There are over 200 billion suns in this galaxy, and it is estimated that every second one has a planetary system orbiting it. George Bolster examines the human position in this immense universe, using the discoveries of exoplanets and ancient galaxies as clues to re-interpreting our culture and place in the cosmos. In Intergalactic Romanticism: Fallible Earthlings, Bolster fuses digital and physical painting with tapestry. Each work has multiple stages of discreet analogue and digital processes within it, including embroidery and manipulation of the image by unthreading, the result of his interaction with machines. Through this process, he attempts to create images of the as-yet impossible-to-see surface landscapes of planets outside our solar system. Bolster acknowledges the fallibility of our society and culture: “We need to not live through fiction, but embrace reality as a positive state for our survival.” As the artist embroiders in The Only Intelligent Life Found (2024), one of the tapestries on view, we are meaningless and meaningful. Humans are small and fallible but also absolutely extraordinary—it is necessary to cherish each life we have. Acceptance of this will ultimately help us to recognize and accept who we are. Astronomy as a scientific inquiry continuously distorts the idea of what humans really are and meant to be. Humankind is not necessarily central to the scheme of the universe. The Earth is actually in an insignificant part of the Milky Way Galaxy, which overturns our beliefs about our special place within it. Bolster’s work and perspective experiment grant this alternative view to see this landscape, shifting the focus of historical and political attentions. Many, of course, choose to live their lives based on fictional origin stories, believing they are destined to go to another world after death, while sitting on the precipice of long-term environmental and cultural disaster. The exhibition opens on Friday, February 23, with a reception for the artist from 6 to 8 pm. Intergalactic Romanticism: Fallible Earthlings, is a long-awaited second solo exhibition with the gallery by multidisciplinary artist George Bolster, after his first solo exhibition in 2020 and solo presentation with the gallery at the Amory Show 2021. George Bolster is a multidisciplinary research-based artist addresses ideas and belief systems from various media and perspective—through his ambitiously immersive text and image works encompassing film, installation, tapestry and photography. He utilizes a combination of science, art history, and sci-fi to examine our most prescient societal and species-wide challenges. Bolster has exhibited in a number of museums and galleries, including Barbara Thumm Galerie, Berlin, Germany; MASS MoCA, MA; Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE; RHA, Dublin, Ireland; CCI, Paris, France; and MMCA, Seoul, Korea. Bolster has been awarded grants from the Arts Council of Ireland, and is the recipient of residencies at Bundanon, Bundanon Museum, Australia; CCI, Paris, France (2019); SETI Institute, Mountain View, CA (2016-17); and the Robert Rauschenberg Residency, Captiva, FL (2013). Bolster’s monograph When Will We Recognize Us was recently published by Hirmer, and his work has appeared in Artforum, The New York Times, Washington Post, and Irish Art Review.
]]>Petzel presents Dungeon, a new exhibition by Berlin-based artist Simon Denny. The show marks Denny’s fifth solo exhibition with Petzel. For his upcoming show, Denny has produced new sculptures and paintings responding to the fantasy idiom of the dungeon. Dungeon celebrates the importance of the format in the history and present of virtual world and game design, and how it has been integrated within technology businesses as they build online environments. In game design, the word dungeon is used broadly to describe any labyrinthine complex (castle, cave system, etc.) rather than a prison cell or torture chamber specifically. From tabletop and role-playing games to early computer games, to the busiest contemporary online worlds like Roblox or Minecraft, dungeons are ever-present components of virtual realms. The dungeon as an organizational logic has spread from virtual spaces to social media, metaverses and online retail experiences. Denny’s reverence for gaming culture has been evident in his artworks throughout the past decade. In the 56th Venice Biennale (2015) his installation Secret Power monumentalized fantasy elements found in NSA slides, including reproductions of board games designed by a former NSA graphic designer. For Blockchain Future States (2016) at Petzel, Denny made sculptural editions of the board game Risk, translating logics of businesses from early crypto companies. In his exhibition The Founder’s Paradox (2017), Denny condensed the philosophical worlds around the entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel into tabletop game sculptures. For Dungeon, new artworks take two formats—paintings of dungeon maps and sculptures of dungeon artifacts. The installation references, appropriates and repurposes elements from Dungeons & Dragons (appearing in many iterations and formats since the 1970s), two tabletop games released by Milton Bradley: HeroQuest (1989) and a Hannah Montana edition of Mall Madness (2008), alongside more contemporary online games, forming a multi-era gaming dungeon survey, of sorts. Following the intertwined narratives and affinities between the growth of gaming and big tech, the installation also includes sculptures made from Twitter office equipment liquidated by Elon Musk post-takeover, and a Game of Thrones t-shirt formerly owned and worn by his on/off partner, the musician and technologist Grimes. A replica of a sword from Lord of the Rings, based on a collectible hanging in the office of Palmer Luckey, has been cast by Denny in resin and coffee. Luckey is an entrepreneur and founder of Oculus VR (a headset startup acquired by Meta), and the defense start-up Anduril. Aptly named after the Lord of the Rings blade, Anduril Industries represents an important link between cyber and kinetic warfare, myth and reality: the growing space of “defense tech.” The sculptures and paintings mix digital and analog technologies, including rough and ready 3D prints (some very crude and others more high resolution) and traditional media like oil on canvas overlaid with digital print. The painted maps and sculptural artifacts are rough, touched; forged together in unconventional combinations of surfaces and techniques. Translating the virtual into the tangible, Dungeon synthesizes a visceral impression of a world between realities. Dungeon is organized in conversation with Multi-User Dungeon (MUD), a group exhibition curated by Simon Denny, presented simultaneously at Petzel’s Upper East Side location at 35 East 67th Street, Third Floor. About Simon Denny Simon Denny (b. 1982, Auckland) lives and works in Berlin. He makes artworks that unpack stories about technology using a variety of media, including painting, web-based media, installation, sculpture, print, and video. He studied at the University of Auckland and at the Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main. Solo exhibitions include Kunstverein Hannover (2023); Frans Masereel Centrum (2023); the Gus Fisher Gallery, University of Auckland (2022); Outernet, London (2022); K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2020); the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona), Tasmania (2019); MOCA, Cleveland (2018); OCAT, Shenzhen (2017); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2017); WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels (2016); Serpentine Galleries, London (2015); MoMA PS1, New York (2015); Portikus, Frankfurt (2014); MUMOK, Vienna (2013); Kunstverein Munich (2013). Denny represented New Zealand at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. Denny has curated exhibitions such as Proof of Stake at Kunstverein in Hamburg (2021) and Proof of Work at Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2018). His works are represented in major institutional collections, including MoMA (New York), Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (Düsseldorf), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Buffalo AKG (Buffalo), Kunsthaus Zürich (Zürich), Sammlung zeitgenössischer Kunst der Bundes-republik Deutschland (Berlin), and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Wellington). He cofounded the artist mentoring program BPA//Berlin Program for Artists and serves as a professor of time-based media at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg.
