5e biennale de l’Art Brut, Collection de l'Art Brut, Lausanne : Croyances

5e biennale de l’Art Brut: Croyances

Collection de l'Art Brut, Lausanne

Jusqu'au 1er mai 2022

Noviadi Angkasapura

Sans titre, 2015

Mine de plomb et stylo-bille sur papier, 14,8 x 20,9 cm

Photo : Atelier de numérisation – Ville de Lausanne (AN)

Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne

Victor Simon

Christ-Roi, 1941

Huile sur toile, 59 x 48 cm

Photo : Atelier de numérisation – Ville de Lausanne (AN)

Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne

Catherine de Porada

L’union primordiale, entre 1942 et 1950

Gouache sur papier, 26 x 21 cm

Photo : Atelier de numérisation – Ville de Lausanne (AN)

Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne

En se plaçant sous le thème des croyances, la 5e biennale de l’Art Brut révèle une nouvelle facette des fonds du musée lausannois. Près de trois cents dessins, peintures, assemblages, sculptures, écrits et broderies dus à quarante-trois auteurs ont été sélectionnés et constituent une sorte d’éventail des possibles, avec aussi bien des illustrations de divinités et de saints, que des compositions abstraites d’un grand raffinement, des peintures à caractère symboliste et des objets rituels. L’exposition invite à faire dialoguer les univers de ces différents créateurs, bien que leurs mondes demeurent uniques et très exclusifs. Les principaux angles d’approche retenus regroupent des œuvres en lien avec la religion, un ensemble de productions dites spirites, une grande pluralité de travaux issus de mythologies personnelles, ainsi que quelques pièces réalisées par des adeptes des sciences occultes ou de la radiesthésie.

Laure Pigeon 

Pierre, 1964

Encre sur papier, 65 x 50 cm

Photo : Atelier de numérisation – Ville de Lausanne (AN)

Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne

Guyodo 

Sans titre, sans date

Stylo à bille sur carton d’emballage, 59 x 40,5 cm

Photo : Atelier de numérisation – Ville de Lausanne (AN)

Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne

Michel Nedjar

Sans titre, entre 1976 et 1982 

Assemblage de tissu, racines, papier, fil de fer et

matériaux divers, le tout enduit, haut. : 26,5 cm

Photo : Atelier de numérisation – Ville de Lausanne (AN)

Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne

Si nombre d’auteurs d’Art Brut vivent en marge de la société, ils restent néanmoins profondément empreints de religion. Celle-ci tient en effet une place importante dans leur éducation et leur quotidien, et colonise leur imaginaire. Quant aux spirites ou médiums, ils affirment être en relation avec l’au-delà et guidés dans leur pratique artistique par des défunts ou des forces surnaturelles, se soustrayant ainsi à la paternité de leurs travaux. Cependant, c’est bien souvent par modestie ou crainte d’être perçus comme illégitimes que ces autodidactes se retranchent derrière cet alibi. L’exposition présente aussi des créations investies de pouvoirs magiques par leurs auteurs, censées notamment remplir une fonction protectrice ou jouer le rôle de talisman.

Charles Boussion

Icône Bernadette, 2015

Feutre, correcteur blanc et collage sur papier glacé 

42 x 29,9 cm

Photo : Atelier de numérisation – Ville de Lausanne (AN)

Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne

Giovanni Battista Podestà

Sans titre, sans date

Peinture sur toile, 60 x 35 cm

Photo : Atelier de numérisation – Ville de Lausanne (AN)

Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne

Philippe Ducollet Michaëlef

Vierges, entre 2006 et 2020

Mine de plomb, encre de Chine et crayon de couleur sur papier

42 x 29,7 cm

Photo : Atelier de numérisation – Ville de Lausanne (AN)

Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne

Les auteurs d’Art Brut ne se distinguent pas tant des autres artistes par leurs interrogations métaphysiques, mais bien par les moyens inédits qu’ils inventent et les procédés qu’ils mettent en œuvre pour y répondre et se relier au monde. En quête d’explications sur les fondements de l’être, sur la vie, la mort ou, plus humblement, sur leur propre destin, pour la plupart en rupture de ban avec la société, marginaux ou anticonformistes, ils ne trouvent à priori pas de réponses dans les dogmes et les repères habituels. Ils conçoivent leurs propres croyances, élaborant des théories singulières et construisant des systèmes de pensée originaux. Et, quand ils s’en remettent à des traditions religieuses, ils les réinterprètent en un geste de réappropriation.

Commissariat : Anic Zanzi, conservatrice à la Collection de l’Art Brut

Comte de Tromelin

Sans titre, ca 1903

Crayon noir sur papier, 32,5 x 24 cm

Photo : Atelier de numérisation – Ville de Lausanne (AN)

Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne

Madge Gill

Sans titre, s.d.

Broderie de laine, 125 x 150 cm

Photo : Atelier de numérisation – Ville de Lausanne (AN)

Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne

PUBLICATION

Le n° 5 de la série éditoriale « Art Brut, la collection », intitulé Croyances, accompagne l’exposition et apporte différents éclairages sur la thématique des croyances dans l’Art Brut. Deux éditions séparées (français et anglais). 

Emmanuel Grimaud, Sarah Lombardi et Anic Zanzi 

Croyances, Lausanne/ Milan

Collection de l’Art Brut/ 5 Continents Editions, 2021,

« Art Brut, la collection », sous la direction de Sarah Lombardi,

168 pages, plus de 100 illustrations couleur, disponible en français et en anglais

LISTE DES AUTEURS PRÉSENTÉS DANS L’EXPOSITION

ALOÏSE [CORBAZ]

