Cindy Sherman @ Sprüth Magers Gallery, Los Angeles - Tapestries

Cindy Sherman: Tapestries

Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles

Through May 1, 2021

Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers present the first solo exhibition at the Los Angeles gallery by internationally renowned artist CINDY SHERMAN, who has been associated with Sprüth Magers since the 1980s. In the latest series on view, Cindy Sherman explores her first non-photographic medium in a career spanning over 40 years: Tapestry. Featuring a dozen examples of her new and recent tapestries, the exhibition marks the début of these works as a coherent body of work.

In line with Cindy Sherman’s long-term photographic investigation into the construction of identity and the nature of representation, the images are based on pictures posted on the artist’s personal Instagram account, which she creates using widely available filters and face-altering apps. Impossible to print in large scale due to the low-resolution nature of the original Instagram images, they are transposed into woven textiles, which in turn resonate with the pixelation of the source material: Pixels, here, translate to the warp and weft of thread.

Produced in Belgium—with its long history of weaving and tapestry—and made of cotton, wool, acrylic and polyester, each tapestry invents and introduces an entirely unique character. In keeping with many of her previous works, the artist becomes nearly unrecognizable through changes in hair color, hairdo, eye color, skin tone, facial features and even gender. For example, one work depicts a figure with a blonde beard in front of mountains, water and pink skies, gazing upward with an inquisitive, hopeful look, as if to the heavens; another shows an almost extraterrestrial-looking being with pink hair, purple skin and two sets of flashy eyelashes taking a selfie in front of a prismatic sunset.

In Cindy Sherman’s tapestries, the interplay between character and background is as dynamic as ever. While earlier bodies of work feature distorted, yet still realistic, human figures, here they are increasingly digitally manipulated, resulting in exaggerated traits or the partial dissolution of the body as it begins to merge with its environment. The artist also continuously experiments with the images’ backgrounds, which range from plain white or grey to elaborate digital landscapes, often using Instagram effects. By combining contemporary, digital tools such as Photoshop and Instagram with such a traditional medium as tapestry—often associated with domestic settings and coded as female—Cindy Sherman also gives a nod to art history, gender and societal roles.

Since the late 1970s, Cindy Sherman has been photographing herself in guises inspired by stereotypes and characters from mass media, everyday life and art-historical imagery. Her unique approach reveals the degree to which these stereotypes are entrenched in the cultural and social imagination. Sherman’s influential, complex oeuvre draws upon cinema, realism and the grotesque, and is embedded in a number of postmodern and feminist theories.

CINDY SHERMAN (*1954, Glen Ridge, NJ) lives and works in New York. Her work was recently the subject of a large-scale exhibition at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, which followed a major retrospective exhibition in 2019–20 at the National Portrait Gallery, London, and Vancouver Art Gallery. Other recent solo exhibitions include: Fosun Foundation, Shanghai (2018), The Broad, Los Angeles (2016), Dallas Museum of Art (2013), and Museum of Modern Art, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (all 2012). Selected group exhibitions include Hayward Gallery, London (2018), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2016), Tate Modern, London (2015), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2012) and MUMOK, Vienna (2011). Cindy Sherman also participated in the 54th Venice Biennale (2011) and co-curated a section of the 55th Venice Biennale (2013).

SPRÜTH MAGERS

5900 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90036

www.spruethmagers.com

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Juraj Kollar @ Rosenbaum Contemporary, Boca Raton - Survey

Juraj Kollár: Survey

Rosenbaum Contemporary, Boca Raton

February 23 - March 27, 2021

JURAJ KOLLÁR

Residential Zone 1, 2016

Oil on canvas, 78 3/4 x 106 1/4 inches (200 x 270 cm)

© Juraj Kollár, Courtesy of Rosenbaum Contemporary

Survey, an exhibition of works by Slovakian artist JURAJ KOLLÁR, on view at Rosenbaum Contemporary, is him first solo exhibition in the United States.

According to art historian Katarina Bajcurová, Juraj Kollár is regarded as “the most naturally gifted and pertinacious painter of his generation” as well as “the central figure of young…contemporary painting in Slovakia.” Kollár’s works can be found in the collections of the Slovak National Gallery and the National Gallery in Prague and have been exhibited in prestigious art fairs including Art Cologne and SP–Arte.

“In the course of a few years he has managed to create, to paint, a relatively respectable body of work… and to achieve a number of prestigious awards in Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Germany,” Bajcurová said.

Juraj Kollár simultaneously works in multiple genres including landscape/”non-landscape,” figurative, pixelation and non-objective abstracts, and has developed innovative processes unique to each.

The exhibition at Rosenbaum Contemporary presents a survey of representative works from each of his major genres.

Juraj Kollár’s landscapes/”non-landscapes” are painted from the perspective of looking out through a window upon abstraction versus looking “in” to the painting. Though he works from photographs, Juraj Kollár’s paintings are not photorealistic. He employs various methods to distort the image and create abstraction. Some works are painted through breeze block walls, either through an existing wall or one that he creates in the environment. The resulting effect breaks the scene into multiple abstract components that, together, form a cohesive whole. In painting his landscapes, Juraj Kollár also adds elements that were not in the original scene, but that he feels should be there.

“I fill space with obstacles, which redefine, deform, or veil the visual perception of reality,” Juraj Kollár said. “I am trying to capture the light-atmosphere and the physical feeling of the state of an event.”

Even when painting from a photograph, he deliberately retains the grain to diffuse and blur the picture to capture the overall atmosphere of the scene versus its details.

The figurative works in the Survey  exhibition come from Juraj Kollár’s Thoughtful series, life-size portraits of students at Harvard listening to a lecture on Imannuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which Juraj Kollár painted from a video he downloaded from YouTube. His goal was to capture each student’s personality using just a few brushstrokes while capturing each at the exact moment of thinking about the lecture they heard.

Juraj Kollár’s pixelated pictures, a cross between pointillism and impressionism, incorporate construction netting, either painted through and removed or painted on and left in place, which has the effect of supporting the paint, enabling him to apply much more pigment than could be supported by the canvas alone. When his landscapes contain figures, they are often blurred so as to “melt” into the work.

Juraj Kollár’s non-representational paintings contain no ties to objective reality and are often titled only with numbers. They result, not from an idea, but from his process and are explorations of how the paint works as a physical material on the canvas including how it occupies space, how it responds to gravity, light, and other colors, and how it can be manipulated by brushes and other instruments and materials. The resulting compositions express a mood, and these experiments in abstraction often make their way into Juraj Kollár’s other works.

ROSENBAUM CONTEMPORARY

150 Yamato Road, Boca Raton, FL 33431

www.rosenbaumcontemporary.com

Normal Exceptions: Contemporary Art in Mexico, Museo Jumex, Mexico City

Normal Exceptions: Contemporary Art in Mexico

Museo Jumex, Mexico City

March 27 - August 15, 2021

Museo Jumex presents Normal Exceptions: Contemporary Art in Mexico, a thematic survey of contemporary art in Mexico over the past 20 years. Drawing primarily from the Colección Jumex with additional works by invited artists and collaborators, the exhibition fills the entire museum with more than 60 works by artists based in Mexico, including those of international origin, and Mexican artists living and working abroad. The museum’s galleries are stripped down to their original design for the exhibition, allowing for the installation of large-scale, conceptual works and ample natural light throughout the galleries.

Curated by the museum’s curatorial team led by Chief Curator, Kit Hammonds, the exhibition’s title is inspired by a key term in micro-history–the study of history from the perspective of individuals and their encounters with authority, and proposes the idea of looking from a grassroots perspective upwards, rather than from the top down.

