Koji Inoue is leaving Christie’s to join Hauser + Wirth where he will start in the Summer of 2019 supervising the 69th St townhouse and its exhibitions of historical artists on the secondary market:

Iwan Wirth, Manuela Wirth, and Marc Payot, Partners of Hauser & Wirth, today announced the appointment of Koji Inoue as International Senior Director Post War & Contemporary Art, based in New York. He will assume his post with the gallery in summer 2019.

In this newly created position, Inoue will collaborate closely with the gallery’s partners and staff to continue developing relationships with clients and consignors of important works of art from eminent collections worldwide. His appointment is part of Hauser & Wirth’s mission to give increased attention to historical and secondary market works of art, and to further expand this area of its business.

Inoue will also oversee Hauser & Wirth’s gallery space and viewing rooms at 32 East 69th Street in Manhattan. Under Inoue’s leadership, the former townhouse will become a platform exclusively for historical exhibitions – shows devoted both to artists whose estates are represented by the gallery and others aligned with the gallery’s artists and program, presented in context to further explore tendencies in postwar art.

Inoue joins Hauser & Wirth from Christie’s auction house, where he has served since 2008 and was most recently International Director, Specialist Post-War & Contemporary Art. In his years at Christie’s, Inoue became Global Head of Private Sales for his categories, redesigning the structure and strategy of private sales at an international level. He was previously Head of Client Intelligence and Strategic Development at the firm; before that was Head of the New York Evening Sale, where he orchestrated six consecutive world-record sales.

Inoue’s appointment follows that of fellow Christie’s alumna Liberté Nuti, who joined Hauser & Wirth in early fall 2018 as London-based International Senior Director of Impressionist & Modern. As global counterparts, Inoue and Nuti represent Hauser & Wirth’s commitment to the full spectrum of art from the 20th century to the present – from Impressionism to Contemporary – and the increased depth and breadth of expertise that will be applied to projects in Europe, the United States, and Asia.

‘With the appointment of Koji Inoue – and Liberté Nuti earlier this year – we are entering a new phase of our business,’ Iwan Wirth remarked. ‘Over the course of more than a quarter century, our gallery has supported research into and developed connoisseurship in the field of 20th century masterworks. And now our attention to this area is growing in truly exciting ways. Koji and Liberté bring firepower to our already significant, ongoing project to find and place exceptional works with the foremost collections worldwide. Our vision is to collaborate even more closely with private collectors, estates, families, and public museums and foundations to identify and
secure masterpieces that in turn enrich the story of art when they live together in collections.’ Wirth continued, ‘Some of Hauser & Wirth’s earliest exhibitions were devoted to Calder, Miró, Arp, Giacometti, and Picabia, and these artists have continued to be touchstones in our program years later. We have always successfully combined activities across the primary and secondary markets, the historical and the new. A core principle of our approach is that a strong 20th century program contextualizes the art of today, and the art
of the present re-contextualizes the art of the past. It’s a full circle, and we look forward to tracing it in many interesting ways with a dedicated space for historical exhibitions at our 69th Street gallery.’

Koji Inoue commented: ‘I am thrilled to join such a well-respected organization and become part of Hauser & Wirth’s world-class team.
I was attracted to the gallery as a place where innovation is prized, and I see ahead many great opportunities to engage the full spectrum of the primary and secondary markets through creative initiatives that connect the dots between our artists and the wider sweep of art history. We aim to provide the highest possible level of service to collectors, working with individuals in-depth and covering all ground to fulfil their needs, while bringing new ideas and connections to the discourse of art.’

Di Donna Galleries is pleased to announces The Life of Forms, an exhibition that explores how modern artists translated forms found in nature into biomorphic shapes in sculpture. The exhibition will bring together important sculptures by Jean Arp, Ruth Asawa, Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Barbara Hepworth, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Henry Moore, and Isamu Noguchi, among others, installed in Di Donna’s Madison Avenue gallery in a setting that evokes an outdoor garden.

The works reveal inspiration ranging from flora (Asawa’s nesting wire mesh pods or the organic “growths” of Calder’s sculptures) to anatomy (Bourgeois and Arp’s depiction of bodily fragments) to living organisms (the amoeba-like forms of Moore and Hepworth’s work). The exhibition features loans from major private collections and institutions, including the Calder Foundation, The Matisse Foundation, and The Noguchi Museum.

The Life of Forms is on view at Di Donna Galleries (744 Madison Avenue) from October 26 trough December 14, with a public opening the evening of October 25. The exhibition will be accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with an essay that investigates the formal and conceptual motivations that led to the development biomorphic abstraction in sculpture.

