ART NEWS: Dec.01

The exhibition “Eclectic Affinities”  brings the extensive work of the artist Hamid Zénati into dialogue with various objects from the collection of the Museum Angewandte Kunst. With his all-over stencil technique, Zénati developed a distinct formal language and created compositions that were both playful and powerful. His paintings on textiles and ceramics, as well as his approach to photography, challenge established boundaries and genres by moving between the realms of design, art, and interior design. Zénati’s work resonates with the museum’s central questions: What is applied art today? Where is the boundary with the fine arts? Do our learned hierarchies, categories of knowledge, and viewing habits do justice to a diverse world? “Eclectic Affinities” sets different focal points in nine chapters and enables new perspectives on the work of an individualist and autodidact whose obsevations of social, cultural and artistic movements organically flowed into his work. The exhibition also elicits unconventional approaches to the collection objects selected by the curators in relation to Zénati’s work. Loans from the Frankfurt Museum of Modern Art and the Walther Collection (Neu-Ulm/New York) create further points of reference. Info: Curators: Dr. Mahret Ifeoma Kupka and Anna Schneider, Museum Angewandte Kunst, Schaumainkai 17, Frankfurt, Germany, Duration: 28/9/2024-11/1/2025, Days & Hours: Tue & Thu-Sun 10:00-18:00, Wed 10:00-20:00, httwww.museumangewandtekunst.de/

Ashley Swarts’ traveling exhibition “Waiting For A Sign” showcases new collage and resin paintings. The exhibition debuted in Marfa at Do Right Hall during Chinati Weekend, but is now open for a second showing at McLennon Pen Co.’s permanent space in Austin. Swarts is currently based in Austin but remains closely connected to both Marfa, where she lived for seven years, and her hometown of Las Vegas. These ties inspired the idea of taking her show on the road. She has been deeply influenced by the distinctive commercial signage in each city, where bold graphics and unique typography shape the visual landscape. From vintage light box and neon signs to clever readerboard and marquee messages, the relaxed, quirky, and humorous style of this Southwestern version of street art features a distinct and beloved aesthetic that is reflected in Swarts’ paintings. To begin each shape, the artist opens the folder of the desired color and lay the pieces out on her floor. Then begins the puzzle of fitting them together to fit within the stencil. Chosen by size, shape, and color she is delighted by the imagery that comes together. Info: McLennon Pen Co. Gallery, 2502 East 12th Street, Austin, TX, USA, Duration: 21/11-7/12/2024, Days & Hours: Thu-Sat (by appointment only), https://mclennonpenco.com/

Claire Chesnier’s abstract compositions in her solo exhibition “A rose, a dewdrop, a sunset” are distinguished by her unique approach to working with color. Through a protocol she has developed over the years, the artist shapes the tones, gradients, and oscillations in her pieces. The artist maintains a distance, observing the gap; her voice resonates in the silence—clear, measured. In this way, she mirrors her painting, which, in turn, plays within the white of the page, making its way effortlessly, merging with the paper in the striation of a trail, the sinuosity of a flow, the grain of a vapor. Claire Chesnier remains at a distance, observing the emptiness, her language plays in the silence, clear, waiting, while she is a replica of her color, which enters into the whiteness of the paper, carrying it without forcing it, becoming one with the paper in the streaks that remain, the smoothness of a current, the suggestion of evaporation. Info: Ceysson & Bénétière Gallery, 23 rue du Renard, Paris, France, Duration: 2/12/2024-25/1/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.ceyssonbenetiere.com/

The histories of window dressing and fine art are closely intertwined. Besides Jean Tinguely, many other artists made significant contributions in the field of window display design. Conversely, window displays have often featured as a motif in artworks or served as a stage for performances and interventions. Shop display windows also reflect social and political developments, as they have shaped the face of inner cities in the western world since the late nineteenth century, mirroring changes in social conditions and the use of public space. “Fresh Window. The Art of Display & Display of Art” is the first museum exhibition to explore the intersection of art and window dressing, from the rise of the department store around 1900 to today’s exclusive luxury boutiques. The exhibition shows works by around forty artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and offers a chance discovering a far less well-known side of artists like Jean Tinguely, Sari Dienes, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol. The exhibition can also be experienced outside the museum on the streets of Basel, as Museum Tinguely is cooperating with former students from the Institute Art Gender Nature at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts (FHNW) who will create installations and performances in various shop windows between 14 January and 2 March 2025. Info: Curators: Adrian Dannatt, Tabea Panizzi and Andres Pardey, Museum Tinguely, Paul Sacher-Anlage 1, Basel, Switzerland, Duration: 3/12/2024-11/5/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.tinguely.ch/

In “Dark Rainbow”, an exhibition of new works, Anoka Faruqee and David Driscoll collaborate to create bewildering paintings devised of layers of carefully misaligned, concentric circles which generate optical effects.  The resulting moiré – the fusion of two or more patterns which create another, much more complex pattern – echoes various natural systems, such as wave formations, stress patterns, and magnetic fields.  But for the artists, the moiré phenomenon demonstrates that what we perceive as light, form and space is, at its most basic, bits of assembled data.  Pixels.  Atoms.  Nano-particles.  These paintings make the invisible tangible. Ironically and satisfyingly, the highly intellectual process of creating these works – grounded in physics and color theory – generates supremely sensuous and transcendent paintings. In their most recent paintings the collaborators expand their earlier techniques: applying texture upon texture and then excavating to create multiple color “channels” within an individual layer. The increased chromatic complexity creates varied shadows that simulate light moving through space. Info: Hosfelt Gallery, 260 Utah Street, San Francisco, CA, USA, Duration: 6/12/2025-25/1/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sat 10:00-17:30, Thu 11:00-19:00, https://hosfeltgallery.com/

With the comprehensive exhibition “Dream – Identity – Reality”, that spans several epochs, the Hamburger Kunsthalle sheds light on the diverse facets of the theme of illusion in art, from the Old Masters to today. Ever since antiquity, artists everywhere have been making use of the “trompe-l’oeil” technique, and it was particularly popular in the Renaissance and Baroque eras. The desire for illusionistic renderings then waned during the Romantic period, but this type of art never completely disappeared from the repertoire and it continues to fascinate artists to this day. The exhibition shows how illusion means far more than merely deceiving the eye. It is manifested in the (illusionistic) self-love of Narcissus as well as in spatial illusions in architecture, in the play of concealing and revealing via the pictorial motifs of the curtain and the mask, in the meaning of the open or closed window to the world, and in depictions of visions and dreams. Based on some 150 paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculptures, installations and video works, the show traces the many different forms taken by hyperrealism, reality, fiction, dream, transformation and deception. Among the exhibits are major works from the Hamburger Kunsthalle as well as loans from national and international collections. Info: Curator:     Dr. Sandra Pisot, Assistant Curator: Dr. Johanna Hornauer, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Glockengießerwall 5, Hamburg, Germany, Duration: 6/12/2024-6/4/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 10:00-18:00, Thu 10:00-21:00, https://www.hamburger-kunsthalle.de/