SEPTEMBER 2017 Modern Painters
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This exhibition is made possible by Major support is provided by The Leadership Committee for Visionaries: Creating a Modern Guggenheim is gratefully acknowledged for its generosity, with special thanks to Trustee Chairs Denise Saul and John Wilmerding, Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson, Bill and Donna Acquavella, Rowland Weinstein, Arnhold Foundation, Peter B. Brandt, Dorothy and Sidney Kohl, Mnuchin Gallery, Elizabeth R. Rea in honor of Michael M. Rea, Lyn M. Ross, Elliot and Nancy Wolk, and those who wish to remain anonymous. Funding is also provided by the William Talbott Hillman Foundation. Peggy Guggenheim at Art of This Century, New York, ca. 1942. Photo: AP Photos. Vasily Kandinsky, Composition 8 (Komposition 8), July 1923 (detail). Oil on canvas, 140 x 201 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, By gift 37.262. © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Visionaries: Creating a Modern Guggenheim
More than 170 masterworks from the Guggenheim collection Through September 6 guggenheim.org/visionaries
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Image courtesy of The Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark and David Zwirner New York/London
Gordon Matta-Clark AnArchitect November 8, 2017 to April 8, 2018
The Residency
Private View 26 September 2017 27 – 30 September 2017
Paintings by:
JONATHAN KELLY SUZI MORRIS MELODY PARK DAVID SCHROETER SAM STOPFORD
Herrick Gallery, 93 Piccadilly, Mayfair, London W1J 7NQ www.herrickgallery.com Image: Dr Suzi Morris, Absence of Light
LETTER FROM THE EDITORS // SEPTEMBER
The 80-year-old is as productive as ever. His friend Martin Gayford ices the cake in this edition of the magazine with a look at burgeoning shows in many nations to celebrate the prolific painter. We get exclusive access to what is coming next in the Hockney World. The man who gave us “A Bigger Splash” and “Bigger Trees Near Warter” continues to think big with 3D shows. He is not the only Modern artist with large-scale visions whom we survey.
Jasper Johns, also an octogenarian, has worked on monumental scale, as did Louise Bourgeois, who lived to be 98. We celebrate all of these, the best of Contemporary and Modern, with a who’s who of top writers. We take a sneak peek at the first major London retrospective of German artist Thomas Ruff. His acclaimed work features the enormous “Portraits” series with passport-style photos blown up to reveal spectacular surface detail. Sizes, and ages, are not everything though; we also look at some younger artists. Simon Castets and Hans Ulrich Obrist write about a worldwide group show they are curating at LUMA Westbau. The influence of the US and its culture remains widespread, with this a theme lapping around many articles in whole or part. It is constantly visible in our guide to the best shows on offer, which inevitably spreads outside the US to the rest of the world. We firmly believe that artistic talent is not concentrated on one country. It can be found around the globe.
David Hockney’s “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures),” 1972, acrylic on canvas, 213.5 x 305 cm
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© DAV I D H O C K N E Y. P H OTO: A R T GA L L E R Y O F N E W S O U T H WA L E S/ J E N N I C A R T E R L E W I S C O L L E C T I O N
Happy birthday, David Hockney!
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Disillusion | opens September 29th through October 28th, 2017
Surfacing, 5 panels, oil on linen, 64” x 28” each
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The very private Louise Bourgeois photographed in 1995 while working on her printing press
modernpainters
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In The News
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In Pictures
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“I WANT TO EXAMINE THE SINGLE DOT THAT IS MY OWN LIFE.”
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—YAYOI KUSAMA
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IT'S ABOUT THE TRUTH
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DAVID HOCKNEY GLOBAL BIRTHDAY FESTIVITIES
YAYOI KUSAMA
The shifts in the art world that matter A world view through the lens of Thomas Ruff
Q&A
Collector Profile
Andrew Hall and the sprawling medieval German castle for the art he loves
LIFE-DEFINING ART THERAPY
Louise Bourgeois, Thomas Ruff, and Andrea Branzi Remembers Ettore Sottsass
ON THE COVER: Jasper Johns’s Flag, 1958. Encaustic on canvas, 105.1 x 154.9 cm
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David Hockney
80th birthday is a great occasion for new adventures by Martin Gayford
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Inimitable
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Philosopher’s Dots
Deborah Wye
by Stephen Heyman
SEPTEMBER 2017
JASPER JOHNS
Features
Portfolio
Andrea Branzi fondly remembers fellow designer Ettore Sottsass Yayoi Kusama is candid in her admission of the purpose of art in her life by Nicholas Forrest
Features 102 The Truth Painter
Edith Devaney, co-curator of the Jasper Johns exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, shares the experience of putting the exhaustive show together
F R O M TO P : P H OTO G R A P H BY M AT H I A S J O H A N S S O N ; P R I VAT E C O L L E C T I O N , © JA S P E R J O H N S/ VAGA , N E W YO R K / DAC S , LO N D O N 2 017. P H OTO: JA M I E S T U K E N B E R G. ©T H E W I L D E N S T E I N P L AT T N E R I N S T I T U T E , 2 017
CONTENTS
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F R O M L E F T: © A DAG P, PA R I S A N D DAC S , LO N D O N 2 017; C O L L E C T I O N O F DA I S U K E M I YAT S U, JA PA N . C O U R T E S Y O F OTA F I N E A R T S , TO K YO/ S I N GA P O R E . © YAYO I K U S A M A . T H E M U S E U M O F M O D E R N A R T, N E W YO R K F R AC T I O N A L G I F T O F M R A N D M R S DAV I D R O C K E F E L L E R . © 2 017 A R T I S T S R I G H T S S O C I E T Y (A R S ), N E W YO R K / A DAG P, PA R I S
Yayoi Kusama Pumpkin, 1981. Acrylic on canvas, 130 x 97 cm
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ABOVE:
Jean Dubuffet Séquence XVIII, April 2, 1979. Acrylic on paper (5 sections); 35 x 25.5 cm
ABOVE:
Paul Signac Opus 217, Against the Enamel of a Background Rhythmic with Beats and Angles, Tones, and Tints, Portrait of M. Felix Feneon, in 1890, 1890
Showcase 54
Rachel Whiteread
The artist becomes the first British of her generation, after Damien Hirst, to receive the accolade of a Tate retrospective by Digby Warde-Aldam
Datebook Gilbert & George 144 132 Beard as a visual metonym for London’s demographic change
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Tony Cragg
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Marc Chagall
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122 Modern In Art
A show from the collection of MoMA, New York, goes to Paris with the theme by Aymeric Montaux
Datebook
In his recent work, the British artist turns sculptures inside out
Music and dance in the art of the early modernist
Jean Dubuffet
Increasing prominence of his work suggests he may be getting his due
Daniel Buren
The artist revisit spatial intervention that he is well-known for
Gordon Matta-Clark
His latest show takes a look at his relationship with architecture
Modern Painters, ISSN 0953-6698, is published monthly with combined Winter (December/ January/February), March/April, and June/July issues by LTB Media (U.K.) Ltd., an affiliate of BlouinArtinfo Corp, 80 Broad Street, Suite 606/607, New York, NY 10004. Vol. XXIX, No. 1. 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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Modern Painters - Full Page - 10.5 x 10.5
Arts of Korea Opens September 15, 2017 This installation of the Brooklyn Museum’s Arts of Korea collection is organized by Joan Cummins, Lisa and Bernard Selz Senior Curator of Asian Art, and Susan L. Beningson, Assistant Curator of Asian Art. The reinstallation of the Korea collection was made possible by three generous grants from the National Museum of Korea.
Belt Hook in the Shape of a Horse. Lelang Korea, Proto-Three Kingdoms or Three Kingdoms period, circa 3rd century. Bronze, 2 3⁄8 x 3 5⁄8 x 3⁄4 in. (6.0 x 9.2 x 1.9 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Paul E. Manheim, 69.125.11. (Photo: Jonathan Dorado, Brooklyn Museum)
CONTRIBUTORS // SEPTEMBER
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Mark Beech
Warwick Thompson
Martin Gayford
Nina Siegal
A journalist for more than 30 years and author of four books, Beech is a member of this magazine’s management team. He previously was Global Team leader for Bloomberg News’s arts and culture section, Bloomberg Muse. His experience also includes spells working for Forbes, the Sunday Times, ITN and Dante magazine. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, holds an MA from Oxford in Philosophy, Politics and Economics and enjoys collecting anything from antique typewriters to books. While he has been on TV more than 100 times, out of hours he can usually be found at the Groucho Club or Royal Academy Academicians’ Room trying to keep a low profile.
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 was delighted with the news that the V&A was to open its huge new Sainsbury Gallery with a gargantuan exhibition about the pleasures and politics of opera, and he writes about it in this issue. He’s also got a novel about 18th-century London in the pipeline.
Martin Gayford is the author of books on Constable, Van Gogh, and Michelangelo. He writes prolifically 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 film from the prehistoric era to the computer age which has been translated, so far, into 14 languages. Martin Gayford was one of the sitters for Hockney’s sequence of works, 82 Portraits and One Still Life, exhibited at the Royal Academy, London in 2016. His most recent publication is a survey of the work of the abstract painter Gillian Ayres, published in April 2017. He lives in Cambridge.
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, writing about European museums, art crimes, and Dutch old masters, among other topics. She also writes for The Economist, Bloomberg News, and various art and culture magazines. In 2004, Nina had the opportunity to interview Jasper Johns at his home and studio in Sharon, CT, and with her article in this issue, she was happy to be able to catch up on his more recent work. “Johns struck me when I met him as a kind of mystical force in art — both fully accessible and endlessly enigmatic. It was interesting to learn more about how his objectives and his visual language have evolved, and continue to evolve, while he continues to work at age 87.”
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Stephen Heyman
Digby Warde-Aldam
Louisa Elderton
Stephen Heyman writes about culture, travel and design for the New York Times and other fine 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.
Digby Warde-Aldam is a writer and critic trying hard not to specialize. He is the visual arts editor of The Week and contributes to a number of other publications, mostly covering art, design, cinema and music. Though working primarily in the U.K., he travels as often as he can to get as full a picture as possible of the state of contemporary art. Recent commissions have taken him to Paris, Brussels, Venice, El Paso, Los Angeles and to the Kassel instalment of Documenta 14 which he, apparently alone amongst critics, rather enjoyed. Later this year, he plans to return to Texas to collaborate on a project with the photographer Lorena Lohr. He lives in London and harbors the (possibly unachievable) ambition is to write a cultural history of bad art.
Louisa Elderton is an independent contemporary arts curator, writer and editor who has contributed to Artforum, Art Review, Frieze, Flash Art, Art Monthly, Elephant Magazine, Apollo, Metropolis M, Monopol, The Burlington Magazine, Vogue China, Berlin Art Link, Artsy, House & Garden, Harpers Bazaar and The White Review. She received a First-Class Bachelor’s degree in Art History and English from The University of Sussex and a Master’s degree from the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she presented an exhibition about Christian iconography in historical and contemporary art. After working for the Research department at Tate, she was Writer in Residence at Jerwood Visual Arts in London, and has curated solo exhibitions at public and commercial galleries for artists including Lawrence Weiner, Francesco Clemente, Wim Wenders, Yinka Shonibare MBE, Nasan Tur and Rachel Howard. A contributing author to numerous Phaidon publications including Vitamin P3: New Perspectives in Painting and Universe, she has also produced monographs on Rachel Howard, Tim Noble & Sue Webster and Francesco Clemente. She is Project Editor of Phaidon’s upcoming book Vitamin C: Clay & Ceramics in Contemporary Art (due for publication in October 2017), and is currently working on the next Vitamin book in the series.
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INS OUTS BY NICHOLAS FORREST
1 Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac announced that it has become the worldwide representative for the estate of American Pop Art pioneer James Rosenquist, who passed away in March this year. Rosenquist will be the subject of a major retrospective at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany, in November titled “Painting as Immersion.” Brussels-based James Rosenquist in his Xavier Hufkens, one Aripeka Florida studio, 1988 of Europe’s leading galleries for Contemporary art, announced its representation of the American artist Sherrie Levine, who will join an already impressive roster of artists that includes the likes of George Condo, Antony Gormley, Sterling Ruby, Danh Vo, and Cathy Wilkes. Gagosian announced the global representation of Jia Aili, one of China’s foremost Contemporary artists.
2 One of the most significant “Ins” of the art world was made by Acquavella Galleries, which named Philippe de Montebello, the former director of New York’s Met Museum, as a director, with a focus on curating exhibitions and developing publications. Mr. de Montebello, who has been friends with the gallery’s founder, William Acquavella, for 14
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around 50 years, told BLOUIN ARTINFO: “I am delighted to be advising Bill and his fine gallery where needed and appropriate to my skills.” Another former Met director, Thomas P. Campbell, whose resignation in February after eight years in the role sent shockwaves through the art world, was announced as the second recipient of the Getty Rothschild Fellowship.
3 Karole Vail, Director, Peggy Guggenheim Collection and Guggenheim Foundation Director for Italy
Willem van Roijen.
4 In gallery news, David Zwirner’s Hong Kong gallery will open early 2018 with an exhibition of new works by the Belgian artist Michaël Borremans; Sprüth Magers George Lucas announced that after extensive renovations, its London gallery will reopen on Grafton Street on September 29 with an exhibition of new works by Gary Hume. The City of Los Angeles announced approval of George Lucas’s Museum of Narrative Art, to be built at Exposition Park in a bold new facility designed by Ma Yansong of MAD Architects. Exciting news also came from the founders of the Condo Collaborative exhibition, which will add Shanghai and Mexico City to its New York and London events in 2018.
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Other major shifts of art world talent include the appointment of Julia Peyton-Jones, the former director of London’s Serpentine Galleries, to the position of senior global director of Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, starting September 1. The Brücke Museum in Berlin named Lisa Marei Schmidt as its new director, starting October, while Guggenheim curator Karole P.B. Vail was announced as the new Director of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and Foundation Director for Italy. On the art fair front, Nanne Dekking has taken over the position of chairman of The European Fine Art Foundation (TETAF), succeeding
On the awards front, The Yuz Museum in Shanghai announced that’s its founder, Indonesian-Chinese collector, patron, and philanthropist Budi Tek, is being honored with the title of Knight of the Legion of Honor by the French government in recognition of his promotion of French culture as well contributions to the welfare of mankind and the development of human society. On the other side of the world, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art named artist Mark Bradford and filmmaker George Lucas as the honorees of this year’s annual Art+Film Gala on November 4 — an event known for attracting some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities. MP
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Thomas Ruff
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THE ACT OF
LOOKING THE GERMAN PHOTOGR APHER THOMAS RUFF, LONG KNOWN FOR PUSHING THE BOUNDARIE S OF HIS MEDIUM , HAS HIS FIRST RETROSPECTIVE IN LONDON , AT WHITECHAPEL GALLERY, WHERE HE CONTINUE S TO QUE STION THE ULTIMATE TRUTH OF THE CAMER A
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( T H I S PAG E & FAC I N G PAG E ) W H I T E C H A P E L GA L L E R Y. © T H E A R T I S T
Zeitungsfoto 101 (Newspaper Photograph 101) 1990, C-print, 21.6 X 18.4 cm
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T H E M U S E U M O F M O D E R N A R T, N E W YO R K . G I F T O F T H E A R T I S T. © 2 017 T H E E A S TO N F O U N DAT I O N/L I C E N S E D BY VAGA , N Y.
Nacht 9 II (Night 9 II) C-print, 20 X 21 cm
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at.’’ The complete range of Ruff’s output will be on display at the Whitechapel Gallery for his first retrospective in London, with a variety of work that will be seen for the first time. The exhibition, September 27 – January 21, is being curated by Iwona Blazwick, Whitechapel Gallery director, with Cameron Foote, an assistant curator. Foote spoke at length about Ruff and the Whitechapel show in an interview with BLOUIN ARTINFO. Could you share how the retrospective came about? Could you elaborate on the breadth and scope of the show? The exhibition shows the full range of Thomas Ruff’s practice, from his earliest “Interiors,” produced from the late 1970s while he was attending the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, to a number of his newest works related to the genre of exhibition installation photography that are
W H I T E C H A P E L GA L L E R Y. © T H E A R T I S T
F
rom the beginning of his career in the 1970s, the German artist Thomas Ruff has played with the boundaries of photography, continually questioning the meaning of imagery while pushing at the technical frontier of the medium. He is best known for“Portraits,” in which he produced laconic headshots of his friends in the style of passport photos then enlarged them to epic proportions, but his conceptual series have touched on everything from architecture to disaster, always planting a seed of doubt about the ultimate truthfulness of the camera. About his work, he has said, “I make investigations that ask people to become aware of what they’re looking
Maschine 1390 (Machine 1390) 2003, C-print, 112 X 147 cm
W H I T E C H A P E L GA L L E R Y. © T H E A R T I S T
neg0india_01 2014, C-print , 29 X 22 cm
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L’Empereur 06 (The Emperor 06) 1982, C-print, 30.2 X 40 cm
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What were the challenges in putting together a retrospective of works by an artist whose medium is photography that itself has undergone tremendous and monumental changes in the span of the artist’s career — from analogue to digital and from being the preserve of a few to the luxury of each smartphone owner? During the course of our research, it was precisely these monumental changes to the technology and circulation of photographs that we discovered was a central importance. The artist works in series, with each body of work exploring a different subject alongside an aspect of how photographic images are produced, circulate and operate in the world. The “Interiors,” 1979-‘83, document the rooms of a network of friends and acquaintances from the artist’s home town with the crisp detail of a large-format view camera, usually used for commercial rather than vernacular photography. Later, series such as “jpeg,” 2004-‘08, showing
W H I T E C H A P E L GA L L E R Y. © T H E A R T I S T
Substrat 31 III (Substarte 31 III) 2007, C-print 186 X 268 cm
on show at the Whitechapel Gallery for the first time. The Whitechapel Gallery has a long history of exhibitions exploring the work of artists who use the camera as a central element in their work, ranging from Thomas Schütte in 1998, Nan Goldin in 2002 to Thomas Struth in 2011 and Zarina Bhimji in 2012. This year, an exhibition titled “A Handful of Dust,” curated by David Campany (who is also a contributor to the Thomas Ruff exhibition catalogue) gave a speculative history of the photographic medium through the 20th and 21st centuries, tracing a visual journey through the imagery of dust, inspired by a famous photograph of Marcel Duchamp’s “Large Glass” taken by Man Ray. There have been excellent surveys of Thomas Ruff’s work in the UK, including at Tate Liverpool and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in the early 2000s. Remarkably, this will be his first full-scale retrospective in London, and includes many of the new works that he has been working on over the past decade or so.
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W H I T E C H A P E L GA L L E R Y. © T H E A R T I S T
Interieur 1A (Interior 1A) 1979, C-print 27.5 X 20.5 cm
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the pixels which make up digitally compressed images, bear witness to different moments in the recent history of the photograph.
