The Hugo Boss Prize 2018: Simone Leigh, Loophole of Retreat @ the Guggenheim in New York

Over the course of her career, Simone Leigh (b. 1967, Chicago) has continuously and insistently centered the black female experience. In Loophole of Retreat, an exhibition presented on the occasion of Leigh winning the 2018 Hugo Boss Prize, she layers form, sound, and text to fashion narratives of resilience and resistance. The project’s title is drawn from the writings of Harriet Jacobs, a formerly enslaved abolitionist who in 1861 published an account of her struggle to achieve freedom, including the seven years she spent hiding from her master in a tiny crawl space beneath the rafters of her grandmother’s home. This act of defiant fortitude, which forged a “loophole of retreat” from an unjust reality, serves as a touchstone for Leigh’s long-standing commitment to honoring the agency of black women and their power to inhabit worlds of their own creation.

The Hugo Boss Prize 2018: Simone Leigh, Loophole of Retreat is on view through October 27 at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum 1071 5th Ave, New York, NY 10128. photographs courtesy of the artist and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Mika Rottenberg Presents "Easy Pieces" @ The New Museum In New York

Employing absurdist satire to address the critical issues of our time, Rottenberg creates videos and installations that offer subversive allegories for contemporary life. Her works interweave documentary elements and fiction, and often feature protagonists who work in factory-like settings to manufacture goods ranging from cultured pearls (NoNoseKnows, 2015) to the millions of brightly colored plastic wholesale items sold in Chinese superstores (Cosmic Generator, 2017). The exhibition presents several of her recent video installations and kinetic sculptures, and premieres a new video installation, Spaghetti Blockchain (2019), that explores ancient and new ideas about materialism and considers how humans both comprise and manipulate matter. Together, the works in the exhibition trace central themes in Rottenberg’s oeuvre, including labor, technology, distance, energy, and the interconnectedness of the mechanical and the corporeal. Easy Pieces is on view through September 15 at the New Museum 235 Bowery, New York. photographs courtesy of the gallery


Annka Kultys Gallery Presents Quid est veritas? Group Exhibition in London

Quid est veritas?, a multi-generational group exhibition exploring the concept of philosophical truth, is now on view at Annka Kultys Gallery.  Through works by AES+F, Morehshin Allahyari, Imre Bak, crocodilePOWER, Simon Denny, Eva and Franco Mattes, Joseph Kosuth, Olia Lialina, Signe Pierce, Timur Si-Qin, and Theo Triantafyllidis, curator Anton Svyatsky scrutinizes the cognitive mechanisms by which humans operate the label of truth. The concept of truth has been and remains a central subject of philosophy, and yet its definition has proved elusive for thousands of years. In a time of universal deceit, propaganda, political truth-bending, and outright condemnation of truth, it becomes imperative to examine our relationship with it. With the dawning of the information age came unprecedented access to knowledge, and with that access, doubt has engulfed humanity. It can be said that doubt is the herald of enquiry and thus the harbinger of truth. Without doubt, no progress towards truth can be made. Each work in Quid est veritas? is intended as a provocation to self-examination, as well as invite the spectator to doubt their belief system by inquiring into their own process of belief formation.

Quid est veritas? is on view through August 3 at Annka Kultys Gallery 472 Hackney Road, London. photographs courtesy of the artists and Annka Kultys Gallery

Ed Moses & Qin Feng @ Blain|Southern in London

An exhibition featuring the work of Ed Moses and Qin Feng puts the two artists in a conversation across cultures through a shared artistic language. Ed Moses and Qin Feng make dynamic, gestural paintings influenced by both Eastern calligraphy and Western abstraction, yet each artist arrived at this common ground from different directions. Moses was one of the founding artists of the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, and over many decades he created one of the most diverse bodies of abstraction in late twentieth-century American art. As with many American artists of the post-war generation, especially on the West Coast, Moses was drawn to Buddhist thought, and he became a practitioner in the early 1970s. Qin Feng is one of the key figures of China’s avant-garde art movement and founder of MOCA Beijing. He has developed an expansive mode of painting deeply rooted in traditional Chinese calligraphy, although Western art has always been an important stimulus in his work. Qin Feng and the late Ed Moses share an interest in the relationship between the artist’s body and painterly gesture, and especially the effects of chance and spontaneity in the painting process.

