Lee Bul's Utopia Saved @ The Manege Central Exhibition Hall In St. Petersburg

The multifaceted work of Lee Bul has in many respects defined the development trajectory of contemporary Asian Art and has also had a significant influence on the contemporary artistic process all around the world. The artist uses icons and tropes from utopian modernism, transforming, allegorising, and juxtaposing them in her own creative works. She engages with utopian modernism with empathy and originality, with critique and imagination. 

The Utopia Saved exhibition is Lee Bul’s first solo exhibition to be held in Russia, and is one of Lee Bul’s most personal artistic expressions. It is the first time that the artist has so fully explained to the public the sources of the current phase of development of her artistic path and the influence that the Russian avant-garde has had on her work.

Utopia Saved is on view through January 31 @ The Manege Central Exhibition Hall, St Petersburg

Clayton Schiff's Small World @ 56 Henry in New York

Et quid amabo nisi quod ænigma est?[*] 
[What shall I love if not the enigma?] 
-Giorgio de Chirico 

Clayton Schiff’s paintings seem like representations of dreams. The  artist gathers impressions of an unconscious that distorts, displaces, enlarges, and compresses experiences accumulated while awake. His haunting iconography recalls the symbolism of Arnold Böcklin, the alienation and anxiety of Edvard Munch, and Leonora Carrington’s fairylands. Yet Schiff’s fantastical creatures and strange landscapes also have a subtlety and lightness that is playful and even humorous recalling Dr. Seuss. 

Schiff’s first solo exhibition with 56 Henry speaks of isolation and disaffection, and champions the irrational and poetic, the enigmatic and arcane. The color palette is muted; soft tones prevail, adding to the work’s otherworldly quality. The paintings often feel empty and sparse, inviting comparisons to Giorgio de Chirico’s dystopian, alienating land and cityscapes.

Small World is on view through January 17 @ 56 Henry Street New York, NY 10002


Michelle Blade's Into The Forest @ Wilding Cran In Los Angeles

Set against the backdrop of a global pandemic and fraught political times, Into the Forest is an amalgamation of experience and emotion made while sheltering in place. Taking note from her most intimate and immediate surroundings, Blade’s paintings depict a collection of quotidian scenes:  the last blush of day, her children in the garden, the remnants of a meal, flowers in stages of decay, mountainous landscapes and towering trees under radiant moons. These meditative moments of solitude within a California landscape take note from the natural world and closely examine its stillness, strength, persistence and metaphysical qualities.

Driven by the inescapable qualities of the natural world this exhibition is about curiosity and one's search for meaning and place within the cosmos. The perceived energy Blade depicts lays behind physical appearances. It’s a world of benevolent energy flowing through and protecting life. The title of the exhibition “Into the Forest”, is not simply an escapist fantasy but also a rallying call to dive more deeply into ones reality and reassess our connection to the health of our afflicted world. In the words of Mary Oliver, using “Attention as devotion”.

Into The Forest is on view for two more days @ Wilding Cran 1700 S. Santa Fe Ave #460 Los Angeles CA 90021

Existential Time: Read Our Interview of Gisela Colón On The Occasion Of Her Solo Exhibition In Palm Beach →

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I conducted this interview with Gisela Colón on November 19, 2020, just after a mysterious obelisk-like structure was discovered in Utah’s Red Rock Country, and just days before the discovery was announced. Exactly when this crudely bolted, John McCracken-like monolith was initially installed is a mystery. That it was found by state employees counting sheep has been described as the most 2020 thing of 2020. Since then, multiple monoliths of varied fashion have been appearing and disappearing around the world, leading to a magnifying force of everything from commercial opportunists, to alien conspiracy theorists, to a Christian military LARPing crusade. Meanwhile, Gisela has been installing her solo exhibition, EXISTENTIAL TIME, Exploring Cosmic Past, Present and Future, of monolith and rectanguloid sculptures created in quarantine from optical acrylics and aerospace carbon fiber. Her unique sculptural language embodies the way that time expands, retracts and collapses. Her two short films express the anxieties that result from isolation and inertness. Her inquiries into the laws of physics address non-linear time flows and they provide the viewer with a sensory and intellectual experience in the grand cosmic sense of time and space. In essence, these “organic minimal” forms inherently attract a diversified coterie of forces that might point toward all the reasons we could be feeling our fragmented world suddenly culled together by a mysterious ping. click here to read more.

