ART NEWS:May 04
How do everyday objects, architecture and technology affect the human body, human behaviour and inter-human relationships? Berlin- Judith Hopf in the exhibition “OUT” explores these issues in art where humor is also a main factor. Giant pears have been carved out of solid cubes built out of red bricks. The inherently illogical nature of producing pear-shaped sculptures out of square bricks is typical of the artist Judith Hopf (b. 1969). By having such easily bruised, perishable fruits shaped out of solid, durable bricks and scaling up the almost cartoonish pear shapes to form monumental sculptures, Hopf challenges our habitual views of the world. The exhibition includes the video work bearing the same name. In this video, Hopf makes a reference to the American architect John Hejduk. In the 1980s, Hejduk proposed the construction of a new neighbourhood on the western side of the Berlin. The project was never realised, but in 1988 Hejduk had a fragment of the original plan built in the Kreuzberg area of the city in the form of the distinctive postmodernist building complex. Info: SMK (National Gallery of Denmark), Sølvgade 48-50, Copenhagen, Duration: 10/5-30/12/18, Days & Hours: Tue & Thu-Sun 11:00-17:00, Wed 11:00-20:00, www.smk.dk
Franz Erhard Walther was one of the most notorious and unique voices leading the artistic experimentations around language and the materiality of the art object that took place in the 1960s. The exhibition “Determinations of Proportion” brings together several works created by the artist from the 1960s until today. On presentation are works from Walther’s iconic series “First Work Set” (1963-1969), a selection of early drawings installed in the Barragán Studio and a new site-specific drawing created by Walther, especially for the house. Throughout his career, Franz Erhard Walther has explored topics related to the body, sculpture, architecture, and the concept of action. Most of his work takes place in the intersection between different techniques and artistic languages, emphasizing the mental and poetic associations that arise at the moment when the body of the viewer experiences and thus brings a work of art into completion. Info: Casa Luis Barragan, Col. Ampliación Daniel Garza, General Francisco Ramírez 12-14, Mexico City, Duration: 12/5-30/9/18, Days & Hours By appointment only Mon-Fri 10:00-17:00, Sat-sun 10:00-13:00, www.casaluisbarragan.org
Lena Henke displays vulnerability and intimacy on a monumental scale. Combining deeply personal experiences with forms abstracted from the history of art and architecture, Henke radically appropriates the past to build narratives that empower rather than suppress. In “THEMOVE” Lena Henke turns outside in and inside out. Urban space merges with the female body and New York street signs lead the way through the artist’s inner life. The gallery space becomes a psycho-geographic projection, scaling the personal into a cityscape. In a life-size self-portrait, Henke poses like a pin-up, holding a photo of New York’s signature phallic high-rise – the Freedom Tower – in front of her crotch. The motif of the pin-up recurs in the large bronze gate that heralds the visitor’s path through the exhibition, it’s curvy green and strawberry contours evoking the figures of one of Tomi Ungerer’s adult cartoons. Info: Galerie Emanuel Layr, Seilerstätte 2/26, Vienna, Duration: 15/5-7/7/18, Days & Hours: Wed-Fri 12:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-15:00, www.emanuellayr.com
Kent Monkman’s exhibition “Beauty and the Beasts / La Belle et la Bête” launches the programming of the reopened Canadian Cultural Centre, The exhibition “is the fruit of the encounter between Kent Monkman, an Indigenous artist of Cree origin, born in Manitoba and based in Toronto, who works with a variety of mediums, including painting, film/video, performance, and installation, and the Musée des Confluences in Lyon. The artist selected, from the museum collections, ten works and artifacts representative of objects and animals now dispossessed of the powers that Indigenous cultures attributed to them. He makes them the heart of an exhibition that examines the relationship between animals and humans, and invites us to think about the concept of cultural appropriation. Info: Canadian Cultural Centre, 130 rue du Faubourg saint-Honoré, Paris, Duration: 17/5-5/9/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-18:00, www.canada-culture.org
