ART NEWS: Feb.01

“Antigone: Women in Fibre Art” is an ambitious group exhibition celebrating the rich tradition of fibre art in Eastern Europe. The exhibition weaves together historic works by its female pioneers; Magdalena Abakanowicz, Jagoda Buić, Ewa Pachucka Barbara Levittoux-Świderska, together with contemporary artists Egle Jauncems and Anna Perach. The exhibition title honours Buić – who recently passed away – referencing her work named after the heroine of Sofocle’s Greek tragedy, who confronted archaic laws in the name of a modern moral sentiment. Like Antigone, Abakanowicz, Buić, Levittoux-Świderska, and Pachucka opposed the traditional view of textiles as specifically feminine, decorative, and low in the artistic hierarchy, elevating them to fine art. In the 1960s and 1970s, they revolutionised the millennia-old tapestry tradition to a point that a new term was coined to describe it: fibre art. Their weaved, knotted, plaited, coiled, and even braided creations forsake flatness and embraced tridimensionality, expanding freely in the space. The feminist movements of the time contributed greatly to the rise of fibre art on the international scene. Indeed, many of the most prominent fiber artists are women. Info: Richard Saltourn Gallery 41 Dover Street, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 31/1-18/3/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-17:00, www.richardsaltoun.com/

“Mechanical Manifestations” is the first solo show in Germany of Silvia Martes, who primarily works with film. She plays with her medium on multiple levels: experiments in nonlinear storytelling span genres, from thriller and sci-fi to documentary, melodrama, and comedy. She often investigates the shifts in power relations within filmic representations, comments on autobiographical storytelling, and explores the blurring of boundaries through pseudo-fiction. Martes’s wide-ranging interest in the sciences, encompassing fields such as neurology, psychology, and physics, feeds into her adventurous, playful, and often humorous—yet not entirely prescribed—film scripts. Her narratives gradually develop through research and committed conversations with both her actors and the filming locations. This deliberately capricious way of working remains visible in the completed films. Since the stories intertwine with autobiographical details, Martes keeps control over as many aspects of production as possible, undertaking nearly every step of the filmmaking process herself: she builds the sets, runs the camera, acts, directs, and edits. Conflicting and deeply troubling ideological and political dilemmas are portrayed through the staging of conflicts and in her association-heavy, dreamlike storytelling style. Info: Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art. Katharinenstraße 23, Oldenburg, Germany, Duration: 2/2-26/3/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 14:00-18:00, Sat-sun 11:00-18:00, www.edith-russ-haus.de/

Zeng Fanzhi’s exhibition cosmists of ten works on canvas executed over the past few years – some of which are over ten feet tall – the exhibition documents Zeng’s latest advances in brushwork and color, celebrating his intuitive approach to painting. Vivid yellow, cyan blue and vermillion are set as the dominant colors that define each painting, while tonal variations remain nuanced as Zeng’s signature inky black brushstroke creates a vibrant network of patterning. Adding further complexity to his brushwork, the artist uses broad sweeping strokes that are impressed, layer by layer, upon thick coats of paint, forming a compact and rhythmic wave-like texture. This body of work represents a turn to introspection and deeper contemplation, in which the artist deploys a more diverse pattern of brushwork to explore human consciousness and convey different elements of the human experience.  A pioneer of contemporary Chinese art, Zeng is celebrated globally for his constantly evolving style and subject matter, and the works on view herald his latest artistic breakthroughs that contemplate the intersection of Western art and style with traditional Chinese subject matter and philosophy. Info: Hauser & Wirth Gallery, Downtown Los Angeles, 901 East 3rd Street, Los Angeles CA, USA, Duration: 2/3-30/4/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.hauserwirth.com/

Gabriel Marian’s exhibition “The map is/not the territory” is mainly composed of works from the “Written Portraits” series specially realized for this occasion in a technique that the artist has been exploring for a few years now, that of acrylic paint markers. These portraits are the tool that Marian uses to constructively participate in the current debate regarding the consequences of colonization and attempts at decolonization, and above all from a cultural point of view (remember that “the map is/not the territory”), referring to concepts such as land and territory, of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation developed by the French Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. According to the artist, these maps include not only the territory but also the culture, the traditions, the individuals who characterize it: they are the symbol of a people. This special interest of the artist for the phenomenon of loss of identity, caused by colonialism, also derives from the history of his Country: for centuries Romania was occupied by various empires, among the most durable and impactful being the Roman, Ottoman and Russian.   Even nowadays, Romania is the centre of such debates that concern both Transylvania, formerly an independent region, and what is defined as a self-colonization, that is, the tendency of the people to resemble more and more the Countries of the European Union. Info: Curator: Camilla Remondina, IAGA Contemporary Art, Strada Cloşca n. 9-11, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, Duration: 2-28/2/2023, Days & Hours:  Tue-Sat 14:00-18:00, https://iagacontemporaryart.com/