How would you sum up the significance of Thomas Ruff’s work in an age when the medium is evolving every nanosecond? While the technology surrounding photographs is continually shifting, the concerns that Thomas Ruff addresses are accelerating in their relevance. In his “Other Portraits” series (1994-‘05), for example, Thomas borrowed a defunct photo-fit device from a museum — a Minolta Montage Unit — which had been used by German police in the 1970s to create profiles of criminal suspects. Using this device, he created his own disturbing composite photographs, often using examples from his own earlier “Portraits” series, resulting in an unsettling series of subjects under surveillance. press++21.11 2016, C-print 259 X 184 cm
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W H I T E C H A P E L GA L L E R Y © T H E A R T I S T
A significant aspect of Thomas Ruff’s photography has been the fact that his work has largely been an investigation “that makes people aware of what they’re looking at.” Could you share how this sets his work apart from the other photography greats of his generation? As you describe, the protocols surrounding image-making are just as visible as the subject matter of the photographs themselves. In the “Portraits,” 1981-’91, perhaps the most famous of Thomas Ruff’s series, the artist made flat, fullfrontal portraits of a range of his friends and peers, mainly in their 20s and early 30s, in the neutral style of ID photographs. He then made one crucial intervention, printing the images on the vast scale of 210×165cm. (82.6 in. x 65 in.) To achieve this size, he used a technology usually deployed in advertising — Diasec face-mounting — to adhere the photographs to large transparent acrylic sheets, which kept them perfectly flat and gave a luminous clarity. This technique for creating prints on a large scale has since proliferated in the art context, but was a real innovation of Ruff’s. Not only is every detail, freckle and blemish visible on the skin of the young subjects, but also the studio apparatus can be seen reflected in their pupils. The exhibition includes a number of the “Portraits,” alongside other works that Ruff has made using a similar scale. We’re very pleased that the conversations about this influential series continue at the National Portrait Gallery, who have organized a focused display to coincide with the Whitechapel Gallery exhibition.
W H I T E C H A P E L GA L L E R Y © T H E A R T I S T
Is it possible for you to throw light on the artist’s current practice and interest? In his recent “press++” series (2015-), Thomas Ruff has again looked to an archaic technology, and a field that has progressively become highly commercialized with its transition into digital space. He has been acquiring photographic prints from the archives of press agencies, often from the Cold War era or showing Hollywood starlets of the 1950s. Before press agencies sold newsworthy images online, physical copies were distributed by post, often with editorial marks, stamps or instructions on the back or cropping marks on the front of the print. Ruff scans the fronts and backs of the prints and combines them into single images, so that these editorial interventions are made visible overlaid on the image. Since digitization, the physical trace of editorial transformations have disappeared from press agency photographs, while the possibility to make changes using software like Photoshop has vastly increased, and the importance of editors, online commentators and political actors in constructing narratives of evidence around images has grown. In addition to the “press++” photographs, the exhibition includes two further bodies of work that have never been shown before, examining the genre of installation photography: “m.n.o.p.,” 2013, and “w.g.l.,” 2017. The installation photograph is a genre of image encountered in almost every arena in the art world (no doubt in several places throughout this publication) but it seldom receives critical attention. For his source material, Ruff undertook research in the archive of the Whitechapel Gallery as well as looking at photographs from the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, a pre-cursor to the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Could you share how Ruff’s style is changing and how this is reflected in the show? Instead of following a chronology, there are distinct groupings of works, to allow comparisons between different moments in Ruff’s trajectory. The earliest series in the exhibition, for example, the “Interiors” are shown alongside the “jpegs” from over 20 years later. Likewise, the “press++” series appear next to a series of works that addressed similar concerns from the 1990s, the “Newspaper Photographs,” which reproduce images found in the media without their corresponding text captions. This strategy of comparisons is continued throughout the exhibition, and we hope will generate productive readings of the changes in Ruff’s style and approach and also reveal the consistent themes that have characterized Ruff’s work across four decades of investigating the photographic image.MP
phg.07_II 2014, C-print 240 X 185 cm
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NEWSMAKERS
GLOBAL CITIZENS
A group show in Zurich, curated by Simon Castets and Hans Ulrich Obrist, reconsiders the notion of citizenship in the light of its disruption by digital practices
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A L L I M AG E S C O U R T E S Y O F T H E A R T I S T S A N D L U M A F O U N DAT I O N . S T E FA N A LT E N B U R G E R P H OTO G R A P H Y
Installation view of ‘Americans 2017’, LUMA Westbau, Zurich. Curated by Simon Castets and Hans Ulrich Obrist for 89plus. Pictured works by Wang Ye (left) and Andrea Crespo (opposite page)
“AMERICANS 2017” showcases new productions by 19 key artists and groups from around the globe. Stemming from the concept of algorithmic citizenship introduced by artist James Bridle’s Citizen Ex project, this group exhibition gives center stage to the work of artists from countries as varied as Ghana, Kuwait, China, Lebanon, Austria and South Africa, all the while reflecting the influence of U.S.-based ‘computerized processes’ over information, aspirations and concerns. World Wide Web inventor Tim
Berners-Lee explains that he originally “imagined the web as an open platform that would allow everyone, everywhere to share information, access opportunities, and collaborate across geographic and cultural boundaries.” Positing an international perspective, “Americans 2017” echoes the Internet’s original universalist promise of alternatives to jus soli and jus sanguinis citizenship, all the while examining the enduring sway of the United States over the World Wide Web at a time when its government is veering toward
discrimination and isolationism. “Americans 2017” is a nod to the Mid-Century seminal ‘Americans’ exhibition series at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition follows the format championed by Dorothy Miller — who curated six of the ‘Americans’ shows — and offers each artist an individual space, the dimensions of which are determined by the body of work on display. Regarding nationality, “Americans 2017” aims to reconsider the notion of citizenship in light of its disruption by digital practices.
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Installation view of ‘Americans 2017’, LUMA Westbau, Zurich. Curated by Simon Castets and Hans Ulrich Obrist for 89plus. Pictured work by Urban Zellweger and Tim Haesler
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I M AG E C O U R T E S Y O F T H E A R T I S T S A N D L U M A F O U N DAT I O N . S T E FA N A LT E N B U R G E R P H OTO G R A P H Y
NEWSMAKERS
I M AG E C O U R T E S Y O F T H E A R T I S T A N D L U M A F O U N DAT I O N . S T E FA N A LT E N B U R G E R P H OTO G R A P H Y
Featuring works by: Ab6al Darja Bajagi´c Anna-Sophie Berger Andrea Crespo Valia Fetisov Aslan Gaisumov Nikima Jagudajev Jessika Khazrik Yoan Mudry NTU
Walter Price Nik Rawlings Bunny Rogers Jasper Spicero Elisabeth Efua Sutherland Ye Wang Shen Xin Urban Zellweger and Tim Haesler Zou Zhao
Co-curators: Simon Castets and Hans Ulrich Obrist 19 May – 3 September 2017 LUMA Westbau Limmatstrasse 270 8005 Zürich Switzerland
Installation view of ‘Americans 2017’, LUMA Westbau, Zurich. Curated by Simon Castets and Hans Ulrich Obrist for 89plus. Pictured work by Jasper Spicero
Head of research: Katherine Dionysius 89plus.com
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Q&A // DEBORAH WYE
THE PRINTMAKER I N 1982 , DEBOR A H W Y E’S PROPOSA L FOR A LOU ISE BOU RGEOIS SHOW AT T H E M USEUM OF MODER N A RT I N N EW YOR K BECA M E T H E A RT IST’S F I RST R ET ROSPEC T I V E . T H E C U R ATOR IS AGA I N AT T H E H EL M OF A MOM A E X H I BI T ION T H AT R EV E A L S A L I T T LE K NOW N SI DE OF T H E A RT IST’S CA R EER BY STEPHEN HEYMAN
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T H E M U S E U M O F M O D E R N A R T, N E W YO R K . G I F T O F T H E A R T I S T. © 2 017 T H E E A S TO N F O U N DAT I O N/L I C E N S E D BY VAGA , N Y.
Untitled From the portfolio “Ode à ma mère,” 1995, drypoint
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Q&A // DEBORAH WYE Though best known for her sculptures, Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) was also devoted to printmaking, which she discovered at the beginning of her long career and embraced with increasing intensity in her final decades. An agoraphobe, she rarely left her Chelsea brownstone late in life, but used the two printing presses she kept at home, and worked with printers, to push her artwork in new directions. She spent hours in her 80s and 90s elaborating on her prints with pencils, ink, watercolor and gouache. The results of these journeys are collected in “Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait,” a dazzling new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that also celebrates the launch of an online catalogue [moma.org/ bourgeoisprints] presenting over 4,000 of the artist’s prints in high resolution. The exhibition, which opens September 24 (through January 28, 2018), not only uncovers this little-known aspect of Bourgeois’s career, it also sheds light on the artist’s close friendship with the MoMA curator Deborah Wye, who helped put Bourgeois on the art world’s map in the 1980s. In an interview, excerpted here, Wye describes meeting the artist and the role printmaking played in her creative life. When you met Louise Bourgeois in 1976, what was her reputation in the art world? She was kind of an underground figure. I hadn’t known her work at all. I saw two of her pieces on a visit to New York — one at MoMA and another downtown at a gallery
Deborah Wye Chief Curator Emerita, Prints & Illustrated Books, The Museum of Modern Art
in SoHo. Both were completely different, and I just loved them for some reason. I called her and asked her if she would be in a group show I was curating then around a women’s theme. And she said yes. The next time I was in New York, I went over to her house on 20th Street. I thought I was going to stay for 20 minutes but I ended up staying for several hours. She had set up a slide projector and was projecting her work on the wall of the living room and I was just spellbound. I had come from a formalist art training in the 60s and there was something about her work that was so completely different. I was ready for it, and that meeting just changed my life. Did you have any clues then that she’d become a major artist? I never thought that she’d be as celebrated as she became. Because the work was so idiosyncratic and personal —
TO P : P H OTO: T I M OT H Y G R E E N F I E L D - S A N D E R S ; L E F T: © M AT H I A S J O H A N S S O N
Louise Bourgeois at the printing press in the lower level of her home/ studio on 20th Street, New York, 1995
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T H E M U S E U M O F M O D E R N A R T, N E W YO R K . G I F T O F T H E A R T I S T. © 2 017 T H E E A S TO N F O U N DAT I O N/L I C E N S E D BY VAGA , N Y.
Spiral Woman Drypoint and engraving, 2003
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Q&A // DEBORAH WYE
Untitled From the fabric illustrated book, “Ode à l’oubli,” 2002
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T H E M U S E U M O F M O D E R N A R T, N E W YO R K . G I F T O F T H E A R T I S T. © 2 017 T H E E A S TO N F O U N DAT I O N/L I C E N S E D BY VAGA , N Y
Untitled From the installation, “À l’infini,” 2008. Soft ground etching, with hand additions
and difficult. When I showed it to people, some were repelled. I never thought it would have universal appeal. But people eventually started taking an interest in her and asking questions about her work. But Louise wasn’t that easy to get along with. In those early days, rather than answering their questions, she often had them call me for the answers. So she kind of deputized you as her explainer? Not really, but I had catalogued much of her work and studied it through a research grant and was starting to give away what I had learned in a piecemeal fashion. I thought it should all be gathered somewhere so I proposed a show to MoMA, which was her first retrospective, in 1982. She was 70 years old. I was in my mid-30s, just beginning at the Museum, but they made me the show’s curator. That show brought her work to a wider audience. The art world was changing just then. The feminists had brought in biography and the body as subjects. It was the kind of work that Louise was doing all along. It wasn’t that she changed but that the art world caught up with her. What relationship did her printed work have to her primary medium, sculpture? She always said there was no “rivalry” between the mediums. She liked prints because they had evolving states and she loved going back over things. For the public, looking at a sequence of developing states is really like being there and seeing her imagination unfold. That’s why I use the word
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“unfolding” in the title — I think the prints really show that. You can make a lot of out of the same composition. Each one reflects how she felt not only on that day but at that moment, that morning as opposed to how she felt in the afternoon. She was trying to make those feelings tangible. I was particularly struck by some of her late prints — like the 2008 series “À l’Infini,”with its vein-like lines of bloody magenta painted over with loose brush strokes. That’s such a great series — I chose one of those for the cover of the exhibition catalogue. They’re so innovative. You know, Louise’s eyesight was not so good at the end and she had arthritis. She died at 98, so she made those works when she was in her mid 90s. She would sit and do her soft-ground etching and she had assistance in turning the large printing plates as she worked because she had to remain seated. She started with one composition, but then printed fragments of it on separate sheets and embellished them very abstractly with watercolor and gouache. There’s something almost musical about the series when you look at all the sheets, they really pull you in and work together. There are also a few figurative elements — babies, an entangled couple, a nude female — but it’s really more like a primordial world whirring around. It’s particularly exciting, considering this is such late work and, also, it falls outside of any one category. They’re not painting or drawing or printmaking, exactly, but just artworks. MP
T H E M U S E U M O F M O D E R N A R T, N E W YO R K . P U R C H A S E D W I T H F U N D S P R OV I D E D BY AG N E S G U N D, M A R I E - J O S É E A N D H E N R Y R . K R AV I S , M A R L E N E H E S S A N D J I M Z I R I N , M A JA O E R I A N D H A N S B O D E N M A N N , A N D K AT H E R I N E FA R L E Y A N D J E R R Y S P E Y E R A N D R I C H A R D S . Z E I S L E R B E Q U E S T ( BY E XC H A N G E ). © 2 017 T H E E A S TO N F O U N DAT I O N/L I C E N S E D BY VAGA , N Y.
Q&A // DEBORAH WYE
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P H OTO : H E L E N D U R I N G
Andrew and Christine Hall at the Hall Art Foundation, Schloss Derneburg Museum
ROAD LESS TAKEN W I T H A RT LOV ERS I N M I N D, A N DR EW H A LL PU TS H IS COLLEC T ION A N D H IS HOPE S I N A R ENOVAT ED M EDI EVA L GER M A N CAST LE BY NICHOLAS FORREST
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About 15 years ago, Andrew and his wife Christine, a fellow art lover, took the step from long-time buyers of art to serious collectors, and have since built one of the world’s greatest private art collections. In 2007, Andrew and Christine established the Hall Art Foundation with the aim of making their collection of Postwar and Contemporary art available for the enjoyment and education of the public. Today, the Hall Art Foundation collections consist of more than 5,000 works by several hundred artists including the likes of Richard Artschwager, Georg Baselitz, Joseph Beuys, Olafur Eliasson, Eric Fischl, JörgImmendorff, Anselm Kiefer, Malcolm Morley, A. R. Penck, Julian Schnabel, Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol, and Franz West. The Hall Art Foundation is more than just a conduit for organizing loans of the Hall’s art collection, it’s also a platform for facilitating exhibitions at the foundation’s two museum spaces — in Derneburg in Germany and in the American town of Reading, Vermont. The foundation also acts as a platform for developing exhibition collaborations with public institutions, such as the foundation’s current partnerships with the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England. On July 1, 2017, the Hall Art Foundation inaugurated its Schloss Derneburg Museum with a program including several solo exhibitions as well as a group show of cinematic works, titled “The Truth of Uncertainty: Moving Image Works from the Hall Collection,” curated by Chrissie Iles, in addition to an exhibition honoring the recently deceased gallerist Barbara Weiss, titled “Für Barbara” and curated by Leo Koenig. Schloss Derneburg, near Hannover, has a history that spans almost 1,000 years. Originally a fortified castle, the structure has had many roles, including as the home of various religious orders and a residence for the Anglo-Hanoverian Münster family. The castle was the home and studio of artist Georg Baselitz from 1976 until 2006 when it was purchased from the artist by the Hall Art Foundation, which has since carried out extensive renovations to turn it into a public museum. To find out more about the new Schloss Derneburg Museum, BLOUIN ARTINFO’s Nicholas Forrest interviewed Andrew Hall.
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I M AG E: © H A L L A R T F O U N DAT I O N . P H OTO: S T E FA N N E U E N H AU S E N
he veteran Wall Street oil trader Andrew Hall could have directed the fruits of his labor toward any number of passions or pursuits. But thankfully for the global art scene, the chairman and chief executive of the oil-focused hedge fund Astenbeck Capital Management chose to focus his attention on his love for art, not just as a collector but also as a patron.
A view of the Hall Art Foundation | Schloss Derneburg Museum, in Derneburg near Hannover in Germany
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B OT H T H E I M AG E S: © H A L L A R T F O U N DAT I O N . P H OTO: H E I N R I C H H E C H T
Left and above: Views of the exhibition “Für Barbara,” curated by Leo Koenig, which is dedicated to the memory of Berlin gallerist Barbara Weiss. This is one of the seven inaugural exhibitions at the Hall Art Foundation | Schloss Derneburg Museum
Could you tell us a bit about the Hall Art Foundation and its primary aims, goals, and activities? We established it about 10 years ago with the aim of showing works from our personal collection for the enjoyment and education of the public. HAF now also has its own collection. It makes and facilitates loans from both collections to museums all over the world. HAF also operates a number of public museums itself. The first was in collaboration with MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, where we repurposed a building on their campus for a long-term installation of large-scale works by Anselm Kiefer. We then converted a former dairy farm in Reading, Vermont, into a series of art galleries where we change the shows annually. HAF has also presented a number of single artist shows drawn from the collections at other museums. For example, last year we did an Andy Warhol show at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford that received critical acclaim. What was the motivation and inspiration to open the museum at the Schloss Derneburg? Schloss Derneburg had been the home and studio of Georg Baselitz for some 30 years. We have a large collection of works by Baselitz and his German contemporaries. Exhibiting them at Derneburg seemed a logical thing to do: Derneburg is in an attractive part of the country, and the combination of art, architecture and the local environment makes for
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Works from the Antony Gormley retrospective, “Being,” including “European Field” (below)
What are the exhibitions that compose the inaugural program at Schloss Derneburg and how do they reflect the aims and goals of the Hall Foundation and its collection? There are seven different shows: a permanent installation by Hermann Nitsch in the crypt of the old Cistercian chapel; a retrospective of works by Antony Gormley which includes “European Field” comprising over 35,000 elements; a retrospective of paintings by Malcolm Morley along with a group of more recent works; a retrospective of works by Barry Le Va; an installation of early sculptures and paintings by Julian Schnabel;“The Truth of Uncertainty,” a selection of moving images works from our collection curated by Chrissie Iles, and “Für Barbara,” curated by Leo Koenig, which is dedicated to the memory of Barbara Weiss, the Berlin gallerist, and is a selection of works by female artists. We generally try to exhibit shows that present in-depth surveys of an individual artist’s works and the first five shows do exactly that. The two
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I M AG E S: © H A L L A R T F O U N DAT I O N . P H OTO: H E I N R I C H H E C H T
a unique experience.
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The Art of Living, Curated by Our Editors
I M AG E: © H A L L A R T F O U N DAT I O N . P H OTO: H E I N R I C H H E C H T
Installation view of the retrospective of Barry Le Va
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curated shows present works from the collection within the context of a particular theme or idea.
