News
Gesture & Form: Women in Abstraction
Group Exhibition at Almine Rech New York Upper East Side
May 3 - Jun 15, 2024
39 East 78th Street, Floor 2, New York, NY 10075 US
Gesture & Form: Women in Abstraction brings together twenty modern and contemporary artists working within the mode of abstraction. In recent years, greater efforts have been made to remediate the imbalanced presence of women artists in the story of abstract painting, and this exhibition engages in that change by celebrating the formidable contributions of these painting giants, past and present.
Following the Second World War, the center of the art world shifted away from Paris to New York, and alongside this geographical shift came the rise of the Abstract Expressionists. As this movement gained traction, pioneering artists featured in this exhibition drew attention with their paintings full of energetic flashes of color and their physically active means of placing paint to canvas. Artists such as Elaine de Kooning and Helen Frankenthaler, for example, were instrumental to the technical and stylistic developments in this art movement, but were frequently underrepresented in comparison to their male counterparts – and excluded from gallery spaces. Gesture & Form: Women in Abstraction encourages viewers to reconsider the legacy of these women and situates their innovations alongside generations of artists working across the globe.
— Ferren Gipson, art historian, writer, and textile artist
www.alminerech.com
Art Basel Hong Kong 2024
"Where we are now", 2023
is on view from March 26-30 on Booth 1B25
with Almine Rech gallery
Interview
Averno: Interview with Sasha Ferré, by Clare Gemima for Whitehot Magazine
"Drawing from the enigmatic allure of Avernus, an ancient site near Cumae, Italy, Ferré's Averno serves as a captivating odyssey into nature’s unknown. Inspired by the poetic resonance of Louise Glück's verses in her compilation of the same name, Ferré infuses fragments of myth and memory directly onto her canvas, merely utilizing her hands to manipulate marks and pigments, evoking a strong sense of intuitive introspection.
In paintings like Who could have known that wasn't the usual sun?, and Was it the wind that spoke? (both 2023), Ferré illuminates the significance of Averno as a liminal space where truth and imagination coexist, and the tangible world intersects with the subconscious. Through her choice of handmade oil sticks enriched with beeswax, Ferré's painterly process brims with sensuality and intimacy, granting her compositions a distinctly tactile richness.
Ferré’s exhibition embraces the fluidity of existence, surrenders to the raw spontaneity of gesture, and questions the interconnectedness of all things. In confronting the raw beauty of the imagination, as well as the eternal dance of life and death, Averno stands as a testament to Ferré's commitment to depict what is often unable to be shown.
Clare Gemima: The title of your show Averno, makes references to Avernus, an ancient volcanic crater near Cumae, Italy. It lies west of Naples, and is believed to be the entrance to the underworld according to Roman mythology. What made you want to research this phenomenon in the first place?
Sasha Ferré: I learnt that the space for the exhibition would be an underground gallery, and it became the starting point to conceive the show. I started thinking about the specificity of underground spaces in relation to my practice and to ecological thinking. At the same time, one of my favorite poets, Louise Glück, died, and I remembered one of her books of poems titled Averno (2006). This word stayed with me for a couple of weeks. Meanwhile, in the studio, I noticed new feathery shapes emerging in my work. I researched the etymology and the story of Averno. I studied Glück’s poems and used different sources to explore the mythological belief that this lake is the entrance to the underworld. Through my research, I realized that in etymological terms, ‘Averno’ means birdless. The lake was toxic because of fumes emanating from the crater, so birds would avoid flying above it. The story of this magical toxic lake without birds, resonated in many ways with what was happening in the studio, and with my concerns with mass extinction and ecology. This is how it really started. From there, I gave all paintings a title borrowed from fragments of poetry written by Glück, not just from Averno, but from all of her compilations. "
Read full interview here
