SAM DURANT – ICONOCLASM

Posted on 2020-10-05

For over two decades, Durant has been engaged in an ongoing dialogue with tumultuous and forgotten events of the past, shining a light on these histories to reveal their resonance with broader social, political, and cultural issues. In a new series of graphite works drawn from archival documentation, Durant depicts the intentional and often violent destruction of public monuments. Produced in 2018, this body of work was first exhibited last year at Library Street Collective in Detroit, and is being shown in October 2020 in Los Angeles at a time when monument-removal has become a divisive political debate issue in the lead up to the US General Election. A new electric sign by the artist commemorates the occasion.

Opposite – Remember in November, 2020

Exhibition runs through to November 7th, 2020

Blum & Poe
2727 South La Cienega Boulevard
90034
Los Angeles

www.blumandpoe.com

  

JULIA CHIANG – HOLDING MY BREATH MOVING CLOSER CLOSER

Posted on 2020-10-05

Chiang is known for her detailed paintings which take flat-colour backgrounds as a setting for an intricate web of shapes and forms, flowing in converging directions and carefully constructed through layers of paint. From an initial viewing the compositions seemingly give off the appearance of a uniform execution but upon closer study reveals the differences in transparency and definition, and at times the presence of uncertainty and chance in the painterly process.
The repetition of pointed ellipses are a prominent feature in Chiang’s paintings, occupying the expanse of flat colour and creating a sense of movement, a channel of energy. Underneath, large forms appear to guide and gather the flow; or layered on top they loom above, threatening to encroach and disturb the serene pattern. The strive for pattern continuity, the ambiguity between containment and expansion, pushing between shapes and directions are reminiscent of the pushing of physical and emotional boundaries Chiang contemplates within her visual language.

Opposite – LEAN MORE, 2020

Exhibition runs through to November 6th, 2020

The Modern Institute
14-20 Osborne Street
G1 5QN
Glasgow

www.themoderninstitute.com

  

JEAN DUPUY – SANS QUEUE NI TÊTE

Posted on 2020-10-05

If there is one expression that Jean Dupuy particularly likes to use when taking leave of friends it is a knowingly delivered “On ne se perd pas de vue.” Much more than the pat “We’ll stay in touch,” the words carry a particular resonance in this artist’s mouth that those unfamiliar with his modus operandi would struggle to imagine. They refer, in fact, to a series of works he made under the same title in the mid-1990s and showed, notably, at Galerie Loevenbruck, Paris, in the exhibition “Sans queue ni tête.” Bringing together the artist’s explorations in the field of modest machines and their capacity to entangle the gaze, this installation demonstrated in condensed form his taste for humble mechanisms involving meticulous bricolage and the poetics of the ordinary, which he had begun to develop years before.

Opposite – Post Flux, 1991

Exhibition runs through to October 17th, 2020

Loevenbruck
6, rue Jacques Callot
75006 Paris

www.loevenbruck.com

  

RON NAGLE – LINCOLNSHIRE SQUIRE

Posted on 2020-09-28

Ron Nagle’s sculptures might measure only the size of a clenched fist, but their intricate, dynamic panoramas evoke planetary domains. Stuccoed façades meet twiggy appendages, while slick, oily layers ooze over the sharp edges of perfect, geometric blocks. Meticulously crafted out of arrangements of texturally and formally contrasting elements, Nagle’s abstractions are both other-worldly and entirely of this one: they evoke a range of influences reaching between mid-century hot-rod cars of the US West Coast, and the composite sensibility of Japanese shibui and wabi-sabi. His new works for Modern Art oscillate between conveying a sense of interior and exterior. They may at once appear loosely like still-life landscapes – conveying a sense of the familiar outdoors, and at the same time describe something as specific as the details of the internal architecture of an unknown place, as though plucked from a dream.

Opposite – Based in SF, 2017

Exhibition runs through to December 18th, 2020

Modern Art
4-8 Helmet Row
EC1V 3QJ
London

www.modernart.net

  

MIMMO ROTELLA – BEYOND DÉCOLLAGE

Posted on 2020-09-28

Perhaps best known for his Décollages made of distressed street posters ripped from the walls of Rome, “Beyond Décollage” establishes Mimmo Rotella (1918 – 2006) as a major pioneer of the Pop Art movement, who worked simultaneously with Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg.

Rotella created an art form that would chronicle his time and marry the power of iconic film and popular imagery to the history of painting, forming a portrait of Italy during its economic boom as it rebranded itself with modernity in the post-war decades. He did so by inventing new techniques to transform the traditional canvas into a photographic surface, a space for layering, printing and exploring what an image could be. The artist experimented with developing photographs on canvas in his Photo Emulsions and with layering and overprinting found images with newsprint and all manner of popular media in his Artypos.

Opposite – Arabesque, 1965

Exhibition runs through to December 12th, 2020

Cardi Gallery
22 Grafton Street
W1S4EX
London

cardigallery.com

  

SHOZO SHIMAMOTO

Posted on 2020-09-28

Shimamoto’s idea is to bring paint back to the material dimension, to the physicality of a chromatic element no longer perceived as a representational vehicle. The result of his technique (the ‘bottle crash’) is a true chromatic explosion. His bottle crash actions of the last decade have an unusual configuration in terms of both the relationship between event and work, and the emotional dimension connected to the action. In fact, these are representative and spectacular moments, real social acts, which include the production of paintings as their outcome. The result is generated by chance, but the gesture and its spectacularity are carefully calibrated.

Shozo Shimamoto was born in Osaka in 1928. After attending the University of Kwansei Gakuin, he became famous as the founder of the Gutai movement in the 1950s, distinguishing himself with an action-based pictorial style, offering an Oriental response to Pollock’s Abstract Expressionism and Allan Kaprow’s Happenings. His works are featured in important exhibitions and museum collections worldwide.

Opposite – Magi M , 2008

Exhibition runs through to December 12th, 2020

Cardi Gallery
Corso Di Porta Nuova 38
20121 Milan
Italy

cardigallery.com