ART NEWS: Sept.01

The photographs and photo-based assemblages in Jude Broughan’s solo exhibition “Soap and Stones” draw from two series that reflect the pandemic era “Pandemic Cemetery Walks” and “Personal Care” referencing solitary activities, repetitive hand washing, and self care rituals. The “Pandemic Cemetery Walks” series began April 2020 in the early days of the pandemic, when Broughan started walking in a large cemetery near her home in Brooklyn, the closest green space where she could exercise. She’s more philosophical than religious, and these walks became meditations on the rolling seasons, on grief and healing, and some social ideological questions. These photographs could maybe be seen as picture postcards from the pandemic, or contemporary memento mori. The “Personal Care” series documents the artist’s accoutrements of daily life, where she is consciously modifying her behaviors over time in order to live ecologically and avoid plastic packaging. Her artwork has long been concerned with the subversion of product packaging and advertising/ But now, rather than abstracting and indexing, she is taking a more direct route, and aims to remove the product packaging altogether. Info: Benrubi Gallery, 529 West 20th Street, Chelsea, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 24/8-30/9/2022, Days & Hours: Wed-Fri 11:00-17:00, https://benrubigallery.com/

Sophie Kuijken’s solo exhibition presents her latest paintings, which manifest her irrevocable taste for the art of portraiture. At first glance, the viewer recognises classical figures painted in the manner of the great Flemish Primitives. Sophie Kuijken builds up her bodies and backgrounds through successive thin layers of acrylic paint, oil and glaze, which she superimposes until she achieves a smooth and deep surface. The history of art seems to permeate the paintings in the exhibition through some of the details and attributes in them. The many brushstrokes, both precise and light, are delicately applied to the wooden panel and create deliberate morphological deformations. In some paintings, the silhouettes are stretched out and the raw flesh tones evoke the mannerisms of the Renaissance. The neutral background of her portraits, their tight framing and the powerful chiaroscuro that shapes her figures also recall the art of Caravaggio. Although Sophie Kuijken’s works are technically flawless and finely crafted, her paintings are permeated by an elusive quality. The artist’s classical influences collide with her highly contemporary artistic approach. Indeed, the artist composes her portraits from a combination of several photographs that she collects from the internet. Each character finds its singularity in the accumulation of plural identities carefully selected by the painter. Info: Galerie Nathalie Obadia, 8, rue Charles Decoster, Brussels, Belgium, Duration: 8/9-15/10/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.nathalieobadia.com/

Jannis Varelas’ exhibition “Salted milk, the fire is Blue” is dealing with the process of understanding oneself and the world around them, by observing and recreating some of the basic cognitive activities of life. Seeing, hearing, eating, leaking, standing, moving; Activities that no one has managed to escape from even during the very early stages of their existence and everybody suffers from their great impact on the subconscious.   Jannis Varelas presents a new body of work. Its core consists of eight paintings, depicting staged scenes with a certain dose of an inescapable reality, where people are engaged in rather strange situations. Also, the artist presents three new multimedia installations. In “War faces/ the Revenge of Noh”, the artist protagonists in a four-channel video installation where he transforms his face with the pressure of his own hands, wearing intense looking faces that bring to mind the intensity of the masks of theater Noh.  Info: Galerie Krinzinger, Seilerstätte 16, Vienna, Austria, Duration: 8/9-8/10/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 12:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-16:00, www.galerie-krinzinger.at/

Some injunctions are more like a slap in the face and even the best advice can turn out to be contrary to common sense… You can understand this injunction to Pierre Ardouvin’s solo exhibition “Dream On” in two different ways, either as telling us that something will forever remain outside our grasp, or more literally as an encouragement not to give up on our dreams. And so the question is, is this show promising to rid us of our illusions, or to get rid of the world itself? It has to be said that Pierre Ardouvin has always had a knack for finding titles that can be interpreted in many different ways. Dream on could also be the title of a hit pop song, the soundtrack of a road movie whose heroes are driving through the night, one of those fake cinematic nights shot during the day but underexposed and tinted blue. And for this new exhibition at Praz-Delavallade, the gallery is indeed immersed in a day-for-night effect where blue reigns triumphant. Info: Praz-Delavallade Gallery, 5 Rue des Haudriettes, Paris, France, France, Duration: 10/9-22/10/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.praz-delavallade.com/

