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11505 - 20170408 - Petzel Gallery presents exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Sarah Morris - New York - 23.02.2017-08.04.2017

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Sarah Morris, Um Al Nar, 2017. Household gloss paint on canvas, 84.25 x 84.25 inches, 214 x 214 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York.

 

Petzel Gallery presents an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Sarah Morris.

The complex language of abstraction, imbued in the paintings of Sarah Morris continues in Finite and Infinite Games, as Morris extracts the codes, systems of control, power structures that characterize urban, social and bureaucratic typologies. The title of the exhibition references James P. Carse’s book on the sociopolitical implications of game play in everyday life, while the body of work is parallel to two films Morris has made: Abu Dhabi shot on location in the United Arab Emirates, and Finite and Infinite Games, a film featuring Alexander Kluge and the Elbphilharmonie, Hamburg.

Architectural, political, and historical examinations of cities through reduced and expanded abstraction have been the mark of Morris’s paintings, in which she focused on revealing the multilayered identities and narratives of cities such as Rio, New York, Washington DC and Beijing. For this new series of paintings, Morris turns her focus to the futuristic landscape of the Middle East. Geographical coordinates, schematically mapped, create the framework for her compositions. Morris’s unique use of vivid color and grid-like geometric shapes produce a virtual architecture of city and desert—landscape and erasure.

Morris’s paintings explore the complex conversation between culture, architecture and power. The work streamlines a way of perception as much as abstracted urban structures. Executed in household gloss paint on square canvases, Morris’s Abu Dhabi paintings, redolent with algorithmic grids, capture the quiddity of the moment. Morris’s paintings and drawings continually develop the artist’s exploration into the essence of place and politics, creating visions of play, possibility and intrigue both finite and infinite. Within this framework, the Olympics, Chase Bank, conspiracies, QR codes, the film industry, the global banking system, Sir Norman Foster, J.G. Ballard, the oil industry, The President of the United States, lunar cycles, pharmaceutical packaging, falconry and even fruit are fair game.

Sarah Morris (b. 1967, American) lives and works in New York. She has exhibited internationally including solo exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2016), M Museum Leuven (2015), Kunsthalle Bremen (2013), Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2012), K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf (2010), Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2009), Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna (2009), Lenbachaus, Munich (2008), Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2008), Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2006), Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover (2005), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2005), Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2005), Kunstforeningen, Copenhagen (2004), The Nationalgalerie in Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2001), Kunsthalle Zürich (2000), Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (1999).

Work by the artist is held in museum collections worldwide, including: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Lenbachhaus, Munich; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Neue Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Centre Pompidou, Paris; SFMoMA, San Francisco; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Tate Modern, London.

The film Finite and Infinite Games is currently showing at the Hamburg Deichterhallen and her site-specific work “Monarch”, a passenger train that operates between Montreux and Zweisimmen, Switzerland can be seen until 2021.

 

 

Website : Petzel Gallery

 

Bron/Source : Artdaily

11504 - 20170401 - Solo exhibition of new work by Juergen Teller on view at Blum & Poe - Tokyo - 04.02.2017-01.04.2017

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Blum & Poe is presenting a solo exhibition of new work by Juergen Teller, curated by Francesco Bonami. This is the artist's first solo presentation in Japan in twenty-five years.

Teller first made his mark on the public’s consciousness when his iconic pictures of Kurt Cobain were published in Details magazine in 1991. Thereafter, his first solo exhibition took place in Japan at Shibuya PARCO, Tokyo, in 1992, where he showed portraits and early fashion photographs. The following year he was the recipient of the 1993 Photography Prize at Festival de la Mode, Monaco. Since then Teller has collaborated with the world’s leading fashion designers including Marc Jacobs, Vivienne Westwood, Comme des Garçons, and Helmut Lang. The candid and casual nature of his work appears random yet it is based on precise planning and staging. This tension is evident in the bizarre scenario created for this exhibition, which debuts a new series of photographs depicting frogs on plates. As Francesco Bonami envisages it:

"‘Once upon a time in a suburban neighborhood of an irrelevant country, people did not eat frogs but kissed them and made love with them’ — this could be the beginning of a fairy tale written by Juergen Teller while imagining this exhibition where frogs turn into a small crowd of viewers looking at the three main characters of the exhibition: the gentleman with the gorilla, the lady with the fox, and the man with the donkey. Teller's gift is not just to tell, with images, a simple story but in fact is the ability to turn extraordinary people — charismatic and curmudgeonly photographer William Eggleston, ethereal and myth-like actress Charlotte Rampling, and his own barbarian self — into normal people on the verge of a magical breakdown. The exhibition is built as a conversation and an encounter between the community of frogs and these three people with their own counterparts in the animal world.”

Juergen Teller was born in 1964 in Erlangen, Germany. He studied at the Bayerische Staatslehranstalt für Photographie in Munich, and has lived and worked in London since 1986. His work has been exhibited extensively around the world: his solo exhibition Enjoy Your Life!, which was held at the Kunsthalle Bonn in 2016, is currently on view at Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague until March 19, and will travel to Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, from April 20 to July 3, 2017. Recent solo exhibitions include The Clinic, Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin (2015); Macho, DESTE Foundation, Athens (2014); Woo! Institute of Contemporary Art, London (2013); Touch Me, Le Consortium, Dijon (2010), which traveled to Daelim Museum, Korea (2011); and Man with Banana, Dallas Contemporary, Texas (2011). Francesco Bonami has worked with Teller since 2012, when he organized Teller’s first solo exhibition in Italy, The Girl With the Broken Nose, at the Palazzo Reale in Milan. In 2014, Teller held a two-artist show with the legendary Japanese photographer, Nobuyoshi Araki: Araki Teller Teller Araki, at the Ostlicht, Vienna. He was also one of five artists to represent Ukraine in the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007. Teller’s work is represented in numerous public collections including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris; International Center for Photography, New York; National Portrait Gallery, London; Pinchuk Art Centre, Kiev; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Website : Blum & Poe

 

Bron/Source : Artdaily

 

11503 - 20170413 - Exhibition presents rare coloured sculptures that represent radical moments in Tony Cragg's practice - London - 01.03.2017-13.04.2017

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Tony Cragg, Red Square, 2007. Bronze, 76 x 80 x 66. Photo: Ellen Page Wilson.

 

Holtermann Fine Art and Dutko Gallery presenting ‘Tony Cragg: Primary Colours’, an exhibition of rare coloured sculptures by Tony Cragg. The exhibition showcases a carefully curated ensemble of secondary market works that represent two radical moments in Cragg’s practice: his early plastic works and his first coloured bronze forms. Over several decades, Holtermann Fine Art has actively supported Tony Cragg and his market, especially through the organisation of major museum exhibitions. This collaboration with Dutko Gallery, planned over the past two years, is based on a long-standing friendship and represents for each art dealer an opportunity to highlight their shared interests. ‘Primary Colours’ coincides with a major retrospective of Tony Cragg’s work at Yorkshire Sculpture Park (4 March, 2017 – 3 September 2017). Holtermann Fine Art is a supporter of this show.

The striking blue, yellow and red hues of the three bronze sculptures in ‘Primary Colours’ testify to the artist’s bold approach to colour in sculpture and demonstrate his unrivalled skill in using it. These works from his important Early Forms series are among the first in which Cragg adds the new element of colour to cast bronze. Applying colours to bronze, rather than traditional patinas, is a complex technological feat that the artist achieved through borrowing techniques from the German car industry, which Cragg, who is based in Germany and intensely interested in science, adapted for his own artistic ends.

A further highlight in the show is ‘Looking at Sculpture’ (1980), a seminal plastic wall piece that Cragg considers one of the finest from the period. A representation of the artist himself looking at ‘The Rape of the Sabine Women’, a 16th-century sculpture by Giambologna, the work attests to Cragg’s early use of colour. ‘Looking at Sculpture’ is assembled from bright plastic fragments collected along the banks of the Rhine. Inspired by Arte Povera, Cragg transformed this found detritus into a large, collage-like composition to be hung on a wall. For Cragg, man-made objects and materials are vital ingredients and underlying his practice is the idea that the utilitarian design of everyday objects restricts the potential inherent in any material. By using plastic objects to create new artistic forms, Cragg makes us look again at this mundane, ubiquitous and disposable material as it is appropriated into a dynamic and playful art-work.

