Dorothea Tanning: Worlds In Collision @ Alison Jacques Gallery In London

Alison Jacques Gallery is pleased to announce the solo exhibition Dorothea Tanning: Worlds in Collision. The exhibition features a rarely displayed body of late work dating from 1981 to 1989, which is being shown together for the first time in the United Kingdom. It includes large scale works on paper in media as varied as graphite, charcoal, crayon, watercolour, gouache, and collage, many of which focus on imagery of the bicycle which preoccupied Tanning at this time. The exhibition coincides with the publication of the monograph Dorothea Tanning: Transformations by Victoria Carruthers, which will be released by Lund Humphries on 31 January 2020.

Worlds in Collision will be on view through March 21, 2020 @ Alison Jacques Gallery 16-18 Berners St. London W1T 3LN. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Arcadia Missa Presents Hamishi Farah, And Lomex (New York) Presents Danica Barboza & Justin Caguiat @ Condo London 2020

Hamishi Farah is an artist, writer, and musician living in Australia while retired from Australian art. Drawing upon afropessimist theory their painting practice skims through possibilities for non-human representation tiptoeing around the white disembodiment of a colonial libido.

Caguiat produces large oil based paintings often on unstretched canvas that shift stylistically between abstraction and figuration. Done in almost a pointillist style, the works appear as landscapes or murals out of a different era; anachronistic images with a register always in flux. Drawing stylistically from sources as varied as symbolist and post-impressionist painting, Viennese history painting, and certain stylistic movements in Japanese painting, they present otherworldy vistas perhaps at home in science fiction or in the realm of fantasy.

Danica Barboza produces suites of sculptures that populate a mythological universe entirely of her own devising; suites of works throughout which the same figures recur in various states of physical development that experiment with notions of celebrity and icon. Her works elaborate a mythic autobiography rooted in a romance between her and a mare figure named in her work as “Draco Adollphus B”; a figure often presented in various states of construction and de-construction, iomages of whom she has produced since as early as 2000 as part of a long term robotics project that informs much of her larger sculptural practice. She has produced a concurrent gothic novel ‘spondere’ which is available in various stages of construction on the occasion of her solo exhibitions.

The works of Hamishi Farah, Danica Barboza, and Justin Caguiat will be on view through February 8, 2020 at Arcadia Missa 14 – 16 Brewer Street, First Floor, Soho, London. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Siera Hyte's Breath Commuter @ Fresh Bread in Chicago

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.

Breath Commuter is on view throughout March 8th at Fresh Bread. Email freshbreadgallery@gmail.com for address. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Brian Calvin Presents Sound @ Almine Rech Shanghai

Back in the 1990s, Brian Calvin began developing a figurative, non-narrative, pictorial style. Landscapes and portraits steeped in his Californian roots dominated this work. Close-up treatment of subjects, highly composed structures, as well  as  luminous colors laid flat endow these large-scale paintings with a  strange temporality. In observing his technique of pictorial economy, one gradually comes to see a type of abstraction in his representation of certain details. They reveal, even greater still, the true finality of his work, reaffirming the primacy of a visual reflection on painting itself and its possibilities. “I prefer to experience abstraction through the creation and tending of images. Painting provides the medium.”

Almine Rech Shanghai is pleased to present Sound, an exhibition of Brian Calvin’s recent portraits. The exhibition continues the artist’s exploration of the unique genre of painting, and furthers Calvin’s distinct development of emotions and imagery.

Sound is on view throughout February 29, 2020 @ Almine Rech Shanghai 27 Huqiu Road, 2nd Floor, 200002 Shanghai, China. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Luis Camnitzer's Towards an Aesthetic of Imbalance @ Alexander Gray Associates in New York

