ART NEWS: June.02

 

Céleste Boursier- Mougenot is taking over the Rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce with his multisensorial installation “clinamen”, which is being shown at an unprecedented scale, in resonance with the architecture of this site. This immersive project transforms the Rotunda into reverie space in which a basin 18 meters in diameter filled with water reflects the sky seen through the museum’s dome. White ceramic bowls float across this blue surface, generating melodious, enchanting sounds as a light current pushes them along. These acoustic vibrations, free of any intervention by a performer, constitute the very heart of the piece, a veritable symphony of the moment that evolves with a flow of invisible waves. This work forms part of a tradition in which sound becomes a living material freed of the constraints of music as we customarily think of it, and in which the visitor is invited to participate actively in the experience. The title clinamen comes from Epicurean physics and refers to the random motion of atoms, a concept that resonates with the work’s inevitably changing and unpredictable nature. Each moment in the installation’s life is unique, offering a sensory and temporal experience that is constantly renewing itself. Info: Curator: Emma Lavigne, Bourse de Commerce—Pinault Collection, 2 rue de Viarmes, Paris, France, Duration: 5/6-21/9/2025, Days & Hours: Mon-Thu & Sat-Sun 11:00-19:00, Fri 11;00-21:00, www.pinaultcollection.com/

In the exhibition “Annimal Family”, figurative elements, which Joe Bradley had begun to develop in previous works, emerge as central compositional structures. A group of horizontal paintings feature black contour lines that serve as scaffoldings for swaths of color, floral blots of brushy paint, and scraped and stippled textural patches, which coalesce into hulking, animal-like forms that fill the surface of the support. Bradley builds up these forms until they achieve a loose balance between assembled wholes and disparate parts, establishing a dynamic tension in the work between cohesion and dissolution. In one painting, pinkish triangles read like teeth extending along a pronounced blue-and-white snout. Lines, shapes, and blots of color momentarily read like a tail or paw but just as quickly come to stand as distinct visual components. This figural mass rests against a black ground dotted with white, suggesting a dark, star-filled sky. While related to those paintings, several vertical canvases represent a notable evolution in Bradley’s work in which the human form becomes a broad organising principle. Shades of mid-century deconstructed figuration and other art-historical references and associations come through in these large, frontally oriented figures. Like his constant working and reworking of the formal and compositional elements in his paintings, such associations are part of Bradley’s open and deliberative method of painterly accumulation and adaptation, whereby he constantly reacts and responds to the process of creation itself. Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 24 Grafton Street, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 6/6-1/8/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.davidzwirner.com/

“When There’s Nothing I Can Do: I Go to My Heart”, is the title of the exhibition of new paintings on canvas by Arcmanoro Niles. Known for his colorful paintings that capture the daily, yet intimate moments of contemporary life, Niles turns to portraiture and still life painting in his latest series, exploring the poignancy and vulnerability of deep emotional connections to ordinary places, objects, and people. Across the exhibition, Niles employs his signature vibrant color palette and swaths of glitter to render tight compositions and focused, singular subject matter, delving into personal relationships and memories. His work offers a window into colloquial moments of daily life with subjects drawn from photographs of friends and relatives and from memories of his past. In depicting not only people close to him but the places and times they inhabit, Niles creates his own record of contemporary life. The paintings, though intensely personal and autobiographical, engage in universal subjects of domestic and family life while referring to numerous art historical predecessors, including Italian and Dutch baroque, history painting, and Color Field painting. Influenced by poetry, Niles’ titles often suggest an underlying narrative behind the seemingly mundane scenes; at the same time, by pairing his own words and images, he seeks to convey a universal sense of emotional experience. Info: Lehman Maupin Gallery, 501 West 24th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 12/6-15/8/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.lehmannmaupin.com/

Rudolf Stingel’s solo exhibition mark the inaugural presentation of the artist’s 2024 series, “Vineyard Paintings”. Stingel has spent his career in pursuit of exposing the mechanisms of painting, challenging its boundaries and conventions and confronting the notion of its obsolescence. In a new and enchanting body of work, he turns to the roots of abstraction and its mimetic relationship to nature. These paintings negotiate the threshold between nature and the studio and are imbued with poetic references to time, memory, and sensation. With the “”Vineyard Paintings, Stingel renews his dialogue with the history of painting, revealing the enduring exchange between nature and abstraction. Through layered textures and a vibrant gold-and-green palette, the works’ surfaces suggest natural phenomena—bare trees bathed in sunlight, the first budding leaves of spring, or the sun-scorched grass of late summer. Viewed up close, gauze imprints and fabric folds emerge, resembling golden stage curtains and recalling the illusionistic qualities of old master painting that work to destabilize the viewer’s sense of time and space. As in previous works, Stingel incorporates the artificial to expose artifice itself—drawing the viewer’s attention back to the picture’s surface and its constructed makeup. Info: Gagosian, 20 Grosvenor Hill, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 12/6-13/9/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://gagosian.com/

