ART NEWS:May 01
The exhibition “Superstudio 50” presents over 200 pieces, ranging from installations to objects, from graphic works to photographs and through to publications covering the entire career and development of the Italian radical Architecture group. The exhibition is a kind of scientific autobiography that reviews fundamental chapters in its history starting from the exhibition “Superarchitettura” (1966), in which together with Archizoom, the group proposed for the first time a radical rethinking of architecture and design, replacing the traditional domestic images with a world of alienating objects and visions. Part of the exhibition is devoted to the group’s videos, including the previously unseen “Continuous Monument” (1969). Info: Curator: Gabriele Mastrigli, MAXXI – National Museum of XXI Century Arts, Via Guido Reni 4A, Rome, Duration 21/4-4/0/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri & Sun 11:00-19:00, Sat 11:00-22:00, www.fondazionemaxxi.it
Julieta Aranda’s work spans sculpture, installation, video, and print media. Her complex body of work exists outside the boundaries of the object, and is characterized by the struggle of catching sight of elusive concepts such as time, circulation, and imagination. Aranda’s installations and temporary projects, which often examine social interactions and the role that the circulation of objects plays in the cycles of production and consumption, are intensely site-specific. Much of her work takes up the concept of time, sometimes to consider alternative notions of the temporal experience, and other times to approach the arbitrariness of time and freedom from time. Her exhibition “Swimming in Rivers of Glue (an exercise in counterintuitive empathy)” looks at the mechanisms of hostile / defensive architecture, and the effects its deployment has in the constitution and use of public space. Info: James Fuentes Gallery, 55 Delancey Street, New York, Duration: 1/5-19/6/16, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.jamesfuentes.com
A series of three exhibitions of the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres will open in conjunction at Andrea Rosen Gallery, Massimo De Carlo and Hauser & Wirth, each exhibition focus on the dialogue between works within an essential form that Gonzalez-Torres created. In so doing, the curators hope to underline the specificity and magnitude within particular bodies of the artist’s work. By engaging the range of decisions brought to bear in manifesting and installing selected Gonzalez-Torres works, works that require being made anew for each presentation, Ault and Horn underscore vital methods reflected throughout the artist’s entire oeuvre. Info: Curators: Julie Ault & Roni Horn, Andrea Rosen Gallery, 525 West 24th Street, New York, Duration: 3/5-18/6/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.andrearosengallery.com, Massimo De Carlo Gallery, Via Giovanni Ventura 5, Milan, Duration: 20/5-20/7/16, Tue-Sat 11:30-19:00, http://massimodecarlo.com, Hauser & Wirth Gallery, 23 Savile Row, London, Duration: 27/5-30/7/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.hauserwirth.com
Howard Hodgkin may be in his 80s and in need of a wheelchair to get about, but he still paints with staggering power. For his solo exhibition “From Memory”, the artist presents new painting completed between 2014-16, Hodgkin’s works create pockets of time and silence, demonstrating afresh the expressiveness, the mystery, and the seeming simplicity of his art. With a deep and vivid palette and dynamic interchanges of light and dark, these paintings, collapse the usual binary distinctions between Abstraction and Representation, narrative and pure sensation, past and present. Info: Gagosian Gallery, 980 Madison Avenue, New York, Duration: 5/5-18/6/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.gagosian.com
The theme of the city, with its subcultures, runs through the three photographic oeuvres of Ken Schles, Jeffrey Silverthorne, and Miron Zownir, which are presented in the House of Photography, the artists touch on social taboos that we avoid. Jeffrey Silverthorne’s photographic work pointedly poses existential life questions of identity, gender, love, sexuality, and death. The exhibition with Ken Schles centers around two series of works, “Invisible City” and “Night Walk”, created in the late ‘80s in New York. His work documents life on the Lower East Side over the course of ten years. From the beginning, Zownir has consistently dealt with topics of social criticism and taboos in his work. In his drastic and somber photographic style he depicts the parallel worlds of outsiders in a seemingly timeless shadow world. Info: Curator: Ingo Taubhorn, House of Photography, Deichtorstrasse 1-2, Hamburg, Duration: 5/5-7/8/16, Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.deichtorhallen.de
Stan Douglas’s new six-channel video installation “The Secret Agent” is an adaptation of the 1907 novel, the work is examining terrorism and political identity in Europe through the combined lenses of history and fiction. In this work, Douglas combines fiction with history, revisionism with speculation, and political identities with literary ones. Stan Douglas’ characterizations and storytelling are always much more than meets the eye. His artwork often disrupts conventions of filmmaking and the audience’s relationship to cinema, photography and history. Info: Salzburger Kunstverein Künstlerhaus, Hellbrunner Straße 3, Salzburg, Duration: 6/5-10/7/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 12:00-19:00, www.salzburger-kunstverein.at
Two exhibitions of Richard Serra are on presentation at Gagosian New York, “NJ-1” and “Above Below Betwixt Between, Every Which Way, Silence (For John Cage), Through”, with four new large-scale steel sculptures and an Installation Drawing. Over the years, Serra has expanded his spatial and temporal approach to sculpture and has focused primarily on large-scale work, including many site-specific works that engage with a particular architectural, urban, or landscape setting. Info: Gagosian Gallery, 522 West 21st Street & 555 West 24th Street, New York, Duration: 7/5-29/7/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.gagosian.com
What language should be used to describe a place? This is the core question of Claudia Losi’s project “How do I imagine being there?”, Losi’s is a peculiar travel chronicle turning into consciousness of the journey itself. It springs out of a real “crossing” of St. Kilda islands in 2012 to later shift into the realm of the mind, to move onto the construction of new maps. The exhibition “So near, so far”, presents 50 works by Paolo Simonazzi, who attempts to bring into focus his gaze on our territory, meant as a crossroads of semantic, cultural, language, visual communications, through a series of shots covering twenty years of Simonazzi’s work. Info: Collezione Maramotti, via Fratelli Cervi 66, Reggio Emilia, Duration: 8/5-16/10/16 & 8/5-31/7/16 , Days & Hours: Thu-Fri 14:30-18:30 Sat-Sun 10:30-18:30, www.collezionemaramotti.org
This exhibition “Urban Now: City Life in Congo”, by photographer Sammy Baloji and anthropologist Filip De Boeck offers an exploration of different urban sites in Congo, through the media of photography and video. Focusing upon the “urban now”, a moment suspended between the broken dreams of a colonial past and the promises of neoliberal futures, the exhibition offers an artistic and ethnographic investigation of what living and living together might mean in Congo’s urban worlds. Congo’s urban residents constantly engage in inventing new social spaces to bypass or overcome breakdown, exclusion, poverty and violence. Exploring these spaces, the exhibition captures a more inhabitable and inclusive urban world, where the possibilities of collective action and dreams of a shared future continue to be explored. Info: Curator: Devrim Bayar, WIELS, Contemporary Art Centre, Av. Van Volxemlaan 354, Brussels, Duration: 8/5-14/8/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, http://www.wiels.org