Artist: Falke Pisano

Venue: De Vleeshal, Middelburg

Exhibition Title: The Body in Crisis

Curated By: Lorenzo Benedetti

Date:  April 1 – May 20, 2012

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Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of De Vleeshal, Middelburg

Press Release:

The Body in Crisis is a series of works in which Pisano explores how in the course of history representation has helped us perceive the constant state of crisis the body finds itself in owing to political and socioeconomic change. The exhibition at De Vleeshal comprises three sculptural installations and a number of videos that approach the topic from various angles, including the actual condition of the body (what are the forces that act upon it, and how does it respond to them?), the functioning of historical representations in their original contexts (who produced the work or illustration, for what purpose and with what audience in mind?) and the question of how such historical moments and their relevance to present-day conditions can be activated in contemporary art.

A series of low obstacles forms both an obstruction and a presentation system which Pisano uses to introduce six historical points of reference that recur in each of the works on display: six dates, six places and six events marking changes that left the body in crisis – for example the year 1915, when the first case of shell shock was reported from the trenches in France, and the year 1984, when the USA’s first privatised prison was opened in Houston by the Corrections Corporation of America.

The exhibition also includes six black panels that are partly concealed behind black curtains, forming a repetitive structure and interrupting the space and rhythm of De Vleeshal. The curtains suggest disruption of direct perception, but the images turn out to have been moved to a nearby wall with a sequence of physical transformations drawn on it in classroom chalk.

The notion of repetition and disrupted perception recurs in the video The Body in Crisis (Notes on Distance, Repetition and Representation). We see a series of images growing more and more distinct against a white background, until we can make out the situations they represent – a woman tied to a ladder being pushed towards a blazing fire, a gladiator being treated out of sight of the spectators in the amphitheatre, a soldier depicted as a skeleton and so on. We hear a voice-over describing these images and placing them in context – but then a black bar slides across, concealing them from view before they are entirely detached from their background.

This video makes clear that Pisano sees potential in giving the distance inherent in every representation (representation recreates the presence of something that is not there – if what is to be represented were there, there would be no need to represent it) concrete shape as an obstruction in the object-representation-subject triad. She uses repetition as a method (or strategy) for rendering this obstruction productive and creating the possibility of perception – a presence in the here and now – in the form of infinite, destabilising, transforming repetition.

From 2005 to 2010 Falke Pisano worked on the Figures of Speech project, part of which was displayed during the Autumn of modernism exhibition at De Vleeshal and De Kabinetten van De Vleeshal from 15 January to 18 March 2012.

The 2012 work The Body in Crisis (Housing, Treating and Depicting) was commissioned and co-produced by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, with support from the Dutch embassy in Madrid.

Born in Amsterdam in 1978, Falke Pisano lives and works in Berlin. She is represented by Ellen de Bruijne Projects in Amsterdam, Balice Hertling in Paris and Hollybush Gardens in London.

Link: Falke Pisano at De Vleeshal

Artist: John Bock, Harald Klingelhöller, Meuser

Venue: Meyer Riegger, Karlsruhe

Exhibition Title: Skulptur

Date: March 23 – May 19, 2012

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Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Meyer Riegger, Karlsruhe

Press Release:

We are pleased to present sculptures by three artists who teach at the Karlsruhe Academy of Fine Arts – John Bock, Harald Klingelhöller and Meuser – in the current show at our Karlsruhe gallery space.

The actions, performances, films, installations, objects and collages by John Bock highlight the prosthetic character of the issues that he subjects to re-presentation and dismemberment at the same time. Through language and dramatic composition, in the form of “lectures,” the artist himself becomes the connecting link between the media which he uses in his artistic work. Bock´s sculptures occasionally play the role of props in his cinematic and performative mise-en-scènes, afterwards they become relics of these within the context of his discursive installations. But as autonomous figures, they can also inscribe the exhibition space as the location of an event. Then they become scenic organisms that include their viewer as a coincidental participant of an arrangement of objects based on reaction.

The sculptures of Harald Klingelhöller are free-hanging or arranged in groups on the floor, they resemble props from a story told in an associative manner. In his transformations and continuations of linguistic structures the artist generates plastic forms, which he converts visually as well as haptically – through the development of graphically implemented structures into sculptures in space. The title of the individual piece thus not only indicates the object, but also denotes the series of letters which form the corpus of the object, whether in fragments or repetition. Sentences and words which can make up the substance of different groups of works produce an analogue narrative description of space – through the layering of language, writing and sculptural corpus.

