Melanie Baker's The Optimates @ Cristin Tierney in New York

The Optimates presents three distinct scenes: a person stands at a podium; a man, seen from behind, speaks to someone unknown; and a group of men huddle in conversation at a window. The works are large in scale; some exceed life-size. All are made with charcoal, graphite and pigment on paper. Two are mounted on panels, and the other is presented loose, pinned to the wall.

Baker crops her images to draw attention to specific details. It isn’t immediately apparent in every work who the subject is, but signifiers indicate the immense power the subject wields. They wear dark suits and crisp white shirts, and several are pictured in richly adorned rooms. These are the people, we are meant to intuit, who possess wealth, class, and authority. They are also, clearly, all middle-aged or older white men, and Baker provides just enough context clues to suggest that they are either the focus of attention, or the ones cutting the back room deal. The exhibition title is a further nod to their status; the Optimates in ancient Rome were conservatives who favored rule by oligarchy and opposed immigration and assistance for the urban poor.

The Optimates will be on view throughout February 22 at Cristin Tierney 219 Bowery, Floor 2 New York, NY. photographs courtesy of the gallery

The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles Presents Paul McCarthy: Head Space, Drawings 1963–2019

The first comprehensive survey in the United States of drawings and works on paper by the Los Angeles–based artist Paul McCarthy (b. 1945, Salt Lake City), Paul McCarthy: Head Space, Drawings 1963–2019, reveals a rarely examined aspect of the artist’s oeuvre. Produced in thematic cycles, McCarthy’s drawings share the same visual language as the artist’s sculptural and performance works, addressing themes of violence, humor, death, sex, and politics, and featuring extensive art historical and pop-cultural references. By presenting his expansive career of more than five decades through the focused lens of drawing, the exhibition offers a greater understanding of this influential artist and social commentator.

Paul McCarthy: Head Space, Drawings 1963–2019 features 600 works on paper selected from McCarthy’s archive. The works incorporate and utilize a variety of mediums, including charcoal, graphite, ink, marker, and collage, as well as more unorthodox materials such as ketchup and peanut butter. A consummate and accomplished draftsperson, McCarthy approaches his daily drawing practice as a way of thinking—a blueprint for projects and a tool to flesh out complex ideas. Since the 1970s, McCarthy has also incorporated drawing into his performances, implementing it as part of an action and often drawing in character. In recent years, this practice of drawing in character has become central to his large-scale video performance projects, such as WS White Snow (2012–13), CSSC Coach Stage Stage Coach (2017), and NV Night Vater (2019–). In a process McCarthy terms “Life Drawing, Drawing Sessions” the artist and his actors produce drawings in costume among the props and simulacrum of his film sets. These works bring together the materials and crude gestures that have been present in the artist’s work for the greater part of his career.

Paul McCarthy: Head Space, Drawings 1963–2019 will be on view throughout May 10, 2020 at The Hammer Museum 10899 Wilshire Boulevard Los Angeles, CA. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Gisela Colon: Meta Minimal @ Gavlak Los Angeles

Through her syncretic process of exploring and expanding upon past history, sculptor Gisela Colon has succeeded in creating sculptures that convey the fullest possible array of sensory and intellectual experience, projecting cosmic energy and power outwards into the world. With her astute practice of Organic Minimalism– an idiosyncratic sculptural language that imbues life-like qualities into reductive forms– Colon approaches her sculptural practice from the expansive perspective of phenomenological concerns: addressing the physical laws of the universe such as gravity, time, movement, energy and transformation. Colon’s oeuvre is the result of a synthesis of pointed historical reflection and visceral raw energy.

Colon’s practice of Organic Minimalism simultaneously expands and challenges the legacies of Light and Space, Minimalism, Kinetic and Latin American Op Art, merging industrial inertness with transformative biological mutability. Her sensual, gender-ambiguous sculptural forms further connect her practice to a history of female artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Yayoi Kusama, Linda Benglis and Judy Chicago. By channeling Bourgeois’ notions of sexualized energies and Chicago’s nascent feminist atmospheric works, Colon similarly posits her sculptures as vehicles for conversion of classic masculine forms into feminized power.

