Aleksandra Domanović

Aleksandra Domanović, Portrait, 2011, 3d model, 50 x 70 cm, inkjet-print in frame

Main

Back

From the Archive

Exhibition: John McCracken, Works from 1963-2011, David Zwirner, New York

11 August 2013

Magazine Contemporary Culture

John McCraCken, Untited Sculptures, Installation Views

John McCraCken, Works from 1963–2011, 10 September – 19 October, 2013
David Zwirner, 537 West 20th Street, New York

McCracken occupies a singular position within the recent history of American art, as his work melds the restrained formal qualities of Minimalist sculpture with a distinctly West Coast sensibility expressed through color, form, and finish. He developed his early sculptural work while studying painting at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland in the late 1950s and early 1960s. While experimenting with increasingly three-dimensional canvases, the artist began to produce objects made with industrial materials, including plywood, sprayed lacquer, and pigmented resin, creating the highly reflective, smooth surfaces that he was to become known for.

Drawn primarily from public and private collections, the approximately fifty works in this exhibition chart the evolution of McCracken’s diverse but considered oeuvre. Encompassing both well-known and lesser-seen examples of the artist’s production from the early 1960s up through his death in 2011.

Highlights from the exhibition include a room-size installation of six monumentally scaled black columns, a layout introduced by the artist in his sketchbook in the early 1970s, but first produced and shown at David Zwirner in 2006; as well as an adjacent room containing stainless steel sculptures from 2011, which are polished to produce such a high degree of reflectivity that they seem translucent and camouflaged, bordering on invisibility as they reflect their surroundings.

A number of works from the 1960s, when McCracken first emerged onto the Los Angeles art scene, are included in the exhibition, such as Untitled (1964), a cross-shaped hybrid form that vacillates between painting and sculpture; three multi-colored rectangular “slot” works, a form that McCracken first exhibited in his seminal 1965 solo show at Nicholas Wilder Gallery in Los Angeles; as well as several of the artist’s earliest “planks,” his signature sculptural form that he first generated in 1966 and continued to make throughout his career. These narrow monochromatic, rectangular board-shaped sculptures lean against the wall while simultaneously entering into the three-dimensional realm of the viewer. Also on view is Untitled (2011), the last plank that McCracken made in his lifetime, which is fabricated in stainless steel.

In 2015, the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, California will host a retrospective of McCracken’s work.

Read Full Article

Michael Schmidt, Lebensmittel (Food)

9 February 2013

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Art Main No Comments

Michael Schmidt, From the series, Lebensmittel, 2006 – 2010

Michael Schmidt is one of Germany’s most important social-documentary photographers. Although he works in series, each photograph stands as an autonomous work in its own right. When the photographs are seen together in a book or an exhibition, connections between two pictures give rise to a third, as Schmidt explained in an interview with Dietmar Elger in his book Irgendwo.

In his Lebensmittel series (2006–10), Schmidt confronts photography with its painterly qualities in 177 photographs. The work’s all-too-perfect patterning makes it look like a naturalistic painting and manifests an immaculate production process. While using the documentary form of investigative journalism, Schmidt succeeds in capturing the social reality, hybridity and poverty of the food industry in a way that is neither accusatory nor dismissive. Schmidt is not concerned with finding a clear, self-sufficient aesthetic form. He opts neither for pure confrontation with the monstrosity of reality, nor for escapist visions based on abstraction. Instead, in his work, the aestheticized landscape becomes a mere region, a building is just architecture, a still life is simply an arrangement of objects.

Schmidt was born in east Berlin, but his family crossed to the west before the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. He trained as a policeman, at his parents’ insistence, before taking up the camera in 1965 to document the streets, buildings and people of west Berlin. He later told an interviewer: “I could also make photos somewhere else; I just wouldn’t know why.” Schmidt was self-taught, and his early series, including Stadtlandschaft (Urban Landscapes) (1974-75) and Berlin, Stadtbilder (Berlin, Urban Images) (1976-80) mapped out the city in which he lived in a semi-documentary way. In 1976, he founded the Werkstatt für Fotografie (Workshop for Photography) in Berlin, and invited several leading American photographers, including William Eggleston and John Gossage, to teach there.

In the following decades, his approach became more impressionistic. He would shoot thousands of frames for each project without thinking too much about the end result, which would emerge later out of rigorous editing. Increasingly, he was drawn to series over single images, atmosphere over documentary representation.