In 1988, Luis Camnitzer represented Uruguay in the 43rd Venice Biennale, where he produced a series of works that combined physical objects, printed images, and text. In the context of the end of Uruguay’s military dictatorship (1973–1984), these works addressed themes of torture, abuse of power, and repression, combining seemingly disparate elements to elicit poetic interpretations. Despite political instability during the transition to democracy, Camnitzer agreed to participate in the Biennale, realizing that “keeping one’s purity could be in the way of more important things like the cementing of a regained democracy.” Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, Camnitzer built upon the political themes in his work, developing new series and projects, including The Agent Orange Series (1985) and Los San Patricios (1992). Conceptually building on the work he debuted eight years prior at the Venice Biennale, Camnitzer presented El Mirador in 1996 at the São Paulo Biennial. Consisting of an enclosed room that is only visible to the viewer through a narrow slit in the wall, El Mirador evokes multiple spaces of confinement: a prison cell, a psychiatric hospital, and a torture chamber. Various objects are placed throughout the white-walled room, which is starkly lit with glaring light, lending the installation a surreal quality. In this tableaux, uncanny elements are gathered––an iron bed frame with a single glass sheet as a mattress, a shattered wall mirror, a house of playing cards, and a window with panes made of Astroturf grass––resulting in a hallucinatory aura, meant to destabilize the viewer’s initial interpretations.

Towards an Aesthetic of Imbalance is on view throughout Feb. 15th at Alexander Gray Associates 510 West 26 Street, New York, NY. photographs courtesy of the Alexander Gray Associates

Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe Presents Black Like Me @ Roberts Projects In Los Angeles

 
 

Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe’s lush and luminous oil paintings of black men and women, some strangers he streetcasts or encounters on social media, many others who are friends and colleagues, stand as visual testaments to the resilience, power and strength inherent in African culture, as articulated by the artist. His portraits reveal the complexities of human experience with both a boldness of line and a depth of color, allowing the viewer to experience their uniqueness and vitality simultaneously. Black Like Me is on view through March 7 at Roberts Projects 5801 Washington Boulevard, Culver City. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Margie Livingston Presents The Earth Is A Brush @ Luis De Jesus In Los Angeles

For the past four years, Margie Livingston has been dismantling the line between painting and performance. In a hybrid form of Action Painting, performance, and Land Art, she drags constructed paintings across terrain, inscribing the canvases with the ground to what she calls Extreme Landscape Painting or “non-painting painting.”  Inherent in this process is the use of chance procedures and the knowledge that the ideas change and evolve as she gets into the work. The Earth Is A Brush is on view through February 15 at Luis De Jesus 2685 S La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Katherina Olschbaur: Dirty Elements @ The University Art Galleries In Irvine

Olschbaur provides a female perspective to a history of canonized male painters, whose work simultaneously inspires her. Although traces of matriarchal order in Western thought typically appear as a mythological apparition, Olschbaur paints a narrative that subverts our expectations under the normative language of patriarchy. For Olschbaur, art historical tropes are appropriated and used like garments, worn then cast aside in a process that is ever changing and moving within each work. In this way, Dirty Elements investigates the power dynamics of patriarchal order and its violent denial of female sexuality. Referencing a wide spectrum of thought, Olschbaur’s practice takes root in mythology, religious and historical paintings, the subcultures of S/M, and film. Embracing Georges Bataille’s concept of the formless, the paintings explore the dirty elements of our carnal nature. In so doing, they feature provocative and erotically charged scenes that are at times humorous and disturbing. Dirty Elements is on view through March 14 at Contemporary Arts Center Gallery, Irvine, California. photographs courtesy of University Art Galleries, UC Irvine © 2020 by Jeff McLane Studio, Inc.

Jenny Holzer Presents "A Little Knowledge" @ Hauser & Wirth In Gstaad, Switzerland

For more than forty years Jenny Holzer has presented text emblazoned on T-shirts, carved in stone, painted on canvas, scrolling on LED signs, and luminously projected onto buildings and landscapes. Beginning in the 1970s with posters wheat-pasted throughout New York City and continuing through recent light projections, her practice rivals ignorance with humour, and violence with kindness and courage. Holzer’s texts address oppression, gender, sexuality, power, and war, and by presenting them in media more commonly associated with advertising, news reports, and public information, she adeptly provokes reflection and challenges expectations and prejudices. A Little Knowledge is on view at Tarmak 22 in Gstaad-Saanen Airport, on view through 22 January. photographs courtesy of Hauser & Wirth

Tomashi Jackson Presents Forever My Lady @ Night Gallery In Los Angeles

Tomashi Jackson’s multimedia practice places formal and material investigations in dialogue with recent histories of displacement and disenfranchisement. Drawing centrally from Josef Albers’ research on the relativity of color and the unconscious processes by which the brain organizes and reconciles information, Jackson’s work bridges gaps between geometric experimentation and the systematization of injustice, incorporating images hand-painted from photographs and materials chosen for their relevance into formalist compositions. 

