Paul McCarthy @ Peder Lund, Oslo - Painted Pirates Heads

Paul McCarthy: Painted Pirates Heads

Peder Lund, Oslo

Through 5 September 2021

PAUL McCARTHY

Captain Dick Hat, 2010/2017

Courtesy of the artist and Peder Lund  

Photo: Uli Holz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PEDER LUND

Tjuvholmen allé 27, Oslo 0252 

pederlund.no

Claude & François-Xavier Lalanne @ The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown - Nature Transformed

Claude & François-Xavier Lalanne  

Nature Transformed 

The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown 

May 8 – October 31, 2021 

It has been more than forty years since an American art museum has mounted a presentation of the work of sculptors Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne, and the Clark’s exhibition provides a fresh perspective on these innovative artists. Their imaginative and powerful sculptures have long delighted international audiences and collectors. During their remarkable careers, the married artists worked and exhibited together, often under the joint name “Les Lalanne,” although they seldom collaborated on objects.

Common to both artists was their abiding interest in nature. From their earliest exhibition in 1964, entitled Zoophites, a reference to objects with a mixture of animal and plant characteristics, the artists repeatedly drew inspiration from flora and fauna and morphed these natural forms into something strange and new. In her works, Claude Lalanne (1924–2019) transformed familiar plants and animals into lyrical and sometimes surreal creations while François-Xavier Lalanne (1927–2008) turned his fascination with the mysterious inner life of animals into abstracted and refined sculptural forms that often concealed a practical function. In the work of both Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne, artistic vision bends natural forms to new uses.

The Clark is the sole venue for this exhibition, which also marks the first museum presentation of the artists’ work since the 2019 death of Claude Lalanne. Nature Transformed features an equal number of objects by each artist from across their long careers, revealing the power of their artistic imagination, their impressive command of technique, and their enduring visual appeal. The works include sculpture and furniture by both artists and a selection of Claude Lalanne’s wildly inventive flatware and jewelry.

Nature Transformed, presented in the Clark’s Michael Conforti Pavilion and in additional outdoor locations, is curated by Kathleen Morris, the Clark’s Sylvia and Leonard Marx Director of Exhibitions and Curator of Decorative Arts. 

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, published by the Clark and distributed by Yale University Press.

Claude and Francois-Xavier Lalanne

Nature Transformed

Kathleen M. Morris

A beautifully illustrated, concise critical analysis of the art, careers, 

and reception of the husband-wife team of artists known as 

Les Lalanne François-Xavier (1927–2008)

 and Claude (1925–2019) Lalanne...

July 6, 2021

THE CLARK ART INSTITUTE

225 South Street, Williamstown, MA 01267

www.clarkart.edu

Thaier Helal @ Ayyam Gallery, Dubai - Abyss

Thaier Helal: Abyss

Ayyam Gallery, Dubai

22 March - 10 May 2021

THAIER HELAL

Sky Line, 2021

Acrylic on canvas, 165 x 165 cm

© Thaier Helal, courtesy Ayyam Gallery

Ayyam Gallery presents Abyss, a solo exhibition featuring THAIER HELAL’s most recent body of work. 

Taking his creative observation further, Thaier Helal continues to pose radical questions. He addresses many subjects concerning our existence, meaning, and current state of bitterness that drains the mind and soul. 

While furthering his previous body of work in ideology, Thaier Helal’s new work differs in texture, stepping away from his structural and sculptural approach, the artist expresses himself through flatness. While developing a trial and error process, focusing on layers of light and darkness, Thaier Helal threads a thin line between figurative and abstract. Thaier Helal succeeds in doing so through non-conformist perspectives, the artist’s technique plays with composition and vantage point. The artist’s fascination with nature is pushed backwards. The artist’s connection manifests itself through subdued earthy and cool tones placed deep within the darkness, symbols of elements of the unknown. 

The process of trial and error creates series of similar yet unique works, allowing the viewer to see through the strokes and gestures, making meaning out of form or lack thereof. The process givesThaier  Helal the opportunity for inner-discussion, with an ongoing interaction between the work and the artist. The interactions offer the artist moments of appreciation. The aim is for each viewer to see something personal that references past experiences, to take the viewer to the extremes of imagination. This technique amounts to artworks of hope and pain that hone on uncertainty. Are we heading towards a specific direction? Will we find meaning to any of it?

The repetition in Thaier Helal’s gestural abstraction allows him to answer questions in several ways, giving multiple ambiguous answers to open-ended issues. The artist is looking for solutions amidst the darkness, tokens of meaning and truth submerged in light and color across the canvases. The light is what remains untouched, resulting in an opportunity for color. Therefore rendering darkness as manmade, saturation of pigment becomes layers of missteps. In the series of small works on paper, the artist envisions common suffering, behind the horizontal strokes are faces masked by the same fate.

THAIER HELAL

Thaier Helal’s constant search for experimental forms has led him to include diverse media, arriving at approaches that often blur the lines between painting and assemblage. With an innovative painting style that has progressed over the course of two decades, Helal is recognised as working at the forefront of contemporary abstraction in the Middle East.

Born in 1967, Thaier Helal launched his career in his native Syria, where he studied with seminal painters at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Damascus. After relocating to the United Arab Emirates in the 1990s, he developed a distinct method of painting that incorporates unconventional materials such as glue, sand, and coal in an attempt to recreate the physical and sensory aspects of the world around him.

Thaier Helal begins each composition with a sketched grid that serves as a compositional base then builds on the surface of the canvas by applying several layers of mixed media, providing a sense of organisation to an otherwise spontaneous picture. This laboured formalism represents the artist’s conceptual rendering of the intrinsic code of nature, and extends to investigations of spatial dynamics as shaped by the fluctuation of society and culture. Thaier Helal communicates movement and energy through expressionist explosions of colour and automatic brushwork, alluding to organic formations.

In the years following the outbreak of the Syrian conflict, Thaier Helal has explored various printmaking techniques and appropriated imagery in works that isolate the mechanisms of war and represent the growing militarisation of global society. Recent works by the artist that use found objects, such as plastic beads and miniature toys, allude to the adverse  effects  of  globalisation,  the  advent  of  consumerist  culture,  and  the  power struggles that have triggered these phenomena.

As a longtime resident of the Gulf, Thaier Helal has contributed to the regional art scene with an extensive exhibition history that includes solo exhibitions at such venues as the Sharjah Art Museum (2000), in addition to  awards from  Tehran’s Contemporary Painting Biennial (2005) and the Sharjah Biennial (1997). Thaier Helal has also influenced the development of local painting as a Senior Member of the Sharjah Arts Institute, and a Professor at the Fine Arts College, University of Sharjah, where he has encouraged emerging artists.

Recent solo and group exhibitions for the artist include Ayyam Gallery 11 Alserkal Avenue, Dubai (2018, 2017); Ayyam Gallery Beirut (2015), Ayyam Gallery London (2015); Ayyam Gallery DIFC (2014); Samsung Blue Square, Seoul (2014); and Busan Museum of Art (2014). Thaier Helal’s works are housed in private and public collections throughout the Arab  world,  including  the  Sheikh  Mohammed  Bin  Rashid Al  Maktoum  Collection, U.A.E.

A monograph on the artist was published by Ayyam Gallery in 2014.

