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.

Donald Sultan’s large-scale still life paintings are filled with rich iconography that merges from provocative objects, like bulbous fruits and flowers, set against a either stark, unsettling black or white backgrounds. Although primarily classified as a still lifes, Sultan maintains that his works are first and foremost abstract.

Sultan's work incorporates basic geometric and organic forms, familiar images, with a formal purity that is both subtle and monumental, reducing them to their most generic schematization. This color screenprint with enamel inks and-tar-like texture on 2-ply museum board representing the ephemeral shape of flowers gracefully combined manifests the synthesis of the natural and abstract typical to Sultan´s work.

Lantern Flowers, Feb 18, 2012

ARTXX

Silkscreen

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 (Opaline White)

Murano Glass Casting

Although Sultan artworks fit into the criteria of still life, the artist considers them first and foremost abstract. The largeness of Sultan’s compositions, in which huge pieces of fruit, flowers, and other objects dominate the canvas against a stark and unsettling background, overwhelm the viewer and generate emotions. The basic geometric and organic forms, which are both subtle and monumental, are weighty and give equal emphasis on both negative and positive areas.

This print of flowing 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.

Mimosa, April 30, 2015

The artist rejected both nonrepresentational abstraction and narratively driven Social Realism in favor of an enigmatic, symbolic style that addresses the chaos of 20th-century Germany. Baselitz’s canvases depict mythic, often grotesque figures situated in sparse fields or scenes of destruction. They’re usually oriented upside down, a tactic that toys with viewers’ perceptions and conjures a topsy-turvy aesthetic universe. Baselitz studied at the Academy of Arts in East Berlin, got kicked out, then attended the Academy of Arts in West Berlin. He has exhibited in New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Hong Kong, Zürich, and Tokyo. His work regularly sells for millions on the secondary market and belongs in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, the Fondation Beyeler, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Tate. Baselitz has also made drawings, prints, and monumental sculptures.

Georg Baselitz

Georg Baselitz’s raw, expressive paintings helped expand notions of figurative art in the mid–20th century.

https://data.wengcontemporary.com/media/Georg_Baselitz_Hannahs_Beine_2022_Content_Sheet_.pdf

"Hannahs Beine" finds its inspiration in Baselitz’s latest series, created during and inspired by the pandemic. Discussing the series, art historian Eric Darragon cites numerous
indicators of the history of stockings in art, as seen in Degas’s depiction of dances and Egon Schiele’s.
confrontational nudes.

Hannahs Beine

11-color archival pigment print on 300g cotton paper

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

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.

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

Being part of Alex Katz ‘Black Hat’ Series, this print features Vivien Bittencourt, a film director as well as the artist’s daughter-in-law. Together with her husband, Bittencourt filmed the artist painting in Alex Katz: Five Hours, documenting the production of his painting on January 3.

Vivien is shielded by a large black hat and sunglasses, her image is playfully aloof and mysterious. This thirty-four-colour screenprint shows Katz’s clean lines and minimal approach to portraiture. The solid monochrome background, a gleaming bright yellow – resembling the sun. Naturally, the sitter is wearing a hat and sunglasses! She is presented elusive but also glamorous, rendered in Katz’s characteristic flat and timelessly recognizable painterly style; the bold colours, simple but strong composition. Minimal and somehow Pop elements surface – even though Katz was never interested in neither movements.

Vivien in Black Hat

Tom Sachs maintains his conceptual practice mostly through sculptures and installations. He investigates into modern hight-tech consumer culture and luxury culture. His technical approach includes variety of disparate at first sight materials such as, steel, ceramics, resin and so on.

Tom Sachs

Tom Sachs (USA, born 1966) is an American contemporary artist who lives and works in New York City.

Too Darn Hot represents a landmark moment for Tom Sachs’ investigations of the past, present and future of authentication. 

The 13-colour silkscreen print depicts LACMA's Frankenrocket, with a Cup Noodles-branded tail, a Chanel body, and Trojan nose-cone. The terms Frankenrocket was coined during Sachs’ NFT project called Rocket Factory, where people could purchase NFTs of rocket components and use them to build a rocket. If those components matched, they created a new Perfect Rocket NFT. If not, they created a "Frankenrocket“.

