ART NEWS:April 02

“we sat rigid except for the parts of our bodies that were needed for production” is an exhibition that convenes the work of the experimental filmmaker Sandra Lahire and the artist and designer Celeste Burlina. Coming from two distinct eras of feminist practice, their piercing meditations on the porosity of the body, labor, and environmental trouble enter into joint fabulation. The exhibition is host  six recently restored films by Lahire. Her galvanizing handling of the celluloid moving image addresses the ways in which capital and patriarchy mold and deplete vital faculties of the (female) body, the earth, and ultimately the moving image itself. Celeste Burlina responds by way of an architectural intervention and echoes Lahire’s cinematic exploration of mining, industrial production, and female labor. Attentive to the ways infrastructure enables or obstructs the gathering of bodies and their circulation, Burlina’s proposition cuts through the three galleries of the Kunstverein. Info: Grazer Kunstverein, Palais Trauttmansdorff, Burggasse 4, Graz, Austria, Duration: 9/4-29/5/2022, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 12:00-18:00, www.grazerkunstverein.org/

In Umar Rashid’s a.k.a. Frohawk Two Feathers, solo exhibition “In Ancien Regime Change Part Two. En Germinal: Les Printemps de Guerre”, the year is 1796 and Rashid’s Frenglish Empire has sent commanders on colonial reconnaissance missions to discover new territories and countries to occupy. Unlike many of his shows, whose fictitious events take place on the gallery’s home soil (a Los Angeles show might detail the imagined wars between the Tongva population of LA and the Frenglish Empire, for instance), Rashid moves this show’s subjects out of France’s domestic borders, expanding his focus to the fringe of the Frenglish Empire, following the battles taking place in four locales, all while Frenglad attempts to make inroads in new locations, widen its colonial borders, and maintain its relevance as a superpower. In Quebec, New Caledonia, Mauritania, and the island of Martinique, the Frenglish armies face unique challenges depending on the varied locales, weather, landscapes—and resistance forces. Rashid’s monumental acrylic paintings feature sceneries that are bright and bold, packed with his signature cacophony of colors, textures, stylized figures, historical knockoffs, and pop culture asides— always with a keen wit and biting humor. Info: Almine Rech, 64 Rue de Turenne (front space), Paris, France,  Duration: 13/4-4/5/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.alminerech.com/

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster in his solo exhibition “Alienarium 5”, imagines possible encounters with extra-terrestrials through speculative, performative and visual fiction. Conceived of specifically for Serpentine, the exhibition features almost entirely new work situated both inside and outside the gallery. Approaching from the park, visitors will first come across a statue in remembrance of the coming alien developed together with writer and philosopher Paul B. Preciado, as well as elements of a soundscape made with musician Perez, a long-time collaborator and co-conspirator for “Exotourisme”, an exhibition presented at the Centre Pompidou in 2002 and a musical project begun in 2018 and an exhibition. Inside the gallery, “Alienarium 5” will continue as a 360-degree panorama, an olfactive extra-terrestrial collaboration with Barnabé Fillion (Arpa Studios), an otherworldly holorama expanding the artist’s ongoing series of ‘apparitions’, and a new VR piece that, following on from her critically acclaimed Endodrome presented at the 2019 Venice Biennale, marks the artist’s second VR work produced by Vive Arts, and developed by Lucid Realities. Info: Serpentine South Gallery, Kensington Gardens, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 14/4-4/9/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.serpentinegalleries.org/

The exhibition “A Contextual Retrospective” spans several decades of Raphael Montañez Ortiz’s  production, from the 1950s to the early-2020s, in different media such as film, painting, photography, video installations, documents, and assemblages. This is the largest exhibition-to-date dedicated to the artist. Raphael Montañez Ortiz is a central figure in U.S. Post-war art, whose pioneering practice began with trail-blazing experimental film works in 1957. In the 1960s, he was a key figure in the international Destruction Art movement, with performative actions that would result in powerful sculptures made from destroyed objects. His practice expands art historical references, from U.S. Abstract Expressionism and Dada to identity and his upbringing in a Puerto Rican family in New York. At the same time, his work was informed by an ongoing interest in psychoanalysis and anthropology, which resulted in his exploration of shamanic practices and the therapeutic and healing potential of art, parallel to his research into pre-Hispanic cultures. Info: Curators: Rodrigo Moura, and Julieta González, El Museo del Barrio, 1230 5th Avenue, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 14/4-11/9/2022, Days & Hours: Thu-Sun 11:00-17:00, www.elmuseo.org/

The retrospective “Stéphane Mandelbaum” is on show at MMK. Driven by fascination as well as by contempt, Stéphane Mandelbaum (1961–1986) produced hundreds of portraits within a short creative period of just ten years. The subjects include Arthur Rimbaud, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Francis Bacon, Pierre Goldman, his grandfather Szulim, and his father Arié Mandelbaum, but also National Socialist criminals such as Joseph Goebbels and Ernst Röhm. Portraying them small and singly or larger than life-size, Mandelbaum sought to capture the essence of their characters with a ballpoint pen, oil paint, or a graphite or colored pencil, often adding scribbles, texts in French, Yiddish, Italian, or German, or collaged newspaper clippings. His Jewish descent, Belgium’s colonial history, but also the nightlife and underworld of Brussels, permeated his work at ever deeper levels and ultimately shaped his life—always driven by the questions: Where do I come from and what can I be? Info: tower MMK, TaunusTurm, Taunustor 1, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, Duration: 14/4-30/10/2022, Days & Hours: Tue & Thu-sun 11:00-18:00, Wed 11:00-19:00,  www.mmk.art

