ART NEWS:May 01

The exhibition “One, Here, Now” is a nine-part series of floor-to-ceiling wall paintings by Brian O’Doherty (Patrick Ireland) that were made over twenty years ago and subsequently covered up and almost forgotten about, until now. The original installation in 1996, was a seminal moment for Irish art. The project came out of a residency that the artist undertook at Sirius Arts Centre in 1995-96. The murals, which comprise of abstract paintings based on Ogham (an early Celtic written language), demonstrate some of Ireland’s/O’Doherty’s key concerns  throughout his sixty-year career; namely those of Irish language, identity and perception. The work was on show for almost two years before being covered up. This important work is one of only two permanent O’Doherty public wall paintings still in existence in the world. This ambitious restoration project proposes to renew and celebrate this historic artwork in what is arguably one of Ireland’s most historically significant coastal towns.  Info: Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh, The Old Yacht Club, Lower Rd, Kilgarvan, Cobh, Co. Cork, Duration: 20/418-21/4/19, Days & Hours: Wed-Fri 10:30017:00, Sat-Sun 13:00-17:00, www.siriusartscentre.ie

Urs Lüthi’s solo exhibition “Just Another Dance”, is composed mostly of new works. As Urs Lüthi says “The foundation of my work is the human condition. My conception arose in the mid 1960’s. It is based on the conviction that one can only experience the world and understand it in a subjective way. I don’t believe in subjectivity and, as part of a radical approach, I’ve taken myself as the subject of my art ‘as mirror of the universe”.  Since the late 1960’s, Urs Lüthi has been developing his practise based on self-portrait, thus exploring multiple aspects of human nature. In the exhibition the new works form or are part of series he initiated during various periods of his life. He has developed some of these works, such as “Spazio Umano, Remains of Clarity – (Flowers)” and “(Thousand or more Images)”, or in some cases imagined a new version for them, as with The “Numbergirl, seen trough the pink glasses of desire” from his Trademark series. Urs Lüthi is thus constantly staging his own body and reconsidering his pieces through time. For the CCS, he also created a device consisting of a new spatial articulation of the room and stripes painted directly on the walls. Info: Centre Culturel Suisse Paris, 38 rue des Francs-Bourgeois, Paris, Duration: 21/4-15/7/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 13:00-19:00, http://ccsparis.com

David Claerbout presents his new solo exhibition, “Erzähl mir das Ende”. In the early 1990s, the cinema theorist Raymond Bellour coined the expression “between-images,” using the term to approach the hybrid images between photography, film and video. The term today would apply perfectly to the work of Claerbout. In “The Algiers’ Sections of a Happy Moment” (2008), time is suspended, yet the fragmentation of space, the multiplication of viewpoints and framing, is purified by a temporal dilation. Here, the viewer is “omniscient,” one is able to see an action from all angles in that precise moment. Another major layer to Claerbout’s photographic video works is sound. Claerbout himself often refers to his work as “audio pieces embedded in video”, “Travel” (1996-2013) is a work that was inspired by, and ultimately born from the soundtrack—a synthesised therapeutic music score composed by French composer Eric Breton, designed to reduce stress and induce sleep. Info: Espace Louis Vuitton München, Maximilianstraße 2a, Munich, Duration: 25/4-25/8/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 12:00-19:00, Sat 10:00-19:00, www.fondationlouisvuitton.fr

A culmination of five years of research and production by Suki Seokyeong Kang, the exhibition “Black Mat Oriole” is conceived as an installation that brings together sculpture, painting, and video to engage viewers with the power and politics of space. While Kang’s expanded painting practice is rooted in her research into classical Korean poetry, craft, and dance, her concerns are firmly articulated in the present. This body of work references the historical Korean solo dance Chunaengmu, which was performed for royalty and adhered to strict codes of court etiquette. With this in mind, Kang explores how a space can be divided into grids whether with regard to systems of power, cultural customs, or artistic lineage. Like the Chunaengmu dance, the movements of the performers in Kang’s videos are carefully scripted. For Kang, freedom is always already inscribed within a set of cultural and political limitations. The black mat is, in her words, “the minimal space each individual in this society is provided with, upon which to stand and sustain one’s weight.” Black Mat Oriole sustains this tension. Freedom is implied but restricted, a condition amplified given the current geopolitical climate. Info: Curators: Alex Klein and Kate Kraczon, Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania (ICA), 118 S. 36th Street, Philadelphia, Duration: 27/4-12/8/18, Days & Hours: Wed 11:00-20:00, Thu-Sun 11:00-18:00, http://icaphila.org

