ART NEWS: May 02
The exhibition “First Contact” shows a wide and colorful selection of sculptures, silkscreen prints, digital artworks, neon designs, and wall objects by RAIDER, who transforms the two floors of the gallery into an exciting art experience, introducing the character Scoop. RAIDER represents a new, young generation of contemporary artists. With a great passion for art, his iconic sculptures of the fictional character Scoop have gained attention around the world since 2020. The creator experiments with all available techniques and materials in a traditional way. The new of RAIDER has its own unique signature. It is fresh, pure, and colourful. For the design of the figure Scoop, spheres are used as primal elements, referring to the science of discovering extraterrestrial life forms. The storyteller draws inspiration from film, animation, music, and travel. Scoop is from another planet and is now discovering our world and its inhabitants. Scoop is friendly, curious, and reflects on human behaviour with a childlike innocence. The Scoop sculptures are made of resin, and are available as Limited Editions in a variety of colours and sizes, from small (10 cm) to monumental (180 cm). Bronze is also used by the creator. Each sculpture is entirely handcrafted and painted. Info: Wanrooij Gallery, KNSM-laan 301, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Duration: 11/5-26/8/2021, Thu-Sat 12:00-17:00, www.wanrooijgallery.com/
In his solo exhibition “Oração”, Thiago Honório occupies the gallery’s space – a U or horseshoe-shaped gallery based on the ground floor of a commercial building – taking into account both the architectural body and the movement of the spectator’s body in its interior, by assuming the form of a text, or a sentence, a linguistic ensemble structured around a verb. In the experience of “Oração” the works are spread throughout the gallery space as graphic symbols, commas and stellar points, which take over the architecture as text. In the trajectory proposed by the exhibition, we glimpse a fractured narrative, both fragmented and suspended, marked by hiatuses, intervals, cuts, voids and silences. Taking into account the architectural plan of the gallery the notion of the exhibition plan acquires new meanings translated into elements seen in the works: a branch of cotton, the rosary’s rose, the garden stake, the shoot or sprout, the floor plan, the design, the map, the diagram, the footprint. Info: Curator: Ana Paula Cohen, Galeria Luisa Strina, Rua Padre João Manuel, 755, São Paulo, Brazil, Duration: 11/5-24/6/2023, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-17:00, Sat 10:00-17:00, www.galerialuisastrina.com.br/
The exhibition “Forever Young” is devoted to the work of Cathy Josefowitz. This focused presentation celebrates Josefowitz’s life, vision and achievements through a meticulous selection of works, including many on view for the first time. Featuring a series of paintings, works on paper—including pastel, felt- tip pen, ink, gouache and watercolor—and rare film footage from two choreographies, the exhibition spotlights the earliest works in Josefowitz’s practice and explores traces of these pivotal breakthroughs that persisted throughout her career. Prolific, prescient and infinitely imaginative, yet under-recognized in her lifetime, Josefowitz ingeniously transcended hierarchies of medium and genre in pursuit of an artistic practice that spanned drawing, painting, theater and dance. Born in New York and raised in Switzerland, she created an oeuvre of marked ambition, developing a compelling, sui generis visual syntax in her quest to represent the human body as a vehicle for expressing individual experience. Discussing her practice, Josefowitz said, ‘It’s my voice, my breathing, my world. Sometimes an ideal world, sometimes a very harsh world.’ Info: Hauser & Wirth Gallery, 32 East 69th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 11/5-22/7/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.hauserwirth.com/
“Secondary” is Matthew Barney’s latest five-channel video installation. It was filmed in Barney’s sculpture studio in Long Island City, where it is staged as an exhibition. The studio is both the site and a central character in Secondary’s narrative structure. Secondary maps two different narratives onto each other, using movement as the formal through-line. The first describes the complex overlay of violence and spectacle inherent in American football, and more broadly within American culture. Barney’s personal involvement in the sport served as a starting point for the development of this project. The extreme physical and psychological conditions of the game have been abstracted in Barney’s art practice since his earliest work, and now provide a context for this subject that is both retrospective and a new, direct engagement. The significant risk of the game became clear, and made a lasting impression on Barney as a young player, through an incident that took place in a professional football game on August 12, 1978 where Jack Tatum delivered an open field hit on Darryl Stingley. Stingley was left paralyzed. Secondary’s underlying plotline examines these charged aspects of football—and, specifically, Barney’s memory of that play in 1978—through a movement vocabulary that focuses on each element of the game, from drills to pre-game rituals to the moments of impact. It seeks to explore the complicated overlay of actual violence and its currency as image within the sport and the culture at large. Info: Matthew Barney Studio, 4-40 44th Drive, Long Island City, NY, USA, Duration: 12/5-26/6/2023, Days & Hours: Wed-Fri 12:00-20:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-16:00
