Paloma Bosquê @ Blum & Poe, Tokyo - Dark Matter

Paloma Bosquê: Dark Matter
Blum & Poe, Tokyo
Through February 29, 2020

Blum & Poe presents São Paulo-based artist Paloma Bosquê’s first solo exhibition in Tokyo, and her first with the gallery. Paloma Bosquê creates compositions of various formats and scales that freely associate materials which are not typical of sculpture. Experimenting with the texture, weight and balance of a wide variety of materials—from brass to felt, bronze, coal, gum rosin, bee’s wax, beef casing, craft paper, coffee sieves and wool—she creates extremely delicate visual landscapes. 

Dark Matter refers to a form of matter whose existence has been hypothesized since the beginning of the twentieth century but has never been empirically proven. It is thought to consist of elementary particles that hardly ever interact with other known forms of matter and also do not emit light, which makes them exceedingly hard to detect. Although the standard Lambda-CDM model of cosmology calculates that these particles constitute twenty-seven percent of the universe, there is little agreement on how to characterize them. Paloma Bosquê is interested in how the visible appearance of the world results from such immense, instantaneous and vibrant interactions among elements that are not readily perceptible—countless atoms in constant cycles of attraction, repulsion, fluctuation, and charge-shifting. Interactions occur in the empty spaces within atoms, in areas between one energy level and another. She has been searching for a horizontal approach towards matter as a means to connect this emptiness and enable a reciprocal relationship of transformation and exchange between herself and the material she forms into an artwork. Furthermore, Paloma Bosquê considers this approach to be a political position in terms of understanding the human being as a single actor negotiating and interacting with a myriad of other different, sometimes mysterious beings. 

This exhibition presents a new body of wall and floor pieces, including freestanding compositions that incorporate hanging elements. In the wall-mounted Plates series, images emerge from juxtapositions of matter. Their compositions originate in the fabrication of the structure, which combines galvanized wire mesh with cotton fiber with glue. The torsion, the removal of material, and the overlapping of different layers of vegetal fiber and everything else that compounds the image are at the same time the actual body of the work. The title of Sea Tube—a wall-mounted tube of dark cotton fiber—refers to a sound effect generated inside of the object due to a combination of its materiality with its form, reproducing the noise of the sea that one hears in shells. For Paloma Bosquê, its inner empty space is a potential channel of connection between different spaces and times. Black Sun consists of an irregular black circle hanging over a metallic structure overlaid by a thin tangle of golden lurex threads. The shape of the lurex yarn is dictated by the metal structure over which they are superimposed, imbuing them with a "liquid" appearance. The round form hanging above serves as a center of gravity within the composition, exerting magnetism, as if it were the element that pulls the wires upwards. This work rests in opposition to the “black hole" where the structure of greatest gravitational force is on the ground bringing down the lurex wires. Through her practice of exploring and cultivating interchange between herself and the materials she composes into final forms, Paloma Bosquê’s work results from what she calls “an agreement which could transform both of us, and the space surrounding us.”

PALOMA BOSQUE (b. Garça, Brazil, 1982) lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil. Recent solo institutional exhibitions include O Oco e a Emenda, Pavilhão Branco, Museu da Cidade, Lisbon (2017) and O Incômodo, Pivô, São Paulo (2015). Her work has been included in museum group exhibitions such as Brasile. Il Coltello Nella Carne, Pac - Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea, Milan (2018); Bienal de Coimbra, Coimbra (2017); Mycorial Theatre, Pivô, São Paulo (2016); Projeto Piauí, Pivô, São Paulo (2016); Roberto Burle Marx: Brazilian Modernist, The Jewish Museum, New York (2016); United States of Latin America, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit (2015). Paloma Bosquê was awarded the Nigel Greenwood Art Prize in 2017.

