YAYOI KUSAMA

Posted on 2016-05-30

Yayoi Kusama’s lifelong exploration of the self’s relationship to the infinite cosmos has given rise to a highly influential career in which she has continuously innovated and re-invented her style. For the exhibition at the Wharf Road galleries, she has created three mirror rooms: Pumpkin’s Infinity Mirrored Room, Chandelier of Grief and Where the Lights in My Heart Go, all of which place the viewer within a universe of varying proliferating reflections.
New paintings displayed alongside these immersive rooms continue an enduring preoccupation with multiplying polka dots and dense scalloped ‘infinity net’ patterns – Kusama’s obsessive repetition of these forms on canvas, which she has described as a form of active self-obliteration, responds to hallucinations first experienced in childhood. The pumpkin, another motif that she has returned to throughout her career, is also present in the form of new polished mirror sculptures.

Opposite – All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins, 2016

Exhibition runs through till July 30th, 2016

Victoria Miro Gallery
16 Wharf Road
N1 7RW
London

www.victoria-miro.com

  

BROOK ANDREW – THE FOREST

Posted on 2016-05-30

For The Forest, Brook Andrew will present a selection of exclusive artworks from original archival sources of the his own collection – the SUNSET series for example- and from reproductions of the Museum of Archeology and Anthropology of Cambridge as well as the Musée du Quai Branly, where he has been awarded a residency as a Photography Residencies Laureate. The source images are then reproduced, worked on, painted over, resized, screenprinted and complemented with neon lights, collages, and other various objects.

The artist firmly believes he is an artist of the world, not defined by one place. Though his mixed cultural ancestry such as Scottish, Irish, Jewish and Australian Aboriginal, informs his practice. His interest in a post-colonial context, the many lineages that forged his identity and shaped his arts practice, is indeed a strong platform to compare the histories of the Asia Pacific with those of the rest of the world relying on ideas of comparisons to other international concerns raised by artists such as Christian Boltanski and Jenny Holzer. The Wiradjuri pattern –recurring in Brook Andrew’s work- comes from the Aboriginal woodcarvings (dendroglyphs) of New South Wales, home state of the artist’s mother, and has inspired the artist’s black and white hypnotic pattern. On another hand, the Sapelli wood he uses for his frames evokes the sudden scarcity of this African resource after it fed the business of modern furniture in fashion back in the 1950’s.

Opposite – Sunset VI, 2016

Exhibition runs through till July 23rd, 2016

Galerie Nathalie Obadia
3 rue du Cloître Saint-Merri
75004 Paris
France

www.nathalieobadia.com

  

CHRISTOPH PÖGGELER – PARADISE

Posted on 2016-05-30

Christoph Pöggeler’s latest paintings from his Düsseldorf studio in this solo exhibition titled Paradies, the German word for paradise, derived from the ancient Eastern Iranian word pairi-daeza, a place of eternal harmony. The show pivots around a composition with the same title, a 122x216cm piece of wood on which a broad strip of blue sky is painted above a partially interrupted section of fence. The artist‘s preference for painting on wood was evident in last September’s group exhibition at Positions in Berlin, when his works such as Schwarze Löcher (2014) and Alte Zypressen (2014) demonstrated Pöggeler’s preference for working on material that has had a life of its own. Remarkable is the fact that sky and fence are meticulously portrayed in a Dürer-like old master’s style, whereas the rest of the tableau is left unpainted, leaving the natural grain of the wood to speak for itself.

There are objective contrasts, abstract contradictions and still harmonies in Pöggeler’s style. Diptychon (2016) shows two nudes on separate pieces of wood. A more reserved young male is painted onto the surface of a vertical plank whereas a bolder young female seems to spring out of a splendidly marked circular piece of wood. The background surface of natural wood with its innate design is embellished only in part by the artist’s soft yet precise painterly strokes. Comparing this new piece with Pöggeler’s Schwarze Löcher, of well-clad businessmen depicted on a rough, used table top, one is again reminded of Neue Sachlichkeit or New Objecivity, the short intense period of realistic painting during Germany’s Weimar Republic that arose in reaction to expressionism.

