ART NEWS:Sept.01
At the center of “Pensiero Spaziolungo”, Rosa Barba’s solo exhibition, is Drawn by the Pulse, a new silent 35mm filmic sculpture that combines astronomical researches and cinematographic techniques. Filmed at the Harvard Astronomical Observatory the works is dedicated to American astronomer Henrietta S. Leavitt and her research on observation, quantification and calculation of the colour and luminosity of stars made visible on the photographic glass plates produced by two Harvard telescopes. In her own words, her filmic vision is “attracted by monumental leftovers, with a weakness for margins, interstices and interludes, and for remote architectural objects which have lost sight of–although not completely lost–the human”. The locations portrayed in her works range from military test sites in the Mojave Desert, to concrete igloos in the woods near Mount Vesuvius awaiting catastrophe to fulfill their purpose, to an island whose inhabitants are attempting to stop the seaward drift of their homes. Impending menace is present in many of her works, but it is often punctuated by relics of modernist faith in technology or progress. Info: Vistamarestudio, Viale Vittorio Veneto 30, Milan, Duration 4/9-27/10/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, www.vistamarestudio.com
Julia Rommel presents her first solo exhibition in Germany entitled “Twin Bed”. The artist uses the conventional materials of painting: linen pulled taut over stretcher bars and oil paint applied by brush, but she uses them unconventionally, pushing her paintings towards the sculptural. For Rommel, material is her starting point. While most painters endeavour to disguise and hide stretcher bars and their functional role as supports, Rommel revels in their structural utility. Through repeatedly re-stretching linen from one stretcher to another in different sizes, and layering paint onto the linen at intermediary stages, she cumulatively builds up a textured surface. This process reveals the passage of time and traces the history of Rommel’s decision-making, visibly evidenced in the various applications of colors. The edges become important, especially the ones that end up scarred and visible. A relief is formed from the accretion of creases, staple holes and edges frayed by repeated stretching. Info: Tanya Leighton, Kurfürstenstraße 156 & 24/25, Berlin, Duration 4/9-6/10/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.tanyaleighton.com
Uriel Orlow’s “Theatrum Botanicum” project will be realised across several venues in three cities in South Africa. Using film, photography, installation and sound, and working from the dual vantage points of South Africa and Europe, the project considers plants as both witnesses and actors in history, and as dynamic agents, connecting nature and humans, rural and cosmopolitan medicine, tradition and modernity, across different geographies, histories and systems of knowledge, with a variety of curative, spiritual and economic powers. The works variously explore botanical nationalism and other legacies of colonialism, plant migration and invasion, biopiracy, flower diplomacy during apartheid, the garden planted by Nelson Mandela and his fellow inmates on Robben Island prison, as well as the role of classification and naming of plants. Khadija von Zinnenburg Carrol describes how the project looks to the botanical world as a stage on which these histories interact as agents. Info: “Theatrum Botanicum”, POOL, 23 Voorhout St, Ellis House, Johannesburg, Duration: 4/9-3/11/18, http://www.pool.org.za/ , “Grey, Green, Gold”, Market Photo Workshop, 57 Margaret Mcingana St, Johannesburg, Duration: 7-9-21/10/18, http://marketphotoworkshop.co.za, “Imbizo Ka Mafavuke & Other Plant Stories”, Durban Art Gallery, Durban City Hall, Smith St, Durban, Duration: 14/9-28/10/18, www.ica.uct.ac.za
Romuald Hazoumè’s work absorbs and confronts the complex realities of contemporary life in Benin and the broader ramifications of Pan-African politics. In his solo exhibition the artist brings together sculptures from 1997 to the present. One of his favorite media is the fifty-liter plastic bidon, or jerrycan, a local staple for the illegal purchase of cheap gasoline from Nigeria, Hazoumè uses strategies of repetition and recombination to create works of elegant potency whose effects are intensified by the wordplay of his titles. Also masks are perhaps the best-known aspect of Hazoumè’s art. In Yoruba culture, masks have long had ceremonial and symbolic importance, as the head and the