ART NEWS:Jan.03

Tom Pnini has constructed the interactive installation “Two Figures in a Field”, comprised of two main elements “The Set” and “The Vinyl Album”, where the audience becomes an active participant. The installation presents like a theatre stage, one that comes to life only when the viewer interacts with it.  Pnini’s use of theatrical motifs enables him to act as puppeteer placing gallery visitors where they can be mesmerized by the illusion created by the work, while still being fully aware of its deception. Entering the space, viewers engage with the set, comprised of 12 rows of shoulder-height partitions forming a series of maze-like corridors in the gallery. Advancing through the space, visitors begin to experience the installation. The partitions form a vast seascape rendered in blues and cutout wave shapes. “The vinyl album” is a limited edition pressing conceived of, and produced by Pnini, featuring musician Hannah Lee Thompson performing songs dating from the 1800s which relate to the themes of water and fire. A record player is waiting in the space for visitors to play the two songs: “Haul Away Joe”, a sea shanty which tells the story of life-long adventure of a sea traveler, and “The Two Orphans Waltz” which references the Brooklyn Theatre fire on December 5, 1876 where 300 people were trampled to death trying to escape a fire that started during a performance. Info: Lesley Heller, 54 Orchard Street, New York, Duration: 10/1-22/2/20. Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 11:00-18:00, Sun 12:00-18:00, www.lesleyheller.com

The exhibition “Dark Matter” brings together individual works from a variety of contemporary artists, ranging from photography, collage, and painting to sculpture, all of which make use of the color black and its diverse contexts of meaning to convey many-faceted connotations. Among them, Björn Dahlem contributes an object as enigmatic as it is cryptic, coming across like the totem of an extraterrestrial civilization while consisting of nothing more than very earthly found objects and similar profane everyday materials, all of which have been painted over simply in black. As a gloomy and mysterious, pixelated jungle panorama the digital collage “Erinnerung” by Markus Selg evokes associations with the sunken sites of the Maya or the myth of Eldorado, even the scenery depicted might have its origin somewhere else, maybe even in a dream or in a vision of a still distant future. Andy Hope’s “Time Tube” (1930’s)  is a hybrid, an amalgam of image and sculpture that realizes the literal spatialization of its art-historical reference object. The Time Tube appears to have fallen out of time in its peculiar form, a futuristic-seeming industrial wood construction with an antique picture frame pulled over top. Info: Galerie Guido W. Baudach, Pohlstraße 67, Berlin, Duration: 18/1-29/2/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.guidowbaudach.com

For his exhibition “remember all the / high and exalted things / remember all the low / and broken things” Billy Childish has created a body of work emblematic of his “radical traditionalist” approach. Pulling from themes found throughout art history (the bather, a lone figure in a landscape, a sunset) Childish presents intensely personal vignettes that feel archetypical, vibrating with the kinetic energy of a moment lived. While working in a state of flow is essential to the creative process of any artist, for Childish this state represents the entirety of artistic production. Working intuitively and quickly, most of his highly gestural paintings are created in a single session without any revision. Childish is also an adept woodblock printer and he produces satirical and activist imagery with his London art cooperative, L-13 Light Industrial Workshop. His material approach to printmaking extends to Childish’s painting practice where color and line are emphasized through a flattening of each composition. His style is often compared to the expressionist painters of the early 20th century, such as Vincent Van Gogh, Kurt Schwitters, or Edvard Munch, however, for Childish, it is the embodiment of these artists’ roles within society that is most compelling. An unabashed universalist, Childish considers artistry to be the inheritance of every human being, a method to capture the expressive impulse and visualize the powerful lure of beauty. Info: Lehmann Maupin Gallery, 536 West 22nd Street, New York, Duration: 23/1-22/2/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.lehmannmaupin.com

