ART NEWS: May 03

For “Virtual Care”, their first solo exhibition in the UK, Pakui Hardware (Neringa Cerniauskaite and Ugnius Gelguda) present a newly devised commission created specially for Baltic’s level 2 gallery space, exploring the subject of robotic and virtual care at a particularly significant moment when we find ourselves more concerned than ever with the quality and accessibility of healthcare. For their new installation the space has been transformed into an environment that resembles a clinical surgery room where human presence – with the exception of the visitor themselves – is replaced by technology. Glass objects affixed to a hanging surgical lamp sculpture will create a sense of warmth and care, in contrast to the alienated coolness of its steel arms that make anthropomorphic reference to surgeon’s hands. Suspended between physical and virtual, bodily and digital, transparent thermoformed or resin ‘bodies’ will be abstracted into sculptural biomorphic shapes that are both present and erased at the same time. Info: Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, S Shore Rd, Gateshead, England, Duration: 19/5-3/10/2021, Days & Hours: Wed-sun 10:30-18:00 (last entry 17:00), https://baltic.art

Doug Fishbone is an internationally renowned artist who creates projects and exhibitions which unearth, question and examine societal misconceptions through humour and manipulation of context. In “Please Gamble Responsibly”, his first solo exhibition in Ireland, Fishbone creates a sculptural spectacle – mirroring the housing and rental market – and invites visitors to wander around his ‘ghost estate’. Replete with broken windows, boarded up balconies and surrounded with shabby corrugated fencing, it offers those that successfully enter – where the barrier is compromised – more than an abandoned half-built interior. Inside, Fishbone presents a free-wheeling examination of property and value, two notions which are repeatedly conflated to toxic effect by our global economic system. The exhibition presents the artist’s largest and most challenging work to date. Resonating as a formal sculpture in its own right and capturing some the empty eeriness of the original Castle Lake complex (which serves as its inspiration) Fishbone’s structure offers an unexpected stage-set for a meditation on wider issues of economy and folly. Info: Crawford Art Gallery, Emmet Place, Cork, Ireland, Duration: 21/5-29/8/221, Days & Hours: Mon-Wed & Fri-Sat 10:00-17:00, Thu 10:00-20:00, https://crawfordartgallery.ie

Now coming to Europe from Japan, the exhibition “Dress Code” presents fashion as a game that underscores the daily transformation as an instrument for the articulation of our personality. On show are fashion classics as well as the imaginative takes on them that fuel the current stylistic pluralism. The exhibition presents a comprehensive survey of contemporary fashion by seminal designers set into an insightful dialogue with contemporary art. It examines different and opposing attitudes to fashion—those of participants and spectators, individualists and conformists. Our choice of clothing is presented as a communicative game that can lead us to a new understanding of our approach to fashion, how we use it and what it means to us. In addition to numerous other offline and online offers, a diversified supporting program including film screenings, workshops, and panel discussions address buzzwords such as diversity, internet-hype, and sustainability and stimulate public discourse. Key topics such as gender-fluid fashion, trends in the (post-)digital age or neo-ecology as a mega trend will be examined and critically scrutinised from the perspective of various fashion experts. Info: Curators: Chinatsu Makiguchi, Makoto Ishizeki, Michimasa Ogata,Eva Kraus and Susanne Kleine, Bundeskunsthalle, Helmut-Kohl-Allee 4, Bonn, Germany, Duration: 21/5-12/9/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed 10:00-21:00, Thu-Sat 10:00-19:00, www.bundeskunsthalle.de

“Ouverture”, the inaugural exhibition at the Bourse de Commerce, strives to highlight the relationship that artists can have with an exhibition space, their relationship to a museum and its visitors, through works that can be situated outside of the museographic framework. With “I… I… I…” (2019), Ryan Gander stages an animatronic mouse with a stutter, nestled in a hole in the wall, surprising visitors as they wait for the elevator. Trapped in its animated “loop”, this unlikely mouse, condemned to live cycle after cycle of the same experience to the point of exhaustion, encourages us to think and even smile about our own condition. With “Offspring” (2018), Pierre Huyghe offers in the Studio, a “black box” located in the basement of the Bourse de Commerce, an original installation in the manner of a sensory and poetic experience, outside temporality and open to infinity, a journey of sorts. At the top of the Medici Column, Philippe Parreno’s light installation “Mont Analogue” (2001-2020) flickers. It has been specially redesigned for the opening of the Bourse de Commerce. Info: Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, 2 rue de Viarmes, Paris, France, Duration: 22/5-31/12/2021, Days & Hours: Mon-Thu & Sat-Sun 11:00-19:00, Fri 1:00-21:00, www.pinaultcollection.com

The exhibition “Bruce Nauman: Contrapposto Studies”, brings together older works and the most recent ones, some of which are new or have never been exhibited in Europe before. The exhibition was conceived as a choreographed totality, with the earlier works establishing a context for the reception of the Contrapposto series, in order to facilitate an intuitive understanding of the logic of Nauman’s work and of the founding themes of this work: the sound, the performance, the artist’s studio, and the relationship between body and the physical, psychological, and cultural spaces it occupies. The exhibition focuses on a series of recent video installations that Nauman has developed over the last years and are related to a single-channel video from 1968, “Walk with Contrapposto”, in which we see the artist walk in a narrow wooden corridor built inside his studio while trying to maintain the contrapposto pose. It represents the first time in which Nauman has explicitly revisited an earlier work to use it as the point of departure for his practice. Initially, he aimed to go beyond the limits imposed by the technology available in the late 1960s, the time when he produced Walk with Contrapposto”. Info: Curators: Carlos Basualdo and Caroline Bourgeois, Punta della Dogana, Dorsoduro 2, Venice, Italy, Duration: 23/5/2021-9/1/2022, Days & Hours: Mon & Wed-Sun 10:00-19:00, www.palazzograssi.it

