Roberto Matta's Surreal Dreamscapes Prove Themselves Ageless @ Galerie Mitterrand in Berlin

Galerie Mitterrand is opening its very first exhibition at 95 rue duFaubourg Saint-Honoré, History is round like the Earth by Chilean artist Roberto Matta. In collaboration with the Matta family and Paradiso Terrestre gallery, the exhibition brings together some thirty works – paintings, sculptures and drawings – covering each decade from the 1930s to the 1990s. An original text by American art historian Terri Geis will also be published for the occasion.

Affiliated with Surrealism, Matta began producing drawings in the 1930s that were freely inspired by the landscapes he discovered during his travels in Latin America. With André Breton’s encouragement, he worked between Europe and the United States, where he met the pioneers of Surrealism and became associated with the Abstract Expressionists (Arshile Gorky, Robert Motherwell, etc.).

In addition to his historical relationship with different movements of modern art, this exhibition intends to revisit the abundant work of the Chilean artist and examine its singularities. Matta’s illuminated, almost psychedelic aesthetic, halfway between esotericism and anticipation, makes him a forerunner of science fiction in the field of plastic art. Combining futuristic architecture, technological-industrial constructions and biomorphic figures, these compositions are in turn reflections on the historical-political context (authoritarian regimes of the twentieth century) and a more metaphysical projection of the human condition. Through its freedom, its great pictorial diversity and its insight into society, Matta’s work appears now more relevant than ever.

History is round like the Earth is on view through December 21st at Galerie Mitterrand, 95, rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, Paris VIII.

Judit Reigl's First Museum Solo Exhibition in Germany Is Presented Posthumously @ Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin

 
 

To commemorate the centenary of Judit Reigl’s birth and the acquisition of three main works by this Hungarian-born French artist (1923 – 2020), the Neue Nationalgalerie is presenting her first-ever solo exhibition in a German museum. The Nationalgalerie is the first public collection in Germany to own works by this important painter closely associated with the French Art Informel movement in the 1950s.

This overview of Reigl’s career showcases a major figure in European art from the second half of the 20th century. On view are sixteen, mostly large-scale paintings from Reigl’s painted oeuvre ‒ works both abstract and figurative. The artist began her studies at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in Budapest. In 1950, the rise of Stalinism led Riegl to flee her homeland and settle in Paris. Although her early, mostly dream-like paintings were still indebted to Surrealism, she turned to lyrical abstraction at the start of the 1950s. Figurative elements are repeatedly found in Riegl’s paintings. In the mid-1960s, they would culminate in the male torsos in her Man series.

Judit Reigl
Man, Tripychon (1967-1969)
Oil on canvas 232.4 x 199.4 cm; 241.3 x 198.1 cm; 232.4 x 208.3 cm,
Fonds de dotation Judit Reigl, promised gift Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin© Fonds de Dotation Judit Reigl

Judit Riegl’s work will be on view through October 8th at Neue Nationalgalerie, Potsdamer Str. 50, 10785 Berlin.

Rita Maikova's "Bones and Ribbons" @ Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery

 
RITA MAIKOVA, THE DOVES ARE HERE, COPYRIGHT © 2023 KRISTIN HJELLEGJERDE

RITA MAIKOVA, THE DOVES ARE HERE, COPYRIGHT © 2023 KRISTIN HJELLEGJERDE

 

Tiny pairs of eyes stare out from drooping, coral-like, fuzzy and ghoulish creatures that appear gathered together in theatrical formation against hazy skies. This is the surreal and magical world of the Ukrainian artist Rita Maikova, Bones and Ribbons, the artist’s first solo exhibition with Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, explores what Maikova describes as ‘the duality of existence’ that not only Ukrainians and other nations living with conflict must negotiate on a day-to-day basis, but millions of other people whose worlds have been torn apart by personal, social or political circumstances. In these works, the divide is drawn between the body (bones) and ribbons (the soul). In each painting we can locate both modes of existence – light and dark, despair and hope – but rather than setting up opposites, the compositions gesture towards a kind of resolution or as Maikova puts it ‘the party after the battle’, a time of healing and celebration.

