ART NEWS:Jan.01

“Hubtopia”, Sépànd Danesh’s new exhibition is an increasingly in-depth exploration of what has become a favourite theme: the corner. Sépànd Danesh’s works provide a trompe l’œil representation of two wall panels meeting as a corner. Faced with this corner, viewers have no other outlet than their imagination and the mental space proposed by the artist. This is a world of the mind, made up of hanging objects associated with images of literature and art history rooted in a dual French-Iranian culture. The exhibition’s title, is a neologism that defines the corner as a place (from the Greek topos) where everything converges and everything originates (hub). The hub is defined as a switch for virtual or real connections which, in Sépànd Danesh’s work, serves to concentrate ideas. The paintings feature motifs that transport viewers from the Renaissance to the disco era, from a pixelated Diego Velasquez homage to an accumulation of contemporary architectures overlooking a Lascaux cave. Info: BACKSLASH, 29 rue Notre-Dame de Nazareth, Paris, Duration: 4/1-24/2/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 14:00-19:00, www.backslashgallery.com

In January 2018 SCOTTY is hosting “Mixed Realities Of Dreams and Dreads”, a screening of experimental films and videos by artists who are expanding the boundaries of the medium through their artistic research, both in regards to content and to the medium itself. After sunset the videos are shown in the shop window of the artist run gallery. Artists and works: Anne Haaning “Mother of Monsters” (2015), Anne Haaning “A Violence Proportional to her Inner Emptiness” (2016- ), Thomas Hawranke “Maximum Chimeara” (2015), Annja Krautgasser “Prelude” (2007), Magda Tothova “The world for this place is not Utopia – Part 1” (2012), Puppies Puppies “Dobby (creators included) (dancing)” (2015) and Transforma “Fragment”. The selected video works reflect visions of either present or future times and suggest new forms of representation. While the depicted figures, objects and gestures are familiar to us through its use in the media, the enormity of what is shown becomes apparent only through the artistic interventions, which put (each in their own way) our perception of reality to the test. Info: SCOTTY, Oranienstr. 46, Berlin, Duration: 6/1-17/2/18, Days & Hours: Thu-Sat  16.00 to 19.00, www.scottyenterprises.de

Focusing on intimate gesture and free experimentation, the group exhibition “Close at Hand” reveals a breadth of formal, conceptual, and material approaches to sculpture, including assemblages, ceramics, and found objects. Formalist oppositions between art and object are played out in sculptures by Anthony Caro and Tony Smith. Exploration of new materials can be seen in the making strange of common objects through a shift in their perceived properties. With Corner (1992), Richard Artschwager creates a cartoonish illusion that three planks of wood-patterned Formica, cinched tightly with a metal bracket, are exploding from a corner of the room. Gestural aspects of the sculptural process are captured in r Lucio Fontana’s Concetto Spaziale Cratere (1968) a hand-formed porcelain form with a jagged aperture that reveals the sculpture’s white interior. Sculpture is also defined as process, as objects become the byproducts of lived experience, from Sterling Ruby’s roughly formed ceramic basins and Shio Kusaka’s delicate stoneware. Info: Gagosian Gallerym 657 Howard Street, San Francisco, Duration: 9/1-24/2/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.gagosian.com

The two-person exhibition “Slipstream” explores the parallel use of botanical imagery and motifs with abstracted and geometrical elements in both by Ken Buhler’s and Ellen Driscoll’s paintings and works on paper. Ken Buhler’s work pulls inspiration from wildflowers clinging to the sides of wind hammered rocks, or dotting the muddy banks of streams. Buhler often collects, dries and catalogs these flowers and mines his collection for painterly inspiration. In Ellen Driscoll’s ink-on-paper pieces urban plants that thrive in densely populated areas are drawn into allegorical tableaux that speak to environmental change and adaptation.  Together, the works by Buhler and Driscoll turn a lens towards the plants that thrive unattended at the margins of our daily lives, bringing to focus that which surrounds us but is often overlooked. Info: Lesley Heller Workspace, 54 Orchard Street, New York, Duration: 10/1-18/2/18, Days & hours: Wed-Sat 11:00-18:00, Sun 12:00-18:00, www.lesleyheller.com

