Frieze London 2017

Carlos Motta (b. 1978) examines multicultural political histories of those oppressed for their sexuality and gender in projects that engage an array of media, including installation, video, photography, and sculpture. P • P • O • W will present works from Motta’s 1998 Untitled Series of photographic self-portraits, which feature the artist performing fictive characters in eerily constructed landscapes. In these early photographs, Motta experiments with the representation of sexual alterity, the elasticity of identity, and the politics of difference, anticipating the themes that he engages in his current practice. Motta’s work has been exhibited at the Tate Modern, London; the New Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, and MoMA/PS1, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; the Museo de Arte del Banco de la República, Bogota; Serralves Museum, Porto; the Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona; the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens; the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Mexico; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson; San Francisco Art Institute; Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin; and X Lyon Biennale; among others. Motta was awarded the Main Prize of the Future Generation Award, Pinchuk Art Centre, Kiev in 2014 and nominated for a Guggenheim in 2008. He has received grants from Art Matters, NYSCA, and the Creative Capital Foundation. Motta lives and works in New York City and is a professor at Parsons, The New School of Design. As a member of the collective SPIT!, Motta will present a series of performances for Frieze Projects 2017. The Crossing, an 11-channel video installation, will debut at The Stedejlik Museum, Amsterdam in September 2017.

Carolee Schneemann (b. 1939) As one of the first artists to use her body in her work, Schneemann activated and took control over the formerly mute female nude with a multidisciplinary practice that includes painting, assemblage, performance, and film. By connecting the kinetic nature of her paintings and assemblages to her radical performances and films, Schneemann’s work has made a permanent mark on the history of art.  In Vulva’s Morphia (1995), 36 hand-painted photographs of Yonic imagery are juxtaposed with an accompanying text that humorously personifies the vulva. Sardonically addressing the ways in which philosophers, scientists, artists, and even feminists have set understandings and expectations of women, Vulva’s Morphia addresses the ways in which self-identity are bound to outside structural forces.  Schneemann’s work has been exhibited worldwide, at institutions including the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Tate Modern, London; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and The Reina Sophia Museum, Madrid. Her published books include Cezanne; She Was a Great Painter (1976); Early and Recent Work (1983); More Than Meat Joy: Complete Performance Works and Selected Writings (1979); Correspondence Course (2010) by Kristine Stiles, and Imaging Her Erotics – Essays, Interviews, Projects (2002). Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Paintings, a comprehensive retrospective of Schneemann’s work, opened at the Museum der Moderne, Salzburg (2015) before traveling to the Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany (2017). The exhibition will be on view at MoMA PS1, New York from October 22, 2017 – March 11, 2018. In April 2017, Schneemann was award the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement.

Betty Tompkins (b.1945) For the last forty years Tompkins has created paintings, drawings and collages based on the tension of intimacy and representation of sexuality in monochromatic tones. P • P • O • W will be presenting new large-scale paintings alongside historical collages from the early-1970s; Tompkins’ vintage paintings will be featured in “Sex Work: Radical Art and Feminist Politics” in Frieze Masters, organized by independent curator and scholar Allison Gingeras. By subverting a genre typically associated with men’s pleasure and the submission of women, Tompkins reclaims the imagery often considered taboo, positioning the female body as a strong and powerful force. While much of Tompkins’ early work was under appreciated by contemporary art critics, her provocative and complex paintings have recently had a resurgence in recognition, and offer a timely response to current dialogues in feminism. Tompkins lives and works between New York, NY, and Pleasant Mount, PA. Recent solo exhibitions include Virgins, P • P • O • W, New York (2017); WOMEN Words, Phrases, and Stories, Flag Art Foundation, New York (2016); Sex Works/ WOMEN Words, Phrases and Stories, Gavlak Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2016); Real Ersatz, FUG, The Bruce High Quality Foundation, New York (2015); Paintings & Works on Paper 1972-2013, Gavlak Gallery, Palm Beach, FL (2014); Fuck Paintings, Galerie Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels, Belgium (₂₀₁₂); New Work, Mitchell Algus Gallery, New York (2009). Tompkins’s work has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including Black Sheep Feminism: The Art of Sexual Politics, Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, Texas (2016); The Shell (LANDSCAPES, PORTRAITS & SHAPES), Almine Rech Gallery, Paris, France (2014); A Drawing Show, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York (2014); CORPUS, Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland (2014); A Chromatic Loss, Bortolami Gallery, New York (2014); Sunset and Pussy, Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York (2013); Elles, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2011).

Suzanne Treister (b. 1958) is a pioneer in the digital- and web-based media from the beginning of the 1990s, developing fictional worlds and international collaborative organizations addressing the rapid technological innovations of the late-20^th Century and their ongoing ontological and epistemological affects. Treister often works in large series over the course of several years, engaging eccentric narratives and unconventional sources for research to examine covert systems at work in the world, whether corporate, military, or paranormal. P • P • O • W will present paintings from 1990-94 that formally and critically deconstruct video game culture in the early days of the World Wide Web. Software (1993-94) is an elaborate series of boxes containing hand-painted floppy discs. Each fictitious product juxtaposes text and image to graphically evoke a fraught world of rules and regulations, rational or not, contained within. Another series, Fictional Video Game Painting (1990-91), consists of hyper-flat paintings on canvas that mimic algorithmic aesthetics, implying continuous mazes of paths and obstacles that extend, seemingly infinitely, beyond the borders of each canvas. In a time when democracy and warfare have been utterly reformed by digital technology, these prescient works scrutinize moral and ethical norms with the artist’s signature wit and depth. Though primarily concerned with painting and drawing, Treister’s practice has consistently engaged multiple media, including video, the internet, interactive technologies, photography and watercolor. She studied at St. Martin’s School of Art, London (1978-1981) and Chelsea College of Art and Design, London (1981-1982). Recent exhibitions include solo and group shows at the ICA London; 10th Shanghai Biennale, China; 8th Montréal Biennale, Canada; ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany; Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (SMBA), Netherlands; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Raven Row, London; Secession, Vienna; Museum of Contemporary Art (CAPC) Bordeaux and Annely Juda Fine Art, London. Treister’s work is held in private and public collections including Tate Britain; Science Museum, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, Poland and Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna.