Thomas Chapman, Alejandro Garmendia, Louis Jacquot, Lucy Mullican, Milko Pavlovelana @ Pace Gallery, Seoul - "Illusive Places" Exhibition Curated by Cy Schnabel

Illusive Places 

Thomas Chapman, Alejandro Garmendia, Louis Jacquot, Lucy Mullican, Milko Pavlovelana 

Curated by Cy Schnabel

Pace Gallery, Seoul

May 11 - June 15,  2024

Alejandro Garmendia 

Jessica Descending & Ascending in the North Sea, 2007 

© Alejandro Garmendia 

Pace presents Illusive Places: Thomas Chapman, Alejandro Garmendia, Louis Jacquot, Lucy Mullican, Milko Pavlov, a group show curated by Cy Schnabel, at its gallery in Seoul. This exhibition brings together works by artists who, in one way or another, share an interest in reinventing landscape painting. These five artists—Thomas Chapman, Alejandro Garmendia, Louis Jacquot, Lucy Mullican, and Milko Pavlov—use landscape as a point of departure to create nuanced approaches to subject matter, form, and content. 

Throughout this exhibition, natural settings turn into imaginary realms that suggest new perspectives of the physical world and life in general. An abstracted sense of space in the pictures on view gives way to unstable compositions that are charged with desire, fantasy, and sometimes loneliness. A range of psychological views carry their own resonances and connect through each artist’s interest in presenting a distinct irreality in their work. Utopias, nightmares, hallucinations, and fragmented memories all materialize in these illusive places.

Cy Schnabel

Cy Schnabel (b. New York, 1993) is an independent curator and the founder and director of Villa Magdalena, a gallery based in San Sebastian, Spain since 2020. The gallery focuses on contemporary Spanish painting and works with international mid-career and emerging artists. In 2017, Schnabel worked as an assistant curator at the Centro Cultural de España en México (CCEMX) in Mexico City, making his curatorial debut with the group show Horizontes Imaginarios. In 2018, Schnabel co-curated the posthumous retrospective Alejandro Garmendia: Paisajes, enigma, y melancolía at the Sala Kubo Kutxa in San Sebastian. Schnabel has presented two exhibitions at Galería Mascota in Mexico City—Mie Yim: New Works on Paper (2022) and Lucy Mullican: Veils (2023)—which marked each artist’s first solo exhibition in Mexico. In collaboration with Spazio Amanita, Schnabel curated Felicidad Moreno: Form and Formlessness (Miami, 2022) and Cristina Lama: Música para un murciélago (New York, 2023), both artists’ first solo presentations in the United States. He was also the author and co-curator of Schnabel and Spain: Anything Can Be a Model for a Painting at the CAC Málaga, a 2022 survey of 23 paintings made by his father between 1997 and the present, showing the artist's works in the context of Spanish painting and the evolution of his practice during this period.

Cy Schnabel’s curatorial writings on the five artists in the show follow below.

Thomas Chapman

After experimenting with shaped canvases for more than 20 years, Thomas Chapman (b. 1975, San Diego, California) has returned to figurative painting, developing a style that is heavily influenced by his drawings of everyday life. Like his Lake Paintings, the works on view in Illusive Places are voyeuristic studies of leisurely moments. Layered imagery resulting in a dense atmospheric haze makes the figures who populate these invented scenes barely perceptible. Throughout his oeuvre, found fabrics, collage, stolen typographies, markers, paint, pencil markings, glue, and many other elements comprise the surfaces of his paintings. The unorthodox shapes of some of Chapman’s early canvases are inspired by a variety of subjects: astronomy, mythology, and ancient history. Taking an unconventional approach to painting, Chapman makes use of supports and many layers of sometimes conflicting visual information as common features in his diverse practice.

Alejandro Garmendia

The two works on view by Alejandro Garmendia (b. 1959, d. 2017, San Sebastian, Spain) are from his Pinturas Sucias (Dirty Paintings) series. But why dirty? Surely it has to do with the murky appearance of these paintings. Their messy execution with a muddy color palette, which reflects the artist’s embrace of accidents and imperfections as part of his practice, confirm that his process for these works is consistent with their conceptual underpinnings. The very idea of a landscape as “dirty” suggests that Garmendia was questioning the legitimacy of the act of painting itself, and, more specifically, the impulse to make something even remotely pastoral in contemporary times. This was yet another ironic and subversive gesture, illustrating an awareness of the risk involved in his chosen subject, given that the pictures seem so opposed to avant-garde tendencies and the general trajectory of contemporary art. In any case, these works serve as pretexts to his experimentations with the surrealist lineage he so admired, along with other art historical references. Garmendia documented the nonexistent, created physically impossible compositions, and ultimately presented a distanced metaphysical vision of the world that evokes estrangement and disorientation.

