CURRENT EXHIBITION

Shiwen Wang, *Belakang Mati,* 2024, oil on linen, 68 3⁄4 x 76 3⁄4 inches.

Shiwen Wang
The river returns nothing of what it takes
October 26 – December 21, 2024

Gallery 1 & 2

Michael Kohn Gallery is pleased to announce The river returns nothing of what it takes an exhibition of new works by London-based, Chinese artist Shiwen Wang. For her first solo exhibition with the gallery and in the United States, Wang presents a series of 10 new abstract compositions that piece together the artist’s recurring explorations of natural life and its impermanence. The exhibition will be on view from October 26 through December 20, 2024.

In The river returns nothing of what it takes, Wang engages with the relationship between humanity and the natural world, or as she describes it: “the unity of cosmic life.” The river functions as a metaphor for loss, fleeting time, and collapse intertwined with creation. There is a vanitas quality to the paintings; a subtle rot of human interference lurking beneath the iridescence. In the diptych Belakang Mati, an expansive blue is continued into a narrow rectangular panel below where the belly of a fish unseams open in putrefaction– the viewer bearing witness to its decay.

Wang’s dynamic picture planes emerge from her acute understanding of the fundamental fluidity between artificial and natural light. Her earth-toned and aquatic palettes summon an intuitive command of color, while layers of impastoed oils, powder pigment, beeswax, and fragile egg tempera approximate an aged patina. Her subject matter appropriates the familiar – fish, decaying leaves, a boat wreckage – and translates it into the unfamiliar. These recognizable, repetitive relics visualize the compression of time and create complex ecosystems which toggle between the natural and synthetic.

In spatial harmony, Wang’s work fuses together the relationship between the past and the present, and organic cycles of decay and rebirth. The artist explains the exhibition title references a line found in a novel, written by French author Sylvain Tesson, titled “A Life to Sleep Outside”: “The river returns nothing, not even the echoes of a cry.” Wang

writes, “The violence and suffocating helplessness in the face of life’s impermanence aligns perfectly with the emotional landscape I aim to evoke in my paintings. The river is not just a natural element, but a container—both a tangible material and a symbol.”

Hadi Alijani, "The Mutilated Gaze," 2024, acrylic on canvas, 39 1/2 x 55 1/4 inches

Hadi Alijani
The Mutilated Gaze
November 9 – December 21, 2024

Gallery 3

Michael Kohn Gallery is pleased to announce The Mutilated Gaze, an exhibition of new works by Paris-based, Iranian artist Hadi Alijani. For his U.S. debut and first exhibition with the gallery, Alijani presents a group of six new acrylic on canvas still-life paintings. The exhibition will be on view from November 9 through December 21, 2024.

With unexpected dimensions and compressed forms, Alijani creates a visual lexicon ripe with subtle humor and artistic sensibility. Exaggerated plants, fruit, fish, and ameoba-like creatures hang suspended in the air or aslant architectural features. Two-dimensional and three-dimensional perspectives are turned upside down, alerting the viewer to the tension between the objects within their compositions. Alijani describes this stylistic synthesis as: “a contact zone resulting from the collision of Eastern and Western perspectives to reach a coherent and separate whole.” He further elaborates: “Painting is a way of seeing the surrounding world. Through it, I try to reconstruct my personal narratives of contemporary events in Iran and the world.”

Alijani’s paintings offer a host of art historical references, most prominent among them Qajar paintings, seen in works by Kamal-ol-Molk and Mirza Baba. The invention of photography in the 19th century had a profound effect on the hierarchy of genres in still-life painting, a direct legacy Alijani embodies here. In one work, the artist recreates the 16th century Safavid Chelsea Carpet to serve as the focal point for an allegorical clash between humans and their effects in society. Above the rug, bumpy squashes undulate atop an octagonal table, while a taxidermied cheetah skin curls halfway out of the picture plane. The top-down view destabilizes easy classifications of perspective and provokes a thornier critique. “In the Qajar period, the still life was a symbol of strength and power of the kingdom,” explains Alijani. “In this work, the deformation of still life deprive the painting of royal strength and glory.”

Other compositions in the show lean further into questions of the viewer’s position in the painting. A folding knife renders a watermelon’s flesh jagged, but there is no hand to fashion it shut. Alijani is suggestive of a human gaze, albeit one which is “mutilated” and in pronounced absence of figuration. Upon visiting an exhibition of Persian miniatures and carpets in Munich in 1910, Henri Matisse remarked: "Persian miniatures showed me the possibility of my sensations. That art had devices to suggest a greater space, a really plastic space." This is one way of understanding the centuries-long cultural exchange between Iran and Europe, which artist Hadi Alijani reframes in his signature style.

Lita Albuquerque, Earth Skin

September 12 - October 19, 2024
Gallery 1, 2 & 3

Chiffon Thomas, Progeny

June 20 - August 17, 2024
Gallery 1, 2 & 3

William Brickel, Was It Ever Fair.

