ART NEWS: Jan.02

An exhibition dedicated to Alberto Biasi, a leading figure in the field of Italian kinetic art is opening in Paris. Throughout his career, he has remained committed to the study of the phenomena of the retina and the ways of optically connecting the observer and artwork. At the age of 22, Biasi founded the Gruppo N together with Ennio Chiggio, Toni Costa, Edoardo Landi and Alfredo Massironi. It was during this period that he carried out his first “optico-dynamic” experiments, rejecting the idea of a “classical” perspective in order to focus on the visual experiences that these works provoked in the viewer. On show are his “Torsioni” that exemplify  the technique developed by Alberto Biasi whereby a monochrome PVC surface is cut into thin strips of equal width and then recomposed by twisting the plane through 180°. Such technique results in a geometric configuration that moves and “vibrates” depending on the positioning of the onlooker’s gaze in relation to the work. Info: Tornabuoni Art, 16 Avenue Matignon, Paris, France, Duration: 13/1-12/3/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:30, www.tornabuoniart.com

Conceived as a broken calendar that marks the artist’s experience of the passage of time, “Broken Year” is Valeska Soares’s response to the COVID-19 global pandemic. The work takes the shape of a gallery-wide installation organized as a physical calendar: Stretched linen-canvas panels are grouped in the familiar grid of a traditional calendar. For each panel, Soares selects pages from books with particularly meaningful or evocative phrases, which are applied to the canvas to mark the calendar days. The work is bookended by two significant dates: March 1, 2020, when she began self-isolating, and March 29, 2021, when she received her second dose of the vaccine. Installed near the Gallery’s entrance, Soares’s 2014 work “Ouroboros” is the artist’s counterpoint to the stretches of time and meaning mapped in the exhibition. The installation’s title refers to an allegorical serpent swallowing its own tail, a symbol of infinity in which time is circular and suspended. Soares replaces the serpent with a golden pocket watch (in Portuguese, the word for gold is ouro) that is suspended from the ceiling by a delicate chain. Info: Alexander Gray Associates, 510 West 26 Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 13/1-26/2/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:30-18:00, www.alexandergray.com

In his solo exhibition Jeff Wall presents a group of “near documentary” realist pictures, one of the principal directions his work has taken over several decades. Men confront each other in tense situations , young people are absorbed in solitary moments—a reclining woman seems fascinated by the sparkling crystals of a necklace; another, eyes shut, faces the blazing afternoon sunshine from atop an automobile, a man reads something written on a hotel room mirror. And a man confronts a musing child: Parent child, photographed on Larchmont Boulevard in 2018, is a reconstruction of an incident reported to the artist by the father of a small daughter. The large two-part photograph is “Actor in two roles” (2020),  each show a moment from a play written and produced within the past two or three years. Wall has replicated the designs of specific productions, adapting them to the “little theater” format of the Los Angeles stages he rented to make the work. Actors must continually change roles and identities, from week to week, day to day, or even during a single day. The diptych structure uniquely permits this transformation of identity and appearance to be witnessed as if it were simultaneous. Info: Gagosian Gallery, 456 North Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, CA, USA, Duration: 13/1-5/3/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://gagosian.com

“Metamorphoses”, Wang Keping’s site-specific exhibition, unveils the artist’s most recent body of work: a group of eight majestic, fire-patinated cypress-wood sculptures. This never-before-seen corpus is the product of three years of work, marking a creative renewal in the life of the 73-year-old sculptor, since moving to his Vendée studio in the spring of 2019. Located between the beaches of the Atlantic Ocean and the national forest of Longeville, an old naval warehouse has been transformed into a creative hearth, allowing Wang Keping to work on a new scale and to carve his sculptures out of very large logs – century-old cypress and oak trees – in a hand-to-hand struggle, where human manipulation is measured up against the power of nature. A product of this frontality, “Cybèle à la robe”, placed in the center of the gallery, offers us the metamorphosis of a tortuous tree that sets itself in motion in order to become a grandiose feminine body. Walking around it, we discover the different facets of this imposing effigy, sculpted in the round, revealing a face’s expressiveness, a silhouette’s determination, the grace of a chignon, the elegance of a kimono. Info: Galerie Nathalie Obadia, 91rue du Faubourg, Saint-Honoré, Paris, France, Duration: 15/1-12/3/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.nathalieobadia.com

