Book Talk: Gemma Rolls-Bentley and Gray Wielebinski on Queer Art

Join us for talk and book signing with curator and writer Gemma Rolls-Bentley to celebrate her new book, ‘Queer Art: From Canvas to Club, and the Spaces Between’ (2024) at Hauser & Wirth Somerset.

Gemma Rolls-Bentley will be in conversation with artist Gray Wielekinski, followed by a book signing. Please note the talk will start promptly at 11 am in our bookshop. Seats will be allocated on a first come, first serve basis.

The garden and Roth Bar will open from 10 am, with the gallery opening at 12 pm.

Tickets are free but must be booked in advance. We encourage donations to our 2024 – 2025 charity partner, Good Company Bruton.

About Gemma Rolls-Bentley
Gemma Rolls-Bentley has been at the forefront of contemporary art for almost two decades, working passionately to champion diversity in the field. She is the author of ‘Queer Art; From Canvas to Club and the Spaces Between’ (2024), published by Frances Lincoln (Quarto Publishing).

Rolls-Bentley has curated for a range of international institutions, most recently the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art, New York NY; Somerset House, London, UK; Tom of Finland Foundation, Los Angeles CA; London Art Fair, UK; and Kkweer Arts, London, UK. In 2022, she curated the Brighton Beacon Collection, the largest permanent display of queer art in the UK, for Soho House Brighton. She has taught at numerous UK institutions including the Royal College of Art, London; Glasgow School of Art; and Goldsmiths, University of London. She co-chairs the Board of Trustees for the charity Queercircle, and sits on the Courtauld Association Committee.

About Gray Wielebinski
Gray Wielebinski is an artist living and working in London, UK. Wielebinski’s expansive practice incorporates installation, video, drawing, performance, collage, sculpture, and more. He explores intersecting themes of power, nationhood, desire and memory. The process of collaging runs through his practice in many forms. Reconfiguring and transforming iconography and visual codes, his work interrogates dominant frameworks and belief systems and proposes alternatives. Continuously attentive to the fraught status of American mythology and landscape, his recent work has focused on surveillance, strategy, and secrecy, particularly as these intersect with questions of gender, sexuality, and the social.

Wielebinski’s solo exhibitions include: ‘The Red Sun is High, The Blue Low,’ Institute of Contemporary Arts London, UK (2023); ‘Fratricide,’ Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA (2023); ‘Love and Theft,’ 12.26 Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2023); ‘Oil and Water,’ Hales Gallery, London, UK (2023); and Selfridges Art Block Commission, London, UK (2023). The artist’s works were also on view as part of the group exhibition, ‘Present Tense,’ at Hauser & Wirth Somerset from January – April 2024.

—

Please be advised that photographs will be taken at this event for use on the Hauser & Wirth website, social media and in other marketing materials.