KAI RICHTER – SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN

Posted on 2017-02-20

The materials – wood, metal and concrete – Richter uses for his sculptures and assemblages refer to the process of building. Some titles like Das schwarze Dreieck (2017) or Barnett (2017) correlate with well-known names in art history. Richter encounters the specific qualities of the varied materials and artistic positions with curiosity. He questions and explores their potential in order to utilize and to develop it. In his understanding artistic practice means observation and experimentation.
While Richter has to respect gravity and statics with his wall works and sculptures, the collages open up a more fantastic sphere. The impossible gets designed and built in these two-dimensional collages. But works like Sonde (2017) or Prop (2017) show that there is only a fine line between fragility and stability, between imbalance and balance, in other words between conceived and constructed works. Hence Sonde stalks on thin scaffolding poles through the entrance area of the gallery while Prop seems to lean weightlessly against the wall.
In the adjacent room of the gallery, the work Das schwarze Dreieck made of brittle and awkward construction materials demonstrates how Richter uses simplicity and clarity of form to elicit sensual aspects of the material. Even though there is accordance and harmony there is also a certain unrest, questions are starting to take shape: What, for example, differentiates a sculpture from a so-called objet d’art. What takes precedence – the material, with which the sculptor occupies a space, or the space itself, which the artist makes visible and perceptible with his art? The answer lies somewhere in between.

Exhibition runs through to April 1st, 2017

Galerie Christian Lethert
Antwerpener Straße 4
50672 Cologne
Germany

www.christianlethert.com

  

PATTE LOPER – SPARKLY DARKLY

Posted on 2017-02-20

Formally trained as a painter, Loper is a conceptual artist working between several mediums to mine the histories of 20th century art. In Sparkly Darkly Loper uses iconic imagery from early surrealism and cubism as raw material that she fragments, disrupts, and dissolves into associative forms and shapes. The aesthetic and cultural codes of her sources, which were revolutionary in their own right the tendency to dismantle and reformulate the figure as a reflection of social and cultural disruption are evident and demonstrate the wide-ranging experimentation in the mediums she employs. The resulting multifaceted spatial collage composed of paintings, performance, video and new sculptural work constructed from recycled material as well as from repurposed sculptural objects from previous exhibitions evokes a response by the viewer, whose recognition of the destruction triggers an internal expectation of reconstruction.

Opposite – Still Life with Percival, 2016

Exhibition runs through to April 9th, 2017

Black & White Gallery / Project Space
56 Bogart Street
Brooklyn
New York
NY 11206

www.blackandwhiteartgallery.com

  

JASMINA CIBIC – FIRM FOUNDATIONS

Posted on 2017-02-20

Cibic’s work seeks to establish dialogues between politically latent objects from diverse historical or linguistic and media spaces. Hers is a practice that addresses the ways in which visual language, art, architecture, and rhetoric are deployed and instrumentalised by political regimes, before investigating what happens to these fragments when the ideologies they endorse collapse.

Gathering together these symbols and iconographies, Cibic’s projects present a synthesis of gesture, stagecraft and re-enactment. Instantiated in films and installations, hers is also an ongoing performative practice, an ‘enacted’ exercise in the dissection of statecraft. Cibic plays a double-game, at once decoding mechanisms of power whilst building her own exemplary allegorical structures. Tracing lines through history, she undertakes detailed research of official state archives and hidden repositories of authority. The conventions, apologues and narratives she turns her forensic gaze upon are drawn from various players involved in the contrivances of power, working in concert to forge common visions of the nation.

Extending from the gallery window to cover almost half of the space’s walls is Cibic’s The Land In Which a Wide Space For National Progress Is Ensured, a performative installation that alludes to the soft power strategies of art and architecture utilized by (trans)national political structures. A wallpaper composed of numerous photographic elements seamlessly stitched together depicts a fictitious monochrome landscape strewn with banners. This picturesque utopia is an amalgam of images taken by Josip Broz Tito’s personal photographers in an attempt to frame the emerging postwar Yugoslavia – artists in the service of the state whose images are necessarily implicated in a political aim despite their circumstantial nature.