There’s a show that just opened at Nahmad Contemporary that is as surprising as it is successful at attracting attention. The exhibition is called (UN)COVERED: Miró | Hammons and features the Catalan master’s late body of work called Sobreteixims paired with David Hammons’s Tarp paintings. Paired together, the artists have a strange and unexpected overlap that seems to be exciting a number of gallery goers. The show will run from Sept. 12 to Oct. 27, 2018.

The first to present the works of Catalan master Joan Miró (1893–1983) alongside postmodern American artist David Hammons (b. 1943), the exhibition illuminates the parallel iconoclastic practices of these two seemingly divergent artists whose careers only briefly overlapped. (UN)COVERED: Miró | Hammons highlights the analogous artistic strategies used to subvert traditional aesthetics in Miró’s visceral Sobreteixims (1972-73) and Hammons’ tarp-cloaked canvases (2000s–present). Whether “uncovering” alternative materials or “covering” conventional aesthetics, the works illustrate each artist’s unique formal innovations and conceptual undertakings.

Notably, the exhibition will be the first to present Miro’s Sobreteixims in the United States since Pierre Matisse Gallery’s presentation in 1973 and will feature esteemed works on loan from the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona. A fully illustrated catalogue with scholarly texts by Jordana Moore Saggese and Linda Weintraub will accompany the show.

Joan Miró’s pursuit of artistic liberty was fueled by the major historical events of his time, from World War I and II to the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s regime. As early as 1927, the artist famously declared an “assassination of painting,” and he committed himself thereon to unrestricted expression. He protested aesthetic norms and rejected technical mastery by rendering disorderly compositions and grotesque figuration, and utilizing unconventional media and supports, such as tar and rope or Masonite and Celotex. In 1970, when Miró began using ready-made materials to create his Sobreteixims, an old Catalan word for a small piece of fabric used as a patch for larger fabrics, he was 77 years old and lived on the island of Mallorca in permanent exile from the Franco regime.Harnessing the automatism of surrealism, he transformed the fibers of found supports—from traditional woven textile to industrial burlap sacks—through systematic destruction and alteration: puncturing and patching, tearing and stabilizing, and burning and extinguishing. The artist applied a range of media and objects to the transformed surfaces, such as acrylic, felt and string in Sobreteixim-sack 12 (1973) and buckets in Sobreteixim 14 (1973). Undulating between the treatment of support and ground, Miró emphasized the “un-covered” background material as much as the foreground. He confounded the customary figure-ground relationship by equating two traditionally hierarchical constituents of painting. Furthermore, Miro democratized his method of construction to defy the canon’s notion of the individual “artist genius”. Precociously postmodern, his Sobreteixims signify the process of their creation through incorporation of the objects used to produce them: brooms, buckets, or skeins of string.

A figurehead in postwar art, Miró established many of the formal innovations of modernist painting and presaged the tenets of postmodernism during the last decade of his career. His spontaneous gestures established the principles of abstract expressionism, a movement that by the time David Hammons began his career had already been recognized as the new standard. It was this newfound canon that Hammons’ work defied as he commenced his career in 1960s America, a period marked by the civil rights movement and parallel sociopolitical upheavals. With particular critique of the art world and its history of racial exclusiveness, Hammons used nontraditional media, from chicken bones to sweatshirt hoods, and charged subject matter, such as slavery and racial slurs, to subvert the institutions perpetuating societal inequalities.

Similar to Miró, Hammons asserted his general disdain for art, proclaiming in a 1989 interview, “I can’t stand art actually. I’ve never, ever liked art, ever.” Palpably rejecting the canon of postwar painting, his ongoing Tarp series, created in his Harlem, NY studio, consist of painted canvases shrouded with frayed and tattered industrial fabrics that he found in the streets. Only through the tears and holes of these dilapidated materials, such as in Untitled (2015), or through the rumpled meshed cloth, seen in Untitled (from Dirty Money series) (2014), does Hammons allow glimpses of painterly brush strokes underneath. He defies the hierarchical preciousness of the medium, covering that which is traditionally exposed and elevating as the focus that which is discarded. Similar to Miró upending the principals of painting, Hammons quite literally denies the canon its traditional viewership.

Multidimensional in form and connotation, Miro’s Sobreteixims and Hammons’ Tarp paintings originate from distinct historical perspectives. Yet, when presented together, striking analogies are evidenced. Through parallel strategies of “uncovering” or “covering” institutional norms with ready-made fabrics, both series merge the material forays of found art with the critical commentary of conceptualism.