“For Normal Exceptions, we looked at the entire Colección Jumex as a starting point, to highlight the development of art in Mexico over the last two decades,” noted Kit Hammonds. “We also want to show these works in the larger context of Mexico’s multi-dimensional ecosystem of artistic practice, and to include collaborators as a way of creating conversations between the museum and its contemporaries.” Museo Jumex’s second and third floors feature a variety of works from the collection, many of which are shown for the first time in the museum, joined by a selection of works by invited artists.

Exhibited for the first time in the Americas, Stefan Brüggemann’s (Mexican, b. 1975) Conceptual Decoration Silver and Black Wallpaper (2008) spans approximately 100 meters of a second-floor gallery wall. Despite its large scale, the two-word text “conceptual decoration” running across its surface appears small, presenting a series of contrasts and ironies between the ideas of concept versus decoration, art and design, work and support, and language and architecture. The ambiguity this provokes is a theme explored throughout the exhibition.

On view for the first time since its acquisition in 2010, Jorge Méndez Blake’s (Mexican, b. 1974) El castillo [The Castle] (2007) is a 14-meter-long brick wall that runs over a single copy of Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel The Castle, distorting and disrupting the orderly rows of 3,000 bricks from which the work is constructed. The work touches on some of the key motifs explored in the exhibition, particularly the relationship of the individual to authority, as explored in Kafka’s novel and represented poetically by the artist in the interruption it makes to the structure above.

Chantal Peñalosa (Mexican, b. 1987) has been constructing an archive of art from projects realized by the iniciative inSite in public spaces in her native city of Tijuana. Having never seen the projects herself, her study and knowledge of them has played a formative role in her own practice. Creating clay models from her imagination and photographing the now empty locations where they were originally presented, Chantal Peñalosa aims to connect to these practices and to the places they temporarily transformed. This is the first presentation of the project in a museum after its showing in the artist’s independent space in Tijuana.

Throughout the run of the exhibition, the first-floor gallery features three different installations presented sequentially and curated in collaboration with an organization that has played a significant role in the formation of contemporary art in Mexico.

The first is co-organized with ZsONAMACO, Latin America’s largest art fair and a chief driver in bringing Mexican artists to the international art market. In collaboration with ZsONAMACO’s Artistic Director, Juan Canela, the installation centers on new work by the Mexico City-based duo Rometti Costales that delves into the intersection of modern and ancient histories, beliefs, and practices.

inSite—which began as a cross-border public arts program in San Diego and Tijuana, and more recently ran Casa Gallina in Mexico City, which engaged artists with various communities—collaborates with Museo Jumex on the second installation. In the last two years, under the curatorial direction of Andrea Torreblanca, inSite has been reflecting on its own artist legacy and its future through a themed journal putting forward critical and highly current issues impacting art and the public, inSite’s journal and archives become the basis for an installation in the first-floor gallery as well as a live performance that takes its archives as a script.

The third collaborative installation is with the independent art school SOMA, founded by artist Yoshua Okón in 2009, which has played a significant role in forging links between artists of different generations and in the development of a discourse that has become central to many emerging artists, through both their studio program and public events.

Normal Exceptions continues Museo Jumex’s year-long series of exhibitions highlighting works from the renowned Colección Jumex, one of the leading collections of Mexican art, and one of the most significant private collections of contemporary art in Latin America. Other artists in the exhibition include Iñaki Bonillas, Wendy Cabrera Rubio, Miguel Calderón y Yoshua Okón, Pia Camil, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Zhivago Duncan, Mario García Torres, Daniel Guzmán, Gabriel Kuri, Teresa Margolles, Damián Ontiveros Ramírez, Gabriel Orozco, Raúl Ortega Ayala, G. T. Pellizzi, Alejandra de la Puente, Santiago Sierra, Melanie Smith, Lake Verea and the collective Tercerunquinto.

Museo Jumex will continue to offer a suite of online programming titled “Museo en casa,” to ensure its content is made widely and easily accessible. “Museo en casa” includes free online courses with critical thinkers in Mexico, and additional content by video, images, and text. Additional details about accompanying online programming for Normal Exceptions will be posted regularly on the museum’s website.

MUSEO JUMEX

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra 303, Colonia Granada, 11520, Mexico City

fundacionjumex.org

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Janiva Ellis Exhibition @ ICA Miami - Rats

Janiva Ellis: Rats

Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami

February 25 – September 12, 2021

Featuring a suite of new paintings created over the past year, Rats is the first solo museum exhibition for the American artist Janiva Ellis, whose paintings use formal themes of speed and transformation to explore fractured states of personal and cultural perception. Her works express a tense intimacy that has been mischaracterized as descriptions of internal crisis. In actuality, the tension in her work comments on the pervasiveness of white delusion and its denial as a brutal and violent social and societal force. Her paintings make expert use of contemporary and historical styles—abstraction, figuration, landscape, and cartoon—to turn a lens to the insidious nature of whiteness. The exhibition traces recent and significant experimentation in the artist’s practice, marking an expansion of her critical approach to representation. 

INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, MIAMI

61 NE 41st Street, Miami, Florida 33137

www.icamiami.org

Jonathan Monk @ Lisson Gallery, London - Not Me, Me

Jonathan Monk: Not Me, Me

Lisson Gallery, London

Through 24 April 2021

JONATHAN MONK’s investigations into memory, ephemera and artistic process emerge from his practice as an inveterate observer, participant and collector of both popular culture and conceptual art. In a new series of collages, collectively entitled Exhibit Model Detail with Additional Information, Jonathan Monk charts and revisits some of his own exhibition history using photographic evidence of previous solo shows, harking back to the first museum presentation featuring wallpaper of his own past work at Kunsthaus Baselland in 2016. Copy and pasted, magpie-like, onto the backdrop of these grisaille, archival documents are various touchstones or influences that went into the depicted display, many of which come from Jonathan Monk’s own treasure trove of personal or artistic memorabilia. Actual objects – from teapots and vinyl records to cacti – are perched on the picture plane, alongside framed portraits of his artistic heroes, printed invitation cards and individual works of art in their own right.

For example, Exhibit Model Detail with Additional Information III (2020) begins with the wallpaper background of Jonathan Monk’s Paul McCarthy puppet looking at himself in a mirror while dressed as Paul McCartney, in two-dimensional black and white. Between these doppelgangers hangs an original Martin Kippenberger edition, in the form of a retro phone, while the record sleeve of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is placed below. A portrait of Bruce Nauman spits from one head like a fountain and an Ettore Sottsass pepper grinder protrudes like a crown from the head of the other figure. This accretion of images and ephemera creates a feedback loop of creation, appropriation, homage and irreverence.

Each Exhibit Model reflects a mood, a moment in time and a discrete body of work, albeit without including Jonathan Monk’s actual art objects in the physical realm, amounting to a kind of ‘anti-retrospective’, as he calls it. There are in fact many shows within this show, each collage also containing Additional Information (also referred to by the Not Me of the show’s title), ranging from internal and personal references to artistic or musical influences, with famous artists making cameo appearances, including Daniel Buren, Jeff Koons, Louise Lawler and Gilbert and George.

More of Jonathan Monk’s artistic forebears are present in this show, through their intervention in a group of sculptural self-portrait busts, entitled Senza Titolo. The otherwise identical Jesmonite effigies of Jonathan Monk have all had their noses removed in the same iconoclastic manner that damaged Roman statuary of old, only these defacements were all by the hand of Arte Povera artists such as Emilio Prini, Gilberto Zorio and Jannis Kounellis. Even Maurizio Cattelan, a near contemporary of Jonathan Monk’s was invited to strike the nose off his face with a hammer, as was John Baldessari, one of the many artist-collaborators to have sadly died since this project was completed in 2012. These vandalized heads represent instances of Jonathan Monk’s work disturbed by the intervention of other artists, while the Exhibit Models strike a less discordant and more-or-less harmonic note when considered in concert with the external forces at play. 

