Douglas Melini @ Van Doren Waxter, New York

Douglas Melini: Starry Sky
Van Doren Waxter, New York
Through January 12, 2019

Douglas Melini 

Starry Sky #7, 2018 

Oil and acrylic on canvas with artist’s frame 

20 x 22 ½ inches (50.8 x 57.2 cm) 

Courtesy of the artist and Van Doren Waxter, New York

Van Doren Waxter presents paintings by Douglas Melini as the inaugural exhibition in the gallery’s new gallery space at 23 East 73rd Street; this newly renovated public exhibition space is an expansion on the building’s 3rd floor, adjacent to the gallery’s private viewing room. Douglas Melini: Starry Sky is the artist’s third show with the gallery. It follows the artist’s solo institutional exhibition at the Schneider Museum of Art, OR.

For this exhibition, Douglas Melini debuts a new series of paintings that merges his densely textured abstractions with the representation of a field of stars. In these chromatically charged works, pattern and saturated color become night skies, strewn and illuminated by stars. Formally rigorous, the canvases emerge from a meticulous collage process made entirely of paint; first layers of thin, nearly transparent acrylic are laid down in a lattice-like structure followed by gestural smears of oil impasto applied with a palette knife, or by hand. These thick tangles of paint become landscapes themselves transforming the work into a study of landscapes both within its materiality and its content. The paintings are then custom framed by the artist, presenting the works as deliberate objects.

Douglas Melini’s new Starry Sky paintings thoughtfully examine the abstract, pictorial, and conceptual nature of image making. In these paintings, he examines several modernist ideas about painting, including the use of the grid, the painterly surface and the painting’s objecthood. The artist also proposes ideas about light and space, both depicted and physical. The artist alludes to varied art historical references and inspirations, in particular the iconography of the night sky, including Italian frescoed ceilings depicting the heavens; saturated stained-glass windows which are illuminated from the back; the image and idea of a star as a symbol and pattern – often used as decoration and background throughout art history; and to gauge and mark the condition of night. 

Van Doren Waxter
23 East 73rd Street, New York, NY 10021
www.vandorenwaxter.com

Michael Scott @ Xippas Paris

Michael Scott : Circle Paintings
Commissaire : Vincent Pécoil
Galerie Xippas, Paris
15 décembre 2018 - 16 février 2019

Michael Scott, #142, 2018.

Peinture émail sur aluminium, 81,3 x 121,9 cm.

Courtesy de l’artiste et de Xippas Paris

Avec Circle Paintings, la première exposition personnelle de Michael Scott à Xippas Paris, l’artiste revisite et donne une nouvelle direction à ses premiers travaux, réalisés dans les années 80 – des peintures de cercles concentriques, quasi-identiques les unes des autres.

Ces tableaux, avec leur absence de style, leur refus manifeste de la maîtrise et de l’originalité, mettaient en avant l’idée en peinture. Ils valaient comme une prise de position par rapport au néo-expressionnisme alors triomphant à New York, et s’inscrivaient dans la voie ouverte par d’autres peintres comme Olivier Mosset ou Peter Halley. Réunies, ces peintures créaient un effet optique fort, qui est aussi un des ressorts de l’exposition à Xippas Paris.

Avec l’ajout de la couleur, les variations sur la taille et le cadrage, les peintures récentes sont nettement plus enjouées que les précédentes. Les choix d’accrochage suggèrent l’interchangeabilité de toutes les peintures, et conservent cette même méfiance vis-à-vis du concept d’originalité qui était le moteur des peintures des années 80. Dans le même temps, réalisées sur des panneaux d’aluminium, ces oeuvres ont une présence plus forte et se donnent comme des objets qui existent dans le monde, plutôt que comme des peintures « pures ».

Le travail de Michael Scott a été associé à celui de ses amis Steve di Benedetto, Matthew McCaslin et Steven Parrino, avec qui il a exposé de nombreuses fois. Sa peinture incarne depuis la fin des années 80 un versant majeur de l’art américain récent, héritier de la peinture abstraite radicale, mais aussi de l’art conceptuel et du pop art.

MICHAEL SCOTT est né en 1958. Il vit et travaille à New York. Ses peintures intègrent aujourd’hui des collections publiques importantes, parmi lesquelles : Le Consortium Museum, Dijon ; le Fonds National d’Art Contemporain ; le FRAC Nord-Pas-de-Calais ; le MAMCO, Genève ; le Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne ; la Kunsthalle Bern et le MACBA, Buenos Aires ; LACMA, Los Angeles. Michael Scott a été représenté par les galeries Tony Shafrazi (New York), Pierre Huber (Genève), Sandra Gering (New York) et Triple V (Paris). A Paris, son travail a été montré dans l’exposition Dynamo, au Grand Palais, en 2013. Parmi ses expositions institutionnelles significatives, figurent : le MAMCO, Genève (2017 et 2016) ; le Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland et le MACBA, Buenos Aires (2015) ; le Circuit, Lausanne (2014) ; le Consortium, Dijon et la Kunsthalle, Bern (2012) ; le CAPC, Bordeaux (2011) ; Le Magasin, Grenoble, (2009) ; la Fondation Vasarely, Aix-en-Provence (2008) ; le Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne (2005) et le Naples Museum of Art, Naples (2001).

GALERIE XIPPAS PARIS
108 rue Vieille du Temple 75003 Paris
www.xippas.com

Simone Fattal @ MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York

Simone Fattal

MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York

March 31 – September 2, 2019

MoMA PS1 presents the first solo museum exhibition in the United States of the work of Simone Fattal (Lebanese and American, b.1942). The retrospective will bring together a selection of over 100 works created over the last 40 years, featuring abstract and figurative ceramic sculptures, paintings, and collages that draw from a range of sources including war narratives, landscape painting, ancient history, mythology, and Sufi poetry. The exhibition will explore the impact of displacement, as well as the politics of archeology and excavation, as these themes resonate across Fattal’s multifaceted artistic practice.

SIMONE FATTAL was born in Damascus, Syria and raised in Lebanon, where she studied philosophy at the Ecole des Lettres in Beirut. She then moved to Paris where she continued her philosophical pursuits at the Sorbonne. In 1969, she returned to Beirut and began working as a visual artist, exhibiting her paintings locally until the start of the Lebanese Civil War. She fled Lebanon in 1980 and settled in California, where she founded the Post-Apollo Press, a publishing house dedicated to innovative and experimental literary work. In 1988, she enrolled in a course at the Art Institute of San Francisco, which prompted a return to her artistic practice and a newfound dedication to sculpture and ceramics. Simone Fattal currently lives in Paris and has had recent exhibitions at the Musée Yves Saint Laurent Marrakech (2018), the Rochechouart Departmental Museum of Contemporary Art (2017), and the Sharjah Art Foundation (2016).

Simone Fattal is organized by Ruba Katrib, Curator, MoMA PS1.

Major support for Simone Fattal is provided by The Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art. Additional funding is provided by the MoMA PS1 Annual Exhibition Fund.

MoMA PS1 

momaps1.org

Rodney Graham @ 303 Gallery, New York

Rodney Graham
303 Gallery, New York
January 11 - February 23, 2019

303 Gallery announces their ninth exhibition of new work by Rodney Graham.

In a suite of new lightbox works, Rodney Graham continues to probe the semi-conscious creation of cultural archetypes. Begun in 2007, Rodney Graham's lightboxes synthesize and expand upon his practices in painting, photography, sculpture and film, using highly detailed set design and arcane conceptual inspirations to point to the paradigmatic functioning of stock characters from the realms of art, Hollywood film, music, history and the social world.

For Vacuuming The Gallery, 1949, 2018, Rodney Graham's monumental piece takes as its inspiration a photograph of New York gallerist Samuel Kootz smoking a pipe in his own gallery during a Picasso exhibition in 1949. On the walls in this image are a series of Rodney Graham's own abstract paintings, part of a series of variations based on a single watercolor by Alexander Rodchenko (Abstract Composition, 1941). Rodney Graham inhabits a role based on the image of Kootz, vacuuming the floors of his apartment-cum-gallery in a quaint-seeming gesture of domesticity. His taciturn, smug expression seems to translate not only the uptown art dealer persona, but the upending of that persona in performing a menial, unusually gendered task. Rodney Graham's Rodchenko-inspired paintings hang in the current exhibition as well, their anachronistic expressionist tendencies magnified by the contextual disconnect between the tableau the lightbox portrays and the contemporary tendency to view art in a sleek white cube.

