ART NEWS:May 03

The exhibition “Adapt to Survive: Notes from the Future” brings together artworks by seven artists that explore how our world might look and feel beyond the present. Engaging with the idea that change is not just inevitable but necessary for future survival and growth, the artists in this exhibition consider new and hybrid forms of architecture, biology, technology and language across time and space. In recent years, the phrase “adapt to survive”—a reference to Darwin’s theory of evolution—has been adopted by entrepreneurial start-ups and professional “change-makers” as a useful metaphor for the way to make progress in a rapidly changing world. During the same time period, futurology has become firmly established as an area of research that combines game theory, statistics and speculation to explore potential futures. Responding to these cultural shifts, the artists in Adapt to Survive make educated guesses about societal “evolution” and progression while conveying uncertainty and scepticism about accelerating patterns of growth and consumption. Info: Curator: Dr Cliff Lauson, Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London, Duration: 18/4-11/6/18, Days & Hours: Mon, Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-19:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, www.southbankcentre.co.uk

“About Photography” is a group exhibition by modern and contemporary artists, who have exhibited with Gagosian gallery over the past four decades. The exhibition explores the ways in which artists use photography as a medium, a means to an end, and a catalyst for other art forms. From Andy Warhol to Richard Prince, these artists open up the question of what it means to utilize the photographic medium for representation, as well as in the creation of form. As intellectual challenges continue to unfold, photography pervades not only all other artistic genres, but our every moment as well, a phenomenon that has irrevocably changed the nature of art itself. The exhibition’s only sculpture, Duane Hanson’s “Man with Camera” (1991–92), takes center stage: a figure perched on a folding chair poises his camera to take a photograph. Celebrated for their startling realism, Hanson’s figures and the “snapshot of America” that they constitute take on new meaning in a photographic context. Info: Gagosian Gallery, 657 Howard Street, San Francisco, Duration: 24/4-23/7/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.gagosian.com

The group exhibition “Weather” elevates our experiences of the weather through photographs, video, sound and installation worksby 26 artists, each engaging with climatic phenomena such as sunlight, snow, rain, mist and thunderstorms from her or his own unique perspective. This exhibition introduces the diverse approaches of artists creating weather-inspired works, ranging from aesthetically distinct photographs to installation works amplifying tactile and auditory sensations. Divided into three chapters: “Recognizing the Weather”, “Talking with the Weather”, and “Remembering the Weather” the exhibition reads like an essay consisting of a prologue, six stories (Sunlight, Snow & Rain, Darkness, Blue, Mist, Sounds of Rain) and an epilogue. Beginning with Recognizing the Weather, the exhibition offers viewers to encounter works that capture everyday climatic concepts from a range of viewpoints, reawakening them to weather that normally goes unnoticed. It then moves on to Talking with the Weather, which brings together works based on sight, touch and hearing to enhance sensory experience of the weather. In the final chapter, Remembering the Weather, visitors discover an epilogue in which five artists employ their personal methods of recording the weather, observing its feelings and forms in their own memories. Info: D MUSEUM, 5-6, Dokseodang-ro 29-gil, Yongsan-gu, Seoul, Duration: 3/5-28/10/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Thu & Sun 10:00-18:00, Fri-Sat 10:00-20:00, www.daelimmuseum.org

“The Land-Paintings from 1994 – 2016” is the first solo exhibition in New York featuring the work of Michelangelo Lovelace. Through Lovelace’s eyes, painting acts as the sole alternative to what he refers to as the “street life”. He instead paints this life that would otherwise be his destined path; one filled with crime, drugs and poverty. Through crude renderings, vibrant colors and outlandish compositions, he brings these subjects to the canvas. Painting from memory, he obscures depth of field, evoking a child-like innocence in his approach of often-explicit subject matter. Lovelace paints street scenes that fill the frame from left to right with storefront windows and blue skies above, reminiscent of Edward Hopper’s paintings of the same subject matter. Yet, rather than the serene unoccupied streets of Hopper’s America, Lovelace fills his scenes from top to bottom with movement and caricatures of people from his neighborhood. In an effort to fill a void he found in art history, Lovelace inserts people of color into the language of American painting. Info: Fort Gansevoort, 5 Ninth Avenue, New York, Duration 3/5-16/6/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.fortgansevoort.com

The exhibition “Birth of the Modern Art Museum-Art and Architecture of MMCA Deoksugung” covers numerous stories from the history of National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, from the government-led construction of the building to the collection of modern Korean artworks that began in earnest with the opening of MMCA Deoksugung in 1998. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the opening of the Deoksugung branch of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, as well as the 80th anniversary of the building’s original construction in 1938, from a design by Japanese architect Nakamura Yoshihei. To commemorate these occasions, MMCA organized this special exhibition to explore the history of its modern art collection. Also, for the first time, the museum is showing the original architectural drawings and related materials that were discovered in Japan in 2014. Info: National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea-99 Sejong-daero, Jung-gu, Seoul, Duration: 3/5-14/10/18, Days & Hours: Tue—Fri & Sun 10:00-18:00, Sat 10:00-21:00, www.mmca.go.kr

