Andy Warhol (1928-1987) was an American artist, a leading figure of the Pop Art movement. ​Using a variety of media materials from photographs up to computer-generated art, Warhol's works explore the relationship between artistic expression, celebrity, culture and advertisement that flourished by the 1960s.
Emerging from the poverty and obscurity of an Eastern European immigrant family in Pittsburgh, Warhol became a charismatic magnet for bohemian New York. In 1960, he began to produce his first canvases depicting Popeye and Dick Tracy. After Marilyn Monroe’s death in August 1962, he started working from snapshots of the star’s already legendary face, which had been widely distributed by the world’s press. His choice of subjects clearly relates to an obsession with demise – his Marilyns, his Ten Lizies (created when the actress Elizabeth Taylor was seriously ill), and also his Elvis. Part of the “Death and Disaster” series, Andy Warhol´s Marilyn Monroes are undoubtedly iconic portraits of our era, exploring as they do the artist’s fascination for images of death and beauty. He worked across many media as a painter, printmaker, illustrator, film-maker, and writer, and produced many world-famous series. Andy Warhol Flower´s series reinterprets a traditional motif spanning the history of art, while Warhol´s Cambell´s Soup Can series represents the mass-produced, printed advertisements that inspired him since his childhood. Towards the end of 1962, the artist turned to the photo-silkscreen process, which became his signature medium. From 1963 up until 1968, the year in which he was shot, Warhol – surrounded by assistants in his studio The Factory – took the industrial character of his work to its climax. Warhol has been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions and books, as well as feature and documentary films. The Andy Warhol Museum in his native city, Pittsburgh, is the largest museum in the United States dedicated to a single artist. Andy Warhol´s artworks are some of the most influential works of art of the second half of the twentieth century, representing the most recognizable images ever produced.

Andy Warhol

Obsessed with celebrity, consumer culture, and mechanical reproduction, Pop artist Andy Warhol created some of the 20th century’s most iconic images.

Of all Andy Warhol's celebrity subjects, none seem more perfectly emblematic of how the artist perceived and synthesised America than Marilyn Monroe. Warhol saw in Monroe all the promise, beauty, sex symbol, a Hollywood product, the fame and tragedy that 1960s America was capable of realizing. In his Marilyn portraits – which he began shortly after Monroe's death, in August 1962 and taking on the suggestion of Henry Geldzahler - it's impossible to locate what one might call the truth of the subject.

Based on Warhol's painting Gold Marilyn Monroe, which belongs to the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Every Saturday night and Sunday morning, the young Andrew Warhola and his mother made a 3 mile walk to Saint John Chrysostom church, a small Byzantine Catholic church. In the church he saw the iconostasis, which was a grid with religious pictures, very two dimensional with gold leaf. This is extremely similar to his works of the Marilyn Diptych. Its simplicity in the sense of colors and the iconic quality which comes directly from the Byzantine art.

Golden Marilyn

ARTXX

Enamel on porcelain

Jeff Koons (born 1955) playfully tests the boundaries of commerce, celebrity, banality, and pleasure. He rose to prominence in the mid-1980s as part of a generation of artists who explored the meaning of art in a media-saturated era. Koons turns banal commercial or everyday objects into art icons by using seductive materials, a shift of scale, and a contextual displacement. Jeff Koons’s “Balloon Dog” (featuring his enormous iconic chromium stainless steel dogs); his large-scale vinyl “Inflatables”; or the giant “Split-Rocker” all follow this principle. For instance, Jeff Koons in “Puppy” engaged the past and the present, referencing the eighteenth-century formal garden, while adding the most sugary of iconography. Originally licensed as a commodities broker, Koons decided to become an artist in the late 1970s and moved from Wall Street into a factory-like studio in SoHo with hundreds of assistants. Since then, he has produced different iconic series, like the “Pre-New”, a series of domestic objects in strange new configurations, and “The Equilibrium” series, consisting of basketballs floating in distilled water tanks. The “Banality” series, which includes Jeff Koons´s “Michael Jackson and Bubbles” and “Woman in Tub”, among others, is characterized by oddly eroticized, comic, and kitsch images. However, it is indeed Koons’s “Made in Heaven” series that is his most provocative and controversial work, in which he examines the place of sexuality in visual culture. Koons is widely regarded as one of the most important, influential, and controversial contemporary artists. He constantly tests the boundaries between art and commerce, high culture and mass culture, ready-made and art objects, by decontextualizing his objects and lifting them to iconic status. Jeff Koons´s art is the result of his intention to bring it out of the enclave of the genius-driven artist into the realms of contemporary pop and commerce-driven culture.

Jeff Koons

One of the most famous artists working today, Jeff Koons makes gleeful, tongue-in-cheek sculptures, paintings, and installations that border—and often cross—the edge of good taste.

https://data.wengcontemporary.com/media/Jeff_Koons_-_Balloon_Dog_Orange.pdf

Jeff Koons playfully tests the boundaries of commerce, celebrity, banality and pleasure. In his hands even the most familiar, everyday items transcend commonality to become true icons that manifest the essence of American popular culture.

