ART NEWS: May.02

The exhibition “Partitura” showcases recent and new works by Silvia Bächli in dialogue with earlier drawings. Since the late 1970s, Bächli has committed to drawing as a practice that is deeply dependent and entangled with her body and its movements, both within the domestic sphere and the landscape. Her drawings can be read as traces of sensorial records– a walk on a field, a body that aches, a poem that triggers – and corporeal gestures – the extension of the arm, the strength of the hand or the rhythm of the brushstroke. Bächli says: “Drawings are actions. Lines tell stories. What do these lines do? Where is the beginning of a line, does it touch another line? How does it touch them? Words appear, which ones come to the tongue?” For this exhibition, Bächli has created a score for the gallery space: a sequence of rhythmic clusters of drawings hung at various heights and intervals which, room after room, accrue meaning in their persistent accumulation. Bächli insistently works with modest and limiting means: white paper of different sizes, qualities and tones marked with Indian ink, charcoal, gouache or pastels. Her process is sequential as the artist draws on sheets from a pile, one after another, arranging constellations of works on her studio wall that are consecutively interrogated, rearranged, rejected, until she discovers something that feels right and surprising. Info: Centro Botín, Muelle de Albareda s/n, Jardines de Pereda, Santander, Spain, Duration: 11/5-20/10/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-14:00 & 16:00-20:00, Sat-Sun 10:00-20:00, www.centrobotin.org/en/

Tomona Matsukawa in her first solo exhibition in France showcases works produced during her two-month residency in La Chaulme (Auvergne). Tomona Matsukawa’s realistic and somewhat dramatic paintings have emerged from conversations with other women of her generation, often strangers. The titles and subjects are derived from striking phrases spoken during these conversations, like “Morning will come and my feelings will ease a little”. Maintaining her interest in the themes of her previous works, such as remnants of daily life, the humanity that persists in certain gestures, or the interiority of human beings, she reconstructs fragments of everyday life scenes drawn from these conversations on the flat and smooth surface of her canvases. In this reconstruction, there is an attempt to transfigure the vulnerability of life. Originally from Aichi, Japan, Matsukawa was born in 1987 and graduated from Tama Art University in 2011, specializing in oil painting. Info: Ceysson & Bénétière, 23, rue du Renard 75, Paris, France, Duration: 16/5-29/6/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00,  www.ceyssonbenetiere.com/

A simultaneous exhibition of works by two Dutch artists: Katinka Lampe and her guest, emerging artist Janine van Oene is on view in “Crossed Wires”. Their artistic approaches are very different, but they are united in their fundamental questioning of painting. Janine van Oene’s is abstract and lyrical, while Katinka Lampe’s is figurative and formal. Despite these stylistic differences, they have confronted their creative processes, finely weaving materials, gestures and emotions. At first glance, the work of Katinka Lampe and Janine van Oene may not seem to have much in common, but through the dialogue they engage in with each other in this exhibition, the viewer gains more access than ever to what preceded it. By shifting the focus to the making process, you realize that the similarities between both artists are enormous. Katinka Lampe’s work is figurative. It’s about people. About how we look at each other and are beeing looked at. By first taking photos of her models posing according to her instructions, Lampe creates a sort of in-between reality. Then she works with those images. The process of painting ultimately leads her to a new unknown representation. You could call it a semblance of reality. Janine van Oene’s work is abstract and intuitive. But at the same time, it’s lyrical. While in her earlier work, clearly figurative elements emerged, her work is increasingly rooted in the abstract world. Info: Les filles du calvaire Gallery, 21 rue Chapon, Paris, France, Duration: 16/5-15/6/2024, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 11:00-18:30, https://www.fillesducalvaire.com/

