The Persistence of Beauty

Hiba Schahbaz, Harbor, 2022, 79x88in., Watercolor, tea, gouache, and gold leaf on handmade paper

MATCHESFASHION
presents
Harbor, a painting by Hiba Schahbaz
Organized by Hilde Lynn Helphenstein.

The project that you likely saw splashed across Jerry’s Instagram was a painting that was born out of a partnership that I’ve formed with MATCHESFASHION. It was with their full support that I undertook the most ambitious commission of my life: to bring into existence one painting composed of portraits of 11 prominent female artists living today. I knew the painting had to exist before I knew who would paint it. Here’s the story of Harbor…

“The Irascibles”

Never in history have female artists held such a prestigious role in leading the charge of contemporary art. I recently realized this when I came across a picture of the ol’ Ab-Exers posing for a group photograph, all white, all male and all very drunk. (Pretty sure this was at the Whitney if my memory serves correctly.) Of course in recent times, books like 9th Street Women have helped correct the fact that women were as much a part of Abstract Expressionism (whoopsie) and they made up roughly half of the group of artists. Unsurprisingly, they were also deeply prolific and worked throughout their lives. However, I don’t recall a group portrait honoring them in any wing of a Modern museum. This thought irritated me further as I tripped down the past of the Surrealists and Dadaists and then further in time with Pop Artists.

Anna Nordstrom, How did they die? (2010).

A textile art work depicting the circumstances under which male Ab-Exers died

It’s 2022 and it suddenly dawned on me that women artists today are completely dominating their male counterparts in almost every way. Women are changing not only our collective perception of what we consider art, but also the market dynamics that underpin the art economy. This is fact. Check auctions. Look at museum accessions. Glance over current gallery programming. The Venice Biennale scantily exhibited male artists. “But Jerry, Mega galleries barely show women!” This is true, but Mega galleries are also like dead stars and their days may be numbered. They may as well be just another luxury brand under the LVMH umbrella. Their modalities for conducting business are out of date, they keep getting caught lying, and most artists don’t even care whether they’re represented by a gallery anymore. The Megas will either be forced to change, reflect half of the population in their artists, or they’ll continue to lose in popularity and by proxy “business go bye bye.” I digress.

Recent Sotheby’s Now Evening Sale result of Anna Weyant’s Falling Woman

Group Selfie (red), 2014. © Petra Collins

So back to my point. People are unquenchingly thirsty for works by Jadé Fadojutimi, Anna Weyant, Emily Mae Smith, Jacqueline Humphries, Julie Curtiss, Sasha Gordon, Jesse Mockrin, Cristina BanBan, Robin F. Williams, or Hiba Schahbaz. I could go and on. One of my favorite painters, Kyle Staver is becoming highly recognized for the paintings she has been perfecting for years. I think it’s important to observe that the artists coming out of this movement aren’t just recent Yale MFA grads. There’s 1000’s of hours of work and independent crit groups that create the female artist ecosystem that often exist in studio buildings in Brooklyn. These communities are not to be underestimated. Trust. Ask a gallery “what is available?” Old, young, figurative, abstract. The women artists are sold out with waiting lists that span years. Even the bros want to buy female artists now which I think is adorable. Did they trip and fall on their head and realize women are immensely talented too? Either way, keep buying them. Keep donating them to museums. This is how we turn this massive ship around, slowly.

Kyle Staver, Swan Flight, 2017, Oil on canvas, 68 x 54 inches

Here are some conspiracy theories about as to why the market shifted the way it did:

Some say Trump made things easier for the wealthy and their taxes. Some say Covid trapped people at home and bored them into buying art from PDFs. Some say identity politics and the mainstream “woke” movement changed buying trends. I’ve heard from a wealth manager that a broader belief in art as a long term assets is dependable while the market is so volatile. However, because this is all speculation, let’s just say that all of the misfortune and anguish we’ve experienced collectively gave birth to a cultural shift enabling women to be at the top for the first time EVER. There is no simple answer.