Norbert Bisky has established a formal vocabulary in which bodies become representations of existential states. The title, “Polympsest”, a neologism composed from the word palimpsest and the prefix poly, already signals two main tenets of the new body of work. It emphasizes the plurality of influences and the layered iconography, which is a contemporary urban equivalent of the ancient practice of overwriting manuscripts, to which the word palimpsest originally referred. Bisky’s figures—painted in bright and seductive colors yet fragmented, falling, untethered—have always been a symbol of the precarious nature of man in totalitarian societies and under capitalism. The new paintings provide this intuited meaning with concrete narrative underpinnings: The young men have banded together in apparent conflict in some paintings or address the spectator directly; some appear to be shouting, others are masked, holding a Molotov cocktail in their hand, or gesture a gunshot. These paintings are of the here and now: they picture landmarks of Berlin life, some of which are threatened by gentrification or urban decay. They are a wakeup call by articulating a wider sociopolitical mood and the consequences of the state of polycrisis on psyche, society, or city—as exemplified by Berlin where the artist has lived since 1981. Info: Galerie Anne Barrault, Potsdamer Strasse 81E, Berlin, Germany, Duration: 12/6-13/7/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.estherschipper.com/

Alain Huck’s solo exhibition “Respirer une fois sur deux” offers a survey of nearly thirty years of creative output, from the early works on canvas to the most recent drawings, by way of the monumental charcoal drawings that established Huck as a major presence. The exhibition is articulated around the question of text and its relationship to the image, of language and its representation, of what can be said and what is left unspoken, of what is remembered and what makes history. Similarly, just as in the works themselves meanings emerge from the montage between text and image, from the overlaying of distinct images, and from the uncertainty of the image itself, the show is conceived in terms of associations. Here the artist creates dialogues between works from very different periods and of varying kinds. Works from major series of drawings are displayed alongside others that use a variety of supports, including tarpaulins, jute sacks, plants, and neon lights, forging a nonchronological approach to the artist’s body of work to generate new meaning. Info: Curator: Nicole Schweizer, Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne (MCBA), Place de la Gare 16, PLATEFORME 10, Lausanne, Switzerland, Duration: 13/6-7/9/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 10:00-18;00, Thu 10:00-20:00, www.mcba.ch/

In 1924, the first manifesto of Surrealism was published in Paris, laying the foundation for a revolution in art whose effects can still be felt today. Challenging the reign of reason following the disaster of the first worldwide armed conflict, André Breton ardently called for reconciling dreams and reality. Play was front and centre in this undertaking. Initially an informal activity that served as the glue holding together Surrealist sociability, play crystallised the birth of a collective mindset defined by a reversal of traditional values, putting the old rules in the dock and inventing new ways of making art. The exhibition “Rendezvous of Dreams. Surrealism and German Romanticism” invites visitors to compare and contrast the diverse artistic, poetic, and intellectual facets of Surrealist art with the heritage of German Romanticism. The show brings together over 180 icons of Surrealism and over 60 core works of German Romanticism, presenting them alongside one another. In keeping with the multidisciplinary approach taken by both movements, the exhibits on display encompass paintings, drawings, sculptures, literature, films, photography and objects. Strikingly enough, the juxtaposition of Surrealism and German Romanticism is at the very heart of the Hamburg collection. On view are masterworks on loan, some of them never before seen, from national and international private collections as well as important museums in Mexico, the USA and throughout Europe. Info: Curator: Dr. Annabelle Görgen-Lammers, Assistant Curators: Vera Bornkessel & Maria Sitte, Curatorial Trainee: Laura Förster, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Glockengießerwall 5, Hamburg, Germany, Duration: 13/6-12/10/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 10:00-18:00, Thu 10:00-21:00, www.hamburger-kunsthalle.de/

