The Armory Show

Armin Boehm was born 1972 in Aachen. He lives and works in Berlin (D).
Armin Boehm paints fictitious and spatially impossible scenes, based on urban layouts and architectural constructions, that are meant to evoke the inner human condition.
In an interview by Gaston La-Gaffe on FAD Magazine, the artist said “The painted surface is as vulnerable as our skin and looking at it is reaching our emotional system very directly”. Due to his tough personal path he is attracted by the painted surface, which is able to deal with the unconsciousness and emotions of the human being.
The images, which sometimes appear to be aerial views or perpetually receding landscapes, explore the idea of natural and manmade borders in geographic surfaces.
His most famous works are large-scale paintings, constructed using complex combinations of materials including fabric, oil paint, pure pigment, metal, and sand.
A majority of Boehm’s paintings have dark palettes and depict nocturnal views with small sources of light; in preparation for exhibiting his paintings, Boehm has been known to paint the walls gray and dim the lights to deepen the experience of darkness. Other subjects have included interiors, smashed trees, bucolic scenes, and car wrecks.
He received a series of Awards in 1998, Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes (D) and in 2001, Cité des Arts, Paris (F).

Sheila Hicks graduated with a BFA and MFA from Yale University. She was one of just three women to receive a bachelor of fine arts degree from the School of Art in 1957. In May 2019 the artist received an honorary degree from Yale University. She lives and works in Paris, France. Hicks participated in the 57th Venice Biennale, curated by Christine Macel (2017); the 20th Biennale of Sydney (2016); Glasgow International (2016); Weaving & We, Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art (2016); Whitney Biennial (2014); and São Paulo Biennial (2012).

The artist was awarded the Smithsonian Archives of American Art Medal in 2010 and was granted an Honorary Doctorate from the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris in 2014.

Recent solo presentations include the major retrospective Sheila Hicks, a little bit of a lot of things, LOK, Kunstmuseum of St. Gallen (2023), SHEILA HICKS: OFF GRID, The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield (2022), Thread, trees, river, MAK Museum of Applied Arts, Wien (2020); Campo Abierto (Open Field), The Bass Museum of Art, Miami (2019); Seize, Weave Space, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2019); Reencuentro, Museo Chileno de arte Precolombino, Santiago (2019); Lignes de Vie, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2018); Free Threads, Textile and its Pre-Columbian Roots, 1954-2017, Museo Amparo, Puebla (2017); Sheila Hicks: Apprentissages, Festival d’Automne à Paris, Musée Carnavalet and Nanterre-Amandiers, Paris (2016); Sheila Hicks: Material Voices, Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha (2016); Sheila Hicks | Why Not, TextielMuseum, Tilburg (2016); Foray into Chromatic Zones, Hayward Gallery, London (2015); Sheila Hicks – Hors Normes, Sculptures Textiles, Passage de Retz, Paris, France (2010); Sheila Hicks: Weaving as Metaphor, Bard Graduate Centre for Studies in Decorative Arts, Design and Culture, New York (2006).

Hicks has created monumental site-specific works for the Ford Foundation Headquarters and Federal Courthouse in New York; The Duke Endowment in Charlotte, North Carolina; King Saud University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Hicks has also produced installations for the Grande Rotonde at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2014-15) and as part of the outdoor exhibition Voyage d’hiver in the gardens of the Palace of Versailles (2017).

Hicks’ work is featured in a number of prominent collections including Tate Gallery, London; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Museo de Bellas Artes, Santiago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The National Gallery, Washington D.C; Art Institute of Chicago; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; The Jewish Museum, New York; and the Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska.

Daniel Buren has punctuated the past 50 years of art with unforgettable interventions, controversial critical texts, thought-provoking public art projects and engaging collaborations with artists from different generations. Throughout his career Buren has created artworks that complicate the relationship between art and the structures that frame it. In the early 1960s, he developed a radical form of Conceptual Art, a “degree zero of painting” as he called it, which played simultaneously on an economy of means and the relationship between the support and the medium. In 1965 he began using his 8.7cm-wide vertical stripes as the starting point for research into what painting is, how it is presented, and more broadly, the physical and social environment in which an artist works. All of Buren’s interventions are created in situ, borrowing and colouring the spaces in which they are presented. They are critical tools addressing questions of how we look and perceive, and the way space can be used, appropriated, and revealed in its social and physical nature. In his work life finds its way into art, while autonomous art is able to reconnect with life.

Daniel Buren was born in Boulogne-Billancourt (Paris), France in 1938. He lives and works in situ. His work has been the subject of major exhibitions at Museo de Arte Italiano, Lima, Peru (2019); Carriageworks, Redfern, Australia (2018); Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, OH, USA (2018); Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, Chemnitz, Germany (2018); Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, Dusseldorf, Germany (2017); Centre Pompidou Málaga, Málaga, Spain (2017); BOZAR Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, Belgium (2016); Museo – Espacio, Aguascalientes, Mexico (2016); Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK (2014); Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg, France (2014); Centre Pompidou-Metz, France (2013); the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, USA (2005) and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2002). Buren has exhibited in the Venice Biennale, Italy more than ten times and was awarded the Golden Lion for his French Pavilion in 1986. That same year, he produced his first and most controversial public commission, The Two Plateaux, for the main courtyard of the Palais-Royal in Paris, France. In 2007, he received the Praemium Imperiale for Painting from Japan. Most recently, he was selected for the site specific Monumenta 2012 commission at the Grand Palais in Paris, France. Buren’s 1994 installation The Arches, permanent work in situ, is on view at the Southampton City Art Gallery, and in May 2017, he launched another permanent installation in the UK – Diamonds and Circles, works in situ – at Tottenham Court Road station in London, commissioned by Art on the Underground.

