Tomás Saraceno In Collaboration: Webs Of Life @ Serpentine In London

Tomás Saraceno
Cloud Cities: Species of Spaces and Other Pieces*, 2023
Three clouds with cohabitational spaces for thirteen species and...
Courtesy the House Sparrow, Blue Tit, Robin, Starling, Barn Owl, Jackdaw, Great tit, Wren, Yorkshire Terrier,Domestic Short-hair Cat, Red Squirrel, Solitary Bees, Butterflies... with Tomas Saraceno

From 1 June to 10 September 2023, Serpentine will present Web(s) of Life, the first major exhibition in the UK of artist Tomas Saraceno and collaborators, including spider/webs; the communities of Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc, Argentina; spider diviners in Somit\ Cameroon; the ongoing research-driven community projects Aeroceneand Arachnophilia initiated by the artist; as well as the life forms of the Royal Parks.

Tomas Saraceno will create a porous environment where Serpentine's building and operations will respond daily to the immediate landscape of the surrounding park and weather conditions. It will bring together new and recent interactive works to propose how it is possible to take a more responsible, and responsive, approach to one's actions in relation to other people, interspecies co-habitation, and the climate injustices unfolding across the world. Challenging the ways in which exhibitions are conceived and enacted, Web(s) of Life will become a 'living organism' that responds to the weather outside and the gallery's unique location in the biodiverse habitat of the park and beyond.

Saraceno is a multimedia artist, who for more than two decades has produced a body of work that draws attention to our role in a complex network of relationships that make up an ecosystem. Web(s) of Life at Serpentine will delve into the many ways in which life forms, extractive technologies, and energy regimes are inextricably linked to climate injustice.

Tomás Saraceno
The birds will keep calling you, 2023
Twenty-one repurposed wood and glass cabinets, minerals, tokens, mobile phones, low consumption LEDs
Courtesy of Artist

Tomás Saraceno In Collaboration: Webs Of Life is on view until September 10th at the Serpentine at Serpentine South Gallery, Kensington Gardens, London W2 3XA

Tomorrow's Anxieties: Read Our Interview of Multi-Hyphenate Artist Jillian Mayer →

 
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Jillian Mayer gets stuck in your head. I still find myself randomly humming the tune to her pop song, “Mega Mega Upload,” even though it’s been ten years since I first saw the video she made for it. Her short, catchy video “I am your Grandma” has a cult following  on YouTube and TikTok and is so delightfully bizarre that it’s bound to be discovered by youngsters for decades to come. Her Slumpies, sculptural furniture designed to help people use their smartphones, are found in airports by travelers who don’t know her, only that her art helps them maintain comfort while staring into Instagram. 

Her latest show, TIMESHARE, likewise wedges its way into your psyche. It leaves me feeling unsettled, yet inspired. It feels urgent but timeless as it examines the impending collapse of society while climate change throws our functional-enough world into chaos and turmoil. Her in-progress mobile bunker recalls the highbrow living spaces of Buckminster Fuller and Andrea Zittell, but also elicits the vibe of the RVs and trailer parks—the most economical but lowbrow living spaces of the American landscape. Read more.

Gisela Colon: Meta Minimal @ Gavlak Los Angeles

Through her syncretic process of exploring and expanding upon past history, sculptor Gisela Colon has succeeded in creating sculptures that convey the fullest possible array of sensory and intellectual experience, projecting cosmic energy and power outwards into the world. With her astute practice of Organic Minimalism– an idiosyncratic sculptural language that imbues life-like qualities into reductive forms– Colon approaches her sculptural practice from the expansive perspective of phenomenological concerns: addressing the physical laws of the universe such as gravity, time, movement, energy and transformation. Colon’s oeuvre is the result of a synthesis of pointed historical reflection and visceral raw energy.

