Who is Your Master? Curated by Wolf Hill

16.03 - 29.04.2023

From 1969 Gallery’s website:

“1969 Gallery and Wolf Hill are pleased to announce Who Is Your Master?, a group exhibition opening March 16, 2023. Curated by Wolf Hill Co-Founders Ethan Rafii and Jonathan Travis, Who Is Your Master? poses its titular question to fourteen international artists and prompts them to consider the individuals, forces, and cultural traditions that have shaped their artistic journeys whether by choice, through education, or even unconsciously or by force.

“Independent curation is a meaningful way for the gallery to exhibit new artists and reach new audiences,” says Quang Bao, owner of 1969 Gallery. “The dual enthusiasm and effort that Ethan and Jonathan have displayed for finding contemporary artists and bringing them to the art world's attention is commendable—I wonder sometimes if they really have full time jobs.”

Drawing on an international network of emerging artists, Co-Curators Rafii and Travis selected fourteen artists from across the globe to explore the exhibition’s central question and produce works that speak to the answers they uncovered. From studios in New York, Paris, Barcelona, and more, the artists identified Masters ranging from the literal—Titian, Egon Scheile, Francis Bacon—to the abstract—water, the environment, “an infinite list of the people I love”. Who Is Your Master? unravels the threads that connect the artist to the long timeline of art history and by extension, each of us to the human experience.

“Our mission at Wolf Hill is to amplify artistic voices. By partnering with 1969 Gallery, we can provide a broader, public audience for fourteen talented individuals who may one day be lauded as Masters themselves,” says Travis. “The works they have produced will force us all to take a deeper look at ourselves, our interpersonal relationships, and our cultural expectations,” adds Rafii.

The exhibition will feature works from Kate Bickmore, Giorgio Celin, Azuki Furuya, Adrian Geller, July Guzman, Yowshien Kuo, Lindsey Jean McLean, Ken Gun Min, Igor Moritz, Hannah Murray, Francisco Pinzón Samper, Oda Iselin Sønderland, David Weishaar, and Georg Wilson.

Curatorial Statement by Ethan Rafii and Jonathan Travis

All artists feel beholden to their Masters—unconsciously, in praise, by choice, through education, or sometimes by programming or force. Every individual desires to choose who they want to become and to have as many options for how to realize and manifest that individuality. Selecting the fourteen artists for Who Is Your Master?, we as co-curators are providing each one an opportunity to exhibit artworks and artistic experiments as well as a platform to broadcast the artists responsible for providing them with inspiration and examples. It is a chorus indebted and in homage to their Masters, which are not always singular people.

We began collecting art at different times in our lives but we both became quick studies, learning to connect emerging artists and their works with prior works by other artists, art movements, and the long timeline of art history. As a contemporary exhibition, Who is Your Master? attempts that same threading across generations. Beyond supporting these artists, we wanted to showcase their evolving artistic practices and attempts to be their own Polaris in front of a larger, public audience. In personality, by trade and collectively, they are thoughtful, obsessive, and intense learners. They are also artists who may one day be lauded as Masters.

These fourteen artists also serve as potential instructors for all of us. The psychologically-charged, pensive figures in Igor Moritz’s works prompt a viewer to reevaluate interpersonal relationships and histories. Kate Bickmore’s otherworldly flowers are watching us, posing big questions: What is the natural world and what is our place in it? Yowshien Kuo’s work conjures up issues about identity, family, race, and the expectations of culture and traditions. How can we not take them personally? Can a force such as inherited, ancestral culture be a different version of a master? Can a person be his own master? An answer to both questions lies in the invented worlds of Ken Gun Min. All of these artists and their narratives provoke vexing questions for each of us, ones that we have asked ourselves since our beginnings.”