The Armory Show 2017 | Pier 92 Booth 403: Frank Bowling | Hew Locke | Thomas J Price | Virginia Jaramillo
Hales Gallery is proud to announce its return to The Armory Show in New York for the fair’s 2017 edition. In a timely celebration of the diverse perspectives represented in the global artistic community, the presentation traces four decades of artists exploring the complexity of our collective cultural heritage and will showcase a selection of significant works by Frank Bowling, Virginia Jaramillo, Hew Locke and Thomas J Price.
Frank Bowling’s spectacular sculptural relief paintings from the 1980s simultaneously evoke the British masters of landscape painting and the riverine geography of Bowling’s childhood Guyana. They represent a crucial development in the legendary abstract painter’s career as he began experimenting with new materials and processes, culminating in his seminal 1986 exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London. The evocative canvases, which will make their fair debut in this presentation, constitute a prominent chapter in Bowling’s forthcoming major survey exhibition at the Haus der Kunst, Munich.
Virginia Jaramillo’s meticulously formed abstract pulp paintings draw on a rich variety of sources spanning history and crossing cultures, from pre-Hispanic civilisation to classical geometry. Made from natural linen fibres and hand-ground earth pigments brilliantly express the artist’s unique creative vision, a materially engaged exploration of sensory experience, geometric structures and human perception. Untitled (1984), a remarkable early example of Jaramillo’s work with paper-making, will be showcased in the Brooklyn Museum’s major exhibition We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women 1965–85 at Brooklyn Museum, New York.
Hew Locke’s iconic Happy Queen (2003), from his powerfully ambivalent series of cardboard portraits of traditional symbols of colonial authority (‘House of Windsor’), will be presented for the first time since its debut at the Luckman Gallery, Los Angeles in 2004. The series recalls memories from Lock’s childhood in Guyana, which was filled with portraits of the Queen. The work extends Locke’s remarkable use of cardboard for the building of extraordinary artworks, such as the monumental sculpture Hemmed in Two (2002) recently acquired by Pérez Art Museum Miami.
Thomas J Price’s luxurious gold-plated heads, created using innovative 3D modelling techniques, develop the artist’s ongoing exploration of 21st-century social identity. His fictional portraits amalgamate a range of sources, from classical sculpture to observed individuals in London’s British Caribbean communities. Playing with process and presentation, bringing together the conventions of classically crafted sculpture and contemporary technologies and characters, Price subtly subverts the viewer’s expectations. This presentation debuts these exciting new works.
Hales Gallery
Pier 92 Booth 403
711 12th Avenue,
New York, 10019
Public hours: 2-5 March 2017, 12-8 pm