ART NEWS: March 02

Nevin Aladağ’s survey exhibition “Interlocking” features textile collages, sound sculptures, installations and videos, drawing connections between different patterns of artistic creation and their socio-cultural backgrounds. The creative forging of such connections is an important aspect of Nevin Aladağ’s extensive oeuvre. The artist has produced new works specifically for the exhibition in the Max Ernst Museum. These include two works of the series Color Floating, in which she covers lamps with colored nylon stockings, thus playfully combining everyday materials into a new aesthetic. In the Social Fabric, Floating Leaves series, she weaves various textiles to form a “utopian rug” that visually brings together the origins of the materials from distinct cultures. Nevin Aladağ’s latest sculpture series “Resonator” consists of objects comprises components of various string, wind and percussion instruments—from harp, mandolin and glockenspiel through acoustic and bass guitar to drum, didgeridoo, pan flute, tuba and trumpet. The sculptures, as fantastic generators of sound, seem surreal. The Resonator Strings, Wind and Percussion will be regularly activated by musicians during the period of the exhibition. Info: Max Ernst Museum Brühl des LVR, Comesstraße 42 / Max-Ernst-Allee 1, Bruehl, Germany, Duration: 10/3-30/6/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, https://maxernstmuseum.lvr.de

Arcmanoro Niles’ exhibition “The City Lights Can’t Shine Quite like the Stars: Got So Far From My Raising I Forgot Where I Come From”, features some of his largest canvases to-date and constitutes a turning point for the artist. Known for his colorful paintings that capture the daily, yet intimate moments of contemporary life through figuration and portraiture, Niles’ new works embrace landscape, depicting the artist’s own inner world through a series of immersive, place-based compositions. In this exhibition, Niles meditates on a personal experience of landscape, drawing inspiration from the colorwork of both contemporary painters like Kerry James Marshall and Richard Mayhew and Old Masters like Caravaggio. In these new works, rendered in vibrant, technicolor hues that construct a signature kind of chiaroscuro, Niles finds himself immersed in nature—in the trees of a remote field, near the shore of the sea, bathed in crisp light peeking through bare trees on a sunny winter. Info: Lehman Maupin Gallery, 501 West 24th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 14/3-13/7/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:0-18:00, www.lehmannmaupin.com/

Situated between sculpture and performance, the exhibition “Sounding Lines” marks the first major solo presentation of Aki Sasamoto in Hong Kong and features a newly commissioned installation and performance in conversation with a recent moving-image work. Fables, anecdotes, and biographical elements often seep into Sasamoto’s works that explore relationships between body and space, engaging viewers on multiple sensory levels through a stream-of-consciousness interaction. The newly commissioned installation takes over the entire exhibition floor, where waves will be sent via a system of metal springs suspended throughout the gallery’s architecture to activate a choreography of catalytic movements. The exhibition title ‘Sounding Lines’ alludes to the method of measuring the depths of bodies of water with a weighted line. Expanding on this concept, the exhibition explores the boundaries and interrelations among people and their physical surroundings, focusing on how these relationships define a sense of intimacy or distance to the world at large. Info: Para Site, 22/F, Wing Wah Industrial Bldg., 677 King’s Road, Quarry Bay, Hong Kong, Duration: 16/3-28/7/2024, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 12:00-19:00, www.para-site.art/

“Good Night Good Morning”, is Joan Jonas’ most comprehensive retrospective in the United States, spanning more than 50 years of her remarkable career. Jonas began her career as a sculptor, and it was not until attending workshops with choreographers from Judson Dance Theater in the late 1960s that she would refocus her artistic practice on experimentation with performance and technology. Organized chronologically, this retrospective highlights four major themes that are present throughout Jonas’s multidisciplinary body of work: performance, technology, literature, and ecology. The exhibition also foregrounds how Jonas uses her own works as archival material—with each project building on those that preceded it—often transforming and restaging them into other mediums. The exhibition also outlines the artist’s use of newly available technology at the beginning of the 1970s, like the Sony Portapak camera used in the artist’s first video-performance, “Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy” (1972). In this work, Jonas considered the monitor as an ongoing mirror—her alter-ego Organic Honey’s performance for the camera harnessed technology’s ability to record and display content in real time. The retrospective offers a new version of the installation Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy/Organic Honey’s Vertical Roll adapted to MoMA’s space, reinvigorating Jonas’s contemporary legacy in the fields of video, installation, performance, and feminist art. Info: Curator: Ana Janevski, Assistant Curators: Lilia Rocio Taboada and Gee Wesley, MoMA (The Museum of Modern Art), 11 West 53 Street, Manhattan, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 17/3-6/7/2024, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri & Sun 10:30-17:30, Sat 10:30-19:00, www.moma.org/

