“OCEANOMANIA: Souvenirs of Mysterious Seas, from the expedition to the aquarium” is the title of Mark Dion’s new project for Monaco. Continuing his investigations as a naturalist, archaeologist and traveler, the American artist explores the collections of the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco to create the largest ever curiosity cabinet of the sea and exhibits his works, showing his interest for the oceans for over 20 years. At the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco (NMNM), Dion dives into the Museum’s collections and presents a major intervention and a selection of artists at Villa Paloma, one of the NMNM’s exhibition spaces.

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“The Art of Narration Changes with Time” – currently of view at Sprüth Magers, Berlin – is a group exhibition curated by Gigiotto Del Vecchio that juxtaposes a selection of works by Peter Coffin, Moyra Davey, Thea Djordjadze, Alex Hubbard, Rosalind Nashashibi, João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva, Margaret Salmon, Oscar Tuazon and Klaus Weber.

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The exhibition “Ventricles” at Andreas Huber Gallery shows three related groups of works of the british artist Dan Rees (born 1982). The series Swansea (2011) consist of fourteen analogue colour photographs, developped by the artist himself, which deliver insight into the artist´s hometown. Their documentary style and conventional views seem to correspond to the character of this unagitatedly pictured city. Contained scratches and shadows testify to their analogue photographic processing and establish a relationship to the plasticine painting (Untitled, 2011), which shows the fingerprints of the artist and references to a practical treatment of the material.
The group of vitrines (Untitled, 2011) containing prints of dissected animals on canvases in their inside and applied foils on their outside, draw the attention to these often unnoted media of representation and let them achieve sculptural character. By chosing “Ventricles” for an exhibition title, the dissected animal remains become a key for opening, for exhibiting, and for exposing the innermost – a procedure that Dan Rees refers mainly to the art context.

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The show concentrates on the idea of the street, and the action of walking. Yorgos Sapountzis takes the recognised dimensions of paving stones found in the city of Berlin and uses them to create a measuring device (a grid of of aluminium poles and fabric) to measure all floor areas of the gallery. These grids (colour coded for each room) are then collapsed and hung from the walls. A statue by the German sculptor Richard Scheibe titled Schreitender (Genesender) translated as Walker provides the second focus for the exhibition. The sculpture’s face, and sections of the arms and legs were cast in plaster secretly at night by the artist. These moulds then form or are integrated with sculptures in the exhibition and the action of casting the statue is also the content of the video work Fast Cast Past.

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At a certain moment we realized that the object of our works could be whatever you could imagine and a sense of internal liberation, purification and relief immediately came. To be honest, it is a very comfortable, light condition. We used to make up our stories before but now we are taking them from the reality. However, it does not prevent them from being sometimes phantasmagorical, sometimes lyrical. As our studio is located in Khimki, this small provincial town, located in the suburbs of Moscow city, living its own life, became one of our central figures. We discover everything in it: a comedy and a tragedy, farce and beauty.

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“Tablet” featuring Michael DeLucia, Joshua Smith, and Valeska Soares

at Eleven Rivington, New York

through August 12, 2011

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At Ellen de Bruijne Projects is currently on view the 3rd and final installment of Rune Peitersen’s project, Saccadic Sightings. Last year’s presentation was focused on the relation between art and science, and the position of these two disciplines in relation to our ideas on the perception of reality. This year, Rune Peitersen, goes back to his initial question it all started from: What do we see, when we look at something.
In Saccadic Sightings this question is investigated already in a very strict way. But Peitersen is also interested in going beyond, to the question of: how do we create an opinion, how do we create meaning? To further investigate different ways of approaching these questions, Peitersen invited a number of artists on 21st of July to reflect on what it is or means to “see”. It will be an evening of fascinating, touching, rational, inspiring presentations, musings and performances in which questions will be raised – and possibly answered – about how artists look at and see the world, and how they use this process in their work.
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Amy O’Neill’s most recent sculpture and installation work, “Victory Gardens” refer back to the war effort in World Wars I and II, in which American and English citizens were urged to plant vegetable gardens to put food on their tables, and to instill, particularly among children, a work-ethic and the kind of patriotism that was seen as essential to the times. Among the vintage images related to these gardens that have been collected by the artist, many show smiling, wholesome young girls posing with the fruits of their labor, casting them not only as future homemakers but as mothers. Propaganda posters were printed with slogans like: “Sow the seeds of Victory – Every Garden a Munition Plant”. The “seeds of Victory” can also be thought to refer to procreation, and the original garden is, of course, the one from which we all supposedly emerged: God and country.

