At The Armory Show 2017, Pippy Houldsworth Gallery will present a mixed booth comprising new work by The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Francesca DiMattio, Ayan Farah, Rachel Goodyear and Stefanie Heinze.
The gallery will be exhibiting new, large-scale paintings by the anonymous Brooklyn-based artist collective The Bruce High Quality Foundation to coincide with their solo exhibition, Pearls, at the gallery in London. This follows a large-scale solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, New York in 2013. The works on show will be a continuation of their iconic History Paintings series, taking inspiration from the Baroque works of Artemisia Gentileschi and Caravvagio. Subversive, provocative and firmly tongue in cheek, The Bruce High Quality Foundation creates installations, videos, paintings, sculptures, performances and institutions that reveal their collective creative agency within the seemingly monolithic forces of art and social history.
The gallery will also present a selection of totemic, ceramic sculptures by US artist Francesca DiMattio. Roberta Smith from The New York Times describes DiMattio's sculptures as 'voracious reconsiderations of the history of ceramics, seemingly deforming, shattering and piecing (or jamming) together appropriated vessels in contrasting styles, glazes and decorative patterns.’ In recent years, DiMattio has had solo exhibitions at Blaffer Museum, University of Houston, Texas (2014); Zabludowicz Collection, London (2013) and ICA, Boston (2011).
New sun-bleached paintings dyed with indigo will be on view by Somali-Swedish artist Ayan Farah. Farah re-purposes pieces of linen and jute sourced from nineteenth-century homes by dying them with natural pigments such as indigo and marigold, often grown herself, before exposing them to long periods of sunlight in the open air. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the David Roberts Art Foundation, London and Saatchi Gallery, London.
Also on show will be a large installation of new drawings by British artist Rachel Goodyear ahead of her forthcoming solo exhibition at The New Art Gallery Walsall, UK opening in May 2017. This follows solo exhibitions at The Drawing Center, New York (2016) and Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2011). Referencing unusual and psychotic scenarios, the works on show at the fair will capture the sensation of fragmented memories and unconscious fears slowly emerging from the psyche.
The gallery will also present new work by young German artist Stefanie Heinze, all of which were produced during her residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Maine in 2016. This will be the first time her work has been presented outside of Europe. Heinze’s large-scale paintings capture hallucinatory scenes in which corporeal forms bleed into one another. Fluctuating between abstraction and figuration, the artist attempts to evoke dream-like states within her work where reason degenerates into nonsense. Her presentation at The Armory Show 2017 will precede her first solo exhibition at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery in March 2017.
