130 ORCHARD STREET
NEW YORK, NY, 10002
Light of Winter brings together international, established and emerging artists that shed light on societal constructs of self, offering new interpretations. Through exploration into our relationship with the natural world, cultural histories, and processes of introspection, the artworks on view invite us to contemplate our own place within an ever-changing ecosystem. Art can be seen as the conduit not only to reflect on our current times but to offer hope for the future.
Jean-Marie Appriou’s sculpted figure is caught between human and animal bodies. The walking thunderbolt shaman pulls inspiration from a Faroe Island folktale which states that seals were former human beings who voluntarily sought death in the ocean, and, once per year are allowed to come on land. His work often draws from mythology and science fiction to imagine worlds inhabited by human, animal and vegetal figures. Deeply dreamlike, Appriou’s material universe is imbued with telluric concerns approached from an original perspective: that of the legendary. Horses, snakes, locusts, sharks and seahorses compose a bestiary charged with powerful symbolism. They evolve in a dream realm, a marvelous natural world that becomes a theater of striking characters. The transition between elements—from the aquatic to the aerial, from the underground to the terrestrial—is one of the central themes of the artist's work.
Daniel Arsham’s uchronic aesthetics revolves around his concept of fictional archaeology. Working in sculpture, architecture, drawing and film, he creates and crystallizes ambiguous in-between spaces or situations, and further stages what he refers to as future relics of the present. They are eroded casts of modern artifacts and contemporary human figures, which he expertly makes out of some geological material such as sand, selenite or volcanic ash for them to appear as if they had just been unearthed after being buried for ages. Always iconic, most of the objects that he turns into stone refer to the late 20th century or millennial era, when technological obsolescence unprecedentedly accelerated along with the digital dematerialization of our world. While the present, the future and the past poetically collide in his haunted yet playful visions between romanticism and pop art, Daniel Arsham also experiments with the timelessness of certain symbols and gestures across cultures.
Lee Bae’s monochromatic practice is a formal and immersive journey into the abysses of blackness. Subtly blurring the lines between drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation, he has developed his abstract aesthetics across categories to imbue the noncolor with tangible depth and intensity. Charcoal, obtained by burning wood and used to revive fire, offers a powerful metaphor for the cycle of life that has further inspired him to expand his exploration to include the fourth dimension of time. Until the early-2000s, he worked exclusively with raw charcoal to create minimal, refined, mosaic-like assemblages of charred wooden shards or chunks on canvas, as well as larger sculptural arrangements of carbonized trunks. While he has moved on to solely working with carbon black, a substance close to soot, Lee Bae’s latest series of pictorial works crystallizes random elemental gestures, which he practices with charcoal ink on canvas and paper, recording his movement and time. The work on view, Issu du feu-26cd, at first appears as a flat surface, however, upon closer inspection, the work’s depth is revealed as light shimmers off the distinct grooves of each charcoal fragment.
Roman Cochet is a New York-based artist whose work examines the fragile, contingent nature of human existence and the temporal uncertainty of life. Through painting, drawing, and sculpture, he imagines post-human landscapes where traces of humanity linger amid fragmented environments. His evocative canvases depict abandoned objects, somnolent animals, and untamed vegetation, revealing a world shaped by the erosion of time. Cochet’s layered approach of stripping, concealing, and revealing allows hybrid forms to emerge, intertwining past and present, human and non-human.
Jean-Philippe Delhomme continues the history of representation with a classic approach of landscape painting, still life and portraiture. His series of three paintings follow the pensive reading of a book by Henri Matisse. Each work is derived from keen observation over a one-time painting session, capturing the fleeting moment of a still life or temporary presence of his model. The reflective and solitary experience of painting the real has slowly imposed its rhythm and implacability over the social commentary on style and culture. The artist retains his spark of social observer but applies it obliquely to other cultural constructs, when he frames a cityscape, arranges books and cultural artifacts next to vases of flowers and composes sequences of images that read like paragraphs of an ongoing investigation of the visible.
Merging pointillism and abstraction in her paintings, Cairo Dwek plays with notions of scale, repetition, and rhythm. Her idyllic scenes are intimate interpretations of the abstract and grandiose. Recent paintings focus on astrological phenomena and notions of the sublime, where waves, lights or horizons function as metaphors for temporality and fleeting existence.
Julia von Eichel has challenged existing modes of technique in every phase of her career. She considers herself a sculptor, even when working in two dimensions—the manipulation of material, with the aim of expressing inner turmoil, manifests itself at times in tangles of string, structures of silk and snapped dowels, or planes of oil paint etched with a razor. Her hands are her preferred tools: sewing, burnishing, tying, or sliding color as if it were an object, not just a hue. A constant in her decades of exploration has been the tension between the many emotions that battle one another under the surface of existence, the barely contained and unsayable contradictions at the heart of being human. Her current work, part sorrow in their somber tones and part joy in their bursts of bright colors, are her answers to all the frustration, pain, catharsis and connection of the past few years.
