ART NEWS:Sept.02

“Nayland Blake’s Opening” is the artist’s first one-person exhibition in Los Angeles in almost twenty years, it features sculptures that examine the human body as a site where sexual pleasure, aging, and identity intersect. For more than three decades Nayland Blake has articulated the experiences of someone living on the border of gender and racial identities. Blake has long used costume play to explore these issues. Hanging from the gallery walls are a fuzzy black suit and a sheet of beige leather, both punctured by dozens of large metal grommets, and a spreader bar outfitted with pink-leather ankle cuffs and collar. Nearby, four wall-mounted assemblages, each incorporating a polished mirror and pendulous forms in hand-blown glass, invoke the artist’s “Work Station” sculptures of the late 1980s but reinvent them as makeup stations. A novelty candle given to the artist as a child and cherished for thirty years was the inspiration for a series of small sculptures installed throughout the exhibition. Long before Blake realized the candle was a knockoff of Robert Indiana’s work “LOVE” the gift took on a special significance. By revisiting this childhood totem and casting it in bronze and colored wax, Blake hopes to genuinely make the argument for love and openness in a time when we’re being told to close off and shut down. Info: Matthew Marks Gallery, 1062 North Orange Grove, Los Angeles, Duration: 7/9-19/10/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.matthewmarks.com

Isaac Chong Wai’s exhibition “I Made a Boat in Prison–A Journey to the Shore” is the artist’s first exhibition in Istanbul and functions as an extension of his solo exhibition “What is the future in the past? And what is the past in the future?”. Contemplating imaginary pasts and looking at possible futures from the point of the present, the drawings, sculptures, site-specific installations and performances of the artist deal with the concealed perils of the public, the hidden available to our gaze. While normative narratives practice a certain rhetoric, Chong’s works beckon us through dilemmas; turning assumed truths on their heads and inviting us to participate in dialogues of vulnerability and resilience. His pieces often play with time, memory and propose performance as a commemorative tool for the future. Taking historical sites as the spaces of memory, Chong addresses complex research on how the body transforms in public space and uses alternating mediums to reflect on layers of historical memory. Info: Zilberman Projects-Istanbul, İstiklal Cad. No.163 Mısır Apartmanı K.2 D.5, Beyoğlu / Istanbul, Duration: 11/9-8/12/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-19:30, Sat 12:00-19:00, www.zilbermangallery.com

Stephen Wilkes in his solo exhibition “A Witness to Change” presents his ongoing global photographic project “Day to Night” that visualizes an entire day in one image. Wilkes photographs from a fixed perspective from dawn until night, capturing myriad moments in extraordinary locations around the world. While the earth rotates on its axis, Wilkes’ camera absorbs the changes in light and color, exploring the space-time continuum within astonishing two-dimensional still photographs. The aestheticized historical documents that began in New York ten years ago have led Wilkes further afield, taking his practice literally out into the world as his focus has shifted from fast-paced cityscapes to the rapidly changing natural environment. This recently took him as far away as to Iceland, Africa, and the wilds of Bella Coola, British Columbia, where climate change has left the rivers hotter and drier, leading to fewer fish for grizzly bears to feed on. Recently on site in Greenland, Wilkes worked to capture the historic glacier melt for his newest Day to Night photograph. Info: Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, 505 West 24th Street, New York, Duration: 12/9-26/10/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, http://brycewolkowitz.com

Matthew Krishanu’s crows could be described as relatives of sorts, sharing similarities of pose and abstracted form, always painted singly and never in flight. Standing on twin legs gives them an anthropomorphic quality, looking directly at the viewer or stepping awkwardly away. Krishanu has been documenting London crows for over seven years and painting their intimate portraits in oil on canvas board. He has captured the minutiae of their lives – perching, feeding, pacing or standing – that only a sustained period of observation could reveal.  In “Corvus. A painting installation” at the space of the Stuart Hall Library, systems of classification, taxonomy and assemblage come into focus. The crows emerge between shelves and bask alongside books, populating the collection with their delicate, comical and eerie presence. Painted in rich tones of black, blue and brown, often against a pale background, this cast of distinctive magical birds has flocked to the library seeking refuge from the outside for a while. When we look up and around, the sometimes-solitary practice of reading is suspended by their curious companionship.  Info: The Stuart Hall Library, 16 John Islip Street, London, Duration: 12/9-2/11/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-17:00, Sat 10:00-16:00, www.iniva.org