Ed Moses & Qin Feng is on view through September 14 at Blain|Southern 4 Hanover Square, Mayfair, London W1S 1BP, UK. photographs courtesy of the artists and Blain|Southern

Singing the Body Electric: A Group Exhibition @ David Zwirner In Hong Kong

Singing the Body Electric features work by aaajiao, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Jian Yi-Hong, Wolfgang Tillmans, Wei Jia, and Lisa Yuskavage. The show’s title is derived from Walt Whitman’s ecstatic and politically nuanced poem “I Sing the Body Electric” from Leaves of Grass (1855). The exhibition includes work from across various media that likewise celebrates and complicates themes of the body and desire, while exploring physicality and identity in the context of the synthetic and alienating nature of a highly digitized world. Singing the Body Electric is on view through August 10 at David Zwirner 80 Queen's Road Central, Hong Kong. photographs courtesy of the gallery

AE2 Presents Chris Coy: Jurassic in Los Angeles

For his second exhibition with Anat Ebgi, “Jurassic,” Chris Coy presents a body of work called the Transfermaster-C series. These oil paintings are first rendered with the assistance of an Artificial Intelligence program, and then hand-painted on linen. Coy fed the transfer program a “decadent diet” of Jean-Honoré Fragonard and François Boucher images, and then the artist asked the program to map those images of superfluous pleasure onto Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War etchings. The results flatten histories and inherit both sets of imagery—luxury and playfulness, as well as violence, rage, and human brutality—forming an aesthetic superposition that in Coy’s words “feel as if the soul of the world has been sucked into the vacuum of space.

“Jurassic” is on view through August 24 at AE2 2680 S La Cienega Blvd Los Angeles, CA. photographs courtesy of the artist and Anat Ebgi

Alicja Kwade: ParaPivot @ The Met in New York

Using a wide range of media, Berlin-based artist Alicja Kwade creates elegant, experiential sculptures and installations that reflect on time, perception, and scientific inquiry. With equal parts poetry and critical insight, she calls into question the systems designed to make sense of an otherwise unfathomable universe. Kwade has created ParaPivot I and II for The Met’s Roof Garden Commission, an annual site-specific installation by a living artist. These towering sculptures consist of powder-coated steel frames that intersect at oblique angles with massive spheres that float in apparent weightlessness in between. Although static, ParaPivot I and II are charged with the possibility of movement: their steel appendages, which fan outward around multiple axes, seem to trace the orbital pathways of the globes evoking an astrolabe or even a miniature solar system. Confronted with the artist’s abstract cosmos, our experience of scale, both human and galactic, is unsettled. Overall, Kwade seeks to recover the mystery and absurdity of the human condition, heightening our powers of self-awareness.

ParaPivot is on view through October 27 at The Met’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden 1000 5th Ave, New York, NY. photographs courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Patty Chang: The Wandering Lake, 2009-2017 @ Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

Organized by the Queens Museum, New York, The Wandering Lake, 2009-2017 is Chang’s most ambitious work to date: an eight-year project that redefines the role of artist, image, object and performance in the construction of narratives through an exhibition that integrates video projection, photography, sculpture, publication, and performance as one expansive body of work. The exhibition allows viewers to navigate through Chang’s personal, associative, and narrative meditation on mourning, caregiving, geopolitics, and landscape. The exhibition has been structured to replicate the complex way in which stories develop through geography, history, cultural mythology, fiction, and personal experience. While Chang’s multi-year project was in part inspired by turn-of-the-century colonial explorer Sven Hedin’s book The Wandering Lake (1938)—which tells the story of a migrating body of water in the Chinese desert—the project also chronicles the loss of Chang’s father as well as her pregnancy and the birth of her son.

The Wandering Lake, 2009-2017 is on view through August 4 at Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles 1717 E 7th St, Los Angeles, CA 90021. photographs courtesy of Elon Schoenholz/ICA LA

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

Luis de Jesus Los Angeles Presents Group Show "I've got a good mind to give up living and go shopping instead"

“I've got a good mind to give up living and go shopping instead,” is a group exhibition featuring works by Jim Adams, Edie Beaucage, Kate Bonner, Liz Collins, Caitlin Cherry, Hugo Crosthwaite, Zackary Drucker & Rhys Ernst, Dennis Koch, Margie Livingston, Erik Olson, Josh Reames, Alexandria Smith, and Peter Williams. The show takes its name from the 1968 blues song by B.B. King, which deals with the heartbreak that comes from a broken relationship. The artists in this exhibition explore ideas about relationships that aren't necessarily what they appear to be. Break-ups can be a constantly negotiated battle between parties. Sometimes things can be read one way and understood in a completely different manner, or perhaps the fluidity of a thing—gender, for example—makes expansive truths and multiple realities possible. The varied nature of interpretations that seem to embody opposing or contradictory positions often inspire a level of empathy, communication, and creativity that may transform a situation, making it ultimately more relatable and moving.

