PAOLA PIVI

Posted on 2013-10-14

Pivi creates artworks that are disorienting and simultaneously poetic. Though formally different, her work pushes the limit of what can be done in this world as an artwork. Her first comprehensive solo exhibition in the United States will take over both floors of the gallery and feature exclusive new
works. On the ground floor, Pivi will present an installation of eight fantastic creatures. The polars bears will return in Paola’s art! An unexpected performing
sculpture, “Money machine (true blue, baby I love you)” will also be on display on the lower level, evoking the topography of the New York building which was previously a bank and hosted a vault.

Nomadic by nature, Paola Pivi has lived all over the world, including Shanghai, the remote island of Alicudi in southern Italy, and Anchorage, Alaska. She is
presently in India. Pivi first exhibited at Viafarini in Milan in 1995, the same year she enrolled in the Brera Academy of Art in Milan. In 1999, she was co-awarded
the Golden Lion for the best national pavilion (Italy) at Harald Szeemann’s Venice Biennial. For this venue, which featured five Italian artists, Pivi presented “Untitled (airplane)”, an inverted Fiat G-91 airplane resting on its cockpit.

Exhibition runs through to October 26th, 2013

Galerie Perrotin
909 Madison Avenue
NY
10021
New York
USA

www.perrotin.com

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PAUL KLEE – MAKING VISIBLE

Posted on 2013-10-14

Paul Klee – Making Visible begins with the artist’s breakthrough during the First World War, when he first developed his individual abstract patchworks of colour that later became characteristic of his ‘magic square’ paintings.
The heart of the exhibition will focus on the decade Klee spent teaching and working at the Bauhaus, the hotbed of modernist design. The abstract canvases he produced there, such as the rhythmical composition Fire in the Evening 1929, took his reputation to new international heights.

The 1930s then brought about radical changes. Having moved to Düsseldorf, Klee was dismissed from his new teaching position by the Nazis and took refuge in Switzerland with his family, while his works were removed from collections and labelled ‘degenerate art’ in Germany. Despite the political turmoil, financial insecurity and his declining health, he nevertheless became even more prolific.

Opposite – A Young Lady’s Adventure, 1922

Exhibition runs through to March 9th, 2014

Tate Modern
Bankside
London
SE1 9TG

www.tate.org.uk

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ADRIAN VILLAR ROJAS – TODAY WE REBOOT THE PLANET

Posted on 2013-10-07

Working with a team collaborating builders, sculptors and engineers, Villar Rojas tests the limits of clay to create an apparently fossilised world of ruins and ancient monuments that play with the concept of time, history, modernity and the future. Overarching connections between his projects create a larger narrative, with themes and forms reappearing and reconfiguring themselves over time. As with My Dead Family, which saw him create a 28-metre long sculpture of a whale stranded in a forest for the Bienniale at the End of The World, each installation can seem as if is the last chapter of an unknown mythical saga.

For his first exhibition in the UK, Villar Rojas re-casts this potent mix of myth and imagination responding to the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, a former ammunition store (The Magazine) built in 1805. Taking inspiration from the brick-vaulted Powder Rooms that sit at the centre of the building, the artist will re-imagine the architecture and original purpose of the new Gallery at the very moment it is revealed to the world for the first time. Drawing on the artist’s self-declared fascination with topics as diverse as science fiction, comic books, popular music and quantum mechanics, his often fantastical sculptures appear as relics from an invented antiquity or an imagined future.

A key element to his installation at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery is the implicit presence of another parallel site of production, a traditional brickworks in Rosario, Argentina which – alongside its daily production of bricks – functions as a laboratory of artistic experimentation for Villar Rojas. The farm produces handmade bricks, using the ancient method of mixing the raw materials in the ground using animal power before hand firing them in glowing pyramidal towers. The immediacy and rawness of this production process, which drew Villar Rojas to the brickworks as well as aspects of the work there, will appear as ‘ghosts’ in the exhibition. This return to an old and traditional practice – similar to that of returning to clay as material and sculpture as a form – is the artist’s path for inventing a symbolic world that speaks to our imagination as much as it does to the politics of a global economy.

Exhibition runs through to November 10th, 2013

Serpentine Gallery
Kensington Gardens
London
W2 3XA

www.serpentinegallery.org

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BERNARDI ROIG – PRACTICES TO SMELL THE LIGHT

Posted on 2013-10-07

The tenor of the exhibition is set by a life-size figure, blocked in with his hands tied behind his back, trying, like a symbol of a singular purpose, to lick a light bulb and to energize the empty space around the spectator’s body. Another smaller figure, in a desperate attempt to smell the light, is crushed by a cascade of fluorescent light. There no longer is a place for the image to adapt to the eye, everything rushes towards an internal abyss.