Meta Minimal will be on view throughout March 7, 2020 at Gavlak 1700 South Santa Fe Avenue, Suite 440, Los Angeles, CA. photographs courtesy of the gallery

On the Politics of Delicacy @ Capitain Petzel in Berlin

On the Politics of Delicacy is a group exhibition conceived around the Robert Anton Theatre Collection. In the early 1970s Robert Anton (1949-1984) created a surreal miniature theatre which quickly achieved cult status and fascinated audiences both in the US and Europe. By bringing together multiple influences – from Antonin Artaud’s writings on the Theatre of Cruelty, alchemist principles of transformation and hybridity, post-WWI characters of George Grosz and Otto Dix, to the eccentric creatures of Hieronymus Bosch; but also early Hollywood and Disney motives, Federico Fellini’s baroque fantasies, and pop cultural impulses of his era – Anton created a unique visual language. Due to the intimacy of his performances which often took place in his loft with a maximum capacity of 18 spectators, his plays remained something of New York’s best-kept secret, a refuge into the surreal imaginary. The exhibition gives insight into Anton’s work by showing his intriguingly sculpted figurines (effectively, his ‘actors’), props and drawings.

At Capitain Petzel, curator Anke Kempkes contextualises the oeuvre of Robert Anton for the first time by unfolding thematic trajectories that resonate with his work, namely the politics of the home theatre, surrealist political theatre, the concept of ‘monstrosity’ in postwar female avant-garde sculpture, a new female painterly symbolism, and queer performativity in times of political polarization. With such specific trajectories in mind, a dynamic dialogue takes place between Anton’s oeuvre and works permeating both genre and epoch by German Dada artist Hannah Höch and Spanish poet and theatre director Federico García Lorca; Anton’s theatre pioneer contemporary Tadeusz Kantor and scenographer Kazimierz Wisniak; works by Wanda Czelkowska and Liliane Lijn; post-modernist and queer artists from East and West Duggie Fields, Jimmy De Sana, Krzysztof Jung, Raúl Martínez and Zoe Leonard; and contemporary artists Yael Bartana, Joanna Piotrowska, Stanislava Kovalcikova, Karolina Jablonska, Mikolaj Sobczak, Nicholas Grafia, Billy Morgan and Uel.

On the Politics of Delicacy is on view throughout February 22 at Capitain Petzel Karl-Marx-Allee 45, 10178 Berlin. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Gagosian Presents MAN RAY "The Mysteries of Château du Dé" in San Francisco

During his storied career, Man Ray, a multidisciplinary artist with a rare breadth, worked in a variety of mediums, including painting, photography, sculpture, printmaking, film, poetry, and prose. While for him photography and painting were paramount, his work in early film and cinema is often overlooked.

Man Ray’s first experience in making film was in New York, in 1920, when he worked with Marcel Duchamp on an unsuccessful attempt to create a three-dimensional film. After moving to Paris, in 1921, his diverse experimentation in the medium of photography eventually led him back to the moving image.

the exhibition also includes objects, drawings, and photography. Moving fluidly between media, Man Ray often made several iterations of a work—photographing it, assembling and disassembling, or making multiples—reproduction being crucial to his concept of the art object. Throughout his vast body of work, Man Ray alluded to relationships between the real and the fictive, the literal and the imaginative, with a deft mastery over the liminal territory between the abstract and the figurative form.

The Mysteries of Château du Dé will be on view throughout February 29, 2020 at Gagosian 657 Howard Street, San Francisco, CA. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Frank Mädler's Teile der Vernunft @ Galerie Susanne Albrecht in Berlin

Fundamentally, Frank Mädler is a doubter, and precisely for this reason he chose – well before the era of Photoshop – the camera as his medium. Whatever the camera documents must exist, it has objectivity. But behind the camera is a human being who determines how the camera works and what is photographed. So objectivity is already in doubt: it, too, is subjective, the camera gives the photographer enough leeway to lend the objects his subjective image. That is what characterises him: he interprets the world with the aid of the camera. So is man the creator of the objects? Does his eye determine how they appear?

These questions come to mind when we look at Frank Mädler’s photographs. They transform banal, familiar everyday things into independent pictures and give them a new meaning. Birds become blurs of light blue, water lilies are turned into dazzling monumental sculptures with many colours, and even the sea does not appear blue or gray, but rather beige, in a strange light that the photographer did not manipulate in any way.