Louis Jacquot

Louis Jacquot’s (b. 1994, Paris, France) practice hinges on relationships between objects and pictures. The artist’s sculptural paintings combine minimalist gestures with iconographic elements. Blinky (2022) and Imi (2022), the two works present in this exhibition, turn intimate spaces and domestic objects on their sides to create illusive perspectives. In Jacquot’s hands, the intimate subject transcends the image to encompass the entire painting. Both the material— bedding—and the shape of the canvases—like that of a pocket notebook—speak to direct contact with the body. In the past, during his BFA at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the artist maintained a workspace more akin to a woodworker’s shop than a painter’s studio. He avoided his “own” mark-making in favor of objects that were practically devoid of any graphic elements. In the few cases where pigments are applied, Jacquot chooses images that could belong to anyone. His previous works show an impersonal vocabulary of generic found symbols appropriated from the street—any universal emblems became subjects of interest for him.

Lucy Mullican

Lucy Mullican’s (b. 1994, New York) paintings use the horizon line as a compositional device to create a tension between gravity and the human spirit, which, in contrast to the former, is always in a state of ascension. We can trace maps of ethereal worlds in her works, which are ultimately self-portraits. The artist has experienced a spiritual transformation that is evident in her departure from painting waterfalls, islands, and rivers in favor of a more contemplative, inward consideration of the mind and the organs. Exterior environments blend with bodily forms, creating anthropomorphic landscapes. Her delicate paintings on wood consist of many layers of mineral pigments and pulsating lines, which create translucent surfaces. What the artist refers to as “pockets” or “holes” within her compositions function like portals, allowing the viewer to travel back and forth between pictures. The natural pigments of the watercolor and the wood receivers become one, reflecting the artist’s innate ability to understand her medium and employ technical fluidity. Mullican’s penetrating vision goes beyond the surface to reveal what we cannot see and bring us closer to what we feel. Transient moments flooded with light embody the artist’s representation of spirit.

Milko Pavlov

Milko Pavlov’s (b. 1956, Aytos, Bulgaria) paintings depict an imaginary natural world where rock formations, trees, water, and other organic matter have been rendered unrecognizable. The artist’s pictorial blend of naturalistic representation and abstraction creates a vast scale within the picture plane that is an everchanging way of seeing. In Pavlov’s oeuvre, form, surface, and composition develop in response to paint itself as a subject. His black and white frottage works—a technique he now applies to canvas—are continuations of the graphic work he was making in Bulgaria in the early 1990s. The artist’s colorful palette derives from his early exposure to 18th and 19th century Bulgarian Icon painters, which shifted his attention towards religious works of art instead of assimilating formal ideas related to the socialist realist aesthetic dominant in the country in the 1970s. With his titles, Pavlov is interested in a conceptual dimension that reflects an intersection of different moments in time. In many cases, his artwork titles can contain multiple dates yet to come, as with 2133-2 МРП 2042 (2024) and B.V 2099 МРП 2065 (2022), both of which are included in the exhibition at Pace in Seoul. Through these references to futuristic times, Pavlov is challenging the life expectancy of everything: himself, the viewer, the painting itself. The way the artist organizes space in his paintings—in other words, the composition—loosely resembles mountains or landscapes, a subconscious gesture which perhaps illustrates the mountainous nature of his native country.

PACE SEOUL

267 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul 

www.pacegallery.com

Artist Adriano Costa @ Emalin Gallery, London - "ax-d. us. t" Exhibition

Adriano Costa: ax-d. us. t

Emalin Gallery, London

The Clerk’s House

12 April – 13 July 2024

Emalin presents ax-d. us. t, Adriano Costa’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The artist’s project draws on the context of the historical Clerk’s House, where the exhibition unfolds, as well as the cemetery grounds of St Leonard’s Church on which the house stands and whose tombstones are built into its walls. With this as his starting point, Costa engages the built and the historical with his sculptural vocabulary that makes tangible the transmutation of value into base material, of life into spirit and of body into dust.

