ART NEWS:Jan.02

“Slow, simple, sweet” is the first solo exhibition by Belgian artist Alain Biltereyst in Italy. The artist continues to explore shapes and colours through his plywood paintings series. Although his small paintings tend to be abstract, the artist always starts from an existing (urban) reality. The study of signs is a theme that runs through Biltereyst’s work. These ties to the present are what differentiate Biltereyst from the abstract art of early last century, which wanted to evoke a world of its own, separate from the existing reality. In his work we always find a reference, to the contemporary everyday life, the here and the now. Info: Brand New Gallery, via Farini 32, Milan, Duration: 14/1-20/2/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-13:00 & 14:30-19:00, www.brandnew-gallery.com

“Two Projects: Tamuna Sirbiladze and Graham Collins” will be on view at the Almine Rech Gallery Brussels. In 2010, on the occasion of Franz West’s solo exhibition, Sirbiladze exhibited paintings in dialogue with sculptures by the Austrian artist. For this latest exhibition, Sirbiladze will present recent paintings created from 2013 to 2015. This new series of paintings extends Graham Collins’ exploration of the status and context of the act of painting. In each of these paintings the conventional stretched canvas is supplanted by plastic casts of an array of objects. His in this exhibition explore similar themes by different means. Improbably upright, bronze casts of tortilla chips, toothbrushes or hairbands, the sculptures defy any dimensional imperative, elegant elaborations of that early instinct to pile and to prove our power to raise. Info: Almine Rech Gallery, 20 rue De L’Abbaye Abdjistraat, Brussels, Duration: 14/1-27/2/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.alminerech.com

Almost 68 years from Waiting for Godot first edition, one of the most important theatrical plays that marked the previous century, “Godot” seems to preserve his timeliness more than ever. The visual art project “Searching for a Godot- Deus Ex Machina’s stories” attempts within a contemporary approach to feature the conceptual pluralism of Waiting for Godot as well as its political and social aspect focusing on exploring the Deus ex-Machina theory. Godot’s story, though, did not start in the mid-20th century. Deus ex-Machina theory originates in ancient Greek theatre and continues to stay alive even today. Waiting for Godot launches in the ‘50s opening a new chapter in the history of theatre. Info: Curator: Maria Xypolopoulou, ARTWALL Project Space, 26 Sofokleous Str., Athens, Duration: 15/1-13/2/16, Days & Hours: Tue & Thu 16:00-21:00, Fri 17:00-21:00, Sat 13:00-16:00, https://theartwall.wordpress.com

M+ Screenings marks another significant chapter in the evolution of M+ Museum. “M+ Screenings: Visible Places” is the first programme of a new ongoing series that showcases a diverse range of moving image works. Using Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities as a point of departure, presents works by 13 Hong Kong and international artists and filmmakers. These animations, artist moving image, documentary and feature films examine how experiences, memories, and desires of our lived environments are (re)invented and (re)imagined on-screen. Info: Curator: Yung Ma, Broadway Cinematheque, Yau Ma Tei, Hong Kong, Duration: 15-17/1/16, www.westkowloon.hk

Caecilia Tripp’s solo exhibition “Going Space”, brings together an emblematic collection of earlier works that the artist has produced since 2004, as well as a number of new pieces that can be seen for the first time. Through sound and film installations, photographs, sculptures, and performances, “Going Space” invites visitors into migratory spaces via a fluid geography, and makes our worldliness resonate on a cosmic scale. Adopting the form of a living archive of our struggles, Tripp’s exhibition celebrates our collective dreams of a shared future. Info: Centre d’art contemporain d’Ivry – le Crédac, 25-29 rue Raspail, La Manufacture des Œillets, Ivry-sur-Seine, Duration: 15/1-20/3/16, Days & Hours: Mon-Thu 14:00-18:00, Sat-Sun 14:00-19:00, www.credac.fr

