ART NEWS:April 03

To mark its 10th anniversary, WIELS presents the large scale exhibition “The Absent Museum” with works from 45 artists, that is held at the fully refurbished Blomme building but also in the two adjacent buildings, which were also formerly part of the Wielemans brewery site. The title, is a nod to the decisive influence that symbolist, ‘thinking has had and continues to have on Belgian modernity. WIELS does not have the status of a museum, but is commonly referred to as ‘the WIELS museum’. This is a token not only of recognition, but also of the expectations that the Belgian audience and public opinion have towards WIELS as an institution. WIELS therefore has decided to use this temporary exhibition to set out a substantive framework or blueprint for a possible museum of contemporary art in the capital of Europe. Info: Curators: Dirk Snauwaertm, Zoë Gray, Frédérique Versaen, Caroline Dumalin & Charlotte Friling, WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Avenue Van Volxemlaan 354, Brussells, Duration: 20/4-3/8/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.wiels.org

For the group exhibition at Raven Row “home” is imagined as a space for social, sexual and political agency, and “the domestic” as a stage on which kinship and self are formed and transformed through acts of love, cruelty and indifference. Visual vocabularies range from bodily waste and bacterial growth to intimate self-imaging. Sculptural forms make reference to temporary shelter and collective occupation, while films are diaristic, improvised and quasi-fictional. The archive is invoked as a “homemaking” space. A commissioned for the exhibition film by Jenna Bliss, explores the class, race and gender dynamics of drug use within domestic contexts in Puerto Rico and New York. Colonial legacies and indigenous activism are explored as well as gentrification and familial histories. The exhibition provides a partial map of the domestic as an unstable zone. The live programme of performances, seminars, screenings and workshops extends the project to include, amongst other concerns, co-housing, modular architecture, non-monogamy, the domestic in narrative film and fiction, living with illness and health activism. Info: Curators: Amy Budd and Naomi Pearce, Raven Row, 56 Artillery Lane, London, Duration: 21/4-11/6/17, Days & Hours: Fri-sun 11:00-18:00, http://ravenrow.org

The exhibition “MALMÖ’S BURNING. An exhibition about Revolt, Dreams and Passions, 1968-1988” is an alternative cultural historical exhibition about Malmö. Malmö’s modern development is usually described as a progression from working city to knowledge city. For the first time we are now presenting an exhibition that portrays part of this period and offers a new and alternative view of Malmö’s transformation. Malmö’s Burning spans from the experimental and increasingly political ‘60s until the ‘80s, when new alternative cultures began appearing just as the years of great economic prosperity seemed to have come to an end. The exhibition begins with the economic boom of the ‘60s and concludes with the recession of the early ‘80s, just before the arrival of postmodernism and a new period of prosperity. Info: Curators: Clemens Altgård and Ola Åstrand, Moderna Museet, Ola Billgrens plats 2–4, Malmö, Duration: 22/4-10/9/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun: 11:00-18:00, www.modernamuseet.se

Into its 51th edition, after its historical beginnings as Kunstmarkt Köln ’67, Art Cologne is still one of the most important art fairs in the world. And it still has its roots in Kunstmarkt Köln ’67, as a fair for classic modernism, postwar and contemporary art. Art Cologne 2017 presents 200 of the most important galleries of the international art world, 39 of them participate for the first time, the galleries present works by 2,000 artists that extend from Modern and Postwar Art to Contemporary Art in the sector GALLERIES. The New Positions offers space for exhibitors in the sector GALLERIES to present additional one-artist presentations of young emerging artists in separate rooms attached to their booths. New for 2017 is the Neumarkt section that presents a new focus on young galleries and on selected curated projects between galleries in the Neumarkt collaborations section. Prof. Günter Herzog, scientific head of the Zentralarchiv des Internationalen Kunsthandels (central archive of the international art trade) (ZADIK), is the recipient of this year’s ART COLOGNE Prize. A site-specific installation by Michael Riedel in the entrance hall of the fair welcomes the visitors. Info: Art Cologne Art Fair, Messeplatz 1, Cologne, Duration: 25-29/4/17, Days & Hours: Tue (25/4/17) (Vernissage) 16:00-20:00, Thu-Fri (26-28/4/17) 11:00-19:00, Sat (30/4/17_11:00-18:00, Entrance fee: Vernissage ticket (valid only 25 April 2017): 46.75 €, Day ticket: 25.00 €, 2-day ticket: 35.00 €, Evening ticket (from 16:00 29/4/17 from 15:00) 20.00 €, Reduced day ticket: 20.00 €, Catalogue: 30.00 €, www.artcologne.com

A career-spanning exhibition of Balthus’s paintings, drawings, and photography is on presentation at Gagosian Gallery. Skirting avant-garde movements such as Surrealism, he cultivated a self-taught classicism in his representations of the physical and psychic struggles of adolescence. In his first gallery exhibition in 1934, his voyeuristic depictions of pubescent female subjects brooding with uneasy dreams scandalized Parisian audiences. In the sixty years that followed, his interior portraits, street scenes, and landscapes continued these enigmatic artistic investigations. The drawings, spanning 1928 to 1978, reveal lively experimentations in form, composition, and content, attesting to Balthus’s technical versatility and stylistic evolution. Info: Gagosian Gallery, 19 place de Longemalle, Geneva, Duration 26/4-29/7/17, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-18:00, www.gagosian.com

The 13th edition of Gallery Weekend Berlin presents exhibitions by emerging and established artists from 47 Berlin galleries. The weekend is a festival of the galleries and serves as a culmination of their year-round activity. As they discover artists, maintain lasting relationships with them, and continually promote and disseminate their work worldwide, the galleries are a point of contact for curators, critics, and collectors. All elements combined—concentrated individual exhibitions, memorable Berlin experience and annual social event, this engagement is celebrated at the place where everything originates. In this special year of art, in which after 10 years 2017 sees Documenta, the Venice Biennale, and Skulptur Projekte Münster all opening within 2 months, Gallery Weekend Berlin is looking forward once again to presenting the gallery as a space of exchange and discourse. Info: Gallery Weekend Berlin, 28-30/4/17, www.gallery-weekend-berlin.de

Comprised of paintings, drawings, sculpture, prints, ceramics, and a home movie made by Picasso in 1929, “Picasso: Minotaurs and Matadors” examines the intersection of Picasso’s bullfighting imagery with his mythological and biographical compositions of the 1930s. Including works dating from 1889 to 1971, this career-long survey traces Picasso’s engagement with the ancient rituals and narratives of his native Mediterranean. The exhibition aims to examine the proposal Picasso described in the quote above, presenting fresh perspectives on some of Picasso’s myths and monsters. Picasso began to create allusive narrative works ripe for Surrealist interpretation, infusing the theatrical combat of the corrida with mythic elements of antiquity. When Picasso returned to live in the Mediterranean after World War II, his work would continue to be steeped in mythology and bullfighting for the remainder of his life. Picasso’s depictions of Minotaurs and matadors provide a key for biographical and scholarly investigation into an oeuvre that he confessed to having created as if keeping a diary. Info: Curator: Sir John Richardson, Gagosian Gallery, 20 Grosvenor Hill, London Duration: 28/4-25/8/17, Days & hours: Tue-Sat 10:p00-18:00, www.gagosian.com