ART NEWS: April 01
Already in the 90s Michael Laube has created a painting technique on acrylic glass to extend his works into space. Michael Laube unites the qualities of a traditional concept of painting with a desire to dissolve the medium’s boundaries. His artistic development is based on painting in a formal, conventional sense, as far as his treatment of color, its application and its technique are concerned. Quite early on, however, he developed an ambition to go beyond this approach and extend the familiar boundaries of the painterly level. For Michael Laube this means, above all, departing from the classical foundation of painting – the canvas – and turning to acrylic glass as his carrier medium. Emancipating the medium in this way gives him the freedom to choose more radical forms when he explores the themes of light, movement, colour and space. One of Michael Laube’s central concerns is to transcend the external pictorial boundary and thus the distinct boundary between the image and the observer, too. In this way, he strives to open immediate intimacy and complexity to experience. The colours, with their miscellaneous arrangements, move along various levels, entering the observational space. Info: Kuckei + Kuckei, Carrer de Pou 33, Palma, Spain, Duration: 1/4-3/6/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 12:00-18:00, https://kuckei-kuckei.de/
The exhibition “Umwelt” brings together Antony Gormley’s most recent attempts to reconcile the first and the second body; if the first body, our material, biological body, is our first dwelling, then the second is our built environment, which we have become part of and largely dependent upon. These works attempt to map and materialise the interactions between these two bodies. The exhibition comprises sculptures from Antony Gormley’s recent investigations in living space where the body is seen as a place rather than an object. As the title indicates, the works on view explore in drawing and sculpture the dynamics between the internal condition of the human body and its environment (‘Umwelt’), testing its boundaries and permeability. This exhibition presents for the first time a group of “Extended Strapworks” that Gormley has developed over the last two and a half years. Linear and open, these sculptures comprise two or four circuits of rusted ribbon steel in the form of Möbius strips that pass around the space surrounding a single body. Sculptures such as “Dwell” (2022) and “Implicate III” (2022) break the body-boundary and reach out towards the edges of the spaces they inhabit, recognising how a room’s orthogonality affects our internal perception of space. Info: Thaddaeus Roppac, Salzburg Villa Kast, Mirabellplatz 2, Salzburg, Austria, Duration: 1/4-20/5/2023, Days & Hours: Mon & Sun 10:00-14:00 Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://ropac.net/
Working with conflicting Kurdish and Western narratives and perspectives, Jala Wahid in her solo exhibition “Mock Kings” explores the enduring effects of longstanding colonial occupation and British and US imperialism on Kurdish art practices and archaeology. Both the Kurdish performance “Mîrmîran” and artefacts from former Mesopotamia serve as starting points for Wahid to counter-draft Western historical narratives and, in doing so, reflect on theatrical and performative forms of political subversion. Which media might aid in criticising and ridiculing colonial power relations, or what’s more, distorting, inverting and temporarily suspending them? What potentials are offered by carnivalesque aesthetics, play and dance, parody and humour? And what happens when political and theatrical action can no longer be clearly distinguished? In the context of political, geographical and linguistic fragmentation and unresolved questions of belonging and permanence, Wahid takes on the contradictions, diffuseness and complexity of diasporic reality and develops alternate techniques of remembering and preserving that can be transformative and playful, that testify to resilience and self-positioning. Info: Curator: Theresa Roessler, Kunstverein Freiburg, Dreisamstraße 21, Freiburg, Germany, Duration: 1/4 -14/5/2023, Days & Hours: Wed-Fri 15:00-19:00, Sat-Sun 12:00-18:00, www.kunstvereinfreiburg.de/
