Read our Interview of Nicole Wittenberg Ahead of Her Debut Exhibition @ Fernberger Gallery in Los Angeles →

Nicole Wittenberg, Midsummer Morning 3, 2023. Image courtesy of Fernberger Gallery.

Garnering inspiration from riotous Fauvist material, Nicole Wittenberg intertwined herself with the world of art from the moment she saw Matisse’s Woman with a Hat. Rooted very confidently in her own intuition, Wittenberg has pursued interests related to her own gestural forms without much hesitation. Her artistic philosophy can be summarized by the kind of unbending compromise that turns heads and makes the world worth looking at. Imbued with synesthetic coloration, the work she portrays is embedded in its own unquantifiable emotional scale. She fearlessly plays with the kind of aggressive coloration that’s capable of conveying its own story, and her viewers get to reap the benefits. Nicole Wittenberg’s Jumpin’ at the Woodside is on view at Fernberger Gallery, a new gallery in Los Angeles. Well known for her erotica work, Wittenberg has garnered well-deserved attention for her experimentation with the body in space. After a shift in interest from figural forms to the entity that houses them, her focus turned to the landscape art we get to witness in Jumpin’ at the Woodside. Read more.

The Human Body and the Corpus of Los Angeles Intertwine in Catherine Opie's harmony is fraught @ Regen Projects

105 Freeway in harmony is fraught by Catherine Opie in Los Angeles

Catherine Opie, 105 Freeway, 1994, 1994/2024 © Catherine Opie, Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Catherine Opie’s eleventh exhibition with Regen Projects, harmony is fraught presents over sixty photographs never shown publicly before, drawn from over thirty years of making pictures in and of Los Angeles. We see a deeply singular diary of Opie’s world—especially her early years as an emerging artist in the 1990s—intertwined with the complex public life of the city she made her home, from its signature freeways and landmarks, like the Hollywood sign, to scenes of activism and surfers at the beach. Together, they collectively trace a profoundly personal story, as well as the evolving drama and common grandeur of Los Angeles itself, a singular assembly of constructions, conflicts, and communities.

 
 

Installed in carefully considered constellations, photographs of freeways and bridges connect and encircle images of more private destinations, portraits of intimates, and telling interiors. Opie likens the literal, tender, resilient human body to the great corpus of the mutable city, always growing, aging, breaking, standing firm—another body with its own queer logic. Curiously, despite the quarter of a century or more that separates us from the moment of their making, many of these images seem to proffer the same city we know now. Likewise, we see subjects yearning for many of the same suspended desires or imperiled freedoms we seek today, evidencing a constancy (or stasis) that can be both touching and deeply unsettling.

harmony is fraught is on view through March 3 @ Regen Projects, 6750 Santa Monica Blvd. Los Angeles

Drunk on Violence, Sensual Chaos, and Alex Foxton's Swoon @ Galerie Derouillon

Sebastian (Hate-no-hama), 2023 Huile sur toile, Oil on canvas, 70 x 180 cm 27 1/2 x 70 7/8 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Derouillon, Paris© Grégory Copitet

Alex Foxton’s paintings are as cathartic as they are therapeutic. The ambiguity of his figures, the colours, the compositions and the narrative logic—also remind us of the fable of Abel and Cain that he has revisited—prevent any simplistic reading, and bring us face to face with the paradoxical violence that inhabits the acts of creating order. Here we find the artist’s fascination with images of young men conscripted into armies the world over, whose naivety and innocence can become the perfect fuel for fascist violence. The paintings, most of which are made up of several layers of other images, remind us, like a manuscript would, that the past informs the present—just as the present reconfigures the past, because the latter can only be read through the former—so all these scenes are rooted in our imaginations, ways of thinking, and upbringings: it does not go unnoticed to anyone that the protagonists are all boys. Chaos is also an inherent part of the method of composition, with the artist painting ‘on’ and ‘against’ ‘randomly prepared backgrounds,’ thus allowing an unconscious image to emerge.

These new works by Foxton take up these old dynamics within his work: a kind of exploration of masculinity and heroic figures, a questioning of the spatial, aesthetic, and symbolic role of color, keeping its distance from national narratives, and also a somewhat-thwarted declaration of love for older paintings. There seems to be a new perspective added to this, a desire to represent the scattered fragments of the world, violently thrown every which way, that people working with good intentions are still trying to weave back together, like Isis patching up the dismembered corpse of Osiris, or the tikkun olam of the Kabbalah. It is only by being patient and attentive with the world, despite the calls for destruction from any given side, that we will be able to purge the black bile that corrupts the hearts of men.

