Christina Quarles The Ground Glows Black

Yohei Abe March 8, 2026

24 February – 3 May 2026

Hauser & Wirth, Downtown Los Angeles

Nik Gelormino “Well”

Yohei Abe March 8, 2026

January 17 to February 14, 2026

FERNBERGER LA

seeing is forgetting the names of the thing one sees

Yohei Abe February 14, 2026

Bob had been headed south from Paris toward Morocco, when, passing through Barcelona, he first heard about Ibiza, a small island off the Spanish Mediterranean coast. He continued to North Africa, but several weeks later, for no particular reason—it was cheap, it was warm, it was said to be peaceful —he ventured out to the dry, barren island. In subsequent years Ibiza (pronounced "E-bē-tha" by native Castilians) became known as something of an artist's colony, a winter resort, but during the season Irwin spent there, it was still utterly remote. On the edge of a barren peninsula, Irwin installed himself one day in a small rented cabin and then did not converse with a soul for the next eight months.

seeing is forgetting the names of the thing one sees, over thirty years of conversation with ROBERT IRWIN, by Lawrence Weschler, Page 40

Artists who came to abstract expressionism with a literate pictorial bias, Irwin feels, were especially unprepared to confront these physical issues. This was particularly the case with the European abstract expressionists, he argues, steeped as they were in the tradition of post-Renaissance pictorial expression. Paradoxically, one artist who exercised a pivotal fascination for the young Californian, particularly in terms of his mastery of those physical laws, was a contemporary European, but not one of those who is usually considered an abstract expressionist. "The Italian painter Giorgio Morandi captivated a lot of us," Irwin recalls, "and we eventually even staged a small show of his paintings at Ferus" (in 1961). "Now, here was a painter whit been repeating the same subject, the same theme, over and over again, for year.

In his studio, he had a collection of bottles and jars, and he painted them continuously: small paintings of groups of these bottles on his table, a kind of still life.

So in one sense they seemed extremely traditional, extremely formal. They still had a subject matter in the most classical sense, the simplest, most direct kind of subject matter, unloaded in any way. This especially seemed the case when you compared Morandi with some of his bold, gestural contemporaries, say, someone like Pierre Soulages, with his modernist imagery, the strokes and slashes and all that.I mean, someone with a conceptual, literate eye, oriented toward looking at the imagery, would certainly think of the Soulages as the modern painting and the Morandi as the old-fashioned one. But if you looked at them on the physical level, in terms of how they actually dealt with the time and space relationships within the painting per se, the Soulages was pre-cubist, almost floating in like a seventeenth-century space, with its sense of distinct figure and ground; whereas the Morandi was essentially the same as a de Kooning or a Kline, with its intimate interpenetration between figure and ground. In Morandi they were never really separate. In fact, even with the figurative elements, there were cases where his ground actually got in front of the figures or in many cases couched them so intimately that there was no separating the two. Physically he carved a space for each one of these elements, where the amount of space left by the so-called ground was exactly that which the object occupied, so that it was as if the air had taken on substance. They were really good paintings.

seeing is forgetting the names of the thing one sees, over thirty years of conversation with ROBERT IRWIN, by Lawrence Weschler, Page 60,61

"But anyway, my discovery was that from one hundred yards away—this was just one of those little breakthroughs—that from this distance of one hundred yards, I looked over, and that goddamn Guston.... Now, I'm talking not on quality, and not on any assumption of what you like or don't like, but on just pure strength, which was one of the things we were into. Strength was a big word in abstract expressionism; you were trying to get power into the painting, so that the painting really vibrated, had life to it. It wasn't just colored shapes sitting flat. It had to do with getting a real tension going in the thing, something that made the thing really stand up and hum.... Well, that goddamn Guston just blew the Brooks right off the wall.

"Now, by all overt measures—size, contrast, color intensity that shouldn't have happened. Everything was in favor of the Brooks. But the Guston blew it right off the wall. Just wiped it out. Not on quality, just on power. The Brooks fell into the background, and the Guston just took over. And I learned something about... some people call it 'the inner life of the painting, all that romantic stuff, and I guess that's a way of talking about it. But shapes on a painting are just shapes on a canvas unless they start acting on each other and really, in a sense, multiplying.