Balloon Dog (Orange) is the latest addition to a series of limited edition artworks by Jeff Koons, referencing his iconic, monumental sculpture of the same name from his highly acclaimed Celebration Series (1994) of five coloured sculptures in red, magenta, blue, orange and yellow. The series evolved from his desire to recreate the ecstatic experiences of a child's enjoyment of the world through universal signifiers representing birthday parties and festive events.

Balloon Dog (Orange)

Limoges porcelain with chromatic coating

The Turner prize winner and epicenter of the YBA movement. Hirst's emblematic art of our era revolutionizes the art market. Hirst is widely regarded as one of the most important artists working today, creating truly iconic artworks.

A genuine star of the Young British Artists (YBA) movement, Damien Hirst has always made a point of mixing up different media. Whether as a sculptor, an installation artist, a painter, or a printmaker, Hirst has produced many of the most spectacular and widely discussed works in recent years and helped to revolutionize the art market. Damien Hirst’s, For the Love of God, the diamond-encrusted replica of the skull of a thirty-five-year-old man from the thirteenth century, broke all records to become the most expensive contemporary artwork in the world. Damien Hirst´s artworks are truly emblematic icons of our era, with their recurring motives such as dots, butterflies, cows, sharks, skulls, pills, and pharmacy cabinets. His works, captivating and intense as they are, challenge our stereotyped concepts and beliefs. Damien Hirst’s shark, suspended in formaldehyde, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), is widely recognized, as are his real butterflies suspended in paint or thousands of butterfly wings arranged in a mandala-like pattern – the famous Damien Hirst butterfly paintings. Since 1986 he has been producing the Spot paintings (sometimes called Dot Paintings), a series of paintings with evocative pharmacological titles, which display lines of colored spots. Damien Hirst´s Spot paintings and his Spin paintings became iconic series. Inspired by such diverse themes as life, death, art, science, and medicine, Damien Hirst’s art takes a direct and challenging approach to ideas about existence. The energy and inventiveness are also to be found in Damien Hirst's prints, which continue to stir controversy within the viewer with the same intensity.

Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst, a poster boy for the Young British Artists who rose to prominence in late 1980s London, is one of the most notorious artists of his generation.

https://data.wengcontemporary.com/media/Damien-Hirst-Forever_8EcHmx2.pdf

This edition of Forever features bright, abstract details from Damien Hirst’s new series of paintings titled Cherry Blossoms. Here, Hirst reinterprets the traditional subject of landscape painting on a monumental scale, entirely covering the surface of the works with bright colours that stretch the boundaries between figuration and abstraction.

The vibrant works pay homage to the Pointillism and Impressionism art movements. With the Cherry Blossoms series Hirst bridges his explorations and examination of colour as well as its effect on the eye, where movement and dynamicity of colour have been composed freely and joyously by the British artist.

This limited fine art edition is technically created by a bright Laminated Giclée print on aluminium composite panel, comes in two sizes and was realized in collaboration with Fondazione Prada to support Save the Children Italia. Hirst has taken existing imagery from his Cherry Blossoms and transposed it into a print, depicting a close up of the densely layered impasto structure, as well as colourful dabs of paint from sections of the large-scale canvases, one can see Hirst's thick brushstrokes and trace the movement of his gestural action painting through the surface.

Forever (large)

Laminated Giclée print on aluminium composite panel

The Chinese artist is one of the most celebrated contemporary artists in the East and West, a global citizen who calls for political investigation within his wide practice. Ai Weiwei investigates and questions institutions and regimes at the core of his work, he measures our existence in relation to economic, political, and social forces, while his practice is rooted in Chinese tradition he executes within a contemporary and conceptual creativity.

His provocative blend of Chinese tradition and craftsmanship within fully contemporary practice serves his strong criticism of human rights violations and condemnations of governmental corruption. His own life since childhood has been marked by his struggles and fights against the Chinese Government. His father, a renewed poet, was declared “class enemy” and sent to labor camp with his family. Migrating to New York was his opportunity to expand his artistic vocabularies where he stayed for over a decade. During this time, he became influenced by the works of Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, and Hasper Johns.
He was secretly detained without any official charges being filed for 81 days from April 3 to June 22, 2011 by the Chinese government, and his passport was held for 4 years afterward. Since being allowed to leave China in 2015 he has produced monumental installations and artworks that advocate for refugee rights and make awareness on the global crisis of displacement.

Ai Weiwei

Dissident artist Ai Weiwei is famous for conceptual artworks that challenge authority and explore the links between the contemporary world and traditional Chinese culture.

Ai Weiwei’s middle finger has been a recurrent theme in the artist production. His photographic series, Study of Perspective (from 1995 onwards), encourages questioning towards governments, institutions and establishments. Ai’s middle finger in flipping of the bird gesture in front of symbols of power across the globe, from the Tiananmen Square to the White House, makes explicit the artist’s rejection of any form of oppression against human freedom. With a raise of his middle finger, Weiwei champions the social responsibility and the importance of standing for our own values and not those created by others.

This precious edition of 100 Study of Perspective in Glass (2019) in six different colours nods to the series Study of Perspective, pointing out to the artist’s deepest beliefs regarding freedom of speech and democratic values. The translation in Murano glass of the iconic Ai Weiwei’s middle finger in six different colours, is powerful and yet elegant. The sculptures, made out from the artist´s own hand cast, embody the deep and engaged message of Study of Perspective series in an edition of precious material and superlative craftsmanship: the innate light and airy qualities of the glass melt with the sturdiness of the design producing a rare effect of beauty and mystic power.

