April 11th marked the opening of Preservation, a group show curated by Paige Silveria and Paul Hameline at CØR Studio in Paris. The exhibition brings together a disparate group of artists (including Ladji Diaby, Alyssa Kazew, Mark Flood, Gogo Graham, Jordan Pallagès, Anthony Fornasari, Bill Taylor, Caos Mote, Ron Baker, Cecile Di Giovanni, Simon Dupety, Gaspar Willmann, Wolfgang Laubersheimer, and the late, great Gaetano Pesce) whose work ranges from photography, collage, video, design, sculpture, and more. These works explore the original purpose of our human intellect before it became aware of itself and started to ask the unknowable. They reflect on a time when the self wasn’t yet conscious and only concerned itself with preservation in the most existential sense of the word. On the occasion of the opening, Paige Silveria spoke with artist Ladji Diaby to learn more about his roots in Mali, his creative process, and his relationship to the art scene in Paris. Read more.
Read Our Interview of Holly Silius on the Occasion of Her Solo Exhibition @ Central Server Works in Los Angeles →
Holly Silius. George Clinton, 2023. Stone and gold leaf.
“I don’t have to sell my soul, he’s already in me” read the lyrics of The Stone Roses’ groundbreaking hit track “I Wanna Be Adored.” Perfectly salient in their minimal simplicity, they defined a generation who watched their idols on television with a yearning desperation for recognition. Los Angeles-based sculptor Holly Silius was in her youth living in Manchester at the time. It was the end of Thatcher’s era of neoliberal deregulation with its flagrant embrace of conspicuous consumption that made so many of her peers feel a hollow ennui; a listless lack of purpose that left them looking ahead to the next millennium without the slightest clue of where they fit in. Thirty-five years later, Generation X finds itself in an era of social media where everyone can build a virtual platform from which to project their image and ideals. Silius now finds herself adorning and casting the faces and bodies of countless people—some with humble followings, some with household names—studying their every angle to capture the elusive essence that makes them so alluring as subjects. Read more.
Izumi Kato's Not-Quite-Human Figures Are Apparitions of Coexistence in Perrotin's Inaugural Los Angeles Show
#6
Untitled, 2023
Photo by Kei Okano
Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin ©2023 Izumi Kato
Perrotin inaugurates their new Los Angeles location with an exhibition of work by Japanese artist Izumi Kato.
Imagine, for a moment, that Izumi Kato’s figurative subjects have a life of their own. From the artist’s studio in Tokyo, his subjects have traversed the ocean, crossing the Pacific to emerge in Los Angeles. Making their way to Pico Boulevard, they appear utterly at home in Southern California—a place where one can encounter the extremes of both prehistoric geology and urban modernity, where tar pits coexist with gleaming new buildings, where eternal ocean cliffs abut concrete highway. These binaries of ancient and modern, geological and man-made, are dualities that also coexist in Kato’s work, making his exhibition a fitting choice for Perrotin’s inaugural exhibition in Los Angeles.
Izumi Kato’s exhibition is on view through March 23 @ Perrotin in Los Angeles, 5036 W. Pico Boulevard
Non-Specific Objects Carves Niches for Difference from Universality @ Capitain Petzel in Berlin
The title of Non-Specific Objects acts as a counterpoint to the ideas expressed in Donald Judd’s canonical 1964 essay Specific Objects. Seeing as Judd characterized specific objects as separate from either sculpture or painting, they were precisely themselves, emphasizing the very materiality of a specific object that lacked expressive or symbolic content, especially to embodied subjectivity. This universal space, which aimed to be all-encompassing, did not make room for gender, racial, and sexual difference. The artists in this exhibition work against the hegemonic universal, creating space for difference in their works by means of abstraction, referencing bodies both literally and metaphorically.
The selection of works collectively embodies the contemporary lived experience of those who occupy spaces outside the normative. While they often do not overtly mirror the human form, the works represent humanity through a lens of abstraction and resistance, inviting viewers to confront themselves and experience bodily otherness. From alienation and embarrassment to intimacy and desire, the artists offer both the possibility of self-reflection and shared moments of humor.