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From June 28 to July 20 the Antonio Ratti Foundation has hosted the XVII edition of its Advanced Course in Visual Arts. Entitled “The Dream Seminar II,” the course had Susan Hiller as its Visiting Professor. On July 14 Susan Hiller gave a conference entitled “The Provisional Texture of Reality,” followed by the opening of the artist’s solo exhibition at Spazio Culturale Antonio Ratti.

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For her first solo show at Greengrassi, Japanese-born American-based artist Shio Kusaka presents a series of ceramic sculptures. Kusaka models ceramic vessels of which no two are the same. Their shapes are simple and usually bottom-heavy or columnar. A minimal choice of palette is enlivened with patterned markings and coloured lines. These frenetic lines explore the surface of each vessel, often creating an awkward interaction of horizontal and vertical planes.

at Greengrassi, London

through July 30, 2011

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In his first solo show at SpazioA, Adrien Missika ventures into the permanence of the tropical dream in the imagination of our modern minds. Seeing those places through Missika’s sunglasses means joining his double vision: affirmation and seduction are paired with a subtle melancholia. With irony his works recycle clichés of our visual pop culture, while at the same time maintaining an analytic distance to his subject.

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Since the early 1990s, the artist Alex Bag (b. 1969, USA) has been one of the most interesting protagonists of video performance art. She became known for her technically simple videos that address the entertainment industry and its various formats, but also the art system with its lingering romantic notions of the artist’s life, and subject these sources to humorous treatment. Bag articulates her social critique with impressive precision, expressing a profound unease with our contemporary culture; an extraordinarily versatile actress, she usually appears in her own work, playing a great variety of roles. The Migros museum für gegenwartskunst is the first institution to present an exhibition offering a comprehensive survey of Bag’s oeuvre.

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The Paula Cooper Gallery presents an exhibition of Sol LeWitt wall drawings composed of arcs and lines. These important works, one of which is presented for the first time since its creation, will be on view through July 28th at 534 W. 21st Street, New York.

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Roe Ethridge, Margarete Jakschik, Jonas Wood

at Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago

through August 27, 2011

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Bortolami Gallery presents the second solo show by Thilo Heinzmann at the gallery, on view through August 2011. A number of works on display situate pigment powder clearly in the field of perception. Not to render the artist’s ‘material’ visible or to expose painting’s internal working principles but to generate a genuine painterly impression. The transitions between the delicate and the dense areas of colored dusting amount to transitions between lighter and darker blues, between lower and higher intensities of color.

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“Under Destruction” is a group exhibition featuring 20 contemporary artists that examine the use and role of destruction in today’s art. Fifty-one years after Swiss artist Jean Tinguely’s historic auto-destructive machine Homage to New York at MoMA (1960) the present exhibition proposes a series of alternative approaches to a theme traditionally associated with the more spectacular and inherently protest-oriented work of Jean Tinguely, Gustav Metzger and others throughout the 50s and 60s.

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Michael E. Smith

at Michael Benevento, Los Angeles

through August 12, 2011

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These are the last days of David Salle’s first exhibition at Maureen Paley. If you hadn’t the chance to visit the show – the first in London since 2003 – click on see more and enjoy an overview of the exhibition.

at Maureen Paley, London

through July 24, 2011

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