One of the most prominent British contemporary sculptors, Tony Cragg (b.1949) began working in the early 1970s and was one of the early proponents of Land Art. His interest in science and natural history, as well as his early experience working in a scientific laboratory, gave birth to an artistic practice that constantly questions the boundaries of materials and forms and expands the visual language of contemporary sculpture.

Cragg’s practice involves working in series. The bronze sculptures presented in this exhibition are part of Cragg’s renowned and longest-running series of cast bronzes entitled Early Forms and versions of these were exhibited as a group in Cragg’s recent retrospective at the Von der Heydt Museum in Wuppertal, Germany, 2016. Started in the late 1980s, this body of work develops out of the forms of vessels, from chemical containers or ancient flasks to jam jars, test-tubes and detergent bottles. As Cragg points out, ‘Works from the Early Forms group are always to do with vessels transforming and mutating into one another in space.’

Cragg's ongoing interest in vessels emerges both from their formal qualities and their historical and metaphorical significance. As illustrated by the title Early Forms, vessels are among the earliest forms of man-made objects. In addition to the civilizing effect the invention of containers has had on human existence, vessels and flasks were key in Cragg’s early laboratory experience. As in the magical play with materials in alchemy Cragg’s practice explores the metamorphosis of forms.

Over the years, the shapes of the Early Forms sculptures have evolved from the simple melding of one vessel into another, to more complex, elastic formations in which the original object is completely transformed, an evolution that is particularly striking in the three bronze sculptures presented in this exhibition. In McCormack (2007), the blue vessel’s playful form is like three-dimensional calligraphy. In the yellow-painted bronze Declination (2003), a title deriving from an astronomical term related to the sun, all that remains is the seam that links one form to the other. The voluptuous Red Square (2007) was conceived at the time of Cragg’s exhibition at the Central House of Artists in Moscow in 2005. The slit that runs along the edges of the sculptures gives a glimpse into the internal space and each work’s inner structure. Cragg speaks of his enduring interest in the inner life of things, matter and human thought and emotions and invites the viewer to consider the same.

As curator Patrick Elliott wrote in his catalogue essay for Cragg’s exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh (2011): the Early Forms sculptures explore both the metamorphosis of form and the space around it:

…they are about the gap between things. In the drive towards economy and mass production, industry has created a limited range of formatted goods, and ignored all those forms which do not serve the purpose of economy or functionality. Cragg addresses the vast terrain of potential forms that lie between these formatted goods. If, at first glance, Cragg’s work over the years seems to have shifted in style and approach, it is in fact united and grounded in this philosophical starting point.

 

 

Website : Dutko Gallery

 

Source : Artdaily

11502 - 20170407 - Exhibition of assemblages and collages by Louise Nevelson at Cortesi Gallery - Lugano - 16.02.2017-07.04.2017

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Louise Nevelson, Untitled, 1980 ca., wood painted black, 94×53.3×43.2 cm, photo by A. Zambianchi, courtesy Cortesi Gallery London - Lugano.

 

Cortesi Gallery, Lugano, presents the exhibition Louise Nevelson. Assemblages and Collages, a remarkable selection of 29 works realised by the artist between 1960 and 1980.

Louise Nevelson (Kiev, 1899 – New York, 1988) was born in the Ukraine but emigrated to the United States in her early years. She is one of the most influential figures of the 20th century, an epoch that she lived to see almost in its entirety.

Nevelson turned to collages from the mid-50s and these works clearly show the influence of Cubism, which she encountered during research trips in Europe. Realised on wooden or paper boards and in different dimensions, the collages reveal the artist’s attention to perspective, chromaticism, spontaneity of execution and compositional balance. To this first kind of artistic production, Nevelson added assemblages: in both cases, the works are realised by collecting scrape wood and metals bits found in the streets of New York.

Reclaimed materials that, as such, tell a story, have a past that Louise Nevelson takes into account when re-assembling the pieces. In her sculptures, we recognise everyday objects – from table and chair legs, to balustrade and more – that the artist re-uses with a sensibility that wavers between New Dada and Abstractionism, but that also looks back at pre-Columbian and Mesoamerican sculpture she became fascinated with during a trip to Mexico in 1950. However, despite these many references, the final result is extraordinarily original, making it impossible to be pigeonholed.

For assemblages, the artist preferred monochrome – in particular, black and gold – as evident in the works on show at Cortesi Gallery. Using a solid colour, the dimension of the objects is flattened while the attention placed on the game of lights and shadows generated by the surfaces, enhancing their evocative aspects. The exhibition is organised in collaboration with Fondazione Marconi (Milan) and is accompanied by a catalogue produced by Mousse Publishing, which includes a critical essay by curator Bruno Corà.

Leah Berliawsky, known as Louise Nevelson (Pereyaslav-Kiev, 1899 – New York, 1988), was born near Kiev to a Jewish family and was forced to emigrate in 1905 to the United States because of anti-Semitic laws enacted in her country a few years earlier. She grew up in Rockland, Maine, then moved to New York, returning to Europe years later to study with Hans Hoffman. On her return to the United States, she worked first as an assistant to Diego Rivera and later as an art instructor in the Works Progress Administration. In 1941, her first solo exhibition was held, and in 1946, she was first invited to participate in the annual exhibition at the Whitney Museum, in which she took part several times.

Her numerous exhibitions include her participation at the Venice Biennale in 1962, when she represented the United States. She also exhibited at the Jewish Museum, New York (1965, 2007); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1967, 1970, 1980, 1987, 1998); the Civic Gallery of Modern Art, Turin (1969); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1973); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1973); National Gallery of Modern Art, Rome (1976); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1986); Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome (1994); Centre national d'art et de culture Georges Pompidou, Paris (1997); Rome Foundation Museum, Rome (2013) and Mediterranean Foundation in Catania (2013–2014). With the collective, Sixteen Americans, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1959–60); The Art of Assemblage, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1961); the Carnegie International (1958, 1961, 1964, 1970); and Documenta in Kassel (1964, 1968).

Many of her works also form part of both private and institutional collections, as well as several public art installations in Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and Philadelphia.

 

 

Website : Cortesi Gallery

 

Bron/Source : Artdaily

 

 

11501 - 20170401 - Of Earth, Heaven and Light: Galerie Karsten Greve presents works by Thomas Brummett - Cologne - 19.01.2017-01.04.2017

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Installation view. © Thomas Brummett, Courtesy Galerie Karsten Greve.

 

Thomas Brummett is an artist who is on a journey that follows two intertwined paths. Thoughtful and patient, he is on a quest to discover the essence of the natural world by focusing on the immediate before him—a twig, a fleeing light beam. He is also an explorer of the medium of photography, experimenting with the myriad ways of making an image with light and marks on the surface of light sensitive paper. All Brummett’s work is from his life-long series Rethinking the Natural.

Born in Colorado in 1955, Brummett matured with an appreciation of arid deserts and soaring mountains. He was educated in ceramics and photography at the Colorado State University (BFA, 1979) and the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, (MFA, 1982), after which he settled in Philadelphia and had a daughter. Raised in a Christian (Episcopalian) family that includes several members of the clergy, after reaching adulthood and traveling to India and Asia, Brummett found that the journey described in Western Abrahamic religions had lost its meaning for him, and he was drawn to Eastern Taoist/Buddhist theology. Rather than embarking on a pilgrimage of transcendence to a Deity who resides above and independent from the universe, Brummett found himself following Eastern monastic traditions that embark on a journey of immanence—intense observation of the world at hand. Such intense focus on the immediate resonates with the scientific method, and thus it is not surprising that Taoist/Buddhist thought permeates modern science and mathematics, as in the writings of Austrian logician Ludwig Wittgenstein who wrote: “the place I must get to is the place where I already am” (Culture and Value, 1930). This mix of meditative practices and modern science is a thread running through Brummett’s art.