For “POWER” his first solo exhibition in France Kepa Garraza presents paintings and charcoal drawings. In this exhibition the artist focuses on the use of sculpture to make portraits of historical leading figures directly related to political or military power. These figures ranging from Julius Caesar to George Bush, includes leading protagonists of history such as Philip II or Napoleon Bonaparte. All these characters have been key to understand the history of the Western civilization and all of them have used art as a propaganda tool to serve their own interests. The project is structured as a chronological narration, which begins in the classical world to advance through the Middle Age, the Renaissance and the 17th and 18th Centuries, where the same patterns of representation of power are repeated. European monarchs from Charlemagne to Louis XIV used an inherited symbolism from the classical world, adapting it to the uses and styles of each era. This tour ends nowadays with some of the few contemporary examples of the genre, the portraits of Kim Jong-il or the sculpture of George Bush. Info: Sobering PARIS, 87 rue de Turenne, Paris, Duration: 17/5-18/6/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-13:00 & 14:00-19:00, Sat 11:00-13:00 & 14:00-19:00, http://soberinggalerie.com
Eija-Liisa Ahtila is a contemporary visual artist and filmmaker. She has long been considered a master of the cinematic installation form. Her work is conceptually organized around the construction of image, language, narrative, and space, and she has often probed individual identity and the boundaries of the subject in relation to the external world. Using the visual language of cinema, Ahtila in her solo exhibition presents large-scale installations with multiple channel projections on multiple screen constructions. These viewing conditions, with their simultaneously charged vantage points, break the tradition of cinematic perspective and construct an experience of several co-existing times and spaces for being. This exhibition offers a survey of Ahtila’s practice through seven film installations made between 2001 and 2018 and a series of drawings. Each of the works has been redesigned for its specific presentation at M. Info: Curator: Eva Wittocx, M – Museum Leuven, L. Vanderkelenstraat 28, Leuven, Duration: 18/5-16/9/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Tue & Fri-Sun 11:00-22:00, Thu 11:00-20:00, www.mleuven.be
“Tour de Madame” is the first in-depth survey show dedicated to Jutta Koether’s work, and present more than 150 paintings in a totally novel fashion. Many of the works have never been exhibited publicly, or have not been on display since their initial presentation. The exhibition offers a chronological overview of Koether’s multifaceted oeuvre. It goes back to her beginnings in the context of Neo-Expressionism in Cologne in the early and mid-1980s, and her sexploration of the color red as an expressive device – presenting a response to the cliché of male painters. After moving to New York in the early 1990s, Koether began making breathtakingly intense and colourful large-scale paintings that layer motifs from pop culture, literature and art history in dense painterly gestures. In the early 2000s, Koether’s approach became increasingly involved with performance and music, culminating in inky black canvases and assemblage paintings incorporating devotional objects from punk and noise culture. The final chapter of the exhibition is dedicated to Koether’s eccentric turn to history painting and her latest appropriations from art history’s visual memory. Info: Curators: Achim Hochdörfer and Tonio Kröner, Assistant Curator: Kirsten Storz, Museum Brandhorst, Theresienstraße 35a, Munich, Duration: 18/5-21/10/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 10:00-18:00, Thu 10:00-20:00, www.museum-brandhorst.de
The focus of the exhibition “First Person Plural” which brings together selected video works from the 1970s-90s as well as the installation “Lorna” (1979-83), lies on Lynn Hershman Leeson’s continuous engagement with identity, gender construction, sexual self-determination, and her progression of these ideas in close exchange with advances in technology, and science. The work challenges our relationship to reality and the possibilities that virtual reality, artificial intelligence as well as genetics are made accessible as a strategy of resistance. By doing so, she defies the limitation of censorship and elimination of the individual voice while also recognizing the dangers inherent in the question, who controls these new technologies. The title of the show is pulled from Lynn Hershman Leeson’s film “First Person Plural, the Electronic Diaries of Lynn Hershman” (1984-96) that sits at the center of the exhibition. In the form of a video confessional amassed over 12 years, the film records Hershman Leeeson’s struggle, transformation, and transcendence as her personal story unfolds before the camera and sees the mirroring effects of when the personal becomes political, becomes cultural. Info: Curator: Anna Gritz, Assistant Curator: Cathrin Mayer KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Auguststraße 69, Berlin, Duration: 19/5-15/7/18, Days & Hours: Mon, wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-19:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, www.kw-berlin.de
