CELEBRATING WOMEN ARTISTS AROUND THE WORLD
MARCH 2023
Women's History Month is a celebration of female contributions to history, art, culture, and society. In honor of this, we are highlighting several talented female artists having shows during this special month not to be missed.
MOLLY LOWE
The paintings in Molly Lowe's exhibition, Falling Together, channel a way of observation that seeks balance within states of limbo, straddling reality and imagination. Lowe begins from assorted everyday images. Combining anonymous online imagery and personal photos, she slices, dices, mixes, and mutates these sources until she arrives at scenes that expose the awkwardness of life in a human body—physically and emotionally.
In addition to painting, Lowe frequently works in performance and sculpture; as such, her paintings are events in their own right. Emanating a sense of action, they record mental and physical movement of the artist's own body.
Molly Lowe was born in 1983 in Palo Alto, CA and received her MFA from Columbia University and her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). She has had solo exhibitions and performances at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Lilith Performance Studio, Malmo, Sweden; Suzanne Geiss Company, New York, NY; SculptureCenter, Long Island City, New York; and Performa 13, New York, NY. Lowe lives and works in New York. Her current show is up until April 8 in Los Angeles, CA.
KYUNGMI SHIN
Los Angeles-based Korean artist Kyungmi Shin’s current practice is inspired by black-and-white vintage photographs from the artist’s family album. She layers historic works from Western art history, such as Edouard Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass, and juxtaposes them with traditional East Asian imagery like the buggy-eyed tiger and Bonghwang, a mythological phoenix, from traditional Korean folk painting.
Found in her uncle’s home in Busan, the black-and-white photos are placed in the center of the painting, with the contours outlined in silver pigment. The seemingly irrelevant visuals in one imagery bring together various narratives embedded in different cultures. Continuing her practice of exploring identity through personal memories, collision of cultures, and historical narratives, Shin’s technique embodies and contextualizes one’s experiences within a greater realm of time and space.
Kyungmi Shin was born in 1963 in South Korea and received an MFA from UC Berkeley, CA, in 1995. Her work is part of the permanent collections at the Getty Center, Los Angeles, and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. She has completed over 20 public artworks, and her most recent public video sculpture was installed at the Netflix headquarters in Hollywood, CA. Her latest works are on view in Seoul through April 15.
SOO KIM
Soo Kim’s photographic works employ techniques of cutting and layering in order to introduce areas of absence or disruption. For her current show, Kim produced a suite of photographs depicting the process of arranging a bouquet of red, yellow, and blue flowers.
Moved by the terminal diagnosis of a friend, this series of still lifes was sparked by the desire to memorialize. It marks an inward turn for Kim’s practice; contrasted by previous bodies of work, which drew the artist outside of the studio and into cityscapes and nature, these photographs were shot inside the artist’s studio and are imbued with a sensitive intimacy. Operating like Dutch still life paintings, the works reach for something permanent, offering their beauty while reminding us of the cyclical qualities of nature and the impermanence of life itself.
Soo Kim was born in South Korea in 1969. Her work is in various public collections, including The Getty Center; The Broad Foundation; The Albright-Knox Art Gallery; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego; North Carolina Museum of Art; and The Escalette Collection of Art, Chapman University. Kim lives and works in Los Angeles, CA where her show will be on view until April 22.
NANCY LORENZ
Nancy Lorenz’s work is characterized by her innovative use of materials and techniques. She explores the mystical and poetic qualities of gold combined with everyday items including cardboard, jute, and burlap. By combining these elements with craftsmanship she learned as an art restorer, each work captures the essence of alchemy, a process of transformation, in which base materials are elevated to a higher form through the artist's skill and intention, creating works that are both a landscape and an abstract painting.
Nancy Lorenz is a visual artist who lives and works in New York City. Her work can be seen in public spaces around the world including Chanel and Dior, as well as in numerous private collections. The works in her current show, Gilded Matter, which can be seen in Palm Beach until April 11, are connected and building off new large-scale installations. The burlap and gold pieces are the studies for a site-specific installation at the Basilica di Santa Maria in Montesanto, Rome on view from April 17 through June 11, 2023. Her work with mother-of-pearl will be featured in the new Tiffany and Co. flagship store in New York opening in Spring 2023.