With all of this in mind, I knew there was no time like the present to create a fiercely feminine document of our last several years of contemporary art. I figured since figurative painting is the dominant art form of our time it had to be painting rather than a photograph. This led me to the question “who on earth could do right by this painting?” While I sat on my porch in Los Angeles, stewing and chain smoking, Hiba Schahbaz popped by for a visit. I’d been alone for a few days so I had a lot on my mind and like a crazy person began preaching the necessity of this painting. As Schahbaz, herself, is a very busy and a highly sought after artist I wouldn’t have dreamed of asking her, but the longer we talked, it was silently understood that she was going to make this monumental work of art. We had three weeks. This wasn’t going to be a vacation.

Hiba Schahbaz and myself aka Jerry out on our usual NYC meanders talking about painting, health hacks, and searching for obscure products Hiba requires.

Who to include in this epic work of art was nearly impossible to narrow down. Female artists are at the front and center of several movements in contemporary art including sculpture, figuration, neo-surrealism, and cross-disciplinary arts including performance. This painting could have easily featured hundreds of female artists, but alas we had a deadline so we were forced to narrow it down to 11. Along the way, I discovered that many artists, including figurative painters, can be shy about their representation in paint. So, there was “the ask” and some light persuasion to get them to “see the vision.” Schahbaz is not only a magnificent painter, but she’s also a very sensitive and considerate artist who deeply explored how to approach the depiction of each artist. The process of bringing this painting to light felt gentle for lack of a better term. Every inch of the work was thoughtful. Every eyelash and finger nail was skillfully applied to the paper with steady hands and a detailed eye. No one else could have made this painting.

With incredible bias, I believe this painting to be a monumental triumph (it’s 80”x90”) and an important work of art for the history of women. Each woman placed in this composition holds her own significant space while also sharing a language that spans the history of our species on earth. Everyone knows women are better communicators , and given the chance, they have the ability to express high ideals and important ideas for the safe passage of our species on earth succinctly.

Below I present to you, dear reader, information on each of the artist’s depicted in Harbor including their achievements and why we saw it as such an honor to work with them. This next portion of this report is long, but it is extremely important to acknowledge the heights these artists have already achieved both creatively, commercially, and institutionally. Though I am not a scholar, I cannot look at the direction of contemporary art without seeing women at the front. I believe this is properly a movement in art.

Hilary Pecis (b. 1979, Fullerton, California) makes paintings and drawings in which tableaus rich with interlocking fields of saturated color, geometric patterning, and bold linework provide views of sun-drenched domestic still lifes and landscape environments. Books crowding a coffee table, the remains of a dinner party, and terrains lush with Southern California succulents make frequent appearances in her work; these meticulously arranged interiors and vibrantly rendered exteriors amount to an overarching portrait of the self that identifies objects and locations as signifiers for human characteristics. Pecis combines distorted perspectives and surprising juxtapositions of hue, placing her work in dialogue with modernist art historical movements like Fauvism in which subjective and analytical tendencies are synthesized. At the same time, her interest in images sourced from her personal experience allows her to transform recognizable mise-en-scènes into vivid explorations that celebrate the quiet moments of everyday life.

Pecis has recently been the subject of solo exhibitions at Rockefeller Center, New York (2021); Timothy Taylor Gallery, London (2021); Spurs Gallery, Beijing (2020); Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York (2020); and Crisp-Ellert Art Museum, Flagler College, St. Augustine, Florida (2019). Recent group exhibitions include Present Generations: Creating the Scantland Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio (2021); The Beatitudes of Malibu, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles (2021); FEEDBACK, Jack Shainman School, Kinderhook, New York (2021); L.A.: Views, Maki Gallery, Tokyo (2020); High Voltage, The Nassima-Landau Project, Tel Aviv, Israel (2020); and (Nothing but) Flowers, Karma, New York (2020). Her work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Aïshti Foundation, Beirut; and Yuz Museum, Shanghai. Pecis lives and works in Los Angeles.

Max Colby (born 1990, USA) lives and works in New York City. She is internationally exhibited including Wave Hill, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling, Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Jane Lombard Gallery, Denny Dimin Gallery, Isabel Croxatto Galería, and Museum Rijswijk, among others. She has completed residencies at the Museum of Arts and Design (New York), the Wassaic Project, MASS MoCA and a Leslie-Lohman Museum Fellowship. Known for her installations and sculptural work, Colby has received numerous research and project grants from Foundation for Contemporary Arts and YoungArts, among others. In 2022, Colby exhibited a campus-wide public commission for Art in Focus at Rockefeller Center in partnership with Art Production Fund. In 2012, she received a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University.

