Before becoming the atmospheric title of this exhibition, Smog a Los Angeles was a jotting on the back of a photograph in one of the archives Elisabetta Benassi is building up: in all some 70,000 photos collected from major press agencies and national dailies like La Stampa and The New York Times. Here the paradigmatic events, locations and personages of the 20th century are thrown together with minor incidents and figures claimed by oblivion, but the documentary material gathered by the artist remains testimony to her problematic, equivocal vision of the events and ideologies it addresses. Firstly because Benassi shows us the backs of her chosen photographs: all the descriptions, captions, credits, stamps and notes that classify and inform the image, rather than the actual image itself, so what we observe and read sets us mentally reconstructing and recreating the missing visual. And because when she puts these documents back into circulation, the different modes of reproduction and presentation she comes up with endow them with a new materiality. Out of these archives objects emerge: installations, sculptures, films, microfilms, drawings. Meticulous watercolour copies, for example, provide an almost archaeological charting of each clue, inscription and rough patch on the paper, giving tangibility to the remains of now invisible plots. In Memorie di un Cieco a microfilm reader, the kind you used to find in libraries, lets you read the verso of the images as it jumps randomly back and forth in time. The artist is endlessly actualizing the past and putting together stories free of all chronology.

Smog a Los Angeles is at once paradoxical and exemplary of Benassi’s work. Accompanied solely by a handwritten number and typed on the pristine, so to speak almost amnesic surface of the photographic paper, this laconic legend describes the image of something (smog) that stops you from seeing (Los Angeles). The task, then, is to re-present to oneself what cannot be observed, working from memory or, failing that, via fiction: Smog a Los Angeles summons us to enter history’s blind spots, to recall, interpret and invent. Once inside, our vision of things is activated by various contrivances that home in on, transform and problematise curious archives. A time machine here, birdsong there, a carpetreproduction of a telegram that once changed an aspect of the world, a modernist cell, a watercolour, a factory canteen table still vibrating from its users, a car: all these things make the history of the 20th century – or rather the memory of it – a dense space, an exhibition through which the spectator moves blindly, stumbling on recollections, rectifying errors of interpretation, conversing with the spectres of Pasolini, Angela Davis, Mario Merz, Einstein, famous animals and illustrious dictators.

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at CRAC Alsace, Altkirch

until 26 January 2013

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Above – Torture-Morte, 2013

Bushman Has A New Toy, 2013

The Bullet-Proof Angela Davis, 2011

Make War Together / Make Peace Together, 2013

Roma K69996, 2007

Lapsus, 2002–2005

Memorie di un cieco, 2010

Passato e presente, 2013

Pausa lavoro (Mensa in fabbrica), 2013

Torture-Morte, 2013

Son of Niobe, 2013

Bushman Has A New Toy, 2013

You’ll Never Walk Alone, 2000

Timecode, 2000

Installation view at CRAC Alsace, Altkirch, 2013

Courtesy: the artist; CRAC Alsace; Alessandra and Paolo Barillari, Rome;  Magazzino Rome; Collection Maramotti, Reggio Emilia.

Giò Marconi is pleased to announce an exhibition of André Butzer featuring new paintings. This is the third solo show by the artist at the gallery since 2006.

André Butzer’s work addresses the medium of painting, exploring its history, its boundaries and possibilities. The artist’s early paintings are overrun with an almost psychedelic use of colours and often filled with biomorphic shapes, disturbing sneering figures, and masks with empty eyes reminiscent of Walt Disney characters. There are clear references here to the history of art, and in particular to Expressionism, but also to politics, comics and science fiction. Against backgrounds of almost grotesque colour, the artist combines reality and Utopia, the past and the present, in fact, Butzer himself has described his work as “Science-Fiction Expressionism”.

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firstsite presents a retrospective exhibition of drawing, prints and sculpture by the New York-based artist, Agnes Denes. This will be the first major survey of the artist’s work in Western Europe and her first solo exhibition in the UK since 1979.

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“Building Communities” is the first museum exhibition of an important selection of pieces that Marinella Senatore has created to date, including projects and works from her last 10 years of artistic practice. Following her earliest pieces inspired by the language of cinema and everyday micro-narratives, Senatore has since 2006 focused on research about the involvement of the audience as a key protagonist. The artist describes her role as that of an ‘activator’. “I feel that I am part of those processes that see the artist as a director who has a score through which people negotiate, or contest, their participation,” Senatore says. “I seek to put into action an affective exchange that moves from story to story. The tale itself becomes an exchange and an open laboratory situation is often constructed, where those who are working learn something, which they take away with them, along with the memory of having been on the set.”