Michael Flomen began taking photographs in the late ’60s, and has been showing his work on several continents since 1972. He has been a darkroom printer and collaborator for many artists including for Jacques Henri Lartigue’s traveling exhibition in Canada and the United States in the mid ’70s. Flomen’s first book of “street photographs,” which followed the Cartier-Bresson formalism of photographic picture making, was published in 1980, followed by Still Life Draped Stone in 1985. Flomen switched camera formats in the early ’90s, photographing snow and producing works under the title RISING. For the last 25 years, this self-taught artist has used camera-less techniques to collaborate with nature. Various forms of water, firefly light, wind, and other natural phenomena are the inspiration for his picture making.
Charles Hascoët is an artist who lives and works between New York City and Paris. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Paris, and graduated in 2014. Of his student years, and along with his teachers (J.Rielly or J.Michel Alberola among them), he had the occasion to continue and deepen his favourite medium, painting. Hascoët draws from art historical tropes, iconic films, and childhood memories to paint nostalgic scenes that exist between reality and imagination. The artist fuses discordant symbols into domestic sill lifes, romantic portraits, and dreamlike landscapes to create fantastical narratives. Hascoet’s tableaux pay homage to reclining figures of master French painters, like Gustave Courbet and Eugène Delacroix, while also incorporating an auto-biographical dimension as the artist inserts himself into these often peculiar worlds. By combining art-historical tropes with personal iconography, Hascoët invites us to join the process of self-discovery as he uncovers various parts of himself, as well as our collective histories.
Thilo Heinzmann, born in Berlin in 1969, attended Städelschule in Frankfurt from the early 1990s in the class of Thomas Bayrle. During that time he also assisted Martin Kippenberger. A significant voice in a generation of German painters scrutinizing the medium and its history, his inventive, precise works are driven by an inquiry into what painting can be today. Using chipboard, styrofoam, nail polish, resin, parchment, leather, pigment, fur, cotton wool, porcelain, aluminum and hessian, Heinzmann has for the last thirty years worked on developing new paths and an unique visual language in his practice. He is interested in the presence that each work creates, which is further enhanced by his paintings’ powerful tactile qualities. It invites the viewer to notions on some essentials: composition, surface, form, color, light, texture, and time. In 2018 he was appointed professor of painting at Universität der Künste in Berlin.
Soren Hope was born on Long Island, NY, and holds a BA in Studio Art from Carleton College (2015). Hope’s practice focuses on the body as a site of uncertainty. With oil paint on stretched canvas and paneI, their work depicts images of bodily disarray or interruption. Imagery of costumes, pranks, double meanings, and incidental resemblances further test the trustworthiness of perception. The artist exhibited their first solo show at Duck Creek Arts Center in Springs, New York in September 2018. In Keyhole, Hope delineates a surreal understanding of human topography, with disparate limbs and torsos melting into each other.
Melding abstraction and figuration, London-born Alexander James’ paintings utilize a complex visual language that pulls together seemingly disparate context, and is transcended into an imagined, ethereal space. His practice began with photography, which has now evolved into a passion for painting as well. His paintings take inspiration from his own memories, and his grandfather’s history, having left Russia and Poland during the Second World War to move to London; as well as historic sculptures from the British Museum.
New York-based Rashid Johnson explores cultural identity and personal narratives through his dynamic multidisciplinary practice. In the main space of our exhibition, his wall-based sculpture functions as a working microphone that is performative in nature, enhancing the sounds of its environment. Through the integration of materials like shea butter, ceramic and mirror tiles, and black soap, his mosaics become vessels for larger cultural associations related to race, class, and social immersion. Johnson’s work facilitates conversation on what it means to inhabit physical space as a person of color, exploring concepts of history and self.
In contrast to Appriou’s fantastical depiction, Izumi Kato’s sculpture, nearby, resembles ancient stone. Inhabiting a liminal space between physical and spiritual realms, Kato’s boldly colored embryonic figure possesses a unique strangeness that embodies a universal, primal form of humanity. Their elementary representation, an oval head with two big, fathomless eyes, depicts no more than a crudely figured nose and mouth. Bringing to mind primitive arts, their expressions evoke totems and the animist belief that a spiritual force runs through living and mineral worlds alike, these magical beings inviting viewers to recognize themselves.