Since the end of the 80’s, Bernardí Roig has been unfolding the disturbing experience of obsession. On occasion, his works have a reflective quality, trapping and deforming our image or placing us on the other side of a theatrical scene waiting for its characters. The scene is always difficult, frozen or pierced by an artificial light.

All the work developed by Bernardí Roig over these years has been produced in the shadow of two questions that are essential to him: how to deal with inherited iconographic repertoires and how to continue to create a persistent image, an image that hurls us towards a psychic precipice, in a world overflowing with images. His work, greatly influenced by literature and cinema, follows a path marked by the narrative and a theatrical approach to space.

The exhibition aims to formulate a reflection on the nature of collective perceptions in an era strongly marked by the domination of the media and the virtual world, which, with the overload of hyper-codified messages, surpasses the individual’s threshold of endurance. The endless flow of media signals has established the supremacy of language over the authenticity of experience and, with an excess of information, has hidden that which by its very nature cannot be spoken: the primary drive that inhabits the very basis of awareness. If reason is the expression of language, then pantomime is the expression of the body.

Exhibition runs through to October 12th, 2013

Galerie Stefan Röpke
St. Apern-Strasse 17-21
50667 Cologne
Germany

www.galerie-roepke.de

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LIU YE

Posted on 2013-10-07

In contrast to his contemporaries, his atmospheric paintings are based mainly on his knowledge of the tradition of European painting from Romanticism through Biedermeier to Modernism. Therefore Liu Ye’s visual cosmos is filled with protagonists of European cultural history: Hans-Christian Andersen, Piet Mondrian, Balthus, and again and again Miffy, a legendary figure from children’s books, conceived by Dutchman Dick Bruna in 1955.

His paintings form a unique synthesis of Chinese culture and European painting, weaving together fairytales, erotic fantasies, and an admiration of the purity of Bauhaus and De Stijl. But at the same time his paintings and their time-consuming process of creation remain always deeply connected to the notions of contemplation typical of Chinese painting. Abstract and figurative elements no longer seem like contradictory poles. Fairytale-like and seemingly idyllic depictions encounter motifs that only appear to be naïve. In some of his most recent paintings, for example, we see crayons and colouring sheets for children. This results in an ingenious play between a naïve subject and the subtly executed painting. And the two paintings in the exhibition that are devoted to the history of the Bauhaus style – a first for Liu Ye – oscillate between a monochrome plane and a three-dimensional object.His paintings derive their power and meaning from the tension of alleged opposites, which are brought into harmony. In this way, Liu Ye points to the Asian roots of his thinking as an artist.

Opposite – Self portrait, 2013

Exhibition runs through to November 2nd, 2013

Johnen Galerie
Marienstrasse 10
10117 Berlin
Germany

www.johnengalerie.de

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FEODOR VORONOV – RELICS

Posted on 2013-09-30

Voronov’s newest works feature his emblematically bold color palette and obsessive mark making techniques, but stem from new source material. His vibrant abstractions of words and letters become monuments to his visual thought process and interest in the interconnectivity of language, thus acting as literal and figurative Relics of his practice.

In establishing his painterly exploration of the socially explicit and implied perceptions of a word, Voronov has visually conceptualized the idiosyncrasies, structure, and comprehension of human communication. Each canvas features an object-like knot of fine ballpoint pen lines, gestural swaths of spray paint, and whimsical bands of marker ink floating within a raw canvas womb, as if illustrating the intricate nature of language’s evolution. Voronov’s seemingly organic marks co-exist alongside regimented patterns, thus emphasizing the respectively colloquial and formal aspects to our daily parlance.

Though he has been working from a single list of vocabulary words for nearly three years, Voronov has now turned his attention to their amassed combination and composition, likening syntax to the analytical configuration of imagery. Inspired by John Chamberlain’s 2012 retrospective at the Guggenheim, Voronov drew from the amalgamations of his metal sculptures, impressed by their feigned weightlessness despite their “hulking masses and multitudes of fractured and jumbled planes.” Much like Voronov’s own work, these assemblages gave material formality to the tensions, balance, and anatomy of composition, be it physical or intellectual. Stemming from this idea, Voronov’s Relics reference terms and phrases from a long, rambling paragraph he calls his “piggy bank” – an autobiographical stream of consciousness – that allows for the advanced entanglements competing focal points. More than ever, the viewer will find evolving entry points and altered senses of perspective in Voronov’s paintings, analogous to the individualized way in which we converse.

Exhibition runs through to October 12th, 2013

Mark Moore Gallery
5790 Washington Boulevard
Culver City
Los Angeles
CA
90232

www.markmooregallery.com

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