The visual artist and filmmaker Davide Quagliola (aka Quayola) likes to deconstruct architecture and historic artworks, rebuilding them to form the basis of his video pieces. He reveals the painter who’s been his biggest source of inspiration. Quayola’s new exhibition “Iconographies” represent a continuation of an ongoing project that employs computational methods to translate iconic paintings into abstract compositions made of points, lines, geometries, hues, saturations and texts. Quayola’s abstract forms become distinct through their power of differentiation, allowing a new visual language to emerge that addresses both object and process. Info: NOME, Dolziger Straße 31, Berlin, Duration: 15/1-5/3/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 15:00-19:00, http://nomeproject.com

Heiner Goebbels has created the multimedia installation “The Human Province”, in which he brings together, in new and unexpected ways, an array of images, sounds, speech, spaces, and rhythms – building up layer upon layer of visual and auditory experiences. The installation is made up of 54 different film sequences, played on a giant wall of monitors, together forming a composition that explores polyphony both as a musical and visual phenomenon and that presents an urban soundscape of various cities, criss-crossed by actor André Wilms. Info: Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau, Brühlsche Terrasse, Dresden, Duration: 15/1-10/4/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.skd.museum

Turning its gaze upon the Pearl River Delta region and taking the sociological issue of population mobility as its foundation, the group exhibition “Adrift” observes and reflects on the phenomenon of migration through the contexts of the works on display, and the dialogues that occur between them. Most of the participating artists are from Guangdong province, and take their personal experiences or research as the starting point for their creations, contemplating the issue of migration with poetic sensitivity, intellectual critique, or nomadic openness. Info: OCAT Shenzhen, Building F2, Enping Road, Overseas Chinese Town, Nanshan District, Shenzhen, Dutation: 16/1-28/2/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-17:30, http://ocat.org.cn

Exhibition of works by the Belgian artist Philippe Van Snick. The exhibition spans almost five decades, and traces developments in this artist’s highly consistent body of work, best known for its Postminimalist painting. Van Snick’s systematic approach to abstraction both offers fresh perspectives on recent developments in painting, and on a more fundamental level connects to the algorithmic interests of the post-digital generation. The exhibition departs from a key work from 1968, “Synthesis of Traditional L-shaped Room”, and ends with a new work, “Mexican Dream Cabin”. These two works, with nearly 50 years in between them, are monumental architectural structures in which Van Snick expresses his interest in systematic methodologies and a minimalist visual language. Info: De Hallen Haarlem, Grote Markt 16, Haarlem, Duration: 16/1-16/5/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-17:00, www.dehallen.nl

John Akomfrah’s video installation “Vertigo Sea”, a three-screen film, first seen at the 56th Venice Biennale, is a sensual, poetic and cohesive meditation on man’s relationship with the sea and exploration of its role in the history of slavery, migration, and conflict. Fusing archival material, readings from classical sources, and newly shot footage, the work explicitly highlights the greed, horror and cruelty of the whaling industry, juxtaposed with shots of African migrants crossing the ocean in a journey fraught with danger in hopes of “better life” and thus delivering a timely and potent reminder of the current issues around global migration, the refugee crisis, slavery, alongside ecological concerns. The firs UK presentation of “Vertigo Sea” with this new work “Tropikos” will be shown at: Arnolfini, 16 Narrow Quay, Bristol, Duration: 16/1-10/4/16, Days & Hours: Tue & Thu-Sun 11:00-18:00, Wed 11:00-20:00, www.arnolfini.org.uk

Mark Hadjipateras’ new exhibition “Universal Habitat” is the culmination of many years’ work and a comprehensive proposal for his imaginary country. It combines elements of his work from the late ‘80s to the present. It introduces new symbolisms and assembles the artist’s research into a single harmonious whole. The protagonists of his work are the familiar inhabitants of the strange Kingdom of his Imagination who we were first introduced to in Geneology (2012). Hybrid archetypal figures leap off the pages of children’s books and cartoons, works of science fiction, epics, myths, the collective memory and the subconscious. Info: a antonopoulou art, 20 Aristofanous St. , 4th floor, Psyrri, Athens, Duration: 16/1-27/2/16, Days & Hours: Wed-Fri 14:00-20:00 Sat 12:00-1:00, http://www.aaart.gr

