ART NEWS:Sept.04

Rogan Gregory’s title of his exhibition “Known Unknown”, provokes a discussion of the dichotomy between juxtaposing states of reality. For this exhibition, Rogan draws inspiration from biological, geological and extraterrestrial forms he discovers in his travels. A central focus in Rogan’s practice is his inherent relationship to material, technique and innovation. The artist pairs classic sculptural mediums such as wood, bronze and stone with materials such as beach sand, igneous rocks and composite materials that he sources and creates. The contrast of polished technology with anthropomorphic pigmentation define the subtle palette of the show with bronze, stainless steel, natural woods, raw resin and bright terrazzo. Often working by hand in his studio Rogan’s organic approach to sculpting has resulted in a series of romantic works that are surreal yet familiar. Rogan often questions the idea of utility in his practice and his work spans the spectrum from useful to useless. Info: R & Company Gallery, 64 White Street, New York, Duration: 13/9-22/10/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat 12:00-18:00, www.r-and-company.com

The exhibition “Time and More, Space and More…” presents David Hockney’s recent video and photographic works in tandem. In center of the exhibition is Hockney’s multi-part video installation “The Four Seasons, Woldgate Woods” (2010-11). The work is composed of four 9-channel video walls and arranged within the space like the cardinal directions of a compass rose. Depicting the same view down a tree-lined country road in Yorkshire, each wall distinctively captures one of the four seasons. The video installation conveys Hockney’s agility in multiplying time and perspectives. Hockney uses the camera to produce impossible visual spaces, a theme which he has carried throughout his practice across a variety of media. Striving to replicate the kaleidoscopic experience of seeing through a composite of vantage points, the photographic drawings on view in the exhibition offer a panoramic sense of time and space in their portrayal of the artist’s Los Angeles studio. Info: Richard Gray Gallery, 875 North Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Duration: 13/9/21/11/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-17:30, www.richardgraygallery.com

While rooted in the present moment of uncertainty and drastic environmental and social change, the works by Richard Dupont in his exhibition “Hydromancy” also reference late 19th and early 20th Century visions of a natural world under siege by the onset of technological development. They depict states of being, as forms coalesce and recede within a state of transformation which allows for multiple interpretations. Beginning in early 2018, Dupont developed a process of large scale paper marbling used in conjunction with brush and ink. The process allows for chance and references the ancient history of Hydromancy: paper marbling as a form of divination. Certain images emerge in these works, such as the image of a commercial fishing trawler based on the woodcut, “Fischdampfer” by the German Expressionist Emil Nolde, while others are more abstract and random.  Like much of Dupont’s figurative sculptural work, the new works on paper examine the distortion of the natural world at the limits of perception. Info: Carolina Nitsch Project Room, 534 West 22 Street, New York, Duration: 13/9-10/11/18, Days & Hours: Wed-Fri 11:00-17:00, www.carolinanitsch.com

The exhibition “Strange Messengers” approaches the impossible task of interpreting the murky semiotics of contemporary life and the seven artists included act as messengers. Their role is both to relay as well as to enact. They are the strange and non-normative. The messages they deliver are vague, obscure, resisting categorization and slipping out from an often violent, patriarchic gaze. The message is at times unintelligible and frequently non-verbal. It depicts non-discrete and alien-like bodies, appendages and extensions of each other or disappeared entirely. Representations of the body in all of these artists’ work is a crucial reflection of the denudation not only of attire, but also of movements, expressions and societal conventions. They aim to disassemble and make visible the work that goes into being a body. These perspectives are vital in today’s unstable world, offering us not only modes of survival, but paths towards fulfillment. Info: Peres Projects, Karl-Marx-Allee 82, Berlin, Duration 14/9-26/10/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 11:00-18:00, https://peresprojects.com

The exhibition “Ed Clark: A Survey” is the first overview of Clark’s career in New York since the Studio Museum in Harlem’s retrospective in 1980. The exhibition include paintings and works on paper spanning six decades, from 1962 through 2013. Affiliated with Abstract Expressionism, Ed Clark has continued to reinvent his unique abstract language over a sixty-year career. He is credited with being the first artist to exhibit a shaped canvas in the United States in 1957, a landmark innovation that profoundly expanded the possibilities of contemporary painting. He is also recognized for his signature process of creating paintings on the floor using a push broom, a radical gesture that transforms a humble symbol of menial labor into a tool of pure abstraction and high art. With these singular achievements, Clark established himself as a pioneer of abstract painting during a period when African-American artists were expected by many to create figurative work. Info: Curator: Sukanya Rajaratnam, Mnuchin Gallery, 45 East 78 Street, New York, Duration: 14/9-20/10/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.mnuchingallery.com

In a meeting of the central committee of the Situationist International in Brussels in 1961, the Dutch artist Jacqueline de Jong proposed the publication of a magazine in English called The Situationist Times, to accompany the movement’s French bulletin. By the time the first issue appeared in 1962, however, de Jong had been excluded from the Situationist International and transformed the magazine project beyond all recognition. The exhibition “Jacqueline de Jong & The Situationist Times” invites the visitor to explore The Situationist Times in all its maze-like knots and controversies. Accompanied by Jacqueline de Jong, who tells the history of the magazine’s creation in a series of recent video clips, in addition, the exhibition unfolds the material that de Jong assembled in the early 70s in collaboration with Hans Brinkman. They intended to use this collection for a seventh, unrealized issue of The Situationist Times. Info: Curators: Ellef Prestsæter and Torpedo, with Jacqueline de Jong, Malmö Konsthall, S:t Johannesgatan 7, Malmö, Duration: 15/9-25/11/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Tue & Thu-Sun 11:00-17:00, Wed 11:00-21:00, www.konsthall.malmo.se