Too Darn Hot is produced with semi-gloss varnish, printed on 600gsm Somerset Tub Sized Satin paper and authenticated by a QR code printed in UV-light sensitive ink, which connects each print with the original Too Darn Hot NFT metadata on the blockchain. Additionally, the prints contains a bespoke deboss, which includes information from the launch of Sachs’ physical Too Darn Hot rocket at LACMA in 2021, a holographic sticker, a unique QR code linking to a certificate of authenticity stored on the blockchain, and an individually-stamped edition number.

Too Darn Hot

13-colour silkscreen print with semi-gloss varnish, printed on 600gsm Somerset Tub Sized Satin paper

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

Known as the power artists duo, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, created ephemeral environmental installations in urban and rural global locations.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude (respectively, born June 13, 1935, Bulgaria—died May 31, 2020, New York, U.S.; born June 13, 1935, Morocco—died November 18, 2009, New York, U.S.) stand out for their environmental and sometimes controversial temporary outdoor installations, most notably the wrapping of world-famous architectonic icons like the “Wrapped Reichstag, Berlin”, 1995 or the project "The Gates, New York", which consists of over 7'503 steel gates with orange coloured fabric stretched acres 37 km of walkaway in Central Park.
After Jeanne-Claude´s passing in 2009, Christo continued to carry out the couple’s proposed projects: “Big Air Package”, 2013 inflating an immense fabric dome within the cavernous Gasometer Oberhausen in Germany. As well as “The Floating Piers”, 2016 connecting two islands in Lake Iseo in Italy. These monumental works were seen not only by those that would visit the installations but also by passers-by. These works confront observers not only with its aesthetic properties but explore environmental, democratic, and humanist questions and it creating new ways of seeing familiar landscapes.

Christo

Christo became famous for his monumental collaborations with his wife and creative partner, Jeanne-Claude.

https://data.wengcontemporary.com/media/Christo_-_Ponte_SantAngelo__Weng_Contemporary.content_sheet.pdf

Among the various man-made and nature's creations, wrapping bridges has always been an important subject that Christo, but also together with wife and artist-collaborator Jeanne-Claude, marked the foundation of their most celebrated series (as Christo and Jeanne-Claude). Wrapping the Ponte Sant'Angelo has been a dream of the artist(s), as it is the oldest bridge in Rome and it also connects the Vatican with the city of Rome. Since their proposition submission to proceed with the installation in 1967, this project remains unrealized.

And for every project, because it takes years, you can see the early drawings and collages as just a simple, vague idea, and through the years and through the negotiations of getting the permit, you see that every detail is now clarified.

Exploring the opportunities of wrapping a built-environment, the artist(s) offers the possibility to review it by applying a new appreciation of its form and volumetric qualities. Creating a layer of abstraction to a figurative and real environment. By applying fantasy to a real occasion, at a gigantic scale, the artist(s) puts the viewer at once in a life-time experience to unravel the metamorphoses of an object.

Ponte Sant’Angelo, Wrapped

Collage on lithograph

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

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

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

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

One of the most renowned contemporary artists, Peter Doig, who was born in 1959, in Scotland, was the central figure in the revival of painting in the contemporary art scene during the '90s. At present his oneiric landscapes are highly sought after by world-leading collectors and museums.

After a childhood spent in Trinidad and Canada, Doig only returned to Great Britain at the age of twenty in order to study art. He was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1994, which cemented his public recognition. Themes of magical realism are recurrent through Peter Doig’s paintings, capturing timeless moments of perfect tranquillity. Doig´s dreamlike depictions are often scattered with ghostly human traces in a sensuous palette.

