Correspondences: Organized by Wes Hardin

François Ghebaly New York is proud to present the first iteration of Correspondences, featuring Heidi Bucher, Craig Jun Li, Alix Vernet, and Willa Wasserman. The second iteration of the exhibition will take place at the Los Angeles gallery over the summer.

Correspondences is a group exhibition about memory and the outstretched hand. The title can mean "affinities,” or alternately "dialogues” and actual letter-writing. The perspectives in the exhibition imagine subjects tethered across divides, spanned by an outward or inward (and perhaps futile, messianic*) reach toward counter, familiar, distant textual location, or the shifting mythology of oneself. Thoughts include:

Twin gods;
The touch of the bird;
Tissue Door—;
Propitiation;
The way of saying things;
The weak force;
Othello’s feeling.

Heidi Bucher was a Swiss artist who is best remembered for her innovative use of latex and exploration of the physical and psychic boundaries between the body and its surroundings. Serving simultaneously as means of historical preservation and metaphorical molting, Bucher’s sculptures and Hauträume—or “roomskins”—act as indexes of the complicated relationship humans have to their bodies and pasts. Anchored in familial, cultural, and architectural histories, Bucher’s practice is deeply entwined with contemporary concerns around public and private space, femininity and the body.

Heidi Bucher (b. 1926, Winterthur, Switzerland; d. 1993, Brunnen, Switzerland) attended the School for Applied Arts in Zurich from 1942 to 1946, specializing in Fashion Design. Her work is held in institutional collections including Centre Pompidou, Paris; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Tate, London, among others.

Alix Vernet looks to the rituals, disappearances, and apparitions contained in the material life of buildings. Her projects involve long-term collaborations with both official and unofficial custodians of public life, including maintenance workers, museum conservators, pedestrians, and neighbors.

Alix Vernet (b. 1997) lives and works in New York. She received her BFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, and her MFA from Yale University. Vernet’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Helena Anrather, New York, and group exhibitions at Museion Bolzano, the Gund Gallery at Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio; Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles; and Soft Opening, London. Her photographs have been published by Dashwood Books, and she has received critical recognition in Frieze, Texte Zur Kunst, Artforum, and Art in America.

From convex still lifes and gauzy self-portraits to impressive mise-en-scènes on polished bronze and fine linen, Willa Wasserman’s practice in painting and figuration is aligned with the world of dreams. Her images are loose and spectral—impressions plucked from the hazy essences of her sitters and various subjects. They are cast in the pensive, indeterminate ambiance with which Wasserman embraces vital questions of intimacy, gender, and above all, becoming. 

In figure and process, Wasserman deftly interrelates histories of classical painting and material culture with contemporary portrayals of queerness. Brass and copper sheet, silver plate, precious metalpoint, and stretched linen are part of a growing array of closely studied materials that uniquely capture the latency in Wasserman’s gestures. They offer keen metaphors for the potentiality at the heart of her practice. For example her linseed oils age, her delicate silverpoints oxidize, caustic reagents transform her metal surfaces into iridescent patinas. With sincerity and lightness, Wasserman conducts these phantom throughlines into tender, moving silhouettes of sex, self, and metamorphosis. 

Willa Wasserman (b. 1990, Evansville, Indiana) lives and works in New York. She gained her BFA at Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College in 2013, and received her MFA at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2019. Recent solo exhibitions include Travesía Cuatro, Madrid; Travesía Cuatro, Guadalajara; François Ghebaly, New York; François Ghebaly, Los Angeles; High Art, Paris, France; Downs & Ross, New York; Good Weather, Chicago; and in lieu, Los Angeles. Selected group presentations include James Cohan, New York; Modern Art, London; Michael Werner Gallery, London; Sargent’s Daughters, New York; and Park View / Paul Soto, Los Angeles.

Craig Jun Li is an art worker and artist. Li’s practice investigates affective forms of knowledge and material production that are often secondary or alternative to established written history. Their works often configure as site-responsive installations composed of rematerialized research sources and mechanical devices scored to operate in situ. Li operates the nomadic curatorial project “Benny’s Video”, currently hosted in a studio sublet in Bushwick, New York.

“CJ” Craig Jun Li lives and works in New York City. Li’s work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions including Taon, Ivey-sur-Seine; Ulterior, New York; ROMANCE, Pittsburgh; Chris Andrews, Montréal; RAINRAIN, New York; September Sessions, Stockholm; Parent Company, New York; hatred2, New York; Prairie, Chicago; and Canal Projects, New York, among others.