A Look Back on Vienna’s “Curated by” Gallery Festival

Ola Vasiljeva
En Rachâchant, installation view Vleeshal Museum (2015)
courtesy the artist
photograph: Leo van Kampen

text by Lara Schoorl


Hope For The Rising Sun of Promise: East not West

Every September, for the past fourteen years, the start of Vienna’s gallery season coincides with Curated by; a monthlong festival that invites international curators to organize exhibitions in the Viennese contemporary art galleries, under an overarching theme. This was the first year that an “impulse provider” was invited to propose said theme to the curators. Elected by twenty-four participating galleries, Dieter Roelstraete, received the inaugural position to present a curatorial and artistic framework for the fourteenth edition of Curated by. 

In the shadow of the Russian invasion in Ukraine and the ongoing war, Roelstraete proposed “East” for the theme. More specifically “Kelet,” Hungarian for East, and explicitly the opposite of “Nyugat,” West. Nyugat was the name of a Budapest-originated, avant-garde journal from the early twentieth century; “Nyugat” one word that captured the desire for what was happening culturally in Paris and Munich, in the West. At that time, Budapest was still the second capital alongside Vienna of the Austrian-Hungarian empire, an interesting fact when thinking about cardinal directions now. Austria, and Vienna in particular, has long carried a gateway position (for culture) between East and West. During in the first half of the last century and through the Iron Curtain, and in the past two decades, Austrian art institutions have often gravitated towards the West in terms of who and what was shown. Yet now, as people move from Kyiv to Lviv, flee from East to West and South to North, Roelstraete urged, more than ever it is important to shift our perspective from West to the (expanded) East. And to then not see East as a place of trauma, but of promise, because “Is it not in the East,” he asks, “where the sun rises?” 

The theme, “Kelet,” remains open for interpretation to the gallerists and curators as East, of course, is a relative position or place depending on where one finds themselves. Although one imagines that this year the galleries might have invited curators and the curators in turn artists from the(ir) East. For Roelstraete “Kelet” provided a platform to contemplate a semantic shift for the meaning of East and or versus West through art in the European imagination. Curated by then may have formed a preliminary map of the state of art in the East (which can also be understood as Central or South and East of Vienna all the way to the Pacific). And such was the impression of the twenty-four exhibitions that spanned curators and artists of multiple generations from Ukraine, Slovenia and Georgia, to Kuala Lumpur and Mexico, and many countries in between.

The full-length curatorial essay by Roelstraete can be found here and below are highlights of this year’s Curated by, reflective of the various interpretations of “Kelet.”

SOPHIE TAPPEINER curated by Lukas Hofmann

Anna Zemánková
Untitled, the second half of 1960s
perforated paper, pastel, acrylic, china ink, embossing
60 x 41 (Detail)
Copyright and courtesy: The Artist’s Estate

Spread across two floors, SOPHIE TAPPEINER presented Pollen, a small retrospective of the self-taught Czechoslovakian artist Anna Zemánková (1908-1986). All works are on paper, all as seemingly fragile as their subjects, “my flowers,” as she called them, curator Lukas Hofmann explains. And all made in the twilight hours of dawn, before the rest of the world woke up—an unconscious nod to the East where the sun would rise as she worked. She used various techniques to create the flowers, often perforating the outlines and shapes in the paper and then coloring them with aquarelle paints, but some include stitching, ballpoint, and collage elements. They each required the viewer to take a step closer, especially her last works, which gradually became much smaller (a result of having both legs amputated and working exclusively from a board in her lap), to see the difference between thread and line and light, and then a step back in case the sun passes by or a light is lit behind them (as with the lamps), and their colors change, and shadows dance. Although the organic appearance of flowers, plants, butterflies and birds in the work is recognizable, the still not exactly true to nature imagery oozes a strong sense of elsewhere. Humble in their size and material, they breathe a kind of freedom. 

CRONE WIEN curated by Eva Kraus & Volo Bevza

In 2022, the works were equally as sharp as the exhibition title. Showing exclusively young artists from Ukraine, curators Eva Kraus and Volo Bevza localized East in one place to inquire about the repercussions of the war (and prior events) that take effect both locally and globally, and how those are experienced. Any type of event, including a war, but also protests and uprisings, can now be witnessed collectively through various instant (social) media outlets. Bevza wrote: “On the ground, you can feel the war, but most importantly, it is ‘experienced’ digitally.” The war takes places in Ukraine, in the East, in our phones all over the world. Reality is stretched into the digital realm, or the digital realm absorbs our reality. Either way, a blurry in between space is created and it is in this liminal space that the artists in 2022 make work. Analog and digital realities bleed into each other in the photography-based works of Victoria Pidust and the paintings of Artem Volokitin of Bevza. A floor to ceiling curtain, also by Bevza, printed with an image of a ruined structure characteristic of his paintings divided the front space of the gallery from the back space. A curatorial intervention gesturing to both roles he occupied in the exhibition. One literally had to walk through or around the edges of the image of destruction enforced by the war in Ukraine. Although dark, the painterly quality and manipulation of the photographic image, as with all of his recent work, softens the harsh visual as it swayed lightly in the gallery space. A contradiction felt also in mediated reality. Not only the image but our sense of reality was distorted moving through the exhibition. Behind the curtain, Yevgenia Belorusets, well-known for her war dairies presented an older work. “Please Don’t Take My Picture Or They’ll Shoot Me Tomorrow” (2015) is part of the series “Victories of the Defeated” which documents the lives of communities during the military conflict in Donbas (indicating too that this war has been ongoing) through photographs and texts. A two-sided sculptural installation, on one side the exaggerated large cover page of a fictional paper Today’s News, and on the other side a portrait of miner a filled up the center of the front space. Through irony—the paper’s subtitle reads “You’re reading a quality-looking newspaper with a seriously dubious name”—Today’s News criticizes the misinformation that the media spreads and how it corrupts the truth, another way in which our reality, be it digital or analog, is distorted.

