Interviews by Brainard Carey

Isaac Aden is an American artist. Aden’s work has always engaged painting from the periphery and approached content as a conceptualist. Deeply informed by Art history, Aden implements a structuralist theory developed Rosalind Krauss in her seminal text Sculpture in the Expanded Field to painting. One aspect of Aden’s work remains true to the tradition of painting while the other veers into new territory.

Aden has exhibited internationally, including: dOCUMENTA 13, MassMOCA, The Fidericianum, White Box, Kassel Werkstadt, Gallerie Rasch, Ulrike Petschel Gallerie, Ethan Cohen Fine Art, SPRING/BREAK, Art Miami, Contemporary Istanbul, VOLTA Basel, Sotheby’s, The Jerome A. Cohen and Joan Lebold Cohen Center for Art. The Bertha and Karl Luebsdorf Gallery, The International Gallery of Contemporary Art, The Parthenon Museum, The New York Public Library and the World Trade Center. He has been awarded Fellowships from the Kossak Foundation, Creative Capital, The New York Foundation for the Arts and the United States State Department.

This is the 2nd interview with Joel-Peter Witkin on this program, the fist one can be found here.

Note: All the images discussed in order in the interview can be seen here.

Joel-Peter Witkin was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1939. In 1959, Edward Steichen, head of the department of photography at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), selected one of Witkin’s photographs for its permanent collection when Witkin is 16 years old.

Se Yoon Park 박세윤 (b. 1979, South Korea) is a sculptor living and working in New York. Park’s foundation in architecture is reverberated through the deft construction of his geometries and manipulation of gravity in his sculptural installations. Integral to his perspective is the deconstructivist approach of Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, founder of Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), Netherlands, where Park began his career as an architect. Koolhaas’ concept of the diagram, sourcing all possibilities on approach to a structure, is a defining principle of Park’s practice as a sculptor.

Park conducted his undergraduate studies in architecture at the department of Architectural Engineering at Yonsei University in Seoul and holds a Master of Architecture from Columbia University in New York. In addition to his time at OMA, his work in the realm of architecture includes positions with Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), Fernando Romero Enterprise (FREE), and with Joshua Ramus (REX). Park began his exploration of light and shadow in his own work as a sculptor in 2014. His work has since been shown by the European Culture Centre in Venice, in tandem with the 57th Venice Biennale, at the United Nations in the 13th UNCCD exhibition, and in solo and two-person exhibitions in New York and Seoul, at Carvalho Park (New York), Gallery Mark (Seoul), and Huue Contemporary (Seoul, Singapore), and as public art commissions in South Korea. His work has been featured in the Brooklyn Rail, Wallpaper* magazine, Artnet News, Dovetail magazine, Surface, Naver Design Press, Artsy Editorial, the Seoulive, Segye Daily, Seoul Economy Daily, among others.

David Kennedy Cutler (b. 1979, Sandgate, VT) is an artist, writer and performer who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

His practice addresses traces of domesticity; he presents material objects as witnesses of unseen labor and hidden objects. He observes, transfers, and transforms recognizable every day and artistic materials to create installations, paintings, and performances. Cutler received his BFA from The Rhode Island School of Design in 2001.

He has had solo exhibitions at Derek Eller Gallery (NYC), Halsey McKay Gallery (East Hampton, NY), Essex Flowers (NYC), The Centre for Contemporary Art (Tallinn, Estonia) and Nice & Fit (Berlin, Germany). Cutler has performed in various spaces in New York including Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, Essex Flowers, Printed Matter, Halsey McKay, Derek Eller Gallery, and Flag Art Foundation, and internationally at the Center for Contemporary Arts Estonia, among others. His works are included in the permanent collections of the Wellin Museum at Hamilton College and The RISD Museum, and his artist’s books are included in the libraries of the Whitney Museum and the Brooklyn Museum. He has been reviewed and featured in The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, The New Yorker and Modern Painter, among others. Cutler is represented by Derek Eller Gallery, NY and Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton. Currently on view is a two person show, Hedge, with Mosieur Zohore.

Tomás Díaz Cedeño (b. 1983, Mexico City) lives and works in Mexico City. Most recently his work has been shown in a solo exhibition at Silke Lindner (New York) and featured in the group exhibition Equis, I Griega, Zeta at Anonymous (New York).

Previously, his work has been featured in the 2021 New Museum Triennial Soft Water, Hard Stone (New York, NY ) Museo MARCO (Monterrey, MX), Fundación Casa de México en España (Madrid, Spain), PEANA (Mexico City and Monterrey), Francois Ghebaly (Los Angeles, CA) and Galerie Nordenhake (Mexico City).

Residency programs completed by the artist include LaCasaPark Artist Residency in New York and Casa Wabi in Puerto Escondido. 

