ART NEWS:Jan.03

“Tomato Can” is the title of Austin Lee’s first solo exhibition in Berlin. In the exhibition, Lee focuses on paintings which are executed based on digital sketches and painted on canvas with an airbrush. The works follow basic compositional forms, have a flattened spatial depth and are heavy on primary colors, a nod to Lee’s digital sketching process. Lee’s choice of color is based on the purpose of stimulating light and creating intense vibrations, reminding the viewer that the primary way of thinking about color today is in the context of the digital realm. However, the way our computers display color is only an imitation of the way we as humans biologically process it. The human eye is sensitive to three different wavelengths of light – red, green and blue, but by combining these three signals, the brain creates millions of different hues. Info: Peres Projects, Karl-Marx-Allee 82, Berlin, Duration: 19/1-2/3/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 11:00-18:00, https://peresprojects.com

At the heart of “The Crime of Art (Hollywood Edition)”,  Kota Ezawa’s solo exhibition  is the new multi-channel animated film, “The Crime of Art”, in which Ezawa re-creates, in his distinctive flattened, distilled style , scenes from Hollywood art heist films. The 3-screen installation functions like a cinematic “exquisite corpse” in which one screen continues the narrative thread where the previous screen leaves off. In contrast to a Hollywood film, this animation has no beginning and no end. Ezawa  also presents a selection of light boxes that further his investigations into stolen works of art, including to-scale recreations of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream”, versions of which were stolen in 1994 and 2004, and Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, which was appropriated by the Nazi regime in 1938 and was famously repatriated to the Bloch-Bauer family in 2006. Info: Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Avenue, Santa Monica, Duration: 20 /1-10/3/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-17:30, www.cgrimes.com

“Le pays où tout est permis” is the first exhibition ever dedicated to Sophie Podolski, whose remarkable body of graphic work has remained dormant in a private archive for the past 40 years. Her visionary oeuvre is emblematic of a time marked by sexual liberation, anti-authoritarianism and social change. In the brief period from 1968 until 1974, when she took her own life at the age of 21, Podolski produced over 200 works on paper, and one book titled Le pays où tout est permis. The exhibition at WIELS places an emphasis on her visual practice and highly personal iconography, bringing this singular work out of obscurity. It includes her drawings made with ink, pastels or coloured pencil, as well as the etchings that are among her earliest works and the original manuscript of her handwritten book. Info: Curator: Caroline Dumalin, WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Av. Van Volxemlaan 354, Brussels, Duration: 20/1-1/4/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.wiels.org

David Maljkovic’s exhibition “Alterity Line” includes a series of paintings and expands upon his practice of reconfiguring and re-presenting his earlier works into site-specific installations. The intricate transformation of works from various stages of his practice into new ones functions to obfuscate hierarchies between media and artworks, considering the relationship between art’s autonomy and its formal developments, the nature of the gaze and the complexities of time. 19 new monochromatic paintings mounted on aluminum hang throughout the gallery, each laser-etched with small drawings, many that Maljkovic found in his old sketchbooks. Referring to the production of these works, he exhibits inside vitrines three utilitarian grates that the mounted canvases were placed on during the laser-etching process. In another series, Maljkovic, who began his career studying painting in Zagreb, presents his old paintings rolled and encased in plexiglas boxes that lay across trestles or lean against the wall. Info: Metro Pictures, 519 West 24th Street, New York, Duration 24/1-24/2/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, http://www.metropictures.com

The advent of aerial photography has changed the way people see their world more than any other development since Eadweard Muybridge’s seminal images of moving animals in the second half of the nineteenth century. The impact is immediately visible in “Leaning Out”, the new solo exhibition by Jeffrey Milstein. Milstein’s overhead images of ports, train yards, airports, parking lots, and cityscapes, shot from small planes and helicopters, reveal harmonious symmetries invisible during daily life, yet are still somehow familiar. It’s as if we’ve seen these views before, or constructed them with an idea of what they would look like from 2,000 feet above the ground. The geometric mosaics in many images jump out immediately, with shipping containers, train cars, and automobiles slotted together in checkered patterns like gigantic tesserae. Milstein’s bird’s-eye view flattens three dimensions to two and his shutter shrinks several square miles down to the size of a tapestry. The signs of use disappear, the wear and tear, the small distinguishing details, leaving behind bold blocks of color that could as easily be a child’s stacked toys as a massive freight yard or automobile dealership. Info: Benrubi Gallery, 521 West 26th Street, 2nd Floor, New York, Duration: 25/1-17/3/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, http://benrubigallery.com