NOVIADI ANGKASAPURA

CHARLES BOUSSION

MARIE BOUTTIER

FLEURY-JOSEPH CRÉPIN

ANTONIO DALLA VALLE

FERNAND DESMOULIN

JANKO DOMSIC

PHILIPPE DUCOLLET-MICHAËLEF

ELIJAH

MINNIE EVANS

JILL GALLIENI

MADGE GILL

JULES GODI

FENGYI GUO

GUYODO

WERNER HERTIG

AUGUSTIN LESAGE

RAPHAËL LONNÉ

SIMONE MARYE

JOSEPH MOINDRE

EDMUND MONSIEL

MARC MORET

MICHEL NEDJAR

ATAA OKO

MICHAEL PANKOKS

LAURE PIGEON

GIOVANNI BATTISTA PODESTÀ

CATHERINE DE PORADA

JANE RUFFIÉ

F. SEDLAK

VICTOR SIMON

PALMERINO SORGENTE

NI NYOMAN TANJUNG

THEO

JOHANN THOMA

JEANNE TRIPIER

LE COMTE DE TROMELIN

VICTOR-FRANÇOIS

AUGUST WALLA

ADOLF WÖLFLI

MARIA WNEK

HENRIETTE ZÉPHIR

COLLECTION DE L'ART BRUT

Avenue des Bergières 11, 1004 Lausanne

www.artbrut.ch

Sadamasa Motonaga @ Peder Lund Gallery, Oslo

Sadamasa Motonaga

Peder Lund, Oslo

Through February 19, 2022

SADAMASA MOTONAGA was born in 1922 in the Mie Prefecture of Japan. In 1955, he became a member of the legendary Gutai group (1954-72), famous for its pioneering performances and innovative methods in the field of painting, sculpture, and installation art. The name of the Gutai group derived from the Japanese word gutaiteki, meaning ‘concrete’ or ‘specific’, and its members aimed to create innovative, peerless art that would be one of its kind. Typical for members of this group, Motonaga’s work can be seen in opposition to the devastation of the war, as he chose to produce joyful paintings, cheerful sculptures, and lively performances.

Sadamasa Motonaga is credited with breaking down the barriers between the genres of manga, graffiti, and fine art, and he was one of the first artists to connect high and low culture in Japan in the late 1950s. His groundbreaking oeuvre was an inspiration for the “Superflat” generation who expanded on his innovative ideas in Japan in the 1990s. His early works share the same vibrant dynamic and energy that are widely praised in the works of his western contemporaries, such as the abstract expressionists Cy Twombly, Jackson Pollock, and Philip Guston while his late works offer a striking reflection of the emerging global convergence of street art, bad art, and high abstraction as for example found in the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Albert Oehlen, and Martin Kippenberger, among others. Parallels to these western counterparts are receiving more focus from curators, scholars, and other art experts; already enjoying legendary status in Asia, appreciation for Sadamasa Motonoga’s work and important place in art history is still on the rise in western circles.

The presented works at Peder Lund were created between 1968–1975 and represent hence one of the most important decades in the artist’s production. Similar works from this period are for example held by the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan; The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA. In 1971, Motonaga withdrew from the Gutai group. However, his work ethos and curiosity to explore new methods for his compositions never stopped, and Sadamasa Motonaga worked daily until he died in Kobe, Japan in 2011.

For his outstanding oeuvre, Sadamasa Motonaga was honored with several prestigious honors, including, the Prize for Excellence at the 6th Contemporary Art Exhibition of Japan, 1964; Grand Prix from the Shincho Foundation and the Grand Prix at the 4th International Biennale Exhibition of Prints, Seoul, 1983; Medal of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters, 1988; the Japanese Government Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon for academic and artistic achievement, 1991; Osaka Art Prize, 1992; Kobe Shimbun Peace Prize, 1996; and the Culture Merit Award from the Mie Prefecture, 2002.

Many retrospective exhibitions have been dedicated to the artist in Japan, most notably at the Hyōgo Prefectural Museum of Art, Kobe, 1998; Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima, 2003; Nagano Prefectural Museum of Art, Nagano, 2005; and Mie Prefectural Art Museum, Tsu, 2009. In 2015, the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX, USA, organized the first survey of Motonaga’s oeuvre outside Japan, alongside the work of his Gutai colleague Kazuo Shiraga. In the last decades, several retrospectives of the Gutai Art Association have been held at international institutions such as the National Gallery of Modern Art, Rome, Italy, 1990; Institut Mathildenhöhe, Darmstadt, Germany, 1991;  Jeu de Paume, Paris, France, 1999; Museo Cantonale d’Arte, Lugano, Switzerland, 2010; National Art Center, Tokyo, Japan, 2012; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, USA, 2013; Musee Soulages, Rodez, France, 2018.

Sadamasa Motonaga’s work is held by several major museums in Japan, as well as renowned institutions abroad such as the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX, USA; Glenstone, Potomac, MD, USA; and Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA.

PEDER LUND

Tjuvholmen allé 27, 0252 Oslo

pederlund.no

___________

Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski @ The Aldrich, Ridgefield - Portal Pieces

Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski 

Portal Pieces

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield

January 6 - May 29, 2022

AMARYLLIS DEJESUS MOLESKI

Graduation Day, 2021

Courtesy of the artist

Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski: Portal Pieces is the third installment of Aldrich Projects, a single artist series that features a singular work or a focused body of work by an artist every four months on the Museum’s campus. Sited in the Leir Atrium, AMARYLLIS DEJESUS MOLESKI presents two large-scale works on paper, Graduation Day, 2021, and The Guardians, 2015. 

Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski’s practice is informed by her Puerto Rican American heritage and a peripatetic upbringing spent crisscrossing the US. Probing motifs of intersectionality, mythmaking, and queerness, she says her visual worldbuilding exploits the “spaces in-between categories” and honors “the trouble and pleasure [sited] there.”

Her expansive body of work spans drawings, video, sculpture, performance, and installation. Using fabled symbolism, Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski’s pantheon of black and brown femme goddesses, heroines, and crusaders adventure across time and space using magical powers to protect and prevail. Her inspirations span art history, popular culture, and higher realms, from comics, ancient cuneiform, Caribbean Surrealism, occult, and alchemical diagrams. 

Graduation Day is a monumental drawing and collage on paper that depicts an erupting rainbow inferno. Inside a triangular-shaped grotto, a figure levitates above a shadowy portal. Two spirit beings, one an iridescent blue and the other a fluorescent brown, hover over the reposing body. They each clutch the end of a wishbone, a symbol of untapped potential. A pink triangle blazes within the scene, snapping the wishbone and releasing a purple flame that burns and shimmers with beaming optimism.

The Guardians is a large gouache and tea drawing on paper. It portrays a pair of protectors brandishing bone swords in the company of a dark horse. Within a field of chamomile, they stand guard. Each is heavily adorned and tattooed with symbols of strength, abundance, nourishment, and passage.

These two works on paper are part of an ongoing mythology that spotlight marginalized histories and femme power. Invigorated by lived and imagined experience, Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski’s utopian storylines speak to struggle, redemption, repair, and reinvention. 

