ARMEN ELOYAN

Posted on 2013-12-23

The instinctive approach Eloyan applies to his painting draws on his emotional bond to an array of collective experiences, related to childhood and youth. The artist’s attitude of painting even refers to the automatic painting of the New York school (Hans Hofmann, Willem de Kooning). Most of the titles here such as ‘Black dog’ or ‘Dizzy girl’ seem to be fairly unmistakeable, when iconic figures as Mickey Mouse, dogs and dinosaurs reappear in his work.
Eloyan frequently uses oil paint as a sculptural material, applying it to his canvases layer by layer, resulting in virtually three-dimensional objects. The physicality of the paint and the emphasis on the fact that they are manually done seem to be the key to understanding them.

Exhibition runs through to January 25th, 2014

Tim Van Laere Gallery
Verlatstraat 23-25
2000 Antwerpen
Belgium

www.timvanlaeregallery.com

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AXEL KASSEBÖHMER – 100 X WALCHENSEE

Posted on 2013-12-23

Since the advent of modernism, the landscape, once among the most important genres of painting, has been relegated to an art-historical twilight zone. The genre last enjoyed prominence with the painters of Impressionism, among them Lovis Corinth. Corinth’s most famous landscape paintings come from the years when he spent his summers in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps, along the shores of the lake known as the Walchensee. Axel Kasseböhmer takes up this moment in art history in a series of one hundred small-format oil paintings based on motifs featuring the lake, some created near the summerhouse of Lovis Corinth, shown as a group in an exhibition entitled 100 x Walchensee. Like many landscape painters before him, Kasseböhmer pursued a private project with these pictures, creating the series after a long convalescence. The paintings not only explore the status of the landscape in contemporary art, but also investigate what, precisely, painting itself can achieve today.

Kasseböhmer’s radical approach to painting is the result of a long development as an artist. The painter earned a reputation at the beginning of the nineteen-eighties for his enigmatic paintings that called to mind segments of well-known works from art history. Following this body of work, Kasseböhmer created a series of pictures that used as their starting point large-format landscape photographs, which he over painted until the underlying photograph disappeared. Afterwards he developed various series’, focusing on still lifes, trees and seascapes, taking up diverting styles to conduct a systematic investigation into the possibilities of painting. What connects all these series’ is a heightened awareness of loss. In his œuvre, Kasseböhmer undertakes the almost impossible endeavor of ushering painterly values into today’s world.

Exhibition runs through to January 25th, 2014

Sprüth Magers Berlin
Oranienburger Straße 18
D-10178 Berlin

www.spruethmagers.com

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JIM SHAW

Posted on 2013-12-16

While Shaw’s methodology embraces a multitude of mediums and approaches, this show of drawings varying in scale and narrative subject highlights a crucially important part of his oeuvre. Part of a ground-breaking group that graduated from CalArts in the late 1970’s including Mike Kelley and Tony Oursler, Shaw’s practice incorporates a dense medley of iconographic references in an ongoing creative process, which borrows from art history, genre cinema, cartoons, consumerism, religious imagery, history, current affairs and the media. Long-term narrative driven works are psychologically charged with the strange revelatory absurdity of dreams and steeped in references to American pop culture.

Shaw consciously documents and re-appropriates the broken timelines and nonsensical sequences of unconscious images that constitute dreams by correlating them with the open and adaptive structure of comic books. In the Blake/Boring series he mimics the stylized bodies and fantasy world of the pre-Romantic artist William Blake and 1950’s silver age superhero comic style of Wayne Boring, a leading Superman artist of his youth. Like the inward looking, imaginary trajectory of Blake, Shaw’s feverish exposure of representational histories and pseudo-worlds are charged with a mystical, dream-like subtext. Still informing his current practice are two interrelated bodies of work from the 1990s, Dream Drawings and Dream Objects that in a self-referential, critical approach to the history of surrealism, draw from his own dream diaries. Spanning over 10 years, these were rendered in a sequential narrative, resembling storyboards.

Exhibition runs through to January 7th, 2014

Simon Lee Gallery
304, 3F The Pedder Building
12 Pedder Street
Central, Hong Kong

www.ngca.co.uk

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WOLFGANG WEILEDER – ATLAS

Posted on 2013-12-16

‘Atlas’ is a monumental new body of photographic works created across the world over the last five years in cities from Tokyo to Turin. A series of 20 new large-scale prints have been created specially for this exhibition, which continues Weileder’s interest in how we use and understand public spaces. The apparently abstract images are, in fact, vast compendiums of “data” about the civic spaces of major cities around the world.