WONNERTH DEJACO curated by Kilobase Bucharest

Alex Horghidan
Untitled [series Polyamory], 2020
graphite on paper framed
35 x 35 cm
Courtesy of the artist, TRIUMFAMIRIA, Museum of Queer Culture and Family Servais Collection

WONNERTH DEJACO opened its doors two years ago and although this was their first time participating in Curated by, their presence was strong. The group exhibition JOY ~ JOY ~ JOY ON THE PEPPERSIDE OF SUPRANFINITE was one of the few shows where the work completely took over; it was louder than the standard white cube aesthetic of the space, but in a way that was welcoming, meeting the viewers at their frequency. The curators, Dragos Olea and Sandra Demetrescu, who collaborate under the hybrid curatorial practice KILOBASE BUCHAREST, brought us dreams of a future in a utopian queer universe called Suprainfinite. Suprainfinite is a space imagined by the art collective Apparatus 22, which includes Olea, in 2015. It is used here in the fictional locale of Pepperside to contemplate hope and joy, and how those experiences can support our future on Earth. They utilized a science fictional approach to explore the idea of utopia, proposing that in radical imagination we find tools the that can facilitate change and evolution in the present. This attitude was visualized by a curatorial intervention Title for an Exhibition (2021) installed in the window and visible first from outside the gallery. In various languages, an LED loop said: “queer since the dawn of time” and “our queer forefathers” suggesting that queerness has always been present in the world. Inside, the “ultra fragile” Shields (2019-ongoing) adorned with tassels or stitching by Irina Bujor rounded off the corners of the first room. A soft voice seeped from behind them, sharing wishes that would change the violence in the realities of transgender people. In the second adjacent room, Irresistible (2021), a short film by Barbora Kleinhamplová in collaboration with Mistress Velvet, features the late queer dominatrix and their BDSM practice; as with their community organization and activist positions, Mistress Velvet used BDSM as a process to foster systemic change in the form of, for example, reparations by letting their white cis male clients read and study Black Feminist Theory. The curators made a point that queerness can become isolated in a bubble that to other communities is perceived as inaccessible or even violent. JOY ~ JOY ~ JOY aimed to not only leisurely depict joy but also the importance of notions of consent, care and comfort, which are of necessary concern to all people. These acts of care were scattered throughout the exhibition, in particular in the pencil drawings of Alex Horghidan’s Polyamory series (2020) in which groups of people, sometimes dressed sometimes not, but always in the comfort of a soft environment of grass, pillows, plants or a bed, and each other are portrayed at rest.

Frieze London Opens to Large Crowds With Visceral Sensations

Installation view, Patricia Domínguez solo exhibition “Indra’s Net,” curated by Sandhini Poddar, Cecilia Brunson Projects Frieze London booth 2022, Courtesy Cecilia Brunson Projects.
Photograph by Eva Herzog


text by Jennifer Piejko


The early crowd snaked through Regent’s Park in central London, pouring into the tents of the 19th annual Frieze Art Fair from the moment the doors opened. After a string of quiet art-fair seasons, the morning circus of 160 temporary galleries, pop-up cafes (city favorites Petersham Nurseries, Jikoni, and Bao among them) and champagne counters was seemingly full from day to evening.

Perhaps the nearly three years of online viewing rooms, PDF sales lists, and isolation have left us with a longing for the deeply personal as well as the three-dimensional, as the engaging paintings on view leaned into the visceral, from Romanian painter Marius Bercea’s wistful portraits of friends and figures, mostly women, from his native Cluj at Los Angeles and New York gallery François Ghebaly. Hints of the seams of social construction—such as the aftereffects of the country’s 1989 revolution and the resulting creep of consumer capitalism into Romanian society, modern femininity and womanhood, and alienation—are disclosed in the details of his paintings, whose stylings recall paintings by Impressionist artist Mary Cassat and Milan Kundera films. 

 

Marius Bercea
Untitled, 2022
Oil on canvas
40 x 50 cm
Courtesy François Ghebaly Gallery © Marius Bercea

 

Warsaw and Cologne gallery Wschód present a series of canvases by Polish artist Joanna Woś that depicts scenes from Renaissance painter Filippo Lippi’s fresco The Feast of Herod (1466), part of Stories of St. Stephen and St. John the Baptist inside the Prato Cathedral in Tuscany. The diaphanous figures in shades from sand to terra cotta share side glances and intimacies while seeing right past and through each other. At the other end of the scale, Gagosian presents a towering row of seven paintings by British artist Jadé Fadojutimi, timed with her solo exhibition “Can we see the colour green because we have a name for it?” at the Hepworth Wakefield in West Yorkshire. Neon lines and forms of abstracted foliage race across the canvas in pure, frantic saturation. 

