ART NEWS: Sept.02

Helen Marten’s exhibition, “Third Moment Profile | The Almost Horse”, own folly is classical: the attempt to depict a horse. This exertion unfolds in three ways: a monumental photographic wallpaper, an architectural scaffold, a fictional tale. In each instance, a reckless inaccessibility deliberately foils any practical realisation of the subject at hand. On the large wallpaper, a photographic image of a white horse stands upside down, the horse hanging static and luminous. The horse is a real horse, documented inside the gallery space several months prior but the image-space it stands in is a mutant, a new construction of CGI treachery, skewed and altered to produce the perspectival artifice of an additional spatial dimension. Twenty-six paintings of identical scale are hung in an equally spaced circuit around the periphery of the gallery. A glib bronze temperature gauge in the form of a frog with downturned mouth and raised umbrella is repeated in sequence across each of the paintings. Each depicts a replicated view through a window onto a classic Romantic landscape. These paintings also house a single “page” fragment of a fictional story written by the artist. Each paragraph begins with the next consecutive letter of the alphabet, an A-Z circuit whose narrative tells of the generative friendship of two strangers and their horse. Info: Sadie Coles HQ, 1 Davies Street, London England, Duration: 14/9-29/10/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.sadiecoles.com/

Originally planned for 2021 and postponed until this year due to the ongoing pandemic, the 16e Lyon Biennale d’art contemporain opens after two and a half years of extensive research and preparation with 40 diverse institutional partners in Lyon, and abroad. The Biennale’s title “Manifesto of fragility” captures a current sentiment that is universally shared, whether it stems from the endangered conditions of the environment, the losses felt through wars, the hardships brought upon by illness and pandemics, or through the perilous conditions of our society’s marginalized members. Fragility is also formally and conceptually at the heart of artistic creation and is the thread connecting all exhibitions and participating artists. In total, 202 artists from over 40 countries, with works spanning two millenia, are participating in “Manifesto of fragility”. The exhibitions include 66 new commissions, as well as many site-specific and large-scale immersive installations that directly engage with the architecture and history of their respective location. Info: Curators: am Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, Lyon Biennale, Various Venues, Lyon, France, Duration: 14/9-31/12/2022, www.labiennaledelyon.com/

In her solo exhibition “Caribbean Cosmos”, Teresita Fernández presents a nuanced understanding of the Caribbean, looking beyond dominant, continental narratives and instead considering the region as emblematic of an expansive, decentralized physical geography, and a global, diasporic state of mind. Using this dispersed lens, she unravels dynamic strands of rhizomatic connection, sprawling landscapes, and a metaphysical understanding of the natural world. Fernández uses earthly elements, including fired clay, etched and polished copper, and solid charcoal made from burned trees, to summon a churning material world in the ever-changing flux of decay, evolution, and renewal. In “Caribbean Cosmos” Fernández infuses matter with meaning, achieving a type of alchemy in the transformation of her raw materials. Fernández often shifts between the cosmic and the microscopic, the subterranean and the firmament, and the geological and the ephemeral—often within a single work. The titular “Caribbean Cosmos” (2022) is a 12-foot panel composed of thousands of tiny ceramic tesserae, which are glazed with minerals from the earth and fired at high temperatures, mimicking volcanic processes. The work depicts swirling shapes that suggest colliding galaxies, archipelagos, aerial views of hurricanes, and vortex rings such as those found in the tributary systems of the human body. Info: Lehman Maupin Gallery, 1 Cromwell Place, South Kensington, London, England, Duration: 14/9-5/11/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.lehmannmaupin.com/