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/may/28/michael-schmidt

Read Full Article

Post Internet Survival Guide, 2010

30 January 2012

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Books Culture Main No Comments

Katja Novitskova, Post Internet Survival Guide , 272 pages, 180 x 230 mm, Revolver Publishing, 2010

You are holding a guide to the ecology of a severe ongoing merging of matter, social and (visual) information in the present world. The shift to a multi-polar, mobile, post-democratic, gated, real-time set of conditions effectively redistributes the global balance of powers. The existing structures of our (Western) mode of thinking and being, including the flows of energy and value, the domain of aesthetics, the currency of art, and our role in the process that is civilization are being reshaped and re-articulated. The scale of these changes are reflected in the dynamics of formats, files, gadgets, species, identities, ideologies, brands, styles, cultures, natural disasters, memes, technologies, entering the ultimate platform and player of dissemination: Internet.

Post Internet Survival Guide 2010 is organized into chapters according to the first page of Google search results for ‘survival guide’: Size up the situation, Use all your senses, Remember where you are, Value living, Improvise, Vanquish fear and panic, Act like the natives, Learn basic skills. It crosses streams of seemingly unrelated information flows, from art and news, to corporate stock photography, screenshots and scientific renderings. Post Internet Survival Guide elevates selected content from its original fragmented online environment and solidifies its temporary values and meanings in a collection of guiding narratives.

This book is a tool to assist in stepping above our daily online routine, to reach a realm that lies somewhere between reading a principal religious text, watching a colonial documentary on savages, or looking at yourself in the mirror. This is the space where we ask ourselves what it means to be a human being today.

The book features texts and works by AIDS-3D, Aaron Graham, Adam Cruces, André Carlos Lenox & Evan Lenox, Anne de Vries, Artie Vierkant, Brad Troemel (The Jogging), Brian Khek, Constant Dullaart, Chris Lee, Christian Oldham, Damon Zucconi, Daniel Chew, Emily Jones, Gene McHugh, Iain Ball, Jaakko Pallasvuo, Jack Latham, Jacob Broms Engblom, John Transue, Jon Rafman, Kareem Lotfy, Kari Altmann, Kate Steciw, Katja Novitskova, Lance Wakeling, Lauren Brick, Lauren Christiansen, Laurence Punshon, Lorenzo Bernet, Louis Doulas, Martin Kohout, Matei Samihaian, Matteo Giordano, Micah Schippa, Mike Ruiz, Orlando Orellano, Pierre Lumineau, R-U-INS?, Rachael Milton, Sam Hancocks, Sebastian Moyano, Sterling Crispin, Tabor Robak, Timur Si-Qin and Yannic Joray.

http://katjanovi.net/postinternetsurvivalguide.html

Read Full Article

T293 Gallery, Naples and Rome

6 April 2015

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Culture Galleries No Comments

Established in 2002 in an historical building of the Neapolitan centre, in Via dei Tribunali 293, T293 has always been characterised by a keen awareness on artistic practices that are both experimental and conceptually relevant to the current discourse in the field. First conceived as artists’ space dedicated to the support of emerging artists, in 2006 T293 changes its organizational status and starts operating as a company managed by the founder Paola Guadagnino and the independent curator Marco Altavilla, who joined as co-Director.

With the new organization, new purposes have been added, expanding the gallery’s mission towards a more international approach and a more incisive curatorial attitude. With the firm intention to honour its roots while also mainting an international status, in 2010 T293 chooses to be headquartered in Rome and to become a benchmark in the contemporary art sector, both nationally and internationally. First located near to Piazza Navona, it then moves to via Giovanni Mario Crescimbeni, few minutes walking from the Colosseum, where is still located.

Addressing an audience that is simultaneously cosmopolitan and qualified, T293 cultivates a professional network characterised by the high professionality of its members. In order to achieve its primary goals, since the very beginning of its activity T293 has presented groundbreaking projects at international art fairs such as Frieze London, Frieze New York, MiArt in Milan, Art Basel Miami Beach and Art Basel-Art Statements, where in 2008 has been awarded the prestigious Bâloise Art Prize (with a solo show of Tris Vonna-Michell).