Installation View, Joanna Woś, Galeria Wschód Frieze London booth 2022

Reaching out to visitors, works highlighting texture and dimensionality filled the fair, begging to be touched or crinkled in the hand: Shin Sung Hy at Gallery Hyundai (Seoul), Suki Seokyeong Kang at Tina Kim Gallery (New York), Joanna Piotrowska at Phillida Reid (London), Barbara Bloom and Karla Black at Gisela Capitain (Cologne), Acaye Kerunen at Pace, Rossella Biscotti at mor charpentier (Paris and Bogotá). It’s a scandalous feeling now that we’ve gotten accustomed to mediating nearly every work through a digital screen.

Installation View, Acaye Kerunen at Pace Gallery Frieze London booth 2022 © Pace Gallery, London 2022 
Photograph by Damian Griffiths, courtesy Pace Gallery 

Among the fair’s usual sections Focus and Editions, this year’s special section is “Indra’s Net,” curated by Sandhini Poddar from the Guggenheim Museum in Abu Dhabi. Titled after the ancient Buddhist and Hindu concept of dependent origination, illustrated by intertwined cords that hold a multifaceted jewel at each knot, where each jewel reflects every other jewel, connecting the entire universe. Works included here reflect connections and exchanges in language, history, ancestry, consciousness, and futurity. At New York gallery Jack Shainman’s booth, Richard Mosse’s work Flooded Municipality, Amazonas captures the environmental damage inflicted on the Brazilian Amazon in the craggy reds and blacks that eat away at a flooded residential neighborhood, chronicling ecocide by drone in his signature conceptual photographic technique. At London gallery Cecilia Brunson Projects, Chilean artist Patricia Domínguez’s works stem from her interest in fantastical ethnobotany. Trained in botanical illustration, she used her recent artistic residency at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Switzerland and time with a Peruvian plant healer to inform the hybrid foliage-and-black box paintings (with gemstones), sculptures, and video here. Seen together, it might offer a roadmap into our next dimension. See you in the line to get in there, too.  

Ahmet Öğüt Presents "A:PPOINTED D:IRECTORS" @ A:D: Curatorial in Berlin

Jump Up! , 2022 Ahmet Öğüt

Ahmet Öğüt
Jump Up! , 2022 
Installation, with 3 selected works from the museum collection,  3 trampolines 

A:PPOINTED D:IRECTORS by Kurdish-Dutch artist, Ahmet Öğüt at A:D:Curatorial deals with institutional critique as well as a number of sociopolitical precarities, questioning the role of art institutions and artists themselves.

“A museum is a not-for-profit, permanent institution in the service of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage. Open to the public, accessible and inclusive, museums foster diversity and sustainability. They operate and communicate ethically, professionally and with the participation of communities, offering varied experiences for education, enjoyment, reflection and knowledge sharing.”

—International Council of Museums, August 24th, 2022

This recently approved new definition of the museum by ICOM is very aspiring, yet still, some objectives are far from reality. Therefore, it is the role of art professionals to find new strategies to achieve these objectives. How may we balance our roles between addressing urgent issues and not falling back into the complicit patterns of the art world? Sometimes smaller institutions can enable strategies to experiment with new formats more easily.

Topics such as museum collections, exhibition displays, public interactions, and institutional representations are addressed throughout the show, using both playful and challenging strategies. Visitors can immediately become part of the show with the installation Jump Up! by jumping on small trampolines to see selected works, which hang above eye level. Another work, No Institutional Abuse Zone, marks the area but also tries to put the same standards and parallels between human affairs and artist-institution relationships. Resulting from a google search, Appointed Curators is a collection of closely cropped portraits underscoring the prevalence of curators who choose to represent themselves with arms crossed. Those who assume this posture are often perceived as being angry, closed off, or feeling overwhelmed. This ironic take on self-representation reminds us of the importance of care, transparency, and a welcoming culture in art institutions. A:PPOINTED D:IRECTORS will be on view from October 9th - December 15th at A:D: Curatorial: Kurfürstenstraße 142, 10785 Berlin.

portrait by Ateş Alpar

Ahmet Öğüt
Appointed Curators, 2022 
250cm x 200cm 
poster 

A Rich, Somber Undercurrent: Read Our Interview Of Alannah Farrell →

Alannah Farrell — the sexual awakening to colors and hues, to kinks and dreams. This queer, trans-identifying artist from rural New York gracefully depicts the real bodies of their queer scene in atmospheric paintings, the magic of which stems from the shapely emotional nuances of each subject. Here, their struggles are visible, but so are the celebrations. Though currently represented by Harper’s and Anat Ebgi, they've had an enduring journey to their current career, beginning as a child yearning for a creative outlet, from babysitter, to cashier, to model, to dungeon domme, and later, Cooper Union graduate, allowing their art to leap from the confines of their bedroom to their first show at The Painting Center in New York. With the vibrant bodies and milky pigments enclosed in these works, Farrell expresses the multifaceted layers of their subjects’ queer identities, supporting the normalization of all expressions of beauty and power within the LGBTQI+ community. We see these queer bodies and faces through a lens unfocused on the taboo fascination that society perpetuates. It is one that instead centers the subject and how they wish to be seen and heard. Undoubtedly a New Yorker, Farrell pursues these intimate scenes and perseverances throughout the city with heart. They allow us, the viewers, into these blissful connections. We sat down with Farrell to discuss their expansive ideas surrounding queer identity in art, the fluidity of life, and their newest solo exhibition, I Want to Thank you, at Harper’s Gallery in New York. Read more.

