ART NEWS: May 02

 

In his new body of work, “Between Instinct and Reason”, Will Cotton continues to reflect on pop culture and a new American mythology. In Cotton’s world of sugary treats, pink unicorns, and hypermasculine cowboys, he is now introducing a new player: the mermaid. Cotton depicts glossy scenes of seductive sirens who are as beautiful as they are potentially dangerous. They tempt cowboys with baked goods and encircle them in oceanic whirlpools; they gaze like Narcissus into their own watery reflections and engage in serious discussion between one another. We observe them from afar in their natural candy-laden habitat, and in other instances are captivated by their hypnotic gaze. Just as the cowboy tries and fails to tame the unicorn, the mermaid cannot be controlled by anyone. She can, however, control whomever she pleases. These paintings are not meant to be didactic—the artist intentionally blurs the line between good and evil. Cotton champions the mermaid as the strongest female character, unimpacted by moral standards and unthreatened by external forces. A siren will seduce and drown a sailor on a whim simply for her own entertainment. Using her singing and physical beauty, she ensnares male counterparts to satisfy her own desires. Subverting even the viewer’s gaze, never subject to the desires of others, the mermaid lures us in with predatory agency. Info: TEMPLON Gallery, 293 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 7/5-28/6/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.templon.com/

Spanning the breadth of Asta Gröting’s career, from the 1980s to the present, the exhibition “The Space Between Two People Having Sex and Space Between Two Women Having Sex”, highlights an ongoing, nuanced investigation into corporeality, its presence or absence. Gröting’s work delves into the unseen, the unsaid, and the invisible forces that bind us, both physically and metaphysically. It is an exploration of the ways in which bodies, whether tangible or abstract, are interconnected, revealing profound truths about our existence, intimacy, and relationships.One of the iconic pieces of the show is “Deep Sea Odyssey” (1982/2025), a reworking of Gröting’s earliest known sculpture, first created during her studies at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. The piece, shaped like a shell and sized to the artist’s own height, symbolically references femininity while also highlighting her position as one of the few female sculptors at the academy during that period. In the 2025 iteration, the shell has been transformed into an organic, with moss encrusting its surface as if it has been submerged in deep sea waters. The thick layer of moss invokes not just the passage of time but the artist’s own evolution and search for identity within the realm of sculpture. Info: Carlier | Gebauer Gallery, Calle de José Marañón 4, Madrid, Spain, Duration: 8/5-26/7/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:00-19:00, Sat 11:00-14:00, www.carliergebauer.com/

“Fragments” is both a major new book and eight exhibitions that will take place internationally during May 2025 in Basel, Brescia, Edinburgh, Hamburg, London, New York, Palma de Mallorca and Vienna. An artist, poet and landscape designer, Ian Hamilton Finlay reinvigorated the classical tradition in a body of work that encompasses a variety of creative forms to celebrate the sustaining power of words. He is best known for his garden at Little Sparta, set in the Pentland Hills, near Edinburgh, where he lived and worked for the last 40 years of his life, and for his guillotine installation, “A View to the Temple”, at Documenta, Kassel, 1987. He significantly influenced the concrete poetry movement, and his extensive printed poetical and graphical works were published by Wild Hawthorn Press, which he co-founded in 1961. His visual art work, achieved in collaboration with expert artists and craftspeople, can be found in museums, parks and gardens worldwide. Info: Curator: Pia Maria Simig, Galleria Massimo Minini, Via Luigi Apollonio 68, Brescia, Italy, Duration » 8/5- , Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-19:00, Sat 15:00-19:00, www.galleriaminini.it/

The love of art that is not made to be art, by people who do not call themselves artists, has permeated Richard Johansson’s artistry from the very beginning. This is reflected in the choice of material, the craftsmanship and methods, but also in the way the story is being told. His works could be excerpts from a road movie without end. They involve in a constant search for stories and encounters with characters waiting to be discovered. The journey goes beyond the highways and meanders into the darkness, ever closer to the core of existence. An imagery that tenderly depict memories, dreams and personal heroes. Richard works in a large variety of techniques and skillfully switches between different materials and expressions. “M/S Eternity”, the title of the exhibition, is also a large sized sculpture in aluminum and wood, depicting a ship. The work was created in connection with the loss of his father and is both a tribute and a meditation on time, transition and memory. Surrounding the sculpture is a series of small paintings that reflect on the people and moments that shape us, even if they often go unnoticed. The works carry both melancholy and humor, much like life itself. Info: Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Fredsgatan 12, Stockholm, Sweden, Duration: 8/5-5/6/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 12:00-17:00, Sat 12:00-16:00, www.gallerimagnuskarlsson.com/

The group exhibition “Fake Barn Country” speculates on a shared sense of practice between an expanded network of artists. It brings together formal and material associations, established conversations and fledgling connections, and draws on local, international and intergenerational references. Co-organised by three artists based in London, the selection describes a year of discussion and negotiation between sensibilities. Like many of those exhibiting, the selectors have been involved in artist-run projects in London and elsewhere – including Piper Keys, previously hosted within Raven Row – and the exhibition contains a number of artworks that recall specific shows in these spaces. Many of the works in the exhibition operate in relation to a kind of realism – with things shown as they are, or how they appear to be. There are found, reconstituted and reiterated forms and images – familiar materials, rudimentary devices, household stuff – while the ways and means of making are often economical, and include low-tech reproduction, layering and repetition, shopping, borrowing and covert recording. Info: Raven Row Gallery, 56 Artillery Lane, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 8/5-6/7/2025, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 11:00-18:00, https://ravenrow.org/