The group exhibition “One Hand Clapping” presents newly commissioned works by: Cao Fei, Duan Jianyu, Lin Yilin, Wong Ping, and Samson Young. These five artists explore the ways in which globalization affects our understanding of the future. Their commissioned works represent a range of traditional and new mediums, from oil on canvas to virtual-reality software. In her paintings and sculptures, Duan Jianyu celebrates the marginal figures who haunt the transitory zone where rural and urban, primitive and modern intersect. Wong Ping’s animated video, driven by the artist’s dark and risqué humor, addresses the tension between an aging population and the relentless pace of the digital economy. Lin Yilin’s VR simulation tests the potential of such technology to enable us to inhabit the experience of another person or even an object—in this case, a basketball. In her fantastical film installation, Cao Fei examines the physical and psychological impact that automated industry exerts on the human body and society. Samson Young plays upon our obsession with values of truth and authenticity by inventing an array of impossible musical instruments and digitally engineering their sounds. Together, these works challenge a universal, homogeneous, and technocratic future determined by economic growth and technological advancement. Info: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 5th Avenue, New York, Duration: 4/5-21/10/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Wed, Fri & Sun 10:00-17:45, Sat 10:00-19:45, www.guggenheim.org

Damien Hirst’s solo exhibition “Colour Space Paintings” is the first exhibition of the series in the United States, following their presentation earlier this year at Houghton Hall in England. Evolving from the iconic “Spot Paintings”, which are among Hirst’s most recognized works, the new seris revisit the free and spontaneous nature of his first two spot paintings from 1986, exactly thirty years later. While the “Spot Paintings” were originally conceived as an endless series, the “Colour Space Paintings” are a finite body of work, commenced and completed in 2016. The latter adhere to some of the formal rules established for the preview works: no single color is ever repeated in a painting, and the dot size isranging from one quarter of an inch to four inches in diameter, is consistent within each work. However, without the logic of the grid and the symmetry of the perfect circle, the Colour Space Paintings appear looser, more stochastic, and more open to incident than the Spot Paintings. Here, Hirst’s imperfect discs overlap and jostle in a riot of color, like so many particles under a microscope. Info: Gagosian Gallery, 555 West 24th Street, New York, Duration 4/5-30/6/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.gagosian.com

Through performance, sound, sculpture and painting, Florence Peake’s “RITE: on this pliant body we slip our WOW” re-interprets a moment in modernism’s history: Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring”, composed in 1913 for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, the original performance is notorious for the riot it provoked on the opening night. The exhibition premiered on 6/5/18 as a performance, six tonnes of clay stands as a wet landscape in the center of the gallery, activated by a host of dancers who perform in it. The clay is shaped and reshaped, progressively turning into mauled flesh as they work. When the performance is over, the clay remained as a sculptural memory of the dance, and Peake installed a painted frieze circling the gallery walls. To create these, Peake collaborated with members of the community who interact with a modernist architectural icon almost every day, drawing outlines of their bodies as they move to the music in a series of private sessions. Inspired by iconic methods of depicting historic scenes in classical and medieval friezes and tapestries, the wall-paintings abstract the Rite of Spring through movement, drawing, paint and plaster. Info: De La Warr Pavilion, Marina, Bexhill, East Sussex, UK, Duration: 12/5-2/9/18, Days & Hours: Daily 10:00-18:00, www.dlwp.com

Capturing our complex surroundings with the dramatic or conversely tranquil aura of his strokes. Whether from an aerial or panoramic viewpoint, layers and folds of interior and exterior spaces are manifested in each of his paintings, executed in dark, light or colorful tonalities. Nuri Kuzucan explores the complex geometries of dense urban landscapes, showing how modern metropolises across the world have become signifiers and quantifiers of modern living, how architecture determines people’s actions and thoughts. Edouard Malingue Gallery, presents the first solo exhibition in Mainland China by Nuri Kuzucan. To understand Kuzucan’s oeuvre, one must understand the city he lives in. As the main metropolis of Turkey, Istanbul is the country’s epicentre of economics, culture and history. As the city straddles between Europe and Asia, Istanbul is a cultural and religious melting pot of East and West. Once the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, as well as the Ottoman Empire, Istanbul has preserved a diverse range of cultural heritage, with ancient museums, cathedrals, mosques, souks, palaces, as well as a stunning natural scenery. It is important to remember that the artist and his art originated in this city which overwhelms the senses of visitors from around the world. Info: Edouard Malingue Gallery, 2202, 2879 Longteng Avenue, Xuhui District, Shanghai, Duration: 13/5-17/6/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-18:00, https://edouardmalingue.com

Michel Comte present “Light III” an exhibition featuring several works that explore the impact of environmental decline on glacial landscapes and our oceans. With “Light III”, the Swiss artist and photographer continues a series of evocative exhibitions. The works of the exhibition made in and made from China, both revealing and connecting to the effects of climate change in the country; Michel Comte has been in China for several months prior to the exhibition, sourcing materials and creating the works. At the heart of Light III is a 580-piece porcelain installation with layers of salt and pigment used to create an immense horizon of a dying glacier in full abstraction, acting as a symbolic reference to the environmental effects of pollution on glacial ice. Info: Galerie Urs Meile Beijing, D10, 798 East Street, 798 Art District, No. 2 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing, Duration: 19/5-10/8/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:30, https://galerieursmeile.com