David Hockney @ Pace Gallery, East Hampton - Ma Normandie

David Hockney: Ma Normandie 

Pace Gallery, East Hampton 

May 27 – June 6, 2021

DAVID HOCKNEY

Ruby Dreaming, 2019 

© 2021 David Hockney, courtesy Pace Gallery

Pace presents a solo exhibition of work by DAVID HOCKNEY as its second show of the 2021 season in East Hampton. The 14 prints on display illustrate the artist’s home in Normandy and its surroundings as well as the interior of the artist’s studio. Exploring the artist’s recurring theme of the natural narrative of the changing seasons, this body of work is full of the vibrancy that has come to define much of David Hockney’s art. These works celebrate creativity and invite viewers to see the power of nature as the world outside continues to blossom and spring gives away to the summer.

On a visit to Normandy in the fall of 2018, the artist fell in love with its pastoral landscape, and in March 2019, he moved to a rural area in the region. As he immersed himself in his new house, a 17th-century half-timber cottage on 12 acres of verdant land, David Hockney committed to documenting the arrival of spring around him—the same subject that had occupied him in 2011 when he famously depicted the advent of spring in East Yorkshire. The resulting images show the Norman countryside waking up to a new season. Images like Study of “The Entrance” (2019) not only show the rich greens and blues of spring but also the joy inherent to that season. On view more broadly are the thoughtful and exploratory ways in which David Hockney engages with his surroundings. Whether walking viewers around his house, which he has captured from each cardinal direction, or imagining the inner workings of his dog’s mind, as in Ruby Dreaming (2019), each work is imbued with the pleasure of its own creation and celebrates with delicate, assured marks the beauty of everyday life.

Included in the show are three new iPad drawings printed on paper. These works capture the inside of David Hockney’s home; one, depicting a hearth with a crackling fire, was featured on the cover of the New Yorker in December 2020 accompanied by an interview with the artist. Hockney has been drawing regularly using the iPad since the device was introduced in 2010, having previously used the iPhone in a similar manner. Throughout his career, he has experimented with a wide variety of then-new technologies, including Polaroid cameras, fax machines, and video.

Concurrent with this exhibition, the artist’s new 2½ minute animated work, titled Remember you cannot look at the sun or death for very long, was broadcast on electronic billboards in Times Square in New York and prominent locations in London, Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Seoul during the month of May. In New York, Times Square Arts feature the work as part of its Midnight Moment series, playing it on 76 synchronized screens throughout Times Square nightly from 11:57pm to midnight. The work depicts a sunrise, offering a powerful symbol of hope and collaboration, in keeping with themes explored in the artist’s exhibition at Pace in East Hampton.

Several museum exhibitions of the artist’s work in the United States and United Kingdom also coincide with the East Hampton presentation. At New York City’s Morgan Library, a show of Hockney’s portraits on paper, which opened in October, will run through May 30, 2021. An astute pairing of the joyful landscapes of Hockney and Vincent van Gogh is on view at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston through June 20, 2021. Finally, an exhibition of 116 of Hockney’s iPad drawings of spring in Normandy opened at the Royal Academy in London on May 23, 2021.

DAVID HOCKNEY (b. 1937, Bradford, United Kingdom), one of the most influential artists of the late 20th and 21st century, has consistently explored the potential of perspective and pictorial space in his work. As a student, David Hockney studied traditions of British landscape painting. He broke from the then-reigning interest in abstract painting to pursue his own style, developing a brightly colored palette that burst forth in his paintings from the 1960s and 1970s in Los Angeles and continued into a distinctive, studied, and original approach to the problems and conventions of painting. Hockney works in a variety of media, including printmaking, painting, stage design, and photographic collage.

PACE GALLERY

68 Park Place, East Hampton, NY 11937 

www.pacegallery.com

Zaha Hadid @ Galerie Gmurzynska, Zurich - Abstracting the Landscape

Zaha Hadid: Abstracting the Landscape 

Galerie Gmurzynska, Zurich 

Through 31 July, 2021 

Zaha Hadid passed away in Miami on March 31, 2016 at the age of 65. On the 5th Anniversary of her death, Galerie Gmurzynska presents an immersive homage to the visionary Architect. 

The shared interests between the gallery and Zaha Hadid for the Russian avant-garde fortuitously crossed paths in 1992 at the monumental exhibition "The Great Utopia," at the Guggenheim Museum for which Zaha Hadid designed the rotunda – the first architect tasked with reimagining the Frank Lloyd Wright architectural icon. From early in her career, her peerless aesthetic was deeply inspired by Kazimir Malevich and the Suprematists, on whom she prepared her graduation thesis in 1976. 

The gallery’s active collaboration with Zaha Hadid from 2010 until her death began with the idea to again combine her knowledge of the Russian avant-garde with her architectural practice, which had advanced deeper since the Guggenheim exhibition. Thus, in 2010, the exhibition "Zaha Hadid and Suprematism" was held at Galerie Gmurzynska’s headquarters on Paradeplatz in Zurich. The exhibition and book, published together with Hatje Cantz, became a global event. This first collaboration with Zaha was followed by many other exhibition projects, including at Art Basel. On the occasion of the important Malevich retrospective held in 2014 at Tate London the star architect was asked to take part in a long documentary about Malevich with the BBC. Part of this documentary included an interview with Galerie Gmurzynska CEO Mathias Rastorfer and Zaha Hadid about Malevich and the nature of architecture and art. 

The final project completely planned by Zaha Hadid was again to show the dramatic development of her architecture in the context of another foundational modern master: Kurt Schwitters. The exhibition architecture was planned entirely by Hadid, and the selection of works by Schwitters was as well rigorously curated by her. Hadid unfortunately died before the opening of the show and left behind an architectural monument remaining unchanged in the Galerie Gmurzynska on Paradeplatz, open to the public. 

The latest exhibition at Galerie Gmurzynska titled "Abstracting The Landscape" was conceived and created with the same team with whom the gallery planned and executed all Zaha Hadid exhibitions since 2010. It has been a fruitful and euphoric collaboration for all involved, for which Galerie Gmurzynska expresses its heartfelt gratitude to the entire Zaha Hadid design and archive team. In this spirit of long-term collaboration and the highest respect for her perpetual vision, historical projects with models and drawings, as well as sculptural objects realized since her passing have been individually selected to be integrated into a custom floor design displaying Hadid’s best traits. The exhibition also features site-specific objects, as well as never-before exhibited designs. 

GALERIE GMURZYNSKA 

Paradeplatz 2, Zurich 

www.gmurzynska.com

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Henri Cartier-Bresson @ Musée Carnavalet, Paris - Revoir Paris

Henri Cartier-Bresson - Revoir Paris

Musée Carnavalet, Paris

15 juin - 31 octobre 2021

HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON

Les quais de Seine, 1955

Collection du musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris 

© Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos

HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON

Sous le métro aérien, boulevard de la Chapelle, 1951

Collection de la Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson 

© Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos

Le musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris s’associe avec la Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson pour mettre en lumière l’importance de Paris dans la vie et l’oeuvre d’Henri Cartier-Bresson, l’un des plus grands photographes français du XXe siècle. Le musée revisite les liens tissés par l’artiste avec une ville où il a toujours habité et qui l’a nourri artistiquement. Après des débuts marqués par l’influence du photographe Eugène Atget et des artistes surréalistes, Cartier-Bresson se découvre voyageur au long cours, avec Paris comme port d’attache. Dans cette ville, qu’il ne cesse de redécouvrir, c’est d’abord l’être humain qui l’intéresse. Il le saisit dans la rue ou à l’occasion de rencontres. Il témoigne aussi de grands événements d’actualité comme la Libération de Paris en août 1944 et Mai 68. Il gagne, dès qu’il le peut, les lieux de manifestations.

