JEREMY DEMESTER – OUIDAH

Posted on 2020-03-23

The present exhibition was developed through consultation with several Voodoo masters (Vodounnon). An oracle gave the artist twenty-one words. These words, such as sun, moon, arrow or cross, are all symbols that populate the works to activate the world of spirits. Stirred by invisible forces, Demester’s paintings embrace the infinite metamorphoses of this cult, through their intense colourism and their exploration of primordial energies.

Demester’s works are presented along with art objects from his own collection, created in Ouidah, which bear witness to several aspects of the Voodoo journey. The Voodoo art objects take various forms and continually evolve in response to the fluctuations of the Western market, which can be felt in the availability of certain fabrics or in clothing fashions. Voodoo, an ancestral force, embodies in all materials – it dominates life.

Opposite – Le pouvoir de Lissa, 2020

Exhibition runs through to May 9th, 2020

Galerie Max Hetzler
Bleibtreustraße 45
10623 Berlin
Germany

www.maxhetzler.com

  

RYAN TRAVIS CHRISTIAN – BANG BANG PLAY

Posted on 2020-03-23

Ryan Travis Christian’s visual language is unmistakable: his compositions display dense layers of graphite, and their obsessive pencil lines delineate high-contrast graphic fantasies, hypnotic geometric patterns, characters out of pop culture moving in slow motion in hazy, surreal landscapes. They are inspired by old political caricatures and satirical cartoons, the traditional hand-drawn animation of the 1930s (especially the work of Ub Iwerks), the Chicago Imagists of the late 1960s (the artists who made up the group Hairy Who), 1980s pop culture, videogames, advertising.

BANG BANG PLAY takes us into a black-and-white world of drawings that are not animated but are full of movement, presenting stories that are strange, violent, chilling, sexual; existentialist allegories, sometimes despairing, deeply fascinating, figures that are outwardly cheery against a background revealing danger, seductive and banal at the same time.

Opposite – BANG SOON, 2019

Exhibition runs through to April 15th, 2020

Galería Javier López & Fer Francés
General Arrando, 40
28010 Madrid
Spain

www.javierlopezferfrances.com

  

TAL R – HOME ALONE

Posted on 2020-03-23

Tal R transforms everything in his environment into art. His works are known for their daring colors and vivid imagery. Tal R works with a variety of techniques and media including painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, installation, print and furniture. Tal R is a keen observer, who takes inspiration from reality as well as his imagination. His work fits within the northern European tradition of Edvard Munch, Asger Jorn, Per Kirkeby and Georg Baselitz. Historical and art-historical references are abundant: threads of expressionism, fauvism and symbolism continue, as well as a nod to traditional Scandinavian art, art nouveau, outsider art and children’s paintings. Tal R’s enigmatic work offers intersections of personal experience and wider history through a visual jigsaw, finely balanced between representation and abstraction, of what the artist has termed ‘Kolbojnik,’ a Hebrew term for leftovers.

Opposite – Polda, 2019-2020

Exhibition runs through to May 9th, 2020

Tim Van Laere Gallery
Jos Smolderenstraat 50
2000 Antwerp
Belgium

www.timvanlaeregallery.com

  

JORDAN WOLFSON – ARTISTS FRIENDS RACISTS

Posted on 2020-03-16

The exhibition is composed of an installation of HYPERVSN 3D holographic displays that project a range of imagery developed by the artist as well as a new series of wall-mounted brass panels featuring snapshot photographs from Wolfson’s childhood. In ARTISTS FRIENDS RACISTS, Wolfson continues to probe American culture and contemporary life through an eponymously titled work utilizing a new holographic display technology made of spinning fans that have micro LEDs embedded in their blades. The LEDs are programmed to rapidly illuminate in a precise manner while spinning so as to create the illusion of holographic imagery floating in space. These unique devices have primarily been marketed for commercial use—as a means of luring consumers and presenting brands and products in a visually dynamic and novel way.

Opposite – Installation view

Exhibition runs through to March 21st, 2020

David Zwirner
108, rue Vieille du Temple
75003 Paris
France

www.davidzwirner.com

  

MATT KEEGAN – RECYCLE

Posted on 2020-03-16

As its title suggests, Recycle features new video, photography and collage-based work made from pre-existing mass-produced material, repurposed for this exhibition. In the three bodies of work exhibited, commercial images serve as tools for learning, archival material, and stand-ins for purported everyday needs. Tied to the subject of image-based communication—foundational to our present-day condition—Keegan examines ways in which meaning is produced through his selected photographs. Incorporating the language of advertising as his main point of reference, Keegan re-enacts and reanimates his sources by shifting them away from their initial context, frequently resulting in humour and satire.

Inspired by a collection of image-only flashcards, hand-assembled by the artist’s mother to teach English-language learning, Keegan’s commercial-length videos translate four static images into a time-based format. The original ESL flashcards were made by cutting photo reproductions out from catalogues, magazines, newspapers and other printed matter that came into Keegan’s home. He selected these four examples from a set of four hundred doubled-sided cards, for their variety of promotional content. The videos present the animation of the inanimate, the sexually charged, the biographical and the naming of particular subcultures, all through the filter of contemporary advertising.

Opposite – Exhibition view

Exhibition runs through to April 11th, 2020

Pedro Cera
Rua do Patrocínio, 67 E
1350-229 Lisbon
Portugal

www.pedrocera.com

  

HEDDA STERNE

Posted on 2020-03-16

The works in this exhibition are drawn principally from the early 1960s when, inspired by a year and a half spent living in Venice as a Fulbright fellow, Sterne embarked upon a series of ostensibly quieter works composed of numerous horizontals that read as multiple horizon lines. These meditative Vertical Horizontals are at once self-contained, having a kinship with minimalist abstraction, and poetic intimations of landscape, with water and sky seemingly repeated and reflected multiple times within a single image. Sterne described her work as a process of ongoing exploration and discovery. The romantic tendency on display here, with opalescent whites, creams and greys and sonorous umbers interspersed with flashes of ochre, green and gold, is characteristic of a restless, searching quality, elaborated upon in a quote by the artist in which she states, ‘I believe… that isms and other classifications are misleading and diminishing. What entrances me in art is what cannot be entrapped in words.’

Opposite – Vertical Horizontal XVII, 1963

Exhibition runs through to March 21st, 2020

Victoria Miro Mayfair
14 St George Street
W1S 1FE London

www.victoria-miro.com