28/02/2017

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

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Jeff Perrott, RW182 (Too Dark to See Tomorrow), 2015. Oil on canvas
 
Morgan Lehman Gallery is presenting new large-scale oil paintings by Jeff Perrott. This will be the artist’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery.

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

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

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

Jeff Perrott earned his BA from Williams College, and his MFA from Yale School of Art (New Haven, CT). Perrott has exhibited at the Boston Center for the Arts (MA), Barbara Krakow Gallery (Boston, MA), Morgan Lehman Gallery (New York, NY), and LaMontagne Gallery (Boston, MA). He is the winner of the Eben Demerest Fellowship, and a nominee for the Foster Prize from the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. His work is featured in both corporate and museum collections such as the Wadsworth Atheneum (Hartford, CT); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (Lincoln, MA); the Whitney Museum of Art prints collection; Wellington Management; the Digitas Corporation; and KPFG San Francisco.
 
 
  
 
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27/02/2017

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

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"Celebrity" © by Jenness Cortez. Acrylic on Mahogany panel, 18 by 24 inches. Homage to Andy Warhol (1928-1987).
 
Harmon-Meek Galleries of Naples, Florida hosts the first exhibition by internationally acclaimed still life artist Jenness Cortez honoring twentieth century masters. On view February 20 through March 16, 2017, Cortez presents her latest paintings depicting the iconic works of Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol.

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

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

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

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

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

Perlmutter Gallery in Averill Park, New York exclusively represents Jenness Cortez.
 
 
 
 
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24/02/2017

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

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Marc Brandenburg, Untitled (detail), 2016, Graphite on paper Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac London·Paris·Salzburg © Marc Brandenburg. Photo: Jens Ziehe.
 
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac is holding its fifth solo exhibition of works by artist Marc Brandenburg, resident in Berlin. Entitled Alpha St, the exhibition comprises 24 drawings from a new series of works based on historical photographs of traditional costumes and on snapshots of young people in school uniforms.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marc Brandenburg, born in Berlin in 1965, grew up in Germany and Texas, USA. He gained a wide reputation during the 1990s with his distinctive pencil drawings. Today, his works are represented in collections worldwide, including the MoMA/New York, Deutsche Bank, Kupferstichkabinett/Berlin, Kunsthalle/Hamburg, Harlem Studio Museum/New York, Kupferstichkabinett/Dresden, Städtische Galerie/Wolfsburg and Museum Moderner Kunst/Frankfurt, and have been exhibited in international museums. In recent years, Kunsthaus/Stade (2015), Städtische Galerie/Wolfsburg (2012), Kunsthalle/Hamburg (2011) and Denver Art Museum (2010) have devoted major solo exhibitions to his work.
 
 
 
 
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23/02/2017

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

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Blair Thurman

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

Photo by Rob McKeever


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

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

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

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

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


 
 
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22/02/2017

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


 
 
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21/02/2017

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

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Samia Halaby , Scattering Yellow, 2013, acrylic on linen canvas, 145 x 145 cm.
 
Ayyam Gallery Beirut is presenting Painting Across Generations , a collective exhibition that highlights contemporary painters from the Middle East who are recognised as international trendsetters.

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

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

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

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

Afshin Pirhashemi uses allegory and historical references to comment on the status of women in his native Iran. In Vitruvian Woman (2015) a female figure is painted as the ideal of man as she defiantly stares at the viewer. Two additional women are shown behind her in straight jackets, attempting to break free from the physical restraints. The artist’s central character is depicted with a mix of realism and expressionism, as Pirhashemi represents a moment of transcendence with dramatic lines and fluid brushwork.
 
 
 
 
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20/02/2017

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Antoni Tàpies was one of Spain’s most accomplished and prolific artists. He extended Spain's early avant-garde lineage (Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí) to become a leading figure in the country's art world in the second half of the twentieth century. His work is included in numerous public and private collections internationally including Tate Galleries, UK; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome; Le Centre Pompidou, Paris; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Tàpies represented Spain in the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993 and was awarded the Golden Lion. He remained an influential presence in Spain for over sixty years, until his death in 2012.
 
 
 
 
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17/02/2017

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

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Richard Wilson, Block of Dering, 2017. Wood, 353 x 250 x 268 cm. © Richard Wilson. Courtesy Annely Juda Fine Art.
 