A good painting has a gathering, interactive build-up in it. It's a psychic build-up, but it's also a pure energy build-up. And the good artists all knew it, too. That's what a good Vermeer has, or a raku cup, or a Stonehenge. And when they've got it, they just jump off the goddamn wall at you. They just, bam!"

seeing is forgetting the names of the thing one sees, over thirty years of conversation with ROBERT IRWIN, by Lawrence Weschler, Page 64

seeing is forgetting the names of the thing one sees

Yohei Abe February 14, 2026

Though Irwin now began visiting the museums, for a long while his curiosity remained at best perfunctory. Mainly he walked around the cities aimlessly. "I walked in the daytime for a long, long time, but then I got into the habit in the evening of buying myself a couple bottles of beer, sticking them in my pocket, and then just walking, for example, in Paris, all night long in Paris until it became dawn, and then returning to my hotel room, sleeping till evening, having dinner, and starting out again. Just walking by myself. At certain times of night I'd be the only one out in the whole city. I mean, whole areas were just dead silent. And it was an incredibly romantic, very beautiful city, especially late at night like that."

It was a strange way to see Europe. "After I'd been over about six or eight times during that decade," Bob recalls, "having spent maybe two or more years there al-together, I remember once having a conversation with some people who'd just come back from a two-week tour and being unable to convince them that I'd been there at all. They'd talk Étoile and Élysées and Opéra and all those names, and I couldn't remember any of that stuff. I'd probably seen more of Paris than all of those people combined, but I couldn't tell them anywhere I'd been in terms of the name of the street or the café or whatever. I just wasn't interested in that. In fact, I maybe saw all the churches in Paris, but I never went to see any of the churches in Paris. In my wanderings there would be this building and I'd walk into it just like I walked into every building, but I didn't care whether it was built in the Whatever or who did it. I mean, even to this day, I couldn't care less. On the other hand, I retained a very real sense of the differing textures of each of those places..." With each new trip Irwin began spending more and more time in the muse-ums. As his own involvement in art grew, his interest in the masters expanded— but only to a point. "After going through the Louvre twenty times and the National Museum and the Prado and whatever—I can't remember the names of the ones in Amsterdam and Florence—well, after a while it got to the point where Id enter a room and just twirl around and go to the next one and twirl and then the next one.... I mean, it got to the point where if I ever saw another fucking brown painting ... I was so fucking tired of brown paintings. I mean, they all looked exactly the same! After a while my whole relationship to the history of art got cleared out to a matter of trusting my own eye. I mean, I could enter a room and go like. that, zap, and pick out the one or two paintings that were at all interesting in terms of technique, like some Davids that were technically really incredible; and there were some that really just jumped out at you, like some Vermeers which were just spectacular. Now and then a piece of Egyptian art or something would really bang you. And if you ever saw an impressionist painting in that atmosphere-which I did once, saw a Gauguin through a haze of brown—it just summoned you back to your senses. But as for the Renaissance and the high tradition, I just came to see that—man, are you kidding? I wasn't interested in any of that stuff. And I'm still not. I look at Da Vincis and Piero della Francescas, and I'm not interested at all. I look at them with the same kind of interest I'd have turning the pages of a magazine.

seeing is forgetting the names of the thing one sees, over thirty years of conversation with ROBERT IRWIN, by Lawrence Weschler, page 38,39

Auguste Rodin, by Rainer Maria Rilke

Yohei Abe February 14, 2026

The work that is to be spoken of in these pages developed through long years. It has grown like a forest and has not lost one hour. One walks among these thousand forms overwhelmed with the imagination and the craftsmanship which they represent, and involuntarily one looks for the two hands out of which this world has risen.

One thinks of how small man's hands are, how soon they tire, and how little time is given them to move. And one longs to see these hands that have lived like a hundred hands; like a nation of hands that rose before sunrise for the accomplishment of this work. One asks for the man who directs these hands. Who is this man?

He is a man rich in years; and his life is one that cannot be related. It began and still continues; stretches out deeply into a great age, and to us, it seems as though it had passed many hundreds of years ago. It perhaps had a childhood; a childhood in poverty-dark, groping and uncertain. And maybe it possesses this childhood still, for, says St. Augustine somewhere, whither should it have gone? It holds, perchance, all its past hours, the hours of expectation and abandonment, the hours of doubt and the long hours of need. It is a life that has lost nothing and has forgotten nothing; a life that has absorbed all things as it passed, for only out of such a life as this, we believe, could have risen such fulness and abundance of work; only such a life as this, in which everything is simultaneous and awake, in which nothing passes unnoticed, could remain young and strong and rise again and again to high creations. Perchance the time will come when someone will picture this life, its details, its episodes and its conflicts.

Someone will tell a story of a child that often forgot to eat because it seemed more important to him to carve inferior wood with a cheap knife, and someone will relate some event of the days of early manhood that contained promise of future greatnessone of those incidents that are intimate and prophetic.

Auguste Rodin, by Rainer Maria Rilke, Translated by Jessie Lemon and Hans Trausil

Page 4,5