In focus is the abstracted body – be it the intimate nature, materiality, and particularities of the individual human body, the collective body that is built on shared historic experience, the extended and amplified body in an age of relentless augmentation, or the body that eschews realistic painterly modes of representation, opting for formally abstract or heavily stylized, sometimes nostalgic renditions of humanity. The diverse set of artistic practices does not adhere to strict principles of representation, but continually references the human, sometimes clearly and often obliquely. It highlights objects that refuse human form but relate to the human by embracing abstraction.
Non-Specific Objects is on view through February 24th at Capitain Petzel, Karl-Marx-Allee 45, 10178 Berlin.
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.
"Portraiture as Social Commentary" Showcases the Genre's Explosive Social Capital @ Persons Projects in Berlin
Zofia Kulik
Land-Escape I (2001)
silver gelatin print, 180 x 150 cm
Persons Projects’ latest group exhibition, Portraiture as Social Commentary, not only highlights the different aspects of the genre but also links together a variety of artistic perspectives. A portrait is a painting, a photograph, a sculpture, or any other representation of a person in which the face and its expressions are predominant. They reveal the presence of the subject viewed from the perspective of the artist – a merger of contrasts between what’s projected by one and perceived by another. These images become mirrors of many faces that reflect both the political and cultural undercurrents relevant to the time period in which they were conceived.
Portraiture as Social Commentary is on view through January 27th, 2024, at Persons Projects, Lindenstr. 34–35, 10969 Berlin.
Hugh Hayden Examines the Prosthetics of Power in Hughman @ Lisson Gallery
text by Tara Anne Dalbow
Upon entering Hugh Hayden’s Hughman exhibition at Lisson Los Angeles, you’re confronted by three interconnected rows of metallic stall doors, the same as you might find in a public restroom. The doors simultaneously invite you toward entry and expel you, intriguing as they are impersonal and ominous. Before you glimpse an object resembling art, you’re implicated in the hidden meaning, an active participant in its revelation. You’re immediately made aware of the physicality of your body, your relationship to the space, and the identity you present to the unknown system of order. Questions arise: Is this a gendered bathroom? Do I belong here? Who am I sharing the space with? The interactive element of opening and closing each door, maneuvering in, out, and between the confined, private spaces, renders engaging from a disembodied perspective nearly impossible. As the exhibition's title implies, there’s no leaving one’s hughmanity at the door.
My initial impression of imposition and interest follows me into the first stall, where a carved commode sprouts a bramble of thorny fir tree branches. The protrusion of sharp limbs obstructs further inspection; the effect is claustrophobic and disconcerting, and I back out cautiously. Behind the next door, a baby’s crib constructed from barbed wire and chain link fencing; behind another, interlocking wedding rings with Descovy pills [HIV antiviral] where the solitaire would be; and behind yet another, a classroom desk consumed entirely by abrasive white nylon bristles. Each object offers participation in a facet of contemporary American life under conditions as unwelcoming, uncomfortable, and caustic as the specular toilet seat.
The visceral materiality of the various textures, though not physically touched, commandeer the senses as the bristles scrape, the barbs prick, and the branches snag against your skin. Prongs, spurs, and skewers disrupt movement and threaten physical confrontation while also poking metaphorical holes in expectations and illusions. Here, the most fundamental promises of the American dream, like the right to an education, are rendered onerous, animating the question: for whom were these institutions made? If the skin you’re in determines your experience, and the object's surface or skin reflects the relative ease or distress of the encounter, then certainly not for the artist, a Black queer man, and by association, those like him.
