ART NEWS: Nov.01

Manuela Marques’ career is one of the most singular and international of Portuguese photography. For the first time, she will present in Portugal an exhibition that brings together several of her photographic and videographic works, produced between 2018 and 2022, as part of a triptych that has included previous presentations at MuMa, (Musée d’art moderne André Malraux), Le Havre, and Centre d’art Domaine de Kerguéhennec, Brittany, France. Her solo exhibition “Echoes of Nature” is characterised by observation and thinking about landscape and the natural environment in all its forms, establishing a dialogue between scientific, perceptual and aesthetic discourses. With a basis in continental and insular territories (France and Portugal, and the Azores archipelago, respectively), she has constructed a body of images that constitute an archaeological approach to the nature of the photographic image and a phenomenological digression on the artistic concept of landscape. Possessing notable technique and aesthetic rigour, Manuela Marques deals with the experimental matter of photography in many of its dualities. Info: Curator: Emilia Tavares, Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea do Chiado, Rua Serpa Pinto, 4 | Rua Capelo, 13, Lisbon, Portugal, Duration: 21/10/2022-29/1/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-13:00 & 14:00-18:00, Sat-Sun 10:00-14:00 & 15:00-18:00, www.museuartecontemporanea.gov.pt/

Across the great diversity of forms, Etel Adnan’s art is characterized by the recurrence of certain themes and motifs, “lines of force” that course through her entire oeuvre: on the one hand, nature—perhaps one of her key themes—and a specific relationship with the earth that, Adnan believes, underlies Arabic poetry; on the other hand, insurrection and active opposition to war and oppression of any kind. The exhibition “Etel Adnan” is the first comprehensive retrospective of her oeuvre in Germany. It gathers artworks from all periods of the internationally renowned artist’s oeuvre and in a wide range of media. Side by side with her small-format abstract paintings, whose intensity of color lends them an almost mystical quality, her monumental tapestries, delicate works on paper, leporellos, and experiments on film shed light on her specific engagement with questions of color and form and with the cosmic dimension of time, space, and the spiritual. The exhibition also pays tribute to Adnan’s writings, which articulate her political stances with particular clarity. Info: Curators Sébastien Delot and Melanie Vietmeier, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Luisenstraße 33, Munich, Germany, Duration: 25/10/2022-26/2/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 10:00-18:00, Thu 10:00-20:00, www.lenbachhaus.de/

Featuring recent figurative paintings and sculptures, Steve Locke’s solo exhibition “your blues ain’t like mine” takes its title from Bebe Moore Campbell’s landmark novel of the same name. Like Campbell’s 1992 text, Locke’s exhibition delineates the complicated relationships between identity, power, desire, and violence. Locke’s cruisers depict intimate moments between men to better map the connection between identity and desire. Employing a sense of color the artist refined in parallel with his abstract “Homage to the Auction Block” paintings (2019–present), recent cruisers emerge as meditations on the power of the gaze. Imbuing a sideways glance with eagerness, uncertainty, and risk. This vulnerability reflects Locke’s own experiences as a queer Black man. Forced to negotiate a world shaped by racism and homophobia, his free-standing works signpost the cost of this navigation, incorporating materials and motifs that reference his biography into their construction. His sculptures’ uncanny, human-like physicality engages viewers in an extended confrontation, implicating them in the rising global tide of polarization and hate. At once seductive and incriminating, Locke’s work critically reflects on contemporary society. His colorful paintings pulse with an unsettling charge that sheds light on the histories of Blackness and queerness. Info: Alexander Gray Associates, 510 West 26 Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 27/10-17/12/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:30-18:00, www.alexandergray.com/

Jimmy Robert’s works deal with different forms of movement, be they in art, queer culture, or public space. The exhibition “All dressed up and nowhere to go” begins with a new installation designed by Jimmy Robert in collaboration with Studio Diogo Passarinho. Through large mirrored walls, it initially places the viewer at the center. The labyrinthine architecture formulates a stage and its backstage, a dressing room, a new space, and a trompe-l’œil image. It conveys an intimate emptiness in the exhibition space of the public institution, in which the visitors are initially confronted with themselves. The title All dressed up and nowhere to go thus poses the question of belonging, position, one’s own gaze, and that of others. Clothing as costume, dressing and undressing, stage and backstage are ideas that run through the installation as well as the photo series created on-site. Performance, as a practice in the artist’s oeuvre, is dissected here in time and space and can be experienced as an installation and as the site of a temporally displaced event. Info: Curators: Christina Lehnert and Çağla Ilk, Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Lichtentaler Allee 8a, Baden-Baden, Germany, Duration: 28/10/2022-15/1/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-18:00, https://kunsthalle-baden-baden.de/

