ART NEWS:March 02

A.R. Penck was visionary polymath whose approach to European painting was both radical and singular. Often associated with the leading German artists of his time, including Georg Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer, Penck’s work was equally distinctive and innovative. Featuring works from the mid-1970s up to 1990, the exhibition “Paintings 1974–1990” focuses on a particularly fertile and significant decade and a half in the artist’s 50-year career. One of the early works in the exhibition, Y (1978) features a sparse composition comprised of a single central figure and other simplified forms in fresh green, set against a solid white ground. While the artist adopted his pseudonym A.R. Penck in 1968 – with reference to Albrecht Penck, an expert in geomorphology, climatology and the Ice Ages – he also occasionally signed his work with the letter ‘y’. Driven by a desire to create a universal visual language that could address contemporary society, Penck was developing what he termed symbolschrift (symbol writing) – a ‘building block system’ involving a glossary of lyrical motifs that would act as the lexical foundation of his profoundly dynamic compositions. Info: White Cube Gallery, 25-26 Mason’s Yard, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 9/3-14/4/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.whitecube.com

Featuring a new series that explores landscape and dream logic, Mandy El-Sayegh’s  solo exhibition “Still, evident (notes on dreams)” draws on poetics while probing its perverse structures. Distilling memory and cultural history into iridescent archives, El-Sayegh’s blushing horizons give way to lesions and bruises. Dreams become channels for painting, as does the sky for palette. The exhibition begins with a set of framed drawings hung over a skin of unstretched paintings. Part of El-Sayegh’s White Grounds series, this installation is composed of repurposed fragments that act as projection screens for desire. The drawings depict the artist’s recurring childhood dreams, which she likens to screen memories: infantile recollections used to conceal emotional experiences. El-Sayegh’s drawings leave sensory traces of such memories, veiled in a complex visual language. She becomes a dreamkeeper, weaving symbols into narrative, laid bare to disentangle, as the nonsensical becomes a vessel for her wishes. In contrast, El-Sayegh’s landscape paintings point to a tradition of historical legibility. Drawing on the seascapes of British painter J.M.W. Turner, the pieces are rooted in the Romantic tradition of landscape painting, which celebrates the painter as an emotional ethnographer. Info: Lehmann Maupin Gallery, 247 Worth Avenue, Palm Beach, FL, USA, Duration: 11/3-10/4/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, Sun 12:00-17:00, www.lehmannmaupin.com

Martin Honert is a German sculptor whose fastidiously crafted works are largely inspired by childhood memories recalled from his own early drawings, schoolbooks, and family photographs. Employing illusion, manipulation of scale, and painstakingly rendered surfaces, they are obsessive depictions of essential ideas that connect to collective experiences. The artist spends many years working on each sculpture, drawing from his memory and two-dimensional source imagery. The three figurative sculptures presented in his solo exhibition, each depict scenes of children at play. In “Wheelbarrow Game”, “Piggyback Ride”, and “Lawn mower game” two children are each engaged in the same task. Stylistically, Honert emulates the illustrative character of children’s books of his youth. The fourth work in the exhibition, “Embankment” is a sculpture of a landscape with a multi-channel projection of a train slowly moving across it. As the artist has noted, although not originally intended for children’s recreation, the railroad track and surrounding area evolve into a playground. Info: Matthew Mark Gallery, 522 West 22nd Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 11/3-23/4/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-sat 10:00-18:00, https://matthewmarks.com

Gabriel Kuri’s exhibition “motion in acceptance of an impending crash” features three new bodies of work. In sculptural reliefs, textiles and assemblages of fabricated materials, Kuri explores ideas that have guided his practice in recent years – those of material and immaterial exchange, and the capacity for any given system to presage its own disintegration. In three new sculptures in steel, Kuri has produced enlarged versions of ‘tip plates’ – the small trays used in restaurants and bars for bearing cards, receipts and cash. In place of these typical contents, Kuri has assembled sculptural objects on the surface of each plate – cut-outs from pie-graphs rendered in laser-cut steel, or curved lines based on the touchless ‘tap and pay’ logo. Referring both to physical and electronic modes of transaction, the moveable fragments imply systems that have been dismantled, dispersed, or thrown into disorder. This sense of free play finds a counterpoint in the objects’ alluring tactility and formalism. Occupying the boundary between two-dimensional compositions and three-dimensional reliefs, Kuri’s assemblages probe the relative values of the organic and manmade, the rarefied and throwaway. Info: Sadie Coles HQ, 8 Bury Street, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 11/3-24/4/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.sadiecoles.com

