ART NEWS:Sept. 01

Terri Friedman, in her solo exhibition  “Rewire”, creates large, painterly weavings that ooze, sag, pinch, and dangle in vibrant shades of magenta, vermilion, fluorescent yellow, and cobalt blue. Her compositions, full of seemingly dissonant yet pleasurable colors and patterns, draw upon viewers’ feelings of discordance to provoke a visceral response. Originally trained as a painter and sculptor, Friedman began weaving in 2014 and found that the repetitive, tactile process was meditative and allowed her to merge formal aspects of both practices. Working on a loom, the artist assembles undulating abstract shapes accentuated with cotton piping, colored glass, and applied paint, evoking bodily textures and psychedelic patterns.  In this body of work, the form mirrors Friedman’s conceptual interest in neuroplasticity, which is the brain’s ability to develop new neural connections over time. Friedman’s textiles optimistically probe at the possibilities for adaptation and growth that haptic encounters offer. Info: Curator: Kathy Butterly, CUE Art Foundation, 137 West 25th Street, Ground Floor, Between 6th and 7th Avenue, New York, Duration: 2-29/9/20, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 12:00-18:00, http://cueartfoundation.org

In Japan, Taro Izumi is a singular artist. He has developed a world which is expressed in installations, sculptures and videos, whose appearance processes are associated with accidents, play or perturbation. Taro lzumi’s first major solo exhibition in Switzerland, entitled “ex”, rests on his observations of our lifestyles, social interactions, and relations with nature and animals. Out of this material, he conceives multifarious, unclassifiable works which, starting from a simple framework and a certain economy of means, take us on journeys to the gates of absurdity. The exhibition feature works that Izumi created for the Tinguely Museum’s own spaces and that reflect on the cultural and societal upheavals caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. The most fitting technique for the instantaneous transcription of the artist’s invented actions is video, which he uses like a pen with which to capture and translate everything he observes. A pivotal medium of his practice, video is an integral part of all his installations and all his exhibitions and plays an essential semantic role. Info: Museum Tinguely, Paul Sacher-Anlage 2, Basel, Duration: 2/9-15/11/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.tinguely.ch

Letha Wilson, Sonia Almeida, Heidi Norton, and Claudia Peña Salinas present current approaches to painting and sculpture, in the exhibition “Vantage Points”, that explore divergent conceptual and physical properties, in dialogue with one another. These works create a vision for the future that is also aware of the past; using archives, whether cultural, photographic, or organic, towards a new synthesis of ideas and forms. Eschewing traditional boundaries between mediums, the works span sculpture, painting, and installation. In this new group exhibition, the floors, ceiling, and walls are all engaged by works that demonstrate how space can be manipulated by both delicate and monumental forms. The artists all invite questions regarding how images can convey and communicate through archetypical models such as historical symbols, figures, geometric forms and the landscape. At the forefront of their practices are the physical concerns of works using materials that include fiber, wax, metal, paper, plants and glass. Whether iconography passed through generations, a visual mode brought into sculptural form, or a documentation of the landscape through process and photography. Info: Grimm Gallery, 202 Bowery, New York, Duration: 3/9-17/10/20, Days & Hours: by appointment only, https://grimmgallery.com

The exhibition “The Festival Exhibition 2020” is based on a theoretical frame-work that Joar Nango has set up together with collaborators from different artistic or academic backgrounds, including art historian Mathias Danbolt, writer Candice Hopkins and anthropologist Dimitris Dalakoglou. Following Nango’s ongoing investigations of the history of Sámi architecture, his library of books on the topic will be utilized in the exhibition, as well as a series of re-appropriated historical images from the 1700s. This series of hand-coloured drawings was made in the mid-1700s and is among the first known representations of Sámi architecture. For a large-scale projection screen, Nango makes use of dried halibut stomachs that are sewn together. The technique, called skievvar in the coastal Sami tradition, is a way of making transparent windows in outhouses and simple buildings. Several of Joar Nango’s previous projects are brought to Bergen, and re configured for the exhibition, such as the girjegumpi, a small building made as a nomadic library inspired by the Sami gumpi, a herder’s hut mounted on sleigh runners. The Festival Exhibition is Bergen Kunsthall´s flagship exhibition, established in 1953. Info: Bergen Kunsthall, Rasmus Meyers allé 5, Bergen, Duration: 4/6-8/11/20, days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-17:00, Thu 11:00-20:00, www.kunsthall.no