What are your plans and aspirations for the future of Schloss Derneburg Museum? We intend to change a number of the shows annually. We want to make Derneburg as accessible as possible to visitors,
I M AG E S: © H A L L A R T F O U N DAT I O N . P H OTO: H E I N R I C H H E C H T
Right and below: A view of the permanent installation of Hermann Nitsch’s works in the crypt of the old Cistercian chapel at the museum
Could you tell us a bit about the location of the museum and why you chose it? It’s in Lower Saxony, about 30 minutes south of Hannover, in the foothills of the Harz mountains. We didn’t choose it: it chose us. As I mentioned earlier, there was a certain logic to showing our collection there.
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ART+AUCTION JUNE/JULY 2017
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| BLOUINARTINFO.COM
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A view of Malcolm Morley’s paintings at the Schloss Derneburg Museum
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52 MODERN PAINTERS SEPTEMBER 2017 BLOUINARTINFO.COM I M AG E S: © H A L L A R T F O U N DAT I O N . P H OTO S BY (C LO C K W I S E F R O M TO P L E F T ): H E L E N D U R I N G; S T E FA N N E U E N H AU S E N (# 2 )
Early sculptures and paintings by Julian Schnabel
especially those who are passionate about art and are seeking a unique experience. It’s a little off the beaten path so you really have to want to go there. But once you do, you won’t be disappointed. In time, we hope to establish various special events and programs there, perhaps involving performance and other cultural activities. We may also have an artist-in-residence program. Actually, the possibilities are limitless.
I M AG E S (C LO C K W I S E F R O M TO P L E F T ): © H A L L A R T F O U N DAT I O N . P H OTO: H E I N R I C H H E C H T; H U G O G L E N D I N N I N G ( P E E R/ T H E R O U N D C H A P E L , LO N D O N , 2 0 0 6). © A N T H O N Y M C C A L L ; © H A L L A R T F O U N DAT I O N . P H OTO: H E I N R I C H H E C H T
How does the Schloss Derneburg Museum help fulfill your own personal ambitions as a patron of the arts? Schloss Derneburg is in a sense a canvas. By combining great works of art with the natural beauty and architecture of Derneburg I hope we have created a “Gesamtkunstwerk” that art lovers from everywhere will visit and enjoy as much as I do. MP
Above and right: “The Truth of Uncertainty,” a selection of moving images works from the Hall collection, curated by Chrissie Iles Top right: “Between You and I,” 2006 by Anthony McCall. Light installation, dimensions variable, part of the exhibition “The Truth of Uncertainty”
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Line Up 2007-8, plaster, pigment, resin, wood and metal (eighteen units, one shelf) 285 x 400 x 250 mm
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BY DIGBY WARDE-ALDAM
P R I VAT E C O L L E C T I O N , N E W YO R K . P H OTO G R A P H C O U R T E S Y O F T H E A R T I S T A N D M I K E B R U C E . © R AC H E L W H I T E R E A D
RACHEL WHITEREAD GETS TATE RETROSPECTIVE TREATMENT
IT WILL BE INTERESTING TO SEE HOW THE EXHIBITION DEALS WITH THE ABSENCE OF THE ARTIST’S MOST FAMOUS WORK EVER
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M A R Y A N D H A R O L D Z LOT. P H OTO G R A P H C O U R T E S Y T H E A R T I S T A N D M I K E B R U C E © R AC H E L W H I T E R E A D
EARLY 25 YEARS AGO,
the British sculptor Rachel Whiteread sparked a national polemic in Britain. In October 1993, she unveiled a new work in an unlovely corner of London’s East End, an area now rich in art galleries and public sculpture — but back then, a cultural desert. “House,” the work in question, was a negative cast of a terraced house that stood on the corner of a crossroads. Whiteread and her team had filled the property itself with liquid concrete, a painstaking process that allowed for no mistake. Once solidified, the exterior walls of the house were stripped away to expose the inverted form of the walls within. This may sound inoffensive to contemporary ears, but beyond a small clique of insiders, the London of the early 1990s was a hostile place for forward thinking and — crucially — publicly funded art. Needless to say, “House” and its relatively modest cost of £50,000 attracted antiintellectual bile by the gallon. Critics, local officials and members of the public alike were outraged by Whiteread’s sculpture, fulminating against any number of perceived transgressions — from “meritless gigantism” (courtesy of the late and consummately reactionary writer Brian Sewell) to illiterate accusations that she was laying the path for social cleansing. This last was particularly odd; if anything, Whiteread — who was born not far away — had created a memorial to a certain type of East End working-class lifestyle that was already in the process of disappearing. Since then, attitudes towards contemporary art both in the U.K. and elsewhere have changed beyond recognition. Whiteread once told me that the turning point came with Damien Hirst’s “The Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” and her own “House.” She was not being immodest. The two people most regularly credited with the transformation of British culture since the 1990s are Sir Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate Galleries from 1988 to 2017, and the collector and impresario Charles Saatchi. Whatever the truth in this, Serota and Saatchi would be the first to acknowledge that without the right artists at
Light II 2010, resin 698 x 349 x 146 mm
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Whiteread herself set the tone for the adjectives regularly applied to her art with her breakthrough work, 1990’s Turner Prize-nominated sculpture “Ghost.” Ever since, “spectral” has been the tag on which one immediately reaches to hang her sculptures.
Untitled (Room 101) 2003, plaster, wood and metal 3000 x 6430 x 5000 mm
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58 MODERN PAINTERS SEPTEMBER 2017 BLOUINARTINFO.COM KUNSTSAMMLUNG N O R D R H E I N - W E S T FA L E N , D Ü S S E L D O R F, P H OTO G R A P H C O U R T E S Y O F T H E A R T I S T; © R AC H E L W H I T E R E A D
Untitled (Book Corridors) 1997-8, plaster and steel, 2220 x 4270 x 5230 mm (above)
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the right moment, their efforts would have come to nothing. Rachel Whiteread was unarguably one of those artists. For all that, Whiteread’s work could not be more different from that of Hirst and the other figures the press of the day were so quick to lump together as the “Young British Artists.” That phrase, however opportunistic, conjures up images of brash, sweary imagery created by chancers with a seemingly pathological urge to offend; the Chapman Brothers’ “Hell;” Tracey Emin’s “My Bed;” Marcus Harvey’s “Myra.” Indeed, so understated (in mood, if not in size) is Whiteread’s output that it’s a wonder she could get a word in amidst the clamor of the coke-frenzied mid-1990s London art scene. She herself set the tone for the adjectives regularly applied to her art with her breakthrough work, 1990’s Turner Prize-nominated sculpture “Ghost.” Ever since, “spectral” has been the tag on which one immediately reaches to hang Whiteread’s sculptures. “Ghost” was last exhibited at Tate Britain in the 1990 Turner Prize exhibition, but this Fall will see what one can only hope will be a triumphant return. A full 30 years after she first began exhibiting her work, Whiteread is to receive what for a mid-career British artist, is the ultimate accolade: namely, a full scale retrospective at the museum (September 12 January 21, 2018). The show will bring together work from every stage of her career, from her first solo exhibition to 1995’s astonishing “Untitled (100 Spaces)” to her Vienna “Holocaust” memorial to new exhibits created especially for the Tate. It is a major statement from the museum: after Hirst, Whiteread is the first British artist of her generation to receive the retrospective treatment. As such, it will be nothing short of fascinating to anyone who has grown up with her work as a part of their life. The only significant omission will be “House” itself. In spite of sustained efforts to leave the sculpture standing, it was demolished in early 1994. Tellingly, the space on which it stood remains glaringly empty. In a sense, it seems almost apt that Whiteread’s most celebrated sculpture will be missing from her own exhibition. To sum up her career in entirely simplistic terms, her work deals with absence in a more eloquent way than any artist before her. MP
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I M AG E C O U R T E S Y O F T H E A R T I S T © R AC H E L W H I T E R E A D
Untitled (Clear Torso) 1993, polyurethane resin 100 x 180 x 255 mm
VILLA CHANTANA, Koh Samui, Thailand
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VILLA ORUZCA, Mexico
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HOCKNEY TURNS 80 David Hockney’s Le Parc des Sources, Vichy, 1970. Acrylic on canvas 214 x 305 cm
© DAV I D H O C K N E Y. P H OTO: C H AT S W O R T H H O U S E T R U S T D E VO N S H I R E C O L L E C T I O N , C H AT S W O R T H
C H A R L I E D E N N I N GTO N A N D M U S E U M M AGA Z I N E
TRIES SPACE EXPLORATION
I T’S A T R I UM PH A L Y E A R FOR DAV I D HOC K N EY W I T H PROLONGED BI RT H DAY CELEBR AT IONS , A N D N EW PA I N T ER LY A DV EN T U R E S BY MARTIN GAYFORD
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SPACE EXPLORATION, YOU MIGHT THINK , is not an occupation for octogenarians. But that is exactly what David Hockney, who turned 80 on July 9th, has been up to recently. True, the space he is exploring is the pictorial variety: the kind that artists can discover within the flat surfaces of pictures. But that does not make Hockney’s forays any the less adventurous. In many ways, this has been a triumphal year: a sort of prolonged global birthday celebration, in which a succession of Hockney exhibitions has opened around the world. First came Current, a major show at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. This included a range of work produced in the last few years, including a new departure:
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immersive installations in which Hockney pictures, moving, painted and photographic, are mirrored on all four walls. In one of these walk-ins, the spectator is surrounded by perfect facsimiles of the artist’s huge painting of 2007, “Bigger Trees Near Warter,” which is 40 feet across. So pictorial space, rather than the normal kind, surrounds you on every side. Last February, a grand career retrospective — superbly selected by Chris Stephens and Andrew Wilson — opened at Tate Britain in London. This proved to be the most popular exhibition ever mounted in the Millbank gallery, attracting almost half a million visitors. This exhibition has now moved to the Centre Pompidou in Paris, where it continues until October 23, and is reportedly drawing huge numbers of
© DAV I D H O C K N E Y. P H OTO C R E D I T: J E A N - P I E R R E G O N Ç A LV E S D E L I M A
David Hockney, Los Angeles, March 9, 2016
© DAV I D H O C K N E Y. T H E M I L E S A N D S H I R L E Y F I T E R M A N F O U N DAT I O N
Looking at Pictures on a Screen, 1977. Oil on canvas, 188 X 188 cm
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© DAV I D H O C K N E Y. P H OTO : R I C H A R D S C H M I DT. B R A D F O R D M U S E U M S A N D GA L L E R I E S , B R A D F O R D
Self-portrait, 1954. Collage on paper journal, 41.9 X 29.8 cm
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© DAV I D H O C K N E Y. C O L L E C T I O N TAT E , LO N D O N , P R E S E N T E D BY T H E F R I E N D S O F T H E TAT E GA L L E R Y 19 6 3
The First Marriage (A Marriage of Styles I), 1962. Oil on canvas, 183 X 214 cm
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Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott,1969. Oil on canvas, 213.5 X 305 cm
© DAV I D H O C K N E Y. P H OTO : R I C H A R D S C H M I DT. C O L L E C T I O N B A R N E Y A . EBSWORTH
ONE MIGHT THINK THAT ALL THESE EXHIBITIONS, TOGETHER WITH THE TRAVELING, DINNERS, INTERVIEWS, AND GENERAL RAZZMATAZZ INVOLVED, WOULD BE ENOUGH TO KEEP MOST 80-YEAR-OLDS FULLY OCCUPIED. BUT NOT HOCKNEY.
© DAV I D H O C K N E Y. C O L L E C T I O N TAT E , LO N D O N , P U R C H A S E D 19 81
A Bigger Splash,1967. Acrylic on canvas, 242.5 X 244 cm
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art-lovers, then moves on to the Metropolitan Museum, New York where it opens on November 27. Meanwhile, other shows are running in parallel elsewhere. In Venice, Hockney’s 82 Portraits and 1 Still Life is at the International Museum of Modern Art in the Ca’ Pesaro, until October 22, after which it transfers to the Guggenheim, Bilbao (opening on November 10). This epic sequence of portraits done between 2013 and 2016, for one of which I sat myself, is another Hockney first. It is, in effect, one multiple work, in which each sitter sat in the same chair, and was viewed from the same angle for approximately the same amount of time. Paradoxically, this consistency of approach brings out individual differences of posture, dress, expression — indeed, everything. So the series becomes an exercise in compareand-contrast in which the whole is greater than the parts, and adds up to one big, composite piece. In addition, Hockney SelfPortraits and Photographs — two shows under the collective title Happy Birthday, Mr Hockney is at the Getty Center, Los Angeles. Now, one might think that all these exhibitions, together with the traveling, dinners, interviews, and general razzmatazz involved, would be enough to keep most 80-year-olds fully occupied. But not Hockney. In the intervals between openings, he has been returning to his home and studio in the Hollywood Hills to paint. Some of the results are included in the final galleries at the Pompidou: wide-angle studies of his pool, terrace and garden. In these, like Monet at Giverny, Hockney is turning his own surroundings into the material for research into how we see, and what pictures can show us. In other words, journeys into pictorial space. This is a topic that has intrigued Hockney since early 1962, and on which he still muses. Last May, when one might have imagined that his schedule was pretty packed, suddenly I and other friends in his e-mail circle received a scan of an 80 page essay by a Russian scholar on the subject of reverse perspective. That is the
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© DAV I D H O C K N E Y. P H OTO : R I C H A R D S C H M I DT. C O L L E C T I O N O F T H E A R T I S T
Garden, 2015.Acrylic on canvas, 122 X 183 cm
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72 J E N N I C A R T E R , D E L K AT H R Y N B A R TO N , A L B E R T Z B E N DA , A N D A R N DT A R T AG E N CY A 3
© DAV I D H O C K N E Y. P H OTO : P R U D E N C E C U M I N G A S S O C I AT E S . TAT E , LO N D O N , P R E S E N T E D BY T H E A R T I S T 2 0 0 8
Bigger Trees near Warter or/ ou Peinture sur le motif le Nouvel Âge Post-Photographique, 2007. Oil paint on 50 canvases, 459 X 1225 cm
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system used in some medieval and Byzantine paintings, by which — instead of getting larger as they are placed closer to the viewer — objects and people become smaller when they appear to be nearer. An exhibition of these new works, all exhibiting reverse perspective and multiple view-points — rather than the standard, academic fixed-point variety — is planned for early in 2018. Hockney celebrated his birthday month in the ideal fashion for a painter: by beginning a new, large painting. This is the second reworking he has produced this year of a celebrated landscape of 1689 by the Dutch artist, Meindert Hobbema: The Avenue at Middelharnis. When I spoke to him recently, Hockney explained that he had always loved this picture, which is part of the collection of the National Gallery, London. He had long noticed that it had two vanishing-points, not one. The painter must have looked along the flat Dutch plain, but also upwards to observe the tops of the poplars. “The trees are so close to us, aren’t they?” Hockney says. “Therefore you must be looking up as well as looking on. I’ve always felt that.” His painting — on six, shaped canvases — is a sort of combined deconstruction and investigation of Hobbema’s space, into which the viewer seems to walk. You go down that avenue, looking right and left as well as up into the sky and down the road. “Just chopping off the corners has done wonders for me”, Hockney enthuses, “because now I can compose with all the edges, in all sorts of ways too — and make space! I’m very excited by it, actually”. He has been using shaped canvases and a variety of perspective techniques at intervals for decades. But still he is making discoveries, still moving on, and his work — as the reworking of Hobbema suggests — has developed into a re-examination of the history of art. Or, rather as he likes to define it, the history of pictures.
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© DAV I D H O C K N E Y. P H OTO : P R U D E N C E C U M I N G A S S O C I AT E S . C O L L E C T I O N PA R T I C U L I È R E
Nichols Canyon, 1980. Acrylic on canvas, 213.5 X 152.5 cm
© DAV I D H O C K N E Y. P H OTO : S T E V E O L I V E R . C O L L E C T I O N PA R T I C U L I È R E , É TAT S - U N I S
Pacific Coast Highway and Santa Monica, 1990. Oil on canvas, 198 X 305 cm
HOCKNEY, LIKE MONET AT GIVERNY, IS TURNING HIS OWN SURROUNDINGS INTO THE MATERIAL FOR RESEARCH INTO HOW WE SEE, AND WHAT PICTURES CAN SHOW US. IN OTHER WORDS, JOURNEYS INTO PICTORIAL SPACE. THIS IS A TOPIC THAT HAS INTRIGUED HOCKNEY SINCE EARLY 1962, AND ON WHICH HE STILL MUSES. Hockney is an engaging and witty man, but also a scholar and an original thinker. Many of his thoughts on perspective, painting and photography — and also drawing, shadows, reflections and the use by old masters of mirrors and lenses — are contained in A History of Pictures, (Thames & Hudson), a book he and I published last autumn. (It has Danish,
Russian, Romanian, Turkish and many other foreign translations appearing later in 2017). Altogether, as he enters his 81st year, there is not the slightest sign of this great artist easing up. As he says, “I’ve always been a worker: what I need is a project!” His energy and brilliance have enriched the world. Happy Birthday, David Hockney. MP
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Ettore Sottsass I M AG E C O U R T E S Y O F F R I E D M A N B E N DA A N D E T TO R E S OT T S A S S
THE DARE THAT ROCKED THE WORLD OF DESIGN
Andrea Branzi with Ettore Sottsass
I M AG E C O U R T E S Y O F F R I E D M A N B E N DA A N D A N D R E A B R A N Z I . P H OTO BY G I U S E P P E VA R C H E T TA
Italian architect and designer Andrea Branzi, now 78, was a member of the Memphis Group founded by the revolutionary fellow professional, Ettore Sottsass (1917-2007), in 1980. “Ettore Sottsass: Design Radical,” the exhibition at the Met Breuer, New York, through October 8, is a nod to the celebrated provacateur on his birth centenary. On the occasion, Branzi recalls his days with Sottsass, and why the time now is right to place him “on a stage more fit for a man of his great stature and eminence.”
ANDREA BRANZI REMEMBERS ETTORE SOTTSASS BLOUINARTINFO.COM SEPTEMBER 2017 MODERN PAINTERS
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Andrea Branzi July, 2017 Translated from the Italian by Todd Portnowitz
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“Mizar” Vase, 1982. Ettore Sottsass (19172007). Glass, 13.25 X 11.5 X 11.5 in.
T H E M E T R O P O L I TA N M U S E U M O F A R T, G I F T O F DA N I E L W O L F, 2 017. © E T TO R E S OT T S A S S
Compared to the leading figures in Italian design, who were brought up on the rationalism of post-war Italy, Ettore was already an intellectual by the 1970s, with interests in America’s Beat Generation, in Japan, India, the South Seas; and, like an anthropologist, he knew the meaning of great wealth and great poverty. With the bold joyfulness of his designs, he offered a refuge from the tragedy of human existence, from solitude, from the misery of mankind — a gift that eased the world’s pain. This profound and multifaceted contribution is what separated Ettore from other, more self-absorbed and ego-driven designers. His creations were often interpreted as an unconscious “Land of Toys,” but the real key to understanding his work is better found in Hieronymus Bosch (1453-1516) and in his lucid vision of the world’s tragicomic fall — a world populated by thieves, magicians, perverts, demons, and madmen; a decaying world transformed into a carnival, a licentious fairground. Like every true bourgeois, Ettore declared himself staunchly anti-bourgeois, with no patience for the social formalities of his privileged milieu. An elegant anarchist, equal parts snobbish and fascinating, he never quite found the right balance between accomplished artist and accomplished professional: I saw him cry for love, for donkeys, for a song, for the death of a friend. Because his country had fought on the wrong side of the War, he eradicated his mother tongue (German) from his life, speaking of the war, if ever, only through anecdotes, misunderstandings, brief escapades. His tenderness and fragile nature were the result of a successful life — refined, though filled with scars that he kept hidden through his openness to the strange. Perhaps this was his way of looking at the world: as an apple, round but rotten . . . It is my hope, on this centenary, that we do not paint too superficial an image of Ettore, all clear colors and clean lines, and so distance him further from our lives; Sottsass was nothing of the sort. Today is our chance, at last, to set him on a stage more fit for a man of his great stature and eminence.
