JIM SHAW

Posted on 2017-04-17

Jim Shaw is a Michigan born and Los Angeles based artist that has become one of the most influential American contemporary artists, renowned for his imaginative, inventive and especially diverse practice – that encompasses different media from painting to sculpture. Jim Shaw’s creations are characterized by the artists’ idiosyncratic approach – where obscure iconography meets craftsmanship – to the reality that surrounds him: each work synthesises the vernacular and the exceptional, mysticism and realism, creating a visual aesthetic that challenges America’s puritan and radical underbelly. The artist is like a shamanic puppet master that infuses American cartoons with the pathos of archaic myths and eerie semi-religious energy.

The black and white body of work presented in the exhibition is rooted in the artists’ interest in the erotic content of historic painting and the related aspects of superhero comics. In this new series of ink line drawings Jim Shaw applies the aesthetics of the early 1960’s DC superhero comics (focusing on the expressionist elements of the comics such as representations of explosions, speed and forces of nature) to the notion of heroic paintings with mythological and biblical subjects that vary from the battle between the Egyptian gods Horus and Seth to the parable of Jacob’s wrestling with God and being renamed Israel.

Opposite – Forces of Nature Chaos #2, 2017

Exhibition runs through to April 29th, 2017

Massimo De Carlo
Ventura: Via Giovanni Ventura 5
20134 Milan
Italy

www.massimodecarlo.com

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OLAF METZEL – PLATTENBAU

Posted on 2017-04-17

For Metzel, the “Platte” (‘pre-fab’; literally: slab) is not only an architectural construction practice and material culture of the former East Bloc, but also a promise of Western postwar Modernist architecture, and similarly it highlights the discrepancy between ideal and reality. If we think of the Grands ensembles in the French banlieues, the Vele di Scampia in Naples or the Gropiusstadt in Berlin, these monuments of utopian Modernism generally stand nowadays as social and architectural historical symbols of urban decay and sociopolitical breakdown. Dilapidation, shattered prospects, cultural decline, criminal networks and social inequalities frequently characterize daily life in these “machines for living”, in which urban life was supposed to manifest itself through density.

Although Lafayette Park in Detroit by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe makes use of the same objective formal vocabulary, it serves urban elites as a site of production and blatantly contradicts the egalitarian function and idea of social residential building.

But even when the accents shift, inherent in these critical architectural movements is a systemic overall dogma: to democratize the housing and therefore the lives of human beings. As architecture parlante, the sculptural buildings of the International Style and Brutalism formulate a visionary belief in a new social order and the participation of art in life.

Exhibition runs through to June 17th, 2017

Wentrup Gallery
Tempelhofer Ufer 22
10963 Berlin
Germany

www.wentrupgallery.com

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EDDIE MARTINEZ – COWBOY TOWN

Posted on 2017-04-10

Deeply indebted to the histories of painting, yet realised in an immediately contemporary manner, Martinez’s canvases – formed from oil paint, enamel, spray paint, screen printing and studio detritus – are loaded with coloured, quasi-abstract masses in varying densities juxtaposed against shifting lines. The resulting dynamic imagery moves and merges from figuration to abstraction and back again.

Cowboy Town sees Martinez depart from recent bodies of work, as paintings are once again primarily figurative. Although not reminiscent of his early figurative works, they are a next step from the more recent abstract canvases. Each painting in this new body of work not only steps back into figuration, but also into an almost subconscious narrative, playing out in an open way. Gestures are strong but also impulsive. The paintings are full of energy and movement – images linger just out of reach, eluding fixed identity. One of Martinez’s remarkable traits is his ability to intuit the general mood of the world around him and translate the sentiment very clearly to his painting.

Opposite – When We Were In Good Hands, 2016

Exhibition runs through to May 6th, 2017

Timothy Taylor
15 Carlos Place
W1K 2EX London
England

www.timothytaylor.com

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KAREN KILIMNIK – LÖWENBRÄU AREAL

Posted on 2017-04-10

Starting in the 1990s, Karen Kilimnik has created a large oeuvre of paintings in which she deals with motifs such as romantic mysteries, nature, Baroque, Rococo, fairy tales, and ballett. Artists such as 17th and 18th century painters Henry Raeburn, George Stubbs, Hubert Robert or François Boucher are frequent subjects to her reinterpretation.