“The Myth of Education” presents a suite of new and existing works by Mike Cloud. Evolving a unique painterly language over the last two decades, Cloud’s work often comprises a mash-up of thick paint and patchworks of collaged material and language culled from photo books, newspapers and other ephemera from daily life. For his exhibition Cloud has created a selection of multi-layered paintings on his signature shaped canvases, newspaper collages made up of clippings from various New York dailies and large-scale paper quilts composed of photographic fragments. These works represent the confluence of the artist’s expressive mark making with a myriad of recognizable forms including graphic symbols, text and pattern. In combining these elements, Cloud explores the creative possibilities of abstraction in contemporary painting alongside unravelling the multiple meanings and associations embedded in familiar signs and symbols of our time. Info: Curator: by Yesomi Umolu, Logan Center Exhibitions, 915 E. 60th Street, 1st Floor, Chicago, Duration: 26/1-11/3/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 9:00-21:00, Sun 11:00-21:00, https://arts.uchicago.edu/logan-center

Attia’s first Canadian solo exhibition “The Field of Emotion” brings together recent and newly commissioned works that confront us with the traumas of the past and their spectres in the present. Works on view include ”J’accuse” (2016), inspired by the injury and disfigurement of soldiers during World War I, the installation consists of roughly-hewn wooden busts of wounded soldiers, facing the eponymous anti-war film by Abel Gance. Originally made in 1919, the film was reshot in 1938, featuring footage of these veterans, as a warning against the looming threat of war. Attia’s film “Reflecting Memory” (2016) takes up the subject of the phantom limb, drawing a link between a lost part of the body and a lost part of society through trauma. Info: Curator: Carolin Köchling, Assistant Curator: Nabila Abdel Nabi, The Power Plant, 231 Queens Quay West, Toronto, Duration: 27/1-13/5/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed 10:00-17:00, Thu 10:00-20:00, Fri-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.thepowerplant.org

In his most recent work, “A swarm of two” AernoutMik directs his attention towards a duo. In this silent, two-channel video two police officers roam the streets of Ostend at night. Heavily armed and uniformed, they undertake a seemingly never-ending trek through deserted shopping areas. Their costuming nods towards the visual codes that symbolize “security” during times of terror. However, their nocturnal wanderings emphasize the ambivalence of security rather than its brute force. The policemen partially shed their uniforms-an armor of unwavering authority-to reveal something darker, more indistinct. Order breaks down and the act of “policing” gives way to a dynamic interplay between the two officers, gestures that fluidly veer between the sexual and the hostile, the amicable and the disaffected. Cast adrift, whether hand in hand or prostrated on their knees, they improvise a choreography of power, subservience, attraction, fear, suspicion, and turmoil. Info: carlier|gebauer, Markgrafenstraße 67, Berlin, Duration: 27/1-3/3/18, Days & Hours: 11:00-18:00, www.carliergebauer.com

Unfolding in two parts throughout 2018, “Be Not Still: Living in Uncertain Times” addresses concerns of the present social and political climate through a radical new model of experimentation and inquiry. Assembling a diverse intergenerational mix of artists with ties to the Bay Area, the exhibition evokes a call to action, inviting participants to identify and respond to a theme of their choosing through the production of new work. Part 1, assembles a diverse intergenerational mix of artists and cultural producers with ties to the Bay Area, including authors Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian, and artists Ala Ebtekar, Rigo 23, and Allison Smith. Participants were invited to identify and respond to a topic of their choosing under the overarching theme of present-day America. The resulting artist projects—exploring topics of surveillance, citizenship, American exceptionalism, and the rise of white nationalism—are presented to open a dialogue around prescient matters affecting our local and global communities. Info: Curator: Amy Owen, Assistant Curator Kara Q. Smith, di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, 5200 Sonoma Hwy, Napa, USA, Duration: 27/1-27/5/18, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 10:00-16:00, www.dirosaart.org

The group exhibition ”Against the Current. Journey into the Unknown” presents international positions in contemporary art that engage with travel as an existential gamble. Every departure entails risks, is a revolt against the old and the familiar, against the persistent powers that hold us back or restrain us. The beginning of every journey presupposes a break with the everyday. It requires a strong impulse, from within or without, to abandon the life lived so far, at least for a time, and set out on a new path—in spite of all obstacles and an uncertain outcome. With the artists in this exhibition, Museum Morsbroich is setting out on a new stage in a long journey that was proceeded by the foundation of the museum in post-war Germany in 1951, itself a pioneering departure, and that has been accompanied since then by countless art-loving companions. Info: Curators: Fritz Emslander and Stefanie Kreuzer, Museum Morsbroich-Leverkusen, Gustav-Heinemann-Strasse 80, Leverkusen, Duration: 28/1-29/4/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sat 11:00-17:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, www.museum-morsbroich.de