Artist Ana Karkar @ Almine Rech London - "Whole Cookie" Exhibition

Ana Karkar: Whole Cookie

Almine Rech London

May 30 — July 27, 2024

Almine Rech London presents Ana Karkar's second solo exhibition with the gallery, Whole Cookie.

The exhibition unveils a new series of figurative paintings by the French-American artist, in addition to an installation piece comprised of video, sculpture and literature. Composed as a temple to eroticism, it explores and universalises the many complex paradoxes of Ishtar, the ancient Mesopotamian goddess of both love and war, as well as fertility and sensuality. As the goddess of paradox, Ishtar is the model of unity in multiplicity.

Each of us reflects some of her discordance in ourselves, and this exhibition, Whole Cookie, explores how we strive to gather these conflicting parts into a semblance of order. Ishtar’s polarities and contradictions feed the creative spirit, but they also provoke insecurity and disruption. She represents chaos, going against order and principle, however this also opens up to possibility and potential. The destructive and harsh in balance with the empowering and transformative; society coexisting side by side with the cosmic.

Upon entering the exhibition, visitors are faced with the painted image of a sphinx, the guardian of the temple – and its riddle:

MINA (reads): ‘Poor is the man whose pleasures depend on the permissions of another’?

SPHINX: It’s a Madonna quote. From ‘Justify My Love’… Can we call room service?

MINA: Gosh, yes, I remember the video. Rather a Helmut Newton pornographic soiree situation.

SPHINX: So sick, yeah. I think I was conceived to that, maybe? (Laughs) In the desert.

MINA: Your father was a lion and your mother was an eagle owl— correct?

[Excerpt from an accompanying text written by Charlie Fox]

In Ana Karkar’s method of seeing others in the show exploring the interaction between humans and hybrid figures. Her gestural work is imbued with colour relationships, as expressed by a vibrant palette in which her bodies are twisted and blended in a dance macabre that evoke the work of Egon Schiele.

Ana Karkar’s work is influenced by cinematography and images in the collective unconscious, especially horror and erotic movies. Filmic elements are often noted in her paintings, however for this show, for the first time Karkar is exhibiting film work, in the video piece Queen of the Night in relation to her painting. This then takes its title from a particular terracotta relief from the Old Babylonian period, from Mesopotamia (now at the British Museum). Pervaded by ancient symbolism alongside post-Punk elements and underground culture references, the film tells the story of the divinely complex marriage of Ishtar and Dumuzi and is set to the soundtrack of Berlin-based band Noj remixed to the Witch house genre.

Like an altar, the film is presented as the backdrop to Karkar’s own sculpture of a goddess, subversively titled Queen of the Nightlife, under whose feet is positioned a text written by Karim Massoteau, MY ANGER, A HARROW WITH GREAT TEETH, HAS TORN THE MOUNTAIN APART, folded and marked ‘REUNIFICATION IN PROCESS’. Visitors can take a copy of this text with them as they leave the altar.

“Now clad in terror, opening her chest, she demands the destruction of the mountain but is met only with resounding silence.

Whiffs of Cypress and Cedar are smelled.

Fist clenched, she then summons all life in her body and weaves a storm, fury assembles in her heart, her folds, her veins, her very blood, and lava dribbling from her lips, unleashes the shockwaves of her orgasm all around.

She blows one blast of pitiless, pulsing, stroboscopic, energy.”

[An excerpt from Karim Massoteau's text]

Ana Karkar, via Ishtar, is insisting we face our shadowy contradictions. That we acknowledge who we are, in all our painful and wonderful complexity. At the same time, she steps forward to do the same.

ALMINE RECH LONDON

Grosvenor Hill, Broadbent House, W1K 3JH London 

www.alminerech.com

Artist Thu-Van Tran @ Almine Rech New York — "In spring, ghosts return" Exhibition

Thu-Van Tran 

In spring, ghosts return 

Almine Rech New York 

May 7 — Jun 15, 2024 

Almine Rech New York, Tribeca presents In spring, ghosts return, Thu-Van Tran's third solo exhibition with the gallery.