For his solo exhibition , Valentin Carron has created new sculptures that deal with the aesthetics of everyday culture in the popular handicrafts and souvenir industries, and are presented in all four exhibitions rooms. A wall-based work, constituting a fake wall made of faux OSB-panels, spans both floors and forms a bracket around the show. For the wall-work, the artist commissioned a craftsman specialized in Trompe-l’œil to paint a wooden OSB-structure on MDF-panels. The work encapsulates the artist’s oeuvre and begs the question: what does one consider to be art? MDF is a cheap material often used for walls in shops or trade fairs. Coating a wall with a fake structure alludes to the technique of Scagliola, which was invented in the 17th century to create an inexpensive alternative to marble walls. A stucco-substance covers the walls and columns, giving them the appearance of precious marble. The new sculptures display Carron’s typical ironic intention that implies a detailed and empathetical observation by the artist of his surroundings. The omnipresent motifs include decorative and often kitschy devices used to make public spaces more comfortable or more beautiful. They all appear familiar and can potentially be found while traveling or while browsing other people’s holiday photos posted on the Internet. They include six figures in a round dance as part of a folklorist ritual, representing prayer or solidarity, and a leaf hanging from a delicate spiral. Info: Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Rämistrasse 33, Zurich, Duration: 25/1-29/2/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:00-18:30, Sat 11:00-17:00, www.presenhuber.com

In his solo exhibition “Videos and Drawings” Robert Wilson shows new and recent drawings about his latest theatre production combined with video portraits. The triptych of video portraits entitled “A Winter Fable” is a story told by a wolf, a fox, and a lamb with a score that is composed of music by Coco Rosie, and readings of the original fable by Italo Calvino’s daughter Giovanna Calvino and her friend Isabella Rossellini. Wilson’s works for the stage unconventionally integrate a wide variety of artistic media, including dance, movement, lighting, sculpture, music and text.  His images are aesthetically striking and emotionally charged, and his productions have earned the acclaim of audiences and critics worldwide. After being educated at the University of Texas and Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, Wilson founded the New York-based performance collective “The Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds” in the mid-1960s, and developed his first signature works, including “Deafman Glance” (1970) and “A Letter for Queen Victoria” (1974-1975). With Philip Glass he wrote the seminal opera “Einstein on the Beach” (1976). Wilson’s artistic collaborators include many writers and musicians such as Heiner Müller, Tom Waits, Susan Sontag, Laurie Anderson, William Burroughs, Lou Reed, Jessye Norman and Anna Calvi. Info: Bernier/Eliades Gallery, 46 Rue du Châtelain, Brussel, Duration: 28/1-4/4/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 12:00-18:00, https://bernier-eliades.com

The 7^th edition of 21,39 Jeddah Arts is a call to action in response to the environmental emergency from the specificity of a local context. Titled “I Love You, Urgently,” the art initiative will be a call to action in response to the environmental emergency from the specificity of a local context. At a time when Saudi Arabia is undergoing a rapid transformation, the council called on local and international artists, architects, designers and thinkers to seek tangible solutions, and to formulate alternative and symbiotic ways to inhabit our planet. The participants are invited to address three specific themes through exhibitions, commissions and a series of dialogues, talks and debates taking place in the gallery spaces of the Art Council and in Al-Balad — the historic city center of Jeddah. The themes “are ideas of biomimicry, the imitation of the models, systems and elements of nature for the purpose of solving complex human problems, of adaptability and of specificity, how to think of alternative and symbiotic ways to inhabit our planet from a local context.” 21,39 Jeddah Arts aims to get its public engaged in environmental and sustainability dialogues currently taking place internationally, while encouraging an understanding of these debates within a local context. Info: Curator: Maya El Khalil, 21,39 Jeddah Arts, Gold Moor Mall, Zahra District, Jeddah, Duration: 28/1-18/3/20, www.21-39.com

A new retrospective of René Burri’s life work entitled “Explosions of Sight” is on show at Musée de l’Elysée. This new exhibition is the culmination of diligent research and studies carried out by the Musée de l’Elysée teams since 2013 on the entire René Burri collection in family archives and the Magnum Photos archives in Paris and New York. It aims to offer a new perspective on all Burri’s myriad creative activities throughout his life. It reveals a more personal and secret side to one of the most influential photojournalists of our time with a great many often previously unpublished documents: contact sheets, study prints, films, models for books, exhibition projects, notebooks, collages, watercolours, drawings, etc. Based on a long, chronological “Lifeline” leading visitors through the nine rooms of the Musée de l’Elysée’s two exhibition levels, this project develops twelve “Focal Points”, each showcasing a decisive element of Burri’s creative process in the broadest sense of the term: Cinema; Structures; Myself and the Others; Che; China; Television; Magnum; Book; One World; Colour; Collages; Drawings. In this exhibition, René Burri is shown to be modern and inventive, committed and facetious, curious and generous, unifying and a mentor, a rebel and poet, impassioned and fascinating and above all, particularly explosive! Info: Curators: Marc Donnadieu and Mélanie Bétrisey, Musée de l’Elysée, 18, avenue de l’Elysée, Lausanne, Duration: 29/1-3/5/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.elysee.ch

