Ouattara Watts Constructs Intricate Dialogues Between Cultural and Iconographic Systems @ Almine Rech in Paris

Through the iconography he conjures, Watts points to interconnected histories and heritages, overlaying systems of signs and finding corelations. From an early interest in ancient Egyptian and Greek history, as well as in classical West African knowledge systems across Dogon, Bambara, Senufo, Baule, Yoruba and Dan cultures, amongst others, he began to explore what is held in common at the intersections of situated worlds and knowledges, as well as to reactivate and make visible effaced cultural constellations. It was to Watt’s knowledge of West African spiritual traditions that Jean-Michel Basquiat was particularly attracted when they met in Paris in 1988. Basquiat had visited Korhogo district in the north of Cote d’Ivoire from where Watts’ family originated, and where he had travelled often as a child and been initiated into Senufo spiritual practice. Basquiat was very interested in exploring these sacred traditions and their relationship to Vaudoo in Haiti, planning a trip to Cote d’Ivoire together with Watts in 1989 but passing away before.

During his years in France, Watts delved into the influence of West African sculptural traditions on European modernist artists, particularly Brancusi, Picasso, Modigliani and the Surrealists. In his works, images appear again and again that relate to these investigations, joined from the 2000s, by mathematical symbols and equations, references to science and technology, as well as to Sufism and other spiritual and esoteric forms, elements of Amharic and Aramaic script, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Bambara, Arabic.

Ouattara in Paris is on view through July 29 at Almine Rech 64 rue de Turenne.

Read Our Interview of Gallerist Jonathan Carver Moore On His Exhibition With Zanele Muholi →

Sanibonani is a Zulu greeting used to welcome or address a group. The word crawls up the wall of the Jonathan Carver Moore Gallery, the title of the current show, featuring Zanele Muholi and various students from their art institute. In Jonathan Carver Moore’s SF Gallery, Sanibonani embodies pride: an unconditional, celebratory welcome. Self-portraits of Black, Queer, South African artists line the walls. Monochromatic San Francisco sun streams through the floor-to-ceiling windows that occupy one wall, matching the grays in the mostly black-and-white images, adding a cool cast to the large, bronze bust of Muholi. Moore’s Gallery is in the Tenderloin, a neighborhood in the world’s first Transgender District. The location makes sense: Moore has a clear passion for highlighting unheard voices and unseen perspectives, and since the gallery’s premier exhibition, The Weight of Souls, with artist Kacy Jung in March, his gallery has developed a reputation for doing just that. I sat down with Moore to talk about his experiences as the first Black, gay, man to own a gallery in the SF Bay Area, the intersection of marginalization and creativity, and the artists with whom he’s worked. Read more.

Dudu Quintanilha's Prophetic Complaints Explores the Act of Being in Public @ PSM

Dudu Quintanilha’s exhibition, Prophetic Complaints, features mostly videos that debate the (im-)possibilities of living together, generating belonging, recognition and social responsibility through research on verbal complaints. At PSM, Quintanilha reformulates the exhibition, adapting it to the gallery's exhibition space through performative collaborations with members of the Blaumeier-Atelier from Bremen, a project that since 1986 has been developing art projects with neurodivergent people in diverse fields such as theater, music, painting, photography, and literature. In addition, he invited the group MEXA from São Paulo – of which Quintanilha is a founding member — to occupy the gallery's "Loggia" and set up their own exhibition, 69 Rooms H&V.

The need to acknowledge the humanhood of marginalized individuals is very prominent in Quintanilha’s work with MEXA. The transdisciplinary art group is composed of people from various minority social groups which in Brazil are under permanent threat. The group embraces mainly transgender, gay, and Black people, whose elaborate performances and theater plays highlight their marginalized social condition in Brazil as a means of opposing discrimination and systemic violence. In the exhibition 69 Rooms H&V, MEXA is showing text-based works produced since the group was created in 2015 after violent events occurred in shelters for vulnerable people in São Paulo.

Prophetic Complaints and 69 Rooms H&V are on view through September 2nd at PSM, Schöneberger Ufer 61, 10785 Berlin.

