“Gravity Moves Me” is the first institutional exhibition of the American artist Tom Burr in France. The show, curated by Florence Derieux, includes works that have been created especially for the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne’s exhibition spaces.

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This is the story of a quiet Swiss office worker with a passion for photography, and his encounter with a tall dark stranger who changed his life. Or at least, changed his clandestine double life.
Born in 1921, Karl Heinz Weinberger had been a warehouse inventory clerk in the Siemens-Albis factory for over thirty years. In his free time, he started taking pictures of the young gay scene in Zurich, working under the pseudonym of Jim. One day in 1958, in the street on his way to work, he ran into a teenage member of Zurich’s Verlausten (“louse-infested ones”). After following him for a while, he summoned up the courage to ask to photograph him, and got to know his friends. Weinberger captured and immortalized their unique grammar of style: they were a bunch of post-war teenagers dissatisfied with the conservative, conformist climate of the times, who adopted a distinctive self-made look, wearing customized jeans, motorcycle jackets, and oversize belt-buckles bearing images of American celebrities like Marlon Brando, James Dean and Elvis Presley.

Text — João Ribas
Visuals — Matthew Buckingham

Ten Fundamental Questions of Curating, edited by Jens Hoffmann and published by Mousse in collaboration with the Fiorucci Art Trust, is distributed with the international edition of Mousse and with subscription copies.

Ricky Swallow’s meticulously crafted sculpture is imprinted with the passage of time onto objects, and in doing so transforms elemental material into conceptual medium. Swallow draws on the inherent narrative of objects and their associations, tapping the capacity of possessions to give shape and meaning to a life, even as and when they outlast their owners. He ‘salvages’ objects that have lived, that have a history, and memorialises a sense of embedded narrative and accumulated time by fixing their forms in sculpture. Swallow alters the nature of his subjects by remaking them as a recognisable idea of themselves – and in the process, creates a new position of meaning, displacing their sense of time in a state of permanent obsolescence.

Mousse is delighted to invite you to the launch of Bored at the Museum, Bored at the Studio on Thursday, February 10, 2011, from 7.30 pm, at Motto Zürich. Published for the “Post Parallelism” exhibition at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, opening in February 2011, Bored at the Museum, Bored at the Studio is a two-way book in which Navid Nuur has collected a hundred images found on the Internet, depicting the “creative boredom” that often seizes visitors to traditional museum spaces.

Matteo Rubbi, Intolleranza 1960 2011, Happening

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The Furla Prize reaches its 10th anniversary and established itself as the ultimate Italian prize in support of young contemporary artists. Alis/Filliol (nominated by Simone Menegoi and Marianne Lanavère), Francesco Arena (nominated by Vincenzo De Bellis and Philippe Pirotte), Rossella Biscotti (nominated by Cecilia Canziani and Vincent Honoré), Matteo Rubbi (nominated by Lorenzo Bruni and Carson Chan), Marinella Senatore (nominated by Alfredo Cramerotti and Emily Pethick) - those are the five finalists of the Furla Prize 2011, who will present their works in an exhibition organized in Bologna in Palazzo Pepoli, one of the historic palaces of the Fondazione Carisbo, from January 29th to February 27th, 2011.

The winner is Matteo Rubbi who was praised for “his ability to interact with the viewers and to create new feedbacks between exhibition space and public space in a spirit of generous engagement. His work engages with different cultural domains in both conceptual and material terms, and reveals a keen sense for experimental adventure.”

Christian Boltanski, the patron artist of the Furla Prize, created the image and motto of this edition, Pleure qui peut, rit qui vet, a sort of oxymoron for the 5 finalists.

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“Untitled (painting)” is a group exhibition of paintings by artists from both the United States and Europe. Included in the exhibition are: Tauba Auerbach, Bernard Frize, Wade Guyton, Albert Oehlen, Josh Smith, Daan van Golden, Charline von Heyl, Christopher Wool, Heimo Zobernig.

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When the museum’s walls are not enough–too irregular? too small? too banal? too institutional? –you might want to (re) consider what you’re waking on, and see the potential for reversing the rules and get this new space of intervention to display what you want to say. A message which is, in the case of the collaborative team Gillick-Weiner, fairly impressive in its outcome and totally effective in its contest. When we think of space, we immediately think in terms of land area, square feet, metres and so on. Museum land art, in effect.

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British artist John Stezaker is fascinated by the lure of images. Taking classic movie stills, vintage postcards and book illustrations, Stezaker makes collages to give old images a new meaning. By adjusting, inverting and slicing separate pictures together to create unique new works of art, Stezaker explores the subversive force of found images. Stezaker’s famous Mask series fuses the profiles of glamorous sitters with caves, hamlets, or waterfalls, making for images of eerie beauty.

His ‘Dark Star’ series turns publicity portraits into cut-out silhouettes, creating an ambiguous presence in the place of the absent celebrity. Stezaker’s way of giving old images a new context reaches its height in the found images of his Third Person Archive: the artist has removed delicate, haunting figures from the margins of obsolete travel illustrations. Presented as images on their own, they now take the centre stage of our attention

This first major exhibition of John Stezaker at Whitechapel Gallery offers a chance to see work by an artist whose subject is the power in the act of looking itself. With over 90 works from the 1970s to today, the artist reveals the subversive force of images, reflecting on how visual language can create new meaning.

John Stezaker is organised by the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and Mudam, Luxembourg.

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“III Things for a second ONE”, the first solo exhibition by Thomas Scheibitz at Parra & Romero gallery, features a wide range of paintings, sculptures and drawings. The German artist continues his exploration of the boundary between abstraction and figuration, creating his own universe, playing with the traditional genres of landscape, still life and portraiture, and thus creating radical new forms that are graphically dynamic and intensified by a chromatic artificiality.

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With the exhbition “The party’s over” , Fabio Tiboni presents a project by Michelangelo Consani conceived specifically for the gallery spaces in Bologna and Rimini. The project reactivate the memory of the canal which, from the beginning of the last century, linked Bologna’s riverside port with the sea. ‘The party’s over’ follows the artistic investigations of Michelangelo Consani, directed at reappropriating every form of marginality – historical, ideological, political and social – and bringing into play a series of new reflections.

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Six questions to Daniel Sinsel on the occasion of his solo show at the Chisenhale gallery in London, the artist’s first in a public institution.

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New York, New York… Since first bursting onto the scene in the early 1980s with his unique adaptation of the language of Old Master painting, George Condo has created one of the most adventurous, imaginative, and provocative bodies of work in contemporary art. Condo’s work has been deeply influential to two generations of American and European painters, who have felt the impact of the artist’s astonishing technical ability, stylistic versatility, and inventive subject matter. This January, the New Museum will present “George Condo: Mental States,” the first major US survey of over eighty paintings and sculptures from the past twenty-eight years of the artist’s career. Condo is famously prolific, and this tightly edited selection of works from 1982 to the present responds to his prodigious output with a unique conceptual approach. The exhibition is organized thematically and stylistically in “chapters” developed in close collaboration with the artist. Highlighting the breadth of Condo’s artistic exploration, the exhibition will focus on the specific ideas to which he has returned throughout his career, particularly his ongoing investigation of human physiognomy and its capacity to convey varied “mental states.”_

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