If the Whitney Biennial is a snapshot of American art at this moment, and if any intimate encounter with American art at this moment must be mediated (as all intimacies these days are), then Marcel Breuer’s museum building here at 945 Madison Avenue is a well-disposed mediation for capturing twenty-four scenes of America. In assembling the artistsand groups I tried to answer a question of Breuer’s from his notes on the building: “What should a museum look like, a museum in Manhattan?”

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How to define “American” in a survey of contemporary American art, especially one with as much history behind it as the Whitney Biennial, is a question that has often challenged, even vexed, curators. As an American who has spent much of the last thirteen years in the United Kingdom, I have been compelled by artists whose work is as hybrid as the significant global, environmental, and technological shifts reshaping the United States.

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Although it may be far-reaching to think that a Whitney Biennial could be organized as a curriculum for other artists, aiming at pedagogy seemed a worthy ambition. Not because I am an artist and a teacher, nor because I sought to create a democratic survey, but because I didn’t want the frame that the viewer will look through to be a purely subjective take on contemporary American art.

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On occasion of his eighth personal exhibition at Art Concept, Jean Luc Blanc presents a new series of drawings and paintings. When talking about this artist, who has been shaking up the French art-scene for the last 20 years, it is difficult to get off the beaten tracks and avoid quoting his own sources of inspiration. We remember his 2009 “Opera Rock” exhibition at the CAPC-Bordeaux with pleasure, as an unusual retrospective in which he took the liberty of surrounding himself with his artist-friends. Generous, faithful, alternative, bizarre, this collector-at- heart definitely is a well-rounded individual, but do we really know him?

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At the beginning of the 1990s, Martin Kersels experimented with his body. As an active member of the group SHRIMPS (with Pam Casey, Gail Gonzalez, Steven Nagler, Ryan Hill and Weba Garretson), he performed a series of familiar and simple gestures: holding, throwing, falling, kissing, cadencing, rocking; performances that oscillated between radicality and the absurd, both transpiring through the photographs taken during the performance. Simultaneously, he developed a 3-dimensional work guided by movement. Inspired by objects and the body language of daily life, Martin Kersels builds not only staged spaces where body and machine interact, but also animated sculptures producing incongruous actions and sounds. The bizarre dimension of his work is only a facade, his plastic work is in fact underpinned by a conceptual and critical reflexion on our relations to the world and society. The constant discussion between bodies, space, and the object is an integral part of his practice.

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Stuart Shave/Modern Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Lara Schnitger. This is the third solo show of the Los Angeles-based Dutch-born artist with the gallery. Schnitger’s signature works – sculptures, paintings and banners made of fabric – are brought together in this exhibition with the artist’s recently launched line of clothing Sister of Arp.

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kaufmann repetto is delighted to announce Pae White’s fifth solo exhibition at the gallery. Continuing in her exploration of diverse materials, techniques and media, …and then you know what? presents two site-specific installations along with a large scale sculptural work that reconfigure the gallery’s architecture, while playing with themes of tradition and history.

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Mamco presents a retrospective of work by the French artist Philippe Thomas (1951-1995), some of whose work is part of the museum collection. Displayed on all four floors of the building, it is divided into three sequences.

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The largest Polish presentation of Paulina Ołowska’s work to date, the exhibition shows both its thematic diversity and the various working methods employed by the artist. It features works of painting, sculpture, stage design, installation, neon light, assemblage, drawing, collage, textile, as well as a new installation, created specially for the exhibition: a fashion store with a collection by the brand Clemens en August. In her practice, Ołowska explores the issue of liaisons between the historical avant-garde and the present, creating a melange of arts: high-brow with applied and popular. She is preoccupied with contemporariness and topicality, which she confronts with utopian visions from the past, encouraging the viewer to reflect on forgotten aesthetics and ideologies.

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For some years Belgian artists Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys have been present on the wider stage of the international art scene. They have been producing a unique epic-absurd theatre consisting of video works, photography series and sculptural installations. In February 2014 they will present “Das Wunder des Lebens” (The Miracle of Life), their first large solo show in Austria. Its main element is a large-scale installation which the artists describe as following: “We think of the big exhibition space as a place of stillness. You can only hear the noise of the water plashing from the fountain and you can see 400 (silent) drawings. There are no colours in the exhibition. Only black and white”.

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Far and High is the inaugural group exhibition at FAHRENHEIT — an interrelated residency program and space dedicated to exhibitions, performances, film programs and talks, initiated by FLAX (France Los Angeles Exchange) and developed by director and curator Martha Kirszenbaum.

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Ceal Floyer tests, teases and skirts around the boundaries of what art can or should be in her first exhibition at Lisson Gallery in Milan, which coincides with a major presentation of her works at Museion in nearby Bolzano. Floyer’s 2008 work, Taking a Line for a Walk, in which a machine that creates the white lines on sports fields is driven around and takes its title from Paul Klee’s assertion in the introduction to his Pedagogical Sketchbook of 1923 that a drawing should be: “An active line on a walk, moving freely, without goal. A walk for walk’s sake” Floyer’s own meandering line through space – a performance and a sculpture, as much as a drawing – will be recreated throughout the galleries, drawing visitors downstairs. A rectangular swathe of grass in the garden, entitled Greener Grass (2014), will indeed – as the old saying goes – seem brighter than its counterpart in nature and more vivid than real life.

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This exhibition features new photographic works by acclaimed Vancouver artist Stan Douglas. Through synthetic and artificially constructed processes Douglas manipulates new camera devices to produce pictures without a lens. Responding to the wide circulation of immaterial images in digital culture the artist reveals an acute awareness of the social impact of media and optical technologies.

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Friday, March 14, 2014

Hermosa Beach, CA

Dear Michael,

I’m back… from swimming pools and American marble: an autumn of daydream flips where alipslide is also known as disaster. As it happens, everything continues to happen.

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Marianne
Boesky
Gallery
is
pleased
to
present “
Saturnine
Swing”,
an
exhibition
of
new
works
by
Matthias
Bitzer.
”Saturnine
Swing”
is
the
artist’s
first
solo
exhibition
at
the
gallery
since
joining
in
2013,
and
his
first
solo
exhibition
in
New
York.

For
”Saturnine
Swing”,
Matthias
Bitzer
will
use
both
the
uptown
and
Chelsea
gallery
spaces
to
present
his
drawings,
paintings,
sculptures,
and
multi-part
installations,
ultimately
engaging
the
two
spaces
and
the
works
contained
within
to
achieve
his
larger
project:
a
metaphysical
space
that
weaves
history,
memory,
and
narrative
into
a
multi-­layered
realm
that
addresses
the
issues
activated
by
our
comprehension
of
reality.

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“The present, the here and now experience – it’s such a dumb and impossibly slippery thing. What we experience is only a fragment of what we are aware… and what I am interested in is the stuff that fills the gaps.” (Trisha Baga, interviewed by Jenny Jaskey, Mousse Magazine, 2012)

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Last days! Cathy Wilkes, “Sea of Galilee”. Presented by Mousse and The Modern Institute.

.

until Saturday, 2.30—7pm

at Fonderia Artistica Battaglia, Via Stilicone 10, Milan

I don’t know how I found myself in that place. Probably the unconscious again directed the course of my journey. I only know that I stood looking at the sight of the monument for a long time. Suddenly I succeeded in finding a narrow slit to escape from all these historical facts and the journey started. (1)

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