Swoon is on view through February 24th, 2024 at Galerie Derouillon, Etienne Marcel 13 rue de Turbigo, 75002

UNESCO & Prada Group Announce The Third Edition of Their Sea Beyond Program

Today is International Day of Education, and in celebration, UNESCO and Prada Group have announced the third edition of their SEA BEYOND educational program dedicated to the dissemination of ocean literacy and ocean preservation, as well as a new partnership with Bibliothèques Sans Frontières (Libraries without Borders). This year, 34,385 students from 184 secondary schools across 56 countries will benefit from the SEA BEYOND’s training, which will focus on the interrelation between the ocean and climate, and the associated environmental challenges. It will offer ocean literacy training sessions for students and teachers and include live lessons with UNESCO ocean and climate experts. The program will run from January through June 2024 and will end with an international contest, as per the previous editions. 

All participating schools will their own awareness campaigns, which will encourage their peers to develop more conscious behaviors that help to promote ocean preservation using text, graphics or interactive content. The jury evaluating the campaigns will be composed of new and pre-established SEA BEYOND “friends,” the so-called SEA BEYONDers, people who have placed a love for the ocean at the center of their personal and professional lives.  

Springtime at the Scottsdale, Arizona Walmart Turns Commercial Landscapes into Sites of Nostalgic Mundanity @ Galerie Max Hetzler

Known for his paintings of man-made and natural landscapes, Jake Longstreth depicts American suburban and rural scenes with a clarity that is at once disquieting and subtly humorous. Devoid of human presence and bathed in perpetual midday light, these landscapes – among them American big box stores and chain restaurants – draw out a poetry of the everyday with a surprising warmth and painterly affection. Though American commercial developments may be considered a crass or ugly subject matter, Longstreth’s sunny neutrality underscores the fact that most Americans find them neither bleak nor remarkable. So ubiquitous that they are rarely truly seen, the stores and restaurants depicted in these compositions comprise a 21st-century version of the American commons. Longstreth encourages us to linger, be still, look. We might ask ourselves: What has become of these landscapes? What will become of them? Beyond the signature quietude of Longstreth’s landscapes, this body of work underscores the artist’s astute observation of landscapes in transformation. Revealed from unusual vantage points, tenderly rendered wildflowers, foliage, and trees cast dappled shadows on their surroundings, literally and metaphorically throwing into relief the cultivated domain that surrounds them.

Springtime at the Scottsdale, Arizona Walmart, is on view through March 2nd at Galerie Max Hetzler, Bleibtreustraße 15/16, Berlin.

Autre Magazine Co-Hosts A Fog Art Fair Dance Party In San Francisco With On Approval and Friends

Last Friday, AUTRE magazine cohosted a hot and sweaty late night dance party to celebrate Fog Art Fair in San Francisco with On Approval, Altman Siegel, Value Culture and Exhibited.At. A mix of tech and art worlds collided with locals at the Lions Den Lounge in Chinatown with music by Eugene Whang and Jeremy Costello. photos by Oliver Kupper

Günther Förg's Diverse Utopia-Critical Body of Work Dissected @ Galerie Max Hetzler

 
 

Günther Förg’s comprehensive and multidisciplinary oeuvre, which spans five decades, includes painting, drawing, and murals, as well as sculpture and photography. The focus is on material, color, and space. The artist's experimental approach to abstraction and monochrome painting was directed against the trend toward figuration that prevailed in Germany in the 1980s. His works made continuous reference to 20th-century modernism, whose utopia he critically questioned. In this context, he engaged with art movements as diverse as early modernism, referencing artists such as Edvard Munch, or the American abstract expressionists including Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Cy Twombly. Elements of conceptual art can also be found throughout Förg’s work, which additionally challenge traditional interpretations.

Günther Förg is on view through February 24th at Galerie Max Hetzler, Bleibtreustraße 45, Berlin.