Opposite – Paradise, 2016

Exhibition runs through till July 2nd, 2016

MAERZ CONTEMPORARY
Potsdamer Strasse 67
D – 10785
Berlin
Germany

www.maerzcontemporary.com

  

CHRISTIANE BAUMGARTNER – LICHT-BILDER

Posted on 2016-05-23

Baumgartner’s woodcuts are based on images – photographs, videos, documentations – found or produced by herself and then transferred in traditional prints using ancient woodcutting techniques. She masterfully engraves the wood using horizontal lines, the structure thus indicating the former image and having to be completed by the viewer due to the grade of abstraction. Baumgartner skilfully uses this abstraction and coarsening of perception to deal intensively with the concepts of time, space and motion, and the problem of depicting them.

The nearly two by three-meter-work Storm at Sea (2013) depicts an enormous wave. Baumgartner used a film still she made by filming a documentary on TV as starting point. The change of medium leads to a particular default, the so called Moiré which occurs when a secondary pattern is superimposed on the primary one that then creates an optical illusion of sorts. To see the work as a whole as well as the complexity of the details the accommodation of one’s eyes is constantly necessary.
Baumgartner also used film as a source for her less abstract series Kleines Seestück I-IV (2011). Through the use of a self generated line grid, the woodcuts seem to flicker when looked at and the scene that has been brought to a standstill appears to be moving once again.

Opposite – Storm at Sea, 2013

Exhibition runs through till July 23rd, 2016

Galerie Christian Lethert
Antwerpener Straße 4
Cologne
D-50672
Germany

www.christianlethert.com

  

PHYLLIS BRAMSON – UNDER THE PLEASURE DOME

Posted on 2016-05-23

Phyllis Bramson is an enigmatic and influential artist and professor in the Chicago art world. Her lush colors, coy figuration and wholehearted embrace of the decorative in the service of masterfully composed assemblages and paintings, that draw the viewer ever further in to many layered stories are continuous threads in her decades long practice of artmaking and teaching. Bramson’s use of kitsch objects, erotic overtones and Orientalist references creates lightly veiled, deeply complex works. The Chicago Cultural Center’s exhibition “Under the Pleasure Dome” is a wide selection of paintings and assemblages drawn from the artist’s collection and illustrative of her work over many years including examples of her most recent “scroll” series.

“Flirting with the psychosexual subconscious of Americana objects, winking at conventions of ‘good taste,’ and pinching at the backside of our public facades of normalcy: Bramson’s aesthetic is that of the bawdy banal. It is sentimental, and it is smart. Through iconography and innuendo Bramson searches for, and somehow depicts, complex worlds of desire, emotion, and curiosity that cultural fantasy, industry, and kitsch-commodity (or, in other words: post-modernity) have conspired to make possible”.

Danny Orendorff, independent curator and art critic

Opposite – Pastoral Pleasures, 2006

Exhibition runs through till August 28th, 2016

Chicago Cultural Center
78 East Washington Street
Chicago, IL60602

www.cityofchicago.org

  

HEINZ MACK – SPECTRUM

Posted on 2016-05-23

The current exhibition thus proposes reviving this essential reformer from the history of abstract art. With
enthusiastic support from the artist as well as major lenders and institutions, I have selected for this exhibition a substantial group of more than seventy works, including some very old ones that have never been shown in public. The presentation will exceptionally take place in all of the spaces of the Galerie Perrotin in Paris, and will link together works of various formats, natures, and periods in order to highlight the main lines, if not the “whole spectrum,” of a broad career.
From one period to another, Mack’s esthetic search has been a constant exploration—both systematic and sensual—of the
lumino-chromatic spectrum and its perceptive thresholds. This immaterial goal took on a philosophical dimension for
the artist, one that was paradoxically based on highly material means, and that used the raw simplicity of natural or
manufactured materials such as paint, metal, wood, stone, glass, plexiglass, or sand. The variability of the manual
production, both controlled and random, as well as this primitivist reduction, make Mack the source of an exceptional phenomenological unfolding. The viewer is prompted to feel the tangible experience of vision, and to consider time and
space as entirely separate mediums.

Opposite – Vibration im blau, 1959

Exhibition runs through till June 4th, 2016

Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin
76, rue de Turenne
75003 Paris

www.perrotin.com