Raul De Lara, Shanique Emelife, Sihan Guo, Tahnee Lonsdale

December 11, 2024–January 15, 2025

Alexander Berggruen is pleased to present Raul De Lara, Shanique Emelife, Sihan Guo, Tahnee Lonsdale. This exhibition will open Wednesday, December 11, 2024 with a 5-7 pm reception at the gallery (1018 Madison Avenue, Floor 3, New York, NY). The gallery is delighted to host an artist walk-through led by the artists at 2 pm, Saturday, December 14. The events are open to the public.

Through painting and sculpture, Raul De Lara, Shanique Emelife, Sihan Guo, and Tahnee Lonsdale render varying manifestations of bodily forms through symbolism, allegory, abstraction, and spirituality. Emelife and Lonsdale paint the essences of figures, capturing their vitality through simplified shapes. Meanwhile, De Lara sometimes offers plants as proxies for people, and Guo paints disintegrating abstractions that feature bodily shapes.

Raul De Lara handcrafts wooden sculptures that often uncannily depict household objects and the natural world. He imbues these works with a poetic symbolism inspired by his experience as an immigrant from Mexico and as a DACA recipient. Growing within these confines, De Lara feels a kinship with potted plants. They too have been uprooted, and although they are unable to put roots into the ground, they are still growing. The artist intentionally includes superficial cracks in his wooden pots to imply the possibility of breaking free from these confines. Two of the sculptures in this show are of monstera plants. Their leaves are based on his own houseplant and the native monsteras he saw while visiting Mexico City. Speaking about “the personality that develops within plants if you take good care of them,” De Lara considers how plants “bear witness to the ups and downs of life.” Amplifying this anthropomorphization, his sculpture Familia features five leaves that each represent a member in his family. Here, the leaf body symbolizes a human body. His work balances poetic political messages with exploring the beauty and mystery of the natural world and the mundane.

Also inspired by their experience as an immigrant, Shanique Emelife paints scenes of their parents’ homes in Nigeria that are animated by their imagination and stories they have heard from their family. With intentional thin layers of paint applied with thin brushes, Emelife begins by grounding these fictions in reality. They first paint the landscape and architecture based on the photographs they took on a recent trip to their parents’ Nigerian villages. The characters manifest intuitively as they find, in their words, “who belongs in that space.” Sometimes the figures in their paintings are clearly visible. In others, a spectral form is implied with minimal mark making, such as in their painting The Door, where a faint translucent outline of a figure endures in the center of the doorway. With the figures and landscapes enlivening Emelife’s compositions, the artist builds a sense of home from feeling and memory, as to them, home is a “transient, internal space,” as opposed to an external foundation.

Tahnee Lonsdale paints transcendental groupings of simplified feminine bodies who gather closely and fill up most of the space in the composition. Their bodies are often interlocking, as some figures are transparent and affect the colors and light of the figures around them. This results in shapes and light that resemble those of Paul Klee. She achieves this through continuously applying, in her words, “gossamer thin, barely-there paint layers, until an apparition becomes apparent.” This process of lightly applying paint gives way to the beings’ density in the same way that an open mind allows the artist to access this mystical realm. Only select details are revealed, such as nearly uniform eyes, hands, and feet. But resonant moods of connection and interdependent histories are conveyed through their colors, slight gestures, and vibrating textures. The figures exist in an often open undefined space that also pulses with similar colors and textures, infusing the beings with a ghostly translucency. Yet, the artist’s beings are alive in her mind, perhaps as guardians who inspire the wonder of nature.

Sihan Guo’s ethereal abstractions present a harmonic system that balances the relationships between the digital and the natural worlds. Approaching this mediation with both hope and anxiety, she begins with a mixture of paint that allows intentional drips, harnessing and embracing uncertainty. The drips create, in her words, “swirling, stem-like, web-like textures that suggest an unregulated flow of energy across a rimless, de-centered structure of reality. This echoes Deleuze’s theory of the Rhizome,” which refers to a multiplicitous, interconnected network. Painting while the drip layer is still wet, Guo generates glowing, organic shapes that may resemble a figure. These ghostly, bodily forms bubble to the fore of the disintegrated space and abruptly dissolve into a sea of melting abstraction. Her subdued color palette—featuring colors such as grays, dusty lavender, slate blue, and ochre—resembles those of a deserted city, where the metallic and concrete structures are crumbling below emergent nature. Here, symbiosis between the digital web-like structures and the natural world surfaces in a representation of, in her words, her “vision of post-human and post-digital organisms.”

