ART NEWS:Jan.02

The dystopian world that the Anthropocene bequeath to the future is a crucial focal point for contemporary South Korean artists. “Anthropocene: Korea x Brazil 2019-2021” brings the best of this production to Videobrasil Online. Throughout January, the website features a selection of artworks by six major Korean video and film artists, organized by, head curator of the Ilmin Museum of Art, in Seoul.  In February, Videobrasil airs a retrospective of the works of Ayoung Kim, one of South Korea’s foremost contemporary artists. By superimposing narratives and visual elements into particular configurations of space and time, her performances, videos and installations explore the issues of the recent history of Korea, imperialism, and the migration of capital. Info: Curator: Juhyun Cho, Duration: 4/1-28/2/2021, videobrasil.online

The Norwegian artist Torbjørn Rødland presents his solo exhibition “More Than Tongue Can Tell”. His composition and use of light, candles, and naked bodies have a theatricality at the same time, however, Rødland’s images are also poppy, sweet, sexual—these ambiguous, immaculate photographs possess the same aesthetic pull as advertising, juggling the stimuli of bodies, consumption, and artificiality, and thus seductively capturing the narcissism of our era. The psychological, surreal undertone of his work enables the most variegated associations, all of which Rødland leaves to the viewer. Still, he does also keep alluding to what we might call “Hollyweird,” that candy-colored dream factory of his adopted home of Los Angeles, a key site in our contemporary mythology, whose absurdity and gloom is also a central subject of filmmakers and multimedia artists such as David Lynch and Paul McCarthy. Like their work, native Norwegian Rødland’s art is rife with mysterious symbols. In contrast to the conceptually ironic distance that has become widespread in photography over the past 40 years, with Rødland the medium takes on a haunting, deeply artistic quality. Info: Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Waldmannstrasse 6, Zurich, Duration: 15/1-20/2/2021, Days & Hours: Wed-Fri 12:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-17:00, www.presenhuber.com

The exhibition “In the Basement Studio” brings together a large selection by Bruno Knutman executed between 1964 and 1990. In a body of work spanning an entire life, paths seldom follow predetermined straight lines. Over the years, explorative approaches generate parallel courses, temporarily changing direction, with whims creating gaps that become new spaces, new journeys. Knutman’s journey was ongoing until the very end, and attempting to fully grasp his pictorial idiom is like mapping the starry sky, where each point of light is a peephole into a universe of its own. Some points hold entire courses of events, whereas others present merely a hint. Some are experienced precisely in that manner, whereas others lie hidden in the periphery, only to engage and initiate an entire chain of sequences when the time is right. Although focusing mainly on painting during his last decades, drawing was early on a powder keg that he explored in full. Info: Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Fredsgatan 12, Stockholm, Duration: 16/1-13/2/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 12:00-17:00, Sat 12:00-16:00, www.gallerimagnuskarlsson.com

Madelynn Green’s exhibition “Birth of a Star” features a new body of works. Referencing the visual language of film photography, with its distinctive haze and ambiguity, Green’s paintings function as the physical embodiments of underrepresented histories and visually engender social and political concepts. Paint drips and figures are loosely rendered to foreground the strength of the medium as a tool for radical image-making, distinct from the objective camera lens. This imaginative balance between abstraction and representation generates new associations. In speaking about her practice, Green often notes how her experiences growing up in the American midwest and south shape her subjective and material interests, which, despite manifesting in paint, are rooted in photography. Green’s background in politics guides her paintings and is subtly manifested in her proliferation of counter-hegemonic images. Making paintings in focused series, she addresses a range of subjects, synthesizing varied ideas and experiences. Working from photo and video reference material as well as imagination, recent subjects have included family and social dynamics— primarily those found in nightclubs and crowds .Info: Almine Rech Gallery, 64 Rue de Turenne, Paris, Duration: 16/1-27/2/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.alminerech.com

Comprised of more than 100 photographs and two films, Shirin Neshat’s “Land of Dreams” marks a significant visual and conceptual shift for the artist, who has turned her lens to the landscape and people of the American West. For this exhibition, Neshat will present the entire collection of photographs from this series as well as both films, which will be complimented by an online viewing room and virtual screenings throughout the show’s run. Combining Neshat’s singular artistic language with her intuitive approach to documenting the subjects she photographs, “Land of Dreams” presents multifaceted, surreal views into contemporary American culture during the Trump era. Alongside the films, the photographic installation Land of Dreams comprises 111 photographs of New Mexico residents who Neshat captured throughout filming. Neshat asked her subjects about their dreams, which she recorded in Farsi on many of the portraits, along with the sitters’ names and dates and places of birth. Info: Gladstone Gallery, 515 West 24th Street, New York, Duration: 16/1-27/2/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00 (Schedule an appointment), www.gladstonegallery.com

