ART NEWS: April 01

It’s a useful reduction to say that both Jonathan Meese and Rinus Van de Velde in their joint exhibition “Two of Hearts” work with alter egos. These are not just the usual art-world flirtations with persona (which often more or less resemble the artist or are recognizable as character studies), but more sustained practices of proliferating biographies and personalities. In Jonathan Meese’s case, this involves a set of behaviors and ways of speaking, a whole machinery of selfhood that only falls apart because it’s so consistent and coherent. His characteristic comportment—which involves frenzied talking, sudden provocative is so dependable that there’s no way to avoid asking oneself if its an act. This is different from exaggeration: rather, it’s too convincing. Despite Meese’s seeming volatility, I’m not sure I know anyone with a personality as unnervingly stable as he presents in his interviews and performances. Van de Velde, on the other hand, draws himself into history with a surprisingly light touch. His self-portraits are projections into other lives. Some of these lives are art- and some are almost melancholy renderings of missed opportunities. In his drawings, the ubiquity of Van de Velde’s visage comes to feel almost inevitable, as if it had been lurking there all along. Info: Galleri Bo Bjerggaard, Flæsketorvet 85 A, Copenhagen, Duration: 6/3-1/5/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 13:00-18:00, Sat 12:00-16:00, www.bjerggaard.com

“Slowly Turning Narrative” (1992) is a room-sized video installation by Bill Viola in the LACMA’s collection and now is on view for the first time in almost 20 years. An acknowledged pioneer of video art, Viola was crucial in establishing video as a major medium in contemporary art. The work speaks to the universal human condition and encompasses themes of presence and absence, childhood and aging, creation and destruction, and the many and the one. One projection, in color, shows vignettes of society’s most corporeal, social, and cultural selves: newborn babies, children at play, people at work, sickness, healing, commerce, car accidents, celebrations, lovers, nature, death—in short, a catalogue of universal human experiences. The other projection portrays a black and white close-up of the artist’s face, while his voice chants phrases of human activity such as: “the one who lives,” “the one who acts,” “the one who reads,” “the one who talks,” “the one who cries,” “the one who loves,” “the one who dies,” etc. One side of the central screen is mirrored; as the reflective side comes into view, the visitor’s own image is subsumed into the video imagery (both on the mirrored screen and reflected onto the surrounding walls), evoking the fullness of human existence. Info: Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, Duration: 1/4-27/6/2021, Days & Hours: Mon-Tue & Thu 11:00-17:00, Fri 11:00-20:00, Sat-Sun 10:00-19:00, www.lacma.org

Titled “Starting from Wrong”, Elisheva Biernoff’s solo exhibition features twelve meticulously detailed paintings measuring no larger than 10,5 x 12,7 cm each. All completed since 2017, Biernoff’s recent paintings are carefully observed, two-sided works based on found and anonymous photographs. Each of Biernoff’s paintings requires three to four months to complete, belying the instantaneous nature of the source material. Aptly beginning with a work titled Wrong 1966, Biernoff’s new paintings depict photographs that may be considered to have failed in a variety of ways. These “failures” include various forms of fading, sun flares, and color shifts, with elements that appear to be damaged or missing. In Him, 2018, a man in a suit is obscured by sunlight coming from behind, rendering him anonymous, and breaking photography’s classic taboo against placing a subject in front of bright light. A mysterious Polaroid verges on jarring abstraction in Instant, 2021, as dark grey patches of “damaged” emulsion appear to rend a light-dappled oceanscape. Biernoff’s double-sided paintings are displayed on stands that allow them to be viewed from multiple perspectives. Ripple, 2020, features figures on a sandy expanse with scribbled handwriting on the verso that references the odd look of the print. Info: Fraenkel Gallery, 49 Geary Street, 4th Floor, San Francisco, Duration: 1/4-28/5/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Thu 11:00-15:00 (by appointment only, book here), https://fraenkelgallery.com

Ho Tzu Nyen is a leading artist from Singapore who has been transforming a wide array of historical and philosophical texts, into artworks across a range of different formats, including video, installation, and theatrical performance. In recent years, he has focused his energies on the situation of Japan during WWII, and the way this relates to the history of Southeast Asia. One starting point of “Voice of Void”, is “The World-Historical Standpoint and Japan,” a roundtable discussion by the so-called ”Big Four of the Kyoto School” (Keiji Nishitani, Masaaki Kosaka, Iwao Koyama, and Shigetaka Suzuki (1907) at the end of November 1941, shortly before the attack on Pearl Harbor. By restaging this discussion, the work explores the complex and often contradictory contexts around the extended network of “Kyoto School” in the 1930s and 1940s. “Voice of Void”,combines elements of 3D animation and anime aesthetics, using a combination of video projections and VR technology, to create an immersive experience in which the audience is invited to slip beneath the uneasy skins of these characters. Ho Tzu Nyen breaks down public history by accumulating images, texts and biographies to expose the complexity of history with all its fictions and contradictions. Info: Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM), 7-7 Nakazono-cho, Yamaguchi, Duration: 1/4-4/7/2021, Days & Hours: Wed-Mon 10:00-19:00, www.ycam.jp