A Paris, comme ailleurs, son appareil photo ne le quitte pas. Photographier est une respiration, une affirmation, une protestation parfois. Ses images parisiennes qui figurent en bonne place dans son oeuvre, témoignent de ses errances mais sont également prises dans le cadre de reportages et commandes souvent méconnues pour la presse internationale – Cartier-Bresson n’en retient généralement qu’une image dans ses livres et expositions. Cette mosaïque définit un flâneur particulièrement attiré par les quais de la Seine et le Paris des marges.

Fruit d’un travail de recherche de plusieurs années, l’exposition présente des tirages originaux dont une trentaine d’inédits, des publications, ainsi que des enregistrements audiovisuels de l’artiste. Les photographies sont issues pour majorité des collections du musée Carnavalet et de la Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Conçu conjointement par les deux institutions, ce projet résonne avec l’exposition Eugène Atget – Voir Paris présentée à la Fondation HCB et réalisée à partir des collections du musée Carnavalet.

Un ouvrage comprenant les essais des commissaires et 200 reproductions est publié aux Éditions Paris Musées.

COMMISSARIAT GÉNÉRAL : Valérie Guillaume, directrice du musée Carnavalet - Histoire de Paris et François Hébel, directeur de la Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

COMMISSARIAT SCIENTIFIQUE : Anne de Mondenard, conservatrice en chef, musée Carnavalet - Histoire de Paris, Agnès Sire, directrice artistique et Aude Raimbault, conservatrice des collections, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson. 

MUSEE CARNAVALET - HISTOIRE DE PARIS

23 rue de Sévigné, 75003 Paris

www.carnavalet.paris.fr

Kristina Riska @ Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki - Canopic

Kristina Riska: Canopic

Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki

Through June 6, 2021

 

The basic forms of KRISTINA RISKA’s (b. 1960) sculptures are carefully planned and crafted. Still, chance inevitably plays a significant role in ceramics, a medium with a mind of its own in quite a literal sense. The clay changes size and shape in the kiln, and the glazes can take on surprising tones and textures.

The thin but sturdy undulating walls of the fragile-looking sculptures are achieved using the coil construction technique: Kristina Riska uses her fingers to roll out soft, thick coils, which she layers one on top of the other. She then decorates the surface with self-made stencils and glazes. Her monumental vessels are not intended for storing anything, but the interior – and the fact that we can see inside the sculptures – is an integral part of each work.

KRISTINA RISKA is one of Finland’s most internationally renowned ceramic artists. She is a senior member of the Arabia Art Department Society of Helsinki. Her internationally acclaimed, award-winning work has featured in numerous exhibitions from Denmark to the US and Japan. Her sculptures are found in many private collections abroad, and she is also represented in public collections, including the Saastamoinen Foundation and the Swedish State collection.

GALERIE FORSBLOM

Yrjönkatu 22 - 00120 Helsinki

www.galerieforsblom.com

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Ellen Gallagher @ Hauser & Wirth London - Ecstatic Draught of Fishes

Ellen Gallagher 

Ecstatic Draught of Fishes 

Hauser & Wirth London 

21 May - 31 July 2021 

ELLEN GALLAGHER 

Ecstatic Draught of Fishes, 2020

Oil, palladium leaf and paper on canvas

248 x 202 cm / 97 5/8 x 79 1/2 inches

Photo: Tony Nathan

© Ellen Gallagher

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

ELLEN GALLAGHER 

Watery Ecstatic, 2021

Watercolour, varnish, and cut paper on paper

198 x 140 cm / 78 x 55 1/8 inches

Photo: Tony Nathan

© Ellen Gallagher

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

ELLEN GALLAGHER builds intricate, multi-layered works that pivot between the natural world, mythology and history. Her process involves undoing and reforming trains of thought often over long periods of time and across linked bodies of works. This exhibition presents new large-scale paintings and watercolour works on paper by the artist, including a continuation of her Watery Ecstatic works (2001—ongoing) and a recent series of paintings Ecstatic Draught of Fishes begun in 2019.

Since the early 1990s, Ellen Gallagher has created a polyvalent body of work encompassing painting, drawing, collage and celluloid based projections that fuse technique and material into syncretic form. Her arresting compositions are a process of recovery and reconstitution through the accumulation and erasure of media, which results in palimpsestic and topographic surfaces that are often carved, inlaid, mounted, printed, blotted and inscribed. The subtile textures of her work bear witness to a singular process that is materially and conceptually intertwined.

In the intricately variegated Ecstatic Draught of Fishes paintings, Ellen Gallagher investigates the parallels between the history of slavery, colonialism and belief systems, in relation to oceanographic natural history. Besides the title, which spans different moments in art history through the course of the three distinct paintings it encompasses, Ellen Gallagher focuses our attention on the draught yet to yield. The basis for the recent works lies in three historical paintings: ‘The Miraculous Draught of Fishes’ (1618–19), Peter Paul Rubens’ depiction of a miracle from Christ; ‘The Raft of the Medusa’ (1819) by Théodore Géricault, showing the aftermath of a shipwreck of colonists off the coast of today’s Mauritania; and J.M.W Turner’s ‘Slave Ship’ (1840), which illustrates the barbaric act of slaves being thrown overboard to relieve weight during a storm. These paintings seem to have been overlaid and atomized in Gallagher’s intense and delicate works. Myriad spots resembling eyes form shimmering, amoebic clouds on backgrounds of penmanship paper, while palladium-leaf caryatids proliferate.

In a new group of works on paper from Ellen Gallagher’s Watery Ecstatic series, the artist employs oceanographic history, Black-Atlantis mythology, and ideas around colonial mapping to cultivate complex biomorphic forms. The most resounding influence of the new watercolours comes from the mappings of 17th-century Dutch artist Albert Eckhout, who travelled with the Dutch Royal Court in the 1630s to document their conquest of the prosperous sugarcane-producing region in the northeast of the Portuguese colony, Brazil. Ellen Gallagher’s watercolours probe and draw upon ‘commodity portraits’ of the African and Indigenous populations of Brazil that Eckhout produced as part of a project of imperial mapping intended to catalogue the local flora, fauna, people, and customs in the new territory. The long-standing influence of the Afro-futurist myth of Drexciya, originally imagined in the 1990s by the prominent Detroit-based electronic music duo of the same name, further informs Ellen Gallagher’s engagement with Eckhout’s catalogue. Drexciya propose a free-floating unclassified existence beyond surveillance; a submarine realm populated by the unborn children of pregnant African women thrown off slave ships during the centuries-long Middle Passage slave trade. Here, their offspring have adapted gills and proliferate as UFO’s (unidentified floating objects).

ELLEN GALLAGHER 

Paradise Shift, 2020

Mixed media on canvas

202 x 188 cm / 79 1/2 x 74 inches

Photo: Tony Nathan 

© Ellen Gallagher

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

A work by Ellen Gallagher entitled ‘Paradise Shift’ (2020), which draws us down to the depths of the ocean floor, is also on display. The artist combines paper and canvas that has been stretched and incised in striated areas. The penmanship paper support is awash with saturations of umber and clay hued pigments, creating a geographic timeline in which interlocking forms appear to mutate between figuration and abstraction, like agents in a musical composition coming together in an evolving continuum.

Ellen Gallagher’s works are currently on view in ‘Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America’ at the New Museum, New York, through June 2021. Ellen Gallagher is also participating in the 12th edition of Sonsbeek in the Netherlands, for which she has made an installation of work in de Waalse Kerk Arnhem, on view from June 2021 until September 2021. The first monograph to provide a comprehensive overview of Ellen Gallagher’s career by Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith will be published by Lund Humphries on 7 October 2021. 

HAUSER & WIRTH

23 Savile Row, London W1S 2ET

www.hauserwirth.com

The New Woman Behind the Camera @ The Met, NYC & the NGA, Washington DC

The New Woman Behind the Camera

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

July 2 - October 3, 2021

National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

October 31, 2021 - January 30, 2022

TSUNEKO SASAMOTO

Unknown, Tsuneko Sasamoto, Tokyo, 1940 

Inkjet print, 2020, 18.2 cm x 18.2 cm (7 3/16 in. x 7 3/16 in.). 

