Go behind the scenes with British artist Alex Chinneck as he discusses his partnership with Vauxhall Motors. The sculpture turns a parking space on its head, peeling back fifteen metres of arching tarmac to turn a one-tonne car upside-down as the vehicle grips the curling road with no visible support.
Shot by Chris Tubbs and Rachel Barber.
This is the first exhibition dedicated to Fairhurst’s animations, a key thread in his early practice. Comprising a fourteen-minute cycle, the works trace the evolution of his distinctive iconography and tragicomic spirit. Hand-drawn gorillas and free-floating anatomies appear in repeating, uncanny gestures. Suspended on luminous fields of colour, they gyrate, morph, or snarl up indecipherably – setting in motion the imagery found in many of Fairhurst’s drawings, for which he used artists and various friends as his original models.
In Strange Loops – Stripping, 1995, we witness a gorilla endlessly peeling the skin away from a human figure to reveal another, identical skin. The action of going back to scratch, over and over, wryly evokes a world in which everything changes but nothing does. Strange Loops – Dissecting, 1996, from the same series, depicts a human figure in a gorilla suit splitting into anatomical cross-sections which dissolve, in turn, into patterned strata (akin to the abstract schemes found in a series of paintings of the same year) – a clunky cartoon rendering of figuration’s passage into abstraction.
In a corpus that resisted categorisation and traversed multiple media, animation and video occupied a central place. Produced using elementary software, Fairhurst’s animations often served as the backdrops to musical performances by his band Low Expectations, active between 1995 and 2001. In these, samples of music were repeated over and over and progressively superimposed, while the performers mimed in a parallel to the visual loops and overlaps. The animations are here presented on a correspondingly large scale that accentuates the contrast between the fitful vignettes and the bright, unchanging fields of colour against which they play out.
Exhibition runs through to March 21st, 2015
Sadie Coles HQ
62 Kingly Street
London
W1B 5QN
Tannatt is an L.A.-based artist who deals with formal inquisitions of space via sculpture, video, and painting. His most recent project, Studio Agony (Revisited) will be on view alongside a newly commissioned sound piece. In the video, Mateo explores an undefined industrial, creative warehouse with the help of quasi-domestic animals such as donkeys and chickens. As the animals traverse the empty room, their interactions with the architecture trigger various memories of modern and contemporary visual experience. As viewers, we move about the gallery in a similar manner, becoming both aware of and displaced from the sculptural forms installed alongside the works. Continuing into a smaller, adjoining room, a series of paintings and sculptures address aerial geometry, mathematics, and color implications.
Exhibition runs through to May 2nd, 2015
Gallery Diet
174 NW 23 Street
Miami
FL 33127
Landscape of Belief is a series of five installation works that call into question how we construct our lives according to our belief systems. The viewer experiences each sculpture as animations composed of text projected and floating diaphanously in glass panels. These texts that generate skylines of real and imaginary landscapes were culled from descriptions of illusory cities and from conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. In Landscape of Belief, Bravo creates a parallel between literature and architecture, as they both define, translate, and shape physical and mind structures.
By carefully overlapping surfaces, a rich non-material space of emptiness is achieved throughout the time-based composition. As a whole, the installation presents nothingness as an object, thus allowing for the space of the metaphysical to challenge the viewer. As the viewers are immersed in the projection, they are given the opportunity to experience the prospect of awareness, of the power of their belief systems and how they define the landscape of their lives. The installation took three years to make and addresses two important issues in the trajectory of Bravo’s work, such as the shifting definition of the medium and the physical manifestation of the piece. Bravo employs a variety of mediums such as archival pigment on cotton rag and film, glass, and aluminum.
Exhibition runs through to April 4th, 2015
Y Gallery
165 Orchard Street
New York
NY 10002
Henry Khudyakov: Final Brain Storm is the first comprehensive solo exhibition in 25 years of this radical, Russian-American artist who has enjoyed recognition for some time but until now has exhibited relatively rarely. The exhibition title, Final Brain Storm, is drawn from the inscription on the back of one of Khudyakov’s paintings where he routinely documents his ongoing process. Presenting a selection of hypnotic paintings and assemblages he has created over the last 35 years, the exhibition highlights his use of recognizable materials – studs, hangers, chewing gum, Band-Aids, bows, glitter and more – all removed from their usual context and intertwined in a mysterious lingual and sensory network. Taking these familiar objects out of context leaves behind a sense of absence and creates a space for thought. To this very day Khudyakov continues to go back to earlier works, adding, expanding, and reinterpreting – further stretching the boundaries of what is commonly acknowledged as art.
The roots of Khudyakov’s art lie in literature. In the 1960s and 70s, a large part of the artist’s activity revolved around writing poetry. At that time, he began experimenting along the lines of the Concrete Poetry movement, as “It occurred to him that traditional forms – these orderly, blocky configurations – did not respond to the sharp, chaotic peaks of emotion that he was trying to convey in his poems,” as one literary historian wrote.
Exhibition runs through to May 3rd, 2015
Black & White Gallery / Project Space
56 Bogart Street
Brooklyn
New York
NY 11206
www.blackandwhiteartgallery.com
Tweet
The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain presents a major solo exhibition of American artist Bruce Nauman’s artwork, the first in France in over 15 years. For the occasion, the artist made a careful selection of recent works never before shown in France, along with some earlier installations, created from a wide array of media that he has explored throughout his career.
This exhibition reflects his continued interest in linking his works to their environment and intensifying the audience’s physical and emotional experience of his pieces. The immersive works on display were thus chosen for their resonance with the Fondation Cartier building, and emphasize the contrast between the transparency of the ground floor and the enclosed lower level.
Opposite – Pencil Lift/Mr.Rogers, 2013
Exhibition runs from March 13th to June 21st, 2015
Fondation Cartier
pour l’art contemporain
261, boulevard Raspail
75014
Paris
