ART NEWS:Sept.03

Aileen Murphy’s new group of paintings, that is on show at his solo exhibition “PAINTING”respond to a series of fundamental questions posed by the artist to herself. In her studio, Murphy states that each work also asks a different question, and each possesses a different voice. Fellow painter and friend, Julia Dubsky, describes Aileen Murphy’s paintings as ‘recalcitrant’. Deriving from the verb ‘to kick back’, this description conveys much of the physical energy and formal qualities of Murphy’s practice. The less literal meaning, disobedience, gestures to the artist’s emotional or psychological attitude to her work. Murphy bucks style and taste in a manner that draws out deeply human physical or emotional sensations such as laughing, crying, kissing, licking. When felt intensely, these are uncontrollable actions, and Murphy amplifies their physicality, sound and texture through a vivid palette and defiant gestural mark-making. Info: Temple Bar Gallery + Studios (TBG+S), 5 – 9 Temple Bar, Dublin, Duration: 20/9-16/11/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.templebargallery.com

The exhibition “Still Undead: Popular Culture in Britain Beyond the Bauhaus” explores how Bauhaus ideas and teaching lived on in Britain, via pop culture and art schools. This exhibition coincides with the centenary of the pioneering art and design school’s founding in Weimar. Spanning the 1920s to the 90s, and including works by some 50 artists, designers and musicians, Still Undead narrates the eclectic and fragmented ways that the Bauhaus’s legacy has been transmitted and transformed. It is structured around six loosely chronological groupings, which move from the Bauhaus to British art schools, from the high street to the nightclub and beyond. The exhibition  departs from experiments in light and sound created by Bauhaus students and teachers. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, and the Bauhaus closed, a number of its masters and students came to Britain. A lack of work pushed them towards a variety of projects, making everything from sci-fi special effects and documentary photography to shop-window displays. After World War II, Bauhaus methods reshaped British art schools through a new approach to artistic training known as Basic Design. At the beginning of the 1960s, a young generation began to reimagine the aims of the Bauhaus for an era of consumerism and commercial design. In the 1970s and 80s, youth culture looked back to early 20^th Century Avant-Gardes for inspiration. This section of the exhibition is a collage of performance, music and graphic design, which invokes the spirit of Bauhaus parties and theatre. Info: Curators: Marion von Osten, Sam Thorne and Grant Watson, Nottingham Contemporary, 125 Charing Cross Road, London, Duration: 21/9/19-12/1/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.nottinghamcontemporary.org

With simple materials like clay, paper and ink Anna Maria Maiolino constructs a fascinating world rooted in human conditions such as longing, fragility and resistance. This is the artist’s first retrospective in the UK, spanning six decades of work. Opening her exhibition “Making Love Revolutionary” are hundreds of simple shapes made of clay such as balls, rolls and snakes. Slight variations evidence the work of the hand, kneading and shaping the primal material of art – mud. Maiolino’s gestural forms evoke baking, housework and objects of ritual. A sense of fragility permeates the raw clay, as it dehydrates and changes color. Her drawings and sculptures constitute a lyrical geometry with marks and voids suggesting an alphabet, maps and topographies; meticulously sewn threads outline a journey of possible spatial configurations.  The upper galleries feature prints of the 1960s, and the radical shifts in the use of paper during the 1970s,  moving from figuration to a dynamic abstraction inspired by Neo-Concretism. Created under the radar of Brazil’s military regime, Maiolino’s politically-charged films and photographs explore repression and hunger. Scarcity of food in her childhood and the social and cultural deficiencies of daily life shape the series “Photopoemaction: (1976–2000). A mouth opens and closes, swallows an egg and expels threads; bare feet tread carefully among scattered eggs. Black stains and flowing lines may represent alienation; or mutate to become symbols of love and regeneration. Info: Whitechapel Gallery, 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, London, Duration: 25/9/19-12/1/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, www.whitechapelgallery.org