JONATHAN MONK was born in Leicester in 1969 and lives and works in Berlin. He has a BFA from Leicester Polytechnic (1988) and an MFA from Glasgow School of Art (1991). Solo exhibitions have been held at Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Israel (2019); KINDL – Zentrum für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Berlin, Germany (2019); Vox, Montreal, Canada (2017); The Gallery at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK (2017); Kunsthaus Baselland, Muttenz, Switzerland (2016); Museo d'Arte Contemporanea di Roma, Rome, Italy (2015); Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), Dublin, Ireland (2014); Centro De Arte Contemporáneo (CAC) Málaga, Spain (2013); Kunstraum Dornbirn, Austria (2013); Palais de Tokyo and Musee d’Art Moderne, Paris, France (2008); Kunstverein Hannover, Hannover, Germany (2006); Institute of Contemporary Art, London, UK (2005); and Museum Kunst Palast, Dusseldorf, Germany (2003). His work has been included in many group exhibitions, including the Whitney Biennial (2006), the 50th and 53rd Venice Biennales (2003, 2009), Berlin Biennale (2001) and Taipei Biennial (2000). He was awarded the Prix du Quartier Des Bains, Geneva in 2012.

Lisson Gallery is temporarily closed. However, the exhibition is viewable in full from the street.

LISSON GALLERY

22 Cork Street, London W1S 3NA

www.lissongallery.com

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Stephan Goldrajch @ Galerie Baronian Xippas, Bruxelles - Porte-Bonheur

Stephan Goldrajch : Porte-Bonheur

Galerie Baronian Xippas, Bruxelles

Jusqu'au 3 avril 2021

Albert Baronian et Renos Xippas présentent actuellement la deuxième exposition personnelle de Stephan Goldrajch dans leur galerie.

Né en 1985 à Ramat-Gan en Israël, STEPHAN GOLDRAJCH a étudié à l’Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles puis à la Cambre en section sculpture, ainsi qu’à l’Académie d’Art et de Design de Bezalel à Jérusalem.

Inspiré par les traditions ancestrales, les rites et les techniques d’artisans, c’est le rapport à l’humain et au social qui le fascinent. Travaillant le fil au crochet, son médium de prédilection, il se nourrit, pour mieux les réinventer, des codes de vie et d’apprentissage, de la magie autant que des contes et légendes ; toutes ces choses bien réelles, souvent irrationnelles, qui font partie de l’éducation des hommes.

Très rapidement et avant que cela ne soit devenu une mode, l’artiste Stephan Goldrajch s’est choisi un mode d’expression singulier, celui de la performance textile participative où les interactions sociales sont essentielles. En organisant des Broderies Participatives sur des places publiques, Stephan Goldrajch invite passants, habitants, réfugiés et même curés à se rassembler autour d’une oeuvre commune. Le mode d’emploi est simple : il suffit de suivre les lignes tracées sur le tissu avec du fil rouge. De la sorte, Stephan Goldrajch permet des connexions inattendues entre tous ces participants en un moment suspendu, à l’image des fils tissés et entremêlés. Ce moment hors du temps, lors duquel la parole suit le rythme de l’aiguille, se partage comme un murmure, une confidence, un rire aussi.

La volonté de tisser des liens entre les domaines du social et de l’art contemporain est au coeur de ses projets. En 2012, au WIELS (Bruxelles), Stephan Goldrajch a créé La Légende du Canal, un récit imaginé avec les habitants des deux rives du canal qui divise la ville. Après plusieurs mois de travail, une exposition de cent grands drapeaux placés à la jonction du quartier branché de Dansaert et de la commune de Molenbeek affirmait la possibilité d’un pont entre deux réalités socioculturelles bien différentes.

En 2018, Albert Baronian et Renos Xippas avaient exposés ses Voodoos dans leur galerie, une série de masques et de créatures en maille qui, avec une pointe d’humour, semblent surgir d’un monde fantastique peuplé de rêves et animé de rituels magiques. Stephan Goldrajch accorde une grande importance au caractère nomade des pelotes de laines avec lesquelles il crochète et aime pouvoir emmener son travail avec lui. Les masques qu’il réalise en crochet ont par ailleurs déjà bien voyagé au départ de Bruxelles à travers le monde, entre l’Israël, la Bulgarie ou le Bénin.

Comme l’illustrent ces masques rituels vaudou, la superstition est au coeur de la pratique de l’artiste et ce, depuis le début de sa carrière. Dès la fin de ses études à La Cambre, il réalise une « tête porte-bonheur », un gri-gri supposé porter bonheur et prospérité et réunit des proches qu’il masque de ses créations en maille pour trouver un espace destiné à déposer cette tête. Depuis lors, les participants masqués forment ensemble la communauté que l’artiste appelle les « Porteur de Bonheur » et célèbrent tous les 22 février la fête du Bonheur.

Dans cette exposition-ci, intitulée Porte Bonheur, Stephan Goldrajch nous dévoile une nouvelle série d’oeuvres éponymes, qui prolonge cet intérêt pour le caractère superstitieux des objets. S’inspirant des masques et toujours avec la technique du crochet, il tisse sur sa toile des éléments disparates. Différents types de fils de laine et de coton, naturels et synthétiques sont tissés un à un et ensuite cousus à même la toile de lin. Il travaille ici à la manière d’un peintre, mais dont la peinture est substituée par des pelotes de laines.

Pour l’artiste, assembler ces fils colorés représente une déconnection totale avec les stimulations extérieures et lui permet de rentrer dans sa propre bulle. Le travail de crochet devient alors son propre rituel. Ainsi, les Porte-Bonheurs exposés sont le résultat d’un long processus ritualisé et méditatif où des fils s’entremêlent dans des compositions complexes et foisonnantes de couleurs et de textures. Peuplé de petites créatures et de végétation textile, le monde imaginaire dans lequel Stephan Goldrajch nous emmène est fantastique, joyeux, voire régressif, jusqu’à nous replonger dans nos jeux et nos dessins d’enfants.

Enfin, ces Porte-Bonheur ont le pouvoir de dégager une force attractive tels que le font les objets sacrés qui portent bonheur à ceux qui les gardent. Les oeuvres invitent ainsi à découvrir la multitude de secrets et de mystères qu’elles cachent. 

GALERIE BARONIAN XIPPAS

33 rue de la Concorde, B-1050 Brussels

baronianxippas.com

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Jukka Mäkelä @ Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki - Paintings 1989-1995

Hommage à Jukka Mäkelä

Paintings 1989–1995

Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki

March 5 – April 4, 2021

JUKKA MÄKELÄ (1949 - 2018) ranks among the leading pioneers of Finnish postmodernism and neo-expressionism. During a career spanning many decades, Jukka Mäkelä continually renewed himself, his rich oeuvre varying radically from one period to the next. The recognizable quality shared by all his paintings is the idiosyncratic way they express a strong bond with nature. Mäkelä’s art is inspired by Finnish nature, though his paintings are anything but traditional landscapes. What endows them with their special quality is the play of light and shadow they capture, as well as a palette of colors that can be described as quintessentially Finnish. These qualities – combined with Jukka Mäkelä’s spontaneous, expressive brushwork – immediately call to mind the Finnish landscapes.

