ART NEWS:Feb.01

Alex Heilbron’s exhibition “Time and Intent” presents five paintings that are part of a larger body of work she began prior to, and completed after, the onset of the pandemic. The power of pattern lies in repetition. As an ongoing echo of the past, a pattern defies linear time and one-way movement, all the while, maintaining structure. Using techniques of doubling and repetition, Heilbron creates paintings in which patterns form grids of floral motifs, geometric shapes and rigid lines that withhold and expose the underlying imagery of female figures. Structures are known to provide guidance and familiarity, perhaps they even become a given. Yet they also impose restrictions and dependence due to their predetermined and fixed nature. As such, structures are formats we can simultaneously long for and long to escape from. Positioning itself in between these ends, this body of work uses movement and transformation within a structured environment to challenge traditional notions of painting and femininity. Info: Meliksetian | Briggs, 313 N Fairfax Avenue, West Hollywood, Duration: 23/1-27/3/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 12:00-17:00, www.meliksetianbriggs.com

Under the name “[erotic roundup]”, Mehdi Chouakri Gallery brings together works by Saâdane Afif, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Sylvie Fleury, Isabell Heimerdinger, Lothar Hempel, Jonathan Monk and Gerwald Rockenschaub. Partly created this year or already almost 30 years ago, they show how erotic subjects can present themselves in completely different sculptures, paintings or drawings. Since exhibitions can only be viewed online due to the current situation, a combination of sex and the Internet seemed obvious. This combination, as it is rumored, has already proven itself over the years. However, [erotic roundup] is not a project that falls under the protection of minors, even if our attentive neighbor may see it that way. Rather, the aim is to show how diverse erotic content is transported in contemporary art. Sometimes the connections are obvious, but in many cases they only arise through the imposed context. What they all have in common is undoubtedly a wink of the eye and a certain ease that turns the minimally precise presentation into a kind of absurdist spectacle. The stage is well visible through the large gallery window. Info: Mehdi Chouakri Gallery, Fasanenplatz Fasanenstrasse 61, Berlin, Duration: 26/1/2021- , Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 12:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-18:00, https://mehdi-chouakri.com

The brothers Florian & Michael Quistrebert combine video and painting in a practice in which they explore the effects of light and shade, while bringing forward ideas of fascination, manipulation of the gaze, and their relationship to hypnosis, ecstasy and trance states. Their sixth exhibition at Crèvecœur, “Melancholia”, presents two new series of paintings on the edge of abstraction and figuration: landscapes and portraits. At the crossroads of different histories such as Gothic art, Cubism, Constructivism and experimental cinema, these two series reflect the artists’ desire to go back to a more quiet, more voluptuous, almost gaseous painting. The contrasts between the two series play on texture, colour effects, curves and scale. They subtly compose the architecture of this new exhibition: where melancholic faces hover, seemingly freeing themselves from the fiery landscapes, in transit, that face them. Like an apotheotic battle between day and night.  The exhibition takes its name from the film by Lars von Trier in which the Earth lives its last moments before being hit by the eponymous planet.  Info: Galerie Crèvecœur, 9 rue des Cascades, Paris, Duration” 30/1-6/3/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10;00-18:00, https://galeriecrevecoeur.com

The exhibition project “Sustainable Societies for the Future” springs from one of the most complex and urgent challenges of our day: how to create safe, inclusive, and sustainable societies. 20 artists and artist groups are contributing works to the exhibition, that in different ways encourage dialogue and engagement with sustainability issues of local and global urgency.The exhibition highlights three dimensions of sustainability—the ecological, the social, and the economic perspectives. The exhibition aims to demonstrate how these different aspects interact with one another. How do we treat our ecosystems with proper attention and long-sightedness? How can we create a society in which human rights are respected? And how do we satisfy humanity’s fundamental needs, given the earth’s limited resources, without negative consequences for people, plants, animals, or the planet? Participating artists: Catrin Andersson, Christian Falsnaes, Tue Greenfort, Max Guy, Ilkka Halso, Minna Henriksson, Ane Hjort Guttu, Hesselholdt & Mejlvang, Ingela Ihrman, Toril Johannessen & Marjolijn Dijkman, Mary Mattingly, Floating Museum, (P)Art of the Biomass, Cheryl Pope, Sean Raspet, Michael x. Ryan, Nilsmagnus Sköld, Sophie Tottie, Wang & Söderström and Amanda Williams. Info: Malmö Konstmuseum, Malmöhusvägen 6, Malmö, Duration: 1/2-23/5/2021, Days & Hours: Daily 10:00-17:00, https://malmo.se

