LOS ANGELES, CA.- François Ghebaly announced the representation of Em Rooney, Ivy Haldeman, & Ludovic Nkoth.

Em Rooney

Across a multidimensional practice that spans sculpture and photography, Em Rooney creates artworks invested in narrative representation and haptic sensuality. She blends inspiration from the natural world using a touched and generous approach to her materials, which range widely from welded steel and blown glass to tulle and rice paper. In some works, her sculptural constructions act as elaborate artist’s frames for her photography. In other works, these forms diverge from the photographs, taking their own paths that weave together references to literature, film, fashion, and architecture. Throughout her work, she addresses themes of reciprocity and mutual recognition, the sacred and the profane, and the performance and dismantling of gender.

Born in 1983 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Em Rooney currently lives and works in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. She holds an MFA from Temple University, Philadelphia, and a BA from Hampshire College, Amherst. Recent solo exhibitions include Women in Fiction, François Ghebaly, Los Angeles; You, Too, Know That You Live, Fons Welters, Amsterdam; and Ordinary Time, Bodega, New York. Rooney’s work was featured in the 2018 Museum of Modern Art exhibition Being: New Photography and has appeared in numerous other group exhibitions, including at Crèvecoeur, Paris; Foxy Production, New York; and Document, Chicago. Currently assistant professor of photography at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, Rooney is co-represented by Bodega, New York.




Ivy Haldeman

From titanic anthropomorphized hot dogs, to phantom skirt-suits and strolling fingers, Ivy Haldeman has spent over a decade cultivating a practice in painting and multimedia sculpture that flexes the psychic power of slippage and transfiguration. Blending elements of psychoanalysis, character study, and visual sociology, Haldeman creates work interested in the mechanisms of commodity fetishism and the interior subjective. Across her work, colossal figures, depicted in clean lines and graphic styling, are cast against the brilliance of titanium dioxide. Their range of physical and emotive states—sensual relaxation, withdrawn repose, casual ennui, electric self-assertion—exemplify Haldeman’s fluency in gestural language, and enrich her figures’ concurrent investments in labor and capital. Interweaving consumerist tropes, ironic conceit, and sensitive, humanist rendering, Haldeman’s practice probes the depths of our capacities of self-recognition.

Born in Aurora, Colorado in 1985, Ivy Haldeman currently works and resides in New York City. Haldeman received a BFA from Cooper Union in 2008, and her recent solo exhibitions include Twice (2021) at Downs & Ross; Hello, the Future is Certain (2020) at François Ghebaly, and (Hesitate) (2019) at Capsule Shanghai. Her work has been exhibited in numerous group exhibitions, including at Petzel Gallery, Hauser & Wirth, Fredericks & Freiser, the Frans Hal Museum, and Paul Kasmin Gallery, among others. Haldeman and her work have been featured by the New York Times, Cultured Magazine, W Magazine, Brooklyn Rail, the New Yorker, and Artforum, and her highly-anticipated solo exhibition, Twice (2021), is on view at Downs & Ross in New York City until June 19. Haldeman is also represented by Capsule Shanghai and Downs & Ross, New York.

Ludovic Nkoth

For the Cameroon-born Ludovic Nkoth, displacement and deferral occupy a familiar place at the margins of the stories he tells. With swirled and meandering brushstrokes, Nkoth’s practice in figurative painting broaches the ongoing negotiation of transatlantic migration—a direct rumination on diaspora history and on his own expatriation to the US at the age of 13. Melding Cameroonian aesthetic motifs and vivid coloration with postcolonial allegory, Nkoth explores the formation and fragmentation of identity. Throughout his work, Nkoth’s figures participate in the fictions and lived experiences that comprise his own identity synthesis; each muddled expression and porous boundary imbues his paintings with the tender incandescence of a distant memory. The navigation of both belonging and outsiderhood in African and American spaces underscores much of Nkoth’s work, and informs the future-building of kinship, solidarity, and self determination that is central to his practice.

Ludovic Nkoth was born in Yaoundé, Cameroon in 1994, and lives and works in New York City. Nkoth completed his BFA at the University of South Carolina, and holds an MFA in painting from Hunter College. Recent solo exhibitions include Don’t Take This Too (2021) at François Ghebaly in Los Angeles, and You Sea Us (2021) at Luce Gallery in Turin. Nkoth was featured in the group exhibition Black Voices/Black Microcosms (2020) at CFHILL Art Space in Stockholm, as well as in group exhibitions at Anthony Gallery, Chicago, and Ross+Kramer, New York. His work is held in the collection of the Yuz Museum in Shanghai.