The exhibition’s title, ax-d. us. t, is a wordplay about the axis of distance between ‘us’ – you and I – contained within the word ‘dust’. Costa’s sculptural focus on detritus and passing is saturated with spirituality: he references the sacred books of Christianity, the biblical prophecy of the world turning from dust to dust, as seen in the churchyard outside. In his native São Paulo, he follows his spiritual guides of Candomblé to pay respect to the stuff from which we are made, the stuff into which we turn, the dead and the living, the trash and the gold, what they sell for and what we give to buy them.

Adriano Costa’s practice mixes universals with trash. He will object to this – just as he would refute the existence of found objects, or site-specific exhibitions. Imbuing all of the material world with the same force of spiritual importance, he concludes that everything is found and everything is site specific. Taking this logic forward, his practice interrogates the alchemy of matter and value, driven by a desperate love for things discarded. Love’s powerful logic spreads into his treatment of other universals and moves him to abolish the hierarchy of value between different materials. And so Adriano Costa wishes to redirect attention away from pedestals and grand gestures by placing his works on the floor, leaving them unguarded, easily mistaken for the trash he is so indebted to. The existential mistake of value stands to Costa for something of the tragic farce of the world — a spiritual kind of humour that unfolds in material objects.

The bronze sculptures in the exhibition follow on from a series of sculptures cast from discarded moulds, retrieved from Costa’s foundry. The foundry in São Paulo is important to the artist: he spends time there, he talks to the workers, makes mistakes with them and, beyond this, engages in a ritual of watching the fire. To Adriano Costa bronze is demanding. When working with it, you must follow its rhythm, you cannot be dictatorial, cannot decide the time it needs. You must respect it because it is not only stubborn but dangerous: it can take your hands. It demands reverence. But this reverence is not at its peak when the bronze is cast - is beautiful, stable, quiet even - but when it is at its most powerful and most wild: when it is in the fire of its birth. These libidinal bronze pieces are heavy with his fingerprints and crushed with a knife, one penetrating another, a reckless abandon of spirit.

Adriano Costa chooses bronze because of its temperature and its history: a history imbued with love’s logic of value. Why did they find this material thousands of years ago? How? It was the metal of ritual, jewellery, eating, for looking at, for selling. How did they find somewhere hot enough? They thought this extremity worthwhile. They thought bronze was endless, immovable, forever precious, capable of eternity. And so one might believe this of Costa’s pieces – but this is a trick, a revealing of his logic. Because as with everything else, just as much as what we imagine to be trash, bronze is ephemeral – prone to deterioration and death. This mistake of bronze is our central mistake. What is precious is never endless. It changes, it dies. It returns to the fire.

This logic is continued by the exhibition’s wood and plaster sculptures, which are made from misshapen wood used to support the bronze moulds, the cast-offs of sculpture making, the detritus of the foundry. When needed, they are integral: they support the weight of curves and extrusions, but afterward they suddenly turn useless. Costa was drawn to this sudden devaluation, and how they remained – lonely – in this space of creation, unpainted, untended, a support structure so vulnerable to collapse, eminently destructible, yet hard to remove. To Costa, this is beauty. He wanted to make a show of such beauty, not of beautiful things, and in its pursuit found that gutting his work was necessary. The exhibition is an aftermath of this gutting – fish, not fresh from the sea, but laid out before us like a deteriorated landscape.

Different types of architecture, elevated and found, shape the bronze, wood and plaster of his sculptures. Since his practice always draws upon Costa’s surroundings, it is inevitable that the material politics of the place where he lives shape the work – the art historical, architectural and social characteristics of São Paulo appear in the landscape of his exhibitions in the same way that Tesco bags and receipts from the local shop will find their way into the assemblages made in London. Hélio Oiticica, the Tropicália, Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape make their appearances. Friends and lovers do. The material landscape of the Cracolândia area of São Paulo, too. The curved plinth made for the ground floor of The Clerk’s House is based on the curvature of the facade of one of São Paulo’s most iconic buildings: the modernist Edifício Copan by Oscar Niemeyer. Behind the building, seen from Costa’s studio windows, are the mountains – elevations of the natural world that also find their way into his cityscapes.

ADRIANO COSTA was born in 1975 in São Paulo, Brazil, where he lives and works. His past solo exhibitions have been held at A Sud, Pescara, Italy (2023); Mendes Wood DM, New York (2023); SALTS, Birsfelden, Switzerland (2022); Nuno Centeno, Porto, Portugal (2019); Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Germany (2018); Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo (2018); David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles (2016); Supportico Lopez, Berlin (2016); and Sadie Coles HQ, London (2014). Costa's work has been included in group exhibitions held at Chi K11 Art Museum, Shanghai, China (2021); Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, US (2017); Lothringer13 Halle, Munich, Germany (2017); Guggenheim Museum, New York (2014); Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (2014); and Musee D’Art Contemporain de Lyon, France (2014).

