Photographs by "Kids" Lensman Eric Alan Edwards Exhibited for the First Time in Tokyo

Whippets marks the first solo exhibition by photographer Eric Alan Edwards on view at the Galerie Hideout at Mustard Hotel Shibuya. For the first time, ten of Edwards’ photographs, taken during the production of Kids in the late ’90s, are shaped into a non-linear photostory and presented as part of a larger installation documenting that era and Edwards’ process.

Edwards worked as the lensman on Larry Clark’s debut feature narrative film, Kids. As Edwards was filming the movie, he simultaneously captured and chronicled the unfolding history, scene by scene.

In the golden age of independent cinema, Edwards took it upon himself to intuitively photograph the world in front of him, an act he has carried on since age ten. What is uncanny about the artworks is how they question what is cinematic, what is real, or what actually took place during the making of this storied American film.

Accompanying the exhibition is various ephemera including movie artifacts, as well as documents of the creative process of Edwards’ involvement in the film-making process that work alongside the artwork to offer a new glimpse into both the subculture and his artistic process, reflecting life, passion, and craft.

Whippets is on view through September 11 @ Galerie Hideout at Mustard Hotel Shibuya
1 Chome-29-3 Higashi, Shibuya City, Tokyo 

Moki Cherry: Here and Now @ Institute of Contemporary Arts In London

Moki Cherry
Malkauns Raga 1973
Textile appliqué
235x190cm
Courtesy of Artist


Here and Now displays over 30 artworks and archival material of Moki Cherry including works that have never been shown in the UK. The exhibition celebrates her exploration of where art and life meet, her collaborative and interdisciplinary practice, and her inventive resolve in the face of gendered challenges working both as an artist and mother – issues which remain pertinent to artists and audiences today. Drawn entirely from the Estate of Moki Cherry, this exhibition presents a rare chance for the public to view these privately held works, which remain preciously cared for by her family.

The title of the exhibition is inspired by an untitled drawing, an abstracted figure with arms outstretched embracing the words ‘Here & Now’ against a cloudlike landscape alongside a star and birds. It reflects the artist’s longstanding study and practice of Buddhism and its teachings which focus on being in the present, rather than dwelling on the past or speculating on the future. Characteristic of Moki’s playful use of language, it recalls her jazz musician husband Don Cherry’s 1976 album Hear & Now, for which Moki designed the cover using appliqué and collage.

Moki Cherry: Here and Now is on display through September 3rd at the Institute of Contemporary Arts at The Mall, St. James's, London

The Corporeal Grotesque Proposes A New Relationship to Social Justice In Gil Yefman's "It Ain't Necessarily Soft" @ Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Los Angeles

All images courtesy of the artist and Shoshana Wayne Gallery.

In his debut solo exhibition It Ain’t Necessarily Soft at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Gil Yefman exhibits sculptural and two-dimensional installations created over the past decade. Yefman’s practice explores a unique artistic language defined by brightly colored knitted sculptures of grotesque, fluid, multi-organ beings. The knitted work becomes an extension of the body, and felting becomes a memorialization of the experiences held within that body. Though knitting and felting are commonly associated with female, queer, and domestic tasks that would traditionally fall into a strictly decorative category, Yefman redefines them into works that honor a memory within the individual to provide a sense of justice and new presence in the world. These soft objects that were once read as defense mechanisms representing a vulnerable or threatened body are transformed into a new relationship with social injustices.

It Ain’t Necessarily Soft is on view through September 15 @ Shoshana Wayne Gallery, 5247 W Adams Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90016

Tomás Saraceno In Collaboration: Webs Of Life @ Serpentine In London

Tomás Saraceno
Cloud Cities: Species of Spaces and Other Pieces*, 2023
Three clouds with cohabitational spaces for thirteen species and...
Courtesy the House Sparrow, Blue Tit, Robin, Starling, Barn Owl, Jackdaw, Great tit, Wren, Yorkshire Terrier,Domestic Short-hair Cat, Red Squirrel, Solitary Bees, Butterflies... with Tomas Saraceno

From 1 June to 10 September 2023, Serpentine will present Web(s) of Life, the first major exhibition in the UK of artist Tomas Saraceno and collaborators, including spider/webs; the communities of Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc, Argentina; spider diviners in Somit\ Cameroon; the ongoing research-driven community projects Aeroceneand Arachnophilia initiated by the artist; as well as the life forms of the Royal Parks.

