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Regen Projects

Regen Projects is pleased to announce an exhibition by renowned artist Anish Kapoor. Since the 1980s Kapoor’s ambitious practice has continuously expanded the limits of sculptural form by investigating scale, volume, color, and materiality. With this exhibition, the artist’s sixth solo presentation following his gallery debut in 1992, Kapoor brings together a selection of new mirror works that challenge optical perception and phenomenological experience through experiments in shape and form.

The cornerstone of the exhibition is a monumental stainless-steel Double S-Curve. Expanding upon a singular work originally exhibited at Regen Projects in 2006, the sculpture’s alternating concave and convex structure snakes through the center of the gallery. Simultaneously appearing both solid and liquid, its highly polished mirrored surfaces refract and reflect its surroundings, creating an illusory sense of reality that confounds one’s relationship to the space.

A new series of wall-mounted mirrors subtly shift in shape between convex and concave. Hovering at eye level each sculpture projects various geometric shapes of acute triangles, circles and rectangles, that playfully tease the viewer’s optical perception and force them to re-examine their phenomenological experience. In his landmark essay on Kapoor’s work “Making Emptiness,” Homi K. Bhaba writes, “The tactile experience of transition is caught in the virtual space in between the double mirrors. The perspectival distance between subject and object, or the mimetic balance between the mirror and its reflection, are replaced by a movement of erasure and inversion – ‘reverse, affirm, negate.’ It is as if the possibility of pictoriality or image-making, associated with visual pleasure, has been unsettled to reveal emptiness, darkness, blankness, the blind spot. However, the purpose of Kapoor’s work is not to represent the mediation of light and darkness, or negative and positive space, in a dialectical relationship in which emptiness will travel through the darkening mirror to assume the plenitude of presence. Kapoor stays with the state of transitionality, allowing it the time and space to develop its own affects – anxiety, unease, restlessness – so that viewing it becomes part of the process of making the work itself. The spectator’s relation to the object involves a process of questioning the underlying conditions through which the work becomes a visual experience in the first place: how can the conceptual be visible? How can the perceptual void be spoken?”

Anish Kapoor was born in Mumbai, India in 1954 and lives and works in London.

Kapoor’s work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions worldwide. In 2019 he became the second contemporary artist to install their work in Beijing’s Forbidden City. The exhibition was presented at the Imperial Ancestral Temple and coincided with a survey at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Additional recent solo exhibitions include CorpArtes, Santiago (2019); Pitzhanger Manor and Gallery, London (2019); Serralves Museum, Porto (2018); Parque de la Memoria, Buenos Aires (2017); MAST Foundation, Bologna (2017); Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Mexico City (2016); Couvent de la Tourette, Eveux, France (2015); Château de Versailles (2015); The Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, Moscow (2015);  Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin (2013); and the Royal Academy, London (2009).

He has been the recipient of numerous international awards, including a Premio Duemila for his representation of Britain at the 44th Venice Biennale (1990), a Turner Prize (1991), a CBE (2003), Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2011), a Padma Bhushan (2012), and a Knighthood (2013) for services to visual arts.

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

“Regen Projects is pleased to announce its first solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Alex Hubbard. On view will be a selection of new works comprising multimedia paintings and two handmade projectors streaming animated videos. Hubbard has often experimented with various media to extend the prescribed characteristics of both painting and video.

The moving image has always been an integral thematic of Hubbard’s practice. His early video works often render a series of alternating acts of construction and deconstruction across a flattened plane while proposing a visual allegiance to painting. With these new works comes a series of questions concerning the position of video in a post-YouTube era. The two projectors display referential animations – recycling elements of Hubbard’s past videos while alluding to the history of structuralist films. Each projector’s animations – one a surrealist landscape, the other a hand-drawn layered composition – feature colorful kinetic forms that play out on the gallery walls.

Hubbard’s paintings combine the language of abstraction with nontraditional, industrial materials like resin, fiberglass, pigmented urethane, and auto-body paint. In this series of paintings Hubbard has employed a new UV printing technology. Each composition is achieved through a multi-layered process of paint pours and printing. While still employing abstract compositions, traces of the figurative are present through cut-out prints of machinery and quotidian objects.

Alex Hubbard (b. 1975 Toledo, OR) received a BFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art. In 2003 he attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. He lives and works in Los Angeles. 

He has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions including Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham (2014); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2012); The Kitchen, New York (2010); and Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis (2009). Hubbard’s works have also been featured in group exhibitions at Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Greensboro (2016); Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach (2016); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2015); Museo Experimental del Eco, Mexico City (2014); Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson (2012); Le Consortium, Dijon (2014); and the 2010 Whitney Biennial; among others.” – per website

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

Regen Projects is pleased to announce But I Woke Jus’ Tha Same, an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Los Angeles-based artist Christina Quarles. This marks her first solo presentation at the gallery. 

Quarles’ seductive paintings feature polymorphous figures arranged in contorted positions in space, rendered through expressive and gestural strokes that teeter on the edge of abstraction and representation. Referencing the history and techniques of painting, her work propels forward the limits of her chosen medium, and is informed by her multiply situated identity as a queer woman of mixed race. Dynamic compositions feature bold patterns and decorative motifs such as flowers, latticework, and plaid tablecloths – feminine tropes that reference domestic space. Yet the subjects in Quarles’ paintings simultaneously inhabit interior and exterior space. Perspectival planes both situate and fragment the bodies they bisect, representing the boundaries that demarcate a space from the individual, and expanding the limits and potential for representation. 

Similar to her paintings, her drawings deftly combine pictorial elements using economy of line with cross hatching, and other modes of mark making, to create form and depth. Punctuating the picture plane, or outlining a figure, text additions in the form of puns or poetic wordplay often reference pop culture, situating the works in our time. 

Christina Quarles was born in Chicago, IL in 1985. She received a B.A. from Hampshire College and an M.F.A. from Yale University in 2016. That same year she attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. She lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.