The parallel paths of the artist’s journey are clearly manifest in the series Infinities and Light Projections. In the series Light Projections the artist controlled the “circles of confusion” a lens can produce when out of focus. A “circle of confusion” is a term in optics for pinpoints of light (commonly known as bokeh [from the Japanese for “blur”]), which is an artifact of the lens that the artist describes as “an optical effect a lens produces with out of focus.” Brummett’s method of controlling and making images out of these so-called “circles of confusion” has never been done in the history of photography. According to the artist, the prints in this series “represent the physical manifestation of Light = The Infinite.” As the artist has stated: “The Light Projections for me are the perfect visual symbol of the Infinite. All light is a part of the natural world. Light is the very basis of the natural world and all life and energy. [In this series] I was not shifting my attention away from the natural world but to its very essence. I was taking the natural world down to its purest form—Light.” With these words, Brummett is following in the footsteps of mystics throughout the ages who have associated light with infinity, and given these concepts divine associations. Notice that Brummett capitalizes “Light” and “the Infinite”, thus personifying/deifying them in the classical Greek tradition of “the Good” “the Just” and “the Triangle” which were, according to Plato, all divine. This association of light, infinity and divinity took deep root in Western thought.

An amateur astronomer can easily arrange to photograph through a ground-based telescope, but a non-scientist cannot book time on a telescope that orbits above earth’s atmosphere. So for photographs of outer space, Brummett used images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope that NASA makes available to the public. Starting with one of these recordings of light—a transatmospheric look back in time—the artist worked like a printmaker and manipulated the image, desaturating the hue and layering the image with other patterns, all of which he has photographed from nature (Infinities [of Earth and Heaven] series 2013-16). The layers include images of stars, magnolia trees, a recording of snowflakes hitting a scanner, as well as real dust and mold from the artist’s studio. In these images Brummett describes his intention as to recreate William Blake’s idea of what the world would look like to all of us: “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1793).

Borrowing a term from thermodynamics, the artist calls his darkroom development process “entropic” (transfer of energy): “I print the image down to black and then resurrect it with bleaches, brushes and a redevelopment process. Each image is unique because the process is so naturally random.

The bleaches attack the metal in the paper literally eating it away.” The process is entropic because “the silver atoms move from a very ordered state to a chaotic state of dissolution or fragmentation, which give me a very beautiful line or edge.”

(Excerpts from a text by Lynn Gamwell, 2016)

Thomas Brummett was born in 1955 in Colorado. He studied photography at Colorado State University and the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and has worked as a freelance photographer since 1983. From 1985 to 1990 he also taught photography at the University of Arts in Philadelphia. His works are included in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janiero, Brazil. Brummett was honoured with many awards for his photographic work. In addition to other prizes, he received the International Photography Award in 2004, 2009 and 2012 and in 2014 he was granted the Sony World Photography Award. Thomas Brummett lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.

 

 

Website : Galerie Karsten Greve

 

Source : Artdaily

  

 

11500 - 20170413 - Louise Bourgeois and Yayoi Kusama united for exhibition at Sotheby’s S/2 Gallery - London - 23.02.2017-13.04.2017

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‘Traumata’ will bring together important sculptures, paintings, prints and works on paper that explore the intense psychological states that comprise Louise Bourgeois and Yayoi Kusama’s divergent yet parallel careers.

 

Sotheby’s S|2 Gallery will stage London’s first joint exhibition dedicated to the work of Louise Bourgeois (1911– 2010) and Yayoi Kusama (born 1929). Opening on 23 February, Traumata: Bourgeois/Kusama will bring together defining works from important private collections and art foundations to reveal how these legendary artists laid bare their own psychological traumas to open up new territories for female artistic expression.

Japan-born Kusama, best known for her obsessive, densely patterned polka-dot paintings and mirrored installations, has attracted more visitors to her exhibitions around the world than any other artist in recent years. French-born Bourgeois, known for creating unflinchingly honest, autobiographical works which explore sexuality, motherhood and the darkest depths of her own psychology, is credited with inspiring and empowering a wave of contemporary female artists.

Burdened by childhood trauma and given to intense psychological states, for both Louise Bourgeois and Yayoi Kusama art was always the way to salvation. “Art is restoration”, said Bourgeois, “the idea is to repair the damages that are inflicted in life”. Throughout her career, Bourgeois created art that dealt with the emotions resulting from the discovery of her domineering father’s affair with her live-in tutor, all while her knowing mother turned a blind eye. Kusama – born in 1929 to a prosperous family in Matsumoto, Japan – similarly creates work heavily shaped by childhood experience. Her mother’s contempt of a husband who was prone to long absences and serial womanising, and her vehement and violent opposition to Kusama’s wish to become an artist exacerbated her nascent hallucinosis: a psychological condition that would become the lifelong well-spring for her obsessive-compulsive work. “By translating hallucinations and fear of hallucinations into paintings,” said Kusama, “I have been trying to cure my disease”. In an attempt to manage these psychological difficulties, Kusama has been a voluntary resident in Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill in Tokyo since 1977. Though driven by intensely personal pathologies, both artists have used their work as a platform to explore wider socio-political issues concerning gender, sexuality, embodiment and subjectivity; issues that continue to resonate strongly today

‘Traumata’ will bring together important sculptures, paintings, prints and works on paper that explore the intense psychological states that comprise Louise Bourgeois and Yayoi Kusama’s divergent yet parallel careers. Organised around four main themes, ‘Good Mother/Bad Mother’, ‘Exile/Dislocation’, ‘Sexuality/War’ and ‘Memory/Melancholia’, the exhibition will span the entirety of the artists’ careers, from rarely seen paintings created by Kusama for her first exhibitions in Japan, to now-iconic sculptures, such as Louise Bourgeois’ Spider.

 

 

Website : Sotheby’s S|2 Gallery

  

Source : Artdaily

 

 

11499 - 20170401 - Exhibition of new works on canvas and photo emulsion paper by Gordon Moore at Anita Rogers Gallery - New York - 15.02.2017-01.04.2017

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Anita Rogers Gallery presents an exhibition of new works on canvas and photo emulsion paper by the American painter, Gordon Moore. The exhibition is on view February 15 – April 1, 2017 at 77 Mercer Street #2N, New York, NY.

In this exhibition Moore's current work continues an interest in the dialogue he has developed over the past decade between the spontaneous flow of painterly liquids and the specific structural framework of his abstract configurations. The esoteric nature of abstraction offers an unlimited potential for invention. Using photo-emulsion paper as a ground for drawing, Moore embraces and encourages the imperfections inherent in the interaction between developer and emulsion. This in turn nurtures Moore's large scale works on canvas which explore a similar approach to depth, dimension, balance and asymmetry. Moore's pieces are exercises in asymmetrical equilibrium that challenge the viewers’ natural perceptions. The collection of works on view here are thoughtful meditations on connections and alignments - on the interaction between flatness and depth, deliberation and spontaneity, the real world and the painted world and finally between abstraction and figuration.

Born in Cherokee, IA, Moore received his undergraduate degree from the University of Washington, Seattle in 1970 and then went on to receive his MFA from Yale University in 1972. He has received numerous awards and grants including the National Endowment for the Arts-Visual Artists Fellowship, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in Painting, the Adolph and Ester Gottlieb Foundation Award in Painting, the Academy Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant and the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. Moore’s work can be seen in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, MA), Yale University Art Gallery (CT), Baltimore Museum of Art (MD), General Electric Corporation (OH), the Krannert Art Museum (IL) and Kinkead Pavilion (IL).

Website : Anita Rogers Gallery

 

Source : Artdaily

 

11498 - 20170325 - Morgan Lehman Gallery exhibits new large-scale oil paintings by Jeff Perrott - New York -26.02.2017-25.03.2017

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Jeff Perrott, RW182 (Too Dark to See Tomorrow), 2015. Oil on canvas

 

Morgan Lehman Gallery is presenting new large-scale oil paintings by Jeff Perrott. This will be the artist’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery.

