photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper
Highlights From The 2020 Frieze Art Fair At Paramount Studios In Los Angeles
Opening Of "I Won't Bite" Curated by Brooke Wise for Tom Of Finland Foundation at Neuehouse in Hollywood
photographs by Vlasta Pilot
Meyer Riegger Berlin Presents Anna Lea Hucht: What Are You Doing The Rest Of Your Life?
In Anna Lea Hucht’s What are you doing the rest of your life?, the artist’s interest in material surfaces remains a driving force. Continuing her series of still lifes, she allows us to participate directly in the highly-charged relationship between photography and painting. Her still lifes are only recognizable as paintings upon detailed inspection, so close is their similarity to the photographic originals in black-and-white. Isolated from space and time, objects thus stand in the centre of the pictorial event where, additionally staged with a realistic interplay of light and shade, they shift the focus of the visitor onto the wholly distinctive and particular aesthetics of the world of things.
Alongside her intensive ongoing concern for objects, the artist is exhibiting four watercolors, which, inspired by the same curiosity concerning structures, examine the nature and regularity of fur. The fable-like creatures, whose faces and legs are furry, find themselves positioned opposite and in rich contrast to a watercolor of a hortus conclusus, out of which a dog stares, whose skin is not worked out in detail. In the background, however, the beholder can study the jungle-like plant world of the garden. As so often in Hucht’s oeuvre, we gaze here into a fantasy realm in which the known and the unusual are combined in a willful, idiosyncratic manner.
What are you doing the rest of your life? is on view through March 7 at Meyer Rigger Schaperstrasse 14 10719 Berlin. photographs courtesy of the gallery
Universal Fatigue: A Solo Exhibition By Mircea Suciu @ Blain | Southern in New York
Part of the Cluj School, Mircea Suciu (b. 1978) is regarded as one of Romania’s leading artists. During his formative years he witnessed the country’s tumultuous transition after the only violent overthrow of a communist government in the 1989 revolutions. Describing himself as an image creator rather than a traditional painter, Suciu mines and references art history and contemporary imagery, reducing down the elements and adding color-coded symbolism. He has ‘his own complex way of making things in which painting, photography, drawing and print all cooperate while playing their individual parts.’
Inspired by his former studies on the restoration of Baroque paintings, Suciu has developed a process he calls ‘monoprinting’. A photographic image is split into a grid of A4 surfaces, each one printed on an acetate sheet, onto which a layer of acrylic paint is applied. The paint acts as a ‘glue’ that adheres directly to the canvas and once dry, the acetate sheet is peeled off. The result is a transference of the printed image with associated faults and imperfections, which Suciu then 'restores' by re-painting with oil and acrylic paint. Sometimes, as with works in the Disintegration series, he overlays the image multiple times using various colors until he creates a surface that is barely recognizable from the original. As a final stage the whole image is repainted. This multi-layered process creates compositions of reinvented images which allude to history, memory and the eventual dissolution of all things.
Universal Fatigue is on view throughout February 22 at Blain | Southern 547 W 25th St, New York, NY. Courtesy the artist and Blain|Southern. Photo by Cooper Dodd:
Witch Women @ Thank You For Asking in Los Angeles
Witch Women, the first group show at Thank You For Asking, features 8 female artists and visually embodies the spirit of this unique gallery. The show was born out of a desire for connection and trust among women, to heal wounds from the past, and to rebuild the coven by listening to eternal female intuition. Each artist chosen for this show presents work that has a distinct, vibrant, and empowered feminine energy. Curated by and featuring works from Jade Wolf and Rebecca Holopter, Witch Women also features artists Deedee Cheriel, Nikki McCauley, Amanda Faber, Kim Baise, Samantha Wilson, and Jade-Snow Carroll. Thank You For Asking is the creation of artist Jade Wolf, a new kind of gallery and event space focused on art, spirit, and humor. Beyond featuring artists and creators, this space holds movie screenings, art workshops, and weekly healing classes, including Multi-Dimensional Breathwork, Kundalini Yoga For Creativity, and The Best Experience: A journey through movement, breath, sound, and meditation.
