Irony and Intimacy Intersect in Lovers in the Backseat @ FeldbuschWiesnerRudolph in Berlin

“‘Lovers in the Backseat’ refers to romantic and intimate relationships. Everything we do happens because we can't help it: Breathing, living, loving and creating art, these are our common elementary needs." (A.N. & R.S.)

The connection between the works of Robert Schittko and Anna Nero lies in the exploration of identity, playfulness and irony, as well as a slight sexiness that resonates in both artistic practices. They take the exhibition visitor on the "back seat", behind their shoulders, on the motorway, country road or overtaking lane - always on the way, but where are they actually going...? Both Nero and Schittko harbor an aversion to self-referential art. Instead, they explore the self in their studios and transform their lives into a vivid artistic practice. Each in their own way: Schittko's sculptural and photographic art focuses on the development of their own identity. Nero provokes with her abstract-representational paintings and ceramics.

Lovers in the Backseat is on view through January 6th at FeldbuschWiesnerRudolph, Jägerstraße 5, 10117 Berlin.

Avery Wheless Celebrates the Vulnerability of Being in a New Environment with "Precipice" @ Katikía in in Monemvasia, Greece

Katikía presents Precipice, an inaugural residency exhibition of LA-based artist Avery Wheless. The exhibition was completed during the artist’s time in Monemvasia, Greece. Kicking off in Athens, Wheless explored ancient Greek art history and uncovered the emerging contemporary art scene within the capital's numerous galleries and artist studios. While creating her own body of work, Wheless produced an art curriculum that she taught at the town's local public elementary school. She worked with students and introduced them to a new approach to painting. The exhibition will be displayed in a historical seaside ruin built into the cliffs along the Castro—a medieval town—for the residents and visitors of Monemvasia to view. 

The movement of bodies in Wheless’s energetic and tender paintings originate from Wheless’s history with dance, particularly ballet. Delicate movements command power and space while exploring the complexities of personal and social impacts of the female form.

“My works are often a reflection on how I relate to others. They explore how I see myself and take up space, finding comfortability while often feeling exposed and vulnerable. In this residency, I have experienced what it means to be removed, but also present in an unfamiliar environment. While observing people, I interact and engage, but also have an extra level of outsiderness as a viewer. It's been interesting to be seen by new people in a new place, while taking in new information, colors, landscapes and attitudes. There is also an obvious part of me which feels removed from those at home. I have been extremely aware of the precipice of transition that I feel myself in. Unsure of what is next while experiencing what I am unaccustomed to. I am grateful for a fresh space and place of unknown to explore. I have been processing a mix of reverence and grief of letting go and acknowledging the beauty of reconnecting with myself."

Precipice celebrates being vulnerable within a new environment. Many of the paintings are from scenes I have experienced here. Whether food, people, colors or landscape, I have pulled from my surroundings as an observer. Some works I have painted myself into. In these pieces I am involved, yet removed. The resulting images celebrate and mourn the capacity to hold and be held. They are a processing of what it means to exist within my body while acknowledging there is a falling apart while simultaneously being held together--thinking about how this relates to water and its capacity to suppress, but also buoy. How water allows us to float and be supported while touching everything and nothing at once. These works allow an openness to magic and spiritual awareness that is easy to find when things are fresh and new.”

Precipice is on view by appointment through August at Katikía

Izumi Kato's Homunculus Monsters Interrogate the Nature of Our Mortality @ Perrotin Paris

For any connoisseur of Japanese art, the ambiguous phenomena that have characterized Izumi Kato's work for more than two decades may seem familiar. Yet there is never any complete correspondence, only omnipresent echoes, the distinctive signs of a highly singular artistic universe.

