SEBASTIAN LLOYD REES

Posted on 2016-01-04

Literally speaking, there is much to admire in the London-based, Norwegian artist, Sebastian Lloyd Rees’s ‘hoarding sculptures’: they can be large. But the scale of their vision is weightless, pivoting in delicate balance with their conceptual and practical endeavours, which unexpectedly counter-weights their physical presence and powerful, visceral, visuality (they also hover, like magic, a delicate 11-13cm above the floor). Like barred gateways, similar in conception to Danto’s ‘thresholds’, as troubled, historical passage-points, they act as meeting places of past and future meaning: their determination reaching backwards and forwards simultaneously.
The primary psychological intent of Lloyd Rees’s chosen material of retrieved plywood hoardings, from the old French hourd – meaning palisade or a temporary wooden (shed-like) construction, originally placed on the exterior of the ramparts of a castle during a siege – is clearly about the head-on confrontation of exclusion. In relation to voices of questionable ‘authority’, Sebastian Lloyd Rees is not to be trifled with, he is a natural campaigner and pamphleteer2; the fragments of Americana talk-show legalise, which form the title of his first solo exhibition for mother’s tankstation, might suggest such…alarming…invasive…a violation…lawless…disrespectful…

Opposite – All the News That’s Fit to Print (2001.09.12 – 2015.08.24), 2015

Exhibition runs through to January 15th, 2016

Mother’s Tankstation
41-43 Watling Street, Ushers Island
8 Dublin
Ireland

www.motherstankstation.com

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AARON CURRY – STARFUKER

Posted on 2016-01-04

STARFUKER, the exhibition’s title, is a red herring: Given the artist’s long-standing connection to Los Angeles and the fact that this show is taking place here, it would seem to point to the spastic and unsavory mixture of sex, celebrity, and power that are part of the city’s reputation and allure. But the stars that appear in this show are of the cosmic variety, and the images conjured by both the paintings and the sculptures point away from the earthly detritus of popular culture that informed earlier bodies of work and toward the spectacularly generative, even erotic chaos that fills the universe at large and appears with increasing acuity in photography of deep space. Curry’s version of the cosmos, however, is one that is informed not only by recent science; equally important are the speculative horizons that are regularly the backdrops of video games, animated movies, and science fiction both in its kitsch-ridden and more paranoid iterations.

The two new major metal sculptures, each painted matte black, strike an unlikely balance between the archaic monumentality of Richard Serra, the modernist biomorphism of Jean Arp and Joan Miró, and the cartoonish contours of the Tomorrowland attractions at Disney theme parks. One sculpture is composed primarily of a curved wall: 12-feet tall and more than 20-feet wide, this imposing element is also the support for a series of tubular, conical, and spherical forms that inhabit its edges and recesses. The other sculpture is organized around a central, rocket-like tower topped with a knotted, tubular element that appears to be precariously balanced with a chain made from looped segments of welded steel. Utilitarian elements like rivets, bolts, and welds (which Curry also uses to sign each sculpture) play an important role in the overall composition of both works.

Opposite – BEARTH, 2015

Exhibition runs through to January 16th, 2016

David Kordansky Gallery
5130 W. Edgewood PL.
CA. 90019
Los Angeles

davidkordanskygallery.com

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TOMASZ KOWALSKI – DJINN

Posted on 2016-01-04

Tim Van Laere Gallery is pleased to present Djinn, Tomasz Kowalski’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. Kowalski, who is a key figure among a new generation of Polish artists, will show nine paintings on canvas (mainly acrylic, occasionally acrylic and oil), 11 gouache paperworks, a sculpture, and three self-composed sound installations, all dated 2015.

The music reiterates Kowalski’s personal investigation during the process of making the exhibition, the affective state that activated thoughts developing an image (and his images activating the sound as well). These pre-thoughts in turn became the short topics and stories for his paintings and drawings. Kowalski’s work describes a microcosm of thoughts and feelings complete with its own laws. Depictions include a balding man (a future representation of the artist) stepping into an abyss of imaginary green paths and various elongated figures whose bodies multiply into infinite space. In several works, spiral-like figures appear, occupying interiors and landscapes of disjunctive temporalities.

His works disclose a terrain existing beyond the certainty of the boundaries between past, present and future, as new forms of knowledge and sensation are opened up. The work’s multiple paths of exploration, through space and time, intermingle material and immaterial worlds engendering an entranced zone where the ghosts of the past and the future are constantly emerging.

Opposite – Djinn, 2015

Exhibition runs through to January 23rd, 2016

Tim Van Laere Gallery
Verlatstraat 23-25
2000 Antwerp
Belgium

www.timvanlaeregallery.com

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HUDINILSON JR.

