ART NEWS: Jan.02

Between observing the impacts of the current climate crisis and the possibility of resilience, the exhibition “Météo des forêts” offers crossings in forests and their multiple chatter. Between 1983 and 1994, the painter Bob Ross, in his television shows “The Joy of Painting”, worked to make us paint “Happy Trees”. “YouTube” tutorials before their time, the broadcasts highlighted bucolic landscapes of lakes and rivers, snow-capped mountains, vaporous clouds and above all “happy trees”. In 2023, “Météo des forêts”” is implemented as a risk prevention tool when, from year to year, the orange glow of fires spreads, asphyxiating cities and their surrounding areas with fine particles from their smoke. From now on, the period is that of megafires which exponentially increase the surface area of their conquests and which, like hurricanes and cyclones, also have their own name. Through this prism of the forest, the exhibition invites us to take the time to slow down to take the temperature of this fragile ecosystem and feel what (re)links us, each other, to each other. Weather forecast thus summons stories, words, gestures affirming the need to rethink our attention to these complex networks of interconnections. Participating artists: Ix Dartayre, herman de vries, Lucie Douriaud, Constantin Jopeck, Stéphanie Lagarde, Nefeli Papadimouli, Julien Prévieux, Thibault Scemama de Gialluly, Ache C. Wang, Lois Weinberger, Virginie Yassef. Info: MABA, 16 rue Charles VII, Nogent-sur-Marne, France, Duration: 18/1-17/4/2024, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 13:00-18:00, Sat-Sun 12:00-18:00, www.fondationdesartistes.fr/lieu/maba/

“Twice“, is a project with artist Park McArthur and M.A. students at the Leuphana University Lüneburg. An October 2023 listening session of McArthur’s work at the Kunstraum launched the project, which continued into January 2024 with weekly hybrid seminar meetings. Guided by disabled artists’ ongoing experiments in description and by in-class guest lectures by historian and critic Rachel Haidu, audio describer and SoundScribe co-founder Elaine Lillian Joseph, and artist and writer Jordan Lord, the seminar studied creative practices of transcription, captioning, imagination, and distributed experience bound to the materiality of disability access (Geelia Ronkina “On Projects 195” The Contemporary Journal, 2020). Participants will draw „Twice“ to a close by collectively producing audio descriptions in German and English, as well as a live zoom tour of the exhibition. The recorded descriptions and transcripts will remain on the Kunstraum’s website following their public debut.  Info: Kunstraum, Leuphana University Lüneburg, Universitätsallee 1, Lüneburg, Germany, Duration: 18/1-11/2/2024, Days & Hours: Wed-Thu 12:00-16:00, https://kunstraum.leuphana.de/

For “anatomies d’un monde”, her second solo show in Geneva, Marie José Burki presents a body of work combining neon, video and photography. Faced with a world saturated with images, Marie José Burki focuses on precise elements of our world, fixing her gaze on details, suspending time and thus questioning our relationship to things, as when she reverses our point of view in “Exposure: Flowers”. The Leaves series seems almost unreal, while the Untitled works are more like an inventory, akin to botanical plates. The various forms of representation underpin different approaches to the world, and thus underscore the importance of the role of perception. Without losing contact with the paper, the pencil draws more than it writes. Later on, the craftsman bends the glass tube, following the drawing made by this trace. The handwriting is first transcribed by scanning, then enlarged, and then retraced by the craftsman. The steps succeed and build on one another until they make a bright and colorful neon. In one and the same movement, the neon both restores and betrays the movement of the hand. Writing, tracing, maybe even communicating a little. Info: Xippas Gallry, Rue des Sablons 6 & Rue du Vieux-Billard 7, Geneva, Switzerland, Duration: 18/1-3/3/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-13:00 & 14:00-18:30, Sat 12:00-17:00, www.xippas.com/