Tattooed Man on Balcony, 2018, follows from a poem Rodney Graham penned in the style of Mallarme that was intended as an instructional guide for a tattoo artist. The image described, in which Popeye is clad in a deep-sea diving suit battling a giant squid, has been extended to an entire phalanx of characters from Popeye's compatriots in the Thimble Theater. The man's pompadour and spread-collar, open to the chest 50s-style shirt suggest an aging rockabilly fan whose most whimsical and hardscrabble years are behind him. Perched on the balcony of an apartment featuring a particularly Vancouver-centric brand of vernacular modernism, Graham again creates a strange kind of third-person self-portrait, as if this character is simultaneously himself, a model, and a type of standardized, unconscious prototype - an 'extra' of sorts.

A different type of stock character emerges in Remorseful Hunter, 2019, inspired by a found thrift store painting. Rodney Graham takes the guise of a mountain man with a rifle apparently in the midst of a remorseful existential crisis, sitting on a rock overlooking a Caspar David Fridrich-style landscape. He appears overtaken by sentimentality, a kind of existential Elmer Fudd who suddenly finds himself identified only with a sympathetic squirrel. Another type of "man with beast" portrait exists in Central Questions of Philosophy, 2018, a lightbox work inspired by two versions of the Pelican paperback cover for the philosopher AJ Ayer's titular book. In one version, the philosopher poses stoically in his home with a learned smirk, and in the other, he assumes the same pose, this time with a dog on his lap. The work nods to Ayer's work as a logical empiricist, positing two versions of reality: in one, a philosopher sits in a chair; and in the other, a philosopher and a dog sit in a chair. Graham is Ayer, Ayer is Graham, a dog is a dog is a dog.

RODNEY GRAHAM was born in Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada in 1949. Solo exhibitions include Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden, Germany (2017); Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, Netherlands (2017); BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK (2017); Le Constortium, Dijon, France (2016); Sammlung Goetz, Munich, Germany (2015); Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada (2012); Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, Austria (2011); and the Museu D’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain (2010). He has participated in group exhibitions such as the Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, USA (2013); the 13th, 14th and 17th Sydney Biennales, Australia (2002, 2006, 2010); the Whitney Biennial, New York, USA (2006); and the Biennale d’Art contemporain de Lyon, France (2003). He represented Canada at the 47th Venice Biennale, Italy (1997). He has received the Gershon Iskowitz Prize, Toronto, Canada (2004), the Kurt Schwitters-Preis, Niedersächsiche Sparkassenstiftung, Germany (2006), and the Audain Prize for lifetime achievement in visual arts, British Columbia, Canada (2011). In 2016, Rodney Graham was appointed as an Officer of the Order of Canada, for his contributions to Canadian contemporary art. He lives and works in Vancouver.

Upcoming: ELAD LASSRY, March 2019, his second exhibition at 303 Gallery.

303 GALLERY

555 West 21st Street, New York, NY 10011

www.303gallery.com

Ceal Floyer @ Lisson Gallery, London

Ceal Floyer
Lisson Gallery, London
Through 5 January 2019

Lisson Gallery presents a new exhibition by Berlin-based artist Ceal Floyer, her sixth with the gallery since she first showed in the same spaces in 1997. Over 20 years on, Ceal Floyer has lost none of her defiant simplicity or piercing philosophical precision, producing a distinct body of sculptural works, featuring poetic situations, subtle interventions, as well as new video and light installations.

A sonic experience beneath a clear, parabolic dome, which contains a directional speaker, hung from the ceiling, briefly drenches visitors with a gushing loop of static sound. While Untitled (Static) could be a strangely meditative zone of white noise, within the already white confines of the gallery, it might also act as an approximation of the sound of rain atop an umbrella, creating a momentary trompe l’oreille (the aural equivalent of a trompe l’œil).

Elsewhere, a diptych montage of small-sized images of Hotel Rooms (all works 2018) culled from travel brochures and glossy magazines advertising hotel suites and interior décor, is hung on two adjacent walls. This travelogue of pristine lodgings bespeaks not so much Ceal predilection for ironic image appropriation as it deconstructs some of the hidden conventions of commercial photography: each vista of a freshly made-up double- or twin-bedded haven is shot from either a left-hand or right-hand point of view. Ceal Floyer proceeds to uncannily mirror and re-stage the angle of the camera in a literal way by categorising and placing each image on either the left- or right-hand side of the space.

An understated survey of what constitutes the boundaries of this exhibition continues on the window where two typical hazard signs depict the maximum headroom available both inside and outside, although the extreme unlikelihood of anyone transgressing the height restrictions render these warnings as merely conceptual in nature. Multiple versions of this work, Maximum Headroom (2014/2018), will be adorning the façade of the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein until next year, further expanding (rather than limiting) where in time or space Ceal Floyer’s suggestions can exist or operate.

The function or lack thereof in Ceal Floyer’s subversive statements is compounded both by their ubiquity in everyday life and by their absurdity in her hands. As if to ram this point home, the main gallery features an outsized video, Hammer and Nail, of a hammer violently pounding a nail into a board. The progress of metal into wood seems stunted by the movement of the entire filmic frame, which gradually comes up to meet the nail’s head with each blow, enacting a negation of duties and a structural reversal or complication of the usual hammer-meets-nail relationship. Riven through, as these pieces all are, with Floyer’s inimitable humour and rigour, it is no surprise that she has been included in the South London Gallery’s current group exhibition, ‘KNOCK, KNOCK: Humour in Contemporary Art’ (until 18 November).

LISSON GALLERY, LONDON
67 Lisson Street, London
www.lissongallery.com

Alex Katz Retrospective Exhibition @ Museum Brandhorst, Munich

Alex Katz

Museum Brandhorst, Munich

6 December 2018 – 22 April 2019

The Museum Brandhorst presents a major exhibition of works by celebrated American painter Alex Katz. A towering figure in contemporary painting best known for his iconic portraits of beautiful, stylish women, masterfully rendered in bold, vibrant colors, Alex Katz has influenced and inspired generations of artists around the world. Featuring about ninety works—including some of the artist’s most important paintings—the exhibition offers visitors a retrospective overview of this seminal artist’s oeuvre from the 1950s to today.

ALEX KATZ (born 1927, New York) emerged on the New York scene during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism and just prior to the explosion of Pop Art. Although he is often hailed as one of the precursors to Pop, his aesthetic is perhaps more closely aligned with such poets as Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery than with other painters of his generation. His unique oeuvre, which now spans some 70 years, is utterly devoted to the representation of the here and now and the immediacy of human perception—a commitment to what the artist has often described as “painting in the present tense.” Working variously en plein air, from photographic sources, and from his own sketches and preparatory drawings, he has focused his attention on subject matter from his immediate milieu: portraits of family (in particular his wife Ada) and friends, artistic collaborators and scenes of social interaction, landscapes and architectural scenes, and flowers. Throughout, Alex Katz’s sensitivity for painterly surfaces unfolds in productive tension with the formal languages of film, fashion, and advertising.

The exhibition begins with works from the late 1950s and early 1960s, including portraits of the renowned choreographer and dancer Paul Taylor and his company, for which Alex Katz designed many sets. A series of seminal single and group portraits from the 1960s establish Alex Katz’s signature style as well as the social and artistic milieu of Downtown New York, both of which remain leitmotifs throughout his work and the exhibition. Two large galleries of landscapes show Alex Katz playing at the edge of abstraction while at the same time recommitting himself to a decidedly modern form of realism.

The quality of light itself, whether direct, reflected, or diffused, becomes a central concern in these paintings. So, too, does the ability of an individual brushstroke to delimit multiple different types of form while also retaining its status as an autonomous mark.

Also on display is a sizable collection of small oil paintings, sketches, and preparatory drawings. Often directly related to the large-scale paintings on view, these works will provide visitors with an expanded understanding of the artist’s multi-layered working process.

The exhibition draws on the Museum Brandhorst’s own extensive collection of works by the artist—including masterpieces from across his long career—supplemented by key works from other public and private collections, and provides an extended glimpse into the prolific production of this 91-year-old painter.

 An abundantly illustrated catalogue was published by Hirmer Verlag, featuring newly commissioned texts on the artist by critic Kirsty Bell and art historian Prudence Peiffer, as well as reflections by contemporary artists Arturo Herrera, Jordan Kantor, and Matt Saunders (ISBN 978-3-7774-3237-3).

On the occasion of the exhibition, the museum premieres a new documentary film on Alex Katz, directed by Kristina Kilian of the University of Television and Film (HFF) Munich. This project is part of an ongoing collaboration between the Museum Brandhorst and the HFF.