Best known for his sculptural works that explores the nature and boundaries of human perception, Markus Raetz’s practice is often focused on humorous reciprocals. The exhibition “Strangers & Lovers” and dedicated to Raetz, brings together works, some of which have a long exhibition history, while others are being shown to the public for the first time from his estate. Alongside geometric forms, figurative pieces dominate. Spanning works from 1966 to 2008, the exhibition honors an artist who worked tirelessly throughout his life. None of the works feel “foreign,” and yet it remains impossible to trace a linear development in his artistic output. Raetz’s work evolved in a spiral — a “process of constant, productive returns.” In line with the artist’s perspective — that drawing and sculptural creation are not separate genres but different modes of expressing a thought process — mobiles, small sculptures, sculptures, reliefs, prints, and drawings are exhibited together. The latter, drawings, hold fundamental significance in Raetz’s oeuvre and often serve as the “germ cell” for sculptural works. Info: Galerie Francesca Pia, Limmatstrasse 270, Zürich, Switzerland, Duration: 9/5-5/7/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-17:00, www.francescapia.com/gallery

The exhibition “Reframing Strangeness: Ha Bik Chuen’s Motherboards and Collagraphs: , an exhibition that refocuses on Ha Bik Chuen’s printmaking practice on the occasion of Ha’s 100th birth anniversary. “Motherboard” is the term that the artist coined for his collagraph plates. Unlike computer motherboards, Ha’s creations are decidedly analogue. They are assembled from wood and other found material through a highly labour-intensive process. Throughout his life, Ha created over 100 motherboards and kept them away from public view. He used these motherboards to produce over 3,000 editioned collagraphs mostly in the 1970s and 1980s. ‘Reframing Strangeness’ stages a selection of Ha’s motherboards, collagraphs and gouache drawings. On these surfaces, otherworldly creatures hover mid-air and ancient Chinese oracle bone scripts are combined with modern Chinese traditional characters and letters from the Roman alphabet. In the exhibition, the motherboards are placed next to their ‘offspring’ collagraphs and ‘parallel’ drawings to offer a re-reading of Ha’s interconnected art practice. The exhibition can also be considered as another interpretative engagement with Ha’s expansive practice by various practitioners, including the Jogjakarta-based research group Hyphen—, London-based publisher Afterall and Hong Kong-based artist Kensa Hung. Info: Curator: Michelle Wun Ting Wong, Para Site, 22/F, Wing Wah Industrial Building, 677 King’s Road, Quarry Bay, Hong Kong, Duration: 10/5-10/8/2025, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 12:00-19:00, www.para-site.art/

Yves Zurstrassen has been exploring the pictorial medium with great freedom since the 1980s. Between lyrical gesturality and almost mathematical structuring, Yves Zurstrassen manages to propose spaces that break free from conventions, offering innovative painting that blurs the boundaries between abstraction and figuration. His exhibition “Sweet Dreams” features new works that are the result of a very particular technique that plays with the collage and de-collage of paper forms, which he uses as stencils on layers of overlapping paint. Anyone fortunate enough to visit the painter’s studio understands the importance of these ecosystems, where everything is carefully organized. Labeled pigments promise an infinite range of colors, the various stencils form a vast and rich vocabulary, and the previous paintings, neatly cataloged on racks, provide sources and references that invite the construction of something new from the old. In the background of Yves Zurstrassen’s works, one often finds details from previous works, canvases that the artist views differently and gives a new direction. On these backgrounds, perforated stencils of geometric shapes are applied, covered with paint, and then removed, leaving only the negative of the shape. Additional flat areas of paint with freer shapes are then added. Info: Xippas Gallery, Rue des Sablons 6, Geneva, Switzerland, Duration: 16/5-28/6/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10;00-13:00 & 14:00-18:30, Sat 12:00-17:00, www.xippas.com/

In 1998 the “6-day-play of the Orgies Mysteries Theater” was performed for the first time at Schloss Prinzendorf and sparked considerable protests as well as bomb threats and political resistance. Hermann Nitsch’s idea for a six-day and six-night action work dates back to 1957. Influenced by the Gesamtkunstwerk efforts of Richard Wagner and Alexander Scriabin, Hermann Nitsch who at that time worked intensively with the medium of literature, conceived his synaesthetically oriented action theater, exhilarating all five senses. Hermann Nitsch worked tirelessly on a second version which he finalised shortly before his death in 2022. In this second version, he placed a particular focus on the music as the leitmotif for the Action. The first two days were performed post mortem on 30 and 31 July 2022 in Schloss Prinzendorf. Over 60 actors, two orchestras with more than 100 musicians, and Rita Nitsch, with the support of Andrea Cusumano, musical direction, and the action directors Leonhard Kopp, Frank Gassner, and Josef Smutny, were involved in making it happen. The continuation of the second version took place in 2023 with the performance of the 3rd day, the “Day of Dionysus”. The final three days of the six-day-play will be performed from 7 to 9 June 2025. Info: Schloss Prinzendorf, Schloss Straße 1, 2185 Prinzendorf an der Zaya, Austria, Duration: 6-8/6/2025, www.nitsch-foundation.com/