ART NEWS:Jan.02

sadie colesDarren Bader’s exhibition “more or less”, revolves around ideas of exchange, authorship, and the boundaries of the art object. In a series of installations, videos, and texts, Bader extends his use of the found object as a literal and conceptual fulcrum, deploying it as absurdist intervention and index of mundane reality. In the main gallery, he and artist Anca Munteanu Rimnic create a large-scale arrangement comprising both their own works and a wide assortment of stuff, including works by other artists. This giant walk-in ‘still life’ invites visitors to determine what is and what isn’t an artwork, in some instances following numerical combinations stipulated by Bader. Throughout his latest works, Bader plays upon the dynamic between artist, artwork, and viewer – foregrounding the role of the viewer or buyer in making meaning. Info: Sadie Coles HQ, 1 Davies Street, London, Duration: 13/1-3/3/18, Days & Hours: Tue-sat 11:00-18:00, www.sadiecoles.com

new museumFor her exhibition “Motion into Being”, Anna Craycroft transformed the Gallery space into an active site for producing a stop-motion animation film that she will develop over the course of the exhibition. Visitors will physically enter the stage where Craycroft will shoot new footage every week. Drawing on traditions of folklore and fables, which often use anthropomorphism to narrate moral tales, the animated film will confront the physical and philosophical lenses used to construct and legitimize personhood. Questions of who and what qualifies as a person have become increasingly contentious as the agency of all beings—from nonhuman animals to corporations, and from ecosystems to artificial intelligence—has fractured legal and theoretical discourse. The structure of Craycroft’s installation borrows from early stop-motion animation techniques like the 20th century setback camera, which gave the illusion of forms moving through real space by filming animation cells on a horizontal glass plane placed in front of a miniature forced perspective set. Info: Curator:  Johanna Burton and Sara O’Keeffe, New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York, Duration: 17/1-13/5/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-sun 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, www.newmuseum.org

Museo del NovecentoAdelita Husni-Bey’s “Frangente/Breaker” at Museo del Novecento is a performance in three acts that combines a site-specific project with a performative reinterpretation of a sound work from 2013 and a public action, brought together as a single reflection on authorship, on barriers, borders, and nationalism, and on the perception of otherness. The first act, “Cementarmato” (2018), is a performance developed for the occasion that brings visitors into interaction with several works from the museum’s permanent collection. The event then continues in the Sala Fontana with “Sull’Esilio” (2018) involving asylum seekers currently housed at the former barracks Montello in Milan, and concludes with the third and final act “Action for a Sandbag Brigade” (2011), that takes place outside, in an action that moves into the public sphere. This performance is the third event in “Furla Series #01 – Time after Time, Space after Space”, a performance-centered program that will present five events by five artists from different generations and backgrounds, to showcase a wide range of approaches to this form of expression. Info: Curators: Bruna Roccasalva and Vincenzo de Bellis, Museo del Novecento, Via Marconi 1, Milan, Duration: 17-18/1/18, Hour: 19:00, www.museodelnovecento.org

PAUL KASMIN GALLERYCelebrating his 90 years, Robert Indiana’s solo exhibition at Paul Kasmin Gallery, includes two iconic works. “LOVE WALL” is a monumental and superlative example of Indiana’s practice. Belonging to a series of iconic paintings, sculptures, and prints dedicated to the theme of love that the artist commenced in the mid-1960s, the work is both accessible and complex in meaning. Its inaugural presentation in New York marked a watershed moment for public art and generated universal enthusiasm for large-scale outdoor sculpture, the significance of which persists today.Indiana’s “ONE through ZERO” articulates the artist’s fascination with numbers as the most fundamental organizing principles of the world.  Comprised of ten individual sculptures, ONE through ZERO takes on a multitude of references that simultaneously hones in on autobiographical significances and conjures universal metaphors related to the sequential nature of life and death. Info: Paul Kasmin Gallery, 515 West 27th Street, New York, Duration: 18/1-3/3/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.paulkasmingallery.com

bernierKostas Sahpazis presents his solo exhibition in Brussels, he is acontemporary sculptor that uses, what one may call, new materials and new media, yet in its essence, his process is strongly based in the predominantly plastic techniques. Kostas Sahpazis leads materials into a situation of mimicking behaviors and qualities in order to lend them properties that were never presented before. What is important in Sahpazis works is the use of void and the management of the forces that hold the surface of the objects. These two elements produce an image that is intensely perceived in the last layer and serves as the main revealing element for each work. Every object, each work of the exhibition, every rigid body, a unit of an open set, realizes its fragile nature, and it’s called to function as a completed organism when it is nothing more than an instrument performing a specific operation. Info: Bernier/Eliades Gallery, 46 Rue du Châtelain, Brussels, Duration: 18/1-31/3/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 12:00-18:00, www.bernier-eliades.com

ica bostonWangechi Mutu is known for her self-proclaimed “maximalist aesthetic”, hybrid compositions, and wall-based works that add texture and dimension to architectural spaces. Feminism, Afrofuturism, displacement, and marginal spaces figure in her category-defying collage and sculpture work. In “A Promise to Communicate” his new commission for the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, Wangechi Mutu uses the rough, gray rescue blankets of humanitarian aid efforts and emergencies to create a less rational interpretation of the world map. The work also create a space for visitors to explore ideas of public space, communication, and free speech, addressing the idea of a world that despite its increasing potential for collectivity struggles to communicate in a comprehensive way. Info: The Institute of Contemporary Art-Boston, 25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, Duration 19/1-30/9/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Sat-Sun 10:00-17:00, Thu-Fri 10:00-19:00, www.icaboston.org

