ART NEWS:Jan.01
The exhibition “Albers and Morandi: Never Finished” explores the formal and visual affinities and contrasts between two of the twentieth century’s greatest painters: Josef Albers and Giorgio Morandi. Both Albers and Morandi are best known for their decades-long elaborations of singular motifs: from 1950 until his death in 1976, Albers employed his nested square format to experiment with endless chromatic combinations and perceptual effects, while Morandi, in his intimate still lifes and occasional landscapes, engaged viewers’ perceptual understanding and memory of everyday objects and spaces. Building on the connections established between the two artists in dual shows in 2005, “Josef Albers”, the first major exhibition of Albers’s work in Italy at the Museo Morandi, Bologna, and “Giorgio Morandi: Landschaft” at the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop, Germany, the exhibition will put each artist’s distinctive treatment of color, shape, form, morphology, and seriality in dialogue. Looking specifically at the stunning palettes of Morandi’s celebrated tabletop still lifes depicting humble vessels and vases and Albers’s seminal “Homage to the Squar:e series, the exhibition will elucidate how the two artists’ careful daily acts of duration and devotion allowed each to highlight the essence of color and the endless possibilities of their respective visual motifs. Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 537 West 20th Street New York, Duration: 7/1-3/4/2021, www.davidzwirner.com
Continuing with his exploratory approach toward his familiar environment, Thomas Klotz presents a recent body of work titled “I’ll never be young again”. In this new series, Thomas Klotz addresses the theme of adolescence and the anxieties that come with it, by referencing his twelve-year-old daughter. Devoid of narrative dimension, this implicit portrait takes shape through anonymous images, “punctuation exercises,” where walls, volumes, materials, voids and shadows are all surfaces of projection, silent commentary. Heavily influenced by Lewis Baltz, Thomas Klotz directs his attention to the everyday, the trivial, where the shot resembles a micro-input of something that, in the photographer’s eye, takes on an intriguing and singular thickness. In addition, through his framing, Thomas Klotz turns away from what naturally draws the eye while suggesting presence by way of hints that attest to a life captured candidly toward a tipping point. In counterpoint, the full-length photograph of the young girl, with her eyes pointed at the objective, marks a frontal return to the human figure in the artist’s work, which still tends toward a sort of pictorial abstraction. Info: Galerie Nathalie Obadia, 3, rue du Cloître Saint-Merri II, Paris, Duration: 9/1-6/2/2021, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.nathalieobadia.com
“The Modern Age” is the first in a 12-month programme of exhibitions ‘On Hannah Arendt’ dedicated to the writings of the German-born, American political philosopher. Drawing from the first chapter of her 1968 publication “Between Past and Future”, the exhibitiion extends Arendt’s examination of tradition and the modern age into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries or what she understood as “the modern world.” The inaugural exhibition links together Arendt’s understanding of knowledge and thinking with remembrance and storytelling – the kind of thinking present in the work of participating artists Siah Armajani, Thomas Bayrle, Véronique Filozof, Vivienne Koorland and Jo Spence, who collectively combine imagination, courage and independence. In partnership with the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, a wide-ranging public programme of talks, artist interviews, lectures and an online discussion series, modelled from the Hannah Arendt Center’s official Virtual Reading Group, will accompany the series of exhibitions. Info: Richard Saltoun Gallery, 41 Dover Street, London, Duration 11/1-13/2/2020, Days & Hours: Thu-Fri by appointment, 10:00-18:00 (celeste@richardsaltoun.com), www.richardsaltoun.com
The group exhibition “Even there, there are stars” celebrates visions and dreams of possible, and more just, futures arising in dialogue with visionary fiction, and explores pathways that might help us get there. These futurities are generated by and sustain queer and trans people, femmes, and people of color: those of us who have learned to live by and through our longings; those of us who were never meant to survive and do, by our collective resilience and our collective dreams. The work included in this exhibition, and the thoughts in the accompanying publication, take up these tactics to help us be bold, center pleasure, and stay connected and interdependent so as to be able to live guided by our wildest dreams of liberation. The exhibition features more than 25 works ranging from large-scale textiles and works on paper to prints, video, and sculpture. Participating Artists: Chitra Ganesh, Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski, Emily Oliveira, and Tuesday Smillie. Info: Curator: CUE Art Foundation, 37 West 25th Street, New York, Duration: 14/1-17/2/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-17:30, https://cueartfoundation.org