Study of Perspective in Glass (Violet)

Laura

Murano Glass Casting

The artist delights in satirizing everyday human interactions, filtering the mundane through a sense of childlike wonder and an unguarded sense of humor. Shrigley attended the Glasgow School of Art and has exhibited in New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles, and Copenhagen. His works belong in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Foundation, and the Arts Council Collection. Shrigley has also worked in sculpture, photography, and printmaking, and has produced music as well.

David Shrigley

David Shrigley’s drawings, paintings, animations, and neon texts embrace cartoon aesthetics and an absurd, deadpan sensibility.

https://data.wengcontemporary.com/media/David_Shrigley_I_Hate_Humans_2022_Content_Sheet_compressed.pdf

David Shrigley's distinctive drawing style imbued with dry humour cuts to the point of human nature, making satirical comments on everyday situations and human interactions. Recurring themes pervade his storytelling, capturing child-like views of the world. Shrigley’s simple, verging-on-juvenile drawings annotated with his distinctive scrawling handwriting are refreshingly egalitarian, direct and immensely profound. 

With "I Hate Humans", 2022 Shrigley captures some of the tensions and high stakes facing our planet and its fauna by speaking on their behalf. With his characteristic humor, Shrigley engages with our natural environment by highlighting the ramification of human beings’ actions while also offering hope that we as induvial can make a difference.

I Hate Humans

10 colour screenprint with no varnish on Somerset Satin Tub sized 410 gsm

Donald Sultan (USA, born 1951) is a distinguished painter, sculptor, and printmaker, who rose to prominence in the late 1970s as part of the New Yorker “New Image” movement. He has a unique artistic method and innovative approach to traditional subject matter. Known as Abstract Representation, Donald Sultan´s art is characterized by the use of geometric black forms set against organic areas of bright color, thus bringing an abstract sensibility to his iconographic images of still life. Throughout his career he has revisited and reinvented still life, using images of lemons, poppies, playing cards, fruits, flowers, and other objects. Donald Sultan’s Lemons, a recurrent theme in his artworks, has, in fact, become an iconic image all over the world. Sultan is considered to be at the forefront of contemporary art. Although his paintings are often classified as landscapes and still life, Sultan states that they are first and foremost abstracts. Besides paintings, drawings, and sculptures, he has created many editions. Donald Sultan’s prints are unique: he uses specific materials like “flocking’s” to create expressive and powerful prints that are reminiscent of his forceful paintings. Since his first solo exhibition in 1977, Sultan’s artistic career has progressed rapidly; his works are part of the most prominent public and private collections to be found across the globe.

Donald Sultan

Donald Sultan’s large-scale still-life paintings feature semi-abstract compositions and unique materials: The artist has used tar, spackle, enamel, Masonite, and vinyl floor tiles to create his minimalist renderings of flowers, fruits, and other natural forms.

https://data.wengcontemporary.com/media/Donald-Sultan-Yellow-Mimosa-merged-merged-compressed.pdf

Sultan’s work incorporates basic geometric and organic forms with a formal purity that is both subtle and monumental. His images are weighty, with equal emphasis on both negative and positive areas. His powerfully sensual, fleshy object representations are rendered through a labor-intensive and unique method.

This print of flowing yellow mimosa blossoms, that shows all the textural qualities that the artist excels at in his printmaking projects, is made with several layers of color silkscreen, some matte finish inks and some glossy. Mimosas depicts the flowering plant Mimosa, which is also called the sensitive plant or sleepy plant. Sultan, seems to have taken inspiration from the name with the dark black, chalky stems flowing down and covering most of the page and the clusters of white spots symbolizing the blossoms.

Yellow Mimosa, July 23, 2015

Silkscreen

Since the 1960s, Ruscha has made photographic books, tongue-in-cheek photo collages, paintings, and drawings that demonstrate a keen interest in language and the idiosyncrasies of life in Los Angeles, where the artist has lived since the 1950s. In his most famous works, he places words and phrases from the colloquial and consumerist vernacular atop photographic images or fields of color—a strategy that situates him within a larger Pop art lineage. Ruscha often paints and draws with unusual materials such as gunpowder, blood, and Pepto Bismol, drawing attention to the deterioration of language and the pervasive clichés in American culture. Ruscha’s work has been exhibited across the globe, and the artist has enjoyed solo shows at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Moderna Museet, in addition to the Venice Biennale, where he represented the United States in 2005. At auction, his work has sold for eight figures.

Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha’s expansive oeuvre defies easy categorization, though it’s all infused with a kind of deadpan California cool.

Ed Ruscha, along with seven other leading international artists, were asked to create a print to celebrate Tate Modern’s 21st anniversary.

Ed Ruscha began his career creating commercial graphics for a Los Angeles advertising agency in the 1960s. His subsequent work often references advertising, both in themes and technique. How words, sounds and images relate to each other is an ongoing fascination.

