P·P·O·W is pleased to present works by Srijon Chowdhury, Daniel Correa Mejía, Dana DeGiulio, Chris "Daze" Ellis, Sosa Joseph, Hortensia Mi Kafchin, Clementine Keith-Roach, Dinh Q. Lê, Judith Linhares, and Martin Wong.
Srijon Chowdhury (b. 1987 Dhaka, Bangladesh) lives and works in Portland, OR, and Los Angeles, CA. He holds a BFA from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, Minneapolis and Saint Paul, MN, and an MFA from the Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, CA. Chowdhury’s works recast themes from across the history of representational painting, from early Renaissance vanitas to German Expressionism. He gives unanticipated twists to traditional genres, including ancient myths, biblical stories, and family portraiture: contemporary life is historicized, gender expectations are upended, and familiar symbols and settings are reconfigured. In her Artforum review of Chowdhury’s 2020 exhibition at Foxy Productions, Reilly Davidson wrote that Chowdhury’s “paintings capture a sense of the natural world as corrupted, forbidding. . . [He] renders a pervasive alienation—between us and our enfeebled earth, between people in this troubling life—with alarming skill.” Chowdhury has presented solo exhibitions at Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA; Foxy Productions, New York, NY; Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA; SE Cooper Contemporary, Portland, Oregon; and Ciaccia Levi, Paris, France, among others. Chowdhury has participated in group exhibitions at Fraçois Ghebaly, Los Angeles, CA; Chapter, New York, NY; Deli Gallery, New York, NY; and Franz Kaka, Toronto, Canada, among others.
Daniel Correa Mejía (b. 1986 Medellín, Colombia) is a visual artist based in Berlin. Mejía’s practice combines painting, drawing, sculpture, and writing to mine imagery from his own subconscious and mythologize the landscape of his interior world. His highly symbolic figures personify various emotional states, becoming one with their scenery as contemporary society fades away and sacred, primordial knowledge is uncovered. His solo exhibitions include Lucrecia, mor charpentier, Paris, FR; Soy hombre: duro poco y es enorme la noche, Fortnight Institute, New York, NY; Amor y Agua, Public Gallery, London, UK; and Die Klarheit, Colombian Embassy, Berlin, DE. His work has been included in group exhibitions at mor charpentier, Bogotá, COL; Maureen Paley, London, UK; P·P·O·W, New York, NY; Kunstverein Meissen, Meissen, DE; Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, Medellín, COL; Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, BR, and New York, NY; Pony Royal, Berlin, DE; Fortnight Institute, New York, NY; and Galerie Crone, Berlin, DE, among others. His work has been featured in articles in Juxtapoz, Art Viewer, and Artnet, among others. Soy el dueño de mi casa, Mejía’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, was on view October 27 – December 9, 2023.
Dana DeGiulio (b. 1978) is a painter who works at home in Brooklyn. Her work in video, drawing, installation, painting, writing, and teaching is about edges and touch and attention. DeGiulio earned a BFA in 2001 and MFA in 2007 from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2022, DeGiulio presented Live or Die, a one-person exhibition at the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT. She has presented solo and two-person exhibitions at the California Museum of Photography, Riverside, CA; Carrie Secrist Gallery, Chicago, IL; Iceberg Projects, Chicago, IL; Lyles and King, New York, NY; take care, Los Angeles, CA; and The Suburban, Oak Park, IL. DeGiulio has been included in group exhibitions at Cooper Cole, Toronto, Canada; ERMES ERMES, Rome, Italy; Marli Matsumoto, São Paolo, Brazil; Frederic Snitzer Gallery, Miami, FL; Goldfinch, Chicago, IL; ICA at Maine College of Art, Portland, ME; Socrates Sculpture Park, New York, NY; The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN; and produced a series of animations for SFMoMA's Open Space program at the invitation of grupa o.k.. DeGiulio is an Adjunct Professor of Visual Arts at New York University, New York, NY; Columbia University, New York, NY; and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL. She is the co-founder (with Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, Colby Shaft, Diego Leclery, and Hans-Peter Sundquist) of the artist-run gallery Julius Caesar in Chicago, IL. DeGiulio presented Opening, her first exhibition with the gallery, in spring 2023.
