Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

This solo exhibition features a new body of colored-watercolor and ink collages and works on paper, alongside a series of bronze busts.

Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is pleased to announce the inaugural exhibition of Wardell Milan, entitled Bluets & 2 Years of Magical Thinking. This exhibition presents recent small and large-scale drawings, along with sculptural works and a suite of etchings from Milan’s printmaking project, The Balcony. Bluets & 2 Years of Magical Thinking will be on view April 28 through June 3. Wardell Milan’s multimedia practice employs collage, painting, and sculpture to explore conceptions of the body and its position within contemporary society. Working from a practical foundation in photography, and his own interest in cinematic mediums, Milan approaches figuration at the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and representational history. His compositions incorporate a wide range of sources, including the photography of artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and George Dureau, along with visual elements from magazines, models, pornography, and film stills. Cut-out body parts and limbs are carefully excised and arranged in a series of two-dimensional jump-cuts, emphasizing the interactions of folds, edges, overlays, and negative space. This fragmentation blurs the boundaries of a singular, coherent body to invoke collective experiences of marginalization and empowerment. Moving through a world of violence and beauty, Milan’s subjects seek their own spaces where they are free to live and openly express themselves. Bluets & 2 Years of Magical Thinking sees Milan continuing to engage questions of bodily subjectivity and the ever-necessary negotiation of selfhood within oppressive systems. He describes the show’s thematic concerns as both universal and specific, drawing from personal experiences and introspection to expand on larger concepts and references to current events. The reclamation of sexual autonomy, freedom of gender expression, and racial solidarity against white supremacy and anti-Blackness are fundamental to the existence of Milan’s subjects, played out in scenes of physical and psychological confrontation. In each of his “training” collages, a group of figures are shown sparring against a photographic background—men, on the shores of a monochrome ocean, and women, amongst verdant foliage. Their collaged limbs collide and overlap one another, utilizing the refuge of their respective pictorial realms to train against impending threats. Silver leaf and blue feature prominently in Milan’s collages and paintings. His use of silver leaf involves building up, then wearing down sections of the material on the canvas to produce a unique, inconstant quality of surface. Blue, for Milan, is a color of reverence; the blue skin tone of his figures marks them as subjects of dignity, uplifting and affirming their existence. The winding streams of blues seen in the collage works 3 warriors finding some piece of mind. Finding some paradise (2023) and King Kenta in deep meditation. Floatin’ on ‘em. (2023) were inspired by the courtship ritual of the Bowerbird, and the brightly colored refuse it collects in the hope of attracting a mate. These ribbon-like elements adorn the silver leaf landscape with color and surround Milan’s subjects in a protective veil of exaltation. Bluets & 2 Years of Magical Thinking will also feature etchings from Milan’s print series, The Balcony. Milan began this printmaking project in 2019, and recently extended the portfolio with a second suite of etchings produced last year, subtitled The World is Made of Eggs. Directly influenced by world events and current sociopolitical developments, Milan’s etchings present a panoramic reflection on the nature of spectacle, power, isolation, and joy.

Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is pleased to present Reverb, a group exhibition featuring new work by Zipora Fried, Arturo Herrera, Sheila Hicks, and Erin Shirreff. Utilizing a diverse variety of mediums and materials—including textile, collage, works on paper, and sculpture—each artist approaches the visual languages of modernism through distinct modes of reexamination and reinterpretation. Placing their work in dialogue with one another prompts new synergies amongst the formal and conceptual qualities of their work, while speaking to their continued interaction with larger modernist art historical lineages. Reverb is on view December 10, 2022, through January 28, 2023.

Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is pleased to present Parts to Whole, an exhibition of new work by Cameron Martin. This will be Martin’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, on view April 14 through May 27, 2022. In his work, Martin explores modes of information transmission and presentation, articulating the potential for abstraction to carry and convey meaning parallel to what is assumed in figuration. Drawing upon a growing lexicon of “almost-signs,” his paintings and drawings engage the viewer’s recognition of familiar cultural forms and their associations without explicitly defining their signification. This sense of incomplete readability opens a productively ambiguous space of representation within his work, mirroring its prevalence in the larger world. Patterns, logos, and shapes reminiscent of those found in everyday life are contextualized within a new visual terrain across the canvas, simultaneously inhabiting spatial formations evocative of current information delivery systems and developing distinct ontological relationships to one another. The works in this exhibition embody three compositional strategies, each of which considers the interpellative effects of figure-ground, subject-to-frame and metonymic relationships. In Harbinger (2021), the central “brushed” shape maintains a clear position as the frontal figure within the painting, set against a patterned ground and contained on all sides by a solid purple border. Even as the gray background and painted white forms extend beyond the interior frame, the subject-to-background dynamic is maintained, as it is in other works such as Assembly (2022) and Capture (2022). Alternately, in paintings such as Sunblind (2021) and Deluge (2021), sinuous tracks of color weave their way across the painting’s foreground, as brush-stroked figures—in echo of Harbinger—swirl behind them, creating the illusion of animated space. Emerging directly from the edge of the canvas, they imply a continuation that exists beyond the edges of the painting; a flow of visual material rendered partly inaccessible, from which the viewer can only infer form and presence. The third approach is found in Martin’s new group of Scale Reticulation marker drawings (all 2022), which operate as potential fragments of expansive fields or matrices. Building upon his previous marker works, in which the smaller work was cut down from a larger drawing, these new images are produced within an increased, predetermined size. Adjusting the length and width of his marker strokes to accommodate the extended proportions, the works produce an enhanced illusory effect, conjuring transmuting units in a potentially endless network. Despite the set dimensions, there is no sense of frame, of beginning or end; lines of color are staggered at the edges of the paper, each negotiating their own moment of entering the pictorial plane and the viewer’s field of vision. Collectively, one watches the wavering, shimmering rows of marker continuously cross the thresholds of the drawing in an infinite scroll of information. Cameron Martin (b. 1970) received his BA in Art and Semiotics from Brown University and continued his studies at the Whitney Independent Study Program. He has exhibited at venues including the Whitney Museum, Saint Louis Art Museum, Columbus Museum of Art, City Gallery (Wellington, New Zealand), and Tel Aviv Museum. His work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum, New York; Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN; and Seattle Art Museum, WA, among others. Martin is a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2010), the Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship (2008), and the Artists at Giverny Fellowship and Residency (2001).

Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is pleased to present Sculptures and their shadows, a solo exhibition of photography and sculpture by Erin Shirreff on view October 29 through December 18, 2021. For the past four years Shirreff has been exploring the sculptural possibilities of photographic printing on aluminum, creating large, informal, collage-like compositions of cut-metal prints arranged in deep-set frames. Her imagery is scanned from books, specifically modern and contemporary art anthologies published forty years ago or more. Here, as in other bodies of work, Shirreff is thinking through object-image translation and how a sense of materiality, our experience of an object, is lost or gained on the printed page. In early examples of this working method, greatly enlarged, monochromatic image fragments faintly suggest plexiglass, wood, or steel through fields of halftone dots. The coloration is subtle, and each work explores a single image. For the works presented here Shirreff reduced the enlargement (the objects pictured are more legible if not identifiable), various images abut and overlap, and, most strikingly, everything is now in vibrant color. The compositions vary. A deep teal green is the backdrop for a seemingly self-standing assemblage in New Moon Construction, Number 10 that resembles Memphis-era design. In Alpha, a vertical band of black and bright orange bisects an ad hoc structure composed of crushed metal, shadow, and empty blue sky. Standing fawn, the largest example on view at more than eight-feet across, takes its title from a 1914 figurative sculpture that combines with mid-century material language to form an ungainly composite animal. In the main exhibition space is Maquette, a large sand-cast bronze sculpture first shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2019. The sculpture derives from an ongoing series of dimensional photographic works Shirreff has made for several years, in which two disparate forms appear connected across the print’s folded center seam. Inspired by documentation of mid-century large-scale graphic abstract sculpture, Shirreff’s photographs feature her own handmade renditions in painted foamcore and card. For Maquette, Shirreff returned to this series, improvising a three-dimensional structure from looking at her collaged, photographic suggestions, creating a sculpture that is composed from a sequence of exceptionally thin angled planes and curves. The sand-cast—a to-scale, one-to-one casting process—carries the tactile qualities of Shirreff’s studio materials: the hand-cut foamcore now rendered in metal with a rich black patina. Ideas of incompletion and unknowability, recurring themes in Shirreff’s work, circulate strongly in Maquette and the two additional sculptures on view. The passage of time and the effects of natural and artificial light are motifs that often animate Shirreff’s work, and are elements intrinsic to making cyanotype photographs, which she has made at different scales on various materials for almost a decade. The cyanotypes exhibited here, hung unframed on the wall, are drawing-like in their simplicity. Each is a photogram created in Shirreff’s studio, using large sheets of material to build and block shadows during three-hour exposures—the most literal expression of the exhibition’s title. Cyanotypes are negatives: white is the shadow of an object and its edges while the blue marks empty space. For these works Shirreff endeavored to invert positive and negative, allowing light to create the illusion of forms and shadows to contour what we see. Erin Shirreff was born in 1975. Recent solo exhibitions include New Work: Erin Shirreff, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA (2019); Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York (2018); and Halves and Wholes, Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2016). A survey exhibition of Shirreff’s sculpture, photography, and video was co-curated by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, NY and the ICA/Boston, MA in 2015-2016. Her work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Centre Pompidou, LACMA, The Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Art, Art Gallery of Ontario, and MCA Chicago, among others. Shirreff’s work is currently on view in a solo exhibition, Erin Shirreff: Remainders at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA, through January 2022; and in On the Basis of Art: 150 Years of Women at Yale at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, CT.

Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is pleased to present a solo exhibition of work by Kara Walker, featuring the narrative film Prince McVeigh and the Turner Blasphemies, and a selection from Book of Hours, a continuing series of works on paper. The exhibition will be on view October 29 through December 18, 2021. Prince McVeigh and the Turner Blasphemies is a 12-minute stop-motion animation that subverts and reframes the visual presentation of modern American mythmaking. Walker’s cut-paper silhouettes reenact several of the most gruesome and infamous acts of white supremacist violence in the country’s recent history, including the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh and the 1998 murder of James Byrd Jr. Inspired by the saturation of white supremacist rhetoric within the mainstream political discourse of the past four years, the film’s creation found prescient relevance during the January 6 insurrection on the US capitol. Prince McVeigh and the Turner Blasphemies is an unflinching interrogation of how radical figures and ideologies ingratiate themselves within the national consciousness. The title references the 1926 feature film The Adventures of Prince Achmed, by the German director and pioneer silhouette animator Lotte Reiniger, and The Turner Diaries, a 1978 fiction novel describing a race war and the eventual mass extermination of all non-white peoples across the world. The Turner Diaries has been noted as one of the most influential texts within contemporary far-right extremist movements and was cited as inspiration by McVeigh himself. The expansive score was composed by Minneapolis-based musician and artist Lady Midnight to encompass a variety of genres. The shifting orchestrations of marching band, ragtime, soul, and rock melodies intensify the narrative’s propulsive, cinematic tone. Walker’s film is a subversive response to the idealized conceptions of nation building and the presumed consistent upward progress of justice; Prince McVeigh and the Turner Blasphemies illustrates how the reverberations of history maintain, reproduce, and amplify systems of oppression and structural violence within the present-day. The ongoing Book of Hours series encompasses several suites of works on paper, with the first produced in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic. The title of the series bears multiple meanings, in reference to the devotional books of the Christian tradition, the near-surreal passage of time amid the pandemic, and the time Walker devoted to the act of drawing itself. In graphite, watercolor, gouache and sumi-e ink, the drawings illuminate the force of entropy of our current moment, and the constant blurring of reality and myth. Yet for Walker, drawing is an act of hope; a dedication of attention, an intimate gesture of making against the constant unmaking of coherency and logic within the world around us. Born in Stockton, California in 1969, Kara Walker was raised in Atlanta, Georgia from the age of 13. She studied at the Atlanta College of Art (BFA, 1991) and the Rhode Island School of Design (MFA, 1994). She is the recipient of many awards, notably the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Achievement Award in 1997 and the United States Artists, Eileen Harris Norton Fellowship in 2008. Walker is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (elected 2012) and American Philosophical Society (elected 2018) and was named an Honorary Royal Academician by the Royal Academy of Arts, London in 2019. She lives and works in New York. Walker’s work is in the collection of prominent museums and public collections throughout the United States and Europe, including the Kunstmuseum Basel’s Kupferstichkabinett (Department of Prints and Drawings); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Tate Gallery, London; the Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI secolo (MAXXI), Rome; and the Deutsche Bank Collection, Frankfurt. Walker was selected by the Tate Modern for the 2019 Hyundai Commission. She responded with a large-scale public sculpture in the form of a four-tiered fountain entitled Fons Americanus. Directly alluding to the Victoria Memorial at Buckingham Palace, Walker’s sculpture stands as a “counter-memorial,” a playful yet incisive subversion of such monuments’ original public function within the context of European imperialist projects.