Courtesy Tsuneko Sasamoto / Japan Professional Photographers Society

The New Woman of the 1920s was a powerful expression of modernity, a global phenomenon that embodied an ideal of female empowerment based on real women making revolutionary changes in life and art. The New Woman Behind the Camera features 185 photographs, photo books, and illustrated magazines by 120 photographers from over 20 countries. This groundbreaking exhibition highlights the work of the diverse “new” women who made significant advances in modern photography from the 1920s to the 1950s. During this tumultuous period shaped by two world wars, women stood at the forefront of experimentation with the camera and produced invaluable visual testimony that reflects both their personal experiences and the extraordinary social and political transformations of the era.

Max Hollein, Marina Kellen French Director of The Met, commented, “The international scope of this project is unprecedented. Though the New Woman is often regarded as a Western phenomenon, this exhibition proves otherwise by bringing together rarely seen photographs from around the world and presenting a nuanced, global history of photography. The women featured are responsible for shifting the direction of modern photography, and it is exhilarating to witness the accomplishments of these extraordinary practitioners.”

The first exhibition to take an international approach to the subject, The New Woman Behind the Camera examines women’s pioneering work in a number of genres, from avant-garde experimentation and commercial studio practice to social documentary, photojournalism, ethnography, and sports, dance, and fashion photography. It highlights the work of photographers such as Ilse Bing, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Claude Cahun, Florestine Perrault Collins, Elizaveta Ignatovich, Dorothea Lange, Lee Miller, Niu Weiyu, Tsuneko Sasamoto, Gerda Taro, and Homai Vyarawalla, among many others.

Known by different names, from nouvelle femme and neue Frau to modan gāru and xin nüxing, the New Woman of the 1920s was easy to recognize but hard to define. Her image—a woman with bobbed hair, stylish dress, and a confident stride—was everywhere, splashed across the pages of magazines and projected on the silver screen. A symbol that broke down conventional ideas of gender, the New Woman was inspiring for some and controversial for others, embraced and resisted to varying degrees from country to country.

For many of these daring women, the camera was a means to assert their self-determination and artistic expression. The exhibition begins with a selection of compelling self-portraits, often featuring the photographer with her camera. Highlights include innovative self-portraits by Florence Henri, Annemarie Heinrich, and Alma Lavenson.

For many women, commercial studios were an important entry point into the field of photography, allowing them to forge professional careers and earn their own income. From running successful businesses in Berlin, Buenos Aires, and Vienna to earning recognition as one of the first female photographers in their respective country, women around the world, including Karimeh Abbud, Steffi Brandl, Trude Fleischmann, Annemarie Heinrich, Eiko Yamazawa, and Madame Yevonde, reinvigorated studio practice. Photography studios run by Black American women, such as Florestine Perrault Collins, not only preserved likenesses but also countered racist images then circulating in the mass media.

The availability of smaller, lightweight cameras spurred a number of women photographers to explore the city and the diversity of urban experience outside the studio. The exhibition features stunning street scenes and architectural views by Alice Brill, Rebecca Lepkoff, Helen Levitt, Lisette Model, Genevieve Naylor, and Tazue Satō Matsunaga, among others. Creative formal approaches—such as photomontage, photograms, unconventional cropping, and dizzying camera angles—came to define photography during this period. On view are experimental works by such artists as Valentina Kulagina, Dora Maar, Tina Modotti, Lucia Moholy, Toshiko Okanoue, and Grete Stern, all of whom pushed the boundaries of the medium.

During this period, many women traveled extensively for the first time and took photographs documenting their experiences abroad in Africa, China, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Others, including Marjorie Content, Eslanda Goode Robeson, and Anna Riwkin, engaged in more formal ethnographic projects. This period also gave rise to new ideas about health and sexuality and to changing attitudes about movement and dress. Women photographers such as Lotte Jacobi, Jeanne Mandello, and Germaine Krull produced images of liberated modern bodies, from pioneering photographs of the nude to exuberant pictures of sport and dance.

The unprecedented demand for fashion and advertising pictures between the world wars provided new employment opportunities for many female photographers, including Lillian Bassman, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Toni Frissell, Frances McLaughlin-Gill, Margaret Watkins, Caroline Whiting Fellows, and Yva. Fashion magazines such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar visually defined the tastes and aspirations of the New Woman and offered a space in which women could experiment with pictures intended for a predominantly female readership.

The rise of the picture press also established photojournalism and social documentary photography as dominant forms of visual expression. Galvanized by the effects of a global economic crisis and growing political unrest, many women photographers, including Lucy Ashjian, Margaret Bourke-White, Kati Horna, Dorothea Lange, and Hansel Mieth, created powerful images that exposed injustice and swayed public opinion. While women photojournalists often received so-called “soft assignments” on the home front, others risked their lives on the battlefield. The exhibition features combat photographs by Thérèse Bonney, Galina Sanko, and Gerda Taro, as well as unsparing views of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps by Lee Miller. Views of Hiroshima by Tsuneko Sasamoto and photographs of the newly formed People’s Republic of China by Hou Bo and Niu Weiyu underscore the global complexities of the postwar era.

The New Woman Behind the Camera is curated by Andrea Nelson, Associate Curator in the Department of Photographs, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. The Met’s presentation is organized by Mia Fineman, Curator, with Virginia McBride, Research Assistant, both in the Department of Photographs.

The exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, in association with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Following its presentation at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the exhibition will travel to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, published by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and distributed by DelMonico Books.

It is made possible in part by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, The Daniel and Estrellita Brodsky Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028

metmuseum.org

Paul McCarthy @ Peder Lund, Oslo - Painted Pirates Heads

Paul McCarthy: Painted Pirates Heads

Peder Lund, Oslo

Through 5 September 2021

PAUL McCARTHY

Captain Dick Hat, 2010/2017

Courtesy of the artist and Peder Lund  

Photo: Uli Holz

Peder Lund presents nine painted bronze sculptures by one of the most widely influential and important artists of his generation, PAUL McCARTHY (b. 1945). This is the gallery’s second time showing the LA artist’s work. Since the 1960s, Paul McCarthy has worked within a broad range of artistic expressions, spanning media such as video, performance, painting, drawing, and sculpture. Paul McCarthy is often associated with Wiener Actionism and its brutal and relentless expressions, which sought to attack conformism, conservatism, and the contentment of society. He challenges both his own and the audience’s boundaries and invites us to view the ordinary with fresh eyes to discover how illusory and relative our conception of reality is.

These painted pirate sculptures were created as part of the artist’s seminal Caribbean Pirates project, an ongoing endeavor that was realized together with Paul McCarthy’s son Damon McCarthy, with whom he has since produced work regularly. First exhibited in 2005 at Haus der Kunst in Munich, Caribbean Pirates was inspired by the popular ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ attraction in Disneyland, however, predates the major blockbuster movie franchise of the same name that Disney would go on to produce. The McCarthys’ project consists of three large installations, a vast number of drawings and sculptures, several thousand photographs, and many hours of video. Unlike the Disney ride, which offers sanitized depictions of pirates as merry swashbucklers, McCarthy’s version centers on hyper-violent, hyper-sexual antics that are set against a backdrop of the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. Paul McCarthy critiques Western stereotypes of masculinity by transforming the iconic figure of the pirate through brutal images of debauchery and castration, as well as allegorizes the destruction, plunder, and collateral damage of uncaring and uninformed foreign governments. Through sickening irony, the artist exposes the jingoistic rationalizations and justifications of remote violence that so exemplified the American occupation and which brought about further destabilization to the Middle East. Other fascinating dimensions of this project were prompted by coverage of disasters at sea around the turn of the 21st century; piracy off the Horn of Africa and in the Strait of Malacca; oil spills from tankers and ocean-drilling platforms; and new waves of perilous seaborne migration in the Mediterranean, as well as Paul McCarthy’s personal assessment of the commercial art world at large. The pirate sculptures have never before been shown.

