Magazine Contemporary Culture

Exhibitions

Artist: Jordan Wolfson

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Jordan Wolfs, Female Figure, 2014 and Colored Sculpture, 2016, Installation View

In a recent interview Jordan Wolfson artist traced a cycle of works produced since 2009 back to a moment of eye-contact: “It is something that became clear to me in Your Napoleon (2009) […]. For that work, I kept trying to figure out how to cut and paste these mock conversations about string theory and pop culture, and it felt like an ad-lib […]. I didn’t come up with the term formal bridge until I basically asked the actors to just read the script and look directly into my eyes, stare deep into my eyes” [Jordan Wolfson and Aram Moshayedi, “Tell a Poser,” in Ecce Homo / le Poseur, Walther König, Cologne, 2013, p. 92].If eye contact is both the semblance of a “truthful” connection and in the right hands a mask for falsity, Wolfson has pursued this “formal bridge” into a realm of heightened artifice and discomforting disclosure. His sophisticated animated constructions have achieved an unerring capacity to meld the giddy “anything goes” of computer-generated imagery with the telling fetish of the pop-cultural meme.

In his first solo exhibition for David Zwirner in New York in 2014, comprising a projected film, an installation and a number of digitally printed reliefs, instances of engineered eye contact between an artwork’s protagonist and the viewer anchored the show. The looped film Raspberry Poser (2012) featured a medley of animated forms layered against stock-image backgrounds and tastefully shot locations, set to a soundtrack of Beyoncé and Mazzy Star. Bouncing HIV virus particles and ethereal floating condoms emitting cascades of love hearts roved the streets and luxury lifestyle boutiques of New York’s SoHo. Meanwhile a generic cartoon boy gleefully strangled and self-eviscerated himself, as if to prove his immortal otherworldliness. Intercut with these characters, a series of live-action sequences showed Wolfson dressed as an archetypal punk on a “dérive” through a Parisian park. A close-up shot sees him turn to the camera and hold the prolonged gaze of the lens, an insouciant smile flickering across his face. The camera, of course, mediates the connection between Wolfson and the viewer. But the intentionality and persistence behind “the look” is unnerving. It holds both an arrogant knowingness and something of the contorted power play of a fashion model’s stare into the camera.

Female Figure 2014 is an almost absurdist endgame for discourse around the theatrics of the sculptural object and the tendency towards stagecraft within the contemporary art exhibition. While the robot’s routine was scripted, programmed and seamlessly looped — not unlike Raspberry Poser playing nearby — the physical nature of the encounter was heightened through the restriction to one or two people entering the room at any time. This conceit, a gesture towards an individualized performance, allowed for the singular experience of being “seen” by “her,” a phenomenon made possible by the use of advanced facial recognition and motion-sensing technology. The robot is the distant figure in the park in Jean Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943). Thought of as a puppet, its relation to the objects around it is purely additive; it creates no new relations in the world of the viewer. In its locking of sight-lines, however, the viewer is momentarily yet disconcertingly aware of becoming an object in the eyes of the automaton.

In many regards, Jordan Wolfson artist work embodies the internalized contradictions of a generation whose teenage years spanned the twin poles of a burgeoning hyper-sexualized cultural economy and the media-stoked specter of sexually transmitted disease. In conjuring up a social imaginary around HIV and AIDS activism, Raspberry Poser echoes a young adult asking: “What does it mean about me?” — what writer Sarah Schulman has described as a “suburban narcissism in which one is able to ‘identify’ in order to internalize value”[Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, University of California Press, Oakland CA, 2012, p. 7]. The “place of distortion” Wolfson moves toward is undoubtedly agonistic, as it rests on a neurotic self-identification that appropriates positions of sexuality, gender, race and class — positions that themselves are present in the work only through inflated, vulgarized stereotypes. “Do you think I’m homosexual? Do you think I’m rich? Will you tell them what it’s like to be with me?” The artist’s needy voice is caught within the performance of a hyperbolized role, a meta-dialogue with the viewer that challenges their presumptions of identity and the “honest” disclosure of inner angst. While Wolfson is evidently not himself the loose-skinned, tired man of the poetic monologue in Female Figure 2014, the psycho-sexual inner world of the creator of the Bellmer-esque robot-as-sex-object looms large as an involuntary fiction.

There is a clear sense in which the artist’s work from 2009 onward has rejected a reliance on acquired methods and signifiers of artistic validity and rectitude. The complex cycle of works that culminates in the twin gazes of the female automaton and the languid punk instead offers witness to an unadorned self-image at odds with the governing techniques of the self-enterprising individual. Wolfson’s adoption of animation and animatronics locates this externalization within structural ambivalence; the ability to warp, inflate, distort and fantasize offers a fitting testimony to the splitting of contemporary subjecthood.

Source: Kunstforum International, June July 2016 Issue.
Text: Richard Birkett, Flashartonline.com.
All images belongs to the respective artist and management.

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Martine Syms, Fact and Trouble, ICA London, Exhibition

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Martine Syms, Fact and Trouble, Lessons I-XXX, 2014, Motivational Text Message and Installation View of Fact and Trouble, 2016

Fact & Trouble is an exhibition by American artist Martine Syms that examines the space between lived  experience and its representation. Syms’s video series Lessons (ongoing), on view at the ICA, is a long, incomplete poem in 180 sections. Each piece is thirty seconds in duration and articulates a lesson from the tradition. One of these lessons is painted on the gallery walls. The videos use the idea of inheritance as a departure point, simulating the private-public unconscious of television shows, advertisements, animated GIFs, police cams, surveillance footage, Vines and other digitally-circulated formats. In the alcove, this abundance of signifiers manifests in an immersive floor-to-ceiling collage. To accompany and expand upon the videos, Syms has created an installation of double-sided photographs and cookies mounted on century stands, a standard workhorse of film production. The exhibition compiles original and found photography, alongside images taken by her father, weaving together familial, cultural, and historical legacies. Fact & Trouble demonstrates Syms’s multifarious artistic practice which includes video, performance and writing as well as publishing through her imprint Dominica.