AYYAM GALLERY

B11, Alserkal Avenue, Street 8, Al Quoz 1, Dubai

www.ayyamgallery.com

Jarmo Makila @ Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki - Land of Shadow

Jarmo Mäkilä: Land of Shadow

Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki

October 23 – November 15, 2020

JARMO MÄKILÄ (b. 1952) has spent the past few years immersed in childhood's imaginary landscapes. In this new exhibition, he reflects on the end of childhood, asking whether childhood ever truly ends or whether the child lives on, hidden inside the man. Jarmo Mäkilä reflects on what manhood ultimately means, asking when, exactly, boyhood's innocence is displaced by the burden of manhood.

The paintings in his new exhibition depict contrasted locations with different emotional resonances: open forests and confined interiors. The forest is the bedrock and spiritual home of Finnish mythology. It represents boundless freedom – an open domain where boys escape the watchful gaze of the mother. They return as young men and look upon their childhood home from afar as if observing a world lost to them.

By contrast, his interiors are constricting. Jarmo Mäkilä paints strong, sturdy men in lyrically brutalist, dream-like places, whether taking jabs at a punching bag, flexing their muscles, or displaying tattoos like a victory sign – flaunting classic symbols of masculinity. Jarmo Mäkilä presents us with mythical images of manhood, telling the story of boys growing into men and letting the narrative unfold with the mythical force of ancient legend. The viewer, too, is gripped with the desire to pound a punching bag, tattoo their life story on their skin, and feel the life force pumping through their veins. Each one of us has a story. Each one of us is unique.

All the paintings in this new exhibition have one feature in common: the power to inscribe a narrative in the viewer’s mind. Every detail appears to have a deeper significance than is visible at first glance. A hidden world lies concealed behind what we see on the canvas. The artist poses the questions: Are boys just boys or children? Can a man ever be just a human being?

A trailblazer who has followed his own artistic path throughout his career, Jarmo Mäkilä ranks among Finland’s most accomplished artists. He has exhibited widely worldwide and held solo exhibitions at venues including the Amos Anderson Art Museum, Helsinki City Art Museum HAM, Sara Hildén Art Museum, and Pori Art Museum. He was the first Finnish artist to hold a solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in 1998. Jarmo Mäkilä received the Pro Finlandia medal in 2002.

GALERIE FORSBLOM

Yrjönkatu 22 - 00120 Helsinki

www.galerieforsblom.com

__________________________

Sturtevant @ Peder Lund, Oslo

Sturtevant
Peder Lund, Oslo
Through June 20, 2020

Peder Lund presents works from the iconic Warhol Flowers series by the American artist STURTEVANT (1924-2014). Sturtevant created one of the most interesting oeuvres in the 20th century. By following a unique approach that consisted of creating stunning repetitions of the artworks of her contemporaries and presenting them consciously as independent works, she questioned the foundations of our understanding of art and her oeuvre confronts us with a fundamental expansion to Duchamp’s concept of the readymade. The show includes 19 unique works from the 1970s that have never been shown in Scandinavia before.

STURTEVANT

Warhol Flowers, 1970

© Estate Sturtevant, courtesy Peder Lund

STURTEVANT

Warhol Flowers, 1970

© Estate Sturtevant, courtesy Peder Lund

STURTEVANT

Warhol Flowers, 1970

© Estate Sturtevant, courtesy Peder Lund

While some of her repetitions were essentially exact copies of the artworks she chose to work with, others were recreated manually from memory. Through the artistry of Sturtevant’s detailed repetitions, the works she referred to can be easily identified, but their meaning was far from being a simple duplication, as her intention was never to create just a close resemblance, but to explore through her work topics such as authorship, authenticity, and originality. Issues that are of the highest relevance in our digital age, which is defined by the endless stream of images and their recombination.

Starting in the early 1960s, Sturtevant created in half a century an impressive body of work that challenged the viewer to look closely and think about the social and historical context of art. During her lifetime, Sturtevant’s work was met with much resistance and, similar to other great female artists, her oeuvre was only first truly given recognition in the last decades of her life. Sturtevant began her career in New York, where she studied at the Art Students League, an art school that has been historically known for its broad appeal to both amateurs and professional artists. Among the alumni of this school are many artists who became key figures of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, such as Cy Twombly, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Rauschenberg. This vibrant environment was an important source of inspiration for Sturtevant’s work and some of her fellow students became close friends and sometime collaborators.

Her first solo exhibition at the Bianchini Gallery in 1965 featured her versions of artists' works that we now see as icons of their time. It demonstrated her remarkable ability to repeat important artworks shortly after their creation, and it is clear that Sturtevant had a keen sense for quickly analyzing the qualities of an artwork and its cultural reception. Among the exhibited works were, for example, repetitions of Andy Warhol’s silkscreened flowers, which he had only started to produce in 1964 and a colorful, concentric square from Frank Stella's Benjamin Moore series which he had begun in 1961.

While some of her contemporaries were offended, other artists such as Rauschenberg and Warhol encouraged her to create repetitions of their work. Memorably, Warhol replied in an interview, in which he was asked about his process and technique, “I don’t know. Ask Elaine” (B. Arning, “Sturtevant,” Journal of Contemporary Art, vol. 2, no. 2, Fall/Winter 1989, p. 43). According to Sturtevant, Warhol had given her full access to his factory and allowed her to use the original silkscreen of his flower series. (Peter Eleey, Sturtevant – Double Trouble, Museum of Modern Art, 2014, p. 73)

Of course, Warhol's oeuvre is especially linked to Sturtevant's work since repetition, authenticity, and authorship are also key elements of his work, however his implementation clearly differed from Sturtevant's pursuit, as his quote perfectly illustrates. While Warhol's factory operated under the premise that he delivered the concept of the work to his assistants, who were then responsible for the work's execution, therefore his name became the brand. Conversely, it was of utmost importance for Sturtevant to execute the work herself. Hence, her flower series, for which she used the same technical tools, demonstrates perfectly that each work will nevertheless differ. In the same way as the products of Warhol's factory are original artworks because of the conceptual idea that lies within them, Sturtevant's works are absolutely unique, exactly because they depict the same thing but with a different meaning.

The fact that Sturtevant, as a woman artist, chose to repeat this particular series by Warhol, a decorative motif which is associated with beauty and femininity and for which he actually used an image of hibiscus flowers first taken by the photographer Patricia Caulfield, is significant. Her choice grappled with the notion that male artists have historically dominated art history and have had much better chances to be taken seriously by exploring and replicating the mundane motifs that Pop Art used. Even though Pop Art has an ironic element, it draws from the visual archive of a commercial culture; most artworks by men of this movement simply repeat the male gaze through which women were objectified - most often by being depicted as either the devoted housewife or a glamorous, seductive pin-up. Of course, female artists worked with this visual vocabulary, as well, and the second series that Sturtevant focused on when repeating Warhol's work used the famous portrait of Marilyn Monroe. The key difference is that the female artists re-appropriated images of their own gender. Hence, most of their works' intention came from a point of feministic empowerment that challenged the given social structures of this time.