“SURF and SURFACES”, is an exhibition of works by French artist duo, Norbert Corsino and Nicole Corsino, otherwise known as n + n Corsino. As atypical authors of choreographic stories, the artist duo departs from the conventional stage, venturing into other fields of representation while exploring indeterminate and arbitrary spaces. They question the fundamentals of dance through their research into the nature and quality of movement and its relationship with writing, inviting spectators to go beyond the boundaries of continually (re)invented spaces. Through their often off-beat, unconventional use of various forms of technology, they reveal a carnal, sensual presence drawing on the memory of movement and its traces. Info: Ikkan Art Gallery, 39 Keppel Road, #01-05, Tanjong Pagar Distripark, Singapore, Duration: 18/1-27/2/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, http://ikkan-art.com

In the light of current geopolitical realities and aesthetic debates, Grotjahn’s evocation of Captain America may be timely, if not more than a little ironic. In the large-scale, ten-part drawing with its centrifugal radiant motif, Grotjahn synthesizes the comic-book hero into pure, vibrating lines of force in symbolic red, white, and blue. Geometry and process resonate with each other in the razor-sharp perspectival rays and random, all-over marks-traces of Grotjahn’s tenacious working method, as he moves from one drawing to another—as well as the skeins of acid-yellow calligraphy that surface from time to time, like an Abstract Expressionist palimpsest. In addition to the multitudes of individual compositions, Grotjahn has produced several magisterial sequential drawings, consistent with the modernist fascination for serial iteration as free, constructive becoming. Info: Gagosian Gallery, 980 Madison Avenue, New York, Duration: 19/1-20/2/16, Days & Hours: tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.gagosian.com

In her performance and video work spanning the early ’90s to the early ’00s, Donegan often used her body as an apparatus for mark-making, parodying the conventions of commercials and music videos while considering the politics of self-representation. Her New Museum exhibition “Scenes + Commercials” tackles the ways and means by which our connections to the past are produced, fabricated, and renewed, particularly in fashion and art history. Info: Curators: Johanna Burton & Sara O’Keeffe, New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York, Duration: 20/1-10/4/16, Days & Hours: Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, www.newmuseum.org

The exhibition “La chose, même – the real thing” offers a panorama of the work of Julião Sarmento, a major figure of contemporary Portuguese art whose career was international from the outset. The artist began working at the end of the ‘70s, when freedom had reemerged due to the end of the Salazar dictatorship. Over the years, Julião Sarmento developed a highly diverse body of work, ranging from photography, drawing, sculpture, video to performance, while maintaining a close connection with text, which he incorporates and assembles in fragments. Info: Curator: Ami Barak, Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian, 39 Boulevard de la Tour-Maubourg, Paris, Duration: 20/1-17/4/16, days & Hours: Mon-Fri 9:00-18:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.gulbenkian-paris.org

The exhibition “Leaves of Stone / Foglie di Pietra”, is the Giuseppe Penone’s first gallery exhibition in Hong Kong, which includes key works from the last decade. In an oeuvre spanning more than forty years, Penone has explored the subtle levels of interplay between man, nature, and art. His work represents a poetic expansion of Arte Povera’s radical break with conventional media, emphasizing the involuntary processes of respiration, growth, and aging that are common to both human being and tree. Info: Gagosian Gallery, 7/F Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central, Hong Kong, Duration: 21/1-12/3/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.gagosian.com

“Visit from Hokusai”, is a new series of two-part ink drawings. In each diptych, Baselitz pairs reconsidered motifs from his own work with iterations, in ink with blue, yellow or green watercolor washes, of an intimate late work by Hokusai, a wry self-portrait sketched at the end of a letter to his print publisher in 1842. The letter accompanied a group of prints made forty years earlier, which the Japanese master described to his publisher as repetitive, unresolved, and immature. He signed it with his pseudonym of the day: “Sincerely yours, the eighty-three year old Hachiemon”. Info: Gagosian Gallery, 19 place de Longemalle, Geneva, Duration: 21/1-18/3/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.gagosian.com