Over the years, Perrott has committed himself to exploring the possibilities of abstraction, interrogating its core tenets and material processes to reveal new and interesting ways of seeing. The works on view are part of an ongoing project that Perrott refers to as “Random Walks.” He explains, “the Random Walks question what I call the ‘will to power’ or ‘will to domination’ of abstract painting by redirecting my hand through the operation of chance: by forcing a negotiation with contingency. At the same time, as chance is choice, the process pushes through its own blindness to what I think of as a different sort of power, not so motivated by domination, but by curiosity with and participation in the thrownness of the situation.”

In this exhibition, richly textured black grounds take on prominent pictorial weight, thus subverting the traditional figure-ground relationship. Each painting presents a ground that is functionally chameleonic: simultaneously sheer depth, blind terrain, and a sort of embodied uncertainty. As one’s eyes adjust to close-value chromatic shifts on the surface of the paintings, high contrast marks give way to more complex, dark, sinewy tangles, with portions of the wandering lines receding into inky black.

The play among the hidden and revealed, the manifest and the underlying, when coupled with Perrott’s chance-based painterly operation, suggests the uncertain unfoldment of the everyday as well as an ostensibly darker contingency undergirding what is seen. Even within disappearance, the lines of color, and the paintings themselves, continue, joining themselves with that very uncertainty, invoking also: possibility.

Jeff Perrott earned his BA from Williams College, and his MFA from Yale School of Art (New Haven, CT). Perrott has exhibited at the Boston Center for the Arts (MA), Barbara Krakow Gallery (Boston, MA), Morgan Lehman Gallery (New York, NY), and LaMontagne Gallery (Boston, MA). He is the winner of the Eben Demerest Fellowship, and a nominee for the Foster Prize from the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. His work is featured in both corporate and museum collections such as the Wadsworth Atheneum (Hartford, CT); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (Lincoln, MA); the Whitney Museum of Art prints collection; Wellington Management; the Digitas Corporation; and KPFG San Francisco.

 

 

Website : Morgan Lehman Gallery

  

Source : Artdaily

 

11497 - 20170316 - Artist Jenness Cortez exhibits her first Homage to Twentieth Century Masters - Naples, FLA - 20.02.2017-16.03.2017

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"Celebrity" © by Jenness Cortez. Acrylic on Mahogany panel, 18 by 24 inches. Homage to Andy Warhol (1928-1987).

 

Harmon-Meek Galleries of Naples, Florida hosts the first exhibition by internationally acclaimed still life artist Jenness Cortez honoring twentieth century masters. On view February 20 through March 16, 2017, Cortez presents her latest paintings depicting the iconic works of Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol.

For centuries artists have been challenging their intellects and skills by paying homage to the painters who preceded them. Jenness Cortez has emerged as the twenty-first century’s most notable exponent of this facet of art history. Her masterful work gives Cortez solid footing in the colorful lineage of artists who have appropriated vintage images and woven them into their own distinctive, recognizable fabric.

Robert Yassin, former director of the Indianapolis and Tucson Museums of Art claims that, “The paintings of Jenness Cortez make my heart sing. It’s my way of knowing the genuine article––a real work of art.”

In this remarkable show Cortez draws upon iconic twentieth century art to continue her reexamination of the classic paradox of realism: the painting both as a “window” into an imagined space and as a physical object. Her work challenges the viewers’ intellectual curiosity and celebrates the sheer pleasure of beautiful painting. In this new chapter of her “Homage” series, Cortez continues to play author, architect, visual journalist, art historian, curator and pundit to help open our eyes to what we might otherwise have overlooked or taken for granted.

As in all previous Cortez work, her new creations touch upon important questions about the nature of painting and the significance of art objects. Presenting subtle shades of meaning that invite contemplation, each Cortez painting presents a specific theme, mixing straightforward cues and obscure allusions. By masterfully presenting iconic works of art in unexpected modern settings, Jenness Cortez continues to inspire us to see differently––to rediscover and revalue our own creative power in everyday life.

Jenness Cortez was born in 1944 in Frankfort, Indiana. She received her B.F.A. from the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis, apprenticed privately with noted Dutch painter Antonius Raemaekers and later studied with Arnold Blanch at the Art Students League of New York. Her work is in numerous public and private collections including those of Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, HM Queen Elizabeth, II and the New York State Museum.

Perlmutter Gallery in Averill Park, New York exclusively represents Jenness Cortez.

 

 

Website : Harmon-Meek Galleries

 

Source : Artdaily

 

11496 - 20170331 - Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac presents its fifth solo exhibition of works by artist Marc Brandenburg - Salzburg - 28.01.2017-31.03.2017

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Marc Brandenburg, Untitled (detail), 2016, Graphite on paper Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac London·Paris·Salzburg © Marc Brandenburg. Photo: Jens Ziehe.

 

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac is holding its fifth solo exhibition of works by artist Marc Brandenburg, resident in Berlin. Entitled Alpha St, the exhibition comprises 24 drawings from a new series of works based on historical photographs of traditional costumes and on snapshots of young people in school uniforms.

"The drawings of women enveloped in their clothes and immobilised like ghostly figures from another age show a fascination for superficial detail. The portrait drawings are based on photographs of women in traditional costumes taken in the 1940s that have been inverted and alienated by the artist through processes of copying and manipulating. Brandenburg emphasises the averted gaze and frozen gestures of the featured women, making their faces and bodies appear immobile, like those of wooden dolls.

The patterns of the elaborate handmade lace and embroidery, resembling decorative armour, are transposed into the social structures of a present time: that of schoolgirls' uniforms. The groups of girls – teenagers chatting amongst themselves, unaware of the spectator's gaze – emerge dimly from a white haze, like scenic souvenir pictures from a distant past. These are modelled on Brandenburg's own photographs, snapshots taken during a trip to New Zealand and Australia.

The subjects, shown here presumably as objects or textures of a social environment, are exclusively female. The striking feature is the sign Alpha Street, isolated from its context and thus pointing nowhere. A narration takes shape, with the viewer in the role of the spectator of a dreamlike, surreal sequence – at once detached, excluded and ensnared in a crippling perpetuity between past and future" (Anna Vetter).

At first glance, Brandenburg's almost spectrally delicate pencil drawings seem like negatives of snapshots of a bizarre parallel world. His realistic scenes with public demonstrators, flagwaving football fans, clowns and fairgrounds, his portraits of friends and relatives, his water fountains and monumental Christmas decorations have an unsettlingly threatening effect. The silvery, shiny materiality of the graphite surfaces is combined with finely-nuanced, gently tapering contours. Everything is bathed in a blaze of unreal light. The motifs on the white paper seem deprived of their original peaceful quality. The way he models the surface structures immerses the images from everyday life "in an acid bath of abstraction" (Harald Fricke).

Brandenburg "examines in drawing the masks and symbols of a ruthless event culture: the ritual outfits of football fans, the chubby bodies of fairground figures and mascots, the slogans and symbols on pennants, banners and billboards" (Oliver Koerner von Gustorf). He draws mostly from his own photographs, which attempt to capture the moment of veering from one motif to another. His concern is what lies between them: "It's like a cut in film, or like individual stills that make up a film – it's like trying to depict an aura", Brandenburg once explained in an interview.

In his speech at the 2005 award ceremony of the prestigious Karl Ströher Prize to Marc Brandenburg in the Frankfurt Museum of Modern Art, writer Ulf Poschardt remarked that although Brandenburg stands in the tradition of pop art and its delight in surface appearance, he still combines the aspects of realism and transfiguration in a contemporary manner. He added that "it was not so much the media world and its images that Brandenburg captured, but rather moments of experienced intensity. A timid viewer (and aren't we all, when confronted with delicate, intimate drawings?) has the feeling that he is looking at the photo negatives of a deeply-felt life. The sheer technical skill and refinement of Marc Brandenburg's work has perpetuated the snapshot. The moment is endowed with permanence. The shock of the moment has been sketched into permanency." There is an evident affinity with the 19th-century genre and history portraitist Adolf von Menzel, whom Brandenburg greatly admires. Also Berlin protagonists of the New Objectivity – such as Otto Dix and George Grosz – may be seen as precursors of Brandenburg.