We are divers held in the moment of contact with the water’s surface. These works carry all the momentum of a fall as well as the cool stillness of the water’s depth. “Liquid” is Antoine Wagner’s first solo exhibition in Brussels. Antoine Wagner captures the warmth and melancholy of years passing as well as nature’s timeless cycle. The contemplative mystery of these works recalls the sublime adventure of painters like Friedrich and Turner whilst driving forward into a visceral abstraction akin to Turrell. In every image there is a seductive sense of the half open curtain into our memories or dreams. A surface to be broken through. And on the other side of this silence emerges a perfect music so finely crafted and yet somehow capable of carrying the untouched purity of nature’s breaking waves, soft rain and trickling streams. Info: La Patinoire Royale Galerie Valérie Bach, rue Veydt 15, Brussels, Duration: 27/4-20/7/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.prvbgallery.com

Tere Recarens woks have to do with moving, the turmoil it sometimes infers. Most of them are answers to precise contexts: Tere Recarens, by choice or necessity, can be brought to react to a situation, she often tries to twist. Each answer is based on the attentive observation of the context and the customs, and often demands investigation over time. In this way, meeting other people is decisive; it can lead to new knowledge, induce any project, any research. For her solo exhibition “Baharestan Carpet”, she has chosen to show two works resulting from several stays in Iran and her studying the history and culture of this country: “Baharestan Carpet” (2017-18), a cardboard carpet, and “Spark” (2015-27), patterns on paper. “Spark” combines three successive printing processes. This long gestation in elaborating the work is due to the quest of the history of this motif. The boteh jegheh is full of political, religious or spiritual meanings. The solid colored motifs faithfully replicated on each piece of paper are silk-screen printed. Info: Galerie Anne Barrault, 51 rue des Archives, Paris, Duration 28/4-9/6/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.galerieannebarrault.com

The exhibition “Hello World. Revising a Collection” places the focus on transnational artistic networks and cross-cultural exchanges from the late 19th century to the present. Numerous works from the collection of the Nationalgalerie provide points of departure for multiple narratives. These stories include Heinrich Vogeler’s path to the Soviet Union, Dadaist Tomoyoshi Murayama’s sojourn in Berlin in the 1920s, and the collaborations between Nicolás García Uriburu and Joseph Beuys. More than two hundred works—paintings, sculptures, installations, videos and films, from the holdings of the Nationalgalerie are comple­mented by approximately one hundred and fifty works on loan from other collections In addition, 400 artworks, magazines and documents are presented in the exhibition from national and international collections. In total, the show features artworks by more than 250 artists. Info: Curators: Udo Kittelmann, Sven Beckstette, Daniela Bystron, Jenny Dirksen, Anna-Catharina Gebbers, Gabriele Knapstein, Melanie Roumiguière and Nina Schallenberg , Guest Curators Zdenka Badovinac, Eugen Blume, Clémentine Deliss, Natasha Ginwala and Azu Nwagbogu, Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Invalidenstrasse 50/51, Berlin, Duration: 28/4-26/8/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri 10:00-18:00, Thu 10:00-29:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.smb.museum

