Disclosed Storage Facility 

Josef Albers, H M Baker, Isabella Benshimol, Madeleine Bialke, Antony Cairns, Leo Costelloe, André Derain, Marley Freeman, Jack Laver, Mino, Sawako Nasu, Fern O'Carolan, Jen O’Farrell, Pablo Picasso, Jessy Razafimandimby, Eddie Ruscha, Gillies Adamson Semple, Nina Silverberg, Spencer Sweeney, Minh Lan Tran, Mia Vallance, Philippa Zu Knyphausen
02/02 - 14/03/2026
 

Consignor’s note on Spencer Sweeny, Marley Freeman and Josef Albers:

 

These three works trace three journeys that are at once geographic and interior, movements through cities and through states of attention, moments in which looking became a way of thinking and thinking became, almost without my noticing, a form of discipline. New York was the beginning, as it often is, a city that teaches urgency and contradiction, where I encountered Spencer Sweeney and recognised in his practice a form of painting that behaves less like an object and more like a residue, something left behind after an encounter, a collision between impulse and memory. His work, deeply informed by a post-punk sensibility, resists closure; it does not aspire to harmony but to truthfulness, and in doing so it accepts awkwardness, exposure, even discomfort, as necessary conditions of expression. The figure appears fractured, pressed against the limits of its own representation, and yet it persists, suggesting that subjectivity itself is something unstable, provisional, always under negotiation. In front of these works, beauty is not immediately offered; it must be earned through attention, through the acceptance that meaning may arrive late, or not at all, and that this delay is itself part of the work’s intelligence.

 

Los Angeles, by contrast, offered a different lesson, one about containment and concentration within a landscape that otherwise disperses endlessly. It was there that I discovered a small but extraordinary work by Marley Freeman, a painting whose scale belies its internal force, where colour is not decorative but structural, carrying weight, tension, and intention. Freeman’s practice engages with the legacy of modernism without reverence, treating it instead as a field to be tested, compressed, and re-energised. Her works hold together opposing qualities—gesture and restraint, intimacy and monumentality—and in doing so they remind me that beauty often emerges where discipline and freedom briefly agree to coexist. This is not beauty as spectacle, but as concentration, a focused intensity that rewards prolonged looking and asks the viewer to slow down, to accept that clarity does not require loudness, and that force can reside quietly within form.

 

Then Marfa, where the landscape itself seems to impose an ethical demand, stripping away excess until only structure remains. There, the most profound surprise awaited me: finding the same edition of Joseph Albers’ Profundo—1965—on the wall of the architectural studio of Donald Judd, my most important artistic reference. This coincidence felt less accidental than inevitable, as if certain works, once truly understood, naturally gravitate toward one another across time and space. Albers’ practice, with its relentless investigation into perception, into how colour behaves not as symbol but as experience, reaches a kind of philosophical austerity in these black works, where depth replaces hue and seeing becomes an act of calibration rather than recognition. That Judd chose to live and work alongside this image speaks volumes: for him, as for Albers, order was not an aesthetic preference but a moral position, a way of insisting that clarity, precision, and coherence matter in a world otherwise inclined toward entropy.

 

To collect, for me, is to participate in this lineage of attention. It is not accumulation, nor ownership in the conventional sense, but a form of study, a continuous attempt to discover works that help me orient myself, that offer moments of alignment amid the disorder that my own optimism and ambition inevitably generate. My days are crowded with ideas, projects, expectations, and the friction between them produces noise, dispersion, and restlessness. Against this, collecting becomes a counter-practice, a way of introducing order not by force but by choice, by allowing form, proportion, and thought to reassert their quiet authority. In this sense, beauty becomes a form of resistance, not oppositional or declarative, but persistent and necessary: resistance to haste, to superficiality, to the erosion of attention. Aesthetics, when pursued seriously, offers a path toward the better, not through grand solutions but through small, exacting acts of care, teaching us that to look well is already to act well, and that the search for beauty, far from being an escape from the world, may still be one of the most effective ways to remain responsibly within it.

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