ART NEWS:March 02

With the program “Dissident Gardens”, Het Nieuwe Instituut explores the classic contrast between nature and culture and the changing role of design. In this context, the garden stands for the site where man’s desire to control his environment collides with the forces of nature. Dissident Gardens includes an extensive program of exhibitions in Gallery 1, including “Biotopia”, “Smart Farming”, “Gardening Mars” and “Pleasure Parks” and in Gallery 2 the exhibition “The Human Insect: Antenna Architectures 1887-2017”. The program presents a range of influential approaches by designers, architects and artists to current developments in our relationship to nature. Some of the issues they raise include the far-reaching rationalisation of the agrarian landscape, Mars as the final utopia, the designer as farmer, and the holiday resort as a microcosm of the changing relationship between the city and the techno-side. These are also the subject of a series of lectures and debates. Info: Curators: Klaas Kuitenbrouwer and Hanna Piksen, Annemiek Snelders, Hetty Berens, Suzanne Mulder, Maurizio Montalti, Marten Kuijpers, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Museumpark 25, Rotterdam, Duration 4/3-23/9/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-sun 11:00-17:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, https://hetnieuweinstituut.nl

Shezad Dawood’s solo exhibition “Leviathan” is an episodic narrative around notions of borders, mental health and marine welfare issues of foremost concern, resonating profoundly with both coastal locations and contemporary life. A ten-part film cycle that will unfold over the next three years, the work draws connections between human activity and marine ecology. Three films have already been premiered in the 57th Venice Biennale Venice. In dialogue with a wide range of marine biologists, oceanographers, political scientists, neurologists and trauma specialists, “Leviathan” explores interconnections between these fields of work and will be presented through sculpture, textiles, museum specimens, films, conversations and online resource material. Dawood also shows a newly commissioned painting drawing upon this specific context, and work with community groups based on the coastal location asking questions about how these issues might come to evolve in a future 20 to 50 years from now, and what that future might look like. Info: Curator: Alfredo Cramerotti, MOSTYN, 12 Vaughan Street, Llandudno, Duration: 3/3/-157/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:30-16:00, www.mostyn.org

The heart of Lena Henke’s exhibition “An Idea of Late German Sculpture; To the People of New York, 2018” is a machine. With a winch set into the walls of the exhibition space, large pieces of chain mail are pulled through the room. However, this material made of aluminum rings does not protect virile bodies in close combat. Instead, it glides across the surfaces of sculptures, sometimes setting them in motion. The exhibition is divided into two extremes: the archive and a topological machine that activates the space. Both poles are contrary to the normal function of the institution, which otherwise shows objects but neither makes it possible to use them nor to see their archiving. The series “Geburt und Familie” shown on the partition between the two exhibition spaces continues this complex reference to the history of sculpture. Info: Curator: Fabrice Stroun, Kunsthalle Zürich, Limmatstrasse 270, Zürich, Duration: 3/3-13/5/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-20:00, Sat-Sun 10:00-17:00, http://kunsthallezurich.ch

The exhibition that is devoted to João Penalva brings together large-scale installations, artist’s books, and photographic and video works dating from 2001 to the present. The exhibition highlights the multiple dimensions of his work, of which the large installation “Pavlina and Dr. Erlenmeye”r (2010) is emblematic. Composed of two distinct spaces, the first places the visitor in the muffled atmosphere of an exhibition salon in an indeterminate time. It chronicles the life of German chemist Carl Emil Erlenmeyer (1825-1909), whose research led him to propose the formula of naphthalene. In a second space, the haunted dream of Pavlina, a retired entomologist, is played out with the moving image of a giant clothes moth. João Penalva is a teller of a very particular genre of tale that is both fantastic and prosaic, that leaves a great deal of room for interpretation. Through meticulous composition specific to each exhibition, Penalva’s multiple plot lines lend his works the mechanisms of a fable, plunging the viewer into a world that oscillates between reality and the uncanny. Info: Curator: Clément Minighetti, Mudam Luxembourg–Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, 3 Park Dräi Eechelen, Luxembourg, Duration 3/3-16/9/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Tue & Thu-Sun 10:00-18:00, Wed 10:00-23:00, www.mudam.lu

In Michael Raedecker’s solo exhibition “cntrl” a repeated motif haunts his paintings: a tree house, set high in the forking branches of a tall and leafless tree. This is architecture at its most basic, nothing more than a pitched roof, four walls, a floor, and a long, bowing ladder that reaches down towards the ground. Try as we might, we cannot locate this structure in a particular period or place. It could have been knocked up by a 21st-Century suburban dad, in the hope that it might persuade his kids to put away their iPads, and play outside for once. Equally, it could be the work of our prehistoric ancestors, a refuge from the wolves and bears that roam the forest floor. Significantly, in two of Raedecker’s canvases, the tree house is silhouetted against a huge full moon, hung impossibly low in the sky. Might the structure’s inhabitants use this celestial body as a clock of sorts, measuring the passing of their days by its waxing and waning? One thing is certain, these works are deeply concerned with time, and how it is encoded in the image. Info: GRIMM Gallery, Keizersgracht 241, Amsterdam, Duration: 10/3-28/4/18, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 11:00-18:00, http://grimmgallery.com

