ART NEWS: Feb.04

As its title suggests, the exhibition “Cosmos Ottinger” features everything that constitutes Ulrike Ottinger’s artistic practice. This exhibition is entirely dedicated to the imagination of this extraordinary artist and, like a dictionary that defines her languages or an alphabet that deciphers her stories, it turns the pages of her diverse and long-standing oeuvre. The exhibition tour embarks from the artist’s extravagant filmic worlds by means of scripts, film props, object and costume installations, fabric collages, and photographs. It ends with a presentation of Ottinger’s paintings, which she created as a young artist in Paris. With her paintings, she is considered one of the most important representatives of Pop Art in Europe. These works remind us that a critical and creative examination of issues that were already addressed fifty years ago in the student protests in Paris must be unrelenting. From film enthusiasts to art loversvisitors to Baden-Baden will assume very different positions as the exhibition reviews the most significant stages of Ottinger’s oeuvre. Info: Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Lichtentaler Allee 8a, Baden-Baden, Germany, Duration: 19/2-15/5/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-18:00, https://kunsthalle-baden-baden.de

The exhibition “Blind Ambition” brings together a major collection of Hassan Khan’s old, recent and new works for the first time in a French institution, presented in constellations and new remixes. The scenography features a variety of devices and viewpoints, in a landscape specifically designed by the artist for Gallery 3 of Centre Pompidou. Partly dedicated to the walkers on Rue Saint Merri, the exhibition addresses the public space directly as the arena of both the predictable and the unpredictable, an important theme in Hassan Khan’s work. This bold project designed for the Centre Pompidou shines a spotlight on the full experimental dimension of artistic research in constant movement. Since the 1990s, Hassan Khan has developed a conceptual oeuvre that uses a wide variety of media: sculpture, photography, video, sound, text and in-situ installations. His constantly evolving body of work offers a subtly ironic perspective of the power relationships that define the political and social context of the contemporary world. Info: Centre Pompidou, Place Georges-Pompidou, Paris, France, Duration: 23/2-25/4/2022, Days & Hours: Mon, Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-21:00, Thu 11:00-23:00, www.centrepompidou.fr

The Southern California landscape in which Michael Hilsman was born and raised appears in his work as a space for self-reflection. Like the fabricated façades of a movie set, the works’ primary illusion is their appearance of flatness, which only enhances their metaphysical depth. Bodies study their own contours in a limitless expanse. Loneliness is as abundant as sunshine. Lush gardens and empty horizons, bathed in crepuscular light, are places where the subconscious will roam. “Man On Bed” the work from which this exhibition takes its name, is deceptively flat in both form and title. Like an analyst’s couch, the titular lounger is a device for day-dreaming. Its pink upholstery is a ground upon which Hilsman has rendered – with unsettling detail – a man’s feet protruding from beneath a blanket. Light glints off each nail and the second toe on the left foot bends at the tip, revealing a broken phalanx. Bony and elongated with sallow skin, these alien appendages are a metonym of modern man’s estrangement from his own body, a corpus increasingly objectified and pathologized. Info: Almine Rech, 18 avenue Matignon, Paris, France, Duration: 24/2-2/4/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, www.alminerech.com

The exhibition “Relations”, is an in-depth look into the creative duo OrtaMiklos. The exhibition offers insight into Orta and Miklos, who decided to separate this past year to develop their individual studio practices. Divided into three separate sections, works by OrtaMiklos alongside pieces from Orta and Miklos Anderson’s independent studios. Relations captures this rare moment in the careers of these emerging designers by looking at how their approach to design has evolved while working as part of a collective and how that experience continues to shape their approach since leaving the partnership. Orta and Miklos Anderson founded OrtaMiklos in 2015 while studying at the Design Academy Eindhoven and spent their formative years working in collaboration while developing their individual practices—sharing ideologies and developing a signature sculptural language. OrtaMiklos’ approach since its establishment has been rooted in experimentation and improvisation, with many of their ideas beginning in guerrilla performances. Info: Friedman Benda, 515 West 26th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 24/2-19/3/2022, Days & Hours:  Mon-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.friedmanbenda.com