face are often regarded as the locus of a person’s destiny. Highly valued by European markets, African masks became recurring motifs in the artwork of the 20th century European Avant-Gardes. Freed from ritual or sociological purpose, Hazoumè’s masks consciously adapt the signifiers of African-European exchange to contemporary realities. Composed of plastic gasoline containers and other discarded materials, the masks are freighted with subtext, bringing to mind the Beninese men and women who, unable to find legal employment, are forced to ferry contraband gasoline between Nigerian sources and their Beninese consumers in order to survive. Info: Gagosian Gallery, 821 Park Avenue, New York, Duration: 5/9-13/10/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.gagosian.com
Naama Tsabar creates experiential, sculptural, sonic installations that explore questions of power, eroticism, gender and memory. Her sensually driven installations, performances, and sculptures address the implicit gender roles and coded behavior of music and nightlife. Tsabar appropriates and subverts the aggressive gestures of rock and roll and their associations with virility and power. The artist presents “Melodies of Certain Damage (Opus 2)”, a site-specific environmentthat tunes the entire Sala Molinos of Faena Art Center. The work will be activated by a number of women and gender nonconforming musicians and performers and will respond to the particular musical context of Buenos Aires by placing international and local musicians in conversation. Appropriating the iconic and overtly macho trope of smashing the guitar, Naama repurposes the remnants of an act of violence, reimagining the broken pieces as objects of visual and functional significance, highlighting the pieces by inserting them back into a working order, making them instruments in their own right. Info: Curator: Zoe Lukov, Faena Art Center, Aimeé Painé 1169, Faena Buenos Aires, Duration: 6-8/9/18, Hours: 12:00-20:00, www.faenaart.org
“Tightrope Walking and Its Wordless Shadow” Haegue Yang’s first solo exhibition in Italy, explores the vast array of media employed by this artist, ranging from paper collage, video essays, and performative sculptures to large-scale installations. Yang’s spectrum of allusions and visions flows freely between social inquiry and history, personal life and collective memory, yielding images and experiences of enormous evocative power, in which objects, people, and places are inextricably linked. The exhibition unfolds through three rooms where landmark works are combined with ambitious new commissions to highlight recurring themes in the artist’s career: abstraction and geometry, movement and performativity, and the relationship between folding and unfolding. Yang explores all of these as interwoven entities in a selection of works that represent key stages in her oeuvre since 2000, including most recent. It points to her deep engagement with the unspoken: the urge to create a language as subtle and delicate as a tightrope walk, where movement becomes powerfully dynamic and charged with both emotional and perceptual tension. Info: Curator: Bruna Roccasalva, Palazzo della Triennale, Viale Alemagna 6, Milan, Duration: 7/9-4/11/18, 1dats & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:30-20:30, www.fondazionefurla.org
Wallace Berman was a crucial figure in the history of postwar California art. Music was inseparable from Wallace Berman’s life and work. The artist always kept strong ties to the music world and kept track of the latest developments with an insatiable curiosity, exploring the avant-garde beyond California and taking notice of innovative, unusual, and sometimes confidential. Wallace Berman’s solo exhibition “Visual Music” examine the connection between sound and image, music and visual art, in Berman’s work and show the extremely important role music played in Berman’s artistic approach. His series of Verifax Collages, named after the brand of copier he adopted as a main tool for his art-making in the mid-1960s. He always composed these collages while listening to music. As a result, sound, specifically music, infuses the artist’s artwork. Explicit or implicit, metonymic or formal, musical references abound in the “Verifax Collages”. For instance, portraits of singers such as Janis Joplin, Neil Young, Joan Baez, Marianne Faithful, and Bob Dylan are featured in several Collages. Info: Curator: Sophie Dannenmüller, galerie frank elbaz, 66 rue de Turenne, Paris, Duration: 8/9-11/10/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.galeriefrankelbaz.com
