Frieze London: Stand A3

Etel Adnan
Matinée récréative, 1970 / 2015
Wool tapestry
72.8 x 65 inches (185 x 165 cm)
Edition 2 of 3 with 1AP (#2/3)
(GP2079)

In 1968, Adnan applied to a class with Ida Grae and discovered a “whole universe linked to tapestry making.” Adnan’s life is itself a weaving, both personally and artistically. Adnan produces her tapestry works with the historic Aubusson atelier PINTON. The pieces are typically based off of early drawings and reveal her mastery of color.

 Etel Adnan’s career spans more than six decades and encompasses a wide range of media—including painting, drawing, tapestry, film, ceramics, and leporello artist books—as it does traditions and locations. Adnan was first an author of poetry and prose, often addressing and protesting the turmoil of the Vietnam War and the Lebanese Civil War. Informing her writing and later her artwork as well, was the landscape, its own history and her emotional and physical response to it. For Adnan, the landscape is mingled with memory, especially a sentiment of displacement, as she was born and raised in Lebanon, but has lived, studied, and worked in France and California throughout her life.

 Solo exhibitions of Adnan’s work have been consistently presented at international institutions since her presentation at Documenta (13), 2012. Currently the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York is hosting: Etel Adnan: Light’s New Measure. Adnan’s work is included in major public collections such as the British Museum, England; Centre Pompidou, France; Institut du Monde Arabe, France; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; M+, Hong Kong, China; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, Tunisia; Tate Modern, England; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

 Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1925. She currently lives and works in Paris, France.

Leonardo Drew
Number 263, 2020
Wood and paint
31 x 31 x 16 inches (78.7 x 78.7 x 40.6 cm)
(GL14814)

In Leonardo Drew's signature language, a richly textured surface with contrasting elements of raw and pigmented wood is built up in Number 263. The undulating shield or mask-like form is recent for Drew; it is abstract yet akin to non-Western art. The work also reveals the artist’s current play of color in his practice.

Drew is known for creating contemplative abstract sculptural works that play upon a tension between order and chaos. At once monumental and intimate in scale, his work recalls post-Minimalist sculpture that alludes to America’s industrial past. Drew transforms accumulations of raw materials such as wood, scrap metal, and cotton to articulate various overlapping themes with emotional gravitas: from the cyclical nature of life and decay to the erosion of time. His surfaces often approach a language of their own, embodying the labored process of writing oneself into history.

Recent solo museum presentations of his work have been held at the University of Massachusetts Amherst; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson; and North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh. Current solo exhibitions are on view at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Connecticut and the traveling solo exhibition Leonardo Drew: Cycles, from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer Foundation, at the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, Florida International University. In addition, Drew’s works have been shown internationally and are included in numerous public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; and Tate, London.

Drew was born in 1961 in Tallahassee, Florida, and he grew up in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Ficre Ghebreyesus
Untitled, c.2002-07
Acrylic on canvas
12 x 9 inches (30.5 x 22.9 cm)
Framed: 14.5 x 11.5 x 1.8 inches (36.8 x 29.2 x 4.6 cm)
(GL13763)

Ficre Ghebreyesus populates his works with intricate, highly personal experiences as a citizen of the world. Born in Eritrea during their War of Independence (1961–1991), he left as a teenage refugee to Sudan, Italy, and Germany. The artist finally settled in the United States where he received an MFA from the Yale School of Art, and was awarded the Carol Schlossberg Prize for Excellence in Painting at graduation. Ghebreyesus continued his lifelong activism for Eritrean independence alongside studying painting, printmaking, several languages, and working as the executive chef and co-owner of New Haven’s Caffé Adulis. Operating fluidly between abstraction and figuration, Ghebreyesus’s matte acrylic and oil paintings suggest the non-linear form of dreams, memories, and storytelling. Momentarily recognizable figures dissolve into colorful patterns: a school of fish becomes human bodies in transit or a boat emerges from brightly hued woven shapes echoing Eritrean textiles. His rebuke of borders and divisions seem to be distilled from his own optimistic embrace of an identity and home perpetually in flux.