Jim Dine presents “Grace and Beauty”, a series of previously unseen works, specially created for the show. Combining large scale paintings on wood panel and anthropomorphic bronze sculptures, Jim Dine explores the notion of creation, its power and its limits. The outsized paintings evoke the painter’s intimate world of studio walls and palettes, their looming presence bringing to mind stage sets, both abstract and figurative. At their heart lie interlaced brass pipes and various tools, either crushed and distorted beyond recognition. As a counterpoint, a group standing sculptures, part machine, part plant, part classical statues, display a rare degree of complexity and technical virtuosity. Jim Dine, who has been an intermittent Parisian for the last twenty years, is often associated with the pioneering days of New York happenings and the glorious era of the American Pop Art. Yet he remains, fiercely independent, insisting on total freedom of form. The new work demonstrates his capacity to push the boundaries of technical experimentation even further: his bronze surfaces either imitate wood slabs or industrial foam; with their sophisticated colours, the hand-patinated sculptures rival with the paintings. Info: Galerie Daniel Templon, 28 rue du Grenier Saint-Lazare, Paris, France, Duration: 15/9-5/11/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, www.templon.com/

Mario Pfeifer’s work explores representational structures and conventions in the medium of film. Conceiving each project out of a specific cultural situation, he researches social-political backgrounds and weaves further cross-cultural art historical, filmic and political references into a richly layered practice, ranging from film and video installations to photographs and text installations. His film “Proof of Unthinkable”  examines a scandal that has preoccupied Germans for the last seventeen years—the Oury Jalloh case—and takes it to the next level. This is one of a number of unsolved cases involving the cover-up of the murder of a black man by the police. Flying in the face of justice and humanitarianism, the German state glossed over this putatively racist act. Pfeifer’s exhibition at KOW presents video footage of police tests alongside the film installation, as well as an original copy of Peck’s report detailing his own studies. Info: KOW, Lindenstr. 35, Berlin, Germany, Duration: 16/9-12/11/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 12:00-18:00, https://kow-berlin.com/

“RE________” is the first major US exhibition of smell researcher and artist Sissel Tolaas. Over the course of the past 25 years, Tolaas has developed an artistic and scientific practice using smell as her primary medium, composing provocative smells to activate memory, recreate place and time, capture seasonality and arouse emotional and intellectual responses. The exhibition is comprised of 20 works that use smell to consider a broad range of pressing issues, including climate change, evolution, geopolitics and anthropology. Tolaas rethinks, reconstructs, revisits, and reacts to these issues in her practice through her intangible, but highly sensory medium. Between each “situation,” or project throughout the exhibition, Tolaas encourages visitors to reflect on their body and the air they breathe, focus on new impressions and revisit old ones. Recognizing that smell as a sense has the greatest capacity to instantly evoke memory and emotion, Tolaas’s work powerfully explores the concept of experience, of the unknown and even the (un)pleasantly familiar. Info: Curator: Solveig Øvstebø, Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania (ICA), 118 S. 36th Street, Philadelphia, PA, USA, Duration: 16/9-30/12/2022, Days & Hours: Wed-sun 12:00-18:00, https://icaphila.org/

“Time Lapsed” is Shara Hughes’ first institutional exhibition in Switzerland. The title is borrowed from her multipart series of works on paper of the same name. The artist often uses wordplay: in addition to past time, Time Lapsed also includes the term time-lapse. Shara Hughes’s fluid forms literally render past time visible. The paintings also involve a time lapse, given that the finished work is always a combination of different landscapes which grow organically and change during the painting process, constantly producing something new. Through her technique Shara Hugues takes up forms of Action Painting, which emerged in the United States in the mid-20th century. At that time, the process of paint application, the expression of abstract subjective inwardness shifted to the fore. Shara Hughes leaves abstraction behind her, however, and transposes this technique into the genre of landscape painting. Info: Curator: Fanni Fetzer, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Europaplatz 1, Luzern, Switzerland, Duration: 17/9-20/11/202, Days & Hours: Tue & thu-sun 10:00-18:00, Wed 10:00-19:00, www.kunstmuseumluzern.ch/

Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili presents an ensemble of large-scale, quasi-abstract, almost diaphanous photographic images specifically developed for the outdoor context of the back wall of Kunsthalle Basel. The images are, as with so much of the Georgian-born artist’s practice, a mix of straight photographs, composite images created by superimposing photographic negatives, and explosions of chroma produced in darkroom processes. Here her images are printed on a PVC mesh often used to conceal building scaffolding. They expand the artist’s persistent interest in looking, deftly, at the minutia of everyday life as it is captured and shot through with transparency and light. The images she makes are straight snapshots or intricately staged photographs, which then undergo a process of altering by hand or digital means, or a mix of both. The multilayered manner in which she combines these interventions, while experimental and often intuitive, converges on a conceptual logic of choreographing and staging not just surfaces, but the conditions of photographic representation. Info: Kunsthalle Basel, Steinenberg 7, Basel, Switzerland, Duration: 17/9/2022-6/8/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-20:30, Sat=Sun 11:00-17:00, www.kunsthallebasel.ch/

Erik Schmidt’s creative exploration is often shaped by the narratives of his experiences abroad and his desire to illustrate his perception of foreign cultures. The exhibition “Retreat”  introduces a new body of work based on a six-week trip the artist  made last spring to Sri Lanka, across the villages surrounding Colombo, the capital city where mass protests began in March 2022 and spread all over the country. Protests of people who – thirteen years after the end of a long civil war – are still recovering and are now struggling with economic crisis, including power cuts and shortages of basics such as fuel, food and medicines. In “No Crisis”, a series of drawings based on photographs taken by the artist while exploring the streets, Schmidt separates figures from the flow of people and portrays them on the newspaper pages from which he receives the national news daily. The result is a highly expressive juxtaposition of bold strokes that offers a real insight into the local community despite the area’s limited color palette and humidity. Info: Kunstraum Potsdam, Schiffbauergasse 4d, Potsdam, Germany, Duration: 18/9-30/10/2022, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 13:00-18:00, https://kunstraumpotsdam.de/

Dawn Williams Boyd’s “cloth paintings” sheer size adds to their larger-than-life, often brutal subject matter. This exhibition “The Tip of the Iceberg” is a collection of works that reflect a lifelong critique of social injustices and racial violence, epic battles with misogyny, and physical and psychological abuses of power. There is no such thing as neutral history. Using scraps of fabric, needles, and thread as her tools, Boyd painstakingly “paints” the entire surface of her quilts, layer upon layer, cutting, sewing, endlessly repurposing, building the surface into a formidable, authoritative source. Boyd charges seamlessly between a myriad of narratives, both distant and recent, collaging together monumental moments of American history that are so often ignored or lost. The work informs and connects people, as humorous and generous as it is unflinching and gut-wrenching. Be it accounts from the past or warnings for the future, Boyd’s paintings bring an overwhelming sense that struggle is timeless. Info: Fort Gansevoort New York, 5 Ninth Avenue, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 21/9-19/11/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.fortgansevoort.com/

Featuring paintings and drawings produced during the past three years in London and Nairobi,  Michael Armitage’s exhibition “Amongst the Living” also includes sculptures by Senegalese artist Seyni Awa Camara. At the invitation of Armitage, Camara has installed a group of sculptures alongside the paintings, offering the first focused selection of Camara’s works in the UK. In images that are both sublime and tragic, Armitage deals with the complexities of contemporary life in his native Kenya. Weaving narratives drawn from literature, film, politics, history and myth, he captures the dramas of the everyday set within the verdant expanse of the East African landscape, while imbuing the whole with a fragile sense of mortality. Armitage paints with oil on Lubugo, a cloth made from fig tree bark from Uganda that is traditionally used in ceremonial burial rituals. His choice of ground is resonant: an attempt, he has remarked, to both locate and destabilise the subjects of his paintings. Now in her eighties, Seyni Awa Camara lives and works in the Casamancian village of Bignona, Senegal, where she was born. Initiated into the traditional techniques of ceramics by her mother when she was a child, Camara’s own practice quickly moved away from the utilitarian to the artistic, in visions guided by what she terms ”mysterious divine initiation”. Info: White Cube Gallery, 144-152 Bermondsey Street, London, England, Duration: 21/9-30/10/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, Sun 12:00-18:00, www.whitecube.com/