Support Structures @ Gathering Explores the 'Fixed Instability' of the Human Condition

Support Structures is a group show bringing together artists exploring the ‘fixed instability’ of the human condition. The exhibition provides a meditative space centering the notions of care and fragility as a collective responsibility. This mode of relationality evades linearity of time, avoids contractual relationships and instead embraces reciprocity and responsiveness by assembling works which elicit an affectual response. As opposed to adapting a representational approach, the exhibition stems from the experience of relatives and loved ones, the support networks.

Works by Alina Szapocznikow and Louise Bourgeois focus on the moment of intuitive, reconstructive shift towards the interest in frailty, both in terms of the choice of materials and the visual language. For Szapocznikow and Hesse in particular, cancer diagnosis has profoundly shaped their artistic efforts, leaving their legacies inherently bound to the ineffable physical and psychological experience. The precision of Maren Karlson’s paintings abstracts the mechanical nature of organisms, suggestive of ribcages, spines or car engines. The approach of quietly marrying the technological and organic are expanded by other artists included in the exhibition, such as Geumhyung Jeong, whose video reclaims a subtle but transformative dance of a complex mechanism.

Support Structures is on view starting Thursday 22 June 6-8 PM - 29 July at Gathering, 5 Warwick Street, London

Toby Ziegler's Spontaneous Gestures Collide with Acts That Abstract & Render Simultaneously @ Galerie Max Hetzler in Paris

Toby Ziegler's fourth solo exhibition at Galerie Max Hetzler, Blind men exploring the skin of an elephant, brings together a range of recent works exploring the connections between figuration and abstraction, control and intuition, and manual and digital means of production. The disruption of established systems and the troubling fractures at play within the circulation of images are central themes in the artist’s recent production.

The title of the exhibition refers to an old Indian parable, transcribed in the work of Hokusai, in which blind men are depicted petting different parts of an elephant, each believing it to be another distinct animal. The tale relates to the idea that each person defends their own belief as being absolute, based on their own limited subjectivity, regardless of the experience of others. To imagine the animal objectively, as a whole, would only be possible by merging these various perceptions.

In Ziegler’s work, the original image springs out of a similar disorder, with figurative elements and motifs subtracted, aggregated or enhanced via personal references. As in the Indian fable, multiple small, distinct elements are united to form one coherent whole. Ziegler’s creative process is sometimes one of incremental ‘figuration’ and sometimes one of abstraction, with different starting points but the same destination. His aim is to make work that self-consciously functions as both figurative and abstract at the same time. It involves the dismantling and deconstruction of imagery drawn from a variety of sources, adding or subtracting elements such as figurative details and patterns.

Blind men exploring the skin of an elephant is on view through July 29 at Galerie Max Hetzler Paris 46 & 57 Rue du Temple.

Martyna Szczęsna Addresses the Challenge of Creating Art in An Ever-Gentrifying Urban Landscape @ Open Source Gallery in New York

In Martyna Szczęsna’s Spectre at Open Source Gallery, the artist has manipulated over 500 feet of nylon construction netting into an oversized ruched curtain, winding it through the KoKo NYC lot space. A playful embodiment of drama, opera and the challenges of securing hospitable space for art and creative expression in the ever-gentrifying urban landscape of this city. The blazing orange work will be on view all summer.

Martyna Szczęsna (b. Olsztyn, Poland) is a multi-disciplinary artist working with photography and sculpture. She is a graduate of the Cooper Union and completed her MFA studies at UCLA. Szczesna lives and works in Brooklyn. Select exhibitions include: ARRAY at Penumbra Foundation, If Rittenhouse– at Callicoon Fine Arts, Portrait of a Landscape at the Museo Sivori, BsAs, and Bronx Calling: The Third Bronx Biennial. Szczesna’s work has been supported by residencies at Yucca Valley Material Lab, Franconia Sculpture Park, HDTS Wagonstations, and The Watermill Center.

Spectre is on view through August 31st at Open Source KoKo NYC Lot at 440 19th Street, Brooklyn NY 11215.

