Augusta, with Harold, Per, Julie, & Sean

Harold Ancart Per Kirkeby Augusta Lardy Micheli Julie Mehretu Sean Scully

As indicated by its title, this exhibition brings together a new suite of Augusta Lardy Micheli’s paintings in dialogue with historical and recent works by Harold Ancart, Per Kirkeby, Julie Mehretu, and Sean Scully. While each artist charts a different course, shared thoroughfares exist in natural abstraction, perspectival shifts, and material inquiry.

Lardy Micheli’s practice orbits disappearing landscapes, climatic instability, and Sublime traces. Her methodology is propelled into an anthropocentric territory, one inflected by Romantic ideals of the outdoors. In her newest paintings, glaciers and the experience of being subsumed by nature become vehicles for considering the impending threat of environmental collapse. Her largest composition is dominated by blue evocations of water, with residues of a pink ground layer serving as a warm undercurrent. Elsewhere, silver paintings use aluminum pigment to translate rock formations into shimmering abstractions.

Across the exhibition, natural synchronicities between these artists become apparent with their treatment of natural phenomena. Where Lardy Micheli and Kirkeby mine geological processes for their formal possibilities, Ancart converts landscape into an object of physical intervention, Mehretu translates environmental and geopolitical forces into kinetic lines, and Scully builds landscapes through ordered bands of color. Across these various approaches, a shared Romantic impulse emerges: the artists approach nature as a vehicle for articulating its vastness and volatility, sublimity and abstraction.

—Reilly Davidson

Harold Ancart (b. 1980, Brussels) lives and works in New York. Ancart has presented solo exhibitions at the Menil Collection, Centre Pompidou-Metz, and the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris. His work is held in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Centre Pompidou, Fondation Beyeler, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.

Per Kirkeby (1938–2018, Copenhagen) studied at the Eks-skolen (The Experimental Art School), Copenhagen (1962), and graduated from the University of Copenhagen with an MA in Arctic Geology (1964). He was Professor at the Academy of Art, Karlsruhe (1978–89) and at Die Städelschule, Frankfurt (1989–2000). His work is held in the collections of Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen; Tate Modern, London; among others.

Augusta Lardy Micheli (b. 1994, Geneva) is a painter based between Neuchâtel, Switzerland, and Paris, France. She studied Philosophy at King’s College London before completing a degree in Fine Arts at City & Guilds of London Art School. In 2021, she was awarded the Freelands Foundation Painting Prize. In 2025, she presented her first institutional solo exhibition at the Musée des Beaux-Arts Le Locle, Switzerland. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including in Madrid at Galería Belmonte, Vienna at VIN VIN, Mexico City at Karen Huber, Paris at Galerie DS, and in Switzerland with Galerie Lange + Pult.

Julie Mehretu (b. 1970, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) lives and works in New York. Mehretu has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the High Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, among many others. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Tate, Centre Pompidou, the Art Institute of Chicago, and numerous international institutions.

Sean Scully (b. 1945, Dublin) lives and works between New York and Europe. Scully has been the subject of major retrospectives at institutions including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb. His work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate, Centre Pompidou, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, among many others.