Flavio Favelli was born in Florence in 1967, in 1993 he graduated at the University of Bologna with a degree in Oriental Studies, only afterwards beginning his career as an artist. He currently lives and works in Bologna (IT).
His works have been exhibited in prestigious international institutions, including: Museo di Capodimonte, Naples (2022); GAM, Turin (2022); Fondazione Adolfo Pini, Milan (2021); Il bello inverso, Ca’ Rezzonico, Venice (2019); Albergo Diurno Venezia, Milan (2017); UNIVERS, A METAPHYSIC STORE, Venice (2017); Art Basel Hong Kong – the Encounters section curated by Yuko Hasegawa (2013); MAXXI, Rome (2015, 2012, 2010); Museo del Novecento, Milan (2012), MACRO, Rome (2012; 2011); RISO – Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Palermo (2011), American Academy in Rome (2011, 2010); Tate Modern, London (2010), MCA, Chicago (2009), Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2008; 2007, 2002); Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2008), Elgiz Museum of Contemporary Art, Istanbul (2008), Benaki Museum, Athens (2008), La Maison Rouge (2007), MAMBO, Bologna (2007), Musée d’Art Contemporain de Nîmes, (2007); Creative Art Center, Beijing (2006); Musèe d’Art Moderne de Saint- Etienne, Saint- Etienne (2005), Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Los Angeles (2004), Museion – Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bolzano (2003).
In 2012 the artist represented Italy at the 11th Biennale de La Habana and he has twice taken part – in 2003 and in 2013 – in the Venice Biennale. Flavio Favelli was chosen for the residence at the Italian Cultural Institute of Istanbul and in 2014 he had a solo show in the historic complex of the Galata Rum Okulu school.

Flavio Favelli creates works using old objects of décor or everyday use, such as lighting fixtures, picture frames, Fanta or Coca Cola bottles, trinkets that evoke the bourgeois aesthetic of the family environments he grew up in, or the Eastern cultures he studied at university. His works are collages, sculptures or installations in which these recycled materials are brought together, giving life to layers of meaning that isolate the object from its mere material reality, elevating it to an artistic dimension. This transition does not occur through the distortion of the object itself but rather through an amplification of its functional features, of its value as an object of use, as an object of décor, as an icon of the everyday life of the past, unwittingly existing in the present. The marked autobiographical component in these works (which also lies behind the artist’s rare performances), functions as a common filter for interpreting the various lines of inquiry that Flavio Favelli develops in all of his works, and, through a reflection on memory and the development of a “poetics of the object” centered around the exotic-everyday dichotomy, he threads together his own personal story with broader social history and political ideas.
Flavio Favelli’s works a marked sense of Italianness. In his art he develops and reworks the contradictions that came about with the rise of conceptual art (and pop-art) internationally, placing these theoretical frameworks inside the forms and achievements of the Italian conceptual tradition. The result are works with a hybrid soul, which make it difficult to know where to place him on the Italian art scene, and at the same time emphasizing the strong personal element that underlies the language used in each individual work.

Matthias Bitzer was born in 1975 in Stuttgart, he lives and works in Berlin (D).
He graduated from Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe, Germany in 2004.
His artistic practice combines drawing, sculpture and painting creating experience spaces with strong references to history and intellectuals and a deep reflection on their identity, in which the viewer can immerse himself. The development of his work shows itself in the increasing complexity of the installations, maintaining their focus on the construction of memory and the reconstruction of reality. His research involves literary personalities, writers and their characters who have frequently slipped into outsider positions. Fascinated by the relation between the invisible and the real, Bitzer layers symbolic fragments and fractured forms on top of one another as citations. In a new inspection of classical modern art from today’s perspective, the artist combines portraits and geometric constructions in his drawings, paintings and sculptures. Through the analysis of this multiplicity of figures, Matthias Bitzer’s work investigates different looks on reality and through his more and more complex abstract patterns he gives the viewer a visual translation to this fragmentary dimension, to these different points of view, to possible gazes. Through paintings, sculptures and mural drawings, all strictly connected to each other, he thinks the exhibition space as an autonomous body, where you can “consider the works as a kind of symbolist translation or a decoding of reality that tries to make visible something that was invisible before” as the artist says.
His works are part of Public collections at LACMA, Los Angeles, USA, MARTa Herford, Herford, Germany, Städtische Galerie Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe, Germany, Geraer Sammlung, Gera, Germany, CCA Andratx, Mallorca, Spain, and Rosenblum Collection & Friends, Paris, France.

New York-based artist Landon Metz has garnered critical attention for his ability to imbue a spare language of abstraction with visual dynamism and sense of movement. His paintings have the capacity to expand and deal with space serially, while being site-responsive rather than site-specific. Metz’s painting practice is marked by a great sensitivity to site and scale and increasingly incorporates performance and sculptural approaches to activate the space.
Strategies of display are central to Metz’s visual language and his installations often incorporate elements of rhythm and repetition. Multi-panel paintings are frequently presented in his work as diptychs and triptychs, which he sometimes installs abutting one another, reaching into or wrapping around corners. He also produces shaped canvases that mimic the abstract shapes that appear in his other paintings. As Metz has observed,
“My work is largely about breaking down polarities, and I think that’s apparent in the way I present space. It’s about negotiating between setting and subject, public and private.”

Metz’s work has appeared in solo exhibitions in Norway, Italy, Denmark and Canada. In 2014, he was the artist in residence at the ADN Collection in Bolzano, Italy. In 2018, Metz was the subject of a solo exhibition at Museo Pietro Canonica in Rome. Metz was recently featured in the group exhibition Blue, at The Nassau County Museum of Art in New York, and Greffes, curated by Pier Paolo Pancotto at Villa Medici in Rome. Metz was born in Phoenix, Arizona and currently lives and works in New York.