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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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