ART NEWS: March 03
Jac Leirner’s solo exhibition ”Us Horizon” includes a new work from his acclaimed series constructed from ensembles of plastic shopping bags, and a new installation made of found numbered markers. The exhibition’s central large-scale work, “Us Horizon”, consists of over 200 vintage shopping bags installed in a double row at eye-level across three walls in the main gallery space. Leirner began collecting the material for this body of work in 1985 and first presented collections of plastic shopping bags at the 1989 São Paulo Biennial and the following year at the 44th Biennale di Venezia. Initially exhibited as vast quilted surfaces covering walls and at times also the floor, or as sculptures made from smaller groups sewn-together, later configurations were exhibited as large orderly grids, most recently at the Museum Ludwig, on the occasion of the artist’s receiving the 2019 Wolfgang Hahn Award. Info: Esther Schipper, Potsdamer Strasse 81E, Berlin, Germany, Duration:12/3-14/4/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.estherschipper.com
Adam Pendleton in “These Things We’ve Done Together”, his first solo exhibition in Canada, presents new monumental paintings from his series “Untitled (WE ARE NOT)” as well as works on Mylar created specifically for the exhibition and seven drawings from his defining series “Black Dada” that were executed this year. The paintings deploy spray-painted language from the artist’s seminal “Black Dada” text (2008), while the drawings index fragments and traces of his painting process. The “Untitled (WE ARE NOT)” are monumental works in which letters, drips, sprays and spatters blur the lines between language and abstraction, between question and affirmation and between disciplines of artistic practice, including writing and drawing, painting and photography. These abstract gestures are revisited and reexamined in a series of drawings on Mylar that combine layers of paint with geometric shapes. In a third set of works – the latest iterations of Pendleton’s “Black Dada” drawings – the artist incorporates images of the traces of paint left on the large sheets of paper hung on his studio walls while he works, creating an index of his painting process. Info: Curator: Mary-Dailey Desmarais, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA), 1380 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Duration: 17/3-10/7/2022, Days & Hours: Tue & Thu-sun 10:00-17:00, Wed 10:00-21:00, www.mbam.qc.ca
Romain Cadilhon’s solo exhibition “Softly and Forever” features a series of colored pencil drawings on paper. Until recently, his work consisted of black and white drawings, charcoal, graphite, pigments, sometimes photorealistic, sometimes abstract. The sources for each drawing are photographs, which Cadilhon has taken over time or collected from personal archives, the internet or books. Color came into Cadilhon’s work two years ago, in the “Cielo” series, which showed abstract, ethereal surfaces, the result of observations of the sky in his studio in Athens. This is also the first time the artist decided to work without a photographic base, without a sketch, but directly on the white of the paper. Figuration (representation) loses its importance and leaves space for the unfolding of color. At the same time, he started to photograph bouquets of flowers with a Polaroid camera. The milky, thick, imprecise aspect of the surface of these photographic images captivated Cadilhon, who started to experiment and play with the accidental and unstable nature of this camera, creating a base of images for the drawings exhibited in the gallery. Info: Bernier/Eliades Gallery, 46 Rue du Châtelain, Brussels, Belgium, Duration: 17/3-14/4/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 12:00-18:00, https://bernier-eliades.com
Paying tribute Teresa Burga who died in Lima, Peru roughly a year ago from Covid-19, the exhibition “Dibujos (1974–2019)” features nearly five decades of works on paper. Foregrounding the figure, Dibujos traces the development of Burga’s experimental approach to color and form while centering the eccentric geometry and flattened subjects of the artist’s late drawings. Burga’s “Theater” works (1974) feature faithful copies of women drawn from advertisements and other print media. The artist inscribed the dates and time spent on each composition in its margins, drawing parallels between artistic production and other forms of labor. These data-driven marginalia anticipate later conceptual projects by the artist like “Perfil de la mujer Peruana” (1980–81), which worked methodically with information systems to provide a comprehensive representation of Peruvian women. Late works by the artist play with perspective and form to push the boundaries of abstraction and representation even further. Burga’s varied works on paper, from faithful facsimiles to automatic drawings to deliberately deskilled compositions, reflect her belief that complacency was the death knell of artistic innovation. Info: Alexander Gray Associates, 224 Main Street, Garden Level, Germantown NY, USA, Duration: 18/3-17/4/2022, Days & Hours: Sat-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.alexandergray.com/
