The Fondazione Giuliani per l’arte contemporanea is pleased to present Rischi minori (Minor Risks), Giulia Piscitelli’s first exhibition in Rome and her most comprehensive to date. Curated by Stefano Chiodi, the show includes a vast selection of artworks which testify to one of the most original artistic practices in recent years.

Piscitelli directs an acute and often unpredictable gaze on contemporaneity, through the exploration of both the individual and collective everyday. The artist brings to the fore grotesque and paradoxical traits through a sharp yet melancholic sense of humour coupled with a strong sense of irony. Using a wide range of media, Piscitelli time and again operates with both the objectivity of the ethnologist and the empathetic participation of a privileged witness. The marginal areas of cities and their industrial outskirts become the ideal stage for her research, focusing on a dispersed and confused humanity, on its contradictory vivacity, which with its tics, obsessions and fragmented existential routine appears to incarnate a common condition of today.
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Francesco Gennari
“Tre autoritratti e un paesaggio”
14 Gennaio- 19 Febbraio 2011
ZERO…, Milano

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For his first solo museum exhibition, on view through May 1, 2011, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis presents nearly twenty of the Richard Aldrich’s large-scale works, produced over the last several years, that span abstraction, figuration, “object-paintings” and text-based canvases.

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BLM 2002>2010. Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa

In its over one hundred years of activity, the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation has organised ninety-four collective exhibitions for young artists, has arranged cultural events such as conferences and meetings, and has provided space for exhibitions of artists of acknowledged international repute. The book is an archive of the happenings during the last nine years, a summing-up of the situation composed by those who shaped it. With texts by: Chiara Casarin, Stefano Colletto, Elisabetta Meneghel and Angela Vettese.

Press Conference Thursday, January 27, 2011, 12 pm
Comune di Venezia | Ca’ Farsetti
San Marco 4136, Venice

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Pleure qui peut, rit qui veut. Premio Furla 2011

The catalogue for the 8th edition of the Furla Prize is structured as an anthology of five small monographs for each finalist: Alis/Filliol, Francesco Arena, Rossella Biscotti, Matteo Rubbi, Marinella Senatore, are introduced by a critical text or a conversation between the selecting curtators and accompanied by an extended selection of the artists’ most representative and significant works. Since its establishment, the Prize has been the leading award for young emerging Italian artists. The catalogue, published this year by Mousse, constitues a unique source for the discovery and understanding of a promising artistic generation.

Round Table “8th Furla Prize 2011”
Friday, January 28, 2011, 11:30am – 1.30 pm
as part of Arte Fiera 2011 Art Talks | Piazza Costituzione, Bologna

“Space is what we have in Los Angeles, but not in the way that you might think.
Space has it charms, it leaves us open to move and think without the usual hindrances of social neuroses and the the emotional heavy-lifting required of being surrounded by other people. It does have its downsides, lots of people hate Los Angeles.

Following a series of critically-acclaimed international solo shows, performances and installations this year and his residence in Edinburgh this summer, Martin Creed returns to London with a major exhibition at Hauser & Wirth’s new Savile Row gallery. Creed will present a monumental new sculpture in the north gallery and works across a variety of media in the south gallery. Creed will also release a single and video.

In recent years Creed has worked on music, dance, writing, sculpture and painting: pieces ranging from compositions for symphony orchestra and music for elevators to architectural commissions, public monuments and dance and performances which combine classical ballet with talk, music, film and animation.

Creed’s work is all-encompassing and seems to seek both to reassure and to confound expectations: ‘Trying to do what you want to do, trying to be free and trying not to do what other people want you to do. If you can do that, it’s amazing’.

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The Turkish origin artist lives and works in Frankfurt. His work is mainly based on the concept of identity, not only in its more common and diffused meaning, but as an actual inner knowledge process. Goekhan Erdogan magnifies the photos of the common people photocopying them on paper. So he begins a process of reconstruction of the whole humanity. He pastes these faces one above the other and then he packs this paper mass under an ancient press obtaining what he calls the paperblock. At the end of this process, when the glue is dry, the artist begins his intervention as a demiurge. With some fine sand he begins to dig seeking a pure, clear, primary image. The result is an undefined, indistinguishable, impersonal identity. Nevertheless the result is even the reunification of the single identities in a collectivity: the whole humanity.

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Installation view, The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow, 2011

The Modern Institute is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Dirk Bell. This exhibition relates directly to Bell’s recent project Made in Germany, which was presented at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, Sadie Coles HQ, London and also at The Modern Institute in the Winter of 2010.

Working with technology and the iconography and materials of contemporary life, Bell’s work is also infused with myth, symbolism and emotion; and laced with references and associations that question society’s various attempts to make sense of the belief systems and the structures that control the world. The new works reflect the relationship between society and human nature, and question the presence and absence of freedom and love in today’s world.

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Mathis Altmann / Heather Cook / Josh Kolbo / Davis Rhodes / Ned Vena
Until February 26, 2011
Max Hans Daniel, Berlin

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Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset, Short Cut, 2003. Installation view. Photo: Marco De Scalzi. Courtesy Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset; Galleria Massimo De Carlo, Milan

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To mark the centennial of the Trussardi Group, the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi is presenting “8½”, an exhibition curated by Massimiliano Gioni and produced in collaboration with the Fondazione Pitti Discovery, which will open the celebrations for the hundredth anniversary of the fashion house. The first major group show organized by the Foundation, set in the monumental spaces of Stazione Leopolda, 8½ brings together the works of the thirteen international artists to whom the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi has dedicated ambitious solo exhibitions and spectacular public art projects in Milan, from 2003 to the present.