Theophanies Explores The Late Steven Arnold's Personal Mythologies @ Fahey/Klein In Los Angeles

Realized between 1981 and 1993, Steven Arnold’s tableau photography represents a confluence of his myriad other disciplines. This modality allowed him the freedom to fully realize his cinematic visions without outside influence or compromise. After sketching storyboards inspired by his dreams, a habit from his filmmaking days, Arnold would craft his tableaus using cardboard, seamless paper, metallic and patterned fabrics, cut paper, paint, and selections from his obsessive collection of antiques, costumes, makeup, and dime store finds. Finally, he would dress, paint, and pose his models within his tableau, bringing his vision to life, then captured with his Hasselblad, often utilizing multiple exposures. 

Theophanies is an exhibition of works curated as a limited retrospective of the late artist’s surrealist tableau photographs, supported by a small selection of drawings, paintings, sculpture, and films. A proud, prominent member of the LGBTQ community years before this moniker became part of our common vernacular, Arnold sadly died of AIDS in 1994. Most recently, he is the subject of a documentary, Steven Arnold: Heavenly Bodies, co-narrated by Anjelica Huston and Ellen Burstyn, which will be screened on September 21 at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Feliz. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion with filmmaker Vishnu Dass, writer/editor Steffie Nelson, writer/filmmaker Jessica Hundley (The Library of Esoterica) and Nicholas Fahey of Fahey/Klein Gallery.

Theophanies is on view through September 24 @ Fahey/Klein Gallery 148 North La Brea Avenue

CHART Art Fair & Art Book Fair: Looking Back & Forward

text by Lara Schoorl
photographs by Niklas Adrian Vindelev

Last weekend (August 25-28) the Nordic art world gathered in Copenhagen for the 10th edition of CHART. For four days visual art, books, music, performance, architecture, talks, food and people filled the rooms and courtyard of Charlottenborg. The art fair was founded in 2013 by six cross-generational, Copenhagen-based gallerists—Claus Andersen, Bo Bjerggaard, Jesper Elg, Mikkel Grønnebæk, David Risley, and Susanne Ottesen—as a not-for-profit. This year they expanded their board with six new members hailing from tech, politics, business and cultural fields. The impetus behind the founding of the fair was to put an international spotlight on the region and to strengthen the local and Nordic art market; now, with the installation of these additional board members, the fair will be steered into a new non-traditional art world business model. 

Like all art institutions, CHART was also challenged to reconsider its format and question its purpose during these past years of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, the fair decentralized in 2020 and instead took place in galleries across the Nordic capitals Copenhagen, Helsinki, Oslo, Reykjavík, and Stockholm. At that same 8th edition, 100% of the exhibiting artists were women; a collective response from the participating galleries to “highlight the structural challenge of gender imbalance in the art market.” This year’s fair was their “first fully gender-balanced art fair.” For the international audience that was unable to visit all these Nordic galleries, CHART organized a series of online talks and published a reader that is still available for free as a PDF. 

 
 

The following two years, the fair continued to expand its public programming with a focus on inclusivity and sustainability, introducing an Experimental section with artist-run and alternative art spaces as well as the CHART Art Book Fair in 2021. For this year’s CHART Architectural Competition the theme was Bio-Architecture, inviting architects, artists and designers to create symbiotic relationships between nature and architecture. Reaching wider or different audiences triumphed during this year’s fair. In addition to exhibiting work at Charlottenborg, CHART invited fifteen artists, among whom are Austin Lee, Jasmin Franko and Nanna Abell, to present work inside the Tivoli Gardens—one of the world’s oldest theme parks, which opened its doors in 1843. Rather than your fair ticket, a ticket to the rides at Tivoli will allow you access to these works. The expanse of visitors continues with The Museum of Nordic Digital Art (MoNDA), which launched at the fair with works by ORLAN, Sabrina Ratté, and Morehshin Allahyari that can be found in the foyer of Charlottenborg and with an AR sculpture garden in the courtyard. MoNDA’s first exhibition, “Flags of Freedom,” a solo NFT show by Mette Winckelmann, can still be visited via the QR code on their website. It quickly became clear that new initiatives were a defining imperative of CHART 2022.

Noticeably different from the past years is that about a dozen more spaces participated in the fair, thirty-eight in total. All of them located in the Nordic region, although some galleries have spaces or viewing rooms elsewhere, such as Carl Kostyal in London and Milan. Others collaborate or engage in projects in the US such as the Norwegian Galleri Brandstrup with Sean Kelly Gallery in NYC and Loyal Gallery as a NADA member respectively. While the fair is structurally and conceptually moving forward, many of the works in the fair still felt more traditional materially, in the sense that the majority were wall works. Some beautifully refreshing nonetheless. Such as Emma Ainala’s surrealist paintings in which fairytale and nightmare meet shown by Helsinki Contemporary, or Anna Tuori’s gestural canvases presented in a collaborative installation with Jani Ruscica’s wall painting and video work for Galleri Anhava. But also the solo presentation at Carl Kostyal of Camilla Engström’s warm paintings that leave us longing for a gentle end of summer—especially in the northern Northern Hemisphere. Remarkable as well was Tacita Dean’s ten-meter-long photogravure, Inferno (2021), at BORCH Editions. The print, inspired by the stage and costume design Dean made for The Dante Project, a ballet on the occasion of the 700th anniversary celebration of the poet’s death, asks you to follow Dante and Virgil, depicted as two dots, across eight parts through the circles of hell, in an upside-down landscape scattered with textual fragments from the Divine Comedy and occasional satanic references like 666—leaving us hover between punishment and play for ten big steps. 

