AMANDA VISELL – AT-AT WOOD SCULPTURE
2017-10-30Hand made and hand painted wood sculpture. Limited edition 5. Stands around 12 inches tall. Each will be slightly different, cause ya know… hand made.
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JAMES HERBERT
2017-10-30James Herbert’s photographs of nude young adults, seemingly lost in the intimacy of a moment, combine conceptions of film and photography with elements of art history to create images that hover between the worlds of fact and fiction, between the romantic and the real. The photographs, made of frames selected from his films, are thus the product of a collaboration between Herbert, functioning as an engaged director, and his subjects. As images, they are more poetic and symbolic than concrete, photographic allegories that draw on the visual traditions of painting.
In 1989, using black and white, and color motion picture film that he shot mostly in the 1980s, Herbert projected individual frames, one by one, on a wall, selecting specific ones that he then re-photographed with 35mm black and white film. He later enlarged the images, printing them on 16 x 20 inch paper. This process of re-photographing and then enlarging emphasized the grain of the film and created an aesthetic that mirrors the plasticity of paint. It makes the flesh palpable, in the same way that layering paint on a canvas can provide a visceral experience. He selected the frames to photograph for their still properties, thus they are not necessarily the same edit he used for the films he made from the same footage, which were also made with a re-photographic process.
Opposite – Sherrill, from “Trains” 1987, 1989
Exhibition runs through to November 4th, 2017
Gitterman Gallery
41 East 57th Street
New York
10022 NY
SAM WINDETT – MOTORWAY IV
2017-10-30Themes of time, movement and repetition, partly taken from the artist’s memories of driving through the South West of England, resonate throughout the work.
Multiple layers of paint, charcoal and textured marks combining torn and cut paper intertwine, evoking broken landscapes caught in a hinterland between abstraction, narrative and representation. Physical and ephemeral aspects of road travel are at play in the work, from the scrambled black and white surfaces of the wet road to the static of a car radio and the surrounding darkness of a night drive. References to radio compound not only through painterly representations of white noise, but in dial-like forms and the repeated letters FM and AM. The recurring motif of the disc doubles up both as suns and moons or the headlights of approaching cars. In the smaller canvases, cell structures resemble the veins of vascular leaves, plants or invented ribcages. Seemingly organic forms contradict their evolution from the motif of fragmented mechanical bodies in earlier paintings of aeroplanes or drones.
Opposite – Motorway IV — FM/AM, 2017
Exhibition runs through to November 5th, 2017
The Approach
1st Floor, 47 Approach Road
Bethnal Green
E2 9LY
London
XU ZHEN – XUZHEN SUPERMARKET
2017-10-30Xu Zhen (b. 1977) is known for his wry and provocative appropriations of the tropes of advertising, distribution, and consumerism. This project, which has previously been presented in Shanghai, Singapore, New York and Miami, takes the form of a functioning supermarket. Visitors to the store, located in the ground-floor ‘Shop’ space at Sadie Coles HQ, are invited to buy from continually-restocked rows of packaged goods from China – all of them completely authentic, and all completely empty.
Playing out the artist’s interest in capitalist products and processes, XUZHEN Supermarket occupies an unlikely space between installation art and commercial food production. Inviting viewers to invest in empty shells – containers bereft of substance or use value – the venture offers a critique of the often-destructive nature of global capitalism – its relentless cycles of supply and demand, brute logistics and mass consumption, and the aesthetic guises it assumes through branding and packaging. There is also a satirical metaphor, in the hollow vessels, for the international art market and its arbitrary ascriptions of value.
Exhibition runs through to November 4th, 2017
The Shop
62 Kingly Street
London W1
HIROSHI SUGIMOTO – SURFACE TENSION
2017-10-30Surface Tension, is a collection of images from the artist’s Seascapes series (1980– ). For Sugimoto, contemplating and photographing images of the seas of the world connects the present to the past and as well as the history of those seas to the land where he sets up his camera. The ever moving surface of the sea ensures that each work has it its own unrepeatable characteristics, communicated via weather, atmosphere and the illumination of the sun or the moon. The singular unifying element throughout the series is the perfectly balanced composition between the lower half weighted with the sea, and the airy upper half depicting the sky, each seascape divided dead centre by the horizon line. In Paris, the artist will present work from the 1990’s to his most recent works of the Tasman sea photographed in 2017.
Opposite – Tasman Sea, Marion Bay, 2017
Exhibition runs through to December 22nd, 2017
Marian Goodman Gallery
79 Rue Du Temple
75003 Paris
THOMAS RUFF – PHOTOGRAPHS 1979 – 2017
2017-10-30Cosmology, suburbia, nudity, utopianism, catastrophe – these are some of the subjects that Thomas Ruff (b. 1958, Germany) addresses in his photographic series, which for almost four decades have investigated the status of the image in contemporary culture. This exhibition will draw from the full range of Ruff’s output: from his acclaimed Portraits – passport-style portraits, reproduced on a huge scale and revealing every surface detail of their subjects, to his most recent press++ photographs, drawing on newspaper archives from the era of the space race and Hollywood starlets.
Opposite – L’Empereur 06 (The Emperor 06), 1982
Exhibition runs through to January 21st, 2018
Whitechapel Gallery
77-82 Whitechapel High St
London
E1 7QX
