Installation photo credit: Dawn Blackman

Arlene Shechet & Nicola Tyson
Frieze Los Angeles, Booth B14
February 16 – 19, 2023

For Frieze Los Angeles, Vielmetter Los Angeles will feature a two-person presentation of new works by Arlene Shechet and Nicola Tyson. Drawing from their respective practices in sculpture (Shechet) and drawing (Tyson), both artists have been on the vanguard of formalist experimentation for the past 40 years.

Arlene Shechet’s sculptures are chimeric amalgamations which refer as much to the body as the architecture which contains it. Working in human scale with intimate precision, the sculptures incorporate materials such as steel, wood, and glazed ceramic within compositions that are both discordant and harmonious, seemingly defying logic and gravity.

British-born artist Nicola Tyson’s drawings and paintings upend gender and representation. Termed “psycho- figuration” by the artist, her corporeal forms appear contorted, frozen mid-ritual in a frenzied, pregnant accumulation of graphite. Heavily influenced by her youth in the 1980s London Underground, Tyson’s work embraces an intuitive, expressionist sensitivity.

Together, Shechet and Tyson’s works play off the other, challenging gendered expectations of craft, assemblage and adornment. Tyson’s sparse landscapes and wild embodiments feel grounded by Shechet’s modern totems, which in turn, offer dimensional visions.

Arlene Shechet’s work is currently on view in Disrupt the View at the Harvard Art Museums. Other recent solo exhibitions include T Space and her ambitious commissioned installation, Full Steam Ahead, in Madison Square Park. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Centre Pompidou, among many others.

Nicola Tyson’s work has been exhibited internationally and included in major collections such as Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; The Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C; and Tate Modern, London.