ART NEWS: Jan.04
KAWS (Brian Donnelly) is considered one of the most innovative artists of his generation. Within the Pop Art tradition, he has created a prolific body of influential work, which both engages young people with contemporary art and straddles the worlds of art and design to include street art, graphic and product design, paintings, murals and large-scale sculptures. In his first major solo exhibition in London, “NEW FICTION”, KAWS presents new and recent works in physical and augmented reality. KAWS uses an app developed by Acute Art to offer a bridge between the virtual and the physical worlds. All the paintings and sculptures in the exhibition as well as a miniature version of the entire show exist as AR works on the Acute Art app and can be placed and viewed at home by viewers globally. They can also be shared on social media, making KAWS’ art visible across the world. Info: Curator: Daniel Birnbaum, Serpentine North Gallery, West Carriage Drive, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 18/1-27/2/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.serpentinegalleries.org
Agnès Thurnauer presents her solo exhibition “How deep is your love?”. Through her paintings, sculptures, and installations the artist focuses her practice around language. Thus, writing is often present in her pictorial praxis leading the viewer to emancipate endlessly of his own reading. This plastic quality of language can be experienced with her three dimensions sculptures made of casts of letters on different scales letting the gaze and the body involved. For Agnès Thurnauer, the relation with artworks induces reciprocity. If artworks reads the world, it is up to everyone to make our own reading. This shared language is at the core of our society and gives art a powerful poetic and political function. Agnès Thurnauer works regularly with writers, philosophers and poets for publications and artist’s books (Michèle Cohen-Halimi, Tiphaine Samoyault, Rod Mengham, Anne Portugal, Francis Cohen…). Info: Michel Rein Gallery, Washington rue/straat 51A, Brussels, Belgium, Duration: 20/1-5/3/2022, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 10:00-18:00, http://michelrein.com
With a major retrospective on Georgia O’Keeffe, the Fondation Beyeler is dedicating the first exhibition of 2022 to one of the most significant artists of the 20th century and an outstanding figure in modern American art. From O’Keeffe’s earliest abstractions to her iconic depictions of flowers and landscapes of the American Southwest, the retrospective will offer an in-depth survey of the artist’s work including rarely seen paintings from public and private collections. The exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler examines Georgia O’Keeffe’s particular way of looking at her surroundings and translating them into new and hitherto unseen images of reality. “One rarely takes the time to really see a flower. I have painted it big enough so that others would see what I would see.” This early quote from 1926 has become a common thread in O’Keeffe’s art and life. The exhibition aims to focus the attention on the topicality of O’Keeffe’s bold and radical way of looking. Spanning more than six decades, “Georgia O’Keeffe” is the artist’s first major retrospective in Basel and the first comprehensive overview of O’Keeffe’s oeuvre in Switzerland for almost 20 years. Info: Fondation Beyeler, Baselstrasse 101, Riehen/Basel, Switzerland, Duration: 23/1-22/5/2022, Days & Hours: Mo-Tue & Thu-Sun 10:00-18:00, Wed 10:00-20:00, www.fondationbeyeler.ch
Golnar Adili’s work in her solo exhibition “Found in Translation: A Story of Language, Play, and a Personal Archive”, is a formal investigation of language, spanning 14th century Persian poetry, didactic Iranian texts, and the artist’s own family archives. Featuring artist books, photographic and textual prints, and an installation of modular wooden sculptures, the exhibition embodies a multidisciplinary exploration of diasporic identity. Born in Virginia, Adili migrated with her family to Tehran as a young child in 1979 in the wake of the Iranian Revolution. Her father, a leftist writer and activist, was forced into exile soon after their arrival, and eventually escaped back to the U.S. in 1981. Adili remained in Iran with her mother, whose multiple attempts at immigration were unsuccessful. Forced to live apart for many years, they kept in touch through letters and photographs sent back and forth – materials that now make up a vast archive of separation and longing. By reactivating these materials in layered prints and artist books, Adili transforms distilled memories into living artworks. Info: Curator: Kevin Beasley, CUE Art Foundation, 137 West 25th Street, Ground Floor, (Between 6th and 7th Avenue), New York, NY, USA, Duration: 27/1-26/2/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://cueartfoundation.org