Sculptures by Meuser draw their form from reality, which their concrete, brittle shapes reduce to a metallic framework, offering a new direction of thought to the real context from which they originate. Meuser uses steel for his work, often scrap metal, which the artist finds and endows with an independent existence within a new frame of reference. Reshaping, colour and language are crucial to this process. The often vivid colouring of his objects borders on painting, however – detached from the canvas – they inscribe their surroundings as autonomous objects. Meuser´s objects forcefully break open of the format of painting without being paintings. Instead they are contour, their own material and its form, in their pure shape they designate the constructive, which Meuser leaves to its own devices while lending the object its own narration and rhetoric.

Christina Irrgang

Translation by Zoe Claire Miller

Link: “Skulptur” at Meyer Riegger

Artist: Lucy Skaer

Venue: Tulips & Roses, Brussels

Exhibition Title: Force Justify (Part 1)

Date: April 20 – May 19, 2012

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Full gallery of images and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Brussels, Belgium

Press Release:

Force Justify is the second incarnation of a traveling installation. Based on the allegory of the Ship of Fools, the work is transported and adapted to each space in which it is exhibited. The work gathers specific forms and attributes depending on the space, while other aspects lapse in to nonsense.

Link: Lucy Skaer at Tulips & Roses

Artist: Thomas Demand

Venue: Sprueth Magers, London

Exhibition Title: The Dailies

Date: April 14 – May 19, 2012

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Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Sprüth Magers Berlin London.  © Thomas Demand, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. 

Press Release:

Sprüth Magers London is delighted to present an exhibition of new work by German artist Thomas Demand in his first solo show in London since 2009. The exhibition will feature the series entitled The Dailies, which is currently on display in Sydney as the 25th Kaldor Public Art Project (23 March – 22 April 2012).

Demand’s photography has long focussed on detailed re-enactments of specific and familiar places, public or private sites often loaded with social and political meanings. The settings are made with paper and card that he photographs as the basis for his finished artworks. These life sized models are highly detailed, yet they retain subtle but deliberate flaws and anachronisms to disrupt the viewer’s comfort with the scene. The effect of Demand’s work has been to challenge any complacent assumptions about photography’s claims to verisimilitude, and to complicate conventional notions of authenticity and artifice.

In this series of work, Demand captures everyday moments and objects. The artist started working on the series in 2008, using the camera on his phone to take images of peculiar arrangements he came across while carrying out his day to day activities. These observations were unrelated to mediated narratives or other references outside the image itself; they were there simply because the artist noticed them. These were then translated into paper sculptures and formally straightforward images, with no elaborate viewpoints, lighting or other tricks. The title The Dailies refers to the daily rushes from film, the leftover images from the cutting room floor.

For The Dailies, Demand used an involved printing technique which acts as a counterpart to the fleetingness of the moment captured. For the first time, the artist experimented with a long-outmoded process: dye transfer, which involves fixing dyes with gelatine to ordinary paper. The practice was chosen by the artist for the saturated, but not garish colours, the spatial depth, the intense darkness, the durability and the extent to which the three primary colours can be modified, unlike ordinary prints. It is believed that there are only around five masters of this complex procedure left in the world. These practitioners have dedicated a large part of their evaporating material to print The Dailies via this rare technique, a method that will soon be unavailable for artists in the future.

Thomas Demand currently lives and works in Berlin and Los Angeles. Amongst others, solo exhibitions include Museum of Modern Art, New York (2005), Serpentine Gallery, London (2006), Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg (2008), Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2009-2010) and Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2010).

Current exhibitions include The Dailies, the 25th Kaldor Public Art Project, Sydney (23 March – 22 April 2012) and Model Studies, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham (28 January – 15 April 2012). For the Kaldor Public Art Project, Thomas Demand has transformed the fourth floor of the Commercial Travellers’ Association, part of the iconic MLC Centre designed by Australia’s most celebrated modernist architect, the late Harry Seidler, hanging a different work from the series in 15 identical hotel rooms that revolve around a circular corridor. The presentation includes contributions from designer Miuccia Prada and US author Louis Begley. London-based art publisher MACK have also created a limited edition catalogue to accompany the project. www.mackbooks.co.uk.

A solo survey of Demand’s work will take place at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (19 May – 8 July 2012).

Link: Thomas Demand at Sprueth Magers

Artist: Will Benedict

Venue: Gio Marconi, Milan

Exhibition Title: Bonjour Tourist

Date: April 13 – May 19, 2012

Note: A video documenting part of a performance by Lucy Dodd has been uploaded here.

