JACK WHITTEN

Posted on 2021-05-03

Consisting of rarely seen paintings, sculpture and works on paper, the exhibition highlights a selection of works from the 1960s through 2010s. Blurring the boundaries between sculpture and painting, and between the artist’s studio and the world outside, the multidimensional paintings on view combine geometric abstraction and found objects to mine spiritual and metaphysical thematic veins. Works on paper emphasize the artist’s playfulness and improvisational skill in searching for his own special visual language, a testament to his commitment to drawing as a means to make manifest his ideas and advance his methods. Together, the works on view reveal an artist of extraordinary sensitivity, capable of imbuing modernist abstraction with the vibrations of historical narratives and bringing the spiritual and material realms into alignment.

Opposite – Windows Of The Mind: A Monument Dedicated To The Power Of Painting! – 1995

Exhibition runs through to July 31st, 2021

Hauser & Wirth
15-16/F, H Queen’s
80 Queen’s Road Central
999077 Hong Kong

www.hauserwirth.com

  

GILBERT & GEORGE – THE PARADISICAL PICTURES

Posted on 2021-05-03

The pictures show Gilbert & George wandering through paradisiacal natural worlds filled with mostly expressionistically-hued fruits, flowers, leaves, and trees. Each one is
a cosmos in itself; together they form a spectacular vision of paradise that is at once lush and fantastic, with hallucinatory and psychedelic elements.
Some works find the artists symbiotically merging with the natural world. BEDWETTING and CURL feature their disembodied eyes, noses, and mouths emerging ghost-like from layers of leaves to gaze piercingly at the viewer. In other pictures, they move-sometimes awkwardly dance-through sumptuous landscapes, as in DATE STONES or TENDER, for example. DATE STONE HEADS and DATE HEADS show Gilbert & George becoming part of the plant kingdom themselves, here in the form of dates and date stones bearing their facial features. The choice of fruit is significant: While dates are associated with sensuality and are said to boost both libido and sexual desire, date stones have a look reminiscent of human excrement and feces. The artist duo has already addressed such socially taboo aspects of being human in their NAKED SHIT PICTURES (1994).

Opposite – TENDER, 2019

Exhibition runs through to August 25th, 2021

Sprüth Magers
Oranienburger Straße 18
D-10178 Berlin
Germany

spruethmagers.com

  

ALESSANDRO PESSOLI – CAROUSEL

Posted on 2021-05-03

These are imaginary portraits of male and female figures. The classic pose of the figures is contaminated by Disney characters and illustrations from William Blake’s Divina Commedia, a reshuffling of iconographies and symbologies. Flowers, apples, birds, skulls, swords, snakes, wings, and talons are some of the elements that accompany and characterize the figures.

The title, Carousel, recalls the continuous rotating, going up and down, a play, an entertainment, it represents a way to outline the human condition through symbolic figures and scenes from Western art history such as Adam and Eve, The Expulsion from Paradise, the isolation, the temptation, the fall, and the rebirth.

Opposite – Jung William Blake, 2021

Exhibition runs through to May 15th, 2021

Anton Kern Gallery
16 East 55th Street
10022
New York

www.antonkerngallery.com

  

MARC DENNIS – LOVE IN THE TIME OF CORONA

Posted on 2021-04-26

The exhibition features a selection of new paintings in Dennis’ signature hyperrealist style, all produced during the prolonged period of social isolation experienced by people around the world, uncannily reflecting a near-universal state of existence in which work, leisure, and communications have been collapsed into a vast, seamless universe of images. By co-opting imagery from celebrated paintings of centuries past, including works by Caravaggio and Ingres, Dennis’ works find new meaning in the hallowed lineage of Old Master painting to explore contemporary questions of artistic ownership, pictorial representation, and the consumption of images.

Opposite – From a Close Distance, 2021

Exhibition runs through to June 5th, 2021

GAVLAK
340 Royal Poinciana Way, Suite M334
FL 33480 Palm Beach

www.gavlakgallery.com

  

MARÍA GÓMEZ – EL VIENTO, RETIRARSE ES LO PRIMERO

Posted on 2021-04-26

María Gómez’s work drifts away from her Spanish contemporaries coinciding with long journeys through Italy, Greece and Egypt. The influence of early Renaissance classics such as Giotto and Piero della Francesca, as well as contemporary masters like Morandi and Balthus, stands aside a rebellious stance against other artistic trends of the moment, claiming the rapprochement between the past and the present within a tradition of her own, deeply rooted in the Mediterranean, where speed slows down, and the past is inhabited and coexisting with the most immediate present. In this way, she delves into painting, architecture and landscape, as well as a narrative restlessness, since she also writes and is a devoted reader.

Opposite – Toro Sevillano, 2019 – 2021

Exhibition runs through to June 5th, 2021

Galería Marta Cervera
Calle Valencia 28
28012 Madrid
Spain

www.galeriamartacervera.com

  

DANIELE FORMICA – BOYS BY THE POOL

Posted on 2021-04-26

To swim in a pool of material belongings, plunging, drifting, whirling. The water is glistening, and so are the boys, staying afloat in the quiet streams of aquatic nostalgia. Fidgety silhouettes merge into one another, blurring the limits of their bodies. The water is inviting yet challenging, for its fluid state of being is not apt for humans to live in. Partly vulnerable, partly sensual, Formica’s boys exist in a voyeuristic vacuum where their beautiful bodies swing between subject and object by our gaze, and they coexist with repurposed memorabilia and blue introspections. In Boys by the Pool, Daniele Formica invites us to dip into his watery realm and navigate its liquidity.

Daniele Formica’s new series of work follow a common thread in his practice that began last year while he was rediscovering his domestic environment. Drifting in a confining atmosphere with a decreasingly structuralised perception of time, his belongings started dissolving around him.

Opposite – Blue Pigment (Some boys drift), 2021

Exhibition runs through to May 22nd, 2021

Ellen de Bruijne PROJECTS
Singel 372
1016 AH Amsterdam
The Netherlands

www.edbprojects.com