Press Release by Kirsten Cave

Raul De Lara, Shanique Emelife, Sihan Guo, Tahnee Lonsdale will run at Alexander Berggruen (1018 Madison Avenue, Floor 3) from October 16-November 20, 2024. The exhibition’s preview is available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery at info@alexanderberggruen.com.

Shanique Emelife
Ifee’s Fear, 2024
oil on wood panel
24 x 36 in. (61 x 91.4 cm.)

About the Artists

Raul De Lara (b. 1991, México) received an MFA in Sculpture and Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University and a BFA in Studio Art from The University of Texas at Austin. SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA will hold a forthcoming solo show of his work, and he will be included in a forthcoming group show at Tucson Museum of Art, AZ. De Lara has also exhibited at Reynolds Gallery, Richmond, VA; Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA; Wharton Esherick Museum, Paoli, PA; MINT Gallery, Munich, DE; The Immigrant Artist Biennial, New York, NY; and Institute of Contemporary Art | Maine College of Art & Design, Portland, ME, among many others. Accolades the artist has been awarded include the Maxwell/Hanrahan Award in Craft, The Hopper Prize Shortlist, NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Craft/Sculpture, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown Fellowship, and Luminarts Fellowship Finalist. He is a current artist in residence at Silver Art Projects Residency, and he lives and works in New York City.

Shanique Emelife (b.1993, Nassau, Bahamas) was an artist in residence at Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in 2023. They received a BA in Sociology from University of Minnesota-Twin Cities in Minneapolis, MN. Exhibitions of their work have been held at Fortnight Institute, New York, NY; FF Projects, Lagos, Nigeria; Sean Kelly Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY; Steven Zevitas Gallery, Boston, MA; Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, CA; and Venus Over Manhattan, New York, NY, among others. Emelife was a Next Step Fund Grant Recipient from Metro Regional Arts Council. The artist lives and works in New York.

Sihan Guo (b. 2000, Shanghai) received a BFA from New York University, New York, NY. Forthcoming exhibitions including her work will be held at Podium Gallery, Hong Kong and Public Gallery, London, UK. Guo’s work has been exhibited at ROCKBUND, Shanghai, CN; Commons Gallery at New York University, New York; Third Street Gallery, Shanghai, CN; Island Gallery, New York, NY; L21, Madrid and Barcelona, ES; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, Chongqing, CN, among others. She was an artist in residence at Season III International Residency, NARS Foundation, New York, and she was awarded the Will Barnet Prize from National Arts Club, New York. The artist lives and works in Shanghai, CN.

Tahnee Lonsdale (b. 1982, Reading, UK) received a BA in Fine Art from Byam Shaw School of Art, University of the Arts, London, UK. Recent solo shows of her work have been held at Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; MASSIMODECARLO Piéce Unique, Paris, France; Galerie Fabian Lang, Zurich, Switzerland; Mine Project, Hong Kong; and Cob Gallery, London, UK. Her work has also been exhibited at Acquavella, Palm Beach, FL; Nassima Landau Art Foundation, Tel Aviv, Israel; Shepparton Art Museum, Shepparton, Victoria, AU; X Museum, Beijing, China; Perrotin, Dubai, UAE; Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA; and Saatchi Art, Los Angeles, CA and London, UK. In 2024, Lonsdale participated in Exhibition A’s artist in residency at Cerámica Suro in Guadalajara, Mexico, and in 2019, she was a finalist for The Hopper Prize. Lonsdale lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Sihan Guo
spleens and heartwood, veins and xylems, slithering, bulging, to escape from the stem, rugged and gritty, olive greens, dusty pinks, 2024
oil on wood panel
47 1/4 x 43 1/4 in. (120 x 110 cm.)