ART NEWS:March 01
Jason Fox’s solo exhibition “Beware of Darkness” is on presentation at Almine Rech Gallery in Brussels. Fox’s work itself acts as a link between these events, and they in turn allow us to chronologically situate his acts of borrowing from both art history and from record sleeves of the seventies. Although considered as common practice today, this kind of artistic approach was not so widespread at the time.The characters cast in Fox’s work are often commented upon, and while their representative qualities are widely accepted they still appear original and imaginative. While the narrative inventiveness and sharp satire of Jason Fox’s work are no longer to be questioned, critics have too often resorted to mentioning only his subject matter, thus backgrounding what actually constitutes Fox’s value in the history of painting is his style. Info: Almine Rech Gallery, 20 Rue de l’Abbaye, Abdijstraat, Brussels, Duration: 1/3-7/4/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.alminerech.com
For “Dating” his new exhibition Yan Pei-Ming audaciously brings together new oil paintings of Popes, Female nudes and erotic scenes, along with a series of gouaches. Yan Pei Ming has long been fascinated by pope portraiture, and its role in the representation of power and authority. With his signature monochromatic palette and energetic brushstrokes, the artist revisits canons that have marked the history of this unique genre. The portraits of popes converse with paintings of a completely divergent genre: female nudes and erotic scenes. As referred by the exhibition title, this is a date between power, women and painting. A dialogue of sorts to restore a balance between the archetypes of papal portraiture – considered a noble subject, and the female nude-a reputedly minor subject because of its links with genre painting. By pairing works that are usually incompatible, the exhibition reflects on how image hierarchies have been abolished in our current information age, as we can so easily switch from a news image of a catastrophe, to a sexually charged advertisement image. Info: Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, 7 Rue Debelleyme, Paris, Duration: 2/3-21/4/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, https://ropac.net
Maria Thereza Alves and Jimmie Durham collaborated for “The Middle Earth” a project devoted to the Mediterranean. This new and original collaboration comes from the artists’ desire to explore together the territory where they live, in a poetic and critical fashion. The two artists reveal common influences that come, on the one hand from a political engagement that flows through their respective work, and on the other hand common areas of research, that deal with notions of territory and authority. One can effectively observe these questions in the work of both artists, and in both cases, their thought processes are engaged in the same criticism of the ideological and normative frameworks that shape people’s relationships with the world. Playing with universalist models, Alves and Durham’s dialogue hijacks the apparent objectivity of classification in order to deploy an active dialogue between recent artworks and archeological and ethnological objects in each category. Info: Curators: Nathalie Ergino and Sandra Lorenzi, Institut d’art contemporain Villeurbanne/Rhône Alpes, 11 rue Docteur Dolard, Villeurbanne, Duration: 2/3-27/5/18, Days & Hours: Wed-Fri 14:00-18:00, Sat-Sun 13:00-19:00, http://i-ac.eu
Questioning notions of ownership and originality, Oliver Laric uses 3-D scanning technologies to make historical artworks and other objects available to be copied on his website, threedscans.com. Laric’s own ghostly versions of classical and neoclassical statues were exhibited most recently at the Schinkel Pavilion in Berlin. From March 3 to April 14, 2018, hes show new works in the exhibition “Year of the Dog” at Metro Pictures in New York. His new animation continues his inquiry into concepts of metamorphosis, encompassing concerns about time and the complex dynamic between human and nonhuman lifeforms. Against a white background, linear animations of fish, fungi, and other figures move and change shape. The back gallery is devoted to three sculptures, all titled Hundemensch, cast in resin from the same mold. Distinguished by their color and varying degrees of transparency and opacity, each sculpture consists of a figure with the head of a dog and body of a human who crouches down, holding a smaller dog protectively in its arms. Info: Metro Pictures, 519 West 24th Street, New York, Duration: 3/3-14/4/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.metropictures.com
Georg Baselitz, who celebrates his 80th birthday in 2018, is a renowned connoisseur and collector of mannerist prints. The exhibition “Baselitz Maniera – Nonconformism as a source of imagination” brings graphics by Baselitz into an exciting dialogue with significant mannerist pieces. The selection of works shows how Georg Baselitz deliberately dissociated himself from abstract painting at the start of the 1960s. He used more than just the topics of his paintings to position himself in opposition to the contemporary artistic zeitgeist, following his own path even in terms of the graphic printing techniques he preferred. In the 1960s, a new era began in reproductive graphics, with silk-screen and offset printing, but Baselitz turned his back on such forms of mass reproduction because of their lack of originality. Instead, he experimented with state proofs, producing small series of works, some of which he altered individually after the impression was taken. Info: Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Kupferstich-Kabinett, Residenzschloss, Dresden, Duration: 3/3-27/5/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-18:00,
