Anne Collier and Jennifer West for High Line Art, New York

by mousse

February 14~2012

Presented by Friends of the High Line, High Line Art commissions and produces public art projects that take place on and around the High Line, a public park built on an historic freight rail line elevated above the streets on Manhattan’s West Side.

High Line Art invited Anne Collier to conceive a new commission for the 25-by-75 foot billboard next to the High Line at West 18th Street and 10th Avenue. This is the second work to be presented as part of HIGH LINE BILLBOARD. The new billboard follows the iconic and much celebrated presentation of John Baldessari’s The First $100,000 I Ever Made, a gigantic reproduction of a $100,000 bill that dominated the skyline in Chelsea during the month of December.

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LA REPRISE – Janette Laverrière at Silberkuppe, Berlin

by mousse

February 3~2012

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Giti Nourbakhsch’s last exhibitions, Berlin

by mousse

January 31~2012

Press release:

Dear friends of the gallery,

on January 21, 2012 we opened the last shows of the gallery with Spartacus Chetwynd, Hans-Jörg Mayer and a group show with works of Ida Ekblad, Matias Faldbakken, Berta Fischer, Karl Holmqvist und Vincent Tavenne.
The gallery closes in March.

Yours, Giti Nourbakhsch

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Ben Schumacher at James Fuentes, New York

by mousse

January 20~2012

REGISTER OF DOCUMENTS 1974-
Register of Documents (Vokno)

Where the Berlin Wall once marked the frontier between the two opposed political systems of Germany, Sony and Mercedes Benz have now constructed new headquarters, celebrating their victory in the Cold War. Materially speaking, these structures are light, soaring tensile monuments of steel and glass – the ideological antithesis of the heavy opaque wall the buildings replaced.

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Hubert Duprat at art:concept, Paris

by mousse

January 19~2012

It is hard to attribute a stylistic unity to Hubert Duprat’s work. His intention isn’t to surprise or to create “out of the blue”; each one of his pieces is the result of a precise and tangible moment that pinpoints a significant experience, meant to allow him to temporarily break up with his previous schemes. He is at the crossings of two worlds: the world of free artistic expression, and the world of rationally organized artifacts. Neither goldsmith nor sculptor, not an entomologist, definitely not an archeologist, not even an artist, he uses his knowledge to reach beyond a purely artistic sphere. His interest doesn’t really lie in the transformation of something into something else that could be considered artwork, but rather in the creation of a metaphor between being and becoming, a ”know-how” and a possible “how-to-know”.

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Oscar Tuazon “Manual Labor” at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich

by mousse

January 17~2012

Galerie Eva Presenhuber presents new work by Paris-based American artist Oscar Tuazon in a show entitled Manual Labor. In recent years, Oscar Tuazon’s works, notably constructions in wood and concrete, have been shown in many exhibitions worldwide, including the 2011 Venice Biennial. His approach, working with and against the entropic qualities of natural materials, achieves fascinating results. In formal terms, Tuazon’s work displays loose links with the development of minimal and land art by artists such as Sol LeWitt or Michael Heizer. Tuazon’s hybrid sculptures, which are formed by and bear the traces of physical labor, are situated between architecture and performance.

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Renata Lucas at Peep-Hole, Milan

by mousse

December 3~2011

“Third Time” is the first solo exhibition by the Brazilian artist Renata Lucas at an Italian institution.

In her works Lucas questions the space we inhabit, our perception of it and the relationships that are established within it, as she is aware that there are no objective answers to be found but merely possibilities to test. Her projects consist of interventions – invasive in some cases and subtle in others – in the architecture and spaces with which the artist interacts, and they are always the outcome of a long process of experimentation, ongoing mediation and failures. Each work is an attempt to suspend the rules, to measure the “limits” of possibilities, using those very limits as contents to be developed again and again in new directions.

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Gert & Uwe Tobias at Maureen Paley, London

by mousse

December 1~2011

Maureen Paley presents the first solo exhibition in London by the Cologne-based brothers Gert & Uwe Tobias (born 1973 in Brasov, Romania). Gert & Uwe Tobias’ exhibitions often incorporate wall paintings, large-scale woodcut prints, collages, type-writer drawings and ceramic sculptures. Their works embrace eccentric figuration, geometric abstraction, and the typographic. The brothers’ interest in folklore and regional mythologies provides a contextual framework for their practice that simultaneously draws on personal biography, cultural identity and popular culture.

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Verne Dawson at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich

by mousse

November 30~2011

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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Mousse Issue #31 Out Now

by mousse

November 29~2011

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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Mark di Suvero and “Accumulations” at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

by mousse

November 28~2011

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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Jesse Ash “The Sculptor’s Nightmare” at Tulips & Roses, Brussels

by mousse

November 27~2011

…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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“Alina Szapocznikow: Sculpture Undone, 1955-1972″ at WIELS, Brussels

by mousse

November 26~2011

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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Jutta Koether “Mad Garland” at Campoli Presti, Paris

by mousse

November 25~2011

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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Aaron Curry and Richard Hawkins at David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

by mousse

November 24~2011

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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Akram Zaatari at Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo

by mousse

November 20~2011

“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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Jonathan Meese “HOT EARL GREEN SAUSAGE TEA BARBIE (FIRST FLUSH)” at Bortolami, New York

by mousse

November 14~2011

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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Sture Johannesson at Kraupa-Tuskany, Berlin

by mousse

November 11~2011

… and then began experimenting in expressing myself in conceptual art forms and actions; with posters, graphics, paintings, happenings, performances, media freaking etc. I learned how free art or even a mischief performance aroused archetypal behavior of the authorities in power, bringing about faces of the Watchmen; the Guardians of the Camp, with censorship, police brutality, and political persecution of dissidents. I believe that art should be well adapted and fused to rock the establishment, opposed to the ruling Party’s desirous ideology production. The notion of ‘entartete kunst’ and its corrupt spirit is still alive in the conglomerated governmental ‘Swedish State Art Control Stations’*. Yeah. I recognize that — by experience. I was born in 1935 as an orphan in the eugenics regime and endured ‘the Gulag Archipelago for Children’. And survived my childhood…

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