Witch Women will be on view through March 27th at Thank You For Asking 8663 Venice Blvd, LA CA 90034. Call or email for appointments. photographs courtesy of Cynthia Alexandra
SISSÒN: COTTON [Phase 1] @ Wilhardt & Naud
Sisson exhibits their sixth body of work, COTTON, divided into two parts, Phase 1 is the first in this series.
Beginning in 2018 with a bag of gossypium (cotton) seeds delivered by mail from their uncle, these seeds sparked a dialogue between the artist and their partner. Those conversations were the catalyst to COTTON.
The body of work in this installment includes paintings, a tapestry, and quilts that the artist learned to make in Mississippi under the mentorship of the Gees Bend masters.
The artist explores the changing shape of slavery’s influence through a plant, tended to by enslaved millions who built America’s superpower economy and shaped its cultural, systemic, and social landscapes.
The plant provided an entry point, through which the artist could develop and explore a personal and direct relationship. Over a year and a half, they grew more than 600 cotton plants on the roof of their home and studio. The remainder of the recently devastated crop are now presented as living sculptures.
SISSÒN: COTTON [Phase 1] is on view throughout February 16, 2020 at Wilhardt & Naud 1667 North Main Street. Los Angeles, CA. photographs by Lani Trock
Peter Hujar & Paul Thek @ Mai 36 Galerie in Zurich
Peter Hujar and Paul Thek met in 1956. Until Hujar's death, the two artists remained close friends - a strong connection on both a spiritual and artistic level, which influenced the artistic work of both artists.
The life and art of Peter Hujar (1934-1987) are closely connected to New York. He moved in the intellectual environment of avant-garde dance, music, art and drag performances. Originally coming from the field of commercial photography, Hujar became more interested in depicting real life from the early 1970s onwards and from then on photographed people, animals and plants, still life, landscape and city, with the portrait taking a central place in his work.
Paul Thek (1933-1988) was an American sculptor and painter. Besides the sculptures and installations for which he is best known, he also created paintings and drawings. In the early 1960s Thek travelled to Europe, where he created extraordinary environments that were shown in important international exhibitions. In them, elements from the fields of art, literature, theatre and religion were intertwined, broadening the concept of work at the time and questioning the perception of art and life.
The group exhibition will be on view throughout March 14, 2020 at Mai 36 Galerie Raemistrasse 37, Zurich, CH. photographs courtesy of the gallery
Hollywood Babylon VIP Opening & Autre Issue 9 Release At The Former Spago With Jeffrey Deitch Gallery & Nicodim Part 2
Generously supported by Haoma. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper
Hollywood Babylon VIP Opening & Autre Issue 9 Release At The Former Spago With Jeffrey Deitch & Nicodim Gallery
Generously sponsored by Haoma. Photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper
601Artspace in New York Presents "How shall we dress for the occasion?"
Acceleration is accelerating. We are faster, stronger, better. We are digital. We are artificial. We are intelligent. We don’t have enough space but we have enough experience. We are connected, we are loud, we are confident. We have all the info we need. We have time. We manipulate time. We know the past, we know the future. We are the future, but somehow, we can’t even predict the weather. If the world has become wretched and damaged, if humanity is futile, “how shall we dress for the occasion?”
This exhibition, featuring artists Chulayarnnon Siriphol, Deniz Tortum, Kathryn Hamilton and Pınar Yoldaş, considers our obsession with future scenarios and how we try to make sense of personal mortality, technological progress and environmental collapse, simultaneously. Are we experiencing the “end of the future” or the “end of history”? How do we fight the accelerated passage of time? Why do we take measures to undo the effects of time? How does it feel to worry not only about our personal time but how much time the generations to come will have on earth? How do we think about the relationship between value and time, when there is an expiration date to humanity’s existence on earth? How shall we dress for the occasion? invites the audience to contemplate our multiple, contradictory experiences of time.
How shall we dress for the occasion is on view throughout March 22, 2020 at 601Artspace 88 Eldridge St. New York, NY. photographs courtesy of Etienne Frossard
Vaughn Spann: The Heat Lets us Know We're Alive @ Almine Rech In New York
The common-sense theory of language is that it says what it means. Or that it means what it says. Perhaps there’s a difference; perhaps not. Put simply, it comprises statements that are either true or false, and questions that help ascertain whether statements are true or false. Because truth, in the end, is what language is supposed to be about. The learned-sense theory of language is that it is a social construction, it changes according to who you are, with whom you are conversing and according to all the experiences they have accumulated, it changes through history, it changes with geography, it changes according to context. These days, everyone knows that language is a very slippery thing. That’s what happens when you try to express an infinity of ideas with a limited set of symbols. On one level, Vaughn Spann’s art explores much of the same territory, no more so than in his current exhibition, The Heat Lets us Know We’re Alive.
