VernissageTV Art TV: Recent Episodes
VernissageTV
Alvaro Barrington (born in 1983, Caracas, Venezuela, lives in London, UK) participates in the Venice Art Biennale 2026 with the artwork “Labor Day Parade ’91”, which refers to the West Indian Day Parade in Brooklyn. This is the official description:
Alvaro Barrington paints very quickly, but the approach can take years of study and fitful epiphany. When it comes, his stroke is kinetic, smoked-out, conveying nothing less than the clash that birthed the black Atlantic. What painting means to him is complicated. What does it mean for the painter to fabricate a carnival dancer out of aluminium, reaching three metres tall? To wrap a sofa in plastic, evoking his grandmother in Grenada? Barrington sublimates personal memory, pop culture, and his study of art history into a Creolised, recombinant aesthetic, driven by a daunting ambition to convey how blackness sees itself from the inside.
Barrington’s installation Labor Day Parade ’91 references memories of the West Indian Day Parade in Brooklyn. It arrives generating its own weather. There is irresoluble tension in the discordance of materials: a truck wrapped in painted Kuba tapestries, its illuminated carcass housing a cell block installation with metal figurines and a winged rope sculpture. There is the crackling sense of the Caribbean syncretic, as embodied by Barrington’s rewriting of European modernism or New Testament scenes, his subversion of the foundational images of the sin and its sinners as agents of liberation. And there is, most viscerally, the feeling of movement – relentless, forward, against all odds.
—Doreen St-Félix
Alvaro Barrington: Labor Day Parade ’91 / Venice Art Biennale 2026. Venice (Italy), May 8, 2026.
Timur Si-Qin: Mariposita, 2026, presented by the galleries Magician Space and Société at Art Basel 2026 Unlimited. Official description: Mariposita is an immersive sculptural installation comprising a stainless-steel structure and an LED screen. It envisions a fragile biosphere left to its own devices: a delicate tangle of plant life, insects, and organic matter forming an integrated, interdependent whole. Suspended forms and flickering imagery create a dreamlike atmosphere. Referencing ecosystems under threat from human activity, the work functions as a meditative gesture, inviting close attention to the complexity and richness of natural systems. Rather than positioning nature as a backdrop, the installation frames it as an active, guiding presence, emphasizing interconnection. Timur Si-Qin (born 1984 in Berlin) is an artist of German and Mongolian-Chinese descent. He interweaves cultural evolution, cognition, and contemporary philosophy to create art that dissolves boundaries between the natural and the synthetic, the human and non-human. Si-Qin lives and works in New York.
Timur Si-Qin: Mariposita, 2026, presented by the galleries Magician Space and Société at Art Basel 2026 Unlimited. Basel (Switzerland), June 19, 2026.
Mareunrol’s, Bruno Birmanis: Untamed Assembly: Backstage of Utopia / Pavilion of Latvia at Venice Art Biennale 2026. Venice (Italy), May 6, 2026.
Official description:
The pavilion presents a new work by artist duo MAREUNROL’S in dialogue with the archives of Untamed Fashion Assemblies (UFA), a series of experimental events founded by alternative fashion designer Bruno Birmanis in Riga between 1990 and 1999. Organised during a decade of profound political transformation, UFA expanded fashion across visual art, music, and club culture, defying conservative social norms inherited from the Soviet era, and offering an alternative to the commercialised fashion markets in the West.
Linking past and present, the exhibition highlights utopian thinking at moments of transition. It asks how collective imagination, desire, and visibility are produced as political and economic systems shift, and how futures and new forms of togetherness are rehearsed from behind the scenes rather than on the main stage. Rethinking UFA’s legacy, the installation is conceived as a backstage, where the clothing rack becomes a holding device and the architecture of the stories.
Newly digitised footage from Birmanis’ archive traces the threads of travel and bordercrossing, transnational community building, scarcity as the force for creativity and fragile political freedom. Returning to this archive, the pavilion asks what can be gathered today from the utopian visions of these festivals.
Muhannad Shono: Towers of Infinite Horizons, 2026, presented by Athr at Art Basel 2026 Unlimited. Official description: For Art Basel Unlimited, ATHR presents Towers of Infinite Horizons by Muhannad Shono, a 17-metrewide installation housed within a lightweight metal lattice structure. Segments of reclaimed foundry sand form the sculp ture’s dark, granular sur-face, transforming industrial residue into a tactile landscape. By reconfiguring the ritual of ascent into a lateral, bodily traversal, Shono interrogates the vertical logic of towers, historically machines of authority and doctrine, presenting instead a fallen monolith: an attentive, listening structure.
Towers were historically raised to command the horizon of ideas. From watchtowers to transmission spires, they projected signals, ideology, and authority from the high ground of the few to the many below. Height rendered hierarchy visible, enforcing a singular narrative that directed imagination upward toward a fixed source rather than outward toward multiplicity.
The tower lies fractured and suspended within a bespoke lattice scaffolding, held in a state of arrested decay. Neither complete nor erased, it becomes a listening structure, attentive rather than directive. Constructed from reclaimed foundry sand, a material designed to be temporary, the work reverses the logic of casting. Here, the sand is not a means to form, but the form itself: fractured, unstable, and open to continuous transformation.
To “climb” the tower is no longer to rise above the world, but to move laterally through its interior. Like tracing exposed roots or navigating a fallen tree, the body becomes the activating force. Architecture no longer projects ideology; it absorbs interpretation.
For new narratives to emerge, monoliths must fall. In collapse, space opens. When towers fall, they relinquish singular authority and unfold into infinite horizons.
Muhannad Shono: Towers of Infinite Horizons, 2026, presented by Athr at Art Basel 2026 Unlimited. Basel (Switzerland), June 19, 2026.
Claes Oldenburg’s “Gartenschlauch” (Garden Hose) is a large-scale public sculpture created in 1983 by the Swedish-American Pop Art artist Claes Oldenburg (1929–2022) in collaboration with his wife, the Dutch artist Coosje van Bruggen (1942–2009). It stands in Eschholzpark (also called Stühlinger Park) in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany.
The sculpture is an oversized, bright red garden hose with a matching faucet (tap). It features a hose, approximately 84–125 meters (about 276–410 feet) long and 0.5 meters (20 inches) in diameter; and a faucet, roughly 10–11 meters (35 feet) high. Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen‘s Gartenschlauch is made of of steel painted with polyurethane enamel, fabricated in sections at Mannesmannröhren-Werke AG in Mülheim (Ruhr area). Engineers developed a special bending process to curve the 30 hose sections in two directions simultaneously.
The piece loops dramatically across the park, with the giant faucet standing prominently. It is a classic example of Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s style: monumental, playful enlargements of everyday objects that transform public spaces.
The site of Eschholzpark was formerly an allotment garden (Schrebergarten) area that was cleared for a vocational school center and the new park. The sculpture commemorates this history — the garden hose symbolizes a key tool from the vanished gardens. Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s design won Freiburg’s 1980 art competition.
The artwork was installed in April 1983 and inaugurated on May 2, 1983, as “Kunst am Bau” (art in architecture) for the school center. Costs were around 400,000 German marks. This was one of their early joint large-scale projects. Oldenburg was known for Pop Art works that brought ordinary items into public view, making art accessible and site-specific.
The sculpture serves as a playful landmark, popular with children (who climb on parts of it) and visitors. The surrounding park offers lawns, playgrounds, sports facilities, and a stream. Over the years it has faced graffiti and paint wear, leading to occasional maintenance discussions, but it remains a beloved local icon and one of Freiburg’s most significant public artworks. It is part of Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s global series of oversized everyday objects, similar to their giant clothespin, baseball bat, or ice cream cone sculptures.
Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen: Gartenschlauch (Garden Hose). Eschholzpark, Freiburg im Breisgau (Germany), July 18, 2026.
The Fondation Beyeler presents the first solo exhibition in Switzerland dedicated to Yayoi Kusama, showcasing over 300 works spanning seven decades. Developed with the artist and her Tokyo studio, the exhibition features pieces from global collections, highlighting Yayoi Kusama’s influence. From her early 1950s paintings in Japan to her avant-garde contributions in 1960s New York and her return to Japan in the 1970s, Kusama’s versatile practice defies categorization, encompassing painting, sculpture, installation, performance, and more. Her iconic motifs—polka dots, nets, and mirrors—explore infinity, self-dissolution, and transcendence. Key works include over 130 pieces new to Europe, iconic infinity nets, accumulation sculptures, Narcissus Garden (1966/2025), and a new Infinity Mirror Room created for this exhibition. Spanning 10 galleries and the museum’s garden, the exhibition runs until January 25, 2026. The exhibition is jointly organized by Fondation Beyeler with Museum Ludwig in Cologne (14 March 2026 – 2 August 2026) and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (11 September 2026 – 17 January 2027).
Yayoi Kusama Retrospective at Fondation Beyeler. Press Preview, October 10, 2025.
Complete film (23:51 min.)Press text (excerpt):
This autumn, the Fondation Beyeler is proud to present the first solo exhibition in Switzerland dedicated to the work of Yayoi Kusama (*1929, lives and works in Tokyo), one of the most groundbreaking artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. The exhibition, developed in close collaboration with the artist and her studio, brings together over 300 works from Japan, Singapore, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Sweden, France and Switzerland, underscoring the global resonance and enduring impact of Kusama’s artistic legacy.
Spanning over seven decades, the exhibition traces Kusama’s extraordinary journey from her earliest creative efforts in postwar Japan to her internationally celebrated status today. Beginning with rarely seen paintings and watercolours made in the early 1950s in her hometown of Matsumoto, the exhibition follows her bold transition to New York in the late 1950s, where she played a formative role in the avant-garde scenes of the 1960s and 1970s. Returning to Japan in the 1970s, Kusama continued to reinvent her artistic language in deeply personal and politically resonant ways. Today, she is arguably the most well- known living female artist and remains a force of remarkable innovation and relevance, creating new work with undiminished intensity.
Through more than 70 years of production, Kusama has consistently defied categorization. Her practice spans a rich array of media – painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, performance, collage, fashion, literature, and film – making her one of the most versatile and influential artists of our time. The exhibition foregrounds key periods of radical invention, offering a dynamic portrait of an artist who continues to reshape our understanding of art and experience.
Central to Kusama’s oeuvre is the concept of infinity – not merely as a formal device, but as a lived, spiritual, and psychological reality. Her hallmark motifs – polka dots, nets, mirrors, and repetitive forms – are more than aesthetic signatures; they reflect a profound meditation on the cycles of life and death, the dissolution of the self, and the desire for transcendence. From the hypnotic intricacy of her infinity net paintings to the immersive intensity of the Infinity Mirror Rooms especially produced for the exhibition, Kusama creates worlds that envelop the viewer in endless visual loops. These recursive environments disrupt the boundaries between interior and exterior, body and space, self and cosmos. Through repetition, Kusama evokes the rhythmic pulse of existence.
Her works are not simply to be observed – they are to be experienced. Her mirrored installations and expansive environments pull viewers into perceptual and emotional states of suspension and immersion. In doing so, Kusama transforms personal struggle into shared sensation. Her art becomes a space of connection, where repetition offers both confrontation and comfort, vulnerability and power.
This landmark exhibition will feature a wide range of iconic pieces, including over 130 works that have never been shown in Europe, alongside new works produced specifically for this occasion. Among the highlights are her mesmerising early works, the iconic infinity nets and the accumulation sculptures, Narcissus Garden, 1966/2025, and Infinity Mirrored Room – Illusion Inside the Heart, 2025. “Yayoi Kusama” will also feature a brand-new Infinity Mirror Room and immersive environment created especially for the exhibition. Visitors will have the rare opportunity to experience the full scope of Kusama’s vision – from intimate early drawings to monumental environments – unfolding across the galleries of the Fondation Beyeler. Taking over 10 galleries and the garden, her mesmerising installations will transform not only the museum interiors and architecture but also the adjacent park. Visitors can expect an immersive experience as Kusama’s iconic Infinity Mirror Rooms and vibrant sculptures extend beyond traditional gallery walls, creating a seamless flow of art that engages the museum environment and surrounding landscape in a captivating dialogue of colour, light, and form.
The exhibition offers a multilayered encounter with an artist whose work continues to challenge perception, provoke thought, and awaken feeling. It is a celebration of Kusama’s boundless imagination and an invitation to reflect on the infinite within ourselves.
Leap Year at Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zürich is the first comprehensive solo exhibition in Switzerland of Berlin-and-Seoul-based artist Haegue Yang. Spanning over three decades of practice, the exhibition highlights Yang’s unique visual language, which blends abstraction and figuration across sculpture, installation, video, and collage. Structured around the themes of movement, spirituality, community, and domesticity, the exhibition explores the complexities of identity, migration, and cultural hybridity. Her work navigates personal and collective memory, emphasizing constant transformation, emotional resonance, and the tension between familiarity and foreignness.
Rich in cultural references, Yang’s practice draws from Korean and global folk traditions, modernist legacies, creating immersive environments that are both sensorial and conceptual. Leap Year invites visitors into a layered, contemplative experience that reflects the shifting nature of contemporary life and the quiet power of materials, rituals, and spaces.
The retrospective is organised by the Hayward Gallery, London in association with Kunsthal Rotterdam, and Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich.
Haegue Yang: Leap Year at Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich is curated by Dr. Michael Birchall (Kurator) with Paula Thomaka (assistant curator). Curatorial assistant: Linda Addae and Mirta Gianocca (trainees). The exhibition runs until January 18, 2026.
Haegue Yang: Leap Year / Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich. Zürich (Switzerland), October 2, 2025.
Extended version (24:00 min.)
Mary Heilmann’s exhibition at Hauser & Wirth’s Limmatstrasse gallery in Zürich (Switzerland) showcases over 30 drawings from 1975 to 2005, building on her 2024 “Daydream Nation” show in New York. Coinciding with the release of Mary Heilmann. Works on Paper: 1973–2019 by Hauser & Wirth Publishers, the exhibition highlights her enduring drawing practice. Born in 1940, Heilmann, trained in literature, ceramics, and sculpture, began painting and drawing after moving to New York in 1968. Her works on paper, ranging from watercolor studies to standalone pieces, feature simple geometric forms and abstract marks, reflecting series like Fans, Chairs, Serapes, and Grids. Notable pieces include Untitled Watercolor Study (ca. 1983–1986), inspired by Piet Mondrian, and Islands (1988), linked to European museum collections. The show also features ceramics and sculptural chairs, emphasizing Heilmann’s multimedia approach. The accompanying book explores her drawings as a form of daydreaming and memory, with essays by Alexis Lowry, Jo Applin, and Ilana Savdie. Heilmann’s work, celebrated globally, is currently featured at Dia Beacon, Guild Hall, and the Whitney Museum. The exhibition runs until December 20, 2025.
Mary Heilmann: Works on Paper / Hauser & Wirth Zürich, Limmatstrasse, October 2, 2025.
Press text (excerpt):
Mary Heilmann returns to our gallery on Limmatstrasse with an exhibition of more than 30 drawings made between 1975 and 2005. Expanding on the artist’s exhibition of works on paper, ‘Daydream Nation’, at Hauser & Wirth New York last year, this presentation continues the recent in-depth exploration into Heilmann’s long-standing drawing practice and coincides with the release of a new publication from Hauser & Wirth Publishers, ‘Mary Heilmann. Works on Paper: 1973 – 2019’.
Raised in San Francisco and Los Angeles, Heilmann (b. 1940) completed a degree in literature, before receiving her M.A. in ceramics and sculpture at the University of California, Berkeley. Only after moving to New York in 1968 did she begin to paint and in the early 1970s establish a drawing practice that continues to this day.
Ranging from watercolor studies to paintings on paper in their own right, ‘Mary Heilmann. Works on Paper’ brings together a selection of rarely and never-before-seen drawings that fluctuate in scale and materiality. The exhibition is a celebration of Heilmann’s talent for translating complex images and ideas into deceptively simple geometric forms and abstract gestural marks.
Many of Heilmann’s most well-known and admired series – Fans, Chairs, Serapes, Grids – are represented in the installation as are drawings that have related works in important European museum collections. ‘Untitled Watercolor Study’ (ca. 1983 – 1986) is one of two drawings in the exhibition that are part of a series of works by Heilmann in tribute to the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian that includes ‘M.’ (1985), a painting in the collection of the Museum Kunstpalast. ‘Islands’, (1988), one of the larger watercolors on view, was made after ‘Laurens’ (1986), an oil on canvas in the collection of the De Pont Museum.
The works on view not only demonstrate Heilmann’s work serially but also her tendency to revisit and reimagine certain arrangements of form and color. Made 15 years apart, ‘Broken Study’ (2005) is a recompilation of an early red, black and white composition, ‘Untitled Watercolor Study’ (ca. 1989) and Heilmann’s web imagery seen in ‘Blue Net’ (1991).
As an artist known for working across mediums and for installations that playfully combine disparate works, the exhibition also includes a selection of ceramic ‘Spots’ and sculptural chairs.
About the book
An in-depth study of Mary Heilmann’s mesmerizing works on paper that explores drawing as a form of daydreaming and memory-making for the influential abstract painter.
Mary Heilmann’s works on paper are suffused with the same sensibility as her influential abstract paintings, a casual playfulness animating a rigorous attention to form and colour, resulting in joyful, evocative geometries. Their suggestive power reflects Heilmann’s process of what she calls ‘daydreaming’: a conjuring of the sights, sounds, and events of past and future travels, the cyclical nature of memory informing her return to various motifs across nearly five decades of work. Edited and with an introduction by curator Alexis Lowry, ‘Mary Heilmann: Works on Paper, 1973 – 2019’ includes an essay by art historian Jo Applin and a personal reflection by painter Ilana Savdie, all together offering a compelling account of this previously underexamined aspect of Heilmann’s practice.
About the artist
Considered one of the preeminent contemporary Abstract painters, Heilmann is best known for incorporating a fusion of personal and cultural influences and craft traditions into an artistic practice including paintings, ceramics, and furniture.
Heilmann is the subject of two major institutional exhibitions, ‘Mary Heilmann. Starry Night’ at Dia Beacon in Beacon NY and ‘Mary Heilmann. Water Way’ at Guild Hall in East Hampton, NY both close in October 2025. On view at the Whitney Museum of American Art until January 2026 is ‘Mary Heilmann: Long Line,’ a site-specific installation that celebrates the 10th anniversary of the opening of the Whitney Museum’s downtown building.
Her work is included in many prominent international collections, such as those of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany.
Since the 1950s, Samia Halaby, a New York-based artist, has created abstract works influenced by historical artistic innovations, including Islamic art and architecture and the early 20th-century Russian Constructivist movement. In 1986, she acquired her first personal computer, a Commodore Amiga 1000, and remarked, “As an artist of my era, I must explore computing.” Halaby started crafting digital abstractions, which she called “kinetic paintings.” The five pieces shown here were made in her early years using the Amiga, as she taught herself the Basic and C programming languages: Rainycentralpark (1986), Constructivist 10 (1986), Niihau (1986), Weavings (1987), Land (1988). The five kinetic paintings have been coded on Commodore Amiga computer and transferred to 3K video. Vibrant shapes and colors expand, shrink, and rotate across the screens, often paired with digital chimes and whirling sounds. Through these dynamic elements of motion, time, and space, Halaby extends the boundaries of abstraction beyond the limitations of traditional canvas. Samia Halaby’s presentation is part of The Hyundai Card First Look series, which spotlights recent acquisitions to MoMA’s collection. The exhibition will be on display until November 9, 2025.
Samia Halaby: Kinetic Paintings / Museum of Modern Art, MoMA, New York. August 28, 2025.
The Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin currently hosts the first German retrospective of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark (1920–1988). Featuring approximately 120 works, this extensive exhibition in the upper hall will showcase her artistic journey from the late 1940s to the 1980s, encompassing geometric-abstract paintings, participatory sculptures, and performances. A key focus of the show is Clark’s interactive approach, with numerous replicas crafted specifically for the exhibition, allowing visitors to engage directly with her art. The exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin runs until October 12, 2025.
Lygia Clark is celebrated as a pioneering figure who transformed the dynamic between artist, viewer, and artwork. As a central member of the Neoconcretismo movement, launched in Rio de Janeiro in 1959, she viewed art as a living, organic entity. Clark emphasized a sensory, body-centered, and subjective art experience, actively involving the viewer.
Clark’s early career focused on geometric-abstract paintings, but after 1954, she began breaking the boundaries of the canvas with relief-like wooden panels that connected to the surrounding space. With the rise of the Neo-Concrete movement, she ventured into three-dimensional works. The movement saw artworks as organic, evolving entities, a concept embodied in Clark’s Bichos (Critters)—movable, geometric sculptures that viewers can manipulate into new configurations. This evolved into her Objetos Sensoriais (Sensorial Objects), such as glasses, masks, and suits, which engaged the viewer’s entire body in sensory experiences. By the late 1960s, Clark introduced the Corpo Coletivo (Collective Body), focusing on community-driven, performative actions. Later, she developed a therapeutic method using her art objects to engage the body.
The retrospective gathers around 120 loans from international collections, including the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Cisneros Collection in New York, offering a comprehensive view of Clark’s groundbreaking contributions.
Lygia Clark: Retrospective / Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin. September 24, 2025.
At this year’s Art Cologne (7-11 November 2024) the LBBW Collection has been showing the collection presentation “Transitions”. Curated by Birgit Wiesenhütter, the show featured works from the LBBW Collection that not only create transitions between artistic genres and media, but also relate formally and in terms of content to diverse transitions in space, time, society and culture. In this video, Barbara Thomann (LBBW Collection) and Birgit Wiesenhütter (freelance curator) take us on a tour of the show. (in German language, english subtitles via YouTube).
“’Transitions’ reflects processes of change. Transitions accompany the crossing of boundaries and at the same time create connections,” explains Birgit Wiesenhütter, who curated the collection presentation as an independent curator. “Nature, every person, every society is in a process of constant change and transition. Transitions are therefore something that we are constantly experiencing.”
Part of the exhibition is a special presentation of works by Tim Berresheim (*1975) with a wallpaper that can be viewed in 3D through 3D glasses. The artist’s works illustrate the transition to a digital world. As an “early bird” (the title of one of the artist’s series), he has been using the computer as a malleable tool to create his images for over 20 years. Some of the works are augmented and can be experienced in their digital extension with the help of an app.
Transitions / LBBW Collection at Art Cologne 2024. November 8, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
The Kunstverein SALTS is currently showcasing three solo exhibitions at its City SALTS location in Birsfelden (Basel, Switzerland). In its Cabane space artist Paul Fritz shows two video loops, the Garage space has been turned into a mixed media installation by the artists Jannik Giger and Demian Wohler, and the Box space features works by Estefania García Pineda and Edinson Quiñones Falla. All three shows run until February 25, 2025. This video takes us to the exhibitions’ opening event on February 2, 2024.
The Kunstverein SALTS encompasses CITY SALTS, situated in various spaces within a garden by the Birs riverside, at the confluence of the Rhine in Birsfelden, on the border of Basel City (since 2009), and COUNTRY SALTS, a spacious remise with living space, a library, nestled high in the green hills of the Basel region in Bennwil (since 2020).
November Opening at City SALTS, Basel. Birsfelden (Basel, Switzerland), November 2, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Exhibition texts (excerpts):
Dummies: Solo show by Paul Fritz in the Cabane, curated by Benedikt Wyss & Samuel Leuenberger
By blending techniques that range from computer-generated images to traditional hand-drawn animation, stop motion, and even live-action footage, Lausanne-based artist Paul Fritz (1999) explores genres and layers of narration to craft illusory stories, where reality and fiction dance hand in hand. «Dummies» is showing the casting tapes’ outtake of two CGI characters auditioning to play the role of the artist and his brother when they were six and four years old. The videos are inspired by original child star casting tapes, such as the one from Henry Thomas auditioning to play Eliott in E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial.
Paul Fritz (b. 1999) lives and works in the Lausanne region. He is currently a student in the Master of Visual Arts program at ECAL. Coming from a background in animation, he maintains both an artistic and a filmmaker’s practice, with a fluid boundary between the two. His work is primarily video-based, often incorporating elements of sculpture, installation, and/or performance. His work was featured in group shows at For Space in Basel in collaboration with Virginie Sistek (2024), POP GUN in New York (2024), Basecamp in Locarno (2023), and HEK in Basel (2023). His films were shown at the LUFF in Lausanne (2024) as well as UFM in Lucerne (2023 & 2024).
Lamento: Video installation by Jannik Giger and Demian Wohler in the Garage, curated by Benedikt Wyss
The Basel-based composer and video artist Jannik Giger (1985) and the Zurich-based set designer Demian Wohler (1984) explore desire and affect in their walk-in installation «Lamento.» They reflect on the fact that there is never an encounter of unmediated bodies, only the meeting of socially constructed fantasies and role plays. In the accompanying video work, extracted verses from iconic love songs are combined with sampled organ sounds, creating a new composition that is projected onto staged human bodies. In this reverse exorcism, two figures on a film set are emotionalized, animated, and instrumentalized by the musical material.
Ofrenda: Duo show by Estefania García Pineda and Edinson Quiñones Falla in the Box, curated by Mario Kreuzberg
Our guest curator duo Mario Kreuzberg (Manuela Morales Délano und Charles Benjamin) presents their last exhibition for SALTS together with Colombian artists Estefania García Pineda (1991) and Edinson Quiñones Falla (1982) who are part of the collective Mingas de Pensamiento Prácticas De-coloniales. For Quiñones, Art is synonymous with healing, his research focuses on making visible what seems invisible and legal what is illegal. His artistic practice includes personal, collective, family, and territorial healing processes. Pineda is an artist and curator from Montelíbano. She has accompanied social processes linked to memory, environment, activity mining, and the development of territorial processes; her work has been focused on symbolic relief and aesthetic bets that become identity constructions, through creative processes and art.
“Days of Reverie” is the title of a new exhibition at Descanso Gardens in La Cañada Flintridge, California. The show at Descanso Gardens’ Sturt Haaga Gallery presents new bodies of work by four Los Angeles-based visual artists: Catherine Ruane, Debbie Korbel, Jason Jenn, and Jill Sykes. Accompanying these visual works is a specially composed musical score by Joseph Carrillo, the exhibition’s guest artist. In this video, the curator of the exhibition, Vojislav Radovanović, guides us through the show.
This project was initiated and curated by Vojislav Radovanović, who envisioned each artist creating entirely new works inspired directly by the beautiful environment of Descanso Gardens. The exhibition runs until January 26, 2025.
From the Genie Davis’ essay about the exhibition:
“With Days of Reverie, Radovanović has curated a powerful group of artists who revel in the perfection of nature’s grandeur and the gardens in which it is allowed to flourish. Compelling and visionary, the exhibition explores the eternity of change through all seasons and hours during the passage of a year, presenting a compelling cultural dialog about the sensorial, spiritual, and visceral experiences of gardens.”
“It connects the natural beauty of Descanso Gardens itself with artistic renderings of its flora and fauna in a museum-quality show. The fragility and resilience of our Earth are here, too; the endless, rich dichotomy of its precious and fraught balance. Descanso Gardens provides the ideal setting for this show’s exploration of our natural world, the soothing promise of quiet hours spent listening to the rustling of wind in the leaves and the songs of birds, drinking in the fragrance of flowers, trees, and grasses, and experiencing the caress of branches and sunlight.”
Descanso Gardens is a botanical garden located in La Cañada Flintridge, Los Angeles County, California. It sits on the northern edge of the San Rafael Hills. Descanso Gardens features a wide area, mostly forested, with artificial streams, ponds, and lawns. It also features the Sturt Haaga Gallery. Its aim is to encourage visitors to contemplate the intersection between contemporary art and garden science. Most Sturt Haaga exhibitions are group shows featuring works based on a single theme proposed by a curatorial advisory committee made up of garden staff, trustees, and art experts from Descanco’s surrounding community.
Days of Reverie / Descanso Gardens, La Cañada Flintridge, CA. October 27, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
In this video, we sit down with Stefan Simchowitz to discuss the launch of Hill House, his new art space in Pasadena, and his other projects, including his recent move into politics. We first met Stefan in 2010 during Portugal Arte 10, a major international contemporary art exhibition in Lisbon, Portugal, where he served as artistic director. Since then his ventures in the field of contemporary art evolved considerably. He started the a pop-up exhibition program called The Newsstand Project, provides industry specific art services via Creative Art Partners, and runs artist residencies in Los Angeles and Cape Town. There’s also Simco Shop, Simco Editions, Simco Drops, Simco’s Club – and Simco Audio, which plays a significant role in enjoying art at Hill House.
This video is the third in our series about Hill House. See also the video about the opening of Los Angeles-based artist Shaina McCoy’s exhibition at Hill House and the Hill House Tour with Stefan Simchowitz.
Interview with Stefan Simchowitz. Pasadena, October 20, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Elektrohalle Rhomberg (Salzburg, Austria) is for the first time participating in the art fair Art Cologne. The gallery presents the artist Arang Choi (born in 1992 in Seoul). In this video, co-founder Boris Lesicky talks about the artist and her work.
Arang Choi / Elektrohalle Rhomberg at Art Cologne 2024. Cologne (Germany), November 8, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Arang Choi: Parallel Panorama, 2023, oil on canvas, 220 x 475 x 100 cm (installation).
Exhibition text (excerpt):
Arang Choi (1992 born in Seoul) finds her inspiration for her forms, colors and surfaces mostly in documentaries about nature, landscape and animals paired with her own observations, which the artist then processes directly into drawings or photographs, thus creating her own fantastic visual world.
At the center of the solo presentation is Arang Choi’s diploma thesis (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, 2023): in the multi part large format installation (220 x 500 cm), which refers to the atmosphere of Renaissance painting, the artist shows a fantasy world she has created, which becomes an almost realistic three dimensional experience for the viewer, also due to the slightly curved shape of the work.
“Parallel Panorama” – the title of the key work – refers to the format of the installation and the possibility of immersing oneself in an infinite number of parallel worlds, realities or mental states.
AAA Experiments in AI, Art and Architecture is an innovative exhibition at Kunsthalle Zürich, co-created by ETH Zurich’s students, researchers, and professors, under the curation of Daniel Baumann and Adrian Notz. It features the ‘Mehrwerk’ stand, constructed from repurposed materials by Professor Catherine De Wolf and her students, serving as a venue for public talks and seminars from October 7. This dynamic space acts as both a real and imagined structure, blending art with science, where ongoing student-led projects evolve the exhibition content. Embracing the philosophy of improvisation and action over rigid planning, as inspired by architect Yona Friedman, AAA Experiments serves as an open platform for experimentation, learning, and interaction, encouraging visitors to engage with an open mind for an experience that could range from mundane to inspirational. The Kunsthalle’s website updates visitors on the schedule of events.
AAA Experiments is made up of four elements: the grandstand ‘Mehrwerk’, Seminars, Public Talks, and an evolving exhibition. In this video we attend the opening reception of the exhibition and speak with Co-curator Adrian Notz, Vanessa Schwarzkopf and Tim Cousin (both Circular Engineering for Architecture, D-BAUG, ETH Zürich) about the project. The exhibition runs until January 19, 2025.
AAA Experiments in AI, Art and Architecture / Kunsthalle Zürich. Vernissage, September 27, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Exhibition text (excerpt):
AAA Experiments is an experimental exhibition developed in collaboration with students, researchers and professors of ETH Zurich, and curated by Daniel Baumann, director Kunsthalle Zürich, and Adrian Notz, freelance curator and former curator of the AI+Art programme at the ETH Zurich. ETH Professor Catherine De Wolf and her students will build the ‘Mehrwerk’ stand from reused building elements that will be used by audiences for public talks and seminars starting on 7 October. During the course of the exhibition additional projects and small exhibitions, developed by the students, will be added.
AAA Experiments is a real and imaginary building and an alternative academy where art and science meet, and where students, professors and visitors develop content. It is a testing ground beyond expectations, a place for success and for failure, and a platform that must find and adapt its form and purpose. Form will indeed be key, as it performs and defines our relationship to the world, and our everyday lives. In the words of visionary architect Yona Friedman: ‘act without planning’ and ‘intelligence starts with improvisation’.
AAA Experiments is open to all, and the results are not predictable. We ask you, our visitors, to be open minded, curious and generous – you may be bored, enchanted and inspired. Our agenda online provides the most up to date information about public talks on Thursday evenings, as well as different seminars and events at Kunsthalle Zürich.
AAA Experiments is made up of four chapters:
- ‘Mehrwerk’
The ‘Mehrwerk’ is designed and built by Prof. Catherine De Wolf together with her researchers, students and the Kunsthalle Zürich technicians using material from the former Huber Pavilion on the ETH’s Hönggerberg campus. The first iteration of Mehrwerk will be presented during the season opening on 27 September. Students will complete the design during the following week in order that the pavilion will be fully functional by 7 October when the educational programme starts. - Seminars
Weekly seminars, courses and workshops will be held from 7 October to 19 December.
Tuesdays 2.30–6 pm, Prof Catherine De Wolf (Circular Engineering for Architecture, D-BAUG), Digital Creativity for Circular Construction
Wednesdays 10 am–1 pm, Prof Philip Ursprung (History and Theory of Architecture, D-ARCH), Fachsemester “Peace Out”
Wednesdays 4–7 pm Tiziano Derme (Chair of Prof Benjamin Dillenburger, Digital Building Technologies (dbt), D-ARCH), Unterdecken-BIO: Mycelium as building system, between design iterations and living mockups.
Thursdays 11 am–1 pm, Adrian Christopher Notz (Mentor Prof Dr. Roger Wattenhofer, Distributed Computing Group, D_ITET), Creative Thinking Seminar
Thursdays 1-3 pm, Daniel Baumann (Mentor Prof Philip Ursprung, History and Theory of Architecture, D-ARCH), The School of (Sub)Curating - Public Talks
Public talks take place on Thursdays between 10 October and 19 December 2024. These talks start at 7pm; entry is free.
27 September: Grand Opening with Vanessa Schwarzkopf and students (Circular Engineering for Architecture, D-BAUG), 6.30 pm
10 October: Eleni Chatzi (Structural Mechanics and Monitoring) and Janiv Oron (artist)
17 October: Inge Herrmann (Nanoparticles Systems Engineering Lab, D-MAVT) and Liat Grayver (artist)
24 October: Alexander Mordvintsev (Entwickler und Künstler), Haro Combusyan (collector and social entrepreneur) and Yariv Adan (developer and investor)
31 October: Ruth Erdt (artist) and André Bideau (Head MAS GTA, D-ARCH)
7 November: Rosa Barba (artist) and Philip Ursprung (History and Theory of Architecture, D-ARCH)
14 November: tbc
16 November: Engadin Art Talks x Kunsthalle Zürich with Eleni Chatzi (Structural Mechanics and Monitoring), Günther Vogt (landscape architect) and Pamela Rosenkranz (artist)
21 November: Emily Cross (Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, D-GESS) and Manuel Hendry (filmmaker)
28 November: Catherine De Wolf (Circular Engineering for Architecture, D-BAUG) and Vanessa Schwarzkopf (Circular Engineering for Architecture, D-BAUG)
29/30 November: Futurological Congress by We are AIA, Martina Huber, Mareike Dittmer et al.
5 December: Bob Sumner (ETH Game Technology Center)and Fabio Zünd (ETH Game Technology Center)
12 December: Benjamin Dillenburger (Digital Building Technologies (dbt), D-ARCH) and Tiziano Derme (researcher and artist)
19 December: Vernissage School of (Sub)Curating. Party - Exhibition
AAA Experiments will also be an evolving exhibition of exhibitions, as the talks and seminars will produce artifacts, displays and micro-exhibitions developing over the course of the exhibition.
Andrea Nepomuceno: Untitled, 2010. Victoria Miro at Panorama Monferrato, a project by Italics. Camagna (Italy), September 5, 2024.
Exhibition text: Maria Nepomuceno interweaves ancient and modern craft techniques to create complex sculptures from rope, straw, beads, playful ceramic elements and objects of various sizes. While often made in carnival-like colors, her works, which explore the potentially endless combinations of the rope coils she makes, are culturally and metaphorically rich. Her sculptures – organic forms, vegetational forms, and landscapes which range from the microscopic to the macrocosmic – interact playfully with space, often inviting tactile exploration.
The work Untitled is emblematic of Nepomuceno’s unique practice and interest in spiraling forms that symbolize the volutes that are naturally present throughout the universe, from galaxies to DNA, which are represented through the words and techniques of her own linguistic tradition.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Nathalie Du Pasquier: Così fan tutte, 2015-2023. Apalazzogallery, Pace Gallery at Art Basel 2024 Unlimited. Official description: ‘Così fan tutte is a group of wooden columns made of painted elements assembled as a 3D collage. By combining painted surfaces and sometimes even small paintings with the three-dimensional wooden constructions, it modifies the perception we have of them – it is also another way to think about painting not only as canvases hanging on the wall.
As a group, the work allows the possibilities of the separate elements to play with each other; Così fan tutte becomes one complex opera.
There is no literal link between the title of this installation and the work of Mozart. In his opera there is an element of fun and grandeur, which in a way I associate with this Unlimited occasion! And I like the sound of this title which has to remain in Italian.’
– Nathalie Du Pasquier
Nathalie Du Pasquier (born 1957 in Bordeaux) investigates the object-space relationship through painting and construction. Du Pasquier lives and works in Milan.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
‘1+1=3’ is the title of a joint exhibition by Nathalie Du Pasquier and Olivier Mosset that just opened at Kunsthaus Biel Centre d’art Bienne (KBCB) in Biel/Bienne (Switzerland). Mosset (1944) is a central figure in post-war abstract painting and an unavoidable reference for several generations of European and US-American painters. Nathalie Du Pasquier (1957) worked as a designer for the Memphis group in Milan until 1987 and has since devoted herself mainly to painting. The two internationally recognised artists know each other but never had the opportunity to exhibit together. Although their work is very different, they share a common attitude that combines their interest in the history of the avant-garde with a playful spirit. The invitation to a joint exhibition becomes a discussion about abstract painting: its historical burden, its decorative horizon, its «commodification» or its relationship to language.
Nathalie Du Pasquier Olivier Mosset: 1+1=3 / KBCB. Biel/Bienne (Switzerland), Vernissage, September 14, 2024.
The exhibition at the Kunsthaus features collaborative and individual works by Olivier Mosset and Nathalie Du Pasquier, exploring the intersections of abstract art with everyday life, space, and historical art movements.
The Parkett section consists of spaces:
Intermezzo 1: Mosset displays a large triptych originally meant to stack vertically but shown horizontally due to space constraints, integrating the gallery wall into the artwork.
Everyday Objects: Du Pasquier transitions from canvas to spatial elements with a decorative false ceiling and still lifes in baskets, reflecting her shift towards abstraction through everyday items.
Reminiscence of the Avant-Garde: A room where Du Pasquier’s mural incorporates Mosset’s geometric drawings, echoing Russian Constructivism and referencing Marcel Duchamp, blending their styles with historical art influences.
Motocyclette: Mosset designs a mural where Du Pasquier’s paintings hang, playing with the concept of functional painting and adding motorcycle-themed compositions, nodding to both functionality and surrealism.
Intermezzo 2: A space entirely conceived by Du Pasquier where abstraction dominates, moving beyond depiction to create an immersive abstract environment.
Science Fiction: The final room inverses the first, with Du Pasquier’s floor design suggesting utopian architecture, while Mosset’s monochrome tondos evoke planets, shifting from mundane to cosmic themes.
In the Galleries section, Mosset’s shaped canvases confront Du Pasquier’s printed motifs, challenging the distinctions between painting, sculpture, and decorative art.
In the Foyer, a repainted piano by Du Pasquier, inspired by historical art-music collaborations, serves as a functional and artistic centerpiece, reminiscent of the Aubette project.
Exhibition text (translation from German):
Nathalie Du Pasquier (1957) and Olivier Mosset (1944) are internationally recognized abstract painters who have known each other for several years but have not yet had the opportunity to exhibit together. The idea of bringing the two together is due to local circumstances: on the one hand, Mosset is the author of a well-camouflaged public sculpture located just opposite the Kunsthaus Biel (Untitled (à Paul Cézanne), 2000-2004). On the other hand, Du Pasquier, who worked for a long time as a designer at the Memphis group, has designed two Swatch models that are manufactured in the watchmaking city. The pair’s discreet presence in Biel seemed pretext enough to consider a dialogue between their artistic practices. Both appreciate each other’s work and have a particular penchant for collaborations. Although their work is very different, they share a common attitude that combines their interest in the history of the avant-garde with a playful spirit. The invitation to a joint exhibition becomes a discussion about abstract painting: its historical burden, its decorative horizon, its “commodification” or its relationship to language. The two make the contrasting typology of the Kunsthaus spaces their own on three levels. The institutional and architectural context of the exhibition is an essential part of the perception of the work and is reflected in the title of the exhibition, which completes the sum of the two artistic practices: 1 + 1 = 3.
PARKETT:
Intermezzo 1
Interested in large-format painting, Mosset presents a triptych that he created for a gallery in China in 2008 on the wide wall of the corridor. Originally, these three paintings were to be hung on top of each other, forming a square. However, since the space of the Chinese gallery (as now that of the Kunsthaus) proved too low, Mosset resigned himself to showing the paintings side by side. The wall on which the work hangs appears de facto as an integral part of the composition.
Everyday objects
Since the 1990s, Mosset has gradually emancipated himself from painting on canvas to work more spatially. With this red and pink false ceiling, inspired by a Japanese interior, abstract painting slides gently towards decoration and furnishing. Below, a series of still lifes bring together various objects (stones, shells, tools…) from Du Pasquier’s immediate everyday life, presented in square wicker baskets. At the end of the 1980s, when there was an immense resurgence of interest in figurative painting in Europe and the United States, Du Pasquier first ventured into painting with still lifes. The paintings reveal a particular attention to texture and a tendency towards formal simplification of objects, which in a way act as a precursor to her abstract works.
Reminiscence of the avant-garde
This room contains a mural designed by Du Pasquier especially for the exhibition, which incorporates a series of Mosset’s geometric drawings. The play with space, the reduced palette and the rectangular shapes are characteristic of Du Pasquier’s work and are reminiscent of Russian constructivism of the early 20th century. Mosset’s geometric drawings, in turn, allow a series of words to appear, with subtle
references to Marcel Duchamp. The father of the readymade and the pioneers of abstraction are unavoidable references in the practice of the two artists.
Motocyclette
Here the process is reversed: paintings by Du Pasquier hang on a mural designed by Mosset. The walls are divided into grey and white areas. This takes up and reverses a principle often seen in public spaces, namely that the lower part of the walls is covered with a colour (usually grey) to make dirt less visible. Mosset has thus taken possession of a primarily functional painting in order to reinterpret it in the exhibition space in the manner of a painterly ready-made. Du Pasquier saw an asphalt road in the grey surface and, knowing Mosset’s penchant for motorcycles, she presents a series of compositions with engines. In addition to this wink, the play with these technical objects is also reminiscent of some surrealist images at the interface with abstraction. This ambiguity is further reinforced by the presence of unidentifiable objects, in this case small colored constructions by the artist.
Intermezzo 2
This room is – in contrast to the corridor with Mosset’s paintings – entirely designed by Du Pasquier. After the early still lifes and compositions that showcase abstract objects, the artist freed herself from figuration. The painting no longer has to depict anything; the entire room becomes an abstract composition.
Science Fiction
This last room appears like the negative of the first. Mosset’s ceiling is replaced here by a carpet designed by Du Pasquier. The abstract composition on the floor looks like a city map or utopian architecture. On the black-painted walls, Mosset’s three monochrome tondos suddenly take on the outlines of planets. While the first room evoked a relationship of abstraction to the most banal everyday life, this last room throws us more into the cosmos.
GALLERIES:
In the galleries, whose high ceilings underline the modernity of the new building, large-format works face each other. Mosset’s monochrome “shaped canvas” is directly confronted with Du Pasquier’s motifs printed on paper. From an art historical perspective, the “shaped canvas” – a term that emerged in the 1960s for paintings with unconventional formats – blurs the boundaries between painting and sculpture, while the printed papers dissolve the boundaries between original and copy, painting and decorative art. On a sensory level, the sublimation of color through the monochrome is contrasted with the playful combinatorics of the abstract motifs.
FOYER:
For the entrance, Mosset suggested that Du Pasquier repaint a piano. The collaborative work recalls the historical links between abstract art and music and is an allusion to the Aubette, a ballroom in Strasbourg designed entirely by Theo van Doesburg, Hans Arp and Sophie Tauber-Arp in 1928: architecture, decor, lighting and furniture – including a piano. A true Sistine Chapel of concrete abstraction, the Aubette was at the heart of Mosset and Du Pasquier’s initial ideas for a possible intervention in the foyer of the Kunsthaus.
They kept the idea of a repainted piano that could, however, be used for concerts or performances. It is a piano made by Burger & Jacobi, the former Biel piano factory, whose history is currently on display in an exhibition at the NMB Neues Museum Biel.
The Fondation Beyeler in Riehen (Basel, Switzerland) hosts a significant retrospective of Henri Matisse from September 22, 2024, to January 26, 2025, marking the first in Switzerland and the German-speaking region in nearly two decades. Matisse, a pivotal figure in modern art, revolutionized painting by liberating color from form, infusing art with unprecedented lightness. This exhibition showcases over 70 key works spanning his career, from early 1900s pieces, through Fauvism, to his iconic cut-outs of the 1940s and 1950s. It reflects his artistic evolution influenced by travels across continents, drawing inspiration from diverse cultures. The exhibit, themed around Baudelaire’s “Invitation to the Voyage,” not only explores Matisse’s artistic journey but also physically recreates his travel experiences through multimedia presentations, offering a deep dive into the environments and processes that shaped his groundbreaking art.
Matisse – Invitation to the Voyage / Retrospective at Fondation Beyeler. Vernissage, September 21, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
In this video we go to Biel/Bienne in Switzerland for the opening of the exhibition ‘Impressions de Biel’ by the Belgian artist duo Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys. De Gruyter and Thys represented Belgium at the 58th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, in 2019.
For almost forty years, the Belgian duo Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys (*1965 and 1966) have been exploring the darkest corners of the human psyche. Using video, photography, sculpture and drawing, they bring to life marginalized figures struggling with their neuroses. The works are both tragicomic and caricaturistic portraits of a human condition alienated by social conformism and driven by sad passions.
The exhibition in Biel shows an ensemble of sculptures that the duo describes as follows: “These newer or less new creatures spring from a parallel world. Many of them are embodiments or mutations of characters that have been wandering through our work for many years. Some figures are very heavy and far too big, while others have become so small that they are in danger of disappearing. Some of them have appeared so recently that it seems as if the population of this universe could suddenly grow at unexpected times. Whether human, half-human or beast, they are characterized by their fixed, slightly psychotic gaze. Their eyes are wide open. They are in a state of trance. They are intoxicated and, as it were, petrified by existence itself. This existence is determined by human decisions, ideologies, projections, but also by fate, which has escaped the mills and lies somewhere to the side until it crumbles into dust. The sculptures, on the other hand, are condemned to a static, immobile existence that lasts forever.” The “animations” of the sculptures are coordinated with each other and give the Salle Poma as a whole the appearance of an old Swiss clock. (exhibition text, translated from German)
Kunsthaus Biel Centre d’art Bienne (KBCB), Vernissage, September 14, 2024.
The current exhibition at Hebel_121 Art Space in Basel brings together the work of two Japanese artists, Yanagi Kenji and Hukuda Atsuo. At first sight, the works by Kenji Yanagi and Atsuo Hukuda have different appearances. It’s a collaboration which is exploring the differences and similarities between two “methods” of applying material. Experimenting with traditional materials such as washi paper, gold leaf, ink, and lacquer inherited from ancient Japan, asking how is their method appearing in modern art. However, the two artists are presenting the “passion”, “impulse” and “movement” behind Japanese art, as one part of their mode of practice leading to mutual understanding.
Yanagi Kenji and Hukuda Atsuo at Hebel_121 Art Space Basel. Vernissage, September 7, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Coinciding with Kunsttage Basel, the second exhibition in Hauser & Wirth’s new Basel gallery is titled ‘Körperlich’, meaning ‘bodily’ in English. ‘Körperlich’ is a group show of women artists. Coinciding with Kunsttage Basel, the exhibition explores the body’s role in the construction and expression of identity through works by Louise Bourgeois, Maria Lassnig, Meret Oppenheim, Alina Szapocznikow, Irène Zurkinden, Lee Lozano, Hannah Villiger and Carol Rama. Located in the heart of Basel’s old town (opposite the Antikenmuseum and in the immediate vicinity of the Kunstmuseum in Basel), Hauser & Wirth’s new space at Luftgässlein 4 occupies the ground floor of a former silk ribbon factory built in the 1880s. In the cabinet-like gallery Hauser & Wirth presents a series of historic exhibitions under the direction of Senior Director Carlo Knoell. In this video, Carlo Knoell (Senior Director, Hauser & Wirth) guides us through the exhibition and talks about some of the highlights. ‘Körperlich’ at Hauser & Wirth Basel runs until November 2, 2024.
Körperlich / Group Exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Basel. Exhibition walkthrough with Carlo Knoell (Senior Director, Hauser & Wirth), Basel (Switzerland), August 29, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Exhibition text (excerpt):
Although in this exhibition the emphasis is on the physiognomy of the body and its organs, the feelings portrayed within the works on view are those that emanate from deep inside: love, desire, fear, anger, hysteria—visceral emotions which reveal themselves through bodily expression. The works on display range from portraiture, depicting images of the nude body and representations of corporeal parts, to semi-abstract images that suggest bodily forms.
Through their work, these artists pose questions about bodily integrity, about control of the body, asking ultimately who has power and autonomy over our bodies, especially those that are gendered as female.
In some of the works, figures are blurred and fragmented, evoking difficult histories, personal and political conflict or violence. Whereas in Carol Rama’s ‘La guerra è astratta’ (1970) or Alina Szapocznikow’s sculpture of a disembodied mouth indicate the disowned physical self in the face of oppression, Hannah Villiger’s photographic work ‘Skulptural (Sculptural)’ (1986), a simple polaroid of an ear, might reference the last sense to be lost in the dying body, the ultimate fading of our conscious bodily existence.
While the work of the artists on view sometimes seek to celebrate the body and play on notions of beauty and gender according to the traditional portrayal of the body in art, they nevertheless problematise these depictions and explore layers of complexity to this tradition such as in the painting ‘Nue’ (1934) by Irène Zurkinden, who also explores a variety of bodily movements in her expressive drawings.
The artists presented challenge the tradition of the nude, expressing it often as a fractured, disintegrating and unstable body, as it appears in the watercolour works of Lassnig and the painting by Lozano.
The artists included could be said to engage with the legacies of a Freudian understanding of the unconscious as it is expressed through a desiring body, but their work also anticipates feminist critiques of this concept, for example, through Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection – a reminder of the material realities of the (female) body.
Elements of organicism and abjection are explored in relation to the body in the hanging sculpture by Louise Bourgeois and Rama’s mixed media canvas from 1969, where the the emphasis is on materiality. In works by Meret Oppenheim, aspects of nature are displayed, incorporating flowers or animal bodies in states of strange or surreal metamorphosis, as seen in ‘Tisch mit Vogelfüssen’ (1939 (executed 1983)).
Together, the artists in this exhibition grasp, investigate and express the complexities of the construction of self that comes from our bodies.
Nicolas Krupp Gallery in Basel (Switzerland) is moving to a new exhibition space. The new gallery at Riehentorstrasse 33 in Basel is still under construction, but on the occasion of the Kunsttage Basel event, gallerist Nicolas Krupp invited the artist Eric Hattan to play with new exhibition space and the trash that accumulates during the construction work. A picture wall in the Petersburg hanging style complements the exhibition.
Eric Hattan, born in 1955 in Wettingen, Switzerland, is a Swiss visual artist known for his work as a conceptual artist, video artist, performance artist, and installation artist. He lives and works in Basel and Paris.
Hattan’s art focuses on everyday life, capturing the ordinary and often overlooked aspects of urban and public spaces through video and other media. His work involves a playful and ironic examination of the “infra-ordinary,” where he subtly manipulates and reintroduces elements of daily life to invite viewers to see them anew. Hattan’s work often involves video installations where he records processes and incidents in urban environments. His art does not aim to deliver critical analysis but to reveal the poetic, absurd, or unnoticed aspects of everyday life. Eric Hattan’s work has been exhibited internationally, including solo and group shows in places like the Swiss Institute in New York, Kunsthaus Baselland, and various art institutions across Europe. Recent exhibitions include a show at Nicolas Krupp in 2024. He received the Basler Kunstpreis in 2016, indicating recognition within the art community for his contributions. In 2023, he was an artist-in-residence at Foundation CAB in Brussels, which was his first significant presentation in Belgium. This residency was seen as both an introduction and a counterpoint to an exhibition of André Cadere’s work. Hattan’s approach includes taking possession of spaces in a way that invites viewers to rediscover them, focusing on movement and its implications for both body and mind.
Eric Hattan & Nicolas Krupp: Construction Site with Trash and Petersburg Hanging (August 30 – September 1, 2024). Nicolas Krupp Gallery, Basel. Basel (Switzerland), August 29, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Mario Ceroli: Progetto per la pace, 1968. Cardi Gallery, Art Basel 2024 Unlimited. Basel (Switzerland), June 13, 2024.
Official description: Originally conceived by Mario Ceroli in 1968, Progetto per la pace is among the artist’s largest and most powerful works of environmental sculpture. An expansive area of earth is covered with towering silk flags, each one measuring four meters in height, creating a visually striking monument that comes alive in the exhibition space. The plain, colorless flags offer a vision of peace that moves beyond national borders or idioms. The work has been historically exhibited in different site-responsive configurations, both outdoors and in institutional settings, inviting viewers into a rarefied space of openness, possibility, and dialogue. The result is an installation that is at once monumental and delicate, wavering between the peaceful assertion of the title and the underlying knowledge of human fallibility.
Mario Ceroli (born 1938 in Castel Frentano, Italy) is one of the major exponents of postwar Italian sculpture. Renowned for his mastery of different materials and mediums, in 1966 he was awarded the then prestigious Gollin Prize at the Venice Biennale. Ceroli lives and works in Rome.
Mixed-media installation: wood, silk, soil, hay, iron; 365 flags, 400 cm each; 16 flagpole holders, 25 × 100 × 100 cm; installation dimensions variable.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Karola Kauffmann is an textile artist and professional weaver from Germany’s Hotzenwald (Southern Black Forest). She embodies the rare craft of traditional handweaving with a modern twist of creativity and individuality. Her work transforms simple threads into poetic textiles, using a 19th-century loom. Her materials are as exclusive as her methods, selecting only the finest like cashmere, silk, and the rare yangir hair. Her dedication has earned her a niche but devoted clientele and recognition in the art world, with her works being acquired by museums for their exquisite craftsmanship and unique color compositions. Karola’s practice also involves preserving the weaving traditions of minority cultures, like the Miao and Dong in China, by collecting and promoting their textiles. This video provides you with a tour of her current show that runs until September 22, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Petrit Halilaj: When the sun goes away we paint the sky is a site-specific art installation on the façade of the Hotel Merian in Basel, Switzerland. The piece is a special commission to celebrate Art Basel‘s 30-year partnership with the Swiss bank UBS. It has been unveiled on the occasion of the 2024 edition of the art fair Art Basel and is still on view.
Petrit Halilaj: When the sun goes away we paint the sky / Hotel Merian, Basel (Switzerland), May 29, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Official description (excerpt):
Art Basel and UBS are bringing stars to Basel with the new iteration of a work by Petrit Halilaj marking the 30th anniversary of the partnership between the two organizations. The Kosovo-born artist first developed the piece for Manifesta 14 in Pristina in 2022. He became aware of the stars on the roof of once-prestigious Grand Hotel through friends, but the hotel had fallen into disrepair.
‘One by one, those stars had come down,’ explains Dr. Catherine Nichols, the curator of the installation at the Hotel Merian, in the video. ‘What was once a symbol of prosperity and hope became a symbol of decline. Petrit’s idea, upon discovering the stars, was to reassemble them.’ ‘This inherent optimism fits well with Petrit’s work, transforming a conflict situation into one of hope,’ she continues.
The title was inspired by an essay by Njomza Vitia, a then twelve-year-old local resident of Pristina. The text, titled ‘When the sun goes away I will paint the sky’ (Kur dielli të ikë, do ta pikturoj qiellin), explored her struggle with the world of adults, as well as her optimism. Halilaj changed the ‘I’ to ‘we’ to transform the statement into a collective aspiration.
This celebration of a three-decade-long partnership between Art Basel and UBS is a compelling narrative of creativity, resilience, and shared dreams. ‘For 30 years, Art Basel and UBS have together created bold artistic projects,’ says Art Basel’s Maike Cruse, the incoming director of the Basel fair. ‘The collaboration over these 30 years between UBS and Art Basel helps us craft spaces together with artists, making their dreams come true and bringing them to reality.’
Petrit Halilaj is represented by ChertLüdde (Berlin) and Mennour (Paris).
Unveiling by Maike Cruse, Director, Art Basel in Basel, and Oliver Zwemmer, Head of Wealth Management in Basel, UBS.
The South African artist Gabrielle Goliath is taking part in “Foreigners Everywhere”, the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, with her project “Personal Accounts”.
Official description: Gabrielle Goliath’s immersive installations and performances examine frameworks of inequality and oppression, highlighting how these conditions may be transformed. Personal Accounts (2024) is an ongoing transnational project initiated in 2014, carried out in cities from Johannesburg to Como and Edinburgh. It employs video and sound to create installations that address the global normativity of patriarchal violence. The project records the testimonies of black, brown, indigenous, femme, queer, non-binary, and trans individuals. Each account unveils everyday structures that preserve patriarchal, racializing and colonial orders. These stories deal with violence and trauma. But they also shed light on the “creative and fugitive ways in which survivors assert life and possibility”, which she reframes as strategies for survival and repair. In a deliberate decision made with collaborators’ consent, the sound of words in the video recordings is withheld. Goliath emphasizes paralinguistic elements such as breaths and swallows. This artistic gesture challenges the norms of ‘legibility’ and ‘believability’ typically associated with such accounts; it creates a supportive environment and encourages a space of understanding and compassion. Troubling the false dichotomy of ‘voice’ and ‘voicelessness’, she focuses on collective and embodied ways of listening. This is the first time the work of Gabrielle Goliath is presented at Biennale Arte. —Tandanzani Dhlakama
Gabrielle Goliath: Personal Accounts (2024) / Venice Art Biennale 2024. Venice (Italy), April 17, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
From August 16 to December 1, 2024, the Kunstmuseum Bern presents a major retrospective on Chaïm Soutine, a significant figure in classical modernism. The exhibition, which has been organized in collaboration with major art institutions in Düsseldorf and Denmark, features around 60 works spanning Soutine’s career. These include pieces from the Kunstmuseum’s own collection and loans from prestigious international galleries like the Musée d’Orsay, Centre Pompidou, Tate, MoMA, and the National Gallery of Art.
Chaïm Soutine’s work explores existential themes through vivid, expressive paintings of landscapes, portraits of society’s lower strata, and still lifes of slaughtered animals, reflecting his own life experiences and the broader socio-political context of his time. His paintings are characterized by bold, dynamic colors and a restless, powerful line, setting him apart from the abstract trends of his contemporaries. His style has influenced post-1945 artists, notably in Abstract Expressionism and the School of London. Born into a Jewish Orthodox family in Belarus, Soutine moved to Paris in 1913, where he remained an outsider due to cultural and linguistic differences, influencing his art’s raw, empathetic portrayal of life. Despite being less recognized than peers like Modigliani or Chagall, Soutine’s work has inspired numerous modern and contemporary artists. His influence was also noted in the Belarusian democratic protests of 2020-21.
The exhibition aims to introduce Soutine’s unique artistic vision to a broader audience, highlighting his contributions to modern art and his enduring influence on subsequent generations of artists. Chaim Soutine: Against the Current / Retrospective at Kunstmuseum Bern. Press Preview, Bern (Switzerland), August 14, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Dorian Sari: I Exaggerated Because I Wanted to be Understood. Öktem Aykut Gallery at Liste Art Fair Basel 2024. Basel (Switzerland), June 10, 2024.
Official description: I Exaggerated Because I Wanted to be Understood by Dorian Sari is a poetic exploration of existence, artfully blending elements of surprise, metamorphosis, and introspection. The installation invites viewers to transcend the surface and immerse themselves in the nuanced beauty of the human experience — a dance between revelation and concealment.
Each box, a metaphorical seed, promises the potential for discovery and transformation. Upon opening one of these seemingly dormant boxes, the spectator is greeted by an unexpected spectacle. This dynamic structure unfurls like a jack-in-the-box, inviting an element of surprise and playfulness. The deliberate choice of wood as the medium adds an organic warmth to the installation. As the structure reaches its zenith, a captivating metamorphosis occurs. The pinnacle of the installation transforms into an open form reminiscent of a gramophone. This hybrid shape serves as the canvas for an intricate dance of black and white patterns, strongly manipulated and distorted, pointing to the 21st century.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Riccardo Previdi: Attenti Al Lupo (Living Together), 2024. / Swiss Art Awards 2024. Basel (Switzerland), June 10, 2024. Official description: Maneki Neko, the Japanese fortune cats are generally used for the purpose of bringing luck to the owners of a business. They invite passersby in by signaling that the store is open. A sign that while conveying a sense of openness and permeability, is a witness to a world full of contradictions and in constant transformation.
First made with my own hands by modelling plasticine, the three subjects, only a few centimeters tall, were then scanned, 3D-printed and milled using various materials and different techniques. For the Swiss Art Awards, they appear as wallpaper and as a series of ceramic figures.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Chiharu Shiota: The Extended Line, 2023 – 2024 / Templon at Art Basel 2024 Unlimited, Basel (Switzerland), June 13, 2024. Official description: Chiharu Shiota’s The Extended Line is rooted in Shiota’s personal experience as a cancer survivor but is intended to connect with the personal experience of the audience. ‘What does it mean to be human? I am asking questions that I believe every person is dealing with during their lifetime and not really getting to a clear conclusion. I believe in the strength of asking those questions together. While we have no answer, we still have the same suffering, regrets, and joys in life.’
The free-standing 16 × 9 meter installation consists of hundreds of kilometers of red ropes hanging above the artist’s open hands and arms from which red papers seem to be flying out.
Chiharu Shiota (born 1972 in Osaka) is often inspired by a personal experience or emotion which she expands into universal human concerns: life, death, and relationships. She explores this sensation of a ‘presence in the absence’ in her work. Shiota lives and works in Berlin.
Chiharu Shiota’s The Extended Line is rooted in Shiota’s personal experience as a cancer survivor but is intended to connect with the personal experience of the audience. ‘What does it mean to be human? I am asking questions that I believe every person is dealing with during their lifetime and not really getting to a clear conclusion. I believe in the strength of asking those questions together. While we have no answer, we still have the same suffering, regrets, and joys in life.’
The free-standing 16 × 9 meter installation consists of hundreds of kilometers of red ropes hanging above the artist’s open hands and arms from which red papers seem to be flying out.
Chiharu Shiota (born 1972 in Osaka) is often inspired by a personal experience or emotion which she expands into universal human concerns: life, death, and relationships. She explores this sensation of a ‘presence in the absence’ in her work. Shiota lives and works in Berlin.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
In this video we have a closer look at a true gem of art in public spaces. Created by the Basel-based artist Ludwig Stocker, the sculpture with the title “Einrollen-Ausrollen (1978)” (Rolling In – Rolling Out), is unique and fascinating in many respects. Ludwig Stocker’s work is located in a rather unusual place in Basel, Switzerland: right in the middle of a spiral pedestrian/bicycle footbridge with the highway on one side and allotment gardens on the other.
Here, where Basel’s execution site used to be, a bridge was built in the 1970s as part of the construction of the freeway to provide access to two parts of the city for non-motorized traffic. In order to overcome the difference in height and at the same time take up little space, a spiral bridge was chosen. To enrich the site with a work of art, Kunstkredit Basel announced a competition, which was won by Ludwig Stocker. Stocker created a vertical column made of Carrara marble as the center for the spiral walkway, with five elements that symbolize evolution.
We had the chance to meet up with the artist in his studio in Basel to get to know more about this artwork. In this video, Ludwig Stocker talks about how this artwork came about, the inspiration for the work, the unique location of the marble column, and the different elements of the piece. The interview was conducted in Swiss German, subtitles in High German and English are available.
Interview with Ludwig Stocker, Basel (Switzerland), June 28, 2024.
P.S.: After all these years, Ludwig Stocker’s sculpture is still an amazing piece of art. It has aged extraordinarily well. Although not many people, even Basel residents, know about this work, it is definitely an artwork that deserves good care and (much more) attention. Those who know about it enjoy its oasis like character. Many thanks to Denise Bienz and Ludwig Stocker for the interview.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Extended version (19:00 min.):
Extended VersionThe artist Ludwig Stocker
Ludwig Stocker (born August 1, 1932 in Herisau) is a Swiss sculptor and painter. Ludwig Stocker grew up in the canton of Appenzell Ausserrhoden. From 1949 to 1954, he trained as a sculptor under Wilhelm Meier and Josef Büsser in St. Gallen and continued his studies at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome. In 1956, he married Annemarie Ledergerber and had four children. Ludwig Stocker has lived as a freelance artist in Basel since 1957. At the beginning of his career, he copied medieval sandstone figures for the Basel Cantonal Monument Preservation Office. In the years 1972-1982, in addition to his freelance work, he reconstructed the Parthenon pediment figures on a scale of 1:1 in the sculpture hall of the Antikenmuseum Basel under Ernst Berger. In this context, he produced extensive studies on the theory of harmonic proportions. In 1961 he received a scholarship from the Kiefer Hablitzel Foundation. From 1972, solo and group exhibitions in galleries and museums followed, including Kunsthalle Basel (1972; 3rd Biennale of Swiss Art, Kunstmuseum Winterthur (1978); Kornschütte Lucerne (1983); Museum zu Allerheiligen, Schaffhausen (1990); October Gallery, London (1990); Kunstmuseum Thun (1991); Kunstmuseum and Kunstverein Olten (1998); Neustädter Rathaus, Prague (2000); Skulpturhalle, Basel (2009). Since 1982 regular solo exhibitions at the Carzaniga Gallery, Basel.
The sculpture in public space Einrollen-Ausrollen (Rolling In – Rolling Out)
In connection with the completion of the A2 highway section (Osttangente) in Basel, a loop-shaped ramp was also built by the engineers R. Walther and H. Mory from Basel. In the area of the pedestrian path from St. Alban-Teich to Galgenhügel, an artistic design was commissioned by the Canton of Basel-Stadt. The column is the work of the Basel sculptor Ludwig Stocker. He submitted this design as part of an art competition in 1976/77. The entry was awarded and commissioned by the Canton of Basel-Stadt.
The artist has carved a stele from Carrara marble under the title Rolling In and Rolling Out, which in turn consists of five similar column elements, each with spiral-shaped capitals. Intermediate supports form cubes, classic elements of resting matter. In the volute centers of the columns, small symbols that change from column to column (shell, crystal, plant, bird, human) in the capitals indicate what is meant by the fivefold division: it symbolizes a cyclical event that orders everything from the water below up to the human being. To illustrate this thought process, the column stands in a small fountain basin, in which it is reflected, and points up into the clouds. Numerous other references show that Stocker is drawing on ancient traditions by reckoning with the laws of harmony: for example, the column height of 10.5 m corresponds exactly to the diameter of the pedestrian spiral.
Other works by Stocker in the city of Basel include “Offener Raum” (1987) in the Hörnli cemetery in Riehen and “Lagerstätte” (1992), a sculpture in the Rhine next to a pillar of the Mittlere Brücke, whose visibility varies with the water level of the river.
(Source: Wikipedia, Hochbauamt Basel-Stadt)
Basel Biennale. The most sustainable art exhibition ever, a visual mixtape. Theme 2024: What Is Already There.
There are so many things that nobody notices in everyday life.
(Ana Jotta)
Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.
(Camille Pissarro)
The artists: Raphael Bottazzini, Christoph Gloor, Henny Jolzer, Les Innombrables, Ludwig Stocker, Leonardo Bürgi Tenorio, Bernhard Luginbühl, Claudio Moser, Michael Grossert, Walter Bodmer, Gerda Maise, Kitty Schaertlin, Urs Cavelti, Hans Arp, Patrizia Stalder, Marco Schuler.
Basel (Switzerland), July 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Basel Biennale 2024 Map:
Official description: For Christine Sun Kim and other deaf or disabled artists, navigating the art system’s accessibility gaps can pose significant challenges. By overlooking or not considering specific needs like sign language interpretation or captions, institutions, galleries, and event organizers create FOMO, ‘fear of missing out.’ Kim’s project FOMO Scores reflects on this sensation. The installation features 15 canvases shaped like the outer contours of the American Sign Language for ‘score,’ each with a written request such as ‘Please keep me in the loop.’ The canvases are painted black making them visibly prominent yet resembling a void where communication falls short. The installation contemplates the ambiguous line between requesting and demanding and the difficulties of advocating for one’s own inclusion.
Christine Sun Kim (born 1980 in Orange County, California) deconstructs the politics of sound in her investigations of how oral languages operate as social currency. Working across drawing, performance, video, and large scale murals, she explores her relationship to spoken and signed languages, and to the world at large. Kim lives and works in Berlin.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Meriem Bennani: Umbrella Twist, 2022. Clearing, Lodovico Corsini at Art Basel 2024 Unlimited. Basel (Switzerland), June 13, 2024.
Official description: Umbrella Twist is a mechanical work by Meriem Bennani, combining sculpture and video to evoke a parasol or a cartoon-like palm tree caught in a storm. A geometric screen reminiscent of 90s arcades blasts a video featuring acidic hues, psychedelic characters, and an operatic soundtrack. This audiovisual barrage, coupled with the work’s unpredictable swaying, destabilizes the viewer’s senses. The animation follows a female character performing the polemical Moroccan cultural phenomenon of ‘Routini Lyawmi,’ where everyday domestic scenes are shared on social media with suggestive and erotic intent. Autobiographical elements, hints to celebrities, and memories of teleshopping channels are also interwoven throughout. Employing not only sculptural prowess but also wry humor, cartoonish animations and symbolism, UMBRELLA TWIST reveals stark offline realities.
Meriem Bennani (born 1988 in Rabat, Morocco) unfolds her practice across a broad spectrum of media including films, installations, and immersive environments, confronting references to globalized consumer and popular culture with the vernacular of her native Moroccan traditions and aesthetics. Bennani lives and works in New York.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Derek Fordjour: Red Queen’s Race / Petzel Gallery at Art Basel 2024. Basel (Switzerland), June 11, 2024. Official description: Derek Fordjour’s mechanized diorama Red Queen’s Race (2023), first debuted at his solo exhibition at the gallery last fall, will be on view, in addition to three new paintings, each depicting Black jockeys. These works continue Fordjour’s interest in the legacy of the Black jockey in horse racing and the artist’s broader examination of Black performance and success in America.
