Marc Selwyn Fine Art

Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to present Favorite Planet, an exhibition of photographs, paintings, and sculptures by Jaylon Israel Hicks, a conceptual artist based in Houston, Texas. This exhibition contains nine works, each influenced by the aesthetics and materiality of baseball. Upon returning to Texas after a period living in Minnesota, Hicks rekindled his appreciation for the sport, which he grew up both playing and watching. Returning to his roots, Hicks felt inspired by the James Baldwin quote: “Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.” This suggestion prompted an internal search about where Hicks feels the most at home, and what that concept truly means to him. He expands the connotation of home and intertwines it with baseball through a series of home plate sculptures and other references to the physical elements of the game included in this exhibition.

Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to present Joey Terrill: Still Here the gallery’s first exhibition of work by the artist. As an openly gay Chicano, Joey Terrill’s career as an artist has run parallel to his evolution as a social justice advocate. Employing the bold color and charismatic aesthetics of advertising and comics, Terrill has addressed the politics of sexual identity, the media’s lack of representation of the Chicano community and the extraordinary losses suffered during the AIDS crisis. Though the narratives depicted are autobiographical – a dose of Videx rests on the breakfast table alongside a jar of Peter Pan peanut butter - Terrill’s use of familiar household objects allows the work to remain effortlessly inclusive. Who doesn’t understand the great pleasure of breakfast or the tyranny of a daily medication?

Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Hannah Hoffman, and the Estate of Rosemary Mayer are pleased to announce a presentation introducing the work of Rosemary Mayer (1943-2014) to Los Angeles for the first time. Mayer’s work spans an array of media exploring themes of history, temporality, and biography, paired with a formal fixation on challenging the assumed properties of fragility. This exhibition, spanning two gallery locations and including site-specific work, provides a unique insight into Mayer’s process by introducing works not exhibited since the time in which they were made and exploring the interplay of documentation, drawing, and sculpture.

Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to present Tony Feher, the gallery’s first exhibition of works by the artist. Recognized for his subtle elegant sculptures, Feher references Minimalism yet upends the genre’s tradition through his choice of materials. His compositions employ bottles, glassware and plastic bags – the detritus of everyday life. Yet these familiar even banal objects are transformed into evocative studies of color and form. With each meticulously refined construction, the artist evokes wonder and pathos in equal measure.

Marc Selwyn Fine Art is delighted to present a solo exhibition of three historical works by Barry Le Va. Renowned as a leading figure of Postminimalism alongside peers Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, Eva Hesse, and Robert Smithson, among others, Barry Le Va’s art of the 1960s and 70s pushed the formal limits of sculpture as a medium. His practice intertwined concepts of relational space, order versus chaos, and his preoccupation with what remains as “evidence” after actions and events. A fan of Sherlock Holmes, Le Va often compared the interpretation of his sculptures to gathering evidence in a forensic investigation.

Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to announce our fifth show with Michelle Stuart, Reflections on Paradise opening June 3rd and running through July 15th, 2023. This exhibition features a selection of works on paper inspired by riads, traditional Moroccan interior gardens that Stuart encountered on her travels to Zagora and Marrakech. Largely comprised of richly applied graphite shapes, these drawings carefully interconnect subtle elements of watercolor, silver pencil, collaged paper, and silver leaf to form what Stuart describes as “imagined places of serenity.” Rendering her architectural forms in overhead perspective, Stuart echoes complex patterns in the elaborate tile work that often decorates the pools and fountains found in the gardens.

Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to present Reflecting Forms by Helène Aylon (1931-2020). This single work installation in our project gallery belongs to the artist’s 1977 Pouring Formations series. Aylon’s Pouring Formations series is an observation of transformation. To Aylon, the materials she uses and the processes she invents are as important as the completed image. The artist describes her method as follows: I painted from behind the surface of the paper, allowing the oils to seep through naturally, in their own time, outside of my doing. I’d wait for the image to manifest on the front surface through chance—absorption—and I would accept the outcome. … I wanted the art to tell me something that I did not know. Aylon’s desire to be enlightened by yielding to nature diverges from the conventional paradigm that an artist is a ‘master creating a masterpiece,’ a differentiation she viewed as feminist. To refute the traditional notions of control and permanence in painting, Aylon embraced her material’s innate pace and movements.

Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to present Flowers 1973-1991, an exhibition of drawings by the late American artist Hannah Wilke (1940–1993). This exhibition will focus on the flower image and includes works in watercolor and sepia ink on paper. It will also include a grouping of three of Wilke’s abstract vaginal forms in ceramic from the 1970’s, highlighting the relationship between her works on paper and her three-dimensional sculpture. A pioneering figure in feminist art, Wilke explored issues of beauty, gender, and Western cultural convention with a diverse approach that included photography, performance, video, sculpture, and drawing. The first woman of her generation to make vaginal art, Wilke asserted ownership over her own body and was a key figure in the feminist art movement of the 1960’s and 70’s. Wilke’s multi-disciplinary practice melded Post-Minimalism, second wave feminism and Abstract Expressionism, making her one of the most influential yet under recognized artists of the late 20th century. Wilke’s works on paper are often in dialogue with her sculpture. Rarely exhibited before her death in 1993, drawings were an integral part of her practice beginning in the 1950’s and early 1960’s. While Wilke’s undulating lines often generate highly abstracted compositions that relate to her sculpture, this exhibition will focus on a series of recognizable floral images which are closely linked to her three-dimensional organic forms. Wilke’s sketches of flowers embody a delicate and ambiguous beauty and come from the same energy exemplified in her performances. As Nancy Princenthal wrote in the artist’s monograph (Hannah Wilke, 2010, Prestel) “Her observations were acute, bringing to life every particularity of texture and form, blooming health and decay without sacrifice to the delicacy for which flowers are treasured.” Wilke continued to produce flower drawings until her death, with some of the final examples done on hospital pillowcases. Hannah Wilke (b. New York, NY, 1940; d. Houston, TX, 1993) trained at Stella Elkins Tyler School of Fine Art, Temple University, Philadelphia. Key solo museum exhibitions during her life included Hannah Wilke: Starification Photographs and Videotapes, Fine Arts Gallery, University of California, Irvine, (1976); and Hannah Wilke: A Retrospective, University of Missouri (1989). Recent solo presentations of her work include Hannah Wilke: Art for Life’s Sake, Pulitzer Arts Foundation (2022), Hannah Wilke: Gestures, Neuberger Museum of Art, New York (2008) and a solo gallery at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2011). Wilke has also been included in significant group exhibitions, including: Eva Hesse and Hannah Wilke: Erotic Abstraction, Acquavella Galleries, New York (2021), Performing for the Camera, Tate Modern, London (2016); Human Nature, LACMA, Los Angeles, CA (2012); Naked Before the Camera, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2012); The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today, MoMA, New York, NY (2010); elles@centrepompidou, Centre Pompidou, Paris, (2009-10): WACK!, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2007); and Sexual Politics, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 1996. Her work is featured in major museum and foundation collections including Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; LA County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Princeton University Art Museum; and Coleccion Jumex, Mexico City.

Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to present Jay DeFeo: Into Other Worlds, the gallery’s fourth exhibition of the legendary artist’s work. Known as a key figure in the Bay Area Beat Culture of the 1950’s and a pioneer in the Abstract Expressionist movement, DeFeo (1929-1989) continues to inspire generations of artists with her astonishingly diverse and innovative range of works. This exhibition explores a recurring and central theme in the artist’s oeuvre—the power of a work of art to function as a window or portal, transporting the viewer into the mystery of other worlds. As DeFeo has written: “Entrances into my artworks have always been a way of getting away from everything we are confined to in an earthly form.” The genesis for these “entrances” has often been a common object or fragment from the artist’s quotidian environment. In Untitled (Reflections of Africa series), 1989, the circular opening in a tissue box becomes an enigmatic portal allowing the viewer to peer into the vessel. In Where the Swan Flies (Loop System No. 1), 1974, the artist finds beauty and inspiration in the form of a broken cup handle, inviting the viewer to enter its black central void. David Pagel, whose essay is contained in a catalogue published concurrently with the exhibition, states: “Those seemingly empty spaces draw viewers to them with something like magnetic forcefulness or the tug of gravity… Like gaps in time and space, the voids in DeFeo’s works interrupt business as usual and complicate our relationship to our surroundings by sharpening our perceptions and stimulating a kind of attentiveness that is laced with anxiety and all the more exciting for it.” This exhibition contains a rich and diverse array of media, reflecting an experimentation with surface and materials that runs throughout the artist’s career. A silver gelatin photograph Untitled (Cabbage Rose), c. 1974-5, for example, draws the viewer into a black vortex formed by a leaf. Two rare large-scale canvases complement a series of graphite drawings, collages, small oil paintings, and paintings on paper that highlight a wide array of material exploration. A conversation about the exhibition between curator Helen Molesworth and art critic David Pagel will take place in the gallery on February 5th at 4PM. RSVP is required to attend the event in person. If you are unable to attend, the conversation will be livestreamed on our Instagram account, @marcselwynfineart. DeFeo’s art is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the British Museum, London, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, The Menil Collection, Houston, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among many others. DeFeo’s works can also be seen in Los Angeles in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (where The Jewel is on permanent view), the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the Norton Simon Museum, UCLA’s Hammer Museum, and the J. Paul Getty Museum. In 2013, the Whitney Museum of American Art, where The Rose, 1958-1966 is currently on view, presented Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective, featuring more than 150 seminal works by the artist.

Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to announce Dustbox, the gallery's first exhibition with Michelle Uckotter. Uckotter's mysterious, darkened interiors draw the viewer into a fascinating world of distorted perspectives and enigmatic narratives. In some works, the human presence is implied, in others the scene is populated by a doll-like female protagonist. With influences as diverse as Francis Bacon, Hans Bellmer, and Japanese and American horror aesthetics, Uckotter's cinematic narratives are at once sinister, seductive, and even humorous in their embrace of a camp sensibility.

Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to announce the gallery’s first exhibition with Judy Fiskin. Since the early 1970s, Fiskin has worked with photography and video to examine the aesthetic values of everyday architecture, popular culture, and visual art. The Way We Live Now features recent digital photographs the artist appropriated from real estate websites. Confined to her house and finding new ways to work during the pandemic, Fiskin investigated a world of interiors she digitally altered to fit her purposes. In the artist’s own words: “A few months into the pandemic, I was looking for a way to work without having to leave the house. I came across a real estate website, which consisted mostly of images of the interiors of houses for sale. Suddenly I had thousands of photos of rooms, furniture and decor at my disposal. And since they would be captured digitally, I could change them however I liked. I made the rooms I chose emptier, stranger, more uncanny or off-kilter—all qualities that I’ve explored in my earlier work.

Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to present William Wegman: Art By Artist, a show of drawings, paintings and photographs dating from the early 1970s to the present. This marks Wegman’s fifth exhibition at the gallery. The show is curated by Andrew Lampert, editor of the recent book William Wegman: Writing By Artist (2022, Primary Information).

Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to present Garden Sound, the gallery’s second exhibition of work by William Leavitt. Leavitt is part of a generation of Los Angeles artists integral to the development of Conceptual art in the 1960s and 70s. Drawing on the fictions and fantasies that power Hollywood, as well as Southern California’s architectural landscape, Leavitt captures distinct filmic moments that seem familiar, yet displaced. In the artist’s set-like installations, images of the California lifestyle come untethered from their original context and take on a sculptural presence.

Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to present an exhibition of recent paintings and works on paper by Gerald Jackson. This show runs concurrently with Jackson’s exhibition, Psychic Rebuilding, at Parker Gallery and follows his recent exhibitions at Gordon Robichaux in 2022 and White Columns in 2021. This exhibition highlights Gerald Jackson’s ongoing body of work exploring the metaphysical and visual power of blue and green. Embracing the colors’ associative potentials – sky, water, and earth – Jackson’s paintings aim to transcend the self and embrace our connection to the natural world. For Jackson, these two colors most successfully move beyond social constructs like race and class, to tap into a universal realm of human spirituality.

Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to present new work by Kevin Reinhardt in cooperation with Grice Bench. Kevin Reinhardt’s meticulously rendered windows could easily be mistaken for minimalist abstractions in the spirit of Barnett Newman. Closer inspection reveals each canvas to be an exacting rendering of slatted blinds. In each composition, solid boxes of color are obscured by the vertical or horizontal louvers. Single strands of colored thread sewn into the canvas highlight the edges and planes, complicating the surface and reinforcing the illusion of three-dimensionality. Irregularities in the blinds – slats are misaligned, the blinds are only half open, edges are broken – occur in every canvas. These views offer a window with limited narrative content (think Sigmund Freud’s windows to the unconscious); the mystery of what might be glimpsed if the blinds are raised remains unknown. Trained as an architect, Reinhardt frequently identifies specific locations as catalysts for his compositions. In this series, his “window paintings” are based on the scaled elevational drawings of Swedish architect Sigurd Lewerentz’s St. Petri Church in Klippan, Sweden. Lewerentz’s design for this building – austere in means but luxurious in thought –has inspired generations to consider context, materials and the methodology of construction as integral to the poetry of architectural form. In his nuanced color sequencings, Reinhardt’s “window paintings” speak most eloquently to a sense of alienation familiarized in works by American painter Edward Hopper. Or perhaps their impact is derived simply from the banality of familiar surroundings. Where is the light source in this scene? What is the view desired by the viewer? Why does this interior insist on masking the exterior? Encircled by these works on canvas, a sculpture of polychrome carved wood exists in counterpoint to the more abstract mystery of the surrounding walls. The bust depicts Sada Abe, a pleasure obsessed geisha. Abe appears defiant, Gyuto blade clenched between her teeth, her gaze falling across the space, obscured by the emptiness before her. As pointed out by Ruth McCormick in a review of the 1976 film In the Realm of the Senses, Sada’s story is one of escape from the conflict found within Eros and Civilization by Herbert Marcuse -- a woman choosing self, left to wander in the pursuit of Eros (love). In an adjacent space, a radiant C-print features an empty hotplate generating heat for no visible purpose. A paper cutout drawing, created by stacking alternating colored sheets of paper, each with interior portions removed, depicts a lone red-tipped cigarette touched by the flame of a stove and left to ash. Kevin Reinhardt was born in 1990 and earned a B.Arch. with a minor in sculpture from USC in 2014. Reinhardt is based in Los Angeles. His work has been featured locally in exhibitions with Grice Bench, Harbor View and Pole, otherplaces. la, and most recently in New York City with Half Gallery.

Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to present new work by Kurt Kauper. For the entirety of his career, Kurt Kauper has explored the communicative possibilities of form by investigating figurative representation. While his subject matter has included contemporary celebrities, athletes, political figures and opera divas, real and imagined, his works are executed with the technical acuity of an Old Master drawing – the kind he fell in love with as an art-obsessed kid. In conversation with Brian Alfred, the artist commented, “I’m interested in traditional representation. The question for me is always, how am I going to modify that form so that the viewer looks at it as if they have never encountered that form before? I think that is formalism.” Consistently Kauper allows his work to track what he calls the ambiguity of “the place where the decisions are made.” Narratives may be suggested, conventional notions of gender and sexuality are frequently confronted, but no attempt is made to resolve meaning through subject matter. Inspired by the audacious formal experimentation of Ingres as well as the evocative light and shadows in the work of Van der Goes, Bronzino and Holbein, Kauper’s canvases derive their emotional force through pictorial structure and the subtleties of color values. Despite the extraordinary clarity in the depiction of form, the artist’s subject remains enigmatic. His light-infused flesh tones offer no clear story as to how they came to be. Yet the lure of their existence speaks volumes.

One of the preeminent figures in the history of conceptual art, Bochner has used verbal, mathematical and geometric systems to motivate the content of his work since the mid-1960s. This exhibition continues his exploration of language in painting, and painting as a language. In these recent oil on velvet works, Bochner uses an embossing technique to build up a rich and variegated surface. Viscous letters spell out an array of synonyms and phrases, from the polite to the perverse, on a porous velvet support which allows paint to absorb and saturate in unpredictable ways. The colorful, complex surfaces surrounding his texts emphasize the ambiguity and tenuous nature of verbal communication. As the mind goes back and forth between reading the texts and experiencing them as color and shape, language loses its authority, literally melting before the viewer’s eyes.

Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to present Traces, Allan McCollum’s first exhibition with the gallery and his first Southern California exhibition in 25 years. Allan McCollum lives and works in New York City and has spent over forty-five years exploring how objects achieve public and personal meaning in a world reliant on mass production. He has had more than one hundred solo exhibitions and his works are in nearly seventy major museum collections worldwide. McCollum’s labor-intensive installations are often comprised of many small components and tiny gestures which may seem at first glance to be identical but slowly reveal themselves to be subtly distinct objects. Traces includes two new bodies of work, The Uncredited and The Writer’s Daughter, which explore McCollum’s search for meaning in things that have been lost or forgotten -- screen shots of art from the sets of his late father’s uncredited movie appearances and a child’s free-form imaginary alphabet. By examining, reproducing, and reconfiguring these “traces,” McCollum’s installations deliver a poignant evocation of identity lost and then remade.

Since the 1970s, Michelle Stuart has been internationally recognized for a rich and diverse practice, including site-specific earth works, intimate drawings, paintings, sculpture and photographs, all centered on a lifelong interest in the natural world and the cosmos. A pioneer in the use of nontraditional media, Stuart brings forth imagery by using organic and site-specific materials in unique ways that expand the notion of what art and painting can be.

Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to present a selection of drawings on graph paper by Lee Bontecou which have never been exhibited outside of the artist’s studio and are exemplary in their staging and ingenuity. This exhibition is presented in cooperation with Bill Maynes, the artist’s sole representative.