Martine Syms (b. 1988) is an artist based in Los Angeles. Her artwork has been exhibited and screened extensively, including recent presentations at Karma International, Bridget Donahue Gallery, the New Museum, Kunsthalle Bern, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Index Stockholm, MOCA Los Angeles and MCA Chicago. She’s lectured at Yale University, SXSW, California Institute of the Arts, University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins University and MoMA PS1, among other venues. Upcoming exhibitions include Made in LA at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and Manifesta 11 in Zurich, Switzerland.

Source: Magazine Contemporary Culture.
Text: Press Release, ICA London.
All images belongs to the respective artist and managment.

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Lars Laumann

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Lars Laumann, Season of Migration to the North, 2015, Kari & Knut, 2009-2010 and Duett (Med styrken i vår tro i en sang, i en sang), 2010

The exhibition Kompendium with the Norwegian artist Lars Laumann features a selection of video works from 2006 until today. By filming, editing, and juxtaposing a mix of appropriated materials and subjectively experienced narratives, Laumann creates virtuoso, visual film collages that feature an extensive cast of characters. His collaborations with artists, filmmakers, and musicians clearly influence the final result. The artist seeks inspiration from the margins of pop culture and explores people and phenomena on the outskirts of society. With a global perspective on both pop culture icons and contemporary political events, Laumann sheds light on the more complex forces of our culture.

‘Kompendium’ is small in scale but broad in scope. The span of Lars Laumann’s works takes in the fishing industries in Somalia and Northern Norway; Morrissey conspiracy theories; migrating puffins and marching bands; and Nico’s last days in Ibiza. This survey of his work – the first time much of it has been shown in his native Norway – comprises six films on small screens or monitors in the upstairs exhibition halls of Kunstnernes Hus, while the newest piece, Seasons of Migration to the North (2015), is projected inside a scaffolding rig that fills up a whole ground floor room.

The earliest piece on show is Morrissey Foretelling the Death of Diana (2006), in which Laumann deconstructs the lyrics of The Smiths’ 1985 album Meat is Murder, track by track, to reveal a dizzying litany of references that appear to predict the death of Princess Diana, an analysis that teeters between being convincing and absurd. Five adjacent monitors play the same film, each one spoken in a different language (one for each country where the piece has been shown to date) and each in a conspicuous, regional accent (the English version is spoken in thick Mancunian). Against a looped background refrain by The Smiths, montaged clips from French New Wave, Kitchen Sink Drama or Carry Onfilms obliquely illustrate the monologue’s rollercoaster of incident. Truth and paranoia lie back to back in what is both an homage to Laumann’s own early Smiths obsession, as well as the obscure lines of research facilitated by the internet.

Laumann is attracted to stories that occur on the margins, or even the margins of the margins. His best known work, Berlinmuren(2008), tells the tale of a Swedish woman, Eija-Riita Eklöf Berlinermauer, who is ‘objecto-sexual’ and has fallen in love with and married the Berlin Wall. The outlandish story, narrated in deadpan fashion by the Swedish woman herself, evacuates the Berlin Wall of its usual symbolic political content and meaning: ‘My love for the Berlin Wall has nothing to do with politics’, she says. Without Laumann’s own presence in the film, it’s difficult to determine if the story is real or fabricated, creating an unsettling viewing experience that brings our own prejudices to the fore.

Laumann’s most recent work, Season of Migration to the North, takes on more topical territory. The film is a refugee story, told from the perspective of a young, gay Sudanese asylum-seeker, doubly ostracized through homophobia and Islamophobia. Again, the narration is in the first person – the protagonist Eddie Ismael reads his diary entries from just before his arrest in Khartoum to his departure for Norway, where he was sent to a refugee camp in the North before moving to Oslo. Eddie’s arrest occurs at a fashion show in Khartoum that he helped organize and took part in. The police raided the event, arresting all of ‘the boys who they thought looked gay’ as well as the girls that ‘looked immoral’. Original footage from this fashion show provides the visual backdrop – handsome, barefoot models parade on a carpeted catwalk, styled in casual designer clothes. The work draws its power from the gulf between the benign images and their role in the narrator’s exile. At one point Ismael brings in a historical parallel, mentioning the diaries of Ruth Maier, an Austrian girl who came to Norway as a refugee from World War II, and fell in love with a Norwegian girl. History repeats itself, and the struggles faced by Jewish homosexuals during mid-20th-century fascism now find their echo in the experiences of Muslim homosexuals – minorities within a minority group.

The first-person narration in both of these films is direct and disarming, while the artist’s own presence is reduced to the point of invisibility. Laumann’s works are never documentary as such: the intense identification of artist and subject dissolves critical distance, rendering the relationship between them ambiguous. Voices, scripts and images are often borrowed, while several works are collaborations with artist friends. Just as Morrissey told his own story through a montage of quotes lifted from literature and films, so each of Laumann’s works becomes an inhabitation of others’ lives. ‘My mind and my life are two different things’, says Nico in the film You Can’t Pretend to be Somebody Else – You Already Are (2009–11), in which a trio of transvestites are called upon to perform the story of Nico’s life: ‘My life follows me around.’

Source: Magazine Contemporary Culture.
Text: Kirsty Bell, Frieze Magazine and Press Release, Kunstnernes Hus.
All images belongs to the respective artist and managment.

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Erika Vogt, Slug, Simone Subal

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Erika Vogt, Stranger Debris Roll Roll Roll, 2013 and installation view of Slug, 2015

Erika Vogt might alternately be described as a sculptor, printmaker or video artist, but, like so many of her peers, these labels merely point at the edges of something deeper. Born out of the tradition of experimental film, Erika brings to bear many of the techniques from that practice to her sculptures and installations – collaging, layering and cutting up different material.

Erika Vogt, born 1973, is a Los Angeles based artist represented by Overduin & Co. in Los Angeles and Simone Subal Gallery in New York City. She received an MFA from California Institute of the Arts and a BFA from New York University.

