Gallery Network
5 Fresh Picks for Artists the Artnet Gallery Network Is Watching This April
This month we have our eyes on artists with shows in Los Angeles, London, and beyond.
This month we have our eyes on artists with shows in Los Angeles, London, and beyond.
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At the Artnet Gallery Network, our mission is to discover new artists each and every month. We sifted through the thousands of talented artists on our site to select a few we find particularly intriguing right now.
Amid the flurry of new shows opening this month, we’ve chosen five artists worth knowing about and who have works on view at spaces in New York, Berlin, and beyond.
Rebecca Ward’s geometric works bridge object, craft, and dimensionality through deconstructed and sewn canvases. In recent works on view in “Infinite Plane,” Ward incorporates curving and organic forms alongside the hard-edged shapes, marked by chromatic fields of saturated tones which she contrasts with lighter washes or raw canvas. These works speak to her investigations into geometry, landscape, and the body. Ward obliquely connects abstraction with her myriad sources of inspiration ranging from math textbooks and celestial maps to Albrecht Dürer’s anatomical graphs and her own recent experience with pregnancy and childbirth.
After years of focus on depicting interiors, Stuttgart-based artist Fabian Treiber’s recent paintings instead present imaginary landscapes, from moonlit desert scenes to vaguely tropical horizons. The artist works first by translating perceptions into sketches, then translating these onto canvas. The paintings are built up in layers, becoming physical encounters for the artist, and encourage viewers to expand their conception of the pictorial space.
Argentine artist Sofia Quirno’s solo exhibition “I Went There” is an exploratory journey that takes off in a variety of directions, including sketches made while watching TV, visualizations of drawings, and her observations of the city landscape. Working with paint, ink, paper, and both new and found materials, Quirno fills these works with sculptural or architectural spaces that seem like dreamscapes or maps coded with hidden meanings. Her incorporation of bits of language suggests overheard snippets of conversation, song lyrics stuck in the mind, or commonplace sayings. Grappling with questions of existence, longing, femininity, and spiritualism, the works deftly capture the mysteries of everyday life.
“What Are You Leaving Behind?” at ROSEGALLERY in Los Angeles brings together works made by Johannesburg artist Lebohang Kganye across nearly a decade. Kganye’s highly poetic practice is both archival and performative, exploring the familial experience in relation to the temporal layers and complexities of storytelling. This exhibition weaves together three seminal series: “Her-Story” (2013), “Reconstruction of a Family” (2016), and “Tell Tale” (2018), which ruminates on the relationships between history and orature and between memory and fantasy. Of these works, the series “Ke Lefa Laka (Her-Story)” confronts the artist’s grief over the loss of her mother via performative recreations of beloved photographs, sometimes superimposing her image over that of her mother in ghostly contrast. In “Reconstruction of a Family,” the artist documents her personal history as it relates to previous generations and the history of South Africa, in that her family was uprooted and resettled by the Land Act and other apartheid laws. Lastly, “Tell Tale” delves into the varied and contradictory ways stories are told, even from a single perspective.
Gretchen Andrew exposes normally invisible systems of power with art, code—and glitter, glitter, glitter. As part of her process, Andrew has previously hacked the websites of major art institutions and even Google search results for “Contemporary Art Auction Record,” replacing results with images of her own collaged “Vision Boards.” The act calls attention to an auction market in which women artists comprise only 2 percent of the contemporary-art sector. Her new solo exhibition “Growth Hacking”—a reference to a field of marketing that targets rapid expansion—presents new “Vision Boards” that serve as both vectors of her digital performance as well as physical metaphors for growth. A product of Silicon Valley herself, Andrew deploys the industry’s symbols in her work, both celebrating and appropriating the success of technology while casting a critical eye on the implications of this power and the ease of its manipulation.