]]>James Cohan presents H2O, an exhibition of new and historic work by Spencer Finch. This is Finch’s fifth solo exhibition with James Cohan. Perception, the memory of visual phenomena, and the impossible attempts to precisely describe them are central to Spencer Finch’s installation work. This exhibition centers on Cloud (H2O), 2005, one of the earliest examples of this important facet of the artist’s practice. Hundreds of incandescent bulbs hang from the ceiling in a cloud-like formation, the bulbs functioning as models of the chemical formula of water - two hydrogen atoms and a single oxygen atom. Finch’s translation of a cloud broken down into its chemical state hints at water’s natural ability to exist in solid, liquid and gaseous states all at once, and serves as a potent reminder of the phenomenal possibilities of nature. Cloud (H2O) illustrates Finch’s interest in the dichotomy between abstraction and representation, perception and imagination, physical and ephemeral. Like many of Finch’s works, the installation presents an alternative notion of representation – one that is simultaneously scientific and symbolic. In addition to this early Molecule light installation, H2O features a new textile work and a series of new drawings. Together, these works deepen Finch’s investigations into light, reflection, water, and the impermanence of human perception.
]]>In the mid-1960s, Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica (1937–80) began embracing joyously transgressive modes of performance, film, and installation that championed marginalized persons and their culture. Created while Oiticica was self-exiled to New York in the 1970s, the immersive 1973 installation series of Bloco-Experiências in Cosmococa–Programa in Progress, or Cosmococas, operate on multiple levels to transform pop and underground culture into a psychedelic experience. Made in collaboration with the Brazilian filmmaker Neville D’Almeida (b. 1941), for each of the five original Cosmococas the artists crafted two sets of instructions: one for public institutional presentations and, in an anti-elitist effort, another for display in private homes. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Cosmococas, the artist’s nonprofit foundation, the Projeto Hélio Oiticica, has organized a year-long celebration for 2023, during which the series has been installed in cities around the world. The Hunter College Art Galleries have joined the initiative to present Cosmic Shelter: Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida’s Private Cosmococas at the Leubsdorf Gallery from October 12, 2023–March 30, 2024. This exhibition features the United States premiere of two private Cosmococas and includes archival material to provide historical context for the layers of political commentary embedded in the subversive, psychedelic series. Curated by Daniela Mayer. The exhibition was developed in conjunction with a two-semester independent study by Hunter College MA Art History students Thais Bignardi, Rowan Diaz-Toth, and Angelica Pomar. Support for this exhibition is provided by the Hunter College Foundation with additional support from Lisson Gallery, Leon Tovar Gallery, and Sokoloff + Associates.
]]>Petzel presents Multi-User Dungeon (MUD), a group exhibition curated by Simon Denny. Multi-User Dungeon (MUD) features works by etoy.corporation, Öyvind Fahlström, Genevieve Goffman, Jack Goldstein, Matthias Groebel, Peter Halley, Yngve Holen, Tishan Hsu, Josh Kline, Isabelle Frances McGuire, Seth Price, Harris Rosenblum, Avery Singer, Suzanne Treister, and Anicka Yi. The exhibition takes its title from an historical genre of computer game, called Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs). Early online adventure games often based on genres like fantasy or science-fiction, technically speaking, MUDs were text-based software that accepted connections from many simultaneous users. Starting in the 1970s, MUDs were the predecessors of contemporary Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs or MMOs). The era of the MUD’s emergence and prominence can be seen as an in-between time, which bridged the emergence of the commercial internet, and earlier networked systems like Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) and academic internets. Today, as social media giants compete with startups to expand and standardize digital worlds, we find ourselves in another moment of transition, with these worlds exponentially increasing in importance and usage. The history of the MUD remains central as newer virtual worlds are designed and deployed. Hardware and software transformations–through types of screens, glasses, network structures and beyond, from online marketplaces to metaverses–affect the visual and the visceral. MUD brings together artworks from many eras that can be seen to navigate the uncanny skeuomorphism of virtual worlds as they evolve over time and spill over into politics, finance and culture. They process and reflect worlds in between the analogue and the digital using “traditional” media like painting and sculpture as they meet new making tools that stem from screens, digital print and 3D print technology. Multi-User Dungeon (MUD) is organized in conversation with Dungeon, a solo exhibition of new works by Simon Denny, presented simultaneously at Petzel’s Upper East Side location at 35 East 67th Street, Parlor Floor. About the Artists etoy / etoy.CORPORATION (est. 1994, Zurich, Switzerland) is an art group registered as a Swiss stock corporation known for its pioneering role in internet art (etoy.INTERNET-TANK-SYSTEM / etoy.com, 1995), controversial operations like the digital hijack (1996), the domain name battle TOYWAR with eToys.com (1999), or the etoy.TANKS (mobile studio and exhibition units built in standard shipping containers). etoy twists artistic production and appearance in a world dominated by ambivalent parameters: mass production and consumption of information and goods, global transportation, branding, maximization of profits, growing complexity, technological penetration of life and virtualization. etoy is incorporated as a privately held shareholder company to replace the traditional concept of the genius