Lehmann Maupin returns to Art SG for the fair’s second edition with a focused presentation of new works by Lee Bul and Cecilia Vicuña—two artists with singular approaches to the sculptural medium. Also on view is a selection of portraits by Chantal Joffe, which explore intimacy through portraiture, alongside a new Piece Painting by Mandy El-Sayegh. Other booth highlights include sculptures by artists Tom Friedman and Erwin Wurm.
Concurrent to the fair, several Lehmann Maupin-represented artists are included in the exhibition Translations: Afro-Asian Poetics, curated by Zoé Whitley at The Institutum. Works by Nari Ward, Do Ho Suh, Billie Zangewa, Dominic Chambers, and Nicholas Hlobo—alongside works by fellow contemporaries—call attention to the synergy and solidarity between African and Asian cultural diasporas, exploring the affinities therein through material.
Lehmann Maupin’s booth will feature Study for Aubade V (1/5 scale) (2019), a sculpture by acclaimed Korean artist Lee Bul. As the title suggests, the piece is a study for Aubade V, which was first exhibited in 2019 at the 58th Venice Biennale. Angular and modern yet architecturally universal, the tower is made from debris collected from the demolished Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), which divides North and South Korea. Lee grew up during the period of time in which South Korea experienced the effects of both military dictatorship and rapid economic and cultural growth, and Aubade V responds to this conflict in its utopian posture. Alongside Study for Aubade V (1/5 scale), a new Perdu work will debut at the booth. In November 2023, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York announced Lee Bul’s facade commission—four new sculptures built for The Met’s iconic niches, which will debut in September 2024. Additionally, Lee Bul currently has work on view at the nearby ArtScience Museum in Singapore.
Lehmann Maupin’s booth features a selection of Cecilia Vicuña’s precarios—an ongoing body of lyrical and intimately scaled sculptures that incorporate found materials, including feathers, stones, wood, shells, cloth, and other detritus. In each Precario, Vicuña poetically combines objects gathered and sourced typically from her walks along coastlines; they are often loosely fastened together with string, emphasizing their delicate nature. As Vicuña turns to the fragile and the fragmentary, she offers a mode of representation that boldly contends with the precarious state of the natural world and the constant threat of destruction that it faces. Vicuña’s work is currently on view in the retrospective exhibition Cecilia Vicuña: Soñar el agua at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, which will next travel to the Pinacoteca de São Paulo in May 2024. In November 2024, Vicuña will open an exhibition of new work at Lehmann Maupin New York.
London-based artist Chantal Joffe is known for her whimsical portraits of herself and of the people she is closest to, including her immediate family, her friends, and her extended family members. By creating tension between the scale of her compositions and the proposed intimacy of their subject matter—as in Katy (Looking to New York) (2023), where a closely-cropped yet expressive portrait of a woman is set against a monochrome background—Joffe prioritizes the human identities and relationships that undergird her compositions over any kind of painterly realism. This approach heightens already complex narratives around connection, perception, and representation (implicit in the relationship between artist and subject), inviting viewers to reconsider their own interpersonal worlds.
Other highlights include a new Piece Painting by Mandy El-Sayegh; a sculpture by Tom Friedman, concurrent to his participation in the group exhibition Everything Gets Lighter at Museo Jumex in Mexico City and ahead of his 2025 solo exhibition at Lehmann Maupin New York; and a selection of works from Erwin Wurm’s Flat Series, concurrent to his solo exhibition Erwin Wurm: Hot at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, GA.
