LeBron James and Savannah Brinson met in 2002, when they were students at nearby high schools in Ohio and just as LeBron became a national phenomenon. The promise of his early expectations was staggering, but he went on to outstrip it. At 37, he’s not so much an elder statesman of the NBA as he is the engine of its contemporary business, politics, and presentation. He’s also vocal about being a family man. He and Savannah married in 2013, and they have three children, Bronny, Bryce, and Zhuri.
Titled “Los Angeles Pines,” this group of screen prints, oil paintings and oils on paper by the Angeleno artist Jake Longstreth at this West Hollywood gallery brings a welcome sense of sunlight and air. Each work features a tree trunk, not necessarily pine, in front of a tennis court, parking lot or scrubby vista of low hills. Because foreground and background are rendered with the same mute colors in the same flat style — think of the comic artist Chris Ware— what could be mundane nature scenes become windows into the timeless uncanny.
“I’ve been extremely impressed by the energy of the Brussels art scene, ever since I participated in Art Brussels in 2016,” Nino Mier shared with Galerie. “When I was thinking about expanding into Europe, Brussels was really the first city I considered, because I remembered the great interest of the collectors and the seriousness of that interest. An artist recently told me that the conversations he had during the gallery dinner for his show were the most challenging, both intellectually and art historically, he has ever had. It rings to the core of the community—they care and they want to understand the work, deeply—which is less and less the case in today’s art world.”
Four works feature young Black swimmers, referencing a lack of access for Black people to beaches and pools. In Derek Fordjour’s magnificent Pool Boys (2019), the central figure, diving into the water, is collaged from material that includes newspaper stock market listings. It stands next to Lilo (2018) by Jonathan Wateridge, a white artist who is from Zambia.
The Finnish artist Iiu Susiraja makes photographs using herself as a model, but her images are less self-portraits than still-lifes. A deadpan protagonist—or a jarring centerpiece—she appears amid carefully staged arrangements of household objects, gazing into the camera with rich dispassion.
Take the image “Fountain,” from 2021. The shot’s vantage foreshortens Susiraja’s reclining figure, exaggerating its proportions, rendering her bare legs and midsection mountainous while shrinking her head, which almost aligns with the composition’s vanishing point. The look on Susiraja’s face—a vacant regard—is, strangely, more forceful for its shadowed, distant presence at the far corner of a bed. The viewer’s eye dwells there rather than on the surrealist hullabaloo in the picture’s foreground, where a transparent plastic umbrella, upside down and full of rubber duckies, covers Susiraja’s crotch. In “Blue Lagoon,” also from 2021, she sits up in the same twin bed, nude but for three strategically placed Santa masks. A slack, hollow-eyed disguise covers each breast, like the triangles of a bikini top; another flaccid Father Christmas is particularly perverse, his white beard acting as Susiraja’s proverbial fig leaf. He appears downcast between her spread legs; she remains expressionless.
Imagine if characters seen across modern sports and gambling arenas morphed into Pre-Colombian artifacts. That’s essentially a good starting point to describe Stefan Rinck’s new solo exhibition at Skarstedt.
Housed at the gallery’s East Hampton location in New York, Semigods of the Jockey Club presents a series of totemic sculptures made of various materials, such as diabase, sandstone and cairo grey marble. Weathered like an artifact you’d find in a museum, yet polished with contemporary techniques, Rinck reintroduces modern lexicon through an almost ancient lens that draws from French Romanesque, Pre-Columbian, and African history.
With two years on Newtown Lane under its belt, Skarstedt continues to mount museum-level shows that would be just as at home in its Upper East Side location. The most recently opened exhibition, ‘Semigods of the Jockey Club’, is from Stefan Rinck, whose satirical surrealist-leaning sculptures of stone festoon symbols from sports, gambling, and popular culture into a cast of motley characters. Cousin Itt, Darth Vader, and Pokémon creatures all find their way into Rinck’s polished marble, quartzite, and sandstone, but they’re fashioned to evoke fine carvings from French Romanesque, Pre-Columbian, and African artistic traditions – an atavistic gesture to enervate older aesthetic conventions into contemporary iconography.
The New York-born artist Lola Montes moved to Sicily three years ago and soon realized there was something missing in her paintings on canvas. Perhaps they weren’t Sicilian enough, or just didn’t reflect her new environment. So she set up a kiln and a laboratory in her home, and began to make ceramics. Collaborating with local artisans, studying ancient techniques, Montes combined clay and volcanic ash from Mount Etna to create exquisite hand-painted tiles, reliefs, sculptural vessels, and candelabra. The results are ethereal. Her myth-inspired figures hover peacefully in the delicate material, as if the colors themselves were born in the kiln. From her foundry in the Mediterranean’s largest island, Montes’s work travels to Los Angeles.
Opening in August and remaining up through the close of summer 2022, Skarstedt’s East Hampton gallery will host a solo exhibition of work by German sculptor Stefan Rinck. This will be the first New York solo show for Rinck, who works primarily in stone and whose zoomorphic sculptures feel both humorous and archaeological, as if worthy of altar-like worship at times and
a good laugh at others.
Nino Mier Gallery, which was founded in Los Angeles in 2015 and has quickly been growing over the past seven years, will soon add a location in New York.
Opening next January, the space will be inaugurated with a solo show of German artist Jana Schröder, who has been with the gallery since its earliest days. The New York location, located in SoHo, on Crosby Street between Spring and Broome streets, will be designed by Markus Dochantschi of StudioMDA and led by Margaret Zuckerman, who has been a director at the gallery since 2018.
In less than a decade, dealer Nino Mier has expanded at a fast clip. He currently operates five locations in L.A., comprised of a campus of four buildings in West Hollywood and a separate location in Glassell Park, as well as a six-story townhouse and annex in Brussels and a project space in Marfa, Texas.
It’s hard to believe, but it’s only been just over a year since Beeple’s explosive sale at Sotheby’s changed the genetic makeup of the art market as knew it.
Over the course of that year, a split has emerged between those in the art world that embrace web3 with aplomb, and those that have been forced to make peace with its presence.
That tension was on full display at this year’s New Art Dealers Alliance fair in New York, its first in the city since 2018. Inside, digital art blended seamlessly with traditional art—which is quite a feat.
Andrea Joyce Heimer presents 24 paintings representing each hour of the day she lost her virginity in new show 24 Hours in Great Falls, Montana at Nino Mier Gallery. Opening March 26th, the show follows that day in Heimer’s life through the lead up, through noon when the fateful event occurred, and finishing out the remainder of the disappointed hours. “I look back at that day and think that’s where the trouble began. Of course it’s not that simple, but those twenty-four hours were formative,” writes Heimer in her statement. “I still find myself downstairs when I should be up.”
24 Hours in Great Falls, Montana is open through April 9, 2022 at Nino Mier Gallery in Glassell Park.
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