JP Munro's Overworld Captures the Extremity of the Southern California Wilds @ Broadway in New York

 
 

Broadway presents Overworld, a solo show of new paintings by Los Angeles artist JP Munro.

The exhibition comprises two enduring strains of the artist’s practice: exacting plein-air landscapes and altogether fantastical tableaux populated with a pantheon of mythical figures.

The landscapes gather their formidable power from the artist’s almost psychedelic level of observation and commitment not just to surface effect but to transmitting an experiential dimension to the canvas. A viewer immediately senses the endeavor of creating these hard-fought works amidst the beauty and extremity of the Southern California wilds. We feel each craggy outcropping of rock, every bristling shank of cactus,and the dramatic sprawl of a live oak as if in real-time and with a spiritual magnification that is unique to encounters with nature.

The figure-centered works would, at first, seem to sit in uneasy relation to the landscapes, but soon reveal themselves as an apt inversion of the former’s exteriority—fiction in place of hard fact. Picture book royalty, Norse deities, and their attendant lusty concubines inhabit mystical realms and cavort in a matrix of meticulously layered black and brown oil paint. Like a conceptualist take on William Blake, these characters hold our attention as both protagonists of the painting and somehow witnesses to its creation.

As the exhibition shifts between disciplined observation and freestyle world-building, Munro completes an expository circuit of the act of painting itself

Overworld is on view Tuesday–Saturday, 11AM–6PM through July 28th at Broadway, 375 Broadway, New York

Judit Reigl's First Museum Solo Exhibition in Germany Is Presented Posthumously @ Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin

 
 

To commemorate the centenary of Judit Reigl’s birth and the acquisition of three main works by this Hungarian-born French artist (1923 – 2020), the Neue Nationalgalerie is presenting her first-ever solo exhibition in a German museum. The Nationalgalerie is the first public collection in Germany to own works by this important painter closely associated with the French Art Informel movement in the 1950s.

This overview of Reigl’s career showcases a major figure in European art from the second half of the 20th century. On view are sixteen, mostly large-scale paintings from Reigl’s painted oeuvre ‒ works both abstract and figurative. The artist began her studies at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in Budapest. In 1950, the rise of Stalinism led Riegl to flee her homeland and settle in Paris. Although her early, mostly dream-like paintings were still indebted to Surrealism, she turned to lyrical abstraction at the start of the 1950s. Figurative elements are repeatedly found in Riegl’s paintings. In the mid-1960s, they would culminate in the male torsos in her Man series.

Judit Reigl
Man, Tripychon (1967-1969)
Oil on canvas 232.4 x 199.4 cm; 241.3 x 198.1 cm; 232.4 x 208.3 cm,
Fonds de dotation Judit Reigl, promised gift Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin© Fonds de Dotation Judit Reigl

Judit Riegl’s work will be on view through October 8th at Neue Nationalgalerie, Potsdamer Str. 50, 10785 Berlin.

Justin Urbach Uses Silicon to Unveil the Symbiotic Relationship Between Man and Machine @ Max Goelitz in Berlin

Justin Urbach’s Fractal Breeze is a three-channel video installation that addresses transformation processes in the digital age as a fragmentary sci-fi narrative.

In Fractal Breeze, two characters move on the borders of virtuality and reality in a metafictional representation of our technological future. The starting point for the video work is silicon, which is used to manufacture microchips and upon which the artist reflects in its many stages of production. In the form of wafers, thin reflective information carriers, silicon enables crossing over into a hybrid world in which virtual spheres increasingly materialize and the characters experience a new physicality. Through the symbiotic connection of body and technology, a transhuman circuit is formed that refers to social developments and the multidimensional processes of raw material extraction and energy storage.

The artist creates a multimedia installation in which the wafers merge into real space as sculptural objects and information carriers. Still blank in the film, in the exhibition they are engraved with body-related data of the actors, collected through MRI scans, 3D scans and motion capture. Fractal Breeze was realized in collaboration with specialists and researchers from the semiconductor and film industries, as well as the medical field, in order to unite these diverse branches. The music produced especially for the project was created in collaboration with musician and sound artist Jonas Yamer.