AMARYLLIS DEJESUS MOLESKI was born in 1985 in Bordeaux, France. She earned an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2019 and a BFA from California College of the Arts in 2014. She is a current recipient of the Keyholder Residency at Lower East Side Printshop, a 2021 Creative Capital Awardee, and was a 2019 Kindle Project Makers Muse Award recipient. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally including the Brooklyn Museum, El Museo Del Barrio, Cue Art Foundation, MoCADA, SOMArts, New York University, Luce Gallery, Weatherspoon Art Museum, among others. Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski will be featured in the Museum’s forthcoming exhibition, 52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone, opening in June 2022. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. 

Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski: Portal Pieces is curated by Senior Curator Amy Smith-Stewart.

THE ALDRICH CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM

258 Main Street, Ridgefield, CT 06877

thealdrich.org

Anselm Kiefer @ Grand Palais Éphémère, Paris - Exposition Anselm Kiefer Pour Paul Celan

Anselm Kiefer Pour Paul Celan 

Grand Palais Éphémère, Paris 

17 décembre 2021 - 11 janvier 2022 

Anselm Kiefer Pour Paul Celan

Affiche de l'exposition

Für Paul Celan das Geheimnis der Farne

© Anselm Kiefer

Photo : Georges Poncet

Conception graphique : Atelier Pierre Pierre

© Réunion des musées nationaux - Grand Palais, 2021

Quinze ans après avoir inauguré la série des Monumenta au Grand Palais en 2007, Anselm Kiefer est le premier plasticien à investir l’intégralité de l’espace du Grand Palais Éphémère, à l’invitation de la Rmn – Grand Palais pour un projet inédit.

Avec Pour Paul Celan, Anselm Kiefer poursuit son travail sur la mémoire européenne dont la France et l’Allemagne sont les grands acteurs. Dans cette exposition des sculptures, installations, et 19 toiles de grand format interagissent avec la poésie inapaisée du grand poète de langue allemande, Paul Celan.

L’oeuvre de Paul Celan a sans cesse été présent dans les peintures d’Anselm Kiefer, depuis l’adolescence et la découverte du poème « Todesfuge » (« Fugue de mort »), et se poursuit jusqu’à aujourd’hui avec ce nouvel ensemble de peintures. Ce dialogue se densifie au cours des dernières années et notamment en 2020 à la faveur de la période d’isolement du confinement.

Dans les extraits de son journal rédigés pendant la préparation de l’exposition au Grand Palais Éphémère, Anselm Kiefer écrit :

Celan ne se contente pas de contempler le néant, il l’a expérimenté, vécu, traversé.

(...)

la langue de paul celan vient de si loin, d’un autre monde auquel nous n’avons pas encore été confrontés, elle nous parvient comme celle d’un extraterrestre. nous avons du mal à la comprendre. nous en saisissons ça et là un fragment. nous nous y accrochons sans jamais pouvoir cerner l’ensemble. j’ai humblement essayé, pendant soixante ans. désormais, j’écris cette langue sur des toiles, une entreprise à laquelle on s’adonne comme à un rite.

(...)

l’exposition au grand palais : comment mettre celan dans une salle construite pour des olympiades ? n’est-ce pas une entreprise impossible, blasphématoire ? tes grands tableaux dans lesquels tu cites celan : n’est-ce pas comme si tu placardais celan sur des colonnes morris ? ne devrais-tu pas mettre le feu aux tableaux, les brûler en public ?

Selon le penseur et cinéaste Alexander Kluge, les tableaux d’Anselm Kiefer font vivre les vers de Celan, qu’ils commentent, et en retour les vers du poète donnent vie aux peintures. Ici les disciplines artistiques s’emparent des conflits de l’histoire, même si, toujours selon Alexander Kluge, « un Bauhaus pour la prévention de la guerre, » ça n’existe pas.

Cette exposition se déroule au moment où la France prend la présidence de l’Union européenne. Elle en est une forme de prologue, comme si, selon les mots d’Anselm Kiefer, « Madame de Staël s’adressait à l’Allemagne ». Les peintures de Pour Paul Celan sont posées dans l’espace dénué de scénographie classique et de cimaises, sans chronologie, comme les mémoires non traitées de notre existence humaine.

Le Grand Palais Éphémère, espace monumental de 10.000m2 conçu par l’architecte Jean-Michel Wilmotte, est l’environnement vivant de cette installation. L’Ecole Militaire ainsi que les bâtiments modernes de l’UNESCO au Sud, feront écho aux leitmotivs qui hantent l’oeuvre de l’artiste : l’histoire politique de l’Europe traversé e par ses conflits.

Un catalogue de l’exposition accompagne le projet, rassemblant des textes du philosophe Emanuele Coccia, de l’artiste Edmund de Waal, du cinéaste Alexander Kluge et du conservateur Ulrich Wilmes ainsi que des extraits du journal d’Anselm Kiefer.

Commissariat : Chris Dercon, Président de la Rmn – Grand Palais

GRAND PALAIS EPHEMERE

2 Place Joffre, 75007 Paris

www.grandpalais.fr

James Ensor @ Gladstone Gallery, NYC - An Intimate Portrait - Exhibition + Catalogue

James Ensor. An Intimate Portrait 

Gladstone Gallery, New York 

Through January 15, 2022 

Gladstone Gallery presents an exhibition of historic works by Belgian artist James Ensor, a monumental figure in the late 19th-century Belgian avant-garde and a singular influence in the development of Expressionism. Curated by Sabine Taevernier, this show brings together paintings, drawings, and etchings, made between 1888 and 1896, alongside one of the most prolific and significant periods of creation during James Ensor’s lifetime. Spanning a diverse collection of subjects and figures, the works in this exhibition demonstrate the artist’s perceptive eye in capturing both his internal strife and the external variables that impacted him and the artists, friends, and family he was surrounded by.

Born in 1860 in the seaside town of Ostend, Belgium, James Ensor would spend time between his hometown and Brussels, which offered him a diversity of experiences and friendships with significant figures who deeply influenced Ensor throughout his lifetime. He had a challenging childhood in Ostend with his merchant parents, as he and family members dealt with depression, anxiety, and alcoholism that eventually led to his father’s death and caused great internal strife for the artist. His main refuge was his attic studio, where James Ensor surrounded himself with his paintings, drawings, and collection of found masks that inspired his realistic and imaginary narratives. In Brussels, where James Ensor spent most of his winters, he found companionship with the Rousseau family, who housed him during his excursions away from the beachfront. Comprised of academics, artists, and doctors, the Rousseau family would discuss science and politics, but also music, literature, and visual art, opening him up to a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives and multifaceted modes of thinking. Primarily perceived as a reclusive thinker and worker, James Ensor’s interpersonal relationships were essential forms of communication and understanding of the political, cultural, and fantastical world around him that greatly influenced the nature of and approach to his practice.