 
 

The art book fair, equally manageable in size with twenty-seven tables, hosted publishers, (art) book and print makers also all based in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. And also ranging from 1980s staples such a Space Poetry to brand new initiatives such as Halden Workshop. Interestingly, however, several operate between various languages and continents. Kinakaal (Norwegian for Chinese cabbage), a multilingual press run by Ben Wenhou Yu and Yilei Wang, which exists alongside their art space Northing in Bergen, for example, fosters communication between Norway and East Asia. To facilitate dialogue and connection between these different cultures, their publications often have Norse, Chinese, and English texts presented together. Then, Halden Workshop, a new (residency) program for book arts, in Halden, Norway offers workshops and studio space with access to letterpress, bookbinding and paper making assistance. The program is organized by Radha Pandey, a letterpress printer, and papermaker, and scholar of paper and book arts, and Johan Solberg is also a papermaker and scholar, letterpress printer, and a bookbinder. While the workshop is located in Halden, they spend half of the year in Delhi, India where they both teach and continue (to share) their practice. 

Tacita Dean, Inferno, 2021. Detail. Photogravure with screen print in eight parts, 89,5 x 956 cm framed. Image courtesy the artist and BORCH Editions

 

Many of the publishers and presses are one, two or three-person endeavors, some are part of institutions, others run small art spaces alongside their publishing arms. Although definitely a labor of love—see CULT PUMP’s multi-color silk screen printed comic and art books and zines—these publications and their makers form a tight regional community that reaches far beyond the Nordic countries. Hour Editions, run by Kristina Bengtsson and Kevin Malcolm, came into being in 2013 out of the communal question “What is the artist’s work?” and the sentiment “If we can’t change the system, at least we can try together.” Malcolm also runs the exhibition space Vermillion Sands, for which Hour Editions has made poetic extensions of several of their shows, with the most appealing titles. Calling All Divas on the occasion of “Inside me with Incredible Intensity” with Martin Jacob Nielsen and Tyler Matthew Oyer is a beautiful and empowering tribute to many known, lesser known, and overlooked “queer artist mentors” who lost their lives to HIV/AIDS; and I like to stare at things that cannot be read. Only in that way can the present be remembered. I need a menu to wash my car. on the occasion of the eponymous show by Mikko Kuorinki brings together the poetry of Jenny Kalliokulju, Karl Larsson, Henning Lundkvsit and Amalie Smith.

For four days a lot was to be seen, listened too, talked about and tasted, but not too much. The size of CHART, including its new and additional programs and collaborations, invites you to linger, take time, and revisit. It is, after all, just a walk across the courtyard between Diana Al-Hadid’s sculptural wall panels (of which the layering and myriad of materials ask for multiple observations) and At Last Books to read Lindsay Preston Zappas’ text on David Risley’s watercolor series Against God. Against Guns. Against Energy. 

Diana Al-Hadid, In the Year AD 832 Large Stones Were Thrown From the Sky, Breaking the Copper Earth, Etc., 2019. Polymer gypsum, fiberglass, steel, plaster, copper, leafing, pigment. Dimensions: 160 x 210 x 10 cm. Image courtesy the artist and Galleri Brandstrup, Oslo

Dozie Kanu's World Building Tools: An Interview From The Biodiversity Issue →

 
 

text by Oliver Kupper
portraits by Parker Woods 

Dozie Kanu’s practice is a conceptual exploration of colonial and hegemonic politics, architecture, spatial narratives, and so much more. Born in Houston, Texas in 1993, and now based in Santarém, Portugal, Kanu’s investigation of cultural artifacts belies an America still grappling with not only its troubled past, but also its troubled present. Razor-sharp, anti-climb, raptor spikes, a visual and physical deterrent for vandals and undesirables, find their way onto one of his sculptures modeled as a baby crib, an emblematic nod to the countless divisions that are psychologically embedded at birth. There is something alchemical about Kanu’s reimagined objects of our urban visual landscape, like an ATM blasted with a thick layer of black epoxy sculpting clay, or a poured concrete chair in “crack rock beige” that sits on a spoked tire rim, that gives Kanu’s work a kind of authentic reclamation of power in a grief-stricken zeitgeist. We caught up with Kanu on a rare visit to Los Angeles, before the opening of his exhibition, to prop and ignore, at Manual Arts, to discuss tools for building a more socially equitable world. Read more.