Derek Fordjour was born in Memphis, Tennessee to Ghanaian parents. He was awarded 2016 Sugarhill Museum Artist-in-Residence, the 2017 Sharpe Walentas Studio Program in New York City, and named the 2018 Deutsche Bank NYFA Fellowship Award. He was appointed The Alex Katz Chair at Cooper Union and served as a Core Critic at Yale University School of Art. In 2018, he was awarded commissions for the Whitney Museum of American Art Billboard Project and the Metropolitan Transit Authority Arts & Design program. Recently, he was the inaugural artist for the Building Art Series on the façade of MOCA Grand Avenue in Los Angeles. His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Financial Times, The Los Angeles Times, and Hyperallergic. He has also been featured in several publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Juxtapoz, Vanity Fair and Forbes Magazine. He is a graduate of Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, earned a Master’s Degree in Art Education from Harvard University, and an MFA in painting from Hunter College. His work is held in the private and public collections of The Studio Museum of Harlem, Guggenheim Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, SFMOMA, Brooklyn Museum, Perez Museum, The Whitney Museum and LACMA. Fordjour is the founder of Contemporary Arts Memphis Summer Fellowship program.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Julio Le Parc. Zepelín de Acero, 2021 / Art Basel 2024 Unlimited. Basel (Switzerland), June 13, 2024. Official description: The monumental installation Zepelín de Acero (Steel Zeppelin) – presented for the first time at the Hermès Foundation in Tokyo in 2021 as part of the exhibition ‘Les Couleurs en jeu’ – offers a reinterpretation of the artist’s exploration of light boxes, characteristic of his installation works. This steel iteration raises questions about the diversity of experiences within a single encounter, evoking notions of motion, instability, and chance, and distancing itself from the idea of stable, singular, definitive artworks. At the core of Julio Le Parc’s practice is a desire to challenge viewers’ perceptions of art, encouraging active engagement and questioning the traditional roles of artist and observer.
Julio Le Parc (born 1928 in Mendoza, Argentina) is a major figure of kinetic and contemporary art. In Paris in 1960, he co-founded the influential collective Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV), which experimented with real movement, light, and instability, actively involving the viewer. Le Parc lives and works in Cachan, France.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Rhona Mühlebach: Antechamber for Supporting Characters / Swiss Art Awards 2024. Basel (Switzerland), June 10, 2024. Official description: Antechamber for Supporting Characters sidesteps narrative and plot in favour of fumbling, idling and rambling. An uncertain clown ventures to communicate with a group of comparatively self-assured spiders through physical mimicry and the sampling of sounds in a space where language and emotions play on a loop. The spiders alternate between cruelty and care while the clown flounders. They find each other in be-tween, with a few harmonious moments. Mühlebach approaches virtual world-building with a DIY aesthetic, revelling in the awkwardness of a medium whose attempts to imitate human experience consistently fall short of the real thing.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
“Tapta: Flexible Forms” is the first major retrospective of Polish-Belgian artist Tapta (1926–1997) outside Belgium. The exhibition, held at Muzeum Susch, highlights Tapta’s central concept of creating flexible sculptures that engage with the exhibition space and viewers. Tapta, born Maria Wierusz-Kowalska in Poland, fled to Belgium in 1945. She studied weaving at La Cambre in Brussels and lived in the Belgian Congo from 1950 to 1960 before establishing herself as an influential artist in Brussels.
The exhibition is organized chronologically, showcasing her textile works from the 1960s-1980s and neoprene works from the 1980s-1990s. Tapta’s textile works evolved from traditional weaving to experimental forms using ropes and three-dimensional structures that invited tactile and physical viewer interaction. Highlights include twenty original textile works and a reconstructed installation, “Forms for a Flexible Space” (1974).
In the 1980s, Tapta transitioned to using neoprene, creating large, flexible installations that continued to engage viewers. The exhibition also features scale models and archival documents, reflecting her innovative methods and teaching career at La Cambre, where she influenced many students. Curated by Liesbeth Decan, the exhibition underscores Tapta’s contributions to avant-garde art and flexible sculpture. The exhibition runs until November 3, 2024.
Tapta: Flexible Forms / Muzeum Susch. Susch (Switzerland), July 20, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Exhibition text (excerpt): Tapta: Flexible Forms is the first large-scale retrospective dedicated to the Polish-Belgian artist Tapta (1926–1997) outside of Belgium, the country to which she fled in 1945 and where she developed her artistic career from the 1960s onwards.
The title of the exhibition, Flexible Forms, refers to the central concept of her oeuvre: the creation of sculptures that through their flexible forms interact with the exhibition space and with the viewer. The exhibition’s ambition reflects Muzeum Susch’s founding mission to promote the work of international avant-garde women artists who have been overlooked or misread and have thus not been equally aligned and lauded with their male counterparts across art institutions all over the world.
Tapta (the pseudonym of Maria Wierusz-Kowalska, born Maria Irena Boyé) was born in Poland in 1926 and came to Belgium as a political refugee with her husband, Krzysztof, after taking part in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. She studied weaving at the La Cambre National School of Visual Arts, Brussels, from where she graduated in 1949. Shortly afterwards, the couple moved to the Belgian Congo (now Democratic Republic of the Congo), where they lived from 1950 to 1960. On their return to Belgium in 1960, until her sudden death in 1997, she worked in Brussels as an artist and – from 1976 until 1990 – as a professor at La Cambre.
Installed in a loosely chronological order, the exhibition will give an overview of Tapta’s oeuvre, which is mainly divided into two ‘periods’: the textile works made in the 1960s until the early 1980s and the works in neoprene from the 1980s to 1990s.
The exhibition first focuses on Tapta’s textile works, in which she steadily distanced herself from traditional weaving by applying experimental techniques such as twisting her woven pieces and, in particular, through the use of ropes, which she knotted and joined together into organic volumes. Her work protruded outwards from the wall, became more three-dimensional and increasingly interacted with the space and the viewer, who was invited to experience the works not only visually but also in a tactile and physical manner, stepping around and even inside them.
In addition to about twenty original textile works, the exhibition will premiere the unique reconstruction recently made of Tapta’s Forms for a Flexible Space (1974). This imposing installation made of cords, in which the visitor can enter and take a seat, is – as far as is known – the only still existing environment of which Tapta created several in the early 1970s. However, since the original is in extremely poor condition, an exhibition copy was made last year during the Tapta exhibition at Wiels, Brussels, and will be shown in its entirety for the first time at Muzeum Susch.
Tapta’s activation of the viewer, as seen in the textile sculptures, also manifests itself in the black neoprene works that she began to make in the late 1980s and which – following an intermediate phase of experimenting with rubber and stretching ropes across the vaults of the exhibition spaces – marked a radical turn in her use of materials. Handcrafted rope sculptures now gave way to sculptures and installations from the industrially manufactured material, neoprene – further developing, however, her idea of flexible sculpture. Large black surfaces connected by metal bars and bolts form open structures, through or past which the viewer can walk. Sometimes, the different elements of the sculpture are connected by hinges, allowing their shape to be changed – according to the size of the space or the will of the visitor.
Next to a wide selection of art works, two rooms of the exhibition will be dedicated to scale models, by means of which Tapta invented both her textile and her neoprene sculptures. These models, which are miniature versions of the final monumental works or trial versions of sculptures that were never executed, reflect Tapta’s way of working: totally lead by the material – its texture, weight, flexibility, and touch – she sculpted the pieces of textile or neoprene into shapes that foreshadow how, in the eventual installations, she would lead, or weave, the visitors through the space, in and around her works, allowing them to experience the environment differently.
Some of the archival documents that will be shown next to the scale models, feature Tapta as a professor at the La Cambre National School of Visual Arts in Brussels. From 1976 to 1990, she led the textile workshop there, renaming it Flexible Sculpture. This commitment as a teacher was as important to her as her artistic practice. Rather than instructing her students in a particular technique, she prioritised the development of an open and critical mind. Her students included Ann Veronica Janssens, Monica Droste and Marie-Jo Lafontaine.
The exhibition is curated by Liesbeth Decan, who is a lecturer at LUCA School of Arts Brussels. Her research is focused on the work of Belgian avant-garde artists from the 1960s till the 1990s. In 2023, she organised the exhibition Tapta: Espaces souples – With Greet Billet, Hana Miletić and Richard Venlet at WIELS, Brussels, where Tapta’s sculptures were placed in dialogue with works from three contemporary artists specifically made for the exhibition.
Tapta (pseudonym of Maria Wierusz-Kowalska, born Maria Irena Boyé) was born in Poland in 1926 and came to Belgium as a political refugee with her husband, Krzysztof Wierusz-Kowalski, after taking part in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. She studied weaving at the La Cambre National School of Visual Arts, Brussels, from where she graduated in 1949. Shortly afterwards, the couple moved to the Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), where they lived from 1950 to 1960. After returning to Belgium, Tapta swiftly established herself as an important member of a new generation of artists who sought to redefine sculpture by using textiles and other flexible materials as sculptural elements. In doing so, she simultaneously took textile art beyond the categories of the decorative arts and crafts. She had her first solo exhibition in 1966 at the Galerie Les Métiers in Brussels, after which her work was shown in major exhibitions in Belgium and abroad, including at the 4th International Biennale of Tapestry in 1969 in Lausanne. This exhibition, in which her work was displayed alongside those of Magdalena Abakanowicz, Jagoda Buić, Elsi Giauque and Sheila Hicks, encouraged her to continue along the path of unconventional experimentation with textiles.In the 1980s she quite radically changed her materials from woven textiles and cords to neoprene. With this industrially produced rubber she created large black installations that, however, still represent her idea of ‘flexible sculpture’. Tapta died unexpectedly in 1997, just as her native Poland was discovering her work at a major solo exhibition at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, and her monumental sculpture Esprit Ouvert near Brussels North Station had just been inaugurated.
Liesbeth Decan teaches history of photography and art at LUCA School of Arts Brussels. She holds a PhD in art history from Leuven University. Her research concentrates on the work of Belgian avant-garde artists from the 1960s to the 1990s, with a special focus on their photographic work. Her most comprehensive publication on that topic is “Conceptual, Surrealist, Pictorial: Photo-based Art in Belgium (1960s–early 1990s),” which was published within the Lieven Gevaert Series of Leuven University Press (2016). On the same topic, she curated the exhibition “From Broodthaers to Braeckman: Photography in the Visual Arts in Belgium” at M HKA, Antwerp (2017). With Mieke Bleyen she co-edited the book “Photography Performing Humor (Leuven University Press, 2019). In 2023, she was the curator of the exhibition “Tapta: Espaces Souples – With Greet Billet, Hana Miletić and Richard Venlet” at WIELS, Brussels, and was the editor of the book with the same title (Mousse Publishing, 2024). She is a senior staff member of the Lieven Gevaert Research Centre for Photography, Art and Visual Culture (KU Leuven/UCLouvain) and a member of the Committee of AICA Belgium.
Muzeum Susch is launching a new exhibition and research program that focuses on 20th-century women’s photography, covering avant-garde, documentary, socially engaged, and feminist photography. This initiative aims to highlight the contributions of female photographers globally, challenging the historically male-dominated narrative of photography. The program will explore the diverse and radical approaches these women brought to the medium, often using photography as an accessible art form due to limited recognition and resources.
The inaugural exhibition, “Běla Kolářová & Emila Medková: Where No One Looked Before,” showcases the works of two pioneering Czech photographers. Emila Medková, associated with Czechoslovak Surrealism, created visually enigmatic photographs with dream-like qualities, often featuring female figures as shadowy, unsettling presences. Běla Kolářová, linked with Constructivism, used everyday objects in her photography to reveal unseen aspects of reality. She developed techniques such as ‘artificial negatives’ to capture what eludes the human eye.
Both artists used photography to unveil hidden dimensions of reality, challenging conventional perceptions. Kolářová’s works are held in major international collections, while Medková’s photographs, characterized by their complex layers and social-political tensions, are also internationally recognized. This program aims to enrich the understanding of photography’s history through the lens of these influential women.
The exhibition Běla Kolářová & Emila Medková: Where No One Looked Before at Muzeum Susch runs until November 3, 2024.
Běla Kolářová & Emila Medková: Where No One Looked Before. Muzeum Susch, Switzerland, July 20, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Muzeum Susch, nestled in the Inn Valley amidst medieval monastery remnants and alpine mountains, opened on January 2, 2019. It blends historical structures with contemporary art, promoting innovation in response to the enchanting Engadin surroundings. Founded by Grażyna Kulczyk, the museum emphasizes female artists and matrilineal art narratives.
The complex comprises four interconnected buildings, including a former monastery and brewery, restored and expanded by architects Chasper Schmidlin and Lukas Voellmy. They respected the site’s historical significance while introducing modern minimalistic interventions. Permanent site-specific installations by artists like Monika Sosnowska, Mirosław Bałka, and others, interact with the architecture, enhancing the museum’s unique character. The Bieraria and Bieraria Veglia buildings, connected by a tunnel, house exhibitions, foundation headquarters, and a restaurant, while the Chasa della Santa and Temporars Susch serve as artist residencies.
The museum’s design, excavation into mountain rock, and incorporation of natural elements create a dynamic interplay between history and contemporary art, offering a reflective and engaging visitor experience.
Oliver Laric: Metamorphosen / ERES Projects, Munich (Germany), May 4, 2024. Official description: A toad, is a toad, is a toad – is a table? Oliver Laric shows a bizarre transformation in his work “Metamorphosis”. A living being becomes an object, each phase is an image in itself, of equal weight and importance. The artist, who was born in Innsbruck in 1981, continues the metamorphosis by means of technical manipulation. He transforms analogue objects by digitising them as 3D scans, making some of the files available free of charge on the Internet and allowing them to take on a spatial form again in 3D printing. In the cycle of this transformation, he plays with different variants, sizes and materials, thereby posing the question of authenticity: “What works well for me is a flexible digital file that can be physically realised, but the focus for me is on the repeatable – that I am writing a recipe or instructions rather than creating a finished product.” Oliver Laric’s works are therefore both copies and originals. It is only logical that the toad, which in nature undergoes the astonishing transformation from a tadpole living in water to a fully-grown land creature, also appears in his work in different variations. Based on the video work “Metamorphosis”, in which a toad is digitally transformed, he first developed the sequence of a bronze toad mutating into a table in five stages, which was realised as a permanent installation on a beach in Belgium. This was followed by an edition of a “toad table” milled from wood in cooperation with the Austrian gallery Brugger. The version of “Metamorphosis” created especially for ERES Projects is the latest variation of the concept and will be on display for the first time at the Various Others Spring Edition.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
After the impressions of the opening of Lorena D’Ercole’s exhibition in Ortigia, Italy, in this video the artist herself guides us through the exhibition, which features painting, sculpture and a performance under the title “Goditela”.
Exhibition Tour with the Artist, Ortygia (Sicily, Italy), July 10, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Dominique Fung: A Tale of Ancestral Memories, 2023 / Massimodecarlo at Art Basel Unlimited 2024. June 13, 2024.
Official description: Tale of Ancestral Memories is a visual odyssey commissioned by Art Production Fund in 2023 for the Rockefeller Center, marking Dominique Fung’s most ambitious work to date. Spanning 26 meters in length and composed of 7 parts (30 canvases in total), this work is revealed for the very first time in its intended form at Unlimited 2024.
This monumental work is the culmination of her ongoing exploration of identity, memory, ancestry, the female body, the passage of time, and the fusion of Eastern and Western art historical references. Playing with the canon of the traditional ancient scroll format, the story gradually unfolds: her tale begins in the water, at night, with the Ama or Haenyeo sea women, taking us across sea, boat and land, to a foreign destination inhabited by surrealist horses with a wheeled chariot in perpetual movement.
Dominique Fung (born 1987 in Ottawa) is an artist who explores the liminal territory where tradition, memory, and legacy permeate the collective subconsciousness. In casting light on overlooked or forgotten stories, she models a new, broader, alternative space of belonging. Fung lives and works in New York.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Torkwase Dyson: Errantry, 2024 / Gray, Pace Gallery at Art Basel 2024 Unlimited. Basel (Switzerland), June 13, 2024. Official description: Torkwase Dyson’s monumental sculpture Errantry deploys geometric forms to create an interactive, architectural space. Dyson references histories of enslavement and architectures of dispossession to further examine human geography and propose spatial liberation strategies within a rubric Dyson calls ‘Black Compositional Thought.’ The artist states, ‘as we navigate built environments we did not design, we’ve learned through our experiences that authority over one’s mind/body in the labyrinth of forms, spaces, and objects is a question of race, composition, and materiality. We must be able to interrogate current infrastructure with new design solutions to advance environmental conditions with our political and material futures in mind.’ Torkwase Dyson (born 1973 in Chicago) employs painting, drawing, installation, and sculpture to distill the spatial and affective residues of diasporic histories and envision new modes of environmental liberation. Dyson lives and works in Beacon, New York.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Jorge Raka: Miedus Domesticus (Domestic Fear), 2024 / Swiss Art Awards 2024. Basel (Switzerland), June 10, 2024. Official description (translated from French): The installation questions values of cleanliness and our relationship with our environment, opening up questions about nature and culture (if nature is a kind of civil war, a constant anthropophagy). The Latin title parodies the classifications used by biologists and entomologists in the 16th and 17th centuries.
The two characters, with an attitude of escape from something that repels them. (Subjectivity that doesn’t recognize otherness?). The rose is inspired in the agricultural fields of the Valais, and it’s the roses that first give the message that an invasion of pests is damaging crops.
L’installation interroge les valeurs de propreté et le rapport à notre environnement, ouvrant des questions sur nature et culture (si la nature est une sorte de guerre civile, une anthropophagie constante). Le titre latin parodie les classifications nommées par les biologistes et les entomologistes des XVIle et XVIlle siècles.
Les deux personnages, avec une attitude d’évasion de quelque chose qui leur fait répulsion. (Subjectivité qui ne reconnaît pas une altérité?). La rose s’inspire dans les champs agricoles du Valais, ce sont les roses qui donnent le premier message qu’une invasion de ravageurs endommage les cultures.
Jore Raka was born in 1980 in Pucallpa (Peru). Raka works in Sion (Switzerland).
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Yayoi Kusama: Aspiring to Pumpkin’s Love, the Love in My Heart, 2023. David Zwirner at Art Basel 2024 Unlimited. Basel (Switzerland), June 13, 2024.
Painted with Yayoi Kusama’s characteristic dots in vertical stripes, this monumental sculpture is part of a series of bronze pumpkin works first shown in the artist’s 2023 exhibition ‘I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers’ at David Zwirner, New York. While pumpkin shapes have appeared in Kusama’s work since her early art studies in Japan in the 1950s, this organic form became central to her oeuvre from the 1980s onward. Here, its normally spherical shape is transfigured into an undulating surface, as if topologically morphed or stretched. The work’s installation prompts viewers to explore the work from various perspectives, each shift in viewpoint unveiling a dynamic interplay of space and form.
Yayoi Kusama (born 1929 in Matsumoto, Japan) makes paintings, sculptures, and installations that allude to microscopic and macroscopic universes, and have transcended two of the most important art movements of the second half of the 20th century: Pop art and Minimalism. Kusama lives and works in Tokyo.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
In this video, we attend the opening reception of Lorena D’Ercole‘s solo exhibition in Ortygia, Italy. The exhibition, which takes place in an old church in the heart of Ortyiga, features paintings, sculpture, and performance. It’s titled “Goditela”, a play on words that includes the english word “God” and the Italian words “godi” (enjoy) and “tela” (canvas).
The artist explains: “Enjoy it” is a word that invites us to live in the moment, to enjoy life with fullness and awareness. But if we look at it more closely, we see that inside “Goditela” there is much more. We find the word “God,” which takes us back to something greater, to the search for a higher meaning. Then there is “enjoy,” which is a direct invitation to find joy in the small and big things in life. Finally, “canvas” recalls the idea of an artist’s canvas, a space where each of us can paint our own story. The exhibition is intended to be an emotional journey through these dimensions. Each work on display will be a reflection on how we live our lives, how we can find beauty even in the most difficult moments, and how we can connect with something bigger than ourselves.
Lorena D’Ercole created the paintings by throwing paint onto the canvas from a height of 7 meters. “In that throw is my strength, my energy, and most of all my confidence in the color that, mixing on the canvas, gave life to shapes and symbols. By surprise. Relying on chance, fate, life, pleasure.”
“I started painting at 45 years old, and even though it initially seemed like a path without prospects, my creative need drove me to continue. Over time, the path became clearer, and opportunities emerged. By following my heart and with persistent effort, I was able to grow. Every canvas I’ve created reflects a part of my soul, projecting it outward.” (Lorena D’Ercole)
The exhibition runs until September 8, 2024. It also features a light installation that designer Angelo Sanzone created specifically for the show.
In an upcoming video, Lorena D’Ercole will guide us through the exhibition. Meanwhile, have a look at the Studio Visit we did with the artist in 2022.
Lorena D’Ercole: Goditela / Ex Chiesa di Gesù e Maria, Ortygia (Syracuse, Sicily), Italy. Opening Reception, July 7, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Markus Müller: Seasons of Compensation, 2024 (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter) / Froh Ussicht, Basel Social Club 2024. Basel (Switzerland), June 13, 2024.
Markus Müller’s main artistic interest is in the field of spatial representation. His work, examining the potential of craftsmanship as an image and strategy for today’s society, has been shown in various institutions in Switzerland and abroad, including Kunstmuseum Basel, Kunsthaus Glarus, Néon – diffuseur d’art contemporain in Lyon and Cafe Gallery Projects London. Permanent interventions in public space – whether in Basel, St.Gallen, Winterthur or Teufen – allow him to introduce this topic into the daily routine of an urban environment. Markus Müller’s work has been honoured with the Swiss Art Award, the Manor Art Prize or membership of the Swiss Institute in Rome. Since 2010 he has been teaching in the study programme at the Fine Arts Department of Berne University of the Arts. (Source: Nicolas Krupp Gallery, Basel)
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Barbara Signer’s Gate III (Warten in Grau / Waiting in Grey), 2024 has been presented by 18, Murata, Japan at Basel Social Club 2024. Barbara Signer lives and works in St. Gallen and Zurich. In her work she deals with reality. It is a reality which is formed by multiple layers of meaning and the relations between beings and things, a place between fact and fiction. (official description).
Barbara Signer: Gate III (Warten in Grau / Waiting in Grey), 2024. 18, Murata, Japan at Basel Social Club 2024. Basel (Switzerland), June 13, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Eva Koťátková’s installation, an animated, landscape-like environment, consists of crates, costumes, and sculptures that come to life through performances including text and sound. Each act tells a different story: that of a child being bullied at school, a shrimp being boiled alive, a fish being pulled ashore, and a bush being unrooted and moved to the suburbs. The narratives are filled with both compassion and humor as well as cruelty; they call for increased empathy for all life. The crates point to the idea of the storage, of the body as an archive of memories, to bodies in migration, and to bodies aiming to leave real and metaphorical confinements behind.
Eva Koťátková was born in 1982, Prague, Czech Republic. She lives and works in Prague, Czech Republic.
Eva Kotatkova Performance at Art Basel 2024 Parcours. Hotel Rheinfelderhof, Basel (Switzerland), June 16, 2024.
Keith Haring: Untitled (FDR NY) #5-22, 1984. Martos Gallery, Gladstone Gallery at Art Basel 2024 Unlimited. Basel (Switzerland), June 13, 2024.
Keith Haring’s monumental frieze Untitled (FDR NY) was created in situ on a fence lining the Franklin D. Roosevelt East River Drive in New York City in 1984. Originally extending nearly 300 feet along the highway, the mural comprised roughly 30 panels animated with Haring’s exuberant iconography and was on view for almost a year before the individual panels were taken down in 1985 and subsequently dispersed. Since then, various groups of the rescued panels have been exhibited at venues including the Musée des Beaux-Arts and Anciens Abattoirs, Mons, Belgium, in 2009, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyon, France, in 2008. Comprising a significant section of the original mural, Untitled (FDR NY) #5-22 brings together 18 panels, exhibited as a group for the first time since their creation and initial display 40 years ago.
Keith Haring (born 1958 in Reading, Pennsylvania; died 1990 in New York) first rose to prominence in the early 1980s for his spontaneous, graffiti-inspired drawings in New York City subway stations. Throughout his short career and after his untimely death in 1990, Haring’s unique visual language and iconic motifs have remained relevant to global audiences.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
This is the 85th episode in our series of VernissageTV Classics. It’s the opening reception of the group exhibition “Branding” at Centre PasquArt in Biel/Bienne Switzerland. The focuses on the artwork between authenticity and aura, criticism and calculus. Participant artists are Sam Abell, Francis Baudevin, Thomas Baumgärtel, Otto Berchem, Daniele Buetti, Barbara Bunker, f & d cartier, COM&COM, herman de vries, Philippe Decrauzat, Stéphane Ducret (Yodeli), etoy, Sylvie Fleury, Nic Hess, Jenny Holzer, Ingold Airlines, San Keller, Alexander Kosolapov, Bernhard Luginbühl, Urs Lüthi, Barbarella Maier, Burton Morris, Olivier Mosset, Protoplast, Albrecht Schnider, Ben Vautier, Lawrence Weiner and Rémy Zaugg.
VTV Classics (r3) highlights the treasures of VernissageTV’s huge archive. Back then published in Standard Definition, these classics are now re-mastered, re-edited and reissued in High Definition.
Opening reception with sounds by Stimmhorn, April 1, 2006. Centre PasquArt Biel / Bienne, Switzerland.
Original Post
Yuko Mohri: Compose / Pavilion of Japan at Venice Art Biennale 2024. Venice (Italy), April 19, 2024. Official description: Known for her installations and sculptures centred on “events” that change with conditions such as their environment, the exhibition by Yuko Mohri and curated by Sook-Kyung Lee fills the pavilion with sound, light, movement, and smell. Inspired by ad hoc efforts seen in Tokyo subway stations to stop water leaks, Moré Moré (Leaky) will artificially create leaks and then attempt to fix them, improvising with a variety of household goods available in Venice to construct kinetic sculpture. In a world where floods affect the environment, and especially in Venice, a city hit by a flood once every fifty years, the last one in 2019, Moré Moré will resonate with a wide range of issues. Decomposition generates sounds and light by inserting electrodes into fruits and converting their moisture into electric signals. The fruits’ internal state shifts constantly, modulating the pitch of the drone and the intensity of the light while they start emitting a sweet smell of decay, dissolving or withering. With a title that etymologically signifies “to place together (com+pose)”, the exhibition asks what it means for people to be and work together in a world facing multiple global crises. Paradoxically, the crisis brings out the greatest creativity — inspired by the subway workers’ resourceful measures against water leak.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
360° Version
ZHdK MA Fine Arts alumnus Leevi Toija received the Kiefer Hablitzel Prize 2024 for Toija’s Motion Study series. Official description: Leevi Toija presents five LCD screens measuring approximately 50 × 35 cm, each fixed vertically at its center, at eye level, on an articulated metal arm that holds it at a distance from the wall on which it is hung. Together, they comprise a set of monochrome tableaux in orange, mauve, black, blue, and yellow, both fixed and mobile. In fact, the images are close-ups of details of functional devices, animated by certain rotating components. The filmed objects (musical box, toy, camera, salad dryer, cassette player) evoke a bygone mechanical era. In each panel, a central cog, aligned with the fixing point at the rear of the screen, turns in a loop. The devices all have a different rhythm and sometimes contain other elements rotating at varying speeds. The montage is extremely precise, both sculpturally and conceptually. The varied rhythms emanate a strange sense of poetry, disturbing in its sensual yet mechanical inevitability. Leevi Toija was born in 1998 in Helsinki (Finland), works in Zurich and Helsinki.
Leevi Toija: Motion Study / Swiss Art Awards 2024. Basel (Switzerland), June 10, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Jingle Dance Program featuring dancers and singers from the Oklahoma Fancy Dancers and Colorado Inter-Tribal Dancers. Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me. Pavilion of the United States of America at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Venice (Italy), April 19, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Extended Version
On the occasion of the Venice Art Biennale 2024, the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice (Italy) presents an exhibition of new works by American artist Alex Katz, titled Claire, Grass and Water. The exhibition follows the artist’s recent retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York, and features three major groups of works created between 2021 and 2022 representing three key aspects of his practice. One group of paintings based on the clothes of mid-century American fashion designer Claire McCardell is accompanied by large-scale close-up depictions of inky oceans and grassy terrain in shades of green and yellow.
Alex Katz: Claire, Grass and Water / Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice (Italy). Opening reception, April 16, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Teresa Solar Abboud: Tunnel Boring Machine (Transformation Figure), 2024. Travesía Cuatro at Art Basel 2024 Unlimited. Basel (Switzerland), June 13, 2024.
Official description: Teresa Solar Abboud’s ongoing series, ‘Tunnel Boring Machine,’ initiated in 2021, featured prominently at the 2022 Venice Biennale. It combines her deep-seated interest in the sculptural qualities of theatrical spaces with a more recent curiosity about the subterranean realm as a site of enigmatic events and encounters.
In her work, Solar Abboud alludes to material entities in states of transformation and the tension between organic and synthetic, embryonic and advanced. She wields these tensions as a conduit to suggest that they coexist in a quantum world, in a constant flow state of evolution.
The sculptures could be described as hybrid creatures, exuding a sense of slow, relentless rotation as if emerging from the earth’s depths, akin to fossils traversing the twilight of deep time.
Teresa Solar Abboud (born 1985 in Madrid) creates sculptures, drawings, and videos characterized by an interest in fiction, storytelling, natural history, ecology, and anatomy. Solar Abboud lives and works in Madrid.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Out now: VernissageTV Magazine No. 55, July 2024. In this issue: Ozzie Juarez, Dan Flavin, Yuan Goang-Ming, Biennale Arte 2024, and Didier Leroi.
Click image or this link to download the magazine (30 MB) or order print copy via Peecho.
All issues are available in our Magazine section.
Los Angeles-based artist Liza Lou makes sculpture, paintings, drawings, and room-size environments that reflect upon issues of women’s labor and connotations of the sublime. While decoration plays an important part in her practice, Lou creates painstaking work that requires countless hours of artisanal-like expertise. Made over the course of a year with a group of Zulu women from her studio in Durban, South Africa – in which every inch of the imposing 13-square-foot structure has been intricately wrapped with countless glass beads – Security Fence signals a point of connection between glamor and socio-political and cultural inequalities. By calling into question notions of security and fragility, the work seeks to dignify the undignifiable and offers viewers the possibility of transformation inside even the most abject of situations.
Liza Lou (born 1969 in New York) gained fame in 1996 for her groundbreaking installation, Kitchen, made entirely of beads. From 2005-2020, the artist founded and operated a women’s art advocacy program in Durban, South Africa. Lou lives and works in Los Angeles.
Liza Lou: Security Fence, 2005. Thaddaeus Ropac, Lehmann Maupin at Art Basel 2024 Unlimited. Basel (Switzerland), June 13, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
This is another episode in our VTV Classics (r3) series. VTV Classics (r3) highlights the treasures of VernissageTV’s huge archive. Back then published in Standard Definition, these classics are now re-mastered, re-edited and reissued in High Definition:
Galerie Friedrich presents “The Chocolate Bar” (film and film stills) by Bethan Huws. “The Chocolate Bar” is a short film (4:25 mins) with three personas, three locations and a host of camera angles, starring Welsh actor Rhys Ifans (with a short appearance of Marcel Duchamp’s “Bottle-Rack”). Bethan Huws was born in Bangor, Wales. She lives and works in Paris, France. Galerie Friedrich is run by Erika and Otto Friedrich who founded the gallery in 1978. “The Chocolate Bar” runs till Mai 20, 2006. Huws also takes part in the exhibition “Mental Image” (April 8 – Mai 14, 2006) at the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen. Galerie Friedrich will participate in Art 37 Basel art fair, Hall 2.1, Booth W3. Galerie Friedrich, Basel, private view, April 8, 2006.
Sandra Gamarra Heshiki: Migrant Art Gallery / Spanish Pavilion at Venice Art Biennale 2024. Venice (Italy), April 19, 2024.
Official description: Sandra Gamarra Heshiki’s extensive research is manifested in new works based on paintings that belong to the national heritage of Spanish art collections from colonial times to the Enlightenment. Each piece investigates the absence of decolonial narratives within museums, revealing the biased representations of colonisers and the colonised. Within this field of study, sociology, politics, art history, and biology intertwine to provide a reinterpretation, where too often ignored consequences of history connect to present-day racism, migration, and extractivism in relation to both the ecological and museological crises.
The Peruvian artist Sandra Gamarra, represents Spain at the Venice Biennale. It is the first time in 60 editions that an artist not born in Spain has done so. Her project, ‘Pinacoteca migrante’, questions colonial narratives and historical modes of representation. The project is curated by Agustín Pérez Rubio, with a long career in Latin American art as artistic director of the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires (Malba) or as curator of the Chile pavilion at the 2018 Biennial.
The Spanish pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale – which is celebrated from April 20 to November 24 – thus becomes a space to reread the Spanish pictorial heritage (Murillo, Zurbarán or even Velázquez) and make silenced cultures visible. Gamarra, who was already at the 2009 Venice Biennale in the pavilion of the Italian-Latin American Institute, takes as a starting point paintings, from the time of the Empire to the Enlightenment, in which reference is made to the territories that were part of Spain, but they carry with them a “monolithic notion that was based on the destruction of other forms of social organization.” Through six rooms or sections she will explore the classic genres of the arts: engraving, portrait, landscape… with interventions and reinterpretations that will analyze the biased representations between colonizers and colonized, in addition to offering a historical context that is linked to the present.
The rooms that make up Pinacoteca migrante are titled: Tierra Virgen, about paintings of Spanish landscapes, but also from Latin America, the Philippines and North Africa; Cabinet of Extinction, which links colonialism with extractivism; Cabinet of Illustrated Racism, a story about how anthropology and science were used as a tool of racial discrimination; Mestizo masks, on the portrait of settlers; Altarpiece of Dying Nature, which will relate the still life to the construction of opulence and treasures; and Migrant Garden, which will recreate monuments about the conquest that are located in the former colonies. In all of them he will combine the plastic arts with quotes from ecofeminist writers or thinkers; modifications of facsimiles of illustrations from real archives or representations of alien or invasive plants, alluding to migration.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
360° Version
Vincent Grange: Dorothy’s Closet / Swiss Art Awards 2024. Basel (Switzerland), June 10, 2024.
Official description by the artist:
This project is an extension of The House of Dorothy (2023). It will be exhibited at the Swiss Art Awards for ArtBasel from June 10th to June 16th 2024 in Basel – competing for the Kiefer Hablitzel Göhner Prize. It will then teleport back to Espace Dukat in Geneva for the Lae Fol, l’Aube et l’Étoile exhibition opening June 21st 2024.
The LGBTQIA+ community has developed multiple secret codes over time to communicate one’s sexual orientation or gender identity discreetly in times of segregation. To name a few, Queer people have been able to identify each other through flowers, colored bandanas, ice cream flavors, cut fingernails, peacock feathers, or – by introducing themselves as “friends of Dorothy.” In 1981, when it was still illegal to be gay in the USA, The Naval Investigative Service (NIS) of Chicago heard about the “Dorothy” phenomenon within the US military and led an important investigation to catch her, hoping she would give out the names of all her gay military friends. In response to the absurdity of this homophobic investigation, I am currently developing and building the home of the imaginary best friend of the community – The House of Dorothy (2023). This project is a way for me to pay homage to queer spaces around the world and acts as a physical manifesto to stress the importance of their existence when 67 countries still criminalize the LGBTQIA+ community today.
Dorothy’s Closet (2024) is a new room in this ever-growing project. Starting from the expression “coming out of the closet,” it questions what a simple piece of furniture represents for those who must hide in it: a place of shelter, a place where you can be your true self, a place where you shape your personality, yet simultaneously a symbol of societal marginalization, fostering feelings of “abnormality.” Playing with the multiple paradoxes that accompany the “closet” (private/public, invisible/visible, inside/outside, comforting/disconcerting), the architecture, objects, and colors contribute to the storytelling of the life of Dorothy and how she and, by extension, members of the LGBTQIA+ community, shape their own closet.
In my artistic practice, absurdity is a tool I use to highlight the irrational nature of homo-, trans-, and bi-phobia. Reclaiming symbols of hate, such as the words «queer» or «fruits,» whic were once used derogatorily against LGBTQIA+ people, has been a powerful response by the oppressed, transforming insults into symbols of pride and resistance. The celebration of uniqueness and peculiarity within the LGBTQIA+ community has empowered many to accept, value, and reconstruct their identities. Through numerous references to queer theory, history, spaces and activists, and by reinterpreting everyday objects, I aim to glorify these aspects of the community that have been marginalized for so long.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Massimo Bartolini: Due qui / To Hear. Italian Pavilion at Venice Art Biennale 2024. Venice (Italy), April 17, 2024.
Official description: Designed with two entrances, the exhibition Due qui/To Hear — presented with support from the Italian Ministry of Culture’s Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity — moves through three spaces built around various acoustic experiences and meeting points, suggesting the highly relational nature of sound. Visitors can enter an almost empty room where they are welcomed by a small sculpture of a Pensive Bodhisattva, a Buddhist figure who prefers thought to action. The drone of an organ pipe creates a sense of frozen time, a space of waiting. In the central room, a large scaffolding of pipes has been transformed into an organ playing a melody composed by Caterina Barbieri and Kali Malone. Visitors can walk through and sit down on a circular bench. At its centre is a pool where a wave constantly rises and falls, prompting a form of meditation, even a trance state. Coming out into the garden, they can listen to two stories about the cycle of birth/death (and regeneration): that of a tree (by Nicoletta Costa) and that of a human being (by Tiziano Scarpa). Further on, they will also hear a choral work (by Gavin Bryars). Hanging in the branches of a tree, these voices sing of a person who feels roots growing through him. They pin him down, but also bring him closer to others, to the Whole…
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
360° Version“We listen in order to interpret our world and experience meaning” (Pauline Oliveros)
Playing on the homophones “two here” (in Italian, due qui) and “to hear,” the title of this project suggests how hearing—or better, listening—is a form of attention to others. The acoustic paradigm should be seen here as a physical experience, but also as a metaphor, an invitation to pay attention, to listen to the Other, be it a human being, a mechanical element, or a natural form. In Bartolini’s view, art is a path to knowledge, and the project suggests that “lending an ear” could become a tool for self-improvement within the community of this world.
Through sculptures, installations, sound works, and performances, with a range that is characteristic of the artist’s practice, it aims to create a context of experience. Visitors to the Pavilion can use either of two entrances—from the Tesa or from the garden—and move through three areas built around different forms of motion and stasis, acoustic experiences and meeting points. All of the works respond to the physical characteristics of each exhibition space, without adopting any form of display.
Due qui / To Hear is also the fullest expression to date of a collaborative approach that Bartolini frequently employs, involving many different figures. The skills and languages of music (Caterina Barbieri, Gavin Bryars, Kali Malone), literature (Nicoletta Costa, Tiziano Scarpa), and technical fields (engineers, organ builders, artisans) have contributed to defining the artistic and curatorial project in all of its complexity, like a polyphonic composition for many voices.
– Luca Cerizza
Pensive Bodhisattva on A Flat, 2024
Sitting on a long recumbent column is the small statue of a Pensive Bodhisattva, a traditional theme in Buddhist art. The Bodhisattva is a person who, having attained enlightenment, voluntarily gives it up in order to show others how to get there. An embodiment of inactivity, the Bodhisattva sits motionless, preferring thought to action.
What looks like a line drawn through the space, a demarcation, actually functions as an organ pipe, with its “mouth” at the other end of the column. A fan moves the air inside, creating a low, steady drone. The suspended state suggested by the Bodhisattva is under-scored by this sustained sound, which evokes a circular kind of time.
The colors of the two long walls in this Tesa allude to how, at different points in history going back at least to Isaac Newton, various scientists and musicians have assigned specific hues to musical keys. In this case, green and purple are respectively A and A flat, in keeping with the associations suggested by composer Alexander Scriabin in 1911. A refers to the key of the organ Bartolini presented at Centro Pecci in Prato (2022-23), while A flat is the key of the work heard in this room.
Due qui, 2024
This is the largest example to date of a series of installations Bartolini has designed over the last few years out of scaffolding pipes. Relying on the aid of organ builders and technical experts, he modifies them to sound like an organ. Like many other projects by Bartolini, this immense mechanical creation works by transforming materials or presenting them in completely new ways, to spark an almost a Baroque sense of wonder. For that matter, according to certain principles of Baroque aesthetics, grasping variation (thauma) is a prerogative of intelligence, and wonder springs from the juxtaposition of “distances,” according to the logic of paradox.
In this case, with a game of contrasts characteristic of this artist, a setting associated with labor and effort (the scaffolding) also becomes an engine of spirituality, perhaps of betterment, through music (the organ). The structure changes function: rather than aiding in the construction of a building, it serves to convey a sound, a musical “edifice.” Filling almost the entire Tesa, this space has various entrances and exits, and exists more as an experience than an image.
The design of this walk-through structure follows the layout of an imaginary Italian garden from the Baroque era. The role that a fountain would normally play in such a garden is filled here by a circular sculpture (Conveyance, 2024), which also serves as a bench on which several people can gather. In point of fact, this center—this meeting place—is the ideal spot for listening, in stereo, to the composition written specifically for this project by two young musicians at the leading edge of experimental and electronic music: Caterina Barbieri (b. 1990, Italy) and Kali Malone (b. 1994, United States). Their joint contribution [Mute vette (A Reflection That Shines From One Mind Upon Another)] is an antiphon in A-flat major in which two melodic lines intersect and complete each other. These two short melodies are played in loop, with mechanical components standing in for the human player of a traditional organ. The music is inscribed on two motorized rolls, like giant music boxes that play in unison. Although the acoustic space has been conceived with a true center, the sound of this musical machine can nonetheless be heard in many different ways depending on how, and at what pace, the visitor walks through it. It is our own movement, in part, that “composes” a constantly changing piece of music.
Conveyance, 2024
Though it echoes the rigorous geometry of a minimalist sculpture, the work is actually “animated” by a natural element: a conical wave that constantly rises and falls. This wave, for which the scientific term is “soliton,” is similar to the kind that generates a tsunami, but here it is constantly repeated as if in a laboratory experiment. Its continual pulsation is a phenomenon that can be observed in solitude or with others; transformed into a hypnotic movement, it can also become a tool that aids meditation. Conveyance is truly a beating heart, a point of equilibrium, perhaps even pacification, within this large, labyrinthine space. Though continually moving, the wave is utterly silent, yet around it all is sound.
A veces ya no puedo moverme, 2024
Ringing out through the Giardino delle Vergini is a choral work for three voices, bell plates, and vibraphone, composed by English musician Gavin Bryars (b. 1943, United Kingdom) in collaboration with his son Yuri Bryars (b. 1999, Canada). One of the most important figures to emerge from the minimalist avant-garde of the late 1960s, Gavin Bryars has worked with Bartolini in the past for the artist’s major retrospective at Centro Pecci in Prato (Hagoromo, 2022-23). Here, Bryars has composed a new piece that draws inspiration from a poem by Roberto Juarroz (1925-95, Argentina). In A veces ya no puedo moverme (Sometimes I can no longer stir myself), a human being has the sense of being a tree, or some other form of plant life connected to the world by its roots, in a form of osmosis: “as if everything were born in me / or as if I were born in everything.” An immobility that is also an interaction. Three pairs of portable speakers have been hung from the branches of three trees, like shoes dangling from a wire to mark a meeting place; they play their sounds in different parts of the garden, suggesting possible relationships between humanity and the environment, or humanity as environment.
About Massimo Bartolini
The creative languages and materials that Massimo Bartolini employs in his practice are vastly diverse: his works range from performances involving temporary actors, the audience, or the architectural space, to drawings made over an intentionally long span of time; from large-scale public installations that often rely on the collaboration of other kinds of experts, to small, rough pieces assembled in the studio; from complex sound sculptures, to photographs and videos.
Bartolini’s work is thus characterized by a radical embrace of all kinds of media, which he adopts and reinvents in unorthodox ways. His path has been guided by a constant urge to probe and explore the languages of art, as if seeking the material best suited in each case to expressing a particular impulse and narrative possibility. Bartolini considers making and experiencing art to be a path to knowledge: about ourselves, about our relationship with the world, about how to interact with others. This path is often blazed by using, contrasting, and transforming different materials in surprising ways, to spark moments of revelation, pauses of wonder, and unexpected little epiphanies.
Bartolini is one of the best-known Italian artists on the international scene. He was born in 1962 in Cecina, where he lives and works; after studying architectural drafting in Livorno, he graduated from the Accademia in Florence in 1989. He teaches Visual Arts at NABA, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti in Milan and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Bologna. Since 1993, he has been showing his work in many public and private spaces in Italy and abroad.
His solo exhibitions include: Hagoromo, Centro Pecci per l’Arte Contemporanea (Prato, 2022); On Identikit, CSAC – Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione dell’Università di Parma (2020); Manifesta 12 (parallel event) Caudu e Fridu, Palazzo Oneto (Palermo, 2018); Four Organs, Fondazione Merz (Turin, 2017); Studio Matters+1, Fruitmarket Gallery (Edinburgh, 2013) and S.M.A.K. (Ghent, 2013); Serce na Dloni, Centre of Contemporary Art Znaki Czasu (Toruń, 2013); HUM, AuditoriumArte (Rome, 2012) and MARCO – Museo de arte contemporáneo (Vigo, 2012); Museu Serralves – Museu de Arte Contemporânea (Porto, 2007); Ikon Gallery (Birmingham, 2007); GAM – Galleria d’Arte Moderna (Turin, 2005); Museum Abteiberg (Mönchengladbach, 2002); PS1 (New York, 2001); Henry Moore Foundation (Leeds, 1996); Paesaggi, Galleria Massimo De Carlo (Milan, 2016); Afterheart, Frith Street Gallery (London, 2012); Three Quarter-Tone Pieces, Magazzino (Rome, 2010).
Among his group shows, one should note: Biennale di Venezia (1999, 2001 parallel event, 2009, 2013); Biennal de València (2001); Stanze e Segreti, Rotonda della Besana (Milan, 2000); Manifesta 4 (Frankfurt, 2002); Bienal de São Paulo (2004); Bienal de Pontevedra (2004); Ecstasy: In and About Altered States, MOCA Los Angeles (2005); Shanghai Biennale (2006 and 2012); Yokohama Triennale (2011); dOCUMENTA (13) (Kassel, 2012); Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale (Tokamachi, 2012); TRACK (Ghent, 2012); One on One, Kunstwerke (Berlin, 2012); The City, My Studio / The City, My Life, Kathmandu Triennale (2017); Habit Co-Habit, Pune Biennale (2017); Starting from the Desert: Ecologies on the Edge, Yinchuan Biennale (2018); Escape Routes, Bangkok Art Biennale (2020); Setouchi Triennale (2022).
Art Basel‘s Parcours sector features site-specific installations, sculptures, and performances in public spaces throughout the city of Basel. This year Parcours moves closer to the fair building and is situated in (empty) stores, and other spaces on Basel’s Clarastrasse between Mittlere Brücke and the Messeplatz. The participating artists are: Rirkrit Tiravanija, James Webb, Kira Freije, Mandy El-Sayegh, Tromarama, Eric Hattan, Lois Weinberger, Anh Trân, Tadáskía, Edith Deyerling, Joanna Piotrowska, Ximena Garrido-Lecca, Moshekwa Langa, Lap-See Lam, Stephanie Comilang, Pol Taburet, Peng Zuqiang, Alvaro Barrington, Eva Koťátková, Iris Touliatou, Nina Canell & Robin Watkins, and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster in collaboration with Paul B. Preciado.
Official description: The Parcours sector at Art Basel is a distinctive showcase of site-specific installations, sculptures, interventions, and performances situated in public spaces and historic sites throughout the city of Basel. Curated by a guest curator, Parcours encourages a deeper engagement between the artworks and the urban environment, inviting visitors to explore the city’s rich cultural and architectural heritage while encountering thought-provoking contemporary art pieces that create new dialogues and perspectives.
The 2024 edition of Parcours is curated for the first time by Stefanie Hessler, Director of Swiss Institute New York. For this newly envisioned edition, Art Basel’s free outdoor sector is moving closer to the fair building and Messeplatz. Hessler’s concept for Parcours is a curated exhibition that meanders through empty stores and operational shops, a hotel, a restaurant, a distillery, and other quotidian spaces on Basel’s Clarastrasse. Through ambitious projects, many of them site-specific and newly produced, the sector explores transformation and circulation in processes of trade, globalization, and ecology.
Clarastrasse, the street leading from the fair to the river and connecting the new part of the city with the old town, is currently undergoing rapid transformation that mirrors the changes in the fabric of many locales post-Covid. Leading towards the Rhine, itself a body of water through which globalization and migration have connected and shaped Europe, Parcours’s relocation galvanizes artistic responses to these ongoing processes.
The artists’ projects will explore flows of information and goods as well as seepages between the hyperlocal and the global, suggesting that those are far from uniform movements, but complex, unwieldy, and uneven processes. A number of artists will address ecological systems, the affordances of nature that are exploited through extraction, and increasingly changing climates. Several projects will examine how information circulates and by whom, from traditional forms of storytelling to newspapers to abstraction as a vehicle for spiritual communication and communion. Again others refer to change and knowledge transfers across generations and communities, across time and geographies, through migration, affect, and somatic memory.
Art Basel 2024 Parcours Sector. Basel (Switzerland), June 15, 2024.
Bhinna is an internet-activated installation underneath Volkshaus Basel consisting of soprano recorders, a type of woodwind musical instrument that Indonesian elementary students are required to learn and play according to the country’s national education curriculum since 1994. In Bhinna, each recorder plays a specific note from the musical composition “Satu Nusa Satu Bangsa” (One Homeland One Nation), a national song from 1947 that students are required to perform in order to graduate.
To create the work, a computer program scours X (formerly Twitter) for the hashtag #nationality. These postings serve as the input that is decoded into binary codes corresponding to the electrical components of the work, orchestrating the instruments’ flow, resulting in a cacophony of sounds echoing within the arched vault. The title Bhinna derives from the Indonesian national motto, “Bhinneka Tunggal Ika” which translates to “Unity in Diversity”. Bhinneka stems from Bhinna meaning “separate” or “different”.
The work examines the ever-changing nature of information as it travels across geographical landscapes and borders, as well as how it continues to take shape in the digital sphere, transcending political areas and the modern nation-state. Bhinna serves as a simulation for the synthesis of national narratives and their performance through song and through social media, while also pointing to their potential dissident uses.
Tromarama is a collective founded in 2006 by artists Febie Babyrose, Herbert Hans, and Ruddy Hatumena. Their works often combine video, installation, computer programming, and public participation to interrogate digital infrastructures and their influence on civil society, notions of globalization, and attitudes towards the environment.
Tromarama: Bhinna, 2024 / Kiang Malingue, ROH Projects at Art Basel 2024 Parcours. Volkshaus Basel, Basel (Switzerland), June 15, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Christo: Wrapped 1961 Volkswagen Beetle Saloon, 1963 – 2014 / Gagosian at Art Basel 2024 Unlimited. Basel (Switzerland), June 13, 2024.
Official description: In February 1963, on the occasion of Christo’s solo exhibition at Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf, Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped a Volkswagen Beetle. The vehicle, used for the sculpture, was lent by Claus Harden, a colleague of German advertising guru and filmmaker Charles Wilp. Wrapped Car (Volkswagen), 1963, only existed for a short time as Harden requested that the car be returned to him in its unwrapped, original state. In 2013, regretting its loss, Christo decided to recreate the original work of art. After purchasing a mint-colored 1961 Volkswagen Beetle – the identical model he and Jeanne-Claude used over 50 years earlier – Christo had the fluids removed from the vehicle and had it mounted on casters. In 2014, Christo wrapped the car, thereby creating Wrapped 1961 Volkswagen Beetle Saloon, now presented at Unlimited 2024.
Christo (Christo Vladimirov Javacheff, born 1935 in Gabrovo, Bulgaria; died 2020 in New York) was an artist who expanded the possibilities of artistic scale and dramatically – but temporarily – transformed familiar landscapes. He worked collaboratively with his wife Jeanne-Claude from 1961 until her death in 2009.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
The first extensive exhibition of American photographer David Armstrong (1954-2014) showcases nearly 100 portraits, a selection of landscape images, and around 300 contact prints from the 1970s to early 1990s. The exhibition captures a bygone New York, presenting it as a haven for artists, poets, musicians, and bohemians, including notable figures like Cookie Mueller, John Waters, Nan Goldin, and Vincent Gallo.
Armstrong’s work documents his generation, depicting an attitude to life marked by rebellion, queerness, and punk culture. His portraits convey a deep intimacy and beauty, reflecting a time when being on the fringes was celebrated. Armstrong’s approach, influenced by classical painting, captures the essence of his subjects without diminishing their individuality, focusing on the commonality within a generation.
The exhibition also includes landscape photographs that contrast with the portraits, offering a melancholic and timeless reflection of the AIDS epidemic’s impact. Armstrong’s art is conservative, celebrating beauty and authenticity amidst a backdrop of excess and scarcity. His oeuvre, comprising portraits, blurred landscapes, and commercial fashion photography, marks the end of an era, immortalizing the figure of the outsider with quiet irony and a sense of impending change.
Curated by Daniel Baumann and Wade Guyton, the exhibition provides a comprehensive view of Armstrong’s work, emphasizing his influence and the enduring beauty of his photography. The exhibition runs until September 15, 2024.
David Armstrong / Kunsthalle Zürich. Exhibition walkthrough and interviews with Lisa Love (Trustee of the David Armstrong Estate); Colleen Doyle (Archivist); and Wade Guyton (Artist and Curator). Zürich (Switzerland), June 7, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Exhibition text (excerpt):
This is the first extensive exhibition of work by American photographer David Armstrong (1954-2014). Just under 100 portraits are on show, a selection of landscape images and around 300 contact prints from the 1970s to the early 1990s.
Why this work now?
Firstly, it is a document of its time that exudes beauty. We see a New York that no longer exists. It is New York as an attitude to life, beyond the Empire State Building, the urban canyons and yellow taxis that occur countless times in films, stories, ambitions and advertising. This New York is a promise, and New York as a home for outsiders and the stranded, for artists, poets, musicians and bohemians. Cookie Mueller, writer and actress in John Waters’ Pink Flamingos, among other films, immortalised these people in her texts, and Armstrong portrayed many of them, including Mueller herself. They, like him, lived in downtown Manhattan, partied at the legendary Mudd Club and hung out at the beach in Provincetown, Massachusetts. In this exhibition we encounter the actress and gallery owner Patti Astor; artists John Waters, Greer Lankton, Jack Pierson, Tabboo! and Christopher Wool; actor and filmmaker Vincent Gallo; photographer Nan Goldin; curator Klaus Biesenbach; writer Gary Indiana; lawyer and civil rights activist William Kunstler; musicians Philippe Marcade, John and Evan Lurie; model and later Vogue editor Lisa Love; tattoo artist Mark Mahoney; artist and fashion designer Maripol; poet and art critic Rene Ricard; and transgender model Teri Toye.
Armstrong photographed his generation. First in Boston in the 1970s, where he studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and formed a scene with photographers and artists such as Nan Goldin, Mark Morrisroe, Taboo! and Jack Pierson. The earliest black-and-white photographs show young people caught between precocious thoughtfulness and cigarette-smoking rebellion:
“Like it could be anywhere. It’s like they are rebelling against their education. They’re in art school, but they don’t want to be like these distant observers, they want to observe themselves, and their lives, and their friends, and their drugs, and their bars. […] You know, it was about queerness, it was about punk and rebellion, it was about drug dealers, drag bars, HIV, like none of those things were inseparable.” (Oral history interview with Lia Gangitano, 2017 February 5-6. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.)
The exhibition manifests how, from the very beginning, Armstrong did not simply depict people, but an attitude to life – and how he gave it form at the same time. This attitude to life had many different facets: it was intoxicated and exuberant, it was full of melancholy and boredom, it was proud and filled to the brim with coolness and emotion. Being on the fringes was celebrated as a success; for many there was no alternative. They met in clubs, first in Boston at The Other Side, later in downtown Manhattan at the Mudd Club, a punk club and the antithesis of the glamorous Studio 54. Style was central, not as an aesthetic, but as an attitude, as staging, and a springboard to self-destruction or to a career. But what is particularly striking today, forty years later, is the beauty and dedication with which Armstrong photographed his people – and the directness with which they looked into the camera, with an unabashed pleasure in posing and seduction. Everyone is sexy. But what is most striking is the almost shocking intimacy. The shock comes from the fact that this form of intimacy has disappeared from our portraits, and we had not realised it.
It could all have easily gone wrong, because there was too much of everything: too much energy, too much intensity, too much time and too little money:
‘Yeah, life is tough in the real world. Actors wait on tables, ballet dancers work as topless go-go girls, artists wash dishes, and that’s not even the worst part. Someday you might bring your garbage on the subway, someday you might even shit in your own bank’ wrote Cookie Mueller in the 1980s in ‘Another Boring Day’, first published in 2022. But therein lies Armstrong’s art and its significance: he did not allow the excess and scarcity that characterised the period to run its course; he did not want to exaggerate and exoticize it, but indeed reined it in. For Armstrong’s art, as others have noted before, is classically conservative. It had to be. It was modelled on the painting he had first studied and from which he borrowed portraiture, landscape painting and the genre scene. These types of images, each with historically anchored pictorial conventions, allowed Armstrong to capture and frame the subject in order to focus on commonality (within a generation, an attitude to life or a moment) without taking away the individual’s brilliance and shortcomings. And they allowed him to unabashedly celebrate beauty:
“I remember first seeing Peter Hujar’s photos. That was earth shattering. Their power – all about authenticity and restraint, proportion and the contemplative, subdued grandeur as they used to define ‘classic art’.” (David Armstrong in conversation with Jack Pierson in Night and Day, 2012).
Roughly speaking, Armstrong’s oeuvre consists of three groups of works: portraits of people, most of whom were in his circle of friends; blurred landscapes from the late 1980s onwards; and, thirdly, commercial photographs for the fashion industry created from the mid-1990s onwards. The exhibition centres on the first group of works, the portraits of his friends, lovers and acquaintances, artists, poets and dealers. These are complemented by a selection of around 300 contact prints, shown here for the first time. These provide an insight into Armstrong’s approach and how he photographed, and broaden the perspective on his work. We are not showing an established, museum-style Armstrong in this exhibition, but an artist at work, whose oeuvre we still need to fully assess.
We have also included a series of landscape photographs. They form a counterpoint to the portraits. In contrast to the portraits, they appear detached from time and place. A building or a landscape does not care whether it is photographed or not. They never pose and do not want to be seen, understood or displayed. They are simply there and will long outlive us; that is the melancholy that Armstrong stages. Thus landscape images are always mirrors of the maker’s soul, they are ciphers for states of mind and indirect self-portraits. This is what makes them so dangerous and open to nostalgia. Armstrong made these landscape photographs contemporaneously with a major, profound crisis at the end of the 1980s: the AIDS epidemic. They are to be understood against the backdrop of this immense tragedy, as still lifes and memento mori. In them, time is suspended as a perpetual future past. ‘The AIDS virus, wearing only its most insidious smile, had crashed the gates of our party’ writes the critic Linka Yablonsky, herself an Armstrong subject, in 1989 in the exhibition catalogue for Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing. Nan Goldin, photographer and close friend of Armstrong, had curated Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing for New York’s Artists Space; it was the first major exhibition on the subject of AIDS and sparked heated debates. In ‘A Last Letter’ shortly before her AIDS-related death in 1989 Cookie Mueller wrote: ‘Each friend I’ve lost was an extraordinary person, not just to me, but to hundreds of people who knew their work and their fight. These were the kind of people who lifted the quality of all our lives, their war was against ignorance, the bankruptcy of beauty, and the truancy of culture. They were people who hated and scorned pettiness, intolerance, bigotry, mediocrity, ugliness, and spiritual myopia; the blindness that makes life hollow and insipid was unacceptable. They tried to make us see. All of these friends were connected to the arts. Time and history have proven that the sensitive souls among us have always been more vulnerable.’
Another aspect of Armstrong’s work is shown in the 1979 cycle Night and Day. A selection of the pictures, originally intended for a publication, is shown here on two screens. These are colour slides taken between New York and Provincetown, Massachusetts. Over the course of 10 months, Armstrong photographed his friends in bars, clubs, cars, in bed, in the bathtub and on the beach: ‘They’re snapshots from a period when I was rarely awake during the day.’ (David Armstrong, Interview Magazine, June 20, 2012) All the pictures were taken with a 35mm hand-held camera, some using a flash that Armstrong otherwise never employed. Night and Day is a portrait of a subculture and bohemia. Spiritually closest to punk, its protagonists present themselves fully conscious of their style. They cultivate a post-romantic, pseudo-conservative rockabilly style, as immortalised on stage by the indie band Lounge Lizards. John Lurie, one of the founders of this conceptual band who was portrayed several times by Armstrong, played in Jim Jarmusch’s style-defining film Stranger Than Paradise in 1984. This cult film of the urban 1980s intelligentsia brought the style celebrated in Night and Day into the alternative mainstream.
But in what tradition does Armstrong’s work stand? Broadly it can be said that Armstrong’s photography, like that of many American photographers, is indirectly or directly centred around the figure of the outsider, the anti-hero and the loner. This figure has shaped American art and culture like no other; it is the basis of American myth, the western and the asphalt cowboy. It is inconceivable without its foil: the self-made man, the oil baron from the gutter, the computer billionaire from the garage and the immigrant as Hollywood star. Great American poets such as Walt Whitman have waxed lyrical on the figure of the outsider, it appears in countless films and books and is equally a major theme in photography. A significant portion of the history of American photography can be traced along the lines of this theme. Susan Sontag did so in her seminal essay ‘America in the Dark Mirror of Photography’, published in 1973. Time and again and in ever new forms, American photography has staged the individual as outsider, and the outsider as heroic individual: as documentary in the work of Walker Evans, socially critical in the work of Louis Hine, criminalistic in the work of Weegee, romantically idealistic in the work of Robert Frank, as early street photography by Lisette Model, in the tense ambiguity of Diane Arbus, a hyper-quotidian way by Stephen Shore or in complete laconicism in the work of Andy Warhol. Armstrong is probably one of the last to immortalise the figure before it was finally exhausted and became commercialised. His work would therefore mark the end of a subject (and an era); indeed his portraits are underpinned by quiet irony. As if his pictures were communicating that this marginalised quotidian, this proud boredom and hedonistic melancholy could soon be over. For all the good humour and elegance, there is consciousness of a great fragility. And the people portrayed know this too; in their neo-post-self-staging they celebrate this figure and their lives once again, as if there were no tomorrow. And in fact AIDS put an end to the whole thing. The approaching unstoppable commercialisation of all areas of life did the rest. So we look at this, Armstrong’s, world and realise, as if caught on the wrong foot, what we have lost. But one thing will remain, and Armstrong knew it: beauty. It is both the strength of and the problem with photography, and Armstrong knew that too. – Daniel Baumann
Curated by Daniel Baumann and Wade Guyton in collaboration with Colleen Doyle, Elizabeth Whitcomb and the Estate of David Armstrong.
With many thanks to J. Luca Ackerman, Tom Alexander, Stefano Bartoli, Christopher Bollen, Tess Çetin, Ric Colon, Lia Gangitano, Nan Goldin und Studio, Ben Grieme, James Haslam, Martin Jaeggi, Yuko Kosaka, Andrei Koschmieder, Sadie Laska, Julia Lee, Dimitri Levas, Jessica Lin Cox, Lisa Love, Win McCarthy, David Mramor, Jeanette Mundt, Attila Panczel, Jack Pierson, Michael and Ellen Ringier, Andy Robertson, Andrina Roth, Nicole Skibola, Zach Steinman, Linnea Vedder, Florian Wagner.
Short biography
David Armstrong (1954 Arlington, Massachusetts – 2014 Los Angeles) attends, in 1974, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University (Boston) intending to paint. He turns to photography, resulting in what later would be coined ‘The Boston School’ of photography alongside Nan Goldin, Phillip-Lorca diCorcia, Mark Morrisroe, Jack Pierson, Taboo!, Gail Thacker and others. In 1977, Armstrong moves to New York City and has his first exhibition at Hudson Gallery, together with Nan Goldin. He shoots the production stills for Eric Mitchell’s film Underground U.S.A (1980), starring Patti Astor, Rene Ricard, Jackie Curtis and Jedd Garet. In 1981, he is part of New York/New Wave at P.S.1, an extensive group exhibition featuring artists, poets, graffiti artists, photographers, and No Wave musicians (curated by Eric Mitchell). In 1983 his ex-partner Kevin McPhee dies of AIDS. In 1989 Armstrong is part of the influential exhibition Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing at Artists Space in New York, curated by Nan Goldin. In 1992, he moves to Berlin, where Nan Goldin is guest of the DAAD Residency. In the 1990s, Armstrong’s work is shown in several exhibitions, at, among others, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York City, Galerie Bruno Brunnet, Berlin, Museum für Gestaltung, Zürich, Whitney Biennal, New York, Galerie Scalo Zürich and New York, Yvon Lambert, Paris, ICA Boston, Boston and Judy Goldman Fine Art, Boston. He finds in Walter Keller of Scalo Verlag Zürich an important supporter who publishes three of his books: A Double Life. David Armstrong / Nan Goldin (1994), The Silver Cord(1997) and All Day Every Day (2002), edited by the Zürich film historian Martin Jaeggi. After his death in 2014, the Estate of David Armstrong is established and his work is inventoried by Colleen Doyle and Elizabeth Whitcomb together with Tess Çetin, Nicole Skibola and Linnea Vedder.
The exhibition “Composição” presents the work of Ana Jotta, a Lisbon-born artist known for her radically polymorphous and versatile artistic output. Curated by Miguel Wandschneider, the exhibition aims to introduce Jotta’s diverse work to a largely unfamiliar audience. Instead of following a specific thematic or chronological order, the curatorial process relied on intuitive associations between selected artworks to reveal the intricacies of Jotta’s practice and her subjective world.
Jotta’s art is characterized by the absence of a consistent style, marked instead by continuous deviations and discontinuities. Her work involves the appropriation and transformation of a wide array of found objects, images, and texts, driven by personal identification and affection rather than aesthetic detachment. Despite the apparent disarray, the exhibition highlights her consistent frugality of means, conciseness of expression, and energetic creativity. Jotta views art as a quotation from life, reflecting her belief in the ongoing reintegration and revelation of existing elements rather than creating anew.
Ana Jotta: Composição at Kunsthalle Zürich runs until September 15, 2024.
Ana Jotta: Composição / Kunsthalle Zürich. Exhibition walkthrough and interviews with Ana Jotta and Miguel Wandschneider, June 7, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Exhibition text (excerpt):
A simple, open-ended question triggered the thinking behind this exhibition: how do you introduce the work of Ana Jotta (b. Lisbon, 1946) to a public that, on the whole, is unfamiliar with it? In other words, how can one reveal her radically polymorphous work when, given the size of the exhibition, the possibility of showing its full breadth and diversity had been dismissed at the outset?
The exhibition title Composição (Composition), borrowed from one of the works, neither alludes to nor comments on the artist’s practice; it refers instead to the exhibition itself as a construct in the double sense of a process and an outcome. Rather than adopting a certain framework of reference or point of view when selecting the artworks, one basic rule was followed: to choose an artwork and thus set in motion a process of association between works that enhances an understanding of the artist’s work, providing insight into the intricacies of her practice and the idiosyncrasy of her subjective world. It was an intuitive and open-ended heuristic process with neither map nor compass.
Underlying the process of selection was a wish to compose a kaleidoscopic exhibition that could reflect the astonishing formal diversity that characterises Jotta’s artistic output. The exhibition provides ample evidence of her versatility with different materials and techniques. What may be disconcerting for someone unfamiliar with her work, however, is the absence of a recognisable style as a common denominator for the pieces shown here, or at least some of them. The result is what looks as if it might be a group exhibition.
In fact, Jotta’s work has never had a specific style. The varied character of her output was already clearly noticeable during her early career, when she took part in several group exhibitions. Since 1986, when she produced the series of paintings that would be shown in her first solo exhibition the following year, the development of her work has been marked by a succession of series. Each new one, as a rule, is very different both in terms of medium and style from that which preceded it. Eschewing any chronological linearity, constantly foiling any possibility of arrangement by phase or period, Jotta’s artistic trajectory is punctuated by successive deviations and discontinuities, throughout which she has prodigiously expanded her realm of creative possibilities, step by step. She doesn’t do it strategically. It is instead a reflection of her temperament: she dislikes retracing her footsteps. Curiously enough, the process of selecting the works for this exhibition eventually focused on those that do not belong to any series or group – she calls them her only children. Amid what seem like an atomised exhibition, the attributes that have been common to the artist’s practice for over four decades come to the fore: a certain frugality of means; a conciseness of expression; and an energetic and spirited mind. This is her signature.
Appropriation is at the heart of Jotta’s modus operandi. She is an omnivorous appropriationist who recycles and transforms the most disparate things. Her idiosyncratic repertoire is made up of found objects (with a predilection for insignificant objects that have had a life of their own), all kinds of images (works by illustrious artists or renowned comic book authors, illustrations from children’s colouring books or vernacular images, to name just a few) and text taken from a variety of sources (quotes from a French language textbook, for example, the name of a well-known encyclopaedic collection of books, the title of a film or book, or a printed text found posted in the street). Her choices are not driven by the principle of aesthetic indifference that Marcel Duchamp associated with the ready-made; they are invariably governed by identification or affection. They can truly be said to demonstrate a form of sensibility, showing her taste for very different things. She does not care, however, and never has, to comment or reflect on the things that she appropriates and their original meanings.
Jotta sees the appropriated materials, including artwork, as fragments of life, of her life; therefore art, as she delightfully puts it, is a quotation from life. ‘In one’s work,’ she wrote in a 2002 letter to an art critic, ‘what isn’t a quotation? It’s about life, the raw material, which is first processed and then quoted. Life doesn’t need work; it needs maintenance and a little expedience. Work needs work (it’s a highly specific blood type – it only accepts its own). It is a quotation of life, proffered and manifest, that enters through the eyes. So, it is always a representation. It can be sharp, produced in a workshop, made by a single person, a single parent. It enters through the eyes and leaves through the eyes – the mirror of the soul.’
