Since debuting Patricia Low Venezia on the Grand Canal in 2023, Patricia Low, a mainstay of art in the Swiss town of Gstaad since 2005, cements her program of emerging and established practitioners at the Dorsoduro gallery. Hosting solo exhibitions by Amy Bessone and Candida Höfer among others in the gallery’s first year, the 2024 schedule showcases Patricia Low’s commitment to supporting and connecting artists at different stages in their careers. The upcoming slate of exhibitions underlines subtle confluences between ostensibly eclectic practices, while also engaging with the urgent themes of Adriano Pedrosa’s Venice Biennale exhibition Strangers Everywhere.
Xenia Hausner: Stranger Things
April 17–June 9, 2024
Opening: April 17, 10am–6pm; 6pm opening reception
In April, the gallery will mount a solo show of works by the renowned Austrian artist Xenia Hausner, titled Stranger Things. Hausner’s brightly-hued figurative paintings picture individuals in moments of connection and transit. Closely, creatively cropped, Hausner’s paintings hint at narratives of exile and migration—a spectral figure pressing a hand to what looks like the window of a train; a boat loaded with items beside an innocuously floating life-ring – while foreclosing the possibility of a complete reading. Bodies are entangled, proximate, their relations imbued with a sense of intimacy and urgency in wider narratives that are nevertheless just beyond the viewer’s gaze. New sculptural works extend the themes in Hausner’s paintings to three dimensions, whether a figure slicked with oil holding on to a life-ring, or a classical-seeming bust gasping for breath.
Enrique Martínez Celaya: Here to Kneel, Voyagers
June 15–July 9, 2024
Opening: June 15
Opening in June is an exhibition by LA-based artist and polymath Enrique Martínez Celaya, who is newly represented by Patricia Low. Here to Kneel, Voyagers integrates nuanced observations of transitory experiences with enduring concerns, such as redemption, memory, time, myth, and nature. The paintings and works on paper on view bring together complete and incomplete parts, where painted figurative details and images of nature coexist with sketchily drawn—often in charcoal—seas, architectural references, words, or lines of poetry. In attempting to extend the boundaries of language, images, and of the paintings themselves to articulate the unspoken as well as the unspeakable, Martínez Celaya opens a vital space for imagination and deeper emotional engagement with the artwork.
Anouk Lamm Anouk
Opening: September 14
In September, the gallery presents a solo exhibition by Anouk Lamm Anouk, whose ongoing series of paintings, post/pre and Lesbian Jazz, open up a portal into uncharted worlds of abstraction and figuration. In post/pre, circular motifs serve as both an anchor and as an invitation to the viewer to linger and enjoy the present moment. With Lesbian Jazz, the viewer is contrastingly a bystander and witness to moments of intimacy and trust, as bodies move musically with one another and across the canvas, sharing moments of tender closeness. Calling for visibility and equality, these transportive paintings point up the complexity of life, while translating the fluid music of jazz into abstraction.
Currently showing
W.K. Lyhne: The Surrogate
until April 6, 2024
W.K. Lyhne’s exhibition The Surrogate features visceral paintings that emit a silent yet powerful scream. Lyhne’s paintings present a frenzied, bodily take on the typically contained depictions of the Virgin Mary at the crucifixion, whose sufferings are imagined in the medieval hymn-paean to maternal sorrow, the Stabat Mater. Lyhne’s wild contortions and animal-human hybrids conflate the maternal body in torment with that of an anguished animal, specifically ewes, whose bodies are frequently used and abused in industrial farming. In Lyhne’s vision, agony breaks free from its containment, unleashing a powerful chaos.