Maikova was abroad when Russia invaded Ukraine and has not been able to return to her home country since. Finding herself caught in a limbo state, she has had to find new ways of existing in the world that involves the compartmentalisation of her emotions, in other words ‘choosing to leave behind the pain in order to leave the house.’ In some ways, this is the experience that these paintings capture, though for Maikova the act of making art is also a form of healing and freedom – it allows her to access her unconscious mind, to dream again. We see this in the fluidity of forms that populate her compositions – hybrid characters appear, often simultaneously, as rock-like formations, rivers, undulating bodies and huge, anthropomorphic beasts against an otherwise bare, desert-like landscape that is inspired by Maikova’s upbringing in the vast, open steppe of southern Ukraine. In this show, the landscape is also sometimes the sea or the beach, defined by the line of the horizon and the changing of light that imply the passage of the day but also, and more importantly for the artist, creates shadows which, she says, ‘express our dark side that is necessary to our existence.’

Bones and Ribbons is on view through June 3rd at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery 533 Old York Road, London (Wandsworth)

 
 

Theophanies Explores The Late Steven Arnold's Personal Mythologies @ Fahey/Klein In Los Angeles

Realized between 1981 and 1993, Steven Arnold’s tableau photography represents a confluence of his myriad other disciplines. This modality allowed him the freedom to fully realize his cinematic visions without outside influence or compromise. After sketching storyboards inspired by his dreams, a habit from his filmmaking days, Arnold would craft his tableaus using cardboard, seamless paper, metallic and patterned fabrics, cut paper, paint, and selections from his obsessive collection of antiques, costumes, makeup, and dime store finds. Finally, he would dress, paint, and pose his models within his tableau, bringing his vision to life, then captured with his Hasselblad, often utilizing multiple exposures. 

Theophanies is an exhibition of works curated as a limited retrospective of the late artist’s surrealist tableau photographs, supported by a small selection of drawings, paintings, sculpture, and films. A proud, prominent member of the LGBTQ community years before this moniker became part of our common vernacular, Arnold sadly died of AIDS in 1994. Most recently, he is the subject of a documentary, Steven Arnold: Heavenly Bodies, co-narrated by Anjelica Huston and Ellen Burstyn, which will be screened on September 21 at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Feliz. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion with filmmaker Vishnu Dass, writer/editor Steffie Nelson, writer/filmmaker Jessica Hundley (The Library of Esoterica) and Nicholas Fahey of Fahey/Klein Gallery.

Theophanies is on view through September 24 @ Fahey/Klein Gallery 148 North La Brea Avenue

Read Our Review Of Cristine Brache's Solo Exhibition @ Fierman Gallery by Adam Lehrer →

Artist Cristine Brache has developed an interest in surrealism. For her recent exhibition, Commit Me, Commit to Me (Cázame, Cásame) at New York’s Fierman Gallery, the artist has created a sculptural installation rife with references to some of the surrealist movement’s most important female practitioners. In particular, the anthropomorphic forms and hybridity between body and object of the figurative sculpture that functions as the installation’s centerpiece, Woman Getting Reupholstered, recalls those soft sculptures of Dorothea Tanning such as Nue Couchée, 1969. Click here to read more.

King Dogs Never Grow Old: A Group Show Curated By Brooke Wise @ Diane Rosenstein Gallery in Los Angeles

Borrowed from André Breton and Philippe Soupault’s surrealist text Les Champs Magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields), the show’s title alludes to exploring the nonsensical and the dreamlike unconscious. The work on view shares a common dialogue and aims to explore these surrealist notions in a contemporary manner.

Jillian Mayer and Haley Josephs use color and whimsy to address these surrealist concepts. Ginny Casey draws inspiration from classic Walt Disney cartoons and welcomes the spectator with distorted, absurd and disproportioned objects, which play with our restrictions of logic and time. Tom of Finland celebrates sexuality, fantasy, and the body in all areas of human endeavor. Scott Reeder and Matthew Sweesy both use comedy and rhetoric in their paintings. Chris Wolston’s Nalgona chairs are humanized by his addition of wicker body parts. Sam Crow’s tufted wall works skew our sense of reality and attempt to destroy our sense of stability in her usage of geometric shapes and dimension. Rose Nestler’s soft sculptures explore the body as the subconscious mind. Bri Williams uses found objects often with personal associations, to evoke a potent, psychic mood. Minimalist artist Robert Moreland reinvents his canvas into the space between painting and sculpture, while Haley Mellin’s small paintings reinvent mundane objects such as a Warholian banana floating in space. Through comedy, rhetoric, sarcasm and the uncanny, these works all share a common discourse about surrealism, the unexpected and the unconventional.

