ART NEWS: Sept.01

Umar Rashid presents “Kagetora’s dream in the time of Sakoku.  (Reds and Blues). Part 1”, his first exhibition in Japan. Rashid makes paintings, drawings, and sculptures that chronicle the grand historical fiction of the Frenglish Empire (1648–1880) that he has been developing for over seventeen years. Critiquing common renditions of the past, Rashid poses hyperbolic counter-narratives that call attention to and propose reconsiderations of neglected or hidden portions of certain moments in history. Many of the paintings in Kagetora’s dream in the exhibition take locations within Japan as their backdrop. A viewer can spot Kanagawa Prefecture, Shizuoka, Niigata (previously Echigo), the island of Dejima, and others. Loosely following the happenings of Japan’s Sakoku isolationist period, this story charts the adventures of the fictitious Order of the Kirin across Japan and beyond. Dissatisfied with Japan’s isolationist policies, this honorable and peace-loving order ironically declares war against the government, battling their way across the aforementioned sites throughout Japan. Info: Blum & Poe Gallery, Harajuku Jingu-no-mori 5F, 1-14-34 Jingumae, Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan, Duration: 2/9-14/10/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 12:00-18:00, https://blumandpoe.com/

David Salle in his solo exhibition “World People” presents new paintings. A general sense of rhythmic musicality pervades each painting. Multiple panels featuring disparate images, colors, and stylistic flourishes, Salle’s paintings reverberate with a distinct aura that transcends narrative description. Despite a leitmotif of figurative elements, storylines are intentionally slippery. Each painting features a cast of cartoon characters bisected by an eponymous tree of life and roiled from below by a swath of abstract brushwork. For example, in Tree of Life, Couple (2023), two figures embrace to the left of an ochre tree, while a third man in a striped outfit stares at the couple from the right. Is he a voyeur? A Peeping Tom in jail stripes or a cuckold in pajamas? Tree branches intersect all three figures, drawing the eye away from the enigmatic interaction, along the tree trunk, and down into the swath of colorful abstraction in the panel below. The tree of life functions as a recurring character throughout the exhibition, gesturing towards the many religious, philosophical, and mythological traditions that understand it as the source of all creation. Its serial presence provides continuity in Salle’s exhibition while instigating dissonant elements of color and abstraction that threaten to explode the black and white melodrama. Info: Lehmann Maupin, 213 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul, Korea, Duration: 5/9-28/10/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.lehmannmaupin.com/

For “bun babylon; a heretics anthology”, Phoebe Collings-James is exhibiting a new series of ceramic sculptures that embody the artist’s heretics. The anthology begins with a cast of six characters: The Infidel, The Dreamer, The Guardian, The Silo, The Cypher and The Preacher. Delving into the intricacies of these figures, all of whom are imbued with the potential for dissent, the show documents the artist’s process of setting imperial wastelands on fire as the clay body travels through the kiln inferno. The figure of heretic is one that has historically been weaponized as outsider, truth-sayer and traitor. Yet the heretic can also be a symbol for revolt, a beacon around which collective action organises. Using sgraffito techniques Collings-James’ sculptures contain a symbolic language (visible, partially visible and concealed) that has developed over years. Hand carved roulettes (referencing various African pottery traditions) are rolled across the clay’s surface creating repeat patterns and words. Fingers and tools produce further text, imagery and patterns, in oxide colours and tin glazes, punctuating the surface of purple-hue fired red and black clays. Clay-as-language, or even hearsay, has been inspired by cuneiform clay tablets of Babylonian and Sumerien origin, forming a direct link to the earliest known forms of communication, and providing another route for thinking about truth. This show considers linguistic representation as something embodied, experienced, passed down and subject to shifts over time. Through the material itself, along with the processes and modifications made by Collings-James, these works call into question euro-centric modes of knowledge building and epistemologies. Info: Arcadia Missa, 35 Duke Street, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 6/9-28/10/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 12:00-18:00, https://arcadiamissa.com/

Misheck Masamvu, presents “Pivot”, his first solo exhibition in Belgium, the body of work combines striking color with a distinct expressionist style to establish a grammar of chaotic compositions, gestural brushwork and perpetually altered or mutated figures often depicted in states of flux or transformation. Oscillating between abstraction and figuration, the exhibition uses the act of painting to (re)think, (re)work and (re)imagine the world and our place within it. The works featured in Pivot were executed over several months and in different parts of the globe – starting in Harare and then later Johannesburg, as well as Cape Town, before finally being completed while on residency in Brussels. They form part of the nomadic project. For Masamvu, the true self can only be found through placing oneself in the unfamiliar. In purposely becoming a foreigner, the artist can gain new perspectives and self-knowledge, adding to his understanding of the world. These new perspectives inform the work, which become markers of the search for the self. His nomadic journey and the constant power struggle between a stagnant state and the desire for a multiplicity of being results in the work appearing to convulse and change, as if it has been caught in the act of mutation. Info: Bernier / Eliades Gallery, 46 Rue du Châtelain, Brussels, Belgium, Duration: 7/9-16/12/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, https://bernier-eliades.com/