Art Athina 2019 involves participations from 36 Greek and international galleries. Its new host, Zappeion Mansion, is strongly associated with Culture, Sports and recent Greek History. It constitutes the first building to be erected for the purposes of the modern Olympic Games, while it is also considered a milestone of Greek Neoclassical architecture. The Main section of the fair spreads in the main spaces of Zappeion Mansion, where local and international galleries present their booths. For a second year, independent curator Katerina Nikou, invites significant individuals from the international art community – museum directors, curators, art historians – to join TALKS program. Central axis of this year’s program is the question “The Future is Now?”, following the structure of the previous year, setting questions within the international discourse of the art scene. LIVE is a performance program by visual artists fueled by the participating galleries of Art Athina 2019 and will take place throughout the duration of the Art Fair in multiple sites at Zappeion Mansion. One specific section of this year’s fair, VIDEO, will find a home under the Athenian night sky, within the oldest cinema of Athens, Aegli Zappeiou. Info: Art Athina 2019, Zappeion Mansion, Queen Olga’s, Avenue, Athens. Days & Hours: Fri (13/9) 14:00-22.30 (invitation-only), Sat-Mon (14-16/9) 12:00-21:00, Admission Adult: 8 €, Concession (unemployed, students, over 65 years-old): 5 €, Group ticket (15+ persons): 5 €, Children up to 18 years old, Disabled, students at ASFA, members of ΑΙCA and the Association of Greek Art Historians and the Chamber of Fine Arts of Greece: Free, https://art-athina.gr

Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz has adopted a mission of colossal magnitude: to preserve memories, narratives and stories deeply connected to artefacts that have been displaced or simply ceased to exist. Since 2007 Rakowitz has effortlessly sought to recreate the close to 8000 historical objects that were looted from the National Museum of Iraq following the 2003 American invasion. But the materials of choice are not sandstone or bronze, instead he utilises tin cans, colorful wrappings and other commodities imported from the Middle East. These commonplace objects that once contained candy, food preserves or soap are now being filled with the collective tales of the Iraqi diaspora. His project is called “The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist” and the results are astounding. The exhibition is focusing on Rakowitz’ work “Room G, Northwest Palace of Nimrud” (2018), a series of bas-reliefs that decked the walls of a monumental palace in ancient Nimrud, south of Mosul. These magnificent Assyrian sculptures survived both the Babylonian invasion of 612 BC and the attraction of British Museum some 2.500 years later. They could not withstand the bulldozers and explosives set by ISIS in 2015, however. Info: Malmö Konsthall, S:t Johannesgatan 7, Malmö, Duration: 14/9/19-12/1/20, Days & Hours: Mon-Tue & Thu-Sun 11 :00-19 :00, Wed 11:00-21:00, www.konsthall.malmo.se

Francesco Clemente in “Watchtowers, Gates and The Sea of Stories” presents recent works, also this exhibition is the first presentation of the artist’s sculptures in Europe. The exhibition comprises “The Sea of Stories”, a monumental mural spanning the length of the gallery that will be created on site, and two bodies of sculpture created in collaboration with local artisans in Rajasthan. Often described as a ‘nomadic artist’, Clemente first travelled to India in the early 1970s and continues to live and work between the subcontinent, Europe and the US. Influenced by India’s traditions, symbolism and the artistic approaches of its artisans, Clemente has created a deeply personal visual vocabulary inspired by his experiences. Whilst celebrated as a painter, his lesser-known sculptural practice relates to the pictorial language of his paintings and works on paper. Every work is a confluence of different elements and motifs such as ladders, labyrinths, gates and keys which allude to transition, boundaries and spaces ‘in between’: earth and sky, the internal and external, and states of consciousness. Info: Blain|Southern Berlin, Potsdamer Straße 77–87 (Mercator Höfe), Berlin, Duration: 15/9-16/11/19, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.blainsouthern.com

