ART NEWS: Jan.03

Suzann Victor’s solo exhibition “Constellations” comprises over 20 new artworks from her latest collaboration with the Creative Workshop, inviting viewers to explore the nuanced possibilities of printmaking through light and shadow, and to create their own secondary light-prints on the gallery walls. Her latest poetic and tactile series offer a reappraisal of our very own embodied encounters with the phenomena of light, space, and materiality, where art is seen as much as it is discovered, sensed, and felt. The works return us to physical experience and spatial experimentation – an antidote to an age dominated by digitally-mediated experiences. Highlights on show include “The Image Stammers I & II,” “Afterglow|, and “Obsidian Moon”, where Victor manipulates transparent acrylic discs to produce intentional effects of “printing” light and shadow on the wall, which become immediately remarkable to the viewer. The artist’s method of Tension-Printing on the acrylic discs in works such as “Fractally Yours” and “Fractally Fuchsia” recall natural patterns seen in lightning, roots, and the arterial networks of living organisms, and enhances our awareness of these worlds hiding in plain sight. Info: STPI creative workshop and gallery, 41 Robertson Quay, Singapore, Duration: 15/1-2/3/2025, Days & Hours: Μον-Στα 10:00-19:00, Sun 11:00-17:00, www.stpi.com.sg/

The group exhibition of prints “Walk the Line: Geometric Abstraction” explores the linear, hard-edge elements of post-war printmaking. As the lyrics of Johnny Cash’s iconic song suggest, geometric abstraction is a balancing act—one that encompasses multiple artistic movements while maintaining its own distinct aesthetic language. This approach transcends mediums, as evidenced by the artists featured in the show. Figures such as Ellsworth Kelly, Donald Judd, and Frank Stella were not only celebrated painters and sculptors but also masterful printmakers who used the medium to further refine the principles and processes at the core of their three-dimensional work. The origins of post-war abstraction lie in early 20th-century European movements, including Cubism, Neoplasticism, Constructivism, and Art Deco. Loosely defined by its focus on form, line, color, and space, geometric abstraction favors flatness and precision over illusionistic depth. Its compositions, carefully arranged within non-representational space, share a kinship with minimalism. Both styles reflect Clement Greenberg’s concept of “post-painterly abstraction,” emphasizing the purity of flat planes of color and rejecting the artist’s mark. Info: Susan Sheehan Gallery, 146 Greene Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 16/1-7/3/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-18:00, www.susansheehangallery.com/

Working from images of dictators taken from various media sources, Max Luisetto performs a process of selection and cropping that isolates elements and repositions them in a more confined composition, increasing their symbolic value—something that only painting can offer. A photograph so cropped would indeed redirect the gaze toward its off-screen and unbalance the attention. Opting for the small format, Max Luisetto in his solo exhibition “The Piece of the Puzzle”,  lowers his subject to eye level, creating a human-to-human relationship. While painting initially, and later image reproduction technologies, may have succumbed to the glorification of «great men», even if they were monstrous as in this series, it can also contribute to this humbling to human scale. The artist isolates and highlights the attributes of power, re-inscribing them in precise compositions, playing with formal and chromatic echoes, ultimately transforming them into mere trappings. Each ostentatious sign of power becomes nothing more than the expression of vanity, in the triple sense of pride, that which is futile, and that which evokes the mortal destiny of man. Info: Michel Rein Gallery, Washington rue/straat 51A,  Brussels, Belgium, Duration: 16/1-1/3/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://michelrein.com/

Over the last four and a half decades, Klaus Merkel’s work in the medium of painting has combined the concepts of display, discourse and abstraction in a way that is unique to him. The decisive moment for his practice came in the early 1990s with the seven panels “Katalogbilder, on which he repainted his previous work side by side on a miniature scale and “shifted its status. This led to a way of working that we find in the exhibition “Touretten” Pictures that question the ideas of authenticity, uniqueness and the chimera of value linked to them and also provide a commentary avant la lettre on the visual structure of our digital world. In the painting “24.05.07 Puppen”, all the gridded rectangles are aligned in portrait format on the surface, all the painterly gestures are presented, covered by forms that clearly transcend their painted boundaries. In contrast to this, the painterly gestures in “24.07.27 Plotz (Rihm)” reach beyond their boundaries. This painting breaks up the organized structure diagonally in a chaotic manner and yet reproduces it unmistakably in the background. Info: Galerie Max Meyer, Schmela Haus, Mutter-Ey-Straße 3, Düsseldorf, Germany, Duration: 17/1-1/3/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 12:00-18:00, www.maxmayer.net/