Jackson’s latest body of work principally concerns the question of democracy, taking up its conceptual origins in Ancient Greece, with its contingent notion of obligatory civic participation. She compares this history of democracy to the realities of the present-day United States, with particular attention to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, written to prevent discriminatory practices at the state and local levels that prevented Black Americans from exercising their right to vote. Jackson cites the enactment of this law as the true beginning of American democracy, though she points to subsequent public crises – the rise of gerrymandering and the the crack epidemic that began in Los Angeles in the 1980s – to question democracy’s true status in the US today. 

Forever My Lady is on view throughout February 8, 2020 @ Night Gallery 2276 E 16th St. LA. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Highlights From The Fog Art Fair In San Francisco

photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Noah Davis @ David Zwirner In New York

Davis’s body of work encompasses, on the one hand, his lush, sensual, figurative paintings and, on the other, an ambitious institutional project called The Underground Museum, a black-owned-and-operated art space dedicated to the exhibition of museum-quality art in a culturally underserved African American and Latinx neighborhood in Los Angeles. The works on view will highlight both parts of Davis’s oeuvre, featuring more than twenty of his most enduring paintings, as well as models of previous exhibitions curated by Davis at The Underground Museum. The exhibition also includes a “back room,” modeled on the working offices at The Underground Museum, featuring more paintings by Davis, as well as BLKNWS by Davis’s brother Kahlil Joseph; a sculpture by Karon Davis, the artist’s widow; and Shelby George furniture, designed by Davis’s mother Faith Childs-Davis. The exhibition will be on view through February 22 at David Zwirner 525 & 533 West 19th Street, New York. photographs courtesy of David Zwirner

Miyoshi Barosh Presents Love @ Luis De Jesus In Los Angeles

"The work of art created as a labor of love may sound cynical, yet it is made in good faith and contains a deep utopian wish for social change, no matter how naive and nostalgic that dream is."  ~ Miyoshi Barosh

Over the last fifteen years, Miyoshi Barosh made her work with humor and dystopian irony in a style she called "Conceptual Pop."  With an emphasis on cultural blindness toward death, decay, and the disintegration of both utopian social constructs, and ultimately the individual body itself, Barosh saw her work as "a manifestation of competing emotions around cultural conceits and identity politics through a handmade carnivalesque, mischievous confrontation."  Given her untimely death, her message is made even more poignant, if not tragic, because she lived it.  

LOVE was the first large-scale work that Barosh created using repurposed afghans -- those lonely and discarded, hand-made blankets which "in itchy, acrylic coziness embody feelings of dependency, obligation, and guilt." Together with I Keep Going On, these collaged and crocheted pieces play on the notion of a "labor of love." Making afghans is traditionally a women's craft that, according to the artist, refers to both the "ideal of self-less love and to the idea of unconditional love, that is expected of, but not a reality of, family." These pieces are "deliberately imperfect, damaged, and irregular like the human condition, pulled by conflicting desires for independence and dependency, freedom and obligation."

