ART NEWS: Feb.01

“Recovered time” is the title of Robert Courtright’s first retrospective exhibition in Paris and features a group of previously unseen works featuring collages and masks, dating from the 1960s to his death in 2012. Born in South Carolina in 1926, Robert Courtright was a self-taught artist. Close to the artistic approaches of Arte Povera, he developed a singular body of work over more than five decades, which today appears aesthetically contemporary. The apparent simplicity of Courtright’s works in fact reveals an incomparable world, at once sophisticated, astute and reduced to the essentials: grids made up of well-ordered rectangles of glued paper. These grids, these constructions, are the framework for expression of a color palette ranging from blood red to sunny yellow. Vibrant, saturated or pale, the colors play on the irregular surfaces of the glued paper, meticulously cut and rearranged.Courtright’s attachment to geometry is nourished by a particular attention to architecture. Ever since a trip to Rome in 1952, surfaces and facades — flat, but with infinite variations and asperities — gleaned from buildings in Italy and the south of France occupied his mind. His first collages, depicting architectural structures, bear witness to this fundamental attraction. Info: Dutko Gallery, 17, Quai Voltaire, Paris, France,vDuration: 1/2-3/2024, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 10:30-13:00 & 14:30-19:00, www.dutko.com/

The exhibition “Cleveland by Night” its devoted to the work of late artist Michelangelo Lovelace (1960-2021). On view are paintings and drawings depicting nocturnal city life in Cleveland, Ohio—exterior and interior tableaux capturing the city where he was born and lived for all of his sixty years. Best known for urban genre scenes set within sprawling cityscapes, Lovelace attracted critical praise in his lifetime for intimate depictions of Cleveland’s Black community and its built world. His subject matter explores topics of policing, poverty, war, and healthcare, all replete with deep personal expressions of Black identity and shaped by his immersion in art as an antidote to the effects of poverty and addiction. Through a rich color palette and adistinctive, even eccentric, approach to spatial perspective, Lovelace’s art imbued his subjects with immediacy and relatability, beckoning the viewer to join him in examining the struggles of urban communities as well as their resilience and vibrancy. Info: Fort Gansevoort, 5 Ninth Avenue, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 2/2-30/3/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10;00-18:00, www.fortgansevoort.com/

The exhibition “Keep Silent” is a concentrated presentation of the Hu Qingyan’s latest creations, showcasing the artist’s sustained engagement in his increasingly in-depth explorations of form, medium, reproduction, and transformation. These works, sometime frank, sometime suggestive, embody the reality Hu perceives around him, while continuously exploring the themes of “emptiness”. In this exhibition, Hu Qingyan has chosen marble, perceived commonly as cold, neutral and solemn, as the sole material for all of the artworks on display. Beyond their discussion of questions internal to sculpture, these creations lead us into multidimensional explorations of society, philosophy, and politics through which to ponder the complex substantive relationships between art, reality, and life. Cardboard boxes carved from marble are laid on pallets, or tossed directly on the floor, creating an unsettling memorial of empty and superfluous consumerism. The work series “The World of Silence” imbues the neutral, cold material with tender, individual human sentiment, while condensing and transforming the artist’s perceptions of the surrounding reality and society. Info: Galerie Urs Meile, Rämistrasse 33, Zurich, Switzerland, Duration: 2/2-29/3/2024, Days & Hours: Wed-Fri 11:00-18:00, Sat 1:00-17:00, www.galerieursmeile.com/

For more than 15 years, Van de Moortel has been building a diverse, multidisciplinary oeuvre. He creates music, paintings, drawings, sculptures and maquettes that may subsequently be solidified into large-scale installations, illuminated by his characteristic signature neon. Together with others, Van de Moortel brings these installations to life in musical performances, while he chooses the medium of video and stop-motion films to mix these various components into a new form. His oeuvre, clearly marked by a horror vacui and full of (art)historical references, word games and puns, serves as a critical discourse to question current relationships between nature, culture, art, religion and society. Joris Van de Moortel can be compared to the figure of the alchemist. In his practice, the artist adopts an inquisitive attitude similar to that of the extinct figure from secular mythology. Rather than seeking eternal life and wealth, Van de Moortel is looking for a path out of the chaos of the world that we ourselves created. Info: Cultuurhuis de Warande, Warandestraat 42, Turnhout, Belgium, Duration: 3/2-28/4/2024, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 9:00-17:00,  www.warande.be/

Austin Eddy presents “Songs For The Sun”. Across mediums Eddy’s work is of multiple minds speaking in a rhythmic unison. Abstraction coalesces into figuration, as shapes become images and images shapes. Texture becomes a material contradiction and the illusionistic warping of viewers’ expectations. It all fits firmly in the tradition of modernism, renewing it a century later while simultaneously breaking it apart. That high art purity melding with an interest in and celebration of more vernacular pursuits. Quilting, collage, the flattened perspectives of rural folk painting that invent ways of depicting landscape and narrative away from classical representational and cinematic models of storytelling. The work manages to maintain a connection with early artforms across culture, be deeply American in spirit and yet insert itself into classical western traditions and genealogies. Within all of it is a sensibility for embedding feelings and the felt in ways that is universally read and personally interpreted. Beneath these images and objects private lives and understandings are beckoned to thrive. Info: Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Lichtenfelsgasse 5, Vienna, Austria, Duration: 3/2-28/3/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-15:00, www.presenhuber.com/

Edgar Ramirez’s solo exhibition “From the Rail to the Water” is a continuation of Ramirez’s 2023 exhibition, “Smoky Hollow” in Los Angeles. In these exhibitions, the artist expands and refines the formal characteristics of his work, as well as his art historical frame of reference. The new show features a group of Ramirez’s “Smoke” and “Remnant” Paintings. The idea for the shows originated through locale, movement, and space: refineries and railways near the port of Los Angeles; the moving, yet seemingly idle cargo. During the time I had conceived both shows (late 2022/early 2023), cargo was at a halt and overflowed from the container yards onto the residential streets in the neighboring community. Ships were backed up; truckers, longshoreman, terminal and railway operators worked with no stoppage and were on the brink of a strike. From the rail to the water – contextualized through the ubiquity of the cargo containers stacked to sublime abundance, spilling over onto residential streets are systems of disruptions akin to the disruptions evident in the paintings. Info: Meliksetian | Briggs Gallery, 150 Manufacturing Street #214, Dallas, TX, USA, Duration: 3/2-16/3/2024, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 12:00-17:00, www.meliksetianbriggs.com/

Coming inside from the cold, concrete wonderland that is the beginning of Montreal’s winter to be greeted by lush vegetation and clear skies is nothing less than invigorating. Sierra Barber’s “Sky Flowers” is a pristine workspace framed by the colorful work that she’s been producing over the last year. The ripe fruits on her beaded paintings make her studio feel more like outside than outside does. Since 2017, Sierra has been inspired by that same resilience, working to explore and reclaim every part of her identity through her artistic work. Also inspired by her father’s practice, she combines oil painting and beadwork to share stories that she knows and ones that she is yet to assemble. The clean lines and bold colours of her paintings are matched by her glimmering, tight beadwork. With the beads appearing to be simultaneously fused to, and emerging out of their canvas environment, Barber’s work invites the viewer to an immersive experience where sight, touch, and even taste are stimulated. Info: Curator: Curator: Katsitsanoron Dumoulin-Bush, La Biennale d’art contemporain autochtone, She:kon Gallery, 5826 Saint-Hubert Street, Montreal, Canada, Duration: 17/2-20/4/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed 10:00-18:00, Thu-Fri 11:00-19:00, Sat 12:00-17:00, www.baca.ca/