ART NEWS: Feb 02

The exhibition “documenta 7” reunite Emilio Vedova’s  five monumental canvases from the landmark documenta 7 exhibition in 1982, curated by Rudi Fuchs. These paintings are shown alongside a selection of important works from the 1980s, a period considered the pinnacle of the artist’s career. Presented in association with the Fondazione Emilio e Annabianca Vedova, this exhibition marks the fourth decade since his participation in documenta 7 in Kassel and the 40th Venice Biennale, held in the same year. By the 1980s, Vedova was widely regarded as one of the most influential abstract Italian artists of his time, having exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1947 and the legendary documenta exhibitions I, II and III (1955, 1959 and 1964) in Kassel. His invitation to exhibit once more in documenta 7 demonstrated his significance for the up-and-coming generation of Neo-expressive artists. It preceded a number of publications and solo exhibitions as the decade progressed, including a retrospective of 280 works, curated by Germano Celant at the Museo Correr in Venice, and a subsequent show at the Staatsgalerie Moderner Kunst in Munich. Info: Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, London Ely House, 37 Dover Street, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 10/2-26/3/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://ropac.net

The exhibition “Color Out of Darkness”, features Ad Reinhardt’s paintings illuminated by a lighting concept conceived by James Turrell, whose pioneering investigations of light, color, space, and perception have been greatly influenced by Reinhardt’s practice and legacy, in particular his “red,” “blue,” “white,” and “black” paintings. Reinhardt, who is widely considered a forefather of Minimalism and Conceptualism, began developing his distinct language of abstraction in the 1930s. While his early works featured bold amalgams of shapes and forms, the artist went on to create his geometrically minded, monochromatic “red” and “blue” paintings and later his “black” paintings. Works from these series figure in Pace’s exhibition, with Turrell’s lighting concept highlighting the nuances and idiosyncrasies of Reinhardt’s abstractions within his monochromatic paintings. “Color Out of Darkness” examine the ways that both artists explore the decentralization of the object in their practices, and Turrell’s lighting concept for the show will foreground the experiential nature of Reinhardt’s work. Leonardo da Vinci’s description of the sfumato technique relates to the exhibition’s focus on perceptual experiences of light and shadow in works by Turrell and Reinhardt. Info: Curator: James Turrell, Pace Gallery, 540 West 25th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 11/2-29/3/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.pacegallery.com

“Herbario Novo. From the ancient herbaria to Artificial Botany” is an integral part of the broader research program undertaken by the multidisciplinary art studio fuse titled “Artificial Botany”. The project explores the expressive potentials of botanical illustrations through the use of machine learning algorithms. Before the invention of photography botanical illustrations were the only way to visually archive the many species of plants existing in the world. These images were used by physicists, pharmacists, and botany scholars to identify, analyze, and classify the species. Although no longer relevant scientifically, they have nonetheless become sources of inspiration for artists who pay a tribute to life and Nature using contemporary tools and methodologies. “Artificial Botany” is a work created in this spirit, drawing from public archives containing illustrations by the greatest artists in this field, including Maria Sibylla Merian, Pierre-Joseph Redouté, Anne Pratt, Mariann North and Ernst Haeckel. These illustrations have become the didactic material for a system known as Generative Adversarial Network that after some training enables to recreate new artificial images with morphological features almost identical to the original images, but with details and characteristics that appear to be created by human hands. Info: Curator: Federica Patti, Marignana Arte Project Room, Dorsoduro, 140A, Venice, Italy, Duration: 12/2-30/4/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, www.marignanaarte.it

In the exhibition “Cassoni. Paintings-boxes” nine artists, from various generations and backgrounds, present a selection of works, most of them never shown in France or produced for the exhibition. In line with the reflection on post-performance painting, the curator imagines what the cassone would be today. At the beginning of the chest of drawers, the first household piece of furniture were the Cassoni, wedding chests, both objects of exchange and of parade. The exhibition invites us to wonder about the economy of love. What would be our trousseau today? The starting point is a reflection on 3D painting, as a transitional object, beside the imaginary plan of an icon: a multidimensional volume which calls our body, performs stories, not only a painted surface stretched on a frame hanging on a wall, but a polysemic and polymorphic one. Then the painting becomes the start or the destination of an action: a volume on a shelf, on the ground, in a showcase. Participating Artists: Niko Chodor, Pui Tiffany Chow, Jordan Derrien, Nathalie Du Pasquier, Cédric Esturillo, Alex Heilbron, Guillaume Pinard, Luigi Serafini and Manon Vargas. Info: Curator:  Marie de Brugerolle, Anne Barrault Gallery, 51 Rue des Archives, Paris, France, Duration: 14/2-26/3/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11;00-19:00, https://galerieannebarrault.com

The exhibition “American People” brings together over fifty years of Faith Ringgold’s work. The exhibition is highlighted by the first full presentation of her historic “French Collection” in over twenty years along with many other quintessential works that will be exhibited together for the first time in decades. Featuring Ringgold’s best-known series, this show examines the artist’s figurative style as it evolved to meet the urgency of political and social change. The exhibition also foregrounds her radical explorations of gender and racial identities, which the artist incorporates into the rich textures of her paintings, soft sculptures, and story quilts. Among the most important artworks of the past fifty years, Ringgold’s fabric works combine local traditions and global references to compose a polyphonic history of this country. Long overdue, this retrospective provides a timely opportunity to experience the art of an American icon. Info: Curators: Massimiliano Gioni and Gary Carrion, Assistant Curator: Madeline Weisburg, New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 17/2-5/6/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.newmuseum.org

