AUGUST 2018 Modern Painters

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The Art World At Your Fingertips The insider’s guide to the global art scene. Find galleries, museums, fairs, and art events around you. Follow and get alerts for your favorite artists and create your personal art calendar. Blouin Art Guide is the fastest and easiest way to be connected with and updated about the global art scene, from New York to Tokyo!

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Carnegie International, 57th Edition, 2018 presents works by 32 artists and collectives from around the globe. One of the world’s preeminent surveys of contemporary art, ongoing since 1896, this exhibition is on view from October 13, 2018 through March 25, 2019.

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cmoa.org/international For a schedule of special programs and events

STUART DAVIS Lines Thicken: Stuart Davis in Black & White 293 Tenth Avenue SEPTEMBER 13 - DECEMBER 22, 2018

LEE KRASNER Mural Studies 297 Tenth Avenue SEPTEMBER 13 - OCTOBER 27, 2018

BRANCUSI & DUCHAMP The Art of Dialogue 515 West 27th Street SEPTEMBER 20 - DECEMBER 22, 2018

WALTON FORD New Gallery Space at 509 W 27th Street OCTOBER 10 - DECEMBER 22, 2018

JOEL SHAPIRO Kasmin Sculpture Garden OCTOBER 10 - DECEMBER 22, 2018

509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com

VOLUME XXX, NUMBER 07

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Galerie Etienne Lévy Curated by BlouinShop

The Art of Living, Curated by Our Editors

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS // AUGUST

FROM TOP EMERGING ARTISTS TO THE BERLIN BIENNALE In journalism and the art world, “top lists” are always a great talking point. We got a lot of response to our list of the top art schools in the world featured in last month’s magazine. This time, Modern Painters presents a list of the top 10 galleries that champion emerging artists. Feedback from gallerists and collectors shows that some venues are especially known for promoting new talent. For example, one of those listed is Tanya Bonakdar, who spotted Olafur Eliasson and Tomás Saraceno. Talking of talent spotting, it was obviously lucky for those, such as the collector Charles Saatchi, who bought works by Jenny Saville from her graduation show in 1992. We take a look at a new exhibition of her paintings in Athens, featuring some eye-popping nudes dating from 1993 to 2015 and talk to Saville herself. Similarly, Shilpa Gupta was identiied as a rising star while she was a student. She is now 42 and is one of the most acclaimed Indian artists. In one of our exclusive interviews from around the world, Gupta tells us about her new sound installations. We also catch up with France’s Sophie Calle, 64, whose output also ranges across media, in her case including literature, photography and conceptual art. She points to its autobiographical origins: “My life is my material — my tool.” In another interview, the Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos, 46, who is known for her fabric sculptures, discusses similar autobiographical inspiration. She says “artists are always hiding behind their work. When you put all your work together, you cannot hide anymore.” We also catch up with the Spanish sculptor Jaume Plensa, who is renowned for his giant human heads placed in public spaces. In addition to the interviews, we explore a retrospective at the City of Paris’s Museum of Museum Art, which features the paintings of Zao Wou-Ki and his bridges between Eastern and Western culture. Over in Los Angeles, Richard Chang reports on the Broad museum’s irst show after its Jasper Johns blockbuster. The latest display is culled from its extensive permanent collection and is meant to explore the passage of time. Meanwhile Nicolas de Staël’s works go on show in Aix en Provence. His son Gustav, an artist himself, guides us through the retrospective, which took two years to assemble. He says of his father: “He wanted to do something wild with both his art and his life. And that’s what he did.” Continuing around the world, we preview the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, a global event that has long succeeded in attracting and polarizing viewers in equal measure. Anya Harrison reports that the 2018 edition will be smaller and subdued yet stronger. When we come to our top list of Biennales it’s fair to say that Berlin will have a strong claim to fame.

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Jenny Saville 18 JUNE 2018 – APRIL 2019

T H E G EO R G E EC O N O M O U C O L L EC T I O N 8 0 , K I F I S S I A S AV E , 1 5 1 2 5 , AT H E N S , G R E EC E T H EG EO R G E EC O N O M O U C O L L EC T I O N .C O M Jenny Saville, Ruben’s Flap, 1998–99, oil on canvas, 304.8 × 243.8 cm. © Jenny Saville. Courtesy Gagosian.

68 Fabiana Faleiros, “Mastur Bar,” 2015–18, installation view, 10. Berlin Biennale, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin.

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In Conversation with Hadrien de Montferrand

44 Art Foundation as Self-Potrait

AUGUST 2018

TOP 10 GALLERIES

TO WATCH FOR EMERGING ARTISTS

SHILPA GUPTA

A RISING STAR OF THE GLOBAL ART WORLD

20 Top 10 Galleries for Emerging Artists

56 The Changing Body

Our picks for the galleries that have been championing the work of up-and-coming artists, whether in recent times or for decades by Cody Delistraty

THE CHANGING BODY ARCHITECTURE

JENNY SAVILLE REMAINS A PIONEER

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BOOK REVIEW: ‘MODERNISTS AND MAVERICKS’ BY MARTIN GAYFORD

On the cover: Jenny Saville , “Cindy,” 2010, oil on canvas, 55 x 46 cm, Private Collection.

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Architecture

An exhibition in Athens shows how Jenny Saville remains a pioneer in depicting contemporary bodies that transcend rigid shapes and identities by Sarah Moroz

Berlin Biennale: Smaller & Stronger The Biennial showcases 46 artists and collectives, with over 30 new commissions, spread across various venues in Berlin by Anya Harrison

Edouard Carmignac, founder of the Carmignac Foundation, has opened a new museum on the island of Porquerolles to show off his collection by Jérôme Neutres

The French gallerist, a pioneer with two galleries in China, opens a new branch in London by Aymeric Mantoux

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Big Heads, Big Heart

Jaume Plensa is known for his sculptures of human heads in public spaces, but his work is guided by an ethos than can only be described as big-hearted by Devorah Lauter

TO P C O U R T E S Y FA B I A N A FA L E I R O S ; I C H L I E B E M E I N E VAG I N A / M C X U PA R I N A , P H OTO: T I M O O H L E R . O N T H E C OV E R : © J E N N Y S AV I L L E A N D GAG O S I A N

CONTENTS

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CONTENTS

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Allen Jones, “First Step,” 1966, oil on canvas, 92 x 92 cm, Collection of Allen Jones.

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Hadrien de Montferrand

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Giving Voice to Freedom

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‘Taking off the Mask’

A rising star of the global art world, Shilpa Gupta uses many mediums to question authority and amplify the unheard and oppressed by Archana Khare-Ghose

With a focus on the plight of women, the Portugeuse artist Joana Vasconcelos is showing 33 works at the Guggenheim Bilbao by Franca Toscano

De Staël in Provence, a Family Exhibition

Mortality, Leavened With Mirth

The son of painter Nicolas de Staël showcases his father’s works, never shown in public before by Aymeric Mantoux

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The French artist Sophie Calle often ventures down dark roads, but not without a sense of humor by Sarah Moroz

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Nicolas de Staël, “Agrigente,” 1953, oil on canvas, 59 x 77,7 cm, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Hövikodden, Norway.

Lives of the Art Mavericks

Martin Gayford’s Book, “Modernists and Mavericks,” reveals little-seen sides of Freud, Bacon, and Hockney by Mark Beech

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Datebooks The season’s top picks from London, New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Vienna, and Berlin

Modern Painters, ISSN 0953-6698, is published monthly by LTB Media (U.K.) Ltd., an affiliate of BlouinArtinfo Corp, 80 Broad Street, Suite 606/607, New York, NY 10004. Vol. XXX, No. 7. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER, Send address changes to: Fulco, Inc., Modern Painters, PO Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834-3000.

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September 16, 2018 – January 6, 2019

Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait in a Cap, Wide-Eyed and Open-Mouthed, about 1630. Etching and drypoint; 2.05 x 1.81 in. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Department of Prints and Photography Rembrandt: Painter as Printmaker is organized by the Denver Art Museum with the exceptional collaboration of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. It is presented by Bank of America with generous funding also provided by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Netherland-America Foundation, the donors to the Annual Fund Leadership Campaign, and the citizens who support the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District (SCFD). This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. Promotional support is provided by 5280 Magazine, CBS4, Comcast Spotlight, and The Denver Post.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Landscape with Woman in Pink and White, 1916

The exhibition is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Organized by the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, and Musées d’Orsay et de l’Orangerie, Paris, with the participation of the Cinémathèque française, Paris

Renoir: Father & Son / Painting & Cinema

UNTIL SEPT 3

B A R N E S FO U N DAT I O N. O RG

JULY //

Kimberly Conniff Taber Kim Conniff Taber is a group editor for the Blouin magazines and web sites, recruiting writers in Europe, Asia and the U.S. and commissioning irst-rate criticism and arts reporting. A journalist and editorial consultant, she advises organizations on ways to sharpen their content for maximum impact in the digital era. She was previously the culture editor of the International New York Times; and before that its senior editor of magazines and art special reports. Prior to joining the NYT company in 2003, Kim was a writer with Brill’s Content Magazine in New York and taught journalism at the University of Pennsylvania and the American University of Paris. She has a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University, and has just completed an executive master’s in digital management at Sciences Po in Paris.

Archana Khare-Ghose Archana Khare-Ghose is a group editor with the Blouin Artinfo magazines and websites, anchoring the editorial teams as well as commissioning and writing stories. She has been an arts journalist and writer for the past 19 years. Beginning with covering the South Asian art scene, she soon graduated to covering and writing about arts and culture at the global level, by reporting from key cultural capitals of the world. Prior to joining Blouin Artinfo Corp, she was the Arts, Culture & Books editor with The Times of India, the largest selling English language daily of the world. In 2012, she was chosen as a cultural leader from Asia by the US Department of State, to visit lesser-known cultural institutions across eight cities of the US, to get insights into the role of culture in bringing about social change.

CONTRIBUTORS

Mark Beech Mark Beech has been a journalist for more than 30 years and is the author of four books. He previously was Global Team leader for Bloomberg News’s arts and culture section, Bloomberg Muse. His experience includes spells working for Forbes as an entertainment correspondent; the Sunday Times; ITN; and as editor of Dante magazine. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and holds an MA from St. Catherine’s College, Oxford University, in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. He writes about performing arts from music to theater - and auctions, from visual art to cars and wine. He has also written and lectured extensively, appeared on television more than 100 times and consulted on social media and management for many companies.

Chris Welsch Chris Welsch, a contributing editor for BLOUINARTINFO, is an editor, writer and photographer, based in Paris for the past seven years. A former staff editor at the New York Times, his photos and stories have appeared in the Times, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Minneapolis Star Tribune (where he worked for 15 years as a travel reporter and photographer). He’s working toward an exhibition of his photographs of Paris.

Louisa Elderton Louisa Elderton is a writer, editor and curator based in London and Berlin, specialising in art and culture. She writes widely on Contemporary art for international publications including Artforum, Art in America and Metropolis M, and is a Project Editor for Phaidon delivering their ‘Vitamin’ books. With a Master’s degree in curating from The Courtauld Institute of Art, she has curated solo exhibition by artists including Wim Wenders, Lawrence Weiner, Francesco Clemente, Yinka Shonibare MBE and Rachel Howard, among others.

Cody Delistraty Based in Paris, Cody Delistraty writes proiles and cultural criticism for the deadtree and digital pages of The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, and Esquire, among others. He also works on art and editorial projects for Dior, and he was named one of the best young writers of 2017 by British Vogue. He holds a bachelor’s degree from N.Y.U. and a master’s in European history from Oxford. He is currently completing his irst novel.

Anya Harrison Anya Harrison is a writer, curator and consultant based in London who has contributed to Flash Art, The Calvert Journal, GARAGE Magazine, Performa Magazine, Moscow Art Journal and other publications, mostly covering art and ilm. After completing a Master’s degree at the Courtauld Institute of Art, she worked for the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, from where she originally hails. She is co-founder of The New Social, a curatorial, and is part of the curatorial team for the 13th Baltic Triennial.

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CONTRIBUTORS // JULY Tina Xu

Stephen Heyman

Tina Xu is a writer-ilmmaker drawn to stories about the fragmentation and evolution of culture in an interconnected world. She grew up between California and China and is currently based in Beijing and Boston. She is inspired by the ways in which artists serve as prophetic voices in the midst of frenetic change. Formally educated in political theory and international relations, she believes that art can contribute to a more peaceful world by luring viewers toward empathy and contemplation.

Michael Prodger Michael Prodger teaches art history at the University of Buckingham and is an art critic for the New Statesman and Standpoint magazines. He is a former literary editor and judge of the Man Booker Prize. He writes on books and art for a number of publications including the Times, Sunday Times and the Guardian.

Mark Piggott

Constance Chien

London-based author and journalist Mark Piggott has written for the Times, Sunday Times and numerous other newspapers, and is author of four novels, with two more underway. He has a Master of Arts and has lectured in journalism and criticism. His website is at markpiggott.com.

Victoria Gomelsky Victoria Gomelsky is editor in chief of JCK, a 148-year-old jewelry trade magazine based in New York City. She joined the staff of JCK in 2010, after spending several years covering the ine jewelry and watch markets for both trade and consumer publications. Her freelance work has appeared in the New York Times, WSJ Magazine, AFAR, the Hollywood Reporter, and Waking Up American: Coming of Age Biculturally, an anthology published by Seal Press.

Warwick Thompson Warwick Thompson says that he often feels like the word “opera” runs through him like a stick of Brighton rock. He’s a critic for various outlets, including Metro newspaper and Opera magazine. He’s also got a novel about 18th -century London in the pipeline.

Stephen Heyman writes about culture, travel and design for the New York Times and other ine publications. He was formerly a features editor at T: the New York Times Style Magazine. His weekly column charting international culture “by the numbers” ran in the global edition of The Times from 2013 to 2015. He has also written for AD, Dwell, Esquire, Slate, Town & Country, Travel & Leisure, Vogue.com, W and The Wall Street Journal.

Constance Chien is a writer and educator currently based in Beijing. Her research interests include gender and sexuality studies, contemporary French poetry and cinema, and media theory. She graduated from Wellesley College, and has lived in cities in France, the United States, and China.

Zandie Brockett

Zandie Brockett 桂才 is a curator, researcher and writer based between Beijing and Los Angeles. She founded the cultural platform, Bactagon Projects, serves as the Editor-in- chief of its bilingual, literary journal, 八家 BaJia, and was the Associate Curator of the biennale, the Shanghai Project. Her research seeks to understand the relationship between social practice art and societies that are increasingly transformed by technology and urban life.

Richard Chang Richard Chang is a Southern California-based journalist, arts writer and educator. He has written for ARTnews, the Los Angeles Times, L.A. Weekly, Coast Magazine, Montage Magazine, Laguna Beach Magazine and a number of newspapers and arts and lifestyle publications. He served as arts reporter and chief visual art critic for the Orange County Register for more than 14 years. He recently served as arts and culture editor at L.A. Weekly. Richard received degrees from Brown University and UC Berkeley, and has taught journalism and writing at UCLA, Cal State Fullerton and Glendale Community College.

Annie Godfrey Larmon Annie Godfrey Larmon is a writer, editor, and curator based in New York. She is a regular contributor to Artforum, and her writing has also appeared in Bookforum, Frieze, MAY, Spike, Vdrome, and WdW Review. The recipient of a 2016 Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for shortform writing, she is the editor of publications for the inaugural Okayama Art Summit and a former international reviews editor of Artforum. She is the co-author, with Ken Okiishi and Alise Upitis, of “The Very Quick of the Word” (Sternberg Press, 2014), and she has penned features and catalogue essays on the work of numerous artists.

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Nina Siegal Nina Siegal is an American author and journalist who has been based in Amsterdam for 11 years. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times, and she also writes for The Economist, Bloomberg News, and various art and culture magazines. For an art market report for Bloomberg in 2004, Nina traveled for the irst time to the Netherlands to cover the TEFAF fair in Maastricht, where she was able to see four Rembrandt portraits at the same time in the Robert Noortman Gallery, and later visited the Rembrandt House in Amsterdam. She became fascinated by Dutch Golden Age painting and in 2006, returned to the Netherlands with a Fulbright grant to write her second novel, “The Anatomy Lesson,” about Rembrandt’s irst large-scale group portrait. She ended up staying in Amsterdam, writing about art, museums, art crime, authenticity and attribution issues, and European cultural life.

Elin McCoy Award-winning journalist Elin McCoy is wine critic for Bloomberg News, where she has written a column since 2001; she’s also the New York columnist at the U.K.’s biggest wine magazine Decanter, and writes frequently for The World of Fine Wine as well as for her blog at www.elinmccoy.com. Her book, “The Emperor of Wine: The Rise of Robert M. Parker, Jr. and the Reign of American Taste,” garnered international praise. McCoy got her wine start at Food & Wine magazine, and has written several thousand articles for many other publications. She’s currently at work on a surprising true tale of a commune winery set in 19th century Sonoma County.

Matthew Rose The artist, writer and musician Matthew Rose is an American who has lived and worked in Paris for some 25 years. Matthew’s exhibition of rooms layered with his wall-to-wall collage works have taken him across the United States and Europe; and he’s recently published a catalog of his drawings – “evidence.” As a journalist, he has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Magazine, Art & Antiques, Art Review and dozens of art publications focusing largely on contemporary art. His twicemonthly columns for The Art Blog range from political art essays to proiles on emerging artists, street and ephemeral art as well as critical takes on some big guns in the art world.

Jessica Michault Jessica Michault is the editor of the member- only luxury website GPS Radar and the host of the podcast Fashion Your Seatbelt. She has been voted one of the Business of Fashion 500 Most Influential People in the World of Fashion. Over the past 20 years she has covered the industry for the likes of The New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, Italian Vogue, Antidote and Industrie. Born and raised in San Francisco, she is now based in Paris where she lives with her husband, three little girls and an ever increasing collection of vintage hair combs.

Tobias Grey Grey is a Paris-based arts writer and critic based in Paris. He writes on art, literature, cinema and current affairs for the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, American Vogue and Newsweek. Grey is equally adept at writing proiles of major creative igures as he is at writing criticism and lengthy features.

Joseph Akel Joseph Akel’s writings have been published in The New York Times, the Paris Review, Vanity Fair, and the Wall Street Journal, among other publications. Most recently, Akel was the editor of V and VMAN magazine. He has contributed essays to several artists’ monographs, including the 2015 exhibition catalogue for Doug Aitken’s retrospective at Frankfurt’s Schirn Kunsthalle, as well as editing “Wolves Like Us” (2015), a monograph accompanying the Sundance award-wining documentary of the same name. Akel presently lives in New York City where he is working on his irst novel.

Sarah Moroz Sarah Moroz is a FrancoAmerican journalist and translator; she has been based in Paris for the past decade. She writes about photography, art, fashion, and other cultural topics for The New York Times, the Guardian, New York Magazine, and i-D, amongst other publications. She is the co-author of a walking guide, “Paris in Stride” that was published by Rizzoli this spring.

Martin Gayford Martin Gayford is the author of books on Constable, Van Gogh, and Michelangelo. He writes proliically on the visual arts and is art critic of the Spectator. Last year he published “A History of Pictures,” co-written with David Hockney, a sweeping survey of visual images of the world, including paintings, photographs and ilm from the prehistoric era to the computer age which has been translated, so far, into 14 languages. Gayford’s most recent publication is a survey of the work of the abstract painter Gillian Ayres, published in April 2017. He lives in Cambridge.

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INS OUTS 1 Pace Makes Adam Sheffer a Vice President

Adam Sheffer, a key player at Cheim & Reid, which will close its space in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York early next year, is joining Pace Gallery as a vice president this month. “He’s a guy who would walk through

front of a truck for them,” said Marc Glimcher, the chief Adam Sheffer executive and president at Pace. “There are brilliant people who are kind of disconnected and then there are ambitious someone with both is like needle in a haystack.” Based in New York, Sheffer will work to support primary and secondary market activity for artists and estates across the gallery’s international program, Pace said in its announcement. Sheffer was a partner and the sales director at Cheim & Read since 2003. Sheffer was elected in 2015 to serve as President of the Art Dealers Association of America, the gallery industry’s top trade group. announced the closing of its Chelsea venue in January of 2019 after a run of 21 years. The New York gallery will relocate uptown and “transition to a private practice” according to an email sent by the gallery’s founders, John Cheim and Howard Read. Cheim & Read opened in Chelsea, New York in 1997 with an exhibition of work by Louise Bourgeois and Jenny Holzer. Cheim and Read said in a statement that

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they “will transition the gallery to a private practice, concentrating on the secondary market, sculpture commissions and special projects. We will continue to work with artists and estates that have been associated with the gallery throughout its history. We will also mount small-scale, focused installations in our new space and continue to participate in select art fairs. Director and partner, Maria Bueno, will spearhead the program in our new location.”

2 Birnbaum to Direct Acute Art

Acute Art, a producer of virtual reality and augmented reality artworks, said that Daniel Birnbaum will be its new director. Birnbaum, who currently holds the position of director at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, will Daniel Birnbaum move to London where the company is based, and take up his position at the end of the year. Acute Art, founded in 2017, has collaborated on virtual reality and augmented reality artworks with artists including Marina ฀ Koons and Christo. In this newly created role, the company says, Birnbaum will focus on identifying opportunities to continue bringing digital artwork to the public, both within an institutional framework and online through a curated offer on Acute Art’s website and app. “Acute Art is a new kind of institution and technology,” Birnbaum said. “This move marks an adventure, a journey in to the future. There is a voracious appetite for technology in the arts and I am curious to see what artists will do with these visual technologies.”

3 Getty Trust Names Drew Gilpin Faust to Board

The Board of Trustees of the J. Paul Getty Trust announced that Drew Gilpin Faust will join its ranks in September. “We are so pleased that Drew Faust is joining the Getty Board of Trustees,” said Maria Hummer-Tuttle, board chair. “Her academic leadership is inspiring and the board Drew Gilpin Faust welcomes her wisdom and expertise.” Faust recently concluded eleven successful years as president of Harvard University, where she continues as the Lincoln Professor of History in Harvard’s faculty of arts and sciences. A distinguished historian of the Civil War and the American South, Faust was the founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. Previously, she served as the Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was a member of the faculty for 25 years. Faust is the author of six books, including “Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War” (University of North Carolina Press, 1996), for which she won the Francis Parkman Prize in 1997. Her most recent book, “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War,” Alfred A. Knopf, 2008, looks at the impact of the Civil War’s enormous death toll on the lives of 19th-century Americans. It won the Bancroft Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, and was named by The New York Times one of the “10 Best Books of 2008.” Faust has served as a trustee of Bryn Mawr College, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and the National Humanities Center, and she serves on the educational advisory board of the Guggenheim Foundation. She served on the Pulitzer Prize history jury in 1986, 1990, and 2004. Recently she joined the board of directors at Goldman Sachs, where she will serve on their governance, public responsibilities, and risk committees.