Vogt uses a range of media and techniques in order to explore the mutability of images and objects. Within her installations, she fuses elements of sculpture, drawing, video, and photography to produce multilayered image spaces. She challenges prescribed art-making systems, conflating and confusing their logic, as sculptures take on the properties of drawing and photographs take on the nature of film. Building on her background in experimental filmmaking, Vogt’s visually dense videos combine both still and moving images, digital and analog technologies, and playfully incorporate drawings and objects from her previous projects. In her recent work, exemplified by installations such as Notes on Currency (2012), The Engraved Plane (2012), and Grounds and Airs (2012), Vogt took as her subject the ritual use and exchange of objects, such as currency, and investigated the empathetic relationship between objects and people.

To read Slug through this gift of words (albeit someone else’s) as “an extension of the interior life of the giver, both in space and time, into the interior life of the receiver” allows us to perceive the slug in its dialectical sense: as a $50 gold coin, for sure, but also its opposite, a counterfeit, a token used to subvert a slot machine’s understanding of exchange value. We experience Slug as the implicit trace of productive activity, but it also transforms us (the viewer) into the slug, the interval between things, the breath or gap. “But blank lines do not say nothing,” as Carson writes.

Through her work, Vogt attempts to gesture towards community. Not in the educational sense or what we conflate with “social practice” as an institutional turn, but in the old way, the way it used to mean friendship, comradeship, living and working together. The sculptures shade, point, protect and interact with each other, creating new perspectives on and for one another. Bringing to mind Shelly Silver’s Things I forgot to tell myself, in which the filmmaker’s scrunched up hand forms an aperture through which we see the city, we should read Slug together. It is through their implied social relation that these objects reveal sincerity. Vogt refuses to take the stance of either cynical embrace or pseudo-rebellious anti-art, meaning there is instead an untypical openness to the work. It yearns to protect, to support.

Source: Art News, September, 2015.

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Patrizio Di Massimo: Col Sole in Fronte (With The Sun In Front Of Me)

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Patrizio Di Massimo, Col Sole in Fronte (With The Sun In Front Of Me), 2010

Col Sole in Fronte (With The Sun In Front Of Me) begins on the ground floor of the gallery with the video Duets for Cannibals. This work was commisioned by Milan City Council and Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation in order to make a portrait of an African boy, Abdullay Kadal Traore, who has been living in Italy for several years. I accepted that request but not standing behind the camera and filming Abdullay as an exotic subject. The video becomes thus a dialogue or a duet in which we reason together about staging my proposal for the commission that he initially accepts and then rejects, revealing the intrinsic limit that we are not disposed to go beyond although we are both paid.

On the first floor, the exhibition continues with a double video installation Faccetta Nera, Faccetta Bianca (Italian, Little Black Face, Little White Face). The drawing that I showed to Abdullay in Duets for Cannibals becomes an image through the use of two actors and a photography study. The video installation examines the problem of difference with a dichotomic and literal attitude, and it gains its real meaning when is combined with the mistaken interpretation in the songs in question. In fact, Faccetta Nera was composed in order to attribute a noble motivation to the Ethiopia’s colonial invasion (1935) encouraging the Italian and the Abyssinian to unite; while Faccetta Bianca was the subsequent request of the regime that didn’t relish the first song. Facceta Bianca attempted to overturn it, however it did not gain a general acceptance among those who still sing Faccetta Nera identifying that “Black” as the ideology colour. Faccetta Nera, Faccetta Bianca:

If you look at the sea from the hills/Young negro slave amongst slaves/Like in a dream you will see many ships/And a tricolour waving for you/Little black face, beautiful Abyssinian/Wait and see the hour coming!/When we will be with you/We will give you another law and another king/Little black face, beautiful Abyssinian/Our law is slavery of love/We will take you to Rome freed/YOU WILL BE KISSED BY OUR SUN/and a black shirt you will be too/Little black face, you will be Roman/Your only flag will be Italian!/We will march together with you/and parade in front of the Duce and the king

Little white face, when I left you/That day on the pier in the steam/With the legionnaires I embarked/And your black eye gazing at the heart/It was equally moved as mine/While your hand was saying goodbye to me/Little white face, my love/Goodbye little, pale, tired face!/Little white face, one goes where one’s already been/in the trench, already on my mind again/among so many misty faces/IS YOUR LITTLE FACE, BRIGHTER THAN THE SUN/Nearly contrasting these black faces/your sharpshooter is a flame and a light/Little white face, my only passion/The day the sharpshooter will clasp you tightly to his chest with emotion/will come/Little white face, one goes where one’s already been/And your little, beautiful, white face/Will rest on a tired medal!

The exhibition pertains to the sun, that is said to be Italy’s petroleum, to our heads and faces, to the intensive dialogue between the Italian contemporary society and its specific colonial past. The Italian song, through its use and quotation, interweaves all the works in the show and expresses historical, cultural and image ties. The exhibition also includes a rich selection of drawings made in 2009.

Col Sole in Fronte is then this press release that explains itself as an artwork within the exhibition. It explains and extends itself all around looking for that place in the sun which is Italy, which should be Italy, but has never been.

Go…my heart, from flower to flower/with sweetness and with love/go you for me…./Go…since my happiness/WITH THE SUN IN FRONT (OF ME)/and happy I sing/blissfully…/I wanna live and enjoy/the air of the mountain/’cause this enchantment/costs nothing!/Ah, ah! Today I ardently love/that impertinent creek, minstrel of love/Ah, ah! The blossoming of the trees/keeps in feast this heart/do you know why?/I wanna live like this/with the sun in front (of me)/and happy I sing/I sing for me!/Ah, ah! Today I ardently love/that impertinent creek, minstrel of love/Ah, ah! The blossoming of the trees/keeps in feast this heart /do you know why?/I wanna live like this/ with the sun in front (of me)/and happy I sing/I sing for me!/

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Viviane Sassen: Pikin Slee

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Viviane Sassen: Pikin Slee, 3 February 2015 – 12 April 2015
Institute of Contemporary Arts, London

The content of the exhibition focuses predominantly on a body of work that Sassen made in Pikin Slee, Suriname in 2013. Pikin Slee is the second-largest village on the Upper Suriname River, deep within the Surinamese rainforest. The exhibition consists of black and white and colour works shot on an analogue camera.

