Month: December 2009

Recommendation

braskart

“Project spaces have a long tradition in Berlin.
Since 1993 I have experienced the restless changing process of Berlin’s cultural landscape.
Alongside the proliferation of commercial galleries in Berlin in the last five years, project spaces continue to be found throughout the city.
To me, this indicates that the city still has open desires. Open spaces and open desires.
Fortunately, the over-representation of the ”established order“ does not saturate the symbolic need and desire for experiencing art and theory as a common good, which opens up possibilities for new forms of sharing public and private space.
Berlin-based independent cultural workers, artists, curators and theoreticians seek to redistribute their cultural capital through the gesture of offering space to, and developing different formats for their colleagues and the public for the exchange and experience of art and theory processes.
Considering Berlin as a laboratory for cultural development for this online issue I launch Sharing the Potlatch, a discussion that will be continued in different formats about the role and reality of project spaces.
I invited following nine Berlin-based project spaces.“

Into The Pill


Conrad Ventur

brasartblog

Rokeby launches 2010 with Conrad Ventur’s first solo exhibition in the UK.

Ventur is recongised for creating complex environments that raise questions regarding time and space. Whilst exploring the subject in relation to historical and contemporary technologies.

Recent work has employed footage of celebrities such as Marlene Dietrich and Dolly Parton within elaborate installations. The selected and configured footage encapsulates the stars potential to make private moments within public forums, commenting upon loss, tragedy and love. Ventur will present an ambitious new installations alongside other never before seen work.

Conrad Ventur currently lives and works in New York. He received his MFA from Goldsmiths College, London and has recently exhibited at Forever and Today Inc. New York and The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. In 2004, Ventur launched the contemporary art magazine USELESS.

Rokeby Gallery

Angel Otero

braskartkavi

Kavi Gupta is pleased to annouce it’s first solo exhibition of Angel Otero’s work. Angel Otero is quickly becoming well known for his textured canvases that weave between abstraction and representation taking their subject matter from an ongoing personal and often autobiographical narrative from his childhood in Puerto Rico. Memories, particularly those from his grandmother, parallel what he is now embracing in contemporary art.

Otero’s paintings and sculptural assemblages also engage directly with a process-based art making. His works are extremely intuitive and often address the idea of failure and the push/pull of painting an inventive space that also relates directly to his own personal history. Structures attempt to balance the slippage between subject and object. Layers of silicone become fluid doilies floating on table tops and thick shapes of dried oil paint are glued into simple patterns recalled from memory.

The work doesn’t operate as a presentation but rather as a self-generating proposition with which to construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct meaning over and over again. Unusual materials and aesthetic extravagance have been inspiring his recent work. Scale is expanding to comment of monumentality, surrounding the viewer and transforming the work to become physically accessible and present. His explorations of personal symbology  as well as abstract expressionism that brings to mind painters that continue to influence his work such as Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning, Georg Baselitz, and Joan Mitchell.

Angel Otero (b. 1981, Santurce, Puerto Rico) was recently including in the Constellations exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. He is the 2009 recipient of the Leonore Annenberg Fellowship Fund in the Performing and Visual Arts. Otero has an upcoming solo show at the Chicago Cultural Center.

Kavi Gupta