The exhibition “Pour la vie“ takes visitors on a journey through portraits of struggling individuals or groups, bearing witness to photographic series initiated by Bruno Serralongue several years ago, to which new productions have been added. He has been questioning, since the early 1990s, the uses and status of the photographic image, going out to meet the communities that are formed around a social and political event and the people who are fighting a battle on which their living conditions depend. The artist focuses on the backstage of the event and the traces left by it and thus offers a “displaced” point of view that questions the notion of objectivity of the photographic medium and the informative power of the image. Whether it is a series on the migrant camps in Calais, begun in 2006, or more recently the struggle of North American First Nations against oil pipelines threatening their environment, or the defenders of the Jardins Ouvriers des Vertus in Aubervilliers threatened with destruction and the evicted occupants of a workers’ hostel in Saint-Ouen – in the run-up to the 2024 Olympics -, the exhibition interweaves the trajectories of individuals and the energy of the collective. Info: Curator: Xavier Franceschi, Frac île-de-france / le plateau, paris, 22 rue des Alouettes, Paris, France, Duration: 27/1-24/4/2022, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 14:00-19:00, www.fraciledefrance.com
The paintings in Gideon Rubin’s solo exhibition “Red Boys and Green Girls” reflect the zeitgeist of our COVID-defined world. Solitary figures, frequently turned away from the viewer, stand immobilized or move dreamily in blurry, indefinite spaces. Isolated and dislocated, the scenes evoke a realm of introspection and become meditations on the individual’s relationship to humanity. Rubin interprets anonymous images he’s mined from the internet, vintage magazines, or scenes from French New Wave Cinema. Like the film director Eric Rohmer, to whose work some of these images refer, he’s more interested in the emotional state of his subjects, than what they’re actually doing. The show takes its title from two series of paintings, each group of the same subject matter: a boy in a red shirt and a young woman wearing a green dress. In each set, it’s the same clothing and same pose. Only the scale of the paintings shifts. Any series is an artist’s exploration of a subject matter that fascinates them. A series inevitably illustrates that the same thing, observed and interpreted repeatedly and at different times, will yield different conclusions. Info: Hosfelt Gallery, 260 Utah Street, San Francisco, CA, USA, Duration: 27/1-29/2/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sat 10:00-17:30, Thu 11:00-19:00, https://hosfeltgallery.com
The exhibition “On the Horizon: Contemporary Cuban Art from the Pérez Art Museum Miami” features works by Cuban contemporary artists based on the island or abroad in the United States and elsewhere. The exhibition is arranged in three sections, each exploring various meanings and associations related to the horizon. This motif has appeared frequently throughout art history, particularly during the Romantic period of the nineteenth century, when the broad expanses and moods of the landscape were equated with unfathomable and often turbulent human emotions. For artists who wish to depict the paradoxical nature of their existence, the horizon is a useful metaphor—it is visibly omnipresent and alluring yet perpetually distant and unattainable. Working across diverse mediums, the artists in the exhibition explore multiple interpretations of the horizon, utilizing it as a symbol of personal desire, existential longing, and geographical containment. Prompting a dialogue about Cuba and its diaspora, these artists connect their own experiences with historical, political, and psychological realities to create works that can resonate with anyone who grapples with questions of freedom, identity, and displacement. Info: First Art Museum, 919 Broadway, Nashville, TN, USA, Duration: 28/1-1/5/2022, Days & Hours: Thu-Sat 10;00-17:30, sun 13:00-17:30, https://fristartmuseum.org
