ART NEWS: May 03

Known for her use of traditional Bangalorean goldsmithing tools and techniques, which have been passed down throughout generations in her family, Prabhavathi Meppayil creates meticulous, subtle abstractions that bridge the past and future. Meppayil has cultivated a highly autobiographical practice through which she explores artisanal production, Indian culture, and the aesthetics of Minimalism and Postminimalism. Close and contemplative looking is central to experiencing Meppayil’s art, and her practice can be understood in conversation with artists in Pace’s core minimalist program, including Agnes Martin, Mary Corse, Tony Smith, Robert Irwin, and Robert Mangold. Engaged with the history of postwar abstraction and modes of non-hierarchical organization, the artist’s work combines modernist aesthetics with the rich craft traditions of India. The artist employs understated, muted color palettes and forges repeated geometric forms in her work by way of a labor-intensive process that often involves multiple layers of gesso on wood panels. For these works, she uses a goldsmithing and jewelry making tool—a thinnam with small, angled indents traditionally used for mark-making in hot metal—to forge a series of delicate, gestural marks and abstractions. Paintings of this kind, as well as panel works with copper wire embedded in gesso, are on view in Meppayil’s solo exhibition. Info: Pace Gallery, 540 West 25th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 13/5-18/6/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10;00-18:00, www.pacegallery.com/

Isaac Chong Wai’s solo exhibition “If we keep crying, we will go blind” features an entirely new body of work, including a large-scale installation, a 2-channel video, a series of silk prints, a lightbox, and a performance. The conceptual, political, and performative qualities of Isaac Chong Wai’s practice are incorporated by an interdisciplinary approach, processing the exigency of societal shifts and global phenomena. His subtle, poetic, and yet critical works infiltrate the systems of meanings, inviting viewers to reexamine his edited representations of the body, powerlessness, violence, collectivism, leaderlessness, and mourning—among other themes. Chong’s motive to bring public space into the gallery is embodied by his large-scale installation “Crying Streetlight” (2022) in the heart of the exhibition. The hollow metal street lamps “cry”—as conceptualized by the artist—and evoke the perceptions of emptiness and transparency, referencing the public lights in the squares of the mausoleums in Tiananmen in Beijing, China, and the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun in Pyongyang, North Korea. Info: Zilberman Selected, İstiklal Mah. Piyalepaşa Bulvarı No: 32C, Beyoğlu / Istanbul, Turkey, Duration: 17/5-30/7/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.zilbermangallery.com/

The exhibition “249 kilometers by 68 meters” homes in on the ways in which Shahpour Pouyan envisions architecture as a beacon of power, that wields both positive and nefarious influences, surveying three seminal bodies of work. Architecture has long represented a true aesthetic shock for Shahpour Pouyan who recalls it was the catalyst Iranian artists funneled their creativity into, at a time when art making was tightly controlled and sculpture making was forbidden by Islamic theology. Inspired by the ways in which Iranian culture found its artistic expression through architecture, Pouyan has dedicated much of his practice to developing a vocabulary of forms created through a conflation of Western and Iranian constructions. As such, the “Flying walls” display attributes drawing from different architectural vernaculars, combining both Roman arches, watchtowers, and gargoyles as well as Persian ornaments. Referencing the 1437 painting by Sassetta part of the St Francis Altarpiece, Pouyan upends the motif of the castle in the sky from St. Francis of Assisi’s dream of a celestial city. Hence the title of the exhibition further intertwines the works within Biblical scripture, alluding to the length and height of wall fencing the celestial heavens. Info: Galerie Nathalie Obadia, 3 rue du Cloître Saint-Merri, Paris, France, Duration: 17/5-16/7/2022, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.nathalieobadia.com/

