MATTHEW RONAY – RAMUS

Posted on 2018-04-02

Ronay’s drawings are automatic and intuitive—they flow naturally from his own body, from internalized habits of composition and muscle memory. His sculptures, in contrast, are meticulous, executed with exacting precision and
exquisite technique. His impossibly kerf-less tongues and grooves bewilder anyone who has ever worked with wood. Still, despite their extravagances, each sculpture is inevitably faithful to the simple drawing that preceded it.
For his upcoming show at Perrotin, Matthew is drawing at a different scale, working on larger paper that allows for a different kind of physical interaction with the drawing. Freed from the confines of the spiral notebook, new
gestures come from the shoulder or the arm rather than the hand. There is more of his body in each drawing and new variations in line weight, texture and detail emerge. Ronay moves back and forth from drawing to object, from clean
room to dirty, from shoe to identical shoe.

Opposite – Installation view

Exhibition runs through to May 26th, 2018

Perrotin
76 rue de Turenne
75003 Paris
France

www.perrotin.com

  

MARK BRADFORD – NEW WORKS

Posted on 2018-04-02

The ten new works on view find Bradford furthering his investigations into the technical and sociopolitical potentials of abstract painting, deploying the profound insight and inventiveness that have established him as one of the most significant and influential artists of his generation.

Bradford employs the ‘tools of civilization’ – billboards, merchant posters, newsprint, comics, magazines, and endpapers – to conflate cultural and political forces, and create layers of social commentary in paintings that evoke deep feeling. ‘How we build and destroy ourself are the materials that I’m really interested in,’ the artist once stated, ‘and paper is one of the main ways in which information is displayed.’ Through his rigorous physical approach to the material presence of painting, Bradford has addressed powerful issues of our time, including the AIDS epidemic, the misrepresentation and fear of queer identity, and systemic racism in America. His recent work engages in a broader excavation of American history to raise questions about the preservation of the past and the transference of power.

Opposite – Rocket, 2018

Exhibition runs through to May 20th, 2018

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

www.hauserwirthlosangeles.com

  

CYPRIEN GAILLARD – NIGHTLIFE

Posted on 2018-03-26

Shot entirely at night over the course of two years, this three-dimensional film connects a series of divergent natural and cultural phenomena throughout Cleveland, Los Angeles and Berlin. Organized into distinct chapters, Nightlife optically, audibly and conceptually brings together an obscure yet significant mix of historical monuments and occurrences, forming a hyper psychedelic experience. This ambitious production ties together several key themes that recur throughout the artist’s oeuvre, such as cultural relics, preservation and entropy, and speaks to the multidisciplinary nature of his practice.

Nightlife chronicles four interconnected subjects: Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker installed at the Cleveland Museum of Art; non-indigenous plants scattered throughout the Los Angeles basin; the annual Pyronale firework event at the Olympiastadion in Berlin; and the Jesse Owens Olympic oak tree at the James Ford Rhodes High School in Cleveland. The film begins with the camera panning over an unidentifiable undulating green form that resembles an indiscernible tropical leaf. As the camera continues rightward, showing the viewer a scaly, dense metal object, Rodin’s The Thinker is unveiled in its full form. One of the last casts overseen directly by Rodin, this work is shown in its current state outside the Cleveland Museum of Art. In 1970, the work was partially destroyed by a bombing attributed to a cell of the anti-imperialist group ‘Weather Underground.’ Through the lens of stereoscopic vision, Rodin’s damaged thinker permeates the exhibition space, establishing both the spectral and sculptural nature of this film.

Opposite – Installation view

Exhibition runs through to April 14th, 2018

Gladstone Gallery
530 West 21st Street
NY 10011
New York

www.galerie-vallois.com

  

SEAN LANDERS

Posted on 2018-03-26

If the early works were considered Landers’ antidote to the aesthetics of a hyper-inflated art industry of the 1980s, these twelve new paintings (approximately 36.25 x 27.5 inches, and 71.5 x 55.5 inches) are more elegiac. The paint is delicately applied on pre-printed yellow canvas; each touch is clearly a mark in script. Disguised as ‘finished’ bozzetti, these works seem to further illuminate the private thoughts Landers unleashed almost 30 years ago. Not only do the new paintings arrest the artist’s stream-of-consciousness, but they also elevate his meditations on mortality, our current political climate, and the success of a middle-aged artist—while simultaneously injecting new urgency and amplifying scale.

Parallel to Landers first solo show at Petzel’s uptown location, the gallery will premiere a suite of new tree paintings at The Art Show, Park Avenue Armory. Some, if not all, of the quotes on the yellow legal pad paintings will find another form of expression as “carvings” in the bark of Landers’ painted trees. As if the thoughts in the gallery show were still a preliminary language (or nascent state of mind) here they are ‘realized’ as images.

Opposite – The Eternal Dawning Of Now, 2017

Exhibition runs through to April 14th, 2018

Petzel Gallery
35 E 67th Street
NY 10065
New York

www.petzel.com

  

DAMIEN HIRST AT HOUGHTON HALL

Posted on 2018-03-26

A series of new paintings by Damien Hirst entitled Colour Space will be installed in the State Rooms at Houghton Hall for the exhibition Damien Hirst at Houghton Hall from 25 March – 15 July 2018. The exhibition will also include a number of the artist’s most celebrated sculptures which will be installed throughout the 18th-century house and gardens.

The Colour Space paintings have never been shown in public before and are a development of the iconic Spot Paintings which are among the artist’s most recognised works.

7 sculptures will be installed outdoors in the park featuring some of the artist’s most famous and visually arresting works. They include the celebrated Virgin Mother (2005–2006) which was shown in the courtyard of the Royal Academy in 2006, and Charity (2002–2003) which was installed on Hoxton Square in 2003 and outside the Royal West of England Academy of Art in Bristol in 2011

Those installed in the house include Anatomy of an Angel, 2008 in the entrance hall, and two smaller kinetic sculptures from the artist’s “levitation” series featuring air blowers and table tennis balls, in the celebrated Stone Hall.

Exhibition runs through to July 15th, 2018

Houghton Hall
King’s Lynn
Norfolk
PE31 6UE

www.houghtonhall.com

  

MARTIN KERSELS

Posted on 2018-03-19

For his exhibition at the George-Philippe and Nathalie Vallois gallery, Kersels is showing his Disc-o-graphs (Disqueso-Graphiques); diverse objects made by arranging parts of furniture and pop music record covers. In the other rooms, a piece by Dufrêne from 1964 decomposes into distinct letters (the founding principal of letterism) the word MOT-NU-MENTAL from backward posters. Out of these two ensembles emerges a game of associations of shapes and images, all an exercise in superpositions. There is also a feeling of obsolescence, a desire to make something out of the old, to retrieve what can still exist. There is nothing digital in any of this, as though the 50s and 60s of the previous century met by separate paths. But there is above all a desire to bring together two crucial and outstanding artists, who ceaselessly “turn the tables”, as one would say to shake the codes of propriety. The word “monumental” sticks to them, both literally and figuratively.

Opposite – Record Collection 4, 2017

Exhibition runs through to April 21st, 2018

Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois
36 rue de Seine
75006 Paris
France

www.galerie-vallois.com