To celebrate its 30th anniversary, Xippas Gallery presents a cycle of exhibitions honoring its artists and its thirty-years history. The first of these exhibitions will feature works by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, Peter Halley, Valérie Jouve, Vera Lutter, Marco Maggi, Vik Muniz, Matthew Porter, Philippe Ramette, Bettina Rheims, Pablo Reinoso, Lucas Samaras, James Siena and Takis. Over the last thirty years, Xippas has worked alongside its artists to promote their talent. The gallery has published numerous catalogues and collaborated with prestigious institutions internationally. More than 500 exhibitions have been shown within its venues in Paris, Brussels, Athens, Geneva, Montevideo and Punta del Este. Renos Xippas inaugurated his gallery in Paris on October 19, 1990 with a major exhibition dedicated to Takis’ sculptures. For this very first exhibition, presented on three floors, Takis worked with the specific features of the gallery’s architecture and conceived an environment made of magnetic sculptures. Info: Xippas Gallery, 108, rue Vieille du Temple, Paris, Duration: 16/1-13/3/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-13:00 & 14:00-19:00, Sat 10:00-19:00, www.xippas.com

Jeremy Shaw’s exhibition “Quantification Trilogy” consists of three parafictional short films: “Quickeners” (2014), “Liminals” (2017), and “I Can See Forever” (2018). The works are set in the future and explore how marginalized societies confront life after a scientific discovery has mapped and determined all parameters of transcendental spiritual experience. This is known as “The Quantification.” Employing aesthetics and outmoded media of the 20th century to depict the future, Shaw’s alchemical combination of cinema verité, ethnographic film, conceptual art, and music video invites the viewer to suspend their disbelief in the story, and provides a series of critical perspectives on systems of power. “Quantification Trilogy” examines fringe culture, theories of evolution, virtual reality, neurotheology, esotericism, dance, the representation of the sublime, as well as the notion of transcendence itself. The exhibition also presents a selection from Shaw’s series of reframed archival photographs: “Towards Universal Pattern Recognition” (2016-20). These photographs feature subjects experiencing states of spiritual, hedonistic, or technological catharsis. Info: Julia Stoschek Collection, Schanzenstrasse 54, Düsseldorf, Duration: 17/1-6/6/2021, Days & Hours: Sun 11:00-18:00, www.jsc.art

Perceptions of truth are widely mediated through moving images. While they can be used by those in authority to exert influence, this exhibition explores the ways in which time-based media can connect political ideologies with the desire to create a world of one’s own. Borrowing from various cultural narratives, the works expound on their potential to serve as an incubator for social mythologies. Traditionally understood as narrations about gods, creation, and sanctity, myths are stories that are widely shared and factually ambiguous. They tell unverified truths, educate and entertain at the same time, and create archetypes from simple characters. The exhibition “JSC ON VIEW: MYTHOLOGISTS” addresses the tensions created between facts and fictions through the production of personal as well as collective narratives. The works each grapple with various mythologies by reinterpreting histories, disrupting established behaviors, and imagining new visual and sonic worlds. What binds them together is that the limits between myth, fact, and fantasy are unclear—whether or not by the artist’s own making. Info: Julia Stoschek Collection, Schanzenstrasse 54, Düsseldorf, Duration: 17/1-6/6/2021, Days & Hours: Sun 11:00-18:00, www.jsc.art

Featuring a new group of wall-based works, Richard Tuttle’s exhibition “Nine Stepping Stones” highlights the recent production of one of the most representative American artists of the postwar period. Over the past six decades, Tuttle has occupied interstitial positions between several genres, including painting, sculpture, drawing, and poetry. In each case, his work demonstrates how traditional categories of artmaking can function as starting points for wide-ranging investigations into the functioning of perception and language, questioning not only how we see or experience, but also what is being seen or experienced. Such questions ultimately hinge upon how a person—whether artist or viewer or both—inhabits and makes sense of the thing that comes to be known as an artwork. “Nine Stepping Stones” is dedicated to a series of assemblages whose titles all include the word “head” and whose roughly head-like proportions and shapes symbolize the human (and humanistic) frame of reference through which they can be engaged. Info: David Kordansky Gallery, 5130 Edgewood Pl, Los Angeles, Duration: 23/1-6/3/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00 (Schedule an appointment), www.davidkordanskygallery.com