artist with a brand that is owned, controlled and fed by hundreds of stakeholders: 25 etoy.AGENTS, a few investors, art collectors and many fans. The only available product in the art market is the etoy.SHARE: unique Swiss stock certificates visually document the etoy.HISTORY and represent the idea of sharing intangible assets such as knowledge, passion and code or social networks and cultural value. Öyvind Fahlström (b. 1928, Sao Paolo, Brazil, d. 1976, Stockholm, Sweden) was born in Brazil to Swedish and Norwegian parents. In 1939, at the age of ten, he was sent to Sweden to visit his grandfather and his aunt. Following compulsory military service, Fahlström entered the University of Stockholm, where he studied Art History and Classical Archaeology. Beginning in the early ’50s, Fahlström experimented with different art forms, writing poetry, theater scripts, and art criticism, as well as cultural commentary for major Swedish newspapers and journals. Between 1957 and 1961, Fahlström continued to experiment with and further develop his signature motifs of “character forms” and “informal” background, involving the fragmenting of black-and-white drawings and comic strips, which he first developed in 1951-2. He met and befriended several New York artists in Stockholm in the late ’50s, among them Robert Rauschenberg. In 1961, Fahlström won a scholarship to live and work in New York, moving into Rauschenberg’s studio at 128 Front Street (Jasper Johns lived in the same building). From 1962 to 1968, Fahlström was one of the most active creators of Happenings in New York, Stockholm and Paris. He created a major work, Kisses Sweeter Than Wine for the E.A.T.-sponsored Nine Evenings at the Armory in 1966. In 1969, Fahlström was honored with a traveling retrospective organized by The Museum of Modern Art in New York. He had subsequent exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, among others. He died of colon cancer in Stockholm on November 9, 1976, at the age of forty-seven. Genevieve Goffman (b. 1991, Washington, D.C.) is based in New York City. She graduated from the Yale MFA in 2020. Goffman’s recent solo exhibitions include Before it all Went Wrong at Hyacinth Gallery in New York in 2022; Grind at Money Gallery, St Petersburg, RU, 2021; Here Forever at Alyssa Davis Gallery, New York, NY, 2020; Hotel Heaven at Lubov, New York, NY, 2019. Goffman’s installation The View, was exhibited in 2023 at the Museum of Applied arts in Vienna Austria. Goffman has exhibited at NADA x Foreland in 2021 with Alyssa Davis Gallery and Bienvenue Art Fair (Paris) in 2021 with Lily Robert. Jack Goldstein (b. 1945, Montreal, Canada, d. 2003, San Bernardino, California) was a member of the first graduating class from CalArts, where he studied under John Baldessari, and alongside artists Troy Brauntuch, Eric Fischl, Matt Mullican, David Salle, and James Welling. His work featured prominently in a number of seminal exhibitions, including Pictures (1977), organized by Douglas Crimp and Helene Winer, at Artists Space in New York. Goldstein’s work has been the subject of numerous international solo presentations, including exhibitions at the Jewish Museum, New York (2013); Galerie Perrotin, Paris (2013); the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach (2012); MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main (2009); Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne (2009); Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York (2008); Metro Pictures, New York (2005); The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2002); and Le Magasin – Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Grenoble (2002). Goldstein lived and worked in Los Angeles until his death in 2003. Matthias Groebel (b. 1958, Aachen, Germany) works and lives in Cologne. Selected solo exhibitions include Ulrik, New York (2023); A Change in Weather (Broadcast Material 1989-2001), Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2022); The Rhythms of Reception, Schiefe Zähne, Berlin (2022); Satellites Cast No Shadow, curated by Andreas Selg, Drei, Cologne (2022); Avid Signals (Broadcast Material 1989-2001), curated by Andreas Selg, Galerie Bernhard, Zurich (2021); Embedded Painting, Praxis Staat, Cologne (2009); Save from Demons, Livingroom, Cologne (2007); Collective Memories, Universal Concepts Unlimited, New York (2003). A monograph of Broadcast Material series was published in 2022 by Edition Patrick Frey. Peter Halley (b. 1953, New York, New York), amongst the electrical landscape of 1980s New York City and toward the end of the modernist era, liberated the square from its prior minimalist stage and set it on fire for a new generation. Using geometry to express the physical and psychological aspects of contemporary urban space in the burgeoning digital age, his dynamic and radically colored paintings introduced a bold new abstraction. On Halley’s flattened canvas planes, or integrated seamlessly into architectural spaces, shapes become elevated from mere form to conjure the prisons, cells, conduits, and apartment blocks of 21st-century life, connecting us as viewers to the realities of our isolated modular existence. Yngve Holen (b. 1982, Braunschweig, Germany) lives and works in Oslo, NO. Recent solo exhibitions include Neuroeconomics at Spazio Maiocchi, Milan, IT (2022); Foreign Object Debris at X Museum, Beijing, CN (2021); Overbeck-Preis für bildende Kunst der Gemeinnützigen, at Overbeck-Gesellschaft Kunstverein Lübeck, Lubeck, DE (2020); HEINZERLING, Kunsthall Stavanger, Stavanger, NO and Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo, NO (both 2019); ROSETTA(DECORAZIONE), San Paolo Converso, Milan, IT (2018); Bagatelle, Fine Arts, Sydney, AU (2018); Robert-Jacobsen-Preis, Haus Würth, Berlin, DE (2017); VERTICALSEAT, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, CH (2016). Tishan Hsu (b. 1951, Boston, Massachusetts) lives and works in New York. He studied environmental design and architecture at MIT and received his BSAD in 1973 and M.Arch in 1975. His first exhibition in New York was at Pat Hearn Gallery, and in 1987, he had a one-person show at Leo Castelli. Hsu’s survey exhibition, Liquid Circuit, opened at SculptureCenter