Booth 370
For TEFAF New York 2022, Petzel is pleased to present FACE/OFF, a selection of works exploring portraiture from the last half century, ranging from photo-based imagery to sculpture. Alongside new and recent paintings by Tomoo Gokita and Emily Mae Smith, the gallery will also feature historical works by Asger Jorn, Maria Lassnig and Roger-Edgar Gillet, whose portraits have been exhibited widely in Europe and whose 1966 masterpiece “Mademoiselle” marks the artist’s debut with the gallery in New York. Also on view will be works by Keith Edmier, Jorge Pardo, Joyce Pensato, Jon Pylypchuk, Dana Schutz and John Stezaker.
Roger Edgar-Gillet’s portraits are best characterized by their impasto techniques and earthy palette of ochres and umbers. Part of a post-war generation of French painters that gave birth to movements like Tachisme and Art Brut, Gillet’s work finds affinities with those of his immediate contemporaries such as Jean Fautrier and Jean Dubuffet. Though rooted in figuration, Gillet’s paintings bleed into the realm of abstraction, with distorted figures that serve to intimate the inner contortions of his subjects. In this, Gillet’s portraits offer the viewer a glimpse, not of his sitters’ faces or of the traditional attributes of dress and bearing, but of their interiority.
Japanese artist Tomoo Gokita is another artist known for overturning commonly-held notions of figuration, most notably in his high-contrast grayscale paintings. Drawing from the visual detritus of mass media and popular culture, Gokita reworks his source material into Neo-Expressionist compositions imbued with both a Surrealist uncanniness and a Dadaist sense of humor. For TEFAF, Petzel is pleased to present a new work by the artist that marks a distinct departure from the metallic sheen of his earlier paintings toward an abstracted primitivism. Here, Gokita applies a new visual vocabulary to an established iconography of images, resulting in a trio of figures titled New Naughty Boys.
A new painting by Emily Mae Smith, whose body of work is noted for its witty undertones and subtle socio-political narratives, will be on view for the first time in addition to sculptural selections by Keith Edmier and Jon Pylypchuk. Where Pylpychuk’s ski-mask portraits—also referred to by the artist as “ghosts”—take the notion of deteriorated portraiture into the realm of grief and loss to capture the lost lives of those near to him in tangible, bronze form, Edmier’s Beatrice Enci retells the tragic and historic tale of the Roman noblewoman of the same name who was beheaded for the murder of her abusive father. Finished in a pale and delicate shade of pink, the stone portrait captures the noblewoman in an ethereal, peaceful state that belies a history of violence.