Curator: Jacob Proctor

MUSEUM BRANDHORST

Theresienstrasse 35A, 80333 München

www.museum-brandhorst.de

Judy Chicago @ Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami - Judy Chicago: A Reckoning

Judy Chicago: A Reckoning 

Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami 

December 4, 2018 – April 21, 2019

The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami presents “Judy Chicago: A Reckoning,” a major survey of works by the pioneering feminist artist. This exhibition highlights Judy Chicago’s iconographic transition from abstraction to figuration, and explores the ways in which the artist’s strong feminist voice transforms our understanding of modernism and its traditions.

Representing the female voice in a male-dominated world, Judy Chicago explores important narratives of history, form and labor. The artist deploys both iconography and working methods in order to problematize gender roles, artistic mastery and skills traditionally regarded as “female” such as needlework and embroidery, as well as stereotypical “male” skills, such as auto body painting and pyrotechnics.

JUDY CHICAGO (b. 1939, Chicago) is an artist, author, feminist, educator, and intellectual whose career spans over five decades. Her influence both within and beyond the art community is attested to by her inclusion in hundreds of publications throughout the world. Her art has been frequently exhibited in the US as well as in Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. In addition, a number of the books she has authored have been published in foreign editions, bringing her art and philosophy to readers worldwide.

“Judy Chicago: A Reckoning” is organized by Alex Gartenfeld, Artistic Director, and Stephanie Seidel, Associate Curator.

INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, MIAMI

61 NE 41st Street, Miami, Florida 33137

www.icamiami.org

Jennifer Packer @ Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York - Quality of Life

Jennifer Packer: Quality of Life
Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York
November 29, 2018 - January 19, 2019

Sikkema Jenkins & Co. presents Quality of Life, a solo exhibition of new paintings by JENNIFER PACKER. This is Packer’s second solo show at Sikkema Jenkins. 

Jennifer Packer’s painted figures and still lifes are exceptional for their expressive fields of color, worked tenderly by the artist’s hand. They are images made with the utmost care–for the subject, and for the artist herself.

Jennifer Packer’s subjects are often friends and family, loved ones who serve as an emotive force in her life. Her representations critique the positionality, autonomy and power of the marginalized subject. Her work intends to address the primacy of the gaze within painting as a locus for accountability and representation. In Jennifer Packer’s work, distinct features fade against the color of their environment, creating a protective distance between the direct gaze of the viewer and the subject’s interiority.

The floral still lifes echo the same fragility and tenderness of life expressed in her portraits. Situated within the historical tradition of still life painting, Jennifer Packer’s floral images are concerned chiefly with painting as a language for the transmission of information through touch; a delicate working of the painted medium in response to loss and trauma. Jennifer Packer’s flowers serve as an act of grief, commemoration, and healing.

Born in 1984 in Philadelphia, JENNIFER PACKER received her BFA from the Tyler University School of Art at Temple University in 2007, and her MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2012. She was the 2012-2013 Artist-in-Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, and a Visual Arts Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, from 2014-2016. 

Jennifer Packer’s first solo museum show, Tenderheaded, was exhibited at The Renaissance Society, Chicago in September 2017 before traveling to the Rose Museum at Brandeis University in March 2018. The catalogue that accompanied the exhibition includes a conversation between Jennifer Packer and Kerry James Marshall, essays by Jessica Bell Brown and April Freely, a poem by Safiya Sinclair, and an introduction by curator Solveig Øvstebø.

SINKKEMA JENKINS & CO.
530 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011
www.sikkemajenkinsco.com

teamLab @ Pace Gallery, Palo Alto - Continuous Life and Death at the Now of Eternity

teamLab: Continuous Life and Death at the Now of Eternity
Pace Gallery, Palo Alto
November 15, 2018 - January 13, 2019

teamLab, Continuous Life and Death at the Now of Eternity, 2017 
Digital work, 9 channels, endless 

© teamLab
Courtesy Pace Gallery

teamLab: Continuous Life and Death at the Now of Eternity, at Pace’s downtown Palo Alto gallery, features six monitor works in various scales. Each work embodies teamLab’s long-standing interest in the possibilities and meaning of what they call ‘Ultrasubjective Space,” the shallow spatial structure of traditional Japanese painting.  As in Japanese styles as varied as Ukiyo-e prints from the Edo period to contemporary Manga illustrations, figures and objects in teamLab’s compositions exist on a single plane of depth focusing on vertical and horizontal relationships to express dimensionality. It is different but equivalent to western one-point perspective as a system for representing space. Compared to classical western space, the viewer does not hold a dominant perspective over the subject matter but rather, is immersed within an integrated experience with it. Neither subordinate nor superior to western perspective, the implication of this alternative vantage point raises questions regarding how different cultures perceive the world. For instance, what does it mean when systems perceived as opposites are equally true and sustainable?

The exhibition includes a 2017 nine-monitor work of the same name that generates images of flowers and plants, evolving and changing in real time, and never repeating itself. New multi-monitor works include Waves of Light, 2018—a continuous loop of mesmerizing motion of white waves on a gold ground—and Reversible Rotation – Continuous, Black in White, 2018 in which calligraphic lines roam from screen to screen as three-dimensional forms on a two-dimensional surface. Another example of spatial calligraphy, Enso, 2017, is a continuous looped image of the Buddhist symbol of wholeness. Two additional single channel digital works featured in the exhibition include Chrysanthemum Tiger from Fleeting Flower Series, 2017—a brightly colored continuous loop of a tiger rendered with thousands of flowers forming and dissolving before the viewer—and Impermanent Life, 2017—an endlessly evolving, abstracted natural image, eliciting a meditation on the subtle quality of change.

teamLab (f. 2001, Tokyo, by Toshiyuki Inoko) is an interdisciplinary group whose collaborative practice seeks to navigate the confluence of art, technology, design, and the natural world. Rooted in the traditions of pre-modern Japanese art and on the forefront of interactive design, teamLab operates from a distinct concept of spatial perception, which they refer to as Ultrasubjective Space. Driven by their investigations of human behavior in the information era, teamLab proposes innovative models for societal development through immersive and participatory installations that employ computer graphics, sensing, sound, and light. Rather than using prerecorded animation, teamLab’s artworks are often rendered digitally in real time, and the actions of viewers cause continuous changes in their appearance and behavior.

Toshiyuki Inoko (b. 1977, Tokushima, Japan) was inspired to form teamLab in 2001 after graduating from the University of Tokyo, where he studied mechanical engineering and physics. Co-founded with his friends, teamLab was conceived as a space for collaborative learning and experimentation, following a common belief in the cogency of digital art and installation. Inoko had long considered the potential of a computer-generated space as a catalyst for change and regarded art as a vehicle to incite thought; within this framework, he committed himself to creating art with digital technology.

teamLab has been the subject of numerous monographic exhibitions, including Dance! Art Exhibition and Learn and Play! teamLab Future Park, at the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation, Tokyo (2014); and What a Loving and Beautiful World, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Cambridge (2015). Recent exhibitions dedicated to teamLab include Ever Blossoming, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (2016); Graffiti Nature, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2017); Homogenizing and Transforming World, National Gallery Singapore (2017); teamLab: Au-delà des limites, Grand halle de La Villette, Paris (2018); A Time When Art Is Everywhere, Cameron Art Museum, Wilmington, North Carolina (2018); and Massless, Amos Rex, Helsinki (2018). In 2018, teamLab partnered with leading urban landscape developer Mori Building Co., Ltd, to open MORI Building Digital Art Museum: teamLab Borderless in Tokyo—a digital only art museum encompassing over 60 artworks installed across all elements of the building.

PACE GALLERY PALO ALTO
229 Hamilton Avenue, Palo Alto, CA 94301
www.pacegallery.com

Joan Lyons @ Steven Kasher Gallery, NYC

Joan Lyons 

Steven Kasher Gallery, New York 

November 15 - December 22, 2018 

Steven Kasher Gallery presents a major solo exhibition of pioneering feminist artist JOAN LYONS. Lyons (American, b. 1937) is one of the great unsung artists of her generation. The exhibition features nine of Joan Lyons’ pivotal photographic projects. This is the first gallery solo exhibition of the artist’s work since 2013. Joan Lyons’ groundbreaking work freely combines feminist theory and personal experience. Her work is intimate and introspective, questioning the indexical quality of photography.

Over the past six decades, Joan Lyons has employed a variety of difficult and obscure image-making processes. Her work spans a broad range of media including archaic photographic processes, pinhole photography, offset lithography, Xerography, screen-printing, and photo-quilt making. In the 1960s and 1970s, Joan Lyons was one of the earliest artists to adopt xerography as an artistic practice and was recognized as an innovator in the use of Haloid Xerox drawing as an image making process. In a 1982 artist statement Joan Lyons said “I work with what is available, a variety of optical devices. I work through complexity, to something simple and direct. This distillation process becomes more evident as time goes on. I work at those things that are evident; how I see, not conventions of seeing.”

