The Armory Show | Booth 313 | 9 - 12 September 2021

Hales at The Armory Show

Anthony Cudahy, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Andrea Geyer, John Hoyland, Virginia Jaramillo, Ebony G. Patterson, Maja Ruznic, Kay WalkingStick
Booth 313, Javits Center, 429 11th Avenue, New York, NY 10001

Thursday, 9 September, VIP Preview (invitation only)
Friday, 10 September, 12–8pm
Saturday, 11 September, 12–8pm
Sunday, 12 September, 12–7pm

Hales is delighted to be returning to The Armory Show for the fair’s 2021 edition, with works by Anthony Cudahy, Andrea Geyer, John Hoyland, Virginia Jaramillo, Rotimi Fani Kayode, Ebony G. Patterson, Maja Ruznic and Kay WalkingStick. The presentation reflects the gallery’s roster, programming and vision in historic and contemporary works that are powerful in concept and form.

Anthony Cudahy (b.1989 Florida, USA) is a painter whose tender scenes reveal the nuanced complexities of life. In masterful compositions he creates a world for unspoken stories, intimate moments and romantic gesture. Personal and poetic, Cudahy’s figures coalesce with the atmosphere of their environments in fluid brushstrokes. Cudahy intuitively combines motifs with personal imagery to create a complex compositional puzzle. Bringing the past into the present, the sensitive works re-visit and expand on original references. This year he has been included in FLAG Art Foundation’s group exhibition, and I will wear you in my heart of heart and Equal Affections at GRIMM Amsterdam.

Andrea Geyer (b.1971 Freiburg, Germany) work ranges across multiple media, incorporating text, photography, painting, sculpture, video and performance. Her practice explores the complex politics of time, in the context of specific social and political situations, cultural institutions and historical events. From her early investigations into urban environments, cultural landscapes and notions of citizenship to more recent research into women’s contributions to modernism, Geyer’s work continuously seeks to create spaces of critical, collective reflection on the construction of histories and ideas that are otherwise marginalised or obscured. Geyer was recently featured in New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21^st Century at University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. In 2019 Geyer’s most substantive monograph was published, Dance in a Future with All Present.

John Hoyland (b.1934 Sheffield, UK – d.2011 London, UK) was one of the most inventive and dynamic abstract painters of the post-war period. Over the span of more than a half-century his art and attitudes constantly evolved. A distinctive artistic personality emerged, concerned with colour, painterly drama, with both excess and control, with grandeur and above all, with the vehement communication of feeling. 7.11.66 is an early work, exemplary of his color-stained canvases of the 1960s, which were titled solely with the date of their completion. Works from this period were exhibited in his first solo museum show at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1967; his defining retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery (1979–80); and his solo exhibition at Newport Street Gallery (2015-2016).

Virginia Jaramillo (b.1939 El Paso, TX, USA) has forged a unique voice, exploring painting through extensive experimentation with material, process and form. Jaramillo’s work preserves a process of thinking about being and a questioning of what upholds meaning in life. In her ongoing investigations, Jaramillo looks to ancient cultures to discover what unifies us – drawing upon architecture and artefacts to see how past societies lived and believed. In abstract works, Jaramillo uniquely reveals these traces of humanity. Hales is proud to present a new painting by the artist, Shaman’s Dream (2021). In 2020, Jaramillo had a solo exhibition at The Menil Collection, TX, USA. This year she is included in the blockbuster group exhibition Women in Abstraction at the Pompidou Centre, Paris, France which tours to Guggenheim, Bilbao. Jaramillo has also been included in recent blockbuster touring shows We Wanted A Revolution: Black Radical Women and Tate’s Soul of a Nation.

Rotimi Fani Kayode (b. 1955 Lagos, Nigeria – d. 1989 London, UK) is a highly influential figure in the history of art who, despite a tragically brief career, produced a complex body of photographic work that explored themes of race, sexuality, spirituality, and the self. The works featured here are meticulously crafted portraits made in the final years of Fani-Kayode’s life. The chromatic works show a refinement of technique and mark a coalescing of ideas and sensibilities. Fani-Kayode had developed an exceptional aesthetic approach that embraced a constructed mise-en-scène dense with references to Yoruba cosmology. His work was featured in the major exhibition, Masculinities: Liberation through Photography, at the Barbican Centre, London, UK (2020) which toured to The Recontres d’Arles, France (2021). In 2019, Fani-Kayode’s work was included in group exhibitions, Artist and Society: Intimacy, Activism and AIDS, Tate Modern, UK; Walkthrough British Art: Sixty Years, Tate Britain, UK; and Implicit Tensions: Mapplethorpe Now, Guggenheim Museum, USA.

Ebony G. Patterson’s (b. 1981 Kingston, Jamaica) multilayered practice – in sculpture, installation, performance, and video – uses beauty as a tool. She employs opulent, hand-embellished surfaces and brightly colored patterns to seduce the viewer into bearing witness to the violence and social injustices imposed upon the invisible and the voiceless. Her works command the viewer to look past the façade– of their rich formal characteristics, of the fabricated fantasies increasingly traded in our consumer and social media-centric culture– and to acknowledge the realities of those not touched by the glitter and gold. Her most recent solo exhibitions include ...when the cuts erupt...the garden rings...and the warning is a wailing... at CAM St. Louis (2020-21) which toured to the San Jose ICA (2021) and …for those who come to bear/bare witness… at Kunsthal Aarhus, Denmark (2020-21), and she is included in the Athens and Liverpool Biennials (2021).

Maja Ruznic (b. 1983 Bosnia & Hercegovina) deftly weaves themes of trauma and suffering with mythology and healing, softening the darker subject matter in her work. This softening is then applied to the process of painting – scumbling, blurring and allowing shapes to bleed into one another – symbolically destabilizing borders. Playing with ambiguity, her paintings lie on the threshold of form, which Ruznic compares to a thought or a feeling that precedes language. In 2020 Ruznic was featured in the group show, The Moon Seemed Lost, at Hales New York and was the subject of a solo exhibition at Hales London. In 2021, Ruznic had her debut institutional show In the Silver of the Sun at The Harwood Museum of Art, Rosewell, NM, USA. Later this year her work is included in the group exhibition, Hi Woman! at the Museo di Palazzo Prato, Italy.

Kay WalkingStick (b. 1935 Syracuse, NY) has for over six decades explored the American Landscape and its metaphorical significances to Native Americans and people across the world. WalkingStick has Anglo and Cherokee heritage, and she draws on the Native American experience as well as painterly traditions to create works that connect the immediacy of the physical world with the spiritual. Attempting to unify the present with history, her complex works hold tension between representational and abstract imagery. The paintings represent a knowledge of the earth and its sacred quality. In 2021 WalkingStick was featured in the group exhibition, In American Waters at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA which tours to Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, AR later this year, as well as Powerful Women at the Eiteljorg Museum, IN, USA.