Sara Berman  (b. 1975, UK) received a BA in Fashion Design from Central Saint Martins in 1999 after which she founded and ran her eponymous fashion brand for 15 years. In 2016 Sara Berman graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art with a MFA in Painting.

Berman’s background in fashion influenced her visual arts practice through the use of various textures, layers, mathematical geometry, pattern and materiality. In her work Berman examines how people see and define themselves through the relationships with their clothes, belongings and the spaces they occupy. The character in Sara Berman’s work is inspired by the trope of the female Harlequin in her ascribed role of the Trickster Whore. Through this character Berman explores space and the role of the feminine within it.

Solo Exhibitions include (Upcoming) Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Berlin (2024); (Upcoming) No Visible Means of Support, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Palm Beach, Florida, USA (2023); The Armory Show NYC, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, New York (2022); Taking Space, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London (2021); Double Ententre, Anat Ebgi, LA  (2018); Between Community and commerce, Site specific installation ZAZ10TS Time Square, NYC (2018); Matter Out Of Place, 93 Baker St. London, Frieze (2018) and Big Cactus Little Cactus, Galerie Huit, Hong Kong (2017)

Tanya Minhas is a New York based visual artist. Raised in Karachi, Pakistan, the artist moved to the United States to attend Princeton University. She received her graduate degree from Columbia University, and painted portraits in oil at The Arts Students League. Minhas started Tanya Minhas Studio in 2012, as a space for her various artistic expressions – painting, drawing, textile designs – to come together.

Her current work reflects her practice of repetitive drawing, utilizing ink, paint, and other various media. She meditatively explores the state of harmony between the internal and the external, the visible and the invisible, the tangible and the elusive. Through these explorations, she examines how the strength of one’s intrinsic life force affects this harmony, offering an impetus that seeks to balance our internal lives with an increasingly tempestuous external world.

Zhang Dali was born in Harbin, China in 1963. He graduated from the painting department at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing with a BA in 1987. An influential figure in socio-political artistic movements in China, Zhang Dali has, for decades, challenged the conventional with his social documentation in graffiti, sculpture, photography, and painting.

Zhang was exiled from China after graduating from the Central Academy of Fine Arts and spent six years immersing himself in Western art and art history in Italy. Upon his return to Beijing, he developed a keen interest in portraiture (usually of himself), documentary and public urban art, often interrupting spaces with confrontational political statements. The photograph series ‘A Second History’ consists of propaganda and found images under the rule of Mao, which have been doctored or altered to the Chairman’s artistic ‘vision’ of politics and appropriation. He is critically recognized as one of China’s first graffiti and street artists.

In 2011, Zhang Dali’s work was featured in New Photography 2011 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The New York Times reviewed the show, mentioning that “the evocation of Orwellian busywork constantly varnishing truth for the benefit of dictatorial dominion is chilling to contemplate.” In 2014, Zhang Dali presented a comprehensive solo show at Klein Sun Gallery titled Square, which featured his cyanotypes, fiberglass sculptures, and paintings. Art in America praised Zhang’s work as it ”compels his audience to acknowledge those who are damaged and marginalized, in hopes of expanding civic awareness and empathy” and stated that “it is now time for the Western media to accord Zhang recognition for his powerful, courageous artworks, which speak up for those who cannot freely speak for themselves.”

His work is in public collections including Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; The Saatchi Gallery, London, UK; Smart Museum, Chicago, IL; and Asia Society, New York, NY.

Zhang Dali currently lives and works in Beijing, China.

Cristina Canale (b. 1961, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) rose to prominence following her participation in the iconic group exhibition Como vai você, Geração 80?, at Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage (EAV Parque Lage) in Rio de Janeiro in 1984. Like many of her colleagues from the so-called “Generation 80”, her early works reveal the influence of the international context as painting resurfaced, especially with that of German Neo-expressionism. Loaded with visual elements and thick paint, her early paintings have a material or textural characteristic that is reinforced by her use of contrasting and vivid colors. In the early 1990s, Canale moved to Germany to study in Düsseldorf under the guidance of the Dutch conceptual artist Jan Dibbets. Her compositions soon acquired a sense of spatiality, as she began to incorporate the use of planes and depth, while also adding greater fluidity to her use of colors.

Cristina Canale’s work is often based off prosaic everyday scenes, which she extracts from advertising photography. Her paintings result in elaborate compositions that intertwine the figurative and the abstract, often blurring one with the other. According to the curator Tiago Mesquita, Canale’s production opposes the quest for constituing structures of the image, which artists such as Gerhard Richter and Robert Ryman engage with, tackling instead “the image and established genres of painting in a subjective manner following the belief in a singular experience.”

Cristina Canale lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Her recent solo exhibitions include: The Encounter, at Nara Roesler (2021), in New York, United States; Cabeças/Falantes, at Galeria Nara Roesler (2018).