Joan Lyons’ work defies every artistic taboo of the 1950s. She had been taught that contemporary art should be universal, gestural, abstract, monumental, qualities which are inherently masculine. After trying and failing to follow these mandates, Joan Lyons’ realized that her work could not be separated from her own experiences as a woman. Her personal narrative, different in content and tone from the dominant male voice, pushed her to establish new artistic structures.

Highlights from the exhibition include Untitled (Bedspread), 1969, the earliest work in the exhibition, is a sharp, ironic commentary on the status of women in the late 1960s. The repeated image of an anonymous, nude woman that has been screenprinted onto a fabric bedspread is a fierce response to the idea that women are best “barefoot and pregnant.” The work also references practices widely considered to be women’s work including sitchery, quilting and the “lesser” decorative arts.

 

In the Haloid-Xerox portraits, taken between 1972 and 1980, Joan Lyons’ utilized her own body in as a means of questioning photographic portraiture and female archetypes. The work is a deliberate attempt not to objectify women but to internalize their representation. Working in opposition to an instantaneous snapshot or a decisive moment, each image is a composite created over the course of many hours. The prints are the result of multiple transfers onto large sheets of paper using the original view-camera based flatbed Xerox equipment that yielded a carbon image on plain paper.

Artifacts, 1973, is a portfolio of 11 offset lithographs created in part as a response to Andy Warhol's soup can and other pop culture images. This body of work was informed by a desire to pay homage to the power objects in the artist’s home, items that ruled the artist’s everyday world.

Joan Lyons’ seminal 1974 work Prom is a ritual artifact, a trompe l’oeil deconstruction of her teenage daughter’s first prom dress. Like most of Joan Lyons’ work, Prom is conceptual and process based. The piece is comprised of six life-size sections of the dress, pressed like flowers onto six pages. The weave of the fabric itself replaces a conventional halftone screen, emphasizing the connection between printing and weaving. Prom was personal, concrete and feminine, a forceful contradiction of everything Lyons’ was taught that art should be.

In addition to her artistic practice, Joan Lyons was the Founding Director of the influential Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1972 – 2004. Under Joan Lyons’ direction, the VSW Press has been active in the evolution and definition of the field of artist’s books over the past three decades. Joan Lyons was responsible for the publication of over 450 artist’s books. The VSW Press also designed and produced books by photographers and writers, and titles relating to theory and historical inquiry in the visual arts. Joan Lyons is the editor of the highly influential annotated bibliography, Artist’s Books: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1972–2008 (2009) and of Artist’s Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook, (1986, 1988, 1991, 1993, 1995).

JOAN LYONS (b. 1937) completed a BFA at Alfred University, New York (1957), and an MFA at SUNY Buffalo, New York (1973). Since 1963 her work has been exhibited at major institutions worldwide including Museum of Modern Art, New York, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, DeCordova Museum, Arts Council of Great Britain, Center for Creative Photography, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Sevilla, Art Gallery of Ontario, National Gallery of Canada and the Bibliothéque Nationale de France. Lyons’ work is found in permanent collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Norton-Simon Museum, J. Paul Getty Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, DeCordova Museum, Museum of Modern Art, New York and the National Gallery of Canada. Lyons has published over 30 editions of her artist’s books since 1972. A retrospective exhibition, Maker/Mentor: Selected Work from Four Decades, appeared at the Rochester Contemporary Art Center in 2007.

STEVEN KASHER GALLERY

515 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.stevenkasher.com

Alexander Archipenko @ Eykyn Maclean Gallery, NYC - Space Encircled

Alexander Archipenko: Space Encircled

Eykyn Maclean, New York

November 9 - December 14, 2018

Eykyn Maclean presents an exhibition devoted to the work of Alexander Archipenko (1887-1964), the artist’s first solo-exhibition in New York City since 2005. The presentation focuses on Alexander Archipenko’s pioneering use of negative space within the human figure. The exhibition is organized in collaboration with Matthew Stephenson and with the support of the Archipenko Foundation, which lends a number of works to the show. Matthew Stephenson is an independent fine art consultant and worldwide representative of The Archipenko Foundation and Estate.

“We are thrilled to reintroduce one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century to a New York audience and to explore his groundbreaking use of negative space, a term he entitled ‘space encircled’,” said Nicholas Maclean, co-founder of Eykyn Maclean.

The Ukrainian born artist is one of a small number of early 20th century masters to have immigrated to the United States, alongside such visionaries as Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and Max Beckmann. A pioneer amongst contemporary avant-garde artists in Paris, Alexander Archipenko was one of the first to apply Cubism to sculpture. Upending traditional sculptural methods, the artist developed a new way to evoke the human form by inserting free space within the sculpture, an aesthetic play of interwoven solids, curves and voids that presents multiple contrasting views at once. This play of negative space would go on to directly influence such artists as Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.

In addition to this novel and sensual approach to space and shape, Alexander Archipenko experimented with materials both traditional and unexpected, using methods of construction that departed from conventional modes of carving and molding. His work across disciplines produced a new term, “sculpto-painting,” as demonstrated with Oval Figure, a piece that draws upon the fundamental elements of both art forms to achieve its particular vitality.

Eykyn Maclean’s exhibition includes works from all periods of the artist’s life and in a variety of media, including terracotta sculptures, works on paper, sculpto-paintings and bronzes. 

A fully illustrated exhibition catalogue features essays on the title theme by Dr. Alexandra Keiser, Archipenko Foundation Research Curator and Professor Christina Lodder, Honorary Professorial Fellow in Art History at University of Kent, Canterbury. The catalogue also includes a new interview with the artist’s widow, Frances Archipenko Gray.

EYKYN MACLEAN

23 East 67th Street, New York, NY 10065

www.eykynmaclean.com

Johannes Hägglund @ Galerie Forsblom, Stockholm - Happy Without You

Johannes Hägglund: Happy Without You

Galerie Forsblom Stockholm

9 November – 21 December, 2018

Johannes Hägglund works with abstract painting in which texture and composition have a clear presence. The paintings are based on an organic construction in which form and color take precedence over the selected motif. He approaches painting as a process, in which he first sketches with ink on paper and then transfers colors and patterns to the canvas. The challenge lies in creating the same feel on canvas as on paper. Brush strokes have powerful energy and movement, and the pattern must continue in a repetition beyond the canvas frame. References to various ornaments and decorations recur, along with a love of gingerbread trim, pastels, and Basset’s Allsorts wine gums.

Color composition has deep significance in Johannes Hägglund’s work. Primary and complementary colors intermingle with one another and common shapes such as ovals, circles, rhombuses and squares are depicted, but without perfectionism. Spatters of color are permitted to remain; childlike elements and the artist himself become part of the work. Nothing should be too perfect or corrected. In one painting, a circle is unexpectedly transformed through the addition of two straight lines and one curved one: Johannes Hägglund recreates the smiley face and elevates its meaning. Sometimes the shapes are intentionally cut in half, forming a type of punctum. It chafes a little bit, which is entirely the point.

JOHANNES HAGGLUND (b. 1993) studied at the Gerlesborg School in Stockholm. After completing his bachelor degree he entered the Master Programme in Fine Arts at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm, which will be completed in 2020. His work has been shown at the bachelor degree exhibition at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in 2018 and at Liljevalchs Spring exhibition 2017 in Stockholm. The exhibition at Galerie Forsblom is his first solo presentation.

GALERIE FORSBLOM

Karlavägen 9, 114 24 Stockholm

www.galerieforsblom.com

Tala Madani @ 303 Gallery, New York

Tala Madani, Corner Projections
303 Gallery, New York

November 1 - December 15, 2018

303 Gallery presents their first exhibition of new work by Tala Madani.

Tala Madani's work posits a world where primal desires are unrestrained by convenient norms. Her works are subsumed by light that points both outward and inward, at human instinct and upended social ritual. Paintings can be grotesque, violent, tender, obscene, and hilarious.

For this exhibition, Tala Madani presents new paintings and animation works. In two large corner paintings, men point handheld projectors at the wall, screens flashing in the distance. Behind the wall, short films combine live imagery with painted animations. In one of them, a group of men struggle to prevent themselves from being crushed by a giant pink penis that has fallen from the sky. In another, a man is trapped in a loop of stairs and escalators in a faceless atrium, eventually caught and dismembered by a crowd. This is one step removed, cinematic, there is an audience looking on; there's something natural in it all.

