Frieze New York

Frieze New York

May 2 - 6, 2018

Booth E3

P•P•O•W is pleased to present historical and contemporary works by Ann Agee, Ramiro Gomez, Anthony Iacono, Judith Linhares, Marth Wilson, and Martin Wong.

­­­­Ann Agee (b. 1959) investigates domesticity, material culture, feminism, and personal history to create ceramic sculptures and mixed media installations that explore appropriation, mimicry, and reproduction. Since her residency at the Kohler Arts Center in 1991, Agee’s practice has focused on replicating objects by hand, a process employed to ape mass production by using the slowest methods possible. Individually stamped with “Agee Manufacturing Co.” or “Agee MFG”, Agee’s ongoing series of Hand Warmers (2017-2018), which will be debuted at Frieze New York, now includes over 200 small, ceramic sculptures that realistically or abstractly engage with the formal history of footwear. Inspired by the 18^th-century Italian folk pottery in the collection of the Davanzati Palace in Florence, these myriad vessels tell the story of life from a woman’s point of view, referencing functional objects that were once common and cheaply obtained at market, but are now rarefied examples of women’s daily lives in the late-Renaissance. Ann Agee has had installations at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA, and her work has been included in notable ceramics exhibitions, including Dirt on Delight, Institute of Contemporary Art, PA and the Walker Art Center, MN, and Conversations in Clay, Katonah Art Museum, NY.  In 2011 she was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and has also been the recipient of The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, among others. Her works are included in the permanent collection of notable institutions including: The Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY; The Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; The RISD Art Museum, RI; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; The Henry Art Museum in Seattle, WA; The Kohler Art Center in Sheboygan, WI; and The Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami, FL. Agee lives and works in Brooklyn.

Ramiro Gomez (b. 1986) depicts the people whose labor often goes unrecognized and underappreciated by society. At Frieze New York, we will present a recent painting from In NYC, Gomez’s first solo exhibition in New York City. Gomez paints from self-shot photography focused on the many laborers whose work is vital to sustaining a functioning city – from janitors and yard-workers who keep city parks pristine to babysitters minding other people’s children. These images are then married with wide-ranging art historical sources including Velazquez, Renoir, and the Ashcan School. Gomez has consistently painted on non-traditional materials, specially salvaged cardboard, which has become central to Gomez’s practice. For Gomez, this material serves as a metaphor for the essential yet disposable nature of the position that many domestic laborers find themselves in. Gomez has exhibited at the University of Michigan, Institute for the Humanities, and the West Hollywood Public Library as part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA. He first gained recognition for what is now described as his Hockney series, works that reimagine David Hockney’s iconic Los Angeles paintings to represent subjects who were previously written out of the story. His work has also been featured in group shows at notable institutions including: the 2017 Whitney Biennial; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Denver Art Museum; Blanton Art Museum, University of Texas at Austin; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; and the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College, Florida; among others. Domestic Scenes: The Work of Ramiro Gomez, a monographic catalog by Lawrence Weschler, was published by Abrams in 2016. His work is currently on view at the National Portrait Gallery as part of its group exhibition The Sweat of Their Face: Portraying American Workers.

Anthony Iacono (b. 1987) is best-known for rigoroulsy composed figurative collages that infuse subtle contortions of form with narratives of longing and desire. Our presentation of new works at Frieze New York will coincide with Talking to Strangers, his second solo exhibition at P.P.O.W. Iacono’s work is characterized by a combination of chromatic excess and precise, yet flamboyant, geometric forms. Each work is composed of painted paper that is cut and assembled like parquetry, with intricately shaped fragments interlocking into the whole. The technical virtuosity and emotional resonance of each scene exists alongside art historical rigor, with works alternately recalling the collages of Hannah Höch, John Heartfield, and Man Ray’s still lifes. Iacono’s engagement with physical and emotional estrangement is further inflected by his engagement with the history of design, specifically Art Deco. Thus, his work relies on the notion of queer time and engaages with historical predcedent in which all artistic references are available for reformulation, citation, and dissolution in the service of expanding the representational outlets available to figuration. Anthony Iacono received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2010, attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2013, and received his MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University's Sculpture + Extended Media program in Richmond, Virginia last spring. Crudités at Sunset, his first solo exhibition at P.P.O.W, was in 2015 and he has been included in group shows at Brennan & Griffin, 106 Green, Rockaway Topless, and Zevitas Marcus. In 2017 he was a recipient of the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship Award. He currently lives and works in New York where he is a resident artist at LMCC Workspace.