Liu Shiyuan Presents For Jord @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery In Los Angeles

For Jord, Liu Shiyuan’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, is comprised of photography, video and drawings, that revolve around a fictional character named Jord. In Danish, the word jord translates to ‘earth’ or ‘dirt’, and as a name, it means ‘divine being’ or ‘peace’. In Liu’s work, this character is not human, not from the past or the future, and has no race or gender. They are the amorphous, symbolic protagonist who binds the work across ideological and formal narratives.

In her photography practice, Liu uses personal iPhone videos and Google image searches as primary sources for her work. By searching words and phrases online, Liu identifies images with multiple meanings that can be attributed to the same word, offering a diversity of perspectives and interpretations. At her studio in Copenhagen, Liu searched the word “Jord” on Google images, resulting in images of dirt. Interestingly, many of the thumbnails featured two hands holding soil - giving the dirt a border, a containment and a sense of belonging. As a country, a culture, or any community with boundaries, the character Jord represents our connected and shared nature. For Liu Shiyuan, a Chinese national living in Denmark, this common ground of all humans is an important aspect of our livelihood.

Liu’s new film, For the Photos I Didn’t Take, For the Stories I Didn’t Read, is inspired by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen’s book The Little Match Seller. The story portrays a penniless young girl on New Year’s Eve trying to sell matches to make money for her family. From the cold and snowy street, she peers into other homes, imagining a better life. As she fantasizes, she peacefully passed away in the dawn of the new year, an abrupt and tragic end to the tale. In 1920, The Little Match Seller was translated to Chinese and included in educational books throughout the country. The story was used by the Chinese government during the Cultural Revolution as a way of explaining how the communist party was saving China from the problems of Western capitalism.

Liu reintroduces the audience to The Little Match Seller with a stream of images the artist found online by individually searching every word in the entire text. By recontextualizing the narrative, the viewer simultaneously reads both stories: the written version from 1845 and a parallel story created by today’s imagery. Every time the word “SHE” or “HER” appears in the text, Liu uses portraits of young girls from around the world - girls from poor families and wealthy families, from refugee camps and of different ethnicities. The result is surprisingly complex and unified. From one perspective it is clear to see the shadow of post-war society; from another, there is no change at all.

Set softly behind the rolling text and images, otherworldly environments create an atmosphere of the unknown, as if the viewer is looking onto earth from another universe. The idea of being a foreigner, an outsider or an alien is a frequent theme in Liu’s practice. Having lived in many different countries: growing up in China, studying in the United States and now living in Denmark — the same country as Hans Christian Andersen — Liu has a unique perspective on the cultural and political differences in these countries. For the Photos I Didn’t Take, For the Stories I Didn’t Read contemplates and questions larger issues of communism, socialism, capitalism and the affects on the individual — especially during the holiday season when indulgence and extravagance are celebrated, disparity and inequality become more pronounced. By bringing up these questions, Liu leaves the viewer to observe our differences, consider alternative perspectives and most importantly, understand our shared connection as humans.

For Jord is on view through January 30 @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery 1010 N Highland Ave Los Angeles, CA 90038.

Unreachable Spring Group Show @ Luis De Jesus Los Angeles

Unreachable Spring takes its title from the eponymous painting by Laura Krifka. The painting was slated to be featured as the sole work in her first Viewing Room on the gallery website, accompanied by an essay by the writer and art critic Andrew Berardini. Laura began the painting in late March—within days of the start of the Covid lockdown in the U.S., and shortly after learning that she and her husband were expecting their first child. By summer it had become clear to us that it was the lede for a deeper exploration of ideas and subject matter.

Over many months we watched as the Covid-19 pandemic transformed the world and like an earthquake of biblical proportions exposed the fragile fissures of our deteriorating human ecosystem, turning one crisis into many. As the author Daniel Susskind writes in Life Post-COVID-19, "This crisis is focusing our collective attention on the many injustices and weaknesses that already exist in how we live together. If people were blind to these faults before, it is hard not to see them now."

These crises have also inspired artists to respond in kind, prompted by a desire to take refuge in their work and address this transformational moment in their own personal way. By creating art that inspires contemplation and elicits discourse these paintings, sculptures and photographs bear witness and provide a record of how these artists have experienced life over these past six months.

Participating artists include June Edmonds, André Hemer, Laura Krifka, Kambui Olujimi, Edra Soto, and Peter Williams. Unreachable Spring is on view through December 19 @ Luis De Jesus Los Angeles 2685 South La Cienega Boulevard.