A comprehensive exhibition catalogue published by the gallery with essays by Susan M. Canning, Sabine Taevernier, Herwig Todts, and Xavier Tricot accompanies the show, and includes a series of essays that further explore the themes presented in this presentation.

JAMES ENSOR

Published by Gladstone Gallery on the occasion of the exhibition James Ensor. An Intimate Portrait, Curated by Sabine Taevernier, at Gladstone Gallery, 130 East 64th Street, New York, November 2021 - January 2022

GLADSTONE GALLERY

130 East 64th Street, New York, NY 10065

www.gladstonegallery.com

Sandra Brewster @ The Power Plant, Toronto - Dense

Sandra Brewster: Dense 

The Power Plant, Toronto 

29 January - 1 May 2022

Sandra Brewster 

Roots 1 (detail), 2021

Photo-based transfer on pressure treated wood, 36x48 in.

Sandra Brewster 

Roots 2 (detail), 2021

Photo-based transfer on pressure treated wood, 36x48 in.

Sandra Brewster 

Roots 2 (detail), 2021

Photo-based transfer on pressure treated wood, 36x48 in.

 

Toronto-based Canadian artist Sandra Brewster has been invited to create a new site-specific installation at The Power Plant. Brewster will transform the light-flooded Clerestory into an arboreal landscape soaring across both sides of the space. Sandra Brewster’s photo-based gel transfers, installed directly onto the gallery’s walls, will envelop visitors in a lush atmosphere. The scratches and ridges in her weathered images reference profound identity shifts that Caribbean immigrants experience when arriving in Canada, the complex and layered experiences of whom Brewster has been consistently exploring throughout her practice. Outside the gallery, Sandra Brewster presents a new interactive sculpture commissioned by ArtworxTO A Place To Put Your Things, a swing set with a seat in the form of a couple’s kiss.

Sandra Brewster is a Canadian artist, born in Toronto where she is presently based.  Sandra Brewster has shown her work in solo exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2019); Or Gallery, Vancouver (2019); and Never Apart Gallery, Montreal (2017). She has participated in group exhibitions at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2019); Mercer Union, Toronto (2018); Eastern Edge Gallery, St. John’s, (2016); and Allegheny Art Galleries, Meadville (2015). Her exhibition It’s all a blur… received the Gattuso Prize for outstanding featured exhibition of CONTACT Photography Festival 2017. In 2018, Sandra Brewster was the recipient of the Artist Prize from Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts, and she was an Artist-in-Residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Sandra Brewster holds a Masters of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto, and a BFA from York University, Toronto. 

Curated by Joséphine Denis, TD Curator of Education and Outreach Fellow, 2021-2023

THE POWER PLANT CONTEMPORARY ART GALLERY

231 Queens Quay West, Toronto, Ontario M5J 2G8

www.thepowerplant.org

Samia Halaby @ Ayyam Gallery, Dubai - Flurrying

Samia Halaby: Flurrying

Ayyam Gallery, Dubai

Through 5 January 2022

SAMIA HALABY

Written with a brush, 2019

Acrylic on Canvas, 152 x 152 cm

© Samia Halaby, courtesy Ayyam Gallery

Samia Halaby’s most recent works reflect everything but stillness, each canvas emulating space encompasses energy and movement, brimming intuitive complexity. Samia Halaby invites us to see nature and urban scenes through her vision, immortalizing a dynamic setting through brush strokes and color, creating infinite layers of moving parts. 

Continuing her previous explorations towards abstraction, Samia Halaby progressively removes all shapes and boundaries and focuses on motion and space only. While still introducing and studying the component of depth, distance, and location, the artist creates fore and backgrounds in which the stokes interpenetrate, creating a timeline of echoes and variations. 

This exhibition highlights both the more geometrical and more calligraphic approach, making a contrasting evolution. The product nonetheless aims to portray space and time and all that lies in between. Thus always creating an invisible set of relationships that our eyes measure and our minds comprehend intuitively. 

SAMIA HALABY: Artist Statement

The Sufi thinker Aby Hamed Muhammad al-Ghazali (1058-1111) noted that the seeing of the eye is limited by some failures while the mind is above these failures. As I think of space and air in painting, I am reminded of his words. Slowly, as I intuitively work on my paintings, my consciousness converts intuition into insights. I think of space in our educated visual perception and realize that, to us painters, space is measured as a distance between us and the concrete object we see through that space in the direction of our gaze. Within that space that we gaze at are things that move in the air. Their motion captures our gaze while our memory captures their path.

The set of new paintings has been in my studio, in the making for over a year. The paintings capture and trace everything that moves in the air, disturbing its relative stasis or affecting its motion. A few days ago, I could watch large snowflakes flurrying here and there up and down Franklin St. being pushed about and swirled by the air currents of the avenue and wind in the air. The odd partners, Al Ghazali and flurrying snowflakes, concretized for me what I have been painting during the past year.

I think of the canvas as space between me and the target of my gaze while my brush marks are activated by energy that puts them in motion. I want to remove all shapes with static boundaries and have only motion. I want eddying, fluctuating, flurrying, patterns of things being blown by the wind obtaining varying speed, adapting with cross currents. I want the energy that scatters, the paths made by all the parts that move to live in a canvas. Growth, gestation, decay, birth, and things I do not yet know make up the ambitious content of my work.  

I want no borders or boundaries. Shapes should be factored by things that constantly move and fluctuate in motion, always reacting to changing situations, turning into variations, not repetitions. Some moving parts lose energy and congeal together, creating islands of rest; such islands might be scattered by the entry of high energy motion in their midst. All shapes need to be born of the motion of things. 

We live in space and see all things moving in it. Space, air, water, and our bodies all are made of moving parts. I think of the canvas as space, and my brush-marks are activated by energy that puts them in motion. The final static, unmoving single image that is a painting should represent one condition in a continuing growth process.

