ART NEWS:Sept.03

moderna musset warhall1968 was a politically turbulent year in Sweden and internationally, with reactions against the Vietnam War, the assassination of Martin Luther King, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, student demonstrations and the tennis riots in Båstad. This was also the year when Andy Warhol’s very first solo museum exhibition opened at Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Due to the left-wing climate that prevailed in Sweden, especially in the arts, the organisers anticipated an onslaught of criticism against the exhibition for being American propaganda. “Warhol 1968” is an exhibition about the Andy Warhol exhibition at Moderna Museet in 1968. It also explores the complexity of Warhol’s practice from the perspective of the life-changing murder attempt, which took place that year. The exhibition includes the now-famous cow wallpaper that covered the facade of the Museum in 1968, wall photos from the exhibition, quotes and reviews, juxtaposing them with works from the Museum’s Collection. Info: Curator: John Peter Nilsson, Moderna Museet, Exercisplan 4, Skeppsholmen, Stockholm, Duration: 15/9/18-17/2/19, Days & Hours: Tue & Fri 10:00-20:00, Wed-Thu 10:00-18:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.modernamuseet.se

ChertLüdde GalleryThe exhibition “A-The Mail Art Archive of Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt and Robert Rehfeldt” presents the archive of Mail Art works received by the two German artists Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt and Robert Rehfeldt, from the beginning of the 1970s until the early 1990s. The exhibition presents all correspondence with artists whose surname (or name of an artistic group) begins with the letter A. Every single piece is available to be accessed by the public. A selection of works is displayed in vitrines while the rest are alphabetically numbered and archived inside folders that the visitors can browse through and take out to closely review. Another section is dedicated to some of the books from the artist’s archive, again books whose title or content is connected with the letter A or which address the alphabet as such. A video slide show presents a collections of stamps created and used by different artists in their Mail Art correspondence. Info: ChertLüdde Gallery, Ritterstr. 2a, Berlin, Duration: 15/9-11/11/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 12:00-18:00, http://chertluedde.com

RAFAELA CORTESEBorn in Italy and raised in Los Angeles, Simone Forti has been a leading figure in the development of contemporary performance over the last fifty years. Artist, choreographer, dancer, writer, Forti has dedicated herself to the research of a kinesthetic awareness, always engaging with experimentation and improvisation. The exhibition “On An Iron Post” is an important comeback by Simone Forti, that presents a solo show at an Italian gallery after the historical collaboration with Galleria Attico in Rome at the end of the ‘70s. The exhibition at the gallery run concurrently with her participation in the group exhibition” Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done” at MoMA, the group show traces the history of the renowned choreographers, visual artists, composers, and filmmakers of the 60s. Simone Forti has been presented in Italy in the last decades through the participation in performances and workshops, from Museo del Novecento-Milan, to Palazzo Zenobio-Venice. Info: Galleria Raffaella Cortese, via A. Stradella 7, Milan, Duration: 18/9-22/11/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-13:00 & 15:00-19:30, https://raffaellacortese.com

met 2Featuring 70 works by 30 artists in media ranging from painting and sculpture to photography, video, and installation art, from 1969 to 2016, the exhibition “Everything Is Connected: Art and Conspiracy” presents an alternate history of postwar and contemporary art that is also an archaeology of our troubled times and traces the simultaneous development of two kinds of art about conspiracy. The first half of the exhibition comprise works by artists who hew strictly to the public record, uncovering hidden webs of deceit, from the shell corporations used by New York’s largest private landlord, interconnected networks encompassing politicians, businessmen, and arms dealers. In the second part, other artists will dive headlong into the fever dreams of the disaffected, creating fantastical works that nevertheless uncover uncomfortable truths in an age of information overload and weakened trust in institutions. Info: Curators: Ian Alteveer, Meredith Brown, Doug Eklund, Aaron I. Fleischman and Beth Saunders, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Met Breuer, 945 Madison Avenue, New York, Duration: 18/9/19-6/1/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Thu & Sun 10:00-17:30, Fri-Sat 10:00-21:00, www.metmuseum.org

sdralvesThe exhibition “Robert Mapplethorpe: Pictures” brings together 179 works from throughout the artist’s career, from early collages and Polaroids, to the images of flowers, nudes, sexuality and portraits that made him one of the most notable photographers of the last century. Having studied painting and sculpture in New York before turning to of photography, Mapplethorpe was influenced by the art of Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp, as well as the photography of Julia Margaret Cameron and others. The artist’s early collages, assemblages and photographs, initially taken with a Polaroid camera, develop the interest in sexuality and composition that would come to define his mature work.  Using a fully-manual Hasselblad camera beginning in 1975 Mapplethorpe began to employ long exposures and ordered arrangements in the studio to craft portraits, still lives, and nudes whose order, balance, and content redefined photography as an art form.  Info: Curator: João Ribas, Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, R. Dom João de Castro 210, Porto, Duration: 20/9/18-6/1/19, Days & Hours: Mon & Wed-Fri 10:00-19:00, Sat-Sun 10:00-20:00, www.serralves.pt

