Micro Era: Media Art from China @ Kulturforum In Berlin

From documentary film images, and the adapted use of classical film language to the aesthetics of Japanese Anime, the works of Micro Era focus on and explore the relationships between mind, body and technology – with installations and single-channel videos ranging from the 1980s to the present. Historically, within the Euro-American context, video art is often regarded as a democratising art form – through the rapid circulation of information and global events by fast-access technologies. Cao Fei, Fang Di, Lu Yang, and Zhang Peili scrutinise the seductive thesis of this democratisation by reflecting in their visual language the mass production of goods as well as how images and virtual subjectivities are produced and consumed, and how we understand our world through imaging technology. At the same time, in the cross-generational exhibition with documentary, narrative and installation references and the expansion into virtual space, the central directions in the development of media art in China are presented. Micro Era is on view through January 26 2020 at Kulturforum Stauffenbergstraße 41 10785 Berlin. photographs courtesy of the Staatliche Museum

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge On Her First Ever West Coast Exhibition

Tom of Finland Foundation and Lethal Amounts present iconic artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge exhibition PANDROGENY I & II. Opening tonight and running until November 24th 2019 at Tom of Finland Foundation and Lethal Amounts Gallery. This marks the first time that the legendary artist’s work has been on view on the West Coast. Below is a sneak peek from a very special interview we did of Genesis Breyer P’Orridge with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist for our next print issue. Click here for tickets to the exhibitions.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST The exhibition in Los Angeles will be called Pandrogyny 1 and 2?

P-ORRIDGE For two locations. One at Tom of Finland, in his house... they keep it as it was when he lived there. When you do an exhibition, what you put there goes amongst all his things, so that one is mainly sculptures. There was a mini retrospective in Holland this year, then it went to Berlin, and now Tom of Finland. It has things like ‘Tongue Kiss,’ which is two wolf heads, and the tongues have been replaced with knife blades. The one above is turning slowly and once every turn the two ends of the knives click. Another one is Bubblegum Machine, and it represents the womb. It has ice cubes and scorpions. It’s the myth of biological replication.

OBRIST Living scorpions?

P-ORRIDGE No unfortunately. It would be nice but no one would let me do that, but real scorpions that have been dried. So it’s things like that, they’re all created out of things that have been around me in my living space, that’s how I always work. Things that are already here that have been drawn to me in some way and then they become something.

OBRIST: What’s your relationship with L.A.?

GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE I never had one really. I would never live there. To me it has a strange atmosphere. It’s like it has a big cave underneath, with a dark energy in it that you can fall into by mistake. It doesn’t suit me at all.

Jim Shaw: Strange Beautiful @ Praz-Delavallade In Paris

Uncle Sam, sickened by Gremlins from the Kremin. Checkers, Richard Nixon’s dog. Brett Kavanaugh, a judge accused of rape, appointed to the Supreme Court by Donald Trump. Mark Zuckerberg, one of the new masters of the world. Jim Shaw’s recent paintings are swarming with grotesque and nefarious figures evoking contemporary American history. Yet, even if these works drip with a sharp satirical intent, we are not dealing with a form of political art, for instance, AgitProp – the creation of an ideological community around a form or an idea. Jim Shaw’s historical models are more distinctively anachronistic, closer to History Painting as it was practiced at the end of the nineteenth century. History Painting brought together discursive tools stemming from a critical rationalist tradition, alongside allegorical images. Another reference of Shaw’s, older still, is Hieronymus Bosch’s hermetic and nightmarish visions, the intent of which remains, even today, half a millennium after their creation, the subject of the most contradictory interpretations. Strange Beautiful is on view through November 2 at Praz-Delavallade 5 rue des Haudriettes, Paris. photographs courtesy of the gallery

"Back Side / Fashion from Behind", An Off-Site Exhibition @ Musée Bourdelle In Paris

In a society that is obsessed with people’s faces, "Back Side / Fashion from Behind" is an original and unexpected theme. By addressing our body’s relationship to clothing from a social and psychological point of view, the exhibition questions the perception we have of our own and other people’s backs.

The exhibition spreads across the Great Hall of Plasters, the contemporary Portzamparc extension and Antoine Bourdelle’s studio. The models on display establish a dialogue between fashion and sculpture, a dialogue with the works of this great master of the turn of the 20th century. "Back Side – Fashion from Behind" gives us a new take on the works of Bourdelle: we look with new eyes at the powerful, muscular backs and the slender outlines of his sculptures. "Back Side / Fashion from Behind"  is on view through November 15 at Musée Bourdelle 18, rue Antoine-Bourdelle, Paris 15e. photographs courtesy of Palais Galliera

Jasmine Nyende: Crested Crane @ AA|LA Gallery In Los Angeles

Through conversation, meditation, and rediscovery of “lost pasts,” Jasmine Nyende uses art to explore and mediate her mother’s southern American roots and her father’s Ugandan genealogy. Incorporating paintings, fiber arts, performance, poetry, meditation, spoken word, and embroidered ready-to-wear clothes, Nyende manifests an alluring confluence of body, identity, and ancestry.