Fractal Breeze is on view through July 29th at max goelitz gallery, rudi-dutschke str 2610969 Berlin

Alfredo Jaar Indulges In Radical Pessimism with "The Temptation to Exist" @ Galerie Thomas Schulte

For over four decades, Alfredo Jaar has used photography, film, installation, and new media to create compelling works that examine complex sociopolitical issues and the ethics and limits of representation.

The exhibition’s title makes a reference to a book by Emil Cioran, one of the artist’s favorite writers. A dark, subversive thinker, Cioran was the poet of pessimism. A philosopher who was always on the verge of suicide, he once said: “If I didn’t write, I could have become an assassin. Writing is a matter of life and death. Human existence, at its core, is endless anguish and despair, and writing can make things a bit more bearable. A book is a suicide postponed.” For Cioran, failure permeates everything. Great ideas can be stained by failure, and so can art and the human condition. “No longer wanting to be a man” he is dreaming of another form of failure he wrote. “The universe is one big failure, and not even poetry can succeed in correcting it.”

For Jaar, art is the impossible answer to an impossible question: how do we make art when the world is in such a state? In the gallery’s main space, an immersive experience is created with a large, red neon work, where the words of the stoic philosopher Seneca take center stage. Seneca strongly believed that if we have the essentials and a strong inner spirit, we can radically accept and endure any circumstances. Eschewing the presence of other objects, the room is entirely illuminated with a dense red light, building an atmosphere of poetic uncertainty, mirroring the unease of contemporary times. The philosopher’s emblematic phrase glimmers in the space, reacting to the tyranny of the white box space and filling it with an idea—a model for thinking about the world.

Jaar’s second part of the exhibition fills the second, smaller gallery space with more than 50 works from a diverse group of artists, including Bas Jan Ader, Rosa Barba, Angela de la Cruz, Valie Export, Yoko Ono, Zanele Muholi, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, and more. Here, the artist has tried to create what he calls “a space of resistance, a space of hope.”

The Temptation to Exist is on view through August 12th at Galerie Thomas Schulte, Charlottenstraße 24, 10117 Berlin.

Avery Wheless Celebrates the Vulnerability of Being in a New Environment with "Precipice" @ Katikía in in Monemvasia, Greece

Katikía presents Precipice, an inaugural residency exhibition of LA-based artist Avery Wheless. The exhibition was completed during the artist’s time in Monemvasia, Greece. Kicking off in Athens, Wheless explored ancient Greek art history and uncovered the emerging contemporary art scene within the capital's numerous galleries and artist studios. While creating her own body of work, Wheless produced an art curriculum that she taught at the town's local public elementary school. She worked with students and introduced them to a new approach to painting. The exhibition will be displayed in a historical seaside ruin built into the cliffs along the Castro—a medieval town—for the residents and visitors of Monemvasia to view. 

The movement of bodies in Wheless’s energetic and tender paintings originate from Wheless’s history with dance, particularly ballet. Delicate movements command power and space while exploring the complexities of personal and social impacts of the female form.

“My works are often a reflection on how I relate to others. They explore how I see myself and take up space, finding comfortability while often feeling exposed and vulnerable. In this residency, I have experienced what it means to be removed, but also present in an unfamiliar environment. While observing people, I interact and engage, but also have an extra level of outsiderness as a viewer. It's been interesting to be seen by new people in a new place, while taking in new information, colors, landscapes and attitudes. There is also an obvious part of me which feels removed from those at home. I have been extremely aware of the precipice of transition that I feel myself in. Unsure of what is next while experiencing what I am unaccustomed to. I am grateful for a fresh space and place of unknown to explore. I have been processing a mix of reverence and grief of letting go and acknowledging the beauty of reconnecting with myself."