F R O M L E F T: P H OTO BY L U K E F O N TA N A , P H OTO BY J O H N S C A R I S B R I C K , C O P Y R I G H T BY W O R L D E C O N O M I C F O R U M . S W I S S - I M AG E .C H/P H OTO M I C H A E L W U E R T E N B E R G

YOUR RELIABLE CHEAT SHEET FOR ART WORLD NEWS

Hadrien de Montferrand Founder, HdM Gallery The French gallerist Hadrien de Montferrand, a pioneer with two galleries in China, opens a new branch in London At a time when many art dealers are trying to get into China, Hadrien de Montferrand, a Frenchman who already has two galleries in the Middle Empire, opened a new exhibition space in London this summer. With an HdM Gallery in Beijing and another in Hangzhou, de Montferrand was an early champion of Chinese Contemporary art and a force in expanding its popularity worldwide. In a wide-ranging interview with Aymeric Mantoux, he explains why he’s looking westward. Why inally settle in London when you are French and have been operating in China for nearly 15 years ? The gallery was doing very well in China. Therefore I had the choice either to reinvest in China, with my associates, and open a third space in another town, or try to expand abroad. In terms of development, we thought opening in a Western country was the ideal

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timing for us. Our expansion has been quite pragmatic. We have many Chinese clients who travel a lot, and quite some Chinese artists who have no representation abroad. We foresaw opportunities. What kind of opportunities? We have been active in Beijing and Hangzhou for more than a decade. Three years ago we opened an ofice in Shenzen, because one of our salespeople went to settle there, and we wanted to continue working with her. So, we started a small venture. It’s still not a huge business, but she is a good seller. We organize events, have diners, happenings. So, I can’t say our activity in China was not going well. Then I married a woman who lives in London. For both professional and personal reasons, this London opening felt right. What will you show? Only Contemporary artists. Showing Contemporary Western artists in China can be pretty tricky because of taxes, customs, transport, insurance, but also

most of them are unknown in the country. Having a space in London will put us on the global international art scene. I am also quite bewildered to see how much Contemporary Chinese art is unknown in the West. I believe because of my experience of 13 years in the market in China, that I have a strong card to play. I have the authority to talk about the range of creative work in China, and overall, the art market in China. But my aim is not to “ghettoize” Chinese artists. One must consider that they are primarily artists that happen to be Chinese. For a longtime you specialized in paper works by these artists — what made you shift? Yes, that’s true, when we started we had an emphasis on paper works, because it’s a very traditional Chinese medium. And also, most of the acclaimed Chinese painters’ works on paper were not considered in the West. I seized this opportunity, this niche, to distribute their works

P H OTO: ©A L E X A N D R A D I E Z D E R I V E R A

Hadrien de Montferrand

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C O U R T E S Y H D M GA L L E R Y

A view of HdM Gallery.

“I worked with the greatest Chinese names in Contemporary art, like Yue Minjun, but then I decided to find younger artists. Unfortunately, it was not financially feasible. The drawings were for sale $500 and $2,000, and it’s difficult to earn any money on those kind of sales” on paper. Originally I worked with the greatest Chinese names in Contemporary art, like Yue Minjun, but then I decided to ind younger artists. Unfortunately, it was not inancially feasible. The drawings were for sale $500 and $2,000, and it’s dificult to earn any money on those kind of sales. What happened next? We opened to other mediums, such as oil on canvas. For traditional Chinese buyers, paper and ink are king. But in Chinese Contemporary art, oil canvases are king. So, we started to show people like Barthélémy Thogo, Fabien Mairelle, Elias Crespin, Jean-Charles Blais. I remember, for Thogo’s solo show during the second year after opening, I sold only one piece. A few months ago, all 14 pieces were gone in a second. The market evolves quickly. So, I believe when you do your job and plant some seeds, they actually grow. How do you chose your artists? They must have a very strong personal style. First of all, I have to like what they do. But a lot of what I do relies on the personality of the artist. Sometimes I don’t feel the alchemy and I decline. There is more to my work than selling or being human. We need trust, because you build a relation on conidence, to get a chemistry that works. I am very cautious. Art is not only a work, it’s all about an ambiance, about telling a story. Building a relationship with artists is spending some time

with them, being sensitive to their conversation, to their reflection, to another point of view on life, on things. Artists feel what is happening, what is going on in the world. They are more sensitive than other people. I try to spend as much time as possible with artists. It happened that I looked at their work differently after having met them. You usually get another perspective after. But, also, an artist has to tick quite a few squares, like being in a market-driven approach, knowing what sells and where. I believe it’s important. Are these conditions why you recently chose to represent Ivan Messac? With Messac, we had a great meeting, thanks to one of his friends who told me I should dig into his work, that it was deinitely more than worth it. We were supposed to meet for 30 minutes, and we stayed 5 hours together. I was hooked by the man’s personality. His art touched me. So yes, now I represent him for all that he does and I’m pushing hard to do everything that he feels is good for him. My job is to make sure his work is seen, sold, and talked about. By all means! What will be your irst show in London? I very much like the two artists we are showing this summer: a Chinese and a western one. Recently, I had a crush on Elias Crespin’s work. One of them was featured in the “Artists and Robots” show in Paris at the Grand Palais,

a great piece. I am generally not so fond of installations, because it can be dificult to live with them, but Elias makes these amazing works which move, are articulated. I was impressed. We have already done a show together in China, which sold very well. It’s really nice to bring him to London and continue the adventure together. Lu Chao — we discovered him when he was still the intern of an artist I knew. When we signed him, he was barely walking out of school. Now he sells for $35,000 to 40,000 euros. It’s very satisfying, because of course, we played a role. He is still under 30 years old, but sometimes we sell him for more than 100,000 euros. Of course, I also want to show younger artists, like a Haitian painter, Manuel Mathieu, whom I discovered. He is quite astonishing. We will be showing him in China soon, and I hope we will be working together for a long time. It was quite a meeting. Why would an artist sign with you, how different are you from any other gallerist? I like to deine my work as an advisor, a helper for my artists. Because we are a small and independent gallery, we are quite flexible and mobilized. For a young artist, being with the giants of the business, might not carry only advantages. Because they focus only on big names. MP The new HdM Gallery will be at 42 Conduit Street in London. More information: HDMgallery.com/en 42, Conduit Street. London.

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20 C LO C K W I S E: C O U R T E SY L I N A I R I S V I K TO R A N D A M A R GA L L E R Y, L U K E W I L L I S T H O M P S O N/ A DA M A R T GA L L E R Y, C O U R T E SY L I U S H I Y UA N A N D TA N YA B O N A K DA R GA L L E R Y, N E W YO R K /LO S A N G E L E S , P H OTO: M A R T E N E L D E R - G H E B A LY

TOP 10

Galleries TO WATCH FOR EMERGING ARTISTS OUR PICKS FOR THE GALLERIES THAT HAVE BEEN CHAMPIONING THE WORK OF UP-AND-COMING ARTISTS, WHETHER IN RECENT TIMES OR FOR DECADES

BY CODY DELISTRATY

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ABOVE: Installation view of Lina Iris Viktor’s “Black Exodus” and it debuted in London September 2017.

ABOVE: Kelly Akashi, “Being as a Thing,” installation view, November 12 - December 23, 2016. Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles. BELOW: Liu Shiyuan, “Isolated Above, Connected Down,” 2018 single channel color video, sound 21 minutes; 55 seconds. Edition of 5, 2 APs.

LEFT: Luke Willis Thompson, “How long?,” 2018, 16mm colour negative film transferred to digital video, silent. Below: Luke Willis Thompson, Autoportrait, 2017, 35mm, b&w, silent. Installation view at Adam Art Gallery Te Pataka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington, 21 February – 15 April 2018.

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56 HENRY When Ellie Rines opened her irst gallery in 2013 in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District — two years before the Whitney Museum also moved down to Gansevoort Street — she was only 25 years old and her biggest worry was how small the space was. At 60 square feet, the gallery’s size meant she could usually only show one artist at a time and that any opening festivities — champagne and the like — had to happen outside. In 2015 though, she moved to Chinatown, onto 56 Henry Street, and while her new exhibition space is still only about

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64 square feet, she now also has a living space and room for a few more artists. Rines represents artists like the photographer Cynthia Talmadge, who exhibited at 56 Henry last year with a show that included an installation that recreated a bedroom at McLean, a psychiatric facility that accepted the likes of Sylvia Plath and David Foster Wallace. Rines also shows Sadie Laska, Hanna Liden, Ryan Wallace, Wade Oates and Richard Tinkler. Rines, whose background is in Chinese antiquities and who worked for the

gallerist Craig F. Starr before striking out on her own, isn’t interested in tapping exclusively unknown talent, however. “I just want to show the best artists I can,” she told Cultured Magazine. The fact that many of them tend to be under-known is only a testament to her keen eye. She’s also interested in creating emerging collectors, finding price points across the board. “There aren’t many galleries that sell work for under $1,000, but it’s a way to create an entry point for someone to collect,” she said.

COURTESY OF 56 HENRY

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Cynthia Talmadge,”” “Like Sands Through the Hourglass,” 2017, Sand on board, 20 x 28 inches.

COURTESY OF 56 HENRY

Cynthia Talmadge Frank E. Campbell, “Evening,” 2017, oil on canvas, 40 x 30 inches. Cynthia Talmadge Frank E. Campbell, “Daytime,” 2017, oil on canvas, 40 x 30 inches.

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The London-born gallerist Amar Singh is technically an Indian prince. His family comes from the Kapurthala line, and he would be sixteenth in line for the throne, if it still existed. Although Singh was born in Paddington and is a longtime Londoner, his Indian ancestors also shared his interest in art. One of his ancestors, Maharaja Jagatjit Singh of Kapurthala, for instance, traveled across Europe collecting ine art, eventually falling in love with Anita Delgado, a Spanish dancer, with whom he had a son. But this isn’t the deining factor for Singh. “I don’t consider myself royal,” he

told Candid Magazine. “What I have taken from my family’s influence is really all about human rights and art.” Singh has a special magic for spotting talent. Although Howard Tangye, the Australian-born designer who has been head of womenswear at Central Saint Martins for nearly two decades, is well-known, he wasn’t as recognized as an artist. But Singh saw Tangye’s potential as a client. “His work reminded me of renaissance drawing with a contemporary flare,” Singh added. “I fell in love with it immediately.” Singh has also found

artists like Sonja Braas, Renee Cox, and most recently, the London-born Liberian conceptual artist Lina Iris Viktor whose stunning show, “Black Exodus: Act I,” the Amar Gallery mounted last year. Singh’s philosophy is to support lesserknown artists wherever he can. “I have been working for human rights in India, focusing on women and LGBT rights, and this has had a heavy influence on my gallery,” he said. “Those underrepresented in India also happen to be quite suppressed in the arts too. I want to give these groups the exposure they deserve.”

Installation view of Lina Iris Viktor’s “Black Exodus” and it debuted in London, September 2017.

Courtesy Lina Iris Viktor and Amar Gallery

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AMAR GALLERY

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Courtesy Lina Iris Viktor and Amar Gallery

Installation view of Lina Iris Viktor’s “Black Exodus” and it debuted in London, September 2017.

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The Los Angeles art scene has been booming over the last few years thanks to signiicant investments from Eli Broad, the Getty Foundation, and other major donors. But there’s been a resurgence in smaller galleries as well. One of the best instances of this is the François Ghebaly Gallery, which, since 2009, has been steadily making a name for itself with both L.A.-based and international artists, mostly in their emerging career stages. Although the gallery started in Chinatown, it moved to Culver City then to downtown L.A. in 2013, where it maintains an impressive 12,000-square-foot showroom that’s shared with other artistic enterprises. The French-born Ghebaly, now in his late 30s, has lived in L.A. for nearly two decades. His goal is of course to sell the works of the artists he represents, but it’s also to be a pioneer of ideas. Matching this philosophy, the gallery tends to put on group shows, such as “SOGTFO,” which was curated by Charlie White and includes work from Kelly Akashi, Andrea Zittel, Amanda Ross-Ho, Nevine Mahmoud and Kathleen Ryan. The show used sculptural and installation works to confront the “language of immaterial misogyny.”

Kelly Akashi, “Being as a Thing,” installation view, November 12 December 23, 2016. Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles.

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TOP 10 GALLERIES TO WAT A CH FOR EMERGING ARTISTS

FRANÇOIS GHEBALY GALLERY

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Installation view, Kelly Akashi, “Being as a Thing,” November 12 - December 23, 2016, Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles.

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Launched in 1994 in Manhattan’s SoHo, the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery moved to Chelsea four years later where it’s been ever since, undergoing a renovation that doubled its exhibition space. Earlier this year, Bonakdar made her biggest change yet with a move to L.A., opening a second branch of her gallery on Highland Avenue in Hollywood. The gallery has long been a champion of emerging artists, discovering Martin Boyce, Sandra Cinto, Mat Collishaw, Olafur Eliasson, Teresa Hubbard, Ernesto Neto, and Tomás Saraceno, among others; and Bonakdar has since taken on artists like Liu Shiyuan, Mark Dion, Meschac Gaba, Sarah Sze, Agnieszka Kurant, Slavs and Tatars and Laura Lima. Most recently, the sculptor Charles Long just showed at the “Made in L.A.” biennial at the Hammer Museum; and, this fall, she’ll be showing Eliasson, who currently has a solo show at the Marciano Art Foundation in L.A. Next year, she’ll debut Saraceno in L.A. (He’s just showed at Bonakdar’s Manhattan gallery.)

Liu Shiyuan, “Music Forbidden,” 2018, synthetic tiger-patterned fabric, fired clay, acrylic paint, found rubber animals, metallic thread, 139.7 x 110.5 x 3.8 cm.

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C O U R T E S Y L I U S H I Y UA N A N D TA N YA B O N A K DA R GA L L E R Y, N E W YO R K / LO S A N G E L E S

TANYA BONAKDAR GALLERY

C O U R T E S Y L I U S H I Y UA N A N D TA N YA B O N A K DA R GA L L E R Y, N E W YO R K / LO S A N G E L E S

Liu Shiyuan, “Isolated Above, Connected Down,” 2018, single channel color video, sound 21 minutes; 55 seconds. Edition of 5, 2 APs.

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C O U R T E S Y L I U S H I Y U A N A N D TA N YA B O N A K DA R GA L L E R Y, N E W YO R K / LO S A N G E L E S

Liu Shiyuan, “Almost Like Rebar No. 4,” 2018, C-print, sandwich mounted, acrylic, oak wood frame painted white with hand drawn black pattern, 128 x 128 x 5 cm, Edition of 5, 1 AP.

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DOCUMENT GALLERY Lawrence and Paul Mpagi Sepuya. The L.A.-based Sepuya, who is represented by Team Gallery but whose work was recently shown at Document Gallery, is one of the gallery’s best-known artists, with work in the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum in New York. But it’s artists like Atterbury, whose work has yet to meet wide popularity, that make Document

Gallery an intriguing incubator of emerging talent. Her recent show there, “Happy Sunny Jade” was comprised of photographs, sculptural works and installations that explored questions of personal identity, and how her hometown of Sunny Side, Florida, has informed her visual language, as she explained in an interview with Artspace.

Mpagi Sepuya, “Dark Room,” installation view at ‘DOCUMENT, ‘2018.

PAU L M PAG I S E P U YA , D O C U M E N T, 2 018 .

Opened in 2011, Document Gallery is based in Chicago, and, for a small gallery, has done exceptionally well to put on over 30 solo exhibitions and promote the work of Chicagobased as well as a few international artists. The gallery represents or shows mostly emerging artists, including Elizabeth Atterbury, Geraldo de Barros, Mary Helena Clark, Julien Creuzet, Sterling

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The Adam Art Gallery, located at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, takes a particularly local approach to art. The gallery was founded in 1999 and is currently directed by Tina Baron, who has made it her mission to uncover and exhibit art that grapples with sociopolitical events salient to New Zealand and the Oceania region at large. The gallery has exhibited a variety of emerging artists since its opening, mostly of Kiwi descent, with works by Brett Graham, Mark Adams, Gavin Hipkins, Darcy Lange, Vivian Lynn and Pauline Rhodes. (There are a few Americans as well, including Joseph Kosuth and Joseph Grigely.) Luke Willis Thompson, 30, is the gallery’s recent emerging star, a New Zealander who currently lives in London and was nominated for the Turner Prize. Mostly a video artist, Thompson’s 2018 film series “How Long,” which was the center of his recent exhibition at the Adam Art Gallery and took up all three of the gallery’s floors, is comprised of a series of four portraits of Fijian soldiers over four decades. The socalled “moving portraits” were shot with sixteen-millimeter film that Thompson later digitized. They are silent and intense, the camera panning across the faces of emotionally volatile soldiers, evoking the unrest that surrounds Fiji’s history of violence and injustice. Thompson calls his work “movingimage artwork” whose mission is to “find form for political silence.”

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ADAM ART GALLERY

Luke Willis Thompson, “Cemetery of Uniforms and Liveries,” 2016, 16mm, b&w film, silent, 8 minutes, 50 seconds @ 24 fps. installation view at Adam Art Gallery Te Pataka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington, 21 February – 15 April 2018.

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Luke Willis Thompson, “How long?,” 2018, 16mm colour negative film transferred to digital video, silent. Below: Luke Willis Thompson, Autoportrait, 2017, 35mm, b&w, silent. installation view at Adam Art Gallery Te Pataka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington, 21 February – 15 April 2018.

L U K E W I L L I S T H O M P S O N , A DA M A R T GA L L E R Y

Luke Willis Thompson, “How long?,” 2018, 16mm colour negative film transferred to digital video, silent. Installation view at Adam Art Gallery Te Pataka Toi, Victoria University of Wellington, 21 February – 15 April 2018.

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315 GALLERY

315 Gallery’s recent breakout artist Phoebe Collings-James is a British-Jamaican model and artist whose recent show at the gallery, “Expensive Shit,” created what she called a “diasporic fantasy” in which she conceived a soundscape that attempted to capture the feeling of movement as a solid place. In working with the American — and Nigeriandescended — poet Precious Okoyomon, they’ve together asked important questions about place, globalization, and the trauma that’s

continually inflicted on black immigrant women who come to America. 315 Gallery, a Contemporary art gallery in Brooklyn, does not yet have a clear or deining ethos but that’s also what makes it so exciting. For instance, a new show by Quay Quinn Wolf includes a work called “My Man’s Gone Now” in which a plastic jug full of water and red carnations sits atop a velvet-lined blazer in a bizarre, elegiac installation. Wolf, who works between sculpture and archival

materials and is often most interested in memories and the process of creating them, may be the gallery’s most intriguing up-andcoming artist. 315 Gallery also represents or shows artists as varied as the Chicago-born artist and poet Diamond Stingily as well as Amy Brener and Lucas Blalock, whose recent exhibition at the gallery “Bottle, Comb, Crutch, Wrench” questioned the mechanization of the body through the use of household supplies.

PAUL KASMIN GALLERY One of the oldest galleries on this list, the Paul Kasmin Gallery was opened in Manhattan’s SoHo in 1989. With a combination of both emerging and better-known artists, the gallery represents and has exhibited works from A-list artists like Constantin Brancusi, Max Ernst and Robert Motherwell, but it has also been the gallery to irst ind artists like Walton Ford, Robert Indiana, Iván Navarro, Les Lalanne, Roxy Paine, and Naama Tsabar. With

three separate spaces now in Chelsea, including one that was just opened on 27th Street earlier this year, the gallery has a signiicant amount of resources to bolster emerging artists. Tsabar, for instance, who was born in Israel in 1982 and currently lives in New York, is one of the gallery’s most signiicant up-and-coming artists. Her works — mostly in the forms of installation, sculptures, and

performances — deal with power structures and how they allow for playing out games of sexuality and masculinity. For instance, in one recent installation, she subverts the power of rock music and its typical masculine associations by looking instead at its role within nightclubs and the ways in which it paves the way for more typically “feminine” ideas of seduction.

2,000 artists from more than 400 galleries from over 30 countries represented on its site, Artspace curates its sales with guest scholars and curators, making itself into a blend of auction house, gallery and personal art specialist. Although Artspace tends to go where the money is, selling works by the likes of Jeff Koons and Robert Rauschenberg, it also has incentive to ind emerging artists like any other beginning gallery. Most recently, Vroom and Levene have begun to showcase the work of Hannah Levy,

a conceptual artist who questions semantic connections and complicates the viewer’s understanding of even the most basic of objects. In “Untitled,” for instance, she uses handrails that, broken off from the side of a pool where they belong, instead come up from a concrete floor, thus becoming an object that blocks movement rather than one that assists with it. With a vinyl cover over its stainless steel, the rails appear to have a prosthetic skin, further questioning their use and function.

ARTSPACE Launched in 2010, Artspace is not so much a gallery as an online art marketplace. Yet the art collectors Christopher E. Vroom and Catherine Levene, who co-founded the site, believe that not only could online art marketplaces like Artspace become the norm for art buying, but they could overtake galleries as well. That might be a bit of a stretch, but the nascent online art marketplace is already off to a strong start, challenging established galleries and auction houses alike. With over

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Genevieve Gaignard, “Grandfather clock,“ ‘Rise and Shine (Her Moment in Time),’2018, 185.4 x 51.2 x 25cm, (73 x 20 1/8 x 9 7/8in).

C O P Y R I G H T: G E N E V I E V E GA I G N A R D. C O U R T E S Y O F G E N E V I E V E GA I G N A R D, S H U L A M I T N A Z A R I A N A N D S T E P H E N F R I E D M A N GA L L E R Y, LO N D O N

STEPHEN FRIEDMAN GALLERY Although the Stephen Friedman Gallery has been open since 1995 and represents a variety of well-known artists including William Kentridge and Kara Walker, it has lately evolved to become a gallery for various emerging artists as well. Located on London’s Mayfair on Old Burlington Street since its opening, it has continued to expand, taking over another, new gallery space that was designed by David Kohn. In both spaces it hosts numerous exhibitions each year, with works by Kentridg and Walker but also by Beatriz Milhazes, Rivane Neuenschwander, Rudolf Stingel, Mira Schendel and Anne Truitt. But it’s artists like the 37-year-old bi-racial artist Genevieve Gaignard who are making the gallery stand out. Gaignard’s over-the-top, costumed self-portraits — in leopard print with a bouffant; with long braids and gold hoop earrings; with a shirt that says “Hoodrat Thangs” — the Yale MFA graduate explores how identity is grafted on to individuals without their say. The works seem silly, almost campy, and yet they prove to deal with greater issues of race and class. “The environments might feel inviting,” Gaignard told Artsy. “They lure you in, but you learn something you weren’t anticipating — the heavier issues come through.”

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TOP 10 GALLERIES TO WAT A CH FOR EMERGING ARTISTS

Genevieve Gaignard, “Rise and Shine (Her Moment in Time),” 2018, custom hand painted porcelain figurine, 185.4 x 51.2 x 25cm, (73 x 20 1/8 x 9 7/8in).

T H I S PAG E A N D FAC I N G PAG E: C O P Y R I G H T: G E N E V I E V E GA I G N A R D. C O U R T E S Y O F G E N E V I E V E GA I G N A R D, S H U L A M I T N A Z A R I A N A N D S T E P H E N F R I E D M A N GA L L E R Y, LO N D O N

Genevieve Gaignard, “Doilies,” ‘Rise and Shine (Her Moment in Time),’ 2018, 185.4 x 51.2 x 25cm, (73 x 20 1/8 x 9 7/8in).

ART FOUNDATION AS THE CURATOR AND WRITER JÉRÔME NEUTRES INTERVIEWS EDOUARD CARMIGNAC, CHAIRMAN AND FOUNDER OF THE CARMIGNAC FOUNDATION, WHO HAS OPENED A NEW MUSEUM ON THE ISLAND OF PORQUEROLLES TO SHOW OFF HIS COLLECTION

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© F O N DAT I O N C A R M I G N AC – P H OTO : J A N A I N A M E L LO L A N D I N I

SELF-PORTRAIT

Janaina Mello Landini, “Ciclotrama 50 (Wind),” 2018, 20 meters of diameter polyethylene and polyester nylon rope, approximately 4100 brass nails, a marble cleat and a marble winch, 5.5m x 1.40m x 12m.

