WILL BOONE

Posted on 2018-10-15

Will Boone has become recognized for paintings, sculptures, and ambitious installations that draw content from sources outside of art historical contexts. He is particularly interested in subcultures and images associated with the broader American social landscape; these include punk music, bar culture, the automotive industry, horror movies, cattle ranching, and conspiracy theories. Boone mines these sources for iconic forms, borrowing their methodologies and technical processes to render objects full of graphic power and remarkable physicality.
Prominently featured in this exhibition are a group of large-scale Mask paintings in which Boone converts images of emblematic objects and people into imposing, mask-like forms by introducing blank spots that stand in for their eyes. The array of images is as varied as it is surreal, with a milk carton, a Goodyear tire, a playing card, Frankenstein, and a Doberman Pinscher all making appearances. On the one hand, these are exercises in anthropomorphism writ large–Boone channels the instinctual human desire to see faces in everything, as well as the psychedelic, animistic state of seeing a living soul in an inanimate form. But they are also monumental expressions of design, printing, and painting techniques the artist has used since his youth, when he regularly designed posters and t-shirts for punk bands.

Opposite – Bad Milk, 2018

Exhibition runs through to November 24th, 2018

Galerie Patrick Seguin
5 rue des Taillandiers
75011 Paris
France

www.patrickseguin.com

  

ELLEN BERKENBLIT – THE CLOCK UNLOCKED

Posted on 2018-10-15

The Clock Unlocked is the first exhibition to encompass works from over four decades of New York painter Ellen Berkenblit’s practice. Hung salon style, arranged instinctually and without chronology, this unbound diary of paintings and drawings reveals the artist’s idiosyncratic ‘alphabet’— the core of her visual language.
Images appear and re-submerge: a witch, a tiger, a shoe, a truck, all reveal themselves as a collection of curves, strokes, and slashes. One recognizes a gesture, and in it a notion of how the physical sensations and muscular reactions of the arm, the hand and the wrist all drive Berkenblit’s mark-making. The viewer becomes privy to an intimate calligraphy that is the result of the dance between artist, material, and surface.

Opposite – Sunshine, 2018

Exhibition runs through to October 20th, 2018

Anton Kern Gallery
16 East 55th Street
10022 New York
USA

www.antonkerngallery.com

  

RODNEY GRAHAM – CENTRAL QUESTIONS OF PHILOSOPHY

Posted on 2018-10-08

Graham’s exhibition at Lisson Gallery features his largest lightbox to date, a four-panel piece featuring a 1940s gallery set loosely based on a photograph of Samuel Kootz. One of the first New York art dealers to champion Abstract Expressionist art, Kootz is shown smugly smoking a pipe in his apartment-turned gallery during an exhibition of work by Pablo Picasso in 1949. Graham takes on the role of Kootz in his new lightbox, hoovering the carpeted floors in preparation for an exhibition opening. In the background, an art collector admires a set of abstract paintings, created by Graham and based on a drawing by Alexander Rodchenko (Abstract Composition, 1941). Here we see Graham’s characteristic and dizzying layering effect: he is an artist, acting as a gallerist, in a gallery set that he has created, with artworks he has created inspired by another artist, as an artwork.

Opposite – Tattooed Man on Balcony, 2018

Exhibition runs through to November 3rd, 2018

Lisson Gallery
67 Lisson Street
NW1 5DA
London

www.lissongallery.com

  

JULIE MEHRETU – SEXTANT

Posted on 2018-10-08

Graham’s exhibition at Lisson Gallery features his largest lightbox to date, a four-panel piece featuring a 1940s gallery set loosely based on a photograph of Samuel Kootz. One of the first New York art dealers to champion Abstract Expressionist art, Kootz is shown smugly smoking a pipe in his apartment-turned gallery during an exhibition of work by Pablo Picasso in 1949. Graham takes on the role of Kootz in his new lightbox, hoovering the carpeted floors in preparation for an exhibition opening. In the background, an art collector admires a set of abstract paintings, created by Graham and based on a drawing by Alexander Rodchenko (Abstract Composition, 1941). Here we see Graham’s characteristic and dizzying layering effect: he is an artist, acting as a gallerist, in a gallery set that he has created, with artworks he has created inspired by another artist, as an artwork.

Opposite – Flo Me La (N.S.), 2017-2018

Exhibition runs through to November 3rd, 2018

White Cube
25-26 Mason’s Yard
SW1Y 6BU
London

www.whitecube.com

  

FRANK STELLA

Posted on 2018-10-08

Few artists are as synonymous with the history of 20th and 21st-century American art as Frank Stella. His work across media, from painting to sculpture to printmaking, has continuously broken ground at each stage of his decades-long career, remaining influential and relevant to subsequent generations of contemporary artists. The selection of works highlights the artist’s ongoing experimentation with spatial representation and includes the début of a new painting series.
In its broad array of forms, colors, and scale, Stella’s recent work offers viewers an equally remarkable and confounding visual experience. Planes intersect, cutting through each other as if in virtual space, while metal frameworks balance brightly painted, sinuous shapes whose appearance shifts radically when viewed from different perspectives. Since the 1990s, the artist has worked with computer renderings of complex forms, piecing together compositions from recurring motifs inspired by smoke rings, a spiralcoiled
hat, stars, and other visual phenomena. Though Stella conceives of all his works in relation to painting, they often extend into three dimensions and are inspired by various disciplines, including literature, philosophy, and music.

Opposite – The Broken Jug. A Comedy [D#3] (left handed version), 2007

Exhibition runs through to November 3rd, 2018

Sprüth Magers
5900 Wilshire Boulevard
CA 90036
Los Angeles

www.spruethmagers.com

  

TOM SACHS – SWISS PASSPORT OFFICE

Posted on 2018-10-01

To coincide with London’s Frieze Week, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac London will remain open for 24 hours on 5th October 2018 for the issuing of Swiss passports at American artist Tom Sachs’ Swiss Passport Office installation. Between 6pm on Friday 5th October and 6pm on Saturday 6th October, visitors can be issued with a Swiss passport at a cost of €20 (no British pounds will be accepted). Those wishing to purchase a passport will be photographed and have their name hand-typed onto a serial-numbered Tom Sachs Studio passport, stamped with a Studio endorsement and entered into the permanent database. Following this 24-hour period, the Swiss Passport Office installation will remain on view at the gallery until 10th November, but closed for the issuing of passports.

Opposite – Desk, 2018

Exhibition runs through to November 10th, 2018

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac
Ely House
37 Dover Street
W1S 4NJ London

www.ropac.net