ALMA ALLEN

Posted on 2019-07-22

This is a showcasing of work made after the artist’s recent relocation from Joshua Tree, CA, to Tepoztlan, Mexico. The pieces continue the compulsive and prolific explorations of a singular sculptor with a recognizable and idiosyncratic visual sensibility, who creates psychologically charged forms in stone, wood, and bronze.
In talisman-like handheld objects in silver and bronze, and in large-scale forms contoured from 500-pound burls of wood and slabs of stone, Allen’s works are exacting in their fluidity. These nonreferential forms at once evoke the familiar and the nameless, drawn from the trauma and willfulness that have marked the artist’s life and his own specificities of resonance and recollection. In Allen’s sculptures, and in their intimations of squeezing and stabbing and smoothing, is a distillation of visceral pains and pleasures: of a clenching or a letting go or opening one’s eyes to the sun after a nap. How the action of sculpting becomes the sculpture itself is apparent in Allen’s work, the result of a physical acting out, punctuated by its recurring themes of organs and violence. Many of the works present a single minimal motion, carved and polished over the course of many months.

Opposite – Not Yet Titled, 2017

Exhibition runs through to August 17th, 2019

Blum & Poe
2727 South La Cienega Boulevard
90034 Los Angeles
USA

www.galeriebuchholz.de

  

HERMAN AGUIRRE – TEJIDO

Posted on 2019-07-22

Tejido (Tissue), is a solo exhibition by Chicago-based Herman Aguirre that consists of new paintings inspired by ordinary objects in his home that have strong sentimental value: family photographs, linens, articles of clothing belonging to him and his wife, a bouquet of flowers and other souvenirs. Aguirre delicately builds up his works so that they represent the fragility of life and of malleability of memory.

Opposite – Viento y sol, 2019

Exhibition runs through to August 24th, 2019

Steve Turner
6830 Santa Monica Blvd.
CA 90038 Los Angeles
USA

steveturner.la

  

SHIRANA SHAHBAZI – NEW GOOD LUCK

Posted on 2019-07-15

A number of mid-sized format works that were created in the context of the simultaneously issued photo book and which draw upon the artist’s three-month stay in India are on show. The motifs collected on the journey are fragmentarily dissolved from their actual narrative and are subjected to a very intimate creative process on the basis of her artistic repertoire. It is experimentation with the original subject of the picture and its photographic quality conceptually mixed with classical lithographic printing techniques. As in previous series such as Tehran North from 2015, Shahbazi is interested in how a journey and the encounters experienced can be perceived photographically without them being externally determined by the visual power of the culturally charged and often very overwhelming colourfulness of the locations. It is the making of collages without physical intervention: the snapshots, which often show anonymous individual people in architectonic space or in a landscape, are taken apart and reshaped, their colour taken out of them or reconfigured like a reset.

Opposite – Kandalama, 2019

Exhibition runs through to July 26th, 2019

Galerie Peter Kilchmann
Zahnradstrasse 21
8005 Zürich
Switzerland

www.peterkilchmann.com

  

BIANCA BONDI – MOTHS DRINK THE TEARS OF SLEEPING BIRDS

Posted on 2019-07-15

Bianca Bondi has chosen an enigmatic title, inspired by a scientific study that a particular moth’ species had developed the ability to drink the tears of sleeping birds1. If nothing in the show directly illustrates this surprising observation, the choice of words however illustrates Bianca Bondi’s impulse to enrich her work with natural sciences and stories as well as religious culture, esoteric or magical. The movement of the bird’s tears when ingested by the moth correspond to a recurring analogy in the artist’s works: the idea of passage, the mutation of matter and its circulation.

Opposite – Have you accepted Christ as your personal savior? I…, 2019

Exhibition runs through to July 27th, 2019

VNH Gallery
108 rue Vieille du Temple
75003 Paris

vnhgallery.com

  

MARGOT BERGMAN – FAMILY ALBUM

Posted on 2019-07-15

Bianca Bondi has chosen an enigmatic title, inspired by a scientific study that a particular moth’ species had developed the ability to drink the tears of sleeping birds1. If nothing in the show directly illustrates this surprising observation, the choice of words however illustrates Bianca Bondi’s impulse to enrich her work with natural sciences and stories as well as religious culture, esoteric or magical. The movement of the bird’s tears when ingested by the moth correspond to a recurring analogy in the artist’s works: the idea of passage, the mutation of matter and its circulation.

Opposite – Carla, 2015

Exhibition runs through to August 16th, 2019

Anton Kern Gallery
16 East 55th Street
10022 New York

www.antonkerngallery.com

  

MIGUEL CARDENAS – CONDO NEW YORK

Posted on 2019-07-08

Cardenas’ landscapes are painted from an impossible point of view, distant and near, flat and spatial, alive and static. Flora and fauna meet depictions of archeological objects on a stage that at once feels like an elaborate, metaphysical recreation of the outside world and a visit to a personal museum. His sculptures draw together the iconography of the ancient Pre-Columbian era with that of European modernism. Through the use of abstract pedestals that deconstruct the animal body yet support an recognisable head, Cardenas conjures up the anthropomorphic qualities of animals and conveys the mimetic element implicit in our fascination with a more primal understanding of the world.

Opposite – Garden City, 2019

Exhibition runs through to July 26th, 2019

Metro Pictures
519 West 24th Street
NY 10011
New York

www.metropictures.com