The LOEWE FOUNDATION presents the third exhibition in its Chance Encounters series, bringing together artists from various disciplines in order to explore unexpected conversations. This year works by Sara Flynn, Richard Smith and Lionel Wendt are presented within the unique space of the LOEWE Miami Design District store, which was designed around a monumental 18th century granary from Portugal. Made from stone and wood, its presence within the building encapsulates LOEWE’s celebration of past, present and future, and provides a resonant setting for the work of these three artists.
Shadows and the interplay of forms are the threads which tie together the works in this third exhibition, as well as an enduring focus on craftsmanship which is central to the ethos of the LOEWE FOUNDATION. Anderson has chosen three artists, working across the diverse mediums of fabric sculpture, ceramic and photography and spanning the 1930s to the present day.
Jonathan Anderson said: ‘Art and craft are always at the centre of my creative process and these exhibitions are an exciting way of exploring artists that are important to me. I love the unexpected things that happen when people from completely different worlds are brought together, the antagonism can create something completely new.’
Following the presentation of ceramics by Lucie Rie (2015) and John Ward (2016) on the granary, for this exhibition Irish artist Sara Flynn has been commissioned to produce a new body of ceramic work that engages with the space and materiality of the historical building. Despite using a wheel to throw her pots, Flynn’s subsequent interventions result in complex and irregular shapes that challenge our reading of the vessel, bringing them into closer dialogue with the language of sculpture. Through cutting, rejoining and adding to their basic thrown volumes, Flynn creates asymmetrical forms that shift and change across their entire surface. These contours are further complicated by intricately applied glazes which range from blacks, whites and yellows, to those that shift between greys and greens, revealing the delicate layering of colour that makes up their surfaces. Flynn has conceived of the commission as a single group, allowing for a formal journey to unfold from vessel to vessel. Flynn was shortlisted for the inaugural LOEWE Craft Prize in 2017.
Richard Smith was one of the most original artists of his generation. He emerged in the late 1950s and became known for works that challenged the accepted traditions of painting, particularly in his use of shaped canvases which extended them into three-dimensional space. Moving to New York in 1959 he took on the legacies of both Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism, folding them into a language entirely of his own. Soaring above the granary at the LOEWE Miami store will be his major 1975 work Shuttle. Specially commissioned for his 1975 Tate retrospective, it is one of his most important ‘kite’ installations, comprising coloured canvases stretched across aluminium rods reminiscent of tent structures. It echoes ideas he explored in his 1973 commission for Mr Chow’s restaurant in Los Angeles, in which the stretched canvas forms activate the space above the viewer’s head.Smith’s work Both Halves (A) (1977) was acquired by the LOEWE FOUNDATION in 2016 and is currently displayed in its Madrid Flagship store.
Following a major presentation of photographs by artist Paul Nash at the Miami store in 2015, this exhibition presents a series of rare images by the historical Sri Lankan photographer Lionel Wendt (1900–1944). Born in Ceylon, Wendt was originally trained as a concert pianist but took up photography later in life after studying in the UK. He created a groundbreaking body of work that documented life in Ceylon as well as homoerotic portraits that were radical for the time in which they were produced. Wendt pushed the photographic medium to its limits, using experimental exposure and printing techniques, such as solarisation, to create images of astounding beauty and poetry. After his premature death in 1944 most of his negatives were destroyed, but his prints were rediscovered in the 1990s and he is now considered one of the key proponents of modernist photography. Wendt’s photographs were presented as part of the setting for the LOEWE Fall 2017 collection at the UNESCO building in Paris.
The exhibition will run from 5 December 2017 to 4 February 2018. LOEWE
Miami Design District 110 NE 39th Street, Suite #102
Bios
Sara Flynn
(b. 1971) was born in Cork, Ireland.
She trained at the Crawford College of Art & Design in Cork and now lives and works in Belfast. She has had solo exhibitions at Erskine Hall & Coe, London (2106, 2014, 2012) and at the Millennium Court Arts Centre, Portadown. She was recently included in Disobedient Bodies: JW Anderson curates The Hepworth Wakefield (2017) and was also a finalist in the inaugural LOEWE FOUNDATION Craft Prize.
Richard Smith
(1931–2016) was one of the most significant artists of his generation. He studied at the Royal College of Art, London from 1954-57. In 1959 Smith was awarded the prestigious Harkness Fellowship which facilitated his move to New York, where he had his first one man show at Green Gallery. He was invited to exhibit at the XXXV Venice Biennale as the official British artist in 1970 and in 1975 he presented his first retrospective at the Tate Gallery. His work is held in the public collections of the Arts Council of Great Britain; The British Museum, London; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; TATE Gallery, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Whitney, New York; MIT, Boston; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC.
Lionel Wendt
(1900–1944) was born in Ceylon, Sri Lanka.
He studied law and musical training as a concert pianist in Great Britain, after which he returned to Colombo in Ceylon, where he dedicated himself to music, literature and the visual arts. In 1934, he established the Photographic Society of Ceylon jointly with Bernard G. Thornley and P.J.C. Durrant, and started running Chitrafoto, the photographic studio of the Associated Newspapers of Ceylon. His first solo exhibition took place in 1938 at the Camera Club in London. After his work was rediscovered in 1994 it entered several major national collections including Tate Modern, London and Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. This year, Wendt’s work is included in Documenta 14 in Athens and a large-scale retrospective exhibition at Huis Marseille in Amsterdam.