This exhibition features a pick of Jukka Mäkelä’s paintings dating from 1989 to 1995. The 1990s marked a clear watershed in his oeuvre: he started working with charcoal, and new lightness and buoyancy crept into his work. His lines became almost translucent, as if defying gravity with their flightiness, while still retaining a sense of solidity and confidence, always finding the perfect path in the composition. Jukka Mäkelä’s lines are not there to enclose or lend contours to forms or colors, rather they are active, autonomous elements that exist unto themselves. 

Nature is not confined to the idea of a landscape in Jukka Mäkelä’s paintings, which embrace the entire spectrum of the natural world, as evinced by everything from his organic treatment of line to his perceptive use of color. His paintings might take their cue from virtually anything, whether a ray of light or a minuscule detail in an urban setting. The essential point to note is that Jukka Mäkelä never regarded himself as something separate from nature – he depicted nature not from the vantage point of an external observer but as an integral part of it. 

JUKKA MAKELA received the State Prize in 1977 and 1981 and was awarded the Pro Finlandia medal in 2007. He represented Finland at the 1988 Venice Biennale and exhibited widely at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Rovaniemi Art Museum, and Oulu Art Museum. His work is represented in notable public collections, including Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, Oslo’s Museum of Contemporary, the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, and the Saastamoinen and the Wihuri Foundation.

GALERIE FORSBLOM

Yrjönkatu 22, 00120 Helsinki

www.galerieforsblom.com

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Adrian Ghenie @ Pace Gallery, New York - The Hooligans

Adrian Ghenie: The Hooligans

Pace Gallery, New York

Through April 24, 2021

ADRIAN GHENIE

The Impressionists, 2020 

© Adrian Ghenie, courtesy Pace Gallery

The Hooligans, ADRIAN GHENIE’s fourth solo exhibition with Pace Gallery, brings together nine paintings and three drawings, all made during the last year. Influenced by Impressionist painters, as well as J.M.W. Turner, Vincent Van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin, this new body of work continues Adrian Ghenie’s exploration of abstracting figures, layering shapes, and using gestural painting techniques to create complex images intertwined with art historical narratives. Adrian Ghenie’s meditation on the idea of “hooliganism” examines the crucial role of rebellion in an artist’s process, working to reject or ignore traditionalism to create the new.

Since the mid-2000s, Adrian Ghenie has created drawings, collages, and paintings that mine the history of art as well as the darkest chapters of Europe’s past, notably World War II and the subsequent rise of communism, including in his native Romania. Somber and gritty, his canvases bear gestural, abstract brushstrokes that build as much as mar their representational contents. Beginning in 2014, the artist began to work from assembled images. In recent years, his focus shifted to an exploration of revolutionary figures from the late 19th century such as Vincent Van Gogh and Charles Darwin, using them as points of departure more than inspiration. Adrian Ghenie’s visceral, even iconoclastic, impasto conjures distortions of memory, as well as fraught experiences that exceed and collide with official accounts of history.

Primarily portraits of nineteenth-century artists, the works on view in The Hooligans suggest a genealogy that begins with J.M.W. Turner, runs through the Impressionists, and ends with Post-Impressionist figures, such as Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. Quiet disruptors, these painters affirmed the materiality of oil paints with their loose brushstrokes, while amplifying painting’s optical qualities, namely its immersive luminosity and chromatic richness. Radicals in their time, their work unsettled the Romantic period, reflecting changes to modern vision as both bodily and subjective - a phenomenon that the nineteenth century’s new optical instruments and scientific experiments had already put underway. Adrian Ghenie, whose past work has explored the relationship between painting and cinema, continues to mine art’s ever-evolving relationship to history, vision and technology, as suggested by the presence of anachronistic details, such as sneakers and baseball caps, VR goggles and security cameras, that interrupt broad sections drawn from familiar nineteenth century paintings.

Meditating on the idea of hooliganism in art, Adrian Ghenie has shared the following statement about this new body of work:

When one stays for long hours in a studio year after year - besides doubting everything - you start to ask yourself what you are looking at when you look at paintings from the past. In time you develop a habit for peeling them like onions. Twenty years ago, I saw the surface, the skill, the prettiness. Now I see the energy behind this, the violence.

When I look at the Impressionists, I have the strange feeling that I am looking at something very schizophrenic. Behind those harmless colorful landscapes there is an incredible, destructive force; camouflaged. It is an act of hooliganism. It’s hard to ask someone to see that Claude Monet’s “Impression, soleil levant" from 1872 is not a sweet sea landscape with a sun rising but a bomb so powerful that it could put the Greek Roman canon to rest for good.

Looking again at these “harmless" paintings drew me deeper into the concept of hooliganism in art - the hooligan side of the artist, how crucial it is, how it manifests. The word hooliganism suggests something loud, exterior, aggressive and in your face. But in art it shows itself in the most discrete ways. Caravaggio’s pilgrims with dirty feet, for example. He was the first to paint the actual dirt on their feet. Such a small detail but it had such power, it could defy the church. Or when he chose a prostitute drowned in the Tiber as his model for the dead Virgin Mary. Or Cézanne’s bathers, for example - they are mockery of the Greek Roman and Prussian canons, but this mockery made Picasso possible. Turner! Oh my God! To paint a train ... when everybody was obsessed with the greatness of nature and the heroism of the past.

It seems that painting is in a crisis. It comes in waves or cycles. But in looking closer, it’s always hard to describe this crisis. It something we feel rather than explain. When I feel that the medium of painting is suffering a mutation or a contamination, more precisely I feel that painting is again becoming literature or journalism. Imagine going back in time and visiting a Pre Raphaelite show. You know it is literature. The medium of painting is strangled by that overdose of symbolism. Hooliganism saved painting by focusing on the medium itself, ignoring the "grand" subject matter and fighting only for the surface. It cleaned painting of literature and restored its autonomy. Even today, we consider this an act of restitution.

Was it clear then? Probably not. We never see it when it happens.

Turn your attention to landscape painting - such a minor genre for centuries but we have only to think of its attempt to impress Paris with apples and haystacks. Putting aside mythology, religion and the Greek Roman canon in these innocuous landscape paintings was in fact an act of hooliganism.

The hooligan inside the artist will not allow the soul to dry with pure intellect. It is a vital force that translates into an ability to rebel, reject, ignore or mock while staying away from ideological hate or fundamentalism. How else can I see the Impressionists or Turner, Van Gogh or Gauguin, if not as monuments to this quality?

This exhibition comes on the heels of two major solo museum exhibitions at The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia; and Palazzo Cini, Venice, Italy in 2019.

ADRIAN GHENIE (b. 1977, Baia Mare, Romania) adopts elements from the tradition of history painting while subverting its conventions by representing provocative subjects and undermining norms of realism. A formally trained painter, he synthesizes his technical abilities with conceptual tendencies from Dada, merging representational and abstract imagery. His practice conflates and extends painting techniques of the past, displaying both a Baroque mastery of chiaroscuro and a gestural handling of paint indebted to Abstract Expressionism. With pronounced brushwork that introduces distortions of depicted space and his subjects’ features, Adrian Ghenie’s art unearths feelings of vulnerability, frustration, and desire, invoking human experience and themes of the collective unconscious.

