LARS ELLING – LUCID DREAMING

Posted on 2016-04-04

Lars Elling’s work features a rich spectrum of narratives broken up into different sequences and which, together, form a transitory pictorial universe. The literary content in his work is articulated through filmic and photographic references that are played out against the non-figurative grammar of the paintings. Thus, a subtle play arises between figurative and abstract elements, an alternation between clearly rendered and more blurred, indistinct areas of the painting. The many lines into the literary landscape are woven together with auto-biographical material, with the nostalgic retrospective glance accentuated in the referencing of the artist’s own family photo album, forming an enigmatic, mysterious passage into a dream -like reservoir of memories. The impulsive acts played out in the paintings suggest a desire that has broken free from the control mechanisms of rationality, with the human figures moving instinctively from an existence ruled by convention and into a purposeless fulfilment of self.

His layers of imagery evoke memories of childhood, with the possible disturbance and trauma written between the lines. Family is the repetitive theme in Elling’s works; familiar moments infiltrated by surprising or unpleasant elements. The formalistic aspect of Lars Elling’s paintings is characterized by the erased and the broken. The pure visual expression has a meaningful function, where story and poetry are strong fundamentals. The paintings can be seen as a burst of memory, a description of a moment, where the almost experienced or almost seen is presented in a dream like and poetic expression, which can be compared to the poetic expressions in the works of Francis Bacon. Like Bacon, Elling also portrays a description of the logic of feelings, and illustrates a beginning, a middle section and an end, not necessarily in that order.

Opposite – “Initiation”, 2015

Exhibition runs through till April 23rd, 2016

Michael Janssen Berlin
Potsdamer Str. 63
D-10785 Berlin
Germany

www.galeriemichaeljanssen.de

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KAMBUI OLUJIMI – SOLASTALGIA

Posted on 2016-04-04

The term solastalgia was coined by Australian philosopher, Glenn Albrecht in 2003. Essentially it is the feeling of homesickness when one is still home. “Solastalgia is when your endemic sense of place is being violated,” Albrecht describes. Though the term originally references the psychological displacement of farmers due to climate change, Olujimi employs it as a lens to examine the psychoterratica of the five boroughs as a result of a different kind of environmental change.

Oscillating between the private and public, Olujimi grapples with the loss of his mentor and guardian angel, Catherine Arline, amidst the cacophony of actions and emotions that has marred the city’s law enforcement over the past year. Arline was a civil servant for the city and state of New York for over 40 years and continued to serve her community of Bedford-Stuyvesant after her retirement as the president and member of various councils and associations locally and throughout the city. Much of her later work attempted to bridge the divide between police and communities they serve. Over the past year and half the world watched as a string of unfathomable events unfolded in New York City; the non-indictment decision in the Eric Garner killing, the shooting of Officers Liu and Ramos and the public display of disdain by law enforcement for the Mayor during the funerals of two their own, and the unprecedented police work stoppage. In addition to these and other recent events, the works of Solastalgia grows out of interviews Olujimi has conducted with current and retired member the NYPD, community leaders, Arline herself, and his own struggle to convey what words cannot.

Opposite – Mercy Doesn’t Grow on Trees, 2016

Exhibition runs through till May 12th, 2016

CUE Art Foundation
137 W. 25th Street
New York
NY 10001

cueartfoundation.org

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ANTON HENNING

Posted on 2016-04-04

In his interiors or installations, Henning sets out a “metalinguistic” reflection on his artistic language that ironizes the presentation of works in a museum space, questioning his own vision of art, the boundaries between representation and reality, and the voyeuristic role of the artist-spectator. His creative work embraces painting, sculpture, photography, video, drawing, music and design in spaces conceived as complete artistic environments (Gesamtkunstwerk) that offer the visitor a pleasurable experience. But through his technical control we meet layers of meaning and indirect reference to other artists such as Courbet, Picasso, Duchamp, Arp or Henry Moore. He dismantles the history of art up to the present day in order to reconstruct it completely in a new form of artistic synthesis, easily and naturally combining styles traditionally considered antagonistic.

If Matisse’s masterpieces show ambiguity about representation and decoration, Anton Henning takes this contrast between the figurative and the abstract to the limit by adopting an ironic distance with respect to his own work that allows him to paraphrase characteristic motifs and elements of other painters—such as Matisse’s decoration or Picabia’s nudes—with virtuosity and a sense of humour. The categories in which he classifies his works—portraits, interiors, still lifes, landscapes—are witty misdirections; he plays with traditional genres, giving a reading and treatment of form that not onlyshows awareness of postmodernism but goes far beyond it, contemplating the past ironically and knowingly.