In a group of paintings, infants are portrayed innocently discovering their imagination. One child crawls toward a light source with his hand outstretched, projecting a mammoth shadow of himself. Another canvas shows a billboard of a child carving glowing lacunae into a body, multiplying the sun. These base instincts hold a puerile allure, where a lack of inhibition is infantile and callow, but also human and liberating. You find these humans crawling into glowing gas ovens to stick their heads inside, returning to a fetal posture of sincere and relatable ignorance. Exploring from beginning to end.

Born in Tehran in 1981, Tala Madani received her MFA from the Yale University School of Art in 2006. Recent solo exhibitions include: La Panacée, Montpellier, 2017; First Light, MIT Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, 2016; Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville, 2014; Nottingham Contemporary, 2014; Rip Image, Moderna Museet Malmö & Stockholm, 2013; The Jinn, Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam, 2011. Tala Madani has also been included in: The 2017 Whitney Biennial, New York; Hope and Hazard: A Comedy of Eros (Curated by Eric Fischl), Hall Art Foundation, New York 2017; Los Angeles – A Fiction, Musée d’art Contemporain de Lyon, 2017; Zeitgeist, MAMCO, Geneva, 2017; Invisible Adversaries, The Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, 2016; The Great Acceleration: Art in the Anthropocene, Taipei Biennial (curated by Nicholas Bourriaud), 2014; Made in L.A. 2014, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Where are we Now?, 5th Marrakech Biennale, Marrakech, 2014; Speech Matters, La Biennale di Venezia, 2011; Greater New York, P.S. 1, New York, 2010; Younger than Jesus, New Museum, New York, 2009. Tala Madani lives and works in Los Angeles.

303 GALLERY
555 West 21st Street, New York, NY 10011
www.303gallery.com

Richard Pettibone @ FLAG Art Foundation, NYC - Endless Variation

Richard Pettibone: Endless Variation

The FLAG Art Foundation, New York

October 27, 2018 - January 19, 2019

“I wished I had stuck with the idea of just painting the same painting like the soup can and never painting another painting. When someone wanted one, you would just do another one. Does anyone do that now?”  -Andy Warhol, 1981 [1]

The FLAG Art Foundation presents RICHARD PETTIBONE: Endless Variation, on view on its 9th floor. A prominent figure in the Pop, Post Pop, and Appropriation Art movements, Richard Pettibone creates small-scale replicas of iconic masterpieces by artists ranging from Marcel Duchamp to Roy Lichtenstein to Andy Warhol. The intimately-sized works, some as small as two by two inches, speak to themes of reproduction, originality, and authorship—ideas as relevant in today’s art world as when he began painting in the early 1960s. Richard Pettibone’s work continues a line of questioning that began with Duchamp and ran through successive generations of artists: What does it mean to appropriate an image of an image of an image?

The exhibition features work that spans 1964 to 2018, focusing on self-portraiture, seriality, and photorealism—three major themes within Richard Pettibone’s oeuvre that the artist continually, and often humorously, critiques and reinterprets. The artist’s facility with representation is particularly evident in his photorealistic paintings and “combine” works, which feature multiple canvases collaged together. Presented en masse, this rarely seen part of the artist’s practice sheds light onto Richard Pettibone’s interest in the intersection of style, pastiche, and art history. Juxtaposed with fine art reproductions of the satin ballgowns from Jean-August Dominique Ingres’s Princess de Broglie, 1853, and the rigid geometry of Frank Stella’s Union Pacific, 1950, are testosterone-fueled images of dirt bikes, race cars, and playboy center-folds.

FLAG’s south gallery is dedicated to the artist’s recurring and career-spanning recreations of Warhol’s iconic Campbell’s Soup Cans, with more than 150 canvases on view. Richard Pettibone he first encountered in the artist’s seminal 1962 Soup Cans exhibition at Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. “I remember that show so clearly,” Pettibone recounts, “The 32 cans were shown in two rooms, and when you walked into this room, all the paintings were all the same. And then you walked into the second room, and it was more of the same; it was the craziest show I’ve ever seen! But slowly I realized, ‘oh my god, they’re all different flavors.’”

Richard Pettibone’s self-portraits place the artist as subject matter, revealing more about his life and influences, all laden with humor and poetic wit. Installed chronologically, these works take shape in various forms, ranging from the artist’s own fingerprints, to paintings based on and scaled to candid polaroids, to series inspired by Duchamp’s Wanted: $2,000 Reward, 1923, posters and Coeurs Volants (Fluttering Hearts), 1936. The latter nods to Richard Pettibone’s recent heart attack, the date of which, “October 16, 2016,” is inscribed at the top of the painting. Like Marcel Duchamp, Richard Pettibone believed everything was a readymade and up for grabs, and his work is infused with a reverence for the artists that he was appropriating – often simultaneous with the artists creating their works—offering an inventive commentary on 20th-century art.

Richard Pettibone: Recent Works is concurrently on view at Castelli Gallery from September 12 - November 21, 2018.

RICHARD PETTIBONE (b. 1938, Alhambra, CA) is an artist living and working in Charlotteville, NY. A pioneer of appropriation art, Richard Pettibone has dedicated his career to creating miniature replicas of artworks by iconic contemporary artists, including Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, and Andy Warhol. Initially constructed to match the size of images of the original works he found in Artforum magazine, Richard Pettibone’s small-scale facsimiles address themes of reproduction, seriality, and authorship. In 1962, Richard Pettibone received his MFA from the Otis Art Institute, CA. He has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including Richard Pettibone: Recent Works, Castelli Gallery, New York, NY (2018); Richard Pettibone: 64 Paintings, 9 Works, Castelli Gallery, New York, NY, (2016); Richard Pettibone (1964-2009), Galerie Mitterrand, Paris, France (2014); Richard Pettibone-Paintings and Sculpture: 1964-2003, David Nolan Gallery, New York,  NY (2013); among others. Recent group exhibitions include Miniatures by Master Artists, Joseph K. Levene Fine Art, Ltd., New York, NY (2018); Very Appropriate, Robert Berman Gallery, Santa Monica, CA (2017); Marcel Duchamp Fountain – An Homage, Francis M. Naumann Fine Art, New York, NY (2017); The Natural Order of Things, Museo Jumex, Mexico City, Mexico (2016); The Appropriationnist (Against and With), Villa du Parc, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Annemasse, France (2015); among others. Several institutions have honored him with significant retrospective exhibitions, including The Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, in 2005, The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, in 2005, and the Laguna Art Museum, Laguna, CA, in 2006.

[1] Shaar, Elisa. “Richard Pettibone: Painting the Same Painting Then and Now,” Richard Pettibone, September 10-October 26, 2013, published in 2013 by Castelli Gallery.

THE FLAG ART FOUNDATION

545 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001

flagartfoundation.org

Roman Vishniac Rediscovered @ The Photographers’ Gallery & Jewish Museum London

Roman Vishniac Rediscovered

The Photographers’ Gallery, London

Jewish Museum London

26 October 2018 - 24 February 2019

Presented simultaneously at The Photographers’ Gallery and Jewish Museum London, Roman Vishniac Rediscovered is the first UK retrospective of Russian born American photographer, ROMAN VISHNIAC (1897–1990).

An extraordinarily versatile and innovative photographer, Roman Vishniac is best known for having created one of the most widely recognised and reproduced photographic records of Jewish life in Eastern Europe between the two World Wars.Featuring many of his most iconic works, this comprehensive exhibition further introduces recently discovered and lesser-known chapters of his photographic career from the early 1920s to the late 1970s. The cross-venue exhibition presents radically diverse bodies of work and positions Roman Vishniac as one of the most important social documentary photographers of the 20th century whose work also sits within a broader tradition of 1930s modernist photography.  

Born in Pavlovsk, Russia in 1897 to a Jewish family Roman Vishniac was raised in Moscow. On his seventh birthday, he was given a camera and a microscope which began a lifelong fascination with photography and science.  He began to conduct early scientific experiments attaching the camera to the microscope and as a teenager became an avid amateur photographer and student of biology, chemistry and zoology.  In 1920, following the Bolshevik Revolution, he immigrated to Berlin where he joined some of the city’s many flourishing camera clubs.  Inspired by the cosmopolitanism and rich cultural experimentation in Berlin at this time, Roman Vishniac used his camera to document his surroundings. This early body of work reflects the influence of European modernism with his framing and compositions favouring sharp angles and dramatic use of light and shade to inform his subject matter.