Lauren Coullard’s painting germinates and feeds itself into a systematic short circuit between abstraction and figuration, mythology and fiction. Her works exhume a “d’antan” imagery, jovially neo-medieval, chivalrous and religious, populated by dames, virgins and docile beasts — strictly courtly and mostly female. In “Night Fall” her first solo exhibition at Lily Robert, Lauren Coullard triggers a further temporal switch, moving the cursor over a science-fictional galaxy. Her lineup of ancestral figures is staged here to officiate and derail Isaac Asimov’s novella from which the exhibition derives its name. It narrates the coming of darkness on a planet perpetually illuminated by sunlight—more precisely, by six simultaneous suns. Its inhabitants are terrified by the advent of the night and its obscurity and the prophecy of an imminent total eclipse by a religious sect throws them into blind desperation. Recovering the philosophical tradition of Enlightenment and the conscious use of the rationality against every obscurantist drift of power, the story is structured around the metaphor of the relationship between light and darkness. Info: Galerie Lily Robert, 18 Rue de l’Hôtel de Ville, Paris, Duration: 15/9-30/10/19, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 14:00-18:00, www.lilyrobert.com

The exhibition “Laboratory of Forms” looks back for the first time over the life’s work of Jan Groover. Based on a selection of archives from her personal collections, the exhibition evsoke not only the artist’s years in New York but also her years in France – a less known part of her career. The exhibition displays the results of the considerable research into the collection conducted by the museum – from the perspective both of conservation (in-depth analyses of processes and photographic materials, restoration processes) as well as historical documentation (contextualising the work and its critical and institutional reception). In the early 1970s, abandoning her earlier vocation as a painter, Jan Groover began to attract attention with her photographic polyptychs constructed around the motifs of the road, cars and the urban environment. As the early stages of her formal and aesthetic explorations, they offer an opportunity to re-examine the reflections initiated at the time by the conceptual trend (especially with regard to notions of seriality and sequence). Mostly created in her studio, her compositions use a variety of processes. In the 1980s, they actively contributed to the recognition of colour photography. Info: Curators: Tatyana Franck, Director and Émilie Delcambre-Hirsch, Musée de l’Elysée, 18, avenue de l’Elysée, Lausanne, Duration: 18/9/19-5/1/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.elysee.ch

In “The Company”, her first exhibition in Rome, Huma Bhabha presentw new sculptures and drawings. In expressive drawings on photographs as well as figurative sculptures carved from cork and Styrofoam, assembled from refuse and clay, or cast in bronze, Bhabha probes the tensions between time, memory, and displacement. References to science-fiction, archeological ruins, Roman antiquities, and postwar abstraction combine as she transforms the human figure into grimacing totems that are both unsettling and darkly humorous. The Company is inspired in part by “The Lottery in Babylon” (1941), a short story by Jorge Luis Borges in which a fictional society is taken over by a pervasive lottery system that doles out both rewards and punishments. The lottery is purportedly run by the Company, a secret, perhaps nonexistent body determining peoples’ fates. Bhabha’s procession of sculptures makes visible the power of this unseen Company. It comprises a pair of large, disembodied hands floating atop transparent plinths; a seated figure; and several standing figures of varying scale. Drawings on photographs echo these forms and characters, which could have come from a distant realm of the future just as easily as from a lost civilization. The standing figures are carved from stacks of dark cork—and its technical inverse, Styrofoam. Info: Gagosian Gallery, Via Francesco Crispi 16, Rome, Duration: 19/9-14/12/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:30-19:00, https://gagosian.com