ART NEWS: March 01

The exhibition “Reckonings and Reconstructions: Southern Photography from the Do Good Fund” surveys the Do Good Fund’s sweeping photography collection to tease apart the tangled cultural memory of the American South. The show features over 100 photographs by 71 artists, diverse in gender, race, ethnicity, and geography. They range from emerging artists to Guggenheim Fellows and testify to the fund’s support in recent years of young photographers and artists of color. The images gathered here are reckonings. They contend with the past. They tally up and give an account. They surmise and assert that change must come. These photographs are also reconstructions. They note failed efforts of reconstructing this region throughout US history. They mount a renewed campaign of restoration and repair and imagine a world as it ought to be. Themes of land, labor, law and protest, food, ritual, and kinship link the works throughout the exhibition. Together these images present the enigmatic, ever-changing qualities of the South and its people—a place where despair and hope, terror and beauty, and indignity and dignity coexist and commingle. Info: Lowe Art Museum, 1301 Stanford Dr, Miami, FL, USA, Duration: 16/2-18/5/2024, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 10:00-16:00, www.lowe.miami.edu/

The thematic exhibition “Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists since 1940” is inspired by the history of Surrealism in the Caribbean with connections to notions of the Afrosurreal in the United States. With a global perspective, this is the first intergenerational show dedicated to Caribbean and African diasporic art presented at the Modern. This project shows a rich history and creative networks that expand on mainstream Surrealism, enriching the canon with Black and Caribbean artists. Surrealism and Us is a provocation that questions, what if surrealist strategies first started in the Caribbean?” Inspired by the essay “1943: Surrealism and Us” by Suzanne Césaire, this exhibition presents over 50 works from the 1940s to the present day, in a wide range of media such as painting, sculpture, drawing, video, and installation. Centered on the intersection of Caribbean aesthetics, Afrosurrealism, and Afrofuturism, this exhibition explores how Caribbean and Black artists interpreted a modernist movement. Artworks, framed within a pre-existing history of Black resistance and creativity, illustrate how Caribbean and Black artists reinterpreted the European avant-garde for their own purposes. Info: Curator María Elena Ortiz, The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 3200 Darnell Street, Fort Worth, TX, USA, Duration: 10/3-28/7/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Thu & Sat 10:00-17:00, Fri 10:00-22:00, www.themodern.org/

Claude Lawrence in his solo exhibition “Reflections on Porgy & Bess” debuts a suite of exuberant, monumentally scaled canvases created in response to composer George Gershwin’s 1935 masterpiece “Porgy & Bess”. Lawrence’s abstract paintings unfold sequentially, echoing the opera’s sweep and emotional impact through the artist’s radiant abstraction and confident improvisation. As a Black abstract artist, Lawrence belongs to a lineage that includes Norman Lewis, Jack Whitten, and Peter Bradley, among many others. He knew many of these artists personally, as they ran in similar circles in Chicago and New York. But as his own practice evolved, so did the distinctiveness of Lawrence’s individual style: strategies familiar from improvisational jazz, particularly the free-associative thought and confident, intuitive strokes of gesture and tone, led him to huge sweeping marks, saturated and alive, that refuse to be easily defined. His consistently unexpected yet masterful decisions about color and gesture are both a testament to the impact of jazz on his way of perceiving and creating, and also reflect a freedom rarely seen in painters with such an identifiable style. Lawrence is an artist that is of his time, who also operates free from its constraints. Info: Venus Over Manhattan, 39 Great Jones Street & 55 Great Jones Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 14/3-4/5/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.venusovermanhattan.com/

Spanning over eight decades of artmaking, the works in the group exhibition  “Inner Cosmos, Outer Universe” encompass a broad range of artistic responses to the celestial imagination over the past century, both literally and metaphorically. Recalling the polished chrome and sleek surfaces of space-age design.  Many of the works in are united by the formal motif of the circle. This simple geometric shape, which can be found depicted in visual art from pre-historic sites across the globe, commonly signifies the infinite and cyclical nature of existence. Yet it also figures in pictorial depictions of basic elements invisible to the human eye: molecules, for example, and the atoms that form them are typically represented as spherical clusters. The tensioned appendages, projecting from the work’s nucleus, evoke an internal pulsation that transcends human comprehension, placing the work in an intuitive realm beyond ordinary reasoning. Info: Pace Gallery, Quai des Bergues 15-17, Geneva, Switzerland, Duration: 15/3-4/5/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.pacegallery.com/

