ART NEWS: Jan.03

Guadalupe Maravilla, the recipient of the Lise Wilhelmsen Art Award, is presenting over 30 works in her solo exhibition “Sound Botánica”. Guadalupe Maravilla is a visual artist working and living in Brooklyn, New York. In 1984, aged eight, Maravilla immigrated to the United States as an undocumented, unaccompanied child, fleeing civil war in El Salvador. When as an adult, he was diagnosed with cancer, Maravilla was treated with radiation and chemotherapy alongside healing practices and became cancer-free. The artist’s interdisciplinary practice constantly refers to these experiences of exile and illness, migration and healing. A series of freestanding sculptures entitled “Disease Throwers”, which are created from found objects and materials collected while Maravilla retraces his migration journey, will be on display in the exhibition. At the heart of each sculpture is a gong that is activated during sound baths; a collective, ritual, and meditative healing experience created by the artist. Info: Curator: Caroline Ugelstad, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Sonja Henies vei 31, 1311 Høvikodden, Norway, Duration: 14/1-30/4/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sat 11:00-17:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, www.hok.no

The group exhibition “Four Positions in Painting” presents works by Christoph Hänsli, İhsan Oturmak,  Bernd Ribbeck and Melanie Smith. Each position occupies one of the four rooms in Galerie Peter Kilchmann and show new works created between 2020 and 2021. In addition to a new video work by Melanie Smith, the focus of the exhibition lies on painting, which connects and at the same time distances all the presented positions from each other. Precise, elaborate colour surfaces and graphic elements in small-format paintings, as well as an individual, questioning view of reality, are characteristic of all four of them. Yet the artists know how to illuminate the multifaceted potential of painting and the peculiar aesthetics of this timeless medium each from a different angle. In his figurative painting, Christoph Hänsli follows his interest in ephemeral moments and objects of everyday life we give little importance to. İhsan Oturmak’s works are closely interwoven with his own story and the impressions of his childhood and youth, which he spent in South-Eastern Anatolia in Turkey. In the works of Bernd Ribbeck, simple geometric shapes such as circles, diamonds, cones and cubes are layered into complex patterns of iconic quality. Since the beginning of her career, Melanie Smith’s artistic practice has manifested itself in various forms of expression such as video installation, painting, collage, sculpture and performance, which all complement each other like a web of references. Info: Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zahnradstrasse 21, Zurich, Switzerland, Duration: 14/1-5/3/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-17:00, https://peterkilchmann.com

New works by the Swiss artists Louisa Gagliardi and Yves Scherer are on show in Eva Presenhuber Gallery. Louisa Gagliardi’s paintings exist as reflections: internally, of artist and viewer, and of the rapid acceleration of technology in our visualized and socialized worlds. Their liminal status, as both digitally rendered images and physically confronting objects, speaks as much to contemporary concerns of self-mediated personas as they do to the compositions and narratives of the classics of art history. The work of Yves Scherer confronts the integrity of existence, in a manner that originates in antiquity and continues into the now. In both sculptural form and his lenticular works, different realities are blurred to be presented as one. Complexity orbits simplicity, encapsulated by avid desire. Perception, both biological and cultural, is questioned and dismantled as viewers reevaluate notions of depiction itself. Info: Eva Presenhuber Gallery, 39 Great Jones Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 15/1-5/3/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.presenhuber.com

The exhibition “America in Crisis” brings together 40 leading American photographers and over 120 works exploring social change in the U.S from the 1960s till today. “America in Crisis” was a ground-breaking group initiative originally conceived in 1969 to assess the state of the nation. This Magnum Photos project was led by American photographer Charles Harbutt and Lee Jones, then Magnum’s New York bureau chief. Revisiting and updating this exhibition creates a unique dialogue between leading photographers from 1968, and the works of 2020 contemporaries. The exhibition highlights the themes present in both eras, confronting the myth of American exceptionalism with the reality of current events. Bringing together these two eras of documentary photography, also provides an opportunity to consider the shifts in documentary practice and image culture that have occurred in the intervening period. Info: Curators: Sophie Wright, Gregory Harris and Tara Pixley, Saatchi Gallery, Duke Of York’s HQ, King’s Road, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 21/1-3/4/2022, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.saatchigallery.com

Justin Fitzpatrick presents “Alpha Salad”, his first major solo exhibition in a public gallery, exploring decadence, food and bodily consumption. Alpha Salad presents a narrative from soil to table, that extends beyond pleasure and the aesthetic and sensory understanding of taste, to highlight the tension between the surreal theatre of food preparation and service, and the biological necessities and risks of eating. Fitzpatrick considers the bodies created, consumed and at work throughout the food and hospitality industry, and invites us to reconsider their complex, but often overlooked, relations and their implications in our everyday lives. As well as Fitzpatrick’s own painting and sculpture, Alpha Salad includes the artist’s curated selection of works from Leeds University Library Galleries and Special Collections, including work by Wendy Abbott, Duncan Grant and Käthe Kollwitz, in addition to photographs from the Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture. Info: The Tetley, Hunslet Road, Leeds, United Kingdom, Duration: 21/1-8/5/2022, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 10:00-17:00, https://thetetley.org

