THE SCOTTISH COLOURISTS SERIES – JD FERGUSSON

Posted on 2014-01-06

Fergusson was born in Leith, near Edinburgh and was essentially self-taught. He moved to Paris in 1907 where, more than any of his Scottish contemporaries, Fergusson assimilated and developed the latest developments in French painting. In 1913 he met the dance pioneer Margaret Morris (1891-1980), who became his life-long partner. Morris, her technique, pupils and Summer Schools, became the main sources of inspiration for Fergusson’s work, before his death in Glasgow in 1961. More than 100 paintings, sculptures, works on paper and items of archival material, lent from public and private collections throughout the UK, will be on display.

Opposite – Danu, Mother of Gods, 1952

Exhibition runs through to June 15th, 2014

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art
75 Belford Rd
Edinburgh
EH4 3DR

www.nationalgalleries.org

  

DAVID TREMLETT – 3 DRAWING ROOMS

Posted on 2014-01-06

British artist David Tremlett, best known for his site-specific wall drawings, makes a vast new work for Ikon, transforming the second floor galleries with geometric shapes, applied directly to the walls using pastel pigment and engine grease. Each of the three rooms has a contrasting composition: horizontal and vertical rectangular blocks of vivid colour, and grey and black, playing off the volumes of architectural space in order to ‘retune’ our perception of them.

Like all of Tremlett’s wall drawings, this work for Ikon has been conjured up in the artist’s imagination, before becoming scale studio drawings. The creation of the final work takes place over several weeks, with the artist and his assistants applying the colour painstakingly by hand. Tremlett’s artistic practice, developed after his formal training at Falmouth School of Art, Birmingham College of Art and the Royal College of Art, is characterised by a critical examination of what sculpture and indeed art could be; an interest in the creative process of making, rather than focusing on a final result. Tremlett refers to his work as objects, flat sculpture, rather than images which, for him, imply illusion. His compositions typically consist of geometric forms, abstract arrangements of arcs, circles, trapezoids, text and line – formal constructs which emanate a pure joy of colourand hue, and relationships between geometry and curved line.

Exhibition runs through to April 21st, 2014

Ikon Gallery
1 Oozells Square
Brindleyplace
Birmingham
B1 2HS

ikon-gallery.org

  

WANGECHI MUTU – A FANTASTIC JOURNEY

Posted on 2013-12-30

Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey is the first survey in the United States of this internationally renowned, Brooklyn-based artist. Spanning from the mid-1990s to the present, the exhibition unites more than fifty pieces, including Mutu’s signature large-scale collages as well as video works, never-before-seen sketchbook drawings, a site-specific wall drawing, and sculptural installations.

Born in Nairobi, Kenya, Mutu scrutinizes globalization by combining found materials, magazine cutouts, sculpture, and painted imagery. Sampling such diverse sources as African traditions, international politics, the fashion industry, pornography, and science fiction, her work explores gender, race, war, colonialism, global consumption, and the exoticization of the black female body. Mutu is best known for spectacular and provocative collages depicting female figures—part human, animal, plant, and machine—in fantastical landscapes that are simultaneously unnerving and alluring, defying easy categorization and identification. Bringing her interconnected ecosystems to life for this exhibition through sculptural installations and videos, Mutu encourages audiences to consider these mythical worlds as places for cultural, psychological, and socio-political exploration and transformation.

Opposite – Riding Death in My Sleep, 2002

Exhibition runs through to March 9th, 2014

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway
Brooklyn
New York
11238-6052

www.brooklynmuseum.org

  

SHEZAD DAWOOD – WOLF PANEL

Posted on 2013-12-30

Comprising textile paintings, sculptures and neon work, Dawood’s installation plays with the gallery space suggesting doubling and assonances.
Seduced by an ambiguous Harvest Moon, the visitor is introduced into a suspended and mysterious eco-psycho-landscape inhabited by the ghostly figure of the wolf, a mythological omen of destruction, war and death.

In a conceptual balance between the decorative and the perverse, the treasured still life sculptures function as vanitas evocative of a sense of emptiness. Here the predator becomes the prey like in a shamanic journey or ‘wolf trance’ of transition to undergo a spiritual re-birth. Through this transformation, knowledge and consciousness emerges.

Shezad Dawood’s work explores the multiple possibilities engendered by the play between cultures, histories and fictions. Notions of authorship and representation are deconstructed by working with a steady stream of collaborators mapping cross cultural influences and trajectories.

Exhibition runs through to February 1st, 2014

Paradise Row Gallery
74a Newman Street
London
W1T 3DB

www.paradiserow.com

  

ADAM GREEN AND FRIENDS – HOT CHICKS

Posted on 2013-12-30

Bordering on architecture or furniture design, the works are only recognizable as female as each has at least one boob; though most have way, way too many boobs. The majority of the works in the show are a mere 12 x 9 inches, but capture in their small size the irreverence and urgency that comes from a direct link between the hand and the unconscious: and as we can see in the show, Green’s unconscious has a somewhat 8-bit sensibility. The bodies are often composed of proliferating blocks, with some including too many eye blocks, too many aforementioned boob blocks, too many mouth blocks, etc. It is as though the image inventory chip to his Nintendo cartridge was functioning properly, however the programming chip that assorted, organized and placed the blocks was malfunctioning.

Symbolically, the “hot chicks” here are extremely not hot, and you can imagine from the titles why: “Angry Chick”, “Burned Chick”, “Dog”, “Blackout Turtle Chick”, etc. Various female archetypical roles are touched on as well from “Stripper Chick”, “Queen Chick”, “Mom Chick”, “Sister Chick” or perhaps most disturbingly “Toddler Chick”. The works, however, bear no malice or violence and instead have an odd sense of humour that at times runs amok: “Polar Chick” looks like a white boob igloo and “Yankee Fan Chick” some eyeballs and boobs connected by pin-striped shapes.

Exhibition runs through to January 31st, 2014

The Hole NYC
312 Bowery
New York
NY
10012
USA

theholenyc.com

  

SPENCER FINCH

Posted on 2013-12-23

The exhibition follows his ongoing exploration into the most elusive of subjects: Color and its perception, or what Cezanne is said to have described as “the place where our brain and the universe meet.” On view are drawings, collages, light installations and a window work using the incoming natural light. Each of the works reveals a different mode of analysis and approach to its subject, giving the exhibition a feel akin to that of an experimental laboratory.

Color Test (624), 2013 for instance, consists of a light box confronting the viewer with an overwhelming abundance of colors. In a process comparable to the mixing of pigments on a painter’s palette, Finch filters the “neutral” white emanating from the light box with two layers of translucent film imprinted with an irregular checkerboard pattern in different hues. The result, a total of 624 different individual color variations, calls into question the limitations of visual perception and differentiation. Indeed, it is unclear how many colors the human eye can discriminate. The Optical Society of America estimates between 7.5–10 million, while other scientists maintain that effectively no more than 180 hues can be distinguished.
The diptych Study for Disappearance, 2013 is related to phenomenological questions of color perception. The work records the changes in the perception of our surroundings when faced with the absence of light. In this case, the artist studied the appearance of colors on nearly 100 different objects in his Brooklyn studio during daylight, matching their tones in watercolor applied on paper. The resulting drawing is paired with a record of the identical objects, this time observed at dusk as the colors shift to grayscale.

Exhibition runs through to January 11th, 2014

Galerie Nordenhake
Lindenstrasse 34
DE-10969 Berlin
Germany

www.nordenhake.com