Annely Juda Fine Art presents an exhibition by Richard Wilson entitled Stealing Space. The exhibition is the artist's first at the gallery and his first solo show in London since unveiling his major site-specific work, Slipstream, at Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 2. The exhibition features four new works, two of which are in direct response to the gallery's internal and external architecture. 
Works in this exhibition dominate the gallery's space and stand, in places, above the height of the architectural beams. In the main room, Wilson has created a sculpture of a slice of the negative space or “space between” the hallway and staircase leading to the gallery’s main entrance. Partial details of a doorway, steps or a bannister in negative form are visible on the sculpture which sits straight on the ground at a tilted angle, offering a reassessment of the perhaps completely unnoticed yet familiar surroundings the viewer has just encountered. Block of Dering, meanwhile, takes the façade of the gallery building at 23 Dering Street and reconfigures it into a near-cube. Even the gallery’s signage can be made out in this sculpture which presents the local architecture in an entirely new way.

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

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

Richard Wilson is a world-renowned British artist whose architectural interventions have won him acclaim throughout his career. Wilson rose to prominence in 1987 when his installation, 20:50 - consisting of a room filled to waist height with reflective sump oil - was shown at Matt's Gallery in London and purchased by The Saatchi Gallery. Wilson has gone on to create a series of predominantly site-specific works, most recently Slipstream (2014), which stands at an impressive 78 meters at Heathrow Airport's Terminal 2. Wilson was appointed visiting research professor at the University of East London in 2004, elected as a member of the Royal Academy in 2006 and in 2008 was awarded an honorary doctorate at the University of Middlesex. He has created permanent and temporary works at prominent locations worldwide and his works have been shown at institutions such as The Serpentine Gallery, London; Saatchi Gallery, London; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra and Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona.
 
 
 
 
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16/02/2017

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

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Vera Molnar's work has been continuously shown in major museums.
 
Vera Molnar, who turned ninety-three early in January, has never really been eager to gain acceptance on the art market. I remember when visiting her in 2014 to inform her that she had won a lifetime award, she was more than surprised. Molnar was already in her sixties when she started selling her work regularly. Despite her artist friends like Francois Morellet, Victor Vaserely and Max Bill, she perceived her art mainly as experimental research. It developed into a dialogue between the computer and her oeuvre, which continues to the present. The more conceptual series, which lead to deconstruction or dissolution of forms, were mainly created in the 1970s to the 1990s. After that installations and paintings again gained importance. Over all this years she kept a sketch book which contains a wide range of unrealized treasures to which we can look forward.
Vera Molnar's work has been continuously shown in major museums, most recently at the Museum Ludwig, Budapest; the Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zürich; and Kunstmuseum, Stuttgart among others. In 2017 we look forward to exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw as well as an exhibition during the Venice Biennale.

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

"I use a computer to combine the forms because I hope that the assistance of this tool will permit me to go beyond the bounds of learning, cultural heritage, environment; in short: of the social thing, which we must consider to be our second nature. Because of its huge capacity for combination, the computer permits systematic investigation of the field of possibilities in the visual world, helping the painter to clear his brain of mental/cultural “ready-mades” and in enabling him to produce combinations of forms never seen before, either in nature, or in museums, to create unimaginable images." --Vera Molnar, 1980
 
 
 
 
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15/02/2017

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

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Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Mirror Study ( _Q5A 3505), 2016. Archival pigment print, 51 x 34 inches Edition of 5. 
 
Yancey Richardson is presenting Figures, Grounds and Studies, Paul Mpagi Sepuyaʼs debut exhibition with the gallery. While deeply engaged with ideas about studio portraiture, the exhibition frames the photographic process as an ongoing conversation and negotiation between the viewer, the artist, the subject and the work. Simultaneously, Sepuya investigates the role of desire as a productive and critical force in the medium of photography.

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

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

Paul Mpagi Sepuya (b. 1982) lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his M.F.A. from the University of California Los Angeles in 2016 and a B.F.A. from New York University Tisch School of the Arts in 2004. Sepuyaʼs work has been featured in numerous exhibitions including at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Franklin Art Works and The Artist Institute, New York. Public collections featuring Sepuyaʼs work include The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Carnegie Museum of Art. Sepuyaʼs work is also on view in the exhibition DEANA LAWSON, JUDY LINN, & PAUL MPAGI SEPUYA at Sikkema Jenkins Gallery (January 13 - February 18, 2017) and Compassion Protocols curated by Moyra Davey and Jason Simon at Callicoon Fine Arts, New York (January 12 – February 19, 2017).
 