ABOUT SAMIA HALABY

Born in Jerusalem in 1936, Samia Halaby is a leading abstract painter and an influential scholar of Palestinian art. Although based in the United States since 1951, Samia Halaby is recognised as a pioneer of contemporary abstraction in the Arab world.

Samia Halaby began her career in the early 1960s, shortly after graduating from Indiana University with an MFA in Painting. While teaching at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1964, she travelled to the Eastern Mediterranean as part of a faculty research grant and studied the geometric abstraction of the region’s Islamic architecture, which has continuously factored into her work. During this time, Halaby launched a series of experiments that would initiate a career-long investigation of the materialist principles of abstraction: how reality can be represented through form.

Also influenced by the abstract movements of the Russian avant-garde, Halaby works with the conviction that new approaches to painting can redirect ways of seeing and thinking not only within the realm of aesthetics but also as contributions to technological and social advancement. This underlying notion has led to additional experiments in drawing, printmaking, computer-based kinetic art, and free-from-the- stretcher painting.

Samia Halaby has been collected by international institutions since the 1970s, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art (New York and Abu Dhabi); Yale University Art Gallery; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Art Institute of Chicago; Cleveland Museum of Art; Institut du Monde Arabe; and the British Museum.

Selected solo shows for the artist include Ayyam Gallery, Al Quoz, Dubai (2017); Birzeit University Museum, Ramallah (2017); Beirut Exhibition Center, Lebanon (2015); Ayyam Gallery, London (2015, 2013); Ayyam Gallery, Al Quoz, Dubai (2014); Ayyam Gallery, DIFC, Dubai (2011); and Ayyam Gallery, Beirut (2010). She has participated in recent group shows at Katzen Art Center, American University Museum, Washington, USA (2017); Palestine Museum, Birzeit, Palestine (2017); Galerie Tanit, Munich, Germany (2017); The School of Visual Arts, New York, USA (2017); Ayyam Gallery, DIFC, Dubai (2017); Zürcher Gallery, New York, USA (2016); 3rd Qalandiya International Biennial (2016); Darat Al Funun, Amman (2015); the National Academy of Arts, New York (2015); The Guggenheim Museum, Abu Dhabi (2014); Broadway 1602, New York (2014); and Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris (2009). 

From the 1960s until the late 1980s, Samia Halaby taught at universities throughout the United States. She was the first full-time female associate professor at the Yale School of Art, a position she held for a decade. Her noteworthy contributions to American academia include a groundbreaking undergraduate studio art program that she introduced to art departments throughout the Midwest.

Samia Halaby’s writings on art have appeared in Leonardo: Journal of Arts, Sciences and Technology, Jerusalem Quarterly, and Arab Studies Quarterly, in addition to edited volumes, while her independently published survey Liberation Art of Palestine: Palestinian Paintings and Sculpture in the Second Half of the 20th Century (2002) is considered a seminal text of Palestinian art history. In 2017 Schilt Publishing released Halaby’s Drawing the Kafr Qasem Massacre while Palestine Books Inc published Growing Shapes: Aesthetic Insights of an Abstract Painter. In 2014 Booth-Clibborn Editions published the artist’s second monograph, Samia Halaby: Five Decades of Painting and Innovation.

Samia Halaby’s recently released book, Drawing the Kafr Qasem Massacre (Schilt Publishing, 2017) has been shortlisted for the prestigious Palestine Book Awards. 

SAMIA HALABY

Drawing the Kafr Qasem Massacre

Schilt Publishing, 2017

AYYAM GALLERY

B11, Alserkal Avenue, Street 8, Al Quoz 1, Dubai

www.ayyamgallery.com

Miquel Barceló @ Thaddaeus Ropac, London - Ceramics

Miquel Barceló: Ceramics

Thaddaeus Ropac, London

8 December 2021 – 5 February 2022

Miquel Barceló’s new works – shown in his first exhibition of ceramics in London – reveal his inventive approach to the medium. One of the most renowned Spanish artists of his generation, ceramics have long been central to his practice, which also encompasses paintings, performances and installations. Inspired by ancient techniques from Mali and his native Mallorca, Barceló’s ceramic sculptures are captured in a moment of dissolution or becoming, a state of ‘continuous transformation’. They seem to evolve before our eyes into other forms: sprouting leaves, rippling with marine life or folding in on themselves.

Each work is experimental. Each work is a trial run for another that will probably never exist. I think this is as true of my painting as my ceramics – or any other thing I make. 

— Miquel Barceló

The artist first began working with clay in the early 1990s, when he established a studio in Mali and was introduced to the ancient Dogon earthenware methods. ‘I learned the Neolithic technique,’ he explains. ‘I gathered clay from the places the potters have been going to for centuries.’ He became versed in the fundamentals of creation – ‘starting at the absolute beginning’ – using humble materials such as earth, animal dung and straw, which were baked at low heat or dried in the sun. In this way, he connected with prehistoric artistic creations, which have survived as pottery shards or paintings on cave walls. Barceló’s time in West Africa proved formative, both for his life and his work. Here, he forged an intimate connection with the earth as a material for his artworks and his body as a tool for creation. 

Traces of these unconventional beginnings are apparent in his irreverent approach to the medium and emphasis on a sense of visceral materiality. For Miquel Barceló, artistic creation is a direct way of relating to the world around him and the ceramics bear the marks of his bodily engagement: ‘When baked with wood fire, clay keeps track of every trace, no matter how slight. Even the slightest contact, a brush with the fingers, will leave a clear trace in the clay after firing.’ The central role of the body is exemplified in his Paso Doble performance, which he conceived with choreographer Josef Nadj for the Avignon Festival in 2006. Barceló describes it as ‘a way of staging the tools and gestures of my work with clay. The body as a tool. The body in positive and negative, mould and cast.’ The Paso Doble performance has since been staged in New York, Madrid, Zurich, Barcelona, Paris, Athens and Mali as a tribute to those who introduced him to the art of ceramics.

Upon returning to Mallorca, Miquel Barceló began creating ceramics in an old brick factory, using the clay from his region as his ancestors did before him. ‘The clay from my village is renowned for its whiteness and fineness,’ he recalls. ‘This clay was extracted for centuries from a little hill called Puig de Sant Nicolau where I used to play as a child. Not one pebble – a mountain of white clay, slippery as soap.’ Traditionally used to create vessels decorated with motifs such as shells, sea urchins, flowers and seahorses, this idea of ‘clay collage’ becomes something entirely new in Barceló’s hands. The vessels are intentionally deconstructed and expressively distorted, with ripples and folds or perforations that open them up to the surrounding space. In gestural, expressive strokes of paint, he depicts the simplified forms of fish and bulls, botanical and human figures, recalling the cave paintings in Lascaux where he spent time alongside palaeontologists. Miquel Barceló’s painterly approach also becomes a form of metamorphosis that bridges different media: ‘The subject of many of these works is painting, how clay becomes painting, canvas, drawing. In short, a transmutation.’ 