Hugh Hayden
Cleanse, 2023
High density polyethylene bristles, cast resin
66 x 38.1 x 35.6 cm
26 x 15 x 14 in
© Hugh Hayden, Courtesy Lisson Gallery
Hugh Hayden
Start 'Em Young, 2023
Chain link fencing and hardware
142.9 x 141 x 81.3 cm
56 1/4 x 55 1/2 x 32 in
© Hugh Hayden, Courtesy Lisson Gallery
Hugh Hayden
Brainwash, 2023
PVC and nylon bristles
83.8 x 66 x 73.7 cm
33 x 26 x 29 in
© Hugh Hayden, Courtesy Lisson Gallery
As I continued around the room, the stalls began to feel more like dressing rooms with various identities available for perusal inside. Within one, a suit jacket and pants sewn from the rough and rigid bark of a cherry tree hang from a clothing rack. Elsewhere: a football helmet encompassed by boar hair, and still elsewhere: a bronze strap-on harness with a gun protruding from the crotch. The striking contrast between organic materials and those that are artificial and mass-produced recalls the antagonistic relationship between what’s natural and instinctual and what’s a consequence of sociopolitical structures. For whom are these spaces made?
Those capable of comfortably wearing the prosthetics of power appear as idealized, neoclassical male torsos carved from white silicone. They wear their means for control where their sex would be; for two, cocked pistols; for another, an abject skyscraper. A fourth iteration sees the male body replaced by a miniature basswood model church whose phallic steeple hangs limply across the shingled roof. In a nod to the dominant enterprise in Los Angeles, a director’s chair projects tapered wood penises in every direction. The appendages appear to both protect the seat of power and stage an assault on the unendowed who come too close. Their audacious vulgarity tempers the violence of the cultural implications and satirizes familiar tropes like toxic masculinity and the male impulse to think with an organ south of the brain.
When that door closes with a bang—emphasized by the acoustics of the room and made ominous by the presence of so many firearms—another door opens onto a bronze and acrylic sculpture of the waist and thighs of a man in navy uniform pants sporting a flashy leather belt, holstered gun, and handcuffs posed atop his white pedestal. Only when you move around the sculpture or are so moved by it do you see where the right side is sliced open to reveal beneath the uniform, armor, weaponry, beneath even the skin, the internal organs, veins, and bones within. The same veins in him that carry the red-blue blood between my heart and feet, the same stomach as the one that rumbles, hungry to be filled full when empty in Hayden, in him, in me. The man is twinned by another sculpture in the exhibition of a tree trunk spliced open to expose the biological contents of a womb carrying a luminous carved baby.
Hugh Hayden
Real Tree, 2023
Cherry bark on Zegna Suit
Suit: 99.1 x 91.4 x 17.8 cm
Suit: 39 x 36 x 7 in
© Hugh Hayden, Courtesy Lisson Gallery
Hugh Hayden
Eve, 2023
Cherry Bark and acrylic on resin, Black Walnut
63.5 x 38.1 x 25.4 cm
25 x 15 x 10 in
© Hugh Hayden, Courtesy Lisson Gallery
Their combined effect illuminates how stripped of societal status, we are of the same nature and origin and made from the same stuff. As intricately connected to one another as we are to the trees, the earth from which the trees grow, and the animals, like the stuffed buffalo in another stall, roam. Hanging together in a red-flocked closet, two raceless, genderless, crimson rib cages tenderly embrace—as the only forms made from material gentle enough to hold and be held. The fellow feeling carries me out of the closet, the stall, the gallery, and I re-enter the world a little more human than I was only an hour before.
Hughman is on view through January 13 @ Lisson Gallery, 1037 N. Sycamore Avenue, Los Angeles
Hugh Hayden
The Audition, 2023
Bald cypress, steel hardware and canvas
149.9 x 188 x 154.9 cm
59 x 74 x 61 in
© Hugh Hayden, Courtesy Lisson Gallery
Paul McCarthy Continues to Define the Language of the Obscene in Them as Was Is @ Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin
Bringing together past and present, then and now, Them as Was Is, Paul McCarthy’s first solo exhibition with Galerie Max Hetzler, presents two fundamental aspects of McCarthy’s practice. On the ground floor, eighteen sculptures constitute an early endeavour by the artist to combine different periods of sculpture into one, allowing visitors to draw out the similarities that weave together his most iconic sculptural projects. On the gallery’s upper floor, a series of drawings and video works from the artist’s more recent ‘A&E’ (2019–) project show film and performance to be at the heart of McCarthy’s practice.