PACE GALLERY

540 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.pacegallery.com

Marianna Uutinen @ Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki - I Hear You

Marianna Uutinen: I Hear You 

Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki 

March 5 - April 4, 2021

MARIANNA UUTINEN (b. 1961) achieves a consummate synergy between the materiality and spatiality of her paintings. Her art articulates space both through its presence as an autonomous physical subject and as something that straddles somewhere between subjecthood and objecthood – as if her paintings were spaces through which everything travels. The three-dimensional forms protruding from her glitter-acrylic paintings are subtly embedded in the composition. The lively, shimmering surfaces are like stardust, sometimes recalling body parts or three-dimensional shapes that emerge as the viewer interacts with the painting’s materiality. Marianna Uutinen has no interest in romanticizing nature; instead, her paintings exist as an alternative natural presence, alive like an extension of the natural world, their materiality obeying its own organic laws. Her paintings have a meditative, erotic, and phantasmagorical quality while also invoking a sense of aesthetic pleasure, hope, escapism, and spirituality. They speak, too, of loneliness – the works in this exhibition were created during the lockdown, during a period of physical isolation – yet they equally convey a sense of intimacy and a free flow of ideas.

Marianna Uutinen’s paintings continually reveal new sides of themselves, reveling in their nascent modes of spatiality. They are like performative spaces with a nonlinear presence that simultaneously expresses ephemerality and a reconstituted reality. Their performative nature is underscored by the viewer’s corporeal relationship with each piece. Their colors shift and change depending on the lighting and the angle from which the painting is viewed. The viewers thus project their presence and position upon the work.

Marianna Uutinen is one of Finland’s most acclaimed contemporary artists. She has held numerous exhibitions throughout Finland and Europe, and she represented Finland at the 1997 Venice Biennale. Her work is found in many prestigious Finnish collections, including the Saastamoinen Foundation, the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki Art Museum HAM, and numerous international collections such as Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, and Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery. The artist is currently based in Helsinki and Berlin.

The exhibition is dedicated to Marianna Uutinen’s mother.

GALERIE FORSBLOM

Yrjönkatu 22, 00120 Helsinki

www.galerieforsblom.com

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Frank Duveneck @ Cincinnati Art Museum - American Master

Frank Duveneck: American Master

Cincinnati Art Museum

Through March 28, 2021

FRANK DUVENECK (1848–1919), United States

He Lives by His Wits, 1878

Oil on canvas

Collection of Gates Thornton Richards and Margaret Kyte Richards

The Cincinnati Art Museum presents a major re-evaluation of the work of FRANK DUVENECK, the most influential painter in Cincinnati history.

Through his brilliant and inspiring work as a painter and printmaker and as a charismatic teacher, Frank Duveneck’s impact on the international art world of his time was substantial and enduring. More than 90 examples across media from the holdings of the museum, the leading repository of the Kentucky native’s work, and 35 pieces on loan from collections across the United States, provides a fresh, in-depth look at this important artist.

Once Cincinnati’s most celebrated artist, Frank Duveneck was born in Covington to Westphalian immigrants in 1848. He studied in Munich, Germany, where he became an influential teacher, and spent nearly two decades in Europe. His work reflected the impact not only of modern German art, as is widely acknowledged, but also French and Italian work. His paintings’ lack of finish and assertive brushwork parallel Impressionism, and his work as a printmaker positioned him centrally in the period’s etching revival.

A captivating educator of men and women, Frank Duveneck counted John Henry Twachtman and Elizabeth Boott among his pupils and James Abbott McNeill Whistler among his collegial friends. Returning to the United States in 1888, Duveneck taught at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, where he became director of the faculty in 1905. As a mentor and esteemed advisor to collectors and the Cincinnati Art Museum staff, Duveneck’s impact on the Cincinnati art world remains unparalleled.

This is the first exhibition in 30 years to dive deep into Frank Duveneck’s artistic development, his working methods, and the historical and social context of his subjects. Presenting abundant new research, the exhibition upends many common misconceptions and reveals the artist’s accomplishments across subjects and media, including oil paintings, drawings, watercolors, pastels, etchings, monotypes, and sculpture.

The paintings of streetwise kids and informal portraits for which he is renowned are accompanied by society portraits, Bavarian landscapes, Venetian harbor views, depictions of Italian city and country folk, renderings of the nude figure and more. A profusely illustrated catalogue published with D. Giles Ltd is available.

Dr. Julie Aronson, curator of American Paintings, Sculpture and Drawings at the Cincinnati Art Museum since 1999, has been working on the exhibition for several years.

“We are excited to celebrate Frank Duveneck with this exhibition that illuminates one of the unique strengths of the Cincinnati Art Museum’s collection: its deep concentration in the works of one of the towering figures of American art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Side by side with our stunning Duveneck masterworks are key paintings on loan from across the country, presenting a fresh approach to the compelling story of one of our regional heroes. Duveneck’s bravura painting shines in this exhibition as never before!” said Julie Aronson.

Advanced online registration is required.

CINCINNATI ART MUSEUM

953 Eden Park Drive, Cincinnati, OH 45202

www.cincinnatiartmusem.org

Carol Rhodes @ Alison Jacques Gallery, London

Carol Rhodes

Alison Jacques Gallery, London

30 April - 29 May 2021

CAROL RHODES 

River, Roads, 2013 

Oil on board 

50 x 57 cm, 19 3/4 x 22 1/2 ins

© Carol Rhodes Estate

CAROL RHODES

Forest and Road, 1998 

Oil on board 

51 x 44 cm, 20 1/8 x 17 3/8 ins.

© Carol Rhodes Estate

Alison Jacques Gallery will present its first exhibition of work by CAROL RHODES (1959–2018). Organised in partnership with the Carol Rhodes Estate, whose curator Andrew Mummery worked closely with the artist for much of her career, the exhibition will include landmark paintings and rarely-shown drawings dating between 1995 and 2016.

Throughout her career, Carol Rhodes produced a highly individual body of paintings describing the encroachment of human activity and occupation upon ‘natural’ landscapes. Primarily adopting aerial viewpoints, Rhodes favoured what she called ‘hidden areas’ or ‘left-over land’: industrial estates, airports, motorways and reservoirs, unpeopled and existing at the margin of more defined (urban or rural) environments.

Writing on this element of Carol Rhodes’s work, the critic Tom Lubbock cited environmental theorist Marion Shoard’s identification of ‘edgelands’: “Between urban and rural stands a kind of landscape quite different […] Yet for most of us, most of the time, this mysterious no man’s land passes unnoticed: in our imaginations, as opposed to our actual lives, it barely exists.” Carol Rhodes similarly identified blind spots and occlusions in our consciousness. “Looking at things from above is detachment”, she once told curator Lynda Morris. “To have an opinion or view, you have to be outside society or your own particular group”.

CAROL RHODES 

Inlet, 1997 

Oil on board  

47.5 x 40.5 cm, 18 3/4 x 16 ins

© Carol Rhodes Estate

Rendered in minute detail yet with painterly breadth, Carol Rhodes’s paintings are fictional syntheses: composite landscapes drawn from disparate sources, including photographs taken by the artist herself or found in books on geography and geology, industrial archaeology and urban planning. Rhodes integrated these disjointed topographies through a complex, intuitive drawing and painting process. Her palette is subtle and particular, often using muted compound colours. (“I like it bland” she once said, though somewhat disingenuously.) Pictorial space can be compressed, even flattened, despite the vast distances described. Both foreground and horizon are mostly eliminated – Rhodes spoke of wanting an ‘egalitarian’ composition.

Despite (or due to) these compositional factors, an unease remains in these paintings – indeed, it intensifies. In works such as River, Roads (2013) or Forest and Road (1998), assumed infrastructural logic slowly reveals itself to be improbable and inconsistent.

In this way, Carol Rhodes’s pseudo-realistic scenes appear familiar yet unknown, mundane yet mysterious. And while the paintings can certainly be discussed in environmental, sociological or political terms, it is their restlessness and psychological charge that perhaps remains most resonant. Rhodes was known to speak of her landscapes as self-portraits.

