Space776 New York is pleased to present LOVE DIVE, a group exhibition of rising and established artists including Alex Katz, Marco Lodola, Damien Hirst, Sunjoo Chung, Richard Prince, and Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, on view from June 20 to July 16, 2025.  

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How can love be defined and understood? How do artists of different generations express the essence of love? The word comes from Old English “lufu,” which is of Germanic origin and means “feeling of love.” And the Old English word can be traced to “lubhyati” of an Indo-European root shared by Sanskrit, meaning ‘desires.’ And “desire” has Latin roots of de meaning “away from” or “from” and sire which means a “heavenly body.”

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The idea of love, therefore, can be rooted in the Earthly and the physical realm, as well as the heavens. For humans, who exist in a liminal state between the physical and the spiritual, the question what is truest form of love – whether bodily, spiritual, or even intellectual – can never be fully resolved.

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What the artists propose through their works concerning love are generally the qualities of material perfection, sweetness in terms of the colors or the metaphor, and shine, which is the intense interaction of light (energy) and the physical (matter) resulting in a luminous quality.

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For example, Alex Katz’s limited edition work, “Pas de Deux IV” (1994), refers to a dance for two people (usually a man and a woman), and it is a pinnacle of painterly perfection, in which the curvilinear forms and gradations become flattened towards cohesive shapes of colors with a semi-graphical quality.

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On the other hand, Frederic Bruly Bouabre resists and relinquishes those characteristics in his work that depicts two people who are possibly friends or couple, instead embracing the spiritual possibilities in his style of imperfection and muted, down-to-earth colors.

 

Artists:

 

Alex Katz (b. 1927) is an American painter who is renowned for his large paintings, whose bold simplicity and heightened colors are considered as precursors to Pop Art. Since the early 1960s, Katz began painting large-scale often dramatically cropped faces, influenced by films, television, and billboard advertising.

 

Damien Hirst (b. 1965) is a British artist who was involved in the YBA movement. Some of his most iconic pieces include “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” (1991) involving a shark immersed in formaldehyde and “For the Love of God” (2007), consisting of a diamond-encrusted skull.

 

Richard Prince (b. 1949) is an American artist who is widely known for re-photographing photographs and, in particular, his “Untitled Cowboys” series from 1980 to 1992. His works were at the center of controversies and lawsuits concerning appropriation and plagiarism. Originally born in Panama, Prince now lives and works in New York City.

 

Marco Lodola (b. 1955) is an Italian artist and a leader of the New Futurism movement, which emerged in the 1980s. His work is known for its pop style, bright colors, and well-defined shapes, often featuring dancers, musicians, and faceless figures. Lodola's art blends art with other disciplines like music, literature, and cinema.

 

Frédéric Bruly Bouabré (1923 ~ 2014) was an artist of Côte d'Ivoire, who invented the Alphabet Bété. His art has garnered recent acclaim, showcased at the MoMA in 2022, and featured in the 2022, 2013, and 1998 Venice Biennale.

 

Sunjoo Chung (b. 1969) is a Korean artist who works with mother-of-pearl to reimagine mundane, universally recognizable forms—such as candies and daily objects—through a contemporary lens. Her work blends cultural references from both East and West, engaging in a quiet dialogue between tradition and modernity, intimacy and spectacle.