In her first visit to Pikin Slee in the summer of 2012, Sassen was intrigued by the village and its inhabitants. Her eye was caught by the overwhelming natural beauty and the Saramacca’s very traditional way of living, combined with the more mundane objects which seemed to seep through daily life. The Saramacca community are isolated from the outside world, living without running water, electricity, roads or the internet. The only way to access the village is by canoe, a journey of about three hours up-river. They grow their food on small agricultural plots, producing cassava bread, pressed maripa palm oil and dried coconut.

Shot mainly in black and white and of contained format, Sassen’s series of abstract compositions and elusive subjects are an exploration of the beauty of the everyday, an investigation of the sculptural qualities of the ordinary.

“My memories of Africa have always played a major role in my life and in my work. I guess that’s because they filled my very first consciousness. It’s in my spine, my blue-print so to speak… When I returned back from Kenya, all I knew was my life there, so Holland seemed very strange and new to me… Now that I’ve travelled so much in Africa over the past 12 years, my ideas about the continent and about myself in relation to it, have changed of course. But it’s a continuous journey, both in the inside world and the outside world. My work is a reflection of that journey.”

Sassen was born in 1972 in Amsterdam, where she now lives. She first studied fashion design, followed by photography at the Utrecht School of the Arts (HKU) and Ateliers Arnhem. Her work was first published in avant-garde fashion magazines and is regularly commissioned by prominent designers. Sassen was included in the main exhibition of the 55th Venice Biennale, The Encyclopedic Palace, in 2013. A retrospective of 17 years of her fashion work, In and Out of Fashion, opened at Huis Marseille Museum for Photography, Amsterdam, in 2012, accompanied by a book published by Prestel (Munich); the exhibition travelled to the Rencontres d’Arles festival and then the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh. The book won the Kees Scherer prize for best Dutch photography book of 2011/2.

She was awarded the Dutch art prize, the Prix de Rome, in 2007, and in 2011 won the International Center of Photography in New York’s Infinity Award for Applied/Fashion/Advertising Photography. She was one of six artists selected for the 2011 New Photography exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Solo exhibitions have taken place at FORMA in Milan (2009) and FOAM in Amsterdam (2008), among other venues.

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Re-View: Onnasch Collection, Houser & Wirth London

David Smith, Seven Hours, 1961 (Pre-painted steel, 214.5 x 122 x 45.5 cm), Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting, 1956 (Oil on canvas, 203.2 x 127 cm), Exhibition installation view

Re-View: Onnasch Collection, 20 September – 14 December 2013
Hauser & Wirth London, Piccadilly and Hauser & Wirth London, Savile Row

Hauser & Wirth is devoting all three of its London galleries to a presentation of works from the collection of Reinhard Onnasch. A celebration of Onnasch’s longstanding passion for art and collecting, ‘Re-View: Onnasch Collection’ is curated by Paul Schimmel, a post-war scholar and the newly announced Partner of Hauser Wirth & Schimmel. The exhibition focuses on the period between 1950 and 1970, which saw the birth of some of the most important artistic movements of the 20th century. It will feature significant works from the Onnasch Collection, including iconic examples of Pop Art, Fluxus, Colorfield, Assemblage, Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism from the New York School of Art, many of which have never been presented before in London.

“This is an unusually diverse collection rich in its strong commitment to both American and European art. It shows a uniquely open-minded and exploratory approach to collecting that is incredibly rare and forms a stunningly diverse view of the currents and counter-currents of this era.”
– Paul Schimmel

Reinhard Onnasch (born in Germany in 1939) was one of the first Germans to open a gallery in New York following World War II. He introduced German artists such as Dieter Roth and Hanne Darboven to American audiences, American artists such as Morris Louis, Claes Oldenburg and Kenneth Noland to German audiences, and was one of the earliest advocates of the American artist, Edward Kienholz. Onnasch was attracted to the individual personalities of an artist’s work, a quality that led him to build an extensive and eclectic collection with a multitude of themes and stories coursing through it.

Onnasch Collection Hauser and Wirth, ‘Re-View: Onnasch Collection’ begins in Hauser & Wirth’s Piccadilly gallery with an exploration of Assemblage, collage and the combine, looking specifically at the quasi-area between sculpture, the performative and the cinematic that these works occupy. The centrepiece of the presentation at Piccadilly is the work of the self-taught American artist, Edward Kienholz. Kienholz’s early, surreal sculptural assemblages highlight the artist’s penchant for wrestling with difficult subject matter and creating sharp social criticism. For example, ‘The Future as an Afterthought’ (1962) confronts the horrors of nuclear war by assembling a mass of dismembered baby dolls in the silhouette of a mushroom cloud.

In the American Room of the Piccadilly gallery, the rich tradition of Assemblage is further explored through works by George Brecht, Christo and Dieter Roth. Their work emphasises the banal, completely disregarding the boundaries between so-called ‘high art’ and everyday life. They embraced the accident and the unpredictability of their unstable materials, including food. Only the red caps peep out of Roth’s ‘Zwerge (Dwarves)’ (1970), a block of garden gnomes immersed in chocolate, a foodstuff once pleasurable that, over time, has become revolting.

The exhibition continues in Savile Row where it is divided into two sections. The north gallery focuses on the New York School of the 1950s and 1960s, including works by Clyfford Still made during what is widely considered to be his most influential period, when he moved to New York from California. A vanguard of the Abstract Expressionists, Still created insistently vertical compositions akin to the sublime works of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman.

The north gallery also feature artists such as Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, artists associated with the next phase in the New York School of Art: Colorfield and geometric abstraction. The corners of Morris Louis’ monumental paintings from his iconic ‘Unfurled’ series (1960 – 1961) are framed with streams of unmixed paint, a testament to the notion of purity central to the Colorfield movement. Likewise, Noland’s early paintings on view at Hauser & Wirth draw upon European abstraction and the language of the Russian Constructivists using the direct application of colour seen in Morris Louis’ paintings.