 
 
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14/02/2017

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Kushner has exhibited extensively in the United States, Europe, and Japan. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Brooklyn Museum, in New York, and the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art. His work is featured in public collections such as The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Tate Modern, London, England; and the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Italy. Publications on Kushner’s work include the monograph Gardens of Earthly Delight (Hudson Hills Press, 1997) with essays by Alexandra Anderson and Holland Cotter, and Wild Gardens by Michael Duncan (Pomegranate, 2006). In 2012, Kushner was the editor of an important volume of art criticism by Amy Goldin (1926-1978) titled Amy Goldin: Art in a Hairshirt (Hudson Hills).
 
 
 
 
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13/02/2017

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


 
 
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10/02/2017

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

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                                                   Studio Job, Big Ben Afthermath, 2009 - 2014. To start the year, Carpenters Workshop Gallery continues its ten-year anniversary programme, dedicating its Parisian space to an exclusive exhibition by renowned design duo - Studio Job.
Entitled ‘Here, There, Nowhere’ this exceptional solo show from Job Smeets and Nynke Tynagel will be the occasion to present a full range of new creations with some of the most emblematic pieces and for the first time drawings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


                                                                          Source : Artdaily


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09/02/2017

11485 - 20170318 - Do Ho Suh's first exhibition at Victoria Miro on view in London - 01.02.2017-18.03.2017

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Do Ho Suh, Passage/s, 2016. Polyester fabric on stainless steel pipes Dimensions variable © Do Ho Suh Courtesy the Artist, Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong and Victoria Miro, London.
 
Inspired by his peripatetic life, Do Ho Suh has long ruminated on the idea of home as both a physical structure and a lived experience, the boundaries of identity and the connection between the individual and the group across global cultures. Meticulously replicating the architecture of the places in which he has lived and worked, such as his childhood home and Western apartments and studios, Suh’s one-to-one scale translucent fabric structures give form to ideas about migration, transience and shifting identities. These ideas are further conveyed in his Hub works, where transitory, connecting spaces between rooms, such as vestibules and corridors, speak metaphorically about movement between cultures and the blurring of public and private, as well as reflecting on the passage of the artist’s own life, and the experience of a person who has developed roots in multiple countries. “I see life as a passageway, with no fixed beginning or destination,” says Suh. “We tend to focus on the destination all the time and forget about the in-between spaces. But without these mundane spaces that nobody really pays attention to, these grey areas, one cannot get from point a to point b.”

The artist’s move to London provides a thematic and emotional touchstone for this exhibition, his first at Victoria Miro. Hub, London Apartment, 2015, a partial representation of Suh’s London home, is joined by other Hubs,including structures derived from his childhood home in South Korea, his home while an undergraduate student in Providence, Rhode Island, and homes and studios in Berlin and New York, to create a walk-through configuration of nine structures occupying the 25-metre-long Gallery II, Wharf Road. This is the most extensive presentation of Suh’s Hubs to date. Created from stitched planes of translucent, jewel-like coloured polyester fabric – including jade green, a colour Suh uses to depict his Korean home – thesedelicately precise, weightless impressions seem to exist between imagination and reality, past and present. To move through them is to experience a distinct emotional register, a sense of being in flux, crossing boundaries and moving between psychological states. For Suh, the experience also represents a meeting of the rational and the impossible that underpins his practice. “Practically it’s impossible to have all these spaces from different cities in one place,” he explains. “So the work is related to my long-held desire to blur the boundaries of geographical distance.” The theme is explored further in animations, also on display in Gallery II, in which photographic images of interior spaces from various locations are digitally ‘stitched’ together. Akin to the experience of walking through Suh’s fabric structures, Passage/s, 2015, depicts a journey through an apparently endless corridor; while in My Home/s, 2016, a camera pans vertically and horizontally through individual rooms as if they were located in a single apartment block.

The idea of transient experience as both a sustained emotional state and an act of self-discovery is a theme shared by the enveloping three-channel video Passage/s: The Pram Project, 2015, on display in Gallery I, in which the artist, accompanied by his daughters, explores streets in South Korea and around his home in London. Suh’s move to London approximately five years ago coincided with the arrival of his first daughter. Attaching three GoPro video cameras to a pushchair, in the film he captures a newly discovered locale from three different viewpoints while ambient sound from the street and conversations between father and daughters, in English and Korean, signal the crossing of cultural and geographical boundaries.

