ART NEWS: Dec.02

Leo Villareal presents his latest NFT collection, titled “Cosmic Bloom” which will be available on the NFT platform Outland, this the second entry in the artist’s “Cosmologies” series, which began with “Cosmic Reef” his successful NFT project for Art Blocks. The works are produced using custom live code and inspired by organic and biological structures, stellar phenomena, and atomic patterns. Each digital artwork in this new collection is unique and features intricate geometric forms that are layered and multiplied, creating captivating patterns set in a non-repeating and constant motion. “Cosmic Bloom” draws from the artist’s longstanding practice of applying coding to generate complex visual sequences in his light sculptures. He draws upon this practice in order to extend his artistic vision into the NFTs, sculpting pixels and binary code into purely digital works. The artist’s first NFT project in the series was a purely generative project, where each mint was randomly created from live custom code. For Cosmic Bloom, the artist has used similar custom code to randomly generate a pool of iterations from which he has hand-selected those that best reflect his particular vision for the project. These curated works constitute the final Cosmic Bloom collection which are available for purchase as blind mints. https://outland.art/cosmic-bloom/

Mungo Thomson’s solo exhibition “Sculptures” is a meditation on the passage of time and ways of seeing through book images. The exhibition presents the artist’s stop-motion animation “Sideways Thought” (2020–22), laying out French sculptor Auguste Rodin’s complete works as photographed and printed in art history monographs. The work is the fifth volume in Thomson’s series “Time Life” (2014–22). This series culls imagery from encyclopedias, how-to guides, cookbooks, science books, and other printed material and arranges them at the high speed of a robotic book scanner.  “Sideways Thought” presents image after image of Rodin’s sculptures in rapid tempo. These works are known for their physicality, exposing the human condition in all stages of passion and suffering. The Rodin images are faded, grainy, and at times oversaturated. Presented alongside captions and fragmented texts and photographed from so many angles in the work, they appear panoramic, and are made to revolve and flow together. Rodin’s western classical figures from history, literature, and religion whir by, and stills are turned into motion by Thomson’s technique. Digitizing this analog, arguably obsolete object—the book page—Thomson puts forth a new mode of indexing that foregrounds how we look at images today. Info: Aspen Art Museum, 637 East Hyman Avenue, Aspen, CO, USA, Duration: 9/10/2022-9/4/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.aspenartmuseum.org/

Simultaneously captivating and discomforting, Patricia Piccinini’s sculptures, films, and environments in her solo exhibition “A tangled path sustains us” confront viewers with possible ecological and genetic consequences of the way we live. In her third solo exhibition at Hosfelt Gallery, the Australian artist creates a life-size diorama of a forest from recycled scrap wood and paper. The viewer enters an immersive space, inhabited by mutated beings that Piccinini imagines have evolved to survive the existential threats of human impact — raising questions about how we treat other species, other humans, and the planet we cohabitate. Often just a step or two away from recognizable animals, Piccinini’s creations are eerily life-like. Made of silicone and real fur or hair, they leap right over any “uncanny valley.” They are the immediately imaginable consequences of climate change, environmental degradation, and theriocide. While most of Piccinini’s creations come from her imagination, one work in the exhibition refers to an all-too-real image. In the aftermath of Australian wildfires, the picture of two children saving a koala splashed across the media. While the photo was used to illustrate a heartwarming tale, Piccinini notes that the rescuers are as vulnerable as the rescued — indeed victims in their own way. Info: Hosfelt Gallery, 260 Utah Street, San Francisco, CA, USA, Duration: 10/12/2022-28/1/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sat 10:00-17:30, Thu 11:00-19:00, https://hosfeltgallery.com/

The exhibition “Je suis la chaise” explores the different symbols and interpretations given to this generic and daily used object. The chair is seen here by various artists as a shape to be deconstructed or reconstructed, as an extension of the human body or even as a social allegory. The chair has since its origin in ancient Egypt for main function to symbolize the rank and power of its occupant and owner. This symbolic origin is contained in the very etymology of the French word dating from the 13th century—chaiere—which means chair, seat, throne. A chair is an incarnate object: empty it marks absence, but when used it becomes one with the body it supports. It is also an invitation to stillness, to individual or collective reflection, like a pause in time. This exhibition aims to question the form, the function, as well as the symbolism of the chair, inviting us to reconsider it thanks to the often irreverent or highly symbolic take on of the artists. Info: Galerie Chantal Crousel, 10 rue Charlot, Paris, France, Duration: 10/12/2022-8/2/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-19:00, www.crousel.com/