“this must be the place to be” is the first solo exhibition by Rod Jones ii. The exhibition presents new work that builds upon jones’s ongoing mixed-media practice, and that draws from his experiences growing up in his mother’s beauty salon. Using materials such as resourced fabric, synthetic hair, glass and acrylic beads, and dental floss, jones makes soft sculpture dolls he calls “homies” and constructs an installation—a world—that holds them. In his first solo exhibition it is clear that Jones is invested in a different kind of placemaking, a kind that asks questions rather than proposing answers. What does it mean to make intentional space? How do we hold—and how are we held by—the places we move through? Who are we in relation to what—or who—surrounds us? What does it feel like to be accepted and to be present, to be embraced and to belong? Info: Curator: Didier William, CUE Art Foundation, 137 Westr 25th St, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 3/11-17/12/2022 & 3-7/1/2023, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 12”00-18:00, https://cueartfoundation.org/

Titled “Big Bongo Night”, the exhibition features mixed media sculptures, paintings, and a work on paper that shed light on David Lynch’s distinctive visual arts practice. The exhibition bringing together disquieting scenes on wood panel and paper as well as sculptures with light components will spotlight his storytelling abilities. Lynch’s artworks often meditate on moments of disruption in domestic, everyday settings. Rife with unsettling, threatening, and enigmatic images, the artist’s work draws from the visual languages of Surrealism and Art Brut. Bringing madcap forms and media into conversation, Lynch’s semi-abstract paintings, which often feature flattened compositions and perspectival distortions, explore enactments of bodily and industrial decay. At the core of these works is a pervasive unease that speaks to the dark realities of contemporary American life. A selection of Lynch’s mixed media lamp sculptures also figure prominently in the exhibition. These works are derived from the artist’s early paintings and experimentations with projection and moving images. Depending on their material makeups, these structures range from linear to geometric to biomorphic. Info: Pace Gallery, 540 West 25th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 4/11-17/12/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.pacegallery.com/

Sonia Gomes, who is known for her use of textiles and everyday materials in her complex assemblages, brings physicality and movement to the fore of her work, titled “O mais profundo é a pele” (Skin is the deepest part), will also mark the artist’s first solo exhibition with Pace since she joined the gallery’s program in 2020. Gomes, a largely self-taught artist, first gained international recognition when the late curator Okwui Enwezor included her work in the 2015 Venice Biennale. In 2018, she became the first living Afro-Brazilian woman artist to have a monographic show at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), and in 2021 she participated in the 13th Gwangju Biennale in South Korea and the Liverpool Biennial in the UK. Born in 1948 in Caetanópolis—which is located in state of Minas Gerais in southeastern Brazil and was once a textile hub—the artist has cultivated a practice anchored by her deft and meticulous manipulation of varied materials. Featuring juxtaposing forms, colors, and media, Gomes’s abstract assemblages have pushed the boundaries of conventional sculpture, forging connections between memory and abstract imagery. Info: Pace Gallery, 540 West 25th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 4/11-17/12/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.pacegallery.com/

Ever since antiquity, inebriation has been presented as a way of opening the doors to creativity, a means that is deeply connected to poetry, both by its origin, inspirational value and its subversive and exhilarating aspects. In “Petits poèmes en prose”, which was published in 1869 two years after his death, Baudelaire assembled men and wine to show the necessity of drunkenness as an escape towards an ideal. In the group exhibition “Enivrez-vous” participate 24 contemporary artists in whom the forces of the imagination meet and intwine with the poet’s ideal. What once excited him and now excites these artists is not describing the material nature of art, but rather setting off in search of its hidden source, by evoking the dreams and considerations to which works of art give rise. Each artist present takes firmly hold of their pictorial truth and the genesis of their art in order to analyse their chosen means of expression and approach to colour, the flat canvas surface, material questions and the mastery of space, light and composition. “We have within us the sparks of knowledge, like a flint: philosophers extract them through reason, but poets force them out through the sharp blows of the imagination. Info: Curator: René-Julien Praz, Praz-Delavallade Gallery, 5 rue des Haudriettes, Paris, France, Duration: 5/11/2022-7/1/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.praz-delavallade.com/

Glenn Brown presents new paintings, sculptures, and drawings in his exhibition “We’ll Keep On Dancing Till We Pay”. Wielding a broad knowledge of art history, literature, music, and popular culture, Brown creates images and forms in which divergent references collide and playfully coexist. By harnessing the lingering allure and historical resonance of old master drawings, he transforms their past imagery into something rich and strange. The new paintings on view in New York include double portraits, twisted figures, and a large-scale still life with ripened quinces. The artist’s exacting mark making, which produces intricate loops and swirls of paint that appear to glide and float across the canvases’ surfaces, infuses these works with an ethereal vitality. After his last New York exhibition in 2014, Brown spent time concentrating exclusively on drawing, describing it as “the skeleton that holds the composition of any painting together.” In this exhibition, the technique becomes his starting point; each painting is based on an appropriated drawing. The work still hinges on art history and maintains his characteristic surrealist-symbolist look, but now Brown’s marks are bigger and bolder and his colors more fantastical, making every rendering intensely graphic and charged with accelerated motion. Info: Gagosian Gallery, 541 West 24th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 8/11-23/12/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://gagosian.com/