BLUM & POE
Harajuku Jingu-no-mori 5F
1-14-34 Jingumae
Shibuya, Tokyo 150-0001
blumandpoe.com

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Tony Lewis @ Blum & Poe, Los Angeles - Charlatan And Ultimately A Boring Man

Tony Lewis: Charlatan And Ultimately A Boring Man
Blum & Poe, Los Angeles
Through July 6, 2019

"What is dangerous here is a turning away from...the turning away from...anything any white American says. ...But I don't know, and neither does Martin Luther King—none of us know—how to deal with those other people...who don't believe anything the white world says, and don't entirely believe anything I or Martin say." — James Baldwin

Blum & Poe presents the gallery’s second solo exhibition with Chicago-based artist Tony Lewis, entitled Charlatan and Ultimately A Boring Man. This exhibition showcases disparate facets of Tony Lewis’ practice, harnessed here together to confront a fraught milestone in contemporary intellectual history that the artist has long grappled with—William F. Buckley’s argument in the historic 1965 debate with James Baldwin on the motion “the American dream is at the expense of the American Negro.”

This exhibition conceptually and formally responds to work Tony Lewis began as far back as 2011—the transcript and video documentation of the Baldwin v. Buckley debate is source material the artist revisits cyclically. Prompted by the words of James Baldwin, Tony Lewis engages with the notion of “turning away from” by actively challenging his natural feelings of repulsion and anger registered when analyzing William F. Buckley’s language, thesis, and rhetorical strategies. Endeavoring to confront the greater apparatus of racism and white conservative psychology, here Tony Lewis meditates on the entirety of Buckley’s argument, and more specifically on one pivotal line from which he has extracted his exhibition title:

"There is no instant cure for the race problem in America, and anyone who tells you that there is…is a charlatan and ultimately a boring man—a boring man precisely because he is then speaking in the kind of abstractions that do not relate to the human experience."

William F. Buckley’s words echo throughout the exhibition, his likeness is projected directly on the gallery wall. This demanding subject matter carries forward Tony Lewis’ established practice of utilizing the medium of graphite to investigate language linked to structures of power and their inherent systems of exclusion, and to puncture such social and political issues as race, communication, and labor. With Charlatan and Ultimately A Boring Man, the viewer first encounters the artist’s shorthand drawings—a visual and gestural lexicon adopted from the John R. Gregg shorthand glyph system of dictation—the works all share the graphite phonemes for the word “boring.” The following gallery houses Lewis’ original site-specific floor drawing from 2011, a graphite-coated sculptural work on paper, with a new collage poem entitled “Man.” As a conceptual refuge in an adjacent room, a labor-intensive drawing rendered in black screws threaded with graphite-soaked rubber bands takes its shape from the shorthand gesture for the name “James.” Beyond a projection of William F. Buckley’s monologue, we encounter another floor drawing from 2014, this time erected and haunting, alongside another shorthand drawing handwritten directly on the gallery wall, “charlatan.” Finally, a second new collage poem created exclusively for this exhibition—the longest of the artist’s to date, a very personal and emotional response to Buckley’s argument.

TONY LEWIS (b. 1986, Los Angeles) lives and works in Chicago. His work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions including Anthology 2014-2016, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (2018); Plunder, Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA (2017); Alms, Comity and Plunder, Museo Marino Marini, Florence, Italy (2016); and nomenclature movement free pressure power weight, Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, OH (2015). His work has been featured in numerous museum group exhibitions including The Revolution Will Not Be Gray, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO (2016); Walls and Words, Museum at Eldridge Street, New York, NY (2014); LUMP Projects, organized by John Neff, Raleigh, NC (2013); People of Color, Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago, IL (2012); and Ground Floor, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL (2012). Tony Lewis participated in the 2014 iteration of the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and was the recipient of the 2017-2018 Ruth Ann and Nathan Perlmutter Artist-in-Residence Award at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University. His work is represented in notable public collections including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington D.C.; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY.

BLUM & POE, LOS ANGELES
2727 S. La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles, California 90034
www.blumandpoe.com

Visions of Brazil @ Blum & Poe Gallery, NYC - Reimagining Modernity from Tarsila to Sonia, Curated by Sofia Gotti

Visions of Brazil: Reimagining Modernity from Tarsila to Sonia, Curated by Sofia Gotti
Blum & Poe, New York
Through June 21, 2019

Blum & Poe presents Visions of Brazil: Reimagining Modernity from Tarsila to Sonia, curated by Sofia Gotti, hosted in collaboration with Mendes Wood DM. Following a tradition of championing critical reassessments of historical art movements beginning with Mono-ha with curator Mika Yoshitake, then Dansaekhwa curated by Joan Kee, and CoBrA with curator Alison M. Gingeras, to 1980s and 1990s Japan again with Yoshitake, Blum & Poe focuses on a revised Modernist narrative of Brazil. This exhibition gathers works that together span almost a century of Brazilian art, from Modernism to the present day.

