Art Basel Hong Kong Viewing Room VIP Opening: March 18, 2020 Public Opening: March 20, 2020 Closing Date: March 25, 2020 Representing four decades of figuration, P·P·O·W is pleased to showcase works by Elizabeth Glaessner, Sanam Khatibi, Judith Linhares, Betty Tompkins, David Wojnarowicz, and Martin Wong. Taken together, these works represent a range of styles and subject maters, each exemplifying the gallery's longstanding commitment to championing artistic practices that explore issues of gender, sexuality, race and social inequality. Flowing from figuration to abstraction, Elizabeth Glaessner (b. 1984) takes elements from traditional history painting and re-contextualizes them within a strange and sensual setting. Exploring memory, personal history, and ritual, Glaessner’s work questions the ways we relate to and re-imagine our past. Glaessner received her MFA from the New York Academy of Art where she received a post- graduate fellowship in 2013. Her work has been exhibited at P·P·O·W, Louis B. James, Sargent’s Daughters, New Release, BRIC, BAM, 1969 and more. Her work has been featured and reviewed in Art in America, Interview Magazine, Art of Choice, ARTnews and Modern Painters, among others. She was awarded residencies at the Leipzig International Art Programme, Glogau AIR in Berlin and the Galveston Artist Residency, where she is living and working for one year. Sanam Khatibi (b. 1979) works in painting, tapestry, and sculpture, citing a range of art historical references. Her works frequently depict dreamily mythological female protagonists in fantastical landscapes, exposing primal impulses and innate animality. Images of brutality, obedience, and seduction make us consider the dichotomy of triumph and failure, and the thin line between fear and desire, to reveal our contradicting traits and tendencies. Khatibi was born in Tehran, Iran and lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. She is self-taught and has been featured in exhibitions around the world, including group exhibitions in Paris, Florence, Los Angeles, Mexico City, New York, Marseille, Vienna, and Warsaw, among others. Recent institutional shows include Mademoiselle at the Regional Centre of Contemporary Art of Occitan (France), Quel Amour!? at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Marseille (France), and The Biennial of Painting at the Museum of Deinze (Belgium). Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at BPS22 in Belgium, as well as Rodolphe Janssen in Brussels and P·P·O·W in New York. Rooted in the California Bay Area counterculture of the 60s and 70s, Judith Linhares (b. 1940) composes folkloric, figurative paintings from confident, abstract brushwork, utilizing broad strokes and brilliant fields of color to gradually develop her subjects. Harnessing both portentous and quotidian symbols, her uniquely irradiant paintings celebrating the female body and communal experience. Lady Lazarus, 2020, shows a totemic, chartreuse women squatting atop a broadly smiling donkey. Taking its title from a poem by Sylvia Plath, this work allegorizes a fearsome cycle of extinction and resurrection. Linhares earned her BFA and MFA degrees from California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, CA. She was included in the influential Bad Painting exhibition at the New Museum, organized by Marcia Tucker. Her work is held in many permanent collections, including the de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Philadelphia, PA; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. Her work is currently on view at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in Contemporary Art: Five Propositions; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Sea Change: Highlights from PAFA’s Collection of 20th- century Art, and Jeffrey Deitch Los Angeles in All of Them Witches, organized by Dan Nadel and Laurie Simmons. In a career spanning five decades, Betty Tompkins (b.1945) has been celebrated and scorned for her provocative feminist iconography. By appropriating imagery created for male self-pleasure, Tompkins has reframed long-held taboos by challenging critical discourses around content, style and scale. Censored Painting #2 (Paris 1973 - Instagram 2019), 2019 chronicles her decades-long battle with institutional censorship. In 1973, two significant paintings from her Fuck Paintings series were seized by French customs and, in April 2019, Tompkins’ Instagram account was deleted after she posted an image of a catalog reproduction of Fuck Painting #1, 1969, which is now in the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou. In a 2017 New York Times article, Rachel Corbett wrote, “Part of what makes Tompkins’ work so enduringly potent today, and what made it too shocking for its time, is not just its frank sexuality: It’s that the art […] seethes with lust, ego, wisecracks and profanity. [She] demanded attention the way men did — through shock and awe.” Tompkins will have a concurrent solo presentation of her visually cacophonous Women Words series curated by Darren Flook at Freehouse Gallery in London. Her recent solo exhibitions include Fuck Paintings, etc., J Hammond Projects, London, U.K. (2019); Will She Ever Shut Up?, P•P•O•W (2018); and Betty Tompkins, Ribordy Contemporary, Geneva, Switzerland (2018). Her work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection, The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY (2018); Histórias da sexualidade, Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), São Paolo, Brazil (2018); Black Sheep Feminism: The Art of Sexual Politics, Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, Texas (2016) and Elles, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2011), among others. Martin Wong (1946-1999) is best known for deploying a unique visual lexicon of stacked bricks, crumbling tenements, constellations and hand signals to passionately render urban life. With Picture Show at Semaphore Gallery in 1986, Wong confronted the gentrification of New York City’s Lower East Side in a series of life-size paintings that depict gated facades. In his artist statement, Wong wrote, “I wanted to focus in close on some of the endless layers of conflict and confinement that have us all bound together in this life without possibility of parole.” P·P·O·W will present one work from the series, Poetry Storefront, 1986, which documents the Nuyorican Poets’ Café on East 6th Street, founded by Miguel Algarían and Mickey Piñero. This seminal work will be exhibited alongside an untitled, undated work that exemplifies Wong’s use of stacked bricks and sign language as both metaphor and motif. Rigorously painted on a heart-shaped canvas, this brick wall bears a blue ASL plaque that reads “For Sale”. Wong was active in the performance art groups, The Cockettes and Angels of Light before moving to New York in 1978. He exhibited for two decades at notable downtown galleries including EXIT ART, Semaphore and P·P·O·W, among others. Wong died in San Francisco from an AIDS related illness. His work is represented in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Bronx Museum of The Arts, and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. In 1998, Wong had a one person at the New Museum, New York. Human Instamatic, a comprehensive retrospective, opened at the Bronx Museum of The Arts, New York, in 2015; Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio in 2016; and UC Berkeley Art Museum in 2017. David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) was among the most incisive and prolific American artists of the 1980s and 90s. Channeling a vast accumulation of raw images, sounds, memories and lived experiences, Wojnarowicz became well known for his spray-painted iconographies, blunt semiotics and graphic illustrations that deftly conveyed his cultural critiques. Wojnarowicz’s work has been exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The American Center, Paris, France; The Busan Museum of Modern Art, Korea; Centro Galego de Art Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; The Barbican Art Gallery, London; and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne. His work is in permanent collections of major museums nationally and internationally and his life and work have been the subject of significant scholarly studies. Wojnarowicz has had retrospectives at the galleries of the Illinois State University, curated by Barry Blinderman (1990) and at the New Museum, curated by Dan Cameron (1999). A third retrospective, David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night, co-curated by David Kiehl and David Breslin, opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in July 2018. The widely acclaimed exhibition has been reviewed in Artforum, The Guardian, The New York Times and The New Yorker, among others. The retrospective, which traveled to the Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid in May 2019, is currently on view at the Musee d/Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg City through February 2020. .