The gallery’s second floor presents drawings created by McCarthy during improvised performances between himself and German actress Lilith Stangenberg as part of their ongoing ‘A&E’ project. The project’s title refers to the layered alter egos which McCarthy and Stangenberg assume: Adolf Hitler & Eva Braun, Adam & Eve, Arts & Entertainment, America & Europe. Created during hours-long sessions in which the collaborators enter a state of delirium, the drawings possess a radical immediacy and undeniable physicality. Alongside unconscious scrawls, magazine clippings, and imagery of Hitler and Mickey Mouse, certain drawings incorporate the artist’s tools, providing witness to the gestures embedded in them.
Them as Was Is is on view through October 21st at Galerie Max Hetzler, Potsdamer Straße 77-87, Berlin.
Isa Genzken 75/75 Celebrates 75 Sculptures & 75 Years of Life @ Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin
To mark Isa Genzken’s 75th birthday, the Neue Nationalgalerie is honoring the German artist with the exhibition Isa Genzken: 75/75, showing 75 sculptures spanning all phases of her oeuvre from the 1970s to the present. The presentation recalls displays of classical antiquity collections in its arrangement of individual sculptures in the Neue Nationalgalerie’s upper hall. In the configuration models, archetypes and assessments of the human and modern society emerge.
The sculptures are not hewn into form but rather embody in their heterogeneous materiality the technologies, plastic, concrete, decorations and functional objects that permeate daily life. Genzken transposes these reassessments and fluid framings into authenticity, beauty, absurdity and exaggeration. Her work derives from actualities, such as a window or the figure of an actor, which she then alters and distorts into her own realities and visual language. The individual, also her as an artist, and her biography are the instruments used in this scrutiny of Western culture’s ideals and types of production.
“The works are meant to function more as moving images than as sculptures, with a new view seen from every angle. Nothing is fixed or two-dimensional but rather cinematic,” said Isa Genzken in an interview in 2016. Visitors discover themselves being queried through the confrontation with familiar everydayness. Collages of personal worlds emerge. The viewers become participants, tools, and scales of measurement within the exhibition space, not least through reflections in the object surfaces.
75/75 is on view through November 27th at Neue Nationalgalerie, Potsdamer Str. 50, 10785 Berlin.
Tina Born's Communal Dreamscape "Gonfanon" @ Laura Mars Gallery
Tina Born
Detail from 60 Jahre träumen (60 years of dreaming) (2023)
Excerpts from a collection of texts, DIN A4 papers, ballpoint pen, glass, metal, wood
approx. 300 x 40 x 3 cm
Copyright by the artist. Courtesy Laura Mars Gallery, Berlin
For her 4th solo exhibition at the Laura Mars Gallery, Tina Born presents an expansive installation entitled Gonfanon. The impetus here is dreams—those "hallucinatory" events that take place when the body is at rest. Evading clear interpretations and conclusions, but creating spaces for interpretation and, as it were, those "snippets" that we often only remember after the dream event, the artist arranges sculpture, found and built objects as well as excerpts from a collection of texts. The latter (60 Jahre träumen, 2023) are Born's own dream notes, which she collected over the years and now assigns to dates spanning a period of 60 years. Based on Arthur Rimbaud's statement, "I am another / I am another" or "I am many." Tina Born, in a further step, asked sixty people from her environment to transcribe these notes in their respective handwriting.
