2014 March : EXIT

SWATCH X OLAF HAJEK

Posted on 2014-03-18

The most recent contributor to the Swatch Art Special collection is the internationally renowned German artist and illustrator, Olaf Hajek. Working with Swatch to create the new work, Olaf Hajek said, “It was a challenge to transfer my artwork into the design of the watches … I loved the idea to create this couple.” NATURE MAN and FLOWERHEAD form a fascinating couple indeed: “Both are the perfect match to express my personal style and taste.”

The watch FLOWERHEAD takes up a fascinating series of Olaf Hajek’s recent paintings, vibrant portraits of black women. The dial presents the face of a black woman clothed in a lush tangle of plants and flowers. The idea, said the artist, was to create an image of luxury, opulence, and beauty which has nothing to do with wealth and prosperity. The beautiful black woman “is wearing the idea of the whole of nature on her head—the beauty as well as the birth and death and the evanescence.”
 The second of Olaf Hajek’s two works for Swatch is NATURE MAN. Like its partner, the work features a face on the dial, this time a formal portrait of a blue-green man gazing into the distance from a surreal landscape dense with spiky plants and brightly colored flowers. On both timepieces, curling leaves that appear to float above the faces serve as hour and minute hands.

www.swatch.com
www.olafhajek.com

HANNAH WHITAKER – COLD WAVE

Posted on 2014-03-17

This show expands on Whitaker’s interest in the Austrian logician Kurt Gödel who introduced the notion of unknowability to mathematics, a field often characterized by certainty. His ideas problematized early 20th century philosophical claims to truth and knowledge, a dialectic inherent to the medium of photography. Whitaker’s interest in Gödel led her to think of the film plane as a formal system—a set of limited variables and operations. The results establish repetitious motifs that occur both within a single image and across multiple photographs.

Employing a 4×5 view camera, she photographs using the intervention of hand-cut paper screens, often layering as many as fifteen in a single image; at times shooting through the screens and at others using them to deform an image selectively after it is shot. These in-camera processes allow her to collapse various moments in time and space onto a single sheet of film. The resulting photographs are suspended between multiple dualities: the handmade and the technical, the geometric and the photographic, the flat and dimensional, or—in the lexicon of Rosalind Krauss—the antireal and the real.

The notion of a formal system is reinforced by her use of the constitute parts of her process as subjects in their own photographs. In Cutouts (Green), Cutouts (Pink) and Cutouts (Orange), Whitaker photographed the paper detritus left behind after cutting her paper screens. She arranged these cutouts on colored paper backgrounds that reappear in different forms in other photographs, establishing material linkages across multiple works. While the photographs contain abstract elements, Whitaker’s subjects can be thought of as resolutely depictive in their familiarity—wintery landscapes, women and still lifes of banal objects. These conventional subjects are thoroughly recognizable, despite gaps in their representation.

Exhibition runs through to April 26th, 2014

M+B
612 North Almont Drive
Los Angeles
California
90069

www.mbart.com

RUDOLF STINGEL

Posted on 2014-03-17

Over the past twenty years, Stingel has examined the nature of memory while expanding the scope and definition of painting. Echoing Albrecht Dürer’s Painter’s Manual of the sixteenth century, Stingel produced Instructions in 1989, a booklet illustrating how to create a Rudolf Stingel painting, which anticipated two decades of his investigation into the relationship between artist and artwork. In the early 1990s, he covered the walls and floors of exhibition spaces with broadloom carpet, transforming architecture into monochrome surface and texture. Later he covered gallery walls with metallic insulation board that viewers could mark and inscribe at will. Accumulating all manner of compulsive graffiti over the course of time, this material was later sectioned to form autonomous panel works, exuberantly human and anonymous. In a further turn of the screw, he cast these panels in copper and gold.

Stingel has sourced vintage black-and-white photographs of his birthplace, Merano, in the Tyrolean Alps, as the starting point for a series of immense landscape paintings measuring up to fifteen feet in width. Every nuance is meticulously recorded, from the steely, snowy peaks that appear in the photographs to the creased and discolored surfaces of the photographs themselves. Although the subject recalls the German Romantic tradition, such detectable influences are simply vehicles for Stingel’s broader concerns with memory and decline. Conflating a subject that is highly autobiographical with a conversely passive process, he has left some of the finished paintings on the studio floor to collect incidental scuffs and debris. In Untitled (2010), the calculated photorealism of the scene is desecrated by white spatters interrupting the panoramic grayscale mountainscape under a silver sky.

Opposite – Untitled, 2010

Exhibition runs through to April 19th, 2014

Gagosian Gallery
522 West 21st Street
New York
NY
10011

www.gagosian.com

BILL DRUMMOND – THE 25 PAINTINGS

Posted on 2014-03-17

‘The 25 Paintings’ represents the climax of Drummond’s prodigious and eclectic art career begun in 1976 when he designed and built the stage sets for the 12-hour play ‘Illuminatus’ at the National Theatre in London. Since that time Drummond’s artwork has taken a multitude of forms including writing and performing music, managing bands, running record labels, forming art foundations, writing, publishing, lecturing, painting, making soup and giving away bunches of daffodils.

‘The 25 Paintings’ is the twenty fifth exhibition at Eastside Projects and exists within the gallery and across the city of Birmingham as Drummond works Wednesday-Thursday around the city and Friday-Saturday in the gallery. The central motif of the exhibition is the ‘25 Paintings’ alluded to in the title but Drummond describes his work as sculpture. The sculpture ‘The 25 Paintings’ began in 2001 and will be complete on 28 April 2025 at the end of the ‘World Tour’.

The twenty five paintings exist primarily to act as markers, signposts and advertisements for the work the artist will be carrying out across Birmingham through to June. The exhibition includes the ’25 paintings’, ‘The 60 Posters’, ‘The 25 Sixty Second Films’, three publications – ‘The 25 Paintings’, ‘MAN MAKES BED’, and ‘MAN SHINES SHOES’ – and ten lectures including three at Eastside Projects entitled ‘Art Versus Money’, ‘Painting Versus Sculpture’ and ‘Life Versus Death’.

Exhibition runs through to June 14th, 2014

Eastside Projects
86 Heath Mill Lane
Birmingham
B9 4A

eastsideprojects.org

ACNE STUDIOS JEWELRY COLLECTION S/S 2014

Posted on 2014-03-17

Acne Studios unveil their Jewelry collection for Spring Summer 2014.
The collection consisits of a Carena Silver Necklace, a thick, drop neck knot necklace in matte silver brass, a Constance Antique Gold Necklace drop neck knot necklace in rustic gold and a Christelle Silver Necklace, a round silvery brass necklace with a hook closure detailing. Also in the collection is a knot bracelet in silver and gold and a Cordelia Antique Gold Earring.

www.acnestudios.com

NEW BALANCE X SHELFLIFE X DR.Z – CITY OF GOLD 574

Posted on 2014-03-17

After a huge amount of collaborative work with New Balance and designs by Dr.Z, Shelflife is to announce their New Balance 574 “City of Gold” is almost ready for release!

The official Shelflife South African release date will be April 17th, and infection of the rest of the globe will commence on April 28th at select premium retailers.