XU ZHEN – XUZHEN SUPERMARKET

Posted on 2017-10-30

Xu Zhen (b. 1977) is known for his wry and provocative appropriations of the tropes of advertising, distribution, and consumerism. This project, which has previously been presented in Shanghai, Singapore, New York and Miami, takes the form of a functioning supermarket. Visitors to the store, located in the ground-floor ‘Shop’ space at Sadie Coles HQ, are invited to buy from continually-restocked rows of packaged goods from China – all of them completely authentic, and all completely empty.

Playing out the artist’s interest in capitalist products and processes, XUZHEN Supermarket occupies an unlikely space between installation art and commercial food production. Inviting viewers to invest in empty shells – containers bereft of substance or use value – the venture offers a critique of the often-destructive nature of global capitalism – its relentless cycles of supply and demand, brute logistics and mass consumption, and the aesthetic guises it assumes through branding and packaging. There is also a satirical metaphor, in the hollow vessels, for the international art market and its arbitrary ascriptions of value.

Exhibition runs through to November 4th, 2017

The Shop
62 Kingly Street
London W1

www.cobgallery.com

  

ROBERT MONTGOMERY

Posted on 2017-10-30

Hammersmith Poem and Love Letters to Kazimir Malevich is a major exhibition of new paintings and light works by Robert Montgomery. In a bold return to painting, these works galvanise Montgomery’s recent artistic objective that calls for a political and aesthetic re-invigoration of the “Modernist Dream”. The exhibition is presented in partnership with JOSEPH and extends to their space on Savile Row.

Montgomery distills a unique mysticism in his works that communicates wider social messaging- bridging a gap between a search for genuine spiritual feeling and an updated ‘Beuysian’ conceptual art practice of social sculpture. His poetic voice seeks to connect the audience directly to political, social and ecological priorities as a result of their interaction with his work.

For the exhibition, Montgomery has deepened a dialogue with early Modernism in a series of paintings that set his texts overlaid on the composition structures or “ghost outlines” of a number of Malevich paintings. Motifs of the Suprematist movement appear as laid foundations to Montgomery’s poetical cautions on political, social, and ecological concerns of 21st Century society.

Opposite – Hammersmith Poem/Malevich Painting (And The Screens That Circle You Like Butterflies Now), 2017

Exhibition runs through to November 25th, 2017

Cob Gallery
205 Royal College Street
London
NW1 0SG

www.cobgallery.com

  

CECILY BROWN – A DAY! HELP! HELP! ANOTHER DAY!

Posted on 2017-10-23

In her new work, Brown presents an allegorical and turbulent vision, drawing from Théodore Géricault’s iconic painting of a shipwreck, The Raft of Medusa (1818-19), as well as those by Eugène Delacroix. Echoing Géricault’s rhythmic system of triangles, Brown composes her packed figures with robust brushstrokes that exacerbate emotional and torsional strain. Included in the exhibition will be Brown’s largest painting to date, a massive triptych of a shipwreck, which introduces burkini-clad women that recall her Madrepore canvases from 2015. Lacking a clear horizon line, space is equivocated through entangled blues, yellows, pinks, and grays, arresting the viewer’s eyes on a compressed surface-substrate matrix. Referencing historical art and literature as well as current political events, these new works recount a retrospective and recursive narrative with contemporary resonance.

Opposite – Sirens and Shipwrecks and Bathers and the Band, 2016

Exhibition runs through to December 2nd, 2017

Paula Cooper Gallery
534 West 21st Street
10011-2812
New York

www.paulacoopergallery.com

  

PAUL OSIPOW – NEW PAINTINGS

Posted on 2017-10-23

For the greater part of his artistic career Paul Osipow has emphasized abstract and non-figurative painting and is a leading proponent of its development within the Nordic art scene, where he continues to inspire new generations of artists.