Cole Sternberg's FREESTATE @ El Segundo Museum of Art

Taking ESMoA and LA’s South Bay City of El Segundo as ostensible “campaign headquarters,” FREESTATE features new artworks by Cole Sternberg conceived as fabricated historical ephemeras and objects, sovereign documents, and fictional propaganda. The gallery space is split into three rooms, forcing the viewer to experience each as a separate moment along the path to the Free Republic. 

Room one is an elaborate canvasing office, replete with posters, buttons, lawn signs and other public activation propaganda. Sternberg has even drafted a new Constitution for California, published in pocket form for easy mass dissemination. Room two is the brain of the concept. As “California Dreamin’” plays on repeat, the walls of this room are filled from floor to ceiling with works on paper chronicling the artist’s mind map of secession. They explain the historical heartache, the environmental elegance and the logistics of a peaceful and beneficial transition. The final stage is the largest and calmest. Feelings of escape and freedom permeate from Sternberg’s environmental sculpture and collage, which sit quietly against a traditional museum backdrop, demonstrating a future where one can breathe.

FREESTATE is on view through March 2021 at ESMoA 208 Main St, El Segundo, CA 90245. To learn more go to www.thefreerepublicofcalifornia.com

Marc Horowitz "Diagrams For Living" @ No Gallery LA

No Gallery is pleased to present Diagrams for Living, an exhibition of paintings, collages, and video work from Marc Horowitz. The first room of the gallery is occupied by new paintings completed in Los Angeles during quarantine. The second room hosts collage works on paper and collage-like video culled from the artist’s vast archive of personal footage gathered throughout pre-pandemic travels. Marc Horowitz - "Diagrams For Living" will be on view until December 13 at No Gallery, 961 Chung King Rd Los Angeles, CA 90012.

Art Of The Divine: Kilo Kish and Rikkí Wright In Conversation →

Film still from A Song About Love by Rikkí Wright

Film still from A Song About Love by Rikkí Wright

Rikkí Wright and Kilo Kish are two of the eight artists exhibiting in this year’s edition of Womxn in Windows, a socially distant group show that clearly presaged the conditions of our current moment in its first edition last year. Visitors are invited to walk along the storefronts of Chung King Road in Chinatown and watch short films through each window with scores that can be accessed via QR code. Founded and curated by Zehra Ahmed, this year’s artists were invited to exhibit work that examines the intertwined relationships between culture, religion, and society. These films remind us how womxn have relied on faith and on each other as well as on a desire for equality, understanding, and the power to make the right choices for ourselves. In both Wright and Kish’s films one observes an intimate relationship with the spiritual, however from highly contrasting perspectives and with completely unique aesthetics. Click here to read more.

Read Our Interview Of Artist, Abolitionist & Facilitator Brianna Mims →

Brianna Mims is a polymath if I’ve ever seen one. Along with a lifetime of training in myriad dance forms and becoming a multidisciplinary movement artist, she can likely be found speaking publicly on the role of the NAACP and transformational justice in the abolitionist movement, or walking runway at any number of fashion weeks, or developing curriculum for children to feel safe in moving and communicating freely. Then again, she might just be researching the efficacy of our local welfare system, or brushing up on her Arabic. click here to read more

Romancing A Wound: Read Our Interview With Multidisciplinary Artist Estefania Puerta →

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“I am not thinking of the womb as an organ attached to a cis female but rather the womb as a place we all have within us, a place of making selves, of nurture, of “the animal within the animal,” and very much about a holding place and how that slippery sense of “holding” can become a place of containment, detainment, of being trapped. The wound aspect of it is that piece around finding a healing place within the wound and not an escape or sutured repression from it.” Click here to read the full interview. Estefania Puerta’s Womb Wound is on view October 11 - Novermber 15 at Situations in New York.