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P H OTO : M AT T H I E U S A LVA I N G

Edouard Carmignac

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T

hirty years after the opening of the glamorous Enrico Navarra Gallery compound in the Provencal village of Le Muy, and a few years after the opening of the Mitterrand sculpture park and the Venet Foundation in the same area, the French southern district of Var can now count another arty destination. Since June 1st, visitors have been embarking from the port of Hyères to reach a Contemporary art museum nestled in the pine woods on the island of Porquerolles. Edouard Carmignac, a 70-year-old investment banker, chose the most protected Côte d’Azur island to open a museum for his 300-strong collection of works by Contemporary masters, from Rothko to Lichtenstein, Richter to Basquiat, Barcelo to Baldessari. In this wild green sanctuary of 200 souls, cars are banned, as is any new construction. (Though a million tourists reach its shores each year.) After a 15-minute walk from the beach, it’s a surprise to discover irst a rather traditional house, that once even served as the decor in JeanLuc Godard’s cult movie “Pierrot Le Fou.” Surrounding it is a 90-acre vineyard, next to a 40-acre sculpture garden designed by Louis Benech. The surprise continues when you are invited to enter the house barefoot, to discover an unpredictable museum of stone and light, with 20,000 square feet of exhibition space, most of it underground. I spoke to Carmignac recently about his inspiration for the museum and his plans for the future. (This edited interview is translated from the French by the writer.)

JN: Why open a new institution in France, which already has so many museums and art centers? What is the purpose of this new project? EC: In France we have the most beautiful museums for antiques and classic arts, but it is like a desert for Contemporary art. Pompidou Center collections have all the big names of Contemporary art, but rarely the big works of those big names. Today, for the younger generation, it is therefore dificult to get a good

overview of the recent art history in the existing institutions. In 1966, I was lucky to visit the Picasso survey at the Grand Palais and it was a revelation for me like for so many people, when we were only used to seeing Fragonard or the Impressionists in museums. When, all over the world, brand new gigantic museums look like airport halls or shopping malls (and vice versa in a time where malls and airports display art), the Carmignac Foundation is set in a classic mas Provencal, with human-size dimensions. Why such modesty? I didn’t want to hire a rock-star architect like Tadao Ando or Frank Gehry, who will impose his personality on a project I wanted to keep only mine. The museum didn’t need an architectural legitimacy. I worked successively with four different architects to adapt the house into a museum, and I inally ended the job myself. I wanted the space totally integrated in the environment, in harmony with the surrounding nature. An organic museum for a living project. Everybody at the opening noticed that the underground space design has the same divisions as a church. Do you see art as a new religion? The design of the museum was guided by my intuition, and a search for natural light. A challenge, as the light in the south is very strong and you have to tame it. It is a very personal project. It is true that one can see in the space a nave, a transept, a choir…. Like in a church. But it is a truly unconscious design! I am not a

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LEFT: Martial Raysse, “Untitled,” 1962. CENTER: Andy Warhol, “Lenin,“ 1986. RIGHT: Andy Warhol, “Mao,” 1973.

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L E F T: © A DAG P, PA R I S 2 018 , C E N T E R & R I G H T: © T H E A N DY WA R H O L F O U N DAT I O N F O R T H E V I S UA L A R T S , I N C . / A DAG P, PA R I S 2 018 . P H OTO : M A R C D O M AG E

P H OTO: M A R C D O M AG E

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Fondation Carmignac

“THE MAIN GOAL IS TO AWAKEN IN VISITORS A CHILD’S SENSE OF WONDER. I WOULD LIKE TO NOURISH OUR CAPACITY TO BE SURPRISED” religious person, though no doubt that we all need some transcendence. I am maybe in a search of a certain mysticism. And art is certainly a way to that. The foundation is the very irst museum one has to visit barefoot, like in a session of Marina Abramovic’s method. Is this strange rule made to force us to remain down to Earth? I am surprised no one ever thought of it before! I have always been living barefoot at home, in all seasons. To be in close contact with the ground, to feel it. Therefore, I chose a special stone, very pleasant to walk on. I try to push the audiences, especially the youngsters, to get rid of their habits and cellphones, etc. To re-connect with themselves! I hesitated whether to ban cellphones, but I want the visitors to be able to take pictures to record their experience. And anyway there is almost no phone network inside. The main goal is to awaken in visitors a child’s sense of wonder. I would like to nourish our capacity to be surprised. Did you collect art works all those years with the strategic goal of building a museum? Again the selection of the works is a very personal issue. I collect art without an advisor. All is a question of an encounter with an art work. I don’t have personal relationships with artists, though I briefly met some of them in the framework of Andy Warhol’s factory when I was living in New York. I prefer to meet their works. I don’t visit artists’ studios; I buy art in the fairs or

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Miquel Barceló, “Not titled yet,” 2018.

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© F O N DAT I O N C A R M I G N AC – P H OTO: M A R C D O M AG E

galleries. Then, I am very faithful to my art. I’ve only resold one piece in my life, because it was damaged. Why then did you hire a curator for the opening exhibition of such a personal project? For the inaugural show of the foundation, I asked the curator Dieter Buchhart, to tell the story of my collection, in a sense. To analyze from his curatorial point of view the meanings of my choices. Nevertheless, I decided myself to hang a dialogue between Lichtenstein and Botticelli, for instance. Every year, we will totally change the display of the collection. Again, I want a very lively museum. Does this personal statement as the basis of the Carmignac Foundation project explain the atypical arrangement of photojournalism next to masters’ paintings? I have been the founder and sponsor of the Carmignac Prize for photojournalism for the last 10 years. When I was a teenager I was fascinated

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by Paris-Match magazine and the photos of the ways of the world. I want people to see more of those photos. Starting next year, the whole irst level of the museum will be dedicated to photojournalism, while the underground spaces will display the paintings. We understand your foundation is like a self-portrait. Nevertheless, you recently appointed your son Charles as its executive director. Too many art projects disappear with their patron. I want to organize the legacy of the foundation from its opening. My son Charles has a very artistic sensibility — he is irst a musician. I exchange with him; he visits galleries with me. At the last Art Basel fair, out of the two works I bought, one was his choice. Charles has been working very hard for the last 18 months to inalize the construction of the project. Later he will develop his own point of view for the collection, based on his personality. A very different personality than mine, who may be more in tune with today’s world issues. MP

© T H E E S TAT E O F J E A N - M I C H E L B A S Q U I AT / A DAG P, PA R I S 2 018 – P H OTO : M A R C D O M AG E

Jean-Michel Basquiat, “Fallen Angel,” 1983-84.

Somogy Art Publishers since 1937 w w w. s o m o g y. n e t © Musée du Louvre, dist. R M N – Grand Palais / Hervé Lewandowski / Laurent Chastel / Thierry Le Mage / Adrien Didierjean

THE CHANGING ARCHITECTURE OF THE BODY A show at the George Economou Collection in Athens shows how Jenny Saville remains a pioneer in depicting contemporar y bodies that transcend rigid shapes and identities BY SARAH MOROZ

Jenny Saville, “Stare (drawing),” 2006-10, charcoal, pastel, and gouache on watercolour, 181 x 154 cm, private collection, Torino (Italy).

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ow bodies can be changed, naturally and unnaturally, is an endless source of fascination to Jenny Saville. The British painter has featured models mostly exempt from the art canon: female nudes in monumental proportions, bodies altered by surgery, proudly gender-fluid identities. It’s a pantheon without ixed boundaries, where biology is non-prescriptive, where corporeality transmutes into vivacious textural brushstrokes and healthy, fleshy tones. The complex yet instinctive igurative painter has always been driven by the visual: “My parents, if they sat long enough, I would start drawing them,” she recalled in a conversation in Athens, at the opening of her latest show. She forged her signature style through rigorous academic training at the Glasgow School of Art, from which she graduated in 1992. The businessman and art collector Charles Saatchi bought up canvases at her degree show and commissioned her to spend two years working on pieces for his gallery dedicated to Young British Artists. The magnetism of Saville’s work

The exhibition commences with an early work, “Cindy,” 1993, which depicts a woman who underwent plastic surgery to mirror the British equivalent of a Barbie: a Sindy doll

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from that and later periods wields intense power in its unflinching intimacy: something unbridled, protean. Simon Schama wrote in the Financial Times in 2011: “I sometimes think that if Lucian Freud had had a heart, as well as the eye of a hawk, he might have become as great a painter of the human body as Jenny Saville already is.” An eponymous show of her work is running until April 2019 in Athens at the George Economou Collection, located in an innocuous building behind a Pet City. The exhibition showcases a sampling of Saville’s canvases from 1993 to 2015. Athens is an especially resonant location for Saville; Greece represents a heady concentration of “civilizations, hybridity, pluralism,” as she put it. She is fascinated by Greek sculpture, Hellenistic metamorphic myths, successive waves of civilization, ancient fertility goddesses. The British Museum in London and the Archaeological Museum in Athens are totemic for her, as they’re “museums with fragments of bodies that have this beautiful purity,” she said. Saville in fact lived in the region, in Palermo, between 2003 and 2009. She easily rattles off references to Mycenaean culture, but is invested in contemporary Greece too, where she loves the constant coating of urban grafiti, echoing the “layers of civilizations, one atop the other.” As she points out, “You can excavate from the destruction.” The exhibition commences with an early work, “Cindy,” 1993, which depicts a woman who

A R T U R O S AV I L L E

Portrait of Jenny Saville

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© S E Y D O U K E Ï TA / S K P E AC , C O U R T E S Y C A AC – T H E P I G OZ Z I C O L L E C T I O N & GA L E R I E N AT H A L I E O B A D I A PA R I S/ B R U X E L L E S

C O U R T E S Y GAG O S I A N GA L L E R Y

Jenny Saville, “Ebb and Flow,” 2015, oil stain, pastel, and charcoal on canvas, 160 × 260 cm, private collection.

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underwent plastic surgery to mirror the British equivalent of a Barbie: a Sindy doll. The painting foreshadowed Saville’s ongoing exploration of physical manipulation. Simon Groom, director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and curator of the show, said of the opener: “You have that sense of confrontation. It’s a small painting but it’s very physical, very powerful. It’s a state of someone revealed and hidden — and I think a lot of her work does that. It both promises and hides; it creates and obliterates at the same time. There’s always an ambiguity.” Adjacent to “Cindy” hangs “Ruben’s Flap,” 1998-99, which belongs to the Georges Economu collection. The astonishing canvas was informed by Saville’s experience of watching cosmetic surgery being performed in 1994, which was a niche procedure 24 years ago. The medical term “Ruben’s flap” refers to the transfer of flesh from the thigh to the breast: “I just fell on this title… this goes together so well with what I do,” she said, readily equating the “movement of flesh from one place to another like moving paint from one place to another.” The experience of watching hands reaching inside the human body had a profound influence upon her, but in an unexpected way: “I went thinking I’d learn about flesh, but actually I went out knowing about painting.” Her own technique can be deemed near-surgical as well. She uses a vacuum cleaner to take away charcoal and edit layers she applies and removes: “When you

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Her own technique can be deemed near-surgical as well. She uses a vacuum cleaner to take away charcoal and edit layers she applies and removes vacuum through it, it’s like cutting through history,” she said. “It takes months to get that believable sense of mass.” Her iguration repurposes concepts she loves from Abstract painting. Willem De Kooning is a hero of hers, and she feels indebted to his “succulent” colors: “He has this sensuality with paint,” she said. But his approach is something she has translated into her own terms: “de Kooning would take two tones, mix them together, the act of the mix creating multiple tones. I thought: how can I do that with iguration? How can I do that with form?” In fact, she accomplished that by layering multiple igures, conveying a sense of frenetic temporality that brings to mind double exposure if not time-lapse photography, as in her 2015 work “Ebb and Flow.” “It has a pace to it,” she said of her work. “I like to draw a thought, and then put another layer on top, and that thought gets buried through history — but when you’re looking, you pick up the thought, your perception shifts.” This layering mixes male and female

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Jenny Saville, “Ruben’s Flap,” 1998-99, oil on canvas, 304.4 x 243.8 cm, private collection.

body parts, so that gender — and, indeed, any sense of an individual self — dissolves. The suggestive silhouettes are such that one is “not sure which bit belongs to which person.” What might seem orgiastic is more about deconstruction, an absence of edges, she said: “It’s not necessarily about sexuality; it’s to do with people as borders.” The porous parameters between self and other, between male and female, is such that “the piece itself becomes like a hermaphrodite: many genders, many types of bodies,” she added. “These bodies merge, and it becomes more about humanity. Everything I’ve done is trying to access something more universal through the particular.” The result evokes the primal, the restless, the immediate, the substantial. The hermaphrodite is also a literal igure in her portfolio: Saville’s 1999 “Matrix,” is an especially compelling piece in the show. It features Del LaGrace, a self-proclaimed “polymorphous perverse queer” who is intersex by design, whom Saville happened to bump into in cafe in London and asked to model. The pose Saville used as a reference was that of a marble statue of Iris in the British Museum she loved so much she named her daughter after it. Saville turned the jutting silhouette on its side so that, on the canvas, the composition is especially frontal. (She irst had herself photographed in the pose she wanted Del to do, with open genitals, as a gesture of solidarity.) The canvas,

The hermaphrodite is also a literal figure in her portfolio: Saville’s 1999 “Matrix,” is an especially compelling piece in the show like the model, rejects the idea of body realignment and spotlights people playing with gender norms. She noted: “At the time, people didn’t think you could be transgender.” (The exhibition notes that comparatively, today, Facebook offers 71 gender-identity options, and Tinder offers 37.) It is not just a depiction of hermaphrodite identity but “what that psychologically feels like, and what that looks like physically,” Groom noted of her visceral work. Saville was, and remains, a pioneer in depicting contemporary bodies that transcend rigid “types.” The contemporary cultural conversation about gender politics and fluid identities is only starting to catch up to her longstanding vocabulary of versatile bodies and form. Her attraction to these identities is further reflected in her technique and radical visual language. Groom praises her ability to evoke “something the intellect couldn’t have thought of,” the intangibility of a sensation that “escalates something more real than what you can see.” MP

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© J E N N Y S AV I L L E A N D GAG O S I A N

Jenny Saville, “Untitled (Stare Study),” 2004-5, oil on watercolor, paper, 190 x 155 cm, private collection.

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e l a n n e i B n i l r Be SMALLER AND STRONGER THE BIENNIAL HAS 46 ARTISTS AND COLLECTIVES, WITH MORE THAN 30 NEW COMMISSIONS, SPREAD ACROSS VARIOUS VENUES IN BERLIN By Anya Harrison

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C O U R T E S Y FA B I A N A FA L E I R O S ; I C H L I E B E M E I N E VAG I N A / M C X U PA R I N A , P H OTO : T I M O O H L E R W

Fabiana Faleiros, “Mastur Bar,” 2015–18, installation view, 10. Berlin Biennale, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin.

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Curator Gabi Ngcobo, 10th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art.

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Called “We Don’t Need Another Hero,” after the 1985 song by Tina Turner, the 10th Berlin Biennale is curated by Gabi Ngcobo with a team consisting of Nomaduma Rosa Masilela, Serubiri Moses, Thiago de Paula Souza and Yvette Mutumba 70

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P H OTO: M A S I M B A S A S A

f any event on the global art map has consistently succeeded in attracting and polarizing audiences in equal measure, the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art is surely near the top of the list. If it doesn’t consciously seek controversy, it certainly doesn’t skirt it: from the Artur Zmijewskicurated edition in 2012 that placed politics literally center stage — by inviting Occupy movement activists to inhabit the ground floor of the Biennale’s main venue — to the 2016 one in which the curatorial reins were handed over to the collective DIS and had critics split between loving and loathing it. It’s safe to say that the Berlin Biennale has often courted debate rather than aim to gratify audience expectations. In this respect, the 10th and latest edition promised early on not only to tackle issues like power, race, visibility and violence — but to treat them in a manner that would avoid the reductive readings and Instagram-friendly snapshots that are the fate of many exhibitions of this scale. Called “We Don’t Need Another Hero,” after the 1985 song by Tina Turner, the 10th Berlin Biennale is curated by Gabi Ngcobo with a team consisting of Nomaduma Rosa Masilela, Serubiri Moses, Thiago de Paula Souza and Yvette Mutumba. This biennial, which runs through Sept. 9, positions itself as a subdued affair that doesn’t subscribe to an easily digestible authorial concept, another form of hero worship that often sees curators unwittingly cast in the role of prophets. Instead, it opts — according to the published curatorial statement — to confront

C O U R T E S Y D I N E O S E S H E E B O PA P E ; J A B U A R N E L L ; L AC H E L L W O R K M A N ; M O L AU D I ; R O B E R T R H E E ; S F E I R - S E M L E R GA L L E R Y, H A M B U R G/B E I R U T, P H OTO : T I M O O H L E R

Dineo Sheshee Bopape, “Untitled (Of Occult Instability) [Feelings],” 2016–18, installation view, bricks, light, sounds, videos, water, framed napkin, 10. Berlin Biennale, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin.

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C O U R T E SY F I R E L E I B Á E Z ; K AV I G U P TA GA L L E R Y, C H I C AG O, P H OTO: T I M O O H L E R

Firelei Báez, “Anacaona,” 2018, oil on canvas, installation view, for Marie-Louise Coidavid, exiled, keeper of order, 10. Berlin Biennale, Akademie der Künste (Hanseatenweg), Berlin.

“current widespread states of collective psychosis” via conversations that “confront the incessant anxieties perpetuated by a willful disregard for complex subjectivities.” Enter a much reduced, but more effective, 46-strong list of artists and collectives (many of them stemming from beyond the Western/AngloAmerican tradition), with over 30 new commissions, spread across ive venues: Akademie der Kunste, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, ZK/U — Center for Art and Urbanistics, HAU Hebbel am Ufer (HAU2), and the Voksbuhne Pavilion, with the majority of the artworks displayed across the three former sites. The dictum that “bigger doesn’t mean better” is in full evidence for the most part; what comes across immediately is the generosity of space that has been afforded the works. Ngcobo and her team have posited the act of “selfpreservation” as central to their premise, and as the antithesis of imposing any one kind of narrative or truth. This is strongest when a balance is struck between works acting as open invitations while not giving up all of their secrets at once. At the Akademie der Kunste, the biggest venue, Basir Mahmood’s video “all voices are mine,” 2018, is a collation of collective gestures, not devoid of humor. Mahmood invited

The dictum that “bigger doesn’t mean better” is in full evidence for the most part; what comes across immediately is the generosity of space that has been afforded the works BLOUINARTINFO.COM AUGUST 2018 MODERN PAINTERS

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Heba Y. Amin, “The Master’s Tools I,” 2018.

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FAC I N G PAG E: C O U R T E S Y H E B A Y. A M I N T H I S PAG E: C O U R T E S Y H E R M A N M B A M B A ; B L A N K P R O J E C T S , C A P E TO W N , P H OTO : E D GA R B AC H E L

Herman Mbamba, “Until the wind blows for another time,” 2018–18, acrylic on canvas, 210 × 300 cm.

technicians and actors to Bari Studio in Lahore and asked them to reproduce gestures previously performed for other ilms, recording them over the course of a single day. The result is an index of images and memories half-remembered: a man who abruptly and silently drops to the ground from his horse’s saddle, and lies motionless, or a group of extras who repeatedly shuffle past a doorway only to reappear prostrate in the next shot. Also here and there across the Akademie der Kunste space, anonymous clusters of reeds stand as silent sentinels; a clandestine iniltration orchestrated by Sara Haq. The work’s power stems from its unobtrusive quietness (and therefore, gains nothing from its too-obvious title “Trans:plant,” 2018). The most politically direct of the works here, Mario Pfeifer’s large-scale video “Again / Noch einmal,” 2018, re-enacts an incident that took place

in Germany in 2016, when four men verbally and physically assaulted a young Iraqi, but were acquitted in court and held up by the wider community as heroes. In the midst of tensions across Europe caused by the ongoing refugee crisis, “Again / Noch einmal” activates questions about violence, social cohesion and ethics that are pertinent not least to Germany itself, but it is dificult to disassociate it from a very similar work by Forensic Architecture irst shown at last year’s documenta. With its melange of Brechtian and talk-show delivery, Pfeifer’s feels like the rougher cut. Sondra Perry’s video “IT’S IN THE GAME ’17 or Mirror Gag for Vitrine and Projection,” 2018, similarly deals with the way that certain bodies are afforded greater freedom than others in their trajectory and ownership of space — whether physical or digital — but in a more oblique (and

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While Tina Turner herself only makes an appearance via the sampling of “We Don’t Need Another Hero,” the biennial is not lacking in other black female voices

Agnieszka Brzezanska, “Sovereign Avatar,“ 2014.

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therefore, to my mind, more persuasive) manner. While Tina Turner herself only makes an appearance via the sampling of “We Don’t Need Another Hero,” the biennial is not lacking in other black female voices, notably those of Nina Simone and Audre Lorde. At KW Institute of Contemporary Art, they’re present in Dineo Seshee Bopape’s “Untitled (Of Occult Instability) [Feelings],” 2016-18, which draws on Simone’s 1976 performance at the Montreux Jazz Festival and bathes the entirety of the ground floor gallery in an unreal orange luminescence; as well as in Natasha A. Kelly’s ilm “Milli’s Awakening,” 2018, a series of interviews with eight Afro-German women about their experiences of growing up and living within German society, which nods at the poet Audre Lorde’s own stay in the capital during the ‘80s and early ‘90s. The weakest link in the Biennale is the ZK/U, whose rabbit-hole warren of rooms makes

TO P I M AG E: C O U R T E S Y P O R T I A Z VAVA H E R A ; S T E V E N S O N , C A P E TO W N/J O H A N N E S B U R G, P H OTO : T I M O O H L E R B OT TO M I M AG E: C O U R T E S Y AG N I E S Z K A B R Z E Z A N S K A ; N A N Z U K A , TO K YO, P H OTO : K E I ZO K I O K U

Portia Zvavahera, “Hapana Chitsva,” 2018, oil-based printing ink and oilstick on canvas, triptych, installation view, 10. Berlin Biennale, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin.

Mildred Thompson, “Woodwork,” 1969, wood, nails, green paint, 90 × 103 × 6,3 cm, private collection.

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for a weirdly broken-up experience that includes a room of paintings by Sam Samiee and works on paper by Tessa Mars. I found myself irked by Heba Y. Amin’s multi-part installation and video “The Anti-Control Room,” 2018, in which the artist plays a geopolitical megalomaniac, with the proposition of merging Africa and Europe into one supercontinent. Surrounded by archival video footage of real former political leaders, including Mussolini of Italy and Nasser of Egypt, the imaginary it constructs feels ham-isted. In 2018, we don’t need to imagine what a blurring of lines between truth, iction and megalomania might look like; we’re already living it. A gem though is to be found in the basement, where a series of videos by Tony Cokes merge image, text and pop music to tap into histories of commodiication, violence and

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emancipation. Walking through these spaces, Gabi Ngcobo’s words from the opening press conference follow me around like an echo: “Let’s face it. We are at war.” The 10th Berlin Biennale, as a “visual war” — right down to the camouflage pink-and-grey design of its branding — purports to shy away from outright didacticism, offering up a space instead for contemplation and action. But while its intended refusal to perform to public expectation is earnest and applaudable, it’s dificult to shy away from the sense that much of the biennial feels lackluster when set against this rallying call. In weakness lies strength. But the opposite also holds true. MP More information: http://www.berlinbiennale.de/

C O U R T E S Y Z U L E I K H A C H AU D H A R I , P H OTO : T I M O O H L E R

Zuleikha Chaudhari, “Rehearsing Azaad Hind Radio,” 2018, video, sound; mixed media, 40’12’’, installation view, 10. Berlin Biennale, ZK/U Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik, Berlin.

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FAC I N G PAG E: C O U R T E S Y GA L L E R I A N D E R S S O N/S A N D S T R Ö M

Jaume Plensa

BIG HEADS, BIG HEART

JAUME PLENSA IS RENOWNED FOR HIS GIANT SCULPTURES OF HUMAN HEADS IN PUBLIC SPACES, BUT HIS WORK IS GUIDED BY AN ETHOS THAN CAN ONLY BE DESCRIBED AS BIG-HEARTED BY DEVORAH LAUTER

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Jaume Plensa, “Heart of Rivers,” bronze and trees.