The exhibition “James Turrell: Elemental”, marks the 20th anniversary of Pace Gallery’s representation of James Turrell.  Elemental is a brand-new immersive installation that expands across the gallery. Turrell’s work evades classification, he explains, “with no object, no image and no focus, what are you looking at? You are looking at you looking.” Placing experiences of time and space at the core of his practice, Turrell’s installation emits a work of art that escapes physical boundary. Imperceptible pulsating transitions of colour mimic the animal mechanics of breathing. Yet, framed with curved corners akin to plane windows – or the convex appearance of the horizon line – the work is elevated to celestial proportion. The experience of seeing guides the viewer into a meditative state, paying homage to the artist’s decades-long devotion to flying airplanes, his Quaker upbringing and immersion in West Coast and Eastern spiritualism. This site-specific gallery takeover continues the artist’s ongoing investigations into light as both subject and material. In titling the work Elemental, the viewer is invited to return to the fundamentals of perception. Although immaterial, the lone presence of light as a substance rather than a tool of disclosure manifests it into physical quality. Light when manipulated by Turrell becomes a phenomenon perceived by and beyond the visual. Info: Pace Gallery, Quai des Bergues 15-17, Geneva, Switzerland, Duration: 25/2-7/5/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.pacegallery.com

Zoe Leonard’s new solo exhibition premieres “Al río / To the River”, a large-scale photographic work begun in 2016 which takes the Rio Grande, as it is named in the United States, or Río Bravo, as it is named in Mexico, as its subject. Leonard photographed along the 2,000 kilometres where the river is used to demarcate the boundary between the United Mexican States and the United States of America, following the river from the border cities of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico and El Paso, Texas, to the Gulf of Mexico. The exhibition is structured in three parts, including a Prologue and a Coda. Each part engages with photographic language, moving fluidly from abstraction to documentary to digital surveillance imagery. Working with a hand-held analogue camera, Leonard takes an embodied position in relation to the river. While always subjective, her view onto the river is not fixed. Crossing frequently back and forth from one side of the river to another (and thus, from one country to another), Leonard refuses a one-sided point of view and instead engages a series of shifting, changing vantage points. Info: Curators:  Suzanne Cotter and Christophe Gallois, Assistant Curator: Sarah Beaumont, Mudam Luxembourg-Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, 3 Park Dräi Eechelen, Luxembourg, Duration: 26/2-6/1/2022, Days & Hours: Mon & Thu-Sun 10:00-18:00, Wed 10:00-21:00, www.mudam.com

The exhibition “Conditioned Movement”, examines universal and existential themes such as time, movement and materiality in relation to museum conservation work. The exhibition probes the idea of a museum collection that exists in an intermediate state between dormancy and exposure, one in which objects and bodies laden with content are resurrected at periodic intervals. The works in the exhibition animate various stages of human activity and subtle gestures that open many potential paths through transformations that seem to offer a glimpse of the infinite on the horizon. The material and the underlying ideas are just as likely to be rooted in the highly personal as in the broadly universal. In a collection that brings together a variety of artistic expressions and concepts, surrealism meets logic and natural science meets the fantastical. Info: Curators: Andreas Nilsson and Gideonsson/Londré, Ola Billgrens plats 2-4, Malmö, Sweden, Duration: 26/2/2022-9/1/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-17:00, Thu 11:00-19:00, www.modernamuseet.se

In his solo exhibition Walton Ford presents new paintings. Absorbing the techniques prevalent in scientific field studies, explorers’ notebooks, and lushly illustrated natural history books, Ford’s watercolors recast, reverse, and rearrange the conventions of wildlife art. His practice is research-driven, responding to such diverse inspirations as Hollywood horror movies, Indian fables, medieval bestiaries, colonial hunting narratives, and obscure zookeepers’ manuals. Ford’s visions are consistently of wild rather than domestic animals. His monumental paintings seek to show us what it means for such animals to live not so much in nature as in the human imagination. “Cabeza de Vaca” (2021) takes its name from the sixteenth-century Spanish explorer. Shipwrecked on the Gulf Coast in 1528, he journeyed lost across the American Southwest before finally reaching Mexico City eight years later. The painting is an exploration of human fear and paranoia when faced with the unknown, the mountainous rattlesnake a dream symbol suggesting the misapprehension and trauma of first contact. Info: Gagosian Gallery, 555 West 24th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 11/3-23/4/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://gagosian.com