ART NEWS: Nov.04

Sarah Awad in her solo exhibition “Rainbow Clearance and Other Paintings”, a show presents 12 canvases. With many paintings rendered in large-scale – a preference on the artist’s part to allow an interpretation of colour and form – the collection is dense with colour and takes on the theme of isolation. It isn’t isolation in the sense of remoteness or seclusion per se, but rather in the function of looking outward and inward, or as Awad puts it: “The way the paint can allow you to see through something to see something else that is coming from the form of the work.” Awad maintains, however, that the paintings are void of narratives, “but hold gesture, body and colour” and are intended to be “open-ended” in their interpretation. “They are figurations, not illustrations,” she asserts. There is a vigour in Awad’s charged and obvious layering, and a dynamism to her grouping of colours – on a palette, they may seem disharmonious, but on her canvases, they are utterly captivating. Colours excite her, especially those that one assumes do not go together. Info: The Third Line Gallery, Alserkal Avenue, Warehouse 78. Street 8, Al Quoz 1, Exit 43 off Sheikh Zayed Road, Dubai, UAEDuration: 14/11-16/12/2022, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.thethirdline.com/

Comprising three extensive new triptychs alongside two individual paintings, the exhibition “Model” continues Dashiell Manley’s exploration of language, repetition, meditation, and play. Manley’s practice is characterized by focused, repetitive, oftentimes labor-intensive techniques with an emphasis on systems of production as means of exploring and understanding cultural and political events. In 2016, Manley started developing his Elegy series, which marked a shift from analytical manifestations of the daily news formerly found in his New York Times paintings to more emotional and psychological expressions on the canvas, allowing himself to open up his gestures and movements as a means of processing collective and personal emotions. The three triptychs In the exhibition follow a similar narrative arc that maps the artist’s ideation of his Elegy series, acting as a sort of prequel to his earlier works. The first panels are illusionistic paintings of Manley’s handwritten notes which have served as the foundation for many of his “Elegy” works. Info: Marianne Boesky Gallery, 507 West 24th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 16/11/2022-7/1/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10;00-18:00, https://marianneboeskygallery.com/

Monster Chetwynd is best known for her exuberant, improvised performances which take on iconic and eclectic moments from cultural history and rework them, as well as “Bat Opera”, an expansive and ongoing series of small scale oil paintings. Following an invitation of the National Glass Centre in the UK, Chetwynd recently began collaborating with hot and a lamp glass workers for an exhibition at Durham Cathedral earlier this year. The exhibition “Lysistrata” expands on this body of work of playful representations of fantastic worlds and personalities that draw us into a world where naked women climb over the back of a golden duck or dance around a bat while silver eels meander through an underwater landscape. In addition to the glass works, the show features a new series of watercolors entitled “Lysistrata” that also provides the title for the exhibition. Named after the Greek drama by Aristophanes, set at the time of the Peloponnesian War in the 5th century BC, the play’s titular character convinces the women on both sides of the conflict to go on a sex strike in order to end the war. In doing so, she challenges gender-specific role models with her active intervention in political affairs and proves to be an assertive politician thanks to her shrewdness, persuasiveness and determination, a role that was not granted to women in ancient Greece. Info: Galerie Gregor Staiger, Via Gioacchini Rossini 3, Milan, Italy, Duration: 16/11/2022-21/1/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 14:00-19:00, https://galerie.gregorstaiger.com/

Comprising new paintings and bronze sculptures, Antonio Obá’s solo exhibition Outras águas / Other waters” intertwines a panorama of references across the histories of Brazilian literature, music, and painting, exploring shared histories and personal resonances that at once engage and reconstruct the worlds embedded within. The point of departure for the exhibition is the seminal writing of the Brazilian author and diplomat João Guimarães Rosa, “The Third Bank of the River” (1962). The story tells of a man who secludes himself from his family, his friends, and society to live in a canoe, sailing up and down a river in solitude. Guimarães Rosa explores this notion of solitude as a return to the self, defending the principle that the real encounter between a person and themselves happens within silence, in observation of nature, and in search for the unknown. This search is the premise of Obá’s exhibition. The works make references across time and place, from the Brazilian Baroque through late twentieth-century Black American painting, to recent Brazilian popular music. Info: Mendes Wood DM, 47 Walker Street, New York NY, USA, Duration: 16/11/2021-21/1/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://mendeswooddm.com/en

“Ornamentum” presenta artists’ jewellery from the Collection Diane Vene. An artist’s jewel, like a painting or a sculpture, is a work of art. Born from the same creative approach, it has the same strength, the same poetry and capacity to evoke, and sometimes the same humour. Only their purpose differentiates them from each other. From Picasso to Koons, many modern and contemporary artists have taken a close interest in jewellery. It belongs neither to the world of high jewellery nor to that of costume jewellery. Nor is it associated with the independent creators of contemporary jewellery who design as much as they make and consider jewellery as a field of expression in its own right. The value of an artist’s jewel cannot be measured in carats. It is not judged by its hallmarks, its brilliance or its transparency. Whatever the art movement to which it belongs, an artist’s jewel created by a painter or sculptor testifies to a renewal of his or her approach to art – a renewal that is perhaps more fun, but just as rigorous. Info: Curators: Diane Venet and Sheila Concari, Boghossian Foundation, Villa Empain, Avenue Franklin Rooseveltlaan 67, Brussels, Belgium, Duration: 18/11/2022-14/5/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.villaempain.com/en/