Brandenburg's iconography often draws on scenes showing loss of control and extreme physicality. In 2008 Diedrich Diederichsen, writing about Brandenburg's aesthetics of excess, said that "the visual grammar of excess is essentially that of an accelerated or accelerating change-over of images which are in themselves clearly contoured. Their smallest element is the stroboscopic flash, alternately bright and darkened images where the bright parts produce a sequence of their own; this is at once excessively bright, leaping out aggressively at the viewer, yet still kept at a distance by the dark interruptions, the effect of proximity thus being mitigated. Brandenburg's drawings endow this experience of the world with intensity and permanence."

Marc Brandenburg, born in Berlin in 1965, grew up in Germany and Texas, USA. He gained a wide reputation during the 1990s with his distinctive pencil drawings. Today, his works are represented in collections worldwide, including the MoMA/New York, Deutsche Bank, Kupferstichkabinett/Berlin, Kunsthalle/Hamburg, Harlem Studio Museum/New York, Kupferstichkabinett/Dresden, Städtische Galerie/Wolfsburg and Museum Moderner Kunst/Frankfurt, and have been exhibited in international museums. In recent years, Kunsthaus/Stade (2015), Städtische Galerie/Wolfsburg (2012), Kunsthalle/Hamburg (2011) and Denver Art Museum (2010) have devoted major solo exhibitions to his work.

 

 

Website : Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac

 

Source : Artdaily

 

11495 - 20170331 - Exhibition of new shaped canvas works by Blair Thurman on view at Gagosian, Geneva - 25.01.2017-31.03.2017

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Blair Thurman

And now, a bubble burst, And now, a world, 2017
Acrylic on canvas on wood
72 1/2 × 54 × 5 inches (184.2 × 137.2 × 12.7 cm)
© Blair Thurman

Photo by Rob McKeever

Gagosian is presenting new shaped canvas works by Blair Thurman. This is his first exhibition with the gallery in Switzerland.

Thurman’s influences range from Pop art and Minimalism to relics from childhood, popular music, and 1970s cinema. His standardized forms, pulled from slot-car racetracks, architectural frameworks, and found shapes from daily life take on a nostalgic register, the fascinations of boyhood working to render abstract geometries more idiosyncratic and accessible. Thurman transposes the formal details of these everyday objects into the subliminal realm of abstraction.

Repeating previously used motifs and introducing new ones, Thurman produces dimensional paintings recalling the pleasures of the road or the silver screen of his childhood era. He enlarges the concave slots of model racetracks and paints them in bold colors that recall the Spectraflame paint and decals of Hot Wheels cars. These recurring references, however, also begin to resemble unrelated forms, to which he alludes in his titles—including Shades of Pemberton (2016), Nite Owl (2016), and Hippie Car Spin-Out #3 (2017). Nite Owl, a new motif born from the abstracted form of a hubcap, which evolved from one of the “mask” works, is comprised of both flat and curved planes, its clean angles protruding from the wall. With panels in orange, white, and black, it simultaneously evokes Constructivist painting and the graphics of racing, while its title and visible brushstrokes encourage imagining the two circles on either side as the wise bird's eyes. Thurman’s eccentric references and private jokes coincide with his serious motivation to give painting an inside edge.

Thurman allows feeling to pervade objectivity. Artist Steven Parrino called him a “Pop Sensitive.” Influenced by Parrino, as well as Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, and Nam June Paik, he participates in a dialogue about the limits of image-making by seeking out subjects that have been left out of art history, and presenting them through formal techniques of repetition, light, and contour. His works are static, yet their slopes and junctures brim with latent energy, causing the eyes to move quickly around them—the active gaze standing in for absent racing cars. Thurman refers to the style and significance of his work as its “signature-content” as he investigates the intersection between our cultural environment and our imagined fantasies, examining the memory and poetry embedded in the very act of looking.

Blair Thurman was born in 1961 in New Orleans, Louisiana, and currently lives and works in New York. He received his B.F.A. from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Canada, and his M.F.A. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His work is featured in the collections of the Centre national des arts plastiques, Paris; Fonds régional d’art contemporain, France; and the Syz Collection, Switzerland. Recent solo exhibitions include Le Magasin—Centre National d’Art Contemporain, France (2014); and “Honeybadgers,” Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Oklahoma (2015). Thurman’s work was included in the 46th Biennale di Venezia in 1995.

Website : Gagosian

 

Source : Artdaily

 

11494 - 20170325 - Lehmann Maupin presents first solo presentation of Kim Guiline's work in the United States - New York - 16.02.2017-25.03.2017

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Kim Guiline, Untitled, 1967. Oil on canvas, 38.19 x 51.18 inches 97 x 130 cm. Courtesy the artist, Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong, and Gallery Hyundai, Seoul. Photo: Max Yawney.

Lehmann Maupin announces the gallery’s inaugural exhibition for Kim Guiline, the first solo presentation of his work in the United States. The lauded Korean artist is one of the foundational members of the Dansaekhwa movement that emerged in South Korea during the 1970s. The exhibition will feature a survey of work that includes rarely shown paintings from the 1960s, his well-known black and white paintings from the 1970s, and bright monochrome paintings from the 1980s-2000s.

Dansaekhwa translates to “monochromatic painting,” and is also identified by experimental modes of paint application—scraping or pushing of pigments through canvas—that aimed to break away from classical approaches to art making. The resulting paintings were considered to be avant-garde, both aesthetically and in their criticism of political and art establishments. Kim Guiline’s paintings thus can be seen as a reflection of the sociopolitical landscape of Korea during the 1970s, a period of authoritarian rule and government surveillance. In contrast to propagandistic art praising the government, Kim Guiline produced abstract paintings that connected Korean heritage to the natural environment, often expressing a spiritual relationship to color and materiality.

In this exhibition, viewers are invited to consider the nuances of Kim Guiline’s work that firmly place him among his Dansaekhwa contemporaries while also delineating his improvisations upon the methodologies of this group. His paintings from the 1960s were inspired by his childhood dreams and demonstrated an interest in geometry and color-field abstraction. In the 1970s, he was working with a more restrained palette in order to explore the numerous narrative and formal possibilities of black and white pigments. During the 1980s, his work developed to include small repetitive squares and egg-shaped dots that became signature gestures in his monochrome canvases. By the 1990s, Kim Guiline was working primarily with five colors: black, blue, red, yellow, and green, allowing him to prioritize surface, texture, and brushwork. Like many Dansaekhwa artists, Kim Guiline is interested in exploring the possible spiritual associations of color.

Contrary to his peers who frequently use white, Kim Guiline often paints with black. Though the color typically has ominous associations, for Kim Guiline, it is representative of creation, renewal, and beginning.

As a whole, Kim Guiline’s practice can be identified by his dedication to the medium of oil paint and the accentuation of color and flatness across all periods of his work. To achieve a matte surface, the artist perfected a technique of using newspaper to absorb the excess oils from the paint. Equally unique is his treatment of layering individual colors on the canvas, rather than pre-mixing his pigments. The accumulation of these layers, upwards of 30 in a single painting, is what achieves the intensity and depth of color that reverberates in his paintings, despite the restrictive palette. Repeated, overlapping marks atop this layered, matte surface draw attention to the artist’s handling of material and invite the viewer to consider the philosophical implications behind the thick accumulation of paint. Kim Guiline’s works present a series of metaphorical propositions about the act and subject of painting that invite us to consider the meaning of the abstract image created by layering oil paint.

Kim Guiline (b. 1936, Gowon, Korea; lives and works in Paris) graduated from Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, South Korea in 1960; Dijon University, France in 1965; École and Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Paris in 1968; and received his BFA from École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Paris in 1971. His work has been featured in numerous international exhibitions and biennials including Color Pool, Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Ansan, South Korea (2015); Inhabiting the World, Busan Biennale, Busan, South Korea (2014); Scenes vs Scenes, Buk Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea (2013); Dansaekhwa: Korean Monochrome Painting, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, South Korea (2012); Qui is Full, Daegu Art Museum, Daegu, South Korea (2011); Korean Abstract Art 1958-2008, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea (2008); and The Opening Exhibition, Seoul National University Museum MoA, Seoul, South Korea (2006). His work is held in numerous public and private collections including Busan Museum of Art, Busan, South Korea; Daegu Art Museum, Daegu, South Korea; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, South Korea; and the Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea.