Recurrent in Petros Moris’ work, systems of geological materiality and digital fabrication unfold the entanglements of chthonic memory with the mythical, social and technological construct of the future. His solo exhibition “Future Bestiary”, brings together an assembly of sculptural entities in suspended material rendering. Reconstructed in marble sourced from quarries around Greece, their figures originate from photogrammetric scans that the artist performed on funerary artifacts of the Kerameikos archaeological site, depicting the daemonic beings and apotropaic animals that inhabited the ancient cemetery as the underworldly protectors of life and death. These tectonic bodies are joined by linguistic signs and digital imagery that encode wishful speculations and emerging anxieties about natural ecosystems, algorithmic sovereignty and sociopolitical change. Likewise, they coexist with alchemically processed forms: 3D-printed specters that trace the conception of the future back to their ritualistic formulations and eventual colonization by scientific institutions and technologies of quantitative simulation and predictive analysis. The symbolic and physical subterranean space recalled in Moris’ work is a realm of bidirectional time and ceaseless emergence. Like the mythological underworld, it is not only perceived as the territory of fateful entropy and sedimentary demise, but equally the origin of earthly wealth—the extractive domain of the material resources that forged the notion of anthropogenic progress and perpetually shape nonhuman coexistences. Info: Lily Robert Gallery, 18 Rue de l’Hôtel de Ville, Paris, Duration: 31/1-3/7/20, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 14:00-18:00, www.lilyrobert.com

Simone Fattal’s sol exhibition “Fix Your Gaze On Saturn’s Rings” features a large number of works from the 1970s until today, presented in a characteristic non-chronologic installation in which a myriad of narrative threads and layers appear through the juxtapositions of works in different media and formal idioms and on different scales. Fattal is mostly known for her work in clay, and her ceramic figures are glazed in luminous colors or shades of sand and brown. The many long-legged figures, assorted vessels or architectural ruins relate to her interest in mythology and archaeology, as well as her efforts to chart deeply human themes such as the ravages of war and recovery. Born in Syria and raised in Lebanon, Fattal studied philosophy in Paris and established herself as an artist at the end of the 1970s in Beirut. In 1982, she moved to California, where she started the publishing venture Post-Apollo Press. The exhibition includes a selection of publications by Post-Apollo Press, illustrated both by Fattal herself and by her life partner, the poet and painter Etel Adnan. Info: Bergen Kunsthall, Rasmus Meyers allé 5, Bergen, Duration: 31/1-22/3/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-17:00, Thu 11:00-20:00, www.kunsthall.no

“Breaking Away: Modernism in Photography since World War I” is an exhibition of 50 rare photographs captured between the 1920s and 1960s by the greatest talents of their day. The exhibition provides a rare insight into the process behind the vintage prints featured in the exhibition, which were created at the time of the negative’s exposure. The photographs reveal how the artists first conceived the printing of a particular image and carry the hallmarks of their early production; the high silver content in many cases giving them an astonishing warmth, a feature lost in later photography as the price of silver rose. The show spans key themes of modernist photography, as artists began to embrace the medium as a means for radical experimentation, examination of the human form, and social documentary. At the heart of the display are daring new depictions of the human body including a rare portrait of Lee Miller by Man Ray entitled “Neck” (1929), which employs soft-focus and cropping to reduce her bust to an ecstatically erotic abstraction. A newly-discovered and most extraordinary print, “Nude (Miriam Lerner, torso, hand on hip)” (1925) by Edward Weston, frames the angles and folds of Lerner’s body, creating a soft, sensuous composition.  Rare images of London by the late great master of American photography Robert Frank promise to be a must-see highlight. Frank, who passed away last year, travelled to the UK in the 1950s and made studies of the different regions with his Leica camera. Info: Richard Nagy Gallery, 22 Old Bond Street, London, Duration: 6/2-27/3/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-17:00, http://richardnagy.com