Theodora Allen in her solo exhibition “Gimlet Eye” presents ten recent paintings. Gimlet Eye, from Middle English, describes a piercing or watchful gaze. It’s a term which compares a manner of looking to the action of a small hand tool—a gimlet is used to bore tiny holes in tight spaces. In the collection of ten works on view, Allen presents a chimera of meticulous and crystalline compositions, where shooting stars, alongside a sequence of emblems, interwoven and succinctly reduced, denote an inward and outward gaze. At once sensuous and ascetic, with lapidary-like precision, the paintings in Gimlet Eye map out a legend of time and devotion. In six of the small paintings on view, Allen positions the teardrop shape in various configurations. The emotional index inherent to this symbol is expanded and drawn upon through a succession of arrangements. When doubled, joined end to end, or placed within the boundary of a glowing red ring, the lacriform shape is altered to form an eye, an infinity symbol, and a candle flame. Info: Huset for Kunst & Design, Nørrebrogade 1, Holstebro, Denmark, Duration: 18/11/2022-19/2/2023, Days & Hours: Thu-Fri 11:00-18:00, Sat-sun 11:00-14:00, www.hfkd.dk/3569974 

Guillaume Leblon’s works in his exhibition “Partaques” are based on forms and objects from our everyday environment. A cast aluminium shell – “The Death of Jennife”r (2022) – presents an iridescent down jacket, lying on the ground like a fragment of the landscape that the artist might have retrieved and placed in the gallery. In the artist’s sculptures, clothing is often used as a body substitute as well as a social marker, anchoring the object in the here and now. Time exerts no hold on the elements of the exhibition: the balls – embedded in the works from the series bodies and balls – are frozen in their trajectories; body parts cast in plaster are from this point forward set in their mediums. These conditions have modified the movements depicted in the immobilized elements: an interplay of resistance and opposing forces taking place between the balls and the plaster-cast body parts. Guillaume Leblon materializes “that infinite time”, close to eternity, in the connection between his works and his life experience. Info: Galerie Nsathalie Obadia, 3 rue du Cloître Saint-Merri, Paris, France, Duration: 19/11/2022-4/2/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.nathalieobadia.com/

Guilherme Almeida’s solo exhibition “Que seja o reflexo” consists of a series of new works conceived for the occasion, capable of weaving stories that intertwine in- dividual and collective dimensions. The exhibition project proposes two different pictorial cycles, united by the presence of the human figure. Portraits made with acrylic paints, applied to give a particular materiality to the painting: in some places the backgrounds are flatter, in others they become more rippled adding an interesting and peculiar character to the canvases, a curious alternation and a rhythm that breathes life into the figures. On the upper floor the works of the first cycle, titled “ONEGRO” are the protagonists: they are mainly choral portraits, of groups or couples caught in “light” moments of leisure, fun, and affection. They are generally known people, bodies that emerge from childhood memories of the same Almeida, as if to ideally compose a family album. On the lower floor the paintings of the second cycle, “Destruição dos Mercados I cycle I:, begun in 2019, offer a counterbalance: They are works created on newspaper pages and dedicated mainly to famous people in Brazilian culture. In this second series, faces and bodies are painted over the news and advertisements: the unusual and iconic portraits thus occupy a large part of the page, obscuring the contents and bringing their own being back to the center. Info: Ribot Gallery, via Enrico Nöe, 23, Milan, Italy, Duration: 23/11/2022-21/1/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 15:00-19:30, Sat 11:30-18:30, www.ribotgallery.com/

David Altmejd’s work is a unique and heady mix of science and magic, science fiction and gothic romanticism: a post-apocalyptic vision which is at the same time essentially optimistic, containing as it always does the potential for regeneration, evolution and invention. For his first exhibition with White Cube in London, David Altmejd populates the gallery with portrait heads and busts of fantastical, hybrid human and animal characters. The presiding spirit of the exhibition is the hare; the trickster, mischief-maker and shape-shifter of many world mythologies and an alter-ego for the artist. The hare appears here in many guises: cartoon-like or endowed with human features and emotions; his tell-tale ears reduced to symbolic stumps or enlarged to provide a canvas for drawings; even metamorphosing into other creatures such as a snake, bat or whale. Altmejd’s sculptures encompass elements of uncanny naturalism and others that are raw and provisional, combining resin, plaster and expanding foam with glass eyes, encrustations of crystal and hanks of hair. Info: White Cube Gallery, 25 – 26 Mason’s Yard, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 23/11/2022-21/1/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10;00-18:00, www.whitecube.com/

“Velvet Terrorism-Pussy Riot´s Russia” is the first ever overview exhibition of protest performance actions by Russian feminist political-art collective Pussy Riot in Island. The exhibition includes Pussy Riot’s world known performance actions as well as showing their numerous lesser known, but consistent actions in and around Russia for the last decade. The works are bursting with the urgency of artistic rebellion against a dead eyed totalitarian system. The exhibition is created with Pussy Riot member Maria (Masha) Alyokhina and exhibits documentations of the activists’ actions from the beginning of their movement in 2011 to the current day. Showing the performances in context – prelude, action, reaction – the exhibition sheds light on the oppression and the growing brutality of the dictatorship in Russia for the last ten years. The exhibition invites the audience to explore a labyrinth of the group’s guerrilla actions and the serious consequences of executing them. In addition, we open the doors for you to the world of constant police surveillance, fake news, the criminal cases against Masha and Lucy Stein, her partner and Pussy Riot comrade, before and during the war,  give you the opportunity to understand a little the totalitarian world that Russia plunged into during Putin‘s decade before making a full-fledged military invasion in Ukraine. Info: Kling & Bang, Grandagarður 20, Reykjavík, Island, Duration: 24/11/2022-15/1/2023, Days & Hours:  Wed & Fri-Sun 12:00-18:00, Thu 12:00-21:00, http://this.is/klingogbang/