Like a carnival parade, 8½ brings together for the very first time the works of Darren Almond, Pawel Althamer, John Bock, Maurizio Cattelan, Martin Creed, Tacita Dean,Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset, Urs Fischer, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Paul McCarthy, Paola Pivi, Anri Sala, and Tino Sehgal: artists who have established themselves over the last decade as some of the most significant figures in the international art scene. 8½ presents an overview of the most groundbreaking projects produced to date by the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, retracing the key stages of its activity and illuminating an important chapter in the history of recent contemporary art.

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For his solo exhibition at Bortolami Gallery, American artist Patrick Hill has implemented large wood beams as structural footing for cement, glass, metal, marble, fabric, and dye. For the first time, Hill introduces a figurative aspect into his work, with sculptures that reference fragmented bodies and detached limbs. Using white Carrera marble for the limbs with wooden support structures as skeletons, the new sculptures created by Patrick Hillrouse Hill’s continuing investigation of underlying, if not foreboding, tensions between the precariously balanced and the stable form.

VW (VeneKlasen/Werner) is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Enrico David.

Anthropologists relate smiling to the baring of teeth. So in Enrico David’s work, there is an inextricable bond between hysteria and the terror of human existence. For his exhibition at VW, Enrico David has created a harrowing body of work that confronts physical decay, vulnerability, voyeurism, and shame. The artist’s latest paintings, drawings and sculptures are enigmatic representations of the human body, often distorted or fragmented to humorous and horrifying effect. The works draw on personal memories and private experiences informed by historical references from Art Deco and Wiener Werkstätte to Joseph Beuys. There is an element of theatricality to the exhibition, in which works are deliberately staged in dialogue with one another.

“On the brink of not being ready to be born,” is how Enrico David has described the condition of his works. They evoke a disquieting state of evolution and entropy, devoid of choice – an inherent awkwardness.

Since spring 2010 Enrico David has been artist in residence at Stiftung Laurenz Haus, Basel, where this new body of work was created. This is his first solo exhibition since the highly acclaimed “How Do You Love Dzzzzt by Mammy?”, presented at Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel, in 2009. Recent major solo exhibitions include “Bulbous Marauder”, Seattle Art Museum; “Ultra Paste”, ICA London and Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh; and “Chicken Man Gong” at Tate Britain, London, and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Enrico David was a finalist for the Turner Prize in 2009. In June 2011 Enrico David will present new works in a solo exhibition at Fondazione Bevilacqua la Masa, Venice.

The exhibition opened January 15 with a reception for the artist and continues through March 4.

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Alexandre da Cunha, Quilt (raft), 2011

Brian Griffiths, Further On, Further In, 2011

Vilma Gold is delighted to present The Extension: an exhibition of works selected by Alexandre da Cunha and Brian Griffiths, including new works by Nate Boyce, Björn Braun, Talia Chetrit, Alexandre da Cunha, Brian Griffiths and Robert Pratt.

‘The Extension’ seeks to set up a conversation between sculptures, materials and the act of building; a modest conversation where form, surface, size, and weight are casually but precisely discussed, where process nearly becomes subject matter and sculptures almost begin to perform.

The works in the exhibition show particular relationship to labour: of diverse physical actions, of time spent (long and short), of collaborative or individual endeavour. The organic and natural elegantly co-exist with the urban and architectural. Outside and inside (world and art, matter and space, – the edges all blurring), top and bottom, real and propositional become entangled digressions. Abstraction or the abstracted hang in the air mixed with utility, of industry and everyday experience. The Extension’ is a show that solidifies thought, creates movement via the inert and reflects the shifting absurd backdrop of our daily life.

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All photos: GuacamoleProject.com

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DIVINE TRUTH

Towards the end of the Middle ages, it was still thought that authors retained total authority over a text, and affected all readers identically. It was believed that the transmission of knowledge took place systematically in the attempts to memorize the fragments of a text, regardless of whether it was read or listened to. The concept of interpretation as we know it today is relatively recent, despite the fact that the impossibility of “thinking in a straight line”, without intrusions, is something inherent to human being.

The title of this exhibition comes from one of the first moments where the possibility emerged of understanding the process of creation and assimilation of knowledge as a kind of tacit dialogue between that which is dictated by books and the reader’s experience of encountering this information. The poet Francesco Petrarca called it divine truth.

Drawing on his past experience as an editorial illustrator, for this exhibition Satorre selected a series of recent works where drawing is the principal medium. Clearly influenced by the history of conceptual art, the interest the artist has maintained in the editorial field focuses primarily on that hidden relation established between writers, characters, illustrators and readers. The hermeneutical notion that all works of art reveal themselves as determined (or in more radical versions, created,) by their interpreter’s particular socio-historical and biographical situation, has served as a methodological principle to approach each one of the works present in this exhibition.

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‘Man made’, Phoebe Unwin’s exhibition at Wilkinson Gallery, encompasses the artist’s curious approach to painting: at once a destabilisation of expectations of style and form, coupled with a stern and enthused focus on realising a subject in paint. Each painting is a new possibility, differing in mark, material, scale and subject, with no repeated motif.

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