ART NEWS: Feb.01

WIELS presents “OBSTAKLES”, a major survey of Willem Oorebeek’s work. Since the early 1980s Willem Oorebeek has been a prominent figure with an extensive presence in exhibitions, publications, and as a teacher and a mentor. He developed his practice in the Netherlands before moving to Brussels in 1994, where he has been living and working ever since. Over the past decades Oorebeek has explored the impact of images and the erosion of the viewing experience caused by the mass inflation of ‘print’ or ‘screen’ reproduction. Spread across two floors, the exhibition highlights Oorebeek’s in-depth exploration of authorship and aura by way of appropriation techniques, selecting printed matter to manipulate and transpose into other media. At the core of Oorebeek’s work stands the human figure, serving as a vehicle to investigate the politics of the image, the allure of icons, and the humor and derision that arise from their overexposure in public consciousness. Info: Curator: Pauline Hatzigeorgiou, WIELS, Contemporary Art Centre, Avenue Van Volxemlaan 354, Brussels, Belgium, Duration: 1/2 -17/4/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.wiels.org/

Terence Gower’s exhibition “Trois Installations” brings together three projects that each demonstrate a different process of form generation, in several different media, including sculpture, drawing, printmaking, and installation. “Human Industry (Escalator)”, 2025 is a suite of sculptures and works on paper based on the truncated form of a common escalator, an artefact of public and commercial sites that feature dense collections of humans on the move, such as train stations and shopping centers. The series emerged from observations during a day hike in Lower Austria in the summer of 2023, related in a short narrative that is shown adjacent to the works in the installation. “Gruen in Tehran” (2018 – ongoing) is a wall drawing and print series that employs woodblock, aquatint, silkscreen, letterpress, and digital techniques. The project is based on research in the Victor Gruen papers at the Library of Congress (Washington, DC), and tells the story of Gruen’s invitation by the Shah of Iran to conceive a new urbanism scheme for Iran’s capital in the early 1960s. “Free Association” (2010 – ongoing) presents the viewer with a cloud of suspended, fragmentary shapes, laser-cut from 6 mm aluminum and coated with a variety of colored enamels. This work is based on the eponymous psychoanalytic technique, in which phrases, images, and memories are excavated from a patient’s unconscious. Info: Andréhn-Schiptjenko Gallery, 56 rue Chapon, Paris, France, Duration: 1/2 -15/3/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:00-18:00, Sat 13:00-19:00, www.andrehn-schiptjenko.com/

Jutta Haeckel presents “Skin in the Game”, he paints on jute – the strong, coarse, natural fiber that burlap is made of – and utilizes a series of unorthodox techniques to undermine and expand traditional notions of painting. Most notably, she applies pigments to the “backside” of the painting, then pushes it through small gaps she’s created in the fabric – extruding the paint onto the “front” and subverting the two-dimensional space of traditional painting. These are paintings unlike anything anyone has ever made. Her newest work aggressively emphasizes the concept of the canvas as a permeable membrane, or skin. Viscous material is forced back and forth across a porous barrier. The woven substrate is so powerfully abraded that at moments it seems about to unravel. Some of these paintings appear to have too little canvas to support the weight of the paint they support. Haeckel’s process is risky. Every move she makes in the studio has the potential of either dynamic creation or complete destruction. That precariousness is what drives her art. Info: Hosfelt Gallery, 260 Utah Street, San Francisco, CA, USA, Duration: 1/2 -15/3/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sat 10:00-17:30, Thu 11:00-19:00, https://hosfeltgallery.com/

The exhibition “Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always” is the largest exhibition of contemporary Native American art at a museum to date. Comprising over 100 works across a range of media, from beadwork and jewelry to video and painting, the exhibition foregrounds the significance of identity in artmaking through the diverse practices of 97 artists, representing more than 50 distinct Indigenous nations and tribes across the United States, and explores the multiplicities of indigeneity and asserts the inextricability of Native American Art from the contemporary canon. Celebrating the breadth of groundbreaking contemporary art made by Native artists,” Indigenous Identities” surfaces a series of guiding concepts—land, social, tribal, and political—that unify the works on view and speak to the permeability of art in Native American life. Featuring jewelry, ceramics, beadwork, and basketry alongside painting, sculpture, and installation, the exhibition confronts the idea that traditional forms of making are artifacts of a past life and acknowledges these practices and their contemporary resonance. Info: Curator: Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, 71 Hamilton Street, New Brunswick, NJ, USA, Duration: 1/2-21/12/2025, Days & Hours: Wed & Fri 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-20:00, Sat-Sun 12:00-17:00, https://zimmerli.rutgers.edu/