Colon’s practice of Organic Minimalism simultaneously expands and challenges the legacies of Light and Space, Minimalism, Kinetic and Latin American Op Art, merging industrial inertness with transformative biological mutability. Her sensual, gender-ambiguous sculptural forms further connect her practice to a history of female artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Yayoi Kusama, Linda Benglis and Judy Chicago. By channeling Bourgeois’ notions of sexualized energies and Chicago’s nascent feminist atmospheric works, Colon similarly posits her sculptures as vehicles for conversion of classic masculine forms into feminized power.

Meta Minimal will be on view throughout March 7, 2020 at Gavlak 1700 South Santa Fe Avenue, Suite 440, Los Angeles, CA. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Jasmine Thomas-Girvan & Chris Ofili: Affinities @ David Zwirner In London

Affinities is a two-person exhibition of work by Trinidad-based artists Jasmine Thomas-Girvan and Chris Ofili at the gallery’s London location. Featuring sculptural works by Thomas-Girvan alongside paintings by Ofili, Affinities brings to light the rich artistic conversation that exists between these two artists, arising both in response to their shared environment as well as an ongoing dialogue throughout the nearly two decades they have known each other.

Drawing alternately from Caribbean history, myth, ritual, literature, and her own experience, Thomas-Girvan’s poetically inflected works are grounded in the specificity of the Caribbean landscape and the region’s colonial past, but open out onto universal themes—most prominently, transformation and the construction of identity. Her sculptures and installations seamlessly weave together traditional supports, such as wood and bronze, with both found everyday objects and materials sourced from the natural environment, including shells, pieces of coral, palm fronds, and mangrove hairs, culled from a vast collection that she has amassed over time. The resulting assemblages, which cohere into singular visual statements, are at once familiar and fantastical, both venerating and working through a rich and complicated past. As Ofili notes: “Jasmine’s work tells beautiful and mysterious tales that are a combination of fragility and dread with a knowing nod towards alchemy and witchcraft of the past, present, and future.”

On view will be several large- and small-scale canvases by Ofili from a 2019 body of work devoted to the figures of Calypso and Odysseus from Homer’s Odyssey. Inspired in part by the music of Trinidad, where Ofili has lived since 2005, the artist has reimagined Calypso—traditionally represented as a deceptive femme fatale—as a striking mermaid, and he has visualised Odysseus as a beautiful, dark-skinned suitor. In the paintings, Ofili presents the characters with curving bodies, sumptuously spread out across the compositions and displayed in layered surfaces filled with arabesque vines and bubble-like forms. Known for his intricate, kaleidoscopic paintings and works on paper that deftly merge abstraction and figuration, Ofili’s recent works—vibrant, symbolic, and frequently mysterious—evoke the lush landscapes and local traditions of Trinidad. Affinities is on view through September 21 at David Zwirner 24 Grafton Street, London. Photographs courtesy of David Zwirner

Twenty Five Years: A Group Exhibition @ Peter Blake Gallery in Laguna Beach

The Peter Blake Gallery in Laguna Beach, California commemorates its twenty-fifth year with an exhibition of historic and recent West Coast Abstraction. Since 1993, Blake’s faithfulness to his creative vision has allowed him to champion West Coast Minimalist works from the sixties through today. Now the longest-running gallery exhibiting West Coast Minimalism to date, Peter has been a champion for the artists assembled into this category for the past twenty-five years. As these artists’ esteemed works have come under the spotlight on the global stage, the gallery’s anniversary offers a fitting occasion to revisit these historic works in a local setting. The exhibition brings together a presentation of works by Lita Albuquerque, Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Ron Cooper, Mary Corse, Tony Delap, Laddie John Dill, Joe Goode, James Hayward, Scot Heywood, Craig Kauffman, John McCracken, John M. Miller, Marcia Hafif, Ron Nagle, Helen Pashgian, Hadi Tabatabai, and De Wain Valentine to celebrate the gallery’s milestone anniversary.

