Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong presents 'Exotica,' a major solo exhibition by Mark Bradford that navigates the concept of 'otherness' through a formally innovative body of work.

Consisting of around 20 new paintings, the exhibition extends Bradford's study of figuration through the use of a signature staining technique, which uses caulk to create ghost-like imprints on the canvas. These forms inject the artist's layered compositions with a trace of fantasy, spectres and strangeness.

The exhibition is anchored by a group of paintings centred on the agave plant, a monocarpic variety that blooms only once at the end of its lifecycle. Drawing inspiration from a 1970s' encyclopedic text that catalogued 'exotic' plants from a western perspective, this new body of work considers how we imagine, internalise, and project a sense of 'otherness' onto which we may be able to name, but have not understood.

Opening reception: 5-7pm

Gallery address: Ground FLoor, 8 Queen's Road, Central

In a wide-ranging practice spanning four decades, post-war Japanese artist Tetsumi Kudo (1935 –1990) explored the human experience, interrogating the proliferation of mass consumption and the rise of technology. His oeuvre addresses themes of colonialism, racism, social cohesion, and environmental degradation through biomorphic sculptures and assemblages incorporating found materials. Kudo’s first solo exhibition in Greater China, opening 31 May, features a selection of the artist’s signature cages made between 1966 and 1980. The worlds created inside these varied environments are intended to encourage viewers to understand themselves as part of an integrated and intricate cosmos in which nature, technology, and humanity influence each other, a system he dubbed the New Ecology.

Tetsumi Kudo© Hiroko Kudo, the Estate of Tetsumi Kudo / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY /ADAGP Paris 2024Courtesy Hiroko Kudo, the Estate of Tetsumi Kudo and Hauser & Wirth

Opening reception: Friday 31 May 6 – 8 PM

Gallery address: G/F, 8 Queen’s Road Central

Best known for his text-based paintings, celebrated American conceptual artist Glenn Ligon has created new works for his first solo exhibition in Greater China. The display includes a continuation of his Stranger paintings, a new abstract painting series titled Static, and a series of untitled drawings on Kozo paper. These works all use excerpts from James Baldwin’s landmark essay ‘Stranger in the Village’ (1953) and exemplify the artist’s radical use of text to explore the politics of culture and identity.

Gallery address: 8 Queen’s Road Central

Titled 'Faces', the inaugural exhibition at Hauser & Wirth's new location in Hong Kong will feature new paintings by Zhang Enli created in the past three decades. The nearly 100 works on view include figurative paintings from the 1990s to early 2000s and the artist's everyday objects series from the 2000s to early 2010s, along with abstract works from the early 2010s until the present day. These gestural canvases reflect Zhang Enli's progression to looser, freer brushwork that has become prominent in the artist's style in recent years and reveals the artist's compelling and continued exploration into abstract form. While anchored in figuration with descriptive titles, Zhang Enli seeks to capture the 'essence' of his subjects rather than their physical representation through these works. His solo exhibition at the Long Museum, Shanghai opens on 7 November 2023.

Zhang Enli first gained acclaim in the 1990s for symbolic, figurative paintings. Within these early works, the perspective was often skewed to heighten the drama of the object's shape, or to enlarge its symbolic importance. Zhang Enli has frequently returned to a personal iconography centred on the more prosaic aspects of contemporary life, drawn to imagery of quotidian objects that are sensitively rendered and imbued with stories. In more recent years, the artist has turned to the outside world, urban dwellings and nature, blurring the boundaries between inside and out. In a series of installations, known as Space Paintings, Zhang Enli paints directly onto the walls of a room to create immersive environments. These range from the abstract, where colour and gesture recall sights and sounds of a particular place, to more figurative reproductions.

Gallery address: G/F & 1/F, 8 Queen’s Road Central

‘The idea of the goldfish falling connects to my family and my memories, but also to the idea of unexpected abundance. A rain of fish may be a fantastical event, but we can move fish from one place to another to feed people. Memories are like magical realism—they combine the factual with the imagination to make something surreal.’

—Angel Otero

Angel Otero is known for his signature approach to visual storytelling, synthesizing magical realism and abstraction, the observed and the imagined, and the past and the present. Beginning 1 June, Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong presents ‘The Sea Remembers,’ Otero’s first major solo exhibition in Asia since he joined the gallery in 2022. Through a labor-intensive process of laying down, peeling and collaging oil paint, Otero’s works are rooted in abstract image making and engage with the idea of memory through addressing art history, as well as his own lived experience.