Marlene McCarty's large-scale drawings of plants, at once poisonous and healing, affirm ways to not only survive but thrive in toxic conditions.

Gibson’s second solo show with the gallery, ALL GOOD FIRES will feature a diverse range of multimedia work, including two new series of paintings and a new video, entitled TO FEEL MYSELF BELOVED ON THE EARTH.

Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is pleased to present River, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Merlin James, on view November 21, 2020 through January 23, 2021. Central to James’ recent work is the artist’s daily, nuanced awareness of the view from his home in Glasgow, looking out to the River Clyde and surrounding environments. These paintings constitute a “familiar remembered image, a cumulative memory,” incorporating all the “inaccuracies or approximations” of his own recollection. Works like Dredge or The Window present very much a specific location, yet a sense of the artificial and the universal is carried through the imaginative scale and coloration. Painting neither directly from life nor from photographs, James draws on impressions and recollections over time to bring to life familiar spaces and the presences that populate them. The physicality of painting remains a central focus. The raw material of canvas is frequently as integral to the complete work as the paint applied upon it. In some paintings James has made incisions to reveal the stretcher bars or contribute to imagery, while other works have semi-transparent surfaces, veiling information beneath. The stretcher (always fashioned by the artist himself) can become a visual, even sculptural feature. Idiosyncratic picture frames are also a frequent feature. While acknowledging poetry and music as touchstones, James insists upon the medium of painting, and the range of genres inherent to it, as a distinct field of art production. Within his visual morphology, abstract shapes transform into landscape motifs, landscape and figure elements combine with still life objects. In these latest works, such complexities of form and convention articulate some of the artist’s most candid statements to date. Writing of French painter Jean Siméon Chardin, he notes: "Personal human narrative is in no way eclipsed by the formal and depictive work and play going on in the painting. It is continuous with them. Pictorial ambiguity and complexity prevents us from seeing the painting merely as a biographical document but, despite or because of that, permits us to entertain as full a human narrative as the picture will sustain." Born in Cardiff, Wales, in 1960, Merlin James studied in London at the Central School of Art and the Royal College of Art. He currently lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland. James’ work has been exhibited widely, including in recent solo shows at A-M-G5, Glasgow, UK (2018); OCT Boxes Museum, Shunde & OCT Art and Design Gallery, Shenzhen (2018); Long Game, CCA Glasgow (2016); Kunstverein Freiburg (2014); Parasol Unit, London; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2013). In 2007 James represented Wales at the 52nd Venice Biennale. He also curates the exhibition space 42 Carlton Place, in Glasgow.

