KW Institute for Contemporary Art will present its Spring Program of 2023 with a focus on interiority and exteriority. These reflections on the physical and psychological conditions of architecture and city planning inform the work of Martin Wong, Win McCarthy, and Karen Lamassonne, in which notions of “the self” are being constructed.

Martin Wong, Cell Door Slot, 1986. Acrylic on canvas, 45.7 x 71.1 cm. Courtesy of the Martin Wong Foundation and P.P.O.W, New York. ? Martin Wong Foundation.

Martin Wong: Malicious Mischief
February 25–May 14, 2023

Curator: Krist Gruijthuijsen, Agustín Pérez Rubio
Assistant Curator: Sofie Krogh Christensen

KW Institute for Contemporary Art is proud to present the first extensive European exhibition of the work of the US-Chinese artist Martin Wong (b. 1946, Portland, US, d. 1999, San Francisco, US).

Martin Wong is recognized for his depictions of social, sexual, and political scenographies from the US in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Poetically weaving together narratives of queer existence, marginal communities, and urban gentrification, Wong stands out as an important countercultural voice at odds with the art establishment’s reactionary discourse at the time. Heavily influenced by his immediate surroundings, the artist’s practice merges the visual languages of Chinese iconography, urban poetry, graffiti, carceral aesthetics, and sign language. His work offers rare insight into decisive periods of recent US American history as told through its changing urban landscapes, unfolding hidden desires, and complexities.

Martin Wong, Malicious Mischief, 1991. Courtesy of the Martin Wong Foundation and P.P.O.W, New York. ? Martin Wong Foundation.

Martin Wong – Malicious Mischief presents a selection of over 100 of Wong’s works. It encompasses early paintings and sculptures made in the euphoric environments of San Francisco and Eureka, California, in the late 1960s and early 1970s; Wong’s iconic 1980s and 1990s paintings from his time as a citizen of a dilapidated New York City; lastly, his reminiscences on the imagery of Chinatowns on the East and West Coast, made prior to his premature death from an HIV/AIDS-related illness.

The exhibition is accompanied by an extensive publication, co-published with Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz K?nig.

Win McCarthy, Fridge Peripheries, 2022, Silver gelatine fiber print, 25 x 20 cm ? Win McCarthy.

Win McCarthy: Innenportrait
February 25–May 14, 2023

Curator: Krist Gruijthuijsen
Assistant Curator: Léon Kruijswijk
Curatorial Assistant: Linda Franken

With Innenportrait, KW Institute for Contemporary Art presents the first institutional solo exhibition of Win McCarthy. In his work, McCarthy (b. 1986, US) explores the dialectical relationships between subjects like city and citizen, friend and the stranger, and present and past. McCarthy’s work often testifies to the paradoxical emptiness experienced in a metropolis. Taking the city’s map as a metaphysical topography, the confluence of real estate, architecture, and urban planning become vocabulary for the construction of a self. 

Besides working with photography and text, McCarthy makes associative installations. His works appear to be images from memories, meeting viewers with a torrent of different emotions, ranging from amusement and admiration to aversion and fear. Innenportrait focuses on a collision between opticality and intellect. If subjectivity has been pivotal in McCarthy’s previous work, its main juncture has been at how the self struggles to find reconciliation with the phenomenological and ontological: where the ‘I’ ends, is where the world begins.

McCarthy’s first publication Common Ruin, which reflects on his work through personal writings, accompanies the exhibition and is co-published with Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz K?nig.

Karen Lamassonne, Suen?o hu?medo III, (Wet Dream III), 1987, Photography with crayon, 28 x 36 cm ? Karen Lamassonne

Karen Lamassonne: Ruido / Noise
February 25–May 14, 2023

Curator: Krist Gruijthuijsen
Assistant Curator: Léon Kruijswijk
Curatorial Assistant: Linda Franken

Ruido / Noise is the first solo exhibition by the Colombian-American artist Karen Lamassonne (b. 1954, US) in Europe and is collaboratively presented with Swiss Institute, New York, and Medellín Museum of Modern Art –MAMM. The exhibition brings together paintings, drawings, collages as well as videos that Lamassonne created between 1974 and today.

The works of Lamassonne are often situated in domestic spaces like bathrooms, bedrooms, kitchens, and hallways. As a woman, she playfully questions notions of self-portraiture and self-representation by concealing and revealing the self. In later works, she would move towards depicting the tension between the intimacy of sensual and sexual bodies in public urban spaces.

Lamassonne became closely connected to the Grupo de Cali (Cali Group), a group of filmmakers who heralded the New Latin American Cinema in the 1970s and 1980s and had a lasting influence on cinema production. Among many other capacities, Lamassonne was responsible for the art direction for Pura Sangre (1982), directed by Luis Ospina, and the German-Colombian production Kalt in Kolumbien (1985), directed by Dieter Schidor. From then on, the cinematic remained essential to her practice.

Lamassonne has been living and working in Colombia, the US, France, Germany, and Italy, and would also frequently travel between these and other countries. With her most recent works, she revisited old personal documents, letters, and postcards, to which she responds poetically, reworking them and turning them into collages. By doing so, Lamassonne has placed the exchange across borders and the nature of change as time passes at the center of her work, evoking a sense of timeless intimacy.

The travelling exhibition is supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art.

Courtesy KW Institute for Contemporary Art.