The Heat Lets us Know We’re Alive will be on view throughout February 22, 2020 at Almine Rech 39 East 78th Street, 2nd Floor New York, NY. photographs courtesy of Almine Rech
Peres Projects Presents Maelstrom by George Rouy in Berlin
Rouy’s approach to the body and his overall pursuit of painting is one of contradiction, harmony, and perpetual transformation, criss-crossing gender, form, and disposition. His work is a fever dream of amorphous and fluid embodiments depicting rhapsodic portraits of 21st century desire that is continuously refilled with physical dissonance, mystery and secrecy, ecstasy and turmoil.
Each work is liberated from established ways of being and becoming which examine the essence and meaning of encounters, drawing equally from the here-and-now, the internet and the machine, as well as more primordial expression and classical demands of color and form. The human figure has always preoccupied artists; its story dominates the history of art. In its imagination and in its image-making, we find clues as to how artists have engaged with the political and socio-cultural conditions and sentiments of their moment. Now we are in a time of renewed and committed interests in figurative painting, Rouy uses the figure as a multi-sided prism to examine and interrogate the contemporary crucibles of gender, fiction and technology.
Maelstrom will be on view throughout February 14, 2020 at Peres Projects Karl-Marx-Alle 82, Berlin, Germany. photographs courtesy of the gallery
"AN ALL COLORED CAST" By Hank Willis Thomas @ Kayne Griffin Corcoran In Los Angeles
An All Colored Cast is an exploration of color theory, popular culture, the development of Pop Art, Color Field painting, Minimalism, and the Hollywood film industry. In this new body of work, Thomas examines the portrayals of gender, race, and identity through the lens of film, performance, and color motion pictures.
Using color theory and screen color calibration charts as an aesthetic starting point, Thomas re-examines the language surrounding “color correction” and “white balance” in order to demonstrate the charged language of color, particularly around the time of desegregation and the proliferation of Technicolor in America.
An all Colored Cast is on view throughout March 7, 2020 at Kayne Griffin Corcoran 1201 S La Brea Ave. Los Angeles, CA. photographs courtesy of the gallery
Melanie Baker's The Optimates @ Cristin Tierney in New York
The Optimates presents three distinct scenes: a person stands at a podium; a man, seen from behind, speaks to someone unknown; and a group of men huddle in conversation at a window. The works are large in scale; some exceed life-size. All are made with charcoal, graphite and pigment on paper. Two are mounted on panels, and the other is presented loose, pinned to the wall.
Baker crops her images to draw attention to specific details. It isn’t immediately apparent in every work who the subject is, but signifiers indicate the immense power the subject wields. They wear dark suits and crisp white shirts, and several are pictured in richly adorned rooms. These are the people, we are meant to intuit, who possess wealth, class, and authority. They are also, clearly, all middle-aged or older white men, and Baker provides just enough context clues to suggest that they are either the focus of attention, or the ones cutting the back room deal. The exhibition title is a further nod to their status; the Optimates in ancient Rome were conservatives who favored rule by oligarchy and opposed immigration and assistance for the urban poor.
The Optimates will be on view throughout February 22 at Cristin Tierney 219 Bowery, Floor 2 New York, NY. photographs courtesy of the gallery
The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles Presents Paul McCarthy: Head Space, Drawings 1963–2019
The first comprehensive survey in the United States of drawings and works on paper by the Los Angeles–based artist Paul McCarthy (b. 1945, Salt Lake City), Paul McCarthy: Head Space, Drawings 1963–2019, reveals a rarely examined aspect of the artist’s oeuvre. Produced in thematic cycles, McCarthy’s drawings share the same visual language as the artist’s sculptural and performance works, addressing themes of violence, humor, death, sex, and politics, and featuring extensive art historical and pop-cultural references. By presenting his expansive career of more than five decades through the focused lens of drawing, the exhibition offers a greater understanding of this influential artist and social commentator.