In 2010, in one of the short texts she has written over the last eighteen years to accompany her exhibitions, she writes, ‘Now, we know, I know, nulla è nuovo (nothing is new, nothing new); I could also use a quote (and an old one at that…): “Within the world there is no place for other creations. There is just an opportunity for reintegration and continuity. Everything that could exist already exists. Nothing else can be created but revealed.”’ (Spinoza, quoted by Clarice Lispector)
In another of her short texts a year later she wittily says, to allay any doubts: ‘I can assure you that, as a singular person rather than a collective entity, it was all done by me.’ – Miguel Wandschneider
The exhibition is curated by Miguel Wandschneider
With the support of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation
We would like to thank Pedro Álvares Ribeiro, CESAR – Coleção Espírito Santo Almeida Roque, Coleção da Caixa Geral de Depósitos, Coleção Figueiredo Ribeiro, Collection Catarina Maldonado and Luís Marques Pais, Collection Gerardo van Waalwijk van Doorn, Collection Juan Várez, Collection Miguel Nabinho, Collection Peter Meeker, Sílvia Dauder, Mark Deputter, Fundação de Serralves – Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Cornelia Grassi, greengrassi, Lab’Bel collection, Pierre Leguillon, Tobias Madison, ProjecteSD, Philippe Vergne
Biography:
Ana Jotta (b. Lisbon, 1946) attended the Lisbon Fine Arts Academy from 1963-64. Her work was shown for the first time in 1979 and she participated in a few group exhibitions over the following years. From 1977–1987, she was very involved with theatre, as both set and costume designer and actress. During those years she worked closely with theatre director Osório Mateus on productions based on texts by Denis Diderot, Frank Wedekind, Gil Vicente, Samuel Beckett, Almeida Garret and Tennessee Williams. Set design for films The Other One, 1980, directed by João Botelho, and Silvestre, 1981, directed by João César Monteiro. First solo exhibition in 1987, becoming, in her own words, a ‘professional amateur’ in the art world. Retrospective exhibition, Ana Jotta Street, at the Serralves Museum, Porto, 2005. Culturgest, Lisbon, presented the exhibition The Conclusion of the Precedent in 2014, which focussed on work made since 2005; following this exhibition she was awarded the EDP Foundation Art Prize and the Portuguese AICA Award. An entirely different survey exhibition, Cassandra, at Culturgest, Porto, 2016. Solo exhibitions outside of Portugal include: Ti re li re, Crédac, Ivry-sur-Seine, 2016; pɔːtjuˈɡiːz ˈhæn.di.krɑːft,, Établissement d’en face, Brussels, 2016; Das-ist-Das?, Temporary Gallery, Cologne, 2018; Une chambre en ville, Cité internationale des arts, Paris, 2022; and Never the Less, CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco, 2023. In 2017, she received the Rosa Schapire Art Prize awarded by the Friends of the Hamburger Kunsthalle. In September 2024 her exhibition On peut, on peut encore will open at WIELS, Brussels.
At Liste Art Fair Basel 2024, Voloshyn Gallery (Kyiv/Miami) presents works by the Albanian artist Abi Shehu. One of the works on display is a video installation that is titled “Saharaja”, after the poem of Vilson Blloshmi, a former prisoner of Spaç political prison in Albania. “Saharaja” was the cause of his arrest and later his execution. It shows fifteen animations on fifteen 15” tube old televisions sets, based on graffiti found within the prison’s ruins.
Abi Shehu: Saharaja / Voloshyn Gallery at Liste Art Fair Basel 2024. Basel (Switzerland), June 10, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Official description (excerpt):
In another series, titled “Saharaja,” Shehu delves into the theme of collective amnesia, drawing inspiration from the forgotten history of the Spaç political prison in Albania. Through a video installation comprising stacked vintage television sets, each flickering with repetitive animations based on graffiti found within the prison’s ruins, Shehu sheds light on the enduring legacy of oppression and resistance. The animation is based on photographic images of graffiti (drawings, inscriptions, and signs) found on the walls of the ruins of the notorious former prison and labor camp Spaç (1968–1990). In poor physical condition due to insufficient conservation, the graffiti of the Spaç camp is presented as an almost archaeological object documented by photographs. They are indeed a valuable testament to the history of the buildings and the existence of the people who suffered in them. Although the graffiti seems to belong to the last years of the prison’s existence (1987–1990) and their origin cannot be formally confirmed, they manage to convey a kind of existential aura and introduce us to the psyche and imagination of the prisoners of this prison, known for its harsh conditions and extreme cruelty.
The aesthetics of this graffiti, in addition to the historical and anthropological value that the building of the former Spaç prison carries, do not stand apart from the aesthetics of public graffiti, which were common in the 1980s and 1990s in schools, dormitories, barracks, and factories, described by Foucault as corresponding to the regime of closed and organized environments (where prison is the most extreme environment) in the function of production. This environment evokes rejection, resistance, and avoidance. It is no coincidence that these images are mostly banal television stereotypes and revolve around sex, advertising, sports, foreign films, dangerous enemies of discipline, and the official ideology of the political regime. It is no coincidence that among the graffiti, one can see TV sets as the only windows from which Albanians of those years could reach them. That’s why Abi Shehu uses old TV sets — objects that Albanians cherished in the years we are talking about. These poignant visuals serve as a poignant reminder of the individuals who suffered within Spaç’s walls, their voices echoing through time via the medium of graffiti—a poignant blend of historical documentation and artistic expression.
About Abi Shehu
Abi Shehu (b. 1993, Lezha, Albania) is a multi-disciplinary visual artist whose artistic research can be described as an archeology of unconsciousness. Through a combination of visual and media art, from installation to sound art, she creates landscapes that embody the unrepresentable and unknowable dimensions of people, societies, places, and historical events. Shehu’s work has been exhibited at Voloshyn Gallery, Hauser and Wirth Menorca; Manifesta 14, Pristina; Zeta Gallery, Tirana; ‘In Waves,’ with Women in Covid, various locations; Bazament Art Space, Tirana; Galeria e Bregdetit, Vlora; EMOP, Berlin; Kino Rinia, Pristina; CLB, Berlin; and ArtHouse & Marubi Museum, Shkodra.
It took us a while, but here it is: the complete coverage of Art Basel 2024’s Unlimited sector, featuring all artworks on display – for Members only. We had fun filming the whole sector, so this is a pretty long piece (over an hour) – but we will add chapters soon.
Art Basel 2024 Unlimited Sector. Basel (Switzerland), June 11/12/13, 2024.
In this video we show you some of the highlights of the art fair Basel Social Club 2024. This time, Basel Social Club takes place in a rather unusual setting for an art fair, on farmland fields in the south of Basel. The Basel Social Club was founded in the spring of 2022 by a collective of artists, gallerists, and curators with the intention of creating social spaces for art. The Basel Social Club is accessible to all and free of charge.
Basel Social Club 2024. Basel (Switzerland), June 13, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Complete Film
The 2024 edition of Art Basel in Basel features more than 250 of the world’s leading galleries from across the globe. At Art Basel, the galleries present modern and contemporary art across all media including painting, sculpture, photography, and digital artworks. The art fair runs from June 13-16, 2024. This video provides you with some impressions from the First Choice / Preview of Art Basel 2024.
Art Basel 2024, Basel (Switzerland). First Choice / Preview, June 11, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Liste Art Fair Basel 2024, Basel (Switzerland). VIP and Press Preview, June 10, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
The third edition of Biennale Bregaglia explores the topic «Architecture and Gardens». After an open dialogue with the local population, the curator has chosen the Swiss village of Bondo as the main venue for the exhibition. In architecture, it boasts many types of buildings as well as a variety of construction and decoration techniques. Its dense architectural identity extends as far as urban planning: The village is located on a main road linking the southern and northern Alps and is characterized by significant civil and hydraulic engineering works due to the relief and dynamics of the landscape. Equally rich is its cultivated landscape: from gardens to vegetable gardens of various sizes, Bondo also lives among fields and forests. The redevelopment work that began after the landslide (2017) and continues to this day is changing both: the architectural and landscape identity of Bondo. It also provides many insights into the social, economic, political and religious structure of the place.
An international selection committee has chosen 10 site-specific projects by national and international artists. The artists are: Kotoaki Asano, Lisa Collomb, Athene Galiciadis, Georg Gatsas, Marcel Herbst, Piero Maspoli, Juliana Rios Martinez, Lea Schaffner, Ines Marita Schärer, and Jonathan Steiger.
Biennale Bregaglia. Bondo (Bregaglia, Switzerland), June 1, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Extended Version
Basel Biennale. The most sustainable art exhibition ever, a visual mixtape. Theme 2024: What Is Already There.
There are so many things that nobody notices in everyday life.
(Ana Jotta)
Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.
(Camille Pissarro)
Basel Biennale 2024 Map
In one of the most comprehensive exhibitions of her work to date, Museum Tinguely in Basel (Switzerland) presents a survey of Argentina-born, New York-based artist Mika Rottenberg’s diverse oeuvre. As well as key video works and installations made between 2003 and 2024, the show includes her feature film REMOTE (2022). The show, titled Antimatter Factory, also features a specially made fountain sculpture in the park outside the museum will be unveiled and there are new, hybrid sculptures made of organic materials and reclaimed plastic. Kinetic works, some of them interactive, complete this overview.
Curated by Roland Wetzel, assisted by Tabea Panizzi, the exhibition takes its title from a research department at CERN in Geneva that conducts experiments into antimatter. Rottenberg’s time there as artist-in-residence provided the inspiration for her work Spaghetti Blockchain (2019-2024), which will be shown for the first time as a three-channel video installation during the exhibition. The retrospective at Museum Tinguely runs until November 3, 2024.
Mika Rottenberg: Antimatter Factory / Museum Tinguely, Basel. Press Preview, June 4, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Extended VersionExhibition text (excerpt):
In one of the most comprehensive exhibitions of her work to date, Museum Tinguely offers a survey of Mika Rottenberg’s diverse oeuvre. In surprising and playful ways, her videos reflect absurd situations shaped by the logic of capitalist production. With their painterly riots of colour, they address all of our senses, bridging the gap between continents and dimensions with ease and with tongue in cheek. As well as key video works and installations made between 2003 and 2024, the show includes her feature film REMOTE (2022). A specially made fountain sculpture in the park outside the museum will be unveiled and there are new, hybrid sculptures made of organic materials and reclaimed plastic. Kinetic works, some of them interactive, complete this overview.
The exhibition takes its title from a research department at CERN in Geneva that conducts experiments into antimatter. Rottenberg’s time there as artist-in-residence provided the inspiration for her work Spaghetti Blockchain (2019-2024), which will be shown for the first time as a three-channel video installation during the exhibition. It addresses the exchange of energies, objects and people, combining the microscopic with the macroscopic and shifting matter through time and space as if by magic. Here, we are already at the heart of Rottenberg’s artistic universe.
Jean Tinguely’s sculptures, too, could be described as factories that produce antimatter, creating immaterial poetry rather than saleable commodities, thus satirizing industrial production as an exploitative relationship between humans and machines. In her ironic takes on the surprising, often positively bizarre connections within the global production system, Rottenberg pursues this same topic. With her social surrealism, she creates parables of alienation that echo Karl Marx’s diagnosis of “a devaluation of the human world in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things.” What makes her critique of capitalist commodity production all the more relevant is its increasing speed, the global free flow of goods (and not of people), and the digitization that detaches things from their representations. This links to another focus of Rottenberg’s art, concerning the agency of objects and materials and their inherent spirituality.
The exhibition presents a comprehensive selection of Rottenberg’s video works and video installations. Visitors are greeted by the sound of sneezing and the first video work they see is Sneeze (2012). Sneezing features in several of the artist’s works, as does her fascination with the growth of hair, fingernails and toenails as vegetative body products. These recurring themes create a thread running through the show.
The video installation No Nose Knows was made in 2015 for the Venice Biennial. It shows the process of industrial pearl production at a factory in the Chinese city of Zhuji, from the insertion of a foreign body, which the oysters then coat with mother-of-pearl, through to harvesting and selection. This location is connected via cogs and transmission belts with a workplace where a woman is surrounded by bouquets of flowers that cause her to sneeze pasta dishes, while her nose gets longer and longer. The question of productivity is caricatured here as an allergic reaction that is highly personal but that is also beyond rational control.
The inspiration for Cheese (2008) came from the story of the Seven Sutherland Sisters who performed as singers around 1900 and whose super-length hair was used to promote a commercially successful hair tonic brand. Labelled “The Lucky Number 7” the bottles of tonic promised not just improved hair growth but also good fortune. Rottenberg’s walk-in installation consists of a labyrinthine structure made of rough timber in which the power of long hair combines with energy from the mist at Niagara Falls to produce the hair tonic. Via a wooden transmission contraption, a surreal link is created between this story and the production of goat’s cheese.
Entering the video installation Cosmic Generator (2017), visitors are taken on a journey through a system of narrow tunnels lit by flickering coloured lightbulbs. The shot begins in the middle of a plate with a Chinese pattern, accompanied by the kind of music often heard in Chinese restaurants, as well as screeching vehicle sounds and the fizzling of electrical short circuits. The camera then shifts to a bubbling ocean of smashed coloured lightbulbs, merging seamlessly with a panning shot across a wholesale market in Yiwu, China. The visual exuberance of the sales booths results from the specialization of these uniform structures, each selling either plastic garlands in every imaginable shade, or all kinds of fairy lights, or flashing Christmas trees, or colourful plastic flowers. A contrast to this overflowing world of commodity fetishism is provided by the saleswomen, who sit in the midst of their wares, almost invisible. The film was inspired by a visit to the border town of Mexicali, Mexico, that has a large Chinese population and many identical Chinese restaurants. Before the border fence was built, the city was connected to the neighbouring Californian city of Calexico by a system of tunnels. The film’s use of simple jump cuts to bridge distances and dimensions can be read as an allegory on the global flows of the commercial world and the geographical confinement of people.
As well as further video works and installations like Time and a Half (2003), Fried Sweat (2008), Smoky Lips (2016-19), and Untitled Ceiling Projection (2018) that span a period of almost two decades, the exhibition shows a selection of hybrid kinetic sculptures made between 2020 and 2022, some of them interactive, with surreal combinations of functions and materials, as well as a group of lamp sculptures, shown here for the first time, that combine organic structures with coloured lampshades made of reclaimed plastic. In Solitude Park, a colourful three-metre fountain sculpture in the shape of a foot has been made specially for the exhibition.
Throughout the exhibition, we will be showing the feature film REMOTE in the lecture hall. Made by Rottenberg during the COVID19 pandemic as a joint project with filmmaker and writer Mahyad Tousi, it is based on conversations they conducted during the lockdowns when digital communication media acquired a new importance. The film tells a fantastic tale of a post-pandemic era where physical and digital interaction unexpectedly combine and distances are abolished.
In overdrawn, absurdly surreal scenarios, Rottenberg’s art questions conditions of production and the value of labour in a Marxist sense, with a special focus on the situation of female workers. Playfully inverting cause and effect, she switches back and forth between the micro and the macro, creating an alchemy of energies and cosmologies. Viewers find themselves in a fantasy world of intoxicating sensuality and troubling illogicality that has a very liberating quality. Combining the real and the imaginary, these ecosystems of seduction and magic are marked by a physicality that is conceived of on an architectural scale: space and time, inside and outside, up and down, near and far, clean and dirty, smooth and rough. With her creative use of materials and her openness to alternative epistemologies via the agency of these materials, she anticipated developments in today’s New Materialism that explores complex links between technology, nature, and the environment.
The exhibition will be accompanied by an online catalogue that presents key themes in Rottenberg’s work via a playful navigation inspired by the artist’s aesthetic. Besides biographical and bibliographical information and exhibition views from the partner institutions Museum Tinguely (Basel), Kunst Haus Wien (Vienna) and Lehmbruck Museum (Duisburg), this online publication also brings together excerpts from video works and interviews with texts by Chen Qiufan, Heather Davis, Hsuan L. Hsu, Gunn Khatri, Barbara Latacz, Filipa Ramos, James Taylor-Foster, Mahyad Tousi, Mika Rottenberg and Roland Wetzel.
In cooperation with Precious Basel Plastic, there will be regular workshops in which objects can be made out of recycled plastic.
The exhibition Mika Rottenberg. Antimatter Factory was produced by Museum Tinguely in cooperation with Kunst Haus Wien and Lehmbruck Museum Duisburg.
Curated by Roland Wetzel, assisted by Tabea Panizzi.
From June 1 to September 8, 2024, Kunstmuseum St.Gallen hosts “Burning Down the House: Rethinking Family,” an international exhibition examining the family as an institution. Featuring works by over 35 artists, including Louise Bourgeois and Mary Kelly, it critiques traditional family constructs and their influence on visual culture. Despite family life being a common theme in photography and portraiture, it has rarely been critically explored in contemporary art. Curated by Melanie Bühler, this exhibition addresses this gap by questioning the family’s role in capitalism, colonialism, and societal norms, contributing to current discourses on family and its potential abolition.
Burning Down the House: Rethinking Family / Group Show at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen. St. Gallen (Switzerland), Vernissage, May 31, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Press text (excerpt):
From June 1 to September 8, 2024, Kunstmuseum St.Gallen presents an ambitious, international group exhibition that critically engages with the family as tradition, idea, and lived reality. Burning Down the House: Rethinking Family untangles some of the crucial problems, beliefs, and contradictions that the family as an institution embodies. It takes a close, critical view of family constructs across geographies, histories, and scale, providing a rare overview of contemporary art practices connected to this topic. It brings together works by more than thirty-five artist that problematize the notion of the family in its stereotypical, bourgeois representation, which has informed our visual culture for century.
The family is a rare topic in contemporary art. While feminist artists have thematized their roles of women, caretakers, and mothers, the family has—weirdly—largely been absent. To be sure, family life is a well-represented genre in photography, just as the family has a long history in portraiture. But as a subject for critical investigation, beyond mere representation, the family has only rarely been addressed. It seems almost as if the family is considered unworthy of such examination because of how deeply it is nested in our reality: it has been naturalized to the point that it “just is.” This seems particularly strange as we live in a moment of reckoning, a time in which institutions are being profoundly questioned. It’s time we question the family.
The exhibition brings together important historic contemporary artworks by pioneering artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Mary Kelly, Bobby Baker, and PINK de Thierry and presents them in dialogue with works by artists from a younger generation, including Rhea Dillon, Kyoko Idetsu, and Lebohang Kganye. With its thematic scope, the exhibition goes beyond the purview of previous exhibitions that have focused on individual aspects or manifestations of the family—such as parenthood/motherhood and chosen or rainbow families—to address more comprehensively and fundamentally the (nuclear) family, an almost taboo subject within contemporary art. It also differs from numerous exhibitions that have centered on visual representations of the family, primarily focusing on photography and painting.
Burning Down the House: Rethinking Family is the first international group exhibition at a museum level to focus on the family from a contemporary perspective while simultaneously questioning it. In addressing this theme, the exhibition and its accompanying publication make an important contribution to art history and engage with current discourse around ideas such as “family abolition” (as theorized most recently by Sophie Lewis, among others).
The following questions are central to the exhibition: What does family life mean beyond the mainstream narratives of TV and advertising? What are the difficulties, peculiarities, and specific qualities of living together as a family? How is the family anchored in and by the larger systems that impact our lives, such as capitalism and (neo)colonialism? Is the family a problem? How can we imagine a life beyond the traditional concept of family?
With a.o.: Jonathas de Andrade, Louise Ashcroft, Shuvinai Ashoona, Bobby Baker, Nina Beier, BOLOHO, Louise Bourgeois, Kathe Burkhart, Vaginal Davis, Adolf Dietrich, Rhea Dillon, Laurence Durieu, Marie-Louise Ekman, Buck Ellison, Christina Forrer, Maria Guta/Lauren Huret, Nadira Husain, Juliana Huxtable, Kyoko Idetsu, Mary Kelly, Lebohang Kganye, Ghislaine Leung, Tala Madani, Katja Mater, Alexandra Noel, Phung-Tien Phan, Josiane M.H. Pozi, Niki de Saint Phalle, Ben Sakoguchi, Ju Sekyun, Sable Elyse Smith, Lily van der Stokker, Madeleine Kemény-Szemere, PINK de Thierry, Terre Thaemlitz, Ryan Trecartin, Amalia Ulman, Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Gillian Wearing, Ambera Wellmann
Curated by Melanie Bühler, Senior Curator at Kunstmuseum St.Gallen
This is a rather special video. We were very much looking forward to this exhibition, so it was a shock when we realized that our camera was not working properly at the day of the filming. Luckily, we had also a little consumer photo camera with us. We knew that that image quality and resolution was rather crappy, but remember, this was 2007, and the best camera is the one that’s with you, right? So we published the video in 320×240 in February 2007. Years after, we wanted to publish a better version of the video with the help of some AI software, but – bummer! – couldn’t find the original files. Usually it’s quite easy to find the original files, our archival system turned out to be pretty good, but in this case: no luck. Until two days ago. While browsing some old Data-DVDs with photos, we found the video files. In hindsight no big surprise: if you shoot with a photo camera, it is (was) likely it ends up in your photo software. Anyways, we were finally able to give the files the r3 treatment. Well, it’s not 4K HDR obviously, but a stabilized, double resolution version of the original footage / video. We hope you enjoy this piece of nostalgia as much as we do. VTV Classics (r3) highlights the treasures of VernissageTV’s huge archive. Back then published in low resolution, these classics are now re-mastered, re-edited and reissued in better quality.
VTV Classics (r3): Gordon Matta-Clark: You Are the Measure / Whitney Museum, New York (2007). New York, February 20, 2007.
This is another episode in our VTV Classics (r3) series. VTV Classics (r3) highlights the treasures of VernissageTV’s huge archive. Back then published in Standard Definition, these classics are now re-mastered, re-edited and reissued in High Definition.
PS: See also our interview with New York-based artist G.H. Hovagimyan, who talks about his adventures with Gordon Matta-Clark, how was a close friend. Hovagimyan worked with Matta-Clark on several projects namely; Day’s End, Conical Intersect, Walking Man’s Arch, and Underground Explorations.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Bruno Gironcoli: o.T., sculpture on display at the booth of the gallery W&K, Wienerroither & Kohlbacher at Art Cologne 2023.
Bruno Gironcoli (1936-2010) was an Austrian painter and sculptor who is especially known for his fantastic and surreal sculptures. Bruno Gironcoli (1936-2010) was an Austrian painter and sculptor. Bruno Gironcoli completed an apprenticeship as a goldsmith in Innsbruck. From 1957 to 1959 and from 1961 to 1962, he studied at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna. He then went to Paris, where he was artistically influenced by the works of Alberto Giacometti.
Gironcoli worked with the materials wood, nylon, iron, aluminum, glass, polyester and wire. In 1967, he had his first solo exhibition at the Heide Hildebrand Gallery in Klagenfurt, followed by a solo exhibition at the Galerie nächst St. Stephan in 1968.
In 1977, Gironcoli was appointed head of the sculpture school at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, where he worked as Fritz Wotruba’s successor until 2004. He received the Grand Austrian State Prize for Fine Arts in 1993 and was Austria’s official representative at the Biennale di Venezia 2003.
Although he never visited Africa himself, Gironcoli collected African masks and fetishes, amassing over 400 examples over the course of time. The masks were exhibited in the Gironcoli Museum in Herberstein. The late work consists of monumental sculptures, mostly made of wood, iron and sheet metal, rarely of aluminum, which implement fantastic and surreal motifs.
Bruno Gironcoli: o.T., sculpture on display at the booth of the gallery W&K, Wienerroither & Kohlbacher at Art Cologne 2023. Cologne (Germany), November 16, 2023.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Petticoat Government / Pavilion of Belgium at Venice Art Biennale 2024.
Official description: Cross-mixing art, curating, architecture, typography and cartography, the collective (Denicolai & Provoost, Antoinette Jattiot, Nord, Spec uloos) displaces the traditional exhibition format through its successive chapters and its fictional potential. The members of the collective are linked by long-term collaborations and their roles as intermediaries and critics inside and outside the field of art, from which they interrogate the way we view collective, popular, alternative organisations and their modes of sharing. Petticoat Government is a multidisciplinary scenario based on existing folkloric giants from various communities in Belgium, France, Spain. The performative journeys in the direction of Italy, passing through the Resia Pass on 9 March 2024 and then returning to Charleroi and Dunkirk in 2025, inject a joyful disturbance into reality using the variety of plays of scale and tensions between the human and non-human, landscape and architecture, borders and their transgression. Unlike a closed work, the Belgian Pavilion is imagined as a place of passage, with a kaleidoscope perspective. By way of the place given to orality and the co-construction of stories, and the “above ground” aerial and sound staging of the gigantic figures, it is the origin of contemporary mythologies and centuries-old stories that is interrogated.
Denicolai & Provoost, Antoinette Jattiot, Nord, Spec uloos: Petticoat Government / Pavilion of Belgium at Venice Art Biennale 2024. Venice (Italy), April 19, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
360° Video
One of the artworks on display at Andrew Kreps Gallery’s booth at Art Basel Miami Beach 2023 was American artits Andrea Bowers’ piece “Oceanfront Turquoise”, a slowly rotating disco ball with neon writing “STRONGER TOGETHER” on it, framed by neon flowers. Andrea Bowers is a contemporary American artist known for her socially and politically engaged artwork. Born in 1965, she explores issues such as feminism, labor, and activism through a variety of mediums, including drawing, painting, and installation art. Bowers often collaborates with activists and incorporates elements of protest and resistance into her work, creating pieces that challenge societal norms and advocate for social change.
Recent solo exhibitions include: Moving in Space without Asking Permission, Fondazione Furla and GAM – Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Milan, Italy (2022), Andrea Bowers, curated by Michael Darling and Connie Butler, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2022) was before at Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2021), Energy with Intention, Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Los Angeles (2021), Grief and Hope, Abteiberg Museum, Mönchengladbach, Germany (2020), and Think of Our Future, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York (2020).
Andrea Bowers: Oceanfront Turquoise, 2023. Andrew Kreps Gallery at Art Basel Miami Beach 2023. Miami Beach (USA), December 10, 2023.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
At last year’s Art Cologne, Ukrainian artist Lesia Khomenko had a solo presentation with Voloshyn Gallery. Lesia Khomenko’s artistic approach involves a reevaluation of the role of painting: she deconstructs narrative images and transforms paintings into objects, installations, and performances. The new works, created specifically for Art Cologne, including “Nomadic Self- Portrait With Rolled Canvas” and “Explosion in the trench,” reflect Khomenko’s personal experience of life in the early stages of war, evacuation, later migration, and her observations of the war in real-time.
Lesia Khomenko. Solo Project at Voloshyn Gallery, Art Cologne 2023. Cologne (Germany), November 19, 2023.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Exhibition text (excerpt):
Recently, Lesia has focused on the role of digital photographs in the context of media warfare and the connection between the development of digital archives and the materiality of painting. The works “Explosion in the trench” capture moments of explosions emerging from the chaos of war in cyberspace and quote frames of military actions available on the Internet. Working with photographs found online, Lesia explores contemporary images of the war in Ukraine. Using specific cutting-edge military technologies that help reshape our perspective on war, the human body, and the landscape, the artist reveals the potential of abstract images in hyperrealistic resources such as soldiers’ video cameras or drone photography.
These works resonate with her earlier pieces, where Khomenko abstractly depicted unrecognizable armed figures, explored the protective techniques of blurring and camouflaging strategic objects, landscapes, and military faces in photographs from the front lines.
To begin with, Lesia drew inspiration from photos taken by her husband, who is currently serving in the army. During wartime, photographing soldiers and military objects is prohibited. Therefore, the artist believes that utility photography has turned into a weapon. Lesia works with the idea of dehumanization as the “new normalcy,” using her digital photo archive with war scenes. The result of this exploration is the important series “Max in the Army,” which has become the focus of discussions and attention from global media.
The series of self-portraits on bifleks, “Nomadic Self-Portrait With Rolled Canvas,” is dedicated to exploring and reflecting the dynamism and constant change of identity. Each self-portrait in the series presents itself in a nomadic context, where individuality is defined not so much by a fixed outline as by unpredictable interaction with the surrounding environment.
The use of acrylic on lycra creates a unique effect of movement and variability, reflecting the artist’s inspiration in the undefined reality of nomadic existence. The completed work appears as a self-portrait that carries a rolled canvas, indicating the continuous development and transformation of the artist’s inner self. This series aims to explore concepts of identity, adaptation, and uncertainty through the use of unexpected materials and techniques. Each canvas is a self-portrait illustrating the continuous search for oneself in an ever-changing world.
About the Artist:
Lesia Khomenko (b. 1980, Kyiv, Ukraine) is a member of R.E.P. group (Revolutionary Experimental Space), and a co-founder of a curatorial union HUDRADA, a self-educational community based on interdisciplinary cooperation. Khomenko showed thrice in the PinchukArtCentre Prize (2009, 2011, 2013), the nationwide contemporary art prize for young Ukrainian artists. Her work forms part of collections both public and private, including M HKA (BEL), Ludwig Museum, (HU), Art Collection Telecom (DE), Ukrainian Museum of America (US) and Albertinum (DE). Recent solo exhibitions include: Image and Presence,
Ukrainian Museum of America, NYC (US), Full Scale, Fridman Gallery, NYC (US). Recent group exhibitions include: This is Ukraine: Defending Freedom, the Collateral Event of the 59th International Art Exhibition the Venice Biennial, Venice, Italy; Imagine Ukraine at The European Parliament (BE); What is Depicted Here? at Museum Folkwang (DE); Women at War at Fridman Gallery, NYC (US); Worth Fighting For at Art Cologne (DE). Khomenko’s works have been covered and reviewed by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Art Newspaper, Brooklyn Rail and Frieze, among others. Lives in New York.
About Voloshyn Gallery:
Established in October 2016 by Max and Julia Voloshyn, Voloshyn Gallery specializes in contemporary art. It exhibits a broad range of works in a variety of media, hosting solo and group exhibitions and taking part in leading contemporary art fairs. Over the last two years, the gallery has participated in The Armory Show, Liste Basel, ARCOmadrid, Art Brussels, Art Cologne, Enter Art Fair, viennacontemporary, Dallas Art Fair, NADA Miami, Untitled Art, Art Athina, EXPO Chicago, and more. Voloshyn Gallery is a member of the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA). In 2023, Voloshyn Gallery opened its new space in Miami, FL, US.
The exhibitors are: Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC): Djonga Bismar, Alphonse Bukumba, Irène Kanga, Muyaka Kapasa, Matthieu Kasiama, Jean Kawata, Huguette Kilembi, Mbuku Kimpala, Athanas Kindendi, Felicien Kisiata, Charles Leba, Philomène Lembusa, Richard Leta, Jérémie Mabiala, Plamedi Makongote, Blaise Mandefu, Daniel Manenga, Mira Meya, Emery Muhamba, Tantine Mukundu, Olele Mulela, Daniel Muvunzi, René Ngongo, Alvers Tamasala, Ced’art Tamasala.
Official description: Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC) is an artists’ collective of Congolese plantation workers, based in Lusanga in the heart of the Democratic Republic of the Congo on a plantation formerly owned by the British-Dutch multinational Unilever. CATPC holds companies like these responsible for exploiting their forests and societies, causing extreme poverty and destroying biodiversity. Since 2014, by creating and selling artworks abroad, CATPC has been buying their ancestral lands back and transforming them into biodiverse agroforests. CATPC argues that art institutions should realise that their buildings and programmes are financed by the very same companies that exploited plantation labour. That’s why in 2017, CATPC – together with Dutch artist Renzo Martens – opened the White Cube, an art centre pinned at the very core of where the proceeds were obtained to fund white cubes all over the world. For Biennale Arte 2024 CATPC presents new sculptures in both the Dutch Pavilion and the White Cube. Alongside, the Dutch Pavilion presents the performance film The Judgement of the White Cube. The ancestral sculpture Balot plays a central role in both exhibitions. For CATPC this wooden statue, made in 1931, is of great significance, connecting the past with the present.
Netherlands Pavilion at Venice Art Biennale 2024. Venice (Italy), April 19, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
“When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting” at the Kunstmuseum Basel showcases over 150 works by around 120 Black artists from the past century, highlighting the political and joyous aspects of Black life. Originally curated by the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town, this exhibition emphasizes Black self-representation and empowerment, contrasting with typical portrayals focused on trauma and colonialism. The title, inspired by Ava DuVernay’s miniseries “When They See Us,” signifies a shift towards Black perspectives. Curated by Koyo Kouoh and Tandazani Dhlakama, the exhibition is organized into six thematic chapters, exploring universal themes like joy, spirituality, and everyday life. It reveals iconographic parallels among geographically diverse Black artists. The exhibition includes a comprehensive program of events and features sound stations curated by Neo Muyanga, providing visitors with a rich, contextual experience of Black joy and resilience. The show runs until October 27, 2024. This video provides you with an exhibition walkthrough on the occasion of the media preview.
When We See Us. A Century of Black Figuration in Painting / Kunstmuseum Basel | Gegenwart. Media Preview, May 23, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Complete versionPress release (excerpt):
In When We See Us. A Century of Black Figuration in Painting, the Kunstmuseum Basel presents a kaleidoscope of Black figurative painting from the past one hundred years. Held at the museum’s Gegenwart venue, the exhibition was originally produced by the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town, and gathers more than 150 paintings by around 120 artists, most of which have never been seen in Switzerland. Its focus is on the power and political dimension of Black joy.
The exhibition’s title is inspired by the Netflix miniseries When They See Us (2019), in which the African-American director Ava DuVernay examines how white people indiscriminately perceive and wrongfully prosecute Black teenagers as potential criminals and hence as a threat. The shift from “They” to “We” indicates a reversal of perspective, making room for the subjects’ own perceptions. The artists’ views take center stage, revealing how the lives of Black people have time and again been represented by others in flat, false, and distorted ways.
When We See Us is the result of extensive research conducted by Koyo Kouoh, executive director and chief curator at Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, and her team. The world’s largest museum for African contemporary art presented the comprehensive survey from November 2022 until September 2023. It captures a Black self-image and the self-empowerment of Black artists who, after centuries of white dominance over the art canon, are writing their own art history. At the Kunstmuseum Basel, the exhibition comes on the heels of a series of monographic shows of work by African-American artists: Theaster Gates, Sam Gilliam, Kara Walker, and, most recently, Carrie MaeWeems. Those and many other exhibitions all over the world have addressed Blackness primarily through the lens of trauma and aspects of colonialism. A different approach is emphasized by curators Koyo Kouoh and Tandazani Dhlakama: When We See Us turns the spotlight on everyday life and the “power of joy,” dismantling stereotypical depictions of racism, violence, or crisis. The exhibition is designed to offer viewers a fresh perspective that is celebratory, vibrant, and dignified. “We need talk much more about ourselves in ways that uplift our spirits,” the curators say.
Everyday life in six chapters
More than a hundred and fifty works of art are gathered in six chapters titled Triumph and Emancipation, Sensuality, Spirituality, The Everyday, Joy and Revelry and Repose. The galleries are not arranged in chronological succession, nor are the works grouped by artists’ countries of origin or residence.
Organized under these universal themes, the exhibition also demonstrates for the first time that artists working in geographically diverse settings in Africa and the African diaspora engaged with the same subjects. The resulting iconographic parallels are unmistakable, for instance, in the works of the African-American artist Romare Bearden (1911–1988) and his South African contemporary George Pemba (1912–2001), or in comparing the art of Chéri Samba (Congolese, b. 1956) and Barkley L. Hendricks (African-American, 1945–2017).
When We See Us takes up the entire Kunstmuseum Basel | Gegenwart. As at Zeitz MOCAA, the exhibition design and spatial translation is by Wolff Architects in Cape Town. The composer and sound artist Neo Muyanga has curated the sound stations. A timeline contextualizes the genesis of the works on display, and an audio guide adapted for the Kunstmuseum Basel supplies narrative context for the works. A dynamic program of events accompanies the exhibition, featuring music, literature, workshops, guided tours, discussion panels, and academic events. A specially designed programming space on the ground floor serves both as a public lounge for visitors and as a gathering and event venue for workshops, seminars, concerts, and other formats.
Chapters and artists
Triumph and Emancipation
At the heart of this chapter is the pride of people of African descent in their own history and achievements—won in the face of extraordinary adversity and centuries of imperial oppression. On the museum’s ground floor, visitors encounter world-famous icons, as in Chéri Chérin’s painting Obama Revolution (2009), who see eye to eye with nameless yet strong figures in portraits like Ibrahim El-Salahi’s Portrait of a Sudanese Gentleman (1951). The sitters are guardians of ancestral cultural treasures, politicians committed to their peoples, and individuals who represent success and social recognition.
Artists: Benny Andrews, Margaret Taylor Burroughs, Chéri Chérin, Kudzanai Chiurai, Aboubacar Diané, Ibrahim El-Salahi, Ben Enwonwu, Gherdai Hassell, Wifredo Lam, Akinola Lasekan, Mustafa Maluka, Eria Nsubuga ‘Sane’, Augustin Okoye, George Pemba, Chéri Samba, Mmapula Mmakgabo Helen Sebidi, Gerard Sekoto, Amy Sherald, Katlego Tlabela, Cyprien Tokoudagba.
Sensuality
In Sensuality, people appear in depictions radiating an intimacy and confidence that the Western visual canon has rarely, if ever, allowed them. Roméo Mivekannin’s Le modèle noir, d’après Félix Vallotton (2019) makes direct reference to that canon, as does Sahara Longe’s Reclining Nude with Lemon (2021). The chapter surveys the manifold spectrums of sensuality, love, and intimate affection. What all works have in common is the protagonists’ self-determination.
Artists: Nina Chanel Abney, Olusegun Adejumo, Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Maxwell Alexandre, Tiffany Alfonseca, Dominic Chambers, Somaya Critchlow, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux, Aboubacar Diané, Ibrahima Kébé, Yoyo Lander, Sahara Longe, Danielle McKinney, Roméo Mivekannin, Moké, Geoffrey Mukasa, Chris Ofili, Kambui Olujimi, Tschabalala Self, Monsengo Shula, Mickalene Thomas, Bob Thompson, Kehinde Wiley.
Spirituality
Black everyday life, the curators argue, is almost unthinkable without spirituality. This chapter unfolds the “triple heritage” the Kenyan-American writer Ali Mazrui (1933–2014) portrayed in his book The Africans: A Triple Heritage: showing Black life in its capacity to incorporate Indigenous, Islamic, and Christian traditions and rituals. The works on display visualize lived spirituality; among them are Jacob Lawrence’s Genesis Creation (1989) and Michael Armitage’s The Dumb Oracle (2019).
Artists: Michael Armitage, Gerard Bhengu, Wilson Bigaud, Edouard Duval-Carrié, Aaron Douglas, Scherezade García, Jacob Lawrence, Cassi Namoda, Malangatana Ngwenya, Kambui Olujimi, Emma Pap’, Naudline Pierre, Prosper Pierre-Louis, María Magdalena Campos Pons, Cinga Samson, Gerard Sekoto, Devan Shimoyama, Alex Shyngle, Sthembiso Sibisi, Olivier Souffrant, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Nirit Takele.
The Everyday
Paintings like Aaron Douglas’s Boy with a Toy Plane (1938), William H. Johnson’s The Reader (1939), Joy Labinjo’s Gisting in the Kitchen (2018), or Johnny Arts’s advertising poster for Ozor International Barber also Specialist in Hair Dying and Shamporing (1962) illustrate the beauty of everyday life. The chapter presents public and private scenes that capture instants of joy or contemplation: among family, in the community, at play, in school, carrying water, or braiding hair.
Artists: Johnny Arts, Malang Badji, Romare Bearden, Aaron Douglas, Gervais Emmanuel Ducasse, Ben Enwonwu, Ablade Glover, Gavin Janties, William H. Johnson, Kangudia, Ibrahima Kébé, Joy Labinjo, Petson Lombe, Marvelous Mangena, Luis Meque, Moké, Meleko Mokgosi, Richard Mudariki, Theresa Mungure, Lavar Munroe, Chemu Ng’ok, Nicholous Njau, Boris Nzebo, Antoine Obin, Télémaque Obin, Bruce Onobrakpeya, George Pemba, Horace Pippin, Kingsley Sambo, Gerard Sekoto, Ancent Soi, Moustapha Souley, Edward Saidi Tingatinga, Zandile Tshabalala, Sane Wadu, Richard Witikani.
Joy and Revelry
Festive moments and leisure pursuits come into focus in the chapter Joy and Revelry: as the curators note, there is always time for a song or a dance. Esiri Erheriene-Essi’s characters in The Birthday Party (2021) sing for anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, while Philomé Obin’s in Un mardi de Carnaval (1960) walk in a parade and Romare Bearden’s in Jazz Rhapsody (1982) listen to the rhythms.
Artists: Romare Bearden, Esiri Erheriene-Essi, Barkley L. Hendricks, Clementine Hunter, Jacob Lawrence, Arjan Martins, Moké, Cinthia Sifa Mulanga, Eric Ndlovu, Nicholous Njau, Nestor Vuza Ntoko, Philomé Obin, George Pemba, Chéri Samba, Matundu Tanda, Katlego Tlabela, Charles White.
Repose
Scenes of rest, no less vital than moments of revelry, are set out on the third gallery floor at the Kunstmuseum Basel | Gegenwart. Figures loll on the sofa, as in Wangari Mathenge’s Sundials and Sonnets (2019), stroll through the countryside, as in Toyin Ojih Odutola’s Surveying the Family Seat (2017), or simply sit down to enjoy the quiet, as in Kudzanai-Violet Hwami’s An evening in Mazowe (2019)—relaxed people everywhere, by themselves or in conversation with family or friends.
Artists: Cornelius Annor, Gideon Appah, Firelei Báez, Amoako Boafo, Beauford Delaney, Kudzanai-Violet Hwami, Wangari Mathenge, Neo Matloga, Sungi Mlengeya, Ian Mwesiga, Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Eniwaye Oluwaseyi, Marc Padeu, Zéh Palito, Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe, Henry Taylor, Zandile Tshabalala, Kehinde Wiley, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.
The Kunstmuseum would like to thank Kadiatou Diallo, Sindi-Leigh McBride and Lorena Rizzo from the Center for African Studies at the University of Basel for their critical view of the adaptation of the exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel.
On the curators
Koyo Kouoh
Koyo Kouoh has been executive director and chief curator at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA) in Cape Town since 2019. Kouoh grew up in Switzerland and moved to Dakar, Senegal, in the 1990s; in 2008, she founded the art institution RAW Material Company, a center for art, knowledge, and society in Dakar, where she also served as artistic director, while continuing her work organizing and curating major exhibitions and biennials all over the world (including Ataraxia, the Salon Suisse at the 2017 Venice Biennale). She also published widely on the international significance of the pan-African art community. In 2020, Kouoh, one of the most important and influential figures on the international arts scene today, was honored with the Prix Meret Oppenheim in recognition of her work as a curator, critic, and founder of cultural institutions who charted new ways of sharing art with audiences
and made a lasting contribution to building global visibility for art from the African continent.
Tandazani Dhlakama
A native of Zimbabwe, Tandazani Dhlakama has worked as a curator and art educator at Zeitz MOCAA since 2017. She was previously at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe and contributed to exhibitions, conferences, and biennials in Africa in a variety of functions. Dhlakama holds a master’s degree in art gallery and museum studies from the University of Leeds, UK (2015), and a bachelor’s degree in fine art and political science from St. Lawrence University, Canton, N.Y., U.S. (2011). Amongst several projects she curated a survey exhibition of painting from Zimbabwe titled Five Bhobh: Painting at the End of an Era (2018) at Zeitz MOCAA, curated Witness: Afro Perspectives from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection (2020) at El Espacio 23 in Miami, an exhibition on systematic oppression, intergenerational trauma, syncretism, identity, and territory, and recently co-curated Seekers, Seers, Soothsayers (2023), an exhibition celebrating the next generation of women artist working in lens-based media from Africa at Zeitz MOCAA.
Official description: For its pavilion at Biennale Arte 2024, Austria presents conceptual artist Anna Jermolaewa. In her work, the artist — born in Leningrad (USSR) and living in Vienna since 1989 — proves to be an astute observer of human coexistence, its social conditions and political requisites. For the Austrian contribution, Jermolaewa draws an arc from her personal experience of migration as a political refugee to signifiers of nonviolent resistance against authoritarian regimes. In Rehearsal for Swan Lake, made in collaboration with Ukrainian choreographer Oksana Serheieva, Jermolaewa references a memory from her teenage years. In times of political unrest, for instance the death of a head of state, Soviet television replaced their regularly scheduled broadcast with Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake in a loop for days. In Soviet cultural memory, the famous ballet became code for a change in power. Jermolaewa and Serheieva turn the ballet from a tool of censorship and distraction into a form of political protest — here, the dancers rehearse for regime change in Russia.
Anna Jermolaewa / Pavilion of Austria at Venice Art Biennale 2024. Venice (Italy), April 19, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Reb5QqaD5HY
Pavilion of Greece at Venice Art Biennale 2024: Dryland: Kostas Chaikalis, Thanasis Deligiannis, Elia Kalogianni, Yorgos Kyvernitis, Yannis Michalopoulos, Fotis Sagonas. Venice (Italy), April 19, 2024.
Official description: Xirómero/Dryland is a hybrid audio- visual installation that is the result of a collective artistic endeavour. The project’s creative team consists of artists and theorists while the work showcased comprises fragments of research, performances, sounds sequences and video installations. Using water as its focal point, Xirómero/Dryland explores the political potential of sound and music as well as the impact of technology on rural landscapes and cultural diversity. The artists explore the experience of a provincial fair, following its course and movements from the village square all the way out to the land. The work draws from the local traditions of Central Greece and of the Xirómero region, which also lends the project its title. Gender relations as well as the incessant interplay between performance and reality punctuating the rhythm of these fairs take centre stage in the Greek pavilion, which is transformed by bringing the community’s meeting space — the square, the public assembly — from the outdoors to the indoors. Xirómero/Dryland aims to relate the experience of local customs to the global condition where aesthetic directions change, traditions shift, rural life and celebration take on different forms, whilst the political dimensions of these processes remain an open subject of inquiry.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
360° video
Four weeks before Art Basel takes place, the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen (Basel, Switzerland) opens its major summer exhibition. The show is quite special, as for the first time in the Fondation Beyeler’s more Four weeks before Art Basel takes place, the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen (Basel, Switzerland) opens its major summer exhibition. The show is quite special, as for the first time in the Fondation Beyeler’s more than 25-year history, the entire museum and its surrounding park will be transformed into the site of an experimental presentation of contemporary art. Participating artists include Michael Armitage, Anne Boyer, Federico Campagna, Ian Cheng, Chuquimamani-Condori and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton, Marlene Dumas, Frida Escobedo, Peter Fischli, Cyprien Gaillard with Victor Man, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Wade Guyton, Carsten Höller with Adam Haar, Pierre Huyghe, Arthur Jafa, Koo Jeong A, Dozie Kanu, Cildo Meireles, Jota Mombaça, Fujiko Nakaya, Alice Notley, Precious Okoyomon, Philippe Parreno, Rachel Rose, Tino Sehgal, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Adrián Villar Rojas. The Summer Show is titled “Dance With Daemons” and is conceived as a “living organism” that changes and transforms throughout its duration.
Connections and interrelationships between individual works are developed in close dialogue with the artists. This exchange also extends to works from the in-house collection, which are an integral part of the project. While a number of the paintings, sculptures, films, installations, and performances were created site-specifically, others are adapted versions of existing works. The exhibition is organized by Fondation Beyeler in partnership with LUMA Foundation. The show runs until August 11, 2024.
Dance With Daemons / Summer Group Show at Fondation Beyeler. Riehen (Basel, Switzerland), May 18, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Running concurrently with the Venice Art Biennale 2024, the Pinault Collection presents a solo show created by the artist Pierre Huyghe at its Punta della Dogana space in Venice, Italy. The exhibition is titled Liminal. It presents major new creations alongside works from the last ten years, particularly from the Pinault Collection.
“Pierre Huyghe has since long questioned the relation between the human and the non-human, and conceives his works as speculative fictions from which emerge other modalities of world. Fictions, to him, are “vehicles for accessing the possible or the impossible—what could be or could not be.” Pierre Huyghe transforms Punta della Dogana into a dynamic, sensitive milieu perpetually evolving. The exhibition is a transitory state inhabited by human and non-human creatures and becomes the site of formation of subjectivities that are constantly learning, changing, and hybridizing. Their memories are expanding with information captured from events, both perceptible and imperceptible, that permeate the exhibition. For Pierre Huyghe, the exhibition is an unpredictable ritual, where new possibilities are generated and coexist, without hierarchy or determinism. With Liminal, he invites us to follow other realities, to become strangers to ourselves, from a perspective other than human—inhuman. This exhibition is supported by Bottega Veneta. Outfits for the work Idiom are designed by Bottega Veneta Creative Director, Matthieu Blazy, in collaboration with the artist. The exhibition has been produced in partnership with the Leeum Museum in Seoul, which will present it in February 2025.” (official description)
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Pierre Huyghe: Liminal / Punta della Dogana, Pinault Collection, Venice (Italy). April 16, 2024.
Giacomo Santiago Rogado is a Swiss painter of Spanish-Italian origin who lives and works in Basel and Berlin. The artist is currently featured in two exhibitions in Thun, Switzerland: at the Thun-Panorama and the Kunstmuseum Thun. It’s the first time an artist is showing work simultaneously at both venues. For the Thun-Panorama, Giacomo Santiago Rogado has developed an expansive installation that examines its surroundings. The Kunstmuseum Thun presents an overview of the artist’s career. In this video we attend the opening reception of Giacomo Santiago Rogado’s retrospective at Kunstmuseum Thun. The exhibition, curated by Helen Hirsch (Director, Kunstmuseum Thun), runs until July 28, 2024.
Giacomo Santiago Rogado: All That You See / Kunstmuseum Thun. Vernissage, May 10, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Illusion, intuition, inspiration and transformation are catchwords that are often applied to Giacomo Santiago Rogado’s work. And he also uses them himself to describe a process-oriented practice that, intriguingly, leaves a great deal to chance. Viewers might also think of such terms when they discover that his work delivers not definitive truths but rather food for their own thoughts. For over 20 years, Giacomo Santiago Rogado, who has been honoured with prestigious prizes such as the Swiss Art Award (2007), the Manor Cultural Prize of Central Switzerland (2009) and the Recognition Prize of the City of Lucerne (2013), has been fascinating the public with his paintings. They draw the eye deep into a picture space with no evident boundaries, thus opening up an infinite expanse.
Giacomo Santiago Rogado is known for arresting compositions that betray an thorough exploration of colour and form. Continually embarking on new paths as an artist and researcher, he playfully probes the limitations and conditions of contemporary painting in ways that are sometimes quite spectacular. Viewers have the opportunity to experience a low-threshold introduction to Rogado’s astonishing creative power and joy in experimentation by contemplating the juxtaposition of a work such as Bellevue with the walk-in installation Growing together through emotions over time (see selected images). Not only the route from figurative to abstract painting becomes apparent here but also Rogado’s increasing focus on what remains when all that is superfluous is simply omitted. Or, as he puts it: “when you integrate the spiritual into the technical”
Giacomo Santiago Rogado, born in Lucerne in 1979, is a Swiss painter of Spanish-Italian origin who today lives and works in Basel and Berlin. His works have been shown in numerous institutional solo and group exhibitions in Switzerland and abroad, including at the Städtische Galerie in Delmenhorst (2021), Kunstmuseum Solothurn (2019), Helmhaus Zürich (2014), Museum im Bellpark in Kriens (2013) and Kunstmuseum Luzern (2009) as well as in group exhibitions at the Centre d’art Pasquart in Biel (2022), Aargauer Kunsthaus in Aarau (2014) and Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (2010).
Giacomo Santiago Rogado is a Swiss painter of Spanish-Italian origin who lives and works in Basel and Berlin. The artist is currently featured in two exhibitions in Thun, Switzerland: at the Thun-Panorama and the Kunstmuseum Thun. It’s the first time an artist is showing work simultaneously at both venues. For the Thun-Panorama, Giacomo Santiago Rogado has developed an expansive installation that examines its surroundings. The Kunstmuseum Thun presents an overview of the artist’s career. In this video we have a look at Giacomo Santiago Rogado’s installation at Thun-Panorama on the occasion of the opening reception, including a performance by Swiss musician Anna Trauffer. The exhibition, curated by Helen Hirsch (Director, Kunstmuseum Thun), runs until December 1, 2024.
Giacomo Santiago Rogado: Out of Sight / Thun-Panorama. Vernissage, May 10, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Illusion, intuition, inspiration and transformation are catchwords that are often applied to Giacomo Santiago Rogado’s work. And he also uses them himself to describe a process-oriented practice that, intriguingly, leaves a great deal to chance. Viewers might also think of such terms when they discover that his work delivers not definitive truths but rather food for their own thoughts. For over 20 years, Giacomo Santiago Rogado, who has been honoured with prestigious prizes such as the Swiss Art Award (2007), the Manor Cultural Prize of Central Switzerland (2009) and the Recognition Prize of the City of Lucerne (2013), has been fascinating the public with his paintings. They draw the eye deep into a picture space with no evident boundaries, thus opening up an infinite expanse.
Giacomo Santiago Rogado is known for arresting compositions that betray an thorough exploration of colour and form. Continually embarking on new paths as an artist and researcher, he playfully probes the limitations and conditions of contemporary painting in ways that are sometimes quite spectacular. Viewers have the opportunity to experience a low-threshold introduction to Rogado’s astonishing creative power and joy in experimentation by contemplating the juxtaposition of a work such as Bellevue with the walk-in installation Growing together through emotions over time (see selected images). Not only the route from figurative to abstract painting becomes apparent here but also Rogado’s increasing focus on what remains when all that is superfluous is simply omitted. Or, as he puts it: “when you integrate the spiritual into the technical”
Giacomo Santiago Rogado, born in Lucerne in 1979, is a Swiss painter of Spanish-Italian origin who today lives and works in Basel and Berlin. His works have been shown in numerous institutional solo and group exhibitions in Switzerland and abroad, including at the Städtische Galerie in Delmenhorst (2021), Kunstmuseum Solothurn (2019), Helmhaus Zürich (2014), Museum im Bellpark in Kriens (2013) and Kunstmuseum Luzern (2009) as well as in group exhibitions at the Centre d’art Pasquart in Biel (2022), Aargauer Kunsthaus in Aarau (2014) and Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (2010).
As Taiwan’s representation at the Venice Art Biennale 2024, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum presents the exhibition “Everyday War” by the artist Yuan Goang-Ming. Curated by Abby Chen, Yuan’s project merges video art with a domestic ambiance, reflecting on contemporary life’s challenges and hidden threats. The centerpiece, the exhibition’s eponymous work “Everyday War,” depicts a domestic space transforming amid warplanes, symbolizing the evolving nature of conflict.
Yuan Goang-Ming’s work blurs the line between video art and film, exploring themes like “home” and “uncanny futures”. The artist grew up in Taiwan and studied media art in Germany. In the 1990s he established himself as one of Taiwan’s leading new-media artists. The exhibition at the Palazzo delle Prigioni around the corner of Piazza San Marco features Yuan’s works “Everyday Maneuver”, “The 561st Hour of Occupation”, “What lies Beyond Us?”, “Dwelling”, “Everyday War”, “Prophecy”, and “Flat World”. The show runs until November 24, 2024.
This video provides you with an exhibition walkthrough and interviews with artist Yuan Goang-Ming and curator Abby Chen.
Yuan Goang-Ming: Everyday War. Taiwan in Venice 2024. Collateral Event of the 60th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. Palazzo delle Prigioni, April 18, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Haus der Kunst in Munich, Germany, currently presents a major retrospective of German artist Rebecca Horn‘s oeuvre. Rebecca Horn’s expansive body of work, spanning six decades, explores the essence of existence and the convergence of nature, technology, and humanity. She identifies primarily as a choreographer, orchestrating intricate relationships between space, light, sound, and physicality. The exhibition “Rebecca Horn” at Haus der Kunst in Munich, Germany, traces her journey from early works on paper to recent productions, emphasizing performativity. Incorporating elements from literature, art history, and film, her art encapsulates the fusion of humanity with machines, animals, and the Earth, offering a tangible experience of life through the body. Curated by Jana Baumann with Radia Soukni, the exhibition highlights Horn’s lifelong exploration of humanity’s evolving role in the world. The exhibition runs until October 13, 2024.
Rebecca Horn / Retrospective at Haus der Kunst, Munich (Germany), May 3, 2024. Extended exhibition walkthrough and introduction by Senior Curator Jana Baumann. (in German language).
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Extended version
In Meta-mentary, the Lenbachhaus in Munich (Germany) invites you to immerse yourself in an exhibition space transformed by Cao Fei’s cinematic imagery and artistic vocabulary. Cao Fei, a prominent figure in post-digital art, explores the pervasive influence of digital technology on daily life. Born in Guangzhou, China, in 1978, she grew up amidst rapid economic and technological change in the Pearl River Delta. Her work, spanning film, photography, and multimedia installations, delves into the societal impacts of globalization and digitalization, reflecting on human adaptation to these transformations. Fei’s art balances between melancholy and humor, utopia and dystopia, offering insights into the complexities of a technologically driven world. Her international acclaim includes exhibitions at renowned venues like MoMA PS1 and Centre Pompidou, culminating in the 2024 SCAD deFINE ART prize.
Cao Fei: Meta-mentary / Lenbachhaus | Kunstbau, Munich (XL). Munich (Germany), May 3, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Extended Version360° VersionExhibition text (excerpt):
Cao Fei is internationally recognized as one of the most important representatives of post-digital art. The term “post-digital” was coined in the early 2000s and refers to an art whose theme and critical element is the digital penetration of our everyday lives. Post-digital art originates in the digital and appropriates its structures and characteristics.
Cao Fei was born in Guangzhou, China, in 1978, as the daughter of two artists. She graduated from the local state art academy in 2001. As a child of the Pearl River Delta, she grew up in an area of China that was a center of rapid economic growth and urban development. Pop culture, computer games, consumer electronics and the latest technologies were her youth companions. She has lived and worked in Beijing since 2006. In her films, photographs and walk-in multimedia installations, Cao Fei deals with the economic and societal transformations of living conditions that affect her and all of us. Digitalization, globalization, the transformation of urban and suburban structures and hence our living environments are at the core of her artistic work. Her questions focus on the circumstances that shape our lives as humans, on how we react to the developments around us and adapt to them or actively incorporate them into our lives. Cao Fei’s works illustrate how we as humans cope with the beauty and at the same time the dangers of a technologized, globalized and hyper connected world and the physical and psychological effects it has on us; thereby touching and changing human experience and the perception of self at its core. For her work, the artist herself visits the virtual world using her avatars and she documents her perception and appropriation of virtual realities in a unique visual language creating distinctive artistic spaces. Her works oscillate between melancholy and humor, between utopia and dystopia, between beauty and horror.
Cao Fei’s art has been featured at numerous international exhibitions: Shanghai Biennale 2004, Moscow Biennale 2005, Taipei Biennale 2006, Sydney Biennale 2006 and 2010, Istanbul Biennale 2007, Yokohama Triennale 2008, Venice Biennale 2003, 2007 and 2015. Selected solo exhibitions: MoMA PS1, New York, 2016; Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong, 2018; K21, Düsseldorf, 2018; Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2019; Serpentine Galleries, London, 2020; UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 2021; MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome, 2021; Pinacoteca de São Paolo 2023. In 2024 she was awarded the SCAD deFINE ART prize.
Curated by Eva Huttenlauch
Toni Schmale’s installation “TANKE” at Kunstraum Dornbirn centers around a petrol station as its focal point, blending industrial aesthetics with abstraction. This environment prompts reflection on societal and environmental narratives, evoking both consternation and transformation. Schmale’s sculptures within the space expand upon the petrol station theme, exploring functionality and materiality. By refusing to offer clear interpretations, Schmale invites viewers to engage with ambiguity and irony, a characteristic present throughout her body of work. “TANKE” serves as a communal space, bridging historical contexts with contemporary challenges, and challenging the notion of temporality. Its placement in former industrial spaces adds another layer to its commentary on urban landscapes and societal functions.
Toni Schmale: Tanke / Kunstraum Dornbirn. Dornbirn (Austria), May 2, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Press text (excerpt):
Toni Schmale has installed an environment entitled “TANKE” at Kunstraum Dornbirn, the central element of which is the petrol station referred to in the title. Technically abstract in a highly aesthetic fashion, apparently dysfunctional and potentially out of place, “TANKE” (2023/2024) allows moments of consternation and transformation to take immediate effect in an exciting interaction with the industrial architecture. Weaving together the characteristics and social function of the site “petrol station”, and its historical and socially-based narratives with new sculptural works, Schmale creates a timeless story with fictional echoes.
“I longed for sound-protection walls and dreamt that gas would just run out, that all cars would break down and the Tanke would be overgrown with wild meadow flowers of the Wienerwald, that my friends would suddenly turn up and we would have an after-work beer.” (Toni Schmale 2021)
Schmale’s dream story of reclaiming nature conjures up the image of the modern ruin. But does it also evoke a utopia? A vision of a new era, for which the automobile was once central to human history? Questions of this kind are not answered within the art work. What is certain, however, is that humanity is facing difficult and multifarious challenges – climatic, political and social. Schmale encounters this complex reality sculpturally in a way that combines abstraction, absurdity, ambivalence, irony, humour and bewilderment as pointed aids and stylistic devices, and takes them to the formal extreme. She chooses the site of the petrol station as the basic sign system and reduces it to a few basic systemic elements – two petrol pumps standing on a concrete base and a framing roof structure rising five meters high.
These component are clearly identifiable, but they obviously refuse to function as a whole. The roofing appears to be a mere skeleton of itself. The steel parts fulfil their task in accordance with the required calculations of statics; they showcase their materiality and performance, indestructible and beyond all influences; but they don’t pump petrol. The slim columns with the hoses on the sides are just contour. Everything is rigid and silver-grey and cold – hot-dip galvanized steel as the perfect materialization of eternal immobility.
The new sculptures distributed throughout the room formally and narratively expand the setting of the petrol station. In these works its functionless nature is carried forward, now extending to material and form in their entirety. Alone the manufacturing process of the individual works makes this clear: for instance, the roof of the petrol station needs technical planning, processes essential for every building. For the petrol pumps, however, it is necessary to choose the right degree of abstraction, which balances the relationship between the intended symbolic function (here in the sense of symbolic recognisability) and mere imitation in such a way that it produces an aesthetic, physically noticeable tension. In the new works “sucker #1 #2” and “sucker #3”, Schmale remains in the figurative world of the petrol station, of the tyre air pressure gauge and the vacuum cleaner. She fuses well-known shapes and props with invented ones. Against the hardness of the steel, she wrests from the material soft lines that oscillate between machine and body. In a 2020 interview, Schmale sums the effect up as follows: “The feeling arises that the sculpture could be capable of something, but it makes no suggestion as to what action might be required.”
In this stringent refusal to make a determination, bemusement and ambivalence are integral parts of the viewer’s response. This runs like a common thread through Schmale’s entire œuvre. Again and again we doubt our own understanding, bounce off the surface only then to be plunged into the depths of human existence. Schmale is internationally known for her very specific formal language. Using metal, concrete and rubber, she develops sculptural works of varying dimensions in which, for example, associations with fitness or torture devices are not arbitrarily but rather referentially enfolded. These associations extend further into the spheres of fetish, physical optimization, sexual gratification and self-dismantling. Schmale expands the concept of sculpture in a constantly advancing search for the nuances of material conditions and forms, for the obligatory examination of the resultant object’s usability and function as critical social commentary. Themes of stereotypical gender attributions or constructions, of social power relations, and of the interaction of both, resonate in Schmale’s work as a subtext that is revealed, for instance, in the ironically humorous titles. These make access to the work both easier and more difficult. In any case, they provide clues as to what the form should be or what potential it can disclose in the mirror of time.
Looking at the tersely titled “TANKE” in Dornbirn, the zeitgeist and its lineage of historical narratives plays an active, activating and easily graspable role. Through the formal citation of a globally identifiable place that is an integral part of the everyday life of millions of people, Schmale succeeds in establishing a communal basis for all viewers. Inherent in this installation is a fictionalized moment, one that is not only played out through the fluid design but also seems to oscillate between the status of a ruin and a sign-post to the future. The whole setting poses the question of temporality.
Schmale further plays with the petrol station as a site of displacement by showing the installation here in a former industrial assembly hall that is now the exhibition space of an art association. For an identical counterpart of the work has been standing in the Vienna Gürtel since 2021, in Stefan Weber Park, a strip of green sandwiched between multi-lane roadways. In her installations in public spaces, Schmale integrates, comments on and challenges the characteristics and social function of the urban spaces and landscapes for which the concepts are created. Thus, through its globally functioning model character and the multi-perspective cultural coding, “TANKE” can be a place of communication in Dornbirn and Vienna. A meeting point that allows both surface and depth, depending on use and our needs.
The current exhibition at Behncke Gallery in Munich is dedicated to the German artist Marco Schuler. Marco Schuler (born 1972, lives and works in the border triangle of Germany, France and Switzerland) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich under Professor Olaf Metzel and taught there. The painter, sculptor and video artist Schuler has been honoured with national and international awards. His works can be found in the collection of the Lenbachhaus and the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, among others. His last art-in-architecture project “Kinderkrippe am Stoppelfeld” was completed in 2023 for the city of Munich. In 2023, the Kunsthalle Darmstadt showed Marco Schuler’s works under the title “Marco Schuler: Go! Go! Go!“. His performative video “Schuler zieht sich an, 2000” was part of the “Solar Breath” exhibition at the Eres Foundation in Munich last year. The exhibition runs until June 15, 2024.
Marco Schuler: New Works / Behncke Gallery | Ludwig Space, Munich. Munich (Germany), May 4, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Marco Schuler in conversation with Annette Vogel. Annette Vogel heads the Museum Penzberg-Sammlung Campendonk and is curator of the ADAC’s (Munich) corporate collection. She has accompanied Marco Schuler’s work for 20 years. Marco Schuler. Artist Talk on the occasion of Marco Schuler’s solo exhibition at Behncke Gallery | Ludwig Space in Munich. Munich (Germany), May 4, 2024. (in German language)
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Șerban Savu and Atelier Brenda: What Work Is / Romanian Pavilion at Venice Art Biennale 2024. Venice (Italy), April 19, 2024.
Official description: Șerban Savu’s project for the Romanian Pavilion and the New Gallery of the Romanian Cultural Institute consists of paintings and mosaics inspired by Socialist realism. Rather than contest or dismantle them, Savu rearranges the revolutionary tropes – of workers united by political aspirations and the choreographic rhythms of building the future – to capture the unadorned reality of a historical limbo, moments of suspension, perplexity and inertia as microcosms of ampler societal shifts or crises. At the pavilion, a monumental polyptych-like installation brings together about 40 paintings in a multi-faceted study of a social scene increasingly emptied of shared meaning, where different ideologies erect their scenographies and emit their proclamations. An architectural installation presents scale models displaying mosaics which diverge from the metaphors and tonalities that the medium conveys in religious environments, or in the cosmogonies of labour that Socialist mosaic-making excels in. At the project’s other venue, one of these mosaics is realised at a monumental scale. In addition, the Brussels-based graphic design studio Atelier Brenda respond to Savu’s project via textual and visual works which think through the abstraction of labour as foundation for the definition of a capitalist self.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
The heart of a giraffe in captivity is twelve kilos lighter is the title of the exhibition at the pavilion of the Czech Republic at the Venice Art Biennale 2024. The show has been created by Eva Koťátková in collaboration with Himali Singh Soin, David Tappeser, the collective Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures, children, educators and older people.
Pavilion of the Czech Republic at the Venice Art Biennale 2024. Venice (Italy), April 19, 2024.
Official description: The heart of a giraffe in captivity is twelve kilos lighter tells the story of Lenka the giraffe, drawing on the history of Czechoslovakia’s acquisition of animals from the Global South. Interpreted through contemporary ecological and decolonial perspectives, the project builds a space for imagining a different way of relating to nature. Lenka was captured in Kenya in 1954 and transported to Prague Zoo to become the very first Czechoslovak giraffe. She survived only two years in captivity, after which her body was donated to the National Museum in Prague and exhibited until 2000. Eva Koťátková’s collaborative project employs a transformative educational practice that re-imagines Lenka’s story as a poetic, embodied encounter, and as a place of critical intervention in the relationship between institutions and the natural world. Alongside collaborations with artists and composers Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser and the collective Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures, Lenka’s story is interpreted by children, educators and older people, with the installation facilitating multiple forms of storytelling. The heart of a giraffe in captivity is twelve kilos lighter stages belonging formed through emotions, touch and ecological relations, instead of fixed notions of identity, borders and nation.
Eva Koťátková in collaboration with Himali Singh Soin, David Tappeser, the collective Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures, children, educators and older people.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Nici Jost’s artistic focus revolves around the color pink, delving into its characteristics, history, and multifaceted roles in psychology, art, literature, and politics. Her work not only explores pink as a controversial element but also as a socio-political lens that provokes discourse. Curated by Isabel Balzer, the exhibition “From West to East to Space” showcases Jost’s exploration of cultural identity and social space through pink. It spans her development from critiquing Western ideals to engaging with Chinese culture and culminates in the GJ 504b project, delving into the intersection of art, science, and technology. Through workshops, talks, and screenings, Jost invites viewers to contemplate the complex significance of pink beyond conventional perceptions. In this video, the artist guides you through her exhibition.
Nici Jost: From West to East to Space. Solo exhibition at Artstübli, Basel. Basel (Switzerland), April 28, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Press text (excerpt):
Nici Jost’s artistic practice is dedicated to the colour pink; its characteristic features, history and its role in psychology, art, poetry, literature and politics. However, she not only works with pink as a controversial and divisive element of social and cultural associations; for the artist, pink is a socio-political lens that is able to polarise like no other colour in the spectrum.
“From West to East to Space” is an exhibition about artistic experimentation and futuristic visions, curated by Isabel Balzer. A visual excursion is created through Jost’s artistic exploration of cultural identity and social space in the context of the colour pink. The exhibition covers stages of her artistic development from Western influences to Far Eastern cultures to “cosmic foresight”.
The exhibition begins with Jost’s exploration of pink in Western culture. On display is a series of works that criticise and celebrate Western ideas that have shaped global aesthetics and thinking. In the first part, she examines pink not only as a colour, but also as a socio-political statement. In doing so, she looks at the relationship to gender, art, modernity and commercialisation in Western societies. The “Recycling Art – Pretty in Pink” project, among others, was selected for the exhibition. The works invite viewers to gain a nuanced understanding of colour psychology and symbolism, challenge preconceptions and show the versatility of the colour pink.
A seamless transition leads to a staging of Jost’s time as artist-in-residence at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel in Shanghai. In Chinese visual culture, the colour pink is used in a different, culturally specific way. It reflects the bustling life of the city and its cultural diversity. The artist goes beyond the purely visual, creating a sensual dialogue with Chinese aesthetics and philosophy.
