Alberto Di Fabio’s work merges the worlds of art and science with themes of biology, ecology and nature. His recent paintings explore structures of the human body and brain. The images are microscopic in their focus, implying biological diagrams, cellular structures, flora, eco systems, and pharmacological research. Di Fabio observes how the human mind’s capacity for information seems amplified due to the increasing means of communications that saturate our daily lives, and he invites us to reconsider the body in its most essential functions – posing questions about science and aesthetics, life and art.

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“Bacon’s Not The Only Thing That Is Cured By Hanging From A String” is Geoffrey Farmer’s first solo exhibition both at Casey Kaplan and in the United States.

Farmer is known internationally for his projects that transform and alter over the course of their exhibitions. His installations are composed of diverse materials and various working methodologies that are rooted in research and in response to site. Farmer creates conceptual works with poetic narratives, often combining his interests in the material production of the art object with theories of psychology and dramatic presentation.

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“Moira Ricci / Amir Yatziv” is a double solo show curated by Gabi Scardi at Laveronica Gallery, Modica (Sicily). The two artists explore the same borderland separating reality from verisimilitude. Both fuel the uncertainty of vision, presenting real but ambiguous facts alongside fictive yet seemingly authentic situations.

Esther Kläs · Elizabeth Newman 2011, exhibition view

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SpazioA takes pleasure in presenting the first show in Italy of Esther Kläs and Elizabeth Newman, curated by Chris Sharp.

This two person exhibition is marked by a conspicuous sense of personality. It features sculptures by German, New York-based artist Esther Kläs and paintings by the Australian, Melbourne-based artist Elizabeth Newman. Although the two artists come from entirely different parts of the world, backgrounds, and age groups, their work meets in a similarly antic place. By no means merely expressive, the work and its antic quality is a byproduct of more complex concerns.

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Lisson Gallery is pleased to announce the first London solo show by Haroon Mirza and Surface/Tension, a three-person exhibition of new works by Kitty Kraus, Dan Shaw-Town and Gedi Sibony that explore the unifying aesthetic and interest in unconventional materials and sculptural practices shared by these three geographically and methodologically disparate artists.

Haroon Mirza, Evolution of a revolution, 2011

Surface/Tension, 2011

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The title of the third solo-exhibition by Los Angeles based artist Sam Durant at Praz-Delavallade refers to Amercian artist Robert Smithson’s work Yucatan Mirror Displacements (1969) which was itself a reference to writer John Lloyd Stephen’s book Incidents of Travel in Yucatan (1843). At the forefront in all of his work, the mirror interests Sam Durant because of its potent symbolic charge. Evocative of both reflection and reflexion, a mirror suggests the creation of a perspective leading to an infinite number of interpretations. The viewer finds himself involved in the work, both through the reflected image and his own reflexion process.

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The work of the Danish artist Jens Haaning focuses on the analysis of the structure of today’s modern society and how the dynamics of the various forms of power manifest and express themselves within that same structure. Some of the key themes of his artistic pursuit are immigration, categorization, racism, intercultural dialogue and the exchange between global capitalism and local economy. With his installation entitled Thai Body Massage, Aalborg exhibited at Galleria Franco Soffiantino, the artist intends to prompt his audience to reflect, by means of real “shifting” dynamics, on the different economic and social models tied to immigration as well as the resulting implications between them and our cohabitation within the urban setting.

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Installation view, Heimo Zobernig © Stefan Altenburger Photography Zürich / Kunsthalle Zürich

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The Kunsthalle Zürich launches its exhibition season at the Museum Bärengasse – where it is based temporarily until June 2012 while work is carried out on the conversion and renovation of its permanent home at the Löwenbräu Areal – with the solo exhibition «ohne Titel (in Red)» by Heimo Zobernig (born in Mauthen, Carinthia, Austria in 1958; lives and works in Vienna). This exhibition presents an artist who, based on a body of work produced since the 1980s, is viewed as a key figure on the Austrian art scene. Zobernig’s exhibition provides insight into an oeuvre that explores themes of minimalism, the historical loading of the opposing pair of “figurativeness vs. abstraction” and the problem as to what art is or can be, its outward form and function. In keeping with the rooms in the buildings of the Museum Bärengasse, which were constructed in 1670, the works selected for presentation – the exhibition includes 11 video works, cardboard and particle board objects created since 1985 – focus on the topics of “furnishing” and “light” and play with the domesticated interior of the former residential buildings. Zobernig develops a specific lighting situation for the rooms of the Museum Bärengasse: he closes the shutters on the windows of the two early-Baroque houses and submerges the exhibition space in red by means of a light installation.