The exhibition “Alexis Akrithakis: tsiki – tsiki” is organised on the occasion of the 80th anniversary from the birth and 25 years from the passing of the Greek artist, Alexis Akrithakis. The exhibition is the first systematic presentation of Alexis Akrithakis’ work devoted exclusively to one of his most recognisable techniques, the “tsiki-tsiki”, as writer Kostas Tachtsis named it. Akrithakis’s work is distinguished by a magical narrative and a childlike writing. Nevertheless, it reflects the idea of unity of art and life that was occupied by the entire artistic community at that time. Αssemblage and raw practice are the lifestyle of the artist himself. The exhibition features a significant part of his “tsiki-tsiki” works created from the mid 60s to the early 70s and projects that will be of particular importance for the creation, development and differentiation of his characteristic style from the beginning and throughout his career. Info: Curators: Chloe Geitmann-Akrithaki & Alexios Papazacharias, Benaki Museum- Museum of Greek Culture, 1 Koumbari St. & Vas. Sofias Avenue, Athens, Duration: 25/8-11/11/19, Days & Hours: Mon, Wed & Fri-Sat 10:00-18:00, Thu 10:00-00:00, Sun 10:00-16:00, www.benaki.org

Laura Lima presents her exhibition “Qual” bringing a group of new works with transforming materials that impact the exhibition environment in a multisensory manner and evoke photographic imagery. All works are suspended. The choice for this method of presentation is explained both by the transparency and delicacy of the pieces, as well as by the artist’s questioning attitude towards everything that is understood as “tradition” in art history. The “Ágrafo “group of works, for example, started in 2015, is almost entirely shown in the same way; in this case, because they are three-dimensional pieces, the suspension has to do with the possibility of observation from different angles, but also with the attitude against the tradition of accommodating sculptures on the floor. The works are not titled individually, as they all make up the Levianes series, like this, without a defined genre. Some are “levianos”, others “levianas”, and there are also “levianes”; that is, they each have their own particular characteristics and their specific particularities, but from a gender standpoint they belong to a time of permanent transitivity, which is the today, the here and now. Info: Galeria Luisa Strina, Rua Padre João Manuel 755 Cerqueira César, São Paulo, Duration: 25/9-9/11/19, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-19:00, Sat 10:00-17:00, www.galerialuisastrina.com.br

“New Monuments for New Cities” is the inaugural project of the High Line Network Joint Art Initiative, a new collaboration between infrastructure reuse projects in North America. For the exhibition, five urban reuse projects that are part of the High Line Network invited five of their local artists or artist groups to create proposals (in the form of posters) for new monuments. The 25 artists in the exhibition have designed monuments, both possible and impossible to build, that question the format itself and envision its future. They span from proposals for traditional monuments, to revised historical statues, to newly imagined methods of public commemoration. They take the form of drawings, photographs, renderings, “missing” posters, Wikipedia pages, bold text-based statements, collages, and more. These 25 artworks address questions around permanence, representation, public space and land ownership, and the writing and re-writing of history. Info: The High Line Park, Manhattan’s West Side, New York, Duration: 26/9-23/10/19, www.thehighline.org

Launching “This Is Not (a) Cinema”, Broomberg & Chanarin present their newly commissioned intervention in to the recently reconstructed “Anniversary of the Revolution” (1918) by Dziga Vertov, with live score by multi instrumentalist Peter Broderick. Considered lost for nearly a century, Dziga Vertov’s directorial debut is the first ever compilation film with a largely propagandistic agenda. Originally commissioned to celebrate the first year of the self-proclaimed republic in November of 1918, this legendary film was recently re-assembled by film historian Nikolai Izvolov. Here, Broomberg & Chanarin have employed powerful machine-vision technology to map the physical movement in the film on to a digital rendering, using the mechanisms of 21st century surveillance to re-frame this historic archive footage. It was at MosFilm, founded in 1924 and still Russia’s most important film studio, that director Alexander Shein formed innovative research lab SovPoliKadr. Established in the late 1960s, SovPoliKadr was dedicated to experimenting with visual narrative and multiple screen techniques. Short films were produced for official celebrations such as the Vladimir Lenin (1970) and Paris Commune centenaries (1971), or international events such as Expo ‘75. Now seen outside their propagandistic role, they stand as exemplary works of highly innovative and politically engaged art. Info: Whitechapel Gallery, 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, London, Duration 27-29/9/19, Days & Hours: 11:30-18:30, www.whitechapelgallery.org