The third part of the exhibition takes us into the cosmic sphere with the GJ 504b project. This project explores the interface between art, science and technology and was developed in collaboration with Nadine Friedel. The GJ 504b Project explores the role of artificial intelligence as a collaborator in the creative process. The project was inspired by a pink-coloured exoplanet 57 light years away, similar to Jupiter. Scientific support was provided by Ben Moore, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Zurich. The newly created colour “GJ504b Pink” stands for the infinite possibilities and unexplored areas of space and artistic innovation. Viewers are invited to reflect on the future of life, the perception of colours and their complexity beyond Earth.
The exhibition will be accompanied by workshops for school classes and visitors. Talks and screenings on these topics will be held in collaboration with the artist Philipp Gasser (Professor Emeritus, Digital Media, Institute Art Gender Nature (Technology), Basel (HGK FHNW) and the artists on the subject of AI art with Midjourney.
Nici Jost is a conceptual and multimedia artist known for her vigorous and critical exploration of the colour pink, using it as a lens to explore and challenge social constructs throughout her body of work. After working as an assistant to Pipilotti Rist for over a year, she received a Master of Fine Arts from the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK FHNW in Basel. Her practice spans photography, video and immersive installations. Jost’s body of work has been recognized by numerous awards, including the Alexander Clavel Foundation’s Cultural Prize and a grant from the Aargauer Kuratorium in 2015. In 2018, she was an artist in residence at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel in Shanghai for six months. Her first comprehensive publication «Instinctive Desire» was published by edition fink in 2019. It appears as volume 8 of the Primeur series issued by the Aargauer Kuratorium. Her work has been widely exhibited in Switzerland and abroad, and her photographs and installations are included in private and public collections worldwide.
Márton Nemes: Techno Zen / Hungarian Pavilion at Venice Art Biennale 2024. April 19, 204.
Official description: Márton Nemes’ work is influenced by techno subcultures; the explosion and rearrangement of the pictorial field gives a psychedelic character to his abstract paintings that evoke the visual atmosphere of nightclubs. Combining painterly and sculptural elements, his multimedia installations create a hypnotic spatial dynamic that propels the viewer from the harsh, real world into a dizzying, fluorescent colour field. Nemes designed the project Techno Zen as an immersive, painting-based Gesamtkunstwerk that expands to other media. Laser-cut steel, car paint, enamelled steel plate, projection, DMX lights, speakers and coloured fans are the tools that he reinterprets the palette of painting with and makes the environment multisensory: its optical, acoustic and haptic content unfolds through the combined effects of light, colour, movement and sound. The project, structured in three main parts, can be fully experienced when the visitor stands in the centre of the pavilion that links left, right, front and back spaces. To be in the middle carries a symbolic meaning, it is both physical and ontological. In an era of polarized societal phenomena that exclude nuances, the project conveys a humanistic message that we, albeit its simplicity, should keep reminding ourselves of.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Archie Moore: kith and kin / Australian Pavilion at Venice Art Biennale 2024. April 19, 2024.
Official description: First Nations peoples of Australia are some of the oldest continuous living cultures on Earth, and statistically one of the most incarcerated. Archie Moore’s kith and kin is both evidence and reminder of these facts. The sprawling chalk on blackboard mural traces his Kamilaroi and Bigambul relations back 65,000+ years, including the common ancestors of all humans. Handwritten across the walls and ceiling, the family tree engulfs the audience. The education materials refer to the transmission of knowledge and what is left out of history. Kamilaroi and Bigambul words in the drawing assert Indigenous language revival initiatives, while holes signal colonial invasions, massacres, diseases and displacement that sever familial ties. The central reflection pool is also a void; a memorial to First Nations deaths in state custody attended by piles of coroners’ reports. Archie adds archival records referencing kin to demonstrate how colonial laws and government policies have long been imposed upon First Nations peoples. These bureaucratic papers documenting tragedies are cradled by the reflection of the family tree in the surrounding water. The artist uses his family history to make systemic issues uncomfortably tangible to audiences while providing a prescient reminder that we are all kin.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Open Group (Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach, Anton Varga): Repeat after Me II / Polish Pavilion at Venice Art Biennale 2024. Venice (Italy), April 19, 2024.
Official description: Repeat after Me II is a collective portrait of witnesses of the war in Ukraine. The protagonists of two films from 2022 and 2024 are civilian war refugees who speak of the war as recalled through the sounds of firearms, and then invite the audience to repeat after them. The artists use a karaoke format. The accompaniment here is not hit tunes: it is shots, missiles, howling, and explosions—and the lyrics are descriptions of deadly weapons. This is the soundtrack of a war that the witnesses try to recreate. The ability to recognise these sounds can save their lives, and we are invited to learn the language of their experiences. The audience can repeat the sounds of the weapons or withdraw into the safe space designed to resemble a karaoke bar. Yet this is no ordinary bar, like the ones we know: it is an instructional karaoke venue forecasting an even more militarised future. This spectre will remain with us for so long as nationalist imperialist policies will be accepted as part of a diplomatic compromise.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Julien Creuzet / French Pavilion at Venice Art Biennale 2024.
Official description: The sight of the matoutou falaise is a gift when it appears in dense forests, on the bark of the Zamana trees or the rocks of the Martinique shores. It requires a deep connection to the environment; an eye that sweeps the contours and glides over the textures. It is about appearances and disappearances, what is given, protected, and also unseen… This way of seeing is undoubtedly what Julien Creuzet strives to offer through the experience of his work. It describes an immersion in a poetry of forms and sounds, volumes and lines in movement, colourful encounters forming new languages: an experience to be lived deeply. This tarantula, endemic to Martinique, could well be the symbol of a way of being with art that history has yet to write. It nourishes, and protects, in the teaching of a sensible and poetic understanding of the world it offers a softer gaze to approach the many ecologies of life. Creuzet’s forms stem from a locus of emancipation, which must be felt to truly see. It is a moment of learning and unlearning as a reconciliation with our senses, as well as a space to be untranslated and liberated.
Julien Creuzet: Attila cataracte ta source aux pieds des pitons verts finira dans la grande mer gouffre bleu nous nous noyâmes dans les larmes marées de la lune. French Pavilion at Venice Art Biennale 2024. Venice (Italy), April 19, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Coinciding with the Venice Art Biennale 2024, Roman Road presents a solo exhibition curated by Marisa Bellani dedicated to the artist Channatip Chanvipava. Titled “The Sound of Many Waters”, the show features eight new works that explore the notions of fixed identities, belonging and subjective memory. The exhibition is on view at Dimora ai Santi, Calle Larga Giacinto Gallina, Canneregio 6381, 30121, Venezia, and runs until May 27, 2024.
Channatip Chanvipava: The Sound of Many Waters. Venice (Italy), April 16, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Press text (excerpt): Aligning with this year’s Biennale theme ‘Foreigners Everywhere’, Bellani turns to water as a powerful reference to address the concepts of queer identity and connection in a divided world. These are vibrantly expressed in Chanvipava’s work which navigates queer sensibilities with immense power and emotion. Water, in this instance, becomes a symbol of both connection and division, resonating with the complexities of queer identity. Based in London, Channatip Chanvipava is a self-taught painter who embarked on his artistic journey after a degree in Economics, driven by an enduring passion for art cultivated since a young age. His unique style, marked by distinctive and bold brushstrokes inspired by the impressionists, seamlessly oscillates between abstraction and figuration. Notably, Chanvipava’s compositions are characterized by layered, thick, and vibrant paint textures distinguished by vertical lines outlining forms. His organic and meditative artistic process relies on intuition and fragments of memory, pieced together to create a ‘tapestry’ of recollections. He navigates through colour as a vehicle to express form, bringing to light moments of reflection, contemplation and liberation. Without employing preliminary sketches or physical references, he paints directly on canvas and relies solely on memory and his acute understanding of space and depth.
Kapwani Kiwanga: Trinket / Canadian Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Venice (Italy), April 19, 2024.
Official description: Kapwani Kiwanga is a multi-disciplinary artist concerned with forms of power: their suppressed histories and quotidian effects. The artist transforms the Canada Pavilion by way of a site- specific sculptural installation on the building’s interior and exterior, turning it into a large-scale tableau. Shapes shift, dissolving distinctions between inside and outside. As one moves through the coil-like architecture, it unfolds, multiplying perspectives. The installation principally consists of conterie (seed beads), historically employed as both currency and items of exchange. Conterie were dispersed globally from the Venetian island of Murano and incorporated into various material cultures. Kiwanga uses these tiny glass units to construct the monumental out of the minute, each bead acting as a witness to past transactions that changed the socioeconomic landscape of the sixteenth century and beyond. The work addresses the often-destructive history of commerce and how the trade of these beads shaped the world. Other materials related to the trade of conterie are also included. They rise from the pavilion’s floor onto the walls and spill out into the courtyard. As they meet the beads, they formalise a place of exchange, prompting reflection on issues of value, aesthetics, and global economic relations.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Super Superior Civilizations is the title of Guerreiro do Divino Amor’s exhibition at the Swiss Pavilion in the Giardini.
Official description: The Swiss Pavilion, as envisioned by Swiss-Brazilian artist Guerreiro do Divino Amor, plays with the national logic of celebratory self-representation through culture, which was at the very origin of the national pavilions at the Giardini della Biennale over a century ago. A passionate researcher, a curious documentarist with a baroque and dreamlike imagination, and an extraordinary world-builder, Guerreiro do Divino Amor invites us to laugh in a benevolent spirit at our chauvinism and at those clichés with which we represent the world and ourselves. The latter attitude seems to us of fundamental importance in a period of increasing polarisation of politics and radical oppositions such as the one we are currently experiencing.
Divided into two parts, the Miracle of Helvetia and Roma Talismano, the Super Superior Civilizations exhibition presents the sixth and seventh chapters of the monumental Superfictional World Atlas saga, which the artist has been working on for 20 years now. Allegorical in nature and potentially infinite in scope, his atlas takes aim – with sharp irony and apparent lightness – at crucial political issues, such as the handling of power and collective imagination by the media, the financial system, and religion.
Guerreiro do Divino Amor: Super Superior Civilizations / Swiss Pavilion at Venice Art Biennale 2024. Venice (Italy), April 19, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
John Akomfrah: Listening all Night to the Rain / British Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia.
Official description: John Akomfrah is an artist and filmmaker whose work is an investigation into memory, racial injustice, the experiences of migrant diasporas and climate change. Listening All Night To The Rain continues the artist’s preoccupation with themes of post-colonialism, ecology and the politics of aesthetics with a renewed focus on the act of listening and the sonic. The exhibition is seen as a manifesto that encourages the idea of listening as activism and is conceived as a single installation with eight interlocking and overlapping multi-screen sound and time-based works. Bodies of water are a central motif in Akomfrah’s exhibition and form a connective tissue that holds the many layered visual and sonic narratives together. Together with the sonic, Akomfrah explores the role of water in understanding our world and holding memory. Open-ended in structure, the exhibition is reflective of the artist’s abiding interest in non-linear forms of storytelling and collage. The exhibition probes into the ways in which addressing and connecting vast historical narratives across five continents can then be reflected in the experiences of diasporic people in Britain.
John Akomfrah: Listening all Night to the Rain / British Pavilion, Venice Art Biennale 2024. April 19, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me / USA at the Venice Art Biennale 2024. April 19, 2024.
Official description: Jeffrey Gibson has forged an interdisciplinary practice and hybrid visual language that draws from American, Indigenous, and queer histories, with references to popular subcultures, literature, and global artistic traditions. A member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, Gibson grew up in major urban centers in the United States, Germany, and Korea— experiences that inform his practice. In his work, intertribal aesthetics, beadwork, textiles, and found objects from the past two centuries commingle with the visual languages of global modernism. His use of pattern and abstract geometries confronts the chromophobia of contemporary art. His practice reflects the vibrant realities of Indigenous communities in the United States, a form of cultural critique that engages with complex histories rather than erasing them. With newly produced multimedia sculptures, mixed-media paintings, site-specific murals, a multichannel video installation, and an extensive exterior installation, the space in which to place me transforms the U.S. Pavilion into an embodiment of Gibson’s radically inclusive vision for the future: a space in which Indigenous art and a broad spectrum of cultural expressions and identities are central to the American experience.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
In this video, Vlatka Horvat, the artist representing Croatia at the Venice Art Biennale 2024, guides us through her exhibition. The show is titled “By the Means at Hand” and is located at Fàbrica 33 (Calle Larga dei Boteri, Cannaregio 5063).
Official description: Vlatka Horvat’s project for the Croatian Pavilion – By the Means at Hand – exists as both a dynamic, accumulating exhibition of artworks by a large group of international artists living “as foreigners”, reflecting on questions and urgencies of diasporic experience, and as a compelling, intimate, social, and performative exchange between them. The pavilion also doubles as Horvat’s temporary artist’s studio over the course of the biennial. Horvat has invited a large number of artists living in diaspora in different countries to engage with her in a series of reciprocal exchanges of artworks and other materials, all of which will be sent between Venice and other places by improvised means – via various friends, travellers, and strangers who will be enlisted as informal couriers for the project. The project builds on the principles of solidarity, shared struggle, mutual support, and friendship – prerequisites for co-existing with others and key elements in the toolkit for those living “in foreign lands”. The project also points to a wide range of other, broader themes such as alternative logistics, spontaneous production of social relations, informal and gift economies, and the idea of trustfulness.
Commissioner: Ministero della Cultura e dei Media della Repubblica di Croazia
Curator: Antonia Majača
Vlatka Horvat: By the Means at Hand / Pavilion of Croatia at Venice Art Biennale 2024. Venice (Italy), April 16, 2024.
— Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Jean-Marie Appriou’s artwork “Horizons” is a monumental project conceived by Jean-Marie Appriou in 2022, a large-scale aluminum boat carrying two ...
In this video we have a look at US-artist Gary Kuehn’s solo exhibition at Galerie Haas in Zürich. Gary Kuehn was born in 1939 in New Jersey. He is an important representative of “Process Art”. Since the beginnings, his artistic career is based in the use of simple forms, such as circle, square or triangle, in conjunction with his interest in mechanical and industrial materials. Gary Kuehn lives and works in New York. His solo show at Galerie Haas features new paintings and drawings.
Gary Kuehn: Recent Works / Galerie Haas, Zürich. Vernissage, September 1, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Exhibition text:
Gary Kuehn is one of the outstanding sculptors of the Post Minimal era, which once again radically changed the concept of art in the 1960s. His oeuvre consists mainly of sculptures, objects and installations. In addition, he has produced an extensive oeuvre of drawings, complemented by videos of performances that essentially thematize drawing itself and its gestural dimension. His sculptural practice always revolves around pairs of opposites such as hard-soft, solid-liquid, push-pull, static-dynamic, or organic-inorganic. The processes of the play of forces or transformation implicit in these works serve him again and again to bring the opposites towards each other – he calls this “making compromises” – and, moreover, to turn them into metaphors of states of mind.
He is known especially for his sculptures from the 1960s, which at first glance seem like classics of minimal art. But if one looks closer, they create a subtle tension in their mirrored, personal, and often contradicting way, which is present throughout his extensive oeuvre from the last 50 years. In 1962, Kuehn studied art history at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, and in 1964, fine arts at Rutgers State University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The trained steelworker worked on construction sites and as a carpenter to finance his studies. In 1979, he received an invitation from the German Academic Exchange Service to Berlin, where he spent a working year. Since 1965, Kuehn has been teaching at various American universities.
In this video we attend the opening reception of Renée Levi’s solo exhibition at Philipp Zollinger Gallery in Zürich, Switzerland. ...
The gallery Lullin + Ferrari in Zurich opens the art season with a solo exhibition by the artist Clare Goodwin. Titled It’s All About, the show features new paintings and sculptures by the artist. Clare Goodwin was born in 1973, Solihull, Birmingham. She lives and works in Zurich since 2002. Clare Goodwin studied at Winchester School of Art from 1993-1996 (BA Painting) and at the Royal College of Art, London from 1996-1998 (MA Painting). In addition to her own artistic work, she is regularly active as an artist-curator. She is the initiator and co-operator of the art space StudioK3.
Clare Goodwin: It’s All About / Lullin + Ferrari, Zürich (Switzerland). Vernissage, September 1, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
In “It’s All About” Clare Goodwin presents new works that feature the special characteristics of her abstract, minimal art: Clear precision and great lightness, reduction to lines, shapes and patterns and a selected colour palette. The exhibition includes small and large canvases in portrait, and, for the first time, landscape format and three new assemblage sculptures conceived especially for the exhibition. All the works bear distinctive characteristics that mark them as carriers of social and political narratives and human existence.
“Clare Goodwin is known for her hard-edged painting compositions, large scale wall painting installations, works on paper and collage, object-furniture and more recently her works in ceramic that stand on the edge of abstraction and figuration. All her works are occupied by geometric elements such as lines, circles and curves combined with her whisper shapes which incorporate narrative within the abstract language. Goodwin is known for a very precise technique on canvas, wall and object which once applied on ceramics enters another field of the unknown.
In Clare Goodwin’s painting practice the sense of an unorthodox relationship in play is perhaps always present in the details. For these precise, rigorously devised and carefully executed arrangements of abstract forms have been shaped by a seriously eclectic and ever-expanding inventory of source materials. Clare Goodwin always uses forenames to title her paintings. High art and home decoration appear to meet in a chromatic soap-opera on canvas that implicates a host of potential human characters in its credits. Goodwin’s survey exhibition Constructive Nostalgia at Centre PasquArt Biel in 2016 – featuring domestic dioramas of two- and three-dimensional works and architectural interventions – provided veritable stage sets for her investigation of the past as an aesthetic currency of the present. Other series of works like the Whispering Widows immediately spark the idea of a possibly complicated and rather gossipy female cast of protagonists.
Clare Goodwin studied at Winchester School of Art from 1993-1996 (BA Painting) and at the Royal College of Art, London from 1996-1998 (MA Painting). Solo exhibitions include sottovoce, Haus der Kunst St. Josef Solothurn (2020); Wallpainting, Last Tango, Zurich (2019); Constructive Nostalgia, CentrePasquArt, Biel (2016); Bradford Jolly, Christinger De Mayo Gallery, Zürich (2014); Unforced Errors, Southwark Park Galleries, London (2012); Kiss on the Blue, Rotwand Gallery, Zurich (2011).”
Source: Lullin + Ferrari)
A new exhibition at Hebel_121 art space in Basel, Switzerland, presents works by the Japanese artists Yuka Miyazaki and Shuhei Fukuda. Yuka Miyazaki’s paintings with ashes are formed by the invisible laws of nature. Her works are connecting with the act of constant change, with the eternal circulation between life and death. Shuhei Fukuda’s mode of practice is showing the process of natural transformation of GINPAKU (silver leaf) caused by the climate of the surrounding environment. Both artists and their works are connecting with the universal flow of time. The exhibition runs until October 14, 2023.
Yuka Miyazaki, Shuhei Fukuda: Ashes and Silver Leaf / Hebel_121, Basel. Basel, August 25,2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
In Čiurlionis Gym, DIY gym equipment is placed on a square blue carpet where workout sessions take place several times a day. The installation is based on the artist’s own experience at the National M.K. Čiurlionis School of Art in Lithuania. Augustas Serapinas’s education was largely based on the development of technical skills such as drawing, sculpting, and painting through copying nature and making plaster copies of ancient Greek sculptures. For Čiurlionis Gym, he goes back to his school archives to make copies of his own works and plaster models, which he then uses in a fully functioning gym. The work questions the premises of an art education based on copying by comparing it to the gym workout – both of which are based on repetitive actions and hard work. Augustas Serapinas (born 1990 in Vilnius) tells stories of places, people, and site-specific memories in his installations. His work is characterized by a spontaneous and above all intense engagement with his immediate surroundings. Serapinas lives and works in Vilnius. (official description)
Augustas Serapinas: Čiurlionis Gym, 2023 / Art Basel 2023 Unlimited. Basel (Switzerland), June 14, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Stories Unfolding is a group show at Villa Renata in Basel, Switzerland. It brings together works by the artists Katharina ...
In this video we attend the opening reception of Maria Magdalena Z’Graggen’s solo exhibition “RAW” at Nicolas Krupp Gallery in ...
The Berlin-based gallery Contemporary Fine Arts has opened its new Basel gallery space with an exhibition that shows key works ...
Ohne Haut Ohne Haus (without skin, without house) is a group exhibition at Akku Kunstplattform Emmen in Emmenbrücke (near Lucerne, ...
The current exhibition at Forum Würth in Arlesheim (near Basel, Switzerland), is dedicated to the German artist Christopher Lehmpfuhl. Christopher ...
The exhibition “Under Construction“, which took place from July 9 to August 13 at the FABRIKculture in Hégenheim, France (near ...
Environnement Chromointerférent by Carlos CruzDiez is an immersive, participatory environment that reveals the changeable, ambiguous nature of color. The projection, ...
The Australian artist Ash Keating is known for his paintings of entire buildings and huge walls. For Museum Langmatt in ...
The Australian artist Ash Keating (born in 1980 in Melbourne) has made an international name for himself with spectacular paintings ...
One of the finalists of the Swiss Art Awards 2023 is Gerome Gadient. He participates in the exhibition with two ...
The exhibition “Under Construction“, which took place from July 9 to August 13 at the FABRIKculture in Hégenheim, was conceived ...
Swiss artist Mathis Pfäffli is one of the finalists of the Swiss Art Awards 2023. The piece he presented at ...
Official description: In Dust 002, Wu Chi-Tsung creates a captivating relationship between artist and viewer, technology and chance. A camera, ...
The Swiss Art Awards exhibition in Basel (Switzerland) runs concurrently with Art Basel each year. The show features the finalists ...
The artwork “the vast ocean of all possibilities (19°36’16.9″N 72°13’07.0″W / 41°30’32.3″N 81°36’41.7″W), 2022” is part of an ongoing series ...
The Swiss Art Awards exhibition in Basel (Switzerland) runs concurrently with Art Basel each year. The show features the finalists ...
Official description: Topa is derived from Jason Rhoades’s greater artwork My Madinah. In pursuit of my ermitage…, a mesmerizing installation ...
Until 10 September 2023 Janet Cardiff’s The Forty Part Motet (2001) is on view in the Druckereihalle at Ackermannshof in ...
Official description: “Standing over 3 meters tall, STRIP-TOWER is an installation that unites several threads of the artist’s continuing inquiry ...
Datament is the title of Poland’s contribution to the 18th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Datament is ...
For his Matratzentraum, Guillaume Bijl meticulously transforms the exhibition space into a mattress store. Each detail is scrupulously considered including ...
In the production hall of the former textile factory, the two artists Gerda Maise and Helen von Burg embark on ...
Running concurrently with the Michael Armitage exhibition, Kunsthaus Bregenz also presents a solo show with works by Anna Jermolaewa. Anna ...
Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller’s artwork Sad Waltz and the Dancer Who Couldn’t Dance (2015) is part of the ...
Pathos and the Twilight of the Idle is the title of the British-Kenyan painter Michael Armitage’s first comprehensive solo exhibition ...
The Kunstmuseum St. Gallen in Switzerland is currently showing a solo exhibition by Cypriot artist Haris Epaminonda. The work of ...
The exhibition Forever Young presents masterpieces of Impressionist painting in the historic villa of the Museum Langmatt in Baden (Switzerland). ...
Curated by Muoto & Georgi Stanishev, the exhibition at the French Pavilion at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition – La ...
The connection between La Biennale (as a ‘supermarket’) and National Pavilions (as ‘products’) is an analogy which the Latvian Pavilion ...
“Who am I Tomorrow?” is a new site-specific installation by Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota, created for the Kunstraum in Dornbirn, ...
On the occasion of the Parcours Night of Art Basel 2023, the artist Alex Baczyński‐Jenkins performed “The tremble”. The tremble ...
The Fondation Beyeler in Riehen (Basel, Switzerland) is the first Swiss museum to dedicate a comprehensive solo exhibition to the ...
As part of the Art Basel closing event Finally Saturday, Swiss artist Nino Baumgartner performed his piece Tinguely Maneuver 2.0. ...
At the Venice Biennale’s 18th International Architecture Exhibition, the Nordic countries (Finland, Norway, Sweden) present Girjegumpi: The Sámi Architecture Library. ...
The exhibition Gego: Measuring Infinity at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York is the first major museum retrospective ...
Love Letter is the title of Deborah-Joyce Holman’s solo show at Galerie Gregor Staiger in Zürich, Switzerland. Deborah-Joyce Holman is ...
The American artist Cindy Sherman currently presents a new body of work at Hauser & Wirth Zurich, Limmatstrasse. The focus ...
Dancing Before the Moon is the title of Great Britains contribution to the 18th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale ...
As part of Art Basel‘s Parcours Night, Swiss artist Julie Monot showed the piece It’s so Quiet, a performance of ...
Open for Maintenance – Wegen Umbau geöffnet is the title of Germany’s official contribution to the 18th International Architecture Exhibition ...
Shilpa Gupta: I Live Under Your Sky Too, 2004 – 2023 / Art Basel Parcours 2023. Basel (Switzerland), June 17, ...
With the exhibition Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller: Dream Machines, the Museum Tinguely in Basel (Switzerland) presents a comprehensive ...
Until 21 July 2023, David Zwirner presents new paintings by Belgian artist Luc Tuymans at the gallery’s 537 West 20th ...
During the Art Basel 2023 week, the work Glacier Dreams by artist Refik Anadol was projected onto the facade of ...
This video takes you on a tour of the 2023 edition of Art Basel‘s Unlimited sector. Unlimited is Art Basel’s ...
Alexandre Diop (b. 1995, Paris) is a Franco-Senegalese artist based in Vienna, where he is studying at the Academy of ...
From 10 June – 10 September 2023 Kunsthalle Zürich presents works by the British-Tamil artist Christopher Kulendran Thomas, in collaboration ...
The Parcours sector at Art Basel is a distinctive showcase of site-specific installations, sculptures, interventions, and performances situated in public ...
The 2023 edition of Art Basel in Basel features 284 of the world’s leading galleries from across the globe. At ...
This year, Liste Art Fair Basel features 88 galleries from 35 countries, which present works by more than 100 artists. ...
A brief glimpse at Basel Social Club, an exhibition / art fair in a former mayonnaise factory, kicking off Art ...
In the summer of 1982, Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988) travelled to Modena in Italy. Gallery owner Emilio Mazzoli had invited the ...
“Renewal: A Symbiotic Narrative” is the title of China’s presentation at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di ...
The exhibition series Raumfahrt (Space Travel) at Museum Langmatt in Baden (Switzerland) presents young Swiss art. The seventh edition features ...
Polish artist Monika Sosnowska‘s solo exhibition at Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, Switzerland, is the first comprehensive exhibition of Sosnowska’s ...
Yayoi Kusama’s solo exhibition “I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers” at David Zwirner New York is one of the Japanese ...
Everlasting Plastics is the title of the official US presentation at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in Venice (Italy). The exhibition brings together site-specific installations that explore one of the most ubiquitous materials in our world: plastic. Exhibited are works by Xavi L. Aguirre, Simon Anton, Ang Li, Norman Teague and Lauren Yeager. Everlasting Plastics is organized by Ohio-based alternative art organization SPACES in cooperation with the US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.
Everlasting Plastics / Pavilion of the USA at Venice Architecture Biennale 2023. Venice (Italy), May 25, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Exhibition text:
Petrochemical polymers known as plastics were developed in the United States as a revolutionary material. Today the global urgency to reframe our approach to the overabundance of plastic detritus in our waterways, landfills, and streets is clear. Exploring our fraught, yet enmeshed, kinship with plastics, Everlasting Plastics considers the ways these materials both shape and erode contemporary ecologies, economies, and the built environment. This exhibition highlights our unseen dependency; demonstrates how plasticity has created expectations for the behaviors of other materials; and points to plastic’s unknown, long-term, and indelible impact on our futures.
Timelapse is the title of American artist Sarah Sze‘s current solo exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Sarah Sze is best known for her sculpture and installation art. In 2013 she represented the United States of America at the Venice Art Biennale. For Timelapse, Sarah Sze created a series of site-specific installations for the exhibition spaces of the Guggenheim’s iconic Frank Lloyd Wright building. The exhibition runs until September 10, 2023.
Sarah Sze: Timelapse / Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum New York. New York City, May 19, 2023.
Exhibition text:
Emerging as an artist in the 1990s, Sarah Sze (b. 1969, Boston) has built a distinct visual language that blurs the boundaries between various mediums including painting, sculpture, sound, print, drawing, video, and architecture, challenging the threshold between digital and the analogue, the tactile and the imagined, and the permanent and the impermanent.
For this solo exhibition, Sze created a series of site-specific installations that weave a trail of discovery through multiple spaces of the Guggenheim’s iconic Frank Lloyd Wright building. Outside, the exhibition spills into the public sphere beyond the museum walls. A flowing river of images traces the building’s exterior, echoing the movement of the traffic and passersby at street level, while a live-feed projection of the moon on the curved rotunda facade will mirror its cycle over the course of the exhibition. In Sze’s reimagination, the iconic UNESCO World Heritage architecture becomes a public timekeeper in a reminder that timelines are built through collective experience and memory.
Inside the museum, Sze arranged a path of unexpected encounters: a pendulum hovering above the fountain on the rotunda floor, an installation tucked into a hallway in front of the freight elevator. These quiet gestures score visitors’ progress to the top level of the rotunda, where an immersive environment comprising new works of sculpture, painting, installation, and sound awaits them. These expansive sequence of eight bays are connected by a river of videos that travel across, above, and behind the works on view, forming a site-specific horizon line of moving images.
Bookending this installation designed for the Guggenheim’s building are two key works from the museum’s collection, both exhibited for the first time in New York: Untitled (Media Lab) (1998), Sze’s first sculpture to incorporate video; and Timekeeper (2016), a monumental, multisensory installation that will mark the exhibition’s finale in the adjoining gallery on Tower Level 7. Time, as it unfolds the ensemble of works gathered for Sarah Sze: Timelapse, is not only a collection of lived and remembered experiences but, in the words of the artist, “a contemplation on how we mark time and how time marks us.”
Sarah Sze: Timelapse is organized by Kyung An, Associate Curator, Asian Art.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
The World is Yours is the title of American artist Bisa Butler’s first solo exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch. At Jeffrey Deitch’s 18 Wooster Street space in New York, Bisa Butler presents portraits of Black Americans for which she uses layered fabrics and appliqués to create textured surfaces, saturated colors and vibrant patterns. In her new works, Butler combines Nigerian hand-dyed batiks and African wax-resist cotton with holographic vinyl-fabric, silk, wool, velvet and lace. Her subjects are sourced from iconic contemporary photographers like Gordon Parks, Janette Beckman and Jamel Shabazz. Bisa Butler’s solo exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch New York runs until June 30, 2023.
Bisa Butler: The World Is Yours. Jeffrey Deitch, 18 Wooster Street, New York. New York City, May 13, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Exhibition text:
It’s mine, it’s mine, it’s mine
Whose world is this?
The world is yours, the world is yours
— Nas, 1994
Bisa Butler’s exhibition, The World Is Yours, is at once a benediction and a mantra inspired by the lyrics of a song by the rapper Nas. In Butler’s words:
I am saying to all people who may have been mistreated through acts of prejudice and racism that this world also belongs to them. In fact, this world belongs to all of us, and it always has. The statement “The World Is Yours” encourages people to stay the course and never stop trying to create the life they envision.
African Americans have overcome tremendous odds to build their communities and customs despite pervasive obstacles, and I want the new generation to keep up that fight. In the 1800s, Sojourner Truth said: “I will not allow my life’s light to be determined by the darkness around me.” If she, a woman born into bondage and then escaped with a small child, could shine a light on the evils of slavery and inspire people to action, then we have no choice but to do the same.
Through her dynamic, celebratory portraits of Black Americans, Butler captures vividly the life and history of a people who are part of the American mosaic. Realized in a medium that both evokes the intimate sense of home and captures the collective dimension of a shared tradition, Butler’s quilts can be situated in the lineage of celebrated textile artists like Faith Ringgold, Romare Bearden, Harriet Powers and the quilters of Gee’s Bend, who elevated the ubiquitous artifact and centuries-old craft to an art form able to shine a light on the experience of African Americans. Through her subject matter and technique, Butler’s work expands the parameters of art history.
In her quilts, Butler introduces elements of painting and photography. Although her finished works are made entirely of textiles, she approaches the medium from a painterly perspective. Butler uses layered fabrics and appliqués to create textured surfaces, saturated colors and vibrant patterns that she found missing from most traditional painting techniques. In her new works, Butler combines Nigerian hand-dyed batiks and African wax-resist cotton with holographic vinyl-fabric, silk, wool, velvet and lace. The stories told by Butler’s quilts, their fibers, colors and motifs interweave with the histories of industrial production, international trade and social change.
Butler’s new body of work represents some of her first collaborative quilted portraits. Her subjects are sourced from iconic contemporary photographers like Gordon Parks, Janette Beckman and Jamel Shabazz. “They captured the spirit of their subjects on film,” says Butler, “and I strive to reinterpret and add to their vision with textiles. The quilts become a conversation between the photographer, the subject, myself and the audience.”
Bisa Butler (b. 1973) lives in South Orange and works in Jersey City, New Jersey. She earned her BFA in painting at Howard University, Washington, D.C. and holds a MA in Teaching Art from Montclair State University, New Jersey. Her work has been exhibited widely, both domestically and internationally. In 2020, Portraits at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Katonah Museum of Art was the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition. Her quilts have been prominently featured in Black American Portrait at LACMA, Los Angeles (2022) and Fabric of a Nation: American Quilt Stories at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2021), and their exhibition catalogs. Her work can be found in the permanent collection of several North American institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago; The Smithsonian American Museum of Art; and The Pérez Art Museum, Miami. Butler is the recipient of the 2022 Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship. The World Is Yours is Bisa Butler’s first solo exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch.
In the second part of our coverage of the Biennale Architettura 2023 in Venice (Italy), we have a look at the Padiglione Centrale (Central Pavilion) in the Giardini. This part of the exhibition features works by Adjaye Associates, atelier masōmī, BASIS con / with GKZ, Cave_bureau Hood Design Studio, Ibrahim Mahama, Kéré Architecture, Koffi & Diabaté Architectes, MASS Design Group, Olalekan Jeyifous, SOFTLAB@PSU, Studio Sean Canty, Sumayya Vally & Moad Musbahi, Thandi Loewenson, Theaster Gates Studio, urban american city (urbanAC), Ainslee Alem Robson, Banga Colectivo, Blac Space, Cartografia Negra, Courage Dzidula Kpodo con / with Postbox Ghana, Faber Futures, Folasade Okunribido, New South, Riff Studio, Tanoa Sasraku, Archive of the Future, Loom, Portico, and Shade.
The 18th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice (Italy), organized by La Biennale di Venezia, is titled The Laboratory of the Future. Curated by the founder of the African Futures Institute, Lesley Lokko, the exhibition’s spotlight is on Africa and the African Diaspora. The show runs until November 26, 2023 at the Giardini and the Arsenale.
Venice Architecture Biennale 2023 / Biennale Architettura 2023: The Laboratory of the Future / Giardini. Venice (Italy), May 23, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
The 18th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice (Italy), organized by La Biennale di Venezia, is titled The Laboratory of the Future. Curated by the founder of the African Futures Institute, Lesley Lokko, the exhibition’s spotlight is on Africa and the African Diaspora. The show runs until November 26, 2023 at the Giardini and the Arsenale.
“The Laboratory of the Future is an exhibition in six parts. It includes 89 Participants, over half of whom are from Africa or the African Diaspora. The gender balance is 50/50, and the average age of all Participants is 43, dropping to 37 in the Curator’s Special Projects, where the youngest is 24. 46% of participants count education as a form of practice, and, for the first time ever, nearly half of Participants are from sole or individual practices of five people or less. Across all the parts of The Laboratory of the Future, over 70% of exhibits are by practices run by an individual or a very small team. (…)”
This video provides you with impressions from the Arsenale, which features works by participants such as AD-WO, Dream The Combine, Flores & Prats Architects, Gbolade Design Studio, Serge Attukwei Clottey, Adjaye Associates with Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Black Females in Architecture, among others.
Venice Architecture Biennale 2023 / Biennale Architettura 2023: The Laboratory of the Future / Arsenale. May 23, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Stan VanDerBeek’s Movie-Drome (1964–65) is part of the exhibition Signals: How Video Transformed the World at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. It’s a dome theater with 16mm films, 35mm slides, 16mm and 35mm film transferred to high-definition video, and 70mm slides transferred to high-definition video (black and white and color, sound and silent; varying durations).
Artwork text by Stan VanDerBeek Archive:
Described by VanDerBeek as a “very intense audio-visual environment” or a large-scale collage, Movie-Drome includes thirty to forty films and five slideshows organized into seventeen moving image and sound programs displayed in a silo top dome structure. Content loops simultaneously in a particular arrangement designated by the Archive. Content is based on VanDerBeek’s playlists for the Movie-Drome and includes material representative of his varied approaches to filmmaking: collage films; computer films; newsreel and found film; dance and performance films; and multiple slideshows combining original and found images. Movie-Drome has a fixed number of programs comprised of material made 1957-1972.
Stan VanDerBeek. Movie-Drome. 1964–65 / The Museum of Modern Art, New York, May 19, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Slow Food is the title of Kenny Schachter’s first solo exhibit in NYC in nearly 25 years. For this show at The NFT Gallery in New York, Kenny Schachter brings together three new ongoing projects: Open Book, a participatory digital publication in conjunction with the Async platform; POP PRINCIPLE: THE ART GAME, a new expansive art and NFT gaming project, powered by Daata; and, Jabberwock, the first of a sculpture/video series that highlights the absurdity and wrongheadedness of marketing dinosaur skeletons as baubles for the rich in contemporary art auctions.
Kenny Schachter talks about the Slow Food exhibition in this video that we produced in the run-up to the show.
Schachter first exhibited computer animations and prints in 1993. Kenny Schachter is known for his writing (largely for Artnet), lecturing and curating. He has been making art for more than 3 decades having recently exhibited at the Kunsthalle in Zurich earlier in the year and in Berlin at Nagel Draxler Gallery. His work is in the collection of Germany’s ZKM museum and will be the subject of a solo exhibition in September 2023 at the Francisco Carolinum Museum in Linz, Austria. The exhibition at The NFT Gallery New York runs until 17 June 2023.
Kenny Schachter: Slow Food / The NFT Gallery New York. Opening reception, May 18, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
The 2023 edition of Volta Art Fair New York presents over 50 national and international galleries from May 17 to 21 at the Metropolitan Pavilion in New York City.
Volta New York Art Fair 2023. May 17, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Frieze New York 2023 art fair at The Shed runs from 17 to 21 May, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Ei Arakawa (b. 1977, Fukushima) is a US queer performance artist born in Japan and based in Los Angeles since 2019. To create his exhibitions and performances, he often forms collaborations with other artists, their works, art historians, or the public. To create his current exhibition “Don’t Give Up” at Kunsthalle Friart in Fribourg (Switzerland), three living American painters (Nicole Eisenman, Laura Owens, Trevor Shimizu) and two deceased ones (Mary Cassatt, Alice Neel) have told Ei Arakawa about the difficulties of being both parents and artists. Based on that, Ei Arakawa creates a maze-like installation made of cardboard in which one encounters singing images.
Ei Arakawa: Don’t Give Up / Kunsthalle Friart Fribourg (Switzerland). Exhibition walkthrough, May 2, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Alternative long version (8:47 min.):
Exhibition text (excerpt):
For Don’t Give Up, three living American painters (Nicole Eisenman, Laura Owens, Trevor Shimizu) and a couple of dead ones (Mary Cassatt, Alice Neel) mentor Ei Arakawa about the hardship and reality of being a parent and an artist at the same time, a subject which is still a rare topic for female and queer artists (although Cassatt was neither married nor a parent). Arakawa’s psychic preparation for planned queer parenthood becomes a maze of hallways and rooms of cardboard in the gallery, through which the visitor encounters singing paintings. Together with the LA based composer Celia Hollander, Arakawa creates an insecure opera of “figuring this out” or “figuring paintings” in need of temporarily connected parenting artisthoods.
Ei Arakawa (*1977, Fukushima) is a queer Japan-born American performance artist based in Los Angeles since 2019. His exhibitions and performances are often created through fervent collaborations with artists (and at times their artworks), art historians, and with audience members themselves. His activities undertake the lo-fi mimicry, duplication, and embodiment of cultural forms—be they architectural structures, art historical legacies, or organizational systems—to reanimate their potentialities anew.
My Little Pumpkin(s)
Much has been written on the social reproduction of power that maintains the organizing principles of life under capitalism. As Johanna Brenner and Barbara Laslett explain : Social reproduction includes, among other things, how food, clothing, and shelter are made available for immediate consumption, how the maintenance and socialization of children is accomplished, how care is provided, and how sexuality is socially constructed. The profundity of what they grasp points us to how reproductive labor, as it plays out both domestically and institutionally, and its co- relations with gender, race and sexuality, come together to deepen our understanding of the quotidian assemblies of sociality and abstracted capital.
For scholars and other contributors to the theory of social reproduction that precede and follow Brenner and Laslett, placing emphasis on the ways in which the production of goods and services is linked to the production of life offers robust entry points in the struggle against inequality and corresponding violence, insofar as it makes appear alienated experiences and introduces sites of production. Though social reproduction itself isn’t a new concept, finding origin in Marxist tradition, we need not look that far back in time to see how it operates beyond preoccupations with class and economic value. Contemporary developments like privatization and reduction of social services, advancements in reproductive technologies, and the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade –including its requisite rebuke–have brought to view daily and renewed connections with the interplay of autonomy, privacy, and state sovereignty in equal measure.
Metabolizing these urgent, perennial concerns in Don’t Give Up, Ei Arakawa takes us through his complex labyrinth of emotions and reflections–reified as a cardboard maze–as he prepares for life as an artist-parent. He draws our attention to the attendant anxieties and speculations of parenthood at every turn. Simultaneously tender and chilling, the exhibition is soundtracked by an omnidirectional chorus of synthesized phrases created using vocaloids with the help of composer Celia Hollander. The lyrics are culled from conversations with artist friends and appear as written text on the surface of the cardboard walls. Arakawa elaborately maps his fractured autofiction, deploying his noted collaborative approach to further lay bare the various negotiations made as a result of the co-constitutions of social relations instigated by reproductive labor.
Located somewhere between realism and speculative fiction, performance and installation, Arakawa’s vertiginous exhibition, in all its formal dissonances, takes semiotic and pictorial references from painters including Mary Cassatt, Laura Owens, Trevor Shimizu, and Nicole Eisenman, all of whom are recognized for their idiosyncratic brush stroke technique. Here, each artist becomes an affectionate teacher. Arakawa seemingly invokes the adage “it takes a village to raise a child” in his LED reworking of their respective paintings that articulate the affective pleasures of childcare as well as intimate bond of mother and child.
These pointillist renderings in Arakawa’s corrugated theater offer a materialist perspective on the very peripheral experiences that lay claim to the reproduction of the social relations of capitalism, and thereby production of meaning and value; positions and interactions that work within and well beyond the walls of any gallery or museum. For in the same way art requires a public, so does capitalism require reproductive labor to replenish and safeguard its tenacious logics. What we bear witness to is the creative and psychic excesses of an artist grappling with these pressing tensions with the help of colleagues – alive and deceased.
Conditions that would have otherwise seemed mutually prohibitive–queer, immigrant, working artist seeking to have a baby and start a family outside of traditional protocols–further showcase what scholar Susan Ferguson states is the necessary yet contradictory social labors that renew and resist the diffuse workings of patriarchal and capitalist dynamics. It’s this sincere dialectic that remains palpable in Arakawa’s performative installation. He isn’t so much concerned with just describing his lived experience-or simply presenting childcare as a theme-but also generously tasks himself with explaining–however tersely–the differentiated parts of a particularly queer sociality. In so doing, he extends the salient question author Sophie Lewis provocatively ponders in her book Full Surrogacy Now : Feminism Against Family ( 2019 ) : Is it easier to imagine life without capitalism than it is to imagine life without the family?
For Canadian-American artist and writer Shulamith Firestone, abolishing the nuclear family system and vaginal childbirth is central to combatting the oppression and exploitation of women and children specifically. As instrumental as her argument–proposed in her book The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for A Feminist Revolution (1970)–may be, its prescriptive points of determinations present a problematic that weakens material potentials. From what neoliberalism has demonstrated, organization of power is variegated and the processes that govern its operation are not easily legible or reducible. Yet, it’s precisely the location and centering of the production of life as an essential locus in the networked production of values and meaning that substantiates Arakawa’s revelation that there are probably a “thousand million ways to raise a child”.
Now that we have technologies that ostensibly make childbirth less, in the words of Firestone, “barbaric” and “like shitting a pumpkin”, further frictions and conditions of possibilities become apparent that force us to re- evaluate the constituencies of alienated labor and being. As Ei annotates with Don’t Give Up, there are a multitude of proverbial pumpkins yet to shit out–albeit with different metabolites and consistencies. His playfully staged operatic études proffer a non-reductive lens into a charged interiority, platforming capacious discussions that take place against the backdrop of ecological and economic precarity.
Mark Pieterson
Writer, curator and public administrator living in Los Angeles
Andreas Hochuli (born in 1982 in Zürich) is a Swiss painter living in Genoa. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts from the ECAL, Lausanne. He studied Art History, Philosophy and Literature at the University of Lausanne. He creates paintings using solid blocks of intense color and his own individual composition protocol. His current solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Friart in Fribourg (Switzerland) features paintings that “accompany the symbolic slippage of time: unabashed archaic passions, commercial esotericism, deep vibrations illustrate the vestiges of an infernal public space. Alert to the origins and utopias of a bottomless West, the artist spins a spider’s web of signs that evoques the mythical foundations of social ties and the cult of the self.” The exhibition runs until May 14, 2023.
Andreas Hochuli: The Year of the Babyshit Brown SUV. Solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Friart Fribourg (Switzerland). Exhibition walkthrough, May 2, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Exhibition text (excerpt):
For over a decade Andreas Hochuli has been producing paintings with a frontal aesthetic made out of solid blocks of colour. Using the basic functionalities of a piece of graphic design software, he composes digital sketches out of the fertile breeding ground of contemporary visual culture. These are then printed as fragments and cut up to serve as patterns onto which he applies acrylic paint. The imperfections of craftsmanship and expressiveness of the artist’s hand haunt the transformation from screen to object.
The recent images produced by the artist constitute an amateurish catalogue of the quest for better living. They explore the alternative modes of existence that populate the merry-go-round of western culture: from Lebensreform to American counterculture, from the search for political, community, sexual meaning and personal animist cosmogonies to the Eldorado of the virtual. These historical occurrences belie an insistent repetition of the utopian impulse, driving cultural renewal and the commerce of the imaginary.
With the title, The Year of the Babyshit Brown SUV, this exhibition makes as if to define our era by drawing on an analysis of cultural markers. But the desire for meaning expressed here, and by extension by art as symptomatic of our times, forms a utopia in itself. In the wake of the long trail of landmark decades, this utopia finds itself scattered over the dreamt surfaces of the paintings.
Just as with the attempt to shape time into eras, the exhibition aims to create meaning out of space by complying with the conventions of hanging areas. However the cultivation of these territories does not converge into a single interpretative horizon. Signifiers are presented as detached, ambivalent, and feeding the need for belief and identification. Tales, folklore and science-fiction make up their framework. The death of an animal, the discovery of fire, the monumentality of idols and extra-terrestrial power constitute charged content in which myth and the future merge once again.
In the exhibition, Hochuli’s painting is presented in a form of stylistic syncretism. Didacticism and the decorative flatten all hierarchy of taste. The geometric abstraction that fashions the exhibition ambiance nevertheless retains a certain exceptionalism, the original representation of the impact of communication, of the graphical inculcation of visual culture. It embodies the modern moment as one in which contentless images vibrate simultaneously in the mind and the commons: pure sensations, synaesthesia, hypnosis, the condition that creates a blank slate on which illustration, pop culture, new portraiture and landscapes can be drawn.
A dilettante researcher, Hochuli composes his paintings as a sort of reflection of desire projected into chaos. In the exhibition, theory or the critical approach, meant as the construction of links between technologies, emancipation and the social unconscious seem to be digested in the images. Hochuli’s tone and style is coloured by an un- knowledge matured over time, a way out shaped by idleness.
Andreas Hochuli ( *1982, Zürich ) is a Swiss painter living in Genoa. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts from the ECAL, Lausanne. He studied Art History, Philosophy and Literature at the University of Lausanne. He is a double winner of the Swiss Art Awards, in 2014 with his painting work and in 2021 with L’Acte Pur (in duo with artist Tristan Lavoyer). Among his recent exhibitions, INFORMATION AND DRINKS at Guts, Berlin (2022); Un vendredi à la campagne. Les champs de blé s’étendaient à l’infini, at Silicon Malley, Lausanne (2019); Chaleur et sommeil at the Centre d’Art Contemporain de Genève (2017); Et ma maman m’a dit with Tristan Lavoyer at Circuit, Lausanne (2016); Il frutto dentro di me with Charlotte Herzig at Kunsthaus Langenthal (2015).
Monira Al Qadiri’s solo exhibition at Kunsthaus Bregenz is titled “Mutant Passages”. The show features entirely new works conceived for Kunsthaus Bregenz. They revolve around the raw material oil and the associated industry. Benezene Float, Choreography of Alien Technology, SS Murex, Gastromancer, and Onus. Monira Al Qadiri: Mutant Passages at Kunsthaus Bregenz runs until July 2, 2023.
Monira Al Qadiri (b. 1983, Senegal) grew up in Kuwait. In 2010 she received her doctorate from the Tokyo University of the Arts. Al Qadiri lives and works in Berlin. The artist has participated in several solo exhibitions at such venues as the Haus der Kunst in Munich, at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and at the Sursock Museum in Beirut. In 2022 she participated in the Venice Biennale, this year her work is part of Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present.
Monira Al Qadiri: Mutant Passages / Kunsthaus Bregenz (Austria). Vernissage, April 21, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Complete video (12:23 min.):
Exhibition text (excerpt):
An alien lives in our midst. It is an ancient alien, one that is hundreds of millions of years old. It is a pilot of flying and non-flying objects; a heater of homes; a master of sanitation; a fashion impresario; a beauty expert; an addict of convenience; a healer of wounds; a maker of wars; a polluter of air; a killer of birds and a destroyer of worlds. This invisible chameleonic character inserts itself into every orifice of our modern existence, at times passing through entirely unnoticed. Who is this ultimate shapeshifter lurking in the background of our lives? The name of this omnipresent being is Oil.
Oil (petroleum) is not merely a source of fuel, but it is also the mother of a myriad of substances that we cannot live without in our daily affairs — the by-products of the petrochemical industry: gasoline, diesel, benzene, asphalt, plastic, polyester, cosmetics, medicine, paint. This Frankenstein-esque mutant transforms into so many forms that it is difficult to comprehend how many mutations it makes and to what scale it extends. Regarded as the harbinger of both fantastic miracles and horrifying curses, it has laid a double-pronged trap for us humans of the modern world, one in which we find ourselves stuck in the throes of an eternal dilemma, seemingly without any means of escaping it. Will we ever be rid of this strange condition of demonic possession we find ourselves in? Can we someday overcome this freak petroleum interval in history and pass over to a new ”ever clear“ reality away from the fossils’ descendants? Will there soon be a scientific breakthrough that unfastens our chains, forever freeing us from the grip of the dark ooze, or will we continue our slow descent into certain climatic apocalypse, constantly bathed in it, wallowing in a dark spiral towards the unknown?
There are those of us, who are chained to oil in a different way: we enable its destructive course across the globe, generating immense amounts of wealth. Ephemeral and fleeting, the sparkling seduction that the promise of unlimited riches emanates is multicolored. It is blinding. The shimmering hues of pinks, greens, silvers, blues and purples: the iridescent sheen of oil tricks the eye, like a shiny pearl, projecting hallucinations of celebrity and power into the mind of its viewer. “You will never be poor again,” it whispers softly. But the trickster genie makes us forget the true price of this prosperity: a mountain of irreversible debt we have accrued to the only planet we will ever know.
The dramaturgy of this exhibition follows the varying paths that oil takes, guiding us through the different formations and stories it generates; the ruptures in history and biology it has induced, the machinery and memories associated with it, and the existential questions it forces us to consider.
Monira Al Qadiri
Mutant Passages comprises entirely new works conceived for Kunsthaus Bregenz, that follow in-depth research, forms and ideas developed by the artist over the last decade around the subject of oil, culminating in this body of work.
In the foyer, large inflatable sculptures greet us, hovering overhead and within the space, coated in iridescent colorful fabrics. The work Benzene Float depicts scientific drawings (technically named “space-filling models” in chemical terminology) of the molecular structure of benzene, propane gas, naphthalene, and other petrochemical substances. The works’ exaggerated forms amplify their presence in modern society, confronting us with their grasp over our lives.
On the first floor, several large-scale sculptures rotate quietly, their iridescent colors shimmering and changing with their movement in space. They resemble some kind
of bioluminescent marine life, especially with their recast surfaces, or some futuristic alien. But they are in fact industrial objects: drill bits used to find oil. Their dichroic colors allude to the pearling industry of the Persian Gulf, a forgotten history that has all but disappeared after the discovery of oil in the region. Choreography of Alien Technology aims to bridge the relationship between pearls and oil, through their colors and forms, presenting more vividly the historical gap that oil has created. The iridescent nature of the color reimagines itself as the carrier of wealth, traveling between pearls, oil, or even another future being.
On the second floor, two reddish mirror-imaged sculptures of gastropod seashells stand side by side, speaking to each other. They both have a hollow cavity in the lower half of their bodies, inviting passers-by to press their ears and heads against them, perhaps expecting to hear the sound of rolling ocean waves. Instead, they encounter an unexpected conversation between two androgynous voices, recalling how they had unintentionally changed genders while lying in the ocean. In Gastromancer, the impact the oil industry has on marine life is on display, and not in ways visibly known to us. The reddish biocide paint tributyltin, known as TBT, protects oil tankers from accruing algae, barnacles and mussels (in a process commonly called “anti-fouling”), but it has also caused strange and bizarre changes and contaminations in the natural environment due to its rapid leakage into the water. For example, TBT contamination causes female murex mollusks to change their gender into males, impairing their ability to spawn and devastating gastropod populations.
On the third floor, the installation Onus is composed of multiple solid glass sculptures of birds that are dispersed over a white floor. During the Gulf War in Kuwait (1990—91), the carcasses of birds, fish, livestock, and many other animals regularly lined the coastline and deserts of the nation—the result of massive toxic clouds fed by the hundreds of torched oil wells. It was and still is one of the worst man-made environmental disasters of all time. However, when images of these oil-drenched animals were disseminated abroad, many people believed them to be fake.
While studying at university in Japan, the artist was confronted with iconic photographs of oil covered birds taken during the war that were presented during a class
as being merely exercises in propaganda. Although a witness to the destruction herself, her lived experience was questioned, and under the influence of others, was even distorted. Through these works, the artist has attempted to breathe life back into her memories by recreating these birds as glass objects, to make both tangible the destruction she witnessed, while demonstrating the fragility of our memories when images move across time, space and cultures. The work conveys the artist’s burden and duty to prove the loss that has been suffered.
On the occasion of the 90th anniversary of the Nazi book burnings, the presentation “bücher 1933” at Hauser & Wirth Publishers bookstore in Zurich looks at how Emil and Emmie Oprecht used publishing as a tool to inform the public about fascism and provide a counter-narrative to Hitler’s and Mussolini’s ideas about culture. Emil and Emmie Oprecht were among the most important supporters of writers who were opposed to the Nazi regime. In 1925, they founded a publishing house and bookshop at Rämistrasse 5, the current location of Hauser & Wirth Publishers.
In the exhibition “bücher 1933” numerous books and magazines published by the Oprechts will be on view, as well as photographs from the wide-ranging series ‘Die Bücher’ (2021) by German artist Annette Kelm, which portray the covers of books that were blacklisted by the Nazi regime in Germany. In texts accompanying the exhibition, historian Ute Kröger explains the significance of the works on view as well as the context of their creation and the experiences of their emigré authors.
In this video, Michaela Unterdörfer (Executive Director, Hauser & Wirth Publishers) guides us through the exhibition, which runs until May 27, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Press text (excerpt):
On the occasion of the 90th anniversary of the Nazi book burnings, a presentation at Hauser & Wirth Publishers bookstore in Zurich looks at how Emil and Emmie Oprecht used publishing as a tool to inform the public about fascism and provide a counter-narrative to Hitler’s and Mussolini’s ideas about culture.
In 1925, at the center of Zurich’s cultural quarter, the Oprechts founded a publishing house and bookshop at Rämistrasse 5, the current location of Hauser & Wirth Publishers. In 1933 they established Europa Verlag at the same address. Emil and Emmie Oprecht were among the most important supporters of writers who were opposed to the Nazi regime. The business premises on Rämistrasse and the Oprechts’ home on Hirschengraben nearby were a port of call for many emigrants and artists who had been forced into exile. In the 1930s, the Oprechts published works by over 100 emigré authors in the Dr. Oprecht and Europa publishing houses, providing a platform for important thinkers, philosophers and poets such as Ernst Bloch, Max Herrmann-Neisse, Thomas Mann, Else Lasker-Schüler and Ignazio Silone.
With the ‘bücher 1933’ exhibition, the bookshop on Rämistrasse becomes a space to reflect on the effects of the Nazi seizure of power, the authors and works blacklisted by the regime and the publishing activities undertaken by the Oprechts as a response to the challenges of their time. The exhibition presents a curated selection of works by Annette Kelm, historical photographs, and publications from the Dr. Oprecht and Europa publishing houses.
Photographs from the wide-ranging series ‘Die Bücher’ (2021) by German artist Annette Kelm portray the covers of books that were blacklisted by the Nazi regime in Germany. For this exhibition, the artist selected works that are linked to Oprecht, among them a photograph of ‘Dachau: Eine Chronik’ by Julius Zerfass – one of the first reports from inside a concentration camp – which the German journalist published with Europa Verlag under the pseudonym Walter Hornung.
Alongside Kelm’s photographs, numerous books and magazines published by the Oprechts will be on view, among them the magazine ‘information’; Walther Rode’s 1934 takedown of Hitler, ‘Deutschland ist Caliban’; Else Lasker-Schüler’s poetic narrative ‘Das Hebräerland’ (1937), written after her second trip to Palestine; Ignazio Silone’s important anti-fascist novel ‘Fontamara’ (1933); and Max Herrmann-Neisse’s book of poems ‘Um uns die Fremde: Gedichte’ (1936).
In texts accompanying the exhibition, historian Ute Kröger explains the significance of the works on view as well as the context of their creation and the experiences of their emigré authors. Kröger, an expert authority on German-language ‘Exilliteratur’, is well-known for her research and publications including her books on Erika Mann, Else Lasker-Schüler (‘Viele sind sehr sehr gut zu mir: Else Lasker-Schüler in Zürich, 1917–1939’), and the Schauspielhaus Zürich (‘In welchen Zeiten leben wir! Das Schauspielhaus Zürich 1938-1998’).
Alongside the presentation of books banned and burned by the Nazi regime, there is a reading corner with a selection of titles from Lars Müller Publishers, Scheidegger & Spiess/Park Books, and Limmat Verlag. Titles on the period in question, with a special focus on artistic and literary avant-gardes, have been chosen in consultation with the publishers and highlight the book as an important medium of remembrance and a bulwark against forgetting.
Further events taking place in Zurich in connection with the 90th anniversary of the Nazi book burnings include the exhibitions ‘Satanische Verse & Verbotene Bücher’ at Museum Strauhof (2 March to 21 May 2023) and ‘Frisch und Fein: Exil Zürich 1933’ at Stiftung Litar (15 April to 10 June 2023). The Literaturhaus Zürich is also planning a number of readings and an exhibition of documents from the Museumgesellschaft’s archive.
In May, the eighth issue of ‘Ursula’ magazine will feature an interview with Zurich book collector Martin Dreyfus on his collection of emigré literature.
For Kunstraum Dornbirn, the Austrian artist Judith Fegerl conceived a site-specific exhibition that mainly deals with electricity. The exhibition space (built in 1893) is a former assembly hall where turbines for the first hydrorelectric power plants were built. For Judith Fegerl’s show, a solar power plant on the south side of the exhibition space has been installed. The electricity of this power plant is used for two of the works on display: “profound understanding”, and “moment”. The stelae of the series “moment” are connected by a copper-colored, very strong electromagnet. They hold together until the power supply is interrupted. If this happens, the individual parts simply fall apart, which is avoided in the exhibition situation due to the potential danger. This effect of the activation of magnetic material by energy is demonstrated in a different way in the work “profound understanding”: An electromagnet is lowered onto a pile of iron granules lying on the ground, switched on and pulled up again with the granules. If the power supply is interrupted after a while, the form caused by magnetic energy collapses and falls back onto the pile.
Judith Fegerl was born in 1977 in Vienna, where she lives and works today. She graduated from the Visual Media Design and Digital Art programme at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, studying with Karel Dudesek, Thomas Fürstner and Peter Weibel (diploma 2004). At the same time she also studied Art and New Media at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna with Peter Kogler and Birgit Jürgenssen (diploma 2006). In 2019, Fegerl received the Media Art Prize of the City of Vienna, and she was recently awarded the Dagmar Chobot Sculpture Prize 2022. The exhibition Judith Fegerl: on/ runs until June 18, 2023.
Judith Fegerl: on/ Solo exhibition at Kunstraum Dornbirn, Austria. April 21, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Exhibition text (excerpt):
The exhibition “on/” by the Austrian artist Judith Fegerl has symbiotically merged with and switched on Kunstraum Dornbirn. Electricity flows. For Fegerl’s works, however, the electricity comes not from the socket as usual but from a solar power plant on the south side of the exhibition space that was specially designed and installed for the exhibition – a reference steeped in history, since the former assembly hall of the Rüsch Works built in 1893 constructed turbines for the first hydroelectric power plants.
The rededication of the raw industrial architecture from a production facility to a room for the presentation and communication of visual art resulted in more than a unique exhibition space that makes the creation of site-specific art particularly appealing. Fegerl is fundamentally interested in what is addressed here in a rudimentary way and otherwise given little attention: How does the art and exhibition industry work? What infrastructure is in place and does this infrastructure meet the minimum requirements? How fragile, vulnerable and efficient is it? How does the climate, the position of the sun or darkness affect the exhibited works and their perceptibility?
Fegerl works with the entire building, interweaving its past and present, intervening in its substance and including significant functional elements. Her work critically examines institutions’ efforts to attain sustainability and the possibilities of keeping in touch with the times through infrastructural changes. This approach treats not only the individual institution but also the overarching cultural-political system.
Thus placing a 40 m2 photovoltaic system in the Dornbirn Municipal Gardens, that is, in public space, seems only logical. In this way, Fegerl makes visible normally invisible processes of energy generation in the exhibition context and integrates them as formal, aesthetic and conceptual factors in the artistic concept.
Inside the exhibition space, an open door provides a view of the back of the solar installation. The inverter, battery storage and distribution box are prominently mounted, staging the power lines running loosely along the floor between the objects in the exhibition and their appropriate energy supply. There are five slightly inclined steel stelae with a diameter of about 30 centimetres and a height of three metres. Each stele is divided into two unequal sections that are connected by a copper-coloured element. This element is a very strong electromagnet that holds the two steel elements together. The position and orientation of the stelae are based on the five historic slewing cranes, to which the stelae are loosely connected by a steel cable.
For the first time, Fegerl combines objects from the “moment” series, which has been ongoing since 2016, with a solar system. Here her artistic work comes full circle in demonstrating the existential dependency of work and energy in a targeted and almost techno-poetic way. The stelae hold together only until the power supply is interrupted. If that happens, the individual components simply fall apart (still secured by the steel cable on the slewing cranes). The instability of the construction is dramatized by the inclination of the massive steel tubes and generates a perceptible tension. An essential part of the work, the tension bespeaks the dependence and availability of energy.
The title “moment” integrates the situational experience on several levels: the temporary connection of the steel elements and the contrast of massive materiality with fragile arrangements. Directly broached seems to be the comprehensive concept of contemporaneity – and this connects inherent processes of the art system and challenges to it with social reality, such as localising the production and exhibition situation in the here and now referring to socio-political and socio-cultural structures.
The series of stelae is complemented by a wall sculpture that bridges the gap to the outside space. The modular composition “last light” shows various surfaces and materials of solar panels that are subject to repeated optimisations in the course of technical development and as such to a predetermined expiry date. In the oversized collage, this becomes visible in the respective formal design of the modules whose production times range from the 70s to today. The transformation of the panels into an artistic artefact consummates the alienation from their actual function. The panels still produce electricity, but the energy is no longer used; it remains as an invisible, circulating potential within the structures. The visual force of the work arises from the different textures and architectures of the modules and their combination.
Displayed on the rear walls of the assembly hall is a picture from Fegerl’s series “solar series of electric shocks” (with the subtitle “long hours”). In this series, Fegerl continues her preoccupation with energy as a material and imaging factor in both form and media. The 160 x 97 cm stainless steel panels, whose dimensions are reminiscent of standard solar panels, are electroplated with copper; this galvanic process is controlled and fed by solar energy from the photovoltaic system in Fegerl’s studio. The artist leaves the composition of the work to the weather and light conditions, which shape the canvas as if in a painterly process. The exhibited work was created in January 2023.
The alternative state that the respect-inspiring stelae of “moment” only hint at is achieved in a thoroughly meditative dynamics by the work “profound understanding”. An electric hoist mounted on the hall’s transverse crane lowers an electromagnet onto a pile of iron granulates. The magnet is activated and slowly pulled up again, separating a mass of granules attracted by electromagnetic forces from the rest of the pile. If the power supply is interrupted after a while, the form caused by magnetic energy collapses and falls back onto the pile on the floor. What is otherwise invisible and formless – electromagnetism – becomes a form-creating force in Fegerl’s artistic practice and sculpture a dynamic reflection of energy and time, activation and passivity, giving and taking.
With the delicate wall object “capture”, Fegerl once again shows the conditions of production required by her work with electricity. At the invitation of the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology, she was able to carry out experiments in its High Energy Laboratory and direct huge surges of electricity to smash into a bed of sand. The intense surge and great heat generated cause the sand to melt and solidify into organic-looking shapes. The fragile forms were then cast in synthetic resin for stabilisation and “short-circuited” with a steel clamp.
The Dornbirn exhibition displays the multimedia spectrum of Fegerl’s artistic work in a finely attuned spatial setting. The exploration of the possibilities of electrical energy as sculptural and imaging material provokes a reflection on the availability and handling of resources. Fegerl’s fascination with time-based, transformative processes of forces and materials opens up an experimental space. The linking of an aesthetic of the functional with the autonomy of art makes a contribution to the current debates on exhibition practices and their responsibilities and possibilities, but it is also a commentary on a general social attitude in our increasingly complex present: “You can’t see it, you can’t hear it, and to a certain extent you can’t feel it either. Nevertheless, electrical energy is the basis of our modern, technologized life: progress and development, utility and luxury, but also conflicts over distribution, provision and, above all, environmental issues – energy is highly political stuff.” (Judith Fegerl)
Judith Fegerl was born in 1977 in Vienna, where she lives and works today. She graduated from the Visual Media Design and Digital Art programme at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, studying with Karel Dudesek, Thomas Fürstner and Peter Weibel (diploma 2004). At the same time she also studied Art and New Media at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna with Peter Kogler and Birgit Jürgenssen (diploma 2006). In 2019, Fegerl received the Media Art Prize of the City of Vienna, and she was recently awarded the Dagmar Chobot Sculpture Prize 2022.
Titled “The Heart of Relations”, Andrea Büttner’s solo exhibition at the Kunstmuseum in Basel (Switzerland) is a broad-based survey exhibition of the past fifteen years of the German artist’s oeuvre. Curated by Maja Wismer, the show is the largest exhibition to date of the artist. Since the early 2000s, Andrea Büttner has created bodies of work dedicated to themes such as labor, poverty, shame. The exhibition spans all three exhibition venues of the Kunstmuseum: Gegenwart, Neubau, and Hauptbau and runs until October 1, 2023.
Andrea Büttner: The Heart of Relations (Der Kern der Verhältnisse). Solo exhibition at Kunstmuseum Basel (Switzerland). Press preview, April 20, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Exhibition text (excerpt):
In Andrea Büttner. The Heart of Relations, the Kunstmuseum Basel presents a broad- based exhibition surveying the German artist’s oeuvre of the past fifteen years. With almost ninety works, it is the largest exhibition to date of the artist, whose compelling sensual distillations of complex concerns have won international awards.
Since the early 2000s, Andrea Büttner (b. Stuttgart, 1972; lives in Berlin) has created bodies of work dedicated to themes such as labor, poverty, shame, and forms of community as well as the ways in which systems of religious or secular belief inform social realities. Having made a name for herself with large-format woodcuts, she has since added a wide variety of other media to her repertoire, including books, glass objects, textiles, and video installations. The works Little Sisters: Lunapark Ostia, Dancing Nuns, What Is So Terrible about Craft? Die Produkte der menschlichen Hand, and Phone Etching exemplify her creative vision.
Büttner’s artistic method is defined by a probing scrutiny of her own formative cultural influences, an effort to make what is seen truly visible, and an engagement with public debates through images. In exhibitions, Büttner assembles her works in thematic groups she installs as sprawling “narratives” in the galleries that visitors can explore step by step. The exhibition The Heart of Relations weaves together around six narrative strands, smoothing the transitions between them to bring out the continuities in the artist’s oeuvre and the entanglements between the subjects she grapples with.
The woodcut series Beggars (2016), which occupies a central position in Büttner’s oeuvre, is on view at the Kunstmuseum Basel | Neubau: life-size depictions of beggars composed of simple lines gouged into the wood surface prompt compassion and attention to their gesture pleading for help. The artist combines these pictures with the eighty-part slide projection Shepherds and Kings (2017), which gathers representatives of the birth of Christ, directing our attention away from the scene’s protagonists and toward the herdsmen and the Magi—as embodiments of poverty and wealth, respectively. The installation is completed by reproductions from the Warburg Institute, London, of historical works of art that depict beggars. Büttner also allows us to see the notes on the backs of those pictures. They record the sources of the reproductions: Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and other international auction houses. In this way, the artist points up the incongruity between the content of the pictures—indigents—and the value that depictions of them have in the art market.
