ART NEWS:Oct.03
Since the mid-20th century, many artists have committed to distinguishing their work from traditional ink art by devising enlightening and imaginative approaches to reflect upon and make use of that legacy. They have developed new expressions and techniques influenced by personal experiences and incorporated artistic tendencies and materials from outside of their own cultures. “The Weight of Lightness: Ink Art at M+” highlights the diverse explorations in ink art from the ‘60s to the present day. It defines ink art not only through its materials, but also as an aesthetic in contemporary visual culture that encapsulates a wide range of applications and interpretations. the exhibition illustrates the tension at the core of ink art—between the material and the spiritual. This relationship permeates the thematic sections of the exhibition: “Scripts, Symbols, Strokes,” “Desire for Landscape,” and “Beyond Material.” Featuring painting, calligraphy, installation, photography and moving image by 42 artists from Hong Kong, Mainland China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, India, U.S., Spain, and others, the exhibition underlines M+’s interest in making existing boundaries more porous and in showing that ink art, endowed with the weight of traditions yet invigorated by the lightness of its material and the experimental vision of artists, possesses boundless potential. Info: M+ Pavilion, West Kowloon Cultural District, Tsim Sha Tsui, Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong, Duration: 13/10/17-14/1/18, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.westkowloon.hk
Commemorating the centennial of the 1917 Russian Revolution, exhibition “Russian Revolution: A Contested Legacy” looks beyond the canon of the Russian Avant-Garde to focus on three avenues of individual freedoms sought by the fledgling socialist society: the equality and emancipation of women; internationalism, including racial equality and the rights of ethnic minorities in Russia, especially Jews; and sexual and gay liberation. By placing a selection of historical printed works by key Russian Avant-Garde artists of the 1920s and 1930s in dialogue with contemporary works by Russian-born, New York-based artists Yevgeniy Fiks and Anton Ginzburg, the exhibition evaluates these often-obscured goals of the Revolution and addresses their continued urgency today—in Russia, the United States, and elsewhere. The historical component of the exhibition, which features posters, book covers, journals, and illustrations by some of the most well-known names of the Russian Avant-Garde, including Gustav Klucis, El Lissitzky, and Elizaveta Ignatovich, alongside more obscure artists of the movement, exemplifies the print medium’s preeminent role in Soviet revolutionary society as the most accessible means for disseminating social and political ideals on a broad scale. Info: Curator: Masha Chlenova, International Print Center New York, 508 West 26th Street, 5th Floor, New York, Duration: 12/10-16/12/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.ipcny.org
The exhibition “For beyond that horizon lies another horizon” is a proposal to imagine emergent horizons for the Earth household of the future. It is inhabited temporarily by works of artists exploring possible modes of survival, cooperation, and care for a myriad of communities connected by the complex web of life. The point of departure for this messy assembly is an attempt to change the world-ecological system based on the concept of unlimited economic growth. The artworks in the exhibition resonate with collective forces working on overcoming the paralysis of imagination related to this model’s inherent lack of consideration for socio-environmental costs and cycles. In particular, they correspond with disputes related to redesigning human organizations in ways that would end the ongoing creation and appropriation of what Jason W. Moore calls “cheap nature”: cheap labor power, cheap energy, cheap food, and cheap raw materials. Cheap nature functions in the exhibition as a metaphor for processes of extracting surplus value from the web of life and putting human and extra-human natures to unpaid or low-paid work. Info: Curator: Joanna Sokołowska, Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art, Katharinenstraße 23, Oldenburg, Duration: 12/10/17-15/1/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 14:00-18:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.edith-russ-haus.de
In his new exhibition “Life is Worth Living”, George Condo exhibits works that include paintings and sculpture he made while living in Paris in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s in conversation with his most recent works made in the past year. During this earlier period in his career Condo’s paintings experimented with combining a variety of media and painterly styles simultaneously. The new works, which continue in the vein of painterly exploration highlighted by Guattari, include two large format triptych paintings depicting in dense all-over figurative abstraction the chaos and illusion of the state of political affairs in contemporary America, bringing into focus the mad, unmitigated paranoia fiercely enveloping the world. Condo predicted the shift in global media perception back in the late ‘80s in his early treatise on art which he called “Artificial Realism”, a term that applied then to art and its evolution but has now become the essence of our daily confusion over what is real and what isn’t. Info: Almine Rech Gallery, 64 Rue de Turenne, Paris, Duration: 14/10-18/11/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.alminerech.com
Widely regarded as one of the world’s most politically engaging yet poetic artists, Alfredo Jaar addresses humanitarian trauma and the politics of image-making, creating visually and emotionally stunning works that have an exceptional aesthetic. Trained as a filmmaker and subsequently as an architect, Jaar often uses constructed spaces and light to navigate what is seen and what is not. At Yorkshire Sculpture Park, seminal installations transform the Underground Gallery and its open-air concourse. His solo exhibition “The Garden of Good and Evil”, the artist includes a major new commission, “The Garden of Good and Evil” (2017), presented in the open air and visible through the glass façade of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s gallery. On entering what appears to be a beautiful grove of trees, visitors experience elegantly fabricated steel cells, which reference “black sites,” the secret detention facilities operated by the United States CIA around the world. Carefully chosen to enhance YSP’s landscape, many of the trees are planted into the Park as a nurturing legacy of the project once the exhibition closes. Other works are: The Sound of Silence (2005) and “A Hundred Times Nguyen” (1994). Info: Yorkshire Sculpture Park, West Bretton, Wakefield, Duration: 14/10/17-8/4/18, Days & Hours: Daily 11:00-16:00, www.ysp.org.uk
