HELEN PASHGIAN

Posted on 2019-12-23

Pashgian’s primary objective is to explore light as both a medium and subject of sculpture. Originally pursuing an academic career in art history, Pashgian planned to begin her doctoral research on the 17th century Dutch masters, who were renowned for their innovative ability to paint light. By the early 1960s, she had turned her attention to art making and began working with industrial materials, experimenting with casting techniques that would allow resin to encapsulate light within a solid form. Part of a pioneering program of artists in residence at the California Institute of Technology, from 1970-71 she was among the first artists and scientists given access to numerous materials developed within the California aerospace industry that had recently become declassified. During her time in the residency program, she pushed the boundaries of her experimentation, leading her to dramatically increase the scale of her work using highly volatile polymer compounds.

Opposite – Untitled, 2019

Exhibition runs through to February 29th, 2020

Lehmann Maupin
74-18, Yulgok-ro 3-gil, Jongno-gu
Seoul
South Korea

www.lehmannmaupin.com

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TERESITA FERNÁNDEZ

Posted on 2019-12-23

Merging the conceptual and the material within her Dark Earth series, Fernández sculpts raw charcoal into sumptuously textured, abstracted images that challenge conventional notions of landscape art traditions. These panoramic landscape scenes expand and contract to suggest ancient mountain ranges, bodies of flowing water, subterranean minerals, radiant skies, and the immensity of the cosmos. Fernández’s sense of the landscape suggests not only the physicality of the land, but also the history of human beings who have carefully cultivated it, or abused it, and the subsequent erasure that continues to shape our present-day perceptions of the people and places around us. Elaborating on ideas of the traditional “figure in the landscape,” Fernández uses
the reflective quality of the golden metal to prompt viewers to consider their own role in this system, as their gaze is returned and distorted within this constructed landscape, and to reexamine their place in the eroded physical and psychological spaces produced by centuries of dominant colonialism.

Opposite – Dark Earth (Glory), 2019

Exhibition runs through to January 4th, 2020

Lehmann Maupin
501 W 24th Street
NY 10011
New York

www.lehmannmaupin.com

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VALIE EXPORT – THE 1980 VENICE BIENNALE WORKS

Posted on 2019-12-16

A pioneer in film, video and installation art, with a career spanning close to five decades, VALIE EXPORT has produced one of the most significant bodies of feminist art in the post-war period. Awarded this year’s Roswitha Haftmann Prize, in recognition of her outstanding contribution to the visual arts, EXPORT’s groundbreaking films and performances throughout the 1960s and 70s introduced a new form of radical feminism to Europe and were among the most revolutionary – and definitive – statements of their time.
Marking a key moment for the internationally acclaimed artist, The 1980 Venice Biennale Works will present EXPORT’s innovative multimedia installation from the 39th Venice Biennale. Originally shown alongside Maria Lassnig in the 1980 Austrian Pavilion, EXPORT’s installation embodies the fierce and fearless interrogation of oppressive power structures and hierarchical systems of control at the heart of the artist’s practice.

Opposite – Einkreisung, 1976

Exhibition runs through to January 25th, 2020

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac
Ely House
37 Dover Street
W1S 4NJ
London

www.ropac.net

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ALEX KATZ

Posted on 2019-12-16

In the large canvases that Alex Katz calls Splits, a single subject is painted from different angles and repeated in sequence. The images are cut or “split”, as if taken by a camera. They are inspired by the new possibilities that the smartphone offers to take pictures easily, and thus sum up the paradigms of a contemporary world influenced by photography, cinema and the mass media.
Alongside the paintings we will show four preparatory cartoons: large drawings made by the artist to enlarge the images and transfer them onto canvas with the same technique that Raphael and the Renaissance artists used to transfer the outlines of their frescos to the walls. We will also present a number of drawings from the 1960s to the present, made in pencil or charcoal, and individual oil sketches on panel. The entire creative process will thus be visible, from the drawing through an oil study and a cartoon until the final oil painting.

Opposite – Susanne 5, 2016

Exhibition runs through to April 11th, 2020

Monica De Cardenas
Chesa Albertini | Via Maistra 41
CH-7524 Zuoz
Switzerland

www.monicadecardenas.com

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ANN WEATHERSBY – THERE IS A CODE OF BEHAVIOR SHE KNEW

Posted on 2019-12-16

In Ann Weathersby’s work, the page reflects and the glass absorbs. Books close and harden, like sewn-up wounds. Pulp fossilized. Stripped of language, the women on their covers float, putting down their meanings with a sigh, as one would a bag or a baby. Arched backs, open mouths, closed eyes. Found photographs are pressed into flat translucent weights. You could fill your pockets with these palm-sized memories, or throw them with ease, watch them shatter. Some of the women in the room we know, some are nameless. But they are all familiar, known in a quiet stomach sense, similar to how you could still find the home of your middle school best friend with no address. She moved towns away, decades ago, but you half expect to see her face in the window.

Weathersby mixes the colors in her painterly glass sculptures, pressing kinetic hues into stillness. No wonder this is how people used to evoke divine presence: a pool of pink light stains the empty floor. Here, shadows fall golden. Lilac glows. Without the tangle of girls and history intruding, it could be a room of minimalist sculpture, pure form, boy heaven. But instead, they lean on the shelf together, milky obelisks and reclining limbs. Both seem precarious and ancient. Wooden boxes open to reveal a different kind of precious relic: Judy Blume, Go Ask Alice, found self-portraits, angled and curious. Blume enters another pantheon of women writers, (Woolf, Duras, Lessing, etc.), worshipped by way of citation. Weathersby creates a palimpsest, sanding down the ink on familiar texts so that the words gently lift from the page, and then printing her own surreal narratives in their place.

Exhibition runs through to January 19th, 2020

Fortnight Institute
60 East 4th St.
NYC 10003

fortnight.institute

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KONRAD LUEG

Posted on 2019-12-09

A seminal figure of the German postwar art scene, Konrad Lueg (1939–1996) mobilized unconventional materials and exhibition formats to critique the rise of mass consumerism and the burgeoning commercial art world in mid-century Germany. Better known as Konrad Fischer, the legendary gallerist who represented artists Carl Andre, Charlotte Posenenske, Sol LeWitt, Robert Ryman, Hanne Darboven, and Bruce Nauman, among others, Lueg worked as an artist in the 1960s. This exhibition, the second of Lueg’s work at Greene Naftali, presents a selection of works from 1963–1968. Contextualizing the pivotal end of Lueg’s career as an artist and the 1967 opening of Konrad Fischer Galerie with a group of early works, the exhibition traces his bold material and formal investigations.

Opposite – Red and Green Thingamajigs, 1966

Exhibition runs through to December 20th, 2019

Greene Naftali
508 West 26th Street
NY 10001
New York

www.greenenaftaligallery.com

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