Weileder uses a bespoke computer programme to create a portrait of each city’s central square, piazza, or plaza over an extended duration. In contrast to orthodox long-exposure photographs, Weileder records an image a single pixel tall across the entire breadth of the square, minute upon minute, so that we encounter several hundred ‘slices’ of time stacked from top to bottom. We are primarily able to register the colours that define each space – whether buildings or people – and the degree of motion and movement through it, rather than being drawn into an illusionistic, or straightforward photographic image. Weileder’s process is akin to that created by Picasso and Braque in Cubism – except that we encounter multiple timeframes within the same picture rather than multiple spatial viewpoints. Where there are clear vertical ‘stripes’, we register the static structures that are immobile over time. Where there are horizontal patterns, we recognise the activity that animates the square, as his camera has registered motion and flux.

Weileder notes that, in contrast to traditional maps or topographical photographs, he presents raw ‘data’ that nevertheless tells us more about the life and activity of the cities than any single image, or any graphical or cartographical representation ever could. We perceive, over the course of an entire morning or afternoon, the texture of life lived in public. Weileder argues that our understanding of space remains trapped in twentieth-century habits, and that a revolution in our ways of thinking about space is required.

Exhibition runs through to February 8th, 2014

Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art
City Library and Arts Centre
Fawcett Street
Sunderland
SR1 1RE

www.ngca.co.uk

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SISLEJ XHAFA – ASYMMETRIC DÉSIR

Posted on 2013-12-16

Bringing together painting, sculpture and installation, Xhafa explores the effects of contemporary consumerism, examining the social, economic and political imbalances inherent in all capitalist societies. Using an ironic and subversive black humour that is intrinsic to his practice, the artist works to expose the limitations of material possessions, highlighting the futility of commercial desire when considered within a broader context of metaphysical and existential questions.

In Mother (2013), we are confronted by a tombstone, on top of which is attached a telephone receiver – an object that normally grants instant gratification to our need for connection. Yet by attempting to give the tombstone an interactive function, Xhafa exposes a type of connection that is unfulfillable: contact with the dead. In doing so, the work alludes to the perceived futility of religious ceremony, ironically subverting notions of afterlife and spiritual communication with those we have lost.

Woman with Red Skirt (2012) invokes the idea of artworks transforming into mere ‘objects’ in their own right, which can be continually recycled within a marketplace. Indeed, the colour red that is indicated by the title is physically absent. Instead, pastel greys and greens make up the hazy form of a woman, whose sensuality is undermined by the muted colours of mould and decay. This incongruity between title and product is a play upon expectation and pre-conceived ideas on painting itself. It is left up to the viewer to decide whether the absence of red is part of the artist’s subjective representation, or whether both the canvas and painted fabric are deliberately presented in a state of gradual decomposition, implying the process whereby a precious object is eroded by the effects of consumerist exchange.

Xhafa once described how ‘reality is stronger than art. As an artist I do not want to reflect a reality, but I do want to question it.’ asymmetric désir represents the artist’s continued ambition to lay bare the realities of psychological and political exploitations that are rife throughout contemporary society.

Exhibition runs through to January 25th, 2014

Blain/Southern
4 Hanover Square
London
W1S 1BP

www.blainsouthern.com

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MATTHEW BRANDT – VELVET AND BUBBLE WRAP

Posted on 2013-12-09

Cocaine, the Hollywood Sign, plush velvet, cheap fantasies, interchangeable personalities, identities of affect, trends, bubbles, stars, and slick surfaces, Brandt directly employs Hollywood tropes and transforms them, prodding and mixing the stereotypical, material signifiers of identity in the Los Angeles landscape.

Matthew Brandt’s images physically incorporate the work’s subject matter into his creative process, tethering conceptual creativity to material production and furthering the read. Starry night skies typically obliterated by city lights are elegantly composed in swirls of cocaine on black velvet. Torsos donning patterned and striped shirts are burned and etched onto fields of pristine white silk velvet. Gaps between the letters of the Hollywood sign are printed in hair dye on bubble wrap, glowing in abstracted scenes.

Exhibition runs through to January 18th, 2014

M+B
612 North Almont Drive
Los Angeles
California
90069

www.mbart.com

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