in 2020, following its first iteration at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. In 2019, Delete, was held at Empty Gallery, Hong Kong. Hsu’s first New York gallery exhibition in 32 years, skin-screen-grass, opened at Miguel Abreu Gallery in October 2021. In 2022, His work was included in the 59th Venice Biennale: The Milk of Dreams, and in the 58th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh: Is it morning for you yet? Tishan Hsu: recent work is currently on view at the Secession, Vienna; and his first European survey exhibition will be held at MAMCO, Geneva, in March 2024. Josh Kline (b. 1979, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) lives and works in New York. The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York recently presented the first U.S. museum survey of Kline’s work. His film Adaptation (2019-2022) recently screened at LAXART on the occasion of his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. Kline’s work has been exhibited internationally at Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (2020); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy (2016); Portland Art Museum, Oregon (2016); and Modern Art Oxford, UK (2015), among others. He has participated in group exhibitions including the Whitney Biennial, New York (2019); New Order: Art and Technology in the Twenty-First Century, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2019); MoMA PS1, New York (2013, 2012); and 2015 Triennial: Surround Audience, New Museum, New York, among others. Isabelle Frances McGuire (b. 1994, Austin, Texas) lives and works in Chicago. Selected solo and two person presentations include Scherben (Berlin, DE), King’s Leap (New York, NY), Mickey (Chicago, IL), Good Weather at Et al. (San Francisco, CA), From The Desk of Lucy Bull (Los Angeles, CA), and Prairie (Chicago, IL). McGuire will stage a two-person exhibition at What Pipeline (Detroit, MI) later this year. Seth Price (b. 1973, Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem, Palestine) lives in New York City. His work has been the subject of numerous one-person exhibitions including most recently the Aspen Art Museum (2019), MoMA/PS1 (2018), the ICA London (2018), and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2017), and he has participated in Documenta 13 (2012) and the Venice Biennial (2011). Harris Rosenblum (b. 1994, Baltimore, Maryland) is a sculptor based in NY, NY. His recent solo exhibitions include Inorganic Demons (Sara’s, NY, 2023) and Relics of The Corrupted Blood (Blade Study, NY, 2022). His work is an investigation into the spiritual potential of contemporary alienation. He is interested in craft, post-industrial materiality, manufacturing, and the novel intelligences borne by networks. He is a contributor and moderator of Do Not Research, a digitally native community and publishing platform. Rosenblum is a founding partner of Transcendence Creative, the first 360 corporation with a historical materialist approach to brand identity. Avery Singer (b. 1987, New York, New York) was born and raised in New York, NY. Singer studied at the Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main in 2008, and she received her B.F.A. from Cooper Union, New York NY in 2010. During her studies, Singer engaged in performance art, video making, as well as sculpture utilizing carpentry, metal casting and welding. After graduation, she discovered her chosen art form from an unanticipated experiment with SketchUp, a program used by her peers to design exhibition spaces, and airbrushed a black-and-white painting based on a digital illustration. Since then, Singer has employed the binary language of computer programs and industrial materials in order to remove the trace of the artist’s hand while engaging the tradition of painting and the legacy of modernism. Her first self-portrait, Self Portrait (Summer 2018) (2018), exhibited at the 2019 Venice Biennale, incorporated a new process with liquid rubber, spray bottles, and watered-down white paint to achieve the reproduction of foggy glass. Often reimagining the subject of painting and image-making as the subject itself, by disengaging with romanticized views, Singer creates her own way of seeing. Suzanne Treister (b.1958, London, United Kingdom) studied at St Martin’s School of Art, London (1978-1981) and Chelsea College of Art and Design, London (1981-1982) and is based in London and the French Pyrennes, having lived in Australia, New York, and Berlin. Initially recognized in the 1980s as a painter, she became a pioneer in the digital/new media/web-based field from the beginning of the 1990s, making work about emerging technologies, developing fictional worlds and international collaborative organizations. Utilizing various media, including video, the internet, interactive technologies, photography, drawing and watercolor, Treister’s work has engaged with eccentric narratives and unconventional bodies of research to reveal structures that bind power, identity and knowledge. Recent solo and group exhibitions include 14th Shanghai Biennale; Helsinki Biennial, Finland; P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York (2023-4); High Line, New York; Palace of Culture and Science, Warsaw (2022). Anicka Yi (b. 1971, Seoul, South Korea) lives and works in New York City. A survey of her work was recently on view at Pirelli Hangar Bicocca in Milan, Italy through summer 2022. She has had solo exhibitions in leading international institutions including the recent Hyundai Commission, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London (2021); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2017); Fridericianum, Kassel (2016); Kunsthalle Basel, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (2015); The Kitchen, New York (2015); and Cleveland Museum of Art (2014). She has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (2019) and Whitney Biennial, New York (2017). In 2019, the artist launched “Biography Fragrance,” a line of three fragrances in limited edition in collaboration with Barnabé Fillion, at Dover Street Market. In autumn 2024, Yi will present a solo exhibition at Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul.
