Beers London Presents Humoral Theory By Morteza Khakshoor, Jerry Kowalsky & Moley Talhaoui

Humoral Theory presents artists Morteza Khakshoor, Jerry Kowalsky, and Moley Talhaoui, each of who have distinct and separate practices, and who show here together for the first time.

Also known as humourism, ‘humoral theory’ was a model for the workings of the human body in which four humours existed as liquids within the body. The humours were blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile, and they governed aspects of the human disposition, including the sanguine, choleric, melancholic, or phlegmatic. As a sort of antiquated ‘medical measurement’ of the body, it dates back to 3rd Century physicians who were interested in ailments and operations of the human body as being natural, as opposed to supernatural. Oddly, they are often referenced today in artistic and certain historic theories, perhaps because they summarize our natural bodily urges, impulses, and physicality into easily understandable categories. While humoral theory may seem slightly silly by today’s standards, they remain a poetic, metaphoric, and abstract means to understand the innate complexities of the human body, mind, and soul. Such thought predates medical, shamanistic, or (quasi)religious discoveries that occurred many centuries later – however naive they may still appear – such as flaying, trepanation, bloodletting, or even more modern psychological revelations as the Phrenology Chart, psychoanalytic study, or the Rorschaech Test, for example – all of which are alluded to (if not directly referenced by) various works on exhibit here.

Humoral Theory will be on view throughout February 22, 2020 at Beers London 1 Baldwin Street London, UK. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Andrew Kreps Gallery NY Presents Think of Our Future By Andrea Bowers

As our global freedoms decline, Andrea Bowers is trying to move from grief to hope by focusing on youth activists beginning with the new video, My Name Means Future. Centered on Tokata Iron Eyes, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe who has been involved with the movement to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline since its inception, the video continues Bowers’s commitment to documenting important activists of her time. Bowers asked the young activist to show her some of her most sacred places in South Dakota. With a small group of friends - all artists and activists, they traveled together for 4 days in September recording video interviews and landscape drone shots of the youth activist discussing the landscapes, their histories, as well as the personal and political issues that arose from being in these sacred sites. In the Lakota language, “Tokata” means “Future”.

In response to her journey with Iron Eyes and the climate emergency we are currently experiencing, Bowers has created a new series of neon works based on the designs of tree branches that incorporate quotes from eco-feminists. These monumental and sculptural pieces are made entirely of reused and recycled materials, inspired by Judi Bari and the Earth First call to action, “Resist Reuse Restore”.

Think of Our Future will be on view throughout February 15, 2020 at Andrew Kreps Gallery 22 Cortlandt Alley, New York, NY. photographs courtesy of the gallery

agnès b. presents “... PHOTOGRAPHERS ... ARTISTS AND THE SNAP CARDIGAN” in New York

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of her signature Snap Cardigan, agnès b. presents “... PHOTOGRAPHERS ... ARTISTS AND THE SNAP CARDIGAN”

The exhibition will echo the first snap cardigan exhibition held at agnès b.’s Galerie du Jour in Paris as part of Mois de la Photo in 1986, where 140 photographers originally contributed to the exhibition. Each were asked to photograph the iconic snap cardigan in his or her own way. Acclaimed by the public and critics alike, the exhibition was then held at the Centre Pompidou in 1996. 

For the 2020 exhibition, which was shown in Paris at the end of 2019, agnès b. has given carte blanche to more than 70 photographers and artists from 14 different nationalities. Young emerging artists and established artists from urban and contemporary scenes offer their interpretation of this timeless garment, working with a singular specification of a 40 × 60 centimeter photograph whose main subject is the snap cardigan. Juergen Teller, David Lynch, Carly Steinbrunn, Mark Cohen, Omar Victor Diop, Ryan McGinness, Jim Jarmush, Martha Cooper, Hiraku Suzuki, Cheryl Dunn, Massimo Vitali, Annette Messager and Maripol are just a snapshot of the celebrated names invited by designer Agnes B. to photograph the iconic snap cardigan in his or her own way.

The exhibition will open on February 8, 2020, at 195 Chrystie Street. NY. It will be on view through March 1, 2020, with an opening reception for the artists on Saturday February 8 4 - 8PM. photographs courtesy of agnès b.