Gallery address: 15-16/F, H Queen's, 80 Queen's Road Central

Rashid Johnson is among an influential cadre of contemporary American artists whose work employs a wide range of media to explore the themes of art history, individual and shared cultural identities, personal narratives, literature, philosophy, materiality and critical history. For his first solo exhibition in Asia, Johnson has created brand new works, including Bruise Paintings, Surrender Paintings and Seascape paintings, alongside his profound mosaics, continuing to work with a complex range of iconographies to explore collective and historical expressions of longing and displacement, while speaking to the times we live in.

Image: Rashid Johnson. Photo: Daniel Schäfer

Gallery address: 15-16/F, H Queen’s, 80 Queen's Road Central

Widely considered one of the most ambitious and influential artists of our time, Mike Kelley often drew from a wide spectrum of high and low culture, mining the banal objects of everyday life to question and dismantle Western conceptions of contemporary art and culture. Beginning 27 October 2022, Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong is proud to present the late Los Angeles-based artist’s first solo exhibition in the Greater China: ‘Mike Kelley: Subharmonic Tangerine Abyss.’ Organized in collaboration with the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, the exhibition focuses on one of Kelley's most significant later series, Kandors. Initiated by Kelley in 1999, the Kandors series comprises of Superman’s birthplace, the city of Kandor. Kandor served as Kelley's inspiration for a twelve-year long project and meditation on themes of cultural memory, passing time, and visions of utopia. In addition to the visually opulent and technically ambitious sculptures and lenticulars that Kelley’s Kandors series is known for, this exhibition will feature three distinct kinds of videos that Kelley included in his original Kandors show at Jablonka Gallery in 2007.

© Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. All Rights Reserved/VAGA at ARS, NY Courtesy the Foundation and Hauser & Wirth

Gallery address: 15-16/F, H Queen’s, 80 Queen’s Road Central

‘The history of landscape painting retraces humanity’s continually shifting relationship to our natural environment. The greatest landscape paintings both contain ideas and question the viewer about it.’

–– Nicolas Party

Best known for his unique approach to landscapes, portraits and still lifes created in pastel, critically admired New York-based Swiss artist Nicolas Party directs his idiosyncratic choice of medium toward otherworldly depictions of objects, both natural and manmade. Beginning 30 June 2022, Hauser & Wirth will debut ‘Red Forest,’ Nicolas Party’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong, in which Party looks to the five elements of the material world as his starting point: wood, fire, earth, metal and water. Comprised of 13 new pastel landscapes and portraits created specifically for this show, ‘Red Forest’ illuminates nature’s complex and often inextricable ties with humanity.

Party’s childhood in Switzerland imparted an early fascination with landscape and the natural world, and the influence of this country places Party firmly within the trajectory of central European landscape painting. Considering this historical canon anew amid the current climate crises, ‘Red Forest’ presents Party’s most recent explorations in pastel depicting forest fires. Influenced by his conversations with Bénédicte Ramade, an art historian, art critic, journalist and curator who made a connection between the idea of L’heure mauve (mauve twilight) and the purple and red skies we are witnessing with forest fires, Party invites the viewer to reflect on nature and our relationship with the environment.

Gallery address: 15-16/F, H Queen’s, Central

In work made over the past five decades, William Kentridge has recorded and reconfigured history – responding to the past as it ineluctably shapes our present – and in doing so, has created a world that mirrors and shadows our own. Through film, performance, theatre, drawing, sculpture, painting, and printmaking, Kentridge seeks to make sense of the world and the construction of meaning; his work brings viewers into awareness of how they see the world and navigate their way to more conscious seeing and knowing. Opening 14 March, Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong will present ‘William Kentridge. Weigh All Tears’, an exhibition organized working closely with Goodman Gallery. This is Kentridge’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong, and the first project between Hauser & Wirth and this Johannesburg-based artist. The exhibition takes its title from a new 6-metre-wide triptych of the same name, where silhouetted figures form a procession against a collage of maps of Africa and historic documents. ‘Weigh All Tears’ is a phrase that cycles through Kentridge’s work, like the phrases he often uses in other larger series, they are “unsolved riddles, phrases which hover at the edge of making sense. These are fragments of sentences which sit in a drawer of phrases used in other work over the years. On occasion they get taken out and sorted through.

