ALLEN JONES

Posted on 2020-03-09

Allen Jones is part of an extraordinary generation of artists from North America and across Western Europe born in the 1930s who, children during the horrors of World War II, were art students in the shift from the austerity of the recovering fifties into a decade of the prosperous swinging sixties with its celebration of a newfound sense of consumerism and sexual liberation. There had not been a comparable decade in Europe since the twenties. In the world of painting, artists who typified this generation included, in the States, James Rosenquist and Tom Wesselmann, Martial Raysse in France, Michelangelo Pistoletto in Italy, and Konrad Klapheck in Western Germany. In Britain there was Allen Jones. All of these artists went on to have distinguished and inventive careers over several decades until the present.

Opposite – Island (diptych), 1986

Exhibition runs through to April 11th, 2020

Almine Rech
64 Rue de Turenne
75003 Paris

www.alminerech.com

  

MARC NEWSON

Posted on 2020-03-09

Few practitioners have occupied the common ground of design and art with such conviction as Newson, for whom the discipline of industrial design presents an inexhaustible opportunity to explore new ways of thinking about form and function, materials and production. Over the past thirty-plus years, he has applied his original vision and technical mastery to innovative items of furniture, from the iconic Lockheed Lounge (1986), which he built by hand from aluminum sections to emulate the world-renowned aircraft, to Extruded Tables and Voronoi Shelf (both 2007), each carved in one piece from a block of marble. The current presentation includes works from several recent series—the Chinese cloisonné, as well as the cast glass and Murrina works produced in the former Czech Republic—all entirely new formal experiments.

Opposite – Cloisonné Blue Chair, 2017

Exhibition runs through to March 15th, 2020

Gagosian
Tarmak 22, Gstaad Saanen Airport
Oeystrasse 29
3792 Gstaad
Switzerland

gagosian.com

  

HIROKI TSUKUDA – THEY LIVE

Posted on 2020-03-09

In reference to John Carpenter’s 1988 cult classic film with the same name, They Live presents a dystopian reality whereby current society has become surreptitiously controlled by humanoid extraterrestrials. Enamored by sci-fi since early childhood, Tsukuda has drawn inspiration from dystopic thrillers, apocalyptic novels, and cyberpunk manga. These fictions have percolated into the artist’s consciousness, transforming his ideas and artistic practice.

Working in the realms of drawing and digital collage, Tsukuda creates multi-dimensional pictures by compositing a profusion of found and created images and coding them with computerized characters and cryptic hieroglyphics. The resulting images appear in states of controlled chaos and organic mutation, edging on a pictorial language that merges cyberpunk fantasy and real-life space exploration. Some of these abstractions hang off of large hollow wooden enclosures while a set of four bionic figures suspend from vacant steel-pipe scaffolds. Rocks, driftwood, and other organic materials are presented on wooden shelves alongside these cybernetic environments.

Opposite – Neon Demon, 2019

Exhibition runs through to April 18th, 2020

Petzel Gallery
456 West 18th Street
New York
NY 10011

www.petzel.com

  

DONNA HUANCA – WET SLIT

Posted on 2020-03-02

Huanca’s practice draws particular attention to the skin as the complex interface via which we experience the world around us. Her ‘skin’ paintings – layered on magnified cross-sections of her models’ painted figures photographed during performance – refer directly to the body. During the artistic process, she layers colours and forms with paint on her models, resulting in an indexical practice that places emphasis on the interaction between the ephemerality of experiential art and the permanence of painting. This exploration of the transient pertains directly to the temporal experience of the body, invoking themes of mortality and calling to mind the fleeting connections, both corporeal and emotional, brought about by physicality and touch.

Opposite – Installation view

Exhibition runs through to April 18th, 2020

Simon Lee Gallery
12 Berkeley Street
London
W1J 8DT

www.simonleegallery.com

  

BILL BRANDT / HENRY MOORE

Posted on 2020-03-02

The photographer Bill Brandt and the sculptor Henry Moore first met during the Second World War, when they both created images of civilians sheltering from the Blitz in the London Underground.

This major exhibition brings together over 200 works highlighting the relationships between sculpture, photography, drawing and collage revealed through Brandt and Moore’s shared interests in the subjects and themes of labour, society, industry, the British landscape and the human body. Moore’s celebrated Reclining Figure sculptures and Brandt’s well-known photographs of coal miners and their families in Durham and Yorkshire are on display, alongside rare original colour transparencies by Brandt, and Moore’s little-known photo collages.

Opposite – Henry Moore, Against the Sky, 1973

Exhibition runs through to May 31st, 2020

The Hepworth Wakefield
Gallery Walk
Wakefield
West Yorkshire
WF1 5AW

hepworthwakefield.org

  

JASON S.WRIGHT – SURRENDER PAINTINGS

Posted on 2020-03-02

The medium, so heavily weighed down by traditions, and having so often been declared dead throughout the 20th century, is never just explored for its own sake; Wright reinterprets and revitalizes the painting through the visual culture which characterizes our age. A web of black/white photographs – cut-outs from found magazines or pulled from the internet – of pin-up girls, cowboys, 60s film stars, naked athletes and posing models from the 80s, sinks into Wright’s collage-paintings, together with his cartoonish figures and grinning grim reaper, a psychopomp used as a symbols for traveling between different planes of consciousness. Wright reworks and overpaints these disparate parts with gestural brushstrokes and soft airbrush in bold or synthetic technicolor. His visual explorations on board and paper – zines, prints, t-shirts or found materials – is never limited to one specific medium, nor is it syntactic or hierarchic. He cross-pollinates, combines and is constantly working on several projects and pieces at once

Exhibition runs through to March 21st, 2020

V1 Gallery
Flaesketorvet 69
Koedbyen
1711 Copenhagen V
Denmark

v1gallery.com