Osipow’s exhibitions in the 1990s revealed his gradual movement away from a pure geometric expression to one unrestricted, inspired by pioneers of modern painting with samplings from late Impressionism, Cubism and Fauvism. Throughout, Osipow has maintained a bold approach to abstract and figurative concepts in terms of what and how to paint. With pragmatic distance and profound seriousness he experiments with the medium’s fundamental and constant questions regarding surface, color, space and form; to depict or not, thus creating intriguing artworks and contributing to an analytical criticism of his medium.

In the preparatory works for this new series of paintings one can sense inspiration from Nordic vernacular rag rugs, but in the works to be shown in this exhibition, a connection has also been made with the craft of mosaics reflecting Osipow’s longstanding interest in the ancient Mediterranean cultures. Composed of brick-like horizontal bands of painted dots, the paintings have been crafted with a certain crudeness and delicacy which results in a strong and direct visual language. Osipow includes the left and right margins of the canvas in these compositions – revealing traces and notes like a prisoners graffiti from the disciplined workdays in his Helsinki Studio. The meticulously laid segments form a long line of contemplation on a painterly foundation which Osipow has constantly developed since the 1960s.

Opposite – Untitled, 2017

Exhibition runs through to November 18th, 2017

Galleri Riis
Arbins gate 7
NO-0253 Oslo
Norway

galleririis.com

  

GEORGE CONDO – LIFE IS WORTH LIVING

Posted on 2017-10-23

In his new exhibition “Life is Worth Living”, a title taken from an old note he once sent to his long-time friend Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, George Condo will exhibit works that include paintings and sculpture he made while living in Paris in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s in conversation with his most recent works made in the past year. During this earlier period in his career Condo’s paintings experimented with combining a variety of media and painterly styles simultaneously, such as the use of oil and collage on canvas with very delicate linear forms as seen in Les Quatre Femmes (1989, oil and collage on canvas, 200 x 250 cm). Works such as The Headless Harlequin (1989, oil on canvas, 220 x 189.8 cm) and When the Elephant Says No… (1986, oil on canvas, 206 x 318.2 cm) exemplify Condo’s use of drawing and painting together in a structurally destructive method of working that the artist has employed throughout much of his career to the present day.

Opposite – Back Channel, 2016-2017

Exhibition runs through to November 18th, 2017

Almine Rech Gallery
64 Rue de Turenne
75003 Paris

www.alminerech.com

  

ADAM MCEWEN – ICE ICE BABY

Posted on 2017-10-16

McEwen exhibits a group of works made using his emblematic methods and materials – primarily cellulose sponge and graphite – newly combining them to achieve disconcerting effects. Stemming from the wreck and sinking of the Titanic in 1912, the show appropriates a group of historical photographs of the icebergs suspected at the time to have caused the disaster. These images, printed on a material that is both unexpected and deeply familiar (commonly found as kitchen sponge), claim both archival aspect and nostalgic imagery, creating a strange mix of historical gaze
and subjective feelings. McEwen’s practice often delves into collective and cultural history and most particularly into its moments of failure and tragedies: one thinks of his gum paintings referring to German cities bombed in World War II (Bomber Harris, 2006-2010), his obituaries of living subjects, or his recreation in graphite of a family coffin carrier. McEwen’s work operates at the intersections of popular culture and personal mythology – in the case of the Titanic, his great-grand father was among the passengers who did not survived the shipwreck. Avoiding morbid obsession, McEwen complicates our relation to death and disaster by injecting the funereal with humor and the uncanny. For whatever reasons, the wreck of the Titanic has ascended to the pantheon of disaster celebrity, a historical event that has become part of our popular imaginary, a trigger for both connection and detachment. McEwen exploits this paradoxical relationship by layering the historical imagery with three-dimensional objects that themselves possess a parallel notoriety: a toilet plunger, a drum cymbal or a hula hoop, each of which is, confusingly, just as well-known as the Titanic. The effect of this composite is to trigger a psychological unease, or to write a narrative which is uncontrolled and defined by the viewer, not unlike montage.

Opposite – Hole in the Head, 2017

Exhibition runs through to November 18th, 2017

Art : Concept
4, passage Sainte-Avoye
Access: gate at 8, rue Rambuteau
75003 Paris
France

www.annetgelink.com