Nazgol Ansarinia examines the systems and networks that underpin her daily life. In her work, she dissects, interrogates and recasts everyday objects and events to tease out their relationship with contemporary Iranian society. Her aim is to expose the inner workings of a social system by picking apart its components and reassembling them in order to reveal the collective assumptions at its core as well as its inherent rules of engagement. The sculptures and video work that make up “Pools and Voids” arise from the recent observation that Nazgol Ansarinia dedicated to the numerous private pools built in the Iranian capital during the 1960s and then left unused as a consequence of the Iranian Revolution from 1979 onwards. This new body of work defines a sort of inversion of the issues on which, in recent years, Ansarinia has reasoned. Her analysis has shifted from the rapid development of the built, and therefore of the demolished, to what remains: the memory of what is left, still present but abandoned, shows a collective desire from the past that still survives in a crystallized form. Info: Galleria Raffaella Cortese, via A. Stradella 7, Milan Duration: 4/2-24/4/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-sat 10:00-13:00 & 15:00-19:30, https://raffaellacortese.com

In each of her series, Jitka Hanzlová composes her vision in sequences: in her solo exhibition “Architectures of Life” she collects images from a variety of them, allowing the self-evident constellation of relations to emerge. In addition to historical series such as “Rokytník” (1990-94), Jitka Hanzlová presents “Water” (2013-19), a body of work which is still evolving. In over 30 years Jitka Hanzlová has portrayed the human, the urban, and nature in her photographic series: these are excerpts, moments of entirety, existing in relations that connect us to ourselves, to one another, us to nature and to every surrounding. Deeply marked by her experience of exile at the beginning of the ‘80s and later return to Czech Republic after the Velvet Revolution of ’89, Hanzlová has developed, step by step, her own visual language; with instinctive gaze focused on questioning identity and belonging, she looks through her subjects, seeking an inner matrix of existence. With time, experience and practice become the true concept behind her photography. Info: Galleria Raffaella Cortese, via A. Stradella 1-4, Milan Duration: 4/2-24/4/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-sat 10:00-13:00 & 15:00-19:30, https://raffaellacortese.com

Nicole Eisenman’s largest solo exhibition in Europe to date, “Giant Without a Body” delves deeply into the artist’s practice from 2006 to the present and includes a number of new paintings and sculptures created over the last year. Since the 1990s, Nicole Eisenman has carved out a place as a central figure in American painting, with a characteristic style that shifts between abstraction and figurative depictions of social environments. She makes use of art historical references, playfully reinvigorating elements from the Renaissance, Baroque and social realism, as well as German expressionism, linking these to the present in a highly astute and distinctive idiom. Eisenman’s works offer a colorful and celebratory first impression, but on closer inspection reveal multiple layers of meaning and intricate narratives. While many of these stories are based on characters from her own life, the artist also draws attention to larger societal issues and political frictions. Info: Curator: Solveig Øvstebø, Astrup Fearnley Museet, Strandpromenaden 2, Oslo, Duration: 5/2-23/5/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri 12:00-17:00, Thu 12:00-19:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-17:00, www.afmuseet.no

Featuring approximately 75 paintings, works on paper, and sculptures, the exhibition “Picasso. Figures” offers an in-depth look at Pablo Picasso’s career-long fascination with the human figure as a means of expressing a range of subjects and emotions. A panoramic survey of Picasso’s career, the exhibition opens with portrayals of his wives and lovers in a range of styles, which often capture the turbulence of their relationships.  The focus then shifts to Picasso’s renowned cubist period of the early 20th century. Of particular interest are works that demonstrate the powerful influence of African and Iberian art on this radical style, in which perceptions of time, space, and reality are altered in ways that embody the ideal of artistic freedom manifested by artists of the period. Continuing through the exhibition, visitors will encounter paintings, sculptures, and works on paper that reflect Picasso’s experiments with a variety of styles, including surrealism, neoclassicism, and expressionism. Info: Frist Art Museum, 919 Broadway, Nashville, Duration: 5/2-2/5/2021, Days & Hours: Thu-Sat 10:00-17:30, Sun 13:00-17:30, https://fristartmuseum.org/

