GALERIE MAX HETZLER | HETZLER

Marfa

Galerie Max Hetzler is banking on Texas. The global contemporary art gallery—which was established in 1974 in Stuttgart, Germany, and now operates six locations across Berlin, Paris, and London—recently opened a spare but elegant compound in the West Texas art hub of Marfa, its first US location. Hetzler’s expansion marks the latest in a decades-long series of events contributing to Marfa’s global art ascent, the through line of which can be traced back to Donald Judd’s arrival in 1972 and which has been building momentum ever since.

Hetzler joins fellow prominent art purveyors like Nino Mier Gallery in establishing an outpost in this remote high desert town, which was founded in the late 19th century as a railroad water station. Gallerists and dealers continue to be drawn to Marfa’s robust arts tourism by the same creative (and admittedly, in recent years, commercial) energy that yielded the original Chinati Weekend in 1987, the opening of Ballroom Marfa in 2003, Elmgreen and Dragset’s Prada Marfa in 2005, and more recently, the inaugural Marfa Invitational in 2019. Artists are drawn to the wide - open spaces, desert landscape, relatively affordable cost of living, and Marfa’s legendary history of sparking and fostering creativity.

Hetzler Marfa opened in May 2022 with an exhibition of Albert Oehlen’s first new sculptures since the 1980s as well as a permanent outdoor installation by Darren Almond that pays homage to the ubiquitous ranch entrance signs we Texans know so well. The Marfa location features exhibition space along with an artist residency program, which at present is primarily available to Hetzler’s stable of artists.

This year Hetzler is doubling down on Texas, participating for the first time in Dallas Art Fair. The gallery will install a group presentation spotlighting artists with strong points of view, including Grace Weaver and Jeff Elrod.

Brooklyn-based figurative painter Grace Weaver (b. 1989, Vermont), fresh off a solo show at the gallery’s London location, recently became Hetzler’s first Marfa artist in residence and will mount an exhibition there this summer. Her large-scale, stylized paintings depict with candor and humor women’s experiences in the public and private spheres. Grounding her subjects (often rendered in shades of millennial pink) in the current moment through recognizable and symbolic accoutrements of her generation like athleisure wear, AirPods, and to-go cups, the artist views her paintings as “emotional self-portraits” that reflect her sense of self from a psychological rather than physical standpoint.

In stark contrast, Dallas-born artist Jeff Elrod (b. 1966), who splits his time between Marfa and New York, creates abstract paintings that combine the digital and the analog. Elrod transfers digital photographs and computer-generated drawings, manipulated via popular programs like Photoshop, onto canvas through a variety of manual and mechanical techniques. The resulting large-scale abstractions are richly layered and complex—formal experiments that have pushed the boundaries of painting since the 1990s, around the same time that the internet became available to the public.

Given the depth and breadth of these two artists’ practices, Galerie Max Hetzler’s Dallas Art Fair booth promises to showcase an exciting array of established and emerging work appealing to a broad range of knowledgeable collectors.–Sara Hignite

Clockwise from top left opposite: Installation view, Jeff Elrod, Max Hetzler|41 Dover Street, London, March 3–April 21, 2022. Courtesy of Max Hetzler Berlin | Paris | London.; Installation view of Grace Weaver, TRASH-SCAPES, Galerie Max Hetzler, London November 2022–January 2023. © Grace Weaver. Photograph by Jack Hems; Rinus van de Velde, While I am making plein air studies in the back garden, …, 2022, oil pastel on paper,. 63.75 x 44.12 in., © Rinus van de Velde and Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin | Paris | London; Installation view of Albert Oehlen, 2022, Hetzler Marfa. Courtesy of Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin | Paris | London.

Eduardo Terrazas, 1.1.417 from the series Possibilities of a Structure, subseries Cosmos, 2021, signed on verso, wool yarn on wooden board covered with Campeche wax, framed dimensions, 39.57 x 39.57 x 2.76 in., dimensions, 35.43 x 35.43 x 1.38 in. Courtesy of the artist and Proyectos Monclova.

Photograph by Ramiro Chaves.

Gabriel de la Mora, 600 I - M.D., from the series Lepidóptera, 2022, signed, titled, and dated backwards, Morpho didius butterfly wings mosaic on museum cardboard, framed dimensions,13.78 x 13.78 x 2.36 in., image size,11.81 x 11.81 x .79 in. Courtesy of the artist and Proyectos Monclova.

Photograph by Ramiro Chaves.