Read our Interview of Nicole Wittenberg Ahead of Her Debut Exhibition @ Fernberger Gallery in Los Angeles →

Nicole Wittenberg, Midsummer Morning 3, 2023. Image courtesy of Fernberger Gallery.

Garnering inspiration from riotous Fauvist material, Nicole Wittenberg intertwined herself with the world of art from the moment she saw Matisse’s Woman with a Hat. Rooted very confidently in her own intuition, Wittenberg has pursued interests related to her own gestural forms without much hesitation. Her artistic philosophy can be summarized by the kind of unbending compromise that turns heads and makes the world worth looking at. Imbued with synesthetic coloration, the work she portrays is embedded in its own unquantifiable emotional scale. She fearlessly plays with the kind of aggressive coloration that’s capable of conveying its own story, and her viewers get to reap the benefits. Nicole Wittenberg’s Jumpin’ at the Woodside is on view at Fernberger Gallery, a new gallery in Los Angeles. Well known for her erotica work, Wittenberg has garnered well-deserved attention for her experimentation with the body in space. After a shift in interest from figural forms to the entity that houses them, her focus turned to the landscape art we get to witness in Jumpin’ at the Woodside. Read more.

Günther Förg's Diverse Utopia-Critical Body of Work Dissected @ Galerie Max Hetzler

 
 

Günther Förg’s comprehensive and multidisciplinary oeuvre, which spans five decades, includes painting, drawing, and murals, as well as sculpture and photography. The focus is on material, color, and space. The artist's experimental approach to abstraction and monochrome painting was directed against the trend toward figuration that prevailed in Germany in the 1980s. His works made continuous reference to 20th-century modernism, whose utopia he critically questioned. In this context, he engaged with art movements as diverse as early modernism, referencing artists such as Edvard Munch, or the American abstract expressionists including Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Cy Twombly. Elements of conceptual art can also be found throughout Förg’s work, which additionally challenge traditional interpretations.

Günther Förg is on view through February 24th at Galerie Max Hetzler, Bleibtreustraße 45, Berlin.

Teresa Baker's "From Joy to Joy to Joy" Recontextualizes Traditional Materials With Modern Discourse

text by Tara Anne Dalbow

If art historian Simon Schama’s assertion is correct that “landscapes are culture before they’re nature” and “scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock,” then when Teresa Baker, a member of the Mandan and Hidatsa tribes, surveys the Northern Plains she sees far more than meets the eye. The nine technicolor tapestries included in From Joy to Joy to Joy offer a glimpse beneath the visible surface of her ancestral homeland at a terrain imbued with ancient meanings, enriched by tradition and ritual, and animated by that which is sacred and ineffable. Poised between the past and present, recollection and reality, the physical and the spiritual, Baker’s chimerical landscapes inspire a poignant commentary on the ways history, social sensibilities, memory, and mythology mediate our experience of nature.

At first glance, the viewer might find the textiles’ base material, Astroturf, surprising. They’d be right to assume that someone raised nomadically across the national parks of the Midwest wouldn’t have had many encounters with the imitation grass. It wasn’t until Baker moved to Texas a few years ago that she discovered the vibrant, short-pile synthetic turf. Sturdy enough to support layers of paint, weavings, sticks, and stones yet malleable enough to be manipulated into unusual, organic shapes, the plastic mats freed her from the rigid constraints of traditional canvas. The mimetic texture, capable of conjuring wide-open plains and vast grassy fields, alleviated the burden of representation and encouraged abstract experimentation. 

Perhaps the fiber’s most compelling quality is the tension it enacts with the natural embellishments. The ultra-contemporary turf, indicative of an age beholden to plastic and artifice, tempers the traditional materials and recontextualizes them within a modern discourse. Yarn, willow, and buckskin, resources used for thousands of years by Indigenous peoples, are dispensed like paint to create mesmerizing gestures, patterns, and shapes across the shaggy surface. Despite being restricted to the materiality of yarn to generate variation in her lines and marks, Baker renders a convincingly painterly effect that’s both innovative and recognizable. Nods to certain expressionists, including Mark Rothko and Helen Frankenthaler, can be found throughout the exhibition alongside techniques, patterns, and symbols culled from Mandan and Hidatsa customs and craftsmanship. 

While the compositions resist narrative, the haptic engagement with the surface texture, the coloration, and the use of organic shapes ground them in the realm of landscapes and topographical maps. One can identify a winding river in Spring Unforeseen, an island in the middle of a lake in No Walls, or a parched field in Yellow Prairie Grass. At times, the individual threads that bisect the picture plane appear as longitude and latitude lines; other times, they read like hiking trails or the boundaries of various plots of crops. Dappled strands of yarn arranged side by side mimic the fluidity of water, and layers of paint imitate shifting patterns of light and shade. Baker relies on the emotional freight of her color palette to modulate between the feeling of a landscape and the landscape itself. Indigo, as evocative of the ocean and the night sky as it is of melancholy and despair. 