Born in 1962 in New York City, Chris “Daze” Ellis began his prolific career as part of the second generation of graffiti writers, painting New York City subway cars in 1976 while attending The High School of Art and Design. Inspired at an early age by writers such as Blade, Lee Quinones, and PHASE 2, Daze gained notoriety as a teenager in the late 70s and early 80s and remains one of the few artists of his generation to make the successful transition from subways to the studio. Daze’s first group show was the seminal Beyond Words at the Mudd Club in 1981 which featured works by Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Soon after, his first solo exhibition was held at Fashion Moda, an influential alternative art space in the South Bronx. He has had numerous solo exhibitions at the Palais Liechtenstein, Feldkirch, Austria; Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain, Nice, France; Galleria del Palazzo, Florence, Italy; Fortune Cookie Projects, Singapore; The Museum of the City of New York, New York; and P·P·O·W, New York. His work can also be found in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Museum of the City of New York, NY; The Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum, Aachen, Germany; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; and The Addison Gallery of American Art at the Phillips Academy, Andover, MA; among others.
Sosa Joseph (b. 1971) is known for atmospheric, dreamlike compositions that draw from the history and visual iconography of her surroundings in Kerala, India. Rendered in a unique style of expressionist figuration, her most recent paintings focus on the stories of individuals from Kerala that were subjected to the Indian Ocean slave trade. Simultaneously unearthing and archiving these histories, Joseph captures moments of daily life from the most brutal to the incidental in her psychologically charged paintings. Joseph studied at the Raja Ravi Varma College of Fine Arts, Kerala, and the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. She has presented solo exhibitions at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Mumbai, India; Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa; and the Setouchi Triennale, Setouchi, Japan. Joseph has also been included in group exhibitions such as Woman Is as Woman Does, Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation, Mumbai, India; Art of India, Clarinda Carnegie Art Museum, Clarinda, Iowa; Superposition: Equilibrium & Engagement, the 21st Biennale of Sydney, Sydney Australia; Mémoires des Futurs / Modernités Indiennes, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Kamarado, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; and the first Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kerala, India. Her work is in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, India.
Hortensia Mi Kafchin (b. 1986) imbues a highly classical painting style with her own mythologies, fairytales, and belief systems, and her avatars traverse time, space, and reality to reach states of self-transformation and liberation. Hybridity, a central tenet of Kafchin’s practice, is innately tied not only to her transition from male to female, but also to her upbringing in post-Communist Romania in which an influx of Western culture intertwined with deeply rooted Eastern Orthodoxy and Medieval traditions. She lives and works in Cluj, Romania, and Berlin, Germany. Her work can be found in collections including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, FR; Collection Deutsche Telekom, Bonn, DE; and the Ludwig Museum, Köln, DE. Kafchin has presented solo exhibitions at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest, RO; Galerie Judin, Berlin, DE; Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Art Encounters Foundation, Timișoara, RO; Lyles & King, New York, NY; Museum of Art, Cluj, RO, among others. Kafchin has also taken part in group exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, FR; New Museum, New York, NY; Austrian Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna, AT; Prague Biennale, Prague, CZ; La Kunsthalle Mulhouse, Paris, FR; La Triennale, Paris, FR; Espace Louis Vuitton, Paris, FR, among others. Years of Bad Hair, Kafchin’s first exhibition with the gallery, was on view in May 2023.
Fusing the corporeal, decorative, historical, and functional, Clementine Keith-Roach (b. 1984) creates detailed, uncanny sculptures that blur boundaries between object and figure. Her work is inspired by clay’s inherent tactility and sensuality, as well as the immediate physical affinity one feels with antique ceramic containers and their readiness to be anthropomorphized. The resulting works simultaneously celebrate the female form and breathe life into the storied histories of domestic objects. Keith-Roach received a BA in Art History from University of Bristol, Bristol, UK. She has exhibited at Ben Hunter Gallery, London, UK; MOCA, Los Angeles, CA; Blue Projects, London, UK; Centre Regional D’art Contemporain (CRAC), Sète, France; The Villa Lontana, Rome, Italy; Open Space Contemporary, London, UK; Pervilion, Palermo, Italy and London, UK; The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; Wellcome Collection, London, UK; and Kasmin, New York, NY; among others. She is also an editor of Effects, a journal of art, poetry and essays. Keith-Roach presented Knots, a two-person exhibition with Christopher Page, at P·P·O·W in June 2022. Keith-Roach’s work is featured on the cover of Art in America’s September 2022 issue illustrating Glenn Adamson’s article Monuments for the Moment, which contextualizes her vessels alongside other influential sculptors including Baseera Khan, Julia Kunin, and Martin Puryear. In fall 2023, Keith-Roach presented another two-person exhibition with Page at Ben Hunter Gallery titled Earth Sky Body Ruins. Her second solo exhibition with the gallery will open in October 2024.