The mumok collection contains nearly five hundred works related to animals—a considerable quantity that raises the question of what kind of zoo the museum in fact is. What is kept, researched, and displayed both here and there to protect “wild life” and the “freedom of art”? And in whose interest? The exhibition “The Animal Within-Creatures in (and outside) the mumok Collection” addresses such questions and uses the popular appeal of animals to reflect on the nature of sex, hunger, and affection, as well as on family and gender relations, socialization and domestication, and, not least, on the enduring impact of colonial history. Who leads whom on a leash? Who clips whose wings? Who scratches whose back? The exhibition is thus less about animals than about bodies, moving or still, reclining or standing, crouching or crawling. The animal as a motif serves as a starting point to get to a materialist understanding of art and life. For in the Western world, “taming and framing” is what we do to mark our territories and claim our subjectivities. Info: Curators: Ekaterina Degot, David Riff, Christoph Platz, Mirela Baciak, Barbara Seyerl, mumok (museum moderner kunst stiftung ludwig wien), Museumsplatz 1, Vienna, Austria, Duration: 22/9/2022-26/2/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.mumok.at/

This year’s edition of steirischer herbst centers on the exhibition “A War in the Distance”,  in both wings of the first floor of Neue Galerie Graz. It combines historical works from the gallery’s collection with projects by contemporary artists, thus offering a rereading of the collection through the prism of ignored wars, hidden histories, and repressed conflicts. Rereadings of Neue Galerie Graz’s collections have already been undertaken in the past, partly in the frame of steirischer herbst, often in search of forms and media prefiguring modernist and contemporary art. This time, the exhibition focuses on works that, in modernism-centered art histories, remained mostly in the shadows: 19th- and 20th-century works that were neglected due to their figurative and narrative qualities. These are linked to works by contemporary artists in different media, most of them newly commissioned. They provide artistic and curatorial comments to ominously peaceful artworks, amplifying the echoes of not-so-distant battles and their far-reaching consequences. The exhibition is divided into chapters and arranged according to subjective curatorial choices, built on free associations and counterpoints. Its focus is on the political uses of painting, and its common thread is a growing sense of danger, connected to the veiled and open conflicts of Austrian history. Info: Curators: Ekaterina Degot, David Riff, Christoph Platz, Mirela Baciak, Barbara Seyerl, Neue Galerie Graz, Joanneumsviertel, Graz, Austria, Duration: 23/9/2022-12/2/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.museum-joanneum.at/

Where is the space for queer desire in a world built upon rigid structures? It’s the core question in Alice Slyngstad’s new work, entitled “Soothing Pants”. The script is based on the navigation in and interaction with several dating apps. Identifying as non-binary, Slyngstad was dazed by the gatekeeping language in these surroundings: “And since you can’t remove your gender description once you’ve chosen one, I went with self-describe—raincloud emoji.” The artist took fragments of texts from profiles they found and chats they were engaged in, and combined these with their own experiences and fictions. Through this multitude of voices, you get confused about who is talking. For the artist, this is a way to express our current times in which we are simultaneously hypervisible and hyperinvisible. The repetition of words, pick up lines and topics also points to the laziness and limitedness within this mode of interaction. Through using a specific type of electrochromic glass, Slyngstad can animate transitions of visibility. The artist is especially interested in one of the technical preconditions of this glass; it is frosted by default and makes itself completely transparent when voltage is applied. The performative potential of this material will be used to distort the surroundings and activate a movement between multiple moods. Info: Vleeshal, Markt 1, Middelburg, The Netherlands, Duration: 25/9-18/12/2022, Days & Hours: Wed-Fri 13:00-17:00, Sat-sun 11:00-17:00, http://vleeshal.nl/