Ange Leccia @ Galleria Six, Milan & Venice - Cars, Marble and Cinder Block

Ange Leccia 

Cars, Marble and Cinder Block 

Galleria Six, Milan & Venice 

March 26 - June 25, 2022 

Galleria Six presents ANGE LECCIA's solo exhibition, Cars, Marble and Cinder Block. This is his second show at the gallery after Ange Leccia: Girls, Ghosts and war (2018-2019).

The exhibition focuses on both sculptural and installation works. The pieces are concerned with the constant relationship between light and image: an image that disorients our gaze, our thinking and leads us to question the subtle relationship between man, technology and identity.

In this exhibition the photographic works, Arrangement, are related both formally and conceptually to the sculptures on display. 

In fact the construction of an enigmatic space placed between the proximity of two or more objects, seems to constitute 'the original gesture' upon which the artist leads us to reflect.

For the occasion a work by Ange Leccia is exhibited in the new space in Venice at Calle de la Vida San Marco 2530.

For the Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris, Ange Leccia has created a video installation, (D') Aprés Monet, which proposes to feel and read the polysemy of Monets Water Lillies from the story of the genesis of this masterpiece. 

Ange Leccia, born in 1952 in Minerviu, Corsica, lives and works in Paris and Corsica. After studying visual arts, he became dually involved as a visual artist and filmmaker, and initiated his research as a resident at the French Academy in Rome. His work has been shown at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Documenta in Kassel, Skulptur Projekte in Münster, the Venice Biennale, the Seibu Museum, Hiroshima Art Document, among others. Ange Leccia has taught at Geidai Tokyo University of the Arts. He was a resident at Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto. In 2013, he had a solo exhibition at the MAC/VAL, as well as the Palais de Tokyo in 2014, and the HAB in Nantes during the summer of 2016. In 2017, he had a retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery in Reykjavik. In 2018, he participated in Printemps de Septembre in Toulouse. In 2019, he had a solo exhibition at the Abbaye de Jumièges and the Akureyri Art Museum in Iceland. In 2022, he will exhibit his work at the Artizon Museum in Tokyo, the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris, the Musée des Impressionnismes in Giverny, and the Louvre Abu Dhabi. Ange Leccia has directed numerous films and fashion shows for big names in the fashion world such as Vuitton and Hermès. He recently co-directed the feature film Christophe Définitivement with the artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. It will be released in 2022.

GALLERIA SIX

Piazza Piola 5 - 20131 Milan

Calle de la Vida San Marco, 2530 - Venice

www.galleriasix.it

Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World @ San José Museum of Art, California

Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World
San José Museum of Art, California
Through October 6, 2019

The San José Museum of Art, California (SJMA) presents Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World, the first mid-career retrospective on the contemporary practice of Rina Banerjee, co-organized with the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia (PAFA).

Known for her large-scale sculptures and installations made from materials sourced throughout the world, Rina Banerjee’s works investigate the splintered experiences of identity, tradition, and culture, prevalent in diasporic communities.  

Make Me a Summary of the World is accompanied by extensive programming and a full-color, 160-page catalogue co-published by SJMA and PAFA. After the exhibition closes at SJMA it will then embark on a national tour.

Rina Banerjee (born 1963) is one of the most important artists of the post-colonial Indian diaspora living in the United States and her work has been shown most extensively in Europe and South Asia. This exhibition, the first in-depth examination into the artist’s work, will consider Rina Banerjee in both American and global frameworks, specifically in relation to Banerjee’s approach to feminism, globalism, colonialism and the environment.

Susan Sayre Batton, Oshman Executive Director of the San José Museum of Art, said, “We are thrilled to bring Banerjee’s monumental work to the people of Silicon Valley and the West Coast,  reiterating SJMA’s dedication to foster awareness of artists’ broad contributions to society. Banerjee’s art explores globalization, migration, and identity—themes that reflect our community.” 

SJMA curator Lauren Schell Dickens, added: “For twenty years, Rina has been using her work to disrupt conventional notions of identity, delving into the complex territory of cultural fragmentation and self-identification, which makes her an important voice today. We’re particularly excited to be presenting this rich examination of her work in San José, which is home to so many diasporic groups.”