For the exhibition, “Before and After Science”, Nicolás Guagnini conceived a set of tapestries that tends to the idea of a castle esthetic. Depicting larger-than-life torsos, these works might be read scientific illustrations for a tribe that has no language and are visualizations of vaccines and internal organs, with all the fantasies they elicit about their processes and effects. The tapestries are accompanied by a ceramic sculpture of a foot, completing the depiction of a giant body, like a monster living in a dungeon. This sculpture is placed in a coalfield, using coal to complement the materiality of the textiles and the ceramic. This also is a further reference to Aldo van Eyck, who created a similar exhibition design with works by the CoBrA group, Jean Miró and Albert Giacometti among others for the First and Second International Exhibition of Experimental Art: Cobra at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1949 and the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Liège, 1951. Info: Galerie Max Mayer, Schmela Haus, Mutter-Ey-Straße 3, Düsseldorf, Germany, Duration: 28/1-13/5/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.maxmayer.net
The exhibition, “Winder Group Show” is blurring the boundaries between art and design and challenging traditional gallery models, launches a long-term collaboration between Carpenters Workshop Gallery and Patricia Low Contemporary, with plans for collaborative shows throughout 2022 to be announced in due course. Selected works are sympathetic to Gstaad’s unruly natural environment. Vincenzo De Cotiis’ “DC1826A Mirror” in cast brass and German silver conjures thoughts of the mountain range’s fragmented layers; Charles Trevelyan’s “Fuse II Arabescato Orobico”, a Marble table, reflects its slopes; and Rick Owens’ “Stag Chair Black Plywood Right” reminiscences regional fauna. The severity of the Alps is brought into balance with the warmth of breakout artist Nacho Carbonell’s signature cocoon lamps and the effervescence of DRIFT’s Fragile Futures, which incorporates delicate Dandelion seeds. The exhibition is presented alongside artists from Patricia Low Contemporary. Info: Patricia Low Contemporary, Promenade 55, Gstaad, Switzerland, Duration: 29/1-12/2/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Thu 13:00-18:30m Fri-Sat 10:00-19:30, Sun 15:00-18:30, http://patricialow.com
“Figure Ground” presents the work of Charles Ray, one of the most has experimented with a wide range of methods, including performance, photography, and sculpture, the medium for which he is best recognized today. In the process, he has utilized a variety of materials, expanded the fundamental terms of sculptural language, and pioneered major advances in production, combining the analog and the digital as well as human and robotic hands. Additionally, Ray’s work addresses in elliptical, often irreverent ways not only art history, popular culture, and mass media but also identity, mortality, race, and gender. This exhibition unites sculptures from every period of Ray’s career with key photographs from the 1970s and 1980s, exploring central aspects of his challenging and sometimes provocative oeuvre. It also brings together for the first time all the works that Ray loosely patterned on Mark Twain’s 1885 novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Info: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 31/1-5/6/2022, Days & Hours: Tue, Thu & Sun 10:00-17:00, Fri-Sat 10:00-21:00, www.metmuseum.org
Jennie C. Jones’ solo exhibition “Dynamics” includes paintings, works on paper, and a sound installation. Many of the works in the exhibition incorporate architectural felt and acoustic panels to create what Jones calls “active surfaces.” These materials absorb and dampen sound, thus affecting the acoustic properties of their environments and impacting the viewers’ experiences, auditory and otherwise as they move through the exhibition. Protruding from the wall, the works are both a part of and apart from the architectural spaces they transform. The pieces in the show comprise multiple components and take the form of diptychs and triptychs, arrangements that Jones compares to chords in music. The surfaces of these objects balance a contained Minimalist rigor with gestural painted marks. This interplay between traces of the artist’s hand and signs of its erasure suggests the tension between improvisation and controlled structure evident in avant-garde music. Jones channels in her hybrid objects a legacy of radical Black sonic practitioners who negotiated 20th century social experience with compositions that could be powerfully expressive in their embrace of opacity. Info: Curator: Lauren Hinkson, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 4/2-2/5/2022, Days & Hours: Thu-Mon 11:00-18:00, www.guggenheim.org