Curated by Lawrence Van Hagen, WHAT'S UP / TWENTY TWENTY is an exhibition and art sale for our time, one that challenges the physical exhibition space as we know it and releases viewers from the confines of one gallery in one location. Visitors and buyers alike will be invited to journey through never seen before fictional spaces, viewing important pieces of sought after works from the 1960s right through to the present day. This sale embraces the digitalisation of the art world and celebrates the narratives that define modern humanity as the vibrant and fervent force that it is today.
Spread across five digital galleries, this latest iteration brings together a spectacular selection of over 30 critically acclaimed artists and eight prominent global designers, each hailing from different backgrounds, cultural heritages and artistic influences. Taking inspiration from celebrated architectural movements and intellects such as Luis Barragán, David Chipperfield or Tadao Ando, these digital galleries were created exclusively for the exhibition, and hope to enhance the cultural richness of the show and provide viewers with the opportunity to experience art in a new light.
Transporting visitors to places one can only dream of at the moment, each exhibition space is housed within striking, fictional corners of the world. First stop, stepping outside, in an open-air gallery of concrete walls suggestive of Japanese master Tadao Ando’s architecture, aSubject sculpture by Sir. Antony Gormley and a geometric painting by José Dávila meets an interactive mirror sculpture by Jeppe Hein, reflecting the surrounding Mediterranean environment and furniture design by David Lopez Quincoces.
In the sophisticated backdrop of a Parisian apartment, influenced by the seascapes and sunset hues of Southern California, a translucent sculpture by DeWain Valentine meets the black opacity of an iconic Outrenoir by Pierre Soulages and a small-scale gem by the eminent post-war German artist Gerhard Richter. Blurring the dichotomies between abstraction and figuration, a painting by emerging star Aks Misyuta, reminiscent of Picasso’s Large Bathers, engages in an easy symbiosis with a painting by Harold Ancart, structured like a musical partition. The carefully curated collection in this room is completed with a large-scale abstract photograph by Berlin-based artist Thomas Ruff and a rare 1980s historical painting by Georg Baselitz.
In a Mexica Casa, inspired by the architecture of Luis Barragán’s, a compilation of nine Shadow Paintings by known-to-all pop-art artist Andy Warhol –one of the artist’s most sought after series- meets the relational aesthetics of a Rirkrit Tiravanija Mirror, and a cult-of-celebrity Flat by Alex Israel, placed alongside a painting by rising star Richard Kennedy, expressing his experience as a black queer man.
On view in a space evoking a Venetian Palazzo, a monumental Target painting by Ugo Rondinone is placed in dialogue with Flare, a painting by Colour Field founding father Kenneth Noland and designer Gabriel Chipperfield. Next door, the hypnotic and spiritual temper of a large-scale painting by the young Bolivian-American artist Donna Huanca ventures into conversation with the surrealist ambiance of Swiss-born artist Nicolas Party’s painting Birds. Lastly, one can wonder in awe at a monumental neon sculpture by LA Light and Space master Robert Irwin.
Lastly, in the middle of the Utah desert, a vast, contemporary looking museum resides, where a Brent Wadden hand-woven tapestry on canvas sits alongside the sophisticated design of a Pierre Paulin Tapis Siège, an Alabaster painting by Sterling Ruby and a stone and marble sculpture by Alicja Kwade.
In these times of restricted movement and social unrest, WHAT'S UP / TWENTY TWENTY hopes to provide an invigorating online experience that holds no confines of social or artistic movement, space or time and aims to celebrate cultural diversity. It is a digital reimagining of the traditional exhibition as we know it, and an innovative celebration of a global connectedness amongst the art world.