“Goings-on”, Alain Biltereyst’s solo exhibition includes small and medium-sized works as well as two mural paintings designed for the occasion. Alain Biltereyst creates abstract paintings with simple, pared-down geometrical compositions. His paintings, often small in size (close to an A4 format), explore the poetry of form according to the principle of “less is more”. They reflect, and reflect upon, the legacy of modernism. These are not, however, geometrical utopias devoid of meaning. Lines and rectangles, grids and squares juxtaposed in Alain Biltereyst’s works are embedded in a context. Fragments of the modern world appear between the lines of his abstract vocabulary. Here and there, the viewer can discern commercial symbols, logos tattooed on the bodies of trucks, typographical designs printed on billboards or packaging. These hidden references combine with abstract and geometrical forms, as if to remind us that in the 70s and 80s, graphic designers turned toward abstract art for fresh and modern inspiration. With Alain Biltereyst, it is the other way around: his art refers to and draws its inspiration from graphic design. In this way, he completes a cycle. Info: Xippas Gallery, 108 rue Vieille du Temple, Paris, Duration: 5/9-10/10/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-13:00 & 14:00-19:00, Sat 10:00-19:00, www.xippas.com

In her latest series of vivid geometric paintings that are on show in the exhibition “Paintings”, Farah Atassi intermingles references to modernist painting, decorative arts, textile motifs and folk art. Having long used colorful triangles, rectangles and circles to construct fanciful unpopulated interior scenes, Atassi has only recently begun to assemble these shapes into stylized still lifes and human forms. The suite of twelve new paintings (all 2020) presented for the first time at Almine Rech features Cubist-style female figures, musical instruments, domestic objects and circus props depicted in rooms whose colorfully patterened décors variously recall Mondrian paintings, Memphis Group designs, Scottish tartans and Pucci textiles. Atassi relies on a grid to organize her carefully devised compositions of colors and shapes. However, she also uses the grid to help plot out the orthogonal lines that help her to represent three-dimensional space. By reappropriating a defining feature of non-objective art as the armature onto which she builds fictive spaces and hangs narrative scenes, Atassi anchors her paintings firmly between abstraction and representation. Info: Almine Rech Gallery, 64 Rue de Turenne, Paris, Duration:5/9-3/10/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.alminerech.com

The exhibition “Balkrishna Doshi: Architecture for the People”  illuminates Doshi’s melding of Modernism with traditional Indian techniques and forms, yielding a body of deeply humanist work. Recipient of the 2018 Pritzker Architecture Prize, Doshi with both Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn in the 1950s, and later adapted the principles and forms of modernism he absorbed from these experiences into his work with local cultures, traditions, and environments, from low-cost housing. The exhibition is organized around four primary themes central to Doshi’s work (Home and Identity, Creating a Livable City, Shaping an Integrated Education & Building Academic Institutions), demonstrating his ongoing dedication to architecture as a civic practice. Focusing on some 20 of the architect’s most significant projects dating from 1958 to 2014, the exhibition brings together full-scale models which vividly convey the physical experience of Doshi’s buildings, along with a wealth of material from the architect’s archive and studio, including drawings and models, artworks, sketches, video, photography, and more. Info: Curators: Khushnu Panthaki and Jolanthe Kugler, Wrightwood 659, 659 West Wrightwood Avenue, Chicago, Duration: 9/9-12/12/20, Days & Hours: Thu-Fri 12:00-20:00, Sat 10:00-19:00, https://wrightwood659.org

