GABRIEL OROZCO

Posted on 2017-10-02

For the last year or so Gabriel Orozco has mainly divided his time between Bali, Tokyo and Mexico but he has also pursued projects elsewhere. He makes his work out of where he lives, using local materials and often drawing on traditional artisanal practices but of course art can – and often has – been made in one place but out of another, that is, in imaginary as well as actual dialogues with its own origins. In one sense Orozco continues to animate precisely this entanglement of circumstance and movement. His methods are much more informal – inclining always to the partial and incomplete – than that of an atlas that aims systematically to document a whole world of images. It’s maybe more like a travel notebook of a life (his own), but one that records the circumstantial conditions of life along with the everyday living of it as he moves between different locations. The relationship of his work to place remains porous, exposing a distinctive formal procedure to multiple global image-circuits and economies, pictorial and otherwise.

Opposite – First lady with a black dot, 2017

Exhibition runs through to October 7th, 2017

Galerie Chantal Crousel
10, rue Charlot
75003 Paris
France

www.crousel.com

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CHRISTIAN MARCLAY – PHONES

Posted on 2017-10-02

On view are two sculptures and a video created by the artist in the 1990s, as well as a selection of photographs and works on paper, exploring the recurrence of telephonic technologies as visual and acoustic material in Marclay’s work. The exhibition will be on view through October 7th. There will be an opening reception on September 7th from 6 to 8pm.

For more than three decades, Christian Marclay has explored the connections between the visual and the audible, creating works in which these two distinct sensorial experiences enrich and challenge each other. Working across a diverse range of media including sculpture, video, photography, collage, and performance, Marclay deconstructs the ubiquity of sound to extrapolate its perceptual limits and examine the increasing prevalence of sonic mediation through technology such as digital recording, mass reproduction, and telecommunication. His installations often employ appropriated objects that merge or reconfigure auditory and visual elements to challenge our ontological understanding of them.

Exhibition runs through to October 7th, 2018

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

www.paulacoopergallery.com

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LUNGISWA GQUNTA – POOLSIDE CONVERSATIONS

Posted on 2017-09-25

In Poolside Conversations Gqunta invites us to reconsider the suburban garden as a space reserved for leisure activities as experienced by the privileged – a private space reserved for the landowner. Through her practice she seeks to disturb these spaces of privilege and highlight the structures of colonialism that are still in place today.

Central to the installation is the notion of the swimming pool – a common design element found in the suburban gardens of South Africa and a visceral symbol of privilege. In a country where basic resources such as water are increasingly rare it
epitomises the luxuries afforded to the few and in effect becomes a racialized signifier of wealth.

Collectively the works in the installation narrates a resistance against the structures of colonialism that remain in place today and the inequality that surrounds us. These privileges are directly linked to issues of racial segregation and other long term effects of colonialism that continue to subtly spread and imprison a large number of South Africans whether its physically or psychologically.

Opposite – Lawn 1 , 2016 (Detail)

Exhibition runs from October 5th through to December 17th, 2018

KELDER
Basement of Mercer & Co.
26A Chapel Market
London
N1 9EN

kelderprojects.com

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ALEX DORDOY – THE MOSS IS DREAMING

Posted on 2017-09-25

While Dordoy’s sculptures, paintings, and silicon ‘skins’ are preoccupied with their own materiality – their unique and bounded ‘thingliness’ – they are also deeply porous. Poised between representation and abstraction, the organic and the digital, his work appears to have been pollinated, or perhaps infected, by stray data. The broken Moebius strips of his sculptures employ wet jesmonite to absorb gestural passages of paint, the impress of corrugated card, and printed imagery including kimono patterns, alchemical symbols, and the artist’s own digital photographs of forest landscapes. Is this density of visual incident at odds with these sculptures’ modest – indeed domestic – scale, or is it only natural in an era in which that most commonplace of objects, the smartphone, seems to suck a whole universe of information out of thin air?

Hanging from the gallery walls, and existing at an ambiguous point between painting and sculpture, Dordoy’s ‘skins’ are made by using liquid silicon to cast the interiors of old photocopiers. Once dried, this fleshy material picks up not only the machinery’s inverted form, but also the streaks of ink and dirt that have built up in its hidden ridges and gullies – traces of its history of use. For all the ghostly charge of these works, they also reflect on photocopier technology’s enduring place in daily life, despite its long-predicted obsolescence. Notably, the artist has described the lumbering Xerox machines that linger in our offices, libraries and copy shops as ‘human’ presences. Perhaps what we value in the photocopier – and the paper document – is not convenience, but the way it affirms our own physicality in an age of weightless, endlessly reproducible code.

Opposite – The field lies prone, 2017

Exhibition runs from October 4th through to November 11th, 2018

Blain|Southern
4 Hanover Square
London
W1S 1BP

www.blainsouthern.com

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JAKE & DINOS CHAPMAN – THE DISASTERS OF EVERYDAY LIFE

Posted on 2017-09-25

Jake & Dinos Chapman expand on their career-long preoccupation with Francisco Goya’s series of etchings, The Disasters of War. The Disasters of Everyday Life presents, for the first time, their latest body of sculptural work in a dialogue with three full sets of Goya’s prints, each set substantially reworked in a different way by the Chapman brothers.

The Chapmans’ oeuvre represents a prolonged philosophical investigation into the turmoil and violence of contemporary existence, placing them in a tradition of protest and pessimism in the visual arts alongside artists such as Goya, Bruegel and Otto Dix (both Bruegel and Dix painted works titled The Triumph of Death). Dix’s paintings revealed the grotesque face of capitalism inherent in both world wars. His series of prints The War sits alongside Goya’s in its extensive, graphic depictions of the battlefield. What then are the battlefields of the twenty-first century as depicted by Jake and Dinos Chapman?

Opposite – The Disasters of Everyday Life, 2017

Exhibition runs from October 4th through to November 11th, 2018

Blain|Southern
4 Hanover Square
London
W1S 1BP

www.blainsouthern.com

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TAL R – SEXSHOPS

Posted on 2017-09-18

With their areas of flat, unmodulated colour and deceptively simple compositions, Tal R’s paintings have long questioned our conception of and presumptions about our surrounding reality – what we see and where its meaning and beauty lies. In these new works he brings a quizzical eye to the largely unconscious actions of seduction, desire and gratification. Approaching his subject matter non-judgementally, Tal R sees the sex shop façade as being metaphorically allied to the function of desire within a painting. For the artist, that which is on display is only successful in as much as it activates the imagination, hinting at something tantalisingly out of reach; in the ‘back room’ as the artist says – unseen and unknown. Keeping us on the outside is a deliberate creative strategy. Working from photographs, some sent by friends and acquaintances from around the world, Tal R is on the outside too: shut out by closed doors and frosted windows, which he paints with varying degrees of abstraction in dazzlingly seductive hues.

Opposite – Dirty Dick, 2017

Exhibition runs through to December 20th, 2017

Victoria Miro Gallery
16 Wharf Road
N1 7RW
London

www.victoria-miro.com

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