Opposite – Firm Foundations, 2017

Exhibition runs through to April 8th, 2017

ZAK | BRANICKA
Lindenstr. 35
D – 10969
Berlin
Germany

www.zak-branicka.com

  

HANNAH WHITAKER – LIVE AGENT

Posted on 2017-02-13

Each photograph was shot on a single sheet of 4×5 film, through layered exposures and in-camera masking. Whitaker’s process begins with a sketch, which she uses to hand-cut a set of paper screens to be inserted into the camera during exposure. The sketches used in Live Agent incorporate wavy scribbling, marking a new turn towards the gestural. These forms are then painstakingly and repeatedly redrawn to make the screens, draining them of any purported spontaneity and burying them under a laborious process. Requiring thorough planning, the completed photographic image may involve up to 30 screens (or 30 exposures) and several weeks of shooting. The resulting image is determined less by any one subject than by its own complex construction.

With a longstanding interest in forms of automation, Whitaker’s process draws from the punch cards used at various points in the history of computing. Similarly employing holes in paper, her screen sets can be thought of like computer programs-they can be run repeatedly, inputting different information to get a different output. As a result, the show features multiple photographs shot with the same screens, compelling different content to adhere to the same visual schematic.

Opposite – Point and Flex (triptych), 2017

Exhibition runs through to March 11th, 2017

M+B
612 North Almont Drive
Los Angeles
California 90069

www.mbart.com

  

TIM NOBLE AND SUE WEBSTER – STICKS WITH DICKS AND SLITS

Posted on 2017-02-13

Based on handmade maquettes made with electrical wire, the sculptures are an act of upscaling playful ephemera into physically domineering artworks with a permanency and scale that transcends human limitations.

The artists are well known for reacting to circumstance. They find inspiration by walking city streets and making sculpture from materials closest to hand in an urban environment. In the past this has included inner city detritus, discarded personal objects and animal carcasses. However, the initial maquettes for this new body of work were created during a residency on the Caribbean island of St Bart’s. This idyllic environment was initially challenging for these urbanites who found themselves stripped of their usual impetus. Struggling with this creative impasse, they began doodling with electrical wire, quickly and intuitively producing two intimate self-portraits.

Part of a great tradition of artists-as-art, their personal image and the dynamic between them is an integral part of their work. As with previous self-portraits, these new paired sculptures express the artistic personae of the duo. One pair features nudes of Tim urinating and Sue lactating — engaging in basic bodily functions is a recurring motif for the artists. As much as they have used refuse in their sculptures, the artists employ their own naked forms as a way to make art with a rawness and truth, using their warts-and-all inseparable dual image as a tool to critique narcissistic obsession.

Opposite – A Lovely Pair (Standing), 2017

Exhibition runs through to March 25th, 2017

Blain|Southern
4 Hanover Square
London
W1S 1BP

www.blainsouthern.com

  

ADRIAN PACI / GIULIANA RACCO – ANOTHER PLACE

Posted on 2017-02-13

Uniting the two artist’s practices are personal histories of resettlement, as well as a mutual concern for ideas surrounding mobility, borders and ambiguous identities. The title Another Place is taken from a film by Racco, whose own research focuses on migration and other forms of individual and collective movement across territories. Throughout this exhibition are reflections on displacement as both a physical and emotional state of being, where history is not fixed and lines can be drawn across geography and memory.

Another Place begins with a series of watercolour drawings by Adrian Paci, which originate from a variety of moving-image sources such as Youtube clips and publically accessible videos. Some works depict unknown groups of bathers and swimmers, as well as stills from films by artist Derek Jarman. The soft-focus, ambivalent qualities of these drawings suggest that these images are not objective records of daily life: in fact, the seemingly uncanny bathers are derived from footage of immigrants arriving onto the Italian coast and waiting for days near the sea before being sent away. Other watercolours originate from clips of recorded training sessions from the Albanian army, where exercising soldiers with opened arms simultaneously call to mind acts of surrender or by contrast joyous celebration. By extracting and pausing what was meant to be a clear image of victory and strength, the drawings become records of more ambiguous and mysterious moments, and thus take on new meanings and identities.

Opposite – The Procession, 2016

Exhibition runs through to April 13th, 2017

Frith Street Gallery
17-18 Golden Square
London
W1F 9JJ

www.frithstreetgallery.com