ART NEWS: May 01
Robert Rauschenberg is rightfully situated as one of the most influential artists of the 20th and 21st Centuries. His use of found and experimental materials, collapsing of distinct artistic categories, and an eye towards collaboration and political activism have been inspiration for younger artists for generations. Paradoxically, the breadth of his multidimensional and perpetually ambitious oeuvre has yet to be adequately examined, and his later experiments have been given less acclaim as a result. With examples from fourteen different series, the exhibition “Robert Rauschenberg: Exceptional Works, 1971-1999” aims to provide a new avenue through which to appreciate this innovative artist. In juxtaposing these works, viewers can see how themes Rauschenberg first touched on in early works such as the “White Paintings” (1951) or the “Combines” (1954–64) remained anchors in his practice while evolving to meet each present moment. The “Hoarfrost” (1974–76) and “Jammer” (1975–76) series, both of which are represented in the exhibition. Each take hung and draped fabric as their starting point, but to different ends. The Hoarfrosts revisit the solvent transfer technique Rauschenberg first developed while traveling with Cy Twombly in the early 1950s, imparting faint and haunting imagery onto the fabric. the “Hoarfrosts” evolved into the “Jammers”, Rauschenberg radically removed nearly all imagery to allow the fabric to take center stage. Inspired by a visit to India in 1975, the “Jammers make plain Rauschenberg’s turn towards a global outlook that would culminate in the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (ROCI) project. Info: Mnuchin Gallery, 48 East 78 Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 3/5-11/6/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-17:30, www.mnuchingallery.com/
Scott Kahn in his solo exhibition “The Walled City” presents 15 paintings dated from 1982 to 2022. This is Kahn’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, on view from May 3 to June 14, 2022. Scott Kahn is an American painter with a long exhibition history, primarily in New York, and abroad. Kahn draws inspiration from life and considers his oeuvre to be a visual diary of the world around him. His subject matter reflects the people and places which he experiences. Drawing from memory and imagination, his work has a dream-like, surreal quality. For the last several years Kahn has been working at home in Westchester, New York, but maintains a studio in Brooklyn. He received his BA from the University of Pennsylvania and an MFA from Rutgers University. He spent a year in Theodoros Stamos’ class at the Art Students League in New York. Kahn has been a recipient of awards from the Pollock Krasner Foundation and a residency at the Edward Albee Foundation in Montauk. His work is included in major corporations and two museums in China, including the Long Museum, and the ICA Miami in Florida. Info: Almine Rech Gallery, 39 East 78th Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 3/5-14/6/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.alminerech.com/
A solo exhibition of drawings by William N. Copley, is marking the first presentation of his works on paper in the UK to date, along with a seminal painting from 1965, “Philosophie dans le boudoir”. Dating primarily from the 1980s and early ‘90s – the final decade of his life – the works on paper mark the zenith of Copley’s drawing practice, reanimating ideas and motifs that he began to employ in the 1950s and ‘60s. While Copley’s paintings draw voraciously upon artistic and pop-cultural sources, his drawings were the direct products of his imagination, expressions of what he called his “private mythology”. The works in the exhibition attest to the fact that drawing was a vital testing ground, throughout his career, for the generation of ideas. Writing to the collector Arturo Schwarz in 1965, Copley stated: “These extended periods of drawing seem to help me more than anything”. The influence of Copley’s twelve years living in Paris, between 1951 and 1963, is instantly traceable, meanwhile, in his evocation of cabaret – the showgirl, the risqué costume, and the ribald ambience – among other kinds of performance. In another work from 1991, two oval shapes contain images of male and female figures, each appearing to dance on raked floorboards: the battle of the sexes is staged as a dance-off. Info: Sadie Coles HQ, 8 Bury Street, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 5/5-18/6/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.sadiecoles.com/
In her self-titled exhibition, Lauren Halsey tasks herself with matters of time. For Halsey, time is that element that belongs to funk, a modality that presumes land, place, home, sound, and ephemera to be traveling things. Time pressurizes and symbolizes, time instructs and erects, time—within funk—is an emancipatory organism, belonging only to get free. The exhibition features a series of architectural structures, geological manifestations, and vernaculars (hue, font, images) from South Central Los Angeles, her generational home. The exhibition continues her ever-growing lexicon of engravings, pillars, funkmounds, and box sculptures. Declarations and blessings (“GOD BLESS US!!!” And “WE’LL HOOK YOU UP”) appear on neon ombre structures alongside businesses offering to save, adorn, and feed you. Signage from buildings now gone, and proclamations from those that still stand, stack alongside and atop each other forwarding Halsey’s sensibility that time itself is a matter of design wherein the past is not merely present but is structuring our HERE and our NOW. Info: David Kordansky Gallery, 520 W. 20th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 6/5-11/6/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.davidkordanskygallery.com/