The Iranian artist Hoda Kashiha presents “I am Here, I am not Here” her first solo exhibition in Paris. In her development of pop painting, ranging from uninhibited Cubism to a cartoonish streak, Hoda Kashiha at first sight presents a joyous selection of works yet they sometimes prove to be dark, strange and full of figurative meaning. She often uses humour to create an intimate connection with the visitor; this mechanism also allows her to tackle serious and sensitive subjects related to the social context and political climate of her home country. Her paintings nevertheless deal with major contemporary subjects found everywhere such as gender issues and the place of women in society. She recently declared in Maake Magazine that “my paintings do not conform to gender stereotypes. The significance of masculine and feminine, as well as their roles and behaviours, are a fluid concept that is constantly changing among the characters in my paintings.” For Hoda Kashiha, her protagonists are activists without saying a word, they present their differences openly and remain resolutely optimistic. Info: Galerie Nathalie Obadia, 3, rue du Cloître Saint-Merri, Paris, France, Duration: 10/9-29/10/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.nathalieobadia.com/

Debuting a new suite of monumental flower paintings, Jorge Galindo’s solo exhibition “Verbena” continues the artist’s ongoing exploration of flora and its representation in art across centuries and genres. Titled after the small, wild vervain plant characteristic of the artist’s hometown of Madrid, Galindo’s flowers simultaneously nod to the popular Spanish street celebrations of summer– the verbenas of Spain’s capital city reinvigorate centuries-old traditions through contemporary reinterpretation. These beloved festivities, often associated with a patron saint, draw a bazaar of food and drink and occasion open-air dancing, with music coursing through neighborhoods and infusing the evening’s urban bustle with a gleeful, carnival spirit. In the exhibition Verbena, Galindo’s presents new works created between 2021 and 2022, using both printed materials and paint. Incorporating strips of stylized floral patterns and ornamental motifs from sourced and scavenged wallpaper designs, the artist has embellished his canvases with decorative borders of printed floral imagery before marking the surface with his brush. Employing a vivacious palette, Galindo’s ebullient new painted bouquets burst through their frames, exploding with color beyond the antique wallpaper borders that surround them. Jorge Galindo is one of the leading Spanish painters of his generation. His immense canvases, brimming with gesture and bold splashes of saturated color, emphasize the expressionistic qualities of his highly physical painterly process. Info: Vito Schnabel Gallery, 455 West 19th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 10/9-22/10/202, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.vitoschnabel.com/

Julia Phillips’ solo exhibitipn “Me, Ourself & You”  includes seven new sculptures and a new series of drawings. “Nourisher” (2022) features a ceramic cast of a chest and a face gazing downward glazed in matte orange and a deep pink. Medical tubing, a new material for Phillips, emanates from the figure’s mouth and nipples and pools below. The “Attachment” series, which take their title from the psychoanalytic and biological studies of mother-infant relationships, include a variety of glazed ceramic grips and handles that suggest attachment in its multiple meanings. Stainless steel hardware, which the artist views as metaphors, include springs as a stand-in for flexibility and quick releases for autonomy. In the “Conception Drawings”, created during the time of anticipated conception, the artist applies pastel and oil to vellum, leaving traces of her hands and arms visible. With titles such as Soft Tubes, Ovulation, Within Between, and Implantation, the drawings’ colors and biomorphic forms allude to a body’s imagined interior and its evolution on a cellular level. “Impregnator” and “Aborter” resembles a makeshift device. With these imaginary tools inspired by OB-GYN instruments, the artist refers to the complicated dynamics of pregnancy and bodily autonomy. Info: Matthew Marks Gallery, 526 West 22nd Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 10/9-29/10/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://matthewmarks.com/