The exhibition “A Vegetal Encounter” proposes a meditation on the vegetal world, and what may be learnt from it. Conceived as a dialogue, between three artists, it reveals the practices of the three artists, whose work slowly deconstructs the artificial wall between ourselves and nature, which is devastating our ecosystems, our life and our health. Patricia Domínguez presents five futuristic totem figures containing ethnobotanical reproductions from Wellcome Collection and the Museo de America , and pieces from South America and Europe owned by the Real Jardín Botánico and the Real Academia de La Historia. She thus gives voice to the narratives of violence and healing incarnated by the material displayed. Ingela Ihrman’s silent installation of corporeal algae A great seaweed day refers to her convalescence period by the seashore and thus suggests links between her intestinal flora and that of the oceans. Eduardo Navarro’s expansive and contemplative drawings use biodegradable envelopes containing tree seeds. At the end of the exhibition, the seeds will be returned to nature and, in contact with the land, they will activate reconnecting us with the holistic humus. Written in collaboration with philosopher Michael Marder, Navarro’s performative instructions (encouraging us to imagine how a plant would respond) invite us to embark on a new path to vegetal enlightenment. Info: La Casa Encendida, Ronda de Valencia 2, Madrid, Spain, Duration: 28/5-19/9/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-sun 10:00-22:00, www.lacasaencendida.es

The exhibition “Art and Race Matters” reveals 50 works throughout 53 years of Robert Colescott’s career that both bring to the surface and challenge diversity and racial stereotypes. The exhibition invites a renewed examination of the artist, whose work is still as challenging, provocative, and relevant now as it was when he burst onto the art scene over five decades ago. Presenting works from across Colescott’s career, the exhibition traces the progression of his stylistic development and the impact of place on his practice, revealing the diversity and range of his oeuvre: from his adaptations of Bay Area Figuration in the 1950s and 60s, to his signature graphic style of the 1970s, and the dense, painterly figuration of his later work. Art and Race Matters also explores prevalent themes in Colescott’s work, including the complexities of identity, societal standards of beauty, the reality of the American Dream, and the role of the artist as arbiter and witness in contemporary life. Info: Curators: Lowery Stokes Sims and Matthew Weseley, Sarasota Art Museum, 1001 S Tamiami Trail, Sarasota, Florida, United States, Duration: 29/5-31/10/2021, Days & Hours: Mon & Wed-St 10:00-17:00, Sun 11:00-17:00, www.sarasotaartmuseum.org

Yves Zurstrassen in his solo exhibition “Red, Blue and Yellow” presents a new series of works. Born in 1956 in Liège, Yves Zurstrassen lives and works between Brussels, Belgium and Viens, France. Zurstrassen’s work is always moving, going from lyrical abstraction to abstract expressionism and vice versa. The Belgian artist develops a singular creating process and uses a very particular technique that reflects the desire to go beyond temporality. His approach plays with the principle of collage and take-off of various forms of paper on successive layers of color. So the layers of pigments add up and subtract, letting emerge by fragments the skin of the canvas or the archeology of its construction. Far away from any formalism, the artist works the gesture in a wild succession of applications and withdrawals. Yves Zurstrassen confronts his spontaneous, sometimes violent, body movements with the delicacy of the floral, stellar and wave-like motives he uses. He creates wefts and networks, bringing to light the rhythm. The gesture is lyrical and makes prevail the musicality. Info: Xippas Gallery, Rue des Sablons 6, Geneva, Switzerland, Duration: 29/5-31/7/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-13:00 & 14:00-18:30, Sat 12:00-19:00, www.xippas.com

The 2021 edition of the Borås Art Biennial presents the work of over twenty Swedish and international artists. “Deep listening for longing” tunes into past and present imaginings of the city—and beyond. Learning how to listen deeply to each other’s experience is a way to build consciousness and a shared understanding of the world. New forms of collectivity are determined or defined by the depth of relationships and shared longing. It is the simple interactions that connect us, from how we relate to the people we encounter in our daily lives to how we show up in our relationships and how we exist within communities. These actions create the patterns that give rise to our social fabric. Artworks will be presented in public spaces, along the Viskan River, and at the Borås Art Museum and the Textile Museum of Sweden. Many of the biennial artists enact an advanced form of listening that turns inwards, while at the same time finding a mode of outward deep listening that attempts to document, present, and understand the sociocultural contexts, histories, and politics of our time. Info: Artistic Director: Eva Eriksdotter, Borås Art Biennial 2021, Borås, Sweden, Duration: 29/5-26/9/2021, www.borasartbiennial.se

Comprising 23 works dating from 2015 until 2021, the exhibition “Heaps of Brocade and Ash 锦灰堆”  explores the mainstays of Huang Yuxing’s visual language that pervade his artistic practice. Centered around humans’ relationship with the natural world, works on display present landscapes imagined, abstracted or otherwise in an electric palette that is all about individualistic, personal expression. Best known for his often large-scale and vibrant paintings, Huang graduated from the mural painting department of Beijing’s Central Academy for Fine Arts in 2000. Shortly after, a formative trip to Lhasa inspired a lifelong interest in both Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, which would go on to lend his work a spiritual quality grounded in humanity. From its infinite passage to fleeting moments crystallized on canvas, time is a recurring theme in Huang Yuxing’s works. Oftentimes symbolized by water, the motif is also visible in the paintings’ echoes and nods to historic artistic movements that span both east and west, brought together in pulsating canvases that transcend time and defy categorization. Info: Almine Rech Gallery, Abdijstraat 20 Rue de l’Abbaye, Brussels, Belgium, Duration: 3/6-31/7/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11;00-19:00, www.alminerech.com