]]>Tanya Bonakdar Gallery presents Aula Expandida, Amalia Pica’s first solo exhibition in New York. Over the last three decades, Amalia Pica has examined relationships and how we communicate. Often using seemingly simple materials and found objects, she investigates human modes of interaction, especially our desire to learn and to be understood as we try to make sense of the world around us, and the accompanying pleasures and failures. Her work has an intentional lightness of touch and playfulness, which Pica prioritizes for its power to draw viewers into a conversation. Pica began her career as a primary school art teacher, an experience that continually informs much of her work. Aula Expandida features an interactive installation, sculptures, embroideries, and collages that explore how art, imagination, and language are connected, especially during the formative years of early childhood. In the gallery downstairs, visitors encounter a large room filled with everyday objects that have been turned into chalkboards, and they are invited to pick up a piece of chalk to draw, write, or scribble on all surfaces around them. In Aula Grande (outlined) – Spanish for large classroom – Pica examines the role school plays in imparting a common visual language in our cultural imaginary, and how this way of seeing and thinking accompanies us through the rest of our lives. The installation proposes that we rewrite, redraw, and reimagine alternative narrative possibilities from an expansion of knowledge centered on daily life. By involving visitors in her work, Pica invites both intellectual and physical modes of participation as we are asked to reconsider our surrounding environment as a classroom. In a new series of colorful embroideries, Pica continues her examination of art and understanding, and how this relationship changes over time. Using drawings made by her young son, Pica and her collaborators painstakingly stitch his quick gestures onto fabric, depicting a pre-representational way of conceptualizing the world around us. She highlights the freedom of expression experienced prior to formal schooling, which ultimately changes our way of seeing and conditions the way we perceive our environment. A deliberate tension between the speed with which the drawings are made and the minute care taken to embroider them exists, embodying the lasting psychological effects of childhood, as well as parental labor. A new group of sculptures and collages from an ongoing series focus on the rhetorical device known as catachresis, the application of terms that apply to things that do not have their own word, such as the teeth of a comb, leg of a chair, tongue of a shoe, or elbow of a pipe, often named with human body parts. The extension of a word beyond the limits of its meaning reveals how language and images can interact, contributing to the definition of reality. The result is a group of hybrid figures and images, in anthropomorphic or animal forms, that demonstrate the flexibility of language and its possibly comical consequences. Amalia Pica was born in 1978 in Neuquén, Argentina and currently lives and works in London. The artist received a BA from the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes P.P. in Buenos Aires in 2003 and attended graduate school at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam. Pica has had solo exhibitions at Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2023); Fondazione Memmo, Rome (2022); Brighton CCA (2022); Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich (2020); Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville, Spain (2019); The New Art Gallery, Walsall, UK (2019); Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Perth, Australia (2018); The Power Plant, Toronto (2017); NC Arte, Bogotá, Colombia (2017); Kunstverein Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany (2016); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands (2014); List Visual Arts Center, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2013); Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City (2013); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2013); Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Neuquén, Argentina (2013); Kunsthalle St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland (2012); Chisenhale Gallery, London (2012); Malmo Konsthall, Malmo, Sweden (2010); among many others. Her work was included in the Gwangju Biennial, South Korea (2016); The Ungovernables: New Museum Triennial, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2015); and ILLUMInations, curated by Bice Curiger, 54th Venice Biennale (2011). Amalia Pica’s work can be found in the permanent collections of Tate Collection, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museo Nacional de Bellas Arte Neuquén, Neuquén, Argentina; KADIST Art Foundation, Paris; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Frac-Collection Aquitaine, Bordeaux, France; Fundação De Serralves, Porto, Portugal; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. *Amalia Pica would like to acknowledge the work of her fellow embroiderers: Annushka Angulo, Yolanda Doku, Aya Fukami, and Indre Joneikyte.