In a similar collaging of stories, with vastly different application, Claire Lehmann’s paintings result from an inquiry into the contents of the image world’s unconscious. Pulling from various technical, vernacular, and art-historical source materials, the artist creates images that invoke the spells of technology and the transience of flesh. Her paintings possess an uncanny realism that is both melancholic and optimistic, urging reflection on the distorted mirrors of our current reality.
Shim Moon-Seup, the pioneer of modern sculpture in Korea, utilizes ‘nature’ and ‘temporality’ as the core element of his works and continuously strives to pursue the quest for how to perceive and express his themes with the infinite possibilities of arts beyond the standardized genres and media. Being recognized overseas as well, he received France Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Grade Chevalier) in 2007 and the Excellence Award from the 2nd Henry Moore Grand Prize Exhibition in 1981.
Keisho Okayama was born in 1934 in Osaka, Japan. The son of a Buddhist priest, he moved with his family to Northern California in 1936. During World War II, Okayama’s family was incarcerated at Tanforan Assembly Center in San Bruno, California, and Topaz Relocation Center in Central Utah as a result of Executive Order 9066 authorizing the forced removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. After the war, Okayama served in the US Army and studied art at UCLA and Los Angeles City College. His late abstract paintings are executed on unstretched and machine-washed canvas, a process resulting in the works’ unique surface textures. Though little-exhibited during his lifetime, Okayama’s abstract paintings possess a sophisticated and sensitive layering of color, and his work is now the subject of renewed attention by curators and art historians. In 2025 his paintings will be featured in the exhibition Solace in Painting: Reflecting on a Tumultuous Century at the University of Texas at Arlington. Okayama died in 2018 in Los Angeles.
Hanging in the center of the room, Jean-Michel Othoniel's signature strands of glass and steel beads ornament the space. His enchanting sculptures, monumental yet delicate, use refraction and reflection to evoke the complexity of human nature. The work is part of his series titled Noeuds Sauvages, a collaboration spanning more than 10 years with mathematician Aubin Arroyo, who introduced him to his theories of knots and reflections.
Anna Plesset’s trompe l’oeil painting is part of a larger series of works that reframe the history of the Hudson River School to give value and visibility to the many women who were affiliated with this iconic 19th-century movement but who have been largely omitted from the canon. Plesset, who is known for work that interrogates the processes that create historical narratives, creates a to-scale reproduction of an 1854 painting by the American landscapist Abigail Tyler Oakes. However, in Plesset’s hands, the “copy” is in-progress and being painted from what appears to be a printed screenshot of a Google search result for the original work. Rendered in a staggering trompe l’oeil technique, this “source material,” framed within the larger unfinished copy, makes visible the ongoing work of historical recovery.
Hayal Pozanti’s paintings act as abstract representations of nature and the subconscious. Reflecting on humankind’s growing reliance on technology, her work investigates how concern for our environment is often omitted from contemporary lifestyle. Inspired by nature’s beauty, Pozanti’s soft forms are reminiscent of biological life which carry the most earnest truths about reality.
The alienation of the physical body can be a form of escapism, which Moroccan artist Youssra Raouchi elucidates in her work. A graduate of the National Institute of Fine Arts in Tetouan, Morocco, she explores the dissolution of dichotomies in her multi-disciplinary practice. In her surreal scenes, figures melt into their surroundings. Playing with both human and ecological forms, she rejects binaries and blurs the boundaries between internal and external, animal and human, domestic and wild.
Gabriel Rico’s work is characterized by the interrelation of seemingly disparate objects. A self-proclaimed “ontologist with a heuristic methodology,” Rico pairs found, collected, and manufactured materials to create sculptures that invite viewers to reflect on the relationship between humans and our natural environment. He frequently uses neon, taxidermy, ceramics, branches, and more personal pieces of his past to create an equation or formulation, achieving a precise geometry despite the organic, roughly hewn character of his materials. His installations ironically and poetically combine natural and unnatural forms, insisting on a necessary contemplation of their asymmetry as well as our own cultural and political flaws.
Central to the exhibition is Park Seo-Bo’s Écriture painting, a series he began in the 1960s which encapsulates a deeply spiritual, introspective methodology. One of the founding members of the Dansaekhwa monochrome movement, Park’s work is undoubtedly linked to notions of time, space, and materiality. Écriture begins with a series of pencil lines, which are made with Korean paper and minimal color. Through a process of reduction and repetition, sustained over time, the artist’s precise mark-making becomes a meditative practice.