The exhibition “Model Studies” features five new photographs made in the archives of the late fashion designer Azzedine Alaïa. The photographs are the newest works in Thomas Demand’s “Model Studies” series, started in 2011, that depict details of working models by architects and designers, including John Lautner, Gio Ponti, and Hans Hollein. The cardboard and tracing paper patterns in the Alaïa photographs are remnants of designer’s creative process and originally served as practical objects used in the making of garments. Thomas Demand’s work investigates the persistence of images and their ability to embed themselves in a society’s collective memory. He studied sculpture at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where Bernd and Hilla Becher had recently taught a generation of German photographers. Like those artists, Demand often makes mural-scale photographs, but instead of finding his subject matter in landscapes, buildings, and crowds, he uses paper and cardboard to meticulously reconstruct images taken from various media sources, often well-known historical pictures or widely seen photographs from the news. Info: Matthew Marks Gallery, 7818 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Duration: 17/2-2/4/2022, Days & Hours:  Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://matthewmarks.com

The exhibition “The Beautiful and the Sinister” demonstrates the close relationship existing between the work of Bill Brandt and the art of the European avant-garde, in particular Surrealism. Departing from the notion that the sinister (unheimlich) is an ever present element of Brandt’s photographs, the exhibition shows how this characteristic manifests itself in both his artistic and documentary practice. From his earliest photographs in the nineteen-thirties, to his portraits and nudes in later years, Brandt shows a permanent fascination to the strange. Bill Brandt’s  work of the1930s is characterised by its emphasis on social inequality in England during that time. By using his family contacts, he was able to visualise the extreme contrasts of wealth in British society. Brandt was most innovative in his photographic experimentation of nudes. These photographs possess a great symbolic significance that in many cases is related to elements taken from psychoanalysis and Surrealism, such as a strong lighting contrast, the inclusion of elements like images, mirrors or doors and windows as symbols of escape. Info: Foam, Keizersgracht 609, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Duration: 18/2-18/5/2022, Days & Hours: Mon-Wed & Sat-Sun 10:00-18:00, Thu-Fri 10:00-21:00, www.foam.org

Carlos Martiel is an artist born in 1989 in Havana, Cuba. His artistic studies were strongly marked by the Behavior Art Department, directed by Tania Bruguera, at Cuba’s Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA). For Carlos Martiel, context is everything, and so he arrives with his performance “Tierra de nadie” (No man’s land) at Galleria Continua, Paris. Specifically, this performance reflects on the impact that African populations and their diaspora have suffered. They were involuntarily enslaved and subjugated through systematic violence, as well as their lands occupied and plundered by world powers. The same powers that continue to profit economically from the misery, territorial division, and rapacious policies created in the colony. Carlos Martiel’s work surges from his own history, womb, skin, and most intimate identity. His work is coherent and solid, as are each of his muscles that become accomplices in his presentations—showing with singular modesty that otherness  that seeks to vindicate the oppressed bodies of minorities, doing so from his own blackness and his homosexuality. Info: Curator: Laura Salas Redondo, Galleria Continua, 87 Rue du Temple, Paris, France, Date: 19/2/2022, Hours: 17:00-18:30, www.galleriacontinua.com

In his solo exhibition “Revealing Narratives”, Stan Douglas presents in Canada his most recent photo series “Penn Station’s Half Century” (2021) and “Disco Angola” (2012), a series of photos that will be presented in Québec for the first time. For “Penn Station’s Half Century” Douglas worked with a researcher who rifled through thousands of newspapers and periodicals to select nine historic moments that took place in New York’s original Pennsylvania Station between 1914 and 1957, before it was demolished to make way for Madison Square Garden. With the series “Disco Angola”, Douglas takes on the persona of a fictional photojournalist living in New York City in the 1970s, who is a regular in the emerging disco scene and travels back and forth to Angola to cover the civil war. The works in the series are dated from 1974 and 1975, which was a critical period for the global political economy, marked by an oil crisis, a global market crash and increasingly strained relations between the US and Soviet Union. Info: Curator: Cheryl Sim, PHI Foundation 451 & 465 Saint-Jean Street, Montréal, Québec, Canada, Duration: 19/2-22/5/2022, Days & Hours: Wed-Fri 12:00-19:00, Sat-sun 11:00-18:00, https://phi.ca

Frida Orupabo presents her first solo exhibition in Switzerland  entitled “I have seen a million pictures of my face and still I have no idea”. Frida Orupabo dissects images and visual records, dis-members and reassembles Black bodies to give them new lives, narratives and histories. With her analogue black-and-white collages and video works, the Norwegian-Nigerian artist and sociologist challenges our ways of seeing – thereby making visible how photography is involved in the formation and perpetuation of colonial power relations, which are not least inscribed in the gaze. For her delicate and at times sculptural works, Orupabo uses visual material that circulates online, from films, art and popular culture to science, ethnography or medicine. The Black female body lies at the heart of her investigations: through its violent (pictorial) history, Orupabo negotiates the themes of colonial violence, racism, sexuality and identity. By dismembering images and reassembling their pieces, with the fractures emerging like scars, Orupabo deconstructs stereotypical representations, processes of objectification, fixation and othering, in which photography becomes an accomplice to the colonial gaze and its legacy. Info: Fotomuseum Winterthur, Grüzenstrasse 44 + 45, Winterthur, Switzerland, Duration: 26/2-29/5/2022, Days & Hours: Tue & Thu-Sun 11:00-18:00, Wed 11:00-20:00, www.fotomuseum.ch