GERHARD RICHTER – PRINTS

Posted on 2019-11-25

Throughout his distinguished career, Richter has remained at the forefront of contemporary abstraction and image-making, embracing haptic process and technological advancements in equal measure and harnessing found imagery in groundbreaking ways. Editions are a central feature of his practice. He modifies details and sometimes entire compositions from his oeuvre, producing artworks that are simultaneously self-referential and new. Divergent in medium, scale, and style, the editions mirror Richter’s mercurial artistic processes and explore the dynamic relationship between source image and pictorial representation.

Many of Richter’s prints are based on personal photographs. He produced his earliest edition Hund (Dog) (1965) by sweeping a paintbrush across a still-damp screenprint depicting the family dog; blurred with a visible texture from the brush hairs, the resulting image is a print that references both painting and photography.

Opposite – Betty, 1991

Exhibition runs through to December 21st, 2019

Gagosian
976 Madison Avenue
NY 10075
New York

gagosian.com

  

UGO RONDINONE – THANX 4 NOTHING

Posted on 2019-11-25

Ugo Rondinone’s thanx 4 nothing, is a mutli-channel video installation that pays tribute to the artist’s late husband, John Giorno. Rondinone reconstructs the gallery into a black box theater, creating an immersive environment through the use of black-and-white film, minimalist score, and the rhythmic intonations of Giorno’s own voice. This exhibition is a prismatic paean to the poet, raconteur, muse, cultural icon, and New York fixture.

Opposite – Installation view

Exhibition runs through to January 18th, 2020

Gladstone Gallery
530 West 21st Street
NY-10011
New York

www.gladstonegallery.com

  

NATHALIE DJURBERG & HANS BERG – ONE LAST TRIP TO THE UNDERWORLD

Posted on 2019-11-18

Djurberg and Berg’s collaborative works conjure surreal landscapes that explore the shadows of human subconsciousness. Using sculpture, stop-motion film, sound, and immersive installation the artists construct narratives that speak to emotional tension, confliction, sexual impulse, and violence.



Rendered through dark humor, with a hint of the absurd, Djurberg and Berg’s work explores an emotional gamut of fear, innocence, power, greed, and shame. The formal qualities of the work—seductive colors, visceral textures and hypnotic music—enhance the emotional dimension and challenge our way of seeing. In dissolving our perspective of morality and bias, Djurberg and Berg invite the viewer to consider our own fears and fantasies.

Opposite – Installation view

Exhibition runs through to December 20th, 2019

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
521 West 21st Street
10011 New York

hetnieuweinstituut.nl

  

SUPERFUNLAND: JOURNEY INTO THE EROTIC CARNIVAL

Posted on 2019-11-18

Super Funland: Journey into the Erotic Carnival examines the sexual history of the carnival, inviting visitors to explore its bacchanalian origins in ancient Greece and Rome and its evolution in pre-industrial Europe and the “midway” of the great World’s Fairs of the 20th century. An historical exploration of carnival’s roots is accompanied by an interactive exhibition of thirteen erotically-charged games and amusements that allows visitors to lose themselves in the carnality, decadence, and joy of a reimagined carnival.

Fairs and festivals have served as outlets for hedonism throughout history, allowing revelers to experience decadent pleasures and, quite often, vice. Following the Industrial Revolution, fairs and festivals began to be carried out at larger scales in the form of traveling carnivals and expositions. Millions of visitors would make pilgrimages to the World’s Fair, where exhibitions on the midway ranged from famed designer Norman Bel Geddes’ topless “Crystal Lassies” to a primitive version of a sex robot. In 1939, Salvador Dali designed the “Dream of Venus” pavilion to promote Surrealist art, featuring bare-breasted performers who posed in bizarre tableaus and dove into large water tanks in an aquatic fantasy of subconscious reveries.

Museum of Sex
233 Fifth Avenue
New York
NY 10016

www.museumofsex.com

  

MATTHEW BARNEY – EMBRASURE

Posted on 2019-11-18

Barney’s 2018 film Redoubt is set on a wolf hunt in Idaho’s rugged Sawtooth Mountains, continuing the artist’s long-standing preoccupation with landscape as both setting and subject. Redoubt adopts the ancient myth of Diana, goddess of the hunt, and Actaeon, a hunter who trespasses on her, as its narrative framework. In Redoubt, an Engraver, played by Barney, creates a series of plein-air drawings on copper plates as he stalks Diana and her attendants. An Electroplater in a remote laboratory subjects them to a chemical process that transforms the Engraver’s drawings: each plate is immersed in an electroplating solution, causing copper growths to form on the engraved lines. Her actions, undertaken with a ritualistic focus, transform the engravings into talismanic objects, connecting them to Barney’s work in drawing, sculpting, and performance.

Opposite – Fascia, 2019

Exhibition runs through to December 21st, 2019

Gladstone Gallery
Gladstone 64
130 East 64th Street
10065 New York

www.gladstonegallery.com

  

PETER HALLEY – HETEROTOPIA II

Posted on 2019-11-11

In Des Espaces Autres (1984), Michel Foucault defines heterotopia in opposition to utopia. While utopias are unrealized representations of a perfected society, heterotopias exist within all societies as realms differentiated from everyday life. Examples include ceremonial, sacred, and institutional spaces such as chapels, cemeteries, libraries, and prisons. They are spaces designated for special activities – creating their own sense of time and operating according to their own standards.

Through a range of media – painting, architectural installation, digital prints, and critical writing, Peter Halley’s work has illuminated the structures of social space and communication that shape our experience of contemporary life. For his second solo exhibition at Greene Naftali, Halley presents Heterotopia II, the latest in a series of large-scale installations exploring the relationship between painting and architectural space. Halley has created a multi-colored, labyrinthine structure in the ground floor gallery housing eight new shaped-canvas paintings, titled after imaginary planets from Isaac Asimov’s science-fictional universe.

Opposite – Installation view

Exhibition runs through to December 20th, 2019

Greene Naftali
508 West 26th Street
NY 10001
New York

www.greenenaftaligallery.com