ART NEWS:Nov.04

Julius Popp presents his latest installation work, “bit.fall pulse”, which is the largest piece of his signature series entitled “bit.fall”, previously shown at various venues throughout the world. Within each of the four large containers stacked toward the ceiling of Seoul Box, hundreds of water droplets form a word, which then disappears after a very short time. As the different words repeatedly appear and replace the previous word in a cascade form, the viewer’s curiosity is instantly stimulated. Info: National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, 30 Samcheong-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul, Duration: 10/11/15-4/9/16, Days & Hours: Tue, Thu-Fri & Sun 10:00-18:00, Wed & Sat 10:00-21:00, www.mmca.go.kr

William Burroughs called artists mapmakers, that they create a poetic cartography that attempts to convey meaning and shape the world in which we live. The work of Nicolás Paris is very much in this vein: a poetic resistance against conventions, rules and ingrained beliefs, engaged as an attempt to discover new ways of seeing and experiencing the places that we encounter. The exhibition “Four variations on nothing or talking about that which has no name” is conceived as a process of examination in which art is seen as a series of encounters and situations that happen in time. Four variations, four rooms, four concepts: tool, method, idea and system—these are the underpinnings of the artist’s thought and work. Info: Curator: Filipa Oliveira, Museu Coleção Berardo, Praça do Império, Lisbon, Duration: 18/11/15-6/3/16, Days & Hours: Mon-Sun 10:00-19:00, http://en.museuberardo.pt

This year’s “Bloomberg New Contemporaries” brings together artists working across a range of media, with materiality, form and the process of making key to the selected works. This year the themes of gender, labour, value and consumption are present in the final selection, as well as an interest in process, the act of making, materiality and modes of production. Complementing this year’s annual national touring exhibition is a public programme of talks and live events that bring together differing viewpoints. Info: Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), The Mall, London, Duration: 25/11/15-24/1/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-23:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, www.ica.org.uk

This exhibition “PAINT” at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek celebrates painting as an art form – directly, openly and stripped of any framing devices and narratives. Quite literally, too, a special range of selected French masterpieces are exhibited without their lovely, heavy golden frames in settings that focus attention on the art itself and on its key quality: its ability to invite contemplation. Without the frames the canvases and their subjects appear exactly as they were when the artists stopped working on them. Their brushstrokes, hatchings and layers of pigment are revealed to us in new ways, unveiling more of the creative process behind the painting. Info: NY Carlsberg Glyptotek, Dantes Plads 7, Copenhagen, Duration: 26/11/15-3/3/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-22:00, www.glyptoteket.com

Ramírez-Figueroa’s practice is rooted in folklore and dreams, conspiracy theories, ancient mythologies and magic. The Guatemalan civil war of 1960–96 is a recurring subject in his work, softened only by the at times absurd or humorous approach that colours many of his sculptures, performances and works on paper. The two newly commissioned sculptural installations that comprise “God’s Reptilian Finger” focus on the amateur archaeology practiced by Mormon missionaries in Guatemala since 1947 and current followers of contemporary British conspiracy theorist David Icke. Info: Gasworks, 155 Vauxhall Street, London, Duration: 26/11/15-7/2/16, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 12:00-18:00, www.gasworks.org

Triennale di Milano presents “Ennesima”. An Exhibition of Seven Exhibitions on Italian Art. Not “one” exhibition of Italian art but, literally, an “exhibition of exhibitions” that, via seven paths, tries to explore the last 50 years of contemporary art in Italy, collecting more than 120 works and over 70 artists, from the early sixties through to the present day, in a display extending over the whole first floor of the Milan Triennale. The title is inspired by a work by Giulio Paolini, Ennesima (appunti per la descrizione di sette tele datate 1973), the first version of which, dated 1973, is divided into seven paintings. This gives the number of exhibition projects included in the exhibition for La Triennale, seven independent exhibitions, in the form of notes or suggestions that explore different aspects, links, coincidences and discrepancies, as well as the exhibition grammar in the recent history of Italian art. Info: Curator: Vincenzo de Bellis, Triennale of Milan, Viale Alemagna 6, Milan, Duration: 26/11/15-6/3/16, Dasy & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:30-20:30, www.triennale.org