Tomas Saraceno will create a porous environment where Serpentine's building and operations will respond daily to the immediate landscape of the surrounding park and weather conditions. It will bring together new and recent interactive works to propose how it is possible to take a more responsible, and responsive, approach to one's actions in relation to other people, interspecies co-habitation, and the climate injustices unfolding across the world. Challenging the ways in which exhibitions are conceived and enacted, Web(s) of Life will become a 'living organism' that responds to the weather outside and the gallery's unique location in the biodiverse habitat of the park and beyond.

Saraceno is a multimedia artist, who for more than two decades has produced a body of work that draws attention to our role in a complex network of relationships that make up an ecosystem. Web(s) of Life at Serpentine will delve into the many ways in which life forms, extractive technologies, and energy regimes are inextricably linked to climate injustice.

Tomás Saraceno
The birds will keep calling you, 2023
Twenty-one repurposed wood and glass cabinets, minerals, tokens, mobile phones, low consumption LEDs
Courtesy of Artist

Tomás Saraceno In Collaboration: Webs Of Life is on view until September 10th at the Serpentine at Serpentine South Gallery, Kensington Gardens, London W2 3XA

Niki de Saint Phalle's Tableaux éclatés Is a Posthumous Ballad to Her Beloved Jean Tinguely

text by Barbara Norton

"Hymn of love. Cannibalism. Communion. 
Jean - I devour you. I absorb your strength. Your soul joins mine. 
Breakdown, movement, now belong to me too. 
Waiting for the breakdown, waiting for Godot, waiting for the mishap, life.
I am even looking forward to the breakdown (perhaps to experience the infinite joy of things working again).
Through my new works, Jean, we continue to collaborate. You are present even if these paintings don't look like you. 
ORDER. CHAOS. CONCRETE. ABSTRACT. COMPOSITION. DECOMPOSITION. ETERNAL RETURN.
These ideas took shape in my mind through intuition.
My first subject was Hindu deity Ganesh, bearer of luck and happiness. 
The 'tableaux éclatants' have become my pals, my companions.
A photoelectric cell activates them, so someone walking by is enough to animate them. 
If I go down in the middle of the night to eat a banana, I am accompanied by a light show, sound, movements and soft noises. 
I have taken down all my older paintings and live only with them."

Niki de Saint Phalle, Letter to Jean Tinguely, 1993

Addressed to her artistic partner and second husband who died two years prior, Niki de Saint Phalle’s Letter to Jean Tinguely was written in 1993 to accompany her new series of works, Tableaux éclatés. Thirty years later, and over sixty years since de Saint Phalle first met Tinguely, Tableaux éclatés is on display at Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois in Paris. The title can be roughly translated to “burst paintings” or “shattered paintings”—both of which embody the fragmentary heartbreak and movement of the exhibition. 

Technically, Tableaux éclatés draws on Tinguely—activated by photoelectric cells, the paintings move as the viewer approaches, similar to Tinguely’s own work. Skulls are cut open, bodies are ripped apart, and the moon rises. Then, all is put back together again. Through photoelectric sensors and hidden motors, de Saint Phalle engineers the chaos of visual death and mechanical reincarnation. 

She herself says, “I am even looking forward to the breakdown (perhaps to experience the infinite joy of things working again).” Here is the crux of Tableaux éclatés: breakdown, and in its wake, strange joy. Niki de Saint Phalle’s paintings burst and shatter and then, loyally, they work again. 

Though the form may draw heavily from Tinguely, the works themselves are unabashedly de Saint Phalle’s. Her thick, famous Nana figures sunbathe among multicolored elephants. Pink skies and pink breasts cavort while a golden-trunk Ganesh, “bearer of luck and happiness,” is flayed open, then slid back into one. 

There is a jumbled chaos to Tableaux eclatés—as if Niki de Saint Phalle’s grief itself engineered the wires and motors. The image of a widowed Niki de Saint Phalle eating a banana in the dark with only the company of her gently whirring paintings is as dystopian as it is comfortingly domestic. In Niki de Saint Phalle’s own words, none of her older paintings remain. Tinguely is also gone. Now, she lives with Tableaux éclatés; inevitable, mechanical death and then a masterful putting-together—perhaps not of the one who left this world, but of the one who remains. 