The first museum survey dedicated to the work of Deana Lawson presents the work of a singular voice in photography today. For more than 15 years, Lawson has been exploring and challenging conventional representations of Black life through photography, drawing on a wide spectrum of photographic languages, including the family album, studio portraiture, staged tableaux, documentary pictures, and appropriated images. Engaging acquaintances as well as strangers she meets in cities across Africa and the diaspora, Lawson uses imagery to build extended families of strangers in living rooms, kitchens, and backyards from Brooklyn to New Orleans, Haiti to Ethiopia, and Brazil to the Democratic Republic of Congo. Through a selection of more than 50 works from 2004 to the present, Deana Lawson features the full range of the artist’s career to date and establishes a narrative arc of her expansive vision for the first time. Info: MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Queens, NY, USA, Duration: 14/4-5/9/2022, Days & Hours: Thu-Fri & Sun 12:00-18:00, Sat 12:00-20:00, www.moma.org/

Ricardo Lanzarini’s exhibition “El Baile Interminable” brings together his famous JOB series of miniature drawings, an ink series of body gestures and his most recent work with color in oil pastel that bursts into the dance of his characters. Urban interventions, aesthetic practices with conflictive social groups and site-specific installations have marked in this artist a trajectory based fundamentally on three aspects: conceptual reflection, the symbolic construction of space and drawing as the syntax of a complex thought. The evolution and setbacks of Lanzarini’s graphic art over almost thirty years are nothing other than the history of each of the pieces that make up this exhibition; on the other hand, they assume on this occasion a strong aesthetic autonomy with respect to that history. Indeed, in the exhibition the artist shows an unexpected formal outburst, although this does not compromise the thematic and conceptual continuity characteristic of his work. Info: Xippas Gallery, Ruta 104 km 5, Manantiales, Punta del Este, Uruguay, Duration: 15/4-29/5/2022, Days & Hours: Mon-Sun 15:00-19:00, www.xippas.com/

Allora & Calzadilla’s exhibition “Antille” brings together three major works that center on the Caribbean where the artists live and work. Grounded in the concrete realities of this complex archipelago, the works consider how colonialism and ecology intersect with Empire building. Throughout the gallery the artists have installed “Penumbra” (2020) a virtual landscape that takes the shape shifting qualities of light and shadow as its substance. The projected digital animation recreates the effect of light passing through foliage in the Absalon Valley of Martinique. This tropical forest was the site of a series of now-mythic hikes that took place in 1941 with Suzanne and Aimé Césaire (the Martinican anticolonial poets, theoreticians, and founders of the literary journal Tropiques) and a group of artists and intellectuals fleeing Nazi-occupied France, whose boat had temporarily docked at the West Indian port of Fort-de-France. The refugees included Helena Benitez, André Breton, Wifredo Lam, Jacqueline Lamba, Claude Lévi-Strauss, André Masson, and Victor Serge, among others. Info: Galerie Chantal Crousel, 10 rue Charlot, Paris, France, Duration: 15/4-28/5/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-19:00, www.crousel.com/

Lonnie Holley’s solo exhibition “Coming from the Earth”, features a new body of ceramic works made specifically for the show that continue his long-standing interests and investigations. The presentation highlights Holley’s creative talent and fresh aesthetics born out of a history of toil, chaos, and an enduring curiosity. Holley made his first sculptures from carved sandstone before settling on his preferred material: found objects. Using steel scraps, plastic flowers or even abandoned buildings and decayed urban sites as a source for materials, he has maintained a prolific art practice over the years. After his inclusion in the benchmark exhibition “Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art of the South”, in 1996, Holley’s work began to attract attention beyond Alabama. He soon became one of the foremost artists of the AfroAtlantic aesthetic that blossomed across the Southern United States. Music forms an integral aspect of Holley’s practice. Notably, both his art and music are improvisational, with no two artworks or compositions ever the same: his ever-evolving arrangements and lyrics morph with each concert and recording. Info: Curator: Peter Doroshenko, Dallas Contemporary, 161 Glass St, Dallas, TX, USA, Duration: 16/4-21/8/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, Sun 12:00-17:00, www.dallascontemporary.org/

For MUVE Contemporaneo programme Ca’ Pesaro  International Gallery of Modern Art is hosting “Afro 1950-1970 From Italy to America and Back” exhibition dedicated to Afro Basaldella, one of the leading exponents of Italian painting in the second half of the 20th century. America was a great testing ground for Afro Basaldella and offered him the opportunity to meet members of the New York school, including Pollock, De Kooning and Gorky. With 45 masterpieces shared from collections and museums around the world, the exhibition pays homage to an artist who is also well represented in the collections of Ca’ Pesaro. Curated by Elisabetta Barisoni and Edith Devaney, From Italy to America and back explores the relationship that developed in the 1950s between Italian art movements and American abstract expressionism and action painting. Info: Curators: Elisabetta Barisoni and Edith Devaney, Ca’ Pesaro International Gallery of Modern Ar, Santa Croce, 2076, Venice,  Italy, Duration: 21/4-23/10/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-17:00, https://capesaro.visitmuve.it/