Since the 2000s, Kato’s "untitled" sculptures, paintings, and drawings have featured hybrid figures (their limbs and breath producing vegetal or human shoots), budding flowers (often lotuses, the Buddhist flower par excellence, a symbol of purifying transformation plunging its roots into the mud), and other beings (human heads or homunculi hanging from bodies like clusters of ganglia). In the latter case, the multiplication is truly “monstrous;” the lotuses don’t proliferate. But they spring from an exhalation that evokes another type of Japanese art, the He-Gassen emaki (literally "fart scroll"), some of which show yokai fighting in a mad battle of winds (like the "Shinnô scroll" in the Hyôgo History Museum). The strange small creatures that spring up like ganglia from the larger figures also recall battles against monstrous animals, like the heroic struggle against the giant tarantula Tsuchi-gumo, at the end of which thousands of human skulls emerge from the spider’s severed neck. The play of mirrors between Kato's work and Japanese art creates limitless perspectives.

The distinctive appearance of his faces, with their enlarged eyes, often without pupils, the whole shaped by nose and mouth, the impression of being covered with ritual makeup, all this has numerous echoes in the fantastical prints produced in the 19th century, during the latter part of the Edo period and the Meiji era of Imperial Japan (1868-1912). Kato's work must be considered in relation to Utagawa Kunyoshi’s prints (1797-1861), one of the masters of the genre. In the work of Kunyoshi, the yokai are startling hybrids with bulging eyes, large jaws, and strange faces that seem like theatrical masks.

Looking at the hand-and-footless limbs of Kato's “characters,” one is reminded of Ichiyusai Kuniyoshi’s playful prints of "demon-shaped plants" (1844-1847). Yet, what sets Izumi Kato's creatures apart from all this pleasant, swaggering bluster is their silence. His work is characterized by a seriousness absent from the other works.

The totemic immobility of Izumi Kato's painted and sculpted works is strikingly melancholic. These figures are endless questions, beyond any specific place or time, as Japanese as they are ours, wherever we are. They challenge our gaze, drawing us in, interrogating what makes us mortal.

Izumi Kato is on view through July 29 @ Perrotin 76 Rue de Turenne.

Static: New Paintings By Vanessa Prager @ Diane Rosenstein Gallery In Los Angeles

Vanessa Prager’s recently completed series of oil paintings, Static, continues her exploration of sculptural impasto techniques and revisits 19th-century post-Impressionism in the 21st century. Prager’s new paintings pack a sensory and emotional impact, redefining perception in a high-def world. Her impasto pieces resist the quick take and allow us to discover the hidden treasure of the work itself; in these paintings, more is more. In this time of pandemic, when screens dominate as a means to work, play, connect and exist, Prager is the analog compass directing us back to the tangible. With big, heavy, drippy canvases and what can only be referred to as extreme painting, Prager rejects artificial crispness and reminds us how an abstract work can help us locate feelings so precisely.

Static is on view through April 10 @ Diane Rosenstein Gallery 831 N Highland Avenue, Los Angeles

Devendra Banhart's The Grief I Have Caused You @ Nicodim Gallery In Los Angeles

“Nothing is more gall-bitter than suffering, nothing more honey-sweet than having suffered.” 
— Meister Eckhart

The recursive abstracted forms within Devendra Banhart’s canvases are a non-hierarchical alphabet of allegories for the diminishment and destruction of ego. Each mouth, prick, eye and ass breaks apart and reconstructs itself until they become a collective commune of equally all-important, yet weightless pieces of the tantric universe. They are a cycle of mala beads through the fingers of time.

The Grief I Have Caused You is on view through March 20 @ Nicodim Gallery 1700 S Santa Fe Avenue, #160. photographs by Lani Trock

Chung Sang-Hwa: Excavations, 1964-78 @ Levy Gorvy in New York

Chung Sang-Hwa: Excavations, 1964–78 is an exhibition of paintings from a formative era of Chung’s five-decades-long career. It includes works from a crucial period in which the Korean master was immersed in the international avant-garde milieus of both Asia and Europe. The paintings illuminate the conceptual and technical trajectories that led Chung to the profoundly original, finely honed approach that defines the art of his mid and late career. By highlighting the eclectic transnational influences in which Chung was immersed throughout the 1960s and ’70s, the exhibition provides rare insight into the progression of his practice, in order to galvanize discourse surrounding Chung’s singular approach to the medium.