Büttner takes an unprejudiced approach to current debates. Her narratives in three dimensions let us experience with our senses the ambivalences inherent in established (half-)truths. A characteristic example is her combining the video installation What Is So Terrible about Craft? Die Produkte der menschlichen Hand (2019) with a body of works, including woodcuts and sculpture, that considers the debate over the asparagus harvest in Germany that flared up during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. In the video, Büttner intercuts footage recorded at a monastery in Cologne with merchandise displays and catalogues from the retail chain Manufactum, for which the nuns make some of the products they also use in their own day-to-day life. The large-format double projection turns the spotlight on the commercial exploitation of spiritual values—in sharp contrast with the admirable self-empowering and worldly-wise realism of the nuns sharing their lives with fairground people whom the artist portrays in Little Sisters: Lunapark Ostia, a video work she produced for documenta 12.
In another set of interrelated works, Büttner delves into Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Eleven large-format collages created in 2014 compile dozens of images that, she argues, correspond to Kant’s abstract text and decidedly dry language. The series is an effort to restore to the book, a classic of Western philosophy that has been especially influential in the field of aesthetics, the visual world that the philosopher may have contemplated as he wrote. At the Kunstmuseum Basel | Gegenwart, the artist combines this imagined pictorial environment with a new wall work developed specifically for the exhibition titled Schamstrafen. Using a semitransparent fluorescent paint, she prints historic and contemporary visual documents of public punishments directly on the wall. Recapitulating her research into pictorial sources, the work grew out of Büttner’s interest in how the experience of shame, or else our desire to avoid it, shape social behavior.
In the progression of the exhibition, these traditional depictions of public shame connect to her series Phone Etching (2015), which translates the traces her fingers left on her smartphone during various web searches into the medium of color etching. Such conjunctions of old and new technologies are another characteristic of Büttner’s trans- media practice.
Andrea Büttner’s work has been featured in recent years in solo exhibitions at international institutions including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Kunst Halle St. Gallen; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Tate Britain, London; and the MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main.
Roger Ballen’s solo exhibition “Call of the Void” is the eighth in a series of exhibitions at Museum Tinguely in Basel that respond to Jean Tinguely’s work “Mengele – Dance of Death”. Ballen’s show consists of two parts: The center of the exhibition space is dominated by a shack, a poor dwelling for people on the margins of society, the walls of the space are hung with photographs from Roger Ballen’s last analogue series. Ballen writes: «My show that I have chosen to title “Call of the Void” is an attempt to come to terms with what I believe to be the most central questions in human existence namely, where did we come from? What are we here for? And where do we go once we die? The exhibition runs until October 29, 2023.
Roger Ballen: Call of the Void / Museum Tinguely. Impressions from the opening reception, April 18, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Exhibition text (excerpt):
Roger Ballen. Call of the Void is the eighth in a series of exhibitions at Museum Tinguely under the title Danse macabre with works responding to Jean Tinguely’s late work Mengele—Dance of Death, shown in direct proximity to it. While Anouk Kruithof. Universal Tongue focussed on dance and Bruce Conner. Light out of Darkness on the apocalypse, the link this time is the disturbing, unsettling quality of Roger Ballen’s photographs and installations. In his work, Ballen examines the human psyche and asks both himself and the viewer questions about being and becoming.
Ballen writes: «My show that I have chosen to title «Call of the Void» is an attempt to come to terms with what I believe to be the most central questions in human existence namely, where did we come from? What are we here for? And where do we go once we die? Whilst I do not claim to provide answers or even questions to these most profound and difficult issues, it is my hope that my exhibition will challenge the viewer’s perceptions and consequently set up a process of self-examination leading to a more inquisitive state of self-consciousness.».
The exhibition consists of two parts that define and enrich one another. The walls are hung with photographs from Ballen’s last analogue series, while the centre of the space is dominated by a shack, a poor dwelling for people on the margins of society of the kind often featured in Ballen’s work.
He writes: «As one approaches the shelter in the middle of the exhibition-space, one is surrounded by black and white photographs that I have taken from the series Asylum of the Birds and Roger’s Rats. In a simplistic sense, these rats and birds have symbolized good and evil, darkness and light, throughout human history. Birds link the heavens to the earth and rats are unfairly associated with dirt, disease, and darkness. Each species of animal brings with its own mythology, and when you bring that mythology into a photograph, it offers unlimited possibilities for creating deeper meanings relevant to the human condition.
The center of the exhibition is dominated by a structure with a mysterious door. Entering this space, the two-dimensional photographs are now expanded into a three dimensional world. The worn, broken and textured walls of the interior reveal a Theatre of the Ballenesque in which the human figures represent absurdity, comedy, and tragedy. Once inside, one is confronted with haunting depictions, sounds, and objects forcing the viewers to face their own void.»
Born in the US and based in Johannesburg, South Africa, Roger Ballen is one of the most important photographers of his generation. He has published over 25 books internationally and has collections in the most prominent museums in the world. His oeuvre, which spans five decades, began with the documentary photography field but evolved into the creation of distinctive fictionalized realms that also integrate the mediums of film, installation, theatre, sculpture, painting and drawing. Ballen describes his works as ‘existential psychodramas’ that touch the subconscious mind and evoke the underbelly of the human condition. They aim to break through the repressed thoughts and feelings by engaging him in themes of chaos and order, madness or unruly states of being, the human relationship to the animal world, life and death, universal archetypes of the psyche and experiences of otherness. Through his unique, complex visual language, and universal and profound themes, the artist has made a lasting contribution to the field of art.
The exhibition at Museum Tinguely is curated by Andres Pardey, in close collaboration with the artist and his artistic director Marguerite Rossouw.
Les Innombrables: A Bag in the Park (2022). Les Innombrables is an ephemeral artist collective founded in 1991 in Heidiland (Switzerland). Les Innombrables describe their artistic activity as the seizure of randomly found realities. This piece has been adopted on the occasion of Frieze Sculpture Park 2022. Regent’s Park London, October 12, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Lap-See Lam’s exhibition “Tales of the Altersea” at Kunsthalle Portikus in Frankfurt am Main (Germany) has its starting point in the story of the Sea Palace, a floating restaurant in the shape of a dragon that sailed from Shanghai to Europe in the early 1990s. At the heart of the show is a video installation that is projected onto the walls and the floor of the gallery. The projection tells the story of the twin sisters Dahlia and Julie. During their underwater journey, the girls encounter a series of characters directly related to or inspired by Cantonese mythology and history. The exhibition is curated by Liberty Adrien and Carina Bukuts and runs until May 28, 2023. A future iteration of the work will be presented at Swiss Institute, New York, from May to August 2023.
Lap-See Lam: Tales of the Altersea / Kunsthalle Portikus, Frankfurt am Main. Frankfurt am Main (Germany), April 1, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Full-length video (17:37):
Exhibition text (excerpt):
In the 2010s when many Chinese restaurants in Sweden went insolvent or changed ownership, including the one run by Lap-See Lam’s parents, the artist set out to make 3D scans of as many of them as possible to preserve their histories. Resulting in an expanded archive, these glitchy reproductions have since defined her visual vocabulary. Spanning from sculptures to videos, Lam’s works decode the ambiguous connotation of chinoiserie and address the cultural transformation of the Hong Kong Chinese diaspora in Europe. Tales of the Altersea continues her reflection on the conflicting ideas between cultural affinity and disidentification.
Starting point for the exhibition is the singular story of the Sea Palace, a three-storey floating restaurant in the shape of a dragon that sailed from Shanghai to Europe in the early 1990s. After a series of unsuccessful ventures, the ship docked in the waters of Stockholm, finding a new purpose as a haunted house in the Gröna Lund amusement park. The restaurant’s history and its emblematic Chinese décor has informed Lam’s imagery and serves as a reference for Tales of the Altersea, which comprises a new group of works that extend from the exterior to the interior: Portal (2023), a gate on the Portikus’ bridge, recalls the Sea Palace’s ornaments depicting two dragons chasing a flaming pearl, while Dahlia (2023), a ghostly neon silhouette floating under the ceiling of the entrance, leds the visitor into the main space.
At the heart of Tales of the Altersea is the eponymous 8-channel video installation, projected onto the walls and floor of the gallery, giving the impression of being inside a magic lantern. The phantom-like aesthetic trope of the piece draws from the visual language of shadow puppetry, a traditional form of storytelling that is closely linked to Chinese folklore, which reached Europe through imperialistic trade relations. Serving as a backdrop for the work is the Sea Palace, sunk to the bottom of the ocean by Hunger, the play’s evil spirit which capsizes ships and devours children. The video begins with two searching eyes emerging from the darkness, which soon give way to the protagonists, twin sisters Dahlia and Julie, swimming towards a map of Europe. During their underwater journey, the girls encounter a series of characters directly related to or inspired by Cantonese mythology and history. While the sisters swim towards the Sea Palace shipwreck, they meet Lo Ting, the tale’s narrator, a hybrid fish-human who is considered the ancestor of the Hong Kong people. Their path is lined with terrifying figures, such as a weeping emperor, monsters and ghosts. After being separated from her sister upon touching the flaming pearl whose light glows green, Julie ends up being swallowed by Hunger and meeting Freedom Swimmer in his stomach, the Intestinal Bay. Lam’s characteristically detailed imagery, yet often ambiguous, delivers a liberating tale when the heroine’s glowing light helps them see in the dark, break the Hunger’ curse and eventually escape. Throughout their journey to safety, the Sea Palace slowly dissolves into fragments and the characters as well: Julie wears a dragon’s head, Dahlia grows a dragon tail and the Freedom Swimmer mutates into Da Peng, a giant bird which is said “to cover the sky and roam the ocean.” With the sisters finally reunited, they resurrect the dragon spirit, escape from the decaying ship, and fly high into the sky. Much as shadow plays are accompanied by songs, the composers Linus Hillborg and Marlena Salonen, with vocals by Bruno Hibombo, created an original music and soundscape for Lam’s rendition.
By employing the narrative strategies of magical realism, Lam interweaves complex mythologies with transnational experiences to both claim ownership of and complicate the idea of cultural heritage. The dragon and flaming pearl, often used as a means to represent Chinese culture, here becomes an allegory for the experience of the Cantonese diaspora. Blending old and contemporary techniques, Tales of the Altersea speaks to the different meanings of ‘generation loss’. On one hand, she refers to what is lost in translation between different media and, on the other hand, addresses what knowledge is not passed on from one generation to the next, from one culture to another.
Lap-See Lam (* 1990 in Stockholm, Sweden) is an artist based in Stockholm, Sweden. Recent solo exhibitions include Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (2022); Trondheim Kunstmuseum (2021); Moderna Museet Malmö (2018–2019). Her work has been shown in group exhibitions at KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2022); GHOST 2565, Bangkok (2022); PinchukArtCentre, Kyiv (2021); Performa 19, New York (2019).
Tales of the Altersea is initiated by Portikus, Frankfurt am Main, curated by Liberty Adrien and Carina Bukuts. A future iteration at Swiss Institute, New York, will be presented from May to August 2023. Portikus and SI have organized a collaborative public program with Lap-See Lam that will take place in Frankfurt and New York from May 10 to May 28. The exhibition will be accompanyied by an artist publication published by Portikus.
Tales of the Altersea is made possible by major support from Hessisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kunst and the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach-Stiftung. Generous support is provided by the Adolf und Luisa Haeuser-Stiftung für Kunst und Kulturpflege. Additional support is provided by the Swedish Arts Grants Committee and Eidotech. Portikus gratefully acknowledges the support of Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm/Berlin/Mexico City. In cooperation with the Embassy of Sweden, Berlin.
Against is the title of Polish artist Artur Żmijewski’s fifth solo exhibition at Galerie Peter Kilchmann. The exhibition features a new film and a new series of photographs. The film follows children of kindergarten and primary school age as they prepare for a demonstration. The fifteen photographs in the Red Army series were taken by Żmijewski in the Soviet Military Cemetery in Warsaw and show sections of the two groups of figures Heroism and Sacrifice by the sculptors Jerzy Jarnuszkiewicz and Stanisław Lisowski. By overlapping the shots the conflict-laden monuments are detached from their site-specific context and given a new level of meaning.
Artur Żmijewski was born in 1966. He lives and works in Warsaw. Works by Artur Żmijewski have been exhibited internationally since the early 1990s. On March 5, the collection presentation Signals: How Video Transformed the World opened at MoMA in New York, featuring Żmijewski’s perhaps most groundbreaking installation Democracies (2009) – a 20-part video work that subtly explores the meaning of democracy in our society. (The exhibition runs until July 8, 2023) In 2022, Żmijewskis solo exhibition When Fear Eats the Soul was presented at the PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan, on the occasion of which a comprehensive monograph will be published in spring 2023. The exhibition at Galerie Peter Kilchmann runs until May 20, 2023.
Artur Zmijewski: Against. Solo exhibition at Galerie Peter Kilchmann Zürich. Zürich (Switzerland), March 30, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Press text (excerpt):
Galerie Peter Kilchmann is pleased to present Against, the fifth solo exhibition by Polish artist Artur Żmijewski (*1966 in Warsaw; lives and works there) at the gallery. The exhibition includes a new film in widescreen format and a new series of photographs in black and white that thematically tie in with Żmijewski’s longstanding exploration of the mechanisms of memory, of collective trauma and the impact of art on socio-political conflicts.
Żmijewski’s artistic repertoire manifests itself primarily in his cinematic works and photographs, whose approach to questions around belonging, political upheaval, stigmatisation, identity and empowerment within a social and political order does not shy away from controversy. In doing so, he never takes a subjective position himself as an artist but remains in the role of observer and documentalist who knows how to transform filmed material into an interesting story. Thus, his documentary-style video works seem to follow a natural narrative that unfolds from the cognitive, emotional and physical expressions of the volunteer participants and their interaction in the group.
Żmijewski’s new film Against, which bestowed the exhibition its title, follows a similar concept and ties in with central works from earlier years, such as Democracies (2009). But in contrast to most of his previous works, the protagonists in Against are not characterized by a social or actual disability. Here, children of kindergarten and primary school age give expression to their voices as representatives of the youngest members of our society. Inspired by current protest movements launched by the young generation to stand up for climate protection and their future on our planet, such as Fridays for Future, the film shows the young participants preparing for a demonstration. However, Against does not impose a political label. Rather, it is about the impressive eagerness with which the children paint their protest banners and flags, and the resulting strong, enthusiastic, yet innocent dynamic. The film follows the children as they craft, design and prepare for the demonstration in a workshop, ultimately taking their values, rights and their future to the streets. The action is accompanied by a Neapolitan tarantella, whose popular, lively melody musically underpins the little demonstrators’ unconcerned drive.
Another exhibition space is dedicated to Żmijewski’s new series Red Army, which deals with the very current political debate on how to deal with Polish monuments honouring Soviet liberation fighters. With the aim of creating a historical consciousness of truth, the monuments were already increasingly put in a critical light in the 1990s. Since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine on February 21, 2022 the debate has gained a new urgency. Contrary to the original meaning of the monuments as a symbol of gratitude, they have become a symbol of the domination of the Soviet Union over Poland. The result has been repeated waves of sabotage and protest in recent years, culminating in an official decision by the Polish authorities on October 27, 2022 to remove four monuments dedicated to the Red Army in the towns of Glubczyce, Byczyna, Bobolice and Staszów.
The fifteen black-and-white photographs in the Red Army series were taken by Żmijewski in the Soviet Military Cemetery in Warsaw and show sections of the two groups of figures Heroism and Sacrifice by the sculptors Jerzy Jarnuszkiewicz and Stanisław Lisowski, which are part of the monument created there to honor the Red Army as Poland’s liberator. The details of the figures carved in stone were recorded on site by the artist and then fragmentarily superimposed. Both groups of figures are gigantic and difficult to access, which is why Żmijewski had to use drones in some cases for his photographs. The interplay of the different perspectives creates photographically overlapping images. The conflict-laden monuments are detached from their site-specific context and given a new level of meaning. Individual shots are combined so that the soldiers depicted meet in newly staged poses. Their hands and melancholically charged faces seem to approach, touch and their bodies merge in a tender embrace, giving the scenes a homoerotic connotation. The reduction to black and white contrast draws a direct reference to the sculptural plasticity of the originals and raises general questions about a new contextualisation of the monuments and how to deal with our political heritage as both a source of conflict and as cultural asset.
Works by Artur Żmijewski have been exhibited internationally since the early 1990s. On March 5, the collection presentation Signals: How Video Transformed the World opened at MoMA in New York, featuring Żmijewski’s perhaps most groundbreaking installation Democracies (2009) – a 20-part video work that subtly explores the meaning of democracy in our society. (The exhibition runs until July 8, 2023) In 2022, Żmijewskis solo exhibition When Fear Eats the Soul was presented at the PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan, on the occasion of which a comprehensive monograph will be published in spring 2023. Other important solo exhibitions were presented at the following institutions, among others: PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan (2022); MoCA Museum of Contemporary Art, Skopje (2021); MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art, Krakow (2020; Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv (2019); Beursschouwburg, Brussels (2018); The Museum for History of Medicine, Riga (2017); Museo de Arte Zapopan, Guadalajara (2013); CCA Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw (2012); MoCCA, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto (2011); MoMA, New York (2009) and CCA Wattis, San Francisco (2005). In addition, Żmijewski’s works are included in numerous group exhibitions. Highlights include Baltic Triennial, Vilnius (2021); documenta 14, Kassel/ Athens (2017); documenta 12, Kassel (2007); 51st Venice Biennale (Polish pavilion, 2005) and Manifesta 4, Frankfurt am Main (2002). In 2012, Żmijewski curated the 7th Berlin Biennale. His works are in collections of major institutions worldwide, including Frans Hals Museum / De Hallen Haarlem; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich; MoMA, New York; Tate Modern, London; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Neue Pinakothek, Munich; Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw.
Go! Go! Go! is the title of German artist Marco Schuler’s solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Darmstadt. The shows a cross-section of two decades of the sculptor, painter and video artist, with special attention to his painting, which has become more important in recent years. In sculpture, the focus is on recent aluminum casts as well as large works in steel. Key to understanding are Schuler’s video works, in which the artist exposes himself to extreme situations. Marco Schuler: Go! Go! Go! at Kunsthalle Darmstadt runs until July 23, 2023. Marco Schuler (*1972 in Bühl) studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich from 1994, where he graduated in 2001 as a master student of Olaf Metzel.
Marco Schuler: Go! Go! Go! / Kunsthalle Darmstadt. Vernissage, April 1, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Press text (excerpt):
Kunsthalle Darmstadt will show a cross-section of two decades of the Markgräflerland-based artist, with special attention to his painting, which has become more important in recent years. In sculpture, the focus is on recent aluminum casts as well as large works in steel. Schuler’s painting, which alternates between colorful neo-expressionism and monochrome surface art, shows a rapid ductus. Pairs of eyes and limbs invoke figurative ideas that include the human, the fantastic, and the artist himself. Key to understanding are Schuler’s video works, in which the artist exposes himself to extreme situations in an orange jumpsuit, such as when he undresses and redresses in a wind tunnel.
“Experiencing every day as if it were the first. Letting the thoughts jump and fly. Farming the mental farm. Perceiving what is fermenting in the undercurrents and recesses. Create a counterpart that lives on. Being able to be quick and patient. To wait for the fertile moment when you already have to let go. Marco Schuler combines the universal with the hilarious. Buster Keaton meets Leonardo da Vinci.” (Exhibition announcement)
Marco Schuler (*1972 in Bühl) studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich from 1994, where he graduated in 2001 as a master student of Olaf Metzel. From 2003 to 2009 he worked there as his artistic assistant. A first small sculpture prize awarded by the ZDF in 1996 was followed by scholarships and numerous other awards, including the 2003 Förderpreis der Bildenden Kunst der Landeshauptstadt München.
Häusler Contemporary in Zürich just opened a new solo exhibition with works by the American painter David Reed. Titled “Krefeld Miami New York” the show features paintings that refer to the mentioned cities. The gallery presents works that David Reed created for exhibitions at Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld (Germany), Pérez Art Museum in Miami (USA), and which are inseparable linked to New York where he has lived and worked since 1970. The exhibition “David Reed: Krefeld Miami New York” runs until June 2, 2023.
David Reed is an American abstract painter who was born in San Diego, California, in 1946. He is known for his large-scale, gestural paintings that explore the possibilities of color and mark-making. Reed began his career in the 1970s, during the heyday of Minimalism and Conceptual Art, but he quickly developed his own style, which emphasized the physical act of painting and the expressive potential of abstraction.
Reed’s work is characterized by its fluidity and dynamism, as well as its interest in the relationship between image and surface. His paintings often feature sinuous, calligraphic lines that seem to float across the canvas, creating a sense of movement and energy. Reed has exhibited extensively in the United States and Europe, and his work is included in the collections of many major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
David Reed: Krefeld Miami New York / Häusler Contemporary Zürich. March 30, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Press text (excerpt):
Häusler Contemporary Zurich is pleased to present a solo exhibition by American painter David Reed anew. The cities of Krefeld, Miami, and New York play a significant role in the artist’s oeuvre as places of origin or the presentation of striking series, and are the focus of our show of selected works. Highlights are the latest works from David Reed’s Studio.
David Reed (*1946, San Diego, US, lives in New York, US) is currently one of the most important representatives of abstract painting. Through extremely elongated picture formats and time-consuming, multi-stage work steps, he explores the potential of a classical medium in an age of multimedia. Against the backdrop of Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Pop Art, a preoccupation with Renaissance and Baroque painting, and inspired by a passion for film, Reed has been shaping his singular style since the 1970s. The characteristics of Reed’s artistic language since the 1980s are powerful gestures set in colored layers, whose multiple superimpositions lend the motifs magical depth. The preferred extreme landscape format offers the artist space to modulate the dynamics of painting through applied color and material accents and to position the motifs in a quasi-film sequence.
For the exhibition «The Mirror and the Pool» 2015 at Museum Haus Lange Krefeld, David Reed interacted with the architecture of the Mies van der Rohe and conceived an impressive site-specific installation by placing his works through the rooms seemingly as an endless image, strung together like a frieze, thus inviting a kind of cinematographic viewing.
We will present «#641» (2003-2015 and 1975-2015, respectively), three significant works from this series of fourteen canvases. Their deep dark purples and magenta tones are particularly evocative. For the first time, Reed employs stencils in these paintings, some of which he used to integrate painterly gestures out of works from the 1970s. Conceived as part of a circulating series at Museum Haus Lange, the three identically sized works «#641» in our exhibition relate to each other and express individual formal characteristics.
«David Reed: Vice and Reflection – An Old Painting, New Paintings and Animations» 2016 was the title of the exhibition at the Pérez Art Museum Miami in 2016, for which the artist created a new series of works inspired by a painting titled «#212 (Vice)» from 1984-1985. Here, the highly saturated blues and yellows reflect the colors of 1980s popular culture, like in the television series Miami Vice. Reed created a reflection of this earlier painting for Miami in the form of new large-scale work that also references the scale and proportions of the museum gallery’s architecture. With «#661», 2003-2013/ 2016 and «#659», 1975/ 1996-2000/ 2007-2011/ 2014-2015/ 2015-2016/2016 we are presenting striking works from this series. As relevant testimony in the artist’s creative process, the meticulous «Working Drawings» and «Color Studies» accompanying the large-scale works document the artist’s thought and work stages. A significant complex of works on paper and selected studies invite visitors to retrace this process in the gallery.
David Reed, although raised on the West Coast, is inextricably linked to New York, where he has lived and worked since 1970. In search of a singular artistic expression, he created narrow vertical canvases between 1974 and 1975 using rapidly placed broad horizontal brushstrokes. «Wet on wet», Reed subsequently painted mainly black or red «Brushstrokes» from left to right, sometimes diagonally. Since the «Brushstroke Paintings» of the 1970s, he has repeatedly taken up this pictorial element and developed it into an essential instrument of his painting, as the more recent «Verticals» «#732-2», 2020 or «#742», 2020-2021 impressively demonstrate. Contrasting with these shades of gray or black are the latest paintings «#773», 2020-2023 and «#774», 2019-2023, from Reed’s studio, for which he chose a color palette of vibrant yellows, reds and blues. David Reed challenges the viewer to explore different facets and shades of color and to discover minimally divergent gradations, color temperatures, and undertones. These intense contradictions account for Reed’s great appeal and emotional impact.
The selected works in our exhibition illustrate how David Reed condenses his vocabulary, which has grown over the years, and has connected the three cities into multi-layered, abstract narratives. His work deals with the history and present of painting as a medium, in conjunction with the change in our perception in the digital age coupled with new emotional conditions.
Out now: VernissageTV Magazine No. 53, April 2023. In this issue: Ibrahim El-Salahi, Art Basel Miami Beach Fashion, Kurt Lightner, Little Island.
Click image or this link to download the magazine (30 MB).
All issues are available in our Magazine section.
The artist Jamilah Sabur works across various disciplines including performance, visual artwork, video and installation. Jamilah Sabur explores the intersections of geology, climatology, geography and memory with dynamics of power and capitalism. The exhibition “The Harvesters” at The Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach runs until April 30, 2023.
Jamilah Sabur: The Harvesters / The Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach. Miami Beach (Florida, USA), December 4, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Exhibition text (excerpt):
Working across various disciplines including performance, visual artwork, video and installation, Jamilah Sabur explores the intersections of geology, climatology, geography and memory with dynamics of power and capitalism.
For The Harvesters, Sabur weaves a series of interconnected works into an exhibition that confronts the labor of extraction, positing play and work as economies of physical movement. Sabur examines climate change, particularly long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns, as an expression of geological rhythms and economies.
The title of the exhibition is a reference to the eponymous Pieter Bruegel painting from 1565. In Bruegel’s painting we see adults harvesting wheat in the foreground, while a sport game is played by youths in the mid-ground and an active bay filled with ships is in the background. For Sabur the painting is of particular resonance as the central focus is the late summer’s heat. Sabur found herself reexamining the painting in context of the current energy crisis and the record-breaking heatwave the planet has experienced this year.
Sabur uses the theme of harvesting as double entendre to connect with her ongoing interest in mining and mineral extraction, especially in the context of post-colonial states and their conception of boundaries. Another idea present in the Bruegel painting and explored in Sabur’s work is movement, the physical labor of harvesting, the worker’s sweeping scythe to cut wheat, expressing rhythmic movements of embodiment. In one painting this figure is paired with a parabolic shape, referring to the Rossby wave, a planetary wave within the Earth’s Ocean and atmosphere formed as a result of the rotation of the planet.
Taking the subject matter of the painting as a starting point Sabur asks us to see what history cannot provide, inviting a glimpse of into the notes in the historical margins. Sabur examines the physical choreography of work and play understood by laborers and forming tenuous connections across cultures and geographies demonstrating a human truth beyond material capital.
Jamilah Sabur: The Harvesters is curated by Leilani Lynch, Former Curator.
About Jamilah Sabur
Jamilah Sabur (b. 1987, St. Andrew Parish, Jamaica) lives and works in Brussels. Metaphysics, geology, and memory are recurrent themes in the work of Jamilah Sabur. Making critical contributions to the discursive spaces of labor and economies of movement, Sabur engages imaging on a planetary scale to re-calibrate our understanding of place, time and history.
Sabur’s work has been shown at galleries and institutions such as Pérez Art Museum, Miami; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, and Fondation PHI, Montréal. Her recent solo exhibitions include Eltanin, Broadway, New York (2022); DADA Holdings, Nina Johnson, Miami (2021); La montagne fredonne sous l’océan/The mountain sings underwater, Fondation PHI, Momenta Biennale, Montréal, Québec (2021); Observations: Selected Works by Jamilah Sabur, University of Maryland Art Gallery (2020). Sabur earned a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore (2009), and an MFA from the University of California, San Diego (2014). Her work is included in the permanent collection of the New Orleans Museum of Art, Pérez Art Museum Miami, The Bass Museum of Art, University of Maryland, and TD Bank Group.
Charmion von Wiegand (1896–1983) was an American journalist, art critic, and abstract painter. Von Wiegand won recognition as an artist with paintings that fused geometric abstraction with Far Eastern pictorial symbolism. Until August 13, 2023, the Kunstmuseum Basel presents the first retrospective of her oeuvre in almost four decades. The exhibition is also Charmion von Wiegand’s very first institutional show in Europe. The retrospective traces Charmion von Wiegand’s career from her early days as a correspondent in 1930s post-revolutionary Moscow to her late work in painting.
Charmion von Wiegand’s breakthrough as an artist came in 1945, when she showed a work in the visionary exhibition “The Women” at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery Art of This Century. The exhibition Charmion von Wiegand features forty-nine paintings and works on paper provided by Swiss and international lenders. The great majority of the works come from the artist’s estate, complemented by loans from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; the Seattle Art Museum; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and other collections.
Charmion von Wiegand / Retrospective at Kunstmuseum Basel | Neubau. Press preview, March 23, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Press text (excerpt):
In the spring of 2023, the Kunstmuseum Basel presents a monographic exhibition of the work of the American journalist, art critic, and painter Charmion von Wiegand (1896– 1983). The first retrospective of her oeuvre in almost four decades, it is also her very first institutional exhibition in Europe, tracing her career from her early days as a correspondent in 1930s post-revolutionary Moscow to her late work in painting. With forty-nine paintings and sketches and a wide assortment of documents, the display reconstructs the evolution of a now-forgotten artist who lived transcultural openness and diversity and translated them into visual art.
Charmion von Wiegand won acclaim as an artist in the mid-twentieth century with paintings that fused the conventions of geometric abstraction with the shapes and colors of Far Eastern pictorial symbolism. A native of Chicago, she grew up in Florida, Arizona, San Francisco, and Berlin and arrived in New York in 1915. As an active member of the literary circles of the 1920s, she was intimately familiar with the New York scene. In the 1930s, she reported from Soviet Moscow, making her mark as a critic for various publications. Her breakthrough as an artist came in 1945, when she showed a work in the visionary exhibition The Women at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery Art of This Century, followed by her first solo exhibition, at a renowned small gallery in New York, in 1947.
The influence of Piet Mondrian
Having reviewed the pamphlet Five on Revolutionary Art, which extolled Piet Mondrian as “truly revolutionary,” von Wiegand got in touch with the artist, who had recently emigrated to the U.S., in 1941. The encounter proved highly consequential for her subsequent pursuits. She not only introduced Mondrian to New York society, wrote about his work, edited his writings, and made sketches showing an early stage of his unfinished painting Victory Boogie-Woogie (1942–44). Her own painterly output, too, was influenced by the Dutch artist. The sustained engagement with Mondrian’s creative approach strengthened von Wiegand’s conviction that geometric abstraction was not bound to remain purely formal, that it was capable of rendering substantive content.
This insight is reflected, for instance, in the “City paintings” she made after Mondrian’s death in 1944. At the time, she was developing her work in an ongoing exchange of ideas with the so-called “Mondrian Circle,” a group of American artists that also included the Swiss émigré painter Fritz Glarner. Other key points of reference of this period included Wassily Kandinsky and Hans Arp. Von Wiegand soon jettisoned the reduction to red, yellow, blue, employing expanded palettes to visualize the inspirations she received from the writings of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy. She was especially fascinated by Blavatsky’s discussions of Buddhist color codes and the mandala and other geometric shapes.
Spirituality and Buddhism
Beginning in the 1950s, von Wiegand took an interest in the spiritual practice of Tibetan Buddhism. In an extension of her engagement with Theosophy, she deepened her understanding of Tibetan art by studying ethnological literature. She later took a leading role in establishing the Tibet Center in New York. As a practicing Buddhist, she now focused her energies on devising a creative vocabulary that allowed her to use form and color also as media of spiritual expression. As Haema Sivanesan writes in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, von Wiegand thus developed the visual language for a “modern transcultural Buddhism.”
The exhibition Charmion von Wiegand features forty-nine paintings and works on paper provided by Swiss and international lenders. The great majority of the works come from the artist’s estate, complemented by loans from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; the Seattle Art Museum; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and other collections.
The exhibition Shirley Jaffe: Form as Experiment at Kunstmuseum Basel is the first retrospective of the American abstract painter in Switzerland. Shirley Jaffe (1923-2016) was born in the United States and settled in Paris in the 1950s. The exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel presents 113 works, from Shirley Jaffe’s early abstract expressionist works to the geometric paintings that are characteristic of her late oeuvre.
The exhibition Shirley Jaffe: Form as Experiment is organized by the Kunstmuseum Basel in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the Musée Matisse, Nice. The show runs until July 30, 2023.
Shirley Jaffe: Form as Experiment / Retrospective at Kunstmuseum Basel | Neubau. Press preview, March 23, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Press text (excerpt):
In Shirley Jaffe. Form as Experiment, the Kunstmuseum Basel presents the artist’s first retrospective in Switzerland, inviting audiences to discover the work of an independent creative mind whose courage made her a role model for many younger artists. Born and raised in the United States, Jaffe settled in Paris in the 1950s and over the years devised an unmistakable personal visual idiom. Conceived in cooperation with the Centre Pompidou and the Musée Matisse, Nice, the exhibition showcases 113 works, from Jaffe’s early contributions to Abstract Expressionism to the geometric paintings in large formats that are characteristic of her late oeuvre.
Shirley Jaffe (née Sternstein, 1923–2016) was born in Elizabeth, N.J., and studied at the Cooper Union in New York. In 1949, the so-called G.I. Bill, which provided benefits for American veterans returning from the war, enabled her and her husband, the journalist Irving Jaffe, to move to the French capital. The marriage did not last, but Jaffe stayed. She soon made friends among the many US-American artists living in postwar Paris, including Al Held, Norman Bluhm, Kimber Smith, Sam Francis, Joan Mitchell, and the Canadian Jean-Paul Riopelle. Her Abstract Expressionist pictures from this period, such as Arcueil Yellow (1956), recall geological formations. As the gestural quality of her work became increasingly prominent, her brushwork and palette grew in complexity (see, e.g., East Meets West, 1962).
In 1958, Darthea Speyer organized an exhibition at the Centre Culturel Américain in Paris that featured hirley Jaffe, Sam Francis and Kimber Smith. Francis introduced Jaffe to the curator Arnold Rüdlinger, who, during his tenures as director of Kunsthalle Bern (1946–1955) and Kunsthalle Basel (1955–1967), championed innovations that lastingly modernized the Swiss arts scene. Rüdlinger displayed her pictures in several group exhibitions and acquired two of her works for the legendary private collection La Peau de l’Ours, which Rüdlinger founded in Basel in 1954 with initially seven art lovers from Switzerland. Rüdlinger served as the collection’s conservator. In 1964, its complete holdings were shown at Kunsthalle Basel.
Meanwhile, Jaffe also presented her work in a series of exhibitions at various galleries in Switzerland, including Galerie Handschin, Basel, and Galerie Klipstein & Kornfeld, Bern. In 1969, a first painting by her entered a public collection in France; the Musée national d’art moderne started acquiring the artist’s works in 1985. After an extensive posthumous gift of Jaffe’s works in 2019, the Centre Pompidou now has the single largest body of her art in an institutional collection. The bulk of the artist’s personal archive is preserved for scholarly study at the Bibliothèque Kandinsky.
Leaving Abstract Expressionism behind …
In the 1960s, Jaffe turned her back on her early work in the Abstract Expressionist vein. This shift in her art began in 1963, when she went to West Berlin on a grant from the Ford Foundation. During the year and a half she spent there before returning to Paris, she introduced simple and clearly identifiable forms to her paintings, counterbalancing their already geometric quality with yet bolder gestures. Luminous colors like those in Big Square (1965) underscore the structures of her pictures.
A second, even more radical transformation commenced in 1968. She now altogether renounced the gestural dimension, instead relying on lucid geometry and muted hues to produce arrangements of flat color fields. This embrace of side-by-side composition went hand in hand with the decision to work with proximity and distance rather than intensity to infuse the interrelations between colors with dynamic energy. Boulevard Montparnasse (1968) is a characteristic example of this development.
In 1969, Jaffe moved into a small studio on Rue Saint-Victor in the 5th arrondissement, where she lived and worked almost until her last breath in 2016. Many artists visited her there over the years, among them Polly Apfelbaum, Beatriz Milhazes, und Sarah Morris. Younger generations, who discovered her work at Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris or Brussels, and elsewhere, embraced her as a model and point of reference because she had had the gumption to abandon Abstract Expressionism and forge a new path.
… toward a personal style
In the 1970s, Jaffe fleshes out her personal style, which is defined by marked contours. Impromptu forms derived from classic geometry, each constituting its own color field,
are the hallmark of this stage in the evolution of her art. Where lines appear on an expanse of color, they neither transgress its bounds nor intersect one another. Toward the end of this period, Jaffe moreover seeks to break the constraints the rectangular frame.
The work she makes starting in 1983 is set apart by the salience of the color white, which initially serves to separate the forms from each other in order to lend them greater independence (see, e.g., Sailing, 1985). The artist’s work from these years also shows her exploring ways in which white can contribute to the dynamic distribution of the color fields on the painting’s surface. Previously segregated forms now sometimes abut in daring geometric constellations. White, in these works, in not merely a background color. It reveals nuances that vary from painting to painting—no two pictures are executed with white paint of the exact same composition. Jaffe furthermore enhances her works with long winding or angular lines that extend across several expanses of color, heightening the impression of overlapping fields (see, e.g., All Together, 1995).
A final innovation that first appears in 1995 and more forcefully from 2001 onward consists in modulations of the color density within a form. The hitherto organized- dynamic chaos of the paintings and the strictly uniform color fields are leavened by traces of brushwork or diffuse paint structures.
The presentation is complemented by studio notes in the artist’s hand—Jaffe diligently recorded the slow gestation of her works—and private archival materials from her estate.
In the past two years, the Kunstmuseum Basel was able to acquire two paintings by Shirley Jaffe. In Medrano (1958) and Big Square (1965), the museum now has an early work and a work from the crucial period when she began developing her own style. The museum also owns four works on paper from the late 1950s.
Katharina Grosse is a German artist who is mainly known for her large-scale, site-specific works, in which she sprays color directly onto architecture, interiors or landscapes. Katharina Grosse used this technique for the first time in an exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bern, in 1998. The Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland is now presenting a show that has its focus on Katharina Grosse’s studio paintings. Katharina Grosse: Studio Paintings, 1988-2022 features 42 canvases, from her earliest works in the late 1980s to her most recent works.
Katharina Grosse: Studio Paintings, 1988-2022, at Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland is curated by Dr. Kathleen Bühler (Chief Curator). The exhibition runs until June 25, 2023. This video provides you with an exhibition walk-through and an introduction by Kathleen Bühler.
Katharina Grosse: Studio Paintings, 1988-2022, at Kunstmuseum Bern. Bern, Switzerland, March 14, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Press text (excerpt):
Since the 1990s Katharina Grosse (born 1961) has developed a body of work marked by an interest in performativity and mediality. Of central importance to Grosse’s practice is color: she experiments with its physical presence and its sensory and socio-political potential. Grosse uses paint in order to break down conventional relationships between foreground, background and underground – both on the canvas and beyond it. The exhibition addresses the can- vas paintings that Katharina Grosse made in her studio between the late 1980s and the present.
In this large survey exhibition, the Kunstmuseum Bern is showing 43 paintings from all phases of her work, and three new room-sized photographic prints on fabric. The exhibition was conceived by the Mildred Lane Kemper Museum in St Louis and reimagined in collaboration with the artist for the galleries of the Kunstmuseum Bern.
Studio works as a new perspective
Katharina Grosse already began working on her first studio works while studying at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf between 1986 and 1990. Based on these works the German artist achieved a breakthrough in the 1990s: in the Kunsthalle Bern in 1998 she made her very first spray-paint intervention – a method for which she is now internationally famous. With the three large- format photographic prints on fabric, the exhibition in the Kunstmuseum Bern 25 years later shows yet again a site-related installation by Katharina Grosse and sheds new light on the artist’s work, always moving along the boundaries of current ideas of painting, from the viewpoint of her studio works.
Returns, revisions, inventions
Like Grosse’s artistic process, the exhibition is divided into two thematic chapters, in which paintings from different phases of the artist’s work confront one another. In the first chapter Returns, Revisions, Inventions the artistic pro- cess is laid bare in all its revisions and new inventions. The juxtaposition of paintings from different decades reveals the ways in which Katharina Grosse returns to previous moments in her own oeuvre and develops them further with new inventions. Colors and forms, materials and working methods appear, then reappear transformed. For example Grosse has recurrently experimented with the course of a line, whether painted, with a brush, sprayed from a gun or both at once.
The second chapter Fissures and Ruptures expands on this approach, and highlights the various methods Grosse uses to break up the homogenous surface of the image in order to question its autonomy and connect it to the spaces of the everyday. Since 1998 Grosse has painted not only with brushes but also with industrial spray-gun that allow her to paint – without any physical contact with the surface – across the edges of the canvas into built space. Throughout the 2010s she also started interrupting her painting process with stencils. By using cardboard, studio waste and materials alien to painting such as piles of earth, she covers parts of the painting and in this away confuses foreground and background in the painting. This approach reached a radical climax in 2020 when Grosse began to slash her paintings and in this way make the wall behind the canvas part of the painting.
Color play for the senses
The element of color is of central importance in the interplay of references and ruptures in Grosse’s painting. The artist assigns an immediate resonance to color, which hits the viewer before one has fully grasped it:
‘Color is so important to me because it creates an immediate resonance within you. Before you know it, you have a visceral reaction to it, like a voice in a performance that hits you before you can even discern words or lyrics.’
The pure, strong colors that Grosse uses reveal their full effect in the large-format paintings, and plunge viewers into a sensual play of colors. With constantly new variations and unfamiliar minglings of foreground, background and sourrounding space, the works invite the viewer to discover diversity and adopt different perspectives – an approach that reflects not only sensory but in many respects socio-political potential.
Coinciding with Frieze Los Angeles, LAND, The Box, and Hauser & Wirth presented Paul McCarthy’s WS White Snow, the artist’s largest single work presented in the US, originally exhibited at the Park Avenue Armory (New York) in 2013. Paul McCarthy’s WS White Snow is WS White Snow is an explicit confrontation with American consumerism and grandiosity that materializes as an 8,800-square-foot artificial forest and a faithful replica of the artist’s family home. The installation has been shown February 16-19, 2023.
Paul McCarthy’s WS White Snow. Los Angeles, February 19, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Extended Version (14:01 min.):
Press text (excerpt):
LAND, The Box, and Hauser & Wirth present Paul McCarthy’s WS White Snow, the artist’s largest single work presented in the US, originally exhibited at the Park Avenue Armory (New York) in 2013.
In November of 2022, The Box initiated an Institutional tour of WS White Snow, with curators and leadership from the Getty, MOCA, the Hammer, the Broad, the ICA LA, LAND, LAXART, LACMA, and the Lucas Museum. This think tank has resulted in the rapid action of this joint presentation of WS White Snow, to coincide with Frieze Los Angeles, as a means to garner support for permanent preservation of the work.
Like many of LA’s legendary secrets, WS White Snow has been hidden in plain sight for the past decade: an 8,800-square-foot artificial forest and a faithful replica of the artist’s family home have stood fully installed in a warehouse in East LA. The accompanying 7 hour four-channel video projection, edited by Damon McCarthy and taken from 350 hours of recorded video from the 30 days of performance in 2012/13 will be projected alongside the installation. Damon McCarthy the co-director and producer of White Snow also edited the double and single channeled videos that were included in the original installation at the Armory in NYC that will not be included in this presentation. This will be the first and possibly only time audiences in Los Angeles will be able to experience the work in situ, with the future of the work uncertain.
WS White Snow is an explicit confrontation with American consumerism and grandiosity that feels as salient presently as it did ten years ago when it debuted. Viewing the work today unearths new layers: reckoning with economic, social, and climate breakdown, we are confronted with the berserkers, the dregs of the party, and the putrid residue from ignoring what frightens us within ourselves. Clues strewn throughout the forest and cottage of WS White Snow point to the screeching halt of the bacchanal in our own culture, Through physical absurdist performances that may at times invoke repulsion, McCarthy, as Walt Paul with Elyse Poppers as White Snow, turn a mirror on the deeper psychological complexities that lurk beneath American Exceptionalism, the upside down of the myths of integrity & civility we craft to define our “best selves.” The subversion of Walt Disney’s Snow White—a syrupy spin of a dark German folktale—chips at the archetypal narrative: there are no heroes or villains to be found here, not even among the symbolism of a prized American storytelling trope. The deeply personal installation details from McCarthy’s own biography illustrate the artist’s acknowledgement of the stakes. Prescient, McCarthy plays with the roles of artist and audience in a culture increasingly obsessed with content creation. Are there boundaries to what we will produce and consume for entertainment?
Paul McCarthy WS White Snow is made possible with support from Hauser & Wirth.
The exhibition includes images and themes that some visitors may find disturbing. Admission is restricted to audiences over 17.
PRESS RELEASE
About the Artists
Paul McCarthy
Paul McCarthy is widely considered to be one of the most influential and groundbreaking contemporary American artists. Born in 1945, and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, he first established a multi-faceted artistic practice, which sought to break the limitations of painting by using unorthodox materials such as bodily fluids and food. He has since become known for visceral, often hauntingly humorous work in a variety of mediums – from performance, photography, film and video, to sculpture, drawing and painting.
McCarthy earned a BFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1969, and an MFA in multimedia, film and art from USC in 1973. For 18 years, he taught performance, video, installation, and art history in the New Genres Department at UCLA, where he influenced future generations of West Coast artists. McCarthy’s work comprises collaborations with artist-friends such as Mike Kelley and Jason Rhoades, as well as his son Damon McCarthy.
Damon McCarthy
Born in 1973, and raised in Los Angeles, California, Damon McCarthy earned a BA in film at CalArts in 1998. For the last 23 years, he has collaborated with his father, Paul McCarthy, as co-director and editor on many complex performative video installations and large-scale film projects. Their collaborative works have been shown extensively worldwide including exhibitions at the Volksbühne, Berlin (2015); Park Avenue Armory (2013); Hauser & Wirth New York (2013); The Box, Los Angeles (2012); Sammlung Friedrichshof, Zurndorf (2010); and Hauser & Wirth Zürich (2007).
Collaborative works include: Theatrical productions of NV (2022) and A&E (2022); Night Vater (2019); Donald and Daisy Duck Adventure, DADDA (2017); Coach Stage Stage Coach, CSSC (2016); WS White Snow (2012-13); White Snow Mammoth (2012); Rebel Dabble Babble (2012); Caribbean Pirates (2005); Piccadilly Circus (2003); Bunker Basement (2003).
About The Box LA
The Box LA was formed in 2007 by Mara McCarthy (Principal/Curator) with her father, Paul McCarthy, when they realized how many critically important artists in their community had been overlooked and were not being shown. From its initial location in Chinatown to its current home in the Arts District in Downtown Los Angeles, the gallery has honed a respected program, and exhibits artists across generations who work in a variety of mediums including performance, installation, dance, drawing, painting, sculpture, video and photography. With a robust public program series, The Box LA offers audiences multiple access points to engage both forgotten art histories and the work of emerging artists who straddle a similar ethos of risk and experimentation. The gallery recognizes the role of the art market as a means for artists to enter or re-enter art histories, and balances commercial interests against the cultural, political, psychological and spiritual content that the work may offer.
Following the gallery’s move to the Arts District in 2012 and the continued growth of the program, McCarthy is now interested in expanding the notion of a commercial gallery space. In recent years, she has facilitated more artist-centered programs, sought new ways to work with more diverse audiences, and continued to engage politically and psychologically dynamic work. The gallery is also interested in engaging with and supporting nonprofit organizations as part of its overall program. In 2021/22, the gallery’s parking lot served as a makeshift residency for Pieter Performance Space, whose work led to the exhibition, Knees, Schools, Urges. The Box has also collaborated with and served as host to homeLA’s public education program, The We in Me, which considers homelessness through the lens of empathy and civic engagement. A low-income housing prototype, Jardin des Estrellas, spearheaded by gallery artist Corazon del Sol, is located in the gallery parking lot and serves as a site for her advocacy and efforts to realize the project on a larger scale throughout the city.
About Hauser & Wirth
Hauser & Wirth was founded in 1992 in Zurich by Iwan Wirth, Manuela Wirth and Ursula Hauser, who were joined in 2000 by Partner and President Marc Payot and CEO Ewan Venters in 2020. A family business with a global outlook, Hauser & Wirth has expanded over the past 30 years to include outposts in Hong Kong, London, New York, Southampton, Los Angeles, Somerset, Menorca, Monaco, Zurich, Gstaad and St. Moritz. The gallery represents over 90 artists and estates who have been instrumental in shaping its identity and who are the inspiration for Hauser & Wirth’s diverse range of activities that engage with art, learning, conservation and sustainability.
Hauser & Wirth opened its Los Angeles location in 2016 in the heart of the burgeoning Downtown Arts District at 901 East 3rd Street. Occupying the former Globe Mills flour mill complex, Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles presents art exhibitions, events and learning activities which connect with the local community in a vibrant architectural space. This February, Hauser & Wirth will expand its Los Angeles presence by opening a second location in West Hollywood. Located at 8980 Santa Monica Boulevard, the new gallery will be housed in the site of a former vintage automobile sales showroom housed in a Spanish Colonial Revival style building and will complement the Arts District venue.
Film Credits
Concept and Script – Paul McCarthy
Directed by – Paul McCarthy, Damon McCarthy
Produced by – Damon McCarthy, Alexis Hudgins
Line Producer – Karen McCarthy
Post Production Sound Design and Editing – Damon McCarthy
Cinematography – Damon McCarthy, Naotaka Hiro, George San Vargas
Audio – Dean S Lee
Cast
Paul McCarthy – Walt Paul
Elyse Poppers – White Snow, Red
Aiden Ashley – White Snow, Yellow
Charlotte Stokely – White Snow, Blue
Jack Spralja – Bashful
Marc McHone – Doc
Trevor Rounseville – Dopey
Michael Villar – Grumpy
Michael Sielaff – Happy
John Drue Worrell – Too Happy
Joseph Carl White II – Sleepy
Randy Tobin – Sneezy
Eric Manuel – Humpey (Humper)
Prince #1 – Josh Rivers
Prince #2 – Jay Smooth
Prince #3 – Richie Calhoun
WS Presentation Installation
Damon McCarthy, Alex Stevens, Brian Young, Dylan Huig, Erick Wilczynski, Jeremiah McCarthy, Jorge Montano, Lancel Reyes, Landon Wiggs, Lee Randle, Michael J Gonzales, Molly Tierney, Sean Townley, Sid Dueñas, Trevor Rounseville
Image Caption: Paul McCarthy, Installation view of WS White Snow, 2011–2013, Artist’s studio, Los Angeles, CA. Wood, steel, foam, mulch, artificial foliage, lights, various materials. 35’H x 141′ x 148′ © Paul McCarthy. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Joshua White
—
LAND’s 2023 exhibitions are made possible with lead support from the Offield Family Foundation, the Jerry and Terri Kohl Family Foundation, and The Perenchio Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Fran and Ray Stark Foundation, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Department of Arts and Culture, the LA Arts Recovery Fund, Brenda Potter, the Wilhelm Family Foundation and LAND’s Nomadic Council. Special thanks to Artist Sponsors Karen Hillenburg, Liana Krupp, Abby Pucker, Ben Weyerhaeuser, and the Poncher Family Foundation.
LAND is a member-supported organization. Support LAND’s free, public programming by becoming a member today.
Marco Schuler is a German artist who works in various media: video, sculpture, painting. Schuler was born in 1972 in Bühl / Baden. He studied philosophy and sculpture and was master student with Olaf Metzel. From April to August 2023 he has a solo show at Kunstverein Darmstadt. On the occasion of our trip to Los Angeles for Frieze art fair we had a quick look at what he was producing in his studio in Los Angeles for Studio Tropical Berlin Dominic Muller.
Studio Visit: Marco Schuler, Studio Tropical Berlin, Dominic Muller. Los Angeles, March 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952–1982 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) explores how the rise of computer technology, together with its emergence in popular consciousness, impacted the making of art in the age of the mainframe. Coded examines the origins of what we now call digital art. The show features artists, writers, musicians, choreographers, and filmmakers working directly with computers as well as those using algorithms and other systems to produce their work.
Coded at LACMA is organized into six thematic and roughly chronological sections and includes over 100 objects made by 75 artists. Some of the highlights are: Edward Kienholz’s The Friendly Grey Computer – Star Gauge Model #54 (1965); Vera Molnár’s À la recherche de Paul Klee (1970); Frederick Hammersley’s “computer drawings” (1969), and Stan VanDerBeek’s film Poemfield No.1 (Blue Version) (1967). The exhibition runs until July 2, 2023.
Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952-1982 / LACMA, Los Angeles. February 27, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Featured artists and works in this video (in order of appearance):
Henri Cartier-Bresson: JFK Space Center, 1967
Lowell Nesbitt: Firing Room, 1969
Lowell Nesbitt: I.B.M. Disc Pack, 1965
Thomas Chimes: IBM Box, 1965; Untitled, 1966
Angelo Testa: IBM Disks, 1952-56
Charles and Ray Eames: Computer House of Cards, 1970
Edward Kienholz: The Friendly Grey Computer – Star Gauge Model #54, 1965
Eduardo Paolozzi: Universal Electronic Vacuum, 1967
Edward Meneeley: IBM Drawings, 1966
Desmond Paul Henry
Frederick Hammersley: Computer Drawings, 1969
Bridget Riley: Polarity, 1964
Frieder Nake: Walk Through Raster, drawings, probably 1967
Jennifer Bartlett: Count, 1972
Jonathan Borofsky: Counting from 1 to 2,941,494, 1969
Manfred Mohr: Cubic Limit, 1973-74
Stan VanDerBeek: Poemfield No. 1 (Blue Version), 1967
Manfred Mohr: P-036 G/White Noise, 1971
Aaron Marcus: Evolving Gravity, 1972/1974; Noise Barrier, 1972/1974
Peter Struycken: PLONS 1972/1974, 1975
Leon D. Harmon and Kenneth C. Knowlton: Studies in Perception I (Alpha Serendipity), 1966/2023
Vera Molnár: À la recherche de Paul Klee, 1970/71
Hiroshi Kawano: Simulated Color Mosaic, 1969
Lillian F. Schwartz with Kenneth C. Knowlton: Pixillation, 1970/2016
Sheila Pinkel: Intuition, 1977
Harold Cohen
Monique Nahas and Hervé Huitric: Cube, 1973
Hans Haacke: News, 1969/2008
Agnes Denes
Sonya Rapoport: Shoe-Field Map, 1982/1985; Shoe-Field, 1986
Joan Truckenbrod: Electronic Patchwork, 1978
Colette Stuebe Bangert and Charles Jeffries Bangert: Grass Series II, 1979-80
Charles Gaines: Walnut Tree Orchard: Set B, 1975
Jean-Pierre Hébert
Sonya Rapoport: Anasazi Series II, 1977
Analivia Cordeiro: M 3×3, 1973
Barbara T. Smith: I Am Abandoned, 1967
Stephen Willats: Homeostat Drawing No. 1, 1969/2023
Waldemar Cordeiro: The Woman Who Is Not B.B., 1971, printed 1973
Charles Csuri: Random War, 1967/2021
Alison Knowles: The House of Dust, 1967
The first time we encountered the work of the American artist Llyn Foulkes was in 2012 when he was performing as one-man band The Machine at Documenta 13. While in Los Angeles for Frieze LA 2023, we had the opportunity to visit and document Llyn Foulkes solo exhibition at Gagosian in Beverly Hills. Titled Bombs Away, the show featured paintings, sculptures, and mixed-media works produced by Llyn Foulkes between 2018 and 2022. Llyn Foulkes is known for his social commentary that targets corporate America, particularly the Walt Disney Company. This video provides you with a look at the show and an introduction to Llyn Foulkes and his work by Sarah Watson (Director, Gagosian Los Angeles).
Llyn Faulkes: Bombs Away / Gagosian Beverly Hills. Introduction by Sarah Watson (Director, Gagosian Los Angeles). Beverly Hills, February 21, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Exhibition text:
A lot of my stuff is in opposition. My machine. My paintings. I’ve been fighting against something the whole time.
—Llyn Foulkes
Gagosian is pleased to announce Bombs Away, an exhibition of paintings, sculptures, and mixed-media works produced by Llyn Foulkes between 2018 and 2022.
Highly diverse, tough to categorize, and often wickedly confrontational, Foulkes’s body of work includes landscape and portrait paintings, mixed-media constructions, and narrative tableaux. Having progressed from the unsettling imagery of his early 1960s paintings, through the geological and postcard subjects of his late ’60s and early ’70s work, to the “bloody head” series of figures from later that decade, he also became known for singular combinations of painting with wood, found clothing, and upholstery fabric. Foulkes’s mordant social commentary has consistently targeted human cruelty and challenged the excesses of corporate America—particularly the Walt Disney Company.
Whatever their medium and format, Foulkes’s works are characterized by their provocative subjects and unexpected formal juxtapositions. In the sculpture The Broken Chain (2020), a lion, standing on an antique-style library card catalogue, bites into a bald eagle in flight, while a nude mannequin looks on. Le Bomb (2020), another jarring assemblage of found objects, features the titular weapon projecting from a gnarled tree trunk. Ivanka (2022) incorporates fragments of animal hide and jawbone into a brutally unflattering portrait of Donald Trump’s eldest daughter and former senior adviser, while Surrender (2022) tackles the war in Ukraine, picturing a sickle-wielding figure blindfolded by the blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag.
Three works in the exhibition make cutting reference to Disney, Foulkes’s long-time bête noire. In Family Portrait (2022), the artist has replaced the heads of a couple and baby in a formal photograph with black-and-white visages of an ossified Mickey Mouse. The image is set against a chalkboard covered with half-erased messages about the financial worth of children. The cartoon rodent also crops up in Implantation (2019–21) and Untitled: Baby Mickey (2020). In the former, he appears in the form of a classic round-eared hat, on the face of a wristwatch, and as the graphic on a “face mask required” sign. The title, inscribed beneath the image, refers to the moment when a fertilized egg attaches to the uterine lining, an allusion to the beginning of life that here allegorizes commercial indoctrination. In the latter work, the familiar silhouette of Mickey’s head masks that of a baby in an ornate vintage gown, wholly erasing its identity.
Foulkes’s caustic, often deliberately crude sense of humor is on display throughout the exhibition. In Skin Flute (2020), he works with a vintage photograph, replacing the subject’s head with a cartoonlike drawing of a penis, a musical stave arching over the whole composition. Creeps (2021) depicts a MAGA-hatted father and son, their faces represented by female torsos in the manner of Magritte’s Rape (1945), leering at a third figure who rebuffs them with the titular insult. Combining such visual wit with a freewheeling collage style, informed by artists ranging from John Heartfield and Hannah Höch to Edward Kienholz and George Helms, Foulkes continues to meld coruscating observations on American pop culture and political life with investigations into the nature of the painted, constructed, and photographic image.
Llyn Foulkes was born in Yakima, Washington, in 1934, and lives and works in Los Angeles. Collections include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Exhibitions include the Pasadena Art Museum (1962); Oakland Art Museum (1964); Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1967); Newport Harbor Art Museum (1974); Between a Rock
and a Hard Place, Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA (1995–96, traveled to Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati; Oakland Museum of California; Neuberger Museum of Art, State University of New York, Purchase, NY; and Palm Springs Desert Museum, 1996–98), and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2013). Foulkes participated in the IX Bienal de São Paulo (1967) and Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany (2012), and won the Prize for Painting at the Biennale de Paris in 1967. As a musician,
he has played drums with City Lights (1965–71) and The Rubber Band (1973–77), and currently performs as one-man band The Machine.
Glenn Kaino and David Sitek’s collaboration High Seas have staged the installation “Invisible Embrace” at AF Projects in Hollywood. It opened on December 8, 2022. This video documents a special performance in the installation by Danielle Agami. Danielle Agami (born 1984) is an Israeli-born dancer and choreographer. She is a teacher of the Gaga style of dance. She is Founder/Artistic Director of Ate9 Dance Company.
Invisible Embrace (2022) by Glenn Kaino and David Sitek is an installation that consists of a 6-channel modular choral organ with vocal instrumentation by various artists, 6 sample modules, six filters, six effects, controllers, function generators, a mixer, and 16 speakers (dimensions variable).
High Seas (Glenn Kaino and Dave Sitek) Performance by Danielle Agami at AF Projects / Louise Alexander Gallery, Los Angeles, February 19, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Exhibition text (excerpt):
High seas is an American art and music collective founded by artists Glenn Kaino and David Sitek.
High Seas manifesto reads: “A compass spins with the magnetism of humanity. The ship sways back and forth, sailing on the sea of language but trapped in the time machine of a palindrome. Going nowhere and everywhere at the same time. There is no north star, just stars guiding our way through a constellation of concerns. In a space, in space, owned by no one. A pirate utopia outside the rule of law, inhabited only by invisible assassins cut from diamonds. X means “we were here.” You are now in the HIGH SEAS.”
Glenn Kaino is known internationally for his expansive vision and activist-minded practice, which encompasses painting, sculpture, installation, performance, monumental public art, theatrical production, and a forthcoming feature film. Glenn is a conceptual artist, experienced entrepreneur, and Emmy-Award winning creator who has lead major digital brands such as the Oprah Winfrey Network, Napster, and Universal Music Group/Farmclub. He has had exhibitions at museums around The world, including the High Museum of Atlanta, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, alongside being selected by the U.S Department of State to represent the United States in the 13th Cairo Biennale. He most recently co-directed With Drawn Arms, a film about his collaboration with activist/athlete Tommie Smith on Starz, and produced both the off-broadway and film version of In & Of Itself, which is now a hit special on Hulu.
Since landing atop NME’s “Future 50” list, TV on the Radio founder David Andrew Sitek has produced Jane’s Addiction, Kelis, Weezer, Scarlett Johansson, Pussy Riot, Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Group Love, Karen O and Willie Nelson while collaborating with Blondie, Jay-Z, Run the Jewels, David Byrne and Solange, landing a Grammy with Jay-Z & Beyonce’s The Carters. He’s arguably the most versatile and indefinable musical talent of his generation, which, naturally, led to something as audacious as Forest for the Trees. Before seeding the early 2000s with a sound and vision soon borrowed/ bought/sold as “Brooklyn Made,” Sitek trained in the visual arts as a painter, photographer, and filmmaker.
Breaks and Suspensions is the title of the second solo show by Israeli-born, New York-based artist Naama Tsabar with the gallery Shulamit Nazarian in Los Angeles. It’s the first time that two of Naama Tsabar’s ongoing series are shown together: Melody of Certain Damage and Gaffer. Tsabar’s practice fuses elements from sculpture, music, performance and architecture.
In 2020, Frieze Projects featured Naama Tsabar’s performance Untitled (Double Face) during Frieze Los Angeles 2020. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Centre Pompidou, amongst others.
Naama Tsabar: Breaks and Suspensions / Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles. Opening reception, February 17, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Press text (excerpt):
Shulamit Nazarian is pleased to announce Breaks and Suspensions, an exhibition by Israeli-born, New York-based artist Naama Tsabar. This exhibition marks the artist’s second solo show with the gallery, on view from February 15 through March 25, 2023.
The exhibition title, Breaks and Suspensions, references colloquial terms for two of the artist’s ongoing series: Melody of Certain Damage and Gaffer. This exhibition marks the first time that these two series are exclusively shown together, making clear the conceptual and utilitarian connections shared by each body of work.
Tsabar’s practice fuses elements from sculpture, music, performance and architecture. Collaborating with local communities of female identifying and gender non-conforming performers, Tsabar writes a new feminist and queer history of mastery. Her interactive works expose hidden spaces and systems, reconceive gendered narratives, and shift the passive viewing experience to one of active participation. The artist draws attention to the muted and unseen by propagating sound through space and sculptural form. Resting someplace between sculpture and instrument, form and sound, Tsabar’s work lingers on the intimate, sensual, and corporeal potentials within these transitional states.
Tsabar’s Melody of Certain Damage series subverts the hypermasculine, destructive and cathartic action of smashing a guitar on stage by re-thinking the broken pieces back into a functioning object, bringing the sculptural into the realm of the aural and tactile. Beginning alone in her studio, Tsabar breaks the guitar against her floor. After impact and break, she maps the exact location of each scattered piece and then reconstructs the instrument so that it can once again emit sound. The resulting form of each work from this series operates as an artifact of the studio-based action, while allowing the new instrument to shift into the realm of sonic sculpture. Tsabar’s use of ready-made objects and the significant role of chance in Melody of Certain Damage introduces a dialogue with Dada practices of the early-twentieth century—a canonic period of art history now scrutinized for its preferential treatment toward male artists and its exclusion of their female contemporaries. Her works in this series are exhibited on low lying plinths on the gallery floor, just as one might find them scattered on a stage or in the artist’s studio. Rather than positioning the viewer solely as spectator, Tsabar opens the possibility to activate the artwork through touch. Viewers and performers can rest their bodies on the floor, beside the object, allowing their touch to elicit an emotional and sensual experience, as well as a sonic expression.
In her newest works from the ongoing Gaffer series, instrument cables travel through fields made from layering numerous strips of tape, the same material used to mask and stabilize cables in performance spaces. The monochromatic field of tape holds the cables suspended in different visual compositions as they flow in and out of the rectangular frame. In these works, Tsabar continues her interest in gaffer tape as a hidden utilitarian material within a performative order—a material she first used in her works Twilight (Gaffer Wall), 2006 and Encore, 2007. This series, which both critiques and pays homage to the aesthetics of Minimalism, moves the tape from the unseen location of the stage floor to its scrutable position on the gallery wall. Tsabar specifically calls attention to the hidden labor associated with the material through the meticulous layering of the tape, creating a significant thickness and a subtle textural rhythm of lines on its surface. She further calls attention to the labor involved in their creation by naming the people who contributed to the act of “gaffering” in the credit lines of the work. These artworks refuse to be confined to a single category, borrowing from elements of painting, drawing, and sculpture. They hinge the functional and the visual; while the cable running through the work can be read as a gestural mark, and the tape itself a color field, the works never lose their potential to actively transmit sound.
Within the exhibition, works from each series are not only united by their concept, at times they also become physically linked. Audio cables transmit sound from the broken guitars in Melody of Certain Damage, move through the physical plane of the Gaffer works, and ultimately connect to a live amplifier that emits sound throughout the gallery. With this gesture, Tsabar activates each artwork and the gallery itself, turning the viewer, artwork, and architecture into active collaborators.
Throughout these works, Tsabar’s invocation of Dada and Minimalist processes and aesthetics is not only an act of feminist reclamation, it also highlights the influences within liberatory movements: Dada’s anti-war anarchic absurdism, Minimalism’s socialist use of industrial objects to create material accessibility, and both movements’ rejection of institutional spaces. Citing these approaches within her work, Tsabar’s practice goes beyond revising art history to diversify the canon. It harnesses these elements as part of a modus operandi that is feminist and a practice that positions individual viewers and local communities as direct participants.
Naama Tsabar (b. 1982, Israel; Lives and works in New York, NY) received her MFA from Columbia University in 2010. Solo exhibitions and performances of Tsabar have been presented at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), The Bass Museum (Miami), Museum of Art and Design (New York), The High Line (New York), Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (Connecticut), Nasher Museum (Durham, NC), Kunsthaus Baselland (Switzerland), Palais De Tokyo (Paris), Prospect New Orleans, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, The Herziliya Museum for Contemporary Art in Israel, MARTE-C (El Salvador), CCA Tel Aviv (Israel), Faena Buenos Aires, Frieze Projects New York, Kasmin Gallery (New York), Paramo Gallery (Guadalajara), Dvir Gallery (Israel and Brussels), Spinello Projects (Miami), Shulamit Nazarian (Los Angeles). Selected group exhibitions featuring Tsabar’s work include The Andy Warhol Museum (New York), The Jewish Museum of Belgium, Moody Center for the Arts (Houston), Ballroom Marfa, Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, Elevation 1049 Gstaad (Switzerland), TM Triennale, Hasselt Genk Belgium, ‘Greater New York’ 2010 at MoMA PS1, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens (Belgium), The Bucharest Biennale for Young Artists, Hessel Museum of Art at CCS Bard, Casino Luxembourg (Luxembourg), ExtraCity in Antwerp (Belgium).
Tsabar’s work has been featured in publications including Artforum, Art In America, ArtReview, ARTnews, The New York Times, New York Magazine, Frieze, Bomb Magazine, Art Asia Pacific, Wire, and Whitewall, among others. Tsabar is a two-time recipient of an Artis Grant, 2014 and 2010; a two-time recipient of the America- Israel Cultural Foundation Grant, 2009 and 2005; the 2009-2010 recipient of the Joan Sovern Award from Columbia University; 2012 Grantee of The Rema Hort Mann Foundation Award; and held residency in 2012 at The Fountainhead Residency in Miami.
Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, A4 Arts Foundation, Centre Pompidou, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Seattle Art Museum, Pérez Art Museum Miami, The Bass Museum, Kadist Collection, Jimenez-Colón Collection, Tel Aviv Museum, Israel Museum, and Coleccion Dieresis.
Jeffrey Deitch Los Angeles currently presents Tom Friedman’s Cocktail Party (2015) at the 7000 Santa Monica Boulevard gallery. Tom Friedman describes Cocktail Party as a “3-D cartoon, consisting of 20 figures interacting.” It’s one of the artist’s major works. The group of figures blends with the group of viewers. In addition to “Cocktail Party”, the exhibition will also features two recent figurative sculptures, Big Hug (2022), representing two figures in an all-consuming embrace, and Kid (2023), an 8 foot tall figure in an ecstatic gesture, textured with a multitude of objects. Pong (2017) a video projection of a vintage Pong video game will be presented in the mezzanine gallery in natural light, giving it a ghostly appearance.
The exhibition runs until April 8, 2023, in parallel with Refik Anadol’s show at Jeffrey Deitch’s 925 N. Orange Drive space.
Tom Friedman: Cocktail Party / Jeffrey Deitch, 7000 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles. Artist Reception, February 18, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Exhibition text (excerpt):
Friedman’s work is the result of epiphanies discovered through what he calls “the meditative artist’s gaze.” The more closely Friedman investigates an object, such as a pencil, the less clear it becomes, until the object dissolves into itself. He moves from the perfect marriage of form and content to deadpan humor, to the nihilistic questions of why even “bother” to make art, to the joy of being.
Each artwork for Friedman is an invention with new processes to learn and new problems to solve. Although his work looks different from piece to piece there is a web of continuity to be discovered. Friedman has said he builds his work from the atom up, which could mean every detail is to be considered.
Cocktail Party, Pong, Big Hug and Kid represent a maturing of Friedman’s process. This figurative sculptural work continues his investigation into the existential meaning of the object to the existential meaning of being human, the self, relationships, wonder, and the complexity of one’s experience. Present in these works are the everyday materials and humor. As Friedman says, “the humility and humor in my work allows a space to think about the seriousness of being in and of the world.”
