ART NEWS: March 04

Valérie Belin’s new series, “Modern Royals” after which the exhibition is titled, is shown in its entirety. This new corpus comprises eleven portraits of women, fictional characters who are nevertheless designated by their first names, posing seated on a sofa. The title of this series suggests that the figures might be celebrities or “wordly women,” meant as illustrations for a romance novel. Each portrait represents a different personality, played in the studio by the same female model, whose looks vary from one picture to the next, depending on her appearance (dress, hairdo, jewelry worn in a conspicuous way), and also on her pose and attitude. Paradoxically, this imbues the portraits with a mixed impression of strange singularity and similarity. Though these photographs were conceived in the manner of a genre scene, due to the tight framing, they look like details. To contribute to the effect of a universe that is not so much bucolic but domestic, urban and contemporary, the “backdrop” of these portraits was realized afterward, by superimposing and juxtaposing vernacular motifs from different photographs. Info: Galerie Nathalie Obadia, 91 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, Paris, France, Duration: 24/3-14/5/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.nathalieobadia.com

Part exhibition, part artwork, “What Is the Object?” invites visitors to view, pick up, and hold 75 items drawn from Richard Tuttle’s own collection, ranging from ceramic teacups and decorative sculptures to vintage fabrics and antique curios. An index card created by Tuttle accompanies each object, outlining his original encounter with it, how it entered his collection, and his thoughts about it. The exhibition also features a series of nine never-before-seen works by Tuttle along with sculptural furniture he designed to display his objects. In addition to Tuttle’s personal collection of objects, the exhibition features a series of never-before-exhibited artworks created by Tuttle. Tuttle designed the exhibition furniture that are used to display the objects from his collection. Each object is accompanied by an index card outlining the piece’s “biography”–encompassing both objective details (including material, provenance, price) and subjective narratives (e.g., Tuttle’s first encounter with the object, his impressions of it, and other observations. Info: Bard Graduate Center Gallery, 18 West 86th St.. New York, NY, USA, Duration: 25/3-10/7/2022, Days & Hours: Wed-Fri 11:00-17:00, www.bgc.bard.edu

Taking its title from the magician Black Herman’s 1938 autobiographical book, Derek Fordjour presents his solo exhibition “Magic, Mystery & Legerdemain”. The exhibition  is a multisensory experience that comprises various elements and highlights the multidisciplinary nature of Fordjour’s work. It includes sculptures and paintings constructed using the artist’s signature collage technique; an architectural installation featuring a live performer at the gallery’s entryway; and a live magic show that will be staged daily. Both the object- and performance-based works on view allude to the use of magic to restructure stories, myths, and folklore across a range of cultures and diasporas. Fordjour employs magic, and specifically, the life of Black Herman as a living metaphor in which the willful suspension of disbelief is alternately seen as a privilege afforded to some, a luxury unavailable to others, or a necessary mode of survival. In his largest painting to date, Fordjour begins a new series mapping of the Black diaspora by rendering images of ceremonial processions; in this instance, portraying rituals specific to descendants of enslaved peoples in Salvador, Brazil. Info: David Kordansky Gallery, 5130 W. Edgewood Pl., Los Angeles, CA, USA, Duration: 26/3-27/5/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.davidkordanskygallery.com/

Latifa Echakhch in the solo exhibition “Night Time” presents a suite of new paintings. This exhibition is connected to “The Concert”, the artist’s presentation at the Swiss Pavilion for the 59th Venice Biennale, underscoring this landmark moment in her career.The paintings in the exhibition begin with photographs taken by a friend of Echakhch, the photographer Sim Ouch. Characterized by high exposure and enigmatic compositions in which bodies and limbs are entangled or twisted, the images capture the nightlife of their community of friends in Lausanne, Switzerland. Echakhch employs a naive fresco method of painting to transpose these images onto canvas, which she treats with a mix of concrete and vinyl glue. Once set, Echakhch cuts into the dense material, a violent and labor-intensive process that leaves cracks and voids in the composition, revealing fragmented bodies in motion below. The striations in the concrete speak at once to geography of maps and the mountainous landscape that surrounds her studio in Switzerland, as well as the histories of formalism and abstraction. Info: Pace Gallery, 5 Hanover Square, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 26/3-4/5/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.pacegallery.com/