Suh’s work always stems from the measuring of space and the processes, rational yet sensual, that enable him to determine and connect with his surroundings. Recently, Suh has completed a major work, the Rubbing/Loving Project, made over the past three years in the New York apartment he first moved into in 1997, shortly after he graduated from Yale University. Created by lining every surface of the interior with paper and taking a rubbing by caressing the surface with coloured pencils and pastels – “a gesture of loving” according to the artist – the work speaks to memories associated with place as well as to the warm relationship between the artist and his former landlord, Arthur, who passed away last year. Suh’s permanent departure from his New York residence after twenty years has also inspired a new set of lightbox works on display in Gallery I. Constructed from white fabric, the Exit Series, 2016 – smaller household fixtures and fittings such as lightbulbs, doorknobs and entry buzzers bearing the names of the artist and his landlord –appear ghostly, like the sloughed skin of a reptile, seeming almost to disappear from view. For Suh, the corporeal reference is key: “my work always deals with the body, with skin.”

The exhibition also introduces a new process, developed during a residency at STPI – Creative Workshop & Gallery, Singapore, in which Suh’s signature architectural pieces are compressed into large-scale two-dimensional ‘drawings’. Using gelatin tissue, the works are sewn in the same way as Suh’s architectural fabric pieces. Once immersed in water, however, the gelatin dissolves, fusing with the paper to leave an image in which the threads appear like a skeletal framework against the coloured form of the object. Residual yet highly visceral, works such as Staircase, Ground Floor, 348 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011, USA, 2016 draw parallels between architectural space, clothing and the body, making explicit Suh’s fascination with the interconnected spaces we inhabit while continuing his career-long investigation into the porous boundaries of identity.
 
 
 
 
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08/02/2017

11484 - 20170311 - Exhibition of new works by David Diao at Postmasters Gallery - New York - 04.02.2017-11.03.2017

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                          David Diao, Not to Scale, 2016. Acrylic on canvas, 78 x 120 inches (198 x 305 cm). Courtesy of Postmasters Gallery NY Postmasters Gallery presents "HongKong Boyhood," an exhibition of paintings by David Diao, his first show of new works since his comprehensive career retrospective at the Ullens Contemporary Arts Center in Beijing in 2015.

Born in 1943 in Chengdu, China, Diao is known for complex weaving of personal history with the history of modernist painting and design. He superimposes images and text on luscious, largely monochromatic surfaces. Diao's paintings visualize data, both private and public, that maps his life's trajectory from mainland China through HongKong to the United States and New York where he has lived since 1964. "HongKong Boyhood" (a tip of the hat to Walter Benjamin's "Berliner Kindheit") is about the five and a half years Diao spent there.

Events surrounding the loss of my home in China due to the Communist takeover has festered in my mind my entire life. Beginning in 2007, I finally painted some 30 works that zeroed in on this obsession. The resulting show was entitled, "I lived there until I was 6..." and consisted of paintings of maps, site and floor plans, deeds and other material evidence that the house actually existed. All photographs were lost. It was a harrowing escape from Chengdu to HongKong in late October 1949.

The present show continues the story but focuses on the 5 odd years before emigrating from HongKong to the US in 1955. One memory is of my neighbor Li Lihua, the famous movie star, and her glamorous life downstairs in contrast to our refugee drabness. Maps to establish locale and emblems of institutions in my life became paintings. The internet is a wondrous source for images that supplant the lack of a private archive. But in the end what is a child's world but home, school, church. In working on these paintings I realize that during the entire period there I was mostly waiting to grow up. Besides America was beckoning. - David Diao, Jan 10, 2017

David Diao has been showing with Postmasters since its founding in 1985. This will be his twelfth solo exhibition with the gallery.
 