Excavations, 1964–78 is on view through January 18, 2020 @ Levy Gorvy 909 Madison Avenue New York. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Jasmine Nyende: Crested Crane @ AA|LA Gallery In Los Angeles

Through conversation, meditation, and rediscovery of “lost pasts,” Jasmine Nyende uses art to explore and mediate her mother’s southern American roots and her father’s Ugandan genealogy. Incorporating paintings, fiber arts, performance, poetry, meditation, spoken word, and embroidered ready-to-wear clothes, Nyende manifests an alluring confluence of body, identity, and ancestry.

Crested Crane materializes through Nyende’s use of fibers and manifests a particular mending of personal identity that echoes throughout the body of work. For Nyende, art is a way to speak to ancestors while asserting her own individuality. Specifically, the crocheted and knitted works relate to the American history of Black female labor in the fiber arts. The web of soft textiles act as connective tissue, binding the vibrant images and colorways into a complex yet comprehensive family narrative that would otherwise be inaccessible. Crested Crane is on view through December 14 at AA|LA 7313 melrose avenue, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Joshua Miller: Liquid Products and Frozen @ T293 Gallery In Rome

“There is a central character in these paintings, and it’s Painting or Language itself. It’s as if there were a being which put on many outfits and spoke in many voices in order to achieve it’s objective: communication. The story is ‘the history of painting.” Joshua Miller

‘Liquid Products and Frozen Form’is the first Italian exhibition of the American artist Joshua Miller (1981, Colorado, United States). Seven large canvases will lead the spectator on a path that, exploring the phenomenology of the visual language, assumes the form of an imagery atlas that will tell the history of painting. Drawing inspiration from popular culture, Miller paints simple and everyday objects with an unusual and original approach. The artist experiments with old techniques and juxtaposes varied pictorial styles to obtain an emotional and expressive structure which exposes the entire range of moods and personalities inherent to painting. Liquid Products and Frozen is on view through October 23 at T293 Via Ripense 6, Roma

Chris Hood Presents PARA @ Praz Delavallade in Los Angeles

Drawn from an archive of personal photographs, self-portraits, advertising imagery and anatomical studies, the figures that Hood paints seem to be in a trancelike state — dreaming, sleepwalking, or hypnotized — suggesting that the disparate images that make up the compositions may be organized by dream logic or governed by a series of undetermined associations. With “portal” vignettes of sunsets, caves, and mountains, the paintings create a telescopic sensation of simultaneous depth and flatness. These sly structural allusions to the devices of artificial perspective act in constant tension by disorienting interpenetrations of layered images and the flatness of the stained surface. Their chief interest is in the complication and the relinquishment of boundaries: between the individual and the archetypal; media and medium; the subjective and the collective; the front and the back of the canvas. What may appear as collage is revealed to be a collision, with the picture plane serving as an interface between the image and the imagined.

PARA is on view through November 9 at Praz Delavallade 6150 Wilshire Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90048. photographs by Marten Elder, courtesy of the gallery

Rebecca Morgan: Town And Country @ Asya Geisberg Gallery In New York

Rebecca Morgan: "Town and Country" shows the extent of Morgan's achievement in painting, with forays into printmaking and brass sculpture, new endeavors for the artist. With archly symbolic portraits and complex scenes, Morgan weaves a grand narrative of gendered subversion buttressed by broader societal scale. Morgan's characters straddle both the timelessness of morality tales, and the specific moment that we find ourselves in - redefining gender relations and reviewing historical representations in works from John Hughes movies, to stylized exemplars like Rubens and Fragonard, to Norman Rockwell's foundational Americana lore. While always emanating from a contemporary socio-political yet diaristic lens, Morgan's works now chart a wider continuum of referents. Archetypal characters strain against their roles, undermine fabricated notions of romance, and confront the hollowness and fear behind current masculinity, with both levity and tension. Town and Country is on view though November 2 at Asya Geisberg Gallery 537b West 23rd Street, New York. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Lenz Geerk: Mixed Blessings @ Roberts Projects In Los Angeles