Highlights From FOG Design+Art Preview Gala Supporting SFMOMA’s Education and Family Programs

The tenth anniversary of FOG Design+Art included a decadent preview gala to support SFMOMA’s Education and Family Programs, which benefits 100,000 young people across the Bay Area every year. This year’s fair included 45 exhibitions by twentieth-century and contemporary design dealers and leading art galleries, and the launch of FOG FOCUS, an invitational designed to showcase art by young and underrepresented artists. FOG FOCUS will features nine exhibitors as well as art installations, activations, and performances in Fort Mason Center’s Pier 2 building. FOG Design+Art is open from January 18th to 21st. Click here to purchase tickets. photographs by Perry Shimon

Read Our Interview of Experimental Catalan Musician Marina Herlop →

 

top by Piero D’Angelo

 

Catalan musician Marina Herlop’s fourth album Nekkuja starts with a bang. On its opening track “Busa,” deep synths pierce through a bouquet of harp strings, choral arrangements and giggling voices. “I always want to include this surprise factor,” she says. “It’s like when you go on a trip, you always need something unexpected to happen, you need to go on a little adventure.” When speaking of the record, Marina often invokes metaphors, comparing the process of making music to architecture, gardening or even playing video games. While her melodies are mysterious and playful, combining elements of devotional and folk music with contemporary electronics, her lyrics are nonsensical, a deliberate choice to allow for the music to speak for itself (Nekkuja is a word she made up). “I don't want to talk about my life, I want to make music that feels aesthetically interesting,” she says. The artist, who counts Björk among her fans, is nonchalant about her recent success. “I know that this has come and this might go at some point, because people might get tired of it or because there's another project that feels hotter at the moment. But the effort I’ve put into music, that growth, never goes away.” We spoke to Marina Herlop about the spiritual nature of creating art, music as a refuge, and trusting her instincts. Read more.

Nike Women Celebrates Style, Self-Expression and Movement for Her in Los Angeles

Nike Women’s Stud Country Event. Image by Simone Niamani Thompson.

Nike Women hosted a weekend imbued with innovative movement and style as an homage to the power that can be derived from community-focused experiences.

On Friday, December 8, Nike Women hosted an intimate dance class with Stud Country at The Paramour Estate. Guests were encouraged to hit the dance floor wearing pieces from Nike’s holiday 2023 collection, selected by stylist Keyla Marquez, paired with favorite pieces from their closet. Stud Country was born from the legacy of queer dance spaces and honors the rich history of LGBTQ cowboy culture.

The next day, on Saturday, December 9, Nike hosted a day-long immersive experience called Nike Style Studios Neuehouse West Hollywood. Hosted by world renowned talent such as Honey Balenciaga, Sienna Lalau, Storm DeBarge and Courtni Poe, guests participated in a range of unique workshops that inspire different forms of self-expression through style, dance, creativity, and community. 

Nike Women celebrated the power of community in Los Angeles with this special weekend of programming that honors a new era of democratized fashion, prioritizing style, self-expression and movement.

 

Stud Country Portraits by Carlos Eric Lopez.

 

Pipenco Lorena's Knitted Gowns Are A Delicate Homage to Her Mother's Post-Communist Immigration


photography by Kelli McGuire
creative direction and styling by Neptune Quek
set design by Lane Vineyard
makeup by Shoko Kodama
styling assistance by Madison Lynn
talent Millie Dunstan & Emma Deegan

The maternal determination to provide a life of opportunity for her post-Communist kin is woven with care into every stitch of Pipen Colorena’s knitwear gowns and slippers. Her newest collection is a delicate transmogrification of her family’s lived experience of immigrating from Romania to London, a push and pull between the pride and struggle of embracing a new chapter while mourning all that’s left behind.

Colorena takes inspiration from the creative exercises her grandmother developed for her as a child while her mother was away at work. After drawing a row of women in dresses on the page, her grandmother would challenge the young designer-to-be to find inventive ways of coloring and elaborating on them based on the various women within their community. Harkening those early mental souvenirs, a coquettish play with the memory of their softness, kindness, and flamboyant nature gives shape and dimension to each and every piece.

There is also a heavy dose of Romanian cinema and art from the 1970s imbued in the gowns, giving them a very personal sense of romantic nostalgia. Finally, to complement the elegant construction of finely knitted fabric, there are moments of conspicuous unraveling—a candid omission of subjection to struggle, the hardship inherent in the process of immigration and assimilation. It is an ode to the fortitude of a mother and a future generation made stronger by the crucible of passion and hardship.

 
 

Highlights Of Art Basel Miami Beach 2023

Alex Israel, photo by Zach Hilty BFA.com.

text by Jennifer Piejko

“For Proust, it was the madeleine cookie. For me, it was 1980s frozen yogurt,” artist Alex Israel introduced his project Snow Beach Frozen Treats, an installation offering sweets as well as turquoise- and magenta-tinted views over South Beach. The nostalgic ice cream shop project (the artist’s family once owned a frozen yogurt shop in L.A.) was set up inside 1111 Lincoln Road, the Tropical Modernist parking structure designed by Herzog & de Meuron—a fitting opening for Miami’s annual art week.