For his solo exhibition “the eight  White Within angel”, Cecilia Edefalk presents painting, sculpture, and video from the 1990s until today. Although the works on view span over twenty years, the exhibition is not conceived as a retrospective, but instead a reflection of the artist’s working process. The exhibition’s title refers to a series of eight large-scale paintings that form the core of the exhibition, which the artist began in 1997 after an encounter with the early renaissance sculpture “The Annunciation Angel” at the San Gimignano Museum. Edefalk’s formative experience with this life-sized, painted wooden  sculpture prompted a shift in her work. She abandoned her practice of using photographs as a starting point for her paintings and began to rely on her own experiences as the catalyst for the imagery her work depicts. Painted at a scale that relates to the human body, Edefalk’s serial investigation of these celestial bodies transforms the spiritual encounter that she had at the San Gimignano Museum into a direct physical encounter between the artist and material. Info: carlier|gebauer, Markgrafenstraße 67, Berlin, Duration: 28/4-2/6/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.carliergebauer.com

Dan Colen in his solo exhibition “Mailorder Mother Purgatory” presents three recent bodies of works that focus on technical innovation in pursuit of ambience and emotional depth. A leading figure of his generation, Colen pursues an art deeply rooted in the history of painting. Having engaged in long periods of material experimentation, employingsubstances from chewing gum, flowers, dirt, and grass, to confetti, and tar and feathers, he has gradually deconstructed the essence of the brushstroke and the gestural mark of the artist’s hand. His spirited and fertile style of tromp l’oeil techniques and tongue-in-cheek humor deliver a decidedly contemporary interpretation to the recognized canon. However, it is also through this lens that Colen mines and questions established historical styles: Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Conceptualism. Challenging the heritage of his medium through an innovative approach to materiality, technique, and content, Colen pushes the boundaries of painting while imbuing his work with formal rigor and art historical richness. Info: Lévy Gorvy, 909 Madison Avenue, New York, Duration: 2/5-23/6/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.levygorvy.com

The exhibition “Paintings from the 1960s and ’70s” features a selection of the Stephen Posen’s work never before been publicly shown. The exhibition is the first significant presentation to revisit Posen’s breakthrough shaped canvases and related paintings since his debut at New York’s gallery O.K. Harris, nearly five decades ago. In the late 1960s, as prevailing abstraction began to give way to a proliferation of defiant and eschewing ‘isms’, Stephen Posen emerged on the downtown scene of Manhattan as an inaugural and prominent figure of a new American Realism. He had recently returned from a two-year Fulbright fellowship sojourn in Italy, where he immersed himself in the art and architecture of centuries past. Liberated and charged by the influence of Renaissance and Baroque masters, and struggling to address age-old questions that still challenged the frontier of 20th century painting, Posen crystalized a vision and style that were astonishingly modern and fresh. His work explored a painterly paradox in which pictorial illusion and spatial perception grapple. His uncanny cut-outs from this period acknowledge a sculptural impetus, imitating draped fabric and hanging clothes with an exacting verisimilitude that probes at aesthetic and intellectual curiosities about form, representation, flatness, and depth. These investigations course through Posen’s art to this day. Info: Vito Schnabel Projects, 43 Clarkson Street, New York, 2/5-23/6/18, Days & Hours: by appointment, www.vitoschnabel.com

In classical science, aether was thought to be the fifth element, filling the region of the universe above the terrestrial sphere, connecting and permeating all things and acting as a medium for the propagation of light. Though these theories were eventually disproved by modern science, the word ethereal still invokes a sense of otherworldliness, fragility and spirituality. The group exhibition “Ethereal” brings together artists from different backgrounds whose work engages with the immaterial, through forms such as light, color, vapor and air. Included in the exhibition are works by Olivier Mosset, Gianfranco Foschino, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Dane Mitchell and João Louro. Dane Mitchell’s practice is concerned with manifesting the physical properties of the incorporeal. Gianfranco Foschino sets up a fixed camera and films the subtle movements that occur in front of the lens. Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s works are engaged in an investigation of how certain extraordinary forces and systems perpetually reshape our world. Olivier Mosset has been associated with a multitude of art historical movements throughout his career. João Louro’s body of work encompasses painting, sculpture, photography and video, with a referential lexical universe comprising minimalism, conceptualism, pop culture, structuralism and post-structuralism. Info: Christopher Grimes Gallery, 916 Colorado Avenue, Santa Monica, Duration: 5/5-16/6/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-17:30, www.cgrimes.com