DUANE MICHALS – ILLUSIONS OF THE PHOTOGRAPHER

Posted on 2019-11-18

Contemplative, confessional, and comedic, the art of Duane Michals exerts an appeal that transcends the conventional audience of photography. Since the early 1960s, Michals has worked past what he sees as the limitations of the camera: he writes in the margins of his prints, creates sequences of images that explore intangible human dilemmas (doubt, mortality, desire), and derives poetic effects from technical errors such as double exposure and motion blur. Illusions of the Photographer combines a full career retrospective-the first on Michals to be organized by a New York City museum-with an artist’s-choice show, as Michals plumbs the Morgan’s vaults for treasures both revered and long-forgotten.

Michals leads viewers on a tour of his mind as he engages heroes and mentors as varied as William Blake, Edward Lear, and Saul Steinberg and matches wits with stage designers, toy-makers, and his fellow portraitists of the past and the present.

Opposite – The Illuminated Man, 1968

Exhibition runs through to February 2nd, 2020

The Morgan Library & Museum
225 Madison Avenue
New York
10016 NY

www.themorgan.org

  

SIZE? X ADIDAS LXCON 94 “CARSTENSZ”

Posted on 2019-11-18

For Size?’s latest limited release with Adidas, the duo rework the LXCON 94 “Carstensz.” Drawing its inspiration from Indonesia’s treacherous Carstensz Pyramid — considered to be one of the world’s most difficult mountains to scale.

www.randomevent.com.cn

  

NATHALIE DJURBERG & HANS BERG – ONE LAST TRIP TO THE UNDERWORLD

Posted on 2019-11-18

Djurberg and Berg’s collaborative works conjure surreal landscapes that explore the shadows of human subconsciousness. Using sculpture, stop-motion film, sound, and immersive installation the artists construct narratives that speak to emotional tension, confliction, sexual impulse, and violence.



Rendered through dark humor, with a hint of the absurd, Djurberg and Berg’s work explores an emotional gamut of fear, innocence, power, greed, and shame. The formal qualities of the work—seductive colors, visceral textures and hypnotic music—enhance the emotional dimension and challenge our way of seeing. In dissolving our perspective of morality and bias, Djurberg and Berg invite the viewer to consider our own fears and fantasies.

Opposite – Installation view

Exhibition runs through to December 20th, 2019

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
521 West 21st Street
10011 New York

hetnieuweinstituut.nl

  

OVERMONO – LE TIGRE

Posted on 2019-11-18

The brothers Overmono reunite for a new EP on their own Poly Kicks imprint. After dropping a tape of live recordings earlier on in the year, POLY011 finds Tessela and Truss back in the studio and serving up another dose of their melodious brand of bass-techno.

Out of POLY011’s two tracks, A-side ‘Le Tigre’ is the more immediate. The track’s pacy groove is not dissimilar to ‘Chiseler’s Rush’, the recent club standout from Call Super and Parris. There’s some old-school garage to the shuffling drum programming, but the deft and balanced production here also draws on contemporary innovations from labels like Timedance and Where To Now?. As ‘Le Tigre’ progresses you find the insistent bass motif burrowing into your brain as the fizzing synths swell to a climax.

overmono.bandcamp.com

  

SUPERFUNLAND: JOURNEY INTO THE EROTIC CARNIVAL

Posted on 2019-11-18

Super Funland: Journey into the Erotic Carnival examines the sexual history of the carnival, inviting visitors to explore its bacchanalian origins in ancient Greece and Rome and its evolution in pre-industrial Europe and the “midway” of the great World’s Fairs of the 20th century. An historical exploration of carnival’s roots is accompanied by an interactive exhibition of thirteen erotically-charged games and amusements that allows visitors to lose themselves in the carnality, decadence, and joy of a reimagined carnival.

Fairs and festivals have served as outlets for hedonism throughout history, allowing revelers to experience decadent pleasures and, quite often, vice. Following the Industrial Revolution, fairs and festivals began to be carried out at larger scales in the form of traveling carnivals and expositions. Millions of visitors would make pilgrimages to the World’s Fair, where exhibitions on the midway ranged from famed designer Norman Bel Geddes’ topless “Crystal Lassies” to a primitive version of a sex robot. In 1939, Salvador Dali designed the “Dream of Venus” pavilion to promote Surrealist art, featuring bare-breasted performers who posed in bizarre tableaus and dove into large water tanks in an aquatic fantasy of subconscious reveries.

Museum of Sex
233 Fifth Avenue
New York
NY 10016

www.museumofsex.com

  

MATTHEW BARNEY – EMBRASURE

Posted on 2019-11-18

Barney’s 2018 film Redoubt is set on a wolf hunt in Idaho’s rugged Sawtooth Mountains, continuing the artist’s long-standing preoccupation with landscape as both setting and subject. Redoubt adopts the ancient myth of Diana, goddess of the hunt, and Actaeon, a hunter who trespasses on her, as its narrative framework. In Redoubt, an Engraver, played by Barney, creates a series of plein-air drawings on copper plates as he stalks Diana and her attendants. An Electroplater in a remote laboratory subjects them to a chemical process that transforms the Engraver’s drawings: each plate is immersed in an electroplating solution, causing copper growths to form on the engraved lines. Her actions, undertaken with a ritualistic focus, transform the engravings into talismanic objects, connecting them to Barney’s work in drawing, sculpting, and performance.

Opposite – Fascia, 2019

Exhibition runs through to December 21st, 2019

Gladstone Gallery
Gladstone 64
130 East 64th Street
10065 New York

www.gladstonegallery.com