While this year’s calendar had been somewhat more subdued than in years past, the work that made it to the city this year also felt more sensitive to the times, offering more balms and room for introspection than viral spectacle. Inside Art Basel Miami Beach, the city’s main fair, visitors were greeted with large-scale installations such as Ja’Tovia Gary’s Quiet As It’s Kept, centered in a 26-minute film made in response to Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye and featuring interviews with the author and Dr. Kokahvah Zauditu-Selassie, author of Spiritual Traditions in the Novels of Toni Morrison, as well as clips that call on the characters and concepts within The Bluest Eye—Lil’ Kim, historical documentary film footage, Azealia Banks, and hot takes on social media mixed with Gary’s original animations. A list of counties in Florida where The Bluest Eye is currently banned is posted at the installation’s entrance. 

Tribeca gallery Freight+Volume gave over their booth to the work of Karen Finley, one of the legendary four artists who sued the National Endowment for the Arts in 1990 after their fellowships were withdrawn after their work was considered indecent, pornographic, and obscene. Finley, as well as John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller, eventually won back their grants in the 1998 Supreme Court ruling, but the N.E.A., as well as U.S. public arts funding in general, reacted by retreating into even more conservative tendencies. Finley’s infamous Go Figure was on view for the 25th anniversary of the case, opening up a nude-model drawing class to fair visitors; some of the gallery’s artists were among the drawing participants in the artwork, drawing the body in protest of some of Florida’s recent rulings narrowing civil rights and a new generation of culture wars in the state. 

Cynthia Talmadge at 56 Henry

Painter Cynthia Talmadge made New York gallery 56 Henry’s booth a pastel-hued kaleidoscopic cube, with wall-sized pointillist paintings and a hand-dyed carpet, in Half Light, her re-creation of Color School painter Mary Pinchot Meyer’s Washington, D.C. studio, showing it simultaneously at three points in possibilities: first, the reality of her daily routine there, in 1963; second, the scene immediately following her 1964 murder, a still-unsolved case rumored to be an assassination by the C.I.A.;  and the third, what Talmadge imagines it would have looked like had the artist been working in 1969. Pinchot Meyer was enmeshed in D.C. high society as much as she was in leftist activist circles, and was seen as a threat to the former. Talmadge’s work of historical fiction underlines the fears that art, even in abstraction, can hold. 

At the Zurich and Paris-based Galerie Peter Kilmann’s booth, Los Angeles artists Raffi Kalenderian and Alberto Cuadros set up a prime destination for both having meaningful conversations as well as laughing them off: a bar, simply calling it Raffi and Al’s. Describing their collaborative work as a “Trojan horse for good times,” the mobile bar looked like a bespoke shipping crate on wheels, made from wooden stretcher bars, linen, and gold hardware and standard minibar drinks—champagne, wine, White Claws—on offer. Headshots of famed Raffi and Al’s patron, including Salma Hayek and L.A. gallerist Matthew Brown, as well as paintings by the artists and their friends and collaborators covered the bar’s surfaces and surrounding booth walls. 

After closing down the fair for the day, crowds swayed to something a little scruffier: a Lot 11 Skatepark, an open lot under a freeway. Sukeban was a one-night-only Japanese women’s wrestling tournament, hosted by Tokyo actor and writer Kunichi Nomura. Wrestlers dressed in anime-inspired costumes by Olympia Le-Tan, hats by Stephen Jones, and makeup by Isamaya Ffrench battled for a belt designed by Marc Newson. A sprawling, snaking night market took over the rest of the underpass. With every swing inside the ring, the crowds let out a roar that drowned out the endless traffic swirling around them. 

Gil Kuno's Early Internet Exploration Remains an Electric Testament to Online Creativity in Solo Exhibition @ panke.gallery in Berlin

Gil Kuno’s work is an intricate tapestry of sound art, installations, and video art. His current solo exhibition at Panke Gallery exhibits his earliest art creations – those created on the Internet in the 90s. 2024 marks the 30th anniversary of the first of these creations, Unsound. "Unsound.com" (1994) was a pioneering media experiment that fused sight and sound, allowing users to interactively engage with artists' works in both visual and audio formats. Through crowd-sourcing, it facilitated artistic curation by audience votes – an innovation that even captured the admiration of Timothy Leary, who subsequently endorsed the site. In 1996, Gil Kuno introduced Wiggle, the world's first Internet band. This groundbreaking endeavour leveraged the Internet's connectivity to forge musical collaborations across geographical boundaries, culminating in a band composed of members from Japan, Australia, and the United States. They achieved a major label deal and released multiple albums, all while some band members remained faceless due to their geographically dispersed nature.