Crested Crane materializes through Nyende’s use of fibers and manifests a particular mending of personal identity that echoes throughout the body of work. For Nyende, art is a way to speak to ancestors while asserting her own individuality. Specifically, the crocheted and knitted works relate to the American history of Black female labor in the fiber arts. The web of soft textiles act as connective tissue, binding the vibrant images and colorways into a complex yet comprehensive family narrative that would otherwise be inaccessible. Crested Crane is on view through December 14 at AA|LA 7313 melrose avenue, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Kate Crawford & Trevor Paglen: Training Humans @ Osservatorio Fondazione Prada In Milan

Training Humans, conceived by Kate Crawford, AI researcher and professor, and Trevor Paglen, artist and researcher, is the first major photography exhibition devoted to training images: the collections of photos used by scientists to train artificial intelligence (AI) systems in how to “see” and categorize the world.

In this exhibition, Crawford and Paglen reveal the evolution of training image sets from the 1960s to today. As stated by Trevor Paglen, “when we first started conceptualizing this exhibition over two years ago, we wanted to tell a story about the history of images used to ‘recognize’ humans in computer vision and AI systems. We weren’t interested in either the hyped, marketing version of AI nor the tales of dystopian robot futures.” Kate Crawford observed, “We wanted to engage with the materiality of AI, and to take those everyday images seriously as a part of a rapidly evolving machinic visual culture. That required us to open up the black boxes and look at how these ‘engines of seeing’ currently operate”. Training Humans is on view through February 24 2020 at Osservatorio Fondazione Prada Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, 20121 Milano

Group Exhibition: Dark Fantasy @ UTA Artist Space In Beverly Hills

Based on the concept of Archeofuturism, which focuses on excavating forms of the past in order to shape future narratives of design, Dark Fantasy guides the viewer through a whimsical world of the fantastic and the obscure, questioning the constraints of reality and what it means to dream. By highlighting advanced techniques, traditional master craft, and new technology, Dark Fantasy brings to life organic and telluric forms that allude to bygone eras of production. The exhibition explores over a decade of functional art from 24 artists from Carpenters Workshop Gallery’s program, creating a dialogue between space, time and contemporary archeology.

The exhibition features over fifty pieces by Virgil Abloh, Atelier Van Lieshout, Maarten Baas, Aldo Bakker, Sebastian Brajkovic, Fernando and Humberto Campana, Nacho Carbonell, Wendell Castle, Vincenzo De Cotiis, Ingrid Donat, Vincent Dubourg, Najla El Zein, Kendell Geers, Steven Haulenbeek, Anton Hendrik Denys, Kostas Lambridis, Mathieu Lehanneur, Frederik Molenschot, Rick Owens, Random International, Robert Stadler, Studio Drift, Charles Trevelyan, and Verhoeven Twins. Dark Fantasy is on view through November 16 at UTA Artist Space 403 Foothill Rd. Beverly Hills, California

Tatsumi Hijikata & Eikoh Hosoe: Collaborations With Tatsumi Hijikata @ Nonaka-Hill In Los Angeles

As Japan urbanized in the economic boom period in the decades following WWII, Hosoe felt a growing sense of urgency to revisit the rural Tohoku region where he had been evacuated as a child to escape Tokyo air-raids.  The photographer enlisted dancer Tatsumi Hijikata, who is from the same Tohoku region, to enact the "sickle-toothed weasel", a vicious god of local folklore and a threat that terrorized the young displaced Hosoe, who also associates his time in that region with an innocent happiness within an otherwise dark period.  Hosoe said:

“In the village, he played with children, was laughed at by farmers along the roadside, shat in the middle of a field, attacked a bride, kidnapped a baby, and ran through the rural landscape. Almost all the shooting was done guerrilla style in a flash. This was something that could only be achieved through photography. No other medium — film, television, painting, or novel — could have been used in its place. At that moment, I was certain of the superiority of photography.” - Eikoh Hosoe, “Foreword” in Kamaitachi 1. Eikoh Hosoe: Collaborations With Tatsumi Hijikata is on view through November 30 at Nonaka-Hill 720 N. Highland Ave., Los Angeles

The Pleasure Ground: Matt Savitsky Presents Two Video Installations @ Cloaca Projects In San Francisco

Matt Savitsky’s new installation, ​The Pleasure Ground​, contains two video installations Savitsky conceived this year while on a self-created residency in his hometown (Lancaster, Pennsylvania). ​Crop Circles​ and ​Turn Bridge​ (2019) construct viewpoints by way of a fixed configuration between a sculptural element to a single camera. In both video images a disconcerting interplay of figure and ground is produced by the movement of each sculptural device relative to the camera’s position, which turns each in a continuous 360 degree rotation. Before becoming video objects, the images prompt a deconstruction of their viewpoint into a relationship defined by the coexistence of subject, object, and support.