King Dogs Never Grow Old is on view through February 1st at Diane Rosenstein Gallery 831 N Highland Ave, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of the gallery

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

New Museum Presents "Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel" The First American Survey Of The Artist's Oeuvre

Over the past thirty years, Lucas has created a distinctive and provocative body of work that subverts traditional notions of gender, sexuality, and identity. Since the late 1980s, she has transformed found objects and everyday materials such as cigarettes, vegetables, and stockings into disorienting, confrontational tableaux that boldly challenge social norms. The human body and anthropomorphic forms recur throughout Lucas’s works, often appearing erotic, humorous, fragmented, or reconfigured into fantastical anatomies of desire.

Initially associated with a group known as the Young British Artists (YBAs), who began exhibiting together in London in the late 1980s, Lucas is now one of the UK’s most influential artists. This presentation, which takes place across the three main floors of the New Museum, brings together more than 150 works in photography, sculpture, and installation to reveal the breadth and ingenuity of her practice. The exhibition addresses the ways in which Lucas’s works engage with crucial debates about gender and power, along with the legacy of Surrealism—from her clever transformations of everyday objects to her exploration of sexual ambiguity and the tension between the familiar and the absurd.

“Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel” features some of Lucas’s most important projects, including early sculptures from the 1990s that substitute domestic furniture for body parts and enlarged spreads from tabloid newspapers from the same period, which reflect objectified representations of the female body. Alongside the photographic self-portraits that Lucas has produced throughout her career, the exhibition features biomorphic sculptures including her stuffed-stocking Bunnies (1997–ongoing) and NUDS (2009–ongoing), the Penetralia series (2008–ongoing), and selections from her installations at the Freud Museum in London (2000) and the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2015). These works, which complicate inscribed codes of sexual and social normativity, have never before been shown together in the US. Lucas has also created new sculptural works for the exhibition, including This Jaguar’s Going to Heaven (2018), a severed 2003 Jaguar X-Type—the car’s back half burned and its front half collaged with cigarettes—and VOX POP DORIS (2018), a pair of eleven-foot-tall thigh-high platform boots cast in concrete.

Au Naturel is on view through January 20, 2019 at the New Museum 235 Bowery New York, 10002. photographs by Adam Lehrer

Jansson Stegner Paintings @ Nino Mier Gallery in Los Angeles

Nino Mier Gallery is currently presenting Jansson Stegner's first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. This new series of oil paintings that ascribe male and female figures with exaggeratedly rendered physiques explores the inversion of gender roles within myriad aspects of authority, dominance, submission and beauty. Jansson Stegner Paintings will on view until March 3 at Nino Mier Gallery 7313 Santa Monica Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90046.

Man Ray and Lee Miller: Partners in Surrealism

A beautiful portrait of Lee Miller by Man Ray. Man Ray |Lee Miller: Partners in Surrealism consists of approximately 115 photographs, paintings, drawings and manuscripts that explore the creative interaction between Man Ray and Lee Miller, two giants of European Surrealism. This is the first exhibition to focus exclusively on the pair’s artistic relationship. On view at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco until October 14, 2012. 

Man Ray and Lee Miller, Partners in Surrealism

From 1929 to 1932, Man Ray and Lee Miller -- two giants of the European Surrealism movement -- lived together in Paris, first as teacher and student, and later as lovers. Their mercurial relationship resulted in some of the most powerful work of each artist's career, and helped shape the course of modern art. Combining rare vintage photographs, paintings, sculpture and drawings, a new exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, tells the story of the artists' brief but intense association and reveals the nature of their creative partnership. On view from June 11 to December 4, 2011. www.pem.org

Surrealism: The Poetry of Dreams

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Victor Brauner, Romania/France 1903–66, Loup-table (Wolf-table) 1939, 1947, Wood and taxidermied fox

This June marks the beginning of a unique, expansive exhibit of surrealist artwork in Queensland, Australia. The Gallery of Modern art in Queensland, a land far from the birth of surrealism, is borrowing "the core" of one of the finest and largest collections held at the The Musée national d’art moderne in at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Its a rare occasion in that the collection rarely leaves Paris.  The exhibition presents more than 180 artworks by 56 artists, including paintings, sculptures, ‘surrealist objects’, films, photographs, drawings and collages. Surrealism: The Poetry of Dreams is on view June 11 to October 2 at the The Gallery of Modern Art in Queensland - www.qag.qld.gov.au.