Adriano Costa's work is included in the permanent collections of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Pinacoteca de Estado de São Paulo; Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Collection, Turin, Italy; The Serralves Foundation, Porto, Portugal; and the Boros Collection, Berlin, amongst others.

EMALIN

The Clerk’s House 

118½ Shoreditch High Street, London

www.emalin.co.uk

Leon Kossoff @ Xavier Hufkens, Brussels - "Close Encounters: Paintings and Drawings" Exhibition

Leon Kossoff

Close Encounters: Paintings and Drawings

Xavier Hufkens, Brussels

2 February — 30 March 2024

Xavier Hufkens presents the gallery’s first exhibition dedicated to the work of the British painter LEON KOSSOFF (1926-2019). Featuring paintings and drawings made over a four-decade period,  the presentation highlights two significant bodies of work showcasing major themes in Leon Kossoff’s oeuvre, namely London cityscapes and his ‘translations’ of works by Old and Modern Masters. The exhibition presents a comprehensive overview of Leon Kossoff’s practice as well as its stylistic evolution.

Leon Kossoff was a leading member of the London School, a loose association of artists that also included Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, and David Hockney. Although stylistically diverse, they all focused on figuration and expressive realism at a time when abstraction and minimalism were the dominant forces in contemporary art. Kossoff painted London almost obsessively. The works in the exhibition include scenes from the north of the city, where he lived and worked, and the East End, where he was raised. Painted between 1971 and 1992, they chronicle Kossoff’s fascination with the city’s post-war renewal. He was especially drawn to places of transformation and transit, such building sites and stations, as evidenced by Demolition of YMCA Building No. 2, Spring (1971), Booking Hall, Kilburn Underground Station No. 4 (1978) and Outside Kilburn Underground Station, November (1984). Separated by a period of six years, the Kilburn paintings not only bear witness to the artist’s unwavering interest in his everyday surroundings but also the way in which even the most familiar subjects are in a state of permanent flux.

The artist additionally depicted buildings and places that evoked specific memories for him, such as Red Brick School Building, Winter (1982). This was a type of school building familiar to many English children growing up in the post-war period, and which reminded him of the primary school he himself attended in Spitalfields. The nearby church, one of London’s grandest baroque edifices, designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor, was the subject of another of his paintings, Christ Church, Spitalfields, Early Summer (1992). For Kossoff, these subjects were not just physical landmarks but ones in which there is a constant interplay between past and present, underscored by the charged and ever-moving brushwork. Leon Kossoff painted London all year round and always from life. Light and the weather determine the atmosphere of his works, together with his gestural technique and characteristic use of impasto. In an oeuvre that chronicles the ebb and flow of life in one of the world’s largest metropolises over the best part of a century, time and memory are important touchstones. While many of the locations that Kossoff painted have long since vanished, the places immortalised in the paintings on exhibition — the Red Brick School Building, (Willesden), Christ Church, Spitalfields, and Kilburn Underground station — can all be seen today.

Leon Kossoff is also renowned for his ‘translations’ of paintings by Old and Modern Masters. While he visited and drew in the National Gallery in London on a weekly basis, and had done from a young age, the drawings in this exhibition were mainly made from works shown in Royal Academy exhibitions: Francisco Goya’s paintings and Courbet’s The German Huntsman were included in the retrospectives dedicated to these artists in 1978 and 1994 respectively, while Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas (c. 1570-1576) was exhibited in Venetian Painting in 1983. Here too, Leon Kossoff worked from life: he made his drawings in the galleries before the actual paintings. Yet these are anything but academic copies. Leon Kossoff’s rapid, dynamic technique and repetitive strokes are unmistakably his own and the sketches, whilst faithful to the originals, are never identical to them. Hence the term ‘translation’. Captivated by certain Old Masters, or canvases by pioneers such as Cézanne and Courbet, Kossoff strove to analyse the psychological and emotional impact of the paintings by recreating it in his own work. It was both an intellectual engagement and an educational exercise. He wrote in 1987: “In my work done in the National Gallery, and elsewhere from the works of others, I have always been a student. From the earliest days…my attitude to these works has always been to teach myself to draw from them, and, by repeated visits, to try to understand why certain pictures have a transforming effect on the mind.” Leon Kossoff was particularly drawn to dramatic and intense works, or those depicting a struggle, as can be seen in the exhibition.