In Christiana Soulou’s solo exhibition are on presentation 40 drawings and watercolours with figures, freely inspired from Paul Valéry’s “Soul and Dance”. Christiana Soulou with her work in the past two decades has shown a drawing practice which is defined by its consistency, rigor, depth, and precision, reaching with her line qualities of great subtlety. In Soulou’s work, exploration of the form (its evolution and transformation) passes through the body’s action and the gesture of movement. Her works perceive this action and redefine the role of mask. In a constant blending with the drawn figures, the presence of mask, in many of her works, acts either as a vector of a double power: of simulation and dissimulation, or as a supply (supléant) that creates a new face; in all cases it works as a manifestation of the human condition. Info: Bernier/Eliades Gallery, 11 Eptachalkou Street, Athens, Duration: 15/3-2/5/18, Days & Hours: tue-Fri 10:30-18:00, Sat 12:00-16:00, www.bernier-eliades.gr

In “Geometry of Light”, his first exhibition in Paris, Y.Z. Kami aligns the questions of portraiture with the patterns and processes of geometry, considering various ways to seek and represent truth. In one gallery, he juxtaposes two “Dome” paintings, comprised of concentric circles of tessellated marks, with a looming depiction of the plaster death mask of Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth century French mathematician, writer, and theologian. In another gallery, three “Dome” paintings and two new portraits, of the artist and his partner Daniele, are presented with “Daya’s Hands II” (2015–16), which shows two hands with palms pressed together in prayer. His large-scale portraits recreate the visceral experience of a face-to-face encounter. Through a matte, uniform haze, he depicts his subjects with eyes open or closed, gazing forward or looking down. Info: Gagosian Gallery, 4 rue de Ponthieu, Paris, duration 16/3-5/5/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.gagosian.com

The major retrospective “Intellectual Property 1968–2018” presents the work of Allen Ruppersberg, the artist’s first comprehensive US survey in more than 30 years. One of the most rigorous and inventive practitioners to emerge from the Conceptual art movement in the late 1960s, Ruppersberg has explored a wide range of media and approaches, rooted in language, images and ideas filtered through the lens of mass culture. His projects consistently focus on the American vernacular uncovering the visual details and unsung conventions that encourage a rediscovery of the past. Often participatory, Ruppersberg’s works invite a layered experience for the viewer through words and accumulated elements. Many of the works have never before been exhibited in US museums. Featured artworks include early installations such as “Al’s Café” and “Al’s Grand Hote”l, his groundbreaking participatory projects of the late 1960s, photo-based narratives combining text and image; and more recent installations containing his commercial letterpress posters, ephemera, drawings, and films. Info: Curator: Siri Engberg, Walker Art Center, 725 Vineland Place, Minneapolis, duration: 17/3-8/12/18, Days & Hours: Tue & Fri-Sun 11:00-17:00, Thu 11:00-20:00, https://walkerart.org

Veronika Kellndorfer and Antonio Ballester Moreno present their joint exhibition. While divergent in materiality, Kellndorfer and Ballester Moreno share a sensibility in their approach to the subject of Modernism as a theme in their work. For this exhibition, Kellndorfer presents photographs of Modernist structures by Albert Frey and Oscar Niemeyer printed on highly reflective glass panels. She primarily focuses her lens on the transparent façades of the structures, allowing the difference between the interior and exterior to play out on the surface of the glass. With attention to texture and figuration, Ballester Moreno applies up to thirty layers of thinned acrylic paint to raw, unprimed jute, essentially dyeing the surface of the canvas. Using this process he applies elements of a simplified, geometric visual language that cohesively represent nature. Info: Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Avenue, Santa Monica, Duration: 17/3-28/4/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-17:30, www.cgrimes.com

“New Watercolors” is the title of Walton Ford’s first solo exhibition in Switzerland. Ford’s work draws on the visual language and narrative ambitions of traditional natural history painting to examine the intersection of human culture and the wild from which it emerged. Specifically, his art focuses on how animals exist in the human imagination. For the exhibition, the artist will debut a series of new paintings on paper that elaborate on his longstanding fascination with the story of a female black panther that escaped from the Zürich Zoo in the winter of 1933. Nearly ten weeks after the escape, that is not until the middle of December, a casual laborer on the boundary between Zürich Oberland and St. Gallen discovered the panther under a barn, and killed it for food. Info: Vito Schnabel Gallery, Via Maistra 37, St. Moritz, Duration: 18/3-6/5/18, Days & Hours: Wed-sun 11:00-18:00, www.vitoschnabel.com

Nazgol Ansarinia’s solo exhibition entitled “Demolishing buildings, buying waste” which includes new sculptures, drawings and videos, highlights Ansarinia’s interest in Tehran’s changing architectural landscape and its relationship to collective consciousness. Through drawings, collages, sculptures, murals and works in textile, Nazgol Ansarinia draws a portrait of everyday life in her native city of Tehran. She grows along with a city that now counts almost 14 million residents and whose face is rapidly changing. As capitalism’s sway over contemporary Iranian society grows ever more pervasive, there is housing shortage, the real estate market booms, houses make way for towering new apartment buildings and shopping malls. This results in a never-ending cycle of growth and decay, or as Ansarinia sees it, a paradox in which the construction of the city also entails its deconstruction. Info: Green Art Gallery, Al Quoz 1, Street 8, Alserkal Avenue, Unit 28, Dubai, Duration: 19/3-28/4/18, Days & Hours: Sat-Thu 10:00-19:00, www.gagallery.com