Tate Britain Presents 40-Year Survey of Isaac Julien's Film Work in What Freedom Is to Me

Isaac Julien
Pas de Deux with Roses (Looking for Langston Vintage Series) 1989/2016
Ilford classic silver gelatin fine art paper, mounted on aluminium and framed
58.1 x 74.5 cm
Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro

Isaac Julien is internationally acclaimed for his compelling lyrical films and video art installations. This ambitious solo show charts the development of his pioneering work in film and video over four decades from the 1980s through to the present day, revealing a career that remains as fiercely experimental and politically charged as it was forty years ago.

The exhibition presents a selection of key works from Julien’s ground-breaking early films and immersive three-screen videos made for the gallery setting, to the kaleidoscopic, sculptural multi-screen installations for which he is renowned today. Together, they explore how Julien breaks down barriers between different artistic disciplines by drawing from film, dance, photography, music, theatre, painting and sculpture.

The show opens with Julien’s earliest experiments in moving image, produced in the context of the Sankofa Film and Video Collective. Founded by Julien in the summer of 1983 together with Martina Attille, Maureen Blackwood, Robert Crusz and Nadine Marsh-Edwards, this group of London art students from across the African, Asian and Caribbean diaspora played a vital role in the establishment of Black independent cinema in Britain. Four works from this period have been brought together at Tate Britain, including Julien’s first film, Who Killed Colin Roach? (1983) — conceived as a response to the unrest following the death of a young man at the entrance to a police station, Territories (1984), which focuses on the Black British experience in the early 80s, and This is Not An AIDS Advertisement (1987), an important work of LGBTQIA+ history that continues to resonate powerfully today. The artist’s pivotal film exploring Black, queer desire — Looking for Langston (1989) — also features, bringing together poetry and image to look at the private world of the Black artists and writers who were part of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s.

What Freedom Is To Me is on view through August 26th at Tate Britain, Millbank, London

The Act of Ornamentation is Centered in Adorned Self @ Sow & Tailor in Los Angeles

Alli Conrad

Adorned Self is Sow & Tailor’s first group exhibition of the summer, showcasing six emerging women artists of the same generation, whose work explores themes such as nature, sensuality, gender, and ornamentation. They share a unique perspective as artists who grew up in the 1990s: an epoch characterized by multiculturalism, globalization, self-reference, environmentalism, and technological advances. With these cultural, social, and political shifts, came new forms of self-fashioning.

Adorned Self explores ornamentation as an act, both outward and internal, that opens the self to enlivenment; how we fashion ourselves in order to attract others, make a statement, or express individuality. The artists probe the way our internal landscapes are expressed and communicated onto the world, even in things as banal as a tattoo, jewelry, makeup, or a luxurious fabric. Adornment can also be entirely internal—achieved through cultivating deep self love.

Adorned Self is on view through August 12 @ Sow & Tailor, 157 W 27TH ST. LOS ANGELES, CA. 90007

 
 

Jean Nagai Invites You to Enjoy the Present Moment in "Midst Seizen" @ Sow & Tailor in Los Angeles

Jean Nagai, "Midst Seizen"

Jean Nagai

Jean Nagai’s Midst Seizen at Sow & Tailor in Los Angeles bears witness to the artist’s work as a landscape painter in that his practice is a direct reflection of the world around him, wherever that happens to be. In the title of his exhibition Midst Seizen, the Japanese American artist’s play on words has a simple yet powerful message for humankind: enjoy the present moment. According to Nagai, the word “midst” refers to layers of reality and is a riff on “mid” and “mist” while the word “seizen” is a play on “season” and “seize.” With the climate rapidly changing, Nagai believes that our seasons have become less defined, and our lives are more unpredictable than ever as a result. His latest body of work serves as a reminder to pause and celebrate the connectedness of everything, to embrace science and the supernatural, and to honor both life on Earth and the otherworldly.

Midst Seizen is on view through August 12 @ Sow & Tailor, 157 W 27TH ST. LOS ANGELES, CA. 90007

"New Paintings of Ordinary Incidents" Captures the Curious in the Quotidian @ Timothy Hawkinson Gallery in Los Angeles

Paul Pretzer, The Downfall, 2020. Image courtesy of the artist and Timothy Hawkinson Gallery.

New Paintings of Ordinary Incidents is a group exhibition presented by Timothy Hawkinson Gallery. The six artists in this exhibition make paintings that closely scrutinize the ordinary, a process that can be unnerving. We take for granted the way things are as they are; the patterns our days fall into being organized, the manner in which household products were designed, the shapes and features fruits and vegetables evolved into. Disturbing oddities and unexpected beauty can be found lurking.

One by one, days go by. Turning into weeks, then months, eventually years and decades. In this inevitable march of time it is nearly impossible to not fall into routines, to get accustomed to surroundings without giving them a second thought. Despite being mundane, these spans are often still busy, yet things become expected. That is the starting point for this exhibition: the overlooked, interstitial passages, where the bulk of life takes place.

 
 

New Paintings of Ordinary Incidents is on view through September 16 @ Timothy Hawkinson Gallery, 7424 Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90036

Isa Genzken 75/75 Celebrates 75 Sculptures & 75 Years of Life @ Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin

 
 

To mark Isa Genzken’s 75th birthday, the Neue Nationalgalerie is honoring the German artist with the exhibition Isa Genzken: 75/75, showing 75 sculptures spanning all phases of her oeuvre from the 1970s to the present. The presentation recalls displays of classical antiquity collections in its arrangement of individual sculptures in the Neue Nationalgalerie’s upper hall. In the configuration models, archetypes and assessments of the human and modern society emerge.