The presentation in the south gallery explores the emergence and development of Pop Art, looking particularly at works by artists such as Jim Dine and Claes Oldenburg that pay homage to the painterliness of the New York School. These express a fascination with a popular culture defined by mass production and consumption and its presence in day-to-day life through magazines, advertisements and ordinary items. For example, Oldenburg’s ‘Model for a Mahogany Plug, Scale B’ belongs to the earliest group of the artist’s large-scale projects, magnifying everyday objects to fantastical proportions.

The candy-colour palette of the cartoon-like paintings of William Nelson Copley and John Wesley, also on view in the south gallery, are further examples of a post-modern investigation into the common object.

The final rooms of the exhibition look at Minimalist and Conceptual Art – two movements arising almost simultaneously with Pop Art – through works by artists such as Dan Flavin and Richard Serra. Two weighty, steel plates balance precariously, propped up against each other in the corner. The sculpture, Serra’s ‘Do it’ (1983), speaks to the formal geometric abstractions of Minimalist Art, whilst accentuating and re-framing the viewer’s experience of sculptural volume and space. ‘Do it’ brings the exhibition full circle. It shares an affinity of latent violence and danger implicit in Kienholz’s works and, like Kienholz’s work, speaks to the attitude of distrust from which American art of this period emerged, whilst expressing the vitality shared by these works.

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Exhibition: Paul McCarthy, WS, Park Avenue Armory, New York

Paul McCarthy White Snow

Paul McCarthy White Snow

Paul McCarthy, WS, Exhibition View, 2013

Paul McCarthy, WS, 19 June – 4 August, 2013
Park Avenue Armory, New York

McCarthy is using Disney’s Snow White, turning her into his White Snow, as a character she is readymade emotional architecture dressed as an impossibly beautiful group of images. The largest installation yet for the artist, WS took 72 semi-trucks to transport from the artist’s studio in Los Angeles to New York, where 38 people worked for about a month to install it in the Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall. The artist’s son, Damon McCarthy, was among 120 people who worked on several films tied to the project.

Walt Paul is Mr. McCarthy’s character in the large-scale exhibition at the Armory, where the artist has installed a “forest” featuring 30-foot trees, oversize plants and flowers, and a three-quarter-scale replica of his childhood home. Video screens hung from the ceiling surrounding the installation show a series of 10 video projections of performances from a recent party at the house, which quickly gets out of hand. McCarthy plays Paul Walt, an amalgamation of himself and Walt Disney, who is embroiled in various psychosexual scenarios with White Snow: he cries as she asks him about doing his homework; he shoves a boom mic into her mouth; she covers his face with ketchup, etc. There is a very sad sequence where he follows her through the forest at night, howling, crying, falling down. The dwarfs dine on chicken and Red Bull, get drunk and descend into debauchery.

Tucked into a room at the entrance of New York’s Park Avenue Armory,  is a fully functional souvenir store overrun by Snow White. The artist has arranged 1,500 pieces of Disney memorabilia on countertops and in glass display cases. A small stuffed Snow White doll costs $75, a Snow White costume $350 and a large figurine of the princess dining with her dwarf cohort $10,000.

The Los Angeles-based Mr. McCarthy purchased most of the pieces, many of which are real Disney products, online from secondary sources like eBay, gallery representatives say.

The shop is part of the exhibition, and all profits go toward offsetting the overall cost of the show (which includes the funds used to acquire the knickknacks and staff the shop). Mr. McCarthy signed the pieces “Walt Paul,” a combination of his name and Walt Disney’s, in black somewhere on each of the items. Disney declined to comment on the exhibition.

Representatives at the armory say the Snow White collectibles, the boxed princesses and stuffed dwarves, the Disney piggybanks and paper plates, are flying off the shelves. “There’s some humor” in the gift shop “and a sense of Americana,” says Rebecca Robertson, president and executive producer at the armory. Mr. McCarthy, she adds, is “playing with the concept of what is art” the way Andy Warhol or surrealist Marcel Duchamp did.

The exhibition has already drawn criticism for its explicit treatment of the classic fairy tale. Restricted to visitors over the age of 17, the show comes with disclaimers about its content.

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Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Ken Price Sculpture

Installation view: Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective, geometrics, 2013

Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective, June 18 – September 22, 2013
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The first major museum exhibition of Ken Price’s work in New York, will trace the development of his ceramic sculptures with approximately sixty-five examples from 1959 to 2012. The selection range from the luminously glazed ovoid forms of Price’s early work to the suggestive, molten-like slumps he has made since the 1990s. In addition to the sculpture, the exhibition will feature eleven late works on paper by the artist. Price’s close friend, the architect Frank O. Gehry, designed the exhibition.

Price was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. Price’s earliest aspirations were to be an artist, “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be an artist. Even when I was a kid I would make drawings and little books, and cartoons..,” he states. Price enrolled in his first art ceramics course at Santa Monica City College in 1954, where he quickly embraced a formal craft tradition as espoused by Marguerite Wildenhain. He subsequently studied at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, before receiving his BFA degree from the University of Southern California in 1956.

In the 1950s Price lived along the Pacific coastline, where his interest in surfing and Mexican pottery developed. During surfing trips in Southern California, Price and his friends, “always made a point of hitting the curio stores in [Tijuana], because they had great pottery. …just looking was a great education in earthenware pottery.” Price’s ceramic work at USC could be characterized as functional vessels derived from a folk pottery tradition.

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Exhibition: Takesada Matsutani, A Matrix

Takesada Matsutani A Matrix

Takesada Matsutani A Matrix

Takesada Matsutani, A Matrix, 2013

Takesada Matsutani A Matrix, 18 May – 27 July 2013
Hauser & Wirth London, Savile Row

This will be the gallery’s first solo show with Osaka-born, Paris-based artist, Takesada Matsutani and also marks the first time his works will be shown in the UK. ‘A Matrix’ features never before seen paintings from Matsutani’s early career, as well as recent organic abstractions in vinyl glue and graphite. In addition, the exhibition will include a performance of Matsutani’s ‘Stream, London, Hauser & Wirth’.