Alongside her paintings, the exhibition will include a number of drawings. These are both rigorously pragmatic preparatory studies (‘cartoons’ in the technical sense of the word) and pictorial statements in their own right. Carol Rhodes first began exhibiting these drawings in 2006; as standalone works, they further evince her profoundly personal aesthetics and her truly unique investigation into the depiction of physical and psychological space.

CAROL RHODES was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1959; she died in Glasgow, Scotland, in 2018. During her lifetime, solo museum exhibitions of Rhodes’s work were presented at venues including The MAC, Belfast (2017); Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2007-08); and Tramway, Glasgow (2000). ‘See the World’, the first posthumous institutional exhibition of Rhodes’s work, is scheduled to take place in 2021 at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow, as part of Glasgow International Festival. Carol Rhodes’s work has been acquired by public collections including Tate; Arts Council of England; British Council Collection; Center for British Art, Yale; City Art Centre, Edinburgh; Glasgow Museums; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh and Southampton City Art Gallery.

ALISON JACQUES GALLERY 

16-18 Berners Street, London W1T 3LN 

www.alisonjacquesgallery.com

Simon Patterson @ Serlachius Museum Gustaf, Mänttä, Finland - Head to Toe

Simon Patterson: Head to Toe

Serlachius Museum Gustaf, Mänttä, Finland

Through 9 January 2022

SIMON PATTERSON 

The Great Bear, 1992

Litography 

Courtesy the Artist

SIMON PATTERSON

The Great Bear (1992) and Saptarishi (2012) 

in the exhibition Head to Toe

Courtesy the Artist. Photo: Sampo Linkoneva

SIMON PATTERSON’s art eludes simple definitions. The curator of the exhibition, Timo Valjakka, classifies Patterson as a conceptual pop artist. In his insightful and often humorous works, he directs us to reflect on what we know about the world we live in and what our knowledge is based on.

The basic elements of Simon Patterson’s works are often entirely familiar. The surprising combination of them, however, shows the world in a new light. Examples of this are wall drawings of football team systems, in which Jesus is the goalkeeper and the players are named after the Apostles.

Names play a central role in Simon Patterson’s art. He collects lists of the names of film stars, presidents, scientists, even astronauts. Sometimes he places them into some completely unexpected element: a map, diagram or instruction manual.

For Simon Patterson himself, each of the name works is a kind of historical painting: “I am interested in, for example, the Apollo 11 astronauts as an historical triptych. Even though we may not necessarily remember anyone’s face or only recall a foggy black-and-white snippet of the landing, when Neil Armstrong descends the ladder of the lunar module, the name paintings represent role models,” says Simon Patterson.

SIMON PATTERSON

Manned Flight 1990

in the exhibition Head to Toe

Courtesy the Artist. Photo: Sampo Linkoneva

SIMON PATTERSON

Enter the Dragon, 1999

Steel mirrors, steel and aluminum signs

Courtesy the Artist. Photo: Sampo Linkoneva

Simon Patterson uses a wide range of materials and techniques. He looks for the technique that best suits each work. Flying and travelling are recurring themes in his works, as are stunts and magic tricks. Appearing as someone else fascinates him greatly as a kind of illusion. He also admits that he uses the first man in space Yuri Gagarin or marine explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau as his alter egos.

The Museum Gustaf’s exhibition includes a series of photographs of his performative works Manned Flightand Landskip, which have been shown in exhibitions around the world. These series of works will also receive a continuation next summer in events related to the Serlachius Museums’ exhibition.

SIMON PATTERSON (b. 1967) lives and works in London. He graduated from Goldsmiths College School of Art in London in 1989 and held his first solo exhibition the same year in Glasgow, Scotland. Simon Patterson’s works has been exhibited in numerous museums and galleries in Europe, Japan and the United States. In 2014, he participated in the Gösta Pavilion opening exhibition, SuperPop!

SERLACHIUS MUSEUM GUSTAF

R. Erik Serlachiuksen katu 2, 35800 Mänttä, Finland

serlachius.fi

Kate Pincus-Whitney @ Fredericks & Freiser Gallery, NYC - Feast in the Neon Jungle

Kate Pincus-Whitney 

Feast in the Neon Jungle 

Fredericks & Freiser Gallery, New York 

Through March 12, 2021

Fredericks & Freiser presents an exhibition of new paintings by KATE PINCUS-WHITNEY (b. 1993, lives and works in Los Angeles). Invested in the sociopolitical and emotive possibilities of the dining table, Kate Pincus-Whitney creates maximalist still life scenes replete with colorful and textured objects of consumption. Whether spilling out onto fabric surrounded by florae or smothering a wooden tabletop, Kate Pincus-Whitney populates her canvases with “things”—from food and drinks, to books and candles, to various utensils and wares.  Her cosmologies of both highly personal and universally recognizable subjects gesture towards the shared necessity of sustenance. They reimagine the still life as a form of narrative portraiture and harness the psychological power of the communal meal to tap into the collective unconscious. 

Unapologetic in her bold color palette, Kate Pincus-Whitney’s scenes are boisterous and frenetic as they buzz with ineffable energy. Theatrically staged to explore the duality of the sacred and the profane, the result is a complete orchestration of a picnic or celebratory meal. Kate Pincus-Whitney harnesses what Jane Bennett calls “thing-power”: every day man-made objects are imbued with a strange and not-fully-knowable aliveness. In Bennett’s conceptualization, we are subject to the “vital materialities” we encounter; Kate Pincus-Whitney’s luminous objects exert their own thing-power and become acting subjects in their own right. The tablescapes read as both sacred shrine and intimate celebration wherein food acts as both symbol and icon. Through these scenes, the artist offers gratitude to a childhood raised in the kitchen by her mother and grandmother, just as she invites her audience to take part in this intimate history.  

As much about life as about death, Kate Pincus-Whitney’s scenes are a contemporary investigation into the Dutch legacy of the stilleven, more appropriately called nature morte in the French tradition and naturaleza muerta in the Spanish. Apparent are the artist’s myriad sources that span cross-discipline: from the writings of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell to Maya Angelou to Tom Wesselman’s resolutely American approach to the still life genre, Judy Chicago’s feminist intervention into the foodscape, and Matisse’s ability to make juxtaposing colors vibrate, to the symbolism of Les Nabis and the aggressive, fleshy strokes of Soutine. And of course, it is hard to miss the Warholian Campbell’s Tomato Soup can that has been emptied out to house a cactus. As a self-proclaimed artist-anthropologist with a ferocious appetite, Kate Pincus-Whitney excavates the annals of history to consider rituals of consumption alongside identity constitution. With her debut New York solo exhibition Feast in the Neon Jungle, Kate Pincus-Whitney positions herself within a cadre of young artists who deploy the capacious logic of the painted object to assert, investigate, and critique personal narratives as well as communal politics. 

FREDERICKS & FREISER

536 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.fredericksfreisergallery.com

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Jackie Nickerson @ Jack Shainman Gallery, NYC - Field Test

Jackie Nickerson: Field Test 

Jack Shainman Gallery, New York 

February 25 – April 3, 2021 

Jack Shainman Gallery presents Field Test, a new body of work by JACKIE NICKERSON. With photographic compositions that are almost sculptural in nature, there is a stunning materiality to these anonymous portrait-like photographs, in which faces are shrouded, shielded, perhaps suffocated – both literally, by the vibrant, textured plastics that wrap each figure, and metaphorically, by the consumerism of the modern world.

At the core of this series is Jackie Nickerson’s engagement with the socio- and psychological stress of technology and the effects its ever-present byproducts have on the human body. From the industrialization of plastic to the rapidly changing, abstract digital realm, these images respond to the readily evident fact that technology is reshaping the world, and those who inhabit it.