Its eagerness in finding what is new in the contemporary artistic scenario has allowed T293 to be the place where today’s most interesting artists have had their first solo shows. The artists T293 represents always achieve international recognition as testified by their activities in institutions such as Tate, Palais de Tokyo, Museum Fridericianum and La Biennale di Venezia among the others. More recently, T293 has inaugurated new, successful models of collaboration with other professionals, hosting within its walls a programme of artistic residencies as well as innovative curatorial projects conceived together with other galleries and institutions.

Willing to nurture the development of contemporary art and visual culture through different generations of artists, T293 showcases that which is the excellence in the contemporary art field not only through its far-reaching exhibitions programme, but also with the support of projects and publications that act as catalysts for the development of fresh ways of seeing and contextualizing contemporary art.

http://www.t293.it/gallery/

Read Full Article

Gallery: Regen Projects, Los Angeles

8 April 2015

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Culture Galleries No Comments

“I knew about the gallery before I ever moved to the United States,” says Philippe Vergne, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art who first landed in the U.S. in 1990s. “If you look at the Los Angeles art scene, Regen Projects, together with a handful of galleries, was really the organization that promoted artists working here from my generation. They represent a group that has been extremely important: Liz Larner, Raymond Pettibon and Cathy Opie, who has been a very important to MOCA not only as an artist but as a member of the board.”

This is the gallery that gave the California-born Barney his first solo gallery show in 1991, when the artist was all of 24. And it was the first to represent L.A. artist Opie, whose elegant portraits of drag kings and S&M fetishists from the 1990s sent a gender-ambiguous lightning bolt through the world of contemporary photography. In 2004, the gallery served as the site of Glenn Ligon’s first solo gallery show in Los Angeles, an exhibition of his gritty text paintings, which borrow passages from a vast array of cultural figures, from Ralph Ellison to Richard Pryor.

The story began in the late 1980s, when Shaun Caley met Stuart Regen at an opening at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. Regen was part of an art dynasty, the son of prominent New York dealer Barbara Gladstone. He had worked at the experimental PS1 art space in New York (now part of the Museum of Modern Art) and later served as the director of the Fred Hoffman Gallery in Santa Monica. Caley, an art critic, had just landed in L.A. after a stint in Milan, where she’d served as managing editor of the magazine Flash Art. The two met for lunch. Regen offered Caley a job directing his soon-to-be-opened gallery.

“Stuart had always wanted to have an art gallery,” says Caley Regen, and the ’80s provided just the right confluence of happenings in Los Angeles. “There had been the opening of MOCA and the Broad Foundation. And there was a cluster of interesting galleries: Margo Leavin, Fred Hoffman and Daniel Weinberg.”

“We came to the idea that it would be an exciting venture and it was that simple,” recalls Weiner, who says the couple’s seriousness persuaded him that it would be the right thing to do. “It will sound pretentious, but they talked about the work and how it set a tone for the people they were trying to attract. I’d been showing in Los Angeles since the ’60s. I have very dear friends who I made projects with, from DeWain Valentine to Ed Ruscha. They saw me as an integral part of Los Angeles culture.”

A string of important shows followed: a light exhibition by James Turrell, prints by the innovative German painter Gerhard Richter and participation in a three-gallery tribute to Nicholas Wilder, an L.A. dealer who had helped foster the careers of painter David Hockney and minimalist sculptor John McLaughlin.

The gallery’s biggest coup, however, came in May 1991, with the first solo gallery exhibition by Barney, who would become one of the definitive artists of the decade. The show was a fusion of performance, sculpture, installation and photography. There were objects related to sports (a football jersey) and sex (bondage belts), as well as a metal cooling chamber that harbored an exercise bench sculpted out of petroleum jelly. The exhibition was a surreal examination by the former athlete of the cult of the body in relation to athletics.

“Stuart had seen his work in New York and was blown away,” remembers Caley Regen. “It was indescribable, so protean. He was using materials people hadn’t used: medical things, sports things, the body. I thought it was amazing.”

The show received a glowing write-up in industry bible Artforum. Kristine McKenna, who reviewed the show for this paper, described it as “rivetingly weird,” an installation that drew vital attention “to the complex and fragile interplay between spirit and flesh.”

“You put these things out in the world,” she says. “If you show great art, people will come to you.”

http://www.regenprojects.com
Read Full Article