ART NEWS: May 01

Senga Nengudi’s exhibition “Topologies” traces the expansive range of the artist’s career and context from the 1970s to today through a combination of more than 70 artworks, including sculptures, environmental installations, and archival documentation. Chronicling the entire arc of Nengudi’s oeuvre, the exhibition begins with a gallery dedicated to one of the artist’s earliest immersive installations. Titled “Black and Red Ensemble” this work is on view for the first time since 1971. The exhibition also features Nengudi’s rarely exhibited “Water Compositions”, an in-depth presentation of the artist’s iconic R.S.V.P. sculptures made of sand-filled pantyhose, and documentation of the artist’s collaborative and performance-based works from her time spent working between New York and Los Angeles. The exhibition also features individual works by Nengudi’s contemporaries and long-time collaborators to honor the ways in which these artists and their creative outputs were intimately connected and intertwined. The exhibition also focuses in greater depth on Nengudi’s work in recent decades, including her experiments with spray paint and dry cleaner’s plastic from the 1990s, her ephemeral sand installations, and the artist’s first video installation, which she produced when she was an artist-in-residence at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia in 2007. Info: Curator: Amanda Sroka, Assistant Curator: Alexis Assam, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, Duration: 2/5-25/7/2021, Days & Hours: Fri 10:00-20:45, Sat-sun 10:00-17:00, https://philamuseum.org

Ranging from the fundamental, existential aspect of safety, to regulations of the social sphere, to the technological impact on the field of security, the exhibition “Safe and Sound” by Aldo Giannotti, the artist’s first anthological exhibition in an Italian institution, invites visitors to reflect upon their own position towards these concepts. Regulations, laws, and given behaviour settings of different social contexts provide the content to Giannotti’s confrontation with said notions. The exhibition welcomes visitors into a space for exercising potential alternatives and challenges them to bend their perception of regulations and their own behaviour and decision-taking processes within deeply embedded structures. Security is defined as the freedom of danger. Giannotti asks what freedoms we give up in order to obtain our safety and probes the paradoxical nature of this negotiation between freedom and security. Our current reality turns precisely such questions into a daily practice and forces us to find answers collectively. Investigating these topics, the exhibition merges the museum’s microcosm with the broader social environment. Info: Curator: Lorenzo Balbi, Assistant Curator: Sabrina Samorì, MAMbo – Museum of Modern Art of Bologna, via Don Minzoni 14, Bologna, Italy, Duration: 5/5-5/9-2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 16:00-29:00, Sat-Sun by required booking the day before the visit 10:00-20:00, www.mambo-bologna.org

The exhibition “Light Out of Darkness” focuses on Bruce Conner’s experimental films with a representative selection of nine works. Among these is “Crossroads” (1976), a film that assembles footage of the first U.S. underwater atom bomb tests at Bikini Atoll in 1946 into a 36-minute study on the horror and sublimity of this apocalyptic event. Bruce Conner’s work in various media is radical and wide-ranging, at once hauntingly beautiful and horrifyingly bleak; it is political, subversive, and powered by a sensual immediacy that gets under the skin. Many of his early collages, assemblages and installations are made of low-quality, ephemeral materials such as nylon, wax or worn textiles and hence are too fragile to be exhibited except on very rare occasions. “Light Out of Darkness” references a solo exhibition project of the same name for the University Art Museum at Berkeley, California, which never actually took place because of Conner’s refusal to compromise in his dealings with institutions, whose rules for artists he would not accept. The title “Light Out of Darkness” emphasizes the experimental character of Conner’s filmic output, which in his early works, especially, resembles a brilliant probing of human perception. Info: Museum Tinguely, Paul Sacher-Anlage 1, Basel, Switzerland, Duration: 5/5-28/11/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.tinguely.ch