Hilma af Klint’s work has been recognized as pioneering in the field of abstract art, and remained largely unnoticed for much of the 20th Century. Her work is presented for the first in Latin America in the exhibition “Hilma af Klint: Possible Worlds”. The exhibition includes 130 works. One of the show’s highlights is a series entitled “The Ten Largest,” painted in 1907 and now considered one of the first and foremost works of abstract art in the Western world, since it precedes the non-figurative compositions of contemporary artists such as Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich. In addition to this set of works, the exhibition in São Paulo will feature several series of works that have never been presented to the public. The work of Hilma af Klint, in a certain way, dialogues with the syncretism and plurality of worldviews that are so present in Brazilian culture. The seriality found in her works also appears in Brazilian art, especially concretism and neoconcretism. Info: Curators: Jochen Volz, Daniel Birnbaum, Pinacoteca de São Paulo, Praça da Luz 2, Luz, São Paulo, Duration: 3/3-16/7/18, Days & Hours: Wed-Mon 10:00-17:30, http://pinacoteca.org.br
“Mixing Stars and Sand: The Art and Legacy of Sarain Stump” is a multi-faceted project that makes a major contribution to the art history of the Canadian prairies. It focuses on the art and legacy of Sarain Stump . Born in Venice, Italy, Stump came to Canada in the mid-1960s. He developed a style of integrating personal and historical narratives with various forms and media of Indigenous art. Stump arrived in Saskatchewan in 1972, he later began work at the Saskatchewan Indian Cultural College, leading the nascent Indart program. A compelling narrative emerges that positions Stump as a cultural catalyst, community activist, and revolutionary. Propelled by the spirit of the times, including the activism of the American Indian Movement, Red Power, and the influence of late-sixties youth culture, in a few short years Stump was instrumental in a renaissance of Indigenous art and artists in the region. His life was cut short when he drowned off the coast of Oaxaca, Mexico at the age of 29. Info: Curators: Gerald McMaster and Anthony Kiend, MacKenzie Art Gallery, 3475 Albert St, Regina Saskatchewan, Canada, Duration: 3/3-24/6/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Wed & Fri-Sat 10:00-17:30, Thu 10:00-21:00, Sun 12:00-17:30, http://mackenzieartgallery.ca/
The exhibition “If our soup can could speak: Mikhail Lifshitz and the Soviet Sixties” celebrates the he 50th anniversary of the scandalous publication “The Crisis of Ugliness” (1968), by Soviet philosopher and art critic Mikhail Lifshitz. The exhibition takes as its starting point Lifshitz’s book and related writings to re-explore the vexed relations between so-called progressive art and politics in the 20th and 21st Centuries, as well as the motivations and implications of Lifshitz’s singular crusade against the modern classics. The exhibition unfolds as a narrative of archival documents, art works, and text fragments, which are situated in a sequence of ten interiors that could be seen as spatial forms for landmark moments in the evolution of modernism, or in Lifshitz’s thinking. It intends to provoke a discussion of art after the triumph of modernism and its contradictory position in a crisis-ridden world where Lifshitz’s radical diagnoses seem more relevant than ever. Info: Curators: David Riff and Dmitry Gutov, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, 9/32 Krymsky Val, Moscow, Duration: 7/3-13/5/18, Days & Hours: Daily 11:00-22:00, https://garagemca.org/en
The exhibition “Dottore di tutto II” is devoted to the work of Giovanni Bosco. What is first striking in this work is that it doesn’t seem indebted to any influence, escaping, in fact, all casual rapprochements. Born in 1948, the Sicilian Giovanni Bosco fell into a psychosis following the assassination of his two brothers by the mafia. The psychiatric institution and the prison where he was sent for one year following, apparently, the theft of a farm animal did not take away his disarming smile, nor his propensity for transforming his penniless existence into an act of pure poetry. Afterwards, in Castellamare del Golfo, to the west of Palermo, his days were punctuated by popular Neapolitan songs and paintings of a rare inventiveness that he executed on the walls of his city or on makeshift materials. When his genius was finally recognized – thanks to the efforts of the photographer Boris Piot, he was lost to cancer in 2009. Info: Christian Berst Gallery/Art Brut, 3-5passage des Gravilliers (entrance 10, rue Chapon), Paris, Duration: 8/3-14/4/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 14:00-19:00, http://www.christianberst.com/en/home.html
The solo exhibition of works by Isa Melsheimer, “The Year of the Whale” features gouaches on paper and a hand-embroidered curtain made during her residency with Fogo Island Arts in Fall 2017. The works seek to trouble the complex, ever-evolving relationship of humans to the environment, suggesting a rebalancing of power structures and permeable boundaries between species. Melsheimer’s works in the exhibition evoke ideas of embodied experience and interspecies dialogue, foregrounding unpredictable encounters and networked, “tentacular” thinking. Four gouaches depict iconic buildings encroached by rising tides and massive sea creatures. Set against dramatic darkened skies. Melsheimer’s landscape evokes traditional Eastern perspective, creating a vertical sense of distance with areas left open to the imagination. The multiview-point imagery creates an embodied sense of space that is an accumulation of time and experience, conveying a feeling of the ocean and landscape, as well as the passage of time. Info: Curator: Alexandra McIntosh Fogo Island Arts, 210 Main Street, Joe Batt’s Arm, Fogo Island, , Duration: 9/3-17/6/18, http://fogoislandarts.ca/