Dominique Fung (b. 1987, Ottawa, Canada) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received a BAA from Sheridan College Institute of Technology in Toronto, Canada. Institutional collections include Canter Art Center of Stanford University, Palo Alto; East West Bank Collection; Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; LACMA, Los Angeles; M+, Hong Kong; MoCA, Los Angeles; Yuz Museum, Shanghai. Recent exhibitions include Wonder Women, curated by Kathy Huang, Jeffrey Deitch, New York (2022); Coastal Navigation, Nicodim Los Angeles (2022, solo); Women of Now: Dialogues of Identity, Memory and Place, Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, Texas (2022); Dominique Fung and Katherina Olschbaur: My Kingdom and a Horse, Galeria Nicodim, Bucharest (2021, two-artist); It’s Not Polite to Stare, Jeffrey Deitch, New York (2021; solo); PAPA RAGAZZE!, Nicodim Upstairs, Los Angeles (2020); Relics and Remains, Nicodim Los Angeles (2020, solo); Friends and Friends of Friends: Artistic Communities in the Age of Social Media, Schlossmuseum, Linz (2020); Wash Your Corners, Ross + Kramer, New York (2019, solo); Looking Backward, Moving Forward, Taymour Grahne, London (2019, solo).

Tschabalala Self is a Harlem born, New Haven based painter. She received her B.A. from Bard College in 2012 and her M.F.A. from the Yale School of Art in 2015.

In her own words:

“My current body of work is concerned with the iconographic significance of the Black female body in contemporary culture. My work explores the emotional, physical and psychological impact of the Black female body as icon, and is primarily devoted to examining the intersectionality of race, gender and sexuality. Collective fantasies surround the Black body, and have created a cultural niche in which exists our contemporary understanding of Black femininity. My practice is dedicated to naming this phenomenon.

The emotional, physical and psychological implications of the figure’s fashioning gives way to existential concerns. In each work, there exists a tension between foreground and background that mirrors the character’s position in the larger social context. As silhouettes emerge and disintegrate into the pictorial plane, the politics of identity jump to the surface. Shown in unison, the characters, articulated through stitch and textile assemblage, create a community and hold space for varied iterations of a shared experience.

The fantasies and attitudes surrounding the Black female body are both accepted and rejected within my practice, and through this disorientation, new possibilities arise. I am attempting to provide alternative, and perhaps fictional explanations for the voyeuristic tendencies towards the gendered and racialized body; a body which is both exalted and abject.

I aspire to hold space and create a cultural vacuum in which these bodies can exist for their own pleasure and self-realization. Free from other’s assertions and the othering gaze. I hope to correct misconceptions propagated within and projected upon the Black body. Multiplicity and possibility are essential to my practice and general philosophy. My subjects are fully aware of their conspicuousness and are unmoved by the viewer. Their role is not to show, explain, or perform but rather “to be.” In being, their presence is acknowledged and their significance felt. My project is committed to this exchange, for my own edification and for the edification of those who resemble me.”

-TSCHABALALA SELF

Self’s work is included in public collections such as:

The Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, Lebanon Arario Museum, Seoul, South Korea The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, USA Art Omi, Ghent, USA Astrup Fearnley, Oslo, Norway Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, USA Bunker Artspace, West Palm Beach, USA CAB Brussels, Brussels, Belgium California African American Museum, Los Angeles, USA Colección Diéresis, Guadalajara, México Emdash Foundation, London, UK Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA ICA Boston, Boston, USA JPMorgan Chase Art Collection, New York, USA Karpidas Family Collection, Dallas, USA Lewben Art Collection Foundation, Vilnius, Lithuania Luma Foundation, Zurich, Switzerland Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, USA Perez Art Museum Miami, Miami, USA Philadelphia Museum, Philadelphia, USA Piakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany Rubell Family Collection, Miami, USA Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, USA Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China

Jenna Gribbon’s paintings draw from memory, art history, and contemporary life. Her syncretic canvases draw on several centuries of painting: figures disporting themselves in a sylvan setting recall Fragonard’s fêtes galantes; an interiors swiftly brushed-on walls evoke the cursory backgrounds of Mary Cassatt; gently distorted architectural features summon the laissez-faire depictions of Karen Kilimnik. Sampling freely from various representational techniques and movements, Jenna Gribbon’s paint handling swerves from the virtuosic to the intentionally slapdash; fast, impressionistic strokes often about minutely illustrated details, highlighting the artist’s interest in collapsing numerous pictorial strategies into a single canvas. Jenna Gribbon was recently featured on the cover of Purple Magazine. She has been included in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville; and the Kurpfalzicches Museum, Heidelberg, and at the Frick Museum.

