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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Danh Vo at Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel

by mousse

November 10~2011

With “JULY, IV, MDCCLXXVI,” Danh Vo shifts the focus of his artistic investigations to the concept of freedom. The title designates 4 July 1776, the date of the signing of the U. S. Declaration of Independence from Great Britain. The writing in Roman numerals is taken from the tablet that the figure of New York’s Statue of Liberty is holding in her left hand. Since 1886, Miss Liberty has symbolized the hope of a better life for refugees and immigrants arriving in New York. She is the most important emblem of freedom and independence, which Danh Vo absorbs. Based on the dimensions of the original and its copper weight of some 31 tons, Vo had a replica of the Statue of Liberty made which forms the main part of ”JULY, IV, MDCCLXXVI.” He calls the gigantic sculpture WE THE PEOPLE, reciting the first three words of the preamble to the United States’ Constitution of 17 September 1787. But the monumentality of the statue is immediately qualified: the sculpture is dissected into its individual parts and thus abstracted. In his recreation, Vo concentrates on reproducing the thin copper skin (the iron scaffolding supporting the figure is missing), which gives WE THE PEOPLE a special fragility. The broken icon, the destroyed allegorical figure of Libertas, forms a strong counterpoint to the massive materiality.

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Matthew Brannon “Gentleman’s Relish” at Casey Kaplan, New York

by mousse

November 7~2011

The first exhibition by Brannon with Casey Kaplan is structured as three separate locales within the three rooms of the gallery. Sculptural doors with hand-painted signage written backwards: “Adult’s Only,” “Powder Room,” and “Police Station” displace the viewer into a fictitious world. Silkscreen and letterpress text-based prints, labeled “Act I”, “Act II”, and “Act III”, imply events that may yet happen­­ or have already occurred.

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Artissima 18 App now available on the App Store

by mousse

November 4~2011

Mousse is happy to announce the first digital guide to Artissima. Download the Artissima 18 App on your iPhone and discover a rich and comprehensive resource to live the fair. Arrange your visit, create your personal catalogue and navigate the constellation of projects and exhibitions in and outside the Oval.

Artissima 18 is a free application, and was developed by Mousse.



Richard Aldrich “Once I Was…” at Bortolami Gallery, New York

by mousse

October 28~2011

In the studio they were made individually, with their own logic and circumstances, but here as they are presented they become more of a symbolic gesture.

This manner of presenting an importance or objective, but in the same swoop tearing it apart in a way that questions the motivation of that initial importance (deterritorialization), which becomes almost a red herring in its surface-ness.

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“George Kuchar: A Tribute” at Tate Modern, London

by mousse

October 27~2011


–

‘The head, heart, and hairy area below the stomach is what should be stimulated at the cinema.’ – George Kuchar

This tribute to George Kuchar, a towering figure in American underground cinema who passed away in August 2011, features films spanning his career and his collaboration with Curt McDowell.

With his twin brother Mike, Kuchar produced a prodigious body of Super-8 and 16 mm films in the 1960s and 1970s – idiosyncratic narrative psychodramas and pop cultural parodies that are charged with perverse humour and became a major influence on younger filmmakers such as John Waters. In the mid-1980s, Kuchar acquired an 8 mm camcorder and began producing an extraordinary series of video diaries, chronicling a singular, ongoing personal history. Exhibiting the rawness of video verité and the theatricality of fiction, his self-narrated tapes record close-up observations of the personal routines and social interactions of Kuchar’s daily life.
–
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“The Event”, Birmingham

by mousse

October 26~2011

‘Our feast has a forerunner: Plato’s banquet during the plague. Diotima, what causes you sadness? What confidence stops oblivion? The alleyways of the heart drive away the desert darkness, open the door for friendship. Are these the spells of Mary the Harpist? Coiled in her hands by a trick of fate. The Arabian hurricane plays on her harp. The last pledge, perhaps, of immortality.’

The Event is an international biannual art festival in Birmingham, this year drawn to the thematic of Plato’s Symposion  (385–380 BC), a text that beats with ‘the genesis, purpose and nature of love’. The ten-day festival comprises exhibitions, publications, encomiums, food parcels, performances, screenings and new commissions, including an evening of performance curated by Boris Ondreička of Tranzit.org, featuring Jan Verwoert, Karl Holmqvist, Emily Roysdon and more.

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Martino Gamper “Condominium” at Galleria Franco Noero, Turin

by mousse

October 21~2011

“Condominium,” Martino Gamper’s first solo exhibition at Galleria Franco Noero, is a unique project expressly conceived for the galleryʼs peculiar spaces and underlines its commitment towards contemporary creative research, overcoming the boundaries between different artistic disciplines.

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Christopher D’Arcangelo at Artists Space, New York

by mousse

October 10~2011

Between 1975 and 1979, the US artist Christopher D’Arcangelo (1955-1979) developed an artistic practice notable for its radicality and critical import concerning the role of the artist, the status of the art object and the institutionalization of art. A desire for a radical democratization of the production and reception of art, motivated D’Arcangelo’s critique of art institutions. His position as an artist was voiced in a statement on anarchism that accompanied, in various stenciled and typewritten forms, the majority of his actions and interventions. The statement, which contains an ellipsis between brackets in the place of an adjectival definition of anarchism, recalls the historical expression “anarchism without adjectives.”

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The 12th Istanbul Biennial

by mousse

October 5~2011

The 12th Istanbul Biennial, curated by Adriano Pedrosa and Jens Hoffmann, opened to the public on September 17 and will be on view through November 13, 2011. This edition explores the rich relationship between art and politics, focusing on artworks that are both formally innovative and politically outspoken. It takes as its point of departure the work of the Cuban American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996). Gonzalez-Torres was deeply attuned to both the personal and the political, and also rigorously attentive to the formal aspects of artistic production, integrating high modernist, minimal, and conceptual references with themes of everyday life.

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‘Short Stories: Ben Schumacher’ at SculptureCenter, New York

by mousse

October 1~2011

Location, reproduction, and distribution are central to Ben Schumacher’s practice. Schumacher (Kitchener, Canada, 1985) creates images and installations that conceptualize and present art, both in-situ and online. His work is engaged in the collapse between object and image, as well as the discrepancies that might occur as one state is transferred to another. Schumacher uses images and objects culled from seemingly inconsequential online sources and order-on-demand readymades: an archive of unattributed signatures gathered from expired online receipts, customized car accessories rendered alien by their lack of context, Google Sketchup’s virtual models rendered as physical objects through the process of 3D rapid scanning.

For ‘Short Stories,’ Schumacher has created a new installation that draws attention to discrepancies between surface and substance, image and object. The dispersion and circulation of images is presented here as an uneasy surrogate or doppelganger of the gallery-based object, where both image and object present visual fictions of one another, thus exposing the true fiction of the ‘original’.

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