Known for her meticulously composed, large-scale color images of architectural interiors, German artist Candida Höfer’s oeuvre explores the structure, presentation, and influence of space. Interested in the psychological impact of design and the contrast between a room’s intended and actual use, Höfer has focused her lens on cultural and institutional buildings such as libraries, hotels, museums, concert halls, and palaces. Whilst devoid of people, the images allow us to consider the role of their missing inhabitants. The large-scale nature of the work invites the viewer to linger over the architectural details and contemplate the subtle shifts in light that make up the character of the space.

Hermitage St. Petersburg VIII, 2014 is from her larger Palaces of St. Petersburg series, which captures the atmospheric ostentation of monumental buildings around St. Petersburg, including the Hermitage Museum, Pushkin Palace, Catherine Palace Pushkin, Mariinsky Theatre, as well as the palaces of Pavlovsk and Yusupov theatre. Höfer studied photography under the influential photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, who also taught noted Düsseldorf School photographers Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Axel Hütte and Thomas Ruff.

Los Angeles native and New York-based artist Kehinde Wiley has firmly situated himself within art history’s portrait painting tradition. As a contemporary descendent of a long line of portraitists, including Reynolds, Gainsborough, Titian, and Ingres, amongst others, Wiley, engages signs and visual rhetoric of the heroic, powerful, majestic and sublime in his representation of black and brown men and women found throughout the world.

Barthélémy Senghor and Mame Kéwé Aminata Lô, are the first sculptures the artist has released from the body of work that he developed in lockdown during COVID-19 in 2020. Wiley spent this time in quarantine at Black Rock Senegal, the artist compound and residency program he opened in 2019 on the coast of Dakar, Senegal. In the absence of any ability to follow his traditional street casting methods, which enables him to find models at random on the streets of New York and many other international cities, Wiley turned to the people immediately surrounding him in Dakar. As the artist describes them, "What follows are a series of portraits that I might consider friends and family of Black Rock."

Wiley’s contemporary bronze sculptures borrow techniques from the 18th century French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon, whose own work was heavily influenced by styles from the Baroque and Antique periods. Wiley has applied these methods to render his contemporary Senegalese subjects - Mame Kéwé Aminata Lô, the local director of Black Rock Senegal, and Barthélémy Senghor, the resident Sports Coach and Trainer—with gravity and dignity.

Serbian artist Marina Abramović has pioneered the use of performance as a visual art form. The body has been both her subject and medium. Exploring the physical and mental limits of her being, she has withstood pain, exhaustion, and danger in the quest for emotional and spiritual transformation. In Portrait with Golden Mask, 2009, Abramović shields her face with a mask made of sheets of loosely applied gold leaf. This photograph captures the fluttering movement of these sheets of gold applied to the artist’s face and ruffling in air, underscoring the fragility of gilding as a technique, while acknowledging the undeniable symbolic power of gold throughout history. The viewer is drawn in close for further inspection, and ultimately finds themselves confronted by Abramović’s gaze.

Abramović and French artist Yves Klein have each used their work to break down hierarchies in art and traditional divisions between art and life. Klein is represented by two iconic works that illustrate his long interest in the metaphysical and the immaterial, Leap Into the Void, October 27, 1960, and Sculpture éponge bleue sans titre (SE 315), 1960-61. Both Abramović’s self-portrait and Klein’s work explore the symbolic and historic resonances of pure color as an expression of nature, purity, the primal, and the ceremonial.  

The resonant power of art historical objects also influences the work of British artist Idris Khan. He created Caravaggio...The Final Years, in 2006, one year after seeing an exhibition of the same title at the National Gallery in London of late work by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, which explored the works made from 1606, when Caravaggio killed another man in a duel and was forced to flee Rome, until his death in 1610. Caravaggio is considered the “master of light” for his use of tenebrism, the strong contrast between light and dark.

Khan’s photograph was constructed by digitally layering images of the late Caravaggio paintings. At first appearing as a mass of bodies, individual body parts emerge and then dissolve back into the chaos of an abstracted composition. The resulting image is almost painterly in its buildup of forms — the contrast between light and dark and play between transparency and opacity. Caravaggio’s hallmark use of light appears even more theatrical when his final works are seen in a single composition. Caravaggio...The Final Years is layered to the point where each individual painting has become almost entirely obfuscated, collapsing multiple years of Caravaggio’s paintings into a single instant captured in a photograph. Khan has developed a unique narrative involving densely layered imagery that inhabits the space between abstraction and figuration and speaks to the themes of history, cumulative experience, and the metaphysical collapse of time into single moments.

Since its inception in 1991, Sean Kelly Gallery has been internationally recognized for its diverse, intellectually driven program and highly regarded roster of artists. The Gallery has garnered worldwide attention for its collaborations with renowned cultural institutions, coordinating hundreds of exhibitions on behalf of its artists at an array of prestigious museums. Over the course of more than 25 years, the Gallery has become known for its high quality, thought-provoking contemporary art program and innovation. In 2018, the gallery launched the critically acclaimed Collect Wisely podcast series aimed at refocusing the discourse around collecting to return to the heart of the matter: discussing art and artists, the passion for collecting and connoisseurship.

This year, the gallery will expand West and open a major new 10,000 square foot gallery in Los Angeles where it looks forward to building on and furthering the legacy of the gallery’s New York program.

For inquiries, please email info@skny.com.