FOOD For Thought: Gordon Matta-Clark’s Restaurant For Artists Changed The Culinary Discourse →

In 1971, artists Gordon Matta-Clark, Carol Goodden, and Tina Girouard opened FOOD, a landmark New York restaurant on the corner of Prince and Wooster Streets in SoHo. In the urban wilds of a not-yet-fully developed or gentrified Lower Manhattan of the early ‘70s, FOOD was a revolutionary laboratory for fresh sustainable cooking and unusual culinary collaborations. Artists like Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage created meals at FOOD. Although never realized, Mark di Suvero had plans to serve dishes through the windows via a crane—he would then instruct diners to eat with tools such as hammers and screwdrivers. As a hub for young artists in the nascency of their careers, the menu was affordable and simple, which created a unique atmosphere of camaraderie and community. Although FOOD, in its original incarnation, only lasted three years, the restaurant became a fabled institution and paradigmatic lesson for the possibility of food at the intersection of art.

Originally published in Autre’s Biodiversity Issue, FW 2021

[Review] Kaari Upson's Powerful Posthumous Exhibition At Sprüth Magers in Los Angeles

 

Kaari Upson “Kris’s Dollhouse” 2017-2019 (detail)

 

A pierced clit from beyond the grave—its folds and sensuous creases climb like a corpse flower too shy to bloom. A sheath covers something secret. A Christmas tree, covered in plastic, sutured closed forever by two rings. This sculpture, a detail from Kris’s Dollhouse (2017-19), is one of Upson’s many abstract and mysterious enlargements—part of a grander picture, a paroxysm of materiality, a puzzle piece from the infiniteness of memory. A hazy, drunken recollection of a family home in a dream. Profane, but holy, and nearly archaeological. In her posthumous exhibition, now on view at Sprüth Magers in Los Angeles, Upson mines the psychosexual miasma and violent ecological grandeur of the Southern California suburbs and its surrounding environs, always tiptoeing on the edge of danger, which is even more haunting now in her mortal absence (Upson died after a long battle with cancer in 2021). Memory is both the canary and the lantern, guiding her into the carbonized cave of our deepest desires. She looks to Freudian and Lacanian analysis as a mirror and the obtuse chromium coating behind the mirror, which renders glass not as a window to peer through, but our reversed double. Walking through the exhibition is like walking through the ruins and artifacts of an artist rushing through the pangs of mortality like a flash flood. Each work is a notation on an emergency: paintings thick with the impasto of life’s sediments, sculptures tortured by unrecognizability and large-scale drawings become like maps of the artist’s psyche, now frozen in time.

Kaari Upson never, never ever, never in my life, never in all my born days, never in all my life, never is on view through October 8, 2022 at Sprüth Magers in Los Angeles

Read Our Interview Of Dan Colen From Issue 13: Biodiversity →

 
 

interview by Gideon Jacobs 
photographs by David Brandon Geeting  

 

Many urbanites dream about farm life. They sit in front of their screens, filling out expense reports or arguing with coworkers on Slack, the blue light slowly irradiating whatever constitutes their unique human spirit, and they imagine that digging their hands into soil and pulling out some kind of root vegetable might cure what ails them. That wasn’t Dan Colen. Colen, an artist who is very much a product of New York City, with a name synonymous with the downtown Manhattan art scene of the aughts, didn’t end up owning and operating Sky High Farm out of manifested romantic notions about the rural, agrarian lifestyle. In fact, as I learned over the course of this interview, when he purchased the forty-acre chunk of Hudson Valley land, farming wasn’t even part of the plan. Like much of his art, he allowed form to develop on its own, following some combination of instinct and medium until he ended up with his biggest project yet. Since its first growing season, Sky High has donated 90,000 pounds of produce and 20,000 pounds of protein to help fight food insecurity in New York State, and they are currently working on developing an agricultural training program to support self-empowerment among those affected by the carceral system. The farm is a nonprofit, a complex machine that straddles the complex ecosystems of upstate New York agriculture, food justice, the art world, and more. That Colen ended up here at this stage in his career, devoting his life to this mission, might come as a surprise to many, maybe even to Colen himself. But in a way, that’s what makes the whole endeavor somehow unsurprising. That’s what makes it make sense. Read more.

Curator Paige Silveria Presents "Daisies" Group Exhibition In Biarritz

After making massive waves in the New York art scene with her all-star lineup in the group show Daisies during the summer of 2019, Paige Silveria brought an international edition of the exhibition this summer, first to Paris and then Biarritz, the chic seaside town in the Basque region of Southwestern France. The show includes works from over twenty artists of varied disciplines, including Quentin De Briey, Apo Broche, Larry Clark, Pierre Touré Cuq, Efron Danzig, Beatrice Domond, Thibaut Grevet, Jeanette Hayes, Sang Woo Kim, Julian Klincewicz, Zakarie Melloul, Terrence Mongo, Jasmine Monsegue, William Strobeck, Seven Strong, Melchior Terson, and Graham Wiebe.