“I’ve got a good mind to give up living and go shopping instead” is on view through August 17 at Luis de Jesus Los Angeles 2685 S La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles, CA. photographs courtesy of the artists and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles

Plumb Line: Charles White and the Contemporary @ California African American Museum

Charles White was a prolific painter, printmaker, muralist, draftsman, and photographer whose career spanned more than half a century. His portrayals of black subjects, life, and history were extensive and his emotional works struck a particular chord with his viewers. Plumb Line features contemporary artists whose work resonates with White’s profound and continuing influence. From abstraction to figuration, the artists of this exhibition find conversation with White through their expressive renderings of black skin and black community, as well as the treatment of black past and presence in both epic and intimate ways.

Plumb Line: Charles White and the Contemporary is on view through August 25 at the California African American Museum 600 State Dr, Los Angeles, CA. photographs courtesy of the California African American Museum

"Roommates" Group Show @ Shulamit Nazarian in Los Angeles

Shulamit Nazarian presents Roommates, an exhibition of works by Chris Bogia, Woody De Othello, Rachel Granofsky, and Michael Stamm. These artists investigate the domestic space as a psychological, and at times psychedelic realm. Drawing from a variety of sources and forms that evoke a sense of home, these artists embed objects and environments with the peculiarities of living beings, illustrating our relationship to possessions that share our most intimate spaces. Like the dancing furniture in Disney’s Fantasia, subject and object wiggle back and forth with a magical realism. The home dweller melts into the sofa, while objects begin to take on a life of their own –all achieved through means similarly found in cartoon animation: flatness, movement, and artifice.

Roommates is on view through August 31 at Shulamit Nazarian 616 N La Brea Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90036. photographs courtesy of the artist and Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles

Leelee Kimmel: Nuwar @ Almine Rech Gallery in Paris

Almine Rech Paris presents Nuwar, Leelee Kimmel’s first exhibition with the gallery. Leelee Kimmel’s paintings are investigations of inner and outer space, collisions between ur-ancient, chthonic nature and the hyper-sophisticated realm of Modernist and postmodernist art histories, between the preverbal and the phantasmagoria of the library, terse and voluble, suddenly laughing then stonily silent. Kimmel’s abstract biomorphs skitter through pitch black abyssal depths, like those of Beebe’s Arcturus Adventure, at once terrifying and comic. The shapes harken back to nature, while Kimmel’s palette is neon and acid, resoundingly anti-naturalistic. 

There’s a sense of potential catastrophe crowding the margins, as forms coil and ricochet through darkness: is that a turtle or a hand grenade revolving on the periphery, is that polyp a gun? Transformation is the guiding formal but also psychological and dare I say spiritual governing force in Kimmel’s dark glittering universe, fearsome and newborn, cunning monsters, mutants, aliens, explorers, invaders, these phantoms of Nuwar.

Nuwar is on view through July 27 at Almine Rech Gallery 64 Rue de Turenne 75003 Paris FR. photographs courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech

Children's Art: Selections from the Steve Feldman Collection @ 57W57Arts in New York

Inspired by Alfred Steiglitz’s 1912 showcase of children’s art at his storied gallery 291, 57W57Arts presents two exhibitions that encapsulate the raw creativity of childhood and the multilayered expressions of child-rearing. A selection of works from Steve Feldman’s collection of children’s art will be on display in the Waiting Room, and paintings from Delia Brown’s 2008 series Precious will be exhibited in the Project Space.

Children’s Art: Selections from the Steve Feldman Collection is on view through August 8 at 57W57Arts 57 W 57th St Suite 1207, New York, NY 10019. photographs courtesy of the artists and 57W57Arts

Michael John Kelly Presents "Tempest" at Anat Ebgi in Los Angeles

Anat Ebgi presents Tempest, a solo exhibition of painting, sculpture, and video by Los Angeles based artist Michael John Kelly. Across media, Kelly's work strikes at the fourth dimension, exploring emotional, instinctual, and capricious realities. With this new body of work, the artist seeks to reveal theoretical, spiritual, and conceptual planes. His wild sense of color and gesture defies demands of concrete ideas and compositional logic, freeing viewers to experience a renewed sense of the world.

