NEW YORK, NY.- Sikkema Jenkins & Co. presents THE (grand) GESTURE, a group exhibition of works by Trisha Brown, Keltie Ferris, and Arturo Herrera. THE (grand) GESTURE is on view from January 10 through February 15, 2025.

THE (grand) GESTURE considers how ideas of movement and action may be formally expressed and conceptually embodied. Trisha Brown, Keltie Ferris, and Arturo Herrera each offer unique interpretations of physicality and performance, often working through the lens of Abstract Expressionism or in response to its legacies.


The first monograph on Venezuelan multimedia artist Arturo Herrera in nearly twenty years, this comprehensive book takes a deep look at his diverse body of work.


Trisha Brown created works on paper in parallel with her well-known dance career. Brown’s drawings meld the ephemeral gestures of performance, central to her groundbreaking choreography, with a postminimal visual quality that suggests the condition of an action in process. Her large-scale works trace the motions of Brown’s body as she turns, twists, stands, and glides across the paper’s surface with charcoal grasped between her hands and feet. The resulting field of lines and marks evokes the continuous, all-over nature of Brown’s movements and the ghost of a dynamic presence.

Keltie Ferris’s abstractions thrum with a vibrant sense of color and tactility. In his paintings, layers of medium are built up and removed with a variety of tools, including hand-held spray guns, palette knives, and occasionally three-dimensional forms. Gesture is invoked as something both immediate and calculated, fomenting a tension between the initiation of an action and its potential outcome. In this way, Ferris’s works can be seen as both a source of energy and an image of its transformation, released as a kinetic interplay of looping swirls, drags of paint, and geometric fragments.

Arturo Herrera’s diverse body of work draws upon Modernist strategies of fragmentation and repetition to explore the mutability of images and how they are perceived. Working largely through collage, his abstractions often play with the ambiguity between what is revealed and what is concealed, and how such visual information or associations are transmitted to the viewer. Dance and choreography have been a significant influence on Herrera’s practice: he describes choreography as “unifying,” defined by certain steps and interactions with space in a way that parallels the composite elements of a collage. His earlier works often feature stylized drips, swishes, and other gestural flourishes, while his more recent compositions continue to use gesture as structure in a more open and painterly way.

Trisha Brown (1936-2017) was born and raised in Aberdeen, WA. She graduated from Mills College in 1958, studied with Anna Halprin, and taught at Reed College in Portland before moving to New York City in 1961, where she became a founding member of the Judson Dance Theater. In 1970, she co-founded the dance collective Grand Union and formed the Trisha Brown Dance Company. In 2008, the Walker Art Center organized Trisha Brown: So That the Audience Does Not Know Whether I Have Stopped Dancing, a major survey of Brown’s drawings. The exhibition traveled to Mills College Art Museum in Oakland and Musée d’art Contemporain de Lyon.

Keltie Ferris (b. 1977, Louisville, KY) received his BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 2004 and his MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2006. His work has been shown in recent solo exhibitions at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York (2023, 2021); Morán Morán, Mexico City (2023) and Los Angeles, CA (2019); Kadel Willborn, Düsseldorf, Germany (2019); and the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY (2018). His work can be found in the public collections of The Bronx Museum, NY; the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; the San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio, TX; and the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY, among others.

Arturo Herrera (b. 1959, Caracas, Venezuela) received a BFA from the University of Tulsa and his MFA from the University of Chicago at Illinois. Recent solo exhibitions include Fare un giro, Spazio Supernova, Rome, Italy (2024); Arturo Herrera: You are here, SITE Santa Fe, NM (2024); Arturo Herrera: Between, The Contemporary Dayton, OH (2023); and Arturo Herrera: Constructed Collage, Ruby City, San Antonio, TX (2022). He has created long-term, site-specific installations for FORMA and The Bass Museum of Art in Miami; Bloomberg European Headquarters, London; and Tate Modern, London. His work is included in the public collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; The Museum of Modern Art, NY; Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; and the Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom, among others. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, ArtPace San Antonio, The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation and the DAAD, Berlin. Herrera lives and works in Berlin.


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