Jodi Throckmorton, Curator of Contemporary Art at PAFA, remarked: “Make Me a Summary of the World marks a defining moment for Rina. As the artist’s first retrospective, it traces her work over twenty years, culminating in sculptures made for the 57th Venice Biennale and 2017 Prospect Triennial in New Orleans—important exhibitions that reflect one of the most exciting periods of recognition in Rina’s career.”

Bringing together several of Rina Banerjee’s monumental installations in conversation with more than two dozen sculptures, as well as a thorough selection of works on paper, Make Me a Summary of the World will transform SJMA into an immersive experience.

Using a variety of gathered materials ranging from African tribal jewelry to colorful feathers, light bulbs, and Murano glass, Rina Banerjee’s sensuous assemblages present themselves simultaneously as familiar and unfamiliar, thriving on tensions between visual cultures and raising questions about exoticism, cultural appropriation, globalization, and feminism. Her works are named with thought-provoking and poetic titles that are works of art in themselves, ranging in length from 50 to 180 words.

Born in Calcutta, India in 1963, Rina Banerjee was raised in the United Kingdom and United States. She received her Bachelor of Science degree in Polymer Engineering from Case Western in 1993 and took a job as a polymer research chemist upon graduation. After several years, she left the science profession to pursue her Masters in Fine Arts from Yale University. Rina Banerjee currently divides her time between New York City and Philadelphia.

She has exhibited in San Francisco, New York, Paris, London, Tokyo, New Delhi, and notably in a solo exhibition at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC in 2013. Her works are also included in many private and public collections such as the Whitney Museum of American Art (NY), Centre George Pompidou, Paris, France; Queens Museum (NY); Kiran Nadar Museum, New Delhi, and the Brooklyn Museum (NY).

A full-color catalogue was co-published by SJMA and PAFA. It illuminates the crossover contexts in which Banerjee works and includes a detailed chronology of the artist’s life and work, and essays by co-curators Lauren Schell Dickens (SJMA) and Jodi Throckmorton (PAFA); Rachel Kent, chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; and writer Allie Biswas. $45, available in the SJMA Museum store.

Other Travel Venues

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia (October 27, 2018–March 31, 2019)

Fowler Museum at University of California, Los Angeles (December 8, 2019–May 31, 2020)

Frist Art Museum, Nashville, Tennessee (July 24–October 25, 2020)

Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, North Carolina (February 18–July 11, 2021)

SAN JOSE MUSEUM OF ART
110 South Market Street, San José, California
sjmusart.org

Georgia O’Keeffe @ The Cleveland Museum of Art

Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern
The Cleveland Museum of Art
Through March 3, 2019

Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern offers a unique look into the fascinating connections among the paintings, personal style, and public persona of one of America’s most celebrated artists. Throughout her 65-year career, Georgia O’Keeffe defied convention and forged a fiercely independent identity that was integral to her art. Showcasing approximately 140 objects, including paintings, drawings, and sculptures alongside her garments (many shown for the first time) and photographic portraits of her, the exhibition reveals Georgia O’Keeffe’s determination to be strikingly modern in both her art and her life. Organized by the Brooklyn Museum, Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern is on view in the Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Exhibition Gallery. 

“Georgia O’Keeffe is a beloved icon of 20th-century American art,” said William Griswold, director of the Cleveland Museum of Art. “The exhibition offers an intriguing look at how O’Keeffe shaped the world’s perception of her identity, artistic values, and style.”

Rejecting the restrained Victorian world into which she was born, Georgia O’Keeffe absorbed the progressive principles of the Arts and Crafts movement, which promoted the idea that everything a person made or lived with should reflect a unified, visually pleasing aesthetic. 

“Throughout the exhibition, we discover an artist who drew no boundaries between the art she made and the life she lived,” said Mark Cole, curator of American painting and sculpture. “Elegant simplicity is a hallmark of O’Keeffe’s streamlined style, manifesting itself through every object in Living Modern.” 

Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern is organized in sections that chart a chronology of Georgia O’Keeffe’s career. One large section is devoted to her early decades as a young artist in New York, specifically the 1920s and ’30s. At this time O’Keeffe honed a restrained palette of black and white, and a plain, relatively unornamented style that dominated much of her art and wardrobe.

The exhibition’s next section is devoted to Georgia O’Keeffe’s mature career in New Mexico, where her art and clothing changed in response to the surrounding colors of the American Southwest. She began wearing blue jeans, which she proclaimed to be America’s national costume, and coupled them with long-sleeved cotton men’s-styled shirts. At this time, she routinely introduced color into her clothing, mostly blue, occasionally red—the palette of her wardrobe mirroring her New Mexico canvases. 

Another section of the exhibition addresses Georgia O’Keeffe’s appreciation of Asian cultures. She professed an interest in Chinese and Japanese painting as early as the 1920s and amassed an extensive library of books devoted to both. In 1959 she was finally able to travel to Asia, where she augmented what would become a collection of nearly two dozen kimonos, some of which she wore for bed and bath.

The final section explores the significant role photography played in establishing O’Keeffe’s late-career celebrity. Some 50 photographers asked her to pose over her lifetime, solidifying her status as a pioneer of modernism and promoting her as an iconic artist with style. For the camera, O’Keeffe dressed in impeccably tailored black suits by designers such as Balenciaga, embodying a toughness, austerity, and individualism befitting someone who had lived life on her own terms. 

Highlights

Georgia O’Keeffe, c. 1920–22. Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864–1946). Gelatin silver print; 11.4 x 9 cm (4 1/2 x 3 1/2 in.). Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, NM, Gift of the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, 2003.01.006

In this early photograph, Georgia O’Keeffe wrapped herself in a black cape and accessorized it with a bowler hat. Posing her against the lightness of the sky and photographing her from a low vantage point, Alfred Stieglitz interpreted Georgia O’Keeffe as androgynous and “mannish.” Like other nonconformist women during the 1920s, O’Keeffe loved challenging and confounding society’s conventional dress codes, and Stieglitz enjoyed dramatizing her boldness and O’Keeffe’s cape can be seen in the exhibition. 

Blouse (detail), c. early to mid-1930s. Attributed to Georgia O’Keeffe. White linen. Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, NM, Gift of Juan and Anna Marie Hamilton, 2000.03.0248. 

Photo © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

The decoration at the neckline of this blouse recalls Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings of crinkled autumn leaves and corrugated seashells. The blouse and the ornament are shaped by tiny pin tucks—each done by hand-- that look like the veins of a leaf. 

The Mountain, New Mexico, 1931. Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986). Oil on canvas; 76.4 × 91.8 cm. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase 32.14. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Digital Image © Whitney Museum, New York 

Georgia O’Keeffe’s love of color in nature found its match in the Southwest, and she explored its hues avidly in her paintings and, more modestly, in her wardrobe. Describing her palette in New Mexico, O’Keeffe explained, “All the earth colors of the painter’s palette are out there in the many miles of badlands. The light Naples yellow through the ochres—orange and red and purple earth—even the soft earth greens.” 

Catalogue: Published by the Brooklyn Museum, Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern explores how Georgia O’Keeffe lived her life steeped in modernism, bringing the same style she developed in her art to her dress, her homes, and her lifestyle. Richly illustrated with images of her art and views of the two homes she designed and furnished in New Mexico, the book also includes never before published photographs of O’Keeffe’s clothes. Author and exhibition curator Wanda M. Corn has attributed some of the most exquisite of these garments to O’Keeffe, a skilled seamstress who understood fabric and design, and who has become an icon in today’s fashion world as much for her personal style as for her art.

Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern is organized by the Brooklyn Museum with guest curator Wanda M. Corn, Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor Emerita in Art History, Stanford University and made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts. 