From the early sixties to the early seventies, Matsutani was a key member of the ‘second generation’ of the Gutai Art Association (1954 – 1972), Japan’s innovative and influential art collective of the post-war era. One of the most important Japanese artists working today, Matsutani’s paintings and performances from throughout his practice demonstrate the ethos of Gutai, translated into an artistic language that is uniquely his own.
In the 1960s, Matsutani began experimenting with vinyl glue, a material that first entered into mass production in Japan following World War II. With paintings such as ‘Work-62’, on view to the public for the first time in ‘A Matrix’, Matsutani deposited the glue onto his canvases and allowed it to run down the surface. Matsutani recalls ‘The glue began to drip and as it dried, stalactites formed, which looked like the udders of a cow’.

Inspired by the shapes of blood samples he had observed, Matsutani developed this technique further, using hairdryers, fans and his own breath to create bulbous forms reminiscent of the curves of the human body. Paintings such as ‘Work-63’ exemplify these early experimentations with vinyl glue, a material that continues to fascinate the artist to this day.
In 1966, Matsutani moved to Paris and began working at William Hayter’s renowned print-making studio, Atelier 17. When the Gutai Art Association disbanded in 1972, Matsutani was able to transition from the artistic style of his Gutai period into a radical yet consistent new body of work, informed in part by his experience at Atelier 17, in which he expressed a greater depth of understanding of pictorial space and composition.

Matsutani’s later paintings bring together the artist’s signature media, vinyl glue, with graphite. In a marked difference from the raw rendering of his early works, Matsutani carefully controls the glue as it moves across his canvases, making or deflating pockets of air and creating new ridges, wrinkles and crevices as the adhesive hardens. Matsutani then covers the surface in methodical, almost meditative, graphite lines. The shapes created resemble the unbridled energy of a crashing wave or the inside of a seed preparing to germinate, whilst the graphite reflects light, teasing out hints of texture, depth and volume.

‘Stream-10, 1984 – 2013, London’, one of Matsutani’s largest works, is a 10-metre sheet of paper which the artist covers in a blanket of graphite, leaving just one thin white line coursing through the middle of the paper. Matsutani then completes the work by throwing turpentine over the edge of the dense surface, quickly dissolving the graphite in a tremendous surge of energy and an act of cathartic liberation.

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N° 5 Culture Chanel, Palais De Tokyo, Paris

From May 5th until June 5th, 2013 Palais de Tokyo in Paris will house the N° 5 Culture Chanel exhibition as part of its Guest Program.

This exhibition has once again been entrusted to Jean-Louis Froment, the curator of the previous editions of Culture Chanel, held successively in Moscow’s Pushkin State Museum for Fine Arts, in Beijing at the National Art Museum of China and more recently in the Opera House in Canton.

Made up of subtle plays of correspondences, N° 5 Culture Chanel cracks the N° 5 code to reveal the links which connected it to specific moments in time and to the avant-garde movements it spanned.

The works of art, photographs, archives and objects exhibited provide an account of the many inspirations which fed the imagination and world of Mademoiselle Chanel. They echo her inner thoughts and shed light on this unique and timeless perfume; whether through her favorite destinations like Venice, Russia or her villa, La Pausa or through the creations of her artist, poet and musician friends Cocteau, Picasso, Apollinaire, Stravinsky, Picabia. Focusing on the long lasting attachments between Chanel and the arts, N° 5 Culture Chanel seeks to reveal the timeless and iconic artistic essence of the N° 5 perfume.

“N°5 is a perfume that travels afar. It crosses countries, gardens, books, poems and artistic movements, where it’s taken as a source for the modernity of its composition. It’s a perfume born of a love story, which its base note very subtly evokes at precisely the same instant time grasps it and carries it to us; so close and never fugitive, revealing even our most secret failings. Indefinable, the words that speak of it are abstract and the images which accompany it superposed on the thick layer of an artistic memory without time. The cultural effect which accompanies N°5 and the unique aura that encircles it, bring continuity to this perfume and enable it to span all periods with knowing assurance. And this journey has no end; it continues to merge and mix with an irreversible movement onward through time. Like a work of art which is renewed with each visitor’s gaze at every exhibition, N°5 recomposes its history with each encounter and time it traverses. Sustained by a set of references attached to the adventures of Modernity’s artistic forms and with Gabrielle Chanel’s very singular and romantic story as a backdrop, the N°5 perfume has gained the status of creation”.  Jean-Louis Froment, Curator of the exhibition.

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Isa Genzken, Hauser & Wirth London, Sawille Row

Isa Genzken, 15 November 2012-12 January 2013,
Hauser & Wirth London,Savile Row

“I have always said that with any sculpture you have to be able to say, although this is not a ready-made, it could be one. That’s what a sculpture has to look like. It must have a certain relation to reality”.  Isa Genzken in conversation with Wolfgang Tillmans

Inspired by the stark severity of modernist architecture and the chaotic energy of the city, just as much as by art history, the aesthetics of the great American artists of the Sixties and pop culture, Isa Genzken’s work is continuously looking around itself, translating into three-dimensional form the way that art, architecture, design and media affects the experience of urban life. From 15 November, Genzken will present an exhibition of new and recent works at Hauser & Wirth’s Savile Row gallery. Genzken’s totemic columns, pedestal works and collages combine disparate aspects from her many sources in seemingly nonsensical, yet harmonious sculptural compilations.

The bust of Nefertiti, an ancient icon of feminine beauty, is one of the most well-known and historically significant sculptures. In Genzken’s new series of sculptures, she appropriates plaster reproductions of this bust, which the artist first saw at the Egyptian Museum in Berlin, gives them sunglasses and places them upon tall, white pedestals. She pairs Nefertiti with a reproduction of the Renaissance icon of feminine beauty, the Mona Lisa, whose famous portrait leans against the foot of each pedestal. Genzken then overlays her own self-portrait on to the reproduction of Mona Lisa, playfully inserting herself and her own practice into this multimedia exploration of the lineage of feminine beauty and the place of women in art history.

