In the above video, legendary New York artist Jack Walls talks about everything from his early experiences with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe to the AIDS crisis and his exploration as an artist. On view now at rare bookseller Glenn Horowitz's RARE gallery, the exhibition of new paintings, and the African carvings that inspired them is the first in a series of artist spotlights. The exhibition will be on view until June 27, 2015 at RARE Gallery, 17 West 54th Street New York, NY
Opening tomorrow night in Los Angeles, MAMA gallery will present To Hide To Show, a group exhibition derived from a contemporary French social anthropological study entitled Montrer / Occulter, which loosely translates to the exhibition’s title. The artists chosen to represent the ideas and concepts behind this study, and its conclusions, experiment with the notion of concealing and revealing on a societal, intellectual and creative basis. These artists include Clara Balzary, Zoe Crosher, Nana Ghana, Ariana Papademetropolous, Mattea Perrotta, Fay Ray, Lisa Solberg, and Johanna Tagada. Click here to read our interviews with all the artists.
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, presents "Tongues Untied," an exhibition titled after the landmark film by poet, activist, and artist Marlon Riggs. "Tongues Untied" presents a selection of works from the museum’s permanent collection by John Boskovich, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and others, alongside Riggs’s deeply personal and lyrical exploration of black gay identity in the United States. Made during a historical period marked by the onset of the AIDS crisis, the works navigate desire, love, loss, and mourning to engage and question sexual and political repression, expression, and deviation. This exhibition coincides with the 30th anniversary of the City of West Hollywood and is presented in concert with a celebration of its activist history. Tongues Untied will be on view until September 13, 2015 at MoCA Pacific Design Center.
a peek at Enoc Perez's studio in New York
“In these paintings, Picasso’s body of work becomes a pictorial genre, like portraiture, landscapes and still lifes”, explains Perez, who used photographic self-portraits posted by women on social networks (Instagram, Twitter) as the basis for his variations on the work of Picasso. Anonymous faces, new digital muses metamorphose into Olgas, Marie-Thérèses, Doras and Jacquelines in the silvery, monochrome palette of Enoc Perez. This approach is founded on resolving the contradiction between the feminine manner in which the women present themselves and the resolutely masculine gaze that Picasso cast on his subjects, which alternated between desire, cruelty and tenderness. “For me, painting has the capacity to offer conflicting visions of the world while preserving its power”, explains Perez, who, with this new series of paintings, attempts to reinvent Cubism in the moment of Instagram, Facebook and other social networks. Click here to read our interview with Perez and here to see a studio tour. The exhibition at Galerie Nathalie Obadia will be on view until July 25, 2015 at Galerie Nathalie Obadia.
303 Gallery presents "Design Office: The City Is A Garden," the gallery's first solo exhibition of new works by Kim Gordon. In this new body of work, Gordon's primary concern is the radical change in the landscape of New York City over the past several years. For the past 20 years Chelsea has been a center of urban renovation, including the opening of the highline in 2009. Small parks appear randomly in the middle of a street. Outdoor sculptures often accompany the arrangements. The new lushness of New York would seem to reimagine NYC as a city for the people, as well as a more attractive landscape for new consumers. Kim Gordon "Design Office: The City Is A Garden" will be on view until July 24, 2015 at 303 Gallery.
In his paintings, Richard Phillips engages the complex web of human obsessions to do with sexuality, politics, power, death that are constantly exploited in mainstream media. Subjecting popular images to a range of classical painterly techniques, he estranges their familiarity and thus imbues them with new meaning. Photographic images of politicians are re-cast in neon, while supermodels are represented as academic paintings, as if to augment their status as pop icons. Over and over again throughout his work, the glossy idealism of advertising propaganda is subverted by his underlying resistance to its blatant seduction. Departing from the more photorealistic tendencies of recent years, in his newest works Phillips culls celebrity portraits, retro textbook illustrations, logos, and Op Art motifs to produce compressed images in an electric palette. Richard Phillips at Gagosian Athens will be on view until August 1, 2015, 3 Merlin Street Athens 10671
Always a beguiling social pundit, Olaf Breuning has created an immersive installation of steel sculptures and large photo collages to continue his discerning humor and astute visual language. These new works identify the artist’s mind and studio as conspicuous sites of transformation and production, where surges of stimuli from daily life are methodically registered, metabolized and repurposed. Click here to read our interview with Olaf Breuning on the eve of his first solo show in the Middle East in 2013. His current exhibition of work, entitled The Life, will be on view until July 31, 2015 at Metro Pictures.