More than a mid-career survey, the exhibition “Rafael Lozano-Hemmer” offers a new conceptual perspective on the artist’s work over the past decade, exploring its poetic and political dimensions from the standpoint of one of its central principles: the notion of co-presence. This concept refers first and foremost to the coexistence of voices, perspectives and singular experiences in Lozano-Hemmer’s works: to the interactions between strangers, to the situations elicited by the dialogic devices deployed by the work. However, co-presence also evokes other, more asymmetrical relationships, such as forced cohabitations and power relations, and speaks to the interplay of gazes and bodies subjected to contemporary techniques of surveillance and control. The exhibition will present major works including the world premiere of “Sphere Packing: Bach” a spherical room fit with 1074 speakers each of which plays a different composition from Johann Sebastian Bach. The piece focuses the entire musical production of the composer in a single dense multi-channel structure that visitors can enter. Info: Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 185 rue Sainte-Catherine Ouest, Montréal, Duration: 24/5-9/9/18. Days & Hours: Tue 11:00-18:00, Wed-Fri 11:00-21:00, Sat-Sun 10:00-18:00, https://macm.org/
With his performative six-week installation “Some of the People, All of the Time Challenges the Meaning of a Crowd” David Levine asks: what does it mean to make an audience, a public, or a republic? Levine explores the complexities of these fabricated identities the exhibition, and bridges the worlds of contemporary art, performance, and theater with works that explore the nature of spectatorship, identity, and labor. In the exhibition, he weaves these elements together to examine the contemporary crowd, asking us to consider what is “real.” The centerpiece of “Some of the People, All of the Time Challenges the Meaning of a Crowd” is the performance of a monologue by a rotating cast, which takes place on an ongoing basis. The performance is integrated with an exhibition of new photographic work by Levine and a selection of historical objects from the Museum’s collection. Info: Curator: Sara Softness, Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY, Duration: 24/5-8/7/18, Days & Hours: Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-22:00, www.brooklynmuseum.org
The solo exhibition “Ship and Dock/Nights and Days” by Donna Dennis features a new sculptural installation and related gouache paintings on paper. The exhibition marks the first time Dennis has incorporated video projection into her work. It is also the first time she has married her three-dimensional installation work with her two-dimensional works on paper. Dennis’ gouache paintings, which are displayed in a gallery adjacent to the installation, serve as inspiration for the sculpture and are incorporated into the projected video. In the darkened back gallery, viewers enter a night sky and find themselves looking up at what appears to be part of a giant ore dock, a familiar sight on Lake Superior. Perched within the structure of columns, beams, ramps and stairways, sit two small houses. One house faces the viewer and the other faces away. This house, “The Gazer”, looks toward a view of water, ship and sky and watches as starry night changes to dawn and back to night. Info: Lesley Heller Gallery, 54 Orchard Street, New York, Duration 31/5-30/6/18, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 11:00-18:00, Sun 12:00-18:00, www.lesleyheller.com
Celebrating Australian Aboriginal culture, the exhibition “Marking the Infinite: Contemporary Women Artists from Aboriginal Australia” includes 68 works drawn from the collection of Miami-based collectors and philanthropists Debra and Dennis Scholl with many key works commissioned specifically for the exhibition. The exhibition features works by nine leading Aboriginal Australian women artists: Nonggirrnga Marawili, Wintjiya Napaltjarri, Yukultji Napangati, Angelina Pwerle, Lena Yarinkura, Gulumbu Yunupingu, Nyapanyapa Yunupingu, Carlene West, and Regina Pilawuk Wilson. The subjects of their art are broad, yet each work is an attempt to grapple with fundamental questions of existence, asking us to slow down and pay attention to the natural world. These are marks made upon an “ancient endless infinity,” revealing humanity’s insignificance against the steady movement of time and the cosmos. Info: The Phillips Collection, 1600 21st Street NW, Washington, Duration 2/6-9/9/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri 10:00-17:00, Thu 10:00-20:30, Sun 12:00-18:30, www.phillipscollection.org