Tableaux éclatés is on view through October 28th at Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois in Paris, 36 rue de Seine

14 Artists Question the Possibility of Human Benevolence & Ecology in Ce que nous donne la terre @ Afikaris in Paris

text by Barbara Norton

Much like nature itself, Ce que nous donne la terre (What the earth Gives Us) is an exhibition comprised of many disparate parts: resin, beads, and acrylic are to the show what beetles, silt, and chlorophyll are to our natural world. Also like the natural world, Ce que nous donne la terre is undeniably united. With fourteen different works on view, each artist challenges what it is to be a human who is both part of that precious, quivering equilibrium of the Earth and a disruptor of it.

While the human is centered throughout the show, we are always in our most early context—nature. In doing so, the relationship between us and world is reimagined countless times, a testament to its eternal loamy dynamism. In Beya Gille Gacha’s haunting Lady Mirror, a blue Mother Nature bathes in black water and algae. She is tranquil, but perhaps not kind—humid anger billows from her like steam from a bath. Though she is a humanoid figure, her lapis lazuli-colored skin is jarring and unnatural against the dirty porcelain.

A blue-bodied figure also appears in Omar Mahfoudi’s Hidden behind the sun. Shielding his visage from the violent, lone smear of sunlight, Mahfoudi’s blue man is blurry with cool, wet anguish beneath the red-yellow light. 

The people of L’Eden are—perhaps—more at peace with their world. Blending into the foliage entirely, their jewelry, clothing, and hair are the only denotation of where the leaves end and their bodies begin. Maybe they have returned to the earliest beginning among the lush, green leaves. But there is also a more sinister possibility: are the figures making a return to their roots, or are they trapped behind the rapidly encroaching leaves? Will the foliage continue to grow and twist across the canvas until it blots them out entirely? 

This tenuous relationship winds itself through each work in Ce que nous donne la terre, on view through 23rd September at AFIKARIS Gallery. What is our place in a world where we are both the product and demise of natural creation?   


Ce que nous dans la terre is on view through 23rd September at AFIKARIS Gallery 7 Rue Notre Dame de Nazareth.

Color Becomes an Agent of Transmutation in Shaping Color @ VSF in Los Angeles

VSF’s exhibition Shaping Color, conceived by LA-based textile artist Diedrick Brackens, brings together six artists to explore the relationships between color and process in their respective practices. Many works in the exhibition are monochromes or utilize a restricted palette. Historically monochromes often signal an intent to emphasize mastery and skill; also, in parting with all information save the essential, artists attempt to access the ineffable and the spiritual.

Color, as employed by these makers, is intrinsically tied to their mediums and modes of production. Color becomes an agent of transmutation, not just a mere surface or mask for form; these objects are altered in ways that inform their subjects radically and color is treated as material rather than surface or ornamentation.

Shaping Color is on view through September 16 @ VSF, 812 N HIGHLAND AVE, LOS ANGELES

 
 

Noah Dillon New Works Is A Beautiful REM-State Dream

Pio Pico, LA presents New Works, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles based artist Noah Dillon curated by Noemi Polo. Noah’s unique trajectory as an artist is key to understanding his perspective and mission. Dillon spent his formative years in Durango, Colorado, a town situated upon the ‘ four corner’ of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. His upbringing in a rural environment, liminally positioned both nowhere and everywhere, inspired a fascination with the American imagination and landscape; how our internal landscapes are cathected onto the material world. Contrasted by his cosmopolitan career as a fashion photographer in Los Angeles, his perspective tensions the old west and the new gods of Americana. New Works explores the corporeal body and its relationship to the engineered landscape. Featuring a series of photographs captured from trail cameras installed across disparate parts of Los Angeles— a Whole Foods, Griffith Park, and MacArthur intersection— Dillon has amassed nearly 1 million images, of which a selection of ten are featured. The anonymous, mechanized capture of the trail cameras is imbued with a delicate attentiveness, one that Dillon uses to construct a non-linear narrative of space and time in the City of Angels. Within this microscopic attention to detail, there’s a discrete pathos in the imbuement of human touch to a camera that functions without it. Moments where the camera had been covered by someone’s thumb have been compiled to form “Untitled - Red Collage”, an experiment in color and form. Centered in the middle of the exhibition is “Untitled - White Dome” that acts as a gravitational center—turning the god-sized hole of late modernity into a reflective pool in which ‘the self’ is simultaneously implicated and alienated. On view until August 26 at Pio Pico.

Le Début Surveys Over 50 Works Dating Back to the Early '70s by Julio le Parc @ Galleria Continua in Paris

text by Barbara Norton

Le Début, on view through September 21st at Galleria Continua in Paris, is a triumph of both artist and movement. Bringing together over fifty works by Argentinian-born artist Julio le Parc, Le Début celebrates illusion and artistry through the canvas of le Parc, a hugely influential figure in the early beginnings of what would become the Op Art and Kinetic Art movements. 

The abstract images of le Parc’s work assuredly reject frivolity—instead, every stroke, line, and curve hums with purpose. Some of these works are rendered on canvas, while others are in three dimensions, such as Sphère Bleue, a large mobile that physically embodies much of the visual movement of le Parc’s 2D pieces. 

Mesmerizing in its mathematical precision and color, le Parc’s canvases glow. His visual dynamism walks along a thin, taut tightrope, baseless but undoubtedly balanced. Le Parc, who moved to Paris in 1958, imbues a deep movement into his abstract and geometric forms. He further liberates this movement with his rainbow of mercury-vapor color. Together, these elements create Le Début—a faithful survey of over fifty years of an artist’s unique visual language. 


Le Debut is on view through 21st September at Galleria Continua 87 Rue du Temple.

Lost Narratives Are Excavated As A Form of Restitution in The Struggle of Memory @ PalaisPopulaire in Berlin

As Milan Kundera writes in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979), “the first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history… The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” The artists in this exhibition are concerned with remembering, reconstructing, reimagining, and restoring. Part 1 of The Struggle of Memory focuses on how memories are embodied, presenting artworks that probe in different ways how the body absorbs, processes, stores, and recalls experiences. Part 2 explores how memories are inscribed, bringing together artworks that draw our attention to the traces of history in the natural and built environment while proposing alternative, sometimes subversive strategies of looking at the past. The show, curated by Kerryn Greenberg, features work by Wangechi Mutu, Kara Walker, Samuel Fosso, Anawana Haloba, Mohamed Camara, Berni Searle, Lebohang Kganye, Toyin Ojih Odutola, and Mikhael Subotzky.

Part 1 is on view through September 18th; part 2 is on view October 6th through March 11th at PalaisPopulaire, Unter den Linden 5, 10117 Berlin.

Thania Petersen Constructs A Cohesive Identity From Her Malay & South African Roots in ZAMUNDA FOREVER @ Nicodim Gallery

Thania Petersen, Cake, 2023. Image courtesy of Nicodim Gallery.

ZAMUNDA FOREVER is Thania Petersen’s first solo exhibition in the United States. The exhibition divides Nicodim Gallery in Los Angeles into three bodies of intricately embroidered narrative textiles, covering her family’s history, their present-day life as seen from the outside, then finally portrayals of their familial dynamic in more personal settings. Juxtaposed against one another, the three series are an honest depiction of how the journey that brought the artist’s people to South Africa resulted in a separation of selves that exist symbiotically to construct a new cohesive and contemporary identity.

Zamunda is the fictional African nation from which Eddie Murphy’s character hails in the 1988 film Coming to America. In these large-scale works, the artist reckons with the hyper-commercialization of her native continent, and the semi-truthfulness of the signifiers both Westerners and Africans use to market themselves to one another. ZAMUNDA FOREVER, like Petersen herself, embodies the plural histories, spiritualities, sonorities, and cultures of the Afrasiatic Sea. Also everpresent: the universal and readily identifiable signs of a family and community that lives, laughs, and loves with one another.

