Month: March 2010

Wes Lang /// “Smile, It’s a Grey Day”

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Wes Lang’s latest exhibition “Smile, It’s a Grey Day” consists of 17 new paintings. Meditating on the recent loss of several loved ones, the artist professes a sometimes veiled reverence for life through his tattoo-inspired imagery. Combining the same deft maneuvers of brush as he has long-employed with the skin-artist’s needle, Lang translates masculine tattoo templates and works from within the confines of stylized graphics of flash art, continuing the tattoo tradition of valuing appropriation over unique imagery. The tattoo tropes and one percenter’s dismissal of social constraints is consistent with Lang’s approach to art and life.

Unafraid of influence, Lang channels Philip Guston, Martin Kippenberger, Cy Twombly and Basil Wolverton — a celebration of disparate forebears, re-combined in an alternately cantankerous and nostalgic American stew. He also finds solace in sources as wide ranging as self-help manuals to country and rock song lyrics. In the end, Lang often expresses his outsized optimism openly in titles like “Everybody Cares, Everybody Understands,” “Don’t Tell Me There’s No Hope At All,” and “The River of Golden Dreams.”

With the keenest eye toward our ephemeral fringe — Lang champions human faults, celebrating the patterns in our rapacity—a familiar vernacular comfort becomes the voice of longing for a world without anchor.

This is Lang’s fourth solo exhibition at ZieherSmith and the first to feature solely painting on canvas. His work has also been seen in shows at Alexander and Bonin and Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York, Dealim Museum, Seoul; Peres Projects, Berlin, and V1 Gallery, Copenhagen among many others. He was named one of 2009’s top fifteen young artists by Interview Magazine. A new publication featuring the work of Lang and Donald Baechler, entitled Skulls and Shit , is available from Ajax Press.

ZieherSmith

Marjetica Potrc

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Galerie Nordenhake Stockholm presents an exhibition by the Slovenian artist Marjetica Potrč. Through her multi-disciplinary practice that merges art, architecture and social science Potrč’s work negotiates the challenges of global developments in the areas of town planning and architecture. Her work emphasizes self-reliance and individual empowerment, problem-solving tools and strategies for the future and testifies to the failures of some of the grand principles of Modernism. In the exhibition she shows a case-study structure and two series of works on paper.

Burning Man: Tensegrity Structure and Waterboy, is an architectural structure from the Burning Man Festival in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. The festival is described as an experiment in community, radical self-expression, and radical self-reliance. The tensegrity structure is based on a design first developed by Buckminster Fuller and Kenneth Snelson in which its stability is result of the principal of the balance of push and pull. Here the shelter is upgraded with self-sustainable technologies such as a solar canopy and a wind turbine, which power the water pump that serves the Waterboy, a cooling bath respite in the desert heat, designed by Marque Cornblatt for the Burning Man Festival. By combining strategies for both leisure and subsistence, participants in Burning Man practice survival strategies through play.

The Homo Ludens (Latin for “Man the Player”) and Venice series of drawings are a result of recent on-site research. Both series address the problems and challenges of the tremendous changes to our living conditions due to global warming and the planet’s changing geology but also represent a celebration of self-sustainable practices and community building.

Homo Ludens explores the hypothesis that the Black Rock Desert will re-fill with water and become a lake again. Changing water levels require new architectures – perhaps of the type currently designed in a playful manner at the Burning Man Festival. In Venice the rising water level has a fundamental impact on the local communities and their living conditions. Both architectures proposed are self-sustainable, temporary and flexible catering to a more nomadic lifestyle.

Marjetica Potrc is an artist and architect based in Ljubljana, Slovenia. She is best known for her on-site projects using participatory design, her drawing series, and her architectural case studies. Her work has been featured in exhibitions throughout Europe and the Americas, including the São Paulo Biennial in Brazil (1996 and 2006) and the Venice Biennial (1993, 2003, and 2009); and she has had solo shows at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (2001); Max Protetch Gallery in New York (2002 and 2005); Galerie Nordenhake (2003, 2004 and 2007). Her many on-site installations include Dry Toilet (Caracas, 2003) and The Cook, the Farmer, His Wife and Their Neighbour (Stedelijk goes West, Amsterdam, 2009). She has taught at several well-known institutions in Europe and North America, including the MIT (2005) and IUAV Universita luav di Venezia (2008, 2010), and has published a number of essays on contemporary urban architecture. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, most notably the Hugo Boss Prize (2000) and the Vera List Center for Arts and Politics Fellowship at The New School in New York (2007). She is currently engaged in the on-site project Between the Waters: The Emscher Community Garden’ for “Emscher Kunst”, Essen, the European Cultural Capital, 2010.

Galerie Nordenhake

Undefined borders for unlimited perceptions

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The group show includes  the participation of 13 artists, almost all of them already in close  relationship with the gallery, who were invited to challenge the title of the  show in an ambitious attempt to disclose one of the most interesting moments  of the creation process, each one through his/her personal research.