Roman Vishniac’s development as a photographer coincided with the enormous political changes occurring in Germany, which he steadfastly captured in his images. They represent an unsettling visual foreboding of the growing signs of oppression, the loss of rights for Jews, the rise of Nazism in Germany, the insidious propaganda - swastika flags and military parades, which were taking over both the streets and daily life. German Jews routinely had their businesses boycotted, were banned from many public places and expelled from Aryanised schools. They were also prevented from pursuing professions in law, medicine, teaching, and photography, among many other indignities and curtailments of civil liberties. Roman Vishniac recorded this painful new reality through uncompromising images showing Jewish soup kitchens, schools and hospitals, immigration offices and Zionist agrarian training camps, his photos tracking the speed with which the city changed from an open, intellectual society to one where militarism and fascism were closing in.

Social and political documentation quickly became a focal point of his work and drew the attention of organisations wanting to raise awareness and gain support for the Jewish population. In 1935, Roman Vishniac was commissioned by the world’s largest Jewish relief organisation, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), to photograph impoverished Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. These images were intended to support relief efforts and were used in fundraising campaigns for an American donor audience. When the war broke out only a few years later, his photos served increasingly urgent refugee efforts, before finally, at the end of the war and the genocide enacted by Nazi Germany, Roman Vishniac’s images became the most comprehensive photographic record by a single photographer of a vanished world.

Roman Vishniac left Europe in 1940 and arrived in New York with his family on New Year’s Day, 1941. He continued to record the impact of World War II throughout the 1940s and 50s in particular focusing on the arrival of Jewish refugees and Holocaust survivors in the US, but also looking at other immigrant communities including Chinese Americans. In 1947, he returned to Europe to document refugees and relief efforts in Jewish Displaced Persons camps and also to witness the ruins of his former hometown, Berlin. He also continued his biological studies and supplemented his income by teaching and writing.

In New York, Roman Vishniac established himself as a freelance photographer and built a successful portrait studio on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.  At the same time he dedicated himself to scientific research, resuming his interest in Photomicroscopy. This particular application of photography became the primary focus of his work during the last 45 years of his life. By the mid-1950s, he was regarded as a pioneer in the field, developing increasingly sophisticated techniques for photographing and filming microscopic life forms. Romn Vishniac was appointed Professor of Biology and Art at several universities and his groundbreaking images and scientific research were published in hundreds of magazines and books.

Although he was mainly embedded in the scientific community, Roman Vishniac was a keen observer and scholar of art, culture, and history and would have been aware of developments in photography going on around him and the work of his contemporaries. In 1955, famed photographer and museum curator Edward Steichen featured several of Roman Vishniac’s photographs in the influential book and travelling exhibition The Family of Man shown at the Museum of Modern Art.  Steichen later describes the importance of Vishniac’s work. ''[He]…gives a last-minute look at the human beings he photographed just before the fury of Nazi brutality exterminated them. The resulting photographs are among photography's finest documents of a time and place.”

Roman Vishniac Rediscovered offers a timely reappraisal of Roman Vishniac’s vast photographic output and legacy and brings together – for the first time – his complete works including recently discovered vintage prints, rare and ‘lost’ film footage from his pre-war period, contact sheets, personal correspondence, original magazine publications, newly created exhibition prints as well as his acclaimed photomicroscopy.  

Drawn from the Roman Vishniac Archive at the International Center of Photography, New York and curated by Maya Benton in collaboration with The Photographers’ Gallery curator, Anna Dannemann and Jewish Museum London curator, Morgan Wadsworth-Boyle, each venue provides additional contextual material to illuminate the works on display and bring the artist, his works and significance to the attention of UK audiences.

Roman Vishniac Rediscovered is organised by the International Center of Photography (ICP), New York.

THE PHOTOGRAPHER'S GALLERY

16-18 Ramillies Street, London W1F 7LW

thephotographersgallery.org.uk

JEWISH MUSEUM LONDON

Raymond Burton House, 129 – 131 Albert Street, London NW1 7NB

www.jewishmuseum.org.uk

Atul Dodiya @ Galerie Templon, Paris

Atul Dodiya, The Fragrance of a Paper Rose
Galerie Templon, Paris
27 octobre - 22 décembre 2018

La Galerie Templon présente pour la première fois depuis 5 ans à Paris le pionnier de l’art contemporain indien Atul Dodiya. L’artiste a conçu une exposition inédite autour du peintre Morandi, célébration de la beauté d’un monde hanté par la peur de la perte, réunissant de nouvelles oeuvres hybrides - peintures, installation et cabinets de curiosité.

Un dialogue du film de Federico Fellini La Dolce Vita est le point de départ de l’exposition : lors d’une réception, face à un tableau de Morandi, le héros exprime sa fascination pour le calme et la beauté de la composition du peintre, avant de révéler son angoisse devant cette sérénité apparente : ‘la paix me fait peur, peut-être plus que tout. J’ai l’impression qu’il ne s’agit que d’une façade qui cache le visage de l’enfer’. L’exposition d’Atul Dodiya s’articule ainsi autour de cette tension entre émerveillement et menace de destruction.

Vingt peintures directement puisées du film inaugurent le parcours. Ensuite une série de peintures inspirées par les fresques italiennes de la Renaissance convoque, au milieu de paysages d’Arcadie, des figures de saints autant que du Dieu Shiva, comme sauveurs d’un environnement menacé par l’effondrement. La colonne de Brancusi y devient un motif abstrait récurrent. Atul Dodiya mêle les références autant qu’il marie les techniques (peinture à l’huile, mastic, stratifié) pour offrir à sa peinture une matérialité inédite. Trois grandes vitrines réunissent des objets trouvés et photographies d’Atul Dodiya, agissant comme des rappels de l’oeuvre de Morandi. On y trouve la fleur en papier que le peintre italien utilisait comme modèle et qui donne son titre à l’exposition. Bien que rigide et sans vie, elle manifeste la beauté de la création dont on peut, malgré tout, imaginer profiter du parfum.

Atul Dodiya a été le premier à jeter des ponts entre art indien et occidental. L’expérience d’une année de formation à l’Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts à Paris au début des années 1990 a été fondatrice. De la même génération que Subodh Gupta, Bharti Kher ou Sudarshan Shetty, il a emergé sur la scène internationale en même temps qu’eux dans les années 2010. Son oeuvre fait voisiner culture populaire et références au cinéma ou à la littérature. Derrière l’humour et la poésie, la politique reste un de ses sujets de prédilection.

ATUL DODIYA, né en 1959, vit et travaille à Mumbai. Il est représenté dans les collections de nombreuses institutions internationales, dont celle du Mnam-Centre Pompidou. Il a pris part à la plupart des grandes expositions sur l’art indien organisées aux Etats-Unis, en Europe et en Asie ces dernières années : After Midnight : Indian Modernism to Contemporary India au Queens Museum de New York (2015), India: Art Now au musée d’ARKEN au Danemark (2012), La Route de la soie au Tri Postal à Lille et Paris Delhi Bombay au Centre Pompidou (2011), Inside India au Palazzo Saluzzo Paesana Turin et The Empire Strikes Back à la Saatchi Gallery de Londres (2010), Indian Summer à l’Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris (2000). Il a également a participé à la Documenta de Kassel en 2007, à la Biennale de Gwangju (commissaire Okwui Enwezor) en 2008, à la Biennale de Moscou (commissaire Jean-Hubert Martin) en 2009, à la Biennale de Kochi en 2012. En 2014 le Bhau Daji Lad de Mumbai lui a consacré une grande exposition : 7000 Museums.

GALERIE TEMPLON
30 rue Beaubourg, 75003 Paris
www.galerietemplon.com

Michael Krebber @ Greene Naftali Gallery, New York

Michael Krebber
Greene Naftali Gallery, New York
October 26 – December 15, 2018

"All languages being cousins beneath the skin, in other words?”

—Ian Watson, The Embedding

Greene Naftali presents Michael Krebber’s seventh solo exhibition at the gallery, and his first since the artist relocated to New York City. The exhibition features new paintings based on iterations of coded painterly gestures, executed in only two colors.

These gestures, which repeat and accrue across the exhibition, transform into an assembly of signifiers that read like a novel.

Michael Krebber’s practice has consistently been characterized by strategies that offer a distinct commentary on painting and art exhibitions, functioning by establishing and obliterating its own constitutive elements in order to tell a joke that continues again and again. With this new body of work the artist moves towards a blur of painterly and textual structures that establish a visual grammar through an abstract compositional method. The interlacing goes back and forth, interweaving the blank ground of the canvas into the painting, resurfacing fore- and background. The paintings in this exhibition play a dual role, as an essence in and of themselves. Yet with their contingency upon a highly coded system, these works do not offer to complete or resolve.