THE CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART
11150 East Boulevard, Cleveland, Ohio 44106
www.clevelandart.org

Minimalism: Space. Light. Object @ National Gallery Singapore

Minimalism: Space. Light. Object.
National Gallery Singapore
Through 14 April 2019

National Gallery Singapore's Facade

(c) National Gallery Singapore

Organised by National Gallery Singapore in collaboration with ArtScience Museum at Marina Bay Sands, Minimalism: Space. Light. Object. is the first survey of Minimalist art held in Southeast Asia, and the first major Minimalism exhibition to include artists from this region as part of an expanded global perspective on the movement.

One of the most influential art movements of the 20th century, Minimalism offers a powerful new way of experiencing art. Rather than referencing the world outside, its simple forms invite us to contemplate what’s physically before us in the present moment. This fundamental shift was inspired by the questioning of the role of art during the 1960s amidst great social change. It spurred a search for new forms of consciousness, with important inspirations being Asian spirituality such as Zen Buddhism and the I Ching, and emerging ideas on perception.

Minimalism contributed to the transformation of how artists use materials and space, and how they involve the viewer. This has been fundamental to the development of contemporary art forms including installation and performance art.

Dr. Eugene Tan, Director of National Gallery Singapore, said, “While Minimalism has had a significant impact on contemporary design and lifestyle in Asia, its relationship to art in the region has been less well understood. This exhibition will examine the relationship of Minimalism to art in Asia, as well as the influence that Asian spirituality and philosophy had on its origins. In so doing, the exhibition will re-evaluate the received understanding of Minimalism as a development of the Euro-American paradigm of formalist modernism. The exhibition will further examine the connections and the legacies that this important movement has had on contemporary artists today. This is in keeping with the Gallery’s perspective of modern art as a global phenomenon that results from complex and interconnected developments happening all around the world.”

The exhibition features around 150 works of art by over 80 artists and 40 composers spanning two venues. Visitors can trace the development and rich legacies of Minimalist art and ideas from the 1950s to the present day at the Gallery, before delving into key aspects of the artistic tendency including colour and spirituality at the ArtScience Museum. The exhibition will also shed light on the ongoing engagement of Minimal art with Asian art and philosophy, and the contribution of Asian artists to a wider discourse of Minimalism.

Honor Harger, Executive Director of ArtScience Museum noted, "Playing to our strength as a museum of art and science, we have also chosen to present artworks which meditate on the notions of the cosmological void, emptiness and nothingness—principles which resonate with both Minimalism and science. The exhibition at ArtScience Museum creates dialogue between the scientific notion of the vacuum and the Zen Buddhist idea of the void. Sound and silence also form a major part of the exhibition, with 40 musicians and composers presented in our Sound Room, which acts as an auditory counterpoint to the visual explorations of Minimalism presented within the galleries."

Featuring many iconic works that have never been shown before in Southeast Asia, the exhibition begins with a focus on ­how Minimalism moved from colour-field painting to Minimalist objects in series and geometric shapes in the 1960s. Subsequent artistic tendencies in favour of more open, expressive forms emerged, including Land art, Process art, Performance, and the use of light and cutting-edge technologies to transform the space and alter viewers’ perception and experience.

The exhibition also features a range of contemporary works from around the world that employ Minimalist forms and ideas to advance social engagement and commentary. These include three major new commissions, by artists Sopheap Pich from Cambodia, Jeremy Sharma from Singapore and Frederik De Wilde from Belgium.

Reflecting Minimalism’s involvement of audiences in the experience of art, British artist and Turner Prize winner Martin Creed presents Work No. 1343 for the first time in Asia at the Gallery’s Gallery & Co cafeteria. This is a new edition of his well-known restaurant project in which no single item is the same, from utensils to crockery to furniture.

Minimalism also had an extraordinary influence on music, the performing arts, cinema, literature, design and fashion. Visitors are invited to experience the experimental and collaborative aspects of Minimalism through a changing programme of performances and moving image works. They include a one-night only dance presentation by the acclaimed TAO Dance Theatre from China, at ArtScience Museum, and performances by students from LASALLE College of the Arts, and visionary pianist Margaret Leng Tan – a recipient of Singapore’s Cultural Medallion - at the Gallery. ArtScience Museum also presents Minimalist music and sound art by over 40 composers, including a new composition by Singapore-based Malaysian musician, Adeline Wong. These special programmes, that introduce artists and scholars from diverse backgrounds, enrich our understanding of Minimalism’s impact on today’s art and lifestyle.

