The Armory Show 2019 | Booth 914 | 7 - 10 March 2019

Hales at The Armory Show

Omar Ba, Frank Bowling, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Andrea Geyer and Virginia Jaramillo

Booth 914, Pier 94, New York, NY

Wednesday, March 6, VIP Preview

Thursday, March 7, 12pm — 8pm

Friday, March 8, 12pm — 8pm

Saturday, March 9, 12pm — 7pm

Sunday, March 10, 12pm — 6pm

Hales is delighted to announce its return to The Armory Show for the fair’s 2019 edition, with an international presentation of five artists, whose work reflects the vision of the gallery’s programme. Frank Bowling, Andrea Geyer, Virginia Jaramillo, Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Omar Ba explore pertinent questions of identity, otherness and aesthetics through powerful expressions of material, process and colour.

Ahead of Frank Bowling’s retrospective at Tate Britain, opening 31 May 2019, two extraordinary works by the legendary British abstract painter are featured on Hales’ booth at The Armory Show. These recent works reflect the artist’s ongoing commitment to abstraction and his ability to continuously challenge the medium. Now in his 80s, Bowling has not ceased to explore the nature and possibilities of paint and still experiments with a diverse selection of formal devices and processes, ranging from stitched canvas frames, to mixed media collage and poured paint. In recent years, Bowling has produced some of the most exciting and challenging compositions of his career, as he continues to orchestrate the emotive potential of colours to communicate a visual experience of uniquely sensuous immediacy.

In Andrea Geyer’s work, material and form express the artist’s engaged exploration into the complex politics of time in specific cultural contexts. This presentation highlights her ongoing investigation into women-identified philanthropists, collectors, museum directors, artists, poets, political and social visionaries, and activists who have actively shaped today’s cultural landscape and contemporary museums. Included are works from Geyer’s series of photographic collages, Constellations (2017-18), which consist of reimagined portraits that depict influential women who significantly impacted the culture and politics of their time. The portraits are exemplary of Geyer’s practice, which continuously seeks to create spaces of critical, collective reflection on the construction of histories and ideas that are otherwise marginalised or obscured. Works from the Constellation series will be included in the exhibition The Rest of History, opening at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art on 23 March 2019.

Over a career spanning nearly six decades, American artist Virginia Jaramillo has explored abstraction through extensive experimentation with material, process, and form. The artist’s approach to abstraction has been informed both by her early interest in archaeology, science fiction, and cultural mythologies. In Site: No. 15 13.5099° S, 71.9817° W (2018), Jaramillo breaks away from the smooth surfaces created in her works from the 1970s, instead favouring a diverse brushstroke technique to build rich, varied textural surfaces which distinguish fractured and fragmented forms. In her recent paintings, Jaramillo focuses in on the intricacies of the structures left behind by ancient cultures: an in-depth study into the physical and spiritual life of ruins. The site of inspiration for this work is Sacsayhuamán, a citadel on the northern outskirts of the city of Cusco, Peru, the historic capital of the Inca Empire.

At the core of Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s art is an important emphasis on difference and otherness. His black and white photographs present an intimate look at his subjects, primarily black men, whose postures and interactions with objects play between the hidden and the visible. Exploring themes of race, sexuality, spirituality and the self, the photographs are infused with a powerful subjectivity that distinguishes them from the sensationalist images of many of his predecessors and contemporaries. A selection of Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s photographs are currently on display at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London, in Grace Wales Bonner’s: A Time for New Dreams, and will be featured in a major exhibition Implicit Tensions: Mapplethorpe Now at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, from 24 July 2019.

Omar Ba lives and works in both Dakar, Senegal and Geneva, Switzerland, drawing on past memories and present experiences of both cultures to create both a deeply personal and politically resonant practice; making works that he suggests tell the stories and weave a thread between African and European culture. His paintings fuse figurative and decorative modes, combining a masterful use of oil, gouache and crayon and delicately applied china ink with rough, readymade surfaces such as corrugated cardboard. The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto, Canada, is currently presenting Omar Ba’s first institutional solo exhibition.