This intimate work reveals the artist’s study of the horizon, the sense of the journey across water, and use of a checkerboard motif.

While Ghebreyesus turned down most opportunities to show during his short lifetime, recent posthumous exhibitions of his work include Ficre Ghebreyesus: City with a River Running Through at the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, California and Ficre Ghebreyesus: Polychromasia at Artspace, New Haven, Connecticut. Writer and poet Elizabeth Alexander’s memoire, The Light of the World (2015), chronicles her husband Ghebreyesus’s life and work. Galerie Lelong began representing the Estate in 2019. His work can be found in museum and public collections such as Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Winter Park, Florida; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, New York; and Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Ficre Ghebreyesus was born in Asmara, Eritrea, in 1962, and died in New Haven, Connecticut, in 2012.

Samuel Levi Jones
Doom, 2021
Deconstructed books on canvas
45 x 50 inches (114.3 x 127 cm)
Framed: 46.8 x 51.5 x 2.5 inches (116.3 x 130.8 x 6.4 cm)
(GL15051)

Samuel Levi Jones is inspired by questions of authority, representation, and recorded history. His ongoing practice centers on physically undoing objects associated with systems of power and control. Jones often rearranges deconstructed books into grid-like compositions that expose their flaws and question their assumed command of the truth. As he explains, “I am ultimately thinking about information that is selectively left out.” His works examine urgent questions of how brutality is embedded in institutional systems such as law enforcement, education, and the medical industry.

Solo and group museum exhibitions include Samuel Levi Jones: Left of Center at the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, Indiana; Infinite Blue at the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Solidary & Solitary: The Joyner/Guiffrida Collection at the Smart Museum at the University of Chicago, Illinois; and Unbound, Studio Museum in Harlem. His work can be found in museum and public collections such as the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin – Madison, Wisconsin; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; Rubell Family Collection, Florida; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. A forthcoming exhibition at Dayton Contemporary, Ohio will open in November 2021.

Jones was born in Marion, Indiana, in 1978, and now lives and works between Chicago, Illinois and Indianapolis, Indiana.

Jaume Plensa
Aleph, 2020
Stainless steel
68 1/8 x 44 1/8 x 58 5/8 in (173 x 112 x 149 cm)
34 kg
(GL14892)

Jaume Plensa is internationally recognized as one of today’s leading contemporary portrait artists; harnessing the power of his approach to convey our relationship to the world and each other by emphasizing our shared humanity. In Aleph, individual letters from different world alphabets compose a kneeling figure. A poetic representation of the breaking of barriers between cultures, the stainless-steel sculpture encourages the viewer to think about the ways in which we are linked as a collective.

Jaume Plensa creates sculptures and installations that unify individuals through connections of spirituality, the body, and collective memory. Literature, psychology, biology, language, and history have been key guiding elements throughout his career. Using a wide range of materials including steel, cast iron, resin, paraffin wax, glass, light, water, and sound, Plensa lends physical weight and volume to components of the human condition and the ephemeral.

Plensa is highly active in projects in public space; his celebrated works can be seen at Bonaventure Gateway, Montreal, Canada; Millennium Park, Illinois; Olympic Sculpture Park, Washington; Burj Khalifa, United Arab Emirates; BBC Broadcasting Tower and St. Helens, England; Pearson International Airport, Canada; Daikanyama, Toranomon Hills, and Ogijima Japan; Shanghai IFC Mall, China; Albright Knox Art Gallery, New York; Rice University, Texas; Bastion Saint-Jaume, France; Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida; among many other sites worldwide. The artist has presented solo exhibitions at prestigious institutions around the globe most recently at the MACBA–Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain and at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid in 2018 which travelled to the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Russia in 2019. Other solo museum exhibitions include Musée d’art moderne et contemporain de Saint-Étienne Métropole, Saint-Étienne, France; Institut Valencia d’Art Moderne, Spain; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas; Musée Picasso, France; Yorkshire Sculpture Park, England; and the Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Finland. Jaume Plensa: Together was presented at the Basilica San Giorgio Maggiore in Italy as a collateral event of the 56th Venice Biennale. The artist was honored at the Hirshhorn New York Gala in 2019 and received the Velázquez Prize for Plastic Arts from the Ministry of Education and Culture, Madrid, Spain, in 2013, among other accolades. A documentary feature of the artist’s life and work Jaume Plensa: Can You Hear Me? (2020), directed by Pedro Ballesteros, was released last year.

