Beginning September 8, LGDR will present Head On, an exhibition curated by Dieter Schwarz that explores sculptural depictions of the human face—a site where intellect, power, and the soul are at once made vivid.
Representations of the face have been foundational to visual culture, from ancient Mesoamerican sculpture to Renaissance portraiture and on to contemporary social media. Throughout the twentieth century, modernism found artists sculpturally abstracting, distorting, and exaggerating the face, revealing its relationship to outside social and technological forces. On the occasion of LGDR’s exhibition, Schwarz—former director of the Kunstmuseum Winterthur in Switzerland and curator of the Skulpturenhalle at Düsseldorf’s Thomas Schütte Foundation, who has organized exhibitions of Gerhard Richter, Schütte, Jean Fautrier, Joel Shapiro, and Bruce Nauman, among many others—gathers sculptures spanning nearly a century: from André Derain’s circa 1930s Personnage sans menton, to Fautrier’s Tête d’otage of 1943–44, Anthony Caro’s Cigarette Smoker I dated 1957, Asger Jorn’s Contemplazione faticata from 1973, and William Tucker’s Masks of 2022. Together, these works trace a surprising and evocative history of approaches to expression. Working across styles and schools, the exhibited artists have challenged the traditional bounds of representation, as Schwarz describes, “building and destroying, caressing and attacking the figure, transgressing formal conventions and inventing faces not seen yet.”