Precipice celebrates being vulnerable within a new environment. Many of the paintings are from scenes I have experienced here. Whether food, people, colors or landscape, I have pulled from my surroundings as an observer. Some works I have painted myself into. In these pieces I am involved, yet removed. The resulting images celebrate and mourn the capacity to hold and be held. They are a processing of what it means to exist within my body while acknowledging there is a falling apart while simultaneously being held together--thinking about how this relates to water and its capacity to suppress, but also buoy. How water allows us to float and be supported while touching everything and nothing at once. These works allow an openness to magic and spiritual awareness that is easy to find when things are fresh and new.”

Precipice is on view by appointment through August at Katikía

Immaculate Heart of Margaritaville, A Group Exhibition Curated by Devendra Banhart @ Nicodim Los Angeles

Curated by Devendra Banhart, “A prayer for my four-to-six nuclear families, for my ever-expanding universe of friends and lovers, for consciousnesses that may or may not exist beyond our postmodern El Dorados and Shangri-Las where dead dreams go to die twice:

May this sea moss gel cool the fire within in me that burns with unfiltered desire for epiphany in a pornographic desert;

May we all find a Six Flags for our unmet oral and spiritual needs;

May we all discover a Cartier diamond bracelet in the Bloomin’ Onion we snuck into the hot yoga session at the Cheesecake Factory;

May we all find comfort within our own place in Margaritaville—that sacred temple, that archetype for a freedom that exists somewhere between legitimacy and artifice that urges us to leave behind the very sacred temple that is selling us the dream to leave it all behind;

May we all attend the vernissage for Immaculate Heart of Margaritaville and bask in the ordinary magic, this orgy of authenticity buried in the most profane of structures.”

–Adapted from Out of Body: The Bortz Metzger Memoirs, R. Driblette, editor. Penguin Books Ltd, 2002

Immaculate Heart of Margaritaville is the top floor of the romantic wing of the capitalist nightmare, a fever dream manifested during a midday nap on a bed of ashwagandha-tipped nails with an ecstatic, honest, and truthful international coterie of artists, many of whom have never shown in the United States before.

In celebration of the closing, noted, lubricated, hole-istic tantric gurus Devendra Banhart and Ben Lee Ritchie Handler will lead the gallery in a guided meditation. Please bring a yoga mat and a clear head. The event will double as release party for a limited-edition t-shirt for the exhibition. July 29 from 3–6. Space is limited, please arrive a bit early.

Immaculate Heart of Margaritaville is on view through July 29th at Nicodim, 1700 S Santa Fe Avenue, #160, Los Angeles, CA 90021

Takashi Murakami's "Understanding the New Cognitive Domain" @ Gagosian

Understanding the New Cognitive Domain, an exhibition of work by Takashi Murakami focused on his monumental paintings, is on dislpay at the gallery in Le Bourget. The exhibition features five such works plus others in smaller formats and several sculptures. This is the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery in France.

The exhibition marks the debut of a monumental new 5-by-23-meter painting by Murakami based on the iwai-maku, or stage curtain, that he produced for the Kabuki-za theater in Ginza, Tokyo, in celebration of Japanese Kabuki actor and producer Ichikawa Ebizō XI’s assumption of the name Ichikawa Danjūrō XIII, Hakuen. (Kabuki stage names, which specify an actor’s style and lineage, are passed down through generations; the Ichikawa family has a roughly 350-year history.) The November 2022 unveiling of Murakami’s design, which was commissioned by film director Takashi Miike, coincided with the first performance of Ichikawa Shinnosuke VIII in the November Kichirei Kaomise Grand Kabuki Theater program.

Also on view is another extended-format painting, Dragon in Clouds – Indigo Blue (2010), which Murakami produced in response to eccentric Japanese artist Soga Shōhaku’s Dragon and Clouds (1763). Shōhaku’s work is a multi-panel Unryūzu (cloud-and-dragon) painting in which the titular creature appears as a Buddhist symbol of optimism and good fortune. Murakami’s painting, like Shōhaku’s, uses a restricted palette and is spread over several conjoined sections. Graphic swirls allude to Shōhaku’s expressive use of ink and suggest the dragon’s flight, combining with its flared nostrils and serpentine whiskers to evoke turbulent motion. Dragon in Clouds – Indigo Blue also resonates with contemporary Japanese visual culture, particularly the video game Blue Dragon, while its vast scale revives the visceral and psychological impact of Shōhaku’s masterpiece.

