“they said it couldn’t be done. or maybe they thought it shouldn’t be done. but it has been done. it was done, and it is done.”

Bite into that soft ass

“because of works of art like this. I believe in abstract art. If I have not been able to justify it, I can perhaps say with the pragmatist, with the literalist: There it is. I have shown it to you. It has been done. It is being done. And because it can be done, it will be done. And now, I am done.” (Kirk Varnedoe, Pictures of Nothing, 2003)

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James Welling (*1951) is an artist whose work occupies the grey areas between painting, sculpture, and traditional photography. For over 40 years his work has addressed the theme of representation and abstraction in the visual image. By critics, artists, and collectors alike he is considered a central figure in international contemporary photography. In addition to presenting Welling’s documentary oriented work, which follows the tradition of classical artistic photography, as exemplified by the work of Paul Strand, the exhibition “Autograph” also includes his abstract photograms, which recall works by avant-garde artists, such as Moholy-Nagy, Christian Schad, and Man Ray.

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Gladstone Gallery is pleased to present its first exhibition with Cyprien Gaillard, “Today Diggers, Tomorrow Dickens.” For this ambitious and complex presentation, Gaillard has created two complementary bodies of sculptural works that explore notions of regeneration, ruination, and decay, turning his eye to the relationship between evolution and erosion – a thread that weaves through much of his work. Navigating the concept of the altered readymade through an anthropological lens, Gaillard has incorporated processed natural and industrial materials to achieve an equilibrium that reflects the way in which our society simultaneously progresses and reverts in the realm of the bleak.

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Gladstone Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Gedi Sibony. For this exhibition Sibony presents a selection of eight sculptural works that he has extricated from the world, as well as one progressively built up in the studio.

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Alicja Kwade has received much recognition in recent years for her sculptures, installations, and videos.

Oscillating between the familiar and the fictional, she combines ready-mades and skilful craftsmanship in sophisticated installations that provoke, amuse, and surprise. Her work possesses formal sculptural qualities with roots in minimalism bordering the surreal or the uncanny.

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Art & Language, Tony Cragg, Angela de la Cruz, Richard Deacon, Ceal Floyer, Ryan Gander, Shirazeh Houshiary, Peter Joseph, Anish Kapoor, John Latham, Richard Long, Jason Martin, Haroon Mirza, Jonathan Monk, Julian Opie, Richard Wentworth

In advance of its 50th anniversary in 2017, the Lisson Gallery is staging a retro-futuristic survey of historical and contemporary British sculpture and installation that questions where the lines of time, influence and artistic inspiration could be drawn or where they might ultimately lead.

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For his sixth solo show with Lisson Gallery, British artist Jason Martin presents a new series of cast copper and nickel works. Trained as a painter in oil and acrylic, Martin began manipulating his chosen material in the early 1990s, dragging, scraping, combing, raking and squeegeeing paint across the surfaces of his canvases and aluminium panels until their edges bled colour and the surfaces picked up textures, gestures and happenstance along the way. This performative process has been complicated in this latest set of cast works, available exclusively through Lisson Gallery, in which thick impasto marks made from brusque, almost baroque sweeps of hand-sculpted material have been solidified into metal in the manner of traditional bronze sculptures or statues.

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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.

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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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