Gallery address: 15-16/F, H Queen’s, Central

© William Kentridge

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Photo: lon Etter

Over four decades Annie Leibovitz’s unique photographic language has dovetailed with – and advanced – the medium’s evolution as a force for art making. Beginning 6 January, Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong will present ‘Annie Leibovitz. The Early Years 1970-1983 and Wonderland,’ a comprehensive exhibition of photographic prints selected by the artist from her early years to be seen alongside selected iconic fashion images from the past two decades. Leibovitz’s prolific output, and her inventive approach to photography itself, position her distinctly within the traditions and trajectory of American portraiture during the twentieth century.

These rarely seen images from Leibovitz’s early years trace the photographer’s development from the start of her career, capturing the dramatic cultural and political shifts of the 70s and early 80s. During these years, Leibovitz became an avatar of the changing cultural role of photography as an artistic medium. These powerful images reveal her singular ability to merge the tactics of portraiture and photojournalism with profound humanism.

Gallery address: 15-16/F, H Queen’s, Central

Natalia Vodianova and Helmut Lang, Paris, 2003

2021
Archival pigment print
33 x 45.7 cm / 13 x 18 in
©️ Annie Leibovitz
Courtesy the artist

This September, Hauser & Wirth presents rarely seen tapestries by Henry Moore. A series of five large- scale tapestries will be shown, courtesy of the Henry Moore Family Collection, for the first time in Asia.

Renowned for his sculptures and drawings, Henry Moore was one of the few modern artists to extend his work into the realm of tapestry. The brilliance of the drawings is confirmed in their transition into large tapestries, seven or eight times the size of the original. These lost nothing of their power in the process, retaining all the textural qualities of the drawing, from a smudgy chalk line to a decisive pen stroke.

The presentation has been made possible due to the artist’s daughter, Mary Moore, who introduced her father to West Dean Tapestry Studio in 1976, and later helped to choose and oversee intimate watercolor drawings interpreted into life-size tapestries. The detailed textile works are the result of a true creative collaboration with highly skilled weavers led by Eva-Louise Svensson, dying wool to achieve precise colors and blending threads of a great variety of tones to adapt the artist’s original drawing media.

Gallery address: 15-16/F, H Queen’s, Central

Beginning 23 September, Hauser & Wirth presents ‘Drawing On The Mind’, a group exhibition curated by Chinese contemporary artist Zhang Enli. On view through 27 November, the exhibition includes selected works by Modern and Contemporary masters, including Louise Bourgeois, John Chamberlain, Alexander Calder, Arshile Gorky, Piero Manzoni, Henry Moore, Pablo Picasso, David Smith, Zeng Fanzhi, and Zhang Enli himself, revealing the thinking processes of the artists, and offering a glimpse into the subconscious of their minds.

Zhang Enli said, ‘Artists’ sketches and drawings are often regarded as preparatory artworks, and can get overlooked. While in fact, they are significant works that related to the artists’ thinking process, they are the reflections in the artists’ subconscious.’ Echoing the coinciding Henry Moore solo exhibition, Enli added, ‘Compared to his most known sculptures, works in this presentation are more abstract and freehand style, they awaken our curiosity and provide us a new perspective to understanding the artist.’

Gallery address: 15-16/F, H Queen’s, Central

Beginning 30 March 2021, Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong will present American abstractionist Jack Whitten’s first solo exhibition in Asia. Celebrated for his innovative processes of applying paint to the surface of his canvases and transfiguring their material terrains, Whitten’s work bridges rhythms of gestural abstraction and process art, arriving at a nuanced language of painting that hovers between mechanical automation and intensely personal expression.

Consisting of rarely seen paintings, sculpture and works on paper, the exhibition highlights a selection of works from the 1960s through 2010s. Blurring the boundaries between sculpture and painting, and between the artist’s studio and the world outside, the multidimensional paintings on view combine geometric abstraction and found objects to mine spiritual and metaphysical thematic veins. 

Gallery address: 15-16/F, H Queen’s, 80 Queen's Road Central, Central

Hauser & Wirth is delighted to present the first solo exhibition by the Ōsaka-born, Paris-based artist Takesada Matsutani in Hong Kong.

For six decades Matsutani has developed a unique visual language of form and materials. From the early 1960s until the 1970s Matsutani was a key member of the influential post-war Japanese art collective, the Gutai Art Association.  As part of the group, Matsutani experimented with vinyl glue, using fans and his own breath to manipulate the substance, creating bulbous and sensuous forms.

This exhibition, organized with Olivier Renaud-Clément, includes new multi-media paintings, works on paper and an important site-specific installation from the artist’s archive.

Gallery address: 5-16/F, H Queen’s, Central