Tom Friedman (b. 1965, St. Louis, MO) lives and works in Massachusetts. The entrance into his philosophical investigation of the meaning of life and art is idiosyncratic, and uniquely his. He combines the use of everyday materials and objects, such as aluminum foil, Styrofoam, pencils, paper, spaghetti and plastic cups to explore the relationship between the making of art, our perception of it, and our growth of consciousness as a result. Like a scientist studying empirical and non-empirical phenomena and an object’s infinite references, Friedman analyses its imperceptible transformations.
His work has been exhibited all over the world including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, New Museum, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; Fondazione Prada, Milan; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Magasin 3, Stockholm; Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv; South London Gallery, London and Mead Art Museum, Amherst.
A War on Wars is the title of an exhibition of new paintings and sculptures by Los Angeles-based artist Amir H. Fallah at the gallery Shulamit Nazarian in Los Angeles. The exhibition combines two distinct and ongoing series for the artist, Veiled Portraits and Grid Paintings, alongside a new series of life-sized figurative sculptures. Amir H. Fallah (b. 1979, Tehran, Iran; Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) received his BFA in Fine Art & Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art and his MFA in painting at the University of California, Los Angeles. It’s Amir H. Fallah’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. The show is on view through March 25, 2023.
A War on Wars is being presented concurrently with a solo exhibition at the Fowler Museum at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). Both the Fowler Museum and the gallery’s exhibitions also coincide with Fallah’s public project CHANT in support of human rights in Iran. The debut presentation of a large-scale neon artwork is being displayed on the gallery’s facade on La Brea Avenue in Hollywood concurrent with his solo exhibition.
Amir H. Fallah: A War on Wars / Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles. Opening reception, February 17, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Press text (excerpt):
The exhibition title, A War on Wars, suggests an active resistance to conflict, one that is centered on awareness, education, and protest. Fallah was born in Iran and lived in the country during the Iran-Iraq war. This exhibition draws from early childhood memories of wartime, combined with a consideration of contemporary global conflicts. Synthesized through painting and sculpture, the artist combines a range of imagery to invoke parables that address an ever-shifting geo-political landscape and structure of power
The exhibition combines two distinct and ongoing series for the artist, Veiled Portraits and Grid Paintings, alongside a new series of life-sized figurative sculptures. The artist’s Veiled Portraits deconstruct traditional notions of identity formation, while simultaneously defying expectations of the genre of portraiture by obscuring the appearance of his subject. In these works, the absence of the sitter’s physical likeness is substituted with a wider representation of their personhood—one that is articulated through a network of symbols and imagery. The Grid Paintings employ seemingly disparate images and symbols that amalgamate personal narratives with historical and contemporary parables. The paintings serve as a diary of lessons, warnings, and ideals providing coded insight into cultural values often passed between generations.
In the painting We See This Fight as Worship, for example, Fallah stages a central figure holding two ceremonial scepters—one orbed, the other bearing a head with horns—crossed against their chest, flanked by two mirrored figures kneeling with their palms pressed together. Any sign of the three figures’ gender or race is obscured by mod patterned fabrics. Drawn from mid-century design, these covers reference a period when Western nations consolidated power domestically, while engaging in tactical destabilization throughout the Global South. Ornate borders, like those of Persian manuscript paintings, disrupt the hierarchic organization of the figures, zig-zagging to a Miniature style equestrian figure engaged in battle with a dragon in the upper register and trumpeting angels in the Art Deco style characteristic of Erté in the lower register. On opposing sides of these vignettes, the bold letters of “we see this fight as worship” are sublimated into decorative floral patterning customary of Persian rugs. While angels and dragon slaying present clear-cut metaphors for good and evil, the remainder of the imagery complicates matters. The title “we see this fight as worship” quotes from one of Khomeini’s speeches during the Iranian revolution—a rebellion which sought to unseat the government formed following the 1953 coup orchestrated by the US and UK. While the revolution liberated the country from direct Western influence, it also established an authoritarian theocracy, ushering Iranian people from one oppressive external influence to another even more restrictive administration. Bringing together these loaded symbols, Fallah maps the suspect dynamics of power, cautioning us to be weary when placing faith.
Fallah combines elements from both the Veiled Portraits and Grid Paintings for a new series of sculptures. Hand painted on cut aluminum, the sculptures similarly exclude signifiers of ethnicity, age, gender, and class. Here, however, the sitter stands composed in the anatomically neutral position characteristic of medical treatises and their form is flattened to a narrow plane. The ornate cultural patterns that appear elsewhere in the artist’s works—draped over sitters in the Veiled Portraits and obscuring the text in the Grids—cover the entirety of the sculpture, while the range of symbolic objects are literally cut from within the body, only discernible from the outlines they make in both the positive and negative spaces of the work. Together, these works address the way identity and culture are staged and presented to secure systems of power and oppression.
A War on Wars will be presented concurrently with a solo exhibition at the Fowler Museum at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). Titled The Fallacy of Borders, the exhibition features twenty-five works spanning painting, sculpture, and stained glass. This exhibition marks Fallah’s first solo museum exhibition in his adoptive home city of Los Angeles, while returning the artist’s work to UCLA, where he received his Master of Fine Arts in 2005.
Both the Fowler Museum and the gallery’s exhibitions also coincide with Fallah’s public project CHANT in support of human rights in Iran. The debut presentation of a large-scale neon artwork will be displayed on the gallery’s facade on La Brea Avenue in Hollywood concurrent with his solo exhibition. A radiant sun—in reference to ancient Persian traditions and a contemporary symbol of dissent—bears the face of a woman. While Persian rulers have added and removed the sun’s gender to validate their own power and authority throughout history, Fallah reclaims the symbolic female sun to foreground women’s rights, elevating the power of people rather than any one ruler. Interchangeably displaying “WOMAN. LIFE. FREEDOM” in Farsi, English, and the phonetic Farsi, CHANT operates as a beacon of light carrying the rallying cry of the ongoing liberation movement in Iran.
On CHANT, Fallah shares, “First and foremost, this project is a tool for public education, joining the demand for urgent change in Iran, using the power of art to elevate the dialogue, spark press coverage, and keep it in the public eye. The sun in the center carries great symbolic weight for the future of the Iranian people, an ancient symbol representing change, hope, and positive growth. CHANT is a visual statement that will help serve as a beacon for all those united in the struggle for freedom.”
The three presentations, A War on Wars, The Fallacy of Borders, and CHANT, collectively provide an expansive understanding of the artist’s prolific oeuvre over the past decade, while also demonstrating new directions in public sculpture, each addressing a nuanced and emotive inquiry about identity, the immigrant experience, and the history of portraiture.
Amir H. Fallah (b. 1979, Tehran, Iran; Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) received his BFA in Fine Art & Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art and his MFA in painting at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions across the United States and abroad. Selected solo exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson; South Dakota Art Museum, Brookings SD; Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland OR; San Diego ICA; and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland KS.
In 2009, the artist was chosen to participate in the 9th Sharjah Biennial. In 2015, Fallah received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant. In 2019, Fallah’s painting Calling On The Past received the Northern Trust Purchase Prize at EXPO Chicago. In 2020, Fallah was awarded the COLA Individual Artist Fellowship and the Artadia grant. In addition, the artist had a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson, accompanied by a catalog, and a year-long installation at the ICA San Jose.
The artist is in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; de Young Museum, San Francisco; Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama; Jorge M. Pérez Collection, Miami; Deste Foundation For Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece; Xiao Museum Of Contemporary Art, Rizhao, China; McEvoy Foundation For The Arts, San Francisco; Nerman Museum, Kansas City; SMART Museum of Art at the University of Chicago; Davis Museum, Massachusetts; The Microsoft Collection, Washington; Plattsburg State Art Museum, NY; Cerritos College Public Art Collection, CA; Los Angeles County Department of Arts & Culture, CA; and Salsali Private Museum, Dubai, UAE.
Portraits is the title of an exhibition of recent paintings by Vanessa Prager at Diane Rosenstein Gallery in Los Angeles. The show features fifteen oil paintings that depict subjects that are a hybrid of floral life and human beings. Vanessa Prager (USA, b. 1984) is a self-taught artist who is known for her elaborate impasto painting technique that creates thickly layered and sculptural surfaces.
Vanessa Prager: Portraits / Diane Rosenstein Gallery, Los Angeles. Opening reception, February 14, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Press text (excerpt):
Diane Rosenstein is pleased to present Portraits, an exhibition of recent paintings by Vanessa Prager. This installation is comprised of fifteen oil paintings that depict individuals in a profound state of metamorphosis. In her mythic portraits, Prager works between still life and classicism to depict subjects that are a hybrid of floral life and human beings. This is Prager’s second solo exhibition with Diane Rosenstein Gallery.
Prager contains her subjects in Classical bust-length portraits. Using an elaborate impasto technique, she directs our interest to her subject’s faces – albeit faces whose features are completely obscured by bouquets of blossoming flowers. The sitters are turned towards us, their attention focused in our direction. Like Florentine portraits of women in the 15th century, some are draped in pearls or gold chains or chokers. While some wear simple tops that expose their necks, others have their ‘bodies’ fully painted with bold patterns such that a beguiling transformation takes place – their human form takes on the appearance of a vessel or jug or bottle. The figure becomes a floral still life.
With a humorous nod to Arcimboldo’s Proto-Surrealistic naturalist visages, Prager’s ‘portraits’ employ the flower as a metaphor for both the transformative and transitory qualities of
life. The artist, acknowledging profound ‘cataclysmic shifts’ in the world over the past few years, notes that this body of work is a gesture towards connection and reconnection with others, an expression of optimism.
In The Card Player (2023), a monumental painting that anchors the exhibition, Prager expresses the archetype of the gambler who lays their cards on the table, displayed for all to see. Inspired by numerous art historical references, from Caravaggio to Cezanne, Prager’s The Card Player also invokes the motifs in Cezanne’s post-impressionist flower paintings. Here, a pattern of black diamonds wraps around the body of a vessel that can barely contain the opulent pageant of asters, freesias, ranunculus, peonies, and imaginary blooms that sprawl across this sixteen-foot diptych. In the upper areas of the painting, soft pink petals radiate from a pair of gerbera daisies, whose dark blue florets morph into a pair of unblinking eyes that gaze directly at the viewer.
In contrast to Prager’s earlier paintings for Static (2020-2021) – in which she employed the thick paint in an enveloping abstraction that more quietly suggested form and concealed its subject – these new paintings have clean edges and distinct patterns. The environment of glowing, swirling pastel hues around the defined vessels is a formal element of so-called traditional portraiture while the dramatic relief of her shaggy impasto textures bring movement to the flowers that expand in all directions, barely contained by the edges of the canvas.
In Ovid’s Metamorphosis and most Greek mythology, the distinction between a plant and person was always in flux. The pantheon depicted in Prager’s portraits are ‘featureless’ yet imbued with character and personality. Are the flowers ‘the mask’ or the true face? Prager’s new exhibition offers complex portraits that speak to our deepest instincts for transformation and renewal. They offer an omniscience, buried deep within each flower, of the cycles of life. Regarding us directly, with a touch of memento mori, they say: Life is in session.
Vanessa Prager (USA, b. 1984) is a self-taught artist who is known for her elaborate impasto painting technique that creates thickly layered and sculptural surfaces. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Prager’s abstract paintings explore themes of identity, self-reflection, and the human condition in the 21st century. Prager received a solo show with Diane Rosenstein, Los Angeles, in 2021. Other solo presentations include those at Kristin Hjellegjerde, Berlin (2019) and London (2018); The Hole, New York (2018, 2016); Richard Heller, Los Angeles (2017); and Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco (2012).
The artist’s work has also been featured in group exhibitions such as Go Figure!, Curated by Beth Rudin DeWoody, Eric Firestone Gallery, East Hampton, NY (2019); Extra, The Hole, New York (2018); How They Ran, Over The Influence, Los Angeles (2018); Sweet Cheeks, Big Pictures, Los Angeles (2018); Richard Heller Gallery, Los Angeles (2017); Russian Doll, M+B Gallery, Los Angles (2015); In the Heat of the Night, Castor Gallery, New York (2015); The Blob, Richard Heller Gallery, Los Angeles (2015); Me and Benjamin, Galerie Xippas, Paris (2014); Boy+Girl, The Salon at Automatic Sweat, Los Angeles (2014); Seven Sisters, Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco (2013); Good Intentions, Subliminal Projects Gallery, Los Angeles (2013); Portrait of A Generation, The Hole, New York (2012); High Five, New Image Art, Los Angeles (2012); MOCA Fresh, MOCA Grand Avenue, Los Angeles (2012); Incognito, ICA/Santa Monica Museum of Art, Los Angeles (2012); California Girls, Katherine Cone Gallery, Los Angeles (2012); Girls, girls, girls, Jenkins Johnson Gallery, New York (2011); Drawn, Subliminal Projects, Los Angeles (2011); Wreck the Walls, Subliminal Projects Gallery, Los Angeles (2010); The Big Show, Silas Marder Gallery, New York (2009); Under the Influence, Gallery 1988, Los Angeles (2009); and Crazy for Cult, Gallery 1988, Los Angeles (2008).
Living Paintings is the title of Refik Anadols first major solo exhibition in Los Angeles. The show at Jeffrey Deitchk’s 925 N. Orange Drive space showcases the complete series of Refik Anadol’s artworks that are based on California-related datasets and merge collective memories of urban life and nature with groundbreaking machine learning and visualization technologies. On display are Refik Anadol’s Infinity Room, and the large media wall Pacific Dreams, among others. Living Paintings at Jeffrey Deitch Los Angeles runs until April 29, 2023.
Refik Anadol: Living Paintings / Jeffrey Deitch Los Angeles, 925 N. Orange Drive, Los Angeles. Artist Reception, February 18, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Complete video (16:52 min.):
Exhibition text (excerpt):
Living Paintings, Refik Anadol’s first major solo exhibition in Los Angeles will open at Jeffrey Deitch on February 14, 2023. The exhibition will showcase the complete series of Anadol’s artworks that are based on California-related datasets, and explore his fascination with the environments – physical, public, virtual, and multidimensional – that play an instrumental role in shaping his artistic vision. Merging collective memories of urban life and nature with groundbreaking machine learning and visualization technologies, Living Paintings invites a poetic and futuristic contemplation of purposeful human-machine collaborations.
Anadol’s AI Data Paintings and Sculptures extend a uniquely dynamic relationship between art, technology, and architecture into the future, activating multiple senses and evoking simultaneous belongings. The primary thread that runs throughout his groundbreaking visualizations of the unseen world is the utilization of data as pigment to create enriched immersive environments. For this exhibition, Anadol will harness environmental data such as wind speed, temperature, and air pressure collected from sensors around Los Angeles, images of national parks in California (the largest dataset of this kind ever to be used for an artwork), and publicly available wind forecast data collected from the Pacific Ocean. By training these datasets with machine learning algorithms and visualizing them through his unique approach to fluid dynamics, Anadol presents entirely new data narratives.
The exhibition will also feature Anadol’s iconic Infinity Room that has traveled around the world and been experienced by more than 2 million people. This iteration of Infinity Room pays homage to Los Angeles by translating its data into a mesmerizing immersive installation. A large media wall that features real-time Pacific Ocean data, Pacific Dreams, emphasizes our embeddedness in nature and presents an entirely new and poetic way of connecting to it. Machine Hallucinations: National Parks turns vast photographic datasets of landscape photographs into multi-sensory experiences to commemorate the beauty of the earth we share.
Refik Anadol (b. 1985, Istanbul, Turkey) is an internationally renowned media artist, director, and leader in the aesthetics of data and machine intelligence. He is also a lecturer in UCLA’s Department of Design Media Arts. His work locates creativity at the intersection of humans and machines. Taking the data that surrounds us as primary material, and the neural network of a computerized mind as a collaborator, Anadol offers us radical visualizations of our digitized memories and expands the possibilities of the arts, architecture, narrative, and the body in motion. Anadol’s site-specific AI data sculptures, live audiovisual performances, and environmental installations take many forms, while encouraging us to rethink our engagement with the physical world, decentralized networks, collective experience, and the creative potential of machines. Anadol’s work has been exhibited at venues including the Centre Pompidou-Metz, National Gallery of Victoria, Venice Architecture Biennale, Hammer Museum, Dongdaemun Design Plaza, Ars Electronica Festival, Istanbul Design Biennial, and ZKM | Center for Art and New Media. In 2018, Anadol collaborated with the Los Angeles Philharmonic for WDCH Dreams, a live audio-visual performance projected on façade of Frank Gehry’s iconic Walt Disney Concert Hall in celebration of the orchestra’s centennial. Refik Anadol: Unsupervised, the artist’s first solo North American museum presentation, opened at The Museum of Modern Art, New York on November 19, 2022.
Echo is the title of a solo exhibition at Regen Projects in Los Angeles that presents works by the artist Elliott Hundley. The show is a survey of works that Elliott Hundley created over the last 20 years. The presentation is inspired by Hundley’s Chinatown studio. It’s Elliott Hundley’s sixth solo exhibition at Regen Projects. A highlight of the show is Elliott Hundley’s work “Balcony,” a large-scale landscape collage that made its first appearance at Prospect.5 Triennial in New Orleans in 2021. Elliott Hundley (b. 1975, Greensboro, NC) received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1997 and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2005. He lives and works in Los Angeles.
Elliott Hundley: Echo / Regen Projects, Los Angeles. February 14, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Press text (excerpt):
Hundley’s liberal embrace of media and materials is on full display in Echo, which presents a concentrated, at times overlapping array of works including large-scale collages, freestanding and hanging sculptures, assemblages, paintings, photographs, ceramics, and works on paper. Into this dense field of symbols, icons, and forms, Hundley inserts items of personal significance he has collected over the years. Taken together, the overwhelming accumulation of objects and artworks teems with all manner of cultural debris, acting like thought clouds that give shape to the feverish affinities, attachments, and excesses of contemporary experience.
The exhibition is structured around a series of foam-covered walls that delineate the space and act as supports for hanging works. The foam serves, too, as fertile ground for intricate groupings of free-form collages which burst forth between and around the adjacent compositions. These interstitial arrangements encroach on the autonomous art object, subsuming it into the logic of the whole. In muddying the boundaries between studio and gallery, Hundley recasts the exhibition—and his practice—as an immense, life-size collage that is in a perpetual state of becoming.
A highlight of the critically acclaimed 2021–2022 Prospect.5 triennial in New Orleans, Hundley’s Balcony will also make its Los Angeles debut. Titled after Jean Genet’s 1956 satire, the work reenacts a moment from the play in which the division of fantasy and reality collapses and social codes are suspended. In Hundley’s Balcony, thousands of sundry images, both found and created, make their way across the panoramic expanse of canvas, pooling together into a porous landscape of signifiers that flicker between intimate self-portrait and collective unconscious. Like the balcony of Genet’s play, Hundley’s work is a compound space, at once real and surreal, microcosm and macrocosm, where queer and common, privileged and poor, bump up against and inhabit one another.
Elliott Hundley (b. 1975, Greensboro, NC) received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1997 and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2005. He lives and works in Los Angeles.
Hundley has been featured in numerous museum exhibitions in the US and abroad. Earlier this year, his work was presented in the 5th Prospect New Orleans triennial, Yesterday we said tomorrow (2021–2022). He has been the subject of solo exhibitions including Elliott Hundley: The Bacchae, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2011), which traveled to Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2012), and Hammer Projects: Elliott Hundley, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2006). Group exhibitions include Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2021); The Broad, Los Angeles (2018–2019); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2017–2018; 2016; 2011–2012; 2010–2011); 7th Moscow International Biennale of Contemporary Art (2017–2018); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2015–2016; 2013; 2010–2011; 2009–2010; 2007); Istanbul Museum of Modern Art (2015–2016); MOCA Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles (2011); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2011); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2010–2011; 2007); and Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010; 2007); among others.
Curatorial projects by the artist include Open House: Elliott Hundley, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2019) and Make-Shift-Future, Regen Projects, Los Angeles (2021).
He received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019.
Work by the artist is held in prominent museum collections including Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive; The Broad, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Istanbul Museum of Modern Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; Pérez Art Museum Miami; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Vancouver Art Gallery; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; among others.
Another year, another location: For the 2023 edition of Frieze Art Fair Los Angeles, the organizers have chosen the Santa Monica Airport. Frieze Los Angeles is divided into two sites: The East Site in a tent is showcasing galleries from across the world and the greater Los Angeles region; the West Site (Barker Hangar) features galleries that are presenting 20th-century art and the Focus section of the fair.
Frieze Los Angeles 2023, Santa Monica Airport, Los Angeles (USA), February 16, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
In this video, we attend the press preview of Spring/Break Art Show Los Angeles 2023. Now in its twelfth year, Spring/Break Art Show offers free exhibition space to independent curators and low cost for galleries. The 2023 theme of the show is “Naked Lunch”. The exhibition takes place at Skylight Culver City and runs from 16 to 19 February.
Spring/Break Art Show Los Angeles 2023. Press Preview, February 15, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Press text:
SPRING/BREAK Art Show is excited to return for its fourth Los Angeles edition during Frieze Week LA, from February 16 – 19, 2023, with a special First Look on February 15. The curator-driven fair will once again be staged in the Skylight Culver City factory space, featuring over 60 curator-led exhibitions under the Neo-Renaissance theme NAKED LUNCH.
Standout features of the SPRING/BREAK LA 2023 show include a performance and installation by actor Parker Love Bowling and video artist/musician Shane McKenzie centered around Bowling’s new book of poetry curated by Co-Founders Andrew Gori and Ambre Kelly; An exhibition curated by celebrated writer and filmmaker Chris Kraus of the work of Brigitte Engler; A movie poster exhibition of films associated with post-war screenwriter Fanya Foss, all oriented around the single Alice Neel painting that depicted, as its subject, Fanya’s humbler pre-Hollywood beginnings, curated by Cade Tompkins; For the adventurous, a ‘tattoo glory hole’ curated by Nora Lucia Boyd, with artist and licensed tattoo artist Kevin Hennessy accepting various body parts of willing participants through a cavity, leaving the resulting permanent tattoo application on the brave recipient entirely up to chance and the artist’s whim.
New this year will be a ‘SINGLE/PALM Award’ for Best Curation. The annual award is led by designer and former curator Carlton Dewoody, alongside a Curatorial Selection Committee with members from the film and art worlds.
The 2023 venue, Skylight Culver City, is an unexpected 40,000 square feet haven. Built in 1940, the industrial yet elegant site is nestled in the Arts District of Culver City, just a 15-minute drive from Frieze LA’s Santa Monica location. Following two successful West Coast editions in Downtown LA and one in Culver City last year, SPRING/BREAK has teamed up once again with Skylight Studios, whose mission is to unlock culturally significant buildings for groundbreaking exhibitions and celebrations.
“We’re thrilled to build on a meaningful and long-standing partnership with SPRING/BREAK Art Show. They combine their curatorial eye with the storied architectural bones, history and character of our venue,” said Stephanie Blake, CEO of Skylight Studios. “Skylight Culver City is the perfect place to showcase this year’s exhibitions, and we welcome the community to experience this beloved, artistic oasis in the heart of Los Angeles.”
2023 SPRING/BREAK LA CURATORS INCLUDE
Abigail Ogilvy Gallery, Adam Englander, Angelica Lorenzi + Hans Wendel, Anne-Laure Lemaitre, Ben Ward, Chris Kraus, Bryan de Roo, Cade Tompkins Projects, Casey Baden, Christopher Stout + Michael Gormley + Cory Dixon, Claire Foussard, Dan Halm, Fred Fleisher, Fred Mann Projects, Gallery 352, Gallery Urbane, Grace Bromley, Hannah Turpin, Heinz Patatzki, Jac Lahav, Jacob Rhodes + Katie Hector, Janet Loren Hill + Jonell Logan, Julia Curran + Melissa Vogley Woods, Katherine Rakoczy, Laura Horne, Lisa Levy + Phil Buehler, Mariana Peragallo + Thomas Martinez Pilnik, Maria Garcia-Vasquez, Michael Slenske, Normal Royal, Nora Boyd + Tyler Krasowski, Nora Martin-Hall, Patricia Sweetow Gallery, Paulina Bebecka, Peter Dudek, Peter Gynd, Paz, Rohksane Hovaida, Rufus Knight-Webb Gallery, Tara de la Garza, Track 16, TECHNE & more
2023 ARTIST SPOTLIGHT
Dasha Bazanova, David Alexander, Eva Mantell & Joel Beck, Greg Haberny, Lena Christakis, Lizzie Gill, Melissa Godoy-Nieto, Mike Chattam, Parker Bowling + Shane McKenzie, Ronan Day-Lewis, Sarah Bereza, Shelley Burgen, Takashi Horizaki.
SPRING/BREAK Art Show, New York City and Los Angeles’ curator-driven art fair, resumes its mission to offer free exhibition space in order to foster exploratory exhibitions in atypical art environments. By keeping overhead costs for independent curators low, their focus can be on emerging and mid-career artists, as well as installation, performance, interactive and video work.
SKYLIGHT is a placemaking and venue development firm for unique and significant real estate. Skylight identifies and transforms underutilized properties into flexible canvases for best in class brands in fashion, art, media, and technology. Founded in the wake of the 2008 recession, Skylight was born to provide creative, revenue-generating solutions to challenged real estate. With a portfolio spanning NY, LA, SF, Chicago, Detroit & Ontario, Skylight continues to provide proof of concept for property owners and brand partners alike by creating the foundations for the most innovative experiences and events.
Robert Grosvenor is one of the artists who were chosen for the 2022 Art Biennale in Venice, Italy. One of the works he presented there was an orange scooter inside an industrial shipping container with a gold interior. Robert Grosvenor’s installation at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York engages similar forms, materials, and ideas on an increased scale: an orange vehicle without wheels that sits directly on the floor, with ten bowling pins next to the vehicle. The installation has been on show from January 7-28, 2023.
Robert Grosvenor at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. New York, January 14, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Press text: A prolonged fascination with the aerodynamics of machinery and vehicular shapes informs the refined form and vibrant color of Grosvenor’s recent sculpture. This exhibition follows Grosvenor’s participation in the 2022 Venice Biennale, where the artist installed three large-scale sculptures. One of these, an untitled work dated 2018, presented an orange scooter inside an industrial shipping container with a gold interior. This mesmerizing and subtly elusive work informed the artist’s new installation at Paula Cooper Gallery, which engages similar forms, materials, and ideas on an increased scale. A vibrant orange vehicle without wheels sits directly on the floor. Adjacent to the vehicle, ten bowling pins are arranged in the triangular formation typical of the game. Positioned such that half of the triangle is directly in front of the vehicle, the composition is both deliberate and ambiguous, imparting a distinct strangeness. A series of photographs taken between 2000 and 2013 translates Grosvenor’s formal vocabulary into two-dimensional images of everyday life. As with his sculptures, the photographs blur the boundaries between found object and artwork, presenting a breadth of objects in striking, often comical, arrangements. Themes of automation, containment and architecture connect the images, which picture vehicles and structures so characteristic of Grosvenor that one wonders if he made them himself. The commanding horizontality, cropped perspectives and silhouetted subjects offer a compelling and uncanny alternate reality.
Kunsthalle Zürich has just opened the first comprehensive solo exhibition of the artist Pippa Garner (born in 1942 in Evanston, Illinois) in Europe. It offers insight into an extensive body of work spanning more than 50 years. Formerly known as Philip Garner, Pippa Garner is an artist and author known for making parody forms of consumer products, custom bicycles and automobiles, and publications such as The Better Living Catalog and Utopia—or Bust! Products for the Perfect World. One of Garner’s most significant works is the Backwards Car, a used Chevrolet where Garner removed the body from its chassis and flipped it around, so the car appeared to be driving backwards when it was moving forwards and vice-versa.
The exhibition in Zürich takes on and expands the exhibition on show at Kunstverein Munich in 2022. The exhibition is co-curated by the New-York based author Fiona Alison Duncan; the director of Kunstverein Munich, Maurin Dietrich; and the director of Kunsthalle Zürich, Daniel Baumann, in collaboration with the assistant curator of Kunsthalle Zürich, Otto Bonnen, and the artist Miriam Laura Leonardi. The exhibition runs until May 14, 2023, and runs concurrently with the exhibition Ibrahim El-Salahi: Pain Relief Drawings.
Pippa Garner: Act Like You Know Me / Kunsthalle Zürich. Introduction by co-curator Fiona Alison Duncan. Zürich (Switzerland), February 3, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Press text (excerpt):
Born in 1942 in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, Illinois, the U.S.-American artist and author formerly known as Philip Garner pushes back against systems of consumerism, marketing and waste and has created a dense body of work including drawing, performance, sculpture, video and installation over her five decade-spanning career.(1) Her uncompromising approach to life and practice has allowed her to interact with the worlds of illustration, editorial, television and art without ever quite becoming beholden to them.
The beginning of Garner’s public practice can be traced to her time serving as a U.S. Army Combat Artist in the Vietnam War and the years that directly followed. Drafted while working on an assembly line at a car plant, Garner was flown to Vietnam in 1966 with a foot soldier assignment, as the United States was escalating its presence overseas, enforcing an enlistment of thousands of young Americans per month. By chance, Garner was assigned to the 25th Infantry, the only division with a Combat Art Team (CAT). Learning of this program – which charged soldier and civilian artists with documenting the war in the forms of sketches, illustrations, and paintings to be collected by the U.S. Army for (in their words) ‘the annals of military history –’ Garner negotiated a position on the CAT team. This assignment would save her from having to engage in direct combat, if not from the trauma of war (in 2010, Garner was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia, a cancer caused by exposure to the chemical defoliant ‘Agent Orange’). Garner bided her time abroad by practicing a new, to her, art form: photography. Using cutting-edge Japanese cameras she had purchased in Saigon, Garner started taking personal photographs at every possible juncture. These images exhibit obsessions with subjects that would preoccupy Garner throughout the rest of her life and career, among them transport vehicles, architecture and urban design, candid street scenes, humorous street signs, satirical and sensual selfportraits, gender bending fashion and pets and animals.
After returning to the United States, Garner resumed her studies in the highly regarded Transportation Design department at ArtCenter, California, with plans to become a car stylist, but was swiftly expelled when, in 1969, she presented her year-end project, Kar-Mann (Half Human Half Car), a centaur-like sculpture featuring the front body of a slick silver automobile with the lower half of a nude human whose limbs are lifted like a dog mid-urination. Smooth and pale, the nude might be assumed to represent a cis female were it not for its attentively rendered penis and scrotum. Like most of Garner’s art objects – the hundreds of sculptures, wall works, design objects and garments she made between the late 1960s and the early 2010s – Kar-Mann (Half Human Half Car) was not professionally archived nor was it collected. Last seen by the artist in the 1970s, with the final outcome of the object unknown, what remains of Garner’s first intentional artwork are photographs, staged and shot by the artist herself.
Photography was Garner’s entry into a public, if ambiguously commercial, art practice. Following her expulsion from ArtCenter, Garner stayed in Los Angeles, working at a toy design firm. In her spare time, she biked around the sprawling city, taking photographs. Garner’s street scenes rarely have people in them. What we see, rather, are amusing DIY design choices and human design failures, including cars in states of deterioration or wild customisation as well as provocative and humorous bumper stickers and business signs. Upon seeing her portfolio, a colleague at the toy design firm suggested that Garner bring her photographs to the Los Angeles Times’ new Sunday supplement, West, a progressive magazine known for its art direction. West immediately started publishing Garner’s work, setting her on a course that would last until the early 21st century, when the internet subsumed advertising budgets previously allocated to print magazines and thus print’s ability to pay contributors a living wage.
Garner’s work for magazines – ranging from Esquire, Rolling Stone, Vogue, Playboy and Wet to Car & Driver and Arts & Architecture – have an interesting, shifting status as art. Initially published in the commercial venue of a popular magazine, the photographs, illustrations, performances and sculptures made for these pages were conceptually driven and fabricated by the artist’s hand with little to no editorial intervention. Never selling anything, but rather deconstructing the very idea of selling through satirical reflections on consumerism and contemporary American life, the work’s commercial placement alone precluded it, as Garner understood it, from being considered seriously in its day as art. “There was such a line of demarcation,” Garner explains, “between anything commercial and fine arts.” Garner was disappointed by this bias but more excited by a mass audience: “It became an obsession,” she recalls, “to put things in print and get thousands and thousands of people to see it.”
One of Garner’s most significant works, the Backwards Car, 1974, was facilitated by Esquire, which agreed to pay for a used Chevrolet, the body of which was removed from its chassis by Garner – who did all of the mechanical work herself – then flipped around and refastened, so the car appeared to be driving backwards when it was moving forwards and vice-versa. The most iconic photographs of the project show the accident-chancing automobile moving with traffic over San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge.
Stunts like the Backwards Car drew the attention of artists and the art world. Garner’s circle during the 1970s and early 1980s grew to include West Coast artists such as Ed Ruscha, Chris Burden, and the radical art and design collective Ant Farm, whom Garner would collaborate with. Another collaborator, the painter Nancy Reese, was a major influence. Trained in a fine art tradition, Reese – at once Garner’s creative and romantic partner – introduced her to contemporary art institutions and communities, as well as to the idea that Garner might identify as an artist herself.
Frequent collaborators, Reese modelled in many of Garner’s photographs while Reese painted her partner in turn. The couple were simultaneously exhibiting at the local level and in formidable institutions: together at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1980) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1984); separately at the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art (Garner in 1980, Reese in 1981); Garner at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (1984) and again the MOCA, Los Angeles (1985); and Reese at Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles (1986, 1987). Juggling high and low, Garner was also, at this time, enjoying mainstream attention as her inventive work in magazines evolved into three book deals: Philip Garner’s Better Living Catalog, 1982, Utopia or Bust: Products for the Perfect World, 1984, and Garner’s Gizmos & Gadgets, 1987. Promotion of these books segued into television appearances on talk shows, most notably the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson to which Garner wore her famous Half-Suit, 1982.
Garner had started gender hacking in 1984 by privately dosing on black market oestrogen. She later described the decision as an ‘aha’ moment of inspiration: “In my earlier work,” she explains, “I was always using objects that were consumer goods, things that came off assembly lines. I remember looking in the mirror one day – this was in the ’80s – and I thought, ‘Hey, I’m an object, too. I’m just another appliance.’” Gender, as Garner saw it, was the cornerstone of consumer identity, while the body was a technology, not so different from a car; why not reverse her own anatomy, as she had with that 1959 Chevy?
‘The concept of sex-change as a form of consumer technology began to intrigue me,’ Garner wrote in a 1995 journal entry. That same year she posted a personal ad in a local San Francisco back page that read ‘Post-op (I did it for art).’ These confident statements were a long time coming. Garner’s ‘sex change,’ as she called it (using the vocabulary of the times), was actually a decade-long process propelled by curiosity, intuition and desire, a personal and cultural experiment conducted with the uncertainty and risk intrinsic to the scientific method. Only later would she rightly call it art.
Garner never felt ‘born in the wrong body.’ When she first began hormone therapy there was no widespread concept of the in-betweens of gender, and no good terms for people who lived there. As she puts it, “You had to jump over the fence.” And so she did – from one binary (as Phil, Garner had presented as hyper masculine) to another (for a handful of years, she tried living as a high femme), only to land somewhere in the middle; that is, removing ‘the fence’ altogether. We now have language for someone like Garner, terms such as nonbinary, genderqueer and transgender. (Garner likes the word transgender but prefers the ancient term androgyny over the more contemporary nonbinary.) Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, Garner’s approach to gender transition was often misunderstood, resulting in isolation from both old friends who missed ‘Phil’ and select LGBTQ+ community members who found Garner’s irreverent relationship to gender to be a mockery. Intelligent and entertaining, Garner was never short of allies, however. She continued to be employed by loyal editors as an illustrator for magazines, doing the back page of Los Angeles Magazine then Car & Driver. Having left Los Angeles for the more inclusive queer bastion of San Francisco and the Bay area, she expressed herself through personal ads and appearances in local newspapers and radio. She also documented every aspect of her transition in photography and writing, taking intimate selfportraits, journaling deeply and collecting legal documents by and correspondences with her therapists and surgeons (she considers her many procedures to be ‘collaborations’ with those doctors).
During this time, Garner’s relationship with cars went through a simultaneous transition. Always ambivalent – critical yet obsessed with cars – by 1990, her attachment was chinking away, exemplified by Protect the Innocent, a bright yellow 1960s Toyota from which she removed as much of the exterior body as she could safely (one of the few large-scale works of Garner’s to survive, Protect the Innocent is collected by the artist Paul McCarthy.) For her last gesture with an actual commercial car, Garner applied, in 1995, for the custom license plate SX CHNGE, a petition that was denied by the Department of Motor Vehicles who wrote ‘the plate configuration request… maybe [sic] considered by some of our citizens to be offensive or misleading.’ Garner resubmitted a request – which was approved – for the plate HE 2 SHE. These were art gestures though; in terms of personal use, cars had taken a back seat to pedal vehicles for Garner for a long time, and in the 1990s, she finally quit driving altogether. Denouncing the oil industry, wars abroad, suburban alienation and land waste, Garner also concluded that she simply preferred to self-propel, using her own body as engine and fuel.
While prolifically productive at a local and personal level, Garner’s professional art career was practically non-existent from 1986 to 2014. She only exhibited once, in 1997, as part of Hello Again!, a recycled art show at the Oakland Museum. Gender discrimination accounts, in part, for this temporary exile. Since Garner was never one to pursue institutional opportunities herself, it was up to curators and fellow artists to recognize Garner as belonging to the museum and gallery system. A confluence of cultural updates set the stage for Garner’s recent rediscovery, not only the dawning of a new, expansive queer and feminist consciousness, the Internet and social media also further flattened the distinctions between mediums and fields, resulting in a generation unperturbed by Garner’s eclectic transdisciplinary manifestations.
What the exhibition Act Like You Know Me proves is that Garner lived a life of constant, obsessive art making. Looking back, we can read Garner’s vast works as united under a cohesive conceptual practice, whether they first premiered in a magazine, a book or a local paper; on television; in a gallery or museum; in the streets; on her body; or nowhere but the privacy of Garner’s often solitary life. The idea that Garner is a conceptual artist is not new. In his 2006 book Full Moon, artist Paul Ruscha, Ed Ruscha’s brother, reflects on the 1980s Los Angeles art world, writing that Garner ‘was regarded by all as the mad genius of conceptual art.’ While previous exhibitions have tended to focus on the materiality of Garner’s satirical consumer propositions and her persona as ‘an inventor’ or ‘absurdist’– to reduce her to roles she had performed while engaging with 20th century publishing and commercial art markets – Act Like You Know Me rather aims to position Garner in the tradition of conceptual art. “Inventor,” as she has confided to writer and the co-curator of this exhibition Fiona Alison Duncan, was a label and character she had played with that the media repeated as her truth, so she ran with it. ‘My behavior,’ the artist penned in one of her many notebooks, ‘is a reflection of the culture.’
The cyclical nature of the material world and the mystery of immateriality are the true bedrocks of Garner’s practice. This comes through in her reliance on found and recycled materials and in her habit of destroying, recycling and/or giving away what she has made. The Backwards Car was shredded. More often than not, she has refused financial compensation in the acquisition of her art. Even her ‘inventions’ – clever consumer goods she fabricated once as an object to be photographed or illustrated as a simple pitch – were never designed for mass-production. Published in catalogue form with no purchase forms, Garner’s products reflected the absurdity and the waste of overproduction and overconsumption; at the same time, Garner allowed herself and her audience to delight in ideation, perhaps the most pleasant stage of creation and consumption. The few covetable products Garner proposed tended to be those that a person could craft themselves, just as Garner had, for example, the Half-Suit and other fashion items, versions of which have turned up in high fashion collections since.
A look into Garner’s ascetic personal life and career indecision reveals a rigorous detachment from bourgeois comforts, binary gender included. Her androgyny-centred transition emerges as but another manifestation of her experimental attitude, transpersonal identity, prankish sense of humour and deep connection to the transitory nature of material life. Fluidity and flux shape Garner’s practice of altering materials of mass production, and that includes mass produced synthetic hormones, plastic surgery and cosmetics. Whatever satire on gender Garner’s multiple performances of the self serve, they do not negate the experiential realities of sexuality and gender identity but find pleasure rather in their multiplicity and in the power of self-determination, while playfully calling out class bias: how gender is often packaged as desirable through its association with wealth and power. ‘I’d be more beautiful,’ one of her earliest slogan t-shirts reads, ‘but I ran out of money.’
Playing in and with the refuse of capitalism, from the disposable print matter of magazines to thrifted t-shirts, Garner’s personal and art-vocational choices are, without abandoning society altogether, remarkably sustainable. More than sustainable in the last two decades: biking and making art mostly from scraps, it’s as if she has been living after the climate apocalypse or in a culture determined to prevent it. This is the California counterculture hippie ethic carried into the 21st century, an ethic that most people of Garner’s demographic abandoned a long time ago in favour of complicity with financial and consumer capitalism.
Thankfully, for all her anti-materialist persuasion, Garner had enough of an attachment to the world to maintain an archive of her life’s work in the forms of photographic slides, drawings, select garments and ephemera. It is these materials that make up the exhibition Act Like You Know Me, a survey of Garner’s practice from the late 1960s to the early 2000s with a focus on the artist’s wild, extensive photographs that both have the status of autonomous works as well as documentation of her practice.
Text: Fiona Alison Duncan.
Act Like You Know Me was at Kunstverein München from 24 September–13 November 2022 and will be on show at 49 Nord 6 Est – Frac Lorraine in Metz from February–September this year.
With warm thanks to David Matorin.
(1) The pronouns she/her have been used throughout this text in relation to Garner as those are her current pronouns, however it would be just as accurate and respectful of Garner’s gender identity to alternate between he/him and she/her, depending on the time in Garner’s life, or to rely on the androgynous pronouns they/them.
Pippa Garner herself uses the name Phil/Philip. It is not a dead name, the artist regards her ‘past life’ or ‘previous identity’, as she calls it, fondly. She is androgynous, non-binary and genderqueer in her trans-ness, not someone who believes they were born in the wrong body, given the wrong gender assignment or given the wrong name at birth.
Running concurrently with the Pippa Garner retrospective, Kunsthalle Zürich is presenting a selection of drawings by the Sudanese artist Ibrahim El-Salahi. Ibrahim El-Salahi is renowned as one of the key figures of African Modernism. El-Salahi was one of the first artists to deliberately try to un-learn the art of Europe (where he had studied at Oxford) in order, from the end of the 1950s onwards, to arrive at a new art through his head-on engagement with his origins and Sudanese traditions. In 2013, El-Salahi was honored with a solo exhibition at Tate Modern in London. In 2023 he participated in the Venice Art Biennale.
Kunsthalle Zürich now presents a group of 89 small-format drawings that Ibrahim El-Salahi calls Pain Relief Drawings. The are drawn on medicine packets or envelopes. El-Salahi started the series in 2016 when back pain reduced his mobility and caused him to rely on medication for relief. The exhibition runs until May 14, 2023.
Ibrahim El-Salahi: Pain Relief Drawings / Kunsthalle Zürich. Introduction by Daniel Baumann (Curator and Director, Kunsthalle Zürich). Zürich (Switzerland), February 3, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Exhibition text (excerpt):
Ibrahim El-Salahi is renowned as one of the key figures of African Modernism. This is true, but only half the story. It is true that El-Salahi founded his own ‘school’, the so-called Karthum School, and travelled throughout the USA, Mexico and Brazil in the 1960s, where he met the artists of the Spiral Group, as well as Rufino Tamayo and many others. He was indeed a cultural attaché for Sudan and later the Sudanese Director of Culture, as well as being a member of the legendary Mbari Club in Nigeria with future Nobel laureates Wole Soyinka and Nagib Mahfuz. And in 1976, El-Salahi was imprisoned for six months without charge in connection with an attempted coup he had nothing to do with, before going into exile in Qatar, where he worked as an advisor to the Emir.
Above all, El-Salahi was one of the first artists to deliberately try to un-learn the art of Europe (where he had studied at Oxford) in order, from the end of the 1950s onwards, to arrive at a new art through his head-on engagement with his origins and Sudanese traditions. This is what makes him more relevant today than ever. El-Salahi is a key figure of Modernism per se, for his work reflects an entire century with its ruptures, hopes and claims. Not least because of this, El-Salahi was honoured with a solo exhibition at Tate Modern in his adopted home, Great Britain, in 2013.
The Kunsthalle Zürich does not have the capacity to stage a comprehensive retrospective of Ibrahim El-Salahi’s sixty-year oeuvre. Instead, we are showing a precise selection: a group of 89 small-format Pain Relief Drawings, which the artist has been creating since 2016. At first glance they appear light and ludic, as if they drawings made in passing while on the telephone. But they are much more than absent-minded occupation. Drawn on medicine packets or envelopes, the Pain Relief Drawings are focused, concentrated miniatures of the kind that thought, drawing a line, produces: associative, agile and meditative.
‘It’s that when I am drawing, my mind is concentrated and I can forget about the pain. […] It’s a mental thing – when I concentrate, my mind goes from the pain to what I am drawing. Drawing for me is a kind of meditation.’ (Ibrahim El-Salahi in conversation with Anna Macnay, Studio International, 26/06/2019)
‘Drawing has continued to be the focus of El-Salahi’s production over the last several decades, and in the past five years he has created an extraordinary series of small works that he calls “pain relief drawings.” El-Salahi started the series in 2016 when back pain reduced his mobility and caused him to rely on medication for relief. A diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease further hampered his movement and added to his intake of prescription drugs. As he explained in an interview from 2019, “I am surrounded by packets of medicine, so I said, ‘What a waste. Why don’t I use them?’ I started opening them and chopping them to size, and I started working on them. I had a number of pens with waterproof and fade-proof ink, which the material of those kinds of packages takes very nicely.” In the past half-decade, El-Salahi has produced hundreds of Pain Relief drawings, despite his advanced age and compromised physical ability. Throughout his career, El-Salahi has emphasized the connection that exists for him between making art and praying, as if the act of creation carries with it some spiritual power to comfort and maybe even to heal.’ (Laura Hoptman, in Ibrahim El-Salahi: Pain Relief Drawings, p. 12)
Biography:
Ibrahim El-Salahi, a key figure in the development of African Modernism, is born in 1930 in Omdurman, Sudan. His father, a Sufi scholar, is in charge of a Qur’anic school, where El-Salahi learns to read and write and to practice the Arabic calligraphy that later becomes an important element in his artwork.
From 1949–1950, he studies Fine Art at the School of Design of the Gordon Memorial College, which later becomes the University of Khartoum. With the help of a scholarship he subsequently goes to the Slade School of Fine Art in London from 1954–1957. At the London art school El-Salahi is exposed to a European education system and the works of artists that gradually influence his art.
In 1957, he returns to Sudan to teach in Khartoum. His time at the College of Fine and Applied Arts there sparks a movement now known as the Khartoum School, of which El-Salahi is one of the founders. Trying to connect to his heritage, El-Salahi begins to fill his work with symbols and small Arabic inscriptions. As he incorporates Arabic calligraphy into his work, symbols begin to produce animals, humans and plant forms, lending his artwork new meaning. El-Salahi combines European artistic styles with traditional Sudanese themes.
In 1962, El-Salahi receives a UNESCO scholarship to study in the United States, from where he visits South America. From 1964–1965 he returns to the US with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1966 he leads the Sudanese delegation during the first World Festival of Black Arts in Dakar, Senegal. El-Salahi is equally part of the Sudanese delegation at the first Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers in 1969. Both of these events are significant in the development of modern African art.
From 1969–1972 El-Salahi is assistant cultural attaché at the Sudanese Embassy in London. After that, he returns to Sudan as Director of Culture in Jaafar Nimeiri’s government, then is Undersecretary in the Ministry of Culture and Information until September 1975. That year he is imprisoned for six months and eight days without trial, accused of participating in an anti-government coup.
El-Salahi is stripped of his freedom in Kober Prison in Khartoum: prisoners are not allowed to write or draw and if a prisoner were to be caught with paper or pencil, he would be punished with solitary confinement for fifteen days. Despite this, El-Salahi is able to get his hands on a pencil and brown paper bags. El-Salahi is released on 16 March 1976 and does not keep any of the drawings he made; he leaves them where they were hidden, buried in sand within the prison. Confined to house arrest, he rents a house in the Banat region of Omdurman for a short period of time. Two years after his release from prison he makes himself an exile from Sudan and for 20 years lives and works in Doha, Qatar, before finally settling in Oxford, United Kingdom, where he currently lives.
Ibrahim El-Salahi: Pain Relief Drawings is organized by Laura Hoptman, Executive Director at The Drawing Center, New York, and is curated at Kunsthalle Zürich by Daniel Baumann, Director / Curator.
Alex Katz: Gathering at the Guggenheim Museum in New York is major retrospective that spans eight decades of American artist Alex Katz’s career. The exhibition features portraits, social scenes, and landscapes. The retrospective runs until February 20, 2023 and includes paintings, oil sketches, collages, prints, and freestanding “cutout” works.
Alex Katz: Gathering / Guggenheim Museum New York. January 15, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Press text (excerpt):
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents Alex Katz: Gathering, a career retrospective staged in the city where Katz has lived and worked his entire life, and prepared with the close collaboration of the artist. On view from October 21, 2022, through February 20, 2023, the exhibition fills the museum’s Frank Lloyd Wright–designed rotunda and an adjacent Tower Gallery. Encompassing paintings, oil sketches, collages, prints, and freestanding “cutout” works, the show opens with the artist’s intimate sketches of riders on the New York City subway from his student days in the 1940s and culminates in the rapturous and immersive landscapes that have dominated his output in recent years.
Across eight decades of intense creative production, Alex Katz (b. 1927, Brooklyn, New York) has sought to capture visual experience in the present tense. Writing in 1961, Katz noted that “Eternity exists in minutes of absolute awareness. Painting, when successful, seems to be a synthetic reflection of this condition.” Whether evoking a glancing exchange between friends or a shaft of light filtered through trees, he has aimed to create a record of “quick things passing,” compressing the flux of everyday life into a vivid burst of optical perception.
Emerging as an artist in the mid-20th century, Katz forged a mode of figurative painting that fused the energy and distillation of Abstract Expressionist canvases with the American vernaculars of the magazine, billboard, and movie screen. He has turned to his direct surroundings in downtown New York City and coastal Maine as his primary subject matter throughout his career, engaging the traditional painterly subjects of portraiture, genre scenes of everyday life, and landscape.
The exhibition’s title, Gathering, references the study of the visible world evoked in the 1951 poem “Salute” by Katz’s admired friend James Schuyler. Equally, it summons the notion of a lifetime of work assembled within the structure of a retrospective, and the gathering of Katz’s sitters within the uniquely open space of the rotunda. Whether depicting individuals or social groups, Katz’s portraits document an evolving community of poets, artists, dancers, musicians, and critics who have animated a downtown avant-garde since the midcentury, including Frank O’Hara, Robert Rauschenberg, Paul Taylor, LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), Joe Brainard, Kynaston McShine, Anne Waldman, John Ashbery, Meredith Monk, Allen Ginsberg, Mariko Mori, Bill T. Jones, and Joan Jonas. A number of portrait subjects recur in the course of the loosely chronological installation, most notably Ada Katz, the accomplished research biologist and Fulbright scholar whom the artist married in 1958 and has depicted over a thousand times since. Described by the poet Frank O’Hara as “a presence and at the same time a pictorial conceit of style,” Ada functions as the iconographic heart of Katz’s work, a physiognomy and a subjectivity studied across the arc of both the subject’s individual life and the artist’s creative development.
The exhibition is accompanied by a scholarly catalogue, featuring eleven newly commissioned essays by David Breslin, Katherine Brinson, Jennifer Y. Chuong, David Max Horowitz, Arthur Jafa, Katie Kitamura, Wayne Koestenbaum, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Kevin Lotery, Prudence Peiffer, and Levi Prombaum. In addition to an extensive plates section and comprehensive exhibition and publication histories, the book contains a Sourcebook of 36 reviews, texts, and poems from an eminent group of writers who have responded to Katz’s work at different points in his career, cohering into an illuminating document of the artist’s rich and mutable critical reception from the 1950s to the present day.
A series of digital productions will complement the retrospective, including a newly captured and intimate video portrait of the artist at work and an audio guide highlighting observations by Guggenheim curators and notable sitters who appear in Katz’s paintings, including choreographer Bill T. Jones, poet Vincent Katz, composer Meredith Monk, and poet Anne Waldman.
“[Katz is] such an honest person,” shares Monk for the audio guide. “And I think his art has an honesty. And I think his work has a lot of love in it, but it doesn’t have to be explicit. The love is implicit, because he chooses what he loves to paint. [Laughs] You know, that’s the key. His love is in his choice of his subject matter, but he doesn’t have to do anything more than just have it be what it is. And then the love comes through.”
The guide also features the Guggenheim’s collaboration with the music house West Channel, with original compositions inspired by Katz’s paintings by Rena Anakwe, Peter Bayne, Oli Chang, Elori Saxl, Michael Sempert, and Hoshiko Yamane. Visitors can enjoy a 40-minute version of these pieces while moving through the show.
Furthermore, Works & Process will present the Paul Taylor Dance Company in the Guggenheim on October 25–26 for three special performances of Polaris, a 1976 collaboration choreographed by Paul Taylor and set and costumes designs by Alex Katz. Selected for the museum’s rotunda by Michael Novak, Paul Taylor Dance Company Artistic Director, these performances of Polaris will offer audiences a unique and unprecedented opportunity to see Taylor and Katz’s sculptural collaboration—normally performed on a proscenium stage—in the round. On October 27, a public program exploring three decades of their collaboration will take place at the New York Library for the Performing Arts, hosted by Works & Process and the Library’s Jerome Robbins Dance Division.
Alex Katz: Gathering is organized by Katherine Brinson, Daskalopoulos Curator, Contemporary Art, with Terra Warren, Curatorial Assistant, and with additional support from Andrea Zambrano, Curatorial Assistant.
“A Simple Prophecy” is the title of Berlinde De Bruyckere‘s current solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Zurich, Limmatstrasse. The show features new bronze and lead sculptures from the Arcangelo series. On display are also a selection of monumental, framed relief works and paper collages from Berlinde De Bruyckere’s “It almost seemed a lily” series. The exhibition runs until May 13, 2023.
Berlinde De Bruyckere: A Simple Prophecy / Hauser & Wirth Zurich. January 26, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Press text (excerpt):
Presenting a powerful meditation upon the fundamental human search for transformation, transcendence and reconciliation in the light of mortality, De Bruyckere’s forthcoming exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Zurich, Limmatstrasse will feature new bronze and lead sculptures from the Arcangelo series. Alongside these, a selection of monumental, framed relief works and paper collages from the artist’s It almost seemed a lily series will be shown. Spanning both painting and sculpture, De Bruyckere works with wax, animal skins, paper, textiles, metal and wood to create hybrid forms with human, animal and plant features. Layering religious iconography and ancient mythology with narratives of transience, carnality and sensuality, Berlinde De Bruyckere surpasses religious connotations and transfers them to the realm of the universal and profane.
Placed high on plinths, De Bruyckere’s Arcangeli cast in bronze and lead offer protection, in spite of the heavy burden they seem to carry; captured in a dynamic moment of imbalance, tilting slightly forward, they are at once about to rise up yet are weighed down. Hovering between divine supremacy and human fragility, these mysterious, hybrid figures merge distinct human figuration with animal hides, revealing pointed protrusions at the shoulders that reinforce the suggestion of wings. These beings appear to carry a dark secret under their cloak of fluidly-draped skins and conjure an image as consoling and inviting as it is unnerving.
A powerful tribute to the healthcare workers and caregivers who have provided vital, indispensable consolation and care to millions over the last two years, these works exceed the artist’s long-standing interest in Old Masters and Christian iconography. As the artist movingly stated, ‘Fortunately, there are angels amongst us. I see them everywhere now. … The archetype of the angel, an archaic figure, is entering our lives in a very concrete manner.’ In the work ‘Liggende – Arcangelo I, 2022-2023’, De Bruyckere presents a ‘fallen’ Arcangelo, a figure lying on a monumental tomb-like pedestal topped with a thin layer of black lino, carrying the figure like a separate entity. The use of a zinc sheet for the outer material of the base was inspired by Victorian lead coffins. The idea for the fallen Arcangelo arose from the question the artist asked herself: ‘how much of the other’s burden can one person carry, before they themselves collapse?’ A larger version of the Arcangelo sculptures is on view at the newly reopened Diözesanmuseum Freising in Germany, responding to the museum’s collection of late Gothic sculptures.
Following her recent critically-acclaimed exhibitions at MO.CO. Montpellier Contemporain, France (2022) and the Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck in Remagen, Germany (2022), the artist will also present works from her It almost seemed a lily series. Inspired by the richly decorated Enclosed Gardens from Mechelen, Belgium, De Bruyckere realized her own large-scale versions of these 16th-century private altars for worship and meditation. Traditionally made using textiles, silk threads, pearls and semi-precious stones, De Bruyckere, instead, elevates found materials to create her monumental interpretations. Permeated with their own history, wallpaper and blankets provide the backdrop to the flowers and petals, framed by oak planking from the 18th Century. Dominated by the figure of the withering flower, ‘It almost seemed a lily V, 2018’ (2018) and ‘It almost seemed a lily IV, 2017-2018’ (2018) show the intertwining of nature and history and offer an overriding sense of fragility in the way they are assembled and layered. ‘I connect the petals of the lilies to images of skin, of flesh; their fragrance to lust and pleasure; their unsavoury smell while wilting to ephemerality and pain,’ the artist explains. The series derives its title from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to describe the purple-coloured flower into which the mortal Hyacinthus – beloved by the god Apollo – was transformed on his tragic death: ‘behold the blood / of Hyacinthus, which had poured out on / the ground beside him and there stained the grass, / was changed from blood; and in its place a flower, / more beautiful than Tyrian dye, sprang up. / It almost seemed a lily, were it not / that one was purple and the other white.’ In light of this, the works transcend the spiritual undertones of the Enclosed Gardens and speak of sublimated desire.
This sense of frailty is also explored in the artist’s new collages of the same name, composed using abstract petals cut from found tracing papers used for embroidery and embossed with flower patterns, which the artist layers and sutures together. Unable to glue the sheets together due to their fragility and transparency, the stitched collages are a prime example of the materials in the work dictating the artistic process, similar to the decision to tie wax flowers to the wall sculptures with rope. There are two groups of collages in the series: one consisting purely of found sheets of tracing paper, the other where the artist has coloured in the flowers with black graphite, erasing or modifying pre-existing shapes into phallic motifs. This erotic reading of the work is deepened with the inclusion of gold dust, referencing pollen and symbolising fertility: ‘I was in my room after a day of work, hanging the drawings to take a proper look at them, when the glossy black graphite caught the light in a very particular way,’ remarks De Bruyckere. ‘There was a flicker in the darkness, like shimmering gold, that threw me back to the gold covered figurines in the Enclosed Gardens; to the Virgin Mary holding the unicorn in her lap. Like pieces of a puzzle coming together.’
About the artist
Born in Ghent, Belgium in 1964, where she currently lives and works, De Bruyckere is profoundly influenced by traditions of the Flemish Renaissance. Drawing from the legacies of the European Old Masters and religious iconography, as well as mythology and cultural lore, De Bruyckere layers existing histories with new narratives suggested by current events to create a psychological terrain of pathos, tenderness and unease. The vulnerability and fragility of man, the suffering body—both human and animal—and the overwhelming power of nature are some of the core motifs of De Bruyckere’s oeuvre.
Since her first exhibition in the mid-eighties, De Bruyckere’s sculptures and drawings have been the subject of numerous exhibitions in major institutions worldwide. These include ‘Berlinde De Bruyckere. PEL / Becoming the figure’, Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck, Remagen, Germany (2022); ‘Berlinde De Bruyckere. Plunder / Ekphrasis’, MO.CO. Montpellier Contemporain, Montpellier, France (2022); ‘Berlinde De Bruyckere. Engelenkeel’, Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht, The Netherlands (2021); ‘Berlinde De Bruyckere’, Middelheimmuseum, Antwerp, Belgium (2020); ‘Berlinde De Bruyckere. ALETHEIA’, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy (2019); ‘Berlinde De Bruyckere. It almost seemed a lily’, Museum Hof van Busleyden, Mechelen, Belgium (2018); ‘Embalmed’, Kunsthal Aarhus, Aarhus, Denmark (2017); ‘Berlinde De Bruyckere. Suture’, Leopold Museum, Vienna, Austria (2016); ‘Berlinde De Bruyckere. The Embalmer’, Kunstraum Dornbirn, Dornbirn, Austria (2015)’; and ‘Berlinde De Bruyckere. The Embalmer’ Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz, Austria (2015). In 2013, De Bruyckere was selected to represent Belgium at the 55th Venice Biennale where she unveiled her monumental work ‘Kreupelhout – Cripplewood’.
The American painter Wayne Thiebaud (1920-2021) is considered as one of the leading exponents of American figurative art, in the tradition of painters such as Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe. Thiebaud is known for his colorful works depicting commonplace objects as well as for his landscapes and figure paintings. Because of his interest in objects of mass culture he is also associated with the pop art movement. The Fondation Beyeler currently presents a retrospective of Wayne Thiebaud’s work that features 65 paintings and drawings, organized by themes, including still lifes, figure paintings, cityscapes and river landscapes. The exhibition has been curated by Ulf Küster, Senior Curator at the Fondation Beyeler. Wayne Thiebaud at Fondation Beyeler runs until May 21, 2023.
Wayne Thiebaud / Retrospective at Fondation Beyeler. Press preview, January 27, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Press text (excerpt):
This spring, the Fondation Beyeler presents the first major solo exhibition in the German-speaking world devoted to the remarkable American painter Wayne Thiebaud (1920–2021), until now virtually unknown in Europe. Thiebaud’s still lifes of everyday objects rendered in seductive pastel shades are powerful evocations of the promise and profusion of the “American way of life”. At the same time, his striking portraits, multi- perspective cityscapes and landscapes showcase the painter’s versatility and dazzling technique. Featuring 65 paintings and drawings on loan from mainly American public and private collections, the retrospective presents Thiebaud’s most important bodies of work and invites viewers to discover his unique painting style and his tactile handling of colour. Celebrated in the United States for his still lifes, Thiebaud explored the possibilities of painterly expression at the limit between the world as we see and as we imagine it, developing a distinctive visual idiom that balances irony, humour, nostalgia and melancholy.
Wayne Thiebaud ranks among the leading exponents of American figurative art, in the tradition of painters such as Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe. He developed an early interest in comics and cartoons, briefly worked in the animation department of Walt Disney Studios and later as a commercial artist. From 1949 to 1953, he studied fine art at San José State University and California State University in Sacramento. He held teaching positions all his life and trained several generations of artists. Thiebaud operated at a remove from the major art capitals and remained independent of successively dominant artistic movements. On account of his interest in the objects of popular culture, he is often regarded as an exponent of Pop Art, a label that he himself consistently rejected. In view of his distinctive take on the aesthetics of mass production and his firm focus on painting, Thiebaud might rather be considered a precursor of Pop Art. He himself named Diego Velázquez, Paul Cézanne, Henri Rousseau and Piet Mondrian as major touchstones, yet as a cartoonist he was also strongly influenced by commercial artists and poster designers.
Thiebaud’s paintings feature many motifs drawn from everyday life in modern-day America, from gumball machines to brightly coloured cakes and convoluted highway entanglements, often bathed in West Coast sunshine. At first glance, his images appear almost blatant and self-explanatory. Looking more closely, however, another level reveals itself. The compositions comprise countless combinations of oftentimes intensely vibrant colours, which take precedence over the motif itself. For Thiebaud, the boundaries between representation and abstraction were fluid: with his precise and sophisticated use of colour, he subjected all the elements in an image to a process of abstraction. His interest thus centred mainly on the possibilities of painting, and especially of colour.
The exhibition presents Thiebaud’s main bodies of work organised by themes, including still lifes, figure paintings, cityscapes and river landscapes. The show opens with three key works: Student, 1968, 35 Cent Masterworks, 1970, and Mickey Mouse, 1988. Thiebaud’s Mickey Mouse shows his attachment to early American pop culture. The cartoon character can be viewed as a counter-project to the traditional Western canon of art and is the very quintessence of “pop”. With Student, Thiebaud showcased the principles of portrait painting. It features a young woman sitting on a chair facing the viewer, seemingly looking out at us. Yet despite her intent gaze, on closer scrutiny her individuality begins to blur as the effect of the painting’s colours supersedes the perception of her person. The closer we move to the painting, the more pronounced this effect becomes, until finally all the young woman’s individual features seem to dissolve into myriads of vibrant colour combinations. In 35 Cent Masterworks, Thiebaud has assembled his artistic influences. Twelve significant works of art history are shown neatly lined up on a newspaper rack. According to the sign above them, Mondrian’s Tableau No. IV, Monet’s Waterlilies and Picasso’s Nature morte à la guitare are all to be had for a mere 35 cents. Thiebaud, who was well-versed in art history, is humorously questioning the “value” of the very masterpieces he admires, while also addressing the relation between originals and reproductions. It is further interesting to note the parallels between Thiebaud’s choice of works and the collection of the Fondation Beyeler.
One entire room of the exhibition is dedicated to Thiebaud’s best-known body of work, his still lifes. Rows upon rows of sweet treats can be seen prettily arranged on plates and in various displays. Toys, stuffed animals and ice cream cones recall the greatest temptations of childhood. In Pie Rows, 1961, several slices of pie are lined up behind and alongside one another, forming a pattern. For viewers, their sugary seductiveness is at once soothing and overwhelming. Thiebaud thereby exposes the supposed innocuousness of the food items and the objects he depicts and unmasks their sheer availability as a significant driver of our consumer behaviour.
Another room is dedicated to the motif of slot machines. Jackpot, 2004, features a so-called one-armed bandit, which holds the promise of big winnings in exchange for just a few coins. Not unlike the slices of pie, this still life lures us with the prospect of having our secret cravings sated. Closing this series of still lifes, shiny paint pots dripping with paint and colourful pastel crayons grant us an almost intimate glimpse of another motif: the artist’s everyday working life and his painting utensils.
Thiebaud’s figure paintings echo his still lifes: while the figures are depicted in a realistic manner, they are shown in unusual, static poses—submerged up to the neck in a bathtub, kneeling alongside each other in bathing suits or eating ice cream. Girl with Pink Hat, 1973, takes its cue from prominent Renaissance portraits by artists such as Sandro Botticelli or Giorgione. Yet unlike these forebears, here complementary contrasts and vibrantly colourful contours serve to make the girl and her pink hat shine. By contrast, Eating Figures, 1963, displays the comic streak to be found in so many of Thiebaud’s images: a man in a suit and a woman in a dress are sitting very close together on bar stools, looking forlornly at the hot dogs in their hands. The painting uses irony to lead the craving for fast food and the pleasure of tucking into this popular snack ad absurdum.
Thiebaud’s cityscapes and landscapes are less well known. Rock Ridge, 1962, and Canyon Mountains, 2011/12, show precipitous rock faces plunging down off high plateaus featuring at times highly detailed landscapes. In the 1960s, Thiebaud began painting landscapes. He focussed on dizzying views of San Francisco, flattened bird’s-eye views of the Sacramento River Delta and imposing panoramas of the peaks and mountain ranges of the Sierra Nevada. The abysses painted by Thiebaud give the impression of falling into the depths of colour itself. His cityscapes are mainly inspired by San Francisco, a city whose rollercoaster hills and steep streets he captures in imaginative compositions featuring sharp contrasts and commanding diagonals. Street views are dizzyingly tilted upward, leaving the astonished viewer to wonder as to their sheer practicability, be it on foot or by car. These are symbolic images of contemporary urban landscapes in the United States, with their dense networks of roads and conurbations in which even the most inhospitable natural environments are technologically conquered by man and yet appear strangely deserted. Later paintings such as Ponds and Streams, 2001, Flood Waters, 2006/2013, or White Riverscape, 2008–2010, feature artificial lakes and rivers. Beginning in the 1990s, the expanses of intensively farmed land near his home in Sacramento inspired Thiebaud to produce a series of panorama- like landscape paintings. Ponds and Streams features a typical Northern Californian agrarian landscape, far removed from the region’s better-known tourist spots. Yet the fields, the clusters of trees and the water reservoirs do not exactly replicate local topography. Rather, they combine to form a fragmentary composition, pieced together from a wealth of recollections and defamiliarised by the use of pastel hues.
In his paintings, Thiebaud drew on impressions from his life. His shimmering colours, harmonious contrasts and vibrant lines bring pastries, landscapes and people to life in a unique manner. Even though his images appear playful and ironic—they make us smile, entertain us or revive our childlike sense of wonder in much the same way comics do—they also carry a nostalgic, melancholy edge. Past our initial delight at the sight of opulent pastry displays and shelves of stuffed toys, a tinge of unexpected sadness comes upon us, a yearning for a bygone world or a long-lost love. Beyond this nostalgic longing, Thiebaud’s images also trigger a sense of oppression and unease, ignited by the artificiality of his still lifes, figures and landscapes. Especially in view of current societal developments, the absence from his depictions of all that is natural and wholesome is felt acutely; for all their colourful temptations, Thiebaud’s images can therefore also be perceived as sites of artificiality, loneliness and toxicity.
Wayne Thiebaud was born on 15 November 1920 in Mesa, Arizona, and grew up mainly in Long Beach, California. His ancestors had been among the first Mormon settlers to make a new home for themselves in Utah in the mid-nineteenth century. During the Great Depression, Thiebaud and his family temporarily moved back to Utah to manage a farm. In 1935, Thiebaud began attending high school, where he drew caricatures of his classmates and teachers. He spent the summer of 1936 working in Walt Disney Studios’ animation department, where he learned among other things to draw Mickey Mouse. While serving in the army, he worked on the Aleck comic series for the bulletin of Mather Air Force Base and designed posters and murals. This period marks the beginning of his career as a painter. From 1949 to 1953, he studied fine art at San José State University and California State University in Sacramento, where he began playing tennis, a sport which was to develop into a lifelong passion. While still a student, his works were featured in a solo show at the Crocker Art Gallery in Sacramento in 1951, and that same year he took up a teaching position at Sacramento City College. During a stay in New York in the 1950s, he became acquainted with Willem and Elaine de Kooning; in 1962, he exhibited for the first time at the renowned Allan Stone Gallery in New York City. Ten years later, Harald Szeemann featured his work in the groundbreaking Documenta 5 in Kassel. Thiebaud also enjoyed an outstanding reputation as a painting professor. He trained several generations of artists, among them Bruce Nauman, who for a time worked as his assistant. In 1978, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art staged the exhibition “Wayne Thiebaud: Recent Work”. In 2001, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York held a retrospective of his work.
