FRONTLINE

Featuring Kennedy Yanko, Brenda Goodman, Katharina Grosse, Esther Mahlangu, Vivian Springford, and Anne Doran

May 13th - June 17th 2023

Swivel Gallery is pleased to present Frontline, an exhibition of ve of the most thrilling, established and historical women in contemporary art today spanning sculpture, collage, and painting as one of two inaugural exhibitions at the new agship location at 396 Johnson Avenue. The show features a careful selection of pieces by the female artists of a previous epoch, which together work as a channel between past and present, while using abstraction to resist existing cannons and linguistic structures. Abstraction is approached not as a specic way of doing art, but as a spontaneous pulse to claim a space to operate at the frontline, in a search of new forms of expression.

Brenda Goodman’s Sometimes It’s Just Joy fills in the incised surface of the canvas with fields of oil paint, slotting both geometric and organic structures in a system of gouged lines to create a composition that is at once mechanical and fluid, meditative, buoyant and deeply personal. An holistic exploration of the parallels between geometry, ancestral traditions and life circles is undertaken by South-African artist Esther Mahlangu, who was the first to reimagine the Ndebele design tradition, bringing it into contemporary art and recontextualizing it into hard edge abstraction. Ndebele painting was routinely performed by women of the community on the exterior walls of houses as a ritualistic practice: the straightness and symmetry of the lines was believed to inform the course of the conjugal life, and would inuence the level of respect in the community.

Katharina Grosse’s propulsive lines have also left the conventional architectural structure, locking two disparate, yet complimentary colors in a singular wave that energetically swells and boldly holding presence in the space. Similarly, Vivian Springford’s distinctive stain paintings emerge from the wall as colored pulses: ushed warmth ooding from beyond a central crater, or from just outside of the frame, seem to reckon with the expansive force of the universe.

Two collages from Anne Doran recall her inuential series, Black Mondays, wherein dark structures are imposed against advertising circulars, an obliterative eclipse upon the everyday images of mass consumption.

Rallying together the works on the wall is Kennedy Yanko’s monumental sculpture, rising from the center of the room as a resounding declaration. wild, wild country frees abandoned scrap metal from its former actuality as compacted generator; clothed in soft paint skins and looped through with mechanical hoses, it becomes an empathetic body, still bearing its scars beneath a coat of new pigment.

The exhibition’s title, Frontline, gestures toward the five artists’ reputations as female forerunners in the contemporary art scene, while staying authentic with their own identity and personality.

In their separate careers, Doran, Goodman, Grosse, Mahlangu, Springford, and Yanko have boldly carved out their own spaces, challenging the prejudice of being a “woman artist” in their respective cultural contexts, pushing the stock themes that were meant to distinguish their work from their male peers while subtly preserving their singular visions and vocabularies as serious abstractionists. In tracing their inuence beyond the connes of this room, we seek to contextualize the endeavors of the new frontline and commemorate both the territory that has been gained and is yet to be gained.

Brenda Goodman (b.1943, Detroit, Michigan) received her BFA from the College of Creative Studies, from which she also received an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts in 2017. After moving to New York City in 1976, her work was included in the 1979 Whitney Biennial and she has had 40 solo exhibitions. In 2015, a 50 year retrospective was presented at the Center for Creative Studies and Paul Kotula Projects. That same year, her work was included in the American Academy of Arts and Letters annual invitational where she received the Award in Art.

Recent solo exhibitions were presented at David & Schweitzer Contemporary, New York; and Je Bailey Gallery, Hudson, NY. Je Bailey Gallery also presented a solo booth of Goodman’s work at NADA, NY in 2017. Recent and upcoming group shows include those at the Landing Gallery, Los Angeles; Gregory Lind Gallery, San Francisco; September Gallery, Hudson, NY; and Hollis Taggart Gallery, New York. Goodman’s work is included in the public collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; the Detroit Institute of Arts; Cranbrook Art Museum; and Wayne State University Art Collection. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Kennedy Yanko (b. 1988, St. Louis, MO) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Yanko’s work has been exhibited internationally and shown by institutions including the Brooklyn Museum and the Rubell Museum, where she was the 2021 Artist in Residence. Recent institutional showings and installations of Yanko’s work include By Means Other Than the Known Senses, Art Basel Unlimited, Basel (2022), Set It Off, curated by Mickalene Thomas and Racquel Chevremont, The Parrish Museum, Water Mill (2022), Brooklyn Abstraction: Four Artists, Four Walls, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn (2022).