ZAMUNDA FOREVER is on view through September 9 @ Nicodim Gallery, 1700 S Santa Fe Avenue, #160, Los Angeles, CA 90021

A Memory: Tabaimo’s Nest at GL Strand in Denmark

Tabaimo, aitaisei-josei, 2015 Video installation ©Tabaimo. Courtesy of Gallery Koyanagi and James Cohan Gallery GL STRAND Photo by David Stjernholm

text by Lara Schoorl

Walking into, Nest, Tabaimo’s first retrospective in the Nordic region, is like walking into someone’s subconscious mind, half asleep, half awake, half dream, half real; each film a vignette into an absurd fusing of desired or criticized aspects of society; each painting and installation a remnant of that. Spread across three floors of Copenhagen’s GL Strand––an eighteenth century aristocratic house designed by the Dutch-Danish architect Philip de Lange that has housed the almost hundred-year old art association for the past five decades––Tabaimo turns the interior of a home into the interior of a psyche; using the architecture of the exhibition space as well as the architecture in her works as a lattice that let the realms of inside and outside, private and public seep through and into each other. 

“haunted house” (2003), one of five hand-drawn and then computerized stop motion animation videos in the exhibition, is the first work on view and a gateway from the outside to the inside, into which one will be pulled deeper and deeper as one dwells through the show. On a curved wall we follow a moving peephole or telescope-like lens across a cityscape filled with apartment buildings; only seeing as much as the round lens reveals, while the rest of the wall remains in the shadows, blocked from our vision and awaiting its turn to be gleaned over. Our eyes move across windows and inevitably the scenes behind it. We see people standing, walking, eating in their homes; we imagine their moods and relationships; and then imagination begins to blend with reality when the (made up) life stories behind these people are suddenly taking place in blown up proportions atop buildings. In this video work, Tabaimo uses an amalgam of childhood memories and adult daydreaming to peer into the lives of others. While we are still looking from an outside perspective, a longing for the inside is instilled.  

Tabaimo, haunted house, 2003 Video installation ©Tabaimo. Courtesy of Gallery Koyanagi and James

As one continues up a floor, we enter “public conVENience” (2003) and stand at the edge of a public bathroom. Installed across three wall-sized screens positioned in a U-shape and built on an inclining ramp, this public yet intimate space starts out as larger-than-life, but grows smaller towards the end of the slope. A concoction of perspectives both realistic and fantastical presents itself depending on where one chooses to stand. We are inside a shared space, a unique liminal space where public and private meet. Women walk into the screen and into the stalls, peeing, disposing of sanitary napkins, re-applying makeup. Then, here too, Tabaimo allows for fictional narratives to insert themselves into our shared reality. One of the bathroom visitors takes off her clothes, and dressed in a bathing suit, ties a rope to her waist before diving into one of the squat toilets; later on, a giant moth flies into the space, and a turtle is flushed in one of the bowls. For the majority of the video we stand separately, as one of the possible bathroom visitors, but occasionally a zoom-in occurs across three screens and we are staring at what could be our own feet squatting above a toilet. Slowly, we are roped into the narratives of the works.

Tabaimo, public conVENience, 2006 Video installation ©Tabaimo. Courtesy of Gallery Koyanagi and James Cohan. GL STRAND Photo by David Stjernholm

The further we enter the exhibition, the more the space between us and the works blur; with each floor interior spaces protrude more outward. On the second floor, in the only room lit by natural light, as though to encourage growth, drawings of hybrid plant body parts are drawn directly upon the walls as well as on papers held in wooden frames. Technically perfect, to the likening of botanical and anatomical drawings for research and documentation purposes, the medium of drawing (here and in the videos) refers to Japanese woodblock printing and anime––the latter became a popular genre in the 1960s in Japan in which the border between real and imaginary lives also became porous––and form a formal undercurrent in Nest. The humanoid flowers lead us into the adjacent room in which an interpretation of Tabaimo’s studio is installed. Its presentation in an exhibition, in an art institution, in which touch is discouraged, emphasizes the installation is a rendering, a recollection (instead of a reality) of this place elsewhere, where it is used by the artist and so presumably holds an aliveness of materials and movement. Here, where the studio is in stasis, the viewer becomes a time traveler sharing the room with a frozen temporality. We are now fully inside one of the most intimate places of the artist, yet kept at a small distance by way of temporal and institutional boundaries. An anchor in our singular, physical, reality in the shape of systemic space or time, and its friction with alternative realities is a trope that recurs throughout the exhibition.