Website : Lehmann Maupin

 

Source : Artdaily

 

11493 - 20170331 - Ayyam Gallery presents a collective exhibition that highlights contemporary painters from the Middle East - Beirut - 08.02.2017-31.03.2017

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Samia Halaby , Scattering Yellow, 2013, acrylic on linen canvas, 145 x 145 cm.

 

Ayyam Gallery Beirut is presenting Painting Across Generations , a collective exhibition that highlights contemporary painters from the Middle East who are recognised as international trendsetters.

Featuring works by Samia Halaby, Safwan Dahoul, Thaier Helal, Tammam Azzam, and Afshin Pirhashemi, Painting Across Generations showcases some of the recent developments in art that are steering a new wave of painting in the Arab world and Iran. This diverse selection of artists represents a multigenerational lineage of ongoing experimentation in the region.

A series of 2013 paintings by pioneering abstract painter Samia Halaby, for example, demonstrates how colourist compositions can recreate the sensations of nature. Using abstraction as a means of describing the interplays of light, tones, and shapes of foliage, or the movement, density, and reflectivity of water, Halaby encourages the viewer to recall similar environments, to rely on memory and experiential experience in order to complete the picture. Thaier Helal also uses the formalism of painting to capture the physical characteristics of natural settings and the evolution of organic forms, alluding to the regenerative power of water in works that depict the Assi River in Syria. By incorporating rocks, leaves, and sand, Helal builds the textures of waterways that have survived the rise and fall of civilizations over centuries, serving as an essential resource for communities that must start anew.

Selected from his ongoing Storeys series, Tammam Azzam’s untitled work places an emphasis on the formal properties of painting in order to approximate the devastation of the Syrian war as he documents the human toll of the conflict. After a two-year hiatus due to forced migration, Azzam returned to using the medium with a new approach that emphasises how painting can serve as a form of art intervention. His recent large-scale works make Syria’s ruin inescapable with imposing compositions and tactile surfaces that appear on the brink of collapse.

Safwan Dahoul represents the Syrian conflict through allegorical representations in his ongoing Dream series, a body of work that has evolved over the span of three decades. The most recent iteration of the series demonstrates how Dahoul uses colour, or the absence of it, and vacant space to further emphasise the affective details of his recurring protagonist. In Dream 107 (2015) Dahoul’s alienated heroine wades through a sea submerged in fog as a small paper boat—an evocation of the current refugee crisis—floats in the foreground. The artist’s figure is rendered with attributes that are taken from the history of visual culture, such as a Pharaonic eye and the hands of saints in Flemish icon paintings. These details are given new meaning in Dahoul’s work, as our increasingly connected world is essentially described as shattered and beyond repair.

Afshin Pirhashemi uses allegory and historical references to comment on the status of women in his native Iran. In Vitruvian Woman (2015) a female figure is painted as the ideal of man as she defiantly stares at the viewer. Two additional women are shown behind her in straight jackets, attempting to break free from the physical restraints. The artist’s central character is depicted with a mix of realism and expressionism, as Pirhashemi represents a moment of transcendence with dramatic lines and fluid brushwork.

 

 

Website : Ayyam Gallery

 

Source : Artdaily

 

11492 - 20170318 - Exhibition of works by Catalan artist Antoni Tapies at Timothy Taylor - London -16.02.2017-18.03.2017

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Installation view. Photo: Sylvain Deleu. Courtesy Timothy Taylor.

 

Timothy Taylor is presenting an exhibition of works by celebrated Catalan artist Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012) that, for the most part, have never been shown outside of Spain before. Emerging in the period between 1999 until the artist’s death, these late works, often monumental in size, reveal the artist at his most vigorous.

As early as 1955, Antoni Tàpies declared: “If forms are not capable of wounding, irritating or inducing society to meditate, to make it realise how backward it is, if they are not a revulsive, then they are not authentic works of art.” This position is evident in the works he produced throughout his long and prolific career, not least of all the explicitly confrontational, ambiguous works produced after 2000.

Tàpies believed that an artist’s responsibility was to interpret the contemporary situation. Now more than ever, these late works seem to demand a reflection on the human condition. In bringing us directly back to the body, in confrontational works that suggest violence, sex, bodily excrement – the abject – Tàpies undermines the ease of disassociation our screen-based culture has produced.

Tàpies was of the generation defined by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that instead of understanding our bodies as something we have, we rather are our bodies. For Tàpies, the body was a site of representation since the 1950s, and a way of exposing what we refuse to see and confront, but that is essential to understanding our own conscience.

In order to access the universal through the personal, Tàpies employed pathos – an artwork’s ability to effect an emotional response in an audience by triggering a personal recollection. In Cames i AT (2011), the artist offers us a pelvis and legs, as well as genitalia comprised of abstract, black gestures and human hair. This bold image is juxtaposed with the artist’s name, and the name of his wife, suggesting a portrait – the union of man and woman, a figure neither explicitly male nor female, but possibly both. This way interpretation is left open through strategic ambiguity.

According to Theodor Adorno’s definition of ‘late’ in an artist’s oeuvre, the works included in this exhibition can be categorised as such due to their fragmentary nature – where the process is manifest, and the works maintain the “superiority of their mystery.” The fragment became a more determined strategy for Tàpies in his late work.

Tàpies flirted with figuration and abstraction simultaneously. Even at his most abstract, images emerge from matter. In the painting Matèria sinuosa (2010), violent images materialise from the seemingly abstract forms, suggesting a human torso and arms engaged in a brutal act. While his materials create an immediate, physical experience, his distortion of the image has an unsettling effect – matter offers nothing concrete. In this way the viewer completes the work by intercepting the image with personal experience and imagination. As he stated in conversation with Barbara Catoir in 1991: “I see that by barely suggesting things the association of ideas I like to provoke in the spectator widens.”

Antoni Tàpies was one of Spain’s most accomplished and prolific artists. He extended Spain's early avant-garde lineage (Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí) to become a leading figure in the country's art world in the second half of the twentieth century. His work is included in numerous public and private collections internationally including Tate Galleries, UK; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome; Le Centre Pompidou, Paris; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Tàpies represented Spain in the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993 and was awarded the Golden Lion. He remained an influential presence in Spain for over sixty years, until his death in 2012.

 

 

Website : Timothy Taylor

 

Source : Artdaily

 

11491 - 20170325 - Stealing Space: Annely Juda Fine Art presents exhibition by Richard Wilson - London - 26.01.2017-25.03.2017

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Richard Wilson, Block of Dering, 2017. Wood, 353 x 250 x 268 cm. © Richard Wilson. Courtesy Annely Juda Fine Art.

 

Annely Juda Fine Art presents an exhibition by Richard Wilson entitled Stealing Space. The exhibition is the artist's first at the gallery and his first solo show in London since unveiling his major site-specific work, Slipstream, at Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 2. The exhibition features four new works, two of which are in direct response to the gallery's internal and external architecture. 

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Works in this exhibition dominate the gallery's space and stand, in places, above the height of the architectural beams. In the main room, Wilson has created a sculpture of a slice of the negative space or “space between” the hallway and staircase leading to the gallery’s main entrance. Partial details of a doorway, steps or a bannister in negative form are visible on the sculpture which sits straight on the ground at a tilted angle, offering a reassessment of the perhaps completely unnoticed yet familiar surroundings the viewer has just encountered. Block of Dering, meanwhile, takes the façade of the gallery building at 23 Dering Street and reconfigures it into a near-cube. Even the gallery’s signage can be made out in this sculpture which presents the local architecture in an entirely new way.