A dual exhibition showcases the works of two dynamic young painters, Audrey Rodriguez and Slater Reid Sousley. Both artists reinterpret traditional still life, infusing the genre with deeply personal cultural and environmental elements. Audrey Rodriguez’s “Levitation” Series features six vibrant still life paintings blending identity, memory, and culture with magical realism. Inspired by her Honduran and Mexican heritage and the streets of New York, her works transform ordinary objects into poetic symbols. Floating elements add a dreamlike quality, encouraging viewers to reconsider familiar items. Three works emphasize primary hues of red, yellow, and blue, while the others focus on the neutral tones of white, cream, and black. Slater Reid Sousley’s “Americana” and “Camouflage” Series explore themes of family, memory, heritage, and abstraction. The “Americana” Series is rooted in American history and culture, featuring artifacts like a replica Civil War drummer boy coat lovingly made by Sousley’s grandmother. These compositions evoke classic Americana with cinematic qualities reminiscent of watching Gunsmoke, the Western series from the 1950s. Objects like a shotgun passed down through generations and brass horse medallions from Sousley’s grandfather convey themes of labor and perseverance. Info: McLennon Pen Co. Gallery, 2502 East 12th Street, Austin, TX, USA, Duration: 17/1-1/2/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://mclennonpenco.com/

Stéphanie Saadé presents her solo exhibition “What Makes Me Think about You, What Makes You Think About Me”.  Her practice is concerned with fragmentation. Scattered traces conjoin into other sets, forming works of insistence that remain indestructible through dispersion. The subterranean scene takes place after the explosion, when all the cameras have turned away from the event, when those who were greedily preoccupied with their observing eye have already moved on to another ‘happening’. And so begins the story of the ungovernable, of indestructibility. Saadé’s traces are abstract. They are neither traces of anything nor of anyone—they are dust, debris, waste. The saturation of the surface through accumulated debris produces a threshold effect which, due to the very materiality of reassociated fragments and their multiplication, escapes the artist’s control. In this sense, Saadé’s work is closer to Abdelkebir Khatibi than to Jacques Derrida or Roland Barthes, both of whom were Khatibi’s readers and interlocutors. The visual writing in question is what Khatibi calls intractable difference, i.e. that which first and foremost resists military and imperial destruction. Info: Galerie Anne Barrault, 51 Rue des Archives, Paris, France, Duration: 23/1-8/3/2025,  Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, https://galerieannebarrault.com/

Rachel Khedoori poses provocative phenomenological questions in her work that merges installation, sculpture, film and photography. Khedoori gained international recognition with her first comprehensive solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel and Kunstverein Braunschweig in 2001. For her new work in Zurich, Khedoori has applied a range of materials and techniques—cast aluminum, bronze, 3-D printing, resin, encaustic paint and paper—to produce an ensemble of sculptural works that oscillate between constructed and deconstructed states. The works on view form an interconnected vocabulary, consisting of various compositions of flat forms that evoke facades of buildings or camera shutters. Some are placed in front of glass panes and lit to produce shadows and reflections, referencing early magic lanterns. Models of rooms are stacked to become towers or collapsed structures or reduced to flattened planes on the floor. Tall rectangular sheets of resin coated paper with window cutouts recall hanging film strips as well as the facade of a building falling apart and flattened into a two-dimensional state. Info: Hauser & Wirth Gallery, Limmatstrasse 270, Zürich, Switzerland, Duration: 23/1-23/5/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.hauserwirth.com/

In her solo exhibition “Accord”, Barbara Bloom presents a new body of works created especially for the space at Via Stradella 7. This project stems from a reflection on the concept of “accord” as a pivotal moment where tensions are suspended and a glimpse of harmony becomes possible. The exhibition starts with the oldest documented peace treaty, signed in 1250 BC between the Egyptians and the Hittites, and moves through historical moments such as the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, which ended World War I, and the 1993 negotiations to end South African Apartheid. However, Bloom does not confine herself to documented history: the exhibition also includes moments of pure imagination, such as an unlikely gathering of iconic figures from the past and present. The works on display transform these extraordinary events into starting points for a greater reflection. In some works, the figures seem to cast shadows on the walls and floor, almost suggesting an absent presence. In others, the scenes appear to detach from the two-dimensional level, sliding into real space as three-dimensional objects or furnishings. These visual effects engage the viewer in an immersive experience, destabilizing the boundaries between representation and reality. Info: Galleria Raffaella Cortese, via a. Stradella 4, Milan, Italy, Duration: 24/1-26/4/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-13:00 & 14:30-19:00, https://raffaellacortese.com/