Howevere, since her work was, of course, putting key values of the art system in question, many important gallerists, collectors, and curators avoided giving her work the attention it deserved. Considering this hostile climate, it is no surprise that Sturtevant chose to retreat from the art scene in 1974 for over a decade. During this time, appropriation became a widely accepted practice in art, and in hindsight, it is clear that Sturtevant’s work must have had a powerful influence on a younger generation of artists. Sherrie Levine, Louise Lawler, and Cindy Sherman became, for example, prominent figures of the Picture Generation and explored the constructed nature of images and the parameters that define the social reception of an artwork further.

In 1985, Sturtevant returned to an art world which had, in the time of her absence, slowly evolved, and she continued to repeat the works of the next generation of artists who were on the rise and in 2000, she expanded her methods and began to create new film and video-based works. In Sturtevant's career, her breakthrough came in 2004, with the major solo exhibition The Brutal Truth at The Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt. After this show, her influence finally began to be widely acknowledged and the demand for her work rose significantly. Many renowned museums started to feature her work prominently, including the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Kunsthalle Zürich, and the Serpentine Galleries in London. In 2011, she was honored with the Golden Lion for her lifetime achievement at the Venice Biennale, and in 2012, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm dedicated the retrospective Image Over Image to the artist. In 2013, she was awarded the Kurt Schwitters Prize for Lifetime Achievement by the Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany, and in November 2014, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, finally opened the first major institutional exhibition, entiltled Double Trouble, in the US, which travelled in the following year to Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, California. Tragically, the artists never got the chance to experience this recognition in her home country in its entirety, as she died in May 2014.

Born in Lakewood, Ohio in 1924 as Elaine Sturtevant, Sturtevant moved to New York in the early 1960s and decided to use only her last name as an artist name. Besides her artistic education, she earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Iowa, followed by a master’s in the field from Teachers College of Columbia University. Later in her career, she held a professorship at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2014, Sturtevant died in Paris where she had lived since the beginning of the 1990s at the age of 89.

Works by Sturtevant are held by renowned public and private collections, including ARC, Paris; DAP, Paris; FRAC, Bretagne; MAMCO, Geneva, MOCA Los, Angeles; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Pinault Foundation; Secession, Vienna, Sintra Museum of Modern Art, Sintra; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Weimar Neues Museum, Weimar; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, ZKM, Karlsruhe.

PEDER LUND
Tjuvholmen allé 27, 0252 Oslo
pederlund.no

Betty Woodman @ David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles - Shadows and Silhouettes

Betty Woodman: Shadows and Silhouettes
David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles
June 27 – August 24, 2019

David Kordansky Gallery presents Shadows and Silhouettes, an exhibition of sculptures and paintings by BETTY WOODMAN (1930-2018). The artist’s first solo show in a gallery since her death, the exhibition features works made between 2008 and 2016, and focuses on thematic and formal issues––creative use of negative space, two- and three-dimensional representations of vessels, the hybridization of vessel and human figurative forms––that were central to her project throughout her career.

Over the course of a career that spanned than 50 years, Betty Woodman revolutionized the use of clay and glazes in contemporary art. The sheer variety of her work, the range of her references, and the vitality and curiosity that appear throughout her oeuvre all help posit her as one of the most ambitious and singular American artists of her time, especially given the oft-marginalized status of her primary medium. Her synthesis of modernist syntax with a truly global array of cues from art, architecture, and design led to objects that are, in the words of critic Peter Schjeldahl, "beyond original, all the way to sui generis."

Shadows and Silhouettes features 12 works Betty Woodman made over the last decade of her life, when she was executing some of her most radical experiments. The exhibition juxtaposes varied works in which painted and sculpted forms are repeated and reversed, and in which outlines of objects carve out negative spaces that re-appear as pictures either on canvases or glazed onto the objects themselves. They range from classic pedestal-based sculptures like the diptych His and Hers Vases: Life Drawing (2008)––whose standing and reclining female nudes are painted with black and white glazes on vertically- and horizontally-oriented vases––to the Cubist complexity of Aztec Vase & Carpet: Mariana (2015), whose canvas "base" and dynamic, four-winged vessel provide surfaces for a continuously painted and glazed composition of alternating dark and light squares, among other motifs.

For Betty Woodman, pictorial and sculptural versions of space were in constant conversation with one another. These conversations could be harmonious, dissonant, humorous, or soaring and poetic, depending on their context. The Chapel, a large painting with ceramic relief elements from 2011, is in the latter mode: flat ceramic elements, glazed a brilliant white, are arranged on the wall so that they resemble tall, multipart vases. The canvas on which they hang has been painted with slashing white brushstrokes against a black background. This optically dynamic play of two-dimensional volumes is accentuated by the dramatic three-dimensional composition defining the work's upper third, where a vessel with bright red glazing sits on a white shelf and another group of relief objects hover over the illusionistic, painted rendition of a room characterized with an intense red floor and yellow walls.

Works like these reflect the increasingly daring ways that Betty Woodman employed architectural imagery, harnessing both its perspectival richness and emotional resonances. Summer Tea Party (2015-16) is another example of this thrust in her work. An interior scene suffused with joyful light––and lightness of spirit––is divided into two main sections. A painting of a provocatively sloped table covered with a blue gingham cloth occupies most of the lower half of the canvas; affixed to it are ceramic representations of plates, pitchers, and a basket of fruit. Whimsy is met with mystery, however, in the form of five unglazed ceramic forms installed in a balustrade-like row over a painted window; the negative spaces between them take the shape of vessels. Such moves break with the already elastic visual logic Betty Woodman establishes with recognizable images and ceramic "pictures" of real-world objects, suggesting ghostly presences that flirt with pure abstraction.

In other cases, however, it is the presence of the figure that leaps out of Betty Woodman’s sculptures and paintings. As her project began to move beyond the constraints of functional ceramics in the 1970s, she began to explore––and explode––archetypal associations between the vessel and the human body. She envisioned her objects, as well as the pictures of vases she painted on and around them, as players in theatrical scenes. Each work became a domestic drama (or comedy) whose narrative is told in colors, shapes, textures, and patterns. Late in her career such narratives took on uncanny dimensions, especially in the paintings, with the silhouettes of three-dimensional vessels repeated on canvases behind them. In Tuesday Afternoon (2016) this effect takes center stage. A white-glazed vessel stands on the floor, its arms arranged like those of a posing model; on the canvas, a brushy, semi-transparent image of a similar object hovers in space, as if the vessel had dreamed itself into a sun-filled parallel reality.