Unsound: The Shape of Sound is on view through December 20th at panke.gallery, Hof V, Gerichtstraße 23, 13347 Berlin.

Caitlin Cherry Centers Black Femininity as Her Muse in Womanizer @ The Hole in Los Angeles

Caitlin Cherry, Lilphantoms (A Hot Summer Night at Crypto.com Arena), 2023. Image courtesy of The Hole.

Caitlin Cherry’sWomanizer is the artist’s second solo exhibition with The Hole. Through painting, sculpture and installation, Cherry creates a personal archive of Black popular culture on the internet by centering femme entertainers as her muses. Composed of celebrities from online image banks like Getty Images as well as sex workers, drag queens and social media influencers, these eight paintings depict popular radical aesthetics within the global Black diaspora. Through a simulated moiré pattern system, Cherry is able to recreate the phenomena of the viewing Black women through a computer screen in order to express how contemporary Black femininity is co-produced by technology.

Womanizer is on view through December 30 @ The Hole, 844 N La Brea Ave Los Angeles CA 90038

Brody Albert’s “Empty, Except for the Ghost” @ Hunter Shaw Fine Art

text by Hannah Sage Kay

An art deco jail turned squat, turned rave venue, turned arts organization, turned youth boxing club has sat abandoned for the better part of the last half century at 421 N Avenue 19. Broken glass and graffiti mark its facade of 16 pane windows, through which it seems idle riders walking to the bus stop across the street passed the time by throwing rocks. The composition that’s resulted has been documented and recreated by Brody Albert in a series of seven windows cast in white polymer gypsum which now hang across a warm gray wall at Hunter Shaw Fine Art. Supported by the clamps one might expect to find in some archeological display of a looted plinth or section of fresco ripped from its site to instead conjure the aura of times past for museum goers on the other side of the world, the windows on which these sculptures are based possess an indexical relationship with their city: a record of passing time, of resentment for its deplorable public transit, of ghost hunters in search of a troubled past and haunted present, of willful abjection that somehow passes for charm.

Proximity to the divine, the ancient, the supernatural, the famous seems to be a shared aspiration. Los Angeles undoubtedly draws those in search of the latter, and so it is a city marked by mundane lore wherein Hollywood bus tours will show you where celebrity lived, died, ate, and shat. But what about a bus tour for the city’s most desecrated spaces: abandoned buildings, vacant lots, discarded suitcases? 

A bird drinks from a small puddle of rainwater on the sunken surface of one such suitcase. Encountered by Albert on a morning walk—recast in epoxy and fiberglass and equipped with a hidden fountain to create a gurgling pool of water—the suitcase now sits at an odd angle on the gallery floor: a bird bath minus the bird. Absenting all signs of life, the suitcase and the windows together posit a future in which the desecrated is all that remains to represent our present—monumentalizing those banalities we try our best to ignore. Will anything else remain of the lives lived on N Avenue 19—except perhaps, the ghosts?

Brody Albert: Empty, Except for the Ghost will be on view at Hunter Shaw Fine Art until December 17.

Irony and Intimacy Intersect in Lovers in the Backseat @ FeldbuschWiesnerRudolph in Berlin

“‘Lovers in the Backseat’ refers to romantic and intimate relationships. Everything we do happens because we can't help it: Breathing, living, loving and creating art, these are our common elementary needs." (A.N. & R.S.)

The connection between the works of Robert Schittko and Anna Nero lies in the exploration of identity, playfulness and irony, as well as a slight sexiness that resonates in both artistic practices. They take the exhibition visitor on the "back seat", behind their shoulders, on the motorway, country road or overtaking lane - always on the way, but where are they actually going...? Both Nero and Schittko harbor an aversion to self-referential art. Instead, they explore the self in their studios and transform their lives into a vivid artistic practice. Each in their own way: Schittko's sculptural and photographic art focuses on the development of their own identity. Nero provokes with her abstract-representational paintings and ceramics.