In John C. Welchman's expansive essay for the two-volume artist book, Paul McCarthy and Damon McCarthy: Caribbean Pirates, he highlights Paul McCarthy's long-standing fascination with the sea, declaring that he belongs to a group of artists whom the author terms the "marine core". As opposed to numerous Los Angeles based artists who deliberately moved their focus away from the ocean that edges their city, instead preferring to engage with the artificial, superficial, or illusory aspects of "La La Land" - Richard Diebenkorn's boulevards from his Ocean Park series; Ed Ruscha's parking lots and gas stations; John Baldessari's examination of civic and Hollywood self-representations and fantasies - the McCarthys, in Caribbean Pirates, intentionally take up maritime lore and legend in their epic project. It should be noted, of course, that the artist and his son chose to focus their attention on the Caribbean, which is quite distant—geographically, historically, and conceptually—from the Pacific, however, offered them ample space to interrogate what Welchman refers to as the "conjectural relations of 'historical' and contemporary events as well as the allegorical conditions they broker between questions of democracy and anarchy, civil and extra-civil society, discipline and desire, rights and needs."

The centerpiece of the Caribbean Pirates film is an imposing five-meter high pirate ship, Frigate, made of fiberglass. The deck of its brownish-red hull is strewn with objects and smeared with chocolate sauce, ketchup, and fake blood. The Pirate Party videos projected on the walls surrounding the ship reveal the obscene and brutal scenes which took place on board the ship when it was parked in Paul McCarthy's Los Angeles studio. The videos star thirty actors, some of them wearing oversize carnival heads. The actors, with Paul McCarthy in the lead, simulate the invasion of a village, complete with rape, mutilation, violence, and the public sale of women in the village. The parallel with today’s global capitalism and imperialist invasions is striking. The other major set-piece, in addition to Frigate, was House Boat, an actual vessel purchased, rather than constructed, by Damon McCarthy. Originally meant to fit in a niche-like aperture in Frigate and physically prop it up, this plan was quickly abandoned due to its logistical impossibility. The desired, conjoined form, however, can be seen in the sculpture entitled Frigate (2010/2017) which comes in separate pieces of the vessels which, when installed, show the truly desired composition. 

The sculptures presented at Peder Lund comprise mostly of busts created of Paul's head created at the time of performances, first cast in plaster, which is a fast and cheap way of working, allowing for Paul McCarthy to then desecrate and mutilate his form, to then be cast in the final material of bronze. Paul McCarthy created dozens of silicone masks of characters to be used in the performance, as well as traditional prosthetics and even an oversized animatronic, fiberglass head of the famed Captain Morgan. The animatronic head ended up being entirely too heavy for an actor to don, so the artist instead took a life cast of his body, affixed it to the head, and tied the entire monstrous piece to a chair where it was then completely remote controlled. Paul McCarthy often uses references to popular culture figures and advertisements, especially those created by the alcohol and tobacco industries, to tear down the obvious cynicism and hypocrisy in light of their documented targeting of populations most vulnerable to becoming addicted to their products - young people and the under-served, often people of color - who were especially barraged with images of care-free, smiling billboard, magazine, and tv ads in the 1970s through early 2000s.

Central to Paul McCarthy's development for such a wide-ranging project as Caribbean Pirates, are his preparatory drawings, many of which now belong to renowned institutional collections and were integral to the Hammer Museum's recent comprehensive survey of the artist's drawings and works on paper, entitled Head Space, Drawings 1963–2019. The sculpture entitled Captain Dick Hat (2010/2017) was, according to the artist, first conceptualized via the drawing entitled Penis Hat (2001), which is owned by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. According to Welchman, Penis Hat exemplifies Paul McCarthy's careerlong interest in the nature and consequences of excavation and the disposition of downwardness it precipitates. Present in many quite literal variants over the last forty years, the idea of the hole also correlates with several other concerns: boring into and breaking through the surface, ideas of de-hierarchization so often present in the judgment of art in the contemporary market, and the more general concept of a descent into what might "lie beneath" - repressed thoughts, dark memories, and the viscera of the human body. The busts of Hammer Head, Shit Face, and Shit Face Fucked Up are all victims to mutilations - with objects haphazardly, yet violently, punched through orifices and internal organs being yanked out for grotesque display.

Hammer Head, along with Butter Dog, was accessorized with a hat in the distinctive shape of a masterwork of mid-century architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright's "temple of the spirit" - the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Often viewed as a pinnacle institutional collection for post-war art, in Paul McCarthy's hands, the stacked cylinders are unsteady, capable of slipping and crashing to the floor at any small disruption. The rough finishing of the enamel paint, which is capable of achieving high-gloss finishes in the works such as Jack or Pot Head, here looks degraded and weathered, as if its most glorious days are behind it. Still considered as an "outsider artist" to many, Paul McCarthy has balked at the commercialization of his art, instead preferring to hold a mirror up to the cannibalizing cycles the art world often demands.

PAUL McCARTHY was born in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1945, and began his art studies at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City (1966-1968), followed by a BFA in painting at the San Francisco Art Institute (1968-1969), and an MFA in film, video, and art at University of Southern California, Los Angeles (1970-1973). He has been inspirational to several generations of artists and pioneered methods that are fairly common today. His way of creating sculptural video installations out of the sets he used in performance works has been adopted by many others. Artists who have been considered influenced in one way or another include Cindy Sherman, Mike Kelley, Jason Rhoades, Jonathan Meese, John Bock, Jake, and Dinos Chapman, to name a few.

Paul McCarthy's work has been shown in major exhibitions at renowned public institutions, including Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2020); M Woods Museum, Beijing (2018); Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham (2015); The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, Chicago (2015); Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2015); Park Avenue Armory, New York (2013); Neue Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin (2012); California College of the Arts, Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2009); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2008); Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent (2007); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2006); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2005); the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2004); and Tate Modern, London (2003). He has participated in many international events, including the Berlin Biennial (2006); SITE Santa Fe (2004); the Whitney Biennial (1995, 1997, 2004); and the Venice Biennale (1993, 1999, 2001). He will hold a solo exhibition in 2021 at KODE, Bergen. His work is owned by the most prestigious institutions in the world.

PEDER LUND

Tjuvholmen allé 27, Oslo 0252 

pederlund.no

Sara Favriau @ Galerie Maubert, Paris - Je pense à une vache volage dans un champ, un peu libre, avec d’autres vaches pour faire des fromages...

Sara Favriau 

Je pense à une vache volage dans un champ, un peu libre, avec d’autres vaches pour faire des fromages. Je n’abandonne pas les chapelles ; pierre grise tu es verte, c’est un but. 

Galerie Maubert, Paris 

27 mai - 31 juillet 2021 

Dans sa nouvelle exposition à la Galerie Maubert, Je pense à une vache volage dans un champ, un peu libre, avec d’autres vaches pour faire des fromages. Je n’abandonne pas les chapelles ; pierre grise tu es verte, c’est un but. SARA FAVRIAU (née en 1983), imbrique analyse scientifique, recherche, essai, poésie, selon une simple forme. Selon une simple action, comme un arbre, un cèdre hybridé en pirogue, qui traverse une mer pour retrouver une forêt. 

