Cindy Sherman: Retrospective

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/

art

Main

Back

From the Archive

Playlist January 2016, World Pop Fest

18 January 2016

Magazine Contemporary Culture

New Music No Comments

Howl – Rival Consoles
Sgoraet (Burning Down) – Kedr Livanskiy
Everywhere You Go – Mari Kvien Brunvoll
Zvichapera – Chiwoniso Maraire
Muévelo Negro – Quantic, Nidia Gongora
Melt! – Flying Lotus
Shipwreck – feat. Thom Yorke – Modeselektor, Thom Yorke
Yarada Lij – Mikael Seifu
In Another Room (Original Mix) – Pional

Read Full Article

Tom Burr, Sentence

11 February 2012

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Artists Main No Comments

Tom Barr, Sentence, 2009

Tom Burr, Sentence, 10 September – 24 Oktober 2009
Bortolami, New York

There was no single work in Tom Burr’s recent exhibition “sentence” that was truly emblematic of the whole, but one pair at least came close. The two sculptures his personal effects (White) and (Natural) (both 2009) demonstrate a bold juxtaposition of randomness and precision and a fascination with the aura of ephemeral objects that united all the pieces here. Enclosing two pairs of worn-out sneakers in Plexiglas cases, one per shoe, and placing them atop wooden pedestals of differing heights colored according to the works’ subtitles, the New York- and Norfolk, Connecticut-based artist seems to have framed his exhibition as a meditation on entropy and loss, a series of forward steps that cohere only with a backward glance.

Tom Burr entered the picture then, back in the early 1990s when he started showing at Colin DeLand’s American Fine Arts in SoHo. AFA had already presented the fences and aluminum panels of Cady Noland and the domestic-object based installations of Jessica Stockholder; across the street and around the corner, Felix Gonzalez-Torres put out strings of light and Jack Pierson hung tinsel. Within this context, Burr was an important new voice in the dialogue of institutional critique, exploring the politics of minimalism and politics at large that were at the forefront of artistic and social concerns—notably identity, society and the body, often dealing with issues of sexuality, war and the structures of public and private spheres.

One distinction of Burr’s work that persists is his consideration of the ephemeral. This interest extends beyond time to all sensory experiences, which must be transitory by nature. He describes individual sculptures as ‘moments’ and thinks of their varied qualities in terms of musical notes, temperatures, and moods—qualities that cannot be trapped into the permanency of an object, but may be somehow suggested.

Read Full Article

Jil Sander, Fall 2015, Ready-to-Wear

5 April 2015

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Fashion No Comments

Jil Sander, Fall 2015, Ready-to-Wear, Milan, 2015

Frédéric Sanchez’s soundtrack—a blurry, impressionistic, almost atonal mesh of Nico’s and Chet Baker’s versions of “My Funny Valentine”—suggested chaos. But the set was a precisely ordered group of colored pillars, like a geometric Stonehenge. Rodolfo Paglialunga imagined his new collection for Jil Sander forming somewhere between the chaos and the precision. The designer would pluck order from disorder.

It’s all any artist tries to do, but Paglialunga’s challenge was a little more pointy, given the patchiness of his efforts to date. Still, he made huge strides with this collection. It won’t set Planet Fashion alight, but it registered as wearable, real-world, and properly proportioned. Credit the designer’s precision for that coup. Long coats and matching pants made a new kind of elegantly elongated suit. A bone-toned leather coat was a standout. The lines that traced a navy blue coat suggested something military, the most precise association of all. And even when Paglialunga started to mess with precision, he didn’t lose that line; it simply went diagonal. Shaved black mink was diagonally pieced for a coat. Dark green pony got the same treatment in a skirt.