January 20 - March 2, 2024
Gallery 1 & 2

Rosa Loy, Glade

March 9 - April 20, 2024
Gallery 1 & 2

Siji Krishnan, Liminal Spaces

April 26 - June 8, 2024
Gallery 1, 2 & 3

Li Hei Di, Oscillating Womb

November 2, 2023 - January 6, 2024
Gallery 1 & 2

Faris Heizer, These days

November 2, 2023 - January 6, 2024
Gallery 3

COMPOSITION

September 15 - October 21, 2023
Gallery 1 & 2

Ed Moses, Edges, Magmas and Waterfalls

September 18 - October 30, 2021
Gallery 1, 2 & 3

101 Years of Still Life: 1920-Present

August 7 - September 11, 2021
Gallery 1 & 2

Joe Goode, 20 Years Later

June 18 - August 7, 2021
Gallery 3

William Brickel, I’d Tell You If I Could

June 11 - July 31, 2021
Gallery 1 & 2

Chiffon Thomas, Antithesis

April 9 - May 21, 2021
Gallery 1, 2 & 3

Jellyfish, Curated by Samantha Glaser-Weiss

January 31 - March 13, 2020
Gallery 1 & 2

Octavio Abúndez, Facts, contradictions, puzzles…

November 9, 2019 - January 16, 2020
Gallery 1 & 2

Enrique Martínez Celaya, The Tears of Things

September 13 - November 1, 2019
Gallery 1 & 2

María Berrío, A Cloud’s Roots

June 1 - August 30, 2019
Gallery 1 & 2

Heidi Hahn, Burn Out in Shredded Heaven

April 6 - May 23, 2019
Gallery 1

Jarvis Boyland, On Hold:

April 6 - May 23, 2019
Gallery 2

Gonzalo Lebrija, Veladuras Nocturnas

January 19 - March 23, 2019
Gallery 1, 2 & 3

Rosa Loy, So Near And Yet So Far

November 9, 2018 - January 9, 2019
Gallery 1 & 2

Tony Berlant, Fast Forward

September 22 - November 3, 2019
Gallery 1 & 2

Jess, Secret Compartments

July 21 - September 7, 2019
Gallery 1, 2 & 3

Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Sheets

June 1 - July 14, 2018
Gallery 1 & 2

Mark Innerst, New Paintings

April 6 - May 24, 2018
Gallery 1 & 2

Gesture | Form | Pop | Process

February 27 - March 29, 2018
Gallery 1 & 2

Engender

November 11, 2017 - January 27, 2018
Gallery 1, 2 & 3

Chingaderas Sofisticadas

September 16 - November 4, 2017
Gallery 1, 2 & 3

Dennis Hopper, The Lost Album

July 8 - September 1, 2017
Gallery 1, 2 & 3

Dean Byington, Theory of Machines

May 19 - June 30, 2017
Gallery 1 & 2

Joe Goode, Old Ideas with New Solutions

March 23 - May 13, 2017
Gallery 1, 2 & 3

Bruce Conner, LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS

February 9 - March 15, 2017
Gallery 1

Bruce Conner, A MOVIE

November 11, 2016 - February 8, 2017
Gallery 1

John Altoon, Works from the Estate

September 16 - October 29, 2016
Gallery 1 & 2

Ori Gersht, Floating World

July 9 - September 10, 2016
Gallery 1 & 2

Wallace Berman, American Aleph

May 6 - June 25, 2016
Gallery 1, 2 & 3

Ryan McGinness, #metadata

March 19 - April 15, 2016
Gallery 1, 2 & 3

Dean Levin, XTC

January 16 - February 27, 2016
Gallery 2 & 3

Lita Albuquerque, Embodiment

January 9 - February 27, 2016
Gallery 1

Simmons & Burke, Dutch Masters

November 6 - December 19, 2015
Gallery 1

Object/Space: Robert Ryman + Giorgio Morandi

September 19 - October 31, 2015
Gallery 1

The West Coast Avant-Garde, 1950 - Present

July 18 - September 4, 2015
Gallery 1 & 2

Jess’s Didactic Nickelodeon

June 6 - July 10, 2015
Gallery 3

William Monk, The Cloud is Growing in the Trees

May 29 - July 10, 2015
Gallery 1 & 2

Camille Rose Garcia, Mirror, Black Mirror

April 25 - May 20, 2015
Gallery 3

Tom LaDuke, Candles and Lasers

April 11 - May 20, 2015
Gallery 1 & 2

LAND, AIR, SEE

February 21 - April 2, 2015
Gallery 1 & 2

Troika, Cartography of Control

January 10 - February 12, 2015
Gallery 1 & 2

Eddie Martinez, Nomader

September 12 - October 25, 2014
Gallery 1 & 2

Lita Albuquerque, Light Carries Information

November 15 - December 20, 2014
Gallery 2

Joe Goode, Flat Screen Nature

July 12 - August 29, 2014
Gallery 1, 2 & 3

Bruce Conner, CROSSROADS & WORKS ON PAPER

November 8 - December 20, 2014
Gallery 1 & 3

Mark Ryden, The Gay 90s West

May 3 - June 28, 2014
Gallery 1, 2 & 3