Read Our Interview of Katharina Kaminski and Hanne Gaby Odiele on Queerness and Fertility →

The iconography of fertility holds a timeless power over us. Our paleolithic Venuses defined this obsession, encapsulating fertility as a powerful force of creation, rooted in the divine feminine while remaining paradoxically universal. Intersex artist Katharina Kaminski expands upon this understanding in her new show, Womb, which embraces our individual potentials for transformation and innovation while interrogating our gendered ideas about fertility. As we find ourselves in the throes of a gender revolution, Kaminski reckons with the intersection of gender and creation in her abstractions of the womb: soft vessels fill the Sainte Anne Gallery, distilling the Venus to its core sense of creation and transformation. In recognition of National Intersex Awareness Day, Katharina comes together with intersex model and activist Hanne Gaby Odiele to discuss creating while Queer, finding community, and claiming ownership of the self in the wake of bodily alienation. Read more.

Berlin Atonal Combines Ritual, Installation, and Performance in an Exploration of Ephemerality

 

Florentina Holzinger
Etúde for Church (2023)
Image credit: Mayra Wallraff

 

Berlin Atonal immerses audiences in constant states of change and fluctuating intensity, where seemingly static artworks defy any rigidity. In Florentina Holzinger’s Études, stunt effects meet the world of music to create scores for bodies as instruments. At Atonal, the artist presents Étude For Church, a performance in which a two-ton iron bell is asked to ‘call in the canonical hours, summon tempests and awake the sleeping soul’.

Bridget Polk
Reclaimed Damages (2023)
Image credit: Frankie Casillo

Bridget Polk will be present throughout the exhibition, reconfiguring Reclaimed Damages by assembling precarious sculptural forms over time, in dialogue with the audience and other works in the exhibition that manifest in ephemeral reflections on the past, present, and personal.

Mire Lee
Installation view
Image Credit: Frankie Casillo

Mire Lee has created a hanging fabric installation, where worn-out, torn, and ripped fabrics are dipped in viscous liquid clay. Over the course of its exhibition, the clay absorbed by the "skin" of the work will be slowly thinned down by water. It promises a misty viscerality as a space to question human fantasies of technologies that contradict the realities of subjects that decay and deform through time.

Cyprien Gaillard
Absorbent Figure (2023)
Image courtesy of artist

Cyprien Gaillard’s "Absorbent Figure" is based on an existing object found by the artist at the Kijk-Kubus-museum house in Rotterdam. While the meaning of the statue is widely debated, the design is similar to the ‘weeping Buddha,’ and one interpretation is that those who touch it will feel a mysterious alleviation of their sorrows. With its new industrial skin, the figure sits outside Kraftwerk amidst those gathering, taking part in the collective experiences of music and nightlife.

Atonal features visual art and concert nights intermittently through 9/17 at Köpenicker Str. 70, 10179 Berlin.

House & Garden Is A World Of Domestic Bliss @ Stroll Garden In Los Angeles

Conceived as a singular installation, House & Garden welcomes viewers into a home of domestic items rendered in clay by Analuisa Corrigan and a garden of working ceramic fountains by Lily Clark, complimented by live plant vignettes created by Alice Lam of A.L. BASA. In recontextualizing the familiar, the artists invite a moment of pause to reengage our senses and reconsider our relationship to often overlooked elements of the everyday, both domestic and elemental. Corrigan creates organic, figurative forms that unite material exploration and personal expression. Corrigan’s pieces are deceptively labor intensive, taking up to a month to make. After sketching and prototyping, each is carefully built up through a coil technique, then dried and sanded to achieve the desired silhouette. The resulting work feels simultaneously robust and delicate.

Whereas Corrigan works intuitively, Clark’s process embraces precision, reflecting her interest in engineering. After drafting a design, she rolls slabs of clay and cuts using a template, then carefully joins the seams. The surface is left unglazed to contrast with the water’s luster. For her large-scale fountains, Clark incorporates stones that she spent six months sourcing from the Whitewater quarry just outside of Palm Springs, fine tuning the design to achieve her desired water flow and sound. Clark’s fountains are arranged within an “indoor garden” by Alice Lam, whose Los Angeles-based creative studio A.L. BASA specializes in sculptural floral installations. Lam’s site-specific design references Buddhist Zen gardens created around works by Isamu Noguchi, as well as plants that are representative of California’s biodiversity. Immersive and temporal, House & Garden contemplates notions of interior and exterior — both somatic and psychological, experienced and subjective.

House & Garden is on view through June 11 @ Stroll Garden 7380 Beverly Boulevard.

 
 

David Lynch's I Was A Teenage Insect Opening @ Kayne Griffin Corcoran in Los Angeles

A group of new paintings, drawings, and watercolors are currently on view at Kayne Griffin Corcoran, and they’re not at all for the faint of heart. They touch on the dark dualities of our most sinister dreams and tickle us in that somewhat uninvited, but not exactly unappreciated sort of way. Within these works Lynch functions as an omnipresent narrator who candidly describes his representation of objects and figures in situations that are simultaneously commonplace yet unexpected. I Was A Teenage Insect is on view through November 3 at Kayne Griffin Corcoran 1201 South La Brea Avenue Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Kupper