LESLEY DILL. White Hinged Poem Dress, 1994. Patinated bronze. 55 x 37 x 30 in. (139.7 x 94 x 76.2 cm). Edition of 4.
EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS OF THE 40th ANNIVERSARY OF THE NOHRA HAIME GALLERY
November 17, 2022 - January 30, 2023
Sophia Vari is a renowned Greek visual artist, specializing in bronze sculpture. She is also known for her collages, oils and watercolors. Her work is an investigation of form and balance. Her compositions all have a certain playfulness and liveliness that are pushed into the realm of dimensional space. From her early representational phase to her most recent abstractions, Vari’s work has been consistently characterized by its extraordinary sensuality and expressive quality. Her unique use of patina with contrasting colors such as black with white, she creates an immediate visual effect giving her sculptures a certain presence. When she began sculpting in the 1960s, her work was figurative. During the 1980s, she worked in rounded abstract forms that suggested the human body. Eventually she began incorporating more planar and constructed forms and would later, during the 1990s start applying color to the surfaces. This contributes to the movement of her pieces, making both her monumental and smaller formats, have an autonomous life.
Born in Athens in 1940, Sophi Vari attended the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris in 1958. She has exhibited widely throughout the world and has had nearly 100 one-person exhibitions. Museum exhibitions include the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence; the Palazzo Bricherassio, Torino; The Ludwig Museum, Kombletz; and more recently, the Pera Museum, Istanbul. Outdoor solo exhibitions of Vari’s monumental sculptures have taken place in cities such as Paris, Rome, Montecarlo, Baden-Baden, Geneva, Pietrasanta, Athens, Madrid and Cartagena de Indias, among others. Sophia Vari currently lives and works in Pietrasanta, Italy.
Francisca Sutil is a painter known for her research of chromatic surfaces and the study of textures and materials that she prepares herself. Sutil’s work is characterized by its superb construction and unique contemplative qualities. When approaching her paintings, the viewer is immediately captivated by the textures and hues. She proposes a rigorous exercise of painting on support, regardless of its material composition, in search of pictorial depth. Intending no specific content in her paintings, she instead asks viewers to respond openly and honestly to her abstractions. Her works encourage reflection, meditation and lasting thoughts. Her technique is integral to the experience, both in her prints and drawings on textured handmade paper, in her pigmented gesso surfaces and vertical oil bands she calls "Spaces." She is interested in the relationship of color and light, as well as in the nature of the support. In her Mute series, she works with traditional materials allowing the expression of the mark to push its meaning. Her interest in the observation and meditation that the paintings cause is reflected in her trance-inducing shapes or marks assembled to reflect the experience of their creation.
Born in Santiago de Chile in 1952, she moved to New York where she received an M.F.A. from Pratt Institute in 1981. Sje has received numerous grants and awards such as Fellowship, Drawing Center (Paper Conservation), New York and Artists Space, New York, among others. Her works are included in public and corporate collections such as El Museo del Barrio, New York; the Museo de Artes Visuales, Santiago; the Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas, Venezuela and the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.. In 2016, Sutil was awarded Best Exhibition of the Year by the Chilean Art Critics Association, and in 2017, the Marco Bontá for her artistic trajectory.
MICHAEL HEIZER. Untitled (Black and Gold), 1979. Oil and aluminum powder on canvas. 111 x 71 3/4 in. (282 x 182.2 cm).
Sophia Vari is a renowned Greek visual artist, specializing in bronze sculpture. She is also known for her collages, oils and watercolors. Her work is an investigation of form and balance. Her compositions all have a certain playfulness and liveliness that are pushed into the realm of dimensional space. From her early representational phase to her most recent abstractions, Vari’s work has been consistently characterized by its extraordinary sensuality and expressive quality. Her unique use of patina with contrasting colors such as black with white, she creates an immediate visual effect giving her sculptures a certain presence. When she began sculpting in the 1960s, her work was figurative. During the 1980s, she worked in rounded abstract forms that suggested the human body. Eventually she began incorporating more planar and constructed forms and would later, during the 1990s start applying color to the surfaces. This contributes to the movement of her pieces, making both her monumental and smaller formats, have an autonomous life.