'Turbo Tears' (2020), like many of Ruscha's works, uses an eye-catching type font that is reminiscent of straightforward advertising slogans. Instead, the text 'Turbo Tears' creates a strange and contradictory image. Ruscha has said, "I’ve always had a deep respect for things that are odd, for things that cannot be explained. Explanations seem to me to sort of finish things off".

Turbo Tears

2 Colour Lithograph Hand Printed on Grey Rives BFK

Yue Min-Jun (born 1962, Daqing, China) is one of the leading Chinese artists. He is best known for oil paintings depicting formations of his laughing self-portraits in various settings. His iconography is easily recognisable, it challenges social and cultural conventions by depicting objects and political issues in a radical, abstract, ironic and cynical manner.
Yue Min-Jun initially started painting as a hobby, subsequently he graduated from the Oil Painting Department of Hebei Normal University, China in 1985. In the 90s he joined an artist community in Yuan Ming Yuan, a village near Beijing where he began to form his style and iconography. The paintings, sculptures, and installations of Yue Minjun feature uniform laughing pink faces, which appear to be self-portraits. Through various symbols, metaphors, signs, or through depictions of daily life the artist constructs various realities against which the laughing figures are rendered. Yue became famous after his participation in the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999, which granted him access to international art. One of the best-known paintings by Yue Minjun and an icon for modern Chinese art and the Cynical Realism movement is Execution. It was painted in 1995 and is generally regarded as a reaction to the Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989, as it shows several laughing men in front of an execution squad. The cloned all smiling Minjun self-portraits have become known in the art world as the "Silly Man". As the preparation for his paintings, the artist uses photographs of himself being photographed in various poses. This approach reflects the self-irony of the artist. Yue Minjun is often classified as part of the Chinese "Cynical Realist" movement, however, the artist does not support such attribution. Nevertheless, Yue often challenges social and cultural conventions by depicting objects and political issues in a radical, abstract, ironic and cynical manner.

Yue Minjun

In fantastical paintings populated with heightened, hysterical self-portraits, Yue Minjun satirizes contemporary society and art historical tropes.

Lotus Pool belongs to the set of twenty lithographs from the “Snatched Ecstasy of Yue Minjun”, which comes as a limited edition of 132 rare books. The work of Yue Minjun is instantly recognizable with its uniform laughing faces, the artist's faces, thus Yue Minjun creates formations of self-portraits. Minjun creates various realities against which the laughing figures are rendered, thus creating ambiguous images, often with the sinister atmosphere, which comes as his personal cynical reaction to various social and political dimensions of contemporary Chinese realities.

Lotus Pool presents a laughing self-portrait on a white crane in the midst of the pink lotus pool. The immediate attention is drawn to the symbolism of happiness - the pink lotus has a sacred status in Chinese culture and beyond and is associated with creation, enlightenment, purity and the highest realms of Buddhism. The white crane symbolizes longevity. Such an ideal setting is juxtaposed with the contorted, "closed" posture of the sitter, whose laughter signifies tension.

Lotus Pool

Lithography

Best known for his photorealistic drawings, Longo explores imagery within a complex social and cultural forces. Robert Longo was born in 1953, in Brooklyn, New York, and has had a childhood fascination with mass media: movies, television, magazines, and comic books, which continue to deeply influence his art. One of the quintessential artists of the 1980s, Longo is perhaps best known for the writhing, dancing figures in his iconic Men in the Cities series.

The American artist´s drawings are, perhaps, his most iconic. They are as much about the content they depict as they are about the artist´s intense devotion to the practice of drawing. His amazingly deep, anthracite charcoal drawings show emotional motives. Perhaps the best known photorealist series of Robert Longo´s is Men in the Cities, depicting contorted, life-size human figures in an urban setting. Robert Longo´s art focuses on his never-ending investigation of the themes of power and authority, which also permeate his series of blackened American flags (Black Flags, 1989–91), and oversized handguns (Bodyhammers, 1993–95). Longo´s series, Monsters, which depict massive breaking waves, and The Sickness of Reason, featuring atomic bomb blasts, followed in 2002 and 2004. It was during the 1980s that Robert Longo started to produce editions, mainly lithographs. He then gradually developed a high-end print technique, Pigment Print, which allows him to reproduce his drawings perfectly. Robert Longo´s prints capture the same level of detail and emotional impact of the original drawings.

Robert Longo

Robert Longo is known for large-scale, hyperrealistic charcoal portraits that consider power, authority, and social unrest.

Longo is best known for his hauntingly realistic works, which straddle a line between hyper-realistic and disturbingly surreal. Longo’s subject has always been power, his images characterized by frozen or extended time.

The artist´s act of appropriating iconic images of esthetic power in his chiaroscuro, seemingly created out of shadow and light, captures here a wire armature of a baroque sort of chandelier dripping with prisms. What happens in his work refuses to resolve, as the viewer is attracted to this image representing an icon of the past, yet modernized by electricity.