Appointment required. Book online on gallery website. Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is pleased to present Morning, a solo exhibition of new work by Louis Fratino, on view October 9 through November 14. This will be Fratino’s second solo show with the gallery. Louis Fratino makes paintings and drawings from specific memory and art historical references. Fratino synthesizes visual languages sampled from antiquity to modernism to describe the contemporary body, landscape, and interior spaces. New paintings of still lifes and interiors explore the tonal and emotionally evocative qualities of morning light, and the quotidian routines associated with that time of day. Searching for a sense of queerness in the gestures of everyday life, Fratino considers the nuanced interactions of light with form, space, and surface as potential realms for discovery. Influenced by the writings of Italian poet Sandro Penna and works by artists Filippo de Pisis and Marsden Hartley, Fratino looks for an essential queerness that lies parallel to the body, extending outward into a more complete world. Born in 1993, in Annapolis, MD, Louis Fratino received his BFA in Painting with concentration in Illustration from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD in 2015. He is a recipient of a Fulbright Research Fellowship in Painting, Berlin (2015-16) and a Yale Norfolk Painting Fellowship, Norfolk, CT in 2014. Fratino lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. The artist's first institutional solo exhibition, curated by Jared Ledesma, will open at the Des Moines Art Center in November 2021.

Information has been encoded in patterns and lines throughout human history, whether in print media, through video, or on a weaving loom. —Wesley Miller (in response to video artist Beryl Korot) Some groups carry the sum of groups which in turn carry the sum of other groups. —Herbert R. Harvey and Barbara J. Williams (Native American Mathematics, 1986) ¿Quién sabe sino que, en las frecuencias más bajas, hablo por ti? —Ralph Ellison, (El hombre invisible, 1952) Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is pleased to present on the lower frequencies I speak 4U (alquimia sagrada), a solo exhibition of work by william cordova on view January 23 through February 29, 2020. For the artist’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery, cordova has developed a multi-media installation seeking to explore “the juxtaposition of past structures to more contemporary structures that illuminate the ephemeral nature of our existence, as beings who create material culture as a means of documentation and memory.” [1 Monique Moss (Choreographer/Artistic Director Third Eye Theater)] The exhibition incorporates large-scale drawing collages, photography, and sculpture into an environment that reflects on abstract forms rooted in sacred geometries, while also drawing from historical moments and monuments of resistance. Two large scale sculptures, untitled (RMLZ), and untitled (palenque), reference both Brutalist and pre-Columbian architecture, specifically the temple-Citadel sites at Sacsayhuaman and Ollantaytambo. Incorporating the architectural motifs found at these sites, such as zigzags and grids, cordova’s sculptures thread an ephemeral repository, meditating on the concepts of image encoding from biological, natural, galactic, and cultural sources. The sculptures disrupt the formal structure of the gallery, creating alternative perceptions of space and time. “Data is only meaningful when viewed within the context of its logical structure.” —Marcia Ascher (Mathematical Idea of the Incas, 1986) In his series rumi maki, william cordova takes on an ethnographic approach in addressing shared symbolism found in textile data encoding and architectural design. Named after the ancient Andean martial arts, rumi maki consists of multi-colored collages on paper, constructed from vivid layers of recycled paint chips. The arrangement of colors and patterns carry latent meanings, dependent on geography, culture, and the readings of celestial bodies. As cosmological maps, the collages synthesize the sacred geometries of architecture with the visual narratives of historical civilizations. Its form also recalls pioneering early video installation artist Beryl Korot, and her contributions to the 1970s video journal Radical Software. ogun (el siglo de silencio) sees the artist return to large-scale collage on paper after several years focused on site-specific installations and smaller-scaled work. This work introduces viewers to a new series titled el quinto suyo (the fifth suyo), collages culled from reclaimed paint chip samples and recycled cardboard pigmented with old discarded oil stick paint. Literary references permeate cordova’s collages; texts such as El Siglo de Las Luces by Alejo Carpentier, El Monte by Lydia Cabrera and Decimas by Nicomedes Santa Cruz point to his ongoing interest in the distribution of power, spirituality, and labyrinths of perception. The exhibition also features the artist’s first published edition, consisting of prints, audio and sculptures, commissioned by the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies at Columbia University. The title quotes the final phrase in Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel, Invisible Man, as the protagonist prepares to return to society following a transformative period. Inspired by cordova’s own return to Harlem in 2019, the edition highlights interconnected systems of spiritual and cultural exchange that transpired between Harlem and Latin America throughout the twentieth century. William Cordova was born in Lima, Peru in 1969 and moved to Miami, Florida at an early age. He graduated with a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1996 and went on to earn an MFA from Yale University in 2004. He has participated in numerous artist residencies including Artpace, San Antonio, TX; The Core program, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; The Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA; The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, Maine; and American Academy in Berlin, Germany. Cordova’s first major survey exhibition, now’s the time: narratives of southern alchemy, was presented at the Perez Art Museum; Miami, FL in 2018. Group shows include Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; 13th Havana Biennial, Cuba; and In Plain Sight at Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle, WA (2019). Forthcoming exhibitions include individual exhibitions at Galerie Florian Schonfelder. Berlin, Germany, and Livia Benavides 80M2, Lima, Peru (2020). His work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Yale University, New Haven, CT; Museo de Arte de Lima, Peru; Ellipse Foundation, Cascais, Portugal; Museum of Contemporary Art, Perez Art Museum, Miami, FL; NSU Museum, Fort Lauderdale, FL; and La Casa de las Americas, Havana, Cuba, among others.

Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is pleased to present As the Ground Turns Solid, a solo exhibition of new work by Zipora Fried on view November 21, 2019 through January 18, 2020. This will be Fried’s inaugural solo exhibition at the gallery. Working across sculpture, photography, and drawing, Fried’s oeuvre explores the potential of color and form to transcend language and express the nuances of the human experience. The subconscious remains a focal point of interest for Fried, as the formal conditions of object and image become deconstructed and reinterpreted through their symbolic connections to one another. Every gesture of the artist’s hand, in shape and form, signifies a distinct moment in the phenomenological experience of Fried’s work. The new works featured in this exhibition are the result of Fried’s lengthy stay on Lamu Island, in the Lamu Archipelago of Kenya. Founded in the fourteenth century, Lamu is the most preserved Swahili settlement in East Africa. Fried’s series of drawings synthesizes the multi-textural conditions of human and natural life, as experienced during her residency on the island. Fried’s series of pencil drawings drew inspiration from the vivid flora and fauna of Lamu Island. Hues of blue, green and gold meld into one another, recalling the artist’s own visions of Lamu Island, of “sky and mud colored lizards, soft-toned cicada shells, sunsets echoing exploding worlds […] the yearning breath of the tide syncopating melodically with the infinite characteristics of the sand.” Composed of meticulously patterned lines, the act of drawing each individual stroke mediates a delicate balance between the composure of ritual and the inconsistency in reiteration. Each mark thus becomes subsumed within a larger color field, as the rational functionality of line and form are deconstructed and transformed into a unique sensorial experience. Zipora Fried (b. Haifa, Israel) studied at the Academy of Applied Arts, Vienna. Recent exhibitions include Late October at On Stellar Rays, New York (2016); Zipora Fried at Marfa Contemporary, Marfa, TX (2015); and Good Night, Mister Procustes at Galerie Steinek, Vienna (2014). Her work is included in public collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY; The Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria; and the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA. She currently lives and works in New York.