]]>Perrotin presents Oslo-basedartist Jason Boyd Kinsella’s inaugural U.S. exhibition, EMOTIONAL MOONSCAPES. On view through April 6th, the exhibition consists of two immersive environments on the gallery’s second and third floors, introducing the artist’s foray into combining various mediums, such as painting, sculpture, and video. Jason Boyd Kinsella is a portraitist not much interested in what people look like. His have no people in them at all, in fact, or at least not the way we’re accustomed to seeing ourselves. Kinsella understands portraits can do one of two things: they can capture the likeness of their subject—the contours of a face, their jowliness, their creases and crags; or they can distill something truer, where likeness is secondary to affect. This is the difference between what someone looks like to others, and what they look like to themselves. Good portraits are always psychological portraits. We are all utterly convinced that we engage with the world in deeply specific ways legible only to us, our perceptions and quirks and mechanisms irreducible. But the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator prescribes only 16 possible personalities, 16 ways of being in the world (introvert/extrovert; carefree/worried, and so on). Nevermind that these binaries are mostly rejected as pseudoscience. Kinsella, having successfully jettisoned traditional facial structures, finds new purchaseforthetypology,anabidingfascinationignitedbyachildhood gift of a Briggs book. He maps the Indicator’s precepts onto intricate, teetering assemblies of geometric forms — building blocks, literally, of psychological attributes. While the results have the clean, highly finished surface of Google architecture or alien tesserae, their spiritual forebears are in fact the Old Masters. The classicism is all there: the 3/4 quarter pose, the finely-tuned sfumato, the fixation on linear perspective — like Rogier van der Weyden’s Portrait of a Lady stripped of flesh, reduced back down to rhomboids. Though they’re piles of blocks, they retain humanness. They emote, are inquisitive, proud, defiant, taciturn. They can be vulnerable or steely, cool or sheepish. All of this is accomplished without eyebrows. Kinsella demands a neat order to his imagined sitters. They are built from distinct units whose contours, color and form betray their personalities, their quirks, their annoyances, their faults. They’re more ordered than a human face, except not really. Faces follow a certain logic and so too do Kinsella’s (his preliminary sketches share something with a Disney animator’s storyboard, as though he were anthropomorphizing a toaster or some other household appliance whose feelings you were blithely unaware of until now). Even though Kinsella’s portraits are personal readings of friends and acquaintances, he insists there’s no Rosetta Stone to his language. Still, it’s easy to imagine a sphere indicating a quickness to anger, or an upturned ellipsoid signifying a tendency toward making jokes to mask pain. Like all good portraits, these characters are of their time. They share a genus with digital avatars, the selves we build to represent ourselves on the Internet, transmuting our personae via digital tools, filters, text- to-image language models to produce light fictions of who we think we are. They’re contradictory in this way: flat but dimensional, referencing AI iconography but rendered by hand, talking about the digital via the analogue. Kinsella doesn’t seem to have any compunction about this. Why should he? Humanness is hopelessly complex. Kinsella is a sculptor who paints. He sculpts too, in the sense that he makes dimensional objects, but his paintings seem wrought out of the same tactile stuff. He manages to pull dimensionality out of paint to the point where you’re compelled to walk around it, even as you’re fully aware there’s nothing on the other side except blank canvas. On the first floor, Kinsella introduces us to Mille Blossom, a character study across painting, sculpture, and video, the first time he’s presented across all these media in one room. Image drifts into sculpture slipping into video, the DNA gliding from paint to steel and resin to pixel with little friction. Kinsella doesn’t make self-portraits, except every picture he makes is a kind of self-portrait, his presence wrapped up in his pictures, implicated in it, “an intangible familiarity,” he calls it, a feeling that hangs between the shapes. His shapes, held together by a thin gravity, have a precarity, the feeling that things could easily come undone. This makes them, in the end, about life — stubbornness in the face of impermanence. On the second floor — the emotional moonscape of the show’s name — sits its largest work. Connection (2024) depicts two figures that yearn to connect but never do, isolated in a yawning, serene expanse. Something keeps them apart, but they knock against it anyway. - Max Lakin
]]>Chambers Fine Art presents “The Cutting Edge” of Lu Shengzhong. In the history of Chambers Fine Art, Lu Shengzhong (1952-2022) played a role of particular importance, both chronologically and as an indication of the guiding principles of the gallery after It was established in New York in 2000. This display of selected works is a tribute to Lu’s singular vision as an artist and as an influence on several generations of younger artists at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), Beijing where he taught for many years. When Christophe Mao made the decision to open a gallery devoted to contemporary Chinese art in the years immedIately before the millennium, there was an urgent need to identify a group of artists who did not conform to what had already become a stereotype in the West, the flashy oil paintings associated with Political Pop and Gaudy Art. When he was introduced to Lu in Beijing, he immediately felt that he would be an ideal candidate for his first exhibition of contemporary art as at that time the plan was to have alternate exhibitions of contemporary art and Classical Chinese art and scholar’s objects. Born in Shandong Province China in 1952, Lu graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 1957, where he had been associated with the Department of Folk Arts. Continuing his research, he made numerous trips in Shanxi Province and other areas where he developed considerable expertise in the tradition of paper-cuts pasted on walls, windows etc., particularly for Chinese New Year. He was the author of numerous books on the subject. Simultaneously, he was establishing a reputation with his own remarkable paper cuts in which he said, he “walked away from the cultural confusion of the time and turned back to the villages, to traditional Chinese folk art.” He began working on a very large scale, as in the 1990 installation Hall of Calling the Soul filled with thousands of the “little red figures ” that were to become his signature as a paper cut artist. The title of Lu Shengzhong’s first exhibition at Chambers Fine Arts, First Encounter (November 11, 2001 – January 2, 2002) refers not only to the first meeting between Christophe Mao and Lu Shengzhong but also to the introduction of Lu’s art to the United States. In the large vertical panels of Poetry of Harmony, lines of what appear to be Chinese characters are in fact left-over scraps of paper from the intricately cut circular forms at the top. The relationship between positive and negative forms is of crucial importance in Lu’s art. Favorably reviewed by Holland Cotter in the New York Times (January 5, 2001), he noted that Lu “used this fragile medium , notable for its lacey, intricate patterns, to create a temple-like installation.” Two more exhibitions followed at Chambers Fine Art, Lu Shengzhong’s The Book of Humanity (November 6, 2003 – January 4, 2004) and Square Earth, Round Heaven Lu Shenzhong Works 2007. In the former, there were two series of works, sets of books in which red on black or black on red collages were gathered in book form, some with Western style bindings, some with traditional Chinese sewn bindings, and Human Bricks in which the hundreds of sheets of red paper from which“little red figures “ had been cut were assembled in multi-layered collages. In the latter, Lu moved into three dimensions, assembling multiple layers of paper into cubes and spheres, described by Robert E. Harriet, Jr., as the “visual and spatial correlates of round/heaven and square/earth that permeates Chinese art and architecture. In his role as an educator, Lu became the director of the department of experimental art at CAFA in 2004 and retained that position until his retirement. Lu Shengzhong’s achievement as an artist was to develop the traditional Chinese craft of papercut in such a way that it was possible to use it not only for small scale individual works but also for installations of great complexity. For those who had the privilege to watch Lu Shengzhong at work, using his scissors with unerring skill so that complex designs in which positive and negative forms emerged effortlessly without any preliminary drawings, it was no suppose that the same gift could be used in the creation of three-dimensional versions of his “little red men.”