Many of Doig's artworks are depicting landscapes, layered formally and conceptually, somewhat abstract, with a number harking back to the snowy scenes of his childhood lived in Canada. While his works are frequently based on found images (photographs, newspaper clippings, movie scenes, record album covers), they are not painted in a photorealistic. Doig instead uses the photographs simply for reference.
The canoes have become an inspiring image throughout his work; their reflection in the water is a fantasy mirror to the unknown. This inventive style, sensuous palette, and suggestive imagery are also maintained in Peter Doig’s prints through the mastery use of different printmaking techniques. Peter Doig is one of a number of pioneering contemporary figurative artists, and recent major solo exhibitions have been staged at institutional venues, including Fondation Beyeler, Basel; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montreal; Gallery Met at the Metropolitan Opera, New York; and Tate Britain, London. His auction record on the painting Rosedale, created in 1991 sold for over $28 million at Phillips New York in May 2017.

Art critic Jonathan Jones said about Doig: "Amid all the nonsense, impostors, rhetorical bullshit and sheer trash that pass for art in the 21st century, Doig is a jewel of genuine imagination, sincere work and humble creativity."

Peter Doig

Peter Doig’s serene, fantastical paintings feature kaleidoscope landscapes punctuated by enigmatic, partially obscured figures.

An avid winter sportsman, Peter Doig lived in Zermatt for six weeks in 2020 and for four months in 2021, working out of a studio on the mountain. With his inventive, painterly approach, the artist uses alpine imagery and traditional printmaking techniques to investigate landscape, material, and form. These diverse series of etchings reflects a self-referential process of experiment and innovation in which works continuously evolve into their final form. Together, this body of work pays homage to Doig’s passion for skiing and connection to Zermatt, while also referencing a rich tradition of alpine paintings in Western art that began in the 15th century and was carried forward by masters such as Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Emil Nolde, and Ferdinand Holder.

Gornegrat Sahara Dust

Etching in two colors, aquatint, spitbite

Working predominantly in painting, but also with sculpture, installation and film, Kunath's practice is characterized by juxtapositions: landscapes and still lives recall 19th century Romanticism and Northern painting, while cartoon characters, 90s song lyrics and tropical sunsets refer to contemporary popular culture.
His work layers a poetic, melancholy imagery with poignant phrases, and embraces comedy and pathos, evoking universal feelings of love, hope, longing, and despair.

Friedrich Kunath

German artist Friedrich Kunath reimagines romanticism in dreamlike compositions, while saturating his art in irony, nostalgia and pathos.

Friedrich Kunath cuts through a sublime sunset with blunt authenticity in This Is The Worst Time Of My Life. In this edition, the artist transports the viewer to an island rich with nature and Romantic awe – stamped with his signature birds-in-flight. Tiptoeing between two and three-dimensional, a bespoke steel ladder is attached to the frame to represent the journey between sadness and happiness – ever-connected opposites. The graffiti-inspired text, added by the artist to each print in acrylic paint, remains open to interpretation. The artist’s continuous practice of intentional ambiguity, in this case, an absent signature, encourages the viewer to fill in the gaps themselves.

This Is The Worst Time Of My Life

Pignment Print on 308gsm Hahnemuhle Photo Rag paper with gloss highlights, blue pigment details and a silkscreen varnish seal, hand-finished by the artist in acrylic ink and accompanied by a powder-coated, laser-cut steel ladder

A pioneer of the British Pop Art movement in the early 1960s alongside Richard Hamilton, David Hockney gained recognition for his semi-abstract paintings on the theme of homosexual love before it was decriminalized in England in 1967. In We Two Boys Clinging Together, 1961; red-painted couples embrace one other while floating amidst fragments from a Walt Whitman poem.

After moving to California at the end of 1963, Hockney began painting scenes of the sensual and uninhibited life of athletic young men, depicting swimming pools, palm trees, and perpetual sunshine. Experimenting with photography in the mid-1970s, Hockney went on to create his famous photocollages with Polaroids and snapshot prints arranged in a grid formation, pushing the two-dimensionality of photography to the limit, fragmenting the monocular vision of the camera and activating the viewer in the process.

A versatile artist, Hockney has produced work in almost every medium—including full-scale opera set designs, prints, and drawings using cutting-edge technology such as fax machines, laser photocopiers, computers, and even iPhones and iPads.