Tempest is on view through August 24 at Anat Ebgi 2660 S La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90034. photographs courtesy of the artist and Anat Ebgi

Kumasi J. Barnett: The Amazing Black-Man @ Lowell Ryan Projects in Los Angeles

Lowell Ryan Projects presentsThe Amazing Black-Man, a solo exhibition by Brooklyn-based artist Kumasi J. Barnett. Riffing on classic superhero series including;The Amazing Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk, Superman, Daredevil and Captain America, the show will feature two hundred hand-painted comic book works pinned up in their clear plastic sleeves. For each work, Barnett has painted over the cover of an old Marvel or DC comic book, replacing familiar heroes with characters including “The Amazing Black-Man,” “The Media’s Thug,” “Whitedevil,” and “Police-Man.” Barnett replaces Spider-Man’s full-body leotard with a hoodie and jeans, Superman’s logo with the stars and bars of the Confederate flag, and turns the supernatural villains into—a no less brutal nemesis—the police. Alteration here acts as an intervention. By addressing real world issues through a superhuman genre, Barnett’s work dissolves the disconnect between contemporary American narratives and the reality of “justice,” making us reexamine cultural conceptions surrounding the Good versus Evil paradigm.

The Amazing Black-Man is on view through August 17 at Lowell Ryan Projects 4851 W Adams Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90016. photographs courtesy of the artist and Lowell Ryan Projects

Tandem: Alejandro Cesarco and Tamar Guimarães @ Alexander and Bonin in New York

The third iteration of Tandem, a project curated by Luiza Teixeira de Freitas is on view at Alexander and Bonin. Tandem consists of a series of five exhibitions presented over 2019 that run parallel to the gallery program, each one a dialogue between two distinct artistic practices. In the video gallery are two films by Tamar Guimarães, O Ensaio [The Rehearsal], 2018 and Canoas, 2010. The dialogue between the two works is framed by the changes that Brazil has gone through over the last decade – namely, the rise of new social movements, the reemergence of the political right, and the fragmentation of the left.

O Ensaio is on view from June 27 to July 25 and Canoas is on view at Alexander and Bonin 47 Walker St, New York, NY from July 26 to August 16 as part of Tandem: Alejandro Cesarco and Tamar Guimarães. photographs courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York

Spilling Over: Painting Color in the 1960s @ the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York

Spilling Over: Painting Color in the 1960s gathers paintings from the 1960s and early 1970s that inventively use bold, saturated, and even hallucinatory color to activate perception. Many artists during this era adopted acrylic paint—a newly available, plastic-based medium—and explored its expansive technical possibilities and wider range of hues. Color Field painters poured paint and stained unprimed canvas, dramatizing materiality and visual force of painting. At the same historical moment, an emerging generation of artists of color and women explored color’s capacity to ignite new questions about perception, specifically its relation to race, gender, and the coding of space. Spilling Over looks to the divergent ways color can be equally a formal problem and a political statement.

Spilling Over: Painting Color in the 1960s is on view through August 18 at the Whitney Museum of American Art 99 Gansevoort Street New York, NY. photographs courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art

bitforms gallery presents "IDEAL CONTAGION" in New York

IDEAL CONTAGION is curated by David Hunt, and features the work of Barry X Ball, Richard Dupont, Peter Gronquist, Jon Kessler, Ted Lawson, and Lynn Hersman Leeson. As a whole, the exhibition suggests a looming middle future where our current tsunami of data and information—largely blank, implacable and bewildering—is seamlessly internalized by each individual artist as the substrate of their work. Technology is transformed from a passing zeitgeist fetish into something inscribed on, or within, the artist’s own body, etched like algorithmic scrimshaw into the far recesses of his or her own mind. Each artist in the exhibition signifies a modernist categorical academic division, such as landscape, body art, or appropriation—that have yet to percolate and trickle down into traditional digital and techno-art discourse.

IDEAL CONTAGION is on view at bitforms gallery through August 16 at 131 Allen Street New York, NY. photographs courtesy of bitforms gallery, New York and Shark Senesak

Hyun Jung Jun: Teyo’s Lightshield at Fresh Bread in Chicago

Teyo’s Lightshield is Fresh Bread’s inaugural exhibition. Fresh Bread is a kitchen-based exhibition series in Rogers Park, Chicago, run by artist Morgan Mandalay and writer Kim-Anh Schreiber. Each show meditates on metaphors of digestion and features an accompanying cookbook, a document of process and practice.

Teyo’s Lightshield is on view through August 4 at Fresh Bread, reservations recommended. photographs courtesy of the artist and Fresh Bread