Wayne Thiebaud, whose works can be found in the collections of major American museums, continued painting right up to the end of his life. On the occasion of his 100th birthday, in 2021 the Crocker Art Museum staged the exhibition “Wayne Thiebaud 100: Paintings, Prints, and Drawings”. Despite the boom in figurative painting, Thiebaud’s works are only very rarely exhibited in Europe and barely feature in public collections. There had so far been only three exhibitions of his paintings in Europe, at the Wallraf-Richartz- Museum in Cologne in 1975, at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol in 1976 and at the Voorlinden Museum in Wassenaar in the Netherlands in 2018.
The exhibition “Wayne Thiebaud” has been curated by Ulf Küster, Senior Curator at the Fondation Beyeler.
Until February 25, 2023, David Zwirner presents an exhibition of works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. The show spans the gallery’s 519, 525, and 533 West 19th Street spaces in New York. It features four major installations: “Untitled” (1994–1995), “Untitled” (Sagitario) (1994–1995), “Untitled” (Public Opinion) (1991), “Untitled” (Portrait of the Magoons) (1993).
Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957-1996) was born in Guáimaro, Cuba. He lived and worked in New York City between 1979 and 1995. He began his art studies at the University of Puerto Rico before moving to New York City, where he attended the Whitney Independent Study Program, first in 1981 and again in 1983. He received his BFA from Pratt Institute, New York, in 1983 and his MFA from the International Center of Photography and New York University in 1987.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres / David Zwirner New York. January 14, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Press text (excerpt):
David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Spanning the gallery’s 519, 525, and 533 West 19th Street spaces in New York, the exhibition will feature four major installations—two of which have never been realized in the manner envisioned by Gonzalez-Torres before his untimely death in 1996 from complications related to AIDS. This will be the second solo exhibition of Gonzalez-Torres’s work at David Zwirner since the announcement that the gallery would be joining Andrea Rosen Gallery in co-representing the artist’s estate.
“Untitled” (1994–1995) and “Untitled” (Sagitario) (1994–1995) are two installations that Gonzalez-Torres had fully conceptualized, and which were scheduled to debut at a significant one-person exhibition at CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux in 1995. For institutional reasons, the exhibition was rescheduled and ultimately never occurred. “Untitled” is composed of two freestanding billboard structures, configured so that a viewer, when facing the work from either side, sees the surface of one billboard and the rear support structure of the other. Each bears a black-and-white image by Gonzalez-Torres depicting a bird flying beneath overcast skies—a motif that appears throughout the artist’s oeuvre. Though related to his well-known billboard works, which are intended to be installed in multiple and varying outdoor locations simultaneously, “Untitled” is an immersive indoor installation. Like the outdoor billboards, yet in a distinct way, “Untitled” reorients and creates complexity around the perceived boundaries between public versus private space. Another significant aspect of “Untitled” is its incorporation of timed sound and theatrical lighting components. This work accentuates the performative aspects of so many of Gonzalez-Torres’s works, while also diverting notions of the theater as a passive/escapist experience into an active/thinking one, calling into question the pretense of the fourth wall and the traditional roles of spectator and performer, subject and object.
“Untitled” (Sagitario) consists of two twelve-foot diameter circular reflecting pools, embedded and level with the floor of the gallery space. The pools are positioned to be just touching, causing a nearly imperceptible exchange of water. The motif of the double—and paired circular forms in particular—recur throughout Gonzalez-Torres’s oeuvre, and “Untitled” (Sagitario) may echo themes of the poignance of partnership, relationality, and queer intimacy within these works. At the time this work was made, the constellation Sagittarius was thought to encompass two stars near enough to exchange gasses. Movement or vibrations in the space—or even the sound element from “Untitled”—may visibly resonate on the pools’ surfaces. The possible movement of water between the pools is richly evocative—potentially of bodies in the cosmos, as well as the exchange of fluids between two human bodies. The latter association brings to mind notions of contamination, infection, and the specter of AIDS.
In the middle gallery will be “Untitled” (Public Opinion) (1991), a candy work on loan from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Listed at an “ideal weight” of 700 pounds, this work may be thought of as one of Gonzalez-Torres’s largest candy pieces, yet—like all of Gonzalez-Torres’s candy works—it can shift in scale, form, and number of simultaneous locations within and throughout each manifestation, in addition to potentially being affected by the audience’s interaction. Composed of an “endless supply” of black candy in clear wrappers, its appearance also pairs with the clear water of the pools and the black-and-white images of the billboards, lending additional affinities to their presentation together. “Untitled” (Public Opinion) can be understood and experienced in a multitude of ways. Its form and title may summon up the diversity of points of view that comprise any notion of a “public,” or the profusion of information within a never-ending news cycle—as relevant today as it was when the work was made, as the work remains continually responsive to its present. While this work resonates with “Untitled” and “Untitled” (Sagitario), as these three works elucidate the artist’s remarkable ability to evoke the personal in the monumental and the sublime in the understated, its distinct form of engagement contrasts with those works’ experiential conditions. The works’ presentation alongside one another highlights Gonzalez-Torres’s interest in shifting ideas of what may be perceived as permanent and what may be perceived as malleable.
Each of the galleries will also present distinct versions of “Untitled” (Portrait of the Magoons) (1993), one of Gonzalez-Torres’s word portraits. The presentation of three versions of the work highlights its ability to exist in more than one place at a time, as well as underscoring the fact that at the core of the portrait works is Gonzalez-Torres’s intention that each manifestation be an opportunity for a new version, in which content could be added, removed, changed or rearranged, that is, to be perpetually mutable. As with all of Gonzalez-Torres’s portrait works, “Untitled” (Portrait of the Magoons) comprises short textual entries and dates that are presented directly on the wall in horizontal registers at “frieze” height. The portrait works are the only body of Gonzalez-Torres’s work that were made in collaboration with the initial owners. When an owner manifests or lends a portrait, they may determine the version or versions that will be installed, or they may choose to extend the right to make a version to another individual with the knowledge of the specific, yet open-ended parameters of the work. In this exhibition, distinct versions of “Untitled” (Portrait of the Magoons) will be determined by Coco Fusco and Glenn Ligon, two artists whose expansive practices and interests dovetail with Gonzalez-Torres’s, and Nancy Magoon, who, along with her late husband Robert, are the portrait’s subjects and original owners. The operation and critical use of language constitute an essential aspect of Gonzalez-Torres’s work; with respect to the portraits, Gonzalez-Torres described a strategy of reversing the denoted and the connoted. The shifting content/authorship of the portraits over time also conveys a nuanced critique of representation and the perspectives from which histories are written.
As this exhibition delves deeply into the nature of the portrait works, David Zwirner will also present a new edition of its celebrated Program video series, hosted by Helen Molesworth, in which the three individuals who authored the distinct versions of “Untitled” (Portrait of the Magoons) will be interviewed.
Through this special and intentional selection of works and the distinctive format in which they will be presented, this exhibition will afford new and reconceived approaches to understanding and experiencing Gonzalez-Torres’s art. In particular, the two large-scale works that have never previously been seen as they were originally intended by the artist will shed light on the evolution of key motifs and conceptual throughlines that animated Gonzalez-Torres’s practice; altogether, the exhibition underscores the constantly shifting methodologies Gonzalez-Torres utilized in order to inspire an engagement with the ways that change and questioning foster meaning.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres was born in Guáimaro, Cuba, on November 26, 1957. He referred to himself as American. He lived and worked in New York City between 1979 and 1995. He began his art studies at the University of Puerto Rico before moving to New York City, where he attended the Whitney Independent Study Program, first in 1981 and again in 1983. He received his BFA from Pratt Institute, New York, in 1983 and his MFA from the International Center of Photography and New York University in 1987.
From 1987 to 1991, Gonzalez-Torres was a part of the artist collective Group Material, whose collaborative, politically informed practice focused on community engagement and activist interventions. In 1988, he had his first one-man exhibitions, at the Rastovski Gallery, New York, INTAR Gallery, New York, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. His earliest billboard work, “Untitled” (1989), was installed at New York’s Sheridan Square on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion. In 1990, a solo presentation of Gonzalez-Torres’s work served as the inaugural exhibition of the Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York.
In 1994, Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Traveling, a survey of the artist’s work, was presented at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, and the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. In 1995, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, organized an international traveling retrospective of his work. The artist participated in numerous group shows during his lifetime, including early presentations at Artists Space and White Columns in New York (1987 and 1988, respectively), the Whitney Biennial (1991), the Venice Biennale (1993), and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1995) and the Art Institute of Chicago (1995).
Gonzalez-Torres died in Miami on January 6, 1996, from AIDS-related causes. In 1997, the Sprengel Museum Hannover, Germany, organized a traveling posthumous solo exhibition and published a catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work. Further solo exhibitions of his work were held at such institutions as The Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (1998); The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (1999–2000); El Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales, Montevideo, Uruguay (2000–2001); Serpentine Gallery, London (2000); Le Consortium, Dijon (2002); and Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2006). In 2007, Gonzalez-Torres was selected to represent the United States at the 52nd Venice Biennale. More recently, in 2010–2011, WIELS Contemporary Art Center, Brussels, organized a six-part traveling retrospective, Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Specific Objects without Specific Form, which was also presented at the Fondation Beyeler, Basel, and Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt. At each institution, Elena Filipovic curated a retrospective version of the exhibition which was reconsidered midway through its run by a collaborating artist-curator: Danh Võ, Carol Bove, and Tino Sehgal, respectively. Further exhibitions devoted to the artist’s work have been held at PLATEAU and Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea (2012); Metropolitan Arts Centre, Belfast, Northern Ireland (2015); Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, China (2016); and Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) (2021).
Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Summer was on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto in 2022. Also in 2022, the two-person exhibition, Felix Gonzalez-Torres – Roni Horn, was presented at the Bourse de Commerce–Pinault Collection, Paris.
Until 18 February the gallery Perrotin in New York presents an exhibition of paintings by Hans Hartung. Hans Hartung (1904-1989) was a German-French painter and graphic artist. He is considered one of the pioneers of the art movement of Informel. The show takes over all three floors of Perrotin’s New York space with works from the 1970s, a seminal period for the artist marked by experimentation with tools, shapes and colors. Titled Revenge, the exhibition seeks to redress Hartung’s 1975 exhibit at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which left the German-French painter underappreciated in the United States. Revenge recreates a section of the Met exhibition with paintings that were on view in 1975.
Hans Hartung: Revenge / Perrotin New York. New York, January 13, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
PS: Special Guest Appearance: Simone.
Press text (excerpt):
Initially, Hartung’s American reputation seemed guaranteed. His star had been on the rise in the States since the 1930s: collected by Eugene Gallatin and Peggy Guggenheim; ushered into the collection of MoMA by 1952; earning the attention and acclaim of key players like Clement Greenberg and Alfred Barr; and friendship with Mark Rothko. When a Hartung retrospective traveled to Houston in 1969, the critic Ann Holmes referred to him simply as the “Father of Action Painting.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired one of his canvases (T1965- E33) in 1972, paving the way for a major solo exhibition there in 1975.
A few years on from this show at the Met, though, and Hartung’s work would languish in the U.S., more or less rejected and forgotten. He would no longer exhibit in the country. What happened?
To understand, we have to rewind to the mid-1970s, and the lead-up to that Met solo. Hartung’s ambitious and often spectacular practice convinced Henry Geldzahler (then in charge of contemporary art at the Met) that his paintings could more than hold their own on the hallowed New York institution’s walls. 27 paintings, in fact, painted between 1971– 75 and unveiled at the museum on October 16, 1975. All signs pointed to a resounding success; archival photos (on view here at Perrotin) attest to the magnificence of the installation.
In the end, Hartung’s career trajectory in the U.S. would arguably be extinguished by a single man: Hilton Kramer. Already known for having poorly reviewed Philip Guston and Roy Lichtenstein—and knocking Europe down a peg in its cultural competition with the U.S.—the influential critic took to the New York Times to deliver a misguided takedown. Hartung, Kramer wrote on October 18, 1975, represented “one of the most minor and moribund accomplishments of the School of Paris in its period of decline.” Vocal support for Hartung from the likes of Alex Katz, Frank Stella, and James Rosenquist would come too late; the damage, as it were, was already done.
What was Kramer responding to, and what was he so afraid of? It may have been Hartung’s prescient technical chops and willingness to experiment in an unprecedented way. In the ‘70s, Hartung was moving away from a muted palette and dabbling in thrilling new chromatic ranges. Extremely warm, sometimes flirting with a Pop edge, these acrylic tones—orange, yellow, and red, with occasional spurts of pink and purple—were daring, to say the least.
The “Father of Action Painting” was also inventing entirely new tools. Hartung designed his own multi-headed brushes (which would be manufactured for him by the famous company Cléton), and began to create complex compositions with parallel lines that were both rhythmic and labyrinthine. He used various scrapers to literally scratch his surfaces, and playfully (mis)used rollers meant for lithography to obtain transparent, painterly effects. Other unique media—like baryta cardboard, normally reserved for photographic prints—were incorporated. And Hartung fully embraced the plastic, cosmic potential of airbrush painting, generating effects that mirrored popular culture’s obsession with space (most notably Kubrick’s interstellar classic, 2001).
And so, a mere forty-eight years after a boundary-pushing exhibition was unfairly maligned, and five years after Perrotin’s survey exhibition in New York, Hans Hartung will have his revenge. This presentation of works from the 1970s, which includes several paintings that were on view at the Met and archival materials from the period, allows us a chance to travel back in time and renew our understanding of Hartung—both as a historical artist, and one whose bold work continues to speak to our contemporary moment.
Hans Hartung
Born in 1904 in Leipzig, Germany. Lived and worked in France. Died in 1989, France.
Hans Hartung achieved international recognition as a seminal figure of art informel, which arose in France during World War II. Beyond the apparent spontaneity of his distinctively bold and almost calligraphic gestural abstraction, rationalism equally informed his style, which arose out of an early interest in the relationship between aesthetics and mathematics—particularly the harmony of the golden ratio—but also out of necessity: early in his career, he meticulously squared up his successful abstract sketches in order to reproduce them on larger canvases, which he could not afford to risk losing to improvisation. The Grand International Prize for Painting, which he won at the 1960 Venice Biennale, marked a decisive turn in his practice. Hartung began improvising directly onto canvas and experimenting with new media, namely fast-drying acrylic and vinyl paints, as well as scraping and spraying techniques. The quest for balance between spontaneity and perfection remained at the core of Hartung’s painterly aesthetics until the end of his life, in 1989.
The exhibition Route is Clear at the gallery Europa in New York presents a new video piece and drawings by the multimedia artist Aki Goto. In both the video and the drawings, a red globe plays an important role. For Aki Goto, the red orb is a physical manifestation for the subconscious. Aki Goto was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1978. Goto currently lives and works in the Hudson Valley, NY.
Aki Goto: Route is Clear / Europa, New York. January 13, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Press text (excerpt):
Aki Goto is a multimedia artist utilizing video, sound, textile, performance, drawing, and painting in her daily practice. Originally from Japan, textile art brought Goto to NYC in 2009. A few years later Gotowas drawn to the Catskill region as she realized the natural world as integral to her work, and it was there her art and life finally blended as one. During the early period of 2020, Goto made the most of a Covid-era lockdown by filming her children in acutely edited videos to share on social media. These videos are rich with content; from the footage we can gather the highs and lows of parenting, the raw innocence of childhood, and the uncanny ability of a young mind to be fully present at any moment. The stretches of ennui juxtaposed with bursts of drama, Goto is present for all of it. The artist edits, deciphers, and delivers these moments with profundity; incorporating the sparks of joy, vulnerability, and strangeness that parenthood ensues.
This exhibition will present the latest incarnation in Goto’s work, Wish, a 15 minute video piece. Wish documents the here and now of winter, illness, and holiday season with Goto’s children Senka and Yuki as the central figures. Woven throughout the video is the mysterious presence of a large red globe. The ball intersects with the children unceremoniously; sometimes menacing, sometimes comforting, oftentimes chased out of the frame. In Goto’s mind, the red orb is a physical manifestation for the subconscious. The premise that human consciousness can emerge out of us to construct our reality, is vividly pronounced in a selection of recent drawings. In these renderings, the red spheres tend to hover over countenance, as if to put true desires, truest selves where their mouths are. Wishes are energy that devise our realm. In these moments, Aki Goto distills the instance our worlds are forged.
Aki Goto was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1978, and raised in the Chiba prefecture, she later returned to Tokyo to study at the Tama Art University. Goto has shown work at the Take Ninagawa Gallery in Tokyo, CLEARING in Beverly Hills and NY, Nonaka Hill Gallery in LA, Starr Suites in Brooklyn, NADA/ Foreland in Catskill. She has toured musically in the Northeast and and shown films at the Greenpoint Film Festival. Goto currently resides and works in the Hudson Valley, NY.
Hurly-Burly by New York-based artist David Deutsch is an exhibition that is presented in a collaboration between the galleries Eva Presenhuber and Venus Over Manhattan. David Deutsch was born in 1943 in Los Angeles. He has lived and worked in New York since 1970. Hurly-Burly presents paintings that are both abstract and figurative. Hurly-Burly features of 40 works across the two spaces: Venus Over Manhattan at 55 Great Jones Street and Eva Presenhuber at 39 Great Jones Street. In this video we have a look at the works at Eva Presenhuber, following the previous walkthrough of the show at Venus Over Manhattan.
David Deutsch: Hurly-Burly / Eva Presenhuber, New York. January 11, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Press text (excerpt):
David Deutsch makes abstract paintings. Or maybe he makes figurative paintings.
Which is right? Neither? Both? There are still serious people out there who see abstraction and the image as irreconcilable. They could even be right—though I doubt it—but even if so, one of the remarkable things about art is its capacity to harbor irreconcilable propensities within a single object. That’s because, despite all appearances, art approaches truth; and we should remember the observation once made by the physicist Niels Bohr, that while the opposite of a trivial truth is false, the opposite of a profound truth is another truth. With that in mind, we hold that abstraction and images are two authentic paths to artistic truth.
Recently, when Deutsch and I were talking in his studio, he remarked, “I leave it”—with the word it referring, I believe, the composition as a whole, “but there’s always some kind of content with subject matter,” and this content is embodied in the imagery woven into the painting’s web of fluid marks. Given the small size of many of the figures—as well as cars and houses—I couldn’t help but think of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century paintings such as those of Claude Lorrain, in which a few figures nestled into the composition served to elevate the secondary (and fundamentally abstract) genre of landscape to the dignity of history painting. But I don’t want this comparison to imply that Deutsch’s figures are afterthoughts, mere accessories; he intends them quite differently. “My figures are never incidental,” he told Jarrett Earnest. “I guess they are concentrating on what they are doing.” But what exactly, in these recent paintings of his, is it that they are doing?
I think these people are fundamentally looking. And observing. And exposing themselves to the tumults of the world that surrounds them. That does take concentration. As observers, they can be understood to be reflections of the viewer, whose incorporation into the scopic structure of the work is thereby emblematized. You can’t construct a story out of the representational elements in Deutsch’s paintings, nor out of the relation between those elements and the nonrepresentational ones. The paintings’ content is not narrative. But it is human, and it has to do with existence in a world that does not necessarily seem intended for one’s habitation. Is this even a place? Or how can it be made into a place? It can feel messy, disorienting, but one senses an underlying will to order—I hesitate to cite Wallace Stevens’ subtly oxymoronic “rage to order,” but there can be a sense of fury in Deutsch’s strenuous marks.
Those marks also raise the question about how an image is embodied in paint. Most of Deutsch’s recent paintings have been made using an unusual process whereby acrylic paint is applied first onto a plastic sheet, then transferred to the canvas. Painting onto the plastic is a time-based process like most other ways of painting—a temporal sequence of marks that becomes a spatial one, and a spatial arrangement that suggests a dynamic perceptual succession. But then in the second stage of Deutsch’s process, the paint is relocated to the canvas all at once—well, really, in two goes, but each time all at once. It’s logical to compare this to a monotype but for me, it resonates even more with photography. One feels the “momentness” of the painting’s coming into being, which somehow subsumes the preceding temporal sequence. If you compare one of Deutsch’s works painted directly with oil on canvas to one of the transfer paintings in acrylic, even with similar imagery, you’ll see the oil painting as slower in tempo, and more spatial—the acrylic transfer painting, no matter how complex it may be, comes across as faster, more immediate, and more about the plane than about depth. The transfer paintings ask you to be faster on your feet in responding to them. You have to concentrate differently on your looking.
I don’t know of anything else in contemporary art quite like Deutsch’s recent paintings. That includes his own earlier work. I first noticed it as long ago as the mid-1980s, when he was making very elongated, very painterly panoramic landscape paintings—this was already some fifteen years into an exhibition history that had begun when Deutsch was still in his twenties—but really got knocked sideways in the early 1990s by the “rotunda” paintings showing masses of framed portraits hanging in a domed space. His art always seemed to ask questions about how and why one sees what one sees, “taking advantage of and highlighting the viewer’s perceptual processes,” as Alfred Sturtevant wrote back in 1986, “in ways that more traditional painting includes but deemphasizes”; it envisages the peculiarity of the everyday. But while I tried to follow Deutsch’s work over the years—as it has evolved through more twists and turns than do most artists’ oeuvres—I only got to know him a little better fairly recently, and that through the urging of his fellow artist Ugo Rondinone, a fervent admirer who has described Deutsch’s paintings as “negotiations with the physical dimensions and sensorial capacities of the human figure; with the desire to see and to find meaning in chaotic conditions” that “tell a dual story about the fragility of painting and the fragility of human existence.” As it happens it was also Rondinone who introduced Deutsch to Eva Presenhuber, who then suggested that Adam Lindemann of Venus Over Manhattan sees it too. That seems appropriate. Artists understand artists first and then the rest of us follow after.
– Barry Schwabsky
About the artist
David Deutsch was born in 1943 in Los Angeles, CA, and has lived and worked in New York, NY, since 1970. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Slow and Fast, Deutsch + Kwartler at PRACTISE, Oak Park, IL, (2018); Kerry Schuss, New York, NY (2016); and Neighbors and Strangers at Feature Inc., New York, NY, (2013). His work is included in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN; Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ; UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.
Hurly-Burly is the title of the first solo exhibition by the artist David Deutsch at the gallery Venus Over Manhattan in New York. David Deutsch was born in 1943 in Los Angeles. He has lived and worked in New York since 1970. Hurly-Burly presents paintings that are both abstract and figurative. The show is presented jointly with the gallery Eva Presenhuber and features of 40 works across the two spaces: Venus Over Manhattan at 55 Great Jones Street and Eva Presenhuber at 39 Great Jones Street. In this video we have a look at the works at Venus Over Manhattan, with the paintings at Eva Presenhuber in the upcoming video.
David Deutsch: Hurly-Burly / Venus Over Manhattan, New York. January 11, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Press text (excerpt):
David Deutsch makes abstract paintings. Or maybe he makes figurative paintings.
Which is right? Neither? Both? There are still serious people out there who see abstraction and the image as irreconcilable. They could even be right—though I doubt it—but even if so, one of the remarkable things about art is its capacity to harbor irreconcilable propensities within a single object. That’s because, despite all appearances, art approaches truth; and we should remember the observation once made by the physicist Niels Bohr, that while the opposite of a trivial truth is false, the opposite of a profound truth is another truth. With that in mind, we hold that abstraction and images are two authentic paths to artistic truth.
Recently, when Deutsch and I were talking in his studio, he remarked, “I leave it”—with the word it referring, I believe, the composition as a whole, “but there’s always some kind of content with subject matter,” and this content is embodied in the imagery woven into the painting’s web of fluid marks. Given the small size of many of the figures—as well as cars and houses—I couldn’t help but think of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century paintings such as those of Claude Lorrain, in which a few figures nestled into the composition served to elevate the secondary (and fundamentally abstract) genre of landscape to the dignity of history painting. But I don’t want this comparison to imply that Deutsch’s figures are afterthoughts, mere accessories; he intends them quite differently. “My figures are never incidental,” he told Jarrett Earnest. “I guess they are concentrating on what they are doing.” But what exactly, in these recent paintings of his, is it that they are doing?
I think these people are fundamentally looking. And observing. And exposing themselves to the tumults of the world that surrounds them. That does take concentration. As observers, they can be understood to be reflections of the viewer, whose incorporation into the scopic structure of the work is thereby emblematized. You can’t construct a story out of the representational elements in Deutsch’s paintings, nor out of the relation between those elements and the nonrepresentational ones. The paintings’ content is not narrative. But it is human, and it has to do with existence in a world that does not necessarily seem intended for one’s habitation. Is this even a place? Or how can it be made into a place? It can feel messy, disorienting, but one senses an underlying will to order—I hesitate to cite Wallace Stevens’ subtly oxymoronic “rage to order,” but there can be a sense of fury in Deutsch’s strenuous marks.
Those marks also raise the question about how an image is embodied in paint. Most of Deutsch’s recent paintings have been made using an unusual process whereby acrylic paint is applied first onto a plastic sheet, then transferred to the canvas. Painting onto the plastic is a time-based process like most other ways of painting—a temporal sequence of marks that becomes a spatial one, and a spatial arrangement that suggests a dynamic perceptual succession. But then in the second stage of Deutsch’s process, the paint is relocated to the canvas all at once—well, really, in two goes, but each time all at once. It’s logical to compare this to a monotype but for me, it resonates even more with photography. One feels the “momentness” of the painting’s coming into being, which somehow subsumes the preceding temporal sequence. If you compare one of Deutsch’s works painted directly with oil on canvas to one of the transfer paintings in acrylic, even with similar imagery, you’ll see the oil painting as slower in tempo, and more spatial—the acrylic transfer painting, no matter how complex it may be, comes across as faster, more immediate, and more about the plane than about depth. The transfer paintings ask you to be faster on your feet in responding to them. You have to concentrate differently on your looking.
I don’t know of anything else in contemporary art quite like Deutsch’s recent paintings. That includes his own earlier work. I first noticed it as long ago as the mid-1980s, when he was making very elongated, very painterly panoramic landscape paintings—this was already some fifteen years into an exhibition history that had begun when Deutsch was still in his twenties—but really got knocked sideways in the early 1990s by the “rotunda” paintings showing masses of framed portraits hanging in a domed space. His art always seemed to ask questions about how and why one sees what one sees, “taking advantage of and highlighting the viewer’s perceptual processes,” as Alfred Sturtevant wrote back in 1986, “in ways that more traditional painting includes but deemphasizes”; it envisages the peculiarity of the everyday. But while I tried to follow Deutsch’s work over the years—as it has evolved through more twists and turns than do most artists’ oeuvres—I only got to know him a little better fairly recently, and that through the urging of his fellow artist Ugo Rondinone, a fervent admirer who has described Deutsch’s paintings as “negotiations with the physical dimensions and sensorial capacities of the human figure; with the desire to see and to find meaning in chaotic conditions” that “tell a dual story about the fragility of painting and the fragility of human existence.” As it happens it was also Rondinone who introduced Deutsch to Eva Presenhuber, who then suggested that Adam Lindemann of Venus Over Manhattan sees it too. That seems appropriate. Artists understand artists first and then the rest of us follow after.
– Barry Schwabsky
About the artist
David Deutsch was born in 1943 in Los Angeles, CA, and has lived and worked in New York, NY, since 1970. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Slow and Fast, Deutsch + Kwartler at PRACTISE, Oak Park, IL, (2018); Kerry Schuss, New York, NY (2016); and Neighbors and Strangers at Feature Inc., New York, NY, (2013). His work is included in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN; Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ; UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.
On the occasion of Paul Pagk’s first solo exhibition at Miguel Abreu Gallery in New York, we recorded a conversation between Paul Pagk and Miguel Abreu. In it, Paul Pagk and Miguel Abreu talk about the current exhibition and Paul Pagk’s work in general. The show features twelve large-scale paintings and thirteen works on paper. The exhibition is held at the gallery’s 88 Eldridge Street space and runs until March 5, 2023.
Paul Pagk in Conversation with Miguel Abreu. New York, January 11, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
“No Man’s Land” at Karma, New York, is a solo exhibition of new sculpture by Will Boone. The show has its origin in an encounter at a swap meet in 2017 where Boone found resonance with sculptures of antiquity. In “No Man’s Land”, Will Boone transforms relics of Americana into bronze statues: cacti, aloes, a tiger, dogs, rats, spiders, etc. “No Man’s Land” at Karma runs until February 25, 2023.
Will Boone: No Man’s Land / Karma, New York. January 12, 2023.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Press text (excerpt):
No Man’s Land is a scenic exhibition that began for Will Boone with an encounter at a swap meet in 2017. Among a menagerie of figurines, toys, horror movie monsters, and busts of United States presidents and music legends, Boone found resonance with sculptures of antiquity. Medusa and Julius Caesar were swapped for Frankenstein and John F. Kennedy; dinged-up plastic and flaking enamel paint took the place of chipped marble and weathered bronze.
Across this body of work, Boone transforms relics of Americana into bronze statues. Like a model toy, Boone hand-paints each with enamel paint, producing a brushy and vibrant surface. Amidst cacti and aloes, a tiger and a barking dog have a standoff at the gallery’s center. A rabbit leaps across a skull and an eagle hangs from the ceiling. A vulture perches on a rock, surveying bones. Several works are deliberately paired together, forming tableaus: a rat and a ribcage, an eagle and a bat, a spider’s web amidst barren branches, a cactus sprouts from a foot. A sculpture hall sourced from the desert of American culture, the exhibition marks the first time this body of work will be shown in its entirety.
For Boone, who has returned to live and work in his hometown of Houston, the visual language of Texas is foundational. Boone’s bronze sculptures are made in a foundry which also produces roadside attractions, located in the small town of Bastrop, which is also home to a gas station barbecue joint featured in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. To Donald Judd, Texas famously offered a featureless landscape, an empty space that harmonized with his sculptural practice. In contrast, for Boone, Texas is defined by its features—cultural artifacts, specificities, and oddities, exemplified in the strange monuments through which small towns assert themselves against the desert.
Boone’s sculptures stand in a playful arrangement, like an abandoned movie set. Their bronze construction guarantees their permanence, through which Boone unites the vastness of time with the vastness of the desert. There, we find his sculptures, lingering in the inexorable unknown that is No Man’s Land.
“The Year of the Moss Children” is an installation that Jason Jacques Gallery showed at Design Miami 2022. The presentation consists of artist Kim Simonsson’s Moss People in a structure by Urban Umbrella. Kim Simonsson / Urban Umbrella: The Year of the Moss Children.
JasonJacques Gallery, Design Miami 2022. Miami Beach (Florida, USA), December 2, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Press text (excerpt):
Early this year, Kim Simonsson’s famed Moss People appeared as Giants in a monumental public installation that transformed Lille’s city-center for “Utopia,” the 6th grand thematic edition of the French triennial arts and culture fair, “lille3000.” Then they appeared again in the late summer, this time at the 16th Lyon Biennale, where over two dozen Moss Children could be spotted through-out the sprawling exhibition’s six official venues. They were swaddled in historical meta narrative, exhibited alongside masterpieces of ancient sculpture in order to present us with a birds eye view not only of artwork past and present but of our own understanding of art history.
Now, Jason Jacques Gallery is thrilled to announce that we are bringing a never-before-seen Moss Giant stateside, where it will be exhibited alongside a grouping of recent works by Simonsson at our Design Miami/ 2022 presentation, which will be ensconced in a large-scale installation, courtesy of Urban Umbrella— a design company re-imagining scaffolding with beauty and security in mind.
The Moss People are gatherers, decked out in readymades, wearing cauliflower shoes and shocks of feathers. They merge figurative sculpture, found objects, and a radical combination of handiwork and industrial fabrication (the hand-sculpted clay figures are covered in epoxy and flocked with nylon after firing) to a mesmerizing effect.
“The name Moss People refers to children’s innate camouflage,” explains Simonsson. “The moss green figures blend perfectly into their natural surroundings, just as a soft carpet of moss covers the ground, rocks, and tree trunks and acts as a sort of protection. In the Moss People’s world, lost and disconnected children, evoking different characters… choose leaders and end up creating false idols.” They communicate through their own symbolic, visual language. Like migratory birds, they move from one place to another on a quest for meaning, seeking re-enchantment.
In addition to the usual look of the Moss People, Simonsson plays with milky white, cobalt blue, and anthracite black glazes, as well as metallic lusters of a wide variety; more recently, he has expanded his sculptural output to include mysterious figures, dark as midnight, flocked in jet-black nylon. Simonsson refers to these preternatural works as “Silhouettes.” Their fibrous, black surface’s superlative level of light absorption gives them a strangely flat appearance that shifts and shimmers as the figures are approached and viewed in the round.
Simonsson himself is a superb sculptor. Freely referencing pop-culture, science fiction, mythology, nature, consumer culture, and children’s games, he uses found objects with great allegorical precision and models clay with a profound sensitivity for his subjects that shines through each of his gestures.
Every sculpture is handmade in the artist’s studio in Fiskars Village, Finland. Their charming, unique texture and hyper-saturated coloration is the result of Simonsson’s unique technique that combines sculptural ceramics with industrial fabrication methods. Each and every one of these variations on Simonsson’s overarching theme expands the mythos that surrounds these beguiling fae. Blown up to monumental size, they continue to captivate an international community of viewers, collectors, curators, and critics.
The group show “Phraseology” at The Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach is an exhibition that explores language in modern and contemporary art. The show runs until April 23, 2023, and features works from The Bass Collection and works on loan. Phraseology includes works by John Baldessari, Kelly Breez, Kenturah Davis, Rafael Domenech, Jeffrey Gibson, John Giorno, Jim Hodges, Roni Horn, Sister Mary Corita Kent, Barbara Kruger, Pope L., Theresa Margolles, Yucef Merhi, Maynard Monrow, Jack Pierson, Faith Ringgold, Jamilah Sabur, Xaviera Simmons, Vaughn Spann, Tavares Strachan, Erin Thurlow and Martin Wong.
Phraseology / The Bass Museum of Art. Miami Beach (Florida, USA), December 4, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Exhibition text (excerpt):
The term “phraseology” references the specific choice of words that a communicator, in this case the artist, uses to highlight certain topics. With the rise of the Conceptual Art movement in the 1960s, many artists began to create art that valued an idea or concept over the finished work. Artists wanted to redefine what art could be and the topics it addressed beyond visual aesthetics. In Phraseology artists merge form and idea by creating works that contain text, familiar phrases and poetry.
Artists in Phraseology employ recognizable language, phrases or slogans that provide conflicting modes of observation to relay a new or different perspective. Placing text in the central role in their art practice, the artists use word play, political activism, subversion of advertising or appropriation of form to reveal, amplify and question histories and contemporary issues.
Artists in the exhibition integrate personal experiences, political activism and recognizable advertising into their works. Vaughn Spann, Faith Ringgold and Sister Mary Corita Kent assert and reveal the histories of power in language and its potential for protest. Investigating the connection between words and images artists like Jamilah Sabur, John Baldessari and Roni Horn explore how we create meaning and memory through association. Through sculpture and reference to book forms, works by Rafael Domenech, Jack Pierson and Kelly Breez explore how text can literally and figuratively construct meaning. The works in Phraseology emphasize the personal power of expression through civic discourse during a time of increased activism.
As a building block of communication, language gives voice to inner thoughts, connecting one’s feelings to the outside world. Language builds texts, books, speeches, poetry and documents to facilitate the exchange of ideas between people while circulating information through social and cultural networks. Throughout history artists have included words, letters and language as elements in their work to make a statement, draw out emotion or to integrate personal experiences into their work.
Phraseology includes works by John Baldessari, Kelly Breez, Kenturah Davis, Rafael Domenech, Jeffrey Gibson, John Giorno, Jim Hodges, Roni Horn, Sister Mary Corita Kent, Barbara Kruger, Pope L., Theresa Margolles, Yucef Merhi, Maynard Monrow, Jack Pierson, Faith Ringgold, Jamilah Sabur, Xaviera Simmons, Vaughn Spann, Tavares Strachan, Erin Thurlow and Martin Wong. Additionally, on long-term view on the museum façade and lobby are works by Sylvie Fleury, Pascale Marthine-Tayou and Lawrence Weiner.
Kontracom 06 was an art festival in Salzburg (Austria) that took place in May – July 2006. Curated by Max Hollein and Tomas Zierhofer-Kin, the festival consisted of art installations, performances and music in Salzburg’s public space. Participating artists were Knut Asdam, Christoph Büchel, Anna Ceeh, Ingar Dragset, Michael Elmgreen, Elmgreen & Dragset, Ayse Erkmen, Oliver Hangl, Felix Kubin, Jonathan Meese, Olaf Nicolai, Paola Pivi, Franz Pomassl, Michael Sailstorfer, Hans Schabus, and Markus Schinwald. In this video we have a look at Elmgreen & Dragset’s artwork “Warm Regards”.
Official description: “In the last few years Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset have dealt with the issue of the welfare state. A concentrated fragment of this ongoing debate is the presentation of a postcard kiosk, ironically called »Warm Regards«. The kiosk appears to be a relic of modern glass-andsteel architecture and therefore, a sightseeing object. Hence, the kiosk just sells postcards showing the kiosk. »Warm Regards« draws an ironic picture of exaggerated selfmarketing, offering only one´s own sale. Warm regards from anywhere.”
Elmgreen & Dragset: Warm Regards (2006). Kontracom 06 Salzburg (Austria), July 7, 2006.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Andrés Denegri’s artwork “Uprising” (2022) was another highlight of Art Basel Miami Beach and its Meridians sector, especially for friends of kinetic art and film.
Andres Denegri: Uprising, 2022 / Rolf Art / Art Basel Miami Beach Meridians. Miami Beach (Florida, USA), November 29, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Exhibition text:
Andrés Denegri produces works where the technological devices of memory are transformed into an allegory of the forgetting and denial of history. Uprising, a large-scale film installation, brings together different works from his ongoing series ‘We Were Expected.’
In reuniting artworks for this project, the magic of the photochemical images, filmstrips, and film projectors unfold to merge with the sound environment of all the functioning pieces, yielding an installation that resembles a large operating machine. Uprising reflects on the origins of cinema in relation to the Industrial Revolution, of which cinema was both proof and apologist. The images taken from the Argentinian national archive come into dialogue with the scaffolding platforms supporting the machines; the translucent screens become as much a testimony to a work in progress as to Argentina’s failed endeavors at industrialization. Andrés Denegri (b.1975, Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a visual artist who works in the field of contemporary audiovisuals and expanded cinema. His projects generate dialogues between formats, addressing them poetically and conceptually to create a tension in the classic employment of audiovisual technologies.
He graduated from the Universidad del Cine de Buenos Aires and he has completed artist residences in Colombia, Serbia, Canada, and the USA. His prizes include the Grand Prix – National Hall of Visual Arts (2015); the Grand Prix – MAMBA/Fundación Telefónica of Art and New Technologies (2009); the John Downey Prize – Santiago Biennial of Video and New Media (2007); Best Experimental Film at the Belgrade Documentary and Short Film Festival (2012). He is director of the Electronic Arts Degree at Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero, where he created a research center dedicated to promoting audiovisual arts. He is also co-director of the Biennial of Moving Image (BIM) and guest curator of film and video at the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires. His work has been exhibited internationally at the Fundación OSDE (2014), Recoleta Cultural Centre (2015), MACBA (2016), ENERC (2018), MUNTREF (2017) in Argentina; Biennale of Asunción, (2015), Salón de Arte y Tecnología Bogotá (2017), AVXLab Auviosual Expandido, Sao Pablo, (2017), Whitechapel Gallery, London (2016), Tabacalera, Spain (2019), among others. His work is part of public and private collections in Latin America and Europe. Denegri lives and works in Buenos Aires.
Christoph Büchel’s piece DUMMY (F-16) was part of the exhibition “Church for Sale – Works from the Haubrok Collection and the Nationalgalerie Collection at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin (28.11.21-19.6.22).
Exhibition text (excerpt): DUMMY (F-16) addresses modern warfare. DUMMY (F-16) is a life-sized plastic reproduction of a US F16 fighter jet, the most commonly used warplane. Inflatable replicas of aircraft like this are used in times of war to deceive the enemy. With his readymade, which can be seen in the museum’s inner courtyard at the beginning and end of the exhibition due to the weather, the artist transfers a wartime dummy to the public sphere and thus illustrates how the increasing mechanization of combat operations abolishes the separation between the battlefield and protected civilian areas.
Christoph Büchel: Dummy (F-16), Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin. Berlin Art Week 2022. Berlin (Germany), September 16, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
María José Arjona’s performance/sculpture “Silla” (Chair) was one of the most popular artworks in the Meridians sector of Art Basel Miami Beach 2022.
María José Arjona: Silla (2011) / Rolf Art / Art Basel Miami Beach Meridians. Miami Beach (Florida, USA), November 29, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Exhibition text: María José Arjona’s Chair straddles the line between sculpture and performance. The work revolves around the concepts of objecthood, the ephemeral aspects of experience, memory, and archiving, while disclosing the body’s critical role when addressing movement, in a given space, as a form of political choreography. While the chair remains suspended horizontally in the space – it is also activated by Arjona in a durational performance, which can last as long as six hours. Chair was first exhibited in New York at the Ballroom Marfa (2011) and at NC-arte in Bogota, Colombia (2015). It was later reenacted by other performers as part of Arjona’s retrospective at MAMBO in Bogota, Colombia (2018). Each iteration expressed the artist’s engagement with the effect of time on the body as a form of sculptural process, simultaneously endorsing the history of performance as an expression that changes the perception of art itself.
María José Arjona (b. 1973, Bogota, Colombia) initially received dance training before devoting herself to performance. She graduated from the Academia Superior de Artes, Bogotá. Her work rethinks the roles of the subject’s movement within space and time, negotiating a perspective in which research and writing become the experimental tools of reflection. In recent years, Arjona has developed a series of workshops, talks, and seminars around the social and political potential of the performing arts. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including the Third Triennial of Guangzhou, China, (2008); ‘In Transit,’ Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Germany (2009); the Quadrilateral Biennial, Croatia (2011); Museo Madre, Naples, Italy (2010); ‘Irregular Hexagon,’ Israel (2012); the Morocco Biennial (2912); DO IT, United Kingdom (2013); the 43rd National Salon of Artists, Colombia (2014); NC-arte, Colombia (2014); CaixaForum, Spain (2015); FLORA ars+natura, Colombia (2015); Kunsthalle Osnabrück, Germany (2016); ‘To Be Known as Infinite’ – Retrospective, Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, Colombia (2018); and ‘Colombian Art of the 21st Century,’ Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, Colombia (2019), among others. She also participated as a ‘re-performer’ for the Marina Abramović retrospective at MoMA, New York, (2010), and in the artist’s residence program of the Watermill Center, New York (2009). Her work is part of public and private collections in Colombia, the United States, Europe and Asia. María José Arjona lives and works in Bogotá, Colombia.
Art Cologne Talks Lounge 2022 – Unlock Art by ZEITmagazin. The art of Memphis Design. Martine Bedin, Architect and Designer, Founding Member, Memphis Milano in conversation with Christoph Amend, Editorial Director, ZEITmagazin and Publisher, Weltkunst.
Livestream recording from the Art Cologne Talks Lounge, Art Cologne 2022, Cologne (Germany), November 18, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
The exhibition Four Sculptures at Hauser & Wirth Zurich brings together four distinct steel sculptures by the American artist David Smith (1906-1965). The painted sculptures represent major sculpture groups David Smith created in the early 1960s. Smith is considered as one of the foremost artists of the 20th Century and the sculptor most closely associated with the abstract expressionist movement. The show at Hauser & Wirth’s Bahnhofstrasse 1 gallery in Zurich features the sculptures Zig I, Gondola II, Primo Piano II, and Untitled (Zig VI).
David Smith was born in Decatur, Indiana in 1906. He worked as an automobile welder before moving to New York City, where he studied painting at the Art Students League. In 1929 he bought property in Bolton Landing, in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. He would settle there permanently in 1940. Smith’s metalworking experience inspired his choice to make sculpture by welding steel, eschewing the conventional sculptural methods of casting and carving. He is widely acknowledged to have created the first welded metal sculpture in the United States and for his ability to use steel as an expressive, sculptural material.
David Smith: Four Sculptures / Hauser & Wirth Zurich. Zürich (Switzerland), December 21, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Exhibition text (excerpt):
One of the foremost artists of the 20th Century and the sculptor most closely associated with the abstract expressionist movement, David Smith (1906–1965) is celebrated for his use of industrial materials and processes and the integration of open space into sculpture. ‘David Smith. Four Sculptures’ will be held in Hauser & Wirth’s glass-fronted exhibition space on Bahnhofstrasse 1, Zurich. The exhibition will showcase four extraordinary, painted sculptures that represent major sculpture groups Smith made in the early 1960s.
Throughout his career, Smith referred to himself as both a painter and a sculptor, working in both mediums simultaneously. Citing the unification of painting and sculpture in ancient Egyptian and Greek art, Smith applied painting concepts to his sculpture and vice versa. ‘I’ve always made painted sculpture,’ Smith asserted in 1962, ‘not one year that I’ve worked have I failed to do this.’ By the early 1960s, he had arrived at a new phase of creativity: he made nearly one-third of his entire sculptural output in the last five years of his life while working on a monumental scale. The large, painted works in ‘David Smith. Four Sculptures’ are outstanding examples of the culmination of Smith’s long exploration of colour and form.
‘Zig I’ (1961) is a part of Smith’s Zig series that comprises seven large-scale, vertical works, each numbered by the artist. The series’ name was an ‘affectionate term,’ according to Smith, that derived from ‘ziggurat’—a stepped pyramid found in ancient Mesopotamia. Each of the Zigs features inventive arrangements of planes and rounded forms that yield surprising spatial relationships as a viewer walks around the sculpture. ‘Zig I’ is made from cut sections of steel tubes that ascend in a playful dance along a vertical axis. The surface of this work is activated by an application of feathery, black brushstrokes over a russet ground, harnessing the gestural vigour seen in the work of Smith’s fellow abstract expressionists.
By contrast, the yellow sculpture ‘Untitled (Zig VI)’ (1964) is characterised by angularity and a monochromatic surface. It has been suggested that this sculpture could possibly be ‘Zig VI’—a number that is missing from the Zig series. While ‘Untitled (Zig VI)’ does bear certain formal similarities with the Zigs, it retains a distinct individuality in its nearly-minimalist, matter-of-fact construction and chromatic uniformity. In this sculpture, Smith stacked I-beams of various sizes and balanced them on four small, found wheels, a feature that connects it to three other wheeled sculptures from the Zig series, all of which are in museum collections. It is especially related to ‘Zig VII’ (1963), in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York which is painted with a large swath of bright yellow and sits on four comparatively sized wheels.
In 1962, Smith was invited to make two sculptures for an exhibition associated with the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy. Working with a crew of local metalworkers in an abandoned steel factory in the nearby town of Voltri, Smith produced a total of twenty-seven sculptures within a month. The experience would have a profound impact on Smith’s work. After returning to Bolton Landing, he sustained the energy he demonstrated in Voltri and made, over a six-week period, three large sculptures that define his Primo Piano series. The title is Italian for ‘first floor’—the floor above the ground floor—where, Smith explained, ‘most of the action takes place.’ In ‘Primo Piano II’ (1962), for example, two vertical elements elevate a central, horizontal beam, above which a dynamic interplay of different shapes and metals unfolds across a span over thirteen feet long. In a natural setting, this large-scale sculpture commands a strong visual presence, as a graphic contrast to the landscape. While the other two works in this series are entirely white, ‘Primo Piano II’ incorporates elements of unpainted bronze and stainless steel that introduce compelling variations within the work itself.
Smith described ‘Gondola II’ (1964) as his latest painted sculpture in a lecture delivered at Bennington College shortly before his untimely death in May 1965. The chromatic surface of ‘Gondola II’ is elegantly articulated, with a black, diamond-shaped plane topped by a cream-colored stanchion and flanked by two cloud-like forms, one in cream and the other a deep purple—tonal contrasts that counterbalance the general symmetry of the work. The title is a reference to the Italian name for the cart used in factories, such as Smith’s workspace in Voltri, to transport large, heavy materials. Smith would incorporate the term ‘gondola’ into the titles of two other large, planar sculptures, now in museum collections. He made the first ‘Gondola’ in 1961 as a response, in sculpture, to Robert Motherwell’s renowned series of paintings, the Elegies to the Spanish Republic. A dialogue, through art, with other artists was part of Smith’s ‘workflow’ and inspiration.
‘David Smith. Four Sculptures’ offers a rare opportunity to consider these distinct sculptures in relation to one another, and to explore the many ways Smith mined history and his own prolific career to continue expanding the definition of sculpture.
About the artist
Regarded as one of the most innovative sculptors of his generation, David Smith (1906 – 1965) sought to redefine what sculpture could be in the modern world. Born in Decatur, Indiana, Smith worked as an automobile welder before moving to New York City, where he studied painting at the Art Students League. In 1929 he bought property in Bolton Landing, in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. He would settle there permanently in 1940.
Smith’s metalworking experience inspired his choice to make sculpture by welding steel, eschewing the conventional sculptural methods of casting and carving. He is widely acknowledged to have created the first welded metal sculpture in the United States and for his ability to use steel as an expressive, sculptural material. Over a 33-year career, he broadened the cultural and material conditions of sculpture, while questioning and advancing its relationship with nature. Smith often worked on multiple series at the same time and regarded his sculptures, paintings and drawings as part of a continuous flow of creativity. When Smith died suddenly in May 1965, he left behind an expansive, complex and powerful body of work that continues to exert influence upon younger generations of artists.
Exhibitions devoted to David Smith’s work have been presented internationally since the 1950s. The Museum of Modern Art in New York NY presented Smith’s first retrospective in 1957. Smith represented the United States at the São Paulo Biennale in 1951 and at La Biennale di Venezia in 1954 and 1958, followed by Documenta II in 1959 and Documenta III in 1964. In 1962, at the invitation of Giovanni Carandente and the Italian government, Smith went to Voltri, near Genoa, Italy, where he produced 27 sculptures for the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto.
Subsequent retrospectives have been held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2006), which travelled to Tate Modern in London, UK and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France; and at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2011) in Los Angeles CA, which travelled to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York NY and the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus OH. Major surveys have been organised at the Sezon Museum of Art, Tokyo, Japan (1994); the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, Valencia, Spain (1996); the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain (1996); Storm King Art Center, Mountainville NY (1998 – 1999); and Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, England (2019 – 2020). In June 2023, The Hyde Collection in Glens Falls NY, near Bolton Landing, will open the exhibition ‘Songs of the Horizon: David Smith, Music, and Dance.’
Smith’s sculptural output has been definitively recorded in ‘David Smith Sculpture: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1932–1965,’ published in three volumes in 2021 by the Estate of David Smith and distributed by Yale University Press. ‘David Smith: The Art and Life of a Transformational Sculptor’ by Michael Brenson, the first biography on the artist, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in October 2022.
“Living Room” is the title of a new immersive and interactive work by Random International. Living Room variation 1 has been commissioned by Aorist and Faena Art and premiered in Miami Beach during Art Basel Miami Beach 2022.
Random International: Living Room / Aorist and Faena, Miami Beach. Miami Beach (Florida, USA), December 3, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
This is how Random International describe their new artwork: “Living Room explores the idea of space as a living being. Visitors are invited to enter a fluctuating architectural domain, which is itself a sentient organism embodied in light and fog. The organism uses these materials to express itself and interact with those who inhabit it. Continually altering its form in response to visitors in varying and unpredictable ways, Living Room creates a living labyrinth in real time and in real space. Living Room is a machine that allows us to choreograph a precise dynamic and sentient architecture around our audiences. The feeling we aim to create is an entire environment that ‘sees’ us, draws us in to devour us and at the same time invites us to instinctively connect with our fellow visitors and the environment around us. While the work may present itself beneficently in its relationship to visitors, there is little ambiguity as to who is in control in the dynamic between human and machine. At all times, the machine leads the dance. This can instil in the viewer a kind of navigatory dissonance, with tensions constantly at play between the solid, static, and inert and the ephemeral, transient, and animate. Leveraging blockchain technology in a revolutionary way, visitors can visualise their physical experience within the installation as a looped video, and perpetually mint and collect it on the blockchain.”
Art Basel Miami Beach 2022 Fashion sector. Well, just kidding. There’s no Fashion sector at Art Basel Miami Beach. But why not? In this piece of performance art, masterworks by Prada, Balenciaga, Pucci, Burberry, Maison Kitsuné and Crocs are being activated by select performers. We call it the Killing Joke x Balenciaga version. Enjoy the colors, the patterns and the people. It’s better than Beeple, and soon will drop as NFTple. (Low pun intended). Caution – cat content!
Art Basel Miami Beach 2022, imaginary Fashion sector. Miami Beach (Florida, USA), December 3, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
If you wanted to show what humanity is capable of (both good and bad) based on the events of one year: 2022 would not be a bad choice. Fortunately, 2022 was a great year for VernissageTV: It was finally possible to do more than in the Corona years of 2020 and 2021. We were able to report on exciting exhibitions, conduct interesting interviews, meet nice people and make new friends. We were able to provide filmmakers and TV stations with footage from our archive and we were allowed to produce films for museums, galleries and art fairs. We are lucky to experience so much support. We create for an audience that appreciates our films and supports us with encouragement, intelligent comments and even with donations. A heartfelt thank you to all. We wish everyone happy holidays and a happy, successful and peaceful new year.
Ah, one more thing: Just like at the end of every year we had a look at what are the most popular videos in 2022. Well, here they are, the most popular videos on our YouTube channel in 2022:
- Venice Art Biennale 2022: The Milk of Dreams / Arsenale
- Anselm Kiefer at Palazzo Ducale, Venezia
- Venice Art Biennale 2022: The Milk of Dreams / Giardini
- Art Basel 2022
- Simone Leigh: Sovereignty /Pavilion of the USA at Venice Art Biennale 2022
- Art Basel Miami Beach 2022
- Yunchul Kim: Pavilion of Korea at Venice Art Biennale 2022
- Austrian Pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale 2022
- Art Basel 2022 Unlimited
- Anna Uddenberg: Fake-Estate / Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin
And here are the Top Ten 2022 as YouTube playlist:
Leandro Erlich: Liminal is the first monographic survey exhibition of Leandro Erlich‘s work in North America. Liminal features 16 site-specific works that span more than two decades of Erlich’s career, including his most popular installation, the Swimming Pool. The exhibition runs until September 4, 2023.
Leandro Erlich: Liminal / Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM). Miami, November 30, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Press text (excerpt):
Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) is pleased to present Leandro Erlich: Liminal, an immersive exhibition featuring iconic artworks by Argentine artist Leandro Erlich, opening on November 29, 2022. Selected and arranged by New York-based guest curator Dan Cameron, the exhibition marks the artist’s first monographic survey show in North America and features 16 works spanning more than two decades of Erlich’s production.
“I believe in art as a practice that sparks dialogue—a dynamic and ongoing conversation with the audience and the greater context. I have never created a project or work without placing the audience’s participation at the center of the experience or without considering the surrounding environment. Architecture is often a key element in my work, and I incorporate local architectural language and cultural constructs that enliven my practice. I have been a nomadic artist for more than two decades, exploring territory far beyond my native Buenos Aires and journeying far outside of my comfort zone. However, as I approach fifty, I consider myself deeply Argentine. This cornerstone of my identity lends particular significance to my first mid-career survey at PAMM, a museum steeped in Latin American culture and heritage. Miami is a cultural nexus between North and South America, between hemispheres and languages. It’s a privilege to show my work in a context that is embedded in my own life,” said Leandro Erlich.
The exhibit is conceived as a sequence of spaces that one might encounter every day: an elevator, subway, classroom, hair salon, sidewalk, swimming pool, laundry room—even a window through which the neighbors’ windows can be seen. Each space is a precise simulation of these ordinary scenarios, but Erlich’s touch fosters extraordinary experiences. A window is air, a reflection is missing, bodies travel in time and space.
Arranged throughout PAMM’s special exhibition galleries, Liminal has been designed to offer an underlying narrative, leading viewers through a series of experiences that act cumulatively to cast doubt on the act of perception and expand its possibilities. Visitors will have the opportunity to interact with some of Erlich’s most widely known artworks and installations, including Swimming Pool; this work allows viewers to look down and see people “underwater” (through a layer of water contained in transparent glass), while those below exist in a type of suspended reality, adorned by the play of light and water on the aquamarine walls. Other works include The Cloud, Erlich’s celebrated glass sculptures of ephemeral beauty and the labyrinthine mystery of Changing Rooms. Characteristically participatory, Erlich’s work offers viewers an active role in installations like Hair Salon and Classroom.
“I was fortunate to get to know Leandro Erlich’s work in the early 1990s in Argentina, and ever since I’ve been consistently amazed by his genius at transforming vernacular architectural spaces into bewildering visual paradoxes. Because of the special challenges his sculptures present in terms of their design and construction, most people have only been able to experience one piece by Leandro Erlich at a time. Ever since I had the unique opportunity, in 2008, to commission Ladder and Window, a new outdoor work, for Prospect.1 in New Orleans, I’ve been obsessed with organizing a survey exhibition of his work for a US museum. It’s a huge commitment on PAMM’s part to take on a project of this scale and complexity, but not really a risk, in light of the first version of Liminal’s extremely successful run three years ago at MALBA in Buenos Aires. For me, Miami is the ideal city to initiate the in-depth appreciation of his work that his artistic achievement truly warrants.” said guest curator Dan Cameron.
Since the late 1990s, Erlich (b.1973) has created a highly distinctive body of sculptures and site-specific installations in which the architectural appearance of the everyday functions as a perceptual trap, leading the viewer into a visual paradox that systematically defies certain laws and attributes of the material world. In Erlich’s parallel universe, stairs lead nowhere, elevators never arrive, passive spectators become active participants, clouds acquire ceremonial solidity, and the integrity of constructed spaces reveals their bottomless nature.
“In the hands of Leandro Erlich, art and magic are often one in the same,” said PAMM Director Franklin Sirmans. “Egyptian, Greek and Roman art of antiquity often illustrated magical spells and incantations for supernatural power. In the 20th Century with the advent of artists as shamans, the power of art has often been connected to the presence of magic. For Latin American writers in the mid-20th century, Magical Realism, not unlike Afrofuturism in the present, opened up worlds that seemingly did not exist in the history of Colonialism. Erlich is hyper aware of such histories and though he may find kinship, his art speaks to the here and now in important ways that highlight global humanism and coexistence. Seeing one of his works by yourself just doesn’t have the same impact as viewing with others. For, rare is the work of art by Erlich that doesn’t involve the physical presence of multiple viewers.”
The exhibition’s title refers to the indeterminate threshold between spaces or experiences, a state rich with the possibility of crossing over, or entering into, a new realm—which is what viewers often find in Erlich’s work. To hover at the liminal edge positions us between one reality (that has been left behind), and a new reality that beckons from just beyond our reach. Erlich’s work challenges our trust that we know where we are in the physical world and how that world behaves, casting a spell of enchantment over our waking lives. The accumulated impact of Erlich’s craft imbues viewers with an intensified awareness of the inherent multiplicity of experience and a reverence for what we do not yet understand.
Leandro Erlich was born in Argentina in 1973. He lives and works between Paris, Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Over the past two decades, his work has been shown internationally and featured in the permanent collections of major museums and private collectors. His most recent exhibitions at the MORI Art Museum (Tokyo, 2017), MALBA (Buenos Aires, 2019), CAFAM (Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, 2019 and CCBB (Belo Horizonte, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, 2021-202) broke all admission records.
He went on to study at the Core Program, an artist residency in Houston, Texas (Glassell School of Art, 1998). In 2001 he became Argentina’s representative at the 49th Venice Biennale with Swimming Pool, a landmark piece that is part of the permanent collection at The 21st Century Museum of Art of Kanazawa (Japan) and the Voorlinden Museum (Netherlands).
As a conceptual artist, his work explores the perceptual bases of reality and our capacity to interrogate these same foundations through a visual framework. The architecture of the everyday is a recurring theme in Erlich’s art, aimed at creating a dialogue between what we believe and what we see, just as he seeks to close the distance between the museum or gallery space and daily experience.
At Art Basel Miami Beach, the artist Christopher Myers put up a space honoring the Black diaspora. Exhibition text: “Christopher Myers built a chapel for the stories of the sea in the Meridians sector of Art Basel Miami Beach. Inside a dimly lit hexagonal structure, a gentle glow emanates from five large stained-glass paintings installed in lightboxes. His imagery draws from sources including fantastical water creatures, blues music, water deities, and spirits – references which Myers uses to make connections between the water, African diasporas, and legacies of Black dislocation. Both theatrical and religious at once, Let the Mermaids Flirt with Me (2022) looks like a devotional space and a theater set. It’s a fitting combination, drawing on Myers’s practice as a playwright and visual artist. During the fair, the installation will be activated by a performance with puppets and original music. Christopher Myers, Let The Mermaids Flirt with Me, 2022 is presented by James Cohan Gallery in the Meridians sector at Art Basel Miami Beach.”
Christopher Myers: Let the Mermaids Flirt with Me / Art Basel Miami Beach 2022. Miami Beach, November 29, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
About the artist (excerpt, source: James Cohan Gallery): “Christopher Myers is an artist and writer whose work across disciplines is rooted in storytelling. Myers delves into the past to build narratives that speak to the slippages between history and mythology. His diverse practice spans textiles, performance, film, and sculptural objects, often created in collaboration with artisans from around the globe. He has worked with traditional shadow puppet makers in Jogjakarta, silversmiths in Khartoum, conceptual video artists in Ho Chi Minh City, young musicians in New Orleans, woodcarvers in Accra, weavers in Luxor, metal workers in Kenya, and textile printers in Copenhagen. These collaborations are driven by his interest in understanding the ways in which globalization is intimately intertwined with notions of self and community.”
On the occasion of Art Basel Miami Beach’s 20th anniversary, the artist studio Drift (Lonneke Gordijn, Ralph Nauta) performed the drone sculpture “Franchise Freedom” above the Miami Beach Convention Center. In addition, one of their earliest pieces, “Fragile Future”, was on display at the booth of Carpenters Workshop Gallery at Design Miami. In this conversation with independent curator Natalie Kovacs, Ralph Nauta talks about the piece and Drift’s work in general.
Natalie Kovacs in Conversation with Ralph Nauta (Drift) / Design Miami 2022. Miami Beach, December 2, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Onajide Shabaka is an artist we first met in 2008 when he celebrated the 9th anniversary of his online publication Miami Art Exchange. Onajide Shabaka was born Cincinnati, OH in 1948. He studied at California College of the Arts and Art Center College of Design and earned his MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. He lives and work in Miami. At Untitled Art Fair 2022, his gallery, Emerson Dorsch, showed two of his works. In this video Onajide Shabaka shows us his work and talks about his current projects.
Interview with Onajide Shabaka / Emerson Dorsch Gallery at Untitled Art Fair Miami Beach 2022. December 1, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Sanlorenzo builds tailor-made motor yachts that are known for their outstanding exterior and interior design. With his holistic approach, Sanlorenzo’s Style Director Sergio Buttiglieri has given the yacht builder a unique design philosophy and connected it to the art world with its presence at the Art Basel shows in Basel, Hong Kong, Paris, and Miami Beach.
As part of the Sanlorenzo Arts platform, Sanlorenzo presented works by American artist Tony Lewis in the Art Basel Miami Beach Collectors Lounge this year. We had the chance to speak with Sergio Buttiglieri about Sanlorenzo’s engagement in the arts, and the design philosophy of the yacht builder. In this video Sergio Buttiglieri talks about the designers that work for Sanlorenzo, sustainability in yacht design, how the company evolved over the years, the customization process, and his personal and professional background.
Interview with Sergio Buttiglieri, Style Director, Sanlorenzo Yacht. Art Basel Miami Beach, December 2, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Warning, crisis! Ecological balances, sustainability, energy crisis: where is the policy of savings heading? Host: Kathrin Luz. Participants: Yilmaz Dziewior, Museum Ludwig Cologne; Till Fellrath, co-director of Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Tue Greenfort, artist, Copenhagen/Berlin.
(in German language, please try YouTube’s auto-translate function)
Livestream recording from the Art Cologne Talks Lounge on November 20, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
El fin de la imaginación is a new exhibition at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach that opened coinciding with Art Week Miami and Art Basel Miami Beach. El fin de la imaginación comprises site-specific installations and sculptures by Adrián Villar Rojas, and newly contextualized presentations of clay works from his archive. In addition, the installation includes two sculptures by Argentinian artist Mariana Telleria who joins him with two works that challenge contemporary notions of monuments and memorials. In El fin de la imaginación, Villar Rojas wonders how the Moon, Mars, or any other extraterrestrial landscapes brought to us by interplanetary conquest will affect our past, present and future monumentality and its memorialization.
Adrián Villar Rojas with Mariana Telleria: El fin de la imaginación. The Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach. December 4, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Press text:
Adrián Villar Rojas (Rosario, Argentina,1980) conceives long term projects, collectively and collaboratively produced that take the shape of large-scale and site-specific environments, both imposing and fragile, leaving scarce traces of their passage through the world due to perishing materiality and parasitical integration. Within his research and worldbuilding, which mixes sculpture, drawing, video, literature and performative traces, the artist explores the conditions of a humanity at risk, on the verge of extinction or already extinct, in which he traces the multi-species boundaries of a post-anthropocene time folded in on itself.
In El fin de la imaginación, a newly commissioned installation for The Bass Museum of Art, Villar Rojas wonders how the Moon, Mars, or any other extraterrestrial landscapes brought to us by interplanetary conquest will affect our past, present and future monumentality and its memorialization.
What will happen when our terrestrial fictions, the ones that cement nations and identities, travel to outer space? Will the stories of the Greco-Latin gods, of European Empires, of Spanish Conquistadors, or even of the United States itself, survive as we know them, as we shaped them in books, museums, anthems and monuments, or will they mutate with the radical change of context? And what will happen with the new stories to come, the ones needed to build the first communes that will inhabit planets? How will political fiction be or behave in this expanded space-time travel to come? How will past and future stories evolve or mutate? Will they lose their ‘original’ meaning and function as space colonization goes over centuries and territories? Just as the monuments to the invaders of the Americas: Cristoforo Colombo, Hernán Cortez, Francisco Pizarro shifted their social meaning from cohesion to rejection, and their symbolic function from glorification of a discovery to testimony of a genocide? Will that day come when we see the oppressed of the future rising against the official stories, occupying and re-signifying the monuments of humanity’s space conquest?
Villar Rojas asks if one of these future monuments might be the Moon itself, with all the physicality and memory of humanity’s attempted interplanetary endeavors imprinted on its lunar soil, or if it already is a museum of such conquests. After all, the airless atmosphere turns the celestial body into a freezer, so unless struck by a meteorite, each boot print, rover track, crashed satellite, television equipment, and flagpole will remain there in perpetuity, these silent, still objects, are forever lying in its dust exactly as they were. With its lack of legal jurisdictions or environmental hazards, the Moon is the utmost preservation device: the Solar System’s ultimate anti-entropy chamber.
Just as the market price of gold, or any other precious heavy metal, would fall dramatically if mining corporations were able to ship a three-billion-dollar gold, copper, iron or lithium asteroid to the Earth, thus triggering an authentic revolution, or even a catastrophe, in the world economy, Villar Rojas’ hypothesis is that colonization of space and celestial bodies will trigger a multidimensional epistemic reaction chain in our way to understand the past, present and future of our memorialization practices, as well as to produce new ones in this amplified context.
Is humanity in a terminal crisis or in an era of light-speed revolutions? Perhaps, as in quantum mechanics, in both processes at the same time.
ABOUT ADRIÁN VILLAR ROJAS
Adrián Villar Rojas was born in Rosario, Argentina in 1980. He lives and works nomadically. Villar Rojas has been the recipient of numerous awards including Sharjah Biennial Prize, awarded by the Sharjah Art Foundation (2015), The Zurich Art Prize at the Museum Haus Konstruktiv (2013); the 9th Benesse Prize in the 54th Venice Biennale, (2011); the Nuevo Banco de Santa Fe Scholarship for Young Artists (2006); and the first prize in the Bienal Nacional de Arte de Bahía Blanca at the Contemporary Art Museum of Bahía Blanca, Argentina (2005). In 2020 he was nominated for the Hugo Boss Prize.
Recent solo exhibitions have been shown at the Tank Shanghai, China (2019); the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada (2018); The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles (2017); NEON Foundation at Athens National Observatory, Athens (2017); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz (2017) and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2017); the Moderna Museet, Sweden (2015); the Serpentine Gallery, London (2013); the Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, Switzerland (2013); and the Musée de Louvre, Paris (2011).
Participation in international group exhibitions include the Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2018); 14th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul (2015); 12th Bienal de La Habana, La Habana (2015); Sharjah Biennial 12, Kalba (2015); dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel and Kabul (2012) and 54th International Art Exhibition: La Biennale di Venezia, Argentina’s National Pavilion, Venice (2011).
ABOUT MARIANA TELLERIA
Mariana Telleria was born in Rufino, Argentina in 1979. She lives and works in Rosario, Argentina. Telleria has been the recipient of numerous awards such as LXV Salón Nacional de Rosario 2nd Adquisition Award (2011), the Fondo Nacional de las Artes Scholarship for Artists (2009) and Nuevo Banco de Santa Fe Scholarship for Artists (2006 and 2007).
Recent solo exhibitions have been shown at Ruth Benzacar Galería de Arte, Buenos Aires (2018); Espacio Californio, Buenos Aires (2017); Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina (2015); Galería Alberto Sendrós, Buenos Aires (2009 and 2011); MAMBA, Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (2011) and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Rosario, Argentina (2007).
Participation in group exhibitions include 58th International Art Exhibition: La Biennale di Venezia, Argentina’s National Pavilion, Venice (2019); MUNTREF Museo de Arte, Buenos Aires (2017 and 2018); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Montevideo, Uruguay (2017); Boghossian Foundation, Brussels (2016); Mana Contemporary, Jersey (2015); Museo Municipal de Arte Moderno, Cuenca (2015); Museo Municipal de Bellas Artes Juan B. Castagnino Rosario (2014); Marian Goodman Gallery, Nueva York (2014); Galerie Xippas, Paris (2014); New Museum Triennial 2012, Nueva York (2012); Plataforma Bogotá, Colombia (2012); and Museo Municipal de Bellas Artes Juan B. Castagnino, Rosario (2011).
Warning, toxic! How dangerous is the operating system art? Host: Kathrin Luz. Participants: Sophie Jung, TAZ, Berlin; Kristian Jarmuschek, gallery owner, president BVDG; Petra Martinetz, gallery owner, Cologne, participant of ART COLOGNE.
(in German language, please try YouTube’s auto-translate function)
Livestream recording from the Art Cologne Talks Lounge on November 20, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
In Basel it’s called ”Unlimited”, in Miami Beach it’s titled “Meridians”: Art Basel’s sector for large-scale projects. The Meridian sector of Art Basel Miami Beach this year presents works by Christopher Myers, María José Arjona, Simon Denny, Richard Deacon, and Zanele Muholi, among others. On the first day, the artworks by Christopher Myers and María José Arjona have been activated by performances, Simon Denny’s sculpture could be brought to live via an augmented reality app.