Gonfanon is on view until July 29th at Laura Mars Gallery, Bülowstraße 52, 10783 Berlin
Read Our Interview of Louise Frances Smith on Cultivating a Circular Art Practice →
Louise Frances Smith
Collect install Assemblage no1 oyster shells, 2023 (detail)
mixed media including clay and crushed oyster shells
photograph by Yeshen Venema
In the context of art history, sustainable ways of creating have been around since the birth of conceptual art in the 1960s. Take German artist, Nils-Udo, whose plant creations placed in nature were left to develop and subsequently disappear as a way of commenting on the links between nature and humanity. Today, as we are faced with the sobering realities of humankind’s impact on the planet, environmentally-conscious art forms are becoming increasingly widespread. By working with found objects, natural and upcycled materials, and through processes that intentionally avoid damage to the Earth’s resources, artists are using their creative expression to highlight environmental degradation and the stark reality of climate change.
Margate-based artist Louise Frances Smith worked mainly with clay until she became increasingly concerned and frustrated with the unsustainable plastic packaging used to store her medium of choice. After conducting considerable research, it became clear to her that it was not possible to naturally source clay from her local area, so she decided to get creative and utilize what was available, better yet, she used what was in abundance: seaweed and oyster shells. Smith has spent the last two years collecting and experimenting with both as part of her newly adopted approach to creating sustainable work.
This year, as part of Somerset House’s 2023 Collect, Smith exhibited Sargassum Tide, a new body of work that examines wireweed seaweed and Pacific oysters, two non-native species thriving on the UK coastlines due to climate change. She subsequently presented the series in a solo show at The Margate School where she facilitated workshops on how to work with sustainable materials in collaboration with community groups, families, and creative practitioners.
In the following interview, Smith shares her journey with adopting a sustainable art practice, discusses the scientists, artists, and experts that have inspired her, and where she hopes to take her sustainable practice in the future. Read more.
Read Our Interview Of Charlotte Edey on the Occasion of Her Solo Exhibition @ Ginny on Frederick in London →
Charlotte Edey is a London-based visual artist who adopts a multidisciplinary practice as a form of personal and political expression. Drawing on a multitude of themes, her work addresses notions of femininity, gender, body politic, and mythology. Edey’s tapestry, embroidery and sculptural pieces are extensions of her drawing practice, and her distinct artistic language focuses heavily on symbolism and the investigation of space. Recognized for their surreal dreamscapes and pastel palette, she employs a recurring water motif that takes inspiration from Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” which serves as an investigation of ‘hydrofemininity,’ and the belief that our bodies are fundamentally part of the natural world.
Edey’s newest body of work, Framework, is currently on view at Ginny on Frederick. In this exhibition, a dialogue between each piece has been created by the artist as she examines various ways to blur the boundary between the real and the represented through the motif of the window and frame. Using these as a point of departure, she explores the notion of transparency to identify and differentiate between interior and exterior, public and private. Her intricately detailed—hand sewn and beaded—tapestry works and larger mirrored pieces are symbolic gateways that gently interrogate interior space, identity, and observation. We spoke on the occasion of Framework’s opening to discuss her development in recent years, as well as her interest in the symbolic interplay between windows, frames, and eyes. Read more.
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.
Dozie Kanu's World Building Tools: An Interview From The Biodiversity Issue →
text by Oliver Kupper
portraits by Parker Woods
Dozie Kanu’s practice is a conceptual exploration of colonial and hegemonic politics, architecture, spatial narratives, and so much more. Born in Houston, Texas in 1993, and now based in Santarém, Portugal, Kanu’s investigation of cultural artifacts belies an America still grappling with not only its troubled past, but also its troubled present. Razor-sharp, anti-climb, raptor spikes, a visual and physical deterrent for vandals and undesirables, find their way onto one of his sculptures modeled as a baby crib, an emblematic nod to the countless divisions that are psychologically embedded at birth. There is something alchemical about Kanu’s reimagined objects of our urban visual landscape, like an ATM blasted with a thick layer of black epoxy sculpting clay, or a poured concrete chair in “crack rock beige” that sits on a spoked tire rim, that gives Kanu’s work a kind of authentic reclamation of power in a grief-stricken zeitgeist. We caught up with Kanu on a rare visit to Los Angeles, before the opening of his exhibition, to prop and ignore, at Manual Arts, to discuss tools for building a more socially equitable world. Read more.
