ART NEWS: Nov.02

As we delve further into the works presented in Rbjørn Rødland’s exhibition “Simple Gifts”, we encounter a captivating array of motifs, each with its own compelling narrative: A man’s neck is threatened by a black baton held by the dainty yet resilient hands of a woman. A leg and foot in a high heel contort on a brick floor, evoking discomfort and intrigue. Cheese upon cheese forms an unconventional sandwich. A woman, with ice cream melting down her cheek, capturing an ephemeral moment. A man clings to legs dressed in latex, evoking desire and submission. Legs adorned in vibrant blue tights gently sway in a hammock, suspended in states between relaxation and tension. Torbjørn Rødland’s “Blue Hammock Legs” captures the intersection of organic and inorganic elements. Toes curl, inviting reflection on the complexities of professed simplicity. The familiar becomes peculiar, disrupting the normative lines, offering a glimpse into queerness. Info: Nils Stærk Gallery, Glentevej 49, Copenhagen, Denmark, Duration: 9/11-22/12/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-17:00, https://nilsstaerk.dk/

The exhibition “Duality”, features new works by Nima Nabavi and Jason Seife. “Duality” is a showing of two artists working together in symbiosis, a product of an enduring “art friendship”. In ways both literal and metaphorical, the exhibition is a way of putting pen to paper on developments that were organically occurring when two artists who share a particular way of seeing collide. Both Nabavi and Seife think in color, shape, and line. Each pairing of canvases, from “Tenet”, to “Civic”, “Radar” and “Level” are mixed and matched, but not exact. The strictest aspect of each coupling of works is the precise dimensions of each canvas as being the same, be it classic rectangle or experimental long diamond. Whilst the foundational proportions were shared, both artists agreed upon the works being cousins and not siblings. There is enough of a similarity to begin to draw out a familial relationship from one work to another, but not enough that they become each other’s mirror image. The conceit is therefore more sophisticated: they are the same, but different. Info: The Third Line Gallery, Alserkal Avenue, Warehouse 78, Street 8, Al Quoz 1, Exit 43 off Sheikh Zayed Road, Dubai, UAE, Duration: 14/11/2023-5/1/2024, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 11:00-19:00, https://thethirdline.com/

Alexandria Smith’s works in “Stirrings of a Polymorphous Bloom” envision cosmic environments inhabited by figures in flux. Smith’s practice is grounded in her exploratory drawings, represented in Hong Kong by works on paper housed in custom frames. From these, she develops boldly colored assemblage paintings that incorporate shapes made from painted wood and 3D-printed elements that rise from their surfaces and extend beyond their frames. Smith’s new works focus on symbols of genesis, light, and growth, inspired by her interests in autobiography, fiction, and collective memory. Variously colored and ambiguously gendered, these hybrid figures emphasize features such as eyes, limbs, nipples, kneecaps, and nails. They stretch, divide, and multiply, embodying Smith’s multifaceted allegories of physical, spiritual, and emotional growth. Spanning fifteen feet over three panels, “Seers like me” (2022) is Smith’s largest work to date, conceived in conversation with Akwaeke Emezi’s work of flash fiction published in Gagosian Quarterly in response to a painting by Smith. Here, nested shapes that may be read as a single figure or three interconnected ones emerge from the earth, gazing upward at a row of arched portals and beaded curtains that act as theatrical elements to frame the scene. Info: Gagosian, 7/F Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central, Hong Kong, Duration: 16/11/2023-13/1/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, https://gagosian.com/

Featuring works by more than forty artists, the exhibition “Retinal Hysteria” draws its inspiration from “Eye Infection”, the landmark 2001–2002 exhibition presented to critical acclaim by the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Curated by Jan Christiaan Braun, “Eye Infection” achieved enduring international impact and influence that continues today via Storr’s accompanying catalogue essay, a tour de force that captured and advanced the maverick sensibility shared by the exhibition’s five artists: a small cadre of Americans united by their interest in the unsightly aspects of contemporary life, a challenge to establishment and avant-garde standards, a flair for blending meticulous facture with audacious vulgarity, and a distinct linguistic style frequently misread as mere jest or anti-intellectualism. Now, almost a quarter century later, the curator revisits these central concerns and expands upon them in the present tense by organizing a cross-generational array of works that irritate, provoke, and unsettle, all against the backdrop of a world he perceives as “coming apart at its seams.” At the heart of Retinal Hysteria are key works by artists included in Eye Infection — R. Crumb, Jim Nutt, and Peter Saul, who are here joined by a host of others, including historical figures and contemporary artists. Info: Curator: Robert Storr, Venus Over Manhattan, 39 Great Jones Street, 55 Great Jones Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 16/11/2023-13/1/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18L00, www.venusovermanhattan.com/