Judith Linhares (b. 1940) paints vibrant scenes or still lifes that blend the imagined with real, everyday objects and actions. Beginning by painting broad brushstrokes of complimentary colors, Linhares creates personal mythologies from a menagerie of animal tchotchkes, vases of brilliant flowers, and alternately haunting or amusing figures. Approaching figuration through the lens of abstraction, Linhares’s work draws on German Expressionism, Neo-Expressionism, and Bay Area figuration, while also reflecting an interest in the Abstract Expressionists and their ability to create works that were at once formally coherent, monumental, and spontaneous. Judith Linhares was born in 1940 in Pasadena, California, and currently lives and works in New York. Judith Linhares came of age in the socially turbulent "take-it-to-the-streets" days of feminism, underground comics, and poetic reverie in Northern California. She graduated from California College of the Arts. In 1975, she received the prestigious Adeline Kent Award in recognition for her contributions to the art of the region. After participating in Marcia Tucker's seminal exhibition "Bad" Painting and receiving the (first of three) National Endowment for the Arts Grants, Linhares moved to New York. Her work is included in the collections of major museums including: The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The de Young Museum, and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, San Francisco; the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, among many others.

Martha Wilson (b. 1947) creates conceptually based performances, videos, and photo/text compositions that address the constructions and manifestations of feminism, identity, and self-presentation. Taking herself as a subject since the early 1970s, Wilson creates transgressive portraits that address political and social issues, teasing out complexity and nuance by infusing her work with humor and playfulness. At Frieze New York, P.P.O.W will present Makeover: Melania (2017), a new video piece that extends her decades-long engagement with the politicized posture of American First Ladies, including Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush. Makeover: Melania uses software employed in digital photo-retouching to merge Wilson’s portrait with Melania Trump’s. Over the course of a single minute, this looped video questions the metaphorical connection between beauty and virtue, strategies of representation shared between advertising and politics, and cultural ambivalence to age and experience. In 2008, Wilson had her first solo exhibition in New York at Mitchell Algus Gallery, Martha Wilson: Photo/Text Works, 1971-74. In 2009, Martha Wilson: Staging the Self, a career survey of four decades of work, was organized by Independent Curators International. In 2011, ICI published Martha Wilson Sourcebook: 40 Years of Reconsidering Performance, Feminism, Alternative Spaces. Wilson’s work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, as well as the Sammlung Verbund Collection, Austria and the Moderna Museet, Sweden. In 2017, Wilson’s work was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Martin Wong (1946-1999) moved to Manhattan in 1978 from his native San Francisco and eventually settled on the Lower East Side. After befriending and collecting some of the best graffiti writers in NYC, Wong’s style began to echo some of the emerging rhythms of graffiti writing and hip hop. At Frieze New York, P.P.O.W will present Son of Sam Sleeps (1981), a large canvas from 1981 that exemplifies Wong’s use of ASL hand signals, as well as his fascination with popular culture and modes of communication. Many of Wong’s hand signal paintings directly quote newspaper headlines. This work references Son of Sam, a notorious serial killer who was a near-constant in local press from 1975-77. His rampage was halting, but his media saturation was extended by using the word “sleep” in refrence to referring to the months-long periods between violent murders. Wong died in San Francisco from an AIDS-related illness in 1999. His work can be found in museum collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Bronx Museum of The Arts, and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Cleveland Museum of Art; The Art Institute of Chicago; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Wong had a one person show Sweet Oblivion at the New Museum in 1998. City as Canvas: New York City Graffiti from the Martin Wong Collection opened at the Museum of the City of New York in 2013 and traveled to the Amsterdam Museum in 2016. Wong's retrospective, Human Instamatic, opened at the Bronx Museum of The Arts in November 2015, the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio in May of 2016 and finished its national tour at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in December 2017.