AJARB BERNARD ATEGWA

Posted on 2020-11-16

The exhibition consists of a new series of portrait based works and the title of the exhibition references the photo studio beside the house that the artist grew up in. The portraits in this exhibition straddle two temporalities – referencing the black and white studio portraiture popular across countries in post-independence Africa, as well as a contemporary selfie culture.

In both cases, the camera that Ategwa imagines is a technology that marks ascendance, status, abundance. The artist demonstrates that to pose for a camera is to control your own image, to know what part of yourself to project, to know what to be proud of. That celebratory energy is channeled by Ategwa through these new paintings. The documentation of a life, is also to be seen. Evident in these portraits is the post-colonial shift away from the ethnographic view of “Africa”, towards a reclamation of the camera as a tool for the affirmation of the self.

Opposite – Studio Ekwe’s, 2020

Exhibition runs through to November 20th, 2020

Peres Projects
Karl-Marx-Allee 82
10243 Berlin
Germany

www.peresprojects.com

  

GLENN SORENSEN

Posted on 2020-11-16

Though figurative painting has been the base of his practice in preceding bodies of work, Sorensen has in recent years increasingly let go of recognizable references in his work. This latest presentation of striking black and green works characterizes Sorensen’s progression into ever greater abstraction.

Essentialism has been the driving force behind Sorensen’s work. In previous work this led him to portray his every day, domestic surroundings, focusing on flowers and plants and his family. The resulting works are instilled with a dreamlike, removed atmosphere, in which the underlying private tensions and emotions remain concealed within the image.

In this recent body of works Sorensen pushes himself further, creating paintings in which the source of the image is masked to unrecognizability. Rather, with the painted canvases laid on wooden panels, the works evoke religious icons. In the use of materials and abstraction, Sorensen explores the essential in the image to a heightened degree. The various bold and less defined lines and spots of colour depicted, communicate an array of movements, emotions and tensions both unknowable and open to interpretation.

Opposite – Non-Stop, 2018

Exhibition runs through to November 19th, 2020

Annet Gelink Gallery
Laurierstraat 187-189
NL-1016PL Amsterdam
Netherlands

www.annetgelink.com

  

WALTER PRICE – PEARL LINES

Posted on 2020-11-16

Walter Price’s paintings offer visions that straddle abstraction and representation, combining suggestions of personal memories, collective history and cultural ciphers within his constructions. Extraordinarily apt at placing the viewer, Price’s compositions invoke the feeling of peering into lucid dreams or surreal stage sets, bringing forth an awareness of looking at a familiar setting but from an unusual and disjointed view, as if a wall were removed to allow quiet observation from a specific perspective. Objects are thus placed to accommodate this direction, or appear in motion as though the viewer stumbles upon seemingly private scenes: figures appear to be in repose as they lounge within the space surrounded by a chest of drawers, sofa, table, all the usual hallmarks of a domestic interior. However there is an idiosyncrasy in them – these sparse interiors act as vehicles for the non-linear narratives they hold rather than mirroring a reality.

Opposite – GLIDE UNDER THE MOON, 2020

Exhibition runs through to November 14th, 2020

The Modern Institute
3 Aird’s Lane
G1 5HU
Glasgow

www.themoderninstitute.com

  

GABBY ROSENBERG – ICONS

Posted on 2020-11-09

Icons, is a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based Gabby Rosenberg that consists of colorful, abstracted, figurative paintings. Created in a corner of her living room during a statewide stay-at-home order, Rosenberg’s new works depict figures in action that are confined underneath an archway. They are comprised of a mix of colorful rounded forms with their limbs, torsos and heads outlined with a contrasting band of color. Borne of imagination, introspection and frustration, the paintings obliquely convey aspects of our troubled time. However, they also convey Rosenberg’s delight in painting. In that way, her spirited effort is the essence of the work.

Opposite – Motion, 2020

Exhibition runs through to November 14th, 2020

Steve Turner
6830 Santa Monica Blvd.
CA 90038
Los Angeles

steveturner.la

  

SHAHZIA SIKANDER – WEEPING WILLOWS, LIQUID TONGUES

Posted on 2020-11-09

Weeping Willows, Liquid Tongues is an expansive, in-depth look into Sikander’s recent work, featuring the artist’s dynamic largeand-intimately-scaled drawings, a captivating new single channel video-animation, luminous, intricate mosaics and her first ever free-standing sculpture. Shahzia Sikander takes classical Indo-Persian miniature painting as the point of departure for her work. From premodern beginnings to contemporary influences, it is precisely this historical continuum and its continuous capacity for reinvention that has sparked Sikander’s visually rich engagement in multiple media. The works in the exhibition explore tensions
between power and powerlessness to present transformative ideas. Sikander’s interest in sociology, psychoanalysis, and the examination of how culture and society shape the imagination is all fodder for her work. The ways in which violence, systemic racism, class and cultural fears are deeply entrenched in media and political representations, be it the fear of the unknown, the migrant, the immigrant, the Muslim, the LGBTQ community, the ‘other’ and the various fault lines of race, class and gender also intersect within her work.

Opposite – Arose, 2020

Exhibition runs through to December 19th, 2020

Sean Kelly
475 Tenth Avenue
NY 10018
New York

seankelly-viewingroom

  

BASIM MAGDY – RENEGADE DREAMS HANGING FROM THE CLOUDS

Posted on 2020-11-09

While Basim Magdy’s film NEW ACID centers on the world of pure words, with chats as the new reality, Magdy’s paintings also focus on surreal stories and alternative realities, dealing with the extinction of the world, animal species that never existed, and past predictions of the apocalypse. What became of the prophecies that never actually happened? What if you – and the three lemurs – arrive at the gateway to the other world and find it doesn’t open? Driven by the urge to escape, Basim Magdy views the world as an archive with many openings but also a number of dead ends . Rather than focusing merely on what has been, he also explores what might have been and what never was.

Opposite – Several Molecules of Future Liberties Manifesting as Baby Miracles (2020)

Exhibition runs through to November 22nd, 2020

König Galerie
St. Agnes – Alexandrinenstr, 118-121
10969 Berlin

www.koeniggalerie.com