The sculptures are not hewn into form but rather embody in their heterogeneous materiality the technologies, plastic, concrete, decorations and functional objects that permeate daily life. Genzken transposes these reassessments and fluid framings into authenticity, beauty, absurdity and exaggeration. Her work derives from actualities, such as a window or the figure of an actor, which she then alters and distorts into her own realities and visual language. The individual, also her as an artist, and her biography are the instruments used in this scrutiny of Western culture’s ideals and types of production.

“The works are meant to function more as moving images than as sculptures, with a new view seen from every angle. Nothing is fixed or two-dimensional but rather cinematic,” said Isa Genzken in an interview in 2016. Visitors discover themselves being queried through the confrontation with familiar everydayness. Collages of personal worlds emerge. The viewers become participants, tools, and scales of measurement within the exhibition space, not least through reflections in the object surfaces.

75/75 is on view through November 27th at Neue Nationalgalerie, Potsdamer Str. 50, 10785 Berlin.

Read A Conversation Between Paul Reubens & Nadia Lee Cohen From Autre 15: Losing My Religion →

 

Autre Magazine, Vol. 2 Iss. 15 F/W 2022: Losing My Religion

 

Paul Reubens is one of the most brilliant comedic talents of our era. His character, Pee-wee Herman, a maniacal man child with a famous red bowtie, hypernasality, and a predilection for mischief, is a Saturday morning cartoon come to life. Invented on the stage of The Groundlings, Pee-wee Herman is equally iconic and archetypal as Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp. Socially defective with the decency to wear a suit, both characters are rife with hilarious contradictions, and both characters are perfect representations of their respective zeitgeists. Whereas the Tramp was a silent and prophetic emblem of the forthcoming economic devastation of two global wars, Pee-wee may as well have been a louder-than-bombs manifestation of the late-capitalistic dreamscape of the 1980s. Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (Tim Burton’s directorial debut) and later Pee-wee’s Playhouse, which aired on CBS and saw an average of ten million viewers per episode, was a fantasy of talking furniture in a supersaturated world that harkened back to 1950s diners and primetime dance competitions, a satirization of Post-War Americana as a frenzied pastiche. This pastiche was a siren call for rising artist and photographer Nadia Lee Cohen, who also trades in the currency of alter egos and the milieu of consumerist reverie through the lens of humor. Raised in the English countryside, a self-professed wild child, the technicolor stagecraft of Hollywood had an irresistible allure. Her solo exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, which was an unabashed sensation, included two large bodies of work from two sold out monographs published by IDEA Books. Women includes over 100 portraits of a diverse cast of female characters fictionalized by Cohen, at work and at play, all under the banner of Los Angeles’ disparate socio-economic milieu. Reminiscent of movie stills, the images are freeze frames in moments of action, repose, or seductive enchantment. In her most recent series,  HELLO, My Name Is, Nadia utilizes extensive prosthetics and makeup to embody a vast array of characters inspired by found corporate name tags—each character has an invented story, thoughts, dreams, and desires. It is a Hitchcockian character study of self-portraiture. Jean Baudrillard talked about this escape from the self in an age of simulation and hyperreality: "Never to be oneself, but never to be alienated: to enter from the outside into the form of the other." Both Paul Reubens and Nadia Lee Cohen take immense pleasure in this metamorphosis. Currently in production is a two-part HBO documentary on the life of Paul Reubens, directed by Matt Wolf (Spaceship Earth) and produced by the Safdie Brothers. In a time of shapeshifting realities and alternative facts, a time when we don’t even recognize the reflection in our mirrors, what can two masters of disguise teach us about who we really are? Read more.

"Resounding, Variegated, Leaves" Foregrounds the Primacy of a Multisensorial Encounter @ Mrs. Gallery in New York

Resounding, Variegated, Leaves, an exhibition featuring works by Fabienne Lasserre, Annie Pendergrast, and Lily Ramírez, brings together three artists who work along distinctly different wavelengths, yet come together as they embrace the natural phenomena of listening, touching, breathing, and looking as it occurs through an exchange between artist and art object. A primordial hum, the aural topography of a cave, a protrusion juts out from the painted surface, an atmospheric aura emanates from a flower.

The multiple postures of Lasserre’s hanging, standing, and leaning ear-like forms project an ongoing moment of repose, surreptitiously confronting the architecture or spectator as they quietly teeter along the tightly wound wire between invitation and revolt. A subtle dissonance pervades from the interaction between the knobby, hand-wrought linen membranes covered in thick paint and the industrial sheen of the vinyl lens at the center of each object.

Annie Pendergrast’s paintings channel the deep-rooted, unrelenting frequencies of natural organisms thriving in the face of air pollutants, radioactive soil, and bioengineering. A palpable heat emanates from the electric hues of flashe, as the paint bubbles up slightly to the surface. Striated bands of color insistently reverberate across each arrangement, buzzing with energy and the possibility for plant systems to reclaim control of the earth through their healing properties and the potential for bioremediation.

A dense cacophony of accumulated marks maps the terrain of Lily Ramírez’s heavily impastoed paintings—acting simultaneously as a direct trace of the artist’s presence and also an aggregate record of her lived experience and memory. On a cellular level, Ramírez’s gestures evoke chromosomal strands vying to shape the proverbial DNA of each painting; while on a macro level, they convey pathways of movement woven across the artist's native city of Los Angeles or other expansive swaths of land.

To privilege tactility and aurality is to thwart the relentless stream of images flooding visual culture. In this way, the works in this exhibition foreground the primacy of a multisensorial encounter that demands the physical presence of a spectator. While the artworks themselves don’t explicitly make sound or ask to be touched, the artists have imbued their work with a methodology that filters the act of seeing through a form of deep listening and touching, as much as looking, at the natural world.

Resounding, Variegated, Leaves is on view through August 11th at Mrs. 60 - 40 56th Drive Maspeth, NY

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.