JOSH SPERLING – PARADISE

Posted on 2020-12-14

Sperling draws on the language of minimalist painting from the 1960s and 1970s, working primarily with shaped canvases. He crafts intricate plywood supports over which canvas is stretched and painted in an extending series of signature palettes. In their three-dimensionality, his works blur the lines between painting and sculpture, image and object. Mining a wide range of sources, from design to art history, Sperling has crafted a unique visual vocabulary remarkable for its expressive quality and irrepressible energy.

Paradise, Sperling’s largest exhibition to date, introduces numerous innovations to his honed repertoire. Sperling here announces both formal and technical developments that signal a bold and exciting direction. New to this exhibition, the addition of stylistic treatments and, in some occurrences, the stark removal of all color, a gesture that reveals the shaped forms in their natural states.

Opposite – Sex on a Hammock, 2020

Exhibition runs through to January 16th, 2021

Perrotin
3/F, 27 Huqiu Road
Huangpu District
200002 Shanghai
China

www.perrotin.com

  

WHAT FRUIT IT BEARS

Posted on 2020-12-14

What fruit it bears, is a exhibition project presenting work by artists whose practices are radically individual, defying categorization, and yet together represent our time. We find ourselves undulating between an inward looking, defining of individuality through multi-faceted identity, and an unprecedented consciousness of the collective. Besides reinforcing the gallery’s original mission to nimbly respond to, activate and highlight practices from around the world, this exhibition presents approaches to figuration which seek equilibrium in understanding both ourselves and our collective path forward.

Opposite – Nicholas Grafia, Dip Toer (Having a Moment), 2020

Exhibition runs through to January 15th, 2021

Peres Projects
Karl-Marx-Allee 82
10243 Berlin

peresprojects.com

  

ROB PRUITT – MASKS

Posted on 2020-12-14

Pruitt’s exhibition centres on a new painting series of faces, initially conceived as props for a dance performance that never was. The body of work began with the smaller canvases which are scaled to the human face and were to be held by the dancers as masks. Reimagining a project that began a decade ago of quick gestures over gradient fields, Pruitt continues his pursuit of depicting the complexities of personality and emotion through these simple means. With these new paintings, the facial gestures are cut into the canvas with a razor – destructive and creative at the same time, these gestures are married to an accumulation of gradients, patterns, and prints to create a character.

Opposite – Comedy, 2020

Exhibition runs through to January 22nd, 2021

Massimo De Carlo
Piazza Belgioioso 2
20121 Milan
Italy

www.massimodecarlo.com

  

RAPHAELA SIMON – THE FASHION SHOW

Posted on 2020-12-07

Conceived for the capital of fashion, The Fashion Show presents a recent body of work that testifies to the development of the artist’s visual vocabulary. Raphaela Simon shifts towards a simplified and almost analytical figuration. Her large canvases aspire to summarise their subjects rather than describe them in a realistic way. The artist endeavours to produce apparently simple compositions, applying, over monochrome backgrounds, synthetized motifs of familiar objects. Like key words, or icons, provided by the artist for us to decode each canvas, the elementary work titles such as, Pantolette (mule) or Dicker Schuh (big shoe), keep the viewer at a distance. The shoes displayed here thus take on a totemic dimension.

Alongside these large canvases, coexist the life-sized fabric figures of thin fashion show models and their dressers, actively bustling. Having recently appeared in Simon’s work, these meticulously staged, colourful sculptures, develop their own narratives and dialogue with the artist’s works on canvas.

In addition to the glamorous shades and platform shoes, accessories that reflect the pages of fashion magazines, the body of works selected comprises some apparently odd ones out. Some are perhaps even slightly provocative, such as the monumental representation of a Fleischwurst, a German sausage, referencing the popular culture of the artist’s homeland, as well as a gun, a tennis racket and a ski boot.

Opposite – Fleischwurst, 2020

Exhibition runs through to January 30th, 2021

Galerie Max Hetzler
57, rue du Temple
75004 Paris
France

www.maxhetzler.com

  

PIETER VERMEERSCH

Posted on 2020-12-07

Vermeersch’s artwork feeds on all the antagonisms of the discipline, seeking, for example, to be both !gurative (it always has a photographic source, and these photographs are always made by Vermeersch, even when they are what he calls “accidental”) and abstract (because these “accidental” photographs often only have to o”er a few informal color variations). Even when the canvas is “abstract,” it is paradoxically fabricated as a photorealistic painting, the photographic image being reproduced in it through a meticulous system of grids. Of the canvas, it
sometimes only retains the format, leading it towards other media: in the Paris exhibition, the !rst room includes silkscreen prints on marble and the last room displays a set of oil paintings on fossilized wood, a wood that, as Vermeersch puts it, time has “mineralized.” In the marble silkscreen prints, “matter becomes image” in favor of an “industrialization of pointillism.”

Opposite – Installation view

Exhibition runs through to January 30th, 2021

Perrotin
76 rue de Turenne
75003 Paris
France

www.perrotin.com

  

ROBERT SMITHSON – PRIMORDIAL BEGINNINGS

Posted on 2020-12-07

Primordial Beginnings will investigate Smithson’s exploration of, as he said in 1972, “origins and primordial beginnings, […] the archetypal nature of things.” This careful selection of works on paper will demonstrate how Smithson worked as, to use his words, a geological agent. He presciently explored the impact of human beings on the surface of our planet. The earliest works are fantastical science-fiction landscape paintings embedded in geological thinking. These rarely seen paintings from 1961 point to his later earthworks and proposals for collaborations with industry. Between 1961 and 1963 Smithson developed a series of collages showing evolving amphibians and dinosaurs. Paris in the Spring (1963) depicts a winged boy atop a Triceratops beside the Eiffel Tower, while Algae Algae (ca. 1961-63) combines paint and collage turtles in a dark green sea of words.

Opposite – Untitled, 1963

Exhibition runs through to January 9th, 2021

Marian Goodman Gallery
79 rue du temple
75003 Paris
France

www.mariangoodman.com