Crystal Chandelier

Pigment Print

Born Brian Donnelly, KAWS is a Brooklyn-based artist and designer who has established himself is one the most prominent heirs of Pop Art. After graduating from the School of Visual Arts in New York, he briefly worked as a freelance illustrator on Disney’s 101 Dalmatians. This fascination and affinity for cartoon and illustration has carried over to his artistic career. He is known to include reworked cartoon icons such as characters from the The Simpsons, SpongeBob SquarePants or the Smurfs as well as the advertisement personalities like the Michelin Man. Gradually expanding his imagery, the artist also invented his own host characters including his most recognizable creation, COMPANION, a cartoon Mickey-Mouse like body and gloved hands, skull-and-crossbones head with X-eyes. 
In exploiting the sentimental potency of iconic imagery, KAWS playful and psychologically charged oeuvre infused with humour, humanity and affection for our times, celebrates generosity, support for others and the deep need we have for companionship. KAWS has gained undisputed prominence in the market with his reconceptualization of popular culture’s most beloved icons within the discourse of contemporary art.

Kaws

One of the most iconic artists of his time, KAWS is known for combining his own characters with beloved popular culture icons to wittingly question the condition of contemporary society.

https://data.wengcontemporary.com/media/Kaws_Share_2021_Content_Sheet__compressed.pdf

KAWS’s "companion" rank amongst the most emblematic figures within the American artist’s pervasive visual lexicon. In recent years, KAWS has successfully traverses the realms of high art and mass culture, with his trademark "companion" character. Simultaneously celebrating and mourning a globalized age of capitalism, mass consumption and accelerated diffusion of information, "companion" remains a loyal sidekick: while his X-eyes are eternally closed in defiance of a world pervaded with brands, logos, and homogenized consumerism, the figure’s adorable cartoon presence harnesses our childhood memories to remind us of the power of hope and faith in humanity.

Share

Screenprint on Stonhenge grey paper

Knoebel’s nonrepresentational works innovate on the modernist ideas and styles of Joseph Beuys, Kasimir Malevich, and the Bauhaus; the artist is interested in seriality, spare geometries, reductive color, and the use of industrial materials such as Masonite. Knoebel studied under Beuys at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and under László Moholy-Nagy at the Werkkunstschule Darmstadt; he has exhibited in Berlin, New York, Paris, Zürich, Tokyo, London, Vienna, and Rome. His work belongs in the collections of the Essl Museum, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, the Museo Reina Sofía, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Modern Art. While Knoebel is best known for his sculptural paintings, his practice also involves drawing, photography, projections, and installation. His work has sold for six figures at auction.

Imi Knoebel

Imi Knoebel’s minimalist hybrids of painting and sculpture explore relationships between color and structure.

Revered for his minimalist and reductionist influences, Knoebel explores the interplay of colors as structured forms. This relationship between the different shapes and colors emphasizes both contrast and precision and allow the artist to solidify the emotions he arouses in the viewer through his deceptively simplified style. His unique and impeccable style has been defined by the recurring “Messerschnitt” or “knife cuts” that produce abstractly expressive shapes.

The response to his art is intensified by rich colour which often overrides the simplicity of the forms. Simultaneously, Knoebel succeeds in creating a dialogue between painting and sculpture with the flow of his brushstroke visible across the surface of his minimalist arrangements. Frequently working in groups or series, Knoebel revisits certain themes and materials time and again at different points in his career, as in the case of Una´s Haus, which follows in the artist´s exploration of architectural concerns.

Una's Haus

Linocut

JR is a photographer and artist whose identity is unconfirmed. After he found a camera in the Paris subway, he did a tour of European Street Art, tracking the people who communicate messages via the walls. Then, he started to work on the vertical limits, watching the people and the passage of life from the forbidden undergrounds and roofs of Paris. He has described himself as a "photograffeur", as he flyposts large black-and-white photographic images in public locations in a manner that is similar to the appropriation of the built environment by the graffiti artist. The artist exhibits freely in the streets of the world, catching the attention of people who are not typical museum visitors. JR's work combines art and performance and its subject varies from commitment, freedom, identity and limitations. JR has exhibited his work at Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern, Watari-Um in Tokyo, Frieder Burda Museum in Baden-Baden, and Power Station of Art in Shanghai.

JR’s practice lies at the intersection of photography, street art, film, and social practice.

https://data.wengcontemporary.com/media/JR_Trompe_loeil_Les_Falaises_du_Trocadero_18_mai_2021_19h58_Paris_France_2021.pdf

We are delighted to introduce you to JR's latest art editions; which are based on his installation Les Falaises de Trocadéro at the Parvis des Droits de l'Homme, from 17 May to 19 June 2021 in Paris. With Les Falaises de Trocadéro JR continues his reflection on architecture and excavation of iconic monuments, imagining a trompe l'oeil revealing a street below a large precipice topped by the iconic Eiffel Tower. Through this work, JR redefines the codes of the urban landscape and invites spectators to apprehend their environment differently. The artwork renews itself according to the various lights of day, with each moment offering a new perspective on Paris’ most famous monument, the Eiffel Tower. The latter remains the central element of the composition, but the illusion of an underground city is a new myth, adding to the long list of its rich history. JR continues to reveal the monuments of Paris in a new light by sublimating them and inviting spectators to take a fresh look at their everyday environment. JR used an anamorphosis technique, requiring the audience and volunteers to be at a precise point resulting in spectators trying to find the perfect location and interacting with the artwork, hoping not to fall into the imagined precipice.