Lefki Christidou presents her solo exhibition “Memorandum-Evolution”. The works of the exhibition are made of colorful aluminum cans of soft drinks and drinks, consumables and recyclable (art of recycling). Scratched, cut, welded with stainless steel wire and sometimes painted. They are projects of small and medium size and are mainly related to the period of the monuments in Greece and the evolution of the species (a tribute to Karolos Darwin). Some others are kiosks and flowers from aluminum constructions. Born in Thessaloniki in 1946 Lefki Christidou finds her main inspiration from the city and mainly from the kiosks of Athens. More than just convenient places to buy newspapers, snacks and cigarettes, kiosks are part of the social fabric of Greek life. The kiosk, or “periptero” as representing an important part of modern Greek history since the beginning of the 20th century as it served as a common point of social interaction. Info: Gallery 7, 20 Solonos st. & Voukourestiou st., Athens, Duration: 25/9-13/10/18, Days & Hours: Tue & Thu-Fri 11:00-14:00 & 18”00-21:00, Wed & Sat 11:00-15:00, www.gallery7.gr

Anne Colier’s “Photographic” is her first solo exhibition in a Museum in Germany. Anne Collier uses and processes found material as a means of arriving at a reflected archaeology of photography’s usages. In the process, it is a specific type of photography that interests Collier for the most part, namely pictures that are characterised by a very emotional visual language. By photographing posters, album covers, photo magazines, book pages and film stills, the artist questions the significance of pictures that shape our everyday lives and illustrate desires They are largely media images from the 1970s and 1980s The artist has recontextualised and reformulated the original pictorial context. By addressing the theme of taking photographs itself and reproducing existing photos, she creates distance to the motifs, filtering out emotions and thus providing an inducement to reflect on the depiction. Her exceedingly analytical perspective foregoes sentimentality or pathos. Info: Curator: Dr. Stefan Gronert, Sprengel Museum, Kurt-Schwitters-Platz, Hannover, Duration: 26/9/18-6/1/19, Days & Hours: Tue 10:00-20:00, Wed-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.sprengel-museum.de

The expansive range of the Olbricht Collection explores such themes as beauty and sensuousness, becoming and disappearing, and the body and society, as manifested in various epochs and media. With some 300 works by approximately 60 artists the exhibition “The Moment is Eternity” shines the spotlight on the photographic works in the Olbricht Collection, showing them in dialogue with other artworks from the Collection, as well as artefacts from the Wunderkammer (cabinets of curiosities). Transience is one of the key themes of the Collection. And what artistic medium other than photography could be better suited to addressing the questions of time and history that this theme throws up? Lending duration to the moment is inscribed into the very medium itself. In this property, art and philosophy come together. Ever since Antiquity, eternity has been described as timeless, and it is in this sense that Goethe equates the moment with eternity in his poem “Vermächtnis” (Legacy, 1830). For humanity, the moment is the only perceptible slice of eternity. Info: Curator: Annette Kicken, me Collectors Room Berlin / Olbricht Foundation, Auguststrasse 68, Berlin, Duration: 26/9/18-1/4/19, Days & Hours: Wed-Mon 12:00-18:00, www.me-berlin.com

The exhibition “Infinito Vão- 90 Years of Brazilian Architecture” is the product of a long work process that Casa da Arquitectura started two years ago and has been undertaking in Brazil, gathering a collection of more than 200 donations. The collection encompasses around 9,000 items, including the aforementioned drawings, photographs and mockups, but also sketches, texts, slides, videos, films, ceramics and letters: 4,540 of these are original, presenting a significant panorama of Brazil’s modern and contemporary Architecture. The exhibition includes an ambitious programme of activities. Between Portugal and Brazil, for 7 months, a vast and varied programme will showcase the excellence of Brazilian architecture and culture, reaching beyond the limits of the discipline. The programme will go from architecture to cinema, literature and music. Info: Curators: Fernando Serapião and Guilherme Wisnik, Casa da Arquitectura – Portuguese Centre of Architecture, Avenida Menéres, 456, Matosinhos, Duration: 28/9/18-28/4/19, http://casadaarquitectura.pt

“Poetry and Images” is the first solo exhibition in Russia of Marcel Broodthaers. Developed specifically for the 10th anniversary of the Garage Museum, the exhibition reveals what the artist once described as “the place where the world of visual art and poetry may perhaps converge on the exact dividing line that absorbs both”. Presenting over eighty works, including many of the artist’s key pieces, from early objects and films to sections of the project Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles, as well as his last installations with palm trees, also known as décors, the exhibition reveal how Broodthaers’ use of language and unique take on institutional critique led to a cult following among Russian artists. It also examines the potential for rethinking the values of the museum as an institution. Info: Curators: Kate Fowle and Katya Inozemtseva in collaboration with Marie-Puck Broodthaers, Garage Museum, 9/32 Krymsky Val st., Moscow, Duration: 29/9/18-3/2/19, Days & Hours: Daily 11:00-22:00, https://garagemca.org