Love will be on view through February 15, 2020 @ Luis De Jesus Los Angeles 2685 S. La Cienega Blvd. LA. Concurrent exhibitions honoring the life and work of the late Los Angeles artist, who died in 2019, will be held at Night Gallery in downtown LA and The Pit in Glendale. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Hybrid Forms: Read Our Interview Of Artist & Storyteller Christopher Myers →

Courtesy of the artist and Fort Gansevoort

How does a country like Vietnam, absent of a black community, develop a rich brass band tradition with roots in the American South? How did the British flag inspire a Ghanaian tradition in textiles that is steeped in magical superstition? What do Aimé Césaire, Vaslav Nijinsky, and Emma Goldman all have in common? To find the answers to any of these questions you’d have to ask none other than the multi-disciplinary, head honcho of hybridity, artist Christopher Myers. His practice is as much about connecting the mythologies of ancient Egypt and Greece with those of Judeo-Christian scripture, as it is about connecting the migrations of syncratic practices across the globe and throughout history. His most recent solo exhibition, Drapetomania, at Fort Gansevoort in Los Angeles primarily features hand-sewn flags depicting a wide array of syncratic allegories that in many ways define the globalized, contemporary psyche. Click here to read more.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya CONDO 2020: Modern Art Hosting Team Gallery In London

The group of Sepuya's work shown at Modern Art is comprised of photographs made between 2016 and 2019. Seen together, the chosen works convey the scope of formal strategies employed by Sepuya. Ranging from close up portraits of interlocking body parts, to studio portraits in which subjects are carefully poised behind and with objects, to photographs of his collages of test prints and archival material of the studio, Sepuya's strategies each speak to the self-reflexivity inherent in his practice and reveal his sensitivity and skill in capturing bodies on camera. Whether at its centre or its edges, the camera and tripod are almost always evident and always implied somewhere in each image, bringing the work firmly back into dialogue with its own technical construction and object-hood, and to Sepuya himself. The exhibition is on view through February 15 at Modern Art 50–58 Vyner Street , London. photographs courtesy of the gallery and the artist

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

Amie Dicke's One-Liner @ Anat Ebgi In Los Angeles

“Some images ask to be folded or covered, others suggest a line. They have their language. And I try to understand how they speak to me.” – Amie Dicke.

The exhibition’s title refers to a striking new technique whereby Dicke uses a continuous, meandering incision to slice into aluminum plates bearing composed fashion portraiture. As she follows her line around the immaculate bodies in works such as ONE-LINER III (Holding the Rodeo Image) and ONE-LINER IV (Listen), the artist maps the touch of her hand and eye around the images, then bends new shapes into the metal. “Nothing is really removed, nothing is lost, just opened,” she notes. By adding space where there was none, and creating work that elides the conventions of two- and three-dimensional forms, Dicke continuously distorts and realigns the possibilities of our visual experience. “They are almost a movie in one still,” she says of these intriguing assemblages.

One-Liner is on view through February 16, 2020 @ Anat Ebgi AE2 Gallery at 2680 S La Cienega Blvd, LA. photographs courtesy of Anat Ebgi

Kirsten Stoltmann and Jennifer Sullivan Presents Female Sensibility @ Five Car Garage In Los Angeles

”Female Sensibility“ is a two person show with LA based artist Kirsten Stoltmann and NY based artist Jennifer Sullivan. The title for the exhibition is inspired by Lynda Benglis’s 1973 video Female Sensibility which simultaneously acknowledges and parodies ideas around being categorized as a woman artist or defined artistically through gender. Stoltmann and Sullivan have continued aspects of this strategy in their own work through fore-fronting not just the female body and gaze, but their own specific bodies, emotional lives, and experiences, in favor of exploring the layers of meaning around self-representation and gender identity. In their work, there is a both a revised valuation of characteristics often assigned as feminine such as emotion, intuition, sensuality, and relationships, as well as a resistance and subversive attitude towards the limiting roles that women are expected to fulfill.

Female Sensibility is on view through March 1, 2020 @ Five Car Garage, Santa Monica, LA. Email info@emmagrayhq.com for address. photographs courtesy of Five Car Garage

Anish Kapoor New Stainless Steel Sculptures at Regen Projects In Los Angeles

Regen Projects presents an exhibition by renowned artist Anish Kapoor. Since the 1980s Kapoor’s ambitious practice has continuously expanded the limits of sculptural form by investigating scale, volume, color, and materiality. With this exhibition, the artist’s sixth solo presentation following his gallery debut in 1992, Kapoor brings together a selection of new mirror works that challenge optical perception and phenomenological experience through experiments in shape and form. On view until February 16, 2020. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper