Galerie Lelong & Co.
Mildred Thompson , Etats-Unis
L’Appel de la Lumière
Mildred Thompson Radiation Explorations 8, 1994 Huile sur toile 222,5 x 279,5 cm W24786 © Mildred Thompson / Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co.
L’Appel de la Lumiere (The Call of the Light) presents paintings, assemblages, and works on paper by African American artist Mildred Thompson (1936-2003) who lived and worked in Germany and France from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s. An artist who utilized a modernist visual language to interpret natural and cosmic phenomena, this exhibition celebrates Thompson’s representations of light and energy, charting early influences from her time living and working in Paris in the mid-1980s to later works created upon her return to the United States. Paying homage to the “city of light” that called Thompson to Paris as a mid-career artist, Thompson’s time in Paris was critical to the development of her unique visual vocabulary.
For more than five years in Paris, Thompson furthered her formal and conceptual artistic investigations. This included a remarkable ability to interpret color found in the world around her in imaginative atmospheric scapes. The exhibition takes its title from two intimately scaled 1982 collages Thompson made in Paris. The bright palettes and improvisational compositions are an indicative precursor to much of the work she created in the following two decades. L’Appel de la Lumiere features several works on paper from the artist’s time in Paris and pieces created shorty after her departure from France. Aqueous gouaches and subtle prismatic color pencil drawings demonstrate Thompson’s constant personal interpretation of the universe. Also on view in the first gallery is a piece (c. 1975) from Thompson’s renowned body of work in wood.
In the second gallery dynamic pastels, watercolors, and paintings from the 1990s and 2000s are characterized by energetic mark-marking, profound understanding of color, and complex compositions. Works from two of her significant painting series – Radiation Explorations and Advancing Impulses – are on view and demonstrate Thompson’s signature approach to abstraction. This work has received increased institutional attention in recent years as understandings of abstraction shift to become more inclusive of women artists of color.
Mildred Thompson was born in 1936 in Jacksonville, Florida, and died in 2003 in Atlanta, Georgia. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from Howard University in Washington, DC in 1957, under the tutelage and mentorship of the pioneering African American art historian James A. Porter. Recently her work has been included in significant group exhibitions including Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today, which travelled from the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC, and Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, Florida; The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture and the Sonic Impulse, which traveled from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, Colorado; and Doro Olowu: Seeing Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois. In 2019, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art presented a solo exhibition of her work entitled Mildred Thompson: The Atlanta Years, 1986-2003. In 2018, her Wood Pictures were featured in a solo presentation, Mildred Thompson: Against the Grain, at the New Orleans Museum of Art, as well as in the 10th Berlin Biennale. Thompson’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Virginia; Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge Massachusetts; and Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., among other institutions.
Exhibition from May 10 to July 13, 2023.
The gallery
For a long time, the Galerie Lelong was associated with some of the major names of the second half of the 20th century, such as Joan Miró, Alberto Giacometti, Antoni Tàpies, Francis Bacon, Eduardo Chillida who exhibited at rue de Téhéran as early as 1945. The gallery took on its current structure in 1981, under the direction of Daniel Lelong, Jacques Dupin, and Jean Frémon. Other major names joined the gallery at this time, including Pierre Alechinsky, Konrad Klapheck, Jannis Kounellis, Louise Bourgeois, and Arnulf Rainer, followed later by Sean Scully, Günther Förg, and Andy Goldsworthy, to name just a few. In the new millennium, the Galerie Lelong has extended the geographical and expressive diversity of its artists, working with Jaume Plensa, Rebecca Horn, Barry Flanagan, Kiki Smith, Barthélémy Toguo, Nalini Malani, Ettore Spalletti, Juan Uslé, and recently Lin Tianmiao and Etel Adnan.
In addition to the organisation of exhibitions in its galleries and its participation in major international fairs, the Galerie Lelong collaborates with museums in the organisation of exhibitions and works to ensure that the artists it promotes figure in important public and private collections. The Galerie Lelong often commissions monumental sculptures for public and private clients. Such works have been installed in Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Cambridge, and Istanbul, for example.
The Galerie Lelong New York, created in 1985, shares with Paris the representation of Nancy Spero, Ana Mendieta, Jaume Plensa, and Andy Goldsworthy and has gradually developed its own identity. Its director, Mary Sabbatino, has played her part in creating the international reputation of artists such as Hélio Oiticica, Cildo Meireles, Petah Coyne, and Alfredo Jaar. She also shows work from younger artists who have quickly found a large audience (Angelo Filomeno, Emilio Perez, Kate Shepherd).
More than 150 exhibition catalogues have been published in the Repères collection, with texts from authors including Michel Leiris, Pierre Restany, David Sylvester, Michael Peppiatt, Rudi Fuchs, Yves Bonnefoy, Catherine David, Octavio Paz, Enrique Juncosa, Armin Zweite, Siri Hustvedt, and more. The gallery also publishes collections of interviews and writings by artists (Donald Judd, Louise Bourgeois, Sean Scully, Richard Serra…) and, in collaboration with the artist’s descendants, has published the catalogue raisonné of the works of Joan Miró,.
In the Parisian gallery, a very dynamic team specialises in prints. Each year it produces new editions in collaboration with artists and workshops, including lithographs, prints, pochoirs, and multiples.
Gallery artists
Etel Adnan • Pierre Alechinsky • Karel Appel • Boomoon • James Brown • Eduardo Chillida • Nicola De Maria • Marc Desgrandchamps • Leonardo Drew • Jean Dubuffet • Simone Fattal • Barry Flanagan • Günther Förg • Andy Goldsworthy • Jane Hammond • David Hockney • Frank Horvat • Rebecca Horn • Jean-Baptiste Huynh • Samuel Levi Jones • Phillip King • Konrad Klapheck • Jiri Kolàr • Jannis Kounellis • Nalini Malani • Ana Mendieta • Henri Michaux • Joan Miró • David Nash • Ernest Pignon-Ernest • Jaume Plensa • Arnulf Rainer • Paula Rego • Christine Safa • Sean Scully • Kate Shepherd • Kiki Smith • Nancy Spero • Antoni Tàpies • Mildred Thomson • Barthélémy Toguo • Juan Uslé • Fabienne Verdier • Ursula von Rydingsvard • Jan Voss • Wang Yan Cheng
Galerie sélectionnée par Alicia Knock, Simon Porte Jacquemus et Camille Morineau
