Artists

Kapwani Kiwanga, Naama Tsabar, Ghada Amer, Astha Butail, Monique Frydman, Jared Ginsburg, Liza Lou, Unathi Mkonto, Chung Sang-Hwa, John Zurier

Press release

Goodman Gallery is pleased to announce Lifelines, a group exhibition featuring works by Ghada Amer, Astha Butail, Monique Frydman, Jared Ginsburg, Kapwani Kiwanga, Liza Lou, Unathi Mkonto, Chung Sang-Hwa, Naama Tsabar and John Zurier. Lifelines brings together artists from across generations and geographies who engage the aesthetics of minimalism through a tactile and embodied approach. The exhibition reflects on mark-making, not as a gesture for personal expression, but a reflection on memory, politics and meditative presence. In the history of Minimalism, the mark was stripped of emotion and replaced by systems, units and industrial form, distilling art to its most “objective” means. In contrast, the artists in Lifelines reclaim the mark and imbue it with material complexity through process and experimentation. Through slow processes, scraping, stitching, rubbing, folding and assembling, these works explore time and labour, transforming the surface into a space of intimate dialogue. Liza Lou, Chung Sang-Hwa and Monique Frydman explore how repetition in mark-making functions not merely as a process, but as meditation and record-keeping. In Lou’s intricately hand-rendered paintings, small bead-like ovals of oil and graphite are inscribed, circled, erased and layered on the surface. The canvas embodies both discipline and release. Sang-Hwa’s paintings are reflective of Dansaekhwa, the Korean art movement which formed in the 1950s to reconcile the influence of Western modernism on Korean artistic culture. Untitled 79-2-8 is made through methodical acts of creasing and scraping on the canvas; each layer of paint a residue of decisive action and memory, a slow accumulation of time and patience. Frydman belongs to a postmodernist generation of artists, Supports/Surfaces, who radically deconstructed painting, a movement which looked at the power of painting through its material and components in the 1970s-80s. Across disciplines and geographies, artists in Lifelines reclaim the mark, not only to express the self, but to make space for process, memory and embodied knowledge.