ART NEWS:June 02

Abigail DeVille’s works in his solo exhibition “Seeds of Empire” realised during a residence of several months at the American Academy in Rome in 2017-2018. Mannequins, dressed with African masks, covered with wire, fragments of mirrors and waste, carry within them the images of great historical figures Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. Her sculptures, made up of series of objects fused together, immerse the viewer in a universe where oppression, discrimination and racial violence are exposed without concession for all to see. Her work focuses on the cosmologies of marginalized people and places. Her works, installations and environments are marked by a multitude of historical and cultural references representing the complexity of racial identity in the United States. As witness to her time, Abigail DeVille is a bearer of stories through the bringing to light of testimonies, memories of survival: her own and those of all the unknown Americans who have been cast to the margins of misery and isolation. Info:  Galerie Michel Rein, 42 rue de Turenne, Paris, France, Duration: 3/6-24/7/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, http://michelrein.com

This is the first time that Tramonto Spaventoso” (2019–20), AlberOehlen’s provocative and personal response to the Rothko Chapel in Houston is being exhibited in its entirety. The paintings are installed in a custom-built octagonal structure in the Grand Theater Gallery of the Marciano Art Foundation, reflecting the layout of the original chapel. Oehlen uses abstract, figurative, and collaged elementsto disrupt the histories and conventions of modern painting. While championing self-consciously “bad” painting characterized by crude drawing and jarring coloration, he infuses expressive gesture with Surrealist attitude, openly disparaging the quest for reliable form and stable meaning. In the eight large-scale paintings that constitute the “Tramonto Spaventoso” project, Oehlen variously interprets and dramatically transforms John Graham’s Tramonto Spaventoso (Terrifying Sunset, 1940–49), a painting by the Russian-born American modernist that Oehlen discovered in the 1990s and has been fascinated with ever since. Info:  Marciano Art Foundation, 4357 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, USA, Duration: 10/6-24/7/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-17:00 (by appointment only, book here), https://gagosian.com

The group exhibition “Sweat” is the result of two years of intensive research. The show is dedicated to the phenomenon of bodies that act together and shape their present. Breaking a sweat in the face of violent attempts to control the human body represents an artistic strategy of resistance. If we are witnessing the global scale of systemic injustice at an unprecedented scale, we are also assisting to the impressive growth of alliances of transnational resistance movements. The exhibition brings together more than twenty artistic voices that respond to several conditions of political pressure. The artistic positions range from present-day to pioneering works from the 1970s and ‘80s that mobilised feminist and postcolonial movements in art and society, opening up historical perspectives on artistic languages that are embedded in forms of radical social emancipation. The artists make use of dynamic media such as dance, film, and video that attest to ephemeral civil choreographies and activate collaborative and archival processes, building on communities and their cultures. Info: Curator: Anna Schneider and Raphael Fonseca, Assistant Curator: Elena Setzer, Haus der Kunst, Prinzregentenstraße 1, Munich, Germany, Duration: 11-6-2021-9/1/2022, Days & Hours: Mon-Wed & Sun 10:00-18:00, Thu 10:00-22:00, Fri-sat 10:00-20:00, https://hausderkunst.de

The exhibition “Hard Copies” shows a selection of photographs from Stephan Keppel’s four extensive series of city portraits. Also presented will be a small portrait-in-progress of the artist’s visual answers to his first encounter with Graz in April 2021.Keppel’s way of working is marked by intensive processes of walking, collecting, scanning, and printing (and rescanning and reprinting). Through his attention to detail in portraying structures and architecture and his awareness of the constant recycling of the built environment, Keppel’s images are devoid of the usual safe distance with which cities turn into cityscapes. Instead, as the artist and writer Adam Bell poignantly remarked, Keppel’s “repurposed images function as building blocks for [his] own metropolis, while also pointing to the regenerative and iterative process of both the built world and [his own] image making”. So far, Keppel has translated four cities into books, in close collaboration with the designer Hans Gremmen and Fw:Books. Info: Curator: Taco Hidde Bakker, Camera Austria, Lendkai 1, Graz, Austria, Duration: 12/6-15/8/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-18:00, https://camera-austria.at

An emblematic group of Roger-Edgar Gillet’s figurative paintings from the early 1960s all the way through to his mature, late 1990s works is on show at Galerie Nathalie Obadia. Attesting to his absolute engagement with painting, this exhibition sheds light on an artist who was on the fringes of the avant-garde and who left a very personal mark on the postwar artistic landscape. After meeting critics Charles Estienne and Michel Tapié, theoretician of informal art, the artist turned to abstraction in the early 1950s, a period of time when the movement was booming. His encounter with El Greco, by way of the gaze of “Cardinal Fernando Niño de Guevara” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, left him deeply moved and played a decisive role in his shift toward a figurative art, where portrait took center stage. At the turn of the 1960s, knowing he was ready to move away from abstraction, the artist progressively embarked on this new aesthetic adventure with an open mind that was untethered to the dictates of fashion. Info: Galerie Nathalie Obadia, 3 rue du Cloître Saint-Merri, Paris, France, Duration: 12/6-24/7/2021, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 11:00-19:00, https://nathalieobadia.com

Simphiwe Ndzube in “Oracles of the Pink Universe”, his first US solo museum exhibition,  presents eight new works exploring the interplay between magical realism and history. The exhibition integrates themes related to power, conflict, and the search for freedom through a Pink Universe, an imaginative world that combines fantasy with the history of Ndzube’s post-apartheid South Africa. A genre first conceptualized in Latin America, magical realism infuses reality with elements of the fantastical. The artworks an expansion of Ndzube’s visual search that explores a mythological place, drawing from his personal experiences, imagination, and art history. He will present exclusive works that depart from Hieronymus Bosch’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490–1500), depicting a theatrical space where heaven, earth and hell intersect. As visitors step into this alternate universe, they will be confronted with artworks that explore themes of conflict, tension, resilience, strength and a fight for human rights. Info: Denver Art Museum, 100 W. 14th Avenue Pkwy, Denver, USA, Duration: 13/6-10/10/021, Days & Hours: Daily 10:00-17:00, www.denverartmuseum.org

The new exhibition of Alan Rath’s work surveys the 35-year oeuvre of the sculptor and electronic art pioneer,spanning the entirety of the artist’s career and incorporating every type of work he made, this encyclopedic show navigates the breadth of an extraordinary practice. Beginning in 1985, Rath made work with technical materials like aluminum, steel, wires, and circuitry, in combination with cathode ray tubes displaying computer-generated video animations of body parts : roving eyes, waving hands, or lips with protruding and wagging tongues. Some pieces incorporated found elements like metal cages, wooden crates, or a photographer’s tripod. In all of these early works, their inner workings are, somewhat indecently, exposed. By 1988, he began making sculptures with audio speakers, fascinated more by their motion than their ability to transmit sound; their movement uncannily simulates breathing as they puff, pant, vibrate, wheeze and throb. Though Rath’s works are revolutionary in their masterful blend of high tech with high art, the technology is always subservient to the form or concept of the sculpture itself. Info: Hosfelt Gallery, 260 Utah Street, San Francisco, USA, Duration: 19/6-31/7/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Sat-Sun 10:0-17:30, Thu 11:00-19:00 (schedule your visit where), http://hosfeltgallery.com