On the occasion of one of the highest grants for young art in Europe, awarded by the Vordemberge-Gildewart Foundation, Museion presents “RENAISSANCE” an exhibition featuring selected works by 15 young artists from northern Italy. Despite the diversity of their practices—including sculpture, installation, painting, drawing, video, photography, and performance—all artists share a regenerative approach towards remnants from the past. How does a young generation of artists process their weighty cultural heritage, shaped by aesthetic and social “standards”, values, role models, icons, or expectations of the artist figure? How do they build upon ruins of the past which still cast long shadows? All 15 artists in the exhibition use found methods, images, or materials to lay bare the foundations of hegemonic patterns of representation in order to build something new on top of them. While some set out to trace traditional rituals and spiritual practices, along with the experiences of migration or the family histories that accompany them, others undertake a critical analysis and re-evaluation of formative pop-cultural images, urban fictions, or stereotypical gender roles in literature, film, design, architecture, and advertising. Several of the artists devote themselves to recycling waste products from the creative industries, in which they sometimes work at the interface between fine and applied arts. Info: MUSEION—Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Bolzano-Bozen, Piazza Piero Siena 1, Bolzano, Italy, Duration: 23/3-1/9/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 10:00-18:00, Thu 10:00-22:00, www.museion.it/

The exhibition “Le monde comme il va” alludes to the tumult and turbulence of current events. Stable reference points everywhere seem to be faltering and slipping away. The title comes from a philosophical tale by Voltaire in which an angel sends an envoy to observe the behaviours of a faraway people, as the Gods no longer know whether they deserve to live or should be destroyed to make way for a newer and better civilisation. Confronted with the paradoxes of humanity and his own hesitation, the narrator ultimately decides to let “the world go as it goes”, trusting that humans will take their destiny into their own hands.  The works from the Pinault Collection selected for this show bear witness to this moment of uncertainty, but they also serve to draw visitors into the momentum of this sphere which keeps on turning regardless, and in the sway of whose movements we collectively write our history. Info: Curator: Jean-Marie Gallais, Pinault Collection, Bourse de Commerce, 2 rue de Viarmes, Paris, France, Duration: 20/3-2/9/2024, Days & Hours: Mon & Wed-Sun 11:00-19:00, www.pinaultcollection.com/

The first-ever New York City museum retrospective devoted to Käthe Kollwitz, and the first major international loan exhibition of her work in the United States in more than 30 years will be on view at  MoMA. Käthe Kollwitz will present a focused exploration of the artist’s career in approximately 120 rarely seen examples of her drawings, prints, and sculptures drawn from public and private collections in the US and Europe. Organized chronologically, the exhibition will trace the development of Kollwitz’s work from the 1890s through the 1930s, a period of unprecedented turmoil in German history marked by the social ills of industrialization in the late 19th century and the traumas of war and political upheaval in the early 20th century. Crucial examples of the artist’s most important projects will showcase her commitment to socially critical subject matter, and key selections of preparatory studies and working proofs will highlight her creative process. Among the pivotal works in the exhibition will be Kollwitz’s iconic etching “Woman with Dead Child” (1903), accompanied by a revelatory sequence of studies, state proofs, and hand-colored working proofs that chart the artist’s process of conceiving and reconceiving its composition. During a period when childhood mortality was a devastating reality, Kollwitz used the traditional Christian subject of the Pietà as a point of departure to reflect upon the theme of mothers grieving the loss of their children. Info: Curator: Starr Figura, Assistant Curator: Maggie Hire, MoMA (The Museum of Modern Art), 11 West 53 Street, Manhattan, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 31/3-20/7/2024, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri & Sun 10:30-17:30, Sat 10:30-19:00, www.moma.org/

In his first-ever solo exhibition in Asia, “The Play of Thought”, Gideon Appah presents paintings and drawings that examine memory and sensuality through his virtuosic compositional arrangements and his surrealist visual language. Known for his rich, jewel-toned figurations, Appah paints utopian landscapes that serve as intuitive, outward translations of the inner self. The oneiric, often coastal realms of Appah’s paintings are inhabited by nude and semi-nude figures inspired by the artist’s imaginative readings of archival imagery. Using layered impasto, Appah constructs worlds that, though visually flattened, take on a seemingly infinite breadth that is at times unsettling and, alternatively, inviting and seductive. 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. Info: Pace Gallery, 267 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul, Korea, Duration:21/3-27/4/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.pacegallery.com/