In the final gallery, after which no throughway or exit is available, only a way back through the previous rooms and tracing our steps down the other two floors, we land in “aittaisei josei” (2015), a video of a corner of a room without a ceiling. Or, a room for which the night sky poses as plafond, a full moon hanging directly above the meeting point of the cornering walls that disappear into a dark infinity. The scene spans one wall covering projection of said corner in which just a couch and a table are placed, with their sides closest to the edge of the image coming out of the screen and continuing into the space as real objects, cut out of furniture matching to the drawing in the video. The interior space in the video and the interior of the gallery space are literally connected as such and form a backdrop for the imaginary outside spilling in. A moth reappears on the screen, from behind the walls a tree grows high and into the room, and from its branches a head of hair appears, locks sweeping and reaching to the ground. In “aitaisei josei” all matter comes to life, moves, and turns not only spaces but meaning inside out.

Tabaimo, aitaisei-josei, 2015 Video installation ©Tabaimo. Courtesy of Gallery Koyanagi and James Cohan Gallery. GL STRAND Photo by David Stjernholm 

Although the longest video is little over 6.5 minutes, it is easy to continue watching each of them for much longer; the addictive quality of the bizarre that creeps into the everyday but also the slightly quivering texture of the countless succeeding animated drawings that compose the videos have a hypnotizing effect. And, simultaneously, it is the medium of drawing that functions both as a barrier between reality and the work, and one that prevents us from fully falling into a shared imagination between the artist and viewer. Nest, in nature a complex and built structure that nurtures new life, entices us to open those drawers in our minds for which there may be no space in our day-to-day life, and provides a place where our fantasy, fears, desires and anxieties are acknowledged and given a response.

Witness Allen Ginsberg's Intimate Chronicle of the Beat Generation in Muses & Self @ Fahey/Klein in Los Angeles

Arthur Miller, William H. Gass, Hotel Royal Elevator, Copenhagen, November 1985 ©Allen Ginsberg, courtesy of Fahey/Klein Gallery, Los Angeles

Muses & Self: Photographs by Allen Ginsberg is an exhibition of Ginsberg's personal photographs balances our understanding of the public, outspoken poet and most prominent figure of the Beat Generation at Fahey/Klein Gallery. At his core, Allen Ginsberg was a witness and chronicler of the world; his profound admiration for the beauty of the vernacular, intense observation, and celebration of the present moment guided his photography and poetry. The photographs included in this exhibition are joyful, often tender, sometimes profound while at other times humorous—and capture Ginsberg’s numerous meaningful relationships.

Muses & Self is on view through September 23 @ Fahey/Klein, 148 N La Brea, Los Angeles

Enrico David Looks to the Human Body As A Metaphor for Transformation in Destroyed Men Come and Go @ KW Institute in Berlin

Destroyed Men Come and Go is devoted to the sculptural practice of London-based Italian artist Enrico David, who works in sculpture, painting, textiles, and installation, with drawing being key to his exploration of form. Mining a space between figuration and abstraction, David returns to the body as a point of departure, exploring the human figure as a metaphor for transformation. His interest in British and European modern sculpture has shaped his work, taking inspiration from the likes of Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore and Alberto Giacometti, while, at the same time, retaining an idiosyncratic aesthetic and provocatively ambiguous language. Made from bronze, silkscreen, steel, and plaster polymer, David’s human figures assume various poses, often entering a dialogue with the architecture that surrounds them – hugging the floor, leaning against walls, or being suspended from the ceiling.

Through references to anatomy, metamorphosis permeates their forms and connects these works with nature. This continuous morphing is further mirrored in David’s manipulation of materials, with modeling and casting obscuring any clear understanding of their material origin. Taken from a quote of Maurice Blanchot, the exhibition’s title elaborates on the relation of existence, speech, and the void in Samuel Beckett’s momentous theater play Waiting for Godot (1952) and its allegory of the collapse of the rational mind. In his Writing of the Disaster, Blanchot writes “We have fallen out of being, outside where, immobile, proceeding with a slow and even step, destroyed men come and go,” describing humanity’s fall from grace in the Anthropocene.

