Dancing in the Dark
Julie Brener Davich
Over the past couple weeks, Sheree Hovsepian has covered a lot of ground in New York. There she was at the opening celebrations for her husband Rashid Johnson’s retrospective at the Guggenheim. Then, she was back at the museum on Thursday for a party honoring Cultured magazine’s Cult100 list, which included Johnson. And all the while she’s been finalizing arrangements in her Gramercy studio for her second solo exhibition at Uffner & Liu gallery in SoHo, which opened last night.
Hovsepian broke onto the international art stage with her figural mixed media collages at the 2022 Venice Biennale, which focused on female surrealists. The works combine photographs, crescent-shaped ceramic tiles, and string set against a black velvet background in walnut wood box frames. Though not strictly a surrealist, Hovsepian counts Man Ray and Hans Bellmer as influences. Under her direction, a photograph of a lily becomes an arm, and a crescent-shaped tile becomes a torso. “Once you know my work, you see the body parts,” she told me when I visited her studio last week.
Hovsepian’s collages speak a new formal language that is at once timely and prescient. She tackles issues of identity and representation with a freshness that is hard to pull off. Her new exhibition, on view through June 21, continues that conversation—spanning from drawings to photographs to mixed-media collages to bronzes. The Iran-born Hovsepian was raised in Ohio, where she did not feel like she fit in. She went on to receive her MFA in photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her art, she says, is about “archiving my presence.” The model in all her photographs is her sister, who serves as a stand-in for the artist. The subtly figural bronzes stand level with her petite height, and bring her crescent motif into three dimensions, as if they are dancers twirling through space. (Hovsepian herself was in a West African dance troupe in college.) Being anchored into the floor gives them a lightness.
Hovsepian’s new mixed-media collages have evolved from the ones she showed at the Biennale: They are still figural, and still made from the same components of ceramic, string, and photographs, but they are more organic. The backgrounds are now black paint on linen, instead of black velvet—commonly used by photographers to achieve the blackest black—and the ceramic crescents have morphed into irregular forms she calls “skirts” and “swirls.” She’s also painted in dots, reminiscent of aboriginal artworks, in a fleshy pink “almost color,” as she described it. It’s the same color she painted the walls of her womb-like exhibition space at the Venice Giardini. Some of the pieces, priced from $6,000 to $85,000, have already sold.
Hovsepian’s works are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Studio Museum, and the Guggenheim. She has previously shown with dealers in Chicago, Brooklyn, and East Hampton, among other cities. Rachel Uffner, who helped launch the careers of Shara Hughes, Hilary Pecis, and Sam Moyer, is her first gallerist in Manhattan. The 17-year-old gallery is entering a new era, adding 25-year-old Lucy Liu as a partner to expand their reach into Asia. Next up on Hovsepian’s busy agenda is the release of her jewelry collaboration with Sidney Garber inspired by her ink drawings.
