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.

Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans are perhaps the most well-known images of American modern art and have become a symbol of American Pop Art. Initially created as a series of thirty-two canvases in 1962, it was first exhibited at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, and displayed together like product at a grocery store.  Between the 32 flavors, there are subtle differences and imperfections, meaning that this really was ‘high’ art dwelling on a ‘low’ — everyday, readily available or seemingly mundane — subject. The very essence of Pop Art itself. Warhol’s inspiration for the series developed from his personal life. He explained: “I used to drink it. I used to have the same lunch every day, for 20 year, I guess, the same thing over and other”. This sense of repetition was both internalized by the artist and embodied by commercial mass culture.

Campbell's Soup, Tomato

ARTXX

Silkscreen On Museum Board

Cy Twombly (1928–2011) was born in Lexington, Virginia. He studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1947–49); the Art Students League, New York (1950–51); and Black Mountain College, North Carolina (1951–52). In the mid-1950s, following travels in Europe and Africa, he emerged as a prominent figure among a group of artists working in New York that included Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. The late American artist brought a distinctive approach to painting and sculpture that evades precise affiliation with the predominant movements of the twentieth century. Inspired by ancient Mediterranean history and geography, Greek and Roman mythology, and epic poetry, Twombly created a sometimes inscrutable world of iconography, metaphor, and myth. Instead of presenting us with a narrative that is fully present and intact, Twombly offers an incomplete archive of impressions on which our own experience must be bought to bear. The artist was invited to exhibit his work at the Venice Biennale in 1964, 1989, and 2001 when he was awarded the Golden Lion at the 49th Venice Biennale. In 2010, he was made Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur by the French government. During fall 2010, Tacita Dean produced a film on Twombly, titled "Edwin Parker".

Cy Twombly

Cy Twombly’s idiosyncratic style incorporated expressive drips, frenetic scribbles, and gestural, calligraphic linework into lyrical abstractions.

From his days as a student at Black Mountain College during the early 1950s until his death in 2011 at the age of 83, Twombly captured his daily life in photographs. He recorded the verdant landscapes of Virginia and the coasts of Italy; close-up details of ancient buildings and sculptures; studio interiors; and still lives of objects and flowers.

"I don´t go to the studio every day. I have to be in a certain mood to work, and I only work when I feel a real need to paint."

This dry-print represents his studio in Lexington, the town where he grew up in Virginia. As in many of his later paintings and works on paper, this artwork shifts toward "romantic symbolism", and its title can be interpreted visually through shapes and forms and words.

Studio Lexington

Dry-print on cardboard

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.

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

Silkscreen

Of all Andy Warhol's celebrity subjects, none seem more perfectly emblematic of how the artist perceived and synthesized 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. Warhol liked watching Hollywood films, saying that the only real reason we watch movies is to see the stars and to see them as often as possible. The first portfolio of Marilyn’s silkscreens was published in 1967 and later became one of the most iconic and memorable representations of the actress, and consequently one of the most sought after printed editions of Warhol’s work. He created a series of 10 variations in what is now referred to as the Marilyn Series, each with virtually the same composition, but different color variations. These prints are made from reproductions of Warhol’s original silkscreens from 1967.

Marilyn Monroe (Portfolio of 10)

Silkscreen on Museum Board

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

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

Although best known for his silkscreens, Andy Warhol was also an excellent draughtsman and drawing was a constant part of his artistic practice, from his earliest days as an art student in the 1940s to the last few weeks before his death in 1987. His characteristic "blotted line" technique served him well, and often in commercial assignments. Warhol was in such demand for commercial illustration, that in order to avoid turning down projects, he recruited assistants to execute drawings under his direction. This working process would later form the foundation for calling his studio in New York City, the Factory.
For Warhol food was his “great extravagance” and he had a very sweet tooth, claiming that “all I ever really want is sugar”. This image of an extravagant dessert has been depicted in the same way he would complete a fashion illustration - with his blotted-line technique and vivid colors. The dessert was almost certainly from the fashionable Serendipity 3 café where Warhol would host coloring parties in the 1950s. He would encourage his friends – some of whom would have helped him create the original illustrations - to color the works with an inventiveness that adds to their whimsical nature.

So Sweet Sundae

Enamel on porcelain

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

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__-_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

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.

Weng Contemporary is delighted to present you with the most iconic work of the 21st century and as Jeff Koons himself has called it the "Trojan horse“ of the Celebration series. The only authentic limited edition depicting the free-standing Balloon Dog is finally here.

This edition is a reproduction of the larger sculpture of the Balloon Dog from the Celebration series, as conceived in five unique colours (starting with Blue, Magenta, Yellow, Orange, Red) starting in 1994 and completing them in 2000.

The Balloon Dog has chameleon-like qualities; its reflective surface is capable of physically changing with its surroundings and its many-layered meanings make it conceptually change in the mind of each viewer.

This limited art edition comes from an edition size of 799 pieces and was created of Limoges porcelain and manufactured in Limoges, France. The freestanding limited edition of the Balloon Dog (Blue) requires 60 people for the production of each work and it takes a full month to complete one. Its creation combines traditional porcelain decoration techniques with new technologies which are not typically applied to ceramics, this combination allows to achieve metallic and reflective characteristics.

Each edition is signed on the inside front right leg and the signature is applied on top of the porcelain and fired in the oven.

Balloon Dog (Blue)

Limoges porcelain with chromatic coating

The street artist and photographer JR started out his artist practice in the streets of Paris. Using the pseudonym JR, the artist is keeping his identity hidden from the public.