Forming the focal point of her exhibition In spring, ghosts return, Thu-Van Tran’s Colors of Grey evokes a world of intense paradox. Vivid hues enact their own negation, their multiplicity eclipsed through their mixing by the emergence of a gray singularity. Differentiation morphs into that which is almost indistinguishable. Begun in 2012 as a poetic reckoning with the so-called Rainbow Herbicides that the United States weaponized against Vietnam during Operation Ranch Hand, the series has taken many forms, from wall-sized frescos to monumental paintings. In her most recent expression, the artist explores expanded vistas on a more intimate scale. These works engage the legacies of Renaissance perspective, 19th-century panoramas, and Christian devotional painting only to subvert them through a meditation on landscape that unfurls across metaphoric and geographical registers.

Arranged at the height of windows with a shared horizon line, the paintings in the exhibition offer a 360-degree view onto a compositionally and conceptually complex miasma of colorful abstraction. Their astounding beauty is rooted in horror. Indeed, the gestural washes that veil the canvas belie the steely logic of Tran’s politically encoded color theory. Between 1962 and 1971, the United States sprayed 19 million gallons of chemical weapons onto the jungles of Vietnam. Agent Orange was the most notorious, but Agents White, Blue, Pink, Green, and Purple were also unleashed in an act of chemical warfare that caused decades of ecological and human devastation. Limiting her palette to the colors used to identify these lethal herbicides, Tran paints each color alongside its opposite, gradually producing a shroud of gray pigment that floats above its originally colorful substrate. Her systematic approach results in a painterly negation that poetically figures the trauma of neocolonial occupation. This is a landscape twice abstracted. First, through the familiar gestural marks of nonobjective painting and, second, through the coda waiting to be deciphered in the very colors that Tran initially employs. 

The resulting panoramic installation that encircles the viewer formally echoes a system of visual representation popularized at the height of colonial expansion. Offering the public an immersive, even cinematic viewing experience, the panorama technique was patented in 1787 to instant acclaim. Visitors flocked to spectacles such as the “panorama du commerce” at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris, where seamlessly fused canvases hung in the round detailed scenes of colonial trade across the French empire. Commissioned to coincide with the Exposition Universelle of 1889, the panorama was a magnum opus of Orientalist painting. Allegories representing each country left no room for doubt as to the hierarchy of civilizations according to the French: Europe was represented as the arts and architecture, while Asia was reduced to elephants and a hookah. 

Conversely, Tran’s installation works against the panorama’s historical roots in imperialist expansion. Traditional panoramas borrowed a compositional style adopted from military protocols used to survey enemy land. They delivered scenes of heightened realism, typically from a bird’s-eye view. Tran immerses the viewer in a shifting landscape of suggestion and abstraction. Rather than indoctrinating viewers through an illusionistic palimpsest deployed to conceal violent conquest, the artist confronts the perpetual unfolding of imperialist aggression through the enigmatic commingling of color, form, and perception.

In In spring, ghosts return, Tran introduces an additional structural element that mitigates the surveilling mode of observation courted in 19th-century panoramas. Interrupting the revolving pan of paintings are two triptychs, whose triple-paneled format borrows from Christian devotional painting. An altar is a threshold to divine mystery. In the Christian tradition, it illustrates the apotheosis toward which all other elements in the church, such as the stations of the cross, narratively progress. Its appearance here is a reminder of forces greater than the visible world and its conquest. This formal intercession in the rhythm of the panorama suggests space for contemplation. The panoramic effect, in turn, exerts reciprocal pressure on the altarpieces, confounding the notion of chronological time fundamental to the Christian worldview. Rather than an explicit narrative mapped onto an advancing timeline, the horizon line that laces across Tran’s panorama suggests a continual cycle akin to the Buddhist belief in reincarnation. In spring, ghosts return reminds us that everything circles back to a point of origin only to begin again.

Tran’s incorporation of altars in the form of dual triptychs invites a spiritual dimension into what might otherwise stand as an exercise in history painting. As the exhibition title suggests, there are ghosts in this landscape. Apparitions coalesce and evanesce in the swirling veils of paint, pointing to mourning, mystery, and the possibility of communion. Tran has previously described her preoccupation with “the melancholy of a shifting landscape into which we must project and construct ourselves.”1  For centuries, Western painting prized various perspectival systems developed in the Renaissance, whose power lay in the promise of projection. These systems relied on the metaphor of the window, placing the viewer in a fixed position relative to the scene before them. A window might provide a view, but Tran’s panorama invites us to choose our own perspective. In this haunted terrain, the act of seeing is also a radical act of reconstruction that forges a future through the vivid condensation of history in the present. 