Emily Mae Smith, (b. 1979, Austin, Texas) makes sly, humorous, and riveting compositions nod to art historical movements such as Symbolism and Art Nouveau, though with a distinctly 21st century spin. Her genre-defying paintings speak through a vocabulary of signs and symbols addressing timely subjects including gender, class, and violence. Smith's paintings tackle art history's phallocentric myths and create imagery for subjectivities absent in visual culture, specifically the feminist perspective.

Emily Mae Smith was born in 1979 in Austin, Texas. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Recent solo exhibitions include: Galerie Perrotin, Paris (2021); Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels, Belgium (2021, 2016); Simone Subal Gallery, New York, NY (2020, 2017); SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA (2020); Marion Art Gallery, Rockefeller Arts Center, SUNY Fredonia, NY (2020); Galerie Perrotin, Tokyo (2019); Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT (2019); Le Consortium Museum, Dijon, France (2018); Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin, Germany (2018); Galerie Perrotin (with Genesis Belanger), New York, NY (2018); SALTS (with Adam Henry), Basel, Switzerland (2017); Mary Mary, Glasgow, Scotland, UK (2016); and Laurel Gitlen, New York, NY (2015).

Select group exhibitions include: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC (2022); Rachofsky Collection at The Warehouse, TX (2022); Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland, OH (2020); Public Art Fund, New York, NY (2020); Petzel Gallery, New York, NY (2020); Hauser & Wirth, New York, NY (2019); Arsenal art contemporain, Montreal, Canada (2019); Gio Marconi, Milan, Italy (2019); Peter Freeman Inc., New York, NY (2018); Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, NY (2018); Lumber Room, Portland, OR (2017); König Galerie, Berlin, Germany (2016); The Moore Building, Miami, FL (2015); and Skirball Museum, Cincinnati, OH (2014).

Smith’s work is included in public collections such as:

Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; Le Consortium, Dijon, France; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum Brandhorst, Munich, Germany; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Powerlong Art Museum, Shanghai, China; SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Zuzeum Art Centre, Riga, Latvia.

Emma Stern, born 1992, both lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Stern's work deploys her formal background in traditional oil-on-canvas painting to achieve a kind of contemporary portraiture made possible by 3d software. Using tools intended for game developers to create virtual female models that serve as her subjects, her work emphasizes and exacerbates the apparent inclination towards pornographic (or at least porn-adjacent) representations of women in 3d communities and gaming culture. Persistent themes include subversion, perversion, fantasy, and a unique kind of off-brand feminism vaguely reminiscent of pop-up ads of the "You Won't Last 5 Minutes in This Game” variety. Stern regularly works with Almine Rech recently presenting a body of work in Paris and a forthcoming solo exhibition with the gallery in Shanghai. Stern has had notable & recent solo exhibitions with Half Gallery and Carl Kostyal. Her work has been shown broadly internationally and within the United States. Notably, Stern has an upcoming museum show at FRAC Corsica.

Gisela McDaniel (b. Bellevue, NE 1995) is a diasporic indigenous Chamorro artist. Her work is based in healing from her own sexual trauma and reflecting the healing of women and non-binary people who have survived sexual trauma. Interweaving assemblages of audio, oil painting, and motion-sensored technology, she creates pieces that “come to life” and literally “talk back” to the viewer upon being triggered by observers. She intentionally incorporates survivor’s voices in order to subvert traditional power relations and to enable both individual and collective healing. Working primarily with women who identify as indigenous, multiracial, immigrant, and of color, her work deliberately disrupts and responds to historical and contemporary patterns of censorship as it relates to the display and exhibition of women’s bodies, voices, and stories. She aims to heal those who have experienced gender-based sexual violence, giving a voice, space, as well as a confidential vehicle for survivors to not only share their experiences, but to also explore how those experiences have affected them long-term. Based in Detroit, she received her BFA from the University of Michigan.