MARIGNANA ARTEThe exhibition “Living Painting” is a tribute to the work of Nancy Genn. Genn, starting from the Seventies strongly asserted herself in the international art scene, showing an absolutely original and intense vision of the new pictorial investigations overseas, exhibiting with Robert Rauschemberg and Sam Francis, in nine Asiatic museums from Tokyo to Hong Kong. The title of the exhibition expressly underlines this indissoluble relationship between the life and the work of Genn: deeply soaked with eastern culture, into which she tracks down refinements and calligraphic mysteries to be translated with personality and individuality in her pictorial research, she claims the value of manual dexterity, in kneading and spreading out papers specifically realized to receive the fluidity of her painting, stretched between an abstract, gestural and vibrating research and an attention towards organic and natural shapes translated into scores of metaphorical marvel. Info: Curator: Ilaria Bignotti, Marignana Arte, Dorsoduro, 141, Rio Terà dei Catecumeni, Venice, Duration: 22/9-24/11/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed 14:00-18:30, Thu-Sat 11:00-13:30, & 14:00-18:30, www.marignanaarte.it

new museum“Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel” the first American survey of Sarah Lucas’  works feature some of her most important projects, including early sculptures from the 1990s that substitute domestic furniture for human body parts, and enlarged spreads from tabloid newspapers from the same period that reflect objectified representations of the female body. Alongside the photographic self-portraits that Lucas has produced throughout her career, the exhibition features biomorphic sculptures and selections from her installations at the Freud Museum in London (2000) and the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2015). These works, which complicate inscribed codes of sexual and social normativity, have never been shown together in the United States. Lucas is also creating new sculptural works for the exhibition. The exhibition address the ways in which Lucas’s works engage with crucial debates about gender and power along with the legacy of Surrealism, as with her explorations of sexual ambiguity and the tension between the familiar and the disorienting or absurd. Info: Curators: Massimiliano and Margot Norton, New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York, Duration: 26/9/18-20/1/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, www.newmuseum.org

moderna musset trockellSince the 1980s, Rosemarie Trockel has been relentlessly challenging and broadening the art world. The exhibition “The Same Different” a sums up thirty years of her work, while a majority of the worksin the show are new. The exhibition features more than forty works from 1988 to the present. Visitors will get a chance to discover the breadth of Rosemarie Trockel’s work, in which ideas, materials, and everyday objects are transformed and given new meaning. Rosemarie Trockel is an artist who takes a stance and gives her opinion of contemporary society. The exhibition allows to follow the artist’s career from her feminist examinations of the 1990s to later works in which she addresses issues of animal ethics, artistic processes, and what art can be. It shows her enthusiasm for experimentation and the rich variety of expressions in her works, which include video, digital prints, drawings, ceramics, and large installations. Info: Curator: Iris Müller-Westermann, Moderna Museet, Ola Billgrens plats 2-4, Malmö, Duration: 29/9/18-3/3/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:00-18:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-17:00, www.modernamuseet.se

Sharjah Art FoundationIncorporating a number of works never or rarely shown before, the exhibition “Frank Bowling: Mappa Mundi” presents an overview of major developments in Frank Bowling’s practice, exploring the artist’s engagement with history, migration, memory and representation across a six-decade career. At a time when artists began to question the rigidity of formalist principles and the autonomy of the painted picture, Bowling sought to imbue the medium with complex social and cultural meaning. In his well-known modulated colour abstractions, which are the focus of this exhibition, he invested painting with a modernising awareness of the social, political and geographic transformations taking place around him. The experience of migration and cross-cultural relationships are important influences on Bowling’s painterly inquiry. Born in Bartica, British Guiana in 1934, he moved to London at the age of nineteen just as the city was experiencing a surge in immigration from the Caribbean and other territories of colonial Britain. Info: Curators: Hoor Al Qasimi, Okwui Enwezor and Anna Schneider, Sharjah Art Foundation, Al Mureijah Square, Sharjah, Duration: 29/9/18-12/1/19, Days & Hours: Mon-Thu & Sat-sun 9:00-21:00, Fri 16:00-21:00, http://sharjahart.org

Lee Bul, "Via Negativa II", 2014Lee Bul’s diverse body of work comprises of performance and installation art that explores dreams, ideals and utopias influenced by futurist theories and science fiction, bioengineering and visionary architecture. The exhibition “Crash” is an expression of Lee Bul’s extensive exploration of the nature of bodies and how they define our experience of the world by evoking sensations of their boundaries and borders. The exhibition is organised around the thematic focal points of her work; each section is arranged chronologically to lead the visitor through a developmental trajectory of her work. Crash presents documentation from the artist’s early performances, sculptural works from series such as Monster and Cyborg, key pieces from utopia-inspired sculptures, recent immersive installations, drawings and paintings as well as Lee Bul’s latest artwork “Scale of Tongue”. The works on display are characterised not only by sensual expressiveness and humor, but also by Lee Bul’s own experiences with and subtle allusions to the history and politics of Korea. Info: Curator: Stephanie Rosenthal, Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin, Niederkirchnerstraße 7, Berlin, Duration 29/9/18-13/1/19, Days & Hours: Mon & Wed-Sun 10:00-19;00, www.gropiusbau.de

Les Ateliers de RennesWith the Les Ateliers de Rennes – Contemporary Art Biennale’s 6th edition “À Cris Ouverts” which junction of sound and meaning cannot be translated (with wide open screams or crisis or verse or green), curators aim to gather artworks and artists from different generations and backgrounds, and who have been shaping different ways to inhabit the world. Rather than artworks merely fitting into an imposed theme, “À Cris Ouverts” intends to question conventions and actively involves the participating artists in a constant dialogue, trying to think beyond a vision of the world ruled by orthodox economics, which continues to demand and shape our civilizational lens. The Biennale offers to reflect on distinct imaginaries of a collective whole, looking beyond the established principles of domestication in which the subordination and management of other subjectivities—human, non-human or post-human—have imposed themselves as the only way to secure value and inhabit the social and natural world.Info: Curators: Étienne Bernard and Céline Kopp, Assistant Curator: Elsa Vettier, Les Ateliers de Rennes – Contemporary Art Biennale, 2 & 3, place Hoche, Rennes, Duration: 29/9-2/12/18, www.lesateliersderennes.fr