Recent solo exhibitions of Betty Woodman's work have been presented at chi K11 art museum, Shanghai (2018); the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2016); Museo Marino Marini, Florence (2015); Gardiner Museum, Toronto (2011); American Academy in Rome (2010); Palazzo Pitti, Giardino di Boboli, Florence (2009); Denver Art Museum (2006); and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2006). Recent and forthcoming group exhibitions include Lessons in Promiscuity: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972-1985, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (forthcoming, 2019); Less Is a Bore: Maximalist Art & Design, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (forthcoming, 2019); Pattern, Decoration and Crime, Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2019); In My Room: Artists Paint the Interior 1950-Now, The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville (2018); the Liverpool Biennial (2016); Playing House, Brooklyn Museum (2012); and Postmodernism: Style and Subversion, 1970-1990, Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2011). Her work is featured in over fifty public collections worldwide, including the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY
5130 W. Edgewood Pl. Los Angeles, CA 90019
www.davidkordanskygallery.com

Magdalena Jitrik @ Galeria Luisa Strina, Sao Paulo - El Silencio

Magdalena Jitrik: El Silencio
Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo
June 5 — July 27 2019

Why call “silence” an exhibition that has so much to say? Eight paintings and a set of objects compose Magdalena Jitrik’s fourth solo exhibition at Galeria Luisa Strina. It is as an enigma to be deciphered. Perhaps the most mysterious of the paintings, which at first sight appears to be the representation of a pair of eyes on a red concrete bulky formation, evokes the glances cast by the seated female figure in the lower right corner of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, as well as the dying woman, outstretched arms in a surrendering posture, on the right side on the Guernica painting. The reference to Picasso is not direct nor fundamental, but it is known that the Argentine artist uses historical vanguards, from cubism and surrealism to the De Stijl and Bauhaus, in her critical reinterpretation of modernisms.

The resemblance to Picasso´s paintings is due less to the work by the Spaniard than to Picasso’s appropriation of primitivism, after all, the aesthetic choice to abandon perspective in favor of the two-dimensionality was deliberately adopted in Les Demoiselles in order to “épater la bourgeoisie”, who was used to traditional European painting, is revised by Magdalena Jitrik in her deliberate use of perspective. In her paintings, Magdalena usually inserts visual contradictions between background and figure. The smoky effect on several of the pictures presented in El Silencio produces not only a sensation of a floating volume, but also projects the figure back and forth in an infinite dynamism.

It is important to remember that in 1907 Matisse classified The Young Women of Avignon as a bad taste joke, and today the painting is considered the genesis of the Cubist revolution. On one hand, if Les Demoiselles founded cubism, Guernica is the movement’s greatest icon. As it is known, the title of Pablo Picasso’s monumental painting derives from the name of the Spanish village that was the first urban area to undergo aerial bombing on April 26, 1937, by the German military air force that backed up the Francoist dictatorship during the Spanish Civil War, prologue to the Second World War. Nowadays, and over the years since then, this work is considered a peace symbol and a libel against war atrocities, of any war. It is said that when a Nazi official saw the painting, he allegedly asked Picasso: “Did you produce this horror, sir?”, To what the artist replied “No, you did”.

Magdalena Jitrik’s exhibition can be thought as a manifesto against the archipelago of arrogance that condemns us to silence. The more geometric works of the show have a Mondrian felling to them, who is also revisited in a sideway manner, logically. It is symptomatic that the pieces assembled in the gallery shed light to the Manifesto I (1918), by the group De Stijl to the present, a century and two great wars later:

There is an old and new understanding of time. The old one is related to the individual. The new one is related to the universal. The dispute between individual and universal is shown both in global wars and in contemporary art. 

War is destroying the old world and its content: predominance of the individual in all fields. 

The new art has brought to light what is contained in the new understanding of time: a balance between the universal and the individual. 

The new understanding of time is prepared to take place in both the inner and outer life.

Tradition, dogmas and the predominance of the individual (of the natural) are preventing this understanding. 

Therefore, the founders of the new plastic arts ask everyone who believes in the reform of art and culture to annihilate these development obstacles, just as they annihilated in the new plastic arts (abolishing natural forms) what prevents any pure artistic expression, the ultimate consequence of all art forms. 

Current artists, driven by the same consciousness throughout the world, took part in the world war against the domain of individualism and authoritarianism from an intellectual point of view. They commiserate, then, with all who fight, intellectually or materially, for the formation of a life union, in art, in culture.

The war against individualism, in Magdalena Jitrik’s career, is perhaps most evident in her militancy ahead of the Popular Workshop on Screen Printing, with Mariela Scafati and Diego Posadas, in the year 2000. With this collective, for example, the Argentine took part in the 27th Bienal of São Paulo in 2006 curated by Lisette Lagnado – an exhibition that disseminated the concept of relational aesthetics by the Frenchman Nicolas Bourriaud in Brazil and is now considered a turning point in the history of the Biennial, firstly by abolishing national representations, but mainly for having placed on the agenda of the art system the artists´ researches that focused on collaboration and cohabitation, or else, on the values ​​of “living together”, which was borrowed from Roland Barthes´ work, that was the expression that gave the 2006 Biennial its name, Como Viver Junto. The union that the artists fought for a century ago was revived in Latin America and around the world in the year 2000 and again, at the beginning of the following decade, in the Arab Spring (2011) and in the Days of June, in Brazil (2013).

Let’s return to the painting that seemed to portray a pair of eyes and see there two birds that touch each other with the tip of their beaks, two people who are in dialogue, or yet the symbol of infinity. “It was a picture where visuality and materiality emerged, somewhat arbitrarily, in the process of producing the works for the solo show at Luisa Strina. I do not have a lot to say about this work, unless I see in it something about communication, communication as a symbol of something continuous, something infinite, “reflects Magdalena Jitrik. The artist´s show tells us, in the end, that, even when we cannot speak, silence promotes the reflection that leads to an infinite conversation with the other.

MAGDALENA JITRIK

Magdalena Jitrik (1966) was born in Buenos Aires, where she lives and works. From 1974 to 1987, the artist lived in México, where she studied visual arts at Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas. She has been showing her work since 1990, when she had her first solo show at Galería del Rojas. She was one of the founders of the Argentine art collective Taller Popular de Serigrafía (2002 -2007), with whom she created an intervention of graphic art in the 27th Bienal de São Paulo (2006). Jitrik has joined the biennials of Porto Alegre, Brazil (2009); Thessaloniki, Greece (2009); Trienal Poligráfica de Puerto Rico (2009), Istambul, Turky (2011) and Manifesta 9, Genk, Belgium (2012).

Recent solo exhibitions include: Venceremos // Black is Beautiful, Centro Cultural Universidad Nacional General Sarmiento e Casa Doblas, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2017); Vanguardia – America, MACBA, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2016); Modern Painting, Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo, Brazil (2014); El Fin, el Principio, Fundación Universidad Di Tella, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2013); International Lantern, The Beltable Center, Limerick, Ireland (2012); La Linterna Internacional, Museo Castagnino, Santa Fe, Argentina (2012).

Recent group shows include: Potência e Adversidade – Art from Latin America at the collections of Portugal, Museu de Lisboa / Pavilhão Branco and Pavilhão Preto, Lisboa, Portugal (2017); Verboamérica, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Buenos Aires (2016); Retour sur l’Abîme – l’art à l’épreuve du génocide, Les Musées de Belfort, France (2015); El teatro de la pintura, Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires (2014).

Public Collections holding her work include: MACBA Barcelona; Reina Sofia, Madrid; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Rosario (MACRo), Rosario, Argentina; Museo de Bellas Artes de Bahía Blanca, Argentina; FRAC – Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, Marseille, France; Fundación ARTEBA, Buenos Aires; MALBA – Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires; Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo, Madrid, Spain; Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, UNAM, México.

