EXPO CHICAGO | Booth 323 | 7 - 10 April 2022

VIP preview: Thursday 7 April 2022

Public days: 8 - 10 April 2022

For EXPO CHICAGO 2022, Hales presents a selection of outstanding works by US based artists Anthony Cudahy, Andrea Geyer, Virginia Jaramillo, Daniel LaRue Johnson, LJ Roberts, Maja Ruznic and Kay WalkingStick.

Anthony Cudahy (b.1989 Fort Meyers, FL, USA), recognised as an important emerging talent in American painting, is known for his beautifully tender works which speak to human experience and the history of narrative painting. Cudahy explores themes of queer identity, recontextualizing the past to address the present. In new works made for the fair, he continues to masterfully construct compositions, creating a world for unspoken stories, intimate moments and romantic gesture. There is a presence of narrative possibility playing out within and beyond Cudahy's painted surfaces. In 2021, his work, Anti-bausor tree (protected sleepers, wolf's-bane and spider around) (2020) was acquired by the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami.

Andrea Geyer (b.1971 Freiburg, Germany) works across multiple media, incorporating text, photography, painting, sculpture, video and performance. This presentation features a piece from Geyer's series of photographic collages, Constellations, 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 were included in the exhibition Kindred Solidarities: Queer Community and Chosen Families at The 8th Floor, Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation (2021 - 22), and The Rest of History at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art in 2019. Geyer's work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NY, USA; the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, USA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA, USA and many more.

Virginia Jaramillo (b.1939 El Paso, TX, USA) has forged a unique voice, exploring abstraction through extensive experimentation with material, concept and form. Since the 1960s, Jaramillo's work has preserved a process of thinking about 'being' and a questioning of what upholds meaning in life. For EXPO CHICAGO, Hales will debut an exquisite suite of seven prints by Jaramillo. This special 2022 edition honors collages made in an unearthed sketchbook from 1969. These rich, formal works of bold color and line are the initial studies for her infamous Curvelinear series. In 2021, Jaramillo was included in Women in Abstraction at the Pompidou Centre, Paris, France; Guggenheim, Bilbao, Spain and had a solo exhibition at the Parrish Museum, NY. Jaramillo's work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Brooklyn Museum, NY; Guggenheim Museum, NY, and many more.

Daniel LaRue Johnson (b. 1938, Los Angeles, CA - d. 2017, New York, USA) was a pioneering American artist known for his varied practice encompassing Hard Edge painting, Minimalist sculpture, and public works. He developed his own concepts of using planes of colour to create depth, space and meaning. The sculpture from 1969 displays his unique style - friend and artist, Frank Bowling stated in 1969: 'Johnson's instinctive understanding of the linear aspects of certain African sculptures locked in an intense marriage with current "striped paintings" are a rebirth completely fresh and triumphant.' Johnson's work is in many prestigious public collections, including Museum of Modern Art, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; California African American Museum; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum, NY.

LJ Roberts (b.1980 Royal Oak, MI, USA) is known for their practice in textiles, installations and embroideries. Their work investigates overlaps of queer and trans politics, activism, protest and craft. Censorship Protest Mask (David Wojnarowicz) (2011) is a detailed embroidery, made in response to one of Wojnarowicz's most striking images depicting the enforcement of silence when speaking about HIV in the late 1980s. This image was then used as an emblem in another act of protest - protesting the Smithsonian's censorship of Wojnarowicz's video "A Fire in my Belly" in 2010. Roberts's first solo exhibition in New York City, Carry You With Me: Ten Years of Portraits opened in 2021, accompanied by their first publication. As part of EXPO CHICAGO programming, Roberts will be speaking on a panel entitled Textile Artists Now, moderated by Michelle Millar Fisher of Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Friday April 8 at 4pm.

Maja Ruznic (b. 1983 Bosnia & Hercegovina) is known for lyrical paintings which seamlessly coalesce figures with their environments. She draws on personal and collective memories to create paintings that deeply connect with human psyche. Ruznic left Bosnia & Hercegovina when the war started in 1992, living in refugee camps in Austria until migrating to California in 1995. She 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. In a new diptych, Mother Spider I & II (2022),Ruznic continues to play with ambiguity. The paintings lie on the threshold of form, which she compares to a thought or a feeling that precedes language. In 2021, Ruznic had her debut institutional show In the Silver of the Sun at The Harwood Museum of Art, Rosewell, NM. Her work was recently acquired by Portland Museum of Art, ME, and EMMA - Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Finland.

Kay WalkingStick (b. 1935 Syracuse, NY, USA) has Anglo and Cherokee heritage, and she draws on her experience as well as modernist traditions to create works that connect the immediacy of the physical world with the spiritual. Her landscapes reflect a balance between memory and lived experience, subtly evoking her personal history. Salt River Canyon I (2016) depicts a sublime vista, overlaid with traditional Native American designs. In Wallowa Mountains Winter Memory, WalkingStick employs the diptych as a tool, to combine representational and abstract imagery. WalkingStick's work is featured in many institutional collections across the US, including Smithsonian, Washington DC, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY. In 2021 she was featured in Epic Abstraction at the Metropolitan Museum and US touring exhibition In American Waters, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA; Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, AR.