Coatdresses were shadow-striped or crisscrossed with tape, always maximizing the line. You could follow the footwear for a subtext. One look featured correspondents paired with a pencil skirt and a full-sleeved knit top. Joan Crawford? That, at least, underscored Paglialunga’s disdain when he dismissed the ongoing debate about the dialogue between feminine and masculine in Jil Sander’s women’s collection as “banal.” If he could silence that debate, he’d definitely be able to put his own thumbprint on the label. So he showed a lovely, simple slipdress, and he closed the show with Hedvig Palm in a blush-toned coat that was forceful in line but indubitably womanly. Paglialunga is finding his feet.

http://www.style.com/fashion-shows/fall-2015-ready-to-wear/jil-sander

Read Full Article

Exhibition: Anri Sala

13 November 2011

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Art Exhibitions Main No Comments

Doldrum, 2008, Installation view

Anri Sala, 1 October – 20 November 2011
The Serpentine Gallery

Anri Sala (born 1974, Tirana) is a leading contemporary artist whose early videos and films mined his personal experience to reflect on the social and political change taking place in his native Albania.
Sala has attached a growing importance to sound, creating remarkable works in which he recasts sound’s relationship to the image. Linked to this development is Sala’s long-standing interest in performance, and particularly musical performance.
A central premise of this exhibition is that most of the works presented at the Serpentine either use a live performance as their starting point or could lead to a performance in the future.

The exhibition is conceived as a cycle, or loop, structured around pairs of works that echo each other

Read Full Article

Wilkinson Gallery, London

6 April 2015

Magazine Contemporary Culture

Culture Galleries No Comments

After cutting his curating teeth running a project space for three years based in the front room of his Paddington Flat, Anthony Wilkinson opened his first gallery behind an unshowy grey façade on Cambridge Heath Road in 1998, at a time when you could still count the number of commercial galleries in the area on the fingers of one hand.

Co-run with wife Amanda, over the past nine years Wilkinson has become an established presence on the East End art scene with a roster of respected British and international artists including George Shaw, Silke Schatz and Matthew Higgs. Wise enough to have bought their space – “I’ve seen a lot of people rent spaces when they were cheap, bring up the area and then get priced out when landlords realised they could triple the rent,” Anthony explains – the Wilkinsons have since sold up and invested in a new gallery up the road on Vyner Street. Rather than take over an existing space, as many of the more recent artworld residents of the street have done, the Wilkinsons have brought in architect Bobby Desai and knocked down, redesigned and rebuilt an impressive new 6,000 square-foot building housing two museum-sized galleries plus an additional project space. They open this week to coincide with September’s Time Out First Thursdays evening of events with a show by German painter Thoralf Knobloch, plus a film installation by late 1970s New York film collective ‘On the Collective for Living Cinema’ (a collaboration with New York’s Orchard Gallery) in the project room.

It may be a major upgrade in size and style from their original gallery but both Anthony and Amanda emphasise that it’s not about a change in artists or ethos. “We put a lot of thought into designing the spaces with our artists in mind,” Amanda explains. “The downstairs space is more raw, with no natural light, perfect for showing video work by artists like Joan Joanas, whereas the upstairs space is more beautiful with skylights, which will be much better for our painters. The project space will be a much more spontaneous and flexible gallery. It’s really about allowing our artists to push themselves. Sometimes when curators see artists in a smaller space they get nervous about how their work might translate if they were offered a show in a major public gallery, so we want to encourage our artists to use and experiment with the spaces.”

While many East End gallerists seek out a West End postcode when it’s time to expand, the Wilkinsons had no hesitation about remaining in the east. “Vyner Street has always had a great feel about it,” Anthony says. “We didn’t decide to move here because it had become a thing; we’ve been in the area for a long time and when we saw the original building we knew that it was right. Initially we hadn’t planned to knock it down and start again but in the end it became more cost-effective. It’s been quite a challenge to create a building from scratch – you keep having to remember to include the really obvious things – like a letterbox, but we’re really happy with how it’s turned out. It’s still Wilkinson; it’s just our gallery in a different and much more exciting space.”

http://www.wilkinsongallery.com

Read Full Article