Plus concrètement, depuis son exposition personnelle en 2016 au Palais de Tokyo, Sara Favriau s’interroge sur la chaîne de consommation du bois : par exemple, les conséquences de l’abattage forestier, notamment pour les besoins d’une oeuvre d’art. A la biennale de Bangkok (2018) et au Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire (2017), tout en analysant les circuits d’import-export des essences locales, elle sculpte troncs ou poutres industrielles, en questionnant l’impact de son geste sur le vivant (en sculptant l’aubier, là où circule en périphérie la sève, donc la vie). À Los Angeles et à la biennale de Rabat (2019), ses oeuvres, outre leur dimension poétique, constituent aussi une réflexion sur l’origine des matériaux, l’extraction des ressources et leurs déplacements. A la Villa Noailles et au Festival des Forêts d’Ile-de-France (2020), Sara Favriau collabore avec des scientifiques (notamment de l’INRAE Avignon) et une réflexion sur l’in situ et l’ex situ, considérant la forêt comme un espace d’engagement. Un espace d’engagement collégial, où les arbres comme les hommes font éclore de nouvelles formes, de nouvelles mythologies : ses œuvres, issues d’arbres condamnés par la sécheresse sur des parcelles de recherches, sont transportées dans des lieux de culture, ou bien s’installent dans le cadre naturel de la forêt en questionnant la temporalité et la pérennité d’un land art d’un nouveau genre. En regardant de plus près ses dernières sculptures, on remarque des interventions qui évoquent, pour la plupart, des processus chimériques : une façon d’«hybrider» le bois, en incisant dans ses profondeurs pour lui attribuer de cette manière, plumes, écailles, poils... Nature et culture se mélangent, au cœur de la forêt, avec de minutieux détails proches d’un travail d’orfèvrerie, tous singuliers. 

C’est une exposition à l’échelle d’une galerie et non pas à l’échelle de la forêt, que Sara Favriau propose à la Galerie Maubert. Certaines oeuvres s’enrichissent toutefois de collaborations (ou de tentatives) avec d’autres artistes ou des biologistes : plusieurs mains s’engagent à cultiver le jardin d’œuvres d’une exposition non strictement personnelle, où le métissage tient finalement une place fondamentale. Depuis quelque temps, Sara Favriau s’intéresse à un concept populaire, le « marronnage », qui nourrit les corrélations de ses nombreuses recherches. Le mouvement du marronnage se déploie sur près de quatre siècles dans les Amériques et les archipels de l’océan Indien. Il s’est formé à partir du comportement de communautés clandestines, qui se camouflaient pour échapper aux « colons ». Par exemple, le créole est une langue contournée et codifiée, et la capoeira oscille de façon ambivalente entre danse et combat. La forêt a un rôle primordial dans ce camouflage physique et intellectuel [1]. 

Dans l’exposition à la Galerie Maubert, Sara Favriau crée un ensemble d’oeuvres qui attestent de cette tentative de détournement des forces de la nature pour déjouer la culture. Miel, par exemple, investit le champ de l’histoire de l’art (J. Beuys), celui de la géopolitique (la Conquête de l’Ouest), mais aussi celui de l’anthropologie contemporaine (modernisme - animisme - totémisme), et enfin de l’histoire des sciences (le darwinisme). L’installation, composée de six oeuvres, voyage de manière autonome et s’expose sans la présence de son créateur. Ses deux caisses de transport deviennent socles et conservent les traces des allers-retours (notamment celle d’une première exposition à Los Angeles lors de la résidence FLAX). Les essences de bois sélectionnées - bouleau, olivier et houx - ont été choisies en correspondance avec celles des bois historiquement importés sur le territoire californien. Ici, le matériau bois, autant que l’œuvre-bagage, questionnent la métamorphose d’une forme de vie en marchandise.

Le titre d’une autre oeuvre, Bacille ou la résurrection, induit une relation entre la dénomination scientifique d’une bactérie (la Bacille, représentée en forme de bâtonnet) et la notion de vivant par la résurrection. Cette œuvre est un ensemble de branches de hêtres et de charmes, glanées dans la forêt de Fontainebleau durant le confinement de mars 2020. Ces branches ont été sculptées - poilées ! - et sont installées verticalement contre un mur en fonction de leur taille : ainsi, elles deviennent une valeur numéraire analytique. Leurs poils, curieusement, leur redonnent vie et émotion : la bactérie ici n’est ni menaçante, ni fataliste, mais bien vivante. Ce n’est pas la première fois que Sara Favriau se réfère à des courants populaires, afin de les transposer. Elle convoque leurs formes pour mettre en dialogue des sculptures et des installations : une cabane, une pirogue, des fétiches, un arc, un arbre… 

« Je développe une pensée horizontale dans laquelle de nouvelles formes peuvent éclore de façon collégiale (les Arbres comme les Hommes). Introduisant le marronnage, Edouard Glissant, avec sa pensée du Tout-monde et de la Relation, nous présente un monde de mélange et de singularité. Un Tout-monde qui s’oppose à la simplification de la culture d’une société. Un métissage proche de l‘actuelle écologie des idées. Il est temps de prendre au mot Edouard Glissant, mêler ces propos à ceux d’Isabelle Stengers, Donna Haraway, Bernard Stiegler... Il est temps de mon côté, en tant que plasticienne, de les métisser pour leur donner une forme. » -- Sara Favriau 

_____________

[1] « Les tactiques marronnes ne visent pas à renverser les pouvoirs institués, mais, au contraire, à déjouer les jeux de pouvoir qui nous amènent à reproduire, à mimer, à singer ce contre quoi nous nous battons. Le marronnage relève ainsi moins de la conquête que de la soustraction. (...) Dans les Amériques, les langues et cultures populaires comportent nombre de témoignages de la symbiose du marron et de la forêt. Les Aluku, Saramaka, N’dyuka et autres peuples marrons de Guyane française et du Surinam se désignent eux-mêmes comme les Businenge les «hommes de la forêt». Quant aux Créoles guyanais, ils utilisent l’expression lavi danbwa (la «vie dans bois») pour évoquer le marronnage.» -- Dénètem Touam Bona, Lignes de fuite du marronnage.

GALERIE MAUBERT

20 rue Saint-Gilles, 75003 Paris

www.galeriemaubert.com

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Nikolai Astrup @ The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown - Visions of Norway

Nikolai Astrup: Visions of Norway  

The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown

June 19 – September 19, 2021

The Clark presents the first North American exhibition focused on the Norwegian painter NIKOLAI ASTRUP (1880–1928), who deftly wove tradition and innovation into his artistic production. Astrup is considered one of Norway’s most important artists, yet he is largely unknown outside of his homeland. Nikolai Astrup: Visions of Norway features more than eighty-five works celebrating this brilliant painter, printmaker, and horticulturalist.

Nikolai Astrup’s oeuvre is notable for its intense, colorful palette, and the magical realism of his remarkable landscapes. Paintings and woodcuts from all periods of his career are presented in the exhibition, including multiple impressions of print compositions that reveal how Nikolai Astrup modified the mood and meaning of these works through changes in color and the addition or deletion of motifs, often using multiple blocks to create his complex prints.

After training in Kristiania (Oslo) and Paris, Nikolai Astrup returned to his childhood home and pursued his career in the remote region of western Norway overlooking Lake Jølster. Eventually, he settled on a property called Sandalstrand, situated across the lake from where he was raised. There he created a farmstead that served as a source of inspiration for his artistic purposes, sustained his family, and proved an early manifestation of ecological conservation.

The area’s sublime landscape, distinctive atmosphere, and ethereal summer light captivated Nikolai Astrup, while his childhood memories—marked by local traditions and Norwegian folklore—deeply shaped his perception of place. Nikolai Astrup’s work responded to, and helped shape, Norway’s emerging national identity. He created a distinctive visual language that expands on the intentions and achievements of composer Edvard Grieg (1843–1907) and playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) in Norwegian music and literature, respectively.

Guest curated by independent scholar MaryAnne Stevens, former Director of Academic Affairs at the Royal Academy, London, Nikolai Astrup: Visions of Norway is presented in the Clark’s special exhibition galleries and is accompanied by a catalogue published by the Clark and distributed by Yale University Press:

Nikolai Astrup

Visions of Norway

Edited by MaryAnne Stevens 

With a prelude by Karl Ove Knausgard, 

essays by Frances Carey, Jay A. Clarke, Robert Ferguson, 

and MaryAnne Stevens, and a chronology by Kesia E. Halvorsrud

July 27, 2021, Hardcover, $50.00

The exhibition travels to the KODE Art Museums, Bergen, Norway, from October 15, 2021–January 23, 2022 and to the Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde, Stockholm, from February 19–May 29, 2022.