The exhibition “A Kind of Longing” continues Alison Watt’s ongoing engagement with the practice of the celebrated eighteenth-century Scottish portrait painter Allan Ramsay, first showcased in her exhibition, “A Portrait Without Likeness” in 2021. Watt’s new paintings originate in the artist’s continuing fascination with Ramsay’s portraits and the drawings and sketchbooks from his extensive archive held by the National Galleries of Scotland, to which she was granted special access. In this new body of work, one can observe how the subtle shifts in tone and color are influenced by Ramsay’s own palette. Watt, best known for her paintings of fabric and drapery, has long been an admirer of Ramsay’s portraits of women, in particular the intensely personal images of his first and second wives, Anne Bayne and Margaret Lindsay of Evelick respectively. Taking objects that appear in Ramsay’s portraits and drawings – including books, a cabbage leaf, lacework, feathers and roses – as signs or symbols of aspects of the sitter’s life and character, Watt’s new paintings are neither portraits nor still lives, but instead extraordinary hybrids of both genres. Tristan Hoare Gallery, 6 Fitzroy Square, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 3/2-10/3/2023, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 11:00-18:00, https://tristanhoaregallery.co.uk/

Since he started his career as an artist, Hicham Berrada has been, working out how to create new worlds by taming the laws of the world we live in. Whether they are laws of chemistry, biology or physics, he uses them to generate fantastical images of potential landscapes. For “Vestiges”, his solo exhibition, Berrada invites us to contemplate printed circuits in a process of metamorphosis. Users are more or less unaware of them, but printed circuits are a crucial element of many aspects of our lives, centralizing and directing the connections in the indispensable technology that we use every day. They are the heart—made of metals, such as silver, copper, palladium, platinum and gold—of our computers and our mobile phones and, due to their complexity, monuments in themselves to human thought. Unfortunately, printed circuit boards are ephemeral monuments: where are the cell phones of yesterday? The obsolescence of electronic components keeps pace with technological progress, and planet Earth is riddled with the dead weight of the superseded elements as they revert to pure materiality: assemblages of various metals and alloys in variable forms. Info: kamel mennour Gallery, 47 rue Saint-André-des-Arts, Paris France, Duration: 3/2-18/3/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, https://mennour.com/

“Things Unstable” reflects on the pioneering work of the Korean avant-garde artist Seung-taek Lee. Lee has gained his reputation from his groundbreaking multidisciplinary practice, which includes ephemeral performances, site-specific works, installations, photographic interventions, appropriated canvases, and sculptures. Throughout his prolific career, Lee has incorporated Korean shamanic traditions, folk objects, and materials to question the values of art and art history. Known for his relentless humor, Lee continues to push the boundaries by inciting vocabularies that subvert conventional ideas of art. For this exhibition, Seung-taek Lee has drawn on the facade of the building at 351 Canal Street, New York. The drawing is brought to life as an artistic intervention using red fabric evocative of his 1970s Wind performances to be revealed during the opening week. Deploying natural elements such as fire, wind, earth, and water, Lee’s multimedia performances expanded the lexicon of the 1970s’ turn towards environmental aesthetics making him an early proponent of eco-art. Info: Canal Projects, 351 Canal St., New York, NY, USA< Duration: 3/2-22/5/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 12:00-18:00, www.canalprojects.org/