LEON KOSSOFF began his artistic training at St. Martin’s School of Art in 1943 but left in 1945 to complete three years of military service. He returned to St. Martin’s in 1949 and followed David Bomberg’s classes at Borough Polytechnic from 1950 to 1952. He then completed his training at the Royal College of Art between 1953 and 1956. Leon Kossoff represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1995 and was the subject of a retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1996. His work is held in major public and private collections around the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Tate Gallery, London.

XAVIER HUFKENS

107 rue St-Georges | St-Jorisstraat, 1050 Brussels

www.xavierhufkens.com

Anish Kapoor @ Palazzo Strozzi, Florence - "Untrue Unreal" Exhibition

Anish Kapoor. Untrue Unreal

Palazzo Strozzi, Florence

7 October 2023 – 4 February 2024

Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi in Florence presents Anish Kapoor. Untrue Unreal, a major new exhibition devised and produced with the celebrated artist who has revolutionised the notion of sculpture in contemporary art. Curated by Arturo Galansino, Director General of Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, the show features monumental installations, intimate environments and thought-provoking forms that will forge an original and captivating dialogue between the art of Anish Kapoor and the architecture and audience of Palazzo Strozzi. 

With a wide range of early, mid-career and recent works, including a new architecturally scaled work especially conceived for the Renaissance courtyard of Palazzo Strozzi, the exhibition offers an opportunity to engage directly with the artist’s oeuvre in all its versatility, discord, entropy and ephemerality. Palazzo Strozzi becomes a venue at once concave and convex, whole and yet fragmented, in which visitors are called on to question their senses.

In Anish Kapoor's art, the unreal merges with the untrue, transforming or negating the common perception of reality. He invites us to explore a world where the boundaries between what is true and false dissolve, opening the doors to the realm of the impossible. One of the distinguishing features is the way Anish Kapoor’s works transcend their materiality. Pigment, stone, steel, wax and silicone, to name only a few of the materials he works with, are manipulated – carved, polished, saturated and formed – to the point of a dissolution of boundaries between the plastic and the immaterial. Colour in Anish Kapoor’s hands is not simply matter and hue, but becomes an immersive phenomenon, containing its own spatial and illusive volume.

Anish Kapoor’s works merge empty and full space, absorbing and reflecting surface, geometrical and biomorphic form. Shunning categorisation and distinguishing himself by a unique visual language that embraces painting, sculpture and architectural forms, Kapoor explores space and time, the interior and the exterior, urging us to probe in the first person the limits and potential of our relationship with the world around us and to reflect on perceived dualities such as body and mind, nature and artifice. His work sparks amazement and uneasiness, encouraging us to question certainties and embrace complexity. In a world where reality seems increasingly elusive and manipulable, Anish Kapoor challenges us to seek truth beyond appearances, inviting us to explore the territory of the untrue and the unreal.

Arturo Galansino, General Director of the Palazzo Strozzi Foundation and curator of the exhibition states: “In the wake of our series of exhibitions dedicated to the leading figures of contemporary art, Kapoor has engaged in a direct dialogue with the Renaissance architecture. The result is entirely original, almost a kind of dialectical juxtaposition, where symmetry, harmony, and rigor are called into question, and the boundaries between material and immaterial dissolve. Amidst the rational geometries of Palazzo Strozzi, Kapoor invites us in this exhibition to lose and rediscover ourselves, prompting us to question what is untrue or unreal."

Anish Kapoor. Untrue Unreal unfolds in the spaces of Palazzo Strozzi in between the galleries at the Piano Nobile and the Renaissance courtyard, in a journey through Kapoor’s diverse artistic practice that challenges the very notion of form and formlessness, fiction and reality.

At the centre of the courtyard stands "Void Pavilion VI"I (2023), a large pavilion that serves as both a point of departure and arrival in the dialogue between Kapoor’s art and Palazzo Strozzi. Upon entering the sculpture, visitors are confronted by a triad of rectangular voids that invite the gaze to descend within, offering a meditative experience of space, perspective and time that unsettles the rational geometric structure of the Renaissance building in which it sits and the orderliness it so emblematically represents.

At the Piano Nobile, the exhibition takes off with the iconic work "Svayambhu" (2007), a title that derives from the Sanskrit term denoting self-originated entities, akin to the Christian concept of acheropoieta, images not made by human hands. As this vast block of blood-red wax moves slowly along its track between two rooms of Palazzo Strozzi, it creates a dialectic between void and matter as its formless substance is shaped by the architecture it pushes through.

