MARTHA DIAMOND

Posted on 2018-07-09

A lifelong New Yorker, Martha Diamond has spent decades breathing in, recording, and understanding the spaces, light, and memory of the city. Those experiences are her guide. Diamond grew up first in an apartment on the 11th floor of a building in Stuyvesant Town, Manhattan. She remembers looking out a window and seeing, across a circular courtyard, only the geometry of other buildings; later, her family lived in Queens. Her father, a doctor, would take her with him in his car on his Saturday rounds to patients, and Diamond remembers the sense of cavernous space she felt down the avenues and streets of the island. Another memory: Her grandparents lived in Silver Lake, Staten Island in a fourth floor apartment with a brick balcony. Martha would walk out on the balcony: First came the reservoir, then a long road, then the Goethals Bridge to New Jersey. One shape, then a space, then another, and then more shapes.
One thing, and then another. Then another.

Opposite – Grisaille Cityscape No. 2, 2007

Exhibition runs through to July 27th, 2018

Galerie Eva Presenhuber
39 Great Jones Street
NY 10012 New York
USA

www.presenhuber.com

  

FRANCES STARK – TEEN O.P.E.R.A.

Posted on 2018-07-09

A solo exhibition of new work by Frances Stark including “The Magic Flute.”

Opposite – Installation view

Exhibition runs through to September 1st, 2018

Gavin Brown’s enterprise
439 W. 127th Street
10027 New York
USA

www.gavinbrown.biz

  

SARAH FAUX – PUCKER

Posted on 2018-07-02

Comprised of new paintings in oil as well as canvas collages, “Pucker” encompasses Faux’s longstanding reflection on the female body and intimacy experience, while highlighting her recent experiments with color, materials, and composition. In her paintings, Sarah Faux merges the seemingly disparate strands of figurative representation and gestural abstraction to construct sensual situations where raw female bodies drift in a state of liminality. That the protagonist is always female, only occasionally in the company of the other sex, is the artist’s modus operandi in this body of work, a deliberate response to an artistic tradition in which the female form is often subjected to fetishization and objectification. But rather than taking a combative position to opt for affirmative representation, Faux conjures bodies that revel in the private moments of a beauty routine, as in Wet Mirror and Broad Daylight and Thin Air (both works 2018), or in erotic bliss, as in White Smoke Rose (also 2018). These invocations of willing consumption—of beauty products and eros—complicate what female agency means in today’s neoliberal world.

Opposite – Wet mirror, 2018

Exhibition runs through to July 23rd, 2018

Capsule Shanghai
1st Floor, Building 16, Anfu Lu 275 Nong
Xuhui District
200031 Shanghai
China

capsuleshanghai.com

  

MARY HEILMANN – MEMORY REMIX

Posted on 2018-07-02

Grounded in the soul of California, Mary Heilmann’s work draws from her memories of the distinctive colors and lines of the West Coast’s landscape and surf culture. Throughout a childhood accompanied by the radio’s ubiquitous soundtrack, Heilmann often watched the ocean tumble to the shore, rode the ‘mountain waves’ at Manhattan Beach, and read Allan Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and Walt Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass,’ which stoked her great admiration for poetry, jazz, and the idea of the Beats. Under these influences and through the deceptively simple means of painting – color, surface, and form – Heilmann physically manifests nostalgic impulses, memories, and allusions to popular culture that remain accessible on both personal and universal levels. In this way, her work transcends the seemingly opaque structures of geometrical abstraction by infusing it with the content of daily life.

Opposite – Mint Table, 2012

Exhibition runs through to September 23rd, 2018

Hauser & Wirth
901 East 3rd Street
90013 Los Angeles
USA

www.hauserwirth.com

  

MATT CONNORS – LOOK UP

Posted on 2018-07-02

For much of his career, Connors, a New York-based painter, has shown an almost mischievous embrace of familiar templates to create what he refers to as “compelling confusion.” His approach to painting puts an emphasis on the idea of the structure of his work. By overloading the canvas with pigment-rich paint, or using laminate as a compositional material, he creates pieces that bend conventions. Much like the title of his 2012 book, A Bell Is A Cup, a painting is also a physical construction.
For his new exhibition, Connors has developed a wide range of tones, building on the inspiration he draws from life in a city built on grids, lines, and
boundaries. Serendipity is an important compositional tool for Connors, and for this show. Figures re-emerge in different patterns, with varied weights and palettes. Deep fields of color are balanced with blocks of white space. Borders can be traditional —contained within the idea of a frame —or can jut into the viewer’s world: Some of the pieces are not on canvas, but are instead plaster casts that paint has been encouraged to seep into. By mounting them on the wall or on pedestals, Connors turns them into objects with a mysterious form and function.

Opposite – Song Inside A Song, 2018

Exhibition runs through to July 20th, 2018

Xavier Hufkens
St-Jorisstraat 6 Rue Saint-George
B – 1050 Brussels
Belgium

www.xavierhufkens.com

  

BENOÎT MAIRE – UN CHEVAL, DES SILEX

Posted on 2018-06-25

The artist, born in Pessac in 1978, creates work that is protean: at the intersection of aesthetics and visual arts, it questions the limits of representation. His work calls on painting, sculpture, photography, video, writing, and performance.
For this exhibition, Benoît Maire combines different works: Peintures de nuages (Cloud Paintings) hang on the walls, the Sphinx (Sphinxes) are suspended in mid-air, and Châteaux (Castles) sit atop pedestals or peculiar pieces of furniture. Some of his works levitate around us, while others seem to emerge from their bases to put themselves on display, but all co-exist to give body to an ambiguity (which, therefore, can be interpreted in two or more different ways).

Opposite – Oui ou non, 2018

Exhibition runs through to July 21st, 2018

Galerie Nathalie Obadia
3 rue du Cloître Saint-Merri
75004 Paris
France

www.nathalieobadia.com