This exhibition positions itself as a cartography for navigating current debates within the US and the Americas surrounding the formation of Modernism in Brazil. Works by Tarsila do Amaral, Sergio Camargo, Willys de Castro, Lygia Clark, Raymundo Colares, Antonio Dias, Sonia Gomes, Alberto da Veiga Guignard, Leonilson, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, Mira Schendel, Rubem Valentim, and Alfredo Volpi trace this pluralist history that winds through anthropophagy, feminist agendas, Afro-Catholic cultural genealogy, and more. 

Upon considering this collection of Brazilian works within the framework of modernity, the first issue exhibition curator Sofia Gotti seeks to address is the concept of modernity itself. Historian Walter Mignolo has made the persuasive argument that “modernity is the name for the historical process in which Europe began its progress towards world hegemony, it carries a darker side, coloniality.” If we understand Modernism as the cultural output of modernity, then using this label when analyzing Latin American art becomes problematic due to its colonialist connotations. Visions of Brazil seeks to “reimagine” the Modernist lens that defined a generation, a temporality, a utopian project, a philosophy, by presenting a rereading of this history tethering it to issues around race, power structures, and economics.

Tarsila do Amaral or simply Tarsila (as she is popularly known in her home country) is best known because of how she conjugated a Modernist aesthetic with her research into the roots of Brazilian identity, reflective of its folk and vernacular traditions. Curators Stephanie D’Alessandro and Luis Pérez-Oramas once proclaimed her the inventor of modern art in Brazil. One of Tarsila’s most iconic works, A Negra (1924), is seen in the foreground of the Manifesto Antropófago (Cannibalist Manifesto, 1928) by her husband Oswald de Andrade. Employing the concept of anthropophagy, this manifesto declared Brazilian culture as cannibalistic towards European culture: it devoured it, digested it, absorbed it, and reformulated it into something new. The Anthropophagous movement became a vital source for multiple artists of successive generations—most notably Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, which explains why this phase of Tarsila’s work is so widely referenced.

The work by Tarsila on view for the initial segment of the exhibition—Terra, 1943—is a rare example of her output after the Anthropophagy movement. Specifically, in the years following 1933 the artist adopted an aesthetic closer to Socialist Realism. In 1931 Tarsila visited the Soviet Union and she frequented Communist Party gatherings in Brazil, which caused her to be detained by the authorities for nearly a month. Besides speaking to her leftist political tendencies, the works produced in this period also confront newer female archetypes through less than idealized images of maternity, orphanages, or seamstresses working. Such works were devoid of all those tropical attributes we see in the drawings on view that distinguished her older output. Through the changes in Tarsila’s work, we can make out how her vision of modernity transformed into one more conscious of class, gender, and race-related issues.

A pivotal step in the construction of a revised Modernist narrative has been offered by Pérez-Oramas as well as curator Paulo Herkenhoff who confer that Tarsila was amongst those who inaugurated the modern period in Brazil, while Lygia Clark brought it to an end by literally embodying Tarsila’s Modernist project through her practice. For Pérez-Oramas, “among the various manifestation of South America’s aspirations to modernity […] perhaps none is more fascinating than Brazil’s cannibalistic phantasmagoria, which becomes image in Tarsila’s work, then later becomes body in Clark’s.” Clark’s revolutionary insight into art’s transformative effects on the body and on consciousness is manifest in some of her earliest and iconic experiments with active spectator participation in her Bichos (1961-1963), and Obra Mole (1964), objects made of connected metal sheets or rubber devised to be manipulated by the viewer and to be unpredictable in their movements. If we consider this history rooted in politics, race, and class as the departure point for a narrative of Modernism, it is possible to argue that it did not come to a close with Clark, but that it remains an ongoing project.