“Rising and Sinking Again” presents sixteen graduate exhibitions realized by the Class of 2023 master’s candidates at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard). Distinct in theme and focus, these projects are the culmination of a year and a half of research in collaboration with artists, writers, scholars, and more. Spread throughout the Hessel Museum of Art, these sixteen exhibitions take up Medina’s statement as their collective method—considering the transmission of heritage, history, and culture; forms of spatial and perceptual mapping; and lesser-known artistic tendencies, among other topics. As various pasts roll in to meet us or recede into the distance, the MA candidates approach the contemporary as a continuous reckoning with the aftereffects and unexpected futures of such pasts. Thinking of history as a permanent process of transition, the projects of “Rising and Sinking Again” map idiosyncratic routes through the recurrent and liquid nature of our contemporary moment. Artists: is Katherine C. M. Adams, Marina Caron, María Carri, Leo Cocar, Liv Cuniberti, Mary Kathryn Fellios, Jiwon Geum, Abel González Fernández, Kyle Herrington, Rachel Horvath-Eboh, Claire Kim, Zehra Begüm Kışla, Sidney Pettice, Ursula Pokorny, Olivia Rodrigues, and Calvin Wang. Info: The Hessel Museum of Art, The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, 33 Garden Rd, Annandale-On-Hudson, NY, USA, Duration: 1/4-28/5/2023, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 11:00-17:00, https://ccs.bard.edu/
Patti Oleon presents her solo exhibitin “Other Side of Night”. Evocative and mysterious, Oleon creates visual amalgams of interior spaces and exterior landscapes lit with the ethereal color and light found in nightfall and daybreak hours. Inspired by the landscape of Los Angeles, its architecture, its film sets, literary history, and her own experience with the city; her paintings are means to consider the outside world transmuted through the interior worlds she creates in her studio. Filled with associations and ambiguities, Oleon’s surreal paintings suggest memories or dreams and are emotionally charged. Although imaginary, Oleon sources her imagery using photographs which are altered and transformed through digital means and are arranged into a composition prior to embarking in her studio on the laborious painting process crafted of multiple layers of oil paint and translucent glazes. Suggesting cinematic dissolves, her paintings operate between realism and abstraction, fact and fiction. Info: Edward Cella Gallery, 8687 Melrose Ave Suite B310, West Hollywood, CA, USA, Duration: 1-15/4/2023, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 11:00-19:00, www.edwardcella.com/
For more than twenty-five years, Cecily Brown has transfixed viewers with sumptuous color, bravura brushwork, and complex narratives that relate to some of Western art history’s grandest and oldest themes. After moving to New York from London in the 1990s, she revived painting for a new generation alongside a handful of other artists—many of them also women—at the very moment critics were questioning its import and relevance. The exhibition “Death and the Maid” is first full-fledged museum survey of Brown’s work in New York since she made the city her home, “Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid” assembles a select group of some fifty paintings, drawings, sketchbooks, and monotypes from across her career to explore the intertwined themes of still life, memento mori, mirroring, and vanitas—symbolic depictions of human vanity or life’s brevity—that have propelled her dynamic and impactful practice for decades. Info: Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Met Fifth Avenue, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 4/4-3/12/2023, Days & Hours: Mon-Tue, Thu & Sun 10:00-17:00, Fri-Sat 10:00-21:00, www.metmuseum.org/
Mimi Lauter presents her solo exhibition titled “Ruach”, a Hebrew word for spirit, wind or breath, her new group of works is inspired by the natural world and the cyclical rhythm of plants. Reflecting Lauter’s interest in European 19th and early 20th century painting, her paintings reveal influences as wide-ranging as Odilon Redon, Pierre Bonnard, Jean-Édouard Vuillard and Hilma Af Klint, as well as Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, and the rich colours of Mexican art and its folkloric imagery. Fascinated by symbolic readings of landscapes and still lifes – and how they can become metaphors for mortality – the artist states: ‘I have always looked at work historically, to understand how images are made now, what the world looks and feels like now, but through the lens of historical anecdotes and imagery’. The notion of a journey is central to this exhibition, in which Lauter explores the connection between a passage through a landscape and an internal movement deeper into the body. Just as a plant grows instinctively towards sunlight, Lauter considers how our path through a landscape is invariably guided by light; in several paintings she combines a circular space, which she has termed a place for ‘wandering’, and an inherent focal point or ‘place of arrival’. Info: White Cube Gallery, White Cube Bermondsey, 144-152 Bermondsey Street, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 5/4-14/5/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, Sun 12:00-18:00, https://whitecube.com/