Born in Athens in 1940, Sophi Vari attended the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris in 1958. She has exhibited widely throughout the world and has had nearly 100 one-person exhibitions. Museum exhibitions include the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence; the Palazzo Bricherassio, Torino; The Ludwig Museum, Kombletz; and more recently, the Pera Museum, Istanbul. Outdoor solo exhibitions of Vari’s monumental sculptures have taken place in cities such as Paris, Rome, Montecarlo, Baden-Baden, Geneva, Pietrasanta, Athens, Madrid and Cartagena de Indias, among others. Sophia Vari currently lives and works in Pietrasanta, Italy.
LAURA GRISI. The Mirrored Palace (From the Series "The Mirrored"), 1990-91. Silkscreen on forex. 16 1/4 x 12 1/4 in. (41.3 x 31.1 cm).
Painter and sculptor Julio Larráz has become one of the most influential figures in Latin American and American art. Born in Havana, Cuba, in 1944, he now lives and works in Miami .
His family fled Cuba and sought asylum in the United States when he was 16 years old. Exile had a profound effect on his life and art. Growing up in Cuba, he developed his artistic skill by creating caricatures and cartoons of teachers in school. He was expelled from several schools and eventually studied in a military academy run by former military officers under dictator Fulgencio Batista. The combination of a politically affiliated education and his exile informed his caricatures. The sense of humor, the ability to portray each individual’s personality, and skilled quality of his work began to draw attention and his caricatures were eventually published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vogue, Rolling Stone, among others. Later he turned to painting, where his works are based on studies he then builds into larger works. He focuses on the appearance and expressions of people he encounters in his daily life and travels, which then come to life in his work as characters from other worlds, places, and times. Larráz refers to this collection of ideas in his imagination as “The Kingdom We Carry Inside.”
His work has since shown in galleries throughout the United States, Europe, and South America and are found in important public and private collections, including Archer M. Huntington Gallery, University of Texas, Austin, TX and the World Bank, Washington, D.C. He has been the recipient of several awards including the Center for the Arts and Education, New York, the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters, New York.
JULIO LARRÁZ. The Main Attraction at the 'Circo Miguelito', 1988. Oil on canvas. 68 x 83 in. (173.4 x 216 cm).
Louise Nevelson® sculpted assemblages from found wood objects and painted them all one color, most notably black. She went on to brilliantly use other materials, e.g. Cor-Ten steel, aluminum, Plexiglas. Her unique process transformed everyday materials into compositions that transcended space and altered the viewer's perception of art. Exhibition rooms of monochromatic works on the floor, walls and sometimes hanging from the ceiling, allowed the visitor passage through her world of the mysterious, of the fourth dimension.
Nevelson also considered her persona as an extension of the sculptures and delightfully collaged ethnic clothing with jewelry, her head wrapped in scarves and riding hats, and eyes highlighted with layers of velvety black mink eyelashes into a unique fashion, making Eleanor Lambert's "Best Dressed International Women" fashion list in 1977.
Louise Nevelson® was celebrated in her lifetime. She received numerous awards and recognitions, including the National Medal of the Arts, Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture, Brandeis University Creative Arts Award in Sculpture, National Arts Club Gold Medal in the Visual Arts, American Institute of Architects Medal, Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was also awarded two magnificent commissions - the "Louise Nevelson Plaza" an outdoor environmental park in Lower Manhattan and the indoor environmental "Nevelson Chapel" of the Good Shepherd at St. Peter's Church in Midtown Manhattan. Her works are included in major international imuseums, municipalities, and private collections worldwide.
OLGA DE AMARAL. Nudo XIII (Azul) (Knot XIII [blue]), 2012. Linen, gesso and acrylic. 114 x 11 3/4 in. (290 x 30 cm).
Juan Cortés uses interdisciplinary processes to explore the connections between art, science and education. His practice includes installations, audio recordings, and concert pieces. His interest in sound and natural forces are the foundation of his art. His scientific upbringing and artistic abilities enable him to break down complicated theories, happenings and phenomena into understandable installations and machines he calls “translation machines”. These machines are made up of materials like TVs, computers, robots, acoustic levitators and LED lights. They interpret phenomena like atmospheric disturbances or concepts like dark matter through coded algorithms, scientific data, sound and light waves.
