When it opens in Beverly Hills on June 22, Michael Werner Gallery’s Los Angeles outpost will feature works by the 19th-century French artist Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and the German postwar painter Markus Lüpertz. The gallery’s co-owner Gordon VeneKlasen chose these artists in part to surprise viewers: “Nobody expects to see those two artists in a show in L.A.,” he says. The show reveals Lüpertz’s longtime admiration of his predecessor: The works on view, dating from 2013 to a decade later, incorporate and recontextualize images from Puvis’s work, such as “Étude pour Le Pauvre Pêcheur” (“Study for The Poor Fisherman”) an 1881 charcoal sketch of a fisherman and two figures, which in Lüpertz’s painting “Besuch von Pierre” (“Visit From Pierre”) (2018) becomes a vista devoid of people. VeneKlasen wants this interplay between two eras to characterize the gallery’s future exhibits. “I really wanted to establish that we’re attached to history and attached to the modern and the contemporary at the same time,” he says. Other exhibitions planned in the minimalist space, which wraps around a courtyard, include those featuring work by the 20th-century American conceptual artist James Lee Byars, the British painter and musician Issy Wood and the German artist Florian Krewer. The gallery will also host a series of events, beginning with a Sept. 7 spoken-word performance featuring California poets.