This work is presented in dialogue with "Endless Column" (1992), a work that references Constantin Brâncuși's iconic modernist sculpture of the same title from 1937. Anish Kapoor’s red pigment sculpture penetrates floor and ceiling to create an aethereal architectural physicality that stands as a link between earth and cosmos. On a different scale but equally architectural is "To Reflect an Intimate Part of the Red" (1981), a seminal work from Anish Kapoor's early career that marked his breakthrough on the international art scene as a profoundly original voice in contemporary art. A suggestive combination of yellow and red pigment forms, appear to emerge from the floor—fragile, otherworldly, yet powerfully present.

In "Non-Object Black" (2015) – characterised by the use of the highly innovative material Vantablack, capable of absorbing over 99.9% of visible light – Kapoor challenges the very idea of a physical and tangible object, presenting us with a form that dissipates as the gaze moves around it. In these groundbreaking works Anish Kapoor provokes us to question the very notion of being, offering a reflection not only on the fictional object but on the immateriality that permeates our world. The fullness of the experience of the no-thing is continued in "Gathering Clouds" (2014), concave monochromes that absorb the space around them in their brooding darkness. Anish Kapoor’s work offers a new way of seeing and thinking about how we experience ‘reality’, with his unique use of form and saturation these works are permeated with psychic resonance.

Flesh, organic matter, body and blood are recurring and fundamental themes in Kapoor’s artistic creation. An entire room is dedicated to works in which Kapoor examines a flayed and ravaged interiority that renders the body as entropic and abjected. The large sculpture in steel and resin "A Blackish Fluid Excavation" (2018) evokes a gnarled vaginal void, that crosses the space and the senses of the spectator. On the wall, Kapoor’s paintings created with silicone are shaped with fluid forms that appear to us as visceral masses, pulsating with their own life. These structures twist, expand, and contract, evoking a sense of continuous movement and transformation. At the same time, a strong tactile sensuality arises from the interplay between softness and solidity, organicity and linearity. These qualities underlie works with evocative titles such as "First Milk" (2015), "Tongue Memory" (2016), "Today You Will Be in Paradise" (2016), "Three Days of Mourning" (2016).

The notion of boundaries and the duality between subject and object are central to Anish Kapoor’s mirror works like "Vertigo" (2006), "Mirror" (2018) and "Newborn" (2019), a work that again pays homage to Constantin Brâncuși’s formal experiments. With their inverted reflections, the specular is thrown into the realm of the illusory in works that seem to defy the laws of physics. These large-scale sculptures reflect and distort the surrounding space, enlarging, reducing and multiplying it, creating a sense of unreality and destabilization while drawing the viewer into the indefinite space they emanate.

The exhibition path of the Piano Nobile concludes with "Angel" (1990): large slate stones covered in numerous layers of intense Prussian blue pigment. These weighty masses appear in contradiction with their ethereal appearance; they seem to solidify the air and suggest the transformation of slate slabs into pieces of sky, transfiguring the concept of purity into a material element. Anish Kapoor manipulates the hyper-materiality of this work to evoke a sense of mystery that responds to the esoteric ambition of achieving the fusion of opposites.

ANISH KAPOOR is one of the most influential artists of our time. Born in Mumbai, India in 1954, Anish Kapoor has lived and worked in London since studying sculpture at Hornsey College of Art and Chelsea College of Art in the mid-seventies. In recent years dividing his time between studios in London and Venice.

His works are permanently exhibited in the most important collections and museums around the world from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the Tate in London; the Prada Foundation in Milan and the Guggenheim Museums in Venice, Bilbao and Abu Dhabi. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Galleria dell’Accademia di Venezia & Palazzo Manfrin, Venice, Italy (2022); Modern Art Oxford, UK (2021); Houghton Hall, Norfolk, UK (2020); Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany (2020); Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum and Imperial Ancestral Tempie, Beijing (2019); Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires (2019); Serralves, Museu de Arte Contemporanea, Porto, Portugal (2018); University Museum of Contemporary Art (MUAC), Mexico City (2016); Chateau de Versailles, France (2015); Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, Moscow, (2015); Gropius Bau, Berlin (2013); Sakip Sabanci Muzesi, Istanbul (2013); Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2012).