Liviu Stoicoviciu has been visualizing the generative processes derived from the abstract virtues of the Golden Ratio for almost half a century. This obsessive activity has resulted in countless drawings and sketches of refined subtlety, in graphs envisioning chaotic fractals, in large-format paintings trying to bring order to this chaos, and in a number of sculptures that point to the spatial virtues of those processes. The artist is a visionary who designs his shapes at urban scale, and a utopian who imagines his drawings transformed into objects with practical functions. Her solo exhibition entitled “Imagined Cities” is on show at: National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC) Bucharest, 2–4 Izvor Street, The Palace of Parliament, Bucharest, Duration: 27/11/15-20/3/16, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.mnac.ro

Folkert de Jong’s expressive sculptures arise from a strong fascination for the psychological and bodily human condition. As the title of the exhibition “Court of Justice” already indicates, this time De Jong focuses specifically on elements of justice, from the hierarchical design of courtrooms, to the psychological manipulation of juries, the theatricality surrounding a judgement and the following isolation. The exhibition is a peculiar fusion of courtroom and prison, a space in between, primarily resembling a scientific laboratory. Info: Galerie Fons Welters, Bloemstraat 140, Amsterdam, Duration: 27/11/15-16/1/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 13:00-18:00, www.fonswelters.nl

The artistic roots of picking up waste material can be found in Dadaism and n the ‘40s and ‘50s other artists followed, such as Joseph Cornell, Robert Rauschenberg, John Chamberlain, César, Arman or Daniel Spoerri. Jeroen Frateur’s art is entangled with the art historical traditions mentioned above, though his work has more to do with composition and it obviously challenges a definition/status that hesitates between sculpture and installation. Frateur’s exhibition “La Vie quotidienne Des Outils Inutiles” is characterized by a visible, ingenious layeredness with regard to the materials it is composed of. Info: Lily Robert, 3 rue des Haudriettes, Paris, Duration: 28/11/15-15/1/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, Sun 14:00-18:00, www.lilyrobert.com

“In it”, is an exhibition of works by Jana Euler. Euler’s practice ranges far beyond the confines of the medium of painting, although they are central to each of her exhibitionsThe exhibition’s title, “In it”, challenges to question our own position in its space while also adumbrating the motifs and visual vocabulary of the art on display. An expansive heart-shaped installation likewise titled initially seems to block the visitor’s entry to the gallery before welcoming the viewer into the room. Info: Portikus, Alte Brücke 2, Maininsel, Frankfurt, Duration: 28/11/15-20/1/16, Days & Hours: Tue & Thu-Sun 11:00-18:00 Wed 11:00-20:00, www.portikus.de

Jasmina Cibic’s project “Spielraum”, both informative and appeasing, considers decoration as the key element in the creation of patriotic spectacle and takes the lifespan of its application to the test. The project reformulates the exhibition space as a combination of gallery, film set and theatre, as the many elements oscillate between prop, sculpture and to stage. “Spielraum” invites us to experience the programmatic decoration behind a composite cultural heritage, pointing to the similarities between different ideological spaces and their relation to representation and soft power. Info: Onomatopee, Willemstraat 27, Eindhoven, Duration: 28/11/15-31/1/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 13:00-17:00, www.onomatopee.net

For her first solo exhibition in Poland, Alicja Kwade moves outside the boundaries of the white cube and engages with the industrial space of TRAFO. A survey of the artist’s video works, many exhibited institutionally for the first time, interacts with the immersive sound and light installation «Nach Osten» to present the artist’s vision of an alternate world seen ‘through a glass darkly’. the installation is being shown alongside a selection of the artist’s unexhibited early video works, allowing viewers to classify Kwade’s more well-known sculptures within the context of their precursors for the first time. Info: TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art, 4 Świętego Ducha Street, Szczecin, Duration: 29/11/15-20/2/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-19:00, http://trafo.org