Nikolai Astrup: Visions of Norway is organized by the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, in cooperation with KODE Art Museums and Composer Homes, Bergen.

THE CLARK ART INSTITUTE

225 South Street, Williamstown, MA 01267

www.clarkart.edu

Gold and Magic @ ARKEN Museum of Modern Art

Gold and Magic 

ARKEN Museum of Modern Art,  Ishøj 

Through 8 August 2021 

SYLVIE FLEURY 

Serie ELA 75K (Won't Smudge Off), 2000

© Sylvie Fleury. Photo David Stjernholm

THOMAS J. PRICE 

Untitled (Icon 1), 2017

Courtesy the artist

ARKEN Museum of Modern Art presents the special exhibition Gold and Magic in which golden treasures from The National Museum of Denmark enter into dialogue with works by some of the greatest contemporary artists. The exhibition takes visitors on a journey through many millennia to explore the power of gold and magic.

Gold has fascinated humankind since ancient times. We express ourselves through gold, and the way of using gold mirrors who we are: from the sacrificial offerings of antiquity and the golden altars of the Middle Ages to contemporary art, which uses gold as a vehicle for pointing out the connection between value and identity. In this spring’s major special exhibition, a range of historical artefacts and precious national treasures from the National Museum of Denmark is exhibited at ARKEN, creating an exciting encounter between cultural history and art. A meeting that offers new perspectives on our thousand-year history with gold.

Golden traces in contemporary art

All over the world, artists are currently turning to gold as a means of expression. They use it to tell stories about humanity and our society – and to question issues such as nationalism and conspicuous consumption. In Gold and Magic, international artists like Damien Hirst, Sylvie Fleury, Lorna Simpson, Thomas J. Price, Bill Viola and Ugo Rondinone show how wealth, identity and the exercise of power are closely interwoven, using gold to highlight our eternal pursuit of happiness and beauty. Some artists are particularly preoccupied with the magic and religious aspects of gold, while others use the precious material to address the global colonial history so inextricably linked with gold. By entering into a dialogue with contemporary art at ARKEN, these historical objects take on new significance and a new identity.

UGO RONDINONE

the sun at 12 am, 2019 

Studio Rondinone 

Photo  Courtesy Studio Rondinone and kamel mennour, Paris - London

LORNA SIMPSON 

Momentum, 2011 

© Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

AI WEIWEI

Circle of Animals - Zodiac Heads (detail), 2010 

ARKEN Museum of Modern Art

Long term loan from the Frahm Collection 

Photo Torben Petersen

Across continents

Gold and Magic takes visitors on a tour around the world. There are golden objects from Colombia, Thailand and Japan, from Danish kings and ordinary Danes. The National Museum of Denmark’s collection demonstrates how gold has travelled with people across continents ever since antiquity – as well as how riches often accumulate in very few hands and in national treasuries. Gold and Magic is the result of an innovative collaboration with the National Museum of Denmark.

The special exhibition presents works by El Anatsui, James Lee Byars, Chris Burden, Eva Steen Christensen, Zhang Ding, Sylvie Fleury, Subodh Gupta, Louis Henderson, Damien Hirst, Alicja Kwade, Runo Lagomarsino, Mercedes Lara, Klara Lilja, Grayson Perry, Thomas J. Price, Ugo Rondinone, Lorna Simpson, Alexander Tovborg, Bill Viola and Ai Weiwei.

ARKEN MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

Skovvej 100, 2635 Ishøj

www.arken.dk

Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann @ ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum - Between Worlds

Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann 

Between Worlds 

ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum 

Through 12 september 2021 

ELISABETH JERICHAU-BAUMAN

En såret dansk kriger, 1865

Statens Museum for Kunst

ELISABETH JERICHAU-BAUMAN

En egyptisk fellahkvinde med sit barn, 1872

Statens Museum for Kunst

The exhibition showcases about 100 paintings by the Danish-Polish artist ELISABETH JERICHAU-BAUMAN (1818–1881), representing a different and lesser-known side of the 19th-century Danish art scene.

- It has long been a desire of ours to set up an exhibition devoted to Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann at ARoS, and we are now proud to announce the most extensive presentation of her works to date. She was a unique voice in 19th-century Denmark and a forceful woman who, throughout her career, fought for her own personal emancipation – both as an artist and as an individual. Now we are giving her the place she deserves, says Erlend G. Høyersten, museum director, ARoS.

A NEW LOOK AT THE DANISH GOLDEN AGE

In the middle of the 19th century it was artists such as C.W. Eckersberg and a number of leading art historians who wrote the history of the Danish Golden Age. The period after the First Schleswig War was marked by strong national feeling, and the Danish art scene was dominated by subject matter dealing with the Danish people, the Danish landscape and the national past. This was the reality that Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann experienced when she came to Denmark in 1849. Because of her background at the art academy in Düsseldorf, she was mistaken for a German on her arrival, which in those years, from a pro-Danish point of view, was practically the worst kind of category to be placed in.

– Jerichau-Baumann is a cosmopolitan when compared to Danish artistic life in general. In Jerichau-Baumann's paintings we see drama and emotion, which runs contrary to the work of contemporary Danish Golden Age painters. The same is true of her use of colour. Jerichau-Baumann works within a range of brownish shades that are characteristic of the contemporary Central European trend, as opposed to the Danish use of colour, which is light and blond. She arrives in a Denmark strongly marked by nationalism, and here, because of her international style, she hits a brick wall, says Jakob Vengberg Sevel, curator, ARoS.

ELISABETH JERICHAU-BAUMAN

Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann was born in 1818 in Warsaw to a Polish mother and a German father. She trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf (1838 to 1844) after which she travelled to Rome where she met the Danish artist Jens Adolf Jerichau. They married and subsequently moved to Denmark, where they had nine children. In the period 1858 to 1871 Jerichau-Baumann travelled back and forth between Copenhagen and London where, for example, she did work for the British royal family. From 1869 to 1870 she made her first long voyage to the Orient (the Middle East and North Africa), and her travels became a way of discovering the world and promoting herself. Thanks to her foreign contacts and European perspective, Jerichau-Baumann was one of the very few Danish painters to portray the Orient and, as a woman, she was given exceptional access to harems which she could thus reproduce from her own observations. In addition, she was a very successful portrait painter of the aristocracy. Stylistically, she was oriented towards Europe and represented the European trends which, at the time, were thin on the ground in the Danish art world.

Curator-in-charge: Jakob Vengberg Sevel, curator, ARoS.

ARoS AARHUS KUNSTMUSEUM

Aros Allé 2, 8000 Aarhus C

www.aros.dk

Leslie Wayne @ Jack Shainman Gallery, New York - The Universe is on the Inside

Leslie Wayne 

The Universe is on the Inside 

Jack Shainman Gallery, New York 

May 20 – July 3, 2021 

I’ve been gazing out the window a lot this past year, reflecting on the collision of events in this moment…Sometimes it feels like all I can muster, just gazing out the window. And yet it feels like precisely the right thing to do, to take a moment to reflect, looking inward as I gaze outside… 

Leslie Wayne, 2021  

Jack Shainman Gallery presents The Universe is on the Inside, an exhibition of new work by LESLIE WAYNE. This series explores the powerful relationship between ourselves and the objects that support and sustain us in our daily lives during a year of complex, unavoidable isolation and ambiguity. At the core of the work is Leslie Wayne’s interest in exploring how we imbue these everyday objects, once inanimate and inert, with subjective meaning and purpose. This poignant and introspective presentation underscores Leslie Wayne’s personal and deeply intimate perspective on the creative process. 