Art Basel Miami Beach 2022 Meridians. November 29/30, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Art Cologne Talks Lounge 2022 – Unlock Art by ZEITmagazin. The Art of Africa. Sakhile Matlhare, PHD, Co-Founder and Art Director at Sakhile&Me in conversation with Dr. Lisa Zeitz, Weltkunst and Kunst und Auktionen.
Livestream recording from the Art Cologne Talks Lounge, Art Cologne 2022, Cologne (Germany), November 18, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Just opposite the Miami Beach Convention Center and Art Basel, Design Miami presents the 18th edition of its design fair. Design Miami features 50 gallery and Curio exhibitions. This is a walkthrough of the show, which features works by designers and artists such as Arthur Elrod, Jean Royère, Charlotte Perriand, Pierre Jeanneret, George Nakashima, Drift, Andile Dyalvane, and Lin Fanglu.
Design Miami 2022. Miami Beach, December 2, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
This is a virtual tour of the 11th edition of Untitled Art in Miami Beach on 1 December 2022. Untitled Art Miami Beach features over 140 exhibitors presenting contemporary artworks, special projects and performances.
Untitled Art, Miami Beach, 2022. December 1, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Just like Art Basel Miami Beach, the art fair NADA Miami celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. The New Art Dealers Alliance’s annual flagship art fair is dedicated to present rising talents from around the globe, with 145 galleries and art spaces from over 40 cities, and a series of conversations and performances as part of NADA Presents. This video provides you with at walkthrough of the show.
NADA Miami 2022. November 29, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Art Cologne Talks 2022: Art, Crisis, and Industry: A discussion with emerging galleries. Host: Maria Inés Plaza Lazo, Arts of ...
Ludovica Carbotta: I come from outside of myself at OGR Torino in Turin, Italy, is a project by OGR Torino ...
At Art Cologne 2022, around 190 galleries and art dealers such as Sprüth Magers, Michael Werner, Karsten Greve and Hans ...
Under the title RHAMESJAFACOSEYJAFADRAYTON OGR Torino presents the first Italian solo show of the US-American artist and filmmaker Arthur Jafa. ...
For over a hundred years the OGR – Officine Grandi Riparazioni in Turin (Italy) was a workshop for trains. Now it’s ...
As part of 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair London 2022, Portuguese artist Grada Kilomba installed a 32-meter-long sculpture in the ...
Out now: VernissageTV Magazine No. 52, November 2022. In this issue: Richard Jackson, Village Suisse Paris, Sascha Wiederhold, and Paris+ ...
The group exhibition Forming Communities at Kindl – Centre for Contemporary Art in Berlin shows examples of the connections between ...
The exhibition Barbara Chase-Riboud: Infinite Folds at Serpentine North Gallery looks back at over seven decades of work of the ...
Center for the Critical Appreciation of Antiquity (2022) is a site-specific installation by the artist Andreas Angelidakis at Espace Niemeyer ...
Currently on view at the Serpentine South Gallery in London is a retrospective of Sudanese artist Kamala Ibrahim Ishag. Kamala ...
On the occasion of the group exhibition DYOR at Kunsthalle Zürich, we had the chance to speak with artist and ...
DYOR is the title of the current group exhibition at Kunsthalle Zürich. In the crypto scene, DYOR stands for “Do ...
Maximum Security Society is the title of American artist Julia Scher’s current solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Zürich. Scher’s work addresses ...
Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s solo exhibition “Scenes” at Almine Rech London consists mostly of paintings that reflect the artist’s love for ...
In this video we have a look at the inaugural edition of Art Basel’s Paris art fair, titled Paris+ par ...
On the occasion of Maxim’s solo exhibition ‘Infinite Drama’ at Miart Gallery in London, we had the occasion to do ...
Some impressions and highlights of 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair London 2022. 1-54 is the first and only international art ...
Highlights of Frieze London Art Fair 2022. London (UK), October 13, 2022. > Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video ...
A solo exhibition of the Swiss artist Rémy Markowitsch will run at the Kindl Art Center in Berlin until February ...
All of a Quiver at Kindl – Center for Contemporary Art is one of three exhibitions that present the work ...
“Praise Berlin” is the title of Los Angeles based artist Karl Haendel’s third solo exhibition at Wentrup Gallery in Berlin. ...
During the Berlin Art Week 2022 we also had a look at Tue Greenfort’s exhibition at Galerie König. The show ...
Sascha Wiederhold. Rediscovery of a Forgotten Artist is a special exhibition by the Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. The ...
As part of Berlin Art Week 2022, Neue Nationalgalerie showed Simone Forti‘s performance “Huddle” in the upper hall of the ...
For Parla_Mute, his first solo exhibition at Michael Janssen in Berlin, the artist Yonamine (born 1975 in Luanda), presents a ...
As part of Berlin Art Week, Tieranatomisches Theater in cooperation with KW Institute for Contemporary Art was presenting the exhibition ...
Mona Hatoum‘s solo exhibition at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) is part of a large-scale survey of her work at three ...
YOYI! Care, Repair, Heal is the title of a group show at Gropius Bau in Berlin that addresses issues such ...
Fake-Estate is the title of Swedish artist Anna Uddenberg’s first institutional solo exhibition in Berlin. For the Schinkel Pavillon, Uddenberg ...
The current exhibition at PalaisPopulaire in Berlin presents LuYang, this year’s Deutsche Bank “Artist of the Year”. LuYang’s works are ...
American artist Richard Jackson is influenced by both abstract expressionism and action painting. For his solo exhibition at Hauser & ...
Interview with artist Lorena D’Ercole, who combines painting and NFTs in a unique way. In this video, Lorena D’Ercole talks ...
Galerie Greulich in Frankfurt/Main opens the fall season with a solo show by Philipp Kummer. Titled “Sitting by the Lake ...
Tour of Positions Berlin Art Fair 2022 during the Preview day. 88 international galleries from 20 countries present contemporary and ...
“Encounters” is the title of the current exhibition at Schlieder Contemporary in Frankfurt am Main (Germany). The show brings together ...
“morgen kommen wir nicht wieder” (tomorrow we won’t come back) is an exhibition by Johanna Schlegel, shown from August 9 ...
In this video we have a look at Asad Raza’s art installation at Kunsthalle Portikus in Frankfurt/Main in Germany. The ...
This video provides you with a look at the exhibition “Erna Rosenstein” at Hauser & Wirth Zürich, Limmatstrasse. Erna Rosenstein ...
“Salzburg is the city of Mozart, and I wanted to place the piece in front of the city’s sculpture of ...
Tishan Hsu is one of the artists, curator Cecilia Alemani has chosen for the 59th International Art Exhibition “The Milk ...
As part of the curatorial project “7 Winds” at Kunsthalle Bern, the vocalist NoBuntu Mhlambi has been showing a two-part ...
Marcela Calderón Andrade’s solo show “Enchura” at Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland is almost invisible at first sight. It consists of ...
Kunsthalle Bern kicks off the 2022 fall season with a series of exhibitions and events. One of them is a ...
Lavinia Schulz & Walter Holdt / Venice Art Biennale 2022 – The Milk of Dreams. Official description: “During the Weimar ...
Louise Bourgeois’ artwork ‘Twosome’, 1991, has been part of the exhibition ‘Louise Bourgeois x Jenny Holzer: The Violence of Handwriting ...
Isa Genzken: Untitled (2007) at Neugerriemschneider at Art Basel Unlimited 2022. Official description: Isa Genzken’s installation, first conceived for Skulptur ...
Les Innombrables is an ephemeral artist collective founded in 1991 in Heidiland (Switzerland). Les Innombrables describe their artistic activity as ...
Out now: VernissageTV Magazine No. 51, August 2022. In this issue: Liz Larner, Arshile Gorky, Biennale Arte 202, Art Basel 2022 ...
At the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, Monira Al Qadiri presents a series of 3D-printed sculptures ...
For the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, The Milk of Dreams (Il Latte dei Sogni), the ...
Mire Lee (born in 1988 in South Korea) is one of the artists who have been chosen to exhibit in ...
Terrarium is the title of a new installation by the artist Kapwani Kiwanga (born 1978 in Canada) for the 59th ...
In this video we travel to the Bergell Valley, more precisely to Vicosoprano, a village about 30km southwest of St. ...
The Kunstmuseum Luzern is currently showing the first comprehensive exhibition of David Hockney’s works in Switzerland. The retrospective presents works ...
Jordan Wolfson’s installation consists of twenty holographic fan displays mounted on a freestanding wall and programmed to project animated characters, ...
The artist Marianne Vitale (born 1973, USA) has been chosen to participate in the 59th International Art Exhibition – La ...
Chun Kwang Young: Times Reimagined is a Collateral Event of the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. ...
Until 31 August 2022, Galerie Gmurzynska in Zürich presents a selection of masterpieces by Chilean artist Roberto Matta (1911-2002). Roberto ...
In its gallery in Basel, Switzerland, Gagosian is currently showing new ceramic works by American artist Theaster Gates. The artworks ...
Wilde Gallery in Basel (Switzerland) is currently showing works by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer in a solo show titled Excuse You!. Rafael ...
Facing Infinity. Alberto Giacometti & Pablo Picasso at Hauser & Wirth Zürich’s Bahnhofstrasse space brings together of two of the ...
‘Light Vulnerable Objects Threatened by Eight Cement Bricks’ (7-12 June, 2022) at Verein by Association in Zürich (Switzerland) is a ...
Karma International in Zürich (Switzerland), currently presents two solo exhibitions: Meret Oppenheim and Ida Ekblad, both running until 16 July ...
The exhibition ‘Bridget Riley: Looking and Seeing, Doing and Making’ at Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern (Switzerland) has its focus ...
Running concurrently with Frank Bowling’s solo show, Hauser & Wirth Zürich presents the exhibition ‘Jack Whitten’. The show features paintings ...
Coinciding with Zurich Art Weekend and Art Basel Week, Hauser & Wirth Zürich presents recent abstract paintings by Frank Bowling. ...
‘Back to the Roots’ at We Are AIA | Awareness in Art in Zürich (Switzerland) is a group exhibition that ...
In this video we have a look at this year’s edition of Design Miami Basel. It’s the 16th edition of ...
Art Basel in Basel, Switzerland, features over 200 leading galleries and more than 4,000 artists from five continents. This video ...
The Unlimited sector is one of the highlights of Art Basel in Basel. Art Basel’s platform for projects that are ...
Liste Art Fair 2022, Basel (Switzerland). Press preview, June 13, 2022. > Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
In a large special exhibition, the Kunstmuseum Basel illuminates the encounter of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) with the old master El ...
Coinciding with Zurich Art Weekend 2022, Kunsthalle Zürich opens a solo exhibition with Californian artist Liz Larner (b. 1960). Over ...
During the 59th Venice Biennale, the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti in Venice, with the support of the ...
Fondation Beyeler’s summer exhibition in Riehen (Basel, Switzerland) is dedicated to Piet Mondrian, one of the most famous artists of ...
After being out of print for nearly 60 years, Hauser & Wirth Publishers released the carefully designed facsimile of a ...
Taiwan participates in the Venice Art Biennale since 1995. After several group exhibitions, three solo exhibitions followed: Wu Tien-chang: Never ...
South Korean artist Mire Lee (b. 1988) is the recipient of the Pontopreis MMK 2002. The award aims to support ...
The exhibition “Brice Marden: Inner Space” that is currently on view at the Kunstmuseum Basel retraces the evolution of Brice ...
Füsun Onur is representing Turkey at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia with an exhibition titled ...
The gallery von Bartha is currently presenting two solo exhibitions in its Basel space: Olaf Breuning and Sarah Oppenheimer. In ...
Coinciding with London Gallery Weekend, König London presents Ayako Rokkaku’s solo exhibition “Imagination for Flying Adventure”. The show is Ayako ...
Francis Alÿs is representing Belgium at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia with the exhibition “The ...
Commissioned by the Australia Council for the Arts and curated by Alexie Glass-Kantor, the artist Marco Fusinato is representing Australia ...
The gallery Häusler Contemporary Zürich currently presents the solo exhibition Gary Kuehn “Box Piece”. The centerpiece of the show is ...
Coinciding with the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, MUVE Contemporaneo presents a monumental installation by the ...
Małgorzata Mirga-Tas is representing Poland at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia with the exhibition “Re-enchanting ...
German artist Maria Eichhorn is representing Germany at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia in Venice, Italy. The exhibition is titled “Relocating a Structure”. Official description: “In her project, Maria Eichhorn focuses on the history of the German pavilion and its architectural transformation. The Bavarian pavilion, built in 1909, was renamed the German pavilion in 1912 and was rede- signed in 1938 to reflect fascist aesthetics. A new façade, rear extensions, and a raised ceiling contributed to the pavilion’s intimidating appearance. Despite post-war modifications, the building still embodies the formal language of fascism. Maria Eichhorn uncovers traces of the original pavilion, hidden behind its 1938 redesign. The project also includes city tours to places of remembrance and resistance conducted by Giulio Bobbo and Luisella Romeo and developed with the Istituto Veneziano per la Storia della Resistenza e della Società Contemporanea (IVESER), performances by Nkisi and Jan St. Werner, and a catalogue.”
Maria Eichhorn: Relocating a Structure / Pavilion of Germany at Venice Art Biennale 2022. Venice, Italy, April 21, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Sonia Boyce represents Great Britain at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia with her exhibition “Feeling Her Way”. Official description: “Sonia Boyce depicts intimate social encounters that explore interpersonal dynamics. Working across drawing, photography, video, and installation, she composes works from images and voices captured during the participatory events she initiates. The exhibition Feeling Her Way (2022) is comprised of tessellating wallpapers, golden geometric structures, and colour-tinted moving-image works that immerse the space in the sound of Black British female vocalists, embodying feelings of freedom, power, and vulnerability. The central work shows the singers as they meet, improvise, and perform acapella together for the first time, demonstrating the potential of collaborative play as a route to innovation, a central tenet of Boyce’s practice.” In her installation, Sonia Boyce brings together five Black women musicians of different generations: Poppy Ajudha, Jacqui Dankworth, Sofia Jernberg, Tanita Tikaram and Errollyn Wallen. With her exhibition, Sonia Boyce has won the Golden Lion prize for Best National Participation at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia.
Sonia Boyce: Feeling Her Way / British Pavilion at Venice Art Biennale 2022. Venice (Italy), April 25, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
As a collateral event to the Venice Art Biennale 2022, the Louise Nevelson Foundation presents the exhibition “Louise Nevelson: Persistence” in the historic rooms of the Procuratie Vecchie, Piazza San Marco in Venice, Italy. The show marks the 60th anniversary of Louise Nevelson’s representation of the United States in the American Pavilion at the Biennale Arte in 1962. The presentation includes more than 60 works created by Louise Nevelson between the 1950s and the 1980s. It features painted sculptures alongside little-known examples of her important collages. The exhibition is the first major show of Louise Nevelson’s work in Italy since 2013 and runs until September 9, 2022.
Louise Nevelson: Persistence / Solo exhibition at Procuratie Vecchie in Venice. Venice (Italy), April 23, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Currently on view at Artstübli gallery in Basel is an exhibition that is dedicated to the “Godfather of Street Art”, the Canadian artist Richard Hambleton (1952-2017). The show features photographs by Vera Isler and Thomas Christ that document Hambleton’s works and his live, as well as two original artworks by Richard Hambleton. In this video we take a look at the exhibition and talk to Thomas Christ, who talks about his time in New York, his encounters with Richard Hambleton, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, and the art historical significance of Urban Art / Street Art.
Richard Hambleton gained fame with his rapidly painted shadow figures which appeared overnight on the walls of buildings in New York and various cities in Europe. In a few seconds and life-size with sweeping brushstrokes in urban space. Also known as the Shadowman, Hambleton left behind over 400 in Manhattan alone. In 1984, Hambleton traveled to Europe five times passing through 24 major cities, including Basel, in the shadow of the night, leaving his signature figures everywhere. The reason for the trips was an invitation to participate in the 1984 Venice Biennale.
The exhibition is presented by Artstübli – Urban Art & Culture, Balzer Projects and the estate of Vera Isler (Verein Blaue Blume, ART-Nachlassstiftung, Bern). The show runs until June 25, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Exhibition text (translation from German):
New York City at the beginning of the 1980s. A city is bleeding to death, the Bronx is burning, the Subway is a “no-go area”. The murder rate is unbelievably high: there are over 30 murders per 100,000 inhabitants. Where today tourists take photos at three o’clock in the morning in New York’s Times Square, back then not even the New Yorkers themselves dared to go after dark. In the 1980s, capitalism and racism showed their ugly faces. From Lower Manhattan to the Bronx – abandoned buildings, poverty, homelessness and crime. There was a lack of prospects for Black and Latino residents of the city, especially the youth.
But already growing on this soil were the seedlings of another New York, a culture that many did not see or did not want to see. Despite, or perhaps because of, this hopelessness, underground creativity flourished. Small artist-run galleries, artists collaboratives, off spaces, and the graffiti scene emerged. The latter consisted of groups of mostly young men who sprayed graffiti with spray cans on subway cars and the walls of houses in the desolate boroughs, thus creatively living out and immortalizing themselves. Always in the hope that everything would get better at some point, that they would be discovered and become famous.
Two people from Basel – the artist and photographer Vera Isler and the art historian, photographer and graffiti connoisseur Thomas Christ – regularly visited the city as early as the late 1970s and early 1980s. They had their cameras in their luggage and sharpened their analytical and artistic eye in the USA. They developed a very individual visual language and brought home a new perspective on political and social realities.
Isler and Christ are chroniclers of American contemporary history. Their photographs are not only invaluable contemporary documents; even today they sharpen our view of the sociological and cultural context in which the artistic and conceptual development of the city’s urban art and underground culture must be seen.
These life-size figures, brushed/sprayed onto walls in seconds with broad brushes and black paint, appeared in dark corners and alleys, as well as on high walls and facades. Sometimes they stood casually leaning against a house wall, sometimes they jumped at passers-by from high walls to scare the (unwilling) public at any time of day or night. Richard Hambleton is therefore still reverently called “The Godfather of Street Art”. He is considered a pioneer in urban art and inspires renowned artists like Banksy, Blek le Rat and JR to this day. He was neither a street artist nor an illegal sprayer. He grew up in a middle-class environment in Vancouver, Canada, and enjoyed an education at an established art academy. The studio was his place of artistic creation, but on the street he entered into direct exchange with the public through his shadow figures. What makes them exciting is the power of the viewer’s imagination – that split second experience when you see the figures that matter. (Quote: R. Hambleton)
On their forays through Lower Manhattan and the Bronx, Isler and Christ met Keith Haring, who would later become an art market heavyweight. Haring and Hambleton knew each other well. It was probably through him that they became aware of the “Shadow Men.” “In 1979, 3 men met in Club 57. Thus the holy trinity of Richard Hambleton, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring was born. Theirs was a perfect storm of creativity, concept and circumstance, marking a new chapter in art history and changing the face of New York’s iconic East Village art scene forever.”
Richard Hambleton saw himself as a conceptual artist and wanted his art, not him, to be the focus. At the same time, Hambleton was vain, secretive, and often met his counterpart with arrogant disapproval. He was aware of his talent and demonstrated a strong artistic self-confidence to the outside world.
In the 70s and 80s Basel developed more and more into an international art scene. Richard Hambleton arrived in 1984 with his shadow figures and immortalized himself in 12-13 places in the city. At that time, however, hardly anyone knew Hambleton’s work, and when the figures appeared overnight, the astonishment was great. Even the Basler Zeitung, which at the time was already following his mysterious activities, puzzled over makers and motives. Amazing – an urban art actor of the New York scene helped to establish an urban art culture in Basel!
The rich collection of photographs by the two Basel photographers will be made available to the public for the first time in this exhibition. Selected views from New York and Basel are shown. Vera Isler also photographed Richard Hambleton in his studio in New York. Her images show a handsome young man in splattered overalls who was well aware of his status and promising career as an artist. They, too, are being presented to an audience for the first time. The photos of Thomas Christ are a part of his legendary graffiti photographs, which have already reached cult status since the 80s in a (out-of-print) publication.
About Vera Isler
Vera Isler-Leiner, (1931-2015) was sent to Switzerland in 1936 with her two sisters to escape the Nazi terror. Her parents were murdered in 1942 in Bełżec, a Polish extermination camp. Having spent her childhood in a orphanage, she later worked as a medical-technical laboratory assistant. Her true passion, however, was making art – tapestries, collages, prints and sculptures.
During a six-months visit to the US in the early 1980s, Isler switched her creative focus to photography. Fearless and adventurous, she searched for good motives and stories in the streets and alleys of New York. The lives of people of all ethnicities and classes fascinated her as much as this newly discovered art form – Graffiti – which she encountered all over Lower Manhattan. “Shadowmen”, the mysterious ghostly figures which appeared overnight, became her favorite subjects. She had the exceptional fortune – likely through an introduction by her friend Keith Haring – to visit and photograph the artist, Richard Hambleton. She followed him to Venice in 1984 and photographed his spooky figures which he painted on a short stop-over in Basel. Her extensive collection of “Shadowman” photographs pays tribute to this.
Isler published her stories in countless newspapers and magazines, such as “Das Magazin”, “NZZ”, “Du”, “Spiegel”, “Stern”, “ART” and “Weltwoche”. International recognition in the 1990s with portrait photography. In “Rollenwechsel” (1992) and “Face to Face” (1994), she created black and white large-format portraits of famous artists and photographers, showing them in their apartments or studios. In 2000 Vera Isler published “Auch ich”, an autobiography which situates her often tragic experiences within the chronicles of her battle against breast cancer.
About Thomas Christ
The Swiss Thomas Christ from Basel was one of the first to document the phenomenon of graffiti and street art with his photos from 1982 and ’83. He used New York graffiti artists as well as Keith Haring and Richard Hambleton as models of illegal design in public space.
Thomas Christ, born in Zurich in 1953, has lived in Basel since 1974, where he successfully completed his law school studies with a doctoral thesis on the copyright of filmmakers. Among his most artistically successful series are his works on the theme of “Schaufensterspiegelungen” from the years 1974-1979, published in 1980 by the Galerie von Bartha in Basel, as far as his published collection of New York Subway Graffiti, a documentation from the Bronx that is both artistically and sociologically significant.
“Urban Graffiti” was his second publication, having already released “Subway Graffiti” in 1984. There the focus was on painted New York Trains and Walls, which he had photographed during the same period. Poem allowed a glimpse into his Blackbook, which are shown as a collection at the end of the book.
Wilde Gallery Basel currently presents Swiss artist Mathieu Dafflon’s exhibition Facewalk / Jumprope. It’s Mathieu Dafflon’s first solo exhibition in Basel and the third with the gallery. It features three large paintings (‘One painting to ruin them all’, ‘Saturday’, and ‘Sunday’) and many smaller paintings. In this video, the director of Wilde Basel, Simmy Swinder Voellmy, provides us with an introduction to the exhibition.
Mathieu Dafflon: Facewalk / Jumprope. Wilde Gallery Basel. Basel (Switzerland), April 12, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Exhibition text (excerpt):
Jumprope refers to a child’s game, playful learning, fun, and entertainment. Facewalk, on the other hand, is a vulgar expression that stands for failure, for “flying on one’s face,” and for nevertheless dragging oneself along in this uncomfortable situation, for somehow carrying on. Facewalk / Jumprope is about the coming together of these two poles. In Mathieu Dafflon’s work, the artist is not a genius who provides us with universal answers to pressing questions. Rather, the artist acts as a sarcastic comedian and wistful observer. Dafflon’s exhibition is a playground where one can go on a personal journey of discovery – playful, failing, without dogmatism, but all the more fun.
In the center of the exhibition hangs a monumental painting that shows, in absurd enlargement, a broken cup. On it is the image of a comic character: a little devil with his eyes wide open and panting with exertion. The character comes from the series “Cow and Chicken.” The notorious villain repeatedly lures the good-natured cow and chicken into various traps and frightens them with his often prominently staged nudity. In Dafflon’s painting, he holds his skinny legs up with his hands to sit on his rear end. Moving around in this pose is the so-called “buttwalk.” This is not only mastered by the devil from the comic series but is also practiced as a strength exercise by numerous fitness fanatics, as evidenced by countless videos on YouTube or Instagram.
Two other large paintings depict childishly painted grimaces. Saturday shows an oversized head with a brush cut, protruding ears, red-rimmed, torn eyes and a mouth contorted into a grin. The nose is emblazoned obscenely large in the center of the face. The painting Sunday shows an exceedingly upset head. Its eyes are riddled with red veins like they are about to burst, while the eyebrows come together in a frown line. The mouth shows the bared teeth, with the canines protruding above the lip like vampire fangs. Even the pointed nose and hair stubble look threatening. One can almost hear a growl coming from the oversized apparition.
Dafflon paints the faces of Saturday and Sunday simply in order to underline the purity of emotion. Their size corresponds to the intensity of their content. On the other hand, they somehow seem false, artificially inflated. This is because Dafflon originally painted the pictures in a small A4 format, and then he enlarged them several times and copied and painted them in meticulous handwork. As a result, they look a bit as if a bad photograph had been printed too large and the quality too poor. The attempt to capture the childlike imagination and the emotions conveyed by the faces in all their size, meaning, and detail fails – Facewalk.
Dafflon finds various ways to pull the weight of meaning of the images into the ridiculous and amusing. In the picture Saturday, a vase is enthroned in the middle of the face, with “faire l’amour” written. A hope for Saturday evening, the only day of the week when there is free space for such pleasure? After all, Saturday and Sunday represent the two days that, even for adults, still contain certain freedom and possibility for escape, far from the daily work routine and clocked habits. On the pointed nose of Sunday’s grumpy face, there is another surprise: instead of pimples, blackheads, and bulbous noses, glass marbles have been painted with great love and fascination, referring to the idleness and uneventful passing of time on a Sunday.
Marbles also appear in some of the smaller paintings. They are painted on an abstract background, in which not infrequently shadowy grimaces and fantasy figures can be discovered. Some are transparent, others matte; they are striped, marbled and dotted. Memories arise of one’s childhood, of the fascination one had with the variously crafted glass marbles, of the endless time one could spend playing with them, throwing them, of the shapes and figures they form when they land scattered on the floor. In other pictures, on similar abstract backgrounds, there are broken motif cups that have been haphazardly glued back together. These have something melancholic about them. Thus, the cup with the imprint “No. 1 Daddy” makes one think of not-so-idyllic family life and the function of a role model, which is broken. Shattered glass, jugs and amphorae refer to the wreckage of adult life or even civilization.
Although all of these smaller paintings function as independent works, they share a common link. The abstract background, which is not infrequently kitschy and overstuffed, is copied from a painting from the 1950s. Dafflon used the painting “Encounter of the Worlds” by the expressionist artist Karel Appel and repainted it as closely as possible. With his careful and deliberate copying, he takes Appel’s spontaneous gesture, marked by strength, conviction and self-confidence, to the absurd. But it is not only the self-confidence and authority that disintegrates in Dafflon’s copy. After completing his copy, Dafflon cut it up and divided it into several small pieces. From these, he created the paintings we see in the exhibition. The encounter of the worlds disintegrates into fragments, into independent individual moments, into poetic contemplations of marbles and everyday rituals such as drinking coffee in the morning or beer in the evening, into holding on to cherished objects, to individual and personal memories that can mean the world to one person, but nothing to another, to be just garbage.
Text by Dr. Martina Venanzoni
Martina Venanzoni holds a Ph.D. in art history. She was curator of the exhibition “Shift in Progress” at the Shift Festival for Electronic Arts in Basel 2009 – 2011 and a research assistant at Schaulager Basel 2013 – 2018. Currently, she is working as curatorial director of FATart and as a freelance art historian. Her previous essays include “Spielregeln und Spielräume / Playing the Game,” in Kathy Halbreich et al. (eds.): Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts (Ausst.-Kat.), Basel: Laurenz-Stiftung, Schaulager / New York: MoMA, 2018 and “Corpo-Real Technologies: Towards a Posthumanist Aesthetics of Information and Body,” in Oliver Ruf and Lars Grabbe (eds.): Techno-Aesthetics. On the material and receptive systematization of techno-aesthetic reality, Bielefeld: transcript, 2022 (in preparation).
Mathieu Dafflon was born in 1987 in Geneva, Switzerland. He graduated from École des Arts Appliqués and Haute École d’Art et de Design HEAD – Genève (2011). He lives and works in Basel.
Mathieu Dafflon was awarded the Prix de la Ville de Genève in 2014 and the Prix Hirzel in 2016. His work was first exhibited at Art Bärtschi & Cie, now Wilde, in 2016, in a solo show titled WPO WPA WPC IPF. Other solo shows with his work include those at Wilde (Geneva and Basel, Switzerland), Kunsthalle Marcel Duchamp (Cully, Switzerland) and Salle Crosnier, Palais de l’Athénée (Geneva, Switzerland), following his award of the Prix Hirzel. Dafflon’s work has been featured in several group shows, including those at the Centre d’Art Contemporain (Geneva, Switzerland), Spielact Festival (Geneva, Switzerland), MAH – Musée d’Art et d’Histoire (Geneva, Switzerland) and Centre d’Art Contemporain (Geneva, Switzerland). His work is included in the collections of FMAC – Fonds d’art contemporain de la Ville de Genève and Collection Banque Mirabaud.
With an exhibition titled ‘Sovereignty’, the American artist Simone Leigh (born 1967) is representing the United States of America at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia.
Official description: “Characterised by an interest in performativity and affect, Simone Leigh’s expansive body of work in sculpture, video, and performance parses the construction of Black femme subjectivity. Leigh’s large-scale sculptural works join forms derived from vernacular architecture and the female body, rendering them via materials and processes associated with the artistic traditions of Africa and the African diaspora, redefining notions of space, time, and existence. Sovereignty commingles disparate histories and narratives, including those related to ritual performances of the Baga peoples in Guinea, early Black American material culture from the Edgefield District in South Carolina, and the landmark 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition. With a series of new bronzes and ceramics, Leigh intervenes imaginatively to fill gaps in the historical record by proposing new hybridities.”
Simone Leigh: Sovereignty / Pavilion of the USA at Venice Art Biennale 2022. Pre-opening, Venice, Italy, April 21, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Virtual Tour of the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia in the Arsenale.
Venice Art Biennale 2022: The Milk of Dreams. Venice (Italy), April 20, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Virtual Tour of the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia in the Giardini.
Venice Art Biennale 2022: The Milk of Dreams. Venice (Italy), April 20, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
“Fujiko Nakaya. Nebel Leben” at Haus der Kunst in Munich, Germany, is a comprehensive survey exhibition of the Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya. Fujiko Nakaya is best known for her fog sculptures, which are challenging traditional notions of sculpture as they change at every moment depending on temperature, wind and atmosphere. The exhibition at Haus der Kunst features fog sculptures, early paintings, single-channel videos, installations and documentation. The outside sculpture Munich Fog (Fogfall) #10865/II on the eastside of Haus der Kunst as well as Munich Fog (Wave), #10865/I are a new pieces created for Haus der Kunst. “Fujiko Nakaya. Nebel Leben” at Haus der Kunst runs until July 31, 2022.
Fujiko Nakaya. Nebel Leben / Retrospective at Haus der Kunst, Munich. Press preview, April 7, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Exhibition text (excerpt):
“Fog makes visible things become invisible and invisible things – like wind – become visible”. Fujiko Nakaya
Fujiko Nakaya’s fog sculptures are made entirely of water. They challenge traditional notions of sculpture as they change at every moment depending on temperature, wind and atmosphere.
“Fujiko Nakaya. Nebel Leben” is the first comprehensive survey exhibition of the visionary sculptor Fujiko Nakaya (b.1933, Sapporo, Japan) outside of Japan. Gaining prominence in the 1960s as a member of the New York-based collective Experiments in Arts and Technology (E.A.T.), she became internationally renowned for her immersive fog artworks, which defied traditional conventions of sculpture by generating temporary, borderless transformations that physically engage with the public and give shape to the surrounding environment. Driven by early ecological concerns, Nakaya’s work deals with water and air, mediums that have particular resonance in the face of the climate crisis. From the artist’s early paintings to her fog sculptures, single-channel videos, installations and documentation that reveal Nakaya’s cultural and social references, this experiential exhibition will offer an in-depth survey of one of Japan’s foremost artists.
The outside sculpture Munich Fog (Fogfall) #10865/II on the eastside of Haus der Kunst as well as Munich Fog (Wave), #10865/I are a new pieces created for Haus der Kunst; conceived of as a performance in which fog, the space, and the public participate. Nakaya introduces water as both a sculptural element and a metaphor for endless temporal processes to link material realities and media-generated illusions. Her cross-disciplinary approach also becomes evident in the titles of her fog works: the sequence of numbers designates the nearest weather station, whose data informs the preparatory planning of each work.
An entire room situates Nakaya’s work in a multiverse of historical events. It is dedicated to her early environmental awareness and the development of her work integrating aspects of both East Asian and Western art movements. The upstairs gallery provides further contextualisation and presents a selection of educational science films produced by Iwanami, a production company founded by the artist’s father, the physicist Ukichiro Nakaya. Alongside the artist’s early paintings and sketches, the room features documents from his research that has significantly influenced Fujiko Nakaya’s approach to the world, its matter and its mediation. (For further information, see the digital guide.)
Nakaya’s paintings and drawings are proof of a transformed way of seeing, informed by observation, which the artist describes as the underlying principle of both art and science. Akin to abstract landscapes, they trace the artist’s interest in cyclical processes of decay and renewal. The painted clouds and biomorphic forms constitute an essential link to Nakaya’s moving image practice and her fog sculptures.
The detailed observation of natural phenomena and seemingly small, everyday gestures plays a central role in Fujiko Nakaya’s oeuvre. Her videos often feature real-time recording and resemble experiments which challenge the patterns of perception. Nakaya used video as a means of subjective analytical documentation and direct communication. In addition to her video sculptures and installations the artist engaged in so-called “communication projects” in which she interviewed and documented local communities. In 1980, she co-founded the artist collective Video Hiroba and opened SCAN, the first gallery for video in Japan.
Fujiko Nakaya is a game-changing artist whose practice not only is driven by early ecological concerns, but also stands out from the acknowledged trajectories of both East Asian and Western sculpture. Her work resonates with the history of her country without being subsumed to the movements Gutai and Mono-Ha nor to the Euro-North American lineage of Anti-Form, Process Art and Post-Minimalism.
Blurring the borders of science, art, and technology, Fujiko Nakaya’s work invites us to rethink, by direct physical experience, human entanglement with the environment.
Curated by Andrea Lissoni and Sarah Johanna Theurer
‘Trinity Site’ is a site-specific exhibition by Italian artist Lucas Memmola at the Milan branch of the aA29 Project Room gallery. Curated by Fabio Avella and Lara Gaeta, the show proposes a reflection on the physical and psychological condition of the human being, located in an underground context that on the one hand protects and shelters, on the other inevitably isolates and disorients. It is a tripartite site where each space corresponds to a poetic extract of the experience of a human being suspended between life, survival and transformation. The exhibition runs until June 9, 2022.
Lucas Memmola: Trinity Site / aA29 Project Room Milano. Milan (Italy), March 31, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
About the Exhibition (translated from Italian):
Milan March 17, 2022. With the exhibition TRINITY SITE by Lucas Memmola (Bari, 1994), curated by Fabio Avella and Lara Gaeta, from April 1 to June 9, the Milan branch of the aA29 Project Room gallery proposes a reflection on the physical and psychological condition of the human being, located in an underground context that on the one hand protects and shelters, on the other inevitably isolates and disorients.
TRINITY SITE is not only the title of the exhibition, but a toponym that identifies itself with the gallery space itself, which for the occasion changes appearance, presenting itself as an underground refuge. It is literally a tripartite site where each space corresponds to a poetic extract of the experience of a human being suspended between life, survival and transformation.
When crossing the threshold, the visitor has the feeling of being in an epochal moment of passage, which brings together past and future. In TRINITY SITE you experience a feeling of lack, loneliness and adaptation, it is a place where the ways of life and habits of human beings are questioned.
With this site-specific work the artist creates a vertical parallelism, in which the physical environment represents the possible catastrophic future of civilization that is closely connected to an existential condition of the human soul.
The artist identifies in the spiritual transformation the starting point to implement a change on the physical plane, going through an inevitable moment of transition.
TRINITY SITE is a concrete metanarrative that gravitates around the traces of a man who, like a chrysalis, slowly evolves, highlighting the will of the human species to always tend towards life.
About the Artist:
Lucas Memmola was born in Bari in 1994 and he attended the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan. Particularly interested in biological and organic processes, his approach to art is similar to that of an alchemist: he investigates how the elements of nature (earth, flesh, gold, fire…) can dialogue with each other, generating visual metaphors that mirror certain conditions of the human soul.
The main objective of Memmola’s artistic research is therefore to describe processes within humankind and the reality that surrounds him through different poetic tools. Drawing also on religious themes or those belonging to the dimension of sacred and mythology, the artist analyses how they influence the contemporary collective imagination.
From 2016 to 2019 he has been assistant of the artist Gian Maria Tosatti. Among the group shows in which he took part there are: Vuoto Apparente, Cinema Beltrade (Milan, 2021); Linea di Contorno, VOCABOLUM (ultrasegno vol.1), Palazzo Fruscione (Salerno, 2021); Exit Strategy, Cinema Arcobaleno (Naples, 2021); exhibition on the occasion of the Eleventh Edition of the Combat Prize (was selected among the finalists), SAC – Spazio Arte Contemporanea (Livorno, 2020) and The Final Show, The Format – Contemporary Culture Gallery (Milan, 2015).
His works have been also published in art magazines and journals of national relevance. Some of his works have been presented in the catalogue Linea di Contorno, Vocabulum (ultrasegno vol.1), 2021, ed. Gutenberg.
About aA29 Project Room
aA29 Project Room takes its name from the small asteroid 2002 AA29 co-orbiting with the Earth that is thought to have formed from the collision between Earth and Theia, a planet that, according to the giant impact theory, would have collided with the Earth, later giving rise to the Moon. Also aA29 was born from the clash-meeting with different entities of the contemporary art world from which it inspired, while following its own orbit, and observing the reality from new and different viewpoints.
aA29 Project Room, founded by Gerardo Giurin and Antonio Cecora, is organised in two galleries in Milan and Caserta, directed by Lara Gaeta: multifunctional spaces, created to promote different forms of experimentation through exhibitions, site-specific projects and residencies. The Project Room addresses socio-political issues, extending its aim to a broader field of research, exploring different possibilities for dialogue and interaction with the other, with the intention of deconstructing some of the foundations of the dominant thought.
aA29 Project Room supports research which is sensitive to ecological and environmental issues, and generates new possibilities of encounter and connection between living beings.
The artists with whom it collaborates, investigate the liminal and dichotomous conditions between human beings and the animal world, between the natural and unnatural, the sacred and the profane, the inhabited and the uninhabited, developing projects in which the public contributes, through participatory actions, towards the affirmation of a collective consciousness that imagines alternative scenarios for the future.
‘Useless Bodies?’ by the artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset at Fondazione Prada is another exhibition that opened during Milano Art Week 2022. According to Fondazione Prada, ‘Useless Bodies?’ is one of their most ambitious thematic investigations to date. Elmgreen & Dragset’s ‘Useless Bodies?’ has been conceived for four gallery spaces and the courtyard of Fondazione Prada’s Milan venue. It spans more than 3,000 square meters. The show “explores the present condition of the body in the post-industrial age in which it seems that our physical presence is losing its centrality or is even completely superfluous. This shift impacts every aspect of our lives: from our working conditions, to our health, our interpersonal relationships, and the way we retain information. The exhibition ‘Useless Bodies?’ also explores how we physically adapt to a world increasingly based on two-dimensional imagery, not least in the light of the current pandemic.” The exhibition runs until August 22, 2022.
Elmgreen & Dragset: Useless Bodies? / Fondazione Prada, Milan. Milan (Italy), March 30, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Exhibition text (excerpt):
As stated by Elmgreen & Dragset, “our bodies are no longer the main agents of our existence. They don’t generate value in our societies’ advanced production methods as they did in the industrial era. One could claim our physical selves have even become more of an obstacle than an advantage. In the 19th century, the body was the producer of daily goods, whereas, in the 20th century, the body’s role became more that of the consumer. Twenty years into the 21st century the status of the body is now that of the product – with our data gathered and sold by Big Tech. With the publicly available knowledge surrounding the harvesting of data from tech companies being so inane, and the rapidly accelerating rate at which such companies are expanding into every aspect of our lives, it does sometimes feel a little scary to think about our bodies’ future role.”
Perception of the body is an underlying theme that connects many aspects of the sculptural and performative work of Elmgreen & Dragset, who throughout their career have explored subjects such as growing up, intimacy, identity, different modes of living and how we navigate the public sphere.
Following the exhibition path from the Podium, to the Nord gallery, to the Cisterna, the audience will encounter several immersive installations. The Milan premises of Fondazione Prada are transformed into a series of different universes, each with their own atmosphere, theme, and aesthetics.
Coinciding with Miart and Milano Art Week 2022, Galleria 10 A.M. Art in Milan presents works by the artist Esther Stocker. Entitled “Return to Rationality”, the exhibition consists of a site-specific installation and a series of paintings and wall sculptures. The show runs until May 27, 2022.
Esther Stocker: Return to Rationality / Galleria 10 A.M. Art, Milan. Milan (Italy), March 30, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Exhibition text:
The socio-economic roots of the irrationality that runs through society today is not simply a distortion created by the coronavirus pandemic; they run far deeper and farther back in time. The irrational has historically and cyclically infiltrated the social fabric, prompting an unreasonable willingness to believe in pre-modern superstitions, anti-scientific prejudice, baseless theories and conspiracies. Beliefs that Covid doesn’t exist or that vaccines are dangerous seamlessly intertwine with flat earthism, questioning September 11 and the moon landing, or the theory that 5G is a sophisticated tool for controlling the populace. Seeking refuge in the irrational may be the result of subjective expectations going unsatisfied or a way of finding a frame of reference to explain events hypothetically shrouded in uncertainty because of a priori skepticism of all systems.
Not only are conspiracy theories and irrational interpretations a wholesale breach of Occam’s Razor (the principle whereby the simplest explanation should always be preferred), they are above all a vision or reading of specific events in which rationality is besieged by cognitive detours, post-truth, factionalism and a lack of trust in institutions responsible for analyzing the facts and coming up with a shared version of reality. As cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker argues, rationality only emerges without forced or instrumentalized evasion in a community of people who reason and identify one another’s mistakes via ongoing research, upholding a significant commitment to objectivity, neutrality and truth.
This is the backdrop to Esther Stocker’s exhibition Return to Rationality, where once again the artist demonstrates her attraction to formal paradoxes, “errors” and playing with optical balance. Although in the past her research often sought to defend or emphasize the concepts of anarchy, irrationality or freedom from fixed or overly rigid systems, current events have prompted her to question the need to return to some form of rationality. As an expression of this, the exhibition at Galleria 10 A.M. ART in Milan is laid out as an environmental installation on the main floor and a series of paintings and sculptures on the lower floor, in which a succession of elements create disturbance and interference, challenging and questioning the limits of order, perceptual consistency, and each individual’s responsibility within the community.
The exhibition is laid out as a system of openings, forms that seek to create a certain settled, normalized, unassailable and objective rhythm subverted by the intrusion of minimal distortions. Invaded by imperfections and dashed expectations, the logic, intuition, rigour and imagination inherent to the mathematical method assert themselves as indissoluble categories in this otherwise theoretically perfect system. An ensemble of eternally repeated modules creates an apparently ordered visual cadence, to which the artist adds anomalies and exceptions that capture our attention, setting off a rhythm that reminds us the subjective perception of a larger system may only be defined through reciprocity and a shared consensus regarding intent, vision and objectives.
Esther Stocker’s hallmark abstractionism and geometry are projected on two parallel tracks that come together: as a spatial painting or expanding pictorial space in the installation, and as paintings and sculptures that engender a focusing, static synthesis. She conjures up a framework of debate around specific issues through free forms that detach from order: desire, the role of imagination, open logic, the ambiguity and uncertainty of a system, mathematical precision and its breakdown, raising questions about things that we thought we knew and take for granted. Without giving in to the constant fugue towards the irrational that is a hallmark of present-day reality, the artist attempts to cast doubt on principles followed and accepted as dogma, seeking out a new paradigm that, as in the scientific process, has the ability to reorder our awareness of the reality we inhabit.
The combination of word and light plays an important role in Jenny Holzer’s work: temporary light installations featuring monumental lettering projected onto buildings and landscapes have been among her best-known works since the 1990s. As part of the exhibition ‘Louise Bourgeois x Jenny Holzer’ at the Kunstmuseum in Basel, Jenny Holzer projects excerpts from Bourgeois’ writings on three public buildings in Basel: City Hall, the Old University on the Rheinsprung, and the Kunstmuseum Basel | Hauptbau. The projections are on view during the first days of the exhibition (February 16–22).
Louise Bourgeois x Jenny Holzer Projections / Kunstmuseum Basel. Basel (Switzerland), February 20, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Yoko Ono: This Room Moves at the Same Speed as the Clouds is an exhibition at Kunsthaus Zürich that looks back at some of the most important works of the artist. Kunsthaus curator Mirjam Varadinis, in collaboration with Yoko Ono and her long-time curator Jon Hendricks, has selected some 60 of them to arrange into an exhibition, which is titled ‘This Room Moves at the Same Speed as the Clouds’. This video provides you with an exhibition walkthrough and an introduction to the show by Mirjam Varadinis.
“I didn’t want to do some kind of historical exhibition now, a classic retrospective, but to start with her commitment against violence against women and also with her commitment for peace, and also with her very radically expanded concept of art.… The focus is on the early work, i. e. the 60s and 70s. But many of the works from back then are also being re-staged or brought to life for the exhibition.” (Mirjam Varadinis)
Yoko Ono: This Room Moves at the Same Speed as the Clouds. Kunsthaus Zürich, Zürich (Switzerland), Media Preview, March 3, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Media Release (excerpt):
Yoko Ono (b. 1933) is one of the most influential artists of our time. Her performances and actions of the 1960s and 1970s have achieved cult status. Some of them will be performed and exhibited at the Kunsthaus Zürich. The artist was personally involved in the exhibition’s conception.
For Peace and Women’s Rights
Since the beginning of her career, Yoko Ono has explored issues of socio-political importance that are still highly relevant today. From early on, she has been committed to peace in the world and the feminist cause. Ideas always play a central role in her work: sometimes she formulates them in a playful and humorous way, sometimes quite radically, and then again very poetically. Some are transformed into objects while others are left immaterial. Yoko Ono’s artistic oeuvre is correspondingly diverse, encompassing sculptures, works on paper, installations, performances, film and music. Kunsthaus curator Mirjam Varadinis, in collaboration with Yoko Ono and her long-time curator Jon Hendricks, has selected more than 60 of them to arrange into an exhibition.
Poetry meets Conceptual Art and Performance
Most of the works start out with ‘event scores’ or ‘instructions’, a majority of which Yoko Ono published for the first time in 1964 in the celebrated square booklet ‘Grapefruit’. This small but seminal work of conceptual art contains directions for simple actions that anyone can execute and that transform basic, everyday activities and forms of expression (such as going for a walk, striking a match or laughing) into performances. What really matters, though, is imagination: the artwork can take shape entirely in our heads, and does not necessarily have to be acted out. Yoko Ono was one of the first to write such ‘event scores’, and in doing so she radically transformed and permanently expanded the concept of art. She chose the title ‘Grapefruit’ because she saw the fruit as a hybrid, a mixture of lemon and orange. She regarded herself as a hybrid too – between Japan and America, East and West, between visual art, music and performance.
Contemporary Relevance
That multifaceted artistic practice is what gives Yoko Ono’s work its contemporary relevance, in an era when the boundaries between artistic disciplines are increasingly breaking down. The idea of the audience as performer and the everyday staging of the individual through social media are now of central importance.
Works from all Creative Periods
The exhibition at the Kunsthaus Zürich sets out to reaffirm that relevance. It shows a selection of key works from all periods of Yoko Ono’s artistic career, with a focus on the early years. The presentation is not a classical retrospective: it brings more than 60 years of artistic creativity to life from a modern-day perspective. Visitors will be able to participate in a wide variety of ways. Yoko Ono was personally involved in the conception of the exhibition.
The work of Swiss artist Jean-Frédéric Schnyder is being honored in two simultaneous exhibitions: at Kunstmuseum Bern (4 February – 29 May, 2022) and at Kunsthalle Bern (26 February – 15 May, 2022). While the exhibition at Kunstmuseum Bern features a selection of works from the museum’s own collection (focusing on the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s), Jean-Frédéric Schnyder’s solo show at Kunsthalle Bern presents new, rarely or never shown paintings and sculptures from 1970 to the present, including those that were not necessarily planned as works of art, but resulted from daily activities. This video provides you with an exhibition walk-through on the occasion of the opening of the show.
Jean-Frédéric Schnyder. Solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Bern. Opening, February 25, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Exhibition text (excerpt):
The art of Jean-Frédéric Schnyder is derived from the things that surround him. He doesn’t have to look for long, it’s all already there. He explores, observes, contemplates. Engaging with the matter involves the crucial question of which form is fitting, which tool most suited. Schnyder likes it neat and tidy. Yet he lets things come to him, follows their course rather than some overall vision. And although he hardly wastes a thing, he does not head towards a goal sparingly. He casts nothing ahead. Already in 1969, for the exhibition Pläne und Projekte als Kunst (Plans and Projects as Art) at Kunsthalle Bern, he stated: Mein Projekt ist, keine Projekte zu machen (My project is not to make projects).
Schnyder approaches the world with openness. He concerns himself with the everyday, with what might be deemed trivial, and is thereby also accessible. He paints the printed paper bag used for greengroceries, the figure of Luigi Moretti off the label of a beer bottle, the mountain Niesen surrounded by creatures of mist, but also Christ bearing the cross. He makes paintings from brush rags, carves sticks for a cage out of hazel wood from the garden, carves crosses, a club out of the Christmas tree. He makes pictorial objects out of wood scraps, stacks wooden blocks to a miniature city, adapts paintings after other artists, paints poems.
He doesn’t judge the things he chooses to give an appearance to, everything is equally valid. This approach is so matter-of-fact that the term art could almost be relegated to the background, even if art is, actually, what we’re dealing with here – it’s also just what he does every day.
When Schnyder decided to paint in the 1970s, he had no knowledge of pencil or brush technique. Which is why a few years earlier, conceptual art seemed to be just the right thing for him: at first, you seemed to have to be able to do very little, in terms of skill at least. His becoming an artist initially had to do with a painter of veduta in town whom he had always admired. But the definitive cue came from artists like Marcel Duchamp or Walter de Maria, who had redefined what art could be and how art could be made. However, the path of conceptual art that Schnyder went down for a while, riding its wave in the 1960s, was not his after all. He found the “visualised thought processes”, at least when it came to himself, too “autistic”. He sought something that suited him more closely, that had more to do with everyday life and could convey it more directly.
So, at a time when painting was considered the abomination of art, he decided to devote himself to painting. Since he did not possess the necessary skills, he had to first acquire them. Stillleben (1970) (still life) embodies this turning point. Schnyder wanted to paint at it for as long as it took for it to look like an old master. Painted after a real arrangement and with the help of a preliminary drawing by the artist Margret Rufener, the motif appears, because of how it is placed, clumsy. But precisely for this reason it is also magical. Stillleben is the link between before and after, between objects and images, between Schnyder’s conceptual and post-conceptual approaches.
Alongside painting, he continued to make objects whose underlying dexterity and use of material place them in the realm of handicraft. Carving, salt doughs, ceramics, soldering, pewter casting. With such moves, Schnyder deliberately branched off from the zeitgeist. Precisely because he consistently went his own way, he developed a timeless art like no other. Though Schnyder left conceptual art behind him, its spirit flows through his works, not least because they are based on the principle of seriality. It is no contradiction that Schnyder, in his “love for the mediocre”, makes works that are accessible, even touching, but at the same time bear the distanced awareness of how their being so is inscribed into art history. They are also images about images and about making things. The act that lies in between unlocks a knowledge that glistens. What emerges from it is not an explanation but an almost sacred magic.
The relationship between Kunsthalle Bern and Jean-Frédéric Schnyder began as early as the 1960s. The artist, who was born in Basel and grew up in Bern, was assistant at Kunsthalle in 1967 and, from 1968 onwards, showed his work in the exhibitions 12 Environments (1968), When Attitudes Become Form (1969) and 22 junge Schweizer (1969) (22 young Swiss artists). Taking up this connection half a century later rounds it off.
Valérie Knoll, who is concluding her tenure as director of Kunsthalle Bern with this exhibition, follows on from the programme of the last seven years, which addressed the possibilities of contemporary painting. Once more, the question as to the future of painting is raised – that practice that will remain even if people should one day say goodbye to art.
Schnyder cannot be limited to painting, however. His work also includes sculpture and installation. Which is why much of the floor in this exhibition belongs to them. New, rarely or never shown works from 1970 to the present are brought together, including those that were not necessarily planned as works of art, but resulted from daily activities.
This video provides you with a short walk-through of the art fair Artgenève Salon d’Art 2022 in Geneva, Switzerland. Participants of the 10th edition of the fair are galleries and institutions based in Switzerland as well as international galleries. The fair runs until March 6, 2022.
Artgenève Salon d’Art, Palexpo Genève. Private View, March 2, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
‘The Violence of Handwriting Across a Page’ is the title of the exhibition at Kunstmuseum Basel that brings together two of the most popular artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Louise Bourgeois and Jenny Holzer. The friendship between Bourgeois and Holzer forms the basis of this project, but there is also a parallel in the artists’ use of language and the written word. Curated by Jenny Holzer and Anita Haldemann, the show presents Louise Bourgeois’ work as seen through Jenny Holzer’s eyes. The exhibition runs until May 15, 2022.
Louise Bourgeois x Jenny Holzer: The Violence of Handwriting Across a Page / Kunstmuseum Basel. Press Preview, February 17, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
At Art Cologne 2021, the gallery Arcardia Missa (London) showed kinetic artworks by Frieda Toranzo Jaeger. Frieda Toranzo Jaeger was born in 1988 in Mexico City. She studied Fine Arts at HfBK Hochschule Für Bildende Künste in Hamburg, Germany.
Frieda Toranzo Jaeger’s practice deals with the representations of masculinity and femininity in the visual culture of late capitalism. Asked why she chose painting as medium, Frieda Toranzo Jaeger answered: “As a queer woman of color, I feel a sense of urgency to respond with my work, to create conceptual spaces to decolonise and free ourselves from the heteronormative. Painting feels like the most immediate medium to do that.” (source: Queerdirect.com).
Recent solo exhibitions include Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD, US (2021); Fantasies of Autonomy, Arcadia Missa, London, UK (2019); and Deep Adaptation, Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin, DE (2019).
Frieda Toranzo Jaeger at Arcadia Missa Gallery at Art Cologne 2021. Cologne (Germany), November 17, 2021.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
The current exhibition at Barbara Seiler Gallery in Zürich (Switzerland) features paintings by Belgian artist Michiel Ceulers. Michiel Ceulers has graduated from the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in 2011 after his studies at KASK in Ghent, BE. He has been awarded Young Belgian Painters Award, Gaverprijs and is included in the Michael & Susan Hort Collection, New York, the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, David Roberts Art Foundation, London, and various other collections worldwide. Michiel Ceulers’ solo show at Barbara Seiler is titled ‘Laura (a friend of Dorothy)’ and will be on view until 12 February 2022.
Michiel Ceulers: Laura (a friend of Dorothy). Solo exhibition at Galerie Barbara Seiler. Zürich (Switzerland), January 20, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Exhibition text:
Barbara Seiler Zurich is very pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Belgian artist Michiel Ceulers (*1986, Waregem, BE) at the gallery, after the artists participation in three group exhibitions: Subject sitting in a darkened room in 2020, A Fair Proposal (with Annaïk Lou Pitteloud and Judith Kakon) in 2017 and And Mea and Mac and Me (with Mark Hagen and Alexander Lieck) in 2013. The exhibition is titled ‘Laura (a friend of Dorothy)’ and will be on view from 15 January to 12 February 2022.
Michiel Ceulers (1986 in Waregem, Belgium) is concerned with the specific conditions and possibilities of painting, taking an experimental approach to abstraction. His process-oriented abstract paintings and sculptures are known to bear traces of misuse in the artist’s studio. He often tears, glues, grinds and punctures his canvases. His works feature imperfect geometric shapes and patterns, a playful exploration of art historical styles. A painting like ‚Living Mirror/Rotten Sun‘ (2021-2022) combines lyrical and geometric abstraction, has something of punk and graffiti, and plays with abstract art’s experiments with the frame.
Michiel Ceulers’ practice is associated with excess of materiality. Ceulers has a fascination with cheap and shabby materials, especially cardboard. The paintings are often composed of found materials and thick layers of paint that are blithely smeared on the paintings and their frames. Michiel Ceulers‘ paintings represents the artist’s work in the studio, showing decay and scars, and raising the question of documentation and fiction. Each painting is a reflection of the result of a process, a physical experience that alienates the works from the artist himself. This conversation is the visualization of an inner process that questions its subject in a constant loop, as a mirror that confronts itself, or as painting that contemplates itself.
The exhibition ‚A Condom Over A Zeppelin‘ (2021 Island, Brussels) was based on a line by Edina „Ed-die“ Monsoon and Patricia „Patsy“ Stone, the main characters in the classic BBC series ‘Absolutely Fabulous’, which Ceulers considers one of the most complex relationships of our time. Michiel Ceulers has a penchant for titles. They come from different cultural fields: science, pop music, film, art, history, science fiction, the art world, philosophy or they are simply the result of his own associative imagination. Many works have duplicate or very long titles and add subjective and conceptual layers, as well as art about art dimensions and clever wordplay. The condom transforms the already phallic Zeppelin into a penis. Rather than evoking the passions of a size queen, the title seems to jokingly assume the inflated artist ego. ‘A friend of Dorothy’ (FOD) originates from the wizard of Oz and is a euphemism for a gay man and, by extension, any LGBTQ person. The term dates back to at least the World War II era, when homosexual acts were illegal in the United States. Saying this or asking if someone is a friend of Dorothy was a secret shibboleth for talking about sexual orientation while avoiding hostility.
Paintings such as ‘Lucy in the Sky/Zu oft existieren die Kunst und die Ideen auf der gleichen Ebene’ (2021) depict a canary. The canary has been a constant companion in Michiel Ceuler’s work in recent years. It appears mainly in yellow, some in orange tones. Most of them appear alone, but there are also pairs. Occasionally they sit behind black bars. Many of them are depicted with mirrors and perches made of cardboard, wood and plastic caps. Most of the birds are painted with a firm texture and grip, with the painting style showing echoes of the Neo-Expressionist style. Michiel Ceulers’ work is usually concerned with the idea of narrative, physicality, and content. Thus, the canary refers to the Belgian artist Roger Raveel (1921-2013), who, like Ceulers, always felt the need to combine art and life in a more intense way. Or Martin Kippenberger (1953-1997), who used the canary to bring art closer to everyday life, depriving it of its great aura. Canaries are cultural signs, but also betray a shameful attitude: in Dutch they can be called ‚kanaripik‘, and ‚pik‘ can mean cock in itself.
Michiel Ceulers workes in series, giving each series a title based on the visual components of the works themselves: lovebirds (diptychs), raster images, pixel images, and graphic characters. Ceulers loves to play with color as matter, with the painting as a layered structure, and with the surprise of small pictorial details within a whole. These details are not just random smears and drips, but necessary particles within a balanced whole. It is an exploarion of relief-like layers by working with stencils or tape that Ceulers painted over and then removed. The process of removing the tape or stencil reveals the subtle, multi-layered character of the paintings, and leaves marks, little dents, raised, pasty little details, little smears and sloppy spots.
Michiel Ceulers has graduated from the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in 2011 after his studies at KASK in Ghent, BE . He has exhibited in institutions and galleries in Europe and the US with recent solo exhibitions including De Garage, Mechelen BE; Island, Brussels BE; Island, Brussels BE. He has been awarded Young Belgian Painters Award, Gaverprijs and is included in the Michael & Susan Hort Collection, New York, the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, David Roberst art foundation, London, and various other collections worldwide.
Allan Kaprow (1927-2006) was an American artist and art theorist of performance art. Kaprow is considered the father of the Happening, but began his career as a painter, studying with Hans Hofmann and focusing on the medium in the 1950s. The current exhibition titled ‘A painter… of sorts’ presents paintings and drawings by Kaprow from this period, as well as a selection of his video works from 1975.
A painter… of sorts / Allan Kaprow: Selected Works 1953 – 1975 / Hauser & Wirth Zürich. Zürich (Switzerland), January 20, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Exhibition text:
This January, Hauser & Wirth brings the work of Allan Kaprow, one of the most influential artists of the 20th Century, to its gallery on Limmatstrasse. With the invention of ‘Happenings’ and ‘Environments,’ Kaprow embarked upon a career of intellectually rigorous, site-specific, and timed works that defied commoditization and ultimately gave birth to performance and installation art. While Kaprow’s radical innovations in the realm of performance shifted the course of 20th-century American art, he began his career as a painter, studying with Hans Hofmann and focusing on the medium in the 1950s. ‘A painter… of sorts’ presents paintings and drawings by Kaprow from this period, as well as a selection of his video works from 1975. The exhibition depicts a clear trajectory for the artist’s practice, from paintings and drawings to his performance-based Happenings and videos, highlighting a career-long exploration into the relationship between everyday life and art. ‘Life is much more interesting than art,’ Kaprow wrote. ‘The line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible.’
Barry Rosen of the Kaprow Estate writes: ‘We today know Kaprow for a Thought, not for his paintings but for another Form entirely. In 1959, Allan Kaprow brought us immediately to a New Discussion (of the links between Art and Life, between our own Lives and Art-making), followed by years of examining this run-in, confusion: the post-World War II pressure to place the meaning of living-in-the-modern-world onto the cultural milieu.’
On view in Zurich are a selection of rarely seen charcoal and ink drawings from 1953-55, made during the artist’s time at Hansa Gallery, a cooperative cofounded by Kaprow and fellow former students of Hans Hofmann. These works depict singular or multiple figures engaged in different activities in Kaprow’s studio space, reflected in titles such as ‘Standing Nude in Studio, Easel in Foreground’ and ‘Seated Nude on Studio Bench’. Here, charcoal is applied in dynamic and charged strokes, implying a sense of movement that vibrates off the page. In other works, such as ‘Seated Model in Leotard in Studio’ (1954), strong, linear forms in ink cut through the blank spaces of the paper. These early drawings suggest Kaprow’s growing interest in physical immediacy and expressive freedom, presaging his later revolutionary experiments in space, activity, and performance.
Kaprow continued to embrace a gestural visual idiom full of rhythmic movement in a series of nudes from 1954, which include the paintings on view in the exhibition ‘White and Brown Figures’ and ‘White Nude Near Green Chair’. In many of Kaprow’s paintings from 1955 and 1956, multiple figures divide the space and either emerge from the picture plane or exist just outside of the canvas. In the work ‘From James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’’ (1956), the artist depicts a group of figures delineated with brushstrokes of vibrant colour – jade green, coral, flesh pink, chalky white, teal blue and bright lemon yellow. He applies the paint with vehemence, in short, slashing strokes, which culminate in thick crests of pigment, paving a way for his ‘action collages’ and later Happenings and Environments. As suggested by its title, the work is inspired from passages of James Joyce’s novel, ‘Ulysses’, which occupies a position within the literary canon as a byword for experimental modernism – much akin to Kaprow’s artistic practice. Here we begin to see a growing tension between painting and everyday life, and the beginnings of Kaprow’s desire to abandon the medium altogether.
This shift away from painting was outlined in Kaprow’s 1958 influential essay ‘The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,’ which explored the artistic impact of Action painting in the wake of Pollock’s death. ‘Pollock, as I see him, left us at the point where we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday life, either our bodies, clothes, rooms, or, if need be, the vastness of Forty- second Street’, Kaprow wrote. His seminal performance-based work, ‘18 Happenings in 6 parts’, was created a year later in 1959.
By the 1970s, Kaprow had begun exploring the possibilities of video as a medium to capture the crossovers between everyday life and art. The works on view in Zurich include ‘Comfort Zones’, ‘Rates of Exchange’, ‘Time Pieces’ and ‘Warm-Ups’ from 1975, whereby Kaprow examines figures relating to one another in space, engaged in staged and repeated actions in front of the camera. Kaprow considered these choreographed films as works of art in their own right, which differed from the documentation films of his live Happenings, examples of which are also on view at the gallery. Concluding the exhibition, these works highlight Kaprow’s continued commitment to blurring the line between art and everyday life in new and radical ways.
‘Chromophilia’ at Hauser & Wirth in Zürich is a group exhibition that is dedicated to the subject of color in art. Until the 20th Century, color in European, or Western, art was largely subordinated to line and form. The emancipation of color in modern art came with the advent of movements such as impressionism, pointillism, fauvism, or the aptly named Blue Rider, and with the early development of modernist abstraction.
Curated by Tanya Barson, ‘Chromophilia’ brings together artists who use color in inventive and extraordinary ways. ‘Chromophilia’ features paintings, collages, sculptures and installations by artists including Phyllida Barlow, David Batchelor, Larry Bell, Louise Bourgeois, Frank Bowling, Geta Bratescu, Alexander Calder, Martin Creed, Günther Förg, Jenny Holzer, Roni Horn, Bharti Kher, Yves Klein, Jason Rhoades, Pipilotti Rist, Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Elisabeth Wild. In this video, curator Tanya Barson provides us with an introduction to the exhibition.
Chromophilia / Group Exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Zürich. Curated by Tanya Barson. Exhibition walkthrough and interview with curator Tanya Barson. Zürich (Switzerland), January 20, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.
Exhibition text:
‘The obvious thing to say is that colour speaks for itself in art, and that any attempt to speak on its behalf is bound to fail. And yet for all the small talk that might happily be silenced forever, there is at the same time a bigger silence around the very subject of colour in art…’—David Batchelor, Chromophobia (2000)
Colour is not a simple subject. In this group exhibition, titled ‘Chromophilia’ meaning the love of colour, the artists on view trace the complexity and possibility of colour, emancipated to differing degrees from line and form, within their chosen medium either synthetic or found – from liquid paint to sewn fabric, from coloured glass to LEDs, from neon to bindis. ‘Chromophilia’ will bring together paintings, collages, sculptures and installations by artists including Phyllida Barlow, David Batchelor, Larry Bell, Louise Bourgeois, Frank Bowling, Geta Bratescu, Alexander Calder, Martin Creed, Günther Förg, Jenny Holzer, Roni Horn, Bharti Kher, Yves Klein, Jason Rhoades, Pipilotti Rist, Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Elisabeth Wild.
Until the 20th Century, colour in European, or Western, art was largely subordinated to line and form. The emancipation of colour in modern art came with the advent of movements such as impressionism, pointillism, fauvism, or the aptly named Blue Rider, and with the early development of modernist abstraction. The role of colour changed radically with the work of pioneering artists from Hilma af Klint to Helio Oiticica, and with Yves Klein, whose work ‘Total Speed (Crazed Blue)’ 1958, a collaboration with Jean Tinguely, will be on view in the exhibition. A concentration on colour remains a complex topic and the radical, though deceptive, simplicity of the use of single colours, particularly as monochromes, has been one of its most challenging aspects. Extending beyond the monochrome to explore close colour contrasts, Larry Bell’s early oil on canvas ‘Untitled’ (1959) ranges from orange and taupe to sienna and wine. This work anticipates his vibrantly tinted glass sculptures, such as ‘Pacific Red (IV)’ (2016-2017). Both show him to be a formidable colourist.
Colour has the capacity to work in myriad ways, representing opposing psychological states, from exuberant joy to crushing despair. Like music, brilliant colour can lift our spirits or stimulate memory; and artists have often turned to synaesthesia to develop their work. Colour is sometimes, though not always, child’s play: the 19th-century German educator Friedrich Froebel’s colour exercises for kindergarten influenced numerous members of the early avant-garde. Like the philosopher Walter Benjamin, they perhaps saw colour as a means to recapture the experiences of childhood. Colour, however, can be and frequently is highly symbolic, and often it is politicised, representing partisan ideologies, playing a role in activism or denoting race and gender. Colour is not impartial and white is also a colour, not necessarily or merely its absence. Colour is historically defined and located; it changes according to its given cultural associations. In the short, dark days of winter we embrace intense and magnificent colour in festivals and celebrations that serve to reinforce identity.
Throughout his career Frank Bowling has engaged with the complexity of colour in painting, and has developed his own highly original approaches to chromatic abstraction. His work ‘Swimmers’ (2020) presents the viewer with a dense, layered surface, composed from acrylic paints and gels, collaged canvas and found materials or objects. Bharti Kher’s sculpture ‘Peacock’ (2011) employs sari fabrics dipped in resin; by forming the bright green, shimmery blue and regal red fabrics into a peacock-like shape, Kher draws our attention to the transformation of everyday materials, likewise to the relation of colour to the body, and also to the important roles colour plays in India.
Occupying the full height of the exhibition space, Pipilotti Rist’s immersive installation ‘Wohnzimmerdisco ohne Angst (Living Room Disco without Fear)’ (2009) combines carpets and curtains, with sound and light to create a shower of vivid colour tones. David Batchelor’s ‘Chromodisc’ (2019) is a sculptural clock that uses light to move through the colour spectrum over the course of an hour. Overall, the artists included in ‘Chromophilia’ deploy colour always in inventive and extraordinary ways, helping us to see and experience our world anew.
Fondation Beyeler’s first exhibition in 2022 is dedicated to Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986). Georgia O’Keeffe is one of the most significant artists of the 20th century and an outstanding figure in modern American art. The major retrospective at Fondation Beyeler in Riehen (Basel, Switzerland) offers an in-depth survey of the artist’s work including rarely seen paintings from public and private collections. The show features important works, from O’Keeffe’s earliest abstractions to her iconic depictions of flowers and landscapes of the American Southwest. The exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler examines Georgia O’Keeffe’s particular way of looking at her surroundings and translating them into new and hitherto unseen images of reality.
Spanning more than six decades, “Georgia O’Keeffe” will be the artist’s first major retrospective in Basel and the first comprehensive overview of O’Keeffe’s oeuvre in Switzerland for almost 20 years. The exhibition is organized by the Fondation Beyeler, Riehen / Basel, the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in partnership with the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe. The show runs until May 22, 2022.
Georgia O’Keeffe Retrospective at Fondation Beyeler. Press preview, January 21, 2022.
Right-click (Mac: ctrl-click) this link to download Quicktime video file.