While Jackie Nickerson’s photographs have historically explored synthetic and natural materiality, Field Test extends beyond their incorporation, implicitly questioning the corporeal form and materials as obstructions, masks, and even protective barriers. She draws on her strong methodology, researching and choosing the exact components of each image prior to arranging them compositionally. There are mostly single individuals, each draped, obscured, and even constricted by tape, plastics, and other synthetic materials. Though human, each is neutralized, and one step further removed from more signifiers of identity such as race, personality, and gender. Her use of these inorganic resources is reminiscent of medical protective gear, if not a disguise or a means of avoiding recognition, suggesting an attack on the human body by an inhuman source and, above all, underscoring the lengths we must go to become “digitally anonymous.”

Rather presciently, Field Test was completed before the Covid-19 pandemic. While the work’s preoccupations are particularly pertinent to the post-Covid-19 world, they have their roots in a much broader range of concerns, of which the pandemic is but one symptom. What we see in Field Test emerges from the inner logic of Jackie Nickerson’s development over a number of years. In a natural progression from her most recent series, Terrain, Field Test operates on a far more abstract level. Rather than drawing from the natural world, Jackie Nickerson explores the “made world” and questions the frequency with which we relinquish control to technology and allow it to govern our daily lives. The materials in use range from the agricultural to the medical, and while they vary in their functionality, their commonality lies in Jackie Nickerson’s subtle decontextualization. In metamorphosing the body into a nebulous figure, one void of identity and facial recognition, each portrait is no longer just that, but rather an anonymous representation of who we have become the wake of globalization and commercialization.  

Jackie Nickerson brings sense of anonymity and formalism in works such as Pink Head, leaving only one strand of hair out of the paper material and tape masking the person beneath. With Hybrid, we are drawn to consider the dynamic relationships between plastics and the human body, which has become dangerously closer and more dependent with time. Drawing on the titular phrase, Field Test is an exploration of all that is visible and invisible, relative to what we believe we know and see.

JACKIE NICKERSON currently divides her time between London and rural Ireland. Her photographs are held in many collections including Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, KS; Pier 24, CA; the Vatican Museums, Italy; the Rubell Collection, FL; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA; The National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin; and have been featured in numerous museum exhibitions, including solo shows at the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin; the Accademia d’Arte, Bologna, Italy; the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, OH; and group shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA; among others. Jackie Nickerson was commissioned by TIME to travel to Liberia to photograph the 2014 Person of the Year, The Ebola Fighters, and was recently awarded Best Fashion and Beauty Cover by the American Society of Magazine Editors for her cover of Lupita Nyong’o for Vanity Fair.

JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY

524 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

jackshainman.com

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Bansky @ Serlachius Museum Gösta, Mänttä, Finland - A Visual Protest

Banksy. A Visual Protest

Serlachius Museum Gösta, Mänttä, Finland

15 May - 10 October 2021

Banksy. A Visual Protest features, in particular, works belonging to BANSKY’s early output: graphics and record covers. The exhibition is complemented by multimedia of street art he has made around the world, some of which has already been lost.

The exhibition has previously been seen in Milan and Rome and is curated by Gianni Mercurio, a curator specialising in pop and street art. This is not an official Banksy exhibition, as it has not been authorised by the artist himself. However, all the exhibition works are authenticated Banksy works from different collections.

The identity of Banksy (b. 1970s) – from Bristol, England – is unknown. Since the 1990s, he has produced street art, performances and artistic tricks around the world. Banksy has eluded the authorities for years, as attempts have been made to hold him accountable for, among other things, defacing public places.

Protected by his anonymity, Banksy makes street art in public places and has smuggled his own works into museums without the staff noticing. His stencil technique enables him to work quickly and to create visually skilful work with engaging content.

Underneath the humour, social protest is revealed 

Banksy’s art mocks commercialism and criticises consumer society. His themes are often anti-war and deeply humane, but at the same time contain warm humour. Animal rights, climate change, the exercise of power and hypocrisy are also important subjects – the multidimensionality of the themes are a hallmark of Banksy’s art. His works first appear humorous, but on closer inspection they exude strong social protest.

“I am proud that it is possible for Serlachius, in this informal, expertly curated exhibition that magnificently covers the themes of Banksy’s art, to present one of the world’s most important contemporary artists,” says Pauli Sivonen, Director of the Serlachius Museums.

Banksy has repeatedly expressed his resentment to the fact that street art is on show at museums charging an admission fee. For this reason, the Serlachius Museums will not charge an entrance fee for the duration of the Banksy exhibition and will not sell merchandise related to the exhibition.

 

SERLACHIUS MUSEUM GOSTA

Joenniementie 47, 35800 Mänttä, Finland

serlachius.fi

Wyatt Kahn @ Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich

Wyatt Kahn

Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich

Through March 13, 2021

Galerie Eva Presenhuber presents its fifth solo exhibition by the New York-based artist WYATT KAHN.

For the past ten years, Wyatt Kahn has been shaping wooden stretchers to produce canvas-covered wall reliefs that engage and indict Modernist legacies of both painting and sculpture. With each body of work, viewers have encountered shifts in scale, geometric adjacencies, contorted shapes, saturation of color, experimentation with surface treatments, and forays onto paper.

In his newest reliefs, Wyatt Kahn strays from the previous two-dimensional line of advancement and initiates a third dimension in a deeper constellation. “This past year made me look back at the foundational structures of my practice and add layers of chaos on top of them,” explains Wyatt Kahn. The usual cadence of shapes, which shares affinities with Harvey Quaytman’s swooning forms and the strategies of the Supports/Surfaces movement, is redirected into an echo. Planes that would usually radiate outwards, right and left, now pile up on top of each other, obstructing each other, complicating the picture with physical depth and shadowy perspective.

The arcs and circles in Piled Up (Ben’s Dream) and Untitled, which harken back to Lygia Clark’s Neo-Concrete Ovo, suggest the fast passing of solar and cyclical time. The titles of particular works, such as Seated Bather or The Old Man, are nods to early Modernism’s preoccupations with lush arcadias, strewn with figures, even if we are only left with its foundational parts and limbs. Language, unspoken, unshared, or solemnly uttered in a vacuum, piles up. The way in which these new occlusions incite the body to move in a new choreography of apprehending recalls Willys de Castro, as well as Lee Bontecou. And yet, this absorption of references, forced through the simplest materials, is expressed in a visual language that is Wyatt Kahn’s alone. It is an inventory of the artist’s syntax that guides us into the histories that inform his lexicon.

WYATT KAHN was born in 1983 in New York, NY, US, and lives and works in New York, NY, US. Recent institutional solo exhibitions include Variations on an object at Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Trento, IT (2016); and Object Paintings at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO, US (2015). The artist was also included in the group exhibition Jay DeFeo: The Ripple Effect at Le Consortium, Dijon, FR, which traveled to the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO, US (both in 2018). His work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, US; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, US; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, US; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, FR; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, US; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX, US; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL, US; CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, US; and Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, US.

GALERIE EVA PRESENHUBER, MAAG AREAL, ZURICH

Zahnradstrasse 21, CH-8005 Zurich

www.presenhuber.com

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Delphine Desane @ Luce Gallery, Turin - Dreams of a Dreamer

Delphine Desane, Dreams of a Dreamer 

Luce Gallery, Turin 

Through 27 February 2021 

Researching, blending and fusing disparate cultures, periods and moments, Delphine Desane uses her practice as a vessel for self exploration. The brush is a vehicle for understanding. Her simple forms contain multitudes. They speak to a single moment, packed with emotion, memories, longing. A single line acts as a marker for realizations, loss, and labor. Delphine Desane’s portraits are direct, intentionally unembellished, quietly referencing the shapes and figures of known and unknown ancestors. Only after completion do influences present themselves to her - the pointed chin of a Dan Mask, the flattened scapes of the Obin family’s practice (Philomé Obin in particular), and the graphic qualities of Ghanian Asafo Flags. Bold and clear, her portraits are purposefully impersonal, so as to not limit their message.