Marking his first solo presentation in the UK, the exhibition “New Paintings” follows Mao Yan’s large-scale survey at the Song Art Museum in Beijing, which provided a panoramic view of his in-depth explorations and experiments with artistic language. At Pace, Mao’s most recent representative portraits and abstractions will be brought together in dialogue, exemplifying the artist’s latest investigations into media, practice, and dynamic stylistic and pictorial relationships. As one of the most influential figures of contemporary art in China, Mao has established a reputation for his spectral portraits of friends, hazily rendered in blue grey sfumato, a compositional device that he deems a subject in itself. Over the past decade, he has continued to delve into the expressive depth of classical painterly process, alongside technical innovation, as tools to explore the relationship between art and life. Info: Pace Gallery, 5 Hanover Square, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 19/1-9/3/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.pacegallery.com/

Co-commissioned by Canal Projects and the 14th Gwangju Biennale, Emilija Škarnulytė’s exhibition “Æqualia” features an installation and a video of Škarnulytė swimming through two bodies of water in the Amazon, shedding light on the ecosystem of the Encontro das Águas in Manaus, Brazil. In the video, the artist submerges viewers in the confluence where Rio Solimões and Rio Negro gives birth to the Amazon River. Rio Solimões’s milky white waters, turbid with suspended silts and clays from the High Andes collides against the black and heavy flow of Rio Negro, dark with the decay of lowland rainforests. The stark difference in temperature, between the icy mountain water of the Rio Solimões and the warm Amazonian flow of Rio Negro, causes the two rivers to remain distinct in color for a six-kilometer stretch before merging. Their endless swirl is a fractal—describable, but infinitely complex and ultimately impossible to replicate. In “Æqualia”, Škarnulytė presents the protagonist of the mermaid –bridging the human consciousness with the unknown depths of nature. Acting as a new species, the mermaid depicts a mythical being in a post-human world guiding viewers through both natural phenomena and human intervention. Info: Canal Projects,351 Canal St Duration: 19/1-30/3/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 12:00-18:00, www.canalprojects.org/

In “ROUTING RUBBER”, Adrián Balseca challenges the idea of the Amazon as a natural horizon, centering this territory as the origin of industrial modernity. The black and white 16mm film, “The Skin of Labour” (2016) and its accompanying archive challenge the trope of the Amazon as a site of endless biodiversity and provides a view of the environment that is conditioned by the rules of the free market. These perspectives are, however, not mere portrayals of anthropogenic landscapes. Instead, they depict “nature” as a construct that is shaped by both colonial histories and the modern-industrial gaze. “The Skin of Labour” depicts a stylized perspective of the extraction of liquid rubber from incisions in the tree bark. In its evocation of early media technologies Balseca’s work illuminates the transformation of the Amazon forest into a project of resource administration, land domestication, and organized labor. The archive, though an unofficial and partial collection of period ephemera, includes manuals and promotional pamphlets published by The Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, The Pan American Union, and the 1939 New York World’s Fair. These historical materials visually link the incision patterns of rubber tapping with the growth of the automobile industry in the United States. Info: Canal Projects,351 Canal St Duration: 19/1-30/3/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 12:00-18:00, www.canalprojects.org/

With the group exhibition “Liminality”, CITRONNE Gallery introduces another current problematic. It addresses challenges arising from a contemporary liquid reality that subverts traditional ways of being, identity and life – whether voluntarily or involuntarily. The transitional stage of moving from one state to another at both an individual and collective level is described, along with the associated “rituals.”. The artists Yorgos Giatromanolakis, Marina Papadaki, Natalia Papadopoulou and Maro Fasouli engage with the concept of liminality. Liminality is a term introduced by the French ethnographer Arnold van Gennep in his book The Rites of Passage in 1909. It represents the middle stage of the three-part pattern “separation, transition, incorporation in rituals.” The exhibition repositions this concept in the context of contemporary experiences, a result of global developments. The curator of the exhibition broadens the term’s meaning and examines its contemporary expressions. Participating Artists: Yorgos Yatromanolakis, Marina Papadaki, Natalia Papadopoulou and Maro Fasouli. Info: Curatro: Vicky Tsirou, CITRONNE Gallery, 19 Patriarchou Ioakim, 4th floor, Athens, Greece, Duration: 19/1-2/3/2024, Days & Hours: Tue & Thu-Fri 11:00-20:00, Wed & Sat 11:00-16:00, https://citronne.com/

