BYRON KIM

Posted on 2011-11-28

In this new series of work, Kim paints night in the city, evoking the quality of light and hazy cloud formations in the transition from dusk to dark and beyond. He depicts the state of constant suspension that city dwellers experience; the omnipresent lights block their view into the cosmos and deny a resolution to the day that true darkness delivers. The paintings in this ongoing series, measuring 90 x 72 inches, often have hard-edged, painted borders on two or three sides that act as reminders of the architectural elements like windows, cornices and facades of buildings that frame our views of the city sky. Kim paints his crepuscular skies from memory, creating open spaces that act as trigger points for the viewer’s inner dialogue, giving the imagination room to resonate and remember.

Opposite – Untitled (for B.L.), 2011

Exhibition runs through to December 22nd, 2011

James Cohan Gallery
533 West 26th Street
New York
NY 10001

www.jamescohan.com

  

DAMIEN FLOOD – HISTORY OF THE VISITATION

Posted on 2011-11-28

Flood’s practice has evolved in rich and fascinating ways. He continues to push and exploit the potential of his primary medium, oil on canvas, with intriguing results. His world is expanding in alien directions, apparently devoid of natural light or sometimes about that light. Equally it is unashamedly and indulgently caught between, on the one hand, an abandon born of an abstract use of his medium and, on the other, maintaining one limb in the “ real “ world. The boundary between “real” and fictional, however, is no longer meaningful in Flood’s vocabulary.

Never one to stay in one place for too long, he has for The History of the Visitation, produced a corpus of paintings and objects that is as diverse, unpredictable and open as ever. No one overriding theme emerges.Flood’s world or New Geography is, at times, microscopic in its focus but in spite of or even because of this can very quickly lead us to an imaginary vast expanse.

All is never as it seems or straightforward or even stationary in Flood’s work. In Dot Dot Dot and Rock and Cylinder, for example, one painting supplants another in a reversal of strategy or is it a doubling up of narratives. No one reading is possible or, if you go by previous belief systems and bodies of knowledge, like the one quoted by the artist : the world according to the now discredited 17th Century theoretician and cleric Athanasius Kirchner, desirable.

Opposite – Bench (2010)

Exhibition runs through to December 10th, 2011

Green On Red Gallery
26-28 Lombard Street East
Dublin 2
Ireland

www.greenonredgallery.com

  

ABSOLUT BLANK LIVE

Posted on 2011-11-21

Video director Saam Farahmand (Cheryl Cole, Klaxons, Janet Jackson) has collaborated with ABSOLUT to document London creativity by capturing people’s movement to create unique video portraits.

Taking part in the live art installation, respondents will dance to create unique digital trails in real-time, as if their bodies are brushes and their background is a blank canvas that becomes filled with their movements. The groundbreaking visual effects will be by The Mill who are behind the special effects in films such as Harry Potter, Tomb Raider, Hannibal, Gladiator and many more.

Exhibition runs from Thursday 24th – Sunday 27th November 2011. Weekdays 16.30-22.30, Weekend 13.00-22.30.

Old Truman Brewery
91 Brick Lane
London
E1 6QL

www.facebook.com/ABSOLUTUK

  

JR – ENCRAGES

Posted on 2011-11-21

The first major solo show by JR, after displaying his work in the biggest Museum of the world, the walls of the cities, JR faces the walls of the Gallery.
JR creates monumental photographs that he pastes around the world, infiltrating in urban life anonymous portraits, witnesses of the present and the past : Women are Heroes, in Rio de Janeiro, Jaipur, Nairobi, (2008-2010), which gave its title to JR’s movie that was selected at the Festival de Cannes in 2010 ; The Wrinkles of the City in Carthagena, Shanghai, Los Angeles (2008-2011).
JR reveals art by action, displaying his gigantic prints over the suburban buildings of Paris, on walls in the Middle East or in the United States, on broken bridges in Africa or in favelas in Brazil.

Never-seen before artwork and films will be shown, as well as a pasting on the facade of the Gallery.
Committed art, street art, participative art, ephemeral art… Beyond any category, JR makes us think by inviting on stage anonymous heroes, displaying the faces of humanity, multiple and one at the same time.

Exhibition runs through to January 7th, 2012

Galerie Perrotin
76 Rue de Turenne
75003
Paris
France

www.perrotin.com

  

MIRIAM CAHN

Posted on 2011-11-21

This exhibition will focus on Cahn’s painting practice spanning three decades. A beloved and historically significant voice in Switzerland, Cahn represented her home country at the 41st Venice Biennale in 1984.

In Drawing Room Confessions Issue #3, a journal published on the occasion of Cahn’s current solo exhibition with the David Roberts Art Foundation in London, Cahn describes how her investigations in film, drawing, books, and performance inevitably led to making paintings. Growing up with black and white television and experiencing art history through books with black and white plates brought Cahn to rule out color as an unnecessary complication in her early career. Color signified wealth since few could afford to print in color.

Years later, Cahn began producing paintings in color for the first time. Cahn’s psychosomatic color palette is generational, influenced by the hyperreality of color experience depicted in artificially colored films like Michelangelo Antonioni’s, Il deserto rosso (1964). The idiosyncratic quality of her paintings can be seen as an intentional confusion of perception with reality. The figure, animal, or landscape becomes reduced to a few brutal performative gestures in some paintings while areas of sensitive but deliberate rendering exist in others.

Opposite – Lächeln, 1996

Exhibition runs through to December 22nd, 2011

Elizabeth Dee Gallery
545 West 20th Street
New York
NY
10011

www.elizabethdeegallery.com

  

WALKING: TO DRAW THE WORLD

Posted on 2011-11-14

Walking: To Draw the World consists of Keijiro Suga’s poetry, Ai Sasaki’s drawings and a display of books based on the theme of ‘books for walking, reading and thinking’. Inspired by the words of Suga, a poet, Sasaki’s drawings are created conjunctively, as though to huddle together with Suga’s poetry.
They are made through a varied selection of materials including colored pencil, pastel and colored inks, and each has varied expressions. Slowly walking through the gallery, the experience of being transfixed between the imaginative scenes that the poetry invites as well as the time spent speculating about the drawings will no doubt conjure a new facet to the act of walking within the viewer.

The “Walking” project began in 2009 at Gallery Zero in Ikuta Library, Meiji University and was further developed by Keijiro Suga (b.1958) and Ai Sasaki (b.1976, Osaka). The project was exhibited at the Glass Pyramid of Moerenuma Park (Hokkaido), and continues today.

Opposite – Drawings for Poems, Ai Sasaki, 2011

Exhibition runs through to December 24th, 2011

Taka Ishii Gallery
1-3-2 5F Kiyosumi Koto-ku
Tokyo
135-0024
Japan

www.takaishiigallery.com