Gilbert & George’s newest body of work “THE BEARD PICTURES”, created over the past two years is on presentation in Athens. Gilbert & George take their places within the works as intense, red, staring, empty-headed and sinister versions of themselves. Their eyes are shadowed and bizarrely prettified. Mutant impish explorers or dead-headed sentinels, they seem to look at, into and through the viewer. They look possessed and serious. They look as though their spirits might have left their bodies. They look stern, absurd, imprisoned, mocking and mocked.   In each picture they wear beards that are surreal and symbolic. Beards made of wire mesh, beards made of beer foam, beards made of flowers, beards comprising rabbits with snakes for tongues. Secular and sacred, the throwback emblem of hip millennial youth as well as a mark of religious faith, the beard is depicted in THE BEARD PICTURES as both mask and meaning: a sign of the times. Info: Bernier/Eliades Gallery, 11 Eptachalkou Street, Athens, Duration: 11/1-22/2/18, Days & Hours: Tue.-Fri: 10:30-18:30, Sat:12:00-16:00, http://bernier-eliades.gr

Titled “1976”, Robert Davis’ exhibition features a series of graphite-on-paper drawings and hand-carved wood sculptures. Collectively, these works form a portrait of the people and artifacts that shaped the world in which the artist grew up, in 1970s Virginia. The subjects of Davis’s graphite drawings are both generic and deeply personal, representative of formative experiences, meticulously re-created in pencil and imbued with nostalgia. Some drawings depict subjects that directly inhabit Davis’s childhood memories, such as the Ford F-150 flatbed truck his grandfather drove. Others, like a portrait of artist Hannah Wilke, represent figures and objects that Davis discovered in adulthood.  While the exhibition’s imagery focuses on the era of Davis’s youth, his project is less a recreation of childhood than an exploration of the early influences that helped to shape his adult aesthetic sensibility. Davis’s sculptures, capture the aesthetics of the era; totem-like with rounded, anthropomorphic features, the wood forms echo 1970s design, with graphite patterns borrowed from 70s wallpaper. Info: Curator: Rashid Johnson, CUE Art Foundation, 137 West 25th Street, New York, Duration: 11/1-15/2/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat, 10:00-17:00, http://cueartfoundation.org

Appropriation artist Ulrich Lamsfuss is showing his work in Brussels. “Cappuccetto Rosso” is the title for a show gathering around 20 works and framing a collection of loose associations on the topic of Little Red Riding Hood, reaching from Karl Marx, his face adorning a decorative sovjet vase, to a Nike campaign becoming the mouthpiece for a heroic attempt, vanity seeping through what seems to be a colouring activity or something ambivalent like whitefacing, while a painted sky introduces ambiguity in a Martin Margiela perfume advertisement, blurring the lines with a 17th century Work. Ulrich Lamsfuss works using photographs from a myriad range of sources, including the press, internet, technical publications and art history, which he reproduces in oils. Info: Galerie Templon, Veydtstraat 13A, Brussel, Duration: 11/1-24/2/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, https://templon.com

Young art dealers are thinking outside the box, creating a number of exciting alternative models to get their artists seen on the international stage while avoiding the prohibitive costs associated with renting booths. Codo’s third edition presents 46 galleries across 17 London spaces. “Condo” led by the young gallerist Vanessa Carlos from Carlos/Ishikaw, takes its name from ‘condominium’ and is a large-scale collaborative exhibition of international galleries. Host galleries share their spaces with visiting galleries , either by co-curating an exhibition together, or dividing their galleries and allocating spaces. The initiative encourages the evaluation of existing models, pooling resources and acting communally to propose an environment that is more conducive for experimental gallery exhibitions to take place internationally. Info: Codo, Various Venues, London, Duration 13/1-10/2/18, www.condocomplex.org

In “Plainsight” Ciarán Murphy presents new paintings. In Ciarán Murphy’s paintings we encounter an unsettling array of things; sticks, rocks, martian landscapes, insects, interiors, hands, letters, blank screens, architectural feature and geometric shapes. Objects seem in varying states of flux: things float, or seem in the midst of changing form, while other things seem barely there, are entirely absent, or in various states of becoming. They all seem to have in one way or another a vexed relationship to gravity. Murphy’s paintings can be understood as an effort to grapple with the fact that we live in a world where images are omnipresent, exerting an almost ghostly or spectral presence in our everyday existence. Temporalities are increasingly blurred and our very notions of what constitutes reality is, in itself, a process mediated by images. In some ways the work grapples with the idea of untangling representation from reality or if such an untangling is even possible. Info: Grimm Gallery, Keizersgracht 241, Amsterdam, Duration: 14/1-24/2/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://grimmgallery.com