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Sous les pavés, la plage (Beneath the paving stones, the beach). The graffiti from May ’68 in Paris conjures an image of undoing the material world piece by piece. To this day, the students and workers from that period, and the artist-cultural-critics among them known as Situationists, are widely cited because of their transformative deeds, words, images, and above all, their potent possibility. But for all the reverence they receive, could the activists of that moment anticipate the world we live in today? Moving beyond the legacies of the ’60s, “The Way of the Shovel”, Dieter Roelstraete’s new exhibition, examines more recent attempts by artists to unearth and undo the material world they find themselves in.

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Los Angeles – OHWOW is pleased to announce “Immediate Surroundings”, Los Angeles-based artist Kim Ye’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, on view from November 9 to December 14, 2013. Through a series of two and three-dimensional work, this exhibition confronts assimilation and the perception of common objects, or familiar surroundings. Her process of imitation, a shifted adaptation of creating traditional copies, presents pieces that animate replication.

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Writing is central to Zin Taylor’s practice. Parallel to a number of artist books Taylor has made are a series of sculptural works the artist proposes as a form of storytelling. How else to understand his project The Story of Stripes and Dots but to “read” the eponymous objects he makes to propel it forward? Taylor conceives his sculptural components—stripes and dots in many variations—as words in a sentence, the articulation of which can be ongoing.

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Judith Hopf “Testing Time”

Studio Voltaire presents a new film commission by Judith Hopf together with a series of sculptural works, made specifically for the exhibition. This exhibition is the artist’s first solo show in a UK public gallery.

Hopf’s work focuses on how our social environments shape us, influence us, and by extension thereby exclude us from ourselves. Hopf uses a wide variety of techniques such as sculpture, installation, film and performance, often engaging subjects and materials that can be found in the immediate environment.In her recent installations for Documenta 13 a series of masks were formed from computer packaging and drinking glasses balanced to create a precarious bamboo forest. Such an approach can be thought of in connection to Bricolage, revealing a socio-political order latent in ready-to- hand materials.

For her presentation at Studio Voltaire, Hopf will create a new film work drawing upon references to silent cinema and feminist film material from the suffragette era. An environment will be built in the gallery to house the film accompanied with a series of sculptural works taking the form of a ‘flock’ of concrete sheep.

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“Forget your Dreams”

The structure for Aldrich’s current show is that of two distinct parts. The first opened on November 8th, and has been on view for a week and a half, after which a second show has opened on November 19th and will run through the end of the month, and then back to the first show for the remainder of the exhibition, closing December 21st.

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VW (VeneKlasen/Werner) is pleased to announce “Eagle Mode”, an exhibition of new works by Harold Ancart.

Harold Ancart works in a range of materials, including pigments, soot, steel and concrete, and relies on the architecture of the exhibition space to guide his process, but it is the temporal, transitional and immediate quality of drawing that lies at the root of his practice.

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Team (gallery, inc.) is pleased to announce a solo show by Italian artist Massimo Grimaldi. The exhibition will run from 31 October through 15 December 2013. Team Gallery is located at 47 Wooster Street, between Broome and Grand. Concurrently, our 83 Grand Street space will house a one-person exhibition of new work by New York-based painter Suzanne McClelland.

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Derya Akay “anewground”

The Apartment is thrilled to present Derya Akay’s debut solo exhibition and second project with the gallery, anewground. Akay will present new paintings and sculptures developed while on residence this summer in Japan and finished this fall in his Vancouver studio.

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The Cooper Gallery is proud to present Before Le Cerveau Affamé, a space for metaphysical transformation, by Georgina Starr, one of the most original and distinctive British artists celebrated internationally since the 1990s for her magically complex and multi-layered works.

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This exhibition marks the first solo show of Pol’s work in Italy and the first collaboration between Nicolo Cardi and Vladmir Restoin Roitfeld. After Modern Vermin Control will feature never-before-seen works that explore the artist’s ongoing examination of contemporary culture.

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From Morn’ Till Midnight is the title of a painting dated 1946 by Julian Beck (*1926, died 1986), founder of the Living Theatre, abstract expressionist and poet. Alongside Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Yves Kline his lively paintings were exhibited at Peggy Guggenheim’s groundbreaking gallery “Art of this Century”. Although inspired by this prominent group of abstract expressionist painters he turned the act of painting into a live gesture which involved the whole body, making the picture and the painter a single entity. Along with his wife, actress Judith Malina, he was the original engine of the avant-garde performance group “The Living Theatre” established in 1947. This is where he would fuel his artistic fervour until the end of his life, promoting ideas of anarcho-pacifism and liberalism throughout Europe, South America and the US.

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kaufmann repetto is happy to announce the first of a series of exhibitions in New York, opening on November 9, with a solo show by Italian painter Pierpaolo Campanini.

The work of Pierpaolo Campanini is at the same time intimate and monumental. The sculptures assembled in his studio in a meticulous process of accumulation of objects and natural elements are, through pictorial mediation, rendered solitary creatures – inhabitants of a fictitious reality, both tangible and indefinite.

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