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is work is shown at museums and galleries across the world, but the large-scale sculptures of the Spanish artist Jaume Plensa are perhaps most widely remembered for the way they transform, and become inseparably part of the landscapes in parks or city squares that surround them. His giant head casts, whose dimensions and features he manipulates, stretches or otherwise alters, captivate with a mysterious aura of wonder and quiet beauty. Reminiscent of the spiritual awe that can be felt when looking at busts carved by Olmec sculptors in Mexico, or the artists who created the monolithic heads on Easter Island, Plensa’s “portraits” are not easily forgotten. While the ancient sculptors cannot speak about the impulses that guided them, Plensa is willing to talk about his uplifting approach to making art that he hopes brings people together. Plensa spoke with Modern Painters on the occasion of several sculpture installations on Djurgården island in Stockholm, on view until September 23, plus a show with Galleri Andersson/ Sandström in the same city, opening August 23. The Djurgården project includes three, 7-meter-high castiron portraits of young girls, made especially for this natural haven in the city center, placed facing each other as if in dialogue across a canal. Another female portrait in a white bronze cast sits in the middle of the water. The artist’s “Heart of Rivers” installation, representative of Plensa’s other “family” of work using letters from several alphabets, was also saved for the island show, and consists of seven selfportraits of the artist’s body embracing living cherry trees. The following has been edited for length. Can you discuss your thoughts about the Djurgården project? When Stefan Andersson (from the Galleri Andersson/ Sandström) invited me to do the installation at Djurgården, it was extremely exciting, because it was an opportunity to create a dialogue with my work

— which has a certain Mediterranean background — with the concept of a Scandinavian park. In Djurgården, it seems like you’re really in the countryside, even if you are in the center of town. The scale of the relationship of my work, with these huge trees, and amazing nature — it was like an opera stage embracing my work. It was spectacular. When I work in nature, I try to disappear in it, to create a link or a kind of dialogue, where pieces and nature can seem as one. At the opening you felt like the pieces had always been there, and to me, it’s wonderful when that happens. Can you tell us about the upcoming show you have in August with the gallery? The gallery will have another family of my work, which is more based on text, and the alphabet. I think it will be a beautiful balance, because [including the park] people will have the two main streams of my work. You’ve talked about making mistakes and intuition as key to the creative process. What mistakes have led you to where you are now? (Laughs) Life is basically all mistakes. It’s the only way you can learn and move ahead. And actually, I guess creation is basically intuition. And it’s beautiful when intuition becomes reality, and you can share that with people. My work has always been around the subject of people and community. The work exists to interact with individuals, and to make them better. It’s about dreaming that one day society can be better. And one of the strongest aspects of the human being is the mistake, and that’s the beautiful touch deining who a person is. We are a work in progress. And I think creation is very similar. How would you describe your creative direction now? We are in a very special, historical moment in our world. Many people are suffering, and it’s a very

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Jaume Plensa, “Carlota,” 700 cm, bronze.

strange time in politics. My work is always trying to produce a certain situation of beauty that can be like a balm, to calm all these strange aspects. I’m trying to talk about our interior, something that really links all of us. It doesn’t matter where you come from. It doesn’t matter what your language is, your religion, the color of your skin. Inside we are dreaming very similar things. And my work becomes like a bridge that connects many people, and ways of understanding reality. Art has this tremendous capacity to regenerate ideas, or become a mirror where people can see themselves, and think about what they can do for society. Every time I open a show, I try to think of that mirror. Do you feel there’s a notion in the Contemporary art world today, that suggests making beautiful art is old-fashioned? Should this be challenged? I am continuously insisting. Beauty is a link that can draw people together. I think it’s a completely wrong approach to think beauty is old fashioned. Beauty is not just about producing beautiful objects. Beauty is something deeper. I love to work with portraits. When you see somebody, what kind of beauty are you expecting from them? A beautiful face? Where are you looking? Art has a tremendous responsibility to produce and introduce beauty again in people’s everyday lives. Beauty is incredibly politically strong. We must have the courage to insist on it as a concept that can really link people together. Your portraits share something similar with the ruins of giant prehistoric, monolithic head sculptures. Do you feel that’s a fair comparison? I’m very pleased about that comparison, because those people and I were, and are probably trying to talk about something similar: which is that the head is the most important part of our body. Everything happens in our head. The brain is probably the wildest part of our body, that is sometimes out of our control. When looking at a person’s face, you can read about the soul. The head has the powers of knowledge, of wisdom, of dreams. When you dream about something, it already exists, because it’s in your ideas.

While working on my project in Chicago, the Crown Fountain [a fountain made of two giant towers facing each other, displaying the faces of Chicago residents spouting water from their mouths like gargoyles, installed in 2004], I’d been ilming 1,000 faces of people living in town, and that experience was terriic, because it made me understand the power of one face. But I wanted to go a little bit further, and work with classic materials, such as stone, wood, bronze, etc. … while keeping that concept of portraits. I always do my portraits, with the eyes closed, and always of a young woman, who is for me, an incredibly strong metaphor about memory and future. Having the eyes closed in a dream state makes it a place where people can ask: What do I hear inside myself? This amazing beauty that I have to communicate with others? Our cultures and education sometimes block us from expressing our feelings and ideas. We are simply repeating the messages that arrive to us, like a certain echo. I’m probably making a link with these heads you are mentioning. There are plenty through history. The Olmec heads, the Eastern cultures ... I’ve dreamed since I was a child about the faces they said you could see on Mars. For some reason, it was a tradition that was cut at some moment of art history, and I want it to come back with my work. You feel that representing the head is a broken tradition? Yes, absolutely. And the Crown Fountain in Chicago has something which is also completely broken as a tradition: the gargoyle. That beautiful idea that faces spit water from their mouths. I reintroduced something that I enjoyed so much when I was a kid: seeing the cathedrals or the fountains with grotesque faces spurting water from their mouths. Many of those concepts have an amazingly strong spirituality, and I believe we also have to introduce spirituality in art today. I’m mentioning beauty, but spirituality as well. I’m aiming to introduce silence in the public ields, but also in my shows. I think silence is a thing that we are losing, because we are in a very noisy moment in terms of ideas and communication. Silence is a perfect space where people can be alone with themselves, and touch what they have inside, and listen to themselves and their souls talking.

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Jaume Plensa, “Paula,” (from burnt wood), 177x 69x 63 cm, bronze, ed. 5.

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Jaume Plensa, “White forest,” (Isabella), 198x88x96 cm, bronze, ed.5.

“A sculptor has this tremendous capacity to create a space, and silence is very similar. It’s that space in which you can grow and dream” How do you ind silence? It’s a very poetic idea, in the way that it’s hard, because silence is an attitude. It’s not exactly the absence of sound. It’s a place to be. I remember many years ago I was in front of a lake on a very stormy day, and there were very big waves on the lake. And there was a wooden pole in the water, and two birds suddenly stopped on top of this pole in the middle of this crazy storm. And I said wow, that is probably my idea of a sculpture: a place you can always go back to. It’s a space where you can feel comfortable thinking about yourself. A sculptor has this tremendous capacity to create a space, and silence is very similar. It’s that space in which you can grow and dream. Why are all your head portraits of young women, versus the faceless, more masculine bodies you often create? I decided only to do young women [for the head sculptures, which are rendered and altered from photographs of a model] … I’ve always thought memory is male, and the future is female. Boys are a beautiful accident, but just an accident. I work a lot with women who are between eight and 14 years old, roughly, and they have a very strange kind of beauty that is in motion. I’m trying to catch a very ephemeral moment in their life, that represents all of us pretty well. My work in portraits tries to merge photography and sculpture. They seem like opposites, because photography catches the instant, the

flashing of the light, but sculptures seem to catch eternity, something that is above us, something about the deities. In their mixture of both photography and sculpture, the pieces look like something strange, something unreal. It looks like photoshop in the middle of a landscape, and I love that idea, because it’s hard to place the piece in terms of time. I love that strange position that is a friction between two opposites. How does the work process typically unfold for you? A sculptor produces little, if you compare with photography or painters, because sculpture is pretty similar to farming. You must prepare the site. Working in the ield of ideas takes so long. There’s a beautiful poem by William Blake that deines your question: in springtime learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy. That’s a perfect deinition for a sculptor, in the sense that you cannot go faster than the process. When I’m working I’m always dreaming about the next piece, and the next piece is always the best piece, and that’s so exciting. What are you working on now? In November we have a pretty large exhibition at the Museu d’Art Contemporani in Barcelona, and in the museum in Madrid, Palacio de Cristal-Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Soia the same month. It’s very emotionally exciting for me, because I’ve never done a show in my country. MP

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Shilpa Gupta, “114.9 1188.5 miles of fenced border West, North-West,” 2011-12, hand wound thread ball and a vitrine.

GIVING VOICE TO FREEDOM A RISING STAR OF THE GLOBAL ART WORLD, SHILPA GUPTA USES MANY MEDIUMS TO QUESTION AUTHORITY AND AMPLIFY THE UNHEARD AND OPPRESSED BY ARCHANA KHARE-GHOSE

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C O U R T E S Y S H I L PA G U P TA

Portrait of Shilpa Gupta

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he Mumbai-based artist Shilpa Gupta doesn’t like her work to be labelled as political because she inds such categorizations restrictive. Yet, the deeply divisive political threads of society that pit people against each other forcefully and violently, often provide the starting point for her enquiries. Through projects born out of concern for the muzzling of one opinion vis-a-vis another, Gupta has used art to negotiate dificult socio-political situations of the world. Whether it is something as outrightly volatile as Kashmir, processed through an untitled work in which Gupta gives voice to wives of those who have disappeared in the troubled northernmost state of India, or the more abstract phenomenon of heightened security measures all over the world, raised to the levels of “absurdity” as she calls it, because of increased terror incidents, through another work titled “There Is No Explosive Here,” the 42-year-old artist has always ventured into territories that lie beyond conventional art, but can be spoken of with any sense of ease only by an artist. As it becomes obvious, given the sweep of her subjects, medium is only a means to express herself — be it through art created in computer graphics, neon installations, sound installations, video, performance. She will use anything and everything that helps her convey her ideas effectively. Gupta, who holds a BFA in sculpture from the Sir J.J. School of Fine Arts, Mumbai, also actively involves viewers in her work. For instance, in her 2007 work “There is No Explosive Here,” which focuses on the concept of fear intensiied by assertive security measures, a visitor to the show leaves it with a bag imprinted with the work’s title — a means to diminish the exaggerated fear by dispersing it widely in society. Gupta’s art has a global appeal and it’s not a surprise that her works are regularly exhibited in important venues of the world. She has been part of group exhibitions or shown solo at Museum voor Moderne Kunst Arnhem, the Netherlands; OK Centre of Contemporary Art, Linz (Austria); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; New Museum Triennial, New York; National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai; Tate Modern and Centre Pompidou, to name a few. Her latest work, “For, in your tongue, I cannot hide: 100 Jailed Poets,” is being exhibited at two

important venues this season — the Edinburgh Art Festival, through August 26, and YARAT Contemporary Art Space, Baku, Azerbaijan, through September 30. In the midst of preparing for the installation of this ambitious project, Gupta speaks to MODERN PAINTERS about her latest work, its political edge, the influence of the megapolis of Mumbai on her art, and more. Your sound installation, “For, in your tongue, I cannot hide: 100 Jailed Poets,” being exhibited at the YARAT Contemporary Art Space and the Edinburgh Art Festival, gives voice to 100 poets jailed for their writings or political leanings. Could you share how the project was born and which countries you chose to focus on? Was there a particular incident that triggered the idea, or something else? This work emerges from a body of work made in 2011, called “Someone Else — a library of one hundred books written anonymously or under pseudonyms,” where writers wrote under a ictitious name and sought freedom in being someone else — whether to conceal one’s gender, avoid personal or political persecution, write in another language, express multiple selves, or publish a rejected work. During the, well, rather long research, I came across writers who had to deal with impositions by the regime, say Premchand, one of my favourite writers, whose book was burnt, or Aziz Nesin, who challenged the right wing and their violence against him or Voltaire who spent time in prison. This along with the changing atmosphere in India, which has been turning restrictive with liberal thinkers, writers

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and ilmmakers being targeted, led the journey of research looking at poets who have been imprisoned over time. I became interested in the power of words and the nervousness around it felt by those in power. The works in the show deal with the fragility and vulnerability of our right to freedom of expression today. In the installation, one hundred microphones are suspended from the ceiling over metal stands, on each of which, is pierced, a piece of paper on which a verse from a poem is printed with the poets name and the year the poet was detained. A single microphone recites this verse which the other 99 repeat. Then another, and then another — over an hour-and-a-half, one hundred poems are read one after another, repeated in chorus by others.

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Gagging of a voice that goes against an established order has been a feature of all types of government since ancient times — whether a monarchy, an oligarchy or even a modern democracy. Yet, during your research, did you come across cases that surprised you, shocked you? Poets have been incarcerated in different geographies and across time — say Giordano Bruno who was burned at stake in 16th century Italy for telling us that the universe did not circle around us, while Nesimi, a Sui poet, is said to have been skinned alive in Allepo in the 14th-15th century — both accused of heresy. Several poets, whether it is Kim Chi-ha from South Korea, Lui Xiao from China or Anna Barkova from the Soviet Union — their poetry echoed state violence for

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Shilpa Gupta, “For, in your tongue I cannot fit - 100 Jailed Poets,” 2017 - 2018, installation view at Yarat Contemporary Art Centre, Baku, July 6 – October 7, 2018.

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Shilpa Gupta, “Don’t See Don’t Hear Don’t Speak,” 2009, billboards of street performance in Bolzano.

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which they have had to pay a price. While there have been charges of obscenity against Irwin Allen Ginsberg and Count Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk, others such as Wole Soyinka [a recipient of Nobel Prize in Literature] were imprisoned without trial. Amanuel Asrat, an Eritrean arrested at his home in 2001 amid a crackdown on state and private media is still missing — believed to be held without charge or trial. Dareen Datour, a Palestinian poet, arrested for an online post, was placed for several months under house arrest, where she was allowed to leave home for a limited time, only if accompanied, has been recently convicted for what can be argued as a mis-interpretation of her poem. There are many unnerving instances that stay on...

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Considering the breadth of the project, do you think you would want to revisit it, or may want to continue exploring it even after the current installation? Do you think an artist ever reaches a closure with topics that have such a broad sweep? Could you answer in the context of your previous works such as “1:14.9,” or “There Is No Explosive Here,” because the central concepts of both these are topics are likely to remain current for a long, long time? You are right, there is rarely a closure as such. In fact, one work leads to another, and to another. From the earliest text based and numerical works from the mid and late 1990s, I have been interested in fault lines of perception and the use of power to mediate what is being transmitted and

T H I S PAG E & FAC I N G PAG E: C O U R T E S Y S H I L PA G U P TA A N D YA R AT. P H OTO : FA K H R I Y YA M A M M A D OVA

Shilpa Gupta, installation view at Yarat Contemporary Art Centre, Baku. Shilpa Gupta at Yarat Contemporary Art Space, Baku, July 6 – October 7, 2018, yarat.az.

Shilpa Gupta, installation view at Yarat Contemporary Art Centre, Baku. Shilpa Gupta at Yarat Contemporary Art Space, Baku, July 6 – October 7, 2018, yarat.az.

rendered. The obsession with measuring the unmeasurable which is behind the work “1:14.9,” 2011, goes back to the voice of the woman in the “Untitled,” 2006, based on the wives of those who disappeared in Kashmir — in which the protagonist raises her hands while jumping on a hand drawn grid line on the floor, uttering, “the inches, the feet, the kilometers, the markings we have made on the land, have increased the distance so much.” It deals with the voice of the individual vis-a-vis a structure that surrounds her, just as the igure in camouflage costume, in “Untitled (War on Terror),” 2004, raises her hand upwards and then sideways, in the air in a search drill by an absent security guard, or the ongoing “There Is No Explosive Here” series that echoes our current environment where we are forced to navigate through hyper security measures taken to surprising levels of absurdity. It is easy to pigeon-hole your work as “political” even though I’m aware that you have, in various interviews, tried to ight off that label. Even if you don’t call it political, do you think it is reflective of how global and local politics have come to have a very powerful presence in our daily lives? My work emerges from how an individual traverses visible and invisible structures that surround us. I prefer to avoid labels and categories, as they tend to isolate the otherwise interconnected space we inhabit, where human desire, greed, aspiration and fallacy are at play with tools we create to deine our lives — be it the idea of the nation state, laws, social norms, technology, and so on. How much has the city of Mumbai — the place of your birth and residence — contributed to the shaping of your thought process? At many levels, it is a microcosm of India, and even of the world, given the immense influx of people it handles, the immense diversity it absorbs. I grew up with the idea and dream of cosmopolitanism which only this megapolis can give — a city of migrants where walking on the street, almost everyone who you come face to face with, is from a place different from where you come from. And the loss of this dream — hopefully a momentary nightmare, until reason might return one day, continues to shape my practice.

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Shilpa Gupta, “Someone Else - A library of 100 books written anonymously or under pseudonyms,” 2011, stainless steel etched books.

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At a fairly young age, you have already had exhibitions in some of the most important venues of the world, and your work is also part of important international museum collections. What is the contribution of receptivity to your kind of art in this international presence of your work? Does India offer same receptivity to your work? As there are hardly any functional institutional spaces in India, my practice which is experimental and seeks wider audiences, continues to be challenging to show. While I have shown with galleries here, or at the Devi Foundation or the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (both in New Delhi) when it comes to outdoor projects, they have all been self-initiated — be it “Aar Paar,” the cross border public art project between India and Pakistan from 2001-2006, or even the recent outdoor animated light installation in my neighborhood (in Mumbai), “We Change Each Other”! Though several tiring months were spent chasing permissions for the latter, the heart-warming reception by the

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general audience on Carter Road promenade made all the efforts worth the while. Last month, I showed the interactive shadow installation at Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum, which was shown a few years ago on the streets in Mumbai, and the feedback from visitors in both contexts has been great. So, the challenge is related to the case of terribly limited public venues rather than the understanding by the audience which in fact is quite enthusiastic and perceptive. Could you talk about your next projects and exhibitions? The central work, which is the sound installation, “For, in Your Tongue, I Cannot Hide: 100 Jailed Poets,” is being shown at the Edinburgh Art Festival in July-August and Asia Paciic Triennale in Brisbane in November. I’m showing photographs from “Altered Inheritances” a project based on people who changed their last names at the MOMA in New York and will show at the Gwangju and Kochi Biennale later this year. MP

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Shilpa Gupta, “There is No Explosive in This - Room Series,” 2007, printed on canvas with archival inks.

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Nicolas de Staël, “Agrigente,” 1953, oil on canvas, 59 x 77,7 cm, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Hövikodden, Norway.

DE STAËL IN PROVENCE,

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A FAMILY EXHIBITION GUSTAVE DE STAËL, THE SON OF PAINTER NICOLAS DE STAËL, SHOWCASES HIS FATHER’S WORKS, NEVER SHOWN IN PUBLIC BEFORE BY AYMERIC MANTOUX

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What makes you proud of this exhibition ? First of all, the Hôtel de Caumont is a magniicent setting. What I am very happy about is the way the paintings

Gustave de Staël

are hung. Sometimes what you planned months in advance does not work. We have managed to organize the rooms in a way that is more telling than what we had imagined at the beginning. In the irst room, which tells how Nicolas de Staël arrived in Provence, how he got inspired after one or two days looking around, I think we have a feeling of what really happened. We can feel the urge to paint, as he was compelled to produce paintings for a New York show scheduled by his dealer, Paul Rosenberg. There is this white

light, the summer haze. You could almost touch it. The most important works, the most valuable or the rarest pieces are not always the most touching for you? There is for example an incredible painting, a dificult one, which is quite important and was in the Barcelona exhibition [at the Fundació Caixa de Catalunya in 2007=. It belongs to the Berardo collection in Lisbon, and when they brought it, I didn’t realize until the last minute that it would

“In the first room, which tells how Nicolas de Staël arrived in Provence, how he got inspired after one or two days looking around, I think we have a feeling of what really happened” 102

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C O U R T E S Y O F H ÔT E L D E C AU M O N T - C E N T R E D ’A R T, A I X - E N - P R OV E N C E

f you were to see only one exhibition this summer, it should be Nicolas de Staël’s works on show at the Hôtel de Caumont, in Aix en Provence until Sept. 23. It is an experience at the source of abstraction, with a special curator, Gustave de Staël, 64, the artist’s son, who personally gathered 71 paintings and 26 drawings, many of them from private collectors and never before shown in public. Now living in Tangiers, Morocco, Gustave de Staël, who is an artist himself, has been committed to his father’s legacy for more than 30 years. He is involved with the Staël committee, and is considered a rare expert on his father’s paintings. This edited interview was translated from the French by the writer.

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Nicolas de Staël, “Paysage,” 1953, oil on canvas, 100 x 73 cm, private collection.

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Nicolas de Staël, “Paysage de Provence,” 1953, oil on canvas, 81 x 65 cm, private collection.

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Nicolas de Staël, “Marseille,” 1954, oil on canvas, 80,5 x 60 cm, private collection.

Nicolas de Staël, “Paysage, Sicile,” 1953, oil on canvas, 73 x 100 cm, private collection.

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“Nicolas de Staël’s works are very difficult to borrow. I had to write a couple hundred letters to all the owners. Most of the paintings are in private hands, very few remain in public collections in France. And we had to cope with many refusals”

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bring so much to the exhibition. The Portuguese curator who came with it was very happy because she acknowledges this painting belonged here, where we had decided to hang it. She thought the setting shed more light on the painting than in their collection amongst thousands of paintings that are not related to it. This one is only 20 inches, which is not so big, but it’s lost when you take it out of its context. In this room which can be considered as an overview of the landscape in Provence seen through the painter’s color palette, it is in its place. How long did it take you to assemble this exhibition ? With my niece who worked with me, it took us nearly two years. Nicolas de Staël’s works are very dificult to borrow. I had to write a couple hundred letters to all the owners. Most of the paintings are in private hands, very few remain in public collections in France. And we had to cope with many refusals. For example, there is a view of Montpellier which we could not

have for conservation reasons, though we offered to pay for the restoration. For another one which is a remarkable view of a harbor by night, we were asked a very high price for insurance, because the estimate for this piece was by far way over the usual prices for Nicolas de Staël, something like $12 million, instead of 2 or 3! Luckily there were only three paintings with which we had issues. Finding all the paintings was like a police investigation? Yes, by all means. We were fortunate to have the painting that’s on the front page of the catalogue, Fiesole. Through a friend of mine at Sotheby’s in New York, who told me he had sold a painting from Sicily a few years ago, and with contacts at the gallery who sold it, we managed to get in touch with the collector. He told us he usually never lent paintings for exhibition, but he was convinced the artist deserved to be shown, and so he gave it to us. But I can understand, especially if you live with the artworks you

collect, you don’t want to be separated from your painting for ive months. Was this very different from your previous show on the painter in Paris in 1994? At the time, I only based the show on French collections. I met with several collectors who had 10, 20 or more paintings. They let me borrow whatever I wanted! Most of them had bought the works in the 1960s, or 70s, and now their children are buying paintings at auctions. Even though only 10 pieces are for sale any given year. How long have you been involved in the promotion of your father’s work? Always. I used to help my mother with the colors for different type of reproductions. For the last 30 years, I have been in charge of this. I also curated different exhibitions and catalogs, in Le Havre or Pompidou. You need to do at least one major exhibition every 10 years. We have done much more, but it is compulsory, as

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Nicolas de Staël, “Paysage,” 1953, oil on canvas, 14 x 22 cm, private collection.