The Pleasure Ground is on view through October 26 @ Cloaca Projects 1460 Davidson Avenue San Francisco. photographs by Andreas Tagger

Chris Hood Presents PARA @ Praz Delavallade in Los Angeles

Drawn from an archive of personal photographs, self-portraits, advertising imagery and anatomical studies, the figures that Hood paints seem to be in a trancelike state — dreaming, sleepwalking, or hypnotized — suggesting that the disparate images that make up the compositions may be organized by dream logic or governed by a series of undetermined associations. With “portal” vignettes of sunsets, caves, and mountains, the paintings create a telescopic sensation of simultaneous depth and flatness. These sly structural allusions to the devices of artificial perspective act in constant tension by disorienting interpenetrations of layered images and the flatness of the stained surface. Their chief interest is in the complication and the relinquishment of boundaries: between the individual and the archetypal; media and medium; the subjective and the collective; the front and the back of the canvas. What may appear as collage is revealed to be a collision, with the picture plane serving as an interface between the image and the imagined.

PARA is on view through November 9 at Praz Delavallade 6150 Wilshire Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90048. photographs by Marten Elder, courtesy of the gallery

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

Naudline Pierre: For I Am With You Until the End of Time @ Shulamit Nazarian In Los Angeles

I Am With You Until the End of Time is an exhibition of works that range in scale from the intimate to the monumental by Brooklyn-based Naudline Pierre. Her paintings and works on paper serve as portals into a mysterious world. Informed by her religious upbringing, Pierre’s works conflate the aesthetics of centuries-old traditions found in Western art history with the artist’s personal narrative. I Am With You Until the End of Time is on view through October 26 at Shulamit Nazarian 616 N La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Stephen Prina: English For Foreigners (Abridged) @ Petzel In New York

English for Foreigners (abridged) isolates two sections of a project—a portfolio of lithographs and the listening station with soundtrack—for its New York première. The lithographs feature all of the illustrations from Second Book in English for Foreigners in Evening Schools by Frederick Houghton (American Book Company, 1917), a book passed down to the artist from his father. The soundtrack is comprised of covers of preexisting compositions, arranged and performed by the artist for vocal and guitar, with the assistance from a clarinetist, including an instrumental version of “Giovinezza,” or “Youth,” the anthem of the Italian Fascist Party, with the clarinet—the father’s instrument in the village band—as solo instrument; “Bella Ciao,” the Italian Resistance anthem, and “Sabato Sera,” a then-current, hit single by Bruno Filippini that was gifted to the artist by his parents in 1964 upon their return from their first trip to Italy together and the first his father made since his emigration in 1923. In addition, the artist has composed a song, the lyrics of which are guided by notes and annotations his father inscribed in his copy of Second Book in English for Foreigners in Evening Schools. English for Foreigners (abridged) is on view through October 26 at Petzel 35 E 67th Street, New York. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Rebecca Morgan: Town And Country @ Asya Geisberg Gallery In New York

Rebecca Morgan: "Town and Country" shows the extent of Morgan's achievement in painting, with forays into printmaking and brass sculpture, new endeavors for the artist. With archly symbolic portraits and complex scenes, Morgan weaves a grand narrative of gendered subversion buttressed by broader societal scale. Morgan's characters straddle both the timelessness of morality tales, and the specific moment that we find ourselves in - redefining gender relations and reviewing historical representations in works from John Hughes movies, to stylized exemplars like Rubens and Fragonard, to Norman Rockwell's foundational Americana lore. While always emanating from a contemporary socio-political yet diaristic lens, Morgan's works now chart a wider continuum of referents. Archetypal characters strain against their roles, undermine fabricated notions of romance, and confront the hollowness and fear behind current masculinity, with both levity and tension. Town and Country is on view though November 2 at Asya Geisberg Gallery 537b West 23rd Street, New York. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Raven Halfmoon: The New Native @ Nino Mier Gallery In Los Angeles