In the second room, a sculpture delineates the “space between” an area of Wilson’s home in South East London whilst Blocka Flats takes a piece of household furniture reconfigured into a form reminiscent of an urban landscape on a micro scale, the very same landscape which Wilson refers to in other works on a 1:1 scale. Two preparatory sketches for each work hang near their sculptural counterparts, whilst in the final room, Wilson shows maquettes of past works and those not yet realised.

Wilson’s work offers a new perspective on everyday spaces, forcing us to reevaluate our surroundings and to look again. Past works slice through and upturn otherwise recognisable objects in, for example, Slice of Reality 2000, a boat sliced to its living quarters only and standing on the bank of the River Thames. Set North for Japan (74 °33' 2") 2000, meanwhile, is a full scale reconstruction of the artist’s London terraced house reduced to a metal frame and partially submerged into the ground in Japan, maintaining its exact original perpendicular and horizontal orientation to true North that it had in London. Firmly rooted in the context of the urban landscape, Wilson’s work takes the familiar and forms new and unusual experiences. For this exhibition, the gallery’s architecture and that of Wilson’s own domestic space is turned inside out and wrapped around itself. The viewer is disorientated as the external is made internal and the often overlooked parts of the buildings become central to our focus.

Richard Wilson is a world-renowned British artist whose architectural interventions have won him acclaim throughout his career. Wilson rose to prominence in 1987 when his installation, 20:50 - consisting of a room filled to waist height with reflective sump oil - was shown at Matt's Gallery in London and purchased by The Saatchi Gallery. Wilson has gone on to create a series of predominantly site-specific works, most recently Slipstream (2014), which stands at an impressive 78 meters at Heathrow Airport's Terminal 2. Wilson was appointed visiting research professor at the University of East London in 2004, elected as a member of the Royal Academy in 2006 and in 2008 was awarded an honorary doctorate at the University of Middlesex. He has created permanent and temporary works at prominent locations worldwide and his works have been shown at institutions such as The Serpentine Gallery, London; Saatchi Gallery, London; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra and Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona.

 

 

Website : Annely Juda Fine Art

 

Source : Artdaily

 

11490 - 20170325 - DAM Gallery presents a selection of works from different periods of Vera Molnar's career - Berlin - 21.01.2017-25.03.2017

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Vera Molnar's work has been continuously shown in major museums.

 

Vera Molnar, who turned ninety-three early in January, has never really been eager to gain acceptance on the art market. I remember when visiting her in 2014 to inform her that she had won a lifetime award, she was more than surprised. Molnar was already in her sixties when she started selling her work regularly. Despite her artist friends like Francois Morellet, Victor Vaserely and Max Bill, she perceived her art mainly as experimental research. It developed into a dialogue between the computer and her oeuvre, which continues to the present. The more conceptual series, which lead to deconstruction or dissolution of forms, were mainly created in the 1970s to the 1990s. After that installations and paintings again gained importance. Over all this years she kept a sketch book which contains a wide range of unrealized treasures to which we can look forward.

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Vera Molnar's work has been continuously shown in major museums, most recently at the Museum Ludwig, Budapest; the Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zürich; and Kunstmuseum, Stuttgart among others. In 2017 we look forward to exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw as well as an exhibition during the Venice Biennale.

DAM Gallery presents a selection of new pieces for Berlin from different periods from 1974 to present time.

"I use a computer to combine the forms because I hope that the assistance of this tool will permit me to go beyond the bounds of learning, cultural heritage, environment; in short: of the social thing, which we must consider to be our second nature. Because of its huge capacity for combination, the computer permits systematic investigation of the field of possibilities in the visual world, helping the painter to clear his brain of mental/cultural “ready-mades” and in enabling him to produce combinations of forms never seen before, either in nature, or in museums, to create unimaginable images." --Vera Molnar, 1980

 

 

Website : DAM Gallery

 

Source : Artdaily

 

11489 - 20170318 - Paul Mpagi Sepuya's debut exhibition with Yancey Richardson on view in New York - 02.02.2017-18.03.2017

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Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Mirror Study ( _Q5A 3505), 2016. Archival pigment print, 51 x 34 inches Edition of 5. 

 

Yancey Richardson is presenting Figures, Grounds and Studies, Paul Mpagi Sepuyaʼs debut exhibition with the gallery. While deeply engaged with ideas about studio portraiture, the exhibition frames the photographic process as an ongoing conversation and negotiation between the viewer, the artist, the subject and the work. Simultaneously, Sepuya investigates the role of desire as a productive and critical force in the medium of photography.

Referencing artistic tropes of homoerotic studio photography, Sepuya comments on the medium as a process of constructive desire: the desire to photograph, to look and to touch. Using drapes or framing to partially obscure the sitter, the studio or the camera, he engenders in the viewer a longing to see what is hidden and implicates the viewer in the looking. Sepuya inserts himself into the images, appearing alternately in a fragmented self-portrait, obscured behind a camera or drape, or reaching into the frame to arrange a sitter, adjust a cloth, or point to the model. His presence is mediated through a self-conscious play of presentation and concealing, exploring surface and reflection, lens and mirror, touch and trace.

Sepuyaʼs photographs often contain images of previous work that is fragmented, conjoined, overlapping the camera lens or taped to the studio mirror into which he is shooting. He states that this approach “…allows me to hold, within the studio, all material as potential. Each enters into the frame of another within a chain of productions, revision, destruction and re-production.” Eschewing digital technology, Sepuya uses the mirror to collapse the studio space into one plane, allowing him to integrate the subject, the camera tripod and prints of earlier images into a single layered, collage-like composition. Sepuyaʼs sitters are friends, lovers, writers and other artists who occupy a charged intersection of the creative, social and sexual spheres in the queer community. The relationships that exist across these “shared subjects,” as Sepuya calls them, and the resulting images serve as an organizing principle for the editing and configuration of their exhibition.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya (b. 1982) lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his M.F.A. from the University of California Los Angeles in 2016 and a B.F.A. from New York University Tisch School of the Arts in 2004. Sepuyaʼs work has been featured in numerous exhibitions including at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Franklin Art Works and The Artist Institute, New York. Public collections featuring Sepuyaʼs work include The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Carnegie Museum of Art. Sepuyaʼs work is also on view in the exhibition DEANA LAWSON, JUDY LINN, & PAUL MPAGI SEPUYA at Sikkema Jenkins Gallery (January 13 - February 18, 2017) and Compassion Protocols curated by Moyra Davey and Jason Simon at Callicoon Fine Arts, New York (January 12 – February 19, 2017).

 

 

Website : Yancey Richardson

Source : Artdaily
 

 

11488 - 20170318 - Exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Robert Kushner opens at DC Moore Gallery - New York - 09.02.2017-18.03.2017

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Exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Robert Kushner opens at DC Moore Gallery

 

DC Moore Gallery presents Robert Kushner: Portraits & Perennials. In this exhibition of new paintings and works on paper, Kushner extends the boundaries of his compositions, infusing his iconic, organic imagery with vibrant color and increased geometric precision in a lyrical synthesis of styles and techniques.

Underscoring the evocative title of the catalogue’s essay, “Do REAL Men Paint Flowers?,” the exhibition seeks to disrupt the narrative surrounding the decorative while exploring the importance of beauty in contemporary art. In paintings such as Bossa Nova (2015), Ahavah (2016), and Nasturtiums–Hot Season (2016), Kushner’s defining grid-like backgrounds have grown increasingly pronounced, as he employs a bold, energized palette of brilliant pinks, purples, and yellows that imbue this body of work with new vigor. “…I began to consider how I could introduce a more raucous color sense, and increase of scale of the individual floral and foliate elements so that they might go spilling off the confines of the canvas,” the artist explains.

These tensions between the figurative and the abstract, achieved through interplays of organic movement and geometric configurations, are in full evidence in works such as Spring Rain (2016) and the artist’s monumental Tenderness (2015). At times the work’s imagery, created with oil and acrylic paint with gold leaf, evokes Matisse’s botanical cutouts, while their bright, vertical bands of color uncannily call to mind the works of Barnett Newman and Ellsworth Kelly. Reflecting on these fluid interchanges, Kushner wittily muses in the exhibition’s catalogue: “So, are geometry and botany at peace? In dialogue? At each other’s throats? I would like to think that when I am done after working on it for weeks and sometimes months, there is an interesting and intentionally confusing juxtaposition between pure abstraction and linear form—that they each balance one another and create their own tightrope act.”

