ART NEWS:May 01

“Soviet Childhood” is the title of the first solo exhibition in the United States featuring the work of Zoya Cherkassky. Through the depiction of the quotidian lives of the final generation of Soviet children, Cherkassky creates a nostalgic and approachable portrait of the Soviet Union. One can relate to the banality of these scenes, with only the fashions and details peppered throughout disclosing the strange time and place in which Cherkassky and her subjects lived. The exhibition portrays the collective memory of the final generation of Soviet children, making for a nostalgic tone. Cherkassky’s subjects are at times as simple as a city street scene busy with commuters on their way to work. Such scenes also act as distinct and easily recognizable architectural landscapes. She then focuses in on vignettes of the lives of these citizens through scenes familiar to all; this includes soccer practice, dancing and parties; their location only made evident by this period’s peculiar fashions and design. Info: Fort Gansevoort, 5 Ninth Avenue, New York, Duration: 2/5-15/6/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.fortgansevoort.com

The works on view in the exhibition “I carry my landscapes around with me” span four decades of Joan Mitchell’s career, and allow for a unique opportunity to explore the range of scale and formal experimentation of this innovative facet of her oeuvre. One of the few artists of her generation to embrace polyptych compositions, Mitchell over time refined and expanded her approach to this format, orchestrating a distinctive balance between continuity and rupture both within and across panels. The horizontally oriented, panoramic expanse of these paintings is ideally suited to landscape, an important and enduring subject for Mitchell that she linked directly to memory. Featuring paintings from both public and private collections as well as the holdings of the Joan Mitchell Foundation, is David Zwirner Gallery’s first exhibition of Mitchell’s work since having announced exclusive representation of the Foundation in 2018. Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 537 West 20th Street, New York, Duration: 3/5-22/6/19, Days & Hours: Fri-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.davidzwirner.com

The photos in the exhibition “Pictures From Another Time” were taken by Bob Colacello during the years he served as editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. The exhibition features approximately 150 vintage and unique prints made with Colacello’s Minox 35 EL camera, the first miniature camera capable of making full frame 35 millimeter photographs. Works on view reflect the societal fluidity and social mobility of “the Me Decade,” an era of emerging liberation movements in American culture. As both a favored confidant and detached observer of some of the most significant figures of that time, from politicians, tycoons, and fellow journalists, to artists, writers, fashion designers, and movie stars, Colacello was uniquely positioned to create an enduring portrait of the Seventies. In addition to serving as editor of Interview, Colacello would accompany Warhol on trips to Europe, where the artist had numerous exhibitions at leading museums and was fêted by the grand hostesses of Paris, London, and Rome. Info: Vito Schnabel Projects, 43 Clarkson Street, New York, Duration: 3/5-21/6/19, Days & Hours: by appointment, www.vitoschnabel.com

Geumhyung Jeong’s work invites us to rethink the conventional distinctions between performance and object. Her performances explore the dynamic between the puppeteer, the passive object and the space of suspended disbelief the audience enters. At once tender and unsettling, the films, sculptures, installations, and performances of Geumhyung Jeongare often studies in animism of some sort. For “Homemade RC Toy”, her first solo exhibition in Switzerland, the South Korean artist and choreographer focuses her attention on the erotics of technical animism. She creates a large-scale installation comprised of numerous robotic sculptures built from DIY technologies and short films demonstrating the strange choreographies to which she subjects her “homemade” bodies. Like so much of her work, the ensemble questions the boundaries between desire and control, human and machine, animate and inanimate. The exhibition will be the stage for the premiere of a new performance on June 6th, 2019 and will be periodically animated by the artist over the course of the exhibition. Info: Kunsthalle Basel, Steinenberg 7, Basel, Duration: 3/5-11/8/19, Days & Hours : Tue-Wed & Fri 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-20:30, Sat-Sun 11:00-17:00, www.kunsthallebasel.ch 

Fragmented and reassembled woodscapes meet the viewer in Leonard Forslund’s solo exhibition “Twilight Painting” with new paintings of dusk paintings. In these works, where lonesome human figures are depicted in the ambivalent borderland of twilight, peculiar meetings between individual and nature are staged. The collage-like compositions of the paintings seem both shattered and indefinite. The black, blue and violet evening pastels of the sky are divided by the foreground’s wide tree trunks, while the treetop’s patterns of branches and leaves split the canvas space into small irregular areas. Between the trees are secluded houses and architectural relics of domed church spaces. The flickering contours of the buildings seem to be dissolving; at first sight, they look like overgrown ruins which have languished in the woods for a hundred years. Most of the elements in the wooden lands of the paintings could, in fact, be considered as stage settings, which are imperceptibly lowered from the ceiling, come sliding in from the sides or rise from hidden trapdoors in the forest soil. Info: Galerie Mikael Andersen, Bredgade 63,  Copenhagen, Duration: 3/5-8/6/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 12:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-15:00, http://mikaelandersen.com