Conveying the struggle of adaptation of the self, David’s sculptures pick up on Blanchot’s thoughts on subjectivity and critically unfold the body’s autonomy through different stages of nonbeings and becomings. David favors time travel to connect the way the body is depicted into different states of being through various periods of global civilization – whether this is sleeping, hanging, relaxing, or decaying form. His references are deliberately naïve and broad, including nods towards the Maya culture, the Tang Dynasty, or the Wiener Werkstätte. However, David’s appropriations are recontextualized to focus on their formal and universal qualities, in which dysmorphic shapes, created, for example, by photographic documentation, offer new opportunities for human and non-human figuration.

Destroyed Men Come and Go is on view through August 20th at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Auguststraße 69, 10117 Berlin

Eva Fàbregas Expansive Installation Immerses Visitors in a Blurring of the Organic & Technical in Devouring Lovers @ Hamburger Banhof in Berlin

Eva Fàbregas takes over the historical hall of the Hamburger Bahnhof with a monumental, site-specific installation. Her biggest solo exhibition to date expands the boundaries of sculpture, inviting visitors to a sensual, spatial experience. Biomorphous sculptures transform the museum's architecture, which is characterized by industrial iron girders, into an organically grown space.

With this new commission, Fàbregas responds to the passage-like architecture of Hamburger Bahnhof’s main historical hall. The soft and bodily objects, characteristic of her work, spread out throughout the entire space, from the sides, from the ceiling, and through the metal structures. Slight vibrations and movements emanating from them cannot be clearly identified, but are almost physically perceptible. The mix of sculpture and movement reorients the visitors’ experience of the hall. The borders between technically generated and the human and non-human worlds become blurred. Visitors find themselves immersed in a surreal organic-technical environment.

Devouring Lovers is on view through January 1st, 2024, at the Hamburger Banhof Museum of Contemporary Art, Invalidenstraße 50-51, 10557 Berlin

how swift, how far Explores our Environmental Woes @ Wonzimer Gallery

All images courtesy of the artist and Wonzimer.

how swift, how far—opening August 18 at Wonzimer Gallery—is a group exhibition of 9 artists that engage environmentalism beyond the realm of “documentary” images, creating transformative and metaphorical works about the various ecologies we inhabit in media that includes painting, photography, sculpture and video. While issues like climate change are always in the forefront, this show seeks to acknowledge the multiple issues that our environmental woes as a society interconnect with: concepts of identity, class and other cultural resonances that are relevant in our current discourse.

how swift, how far is on view through September 20 @ Wonzimer Gallery, 341-B S Avenue 17 Los Angeles 90031

Marie Larrivé Captures the Spirit of Natural Magnetism in La Lune et les Feux @ Galerie Miyu in Paris

 

text by Barbara Norton

 

In Marie Larrivé’s world, the light is soft and the air is tender. The French filmmaker and painter’s newest exhibition, La Lune et Les Feux, is no exception. On view at Galerie Miyu in Paris, Larrivé’s round, vibrant colors paint a world made up of all the floating, ethereal parts of ours. 

A reverberation of L’arrivé’s directorial history, much of La Lune et les Feux presents like a snapshot of a larger story, one that is both melancholy and joyful. The eerie stillness, particularly in the gentle sorrow of Jours étranges and fantastic greenery of Arbres Noirs, begs the question of what natural mysticism lurks behind the leaves and beneath the soil. The desire for the answer lends Larrivé’s works a magnetic quality—so close to the world we know, yet different. 

No matter the story, nature’s curves, slopes, and outstretched branches coolly take center stage. Humans are occasionally present, but a fleeting presence in Larrivé’s superlunar narrative. There is the distinct feeling that these people and these landscapes are shaping each other even when we, the viewers, are not looking. When we are looking, we are mere observers, pulled in only by the humanity of the moonlight and grasses. 

If Larrivé has a leading lady, she is certainly the water, an especially masterful constant throughout Larrivé’s œuvre. It is clear that Larrivé was born by the sea, in Brittany—the coy glint of sun on water in Saint Malo thrums with the expertise of an artist who fully understands its transient nature. Similarly, the soft brushstrokes and deep, blue-green water seem to conceal some larger, perhaps darker mystery beneath the water’s surface in Le Lac. Perhaps the mystery would reveal itself, if only you could step onto the mossy bank of the lake. More likely, it will remain an enigma to you, the watcher of Larrivé’s shadowy, enchanting scenes, no matter how much you may wish otherwise. 

La Lune et Les Feux is on view through September 13 at Galerie Miyu 101 Rue du Temple.