Art Paris Art Fair 2020 due the Convid19 pandemic was postponed and reinvented as a virtual online art fair, will be returning to the Grand Palais on September. 112 galleries will be present, including 25 galleries hailing from Korea, Canada, the Ivory Coast and Peru, in addition to galleries from Germany, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Spain, Greece, Italy, Holland, Portugal and Switzerland.  The 2020 selection, which counts 36% of first-time participants, is also marked by the arrival of major galleries such as Perrotin, Yvon Lambert, Jeanne Bucher Jaeger and Karsten Greve in association with Caroline Smulders. Each year, in support of the French scene, Art Paris invites a curator to engage critically and historically with a selection of projects by French artists presented by participating galleries. In Common and Uncommon Stories, guest curator Gaël Charbau brings together the work of 18 artists, most of which were born in the 1980s. Also, the 2020 edition will feature 21 solo shows distributed throughout the fair. Promises Section will explore rarely represented art scenes with galleries presenting between one and three emerging artists and benefit from financial sponsorship from the fair. Info: Art Paris Art Fair 2020, Grand Palais, 3 Avenue du Général Eisenhower, Paris, Duration: 10-13/9/20, Days & Hours: Thu (10/9) & Sat-Sun (12-13/9/20) 12:00-20:00, Fri (11/9) 12:00-21:00, Admission: : 28 € / 14 € (students and groups), www.artparis.com

An exhibition of William Eggleston’s medium- and large-format photographs from the 1970s, many of which have never been exhibited before. Is on show at David Zwirner Gallery. Over the course of nearly six decades, Eggleston has established a singular pictorial style that deftly combines vernacular subject matter with an innate and sophisticated understanding of color, form, and composition. His vividly saturated photographs transform the ordinary into distinctive, poetic images that eschew fixed meaning. A pioneer of color photography, Eggleston helped elevate the medium to the art form that it is recognized as today. Throughout the 1970s, Eggleston worked with a variety of cameras and photographic formats. In addition to using 35mm Canon and Leica cameras, he also photographed in medium and large formats. Eggleston began exploring these formats, which were less popular in the snapshot, street-photography ethos of the 1960s and 1970s, for the high level of detail they offer, spearheading their use with color film and using them to further his investigation of the distinctive character of the American visual and material landscape. Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 5-6/F, H Queen’s, 80 Queen’s Road Central, Hong Kong, Duration: 10/9-17/10/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.davidzwirner.com

Ron Nagle’s sculptures might measure only the size of a clenched fist, but their intricate, dynamic panoramas evoke planetary domains. Stuccoed façades meet twiggy appendages, while slick, oily layers ooze over the sharp edges of perfect, geometric blocks. Meticulously crafted out of arrangements of texturally and formally contrasting elements, Nagle’s abstractions are both other-worldly and entirely of this one: they evoke a range of influences reaching between mid-century hot-rod cars of the US West Coast, and the composite sensibility of Japanese shibui and wabi-sabi. His new works that are on show in his solo exhibition “Lincolnshire Squire”, oscillate between conveying a sense of interior and exterior. They may at once appear loosely like still-life landscapes – conveying a sense of the familiar outdoors – and at the same time describe something as specific as the details of the internal architecture of an unknown place, as though plucked from a dream. Info: Modern Art, 4-8 Helmet Row, London, Duration: 10/9-12/12/20, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 12:00-17:00, https://modernart.net

The exhibition “A Focus on Painting” features four artists from different generations and at different points in their careers: Alvaro Barrington, Mandy El-Sayegh, Rachel Jones and Dona Nelson. The individual artists’ presentations on display throughout the Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery demonstrate the wide-ranging possibilities of painting today, while exploring themes such as the formation of identity, the communication of meaning and the subjectivity of interpretation, as well as the boundaries between personal expression and collective experience. The exhibition explores the artists’ unique approaches to painting – whether through an innovative approach to modes of display, the canvas as a binding structure, the incorporation of seemingly disparate elements into the picture plane, painting as a site of containment or an index of process and gesture, or the interplay between abstraction and figuration. Info: Curator: Julia Peyton-Jones, Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, Ely House, 37 Dover Street, London, Duration: 12/9-21/10/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://ropac.net