GALERIA LUISA STRINA
Rua Padre João Manuel 755
Cerqueira César 01411-001
São Paulo SP Brazil
www.galerialuisastrina.com.br

Go Figure! Curated by Beth Rudin DeWoody @ Eric Firestone Gallery, East Hampton, NY

Go Figure! Curated by Beth Rudin DeWoody
Eric Firestone Gallery, East Hampton, NY
May 25 – June 22, 2019

Eric Firestone Gallery presents Go Figure!, a group exhibition about an ongoing dialogue between contemporary figurative artists and figuration of the 1950s, 60s and 70s and includes works by the following artists: 

Tunji Adeniyi-Jones • Emma Amos • Will Barnet • Diedrick Brackens • Katherine Bradford • Delia Brown • Joan Brown • Alex Bradley Cohen • Lucille Corcos • Mira Dancy • Elaine de Kooning • Charles DuBack • Angela Dufresne • Martha Edelheit • Eric Fischl • Natalie Frank • Barnaby Furnas • Shirley Gorelick Mimi Gross • Ridley Howard • Konstantin Kakanias • Sam Kalda • Maira Kalman • Howard Kanovitz • Alex Katz • Bill King • Marcia Marcus • Liz Markus • Jan Müller • Joe Overstreet • Philip Pearlstein  Vanessa Prager • Eleanor Ray • Walter Robinson • Mira Schor • Joan Semmel • Jansson Stegner • Ruby Sky Stiler • Billy Sullivan • Nick Weber • Tom Wesselmann • Jane Wilson • Jason Yarmosky • Hartwell Yeargans • Yelena Yemchuk

Curator Beth Rudin DeWoody says:

I’ve always been attracted to figurative painting and drawing even though I love abstract and minimalist art. I also love the in-between when figure melds into the abstract.  There are many young artists who are looking back to some of the great figurative artists of the mid 20th-Century, putting their own 21st-Century influences and viewpoints onto the works.  

The exhibition is about pairing contemporary artists with artists of the mid-20th Century to shed new light on the strength of their voices, and continued relevance today. Despite the dominance of Minimalist and Conceptual art, a surprising number of artists in the 1960s and 70s were using figuration to pioneer aesthetic and political ideas that we often take for granted today. 

In the historic work, we see explorations of personal identity and societal roles within a range of portraiture. Artists look at the domestic and the family, the fictional studio space, and the world outside.  In many works, an intimate space collides with a broader popular culture image bank.  Traditional images of the nude are undone, appropriated by a female gaze or a deconstruction of formal conventions. The exhibition displays a massive range of material approaches, from a finely rendered touch, to collage and impasto surfaces, to work that exists in the space between painting and object. 

The pairings that guided curatorial selections are often playful visual connections, but can also reflect more literal mentorship or inter-generational connections between the artists.

Beth Rudin DeWoody, art collector and curator, is President of The Rudin Family Foundations and Executive Vice President of Rudin Management. The Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection has over 10,000 works in various media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, works on paper, video, and installation, by leading and emerging contemporary artists. It also includes significant holdings of iconic furniture, design, objects, ephemera, and artist’s books. The Collection has been the subject of exhibitions featured at the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach and the Parrish Museum, Water Mill, among other institutions. In December 2017, Beth Rudin DeWoody opened The Bunker Artspace in West Palm Beach, Florida to present viewable storage of her collection, as well as exhibitions. 

Beth Rudin DeWoody has curated numerous exhibitions, including “I Won’t Grow Up” at Cheim & Read, New York; “Think Pink” at Gavlak Gallery, Palm Beach; “Bad For You” at Shizaru Gallery, London; “Please Enter” at Franklin Parrasch Gallery, New York, and “Really” at Wilding Cran, Los Angeles.

ERIC FIRESTONE GALLERY
4 Newtown Lane, East Hampton, NY
www.ericfirestonegallery.com

Jeffrey Gibson @ Madison Museum of Contemporary Art - Like a Hammer

Jeffrey Gibson: Like a Hammer
Madison Museum of Contemporary Art
June 8 - September 15, 2019

JEFFREY GIBSON (Mississippi Band Choctaw/ Cherokee) 

AMERICAN HISTORY (JB), 2015

Wool, steel studs, glass beads, artificial sinew, 

metal jingles, acrylic yarn, nylon fringe, and canvas

89 × 66 × 5 in. 

Lent by the Lewis Family

Image courtesy of Jeffrey Gibson Studio and 

Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California 

Photograph by Peter Mauney

The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (MMoCA) presents the 2019 presentation of artist JEFFREY GIBSON’s first major museum exhibition. Organized by the Denver Art Museum (DAM), Jeffrey Gibson: Like a Hammer showcases the artist’s highly acclaimed multi-disciplinary work and chronicles a pivotal moment in the artist’s career when his contemporary artistic practice converged with his Native American heritage. The exhibition features about 65 objects comprising large and mid-sized figurative works, text-based wall hangings, a significant selection of his illustrious Everlast beaded punching bags, painted works on rawhide and canvas, as well as videos.

“Jeffrey Gibson’s work is vibrant and bold, yet its layering conveys ideas that reward close viewing. His distinctive voice and visual language have drawn well-earned accolades,” stated Stephen Fleischman, MMoCA director. “We are fortunate to bring this exhibition to Madison and to continue our ongoing dialogue with the community and other museum visitors.”

JEFFREY GIBSON (Mississippi Band Choctaw/ Cherokee) 

I PUT A SPELL ON YOU, 2015 

Repurposed punching bag, glass beads, artificial sinew, and steel

40 × 14 × 14 in. 

Collection of the Nasher Museum of Art 

at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

Museum purchase, 2015.11.1. 

Image courtesy of Jeffrey Gibson Studio and 

Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California
Photograph by Peter Mauney

JEFFREY GIBSON (Mississippi Band Choctaw/Cherokee)
OUR FREEDOM IS WORTH MORE THAN OUR PAIN, 2017
Repurposed punching bags, glass beads, artificial sinew, acrylic felt, steel, and brass
114 × 71 × 42 in
Collection of Vicki and Kent Logan
Image courtesy of Jeffrey Gibson Studio and
Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California
Photograph by Peter Mauney

Jeffrey Gibson: Like a Hammer reveals how the artist draws upon his heritage and remixes his older works to create a distinct visual vocabulary in artworks that explore his multi-faceted identity and the history of modernism. Jeffrey Gibson derives inspiration from a multitude of sources, ranging from pan-Native American visual culture to his involvement as a young adult in the queer club scene. His interests and life experiences inform his vision of exuberant hybridity, in which glass beads and metal jingles merge with abstract geometric patterns and passages of text from song lyrics, poems, and the artist’s own voice.

"Like a Hammer will feature works from one of the most important periods of my career so far,” said Jeffrey Gibson. “The exhibition begins with artworks that I made just after nearly giving up making art altogether due to feeling misunderstood as an artist and struggling to establish a personal language that describes my experience without compromising it. The objects, sculptures and paintings I've made since 2011 document this journey of establishing my own forward-looking voice influenced by all that has come before me."

JEFFREY GIBSON (Mississippi Band Choctaw/Cherokee)

All Things Big and Small, 2016

Acrylic paint and graphite on canvas

70 × 57 1/8 in. 

Collection of Lisa and Stuart Ginsberg

Image courtesy of Jeffrey Gibson Studio and 

Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California
Photograph by Peter Mauney

JEFFREY GIBSON (Mississippi Band Choctaw/Cherokee)

Thinking of You, 2015

Graphite and acrylic paint on rawhide over wood panel

18 x 32 x 2.5 in. 