— Katherine Rochester, PhD, art historian and curator 

1  Hélène Guenin,“Interview: Thu-Van Tran and Hélène Guenin,” in Thu-Van Tran: Nous vivons dans l’éclat, ed. Hélène Guenin (Nice: MAMAC; Paris: Editions Dilecta, 2023),141.

ALMINE RECH NEW YORK

361 Broadway, New York, NY 10013 

www.alminerech.com

Keiichi Tanaami @ Almine Rech Gallery, Shanghai

Keiichi Tanaami

Almine Rech Gallery, Shanghai

October 27 — December 2, 2023

Almine Rech Shanghai presents KEIICHI TANAAMI's latest presentation with the gallery.

The Pop Art movement, characterized by its enduring global resonance until today, has embarked on a fascinating journey across cultural landscapes worldwide since its origins in 1950s America and Great Britain. The movement flourished in Japan in the late 1950s and early 1960s, melding Western Pop Art sensibilities with distinct Japanese cultural and social contexts. A new generation of Japanese artists embraced the Pop Movement's ethos, driven by a desire to challenge the conventional traditions of Japanese art. This creative awakening was a response to Western materialism and popular culture in postwar Japan.

Keiichi Tanaami (Born 1936 in Tokyo), an influential figure in Japanese Pop Art, stands out among his contemporaries. A hugely prolific artist whose career spans illustration, animation, experimental cinema, and painting, he explains, "My life is not a straight shot with one central theme running through it." His works have been widely exhibited worldwide and have been collected by major international art institutions, such as the New York MoMA, The Art Institute of Chicago, Hong Kong's M+ Museum, Washington's National Portrait Gallery, and the Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin.

— Athena Chen, art researcher

ALMINE RECH SHANGHAI

27 Huqiu Road, 200002 Shanghai

www.alminerech.com

The Echo of Picasso @ Almine Rech Galleries, NYC - Trebica and Upper East Side - Pablo Picasso in a contemporary perspective

The Echo of Picasso

Almine Rech Galleries, New York

November 8 — December 16, 2023 

In honor of the 50th anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death (April 8, 1973), Almine Rech presents The Echo of Picasso, a wide-ranging group exhibition curated by Eric Troncy, spanning across its two locations in New York City.

The exhibition offers two perspectives: one that revisits a time in history wherein Picasso's contemporaries sought to challenge his work, and a second in which living artists today echo the Spanish artist’s oeuvre. As Michael Fitzgerald* described, "instead of being a potential adversary in life, in death, Picasso became a voluminous encyclopedia of ideas and images for artists.” 50 years since Pablo Picasso's death, the contemporary works on view still echo the formal, technical, and conceptual inventions of one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. The exhibition also allows us to see Pablo Picasso in a contemporary perspective.

*Excerpt from the text by Michael Fitzgerald - Kluger family Professor of Art History Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut - in Museo Picasso Malaga catalog, The Echo of Picasso.

The Echo of Picasso is on view simultaneously at both Almine Rech locations in Tribeca, and in the Upper East Side, in New York City.

Rare works by Pablo Picasso, including one of only six Glass of Absinthe sculptures from 1914 (on loan from Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso), is on view, alongside those by Willem de Kooning, Francis Bacon (on loan from the Museum of Modern Art New York), Louise Bourgeois, George Condo, Jeff Koons, Farah Atassi, and Genesis Tramaine, among others (listed below).

The Echo of Picasso is curated by Eric Troncy, French art critic, curator, and Director of the Consortium Museum in Dijon, France and Editor-in-chief of FROG Magazine.

Artists featured in The Echo of Picasso, New York, are as follows: Joe Andoe, Karel Appel, Farah Atassi, Francis Bacon, Cristina BanBan, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Oliver Beer, Louise Bourgeois, Brian Calvin, César, Antoni Clavé, George Condo, Timothy Curtis, Jose Dávila, Urs Fischer, Jorge Galindo and Pedro Almodóvar, Jameson Green, Peter Halley, David Hockney, Thomas Houseago, Marcus Jahmal, Rashid Johnson, Willem de Kooning, Jeff Koons, Maria Lassnig, Cristina de Miguel, Annie Morris, Louise Nevelson, Pablo Picasso, George Rouy, Claire Tabouret, Genesis Tramaine, Rebecca Warren, Zio Ziegler.

ALMINE RECH NEW YORK GALLERIES

361 Broadway, Trebica, New York, NY 10013

39 East 78th Street, Upper East Side, New York, NY 10075

www.alminerech.com