Eva Barto presents “Weak Tongue”, her first solo exhibition in a Parisian institution, the exhibition is a continuation of her research into the notions of assistance, financial support, and their ambiguities. The exhibition is constructed using incisive doublespeak that is constantly being turned around. It manifests itself in the manipulation, interpretation and deviation of laws and rules that protect and spare both those who make them and those who circumvent them. “Weak Tongue” exaggerates the opportunistic method in place in these strategies, conveying it through borrowed testimonies, cumulating official and unofficial, real, erroneous, or contradictory versions1. The shift from one discourse to another, as well as the treatment of the exhibition space to neutralise it, establishes a regime of suspicion and leads us to consider the context as a whole, to measure what is said and what is not said, allowing the corruptive dynamic to spread and spare nothing. As a result, the exhibition sets up a whole apparatus of revelations, omissions and protection of information, obliged to provide some of its data only beyond the scope of its framework and temporality, where the elements of its complementarity can then unfold. Info: Curator: Xavier Franceschi, Frac Île-de-France, Le Plateau, 22 rue des Alouettes, Paris, France, Duration: 19/5-24/7/2022, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 12:00-19:00, www.fraciledefrance.com/

The twenty-four new monumentally-scaled paintings on view comprise the solo exhibition “Pink sunsets, cigarettes, 3 regrets and hope to haunt the future” for Jordan Kerwick who lives and works in the South of France. The paintings on view have been selected to introduce Los Angeles visitors to Kerwick’s fantastical visual style, expressed in scenes of menacing beasts and predatory animals rendered in an intense, vibrant palette of electric color. Executed in oil, acrylic and spray paint on canvas, Kerwick’s paintings are characterized by an unselfconscious approach to naive mark-making– a disregard for academic tenets and rules of perspective and structure– and a heavily textured application of paint that boldly flattens form and the perception of pictorial space. Kerwick’s oeuvre revolves around recurring iconographic elements and identifiable symbols– a striking visual language that deliberately tangles art historical references, ancient iconography, and images inspired by the artist’s domestic life at home with his wife and two young sons. Kerwick’s figurative tableaux offer up playful, absurdist narratives of interactions between a rotating cast of hybrid creatures– double headed cobras, fanged tigers, feather-maned unicorns, snarling wolves and skeletal faces in wide-brimmed hats. Info: Vito Schnabel Gallery, The old Santa Monica Post Office, 1248 Fifth Street, Santa Monica, CA, USA, Duration: 19/5-26/6/2022, Days & Hours: by appointment only, www.vitoschnabel.com/

“Fossil of High Noon” is a solo exhibition of Minouk Lim who continues to create works that span different genres and media including writing, music, video, installation and performance, This is the artist’s second exhibition with the gallery, featuring new series of sculptures, drawings, and video installation. The various works displayed in the exhibition highlight Lim’s capacity to translate the hidden voices and figures of history, foregrounding themes of departure due to spatial and temporal discrepancies and the possibility of reunion. Lim’s video piece “Portable Keeper_Sea” allows estranged generations to coexist in an alternate dimension, illustrating binaries such as memory and future; life and death. “Dudu Mulmul”, the sculpture installed along with the video, embodies an uncertain secret of when, where, and how it came to be there. The new “Portable Keeper” pieces appear as though dredged from an era of dinosaurs or forgotten kings, alluding to the invisible, historic losses, and repressed traumas. Through these works, Minouk Lim explores measurements of time in unchronological order and reexamines signs emerging from the midst of oblivion through suspicion and speculation. Info: Tina Kim Gallery, 525 West 21st Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 19/5-1/7/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.tinakimgallery.com/

An exhibition foregrounds Wangechi Mutu’s current practice in earth and bronze sculptures, which populate Storm King’s expansive landscape. Mutu’s work reverently engages with the natural world to address ideas of mythology, ritual, and historical violence and its impact on women, their inextricable relationships with our ecosystems. Mutu rejects hierarchies among living things, whether human, plant, or animal. The artist molds her ideas and materials to assert the existence and cultural relevance of ancient original myths, fables, and histories derived from African art. For the indoor portion of the exhibition, Mutu brings the natural world inside through both raw materials and visual representations. The galleries are inhabited by Mutu’s earthworks, animalesque creatures, and humanoids made from soil, wood, paper pulp, horn, and bone, all collected around the artist’s studio in Kenya. Two films that feature the artist in different forms and guises offer portals into imagined and mythological landscapes. Other works remind viewers that nature has for centuries been a locus of colonialism and acts of violence. Sited outside are eight of Mutu’s large-scale cast bronze works. Installed in the context of meadows, woods, and ponds, these sculptures take on new resonance, while adding layers of meaning to the site’s existing ecologies and histories, including the consideration of the site and region as colonized land. Info: Storm King’s Museum, 1 Museum Rd. New Windsor, NY, USA, Duration: 21/5-7/11/2022, Days & Hours: Mon & Wed-Sun 10:00-17:30, https://stormking.org/