Private collection, courtesy of Marc Straus Gallery, New York

Image courtesy of Jeffrey Gibson Studio and 

Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California
Photograph by Peter Mauney

Jeffrey Gibson frequently explores colonialism and the post-colonial mindset, reflecting on how American Indian experiences parallel other civil rights movements. His work also revolves around universal themes of love, community, strength, vulnerability and survival. Through videos featuring interviews with the artist and related programming, visitors will be able to gain an enhanced understanding of Jeffrey Gibson’s distinctive and complex creative practice, as well as how it has evolved from series to series.

Jeffrey Gibson: Like a Hammer is organized by the Denver Art Museum and curated by John Lukavic, Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Native Arts. The exhibition travelled to just two additional venues (the Mississippi Museum of Art and the Seattle Art Museum). 

Exhibition Sponsors: Generous funding for MMoCA’s presentation of Jeffrey Gibson: Like a Hammer has been provided by the Pleasant T. Rowland Foundation; The DeAtley Family Foundation; The David and Paula Kraemer Fund; Mary Ellyn and Joe Sensenbrenner; Ellen Rosner and Paul J. Reckwerdt; Gina and Michael Carter; maiahaus; Betty Jane Perego Fund at the Madison Community Foundation; National Guardian Life Insurance Company; Sara Guyer and Scott Straus; Mark and Judy Bednar; Dan and Natalie Erdman; a grant from the Wisconsin Arts Board with funds from the State of Wisconsin and the National Endowment for the Arts; and MMoCA Volunteers.

MADISON MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART
227 State Street, Madison, WI 53703
www.mmoca.org

Kehinde Wiley @ Santa Barbara Museum of Art - Equestrian Portrait of Prince Tommaso of Savoy-Carignan

Kehinde Wiley: Equestrian Portrait of Prince Tommaso of Savoy-Carignan
Santa Barbara Museum of Art
Through October 13, 2019

KEHINDE WILEY

Equestrian Portrait of Prince Tommaso of Savoy-Carignan, 2015

Oil on canvas

Collection of Dennis and Jeanne Masel

Image courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles

© 2019 Kehinde Wiley

The Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA) presents of a major work by Kehinde Wiley that appears as part of the Museum’s innovative series of public exhibitions, Park Projects. The painting, a large equestrian portrait fashioned after an early 17th-century painting by Dutch master Anthony van Dyck, is on view in the Museum’s Park Entrance space.

Kehinde Wiley has become internationally recognized for his examinations of the aestheticizing of power and masculinity through the time-worn genre of portraiture. This major painting, titled Equestrian Portrait of Prince Tommaso of Savoy-Carignan, is an extension of the artist’s Rumors of War series, which takes the form of historic equestrian portraiture. In Wiley’s hands, this established genre expands in scale to over nine feet in each dimension, and explodes in color with a revelry of bold and bright hues.

For this series, and in much of his work, Kehinde Wiley cast his subjects from young black men he met on the street, mostly from New York. During this process, he invites the individuals to his studio, asks them to choose a painting from art history textbooks, photographs them in that pose—in their own clothing—and then paints them. In this way, Kehinde Wiley subverts the tradition of portraying European nobleman in positions of power by depicting contemporary black men in the same poses. Addressing the politics of race and authority in art, Kehinde Wiley’s work points to the lack of representation of people of color in the history of Western painting, while also challenging present-day portrayals of masculinity.

ANTHONY VAN DYCK

Equestrian portrait of Prince Tommaso Francesco of Savoy-Carignan, ca. 1634-35

Oil on canvas

Collection of Sabauda Gallery, Turin, Italy

The painting on view was inspired by a 1634–1635 equestrian portrait by Flemish artist Anthony van Dyck and depicts Prince Tommaso of Savoy-Carignan, an Italian military commander. Painted in a style of relaxed elegance and ease, the portrait attributes a noble status to the subject through artistic tropes used to convey glory, wealth, and prestige. Naming the work after the original source, Kehinde Wiley’s Equestrian Portrait of Prince Tommaso of Savoy-Carignan blurs the boundaries between traditional and contemporary modes of representation. Painting his subject larger-than-life and isolated against a colorful floral background, Kehinde Wiley emphasizes the dignity and nobility of his model.

KEHINDE WILEY

President Barack Obama, 2017

Oil on canvas

Collection of National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

© 2019 Kehinde Wiley

In 2018, Kehinde Wiley became the first African American artist to paint an official US Presidential portrait for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. Former US President Barack Obama selected Wiley for this honor. In 2015, Wiley was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, titled A New Republic, which traveled to six venues including the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio; the Phoenix Museum of Art, Arizona; and the Seattle Art Museum, Washington.

KEHINDE WILEY was born in Los Angeles, California and is based in New York. He received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1999 and his MFA from Yale University in 2001. Shortly after, he became an Artist-in-Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem. His work has been the subject of exhibitions worldwide and is in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Denver Art Museum; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the High Museum, Atlanta; the Columbus Museum of Art; the Phoenix Art Museum; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Jewish Museum, New York; and the Brooklyn Museum, New York.

SANTA BARBARA MUSEUM OF ART
1130 State Street, Santa Barbara, CA
www.sbma.net

Billy Childish @ Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate, Kent - man in the mouth of a cave

Billy Childish: man in the mouth of a cave
Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate, Kent
26 May - 25 August, 2019 

Carl Freedman Gallery opens in Margate, Kent on Saturday 25th May with a major solo show of new work by British painter Billy Childish.

After purchasing part of the old Thanet Press building in the centre of town, Carl Freedman’s new HQ spans 10,000 square foot of a concrete 1960s commercial building. The site includes three exhibition spaces, an artist apartment and an upper floor dedicated to Freedman’s print publishing business Counter Editions. ‘This is a fantastic opportunity for us to present larger-scale solo presentations by our artists as well as more expansive curated shows. Margate is going through an amazing transformation, led by a growing art community, and we are excited to be a part of the future of the town’s creative-led regeneration’ – Carl Freedman.

The inaugural exhibition man in the mouth of a cave by Billy Childish introduces new themes in the artist’s oeuvre of swimming and wild uninhibited nature. Free of irony or superficial novelty, these paintings espouse values of authenticity, spirituality, and beauty, conveying a sense of a vivid physical presence. Above all, they express Childish’s earnest engagement with life. Waterfalls, the sea, caves, trees, nudes and the artist himself are recurring motifs. In some works the mouths of caves suggest the religious motif of the empty tomb, in others a dark, Styx-like river.

Present throughout is a quality of quiet melancholy combined with a vibrating, somewhat hallucinatory energy, rendered through Billy Childish’s roiling brushwork. Childish’s canvases clearly bear the marks of the art-historical lineage of which Childish feels himself a part. Interlocking patterns and forms cluster, coalesce, and dissipate, working as vehicles for Childish’s Munch-like preoccupation with colour. Staccato brushstrokes are contained by more flowing, sinuous lines, recalling the visionary intensity of German Expressionism.

