Increasingly well-known since the mid-1980s, especially in New York, Verne Dawson’s painting focuses with positively anthropological zeal on the history of humankind’s evolution and impact in dialog with the world around it. The universal manner in which the artist views and examines the world is evident in his complex cycles of works. Recurring themes including astrology, numerology, religion and mythology become the key sources from which his pictorial narratives are fed. In this way, Dawson’s works offer a door to a world which has always existed, and which still exists, but which has been marginalized by the many-layered interconnections of modern civilisation.

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Jonathas de Andrade, in a conversation with Stuart Comer, thinks about the condition of stiffness that inhibits his generation and explains how his work sets the goal – identified by Suely Rolnik – of grasping a new political-creative flux.

Chantal Akerman has addressed issues like otherness and confinement, starting with her own biography and that of her mother, a survivor of the Nazi camps. Elisabeth Lebovici met with the artist to talk about how her extraordinary filmography has been able to shed light on the Other as Subject.

The Arab Image Foundation is an expanding collection of photographs from the Arab region. Alessandro Rabottini talked with its co-founder, the artist Akram Zaatari, who explains why the images produced by everyday people are so important in his work.

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The fifteenth encounter of The most beautiful Kunsthalle in the world takes the shapeof a workshop dedicated to probably the most complex and controversial problem of the exhibiting practices of contemporary art, as it will analyze the history, role, and physiognomy of the curator.

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Mark di Suvero continues to test the limits of large-scale sculpture, engaging space through seemingly weightless compositions of colossal steel beams, torqued metal and kinetic elements. The never-before-seen Paula’s Pleasure, a soaring construction measuring approximately twenty feet in height, is an assemblage of intersecting I-beams tied around a central steel “knot”. The piece invites active contemplation from various angles, shifting our perception of space and sense of balance as we move under and around it.

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…The ‘somewhere else’ you describe, could be thought of materially. I mean there are rules when you use a material like chalk, or editing software like Final Cut Pro and essentially you’re doing the same thing. Cutting away, re-modeling. And these rules and structures then impose their own restrictions to the content that may be taken from the ‘big outside’. In a sense, by materializing this information, I exert another filtering mechanism which abstracts it, and this abstraction is caused and affected by the processes which allow me—the author, but also just an individual in the world trying to closer to the already abstracted rhetoric of politics. It’s a document of proximity in a way.

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This expansive survey of Polish sculptor Alina Szapocznikow (1926-1973) coincides with the Polish presidency of the European Union and is one of the first major solo exhibitions of the artist’s work outside of Poland. It concentrates on her most experimental period from the 1960s and 1970s, before her untimely death at age 47. As a Holocaust survivor who began working in the post-war period in a rather classical, figurative manner, her later experimentation and re-conception of sculpture left behind a legacy of provocative objects – at once sexualized, visceral, humorous, and political – that sit uneasily between Surrealism, Nouveau Réalisme, and Pop Art. Her tinted polyester-resin casts of her lips and breasts transformed into quotidian objects like lamps or ashtrays, her spongy polyurethane forms often embedded with casts of bellies or live grass, and her construction of resin sculptures that incorporate found photographs remain as remarkably biting, visionary, and original today as when they were first made. The exhibition features extensive archival materials as well as more than 100 artworks, including drawings and photography alongside Szapocznikow’s sculpture and object-making.

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Campoli Presti presents Jutta Koether’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition comprises one large painting and a set of five plank-canvases composing one work.

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David Kordansky Gallery presents “Cornfabulation,” a collaborative exhibition by Aaron Curry and Richard Hawkins. Though both artists are originally from Texas, and Curry was Hawkins’ student at Art Center College of Design in the early 2000s, the exhibition goes far beyond notions of camaraderie or shared influence. Works made by each artist individually, as well as by the two together, will be installed in an immersive environment that synthesizes their visual and material concerns. Collages, sculptures, paintings and drawings on paper, and hybrid works incorporating diverse media are juxtaposed against––and often made from––the elements that surround them. Accordingly, the upending of traditional hierarchical relationships between sculptures and bases, compositions and frames, and high and low cultural forms, becomes a recurring theme in the work.