xippasMichael Scott’s solo exhibition presents works from different periods. It includes a series of canvas with systematic constructions from the early 1990s, composed of black and white lines which have specifically participated into the recognition of his style. These vertical and narrow lines are paints on aluminum plates of variable dimensions. To generate them, the artist explored different trough which he restrained himself during the process of creation, as a binding notice to be respected to the millimeter. A canvas testifies in the exhibition of incursions of the artist in the figuration. In 1994, Michael Scott stopped line paintings; having not set a term for his work methodology, he said he was coming to the end of his systematic work and wanted to express something else. This 1995 painting, entitled “The Realm of the Clown”, which describes a psychedelic “Looney Tunes” landscape, would be the very opposite of his systematic work. Info: Xippas Gallery, Rue des Bains 61, Geneva, Duration: 19/1-10/3/18, Days & Hours: Τue-Fri 14:00-18:30, Sat 12:00-17:00, www.xippas.com

Galerie Mikael AndersenFritz Bornstück in his solo exhibition “TEN” presents new paintings and ceramic works. Working on the Italian island of Elba during the spring of 2017, Fritz Bornstück moved his studio outside and painted en plein air. Combining oil painting and textile collage, the colour palette is very much inspired by a 19th century approach, with Fritz Bornstück working like an impressionist in the field, while at the same time turning the works around to pull them in a decidedly more contemporary direction, inflicting contrasting architecture and items on the classical compositions. The atmosphere in the paintings is uncertain and ambiguous, and the landscapes lose their affinity to “the real world” and become non-places, or perhaps more precisely: places out of time, places out of place, mythological outside of any mythos. Info: Galerie Mikael Andersen, Bredgade 63, Copenhagen, Duration: 19/1-3/3/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 12:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-15:00, http://mikaelandersen.com

almine-rech-galleryThe exhibition “Women” features recent paintings and drawings by Kurt Kauper. His work layers historical and contemporary traditions, incorporating both elevated and vernacular subject matter. He subverts his seemingly academic style with a radical, but subtle vanguard sensibility. The effect of his paintings is uncanny. They hover in an indeterminate state between reality and artifice. An uneasy balance between opposing concepts: real and unreal, representation and abstraction, and most interestingly, avant-garde and kitsch, characterizes Kauper’s unique and original approach to painting. In his new series, Kauper takes on one of the greatest artistic traditions, the painting of the female nude. For years, Kauper wasn’t interested in painting nude women. He recently questioned his self-imposed prohibition, however, and wondered if it was possible to sidestep the paradigmatic categories through which the female nude had been conventionally understood. The titles of the works, “Woman 2”, “3, “4”, and “5”, are inspired by de Kooning’s celebrated Woman paintings of the early 1950s.  Info: Almine Rech Gallery, 39 East 78th Street, 2nd Floor, New York, Duration: 20/1-24/2/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.alminerech.com

centre pompidou metxThe exhibition “Dumb Type” is the first monographic exhibition in France dedicated to this art collective. Formed in 1984, Dumb Type, in its early stages, was made up of about fifteen Kyoto City Art College students from different fields: visual artists, video artists, choreographers and performers, as well as architects, graphic designers, sound engineers and computer scientists who combined to invent a new, fundamentally pluridisciplinary type of performing art. The Centre Pompidou-Metz is presenting five major Dumb Type installations, including a new installation produced for the occasion. Some of these works are the respective productions of three of the very first members of the collective: Teiji Furuhashi, Ryoji Ikeda and Shiro. Archives and testimonies are also presented in the exhibition and retrace the genealogy of the group, before and after the death of Teiji Furuhashi in 1995. Info: Centre Pompidou-Metz, 1 parvis des Droits-de-l’Homme, Metz, Duration: 20/1-14/5/18, Days & Hours: Mon & Wed-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.centrepompidou-metz.fr

Tomio Koyama GalleryToru Kuwakubo’s exhibition “A Calendar for Painters Without Time Sense 1. 3. 4. 5. 7. 8”, features six paintings and six drawings form  his “Calendar Series”, in which he depicts the respective lives of the painters he respects: Picasso, Vermeer, Ensor, Cézanne, Seurat, and Gogh. He paints these painters’ studios as imaginary, spectacular spaces of alternate dimension through manner of his own interpretation. Such works serve as an ultimate homage that attempt to re-experience these painters’ practices and ideas. The days lived by these prominent painters within art history, their time of practice, and the era in which they lived, as well as the time of Kuwakubo’s own practice and life, all seem uncannily fleeting and give rise to a sense of ‘irregular speed of time.’ Kuwakubo had decided to use a “calendar,” which he had always expressed a fondness for to depict the notion of “time” within his paintings. Info: Tomio Koyama Gallery, Complex 665 2F, 6-5-24 Roppongi, Minato-ku, Tokyo, Duration: 20/1-17/2/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, http://tomiokoyamagallery.com