Karla Black presents a major exhibition of previously unseen sculptures by critically acclaimed Scottish artist. This will be the artist’s largest UK solo exhibition and is a rare opportunity to see her work in depth. Karla Black uses a distinctive palette of pastel and metallic colours and selects materials for their physical properties, from cotton wool, Vaseline, bath bombs and make-up to polythene, cellophane, powder paint and paper. She makes no distinction between commercial or fine art shops as repositories for material she wants to work with. For the first time, the artist presents a large group of paint-filled jewellery boxes in grid formation, bringing to mind the desirable and carefully organised displays of sweet shops and make-up counters. Gallery-filling sculptures and robe-like objects absorb into them Black’s longstanding interest in Greek philosophy and ancient history, in particular the closed-off environment and politics of Plato’s Academy, the first institution of higher learning in history to the virtual exclusion of women. Experienced together, these works inform, affect, and contrast each other, involving the viewer in a bodily way. Info: Curator: Zoë Lippett, The New Art Gallery Walsall, Gallery Square, Walsall, United Kingdom, Duration: 12/5-29/10/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-17:00, Sun: 12:00-6:00, https://thenewartgallerywalsall.org.uk/
“Forgotten Lore”, the first solo exhibition of work by the queer artist, dandy, and stalwart of the New York art scene, Peter McGough, is on view now in Los Angeles. This exhibition presents two never before seen bodies of work from an artist who has dedicated his life to what he produces, yielding a result that is at once visually captivating and historically critical. In this exhibition, the artist unveils a new series of paintings and sculptures in which he reclaims slurs and otherwise sinister utterances, and pens phrases that convey a poetics of disappointment buffered by mordant humor. With these works, McGough uses writing, narrative, and wordplay to explicitly depict his lived experience as an artist, gay man, and political being. Known for his frank depictions of queerness in the 1980s and 90s, McGough’s imagery engages with the expression of gender, celebrations of gay sensibility, desire, and camp in a way that still threatens to exasperate the keepers of ‘taste’ and artistic probity at museums, galleries, and universities. Info: The Future Perfect’s Goldwyn House, 1200 Laurel Lane, Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Duration: 12/5-16/6/2023, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-17:00, www.thefutureperfect.com/
The exhibition “Breath Pieces” focuses on the Camila Sposati’s fascination for the core of our planet, with its subterranean energy currents transforming the earth’s surface and charged with history. Camila Sposati, a Brazilian artist and researcher, approaches art with an experimental and interdisciplinary practice. She challenges various assumptions and categories that have shaped Western thought, including anthropocentrism, linear time, and the division between culture and nature. Breath Pieces, the artist’s first comprehensive solo exhibition in Germany, creates a unique experiential space that vibrates throughout the city of Stuttgart and builds on her artistic exploration over the past twenty years. The exhibition is a bodily experience of changing perspectives in three acts: at ifa Gallery, at Theatre of the Long Now at Wagenhallen, and at Theater Rampe. The concept of Amerindian perspectivism stands for the cosmology of indigenous communities in the Amazon region in Brazil, and it comprises a multiplicity of realities – of animals, plants, and the Earth itself, all of which are closely interwoven with humankind. This way of experiencing the world and connecting with it is central to the artist’s project in Stuttgart. Sposati interprets perspectivism as a way of understanding the world as multiple subjectivities rather than a singular and objective reality, emphasising the interconnectedness and interdependence of all beings. In doing so, she highlights the importance of exchange between and the coexistence of plural temporalities, and stresses the mutual shaping of the human and nonhuman worlds. Info: Curators: Theater Rampe and Bureau Baubotanik, ifa Gallery Stuttgart Charlottenplatz 17, Stuttgart, Germany, Duration: 13/5-20/8/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 12:00-18:00, https://www.ifa.de/