Andriu Deplazes’s solo exhibition title,” Nasse Augen” references his solo exhibition “Rote Augen” at the Bündner Kunstmuseum Chur in 2019. While “Rote Augen” represented raging anger, wrath, and a loud outcry, “Nasse Augen” symbolizes letting go, liberation, and the courage to finally cry. The sense of powerlessness, as a reaction of the individual to seemingly insurmountable, complex issues in our present moment,  reverberates. The exhibition  embodies  the artist’s development: his  work has  matured, solidified, and he convincingly demonstrates his quality as an outstanding painter.Through his works, Deplazes explores the three floors of the Rämistrasse with themes that reflect political, global, and  personal  processes:  human  beings  and  their  connection  to  nature,  family  constellations,  protection, exclusion, and precarity—motifs already familiar from his previous body of work. Water appears in many of his pieces as a unifying element, while another central theme is the search for mechanisms of protection, security, and intimacy, or, conversely, the act of liberation—a dynamic interplay between the inner and outer realms. The exhibition features new paintings on canvas, works on paper, ceramic sculptures, and paintings on glass, some of which are presented in light boxes. In his use of colors and atmospheres, the artist has drawn inspiration from Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Lucian Freud, Maria Lassnig, and other artists of classical modernism. Info: Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Rämistrasse 33, Zurich, Switzerland, Duration: 25/1-15/3/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-17:00, https://www.peterkilchmann.com/

The exhibition “Friends, Foes, Beds and Beaus”, by Patrizio di Massimo takes place at a specific moment in the artist’s career and is the result of a year-long working process. During this extended creative journey, on several occasions he put his hand to the artworks in his London studio, a space capable of influencing the practice itself and in which he allowed himself to listen to his own thoughts in a state of deep solitude studded with introspective insights. In its evolution and transformation, his painting practice – metaphorical, symbolist and openly lyrical – has maintained an underlying coherence over the years that is expressed here once again through a profound emotional, expressive and conceptual awareness that emerges from the exploration of the portrait and self-portrait. The artist’s urge appears to be guided by the same instances that have characterised his path since his beginnings at the Brera Academy in Milan: the ineluctable necessity to question himself and his own identity, the world around him and the relationships we weave. By structuring a quest that is as much artistic as spiritual, di Massimo offers us access to his own life mediated by a visionary essence. In a process that makes him ever more (re)knowable to the observer letting him develop a progressive focus on his own image, the artist sheds – and then reclaims at will – the conventions that define male identity within the framework of painting. Info: Gió Marconi Gallery, Via Tadino 15, Milan, Italy, Duration: 31/1-8/3/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.giomarconi.com/

Camille Henrot presents “A Number of Things”  Evoking children’s developmental tools, shoes, distorted graphs and counting devices, new large-scale bronze sculptures from the artist’s “Abacus” series (2024) presented alongside recent smaller- scaled works, address the friction between a nascent sense of imagination and society’s systems of signs. The exhibition also features vibrant new paintings from Henrot’s ongoing “Dos and Don’ts” series. Initiated in 2021, this series combines printing, painting and collage techniques with excerpts from etiquette books and computer desktop screenshots to serve as palimpsests for play with color, gesture, texture and trompe l’oeil. The artworks on view emerge from a site-specific flooring intervention conceived and designed by Henrot in collaboration with Charlap Hyman & Herrero. As viewers enter the gallery, they are greeted by a pack of dog sculptures tied to a pole, as if left unattended by their walker. Shaped from steel wool, aluminum sheets, carved wood, wax, chain and other unexpected materials, Henrot’s creatures speak to the ever-unfolding effects of human design and domestication. As an extension of Henrot’s ongoing interest in relationships of dependency, the dogs stand in as the ultimate image of attachment. . Info: Hauser & Wirth Gallery, 542 West 22nd Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 30/1-12/4/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.hauserwirth.com/