Lu Chao presents his new body of work “Black Fruit”, where the mysterious is ever present. In sixteen compositions crowds are represented in the form of fruits, cakes, chemical particles or as funambulists creating a fantastical imagery. When viewed up close, the facial expressions of the many small-sized figures reveal both the resilience and the many upheavals experienced by humanity. The solemn use of ‘ivory black’ paint in his artistic practice is inspired by the historical Chinese landscape paintings of the Song and Yuan Dynasties, where the artists used only black ink to create an alternating play of light and hues that was considered as ‘colors’. This tonality in black gives structure to the image. In it, Lu Chao is constantly exploring new ways to expand his graphic and technical possibilities in his chosen visual language. The largest painting in the show “Dark Energy No.4” (2020) bears witness to the influence of traditional Chinese ink painting and the artist’s play with scale, in particular the dark vast landscape with what appears to be a giant ‘’Penjing” bonsai tree in the forefront completely eclipsing the ant-sized figures on the grounds. Inspired by Taoism, with its belief in the power of nature, this scene attempts to represent the dark energy that surrounds us and still eludes our comprehension, to bring to the fore the unconscious reality of humanity. Info: Galerie Nathalie Obadia, 8 rue Charles Decoster, Ixelles-Brussels, Duration: 14/1-6/2/2021, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.nathalieobadia.com
The exhibition “Pure Form” explores the formal qualities of abstraction Throughout the history of modern and contemporary art, artists have engaged with the visual, experiential, and conceptual dimensions of shape, color, texture, and materiality, positing these qualities as the subject of their work rather than any overt representational imagery. This exhibition highlights a variety of abstract, minimalist, and nonrepresentational approaches artists have pursued in their art over the past seventy years. Some works play with spatial representation, such as Fred Sandback’s use of the seemingly infinite vertical line to create a phenomenological experience of space, while others rely on gestural marks and patterns to create ordered compositions. Featured are works by Ruth Asawa, Suzan Frecon, Ad Reinhardt and Fred Sandback dating from the 1950s up to the present. In this way, works by contemporary artists are shown to be in a continuous and ongoing dialogue with their predecessors, further revealing the wide range of expressions artists have pursued within a focused and restrained set of formal means. Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 34 East 69th Street, New York, Duration: 14/1-20/2./2021, www.davidzwirner.com
Thomas Ruff’s solo exhibition exhibition will feature works from the artist’s “tableaux chinois” series (2019- ), which debuted this fall as part of his solo exhibition at K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf. Ruff rose to international prominence in the late 1980s as a member of the Düsseldorf School, a group of young photographers who had studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher at the renowned Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and became known for their experimental approach to the medium and its evolving technological capabilities. Working in discrete series, Ruff has since conducted an in-depth examination of various photographic genres, including portraiture, the nude, landscape, and architectural photography. Ruff’s “tableaux chinois” arose out of his long-standing interest in the genre of propaganda photography—inherently at conflict with the medium’s mimetic capability as it presents an ideologically inflected version of reality. Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 108 rue Vieille du Temple Paris, Duration: 14/1-6//2021, www.davidzwirner.com
The first solo show of Raoul De Keyser’s work in Greater China will feature paintings from the last 25 years of De Keyser’s career, illustrating his intuitive—yet rigorous—facility with his medium. Complementing the presentation in Hong Kong will be an online group exhibition that situates the late Belgian painter in dialogue with contemporary painters whose art continues to relate to or be informed by his pioneering compositions. De Keyser is known for his sophisticated and tempered paintings that subtly and evocatively explore the relationship between color and form. Made up of simple shapes and painterly marks, his works allude to the natural world and representational imagery, while avoiding suggestions of narrative or reductive frameworks that limit experience and interpretation. Despite—or precisely because of—their spare compositions, De Keyser’s works convey a visual intensity that inspires prolonged contemplation, mirroring the artist’s own sustained, reflective artistic process. Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 5-6/F, H Queen’s, 80 Queen’s Road, Central, Hong Kong, Duration: 15/1-6/3/2021, www.davidzwirner.com
MOMENTUM is pleased to announce the appointment of Théo-Mario Coppola as the curator and Håkon Lillegraven as the associate curator of the eleventh edition of the MOMENTUM biennale that will take place in 2021 under the title “HOUSE OF COMMONS” that is being conceived with the view that a paradigm shift is needed to change how current and historical forms of domination resulting from capitalism, colonialism, racism, patriarchalism, and gender normativity have impacted our lives. As such, “HOUSE OF COMMONS” will be shaped by togetherness and horizontality. By placing commonality at its core, it will operate as a shared living space for exhibition, research, and knowledge. Informed by the notion of ‘commons’ that was developed by Elinor Ostrom from the 1980s onwards, “HOUSE OF COMMONS” will re-problematise commonality and the process of commoning, both with practitioners and with participants. It will draw from new forms of governance and concrete utopia, personal narratives and resilience strategies, communities’ concerns, protests and measures of empowerment, and the protection of ecosystems.