Pictures Girls Make Inverts Archaic Norms Through Portraiture @ Blum & Poe in Los Angeles

“Pictures Girls Make”: Portraitures, Installation view, 2023, Blum & Poe, Los Angeles © The artists; Courtesy of the artists and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo, Photo: Evan Walsh

Blum & Poe presents Pictures Girls Make: Portraitures, an exhibition bringing together over fifty artists from around the world, spanning the early nineteenth century until today. Curated by Alison M. Gingeras, this prodigious survey argues that this age-old mode of representation is an enduringly democratic, humanistic genre.

“Pictures girls make” is a quip attributed to Willem de Kooning who purportedly dismissed the inferior status of his wife Elaine’s portrait practice. Inverting the original dismissal into an affirmation, Pictures Girls Make is a rallying cry for this exhibition which examines how different forms of portraitures defy old aesthetic, social, and ideological norms.

Pictures Girls Make is on view through October 21 @ Blum & Poe, 2727 South La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles, California 90034

Zephyr by Prissilya Junewin & Maya Lu

full look: Prada

photography by Prissilya Junewin
styling by Maya Lu
hair by Dennis Brandt
make up by Jamal Musa
photographer assistant by Emi Iguchi
modeling by Looloo, Damrasi, Idi
casting by Majin Scouting
production by Kaputt Agency

full look: Miu Miu

top & skirt: Meryll Rogge
tie: Dior
boots: Scarrossa
bag: Jerome Dreyfuss

top: Issey Miyake

dress: Ferragamo

dress: No Faith Studios

jacket & skirt: Annakiki
shoes: Miu Miu

Coat: UGG

Drink the Wild Air @ Capitain Petzel

 
A poster showing artists Andrea Bowers and Mary Weatherford running through the desert. The words "Drink the Wild Air" are above them and "Capitain Petzel" below.
 

Mary Weatherford and Andrea Bowers have often talked about making a show together. Bowers suggested that she would make neons while Weatherford would make paintings, a serious joke that neither would strictly hold the other to but subsequently formed the foundation for their two-person show, Drink the Wild Air, at Capitain Petzel. For Bowers, Weatherford is part of her “Beloved Community”, a quote from MLK containing two simple words that embrace the basic human necessity for democracy and love.

Mary and Andrea met in NYC around 1988 where the two were working in galleries in Soho. Mary attended the Whitney ISP in 1985 and Bowers began graduate studies at CalArts in 1990. Perhaps both young artists internalized the benefits and disfunction of the anvil of pedagogical theory dropped on them. Creativity was not a topical issue. The zeitgeist was critical analysis. Mary’s response was to move in a direction that was more personally freeing by committing to a body of work 100 percent based on her own stories. While at CalArts, Bowers was told to stop drawing and focus on content. She found her voice in the histories of community organizing and nonviolent civil disobedience and committed to using aesthetics in service of social justice.

 
Andrea Bowers Courtesy the artist and Capitain Petzel, Berlin Photo by Gunter Lepkowski

Andrea Bowers
Courtesy the artist and Capitain Petzel, Berlin
Photo by Gunter Lepkowski

 

Both practices are part of the tradition of women’s storytelling. While Bowers bears witness to the narratives of activists and political movements, Weatherford focuses on autobiography. In the way that women historically hid familial histories and recipes for holistic medicines in unexpected places like children’s stories and folklore, Weatherford’s stories are clandestine, hidden in liquid paint. Weatherford’s secret narratives simmer beneath the surface while Bowers insists on clarity toward action and citizenry. Both positions are viable and crucial. In a matriarchal model of community, responsibility and care, two seemingly oppositional approaches can flourish simultaneously.

Drink the Wild Air is on view through August 5th at Capitain Petzel, Karl-Marx-Allee 45, 10178 Berlin

Zoe Buckman: Heavy Rag @ Fort Gansevoort In New York

Zoe Buckman’s solo show is explicitly linked to women’s work. Culled from deeply personal experience, the exhibition embraces the domestic archetype by balancing an ambiguity between vulnerability and strength. Occupying the three floors of the gallery, the bodies of work are interconnected by the manifestation of the artist’s relationship to physical spaces—the home, her mother’s kitchen table, the boxing gym. After learning of her mother’s terminal diagnosis, Buckman began to employ a variety of techniques and materials traditionally adorned by women; embroidered tea towels, quilting and pottery. The works which take form as misshapen tea cups, clusters of boxing gloves, and framed flatworks are intrinsically referential to the bodily form; all at once unveiling a complex dichotomy of trauma and pleasure and the slippage in between. Heavy Rag is on view through October 12 at Fort Gansevoort 5 Ninth Avenue, New York. photographs courtesy of the artist and Fort Gansevoort, New York

Margot Bergman: Family Album @ Anton Kern Gallery in New York

For the artist’s second solo exhibition with Anton Kern Gallery, Margot Bergman presents Family Album, which includes her most recent paintings and photographs. Bergman has sustained an active painting practice in Chicago since the 1950s and honed a peerless style of figuration. For the last 15 years her subject matter has focused on individual faces of imagined people, predominantly women. Her style is characterized by active expressionistic brush work, unconcerned with symmetry, realistic proportions, and traditional notions of femininity. The artist can adeptly shift styles within a single composition, juxtaposing photorealistic eyes and lips, with a scribbly green hair-do, and a thin wash of color for the complexion. Accompanying Bergman’s paintings are theatrical and lively photographs that bear an uncanny resemblance to her painted works. Together Bergman’s paintings and photographs create a manufactured family album that memorializes the environment in which they were created and their palpable relationship with the artist.

Family Album is on view through August 16 at Anton Kern Gallery 16 East 55th Street New York, NY. photographs courtesy of the artist and Anton Kern Gallery

Dana Kyndrová Presents "Woman Between Inhaling And Exhaling" @ The Czech Center In New York

Czech documentary photographer Dana Kyndrová has been focusing her camera on women for half of a century. The series "Woman between Inhaling and Exhaling" examines the many aspects of women’s lives. Shot primarily in former Czechoslovakia and later in the Czech Republic, but also in some Western countries, the photographs show the moment of birth, the tension of school exams, falling in love – daily life, both under Communism and after. Woman between Inhaling And Exhaling is on view through July 28 at the Czech Center, Bohemian National Hall, 321 East 73rd Street, New York. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Exclusive Premiere of "Screen Test n.11: Romantic Love" by Alex Franco Featuring Poet and Model Greta Bellamacina

The short-film and intimate spoken word snapshot, entitled Screen Test n.11: Romantic Love, by photographer and filmmaker Alex Franco, features English poet and model Greta Bellamacina sprawled out, reading her poem Romantic Love. Bellamacina, who just had her first child with fellow artist and poet Robert Montgomery, says that the poem is from a series that explores the “early stages of motherhood from a young female contemporary perspective,” which is a perspective that is “massively under represented in the media today.” The poem, Romantic Love, is inspired by Lucien Freud’s 2002 painting Naked Portrait, which features a pregnant Kate Moss softly laying her head on her own arm in an intimate setting with a maternal glow. Bellamacina, who is a lingual portraitist that uses deeply powerful rhythms of language to paint her poems, plans to release a book of poetry later this month called Stockholm Syndrome. Click here to read the poem. Poem by Greta Bellamacina @ VIVA Model Management. Film by Alex Franco @ Artist and Agency .