Zoya Cherkassky presents new paintings in her solo exhibition “The Arrival of Foreign Professionals”, in her latest works, Cherkassky offers up vibrant figurative compositions to depict scenes of African diasporic communities in Europe, Israel, and the USSR from the 1930s to the present day. Based upon historical research and the artist’s own memories, these paintings examine cross cultural encounters from disparate times and locations. Cherkassky’s personal experiences as the wife of a Nigerian emigrant and mother of a mixed-race child simultaneously inform her perspective and complicate her relationship to the subjects she portrays. Aware of the challenges that come with presenting these works in America—a nation whose own history of African enslavement and white supremacy remains entrenched— Cherkassky aims to engage viewers in open conversation about the aftermath of failed colonial projects. In spite of the delicate and difficult subject matter she portrays, Cherkassky does not shy away from humor and awkwardness. Rather than being polemical, her paintings capture slices of life that embrace the unresolved, the transitional, and the complexities that characterize our shared humanity. The works on view at Fort Gansevoort continue her ongoing artistic project: excavating personal feelings about identity, nationalism, and belonging in relationship to her mixed-race family and to similarly positioned communities all over the world. Info: Fort Gansevoort, 5 Ninth Avenue, New York, Duration: 7/4-3/6/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.fortgansevoort.com
In her solo exhibition “Brittle Connections”, Lillian Lykiardopoulou presents two sets of works, a series of wall-mounted ceramic sculptures and a series of site-specific sculptures in colored clay and porcelain. Lykiardopoulou’s works bear witness to her personal exploration of the possibilities of the material she is using, as well as her themes, which she draws from the urban landscape and her personal life. This series witness her evolution from a more conceptual art (Loop Ahead) into matter, based on an emotional processing of her observations, without the works losing their humour and sense of the absurd. The first series is about the grids in orange and it started by observing the grids that exist in the streets of Athens when construction projects are taking place. Again by observing elements in the city the artist was interested in some pipes in front of apartment buildings (very often in pairs) used to ventilate basements. she started a series of projects starting from these pipes that resembled periscopes. With the use of clay or porcelain these shapes became more organic. The third series is about works she made with the sense of protection-defense and passive-aggression in mind. Shewas looking at animals with scales, exoskeletal insect shells, claws, cuticles, i.e. something hard protecting something soft and fleshy. Info: Bernier/Eliades Gallery, 11 Eptachalkou Street, Athens, Greece, Duration: 6/4-11/5/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:30-18:30, Sat 12:00-16:00, https://bernier-eliades.com/
Monia Ben Hamouda presents her solo exhibition “About Telepathy and other Violences”. Living between al-Qayrawan and Milan, her work reflects her dual Islamic and Christian heritage, sculpting calligraphic references that blend identity and meaning, specifically emphasizing aniconism in Islamic tradition. On the floor of the exhibition, wood sculptures bandaged with cloth rest among twelve hanging steel sculptures to highlight the contrasts between the dynamic gestures and static pauses in their form. Part of a personal shamanic process centered on recovery and resilience, the laser-cut steel sheets have been dressed with different spices and powders (chili, cumin, curry, henna, coconut charcoal, dried beetroot, salt). Cut into shapes that abstract traditional Islamic calligraphy, each of these works is composed of repeated layers, installed one behind the other to create the illusion of movement. The artist’s visual focus on representing movement is a reference to migration, manifesting allusions to the pilgrimage to Mecca and the Hajj’s stone-throwing ritual. As you walk through the exhibition, the layers of steel sheets reveal a hand in motion, in various stages of throwing. Following the belief that each individual is inextricably connected to their family tree and the psychological universe of their ancestors, Ben Hamouda attempts to master her influences in a contemporary and constantly changing landscape. Info: ChertLüdde, Hauptstrasse 18, Berlin, Germany, Duration: 28/4-1/6/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 12:00-18:00, https://chertluedde.com/