TEFAF Maastricht 2024

Stand 461 and Focus Booth 702
MECC, Maastricht, Netherlands

VIP Days: March 7 – 8, 2024
Public Days: March 9 – 14, 2024

Sean Kelly is delighted to announce the gallery’s participation in the 37th edition of TEFAF Maastricht, featuring two exciting presentations. Our main booth unites contemporary artworks by the gallery’s artists in dialogue with historical works ranging from Ancient Egypt and Classical Rome to early 20th-century painting provoking engaging discourse around issues of aesthetics and connoisseurship across millennia.

Julian Charrière's photographic works, Buried Sunshines Burn, are in dialogue with John Beasley Greene's original negative of Cataract of the Nile, 1853-1855. Both artists utilize early forms of photography; a heliograph by Charrière, made by etching his images into stainless steel plates. Beasley Greene's method used a waxed paper negative with selectively applied pigment. Their pairing creates a captivating exchange between two technical methodologies across time.

Awol Erizku's recent work, presented alongside its direct source of inspiration, Marcel Duchamp's infamous readymade L.H.O.O.Q., 1919, creates a dynamic tension challenging notions of value, representation, and race within the Western art historical canon. With a cheeky nod to Duchamp's playful, yet subversive intervention, Erizku incorporates a zipper onto the Mona Lisa's face, a specific reference to David Hammons' iconic Fly Jar,1996.

Laurent Grasso’s Panoptes alludes to the mythological figure of the shepherd Argos Panoptes. The sculpture is paired with an Egyptian emerald udjat eye amulet, which represents the healed eye of Horus, one of the most popular amulets in ancient Egypt. Candida Höfer’s meticulously composed photograph, Uffizi Firenze III 2008, offers a rare and serene view of one of the world’s oldest public museum exhibition spaces. Here, Hofer’s majestic work is paired with an ancient Roman marble sculpture of Asclepius, the god of medicine, its dynamic three-dimensional torso similar to the sculptures captured by Höfer in her planar photograph.

Idris Khan’s new work, created especially for TEFAF, is inspired by a 10th-century Samanid Dynasty bowl with calligraphic inscriptions. Responding directly to this artifact, Khan’s new oil-based ink on gesso and aluminum panel presents densely layered text that inhabits the space between abstraction and figuration and speaks to themes of history and cumulative experience. In another compelling visual dialogue, Hugo McCloud's painting, made of single use plastic, echoes the tradition of floral still-lifes, such as the late 19th-century pastel by Odilon Redon.

A mosaic by Shahzia Sikander is presented in visual dialogue with a Rajasthani miniature painting from the 1670-80s, portraying the iconic representation of Ragini Bhupali. Sikander’s mosaic will also be presented in Collective Behavior, her major survey exhibition premiering at Palazzo Soranzo Van Axel during the Venice Biennale Arte 2024, which traces the artist's own evolution from a master of miniature painting to a multimedia artist often working on a vast scale. Like Sikander, Kehinde Wiley is among the most influential artists of his generation. His paintings, with their provocative blend of contemporary urban life and historical references, challenge conventional notions of glory and history in portraiture. Pairing his larger- than-life portrait of Issa Diatta, proudly clutching an antique sword, with an early 18th-century sword, showcasing unparalleled craftsmanship in English decorative cut steel, establishes a connection between intertwining themes of power, influence, and masculinity.

Wu Chi-Tsung's Cyano-Collage series connects Eastern and Western artistic traditions, seamlessly integrating traditional aesthetics with bold contemporary language. Displayed alongside an 18th-century hanging scroll from the Kano School (Japan, Edo Period: 1615-1868), the pairing reveals a compelling intersection of traditional aesthetics and contemporary language as both draw inspiration from Chinese landscape paintings.

As a painter, Ilse D’Hollander’s intuition led her to arrive at a practice that combined total abstraction with discernable elements of the natural world. The subject matter of her paintings is gesture, encompassing bursts of thick pigment to suggest the nuance of the landscapes in the Flemish countryside. Other works by Rebecca Horn and Janaina Tschäpe demonstrate how the artists utilize gesture, movement, and the body as integral elements in their works. Tschäpe's paintings showcase a physicality that mirrors the dynamic intensity and focused motion she invests in their creation. Horn often worked simultaneously across multiple sheets of paper laid out before her, adding marks and details as she moved delicately and quickly across the surfaces.

In Marina Abramović’s mesmerizing video work, Portrait with Golden Mask, the artist has created a contemporary icon, echoing Byzantine relics and icons and a 1965 performance by Joseph Beuys. Abramovic’s face is covered with gold leaf that flutters and animates her almost motionless visage as it emerges from a black background. Abramović’s major retrospective opens March 16, at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, second venue of the touring retrospective organized by the Royal Academy in London. Featuring over 60 key works, the exhibition spans five decades of the artist's career.

Cumulatively, the works included in Sean Kelly’s TEFAF Maastricht 2024 presentations and the provocative juxtapositions they evoke connect art aesthetically and ideologically across time, while echoing current critical discussions surrounding the reframing of art history.

For all inquiries, please email info@skny.com

For more information on the fair, including hours and ticketing information, please visit tefaf.com