The artist was born in Barcelona, Spain in 1955, where he currently lives and works.

Zilia Sánchez
El silencio de la brisa, 2018
Acrylic on stretched canvas
18 x 36 x 5 inches (45.7 x 91.4 x 12.7 cm)
(GL12739)

Sánchez achieves crescent-like curvatures and anatomical protrusions by stretching canvas over hand-molded wooden armatures, resulting in artworks that imbue painting with sculptural and architectural sensitivity. El silencio de la brisa [The Silence of Breeze] employs a deep, more saturated, blue as evolved from previously muted palettes, in a composition that is evocative of both natural and corporeal landscapes.

Zilia Sánchez’s work is characterized by her distinctive approach to formal abstraction through the use of undulating silhouettes, muted color palettes, and a unique, sensual vocabulary. She is primarily recognized for her shaped canvases, first created in Havana in the 1950s and further developed while living in Havana, New York City, and Madrid. Sánchez’s signature style consists of stretching canvas over hand-molded wooden armatures and painting them with acrylic. Over her 65-year career, Sánchez has explored the juxtapositions between the feminine and the masculine, the painterly and the sculptural, the personal and the universal, the exterior body and the interior self. The reduced color palettes in her compositions as well as the serial processes she employs, connect her to Minimalism, though the sensuality and embrace of the curve in her work bear witness to the distinct language Sánchez has developed.

The artist’s first full retrospective, Zilia Sánchez: Soy Isla, was recently organized by the Phillips Collection, Washington DC and traveled to El Museo del Barrio, New York and Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico. Her work was included in the 57th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, VIVA ARTE VIVA, curated by Christine Macel. Sánchez’s work is included in international museum and public collections including the Colección Isabel y Agustín Coppel, Mexico City, Mexico; El Museo del Barrio, New York, New York; Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois; Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine; Museum of Latin American Art in Buenos Aires MALBA, Argentina; Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana, Cuba; Perez Art Museum Miami, Florida; Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York; Tate, London, England; and The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.

The artist lives and works in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where she permanently settled in the­ early 1970s. She was born in 1926 in Havana, Cuba.

Tariku Shiferaw
Adinkrahene, 2021
Acrylic on canvas
60 x 48 inches (152.4 x 121.9 cm)
(GL15114)


This new painting from Shiferaw reveals interplays of blacks and blues as he has experimented with throughout his practice. Evoking visions both severe and beautiful such as bruised skin and the sky, a celestial constellation emerges in the composition. The work comes from his new and ongoing series—Mata Semay (Amharic for “night skies”) which addresses the concept of mark-making and erasure using mythology as a way to take up space. The painting portrays a backdrop of the night sky with imagined constellations, while the foreground contains a symbol of an ancient West African culture, the Adinkra people. Other paintings in the series use symbols from diasporic cultures such as the Dogon people (modern-day Benin, Ghana, Nigeria), the Nubian, Cush, and Aksum people (modern-day Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia), the Aborigines, and many others.