Janet Sobel and Pearl Blauvelt @ Andrew Edlin Gallery in New York

Janet Sobel (1893-1968) and Pearl Blauvelt (1893-1987), two female self-taught artists born in the same year. Though both women were making art in the 1940s, they came from vastly different backgrounds and achieved art world recognition in the opposite manner. Sobel received critical attention during her lifetime at the epicenter of New York cultural circles, while Blauvelt created in complete anonymity, her drawings only discovered years after her death. Both artists currently have work on view in the recently completed rehanging of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 

Janet Sobel and Pearl Blauvelt will be on view until February 22, 2020 at Andrew Edlin Gallery 212 Bowery New York, NY. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Carrie Mae Weems: Push @ Galerie Barbara Thumm in Berlin

Galerie Barbara Thumm presents Push, Carrie Mae Weems’ first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Throughout her career Weems’ works have compelled viewers to actively consider how the world is structured, revealing systems of oppression and inequality while exploring the relationships between power, class, race and gender. Push present several bodies of work, which look at these themes in relation to how the past comes to bear on the present. In this regard Weems reflects on history in order to engage with the present and question where we might be going.

The exhibition features Ritual and Revolutions, Weems, largest immersive installation which marks one of the artist’s earliest forays into three dimensions. Composed of 11 diaphanous printed cloth banners organized in a semi-architectural formation and a poetic audio track, Ritual and Revolution explores the historic human struggle for equality and justice, including references to the Middle Passage, the French Revolution, World War II, among others.

Push is on view throughout February 1, 2020 at Galerie Barbara Thumm Markgrafenstrasse 68 D-10969 Berlin. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Apexart Presents Souls Grown Diaspora in New York City

Souls Grown Diaspora is an exhibition that explores a generation of leading contemporary visionary African-American artists from the wider United States, and situates their work into an art-historical lineage shaped by the Great Migration. The exhibition traces the migration: the movement spanning 1916 to 1970 in which six million African-Americans left the rural South for urban centers such as New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Oakland. Souls Grown Diaspora follows a new wave of artists, mostly self-taught, whose works address a range of revelatory social and political subjects.

The show’s title takes its inspiration from Atlanta’s Souls Grown Deep Foundation, which has worked for decades to change the canon of art history to include a group of pioneering African-American artists from the South—among them Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, Mary T. Smith, Hawkins Bolden, and the women’s collective known as the Gee’s Bend Quilters (Arlonzia Pettway, Annie Mae Young and Mary Lee Bendolph)— as essential to the understanding of developments in the history of American art. The name “Souls Grown Deep” originates from the last line of Langston Hughes’ 1921 poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”: “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.” A collection of research material will be included in vitrines and a series of performances and talks will accompany the exhibition during its run.

Souls Grown Diaspora is on view throughout March 7, 2020 at apexart 291 Church Street, NYC. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Dorothea Tanning: Worlds In Collision @ Alison Jacques Gallery In London

Alison Jacques Gallery is pleased to announce the solo exhibition Dorothea Tanning: Worlds in Collision. The exhibition features a rarely displayed body of late work dating from 1981 to 1989, which is being shown together for the first time in the United Kingdom. It includes large scale works on paper in media as varied as graphite, charcoal, crayon, watercolour, gouache, and collage, many of which focus on imagery of the bicycle which preoccupied Tanning at this time. The exhibition coincides with the publication of the monograph Dorothea Tanning: Transformations by Victoria Carruthers, which will be released by Lund Humphries on 31 January 2020.

Worlds in Collision will be on view through March 21, 2020 @ Alison Jacques Gallery 16-18 Berners St. London W1T 3LN. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Arcadia Missa Presents Hamishi Farah, And Lomex (New York) Presents Danica Barboza & Justin Caguiat @ Condo London 2020

Hamishi Farah is an artist, writer, and musician living in Australia while retired from Australian art. Drawing upon afropessimist theory their painting practice skims through possibilities for non-human representation tiptoeing around the white disembodiment of a colonial libido.

Caguiat produces large oil based paintings often on unstretched canvas that shift stylistically between abstraction and figuration. Done in almost a pointillist style, the works appear as landscapes or murals out of a different era; anachronistic images with a register always in flux. Drawing stylistically from sources as varied as symbolist and post-impressionist painting, Viennese history painting, and certain stylistic movements in Japanese painting, they present otherworldy vistas perhaps at home in science fiction or in the realm of fantasy.

Danica Barboza produces suites of sculptures that populate a mythological universe entirely of her own devising; suites of works throughout which the same figures recur in various states of physical development that experiment with notions of celebrity and icon. Her works elaborate a mythic autobiography rooted in a romance between her and a mare figure named in her work as “Draco Adollphus B”; a figure often presented in various states of construction and de-construction, iomages of whom she has produced since as early as 2000 as part of a long term robotics project that informs much of her larger sculptural practice. She has produced a concurrent gothic novel ‘spondere’ which is available in various stages of construction on the occasion of her solo exhibitions.

The works of Hamishi Farah, Danica Barboza, and Justin Caguiat will be on view through February 8, 2020 at Arcadia Missa 14 – 16 Brewer Street, First Floor, Soho, London. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Siera Hyte's Breath Commuter @ Fresh Bread in Chicago

Fresh Bread is a kitchen-based exhibition series in Rogers Park, Chicago, run by artist Morgan Mandalay and writer Kim-Anh Schreiber. Each show meditates on metaphors of digestion and features an accompanying cookbook, a document of process and practice.