The Museo Nivola, paying homage to Alessandro Mendini after three months from his passing, presents the outcome of fifty years of architectural planning: all Atelier Mendini’s public and private architectures, shown by 25 extraordinary accurate wooden maquettes of 25 buildings, together with a related series of drawings. In the exhibition “Atelier Mendini. Architectures” the most famous buildings by the Atelier come alive in a miniaturized, Gulliverian scale, as toy-sculptures: from the visionary Groningen Museum in Holland (1989-1994) to the Tower of Paradise in Hiroshima, Japan, to the most recent projects in South Korea.. The Mendinian architecture is post-modern and neo-constructivist, colorful and joyful. It subverts the relationship between structure and decoration, claiming the supremacy for the second, understood not as superficiality but – in Mendini’s own words “ as cult of the surface, on which is inscribed, through decoration, a richness of visual narration that offsets the dullness of the function”. Info: Curator: Aldo Colonetti, Museo Nivola, Via Gonare no. 2, Orani, Duration: 4/5-16/6/19, Days & Hours: Thu-Tue 10:30-19:30, www.museonivola.it

The exhibition “Poverty/Porn” engenders a dialogue between Steve Hash and the late Andy Warhol. Both Hash and Warhol grew up in poverty, heavily immersed in religious ideologies. Warhol was a Ruthenian Catholic and son of a coal miner in depression-era Pittsburgh, PA. Hash was raised in a radicalized Christian community in rural Mississippi, the son of a construction worker. Warhol was able to elevate the quotidian commodities of American life into the realm of fine art. Similarly, Hash transforms everyday, accessible materials into elegant forms. The exhibition features sculptures from three of Hash’s ongoing bodies of work: “Voids,” “Nurture vs Nature” and “Clotheslines.” Warhol’s late black and white works appear to be a deliberate departure from the polished, celebrity-obsessed Pop Art he became famous for. Warhol’s works chosen for this exhibition pull from source material indicative of his early days in advertising. Info:  Chase Contemporary, 521 West 23rd Street, New York, Duration: 4-26/5/19, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.chasecontemporary.com

Josefin Arnell presents her solo exhibition “Suck On Me Harder I Eat You For Starter”. The artist has been exploring the haunting plagues of both the psyche and the body for years now. At times we find a very subjective sentiment to her work, as she deals with paranoia, coming of age and states of the body like Lyme disease, which she can attest to knowing. Her video work “Gag reflex/I wanna puke in heaven” a cute homage to the chronic collective fatigue of our times. All Arnell’s works sit inside a room punctured with escape routes be it the winding staircase into the black hole or the letters slipping over the window pane. Even the walls bricked up or in a state of alabaster white echo to possible other states, the room could take. Arnell as an artist also conducts the role of the archaeologist, sifting through the matter of our times not to give it universal meaning but instead to find the links and landscapes it was created in. Info: Galerie Lily Robert, 18 rue de l’Hôtel de Ville, Paris, Duration: 4/5-8/6/19, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 14:00-10:00, www.lilyrobert.com

Aili Schmeltz’s structured paintings and sculptures in the exhibition “A Future Perfect” show influences among such artists as Louise Nevelson, Hilma af Klint, and Donald Judd and the modernist architecture of John Lautner, Le Corbousier, Rudolph Schindler, and Richard Neutra. Her ongoing project “Object/Window/Both/Neither” developed as she was renovating a homesteader cabin near Joshua Tree into an exhibition space and live in gallery called Outpost Projects. While painting the walls a stark white she noticed an optical effect of the surrounding landscape shifting forward spatially through the windows while the walls receded into background Schmeltz’s research based process integrates utopian ideologies into her paintings, drawings, and sculptures. Reflecting on Modernism and obsessively engaging with architectural forms; Schmeltz manipulates and reduces these ideas and objects to their simplest form. The exhibition centers on the sense of endless possibility with a penetrating gaze that challenges the modernists notion of a perfect future. Her fascination with the landscape fuels this critical aproach that questions the political philosophies of the American West that created the artificial enviornments in which we now live. Info: Edward Cella Art & Architecture,  2754 S. La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles, Duration: 11/5-22/6/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18L:00, https://edwardcella.com

The exhibition “Reagents” gathers together the works by eight artists – Arthur Duff, Serena Fineschi, Silvia Infranco, Túlio Pinto, Fabrizio Prevedello, Quayola, Verónica Vázquez e Marco Maria Zanin – whose research is characterized by a great sensibility and reactivity for the spatial contexts and for the dynamics of action-reaction triggered by the environmental variables. the show highlights how in the activity of these artists, the work can be seen as a device generated by a process of opposition to stimuli, to physical and mental pressures, which is acted and executed by the context. On view there are about fifteen two-dimensional and sculptural works, which range from a processual nature to a more evident conceptual matrix. The title of the exhibition refers to the well-known Newton’s third law, formulated by Isaac Newton in “Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica” during the interaction between two bodies, the force that the first body exercises on the second one is equal and opposite to the force that the second body exercises on the first one. In the same way Reagents analyzes how the work can be the witness and the final visual result of a process into which it responds to the strengths that it directly suffers. Info: Curator: Daniele Capra, Assistant Curator: Ludovica Matarozzo, Complesso dellâ’Ospedaletto, Farmacia, Castello 6691, Access from Barbaria delle Tole or from Calle Torelli a.k.a. de la Cavallerizza, Venice, Duration: 11/5-24/11/19, Days & Hours: Tue-San 10:00-18:00