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

Mulholland Bloom by José Cuevas & Marco Milani

cape jacket: vintage Comme des Garçons Couture
bodysuit and tights: Wolford
shoes and earrings: Gucci


photography by José Cuevas
styling by Marco Milani
hair & makeup by Briky Stone
art direction by Malena de la Torre
modeling by Riley Hillyer @ Photogenics LA
special thanks to Paumé Los Angeles

full look: Gucci
glasses: Oliver Peoples x The Row

 

suit: vintage Philosophy di Lorenzo
earrings: vintage archive

blazer: vintage Givenchy
shirt: vintage Christian Dior
earring: Gucci
headpiece: vintage archive

 

dress: vintage Julia Clancey
earring: vintage archive

 

full look: Gucci
earrings: vintage archive
glasses: Oliver Peoples x The Row

dress: vintage Roksanda Ilincic
shirt: vintage Christian Dior
gloves: Dolce & Gabbana from Paumé Los Angeles
earring: vintage archive
necklace: vintage Chanel and vintage Xenia Bous from Paumé Los Angeles

 

full look: vintage Gucci
earrings: vintage archive

 

blazer: Givenchy from Paumé Los Angeles
shirt: Christian Dior from Paumé Los Angeles
pants: Victor & Rolf from Paumé Los Angeles
earrings: Gucci
necklace: Chanel from Paumé Los Angeles
headpiece: vintage archive

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

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.