Anish Kapoor represented Great Britain at the 44th Venice Biennale in 1990 where he was awarded the Premio Duemila Prize. In 1991 he won the Turner Prize and has gone on to receive numerous international awards and honours. Also renowned for his architecturally scaled works, public projects include: Cloud Gate (2004), Millennium Park, Chicago, USA; Leviathan (2011) exhibited at Monumenta, Paris, France; Orbit (2012), Oueen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London; Ark Nova, an inflatable concert hall created for Lucerne Festival, Japan (2013); Descension (2014) most recently installed in Brooklyn Bridge Park, New York, USA (2017) and the soon to be completed Traiano and Universitá Monte St Angelo Metro Stations, Naples, Italy (2002–24).

Curated by Arturo Galansino

PALAZZO STROZZI, FLORENCE

www.palazzostrozzi.org

Victoria Cantons @ Flowers Gallery, London - Nothing is Absolute

Victoria Cantons: Nothing is Absolute 

Flowers Gallery, London 

21 April - 20 May, 2023 

VICTORIA CANTONS

We Need to Watch it Over and Over for the Light That is Here, 2022 

Oil on linen, 45 x 50 cm

© Victoria Cantons, courtesy Flowers Gallery

VICTORIA CANTONS

How the dizziness slips away like a wisp of a cloud on the wind, 2022

Oil on linen, 160 x 140 cm

© Victoria Cantons, courtesy Flowers Gallery

Flowers Gallery presents a solo exhibition by London-based artist Victoria Cantons, her second exhibition with the gallery. 

The exhibition title refers to a shifting relationship between the self and the perception of the surrounding world, which Victoria Cantons describes as a constant revisioning and adjustment of the concepts of truth and understanding. As Cantons says, "Nothing is fixed. Everything is in flux, and anything can change it.”

In these recent works, ideas of transience are explored in figurative and floral paintings, in which the shimmering saturation of colour and fluid brushwork appear to allude to moments of ripening at the turning point of decay. Many of the floral works were painted on residency in Italy during the summer of 2022, resulting in an abundance of light emanating from the paintings, which became repeated in the form of memory in later works on her return to London.

The recurring floral motifs reflect both a personal symbolism, and a contemporizing of the art historical genre of 17th century Vanitas painting. Frequently featuring roses, often associated with romance, Cantons’ paintings simultaneously reflect earthly sensuousness and a record of time passing, embodying the entangled notion of what she describes as “everything and nothing.” Cantons says, "It is only in something or someone passing, that we understand its value and temporariness. And it feels bittersweet. Because our nature is ‘to resist’. The paintings are a resistance to the idea that nothing is absolute.”

The titles of many of the paintings relay a sense of nostalgic desire, such as A Moment Perpetually of the Past and the Present and When it Becomes a Memory… May I Consume it With Pleasure. This theme continues in figurative paintings such as We Need to Watch it Over and Over for the Light That is Here, which Cantons describes as being concerned with "being present in the moment”; while Subjective Ideas During Wartime considers how intimate human connections may still flourish during the destruction of conflict in all its forms.

Much of Victoria Cantons’ work is rooted in language, finding expression through evocative titles, or incorporated as text in the works themselves. The painting Untitled (An Urge to Hide the Minute Beneath the Light) introduces word-play, which she describes as celebrating the “openness of language,” where the word ‘minute’ invites alternate readings relating to a preservation of the precious and fleeting. 

VICTORIA CANTONS

Good Fortune or an October flush, 2022 

Oil on linen 170 x 150 cm

© Victoria Cantons, courtesy Flowers Gallery

The self-portrait Good fortune or An October Flush, a continuation from the Transgender Woman series (2019-present), captures the first stages of recovery from facial surgery. The artist here reflects on the "good fortune" of transformative surgery, while the blooming scars and bruises reflect a visceral awareness of the fragility of mortality. Reflecting on the nature of trust required in the process, Victoria Cantons says: "It's about seizing the moment; a leap of faith.”

VICTORIA CANTONS

Victoria Cantons (b.1969, British), lives and works in London. She studied Fine Art Painting at Wimbledon College of Arts, UAL; followed by the Painters Studio Programme, Turps Art School, London; and graduated with an MFA in Painting from Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, in 2021. She is a recipient of the Felix Slade Scholarship, Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, and was shortlisted for the Chadwell Award in 2021. Recent group exhibitions include Tomorrow: London, White Cube, (online); Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy, London, PAPA RAGAZZE, Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, Like there is hope and I can dream of another world, Hospital Rooms, London and (It's My Party) I Can Cry If I Want To, Guts Gallery, London. Cantons curated the Slade Rooms as part of LONDON GRADS NOW 2020 and 2021, Saatchi Gallery, London. Victoria Cantons first exhibited at Flowers as part of the 24th Edition of Artist of the Day in 2018, and had her first solo exhibition with the gallery, People Trust People Who Look Like Them, in 2022. 