]]>Americas Society presents the first part of El Dorado: Myths of Gold, a two-part group exhibition exploring the legend of El Dorado as a foundational myth of the Americas. The exhibition presents artworks by more than sixty artists, from the pre-Hispanic period to the contemporary era, that challenge, reinforce, and question the continuity and effects of the myth in the Americas into the present. El Dorado is a tale of searches and quests, delirium, and violence. During the colonization of the Americas, rumors of an Indigenous kingdom replete with gold and precious stones quickly permeated the European imagination, galvanizing the invasion of the continent without regard for Indigenous lives, ancestral territories, or environmental concerns. Despite never being found, the mythical El Dorado functioned as a foundational ethos for the colonization of the Americas that persists until today. The city of gold has transformed into more intangible, though equally powerful, personal and collective values—such as individualism, greed, and consumerism—that are central to contemporary capitalist societies. As we grapple with the enormous long-term sociopolitical and environmental effects of this operating dynamic, there is a pressing need to reevaluate its influence on our identification as human beings and members of a globalized society. Presenting artworks from the precolonial period to today, this exhibition complicates and reevaluates the idea of El Dorado, employing the myth as a framework for understanding the Americas. By placing historical and contemporary artworks together, the exhibition facilitates dialogues between past and present to investigate how the myth has shaped the value of gold, as well as that of territories, peoples, religious beliefs, and nature. Part I of the exhibition will be on display from September 6 through December 16, 2023 and part II will take place from January 24 through May 18, 2024. The exhibition is accompanied by two publications: an exhibition catalog featuring a curatorial text along with the exhibition checklist, to be published in September 2023; and a reader on El Dorado featuring essays by more than fourteen scholars as well as primary sources. This new anthology will be published in early 2024. Artists in the show include: Olga de Amaral, Denilson Baniwa, Bruno Baptistelli, Andrés Bedoya, Charles Bentley, Juan Brenner, Fernando Bryce, Wendy Cabrera Rubio, Leda Catunda, Chiriquí artist, Coclé artists, william cordova, Juan Covelli, Covens & Mortier, Theodor De Bry, Dario Escobar, Scherezade Garcia, Anna Bella Geiger, Mathias Goeritz, Joaquín Gutiérrez, Thomas Hariot, John Harris, Pablo Helguera, Ana Mercedes Hoyos, Alfredo Jaar, Nancy La Rosa & Juan Salas Carreño, Lambayeque artist, Jaime Lauriano, Mariano León, Hew Locke, Karen Lofgren, Juan Pedro López, Liliana Maresca, Esperanza Mayobre, Sara Mejia Kriendler, Ana María Millán, Marta Minujín, Herman Moll, Priscilla Monge, Santiago Montoya, Carlos Motta, Eamon Ore-Giron, Rubén Ortiz Torres, Ebony G. Patterson, Rolando Peña, José Antonio Peñaloza, Armando Queiroz, Ronny Quevedo, Mazenett Quiroga, Quimbaya style artist, Freddy Rodríguez, Carlos Rojas, Miguel Ángel Rojas, Luis Romero, Harmonia Rosales, Johann Moritz Rugendas, Tiago Sant’Ana, Julia Santos Solomon, Vicente Telles, Pedro Terán, Ernest Charton de Treville, Moara Tupinambá, Veraguas artist, Laura Vinci, and Alberta Whittle Curated by Aimé Iglesias Lukin, Tie Jojima, and Edward J. Sullivan.
]]>Galleries 223-232 Drawn largely from The Met’s renowned collection of Japanese art, this exhibition explores the twin themes of anxiety and hope, with a focus on the human stories in and around art and art making. The exhibition begins with sacred images from early Japan that speak to concerns about death, dying, and the afterlife or that were created in response to other uncertainties, such as war and natural disaster. The presentation then proceeds chronologically, highlighting medieval Buddhist images of paradises and hells, Zen responses to life and death, depictions of war and pilgrimage, and the role of protective and hopeful images in everyday life. In the final galleries, the exhibition’s underlying themes are explored through a selection of modern woodblock prints, garments, and photographs. Rotation 1: April 8–August 13, 2023 Rotation 2: August 26–November 26, 2023 Rotation 3: December 16, 2023–April 14, 2024 Rotation 4: April 27–July 14, 2024
]]>Es Devlin, a white woman with dark hair wearing a vibrant red jumpsuit, appears miniscule in the center of a gray and white sphere with swooping gray arches and city skylines. The images on the sphere are mirrored, as is Es herself; a reflection of her extends upside down from beneath her feet. An Atlas of Es Devlin is the first monographic museum exhibition dedicated to British artist and stage designer Es Devlin (born 1971), who is renowned for work that transforms audiences. Since beginning in small theaters in 1995, she has charted a course from kinetic stage designs at the National Theatre and the Metropolitan Opera to installations at major institutions, including the World Expo, Lincoln Center, and the United Nations headquarters. Her sculptures for Olympic Ceremonies, NFL Super Bowl halftime shows, and stadium tours for Beyoncé, The Weeknd, and U2 frame narratives that feel personal at a monumental scale. Over the past decade, she has adapted her craft to address climate and civilizational crises. Her public installations on endangered species and languages have inspired audiences to reimagine their connections to each other and to the planet. She shapes stories in ways that stay with us and reframe our thinking. These stories often begin in the margins of texts. Devlin’s work is rooted in a lifelong practice of reading and drawing. Sketches and small cardboard models form the seeds of her large-scale architectures. Until now, these drawings, paintings, and sculptures have remained unseen. For this first monographic exhibition of her work, Devlin and the curators dug through her 30-year archive, mapping throughlines that connect her teenage paintings to her stage designs to her contemporary installations. Devlin calls the result an atlas—a collection of maps.