A massive bronze sculpture has been installed at Rockefeller Center as part of a new multi-part public art exhibition. Designed by Sanford Biggers, “Oracle” stands 153 cm tall at the foot of the Channel Gardens and is a continuation of the artist’s recent Chimera sculpture series. As the first campus-wide takeover by a solo artist at Rockefeller Center, the exhibition also includes a flag installation at the iconic flagpoles, small-scale sculptures, a virtual experience, and murals, in addition to the sculpture that weighs over 11.500 kgr. The artist also created a new flag design that features a wave illustration, meant to represent wind and water elements and reference ideas of movement. Biggers’ site-specific installations will be on view throughout the plaza, including the glass displays at 45 Rockefeller Plaza. “Chimera “sculptures are staged with backdrops and stills from Biggers’ recent video works. The murals on view throughout the campus feature Biggers’ “Codex” series, which consists of mixed media paintings and sculptures done on or made from antique quilts. In the concourse of Rockefeller Center, there’s a 381 cm mural titled “Just Us”, a play on the word “justice”. Info: Rockefeller Center, 45 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, USA, Duration: 8/5-29/6/2021, www.rockefellercenter.com

Sanya Kantarovsky works across mediums, including sculpture, animation and curation, with painting remaining at the center of his practice. Teeming with wry humor and unearthly narratives, Kantarovsky’s paintings propose scenarios of turmoil and investigate liminal spaces, physical proximities, affect, and cruelty. Sanya Kantarovsky’s group of representational paintings, that are on show in his solo exhibition “The House of the Spider” was made between the months of December 2019 and March of 2021. It involves a range of subjects and motifs, rendered primarily in oil and watercolour. In many of the paintings, subjects are positioned in monochrome colour fields which function as stages, while in others, interactions unfold against florid representations of nature. Most of the images suggest a preceding and succeeding frame, offering a parable-like narrative without a discernible moral resolution. This ethical ambiguity threads throughout the paintings, staging an aesthetic enchantment alongside cruelty and chaos. Such fractures become material — binder separates from pigment in unsightly, evaporated puddles, which coexist with indulgently virtuosic passages and complex occasions of color. Info: Modern Art, 4 – 8 Helmet Row, London, England, Duration: 8/5-12/6/2021, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 12:00-18:00, https://modernart.net

Featuring nearly 90 works by a diverse group of artists from countries including Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Qatar, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, and the UAE, the exhibition “The Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s–1980s” explores the development of abstraction in the Arab world via paintings, sculpture, and works on paper dating from the 1950s through the 1980s. By looking critically at the history and historiography of mid-twentieth-century abstraction, the exhibition considers art from North Africa and West Asia as integral to the discourse on global modernism. Examining how and why artists investigated the expressive capacities of line, color, and texture, Taking Shape foregrounds a number of abstract movements that developed in the region at a time when individual artists and artist collectives grappled with questions of authenticity, national and regional identity, and the decolonization of culture. Info: Curators: Suheyla Takesh and Lynn Gumpert, McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 2101 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts, USA, Duration: 12/5-13/6/2021, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 10:00-17:00 (by appointment, book here), www.bc.edu

A major new commission by Christian Newby, is displayed in Edinburgh’s City Dome exhibition space. Responding to this remarkable building, originally built to house an astronomical telescope, Christian has created a large-scale, highly decorative, architectural intervention in the form of a nine-metre-wide textile, “Flower-Necklace-Cargo-Ne”, which reshapes the space. The images depicted on the tapestry are an intuitive reaction to typical rug and textile design and subvert traditional motifs such as flowers, geometric patterns, birds and shells. In this new work these motifs are pictorially contained by a large net that envelopes the whole work and alludes to our shared experience of enclosure during the Coronavirus lockdown. Christian’s practice focuses on experimental textile production. This new work for his largest exhibition to date combines artist’s mark-making with industrial carpet tufting to explore how questions of labour, authorship and materiality define the fine and applied arts. Info: Collective, City Observatory, 38 Calton Hill, Edinburgh, Scotland, Duration: 13/5-29/8/2021, Days & Hours: Thu-sun 10:00-16:00, www.collective-edinburgh.art