FLOWERS GALLERY

21 Cork Street,, London W1S 3LZ

www.flowersgallery.com

Michael Snow @ Galerie Martine Aboucaya, Paris - Autour de son nouveau livre

Michael Snow

Autour de son nouveau livre

Galerie Martine Aboucaya

15 novembre 2022 - 10 janvier 2023

Michael Snow

La collection de photographies de ma mère

Photo courtesy of Galerie Martine Aboucaya

La galerie Martine Aboucaya présente sa cinquième exposition personnelle de Michael Snow (Toronto, 1928).

Figure clef du cinéma expérimental et musicien de renom, Michael Snow a développé au fil de sa carrière une pratique polymorphe et transversale mêlant film 16mm, peinture, sculpture, vidéo, photographie, dessin, écriture, holographie et musique. Il aborde ces différentes expérimentations à travers de nombreux écrits théoriques, publiés dans des catalogues, des revues, ou restés inédits (Des écrits 1958-2001, recueil de textes commentés par l’artiste, publié par le Centre Georges Pompidou en 2002).

L'exposition s'est construite autour de son nouveau livre intitulé "La collection de photographies de ma mère". Cet ouvrage reprend  fidèlement l'album photo familial. Voilà ce qu'en dit l'artiste :

Pour ses amis et sa famille, ma mère, Marie-Antoinette Françoise Carmen Levesque Snow Roig se surnommait «Toni». Elle signait ses lettres « Toni». Elle était née le 21 février 1904 à Chicoutimi et elle est décédée à Toronto le 19 février 2004 (vraiment, elle a vécu roo ans). Son père s'appelait Elzéar Levesque (1875-1937), avocat, et pour quelque temps le maire de Chicoutimi. Son père, également Elzéar, était capitaine de bateaux sur la rivière Saguenay et le fleuve Saint-Laurent. Sa femme, Delphine Tremblay, était d'origine innue (montagnaise). La mère de Toni s'appelait Caroline Dénéchaud Levesque. Le père de Caroline s'appelait Macaire Dénéchaud. Son père à lui, Claude Dénéchau*, possédait une seigneurie près de la ville de Québec à Berthier-sur-mer. Le père de Claude, Jacques Dénéchaud, vint de la France et arriva à Québec en 1752; il était chirurgien et apothicaire. En 1924, Toni a épousé Gerald Bradley Snow à Toronto. Il a été arpenteur dans la région du Lac Saint-Jean et il était aussi ingénieur civil supervisant la construction de deux ponts près de Chicoutimi. John Snow, charron de son état, fut le premier Snow en Amérique du Nord britannique. Il est arrivé d'Angleterre en 1816 et s'établit dans la région devenue depuis Hull/Ottawa. Son fils, également prénommé John, était arpenteur-géomètre. Toni et Gerald Bradley Snow eurent deux enfants, Denyse et Michel (l'auteur de ce livre). Ma mère a soigneusement gardé les merveilleuses photos des trois lignées familiales (Dénéchaud, Levesque et Snow). Et elle a noté l'identité des gens qui apparaissent dans les images, ainsi que le lieu, la date et les circonstances de l'événement photographié. Les photos sont si belles et si historiques que je souhaite les partager avec tous et toutes.

L'exposition évoque et partage un vécu à la fois intime et collectif en réunissant principalement 3 oeuvres : Autour de l'île, Sinoms et Cityscape. Le livre lui, ponctue et arrête le temps. Michael Snow nous permet de découvrir un peu de son enfance. Et nous reconnaîtrons partout ici les mouvements de caméra chers à  Michael Snow comme dans Wavelength (1967), Back and Forth (1969), La Région Centrale (1971) et Rameau's Nephew (1974).

Michael Snow a fait l’objet de nombreuses expositions monographiques de par le monde. Ses œuvres figurent dans plusieurs grandes collections - Museum of Modern Art, New York; Ludwig Museum; Tate London; MNAM, Centre Georges Pompidou; Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; FRAC Lorraine; Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg; Musée des Beaux Arts, Canada; Art Gallery of Ontario; National Gallery of Canada...

GALERIE MARTINE ABOUCAYA

5 rue Sainte Anastase, 75003 Paris

martineaboucaya.com