Working in photography, film, and installation, Dinh Q. Lê (b. 1968) presents little-known narratives of war and migration from the perspective of Vietnam, America, and the global Vietnamese diaspora. Synthesizing his own memory and perception with popular depictions in entertainment and journalism from Western and Eastern cultures, Lê’s singular voice has reframed global histories of Southern Vietnam, challenging censorship, exploitation, and propaganda from all sides. Lê was born in Ha Tien, a Vietnamese town near the Cambodia border. Soon after the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1978, the Lê family immigrated to Los Angeles. After receiving a BFA from UC Santa Barbara, Lê began his first photo-weavings using a traditional technique he learned from his aunt. Lê participated in the 2013 Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; the 2009 Biennale Cuveê, OK Center for Contemporary Art, Linz, Austria; the 2008 Singapore Biennale, Singapore; and the 2006 Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, Australia. His work has been exhibited at major institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA; MoMA PS1, New York, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Tufts University Art Gallery, MA; and the Asia Society, NY, among many others. In 2010, he was awarded the Prince Claus Award for his outstanding contribution to cultural exchange. He has been represented by P·P·O·W since 1998 and presented seven solo exhibitions with the gallery. In 2022, Lê was the subject of the exhibition The thread of memory and other photographs at Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, Paris, France, and was featured in Living Pictures: Photography in Southeast Asia at the National Gallery Singapore, Singapore.
Rooted in the California Bay Area counterculture of the 60s and 70s, Judith Linhares (b. 1940) composes folkloric, figurative paintings from confident, abstract brushwork, utilizing broad strokes and brilliant fields of color to gradually develop her subjects. Harnessing portentous yet quotidian symbols, her uniquely irradiant paintings celebrate the female body and communal experience. Fueled by the permissive, psychedelic atmosphere of the 1960s, Linhares continues to investigate the relationship between the conscious and unconscious – her dreams often providing her work with their mythic narratives, characters, and kaleidoscopic compositions that pulsate with color. Linhares earned her BFA and MFA degrees from California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, CA. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; the de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Philadelphia, PA, among others. Judith Linhares: The Artist as Curator, an exhibition featuring five decades of work, was presented at the Sarasota Art Museum, FL, in winter 2022. The exhibition included a curated presentation of works by Bill Adams, Ellen Berkenblit, Karin Davie, Dona Nelson, and Mary Jo Vath, highlighting the longstanding influence of dialogue between artists. Linhares’ second solo exhibition at P·P·O·W, Banshee Sunrise, opened in April 2022. Linhares presented Honey in the Rock, her first solo exhibition at Massimo de Carlo, London, UK, in spring 2023. In November 2023, Linhares presented a collection of rarely seen works from the 1970s in Love Letters from San Jose, her first exhibition at Parker Gallery, Los Angeles, CA.
A “documenter of the constellation of social life,” Martin Wong (1946-1999) developed innovative approaches to technique and form, creating rich surfaces and intricate details from astrology, architectural space, and various modes of language. Wong was born in Portland, Oregon and raised in San Francisco, California. Wong exhibited for two decades at notable downtown galleries including EXIT ART, Semaphore, and P·P·O·W, among others, before his passing in San Francisco from an AIDS related illness. His work is represented in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, among others. Human Instamatic, a comprehensive retrospective, opened at the Bronx Museum of The Arts in November 2015, before traveling to the Wexner Center for the Arts in 2016 and the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in 2017. In late 2022, the first extensive, touring exhibition of Wong’s work in Europe, Martin Wong: Malicious Mischief, debuted at the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in Madrid, before travelling to the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, and the Camden Art Centre in London. Curated by Krist Gruijthuijsen and Agustín Pérez-Rubio, the final leg of the exhibition is currently on view at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, until April 2024. P·P·O·W will present an exhibition featuring Wong’s work in dialogue with Canadian artist Paul P. in spring 2024.