                                                                         Website : Postmasters Gallery

 
 


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07/02/2017

11483 - 20170311 - Hauser & Wirth Zürich presents exhibition focused on early works by Henry Moore - Zürich - 21.01.2017-11.03.2017

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Installation view, ‘Henry Moore. Myths & Poetry’, Hauser & Wirth Zürich, 2017. Reproduced with permission of the Henry Moore Foundation. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth
 
Hauser & Wirth Zürich presents an exhibition focused on Henry Moore’s early works on paper relating to myth and poetry. Including poetry magazine covers, illustrations for poems by Herbert Read and sketches of the Prometheus myth, the presentation explores the graphic side of Moore’s practice and provides an insight into his relationship with the literary world. In addition to etchings, lithographs and drawings, several sculptures are also on view including a large-scale work carved from Elmwood that has not been exhibited since the 1950s. Most of the works were created in the years surrounding the end of World War II; supporting archival material, such as the artist’s tools, photographs of his etching studio and correspondence with friends such as W. H. Auden and Herbert Read, offer intimate access to this period in Moore’s career. ‘Myths & Poetry’ has been organised in collaboration with the Henry Moore Foundation and is curated by the artist’s daughter, Mary Moore.

Due to the uncertainty brought by war, in 1940 Moore relocated from Kent and London to Hertfordshire. This move forced him to abandon sculpture for two and half years, shifting his focus to drawings and works on paper. A significant project that emerged from this period was the book Prométheé – André Gide’s adaptation of Goethe’s Prometheus, illustrated with Moore’s lithographs and typography. During a trip to Paris, Moore had been invited to contribute to the publication by French typographer and publisher, Henri Jonquieres. The artist produced eight lithographs alongside the cover, title page and letters to begin each chapter. The exhibition presents a group of drawings found in related preparatory sketchbooks (1949 – 1950) where each page is quartered into a sequence of four smaller drawings. Fine works in their own right, they also illuminate how Moore explored the new possibilities for sculpture, most significantly the male figure, something previously unseen in his practice. The drawings present new shapes, forms and textures, each page littered with annotations detailing how the figures could be realised in bronze or clay.

Moore’s characterisation of Prometheus defies the traditional gothic horrors where he is portrayed as figure of anguish, suffering eternal torment tied to a rock. In Moore’s hand, Prometheus is gallant like the stoic warriors of ancient Greece; he stole from the gods to help mankind, unperturbed by the punishment that he might have to endure as a result. For example, in ‘Prometheus Defiant’ and ‘Prometheus on the Rocks’, the figure – with a broad torso and svelte limbs typical of Moore’s work – stands tall, bold and measured. The muted tones of the wax-crayon and watercolour wash produce a charged yet calm atmosphere. Moore also employed the ‘two-way sectional line method’ that he developed in his etching studio: a grid of horizontal lines follow the curves of the figures, emphasising their three-dimensional form and allowing him to create depth without shadow.

The large-scale bronze ‘Warrior with Shield’, created in 1953 / 1954 shortly after the Prométheé project and following a trip to Greece in 1951, was the first single male figure that Moore carried out in sculpture. As implied by its title, the work is classical in arrangement and the twisted, tense and amputated torso, with only a shield for protection, calls to mind the brave swordsman succumbed to brutal battle-wounds in Homer’s epics. Moore explained in a letter that ‘at first the figure was reclining. A day or two later I added a shield and altered its position… so it changed from an inactive pose into a figure which, though wounded, is still defiant […] I think The Warrior has some Greek influence, not consciously wished but perhaps the result of visit to Athens and other parts of Greece’. Indeed the broken limbs echo the fragmentary nature of surviving Greek antiquities that Moore would have encountered on his visit to Greece, and perhaps too from visits to the British Museum. In spite of this, ‘Warrior with Shield’ is also decidedly modern – created in the aftermath of World War II, it discloses an overt concern with the mutilation and miseraries of contemporary war. Art Historian Christa Lichtenstern has suggested that the shield, which gives protection from above, alludes to the aerial bombardments of the war, subsequently linking Moore’s warrior sculptures with his earlier Shelter drawings and those made for Edward Sackville’s The Rescue. When talking about the inception of ‘Warrior with Shield’, Moore said, ‘It evolved from a pebble I found on the seashore… which reminded me of the stump of a leg, amputated at the hip. Just as Leonardo says somewhere in his notebook that a painter can find a battle scene in the lichen marks on a wall’.