Also on view are several “lucky cat” paintings that reference the artist’s recent NFT projects, and other works featuring Murakami’s iconic smiling flower motif—including a two-meter rainbow neon sign—in which the artist again employs a retro-digital variant on his influential Superflat aesthetic. His ever-proliferating cartoonlike blossoms function as immediately recognizable and infinitely flexible icons that may be at once ornamental and symbolic, directing the viewer toward intertwined themes of identity, representation, and technology.

Understanding the New Cognitive Domain is on view through December 22 @ Gagosian Le Bourget 26 avenue de l’Europe. Every Saturday during the exhibition, Gagosian shuttle buses will run gratis between Le Bourget Gare RER (exit 1: Place des Déportés) and Gagosian Le Bourget every twenty minutes from 2 to 6pm. No reservation required. 

Everything is Alive: SHRINE Los Angeles presents Ross Simonini's "Tales"

Ross Simonini, The Ties, 2023, milk paint on muslin in walnut frame. Image courtesy of SHRINE.

Ross Simonini’s Tales is currently on view at SHRINE Los Angeles. In his work, Simonini completely intertwines art with life. He uses every body part to write, draw and paint—eradicating the divide that often lies between the artist and the canvas. It’s this corporeal process that begs the hidden unconscious to appear.

All of Simonini’s beings signify and relate to an understanding of the world through animism—a universal concept that every single thing is alive and animated. The confounding narratives that drift into focus in his paintings include virtually all beings from the animate to inanimate. Simonini sees and feels the life inside everything.

Tales is on view through August 19 at SHRINE, 538 N. Western Los Angeles, CA 90004

 
 

Persons Projects Examines the Influence of The Helsinki School Perspective @ Both of Their Gallery Spaces in Berlin

Persons Projects’ summer exhibition, The Helsinki School Perspective, is presented in both gallery spaces Lindenstr. 34 and 35, featuring a selection of artists, all of whom had pivotal roles in the beginning of the Helsinki School. The exhibition is dedicated to the historical aspect, exploring how these artists use the photographic processes as a voice for abstraction and a tool for interpreting their emotional landscapes. The Helsinki School platform was created by Timothy Persons in the 1990s, who became inspired by his experience with the Open Studio Concept that was popular during his graduate studies in the mid-1970s in Southern California. It grew to become the most extended sustainable educational platform of its kind consisting of six generations of selected MA students originating from the University of Art and Design, Helsinki, Finland. There are now more than 180 monogram books and 6 volumes of the Helsinki School book that have evolved from this program. This exhibition is curated to reintroduce a new perspective on the conceptual roots that built The Helsinki School.

Part 1 features work by Niko Luoma, Ea Vasko, Mikko Sinervo, and Nanna Hänninen. In Part 1, we experience four different approaches to how these selected artists use the photographic process to abstract a moment in time, the passage of a day, a memory of a specific place, or the interpretation of a historical painting.

Part 2 features work by Anni Leppälä, Janne Lehtinen, Miklos Gaál, and Ilkka Halso, artists who form a unique image that transcends how we interpret our personal, social, and ecological landscape seeing through a Nordic approach to nature.

Niko Luoma
Self-Titled Adaptation of Le Rêve (1932), (2015)
From the series Adaptions
Archival pigment print, Diasec
193 x 155 cm
© the artist, courtesy: Persons Projects

Niko Luoma
Self-Titled Adaptation of Caryatid (1913), (2018)
From the series Adaptations
Archival pigment print, Diasec
128 x 103 cm
© the artist, courtesy: Persons Projects

The Helsinki School Perspective is on show July 1st to September 9th at Persons Projects, Lindenstraße 34-35, 10969 Berlin

Benjamin Slinger Explores the Trickle Down of Role Player Games @ London's Darren Flook Gallery

 
 

Benjamin Slinger presents Dungeon Inc., their first solo show of sculpture, found objects and wall-based works at Darren Flook in London. In Dungeon Inc., the artist builds upon their previous work with science fiction and strike action and here links role player games and the birth of the new economics of the ‘80s, an economic revolution the consequences of which are still being lived with and built upon today, into their own world of references and laws.