“I’m now seeing things from the side of death. I’m looking at the world from the other side of the sky. That’s why it’s mirrored.” – Nobuyoshi Araki. This spring, Araki started shooting 6×7 color positive film and black and white photographs with date inscriptions in a diaristic manner documenting daily events and his emotions regarding life and death. In the current series, Araki presents everyday scenes in mirrored images to express the sense that he now sees the world from the side of death, i.e. the other side of the mirror. In 2013, after experiencing the onset and removal of prostate cancer and the death of his beloved cat Chiro, Araki suffered from central retinal artery occlusion and lost sight in his right eye. Despite this loss, he has continued to produce photographs at a prolific pace, transforming his sadness and thoughts on death into fuel for shooting photographs. This series is his first foray into shooting images with his perspective from “the other side.” The exhibition will be on view until June 20, 2015 at Taka Ishii Gallery Photography / Film in Tokyo.
Who was it again that wrote every time he came to Brussels, he had to think of the plundered richness of the Congo on which this city was built? From Park Cinquentenaire, to the stately avenues Louise and Tervuren, King Leopold II’s Museum for Central Africa, there are countless buildings, sculptures and squares across town, which directly or indirectly remind us of the country’s colonial past. This makes the capital of Europe a perfect setting for Radek Szlaga’s exhibition "All the Brutes" on view now at Harlan Levey Projects. The show consists of a selection of works from his on-going series, which digs into Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness; a work that has become the textbook example in colonial studies of a caricatured depiction of Africa. Szlaga hasn’t followed Conrad to the Congo, but spent two months in Brussels on a residency this year exploring the links between the heart of Europe and the heart of darkness. In case any Belgian viewers might object to a body of work dealing with the Congo that’s painted by an artist who has never been to Africa, let’s remind ourselves that Leopold II never placed a foot on Congolese soil as he uprooted it. Besides, Szlaga’s aim is not to present some anthropological view on Congo, but to explore, in a pictorial way, how the novel is engrained in our collective imagination, whether that is through literature, cinema, painting or in daily life (like the all too often quoted: “The horror! The horror!”). Radek Szlaga 'All the Brutes' will be on view until July 11, 2015 at Harlan Levey Projects, 46 Rue Jean d’Ardenne Straat, Brussels.
In Huma Bhabha’s third exhibition at Salon 94, the artist presents new work in both of the gallery’s downtown spaces. In each installation, Bhabha draws from an expansive trove of references that cross genres, centuries, continents and mediums. Her inspirations are non-hierarchical, coming as much from popular horror movies and science fiction as from ancient artifacts, religious reliquary, Modernist sculpture and German neo-expressionism. The work can be read as an encyclopedic memory that maps, retraces, and re-imagines cultural history as an active interplay between decay and renewal. The exhibition will be on view until June 28, 2015 Salon 94, 12 East 94th Street New York.
The Serpentine presents the work of late American sculptor Duane Hanson in his first survey show in London since 1997. Throughout his forty-year career, Hanson created lifelike sculptures portraying working-class Americans and overlooked members of society. Reminiscent of the Pop Art movement of the time, his sculptures transform the banalities and trivialities of everyday life into iconographic material. The exhibition will be on view until September 13, 2015 at Serpentine Sackler Gallery.
A peak at Lisa Solberg's studio – she will be a part of a group exhibition, entitled To Hide To Show opening next week at MAMA Gallery in Los Angeles. photograph by Adarsha Benjamin
1. French photographer Marie Baronnet presents her photographs of aging and retired stars of strip tease – aged from 60 to 95 - for an exhibition entitled 'Legends' on view for only one more week at Galerie LO/A 2. British artist Bridget Riley presents her classic geometric patterned paintings at Galerie Max Hetzler 3. Celia Hempton presents her first solo show entitled, Lupa, at Sultana Gallery 4. Turkish artist Sibel Kocakaya presents Binary Appearances at Galerie Dukan 5. Artist, poet, visual artist, filmmaker, photographer, Marcel Broodthaers presents a site specific exhibition at the Musée d'Art Moderne 6. Musician Lenny Kravitz is showing a selection of photographs - part of his "Flash" series that documents his life in front of the camera - at the Colette store in Paris.