Lenz Geerk is a figurative painter whose subjects of portraits, landscapes and still-lifes are portrayed in exceptional intensity and luminosity.He manipulates traditional techniques to bring distinct render to every figure through soft acrylic color. The nearly monochromatic palettes, only occasionally warmed by other colors, add an aura of heightened emotional tension. Geerk’s new series is an insightful examination into the undercurrent of the threat, uncertainty, and fear of the current day. Unlike “The Table Portraits”, Geerk’s first solo show with the gallery, there is no formal link between the individual works of this show. What ultimately connects the works on view is an underlying feeling of domestic suspense, fueled by an unsettling lack of faith in larger institutions. Mixed Blessings is on view through October 12 at Roberts Projects 5801 Washington Boulevard, Culver City, California. photographs courtesy of Roberts Projects

Celeste Rapone: Future Amateur @ Roberts Projects In Los Angeles

Through her paintings, Celeste Rapone invokes the willing suspension of disbelief and the engagement of suspicion aligned along particular interests or ideas communicated to us by the characters she portrays. Initially conceived as coping mechanisms for a future as a failed painter, Rapone’s portraits now tap into consequences of exposure: humiliation, vulnerability, self-doubt and self-deprivation. Her autobiographical characters –most often women–are proxies to her discomfort felt at new ideas and approaches, the doubt in her own representation and object-making, her inability to mediate attention once exposed to it, and the abstract possibilities opened up and emphasized by these failures. Future Amateur is on view through October 12 at Roberts Projects 5801 Washington Boulevard, Culver City, California. photographs courtesy of Roberts Projects

Gus Van Sant: Recent Paintings, Hollywood Boulevard @ Vito Schnabel Projects In New York

Recent Paintings, Hollywood Boulevard is Van Sant’s first solo painting exhibition in New York. On view is a series of large-scale watercolors on stretched linen that collapse dreamlike impressions of urban Los Angeles with specific narratives inspired by the people and events Van Sant has observed since establishing his home in the city in the 1970s. Recent Paintings, Hollywood Boulevard is on view through November 1 at Vito Schnabel Projects 43 Clarkson Street, New York. photographs courtesy of Vito Schnabel Projects

Trude Viken: Unmasked @ M+B In Los Angeles

Viken’s paintings describe the human psyche in bold and unflinching terms. On view is a selection of the artist’s small format works from her Diary Notes series. Originally intended as a visual daybook of self-portraits, over time it has evolved into a larger body of paintings that explore the medium's ability to convey interior moods and fantasies. The exhibition also showcases new large-scale paintings by Viken that have never before been shown in the US. Unmasked is on view through October 12 at M+B 612 North Almont Drive Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of M+B

Egan Frantz "Paintings" @ Team (gallery, inc.) In New York

Good paintings, those with intrigue, appeal and tension, ask us to hold competing and simultaneous understandings in mind, and contend with synchronized yet oppositional forces. At odds with the unexpectedness and complexity of Egan Frantz’s works is an effortlessness, an instinctive ease, vital in producing an image that is at once seemingly familiar and impossible to place. This is a show of new images, adamantly straightforward yet enigmatic, that manifest a proprietary power and charged presence. Paintings is on view through October 5 at Team (gallery, inc.) 83 Grand Street, New York. Photographs courtesy of Team (gallery, inc.)