Kent Iwemyr’s paintings are imaginative stories in acrylic color. He paints his pictures as he has always done. He has been drawing since his youth. But it is only in the last thirty years that he has devoted himself to art full time. In his younger years, Kent Iwemyr was a jack-of-all-trades who, after studying to be an art teacher at the University of Arts, Crafts and Design, found his way back to the pictures of his youth. And there he has remained and wants to stay. He thrives on the fringes. That’s where the directness and honesty of creation are. The stories in the pictures are similar to the way the naivists created images. For Kent Iwemyr, it is like his own language. The pictures all have their own stories, which are often a mixture of real, self-perceived events and pure invention. The carefully chosen title leads the viewer into the picture, which then continues in our own imagination. The exhibition “From One Day to Another Time” at Bror Hjorths Hus contains new paintings, but the approach is the same. The humor mixed with seriousness, the poetic titles and the environments taken from Bergslagen and Norrland have followed him in his pictures from another time to today. Info: Bror Hjorths Hus, Norbyvägen 26, Uppsala, Sweeden, Duration: 1/2 -16/3/2025, Days & Hours: Thu-Sun 11:00-18:00, https://brorhjorthshus.se/

Alex Israel’s paintings frequently draw on pop culture and entertainment, with an air of nostalgia, fantasy, escapism, joy, and humor. For his new solo exhibition titled “Noir”, which marks the LA-based artist’s first hometown show in nearly a decade, he showcases the City of Angels at night. The visitors are introduced into a reimagined Los Angeles. Israel, born and raised in LA, grounds his work in the visual and psychological disorientations of Hollywood noir, a genre that emerged alongside the global uncertainty of World War II. With Warner Bros. as his creative playground, Israel’s new paintings draw directly from the city’s layered past. The artist’s process is as intricate as the city he captures. Starting with photographs and sketches, Israel worked collaboratively with animators to create digital blueprints that evolved into the finished pieces. His attention to detail extended to selecting specific fan palm silhouettes and perfecting the purplish gradients of twilight skies. Painted by a Warner Bros. Scenic Art department artist, the final works are acrylic on canvas, carefully crafted, yet deliberately heightened to evoke a sense of cinematic unreality. Info: Gagosian, 456 North Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, CA, USA, Duration: 6/2-22/3/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:30-17:30, https://gagosian.com/

“Yawm al-Firak” (Arabic for Day of Separation), is the first solo exhibition by the Palestinian-Dutch photographer Sakir Khader. Since 2024, he has been the first Palestinian photographer selected to join the renowned photography collective Magnum Photos. Through his firsthand experiences in Palestinian occupied territories, Khader brings the viewer directly into the heart of the occupation. His images explore the fragile boundary between life and death. In this exhibition, Khader gives a voice to seven young Palestinian men who were violently taken from life, and to their mothers who lost them. Through their stories and experiences, he reflects on farewells in times of occupation, conflict, war, and displacement. His images explore the fragile boundary between life and death.  The number seven symbolizes unity in many cultures. The seven mothers and their lost sons at the center of this exhibition represent the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians with the establishment of the state of Israel since 1948, also known as the Nakba. Info: The Foam, Keizersgracht 609, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Duration: 7/2-14/5/2025, Days & Hours: Mon-Wed & Sat-Sun 10:00-18:00, Thu-Fri 10:00-21:00, www.foam.org/

The “Tactile “ opens a three-part series on materials (marble, wood, thread) at Chapelle XIV. This first installment brings together the practices of Marion Artense Gély and Denis Macrez around marble. The invitation to touch goes beyond the allure of stroking smooth, reassuring stone curves. Marble is not merely an object of aesthetic admiration—it is alive. It represents a continuity of inert matter, a passage between representation and the represented. In Marion Artense Gély’s paintings, marble’s characteristic veins spread like a network of blood vessels. Shades of red and blue contrast with pink—the skin as a landscape. While Marion Artense Gély accumulates successive layers of material to make forms emerge, Denis Macrez hollows them out. The stone is carved, excavated, and sanded—an ancient technique: starting from a solid mass to create voids and reveal their contours. In his work, the artist invites visitors to physically engage with the pieces. Like negative forms completing the palms of our hands, his wall sculptures are designed like climbing holds. A practitioner of this sport—now common among young urbanites deprived of contact with vast natural spaces—Denis Macrez offers the possibility of symbiosis. Info: CHAPELLE XIV, 14 boulevard de la Chapelle, 3ème cour à droite, Paris, France, Duration: 8/2-29/3/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.chapelle14.com/

In the exhibition “Written on Water” Oscar Tuazon presents a series of works and sculptures shown for the first time in France. These pieces are part of his ongoing exploration of water and its relationship with the environment and architecture. Inspired by paper marbling techniques, the artist uses pigments to create fluid patterns, capturing the movement of water through color. The pigments are treated as sculptural elements, interacting with their environment. A series of scale model fountains, made of concrete, branches, and steel, combine brutalism with natural elements, offering sculptures that oscillate between transformation and petrification. Oscar Tuazon collaborates with designers, engineers, and craftsmen to create monumental installations and public commissions, referencing Land Art and Minimalism. Since 2016, he has also developed Water School, an educational and moving project exploring the diverse dimensions of water as a unifying element among people, places, materials, and objects. Primarily using architectural techniques and materials such as steel, glass, or wood, he adopts a do it yourself approach to create structures and installations. Info: Galerie Chantal Crousel, 10 rue Charlot, Paris, France, Duration: 8/2-8/3/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-20:00, Sat 11 :00-19 :00, www.crousel.com/