In the Light of Mexico

Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata were stealing back Mexico for the people.  Freedom was being won with blood.  Mexico was in the throes of a revolution. The great first quarter of the twentieth century Mexico was fertile ground for not only revolutionaries, but also artists. Mexico was indeed succeeding to a modern world.  Mexico, always the symbol and champion of the underdog, the poor, the hungry has always held on strong to its icons.  They were roughhewn in their prismatic, threadbare ponchos, sombreros, and dark mestizo skin that glowed amber under a romantic, warm desert sun in a landscape of infinite flowers, cobble stone, and chirping monkeys. And like inventing memories from photographs, our images of Mexico have been always invented by this imagery.  It's the murals of Diego Rivera, the gardens and portraits of Frida Kahlo and the poems of Octavio Paz that paint of landscape of a bygone Mexico - poorly preserved by kitsch, refrigerator magnates, and theme restaurants. We always wonder what happened to the good old days when they're seemingly gone forever.  Certainly one of the most influential icons of Mexico's good old days is the photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo.

Manuel Álvarez Bravo, whose work is being exhibited alongside the poetry of another symbol of Mexico's heritage Octavio Paz, at the Mexican Embassy in India, captured the spirit of a Mexico experiencing the pangs of a revolution and the dialectic of an artistic movement mirroring back its angst. Screaming in a fulmination of dust, Bravo's photographs are as  journalistic as they are erotic.  Bravo was born in 1902 to a  family of artists and writers, and met several other prominent artists who encouraged his work when he was young, including Diego Rivera.  Bravo, who was inspired by the burgeoning surrealist movement in France, starting taking pictures at 18 whilst working a government job.  Bravo would become a profoundly influential figure in contemporary Mexican and Latin American photography, but he would not become largely known in the rest of the world.   Bravo died in 2002 at the age of 100, but his photographs are a significant part of Mexico’s history.

An exhibition, entitled In the Light of Mexico, curated by Conrado Tostado Gutierrez, the cultural attaché of the Embassy of Mexico in Delhi, comprises a substantial body of images that evokes the era of the Mexican Revolution of early 1907 to 1911, the newly independent Mexico and its people. Bravo’s daughter Aurelia Alvarez Bravo and his widow Collette Urbajtel have painstakingly developed the original negatives from the photographer’s work to make this exhibition possible. Bravo's photographs are coupled with the poems of poet and former Mexican Ambassador to India, Octavio Paz.

On view until June 30th in New Delhi, India. More info.

Text by Oliver Maxwell Kupper for Pas Un Autre

Miró in London

A Star Caresses the Breast of a Negress (Painting Poem) 1938

Joan Miró's works come to London's Tate Modern in the first major retrospective here for nearly 50 years. Renowned as one of the greatest Surrealist painters, filling his paintings with luxuriant colour, Miró worked in a rich variety of styles. This is a rare opportunity to enjoy more than 150 paintings, drawings, sculptures and prints from moments across the six decades of his extraordinary career. 14 April – 11 September 2011 www.tate.org

 

Required Reading: Lautréamont's Maldoror

"The deadly uses of this book will lap up his soul as water does sugar." In 1917 French writer Philippe Soupault discovered a copy of Comte de Lautréamont's manuscript Les Chants de Maldor in the mathematics section of a small Parisian bookshop, near the military hospital to which he had been admitted.. Lautréamont, which was the pseudonym of Isidore Lucien Ducasse, born in Uruguay 1846 and died in Paris in 1870, was immediately canonized as a surrealist god - in the pantheon of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarme.  "Chants de Maldoror unveils a world, half vision, half nightmare, of angels and gravediggers, hermaphrodites, and homosexuals, madmen and strange children."  Right now at the Galerie Anais in the Bergamont art space in Santa Monica, California a small exhibit of inspired drawings by the the similarly morbid artist Hans Bellmer - The Songs of Maldoror and Erotic Series is on view until March 31st. www.galerieanaisla.com