EMILY LUDWIG SHAFFER – IN STEAD OF ME

Posted on 2022-11-21

To act in someone’s stead is to hold or stand in their place. It is a phrase tied to both absence and locality. The title In Stead of Me speaks to the dualities and contradictions in Shaffer’s works. The artist gestures to intimated but non-present figures through various motifs in her work: the empty chairs in Flowers to Share (2022), the child in the mother’s womb in City of Lady (2022), and the shadow figure in Nurse Log (2022). The title also alludes to how paintings can stand in for the artist’s state of being. Shaffer describes this exhibition – which is her first solo since becoming a mother – as having come together in an intuitive and organic way. These are a series of loose vignettes and spaces that have inspired or grounded her in a year of constant change.

Opposite – Nurse Log, 2022

Exhibition runs through to January 6th, 2023

Peres Projects
Karl-Marx-Allee 82
10243 Berlin
Germany

peresprojects.com

  

RAGNAR KJARTANSSON

Posted on 2022-11-14

No Tomorrow is a new video installation by Kjartansson, choreographer Margrét Bjarnadóttir, and composer Bryce Dessner. Spanning six screens that encircle the room, the installation surrounds viewers with a performance of spatial music written for eight dancers with eight guitars. Recorded from the center of the performers’ space, the installation is kaleidoscopic, capturing the dancers as they weave within each screen and across the channels; their movements and melodies ranging from pastorale to rock and roll. Combining a variety of classic Western references – blue jeans and white t-shirts, the draped silk curtains of mid-20th century song and dance films, as well as lyrics drawn from the Archaic Greek poet Sappho and adventurer Vivant Denon, two sensualists millennia apart – the work spins notions of idealization and iconography. It is also a reflection on our ideals of beauty, our search for it, and the absurdity of its representations, inspired by the frivolity and reality of Rococo paintings, classical ballet, and modern pop music videos. The performance was initially commissioned for the Iceland Dance Company in 2017, and the new video work features the original cast of performers, all of whom were integral to the development of the work.

Opposite – Installation view

Exhibition runs through to December 17th, 2022

Luhring Augustine Chelsea
531 West 24th Street
NY 10011
New York

www.luhringaugustine.com

  

INI ARCHIBONG – NARTHEX

Posted on 2022-11-14

No Tomorrow is a new video installation by Kjartansson, choreographer Margrét Bjarnadóttir, and composer Bryce Dessner. Spanning six screens that encircle the room, the installation surrounds viewers with a performance of spatial music written for eight dancers with eight guitars. Recorded from the center of the performers’ space, the installation is kaleidoscopic, capturing the dancers as they weave within each screen and across the channels; their movements and melodies ranging from pastorale to rock and roll. Combining a variety of classic Western references – blue jeans and white t-shirts, the draped silk curtains of mid-20th century song and dance films, as well as lyrics drawn from the Archaic Greek poet Sappho and adventurer Vivant Denon, two sensualists millennia apart – the work spins notions of idealization and iconography. It is also a reflection on our ideals of beauty, our search for it, and the absurdity of its representations, inspired by the frivolity and reality of Rococo paintings, classical ballet, and modern pop music videos. The performance was initially commissioned for the Iceland Dance Company in 2017, and the new video work features the original cast of performers, all of whom were integral to the development of the work.

Opposite – Stargazer, 2022

Exhibition runs through to December 16th, 2022

Friedman Benda
515 West 26th Street
NY 10001
New York

www.friedmanbenda.com

  

LUCIO FONTANA – SCULPTURE

Posted on 2022-11-14

Curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, in collaboration with the Fondazione Lucio Fontana, and focused on Fontana’s prolific breakthroughs and experiments in the medium of sculpture, this exhibition will fill the gallery’s uptown location at 32 East 69th Street, the very same address where, in 1961, Fontana’s first solo show in the US was presented at the galleries of the legendary art dealers Martha Jackson and David Anderson. ‘Lucio Fontana. Sculpture’ will feature over 80 works on loan from important institutions and museums, the Fondazione Lucio Fontana and both private and public collections and will shine a light on a critical dimension of the artist’s revolutionary practice that is rarely explored in depth outside of Europe.

Opposite – Concetto spaziale [Spatial Concept], 1968

Exhibition runs through to February 4th, 2023

Hauser & Wirth
32 East 69th Street
10021
New York

www.hauserwirth.com

  

ROB PRUITT – PANDA-MONIUM IN BEIJING

Posted on 2022-11-07

Pruitt’s vocabulary is straightforward, minimalist, and above all, highly relatable. Drawing on everyday iconography with the frankness of youth, he confronts the viewer with the paradox of modern-day existence: one where the line between hope and dystopia is harder and harder to grasp.
The presentation at the Beijing space brings together Pruitt’s well known Panda paintings along with his paintings of faces.

Opposite – Cohorts, 2021

Exhibition runs through to November 20th, 2022

MASSIMODECARLO
Blanc International Art Space
Beijing
China

www.massimodecarlo.com

  

ENIVREZ-VOUS (GET DRUNK)

Posted on 2022-11-07

Praz-Delavallade is pleased to present Enivrez-vous (Get Drunk) a group show opening in Paris. Ever since antiquity, inebriation has been presented as a way of opening the doors to creativity, a means that is deeply connected to poetry, both by its origin, inspirational value and its subversive and exhilarating aspects. After all, is it not fêted for giving rise to sharing and festivity by worshipers of the Greek god Dionysus and his Roman counterpart Bacchus, the god of wine who is the living embodiment of this tribute to the values of drunkenness that paves the way to other excesses, madness, theatricality and tragedy. Poets lay claim to inebriation, asserting it as their way of accessing the inspirational divine voice and describing the latter’s light, euphoric and ephemeral condition.

Opposite – Thomas Liu Le Lann, ASHE, 2021

Exhibition runs through to January 7th, 2023

Praz-Delavallade
5 rue des Haudriettes
75003 Paris
France

www.praz-delavallade.com