You are sitting in a car. Not your own car. You actually have no idea whose car this is. All you know is that it was lovingly placed on the rooftop of a historic building, here in downtown Ramallah, Palestine. And that you’ve been watching a 1970s Egyptian Western. A French political musical. An experimental program of artists’ film and video. The smell of popcorn fills the air, and the radio dial is a little buttery with your greasy fingerprints. Cinema Sayyara! is a rooftop drive-in cinema by the artist Phil Collins, commissioned by the 5th Riwaq Biennale. It is the latest rendition of Collins’s Auto-Kino!, which was rolled out in Berlin five years ago. The new film program for Ramallah has been collectively selected by artists, and filmmakers whom Collins invited as guest programmers, as well as by residents of the Beit Saa neighborhood. The project runs only for four weeks and offers a maximum of 21 seats per night. But if you live nearby, you can watch the program from the street, your balcony or your favorite cafe by using a standard 98.9 FM frequency to tune into the soundtrack on the radio.
Legendary No Wave musician (Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Queen of Siam), writer, spoken word artist, and actress Lydia Lunch makes her return to New York with a new photographic exhibition and installation called "So Real It Hurts" on view for on more week at Howl! Happening in New York. This Friday, to close the exhibition, she will be performing her spoken word piece "Conspiracy on Women." The piece will be also be reissued on Other People.
Israeli-American artist Daniel Rozin's PomPom Mirror features a synchronized array of 928 spherical faux fur puffs. Organized into a three-dimensional grid of beige and black, the sculpture is controlled by hundreds of motors that build silhouettes of viewers using computer-vision. Along its surface, figures appear as fluffy animal-like representations within the picture plane, which is made permeable by a ‘push-pull’ forward and backward motion of meshed ‘pixels’. Ghostly traces fade and emerge, as the motorized composition hums in unified movement, seemingly alive and breathing as a body of its own. Rozin's PomPom mirror is on view now – part of a solo exhibition entitled “Descent With Modification,” which marks the artist's first display of interactive sculpture. Merging the geometric with the participatory, Rozin’s installations have long been celebrated for their kinetic and interactive properties. Grounded in gestures of the body, the mirror is a central theme of Rozin’s practice. In his art, surface transformation becomes a means to explore animated behavior, representation, and illusion. Descent With Modification will be on view until July 1, 2015 at bitforms Gallery in New York.
Gagosian presents the work of legendary sculptor Michael Heizer. Heizer's first exhibition with the gallery comprises rarely or never-before-seen early paintings, the Altar series of new monumental steel sculptures, and negative wall sculptures featuring metamorphic and igneous rocks. Working largely outside the confines of gallery and museum, Heizer has redefined sculpture in terms of size, mass, gesture, and process. In the late 1960s, he relocated to New York, while continuing to travel and live in the open terrain of the American West, where he has since created awe-inspiring land artworks. Michael Heizer 'Altars' will be on view until July 9, 2015 at Gagosian Gallery, 555 West 24th Street, New York. photographs by Eric Minh Swenson
Daniel Arsham, Juliette Lewis, Waris Ahluwalia, and Mike Figgis at the 5th edition of the IST Festival in Istanbul - curated and co-founded by Istanbul 74' - which explored realist in art and culture. Daniel Arsham premiered his film Future Relic 03 starring Juliette Lewis. photograph by Will Ragozzino
1. Dan Flavin's early work - a series called Icons - is on view at Dia's Dan Flavin Art Institute 2. Matthew King: This Side Down is on view at the rare art book shop Harper's Books 3. Cole Sternberg's ARTed House is a site to see on David's Lane in East Hampton 4. Womanhouse is a powerhouse group exhibition featuring twenty-one female artists - from Orly Genger to Agathe Snow on view at Eric Firestone Gallery 5. Artist Jen Stark paints the Surf Lodge with dripping psychedelic colors.