Embedded in a tradition stretching back into the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Billy Childish’s work is still – as ever – insistently and idiosyncratically his own. As Billy Childish states: ‘You could say that these paintings are ultrapostmodernist; they’ve absorbed everything, and then decided what’s of value. Each one is an exultation of being a painting.’ Unconcerned with any narrative of progress within his practice each painting – whether a depiction of his nude body or a birch tree – is, for Billy Childish, a form of self-portraiture. In his own words: ‘As I work fluidly from painting to painting, theme to theme, so the cycles develop organically and explain themselves without my prescription. In essence I am painting one painting that is everchanging as if of its own volition – the painting of myself.’

In association with Damaged Good Records, Carl Freedman Gallery presents Wild Billy Childish & CTMF live in concert at Margate’s Theatre Royal on Sunday 16th June 2019, from 7pm. Tickets are on sale now via the Theatre Royal box office and website (click here: http://theatreroyalmargate.com).

Billy Childish is a prolific painter, author, poet, publisher, and musician. Born in 1959 in Chatham, Kent. He has extensively exhibited and performed internationally. Exhibitions include: heaven’s journey, Neugerriemschneider, Berlin (2018); man with jackdaw, Villa Schöningen, Berlin (2017); mountain view house, Goss Michael Foundation, Dallas (2017); Billy Childish: incomprehensible but certainly, Opelvillen, Rüsselsheim, Germany (2016); Billy Childish in Print (A Survey), Rochester Art Gallery, Kent (2016); the house at grass valley, Carl Freedman Gallery, London (2016); flowers, nudes and birch trees, Lehmann Maupin, New York (2015); Billy Childish. Frozen estuary and Other Paintings of the Divine Ordinary, The Historic Dockyard, Chatham, Kent; Billy Childish: Unknowable but Certain, ICA, London (2010). The artist lives and works in Kent, England.

CARL FREEDMAN GALLERY
28 Union Crescent, Margate, Kent, CT9 1NS, England
carlfreedman.com

William Eggleston @ David Zwirner, London

William Eggleston: 2¼
David Zwirner, London
Through June 1, 2019

David Zwirner presents 2¼, a series of square-format colour photographs from the 1970s by American photographer William Eggleston. On view at 24 Grafton Street in London, the show marks the artist’s first presentation at the gallery’s UK location and his second solo exhibition with David Zwirner since joining the gallery, in 2016.

Over the course of nearly six decades, William Eggleston has established a singular pictorial style that deftly combines vernacular subject matter with an innate and sophisticated understanding of colour, form, and composition. His vividly saturated photographs transform the ordinary into distinctive, poetic images that eschew fixed meaning. A pioneer of colour photography, Eggleston helped elevate the medium to the art form that it is recognised to be today. He took the 2¼ photographs in California and throughout the American South following his groundbreaking solo show Color Photography by William Eggleston at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1976. Curated by John Szarkowski, this exhibition would come to herald the medium’s acceptance within the art-historical canon.

The works in the 2¼ series are notable within William Eggleston’s oeuvre for their distinct format. He shot the photographs using a two-and-one-quarter-inch medium-format camera, resulting in images that exist between the registers of portraiture and landscape, dissolving the boundaries between the two. The individuals, cars, parking lots, and local stores and businesses that the artist depicts in the series speak to the uniformity of postwar material culture while revealing the distinct character and idiosyncrasies of the people and places that populate the American landscape. Through William Eggleston’s lens, a rusted-over Cadillac dealer’s sign becomes both a potent emblem of industrial decline and a lushly toned formalist colourscape of rich blues and bronzes. Vermeer-like, William Eggleston exhibits a sensitivity to the powerful yet diffuse light that permeates these spaces. Several images from the series capture cars parked in litter-strewn lots, immersed within this special saturated glow. As Agnès Sire notes, 'The light of the South is explosive, despite being treated [by William Eggleston] in a very uncommon manner, as if cleansed of expressionistic shadows.'(1)

Many of the images in 2¼ were first published as a monograph of the same title by Twin Palms in 1999. Several were also included in Cadillac, a portfolio of thirteen chromogenic prints that William Eggleston produced the same year. The exhibition at David Zwirner follows recent presentations of the artist’s work in the UK, including William Eggleston: Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, London, in 2016, and William Eggleston at Tate Modern, London, in 2013.

WILLIAM EGGLESTON was born in 1939 in Memphis, Tennessee, where he lives today. William Eggleston: The Democratic Forest, an exhibition of works drawn from the artist’s encyclopaedic project, marked his first solo show at David Zwirner New York in 2016.

Since the 1970s, William Eggleston’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at prominent institutions worldwide. Important solo presentations were held at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, in 1990; Barbican Gallery, London, in 1992 (travelled to Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Museum Folkwang, Essen; and Fotomuseum Winterthur); documenta IX, Kassel, in 2002; and Museum Ludwig, Cologne, in 2003 (travelled to Museu Serralves, Porto; Nasjonalmuseet – Museet for samtidskunst, Oslo; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Albertina, Vienna; and Dallas Museum of Art). In 2008, a major career-spanning survey, William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Videos 1961–2008, was organised by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and Haus der Kunst in Munich; it subsequently travelled to the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Art Institute of Chicago; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.

More recent solo exhibitions have included those held at Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, in 2009 (travelled to Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, and Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg, Sweden); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 2013; and Foam Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam, in 2017. In 2018, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York presented William Eggleston: Los Alamos, a solo exhibition featuring a landmark gift to the museum by Jade Lau of the artist’s notable portfolio, Los Alamos.

William Eggleston received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1975 and has been the recipient of numerous notable awards, including the International Center of Photography Infinity Award for Lifetime Achievement (2004) and the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, République Française (Order of Arts and Letters of the French Republic) (2016), among others. The Aperture Foundation honoured William Eggleston in October 2016. Work by the artist is held in major international museum collections.

Founded in 1992, the Eggleston Artistic Trust is dedicated to the representation and preservation of the work of William Eggleston and is directed by his sons, Winston Eggleston and William Eggleston III.

(1) Agnès Sire, ‘The Invention of Language’, in William Eggleston: From Black and White to Color. Exh. cat. (Göttingen: Steidl, 2014), p. 14.

DAVID ZWIRNER, LONDON
24 Grafton Street London, W1S 4EZ
www.davidzwirner.com

Michelangelo Pistoletto & Pascale Marthine Tayou @ Galleria Continua, San Gimignano – Una cosa non esclude l’altra – One thing doesn’t exclude the other

MICHELANGELO PISTOLETTO & PASCALE MARTHINE TAYOU
Una cosa non esclude l’altra – One thing doesn’t exclude the other
Galleria Continua, San Gimignano
Through 1 September 2019

Galleria Continua presents “Una cosa non esclude l’altra – One thing doesn’t exclude the other”, an exhibition which brings together two personal shows: those of Michelangelo Pistoletto and Pascale Marthine Tayou. It represents a creative dialogue, treading a path which weaves together differences and oppositions, and explores the coexistence of humanity and otherness. Addressing Pascale Marthine Tayou, Michelangelo Pistoletto declares: “As one and one make three, I am happy to be doing this exhibition with you.” If we take as our point of departure Michelangelo Pistoletto’s main focus as an artist, the exploration of ‘creative duality’, this phrase captures the symbolic significance of the show: that of bringing into contact two seemingly distant elements in order to give rise to a uniting third force. Pascale Marthine Tayou, whose art has a very global approach, mixing cultures and a variety of geographical stimuli, replies: “Thank you, I am happy with this exhibition, and since I am hugely impatient I will arrive early for the appointment so as not to miss this unique occasion!”

Michelangelo Pistoletto and Pascale Marthine Tayou both create art which is open to dialogue and exchange. Their works are testament to a process of continual evolution and expansion, aimed at refreshing the point of contact between the artistic experience and the external world. A dialogue – in the case of Michelangelo Pistoletto’s multi-disciplinary practice – in which multiple voices take part, as his aesthetic is based on a form of relationship and participation which goes beyond the confines of the work. Pascale Marthine Tayou’s work on the other hand seeks to redefine postcolonial issues via the European experience, and to reflect on questions such as immigration, the role of the individual, and national and cultural identity.

The show opens with one of Michelangelo Pistoletto’s most emblematic works: “Grande sfera di giornali – Progetto per un museo” (Large sphere of newspapers - Project for a museum). The first sphere was created by the artist in 1966 and was rolled through the streets of Turin in December 1967, a performance known as “Scultura da passeggio” (Walking sculpture). The newspapers that Michelangelo Pistoletto used to make that first sphere carried reports of the troubles rocking Italy at the end of the Sixties. At the time Michelangelo Pistoletto made a model, which was then built for the first time at the 1976 Venice Biennale. On the occasion of the show in San Gimignano, Michelangelo Pistoletto creates a new sphere, more than three metres in diameter, covered with papers from all over the world and bearing witness to the current events of our time. Hanging on the walls in the same room are a series of LED writings by Pascale Marthine Tayou, sketching out the concept of the global village as the stage upon which the daily confluence of our lives takes place.

In Pascale Marthine Tayou’s work, his interest in materials and their significance predominates. For this exhibition he uses rusted nails with different coloured heads as his contribution to a dialogue with Michelangelo Pistoletto’s “Rotazione dei corpi” (Rotation of bodies). The work comprises two transparent sheets upon which a portion of the universe is reproduced. By moving these two elements, the point around which all the stars of the universe rotate can be continually changed. For the two artists, no unique centre of the universe exists; rather, every point is the centre. In the same way, each individual is the centre of society.

Pascale Marthine Tayou’s work is intentionally mobile and always closely tied to the idea of the journey and the encounter of the self with the other. For him, the traveller represents not only a literal circumstance but also a psychological condition, capable of subverting our social relations and political, economic and social systems. In the exhibition this idea meets “Il cesto dello Zoo” (1969) a wicker basket used in some shows of Lo Zoo, a multidisciplinary group formed by Michelangelo Pistoletto and Maria Pioppi together with people from other artistic disciplines: music, literature, theater, visual arts. Between 1968 and 1970, Lo Zoo created a series of shows in squares, discos, breweries, theaters and galleries conceived as creative collaborations and a form of communication not mediated by objects.

The dialogue between the two artists continues with a series of hanging or suspended sculptures and of works arising from gestures, actions, videos and texts, before reaching its conclusion in the parterre. Here, a study of Michelangelo Pistoletto’s past works highlights the interrelation between art and life, mirrors extend space in a continual present, and simultaneously show us our reflection and everything that surrounds us. Pascale Marthine Tayou presents a gravitydefying forest whilst blown-glass Poupées (Dolls) drift around the space. “Una cosa non esclude l’altra.”

MICHELANGELO PISTOLETTO was born in Biella in 1933. In 1962, he made the Quadri specchianti (Mirror paintings), for which he soon received international recognition. Between 1965 and 1966 he produced Oggetti in meno (Minus objects), considered fundamental to the birth of Arte Povera. In the Nineties, he founded the Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto in Biella, to bring art into active relation with diverse spheres of society with the aim of inspiring and producing responsible social change. In 2003 he won the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion for Lifelong Achievement. In 2004 the University of Turin awarded him a laurea honoris causa in Political Science, and the artist announced the most recent phase of his work, Terzo Paradiso (Third Paradise). In 2007, in Jerusalem, he received the Wolf Foundation Prize in the Arts, “for his constantly inventive career as an artist, educator and activist whose restless intelligence has created prescient forms of art that contribute to fresh understanding of the world.” In 2011 he was the artistic director of Evento 2011 in Bordeaux. In 2013 the Louvre in Paris hosted his personal exhibition Michelangelo Pistoletto, année un – le paradis sur terre. In this same year he received the Praemium Imperiale for painting, in Tokyo. In 2014 the symbol of the Terzo Paradiso was installed in the hall of the headquarters of the Council of the European Union in Bruxelles for the period of the Italian Presidency of the European Council. In May 2015 he received a degree honoris causa from the Universidad de las Artes of Havana in Cuba. In the same year he realized a large-scale work called Rebirth, situated in the park of the Palais des Nations in Geneva, headquarters of the UN. In November 2016 he held a large retrospective show at the Havana’s Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, dedicated to past and present works. In 2017 he took part in the 57th Venice Biennial with “One and One Make Three”, a collateral event at the Basilica di San Giorgio. Of particular note in 2018 was his South America tour, among the most important shows of which were those that took place in Lima and Santiago de Chile. His works can be found in the most important modern and contemporary art museums around the world.

PASCALE MARTHINE TAYOU (Nkongsamba, Cameroon, 1966) lives and works in Ghent, Belgium. He has been known internationally since the Nineties, and in particular following his presence at Documenta 11 (2002) and the Venice Biennial (2005 and 2009). He has participated in numerous international exhibitions and in artistic events such as the Dakar Biennial (2018), the 5th Lubumbashi Biennial, Hangar Picha (2017), the PARCours Biennial – PARKunst (2016), the Cairo Triennial (2015), the Turin Triennial (2008), and Biennials in Gwangiu (1997-1999), Santa Fe (1997), Sydney (1997), Havana (1997-2006), Liverpool (1999), Berlin (2001), San Paolo (2002), Munster (2003), Istanbul (2003) and Lyons (2002-2005). The artist has presented personal shows in the following galleries: Macro (Rome, 2004 - 2012), S.M.A.K. (Ghent, Belgium, 2004), MARTa Herford (Herford, Germany, 2005), Milton Keynes Gallery (Milton Keynes, Great Britain, 2007), Malmo Konsthall (Malmo, Sweden, 2010), Mudam (Luxembourg, 2011), La Villette (Paris, France, 2012), KUB (Bregenz, Austria, 2014), Fowler Museum (Los Angeles, USA, 2014), Serpentine Gallery (London, Great Britain, 2015), Bozar (Brussels, 2015), Musée de l’Homme (Paris, France, 2015), CAC Malaga (Malaga, Spain, 2016), Varberg Kunsthal (Varberg, Svezia, 2017), IFA (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen), (Berlin, Germany, 2017), Mu.ZEE, (Oostende, Belgium, 2018). His works form part of the collections of prestigious international institutions such as the Pompidou Centre, Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Mudam, ARKEN Museo d’Arte Moderna, SMAK, Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Kunsthaus Bregenz, the Abu Dhabi Guggenheim Museum, Tate Modern, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, MAC Lyon, MACRO (Museum of Contemporary Art Rome), National Gallery of Victoria and the Salama Bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Foundation. 

GALLERIA CONTINUA
Via del Castello 11, San Gimignano (SI), Italia
www.galleriacontinua.com