Paul McCarthy: Head Space, Drawings 1963–2019 features 600 works on paper selected from McCarthy’s archive. The works incorporate and utilize a variety of mediums, including charcoal, graphite, ink, marker, and collage, as well as more unorthodox materials such as ketchup and peanut butter. A consummate and accomplished draftsperson, McCarthy approaches his daily drawing practice as a way of thinking—a blueprint for projects and a tool to flesh out complex ideas. Since the 1970s, McCarthy has also incorporated drawing into his performances, implementing it as part of an action and often drawing in character. In recent years, this practice of drawing in character has become central to his large-scale video performance projects, such as WS White Snow (2012–13), CSSC Coach Stage Stage Coach (2017), and NV Night Vater (2019–). In a process McCarthy terms “Life Drawing, Drawing Sessions” the artist and his actors produce drawings in costume among the props and simulacrum of his film sets. These works bring together the materials and crude gestures that have been present in the artist’s work for the greater part of his career.
Paul McCarthy: Head Space, Drawings 1963–2019 will be on view throughout May 10, 2020 at The Hammer Museum 10899 Wilshire Boulevard Los Angeles, CA. photographs courtesy of the gallery
Gisela Colon: Meta Minimal @ Gavlak Los Angeles
Through her syncretic process of exploring and expanding upon past history, sculptor Gisela Colon has succeeded in creating sculptures that convey the fullest possible array of sensory and intellectual experience, projecting cosmic energy and power outwards into the world. With her astute practice of Organic Minimalism– an idiosyncratic sculptural language that imbues life-like qualities into reductive forms– Colon approaches her sculptural practice from the expansive perspective of phenomenological concerns: addressing the physical laws of the universe such as gravity, time, movement, energy and transformation. Colon’s oeuvre is the result of a synthesis of pointed historical reflection and visceral raw energy.
Colon’s practice of Organic Minimalism simultaneously expands and challenges the legacies of Light and Space, Minimalism, Kinetic and Latin American Op Art, merging industrial inertness with transformative biological mutability. Her sensual, gender-ambiguous sculptural forms further connect her practice to a history of female artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Yayoi Kusama, Linda Benglis and Judy Chicago. By channeling Bourgeois’ notions of sexualized energies and Chicago’s nascent feminist atmospheric works, Colon similarly posits her sculptures as vehicles for conversion of classic masculine forms into feminized power.
Meta Minimal will be on view throughout March 7, 2020 at Gavlak 1700 South Santa Fe Avenue, Suite 440, Los Angeles, CA. photographs courtesy of the gallery
On the Politics of Delicacy @ Capitain Petzel in Berlin
On the Politics of Delicacy is a group exhibition conceived around the Robert Anton Theatre Collection. In the early 1970s Robert Anton (1949-1984) created a surreal miniature theatre which quickly achieved cult status and fascinated audiences both in the US and Europe. By bringing together multiple influences – from Antonin Artaud’s writings on the Theatre of Cruelty, alchemist principles of transformation and hybridity, post-WWI characters of George Grosz and Otto Dix, to the eccentric creatures of Hieronymus Bosch; but also early Hollywood and Disney motives, Federico Fellini’s baroque fantasies, and pop cultural impulses of his era – Anton created a unique visual language. Due to the intimacy of his performances which often took place in his loft with a maximum capacity of 18 spectators, his plays remained something of New York’s best-kept secret, a refuge into the surreal imaginary. The exhibition gives insight into Anton’s work by showing his intriguingly sculpted figurines (effectively, his ‘actors’), props and drawings.
At Capitain Petzel, curator Anke Kempkes contextualises the oeuvre of Robert Anton for the first time by unfolding thematic trajectories that resonate with his work, namely the politics of the home theatre, surrealist political theatre, the concept of ‘monstrosity’ in postwar female avant-garde sculpture, a new female painterly symbolism, and queer performativity in times of political polarization. With such specific trajectories in mind, a dynamic dialogue takes place between Anton’s oeuvre and works permeating both genre and epoch by German Dada artist Hannah Höch and Spanish poet and theatre director Federico García Lorca; Anton’s theatre pioneer contemporary Tadeusz Kantor and scenographer Kazimierz Wisniak; works by Wanda Czelkowska and Liliane Lijn; post-modernist and queer artists from East and West Duggie Fields, Jimmy De Sana, Krzysztof Jung, Raúl Martínez and Zoe Leonard; and contemporary artists Yael Bartana, Joanna Piotrowska, Stanislava Kovalcikova, Karolina Jablonska, Mikolaj Sobczak, Nicholas Grafia, Billy Morgan and Uel.
