MATHEW WEIR

Posted on 2013-07-15

In these works Weir continues to fuse imagery of ceramic figurines with his archive of landscapes to create complex narratives with exquisite yet melancholic auras. By dislocating and re-presenting historic objects such as early 19th Century German terracottas or Victorian ceramics in uncanny contexts, Weir entreats the viewer to reconsider how our interpretations of their original representations have been transposed over time and to actively address notions of racism, oppression, violence and death.

Two works from this exhibition, Jar (2011) and Bitter Fruit (2012) contrast the depiction of a black adolescent through a derisory colloquial object and the seemingly idyllic representation of a white woman: in the former, a rendition from a Victorian ceramic tobacco jar makes a visual parallel between boot-polishing and the original subject’s skin, while in the latter the female figurine is dressed in elegant, pastoral drapes picking fruit for her basket as if in an Arcadian scene. The work’s title, however, alludes to Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit, in particular her last line: ‘Here is a strange and bitter crop’. This, together with the headscarf around the figure’s neck, merges the violence of lynching with the Greek myth of Daphne becoming a tree.

Weir employs such layering of metaphor throughout his landscapes: an image of a waterfall referring to latent sexuality, a children’s see-saw to the idea of psychological balance. And even in those works in this show where he has deliberately sliced his figurines apparently out of context so that they loom at you from solid black backgrounds, this ominous duality of interpretation is rife. Glory, Hallelujah (2013) is based on a detail of a Staffordshire figurine depicting the American abolitionist John Brown, who himself was hung for insurrection, its title from the famous Civil War marching song sung in his honour. The original figurine is cropped to an intimate portrait, which makes our encounter with Brown directly charged. His ardent but mis-painted eyes stare out from what’s clearly a painting of a painted object, the quick, imprecise marks and cracks on the original mass-produced popular figurine contrasting with Weir’s exacting brushwork. This vulnerable martyr not only epitomizes emancipation and release for Weir, but also fragile disfiguration.

Exhibition runs through to August 1st, 2013

Alison Jacques Gallery
16 – 18 Berners Street
London
W1T 3LN

www.alisonjacquesgallery.com

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FORMING THE LOSS IN DARKNESS

Posted on 2013-07-15

This is not a tribute.

In the 1988 silent super-8 film by David Wojnarowicz* titled Beautiful People, the black-and-white film turns into color at precisely the moment when its central and sole character, played by Jesse Hultberg, dressed in daytime drag, came into contact with an upstate New York lake in what appears to be a suicide attempt. Elation and death, held together and compressed into a singular graspable moment, uproots the previous state of consciousness. What have we been seeing when we watched him waking up, putting on makeup, hailing a cab in an escape from New York to the woods? What did he pack into his plastic box besides a framed image of Siamese twin skeletons?

Tracking the journey from slumber to death, for this exhibition, nine artists’ works set an alternative mise-en-scène of the rarely-screened film. The exhibition title is a reworking of the chapter “Losing the Form in Darkness” in Wojnarowicz’s book Close to the Knife: A Memoir of Disintegration (1991). To draw on the mundane history of the artist, telephone answering machine messages puncture the silence of the exhibition in the form of text and/or recording.

Each work in the exhibition lays open a different territory of Wojnarowicz’s video, but above all, as attempts to give form to something as fugitive as loss. Predominately abstract and concerned with the history of material as a form of narrativity, they embody a sense of life, of fate, of necessities. Fate with a sense of knowing that this might not be it, but it’s necessary.

Exhibition runs through to July 24th, 2013

Praz-Delavallade
5, rue des Haudriettes
75003 Paris
France

www.praz-delavallade.com

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JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT

Posted on 2013-07-15

Born to a Haitian father and a Puerto-Rican mother, Basquiat left his family home in Brooklyn, New York at the age of fifteen and took to the streets. A voracious autodidact, he quickly became a denizen of the explosive and decadent New York underground scene—a noise musician who loved jazz, and a street poet who scrawled his sophisticated aphorisms in Magic Marker across the walls of downtown Manhattan, copyrighting them under the name SAMO.

In 1981, he killed off this alter ego and began painting and drawing, first on salvaged materials then later on canvas and paper, and making bricolage with materials scavenged from the urban environment. From the outset he worked compulsively; his passion for words and music, his intense yet fluid energy, and the heterogeneous materials that he employed so freely imbued his work with urgency and excitement. He sold his first painting in 1981, and by 1982, spurred by the Neo-Expressionist art boom, his work was in great demand. In 1985, he was featured on the cover of The New York Times Magazine in connection with an article on the newly exuberant international art market. In that photograph, Basquiat is a vision of cool, sprawled in a chair in an elegant three-piece suit and tie, with bunched dreadlocks and bare feet, in front of a large, bold painting, a supernova in the making.

Charismatic image aside, Basquiat was a prodigious young talent, fusing drawing and painting with history and poetry to produce an unprecedented artistic language and content that bridged cultures and enunciated alternative histories. Combining materials and techniques with uninhibited yet knowing and precise intent, his paintings maintain a powerful tension between opposing aesthetic forces, expression and knowledge, control and spontaneity, savagery and wit, urbanity and primitivism, while providing acerbic commentary on the harsh realities of race, culture, and society.

Exhibition runs through to August 10th, 2013

Gagosian Gallery
7/F Pedder Building
12 Pedder Street
Central, Hong Kong

www.gagosian.com

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