JONATHAN MEESE – DR. 50/50FITTYMEESE

Posted on 2020-01-20

Jonathan Meese (°1970 Tokyo, lives and and works in Berlin and Hamburg) is renowned for his multi-faceted work, including wildly exuberant paintings, installations, ecstatic performances and a powerful body of sculptures in a variety of media. Apparently effortlessly, he has developed in all
genres an independent and at the same time unique vocabulary that gives his work a variety, visual energy and quality which, according to Robert Fleck, has been unheard of since Picasso. All of Meese’s work share a humor tending towards the grotesque, as well as a powerful, original creative will. Both are driven and supported by a striving for a rule of art, the Dictatorship of Art.

Opposite – MEIN CHEF CHEFT K.U.N.S.T.!, 2020

Exhibition runs through to March 12th, 2020

Tim Van Laere Gallery
Jos Smolderenstraat 50
2000 Antwerp
Belgium

www.timvanlaeregallery.com

  

FIONA RAE – ABSTRACTS

Posted on 2020-01-13

On the occasion of this exhibition, the artist shows a new collection of canvas paintings and more intimate works on paper, her Abstracts, in line with her recent formal research. Her preliminary work in gouache and watercolour, less well known and more rarely exhibited, constitutes a set of ideas from which she creates her paintings and thus allows us to catch sight of their deve- lopment. The artist has chosen to present these two practices in a fixing that takes into account their mutual contributions and correspondences.

Fiona Rae’s work incarnates an abstract-pop universe, filled with references to modern and contemporary painting, to pop culture, and to digital technology. Biomorphic forms float at the paintings’ surface and bring to mind the surrealist visions of artists like Yves Tanguy, side by side with figurative elements borrowed directly from manga, comics, Walt Disney, Dr Seuss—quirky and playful resurgences that recall the work of Philip Guston and Takashi Murakami. The gestural, although organized treatment inscribes it in a form of painterly abstraction, while certain pictorial effects simulate the possibilities offered by Photoshop, revealing a painting practice that is resolutely anchored in her time.

Opposite – Abstract 5, 2019

Exhibition runs through to March 7th, 2020

Galerie Nathalie Obadia
18 rue du Bourg-Tibourg
75004 Paris

www.nathalieobadia.com

  

KENICHI HOSHINE – THE MAGICIAN AND THE THIEF

Posted on 2020-01-13

Inspired by a wide range of subjects, from film and television, to theatrical sets, to found imagery, Hoshine’s painting practice is grounded in the experiences of his daily life. Expressed in abstract forms and gestures, however, these everyday references are imbued with newfound emotion and narrative quality. For his upcoming exhibition at Hollis Taggart, Hoshine will present a selection of new paintings on wood panel that capture his converging fascinations with theater, poster design, and the occult.

Opposite – Wurlitzer, 2019


Exhibition runs through to February 15th, 2020

Hollis Taggart
521 W 26th Street, 1st Floor
NY 10001
New York

www.hollistaggart.com

  

ANTONY DONALDSON – PAPERWORK FROM 1960 TO 2019

Posted on 2020-01-13

This show of drawings and prints, which covers Antony Donaldson’s career since he was a student at the Slade to the present, confirms that Joe Goode’s long-held opinion of his friend’s character is no less true of his art.
Donaldson’s art is indeed smart – it questions ceaselessly and scrupulously subverts clichés. It is cultured, in the breadth of its reference, and it is erotic to the nth degree of refinement, which is indeed most un-English. Pre-1960 there wasn’t much English art that dwelt on female sensuality. Donaldson was in the vanguard of that change and as the ultimate authority Marco Livingstone has written (Antony Donaldson Of Memory and Oblivion, The Mayor Gallery, 2015), far from objectifying
women in a male-dominated society his female images, early and late, while ‘sexually alluring’ also ‘exude a certain innocence’. There are 48 works on paper and all but eight of them feature alluringly youthful women. Other subjects – racing cars, planes, searchlight beams – are no less sensually described.

Opposite – Saskia in Esher, 1972

Exhibition runs through to January 31st, 2020

The Mayor Gallery
21 Cork Street
First Floor
W1S 3LZ
London

www.mayorgallery.com

  

STAN DOUGLAS – DOPPELGÄNGER

Posted on 2020-01-09

Since the late 1980s, Stan Douglas has created films and photographs – and more recently theatre productions and other multidisciplinary projects – that investigate the parameters of their medium. His ongoing inquiry into technology’s role in image-making, and how those mediations infiltrate and shape collective memory, has resulted in works that are at once specific in their historical and cultural references and broadly accessible.

Doppelgänger is set in an alternative present. Displayed on two square-format, translucent screens, each of which can be viewed from both sides, the looped narrative unfolds in side-by-side vignettes that depict events on worlds that are light years apart. When one spacecraft embarks on its journey, another is launched at the same time in a parallel reality. Alice, a solitary astronaut, is teleported to a distant planet, and so is her double. Then, Alice and her ship, the Hermes II, for unknown reasons, return. Alice assumes her mission has failed and she has somehow returned home; but she has, in fact, arrived at a world where everything, from writing to the rotation of the sun, is literally the reverse of what she once knew.

Opposite – Doppelgänger, 2019

Exhibition runs from January 31st – February 22nd, 2020

Victoria Miro
16 Wharf Road
London
N1 7RW

Doppelgänger will concurrently be on view at David Zwirner, New York, from January 16th – March 14th, 2020

www.victoria-miro.com

  

NANCY LORENZ – ALCHEMY

Posted on 2020-01-06

Nancy Lorenz’s work fuses a deep understanding of Post-War abstraction with a reverence for the craft and materials of traditional Asian art. Reinterpreting Japanese aestheticism with unrestrained brushwork often yielding unexpected results, Lorenz employs techniques that give material form to the relationship between fine art, craft, and design. The range of her pictoral gesture is closer to the modern abstraction of Joan Mitchell and Lee Krasner, combined with with traditionally-considered decorative techniques such as precious stone inlay, lacquer, and methods of water gilding and burnishing. The artist spent half a decade living in Tokyo, Japan, which left her with a deep understanding of luxurious materials, such as mother-of-pearl, kijiro-urushi (lacquer), and gold leaf, as well as the ability to employ them in painterly gestures that meditate on the Sublime.

Opposite – Landscape Study, 2018-2019

Exhibition runs through to January 26th, 2020

GAVLAK
340 Royal Poinciana Way, Suite M334
FL 33480
Palm Beach

www.gavlakgallery.com