Genzken’s sculptures are precariously stacked assemblages of potted plants, designer furniture, empty shipping crates and photographs, among other things, arranged with the traditions of modernist sculpture in mind, traditions which are then manipulated by the artist. With this cacophonous array of objects, Genzken undermines the classical notions of sculpture and, in the North Gallery of Savile Row, re-creates the architectural dimensions of the artist’s beloved skyscrapers and the riotous colours of the city streets. Devoid of the weightiness and overpowering scale seen in the sculptures of her Minimalist predecessors, these works abandon notions of order and power, allowing the viewer to relate to the works’ inherently human qualities of fragility and vulnerability.

Both sculpture and photography combine and overlap in Genzken’s collages, whose dense surfaces are formed from the materials of the artist’s world: magazines, flyers, snapshots of friends, self-portraits and reproduced artworks. Genzken makes use of all surfaces of the gallery, including an on-going series of collages that span the floor of the space, like a pavement down a busy city street.

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Exhibition: Bjarne Melgaard, A House to Die In, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London

bjarne melgaard a house to die inBjarne Melgaard A House to Die In

Bjarne Melgaard A House to Die In

Bjarne Melgaard, From the Exhibition, A House to Die In, 2012

A House to Die In, 25 September – 18 November, 2012
Institute of Contemporary Arts, London

A House to Die In is New York based Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgaard’s first solo exhibition in the UK. The Lower and Upper Galleries feature two of his collaborative projects, which investigate the dynamics of creative and collaborative relationships.

The architectural facade in the Lower Gallery realises a key stage in Melgaard’s ongoing collaboration with award-winning architectural firm Snøhetta, who have exchanged architectural drawings, models and documents with the artist since 2011 as they work closely towards the construction of a purpose-built house where Melgaard will live and work. In the exhibition, Melgaard and Snøhetta present a 1:1 facade of the building’s exterior, alongside a wider body of shared research that demonstrates the positive struggle experienced by both parties as they continually challenge the conventions of their respective practices.

The Upper Galleries house an installation of paintings and sculptures that imagine the interior spaces of Melgaard’s proposed residence, alongside bespoke furniture and ephemera from the artist’s studio. Melgaard created the paintings and sculptures in partnership with a group of artists who have no formal art education and little or no connection to the art world (several of whom are in recovery, face mental or emotional challenges, or suffer from schizophrenia). In these works, their layered conversations are made visible as the artists respond to and expand upon his visual lexicon.

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Exhibition: Image Counter Image

image-counter-image

Image Counter Image, installation view Haus der Kunst, photo Wilfried Petzi

Radenko Milak, What Else Did You See? I Couldn’t See Everything! (No. 5), 2010–2012 and Installation view of the Exhibition

Image Counter Image, 10 June – 16 September, 2012
Hause der Kunst,Prinzregentenstraße 1, Munich

The exhibition Image Counter Image at Hause der Kunst, presents artistic positions that focus on the critical analysis of violent conflicts in the media, beginning with the First Gulf War of 1990-1991 to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, and ending with the events of the Arab Spring of 2011.

Media coverage has changed significantly in the last two decades. While the media image of the First Gulf War was based on a memorandum that advised units of the United States military to channel information flow to serve the military operation’s political objectives, the images of the attacks on the New York World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, were transmitted on all possible channels. They showed a worldwide audience its own, and global, vulnerability. Through the Internet and, more recently, via Web 2.0’s social media, communication channels have been expanded to include opportunities for direct peer-to-peer exchange. Because of their decentralized structures, these channels are difficult to control and are used as an alternative source of reporting on political events.

The question remains who, in this changing media landscape, tries to secure control of both the production and interpretation of the content, and what purpose it serves.

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Histories in Conflict: Haus der Kunst and the Ideological Uses of Art, 1937-1955

Histories in Conflict: Haus der Kunst and the Ideological Uses of Art, 1937-1955, 10 June 2012-13 January 2013
Hause der Kunst, Prinzregentenstraße 1, Munich

“This year Haus der Kunst marks the 75th anniversary of its public opening. This anniversary gives us the opportunity to reflect on the historical legacy of the museum, especially on the building as an icon of ideological power; on the various positions of art through its history and the stories of what it is today”.  Okwui Enwezor.

In 2012, Haus der Kunst opens its doors for its 75th year. At the same time, it looks back upon its 20-year existence as Stiftung Haus der Kunst München GmbH. Aware of its history and its legacy as a Nazi instrument of power, the exhibition Histories in Conflict: Haus der Kunst and the Ideological Use of Art 1937-1955  investigates the institution’s international connections; the relationships between the Great German Art Exhibition and the vilifying exhibition Degenerate Art, or, for example, between Albert Speer’s German pavilion for the 1937 Paris World’s Fair, in which a model of the House of German Art was exhibited, and the Spanish pavilion, in which Picasso’s Guernica, an icon of anti-war art, was on view.

Histories in Conflict covers the important period from 1937, in which the fate of the European avant-garde was still in abeyance, to the period of its condemnation until 1955, when it regained respect. Both the exhibition Picasso in Haus der Kunst, which presented the painting Guernica for the first time in Germany, and Arnold Bode’s documenta 1 took place in 1955. By exhibiting works by artists who had been condemned in the Degenerate Art exhibition in 1937, Haus der Kunst aimed to reconnect with international modernism.

As part of the programs marking its 75th anniversary, Haus der Kunst also shows the exhibition Image Counter Image. Occupying the vectors where global media industries, artistic reflexivity, and ideological power intersect, the two exhibitions undertake to explore the complex zones of mediatized image regimes and artistic propaganda in organizing public opinion.

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Thomas Ruff, Gagosian Gallery Britannia Street and Davies Street

 

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Thomas Ruff 3D_ma.r.s.04, 2012, Nudes, Installation view and jpeg tj01, 2007

Thomas Ruff, Ma.r.s., March 8-April 21, 2012
Gagosian GalleryBritannia Street and Nudes, Davies Street

Gagosian Gallery presented two exhibitions of new and recent photographs by Thomas Ruff. This is his first exhibition with the gallery.

The difference between my predecessors and me is that they believed to have captured reality and I believe to have created a picture. We all lost, bit by bit, the belief in this so-called objective capturing of real reality. Each of my series has a visual idea behind it, which I develop during my research. Sometimes the development follows a straight line from A to B; sometimes something completely new and interesting shows up, which makes me leave the straight path and follow a more indirect one with new rules”. 