The exhibition “Worried notes” builds upon Keli Safia Maksud’s ongoing interest in the formation of national identity, particularly in relation to post-colonial African statehood. Through sound, sculpture, installation, text, printmaking, and embroidery, Maksud explores notions of replication and standardization as enduring influences of colonialism — and as processes that continue to shape individual and collective understandings of self. Utilizing diagrammatic systems of notation as a starting point, worried notes examines inherited identities, cultural memory, and received histories. A “worried note” — also called a “blue note” — is a term in musicology that refers to a note that falls slightly below one that exists on the Western 12-tone major scale. Present in blues, jazz, and gospel music, and derived from African vocalization that is not based on the major scale, worried notes are often thought — within the construct of Western music — to contribute to sound that is expressive and intense, conveying emotions such as pain, longing, melancholy, and despair. Info: Curator: Abigail DeVille, Cue Art Foundation, 137 West 25th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 25/1-16/3/224, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 12:00-18:00, https://cueartfoundation.org/

In 2023, Felipe Romero Beltrán won the 17th edition of the Foam Paul Huf Award. Now Foam presents his solo exhibition “Dialect”. The exhibition captures the journey of a group of young Moroccan men after their arrival from a dangerous journey crossing the sea to Spain. Romero Beltrán creates a multimedia narrative of the boys becoming young men, navigating a period of legal limbo in Spain. Through his work, Romero Beltrán sheds light on issues such as alienation and social inequity of migrants in today’s society. Romero Beltrán relies on a strong, almost cinematic framing in his work. He combines documentary photography with elements of performance and choreography. Alongside his photography, the exhibition will showcase videowork and include an installation as a response to the inaccessible paperwork this legal process brings along. Felipe Romero Beltrán displays a powerful humane manner in his practice: the subject and method of his work are intrinsically connected to him as a person and artist. His own background as a migrant from Colombia and his sincere affection towards his subjects guide his vision and perspective. Info: Foam, Keizersgracht 609, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Duration: 26/1-1/5/2024, Days & Hours: Sat-Wed 10:00-18:00, Thu-Fri 10:00-21:00, www.foam.org/

Part reliquary, part sanctum and part tourist attraction, Emanuel Swedenborg’s lusthus has long been an object of pilgrimage and curiosity. Described as early as 1766 as “a kind of temple in which he often retired for contemplation” with “dim religious light” it once served as the site of his visionary experiences and it has since been used as a hideout for a gang of thieves, a house of repose, the site of musical performances and poetry incantations. Today it sits in Skansen, the open-air museum in Stockholm, and has been an inspiration for writers and artists for over 200 years.  Showcasing new works by Bridget Smith, Anonymous Bosch, Mark Riley, Ben Wickey, John Christie, Daniel Birnbaum, Iain Sinclair among others, and in conjunction with previously unseen artefacts from the collection at Swedenborg House, the immersive and multi-media exhibition “Swedenborg’s Lusthus: On Memory And Place” explores the unique spatial conditions of this enigmatic eighteenth-century house and the broader question of the relationship between place, dwelling and the modes of our thinking. Info: Curator: Stephen McNeilly, The Swedenborg Society, Swedenborg House, 20-21 Bloomsbury Way, London ,, United Kingdom, Duration: 29/1-5/4/2024, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:30-17:00, www.swedenborg.org.uk/

Uman’s solo exhibition “Darling Sweetie, Sweetie Darling” takes place in London. Uman’s ebullient visual vocabulary reflects her expansive cross-cultural experiences. Born in Somalia and raised in Kenya, she emigrated to Denmark as a teenager and later to New York as a young adult. Now living and working in upstate New York, Uman paints lavishly detailed, opulently colored worlds replete with gesture, geometry and evocations of the sublime. While these works are executed primarily with oil paint, she also combines acrylic paint, oil stick and collage techniques. An intuitive artist and voracious autodidact, Uman draws upon her memories of her East African childhood, rigorous education in traditional Arabic calligraphy, deep engagement with dreams and fascination with kaleidoscopic color and design. With nods to self-portraiture and fictional topographies, Uman’s paintings fluidly navigate in-between realms to explore both the physical and spiritual, intertwining abstraction, figuration, meditative patterning and a reverence for the natural world. Info: Hauser & Wirth Gallery, 24 Savile Row, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 30/1-30/3/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10;00-18:00, https://www.hauserwirth.com/