The female figures in the Prométheé drawings (1949 – 1950), such as in ‘Statues Dispersed through a Grove’ and ‘Statues and Draped Figures’, incorporate drapery marking another subtle classical delineation that would later come to feature in his sculpture. For example, ‘Standing Girl’ (1952), carved from Elmwood, and ‘Draped Reclining Figure’ (1952), moulded in bronze. Drapery had already played an important part in the Shelter drawings; he began to learn about its function as form and it encouraged in him the intention to use drapery in sculpture in a more realistic way. The Prométheé drawings helped strengthen this intention. ‘Drapery can emphasise the tension in a figure’, Moore said in 1954, ‘for where the form pushes outwards, such as on the shoulders, the thighs, the breasts etc., it can be pulled tight… and by contrast with the crumpled slackness of the drapery that lies between the salient points, the pressure from inside is intensified […] It need not be just a decorative addition, but can serve to stress the sculptural idea of the figure’. So, whilst direct interpretations of classical narratives never featured in Moore’s sculpture, ancient civilisation and the European Renaissance still provided a point of inspiration and the Prométheé drawings marked the beginning of this interest.

Throughout his life Moore enjoyed poetry and surrounded himself with friends and artists that shared and discussed their writing with him. Moore and art critic Herbert Read had been friends since the early 1930s, having met in Hampstead where they both lived. The development of their respective work as critic and artist was entwined for nearly 40 years: Moore had a profound impact on Read’s aesthetic politics; Read cemented Moore’s legacy as Britain’s most important modern artist. In 1945/6 a collection of Read’s poems were released and at the request of the publisher Moore was asked to create a lithograph in response to a particular poem, ‘They Came Running’ (1945). The exhibition displays a collection of Moore’s drawing studies for the lithograph, in which the artist perfectly captured the conflict between the naive joy of childhood and the dark, existential angst of the adult world. The dark ominous sky and barbed wire littered on the beach act as a bleak reminder of man’s propensity for conflict.

Beginning in 1937, Moore contributed illustrations to two modernist literary magazines: Poetry London and Contemporary Poetry and Prose. The magazines featured verse and criticism by Moore’s friends and acquaintances such as W. H. Auden, Herbert Read, Stephen Spender, and Dylan Thomas, as well as leading international figures including Paul Éluard and Salvidor Dalí. Moore was one of several artists, including Hans Arp, Paul Klee and Max Ernst, invited to design the cover for individual issues and presented here is a collection of his design prototypes. ‘The Lyre Bird: Cover Design for ‘Poetry’’ (1942) is a joyful and graphic watercolour depicting a group of Lyre birds, known for their ability to mimic sound. The cover designs for Contemporary Poetry and Prose (all 1937) feature abstract pen and ink drawings – dynamic black lines overlaid on bright inky shapes play with positive and negative space to conjure figures and mythical forms. The sharp, geometric qualities of the illustrations that Moore produced for both publications are unlike any of his other works on paper. Moore recalled being invited to illustrate a collection of Auden poems slightly later in the 1970s. He said ‘When Véra Lindsay suggested that I illustrate a selection of Auden poems I was at once interested in the idea, because I had known him since the 1930s and had always greatly admired him and his poetry, but it was some months before I could really get going. I began… in a straightforward way as if I were illustrating Alice in Wonderland or any other story. But after reading some of the poems I realised it would be impossible to treat them in the same way and I began to wonder what other ways there were of approaching the problem’. We see here that for Moore, working with poetry was about much more than producing narrative illustration.
 
 
 
Source : Artdaily
 
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06/02/2017

11482 - 20170311 - Sean Kelly presents a major one-person exhibition by James Casebere - New York - 27.01.2017-11.03.2017

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James Casebere, Yellow Passage, 2017. Framed archival pigment print mounted to dibond paper: 44 3/8 x 66 1/2 inches (112.7 x 168.9 cm). Framed: 47 x 69 3/16 x 2 1/4 inches (119.4 x 175.7 x 5.7 cm). Edition of 5 with 2 APs © James Casebere, courtesy: the artist and Sean Kelly, New York.
 
Sean Kelly presents Emotional Architecture, a major one-person exhibition by James Casebere. This is Casebere’s first solo presentation of new work in New York since 2010 and his first in the gallery’s new space. 
In Emotional Architecture, Casebere presents an entirely new body of work inspired by world-renowned Mexican architect Luis Barragán. The title of the exhibition references the name given to the style of modernist architecture conceived by Barragán and the artist Mathias Goéritz, who, frustrated by the cold functionalism of Modernism, embraced space, color and light to create buildings that engendered warmth, meditation, and reflection.

In this new body of work, Casebere returns to his career-long interrogation of interior architectural spaces to explore Barragán’s sumptuous use of color, dramatic light and simple haptic, planar surfaces. These new works evoke the serene austerity that inhabited Casebere’s early series of work examining societal power structures through the interrogation of prisons cells. However, the sense of isolation and enforced confinement that defined those works has been replaced with an atmosphere of joy and beauty that characterizes Barragán’s unique oeuvre.