“On the Fringes of Identity- Contemporary Video Art from the Han Nefkens Foundation” is an exhibition exploring and illustrating the degree to whichcontemporary artistic research is involved in the cultural and social debate regarding the human condition in a globalised world. The artists featured present their reflections from personal and cultural standpoints that are sometimes very different, employing varied and often dissimilar narrative and expressive strategies. What emerges from this selection of video narratives is the urgent need for a human focus in the exploration of processes affecting identity, belonging, the awareness of differences and the acknowledgement of otherness. To be on the fringes, as the exhibition’s title implies, is a reference to that fluid space in which individual identities are defined by comparative or negotiative relationships with an Other that is similar or diverse. The videos featured in the exhibition point to apositivistic vision of interculturality providing the blueprint for humanity’s path to salvation – a path which is constantly evolving. Info: Curator: Giacomo Zaza, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Lissone (MAC), viale Elisa Ancona 6, Lissone, Duration: 28/9-24/11/19, Days & Hours: Wed & Fri 10:00-13:00, Thu 16:00-23:00, Sat-Sun 10:00-12:00 & 15:00-19:00, www.comune.lissone.mb.it

In an oeuvre spanning sculpture, ceramics, painting, drawing, collage, video, and garments, Ruby continually returns to themes of societal and art historical friction, generating feelings of anxiety and agitation by contrasting clean lines and recognizable objects with coarse and uncanny forms. The exhibition “ACTS+TABLE” lays out Sterling Ruby’s critique of the authoritarian, exclusionary ideological underpinnings of Minimalism. He begins with familiar shapes valued by the Minimalists but subverts them by defacing their smooth surfaces and exposing their physical means of production. In “ACTS”, short for “Absolute Contempt for Total Serenity” Ruby captures liquid dye inside clear urethane and balances these pure prisms atop scuffed, inscribed, and spray-painted Formica bases. These works expand upon his earlier Formica sculptures.The exhibition also includes “TABLE (DOUBLE LAST SUPPER)” (2019), the culminating work of Ruby’s “TABLES”, a series that explores the concept of personal and cultural archaeology. In 2015, Ruby moved into a gargantuan studio outside of downtown Los Angeles and salvaged the welding tables left there from the building’s erstwhile function as a manufacturing warehouse. Info: Gagosian Gallery, 6–24 Britannia Street, London, Duration: 2/10-14/12/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://gagosian.com

The exhibition “Cy Twombly. Sculpture” marks the publication of the second volume of the catalogue raisonné of sculptures, edited by Nicola Del Roscio, President of the Cy Twombly Foundation, and published by Schirmer/Mosel. Twombly made his sculptures from found materials such as plaster, wood, and iron, as well as objects that he habitually used and handled in the studio. From 1946 onward, he created many assemblages, though they were rarely exhibited before the 1997 publication of the first volume of his catalogue raisonné. Often modest in scale, they embody his artistic language of handwritten glyphs and symbols, evoking narratives from antiquity and fragments of literature and poetry. Many of Twombly’s sculptures are coated in white paint, which unifies and neutralizes the assembled materials and renders the newly formed object into a coherent whole. In referring to white paint as his “marble,” Twombly recalls traditions of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman sculpture while also subverting marble’s classical connotation of perfection through his roughly painted surfaces. The intimate scale of these works, together with their textural coats of paint, underscores their fundamentally haptic nature. Info: Gagosian Gallery, 20 Grosvenor Hill, London, Duration: 30/9-21/12/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://gagosian.com