]]>In April, 2003, the Brooklyn Museum completed the reinstallation of its world-famous Egyptian collection, a process that took ten years. Three new galleries joined the four existing ones that had been completed in 1993 to tell the story of Egyptian art from its earliest known origins (circa 3500 B.C.) until the period when the Romans incorporated Egypt into their empire (30 B.C.–A.D. 395). Additional exhibits illustrate important themes about Egyptian culture, including women's roles, permanence and change in Egyptian art, temples and tombs, technology and materials, art and communication, and Egypt and its relationship to the rest of Africa. More than 1,200 objects— comprising sculpture, relief, paintings, pottery, and papyri—are now on view, including such treasures as an exquisite chlorite head of a Middle Kingdom princess, an early stone deity from 2650 B.C., a relief from the tomb of a man named Akhty-hotep, and a highly abstract female terracotta statuette created over five thousand years ago.
]]>Due to installations in the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Gallery, twelve bronze sculptures by Auguste Rodin have been installed in the Rubin Entrance Pavilion. This newly excerpted presentation of the Museum's large holdings by Rodin includes The Age of Bronze, a signature conception from the early years of the sculptor's career, as well as other works from his most significant commissions, including The Burghers of Calais, The Gates of Hell, and the Monument to Balzac. These casts came to the Brooklyn Museum through the generosity of Iris and B. Gerald Cantor.
]]>The Broken Kilometer, 1979, located at 393 West Broadway in New York City, is composed of 500 highly polished, round, solid brass rods, each measuring two meters in length and five centimeters (two inches) in diameter. The 500 rods are placed in five parallel rows of 100 rods each. The sculpture weighs 18 3/4 tons and would measure 3,280 feet if all the elements were laid end-to-end. Each rod is placed such that the spaces between the rods increase by 5mm with each consecutive space, from front to back; the first two rods of each row are placed 80mm apart, the last two rods are placed 580 mm apart. Metal halide stadium lights illuminate the work which is 45 feet wide and 125 feet long. This work is the companion piece to De Maria's 1977 Vertical Earth Kilometer at Kassel, Germany. In that permanently installed earth sculpture, a brass rod of the same diameter, total weight and total length has been inserted 1,000 meters into the ground. The Broken Kilometer has been on long-term view to the public since 1979. This work was commissioned and is maintained by Dia Art Foundation. All images of The Broken Kilometer are copyright Dia Art Foundation and may not be reproduced in any form without written permission from Dia Art Foundation. photo credit: Jon Abbott
]]>The New York Earth Room, 1977, is the third Earth Room sculpture executed by the artist, the first being in Munich, Germany in 1968. The second was installed at the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt, Germany in 1974. The first two works no longer exist. The New York Earth Room has been on long-term view to the public since 1980. This work was commissioned and is maintained by Dia Art Foundation. [Image: Walter De Maria “The New York Earth Room” Photo: John Cliett © Dia Art Foundation]
]]>Life, Death and Transformation in the Americas will present one hundred-two masterpieces from the Arts of the Americas permanent collection that exemplify the concept of transformation as part of the religious beliefs and social practices of the region’s indigenous peoples. Themes of life, death, fertility, regeneration, and spiritual transformation will be explored through pre-Columbian and historical artworks including twenty-one objects that have not been on public view for decades or have never been exhibited. This long-term installation, which will open on January 18, will be on display in the Museum’s recently re-opened galleries on the fifth floor adjacent to American Identities. Highlights include the Huastec Life-Death Figure, a carved stone statue that juxtaposes images of life and death and is one of the finest of its kind; the Kwakwaka’wakw Thunderbird Transformation Mask (pictured), a carved wood mask in the form of an ancestral being that opens to reveal a second, human face; and two eight-foot-tall, carved nineteenth-century Heiltsuk house posts made to support the huge beams of a great Northwest Coast plank house. Other featured objects include examples from the extensive Hopi and Zuni kachina collection; masks from all over the Americas; Aztec and Maya sculptures; pre-Columbian gold ornaments; and ancient Andean textiles including the two-thousand-year-old Paracas Textile, the most famous piece in the Museum’s Andean collection, which illustrates the way in which early cultures of Peru’s South Coast envisioned their relationship with nature and the supernatural realm. Among the objects that have rarely been on public view are a full-body bark-cloth mask made by the Pami’wa of Colombia and Brazil; a Paracas painted textile mask that was most likely associated with a mummy bundle; a Northwest Coast Kwakwaka’wakw Wild Man Mask by John Livingston; a Maya effigy vessel in the form of a hunchback wearing a jaguar skin; a large, elaborately-painted Paracas jar; a Maya warrior figure with removable headdress; two contemporary kachinas by the Hopi carver Henry Shelton; Anasazi and Valdivia clay figurines, the oldest types found in North and South America; Paracas textile fragments from South America; an aquamarine grasshopper pendant from Mexico; ceramic bird whistles from Costa Rica and Panama; Moche stirrup-spout vessels from Peru; and a large, woven Apache basket with spirit figures. Life, Death and Transformation in the Americas is organized by Nancy Rosoff, Andrew W. Mellon Curator, Arts of the Americas, Brooklyn Museum; and Susan Kennedy Zeller, Associate Curator, Native American Art, Brooklyn Museum. This installation will be accompanied by a series of educational programs to be announced at a later date.
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