Avery Wheless, 1993, grew up in Petaluma, CA and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She has a BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design (2015). Her paintings explore the existence of the body in regards to the space they inhabit. Utilizing a combination of heavy, energized mark making and illustrative strokes, Wheless creates a stage on which figures play with the intimate interactions between subjects, and their roles as surveyors and as the surveyed. She has been included in several group exhibitions in Los Angeles and had her first solo show this year with Ochi Projects. Most recently, Wheless participated in a two person exhibition with Fabian Adele at Superzoom in Paris. She is currently working toward her first Los Angeles solo show at Seasons slated for the fall.

Kennedy Yanko (b. 1988, St. Louis, MO) is a sculptor and installation artist working in found metal and paint skin. Yanko deploys her materials in ways that explore the limitations of optic vision, underlining the opportunities we miss when looking with eyes alone. Her methods reflect a dual abstract expressionist-surrealist approach that centers the seen and unseen factors that affect, contribute to, and moderate human experience.

In 2019, Yanko debuted three solo shows: Highly Worked (Denny Dimin Gallery, New York), Hannah (Kavi Gupta, Chicago), and Before Words (UICA, Grand Rapids), and installed her first public sculpture, 3 WAYS, on the Poydras Corridor in New Orleans in collaboration with The Helis Foundation and the Ogden Museum of Art. In 2020, Yanko debuted two solo shows, Because it’s in my blood (Galleria Poggiali, Milan) and Salient Queens (Vielmetter Gallery, Los Angeles).

She was also named Art Forum’s “Critic’s Pick” in 2019 and was featured in 100 Sculptors of Tomorrow published by Thames & Hudson. Most recently, Kennedy Yanko was an Artist in Residence at the Rubell Museum.

Her institutional exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (Parallels and Peripheries curated by Larry Ossei-Mensah); University of South Florida (Life During WarTime, curated by Christian Viveros-Faune).

Her work is included in notable private museums, namely: The Bunker Artspace, West Palm Beach (Beth Rudin DeWoody), Espacio Tacuari, Buenos Aires (Juan Vergez and Patricia Pearson), and the Rubell Museum, Miami (Don and Mera Rubell).

Z Tye Richardson is a Brooklyn based artist who explores concepts through ancestral praise. She is intrigued with somatic relations and how they associate with emotional connectivity. These works are intended to serve as queer offerings to LGBTQIA-POC communities. z continues to research the kinesthetic body with instinctual energy to fulfill their curiosity. She has been included in exhibitions with Bronx Museum of Arts, Volta/Armory Art Fair, The Living Gallery, Long Gallery Harlem, Jenkins Johnson Gallery, Postmasters Gallery, Fridman Gallery, Art in Buildings, and Participant INC. Choreographic work has been commissioned by The Shed, BMW, BOFFO, Jack, Gibney, Movement Research, and Dance Canvas ATL.

And last, but hardly least, about Hiba Schahbaz, the painter.

Hiba Schahbaz was born in Karachi, Pakistan and lives in Brooklyn, NY. She works primarily with paper, black tea, and water-based pigments. She depicts women’s bodies while referencing self-portraiture, creating a space for herself and other women to tell their stories and reclaim their histories. Since migrating to the United States, her practice has expanded from miniature painting to human-scale works on paper.

Schahbaz trained in miniature painting at the National College of Arts, Lahore and received an MFA in painting from Pratt Institute. Her recent exhibitions include include Fire Figure Fantasy currently on view at ICA Miami, Wonder Women on view at Jeffrey Deitch, Nova at Half GAllery LA (2022), Messages from the 6th Dimension at Almine Rech London (2022), FIAC (2021), In My Heart, a public art commission for Rockefeller Centre with Art Production Fund (2021)

She has been written about in Whitewall, Artforum, NY Mag, Forbes, The Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, Coveteur, Vogue, Harpers Bazaar, Art Critical amongst other publications. Schahbaz has been an artist resident at The Tang Museum. Mass MocA, StoneLeaf Retreat, The Wassaic Project, the Vermont Studio Center to name a few. She currently serves as a board member for Art Production Fund.

hibaschahbaz.com

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