Katharina Grosse (b. 1961 Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany) lives and works in Berlin and New Zealand. Collections include the Milwaukee Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Bualo, NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Kunsthaus Zürich; and Centre Pompidou, Paris. Exhibitions and on-site paintings include psychylustro, Mural Arts Philadelphia (2014); Untitled Trumpet, 56th Biennale di Venezia (2015); Rockaway!, MoMA PS1 at Fort Tilden, New York (2016); Asphalt Air and Hair, ARoS Triennial, Aarhus, Denmark (2017); The Horse Trotted Another Couple of Metres, Then It Stopped, Carriageworks, Sydney (2018); Wunderbild, National Gallery, Prague (2018–19); Mumbling Mud, chi K art museum, Shanghai, and chi K11 art space, Guangzhou, China (2018–19); Mural: Jackson Pollock/Katharina Grosse, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2019–20); Is it You?,

Baltimore Museum of Art (2020); It Wasn’t Us, Hamburger Bahnhof–Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2020–21); Chill Seeping from the Walls Gets between Us, Helsinki Art Museum (2021–22); Shutter Splinter, Helsinki Biennale (2021); Chill Seeping, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia (2022); Apollo, Apollo, Espace Louis Vuitton, Venice (2022); Splinter, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2022); and Studio Paintings, 1988–2022: Returns, Revisions, Inventions, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis (2022, traveled to Kunstmuseum Bern, 2023). Grosse’s permanent installation Canyon was unveiled at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, in 2022.

Anne Doran (b. 1957, Canada) lives and works in New York. Her work has been included in exhibitions at MoMA P.S.1, Long Island City, NY; The Kitchen, New York; Artists Space, New York; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; and 303 Gallery, New York and has been reviewed in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Village Voice, among other publications.

Vivian Springford (b. 1913, Milwaukee, WI), contributor to Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting, is acclaimed for calligraphic gesture paintings as well colorful stain paintings featuring glowing, organic orbs in sensual pastel hues. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Springford began her artistic career as a portraitist and a commercial illustrator during the 1930s and 1940s while studying at the Art Students League. In the 1950s, she was drawn into New York Abstract Expressionist circles, developing friendships with art critic Harold Rosenberg and artists Pierre Alechinsky, Karel Appel and Sam Francis. She was deeply inuenced by her relationship with Walasse Ting, with whom she shared a studio from 1958 until the mid 1960s. A Chinese-American artist, Ting introduced Springford to Taoism, Confucianism, and calligraphy.

The artist carried on producing paintings and abstractions on paper until the mid-1980s, when she lost her eyesight due to ill health. In 1998, ve years before Springford passed away, the New York gallerist Gary Snyder was introduced to her work and held a solo exhibition after the interval of 18 years and continued to showcase her works into the 2000s.

Following her inclusion in the Denver Art Museum's exhibition catalog, Women of Abstract Expressionism (Joan Marter, 2016), the time is right for a critical revision and appreciation of Springford's abundant talent and tireless persistence-a story that mirrors those of so many women artists, past and present.

Since her ‘rediscovery’, Springford’s work has in fact begun to be re-evaluated and presented in exhibitions with galleries, mainly in the U.S. Recent solo shows were held at: DnA Shenzhen, Shenzhen, China; Philips Museum of Art at Franklin & Marshall College, Lancaster, US; Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo; Almine Rech, New York.

Esther Mahlangu ( b.1935 Middleburg, Mpumalanga, South Africa) is a multi-award winning visual artist, and much loved South African cultural ambassador.
Since she was rst ocially introduced to the Western art word with the legendary Centre Pompidou’s exhibition Le Magicien De La Terre (1989) , Mahlangu participated in documenta 9 (1992), Lyon biennale (2000), 3rd Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art (2009), and numerous solo and group shows in galleries such as solo at Almine Rech London and Paris, and museums in the USA, Mexico, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Greece, Portugal, Switzerland, Netherlands, Finland, Denmark, Slovakia, Serbia, Japan and Australia, to mention a few. The bold Ndebele inspired artworks for which she is globally acclaimed grace many of the world’s most respected museums, private, public and corporate collections, including:Many leading museums, private collectors and corporates have also acquired her works including the Smithsonian Institute, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, National Museum of Woman in the Arts, Centre Georges Pompidou, Museum Bochum, Musee des Beaux Arts, Iziko South African National Gallery, Pretoria Art Museum, Jean Pigozzi, the Sovereign Art Foundation and the World Bank amongst numerous others who understand her invaluable contribution to contemporary art. Many experts believe that any important Pan African Contemporary collection cannot be considered complete without including one of her works.