Posted on 2015-12-28

In the jargon of São Paulo’s homosexual subculture, Fazer Tricô is a long conversation amongst homosexuals, mostly gossip on activities within their own minority culture. It literally means ‘to knit’. In the context of Hudinilson Jr.’s exhibition, it refers to the possibility of adopting a stance through writing that allows for the unravelling of a specific language’s inflections, corresponding with the framework of a marginal social field such as that of homosexuals in 1980s Brazil, yet aimed at a broader audience.

Hudinilson Urbano Junior (São Paulo, 1957- São Paulo, 28th of August of 2013) studied Fine Art at the Armando Álvares Penteado Foundation in the mid 70s, and began to experiment with drawing, painting, graffiti, mail art, performance, and urban intervention. His first big moment of public visibility came up in 1979 when he founded the collective 3 Nós 3, together with artists Màrio Ramiro (1957) and Rafael França (1957-1991). From its foundation and up until its dissolution in 1982, the group carried out public actions that saw the city as a page on which to compose graphic design, thus inserting monumental gestures in the city of São Paulo during the military dictatorship. From then on, Hudinilson Jr. began his most mature individual work in an unusual context: after decades of a repressive regime in Brazil, a political relaxation began to emerge, announcing the arrival of democracy. While the actions of 3 Nós 3, including the photo novel CASOS – produced in 1978 and reprinted in 2014 on occasion of the tribute exhibition to Rafael França at the Jacqueline Martins Gallery in São Paulo-, were defying the established social and urban order, Hudinilson Jr. was questioning the dictatorship’s scopic regimes through his first Xerox works. The precise and categorical control of citizens’ bodies in a military regime was substituted in his oeuvre by the opacity of his own flesh, by the metonymical promiscuity of the relations between the different parts of a social self-portrait.

Opposite – Untitled, 1980’s

Exhibition runs through to January 23rd, 2016

Galerie Sultana
12 rue ramponeau
75020 Paris
France

www.galeriesultana.com

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EDUARDO STUPIA

Posted on 2015-12-28

The exhibition includes works created in São Paulo, inspired in Barra Funda neighborhood. The canvases painted by Stupía, known for his drawings of utopian architectural forms, reveal a perception of the artist, rather than on the geographical displacement. Stupía believes that every physical and territorial change implies emotional changes, this is what transpires in the works that make up the exhibition. “The Barra Funda neighborhood imposes its qualities to a newcomer and a
strong scenic temperament. In this sense, I understand the exhibition as a real journey diary, besides geographical adventures, but psychic impressions, resonances, metaphors and illusions. Sometimes, looking at each of the screens, they individually appear to represent aspects mostly narrative” said Stupía.
According to the artist, the inspiration came naturally when he was visiting the hangar of Baró Gallery, on entering the large space, noted that there was a resonance between the reach and geometries, architectural structures and outdoor spaces around. “It started to be processed and translated in the form of pure graphic language, in other words, my impressions of the journey produced a phenomenon more analog than mimetic,” he adds.

Opposite – Paisaje, 2015

Exhibition runs through to January 16th, 2016

Baró Galeria
Galpão: Rua Barra Funda, 216 – Santa Cecilia
SP, 01152-000 São Paulo
Brazil

barogaleria.com

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ENRICO BAJ

Posted on 2015-12-28

With a passion for the eccentric and a strong iconoclastic impulse, Enrico Baj was one of the central figures of the Italian neo-avant garde. His art and political writings have played an instrumental role in the chronologies of influential movements, from Dada and Surrealism to Art Informel and Cobra, as well as the Milanese movement of Nuclear Art, which he co-founded with Sergio Dangelo. Throughout it all, Baj formed an idiosyncratic iconography that was all his own. Departing from gestural abstraction in the mid-1950s, he honed a painterly practice that defiantly embraced figuration and kitsch symbols, subverting authoritative, bourgeois conventions of “good taste.”

In the late 1960s Enrico Baj’s main focus was on his Plastics. During this period he began exploring the aesthetic possibilities of all different kinds of plastic materials. His first steps into the new medium were made with little multi-coloured Lego bricks that Baj included into his conventional tapestry canvases, thereby adding a very contemporary, colourful and pop art component to his otherwise plushy fabric backgrounds. He cut, assembled and superimposed onto the entire spectrum that was offered by these new industrial materials: PVC, lego, polyethylene, polyester – all this gave birth to numberless colourful characters, landscapes and his ultimate series of loud and varicoloured neckties.

Opposite – Cravatta, 1968

Exhibition runs through to January 31st, 2016

Giò Marconi
via Tadino 20
I-20124 Milan
Italy

www.giomarconi.com

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