ART NEWS: Nov.01

Jean-Marie Appriou in his solo exhibition “Gemini” invites us to consider a different set of twins (poetry and sculpture) through the lens of the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke and the French artist Auguste Rodin. For this exhibition, Appriou has created three glass portraits of Rilke tinted with ink, as though the poet’s words were suffusing his very flesh and blood. These sculptures are the first in a new series of portraits that Appriou plans to produce in homage to the writers who have influenced him and his work. Another face, this one bronze with parted lips, returns our gaze through a pair of cobalt glasses. Deep cracks branch across the cheeks and brow of this observer like bolts of lightning. When Appriou first modeled this face in clay, the surface was pristine. Left in a corner of the studio, however, the piece dried out and developed deep fissures. Appriou embraced the transformation and casted the new face in bronze, just as Rodin repurposed old pieces again and again to produce new sculptures. This ability to discover fresh possibilities in past creations, to look ahead while gazing back, is central to Appriou’s practice. Info: Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Lichtenfelsgasse 5, Vienna, Austria, Duration: 9/11-22/12/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-15:00, www.presenhuber.com/

Pipilotti Rist presents a selection of new and recent sculptural works and projections in “Prickling Goosebumps & a Humming Horizon”, a major two- part exhibition. The exhibition, which will take place simultaneously at Hauser & Wirth’s 22nd Street location and Luhring Augustine’s 24th Street location, has been conceived by the artist as a multisensory experience for visitors. In these complementary presentations, Rist will explore interior and exterior—internal and external physical and psychological spaces—with Luhring Augustine reimagined as an expansive, shared ‘backyard’ and Hauser & Wirth transformed into a whimsical collective living room. At each location visitors are greeted with an artistic gesture on the façade: the work ‘Textile Simultaneity’ at Luhring Augustine and ‘Innocent Collection’ at Hauser & Wirth. At Luhring Augustine Chelsea on West 24th Street, visitors are taken on a journey through an expansive ‘backyard’ environment animated by sounds, colors and textures.  The artis presents “Big Skin” (2022), a version of which was first included in Rist’s solo exhibition ‘Behind Your Eyelid’ at Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong. The installation’s undulating, semi-translucent resin panels, or ‘skins,’ float cloud-like from the ceiling with video projections of real and animated galaxies and natural landscapes dancing across their surfaces. Info: Hauser & Wirth Gallery, 542 West 22nd Street & Luhring Augustine Gallery, 531 W 24th St, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 9/11/2023-13/1/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.hauserwirth.com/ &  Luhring Augustine Gallery, 531 W 24th St, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 18/11/2023-3/2/2024,Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00,  www.luhringaugustine.com/

The 14th Shanghai Biennale is entitled “Cosmos Cinema”, the works included in the exhibition are as various in their forms and approaches as are readings of the constellations. They reflect on diverse cosmologies and microcosmic realities, indicating the different ways in which humanity interacts with and understands the cosmos. But they might all be said to begin from a point of wonder: how do we fit into the systems that govern time and space? Do the same principles operate at every scale, and how might our understanding of the cosmos change our terrestrial behavior? How do we live together, as a species and with nonhuman others, on earth and beyond? “Cosmos Cinema” proposes that contemplations of the cosmos (ancient and modern) might work against the alienation that is endemic to our historical moment: alienation from each other, from nature, and even from time itself. As no part of our world can be separated from the effects of the sun, the moon, and the heavenly bodies, Cosmos Cinema suggests that reframing our connection to the cosmos might encourage more complex ways of thinking about the ever-more entangled challenges that face the world today. Info: 14th Shanghai Biennale, Chief Curator: Anton Vidokle, Curators: Zairong Xiang, Hallie Ayres, Lukas Brasiskis, Power Station Of Art 678 Miaojiang Road, Huangpu District, Shanghai, China, Duration: 9/11/2023-31/3/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-19:00, www.powerstationofart.com/

The exhibition “Meditation” includes twenty-seven vintage color photographs from the estate of Luigi Ghirri. Made between 1970 and 1990, each work is unique and many are exhibited here for the first time. “The most important lesson I received from Conceptual art consisted in the recording of simple and obvious things, and viewing them under a whole new light,” Ghirri wrote. The exhibition’s title refers to his innate understanding that images never come to us directly, that they are always encoded, seen through an unacknowledged lens and layers of meaning. Keenly aware of a photograph’s ability to play with our perception of things we think we know, the work in the exhibition highlights Ghirri’s intentional yet subtle toying with found imagery. In Ghirri’s work, this can take the form of reflections, a glimpse of a vista through a fence, or uncanny advertising. In one work, a woman’s heavily made-up eyes stare out of a shop window. In another, what appears to be an Old Master painting has been transformed into a jigsaw puzzle. Info: Matthew Marks Gallery, 526 West 22nd Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 10/11-22/12/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://matthewmarks.com/

“Degrees of Separation” features a group of new paintings in which Odili Donald Odita poses pointed questions about the meaning and perception of darkness in a variety of social and aesthetic contexts. In so doing, he elaborates and expands upon themes that have characterized his work for more than twenty years, exploring ways in which color, line, geometry, implied movement, and patterning inform shared experiences of the world at large. Executed with acrylic paints on either canvas or reconstituted wood panels, the paintings are distinguished by shifting, angular, and ray-like compositions in which apparent symmetries and grid-oriented images of order are offset by the visceral, structuring function of color. Odita is known for his commitment to mixing pigments by hand anew for each painting, so that the same color never appears in his work twice. Odita brings the fullest possible array of technique, conceptual analysis, and sociopolitical critique to the practice of painting. The results of this radical synthesis are works that engage the eye, body, and mind in equal degree, and that focus attention not only on their own compositional and chromatic qualities, but on elements of identity and cultural production that are consistently excluded from dominant points of view. By forging parallels between visual constructs like perspective or the indeterminacy of color and observations about mechanisms of power and psychological bias, Odita repositions painting as a force that engenders new kinds of seeing, and that enables its viewers and makers to perceive facets of their physical and epistemological environments that might otherwise go unseen. Info: David Kordansky Gallery, 5130 W. Edgewood Pl., Los Angeles, CA, USA, Duration: 11/11-16/12/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.davidkordanskygallery.com/