“Show and Tell” is the first comprehensive retrospective of photographer Laura Aguilar assembling more than 70 works produced over three decades. Through photographs and videos that are frequently political as well as personal, and which traverse performative, feminist, and queer art genres, Aguilar offers candid portrayals of herself, her friends and family, and LGBTQ+ and Latinx communities. Her practice intuitively evolved over time as she struggled to negotiate and navigate her ethnicity and sexuality, her challenges with depression and auditory dyslexia, and acceptance of her large body. From early photography, including portraits of friends and other artists within the Chicana/o art community, Aguilar moved to courageous nude self-portraits, while her emerging lesbian identity and political activism within Los Angeles’s gay and lesbian community began to inform her work. Throughout her practice, Aguilar disrupted normative concepts of beauty and the female form while specifically utilizing the gendered body as a site for social critique. Info: Curator: Sybil Venegas, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, 26 Wooster St, New York, Duration: 6/2-9/5/2021, Days & Hours: Wed & Fri-Sun 12:00-18:00, Thu 12:00-20:00, www.leslielohman.org

The works in Enrico David’s solo exhibition “Cielo di giugno” manifest a distinctive pull towards both lightness and a craving for the horizon, in part following from and reacting to David’s Venice experience: original material such as notes, drafts and drawings that are typically at the core of all of his work were conceived during the conceptual stages of the Italian Pavilion at the 58th Biennale. The exhibition marks a threshold in David’s practice, in that it is his first exhibition composed exclusively of graphic works, of “beginnings” and “clues” which in different circumstances would have migrated to other medias and modes of expression. The sequence of works, oscillating between proximity and distance, sinking and gliding, underlines David’s position as a painter and finds its pretext in an exteriority made of air and atmosphere, dust motes and light, waning wind and twilight, the sun, the moon and endless vistas. The act of observing is equal to sitting on a clod of earth – or on an unlikely bench, waiting for irreducible remains. Here the horizon is the utopia that Edoardo Galeano describes as a kind of tension: drawing us closer but inevitably shifting further away, its only purpose being to allow us to move forward. Info: Fondazione Gió Marconi, Via Tadino 20, Milan, Duration: 9/2-30/3/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, https://giomarconi.com

Art Mûr celebrates its 25th anniversary and wishes to symbolize its programming with a collaborative and inclusive approach with the group exhibition project “Terra Nova: A look at the present and the future” with artists represented by Art Mûr and collaborative artists. The initiative of this exhibition offers us food for thought about our world as it is, and at the same time anticipates the idea of tomorrow’s world. In particular, the magnitude of the environmental problems facing humanity raises many concerns from a human rights perspective. Also, about our social values where we guarantee through declarations and laws that the individual possesses many fundamental rights and freedoms; yet there is such a persistence of inequality, discrimination, and injustice. The Covid 19 pandemic has only accentuated dissension and inequality.  Also, VR artists succeed one another to present original works in virtual reality in “Vitreus Ombre”, Sebastian Millar is the first artist to propose his creations of imaginary worlds filled of patterns, color planes, cosmic creatures and animals. About fifteen artists will be presented to draw our attention to a new way of experiencing and acquiring digital works. Info: Art Mûr, 5826 St-Hubert, Montréal, Québec, Duration: 9/2-24/4/2021 , Days & Hours: Tue-Wed 10:00-18:00, Thu-Fri 12:00-20:00, Sat-Sun 12:00-17:00, https://artmur.com

The exhibition “Eight O’Clock in the Morning” takes its title from Ray Nelson’s novel that served as the basis for the adaptation of John Carpenter’s movie “They live. Based on a principle of altered perception, the main character discovers reality in a new way following a hypnosis session, revealing a world and its inhabitants that were hidden until his “awakening”. The project gathers 5 artists or duos whose works could be tied to a kind of relativity, by producing or enhancing the distance between an object and its perception, a reality and the way it is perceived. If the reality can be defined as the whole of the perceived or existing phenomena, these are subjected to the interpretation of the subject, but also to anagogical or scientific or social practices trying to circumscribe them, or to re-interpret them continuously. The works presented could be perceived according to different approaches, questioning this gap between the object, its reading or its commentary, at the same time historical, semantic or linguistic, while allowing a more speculative framework of divination or intuition, of re-enactment or as science-fiction or speculative realism. Participating Artists: Brognon Rollin, Ferenc Gróf, Alex Hanimann, Basim Magdy and None Fútbol Club. Info: mfc-Michèle Didier, 66 rue Notre-Dame de Nazareth, Paris, Duration: 9/2-3/4/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.micheledidier.com