This idea of metamorphosis is fundamental to the artist, who recently created original watercolours for a new edition of Franz Kafka’s La Métamorphose, first published in 1915. This transformation is made manifest in his ceramics, which also undergo an alchemical change when fired in the kiln: the malleable clay becomes hardened, brittle, and may even crack due to the high heat. These chance effects are integral to his ceramics: ‘They are often fissured and I accept the cracks with joy as part of the work.’ 

The medium has become central to Miquel Barceló’s artistic production, forming the basis of several large-scale works. In 2007, he created a 280 square metre terracotta mural for the Palma de Mallorca Cathedral that addresses the biblical miracle of the loaves and the fishes. A year later, he unveiled an installation of thousands of marine stalactites which descend from the domed ceiling of the Human Rights and Alliance of Civilisations Chamber in the United Nations’ Palais des Nations in Geneva. He also created an ephemeral mural for the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris in 2016, applying gestural smears of clay to its windows before scratching out the outlines of human and animal forms that reference prehistoric paintings.

Miquel Barceló was born in 1957 in Felanitx, on the island of Mallorca, and now divides his time between his birthplace and Paris. As a young artist, his participation in the São Paulo Biennial in 1981 and documenta 7 in Kassel in 1982 helped establish his international reputation. Deeply influenced by poetry, he exhibited more than 300 drawings illustrating Dante’s Divine Comedy at the Louvre Museum in 2004. He represented Spain at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, presenting ceramics alongside his paintings. Numerous retrospectives of his work have been hosted by renowned institutions, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; and the Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City. In 2019, a monographic exhibition of Miquel Barceló’s ceramics took place at the Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche, Faenza. His solo exhibition Metamorfosis was shown at the Museo Picasso, Málaga in 2021, followed by an exhibition at the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery in 2022.

THADDAEUS ROPAC

37 Dover Street, London W1S 4NJ

ropac.net

____________

Sasha Huber @ The Power Plant, Toronto - YOU NAME IT

Sasha Huber: YOU NAME IT 

The Power Plant, Toronto

29 January - 1 May 2022 

Sasha Huber

Still of Rentyhorn, 2008

Video, 4:30 mins

Courtesy the artist and Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma 

Photo: Siro Micheroli

Sasha Huber

Shooting Back: Louis Agassiz, 2008

Metal staples shot into abandoned wood boards, 150 x 115 cm 

Courtesy the artist and Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma

 

Swiss-Haitian-Finnish artist SASHA HUBER uses performance, photography, and film, among other media, to investigate colonial residues left in the environment. YOU NAME IT, Huber’s first solo show in North America, will feature over a decade’s worth of work prompted by the cultural and political activist campaign “Demounting Louis Agassiz,” which seeks to redress the racist legacy of the Swiss-born naturalist and glaciologist Louis Agassiz (1807–1873). Huber’s artworks challenge the terms by which we remember, asking not only who and what we memorialize, but also, and more importantly, how we do so. The exhibition is initiated, organized​, and circulated by The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, Canada​, in collaboration with Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam, Netherlands; Autograph ABP, London, United Kingdom; and Turku Museum, Finland. 

Sasha Huber

Mother Throat, 2017

Video, 10:30 mins

Throat singing by Silla: Charlotte Qamaniq (Iglulik, NU) and

Cynthia Pitsiulak (Kimmirut, NU)

Supported by Arts Promotion Centre Finland, AVEK

Courtesy the artist

Sasha Huber 

Still of Louis Who? What you should know about Louis Agassiz, 2010

Video, 3:50 mins

Commissioned by the Capacete in Rio de Janeiro for the 29th São Paulo Biennale 2010

Photo: Calé. Courtesy the artist

Sasha Huber

Still of Karakia - The Resetting Ceremony, 2015

Video, 5:20 mins

Supported by AVEK, Arts Promotion Centre Finland, Te Whare Hēra Wellington International Artist Residency

Courtesy the artist

 

Sasha Huber is a Swiss-Haitian-Finnish artist who lives and works in Helsinki, Finland. Recent solo exhibitions include Artivist Lab, Prague (2020); Centro Helio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro (2019); and Forum Box, Helsinki (2016). She has participated in international exhibitions, including the 56th Venice Biennale (2015); 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014); and 29th São Paulo Biennial (2010). Sasha Huber is completing her PhD at the Department of Art and Media at the Zurich University of the Arts, and she holds an MA from the University of Art and Design Helsinki. 

Curated by Noor Alé, Associate Curator.

 

THE POWER PLANT CONTEMPORARY ART GALLERY

231 Queens Quay West, Toronto, Ontario M5J 2G8

www.thepowerplant.org

Wendy Ewald @ Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto - The Pictures Woke the People Up: Canada, Colombia and American Alphabets

Wendy Ewald

The Pictures Woke the People Up: Canada, Colombia and American Alphabets

Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto

Through 15 January 2022

The Stephen Bulger Gallery presents “The Pictures Woke the People Up: Canada, Colombia and American Alphabets”, their first solo exhibition with acclaimed photographer WENDY EWALD which announces the gallery's representation of her work. For over fifty years, Wendy Ewald has collaborated on art projects with children, families, women, and teachers in Labrador, Colombia, India, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Holland, Mexico, Morocco, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Working as a photographer and teacher, Wendy Ewald’s projects emphasize a method of collaboration that challenges the distinctions between photographer and subject. Adopting a variety of approaches, she creates projects based on a reciprocal vs. hierarchical approach. Her goal is to provide the vision of her subjects rather than merely make images of them. Through her documentary investigations of places and communities, Ewald probes questions of identity and cultural differences. In her work with children and women, she encourages them to use cameras to record themselves, their families, and their communities, and to articulate their fantasies and dreams.

