ART NEWS: Oct.03

In commemoration of both Frank Stella’s life and artistic legacy, the selected works in the exhibition “Homage to Frank Stella” illuminate the enduring significance of Stella’s diverse and exploratory oeuvre through seminal examples spanning from 1958 to 2023. At the height of the Abstract Expressionist movement, Stella redefined painting with his Black, Aluminum, and Copper series, proposing a new trajectory for the medium which presaged Minimalism. The historical significance of Stella’s early works is epitomized in pieces like “Arbeit Macht Frei” (1958) where the haunting phrase from Auschwitz’s entrance imbues a dark, contemplative gravitas. Stella sought to challenge and broaden the spatial and conceptual definitions of painting. In the 1970s, Stella expanded upon these ideas by developing painted wall-constructions. A masterfully innovative artist, Stella’s late career is further defined by his ventures into the sculptural realm, with dynamic shapes and intricate linear constructions reflecting his enduring fascination with the interplay of materials, forms, and structures. Stella’s use of Protogen RPT, a lightweight and durable resin, exemplifies his innovative approach to integrating new materials into his work. Info: Mnuchin Gallery, 45 East 78 Street. New York, NY, USA, Duration: 18/9-14/12/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-17:30, https://www.mnuchingallery.com/

Lenbachhaus Munich presents the exhibition “But Live Here? No thanks: Surrealism and Anti-fascism”. Surrealism was a political movement of international reach and internationalist conviction. While it had its origins in art and literature, it far exceeded both. Surrealists declared reality to be insufficient. Their ambition was to radically alter society and reimagine life. As early as the dawn of the movement in the 1920s, surrealists denounced the European colonialist project. They organized against fascists, fought in the Spanish Civil War, called on Wehrmacht soldiers to commit sabotage; were detained in camps and persecuted, escaped Europe, and died in war. They wrote poems, worked on paintings and collective drawings, took photographs, assembled collages, and organized exhibitions—all of which were aimed at disarticulating a supposedly rational language in a supposedly rational world. The government and occupation by fascist parties in Europe and throughout the world, as well as the World Wars and colonial wars, shaped Surrealism at the time of its emergence, and forced the lives of its protagonists into unpredictable trajectories. At the same time, these upheavals resulted in remarkable encounters and actions of international solidarity, whose red lines connecting countries all over the world. Info: Curators: Stephanie Weber, Adrian Djukić, Karin Althaus, Assistant Curator: Johannes Michael Stanislaus, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Luisenstraße 33, Munich, Germany, Duration: 15/10/2024-2/3/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 10:00-18:00, Thu 10:00-20:00, www.lenbachhaus.de/

The exhibition “Just About Everything, Someplace Else” showcases a selection of Jeff Brouws’s iconic photographs alongside several previously unseen works. In the exhibition the artist brings together images that act as artifacts of history while continuing to speak to themes that resonant today: a sense of abandonment, loneliness, alienation, and the influence of technological change, in essence all suggestive of an American Dream that isn’t quite what it seems. In this show Brouws incorporates photographs from several series including his Ed Ruscha-influenced “Language in the the Landscape”, the Hopperesque images from the series “Approaching Nowhere:, and the discarded and franchised elements of our collective commercial environments that pay homage to, and update, the New Topographics. Throughout his career Brouws has created a rich archive with an emphasis on documenting our built environment, a practice that he terms “visual anthropology.” In preserving the remnants of the American landscape he has created a photographic anthology that allows us to see the impact of economic and social forces as they play out, especially across non-urban areas of America. In these images a connecting thread is the highway, a central character and place upon which so much of American life unfolds. Info: Robert Mann Gallery, 508 West 26th Street, Suite 9F, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 17/10-6/12/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-16:00, www.robertmann.com/