Teile der Vernunft is on view throughout February 8, 2020 at Galerie Susanne Albrecht Bleibtreustr. 48, 10623 Berlin. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Clintel Steed's Allegory Of Now @ M+B In Los Angeles

Clintel Steed’s paintings create a visual language that is a way of understanding the world. His work manifests an acute awareness of the history of painting, its potential, and combines it with an unfiltered immediacy. For Allegory of Now, Steed has made a suite of new paintings based on works by canonical painters such as Jacques-Louis David, Peter Paul Rubens, and Giotto. Selected for their subject matter and such universal themes as loyalty, judgment, and punishment, each narrative remains relevant today and is a reflection of how the world feels to the artist now. In The Last Judgment, bodies topple and free-fall towards the abyss — an unpitying metaphor of our mortality and a prescient evocation of our present situation. In Bacchanalia, Steed brings alive the inequity and absurdity in the follies of excess. 

In the process of transcribing the compositions, Steed deciphers the hidden geometries in each work, the shapes, colors and connections that make up the whole. There is an unadulterated devotion to the materiality -- surfaces are fragmented, and paint is often thickly layered. In some works he paints and repaints the canvas, building an accumulation of figures and forms in buttery impasto, while in others he works briskly -– wet-on-wet — and lets the white gessoed underpainting crack throughout the composition. In this reworking and re-presenting of classical themes, Steed aims to give us a greater sense of perspective on our current circumstances.

Allegory of Now is on view throughout February 7, 2020 at M+B 612 North Almont Drive Los Angeles, CA. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Beers London Presents Humoral Theory By Morteza Khakshoor, Jerry Kowalsky & Moley Talhaoui

Humoral Theory presents artists Morteza Khakshoor, Jerry Kowalsky, and Moley Talhaoui, each of who have distinct and separate practices, and who show here together for the first time.

Also known as humourism, ‘humoral theory’ was a model for the workings of the human body in which four humours existed as liquids within the body. The humours were blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile, and they governed aspects of the human disposition, including the sanguine, choleric, melancholic, or phlegmatic. As a sort of antiquated ‘medical measurement’ of the body, it dates back to 3rd Century physicians who were interested in ailments and operations of the human body as being natural, as opposed to supernatural. Oddly, they are often referenced today in artistic and certain historic theories, perhaps because they summarize our natural bodily urges, impulses, and physicality into easily understandable categories. While humoral theory may seem slightly silly by today’s standards, they remain a poetic, metaphoric, and abstract means to understand the innate complexities of the human body, mind, and soul. Such thought predates medical, shamanistic, or (quasi)religious discoveries that occurred many centuries later – however naive they may still appear – such as flaying, trepanation, bloodletting, or even more modern psychological revelations as the Phrenology Chart, psychoanalytic study, or the Rorschaech Test, for example – all of which are alluded to (if not directly referenced by) various works on exhibit here.

Humoral Theory will be on view throughout February 22, 2020 at Beers London 1 Baldwin Street London, UK. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Andrew Kreps Gallery NY Presents Think of Our Future By Andrea Bowers

As our global freedoms decline, Andrea Bowers is trying to move from grief to hope by focusing on youth activists beginning with the new video, My Name Means Future. Centered on Tokata Iron Eyes, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe who has been involved with the movement to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline since its inception, the video continues Bowers’s commitment to documenting important activists of her time. Bowers asked the young activist to show her some of her most sacred places in South Dakota. With a small group of friends - all artists and activists, they traveled together for 4 days in September recording video interviews and landscape drone shots of the youth activist discussing the landscapes, their histories, as well as the personal and political issues that arose from being in these sacred sites. In the Lakota language, “Tokata” means “Future”.

In response to her journey with Iron Eyes and the climate emergency we are currently experiencing, Bowers has created a new series of neon works based on the designs of tree branches that incorporate quotes from eco-feminists. These monumental and sculptural pieces are made entirely of reused and recycled materials, inspired by Judi Bari and the Earth First call to action, “Resist Reuse Restore”.