Simone Fattal: Works and Days @ the New York MOMA

Simone Fattal: Works and Days brings together over 200 works created over the last 50 years, featuring abstract and figurative ceramic sculptures, paintings, watercolors, and collages that draw from a range of sources including ancient history, mythology, Sufi poetry, geopolitical conflicts, and landscape painting. Fattal’s work explores the impact of displacement, as well as the politics of archaeology and excavation, constructing a world that has emerged from history and memory. Both timeless and specific, Fattal’s work straddles the contemporary, the archaic, and the mythic.

Simone Fattal: Works and Days is on view through September 2 at MOMA 11 West 53 Street. photographs courtesy of MOMA

Jonas Wood @ Gagosian in New York

Jonas Wood combines art historical references with images of the objects, interiors, and people in his boldly colored graphics. In his new paintings and works on paper, Wood translates the three-dimensional world around him into pure color and line. The artist composes these works through a process of layering and collaging, using photography, projection, drawing, and then painting. Wood confounds expectations of scale and vantage point, causing the flat picture plane to bristle with an abstract charge.

Jonas Wood is on view through July 19 at Gagosian 555 West 24th Street, New York. photographs courtesy of Gagosian

Geraldo Perez Presents 'The Chicago Paintings' @ East Hollywood Fine Art In Los Angeles

The Chicago Paintings is a selection of paintings on canvas and phone books all made over the past 7 years. After being bought out of his New York apartment, Geraldo Perez moved to the suburbs of Chicago, Illinois and purchased a house, where he was able to convert his entire basement into his studio. The Chicago Paintings present a survey of memories lived and experienced from Perez’s birth in 1962 in the Dominican Republic, to his family’s emigration to New York six years later, and to his day-to-day experiences with intimacy, family, and transition. The paintings reflect on a chance encounter with Basquiat at Danceteria, studying under Jack Whitten and Dore Ashton at Cooper Union in the 2000’s, war and death in the DR, being a father, being brown, seeing the MOMA for the first time, making love, and so much more. The Chicago Paintings is on view through June 23 at East Hollywood Fine Art 4316 Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles. photographs by Lani Trock

Lorna Simpson Presents "Darkening" @ Hauser & Wirth In New York

Debuting a suite of new large-scale paintings, Lorna Simpson’s Darkening finds the artist returning to and building upon themes and motifs at the center of her practice: explorations focused on the nature of representation, identity, gender, race, and history. For more than 30 years, Simpson’s powerful works have entangled viewers in an equivocal web of meaning, drawing upon techniques of collage through the use of found materials, often culled from the pages of vintage Jet and Ebony magazines. In ‘Darkening,’ Simpson continues to thread dichotomies of figuration and abstraction with vast and enthralling tableaux that subsume spliced photos and fragmented text, abstracted beyond comprehension. Equally arresting and poetic, the paintings engage viewers with layers of paradox, capturing the mystifying allure of an arctic landscape in inky washes of blacks, grays, and startling blues. Darkening will be on view through 26 July at Hauser & Wirth 548 West 22nd Street, New York. photographs courtesy of Hauser & Wirth

Mi Kafchin Presents "Chemtrails" @ Nicodim Gallery In Los Angeles

Born only a few months after the Chernobyl Disaster in 1986, Romanian artist Mi Kafchin was inundated as a young child with fear-driven remedies that would help to cure the invisible but pervasive radioactive toxins that enveloped her region and in effect her being. Trust in aspirational progress or the security of big government would dissipate into that same air. The chemtrails that crisscrossed the sky above represented a direct and constant communication of this reality but banalized into a sublime of the everyday. This toxic cocktail of aluminum, barium and strontium militaristically seeded into our atmosphere successfully keeps society under control… at least, that is, until the EMF from 5G begins to vibrate our delicate bodies. This legacy of trepidation from sources governmental, paranormal and extraterrestrial has festered into a menacing ideological vortex of possibility, one looming large in the work of Mi Kafchin and mapped out here in her second solo exhibition at Nicodim Gallery.  Chemtrails is on view through June 1 at Nicodim 571 South Anderson Street, Los Angeles. photographs by Agathe Pinard