Nicolas de Staël, “Arbres et maisons,” 1953, oil on canvas, 65 x 81 cm, private collection.

generations pass and the general public changes. His vision of Provence is quite different from others? It is his uniqueness that makes this exhibition important. But also the fact that he managed to show this region in a totally different way. He had seen van Gogh’s and Cezannes’s works, of course, and tried something radically opposite. Nicolas de Staël wanted to get a closer look at Provence. After 10 years painting very dark paintings in his Paris studio, he inally got out into the wild. He left with his wife and kids, and two friends, because he was seeking new things to paint. He thought a change of horizons would do him good. And it did. He must have felt freed from darkness. It seems as if he had rediscovered light, warmth, without denying his own profoundness. There is a view from Grignan which looks

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like a blast of fresh air. For me it’s something he saw out of a car window, or walking, and immediately painted as he came home. Because he never painted outside. How did he feel in Provence? We must remember he was originally from the Baltic sea. We showed in Le Havre how Nicolas de Staël could swim in tears and brownish colors which are quite nostalgic. I think he was totally dazzled by the light, the crystallinity of the skies of Provence, where he had already been as a kid for vacations. You don’t feel he’s inhabiting his paintings, like Cézanne does. I think he managed to remain inside himself, and it’s the echo of what he felt that expresses the better Provence. It’s quite a rare phenomenon. Most impressionists for example remained quite on the outside. He understood maybe more than

others the immanent, universal characteristics of Provence. The devil in him managed to catch this extraordinary light like no other. There is a science in the eye, in the way different layers produce such an intense blue like the color presented in the last room, “The Nights of Agrigente” which holds it all together. For me it’s an important landmark in the painter’s personal geography. You can feel tension, the warmth of a midsummer’s night. What does this exhibition reveal about the artist? It shows the painter’s ability to express his own vision. He learned alone how to create these spaces on a canvas, how to invest them, drawing just two or three thin lines. He was young and he had found clarity, light. He wanted to do something wild with both his art and his life. And that’s what he did. MP

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“He learned alone how to create these spaces on a canvas, how to invest them, drawing just two or three thin lines. He was young and he had found clarity, light. He wanted to do something wild with both his art and his life. And that’s what he did”

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Joana Vasconcelos

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‘TAKIN E G H T F F O O G E F N F H I T K F A F ’ T T ‘ H O K S E G A N M I M K A A ’ T S ‘ K K S ’ A M W I T H A FOC US ON T H E PL IGH T OF WOM EN, T H E PORT UGEUSE A RT IST JOA NA VASCONCELOS IS SHOW I NG 33 WOR KS AT T H E GUGGEN H E I M BI LBAO

BY FRANCA TOSCANO

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conceptualist art, for example.” Another important aspect of Vasconcelos’s practice is her ability to address a central issue of our time: womanhood. “She’s a very feminine feminist,” said Joos. While she “really knows” the challenges faced by women in the world today, “she likes to be feminine too: she’s very aware of her body, of being a woman, and likes to defend that position.” A few of the pieces in the exhibition are new. One is “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” a giant Venetian mask made of a multiplicity of gilded baroque mirrors. Visitors see their own reflection in the work, whose title is borrowed from the Lou Reed song. “It’s about this show: I’m putting all my pieces together and taking off the mask,” Vasconcelos said. “Artists are always hiding behind their work. When you put all your work together, you cannot hide anymore.” Parked outside the museum is “Solitaire,” an enormous sculpture of a diamond ring, with the ring itself composed of gilded wheelrims (the kind you’d ind on a luxury cars), while the diamond topping is an inverted pyramid of whisky tumblers. “It’s a comment about what men and women desire,” the artist said. “Men desire fast cars with golden wheel rims, and whisky, expensive whisky. Women desire a super-beautiful ring that is given by the man. The bigger the rock, the better. It’s putting together all these stereotypes of luxury symbols.” was born in 1971 in Paris, where her parents lived in exile, away from military rule in Portugal. After the so-called Carnation Revolution in 1974, the family moved back to Lisbon. Young Joana’s life would have been very different had her parents decided to stay on in France; she would probably have gone on to be a French artist instead of a Portuguese one. Were it not for a second twist of fate, she might have turned out to be a professional karate player. Vasconcelos practiced karate at a high level as a child, and trained for championships. Even when

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he Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao is one of the most admired buildings of the new millennium. Designed by the Pritzker Prize winning architect Frank Gehry, it is recognizable by a facade that looks swathed in folds and cascades of titanium. Now, and through mid-November, its atrium is festooned with a towering, multicolored work of fabric and textile by the Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos. Vasconcelos, 46, is a well-known name in the international art world. Her “Royal Valkyrie” — another hanging sculpture made of handmade woollen crochet, felt and fabric — is the irst thing you see on a visit to the Royal Academy of Art’s Summer Exhibition this year. She came to international attention at the 2005 Venice Biennale, and had a spectacular exhibition at the Palace of Versailles in 2012, when her creations overtook the halls and gardens of Louis XIV’s former abode. Now, she’s getting another major exhibition at the Guggenheim Bilbao, with 33 mostly large-scale works — the largest being “Egeria,” the 35-meter-high contraption hanging in the atrium. “It’s designed to it in the space that Gehry designed,” said the artist in a telephone interview. “It’s super-organic, goes around the building, and connects with the building’s passageways and lifts.” The idea for a Vasconcelos show was proposed by the exhibition’s co-curator, Enrique Juncosa, who has known Vasconcelos for a long time. The show’s other mastermind, Petra Joos, who is Guggenheim Bilbao’s chief curator, agreed — for several reasons. “First of all, she works with the spaces,” Joos explained. “We thought that with this very special architecture that we have in Bilbao, she would do a wonderful job.” Secondly, Vasconcelos is a young artist, yet one with a very established career. Thirdly, “she’s not mainstream: she does her own work,” and has her own form of artistic expression. “She’s not part of video art or minimalist art or

Joana Vasconcelos, “Full Steam Ahead (Yellow),” 2014, “Full Steam Ahead (Green),” 2013, “Full Steam Ahead (Red),” 2012, BOSCH steam irons, PLC gearmotor, microprocessor-based electronic control unit, low pressure hydraulic system, stainless steel, demineralized water, (3x) 155 x 170 cm.

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Joana Vasconcelos, “Ni Te Tengo, Ni Te Olvido,” 2017, ceramic urinals, handmade cotton crochet, 40 x 58 x 30 cm.

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Joana Vasconcelos, “The Bride (A Noiva),” 2001–2005, OB tampons, stainless steel, cotton thread, steel cables, 600 x 300 cm, Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Elvas –Coleção António Cachola.

“Many people liked that piece, and many people hated that piece, mostly men. They were

Joana Vasconcelos, “Red Independent Heart (Coração Independente Vermelho),” 2005, translucent plastic cutlery, painted iron, metal chain, power supply unit, motor, sound installation, 371 x 220 x 75 cm, Museu Colecção Berardo.

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she enrolled at art school, she kept up the karate. But a week into her art studies, she broke her knee. That put an end to her karate career, yet left her with a drive and determination that she brought to sculpture. From the mid-1990s, she started exhibiting her artworks. They were made up of an unusual array of materials: from cutlery, kitchen utensils and household appliances — fridge doors, hair dryers — to men’s ties and women’s tights, patches of fabric, and outsize spools of thread. For the artwork she displayed at the 2005 Venice Biennale, she used a particularly unexpected material: white tampons, strung up in their thousands to form a perfect chandelier. She called the work “The Bride,” and scored her big career break. “My piece was a statement for the irst Biennale curated by women,” said Vasconcelos of an art exhibition that, by then, was more than a century old. “I thought, oh my God, is this true?” she recalled. “I realized that, in a way, all these women curators and museum directors were never really acknowledged and valued.” She also realized that she was “part of something bigger than me, and I think that was a very deining moment for my career.” As was to be expected, the work divided opinion. “Many people liked that piece, and many people hated that piece, mostly men: They were really bothered by the tampon thing going on.” More discomfort was to follow, this time from another woman. When Vasconcelos was invited to put on an exhibition at Versailles, the invitation was extended by the palace’s then president, Jean-

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really bothered by the tampon thing going on”

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Jacques Aillagon, a former French culture minister. By the time she was ready to put on the show, Catherine Pégard was in charge — and she categorically refused to show “The Bride.” “I was censored by the president: It was not polite to put tampons in Versailles,” said Vasconcelos, noting that Aillagon had approved the piece. There was initial resistance, as well, to the idea of Vasconcelos exhibiting in one particular royal chamber. “They didn’t want me to showcase my work in the Marie Antoinette room. I said if not, I’m out of this show. It makes no sense. I really wanted to be in Marie-Antoinette’s room because of the issue of women and women’s rights. Those women lived in prisons, they were imprisoned in a golden cage. For me, it was quite a statement.” In the end, she did display a work in the queen’s bed chamber, and in many other places besides. Her Versailles show was “an incredible moment,” she said. It drew a staggering 1.6 million visitors

over the three-and-a-half months that it took place. According to Le Figaro, it was the most visited exhibition in France since 1960. The condition of women has been a consistent theme of Vasconcelos’s work. So how does she feel now that the #metoo and #timesup movements have put that theme at the top of the global conversation? “My experience of life is that I’ve been the irst woman in many situations, and that gave me the consciousness that there’s still a lot to do,” she said. She recalled being the irst woman to have an exhibition at Versailles, and noted that she was now, also, the irst woman (as well as the irst Portuguese artist) to have a solo show at the Guggenheim in Bilbao. “People are not used to a woman being a sculptor. They doubt your intelligence, your knowledge,” she said. So “whatever we can do to make it as equal as we can, is for society.” History was a constant source of inspiration,

Joana Vasconcelos, “Marilyn (AP),” 2011, stainless steel pans and lids, concrete, (2x) 297 x 155 x 410 cm.

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Joana Vasconcelos, “Call Center,” 2014-2016, analogue telephones, metallized and thermo-lacquered mild steel, sound system, oscillators driven by microcontroller, Music: Call Center: Electroacustic Symphony for 168 Telephones, composed by Jonas Runa, 20’ 210 x 80 x 299 cm.

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Joana Vasconcelos, “Pop Rooster (Pop Galo),” 2016, Viúva Lamego hand painted tiles, LED, fibreglass, iron, power supply units, controllers, sound system, sound and light by Jonas Runa, 900 x 372 x 682 cm.

“People are not used to a woman being a sculptor.

They doubt your intelligence,

she said, explaining that she liked to name her works after “brave women who took the boundaries further and deined their own time by doing things that were not expected of them.” The giant work illing the atrium of the Guggenheim, “Egeria,” is named after one of the earliest documented Christian pilgrims, who set out in the fourth century A.D. from somewhere in or near northern Spain to Jerusalem, at a time when women were not permitted to travel alone, and who later wrote an account of her travels. Women artists belonging to the generations before her had it a lot harder, Vasconcelos admitted. The fact that, in 2017, the British artist Phyllida Barlow represented Britain at the Venice Biennale for the irst time at the age of 73 was “really sad, I have to say. What took them so long?” She said she “cannot possibly imagine what they’ve been going through all these years.” Their example was one that she was determined to follow. “I feel privileged that they kept on going and never gave up,” said Vasconcelos. “I have to continue what I’m doing.”MP

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MORTALITY, LEAVENED WITH MIRTH THE FRENCH ARTIST SOPHIE CALLE OFTEN VENTURES DOWN DARK ROADS, BUT NOT WITHOUT A SENSE OF HUMOR

Portrait of Sophie Calle.

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BY SARAH MOROZ

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ophie Calle’s latest work broaches death and loss, but the elegiac tone ordinarily associated with such loaded subjects is mediated with dark humor. This summer, the French artist has two temporary exhibitions, “Douleur Exquise” and “Serie Noire,” on view through August 15 at Château La Coste, a 500-acre open air Contemporary art venue and vineyard situated between Aix-En-Provence and Luberon National Park. These shows complement a newly-installed permanent work, “Dead End,” which she has made for the sprawling premises, joining a roster that includes Richard Serra, Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, Lee Ufan and Tracy Emin. Calle was introduced to the owner of Chateau Lacoste through the former R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe — he has a sculpture on site, “Foxes.” She did a music video upon special request for him, stringing together clips that were already in her phone, of a peeing horse, a fly, and ballerina/choreographer Marie-Agnès Gillot dancing in a parking lot. This sums Calle up nicely: She’s funny, experimental, and draws from readily available material. Her permanent piece “Dead End” is situated at the end of a former Roman road, in the heights of the verdant property. Signposted with newly-planted young cypress trees — “the tree of cemeteries,” Calle noted — it’s a marble casket that solemnly reads “Ici reposent les secrets des promeneurs” (approximately: Here lie the secrets of the wanderers). The smooth surface has a slit like a mailbox in which people can deposit confessions; there are pencils and paper nearby, and slabs of stone to write upon. “Dead End” continues previous interventions at Geneva’s Cimetière des Rois and Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. In a special inaugural event at the latter, thousands of visitors unburdened themselves to her atop Bay Grove Hill; she became at once an artist, a priest, and a vault. Calle wrote down these strangers’ private narratives, then inserted them into an obelisk; thereafter, visitors could do this freely without her. When the grave ills to capacity with notes, they’re burned into oblivion — and the process starts again, ongoingly, for the next 25 years. Born in 1953, Calle has exhibited her photographs and texts — most often as a pairing — widely and internationally. Often sourcing ideas and events from her own life, intimacy becomes public domain, but heightened into something symbolic of greater human experience. Her very irst show was at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris at age 26 for the Biennale des Jeunes Artistes, which also included Jean-Marc Bustamente and Gérard Garouste. She had never been to the museum before she was, in fact, featured in it. Even if she did not partake in museum culture growing up, “my father was in the art world, so it’s a language that I learned,” she said. As an early collector of Pop and Conceptual art, he was the impetus for her career. That career is a most singular one. She has variously taken photos of people beholding

Calle wrote down these strangers’ private narratives, then inserted them into an obelisk; thereafter, visitors could too do this freely without her. When the grave fills to capacity with notes, they’re burned into oblivion — and the process starts again, ongoingly, for the next 25 years

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Her artistic style is mostly defined by a balance of text and image, the combination of which, she said, “is my natural gesture”

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the sea for the irst time, asked 107 women to parse a breakup text she received according to their diverse professions, invited people to sleep in her bed, riffled through the personal possessions of guests while a hotel employee, and famously followed a stranger on a whim to Venice. She is not hemmed in by anything. In person, she sported round tinted glasses and a navy jumpsuit with a tiny dog print; she wears multiple rings — including an oversized mouse with a tail (made by Marie Beltrami), a reminder of her now-deceased cat named Souris (Mouse) — and a ring that spells “mother” (she has no children and likes it that way). She is more interested in theater than in photography or literature — within the span of a week, she was going to see contemporary plays by Krzysztof Warlikowski, Alain Platel, and Julien Gosselin in three different cities scattered in the south of France. Her artistic style is mostly deined by a balance of text and image, the combination of which, she said, “is my natural gesture.” She recalled: “My father had images on the wall — the wall was my irst goal. Writing was what I took pleasure in. I found my style without really deciding it.” She added: “I don’t have to choose a territory.” “Série Noire,” exhibited in a former wine storehouse, directly references an eponymous book collection, each framed in the entryway. The titles address death themes with satirical titles like “Adios, Chiquita!” and “Let’s Erase Everything.” The exhibition also pulls from her previous “My Mother, My Cat, My Father, in that order,” providing a delicate exploration of mortality through her own losses: her parents and her beloved cat. Her parents are buried at Montparnasse Cemetery, a site Calle crossed daily on her commute from school to home as child. Her cat is no less important to her: in addition to being a feature of this show, Calle is planning to release a limited edition vinyl concept album with original songs by The National, Jarvis Cocker, various chanteurs français, and her friend Laurie Anderson, which will be part of a fall 2018 exhibition at Galerie Perrotin. She also sings on it. Calle’s art conjures “a ine line between grief and deadpan humour,” Sean O’Hagan noted in the Guardian. “Though, as is often the case with Calle, how deadpan or how humorous is open to question.” Dark comedy is clearly something that runs in the family. Calle recalls in the show how, a week before she died, her mother refused to see visitors, staving one off preventatively with: “Tell him I’m dead!” The work explores if one can anticipate a farewell. She collected the last words her father articulated in his inal days, using it as a way to gauge whether he’d be alive or not the next day. She decided he had more in him when his last word on a Thursday was “toilet” — “not great” she wrote, as in: not poetic enough a note to leave on. “He’ll deinitely be alive tomorrow. ”When he said “daughter,” she realized that she would never hear the words “That’s my daughter” again, and the sadness is acute. Calle also posits: how do you represent the identity of a complex person succinctly when they’re gone? Black-and-white images of tombstones lay on the ground of the exhibition, echoing the way Calle encountered them in a California cemetery — in Bolinas,

Tadao Ando, Art Centre, 2011.

CMYK Sean Scully, “Boxes Full of Air,” 2015; Louise Bourgeois, “Crouching Spider,” 2003.

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Sophie Calle, “Bob,” 2017.

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Tadao Ando, Art Centre, 2011.

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Calle creates art as a way of, essentially, detaching herself from emotion. The act of making “Douleur Exquise” was one of twisting a situation in her favor: “Instead of just remembering that moment as a painful one, what I see is that I made a work, and it’s on the wall” north of San Francisco — in 1979, when she was renting a house that belonged to a photographer. They are, she mused, “the irst photos you could consider as part of my work.” The graves each articulate single titles: “Father,” “First Wife,” “Brother.” She elaborated: “I was curious to understand why they had frozen people in one identity… At the same time, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know why, because there was more mystery than to know a banal reason, or a reason that would destroy the poetry.” In the Renzo Piano Pavilion a short walk away, Calle installed “Douleur Exquise” (Exquisite Pain), shown for the irst time in France since its 2004 presentation at the Centre Pompidou. It’s an exhaustive recollection of a failed love affair: In 1984, the artist obtained a grant to study in Japan, knowing that the man she was with at the time was ambivalent about waiting for her. When he stood her up in New Delhi, where they were supposed to meet, the scale of her hurt was unprecedented. The anxiety she felt during her journey knowing that he was unavailable to her, and then the repeated storytelling of the pain when she realized their relationship was deinitively over, divides the works into two parts. She brought these elements together in photographs and transcribed monologues — to release her pain, and to juxtapose it with the pain others, having asked those who listened to her woes: When have you suffered the most? The work “slept for 16 years,” as she put it: she did this exercise in 1984, but produced it in 2000. “When I took the images during the trip, I didn’t think I would use them; I just took images like everybody does,” she said. Calle creates art as a way of, essentially, detaching herself from emotion. The act of making “Douleur Exquise” was one of twisting a situation in her favor: “Instead of just remembering that moment as a painful one, what I see is that I made a work, and it’s on the wall,” Calle said. “Here it was not about saying ‘a man left me’; it was playing with how you take distance with something painful, and how you relativize it,” she distinguished. “It becomes a story you observe, not something you endure.” The anonymous man, then, had to endure it in turn: “He didn’t like being the subject, but he respected the idea,” Calle said of the lover in question, who himself later published an 1,800-page novel in which Calle gets some ink. (“It’s ine; I deserve it,” she shrugged.) The intimacy of her work is real, but meticulously managed through her compositions of text and image. It’s a generous way to leave room for other people to receive the work, and also a way to not overshare. She said: “My life is my material — my tool,” she said. But she counters just as truthfully that it’s not a representative depiction: “It’s an element: an hour, one day. It’s not what happened just before, what will happen after. If I want to speak about my life, I speak to my friends. On the wall of a show, I want to have a good style artistically.” Ultimately, she scoops from her own experience to examine what or who is in absentia, both literally and existentially. “It’s always the absence that takes me through: a man that goes, a father that dies… that’s the thread,” she asserts. “It’s an obsession — and why an absence? I don’t have a clue: I wasn’t abandoned, I was not left in a corner by myself,” she said. “This happens to everybody, everywhere — we all have been left, we’ve all lost somebody, it’s just terribly banal,” she remarked matter-of-factly. While she inds the experience of absence a compelling one to explore, she divests herself of having to come to any conclusion about its meaning. “I don’t do therapy,” she said. “I have not been trained to know more.” MP

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REVIEW // BOOK

LIVES OF THE ART MAVERICKS Martin Gayford’s Book,“Modernists and Mavericks,” Reveals Little-Seen Sides of Freud, Bacon, and Hockney

BY MARK BEECH

Martin Gayford

L UK cover of “Modernist and Mavericks” published by Thames & Hudson in April and priced at £24.95.

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U.S. cover of “Modernists & Mavericks” by Martin Gayford, published by Thames & Hudson in June in the U.K. Priced £24.95 and U.S. publication and priced at $39.95.

ucian Freud was at Graham Sutherland’s house in Kent one day in the mid-1940s. Freud asked his host who he thought was the greatest painter in England. The story is contained in the new book “Modernists and Mavericks” by Martin Gayford, who recounts that it would be natural for a major artist such as Sutherland to probably consider that he himself was the greatest painter. Sutherland gave an unexpected answer, however. He said his choice was like a cross between Vuillard and Picasso: “He’s never shown and he has the most extraordinary life. If he ever does a painting he generally destroys it.” The name of the artist was “Francis Bacon, and he sounded so interesting that Freud quickly arranged to meet this mystery man,” Gayford writes. The subtitle of the book is “Bacon, Freud, Hockney and the London Painters.” If there were anyone qualiied to write about these masters and many others, it is Gayford, who draws on 30 years of interviews. He couples the Sutherland anecdote by noting that on the evening of November 12, 2013, Bacon’s “Three Studies of Lucian Freud” went under the hammer at Christie’s in New York. After a lengthy bidding war, the work sold for $142.4 million. He writes: “A picture painted in London well within living memory became, for a while, the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction.” This state of affairs would have been utterly unimaginable in 1969 when the picture was painted, let alone when the two artists irst met. The price would stretch credulity even in 1992, the year in which Bacon died. The book’s timeline runs from the Second World War to the 1970s. It is an intriguing story of interlinking friendships, shared experiences,

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Allen Jones, “First Step,” 1966, oil on canvas, 92 x 92 cm, Collection of Allen Jones.

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Richard Hamilton, “Swingeing London,” 1967, oil on canvas and screen print, 67 x 85 cm, Private Collection.

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Frank Auerbach, “Mornington Crescent with the statue of Sickert’s father-in-law III, summer morning,” 1966, oil on board, 121.3 x 152.5. Private collection.

rivalries and overlapping artistic concerns. The painters sometimes love and sometimes hate their fellows, friends and rivals. They variously work, rest and play together and especially drink together. The list of names is stellar includes Frank Auerbach, Victor Pasmore, Bridget Riley, Patrick Heron, Richard Hamilton, Prunella Clough, Peter Blake, Allen Jones, Frank Bowling and Howard Hodgkin. It is especially good to see mention of Gillian Ayres, who has sadly just died. If these artists have anything in common it is that they were all obsessed with the question posed by Ayres of “what can be done with painting?” They all shared a belief that paint could accomplish work that other media — photography for example — could not. The narrative has a constantly changing backdrop, from the postwar years through 1940s Soho bohemia, the conidence of the 1950s and “swinging London” in the 1960s. “Being born just before the outbreak of the Second World War, I just thought things naturally got better and better,” Jones is quoted as saying. “When the Seventies came along, it was a bit more real,” adds Sir Anthony Caro. The book explores influences from other countries, ranging from Abstract Expressionist contemporaries such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, through to Piero della Francesca, Picasso and Matisse. Despite all these external inspirations, the artist R.B. Kitaj suggested in 1976 that there was a substantial “School of London.” Gayford agrees, while adding that given the idiosyncratic art mavericks involved, it is a very wide-ranging, loose movement. There is no common factor apart from each of the artists was a modernist, sometimes crossing the frontier between igurative and non-igurative: “Several artists, notably Auerbach and Hodgkin effectively set up their tents on the border zone itself.” In addition, some are not truly London painters. Hockney for example moved to Paris and then Los Angeles, as well as keeping links with Yorkshire. Flick through the pages and there are strong senses of how art was influenced by The Beatles and street style. Jones would put his twins into a stroller and perambulate down the King’s Road, past freakilynamed and trendy boutiques such as Granny Takes a Trip, while all the

Frank Auerbach, “E.O.W. Nude,” 1952, oil on canvas, 76.2 x 50.8 cm. Private Collection.

time soaking up colorful fashion inspiration: the ever shorter miniskirts and the ever higher heels. The personal life of all of the main protagonists is enough for any number of books on their own — Freud’s lovers, the suicide of Bacon’s lover George Dyer and so on. Aptly, Freud is quoted as saying that he’s always liked the expression “the naked truth.” There are constant insights which are amusing and revealing, such as about the creation of Bacon’s monumental “Three Studies for a Cruciixion” in 1962. The entire triptych was painted in a fortnight in what Bacon described as “a bad mood of drinking.” The book says: “Sometimes he was so drunk that he hardly knew what he was doing.” For all this, there is general agreement that the triptych was an important work, a turning point. BLOUINARTINFO.COM AUGUST 2018 MODERN PAINTERS

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Restaurant Mural, 6th January 195 by Victor Pasmore (1908 - 1998) at work in a restaurant on London’s South Bank for the Festival of Britain. Original Publication: Picture Post - 5178 - The Festival Is Britain’s pub. 1951.

