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Thick as a Brick

April ~ 2013

Event

Parallel to the Milan Furniture Fair and on the occasion of the project curated by Maria Cristina Didero, “Thick As A Brick,” a selection of more than 100 catalogues, books, art editions and zines published by Mousse since 2008 were shown at the Galleria Gió Marconi, within three brick structures conceived by Kuehn Malvezzi and produced by Petersen Tegl.

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One of the most influential yet underrecognized artists of his generation, Llyn Foulkes (b. 1934 in Yakima, Washington) makes work that stands out for its raw, immediate, and unfiltered qualities. His extraordinarily diverse body of work—including impeccably painted landscapes, mixed-media constructions, deeply disturbing portraits, and narrative tableaux—resists categorization and defies expectations, distinguishing Foulkes as a truly singular artist. “LLYN FOULKES” is organized by Hammer curator Ali Subotnick and will travel to the New Museum in New York (June 12 to September 8, 2013) and to the Museum Kurhaus Kleve in Germany (December 2013 to March 2014).

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Aesthetic has long become a commodity of the twenty-first century, has already been internalized by mass culture and has been implemented by the market as a functioning construct of values, lifestyles and experiences.

Trisha Baga & NO BROW is a trial version of two separate shows interlacing and corresponding with each other. It takes as its point of departure the interest of young artists in the appearance and design of the everyday and its free circulation through visual circuits of distribution. By regurgitating styles of their surroundings, the artistic positions in Trisha Baga & NO BROW not only reflect the re-calibrated relation between applied and autonomous art, but also probe the currency of design as a diagnostic tool to uncover the hidden ecologies of the things that fill the lifeworld. However utopian current approaches to design may be, this show focusses on artistic strategies of re-staging and reiterating designed networks, activities and services. Doing so, the artists that come together in the show explore anew the modernist promise of universality and democracy in today’s era, in which the modern dualisms of subject and object have irrevocably proven obsolete..

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When we stopped filming, the old woman went crazy. We’d asked the drunken couple to dance a bit in front of the camera. Why did they give me this man, if I had my way, I’d have another, she turned to face us, opened her eyes wide, waved her hands in the air and in a lewd gesture grabbed the brightly printed cloth between her legs, put her hand on her crotch and shouted that she was on fire, on fire in there, and with that she started to dance by herself and arse into our trousers, I want a white man to get myself a mulatto, give me a white man and I’ll make a mulatto. Behind her, Zebndequias was explaining to Pedro, drinking alcohol every day doesn’t hurt you, drinking every day doesn’t hurt you, how many languages do you speak, parlez-vous français? Ich spreche 27 Sprachen, dialects and whatever; Ich spreche 27 Sprachen, drinking every day doesn’t hurt you, unless you overdo it, not every day, if you drink too much water, you die, a lot of water’s a bad thing, it’s like laughing, if you laugh too much you can fall over and hit your head on the ground, and die, but drinking every day is good.

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Can’t Hear My Eyes shows a number of works with sculptural and painterly connotations, dimensions and properties: to evoke their seemingly static nature and surface in light of the work’s inherent – and consequently invisible and not directly sensible – dynamics, through the format of an exhibition, in two given spaces. It does so in order to test the potential of the work of art in the key of current tendencies within our information culture. The given fact that we have grown more and more accustomed to hard facts as based on transparent, ascertainable (‘checkable’) and ‘democratic’ sources of information and modes of communication; and the surge for clear–cut definitions to indicate the parts that surround us, has lead to, one could argue, an incongruity between works of art and the way we generally organise and conceive of our lives.

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“Mommy Puffy Daddy Monster” features Loredana Di Lillo’s multimedia work dealing with her interest in overlapping temporal spaces—specifically childhood and a time of lost innocence as reflected by the exhibition’s singsong title. Di Lillo experiments with drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, photography, and video to unveil underlying societal themes. Starting from her analysis of customs, vices and virtues, local history and identity, she reflects on everyday life by interweaving her artistic practice with the reality she inhabits.

“Day After Forevermore” centers on Marnie Weber’s film, The Night of Forevermore, set in a fantastical world that exists somewhere between a Hieronymus Bosch painting and a contemporary Halloween horror movie.

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As a prelude to its repositioning, the Kunsthalle Wien organizes a ten-day festival dedicated to key issues of today’s society. WWTBD – What Would Thomas Bernhard Do takes up the tradition of Thomas Bernhard’s critical and recalcitrant thinking, transfers it into the present, and breaks it down into various disciplines in the sense of a concise analysis of the present.

