GARY SIMMONS – SCREAMING INTO THE ETHER

Posted on 2020-04-20

Gary Simmons’s latest work expands the artist’s decades-long examination into the propagation of racial stereotypes through American media and its devastating effects on how people of color perceive themselves and are perceived by others. The twenty new paintings on view reconsider his signature “erasure” technique and the racist cartoon characters Simmons first appropriated in his renowned chalkboard drawings from the early 1990s.
Simmons employs a rich gray palette in the backgrounds of his new canvases for the first time, recalling dusty blackboards or a flickering blackand-white film. Isolated against them are figures based on the Looney Tunes characters Bosko, his girlfriend Honey, and Bosko’s “Little Sister.” Introduced to movie theater audiences in 1930, the three characters were degrading caricatures of black Americans based heavily on minstrelsy. Rendered as ghostly fragments, the figures appear as faint specters on the canvas, just as the insidious imagery lingers in our collective imagination.

Opposite – Piano Man, 2020

Exhibition runs through to April 25th, 2020

Metro Pictures (Online Viewing Room)
519 West 24th Street
NY 10011
New York

www.metropictures.com

  

REENA SPAULINGS – LIFE AT SEA

Posted on 2020-04-20

The high-viz yellow image of two peasant girls is based on a Camille Pissarro painting we used to visit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The anarchist-Impressionist made many paintings and drawings of laborers shown in moments of rest, napping, spacing out, gossiping and just being there in bucolic landscapes. Awkward croppings and intimate angles make these figures of not-working workers float strangely against harsh, multicolored fields. Here, one figure sits wedged in the painting’s lower left corner as the other leans on her hoe.
They are seen chatting together against a tilted rectangle of cultivated land, with the horizon pushed back almost as far as it can go. The empty space between the girls, imagined now as a sort of viral gap, full of potential communication, is echoed by an extra area of blank neon yellow to their right. We named our painting New Models after the Berlin-based website and podcast.

Opposite – New Models (after Pissarro), 2020

Exhibition runs through to April 25th, 2020

Galerie Neu
Linienstraße 119 abc
10115 Berlin
Germany

www.galerieneu.net

  

ARNE MALMEDAL

Posted on 2020-04-20

Since the late 1980s, Malmedal has explored the problems around figure / ground / image / frame in several large paintings that were mainly executed in earth colors with clear references to the natural world. These works were shown at Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo in 1994 together with monochrome paintings on fiberglass scrim, canvases framed by a window-like grid, and paintings where a boxy frame structure was fully integrated into the painting. This exhibition manifested his position in the Norwegian art scene as a vital and experimental abstract painter with a playful look at the history of the medium.
In the paintings from the early 2000s, light became an important motif for Malmedal. He was preoccupied with portraying color as pure light, resulting in images where a monochrome field
resides in a spatial arrangement framed by a white surface, reminiscent of American artist James Turrell’s light installations. Several of these works were central to Malmedal’s
retrospective exhibition at The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo, 2003, demonstrating his delicate treatment of color and its’ associations with nature and light
and its’ own materiality on the canvas.

Opposite – Installation view

Exhibition runs through to April 25th, 2020

Galleri Riis
Arbins gate 7
NO-0253 Oslo
Norway

galleririis.com

  

THE JOHN ARMLEDER AND ROB PRUITT SHOW

Posted on 2020-04-13

Featuring a joint show with influential Swiss artist John Armleder, and new works by American postconceptual artist Rob Pruitt, the space is launched with jovial and conceptual tone; equally elucidating on the architectural gravitas of the gallery’s surroundings. John Armleder will present a series of iconic works that embody the necessary playful statements that are key in the artist’s multi-layered practice: colorful, abstract and geometrical reflections around the notion of space. On the other hand, Pruitt’s signature tongue in cheek wit mystifies melancholy and layers of separation by analyzing the infinite, and increasingly relevant, semiology of squares, screens and tokens.

Opposite – Installation view

Exhibition runs through to April 30th, 2020

Massimo De Carlo
Viale Lombardia 17
20131 Milan

www.massimodecarlo.com

  

IDA EKBLAD – A DEEP MEDICINE

Posted on 2020-04-13

Ida Ekblad explains that she has tried to copy in oil what she recently achieved in her signature puff and plastisol works. In oil there is another world of pigment. Ekblad uses the highest quality paint with no fillers, pure cold pressed linseed, which makes the colors extremely varied. Puff turns matte when heated and dried, but these oils are saturated and shiny, vibrant, almost freaky.

Opposite – PSYCOTRONIC MICROWAVE, 2020

Exhibition runs through to July 31st, 2020

Galerie Max Hetzler
57, rue du Temple
75004 Paris

www.maxhetzler.com

  

ETEL ADNAN – PLANÈTES

Posted on 2020-04-13

Etel Adnan has always been interested in cosmology, the relationship of planets and stars with each other, butabove all their interaction with Earth. Her first poem, written when she was still living in Lebanon, evoked the link between the sun and the sea. In the 1960s, in California, she was fascinated by space exploration. When Gagarin died, she wrote A Funeral March for The First Cosmonaut and the publishing house founded by her
friend Simone Fattal was named The Post-Apollo Press, in tribute to the Apollo missions organised by NASA.

Opposite – Planète 9, 2019

Exhibition runs through to May 6th, 2020

Galerie Lelong & Co.
13, rue de Téhéran
75008 Paris

www.galerie-lelong.com