The latest Gwangju Biennale Commission productions include Sung Hwan Kim’s “Hair” is a piece of head, a single-channel film that explores undocumented Korean immigrant histories at the turn of the 20th century in the US; Tarek Atoui’s “The Elemental Studio” (working title), an ongoing project composed of an ensemble of instruments, sound objects and compositional ideas, inspired by Korean musical traditions and the philosophy that lies within; Ho Tzu Nyen’s “The 49th Hexagram”, a two-channel animation work that examines the significance of the democratic movement in Gwangju against the backdrop of the numerous uprisings that recurred throughout the Korea’s history of mobilisation toward democracy; Lee Bul’s “Civitas Solis” and “Aubade V”, two restaged and recomposed works that present the shifts in the atmosphere of the former Armed Forces’ Gwangju Hospital through the formal invention of a Modernist tower and fragmented mirrors respectively, while the perception of the works is suspended between the intimate and the political, subjectivity and abstraction; Minouk Lim’s “Mr. Chai Eui Jin” and “1,000 Canes”, a poignant installation that traces the perennial oeuvre of Chai Eui Jin, a survivor of the civilian massacre committed against unarmed civilians just before the outbreak of the Korean War; and Chiharu Shiota’s “Language of God”, a site-specific installation that resonates with the richly temporal traces inside the catholic chapel of the former Armed Forces’ Gwangju Hospital. These new commissions are shown alongside the restaging of two previous GB Commission installations: Kader Attia’s “Shifting Borders”, a three-channel film that explores the conception of “repair” and different cultural means of dealing with trauma; and Mike Nelson’s “Mirror reverb (the blinding of a building, a notation for another)”, a site-specific installation that reinterprets the physicality and internality of the former Armed Forces’ Gwangju Hospital church. Info: 13th Gwangju Biennale, 111 Biennale-ro, Buk-gu, Gwangju, Duration: 1/4-9/5/2021, www.gwangjubiennale.org

Brian Rochefort presents “Stellar Gems”, his first solo exhibition in Athens. Brian Rochefort uses ceramic and glazes to create arresting ceramic sculptures that suggest forms or phenomena in the natural world. Each work is built up of layers of mud and slip clay, which the artist repeatedly breaks and builds back meticulously over a period of time, and then fires, airbrushes, and glazes – over multiple firings. All of his  works and their titles, are based on traveling to remote areas around the world, such as the Bolivian Amazon, the Serengeti in Tanzania, and the Choco Cloud Forest in Ecuador among so many other places. Also protected barrier reefs in Africa and the Galapagos Islands. The title to most of his shows is a product of doomsday scenarios. His new show “Stellar Gems”, describes the objects as the aftermath of a fictitious comet or asteroid that hits the planet and results in chaotic debris. Info: Bernier/Eliades Gallery, 11 Eptachalkou Street, Athens, Duration: 3/4-20/5/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:30-18:00, Sat 12:00-16:00, https://bernier-eliades.com

One of the founding figures of Dansaekhwa, the Korean monochrome painting movement of the 1970s, Kwon Young-woo, has his first solo presentation in Japan. Schooled in ink-painting traditions, Kwon forged a new direction in the 1960s by abandoning the use of ink and scratching the surface of the delicate, multilayered hanji paper with his fingernails, creating all-over compositions of rips that emphasized the primacy of the ground. For Kwon, paper, like ink or the brush, was only a “tool” or a “method”.  Kwon’s unprecedented style and experimentation helped him rapidly gain recognition overseas. In 1965, his work was included in the Tokyo Biennale, and in 1975 he was featured in the landmark exhibition “Five Korean Artists, Five Kinds of White” at Tokyo Gallery. In 1978, sponsored by the French government, he moved to Paris, where he remained until 1989. There he began experimenting variously with puncturing the surface of the paper with the end of a paintbrush, an awl, or a pair of scissors—sometimes perforating it from behind or tearing it into more ragged strips. Although the paper he used was white, layering and discoloration of the material through time gave unique qualities to each piece. While in Paris, he also reintroduced the use of color, pouring gouache and ink into and around the incisions to further accentuate his mark making. Info: Blum & Poe, Harajuku Jingu-no-mori 5F 1-14-34 Jingumae Shibuya, Tokyo, Duration: 3/4-22/5/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00 (by appointment only, book here), www.blumandpoe.com

Through her videos, paintings, drawings, tapestries, glass sculptures, ceramics, and performances, Laure Prouvost in her solo exhibition “Reaching hi her grounds from the rub he she we grow” creates truly immersive environments, the grounds for personal mythologies and semi-fictional tales that weave and enrich themselves with each passing year. The artist shifts her attention toward spring and the renewal of nature, an ode to life filled with hope and optimism, in harmony with the season, and echoing current events. Nature has always occupied a dominant place in the artist’s oeuvre. A guest of the Palais de Tokyo in 2018, Laure Prouvost transformed the industrial architecture of the museum into an abandoned, post-apocalyptic garden. In the present exhibition, each floor of the gallery represents a natural state in the blossoming process. The anarchic abundance of greenery and the organic proliferation are constitutive of her work, which, as always, spreads beyond the walls, generously welcoming all life forms in a place that is part utopian part dystopian. Femininity, through its most sensuous attributes, has permeated Laure Prouvost’s work for many years—breasts, buttocks, or pregnancy bellies incarnate a fertile and nurturing life, while also being discreet and supportive nods towards women’s emancipation movements—and takes on its full significance in this evocation of a rapidly burgeoning nature. Whether under the guise of a voluptuous silhouette or teeming flora, desire is at the heart of this work. Info: Galerie Nathalie Obadia, 8 rue Charles Decoster, Brussels, Duration: 8/4-29/5/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.nathalieobadia.com