LAURENT GRASSO – FUTURE HERBARIUM

Posted on 2021-04-05

The exhibition, Grasso’s first solo presentation with Perrotin in Hong Kong, is titled after his latest investigation into the idea of exploring the contemporary world anew. Key to these ongoing studies is his recently debuted film Artificialis, which was produced in collaboration with the Musée d’Orsay, in dialogue with its exhibition, The Origins of the World: The Invention of Nature in the 19th Century. In parallel to his monumental installation Artificialis at Musée d’Orsay, Grasso developed Future Herbarium, a body of painted and sculpted flowers executed in the manner of nineteenth-century herbariums, shaped by observations of different species of flowers that mutated after the Fukushima disaster in Japan.

Exhibited alongside Future Herbarium, Solar Wind, a video installation also presented at the new Jeonnam Museum of Art, South Korea in March, explores concepts of science, belief, illusion, and fiction, based on the artist’s interest in solar storms and space meteorology. Inspired by his permanent light installation on the outskirts of the thirteenth arrondissement in Paris, Solar Wind visually renders in real time, in the form of colored undulations, the activity occurring on the surface of the Sun.

Opposite – Solar Wind, 2020

Exhibition runs through to April 24th, 2021

Perrotin
807, 8/F, K11 Atelier Victoria Dockside
18 Salisbury Road
Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon
Central Hong Kong
China

www.perrotin.com

  

CHRISTIAN NEWBY – THE DRUM, THE CHIME, THE SCRAPE, THE SPLASH, THE JERK

Posted on 2021-04-05

Newby incorporates techniques from industrial textile production into a drawing practice that aims to subvert the assumptions pertaining to value and skill within fine and applied arts practice, as well as challenge the design principles and craft rhetoric commonly associated with carpet tufting.

The works on display are made using a handheld industrial carpet-tufting gun and created through a process of improvised drawing. He is currently looking at the carpet-tufting gun as a case study in how the roles of artist, artisan and fabricator are determined by terminal belief systems in productivity and commodification. His unique technique of ‘drawing with carpet’ redirects the manufacturing function of the gun and instead explores its capacities as a mark-making tool, while observing it as a fundamental equivalent to the pencil, spray can, paintbrush and tattoo needle. His works carry an awareness of the anonymity of globalized commercial production and mass labour, in direct contrast with the skilful mastery equated with artisanal handicraft.

Opposite – Raspberry-Jail, 2020

Exhibition runs through to May 29th, 2021

Patricia Fleming Gallery
80 Nicholson St
G5 9ER
Glasgow

www.patricia-fleming.com

  

HELEN BEARD – LYRICAL LINES

Posted on 2021-03-31

Four new prints by Helen Beard, available to buy online from 10:00am GMT Wednesday 31st March, 2021.

“I used to hate my work being referred to as pornographic, and also I used to hate it being referred to as erotic. I didn’t want to be pigeonholed. But I did read Audre Lorde’s essay about the power of the erotic recently, and actually, I think I’m much more comfortable with the term ‘erotic’ now, and I don’t mind that label. Because she talks about it being a lifeforce of creativity, eroticism is that, and a female lifeforce. You know, it’s what creates us all, there isn’t anything more important.”

“I knew that I wanted to make a painting with a clitoris shape. Nobody knew it was that shape until really recently, I just couldn’t believe that we wouldn’t know that. I guess doctors didn’t study female anatomy, it was unimportant in a patriarchal system. It’s a lovely shape and it’s really graphic, and the minute I saw it, it made me think of those Matisse works. I wanted to make each one slightly different because all women are different. So they couldn’t be the same but I wanted to keep them as simple shapes, like Matisse’s cut outs and I did do them as cut outs to start with. The titles of my works are really important and I was making an awful lot of paintings, so it felt factory-like, and I was thinking about Warhol and The Factory and listening to that Gang of Four song ‘It’s Her Factory’ and then it just sort of seemed really relevant. It was significant that it was my factory, that it’s a woman’s.”
Helen Beard

Opposite – It’s Her Factory, 2021

The prints will be on display in the gallery from Monday 12th April, 2021

Paul Stolper
31 Museum Street
London
WC1A 1LH

www.paulstolper.com

  

MATEO LÓPEZ – DRAWINGS

Posted on 2021-03-29

In March of 2020, after six years in Brooklyn, NY, López returned to his native Bogotá to wait out the quarantine. The familiar act of putting graphite to paper was a comfort in a moment of uncertainty. In his own words, “I just need time, a table, and I can start drawing. When we started quarantine, I was drawing like mad. Like everyone, I felt very emotional. I was trying to release that.”
The included drawings are part of an ongoing installation-based series titled “Old Ideas Stuck in Corners,” begun in 2015. The series consists of a modular reconstruction of a wall made out of multiple pine panels tacked with a myriad of works on paper that are continually rearranged and replaced over time. While the wood partition is currently located in the artist’s vacant Brooklyn studio, López’s works on paper exist as an ever-evolving creative action representative of his studio process. López’s multifaceted practice spans diverse fields of study, from architecture and design to educational theory and dance. These varied conceptual interests take form in works on paper, sculpture, site-specific installation, and performance. López’s latest drawings revisit the fundamentals of his background in technical draftsmanship and architecture by using ‘line’ as a point of departure.

Opposite – Bricolage, 2021

Exhibition runs through to April 24th, 2021

Casey Kaplan
121 West 27th Street
10001
New York

caseykaplangallery.com

  

CHLOE WISE – THANK YOU FOR THE NICE FIRE

Posted on 2021-03-29

In this series, Wise proposes scenarios of simulated familiarity, where smiles, hand gestures, and utterances are at odds with underlying realities, such as widespread uncertainty, willful ignorance, growing inequality, and aspirational notions of “unity” that reinforce a status quo. Underneath (or alongside) the comfort of platitudes resides the chaotic potential of the abject.
In Baudrillard’s experimental travelogue America (1986), he cross-examines the American smile in postwar America and its own travel within Reagan’s America:

“The smile of immunity, the smile of advertising: ‘This country is good. I am good. We are the best’. It is also Reagan’s smile – the culmination of the selfsatisfaction of the entire American nation […] Smile to show how transparent, how candid you are. Smile if you have nothing to say. Most of all, do not hide the fact that you have nothing to say nor your total indifference to others.”

Opposite – All that free speech is very expensive, 2021

Exhibition runs through to April 24th, 2021

Almine Rech
39 East 78th Street
NY 10075
New York

www.alminerech.com

  

JESSICA RANKIN – THE NOSTALGIA FOR THE INFINITE

Posted on 2021-03-29

Known for her large-scale embroideries, collages and watercolours that combine celestial maps and landscapes with text, Rankin’s recent works focus more specifically on the language of painting. While her earlier embroideries could be read within a historical tradition of landscape painting, Rankin’s new paintings can be situated within the trajectory of abstraction.

This new body of work developed in the aftermath of the 2016 US election. A period of personal struggle for the artist, in these works Rankin focuses on ideas of desire, joy, intimacy and tenderness and how, in an age of political and social turmoil, these states can forge a space for resistance. In particular, Rankin was inspired by the way marginalised sectors of society – including queer people or people of colour as well as women – are able to maintain identities and relationships and forge a place in the world, in the wake of increasing social conservatism.

Opposite – Strange Currents, EA, 2020

Exhibition runs through to May 1st, 2021

White Cube
144-152 Bermondsey Street
SE1 3TQ
London

www.whitecube.com