Lovers in the Backseat is on view through January 6th at FeldbuschWiesnerRudolph, Jägerstraße 5, 10117 Berlin.

WhiteBox.LA Presents Tim Biskup: EMERGENT @ Face Guts Gallery In Los Angeles

For the past 15 years, Tim Biskup has been perfecting a style of monochrome graphite drawings on paper that has come to define his artistic practice. The abstract images he creates with a single block of graphite draw on modernist forms simultaneously reminiscent of the Isamu Noguchi and Henry Moore, but are executed with the whimsy and humor of contemporary flat field artists like and Joe Bradley and Jonas Wood. Biskup has garnered tens of millions of views of his live drawing videos posted to his @tbiskup account on Instagram. Many of the works created live on this platform will be exhibited as part of EMERGENT. Culled from thousands of finished drawings and studies Biskup’s Face Guts exhibition examines the process and breadth of this body of his work and includes works created throughout the 2020 pandemic and some as recently as the day of the opening event. Face Guts Gallery will also host a series of live drawing events that will allow the public to witness the spontaneous birth of Biskup’s graceful lines and will be integrated into the show as they are created. EMERGENT will be on view at Face Guts Gallery from December 9 to January 7 2024 with an opening reception on December 9th 5-8pm. 4136 Verdugo Road Los Angeles 90065

Cloud Gate's Lunar Halo Questions the Body's Purpose in Our Current Technological Age


text by Lara Monro


Cloud Gate was founded in 1973 by Lin Hwai-Min; one of the first Taiwanese choreographers to bring contemporary dance to the Chinese world. His language became emblematic of the country’s own national struggle in establishing an identity for themselves, perched between communist China and the wider world. 

Cheng Tsung-lung took over from Hwai-min in 2020. Big shoes to fill. Fortunately Tsung-Long’s undeniable determination and vision—from humble beginnings as a street hawker of slippers to internationally recognized choreographer—made it a manageable challenge.

The timing of his appointment as Artistic Director, on the other hand, not so much. No sooner had he decided to create Lunar Halo—a production inspired by the natural phenomenon of the same name exploring how our bodies inhabit a technologically-advanced world—Covid-19 forced the world to pause. 

Light refracts through layers of ice in the atmosphere to produce a lunar halo, which is ultimately a sparkling ring around the moon. Tsung-lung first witnessed the arresting event in Iceland. Soon after, he went on to choreograph the 70-minute piece that includes thirteen dancers (seven male, six female) and examines “the invisible hand of all-powerful big data.” The hauntingly etherial soundtrack created by the Icelandic band Sigur Rós both compliments and jars with the dancers versatile movements, which are indicative of Cloud Gate’s unique training; a fusion of tai chi, calligraphy, martial arts, and meditation. 

To signify the forever growing dependance of society’s reliance on technology, the performers interact with one another in a multitude of mesmerizing, abstract, and experimental ways. Take the opening scene, where a sea of male bodies converge as one; flowing and shape-shifting between what looks like a strand of DNA and a centipede. Tsung-lung further exaggerates the overarching theme of technology, by using multiple LED screens to present images and shapes that reiterate the insidious nature of technology and our ubiquitous, cult-like dependance on it. As the performance draws to an end, a thin screen appears from the ceiling, presenting a larger-than-life naked male; perhaps a digital god, or Satan? 

Either way, Lunar Halo presents one of the essential questions of our age: if we can satisfy our needs and desires with just a few taps of a screen, what is the purpose of the human body? A beautiful irony in this case given the physical nature of the performance; the strength and reliance of each dancer and their dependance on one another. 

group of dancers huddled with big hair movement

"Portraiture as Social Commentary" Showcases the Genre's Explosive Social Capital @ Persons Projects in Berlin

 

Zofia Kulik
Land-Escape I (2001)
silver gelatin print, 180 x 150 cm

 

Persons Projects’ latest group exhibition, Portraiture as Social Commentary, not only highlights the different aspects of the genre but also links together a variety of artistic perspectives. A portrait is a painting, a photograph, a sculpture, or any other representation of a person in which the face and its expressions are predominant. They reveal the presence of the subject viewed from the perspective of the artist – a merger of contrasts between what’s projected by one and perceived by another. These images become mirrors of many faces that reflect both the political and cultural undercurrents relevant to the time period in which they were conceived.

Portraiture as Social Commentary is on view through January 27th, 2024, at Persons Projects, Lindenstr. 34–35, 10969 Berlin.