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William Scott, “Still Life with Frying Pan,” 1952. gouache on paper. 31.8 × 27cm.

Francis Bacon, “Painting 1946,” oil and pastel on canvas, 197.8 x 132.1cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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William Gear, “Autumn Landscape,” 1950-51. oil on canvas, 178 x 127 cm, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Whole books have been written about the Colony Room drinking den. Gayford cleverly cherry-picks the most important moments, right through to the creation of the Michael Andrews picture which contains many of the key dramatis personae. There was a time when the tiny shabby bar run by Muriel Belcher was the center of the city’s artistic world, (perhaps along with the Slade School) and here there are quotes from those who knew it or had irst-hand experience of how the cultural world was changing. Paula Rego notes: “England gave me the freedom to be more myself.” Leon Kossoff says: London, like paint I use, seems to be in my bloodstream.” Gayford, art critic for the Spectator, has also written for Blouin Artinfo and its magazines such as Modern Painters as well as for Bloomberg News. He has had his portrait painted by Freud (resulting in his memoir “Man With a Blue Scarf”) and by Hockney (leading to the book “A Bigger Message.”) Gayford’s other books cover different periods — from nine weeks in the life of Vincent van Gogh, to seven years of

John Constable’s romance with his wife-to-be, and a biography of Michelangelo and its centuries of influence. MP The book was published in hardback by Thames & Hudson in April in the U.K. priced £24.95 with U.S. publication in June at $39.95. Publisher website: http://thamesandhudson.com BLOUINARTINFO.COM AUGUST 2018 MODERN PAINTERS

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PREVIEWS& REVIEWS Not-to-bemissed shows this month LOS A N G E L ES

Off a busy yet otherwise nondescript section of La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles, tucked behind a wall with a heavy metal door that encloses a serene green lawn, Kayne Grifin Corcoran gallery quietly does its business. In this case, its business is a collection of James Turrell’s light-based works from this year and sculptures from the 1990s, along with a pair of twodimensional works on Mylar from 1984 and 1992. Turrell is a master at his craft, which — since the 1960s — has been light. A key igure in the Southern California Light and Space movement of the 1960s, Turrell has established a very successful career since then. He has enjoyed solo shows at the Whitney, the Stedelijk and MASS MOCA, won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974 and received the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius grant” in 1984. In 2013, Turrell, who is 75 and based in Flagstaff, Arizona, had a highlight year. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York all organized sizeable retrospectives of his work. The exhibition of new and historic work is his seventh at Kayne Grifin Corcoran during the last 15 years. “James Turrell” starts with “Praamzius (12),” a diamond-shaped etched glass with light-emitting diodes inside, embedded in the gallery wall. Like all of his “Glass” works, the light slowly changes colors, evolving from blue to aqua to yellow, with the center of the piece often differing signiicantly in hue from the edges. The next piece — in its own space in an adjacent gallery — is a circle titled “Chaos (98).” Light emanates from the etched glass and shifts from

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James Turrell, “Jhuya 20(00) Medium Elliptical Glass,” 2017, L.E.D. light, etched glass and shallow space, 54 x 61.32 inches.

C O U R T E S Y J A M E S T U R R E L L A N D K AY N E G R I F F I N C O R C O R A N , LO S A N G E L E S . P H OTO C R E D I T: F LY I N G S T U D I O.

In James Turrell’s Light at Kayne Grifin Corcoran

B OT H I M AG E S : C O U R T E S Y J A M E S T U R R E L L A N D K AY N E G R I F F I N C O R C O R A N , LO S A N G E L E S . P H OTO C R E D I T: F LY I N G S T U D I O.

James Turrell, “Jump Start,” 1990, cast plaster and wood, 18 1/2 x 34 3/4 x 34 3/4 inches.

purple, red and pink to white, yellow, green and yellowish orange. “Pluto,” 2018, is a rectangle that offers substantial contrast between the center and the edges. A pink center with a red outline transforms into a purple center with a light green outline. Then, several minutes later, it’s a green center with a peach outline. In all of these “Glass” works, the color variables number in the hundreds, and it’s nearly impossible to predict what color combinations might come up during one sitting. Turrell’s territories of color are not always distinctly deined. They’re like Mark Rothko’s color ields — deep in some spaces and fuzzy at the edges. Yet Turrell’s colors aren’t static; they constantly change and evolve with time. In the second half of the exhibition are sculptures and two works on Mylar. The sculptures, dubbed “Autonomous Structures,” look as if they don’t belong on planet Earth. “Jump Start,” 1990, resembles a spaceship, or a habitat for survival in another galaxy. It’s a white, circular structure made of cast plaster and wood, and it features an elevated level punctuated by tiny, circular windows. “Cold Storage,” 1989, looks like a threelevel observatory, and “Transformative Space: Basilica for Santorini,” 1991, is undoubtedly a church, with Turrell’s signature dome roof topping each element. Inside, pillars and clerestories reveal that the artist is truly serious about these models, underscoring the notion that they’re only a start to something bigger later on. The two mixed-media Mylar pieces are topographical, with geometric measurements, concentric waves and scribbled notes. They’re simultaneously speciic and abstract, as they don’t indicate exactly what their subject matter is. However, they’re probably related to Roden Crater, the 400,000-year-old extinct volcanic cinder cone in the western Painted Desert, northeast of Flagstaff. Turrell has been working at the crater since 1979, and has

James Turrell, “Cold Storage,” 1989, cast plaster and wood, 28 x 34 13/16 x 34 13/16 inches.

constructed a naked-eye observatory there, as well as installation art and several “Skyspaces,” or rooms with openings in the ceilings and walls that change in appearance, according to the time of day. There’s virtually no explanatory text in

this exhibition, and prices are nowhere to be seen. For the most part that’s unobjectionable, since, upon further investigation, the light works range from $350,000 to $550,000, and the sculptures are $250,000 each — most likely out of pocketbook range for most viewers. Turrell has stated many times that his art is about experience and he wants observers to “see themselves see.” On those grounds, he largely succeeds. Kayne Grifin Corcoran is presenting “James Turrell” through Aug. 25. The gallery is at 1201 S. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles. More information: www.kaynegrifincorcoran.com — RICHARD CHANG

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If Pop Art was a movement that elevated elements of everyday public life — advertisements, product designs, media images — to the status of ine art, femmage, a practice and a term coined by the artist Miriam Schapiro (1923-2015), elevated elements of everyday private life — wallpaper, textiles, buttons, etc. — to the status of ine art. The exhibition “Surface/Depth: The Decorative After Miriam Schapiro,” exhibits the movement spearheaded by Schapiro and considers its legacy through a grouping of works by nine Contemporary artists. The show, which runs at the Museum of Art and Design in New York through Sept. 9, includes a small but purposeful selection of art, writing and ephemera by Schapiro to illustrate her deliberate celebration of decoration as ine art. However, by pairing her work from the late ’60s to the mid ’80s with works by artists made within the last decade, it posits an uneven argument for the persistence of her methods and ethos into the present. “Surface/Depth” comes three years after Schapiro’s passing in 2015 at age 91, but does not survey the breadth of her career; it concentrates only on the period in the late 60s to mid 80s when she shifted away from mainstream movements and painterly styles to develop a way of working that paid homage to centuries of under-recognized contributions to visual culture relegated to the home. Against the backdrop of the second-wave feminist movement in the 1970s, Schapiro was driven by political conviction to highlight and celebrate that which was decorative, craftoriented and emotional. These were elements left out of the ine-art canon, and by extension, subordinated the kind of work that had traditionally been most accessible to women: embroidery, quilt-making, paper crafts, embellishment and decoration. Her 1967 acrylic on canvas, “Silver Windows,” opens the exhibition. It is a hardedge geometric abstraction painting in acrylic that followed her trajectory out of Abstract

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Miriam Schapiro, “Tapestry of Paradise,” 1980, acrylic fabric glitter on canvas, 60 x 50 inches.

P H OTO BY J E N N A B A S C O M . C O U R T E S Y O F T H E M U S E U M O F A R T S A N D D E S I G N .

Elevating Craft at Museum of Art & Design

LEFT: Miriam Schapiro, “Pagoda,” 1982, acrylic and fabric collage on shaped canvas, 161.3 × 175.3 cm. CENTER: “Mardi Gras,” 1982, acrylic, decoupage, and glitter on wood, 80 × 78.7 cm.

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RIGHT: “Baby Block Bouquet,” 1981, acrylic and fabric collage on shaped canvas, 161.3 × 175.3 cm.

Expressionism, and into her own break with convention. The colorful, optic, rectangular frames of “Silver Windows” develop into “Again Sixteen Windows” (c. 1973), where the pattern is replicated as a central motif floating on a background that recalls white fabric hand-dyed with a red pattern, and the “window frames” of her earlier style are painted as if they are wrapped in patterned textiles or paper. From there, the exhibition illustrates how Schapiro further transitioned into a focus on craft-as-subject through a series of prints. Titled “Anonymous was a Woman” (1976), these were collotypes on paper depicting different pieces of intricate lace. The motifs recall the early photographic exposures of William Henry Fox Talbot, but emphasize the unauthored object of representation and its maker, who was “lost” to history. These works hang framed on a wall in front of a vitrine illed with ephemera, collage experiments, and an issue of the feminist art journal Heresies from 1978 dedicated to craft, which included a text co-authored by Schapiro and the artist Melissa Meyer. Titled “Waste Not/Want Not: an inquiry into what women saved and assembled,” the article listed the various activities practiced by women to create their art — sewing, embroidering, appliquéing and even cooking — and grouped them under one neologism they created, “femmage.” The term was also

a way to revise the history of collage from the prevailing modernist narratives centered on artists like Picasso and Braque, to acknowledge the technique’s longer history, which belongs to scrapbooking “schoolgirls” and “housewives.” Schapiro’s paintings of the late ’70s and early ’80s are illustrative of the ways in which she put her femmage manifesto into practice. “Pagoda” (1982) is a dazzling, heartshaped canvas with a central architectural motif that becomes lost in a swirling and masterful overall patterning of dreamlike scenes and shapes that fan out to a blue border around the work’s soft edges. On the other hand, works such as “Garden of Paradise” (1980), which espouse a color palette of faded pastels on a dark, black background, recall dated décor of the period. The painting, like much of Schapiro’s work from this era, is deliberately and selfconsciously indulgent in everything that others might term kitsch, cutesy, or frivolous — such as glitter, ribbon, appliqué flowers and fabric piping. Which begs the question: is it outmoded or is it a document? Doesn’t décor shape environments and moods, and reflect attitudes of certain time periods? Are these paintings records of those attitudes, and therefore of value for their obvious “bad taste” and not in spite of it? Schapiro’s celebration of decoration was evident in all of the works by Contemporary

artists selected for the exhibition: Sara Rabar’s flag series incorporates everyday materials to produce politically-inflected assemblages, and Edie Fake’s “Memory Palaces” series draws on overall patterns to produce intricate, quilt-like drawings as monuments to deceased friends. But the link to Schapiro’s overtly indulgent celebration of craft was tenuous in those works and others included — positing that any artist whose work had a craft element was somehow indebted to Schapiro, which is certainly not the case. Quilt paintings by Sanford Biggers and intricate paper by Jasmin Sian make for more convincing lines stemming from Schapiro, at least on a formal level. For instance, Biggers’ “Dagu,” appropriates antique quilts, shaping them into a canvas for his spray-painted clouds, leaving the quilts visible underneath his additions to produce a dazzling wall work indebted to a history of women’s labor. But femmage was not only about the use of craft to produce ine art, it was a deliberate assault on the taste of the times. None of the work by the Contemporary artists included produced a similarly self-conscious effect. But perhaps that says more about how open Contemporary art has become, and how much more dificult it is today to challenge norms through an indulgence in decoration. — AMY ZION

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Zao Wou-Ki, “Hommage à Matisse I 02.02.86I,” 1986. oil on canvas. 162 x 130 cm, Collection particulière.

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Born in Beijing in 1920 to an affluent family descended from the Song Dynasty and having begun courses in traditional Chinese painting techniques at the age of fourteen, the artist Zao Wou-Ki was primed for a career in traditional Chinese art. But in his late teens and early 20s he was drawn away from the Chinese techniques he’d learned and toward oil painting. He moved to France when he was 28, and, upon befriending the symbolist painter and poet Henri Michaux and, later, the expressionist painter Paul Klee, he became enamored with the art of the West, especially Abstract Expressionism, which he embraced during a trip throughout the United States in 1957. On until January 6, 2019, “Zao WouKi: Space is Silence,” at the City of Paris’ Museum of Modern Art, looks to show the bridge between Asian and Western artwork that no one has accomplished or personiied better than Wou-Ki. The exhibition includes 40 paintings and drawings, including a collection of his ink drawings from 2006 that have not before been shown publicly. Curated by François Michaud, the museum’s head curator of patrimony, and Erik Verhagen, an art historian at the University of Valenciennes in northern France, the show leans heavily on Wou-Ki’s adopted Frenchness. (Wou-Ki became a French citizen and lived most of his adult life in Paris.) His work was often in dialogue with French, especially Parisian, artists, both past and present, including Claude Monet, Henri Matisse, and the composer Edgar Varèse. His painting “15.12.76-triptyque,” an homage to Monet, deploys Monet’s color palette in an Abstract Expressionist mode. In “Hommage à Henri Matisse I 02.02.86,” he employs the same tactic, this time turning Matisse’s colors and blocky igurations into a flattened game of color that resembles any number of vertical works by Mark Rothko.

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Although the emphasis in the show is largely on Wou-Ki’s French instincts (there’s a wonderful video of him lighting a cigarette as he walks through his Parisian courtyard and enters his studio to stare at a blank canvas), it’s largely Anglo-Saxon artists that Wou-Ki took from, with many of his works looking like combinations of canvases from Joan Mitchell, Francis Bacon, and Cy Twombly. But while a number of the paintings on show might appear derivative, it is their bridge to Asian art that makes them special. From the early 1970s onward, he began indulging in “ink wash” paintings,

Zao Wou-Ki, painting boldly then letting “03.12.74,” 1974, the ink drip and dry where it oil on canvas, 250 x 260 cm. liked. From here, he transitioned to using more earthy colors and Chinese symbols, which he tucked into paintings. Many of his works have the quality of literati painting, an idealized scholarly form of Chinese painting that represents a place of beauty — usually a landscape — with an expressive description in calligraphic letters next to it. The name of the show comes from a line written by Michaux, but so much of Wou-Ki’s work feels frenetic, like someone trying to ind space

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In Paris, Crossing Zao Wou-Ki’s Bridge Between Worlds

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and silence rather than living in it as Michaux’s line implies. And yet, there are a few, with large holes of space in their corners, like “01.10.73” and “03.12.74,” both of which are evocative of Willem de Kooning’s work (with whom, incidentally, Wou-Ki was recently shown at the Lévy Gorvy Gallery in New York City). Even as he never considered himself an “Asian artist,” Wou-Ki’s work maintains its originality and importance to European abstraction for its nods to Chinese, and sometimes Japanese, art.

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It’s forever true that what we run from is so often what comes to consume us, deine us. For instance, a triptych that takes up an entire wall entitled “Le vent pousse la mer triptyque” (“The Wind Pushes the Sea Triptych”) is a stunning seascape of shades of blue with only the smallest, igurative boat in the corner. Even in “Hommage à Claude Monet février-juin 91-triptyque” Wou-Ki includes Chinese symbols. The show ends with a clear embrace of the East, as if Wou-Ki had, by the 2000s (he died ive years ago), inally contended himself to

what had so long deined him. In “Le temple des han triptyque” (“The Temple of Han Triptych”), Wou-Ki sketches out a depiction of the Temple of Han that looks as if Monet had tried to draw the Parthenon in pink. Words run vertically down its side — a revolutionary form of the literati painting. “Zao Wou-ki: The Space Is Silence” is on view at the City of Paris Museum of Modern Art through January 6, 2019. More information: http://www.mam. paris.fr/en/ — CODY DELISTRATY

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Zao Wou-Ki, “05.03.75 – 07.01.85,” 1975-1985, oil on canvas. 250 x 260 cm, Collection particulière.

A B OV E I M AG E: © S H A R O N LO C K H A R T; . B E LO W I M AG E: © R O N M U E C K C O U R T E SY T H E A R T I S T, A N T H O N Y D ’O F FAY, LO N D O N A N D H AU S E R & W I R T H

Sharon Lockhart, “Pine Flat Portrait Studio, Becky, Damien, Katie,” 2005, framed chromogenic print, 45 1/2 x 36 3/4 in, The Broad Art Foundation.

LOS A N G E L ES

At The Broad, an Attempt at Time Travel Jasper Johns is a hard act to follow. From February through May of his year, The Broad museum in downtown LA presented the most comprehensive work of the legendary American artist in more than two decades, and the irst major survey of the artist’s work in Los Angeles. It was very well received, both by the public and the press, setting the bar high for whatever might follow. Now in the same ground-floor galleries is “A Journey That Wasn’t,” culled from The Broad’s extensive permanent collection of post-war and Contemporary art. This exhibition explores the passage of time, which is a pretty challenging topic. How do you depict what is largely an existential phenomenon, an ineluctable transition from one moment to the next? Forty of the 55 works on view have never been seen in public before, according to Joanne Heyler, founding director of The Broad. The co-curators of “Journey” are Ed Schad and Sarah Loyer, associate and assistant curators at The Broad, respectively. The exhibit borrows its title from Pierre Huyghe’s video, “A Journey That Wasn’t” from 2006. He traveled to Antarctica in

search of the albino penguin, capturing some intriguing scenes of penguins and vast, icy landscapes. The show opens with Ed Ruscha’s acrylic on canvas diptych “Azteca/Azteca in Decline,” 2007. The diptych depicts a triangular Aztec mural in its original form on one wall, then the same mural imagined years later on the opposite wall, falling off and aging. Frankly, better-looking, more detailed Mexican murals abound in this region and in Mexico, although the grafiti is a clever touch. And Ruscha’s dilapidated, aged version is paltry compared with the artist’s proven accomplishments elsewhere with realism and detail. Smaller and more pleasing to the eye are Ruscha’s acrylics on raw linen, “Bible,” “Atlas” and “Index,” all 2002. The artist has painted these books in the trompe l’oeil (trick of the eye) style, and they look almost pristine (“Atlas”) to well-used (“Index”). Ruscha’s “Bible” looks like many a Bible in many a home — digniied, but not well thumbed through. Huyghe’s video — the title track, as it were — is engaging at irst. The Antarctica-bound protagonist shines some strange, flashing light bulb in front of a crowd of penguins, and they are as perplexed about the shenanigans as the viewer is.

Ron Mueck, “Seated Woman,” 1999, mixed media, 23 1/8 x 17 1/4 x 18 1/2 inches.

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Huyghe also re-created some Antarctic scenes in New York’s Central Park, with shots of a live audience observing the event. Why that audience is present is not entirely clear, resulting in a mixed effect. Ron Mueck’s “Seated Woman,” 1999-2000, is a mixed media sculpture of an old woman in precise miniature. The hair, skin and clothing are so realistic, they’re eerie. This diminutive, hunched over woman with hands clasped certainly looks sad. One can stare and try to follow those eyes — which seem to move, they’re so lifelike — for quite a while. In Janine Antoni’s “Mom and Dad,” 1994, the artist dresses her mother as her father, and vice versa, and takes three different portraits of them together. This piece has a comic element, and it’s fascinating how parents start to look like each other over time. Glenn Ligon’s “Narratives,” 1993, features nine title pages from real and imagined novels, substituting story elements with the artist and his African American heritage. It’s inventive and a little chilling.

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Elliot Hundley’s “Blinded,” 2009, is a large, exciting multimedia mural that exudes energy and color and is almost pointillist with the amount of pressure points and crazy detail. Hundley is showcased again with “the high house low!,” 2011, a vivid, dynamic and textured collage on Kitakata paper. This extensive piece features a magnifying glass you can look through for augmented detail of a multi-hued igure, crouched over and getting ready to walk. Hundley’s inkjet print is spacy, extraterrestrial and far out. It’s deinitely a highlight of the show. Near the end of the exhibition is Ragnar Kjartansson’s installation, “The Visitors,” 2012. The nine-screened production of a live band performance in an upstate New York farmhouse is emotional and immersive. The artist, who himself is lying in a tub playing acoustic guitar, captures a band of musical friends at work and play in real time, and it’s kind of like being in a concert you can walk through in the dark. The Broad is bringing this popular installation back for the irst

time since the museum’s inaugural exhibition two years ago. “A Journey That Wasn’t” is conceptually interesting, and time is certainly a tough topic to narrow into an effective theme, but aesthetically, it’s on the ho-hum and bland side. Perhaps some of us are biased in favor of seeing a little more beauty now and then. And some may have been spoiled by the awesomeness of “Jasper Johns.” Regarding time, the organizers could have presented something more kinetic — e.g., Chris Burden’s frenetic “Metropolis II” on view at LACMA — or perhaps something more literally time-based, such as Christian Marclay’s inventive video “The Clock.” Overall, this exhibit features several outstanding pieces and some very talented artists, but one can also borrow from the title of the show — a journey that wasn’t. The Broad is presenting “A Journey That Wasn’t” through February 2019. The Broad is at 221 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles. More information: www.thebroad.org — RICHARD CHANG

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Pierre Huyghe, “A Journey That Wasn’t,” 2006, super 16 mm film and HD video transferred to HD video, color, sound, The Broad Art Foundation.

© S H A R O N LO C K H A R T

Sharon Lockhart, “Pine Flat Portrait Studio, Sierra,” 2005, framed chromogenic print, 45 1/2 x 36 3/4 in., The Broad Art Foundation.

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Nicolas Hlobo’s ‘Ulwamkelo’ at Lehmann Maupin

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(2017, Xhosa for “tricky”), Hlobo uses the same technique but works the white ground of the canvas into a sculptural form, bending it using the same hole-and-ribbon technique to produce an abstract pattern that resembles a mysterious, topographical map. Hlobo has been open about the ways in which his work is anchored in his South African identity and in his sexuality. His materials are symbols for feminine and masculine dualities between which he struggles to locate his subjectivity within his own part of the world. Between Xhosa, his mother tongue, and English, the language he uses to speak about his work (and also the predominant language of the art world), he uses materials and gestures to work out ideas and tell stories that he cannot express in any of his tongues. Hlobo is also explicit about the sexual nature of many of his works, which he achieves through the use of leather, binding, and playing with the phallic quality of musical instruments. For instance, in his sculpture “Mphephethe uthe cwaka (element 2)” (2017), he elongates a small, classic horn in copper and twists the long end like a balloon animal into an abstract shape. He adorns the horn end with some sort of metal

Nicholas Hlobo, “Unduluko,” 2017, ribbon, leather, plastic, copper, and rope, 50 x 122 x 46 in., 127 x 309.9 x 116.8 cm.