Born 1954, Cologne, Germany, Michael Krebber lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include The Living Wedge (Part II), Kunsthalle Bern, Bern (2017); The Living Wedge, Serralves Museum, Porto, (2016); Greene Naftali, New York (2015); Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 2015; Les escargots ridiculisés, CAPC musée d’art contemporain, Bordeaux, (2012); and Greene Naftali, New York (2011). His work is in the collection of Museum of Modern Art, New York; CAPC musée d'art contemporain, Bordeaux; Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum of Contemporary Art, Berlin; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; and Museum Brandhorst, Munich. He was awarded the Wolfgang Hahn Prize by the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, in 2015.

GREENE NAFTALI
508 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001
www.greenenaftaligallery.com

Tacita Dean @ Kunsthaus Bregenz

Tacita Dean
Kunsthaus Bregenz
20 October 2018 - 6 January 2019

The work of the renowned British European artist Tacita Dean has already been seen at Kunsthaus Bregenz in 2003/2004 as part of the group exhibition Remind... with Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Anri Sala, and Jane and Louise Wilson. She is regarded as one of today’s most outstanding artists. Her subject matter is often historical, touching on memory and empathy, the forces of nature and the traces left behind by humanity. Her works, from her early chalk on blackboard drawings to her four or more leaf clover collection, round stones, and found postcard interventions become ardent witnesses to a lost past, and the desire to capture, in imagery, the incomprehensible. Tacita Dean’s works in film also demonstrate her insistence on a medium’s materiality reinforcing her stance against a work’s arbitrary and careless exhibition. When the last laboratory printing 16mm film was suddenly closed in London in 2011, she began her campaign to preserve the medium of photochemical film by writing an article published in The Guardian newspaper.

Tacita Dean’s graphic work interrelates the medium of film, photography, drawing, and books. Her works on blackboards appear like excerpts from a film storyboard. Her photogravures of fictional landscapes display a richness of forms and diversity of line. Small-scale notation is embedded within large-scale imagery; they are miniscule and personal, her handwriting almost indecipherable. And yet it becomes clear that every scene, every vista, each image is permeated by a directing, scripting, and planning hand.

The extensive exhibition at Kunsthaus Bregenz includes three of her most significant film works – FILM, 2011 made for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, her six film installation Merce Cunningham performs STILLNESS… (2008), as well as her most recent and most elaborate film project Antigone (2018). It premiered in the spring of 2018 in the new Burlington Garden spaces at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the third in an unprecedented collaboration of simultaneous exhibitions across three venerable London institutions that also included The National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery. Antigone is an hour-long dual synchronized 35 mm film projection. Based on the mythical figure Antigone, which is also the name of the artist’s sister, the film addresses time, transience and the mythological, as well as the materiality of film itself.

One of her most important works at Kunsthaus Bregenz is the large-format chalkboard drawing The Montafon Letter (2017) which depicts a mountain landscape, drawn with white chalk on a blackboard surface. The story that gave the work its title is as sublime and impressive as the drawing itself: In the 17th century, an avalanche fell in the mountain valley of Montafon, south of Vorarlberg. Legend has it that a priest, while blessing the dead was himself then buried by a second avalanche only to be miraculously uncovered by a third. Tacita Dean has just completed a second, similarly monumental drawing called Chalk Fall, 2018, which depicts the collapse of a chalk cliff, deliberately matching her subject matter with the medium she has used to make it, while at the same time mirroring the fall of white on white in The Montafon Letter.

TACITA DEAN was born in 1965 in Canterbury, UK. She currently lives and works in Berlin and Los Angeles. Tacita Dean has been awarded numerous prizes including the Hugo Boss Prize (2006), the Sixth Benesse Prize at the 51st Venice Biennale (2005), and the Kurt Schwitters Prize for Visual Art (2009). Tacita Dean has had solo exhibitions in internationally established museums such as Tate Britain, London (2001), Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2001), Schaulager, Münchenstein/Basel (2006), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2007), Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan (2009), MUMOK, Vienna (2011), Instituto Moreira Salles, Rio de Janeiro (2013), Fundación Botín, Santander (2013), Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2013), Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (2014), Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2016), National Portrait Gallery, The National Gallery & Royal Academy of Arts, London (2018). Her works were also included in dOCUMENTA (13) (2012), 55th Venice Biennale (2013), as well as the 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014).

KUNSTHAUS BREGENZ
Karl-Tizian-Platz, 6900 Bregenz
kunsthaus-bregenz.at

Ange Leccia @ Galleria Six, Milan - Girls, Ghosts and war - Curated by Elio Grazioli

Ange Leccia 

Girls, Ghosts and war 

Galleria Six, Milan 

20 October 2018  - 26 January 2019 

​Galleria Six presents a solo show by Corsican artist Ange Leccia curated by Elio Grazioli

​In the '80s Ange Leccia became famous for one of the simplest yet most fascinating artistic operations, a sort of double readymade. In fact, he took two copies of an object, of various sizes, even very large, such as the caterpillars at Skulptur Projekte in Münster (1987) or two airplanes or two oil tankers (of which a photographic version is on display), arranged one in front of the other (or next to it) . It was a radical and significant operation as never before, if one thinks that doubling is the basis of a certain idea of postmodernism. One of the most important exhibitions of American art of the period was titled Art and his double (1986). Ange Leccia's version was more limpid than the American ones and at the same time unequivocally poetic, suspended and not demonstrative . Two identical objects, that were simply juxtaposed, "arranged" as the French say (and it was the title of the works: Arrangement), as if they were a reflection of one the other, or as if they were kissing, as an encounter, but also as a confrontation . Because a relationship between two parties is the simplest but also the most paradigmatic one: what happens between the two? What unites them and / or separates them? how are they together? But the fact that they are identical gives these questions sort of an enigmatic allure, as in the case of twins: something flows between the two, unity is the whole, no longer the single, or other.

​In the '90s Ange Leccia went on to make more and more videos - he had already shot them before, but never shown before, and they are back now. Sometimes he put two projections of the same video next to each other, but gradually Ange Leccia goes from identical subjects to other forms of relationship . Therefore the video can now either be alone or inserted into complex video installations. It is as if instead of looking at the two objects now Ange Leccia looks rather at the space between them, the one in which they touch, while remaining separate: something happens there, something special. Videos are a particular medium: the shooting first, with its face to face with the subject that is shot, and the projection then, with that peculiar device that is the screen, seem to contain the two from the beginning , the doubling and the relationship. But Ange Leccia also goes in search of subjects that make this new and different doubling clearer: the explosion, the wake of the ship, the shore, the lightning, the intermittent light. There, in threshold spaces, all sorts of mixing or tensions take place, of turbulences or contacts. All ever-changing visual forms.

​Elio Grazioli

GALLERIA SIX

Piazza Piola 5 - 20131 Milan

www.galleriasix.it

Orsay vu par Julian Schnabel @ Musée d’Orsay, Paris

Orsay vu par Julian Schnabel 

Musée d’Orsay, Paris 

10 octobre 2018 – 13 janvier 2019 

Pour sa première invitation à une grande figure de la création contemporaine, le musée d’Orsay a invité le peintre américain Julien Schnabel à proposer sa lecture des collections en sélectionnant des oeuvres et en les présentant dans deux salles historiques, en conversation avec celles de l’artiste, de 1978 à aujourd’hui.

Pour cette exposition au musée d’Orsay, la première de Julian Schnabel dans une institution parisienne depuis le Centre Pompidou il y a plus de trente ans, l’artiste a choisi dans la collection des oeuvres qui n’ont jamais été présentées ensemble – de Van Gogh, Cézanne, Manet et Toulouse-Lautrec, à d’autres artistes moins connus de la même époque, mais de grande influence. Ces rapprochements nourrissent des dialogues par-delà le temps et l’espace, entre ces oeuvres d’art qui coexistent pour la durée de l’exposition, et mettent ainsi en évidence les propriétés de la peinture, en contredisant la notion commune au XXe siècle d’une « fin de la peinture », illustrant qu’elle est bien vivante, et que sa signification est tout aussi grande dans le présent que par le passé.

L’artiste a non seulement choisi les tableaux, mais, avec Louise Kugelberg, a conçu la scénographie et l’installation de l’exposition. Julian Schnabel nous invite à voir dans les oeuvres du XIXe siècle et d’aujourd’hui davantage que des images, des expériences existentielles où le corps humain, l’échelle, les émotions de l’art sont données à vivre à nouveau. Il propose des lectures de chaque oeuvre et offre une expérience complète, à la fois historique et contemporaine.