 
 

A review of Cole Sternberg´s Exhibition "Departed for the curve" @ Praz Delavallade

 

Cole Sternberg
a boisterous stream in a boulder-choked channel, 2019
mixed media on linen

 

text by Stella Peacock-Berardini

Cole Sternberg scratches against the cheek of humanity, inviting the ideals of people in, while simultaneously belittling or questioning our existence, present and future. Sternberg's work provides a sort of kaleidoscopic effect veiling over images or winding paths and curves throughout the works, almost as if to represent the blurred lines and alternative routes our future plays as we grow in our society. It is not quite misanthropic, but provides skeptic views around human life itself, in examples such as the titles, but what may we say ourselves and the flock?,  and questions he proposes in other pieces. Within this show, he provides a distinct visual of how little we, as humans, really are, in which these curves of nature stand taller and stronger then we have been for centuries. We idolize these monuments throughout earth, while we simultaneously destroy them. This ironic analysis of nature's play within the avaricious mindset of the world today provides a start into deeper queries or fascination with the environment, especially considering current climate change worries. It proposes this idea, what if nature fought back, what if it already is? In, by reason of the high hills, the long green hills and thick wilderness juxtapose the wet, layered rocks that compete with the humans attention, the rocky wetlands win that battle, as the people consume nature's beautiful curves and ridges. The hard surfaces and towering landscapes devour the humans in, who stand miniscule compared to the surrounding land, enthralled by the natural entertainment of water rushing past, and the breeze through the rugged trees. A milky storm blue encloses this piece, as a film between the lives of the humans in the work, and the enjoyers of this piece. As the audience, we interrupt this moment between a family and the vast wilderness, becoming a part of the phenomenon once again, fascinated by the view we have been seduced by, unaware of our effect on the future of this landscape, or ignorant of our effects at the very least. The meandering and complex lines or curves in this show as well, which shape the pieces with its x-ray appearing layer in parts of the work, summons you in deeper, unsure if we are staring at a birds eye view of a lengthy canyon or the grips of a pterodactyls claws. The abstraction of the images provided in this show, allows Sternberg to reference and evolve common ideals and values of our cultural identity. It provides a memory you may relate with, or find yourself creating fictitious familial trips, yet also questioning the consciousness of people, and our ability to reflect on the intersectionality between the industrialization of the world, and the earth we have molded to our needs, for better or worse. How or will we depart from the trends of destruction we became attuned too? Sternberg pleases the eye with this work, and positively disrupts the human mind with fears we wish to avoid. Departed for the curve will be on view until July 30, 2022 at Praz Delavallade.

 
 

A Forsaken Place: Andrea Zittel's A-Z West Is A Laboratory For The Future →

Andrea Zittel
A-Z Wagon Station customized by Giovanni Jance
2003
Powder-coated steel, MDF, aluminum, Lexan,cushions, iPod Nano, headphones, solar iPod chargers
91 x 82 x 57 inches
© Andrea Zittel, Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles


The desert is an unforgiving, but magnetic landscape. Agnes Pelton, Georgia O'Keeffe, Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, and many more artists have all been drawn to the desert of the American West. Its barrenness, its potential, its raw heat, its solitude, and liquid mirages all provide a contemplative and hot combination of all the right ecosystemic ingredients for artists to experiment and conceive of cosmic ideas. Even the word desert is alluring: it comes from the ecclesiastical Latin root desertum, which means a “forsaken” or “abandoned” place. Lately, though, the desert has become less a quirk of America’s multifold topography and more a frightening, but beautiful prelude to an arid, lifeless future on Earth. 

Andrea Zittel fits into the historical canon of artists lured to these forsaken and abandoned landscapes—abandoned by time and most botanic nature—but she isn’t so much a land artist as she is an artist of the land. Like the late artist and sculptor Noah Purifoy before her, Zittel is not a visitor—she is a guardian of the desert’s inexplicable potential as a testing ground for future civilizations who might live in a world that is going through a rapid process of what geologists call desertification.  According to scientists, over a third of the world is going through this process, and every year 120,000 square kilometers of land turns into an actual desert. Studies show that if global carbon emissions aren’t curbed, much of the Earth will become a desert by 2050. Read more. Originally published in Autre’s Biodiversity Issue, FW 2021

Dennis Osadebe Looks To Heritage For Answers To The Future In MODERN MAGIC @ König London

With the starting point of the influence of Black culture, the works of Dennis Osadebe’s MODERN MAGIC present themselves like a theatre filled with visual challenges and rich experimentation. Viewers are given a front-row seat to an unfolding show as Osadebe’s painted characters take on the role of performers captured amid moments of magic; their masks symbolic of divine protection. Abstracted architectural spaces are lit by variegated sources, along with exaggerated shadows, and heightened perspective, to create an atmosphere of a dreamlike stage. Drawing from a wellspring of metaphysical, Surrealist, and Renaissance painting, Osadebe conjures a realm where viewers can only question the location of the powers that be.

Lavish cultural motifs reflect Osadebe’s fascination with craftsmanship. References to the Magic 8 Ball are found throughout the paintings and act as a point of focus for Osadebe’s first-ever conceptually guided sculptural installation, with objects employed as vessels aimed at preservation. These include the traditional Nigerian fan — a ubiquitous, accessible object, necessary for everyday life — highlighted by a pristine, symbolic framing that celebrates its cultural significance. This one motif is exemplary for Osadebe’s take on preservation, which looks to heritage for answers to the future, consciously speaking of Blackness and its pivotal role in shaping contemporary culture.

Osadebe’s radical approach to self-portraiture manifests his philosophical basis for contemporary Nigerian art, fusing Western techniques and indigenous traditions to construct a new paradigm for the evolution of art. As said by prolific Nigerian painter Ben Enwonwu, “It is setting the clock back to expect that the art form of Africa today must resemble that of yesterday otherwise the former will not reflect the African image.”