With AI-generated birdsong under an artificial dawn sky, “Machine Auguries” warns of our infatuation with technology at the expense of nature. Using thousands of field recordings of wild birds, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg has trained a pair of neural networks to develop their song in dialogue. In her immersive installation, a real dawn chorus is slowly taken over by synthetic birdsong, and when it falls silent, we are no longer sure what is real. Machine Auguries reminds us of the impossibility of recreating nature and of the urgent need to protect it. As human actions decimate bird populations, the artist offers a false copy of the dawn. The exhibitionbrings together three iterations of Machine Auguries for the first time. The first two recreate the dawn in London, 2019, and Toledo, Ohio, 2023, and are presented throughout the exhibition. In January 2025, a site-specific Umeå chorus will be added to the series. As an artist record of the experience of a place, Machine Auguries is an expanding archive of vanishing local realities. This collection celebrates the uniqueness of ecosystems but reminds us of their interconnectedness, as bird species repeat. Info: Curator: Sarah Cook, Bildmuseet, Umeå Arts Campus, Östra Strandgatan 30B, Umeå, Sweden, Duration: 18/20/2024-6/4/2025, Days & Hous: Wed-Sun 12:00-17:00, /www.bildmuseet.umu.se/

Today, Binia Bill is considered an important representative of 20th-century Swiss photography. Her works not only provide valuable documentation of her era’s art-and-culture scene, but also stand out as an independent oeuvre that combines the modern visual language of the pre-war period with a distinct sensitivity. The retrospective exhibition “Binia Bill – Images and Fragments” offers comprehensive insight into her work and pays tribute to her role as a pioneer of modern photography. The exhibition ranges from applied photography to freestyle photo/graphic works. Product presentations, architectural photographs, portraits, still lifes and plant studies are on display. The first room shows a series of self-portraits of the young Binia Bill, who turned to her new profession with ambition and confidence in the early 1930s. In display cases, her early commissioned works are juxtaposed with brochures, posters and advertisements designed by Max Bill. In the second room, a series of portraits thematise the Bills’ encounters and friendships with the architect couple Elsa Burckhardt-Blum and E. F. Burckhardt, and the artists Jean Arp, Max Ernst and Verena Loewensberg. Binia Bill’s portrayal of these personalities is characterised in part by unusual perspectives, but above all by the familial feel of the mise-en-scène. The final part of the exhibition is dedicated to photographic engagement with bodies, objects and plants that Binia Bill arranged in front of various backgrounds. Here, she took her cue from avant- garde photography, exploring the specific properties and possibilities of the medium. Info: Curator: Teresa Gruber, Fotostiftung Schweiz, Grüzenstrasse 45, Winterthur, Switzerland, Duration: 19/10/2024-26/1/2025, Days & Hours: Tue & Thu-Sun 11:00-18:00m Wed 11:00-20:00, https://fotostiftung.ch/

Spanning the abyss of space and the depths of the earth, Charles Stankievech’s exhibition “The Desert Turned to Glass” is an epic meditation on beginnings, endings, and infinity. Altogether, the exhibition explores alternative theories concerning the origin of life, consciousness, and art. “The Desert Turned to Glass is a place where the cosmic and chthonic collide. At the Centennial Gallery, the artist presents the 30-minute film, “The Eye of Silence” in an immersive black box video installation. Evoking the resplendence of Earth’s evolution and existence, the film depicts a vast tapestry of creation and destruction. High atmospheric footage of volcanoes and the atmosphere lead to images of other otherworldly aspects of our planet’s terrain—deserts, meteorite craters, cave paintings, fields of stars, and views from inside a darkened cave. Created using various extra sensory photographic and sound equipment, and combining both resulting image and sound in a spectacular intensity, “The Eye of Silence” embodies metamorphosis and the sublime while skirting around notions of the limits of knowledge and experience. At the Gairloch Gardens gallery, in dialogue with the landscape, garden and light at this lakeside site, the artist presents a new series of photographs, various sculpture—including one that defies gravity, and new video work based on recordings made by the artist during the Total Eclipse at Gairloch Gardens on April 8th, 2024. Info: Oakville Galleries, 1306 Lakeshore Road East, Oakville, Ontario, Canada, Duration: 19/10/2024-1/2/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-17:00, www.oakvillegalleries.com/