Such discussions offer the perspective that certain socio-political and economic conditions do not allow for the full realization of that Modernist utopia imagined in the 1920s and 1960s, suggesting it may still be a work in progress. When we turn to the work of an artist such as Sonia Gomes, a new facet of this narrative appears. Gomes’ works are still entangled with certain aesthetic tropes contained in the practices of Tarsila or Lygia Clark, though she is the first from this group who is non-white, coming from a bi-racial background, and who did not train in Paris. Gomes makes her works by using fabrics found or gifted from friends and family. Her choice of materials is also a reference to her growing up in a town in the state of Minas Gerais, which has amongst the oldest traditions of textile production. Her research approximates Tarsila’s inasmuch as it draws from Brazil’s localized cultural makeup. Her works have a corporeal presence that engages and involves viewers. Yet, by employing techniques such as weaving and embroidery, and for using unpretentious found materials (traditionally dismissed as feminine or craft), Gomes’ work brings to light a wholly different set of references. Her practice is positioned at an important point of juncture where it embodies simultaneously different visions of modernity. When asked why she recognized her own practice as art so late in life, she explained that the conditions were not ripe to do so. In other words, her work could not have entered the cultural discourse at an earlier date because the transformative potential it was offering would not have been recognized.

Visions of Brazil: Reimagining Modernity from Tarsila to Sonia positions works by Brazilian Modernists (such as Tarsila and Alfredo Volpi) alongside others made by artists working outside of Modernism's canonical time bracket (Gomes, Leonilson), allowing us to deconstruct what Modernism may stand for; and by rooting this rereading in politics, race, and class, we may support a visual narrative of Brazilian Modernism suspended on diversity and equality.

Dr. Sofia Gotti is a scholar and curator based in Milan. She has taught at The Courtauld Institute of Art and the University of the Arts London, and currently lectures at Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti (NABA), Milan. Her research centers on feminist art practices in Latin America and Italy. She has worked with organizations including the Feminist Institute, Castello di Rivoli, FM Centre for Contemporary Art, Tate Modern, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

A panel discussion on the occasion of the exhibition has been held at the Americas Society on Thursday, May 2, with Sofia Gotti and curators Gabriela Rangel (Americas Society) and Sergio Bessa (Bronx Museum), and with contributions by Kiki Mazzucchelli and Sergio Martins. 

BLUM & POE, NEW YORK
19 East 66th Street, New York, NY 10065
www.blumandpoe.com

Chiho Aoshima at Blum & Poe, Santa Monica

Chiho Aoshima
Blum & Poe, Santa Monica
February 8 - March 9, 2002

In her solo debut, Chiho Aoshima exhibits five medium to large-scale digital prints. Most recently seen in the traveling exhibition Superflat, her work is identified with the visual and conceptual precedents of Takashi Murakami's work. Chiho Aoshima's style demonstrates the striking trend of anime- and manga-influenced work that has garnered so much attention in recent Japanese art. This work derives many of its stylistic cues from 18th- and 19th-century traditions of formal and spatial reduction. In Chiho Aoshima's work, space and scale are obfuscated by the all-over compositional methods she creates digitally. Though they have the appearance of paintings, she composes her brightly-hued work entirely on the computer, which allows for every inch of the work to be painstakingly rendered.

Chiho Aoshima's works often depict adolescent girls in humorous or bizarre situations. These range from magical and dream-like to dark and horrific. The visual vocabulary she uses exemplifies kawaii, or cute, imagery, but Chiho Aoshima twists this distinctly Japanese device into her own. Frogs, girls, cherry blossoms, fish, snakes, and noodles all occupy the same world, a world with indecipherable terrain, where there is no demarcation between air, water, or land. Still-life and portraiture mix easily in Chiho Aoshima's variously scaled works, as do fashion, design, and traditional art practices.

Chiho Aoshima lives and works in Tokyo and is the head of Digital Drawing for Takashi Murakami's Hiropon Factory.

The pieces were created with the support of Canon, who generously assisted Chiho Aoshima with the printing.

BULM & POE
2042 Broadway, Santa Monica, CA 90404
www.blumandpoe.com