The starting point of the exhibition was Slinger’s research into role player games and the discovery that in the midst of mass privatisation and creeping monetisation ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ wobbled through a licensing issue which caused a stir in the tabletop gaming world, the ownership of one's own fantasies seemed more and more tenuous. From that idea of capitalisms intersection with the personal and apparently private - which had been very present in Slingers last exhibition at Karin Guenther in Hamburg, Slinger started to conceive of a place where the politics of Reagan and Thatcher intersected with the games of imagination. Slinger merges the semiotics of civil disobedience, gameplay & collectables, and proposes political hyperbole as fantasy, economics as mysticism & politics as feudal warfare. Feudal CEO warlords, Reaganite Druids, Wallstreet Paladins fill the crevices where neoliberalism and capitalism break apart. As the artist stated “Dungeon Inc. is a psycho-political installation that plays with the implications of socio-political happenings and their pop cultural hangovers via cues from medieval fantasy role playing games.”

Dungeon Inc, like a game, leaves clues and cross references, Obama’s Oval Office door is perfectly recreated as conceptual painting, a figure lies on the ground, face covered with a sniper's mask wearing a President Bush election T- shirt. A lenticular scan of a Reagan character from Spitting Image and walls lamps made from Financial Times mugs, Republican memorabilia and fake candle light electric bulbs. In the office space Slinger has installed two works which are collections of trading cards, US presidential and role-playing games. The exhibition creates a whole, but a fractured and complex one, relating as it does to our private fantasies, the roles we play and world economics it feels appropriate that there is no neat resolution to this game.

Dungeon Inc. is on view through July 8th at Darren Flook, First Floor, 106 Great Portland Street, London

Will Cotton's "Trigger" @ Galerie Templon in Paris

 
 

Twenty years after his very first exhibition in Paris, New York painter Will Cotton, known for his depictions of sweets and cakes, is back on the walls of Galerie Templon with a subtle and quirky exhibition: Trigger.

In this new show, Will Cotton continues to reflect on pop culture and American myths. His 2020 series The Taming of the Cowboy, about the hyper-sexualisation of childhood and gender representations, featured ultra-masculine cowboys battling with pink unicorns. Will Cotton now introduces the cowgirl, an archetypal feminist figure, as voluptuous as she is provocative. With humour, she takes the opposite direction to the artist's usual female characters, pushing the gender boundaries further and blurring the relationship between the sexes as well as LGBT struggles and the notion of queerness.

The title of the exhibition is inspired by a notion that has become a political concept in the US: the trigger. It refers to the safe spaces created by the liberal left on American campuses in recent years. Trigger warnings are intended to prevent situations that could lead to post-traumatic stress disorder. However, in an America torn apart by the controversial issue of carrying weapons, the artist wonders if it is possible to dissociate it from the trigger of the firearms defended tooth and nail by the conservative right.

Will Cotton thus invents a world that mirrors our schizophrenic societies. His grandiose landscapes, with their cascading sweets and candy floss, are home to ambiguous scenes, playful but potentially disturbing or even explosive. A commentary on the opulence of an idealized America, Cotton's art is also a means of questioning the power of painting itself. The fluidity between great painting, timeless myths, advertising imagery and pop icons acts as a metaphor for the contradictions of our time.

Trigger is on view through July 22 @ Galerie Templon 30 Rue Beaubourg Paris.

Tina Born's Communal Dreamscape "Gonfanon" @ Laura Mars Gallery

Tina Born
Detail from 60 Jahre träumen (60 years of dreaming) (2023)
Excerpts from a collection of texts, DIN A4 papers, ballpoint pen, glass, metal, wood
approx. 300 x 40 x 3 cm
Copyright by the artist. Courtesy Laura Mars Gallery, Berlin

For her 4th solo exhibition at the Laura Mars Gallery, Tina Born presents an expansive installation entitled Gonfanon. The impetus here is dreams—those "hallucinatory" events that take place when the body is at rest. Evading clear interpretations and conclusions, but creating spaces for interpretation and, as it were, those "snippets" that we often only remember after the dream event, the artist arranges sculpture, found and built objects as well as excerpts from a collection of texts. The latter (60 Jahre träumen, 2023) are Born's own dream notes, which she collected over the years and now assigns to dates spanning a period of 60 years. Based on Arthur Rimbaud's statement, "I am another / I am another" or "I am many." Tina Born, in a further step, asked sixty people from her environment to transcribe these notes in their respective handwriting.

 
 

Gonfanon is on view until July 29th at Laura Mars Gallery, Bülowstraße 52, 10783 Berlin

Doing Time @ South Parade Gallery in London

In 2012, Juan Betancurth asked Benjamin Fredrickson to go to Colombia and photograph Betancurth’s mother handling a set of sculptures he had made for her. Betancurth, who was then living in New York, had not been home for eight years.

His mother is holding the sculptures as if they were a surrogate for her absent son. Her touch is tentative and meditative; but the sculptures are erotic and perhaps even menacing. They have the familiarity of household utensils but with the suggestion of fetish toys. The distance from which the artist conducts the encounter is a metaphor for the time that he has been away and remote from his mother. The experience is vicarious for both mother and son.

Doing Time by Juan Betancurth, Tristan Higginbotham, Georgina Hill, Garrett Lockhart, Stephen Polatch, Melanie Smith and Lucía Vidales is on view through July 8th at South Parade, Enclave 9, 50 Resolution Way, London

Izumi Kato's Homunculus Monsters Interrogate the Nature of Our Mortality @ Perrotin Paris

For any connoisseur of Japanese art, the ambiguous phenomena that have characterized Izumi Kato's work for more than two decades may seem familiar. Yet there is never any complete correspondence, only omnipresent echoes, the distinctive signs of a highly singular artistic universe.

Since the 2000s, Kato’s "untitled" sculptures, paintings, and drawings have featured hybrid figures (their limbs and breath producing vegetal or human shoots), budding flowers (often lotuses, the Buddhist flower par excellence, a symbol of purifying transformation plunging its roots into the mud), and other beings (human heads or homunculi hanging from bodies like clusters of ganglia). In the latter case, the multiplication is truly “monstrous;” the lotuses don’t proliferate. But they spring from an exhalation that evokes another type of Japanese art, the He-Gassen emaki (literally "fart scroll"), some of which show yokai fighting in a mad battle of winds (like the "Shinnô scroll" in the Hyôgo History Museum). The strange small creatures that spring up like ganglia from the larger figures also recall battles against monstrous animals, like the heroic struggle against the giant tarantula Tsuchi-gumo, at the end of which thousands of human skulls emerge from the spider’s severed neck. The play of mirrors between Kato's work and Japanese art creates limitless perspectives.

The distinctive appearance of his faces, with their enlarged eyes, often without pupils, the whole shaped by nose and mouth, the impression of being covered with ritual makeup, all this has numerous echoes in the fantastical prints produced in the 19th century, during the latter part of the Edo period and the Meiji era of Imperial Japan (1868-1912). Kato's work must be considered in relation to Utagawa Kunyoshi’s prints (1797-1861), one of the masters of the genre. In the work of Kunyoshi, the yokai are startling hybrids with bulging eyes, large jaws, and strange faces that seem like theatrical masks.

Looking at the hand-and-footless limbs of Kato's “characters,” one is reminded of Ichiyusai Kuniyoshi’s playful prints of "demon-shaped plants" (1844-1847). Yet, what sets Izumi Kato's creatures apart from all this pleasant, swaggering bluster is their silence. His work is characterized by a seriousness absent from the other works.

The totemic immobility of Izumi Kato's painted and sculpted works is strikingly melancholic. These figures are endless questions, beyond any specific place or time, as Japanese as they are ours, wherever we are. They challenge our gaze, drawing us in, interrogating what makes us mortal.

Izumi Kato is on view through July 29 @ Perrotin 76 Rue de Turenne.