Oscillating between magic worlds, unspoiled nature and the intuition that both could be merely a facade, Kilimnik’s motifs feel familiar. And this is for good reason: Her landscapes play with references to precursors. In “The Egerton House Hotel”, for example, she refers to Giorgione’s “Landscape with sunset”. Depicting Giorgione’s composition, Kilimnik removes the figures and instead inserts furniture from “The Egerton House Hotel” in London. In doing so, she changes the landscape from one to only look at into one that seems to invite the viewer to take a seat. “The Egerton House Hotel” is one of the artist’s favourite hotels. For her it represents an ideal, comfortable and luxurious shelter.

Kilimnik’s work has been shown in historic spaces such as palaces. Doing so, she plays with a space in which the viewer would rather expect historical paintings. But Kilimnik questions the temporality of what we see just as much within her paintings: The reference – Giorgione – is known, but belongs to the 16th century, while the painting itself is contemporary. Likewise, the depicted furniture is historic and at the same time located in a contemporary hotel.

Opposite – Scene In The Countryside 1600’s, 1999

Exhibition runs through to May 27th, 2017

Galerie Eva Presenhuber
Löwenbräu-Areal, Limmatstr. 270
CH-8005 Zürich
Switzerland

www.presenhuber.com

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SADIE BENNING – SHARED EYE

Posted on 2017-04-10

The US-American artist Sadie Benning (b. 1973) brings together a body of new work that is somewhere between sculpture, painting, and photography. Each piece is built up from colored resin, mounted digital snapshots, found photographs, objects, shelf-like protrusions, and painted elements that reflect on American politics, lived experience, and the poetry of the everyday.

Exhibition runs through to April 30th, 2017

Air de Paris
32, rue Louise Weiss
75013 Paris

www.kunsthallebasel.ch

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MARKUS SCHINWALD

Posted on 2017-04-03

Upon entering the exhibition space the viewer walks towards a long row of ten canvas sack sculptures – all hung in a single file along one wall of the gallery, each filled with arrangements of Chippendale-legs, some splayed, some demure. In his sculptural practice Schinwald has always been interested in the manipulation of pieces of furniture. He often uses Biedermeier table or chair legs, characteristic of a 19th-Century style. He saws them off and rearranges them in uncanny ways that bring out their anthropomorphic qualities. The half-hidden wooden parts stretch the fabric, which is reminiscent of the white cloth that is used to cover and protect furniture, thus creating weird and sexually allusive forms. The stretched fabric acts as both sling and cocoon, concealing joints and limbs that struggle as much as they acquiesce. Besides the row of sacks Schinwald also intervenes with the actual gallery space: The jigsaw-like assembly of large, interlocking metal panels that extend across the ceiling, are embossed with a pattern that creates the impression of a complex, suspended machine, a kind of exposed mechanical viscera. The metal mimics the bas relief gesture of Rococo stucco, curving and extending overhead, blanketing the entire space in a mildly aggressive red sheen and giving the whole show a slightly erotic touch.
In transforming the white gallery ceiling into a red tiled artwork Schinwald bestows a completely different atmosphere upon the room and makes a Gesamtkunstwerk of the space. At the entrance of the gallery, the ‘Jubelhemd” is displayed. One of Schinwald’s earliest works, is a fabric piece inspired by the tailored shirts worn by orchestral conductors. The altered arms force the wearer to keep their arms raised, a gesture that evokes both celebration and capitulation. Though the ‘Jubelhemd’ is celebrating its 20th anniversary, its ambivalent extremes seem particularly relevant in today’s political climate.

Opposite – Jubelhemd, 1997

Exhibition runs through to May 20th, 2017

Giò Marconi
via Tadino 20
I-20124 Milan
Italy

www.giomarconi.com

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