Marc Selwyn Fine Art and Hoffman Donahue are pleased to announce Hello the Roses, a group exhibition curated by Julia Trotta welcoming the galleries’ new shared exhibition space at 427 North Camden Drive in Beverly Hills. Bringing together over thirty artists, the show explores poetic correspondences and threads that connect the programs of the two galleries.
Hello the Roses features works by:
Allen Ruppersberg, Anita Steckel, Ann Craven, Beaux Mendes, Bernice Bing, Caitlin MacQueen, Calvin Marcus, Christopher Knowles, Davide Balula, Elana Bowsher, Hannah Wilke, Hélène Fauquet, Jay DeFeo, John Russell, Lee Bontecou, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Maren Karlson, Michelle Stuart, Monica Majoli, Nancy Graves, Nancy Grossman, Naoki Sutter-Shudo, Olga Balema, Patricia Iglesias Peco, Rochelle Feinstein, Rodolfo Abularach, Roksana Pirouzmand, Sonya Kelliher-Combs, Stewart Uoo, Suzanne Jackson, Trevor Shimizu, and Veronica Ryan.
Included in the exhibition are important examples of works from Marc Selwyn Fine Art’s stable of represented artists. Michelle Stuart contributes Xochitl II, 1988, one of her signature encaustic paintings that combines organic material, pigment, and wax to merge the natural world with the language of abstraction. Also on view is Hannah Wilke’s Untitled, a three-part ceramic sculpture which demonstrates the artist’s radical embrace of the body. Wilke’s folded vaginal forms critique beauty, sexuality, and vulnerability while challenging traditional representations of femininity. Rodolfo Abularach’s Eclipse No. 2, 1977 exemplifies the Guatemalan painter’s haunting investigations of perception and spirituality, portraying the human eye as a cosmic metaphor. Allen Ruppersberg’s Seven Days A Week, 1973 explores language, identity, and seriality, all key themes in his conceptual practice.
Curator Julia Trotta writes:
The exhibition takes its title from a poem by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, where roses, observed with ecstatic perception, open up a pathway between the natural and the metaphysical. For Berssenbrugge, who since the 1970’s has sought to “‘feminize’ the rhetoric of scientific language,” roses become interlocutors in the exploration of ecology, eroticism, dream states, phenomenology, and everyday experience.
The poem begins: “My soul radially whorls out to the edges of my body, according to the same laws by which stars shine, communicating with my body by emanation.” Ethereal and vast, at times even hallucinatory, the work in the show explores a porousness between human consciousness and the natural world, between perceiver and perceived. For Berssenbrugge “Hello,” a simple greeting, becomes an ontological prompt to consider our entanglement.
So hello roses, hello moon, hello clouds, hello skin, hello ocean floor, hello vulva, hello shells, hello rain, hello bird, hello seeds.