“The Hauntologists” emerges from the collaborative work of the 2021/2022 BAK Fellows to test how various notions of spectrality and spectral tactics could engage with or fathom possible burgeoning futurities, the contested strategies for living a liveable life, and the unresolved tensions in troubled archives and languages, among others. Dwelling between gatherings, seminars, subcultures, and everyday moments, the BAK Fellows and their guests—“the hauntologists”—search for vocabularies that undo the abstract social forms that stand in the way of political imagination and agency. They are furthermore committed to proposing aesthetico-political positions that open spaces of possibility and collectivity through the rehearsal of new models of reading, interpretation, and sociality. Offering a framework for a plurality of artistic practices, The Hauntologists are not merely haunted—they haunt. The Hauntologists takes place throughout the different locations in which the BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice is established: in Utrecht in Istanbul from November 18–20, 2022; and in Jakarta at Gudskul from November 26–December 10, 2022. Conceived as an unfolding score, the components of the program are presented in a staggered, situated way throughout the different geographical contexts, as well as on BAK’s digital forum Prospections. Info: Curator:  Julia Morandeira, BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Pauwstraat 13a, Utrecht, The Netherlands, duration: 10/9-13/11/2022, Days & Hours: Wed-sun 13:00-19:00, https://www.bakonline.org/

The group exhibition “Ivy” spans the three venues of the Zilberman gallery in Istanbul. The conceptual framework of the exhibition started with a passage on “ivy” from a recently discovered manuscript by Alexís O. van Tlön. The passage provides detailed information about how the Arabic word for ivy, pronounced as “asheka,” has been transformed into the root of the word “aşk” [love—even excessive and severe love] in Turkish. The reasoning is quite logical and even poetic: “the ivy absorbs the water of the tree it surrounds, withers it, weakens it, and sometimes dries it the way excessive love cuts off the lover’s connection to life and exhausts the lover like a faded plant”. The exhibition follows the enigmatic and paradoxical connotations of “ivy” that branch out into multiple narratives, perspectives, entities, and realities that exist and possess it at the same moment. The works bind these branches together through shared spatial, territorial, and mental temporalities within the three venues, Zilberman Istanbul, Zilberman-Project Space, and Zilberman Selected. Through these links, the venues responsively give cross-references to each other across the city. Info: Curator: Başak Şenova, Zilberman Gallery, İstiklal Cad. No.163 Mısır Apartmanı K.3 D.10 & Zilberman Project Space, İstiklal Cad. No.163 Mısır Apartmanı K.2 D.5 & Zilberman Selected, İstiklal Mah. Piyalepaşa Bulvarı No: 32C, Beyoğlu / Istanbul, Turkey, Duration: 14/9-1/12/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.zilbermangallery.com/

If film is the medium, then cinema is the cultural situation in which showing and viewing moving images becomes a shared social engagement. The group exhibition “Kino” translates this framework of collective spectatorship into the context of an exhibition. It hereby follows the current interest of artists in probing the temporal and narrative possibilities of time-based formats, between video and feature-length film, associative image collage and narrative epic.The exhibition consists of a mobile display of projection screens and seats, transforming the act of looking into an individual and collective negotiation. Kino will be split into two distinct parts, with an addition of new works and a rearrangement of the display taking place in the middle of the exhibition’s runtime. Its curatorial directive aims to create a social situation in which an architecture of temporal and spatial settings serves as a template for different approaches to the sometimes unwieldy presentation of video and film in an exhibition context. Borrowing from cinema’s conventions, loosely fixed time schedules and spatial positionings experimentally expand the traditional way of engagement with moving images in an exhibition setting. Participating Artists: Rosa Aiello and Dylan Aiello, Noah Barker and Dora Budor, Marie Karlberg, Peter Wächtler, Jiajia Zhang, Ted Fendt, Simon Lässig, Katz Tepper, Peter Wächtler, Jiajia Zhang. Info: Curators: Dennis Brzek and Junia Thiede, Fluentum, Clayallee 174, Berlin, Germany, Duration: 15/9-17/12/2022, Days & Hours: Fri 11:00-17:00, Sat11:00-16:00, www.fluentum.org/