This exhibition presents a selection of work from various stages of her career. During Wendy Ewald’s college years, starting in 1969, she worked with Indigenous children in Sheshatshiu, Labrador and in Eskɨnuopitijk, New Brunswick. She observed that her photography was restrained partially by a reticence to disturb her subjects. Her students’ approached their work in a more dynamic fashion. While photographing the same scene as 14-year-old Merton Ward, she was struck by the difference.  Her photographs were clear renderings of the evidence before her, whereas his portrayed life on the reservation was more expressive. She successfully applied to the Polaroid Foundation for cameras and film for her students, which enabled her to work there for four summers. We will exhibit vintage prints from that period, a film, as well as colour work made during visits to the region 39 years later.     

After working in the Appalachian Mountains in the 70s, Wendy Ewald travelled to Latin America to create work within another rural community. She was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in 1982 to photograph and teach photography in a Colombian village. She hoped that by working outside her native language she would be forced to rely on her visual skills. She was also introduced to Alicia Vásquez, a single mother living with three young sons in an invasion barrio in Bogota. Over time, she shared her life story with Ewald who brought her books of classical literature. Her mother María and other members of the family told their stories which prompted Ewald to illustrate the family’s memoir. Alicia was uncomfortable around a camera. Photographs made by Ewald and the children she taught in the village of Ráquira are interwoven with transcribed and edited stories of the Vásquez family. Our exhibition displays an excerpt from the book of this work, MAGIC EYES: Scenes From An Andean Girlhood.

In 1991, Wendy Ewald became a senior research associate at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies and founded the Literacy through Photography program for Durham Public Schools in North Carolina. During this time, she became aware of the language barrier amongst immigrant and local communities. She recognized the prevalence of cultural descriptors in North American children’s alphabet primers (i.e ‘C’ is for ‘Car’) and collaborated with children from different backgrounds to create primers of their own. She asked students to think of words for each letter of the English and Spanish alphabets and assign them visual signs specific to their culture. Wendy Ewald photographed the signs, objects, or scenes selected. When the large-format negatives were developed, the children altered them with Sharpies, adding the letter and word they illustrated. Our exhibition will include alphabets from several communities.

Wendy Ewald has received many honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Andy Warhol Foundation, the Rauschenberg Foundation, and the Fulbright Commission. She was also a senior fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School from 2000-2002. She has had solo exhibitions at the International Center of Photography, New York, the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, the George Eastman House, Rochester, Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam, the Fotomuseum, Wintherthur, Switzerland, the Corcoran Gallery of American Art, Washington, DC, and The Queens Museum, New York, among others. Ewald’s work was included in the 1997 Whitney Biennial. She has published fourteen books, her fifth, a retrospective documenting her projects entitled Secret Games, was published by Scalo in 2000. Two books were published in 2005. A third, To The Promised Land was published in 2006 to accompany an outdoor installation in Margate, England, with “new starts” and refugees commissioned by ArtAngel. She was an artist in residence at Amherst College for eleven years where she taught the course, Collaborative Art: The practice and theory of working with communities. This Is Where I Live, which maps Israel/Palestine through 14 different communities, was published by MACK in 2015 in conjunction with a traveling exhibition, “This Place”. America, Border, Culture, Dreamer a collaboration with young immigrants to the US was published by Little Brown in Fall 2018 to accompany a public art installation in Philadelphia. Her film for PBS, Portraits and Dreams, was released in 2020 accompanied by an expanded update of the original book published in 1985. Wendy Ewald’s project for “Towards a Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40” continues until December 19, 2021, throughout Chicago, presented by the Smart Museum. The book The Devil is Leaving his Cave, will be published by MACK Books in 2022. From November 8 ­– 28, 2021, Wendy Ewald and artist Zak Hajjaoui have collaborated on a billboard that will be on display at the corner of Richmond Street East and Parliament Street, Toronto, as part of For Freedoms North American “Billboards” exhibition. For Freedoms is an artist-led organization that models and increases creative civic engagement, discourse, and direct action.

Wendy Ewald, Katherine Hyde, Lisa Lord

Literacy and Justice through Photography

© Teachers' College Press

Wendy Ewald, Alexandra Lightfoot

I Wanna Take Me a Picture

© Beacon Press

In addition to her artistic practice, Wendy Ewald has published two books for teachers and families, I Wanna Take Me a Picture and Literacy and Justice through Photography. She has been collaborating with partners in Tanzania for the past ten years to create photographic teaching materials for the national primary and secondary school curriculums. In 2021 she developed a course in teaching and learning through images for Humanities and Education students at the University of Dodoma, Tanzania.

STEPHEN BULGER GALLERY

1356 Dundas Street West, Toronto, ON M6JIY2

www.bulgergallery.com

Suzanne Valadon @ Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen - Model, Painter, Rebel

Suzanne Valadon 

Model, Painter, Rebel

Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen

24 February – 31 July 2022

Suzanne Valadon 

Nude in the Mirror, 1916-17

Oil on canvas 

The Weisman & Michel Collection

Suzanne Valadon 

Nude Sitting on a Sofa, 1916

Oil on canvas 

The Weisman & Michel Collection

Suzanne Valadon

Woman in an Armchair, (Portrait of Madame G.), 1919

Oil on canvas 

The Weisman & Michel Collection

The Glyptotek is presenting the first-ever exhibition in the Nordic region about the French painter and model, Suzanne Valadon. Despite her poor upbringing, Valadon forged a successful career as an artist, based on her work as a model, her independent studies and her talent. 

Suzanne Valadon modelled for Renoir, Puvis de Chavannes and Toulouse-Lautrec, she was a friend of Degas and van Gogh, and she was a great admirer of Gauguin. Prior to becoming part of their artistic circle, Suzanne Valadon (1865 – 1938) was a favourite model for the painters of Montmartre. Inspired by her role models, she taught herself to paint and, in the early 20th century, she was the very first self-taught woman to exhibit at the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux Arts.

If her name rings a bell, it is perhaps because she already hangs on the walls of the Glyptotek portrayed in paintings by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. His 1885 portrait of Valadon is an important testimony to the network, which she influenced and to which she belonged. But the portrait also testifies to the fate she and so many other great female artists of the time met: hugely successful in their day, yet forgotten by posterity. The permanent collections of the Glyptotek are no exception. Valadon is represented not by her own work, but only as a model for Toulouse-Lautrec.

Since 1949, the Glyptotek has never mounted a major, historical solo exhibition of works by a French female painter. Now, once again, the museum is making its galleries available to a rebel painter who, by asserting her independence, challenged the conventions of the age, as both an artist and a woman.