On the Politics of Delicacy is on view throughout February 22 at Capitain Petzel Karl-Marx-Allee 45, 10178 Berlin. photographs courtesy of the gallery
Gagosian Presents MAN RAY "The Mysteries of Château du Dé" in San Francisco
During his storied career, Man Ray, a multidisciplinary artist with a rare breadth, worked in a variety of mediums, including painting, photography, sculpture, printmaking, film, poetry, and prose. While for him photography and painting were paramount, his work in early film and cinema is often overlooked.
Man Ray’s first experience in making film was in New York, in 1920, when he worked with Marcel Duchamp on an unsuccessful attempt to create a three-dimensional film. After moving to Paris, in 1921, his diverse experimentation in the medium of photography eventually led him back to the moving image.
the exhibition also includes objects, drawings, and photography. Moving fluidly between media, Man Ray often made several iterations of a work—photographing it, assembling and disassembling, or making multiples—reproduction being crucial to his concept of the art object. Throughout his vast body of work, Man Ray alluded to relationships between the real and the fictive, the literal and the imaginative, with a deft mastery over the liminal territory between the abstract and the figurative form.
The Mysteries of Château du Dé will be on view throughout February 29, 2020 at Gagosian 657 Howard Street, San Francisco, CA. photographs courtesy of the gallery
Frank Mädler's Teile der Vernunft @ Galerie Susanne Albrecht in Berlin
Fundamentally, Frank Mädler is a doubter, and precisely for this reason he chose – well before the era of Photoshop – the camera as his medium. Whatever the camera documents must exist, it has objectivity. But behind the camera is a human being who determines how the camera works and what is photographed. So objectivity is already in doubt: it, too, is subjective, the camera gives the photographer enough leeway to lend the objects his subjective image. That is what characterises him: he interprets the world with the aid of the camera. So is man the creator of the objects? Does his eye determine how they appear?
These questions come to mind when we look at Frank Mädler’s photographs. They transform banal, familiar everyday things into independent pictures and give them a new meaning. Birds become blurs of light blue, water lilies are turned into dazzling monumental sculptures with many colours, and even the sea does not appear blue or gray, but rather beige, in a strange light that the photographer did not manipulate in any way.
Teile der Vernunft is on view throughout February 8, 2020 at Galerie Susanne Albrecht Bleibtreustr. 48, 10623 Berlin. photographs courtesy of the gallery
Clintel Steed's Allegory Of Now @ M+B In Los Angeles
Clintel Steed’s paintings create a visual language that is a way of understanding the world. His work manifests an acute awareness of the history of painting, its potential, and combines it with an unfiltered immediacy. For Allegory of Now, Steed has made a suite of new paintings based on works by canonical painters such as Jacques-Louis David, Peter Paul Rubens, and Giotto. Selected for their subject matter and such universal themes as loyalty, judgment, and punishment, each narrative remains relevant today and is a reflection of how the world feels to the artist now. In The Last Judgment, bodies topple and free-fall towards the abyss — an unpitying metaphor of our mortality and a prescient evocation of our present situation. In Bacchanalia, Steed brings alive the inequity and absurdity in the follies of excess.
In the process of transcribing the compositions, Steed deciphers the hidden geometries in each work, the shapes, colors and connections that make up the whole. There is an unadulterated devotion to the materiality -- surfaces are fragmented, and paint is often thickly layered. In some works he paints and repaints the canvas, building an accumulation of figures and forms in buttery impasto, while in others he works briskly -– wet-on-wet — and lets the white gessoed underpainting crack throughout the composition. In this reworking and re-presenting of classical themes, Steed aims to give us a greater sense of perspective on our current circumstances.
Allegory of Now is on view throughout February 7, 2020 at M+B 612 North Almont Drive Los Angeles, CA. photographs courtesy of the gallery