Birgit Jensen is interested in the connection between artifice and truth and the role of mediation in our pursuit of perfection. In service of that exploration, she’s created a group of atmospheric landscape paintings, carefully constructed to suggest they might be photographic. In spite of their photographic appearance, Jensen’s paintings are not representations of images of the place, but impressions she’s stitched together to convey the mood the setting instills.  Both the landscape architect and painter have as their goal the creation of something perfect.  An ideal that’s “truer” than reality. In this case, we experience nature that isn’t actually natural, but is constructed by a designer, then depicted by an artist who looked at photographs, and from them, created images, not of the site, but that “feel” like the place.  At the same time, those paintings look like photographs, suggesting the image is accurate, or “real.” Instead of exploring the relationship between artifice and truth, perhaps it is more accurate to say that Jensen is illustrating the truth within the artificial. Info: Hosfelt Gallery, 260 Utah Street, San Francisco, CA, USA, Duration: 26/3-23/4/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sat 10:00-17:30, Thu 11:00-19:00, https://hosfeltgallery.com

“Some farmed, others mined” is the most recent body of work by Davide Balula that engages with the artist’s long-standing inquiry into ecology, microbial social theory, and machine-based learning systems. Balula’s concerns, formalized here, highlight the entangled relations of life and non life in a moment of technocratic governance. The works hone in on the need for ecological transition, care and responsibility, while living on a damaged planet increasingly moderated by machines.  From spring 2020 to spring 2021, while living in isolation in the countryside with his family, Balula left unprimed canvases in contact with their immediate environment. These “farmed paintings” take root in earlier experiments where he would place unprimed canvases in riverbeds, inside trees, and underground, inviting a world of relations between wildlife, weathering, and environmental fluctuations. Cast in shades of green, pink, brown and black, microorganisms are captured here through abstract patterning by chance-based relations. The works speak to the greater universe, such as star systems, or viral cultures under scrutiny. They are the actants of their own scene, directly present rather than represented. Info: Frank Elbaz Gallery, 66 rue de Turenne, Partis, France, Duration: 26/3-7/5/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.galeriefrankelbaz.com

In her visual and acoustic collages, Michaela Melián asks questions about the social, about memory, language, and identity. Her drawings, objects, multimedia installations, and audio works point to a complex network of historical facts and their traces in the present day. Melián contrasts the history of places and people with phenomena of everyday culture and specially composed music, and thus invents a form of commemorative culture that surfaces stories that have been absent, omitted, or buried. The focus of the solo exhibition “Red Threads” at the KINDL is a newly developed installation on the legends surrounding the guerrilla Tamara Bunke, aka Tania, between Havana and Berlin. Info: Curators: Kathrin Becker and Ingrid Wagner, KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Am Sudhaus 3, Berlin, Germany, Duration: 27/3-24/7/2022, Days & Hours: Wed 12:00-20:00, Thu-Sun 12:00-18:00, www.kindl-berlin.com/

Monica Bonvicini presents her solo exhibition “Pleasant”, in all three exhibition spaces of Galleria Raffaella Cortese. The works on view continue the artist’s investigation into language, literature, and the construction of identity through spaces and intellectual labor. The six mirrors shown in via Stradella 1 feature sentences painted directly on the surface. Mirroring each other, they create a cacophony of overlapping voices capable of transforming the space into a labyrinth of references and situations. These works materialize the trilingual poetry of stateless writer Amelia Rosselli as well as the pitiless, poignant words of contemporary short story novelist Diane Williams and Sylvia Plath’s classical observation. In via Stradella 4, five elaborate prints on mirrors reproduce quotations about living within four walls. The coated mirrors feature subtle tonalities, from calm copper to milky white, colors taken from a portrait of Virginia Woolf by Gisèle Freund. The theme of interiors and their resulting discomfort also emerges from the series of sculptures shown in via Stradella 7. The exhibition space is dark; the translucent light works “StripLight” (2021), hanging from the ceiling, are the only source of illumination. The invisible terrain of home comforts and the immaterial space of the unconscious precisely merge within this scenario that hosts an installation that is as quiet yet as uncanny as it can be. Info: Galleria Raffaella Cortese, via Stradella, via Stradella 4 & via Stradella 7, Milan, Italy,  Duration: 30/3-6/8/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-13:00 & 14:30-19:00, https://raffaellacortese.com

Spanning more than 3,000 square meters, “Useless Bodies?” is an exhibition by the artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset and one of the most ambitious thematic investigations realized by Fondazione Prada to date. Conceived for four gallery spaces and the courtyard of its Milan venue, the exhibition explores the present condition of the body in the post-industrial age in which it seems that our physical presence is losing its centrality or is even completely superfluous. This shift impacts every aspect of our lives: from our working conditions, to our health, our interpersonal relationships, and the way we retain information. The exhibition “Useless Bodies?” also explores how we physically adapt to a world increasingly based on two-dimensional imagery, not least in the light of the current pandemic. Following the exhibition path from the Podium, to the Nord gallery, to the Cisterna, the audience will encounter several immersive installations. Info: Fondazione Prada, Largo Isarco, 2, Milan, Italy, Duration: 31/3-22/8/2022, Days & Hours: Mon & Wed-Sun 10:00-19:00, www.fondazioneprada.org