Kasia Fudakowski presents “Gallery Power LTD” an exhibition exploring the relationship between power, energy, and culture through real and artificial limits. The exhibition, filled with power-hungry sculptures, will labor under an assigned energy limit, controlled, to a certain extent, by the visitors. The sculptures on display include motors and lights, which visitors can choose to turn on and off to activate them in various ways. There will, however, be a limit on the total amount of electricity the visitors are permitted to use within the exhibition’s two-month duration. The remaining power will be displayed as a countdown timer in hours, minutes and seconds on an e-ink screen at the entrance/exit of the gallery. Once the energy limit has been reached, the sculptures will remain permanently off. The sculptures’ ability to ‘work’ is dependent on the energy provided by the gallery, along with the visitor’s attendance and engagement. The more visitors engage, the more energy is consumed – leaving later visitors with less. They will not, however, have total control. One particular work includes a powerful spotlight which, besides consuming the largest percentage of energy, is also controlled by an external mechanism. This element throws into question who really has control in a cultural space as it pits personal autonomy against corporate, political, and historical decision-making bodies, ultimately critiquing the mechanisms which enable the circumstances of art making itself. Info: ChertLüdde, Hauptstr. 18, Berlin, Germany, Duration: 4/2-15/3/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 12:00-18:00, https://chertluedde.com/

The exhibition “Unruly Kinships” presents various temporal and spatial imaginations, disorientations and understandings of kin-relations. They prompt us to imagine the present and the future differently, to envision a world in which solidarity, interdependence and other forms of intimate association and belonging coexist, one where we can make space and time to see one another in our abundance. The exhibition reckons with the fact that no ideal version of kinship exists, there is no blueprint which relations can be modelled upon. And yet it strives towards perspectives and approaches that anticipate new solidarities, affinities and alliances, ones in which freedom in love and self-determination can be attainable for everyone. It is a leap into the unknown. How about then imagining collectively other forms of kinship? The unruly ones—not subjected to the imposed societal orders? Those which do not submit to known ways of living? They are disobedient, riotous, resourceful. How about reimagining kinship and asking again: How would we like to live? How would you like to live? The endeavour contemplates various possibilities of kin-making and care relations in our contemporary society. It presents various ways we relate to each other and the unexplored potentialities of these relations, starting from everyday interactions to artistic genealogies and queer lineages. Info: Curators: Kris Dittel and Aneta Rostkowska, Temporary Gallery—Centre for contemporary art, Mauritiuswall 35, Cologne, Germany, Duration: 4/2-30/4/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 12:00-17:00, www.temporarygallery.org/

Sheila Hicks’ exhibition “a little bit of a lot of things” includes works that span a period of more than fifty years. It looks back on an extensive, fascinating work and also features recent works by Hicks, whose creative power remains undiminished to this day. Large-scale works alternate with small weavings, which the artist continually works on from time to time, like drawings. Hicks has repeatedly invented artistic manipulations in order to articulate new forms out of textile materials, such as weaving interspersed with found objects from nature, scepters wrapped with colored wool, and accumulations of threads tied into ropes as thick as an arm. Τwο monumental textile columns extend up to the ceiling of this industrial building, which once housed locomotives, as if they were supporting the fragile roof. A heap of colorful wool nets forms a soft sculpture with painterly qualities. Hicks’s textile interventions fundamentally change the space. Dimensions are put into perspective, and the artist intervenes on a scale that makes the human body seem insignificant. In addition to the textile materials, which exude a strong presence, Hicks’s saturated and extroverted color palette is also worth noting. It recalls the indigenous textile crafts of South America and India. Info: Curator: Gianni Jetzer, Kunstmuseum St.Gallen,  The LOK, Grünbergstrasse 7, St.Gallen, Switzerland, Duration: 4/2-14/5/2023, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 13:00-20:00, Sun 11:00-18:00, www.kunstmuseumsg.ch/

Beginning February7, 2023, Sharjah Art Foundation brings together over 150 artists and collectives for the 15th edition and 30-year anniversary of the Sharjah Biennial. The 19 venues spread across the emirate of Sharjah—from heritage buildings and historical landmarks to modern architecture of the late 1900s and contemporary spaces—connect different moments of Sharjah’s history as well as its diverse communities and landscapes. Through more than 300 artworks, the Biennial proposes a transcultural universe of thought embedded into this local social fabric, involving Sharjah’s own lived past in a nuanced conversation around postcolonial subjectivity, the body as a repository of memories, restitution, racialization, transgenerational continuities, and decolonisation. Rooted in intimate and caring observations of everyday lives and vernacular traditions, performances, concerts, workshops and other public programmes will activate the venues as well as regional art centers located in each city, forming a capillary reach across the emirate throughout the four-month duration of the Biennial. Info: Curator: Hoor Al Qasimi, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, Duration: 7/2-11/6/2023, https://sharjahart.org/