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C O U R T E S Y O F T H E GA L L E R Y M O U R M A N S . © E T TO R E S OT T S A S S
Omaggio 3, 2007. Ettore Sottsass (1917-2007). Corian and wood, 75 X 64.25 X 59.25 in.
P R O P E R T Y F R O M T H E C H A R L E S A N D S H A R O N T R AU R I N G C O L L E C T I O N , B R O O K L I N E , M A S S AC H U S E T T S . I M AG E C R E D I T: H E R I TAG E AU C T I O N S , H A .C O M
Malabar Sideboard, 1982, Memphis Milano. Ettore Sottsass (1917-2007). Laminated and enameled wood, enameled steel, 213.4 X 254 X 50.2 cm
INSIDE A WORLD OF QUIRKS
BY LISA CONTAG
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aster of “Bastard Design.” “Godfather of Italian Cool.” “Anti Design Hero.” Ettore Sottsass, who died on New Year’s Eve in 2007 and would have celebrated his 100th birthday this year, collected many
illustrious titles over the decades of his rich and productive career. Known to many chiefly as the founder of the Milan-based Memphis Group, which was active in the 1980s, Sottsass lived up to his credo that “there is no border between architecture, sculpture, design, and painting,” creating some of design history’s most idiosyncratic works that continue to fascinate and irritate.
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P R O P E R T Y F R O M T H E C H A R L E S A N D S H A R O N T R AU R I N G C O L L E C T I O N , B R O O K L I N E , M A S S AC H U S E T T S
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Clesitera, 1986, Toso Vetro d’Arte for Memphis Milano. Ettore Sottsass (19172007). Polychrome glass, height 49.8 c
C O U R T E S Y O F T H E GA L L E R Y M O U R M A N S © E T TO R E S OT T S A S S
Cabinet No. 56, 2003, Ettore Sottsass (1917-2007). Wood, ebonized pearwood veneer, acrylic. 203.5 X 210.5 X 60 cm
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T H E M E T R O P O L I TA N M U S E U M O F A R T, G I F T O F D R . M I C H A E L S Z E , 2 0 0 2 . © E T TO R E S OT T S A S S
“Ivory” table, 1985. Ettore Sottsass (Italian, 1917-2007). Formica, wood, glass, H 39.75 X Dia 24 in. Glass Top: Dia 19.5 X Thickness 0.25 in
T H E M E T R O P O L I TA N M U S E U M O F A R T, G I F T O F R O N A L D S . K A N E , 19 9 2 . © E T TO R E S OT T S A S S C O U R T E S Y: T H E M E T R O P O L I TA N M U S E U M O F A R T
“Murmansk” Fruit Dish, 1982. Ettore Sottsass (Italian, 1917-2007). Silver, 12 X 13-7/8 in
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86 MODERN PAINTERS SEPTEMBER 2017 BLOUINARTINFO.COM T H E M E T R O P O L I TA N M U S E U M O F A R T, J O H N C . WA D D E L L C O L L E C T I O N , G I F T O F J O H N C . WA D D E L L , 19 97. © E T TO R E S OT T S A S S
“Carlton” Room Divider, 1981. Ettore Sottsass (Italian, 1917-2007). Wood, plastic laminate, 194.9 X 189.9 X 40 cm
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ABOUT HIS RED VALENTINE TYPEWRITER, SOTTSASS SAID, “IT WAS FOR USE IN ANY PLACE EXCEPT THE OFFICE” Sottsass was born on October 14, 1917 in the Austrian town of Innsbruck and grew up in Turin, Italy, as the son of the architect Ettore Sottsass senior, who was firmly rooted in Italian Modernism. After his graduation from the Politecnico di Torino in Architecture in 1939, the younger Sottsass was conscripted as a soldier in World War II, most of which he spent as a prisoner of war in a Yugoslavian concentration camp. Following his release, Sottsass worked with his father for a short period, before moving to Milan in 1945, where his infamous emancipation from Modernism took its course. In the next years he would move to New York to briefly work for the industrial designer George Nelson, and he returned to Italy to create furniture for Poltronova. It was his engagement with the Italian firm Olivetti, however, that resulted in his first widely noted commercial designs and a reputation for being rebellious and unconventional. Among his most successful projects for Olivetti: the Elea 9003, Italy’s first mainframe computer, and more famously the cherry red portable Valentine typewriter, a pop icon created in 1969 “for use in any place except the office, so as not to remind anyone of monotonous working hours,” as Sottsass once noted. Next to a great passion for art and literature — he deeply admired American Abstract Expressionism and founded a literary magazine titled “Planeta Fresco” with Allen Ginsberg in the late ‘60s — Sottsass loved to travel, and his journeys to India and East Asia from the early 1960s on would deeply impact his work and approach. After overcoming an unspecified, severe health issue, he went on to create his “Ceramics of Darkness” and “Ceramics of Shiva” series in the mid 1960s, prime examples of his artistic vision and drive to transcend the borders of art, pop, spirituality, and design with the help of bold shapes and color combinations, while also seeking a
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deeper, mystical connection between form and meaning. The “Superboxes” from the late 1960s for Poltronova, closet-like sculptural structures from plywood covered in colorful stripes of laminate — then a novel and revolutionary material — also bore witness to Sottsass’s unique aesthetic curiosity and anarchistic sense for the comical. Sottsass was a devoted collaborator who joined forces with numerous protagonists of the Italian avant-garde, from Archizoom and Superstudio in the 1960s to the Alchymia group in the 1970s. In 1980, Alchymia’s Alessandro Mendini was among the founding members of Memphis. The group, which named itself after a Bob Dylan song that was playing at the initial meeting, soon made waves with frivolously colorful and outlandish furniture, lighting and interior design that set out to visually and intellectually counteract the sober modernist rationale. Despite the worldwide interest in Memphis, Sottsass left the group in 1985 to move on to new ventures with his architecture and design practice Sottsass Associati. He also returned to architecture: alongside industrial designs for Alessi, Vistosi, and Knoll, among others, he created shop interiors for Esprit and designed a number of private homes, though the most prestigious project of his late career would be Milan’s Malpensa Airport, which was realized in 2000. When Ettore Sottsass died in 2007, he left the world an impressive body of work covering architecture, furniture, industrial design, ceramics, glass, painting, photography and a wealth of writings. “Ettore was the last representative of an idea of design that was poetic and humanist,” fellow Memphis member and designer Aldo Cibic said after Sottsass’s death, adding that he was never cynical and never thought about money. “He was a free soul.” MP
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FAC I N G PAG E: ©YAYO I K U S A M A , C O U R T E S Y O F OTA F I N E A R T S , TO K YO/ S I N GA P O R E , V I C TO R I A M I R O GA L L E R Y, LO N D O N , DAV I D Z W I R N E R , N E W YO R K
Facing page: Yayoi Kusama in front of her latest work, Life is the Heart of a Rainbow, 2017. Acrylic on canvas. 194cm x 194cm
YAYOI KUSAMA
on Life, Infinity and a Major Retrospective
I N T RODUCED TO A RT FOR C U R I NG M EN TA L I LLN E SS , KUSA M A NOT ON LY FOU N D H ER FOOT I NG BU T PROPELLED H ERSELF TO E X PLOR E H ER PL ACE I N T H E U N I V ERSE A N D BEYON D BY NICHOLAS FORREST BLOUINARTINFO.COM SEPTEMBER 2017 MODERN PAINTERS
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to the fabric of contemporary visual culture is almost impossible to express in words. Throughout a career spanning seven decades, Kusama has developed a practice that transcends boundaries and defies definition. It could be said that with no other artist is the connection between art and life more inextricably linked — a career-defining connection that originated with her introduction to art as a form of therapy for the mental illness that led her to voluntarily check herself into the psychiatric asylum in Tokyo where she has lived since 1977. Kusama’s visual language is defined by the obsessive dedication to specific motifs such as dots, nets, and pumpkins as well as the acts of repetition and accumulation — as seen in her iconic “Obliteration Room” — that remain key characteristics of her unique mode of communication. What started out as a form of “medicine” for the 88-year-old artist has since developed into one of the most intimate and expressive art practices of modern times. Taking simple, recognizable, and highly accessible motifs, she gently guides her audience into a multilayered world of profound insights into humanity and the human condition. The breadth and scope of Kusama’s prodigious oeuvre is currently being showcased in a major survey exhibition produced by the National Gallery Singapore in collaboration with the Queensland Art Gallery|Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) in Brisbane, Australia. Titled “Yayoi Kusama: Life is the Heart of a Rainbow”
Marilyn Monroe, 1970. Oil on canvas with painted wire netting on wooden frame, 100 X 80 cm
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CONTRIBUTION
C O L L E C T I O N O F C H I B A C I T Y M U S E U M O F A R T ©YAYO I K U S A M A
Y
YAYOI KUSAMA’S
AGGLOMERATION
© Musée des Jacobins – Auch, Feathered panache, Perù
Somogy Art Publishers since 1937 w w w. s o m o g y. n e t
KUSAMA WAS INTRODUCED TO ART AS A FORM OF THERAPY
as new soft sculptures and paintings from her “My Eternal Soul” series (2009– ongoing), as well as the title work of the exhibition,“Life is the Heart of a Rainbow.” Other highlights include a mirrored “peep” room, “I WANT TO LOVE ON THE FESTIVAL NIGHT,” specially created for the gallery. Russell Storer says that the curators at the National Gallery of Singapore felt that Kusama’s work should be more widely seen and understood — that the exhibition should go beyond the Instagram moments to show how her practice has developed over time and to uncover lesser-known aspects
C O L L E C T I O N O F T H E A R T I S T ©YAYO I K U S A M A , C O U R T E S Y O F OTA F I N E A R T S , TO K YO/S I N GA P O R E , V I C TO R I A M I R O GA L L E R Y, LO N D O N
Infinity Mirrored Room — Gleaming Lights of the Souls, 2008. Mirror, wooden panels, LED lights, metal, acrylic panels. 415 X 415 X 287.4 cm
and co-curated by the National Gallery of Singapore’s Russell Storer and Adele Tan, and QAGOMA’s Reuben Keehan, the exhibition is on view at the National Gallery Singapore from June 9 until September 3 this year and then at QAGOMA from November 4 to February 11, 2018. At the National Gallery Singapore, “Yayoi Kusama: Life is the Heart of a Rainbow” features more than 120 works spanning a wide variety of media, including examples of her signature infinity mirror rooms and infinity net paintings. The show also includes previously unseen works such
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C O L L E C T I O N O F T H E A R T I S T © YAYO I K U S A M A . P H OTO BY H A L R E I F F.
Self‐Obliteration by Dots, 1968
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©YAYO I K U S A M A
“I HAVE ALWAYS HAD THE DESIRE TO MEASURE THE INFINITE UNIVERSE TO SEE MY LIFE. THEREFORE INFINITY, ETERNITY AND LOVE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN THE MOTIFS IN MY WORK.”
The Spirits of the Pumpkins Descended into the Heavens, 2017. Mixed media, dimensions variable
of her work, such as her “cage paintings” of the early 1970s. “The show is therefore broadly, but not strictly chronologically, combining recent major works with early works to demonstrate the development of her key forms and imagery,” Storer says. QAGOMA’s exhibition includes more than 70 works, exploring the recurring motifs in Kusama’s work with a thematic focus on her engagement with the body as both subject and object as well as her unique conception of space. From early experimental paintings to later large-scale installations, the QAGOMA exhibition traverses the entire spectrum of her oeuvre. Highlights include two works commissioned for QAGOMA’s 2002 Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art — the mirror ball installation “Narcissus Garden” (1966/2002) and the interactive “The Obliteration Room” (2002–ongoing). According to Reuben Keehan, QAGOMA has devoted a significant portion of its exhibition to Kusama’s “mid period work,” which he says is understudied. “This is the time between her return to Japan after living in the United States for nearly 20 years and her re-emergence as a major international artist in the early 1990s,” says Keehan. “This work includes experiments in soft sculpture, assemblage and installation. Not only does it allow audiences to see the development of her practice toward the assured use of perception and space she is so well known for today, it is immensely rich and poetic in its own right, and deserves wider attention for a more thorough understanding of Kusama’s practice,” he adds. To find out more about Kusama’s work, BLOUIN ARTINFO speaks with the artist about her art and life. Your signature motifs include dots, nets, and pumpkins. Why do these particular images stand out from anything else that has come into your mind to the point that you have spent so much time using them as the foundation for so many of your works?
“I HAVE BEEN STRUGGLING WITH PAIN, ANXIETY, AND FEAR EVERY DAY SINCE CHILDHOOD. THE ONLY METHOD I HAVE FOUND THAT RELIEVES THESE IS TO KEEP CREATING ART.” These themes, the philosophy of Kusama Art, have never changed over time. My desire is to measure the infinity of the unbounded universe from my own position in it with polka dots. How deep is the mystery? Does infinity exist beyond our universe? In exploring these questions, I want to examine the single dot that is my own life. One polka dot: a single particle among billions. I have kept up my determination to return to eternity by means of art. This is a message about Kusama’s self-obliteration. Polka dots and nets are in negative-positive relations. The pumpkins have attracted me because they are humorous, lively and full of vitality. This is why I have drawn and painted a lot of them. Your “Infinity Mirror” installations transport the viewer into another world. When did the idea for the mirror rooms first come to you and what was it that you saw or experienced that made you want to create rooms of mirrors? “Infinity Mirror Rooms” represent my philosophy, which I have held as a proof of my living since I was about ten years of age. It is a message from my body and soul that perceives the universe, an eternal message
from my life. I have sublimated all of my hallucinations, joy and the nothingness of life into art, art of my forever-longing universe. Such illusions of life were transformed into these “Infinity Mirror Rooms.” If everyone can feel how it is in the end of the universe, I’d be grateful. You seem to have a greater understanding of the human mind and its complexities than most people. What are the main thoughts and experiences that have had the biggest impact on the way your works look and feel? That is a question to my hands. I do not think when I am painting. I am sometimes surprised with my own painting when it’s finished. You say your art is an expression of your mental illness. Could you explain what you mean by this and how your art is an expression of your mental illness? Luckily, I was able to see a psychiatrist who had an understanding of art when I was young enough. Since then I have struggled to cure my illness, though in my case, the cure was in creating art based on the illness. Developing creativity was my cure. Your family had a major impact on your life. What are the memories of your father, mother, and brother that have had the biggest impact on you and your work? The way my family was and how my parents hurt me in my childhood influenced me deeply. As I grew up I studied the existence of life and human beings and I established myself as an artist on my own. At the center of your practice is what has been described as your “cosmic vision.” Could you describe what your cosmic vision is and how did you turn that cosmic vision into works of art that exist as tangible objects and are able to be experienced in a physical way? I have always had the desire to measure the infinite universe to see my life. Therefore infinity, eternity and love have always been
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C O L L E C T I O N O F T H E A R T I S T ©YAYO I K U S A M A , C O U R T E S Y O F OTA F I N E A R T S , TO K YO/S I N GA P O R E , V I C TO R I A M I R O, LO N D O N , DAV I D Z W I R N E R , N E W YO R K
Everlasting Beauty for the Never Ending Universe, 2016
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C O L L E C T I O N O F T H E A R T I S T ©YAYO I K U S A M A
Self-portrait, 1952. Gouache, pastel, crayon on paper, 28 x 20.4 cm
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the motifs in my work. These motifs are incorporated in all of my works including paintings, sculptures, novels and poems. The infinite polka dots and nets are scattered all over in the cosmic space and cover the whole universe with the message “Love Forever.” Love disappears into eternity, telling you what life is all about. You once said: “I create art for the healing of all mankind.” What does this mean to you and how do you achieve it ? The world is unpeaceful and full of turmoil. As an artist, I think it is important to deliver love, peace and hope to people who are suffering. I have been struggling with pain, anxiety, and fear every day since childhood. The only method I have found that relieves these is to keep creating art. You aim to achieve self-obliteration through your work. What does selfobliteration mean to you and how do you achieve it with your artworks? “Self-obliteration” is to lose self-existence by committing oneself to a flow of infinite time which perpetually moves forward. We cannot stop our existence the same as how we cannot escape from our death. In order to overcome fear and anxiety, I find selfobliteration by covering my entire body with polka dots, and then covering the background. My own mass is therefore absorbed into something timeless. And when that happens, I too am obliterated. The exhibition “YAYOI KUSAMA: Life is the Heart of a Rainbow” at National Gallery Singapore has been receiving a steady stream of visitors of all ages and nationalities. What do you think about the exhibition, in particular, having
your latest works shown in Singapore? My heart is full of surprises. I have overcome my illness with the power of art and I have developed myself as an artist with the weapon called art which has and shall forever rule me. It was the awe towards my life as a human being, and the longing towards the eternal mystery of the universe that gave me the creativity and the power to live through as a human being. I would be grateful if people in Singapore can feel the same through my art. What does it mean to you for your work to travel around the world and come back to Singapore in a major museum exhibition at National Gallery Singapore? I am grateful that I have led my life until this day with endless effort and ardent wishes. And I’d love to share my traces and artworks with more people. MP
The Sun Wants to Go On A Journey, 2012. Sewn stuffed fabric, paint, metal, 200 x 85 x 85 cm
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“Target,” 1961, by Jasper Johns. Encaustic and collage on canvas. 167.6 x 167.6 cm
THE WEIGHT OF RESPONSIBILITY EDITH DEVANEY, CO-CURATOR OF THE UPCOMING JASPER JOHNS SURVEY AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS, REFLECTS ON THE PROCESSES THAT DETERMINED ITS COURSE
BENEDICT JOHNSON
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asper Johns: ‘Something Resembling Truth’ is not a retrospective in the strictest definition of the term — “an exhibition or compilation showing the development of an artist’s work over a period of time,” according to the Oxford Dictionary — for it is arranged thematically rather than chronologically, an important distinction. But given that the exhibition spans Johns’s entire career and represents his major developments across all media, the conceptual difference between a full thematic survey and a retrospective is something I have given much thought to. Most retrospective exhibitions focus on mature works, covering those most significant periods of the artist’s career presented in the correct order, with much subtlety of judgement required on the part of the curator to fairly represent the artist within the final selection of works. However, if a monographic retrospective exhibition is approached from a purely art historical perspective, a curatorial vision is not necessarily required in such great measure; for it is, in effect, an arrangement of the works on the gallery walls in the correct chronological order as they would appear in a catalogue raisonné. The only pressing issue is to determine what is left out, and whether there should be an attempt to represent each and every nuance of the artist’s development, minor detours, or culde sacs along the way. This is not to suggest that exhibitions adhering to the general principle of embracing volume and completeness are not of value — they can be fascinating, particularly from a didactic perspective, but risk being somewhat arduous for both the visitor and the curator.
Edith Devaney
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The marvelous Braque retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2013 was not for the faint-hearted, given the number of works included. To spend several hours in the exhibition (for that is what it demanded) was to follow the most remarkable crash course in the study of Braque’s artistic output. Taken from that perspective, it was an absolute triumph. However there is a question as to whether this is always the best approach; and the best approach for all artists and their work? Jasper Johns’s works reveal a quickness of thought, a lightness of touch and a propensity to revisit and adapt earlier concerns across differing media. His work displays humor with serious intent, held in perfect balance. To find an exhibition narrative that clearly presents this agility of thought and hand, and that reflects these hard-to-quantify qualities became a strong driver. The question curators posit at the commencement of a project, and indeed continue to interrogate and re-evaluate throughout the course of its preparation and development, is the extent to which they are presenting an accurate account, or aspect, of an artist’s oeuvre and overall achievement. Because in the end that is the point. Every exhibition does, and should, carry a weight of responsibility, with a myriad of factors required to be lined up to ensure its critical success, the selection of work being one of the most crucial. Referring to the painter Robert Motherwell’s famous remark that every “intelligent modern painter carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head,” the same is true for curators, and, like “intelligent” painters, curators are sensible to the reality that good exhibitions can change perceptions, and that great exhibitions determine the course of the history of art. None of this is to suggest that there is a formula as such; that would be much too easy, for each exhibition, artist, artistic movement and audience is different, and therefore has differing requirements. So how to present an exhibition spanning Jasper Johns’s
extraordinary career? How to do justice to his quick intellect and light touch; his intellectual engagement with the making of art; the complexity of the textures he achieves on the painted surface by adopting techniques such as collage and the use of encaustic; his remarkable ability in printmaking and casting sculpture; his references to literature and language, to memory and the cycle of life; his interrogation of the objectivity of the painting and above all, his depiction and consideration of the nature of the human condition? When I first proposed this exhibition in 2013 the overriding objective was to bring Johns’s remarkable achievement to a British audience, who had last been presented with a sizable body of his works some 40 years earlier, in a 1977 retrospective. Four highly productive decades of painting have passed since then, and I had also become very familiar with the wonderful later bodies of work which I was committed to giving the prominence they deserved within the exhibition. As already mentioned, there is, and absolutely should be, a great imperative to get an exhibition right. This priority is all the more acute when the artist is living, and especially when he has occupied a pre-eminent position in the art world for the past 60 years. The stakes are high for everyone. For an artist to engage with the development of his or her exhibition is an enormous privilege for the curator, and it can provide, certainly in this case, the most helpful of all possible counsels. So when, after a long period of deliberation, my cocurator Roberta Bernstein and I presented the idea of a thematic survey to the artist, with the specific chapters and the narrative and content for each of these chapters sketched out, Johns was encouraging and engaged, always extremely helpful in his comments and observations on the exhibition’s development. For what this thematic survey is striving to achieve is a clear insight as to how Jasper Johns thinks. How his reflections on particular concerns and imagery have developed over time, and in
“When I first proposed this exhibition in 2013, the overriding objective was to bring Johns’s remarkable achievement to a British audience, who had last been presented with a sizeable body of his works some 40 years earlier, in a 1977 retrospective.”
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“Painting with Two Balls,” 1960 by Jasper Johns. Encaustic and collage on canvas with objects (three panels). 165.1 x 137.5 cm
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“Untitled,” 1992-4, by Jasper Johns. Encaustic on canvas. 199.4 x 300.7 cm
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“Summer,” 1985, by Jasper Johns. Encaustic on canvas. 190.5 x 127 cm
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doing so reveal the extent to which these differing approaches and concerns interconnect. Johns was catapulted into the spotlight in 1958, right at the beginning of his career, when he first showed his flags, targets and numbers at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York. This was a time when the art scene was dominated by the Abstract Expressionists, then at their height. Having initiated and cocurated the Royal Academy’s recent “Abstract Expressionism” exhibition (2016), I was particularly fascinated to program his exhibition in quick succession, as indeed was Johns, who took considerable interest in this project. He was, after all, at the forefront of the generation who came behind this movement, and by appearing to remove any sense of an emotional content in his work, and in presenting a form of reality — Johns was seen at the time as challenging the prevailing direction of the art that gripped New York. As would be expected, this exhibition covers this now iconic body of early work, but it also contextualizes it. For that is one of the capabilities of a survey exhibition: it affords the possibility to highlight the extent to which our perception and understanding of works produced early in the cannon are affected by what follows. In Johns’s case, to see the iconic signs and symbols through the prism of the later bodies of works — such as the very autobiographical “Seasons” paintings of the 1980s, the elegiac “Catenary” works of the late 1990s and the 2013 “Regrets” series, redolent with memory and a sense of taking stock — is to comprehend them in a different way. The vivid realism and a preoccupation with reformulating the familiar in the early works,
or “things the mind already knows” (seen in the iconic emblems of flags, targets, maps, letters and numbers), encourage the viewer to take a more active role in perception, to interrogate more closely “things which are seen but not looked at, not examined.” And this invitation to continue to interrogate; to arrive at the “truth” is just as strongly present in the late works, albeit through a palimpsest of experience. Indeed one of the key and most deliberate structures of the exhibition is to show the work in “the round.” The first gallery containing mainly early works of flags, targets and numbers faces the last gallery, containing the later, more reflective works. The galleries in between are arranged in thematic chapters, all including works from across the last 60 years. In conclusion, the Academy’s thematic survey provides a comprehensive exhibition of Johns’s long career, devoting equal attention to the objects and signs that established his international reputation as to the artist’s later work, and thereby revealing the continuities and changes that occur over six decades. Presenting a consistently strong and constantly evolving body of work from the 1950s up to the present day, it reveals the re-examination and development of many of the early themes and motifs throughout the course of Johns’s career. It highlights his mastery of craft and process and the extent to which he employs differing media to explore the same concerns. The clear focus and complexity of his curiosity is apparent with the cumulative effect being one of psychological depth, in the interweaving of observances of art history with personal memories, and all articulated by his formidable technical ability.
“Presenting a consistently strong and constantly evolving body of work from the 1950s up to the present day, it reveals the re-examination and development of many of the early themes and motifs throughout the course of Johns’s career.”
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Somogy Art Publishers since 1937 w w w. s o m o g y. n e t © Luc Fournol, Cyril Clément, Estate Luc Fournol ‘A few carefree moments in a life otherwise devoted to work. Bernard never realised how elegant and handsome he was. Seductively wrapped in solitude and modesty-that’s how I knew and loved him’, Château l’Arc, 1958
MUSÉE DE MONTMARTRE JARDINS RENOIR
THE PERSONAL NARRATIVE IN HIS EARLY WORK, JASPER JOHNS CREATED A BARRIER BETWEEN HIMSELF AND HIS ART. THAT’S NOT QUITE SO ANYMORE, AS HIS RECENT OUTPUT REVEALS
“Between the Clock and the Bed, 1981, by Jasper Johns. Oil on canvas. 182.9 x 320.7 cm
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asper Johns began his career by rejecting the reigning notion of art as a form of self-expression. His famous early motifs embraced concrete reality, while also undermining it absolutely. His were cool, impersonal, flat forms depicting “things the mind already knows” and raising questions about our shared understanding of what we see. A painting of a flag — even when mounted on plywood, and painted on strips of newspaper using pigment and molten wax — is both a representation of a flag and a flag itself. A painting of a target — even when its colors diverge from the targets we know — is still a target. What, then, is the target of this target? Johns’s simple conceptual maneuver confused the act of viewing irrevocably and catapulted him into the pantheon of art history, where he has remained a pre-eminent figure for 60 years. Now 87, Johns is still busy working every day in his studios in Sharon, Connecticut, completing a large-scale sculpture project of his famous numbers series, printing monotypes that have engaged him for several years, and finishing a series of paintings that he plans to exhibit as a single work, entitled “Five Postcards.” “Something Resembling Truth,” a retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts, will explore his œuvre from his first revelatory works from the 1950s to his most recent art. While it emphasizes the
C O L L E C T I O N O F T H E A R T I S T © JA S P E R J O H N S / VAGA , N E W YO R K / DAC S , LO N D O N 2 017. P H OTO: JA M I E S T U K E N B E R G © T H E W I L D E N S T E I N P L AT T N E R I N S T I T U T E , 2 017
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“Fool’s House,” 1961-1962, by Jasper Johns. Oil on canvas with broom, sculptural towel, stretcher and cup, 182.9 x 92.5 x 11.4 cm
recurring motifs of Johns’s work, said Roberta Bernstein, who curated the show with Edith Devaney, it also demonstrates how the artist has moved away from his absolute rejection of self-expression, and has, little-by-little, embraced the “things the mind already knows” as part of a lexicon through which he explores more personal terrain. “His early work was very much about the object, the art work, there was a focus on that, and he didn’t want — as he said — his personality to be part of it,” Bernstein said in a telephone interview. “But I think he came to terms with the reality that all art is on some level about self expression, and he had to find his own way to incorporate that.” In his early work, Johns often created a barrier between himself and his own art. For a large number of works in his “Device” series, from 1959 through the 1960s, for example, he did this literally, by using a slat of wood, a stretcher bar or a ruler to scrape paint around the canvas, rather than paint by brush. But in more recent work, Johns has allowed for an emotional connection to exist between himself and his work. In a series he started created in 2012, “Regrets,” for example, represented in the exhibition, he made works inspired by an old photograph of the artist Lucian Freud taken by the Soho photographer John Deakin, and owned by Francis Bacon, who used it as the basis for his portraits of Freud. The work explores the interrelationships between artists and friends, and the process of artmaking, recalling his own love and collaborative relationships with the artists Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg, if somewhat obliquely. In more recent years, Johns has been focused on a series of monotypes that also centered on an image of a man crumpled in anguish: a photograph of a 21-year-old helicopter crew chief, Marine Lance Corporal James C. Farley, curled into a human ball on a trunk, after a disastrous mission in Vietnam. These works move closer, said Bernstein, to delving into Johns’s personal pre-occupations with subjects such as love, memory, humiliation, loss and death — even if they are not precisely personal. “Earlier on he was more focused on really exploring what is the nature of this medium I’m working in, how do we perceive things?” said Bernstein. “All of those things are still present in his work, but at a certain point, dealing with things that are part of the human condition” became more prevalent. Organized into sections that touch on his recurring themes, such as “Painting as Object”; “Seasons and Cycles”; “Words and Voices,” the Royal Academy exhibition aims to demonstrate that Johns’ work has always re-explored and deepened. “He has developed a language for himself in the course of all of these decades, and he can draw upon that language as needed, and he’s also always trying to expand that language,” Bernstein said. And it’s a process that continues. “There is a sense of urgency about getting work done. He is aware of the fact that time is precious, and he’s working every day.” MP
Somogy Art Publishers since 1937 w w w. s o m o g y. n e t © Fonds Kandinsky / Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Paris, Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne Boris Lipnitzki, Wassily Kandinsky dans son atelier à Neuilly-sur-Seine devant Courbe dominante
SPOTLIGHT // OPERA: PASSION, POWER & POLITICS AT V&A
GO BIG, OR GO HOME… SEX, SEDITION AND HIGH Cs AT THE V&A The new Sainsbury Gallery at the V&A, one of the largest exhibition spaces in Europe, opens its doors with a multimedia spectacle set to outbust all previous blockbusters. It’s curtains up for ‘Opera: Passion, Power and Politics’ BY WARWICK THOMPSON
of those subjects guaranteed to raise the blood pressure higher than a top C. If you believe some current pundits, you’ll think that every public penny spent on such useless, elitist, incomprehensible nonsense is a penny stolen from cancer research or the education budget. If you believe others, you’ll think opera holds the key to civilization itself. It’s either destructive, seditious and corrupt or it celebrates the absurd, beautiful mysteries of life. Take your pick. The V&A is leaping into the ring with “Opera: Passion, Power and Politics,” the opening blockbuster of its acclaimed Sainsbury Gallery, a massive new column-free exhibition space of 1,100 square metres. Using sound installations, video, historic objects, and theatrical reconstructions, the show — which has been created in collaboration with the Royal Opera House — looks at seven major cities which have hosted game-changing premieres, and explores how each of the works reflected, altered, and even undermined, their social fabric. You can wander into a reconstruction of Vanbrugh’s gorgeous Queen’s Theatre and see what the world premiere of Handel’s magical “Rinaldo”— the first ever Italian opera composed specifically for the London stage — must have looked like in 1711, and find out why Hogarth thought that it heralded a moral Armageddon for London. You can stroll through an innovative soundscape of the Royal Opera chorussingingtherousing‘Vapensiero’fromVerdi’s
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Barbara Hannigan in Written on Skin. Director: Katie Mitchell, designer: Vicki Mortimer
© 2 012 R O H/S T E P H E N C U M M I S K E Y; FAC I N G PAG E: © M U S E E D ’O R S AY, PA R I S , F R A N C E / B R I D G E M A N I M AG E S
OPERA IS ONE
An oil on canvas by Eva Gonzalès (1849–83), circa 1874, Paris, Musée d’Orsay, gift of Jean Guérard, 1927
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Music in the Tuileries Garden, Édouard Manet (1832-83). Oil on canvas, 1861–62 National Gallery NG3260
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“Nabucco” of 1842, and discover how this Milanese showstopper helped change the course of Italian history. There’s a cross-dressing celebration of all things amoral and hedonistic in Monteverdi’s “L’incoronazione di Poppea” (The Coronation of Poppea), which first appeared in Venice in 1642. This opera, about a scheming, powercrazed beauty who triumphs over all her rivals, reflected a new thirst for sexual ambiguity on stage; but by the time we get to Mozart’s “Le nozze di Figaro” (Vienna, 1786), you can discover how cross-dressing ambiguity is being employed to push the burgeoning democratic values of the Enlightenment. The exhibition also shows how Wagner’s spectacular“Tannhäuser”(Paris,1861)polarized and transformed the artistic life of the French capital, and how Richard Strauss’s “Salome” (Dresden, 1905), with its shocking depiction of a woman tonguing the severed head of John the Baptist, took opera into new realms of psychological exploration. When Shostakovich tried something similar in “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” (Leningrad, 1934), his opera about a bored, oppressed housewife who commits murder, Stalin was so enraged at its flouting of socialist-realist orthodoxies that he nearly threw the composer into prison. Passion, power, and politics indeed. Alongside all the multisensory soundscapes and state-of-the-art bells and whistles, there will also be several unique historical objects: Mozart’s own piano sits alongside a surviving score for Poppea, and Salvador Dalí’s designs for a notorious production of “Salome” in 1949 can be seen with Manet’s ‘Wagnerian’ painting “Music in the Tuileries Gardens.” If you loathe opera, prepare to be challenged. If you love it, prepare to fall even deeper. MP “Opera: Passion, Power and Politics,” sponsored by Société Générale, is in the new Sainsbury Gallery at the V&A from September 30 until February 25, 2018. Tickets: vam.ac.uk/opera or 0800 912 6961
Nadja Michael as Salome, Royal Opera House, London, 2008
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“Accumulation No. 1,” 1962, by Yayoi Kusama (Japanese, born 1929). Sewn stuffed fabric, paint, and chair fringe, 94 x 99.1 x 109.2 cm
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“Bird in Space,” 1928, by Constantin Brancusi (French, born Romania. 1876-1957). Bronze, 137.2 x 21.6 x 16.5 cm
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T H E M U S EU M O F M O D E R N A R T, N E W YO R K . G I V E N A N O N Y M O U S LY, 193 4 . © 2 017 A R T I S T S R I G H T S S O C I E T Y (A R S), N E W YO R K / A DAG P, PA R I S
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he Museum of Moder n A r t and the Fondation Louis Vuitton are presenting a one-of- a-kind of exhibition in France called “Être Moderne: Le MoMA à Paris,” which will be on view at the foundation’s Frank Gehry-designed building in Paris from October 11, 2017 through March 5, 2018. Established in 1929, the Museum of Modern Art in New York was one of the first museums devoted exclusively to the visual arts of the time. “Être Moderne” will showcase 200 works that precisely trace MoMA’s journey of collecting over the decades, ranging from the early defining movements of the modern art period to Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Pop art and digital works of art. The exhibition will present a mix of works drawn from all six of the museum’s curatorial departments: paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, films, media works, performances, architecture and design objects that echo the evolution and diversity of MoMA’s collection. Interestingly, the exhibition was conceived in relation to the architecture and interior spaces of the Fondation Louis Vuitton building, creating a compelling historical narrative across its floors. The show is divided into four major segments, opening with MoMA’s first decade. It continues to the postwar period, dedicated to Minimalism and Pop art. Emerging as two major new art forms in
T H E M U S E U M O F M O D E R N A R T, N E W YO R K . C O M M I T T E E O N D R AW I N G S A N D P R I N T S F U N D, 2 014 . © 2 017 R I R K R I T T I R AVA N I JA
“Untitled (the days of this society is numbered/ December 7, 2012),” 2014, by Rirkrit Tiravanija (Thai, born Argentina, 1961). Synthetic polymer paint and newspaper on linen, 221 x 214.6 cm
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“Opus 217, Against the Enamel of a Background Rhythmic with Beats and Angles, Tones, and Tints, Portrait of M. Fèlix Fènèon in 1890,” 1890, by Paul Signac (French, 1863-1935).
126 MODERN PAINTERS SEPTEMBER 2017 BLOUINARTINFO.COM T H E M U S E U M O F M O D E R N A R T, N E W YO R K . F R AC T I O N A L G I F T O F M R . A N D M R S . DAV I D R O C K E F E L L E R . © 2 017 A R T I S T S R I G H T S S O C I E T Y (A R S ), N E W YO R K / A DAG P, PA R I S
T H E M U S E U M O F M O D E R N A R T, N E W YO R K . G I F T O F E M I LY A N D J E R R Y S P I E G E L , 19 91 © 2 017 B R U C E N AU M A N/A R T I S T S R I G H T S S O C I E T Y (A R S ), N E W YO R K
“Human/Need/Desire,” 1983, by Bruce Nauman (American, born 1941). Neon tubing and wire with glass tubing suspension frames, 239.8 x 179 x 65.4 cm
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T H E M U S E U M O F M O D E R N A R T, N E W YO R K . G I F T O F T H E A R T I S T, 19 6 9. © 2 017 E L L S W O R T H K E L LY
“Colors for a Large Wall,” 1951, by Ellsworth Kelly (American, 1923-2015). Oil on canvas, sixty-four panels, 240 x 240 cm
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T H E M U S E U M O F M O D E R N A R T, N E W YO R K . H O R AC E W. G O L D S M I T H F U N D T H R O U G H R O B E R T B . M E N S C H E L , 19 9 5 © 2 017 C I N DY S H E R M A N
“Untitled Film Still #21,” 1978, by Cindy Sherman (American, born 1954). Gelatin silver print, 19.1 x 24.1 cm
the 1960s, these movements are seen through a dialogue between painting, architecture, sculpture and photography. The third section showcases other works from 1960 onward, including pieces from movements such as Fluxus and the so-called Pictures Generation, as well as an introspective look at the history of the United States. The last and final section, located on the top floor of the building, focuses on Contemporary works from around the world, most of which were acquired by MoMA in the last two years. The exhibition was curated under the direction of Glenn Lowry, an American art historian and MoMA’s director, along with Suzanne Pagé, the artistic director of the Fondation Louis Vuitton. Quentin Bajac is the curator, along with Katerina Stathopoulou and Olivier Michelon. The archival section was organized by Michelle Elligott, MoMA’s chief of archives.
