For TEFAF New York Spring 2023, Sean Kelly is delighted to present a thematic  booth based on the concept of Time, featuring works by Dawoud Bey, Julian  Charrière, Laurent Grasso, Candida Höfer, Rebecca Horn, Callum Innes,  Joseph Kosuth and Kehinde Wiley, drawing upon our internationally acclaimed  roster of artists. 

Dawoud Bey is represented by a photograph from The Birmingham Project, which is  a tribute to the victims of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham,  Alabama. Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of this tragedy, the series focuses on  how Bey visualizes the past through the lens of the present, pushing the boundaries  of portraiture and engaging ongoing issues of racism and violence against African  Americans. Displayed in a vitrine like a topological fragment from a futuristic natural  history museum, Julian Charrière’s Metamorphism is an amalgam of cultural  memories incorporated into a geological matrix. For this piece, various technological  devices were melted down to create an artificial lava, returning them to their  geological origins. In the newest iteration of Laurent Grasso’s ongoing series,  Studies into the Past, the depicted phenomena –clouds– are trapped in interior  spaces. Grasso was inspired by the historical interiors of 17th century Holland,  painted by masters such as Pieter Saenredam (Dutch, 1597–1665), whose work  embodied the sense of purity and timelessness in the post-Reformation era church.  Candida Höfer’s photographs present a single moment objectively and with  detachment. Her work captures fluid time as a static image; they are always about a  past moment, ephemeral and elusive. The objects used in Rebecca Horn’s sculptures move beyond their defined materiality and are continuously transposed  into ever-changing metaphors touching on mythical, historical, literary, and spiritual  imagery. Each of Horn’s installations is a step towards breaking down boundaries of  space and time. Callum Innes makes work in a number of different ways, all of  which are gradually evolving. Innes removes, or as he has described it, “unpaints”  the canvas, leaving all but the faintest vestigial traces of color. The result reveals  varied veils of color buried within the seemingly monochromatic single pigment.  Each finished painting thus suggests a freezing of time, the momentary arrest of an  ongoing process. In his series, Existential Time, Joseph Kosuth investigates time  and existence through a variety of literary references. Kosuth’s reflection on time  stems from both a personal and philosophical concern with finding meaning within  the various contexts and narratives life provides; thus, it is also an investigation into  the process of making meaning in his own artistic practice. In the Kehinde Wiley work selected, the artist connects portraits of African American men from modern  urban life in everyday street clothes with the traditions of early Christian devotional  painting, Wiley draws attention to the absence of Black minorities in the white art-history canon. 

We very much look forward to welcoming you to our booth at TEFAF New York.