Per Bak Jensen shows 16 new works in his solo exhibition “Testimony”. He is the first student to be admitted to the Royal Academy on the merits of his photography, he has set the standard for generations of artists who use photography as an art medium. A vastly experienced, incisive artist, he shows us new aspects of the visible world that we often have a hard time seeing with our own eyes. Testimony testifies to a variety of places, whose nature and identity are conveyed to us through the artist’s lens. It’s all there for us to see, if we show ourselves willing to learn from Bak Jensen’s photography. The unmanipulated work encapsulates a section of the world that can be hard to spot. His new images are primarily of nature, but not necessarily innocuous, attractive nature. Culture imperceptibly creeps in on nature, and the human impact is constantly present – most radically through the artist cropping and transposing nature to the gallery. Info: Galleri Bo Bjerggaard, Flæsketorvet 85, Copenhagen, Denmark, Duration: 18/3-7/5/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 13:00-18:00, Sat 12:00-16:00, https://bjerggaard.com
For her exhibition “Gap Years” the Berlin-based artist and filmmaker Loretta Fahrenholz combines her new film “Happy” Birthday (2022) with the also newly created photographs “Gap Years” (2022) and photographs from her series “Circle Navel Nil” (2020) to create an expansive installation. Tempelhofer Feld in the middle of Berlin, is the setting for both newly created works. During the pandemic, the field replaced many other social interaction spaces. As a partially unregulated, uncommercial void of Berlin, dystopian and utopian aspects of the Corona years were reflected here, spatially compromised. Thus the ambivalent, very changeful history of the field continues: It served as a place of entertainment and recreation already in the 19th century, but at the same time also as a parade and military ground; it was an airport, a mass meeting place during the Nazi era, and the site of a concentration camp, a military hospital, and the first soccer training ground in Germany. Kölnischer Kunstverein, Hahnenstraße 6, Cologne, Germany, Duration: 19/3-26/6/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, https://koelnischerkunstverein.de
The work presented in the exhibition “Cushion of Air” allusively depicts Aarom Garber-Maikovska in a state of performative movement wherein he channels the human condition through his gestures captured and recorded in ink and oil on fluted polypropylene boards. Furthering the artist’s explorations of communication, interpersonal connection, urban sprawl, and the body, the pieces that comprise this exhibition act as memorandums or physical documentations of the visual language that Garber-Maikovska has developed throughout his oeuvre—growing beyond, but keeping the codes of, the motions enshrined in his early time-based performances. When speaking on the process of painting, Garber-Maikovska uses words such as “excavate” and “reveal” to describe how he achieves a finished work; he is a facilitator of the final composition, activating the process of art making from a place outside of himself. However, in tapping into the action of painting as made available through the collective unconscious, he is also accessing reflections on the cultural moment in which his body exists. Info: Blum & Poe, Harajuku Jingu-no-mori 5F, 1-14-34 Jingumae, Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan, Duration: 19/3-7/5/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 12:00-16:00 (by appointment), https://blumandpoe.com
Under the title “Rise and fall of shame”, Leo Mock is showing a group of recently created works in which he further elaborates the characteristic features of his painterly practice while also setting new accents. The pictorial worlds of Leo Mock are situated in the field of tension between Romanticism, surrealism, comics and science fiction. Mock creates landscapes that sometimes seem to be inspired by real places in his native California, but actually exist exclusively in his imagination. The natural panoramas, executed with care in mostly subdued colors, have a calming, almost meditative atmosphere, and at the same time exude a touch of melancholy. Pure escapism, one might think, were it not for these irritating apparitions, especially the humongous stick figures, whose long-limbed extremities appear more in front of the landscapes than in them, giving the impression that Philip Guston has appropriated the formal language of Alberto Giacometti. Info: Galerie Guido W. Baudach, Pohlstrasse 67, Berlin, Germany, Duration: 19/3-23/4/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, https://guidowbaudach.com
Through the exhibition “Change of perspective”, Galleria Continua examines Ai Weiwei’s strong bond with Chinese tradition and culture that the artist succeeds in interpreting and experiencing in a different light. A change of perspective means arriving at a desecration and a break with the past while protecting the elements of authenticity and the uniqueness of a priceless and incredibly rich culture. A change of perspective that Ai Weiwei makes to better understand the symbols and places of his own native country, after having moved away in an urgent rebellion while simultaneously claiming a strong sense of belonging. A change of perspective that juxtaposes the contemporary with the ancient, the future, and the present, through the traditional techniques, images and metaphors of Chinese culture. Info: Galleria Continua, Via Vittorio E. Orlando 3, Rome, Italy, Duration: 25/3-7/5/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.galleriacontinua.com