Mythology is an important component of this series. Roland Barthes described mythology as a "phenomenon of mass culture," a semiological system which can transcend factual systems. Following Barthes’ interpretation, Shiferaw considers mythology to decisively affect the way we exist. It is a vital tool in shaping our imaginations and in forming interpretations of our reality. The artist finds mythology effective because of its invisibility—it infiltrates people’s perceptions clandestinely and subtly, shaping minds and behavior through mass cultural phenomena. Mata Semay is an imagining of what the night sky could be if Black people’s contributions—both past and future—were not erased from the global narrative. In this series, a variety of symbols representing the stories and myths of different groups of people from the diaspora are painted onto an imagined landscape of the night sky. Demarcating a place in the constellations and concurrently decolonizing and returning the “mata semay” back to all people. This simultaneously interrupts and subverts the West’s colonial impetus to occupy and appropriate space and culture.

Shiferaw is known for his practice of mark-making that explores the metaphysical ideas of painting and societal structures. This formal language of geometric abstraction is executed through densely layering material to create “marks,” gestures that interrogate space-making and reference the hierarchy of systems. As the artist explains, “A mark, as physical and present as cave-markings… reveals the thinker behind the gesture—an evidence of prior markings of ideas and self onto the space.” For Shiferaw, working in abstraction entails a re-envisioning of identity and form, the gestural surface in his paintings and mark-making is his reclamation of a space that was denied to many artists.

Museum exhibitions that have presented works by Shiferaw include the 2017 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York; A Poet*hical Wager at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Ohio; Unbound at the Zuckerman Museum of Art (ZMA), Kennesaw, Georgia; Men of Change, a traveling exhibition organized by The Smithsonian Institution, and currently on view at the Anacostia Community Museum, Washington, DC and California African American Museum, Los Angeles; and What’s Love Got to Do with It? at The Drawing Center, New York, New York. Shiferaw has participated in the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art (Studio), in Open Sessions at The Drawing Center, and he was artist-in-residence at the LES Studio Program in New York City. Shiferaw is currently an artist-in-residence at the World Trade Center through Silver Art Projects.

Shiferaw was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1983, raised in Los Angeles, California, and now lives and works in New York City.

Nancy Spero
Mother and Children, 1962
Oil on canvas
76.75 x 43.5 inches (195 x 110.5 cm)
(GL7030)

This work is from Spero’s early series titled the Black Paintings. The subjects in these works and their related works-on-paper are lovers, mothers and children, and amorphous, looming creatures—figures allusive of existential oppositions and emotional turmoil. Somber, figurative works made at a time when Pop Art and Minimalism were the main focuses of the art world, the Black Paintings preface Spero’s radical career. They are the first works with the imagery that will occupy her for the rest of her life; the agency of women and women’s complicated role in society – as maternal care giver, but also survivor and leader. Spero worked on the paintings over long periods of time, often at night. Broad, unmeasured strokes of dark oils surround and obscure the figures, enveloping them in a way that is both sensual and haunting. Coded references to the dominance of male painters in the American abstract expressionists are also visible. The Black Paintings present fascinating insight into Spero’s practice, evoking a union of European civilization and history with the raw and uncompromising beauty of contemporary American painting.

In a groundbreaking career surpassing 50 years of practice and encompassing many significant visual and cultural movements including Conceptual Art, Post-Modernism, and Feminism, Nancy Spero made the female experience central to her art and challenged aesthetic and political conventions. Spero’s lexicon was derived from an immersion in the history of images, notably from Egypt, classical antiquity, pre-history, and contemporary news media. She combined, fractured, and repurposed found imagery and adopted text to comment on contemporary and historical events such as the monstrosities of the Vietnam War, extermination of Jews during the Holocaust, and torture of women in Chile. With raw intensity, Spero executed works on paper and installations that persist as unapologetic statements against the pervasive abuse of power, Western privilege, and male dominance.

Spero’s work is held in over 50 prominent public collections worldwide including the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; Centre Pompidou, France; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Spain; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Tate Gallery, England; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Massachusetts; and Dallas Museum of Art, Texas. Major monographic exhibitions of Spero’s work have been shown at renowned museums including the Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico; Centre Pompidou, France; Serpentine Galleries, England; Museo d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia; MoMA PS1, New York, and Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Spain.

Spero was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1926. She died in New York City in 2009.