Breath Commuter is on view throughout March 8th at Fresh Bread. Email freshbreadgallery@gmail.com for address. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Ohslo Releases Their First Full-length Album Honeymoon

Late at night, Dave Sorry and Nanne Hil record slow songs in their bedroom. Sitting closely together on the floor and musing amidst their synthesizers allows them to step back from the mundanity of life. Their electronic jams take inspiration from all sorts of (other)worldly stories, melodies and rhythms and are instantly recorded to capture the vibrancy of the moment. Ohslo’s live performances invite you to join them in this hidden place, for a sit-down between white sheets and synths. The duo’s sounds - glacial beats and warm flutes - are put to surreal visuals, created in collaboration with their collective of friends in the North of the Netherlands. Click here to listen.

Ohslo released their Comfort EP and Healthy Animal EP through Purple Noise Record Club in 2015 and 2016. Their first full-length album Honeymoon is out today on Babyrace Records.

Brian Calvin Presents Sound @ Almine Rech Shanghai

Back in the 1990s, Brian Calvin began developing a figurative, non-narrative, pictorial style. Landscapes and portraits steeped in his Californian roots dominated this work. Close-up treatment of subjects, highly composed structures, as well  as  luminous colors laid flat endow these large-scale paintings with a  strange temporality. In observing his technique of pictorial economy, one gradually comes to see a type of abstraction in his representation of certain details. They reveal, even greater still, the true finality of his work, reaffirming the primacy of a visual reflection on painting itself and its possibilities. “I prefer to experience abstraction through the creation and tending of images. Painting provides the medium.”

Almine Rech Shanghai is pleased to present Sound, an exhibition of Brian Calvin’s recent portraits. The exhibition continues the artist’s exploration of the unique genre of painting, and furthers Calvin’s distinct development of emotions and imagery.

Sound is on view throughout February 29, 2020 @ Almine Rech Shanghai 27 Huqiu Road, 2nd Floor, 200002 Shanghai, China. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Luis Camnitzer's Towards an Aesthetic of Imbalance @ Alexander Gray Associates in New York

In 1988, Luis Camnitzer represented Uruguay in the 43rd Venice Biennale, where he produced a series of works that combined physical objects, printed images, and text. In the context of the end of Uruguay’s military dictatorship (1973–1984), these works addressed themes of torture, abuse of power, and repression, combining seemingly disparate elements to elicit poetic interpretations. Despite political instability during the transition to democracy, Camnitzer agreed to participate in the Biennale, realizing that “keeping one’s purity could be in the way of more important things like the cementing of a regained democracy.” Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, Camnitzer built upon the political themes in his work, developing new series and projects, including The Agent Orange Series (1985) and Los San Patricios (1992). Conceptually building on the work he debuted eight years prior at the Venice Biennale, Camnitzer presented El Mirador in 1996 at the São Paulo Biennial. Consisting of an enclosed room that is only visible to the viewer through a narrow slit in the wall, El Mirador evokes multiple spaces of confinement: a prison cell, a psychiatric hospital, and a torture chamber. Various objects are placed throughout the white-walled room, which is starkly lit with glaring light, lending the installation a surreal quality. In this tableaux, uncanny elements are gathered––an iron bed frame with a single glass sheet as a mattress, a shattered wall mirror, a house of playing cards, and a window with panes made of Astroturf grass––resulting in a hallucinatory aura, meant to destabilize the viewer’s initial interpretations.

Towards an Aesthetic of Imbalance is on view throughout Feb. 15th at Alexander Gray Associates 510 West 26 Street, New York, NY. photographs courtesy of the Alexander Gray Associates

Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe Presents Black Like Me @ Roberts Projects In Los Angeles

 
 

Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe’s lush and luminous oil paintings of black men and women, some strangers he streetcasts or encounters on social media, many others who are friends and colleagues, stand as visual testaments to the resilience, power and strength inherent in African culture, as articulated by the artist. His portraits reveal the complexities of human experience with both a boldness of line and a depth of color, allowing the viewer to experience their uniqueness and vitality simultaneously. Black Like Me is on view through March 7 at Roberts Projects 5801 Washington Boulevard, Culver City. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Watch The Premiere Of ROMY's New Music Video: Normal Day Directed By Geneva Jacuzzi →

ROMY, known for her all-girl punk band, agender, and for throwing LA's esteemed queer parties, Homocult and Lez Croix releases "Normal Day" off the new record, Celluloid Self, directed by Geneva Jacuzzi with an all female crew. The video also features visuals from JJ Stratford, exploring themes of voyeurism, desire, and the paranormal. Watch the video and click here to read our interview with ROMY and Geneva Jacuzzi on the eve of the video's release.