Though Marie-Clémentine Valadon (pseudonym: Suzanne Valadon) grew up in poverty, by the time she was a teenager she had forged a brilliant career as an artist’s model. From her work as a model she learned artistic techniques and social codes, and was to become part of an impressive network of artists.

With her uncompromising portraits and nude studies, rooted in her gender and her class, Valadon paved new ways for art. She defied the social norms of the time and carved her own unique path into the Parisian art world. Her unusual history, her business connections, strategies and contribution to 20th century art will be the subjects of the Glyptotek’s special exhibition 'Susanne Valadon – Model, Painter, Rebel'.

“It is more than a hundred years since Valadon painted her audacious portraits of confident women with strong bodies, sinuous shapes and pubic hair. Easily recognisable by their fiery dark contours and bright colours, Valadon’s works tackle a number of issues that, even to this day, challenge social codes related to femininity, marriage, motherhood, desire and the female body. Valadon was not a feminist in the traditional sense of the word, but her works make a huge impact, despite all the gossip that has so often overshadowed her work. The upcoming exhibition will not only feature her extraordinary works, but will also tell the story of an exceptional woman who succeeded in transforming her working-class background from a disadvantage into a unique entrée into the world of art. Valadon definitely deserves to be acknowledged as one of our many inspiring, female forebears in the history of art,” says Anna Kærsgaard Gregersen, Curator, Danish and French Art of the 19th Century at the Glyptotek.

 

The exhibition, 'Suzanne Valadon - Model, Painter, Rebel' is a collaboration between the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek and the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia.

The exhibition was originally devised by the Barnes Foundation. At the Barnes Foundation - 'Suzanne Valadon: Model, Painter, Rebel' was supported by the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Philadelphia.

The exhibition is accompanied by the publication of a richly illustrated catalogue.

The exhibition opened at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia on 26 September 2021 and runs until 9 January 2022. At the Glyptotek it will run from 24 February to 31 July 2022.

SUZANNE VALADON

Born to a single mother in Bessines-sur-Gartempe, Suzanne Valadon (née Marie-Clémentine Valadon, 1865-1938) grew up in poverty in Paris. Valadon spent little time in school and, though she began drawing at the age of 9, she never received any formal art education.

As a teenager, Valadon modelled for some of the most famous artists of the time, including Renoir, Puvis de Chavannes and Toulouse-Lautrec. The modelling work kindled her own ambition. Encouraged by Degas, the artist’s friend and mentor, she began working on drawings and prints. At the age of 18, she gave birth to her son, Maurice Utrillo who, with his mother’s help, went on to enjoy a successful career as an artist.

In 1882, Suzanne Valadon started to experiment in the use of oil as a medium. Her drawings and paintings were exhibited, capturing the attention of collectors, gallery owners and art critics. By 1910, Valadon was a confident painter. She had divorced her first husband and was about to get married a second time: to her son’s friend, André Utter, who was a mere 20 years old.

In the 1920s, Suzanne Valadon enjoyed great commercial success and, prior to her death in 1938, the French state purchased several of her works. In her lifetime, Suzanne Valadon exhibited both nationally and internationally. However, today she is chiefly known in her home country.

NY CARLSBERG GLYPTOTEK

Dantes Plads 7, Copenhagen 1556

www.glyptoteket.com

Kenny Hunter @ Aberdeen Art Gallery - Sculpture Court Exhibition

Kenny Hunter - Sculpture Court 

Aberdeen Art Gallery 

11 December 2021 - 30 October 2022 

Aberdeen Art Gallery presents a new exhibition by sculptor Kenny Hunter. Sculpture Court, which is displayed in the Art Gallery’s grand central gallery of the same name, reflects on the changing role of the monument as a public artform.

Kenny Hunter is one of Scotland’s leading contemporary artists. Born in Edinburgh in 1962, Hunter graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 1987 and then studied classical sculpture at the British School in Athens. He is based in Edinburgh and is a lecturer at Edinburgh College of Art, part of the University of Edinburgh.

Kenny Hunter makes elegant sculptures in many materials including wood, plastic, iron and bronze. He exhibits work widely in the UK and internationally and has also created a number of high-profile commissioned works, including Citizen Firefighter (2001), outside Glasgow’s Central Station, Youth With Split Apple (2005) for King’s College, Aberdeen and iGoat (2010) in Spitalfields, London. Feedback Loop (2003) is in the collection of Aberdeen Archives, Gallery & Museums. In 2008 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Aberdeen University. Hunter is currently working on a new commission for the Thomas Blake Glover memorial garden in Fraserburgh. He has also been commissioned by the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh to create a memorial to healthcare workers for their tireless efforts throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

Kenny Hunter describes his practice as a sculptor as an ongoing effort to deconstruct the monument as a permanent symbol of political and historic progress and instead re-present it as a form in flux, open to varied interpretation. This has been expressed through inverting traditional monumental values and certainties with unexpected uses of scale, material and subject matter, opening up questions for the viewer rather than providing answers.

Kenny Hunter said: “For this new exhibition, Sculpture Court, I was drawn to the idea that today, the original power and purpose of the monument can seem incongruous. Recently we’ve all become much more aware of the failings, fragility, and fallibility of this public artform. I’m presenting this group of artworks here against the magnificent backdrop of Aberdeen Art Gallery’s classically-inspired Sculpture Court as ambiguous and open to varied interpretation. I hope that visitors to the exhibition will consider both the future role of the monument and its legacy, thinking about questions such as - what they are for, what do they represent and who do they serve?”

Councillor Marie Boulton, Aberdeen City Council’s culture spokesperson said: “Kenny Hunter has enjoyed a relationship with Aberdeen over many years, specifically with Aberdeen Art Gallery, Peacock Visual Arts and Aberdeen University. His sculpture Feedback Loop is already a firm favourite with visitors to the Art Gallery. For people who know Kenny’s work from other locations such as at Aberdeen University, elsewhere in Scotland and the UK, I hope that they will take the opportunity to visit Aberdeen Art Gallery over the coming months and discover this wonderful new exhibition by one of Scotland’s leading contemporary artists.”

ABERDEEN ART GALLERY

Schoolhill, Aberdeen AB10 1FQ

www.aagm.co.uk

www.kenny-hunter.com

Instagram @realkennyhunter

ABERDEEN CITY COUNCIL

www.aberdeencity.gov.uk