“Twenty Five Years” is on view through August at Peter Blake Gallery 435 Ocean Avenue Laguna Beach, CA. photographs courtesy of the artists and Peter Blake Gallery

Liz Larner Presents "As Below, So Above" @ Regen Projects In Los Angeles

Liz Larner’s As Below, So Above is a selection of new works that demonstrate her ongoing examination into sculpture, painting, drawing, and ceramics. The environment – the personal and the entrenched – are set together in these artworks that reach for an understanding of vulnerability through what is and has been considered low and directed, made capital of, and endangered. As Below, So Above will be on view through June 22 at Regen Projects 6750 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Frank Stella Presents "Recent Work" @ Marianne Boesky Gallery In New York

Ranging from the monumental to the intimately-scaled, the featured sculptures capture Frank Stella’s ongoing exploration of the spatial relationships between abstract and geometric forms and the ways in which they behave in and engage with physical space. In these newest works, Stella combines interlocking grids with more fluid and organic lines, creating a dynamic interplay between minimalist and gestural visual vocabularies. Frank Stella: Recent Work will be on view from April 25 through June 22 across both of the gallery’s Chelsea locations at 509 and 507 W. 24th Street. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Charles Ray Presents "Two Ghosts" @ Matthew Marks Gallery In Los Angeles

The centerpiece of the exhibition is Charles Ray’s first work in stone, Two Horses (2019), a relief carved from a single block of Virginia granite. The sculpture is ten feet tall and fourteen feet wide and weighs more than six tons. A smaller work displayed on a pedestal, Mountain Lion Attacking a Dog (2018), is a hypothetical scene from the hills around Ray’s home in Los Angeles. Each animal has been machined from a solid block of aluminum, producing a reflective surface that enhances the work’s finely sculpted details. Two Ghosts is on view through June 22 a Matthew Marks Gallery 7818 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Tim Hawkinson Presents New Works @ DENK Gallery In Los Angeles

New Works is a new series of sculptural works, and large-format drawings on paper, that continue to explore multidisciplinary artist: Tim Hawkinson's playful and morbid morphologies. The artist disassembles the familiar and stages dysfunctional propositions in which the self repeatedly appears as the only, albeit imperfect, measure of experience and inventive return to obsessive craft in service concept exists in an expanded and embodied field, dramatized by the inclusion of living variables like time, breath (sound), and movement. New Works is on view through March 30 at DENK Gallery 749 East Temple Street, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Read Our Interview Of Rosha Yaghmai On The Occasion Of Her Exhibition At The Wattis Institute → →

Walking into Rosha Yaghmai’s studio is a little bit like walking into the laboratory of a junkyard hoarder/mad scientist. There’s a distinctly pleasant organization to the vast collection of Los Angeles detritus that extends from the studio to the backlot outside. The walls are plastered with images from torn magazine pages, postcards, posters, watercolors and collage works. It’s as though you could hold a microscope to any detail in the room and discover a tiny world within. Click here to read more.

Jordan Wolfson's (Female Figure) @ The Broad In Los Angeles

Artist Jordan Wolfson's (Female figure), 2014, is an immersive environment that features a robotic sculpture. For seven minutes, the robot gives monologues and dances to pop songs. Startling and unnerving, the work raises the specter of misogyny and exposes fissures in pop culture. It challenges the ways women are represented, and the ways images of women are consumed. (Female figure) will be on view through January 20, 2019 at The Broad 221 S. Grand Ave, Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Kupper

Willard Hill's Solo Exhibition @ Good Luck Gallery In Los Angeles

The intricate masking tape and mixed media sculptures of Willard Hill (b. 1934) draw from a lifetime spent in the small town of Manchester, Tennessee. Over twenty years ago, when Hill returned home debilitated after a hospital stay, the idea came to him to start making sculptures out of all the everyday detritus he had at hand. Primarily composed of masking tape, Hill’s sculptures also utilized plastic bags, wire, toothpicks, rocks and a plethora of other found materials. Whatever a piece reminded him of as he worked, that’s what it became and soon every surface in his small home was covered in evocative gems. The exhibition is on view through October 14 at Good Luck Gallery 945 Chung King Road, Los Angeles.

