ART NEWS:Nov.02
The exhibition “Rituals of Signs and Metamorphosis” situates the works of ten visionary artists between historical and contemporary systems of thinking, which allows the unexpected, the unknown and the mysterious to appear. The works are displayed along an imagined ritual path of concepts and forms, materials and mediums, gestures and actions, and they explore different registers of metamorphoses. This poetic journey leads us to question the certainty of narratives, provokes reflections and ideas, and sparks the desire to seek out divinatory signs. The exhibition aims to create a collective dialogue in a space where various critical and methodological approaches converge to shift rigid patterns of perception and induce intuitive ones. The exhibition sheds light on the concepts behind the aesthetics, offering both a rich visual and reflective experience. It signals various aesthetic and epistemological structures that suggest that nothing is constant in the universe and everything is always changing in form and essence. Info: Curator: Tarek Abou El Fetouh, Red Brick Art Museum, Shunbai Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing, Duration: 3/11/18-7/4/19, Days & Hours: Tue-sun 10:00-17:30, www.redbrickartmuseum.com
The exhibition “World Receivers” provides insight into an extraordinary and largely unknown chapter of modernism: Completely independent of one another, Georgiana Houghton in England, Hilma af Klint in Sweden, and Emma Kunz in Switzerland each developed their own abstract visual language highly charged with meaning. With their works, all three strove to visualize laws of nature, the spiritual, and the supernatural; they followed their convictions with persistence and self-assertion. Georgiana Houghton, Hilma af Klint, and Emma Kunz explored invisible forces and the transcendental; the works presented in this exhibition are the result of spiritual experiences and communication with a higher realm. The three artists understood themselves as mediums, as recipients of messages which perhaps only they could hear and which they captured in the form of works of art. With this form of mediumistic artistic creation, the artist subject relinquishes his or her ego, hands it over, as it were, at the studio door, and acts as a mediator between a hidden and the visible world. Their works are complemented here by little-known films by Harry Smith, the brothers John Whitney and James Whitney. Info: Curators: Karin Althaus and Sebastian Schneider, The Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Luisenstraße 33, Munich, Duration: 6/11/18-10/3/19, Days & Hours: Tue 10:00-20:00, Wed-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.lenbachhaus.de
The exhibition “Architecture Itself and Other Postmodernist Myths” proposes a counter-reading of postmodern procedures, replacing the myth of the autonomous architect with accounts of empirically describable architectural activity. The exhibition makes original contributions both to a counter-historiography of the postmodern and to contemporary curatorial methods. A broad selection of material evidence, including drawings, models, and primary source documents gathered from building sites, libraries, and archives including the CCA collection—supports accounts of architects’ and architecture’s entanglements with bureaucracy, the art market, and academic and private institutions, as postmodernization challenges the discipline to redefine its modes of practice and reconsider the very idea of architecture itself. Info: Curator: Sylvia Lavin, Associate Curator: Sarah Hearne, Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1920 rue Baile, Montreal, Duration: 7/11/18-7/4/19, Days & Hours: Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, www.cca.qc.ca
The exhibition “Adapt to Survive: Notes from the Future” brings together artworks by seven artists who imagine how our world might look and feel in the future. Engaging with the idea that adaptation is necessary for survival, the artists present films, sculpture and text-based works that explore ideas of change and hybrid forms of architecture, biology, technology, and language. Taking its title from the phrase adopted recently by the business sector, the exhibition explores the idea that Darwin’s theory of evolution can serve as a metaphor for a future-facing strategy for survival and growth. In recent years, the phrase “adapt to survive” has been adopted by entrepreneurial start-ups and professional “change-makers,” suggesting a fast-paced form of agency that is antithetical to Darwin’s concept of natural selection. In recent decades, futurology has become established as an area of research combining game theory, statistics, and speculation. Responding to these cultural shifts, the artists in Adapt to Survive: Notes from the Future make educated guesses about our society’s evolution and progression, but equally convey uncertainty and scepticism about our accelerating patterns of growth and consumption. Info: Concrete, Alserkal Avenue, Street 17, Dubai, Duration: 7-21/11/18, www.concrete.ae
Cecily Brown’s work offers a female artist’s gaze at a world which in many ways has been created by men – and that part of it is hard to ignore. The exhibition “Where, When, How Often and with Whom” is one of a succession of presentations of contemporary painting featuring Peter Doig, Daniel Richter and Tal R. Cecily Brown’s relationship with history is not about following imperceptibly in the footsteps of the artists mentioned, for when she made her impact in earnest on the art scene the figurations and fragments in her works had in the meantime become a far more complex and “difficult” issue. She has maintained and actively exploited the perplexity and incomprehension that the current age can have in the face of such an obviously improvisational talent, which at one and the same time pays tribute to the potential of painting for seduction, and insistently grafts onto it classic pornography, elements from the visual worlds of Bosch, Goya and Hogarth, and most recently motifs from the human disasters of our own time. Info: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Gl Strandvej 13, Humlebæk, Duration: 8/11/18-10/3/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:00-22:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.louisiana.dk
Seth Price in his solo exhibition “Hell Has Everything” presents a wave of new experiments, including mixed-media paintings, a large-scale7 video projection, and back-lit photographic works. Price’s new paintings employ printing, collage, paint, and photographic techniques. Some are based on photographs the artist took in New York’s streets and subways while others feature ambiguous objects constructed with 3D modeling software. All the works are manipulated by way of chemicals, pigmented polymer fluids, and powdered earth. The video-projection “Social Synth” is suspended from the ceiling. To create the work’s bizarre imagery, Price utilized a robotic camera that spent hours roving across a squid’s skin in order to yield over ten thousand photographs, which were then processed through software designed for map-making and 3D cinema. In this hybrid work, natural and artificial are intertwined, and a computer-generated light source becomes the protagonist in an uncanny organic landscape. Info: Petzel Gallery, 456 West 18th Street, New York, Duration: 8/11/18-5/1/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.petzel.com
The exhibition “Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World” is one of the largest exhibitions held to date on Chinese contemporary art during the most transformative period in the country’s recent history, from 1989, the year of the Tiananmen protests, to 2008, when the Olympic Games were held in Beijing. Presenting 60 artists and 120 artworks, the exhibition provides a fresh interpretive survey of Chinese experimental art in a context framed by the end of the Cold War, the spread of globalization, and the rise of China as a world power. The exhibition is divided into thematic and chronological sections, and encompasses a variety of artistic practices, including performance, painting, photography, installation, and video art as well as socially engaged projects. With a concentration on the conceptualist art practices of two generations of artists, this exhibition examines how Chinese artists have been both critical observers and agents of China’s emergence as a global presence and places their experiments firmly in a global art-historical context. Info: Curators: Alexandra Munroe, Philip Tinari, Kyung An and Xiaorui Zhu-Nowell, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFOMA), 151 Third Street Entrance, San Francisco, Duration: 10/11/18-24/2/19, Days & Hours: MO-Tue & Fri-Su 10:00-17:00, Thu 10:00-21:00, www.sfmoma.org
Eduardo Kacworks on the interface of electronic art and biological systems, of computer tech and transgenetics, of video art and biotelematics. The artistic interlinking of nature and technology is his way of philosophically questioning processes of communication. In this, he is particularly interested in the communication between species, for example the processual exchange between human and plant by means of technology, presupposing organic processes and technical sequences as non-verbal forms of communication. Human, biological, and technical language systems are codings by which information is communicated, received, and processed. In the exhibition “Inner Telescope”, Eduardo Kac fathoms in videos, photographs, drawings, and textile works the linguistically coded versus the figurative representation of the self, along with the localisation of the self in the context of the respective environs. The video work of the same title positions a simple paper object within a technical construct in the infinity of space – a representation of the self as an ephemeral and fragile element of the all-encompassing nature, organically structured and creatively made with simplest codes in an environment of highly complex technologies. Info: DAM Gallery, Seydelstr. 30 corner of Elisabeth-Mara-Strasse, Berlin, Duration: 10/11-30/12/18, Days & Hours: Wed-Fri 13:00-18:00, Sat 12:00-16:00, https://dam-gallery.de
Silvina Der Meguerditchian presents “Please! Material and Immaterial Call” her first solo exhibition. Der Meguerditchian works with various materials and in different media and embarks on a visual trip of deciphering the relationship between ‘material’ and ‘immaterial’ world. Drawing inspiration by the interpretive challenges of traditions, such as the Catholic ex-votos, the Buddhist gau (portable reliquary / amulet) or the Greek Orthodox votive offerings (‘tamata’), the works presented in the exhibition explore the ways in which personal memories, dreams, desires, intimate moments live in the objects that human create during their lives or those they select to infuse with special meanings, as an act of faith, love or hope. At the same time, the artist investigates this motif of actions in juxtaposition to themes which stand in the core of her artistic practice: individual and collective memory, objects, personal stories and History, private and collective spaces, the connection of a collective practice with the action of a person or a particular community. Info: Kalfayan Galleries, 11 Haritos Street, Kolonaki, Athens, Duration: 15/11/18-11/1/19, Days & Hours: Mon 11:00-15:00, Tue-Fri 11:00-19:00, Sat 1:00-15:00, www.kalfayangalleries.com
Tom Everhart’s works in his solo exhibition “Sleeping Beauties: The Have Mercy Paintings” are both familiar and new. Using cartoon characters in his art, Everhart utilizes the instantly recognizable image of Snoopy to communicate a new sensibility – one that is at once accessible and exotic. Working alongside the likes of artists such Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat in the 80s of New York, he then became fascinated with the architecture of Schulz’s black ink line and its potential for monumental shifts in tone and scale. From the early expressionist slashes of his works, to the prismatic dot, to the sculptural tendencies of his most recent art, Everhart has an unmatched eye for color and a willingness to experiment with textures and surfaces. Everhart’s work has been exhibited in Museums including the Louvre (Paris, France), Museu da Cidade (Lisbon, Portugal), Suntory Museum (Osaka, Japan), and the Charles M. Schulz Museum (Santa Rosa, CA). Info: Chase Contemporary, 231 West 10th Avenue, New York City, Duration: 15/11-15/12/18, Days & Hours: Daily 10:00-18:00, www.chasecontemporary.com