Trompe l'oeil, Les Falaises du Trocadéro, 18 mai 2021, 19h58, Paris, France, 2021

Giclée Print Laminated with G-gloss, Mounted on 3mm Dibond

https://data.wengcontemporary.com/media/Damien_Hirst__-_Kew_Veil_-_2022_IBcaKEw.pdf

Revisiting his Visual Candy paintings series, which Hirst created in the 1990s as a continuation of his fondness of colour, Hirst’s new body of work, the Veil Paintings from 2018, are gestural paintings that have been translated into limited fine-art editions.

Referencing Impressionism, Pointillism, and Abstract Expressionism, in the Kew (Veil) one notices the rich and heavy impasto, as well as the brushstrokes that trace the artist’s movement on the surface.

The Veil Paintings were initially exhibited in 2018 at Gagosian in Los Angeles. The more Hirst would look at the Veil Paintings, the more they would start to look like flowers, marrying abstraction with figuration. These works share a transcendency throughout the serene colour composition and offer meditative aesthetics, reminiscent to the ones found in Rothko’s abstract expressionistic paintings. Hirst has said that these works are “solid yet invisible and reveals and yet obscures the truth.”

Diasec-mounted Giclée print on aluminium composite panel

Candida Höfer (1944, Eberswalde, Germany) has been photographing both public and semi-public spaces in a style defined by an anachronistic approach since 1989. After studying at the Kölner Werkschule between 1964 and 1968, Candida Höfer attended the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf (Germany), initially reading film with Ole John (1973-1976) and then photography with Bernd Becher (1976 -1982). Following in the tradition of the Düsseldorf School of photography, Candida Höfer has often captured images of waiting rooms, spa resorts, banks, churches, libraries, theaters, and museums. These transitional spaces are also places where universal culture is accumulated, organized, and conserved to an encyclopedic degree, and are photographed by the artist with a rigor and simplicity approaching minimalism. Immediately recognizable, Candida Höfer’s photographs crystallize the peculiar inherent in places where often an illustrious history clashes with their present-day use. As in Spiegelkantine at Hamburg’s Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, the lighting for these neutral shots comes solely from the natural light of the location. Spaces normally packed with visitors are shown devoid of human presence: all that remains are the outlines of these architectural products of culture or industry.

Candida Höfer

In majestic large-format color photography, Candida Höfer captures the psychological residue left behind in empty public and institutional spaces.

https://data.wengcontemporary.com/media/Candida_Hofer_Teatro_Degollado_Guadalajara_III_2015_Content_Sheet.pdf

Candida Höfer is known for her images of empty interiors of libraries, museums, palaces and theatres, focusing on the cultural spaces free from human presence. Part of the artist’s latest exhibition at Sean Kelly Gallery, Candida Höfer in Mexico, Teatro Degollado Guadalajara III expands her signature attention to Mexican Baroque interiors.

The self-imposed subject restrictions evident in her project are both cultural and formal in nature. The Baroque interiors of the Mexican Teatro Degollado Guadalajara provide a “formal portrait of the society itself”.

Teatro Degollado Guadalajara III

C-print

Chiharu Shiota is a Japanese performance and installation artist based in Berlin. Confronting fundamental human concerns such as life, death, and relationships. A former student of Marina Abramovic, Shiota explores human existence throughout various dimensions by creating an existence in the absence either in her large-scale thread installations that include a variety of common through her drawings, sculptures, photography and videos. 

Shiota gained international fame, when she represented Japan in 2015 at the Venice Biennale with The Key in the Hand. The installation made of dangling 50,000 metal keys, collected from around the world, bound together in a colossal red web hovering above two wooden boat offered a collective metaphor for the distillation of individual experiences into collective memory. The manifestation of Shiota’s emotions and interior battles, truths and memories that are at once personal and collective makes her oeuvre is very intimate but also universal.

Chiharu Shiota

Best known for her delicate, mixed-media web-like composition combined with everyday items, Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota’s oeuvre, explores fundamental human concerns such as life, death and relationships.

https://data.wengcontemporary.com/media/Chiharu_Shiota_Second_Skin_2014_Edition_of_30_Content_Sheet_compressed.pdf

The Berlin based, Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota is best known for creating immersive thread installations that surround the public like a mental space. Shiota gained international fame, when she represented Japan in 2015 at the Venice Biennale with “The Key in the Hand”. The installation made of dangling 50,000 metal keys, collected from around the world, bound together in a colossal red web hovering above two wooden boat offered a collective metaphor for the distillation of individual experiences into collective memory. Shiota’s mixed media web like compositions explore the connections between past and present, object and memory. By incorporating everyday objects, such as clothing or furniture, containers of proud memories whether joyful and painful these banal yet intensely personal items symbolise the poetics of everyday life. The former student of Marina Abramovic, explores and confronts fundamental human concerns such as life death and relationships, by manifesting her emotions and interior battles, truths and memories that are at once personal and collective. Shiota’s oeuvre is very intimate yet also universal. 
“Second Skin”, 2014 is a great example of a two dimensional representation of Shiota’s artistic practice and reminiscent of several site specific installations created in 2012: “State of Being” at Casa Asia, Barcelona, Spain and Labyrinth of Memory at La Sucrière, Lyon, France, but also “Seven Dresses” in 2015 at Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken, Saarbrücken, Germany.