Born in 1989, Juan Cortés lives and works in Bogotá, Colombia. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally in institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Center for the Arts , Madrid, Spain; Bilbao Exhibition Center, Spain and Centrequatre-Paris, France. He is co-founder and curator of the RADAR Video Art Festival and the SATELLITE Festival of Sound Art. He received numerous awards including: VII Bogotá Prize for Alternative Art Spaces in Colombia and the prestigious PRAC Grant of the Ministry of Culture of Colombia. In 2016, he received an Honorary Mention in the CERN Collide International Prize.
LOUISE NEVELSON. Untitled, 1981. Wood painted black. 92 x 35 x 3 3/4 in. (233.7 x 88.9 x 9.5 cm).
JUAN CORTÉS. The Migranta, 2021. Single channel video, 17 min.. Edition 3 of 6.
Niki de Saint Phalle embodied feminism in mind and spirit as her practice reflected an empowered point of view very early on in her career. This was in part due to the very strict catholic upbringing making her very critical of her generation's social norms, she reflected throughout her artistic production. As she aptly stated, "I'm following a course that was chosen for me, following a pressing need to show that a woman can work on a monumental scale." Although she is most known for her sculptures, particularly her Nanas, she was not only incredibly prolific but versatile and explored a huge variety of mediums that include: books, gardens, architectural projects, films, theater sets, clothing and jewelry.
During the mid-1960s she started with large-scale sculptures that celebrated womanhood and challenged traditional ideas around the female body and role of women, seen in her Nana's. She accentuated body features and breathed new life into the shape through her purposeful choice of radiant hues. Dawn (Bleue), circa 1993, currently in the exhibition, is a prime example of this.
Olga de Amaral's body of work brings together skillfully art, craft, and design, pushing the boundaries of conventional textiles. Her works reflect a unique and very intricate vocabulary, and technique seen in a variety of forms such as thinly weaved strips and dynamic grids to showcase elements in the landscape and geography of her native Colombia. Her first series of Rios was presented in the United States, during the 1990s that were influenced by rivers and rock formations from her family farm. Her vocabulary is also seen in her varied use of materials such as gesso and acrylic paint she purposefully uses to evoke depth, in this way, also creating a variations in the luminosity and texture of the surface. Her textiles are also informed by her in-depth research Pre-Columbian basketry and weaving techniques as well as baroque art.
Born in Bogotá, Amaral studied architectural design at Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca prior to attending Cranbrook Academy of Art in the United States in 1954-1955. Majoring in weaving and textiles design, she studied under Finish-American designer Marianne Strengell who encouraged her to experiment with native materials—which she eventually incorporated in her artworks, such as raw wool, wood branches, luffa, horsehair, and plastic—and to explore scale and the relationship of tapestries with architectural settings. When she returned to Colombia, she founded the workshop Studio-Telas Amaral. Ten years later she established the Textile Department at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá. In 1973 she was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship which allowed her to work in Paris. She represented Colombia at the 42nd Venice Biennial in 1986.
Michael Heizer's work include monumental excavations, site-specific constructions, geometric paintings, and drawings. He explores the relationship between positive and negative space and examines the profound effects of form and scale. His father, a renowned archeologist, influenced his work early on in his career, as he would accompany his father on digs and make site drawings, a process he used throughout his career. In the mid-1960s he moved to New York and began working on shaped canvases he called “negative paintings.” In 1967 Heizer made a trip to the Sierra Nevada mountains, where he dug two large pits in the woods and lined one with plywood and the other with sheet metal. This work would mark a turning point in his practice, as he would start manipulating his landscapes further. A clear example of this can be seen in Double Negative (1969). During the 1970s he continued seeking out ideal terrains for his work, compiling real estate files for property and buying remote land as raw material. In 1970 he began City, a project in the Nevada desert that he worked on for more than forty years reflecting his interests in ancient civilizations and his unique ability with monumental variations in scale viewpoint and perspective. The project was also informed by Native American and Pre-Columbian traditions of mound building.
Heizer has also developed several major bodies of work, as well as "negative wall sculptures” composed of rocks and boulders set into rectangular niches, these included works such as Levitated Mass (2012) installed in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Altar series (2015) at Gagosian Gallery in New York. By merging images and architecture of different cultures and time periods, Heizer attempts to create art that can outlast many generations.