In “Beyond Devotion”, Alexander Tovborg continues expounding on the morphology of the great archetypes already associated with his artistic identity. Throughout the sculptures and paintings that make up the exhibition, Tovborg has seamlessly interwoven symbols of Christianity, mysticism, mythology, astrology, and botany. Without the constrains of chronology, temporality, science, or naturalism, Tovborg is able to move freely between these disparate, symbolic realms. Tovborg’s deployment of Christian iconography simultaneously offers viewers a means of entry into his complex and idiosyncratic visual language and serves as a means of critiquing the patriarchal history of the church. In “dea madonna with rainbow crown (night)” (2021) a mother is shown cradling her child. This pastel and acrylic work represents Tovborg’s contribution to the most recognizable example of Christian iconography: the Virgin Mary holding Christ in her arms. In Tovborg’s variation, however, the infant Christ is depicted as Dea, the daughter of God. This subversive reimagining of the central narrative of Christianity sees Dea taking the place of Christ. Info: Blum & Poe Gallery, Harajuku Jingu-no-mori 5F, 1-14-34 Jingumae, Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan, Duration: 21/5-2/7/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 12:00-18:00, www.blumandpoe.com/

The exhibition “Never Enough” pay tribute to Kaari Upson, who over her brief yet prolific 15-year career developed an elaborate universe woven out of memory, conjecture, fact, and fiction. Imbued with a mystical animism, each sculpture, painting, drawing, and video merges personal and collective traumas, desires, fears, and fantasies. For Upson the key to accessing oneself could be found in one’s possessions, especially those contained in the home. Upson’s interest in domesticity grew out of “The Larry Project” (2007–212), a series of works in which she investigated the psyche using a mysterious neighbor, whom she later called “Larry”. Having acquired a significant amount of his personal belongings Upson obsessively researched him giving rise to an astonishing body of work about a man she never met. In several videos Upson appears in multiple roles playing a version of herself, a twin, a lover, her mother, a friend—all while reenacting, theorizing, and questioning aspects of domesticity, personae, and interpersonal relationships. Info: Curator: Dakis Joannou, DESTE Foundation, Filellinon 11 & Em. Pappa street, N.Ionia, Athens Greece, Duration: 26/5-27/11/2022, Days & Hours: Wed 12:00-20:00, Sat 10:00-14:00, https://deste.gr/

“Conversations on Shadow Architecture” is a multidisciplinary group exhibition featuring the work of artists, architects and composers. Centred on Critical Spatial Practice (CSP) (which can be understood as a theoretical lens and practical mode to critically engage with the cultural, social and political potential of space and architecture) the exhibition began as a thought exercise with practitioners whose work resonated with the various limbs of CSP. Here architecture (built and unbuilt, its absence as much as presence), politics, history, economies and the future are understood as inextricably linked through complex networks of spatial variables that affect the way we think, feel, move, make decisions and operate together. The contributors A were invited because their practices resonate with the non-hierarchical limbs of our thought exercise: creatives who disrupt the machine or reject the monotony of what’s practiced in the everyday. They step clear of the well-beaten track to provoke the core of our humanness—and its shadow—recalling the currency of fluid, liminal and responsive existence. Info: Curator: Ineke Dane, Dominik Mersch Gallery, Upstairs, 75 McLachlan Ave, Rushcutters Bay, Australia, Duration: 28/5-25/6/2022, Days & Hours: Wed-Fri 11:00-18:00, Sat 12:00-17:00, https://dominikmerschgallery.com/