Suspended in Memory: Read Our Interview Of Veronica Fernandez →
Standing in front of Los Angeles-based artist Veronica Fernandez’s paintings you may start to feel as if you’re part of a fever dream or someone else’s past life regression. They are raw and autobiographical, a place where the viewer is invited to float through fragments of extremely personal memories while being entertained by the various textures and materials Fernandez has thoughtfully arranged in each work. There are painterly aspects that divide you from reality, yet it still feels as if you're walking into someone else's actual space and you’re welcome to stay as long as you’d like.
The paintings are in essence a mapping of her family lineage, their struggles and their persistence captured through the lens of old photographs passed down from her grandmother. Through these photographs, Fernandez is navigating her own identity as it relates to her childhood and her closeness to family. She manipulates these images to tell a story of adolescence that most of us couldn’t comprehend and yet she finds strength in these memories, weaving them into a narrative about what it means to call somewhere home and to make a place for yourself.
I visited Fernandez in her studio as she put the final touches on her first solo exhibition entitled When you hold onto my spirit, will you let your spirit grow? at Sow & Tailor in Los Angeles. Read more.
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.
Kate MccGwire Mines Tension Between Nature & the Manmade World In Undertow @ galerie Les filles du Calvaire in Paris
Known for her muscular, writhing forms made with feathers, and reminiscent of Classical sculpture and creatures from mythology, Kate MccGwire’s works explore dualities of aesthetics, being simultaneously seductive and repulsive; form, being both organic and abstract; and movement, appearing fluid yet being static. As she has noted, “I am interested in the interplay of opposites which runs like a leitmotif through everything I do. It is as if the work needs that tension to create its own internal equilibrium; it is an expression for me of the duality I see all around me and the materials I choose need to be able to physically embody this.”
Influenced by the cycles, patterns and currents of water, these works explore conflicting relationship between nature and the manmade world. Observing the dichotomies of nature on her daily wild swims and walks, MccGwire makes work inspired by visual rhythms and sequencing observed in flowing water, but also its rupture, control and diversion through human interference with dams and weirs.
The artist’s process of creation begins with the intense and repetitive method of collecting and preparing the feathers, each of them carefully examined and classified according to its size, shape and natural color. In a compelling and meditative process, MccGwire arranges the feathers to mimic the overall form and patterning of the pieces informed and inspired by the anatomy of birds’ wings. Discarded, impermanent and overlooked materials have always fascinated the artist. In her piece TAINT she contrasted lead sheet with intricately arranged feathers, creating an anaemic, skin-like surface. In the visceral forms of UNDERTOW, the artist is seduced by the beauty, flow, power and turbulence of flowing water and ultimately drawn to the danger that lies beneath the surface.
Undertow is on view through May 7 @ galerie Les filles du calvaire 17 rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, 75003 Paris
Kate MccGwire
Making of SASSE/SLUICE, 2018
Photo : Jo Scott
Transmundane Economies: Queerness, Spirituality & Heritage Overlap in the Work of Theodoulos Polyviou →
jacket: GmbH, shirt: Theo’s own
Theodoulos Polyviou is an artist whose practice explores the multilayered spaces where queerness, spirituality, and cultural heritage overlap across physical and digital worlds. Often utilizing virtual reality (VR) technology, Theo’s work also features architectural and sculptural elements, text, and sound, resulting in installations that are at once intellectually deep and sensuous to experience. He has participated in numerous exhibitions and residencies throughout Europe, and has a forthcoming project in Lecce, Italy, later this year. I met Theo on the occasion of his recent exhibition Transmundane Economies at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, where he has pursued a long-term artist residency. As an art critic, I’m usually hesitant and skeptical regarding the experience of art in virtual reality. But I found how Theo uses VR in Transmundane Economies to construct a “ritual space” that conjoins queerness, religion, and Cypriot cultural heritage to be profound and compelling. So I’ve met with him again to find out more. Read more.
