Alexander Berggruen is pleased to present Ted Gahl, Dustin Hodges, Gabriel Mills, Anna Ting Möller, Soumya Netrabile, Kaifan Wang. This exhibition will open Wednesday, January 17, 2024 with a 5-7 pm reception at the gallery (1018 Madison Avenue, Floor 3, New York, NY). The artists in this group exhibition complicate our relationship with imagery and understanding. Ted Gahl, Dustin Hodges, Gabriel Mills, Anna Ting Möller, Soumya Netrabile, and Kaifan Wang create diverse paintings and sculptures marked by turbulent but considered gestures across a spectrum of varying formal qualities such as color, texture, and material. Forms and constructed spaces slip from familiar to foreign as imagery and non imagery are warped by the artists’ memories, imagination, meditations on space and time, surroundings, and ancestry.
For some, the image-making process is spurred by recollection and intuition. While reflecting on her walks and close looking in the woods, Soumya Netrabile paints lyrical landscapes with long, draftsman-like, energetic brushstrokes that appear to be full of movement and flux. Loose references to objects tether her paintings to the natural world as they float in mythological abstraction. In her 2023 painting Night Flies, leaves and a swarm of flies materialize out of her gestural red marks. They seem to violently sway in the otherwise invisible force of the wind. Netrabile explores our fragile relationship with nature by rendering it with a seemingly unstoppable, moving power, recalling its unwieldy force.
Similarly fusing figuration with abstraction, Ted Gahl’s paintings open windows and doorways into ambiguous mental spaces between thoughts, reality, and dreams. Inspired by fashion, the artist renders fabric-like patterns that envelop or exist alongside lithe figures. The scenes are obscured by a haze, as the forms are often unbound by distinguishing features and are swept up in the movement of the brushstrokes and occasional paint drips. Sometimes, Gahl breaks the composition up into segments he calls Diversions. A viewer’s attention is redirected by these obscuring components, leaving one to wonder what may be behind or beyond them. Rendered with restless mark-making, Gahl’s paintings conjure the feeling of being allowed brief glimpses into psychological spaces.
Dustin Hodges also finds propagative possibilities in what lies beyond the frame. Considering time arts, Hodges’s paintings emerge from, in his own words, “the idea of a film that functions as a motor generating paintings as if they were each an individual frame or still” (1). He probes how narratives around an object can change in varying atmospheres. The artist extracts and repurposes forms from sources including Odilon Redon’s painting Butterflies (circa 1910) and the 1996-2022 cartoon Arthur. His 2022 painting Diver Mentality animates a rock formation found in Redon’s Butterflies by isolating and rotating it such that, here, it resembles a lion plunging downwards. This manifests above a figure’s head, comparable to the visual metaphor of a thought bubble. Through shifting revisitations of similar subjects, Hodges embraces an uncertain, unstable, and unattainable narrative, reminiscent of the fertile, wavering qualities of abstraction.
The abstract topographical surfaces Gabriel Mills paints hover between the earthly and the celestial. His sculptural application of oil paint ties the work to a tangible reality while the lifted attention to light and color engenders an otherworldly reach for the divine. Mills grapples with disjunction. Breaking his paintings up into triptychs with sometimes unconventional ratios, the artist prevents continuity. In his 2023 triptych Changria, uniform horizontal striations meet thin maze-like raised paint, next to a wider panel of thickly built up and scraped away paint. These rifts in compositions and the suffocated space between them act as abrupt events of change, resembling significant indicators of one’s subjective experience of “time” and “presence”.
Kaifan Wang’s Tumbleweed series resembles the movement and round form of the eponymous plant in swirling brushstrokes that verge on abstraction. Born in Hohhot, China, the artist now lives and works in Berlin, where, in his words: “a grain of sand blown into one’s eyes on a Berlin street can remind him of flying dust in Inner Mongolia.” Earth-toned, calligraphic, swirling marks overlap in and spill out of his 2023 painting Tumbleweed VIII. Contemplating his personal experiences with migration, Wang balances the chaos of a tumbleweed’s inertia with its peaceful terrestrial color palette, true to the plant’s existence. He evinces the fluctuating experience of living in an increasingly global economy. In response to life’s unpredictability and social upheavals, Wang seeks to channel the spirit of the tumbleweed—following the destination of the wind in surrender.
Another artist interrogating their ties to being “from” and living between vastly different countries, Anna Ting Möller challenges notions of kinship and alienating colonial structures. On an unsuccessful search for their birth mother, Möller was gifted a kombucha-mother—a fermenting culture also known as the acronym SCOBY for Symbiotic Cultures of Bacteria and Yeast. This SCOBY has become Möller’s primary sculptural medium. Considering the continual care required to maintain the SCOBY, the artist investigates the notion of lineage, whereby the relationship they share with the fermenting culture is that of, in their words: “other, offspring, caregiver, contaminant, and even parasite”. They hand stitch growths from the SCOBY with suture seams to fit as flesh around metal or porcelain armatures or into long sheets, reminiscent of a canvas structure. Much like the artist themself, the SCOBY in their work is, in their words, “detached from its origins.”
Pursuing shifting imagery through memory, intuition, time, and changing relationships, the artists in this show chase the nebulous, elusive qualities of subjective reality. They seem to find that deviation from the details allows access to the essence. What unites these distinct artists is their grappling with the unknowable, through the forces which connect us, the divine, and our individual and collective histories.
Press Release by Kirsten Cave