“With ‘Être moderne,’ we hope to provide a history of modern art through the lens of MoMA’s ever-evolving collection,” Bajac said. “From iconic works by artists such as Cézanne to contemporary works by designers such as Shigetaka Kurita, the exhibition exemplifies how MoMA’s collection has shaped the public’s definition of Modern art and continues to challenge our interpretation of it.” Some of the classic works being bought to France for the first time include Constantin Brancusi’s sculpture “Bird in Space,” the photographer Diane Arbus’s “Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey (1967)” and Andy Warhol’s painting “Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962).” A selection of rarely shown documentary material from MoMA’s archives will be incorporated in the galleries, tracing the history of the museum and contextualizing the works. MP
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Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild, Courbet, 1986 © Gerhard Richter
DATEBOOK T he season’s top picks from all the art capitals
N EW YO R K
GENTRIFICATION IS A WORD that summons visions of avaricious land developers and adventurous gentry moving into minority and low-income neighborhoods, altering the cultural and social fabric of long-standing communities. While many today associate gentrification with the likes of tech-vexed San Francisco and New York’s High Line, London and its neighborhoods — particularly the East End — have long been affected by the ebb and flow of immigration and financial circumstance. (It was, after all, the British sociologist Ruth Glass who coined the term “gentrification” in 1964 to describe the urban cycle taking place there). The artists Gilbert & George, longtime residents of the East End — now going on some 50 years — are well perched to examine the effects of gentrification from their Spitalfield townhouse located on tony Fournier Street (Keira Knightley was once a neighbor). For their forthcoming exhibition, “THE BEARD PICTURES,” beards act as visual metonyms of their neighborhood’s changing demographic, in this case barbate millennials and the economic effects that come with them (like artisanal coffee shops, gastropubs and higher rents). Deploying their signature
Beardstead, 2016 by Gilbert & George. Mixed media, 88.98 X 75.2 in
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© G I L B E R T & G E O R G E . C O U R T E S Y T H E A R T I S T S A N D L E H M A N N M AU P I N , N E W YO R K A N D H O N G KO N G
Gilbert & George – ‘The Beard Pictures’ at Lehmann Maupin
© G I L B E R T & G E O R G E . C O U R T E S Y T H E A R T I S T S A N D L E H M A N N M AU P I N , N E W YO R K A N D H O N G KO N G
Beardover, 2016 by GIlbert & George. Mixed media, 118.11 X 150 in
aesthetic — large-scale, mixed-media collages, divided into grids — the works in “THE BEARD PICTURES” portray Gilbert & George with fantastically overgrown beards in various states of psychedelic disembodiment, all set against backgrounds of barbed and chicken wire. In “BEARDSTEAD” (2016), the duo has whiskers that morph into brown-picket fences, while in “BEARDFOLD” (2016), the artists’ woolly beards — overlaid with a leaf-like pattern — interlock like tentacles, while crowns of barbed wire adorn both of their heads. While the visual analog Gilbert & George make between their beards and those of the millennials is clear, the import
of fence-related imagery is less so. Once could make the argument that the depiction of such physical barriers operates as a visual metaphor for the division and exclusion usually associated with gentrification. George is often quoted as saying, as he did in a 2009 interview with the British newspaper The Telegram, “Nothing happens in the world that doesn’t happen in the East End.” And indeed, over the last 50 years, the duo has found in their own neighborhood ample evidence of an everchanging social and economic landscape. From early projects such as their 1981 film, “The World of Gilbert & George,” to their
more recent series “SCAPEGOATING PICTURES” 2014 — a show not without controversy — the pair readily look to their fellow East End denizens for inspiration with varying degrees of approval and politically conservative opprobrium. Gentrification, for Gilbert & George, would seem to have many agents — including artists, a group that is often the first to settle into marginalized communities. Indeed, in depicting themselves with the very beards associated with gentrification, Gilbert & George mordantly acknowledge their roles as both critics and early proponents. —DIGBY WARDE-ALDAM
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‘Tony Cragg: Recent Sculptures’ at Marian Goodman Gallery his recent Yorkshire Sculpture Park show in England — the sizes of the sculptures included still show his range, measuring as small as 20 inches and as large as six feet. Cragg again proves himself to be a master of multiple media. The material has always driven his sculptures, and in this exhibition the undulating forms are crafted from aluminum, white onyx, stone, wood, bronze, stainless steel and glass. All have the same attention to detail; works like “Spring” are so graceful they bring to mind natural landscapes carved by wind or water. Even sculptures that are not new will find a new audience. It is the first showing in the US of “Hedges,” inspired by Cragg’s childhood in the English countryside and one example of how his works blur the line between the man-made and the natural. Looking closely, you can see that he
has extrapolated central figural and industrial shapes into something else. In “Skull,” a replica of a human skull is multiplied and cut away to reveal the interior with ocular openings. “We” is built from reproduced profiles of the artist, the faces spiraling into a geometric repeat. Similarly, a new bronze work, “Hands Like Mandelbaum,” features a portrait of Cragg’s hands repeated over and over to form a shrub-like shape. The “Runner” series, in bronze and stainless steel, zigzags sinuously, both elegant and energetic. “Industrial Nature I and II,” sculpted from painted aluminum, unfurls like weathered flowers. Cragg, ever the innovator, reinvents even his riffs on old forms with new materials and new ways of pushing physical boundaries, for a collection of work that confirms his reputation as a master sculptor. —SHANNON EBLEN
clockwise from top left:
Tony Cragg’s One Way Or Another, 2000. Giallo Sienna Marble, 196 X 72 X 71 cm; In An Instant, 2015. Bronze, 99 X 102 X 90 cm; Mixed Feelings, 2012. Bronze, 550 X 236 X 224 cm
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A L L 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 M A R I A N G O O D M A N GA L L E R Y
Tony Cragg has always focused on what lies beneath the surface. He has said that he works from the inside out, using the foundation to dictate the exterior of his sculptures. In his exhibition of recent works, the British sculptor takes this idea a step further, cutting away and turning forms inside out to reveal the interior structure. “Recent Sculptures” is true to its name: the oldest pieces on display date only to 2015 and some are being shown for the first time here, arriving fresh from Cragg’s Wuppertal, Germany, studio. The exhibition runs September 12 through October 14. Cragg, who is deeply familiar with the gallery, having exhibited there for decades, worked closely with the staff but essentially curated the show himself. Despite the space limitations of an indoor gallery — as opposed to the open-air backdrop of
Louise Fishman at Cheim & Read LOUISE FISHMAN’S WORK isn’t easily categorized. Steeped in art from an early age, she grew up in the museums and art schools of Philadelphia and her paintings reflect that experience, touching on the history of abstraction without directly referencing any particular artist. There is an individuality that allows her work to exist outside of any one movement, and Fishman’s constant evolution keeps her work fresh and relevant. Much of the collection on show at Cheim & Read, painted in 2016 and 2017, is influenced by her time in Venice. “A translation, not a transcription,” said Aruna D’Souza, who wrote the essay for the exhibition catalogue. The paint is laid down and built up using bold marks — her process is a physical one — but
with more openness and negative space than in past paintings. One can sense the natural world through the implied air and water, but it is nature filtered through Fishman’s characteristic grid, with intersections of geometric strokes. The paintings manage to appear both natural and architectural at once, a distinctly Venetian cityscape. Sketchbook pages with strokes in colored pencil, egg tempera and watercolor offer a pared-down look into the process Fishman uses for her largescale oil canvases. The layered colors of “A Little Ramble” and “Piano Nobile” appear more complex than the smaller untitled paintings, pages with only a few directional strokes or splashes of color, but seeing the pages helps the viewer understand how the paintings developed. The exhibition runs September 7 through October 28. —SHANNON EBLEN above:
Monongahela, 2017. Oil on linen, 66 X 55 in
Piano Nobile, 2017. Oil on linen, 70 X 90 in
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 C H E I M & R E A D GA L L E R Y
left:
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‘Radical Women’ of Latin American Art at Hammer Museum America and the United States between 1960 and 1985. The show’s organizers say it aims to address a vacuum in art history, giving visibility and context to the radical and feminist work that was produced during these decades, but that has been underserved in the academic world. Included are an assortment of 260 works in mediums including photography and video by 116 artists from 15 countries. Lygia Pape, Ana Mendieta, and Marta Minujín are among the artists featured, but
the show also includes lesser-known figures such as the Cuban-born abstract artist Zilia Sánchez, the Colombian sculptor Feliza Bursztyn, and the Argentine mixed-media artist Margarita Paksa. “The artworks in ‘Radical Women’ can be viewed as heroic acts that gave a voice to generations of women across Latin America and the United States,” says Ann Philbin, the director of the Hammer Museum. Limitada (Limited), 1978, by Marie Oresanz (Argentine, born 1936). Black-and-white photograph,35 X 50 cm
C O L L E C T I O N O F M A R I E O R E N S A N Z ; C O U R T E S Y A L E JA N D R A VO N H A R T Z GA L L E R Y. © M A R I E O R E N S A N Z
“RADICAL WOMEN: Latin American Art, 1960–1985” will be on view at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles from September 15 through December 31. As a part of “Pacific Standard Time: LA/ LA” — an effort by Getty and other arts institutions across Southern California to explore the birth of the Los Angeles art scene — “Radical Women” brings a fresh perspective to the work of a cross-section of internationally influential women artists who helped shape experimental art in Latin
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Hábito Habitante (Inhabitant habit), 1985 by Martha Araujo (Brazilian, b. 1943). Photographic documentation of performance: four black and white photographs, 17.5 × 22.5 cm each; Escape de gas (Gas leak), 1963. Plaster and other materials, 135 × 80 × 45 cm; Biscoito arte (Art cookie), 1976. C-print (diptych), 74.9 × 99.1 cm
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C O L L E C T I O N O F M A R T H A A R AÚ J O; C O U R T E S Y O F GA L E R I A JAQ U E L I N E M A R T I N S . A R T W O R K © T H E A R T I S T; P R I VAT E C O L L E C T I O N . A R T W O R K ©T H E A R T I S T; C O L L E C T I O N O F F E R N A N DA F E I TO S A A N D H E I TO R M A R T I N S . A R T W O R K © T H E A R T I S T
clockwise from above:
C LO C K W I S E F R O M TO P R I G H T: P R I VAT E C O L L E C T I O N , © 2 017 A R T I S T S R I G H T S S O C I E T Y (A R S ), N E W YO R K /A DAG P, PA R I S , P H OTO © 2 017 A R C H I V E S M A R C E T I DA C H AGA L L , PA R I S ; S T E D E L I J K M U S E U M , A M S T E R DA M , O N LOA N F R O M T H E C U LT U R A L H E R I TAG E AG E N CY O F T H E N E T H E R L A N D S . C R E D I T: © 2 017 A R T I S T S R I G H T S S O C I E T Y (A R S ), N E W YO R K /A DAG P, PA R I S , P H OTO: B A N Q U E D ’ I M AG E S , A DAG P/ A R T R E S O U R C E , N Y; A R T © 2 017 A R T I S T S R I G H T S S O C I E T Y (A R S ), N E W YO R K /A DAG P, PA R I S , P H OTO © 2 017 I S I Z- M A N U E L B I D E R M A N A S
‘Chagall: Fantasies for the Stage’ at L.A. County Museum of Art “Chagall: Fantasies for the Stage”, is on view through January 7 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Organized in collaboration with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the exhibition focuses on the important role dance and music played in the art of Marc Chagall (1887-1985). The exhibition is centered around four major stage productions with sets and costumes made by Chagall — the ballet “Aleko,”with music by Tchaikovsky (1942); “The Firebird,’’ with music by Stravinsky (1945); “Daphnis and Chloé” with music by Ravel (1958), and a 1967 production of Mozart’s “Magic Flute.’’ Many of
the costumes, set pieces and other works have not been seen since they were on stage. The exhibition includes an array of performance-related paintings and documentary footage of the performances.
clockwise from right:
Marc Chagall’s Clown Playing The Violin, 1941-2. gouache, gouache wash, pastel, colored ink, colored pencil, and graphite on paper, 24 3/8 × 19 5/16 in; Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers, 1912. Oil on canvas, 49 5/8 × 42 5/16 in.; Marc Chagall working on the panels for New York’s Metropolitan Opera: The Triumph of Music, Atelier de Gobelins, Paris, 1966
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First US Retrospective for Anna Maria Maiolino at MOCA Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles is presenting the first major American retrospective of the BrazilianItalian artist Anna Maria Maiolino, through December 31.
THE MUSEUM OF
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The exhibition surveys five decades of diverse work by the artist, including prints, drawings, sculptures, photography, video, and performance pieces. Better-known in Europe and Latin America, Maiolino has been gaining prominence in North America for her art, which often focuses on her identity as a migrant, mother and global citizen. Born in 1942 in Scalea, Italy, Maiolino’s
multi-disciplinary practice is manifestation of her status as a migrant coming of age in politcally-charged Brazil. She has achieved perfection in attaining a balance between opposites. The retrospective is being presented as part of The Getty Foundation’s “Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA,’’ a collaboration between arts institutions in Southern California that address the birth of the Los Angeles art scene through Latino and Latin American art.
P H OTO BY E L Z B I E TA B I A L KO W S K A
Here & There, 2012, dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, by Anna Maria Maiolino
clockwise from left:
Anna Maria Maiolino’s Capítulo II (Chapter II, from the Mapas Mentais (Mental Maps) series), 1976/1999, ink and transfer type on paper, 50 x 50 cm; São (They Are), 1994–2005. Plaster, each 12 X 48 X 32 cm;
C LO C K W I S E F R O M TO P : C O U R T E S Y O F T H E A R T I S T; C O U R T E S Y O F T H E A R T I S T; G I L B E R TO C H AT E AU B R I A N D C O L L E C T I O N , M U S E U D E A R T E M O D E R N A , R I O D E JA N E I R O. © A N N A M A R I A M A I O L I N O.
Glu Glu Glu…, 1967, acrylic ink and fabric on wood, 110 x 59 x 12.5 cm.
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LO N D O N
Rita Ackermann’s ‘Turning Air Blue’ at Hauser & Wirth IT’S HARD TO SUM UP the work of Rita Ackermann. She is probably best known for rough and ready paintings that often feature bevies of gimlet eyed and naked little girls that fall somewhere between Capitalist Realism-era Polke and a child’s schoolbook doodles. But her output is notoriously spontaneous; having drawn source material from everything from fashion catalogues to sometime collaborator Harmony Korine’s demented movie “Trash Humpers.” As such, it’s difficult to know what to expect from her forthcoming exhibition at Hauser & Wirth’s Trianon-esque Somerset
outpost, and a gamble for the gallery to give her free reign. According to advance press material, the show will feature a series of four or five very large chalk board paintings, addressing the “deconstruction and disappearance of a pictorial language,” as well as a major series of new paintings titled “Turning Air Blue.” Quite a provocation. Enticingly, the gallery has suggested that the latter body of work is a direct continuation of Ackermann’s tremendous “Fire by Days” series, first exhibited at Hauser & Wirth’s now defunct Piccadilly space in 2012. Anyone who saw this
landmark show will recall a series of large, blotchy and scintillatingly kinetic paintings that took shape after Ackermann accidentally slopped a vat of paint onto the floor of her studio. Taking that as the start point of her process, she produced a showcase that seemed to charge the room with energy. “Turning Air Blue” will apparently replace the bold colors of that series with pastel hues — an intriguing move, to be sure, but one that inspires no end of curiosity as to the result. —DIGBY WARDE-ALDAM from left:
B OT H T H E I M AG E S © R I TA AC K E R M A N N . C O U R T E S Y T H E A R T I S T A N D H AU S E R & W I R T H
Rita Ackermann’s Nude 21, 2017. Oil on board; Nude Turning Air Blue 3, 2017. Oil on board.