Nicholas Hlobo, “Phantsi Komngcunube,” 2017, ribbon and leather on canvas, 94.49 x 71.65 in., 240 x 182 cm.

emblem and two tassels, then closes the other end (which would usually be pressed to the musician’s mouth) with a phallus-shaped bead. The works’ effects come together through the interplay of materials, form, and the language Hlobo uses to name them in his titles. In this work, the silence associated with matters of sexuality — particularly homosexuality in South Africa — remain outside of language, yet ind a clear mode of expression. — AMY ZION

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“Ulwamkelo,” which runs through Aug. 24, is Nicolas Hlobo’s second exhibition at Lehmann Maupin in New York, following his debut last year with “Umkhokeli.” The titles, both in Xhosa, a language of South Africa, translate respectively as, “the welcoming,” and “master” or “leader.” The latest exhibition’s title is a greeting addressed to some of the works on view, which were recovered from a robbery that took place in the artist’s Johannesburg studio in 2017. The works in “Ulwamkelo” echo Hlobo’s last exhibition at the gallery in terms of their formats. For example, Hlobo continues to employ materials like ribbon and leather, using techniques like sewing and puncturing stark white canvases to produce sculptural wall works. In the work “Phantsi Komngcunube” (2017, Xhosa for “underground”), for example, the artist assembles four identical white canvases together as a square, with a few inches’ border between them. He marks the resulting overall plane as if it is one continuous drawing, puncturing small holes to delineate organic, twisting lines, that emanate from a central form. Hlobo uses these small holes to string white ribbon like a needle and thread, attaching black leather as flat shapes, or building it up into a three dimensional, abstract igure with appendages that extend out towards the viewer and down beyond the picture plane, piling onto the floor. Similarly, in “Intlantsana”

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DATEBOOK Not-to-be-missed shows this month LO N D O N

This summer Sadie Coles HQ in London is presenting “Soft,” a new collection of works by the artist Urs Fischer that will be on view until August 18. The exhibition includes silk screen prints designed on a mobile phone and a sculpture. In an interview on the gallery’s website, Urs discusses his decision to create using his mobile phone, saying that “working on the phone, you basically paint with light. I like it better myself, because it is much closer to playing an instrument: your direct touch transfers immediately into what it is, rather than needing to move material around. You don’t have material restrictions, you can go back and remove stuff, you don’t have to damage, change or ruin a painting, you can just go back, you have freedom. I made many, many of these drawings and I can choose to go back in, make copies, change things, because they are all just iles on my phone, until they are not.” In the center of the exhibition is a sculpture of a tree branch. In the interview on the website, Urs describes the sculpture as a “competing reality,” to the drawings. “It is an anchor, a reality, and it is in the middle of the room,” he says “But it brings some of the world you see in the drawings into a physical space, ideally.” More information: https://www.sadiecoles.com/

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Urs Fischer, “Sweet Home,” 2018, paper laminated MDF, primer, gesso, screen printing ink, milled polyurethane frame, resin-based paint, 97.8 x 74.8 x 2.8 cm.

© U R S F I S C H E R . C O U R T E S Y S A D I E C O L E S H Q . P H OTO : S T E FA N A LT E N B U R G E R

Urs Fischer Show at Sadie Coles HQ, Features Works Created on Phone

Unknown American maker, “Studio Portrait,” 1940s–50s, gelatin silver prints. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017.

Unknown American maker, “Studio Portrait,” 1940s–50s, gelatin silver prints. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017.

Daisy Studio (American, active 1940s), “Studio Portrait,” 1940s–50s, gelatin silver prints. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Twentieth-Century Photography Fund, 2015, 2017.

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“African American Portraits: Photographs from the 1940s and 1950s” at The Met The exhibition “African American Portraits: Photographs from the 1940s and 1950s,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through October 8, features more than 150 studio portraits. “The exhibition offers a seldom-seen view of the African-American experience in the United States during World War II and the following decade — a time of war, middle-class growth, and seismic cultural change,” the museum says. “Part of an important acquisition made by The Met in 2015 and 2017, these photographs build on and expand the museum’s strong holdings in portraiture from the beginning of photography in the 1840s to the present.” The subjects in these portraits are seen sitting facing the camera with a painted backdrop, a table with a telephone where a hand rests casually, or clutching a handbag with a faint smile on their faces. “Soldiers and sailors model their uniforms, graduates wear their caps and gowns, lovers embrace, and new

parents cradle their infants. Both photographers and subjects remain mostly unidentiied,” the museum writes. During the war, photography studios became a center of activity for local and regional communities. “Some studios were small and transient, others more established and identiiable, such as the Daisy Studio in Memphis, Tennessee,” the museum says. These studios used the process of waterprooing direct positive paper instead of using ilms to produce high-quality, inexpensive portraits in minutes. “The poignancy of Unknown these small photographs lies American maker. in the essential respect the “Studio Portrait,” camera offers its subjects, who 1940s–50s, gelatin silver prints. sit for their portraits as an act The Metropolitan of self-expression,” the Museum of Art, New York, museum adds. Twentieth-Century More information: https:// Photography www.metmuseum.org Fund, 2015, 2017.

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James Gillray (1756–1815), “A Voluptuary under the horrors of digestion,” 1792, etching and stippling with hand colour.

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Ian Hislop Curates Exhibition on Dissent at The British Museum

“Make America Gay Again” badge.

“Crooked Hilary” badge.

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The editor of the magazine “Private Eye” and a panelist on the British television show “Have I Got News for You” has turned his attention to the collections at The British Museum in the exhibition “I object: Ian Hislop’s search for dissent,” which runs through September 6 in London. In the exhibition, Hislop, a journalist, historian and broadcaster, showcases over 100 artifacts from the museum’s collection that challenge the oficial version of events and defy established narratives. With items spanning three millennia — from ancient Mesopotamia in 1300 B.C. to the 2016 US presidential election — the exhibition demonstrates that humans have always subverted concepts of authority,” the museum says. Some of the items on display include grafiti on a Babylonian brick, a banknote with hidden rude words, satirical Turkish shadow puppets and a “pussy hat” worn during a women’s march. “Together they are evidence of the power of objects and their potential to carry messages about histories and stories that go against the mainstream.” A highlight of the exhibition is Banksy’s “Peckham Rock,” a work that makes somewhat of an oficial comeback to the British museum. In 2005, the grafiti artist secretly installed the piece, along with a mock information tag, in the museum, where it remained undiscovered for three days. Once the museum realized the work was there, it was removed and returned to Banksy. Since then, “Peckham Rock” has featured in the artist’s exhibitions in London and Bristol, and now, it goes back on display at its “original home” for this exhibition — this time with the museum’s permission. According to the museum, the exhibition will be preceded by a threepart series of the same name on BBC Radio 4, presented Hislop and broadcast in August. More information: http://www. britishmuseum.org

Don McCullin, “The Great Elephant Festival at the River Gandak, near Patna, India,” 1987, printed in 2015, platinum print, 36.3 x 54 cm.

Don McCullin, “A boy from the Surma Tribe, Southern Ethiopia,” 2003, printed in 2015, platinum print, 41.5 x 50.5 cm.

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Don McCullin’s War Photography in Artist’s First Solo at Hauser & Wirth “When human beings are suffering, they tend to look up, as if hoping for salvation. And that’s when I press the button.” — Don McCullin McCullin’s passion for documenting human struggle took him to sites of crisis and conflict that included Vietnam, Biafra, Northern Ireland, Lebanon, the Belgian Congo, Afghanistan and Cambodia. Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles, presents 30 of McCullin’s photographs in a show on view through September 23. This exhibition, the artist’s irst solo in LA, is a prelude to McCullin’s 2019 retrospective at Tate Britain, which will mark the irst ever survey for a living photographer in the London-based museum. “A selection of the works on view speaks of the erection of the Berlin Wall, the conflict in Northern Ireland, and of the Vietnam War, shown here on the 50th anniversary of the bloodiest year of that infamous conflict. Most photographs, shown in the form of rare platinum prints, address the complexity of McCullin’s human experience, notably

in Africa and India, or depict hauntingly beautiful English landscapes and still life,” the gallery says. In a career spanning decades, McCullin has earned many accolades and some consider him the dean of war photographers, and moreover, and a master of black and white photography. “McCullin has received a number of prestigious awards, and in 2017 he became a Knight of the Realm, the second photographer (after Cecil Beaton) to have been given such an honor, which he adds to his Commander of the British Empire Medal. His photographs have been exhibited worldwide, including solo shows at the Victoria & Albert Museum (Hearts of Darkness, 1980), The Barbican London, and the Imperial War Museum,” writes Hauser & Wirth. The exhibition will be completed with the “Printed Matter Lab” installation, put together with archival materials drawn from the artist’s 60-year career, including video footage, ephemera, and a camera containing a bullet hole. More information: https://www. hauserwirth.com/

Don McCullin,“Fishermen, Scarborough Beach,” 1965, printed in 2016, platinum print, 55.5 x 77 cm.

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Mark Grotjahn, “Untitled (Poppy Red and Yellowed Orange Butterfly 48.90),” 2016, colored pencil on paper, 76 × 42 in., collection of the artist. LOS A N G E L ES

A black and creamcolored pencil sketch that the artist Mark Grotjahn made to it the dimensions of the wall in his kitchen inspired him to create a body of work that makes up the “50 Kitchens” exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through August 19. The display, conceived as one work, presents more than 50 chromatic drawings, exploring pairs of radiating colors like Tuscan Red and Chartreuse, Mark Grotjahn, “Untitled (Orange and or Grass Green and Black Butterfly 45.76),” 2014, Canary Yellow that colored pencil on paper, create a prismatic 76 × 42 in., collection of the artist. display. The works allude to the Los Angeles-based artist’s interest in color, light, and optics, showcased by artists such as Wassily Kandinsky and the Op Art painters of the 1960s. The works also incorporate residual traces of earlier drawings that have been seamlessly integrated into the new works of the artists. Grotjahn is best known for his “Butterfly,” which he has been working on for over a decade. More information: http://www.lacma.org

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“Mark Grotjahn: 50 Kitchens” at LACMA

Paloma Varga Weisz, “Wild Bunch,”2018, installation view. LO N D O N

Paloma Varga Weisz’s “Wild Bunch” Sculptures at Sadie Coles HQ In the show “Wild Bunch,” at Sadie Coles HQ in London through August 18, the artist Paloma Varga Weisz showcases a new series of sculptures carved in limewood. These works recall her origins as a woodcarver in Bavaria, Germany, in the late 1980s, while also reflecting the layered personal iconography — surreal, mythological and Modernist — that she has developed over her 30-year career, the gallery says. “At the center of the exhibition is an articulated wooden igure — a life-size version of an artist’s mannequin — suspended acrobatically from ropes,” the gallery says. “This alludes to the long tradition of drawing from wooden standins or ‘lay igures,’ and equally to the surrealist fascination with the doll or

shop mannequin as a proxy body.” Varga Weisz has also positioned a group of carved characters who oscillate, in similar fashion; one igure, for example, is part man, part dog. Then there are also strange creatures that evoke myth or folklore, encapsulating the double-edged mood that often recurs throughout Varga Weisz’s work. Another sequence of sculptures shows elongated female nudes with simpliied features, reminiscent of ‘primitivist’ carvings of Modernist sculpture. Throughout her latest works, Varga Weisz continues to examine and rethink the ways in which sculpture has been presented and viewed. More information: https://www.sadiecoles.com

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Roni Horn’s Solo Show Features New Installation at Hauser & Wirth The exhibition “Wits’ End Sampler | Recent Drawings” on view at Hauser & Wirth, Zürich through September 1, features a selection of large-scale drawings as well as a new installation by the American artist Roni Horn (b. 1955). Horn’s scope of work encompasses various mediums, including drawing, photography, installation, sculpture and literature, but since 1980, drawing has remained her primary activity underpinning her broader practice. Themes of identity, interpretation and textual play are Roni Horn, recurrent in the body of “Yet 1,” 2013/2017, works by the New Yorkpowdered and Reykjavik-based pigment, artist, the gallery says. graphite, charcoal, “In drawings from the coloured pencil ‘Yet’ series, Horn has and varnish on worked powdered paper, 312.4 x 247.7cm. pigment, graphite and

varnish into a few irst phase drawings called ‘plates’, which are then cut apart. These pieces are then rearranged and assembled and may undergo several more cycles of splicing and stitching together before taking their ultimate form. Pencil marks, numbers, and words are interspersed between shards of color as Horn annotates the joining of plates in each drawing,” Hauser & Wirth says. The exhibition gets its title from her new installation “Wits’ End Sampler,” a project for which Horn accumulated more than 1,000 idioms and clichés, chosen or handwritten by strangers, friends and colleagues. These idioms are silk screened in the gallery’s second floor, creating a unique linguistic environment. Idioms and textual play have always been vital to Horn’s work, the gallery says. More information: https://www.hauserwirth.com

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The Whitney Museum of American Art will showcase the works of the American artist Louise Nevelson in an exhibition that follows her journey from the early focus on the human body through her progression into abstraction. “The Face in the Moon: Drawings and Prints by Louise Nevelson” opens on July 20. Nevelson (1899–1988) is noted for her majestic, monochromatic, wooden wall pieces and outdoor sculptures. Through her extensive and proliic career extending more than six decades, Nevelson also produced an exclusive body of works on paper. “The Face in the Moon” focuses on this lesser-seen part of her oeuvre, which is drawn entirely from the Whitney’s permanent collection. The use of unconventional or recycled materials is characteristic to Nevelson’s works. “In her prints, she layered scraps of fabric to create deeply textured environments containing mystical igures and architectural forms. Her paper collages, like her sculptures assembled from wooden objects, reconigure the disparate materials from which they are composed, including scraps of paper and foil, into uniied, unexpected compositions,” the museum says. Referring to her individual style of work, the museum writes, “Interested in the physical constraints of objects, Nevelson sought to transform the materials that she used and the subjects that she depicted. She believed that art could reorient one’s relationship to the built and natural world, challenging us to see our environments differently through her work.” More information: https://www.whitney.org

Louise Nevelson (1899-1988), “Untitled,” 1963, Lithograph: sheet, 34 × 23 9/16 in.; image, 32 1/8 × 22 1/4 in. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of the artist.

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Whitney Museum Exhibition Tracks Louise Nevelson’s Artistic Journey

John Akomfrah, “Transfigured Night,” 2013, (installation view). two-channel HD video installation, 5.1 sound, color; 26:31 min.

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“John Akomfrah: Signs of an Empire” at New Museum The exhibition “John Akomfrah: Signs of an Empire” at New Museum, the irst American survey of the British artist, features four renowned works from his oeuvre. Since the early 1980s, Akomfrah, who was born in Ghana, has been making ilms and video collages that examine the violent legacy of colonialism. His work came to prominence in the early 1980s when he was a part of the Black Audio Film Collective, a group of seven artists founded in 1982 in response to the 1981 Brixton riots. Another breakthrough for John Akomfrah was “Vertigo Sea,” an unsettling three-channel video that portrayed the oceans as sites of true savagery. In the video, Akomfrah projects the ocean as an environmental, cultural,

and historical force; a force that connects “literature and poetry, history of slavery, and contemporary issues of migration and climate change,” the New Museum says. The work, which was showcased irst at the Venice Biennale 2015, and with “Signs of Empire,” will make its debut in America. Along with “Vertigo Sea,” the exhibition will offer to its viewers, three additional, phenomenal works from Akomfrah’s oeuvre — “The Uninished Conversation” (2012), “Expeditions — Signs of Empire” (1983), and a new version of “Transigured Night” (2013/2018), a two-channel work looking at the relationship between the US and post-colonial African history. The exhibition is curated by Gary Carrion-Murayari, Kraus Family Curator

and Massimiliano Gioni, the Edlis Neeson artistic director. It will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog featuring essays by Tina Campt, T.J. Demos, Okwui Enwezor, Aram Moshayedi, Diana Nawi, and Zoe Whitley. More information: https://www.newmuseum.org

John Akomfrah, “The Unfinished Conversation,“ 2012 (still), three-channel HD video installation, 7.1 sound, color; 45:48 min.

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Michal Rovner, “Nilus,” 2018, 2 LCD screens wand video, 144.9 cm x 166.1 cm x 11.7 cm.

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Michal Rovner’s “Evolution” at the Pace Gallery in New York is a solo show dedicated to the work of the pioneering Israeli artist following its celebrated exhibition at the gallery’s Palo Alto venue earlier this year. Rovner (b. 1957) is best known for her multimedia practice of drawing, printmaking, video, sculpture, and installation, especially deining a new and evocative language of abstraction, broadly addressing themes of history, humanity and time. The exhibition, which runs through August 17, features video works and prints that mark a return to Rovner’s unique, abstracted language. It will include many of the highlights from the Palo Alto show, as well as new works and a major video installation. A central part of “Evolution” is the video work “Nilus” (2018) — a nocturnal silhouette of a jackal, stretched across two screens, as across two pages of a book, whose space is illed with dense lines of miniature human igures. “The unique nocturnal light, something in the shape of the vigilant animal, possibly exposed to danger, the glimmer of its hollow eyes in which human igures appear occasionally to be reflected — all of these elements along with the dense

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Michal Rovner, “Cipher 3 (Mechanism),” 2018, archival pigment print, 169.9 cm x 91.8 cm.

lines of the flickering ‘text,’ create a disturbing feeling that something is amiss, perhaps the creature is artiicial, maybe a cloned jackal, maybe a hybrid,” the gallery says. Rovner’s last exhibition at Pace in New York, in 2016, was “Night,” which also featured images of jackals from encounters in dark ields. “The works reverberate an unfamiliar dimension, a sense of fear and alertness, primal powers and the night within us,” the gallery says. More information: https://www.pacegallery.com

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Michal Rovner’s “Evolution” at Pace Gallery

Marcel Broodthaers “A pyramid of 19 canvases on stretchers with painted edges,” 1973, 35.2 x 46 x 38.7 cm.

Keiji Uematsu, “Vertical Position,” 1973, two vintage gelatin silver prints, each: 48.2 x 35.8 cm.

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“Towards Ininity: 1965-1980” at Simon Lee Gallery The exhibition “Towards Ininity: 19651980” at the Simon Lee Gallery in London takes its title from Giovanni Anselmo’s seminal work of the same name — “Verso l’ininito” (1969). The exhibition, which runs from July 4 through September 7, explores the dematerialization of the art object and the dismantling of concepts that had bolstered the deinition and context of traditional art-making well into the 20th century, says the gallery. The exhibition consists of major works conceived by artists from across the international scope of the Conceptual Art movement, with special focus on the period between 1965 and 1980. In the 1960s and 1970s, there was a disillusionment with pervasive movements in art and the influence of radical European theoretical thought inspired a re-evaluation of long-held attitudes toward formal and material conventions. “Working across a wide range of media, including photography, ilm, video, performance and installation, the artists in the exhibition all demonstrated an anti-hierarchical approach to both subject and material

that positioned the idea irst and form second. All the works presented adhere to the fundamental premise put forward by Anselmo’s ‘Verso l’ininito,’ challenging the constructs of time and space to create an art that is at once forward-looking, in flux and without limits,” the gallery says. “Works by Michelangelo Pistoletto and AlighieroBoetti demonstrate a similar concern with mimesis, as well as with performance and collaboration. While Boetti’s ballpoint pen picture, ‘Fame di Vento’ (1979) was made by a team of art students, Pistoletto’s ‘Cane allo Specchio’ (1971) directly involves the viewer, who becomes part of the work, reflected in its mirrored surface.” More information: https://www. simonleegallery.com/exhibitions/138/

Mel Bochner, “Forgetting Is The Only Continuum,” 1970 / 2018 , acrylic paint and oil pastel on wall, 180.3 x 121.9 cm Edition 1 of 3.

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Installation image, Jameel Prize 5, 28 June - 25 November 2018.

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The Victoria and Albert Museum in London will showcase the works of eight contemporary artists who are inalists for the Jameel Prize 5, which recognizes Contemporary art and design that is inspired by Islamic tradition. The exhibition runs through November 25. The biennial international award, worth £25,000, explores “the relationship between Islamic traditions of art, craft and design and contemporary work as part of a wider debate about Islamic culture and its role today,” the V&A says. The inalists in this ifth edition of the competition are Kamrooz Aram, Hayv Kahraman, Hala Kaiksow, Mehdi Moutashar, Naqsh collective, Younes Rahmoun, Wardha Shabbir and Marina Tabassum. With connections to countries as diverse as Bangladesh, Iran, Iraq, Bahrain, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, France and the USA, the inalists’ varied practices range from architecture, painting and fashion design to abstract work and multi-media installation. “This variety highlights the richness of Islamic tradition as a source of contemporary creativity, which in turn shows how the Islamic past is relevant now,” the V&A says. Both the prize and the exhibition are organized by the V&A in partnership with Art Jameel. More information: https://www.vam. ac.uk/exhibitions/jameel-prize-5

Younes Rahmoun, “Tâqiya-Nôr [Hat-light]” 2016, multimedia installation, shown at the 57th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, Viva Arte Viva.

Kamrooz Aram,“Untitled ,” Two works from the series ‘Ancient through Modern,’ 2016, multimedia.

Mehdi Moutashar, “Two squares, one of them framed,” 2017, wood, paint, elastic wire.

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V&A Showcases Works by the Finalists of Jameel Prize 5

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Francis Bacon, “Three Studies for Portraits (Including Self-Portrait),” 1969, oil on canvas, tryptichon, 35.5 x 30.5 cm, private collection.

“Bacon — Giacometti” at Fondation Beyeler

Francis Bacon, “Lying Figure,” 1969, oil on canvas, 198 x 147.5 cm, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Beyeler Collection.

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The works of two giants of Modern Art, Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon, are being exhibited together in a landmark exhibition at Fondation Beyeler until September 3. This irst-ever joint exhibition explores the relationship between the two artists, who met in the early 1960s, the museum says. By 1965, their friendship had grown close enough for Bacon to visit Giacometti at the Tate Gallery in London, where he was setting up a retrospective. “Bacon — Giacometti” presents about 100 thematically arranged works, spread across nine rooms. The exhibition juxtaposes the similarities in the works of Bacon and Giacometti as direct comparisons. Themes in the exhibition include the artists’ obsession with depicting the human head; the representation of movement in painting and sculpture; love and violence; and the use of cage-like structures to create space and perspective, the foundation says. “Bacon and Giacometti were united by an unwavering belief in the importance of the human igure. They were intensely concerned with the role of tradition and the Old Masters, whom they studied, copied and paraphrased,” the museum says. More information: www.fondationbeyeler.ch

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Berlinde De Bruyckere Reimagines a Palermo Church As part of Galleria Continua’s 5x5x5 Program at Manifesta 12, Berlinde De Bruyckere is showing two of her projects, ”Mantel I and Mantel II,” in a church in Palermo, Italy. They will be on view through November 4. “Over the course of her extraordinary career, Berlinde De Bruyckere has succeeded in drawing a ine line throughout her body of work, reinterpreting and sometimes revolutionizing certain elements that for her have become key,” writes Gallery Continua. “‘Mantel I and Mantel II’ are a result of the new exploration on the artist’s part. The work, which started in 2016 with her series ‘It almost seemed a lily’ combines references to Christian symbolism and compelling antinomic pairings associated with the core of human existence — ‘masculine — feminine, eros — thanatos, life — death.’” These art pieces ”house reconstructions of the Garden of Eden and contain miniatures of saints and patrons, textiles, glass, precious metals, wax and even bone.” The exhibition will be on view at Chiesa di Santa Venera, Piazza Bellini, in Palermo, Italy. More information: www.galleriacontinua.com

Berlinde De Bruyckere, “Mantel I,” 2016-2018, wood, blanket, wall paper, wax, epoxy, iron, 408 x 247 x 106 cm, exhibition view, collateral event, Manifesta 12, Chiesa di Santa Venera sulle Mura della Pace, Palermo.