Where the materials resist domination, the strings fray, the Astroturf emerges beneath the painted veneer, and the rawhide curls around the edges, the tapestries feel most alive, charged with an energy and agency of their own invention. Even affixed to the gallery walls, there’s a sense of perpetual unfurling as if the works are still engaged in the act of becoming. To see them this way is to see them as products of a dynamic relationship between artist and material, not a subjugation or domination of the former by the latter. The metaphorical jump from the material to the land itself is difficult to ignore, rendering them poignant examples of symbiotic stewardship. 

On the afternoon of my visit, a rogue red ant crawled assiduously across the brilliant green field in Unwritten. For just a moment, I experienced that exhilarating awareness of being unfathomably small but fundamentally connected to something unfathomably vast and irrefutably miraculous that I’d previously assumed only the grandeur of nature could provoke.

From Joy to Joy to Joy is on view through October 14 @ de boer 3311 E. Pico Boulevard, Los Angeles

JP Munro's Overworld Captures the Extremity of the Southern California Wilds @ Broadway in New York

 
 

Broadway presents Overworld, a solo show of new paintings by Los Angeles artist JP Munro.

The exhibition comprises two enduring strains of the artist’s practice: exacting plein-air landscapes and altogether fantastical tableaux populated with a pantheon of mythical figures.

The landscapes gather their formidable power from the artist’s almost psychedelic level of observation and commitment not just to surface effect but to transmitting an experiential dimension to the canvas. A viewer immediately senses the endeavor of creating these hard-fought works amidst the beauty and extremity of the Southern California wilds. We feel each craggy outcropping of rock, every bristling shank of cactus,and the dramatic sprawl of a live oak as if in real-time and with a spiritual magnification that is unique to encounters with nature.

The figure-centered works would, at first, seem to sit in uneasy relation to the landscapes, but soon reveal themselves as an apt inversion of the former’s exteriority—fiction in place of hard fact. Picture book royalty, Norse deities, and their attendant lusty concubines inhabit mystical realms and cavort in a matrix of meticulously layered black and brown oil paint. Like a conceptualist take on William Blake, these characters hold our attention as both protagonists of the painting and somehow witnesses to its creation.

As the exhibition shifts between disciplined observation and freestyle world-building, Munro completes an expository circuit of the act of painting itself

Overworld is on view Tuesday–Saturday, 11AM–6PM through July 28th at Broadway, 375 Broadway, New York

Giuseppe Penone's Universal Gestures Opens @ Galleria Borghese in Rome with the Participation of Fendi

On March 13th, over thirty works by the Master of Arte Povera, Giuseppe Penone, were revealed at the Galleria Borghese in Rome in participation with Fendi, weaving a new dialogue between nature and history. Created between the 1970s and the early 2000s, this body of work curated by Francesco Stocchi demonstrates the immutable vitality of sculpture, and in attendance were some of Italy’s most prominent figures in art, fashion, and entertainment. 

The exhibition stems from the search for something that is not present in the splendid spaces of the Galleria, offering a new reading of the relationship between landscape and sculpture that the ancient statuary present in the museum’s collection embodies according to classical canons. A path that is in perfect continuity with the research on the relationship between Art and Nature that characterizes the direction of Francesca Cappelletti. 

Giuseppe Penone. Universal Gestures does not propose any comparison but presents works chosen as a “reflection” with respect to the environment, offering a “completion” of elements: in the rooms characterised by a triumph of marbles, sculptures and decorations — magnificent representations of the mineral world — Penone adds an organic graft of leaves, leather, wood that connects and defines the two universes. In the Gardens, on the other hand, the integration looks to the world of metals, with bronze sculptures that dialogue with the rich surrounding vegetation, enriched by around forty new potted plants to support some of the works. 

The exhibition itinerary includes nuclei of lesser-known works that are less associated iconographically with Penone’s work, such as Vegetal Gaze, and others exhibited for the first time in thematic groups – Breath of leaves and To breathe the shadow — inserted into the space as autonomous and original presences. In the absence of mythology in Penone’s work, the narrative shifts its axis, and the relationship between natural time and historical past gives rise to a new, uncertain present. 

Distancing itself from any possible formal or symbolic comparison with the Galleria, Penone’s work observes matter by revealing the forms it conceals, with the intention of reactivating the natural osmotic exchange between the museum and the surrounding park, which inspired many of the works composing the museum’s collection. 

The artist’s interventions do not disrupt the unique balance between form and architecture that characterizes the Galleria, but renew that entirely Baroque game that intertwined landscape, nature and sculpture, activating a new dialogue, presenting a question on sculpture, revealing its historical and contemporary evolution.

Giuseppe Penone. Universal Gestures is on view through May 28th @ Galleria Borghese, Piazzale Scipione Borghese, 5 00197 Roma.