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Jean Dubuffet at Pace Gallery has never lacked for critical plaudits, but until relatively recently, his work has never quite commanded the collectable cachet of artists with equivalent art historical influence. However, as Tamara Corm, director of Pace London, puts it, the market is now “waking up” to his significance — a fact reflected by the increasing prominence of his work at major international art fairs. “People now are getting it about Dubuffet: that he’s certainly one the 10 most influential artists of the 20th century, without question,” Pace president Marc Glimcher has said. And he should know. Fifty years ago, Dubuffet cut ties with his long-term dealer Pierre Matisse to join Marc’s father, the then-26-year-old Arne Glimcher’s nascent roster. The move was a risky one — Glimcher had established Pace less than seven years before — but it paid off. Dubuffet remained with the gallery for the rest of his life. Now, the dealership’s palatial
London outpost, located just behind the Royal Academy, is to stage a major Dubuffet exhibition that is, somewhat unbelievably, the first significant London show devoted to the artist since his death in 1985. The display will feature a selection of paintings from his “Théâtres de mémoire” series, realized between 1975 and 1978. For this late body of work, Dubuffet exploited the medium of collage, cutting and pasting what, for him, represented evocative images into his compositions. To simplify it down to a phrase, the title appears to reveal his motive: Memories jostling together to dictate the narrative of his — and our — own memories. —DIGBY WARDE-ALDAM clockwise from top right:
Jean Dubuffet’s Dramatisation, January 12, 1978. Acrylic on glued paper mounted on canvas (42 sections), 210 x 328 cm; Séquence XVIII, April 2, 1979. Acrylic on paper (5 sections); 35 x 25.5 cm; Scène et site, October 27, 1979. Acrylic on paper (4 sections), 51 X 70 cm
© A DAG P, PA R I S A N D DAC S , LO N D O N 2 017
JEAN DUBUFFET
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TO P : P R E S S A S S O C I AT I O N P H OTO; B OT TO M : C O P Y R I G H T: DA N I E L B U R E N . C O U R T E S Y: L I S S O N GA L L E R Y
Daniel Buren’s ‘Pile Up: High Reliefs. Situated Works’ at Lisson Gallery “PILE UP: HIGH RELIEFS. Situated works,’’ an installation by the French conceptual artist Daniel Buren, will be on view at the Lisson Gallery in London from September 22 through November 11. Buren (born March 25, 1938) is known for his site-specific works, often involving contrasting stripes, and this exhibition follows a 2007 show at Lisson titled “Hauts-Reliefs, situated works.” The works in the upcoming exhibition are made from aluminium blocks, some painted, some with mirror-like surfaces, structured to create configurations in the gallery, a space Buren has been using periodically for installations since the 1970s. Buren’s work is also being celebrated in an exhibition at Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, Colombia, on view through January 7, 2018. above:
Daniel Buren with his permanent artwork “Diamonds and Circles,” works ‘in situ’ commissioned by Art on the Underground at Tottenham Court Road Station, London left:
A view of an installation by Daniel Buren at Lisson Gallery, London, 1976
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BERLIN
precedes it: as a vibrant city bursting with artists, galleries and museums. And yet the international art world only comes together here for one main reason: Berlin Art Week. Taking place from September 13 through 17 for the sixth time, the event and its maelstrom of exhibition private views, artist studio visits, performances, lectures, film screenings and award ceremonies will inevitably leave visitors feeling a mixture of elation and exhaustion. The week will kick off with a series of high-profile museum exhibition openings, the highlight of which will be the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein’s retrospective of the German filmmaker Harun Farocki, who made over 90 experimental films and died unexpectedly in 2014. The Berlinische Galerie will mount a show by the Italian artist Monica Bonvicini inspired by the
BERLIN’S REPUTATION
cities of Berlin and Istanbul — running parallel to the 15th Istanbul Biennale, in which the artist is also participating. The American photographer Danny Lyon will send a “Message to the Future” with his appropriately titled show at C|O Berlin, while the KW Institute’s presentation of the multi-media Dutch artist Willem de Rooij will draw upon cultural and historical artifacts, alongside socio-political commentaries from the past 20 years. Having closed to the public in 2008, Berlin Tempelhof Airport has become a public park after a successful referendum voted by the city’s citizens, and one of its defunct hangers will be used permanently by the Volksbühne. The theater’s artistic director, Chris Dercon, will formally open his program over Berlin Art Week, with a premiere by the French dancer and choreographer Boris Charmatz. above:
Danny Lyon, The March to Washington, August 28, 1963. (C/o Berlin. Danny Lyon. Message To The Future) left:
Miet Warlop, Dragging The Bone. (HAU Hebbel am Ufer Werkschau / Performances)
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F R O M TO P : © DA N N Y LYO N / M AG N U M P H OTO S . C O U R T E S Y GAV I N B R O W N ‘ S E N T E R P R I S E ; F OTO: R E I N O U T H I E L
Berlin Art Week
In a bid to strengthen the art market in Berlin — which is developing slowly but remains lackluster compared with Basel, New York and London — the fair art berlin contemporary (abc), now in its 10th year, has recently merged with Art Cologne. Renamed Art Berlin, it will open in the old train depot Station Berlin on September 14, bringing together 110 international galleries from over 16 countries including Australia, Switzerland, Austria, the United Kingdom, the United States and France. “Berlin’s art market keeps growing,” said Maike Cruse, the fair’s director. “Besides many collectors from other German cities and from all over the world moving here,
there are many young people starting to buy.” She added that “people from the startup scene in Berlin, and also DJs are regulars at our events and have a high affinity to art and culture. This is a very different scene from families who have been buying for generations, but it’s coming.” Art Berlin will widen its scope to include 20 very young galleries and 16 galleries presenting Post-war and Modern art. Booths of local players to watch out for include Gillmeier Rech, a gallerist duo who will show the emerging artists Jasmin Werner, Jim Thorell, Lindsay Lawson and Max Schmidtlein; Future Gallery, a space focused on post-internet art that will bring
Jon Rafman; Galerie Neu, presenting the work of Emily Sundblad, the co-founder of the artist collective Reena Spaulings; and Supportico Lopez, which is presenting the Brazilian artist Adriano Costa. In addition, the fair’s VIP program of events includes studio visits with Tomas Saraceno, Peles Empire and Karin Sander; contemporary art-based performances by Vanessa Safavi, Sophie Reinhold, Lisa Holzer and Annabel Daou; and lectures by the German painter Uwe Henneken and the Spanish multimedia artist Eli Cortinas, whose practice examines cinematic memory. —LOUISA ELDERTON clockwise from left:
C LO C K W I S E F R O M TO P R I G H T: P H OTO: S T E FA N KO R T E ; L A M YA GA R GA S H / GA L E R I E T H E T H I R D L I N E ; P H OTO: R O M A N M Ä R Z , © N AT H A L I E D J U R B E R G / VG B I L D - K U N S T, B O N N 2 017
A view of the fair art berlin contemporary, 2016; Portrait of a Nation, by Lamya Gargash, Diana, 2012, from the series “Im Spiegel.” Diptychon C-Print, 114 X 76 cm; Installation view of work by Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg with works from Willem de Kooning from Frieder Burda Collection
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‘Felix Kiessling: Neuordnung II’ at Alexander Levy Rangipo Desert in New Zealand to Spain’s lush vegetation in the Parque Nacional de Cabañeros. In the images, a metal pipe has been inserted at both places: “Erddurchstechung” (Global Piercing, 2017) envisages a piercing that spikes right through, adorning the land. With “Erdtangente” (Earth Tangent, 2017) it is an imagined 4,000-meterlong line that touches the land at only one point. A tripod will stand in the gallery, with another in the forest at Berlin’s edge, an aluminium pole resting upon each to represent this line’s trajectory. We exist in a universe bound by the laws of physics, within a world where sea, sky and land frame our everyday movements. For Kiessling, these are merely springboards from which to see the cosmos differently, re-evaluating how we might behave within it. —LOUISA ELDERTON
above:
Erddurchstechung (Tool), 2017 by Felix Kiessling. left:
Erddurchstechung (New Zealand ), Process foto (3), 2017.
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VISUALIZE YOURSELF WATCHING the Earth from space. As the planet spins, three lines are visible. One spears the planet; another merely grazes the ground’s surface; and the last creates a hole that penetrates terra firma. This is an example of how the German artist Felix Kiessling’s imagination works, and has nourished his new multimedia works being exhibited at the Berlin-based gallery Alexander Levy from September 9 through November 11. The show is titled “Neuordnung II” (New Order II), and follows the artist’s 2010 gallery presentation of the same name to envisage an alternative way of interacting with the Earth. Kiessling hopes to overcome the world’s existing physical boundaries by probing at its scientific limits. A series of photographs represent opposite sides of the globe, from the dry sands of the
Gordon Matta-Clark at Galerie Thomas Schulte with the estate of Gordon Matta-Clark since 1993, Galerie Thomas Schulte will open its 10th exhibition of the American artist’s work from September 9 through November 4. The gallery previously examined aspects of Matta-Clark’s oeuvre including drawings, films and his treatment of the city, while this time it looks at his relationship to architecture. Matta-Clark (1943-1978), who studied the subject at Cornell University in New York and the Sorbonne in Paris, was renowned for reinterpreting what architecture could be. For example, his “buildingcuts” saw abandoned structures being literally dissected with saws during the late 1970s. The artist described this practice as a form of “anarchitecture,” admonishing the functional aspect of architecture by giving buildings an alternative meaning. The gallery founder Thomas Schulte describes how this exhibition is “about looking at the work and trying to understand Matta-Clark’s
A L L I M AG E S © T H E E S TAT E O F G O R D O N M AT TA - C L A R K , N E W YO R K , C O U R T E S Y T H E E S TAT E O F G O R D O N M AT TA - C L A R K , N E W YO R K , GA L E R I E T H O M A S S C H U LT E , B E R L I N , A N D DAV I D Z W I R N E R , N E W YO R K
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approach towards architecture from a general position of where the human should be within architecture; about social aspects in architecture and the development of the city; about his architectural planning and drawing; and also about these ideas within his artistic and sculptural practice.” Matta-Clark was concerned with the possibilities of freedom that architecture could offer, as opposed to sheltering people in isolated entities. The idea of opening up areas or suspending people within space is expressed in the exhibition’s largescale photographs of “Jacob’s Ladder,” conceived for Documenta 6 in 1977. Further highlights will include a “Garbage Wall” sculpture, a fourmeter high partition that will be installed in the corner space, which sprung from the idea of homeless people being able to build their own shelters using discarded matter and cement; and a rare sculpture from a German private collection, a bronze floor cut-out that directly references the building-cuts. —LOUISA ELDERTON
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Jacob’s Ladder, 1977. Silver dye bleach print (Cibachrome), 101 X 76.2 cm below:
Sky Hook (Study for a balloon building), 1978. Pencil on paper, 23 X 28 cm
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Melike Kara solo at Peres Projects figures in the German artist Melike Kara’s paintings can make for intense viewing, directly returning the watcher’s gaze. With her exhibition at Peres Projects, which runs September 7 through October 27, a new group of paintings on canvas using acrylic and oil stick are complemented by chiseled wooden sculptures. Interconnected people are depicted floating, sitting, lying, crawling, stretching and kneeling: hands overlapping thighs, a foot resting upon a mouth, fingers tickling a forehead. What do they have in common? Mask-like faces, through which appear
THE STARING, HAUNTING
penetrating black pupils. Kara often works on large-scale canvases of over two by two meters, and her naïve, even cartoonish aesthetic sees bold, graphic outlines softened by broader washes of pure color. Although Kara studied under the guidance of the artist Rosemarie Trockel at the Dusseldorf Art Academy, it is the influence of Pablo Picasso’s African period that can be felt in her practice. His love of ethnographic sculptures at the turn of the 20th century shaped the female forms in his masterpieces such as “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (1907). These are echoed in Kara’s own paintings, innovatively
reinterpreted as anonymous, androgynous beings from the 21st century. While her works are ostensibly outward looking, the dealer Javier Peres said: “In this new series I see a new direction: more introspective. I think her works always reflect what is happening in her life, what she’s feeling about the state of the world. She has very strong and powerful sensory connections.” The artist transfers this internal emotional state into her objects, and you can feel it pouring back out through their eyes. —LOUISA ELDERTON
from left:
It’s easy to say, 2017, by Melike Kara. Aquarelle, pastel sticks and oil sticks on canvas, 80 X 60 cm;
I M AG E S C O U R T E S Y P E R E S P R O J E C T S , B E R L I N . P H OTO G R A P H E R : M AT T H I A S KO L B
Global Warming, 2017. Aquarelle, pastel sticks and oil sticks on canvas, 80 x 60 cm
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Jon Rafman’s ‘Dream Journal ’16-’17’ at Sprüth Magers the destruction of Berlin’s Pariser Platz in 2016 for his virtual reality work at the ninth Berlin Biennale, the Canadian artist Jon Rafman returns to the city with an equally trippy animation. “Dream Journal ’16 – ’17” will be mounted in Sprüth Magers’ ground-floor gallery from September 16 through October 28, an immersive hour-long video installation complete with sculptural chairs in which viewers can recline. The project began life as a series of erotic dream recordings. Rafman then became interested in the idea of dreaming more generally, unconscious fantasies creating otherworldly characters that move seamlessly between strange scenarios. Using primitive animation software, his non-linear narrative sees two intrepid
protagonists travelling through a Dantelike journey where they battle with albino red-eyed zombies, dance beneath the ultraviolet lights of a club and suckle directly from the udder of a cow. Rafman’s practice looks at the influence of technology on society, examining the Internet as a space for avatar lives, subcultures, sexual fantasies and violence — and their aesthetic potential. During a period in history when digital saturation see us rapidly flicking between different screens and apps, he cites the rise of virtual reality and IMAX theaters, which force viewers to engage in individual moments – albeit digital ones. This exhibition will recreate this sense of theatrical immersion, inviting viewers into a space of celestial interior design with
anthropomorphized seating that has human characteristics, the inorganic coming to life. It acts as a window into the uncanny enormity of the World Wide Web, where you can step in, live out your wildest fantasies and then pretend that it was all a dream. —LOUISA ELDERTON
Dream Journal May 2016 - February 2017 (Film still), 2017. Video installation, single channel video, 32 theatre chairs, foam, resin, acrylic, wood. Music by Oneohtrix Point Never and James Ferraro, dimensions variable, 58:57 min
© J O N R A F M A N . C O U R T E S Y T H E A R T I S T A N D S P R Ü T H M AG E R S
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Works from Richard Prince’s Super Group series, 2017.
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Richard Prince’s ‘Super Group’ at Galerie Max Hetzler THE AMERICAN ARTIST Richard Prince is no stranger to controversy. His appropriation of imagery has caused him to be involved in a series of copyright cases over the years, not least the current one looming large for his 2014 series “New Portraits,” where other people’s Instagram photos are printed on huge canvases. But for his first exhibition with Galerie Max Hetzler, which will be mounted across their two galleries in Berlin’s Charlottenberg district from September 16 through October 28, it is Prince’s own historical visual repertoire that he references and reproduces. Playfully titled “Super Group,” the exhibition refers to bands comprising musicians who have already assumed superstar status through their former acts — a fitting wink at the past lives of people and images. Fifty paintings are on view, from 2013–2017, many of which are covered with both real and scanned record sleeves. These are closely tiled to recall music halls of fame, where one record follows another, and have been attached to the stretched canvas surfaces using staples and glue.
Most of the works are named after the show’s title, and in a slightly older piece, “Super Group” (2015), raw canvas remains visible beneath the vinyl’s holes, accompanied by a spattering of chaotic paint marks that recall the dynamic approach of Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock. Slate grey, turquoise blue, mustard yellow and raspberry red are some of the colors that jostle for attention, overpowered by the great swathes of papal purple washed into the top right-hand corner. Overlaid are the names of groups including The Doors, The Cramps, Public Enemy and The Wailers, scrawled in white oil stick. As such, Prince continues to explore his ongoing fascination with American culture and the search for iconic stardom that it encourages. Collage is used on a number of large-scale portrait works, which are just under two meters in height, combining photographs, posters, magazine covers and even bras with ink jet, acrylic and oil stick. “Black Bra (Super Group)” (2017) sees endlessly repeated record covers depicting the fastening and unfastening of the straps of a black bra,
modulated with variations of white and black paint and the application of a real white bra. The artist’s own flirtation with musical fame is humorously referenced, having been a member of a two-person rock band called Black Bra (one strap for each member?). Indeed, it is Prince’s self-appropriation that underscores many of the works on show, in particular the cartoonish figures from his “Hippy Drawings” of the early 2000s. Many of these are printed on canvas, before being cut out and collaged upon the surface. In another titular work dated 2017, numerous figures stand staring, against a rich black background. They are portrayed in bright, garish colors including tangerine, scarlet red and canary yellow, and while some have scrawled monster faces or childlike googly eyes with tongues sticking out, others are rendered with a single, uninterrupted white outline. Having built his career upon questions of authorship and copyright, here Prince ventures back through his own oeuvre to become simultaneously the copier and the copied. —LOUISA ELDERTON
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PARIS
Klara Kristalova’s ‘Camouflage’ at Galerie Perrotin
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clockwise from top left:
Left behind, 2017. View of the work at the artist’s studio, glazed stoneware, 98 X 35 X 27 cm; Alter egos, 2014. Glazed stoneware, 100 X 41 X 38 cm; Girl with branches, 2017. Glazed stoneware, 40 X 35 X 30 cm
© K L A R A K R I S TA LOVA / A DAG P, PA R I S 2 017. P H OTO : M A R TA T H I S N E R / C O U R T E S Y GA L E R I E P E R R OT I N
KLARA KRISTALOVA , born in Prague in 1967 and now based in a rural town north of Stockholm, draws on the imagery of northern European stories — such as those of Hans Christian Andersen, Selma Lagerlöf, and Gösta Berling — to construct dreamlike narratives in which adolescent girls and boys find themselves alone, physically altered, or out of place in nature. Her sculptures in bronze, ceramic, plaster, and wood have stunned the contemporary art world with figures that conjure folk tales, childhood fantasies, gothic novels, and, especially, good old-fashioned nightmares. By presenting her ceramics on plinths and in cabinets of curiosities, Kristalova has developed a language that balances nature and memory, trauma and lost childhood. From September 7 to October 7, “Camouflage,” her third exhibition, will be on show at the Galerie Perrotin in Paris. For “Camouflage,” Kristalova collaborated with the French florist Thierry Boutemy to create an immersive installation of works linked to gardens and nature. One room will be dedicated to drawings, while the others will include her painted ceramics and bronzes in which oversized heads of birds and flowers are grafted onto female bodies; young boys are given thin, fly-like wings; humans wear animal masks; and typically domesticated animals look distressed and incongruous. Rooted in the decorative craft traditions of 18th-century Meissen porcelain figurines, Kristalova’s works on display at Perrotin twist traditional techniques by manipulating glazes so they run and bleed into each other, conjuring a wonderfully confused, mixed aesthetic of painting and sculpture. Although she creates her bizarre figures from her studio in the Swedish countryside, it is from the most distressed, macabre parts of her mind that her work seems to truly spring. —CODY DELISTRATY
A L L I M AG E S P H OTO J U L I E N G R E M AU D. © VA L E N T I N C A R R O N . C O U R T E S Y T H E A R T I S T A N D K A M E L M E N N O U R , PA R I S/ LO N D O N
‘Valentin Carron: Céleste Témesta’ at Galerie Kamel Mennour RUDYARD KIPLING’S FAMOUS poem “If” sets out a series of tasks that, if accomplished, makes one a man (“if you can dream — and not make dreams your master,” he wrote). The Swiss artist Valentin Carron, for his part, has spent his career exploring what tasks must be achieved to become an artist. Carron, 40, is perhaps most famous for deconstructing national mythologies — especially the Swiss mythos — through rustic architectural details and iron shop signage. More recently he has begun to ask what it means to become an artist by undermining traditions of contemporary artmaking, dabbling in re-appropriation (which got him accused of plagiarism in 2014), re-thinking Pop Art, and making transparent the artistic production process — all the while taking on themes of power and politics. With “Céleste Témesta,” on view from September 8 to October 7 at the Galerie Kamel Mennour in Paris, Carron’s work will shift toward questioning the effects of our present-
