ART NEWS: April 02

For his solo show, “Antithesis”, Chiffon Thomas denotes how opposing objects or bodies can exist within a single environment or space, creating a utopia of their own design. The artist bonds binary qualities together, crafting fluid subjects who evade simple categories… modeling the autonomy they seek. Thomas’ usage of multimedia allows them to examine issues of race, gender, and sexuality. In particular, photography and stitching are combined as a way to preserve and repair history. In Thomas’ work, the loose threads allow for a meaning of your own interpretation, while the usage of different mediums paints a picture of a loaded and rich past. Utilitarian materials such as rebar ties found in concrete to hold skyscrapers together are re-cast to construct the frame of Thomas’ bodies, but only the outline is present. As an amalgamation of ideas about capitalism in relation to Christianity, , “Antithesis provides an indication of how social constructs are being corrupted. Inspired by Colonial design, Thomas uses deconstructed materials from a New England demolition site to build an array of sculptures ranging in size along with a selection of works on paper. The silicon bodies in these sculptures wear the parts of building materials – deconstructed and reconstructed several times from cement, foam, rigid plastic and more. Info: Kohn Gallery, 1227 North Highland Ave, Los Angeles, Duration: 9/4-21/5/2021, Days & Hours: By appointment only (mail email Karys Judd at karys@kohngallery.com), www.kohngallery.com  

Featuring a selection of sketches and approximately 18 corresponding assemblages and collages, alongside approximately a dozen of her travel sketchbooks; “Call and Response” is the first exhibition examining the relationship between Betye Saar’s found objects, sketches, and finished works, thereby shedding new light on her distinctive practice. One of the most significant artists working in assemblage and collage today, Betye Saar is best known for incisive works that confront and reclaim racist imagery. Addressing spirituality, gender, family history, and race in her art, Saar ruminates and plays with objects and ideas, making sketches inspired by specific found objects in her possession. These sketches form an essential part of what she considers the mysterious transformation of object into art and provide a window into her creative process. The daughter of a seamstress and herself a printmaker by training, Saar brings to her work a remarkable sensitivity to materials. Emerging in the 1960s as part of a wave of artists, many of them African American, who embraced the medium of assemblage, Saar combines items typically found at flea markets and secondhand stores to create conceptually and physically elaborate works. Info: Mississippi Museum of Art, 3805 Lamar Street, Jackson, Duration: 10/4-11/7/2021, Days & Hours: Thu-Sat 10:00-17:00, Sun 12:00-17:00, www.msmuseumart.org

In “Mitosis” Leah Harper presents a collection of biomorphic site-specific installations and drawings. The exhibition centers around a sculptural cluster of oblong glowing orbs constructed of resin-coated fabric and wire. It’s accompanied by a small wax scale model that served as the show’s primary inspiration. Miniature porcelain figures of similar form dot the gallery walls in arrested motion, mirrored by 2-dimensional representations in marker and ink. All are connected by a common theme of soft, rounded organic shapes that evoke the ephemeral and almost alien life of the sea. Harper’s sculptures mimic marine organisms and ecosystems, with forms grouped together in small reef-like colonies or traversing the built environment in migratory patterns. Her drawings transpose these structures onto a flat plane, focusing on geometric swathes of opaque color and clean, strong lines. This variety of media is typical of her work, stemming from a multidisciplinary background in art, architecture, and graphic design. Info: YI Gallery, 56 Bogart Street, Brooklyn, Duration: 10/4-15/5/2021, Days & Hours: Sat 14:00-18:00, https://gallery-yi.com

Rachel Whiteread employs the formal language of Minimalism, taking cues from its emphasis on geometric seriality, yet adds a quietly emotive aspect, maintaining an acute sensitivity to objects’ minor details and subtle markers of use and human irregularity. Over the past four decades, she has used the method of casting on both “low” materials as well as more traditional sculptural materials, such as bronze. She employs existing artifacts and spacesto evoke and explore corporeal presence. Notably, her deft use of negative space can imply a thing that’s gone and been reincarnated. In the exhibition, “Internal Objects”,  this suggestion of haunting, or ghostliness, is manifested in a different way, she has again created cabin-like structures but has, for the first time, eschewed casting existing objects in favor of building original ones. “Poltergeist” (2020) and “Döppelganger” (2020–21), which will occupy the two main rooms of the Gagosian London gallery, are made of found wood and metal that has been meticulously overpainted in white household paint. Info: Gagosian Gallery, 20 Grosvenor Hill, London, Duration: 12/4-5/6/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00 (by appointment, book here), https://gagosian.com

Francesco Clemente in his exhibition “Fragments of Now”, introduces a new body of work. The nine monumental canvases on view find Clemente drawing inspiration from Homer’s “Iliad”, a cornerstone text of Western culture first transcribed in the 8th century B.C., describing the Trojan War as a sprawling conflict between and among both humans and gods. Each painting in the exhibition depicts an archetypal Corinthian helmet, a classic form from Ancient Greek culture, accompanied by a carefully selected fragment of Homer’s epic poem. Through their combination of bold repetition and subtle variation, these works together suggest that ancient Western preoccupations with fate, hubris, memory, and glory – and their cousins, power, violence, illusion, and virtue – are timeless, eternal forces shaping human culture and connecting its past to the present. Strongly influenced by history, mythology, philosophy and literature, Francesco Clemente’s distinctive figuration and distinctive lexicon of metaphorical imagery are vehicles for an ongoing exploration of spirituality, identity, mysticism, and the self. For the last five decades, Clemente has explored the world in a state of flux and shifting consciousness, inspired by his nomadic sojourns to places such as Afghanistan, Brazil, Jamaica, and, most significantly, India. Info: Vito Schnabel Gallery, 455 West 19th Street, New York, duration: 16/4-15/5/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat by appointment, book here, www.vitoschnabel.com

The  Californian conceptual artist, Allen Ruppersberg in his first solo show in Switzerland shows his recent collages. These works calculate the involvement of their viewer as a social participant, who enjoys pop culture objects such as postcards, calendars, books, comics and records. Shifted into the art context, the result is a combinatorial interplay of text and image, fact and fiction. Ruppersberg moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1960s with the goal of becoming an illustrator, but soon became active in an emerging scene led by artists such as John Baldessari, Ed Ruscha, William Leavitt and others who explored the intersection of language and image through the lens of mass culture. His early projects, included environments made from found objects, ironic narrative photographic works, and a hand-copied novel-launched a career-long practice of creating works that encourage both reading and viewing, weaving fact with fiction. Since those early years, Ruppersberg has worked actively between Los Angeles, New York, and Europe. His wide- ranging approach is unified by his regular use of everyday American culture, including books, posters, newspapers and magazines, records, old films, and other vintage objects drawn from his extensive collections of source material. Info: Mai 36 Galerie, Rämistrasse 37, Zurich, Duration: 16/4-29/5/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:00-18:30, Sat 11:00-17:00, www.mai36.com

Nilbar Güreş solo exhibition “Sour as a Lemon” focuses on the last six years of her career. Güreş works in a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, installation, photography, film, performance, collage and drawing. Important elements of her work are the aspects of women’s lives and relationships that are inclusive and show solidarity, as well as the way in which they integrate their worlds into existing systems. The artist makes seemingly normal landscapes and geographies which she interlaces, however, with minimal adjustments, thereby conferring on them a touch of surrealism and a sense of the absurd. Textiles are an important medium for the artist, which she incorporates in her photographs, collages and sculptures, in order to reflect perceptions of the body and social structures of possession. Characteristic of Güreş’ collages are pictorial and graphic elements to which she adds fragments of textiles. In her collages the artist frequently takes up themes related specifically to the sexes, questioning conventional female roles within patriarchal family structures and symbolising the collective empowerment of women resulting from processes of solidarity. Info: Kunsthaus Pasquart, Seevorstadt 71, Biel/Bienne, Duration: 17/4-13/6/2021, Days & Hours: Wed & Fri 12:00-18:00, Thu 12:00-20:00, sat-sun 11:00-18:00, www.pasquart.ch