Casebere's innovative work has established him at the forefront of artists to work with what would become known as constructed photography. His practice over the last four decades reveals the influence of film, architecture, and art history on him, in both the simple and the complex models that he creates in his studio. His table-sized constructions are made of everyday materials, pared down to their essential forms in order to create ambiguous, evocative, and, on occasion, unsettling environments. Devoid of human figures, the resulting images invite viewers to project into and inhabit the spaces he has created, relying on their imagination and memory to fill in the gaps.

Casebere is the recipient of numerous fellowships, including several from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. His work is collected by museums worldwide, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; the Los Angeles County Museum; and the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Tate Gallery in London, England, among many others.

In 2016, Casebere was a New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame Honoree and the subject of important survey exhibitions: Fugitive at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, curated by Okwui Enwezor; Immersion at Espace Images Vevey in Switzerland; and After Scale Model: Dwelling in the Work of James Casebere, at the BOZAR/Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels, Belgium. The exhibitions were accompanied by major publications, which are available at the gallery.

For his exhibition at the Haus der Kunst, Casebere created site-specific works that referred to the building’s complex political history as a representational National Socialist structure. One of these works, entitled Grandstand, will be on view in the front gallery space during Emotional Architecture. The work is an abstract interpretation of the stage used in the Albert Speer-designed Zeppelin Field in Nuremberg, the Nazi equivalent of a Roman arena. Although thematically separate from the rest of the exhibition, Grandstand is part of Casebere’s continuing confrontation with historically burdened architecture. Furthermore, it presents a particularly pertinent meditation on the current political climate.
 
 
 
 
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02/02/2017

11480 - 20170304 - Fraenkel Gallery debuts of new, large-scale photographs by British artist Richard Learoyd - San Francisco - 05.01.2017-04.03.2017

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Richard Learoyd, Jasmijn red, 2016, 48 x 48 inches © Richard Learoyd, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
 
Fraenkel Gallery presents the worldwide debut of new, large-scale photographs by British artist Richard Learoyd from January 5 – March 4, 2017. Featured are color studio portraits, still lifes, and black-and-white landscapes photographed in California and Eastern Europe. All of the photographs were made with room-sized cameras constructed by the artist.  
Richard Learoyd’s singular working methods use a camera obscura to create remarkable extra-largeformat darkroom photographs, up to 85 inches wide. Both in the studio and in nature, the focal point of the artist’s camera lens captures a nearly hyperreal level of detail, lending the person or landscape a heightened quality of presence. This is contrasted with the shallow depth of field, in which the subject gradually becomes out of focus as it recedes from the camera, as if to escape the visual acuity of the viewer.

In Learoyd’s most recent larger-than-life portraits, his subjects are turned away from the camera, seemingly unknowable. But the artist’s palpable curiosity manifests itself in the intensely rendered details. The photographs have a physicality and tactility that projects a desire for closeness. Subtle use of gesture, color, and pose become signifiers of the subject’s inner life, while the translucent qualities of skin and fabric suggest human vulnerability and fragility.

Learoyd has said of his portraits, “The pictures are about extending the duration of looking… My hope is that they inspire a truly reflective view: a view of intimacy and understanding, and insight into another that will increase our humanity.”

Likewise, in Learoyd’s new black-and-white landscapes, his process is one of search and discovery, revealing surprising scenes with quiet delicacy. His varied subjects reflect encounters with previously unfamiliar terrain, on the coast of California and in rural areas of Bulgaria, Romania, and Poland. Whether photographing a beached whale or the ruins of a monument, his photographs capture an imposing presence, its texture, weight, and volume. Revealing the physical and metaphorical gravity of the scene, Learoyd’s photographs embody the timelessness of the landscape.

Richard Learoyd’s first solo museum exhibition, Dark Mirror, was mounted at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2015. More recently, The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles presented the solo exhibition Richard Learoyd: In the Studio, which will travel to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, February 10 to June 11, 2017.

Learoyd’s photographs are in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art in New York; SFMOMA, San Francisco; The Getty, Los Angeles; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate and Victoria & Albert Museum in London; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, among others. In 2015, Aperture and Pier 24 Photography published Day for Night, a major 328-page monograph of Richard Learoyd’s work.
 
 
  
 
 
 
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