Paul Chan: The 7 Lights

Veilhan. The works on view focus on the artist’s interest in geometry, including a new series of line drawings, graphic mobiles and a marquetry, as well as a site-specific mural of hand drawn circles on the walls of the gallery. The wall mural will be completed during the public opening on February 28th at 5pm, marking Veilhan’s first live drawing session in the United States.</p><p>Over the last three decades, Xavier Veilhan has developed a multiform approach to sculpture, painting, performance, video, and photography, often generating installations in which the audience becomes an active participant. Known primarily for his figurative sculptures and conceptual paintings, he has developed his own formal vocabulary, reinterpreting classical sculptural and architectural elements under a technological gaze. Utilizing geometrical figures and mathematical designs, the artist conceptualizes the living world through an analytical perspective.</p><p>In the exhibition, we are welcomed by the form of Alice n°2, the only marquetry on view. Combining the digital and the material, Veilhan attempts to capture the familiar likeness of the human figure through a modernistic perspective. The structural geometric form poised against a neutral background questions our understanding of classical portraiture, as Alice exists separate from physical representation of the real world.</p><p>The core of Compass consists of a series of new drawings in a variety of circular shapes and scales. For years, the artist has utilized drawing as a method for research and communication, which is now at the heart of his practice. In 2020, Veilhan began exploring the possibilities of a single line on paper in his Confinement drawings. These new works will expand his interest beyond the paper, creating an illusion of infinite space.</p><p><br></p>" />

artist Shim Moon-Seup</a> (b. 1943). Looking towards the seascapes of Tongyeong, the coastal city where Shim grew up and has since returned to, the works on view continue the artist's ever expansive and empathetic outlook on time, space, and nature--then, and now.</p><p>In 2010, Shim began making an ongoing series of works on canvas entitled The Presentation. Known primarily as a sculptural artist in the decades prior, this material turn coincided with the artist's relocation to childhood hometown Tongyeong in 2012, after a five-year sojourn in Paris (and prior to that, in the suburb of Seoul.) The return to familiar bodies of water and a slower pace of life not only allowed the artist to reconnect with the seascapes which has nurtured his curiosity and sensibility since childhood, but also allowed for a vital reengagement with the core of Shim's personal and artistic belief. What gravitates Shim towards the sea is its permutations between mundaneness and infinity. To Shim, the universal experience of the ocean as a landscape, and the emotional specificity of ocean-watching subjected to each viewer, do not present themselves as paradoxes; rather, they consubstantiate opportunities to "reveal to, share with, and invite others to engage in mutual resonance."</p><p>A member of the seminal A.G. Group (Korean Avant-Garde Association, 1969-1975), Shim's indelible contribution to the constellation of Korean experimental art began in the 1970s, when he made series of sculptures which spatially reveal modules of drawing, painting and performance. What unites the diverse forms in Shim's near-five decade-long oeuvre are the works' tendency to reduce, challenge or even negate the very grounds which sustained their structural and conceptual wholeness-often through elements of surprise. For example, Shim's 1971 seminal work Relation (Place) presents a torn paper canvas, with the upper half affixed the wall and the lower half anchored by the gravitational weights of rocks. In doing so, the work presents a three-dimensional configuration with an intense planar awareness. For the artist, the gesturally minimal, yet radically transformative intervention to materials and site are precisely what allows for sculptural materials--be it canvas, wood, or rock, or steel-to reveal their true properties and relational specificity with the site which they share.</p><p>In many ways, The Presentation and Re-present, works on canvas and paper made in the recent decade, continues Shim's exploration of three-dimensional forms which reflect the history or continuum of its flatness-a concern which the artist has held and systematically explored since the 1970s. Using a "brush rather than a hammer," and "canvas rather than wood," Shim sees the seascapes as cognate twins of his provocative sculptures, in that both bodies of work address the shared contingencies of plastic techniques and the allegorical potential which emerges out of the forms' mutual acknowledgement.</p><p><br></p>" />

Zach Harris</a> which immerses the viewer in all aspects of his studio practice. The artist's presentation includes his signature carved panel paintings, large-scale sculptural forms, and diaristic works on paper which offer an intimate glimpse into the artist's working process. Harris' ornate artworks contain multiple layers of narrative which require deep contemplation, akin to a meditative experience. This is his fourth solo exhibition with Perrotin, and second at the gallery's New York location.</p><p>Zach Harris is an artist whose contemporary practice manages to feel profoundly modern and defiantly ancient in equal measure. Drawing from a diversity of inspirations-not limited to philosophy, classicism, architecture, metaphysics, and cosmology-his output defies easy categorization. His merging of painting with drawing, divine geometries, architectural forms, and sculptural elements results in works that often carry a sense of the devotional-forms that demand contemplation: for themselves and for us.</p><p>Formally, much of Harris' work consists of combining painted panels and canvases with carved wooden frames and surfaces. This recalls, in an abstract and more modern sense, the panel paintings and portable altarpieces for private devotion that existed in the early Italian renaissance. These polyptychs, much like Harris' own, consisted of detailed scenes combined with ornate and articulated frames, whereby the viewer would contemplate themselves and their place upon this mortal coil. Within his paintings, Harris distills whole universes and conjures Borgesian visions onto their surfaces. Prophetic visions, cosmologies, zodiacs, and patterns abound in a way that seems to psychedelically search for its own truths. In their effect, Harris's works are a high desert fever dream that is part mystic mountain, part Vegas casino floor, full of color and texture.</p><p>As a Californian artist, it's possible to view Harris through an intellectual framework that defines many who chose to head westward to find a new reality. Harris' architectural adages may recall the aesthetics of Frank Lloyd Wright's Talesin West, and the experimental Arizona community of Arcosanti, but it is Harris' own interest in eastern thought—and particularly meditation that perhaps defines his work the most. Like Buddhist mandalas that map the universe and paths to enlightenment, Harris' paintings serve as a form of visual meditation. The viewer's gaze endlessly circumnavigates their surfaces, finding details in amongst the whole. Heavens and hells, divine order, and a glimpse at the great mysteries of life, Harris' works recall the ever-deepening questioning of Zen koan practice.</p><p>Drawings from Harris' sketchbooks are on display alongside his larger composite works. These showcase the diversity of ideas to which Harris is constantly engaged. Unlike the slower moving larger works, these intimate drawings are a lesser seen element-a place where Harris feels free to experiment and to build a sort of visual journal. Collages, animalistic deities, sentient Al beings, disasters, architectural models, Harris' work on paper spans the alpha through omega-the beginning to the end. "An artist's journal is the most creative and responsive," he explains. "You can't hide, it's all there. What's better?"</p><p>The term 'practice, in the religious sense, gives insight into much of Harris' own personal meditations within his studio. Pieces are worked on, reconfigured, amended, and improvised for indefinite amounts of time. As long as they remain in the studio, they are - James Casey very much a work in progress, sometimes for years at a time. This process of losing oneself in the act of painting is its own form of contemplation, meditation and devotion.</p><p><br></p>" />