The 13th edition of the MOMENTUM biennale is an investigation and celebration of sound and an exploration of the relations between the natural and cultural worlds of Moss, Norway. The biennale invites audiences to embark on an extraordinary journey of soundscapes and stories, bridging the boundaries of human and non-human worlds. MOMENTUM 13 situates itself as a platform for “ultra-local” experiences and transformative engagements with the resonant connections between art, sound, and ecology. Through approximately 40 projects, MOMENTUM 13 delves into the resonances between ultra-localities in Moss—its cityscapes, forests, fjords, and the island of Jeløy—and their intersections with global ecological and technological phenomena. The 13th edition of the MOMENTUM biennale kicks off its opening week with a packed and diverse programme of concerts, sound walks, workshops and talks, taking place from 13 to 17 June. On Friday, 13 June, the vernissage for MOMENTUM 13 will take place at Galleri F 15 from 2 pm to celebrate the biennale opening with artists and visitors. Moss Church will host a number of concerts and sound installations with performances. Info: Curator: Morten Søndergaard, MOMONTUM 13, , Venues: Galleri F 15: Albyalléen 60, House of Foundation: Henrich Gerners gate 12, Moss Church,: Rådhusgata 4, Outdoor areas: around the Alby forest, the Alby beach and the Alby farm at Jeløy. Moss, Norway, Duration: 13/6-12/10/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-17:00, Addmision: Regular – 100 NOK, Students, military, seniors – 50 NOK, Under 25,  All the outdoor art works are available for free. https://momentum.no/

Primarily interested in death and legacy, Ser Serpas’ work is preoccupied with its own urgency in the face of fossilization. Ser Serpa works take the from of unstable assemblages of found objects, in which painting, sculpture, drawing, and texts bring together personal memories and traces of everyday life. She mashes bits of her life, both real and imagined, into anti portraits, some of which she deems fit to share within the contexts of exhibitions and performances. At the present, she’s taken to sequestering the mundane while freely quoting art history in its full depth, paying little heed to the latter. The artist is passionate about corporeal and poetic forms of expression, which she explores as both a painter and sculptor. In “Of my life” her largest solo exhibition to date in Switzerland, she presents the multiplicity of her aesthetic vocabulary and examines the boundaries between body, time, and the ephemeral images that lie in between. At Kunsthalle Basel, she brings together sculpture, painting, and performance art, with a particular focus on her collaboration with the Margo Korableva Performance Theatre from Tbilisi. In her artistic practice, both Serpas and the theater company take existing elements, deconstruct them, and imbue them with new, reimagined meanings. This artistic synergy allows Serpas to reenact selected performances from the theater’s repertoire, creating a dynamic, engaging dialogue between performance art and her sculptures. Info: Kunsthalle Basel, Steinenberg 7, Basel, Switzerland, Duration: 13/6-21/9/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed  & Fri 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-20:30, Sat-Sun 11:00-17:00, www.kunsthallebasel.ch/

The exhibition “Susanne Bartsch – Transformation!” introduces the visionary world of Susanne Bartsch, a style icon and mind behind of some of New York’s most legendary events over the past four decades. With roots in the counterculture of 1970s London, Punk, and the New Romantic movements, Bartsch has championed diversity in New York since the 1980s. Examining how she uses hedonism as a creative strategy to break boundaries, challenge norms, and foster inclusivity within the fashion and art worlds, the exhibition showcases her unique imagination and style, highlighting her lasting influence on underground fashion and contemporary culture. For the first time in Switzerland, the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich is presenting an overview of Susanne Bartsch’s extensive oeuvre, demonstrating the unbroken topicality of her work. This monographic exhibition highlights Susanne Bartsch’s interdisciplinary approach and her role as a cultural catalyst in the fashion world. Leaving Switzerland at 17, Bartsch discovered her love for fashion and music in 1970s London. She moved to New York in 1981, where she opened a pioneering boutique, introducing young British designers like Vivienne Westwood, Leigh Bowery, BodyMap, and John Galliano to the U.S.  Soon after, she began organizing parties and events that became influential gathering places, bringing together people from diverse backgrounds in an inclusive expression of creativity and style. Info:  Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, Ausstellungsstrasse 60, Zurich, Switzerland, Duration; 20/6-9/12/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 10:00-17:00, Thu 10:00-20:00, https://museum-gestaltung.ch/