Ben Skinner grew up in a small oil town in Southern Ontario. He is often on the lookout for new materials and techniques to employ in his visual art practice. Among other formats, he has created work using plexiglass, gold leaf, holographic foil, LED lights, spray paint, and even candy sprinkles. Whether he uses paint, or sprinkles, or plaster, or mirrors, there’s a brilliantly absurd quality to it all. And if you look for long enough many of the dad jokes become something quite profound. His new exhibition is on presentation at: Modus Art Gallery, 23 Place des Vosges, Paris, 29/11/15 Hours: Tue-Sat 10:30-20:00, www.modus-gallery.com

“Again for the First Time: Contemporary Remakings of Abstraction” is the first of two international group exhibitions, it examines the reconfiguration and contextualization of abstraction in recent artistic practices. Aiming to reassess abstract art’s critical role as aesthetic idiom, perceptual process, and research form, this project considers how abstraction’s constant re-makings keep it crucial, a strategy to think contemporary culture and to incite ongoing critical dialogues with everyday reality. Info” Curator: Rina Carvajal, Durban Segnini Gallery, 3072 SW 38th Ave., Miami, Duration: 30/11/15-30/3/16, http://durbansegnini.com

With the exhibition “Hermann Scherchen: alles hörbar machen II”, the Swiss artist Luca Frei dedicates his solo show to Hermann Scherchen and his late musical research in Gravesano, Switzerland. We find Frei juggling several hats in this project: visual artist, researcher, archivist, and grandson of Hermann Scherchen. In a sculptural installation, he reacts to the architectural interventions of Hermann Scherchen and his acoustic experiments, whilst a photo edition titled Gravesano Album provides an insight into the social and musical events that took place in the building and garden of Gravesano. Info: Barbara Wien gallery & Art Bookshop, Schöneberger Ufer 65 (3rd floor), Berlin, Duration: 1/12/15-30/1/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 13:00-18:00 Sat 12:00-18:00, www.barbarawien.de

The exhibition “A LABOUR OF LOVE” focuses on a key part of the Weltkulturen Museum’s contemporary art collection: 600 works from South Africa, which the Museum acquired in 1986. The selection of works from the museum’s collection is informed by different ways of reading the notion of love in the works themselves, as well as by their historical contexts, love in human relations, but the works also reference forms of love in complex hierarchical relationships, for example, between patron and artist, where the dynamics driven by religion, faith, politics, activism and economics play a major role. Info: Curators: Gabi Ngcobo & Yvette Mutumba, Weltkulturen Museum, Schaumainkai 29, Frankfurt, Duration: 3/12/15-24/6/16, Days & Hours: Tue & Thu-Sun 11:00-18:00, Wed 11:00-20:00, www.weltkulturenmuseum.de

The thematic exhibition “Recto Verso”, presents artworks that consciously foreground the hidden, concealed or forgotten phenomenon of “the back”. Western art tradition has mainly conceived of paintings as frontal (“recto”) artifacts. The back (“verso”) carries significantly less cultural meaning, destined to be beyond the public’s perception, and only visible to the artists themselves or staff at museums and galleries. In this exhibition, artists flip the back of a canvas to the front by using, for example, the traditional trompe l’oeil technique, to foreground the frame, not the picture. Or, double exposure photography is used to see through the work itself and emphasize the structural and physical features of the object. Info: Fondazione Prada, Largo Isarco 2, Milan, Duration: 3/12/15-7/2/16, Days & Hours: Sun-Thu 11:00-19:00 Fri-Sat 11:00-22:00, www.fondazioneprada.org

The year 2016 is the 40th anniversary of Victor Burgin’s seminal photo-text series “UK76”. To mark the occasion Richard Saltoun Gallery will present the work in its entirety and in the form in which Burgin’s works of the ‘60s and ’70s were originally shown: pasted directly to the wall and scraped off at the end of the exhibition. “UK76” comprises eleven large photographic prints overlaid with text. The photographs were originally commissioned from Burgin by the National Community Development Project and Coventry workshop. Burgin subsequently added short texts and captions ‘reversed out’ over the photographs in ironic reference to fashion magazine spreads. Info: Richard Saltoun Gallery, 111 Great Titchfield Street, London, Duration: 4/12/15-29/1/16, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-18:00, www.richardsaltoun.com