All the paintings in Leonard Forslund’s new exhibition “Yellow monument” are yellow. There are occasional black contours; otherwise, everything is yellow. Many of the motifs are common in the digital world, consisting of details of various emojis – small symbols used in text messages. Unlike the smooth digital miniature symbols, Forslund’s paintings are not smooth. The paintings are characterized by layers of colored wax running down the canvases. While the digital emojis we know should be easily readable, Forslund’s large yellow works are ambiguous. The otherwise small symbols, as we know them from our mobile phones, are transformed in the paintings into signs that almost shout out the symbols’ meanings. In the paintings, emojis are enlarged into monuments for a simplified and emotional form of communication, characteristic of our digital age. Among the emoji depictions are works with more personal motifs. They have the same simplified form, but the motifs and meanings are unclear. In one work, an ear appears, in another a foot, and in a third a couple of letters, but otherwise, it is not possible to extract a coherent meaning from the paintings. There is something sketch-like about the motifs, as if there is a lack of a definition and structure. Info: Galerie Mikael Andersen, Bredgade 63, Copenhagen, Denmark, Duration: 15/3-27/4/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 12:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-15:00, http://mikaelandersen.com/

Oliver Lee Jackson’s exhibition “Machines for the Spirit”, is his first in Los Angeles since 1982. As the exhibition title implies, Jackson’s oil-based paintings act as mechanisms that are meant to prompt an experience in their viewer. The artist states that, like a machine, every part of a composition must work together to function in unison. As Jackson loads each composition with dynamic interplays between figure and field, the artist’s work provokes a process of leisurely and assiduous looking as the eye takes in a sense of space, illumination, figural forms, and the abstract marks signaling the artist’s hand. Working at a scale that encourages onlookers to imagine entering the work, Jackson prefers this intimate visual reciprocity between individual and composition to some of art’s more esoteric quandaries, saying of the latter, “They are trying to make a process that is dynamic stand still”. The earliest of the twenty paintings in “Machines for the Spirit: was made in 1983, although the majority of the exhibition represents Jackson’s new works. Info: Blum Gallery, 2727 South La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Duration: 16/3-4/5/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.blum-gallery.com/

Marking Gideon Appah’s first-ever solo exhibition in Asia, the “The Play of Thought” features paintings and drawings that examine memory and sensuality through his virtuosic compositional arrangements and his surrealist visual language. The exhibition will be accompanied by a digital catalogue, available in both English and Korean, produced by Pace Publishing. In the new paintings, Appah expands his expressions of memory and cultural identity through his evolving technique and renewed commitment to his distinctive surrealist vocabulary. Within his expansive canvases, life-size athletic figures find anchorage in meticulously crafted landscapes made up of careful interplays of line, color, light, and shade. Appah’s substantial and layered application of paint dissolves any suggestion of rigidity in his compositions—an effect that he accentuates by revealing areas of undercoat. Left unworked, these abstract sections of lightly washed and dripped paint give rise to almost identifiable forms from within the canvases. Further subverting narrative expectations is the apparent indifference of the figures to one another and the viewer—as if in a memory or dream, they embrace, swim, play music, and recline in states of undisturbed reverie. Info: Pace Gallery, 267 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul, South Korea, Duration; 21/3-27/4/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.pacegallery.com/

Lauren Halsey’s second exhibition in France, following “Too Blessed 2 be Stressed!” at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, in 2019.Halsey’s work proposes visionary new possibilities for art and architecture that convey the vitality, pride, and resilience of her community in South Central Los Angeles, an area that has long played an important role in defining Black culture. The exhibition in Paris features two related series: “foil works’ (2011–) and “protruded engravings” (2022–). In both bodies of work, Halsey collects and repurposes imagery unique to her community as means of commemoration, celebration, and transcendence. The eight-foot-tall wall-mounted “foil works” are mixed-media assemblages on foil-insulated foam, a support that reflects Halsey’s interest in architectural materials. Halsey produces “protruded engravings” using a dense, durable form of polymer-modified gypsum, carved into wall-mounted reliefs with an applied patina. They feature words and symbols inspired by the lived experience and visual culture of South Central residents, remixed with ancient Egyptian iconography and Afrofuturist utopian visions. Info: Gagosian, 4 rue de Ponthieu, Paris, France, Duration: 21/3-25/5/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:30-18:30m https://gagosian.com/