Minimalism: Space. Light. Object. is curated by Eugene Tan, Russell Storer, Silke Schmickl and Goh Sze Ying from National Gallery Singapore, and Adrian George and Honor Harger from ArtScience Museum.

NATIONAL GALLERY SINGAPORE
1 St Andrew's Rd, Singapore 178957
www.nationalgallery.sg

Tony Cragg @ Buchmann Galerie, Berlin

Tony Cragg
Buchmann Galerie, Berlin
Through 16 February, 2019

Tony Cragg

Untitled (Multiple Skull), 2017

Wood

240 (h) x 227 x 172 cm - 95 x 89 x 68 in

(c) Tony Cragg, Courtesy Buchmann Galerie, Berlin

Buchmann Galerie presents an exhibition featuring new sculptures and drawings by Tony Cragg.

In the front exhibition space, a monumental sculpture from the new work group Skulls, measuring 240 x 227 x 172 cm, makes a powerful impression with its complex interlock of internal and external spaces. The entire volume of this work constructed from layered plywood is permeated by innumerable close-lying and in some cases interlaced, tube-like forms. They open up a surprising insight into the sculpture's internal depths. Resembling foam and yet conveying solidity, the work evokes organic forms, the innermost part of which generates the exterior. Tony Cragg explains: "There exists a real psychological pressure and need for the viewer to see beyond the surface and that all the forms we see provide a connection to the greater and more fundamental external and internal forces that make them."

The group of work Hedges, inspired by Tony Cragg's childhood memories of landscapes with hedges in his English home region, comprises filigree leaf- and blade-like forms. The organic configurations rouse associations with a hedge or tumbleweed. The red-brown, matt shimmering patina of the steel contributes to these natural associations. However, looking more closely, it becomes clear that the forms, in their buoyancy and arrangement, are artificial – they are man-made. Like a mobile, the formations seem to float in a perfectly balanced state, as if their shape could alter at any given moment.

Conversion, made from aluminium, adopts the leaf-like structure of the Hedges but transposes it into a floral setting, which in turn seems to explode the limitations of abstraction with its camouflage finish.

Tony Cragg is an artist who has always utilized a study of natural science in order to challenge nature. The absolute loyalty to his materials that Peter Schjeldahl attests to the artist (1) meets with a will to form in Tony Cragg's work that is not exhausted in the work itself but wrestles with nature. "I am an extreme materialist" the artist maintains repeatedly. And Peter Schjeldahl adds that it is from this alone that the fantastic spectrum of material and formal freedom can emerge, which characterizes this great sculptor's extensive oeuvre.

In the Buchmann Box are showing a collection of recent sculptures and drawings, which exemplify the artist's work as it continues to unfold in an almost encyclopaedic manner. The sculptor's outstanding significance was recognized impressively in 2007, when he received the Praemium Imperiale for Sculpture.

In the last two years several important solo presentations of Tony Cragg's work have taken place, including in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Mudam Luxembourg, and the comprehensive retrospective "Parts of the World" in the Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal, in 2016. A Rare Category of Objects in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK, was one of the most extensive outdoor exhibitions of his art seen to date. A five volume monographic publication examining Tony Cragg's work is currently being issued by the Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne. Besides a volume about his drawings and prints, it comprises three volumes on his sculptures since the late 1960s, as well as a volume of the artist's own writing. Three of these volumes are already available.

(1) Peter Schjeldahl, Cragg's Big Bang, in: Anthony Cragg, Parts of the World, Cologne 2016, pp. 155-166

BUCHMANN GALERIE
Charlottenstraße 13, D-10969 Berlin
www.buchmanngalerie.com

Douglas Melini @ Van Doren Waxter, New York

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

Douglas Melini 

Starry Sky #7, 2018 

Oil and acrylic on canvas with artist’s frame 

20 x 22 ½ inches (50.8 x 57.2 cm) 

Courtesy of the artist and Van Doren Waxter, New York

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

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

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

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

Michael Scott @ Xippas Paris

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

Michael Scott, #142, 2018.