Predominately a sculptor, Naeemeh Kazemi began painting in 2020 when the lockdown started since she could not get to her studio. She worked on these magical canvases in her one bedroom apartment in Iran, which helped her escape the confinement of quarantine and transported her to fantastical places. Living in Iran, Kazemi has had to take creative approaches to her meanings through symbols, so as to not get in trouble with the Iranian government. Her themes of environmental and virus anxiety, feminism, and humanity are disguised in her enchanting paintings through tokens and motifs of the natural world, classical paintings, and quotidian objects. In her most recent “La La Land” series, she depicts a world that is intertwined yet fragmented. It is as if familiar pieces float strangely in space. In her complex yet highly composed paintings, Kazemi ponders the questions “Could the whole history of the world be a mere misunderstanding?” and “Is it possible that man, with all his discoveries, developments, culture, religion, and global wisdom is just lingering on only to the outward of life?” This series reflects Kazemi’s feelings and anxieties towards the world, exacerbated by the Covid pandemic quarantine instated since March 2020. She says, “I’m incredibly scared because I know we will soon annihilate this enlivening life- giving planet. A planet that soon gets a shell from skulls, bones, and dead machines. No one can do anything for her. We lost the game!” Kazemi creates an oasis sheltered from these fears in this series. A “La La Land,” clearly fictitious, but serving as a safe haven from the uncertain world. Info: Leila Heller Gallery, 17 East 76th Street (off Madison Avenue), New York, NY, USA, Duration: 7/9-11/10/2023, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-18:00, www.leilahellergallery.com/

“Another world is waiting for us” is the latest exhibition Hoda Kashiha and features a series of recent works produced by the artist in her studio on the outskirts of Tehran. The exhibition reveals the vitality of a burgeoning oeuvre that has acquired a prominent place in the Iranian art scene. Born in Tehran in 1986, Hoda Kashiha initially studied painting in the Iranian capital before transferring to Boston University in the United States in 2014. After residing temporarily in the United States, the artist returned to Iran in 2016, where she decided to live and work. This international mobility enabled her to broaden her knowledge of the arts and, more broadly, her understanding of the world. At the age of 25, the artist discovered the Boston art scene, which was much larger than the one she had previously been exposed to in Tehran. The various courses she took had an impact on her pictorial vocabulary: her works are intersections of varied influences, oscillating between Cubism and a cartoonish style, with the Iranian socio-political situation as their central subject. Her paintings and installations depict subjects that derive from comic strips or cartoons, in a manner reminiscent of American Pop Art. However, unlike the thought bubbles that allow viewers to read the characters’ emotions, Hoda Kashiha opts for the expressiveness of gesture and colour: the works vibrate with angular, round, expansive and slender shapes, painted in a chromatic palette that is at odds with reality. Info: Galerie Nathalie Obadia, 8 rue Charles Decoster, Brussels, Belgium, Duration: 7/9-21/10/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.nathalieobadia.com/

Internationally admired for his uniquely adroit use of soft pastel, bold yet delicate, as a primary painting medium, Nicolas Party created many of the works in his solo exhibition “Swapm”, including the striking site-specific murals, in pastel. He first began working in this medium over 10 years ago and has since become a master at exploiting the pigments’ versatility, immediacy and saturated color. Upon entering the exhibition, visitors will encounter the first of two expansive pastel murals––a forest in flames. Party is known for conceiving his exhibitions as comprehensive environments, incorporating architectural interventions and extending the palette of his paintings across the gallery’s white walls. Heightening the powerful effects––formal and psychological––of his subject matter, Party has chosen to steep the surrounding walls in a rich maroon. Just beyond the pastel mural hangs a group of portraits featuring enigmatic figures paired with an animal that obscures their body. These creatures were inspired by the work of radical 19th-century French realist painter Rosa Bonheur, an icon of women’s independence who put the living world at the heart of both her life and work, placing animals at the center of her practice. Info: Hauser & Wirth, 542 West 22nd Street New York, NY, USA, Duration: 7/9-21/10/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.hauserwirth.com/

The exhibition “West of Nowhere” is William Monk’s first solo show in LA since 2015. Monk is known for his atmospheric, vibrant compositions that feature mysterious and otherworldly forms. The artist’s semi-abstract paintings are deeply engaged with the rich tradition and history of the medium. He frequently creates works as part of different series, drawing on various sources of inspiration connected to his own experience. The exhibition is focusing holistically on notions of transience and liminality, spotlight two new bodies of work by the artist: large-scale landscapes that relate to the paintings he presented at Pace’s New York gallery last year and small-scale paintings based on Rorschach inkblot tests. Both these series are underpinned by questions of subjectivity and perception, particularly as they relate to ascriptions of meaning. Like his other bodies of work, Monk’s new paintings evade easy categorization and interpretation. As the artist has said, “Only after the work is complete do I become aware of specific past experiences that helped to inform it— perhaps in the same way that a dream picks up on certain conscious moments and twists them.” Info: Pace Gallery, 1201 South La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Duration: 9/9-21/10/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.pacegallery.com/

The exhibition “The Last Five Years” focus on Sam Gilliam’s beveled-edge canvases that have never been exhibited publicly. The works included in the exhibition, organized in close collaboration with Gilliam’s family and studio, center on the different modes of painting that the artist pioneered in the 1960s and returned to during the final years of his life. Offering a sweeping view of his expansive, ceaselessly innovative, and boundary-pushing approach to the medium, the works in the show attest to Gilliam’s monumental contributions to Modernism and, more broadly, the history of art. In the intensely creative period that this two-part exhibition chronicles, Gilliam made new advances in both his Drapes and beveled-edge paintings—formats that he developed simultaneously in the late 1960s. In his later years, the artist revolutionized his processes for these works, adding new dimensions to the formal breakthroughs that had first brought him acclaim six decades earlier. Unfolding in two stages across two different locations, these separate presentations comprise a single exhibition that will be accompanied by a catalogue produced jointly by Pace Publishing and David Kordansky Gallery. Featuring a new critical essay by curator and art historian Lowery Stokes Sims, the publication will be released in fall 2023. Info: Pace Gallery, 510 West 25th Street, New York, NY, YSA, Duration: 15/9-28/8/2023. Days & Hours: Mon-Thu 10:00-18:00, Fri 10:00-16:00, www.pacegallery.com/