The human relationship with animals, and the agency surrounding that interaction is critical to the work of the German-Iranian artist Yalda Afsah. In “Every word was once an animal” her first institutional solo exhibition, the artist is focusing on questions of power, care, and control in relation to domestication. Using three examples (bullfighting, horse dressage, and pigeon breeding) she examines the blurred boundaries between affection and identification with animals on the one hand, as well as submission and human domination on the other. In the conditioning of animals, anthropocentric power relations become evident. Afsah’s works reveal the ambiguous character of the forces that operate at the center of these relationships. She directs our gaze to the moments when the bodies of humans and animals are marked by an uncanny closeness: the camera lingers on the aesthetic yet unnatural movements of a horse, focuses on the concentrated aggression of a bull, or follows the gazes of men searching the sky for pigeons performing falls. Info: Kunstverein München e.V., Galeriestr. 4, Munich, Germany, Duration: 15/1-3/4/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 12:00-18:00, www.kunstverein-muenchen.de

In “Pigeon Sweat”, Eddie Martinez presents new large-scale paintings that capture his mastery of revealing the representational through abstraction. He channels speed, impulse, and automatism in combination with tradition and art historical precedents, manifesting compositions that are simultaneously journalistic and autobiographical. With this exhibition, Martinez records snippets of life as it happens—quotidian vignettes in which Raid cans aim at wasps, foliage crawls a loggia wall, and toys litter a toddler’s floor. Variously combining oil, enamel, and spray paint on canvas, Martinez also often layers unexpected materials from the studio in his collaged surfaces—perhaps a discarded baby wipe lending dimension to the wing of a butterfly painting. The exhibition’s eponymous artwork, is a still life with vibrant blocks of color and expressive strokes. Against a strawberry-milkshake-pink background, cartoonish forms cluster together at the painting’s center with imagery that conjures loose associations and dreamlike meanderings. Info: Blum & Poe Gallery, 2727 S. La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Duration: 15/1-26/2/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.blumandpoe.com

The exhibition “Winter Show 2” presents works by artists from Europe and Latin America dedicated to painting and drawing that revolves around current events or memories. The exhibition seeks to create tension between the different and eclectic styles of the artists who work on corporality, colors and the search for light in order to give a further dimension to their work. Francisca Aninat’s work brings together different raw materials of everyday life, collected, the artist puts forward the corporality of the work and reconsiders our relationship to art. The singularity of Thomas Broomé’s approach is repetition as a recurring technique, with him the word is the image and the image is the word, they are both content and form. For almost thirty years, Alberto Cont has been exploring and working on the question of painting and the canvas, his work is focused on color and light. Mauro Giaconi imagines, in his method of «blurring», an enlarged drawing, leaving the usual format, which influences the energy and the senses that emerge from a space. Christiane Pooley purposely depicts indeterminate landscapes in this series of works in order to absorb the viewer into her paintings or to project herself into them without being completely involved. In his latest series, Matthias Reinmuth paints emotional landscapes that reflect the constant flow of sounds and images that are disseminated by the media, social networks, which are mixed with our daily lives. In his work, Julio Rondo remains faithful to his own unique technique of acrylic painting under glass. His works are situated between abstract painting and materiality. Info: Bendana | Pinel Art Contemporain, 4 rue du Perche, Paris, France, Duration: 15/1-19/3/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.bendana-pinel.com

Furthering Cerith Wyn Evans’ exploration of perception through the transposition of form, for his solo exhibition “….)( of, a clearing”, Evans has conceived the gallery as a form of ‘vernacular temple’, a space for reflection where possibilities can ensue from interstitial spaces: from the shadows, vibrations, after-images and echoes that occur between and around the artworks. Drawing on several key moments of Modernism, themes of doubt and ambiguity combine with artistic strategies of reversal, disruption and deviation, to open up new realms of experience within the imaginary. Cerith Wyn Evan’s poetic work derives its refined aesthetic from a wide range of influences including film, music, literature and philosophy. Visual or textual sources and ideas are often repeated across different bodies of work, an indication of his desire to keep ideas in play or to bring them back to life as raw material for future use. He harnesses the potential of language to create moments of rupture and delight, where desire and reality conjoin, evident in his series of firework sculptures where wooden structures spell out open-ended texts and fleetingly burn over a designated period of time. Info: White Cube Gallery, 50 Connaught Road Central, Hong Kong, Duration: 21/12-11/3/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, https://whitecube.com