Beginning in the early 1970s, lifelong Californian Richard Jackson’s Wall Paintings, Stacks, and Room-themed installations gave rise to a series of landmark innovations in painting, sculpture, performance, installation, and the relations between them. Jackson’s interest in the larger possibilities of artmaking and how it can be done extends to books, as well. Organized by Dagny Corcoran, a longtime friend of Jackson’s and author of the expansive chronology in Hauser & Wirth Publishers’ 2020 monograph on the artist, this “Book & Printed Matter Lab” presentation highlights Jackson’s artist’s books and supporting archival material, displaying the artist’s preoccupation with the ambiguous requirements of codex, content, format, and purpose of a publication. Jackson’s work is process-oriented, and the structural aspect of his installations involves a high level of craftsmanship and engineering. However, the final application of paint is generated through an automated process which Jackson calls ‘activation.’ He equips his ‘painting machines’ with a network of pipes and hoses which, when deployed, cause violent eruptions of paint that immerse the work and surrounding area. The finished installations remain in the aftermath of this extreme and unpredictable performative action. Info: Hauser & Wirth Gallery, 901 East 3rd Street, Los Angeles, Duration: 20/4-6/6/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:30-18:00, www.hauserwirth.com

Featuring one of the most commanding and rarely seen bodies of work by Lygia Pape, the exhibition “Tupinambá” introduces her deeply Brazilian “Tupinambá series” to a North American audience for the first time. Pape devised a wholly original language during her career to investigate the physical and experiential life of the body, and with this series achieves an unprecedented union of the geometric and the figurative within the wider context of her oeuvre. Here, Pape proposes a refreshingly divergent understanding of Brazil’s modernist history, suggesting that the aesthetic prerogatives of the present are firmly rooted in the nation’s indigenous past. The series thus reflects Pape’s longtime interest in indigenous Brazilian peoples and cultural practices—most notably that of anthropophagy, a ceremonial variant of cannibalism practiced by the Tupinambá people. She describes it as follows: “The Tupinambá devoured their prisoners, their enemy, not from hunger as in cannibalism, but to swallow and assimilate the spiritual capacities of the other”. Anthropophagy thus possesses a dual valence, in one sense it is literal and ritualistic, and in another, cultural and metaphorical. Info: Hauser & Wirth Gallery, 901 East 3rd Street, Los Angeles, Duration: 24/4-1/8/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:30-18:00 (by appointment only, book here), www.hauserwirth.com

Andile Dyalvane in “iThongo” unveils an extensive collection of sculptural ceramic seating. In homage to his ancestors, this body of work traveled in its entirety to Dyalvane’s rural homestead in Ngobozana, Eastern Cape. The exhibition comprises a series of sculptural stools, chairs and benches, exhibited in the custom of Xhosa ceremonial gatherings, in a circular arrangement around a fire hearth and herbal offerings. Hand- coiled in terracotta clay, their voluptuous, rounded bases give rise to sculptural backrests stretching up to almost a meter tall. The intricate form of each is based on a single pictogram or glyph from a series of close to 200 symbols that Dyalvane has created to denote important words in Xhosa life and which also relate to the natural world and more universal human themes and concepts. Dyalvane’s symbolic lexicon has been an ongoing project, born of his interest in preserving traditional Xhosa knowledge, cultural practices and language. The symbols began as calligraphic ink drawings that he has codified over the years, dating back to the work he produced for his first solo show. Their forms also emerge from and dissolve into the sculptures’ clay surface, an effect created using tools such as carved stamps and linocut tiles. His coded language thus becomes embedded into both the form and the skin of each piece. Info: Friedman Benda Gallery, 20 West 22nd Street, New York, Duration: 29/4-22/5/2021, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.friedmanbenda.com