Peter Freeman, Inc., is pleased to announce our participation in GALLERIES CURATE with a group exhibition on view in New York and online from 8 to 30 January 2021, including works by gallery artists, Jan Dibbets, Helen Mirra, Fiona Tan and Richard Wentworth.  

GALLERIES CURATE is a collaboration among galleries from all over the world, conceived during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, that will present series of unique exhibitions and programs, each revolving around a common theme. RHE, (from Greek for 'that which flows') is the first chapter of this collaboration, organized around a universal subject: water. Like culture, water is never static but always in flux. 

Here works by Jan Dibbets, Helen Mirra, Fiona Tan and Richard Wentworth evoke themes of human presence, its erasure, and history. Besides a few exceptions, humans are the subject of the image, even when absent from it. And while the artists employ various mediums throughout their individual, diverse practices, the majority of the artworks on view share use of the medium of photography and either depict water or refer to it through textual or other visual references like color.

On this occasion, in addition to the gallery exhibition, Fiona Tan’s 2009 installation, Rise and Fall, commissioned by the Vancouver Art Gallery and seen in her solo exhibition Disorient at the 2009 Venice Biennale in which the artist represented the Netherlands, will be exceptionally available to view in its entirety online through 30 January 2021, through both the gallery’s and GALLERIES CURATES's websites.

Based in Amsterdam, Jan Dibbets—a pioneering figure of conceptual art since the 1960s—was among the first artists to challenge the ease of the camera’s status as a documentary tool. He continues to navigate a relationship between the conceptual and the pictorial through the medium of photography, creating images that are abstractions of reality. By using simple photographic processes and subtle variations, by changing the position of the camera or the quality of natural light from image to image—as in Flood Tide (1969)—Dibbets establishes a unique register of perception, the subject of which is only a pretext for the transformation that occurs.  

Dibbets has presented his work in seminal exhibitions of conceptual art, including When Attitudes Become Form (Kunsthalle Bern, Bern; Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld; and Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, curated by Harald Szeeman, 1969); 557,087 (Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, and Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, curated by Lucy Lippard, 1969), and Earth Art (Andrew Dickinson White Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, curated by Willoughby Sharp, 1969). In 1972 he represented The Netherlands at the 36th Venice Biennale. Since then he has realized solo exhibitions at major international museums, including the Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris (1976), Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (1980), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1982, 1986, and 2016), Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh (1986), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1987), Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1987), and Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit (1987). Recent solo exhibitions include: Horizons (Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris, 2010), 3 x Jan Dibbets (Cultuurcentrum Mechelen, Belgium, 2011), and Jan Dibbets: Another Photography (Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin, 2014). In 2016, Dibbets curated A History of Another Photography: PANDORA’S BOX at the Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris.

Helen Mirra’s work is often referred to as poetic, and indeed Mirra engages directly with poetic lyricism and metrics. For over two decades, she has imbued her works with complex reverberations of literature, history, and philosophy. Mirra abides by structural and conceptual logics of her own configuration, resulting in a sophisticated beauty created through simple means. 

Helen Mirra was born in Rochester, New York in 1970 and lives and works in Muir, California. Recent solo exhibitions include Nine Years of Slope-Walking (MAZ Museo de Arte de Zapopan, Guadalajara, MX, until April 2021); la malplena ĉambro estas bela (Large Glass, London, 2020); Acts for placing woollen and linen (Cample Line, Thornhill, Scotland, 2020); Bones are spaces (Peter Freeman, Inc., New York, 2019); * (Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm, 2018); Gehen, weben / Camminare, tesserae / Walking, weaving (Kunst Meran / Merano Arte, Italy, 2017); 12th Havana Biennial (2015); Habitat de transição (Culturgest, Lisbon, 2014), and gehend (Field Recordings 1-3), held at three venues: Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, and Bonner Kunstverein (2011–2012). Mirra was the artist-in-residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (2013) and MacDowell (2013), and has been awarded many grants and fellowships, including the DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst Kunstlerprogramm), Berlin; IASPIS (International Artists Studio Program in Sweden), Stockholm, and Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue.

As a part of GALLERIES CURATE: RHE, Meyer Riegger Galerie, Karlsruhe will present a solo exhibition of Mirra's works, entitled Gletscherbachfloß (Glacial-river-raft). 

Fiona Tan has attracted international recognition for her film and video projects since the late 1990s. Oscillating between documentation and fiction, biography and imagination, Tan’s work is informed by her acknowledgment of the camera as an agent provocateur, rather than an instrument for recording reality. Deeply embedded in all of Tan’s work is her fascination with the deceptive nature of representation and the play of memory across time and space. 

Tan has recently exhibited at Sprengel Museum, Hannover (2019); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2019); MACS Grand-Hornu, Belgium (2019); De Pont Museum, The Netherlands (2017); Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2017); MMK, Frankfurt (2016), Mudam, Luxembourg (2016); Guggenheim, Bilbao (2016); Izu Photo Museum, Japan (2016); The Baltic, United Kingdom (2015); Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo (2015); Philadelphia Museum of Art (2013), and MAXXI, Rome (2013). In New York, her work has been included in group shows and film screenings at the Museum of Modern Art, New Museum, International Center of Photography (ICP), and Film Forum. Tan represented The Netherlands at the 53rd Venice Biennale with her solo presentation, Disorient (2009). Her work is a part of many major museum collections, including Tate, London; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; New Museum, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Philadelphia Museum of Art; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among others.  

Mit der anderen Hand / With the other Hand, concurrently on view at two venues, the Museum der Moderne Salzburg and Kunsthalle Krems, Austria, is the artist’s first comprehensive mid-career retrospective. It includes her latest work, Gray Glass (2020), commissioned by the Museum der Moderne Salzburg and filmed on the Hoher Sonnblick peak and glaciers and inside the ice caves of the Eisriesenwelt at Werfen, both in Austria. 

Richard Wentworth is widely recognized for his sculptural repositioning of ordinary objects and for his abilities as a keen observer and chronicler of daily life. His photographs capture the provisional ways in which people modify the world they inhabit.

Richard Wentworth was born in 1947 and lives and works in London. He attended Royal College of Art, London from 1966–70 and taught at Goldsmiths, University of London from 1971–87. In 2002 he became Master of Drawing at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford University and in 2009 was appointed Professor and Head of RCA's Sculpture Department. Wentworth has presented solo exhibitions at Hayward Gallery, London (2015), Whitechapel Gallery (2010), and Serpentine Gallery (1993) and participated in the Havana Biennial (2015), Manchester International Fesitival (2013), Venice Biennale, (2003, 2009) and Istanbul Biennial (1995). His work is in the permanent collections of Tate, London; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford; Centro Cultural Arte Contemporáneo, CDMX, and Israel Museum, Jerusalem. In 2011, Wentworth was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for his services to art.