 
 

Melike Kara, My Beloved Wild Valley @ Arcadia Missa in London

Artist Melike Kara’s first solo exhibition in London, “My Beloved Wild Valley,” is now on view at Arcadia Missa. For this exhibition, Kara’s figures are encircled with signifiers of place; perhaps locating their identities as connected to the heritage of the artist herself, as well as outside of being read simplistically through the body. These figures are read through their landscapes and histories. Markers of site and culture, such as sunflowers and the setting sun, speak of history as identity, a more complex matrix from which to map a sense of self, one made from ghosts. The presence and characters of Kara’s figures are created through the interaction they have with one another on the canvas and the placing of them within contexts, signifiers, or even areas of negative space.

“My Beloved Wild Valley” is on view through July 31 at Arcadia Missa 14 – 16 Brewer Street, First Floor
Soho, London. photographs by Ollie Hammick. courtesy the artist and Arcadia Missa, London

Asya Geisberg Gallery presents "Plastic Garden" Group Exhibition in New York

“Plastic Garden” is an exhibition curated by Katrina Slavik featuring the works of seven painters: Madeleine Bialke, Jennifer Coates, Sharona Eliassaf, Adrienne Elise Tarver, Joani Tremblay, Emma Webster, and Brian Willmont. These artists depict landscape and flora through a synthetic lens, creating lush, technicolor dystopias. In combination, their works seek a spiritual connection to nature not through awe-inspiring vistas, but with toxic colors, moody surrealism, and industrial surfaces.

“Plastic Garden” is on view through August 16 at Asya Geisberg Gallery 537B West 23rd Street, New York, NY. photographs courtesy of the gallery and Etienne Frossard

Greg Ito & Honor Titus: Enter the Garden @ Penske Projects in Los Angeles

Multidisciplinary artists, Greg Ito and Honor Titus, are currently exhibiting their work in a group show at Penske Projects in Los Angeles. Both artists have taken the urban landscapes they have lived in and frequented, and reflected the beauty and the mystery of these cities in their respective artwork. While Ito uses iconography engrained in Los Angeles’s urban surroundings to express the many faces of the city, Titus focuses on depicting street scenes which encapsulate the memory of hot summer months spent in cities such as London, New York, and Paris. Ito and Titus’s complementary bodies of work come together in this exhibition to navigate the viewers through a tour of the magical urban gardens they have created through their work.

Greg Ito & Honor Titus: Enter the Garden is on view through July 27 at Penske Projects 4859 Fountain Ave, Los Angeles, California. photographs by Oliver Kupper

Ed Ruscha: Eilshemius & Me @ Gagosian in London

Gagosian presents Ed Ruscha: Eilshemius & Me, an exhibition of works by Ed Ruscha and Louis Michel Eilshemius (1864–1941). In the exhibition, landscape emerges as a set of ideas rather than a dutiful imitation of reality. The picture’s frame, whether physically real or illusionistically painted, isolates the painter’s vision, demarcating and confining it, almost like a theater curtain or the contracting aperture of a camera lens over a silent film—slowly revealing the plane on which the artist’s storytelling will take place, ready to contract again when the story is told.

Eilshemius & Me is on view through August 2 at Gagosian 17–19 Davies Street London W1K 3DE, UK. photographs courtesy of Gagosian

March Avery @ Blum & Poe in New York

Blum & Poe presents a solo exhibition of paintings by New York-based artist March Avery. The exhibition, which is Avery’s first with the gallery, introduces a body of work spanning over five decades and is the artist’s first extensive solo presentation in New York in over twenty years. Focusing on portraiture and landscape and punctuated with still life, the selection of works on view repositions the vitality of moments past through paint applied to canvas. Mothers read bedtime stories; children eat breakfast, sit on laps, and play Chinese checkers; clouds hover over the surface of a cerulean blue lake; and potted plants are placed amongst a child’s toys or present themselves in paintings hung behind a sofa, upon which a young woman reclines in the company of a cat. These diaristic tendencies that characterize Avery’s oeuvre encapsulate a lifelong commitment to the process of painting itself.

March Avery is on view through August 9 at Blum & Poe 19 E 66th St, New York, NY 10065. all images courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo

Joan Mitchell: "I carry my landscapes around with me" @ David Zwirner New York

Joan Mitchell’s “I carry my landscapes around with me” is the first exhibition to focus on the artist’s multi-paneled paintings created across four decades. Mitchell established a singular approach to abstraction over the course of her career through her inventive interpretation of the traditional figure-ground relationship and synesthetic use of color. Her emotionally charged compositions evoke individuals, observations, places, and points in time. The horizontally oriented, panoramic expanse of Mitchell’s polyptych panels is ideally suited for landscapes—a poignant subject for the artist that she linked directly to memory. The exhibition features paintings from both public and private collections, as well as works drawn from the Joan Mitchell Foundation. “I carry my landscapes around with me” is on view through July 12 at David Zwirner 537 West 20th Street, New York. photographs courtesy of David Zwirner New York.