Edel Assanti presents new and previously unseen works by six gallery artists, spanning film, painting and sculpture.
Edel Assanti’s booth centres on Jenkin van Zyl’s immersive film installation: visitors enter a 4 x 4 sauna structure, within which they encounter van Zyl’s new film. Shot in the iconic setting of the drained swimming pool of Victoria Baths in Manchester, the film follows two doppelgangers, alternating between a pattern of self-care and abuse. The film explores the complex world-building that occurs within fringe subcultural communities, and how the body can be reimagined within them. This is van Zyl’s first presentation in an art fair context, following his acclaimed solo show Surrender at FACT Liverpool, UK (2023-2024).
Following Lonnie Holley’s major solo exhibition at Camden Art Centre, UK (July-September 2024), the booth includes a sculptural work created during his 2024 UK residency in Suffolk in preparation for his first London museum show. Holley’s assemblage, The Nine Notes (2024), comprises a series of nine upstanding antique church organ pipes, referencing the race-motivated 2015 Charleston church shooting in which nine victims were killed. Adorned with a dream-like painted composition, the surface features repeated, overlapping silhouettes, evoking themes of ancestral memory, and intergenerational struggle. In 2023, Holley received lifetime achievement awards from the American Folk Art Museum and Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture (both USA). In 2023, Holley featured in the Royal Academy, UK, exhibition, Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers, and had a solo exhibition at MOCA North Miami, USA.
A new wall-relief painting by Simon Lehner, exhibiting for the first time in a UK fair, examines questions of digital identity and toxic masculinity, following Lehner’s 2023 solo show at Kunstpalais Erlangen, Germany. Lehner’s work establishes the link between the mass media flood of images and the inner psyche. The protagonists of his compositions look like avatars of identitarian stereotypes generated by algorithmic media technology. Lehner harnesses AI tools to generate his motifs out of private and collective visual archives. He paints them together with a robot, his hand and the machine’s meeting over the canvas, delving into traumatic structures and memory loops, panicked distortions of reality, losses of information and context. Lehner will have a solo exhibition at Edel Assanti in March 2025.
A painting by Gordon Cheung interrogating the levers of power that govern our understanding of the world is also included, following Cheung’s 2023 solo show at The Atkinson Museum, UK. Recent group exhibitions include Tremenheere Gallery, UK; Herbert Gallery & Museum, UK and Centre Pompidou-Metz, France (all in 2023). Cheung’s latest paintings depict aerial perspectives of part real, part prophetic and part mythological landscapes, each relating to specific sites in China that collectively comprise the largest infrastructural project in human history. The sprawling cityscapes are rendered from satellite imagery, built up as reliefs on the canvas in hardened sand and pigment. The scenes’relationship with reality is destabilized by the overall compositions, which feature floating cities below glimmering constellations that mark out future geopolitical maps, such as the “One Belt One Road” trade route.
Oren Pinhassi’s anthropomorphic sculptures examine the relationship between the human figure, nature and the built environment by seamlessly incorporating vegetal and insect-like attributes alongside architectural details and everyday objects. The presentation follows Pinhassi’s 2023 first UK institutional solo exhibition at Mostyn, Wales, and inclusion in This is a Rehearsal at The Chicago Architecture Biennial and Moveables at ICA Philadelphia (both USA). In May 2024, Lehmann Maupin announced co-representation of Pinhassi alongside Edel Assanti and Commonwealth and Council. Pinhassi’s work will be featured in the The Current’s (USA), 33rd annual outdoor sculpture exhibition from 22 June through 19 October 2024.