Second Skin

Photoengraving

Born in India, Anish Kapoor has lived in England since the 1970s. From 1973 he studied in London at the Hornsey College of Art, before going on to the Chelsea School of Art. After spending some time in India in 1979, he gained recognition on the international scene from the early 1980s. Since the early 1980’s the artist has not only produced some of the most innovative work in contemporary sculpture but has also done much to re-establish certain original sculpture forms. Although he is influenced by his cultural origins, Anish Kapoor continues to incorporate new ideas into his work. Born out of spiritual reflection, his pieces strive to give form to the vital and opposing forces, as in his series of Shadow Prints: full/empty, material/spiritual, light/darkness, visible/invisible, aware/unaware, male/female, land/sea. Through a visual vocabulary that incorporates colour pigments in particular as well as glass fiber and stainless steel, the artist has developed an ambitious body of work in sculpture and installation that at times approaches design and architecture. Often displayed in public spaces, Anish Kapoor’s sculptures are striking for their apparent simplicity and yet his work is hard to overlook and has a hold on its audiences.

Anish Kapoor

Anish Kapoor is known for elegant sculptures of spare geometries and organic forms, which he fabricates with feats of engineering.

https://data.wengcontemporary.com/media/Anish_Kapoor_Shadow_III.pdf

Anish Kapoor’s art is always striking, his pieces delivering a captivating experience. In this series of Shadow prints, as in his monumental sculptures, Anish Kapoor puts the relationship between conflicting energies at the center of his creation. His sculptures appear solid and intangible, dark and light, empty and full. In these print series Kapoor is engaging the same dichotomies but on a two dimensional surface.

A colour of intense depth gradually focuses into a bright luminous white; absorbed by the vacuum at the center of the print, the viewer is drawn into a breath-taking visual experience. These prints possess a three-dimensional quality, which is reminiscent of Kapoor's sculpture. The viewer is constantly pulled back and forth between pure color and bright white as if pulled into some vortex.

Shadow III (Portfolio of 9)

Etching

Notable for his unique exploration of different materials within sculptural forms, including found objects and raw matter of various kinds. Cragg´s sculptures are very popular within site-specific public installation in various countries.

Born in 1949 in Liverpool, Tony Cragg understands sculpture as a study of how material and its forms affect and form ideas and emotions. Studying the human figure is a prime example of something that looks ultimately organic eliciting emotional responses while being fundamentally an extremely complicated geometric composition of molecules, cells, organs, and processes. Cragg´s work does not imitate nature and what we look like, rather it concerns itself with why we look like we do and why we are as we are.
A Royal Academician, Tony Cragg won the Turner Prize in 1988 and represented Britain at the 42nd Venice Biennale in the same year. In 2002 he was named a CBE (Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) for services to art.

Tony Cragg

Turner Prize–winning sculptor Tony Cragg draws new connections between humans and the material world.

Constantly pushing to find new relations between people and the material world, Tony Cragg works with stone, wood, glass, stainless steel, aluminum, cast bronze and cast iron, and found objects, from plastic consumer goods to rubbish from the streets. Cragg has always had a passionate interest in science and natural history and worked as a young man as a lab technician at the National Rubber Producers Research Association, an experience that is reflected in his vigorous approach to material.

Blurs of irregular, knifelike forms that appears at once rocklike and insubstantial, this sculpture suggests the aftermath of a human presence rather than the presence itself. Yet for all it apparent amorphousness, this sculpture is nothing if not solid.
Created for the celebration of the 25th anniversary of German reunification, it represents a tribute to the newfound freedom with its stylistically reference to the opening of the Brandenburg Gate.

Grenze Weg

Steel with rust patina

https://data.wengcontemporary.com/media/Sans_Souci_Content_Sheet_2022_5edqjyf.pdf

Revisiting Damien Hirst's "Visual Candy" paintings series which he created in the 1990s, these works act as a continuation of the artist's fondness of colour. In 2018 Hirst started a new gestural body of work, titled the "Veil Paintings" which have been translated into limited fine-art editions. Referencing both Impressionism, Pointillism, and Abstract Expressionism, in the "Veil Paintings" one notices the rich and heavy impasto, the brushstrokes that trace the artist’s movement on the surface.

Sans Souci

One of the eight works from "The Virtues" by Damien Hirst.

Born in 1967 in Chbanieh in Lebanon, Walid Raad is an artist whose work reflects the troubled history of his country of origin, which he has witnessed since childhood. By collecting, modifying and creating photographs, texts, and videos, he plays on the idea of the document as it relates to the civil war and the troubles between communities that have shaken this territory. The artist infuses his depictions with a cloudiness intended to throw doubt on the notion of documentation itself and posing a profound question about how History is constructed. "Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History of Art in the Arab World" expands upon the research-based methodology of Raad’s The Atlas Group (1989–2004), the visual and performative archival project he has initiated to document the social, political, psychological and aesthetic conditions of the Lebanese wars (1975–1990/91). The new project marks a critical juncture in Raad’s practice, at once a departure from The Atlas Group while expanding its historical and theoretical reference. His works have been exhibited at The Venice Biennale (Venice), The Whitney Biennial (New York), and numerous other festivals in Europe, the Middle East, and North America.