The exhibition “Togetherness” can be seen as a free, artistic unfolding across the three invited artist’s close friendship. Lin Utzon, Malene Birger and Bertel Bjerre are all drawing from their individual experiences from art, ceramic, porcelain, fashion, interior, and design industries. The exhibition therefore includes the materials ceramic, porcelain and works on paper. Through a common thread being that they all explore a playful approach to the possibilities but also limits of such materials.Lin Utzon has worked internationally with various medias such as porcelain, granite, tile, concrete, wood, varnish, metal, and glass. She has made commissions for public and private institutions and for exhibitions. Further she has made design works for Rosendahl and Royal Copenhagen and scenography and costumes for The Royal Ballet, New Danish Dance Theater and Copenhagen Summer Ballet Festival. Malene Birger graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Design in 1989. She works at the present time primarily as an artist and with interior projects. She managed to establish her name internationally through her work within the fashion industry; founding two of the most successful fashion houses. Bertel Bjerre was originally trained as a craftsman/designer from the School of Applied Arts in Copenhagen. Over the years and after a longer period and study in Pientrasanta in northern Italy, he developed and worked with sculpture and later with painting. Info: Curator: Erik Rimmer, Galerie Mikael Andersen, Bredgade 63, Copenhagen, Denmark, Duration: 10/12/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 12:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-15:00, http://mikaelandersen.com/

Founded in 2011, Kochi-Muziris Biennale is India’s first ever biennial of international contemporary art and its story is unique to India’s current reality—its political, social and artistic landscape. It began as a government initiative, when the Department of Cultural Affairs of Government of Kerala approached two artists—Riyas Komu and Bose Krishnamachari—to help organize an international platform for art in India. The challenge was proportionate to the ambition of the project. A biennial had never gotten past the conceptual stage in India before. There was no existing infrastructure necessary for an exhibition of this scale… The biennale programme “IN OUR VEINS FLOW INK AND FIRE” hosts contributions from diverse voices and practices including Homi Bhabha with Jitish Kallat; Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Pallavi Paul and Shaunak Sen with Jeebesh Bagchi initiated by ICAS-MP and its media module Media and the Constitution of the Political; Ali Cherri; Ala Younis; The White Review with Dayanita Singh, Vikram Aditya Sahai, and Shripad Sinnakar; Manu S Pillai; and Decolonizing Architecture Art Research. A full list of contributors and a schedule will be announced in the second half of October. In addition to the talks and seminar programmes, the foundation will also host book launches, film, theatre, dance, and music programmes including the folk traditions of Kerala. Info: Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Fort Kochi, Kochi, Kerala, India, Duration: 12/12/2022-10/4/2023, www.kochimuzirisbiennale.org/

The work of Michel Majerus negotiates social paradigms that unfolded in the 1990s and continue to influence us today: the start of the virtual age with the increasing presence of computers and the internet, the spread of mass media, the world of advertising, and pop and youth culture. His large-scale paintings, expansive wall works, and monumental installations embody an artistic reflection on the digital turn and the overflow of imagery that characterizes social networks today. His work reveals a non-hierarchical and discursive understanding of the image, in which quotations, seriality, and temporality play a central role, blurring the boundaries between the art world and everyday life. The exhibition at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein highlights Majerus’s installations as a central means of expression in his practice. They comprise an extensive video installation, key wall works and spatial designs, as well as sculptural models conceived for site-specific, large-scale projects and presented here for the first time. They convey the intermedial specificity of his artwork, his reflections on mass media, and his method of creating spaces for nuanced aesthetic experiences.Info: Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), Chausseestrasse 128 / 129, Berlin, Germany, Duration: 17/12/2022-15/2/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 12:00-18:00, Thu 12:00-20:00, www.nbk.org/  

Basim Magdy presents “An Alligator in the Clouds”, his first solo exhibition in the Netherlands, The anchor of the exhibition is Magdy’s latest film “FEARDEATHLOVEDEATH”, about the absurdity of death and the impossibility of understanding it. Transition – the process of passing from one state to another – is the common thread in the exhibition. Magdy filmed the footage for “FEARDEATHLOVEDEATH” while travelling. Another series that feature in the exhibition consists of small and medium-sized photographic work comprising more than one image, and sometimes text, in an investigation of a hypothetical history: what might have happened. Magdy points out that history is either written by the people in power, or by people who can write. “There is an unknown infinite history of people we know nothing about. We have no idea about their lives because either they were not powerful or their story was not passed on through written language. So much has been lost because of that, and so many lives are lost not only physically but also in the memory, because memories fade”. Info: KM21, Stadhouderslaan 43, Den Haag, Netherlands, Duration: 17/12/2022-23/4/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-17:00, www.km21.nl/

The exhibition “Action, Gesture, Paint- Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940–70” reaches beyond the predominantly white, male painters whose names are synonymous with the Abstract Expressionism movement, to discover the practices of numerous international women artists working with gestural abstraction in the aftermath of the Second World War. The exhibition’s geographic breadth demonstrates that, while the Abstract Expressionism movement is said to have begun in the USA, artists all over the world were exploring similar themes of materiality, freedom of expression, perception and gesture in the mid-century period, from Art Informel to Arte Povera in Europe, and from calligraphic abstraction in East Asia to experimental, highly political practices in Central and South America, and the Middle East. The exhibition features well-known artists associated with the Abstract Expressionism movement, including American artists Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler, alongside lesser-known figures such as Mozambican-Italian artist Bertina Lopes (and South Korean artist Wook-kyung Choi. More than half of the works have never before been on public display in the UK. Info: Whitechapel Gallery, 77-82 Whitechapel High St, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 9/2-7/5/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, www.whitechapelgallery.org/