Essential Schemes: Selected Paintings

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Werner Berges, George Condo, Adolph Gottlieb, Damien Hirst, Hans Hofmann, Nicholas Party, Richard Serra, Tom Wesselmann

Helwaser Gallery is pleased to present Essential Schemes: Selected Paintings. Bringing together a varied selection of paintings and works on paper that exemplify seminal formal approaches developed during the postwar period, the exhibition demonstrates the respective artist’s best-known thematic concerns, and highlights their use of color and form within their compositions. Whilst emphasizing the achievements of each respective artist, it draws out the nuanced stylistic dialogues occurring between each work, allowing unexpected connections to be made between the movements that took place within the later half of the twentieth century.

Large-scale works include Hans Hofmann’s Composition #2 (1951), a precursor to the artist’s well-known “slab” paintings. Tom Wesselmann’s Bedroom Blonde with Black and Green Pillows (1986) revisits the imagery of the artist’s famous Bedroom Paintings series on a monumental scale, using laser-cut metal. The scale of these works stand in contrast to small works on paper including Adolph Gottlieb’s Untitled 6715 (1986), and Nicholas Party’s Untitled (2020) —both of which evoke the intimacy of the viewing experience. Fresh, bright, and vibrant, the works collectively establish the range of new perspectives and approaches that marked two decades of prolific artistic activity in the postwar era. As Hofmann once remarked, “A work of art is a world in itself, reflecting senses and emotions of the artist’s world.”