Halfmoon creates powerful, often large-scale ceramic sculptures that speak to the artist’s identity as both a citizen of the Caddo Nation and as a woman. The Caddo people are renowned for ancient ceramics, with this in mind, Halfmoon utilizes the medium as a way to represent Caddo people in today’s society. Continuing a legacy of craft and clay, Halfmoon also secures her place within that tradition and cultural history. By excavating her past, as well as the history of her tribe, Halfmoon addresses the ever-relevant, but often forgotten, story of “the other,” but also the provocative questions of cultural appropriation that haunt contemporary society. Raven Halfmoon is on view through October 26 at Nino Mier Gallery 7313 Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Lenz Geerk: Mixed Blessings @ Roberts Projects In Los Angeles

Lenz Geerk is a figurative painter whose subjects of portraits, landscapes and still-lifes are portrayed in exceptional intensity and luminosity.He manipulates traditional techniques to bring distinct render to every figure through soft acrylic color. The nearly monochromatic palettes, only occasionally warmed by other colors, add an aura of heightened emotional tension. Geerk’s new series is an insightful examination into the undercurrent of the threat, uncertainty, and fear of the current day. Unlike “The Table Portraits”, Geerk’s first solo show with the gallery, there is no formal link between the individual works of this show. What ultimately connects the works on view is an underlying feeling of domestic suspense, fueled by an unsettling lack of faith in larger institutions. Mixed Blessings is on view through October 12 at Roberts Projects 5801 Washington Boulevard, Culver City, California. photographs courtesy of Roberts Projects

Celeste Rapone: Future Amateur @ Roberts Projects In Los Angeles

Through her paintings, Celeste Rapone invokes the willing suspension of disbelief and the engagement of suspicion aligned along particular interests or ideas communicated to us by the characters she portrays. Initially conceived as coping mechanisms for a future as a failed painter, Rapone’s portraits now tap into consequences of exposure: humiliation, vulnerability, self-doubt and self-deprivation. Her autobiographical characters –most often women–are proxies to her discomfort felt at new ideas and approaches, the doubt in her own representation and object-making, her inability to mediate attention once exposed to it, and the abstract possibilities opened up and emphasized by these failures. Future Amateur is on view through October 12 at Roberts Projects 5801 Washington Boulevard, Culver City, California. photographs courtesy of Roberts Projects

Richard Serra: Forged Rounds @ Gagosian In New York

Photo: Silke von Berswordt. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.

Four new works from Richard Serra’s Rounds series fills the entire West 24th Street gallery. Each forged steel sculpture is composed of multiple -ton elements of differing diameters and heights. Bisecting the West st Street gallery space will be Reverse Curve, a sculpture measuring feet long and feet high. Originally conceived in for a public project in Reggio Emilia, Italy, Reverse Curve is finally being realized for the first time. In conjunction with these exhibitions, Gagosian and Anthology Film Archives will present a three day retrospective of Serra’s films and videos from October 17 through 19, drawn from the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Anthology Film Archives, Joan Jonas, and Stiftung Situation Kunst. This is the first time that all of the artist’s film and video work will be shown together. The screening on October will be followed by a panel discussion between curators Søren Grammel, Chrissie Iles, and Jeffrey Weiss, moderated by art historian Benjamin Buchloh. Additional screenings of the full program will take place on October 20 and 23. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Julian Rose. Forged Rounds is on view through December 17 at Gagosian 555 West 24th Street, New York.

Hannah Greely: Busy Box @ Parker Gallery In Los Angeles

Hannah Greely is known for her imaginative sculptures of commonplace objects that teeter on the edge of the absurd, the artist’s works are simultaneously imbued with a sense of ambiguity and humor, fantasy and reality. At turns uncanny and surreal, Greely’s subjects are both of and outside of this world. For this exhibition, the artist has created a colorful environment in which distinct works can be read in a loose narrative. Among the works on view are a standalone door, whose knobs, hinges, nails, and accessories are inlaid into the surface, denying the structure its traditional functionality. Elsewhere, suggestions of the home and built environment are echoed in a tabletop vase with flowers and wilted tools. Here, the vase becomes a domestic toolbox in which all elements playfully conform to the logic of plant life. Parker Gallery is open Thursday–Saturday, 12–6pm and by appointment. photographs courtesy of Parker Gallery

Irving Marcus: Works from the 1980s @ Parker Gallery In Los Angeles

Works from the 1980s includes large-scale paintings from the early 1980s, together with graphite and oil pastel drawings. This body of work represents a crucial development in Marcus’s practice. In these works, the artist combined photographs from multiple newspapers to create a composite image, oftentimes flipping the images upside down to construct vertiginous and enigmatic compositions. Parker Gallery is open Thursday–Saturday, 12–6pm and by appointment. photographs courtesy of Parker Gallery