Opposite – Portrait No. 444, 2015

Exhibition runs through till April 21st, 2016

Galeria Javier Lopez & Fer Francés
Guecho, 12 B
28023 Madrid
Spain

www.javierlopezferfrances.com

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CHEN FEI – THE DAY IS YET LONG

Posted on 2016-03-28

What Chen Fei’s paintings are concerned with is certainly not any kind of grand theme. His expertise is the choreography of the scene. Those scenes of daily life could not be any more common but, because of tedious detail and character arrangement, often bring out a compact tension and an unexpected sense of drama. Chen Fei has an almost paranoid discipline towards detail: wallpapers covered with blossoming flowers, lush and expansive forests, thick, flowing hair… Chen Fei mechanically traces every line and every nuance without care for how much paint, effort, or time required. Because of this, he injects a strong sense of realism and the feeling of a film still into his work. Viewers standing in front of the canvas often back away out of discomfort. However, in spite of this, they are often still “kidnapped” into speculating on the canvas’ psychological narrative and characters.

Chen Fei’s works have been mostly autobiographical. Railing against politics while at the same time lampooning morality, Chen Fei also likes to mock himself. In the series of works of all the same size (180 x 240 cm) that we are exhibiting this time, he often imbeds himself in the paintings as characters: as a bare-chested shop owner leaning on the counter in a slightly offensive manner (Hornet, 2013), as a completely naked man covered in tattoos (I am the Jungle, 2015), surprisingly, as a worker displaying frustration at his just-completed sexual performance on the production line of a state of the art automated car plant (Lychee, 2015), or as ‘police officer’ standing intently along a lake with a leg up on the railing next to a scantily-clad female pan-handler (the last piece of this series, The Day is Yet Long, 2015)… Chen Fei mocks himself without mercy. A backdrop of obvious nudity and images of genitals signify lust, ugliness, etc. as a kind of abstract experience.

Opposite – Romance of the Mute, 2014

Exhibition runs through till April 30th, 2016

Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne
No. 104, Caochangdi Cun, Cui Gezhuang Xiang,
Chaoyang District, PRC-100015
Beijing
China

galerieursmeile.com

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JEAN CHARLES – BLAIS SIMULTANEOUS

Posted on 2016-03-28

The comparison of works from different periods, which simultaneously work on different levels, is a common practice in the work of Jean Charles Blais. His work is informed by the diverse application of the medium, by using the couture as drawing or painting. With the help of digital media, billboards and other graphics emerge.

An earlier exhibition by Jean Charles Blais, which was shown in 1998 in the Bawag Foundation, already brought together two levels of his oeuvre. The series of works “sur mesure” (“Tailor-Made”) is half object and half sculpture. It creates a hypothetical wardrobe, which has been reduced to fragments and arranged on large black surfaces with paint and chalk. For his current exhibition in Vienna, Blais has expanded his body of work through the presentation of large format paintings, new cut and rearranged posters as well as gouache paintings. These new works fit into his figurative repertoire, whose fascination lies in the various layers of paper. It seems that the memory of forgotten forms, which were present in early works from the 80s, have been rediscovered. The polysemy arises through incessant metamorphoses, which play with the staging of the body and ambiguity. Forms are created, which arise from the concurrence of depth and surface – modern, unique, consistent and elusive.

And so the theme of this exhibition is the connection of these individual forms and their interaction. One looks for the empty forms, which emerge as memories of an absent body only to immediately disappear again.

Opposite – 10 5 15, 2015

Exhibition runs through till May 14th, 2016

Mario Mauroner Contemporary Art Vienna
Weihburggasse 26
A – 1010 Wien
Austria

www.galerie-mam.com

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ANDY WARHOL – SHADOWS

Posted on 2016-03-28

Known for his appropriations of popular culture and advertising vernacular, Andy Warhol is synonymous with Pop Art. In the second half of the 1970s, however, Warhol became increasingly preoccupied with the darker side of mass culture. With precedents in works like his Electric Chair series, Warhol’s aesthetics of repetition shifted from a critical celebration of Madison Avenue marketing to moody studies of existential concepts like absence and mortality. His Still Life, Hammer and Sickle and Skulls series from the 1970s use shadows to accentuate contrast. As a result, the subjects of these series – and many of his self-portraits from the same period – are thrown ever deeper into abstraction. 


Exhibition runs through till April 23rd, 2016

Honor Fraser Gallery
2622 S La Cienega Blvd
Los Angeles
CA 90034

www.honorfraser.com

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