The accompanying catalogue to the exhibition highlights these new developments through a series of thought-provoking questions posed to the artist by notable individuals in fields ranging from the art historical and creative to the spiritual and culinary realms. These included curators and art critics, two museum directors, a poet, a rabbi, a restaurateur, and a diplomat. Their inquiries covered a wide spectrum of Kushner’s artistic concerns and brought new critical insights into the artist’s ongoing body of work.

Robert Kushner has exhibited extensively in the United States, Europe, and Japan. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Brooklyn Museum, in New York, and the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art. His work is featured in public collections such as The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Tate Modern, London, England; and the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Italy. Publications on Kushner’s work include the monograph Gardens of Earthly Delight (Hudson Hills Press, 1997) with essays by Alexandra Anderson and Holland Cotter, and Wild Gardens by Michael Duncan (Pomegranate, 2006). In 2012, Kushner was the editor of an important volume of art criticism by Amy Goldin (1926-1978) titled Amy Goldin: Art in a Hairshirt (Hudson Hills).

 

 

Website : DC Moore Gallery

 

Source : Artdaily

 

11487 - 20170310 - Luiz Zerbini's first exhibition with Stephen Friedman Gallery in London - 08.02.2017-10.03.2017

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Installation view. © Luiz Zerbini. Courtesy: Luiz Zerbini and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London.

Stephen Friedman Gallery announces Luiz Zerbini’s first exhibition with the gallery. The show is comprised of large scale abstract and figurative paintings and slide collages for which he is known. The artist draws visual references from what he sees around him, borrowing from Brazilian cityscapes, lush gardens, art history and pop culture to produce his work.

Zerbini works concurrently on different formal possibilities, using abstract and figurative elements on their own and in combination. Figurative works such as ‘Monster’, ‘Cabeça d'Agua’ and ‘Pica-Pau’ are inspired by memories and photos of trips in Brazil. He simply paints what is around him; the Gaudi-esque building from an island in the bay of Rio in ‘Monster’; the Pica-Pau tree which takes its name from the woodpeckers that live in it; waves in the South Atlantic ocean; and the garden at his studio in Rio. His compositions use classical elements such as veils and windows to the vista outside. Intense colour, metallic paint, and layering with semi translucent pigment bring the surface of the canvas to life.

Zerbini began his career as a figurative painter, finding lasting inspiration in the Brazilian landscape. He then developed a body of more abstract works. These refine and transform the patterns of windows in iconic structures, such as the Oscar Niemeyer Copan building, into paintings of pure geometry that radiate with energy. This was an intentional move towards optical illusion. The surface of ‘Double’ unfolds like origami and ‘Flare’ and ‘Compasso’ use a square grid to create a mesmerising series of circles, half circles and overlapping circles. The latter is Zerbini’s newest investigation into the possibilities of the grid. In ‘Bambu Amarelo’ the geometric waves are punctuated by stems of bamboo. By juxtaposing styles and techniques, organic and geometric patterns, fields of light and shadow, Zerbini creates optical effects that beckon contemplation.

The slide collages in Gallery Two form part of a series that the artist began ten years ago, working from his personal archive and continuing with slides donated to him or bought in markets. They are a forgotten medium and represent a specific period of image production. The collages follow both personal histories and a collective memory. Zerbini leaves notes made by the initial owner visible; ‘me in ‘79’, ‘Disney’ and ‘Seaworld July 1979’, and in some the original images become part of the work. He adds metallic paint or replaces the slide with coloured gelatine, ordering them in rhythmic compositions that mirror the abstraction in his painting.

In 1984 Zerbini participated in ‘Como vai você, geração 80?’ at Parque Lage in Rio de Janeiro, as part of the so-called ‘Generation 80’. It was at this time that he first found recognition; and the artists involved are now thought to be some of the leading names in Latin American art. They aimed to revolutionise and revitalise painting, to make it more relevant to modern Brazil. These artists forged work that was fractured, layered and expressive. Their motto was: ‘return to painting and (or with) pleasure’. Zerbini is one of the few to have remained dedicated to painting, though his work also includes sculpture, video, drawing and photography. Zerbini has collaborated with Barrão and Sergio Mekler as part of Chelpa Ferro, whose eclectic practice explores the plasticity of sound.

Luiz Zerbini is an artist that constantly expands the possibilities of painting and rejects any potential stagnation, working on many bodies of work at a time. This means there is little linearity in his production. This group of work exemplifies his on-going practice; paintings that explore sensory overload, memory, Brazilian folklore, architectronic forms and luxurious flora. The unique combination of abstraction and figuration renders the works equally surreal and real, and imbued with pure joy.

Luiz Zerbini was born in São Paulo in 1959 and lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In 1982 he graduated in Fine Arts from Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado in São Paulo. At an early age he studied painting with José Van Acker and later studied photography with Carlos Moreira and watercolour with Dudi Maia Rosa.

Website : Stephen Friedman Gallery

 

Source : Artdaily

 

11486 - 20170311 - Exclusive exhibition by renowned design duo Studio Job on view at Carpenters Workshop Gallery - Paris - 19.01.2017-11.3.2017

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                                                   Studio Job, Big Ben Afthermath, 2009 - 2014. To start the year, Carpenters Workshop Gallery continues its ten-year anniversary programme, dedicating its Parisian space to an exclusive exhibition by renowned design duo - Studio Job.

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Entitled ‘Here, There, Nowhere’ this exceptional solo show from Job Smeets and Nynke Tynagel will be the occasion to present a full range of new creations with some of the most emblematic pieces and for the first time drawings.

Recognised for their forward-looking approach, dreamlike and sometimes provocative designs, the exhibition will reveal the scope of the duo’s savoir-faire craftsmanship that floats between audacity, exuberance and technical prowess.

DESIGN & SYMBOLS
Peculiar creatures, hybrid forms or wacky objects, the works of Studio Job invent a kitsch and fanciful world where the object transcends functionality and affirms a ‘Neo-Gothic’ aesthetic championed by the duo.

Authentic figurative scenes in three dimension and tinged with irony; the creations of Studio Job play upon and thwart iconographic references, notably religious.

The piece ‘Chartres’, a detailed reconstruction close to the architecture of the cathedral, hides underneath a diptych door entirely covered in obscure figures delicately gilded with leaves.

Skulls, snakes and insects: iconoclastic symbols convoluted with sarcasm.

POLITICS & NARRATION
Behind the displayed exuberance, the design duo also affirms a satirical and political stance, as in the luminous sculpture ‘Big Ben (Aftermath)’.

A reinterpretation of the emblematic London monument and allegory for the Western, the work stages their cynical vision of a world in decline.

As storytellers, the object is never the starting point of a narrative but the whole story.

‘Train Crash’, an epic collision of two steam trains borrowed from the imagery of Western films, has the pretext of a table that despite its imposing mass defies the laws of gravity.

Alongside great history, grand monuments, cinema, or popular culture, Studio Job also draws inspiration from the anecdotal to create realistic, but always humorous ‘situational-objects’.

For example ‘Cat Fight’: a brawl between two cats becomes a pretext for a luminous sculpture.

BRONZE IN ALL ITS STATES
A material favoured by the duo who have mastered all its codes, bronze is tamed and endlessly worn down. Whether painted, polished, burnished and gilded… the savoir-faire of Studio Job’s workshop allows them to cut loose from the material’s constraints and grant all its freedoms.

Depending on the pieces, the use of noble materials such as hand-blown glass and marble are added to the bronze, with which the designers then compose their pieces in very limited editions.

Essential preliminary stages, drawings and preparatory plans also constitute real works in themselves. Amongst the sculptures, four of them will be exhibited in ‘Here, There, Nowhere’: a new voyage in the Studio Job galaxy.   

                                                                     Website : Carpenters Workshop Gallery

                                                                          Source : Artdaily