“THE MAW OF” by Rachel Rossin explores the coming together of flesh, machine, cognition, and code provoked by current research into brain-computer interfaces. An artist and programmer whose multi-disciplinary practice has established her as a pioneer in the field of virtual reality, Rossin’s work blends painting, sculpture, new media and more to create digital landscapes, which she uses to address aspects of entropy, embodiment, the ubiquity of technology, and its effect on human psychology. Spanning installation, sculpture, augmented reality, virtual reality, and net art, “THE MAW OF” features a site-specific installation at Tieranatomisches Theater (TA T), Berlin, as part of the digital program of KW Institute for Contemporary Art. Conceived as mixed-reality theatre, Rossin’s project stages a new conceptual and visual vocabulary, addressing the expanded limits of the human body and mind today. Imagining the corporeal as a component within a larger technical assemblage, the work draws from the historic development of body peripherals and outsourced sensing. Marshalling visual tropes from gaming, mobile apps, manga, and documentary video, Rachel Rossin’s work is a guided trip through the outer reaches of fantasy made real. Info: Curator: Nadim Samman, Curatorial Assistant: Linda Franken, Tieranatomisches Theater, Campus Nord, Haus 3, Philippstraße 13, Berlin, Germany, Duration: 15-18/9/2022, Days & Hours: Daily 12:00-19:00, https://tieranatomisches-theater.de/

Kylie Manning’s exhibition “Both Sides Now” takes its title from Joni Mitchell’s acclaimed song. Engaging with Mitchell’s lyrics about temporality, perspective, and subjectivity, Manning’s paintings in the show use mark making as a language to express a visual musicality, bringing the emotional and intellectual resonances of music to canvas. Manning produces new bodies of work as cohesive families, working on paintings in various stages of completion at the same time. Every work answers a different question, creating a sense of balance within the group. Among the paintings in the artist’s are “Sanctuary” (2022), which depicts a tableau of undulating bodies rendered in warm yellow, orange, and brown hues, and “Galvanize” (2022), wherein two figures intertwine amid swathes of electric pink, purple, and orange. The two largest works in the exhibition “Hinterland” and “What stays with us, and what falls behind” (both 2022) are epic explorations of line and color that marry 19th century Romanticism with a distinctly contemporary edge. Info: Pace Gallery, 1201 South La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Duration: 16/9-29/10/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.pacegallery.com/

Tyler Mitchell’s photographs and videos in his solo exhibition “Chrysalis” propose a utopian vision of Black beauty, desire, and belonging. For “Chrysalis”, he has produced photographs of youthful subjects in nature. Shot on location in upstate New York and in studios in New York and London in 2022, the images allude to the contemporary landscape while reflecting on the history of photographic images of Black people, particularly in the American South. Playfully theatrical and surreal, the works focus on Black figures and the landscapes they inhabit, incorporating visual signifiers of spirituality, transformation, and aspiration. “Chrysalis” presents images of Black men and women in idyllic states of leisure and repose, safe and unencumbered by social expectations. In a photograph that shares its title with the exhibition, a young man sleeps on a blanket-covered bed, within the protective cocoon of a mosquito net. Mitchell uses land, water, and sky in both natural and artificial forms as symbols of possibilities and transformation. Info: Gagosian Gallery, 17–19 Davies Street, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 6/10-12/11/2022, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-18:00, https://gagosian.com/