Kate Joyce in the exhibition “Metaphysics” presents photographs created between 2012 and 2019, during a period when Joyce was regularly commuting by air. This series of photographs highlights the way static images can capture the passage of time, revealing fragments of its movement through light and space. Spending so much time in the sky, Joyce began to see the window seat as its own destination: a “studio of constraint.” In the beginning, she photographed out the window, capturing the mesmerizing aerial views, but soon turned her lens inside, towards body shapes, reflected sunlight, the curves of the interior airplane architecture, and halos of color refracted from passengers’ clothing onto the plastic interior surrounding them. For the past 25 years, the artist has used the visual image to explore themes of intimacy and the elemental qualities of light, texture, and color. She received a Lewis Hine Documentary Initiative Fellowship (2003-2004). Info: SITE Santa Fe, 1606 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe, NM, USA, Duration: 21/1-22/4/2022, Days & Hours: Thu & Sat-Sun 10:00-17:00, Fri 10:00-19:00, https://sitesantafe.org

Alex Prager presents new works in his solo exhibition “Part One: The Mountain”. Both a photographer and filmmaker, Prager is known for her elaborately staged scenes that capture a moment frozen in time, inviting the viewer to “complete the story” and speculate about its narrative context. Prager cultivates an uncanny, dreamlike mood throughout her oeuvre—an effect heightened by her use of timeless costuming and richly saturated colors that recall technicolor films, as well as the mysterious or inexplicable happenings she often depicts. Her meticulously crafted photographs are filled with hyperreal details, from signatures on the cast of a high school football player or bandage on the nose of a woman running in terror, to the face in the reflection of a handheld mirror or figure revealed to be a cardboard cutout, firmly locating Prager’s images in the real world and belying the sense of the surreal that often pervades her work.  Although Prager’s immersive, large-scale photographs of crowds are among her best-known work the artist’s newest series evinces a return to portraiture, a genre she first explored early in her practice. Info: Lehmann Maupin Gallery, 1 Cromwell Place, South Kensington, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 21/1-5/3/2022, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.lehmannmaupin.com

Stephan Goldrajch’s solo exhibition “Bayeux” opens a door to a carnivalesque universe inhabited by mythical characters, as if surprised at the turn of a page of a book or a comic strip, and in-depth historical references. Spread over the gallery’s two floors, it will feature a monumental embroidery, watercolours, and a series of recent crochet works. Naive and childish, not to say “brut”, Stephan Goldrajch’s crocheted works create a mass of colourful shapes that mix and mingle, like bodies at a party or a festive parade. Everything seems animated: the sun, stars, a she-centaur, and even a jug. Everything has a face: the features are illuminated by wide and red smiles. Inspired by the Bayeux tapestry that tells the story of the William the Conqueror’s conquest of England in a medieval style, a mixture of reality and fantasy, Stephan Goldrajch’s paintings rewrite history to change its focus. They highlight what had been relegated to the margins and give a central place to the small details on the edges of the tapestry (animals, sometimes human beings). By reincarnating them in crocheted silhouettes, the paintings interpret the story of the past and give it an inclusive twist. Info: Xippas Gallery, 108 rue Vieille du Temple, Paris, France, Duration: 22/1-11/3/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-13:00 & 14:00-19:00, Sat 10:00-19:00, www.xippas.com

Judit Kis presents her latest video works and sculptures concerning her ongoing research on self-healing processes at Kahán Art Space Vienna & Budapest. In her performative art Kis reflects on the experiences and traumas that shape our identities, personal boundaries, and behavioral patterns. The artist combines digital content with installations of objects and expands into participatory performances and community engagement. During the exhibition we invite the audience to take part at various activities, such as yoga & dance performances and individual meetings with the artist. Visit the website for all upcoming events! Judit Kis is an intermedia artist from Hungary who recently completed a studio residency at Residency Unlimited and Artist Alliance inc. in New York City. In 2020 she received the ACAX – Leopold Bloom and Young Visual Art Award, in 2019 the Derkovits Art Grant with an exhibition at the Kunsthalle Budapest. Info: Kahán Art Space Vienna, Große Pfarrgasse 7, Vienna, Austria, Duration: 26-30/4/2022, Days & Hours: Wed-Thu 14:00-17:00, Fri-Sun 12:00-18:00 & Kahán Art Space Budapest, Nagy Diófa u. 34, Budapest, Hungary, Duration; 10/2-4/3/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 13:00-18:00, https://evakahanfoundation.org