Bridging the gap between past and present self, multi-disciplinary artist Kuldeep Singh deconstructs and rebuilds cultural narratives across painting and performance. In his canvases, Singh reinterprets the traditional ragamala paintings of 16th – 18th century Central India through a queer, ecological lens. Singh’s work often explores how cultural past informs present identity. In The Barren Wish-fulfilling Tree, his figures anchor each other tenderly in peace, despite the surrounding darkened tendrils of a dead “wish-fulfilling” tree. In his performances, Singh combines his two decades long training in the classical Indian dance form of Odissi with sensuality and a decolonial sensibility.
Utilizing classical techniques, Jake Troyli’s oil paintings investigate the socio-political construction of ‘otherness’ and preconceived notions surrounding identity. Often embedding himself into seemingly comical scenes, he explores the uncomfortable notions of self through prop-like iconography and vividly imagined interactions. The artist appropriates motifs from both the classical and the comic in order to convey the commodification of black and brown bodies as a source of entertainment and spectacle. His paintings beg the question, “How easily does the boundary between subject and object become blurred?”
Vickie Vainionpää’s generative oil paintings are organic and biomorphic in form, her fleshy creations congested at every interval. Using code as a medium to create infinite relationships between diameter, curvature, and entanglement, the artist examines and dismantles how we interact with abstraction which she translates onto canvas using oil paint.
Since the late 1980s, Xavier Veilhan has created an acclaimed body of work inspired by both formal classicism and high technology, including a range of mediums (sculpture, painting, installation, performance, video, and photography). His work is often showcased in the public space, with sculptures occupying numerous cities across France and abroad, including Paris, Stockholm, New York, Shanghai and Seoul, among others. In this exhibition, Veilhan reduces natural landscapes to their most essential vocabularies of shape and color. In their abstraction, the artist’s gradient landscapes illustrate endless interpretations of earth and space in hues of blue, grey, yellow, and pink.
Bao Vuong’s paintings elucidate the processes of remembrance and subsistence. Having fled Vietnam with his family at a young age, the artist paints contemplations of his lived experiences in black and white, eliminating everything but light and shadow. The resulting images are reduced to their essential visual vocabularies, as though they are fragments of memory, real or imagined. By delving into personal history, he is able to reinterpret unpleasant memories into scenes of optimism.
The Berlin-based Chinese artist Xiyao Wang creates large-scale, immersive paintings in which gestural lines evoke echoes of landscapes, bodies, movements, thoughts. In the process, she develops a kind of hybrid abstract painting that combines various influences and inspirations: Taoism and post-structuralism, ancient Chinese pictorial traditions, bodywork, dance, martial arts, and the canon of Western art history. In her work, mythologies and the lyrical, hermetic painting of Cy Twombly merge with global mass culture, electronic music, with the networked, media-influenced thinking of millennials and Gen Z. Xiyao’s paintings explore inner visions, bodily perceptions, sensations, feelings, interrogating her East-West biography.
Chris Watts seeks to revise and reexamine personal and social narratives through his multimedia practice, working between painting, installation, sculpture, and film. His work often takes the literal shape of a window, replacing the traditional canvas with a poly-chiffon surface and becoming a space for introspection. In his multimedia work, he interrogates Afro-Indigenous interiority, navigating what is concealed and what is exhibited.
Charisse Pearlina Weston utilizes glass, photography, text and other materials to interrogate the intersections of Black interior life, resistance, and the ideological apparatuses of surveillance. Glass has an inherently dual nature, as extremely malleable, able to bend and fold into new forms, while also exceedingly fragile, susceptible to shattering at any act of violence. Enclosed in the surface of Weston’s works are fragments of semi-autobiographical poetic text, which are obstructed by purposeful folds and complex layerings of material. Utilizing concealment and curvilinear lines, Weston investigates interiority and space.
Through the combination of acrylic and airbrush techniques, Leon Xu’s paintings are tender glimpses into intimate scenes of everyday life. Each image by Xu is hidden under a misty haze, blurred and faded as if taken by an unsteady camera or recalled from a lost dream. His artistic investigation into light and shadow explore notions of tangible versus intangible.
Dustin Yellin tells stories that weave together the diverse forces of nature and technology. Through his multidisciplinary body of work, which includes object making, painting and animation, Yellin draws attention to the interconnectivity of all beings and things. His approach tunnels across traditionally siloed fields so as to crystallize the idea that both the human world, and all other worlds around us, are a collection of enmeshed networks - even if many are hidden. Yellin’s glass works in particular, in which paint and images clipped from various print media are embedded within laminated glass sheets to form grand pictographic allegories, invite viewers to engage with the legions of their own consciousness and its embodied emotions, as well as that of our collective society and its infrastructures. Yellin is the founder and director of Pioneer Works, a multidisciplinary cultural center that builds community through the arts and sciences. The artist balances descriptive poetry with a prescriptive social practice so as to span new ways of seeing and being, and build a bridge to a more holistic world.