Derek Fordjour's Magic, Mystery & Legerdemain @ David Kordansky Gallery In Los Angeles
To enter Derek Fordjour’s deeply visceral first solo exhibition at David Kordansky Gallery is to suspend disbelief. Behind mysterious curtains, old-fashioned turnstiles, and gallery corridors, the past, present and future merge into a fantastical tableau of interstitiality and multimedia, from painting to sculpture to a live magic show. Magic is the theme and in these works we feel the power of illusions, the power of disappearance and the ultimate power of reappearance. The title of the show, Magic, Mystery & Legerdemain, is taken from the semi-fictionalized autobiography of turn-of-the-20th-century illusionist Black Herman. Herman’s act included Asrah levitation where a participant, usually an assistant, is levitated under a cloth and then rendered invisible, only to materialize later somewhere in the audience. His routine covered the standard canon of tricks, like making rabbits appear from hats. But one of his signature acts was having himself buried alive in an outdoor area called "Black Herman's Private Graveyard,” and then exhumed three days later to finish his show. Black Herman’s magic and Fordjour’s artwork are metaphysical, or perhaps psychological, analogies to the Middle Passage, the Bermuda Triangle of the Black Diaspora, and the disappearance and reappearance of Black bodies across the globe. The legerdemain, or sleight of hand, of the Black experience. In a new suite of paintings, Fordjour wows us with his brilliant and exuberant use of artifactual materials like newspaper and cardboard that force us into current cultural realities as if to say, “Tada!” with a wave of his magic paintbrush. There is Earvin ‘Magic’ Johnson in his Lakers jersey, reaching for an orange in the land of plenty, standing next to a Rolls Royce, the Spirit of Ecstasy hood ornament nearly middle-frame. There are also devotions to other Black magicians, like the Armstrong family, which consisted of J. Hartford Armstrong, known as the “King of the Colored Conjurers” and his daughter Ellen, who was one of the first female Black magicians. Or Goldfinger and Dove, a husband and wife duo who performed at Los Angeles’ Magic Castle. And, of course, Henry Box Brown, a magician and former slave who sent himself via USPS in a wooden crate to abolitionists in Philadelphia. The works are rife with breadcrumbs, easter eggs, and not-so-secret ciphers that celebrate Black cultural output through the lens of magic, both figuratively and literally. Fordjour’s largest painting to date, Meu Povo, which spans across eight panels, explores a carnival procession in real time, including rituals and dance inspired by Afro-Brazilian folklore, as part of a new series mapping Black migration. Magic, Mystery & Legerdemain is a thunderclap of an exhibition, proving that Fordjour is one of the most important voices and painters of our current surreality.
Magic, Mystery & Legerdemain is on view through May 7 @ David Kordansky Gallery 5130 W. Edgewood Place Los Angeles. Click here to read a conversation between Derek Fordjour & Torkwase Dyson from our FW2020 Sitting Issue.
Watch The Premiere Of "The Performance" By Avery Wheless
shot & directed by Avery Wheless
art direction & styling by Kari Fry
choreography & movement by Cami Árboles
music "I Left My Juul in Monterey" by Niia Bertino
clothing by SUBSURFACE
What does it mean to be a performer? The Performance explores the connection between fabric and figure, self and body, perception and performance. As humans, we are always in a kinetic state; always moving, shapeshifting, and grappling with the impermanence of the human experience. To be human is to be the sculpture and the sculptor—we are being passed around to, for, and from each other, molding and being molded along the way. This piece is an embodiment of these sentiments through an intentional synthesis of garment, body, movement, and form. It represents a return to self—a self that embraces the beauty in evolving, sculpting, and shedding. We are forever performers on our own stage.