Margie Livingston Presents The Earth Is A Brush @ Luis De Jesus In Los Angeles

For the past four years, Margie Livingston has been dismantling the line between painting and performance. In a hybrid form of Action Painting, performance, and Land Art, she drags constructed paintings across terrain, inscribing the canvases with the ground to what she calls Extreme Landscape Painting or “non-painting painting.”  Inherent in this process is the use of chance procedures and the knowledge that the ideas change and evolve as she gets into the work. The Earth Is A Brush is on view through February 15 at Luis De Jesus 2685 S La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Katherina Olschbaur: Dirty Elements @ The University Art Galleries In Irvine

Olschbaur provides a female perspective to a history of canonized male painters, whose work simultaneously inspires her. Although traces of matriarchal order in Western thought typically appear as a mythological apparition, Olschbaur paints a narrative that subverts our expectations under the normative language of patriarchy. For Olschbaur, art historical tropes are appropriated and used like garments, worn then cast aside in a process that is ever changing and moving within each work. In this way, Dirty Elements investigates the power dynamics of patriarchal order and its violent denial of female sexuality. Referencing a wide spectrum of thought, Olschbaur’s practice takes root in mythology, religious and historical paintings, the subcultures of S/M, and film. Embracing Georges Bataille’s concept of the formless, the paintings explore the dirty elements of our carnal nature. In so doing, they feature provocative and erotically charged scenes that are at times humorous and disturbing. Dirty Elements is on view through March 14 at Contemporary Arts Center Gallery, Irvine, California. photographs courtesy of University Art Galleries, UC Irvine © 2020 by Jeff McLane Studio, Inc.

Jenny Holzer Presents "A Little Knowledge" @ Hauser & Wirth In Gstaad, Switzerland

For more than forty years Jenny Holzer has presented text emblazoned on T-shirts, carved in stone, painted on canvas, scrolling on LED signs, and luminously projected onto buildings and landscapes. Beginning in the 1970s with posters wheat-pasted throughout New York City and continuing through recent light projections, her practice rivals ignorance with humour, and violence with kindness and courage. Holzer’s texts address oppression, gender, sexuality, power, and war, and by presenting them in media more commonly associated with advertising, news reports, and public information, she adeptly provokes reflection and challenges expectations and prejudices. A Little Knowledge is on view at Tarmak 22 in Gstaad-Saanen Airport, on view through 22 January. photographs courtesy of Hauser & Wirth

Tomashi Jackson Presents Forever My Lady @ Night Gallery In Los Angeles

Tomashi Jackson’s multimedia practice places formal and material investigations in dialogue with recent histories of displacement and disenfranchisement. Drawing centrally from Josef Albers’ research on the relativity of color and the unconscious processes by which the brain organizes and reconciles information, Jackson’s work bridges gaps between geometric experimentation and the systematization of injustice, incorporating images hand-painted from photographs and materials chosen for their relevance into formalist compositions. 

Jackson’s latest body of work principally concerns the question of democracy, taking up its conceptual origins in Ancient Greece, with its contingent notion of obligatory civic participation. She compares this history of democracy to the realities of the present-day United States, with particular attention to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, written to prevent discriminatory practices at the state and local levels that prevented Black Americans from exercising their right to vote. Jackson cites the enactment of this law as the true beginning of American democracy, though she points to subsequent public crises – the rise of gerrymandering and the the crack epidemic that began in Los Angeles in the 1980s – to question democracy’s true status in the US today. 

Forever My Lady is on view throughout February 8, 2020 @ Night Gallery 2276 E 16th St. LA. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Highlights From The Fog Art Fair In San Francisco

photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Noah Davis @ David Zwirner In New York

Davis’s body of work encompasses, on the one hand, his lush, sensual, figurative paintings and, on the other, an ambitious institutional project called The Underground Museum, a black-owned-and-operated art space dedicated to the exhibition of museum-quality art in a culturally underserved African American and Latinx neighborhood in Los Angeles. The works on view will highlight both parts of Davis’s oeuvre, featuring more than twenty of his most enduring paintings, as well as models of previous exhibitions curated by Davis at The Underground Museum. The exhibition also includes a “back room,” modeled on the working offices at The Underground Museum, featuring more paintings by Davis, as well as BLKNWS by Davis’s brother Kahlil Joseph; a sculpture by Karon Davis, the artist’s widow; and Shelby George furniture, designed by Davis’s mother Faith Childs-Davis. The exhibition will be on view through February 22 at David Zwirner 525 & 533 West 19th Street, New York. photographs courtesy of David Zwirner