In 2017, in Death Valley in California, JR installed a monumental billboard photograph reproducing the surrounding mountainous landscape in black and white.

This giant trompe l'oeil was a collaboration with the band Arcade Fire for the cover of their album Everything Now.﻿

Trompe l'oeil, Death Valley, Billboard, March 4, 2017, 5:41 pm, California, USA

14 colors lithograph printed on Marinoni machine on White paper BFK Rives - 270 grammes

Elger Esser (born 1967 in Stuttgart, raised in Rome) is known for his silent, almost meditative large-format landscapes. Although a student of Bernd and Hilla Becher, Esser nevertheless backed away from their characteristic industrial and architectural landscapes to pursue the exploraiton of nature.

German photographer Elger Esser (born 1967 in Stuttgart, raised in Rome) is usually associated with silent, almost meditative landscapes in large formats and with earthy colors. Esser was a student of Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Academy of Arts in Dusseldorf, the same school where talents such as Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, and Thomas Struth were formed. While clearly influenced by their teachings, Esser nevertheless backed away from their characteristic industrial and architectural landscapes and the rigorous style connected with them. Esser’s semi-romantic landscapes are unmanipulated and usually work with a very low horizon line in a simple, almost empty composition. Nature becomes a totality, indefinite and mysterious, but yet also calming and steady. Sky and water blur into each other to a point of complete disappearance, where everything seems to be mirrored by the same vast emptiness of the sky. As one of the most prominent photographic artists in Germany, Esser's works can be found in the collections of top museums and galleries in New York, Paris, and Amsterdam.

Elger Esser

Elger Esser’s pale, luminous landscape photographs, which are almost entirely unpeopled and frequently feature a straight, low horizon line, have been compared to both early-19th-century photography and Dutch landscape paintings of the 17th century.

Esser’s Giverny series revisits Monet’s famous garden from a different angle than what we are used to seeing. Esser explores this common visual memory of this iconic art destination and deconstructs it, by taking the images to a level of abstraction where the place itself becomes almost unrecognizable.

Nocturnes à Giverny

Playing with ideas of color, scale, and form, he later gained renown for gridded paintings that appear abstract from up close and highly realistic and pixelated from afar. Close has exhibited extensively since the ’60s and enjoyed solo shows at the Walker Art Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the State Hermitage Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, among other institutions. He has featured in group exhibitions at the Venice Biennale and Documenta on multiple occasions. At auction, his work has sold for seven figures. Close has often depicted his family and friends, including fellow artists Robert Rauschenberg, Cindy Sherman, and Richard Serra. His work links him not only to other Photorealists such as Richard Estes and Audrey Flack, but also to the Conceptual art movement.

Chuck Close

In the 1960s, Chuck Close pioneered Photorealism with his monumental, exquisitely detailed portraits, whose subjects he took from photographic sources.

Chuck Close is widely known for his painterly process of using abstraction to a realistic end. Gridding both a source photograph and a canvas, Close paints brightly-colored concentric rings that up close look like simple color fields, but from afar turn out to be very detailed portraits.

In this intricately detailed picture, the artist displays his technical mastery of the camera, capturing the sunflower in a finely balanced play of light. This is a flower as seen by a bee, with its center deep, inviting and overwhelming. This presumably innocent subject, a sunflower, has a disheveled luxuriance and a thrill of sex, which make it very unlike the traditional imagery of still life subjects. In Close´s flowers pictures, the erotic energy is myopic as the imagery seems to have emerged from the sense of touch more than from vision.

Sunflower

Born on February 9th, 1932, in Dresden, Germany, Richter was raised during the Second World War becoming an artist in Eastern Germany and escaping Communism in 1961. His life has followed a series of historical events whose memories are kept alive through his work. From the beginning, Richter explored different paths simultaneously, alternating between the abstract and the figurative, developing a profusion of themes, mediums, and techniques. Deeply affected by the Second World War, he made forays into his own memory as well as that of Germany. History continuing as the dominant theme, he worked from photographs: from an annihilated Dresden, to the Baader-Meinhof gang, to the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Ever unpredictable, Richter has found inspiration in the classic Italian Grand Masters such as Titian (Annunciation after Titian) and painted an immense multi-coloured checkerboard (Colour Chart). When the artist, who has never adhered to any particular convention, fashion, or trend, embarked on his most abstract series (Abstract Paintings), his innovative; overturning buckets of colour that he proceeded to crush onto ten-meter square canvases.

Gerhard Richter

One of the most famous artists to emerge from post-war Germany, Gerhard Richter is known for his prolific, varied, and widely influential painting practice.

Editions form an important part of Gerhard Richter's œuvre. From 1965 onward he has produced prints, photographs, oil paintings, artist's books, multiples and posters in edition as they offer the artist a chance to explore creative possibilities in especially diverse and experimental ways.

Lately, Richter was increasingly focused on his Abstract Paintings. Based on Gerhard Richter´s Flow paintings, which were created by capturing poured enamel paints on a glass surface, these editions are chromatographic prints of high-resolution photographs of the originals, mounted on aluminium. The artist refers to them as "facsimile objects", even if they proceed indeed from the Flow paintings, this series distinguishes from the originals in some aspects: in some cases they are presented differently by the artist; in others, they represent the only version of paintings that no longer exist. This exclusive series was released by Serpentine Galleries.

Bagdad II (P10)

C-Print on aluminum

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Get your home ready for autumn cosy days!

Mouths are planted" ("The Currency"), 2016-2021

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