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BERLIN

Esther Schipper gallery in Berlin is showing four series of work by the Indian artist Prabhavathi Meppayil through August 11. “Prabhavathi Meppayil transposes in her works the techniques and materials associated with the ancestral craft of goldsmithery into a contemporary plastic language that belongs to the modernist canon, whether by embedding metal wires in layers of white gesso, or by marking its surface with tools traditionally used by goldsmiths,” the gallery says. “Meppayil’s practice is process-oriented, focusing on materials and tools. As she says herself, ‘the panels illed with tool marks [are] the abstraction of the tapping sound of the tool.’” Meppayil’s work sometimes involves using traditional Indian techniques and tools for making jewelry in unconventional ways. Meppayil’s work has been exhibited at numerous institutions, particularly in India and Europe. In 2014, she had a solo exhibition at the American Academy in Rome, and in 2013 her work was shown in the 55th Venice Biennale exhibition. More information: www.estherschipper.com

Prabhavathi Meppayil, “se/hundred and twelve,” 2018, “Found steel objects (441 pieces),” Overall: 126,1 x 125,5 x 2,5 cm.

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C O U R T E S Y: T H E A R T I S T A N D E S T H E R S C H I P P E R , B E R L I N P H OTO : © A N D R E A R O S S E T T I

Prabhavathi Meppayil at Esther Schipper

Roberta’s “Construction Chart #2,” 1975, chromogenic print, 50 × 64 cm.

S I N GA P O R E

C O U R T E S Y O F S H A N G H A R T GA L L E R Y

Exploring Lynn Hershman’s “Alter Ego” at ShanghArt The American artist Lynn Hershman proved to be far ahead of her time with the works and performances she created in the ’70s with a ictional self whom she named Roberta Breitmore. Through Breitmore, she challenged norms and conventional morality. ShanghArt in Singapore is showcasing this groundbreaking work in “Alter Ego (Roberta Breitmore Series),” 1973-1978. The exhibition, on view through August 16, includes works related to the Breitmore character in a number of mediums. “The works showcased examine the relationship between individuals’ ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ identities — a topic that is still very much relevant in this day and age of consumerism; when issues such as Facebook’s data breach and mass surveillance in everyday life forces us to reevaluate the balance between privacy, security, and convenience; and an environment where technology is increasingly intertwined with our lives,” the gallery says. More information: www.shanghartgallery.com

Lynn,Hershman, “Want Ad, S.F. Progress (Folded),” 1974, photograph digital pigment print, 25.4 × 20.1 cm.

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Hans Op de Beeck, “Brian,” 2018, polyester, glass, coating, 62 x 58 x 62 cm, exhibiton view ‘Kids, cabinets, pictures and ponds’ - Galleria Continua / Les Moulins, May 2018. PA R I S

Hans Op de Beeck at Galleria Continua

Hans Op de Beeck, “Pond,” 2018, glass, glue, PU, synthetic plaster, 200 x 200 cm, exhibiton view ‘Kids, cabinets, pictures and ponds’ - GalleriaContinua/ Les Moulins, May 2018.

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Hans Op de Beeck brings together new sculptural and photographic works into a large-scale installation in “Kids, cabinets, pictures and ponds” at Galleria Continua’s location in Moulin de Boissy, west of Paris. In line with the exhibition title, the show starts with the display of “a kind of hiking trail with gravel and small sculpted ponds” on the ground floor, the gallery says. “There is, for example, a boy meditatively holding a crystal ball in his hands, a boy who just closed his eyes before shooting an arrow with a toy bow, and a young woman listening to music.” Op de Beeck also has a take on Cabinets of Curiousities, with a

selection of ash-gray display cases, wherein he brings together diverse sculptural interpretations of keepsake objects. The exhibition also includes Op de Beeck’s latest ilm “The Girl” (2018). Shown on the ground floor, the stirring ilm, follows the story of a 14-year-old girl as she lives an isolated existence in an old trailer near a lake, a highway and a dark forest. Op de Beeck (born 1969 Turnhout) lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. “His work,” the gallery writes, “is a reflection on our complex society and the universal questions of meaning and mortality that resonate within it.” More information: www.galleriacontinua.com

A L L I M AG E S: C O U R T E S Y T H E A R T I S T A N D GA L L E R I A C O N T I N UA , S A N G I M I G N A N O / B E I J I N G / L E S M O U L I N S / H A B A N A P H OTO BY OA K TAY LO R - S M I T H

Hans Op de Beeck, “Wunderkammer,” 2018, wood, metal, glass, polyester 217 x 120 x 40 cm, exhibiton view ‘Kids, cabinets, pictures and ponds’ - Galleria Continua/ Les Moulins, May 2018.

Tony Bevan, “Horizon,” 2018, acrylic and charcoal on canvas, 126 x 198.5 cm.

LO N D O N

B OT H I M AG E S: C O U R T E S Y O F T H E A R T I S T A N D B E N B R O W N F I N E A R T S

Tony Bevan at Ben Brown Fine Arts Ben Brown Fine Arts is exhibiting works by Tony Bevan at its London venue. Ben Brown Fine Arts presents an exhibition of new, large-scale paintings by the British artist Tony Bevan at the London gallery through September 15. Bevan’s distinctive graphic style, highly textured surfaces, and persistent exploration of igurative and abstract representation make him one of the United Kingdom’s most signiicant Contemporary painters, the gallery says. “In this exhibit, Bevan’s intense thematic investigations over the past three decades of architectural constructions, trees, and imagined landscapes, each connected by a unifying elemental structure,” the gallery writes. “The works on display further explore

Tony Bevan, “Skylight,” 2017, acrylic and charcoal on canvas, 210 x 155.5 cm.

the cohesive yet dynamic evolution of Bevan’s work with the introduction of his new Place, Skylight and Throat paintings, as well as languid and emotive progressions of his Trees series.” “In these reined paintings, composed of his distinctive pigment-rich skeletal forms, Bevan highlights strong angles through thick lines and marks of pure color. Bevan’s profound aesthetic can be distinguished by his exclusive use of charcoal and selfproduced acrylic paints in a typically restrained palette of black and red,” says the gallery. Bevan has exhibited widely, holding his irst solo US show at L.A. Louver, Los Angeles, in 1989. More information: wwwbenbrowninearts.com

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VIENNA

Olaf Nicolai’s Walkable Art at Kunsthalle Wien This show invites spectators to become participants as the walk on work by the German artist Olaf Nicolai, altering it as they go. “There Is No Place Before Arrival” will run at Kunsthalle Wien until October 10. “Nicolai’s artistic output is at once conceptual, complex and poetic. He develops a variety of interdisciplinary projects that address the primary experiences of space, time and corporeality,” the museum says. The exhibition focuses on problems that arise from a particular method. “This method not only determines the way Nicolai conceives and realizes his work, but also becomes a type of work itself,” the museum adds. In the museum space, the artist creates chalk tracings on the floor of the gallery spaces. The outcome is a walkable sequence of motifs or a tableau that is made up of evocative images which contain both political and poignant connotations. According to the museum, “visitors will be invited to traverse the painted floor. The chalk will blur, and the imagery will become unrecognizable until all that remains are fragments of the original paintings.” More information: http://www. kunsthallewien.at/#/en

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Olaf Nicolai, “A drawing book for children based on motifs by Arnulf Rainer,” 2002, Edition Sammlung Essel, Klosterneuburg, 2002.

Olaf Nicolai, “Don’t spend time searching the colourful layered flood of leaking information, or: There is no place before arrival,” 2016, installation view, Galerie im Taxispalais.

TO P L E F T: C O U R T E S Y O L A F N I C O L A I A N D GA L E R I E E I G E N + A R T L E I P Z I G/B E R L I N , © B I L D R E C H T G M B H , 2 018 , P H OTO : M O R I T Z H A A S E . TO P R I G H T: C O U R T E S Y O L A F N I C O L A I A N D GA L E R I E E I G E N + A R T L E I P Z I G/B E R L I N , © B I L D R E C H T G M B H , 2 018 . B OT TO M : C O U R T E S Y O L A F N I C O L A I A N D GA L E R I E E I G E N + A R T L E I P Z I G/B E R L I N , © B I L D R E C H T G M B H , 2 018 , P H OTO : W E S T. F OTO S T U D I O, W Ö R G L

Olaf Nicolai, “Hier wird heute Abend ein Mensch wie ein Auto ummontiert / Ohne dass er irgendetwas dabei verliert. Brecht in der Auto-Werkstatt,” 2018.

Karl Wirsum, “Sputter in the Niche of Time,” 2009, acrylic on canvas with painted wood frame, 143.5 x 110.5 cm.

N EW YO R K

B OT H I M AG E S: C O U R T E S Y O F M AT T H E W M A R K S GA L L E R Y

Painting’s Ininite Pleasures at 2 New York Galleries “Painting: Now and Forever, Part III,” presented by Matthew Marks and Greene Naftali galleries, is a group show with work by 40 artists installed across the spaces in Chelsea through August 17. The wide array of styles and subjects on view prove the vitality of Contemporary painting, say the galleries. The irst “Painting: Now and Forever” exhibition was organized by Pat Hearn and Matthew Marks in 1998, and the second by Carol Greene and Matthew Marks in 2008. Participating artists include Magnus Andersen, Monika Baer, Robert Bechtle, Nayland Blake, Julien Ceccaldi, VijaCelmins, Xinyi Cheng, Leidy Churchman, Whitney Claflin, Ed Clark, Robert Colescott, Matt Connors, Allan D’Arcangelo, Noah Davis, Lois Dodd, Lukas Duwenhögger, Nicole Eisenman, Janiva Ellis, Jana Euler, Genoveva Filipovic, Sam Gilliam, Tony Greene, Rachel Harrison, Luchita Hurtado, Alex Israel, Jasper Johns, Matsumi Kanemitsu, Bhupen Khakhar, Mathieu Malouf, Helen Marten, Lucy McKenzie, Rodney McMillian, Jill Mulleady, Jeanette Mundt, Howardena Pindell, Suellen Rocca, Eiichi Shibata, Gedi Sibony, Avery Singer, Sylvia Sleigh, Anne Speier, Linda Stark, Hervé Télémaque, Karl Wirsum, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and Gang Zhao. More information: www.matthewmarks.com

Karl Wirsum, “Toot Toot Tutu Toodle-oo,” 2013, acrylic on canvas with painted wood frame, 134.6 x 105.4 cm.

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Stephen Frykholm, “Herman Miller Summer Picnic poster,” 1985, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, gift of Stephen Frykholm and Nancy Phillips.

SA N F RA N C I SCO

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is showing “Summer Picnic Posters” — a series of advertising posters for Herman Miller Furniture — by Stephen Frykholm through September 3. Frykholm (b. 1942) started his career as a graphic designer in 1966 after working in Aba, Nigeria, with the Peace Corps at a trade school for girls. He learned screen printing in an effort to develop a skill he could train the young women to pursue. His artistic practice blossomed once he returned to the United States and earned his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. In 1970, Herman Miller hired Frykholm as the lead in its freshly established graphic design department. One of his irst assignments was to create screen-printed posters for an annual company-wide summer picnic — the Sweet Corn Festival. He created a poster depicting a zoomed-in view of a pair of teeth clamped around an ear of corn, which became an instant hit, the museum says. Frykholm went on to design 20 picnic posters over the next 20 years, before passing the baton to his team at Herman Miller at retirement. “His bold, Pop art — influenced posters have become iconic in their own right, instantly transporting us to the picnic table with their vibrant close-ups of a favorite American pastime,” writes the museum. Frykholm, in his 40 years at Herman Miller, went on to become the vice president of company’s creative design wing. More information: www.sfmoma.org

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Celebrating Summer at San Francisco MOMA

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GALLERY LISTINGS Acquavella Galleries

David Nolan Gallery

Galerie Eigen + Art

Galerie Krinzinger

18 E 79th St, New York, NY 10075 +1 212 734 6300 [email protected] acquavellagalleries.com 19th, 20th and 21st Century Art

527 W 29th St, New York, NY 10001 +1 212 925 6190 [email protected] davidnolangallery.com

Auguststraße 26, 10117 Berlin 49.30.280 6605 [email protected] eigen-art.com “offen Vol. 2:” Yang-Tsung Fan, Marion Fink, Zora Janković, Justin Mortimer, Andreas Mühe, Ulrike Theusner, Raul Walch, Alexander Wolff, July 11-August 25

Seilerstätte 16, 1010 Vienna +43 1 5133006 [email protected] galerie-krinzinger.at Selected Works by Otto Piene, Meret Oppenheim, Daniel Spoerri, Bernd Oppl June 28-August 3

Di Donna 121 W 27th St, New York, NY 10001 +1 212 645 7335 [email protected] caseykaplangallery.com

744 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10065 +1 212 259 0444 [email protected] didonna.com Surrealist, Post-War and Modern Art

Cheim & Read

Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art

547 W 25th St, New York, NY 10001 +1 212 242 7727 [email protected] cheimread.com “All over the moon:” Laurel Sparks, Lily Stockman, Richard Tinkler, curated by Jack Pierson, July 12August 30

37 W 57th St, New York, NY 10019 +1 212 517 2453 [email protected] edwardtylernahemfineart.com Modern, Post-War and Contemporary Masters

Casey Kaplan

DC Moore Gallery 535 W 22nd St, New York, NY 10011 +1 212 247-2111 [email protected] dcmooregallery.com “Line Up” and “Zig Zag Zig” Group Shows, through August 10

Edwynn Houk Gallery 745 Fifth Ave, New York, NY 10151 +1 212 750 7070 [email protected] houkgallery.com Vintage photographs by the leading figures of the Modernist movement

Galerie Greta Meert 13 Rue du Canal, 1000 Brussels +32 2 219 14 22 [email protected] galeriegretameert.com Re-opening September 6 with “Wiggle,” group show

Grabbeplatz 2, 40213 Düsseldorf +49 211 132 135 [email protected] galeriehansmayer.de

CHIE FUEKI Where, 2017, acrylic, ink and colored pencil on mulberry paper on wood, 72 x 72 inches at DC Moore Gallery

17, rue du Parc Royal, 75003 Paris +33 1 42 77 27 74 [email protected] lahumiere.com “Weaving Braiding: Villa Datris Islesur-la-Sorgue,” through November 1

Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi Schöneberger Ufer 61, 10785 Berlin +49 30 26 39 49 85 [email protected] bortolozzi.com

Galerie Jocelyn Wolff 78 Rue Julien Lacroix, 75020 Paris +33 1 42 03 05 65 galeriewolff.com Re-opening September 1 with Santiago de Paoli

Galerie Daniel Templon 30 rue Beaubourg, 75003 Paris +33 142 72 14 10 [email protected] danieltemplon.com Re-opening September 8 with George Mathiew, 1969-1975

528 W 26th St, New York, NY 10001 +1 212 315 0470 [email protected] galerielelong.com “Of the Self and of the Other:” Etel Adnan, Ione Saldanha and Carolee Schneemann, through August 3

Galerie Lahumière Galerie Hans Mayer

Galerie Buchholz Fasanenstraße 30, 10719 Berlin +49 30 88 62 40 56 [email protected] galeriebuchholz.de Florian Pumhösl, and Atsuko Tanaka, extended through September 1

Galerie Lelong & Co.

Galerie Karsten Greve 5, rue Delelleyme, 75003 Paris +33 1 42 77 19 37 [email protected] galerie-karsten-greve.com Re-opening September 1 with Qui Shihua, “Impressions”

Galerie Martin Janda Eschenbachgasse 11, 1010 Vienna +43 1 5857371 [email protected] martinjanda.at Re-opening September 9 with an exhibition curated by Latitudes (Max Andrews and Mariana Cánepa Luna)

Galerie Max Hetzler Bleibtreustraße 45, Berlin Goethestraße 2/3, Berlin +49 30 34 64 97 850 [email protected] maxhetzler.com Re-opening on September 14 wtih Louise Bonnet

Galerie Nagel Draxler

Gladstone Gallery

Weydingerstraße 2-4, 10178 Berlin +49 30 40 04 26 41 [email protected] nagel-draxler.de Dominik Sittig: “Memoriorama,” through August 8

515 W 24th St 530 W 21st St New York, NY 10011 +1 212 206 9300 [email protected] gladstonegallery.com

Hauser & Wirth Galerie Nathalie Obadia 3 rue du Cloître Saint-Merri, 75004 Paris +33 1 42 74 67 68 [email protected] galerie-obadia.com Re-opening September 8 with Rina Banerjee

23 Savile Row, London W1S 2ET +44 207 287 2300 [email protected] hauserwirth.com Re-opening this fall with Zeng Fanzhi in the London, Hong Kong and Zurich galleries

Howard Greenberg Gallery 41 E 57th St, New York, NY 10022 +1 212 334 0010 [email protected] howardgreenberg.com Staff Picks, through August 30

Lehmann Maupin

RINA BANERJEE In noiseless soils underground, a distanced poor from below touch fine air rooted in piles upon piles weeded and watered to then have no light shared, 2017, steel armature, feathers, fabric, glass beads, thread, shells, gourds, silver leafing, 51.125 x 41.375 x 17.75 inches at Galerie Nathalie Obadia

Galerie Nordenhake Lindenstrasse 34, 10969 Berlin +49 30 20 61 48 3 [email protected] nordenhake.com

Galleria Continua #8503, 2 Jiuxianqiao Road Chaoyang District 100015 Beijing, China +86 10 5978 9505 [email protected] galleriacontinua.com Michaelangelo Pistoletto, through October 21

536 W 22nd St, New York, NY 10011 +1 212 255 2923 [email protected] lehmannmaupin.com Nicholas Hlobo, through August 24

Luhring Augustine 531 W 24th St, New York, NY 10011 +1 212 206 9100 [email protected] luhringaugustine.com Phillip King: “Color, Space, Place,” through August 10

Marian Goodman Gallery 24 W 57th St, New York, NY 10019 +1 212 977 7160 [email protected] mariangoodman.com Summer Selections, June 28August 24

ZENG FANZHI Untitled, 2018, oil on canvas, courtesy of at Hauser & Wirth, London, Hong Kong and Zurich

Marianne Boesky Gallery

Michael Werner

509 W 24th St, New York, NY 10011 +1 212 680 9889 [email protected] marianneboeskygallery.com “The Mechanics of Fluids,” through August 3

4 E 77th St, New York, NY 10075 +1 212 988 1623 [email protected] michaelwerner.com “Vile Bodies:” A group exhibition of paintings, drawings and sculptures, July 11-August 31. The exhibition is also on view in the London Gallery July 12-September 15

Matthew Marks Gallery 523 W 24th St, 522 W 22nd St, 526 W 22nd St New York, NY 10001 212-243-0200 [email protected] matthewmarks.com “Now & Forever, Part III,” painting, through August 17

Metro Pictures 519 W 24th St, New York, NY 10011 +1 212 206 7100 [email protected] metropictures.com “Evidence:” Organized by Josh Kline, extended through August 3 Re-opening September 6 with B. Wurtz

Mitchell-Innes & Nash 534 W 26th St, New York, NY 10002 +1 212 744 7400 [email protected] miandn.com “35 Days of Film:” A summer screening of a selection of films and videos dating from 1965 to 2018, July 9-August 27. Please see gallery website for screening schedule.

Mnuchin Gallery 45 E 78th St, New York, NY 10075 +1 212 861 0020 [email protected] mnuchingallery.com “Post War and Contemporary Highlights,” through August 31

Regen Projects

Sprüth Magers

Victoria Miro Gallery

6750 Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90038 +1 310 276 5424 benthornborough@ regenprojects.com regenprojects.com Dan Graham: “New Works by a Small-Town Boy,” July 7-August 18

Oranienburger Straße 18, 10178 Berlin +49 30 28 88 40 30 [email protected] spruethmagers.com Andro Wekua, through September 9 Senga Nengudi, through September 9 Kara Walker, through September 9

Gallery I and II: 16 Wharf Rd, N1 7RW London Mayfair: 14 St. George St, W1S 1FE London +44 20 7336 8109 victoria-miro.com A major exhibition of new works by Yayoi Kusama will take place across from the Wharf Road galleries and waterside garden this Autumn. Please visit gallery website for details

Richard Nagy Ltd 22 Old Bond Street, Mayfair, London W1S 4PY +44 20 7262 6400 [email protected] richardnagy.com LOIE HOLLOWELL A gentle meeting of tips, 2018, oil paint, acrylic medium, sawdust, and high density foam on linen mounted on panel, 36 x 48 inches at PACE

PACE 6 Burlington Gardens London W1S 3ET +44 20 3206 7600 [email protected] pacegallery.com Beth Letain: “Signal Hill,” through August 4 Loie Hollowell, August 28September 20

Pace/MacGill Gallery 32 E 57th St, New York, NY 10022 +1 212 759 7999 [email protected] pacemacgill.com “Pairs:” Group show, through August 24

Sadie Coles HQ 1 Davies St, London W1K 3DB 62 Kingly St, London W1B 5QN +44 20 7493 8611 [email protected] sadiecoles.com Paloma Varga Weisz: “Wild Bunch,” through August 18 Urs Fischer: “soft,” through August 18

Simon Lee Gallery 12 Berkeley St, London W1J 8DT +44 20 7491 0100 [email protected] simonleegallery.com “Towards Infinity: 1965-1980,” July 4-September 7 Leelee Kimmel, July 4-August 30

Skarstedt

176 Grand St, New York, NY 10013 +1 212 244 6055 [email protected] peterblumgallery.com

8 Bennet St, London SW1A 1RP +44 207 499 5200 [email protected] skartstedt.com Richard Prince: “Early Joke Paintings,” through August 3

Paula Cooper Gallery

Sperone Westwater

534 W 21st St, 521 W 21st St, New York, NY 10011 +1 212 255 1105 [email protected] paulacoopergallery.com Celebrating 50 years of exhibitions, performances, poetry and music

257 Bowery, New York, NY 10002 +1 212 999 7337 [email protected] speronewestwater.com Alexis Rockman: “New Mexico Field Drawings,” through August 3

Peter Blum Gallery

Stephen Friedman Gallery 25-28 Old Burlington St W1S 3AN London +44 20 7494 1434 [email protected] stephenfriedman.com

Van de Weghe Fine Art 1018 Madison Avenue, 3rd flr, New York, NY 10075 +1 212 744 1900 [email protected] vdwny.com Modern and Contemporary Art

Van Doren Waxter 195 Chrystie St, New York, NY 10002 +1 212 982 1930 [email protected] vandorenwaxter.com Aiko Hachisuka and John Williams, August 29-September 29

Washburn Gallery 177 Tenth Ave, New York, NY 10011 +1 212 397 6780 [email protected] washburngallery.com Re-opening September 13 with Richard Stankiewicz, Sculpture from 1950s - 1970s

White Cube 144-152 Bermondsey St SE1 3TQ London +44 207 930 5373 [email protected] whitecube.com “Memory Palace:” A major group exhibition extending across White Cube’s London galleries in Bermondsey and Mason’s Yard, July 11-September 2

Winston Wächter Fine Art 530 West 25th St, Ground Floor, New York, NY 10001 +1 212 255 2718 [email protected] winstonwachter.com “The Ideal Feminine/The Feminine Ideal?” Group show curated by Natasha Schlesinger, through July 31

AIKO HACHISUKA Untitled, 2017, silkscreen on clothing, kapok, upholstery fabric, foam on wood support, 76 x 63 x 20 inches, courtesy Van Doren Waxter, NY

To be included in Modern Painters’ Gallery listings, contact [email protected]

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