The group exhibition “Narrative Obsession in the Post-Colonial Psyche” explores post-colonialism from the perspective of 12 artists addressing the harmful global histories and present-day legacies of imperial subjugation. Post-colonialism as an area of study began in the field of literature through an assessment of Western-centric projections onto characters in fiction. It has since expanded to include the disciplines of art, anthropology, philosophy, and sociology. A foundational text on the subject is Edward Said’s Orientalism, which exposed the European fantasy that denigrated colonial subjects through constant Othering and fetishization across Asia and the Middle East. Although many aspects of Said’s original argument have been refuted as restrictive in geographic, cultural, pedagogical, and religious scope, cultural institutions have been deconstructed through this metatheory since the early ‘80s. The exhibition excavates the layering of diverse histories through the impulses of artists engaged by works of literature in both fiction and fact. Artworks on view challenge institutional power structures, address problematic legacies within current states of settler colonialism, and highlight the discreet colonial impact of industry and tourism upon the environment. Unlike the literary tradition, artists are not confined to the theoretical strictures of research; their approach to the subject ranges from documentary-like narratives to a proliferation of fantastical ones, essentially reversing the European colonial gaze which governed, manipulated, or destroyed forms of cultural expression considered as “Other.” Info: Curators: Anjuli Nanda Diamond and George Bolster, The 8th Floor, 17 West 17th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 16/5-13/7/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.the8thfloor.org/

The essayistic group exhibition “Genossin Sonne” brings together artistic and theoretical work in which cosmic connections and reconstructions of cosmology are imagined as an element of political struggle, drawing on sources from fiction, theory, poetics, and other writing. Is intensified solar activity (incidence of sunspots and solar winds) related to terrestrial revolution? What exciting speculative reflections on this matter might be found in contemporary art and poetry? The word “revolution” came to mean “violent overthrow of an existing social-political order” following the Haitian/Caribbean, French and North American revolutions of the late 18th century. Before that time, however, it was used in astronomy with reference to the rotation of celestial bodies. The connotation of social and political actions came later. Capitalism and industrialization soon took charge of humans’ radical “emancipation” from their environment, replacing a relationship of mutual co-operation with one of extraction. Nature now became an adversary, an other to be exploited for raw materials. Yet in the context of the present climate catastrophe, humanity is beginning to remember that it is a part of its environment. The exhibition Genossin Sonne goes a step further, playfully speculating that the sun itself may be our comrade, our ally. Info: Curators: Dr. Inke Arns and Andrea Popelka, Assistant Curator: Hannah Marynissen, Kunsthalle Wien, Museumsquartier, Museumsplatz 1, Vienna, Austria, Duration: 16/5-30/9/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-19:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, https://kunsthallewien.at/

In “The Consolation of Objects”, Orhan Pamuk (the first Turkish writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature0 presents his multifaceted creative output as a writer, photographer, graphic artist, curator, museum founder, and important political voice in today’s world. Pamuk tells his stories through objects. Based on his Istanbul “Museum of Innocence” with everyday objects associated with his novel of the same title, he transposes literature into the space of the museum, creating fictions that visitors can enter and immerse themselves in. Pamuk’s museum illuminates the love story between Kemal, the son of a factory owner, and his fair cousin Füsun. When their relationship ends in disaster, Kemal establishes a museum filled with thousands of objects that remind him of Füsun. At the same time, the objects reflect everyday life in Istanbul from the 1950s to the 2000s — and hence also major events of the same period, gender roles, the contemporary cinema, and more. In three-dimensional collages that, like cabinets of curiosity, unfold a world of their own, the power of things attains poetic immediacy. Forty cabinets from the Istanbul museum that Pamuk reconstructed for the traveling exhibition are on view in Munich. Info: Curators: Melanie Vietmeier and Matthias Mühling, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Luisenstraße 33, Munich, Germany, Duration: 17/5-13/10/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 10:00-18:00, Thu 10:00-20:00, www.lenbachhaus.de/