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

Courtesy de l’artiste et de Xippas Paris

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ceal Floyer @ Lisson Gallery, London

Ceal Floyer
Lisson Gallery, London
Through 5 January 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alex Katz Retrospective Exhibition @ Museum Brandhorst, Munich

Alex Katz

Museum Brandhorst, Munich

6 December 2018 – 22 April 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Curator: Jacob Proctor

MUSEUM BRANDHORST

Theresienstrasse 35A, 80333 München

www.museum-brandhorst.de

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

Judy Chicago: A Reckoning 

Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami 

December 4, 2018 – April 21, 2019

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

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

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

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

INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, MIAMI

61 NE 41st Street, Miami, Florida 33137

www.icamiami.org

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© teamLab
Courtesy Pace Gallery

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joan Lyons @ Steven Kasher Gallery, NYC

Joan Lyons 

Steven Kasher Gallery, New York 

November 15 - December 22, 2018 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

STEVEN KASHER GALLERY

515 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.stevenkasher.com

Alexander Archipenko @ Eykyn Maclean Gallery, NYC - Space Encircled

Alexander Archipenko: Space Encircled

Eykyn Maclean, New York

November 9 - December 14, 2018

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

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

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

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

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

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

EYKYN MACLEAN

23 East 67th Street, New York, NY 10065

www.eykynmaclean.com

Johannes Hägglund @ Galerie Forsblom, Stockholm - Happy Without You

Johannes Hägglund: Happy Without You

Galerie Forsblom Stockholm

9 November – 21 December, 2018

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

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

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

GALERIE FORSBLOM

Karlavägen 9, 114 24 Stockholm

www.galerieforsblom.com

Lee Friedlander: MARIA @ Deborah Bell Photographs, New York

Lee Friedlander: MARIA 

Deborah Bell Photographs, New York 

November 1, 2018 – January 19, 2019 

Deborah Bell Photographs presents MARIA, an exhibition of photographs by Lee Friedlander featuring his wife, Maria. Dating from 1958 to 2008, the pictures were taken during Maria and Lee's early marriage, and throughout their family life as parents and grandparents. The 32 prints in the exhibition were selected by Lee Friedlander for this venue, thus offering a special opportunity for his audience to see these pictures in a new and intimate context. Although most of the photographs on view are well known from their inclusion in Friedlander's books and exhibition catalogues, and have appeared on the walls of many museum and gallery exhibitions internationally, this is the first exhibition devoted to Friedlander's pictures of Maria, and contributes to the ongoing narrative of this fifty-year love story.

Lee Friedlander, born in 1934 in Aberdeen, Washington, began photographing the American landscape in 1948. With an ability to organize a vast amount of visual information in dynamic compositions, Lee Friedlander has made humorous and poignant images among the chaos of city life, dense natural landscape, fellow artists, friends and family, and countless other subjects. Lee Friedlander is also recognized for a group of self-portraits he began in the 1960s, reproduced in Self-Portrait, an exploration that he turned to again in the 1990s.

This exhibition is presented in association with Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

DEBORAH BELL PHOTOGRAPHS

16 East 71st Street, New York, NY 10021

www.deborahbellphotographs.com

Tala Madani @ 303 Gallery, New York

Tala Madani, Corner Projections
303 Gallery, New York

November 1 - December 15, 2018

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Pettibone @ FLAG Art Foundation, NYC - Endless Variation

Richard Pettibone: Endless Variation

The FLAG Art Foundation, New York

October 27, 2018 - January 19, 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE FLAG ART FOUNDATION

545 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001

flagartfoundation.org

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

Roman Vishniac Rediscovered

The Photographers’ Gallery, London

Jewish Museum London

26 October 2018 - 24 February 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE PHOTOGRAPHER'S GALLERY

16-18 Ramillies Street, London W1F 7LW

thephotographersgallery.org.uk

JEWISH MUSEUM LONDON

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

www.jewishmuseum.org.uk

Atul Dodiya @ Galerie Templon, Paris

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

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

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

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

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

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

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