Grounded in play between trompe l’oeil and verisimilitude, her pieces hover between abstraction and representation as the shape of each painting takes on the contours of the objects they represent. From utilitarian worktables and loft windows in disrepair to personal medicine cabinets and cracked mirrors, each object stands witness to and reflects on the artist’s intimate, daily life and state of mind. 

Go Ask Alice takes the form of a partially opened cabinet and brings to the fore the artist’s striking ability to challenge our perceptions of form in space through an idiosyncratic distortion of perspective. As the artist suggests, “while our eagerness to participate in this suspension of disbelief is duly challenged by the painting’s irrefutable materiality, the seduction of verisimilitude keeps that disbelief suspended. This hovering between the two is for me the fascinating part of perception, where the brain, and the mind as a realm of the senses, pushes and pulls our faith in what we see and what we choose to believe.” 

Loft presents a picture of Leslie Wayne’s crumbling old studio window. Like many of her pieces that serve as portals —windows, doors, cupboards— the viewer is positioned inside of the space, looking to an outside world that is muddled and unidentifiable, suggesting a place that is visually, metaphorically, and physically unattainable, yet still anticipated and tangible. Other windows in the exhibition confuse our reading of the viewer’s position, offering the perspective of looking in from the outside, but with the internal view being the night sky filled with stars or the crepuscular sky with passing clouds, rather than an architectural interior space. 

Created during what Leslie Wayne calls the “seemingly never-ending pandemic,” The Universe is on the Inside offers unexpected form to the redefining, collective experience of transformation, anxiety and ultimately hope. With the weight of uncertainty dominating the days and months of this past year, Leslie Wayne reflects on the instability of our current socio-political moment and the all too ubiquitous and undeniable divisions systemically rooted in our day-to-day experience. 

LESLIE WAYNE lives and works in New York City and has been showing at the gallery since 1993. Her influences are rooted in the West Coast landscape of her youth and, along with California’s Light & Space and Craft movements as inspiration, she has cultivated a unique sensibility with her material and with the contemporary practice of painting. In recent years she has continued to push the boundaries of composition, texture, color, and scale in her practice, further developing and challenging the relationship between abstraction and representation. 

Concurrently on view is a group show featuring Lyne Lapointe, Hayv Kahraman, Nick Cave and Carlos Vega at our 20th Street space. Upcoming exhibitions include Feedback, a group show at The School | Jack Shainman Gallery in Kinderhook, NY, opening June 5th, 2021.

JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY

524 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011 

jackshainman.com

________________

Yayoi Kusama @ Victoria Miro, London - I Want Your Tears to Flow with the Words I Wrote

Yayoi Kusama: I Want Your Tears to Flow with the Words I Wrote 

Victoria Miro, London 

4 June – 31 July 2021 

YAYOI KUSAMA 

On Hearing the Sunset Afterglow’s Message of Love, My Heart Shed Tears, 2021 

Acrylic on canvas

130.3 x 130.3 cm

51 1/4 x 51 1/4 in

© YAYOI KUSAMA

Courtesy Ota Fine Arts and Victoria Miro

Victoria Miro presents YAYOI KUSAMA’s thirteenth solo exhibition with the gallery. This major presentation of new works features a dynamic installation of paintings from Yayoi Kusama’s iconic My Eternal Soul series, bronze pumpkins and painted soft sculptures.

Throughout her career, Yayoi Kusama has developed a unique and diverse body of work that, highly personal in nature, connects profoundly with global audiences. Continuing to address the twin themes of cosmic infinity and personal obsession, the works in this exhibition are testament to an artist at the height of her powers.

The My Eternal Soul paintings on view in this exhibition introduce new and recent examples drawn from the artist’s highly celebrated, ongoing series, which she commenced in 2009. These works, at once bold and intensely detailed, and conveying extraordinary vitality, are joyfully improvisatory, fluid and highly instinctual. They abound with imagery including eyes, faces in profile, and other more indeterminate forms, including the dots with which the artist is synonymous, to offer impressions of worlds both abstract and figurative, microscopic and macroscopic.

A series of bronze pumpkins take a dynamic new form, their surfaces impressed with patterns of circles that create a sophisticated geometry. The pumpkin, or kabocha, with its dotted skin has, in various forms, been a recurring motif in Yayoi Kusama’s art since the late 1940s. The artist’s family cultivated plant seeds in Matsumoto, and she was familiar with the kabocha squash in the fields that surrounded her childhood home. At around the same time, the artist first experienced hallucinations in which her surroundings were overtaken by a proliferating pattern that engulfed her field of vision. Explored across scales, colours and media, the pumpkin occupies a special place in her iconography. Each pumpkin has a distinct character, as if caught in a particular stage of growth. Arrangements of dots on their plump bodies and curving stems, meanwhile, seem as unique as fingerprints. Enchanted by their ‘charming and winsome’ forms, the artist has said it is the pumpkin’s air of ‘general unpretentiousness’ and ‘solid spiritual balance’ that appeals to her.

Soft sculptures have been a key tenet of Yayoi Kusama’s oeuvre since the early 1960s, pre-empting many famous examples from that decade and inspiring many others subsequently. Writing about the genesis of this aspect of her practice Yayoi Kusama explains, ‘From around 1961 something new appeared in the world of my art. It came to be known as “soft sculpture”. The nets I was painting had continued to proliferate until they had spread beyond the canvas to cover the tables, the floor, the chairs, and the walls. The result of the unlimited development of this obsessional art was that I was able to shed my painter’s skin and metamorphose into an environmental sculptor. I went on finding new ways to turn my obsessions into concrete forms.’

The sculptures on view are painted in the style that has come to characterise Yayoi Kusama’s My Eternal Soul paintings and incorporate their palette and aesthetic vocabulary of widely opened eyes, polka-dots, nets and organic shapes. While the freestanding sculptures appear as though Yayoi Kusama’s images have been released from the canvases they are surrounded by and have organised themselves into three-dimensional forms, a further work, its organic forms contained within yet appearing almost to overflow from a number of wall-mounted boxes, accentuates a tension between containment and release.

Born in Matsumoto City, Japan, in 1929, YAYOI KUSAMA lives and works in Tokyo. She is one of the world’s most celebrated artists. Over the past decade there have been museum exhibitions of Yayoi Kusama’s work touring the world in North America, Japan, Korea, Singapore, China, Australia, Russia, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Spain, England, France, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland. In 2016, Yayoi Kusama received the Order of Culture, one of the highest honours bestowed by the Imperial Family. Yayoi Kusama is the first woman to be honoured with the prestigious medal for drawings and sculptures.

KUSAMA: Cosmic Nature is currently on view at The New York Botanical Garden, Bronx, New York, until 31 October 2021. Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective is at the Gropius Bau in Berlin from 23 April–15 August 2021. Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirror Rooms opens this spring at Tate Modern in London. Exhibitions of My Eternal Soul paintings will be presented at David Zwirner, New York, on 17 June and Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo, on 19 June. 

VICTORIA MIRO

16 Wharf Road, London N1 7RW

www.victoria-miro.com

Frank Bowling @ Hauser & Wirth, New York & London

Frank Bowling – London / New York 

Hauser & Wirth New York 

Through 30 July 2021 

Hauser & Wirth London 

Through 31 July 2021 

Reflecting the scale and scope of a prodigious six-decade career that has unfolded while criss-crossing the Atlantic Ocean, Sir Frank Bowling’s inaugural exhibition with Hauser & Wirth is presented in both the gallery’s London and New York locations simultaneously. With works on view spanning over 50 years of the British icon’s career from 1967 to the present day, ‘Frank Bowling – London / New York’ celebrates the ways in which one artist’s inventive approach to the materiality of paint has expanded the boundaries of abstraction.