day reality, which he sees as increasingly medicated and self-modified. Working in a variety of media — from oil paint to printed matter — Carron has created fragments from advertisements and artworks, collaged together so they appear nearly the same. More astounding, however, and further along in the gallery show, white walls bathed in bright light will illuminate what at first looks to be a set of ancient sarcophagi, but is in fact a series of replicas of stone watering troughs from Swiss villages, each one precisely copied by Carron. In creating these troughs, Carron seems to have found an answer to his question of what it means to become an artist. Taken from their original context and placed in the sober light of the gallery, his works can be seen most starkly — the marks of their pasts wholly apparent. Artistry, Carron seems to say, is the total illumination of death; it can only be seen keenly in the healthiest of light. —CODY DELISTRATY
from top right:
Not Titled Yet, 2017. Polystyrene, fibre, acrylic paint, acrylic resin, 300 X 116 X 53 cm; Not Titled Yet, 2017. Mixed media, 106 X 96 X 6 cm
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BEIJING
Cheng Ran’s ‘Diary of a Madman’ at Galerie Urs Meile THE TITLE OF THIS solo exhibition of Cheng Ran’s work (September 9 - October 22), a multi-video show curated by the artist, echoes a 1918 story by Lu Xun, which in turn references Nikolai Gogol’s short story “Diary of a Madman.” Both works track a man’s gradual descent into madness. Lu Xun’s story follows a man who thinks he sees signs of cannibalism in his family and in his neighbors, and even in the Confucian classics. Since these texts were long held as bastions of humanism in Chinese culture, Lu’s work amounts to a not-so-subtle critique of traditional Chinese culture, and a call to arms for a new culture based on Western and global ideas. Similarly, Gogol juxtaposes the ordinary and the eccentric — reality and the convoluted world of madness — in his short story, which follows a low-ranking civil servant who becomes increasingly alienated from the rest of society and out of touch with reality, and creates hallucinatory stories about the people and events in his life. Cheng Ran’s work, which appeared in
his first solo U.S. exhibition this summer at the New Museum in New York after a three-month residency there, brings to mind such forms of alienation. Cheng draws on both Western and Chinese influences to create video work that questions the relationship between substance and simulacra, and defamiliarizes the ordinary. The exhibition presents videos that take place in an imagined New York City where Americans, regardless of race, speak in Mandarin. In “The Bridge,” a hip young man walks across the Williamsburg Bridge, seems to realize the futility of his situation, takes off his jacket and glasses, asks in Mandarin, “Why am I here?” a few times. Eventually he decides to put on his jacket and glasses and continue walking, declaring “I do not turn around.” Nothing is ever quite as it seems, and Cheng’s references to existential conflict and eventual disillusionment force viewers to reconsider their own thoughts about ideas like purpose and true meaning. —CONSTANCE CHIEN Cheng Ran’s The Water Tower, 2016. Single channel HD video, color/ sound, 16:9, 5’54”, edition of 6 + 1 AP left:
The Circadian Rhythm, 2016. Single channel HD video, color/ sound, 16:9, 3’16”, edition of 6 + 1 AP
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‘Zhao Bandi: China Party’ at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art
from left:
Zhao Bandi’s Let Panda Fly (Still), 2013. 88’ 51”;
reputation in the past three decades as the ‘‘panda man’’ for his wry, sardonic pieces featuring himself in dialogue with stuffed panda bears. By appropriating a national symbol of China, the comic-like photo series “Zhao Bandi and the Panda” playfully critiques Chinese society and the establishment, engaging with current issues like unemployment and air pollution. Zhao and the toy pandas enact scenarios in which they appear to communicate with each other via speech bubbles or text banners in the photos. Sometimes the panda is a compatriot; sometimes, a lover or partner. Zhao has also recently been appropriating the language of statesponsored public service announcements in these panda dialogues, repurposing these banal messages in a delightfully humorous and absurd manner. “Block SARS, Defend the Homeland” features
the artist in faux military wear with a plastic assault weapon. Next to him is a panda, similarly posed. Above and below the image is the titular public service announcement in Chinese and English, bringing to mind the visual language of both communist propaganda and mass media advertisement. During the SARS Epidemic of 2003, and the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Zhao created a series of film and performance projects that used such institutional language to similar ends. The exhibition showcases the artist’s roots in social realism, presenting work that blurs the line between fiction and reality, and the easily enacted manipulations and transformations that can so quickly alter the significance of an image. —CONSTANCE CHIEN
I M AG E S C O U R T E S Y U L L E N S C E N T E R F O R C O N T E M P O R A R Y A R T ( U C C A)
Butterfly, 1990. Oil on canvas, 250 X 140 cm
‘‘CHINA PARTY,’’ a solo exhibition of the work of Zhao Bandi, showcases more than a dozen projects from 1987 to the present. Running through October 22, 2017, it will be the artist’s largest to date, and his first institutional solo show in China. Zhao’s practice, which reflects a tradition of social realism, is known for its personal engagement with China’s transformations in the past three decades. The works included span fashion design, video, film, performance and painting. Zhao’s work often finds itself at the intersection of art, advertisement, and political activism, and the artist has described social development as “a fantastic party” characterized by both joy and sorrow. Zhao has taken on topics as diverse as the 2004 SARS epidemic and the 2008 Beijing Olympics. He has built his
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THE FAURSCHOU FOUNDATION is presenting an exhibition focusing on the emerging genre of virtual reality (VR) art, in collaboration with Khora Contemporary, a for-profit VR production company created for artists. The show will run through January 27, and the foundation will show five VR pieces, one at a time, over the course of five months. From August 26 through September 29, Faurschou is presenting the work of the German artist Christian Lemmerz; from October 1 through October 27, the German-born, NY-based artist Erik Parker; from October 29 through November 24, the American artist Paul McCarthy; from November 26 through January 5, the American artist Tony Oursler; and from January 7 through 27, the Chinese artist Yu Hong. The advantages of VR art — its ability to immerse the viewer in the piece, altering the relationship between viewer and art — can often be a vehicle for dark, emotionally disturbing themes, and creative work that pushes such boundaries. At the 2017 Venice Biennale, Faurschou collaborated with Khora Contemporary to present “La Apparizione,” which will be on view at the foundation. It forced the viewer to confront a burning corpse representing Jesus Christ, dripping in golden blood and “raining” embers. Paul McCarthy’s “CSSC VR experiment ‘what is your name?,’ ” a piece created especially for the Biennale show, pushed its way into viewers’ personal space, forcing them to become protagonists in an interaction between two female characters named Mary and Eve. The gallery will also feature a work by McCarthy, “C.S.S.C. Coach Stage Stage Coach VR experiment Mary and Eve,” that will take part in the same “universe” involving Mary and Eve. —CONSTANCE CHIEN from top:
Installation view of New Media Virtual Reality by Paul McCarthy; Mary and Eve, 2017. Virtual Reality, C.S.S.C. Coach Stage Stage Coach VR Experiment
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F R O M TO P : P H OTO BY A N D E R S S U N E B E R G. © FAU R S C H O U F O U N DAT I O N ; C O U R T E S Y T H E A R T I S T, H AU S E R & W I R T H , X AV I E R H U F K E N S A N D K H O R A C O N T E M P O R A R Y. © PAU L M C C A R T H Y A N D K H O R A C O N T E M P O R A R Y
‘Virtual Reality Art’ at Faurschou Foundation
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John Henderson’s ‘re-er’ at Galerie Perrotin
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JOHN HENDERSON, a young American abstract painter, is known for his minimalist creations in hues like burnished metal, sky blue and rust red — perhaps reflecting the colors of his native Minnesota. On closer inspection, his works have what he describes as a “raw patina,” a slightly rough edge that calls to mind crumbling fresco and unfinished canvases. Galerie Perrotin has championed the Chicago-based artist he since was in his 20s. He was showcased at Perrotin’s then-new Hong Kong space in 2013, followed by solo shows in New York in 2014, and Paris in 2016. Now 32, he returns to Hong Kong this autumn with his second solo show in this city, named “re-er” (September 1 – November 11). According to exhibition materials by the critic Daniel Szehin Ho, the show’s title combines the prefix “re-“ (as in “re-new” or “re-tract) and the suffix “-er” (as in “flat-er”). “re-er” will include both Henderson’s more traditional canvas work, plus a new series called “Reticle (model).” For these new works, Henderson covers fiberboard panels “with thick white impasto strokes overlaid by blue grids of different scales” — basically creating frames within frames. (The word “reticle” refers to the net of fine lines in an optical device or eyepiece.) As Ho writes, “these paintings also evince an awareness of how paintings are viewed — these days, more often than not through the camera of a mobile phone.” —JOYCE LAU
John Henderson’s Reticle (model 00) (detail), 2017. Acrylic painting, gesso, printed ink, MDF panel, 45.7 X 58.4 cm
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Wang Gongxin solo ‘Rotation’ at White Cube OVER THE past 20 years, Wang Gongxin has produced an impressive body of striking video art which has shown all over the world. But for “Rotation,” his latest solo show at White Cube’s gallery in Hong Kong, he has decided to re-exhibit works from the beginning of his career in the mid-‘90s. Wang, now 57, was part of a breakthrough generation of Chinese artists that included video pioneers like Zhang Peili. They were the first to attend university after the Cultural Revolution; the first to study and show in the West; and the first to experiment with moving images and projection.
Much has happened in China — in politics, and in debates over the freedoms of speech and artistic expression — in two decades. And viewed in 2017, the objects used in Wang’s mid-‘90s installations — an empty chair, a bare lightbulb hanging over what might be an interrogation room — take on new meaning. In “Dialogue” (1995), two lightbulbs hang over a table covered in watered-down black ink. In “Unseatable” (1995), four empty chairs face each other, under the stark light of a similar bare bulb. In “Baby Talk” (1996), videos of the faces of doting parents and grandparents are projected onto an old-
fashioned baby’s crib. But the sound is turned off — you can’t hear their voices — and the images are surrounded by the bed’s metal cell-like bars. “Rotation” also includes new works from 2017, some of which echo those from two decades ago. The bare lightbulb is back, suspended over a rough wooden bench. So is the rusty crib, now with a puffed up, yellowed mattress emitting an eerie light from within. With this show, Wang completes an artistic cycle he began at the start of his career. —JOYCE LAU
© THE ARTIST AND WHITE CUBE
Dialogue, 1995. Metal container, wooden table legs and motor, 300 X 100 X 89 cm
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Shop now on BLOUINSHOP.com The Art of Living, Curated by Our Editors
Courtesy ARTEMEST
curated by
GALLERY LISTINGS ACA Galleries 529 West 20th Street 5th floor New York, NY 10011 +1 (212) 206-8080 [email protected] www.acagalleries.com Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday 11-6 “Peace: Love, Rock and Revolution,” photographs by Jim Marshall (1936-2010), September 6-30
Acquavella Galleries 18 East 79th Street New York, NY 10075 +1 (212) 734-6300 [email protected] www.acquavellagalleries.com Gallery Hours: Monday-Saturday 10-5 Jacob El Hanani: “Linescape,” September 8-November 17 “Three Dimensions: Modern and Contemporary Approaches to Relief and Sculpture,” September 8November 17
Debra Force Fine Art
522 West 19th Street New York, NY 10011 +1 (212) 414-1169 [email protected] www.chambersfineart.com Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday10-6 “Transitions:” Lao Tongli, Dong Yuan, Lam Tung Pang, on view through September 2 Yang Jiechang: “The Whip,” September 7-October 17
13 East 69th Street Suite 4F New York, NY 10021 +1 (212) 734-3636 [email protected] www.debraforce.com Gallery Hours: Monday-Friday 10-6, Saturday by appointment Colorful impressions featuring works by Charles Burchfield, William Glackens, Abbott Fuller Graves, Alexander Harrison, Frederick Childe Hassam, Albert Herter, George Hitchcock, Winslow Homer, Lawton Parker, Jane Peterson, Edward Pothast and Maurice Brazil Prendergast, among others, on view through September 22
Chambers Fine Art
SANFORD BIGGERS “BAM (for Yvette),” 2016, HD video, dimensions variable, 59 seconds Image Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen. ©Sanford Biggers.
Red No. 1-D, Caochangdi Beijng, 100015 China +86 10 5127 3298 [email protected] www.chambersfineart.com Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Sunday 10-6 Yan Shanchun: “A Decade of Paintings and Prints,” September 23November 16
Crown Point Press
525 West 22nd Street New York, NY 10001 +1 (212) 445-0051 [email protected] www.amy-nyc.com Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday 10-6 Franklin Evans: “paintingpainting,” September 7-October 7
Boesky East 507 West 24th Street New York, NY 10011 +1 (212) 680-9889 [email protected] www.marianneboeskygallery.com Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday 10-6 Sanford Biggers: “Selah,” September 7-October 21
Boesky Gallery 509 West 24th Street New York, NY 10011 +1 (212) 680-9889 [email protected] www.marianneboeskygallery.com Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday 10-6 Diana Al-Hadid: “Falcon’s Fortress,” Sept 16-Oct 21
Boesky West 100 South Spring Street Aspen, CO 81611 +1 (212) 680-9889 [email protected] www.marianneboeskygallery.com Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday 11-7, Sunday 12-5 John Houck: “Tenth Mountain,” July 27-Oct ober 1
Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe
Chambers Fine Art
20 Hawthorne Street San Francisco, CA 94105 +1 (415) 974-6273 [email protected] www.crownpoint.com Gallery Hours: Monday 10-5, Tuesday-Saturday 10-6 “Tom Marioni at 80,” September 7October 28 Wayne Thiebaud: “Merriment,” September 7-October 28
Danese/Corey 511 West 22nd Street New York, NY 10011 +1 (212) 223-2227 [email protected] www.danesecorey.com Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday 10-6 William Tucker: New Sculpture and Drawings, September 8-October 14
Flowers 529 West 20th Street Suite 3E New York, NY 10011 +1 (212) 439-1700 [email protected] www.flowersgallery.com Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday 10-6 “No Lemon, No Melon,” Summer exhibition on view through September 2 Patrick Hughes: “Perspective in Perspective,” September 7October 14
Flowers 82 Kingsland Road London E2 8DP +44 20 7920 7777 [email protected] www.flowersgallery.com Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday 10-6 “Mono: An exhibition of Unique Prints,” on view through September 9 Nicola Hicks, September 20November 11
Flowers
Jack Shainman Gallery
Lehmann Maupin
21 Cork Street London W1S 3LZ +44 20 7439 7766 [email protected] www.flowersgallery.com Gallery Hours: Monday-Saturday 10-6 Freda Payne: “Returning,” on view through September 2 Julie Cockburn: “All Work and No Play,” September 6-30
513 West 24th Street New York, NY 10011 +1 (212) 645-1701 [email protected] www.jackshainman.com Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday 10-6 Andres Serrano: “Torture,” a selection of photographs from the 2015 series Torture, Sept 28-Nov 4
201 Chrystie Street New York, NY 10002 +1 (212) 254-0054 [email protected] www.lehmannmaupin.com Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday10-6
Gemini G.E.L. at Joni Moisant Weyl
524 West 24th Street New York, NY 10011 +1 (212) 337-3372 [email protected] www.jackshainman.com Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday 10-6 Leslie Wayne: “Free Exerience,” a selection of new works, September 7October 21
535 West 24th Street, 3rd Floor New York, NY 10011 +1 (212) 249-3324 [email protected] www.joniweyl.com Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday 10-6 Robert Rauschenberg: “Rookery Mounds” and Selected Series from the 60s & 70s. Presenting the historic 1979 series of 11 lithographs, marking the first time the artist utilized his own photography in a printmaking project. Also on view are rare Rauschenberg editions from the 60s & 70s. Through September 30
Hirschl & Adler 730 Fifth Avenue, 4th Floor New York, NY 10019 +1 (212) 535-8810 [email protected] www.hirschlandadler.com Gallery Hours: Monday-Friday 9:30-4:45 “License to Deceive:” With “alternative facts” dominating today’s news, “License to Deceive” explores how trickery has captivated artists and delighted viewers throughout history. Focusing on still life, landscape painting, sculpture, and the decorative arts from the 19th century to the present, this exhibition will investigate ways in which artists make illusion and deception an integral part of their work, extended through September 20
Jack Shainman Gallery
Jack Shainman: The School 25 Broad Street Kinderhook, NY 12106 +1 (518) 758 1628 [email protected] www. jackshainman.com Gallery Hours: Open by appointment “The Coffins of Paa Joe and the Pursuit of Happiness:” A group show including works by Kerry James Marshall, Jackie Nickerson, Margaret Kilgallen, David Altmejd, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Beverly Fishman, Wolfgang Tillmans, Lynette YiadomBoakye, and Malick Sidibe, on view through January 6
James Goodman Gallery 41 East 57th Street New York, NY 10022 +1 (212) 593-3737 [email protected] www.jamesgoodmangallery.com Gallery Hours: Monday-Friday 10-6 Modern and Contemporary Masters: Chamberlain, di Suvero, Dine, Hofmann, Motherwell, Moore, Wesselmann and others
Lehmann Maupin 536 West 22nd Street New York, NY 10011 +1 (212) 255-2923 [email protected] www.lehmannmaupin.com Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday10-6 Mary Corse, September 7-October 7
Lehmann Maupin 12 Pedder Street Hong Kong, China 852 2530 0025 [email protected] www.lehmannmaupin.com Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Friday 10-7, Saturday 11-7 Points of Departure,” on view through September 9
Leonard Hutton Galleries
790 Madison Avenue Suite 506 New York, NY 10065 +1 (212) 751-7373 [email protected] www.leonardhuttongalleries.com Gallery Hours: Monday-Friday 10-5:30, Saturday by appointment
Locks Gallery
600 Washington Square South Philadelphia, PA 19106 +1 (215) 629-1000 [email protected] www.locksgallery.com Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday 10-6 Jennifer Bartlett: “Pastels,” August 4September 16 Elizabeth Osborne: “Reflections: Painting Memory,” September 8October 14
GIL ELVGREN “I’ve Benn Spotted,” 1949, oil on canvas, 30 x 24 inches at Louis K. Meisel Gallery
Louis K. Meisel Gallery 141 Prince Street New York, NY 10012 +1 (212) 677-1340 [email protected] www.meiselgallery.com Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday 10-6 Louis K. Meisel Gallery specializes in Photorealist painting and the Great American Pin-Up
Marian Goodman Gallery 24 West 57th Street New York, NY 10019 +1 (212) 977-7160 [email protected] www.mariangoodman.com Gallery Hours: Monday-Saturday 10-6 Tony Cragg: Recent Sculptures, September 12-October 14
Michael Rosenfeld Gallery 100 Eleventh Avenue New York, NY 10011 +1 (212) 347-0082 [email protected] www.michaelrosenfeldart.com Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday10-6 Barbara Chase-Riboud: “Malcolm X: Complete,” September 9November 4
Mnuchin
Roberts and Tilton
Samar Albader
45 East 78th Street New York, NY 10075 +1 (212) 861-0020 [email protected] www.mnuchingallery.com Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday 10-6 “Minimalism and Beyond,” September 12-Oct ober18
5801 Washington Boulevard Culver City, CA 90232 +1 (323) 549-0223 [email protected] www.robertsandtilton.com Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday 11-6 or by appointment Jeffrey Gibson, September 9 October 14 Daniel Joseph Martinez: “Pacific Standard Time LA/LA,” September 9 - December 16
+965 24819767 [email protected] [email protected] www.samaralbader.com
Nancy Hoffman Gallery 520 West 27th Street New York, NY 10001 +1 (212) 966-6676 [email protected] www.nancyhoffmangallery.com Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday 10-6 Ilan Averbach: “The Lily Pond,” September 7-October 21
Ronald Feldman Fine Arts 31 Mercer Street New York, NY 10013 +1 (212) 226-3232 [email protected] www.feldmangallery.com Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday 10-6 “Cassils: Monumental,” September 16October 28
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Sperone Westwater 257 Bowery New York, NY 10002 +1 (212) 999-7337 [email protected] www.speronewestwater.com Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday10-6 William Wegman: “Dressed and Undressed,” September 5-October 28 Tom Sachs: “Objects of Devotion,” September 5-October 28 Van Doren Waxter 23 East 73rd Street New York, NY 10021 +1 (212) 445-0444 [email protected] www.vandorenwaxter.com Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday 10-6
Washburn Gallery New location in September: 177 Tenth Avene, New York, NY 10001 +1 (212) 397-6780 Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Sautrday 10-6 “The WPA,” September 14October 28
Winston Wächter Fine Art 530 West 25th Street Ground floor New York, NY 10001 +1 (212) 255-2718 [email protected] winstonwachter.com Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday10-6
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Claude Monet, Woman with a Parasol - Madame Monet and Her Son, 1875
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