Think of Our Future will be on view throughout February 15, 2020 at Andrew Kreps Gallery 22 Cortlandt Alley, New York, NY. photographs courtesy of the gallery

agnès b. presents “... PHOTOGRAPHERS ... ARTISTS AND THE SNAP CARDIGAN” in New York

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of her signature Snap Cardigan, agnès b. presents “... PHOTOGRAPHERS ... ARTISTS AND THE SNAP CARDIGAN”

The exhibition will echo the first snap cardigan exhibition held at agnès b.’s Galerie du Jour in Paris as part of Mois de la Photo in 1986, where 140 photographers originally contributed to the exhibition. Each were asked to photograph the iconic snap cardigan in his or her own way. Acclaimed by the public and critics alike, the exhibition was then held at the Centre Pompidou in 1996. 

For the 2020 exhibition, which was shown in Paris at the end of 2019, agnès b. has given carte blanche to more than 70 photographers and artists from 14 different nationalities. Young emerging artists and established artists from urban and contemporary scenes offer their interpretation of this timeless garment, working with a singular specification of a 40 × 60 centimeter photograph whose main subject is the snap cardigan. Juergen Teller, David Lynch, Carly Steinbrunn, Mark Cohen, Omar Victor Diop, Ryan McGinness, Jim Jarmush, Martha Cooper, Hiraku Suzuki, Cheryl Dunn, Massimo Vitali, Annette Messager and Maripol are just a snapshot of the celebrated names invited by designer Agnes B. to photograph the iconic snap cardigan in his or her own way.

The exhibition will open on February 8, 2020, at 195 Chrystie Street. NY. It will be on view through March 1, 2020, with an opening reception for the artists on Saturday February 8 4 - 8PM. photographs courtesy of agnès b.

Janet Sobel and Pearl Blauvelt @ Andrew Edlin Gallery in New York

Janet Sobel (1893-1968) and Pearl Blauvelt (1893-1987), two female self-taught artists born in the same year. Though both women were making art in the 1940s, they came from vastly different backgrounds and achieved art world recognition in the opposite manner. Sobel received critical attention during her lifetime at the epicenter of New York cultural circles, while Blauvelt created in complete anonymity, her drawings only discovered years after her death. Both artists currently have work on view in the recently completed rehanging of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 

Janet Sobel and Pearl Blauvelt will be on view until February 22, 2020 at Andrew Edlin Gallery 212 Bowery New York, NY. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Carrie Mae Weems: Push @ Galerie Barbara Thumm in Berlin

Galerie Barbara Thumm presents Push, Carrie Mae Weems’ first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Throughout her career Weems’ works have compelled viewers to actively consider how the world is structured, revealing systems of oppression and inequality while exploring the relationships between power, class, race and gender. Push present several bodies of work, which look at these themes in relation to how the past comes to bear on the present. In this regard Weems reflects on history in order to engage with the present and question where we might be going.

The exhibition features Ritual and Revolutions, Weems, largest immersive installation which marks one of the artist’s earliest forays into three dimensions. Composed of 11 diaphanous printed cloth banners organized in a semi-architectural formation and a poetic audio track, Ritual and Revolution explores the historic human struggle for equality and justice, including references to the Middle Passage, the French Revolution, World War II, among others.

Push is on view throughout February 1, 2020 at Galerie Barbara Thumm Markgrafenstrasse 68 D-10969 Berlin. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Apexart Presents Souls Grown Diaspora in New York City

Souls Grown Diaspora is an exhibition that explores a generation of leading contemporary visionary African-American artists from the wider United States, and situates their work into an art-historical lineage shaped by the Great Migration. The exhibition traces the migration: the movement spanning 1916 to 1970 in which six million African-Americans left the rural South for urban centers such as New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Oakland. Souls Grown Diaspora follows a new wave of artists, mostly self-taught, whose works address a range of revelatory social and political subjects.

The show’s title takes its inspiration from Atlanta’s Souls Grown Deep Foundation, which has worked for decades to change the canon of art history to include a group of pioneering African-American artists from the South—among them Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, Mary T. Smith, Hawkins Bolden, and the women’s collective known as the Gee’s Bend Quilters (Arlonzia Pettway, Annie Mae Young and Mary Lee Bendolph)— as essential to the understanding of developments in the history of American art. The name “Souls Grown Deep” originates from the last line of Langston Hughes’ 1921 poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”: “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.” A collection of research material will be included in vitrines and a series of performances and talks will accompany the exhibition during its run.

Souls Grown Diaspora is on view throughout March 7, 2020 at apexart 291 Church Street, NYC. photographs courtesy of the gallery

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