of 2023. In 2021, Rosen was commissioned by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, to create a site-responsive installation for the Gallery’s East Building; her large-scale painting, entitled SORRY, was on view through March 2022.
A two-venue mid-career survey entitled Kay Rosen: Li[f]eli[k]e, curated by Connie Butler and Terry R. Myers was exhibited at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and Otis College of Art Design in 1998-99. Other solo exhibitions include shows at the Aldrich Contemporary Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2017); Contemporary Art Museum Houston and Grazer Kunstverein, Graz, Austria, in collaboration with Matt Keegan (2016); Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia (2014); Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada (2013); Aspen Art Museum, CO (2012); and University Art Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA (2004). Rosen was included in the Whitney Biennial in 2000 as well as in 1991 as part of Group Material’s “AIDS Timeline.”
Rosen has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2017), the SJ Weiler Fund Award (2013), Anonymous Was a Woman Grant (2009), and three National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Grants (1995, 1989, 1987). Her work is included in the permanent collections of Art Institute of Chicago, IL; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Museum of Modern Art, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Indianapolis Museum of Art, IN; Collection Lambert, Avignon, France; and The Progressive Art Collection, Mayfield Village, OH, among many others.
Martyn Cross | All Shall Be Well
Marianne Boesky Gallery | NYC
October 26, 2023 – January 13, 2024
PR: Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to present All Shall Be Well, an exhibition of new work by U.K.-based artist Martyn Cross (b. 1975, Yate, United Kingdom). In the paintings and drawings on view in his first major solo exhibition in New York, Cross populates uncanny mythical lands with earthly forms in the midst of bewildering, transcendent metamorphosis. Transporting viewers to surreal worlds removed from time and place, Cross meditates on the inextricable links between man and nature, between the corporeal and the mystical.
Informed by medieval religious imagery and literature, Cross’s work revels in the visionary power of vast, otherworldly landscapes. Working with a distinctive, muted color palette, Cross layers scratched and scrubbed dry-brushed pigment to yield weathered and worn textures that glow with the internal luminosity of medieval manuscripts and frescoes—that seem to hold within them ambiguous, untold histories. From these surfaces emerge references to the terrestrial and to the celestial: roots grow into the ground and morph into strange, humanoid creatures, immense hands reach down from the clouds, comets transform into eyeballs as they blaze across the sky. Cross’s visual language derives from our world—but operates according to a divine logic and enigmatic physics entirely of the artist’s own imagining.
In early 2023, Cross attended the Hogchester Arts Residency in southwestern England, near Charmouth on the Jurassic Coast. The area’s remarkable terrain was formed nearly 250 million years ago, during the Mesozoic Era. Inspired by this landscape—cliffs falling into sea, fossils embedded in the rock, beaches melting into water—Cross made the drawings from which many of the works in the exhibition derive. The coastal vistas, the striking horizon lines, the geological strata, all filter through the work on view in this exhibition—in imagery, in texture, and in tone.
The exhibition takes its title, All Shall Be Well, from Revelations of Divine Love, a medieval account of visions from God written by English anchoress Julian of Norwich. While making this body of work—while absorbing the revealing landforms along the Jurassic Coast—Cross also absorbed the rich spiritual accounts in Revelations of Divine Love. For many years in the latter fourteenth century, Julian lived in a small cell off the main sanctuary at the St. Julian’s Church in Norwich, where she led a simple life of prayer and solitude. In All Shall Be Well, Cross’s new paintings—with their rich, glowing surfaces—inhabit the large front gallery space, adorning the gallery walls much like the opulent stained-glass windows of a church. In a smaller side gallery—a room not dissimilar in scale to Julian’s cell—Cross presents a monumental installation of drawings on which many of the paintings are based. Within this small, secluded space, Cross conjures visions of his fantastical world—a world removed from time and place, a world where some unknown higher power reigns. And next door, his paintings sing, exalting in their strange and unsettling history, promising, like Julian’s writings, that all, in fact, shall be well.
ABOUT MARTYN CROSS
Cross has exhibited at galleries and institutions across the United Kingdom and internationally. Martyn Cross: My Assembled Selves is on view through November 5 at Flatland Projects in Bexhill on Sea, United Kingdom. His work has also been the subject of solo exhibitions at Hales London, United Kingdom and Ratio 3, San Francisco, CA. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, UK; OSHSH Projects, London; Oceans Apart, Manchester; Bath Spa University; Spike Island, Bristol; LIMBO, Margate; Stroud Museum, UK; and Kettles Yard, Cambridge, among others. In 2023, Cross was longlisted for the John Moores Painting Prize. A Thought Sublime, a 2021 group exhibition at Marianne Boesky Gallery, was Cross’s first exhibition in the United States. Cross holds a BA in Fine Art from Bath Spa University; he lives and works in Bristol, United Kingdom.