Levi Orta has always focused on exploring the relationship between art and politics. But on the occasion of “Adiós España”, his first solo exhibition in Madrid, he invites the viewer to delve into his own family history and use it as a filter through which to decant certain inventions and confront social issues of great urgency. The starting point of his work is performance, but not understood as a spectacle, but as a small event or behavioural action hidden in the framework of the real. Photography, video, installation and painting allow him to record his peculiar observations. He is interested in exploring ways of subverting certain hegemonic relations, using the legal cracks in contemporary political systems. He parodies restrictions, norms and protocols; he uses camouflage, appropriation, copying and archival editing to alter power and bring it into the permeable terrain of art under the effect of a kind of “decoding acid”. Info: El Apartamento, Calle de la Puebla #4, local bajo derecha, Madrid, Spain, Duration: 16/11/2023-1/2/2024, www.artapartamento.com/

Ed Atkins’ dual-venue installation is mounted in Gladstone galleries at 21st and 64th Street locations. Known for creating videos in which computer-animated proxies reflect on themes of loss, intimacy, abjection and melancholy, the Ed Atkins’ multidisciplinary approach to artmaking examines the increasingly permeable boundaries that separate life from its digital simulations. Addressing contemporary culture’s fetish for media that painstakingly mimics the aesthetic contours of reality but fails to accommodate the burden of its subject, Atkins mines performance, theater, cinema, literature, and himself to examine the alive/dead dichotomy that ricochets between all bodies and their cybernated doppelgangers. A new booklet featuring an excerpt of the artist’s recent writings accompanies the exhibition. Premiering at 21st street is ‘Pianowork 2,’ a new computer-generated animation that depicts the artist playing Jürg Frey’s piano composition, ‘Klavierstuck’. Shown in concert with ‘Pianowork 2’ is ‘Sorcerer,’ the cinematic adaptation of a play written and produced in collaboration with writer Steven Zultanski. Info: Gladstone Gallery, 530 West 21st Street and 130 East 64th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 17/11/2023-6/18/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.gladstonegallery.com/

For the first time in Italy is presented a curated selection of passages from Zoe Leonard’s “Al río / To the River”. This emblematic work consists of hundreds of photographs taken between 2016 and 2022, along the Rio Grande/Río Bravo, where for 2,000 km the river is used to demarcate the border between the United States and Mexico. Leonard says: “The shifting nature of a river – which floods periodically, changes course and carves new channels – is at odds with the political task it is asked to perform”. These powerful and nuanced photographs describe the natural beauty of the region, while also drawing attention to political and human dimensions of life in the borderlands. Through Zoe Leonard’s gaze, the river is seen as a complex place where daily life unfolds alongside control, conflict and surveillance. In this journey along the river, the artist depicts nature and built environments; movements of animals and people; and structures that both connect and divide. Together these elements become chapters in an evocative, ongoing narrative. Info: Galleria Raffaella Cortese, via a. stradella 7, via a. stradella 4 & via a. stradella 1, Milan, Italy, Duration: 18/11/2023-9/3/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-13:00 & 14:30-19:00, https://raffaellacortese.com/

With artists spanning the media of painting, sculpture, photography, and collage, the exhibition “Night Swimming” is a rumination on material’s role in translating and documenting records and information. The included artists use diverse material to track time accumulation or record fleeting yet precise moments and events. Producing documents that function as both mementos and translations that are organized and realized via each artist’s material and conceptual lexicon. The resultant works create an archive of fluctuating objects, translated snapshots, and material and visual accumulation. The show’s title, “Night Swimming,” alludes to the experience of attempting to navigate a murky and vast space while only being able to sense what is in your immediate vicinity. The memory of spaces once seen in the light, the instability of buoyancy, and the lack of stillness in the act of swimming in darkness mirrors the disoriented and vulnerable translation of recollection found in the works included in the exhibition. Like the world obscured by night and water, a clear understanding sits just out of reach. Info: SCOTTY, Oranienstr. 46, Berlin, Germany, Duration: 18/11-23/12/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 15:00-19:00, Sat 14:00-18:00, https://scotty-berlin.de/

In the exhibition “Living Yellow Light”, a series of oil paintings executed over the last ten years allow us to explore and reconstruct Siri Kollandsrud’s articulate and fantastic imagery, rooted in the tradition of Abstract Expressionism and Informalism. These works are visions, metamorphic stories that preserve traces of reality and that are observed with the curiosity and interest generated only by the most mysterious events, but also with the aspiration to interpret and complete them with one’s own imagination. It thus happens that in works such as “Annunciation, free after B.F. Angelico” (2021), the classic iconography of the Annunciation leaves room for the materialization of colored “ectoplasms” that hover in the architecture and that each person retrieves and visualizes starting from his or her own culture or desire.  Kollandsrud’s semi-abstract images are built up through energetic brushstrokes superimposed on each other, a kind of geological process that settles one trace on top of another until the painting is finished. The canvases appear as fluid living organisms where form and color have no rigid boundaries, rather their uncontrolled proximity generates fascinating mixtures and unions. Info: RIBOT gallery, Via Enrico Nöe 23 – Milan, Italy, Duration: 22/11/2023-27/1/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 15:00-19:30, Sat 11:30-18:30, www.ribotgallery.com/