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‘HE MISTOOK THE GROUNDLIGHTS FOR STARS AND ASKED WHY THE AIRPLANE WAS FLYING UPSIDE DOWN’ is the first Belgian artist/filmmaker Johan Grimonprez’ exhibition at ltd los angeles.
The show presents three major works, YouTube Me and I Tube You: Maybe the Sky is Really Green, and Weʼre Just Colorblind (2006-today), Kobarweng or Where is Your Helicopter? (1992) and It will be all right, if you come again, only next time, donʼt bring any gear except the tea kettle (1994 – 2005). In addition, Hitchcockʼs Belly Button, a sound installation, serves as the backdrop for a series of drawings and photography staging a Hitchcock casting which was on the hunt for the perfect Hitchcock döppleganger. This LA casting occurred in 2004 and ultimately resulted in the film Double Take (2009), also on view.

After the jump, an interview with Mariana Castillo Deball on her latest exhibition ‘Figures don’t lie, but liars can figure’ at pinksummer, Genova

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Independent strives to reexamine traditional art fair models and methods of presentation, in response to the changing attitudes and growing challenges for artists, galleries, non-profits, curators and collectors as the experience of viewing and interacting with contemporary art in a group context.

Mousse will borrow crates from some participating galleries to present a temporary library of its printed production, representing the origins, motifs and relations which determine the birth and the forms of a catalogue of books.

Mousse has also published the catalogue of Independent. Independent: A Catalogue of Advertisements is an exercise in straightforwardness. Advertising is of large importance to a gallery (or art venue), arguably the most daring and tricky way of projecting the aims and goals behind its existence in the contemporary landscape. Edited by Esperenza Rosales, and printed in 400 copies, Independent: A Catalogue of Advertisements is a collection of specially commissioned ads by participating galleries, a flattened composite of their programs and activities.

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For his first American solo exhibition, Italian artist Massimo Grimaldi examines and reassesses existing platforms of spectatorship, questioning the functionality of the contemporary work of art as it relates to specific communities and social spheres. Issues of ethics and morality, and their relationship to the culture industry and economics at large are central to his output. Grimaldi consistently asks the viewer to consider the value of the aesthetic marketplace and its position within the larger global economy, and how the art object can be brought into the realm of the socially responsible.

Bettina Pousttchi (b. 1970, Germany) has recently received due attention for her large-scale, site-specific photographic work Echo (2009/10). The recent project involved covering all four elevations of the Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin, built in 2008 by Adolf Krischanitz and situated in the historical centre of Berlin, with a digitally manipulated collage of archival images of the glass skin and concrete pilasters of the nearby Palast der Republik. The Palace, a landmark of late Eastern European modernism, was designed by Heinz Graffunder and completed in 1976, when it became the seat of the German Democratic Republic’s Volkskammer (People’s Chamber, or parliament). For Echo, Pousttchi’s black-and-white, digitally manipulated representation of the Palace temporarily replaced the perfect neutrality of the Temporary Kunsthalle’s white cube. In this “battle of fake facades”, as the artist puts it, the Kunsthalle, the Palace, and Pousttchi’s own work that mediated between the two, all met their inevitable end. Echo was duly taken down after its scheduled six-month-long presentation. The Palace of the Republic, meanwhile, was dismantled in 2009 to make room for the future reconstruction of the 18th-century Berliner Stadtschloss (Berlin City Palace). Most of the Palace’s steel girders were sold to the United Arab Emirates and used to construct the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, which, at 828 meters, is now the tallest building in the world. Finally, the Temporary Kunsthalle closed in August 2010, according to plan.

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“Ritorno al Futuro” (Back to the Future) is a publication documenting Alessandro Ceresoli’s stay in Asmara, Eritrea, an experience that he later translated into a series of drawings and sculptures presented at Galleria Francesca Minini in Milan. The project—which took two years to complete, due to the difficulty of exporting works produced with local artisans—is illustrated through a series of photographs that the artist took in the teeming African capital, from the first stages of production all the way to the sculptures’ arrival in Europe.

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