MODERN MAGIC is on view though July 16 @ König London 259-269 Old Marylebone Road

Naima Green Performs Rituals Of Intimacy In "A Sequence for Squeezing" @ Baxter St In New York

A Sequence for Squeezing is a solo show of lens-based work by 2021 Baxter St Workspace Resident Naima Green. Featuring new and recent photographs, as well as a recent video work, the exhibition continues Green’s practice of collaborating with her community to create intimate portraits and record personal scenes of play, exploration, and pleasure. Focusing on the experiences of Black, Brown, and Queer individuals, the exhibition builds on and expands the themes of Green’s previous work, exploring water as a site for pleasure and freedom, the sensuality of enjoying food, and the rituals of intimacy. 

On the back wall of the exhibition, a giant vinyl double-exposed image of the Rockaways serves as the  backdrop for Green’s video work The Intimacy of Before. The Rockaways — and water — are an important  reoccurring site in Green’s life and work, and water is featured across much of her new work, even if as a  subtle suggestion. At Baxter St, the Rockaways frame Green’s intimate video self-portrait, a sensual  exploration of self the artist shot in her apartment during the early days of the COVID pandemic. The audio  from the video, including the sounds of waves and Green’s own voice, becomes a soundtrack to the exhibition  as a whole, asking, as she does in the video, “Is it too much to want a tender and complete intimacy?” 

A Sequence for Squeezing is on view through July 23 at 126 Baxter St

Suspended in Memory: Read Our Interview Of Veronica Fernandez →

Standing in front of Los Angeles-based artist Veronica Fernandez’s paintings you may start to feel as if you’re part of a fever dream or someone else’s past life regression. They are raw and autobiographical, a place where the viewer is invited to float through fragments of extremely personal memories while being entertained by the various textures and materials Fernandez has thoughtfully arranged in each work. There are painterly aspects that divide you from reality, yet it still feels as if you're walking into someone else's actual space and you’re welcome to stay as long as you’d like. 

The paintings are in essence a mapping of her family lineage, their struggles and their persistence captured through the lens of old photographs passed down from her grandmother. Through these photographs, Fernandez is navigating her own identity as it relates to her childhood and her closeness to family. She manipulates these images to tell a story of adolescence that most of us couldn’t comprehend and yet she finds strength in these memories, weaving them into a narrative about what it means to call somewhere home and to make a place for yourself. 

I visited Fernandez in her studio as she put the final touches on her first solo exhibition entitled When you hold onto my spirit, will you let your spirit grow?  at Sow & Tailor in Los Angeles. Read more.

Moving Past Giants: Read Our Interview Of Artist Devon DeJardin →

Devon Dejardin sits in front of a couch, arm resting on the cushion, looking into the camera.

text by Stella Peacock-Berardini

Devon Dejardin’s exploration of art may have started from the humble encouragement of a sugar daddy psychic, but it has grown into a journey of healing and reflection that continues to drive his success in the art world. Within his cubist-influenced style of work, Devon Dejardin, an LA-based painter, processes through the elements of life demanding answers to all of its most urgent lingering questions. Dejardin employs his work as a way to unpack and understand the entropic nature of the universe through his lens of belonging, going deeper into the storms he's faced that brought him to the clear sky of his creation. This 29-year-old, self-taught artist originating from Portland juggles depression and anxiety within the creative realm and expresses his gratitude for the therapeutic release his art supplies to himself and its viewers. His newest project, Giants dives into this preconceived idea of spirituality and shifts its narrative to his ideas surrounding the guardians of the world, those that protect, aid, and grow in strength and vulnerability within the boundaries of our world. His art, huge in size, mimics the ideas of giants and how they are commonly perceived, yet it develops further than that. These feelings, or challenges in life, such as sadness or grief materialize as giants, but represent the deception life can have on us all. We sat down with this artist to explore his influences, conceptions around his work as a whole, and his first New York solo exhibition at Albertz Benda. Read more.

How Do You See The Now: Read Our Interview Of Artist Jillian Mayer →

RACHEL ADAMS: When I think about your work, I often see objects that provide assistance. Slumpies help your body adjust to the onslaught of technological devices, sculptures that become flotation devices, and the works in our show TIMESHARE were prototypes for living in a future where you couldn’t go outside–a fountain that doubles as a hydroponic garden, blueprints for life underground, etc. How do you see this new glasswork fitting into the idea of assistance?

JILLIAN MAYER: I have always loved the appeal of any object that does more than one thing. Whether it be a mop that can convert to a broom, a reversible clothing item, or anything else that fits into the  “Well that’s not all…” rhetoric. I love to think of these items as suggestive and simultaneously insecure and self-aware of their limit if they could only be one thing… that objects have to try to justify their existence as well as place amongst your other objects. Along with pressure for us to perform many tasks, our items are not excused from this weight. There is only so much room in our lives so these objects plead the case for their acceptance. Read more.

Nadia Lee Cohen "HELLO, My Name Is" Opening At Jeffrey Deitch Gallery and Private Dinner in The Hollywood Hills

Friends gathered for the opening of Nadia Lee Cohen "HELLO, My Name Is,” the artist’s first major solo exhibition in the United States, now on view at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery. After the opening, friends gathered at the home of Jeffrey Deitch in the Hollywood Hills for a private dinner. photographs by Aaron Sinclair, Becky Hearn and Myles Hendrik