David Hockney

A pioneer of the 1960s British movement, David Hockney is one of the most celebrated and prolific artists of the 20th and 21st centuries.

From a small, picturesque farmhouse in the rich fields and meadows of the northern French region of Normandy, Hockney followed and recorded the changing seasons throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. For the past decade, Hockney’s medium of choice has been the iPad and it was this technological instrument, he used to spontaneously depict impressions of the Norman landscape surrounding him. The two-year project entitled “220 for 2020” documents the passage of time by portraying the first spring blossoms, the smell of summer, the saturated colours of autumn, and the stark shapes of dark branches in winter time. This poetic undertaking represented a lifeline for the artist, and offered its viewers a message of hope in unprecedented times. As part of this project, Hockney included drawings from his “La Grande Cour, Rumesnil, Normadie, 26 Juli 2019”, sketchbook. These almost autobiographical accounts started in the vicinity of the artist’s Los Angeles home and followed him along his scouting trips around Normandy. ”Two Chairs and Rain on Window” belongs this series of personal drawings.

220 for 2020. Art Edition No. 201–300 ‘Two Chairs and Rain on Window’

11-color inkjet print on cotton-fiber archival paper

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_-_politeness_8YQP0oh.pdf

Politeness is one of the eight works from the iconic Virtues prints, the latest edition by British artist Damien Hirst.  These eight limited editions are each titled after one of The Eight Virtues of Bushidō according to Nitobe Inazō -Justice, Courage, Mercy, Politeness, Honesty, Honour, Loyalty, and Control. A continuation of Hirst's "Cherry Blossom" works, which will be exhibited for the first time at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, in July 2021 until January 2022. Hirst devoted two years, in 2018 and 2019, to creating the 107 imposing paintings that comprise the Cherry Blossoms series. In his London studio, he combined thick brushstrokes and elements of gestural painting, referencing Impressionism, Pointillism, and Action Painting. Hirst has been fascinated by the subject
of cherry blossoms from an early age, as early as at the age of three - still remembering - watching his mother paint a cherry blossom tree in blossom. As a young adult Hirst was enchanted by a cherry blossom tree outside his bedroom window in Devon. The series of the Cherry Blossoms once again binds Hirst's oeuvre together; each blossom is made out of coloured dots echoing his Spot series, as well as the Veils paintings and even going all the way back to his Visual Candy series - early painterly representations created in
an abstracted matter.

Politeness (The Virtues, H9-4)

Laminated Giclée print on aluminium composite panel

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.

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. Exploring ideas of commodity, spectacle, celebrity, and consumption, Koons has made monumental balloon dogs, a series about his lusty relationship with Italian porn star Cicciolina, cast-aluminum pool toys, a gold-painted porcelain sculpture of Michael Jackson, and a giant sculpture that resembles both Play-Doh and a heap of dung. Though the artist resists complex interpretations of his work, Koons’s innovative fabrication processes have elevated him far above the designation of simple provocateur. Koons received his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and has exhibited extensively in New York, London, Chicago, Basel, Seoul, and elsewhere. His work belongs in the collections of The Broad, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. His work has sold for nearly $100 million on the secondary market.

Tulips Coupe Plate

Glazed porcelain

Yue Minjun's work revolves around his characteristic grinning self-image - a repeated motif throughout his oeuvre. The figures, all based on a generic self-portrait, are each rendered with an inane beaming smile - a cynical grimace that represents the artist's resignation and disdain towards the materialism and spiritual emptiness of contemporary mainland Chinese culture.

"Armed Forces" is without doubt one of the most important works in which Yue Minjun uses his laughing self-image as a recurring motif. A group of men clad in identical uniform each wears different headgear. Every man is thus assigned his own distinct role. So the placing of various hats on the figures in this artwork is about highlighting the role of the hat in asserting and reinforcing social differentials, and my sense of the absurdity of the ideas that govern the sociopolitical protocol surrounding hats.

Armed Forces

Lithograph

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