Dor Guez was born in Jerusalem into a Christian Palestinian family on his mother’s side and a Sephardic-Jewish immigrants’ family on his father’s side. The exhibition “Between Wind and Water“ presents three series of archival inkjet prints conceptually engaging with the personal and historical dimensions of migration and pilgrimage. The title of the exhbition is a nautical metaphor designating the part of a ship close to the waterline, a vulnerable point particularly prone to damage. This phrase was first documented in its literal sense at the time of the Spanish Armada (1588): By the mid-17th century, the term was also applied to people—a fitting descriptor for the precarity of lives on the move. The exhibition shows a series of archival inkjet prints recently commissioned by the Jewish Museum in New York City and includes one work from Guez’s series “Lilies of the Field” which mines the rich historical and mythological dimensions of Jerusalem as a site of religious and political projection. The photographic series comprises luminous prints of pressed floral and plant arrangements that the artist discovered in his research of the American Col-ony archives that represent a diversity of flora indigenous to the holy land, and the areas surrounding the Old City. Info: carlier|gebauer, Calle de José Marañón 4, Madrid, Spain, Duration: 6/5-4/6/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:00-19:00, Sat 11:00-14:00, www.carliergebauer.com/
“Slower” is a show about pacing. Shannon Finnegan’s work often furnishes the conditions to spend time with others’ artwork. However pronounced their commentaries on infrastructure, Finnegan’s benches and seating, in particular, make time. They collect acts of rest into a performative group utterance of assent: “Rest here if you agree.” Shannon Finnegan is a multidisciplinary artist. Some of their recent work includes Anti-Stairs Club Lounge, an ongoing project that gathers people together who share an aversion to stairs; Alt-Text as Poetry, a collaboration with Bojana Coklyat that explores the expressive potential of image description; and Do You Want Us Here or Not, a series of benches designed for exhibition spaces. Their work has been supported by a 2018 Wynn Newhouse Award, a 2019 residency at Eyebeam, and a 2020 grant from Art Matters Foundation. Info: Deborah Schamoni Gallery, Mauerkircherstr. 186, Munich, Germany, Duration: 7/5-17/6/2022, Days & Hours: Wed-Fri 11:00-18:00, Sat 12:00-16:00, https://deborahschamoni.com/
The exhibition “Wolfgang Petrick” is the first attempt at a large-scale retrospective of this German post-war artist, on display are paintings, drawings, prints, objects, sculptures, and installations from all of the artist’s creative phases, The exhibition unites more than six decades of Wolfgang Petrick’s creative period and shows the artist’s development from the late 1950s until today. Wolfgang Petrick began his artistic path in the late 1950s in the environment of teachers who were committed to the Bauhaus, Abstract Expressionism, Surrealism, gestural painting and Art Brut. Petrick then founded the first producer gallery Großgörschen 35 together with artists such as KH Hödicke and Markus Lüpertz as early as 1964. In dissociation from the current trends of the time, he developed the group “Aspekt” in the context of Critical Realism with artists such as Hans-Jürgen Diehl, Joachim Schmettau and Peter Sorge, which had set itself the goal of cleaning up the narrow-mindedness and constraints of post-war German society. In the late seventies he broke with this movement. It was not the last stylistic break in his work. “Breaks” run through his entire creative period and are the most striking consistency in Petrick’s work. Info: WAI (Woods Art Institute), Golfstraße 5, Wentorf bei Hamburg, Germany, Duration: 8/5- , https://woodsartinstitute.com/
Introduced last year by an immersive installation of glass steles and Indian ink paintings, the “Operire #8” exhibition presents the new color series of paintings on glass by the young visual artist Justin Weiler. The three primary colors, if we mix them, become black, this black to which Justin Weiler had accustomed us in his work. Here, cyan, magenta and yellow are not mixed but superimposed. And it is indeed the absence of one of the primary colors that gives rise to color. For Justin Weiler, the approach is the same, there is always this need to hide, to conceal and each layer of paint covers the glass a little more to erase the transparency. Yet part of the drawing left blank reveals an architectural space that structures each painting. The motifs follow each other and link the paintings together. A frame takes shape that takes us on a linear journey. We follow the exhibition from painting to painting, one bringing the other, we let ourselves be carried away. Step by step. Info: Galerie Melanie Rio Fluency, sur l’Ile de Nantes, en face de La Fabrique, 3 place Albert Camus, Nantes, France, Duration: 10-15/5/2022, Days & Hours: Wed-Fri 13:00-19:00, Sat-Sun 15:00-19:00, www.rio-fluency.com/
All of the exponents on the exhibition “C4” share a special approach to telling stories. Mercedes Azpilicueta is concerned with the history of subcultures and outsiders operating outside of the mainstream. Their role is retold in the construction of a cultural memory. In their work artist couple Invernomuto expose mystifications and legends of the past as fabricated fiction. Formative places of everyday life are the focal point for the biographical exploration of history undertaken by Diamond Stingily and Nazgol Ansarinia. The contributions to the exhibition pan out a range of individual views of a time gone by, interweaving with each other to present a possible interpretation today. What is more, C4 is the outcome of an examination of the collection, and thus the history of the Museum, by four different contemporary artists: the “C” in the title of the show refers to the collection as the basis and starting point but also evokes associations with “cooperation”, “collaboration” and “contamination”. Participating Artists: Nazgol Ansarinia, Mercedes Azpilicueta, Invernomuto, Diamond Stingily. Info: Curator: Letizia Ragaglia, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Städtle 32, Vaduz, Liechtenstein, Duration: 20/5-4/9/2022, Tue-Wed & Fri-sun 10:00-17:00, Thu 10:00-20:00, https://kunstmuseum.li/