Terry Winters’s exhibition “Table of Contents” includes nine paintings on linen, five paintings on paper, and a set of twenty-six grisaille drawings. All are being exhibited for the first time. Winters’s work returns us to the life of abstraction on molecular, cosmic, and compositional levels. His materials inform his images, often in surprisingly direct fashion. The paintings on linen, most measuring seven feet tall by five feet wide, are made with oil, wax, and resin. With careful attention to the attributes of his pigments, Winters achieves a color palette of exceptional depth and vibrance. The paintings on paper, each filling a large sheet from edge to edge, are created through a parallel process, and the flatness of their support transmits both the immediacy of his markings and the imaginary spaces of their content. Over the last four decades, Terry Winters has expanded the concerns of abstract painting by engaging contemporary concepts of the natural world. Many of his earliest paintings depict organic forms reminiscent of botanical imagery. Over time, his range of themes expanded to include the architecture of living systems, mathematical diagrams, musical notation, and new orders of data visualization. Info: Matthew Marks,Gallery, 522 West 22nd Street, New York, USA, Duration: 14/5-26/6/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 12:00-18:00, by appointment (book here), https://matthewmarks.com

The group exhibition “And if I devoted my life to one of its feathers?’ brings together artists whose practices engage in the struggle for collective survival and the processes involved in restoring disrupted social bonds. Indigenous epistemologies are understood as central in order to explore the possibilities of interweaving the poetic gesture with radical political action. With their works, the more than 35 exhibiting artists (from the Amazon region to Australia, from Guatemala to India) seek not only to awaken public consciousness to the realities of environmental exploitation and destruction, but also to deconstruct traditional Western patriarchal models, gender roles, and enduring colonial and racist discourses. The exhibited works critically examine the breakneck pace with which raw materials are mined and the environmental destruction inflicted by neoliberalism. Indigenous positionalities burst through colonial legacies to remind us of the continuation of extractive logics in the 21st century. Works exploring solidarity based and anticolonial feminisms highlight the struggle against patriarchal capitalism and state oppression, while others tell stories of reverse migrations and forms of affective belonging. Info: Curator: Miguel A. López, Assistant Curator: Laura Amann, Kunsthalle Wien, Museumsquartier, Museumsplatz 1, Vienna, Austria, Duration: 15/5-26/9/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 12:00-18:00, https://kunsthallewien.at

Across multiple outdoor sites in Glasgow, The Common Guild presents Sam Durant’s “Iconoclasm”, a series of drawings depicting acts of destruction enacted upon public statues and monuments. Based on images gleaned from various historical and contemporary sources, including newspapers and television reports, Durant’s graphite drawings render moments of intense disruption and call on current debates about how we relate to symbols in public space. Produced here as large-scale billboards and street posters, the 14 original graphite drawings use a fugitive, labour-intensive form to document fleeting yet significant moments of historical change, commemorating the action. Their appearance in various sites around the city draws attention to questions of representation on our streets: who gets to occupy them and why. Scenes depicted include religiously motivated acts of destruction from 16^th Century European Protestants to contemporary Islamic fundamentalism; politically and culturally motivated acts of image-breaking such as the 1871 toppling of the Column Vendome in Paris, in which the artist Gustav Courbet participated, and against communist statues in Europe and Africa; the cultural revolution in China; removals of colonial statues in the Caribbean, Central and South America; and nationalist uprisings of 1956 in Hungary and Egypt, among others. Info: Public sites across Glasgow, England, Duration: 17/5-11/7/2021

Mercedes Azpilicueta presents her first UK solo exhibition, entitled “Bondage of Passions”. Her work brings together marginal historical figures, fictional characters and gendered mythologies from South America’s colonial past. Fuelled by collaboration with dancers, writers, researchers and craftspeople, her installations often take the form of intricate set designs, theatrical props, soundtracks and scores for a live performance that doesn’t yet exist, and where the viewer is invited to take centre stage. Azpilicueta navigates across multiple geographies, chronologies and fields of knowledge, ranging from literature and art history to popular music and street culture, in a loving pursuit of subversive and contested historical figures —queer, feminist, exiled and unheard voices from the past— who haunt her videos, sculptures and textiles. The exhibition offers a speculative vision of Catalina de Erauso, a 17th-century nun from the Basque Country who travelled to the New World, where s/he lived under male identities and became a ruthless lieutenant in the Spanish colonial army. Azpilicueta’s show presents newly-commissioned Jacquard tapestries alongside a new body of sculptures, costumes and props. Info: Gasworks, 155 Vauxhall Street, London, England, Duration: 19/5-4/7/2021, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 12:00-18:00, https://gasworks.org.uk