Lee Kit: Skin

Jenkins's work</a> since announcing the gallery's relationship with the Foundation in late 2024.</p><p>In the early 1950s, following his studies at the Art Students League in New York under Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Jenkins settled in Paris, where he developed modes of painting that privilege chance processes. Allowing paint to pool, bleed, drip, and dribble on the canvas as he manipulated the surface, he created veils of colour that evoke changing light. Inspired by the radical improvisation of Michel Tapié's art autre, the proto-conceptualism and process-rich painting of the Gutai Art Association, and Zen Buddhism, he synthesised aspects of and departed from the work of his peers. Notably, he eradicated any evidence of his hand. At the end of the decade, he began using an ivory knife to conduct the flow of paint, bringing an element of enigmatic expression and gesture to a process invested in indeterminacy. The resulting paintings recall kaleidoscopic memories of landscapes, at once lucid and obscure.&nbsp;</p><p>The exhibition will include Phenomena of Air Striae from 1959, a critical moment for the artist. That year, influenced by Goethe's colour theories and the work of Immanuel Kant, he began titling every painting Phenomena and coined the term "abstract phenomenist" to describe his orientation to his work, which prioritised an engagement with flux. This rare canvas, notable for its scale and the comprehensiveness of its composition, features a tumultuous field of colour, in which licks of crimson lap through unruly striations of yellow, black, and white, like flames. A spectral umber form seems to sway at the centre of the vertical composition, as if caught in wind. Oceanic blues on the periphery lend a sense of deep space.&nbsp;</p><p>The year after this work was completed, Jenkins discovered that working with water-based acrylic allowed for translucency that retained a desired vividness of colour, and he converted almost exclusively to the medium, applying it to the smooth surfaces of primed canvas. The exhibition includes three paradigmatic acrylic paintings from this early period of invention with the medium and six from the 1970s. The vertical composition Phenomena Samothrace Arch (1973) centres on a cleaved form comprising mirrored shapes, one radiant blue and the other an inconstant yellow marbled with red and gray. This form, a kind of summit, rises from an aquatic horizon-the whole arrangement undulating gently against a white ground. The exuberant canvas Phenomena Rain Palace (1976)-which has been exhibited in major presentations in New York, Palm Springs, Antibes, and Haifa, among other cities-features an ephemeral, rainbowed architecture that seems to cut through clouds. Intense colours and muted hues alike generate seemingly weightless forms.&nbsp;</p><p><br></p>" />

Jessica Stoller</a>’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. Known for her meticulous and highly detailed porcelain sculptures, Stoller mines the rich and complicated history of the medium to reveal its capacity for subversion, defiance, and play. Featuring a new series of freestanding sculptures, wall works, and a large-scale ceramic still-life, this exhibition synthesizes historical, cultural, and personal narratives that grapple with the belief that “in a patriarchy your body is technically not your own until you pass the reproductive age.”</p><p>Sparked by America’s ongoing repression of bodily autonomy, Stoller created Seeing Red, 2024, an evocative tableau composed of over 150 individual ceramic components positioned low to the ground. Deliberately debased, yet impossible to ignore, this installation draws inspiration from 18th and 19th century “anatomical Venuses,” pseudoscientific wax sculptures of slumbering women, often adorned with strands of pearls. In Stoller’s version, these pearls are stripped of their traditional ties to beauty and seduction. Instead, they adopt an ominous quality, looming large atop the marbled, blood red tiles. Referencing the elaborate ceramic platters of 16th century French potter Bernard Palissy, Stoller also intersperses this tableau with amphibians, shells, abortifacient plants, fractured body parts, broken shards, birth control tests, and crumpled underwear to underscore the connection between the natural world and the female body as subjugated entities. Dizzying and complex, Seeing Red confronts a world that repeatedly denies gendered female bodies dignity and self-determination.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p><p>Alongside Seeing Red, Stoller’s more intimately scaled freestanding and wall-based works seduce with their soft pastel colors and tactile sensuosity before revealing a more menacing edge. Masterfully sculpting crones, skeletons, medusas, and other supernatural forms, Stoller explores the repeated pathologization of the female body. One such work, Multiply, 2024, depicts a skeletal figure evoking an Auricular Style. Channeling the eerie effect of this 17th century Dutch ornamentation based on human anatomy, Stoller’s Multiply strikes a fervent stance atop a bulbous, fleshy protuberance oozing out from its core. Taken together, the works in Split suggest that, as philosopher and gender theorist Christine Battersby writes, “the experience of the female human in our culture has direct links with the anomalous, the monstrous, the inconsistent, and the paradoxical - in such a way that allows for a recontextualization or an opening up of embodied identity.”</p><p><br></p>" />