A reality where there are not  boundaries, limits and rules is not credible; a reality where space, time and  actions are not defined within schemes that are often strict and definite.
Because of external commands or  personal considerations, we keep on imposing more and more interfering rules  which create  new boundaries and limit our thoughts.
Nevertheless, many of these  limits are not that clear and that evident, but they result from our belonging  to groups, cultures, traditions which – although they are reliable – hide the  potentials and benefits of different points of view.
The artist, more than any other  people, when carrying out creation processes, goes beyond the physical and  psychological barriers, setting minds free and open to different  perceptions.

Each invited  artist has interpreted the title of the show by proposing one or more works,  many of which have been created purposely for the show:

Simon Boudvin (FR) presents Auteurs, a project made of 8 snapshots taken in  the streets and places of Paris where there are the statues of famous writers  and sculptors:  Bernard Palissy, Pierre de Ronsard, Jean-Jacques  Rousseau, Voltaire, Dante Alighieri, Georges Jacques Danton, Denis Diderot,  Michel Eyquem de Montaigne. The artist, climbing on the statues, took pictures  at the height of their eyes, by showing their point of view.

Davide Cantoni (IT)  went beyond the boundaries of the Earth with Galaxy M31, a large format  artwork created purposely for this exhibition with his famous technique of the  burned drawing made with magnifying glass and sun on paper.

Vittorio Corsini (IT)  created Ready, a big carpet of sawdust and pigments reproducing the 4  flags of Papua-New Guinea, South Africa, Sweden and Mongolia. During the  exhibition, it will be possible to mix the colors of the flags by walking on  the artwork.

Angela  Detanico and Rafael Lain (BR) got  inspired by the studies carried out by Nathaniel Bowditch in 1802 about the  relationship between the letters of the alphabet and time zones, still used in  navigation, to create A given time in a given place (Zulu time), a  large wall drawing where a new map of the world is reproduced, showing the  time zones with the cartographic and linguistic meanings.

Nina  Saunders (DK) for the first time at the gallery,  presents Haute Cuture, an art work purposely created for the  exhibition, where starting from the cushion of a Chesterfield armchair,  skillfully reshaped, and apparently ever changing, you guess a stuffed fox  wearing a coyote mask.

Sarah Ciracì (IT )proposes La X Dimensione,  lighting box with intermittent light able to hypnotize visitors’ eyes and take  them to new dimension.

Berend Strik (NL) presents two new artworks  created in New York, Orbs and Identity and Made in Brooklyn,  where the embroidery and the fabrics hide and change the photographic basis on  which they are applied.

Gian Paolo Striano (IT) has purposely created for the  exhibition Domestic Hearth, an artwork made of lacquered wood, cathode  tube and led, which investigates on the more and more undefined borders  between art and design.

Simon Keenleyside (UK) presents the large painting on  canvas Somebody calling from the other side, in the middle of which  there is a large frontier tower, and two small paintings Take me back to  that other shore and Curse the dark, where a boundary wall cuts  into two the magical world of the artist, the landscape of Essex.

Benny Dröscher (DK)  has painted two canvas were, as usual in his artworks, the perception of the  absence of boundaries completely fills the artwork. On the intense sky blue of  the canvas, symbolic elements of nature and abstract elements are painted in  harmony, creating an image that goes beyond the canvas by invading the view of  the visitor completely, so that canvas seem to be painted without a fixed  direction, but they can be observed from any point of view.

Julien Berthier (FR)  proposes the artwork Hypnos. Five stuffed pigeons, pulled down in  anthropomorphic posture, wear fiberglass masks which represent Hypnos, the God  of Sleep in Greek mythology. Courtesy of the artwork Galerie GP & N  Vallois, Paris.

Seulgi  Lee (Korea) presents a re-interpretation of Don Quixote, a grey  wooden cube on the top of which there are multicolor hairy skewers.

Adam Cvijanovic (USA)  presents two new artworks both made through the flash and latex on Tyvek paper  technique. One shows the ocean and the other one shows a wonderful and rich  abandoned villa with a refined design.

Blindarte Contemporanea

On Paper

on paper 3
There is something innocent and light in the image of a paper fly like on this invitation .
Just think about a kid playing with it. – What is more suitable for a playful exhibition with
artworks, which are making use of this media in all kind of way? Isn’t paper the basic medium
of making art? There are surely very few artists who never used it in their creative process at
a certain point.
But nevertheless – paper as a medium is not as easy as it seems: Its maybe 2200 year old
history might about to be over. It is definitely in its last chapter. In the old China paper was
something holy and the making of it a carefully protected secret. The Arabs brought it to the
west and with Gutenberg’s letter press machine it got its breakthrough: money, books,
documents, pamphlets, pictures, photos, photocopies. It became the communication media
from the highest to the lowest culture the next 500 years.
Now we are in the middle of a new revolution of communication: More and more information
in our culture becomes digital. The computer displaces paper, which means that a material
information carrier is displaced by a virtual one. We can only guess where it leads. Fact is:
credit cards displace money, kids are using their notebooks instead of exercise books and
David Hockney just demonstrated how great it is to make drawings on his iphone.
So what does paper mean for artists today? There is surely not one answer. But there are
plenty to find in the show at  55 artists  from 13 nations with 4 to 12  works each will show
how lively this media still is and not leave much free space on the wall.
The following artists participate:

Stalke