TALA MADANI
Tala Madani continues her transgressive examination of cultural norms, sociopolitical relationships, and power dynamics in a new show in New York through April 15. With Dirty Windows, Madani presents the latest iteration of her Cloud Paintings. Soft in texture and colossal in scale, the sky-filled canvases display the analogous formation of clouds as figures and words. In this show, Madani draws the viewers' attention upwards to ponder what we look up to and what we worship.
Central to the exhibition is the concept of windows. Using the sky as a background and the canvas' veneer as a foreground, the paintings become permanent structures for doodling. Like fingers playfully dragging across condensation on dirty glass, Madani projects her imagination into the ether as drawings of miniature stick figures, unidentifiable men, and buildings create scenes of narrative.
Tala Madani's work is held in numerous public and private collections, including the Guggenheim, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; MOCA Los Angeles, and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Born in Tehran in 1981, Madani lives and works in Los Angeles.
EMMA WEBSTER
Emma Webster uses digital technologies to inform her landscapes, which transcend traditional painting.
Although Webster's compositions appear familiar at first glance, the natural landscapes quickly morph into dreamlike, intangible vistas, inspired by trompe l'oeil paintings. Webster achieves an ethereal undertone to her works by incorporating computer graphics into her two-dimensional sketches, contrasting worlds of natural terrain and virtual reality which she then embellishes with theatrical illumination, to create natural vistas that relish in artifice, drama, and distortion.
Emma Webster was born in 1989 in Encinitas, CA and is a graduate of Stanford University and Yale University, where she received an MFA in Painting in 2018. Her current show is on view in Tokyo through April 26.
LOUISE NEVELSON
Louise Nevelson's latest show in Los Angeles features iconic, monochromatic wooden sculptures, mixed media collages, and sculptural wall reliefs created by the artist between the 1950s and 1980s. This immersive presentation, on view until April 29, will highlight the relationship between Nevelson as a sculptor and her lifelong practice of creating wall-based assemblages and collages.
Nevelson’s artworks have been celebrated for incorporating unexpected combinations of materials and forms. This current show will speak to her pioneering yet historically overlooked role in the development of what came to be known as installation art.
Not to be missed is a selection of graphic collages—in which the artist transformed scraps of cardboard, foil, wood, metal, newsprint, and other found materials into lyrical abstractions—which shed light on a lesser-known but essential aspect of her practice. Nevelson kept this work mostly secret during her lifetime, preferring to exhibit her sculptural works. Deeply interwoven with her sculptural practice, collage-making was a daily act for the artist, who treated the medium almost like drawing.
Later this year, an exhibition of more than 50 works will open at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, which will spotlight Nevelson’s monumental legacy in postwar American art and culture.
KYLIE MANNING
Kylie Manning’s show in Switzerland, on view from March 28 - May 13, was conceived in parallel to her forthcoming collaboration with the New York City Ballet. Her large-scale paintings are a combination of color, energy, and diaphanous figures, inspired by the landscapes of her childhood, which was split between Mexico and Alaska and some time spent on commercial fishing boats. Shifting between abstraction and figuration, Manning uses a technique used by Old Master painters in which countless layers of oils are applied to the canvas’s surface in order to absorb and refract light.
As one of five children, ideas of playfulness, intimacy, and chaos within family dynamics are central to Manning’s subject matter. Pareidolia, the brain’s tendency to see images in ambiguous patterns – such as a face in clouds – is a central concern of Manning’s approach to painting. Thus, Manning leaves interpretation open and subverts the ways in which her paintings are experienced, allowing viewers a closer and more active engagement with the works.
Kylie Manning is based in Brooklyn, NY. She is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts with a double Major in Philosophy and Visual Arts. She also earned a master's degree from the New York Academy of Art. Manning's work is held in numerous collections worldwide including the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, Florida; X Museum, Beijing, China; and Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China.