The exhibition “Les années 60-70” offers the chance to rediscover one of the most singular and emblematic painters in French contemporary art: Georges Mathieu. The exhibition features around thirty paintings created between 1960 and 1979, demonstrating the significance and inventiveness of a body of work that left a lasting impression on French art and imagination. The period covered by the exhibition represents Georges Mathieu’s work at its pinnacle. In his quest to transcend the notion of the avant-garde, he developed a form of painting where speed and spontaneity became key. He was famed for his large-scale formats where the unadulterated paint spurts from the tube. He brought a new brand of freedom to the creative gesture, rooted in emotion, violence and subjectivity. Freedom that then gave birth to a brand new style, somewhere between esoteric sign, calligraphy and raw energy. The titles, often steeped in historical, musical and geographical references, add a poetic quality, both sophisticated and offbeat. Info: Galerie Galerie Templon, 30 rue Beaubourg, Paris, Duration: 8/9-20/10/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-19:00, www.templon.com
With an initial degree in Landscape Architecture, Everett traversed into art. Citing inspirations such as Land Art masters Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer, Everett’s work stems from a centre of intuition and subtly evolves beyond process and creation; neither never fully created nor complete, its significance is in its evolving state between beauty and decay. Jeremy Everett in his solo exhibition “Proposal for A Defective Monument”, presents a series of works through which he explores the act and processes of painting: plays with pigment, light, surfaces, texture. In particular, a collection of paint and light-sensitive emulsion on blanket works permeate the room, harking in their varying tonalities the ad hoc veins and filaments of the marble in his film. “Proposal For A Defective Monument” (2018), his new film lends itself to the title of the exhibition. Permeating the space is a sense of his highly charged poetics, how each work exists as the fragment of a sentence, a lyrical exposé, released into the world with precise abandon. Info: Edouard Malingue Gallery, 2202, 2879 Longteng Avenue, Xuhui District, Shanghai, duration: 8/9-21/10/18, https://edouardmalingue.com
With “Autopsy of our Consciences”, Omar Ba is adopting a critical posture. The paintings and installations seek to unearth the “annals of forgetfulness”. Reflecting upon recent history, ecological issues and his own past, Omar Ba unravels the complexities of the world in an attempt to better understand them. The artist examines the WWII and the way it is recounted via the theme of official awards, medals and recognition. He explores maternal love and its sacrificial dimension through the figure of a missing mother. With an apparently simple color range the artist creates a harmonious compendium of portraits, fantastical creatures, abstract motifs, symbols and lush vegetation. Each work plays out like a dream or a cartoon. His favourite subjects are visible: the problem of power, interdependence, tolerance and the need for dialogue. Info: Galerie Templon, 28 rue du Grenier Saint-Lazare, Paris, Duration 8/9-3/11/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.templon.com
Lefki Christidou presents her solo exhibition “Memorandum-Evolution”. The works of the exhibition are made of colorful aluminum cans of soft drinks and drinks, consumables and recyclable (art of recycling). Scratched, cut, welded with stainless steel wire and sometimes painted. They are projects of small and medium size and are mainly related to the period of the monuments in Greece and the evolution of the species (a tribute to Karolos Darwin). Some others are kiosks and flowers from aluminum constructions. Born in Thessaloniki in 1946 Lefki Christidou finds her main inspiration from the city and mainly from the kiosks of Athens. More than just convenient places to buy newspapers, snacks and cigarettes, kiosks are part of the social fabric of Greek life. The kiosk, or “periptero” as representing an important part of modern Greek history since the beginning of the 20th century as it served as a common point of social interaction. Info: Gallery 7, 20 Solonos st. & Voukourestiou st., Athens, Duration: 25/9-13/10/18, Days & Hours: Tue & Thu-Fri 11:00-14:00 & 18”00-21:00, Wed & Sat 11:00-15:00, www.gallery7.gr