Alexis Soul-Gray Peers Through the Looking-Glass in Immutable Fragments @ Bel Ami

Images courtesy the artist and Bel Ami, Los Angeles. Photo credit: Paul Salveson.

Bel Ami presents Immutable Fragments, Alexis Soul-Gray’s first solo-exhibition in the United States. Like Lewis Carroll’s journey through the looking glass, Soul-Gray shows how curiosity and experimentation peel back hidden layers, revealing the emotional life of childhood and how it conditions our perceptions and responses into adulthood.

Appropriating photographic imagery of mid-to-late 20th century family life from popular British magazines and books, Soul-Gray finds clichéd tableaus of women and children, choosing them for their artificial quality, “where family is often faked but also, somehow felt.” She then delicately draws out eerie moments that seem unexpectedly real, for example, a backward glance or a playful gesture. For this exhibition, Soul-Gray sources illustrations from fairy tales and the nostalgic imagery of advertising, designed to invoke in the consumer their own desires and fears. These images function as screen memories, referring to Sigmund Freud’s concept of a falsified image that stands in for an experience too disturbing to recall.

Immutable Fragments is on view through September 9 @ Bel Ami, 709 N Hill St. #103 & #105, Los Angeles

 
 

Lydia Maria Pfeffer Examines the Mythologies That Populate the Subconscious in Love Magic @ Galerie Droste in Paris

text by Barbara Norton

Love is magic and magic is love in Lydia Maria Pfeffer’s newest exhibit at Galerie Droste. Pfeffer gleefully dances across the teeming, queer forest floor in Love Magic, on view through August 12 in Paris. Unabashedly beastly, Pfeffer’s creatures have uncovered the secret to that jeweled, wisteria world of queer perfection. And they aren’t reluctant to let the rest of us know—serene, self-satisfied smiles grace the face of nearly every face (human or not). In this world, the joy is so open that it is difficult to look away.

These creatures’ utter comfort with both themselves and each other is especially magical in Heavenly Visit, as a leopard with a near-human visage nuzzles against a beaked woman’s lap. With its eyes closed and mouth open in bliss, one can’t help but feel almost jealous of that leopard and its pink-tinted nirvana. 

A visual gorging, lilacs, apples, and moons pirouette around amongst feathered, furred, and finned revelry. Pfeffer’s use of color only furthers her fantastic agenda of complete release—pale blues wrap amorously around golds and ruby reds. The rainbow of greens in Dream in Green is especially erotic in its lushness. Starburst-like white flowers—woven into the mane of the center wolf woman—bloom from soft brushstrokes that glow with vitality.

Meanwhile in Sweet Love, a fox wraps an arm around the waist of a heavenly messenger, as lily of the valley blooms and a swan looks on. Joy shines in these small details, suggesting that these scenes exist in an entirely formed world, perhaps only a few galaxies away from our own. In Pfeffer’s twilight boudoir, erotic, unhinged queer love is the shimmering core—true love magic. 

Love Magic is on view through 12 August at Galerie Droste Rue des Archives 72.

Berlin's Schwules Museum Spotlights Germany's Modern Queer Movement in Photography as a Way of Life. Rüdiger Trautsch: 50 years of pictures

Rüdiger Trautsch not only carved a space for the documentation of Queerness, but also captured the beauty and artistry in his community’s everyday life: radical acts, during his career and still today, as Queer reality and history face continuing (but impossible) threats of erasement. His work includes photographs of the first gay protest marches in Münster and West Berlin in the 1970s up to the last Folsom events before Corona in Berlin. In between are celebrity shots of Warhol and Mapplethorpe, images of the legendary Hamburg house club Front, shots of bear parties, and his drag and couples series. Trautsch’s pictures move between documentation and art. They are indispensable visual material for queer historiography in Germany, but his work also offers moving individual shots that reflect a very special relationship to his subject. Photography as a Way of Life presents an overview of the five decades of Trautsch’s work, focusing on one motif: for photographer Rüdiger Trautsch, the camera was a means of making contact with people rather than just a device. In Rüdiger Trautsch’s life, photography became not only a cultural practice, but also a social one: taking pictures to make friends.

Photography as a Way of Life is on view through September 23rd at the Schwules Museum, Lützowstraße 73, 10785 Berlin