Beside Myself Group Show Opens @ JTT In New York

Through their very gothic and physical imagery of mutation, fragmentation, disintegration and masquerade, the works in Beside Myself position themselves as objects in opposition to the self-same body; by presenting themselves as its shadow. This show demonstrate the ways in which art maintains not just the historical but also the magical ability to conceive of expansive and malleable identities in the midst of all those that society and culture prescribe. Beside Me is on view through August 3rd at JTT Gallery 191 Chrystie Street New York. photographs by Adam Lehrer

Drake Carr Presents "Gulp" @ The Hole In New York

Drake Carr presents Gulp, a new series of figurative sculptures composed in two parts. Like the composition of an album, Carr’s sculptural ensemble segues between genres, time signatures, and themes to populate a scene built of multiple tracks. Irregularities in scale and texture animate and describe the boundaries between each of the figures, casting kaleidoscopic patterning as the crux of the soiree’s representational and interpersonal logic. Stuffed and dressed, bodysuits and armatures shuffle and skip (like a scratched CD) in a warp of orientations. Gulp is on view through August 12th at The Hole 312 Bowery New York. photographs by Adam Lehrer

Catalina Ouyang's Death Drive Joy Ride @ Make Room

Death Drive Joy Ride is Catalina Ouyang’ s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. The exhibition features a new body of sculpture, installation and video. Taking East Asian fox spirits as a departure point, the work positions mythic desires for immortality alongside a contemporary endeavor to find joy and community amid a seemingly inexorable drive toward planetary destruction. Death Drive Joy Ride speaks (or wails) honestly from the positionality of its maker: a lonely Chinese-American girl clawing her way through our Wicked Problems. Death Drive Joy Ride is on view through August 8 at Make Room 1035 North Broadway Los Angeles. photographs by Lani Trock

Opening Of 'Water & Power' Curated By Noah Davis @ The Underground Museum

Noah Davis’ fourth exhibition curated from MOCA’s permanent collection features four seminal artworks by Olafur Eliasson, Hans Haacke, James Turrell and Fred Eversley that use natural phenomena as sculptural material, along with a poem installation by LA’s Poet Laureate, Robin Coste Lewis. The show is a meditation. Water. Flow. Woman. Moon. Aqueducts. Flint. Light. Climate. “Seeing yourself seeing”. Power. Water & Power is on view at the Underground Museum 3508 W. Washington Boulevard Los Angeles. photographs by Lani Trock

"Nighthorses" by Adam McEwen @ Gagosian Gallery

As Adam McEwen’s title suggests, anxiety resides even in the most common images and objects. His art draws attention to the vestigial dramas of daily life; the forgotten is memorialized, the subliminal laid bare. Narrative flow is tempting to seek yet impossible to find. See more exhibition images here. "Nighthorses" is on view through June 9 at Gagosian Gallery 456 North Camden Drive Beverly Hills. photograph by Oliver Kupper

Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body @ The Met Breuer

Seven hundred years of sculptural practice—from fourteenth-century Europe to the global present—are examined anew in this groundbreaking exhibition. Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body (1300–Now) explores narratives of sculpture in which artists have sought to replicate the literal, living presence of the human body. On view through July 22 exclusively at The Met Breuer 945 Madison Avenue New York. photographs Adam Lehrer

Peter Shire's Solo-Exhibition “Drawings, Impossible Teapots, Furniture & Sculpture” @ Kayne Griffin Corcoran

Peter Shire, noted local sculptor and ceramicist known for his zany post-modern teapots and his connection to the 1980s Memphis Milano design movement is showing is new solo-exhibiton called “Drawings, Impossible Teapots, Furniture & Sculpture.” The exhibition is on view through May 12 at Kayne Griffin Corcoran, 1201 South La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles.