TAKESADA MATSUTANI

Posted on 2017-07-10

From the early 1960s to the early 1970s, Matsutani was a key member of the ‘second generation’ of the Gutai Art Association (1954 – 1972), Japan’s innovative and influential art collective of the post-war era. One of the most important Japanese artists still working today, Matsutani continues to demonstrate the spirit of Gutai throughout his practice, conveying the reciprocity between pure gesture and raw material.

‘In Gutai Art, the human spirit and matter shake hands with each other while keeping their distance. Matter never compromises itself with the spirit; the spirit never dominates matter,’ stated Jiro Yoshihara, founder of the Gutai Art Association, in his ‘Gutai Art Manifesto’ (1956).

Exemplary of his commitment to the Gutai ethos is Matsutani’s lifelong artistic exploration with polyvinyl acetate adhesive, otherwise known as Elmer’s glue. Harnessing the rapid economic and technological growth of post-WWII Japan, a young Matsutani chose to explore the expressive opportunities of vinyl glue, a material that first entered mass production in the early 1960s. In his earliest experiments, Matsutani impregnated the canvas surface with bulbous elements, using his own breath to create swollen and ruptured forms evocative of flesh and wounds.

Opposite – Work-C, 1971

Exhibition runs through to September 17th, 2017

Hauser & Wirth
901 East 3rd Street
90013 Los Angeles

www.hauserwirthlosangeles.com

  

ZANDER BLOM – NEW WORKS

Posted on 2017-07-10

Blom’s sustained explorations into the developments of abstraction in twentieth century Modernist art movements have, until now, resulted in a diverse range of strictly nonfigurative experiments in painting, most recently taking the form of geometric and minimalist abstraction. This exhibition of new work marks an important point of departure for Blom as the figurative elements from his drawing practices have entered the realm of his paintings for the first time, symbolizing a critical disengagement with pure abstraction.
At the center of this exhibition is a large format installation of pages torn from old Mondrian catalogues and defaced with Blom’s drawings of dinosaurs, aliens and other childishly rebellious icons. Writing in Blom’s second catalogué raisonne, Nicola Trezzi considers how these drawings allow one to really understand the complex and contradictory nature of his art: ‘If Blom’s paintings can be considered his ‘representation’, affirming his position, as a painter, as an artist, to the world, his drawings are his ‘will’, the thing behind the veil, the magmatic truth, the lava beneath our terrestrial crust.’
These iconoclastic scribbles, which animate Blom’s Piet Mondrian drawings, have now moved across to his paintings, to deface his ordered geometric abstractions, and to question his own approach to painting. For Trezzi, this is a taste of Blom’s ‘bestial modernity’, a desire ‘to make works that take modernity to its ultimate state, which is, despite its premises, wild, animalistic, primal and instinctive’. These paintings of ‘bestial modernity’ are shown alongside his characteristic abstractions of oil on raw Belgian linen, with his signature technique of making painting that look digitally rendered.

Exhibition runs through to September 2nd, 2017

Galerie Hans Mayer
Grabbeplatz 2
40213 Düsseldorf
Germany

www.galeriehansmayer.de

  

SELECTED

Posted on 2017-07-03

For Selected, each member of staff was invited to delve into the Sean Kelly archives and choose two works that touched, surprised, inspired, intrigued, or perhaps even unsettled them from the history of the gallery’s exhibitions or the gallery’s collection. Their fascinating choices range from pieces they had previously worked with during a past exhibition, to things they knew were in the collection but had never seen installed, to works they had no idea were even part of the gallery’s history, but discovered through this process. A personal statement addressing what it is about the work that they find meaningful will accompany each piece. The resulting exhibition—like the people who work at the gallery—is eclectic and surprising. And whilst their choices reflect their individual tastes, the forty-plus works presented come together to form a cumulative portrait of the gallery; mirroring both the extraordinary and diverse program that Sean Kelly is known for and the multitude of backgrounds and voices of the people that work here.

Selected includes a diverse array of work in various media––sculpture, painting, photography, video and performance––from the following artists: Marina Abramović, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Los Carpinteros, James Casebere, Julian Charrière, Jose Dávila, Edgar Degas, Marcel Duchamp, Awol Erizku, Iran do Espírito Santo, Douglas Gordon, Antony Gormley, Laurent Grasso, David Hammons, Rebecca Horn, Tehching Hsieh, Marine Hugonnier, Callum Innes, James Joyce, Idris Khan, Yves Klein, Joseph Kosuth, Peter Liversidge, Édouard Manet, Anthony McCall, Mariko Mori, Yasumasa Morimura, Sam Moyer, Zanele Muholi, Shirin Neshat, Rocío Olivares, Simon Patterson, Julião Sarmento, Shahzia Sikander, Alec Soth, Frank Thiel, James White, and Sun Xun.

Opposite – Shahzia Sikander, Singing suns, 2016

Exhibition runs through to July 28th, 2017

Sean Kelly
475 Tenth Avenue
NY 10018 New York
USA

www.skny.com

  

RUBEN MONTINI – WHERE I STAY WITH ME

Posted on 2017-07-03

I don’t want to call what I do “artistic practice” because it is truly connected to – is actually totally a part of – my life. My choice to have a home-studio, too, illustrates this continuity and continuous overlapping. The space where I live is also the space where I think and produce my work. Embroidery is the activity that, at the moment, occupies my days the most. It has historically been considered a hobby or a pastime for women when they relaxed after a day’s work outside the home, once they finished housework or while watching TV. However, it is increasingly becoming an actual job, like a cathartic instrument or an artistic methodology, independently of the gender of the person performing it. I, for example, count it among my daily activities ever since I started practicing it for my performance “E’ tutto qui. Dove sto con me” (2013). This “activity” became part of my everyday routine some years ago, first with an intent to quote Maria Lai and immediately afterwards, as a long performance where I tried to adopt that cliché connected to the domestic figure of the woman as my own. I brought what for many was considered a hobby to extremes, to such exasperated extremes that it fully became part of my days. Initially, I embroidered directly on Sardinian tapestry projects: instead of using them as outlines, I embroidered directly on the paper sketches that, for others, indicate the road to follow. For me they became – and sometimes still do – the road itself.

Ruben Montini

Exhibition runs through to July 29th, 2017

Prometeogallery di Ida Pisani
Via Giovanni Ventura, 6
20134 Milan
Italy

www.prometeogallery.com

  

LOUISE FISHMAN

Posted on 2017-07-03

Fishman’s art has always been difficult to pin down. Writing in Bomb magazine, the artist Archie Rand has persuasively argued that Fishman belongs “in the last open slot of the first generation of Ab Ex,” while at the same time comparing her to such dissimilar painters as John Sloan, Frederick Remington, Bram van Velde, Pierre Bonnard, and Georges Braque. Other writers have aligned her work at one time or another with the Pattern and Decoration movement of the mid-1970s and even Neo-Expressionism. She has made gestural as well as hard-edge abstractions, word paintings (her Angry Women series of 1973), and representational self-portraits, sometimes using such unconventional supports as rug samples, sandpaper, and canvases folded like accordion books.

The varied nature of her work can be explained by a simple statement from the artist herself, who said, “My intention, always, was to not repeat a painting, was to not repeat aspects of paintings. My intention in painting is to keep discovering and to keep changing.” She also occupies the paradoxical position of reconciling her formalist concerns with a strong commitment to her Jewish, feminist, lesbian identity.

Fishman’s new paintings, made in 2016 and 2017, push to extremes the artist’s spontaneous improvisations upon an implied grid, in works that range widely in scale, from 4 by 6 inches to 96 inches in width. The paint can be troweled, squeezed from the tube, diluted into a wash, or pressed on with a sheet of paper and pulled off. The mediums include oil, watercolor, egg tempera, colored pencil, ink, and graphite.

Opposite – Shahzia Sikander, Singing suns, 2016

Exhibition runs from September 7th through October 28th, 2017

Cheim & Read
547 West 25th Street
10001 New York

www.cheimread.com

  

SUE DUNKLEY: WORK FROM THE 1960S & 1970S

Posted on 2017-06-26

This exhibition follows the 2016 solo show curated by Sue Dunkley’s daughter, playwright Jane Bodie, and her brother Jim Dunkley, in the artist’s Islington home and studio where she had lived and worked for over 50 years. Sue Dunkley now sadly suffers from dementia and has recently moved to a local care home. The current exhibition at Alison Jacques Gallery focuses on a series of large-scale paintings from the 70s and works on paper from the 60s through to 1980. This will be the artist’s first major gallery show in over a decade.

Sue Dunkley was close to many key figures of the 60s, 70s and 80s in London. In 1968 she interviewed Barbara Hepworth and was friends with British artist Phyllida Barlow and Irish poet and playwright Seamus Heaney. Dunkley was the subject for a painting by Howard Hodgkin and she collaborated on the 1991 film The Railway Station Man starring Julie Christie and John Lynch. Collectors of her work include Harold Pinter, Salman Rushdie and Donald Sutherland.

Opposite – Sue Dunkley, Untitled (Marilyn, Yves & Simone), c. 1975

Exhibition runs through to July 29th, 2017

Alison Jacques Gallery
16-18 Berners Street
W1T 3LN
London

www.alisonjacquesgallery.com