The exhibition project “Survival In The 21st Century” explores the foundations of life in the age of the polycrisis. Developed by Georg Diez and Nicolaus Schafhausen in close cooperation with the Deichtorhallen, the exhibition incorporates elementary questions of ecology, technology and spirituality. The “School of Survival” expands the about 40 international artistic positions and turns the exhibition venue into a learning space for the future. The exhibition focuses on fundamental questions of human existence and reflects on the radical disruptions we are facing: climate change, the digital revolution, growing injustice on a national and global scale, the crisis of democracy and the question of community.  The exhibition aims to make world concepts accessible beyond artistic practice. It is a social offer to learn together and from each other as a constructive public – in workshops, lectures and continuously through the seminar-like educational program of the “School of Survival” also in the city. The exhibition house will become a kind of school for the new century, which sees and embraces the changes in education and learning as essential. Art is the medium, survival is the goal. Info: Curators: Georg Diez and Nicolaus Schafhausen. Research Curators: Lena Baumgartner and Frances Fürst, Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Deichtorstr. 1-2, Hamburg, Germany, Duration: 18/5-5/11/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.deichtorhallen.de/

In the exhibition “adler barfuß” the new series of paintings and ink drawings features eagles, a motif that has resurfaced in Georg Baselitz’s oeuvre throughout his life. Depicted in tactile, multicolored impasto, the works feature eagles rendered in gestural strokes, larger than life, hovering in an undefined space. Seemingly weightless, they appear to float against varying backgrounds of blue, in hues reminiscent of works by Lucas Cranach the Elder or ‘the beach paintings that Picasso created in Dinard, in Brittany, in the 1920s. In two paintings, Baselitz depicts birds against a lighter, slate blue backdrop, grounded by a web of color streaks that stretches across the canvas in zigzag lines. The eagles in these works prominently feature applications of cut-out plastic circles as eyes. The two largest works in the exhibition each show a pair of birds in flight on a monumental scale, their wings spread almost three metres wide across the canvas. The birds are depicted against a mountain range and thereby directly refer back to the artist’s first ever rendition of the subject. Painted at the young age of 15, one of Baselitz’s earliest works likewise shows two eagles in flight over mountains. Info: Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, Salzburg Villa Kast, Mirabellplatz 2, Salzburg, Austria, Duration: 18/5-20/7/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat 10:00-14:00, https://ropac.net/

Ryan Sullivan presents his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, his work commingles painting’s formal concerns and sculpture’s preoccupation with materiality. Where traditional painting builds out from the canvas, covering or obscuring the gestures that preceded, Sullivan’s process functions in the inverse—the first layer of resin forms the work’s initial structure and, later, becomes the object’s face. Thin and flat, unlike any oil or acrylic on stretched canvas ever could be, these resin paintings—with their smooth, matte surface—flaunt the duality of their station, defying art’s conventionally divided medium specificities of painting and sculpture. Using a liquid urethane, Sullivan initiates his resin casts by distributing this material within a rectangular, silicone mold on the floor. Each pour, brushstroke, or application of pigment is a unique gesture—unable to be replicated or restaged—for which the finished work, after curing overnight, becomes a receipt frozen in time and evidencing its own making. Sullivan reveals and encounters the work’s composition for the first time once it sets and is no longer subject to change—each work an anomaly intuited into being. These unique circumstances—the three-dimensionality of the material, its drying speed, and the inverted image-making—all create novel problems that the artist must solve. Info: Blum Gallery, 2727 South La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Duration: 18/2-29/6/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10;00-18;00, www.blum-gallery.com/

The exhibition “Summer Show” is conceived as a “living organism” that changes and transforms throughout its duration, it aspires to stimulate artistic freedom, interdisciplinary exchange and collective responsibility. The approach, as stated by Philippe Parreno and Precious Okoyomon, acknowledges ‘the complexities and uncertainties involved in bringing artists together, yet it also embraces these entanglements as integral to the creative process’. The show is envisioned as ‘a dynamic rather than static proposal, an evolving ontological project that mirrors the complexity and diversity inherent in bringing together distinct artistic voices under one umbrella’. Conceived as a living organism that changes and transforms, participants have contributed their thinking on every phase of the making of an exhibition from its conception, elaboration and production to its creation and presentation. In particular, Tino Sehgal has been invited to create transforming display features for the overall presentation, especially extending to works from the in-house collection. Info: Fondation Beyeler, Baselstrasse 101, Riehen/Basel, Switzerland, Duration: 19/5-11/8/2024, Days & Hours: Mon-Tue & Thu-Sun 10:00-18:00, Wed 10:00-20;00, www.fondationbeyeler.ch/