DAMIEN HIRST- VISUAL CANDY AND NATURAL HISTORY

Posted on 2017-11-27

Since emerging onto the international art scene in the late 1980s as the protagonist of a generation of British artists, Hirst has created installations, sculptures, paintings and drawings that examine the complex relationships between art, beauty, religion, science, life and death.
Through mediums as diverse as household paint and butterfly wings, he has investigated and challenged contemporary belief systems, tracing the uncertainties that lie at the heart of human experience. This exhibition juxtaposes the joyful, colorful abstractions of his ‘Visual Candy’ paintings with the clinical forms of his ‘Natural History’ sculptures. The ‘Visual Candy’ paintings allude to movements including Impressionism, Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, while the ‘Natural History’ sculptures—glass tanks containing biological specimens preserved in formaldehyde, reflect the visceral realities of scientific investigation through minimalist design. Despite their stark formal differences, the two series were made during the same period and share conceptual foundations: an exploration of the relationships between pleasure and pain, transience and permanence, logic and emotion.

Opposite – Happiness, 1993 – 1994

Exhibition runs through to January 13th, 2018

Gagosian
7/F Pedder Building
12 Pedder Street
Central, Hong Kong
Hong Kong

www.gagosian.com

  

JORINDE VOIGT – HILLS AND TURNS

Posted on 2017-11-27

Jorinde Voigt’s solo exhibition “Hills and Turns” presents a selection of new works on paper whose common element is the hill shape. The works 45 Hills and 40 Hills (Vertical Turn), the eight-part series Yellow Hills, and the ten-part series The Scope (all 2017) are on display in a colorful architecture custom built for the show. Voigt’s hills are a reference to an archetypical way to represent an event. The suspense curve, originally a diagram, traces the dramaturgical arc of an action. This inserts a temporal dimension into the picture, making it legible from left to right. In the various works and series, individual events generated by a structure of repetition and variation form entire event landscapes rendered as hill sceneries (The Scope). In the overarching compositional ensemble, the hill thus emerges as both the prominent element and what obscures other elements.

Opposite – The Scope I, 2017

Exhibition runs through to January 7th, 2018

König Galerie
St. Agnes – Alexandrinenstr, 118-121
10969 Berlin

www.koeniggalerie.com

  

DAWN MELLOR – SIRENS

Posted on 2017-11-20

Dawn Mellor presents a new body of paintings, each depicting a British actress portraying a police officer. The title, Sirens, is a triple-entendre, evoking the sounds emitted by cop cars, as well as the vernacular term for a sexually provocative actress and the deadly seductresses of Greek mythology. These paintings are not tributes to the mystical star-power of their celebrity subjects: instead, they highlight the dangers of our lustful projections onto the famous, sounding a loud, dissonant and potentially violent alarm against the passively cannibalistic consumption of mass media.

Mellor works from pre-existing images – in this case, film and TV stills – but always corrupts or mutilates her referents. Here, her subjects appear submerged in water up to their shoulders, their faces partly shrouded by the likes of colorful netting, floral patterning, and eczema. While perhaps not as outright gruesome as some of the artist’s other work, these pictures nonetheless are powerfully, unsettlingly lurid: they practically seethe with sadistic humor, erotic enticement and malevolence.

Opposite – Unnamed Extra (2), 2016

Exhibition runs through to December 23rd, 2017

team (gallery, inc.)
83 Grand Street
10013 New York
USA

www.teamgal.com

  

DAVID ADAMO

Posted on 2017-11-20

Fried eggs are comfort food. They resist interpretation. Sometimes things really are as simple as they seem to be. And then sometimes things—fried eggs, flippers, orange peels—perform their simplicity. Central to David Adamo’s second solo exhibition at rodolphe janssen is a series of works on raw canvas depicting swirling compositions of trompe l’oeil fried eggs. It’s the multi-faceted coagulation of fried eggs that we are asked to focus in on here; Adamo worked layer by layer to build up their milky translucency. Each egg is a unique being, collectively forming a rhythm by which to see them—and ultimately the entire exhibition—as a whole. This silent rhythm is in turn punctuated by another in absentia: the inner workings of a metronome housed in a soundproof box ticks away, barely audible. In past works, Adamo removed the device’s inner mechanism, leaving only its casing—an homage to György Ligeti’s 1962 Poéme Symphonique. The metronome’s role reversal hints at a central element in Adamo’s work, in which the beat of everyday life is found through the removal of elements.

Opposite – Untitled (eggs 6), 2017

Exhibition runs through to December 22nd, 2017

Rodolphe Janssen
Rue de Livourne 32 Livornostraat
B-1050 Brussels
Belgium

www.rodolphejanssen.com

  

JACK PIERSON

Posted on 2017-11-20

For close to three decades, Pierson has created a multi-disciplinary artistic practice that utilizes the visual languages of photography, painting, drawing, and sculpture to examine themes of memory, desire, longing, absence, despair, and glamour.

The exhibition brings together a selection of Pierson’s signature large-scale word sculptures formed from individual found letters salvaged from vintage commercial signage, collected by the artist over the years. The sculptures are comprised of individual letters – each one with a distinct color, surface, texture, shape, and size – placed together to create incantations of emotionally charged words and poetic phrases.

Referencing traditional Americana motifs of roadside signage associated with the American West, within the gallery walls his sculptures like BROKE MISERABLE AND ALONE, DUST AND DREAMS, and MANIFEST DESTINY become decontextualized iconic messages imbued with nostalgia and disillusionment.

Opposite – PEOPLE ARE WEIRD, 2016

Exhibition runs through to December 23rd, 2017

Regen Projects
6750 Santa Monica Boulevard
CA 90038
Los Angeles

www.regenprojects.com

  

GUY YANAI – BARBARIAN IN THE GARDEN

Posted on 2017-11-13

For his exhibition Barbarian In The Garden, Yanai presents a series of paintings and drawings that capture his alienation to memory and places, flattened and made shallow through solid blocks of color that create the appearance of cut-outs or collage. He creates a mise en scène by the activations of separate vignettes from distant memories such as a painting of George Washington on a horse—drawn from a recollection of when he made a similar drawing for his brother around the age of 7—juxtaposed with paintings of plant life, unoccupied interiors such as a view from his apartment in Tel-Aviv or a hotel in Rayol-Canadel-sur-Mer.

Influenced by impressionist masters such as Matisse and Cézanne, as well as contemporary figures like Tal R and David Hockney, Yanai’s personal style mixes the aesthetics of his transcontinental childhood spent between Haifa, Israel and the suburbs of Boston, where he first drew inspiration from scenes of everyday life. In his paintings, the banal is reduced to geometric segments where he then abandons references to the tangible world in favor of a visual experience that is more akin to digital imagery – such as a painting of Palermo as seen through Google Street View.

Opposite – Grey Sofa (Barbarian In The Garden), 2017


Exhibition runs through to December 22nd, 2017

Praz-Delavallade
6150 Wilshire Blvd
CA 90048 Los Angeles
USA

www.praz-delavallade.com