Thomas Ruff’s body of work testifies to the wealth of practices, objects and forms available to photographers today. He has been testing the limits of his medium for more than two decades, producing photographs in series with subjects that range from domestic interiors to the planets, from modernist architecture to abstract psychedelia, from specific portraits to generic internet pornography. The tools and techniques that he has investigated thus far include a composite picture-making apparatus, star light system for night-vision, hand-tinting, stereoscopy, digital retouching, and photomontage. He has appropriated images from various sources including scientific archives, newspapers, and, more recently, the internet.

Thomas Ruff was born in 1958. Lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany.

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Isa Genzken: Halleluja, Zurich

isa genzkenisa-genzken-hallelujaisa-genzken-halleluja-zurich

Isa Genzken, Halleluja, 14 April-19 May 2012, Hauser & Wirth Zürich, Hubertus Exhibitions, Zurich

Isa Genzken’s work is a cacophonous riot of colour, material and form. She pulls from the geometries of modernist architecture, the aesthetic of Robert Rauschenberg’s combines and the stark and severe ethos of minimalism and corrals these elements in to her own world, rearranging them according to her distinct set of rules. For Hauser & Wirth’s final show at the gallery’s temporary space at Hubertus Exhibitions, Genzken will present new sculptures and collages. These works reference the individuality of the real world, exploring the works’ more human qualities of fragility and haphazardness.

Genzken’s new sculptures echo the architectural dimensions of the high-rise buildings and skyscrapers abounding in New York, the artist’s favourite city. Each work consists of a fantastical melee of objects, such as stacked shipping crates, potted plants, overturned designer chairs, and paintings of Disney characters. These elements are all perched precariously upon high plinths, seemingly held together only by sprays of paint and a few dots of glue.

Like a tourist wandering wide-eyed through a sprawling metropolis, the sculptures invite the visitor to first gaze up at the fabricated skyline, and then to look closer at the ‘eye level’. At this level, Genzken takes the viewer inside the sculpture, transforming her spiralling towers of miscellany into anthropomorphic forms, a surprising humanity residing in their instability.

Photography, sculpture and painting overlap in Genzken’s new collages and with these works, Genzken activates all surfaces of the gallery, not just the walls. One new installation spans the floor of the space, like a sidewalk down the hectic streets of New York City. Each collage contains a mixture of imagery: snapshots from the artist’s personal life, self-portraits, works from her oeuvre, reproductions of Renaissance paintings, kitsch greeting cards, adverts from glossy magazines and an assortment of gaudy patterned papers sprayed with paint. Installed as if they had been forcibly flung upon the walls and on to the floor, Genzken lends these two-dimensional works the same tactility, movement and momentum seen in her sculptures.

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Exhibition: Juergen Teller

jurgen teller

Juergen Teller, Lehmann Maupin, New York
10 February -17 March 2012 201 Chrystie Street

This exhibition highlighted three recent series, demonstrating Teller’s dynamic and diverse oeuvre. Featuring the controversial photographs of Kristen McMenamy, shot in the home of Carlo Mollino and seductive portraits of Vivienne Westwood, juxtaposed with intimate portraits of his family and close friends, this exhibition displays an amalgam of subjects and personalities. Drawing inspiration from the eccentric architect, Teller recalls Mollino’s fascination with the erotic, capturing McMenamy in provocative poses. Although the series garnered controversy for its alleged “pornographic” nature, it demonstrates Teller’s skilled storytelling and fearless approach to his medium. Composed of recent photographs taken in and around his home in Suffolk, photographs from the series, “Keys to the House,” includes deserted landscape shots and intimate portraits of Teller’s family and closest friends. The third series, “Men and Women,” includes portraits of Vivienne Westwood and photographer William Eggleston, as well as Teller’s son, Ed. As a whole, the series has been read as a representation of masculinity at two stages, coming of age and loss of virility, contrasted with a strong feminine power.

Born in Erlangen, Germany in 1964, Juergen Teller studied at the Bayerische Staatslehranstalt für Photographie in Munich, Germany before moving to London in 1986. His work in influential international publications such as W Magazine, I-D and Purple nurtured his own photographic sensibility, which is marked by his refusal to separate the commercial fashion pictures and his most autobiographical un-commissioned work.

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Cindy Sherman: Retrospective

cindy sherman

Cindy Sherman: “Untitled #465”, 2008, C-Print, 161,9 x 145,4 cm

Cindy Sherman, Retrospective, February 26-June 11, 2012
The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Throughout her career, she has presented a sustained, eloquent, and provocative exploration of the construction of contemporary identity and the nature of representation, drawn from the unlimited supply of images from movies, TV, magazines, the Internet, and art history.

Working as her own model for more than 30 years, Sherman has captured herself in a range of guises and personas which are at turns amusing and disturbing, distasteful and affecting.

To create her photographs, she assumes multiple roles of photographer, model, makeup artist, hairdresser, stylist, and wardrobe mistress. With an arsenal of wigs, costumes, makeup, prosthetics, and props, Sherman has deftly altered her physique and surroundings to create a myriad of intriguing tableaus and characters, from screen siren to clown to aging socialite.

http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2012/cindysherman/

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Joan Mitchell, The last paintings

Then, Last Time IV, 1985, Oil on canvas, 259,1 x 200 cm

Joan Mitchell, The Last Paintings, 3 February-28 April 2012
Hauser & Wirth London

“My paintings aren’t about art issues. They’re about a feeling that comes to me from the outside, from landscape. […] Paintings aren’t about the person who makes them, either. My paintings have to do with feelings”. Joan Mitchell, 1974

Mitchell was born in Chicago and in 1950 moved to New York where she was one of the few female artists to participate in seminal exhibitions alongside prominent Abstract Expressionists such as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline. In 1959, Mitchell relocated to France. She stayed in Paris for eight years before she moved to Vétheuil where she remained for the last 25 years of her life, producing dynamic paintings despite such momentous events as the loss of close family, friends and her long battle with cancer that took her life in 1992.

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