Walid Raad

Walid Raad works across installation, performance, video, and photography in order to grapple with the legacy of the Lebanese Civil War; memory, loss, carnage, and dizzying acts of reconstruction are all major motifs.

Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History of Art in the Arab World expands upon the research-based methodology of Raad’s The Atlas Group (1989–2004), the visual and performative archival project he has initiated to document the social, political, psychological and aesthetic conditions of the Lebanese wars (1975–1990/91). The new project marks a critical juncture in Raad’s practice, at once a departure from The Atlas Group while expanding its historical and theoretical reference.

Raad records the visibility (or invisibility) of modern and contemporary Arab art at a time when high-profile museum-building in the Emirates has led some to celebrate a Renaissance of sorts in the Gulf states. By way of quintessentially western aesthetics, Raad puts to the test our assumption of seeing something, or possibly nothing, when confronted with Arab art. An unemotional, though challenging test for our ‘ways of seeing’

Scratching on Things I could Disavow (Portfolio of 4)

Inkjet print

Alex Katz (American, born 1927) is the outstanding protagonist of figurative painting and one of our era's most acclaimed artists. In the late 1950s, the artist began to develop his mature style, characterized by elegance, simplicity, and stylized abstraction, which typifies his entire production. Alex Katz’s paintings are the result of a transformation of the three-dimensional world into simplified landscapes and portraits. He chooses to minimize details and shading and to present bold contours and blocks of colour. Indeed, Alex Katz’s art captures the appearances and transposes them into paintings. Alex Katz’s portraits feature his own social milieu – friends, fellow artists, and most notably his wife Ada, whom he has painted more than 200 times. The artist’s quest to represent the experience of spectatorship is reflected in his portraits, also in his large landscapes, which he characterizes as “environmental”. In his continued experimentation with different media, the artist creates what he calls “cut-outs”, freestanding sculptures that blur the line between painting and object. Back in 1965, Katz began experimenting with printmaking, which became a key aspect of his artistic practice. Alex Katz’s prints, which vary from lithographs, etchings, and silkscreens to linoleum cuts, have been exhibited in major museums, such as the Albertina Museum in Vienna, which, in 2010, showed a retrospective survey of over 150 graphic works, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in an exhibition in 2012. The transposition of his notable paintings into prints allows Alex Katz to make his art more accessible to his collectors, thereby maintaining the same allure and stylish power as his painted works.

Alex Katz

With flat planes of rich, lovely color, Alex Katz’s landscapes and portraits evoke the smooth aesthetics of advertising billboards and film.

“Twilight” by Alex Katz is a portfolio of three woodcut prints, each representing a study of various points in time during the natural phenomena that precedes the beginning of the new day.

While Alex Katz is best known for his portrait series, his landscapes are a significant part of his work. Katz’s profound interest in nature is reflected in this detailed study of light, each time capturing a brief moment in nature when the sun has not yet reached the horizon. The woodcut medium highlights the natural grains of the wood aiding to the atmosphere of natural beauty.

Twilight (Portfolio of 3)

Woodcut

Art of Survival – this stands as a kind of preliminary statement to all the work of Abdulnasser Gharem (born 1973, Saudi Arabia). Gharem is surely the only artist to be both a leading figure on his country's emerging art scene and a major in the Saudi army.

Art of Survival – this stands as a kind of preliminary statement to all the work of this artist born in 1973 in Khamis Mushait, Saudi Arabia. Abdulnasser Gharem is surely the only artist to be both a leading figure on his country’s emerging art scene and a major in the Saudi army. His story began in 2003 when Abdulnasser Gharem, an army recruit, enrolled in the Al-Miftaha Arts Village in Abha, Saudi Arabia. Founded a few years earlier by Ahmed Mater, this institution soon became the nerve center of the new art scene that was represented in the 2004 exhibition "Shattah", which captured the renewal of the Saudi Arabian scene. From now on, Gharem began using the street as his studio, working in response to his local context. In numerous performances and site-specific installations, he drew attention to ecological, geographical, urban, and societal issues, recording his actions on video or in photographs. At the same time, he was working on a series of stamp paintings in which major events are juxtaposed with the excesses of a bureaucratic system that seems capable of expressing itself only by rubberstamping.

Abdulnasser Gharem

Born 1973 in Khamis Mushait where he use to live and work. In 1992 Gharem graduated from the King Abdulaziz Academy before attending The Leader Institute in Riyadh.

Part of Gharem's Restored Behaviour series of 'Stamp Paintings', In Transit depicts a plane taking off, completely overpainted by a pattern of ornamental Islamic rubber stamps. Those rubber stamp letters are both references to the rubber stamp Gharem uses in his everyday work as Lieutenant to stamp security documents, as to the bureaucracy that is implicated by the use of the rubber stamp.

While the plane usually is an image for mobility and globalization, Gharem shows that in his version (which symbolizes the Saudi Arabian situation in a post 9/11 era), any mobility and flexibility is impedited by a bureaucracy which overcasts spontaneous decisions. In Transit is a reference to Gharem’s earlier work The Path (Al Siraat). The main question presented, shall we, as individuals, as cultures, as societies, follow a straight path and whether we rely on a path at all? The initial stamp painting has been part of the "Restored Behaviour" solo exhibition at XVA Gallery, Dubai in 2010.

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