In his solo exhibition “Waves of Change and History Re-asserts Itself”, San Francisco-based artist Mansur Nurullah presents intricately stitched, wall-hanging sculptures that build on the legacies of African-American quilt makers to trace personal and community histories.  Made from discarded clothing, upholstery, bits of fur, disassembled shoes and handbags and other detritus, he incorporates the pasts of those materials and the people who used them, to depict personal or social narratives in exuberant, three-dimensional artworks that exist beyond the boundaries of painting, sculpture or textile. Living and working in San Francisco, Nurullah moves through the city on foot or bicycle and thinks of plotting one’s course in daily life as a metaphor for finding one’s place in the world.  He sees each of his artworks as charting a journey – whether tracing the lives of students he councils, the social travails of marginalized communities or the flight of his great grandparents from Tulsa to a new life in Chicago.  These billowing, three-dimensional quilts are the topographic maps of people’s emotional lives. Info: Hosfelt Gallery, 260 Utah Street, San Francisco, CA, USA, Duration: 19/10-23/11/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sat 10:00-17:30, Thu 11:00-19:00, https://hosfeltgallery.com/

Peter Köhler in the exhibition “Left Hand and Against the Sun“ presents a collection of drawings in ink and acrylic from the last three years. In his imagery, the dance winds its way through past and present. This is a dance of death, hidden knowledge and verdure. Staggering skeletons in monk’s robes dance plague victims into their graves. An inbred celebration of fecundity at a warped harvest festival. A cunning man walking backwards around the parish church on a Thursday night to attain sorcerous power. Waltzing preschool kids whose rain overalls droop since no wind blows in Hades. Köhler’s primary palette is one of putrefaction. The muted colors suggest rotten-damp odours and brown-black leaf mush of autumn. The purple-red bruises of a forgotten cadaver. Green mould groping with fingers of dissolving spores. Meanwhile, new life springs from the macabre and decomposing. The rotting becomes the lush. And bright colours erupt: shimmering beetles, glistening petals, motley hats, balloons. Köhler stopped using pencil and eraser a long time ago. He avoids excessive planning and correcting, lets his ink pen run freely across the paper. Invites surprise, in a process he describes as “almost automatic”.  Info: Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Fredsgatan 12, Stockholm, Sweden, Duration: 19/10-23/11/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 12:00-17:00, Sat 12:00-16:00, www.gallerimagnuskarlsson.com/

Cesar Santos’s solo exhibition “Manuscripts” features over twenty of the artist’s signature paintings that show his mastery of form, harmony and colour. The artworks range in media and scale, from ink and charcoal drawings and acrylic on paper, to ambitious works in oil stretching over 2m in height. The title refers to the improvisation that begins each painting, emphasising the raw and organic nature of Santos’ practice. Also, the term Manuscripts signals that each artwork can be ‘read’ and ‘interpreted’ by viewers to ascertain its significance – a significance that might be fresh and different for each person. Every work demonstrates the artist’s organic approach to painting, creating discrete ecosystems which emerge as he paints, often building layers over several days. The artworks in the exhibition also mark a new development for the artist that has emerged over the last year: the engagement with the formal qualities of impasto. The artist’s immersion in Italian and wider European Old Master painting, since moving to live in Florence, Italy, in 2021, has sparked these investigations, while also providing models for the principles of harmonious composition and colour that characterise the paintings. Info: Robilant + Voena, 19 East 66th Street, 4th and 5th Floors, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 25/10/2024-15/1/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.robilantvoena.com/

The exhibition “Face Value”, presents twenty-eight portraits from the Ahmanson Collection. This exhibition offers a historic and cross-generational examination of the portrait genre, exploring its evolving cultural significance and diverse interpretations and traces the evolution of portraiture from its origins as a formal stylistic practice in the Renaissance, where artists focused on capturing the surface details of their subjects, to its modern realization as a more interpretive art form, aimed at expressing the essence of a subject’s persona or reflecting the artist’s creative exploration of individuality. Over the centuries, portraiture has adapted stylistically to reflect shifting cultural values. By the nineteenth century, as portrait painting became a more professionalized and specialized practice, its subjects diversified, representing a broader spectrum of class, occupation, race, and gender. This evolution enriched the genre’s ability to document cultural history. Simultaneously, the advent of photography complemented the achievements of painting, allowing artists to work across both mediums in their studies of humanity. The works in this exhibition explore the essence of humanity, while their creators continue to experiment with new approaches to understanding individuality. Info: Curator: John Silvis, The Ahmanson Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Duration: 17/11/2024-30/1/225, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 8:30-18:30, www.ahmansongallery.com/