In Delphine Desane’s first solo show “Dreams of a Dreamer”, landscape provides no home to the artist's cast of characters. Instead they must find roots on their own. These roots find fertile ground in the memory of the viewer, growing slowly into something that can’t be ignored. In her three years as a practicing artist, Delphine Desane has seeded themes of displacement, home, birth and regeneration. Her steady hand relays a grace and conviction central to her person, depicting mostly female, sometimes animal characters, with pieced together identities, both connected to and separated from the Earth. Her generally minimal backgrounds are “an open question,” allowing the viewer to imagine her figures almost anywhere. What multiplicities exist within her subjects are held in the eyes. The truth rests in an iris, but is only accessible to those willing to look directly at it. Like the artist, these figures refuse to be boxed in.

Delphine Desane’s subjects live outside of time - a child, a mother and a grandmother all at once. Lineage is held within a single husk - an impossibility in our physical realm. Delphine Desane’s figures are not defined by their past, present or expected future, respectively, but encapsulate all that they could be, all that they are, all that they were, in one explosive moment. “No matter where you go, the first thing people see is your blackness,” says the artist, and so, that is often the only clue given to the viewer - a reclamation of agency.

Drawing on the surrealist and religious themes in Hector Hyppolite’s paintings (a peer of Andre Breton) and the perceptive black and white photographs of Katsu Naito and Seydou Keita, Delphine Desane creates ever-extending narratives that seem to grow and move as you witness them. There is something ancient in these paintings. Like the figurative etchings on Greek Amphora or the portrait on an agate cameo, “I’ll Open My Sun-Filled Heart to You” shows us a figure thrown into relief, passion shown in her stance alone. In “Promised Land” we see a traveler nearing the end of her journey. Nature folds in on her as she moves, protecting or restricting.

At this early stage in her career Delphine Desane’s oeuvre speaks to the scores of experiences she has weathered at each stage of her life as a Black woman. Her canvases relate to each other in their anonymity. One consistent feature is the artist’s use of blue, valued because it is “synonymous with infinity.”

In “Dreams of a Dreamer”, Delphine Desane brings together the latest body of works, simply rendered, and sensitively offered. The paintings shown detour from Delphine Desane’s previous works in their ambition, easily traceable through their growing size. The artist is beginning to connect the dots between her personal history, imagined future, and the myriad identities of her people. She reaches for something that is purely her own and in so doing excavates the many inescapable influences that inform her dual cultural identities (Haitian and French). Dreams of a Dreamer is one long, never ending, waking dream. A chosen dream. One in which the message is revealed and the messengers are hidden.

By Camille Okhio

LUCE GALLERY

Largo Montebello 40, 10124 Torino

lucegallery.com

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Jay Heikes @ Marianne Boesky Gallery, NYC - Echo In Color

Jay Heikes: Echo In Color 

Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York 

February 13 – March 13, 2021 

JAY HEIKES

Second Wave, 2020

Oil on stained canvas

75 x 112 in

Courtesy of the artist and 

Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen

Marianne Boesky Gallery presents Echo in Color, JAY HEIKES’ fifth solo exhibition with the gallery. With his show, Jay Heikes continues his exploration of alchemical processes and the fleeting sense of connection that can be found when turning to nature and the universe. The exhibition features a selection of new and recent paintings from the artist’s Mother Sky series and Minor Planets sculptures. 

Jay Heikes is regarded for his varied practice, wherein he combines and transforms an array of media and materials, including recent works that center around a preoccupation with the philosophical tradition of alchemy. The title of the exhibition, Echo in Color, references the perceptual phenomena of synesthesia, a blending of the senses in which the stimulation of one modality produces sensation in another. The assembled works in the exhibition evoke a similar awareness, crossing the senses in ways that are not understood through everyday language. Jay Heikes’ preoccupation with these concepts speaks to his deep considerations of the role that art serves in culture. During a time of economic, social, and environmental turbulence, the artist creates a meditative response to this uncertainty.

“The sheer vastness of a wide-open space is imbued with feelings of emptiness – only in a cave or canyon can the gesture of a scream be returned,” said Jay Heikes. “Through the last four years of alienation and the recent time collectively spent in isolation, I began to see the idea that in retreating to an imagined vastness, such as through a painting of the sky, the works become representations that keep us grounded and avoid the total void of the sublime.”

In particular, Jay Heikes is interested in the juxtaposition of the painting and sculpture presented within Echo in Color. In his Mother Sky works, the artist stains the canvas using a combination of vinegar, salt, and powdered pigment. As they react, these substances generate unpredictable hues, ranging from rust, indigo, copper, and fluorescent greens. Screen printed and dabbed on the canvases are voluminous shapes of clouds and smoke, composed from distortions of found and photographed images. The euphoria in the otherworldly and meditative vistas simultaneously cause an underlying unease through the eerie and acidic tones of the tempestuous, burning skies that layer the canvas. The imagined atmospheres, at first an escapist opportunity for the viewer, reflect an inability to create complete control.

Presented alongside the paintings, Jay Heikes features Minor Planets sculptures. This series of sculptures has been crafted from a range of materials, including concrete, pyrite, salt, slag, asphaltum, quartz, rope, and dust collected from the artist’s studio in the forms of modeled orbs and disks – timeless and ancient in appearance. The latest iteration of the Minor Planets on view in Echo in Color has transitioned to center on the material of concrete, giving the sculptures weight and autonomy in both their scale and composition. In this way, the juxtaposition of turning to the sky as a means of transcendence alongside the grounding materiality of the sculptures offers refuge in turbulent times. Yet even the Minor Planets serve as a testimony to the unpredictability of the artist’s chosen mediums and form, as the metals and complementary materials in the sculptures oxidize and mutate over time. In his 2019 text on this body of works, “I Wavereth,” Jay Heikes notes, “At times it feels like I am playing God with these landscapes, imagining an atmosphere from above that has finally freed itself of all human trivialities. I was supposed to pick up the mantle of activism and help answer the people’s cries but instead I became more distant, even hidden, while creating these representational moods of the soul.”

On the occasion of this exhibition, the artist’s first comprehensive monograph was published in cooperation with Gregory Miller & Co. and distributed by Distributed Art Publishers and features text by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, Jenelle Porter, Philippe Vergne, and an interview between Jay Heikes and Hamza Walker.

Yale graduate and Minneapolis-based artist JAY HEIKES (b. 1975) is known for his heterogeneous practice, which mixes and reinterprets a kaleidoscopic array of media—activating stories, puns, and irony in a cyclical meditation. His most recent body of work employs his preoccupation with the philosophical tradition of alchemy. Themes of evolution and regeneration, stasis and corrosion take form in his artistic actions, recharging Heikes' previous narrative pursuits and reaffirming the notion that mutation and change are essential to the creative process.

Following his first solo presentation at Artists Space, New York in 2003, Jay Heikes participated in a number of group exhibitions at venues such as the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2003) and the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (2002 and 2005). In 2006, Jay Heikes was included in the Whitney Biennial: Day for Night,curated by Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne. Since then, Heikes has been the subject of numerous domestic and international exhibitions, including shows at The Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2007); the Aspen Art Museum (2012); Grimm Gallery, Amsterdam (2015); Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago (2015); Federica Schiavo Gallery, Rome (2019); and Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NE (2019).

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