Depuis quarante ans, Julian Schnabel a proposé des manières neuves et audacieuses de regarder la peinture. Son oeuvre a pris des aspects très différents, et a contribué à changer la façon dont nous comprenons la peinture aujourd’hui, en ouvrant aux nouvelles générations des possibilités qui étaient considérées inenvisageables au moment où elles furent dévoilées. Il s’est opposé à la tendance à avoir un « style-signature » en peinture, en répétant un modèle de peinture et en proposant une image irréductible emblématique de l’artiste, caractéristique de l’expressionisme abstrait d’après-Guerre. En ayant recours à des matériaux et des images très divers, Julian Schnabel a créé des oeuvres qui semblent contredire la trajectoire du modernisme au XXe siècle, et réaffirmer que des manières différentes de peindre étaient possibles, au-delà de la polarité entre Duchamp et Picasso.

Ses oeuvres ont été exposées dans de nombreux musées, et sont présentes dans les collections majeures, telles le Centre Pompidou, Paris, Tate, Londres, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

À l’occasion de l’exposition, le portrait d’Azzedine Alaïa par Julian Schnabel sera emprunté au studio et présenté dans les salles du pavillon Amont, comme un hommage particulier à Monsieur Alaïa, ami proche de l’artiste, et ami du musée d’Orsay. Ce sera la première fois que l’oeuvre d’un artiste contemporain sera présentée dans les collections.

Orsay vu par Julian Schnabel coïncide avec la sortie du film de Julian Schnabel At Eternity’s Gate, avec Willem Dafoe en Vincent Van Gogh, qui connaît sa première à la Mostra de Venise, et sa première américaine en nuit de clôture du New York Film Festival.

En 1996 Julian Schnabel a écrit et réalisé le film Basquiat, à propos de l’artiste new-yorkais, dont il était proche. Le film fut présenté en sélection officielle à la Mostra de Venise. Son deuxième film, Avant la nuit, basé sur la vie du défunt romancier cubain Reinaldo Arenas, fut récompensé à la fois par le Grand Prix du Jury et par la Coppa Volpi pour le meilleur acteur, Javier Bardem, à la Mostra de Venise. En 2007 Julian Schnabel réalisa son troisième film, Le Scaphandre et le papillon. Il fut récompensé par la caméra d’or au Festival de Cannes, et le Golden Globe du meilleur réalisateur. Le Scaphandre et le papillon fut nommé pour quatre Oscars.

Un projet conçu par Julian Schnabel, en collaboration avec Louise Kugelberg et Donatien Grau.

Catalogue de l'exposition, coédition musée d’Orsay / Flammarion, 96 pages, 240 x 310 cm.

Musée d'Orsay

1 rue de la Légion d'Honneur, 75007 Paris

www.musee-orsay.fr

Mark di Suvero @ Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

Mark di Suvero: Hugs
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
October 6, 2018 - February 28, 2019

Paula Cooper Gallery presents the installation of Mark di Suvero’s monumental steel sculpture Hugs at 220 11th Avenue, New York. Organized on the occasion of the gallery’s fiftieth anniversary, the installation is located down the street from its new primary space at 524 W 26th Street. The presentation honors Mark di Suvero’s long history with the gallery, having first collaborated with Cooper at Park Place Gallery (1965-67) and later at the Paula Cooper Gallery—including the second exhibition in 1968, and most recently in a one-person show in 2018. The sculpture is presented in collaboration with the Moinian Group and Alex Brotmann Art Advisory.

Throughout his sixty-year career, Mark di Suvero has created vibrant and dynamic works, which fuse vitality and improvisation with complex construction. Standing over fifty feet high, the pyramidal structure Hugs, is composed of steel I-beams whose three legs intersect in a central, curved form. Its expansive scale allows viewers to engage physically with the work, inducing a kinesthetic response as one walks under and around to perceive it from shifting vantages. Democratic accessibility and viewer participation have long been driving principles in Mark di Suvero’s artistic practice:

“When one is an artist, one wants to do art that is meaningful to a lot of people. Most art is shown in museums and galleries, which eliminates a whole population. By putting it out on the streets, you open it up to the world … there’s a great thing that happens when you have outdoor works where people are interacting and searching … I like to do interactive work. I really believe that the piece needs to be all the way around you. We see in about 210 degrees, but you feel what there is at the very edge of vision. With sculpture, you can get inside of it. It gives you a different kind of a feeling.” (Mark di Suvero, interviewed by Brienne Walsh: “Orgasmic Space: Q+A With Mark di Suvero,” Art in America, July 1, 2011)

Born in 1933 in Shanghai, China, Mark di Suvero first came to public prominence in 1975 with a display of his work in the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris—the first for any living artist—and a major retrospective that same year at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. This exhibition featured his large-scale sculpture in public sites throughout all five boroughs of the city. The artist has had acclaimed international exhibitions in Nice (1991), Venice (1995, on the occasion of the 46th Venice Biennale) and Paris (1997), among others. In 2011, eleven monumental works were installed on Governors Island in New York Harbor. Organized by Storm King Art Center, this marked the largest outdoor exhibition of work in New York City since the 1970s. That same yearMark  di Suvero received the National Medal of Arts, the nation’s highest honor given to artists. In May 2013, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art presented eight monumental sculptures in the city’s historic Crissy Field for a yearlong outdoor exhibition. In September 2016, two monumental works were installed on Chicago’s Lakeshore Drive through a partnership between the Chicago Park District and EXPO CHICAGO; they will remain on view through September 2019. One can also see a number of permanently installed Mark di Suvero sculptures at the Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York. The artist currently lives and works in Petaluma, CA.

PAULA COOPER GALLERY
524 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001
www.paulacoopergallery.com

Stéphane Couturier / Fernand Léger, Musée national Fernand Léger, Biot

Stéphane Couturier / Fernand Léger
Musée national Fernand Léger, Biot
6 octobre 2018 - 4 mars 2019

Les musées nationaux du XXe siècle des Alpes-Maritimes invitent des artistes contemporains à exposer ou créer des œuvres dans le cadre d’expositions conçues en résonance avec les collections et le site du musée.

En 2018, le musée national Fernand Léger a souhaité mettre en lumière les riches correspondances thématiques et plastiques qui existent entre la peinture de Fernand Léger (1881-1955), pionnier de l’avant-garde de la première moitié du XXe siècle, et l’œuvre photographique de Stéphane Couturier, artiste français né en 1957. 

La rencontre de Stéphane Couturier avec l’œuvre du peintre a donné lieu à la création de photographies inédites,inspirées par la collection du musée : Stéphane Couturier a choisi le tableau intitulé Le Grand remorqueur, paysage industriel des bords de Seine peint par Fernand Léger en 1923, point de départ pour le photographe de nouvelles prises de vue, réalisées dans la ville de Sète à l’automne 2017.

L’exposition présente également des œuvres plus anciennes de Stéphane Couturier, qui établissent un dialogue in situ avec les tableaux de Fernand Léger. Les deux artistes partagent une même fascination pour les profondes mutations de la ville, un intérêt commun pour le monde du travail, l’esthétique industrielle ou l’architecture moderne, notamment celle de Le Corbusier. Mais, tandis que Fernand Léger exprime, après la Seconde Guerre mondiale, sa foi dans le progrès, la modernité et la reconstruction, Stéphane Couturier documente, à partir des années 1990, la disparition progressive de la société industrielle et la transformation de l’espace urbain qui en découle, dans les métropoles mondiales (Paris, Berlin, Séoul, Brasilia, Salvador da Bahia, Alger).

Dans sa série inédite, conçue en écho à l’œuvre de Fernand Léger, Stéphane Couturier utilise la superposition de plusieurs photographies numériques, technique initiée en 2004 dans ses premières séries intitulées Melting Point. L’artiste fait naître une réalité hybride, à partir de la fusion de deux ou trois images. Cette synthèse entre deux réalités produit une multitude de détails, où l’œil du spectateur se perd et provoque une impression de mouvement et de dissolution du sujet, au sein d’une composition monumentale.

Aujourd’hui, l’œuvre photographique de Stéphane Couturier, jouant des potentialités infinies de l’outil numérique, allie une approche documentaire à un traitement complexe de la composition. A la manière d’un tableau cubiste, elle puise dans le réel, le fragmente et, grâce au rythme et aux contrastes entre lignes, formes et plans colorés, le dépasse pour en offrir une nouvelle perception.

Stéphane Couturier interroge ainsi la nature prétendument objective du medium photographique : s’affranchissant de la réalité la plus immédiate, ses photographies nous font voyager dans un paysage imaginaire où tout devient possible.

MUSEE NATIONAL FERNAND LEGER
Chemin du Val de Pôme - 06410 Biot
musees-nationaux-alpesmaritimes.fr