The exhibition charts Frank Bowling’s life and work between the UK and the United States. Born in Guyana (then British Guiana) in 1934, Bowling arrived in London in 1953, graduating from the Royal College of Art in 1962. He later divided his time between the art scenes in London and New York, maintaining studios in both cities. London is the city where Bowling trained as a painter and achieved early acclaim. New York is the city that drew him to itself at , art, artistthe height of the Civil Rights movement, where he became involved in discussions of Black Art – New York was a place of fresh energy and ideas for an artist in search of new ways to make paintings.

Frank Bowling’s transatlantic orientation reveals itself in a shift from his early engagement with expressive figuration and pop art, to an immersion in a uniquely poetic abstraction that continues to evolve even today. Visible in his work are the legacies of both the English landscape tradition and American abstract expressionism. Developing in and between two cities over the course of decades, Bowling’s exploration of light, colour, and geometry can be understood as profoundly influenced by the two great rivers of his life: he has maintained studios close to The Thames in London and the East River in New York, absorbing the brilliance of the rivers’ light into his vision. Bowling would often begin a work in one city and finish it in the other, merging the atmospheres of both. In his own words, ‘I would just roll the lot up and move. And I knew that when I got to the other end, I could roll them out again and continue to work.’

Frank Bowling’s restless innovation on the painted plane endures in his latest works. He continues to break ground through the use of thick impasto textures, acrylic gels, collage, stitched canvas, and metallic and pearlescent pigments. The complexities of his upbringing in Guyana and his constant journeying between London and New York have only served to activate the richness of the different influences of each location. His paintings are a celebration of life lived in varying lights and colours.

A new publication will be released by Hauser & Wirth Publishers, to mark the occasion of this exhibition. In July 2021, Arnolfini, the International Centre for Contemporary Arts in Bristol (UK), will open a solo exhibition of Frank Bowling’s work as part of the institution’s 60th anniversary.

London

Upon arriving there in 1953 at the age of 19, Frank Bowling immediately recognised London as home. He trained as a painter at the Royal College of Art and was struck by the achievements of such towering British artists as Constable, Turner, and Gainsborough. From their classic landscapes he learned to use translucent gel, a substance that adds body to paint for impasto technique. As Frank Bowling himself said, ‘The fact is, it’s exciting and challenging to work in London, Turner’s town, and the pressures of the weight of British tradition are exhilarating’.

FRANK BOWLING

Frank Bowling with Fishes Wishes and Star Apple Blue, London, 1988

© Iona Scott

By the beginning of the 1980s, having taken up a studio near the Thames in Pimlico, Frank Bowling was sharply attuned to the purely abstract aspects of traditional painting and the rich tradition of European painterly engagement with land, sea, cloud, and sky in their abstract forms. This is visible in works like ‘Rockface’ (1987) and ‘Sand Circle’ (1983), in which the artist used thick mixtures of acrylic gel and strips of polyurethane foam to create relief structures, evoking textured landscape and geological strata. By the late 1980s, when his passion for historical European painting had been further enriched by an immersion in the theories and practice of American colour field abstraction, Bowling embarked on a period of experimentation: ‘I was trying to invent ways of using the traditional methods of applying paint – spilling, dripping, marking, measuring’. He wanted to achieve a modernist expression of natural phenomena whilst conveying his formalist intentions, leaving room for the viewer’s interpretive imagination.

Recent works on view include ‘May Shimmer’ (2018), a canvas of muddy-pink tones surrounded by vibrant yellow, and green made visually dynamic by light refracted from bits of jagged straw packing material embedded in the paint. In this work, Bowling achieves a delicate radiance by using drops of pearlescence, a pigment which produces shimmering and iridescent effects.

New York

In 1961, while attending the Royal College of Art, Frank Bowling visited New York. It would be the first of frequent visits over the years, when he stayed and worked at the infamous Hotel Chelsea, the city’s unofficial clubhouse for artists, writers, poets, photographers, and musicians. Recognizing that New York City was the centre of the art world, and the home base of an organized effort to achieve greater representation of Black artists in public institutions, Frank Bowling felt compelled to migrate there.

In New York, Frank Bowling befriended likeminded artists and was inspired to explore the medium of painting devoid of any figurative references, advancing his journey toward pure abstraction. The work of Jasper Johns, whose paintings with stencilled words and enigmatic images, made a significant impact upon Frank Bowling in his search for new ways to experience and make art. As he says, ‘New York beckoned, and the toughness, competitive edge, and excitement drove me and my work to rise to new horizons’. Frank Bowling’s position in New York was secured when he took a permanent studio on Broadway and was given a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971. 

FRANK BOWLING

Frank Bowling in his studio at 535 Broadway Studio, c.1971

Courtesy Frank Bowling Archive

FRANK BOWLING

Frank Bowling New York loft, 1999

Courtesy Frank Bowling Archive 

© Spencer Richards

Frank Bowling moved to New York in 1966, a charged historical moment in which Black American artists were seeking commitment from the larger art world to the civil rights movement. Major museums were just beginning fledgling efforts to represent the richness of Black art and culture. As an active instigator of dialogue, Frank Bowling addressed the critical invisibility of Black artists through a series of writings for Arts Magazine (1969 – 1972), making a significant contribution to intellectual discourse around Black art in America with essays on fellow artists Jack Whitten, Mel Edwards, and Al Loving.

In the summer of 1984, Frank Bowling spent nine weeks as a resident artist-teacher at the renowned Skowhegan School of Art in Maine. It was here that he began to gather natural materials from the surrounding property, gluing them to the surface of his canvases and painting over them. In this magical rural setting, Frank Bowling’s impressions of rivers, natural light, and terrain fused with his memories of classical English landscape painting. The effects can be seen in such works in the exhibition as ‘Armageddon’ (1984) and ‘Swissvisit I’ (1983). It was Frank Bowling’s constant movement between New York and London that led him to cut up canvases in order to transport them more easily; he would sometimes even attach a canvas to another work, with extra strips added to the cropped edges. In works such as ‘Jamsahibwall’ (1990), a seven part work, this formal framing device extends into the painted ground area itself, and demonstrates the pioneering spirit of Frank Bowling’s approach to technique.

About FRANK BOWLING

Sir Frank Bowling OBE RA has been hailed as one of the greatest living painters. Born in Guyana in 1934, Frank Bowling arrived in London in 1953, graduating from the Royal College of Art with the silver medal for painting in 1962. By the early 1960s, he was recognised as an original force in London’s art scene with a style combining figurative, symbolic and abstract elements.

After moving to New York in 1966, Frank Bowling’s commitment to modernism meant he was increasingly focused on material, process and colour, so that by 1971 he had abandoned the use of figurative imagery. Frank Bowling’s iconic ‘Map Paintings’ (1967-71), which include the stencilled landmasses of South America, Africa and Australia, embody his transition from figuration to pure abstraction. In 1969, Frank Bowling organised, curated, and wrote the catalogue essay for the notable exhibition, 5+1, at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, and Princeton University, which showcased the work of five African American abstract artists as well as his own recent paintings. Bowling exhibited six large ‘Map Paintings’ in a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971. From 1973 to 1978, Frank Bowling experimented with ideas of chance and ‘controlled accidents’, pouring paint from a two-metre height to create his visually arresting ‘Poured Paintings’.

Frank Bowling became a Royal Academician in 2005. He was awarded the OBE for Services to Art in 2008 and a knighthood in the Queen’s birthday honours in 2020. His work is represented in collections worldwide and has been exhibited in numerous group and solo exhibitions, including the 2017 – 2019 touring exhibition, Mappa Mundi, and the hugely successful retrospective at Tate Britain in 2019. Frank Bowling is the subject of a BBC documentary, 'Frank Bowling’s Abstract World', which coincided with the opening of the Tate Retrospective. At the age of 87, Frank Bowling works most days in his South London studio, accompanied by his wife, Rachel Scott, other family members and friends, forever driven by his fascination with pushing the vast and radiant possibilities of paint.

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