Kenny Scharf Karbombz! Rally Presented By Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles

Kenny Scharf’s Karbombz! are regularly seen driving on the Los Angeles streets and freeways. Since starting the project in 2013, Scharf has painted 260 cars around the world, about 100 of which are in Los Angeles. For the rally Scharf invited all of the Karbombz! drivers in Los Angeles to participate in a rally, which will took place on Santa Monica Boulevard between San Vicente and Sycamore. About fifty Karbombz! participated. Scharf’s Karbombz! range from beat up jalopies to luxury brands. The drivers come from all walks of life. Potential Karbombz! owners connect with Scharf on the street in front of his murals, through other drivers, and through Instagram. An essential part of the project is that the cars are always painted for free. Kenny Scharf currently has a exhibition on view at Jeffrey Deitch gallery with two hundred fifty new paintings of faces, all of them different, called MOODZ, on view until October 31st. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Ed Clark "Expanding The Image" @ Hauser and Wirth Los Angeles

Los Angeles... A pioneer of the New York School, Ed Clark (1926 – 2019) extended the language of American abstraction beyond expressionism through his inventive use of pure color, abstract form, and the seductive materiality of paint. Following Hauser & Wirth’s recent New York exhibition of Clark’s paintings made from 2000 to 2013, ‘Expanding the Image’ will be the gallery’s first exhibition in Los Angeles devoted to the artist. On view will be works from his highly formative years of 1960 through 1980, two decades during which Clark made pivotal breakthroughs that expanded the language of abstraction. Make an appointment to see the exhibition here. On view until January 10, 2021 at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles, 901 East 3rd Street Los Angeles CA 90013. Installation photographs by Fredrik Nilsen, courtesy of Hauser & Wirth.

Serkan Sarier’s "They Eat Their Young" Is A Prescient Reflection Of The Current Moment

 
 

Serkan Sarier’s first solo exhibition in Germany features installations and complementary paintings made onsite during a nine-week residency hosted by the Stiftung Reinbeckhallen. It draws inspiration from The Little Mermaid, a story written in 1836 by Hans Christian Andersen after he was rejected by the man he loved, as well as the artist’s own memories of rejection, feelings of otherness, and moment of transformation. As a member of a Turkish migrant family (Gastarbeiter Familie) and a German citizen, Sarier often explores the subaltern in his work; in the case of They Eat Their Young, he does this through mythical bodies that are not only trapped and isolated, but removed (both socially and geographically) from each other and the observer. It is a hybrid of classical Greek and Roman sculptural references combined with the artist’s own cultural heritage. An exploration made relevant by the scores of younger immigrant generations currently seeking asylum in the Western world.

Shaped by the environment of both his family’s culture and everyday life in Hanau, Serkan expresses this juxtaposition in his use of color and materials. The pervasive and suffocating nature of humankind is made visceral by way of large rocks drenched in iridescent car paint, the weight of them supported by metal grates that line industrial plastic containers; a proper plinth for a rodent being studied in a lab. Great care is taken in the details of faces, gloves and feet. Yet, the genitalia remain vague, if not feminine, on otherwise masculine bodies. One figure dons a large pair of rubber gloves identical to those worn by the artist’s father years ago when he was of working age, its face composed of a deflated rubber mask is squashed and frozen in a moment of anguish. Mannequins made from a soft, rubbery material bring a haunting humanity to wholly cold forms. Each sculpture is immersed in a fresh new coat of car paint that harkens Western Germany from the 1950s through the 1970s, an era when most Turkish immigrants were employed by the automobile industry. They glitter with the promise of assimilation: an opportunity to provide for one’s family in a new Western life.

They Eat Their Young is on view through September 20 @ Stiftung Reinbeckhallen Reinbeckstr. 17, 12459 Berlin. text by Mimi Krtinić Rončević, photographs courtesy of the gallery

Majeure Force: Part II Group Show Marks Tenth Anniversary Of Night Gallery In Los Angeles

In this second installment of Night Gallery’s tenth-anniversary exhibition, forty-one artists have been assembled from its roster and surrounding community to celebrate the exuberant city of Los Angeles. It is a testament to the endurance of creativity and the power of art to continue bringing people together. The closing celebration included a performance by Daniel Gaitor-Lomack photographed below by Lani Trock. Majeure Force Part Two features work by Sarah Awad, Cara Benedetto, Josh Callaghan, Cynthia Daignault, Mira Dancy, Ian Davis, Daniel T. Gaitor-Lomack, Samara Golden, Paul Heyer, Ridley Howard, Khari Johnson-Ricks, JPW3, Grant Levy-Lucero, Tau Lewis, Anne Libby, Rose Marcus, Jesse Mockrin, Luke Murphy, Rashaad Newsome, Sterling Ruby, Melanie Schiff, Elaine Stocki, Claire Tabouret, Marisa Takal, Kandis Williams, and Andy Woll.