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Classified into the formal among American Conceptual and Minimal artists of the 1960’s and 1970’s, Luis Camnitzer has developed a mainly autonomous production that differs from his American colleagues’, showing an exquisite sensibility towards the context and the eventuality, and an ironically metaphorical polyvalence. Besides, a strong sociopolitical compromise lies within his artwork.

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Now enter a number of commands that you would like to be executed. You can start with … a hiss and then cAH-junK. (automatic doors) Now, exit from your editor and type … entrances, significant actions or business and then exit.

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This exhibition, curated by Vincent Honoré, is the first solo presentation of Cahn’s work in London. It includes new works and installations together with a selection of paintings, drawings and photographs spanning her career from 1978 to 2011.

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“Composition for Two Wings – works by Akram Zaatari,” launches Kunstnernes Hus’ annual event Oslo Contemporary Art Exhibition, which aims to challenge contemporary arts’ traditional and centralized cultural networks. The exhibition consists of a juxtaposition of two bodies of work: Earth of Endless Secrets and The Uneasy Subject.

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The term “secret societies” describes groups pursuing various political, social, economic, religious, esoteric and occult interests and objectives all of which have a conspiratorial background. Whether harmless alliances such as hermetic youth scenes, academic brotherhoods, or influential business combines, such associations always operate in the dark to preserve their secret knowledge and protect their exclusive circle of members. Man has always been fascinated with secret societies and their clandestine rites,their covert knowledge, and exclusive circle of members. Particularly in times of crises, secret societies provide surrogate values for the prevailing political, social and technological systems of order.

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First presented as a manifesto in the 1960s in Japan, “Metabolism” is a theory of architecture contending that “buildings and cities should be designed and developed in the same continuous way that the material substance of a natural organism is produced.” From the time of Japan’s postwar redevelopment to its period of rapid economic growth, the theory gave birth to grand visions of future cities, encouraged the realization of much experimental architecture, and also provided the foundation on which many of Japan’s contemporary world-renowned architects and designers could build their careers. It is the most widely known modern architecture theory to have emerged from Japan.

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For his first solo exhibition in Belgium, Valentin Carron reproduced objects from his immediate surroundings: symbolically charged objects (sculptures, architectural fragments) taken from the reality of his region and its «landscape». Through the appropriation of cultural emblems or decorative ornaments from the vernacular culture, he questions the meaning of tradition and authenticity, the aesthetic concepts of kitsch and the modern ideal.

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The Fear Society. Pabellón de la Urgencia at the 53th Venice Biennale

June ~ 2009

Corporate Image

Corporate image for the group show “The Fear Society. Pabellón de la Urgencia”, curated by Jota Castro in occasion of the 53rd Venice Biennale.

thefearsociety.eu

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Bortolami presents Jonathan Meese’s third exhibition at the gallery, conceived as a continuation of his current “Total Self-Portrait” show at GEM (Museum voor Actuele Kunst) in The Hague, Netherlands. The exhibition includes a large-scale installation in the main space, in which photographs, posters, painted panels, bronze sculptures, paintings and wooden structures, act as a contemplation of himself as artist, a personal exploration of his assumed role. Since Meese’s days as a student, performance and installation have been a pivotal part of his art, both formally and in content, always related to theater and film.  His installations have been platforms for his ideas about the autonomy of art, which he expresses in the ubiquitous term “Dictatorship of Art.”

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Now in its fourth edition, Art Fall presents “Simone,” Invernomuto’s first solo show to take place in an institutional setting. The exhibition marks a significant moment in the path of this creative duo. Building on a rich and layered output, it both looks back at the production of the last few years while opening up to new developments. The exhibition is arranged on two floors at the Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea in Ferrara and presents three new works, bringing to life a synesthetic audiovisual landscape that best represents the poetics and world of Invernomuto.

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