Deliberately posed without a punctuation mark, the question What Would Thomas Bernhard Do does not raise expectations of a singular answer. It rather makes room for a wide range of statements, discussions, as well as the construction of both stable and fragile investigative and intellectual edifices.What Would Thomas Bernhard Do does not only work in a scientifically logic or poetical way, but also musically, visually, and, above all, in the togetherness and confusion of a marathon without a traced-out finishing line.

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Claus Hugo Nielsen works with a variety of media like sculpture, reliefs, installation, painting, photography and video, and have continuously addressed the phenomena of time: His work could be something from the past, made for the future or could as well be something from the future that should appear to be something from the past. Motifs of Claus Hugo Nielsen’s work range from the classical genres of art history, such as still lifes and the artist at work, to redefined archetypical forms of abstract sculpture with biomorphic characteristics as seen in the current exhibition. The artist reinvents these motifs in different scales and materials and plays with multiple historic and visual references, translating these timeless images into a contemporary art context.

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Independent 2013

March ~ 2013

Special Projects

This time around, the publication accompanying the fourth edition of Independent draws all the content from the fair new website.

independentnewyork.com

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If you say “haha,” aloud, you are not, under any circumstances, laughing. In fact it is something like the opposite of a laugh, the onomatopoeia of a dead laugh. You are laughing at laughing, or at best describing it (‘funny haha’). That is why, in transcriptions of interviews for example, laughter often becomes instead a stage direction, a non-verbal cue in parentheses: “(laughs)… (laughter)…”

If you write “haha,” on the other hand – rather, for example, than “lol” – you are begging the question. You are choosing, deliberately, to inhabit the ambiguity of writing, its indecision between saying and doing, its fundamental indirection. It is, just, possible for “haha” on the page to be a sympathetic form of laughter rather than its mockery; but it is impossible that it evades the possibility of mockery – which is to say, the possibility of irony – entirely.

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2.2 140 MILES EAST OF LA

Standing at the edge of the desert Freedman asks Fitzpatrick if he remembered the camera. He nods. As gallerists, they bury a suitcase filled with artwork.

2.3 EUROPE

Marlie Mul, perched on a stool at Besenkammer, gives advice on pouring resin. Hannah Weinberger, at Elaine, sends out a mass email about the Sadie Benning screening. Matthew Lutz-Kinoy exits a cab holding an Ikea bag filled with painted bathrobes. Leaning on the doorframe in Tobi’s living room, Jean-Michel Wicker describes his book release at APNews. Claus Rasmussen spills a Pilsner Urquell gesturing how to tailor a suit.  Nhu Duong, standing in Hauptbahnhof, adjusts a silver dress on Juliette for a photograph. Mathis Altmann picks up DJ Rashad from the airport and brings him to Longstreet Bar.

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“Splays” refers to the idea of the spreading out and expansion of body parts. The concise titles chosen by Gabriel Hartley for his works allude to the possible interpretations of his pieces, only apparently consigned to an abstract existence, for the simple spontaneity with which they become associable to the physical surrounding environment which, however, seizes the surreal references. This title manifests and justifies the artist’s choice to literally display his works on the table-cloth like prints, laid out as if they were splayed on the scanner.

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Having a cell phone number allows you to be tracked down rather easily. In the world of telecommunications, the most effective definition of existence – which a more primitive level, would be one’s identification with a name – is found in an apparently anonymous numeric code which makes it possible to be both traced and located: giving the enormous power, to a vaguely defined authority, to track our movements through the cells marking all possible positions on the invisible, yet very real grid that carves the world up into little segments of space.

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Galleria Franco Noero announce the opening of its new exhibition space in Turin, with “punto y línea en el altiplano,” an exhibition of new works by Gabriel Kuri. This is the third solo show of the Mexican artist for the gallery.

Shown in the former factory building converted to a design by Flavio Albanese, the series of works illustrates the ongoing development of Kuri’s most characteristic themes: an analysis of the nature of sculpture and of its potential in terms of form, together with the possibilities opened up by combining different elements, whether found or made, in a way that augments their intrinsic material and tactile qualities.

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British artist Stephen Willats returns to Modern Art Oxford for his fourth solo exhibition since 1968. Willats creates visually intensive works that explore the nature of human interaction, communication and connection between individuals and communities.

Examining social interaction, the influence of technology on daily life and the way we look at and think about our surroundings, Conscious – Unconscious presents a large dynamic mural work, an environmental datastream installation, photographic and text wall-­‐based works and a series of new drawings centering on flows of ideas and data.

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Taking its cue from the world of the corporate workspace, the title loosely defines decision-making and strategy in order to communicate more effectively. The exhibition pitches the logic and efficiency methods of post -industrial communication against artists’ intentions for image and object making. With office management in mind ‘Managing Bounces’ refers to the artists’ aspirations; ‘to successfully get a message across relies on cleaning up the delivery’.

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