Haegue Yang’s solo exhibition entitled “Quasi-ESPESP” (extrasensory perception, also known as sixth sense or second sight) refers to the sensing of information by means outside of one’s normal sensory capability and includes psychic abilities such as intuition and telepathy. “Quasi-ESP” evolved around aspects of our immanent environment, a hybrid of the natural and the technological as well as whatever else can be counted as belonging within. Taking as starting points two groups of works, the “Lacquer Paintings” and the “Hardware Store Collages” (1994- ), Yang attempts to implant a hybrid or an oscillating view between seemingly different phenomena in “Quasi-ESP”. The exhibition presents a unique set up for deviations born out of active self-negation. According to Yang, deviations contribute to a valuable level of maturity, characterized by rebellion against her own establishment of existing logics and purposes. Leaning on her willful whim and inconsistency, pseudoscience is another part of Yang’s corpus of work. Info: Galerie Chantal Crousel, 10 rue Charlot, Paris, Duration: 14/10-25/11/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.crousel.com
“Delay”, Philippe Decrauzat’s new series of paintings suggests that an aesthetic renewal may well be underway, but not one that entirely disrupts his artistic language, nor the narrative that he has been endeavouring to establish since his beginnings. If the form is unchanged, the spatiality of his work has evolved to adapt to a core derived from the same matrix. His aesthetic approach makes good use of the formal resemblance of which Heidegger was so fond, asking the fundamental question of humankind’s penchant for structuring itself in terms of its temporality and relationship to time. Proof of this lies in the resemblances that Decrauzat reveals in this exhibition in which five paintings are presented to the spectator’s longing gaze in formats that may be different, but which are all part of the same logic; a formal resemblance captured at different moments. “Delay” is a new story, one which, as its name suggests, courts with the idea of lateness. The artist imposes his prose in a diktat for which he takes full responsibility and in which he imagines that we are ready to read, observe and experience the immediacy of visual effects. Decrauzat awakens within us the experience that harks back to the subject of the work itself, like a distinct condition without which there would be no question of a source of intrinsic truth. His truth. Info: Praz-Delavallade, 5 rue des Haudriettes, Paris, Duration: 14/10-25/11/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.praz-delavallade.com
“Nearer, Further”, Józef Robakowski’s first retrospective in Italy is on presentation at the Luigi Pecci Centre for Contemporary Art . Józef Robakowski is an artist and creator of films, videos, installations, performances and photographs, as well as a cultural promoter and art theorist. He coordinated some key artistic movements of the second half of the 20th century, from the collective Zero-61 (1961–69), which was inspired by the tradition of metaphorical montage used by avant-garde cinema, to the Workshop of the Film (1970-77). His research led him to question the language, mechanics and material of film, uniting these elements with an interest in the avant-garde conceptual tradition filtered through the lens of authenticity and personal identity. The exhibition presents some of the author’s most significant works and his research on the language of film and montage: a selection of films, videos and documented performances from the 1960s up until more recent times. Info: Curator: Bożena Czubak, Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Viale della Repubblica 277, Prato, Duration: 14/10/17-28/1/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-23:00, http://centropecci.it
The exhibition “New Paintings”, presents new works by Ilya Kabakov dating from 2014 to 2016, that are never shown before. The exhibition presents three series that reflect the artist’s complex relationship with the past and the notions of personal and collective memory. Ilya Kabakov adopts a new painter’s persona for each series in which different realities overlap. In the series “Two Times” (2014-16) Ilya Kabakov merges visual fragments of soviet imagery with those of seventeenth century Baroque paintings in the Louvre. The painting “In the Right Direction”, Nr 4 (2014) features four different cut-out scenes arranged in sequence: the first shows a ship departing, followed by a 1950s ski resort, then a grand 1930s interior and finally a sunlit nurse. The “Flying Painting During the Temporary Loss of Eyesight” (2015) series combines abstract motifs of white planes and dots with urban subjects. Here, the artist adopts a character of a painter that longs to create a better reality. Info: Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, 7 rue Debelleyeme, Paris, Duration: 19/10/17-6/1/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, www.ropac.net
Stefan Kürten likes to say that every weekend of his childhood was spent accompanying his parents and their realtor in their search for the “perfect home.” In his solo exhibition “Millefleurs”, Kürten explores the deep and universal yearning to find that quintessential place. With eleven paintings on paper, the artist imagines what the perfect home would look like. Anchoring the exhibition are two major new works. The first is a monumental canvas, two years in the making . The second is a 5 ½ x 7 foot multi-panel work on paper representing the tenacious human belief in progress, our desire to make life happier and the world a better place. Stefan Kürten is a professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where, as a young man, he studied with Michael Buthe. Kürten is also an alumnus of the San Francisco Art Institute. Info: Hosfelt Gallery, 260 Utah Street, San Francisco, Duration: 21/10-2/12/17, Days & Hours: Tue-wed & Fri-Sat 10:00-17:30, Thu 11:00-19:00, http://hosfeltgallery.com