Marie Brett featuring works that consider social, psychological, allegorical, and mystical methods of processing trauma, conflict, and control. “The Hidden Mountain, the Fort and the Five Trees” is Brett’s first survey show, and the most comprehensive presentation of her work to date. It brings together a commissioned, newly made installation; a group of past films alongside the premiere of her latest film; and an eclectic display of objects, texts, photographs, and videos documenting and reimagining other installations produced in recent years. The exhibition facilitates a critical review of Brett’s practice, repositioning and furthering her idiosyncratic voice and style within the Irish art scene. Brett creates installations, films, and performances, often collaborating with communities having particular interests and geographies and welcoming other creative contributions—from music to lighting design and dance—as well as both specialized academic advice and amateur, skill-based knowledge. She undertakes considerable periods of research and active dialogue as a means of forefronting reciprocal intellectual and practical exchanges. Info: Sirius Arts Centre, The Old Yacht Club, Westbourne Place, Cobh, County Cork, Ireland, Duration: 12/3-15/10/2022, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 11:00-18:00, https://sirius.art

For his solo exhibition “Human Performance”, Kenneth Bergfeld presents a new body of paintings. The title is borrowed from the scientific journal of the same name concerned with industrial and organisational psychology in relation to work performance, and reflects the artist’s concern for the labour conditions of a globalised economy. In particular, exploitation, economic inequality, and hierarchical power structures. The site-specific work “The Ruins of Exchange” (2022) a black velour carpet plotted with motifs executed in oil, serves as a continuation of the hung works. Kenneth Bergfeld’s portraits are avatars often depicted with a shell of hair which oscillates between a bushy helmet and a sacred halo. These mystified beings, eyes obscured under a silky, velvety mass or retro-futuristic sunglasses, move between the interior and exterior, revealed without revealing themselves. The paintings are a result of the superimposition of three levels of presence: their materiality, the aura of the characters, and their internal landscapes. Info: Jan Kaps Gallery, Lindenstraße 20, Cologne, Germany, Duration: 12/3-7/5/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, https://jan-kaps.com

The group exhibition “LO(L) – Embodied Language”, is combining various artistic approaches in large-format text, sound and video installations, examines how language, writing, images and sounds connect us digitally in real time and permeate our living and working worlds. Recent developments in information and communication technology, including the challenges and opportunities they present, are critically discussed in this group exhibition. In 1969 LO was the first digitally transmitted message. It was intended to be the word login, but the system crashed after the first two letters. Whereas the acronym LOL – Laughing out loud, deriving from internet slang, has become a firmly established element of our language and has become part of the digital body language shaped by algorithms. Only fifty years lie between the first attempts to exchange information via computer and today’s use of language codes. Thus LO and lol reflect both the enormous speed of ongoing digital transformation and the formative influence it exerts on our communication behaviour. Participating Artists: Arno Beck, Gerry Bibby, Thomas Hirschhorn, Barbara Kapusta, Christine Sun Kim & Thomas Mader, Nontsikelelo Mutiti, Katja Pilipenko, Émilie Pitoiset, Nora Turato. Info: Curator Anna Nowak, Kunsthaus Hamburg, Klosterwall 15, Hamburg, Germany, Duration: 12/3-1/5/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, https://kunsthaushamburg.de

The exhibition “Capillary Refill” presents two series of works that Eric Sidner developed in parallel over the past two years. Opulent blown glass and cast bronze sculptures hover throughout the space framed by a group of geometric drawings that span from the floor to the ceiling of the gallery space. Evoking anatomical forms, the works betray an occupation with the body, its organs, notions of circulation, health and mental states, particularly in respect to states of crisis that the pandemic has brought into sharp relief. Produced in the Czech Republic by artisans using centuries-old Bohemian glass techniques, the hanging sculptures bring together an abundance of succulent and pneumatic forms. Constellations of visual motifs and abstract shapes are held together in delicate suspension from lost mould cast armatures, a process whereby the original sculptures, made of wicker, are entirely incinerated. While it is difficult to discern any specific references, the works generate an array of visual associations, ranging from cartoon animation to reliquaries, not to mention Venetian chandeliers (a comparison that is perhaps not merely superficial given their common Bohemian influences). Info: Deborah Schamoni Gallery, Mauerkircherstr. 186, München, Germany, Duration: 13/3-30/4/2022, Days & Hours: Wed-Fri 12:00-18:00, Sat 12:00-16:00, https://deborahschamoni.com