“Wonder Lust” is the first solo exhibition in Switzerland by Atiéna R. Kilfa. The installation revolves aroξen from the back, contemplating an evocative and often dramatic landscape, recurs throughout the history of painting and cinema alike. In subverting the figure’s object of contemplation, replacing a distant land with a mere maquette, Kilfa’s work stages a form of playacting that both exposes and deflates the pomposity of the heroic set-up. Two additional works are part of the exhibition, both of which further break down the production of “wonder” as a prop. The print “Landfall at Sunrise “ is a still, derived from an unused cut of the video, in which we see, in a large close-up, the reflection of the landscape in the figure’s eyes, bringing yet another point of view to bear on the figure’s relation to the landscape. A “wind machine” is exhibited as well, a type of foley instrument that creates the illusion of the sound of wind by spinning a wooden drum against fabric. Info: Curator: Melanie Bühler, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Museumstrasse 32, St.Gallen, St.Gallen, Switzerland, Duration: 8/2-6/7/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 10:00-17:00, Thu 10:00-20:00, https://kunstmuseumsg.ch/

In “Swift as a Whirlwind, Through the Marble Sky”, Bram Demunter presents a new series of paintings and drawings. n this new series of paintings, there are a lot of traces of mystical figures such as Mad Meg or epic stories such as Beowulf, Paradise Lost and Don Quixote. Like these stories, Demunter’s paintings unveil the chaos and absurdity of human existence and our impact on the natural world. The essence of Bram Demunter’s work lies in its profound exploration of the human condition, focusing on themes of transformation, internal conflict, and the complex relationship between humanity and the natural world. Demunter’s paintings often evoke the tension between human aspiration and nature’s overwhelming forces, portraying both the fragility and power of the human spirit in a world shaped by environmental and existential struggles. Demunter’s art reflects a nuanced understanding of the human psyche, where individuals navigate the chaos of existence, facing internal and external forces that shape their identities. His use of mythic and literary figures, such as Beowulf, Don Quixote, and Mad Meg, positions these characters not only as symbols of heroism or folly but also reflections of human vulnerability and the search for meaning. Info: Tim Van Laere Gallery Rome, Palazzo Donarelli Ricci, Via Giulia 98, Rome, Italy, Duration: 8/2-3/5/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 13:00-18:00, www.timvanlaeregallery.com/

Alireza Shojaian’s  solo exhibition title “Le démon blanc et l’arbre en feu” refers to two powerful symbols: the “white demon”, one of the central characters in the “Shâhnâmeh” (The Book of Kings), a fundamental epic poem of Persian literature, and the “burning tree”, an emblematic image of ancient mythology. Alireza Shojaian reimagines the ancient aesthetics and historical archetypes drawn from these legends through a contemporary narrative. These timeless figures are transposed into a space where binary oppositions (good versus evil, order versus chaos) and conventional norms are deconstructed, redefining their roles and opening up a dialogue with contemporary issues. In this new series, Shojaian expands his technical vocabulary by enriching his colored pencil drawings with airbrushes. Color becomes an essential narrative device, enveloping the “dark memories” of societal trauma in a vivid, contrasting palette. Violence is transformed into a poignant vision of strange beauty, and treated with a tension between visual brilliance and the gravity of the subject, between aesthetics and raw emotion. Info: Bendana | Pinel Art Contemporain, 4 rue du Perche, Paris, France, Duration: 8/2-5/4/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.bendana-pinel.com/

All the works in Matias Faldbakken’s exhibition “Abstracts and Pewter Abstracts” are drawings: on paper, on canvas, and with pewter. And they are all abstract. I’ve written some sentences to clarify “drawing” and “abstract,” but things are not very clear and perhaps there is no other way than to put this in paradoxical terms. Drawing has a strange essence. A drawing on a white sheet of pricey art paper can diminish the paper’s value; it seems easier to discard a piece of paper stained by a lousy drawing than to throw away the untouched sheet — which is straight up violent. On the other hand, a drawing doesn’t have to be done to be done. Drawing seems thin, slight, and doesn’t have the nasty limitlessness of painting, it doesn’t go as “far”. Most, if not all, drawing gravitates toward the same level of questionable. Drawing is material image-making pitted against all the other images. Let every drawing be a critique of whatever hangs next to it. Drawing embodies the potency slash impotency of images. On show is my compulsion to draw, drawn, and my reluctance to draw, drawn. Drawing is empathic denial and the way you draw is deeply embarrassing but it’s also yours. You will never draw straight because your hand has a dialect — or is it an accent? The lofty thing about a grown man drawing and the dubious thing about a middle-aged man drawing. A man drawing — an inoperative man. Info: Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Waldmannstrasse 6, Zurich, Switzerland. Duration: 8/2-22/3/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-17:00, www.presenhuber.com/