NIKI DE SAINT PHALLE. Dawn (Bleue), circa 1993. Painted polyester on metal base. 55 1/2 x 45 1/2 x 25 in. (141 x 115.6 x 63.5 cm). Edition 3 of 5.
Olga de Amaral's body of work brings together skillfully art, craft, and design, pushing the boundaries of conventional textiles. Her works reflect a unique and very intricate vocabulary, and technique seen in a variety of forms such as thinly weaved strips and dynamic grids to showcase elements in the landscape and geography of her native Colombia. Her first series of Rios was presented in the United States, during the 1990s that were influenced by rivers and rock formations from her family farm. Her vocabulary is also seen in her varied use of materials such as gesso and acrylic paint she purposefully uses to evoke depth, in this way, also creating a variations in the luminosity and texture of the surface. Her textiles are also informed by her in-depth research Pre-Columbian basketry and weaving techniques as well as baroque art.
Born in Bogotá, Amaral studied architectural design at Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca prior to attending Cranbrook Academy of Art in the United States in 1954-1955. Majoring in weaving and textiles design, she studied under Finish-American designer Marianne Strengell who encouraged her to experiment with native materials—which she eventually incorporated in her artworks, such as raw wool, wood branches, luffa, horsehair, and plastic—and to explore scale and the relationship of tapestries with architectural settings. When she returned to Colombia, she founded the workshop Studio-Telas Amaral. Ten years later she established the Textile Department at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá. In 1973 she was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship which allowed her to work in Paris. She represented Colombia at the 42nd Venice Biennial in 1986.
FRANCISCA SUTIL. Mute, #8, 2014. Ink of paper. 92 7/8 x 50 5/8 in. (236 x 128 cm).
Italian artist Laura Grisi, emerged on the art scene in the 1960s and was known for her series “Variable Paintings and “Neon Paintings,” 1966–1968. These series featured diverse combinations of different mediums consisting of panels of painted canvases, colored Plexiglas, neon, wood and metal. They reflected Grisi's interest in variability and her works also allowed viewers to change the compositions. Her neon lights installations included elements such as water and wind in an attempt to redefine physical space.
Grisi was born in Rhodes, Greece, and lived between Rome and New York. She studied art in Rome and at the Ecole des Bux Arts in Paris. She participated in the Rome Quadriennale in 1965, 1973, and 1986; the Venice Biennale in 1966 and 1986; and the group show “Young Italians” at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and the Jewish Museum in New York in 1968. Her works are included in the collections of a number of prestigious institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Brooklyn Museum and the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna in Turin amongst other. In October 2017, she started to collaborate with P420, Bologna, which presented her works in a solo show in Frieze Masters, London.
ALVARO BARRIOS. Untitled (You will Give Us the "Large Galss" whether You want to or Not, Superman!), 2008. Acrylic on canvas. 5 1/4 x 98 1/2 in. (130 x 250 cm).
Álvaro Barrios is a multidisciplinary artist whose works are known for their sense of humour, their irony, and the influence of collage and comic strips. His themes are often paradoxical and full of cultural references, informed by Duchamp, surrealism, conceptual art and pop culture. Drawn to comic strips as a youth, Barrios began his career by incorporating these narratives into artistic compositions, along with certain characters and superheroes that marked him. His compositions are seemigly simple, yet reflect a profound knowledge of Art History, filled with irony, sense of humour and sarcasm. It is also a biting commentary on art collecting.
Barrios was born in Barranquilla, Colombia in 1945. In 1966 he moved to Italy, where he studied at the Universitá di Perugia and in la Fondazione Giorgio Cini di Venezia. He has held many important exhibitions throughout the world, and his work is in numerous private and public collections such as the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Centro Wifredo Lam, Havana, Cuba; the Museum of Modern Art of Latin America, Washington, D.C. In 2005, the Museum of Modern Art acquired 76 pieces of his series “grabados populares” for its Latin American art collection. Barrios currently lives and works in Colombia.
TAKASHI MURAKAMI. Miss KO2 - Satoeri, 2004. Colored photograph. 84 1/8 x 60 1/8 x 3 in. (214 x 153 x 7.5 cm). Edition 2 of 4.
SOPHIA VARI. Double Epee, 1997. Bronze, black patina and yellow oil. 48 x 15 3/4 x 9 in. (123 x 40 x 23 cm). Edition 1 of 3.