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Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Gio Marconi, Milan. Photos by Filippo Armellin

Press Release:

For the past several years Will Benedict has been working professionally as a photographer, painter and tourist. This April at Gio’ Marconi, Benedict will present Bonjour Tourist, new works relying on various combinations of gouache paintings and cut-out studio portraits, mounted in customized aluminium and foamcore frames. Organized in distinct series, they fulfill the nominal categories of newscasters, postcards, flags, couples having dinner and nations peeking in through windows. Compared to the kind of aesthetic stimulation experienced while watching TV the works are like watching two, maybe three channels at the same time.

In Benedict’s works the buzzing clamor of things, places, foods and people are fossilized in lavishly painted waxed foamcore passepartout, freezing the sadness of the tourist and audience (the same thing) into an ever so slight hypomanic mixture of euphoria and irritability. Frozen along with everyone and everything in these passepartouts are paintings on canvas depicting a tits and penis nationalism that sells food at restaurants, plane ticket to exotic locals, walls or stamps.

Social relations are stimulating, they embody growth, destruction and a reformulation of ideas. Throughout the constant remediation in Benedict’s paintings, the only immutable thing is the multiplication of interpellative layers. At the opening, more guests will join the life-size photographs that populate the work and a performance by Lucy Dodd will pierce the atmosphere. With limitless attention, painting is an infinite zoom in effect that endlessly generates and penetrates the recursive layers of a falsely faustian dilemma—work or not, dine or paint, dinner, painting, dinner, painting, etc. Like a metropolitan first date where we get fat, talk, suffer nationalistic tendencies and wade through what can be done about them.

- Mathieu Malouf

Link: Will Benedict at Gio Marconi

Artist: Egan Frantz

Venue: Tomorrow, Toronto

Date: April 19 – May 20, 2012

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Full gallery of images and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Tomorrow, Toronto

Link: Egan Frantz at Tomorrow

Welcome to Week in Review, our Sunday round-up of the last 7 days of activity here at Contemporary Art Daily. Please subscribe to our RSS feed, follow us on Twitter, follow us on Tumblr, and become a fan on Facebook.

We would like to thank Dirk Denison Architects for their generous sponsorship of Contemporary Art Group.

This week’s featured exhibitions:

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster at Esther Schipper

James Lee Byars at Overduin and Kite

Kirsten Pieroth at Office Baroque

Richard Artschwager at Susanne Hilbery

“Y… as in Yet” at Shanaynay

“White Oxford Cotton” at Cabinet

Claus Rasmussen at Neue Alte Brücke

Luca Frei at Bonner Kunstverein

Elizabeth Peyton at Regen Projects

Jonas Wood at David Kordansky

Dirk Bell at Andreas Melas & Helena Papadopoulos

Martin Westwood at The Approach

Francesco Joao Scavarda at Gasconade

Barry X Ball at Nathalie Obadia

Have an excellent week.

Artist: Ball X Ball

Venue: Nathalie Obadia, Paris

Exhibition Title: Matthew Barney / Barry X Ball Dual-Dual Portrait

Date: March 17 – May 16, 2012

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Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Nathalie Obadia, Paris

Press Release:

On the occasion of its first collaboration with Barry X Ball, Galerie Nathalie Obadia is delighted to present Matthew Barney / Barry X Ball Dual-Dual Portrait, a new installation by this American artist, in its Parisian gallery space.

After the critical success of his exhibition at Ca’Rezzonico in Venice last summer, the artist will be showing a composition of great technical virtuosity: a Janus-like double portrait of himself and fellow artist Matthew Barney.

In the spirit of his most emblematic pieces, Barry X Ball thus continues his work on a contemporary reinterpretation of historical sculpture, taking as his models art-world personalities, in an effort to offer a total sensory experience, getting the viewer to oscillate between the tension of the sublime and the possibility of the grotesque.

Matthew Barney / Barry X Ball Dual-Dual Portrait is the sixth and last piece in a series of installations dedicated to the famous American artist, intitiated in june 2000, when Matthew Barney was invited by Barry X Ball to pose for him. Although all of Ball’s heads have been carved from stone, his portrait project has gone through many formal and conceptual changes, since its inception : the completed works vary greatly in form, scale, and materials. The Matthew Barney installations are the largest, most-complex portrait sculptures Barry X Ball has realized.

« I have chosen to work primarily stone because it’s a déclassé material », explains Barry X Ball, « because of its proven permanence, because of its glorious history as a sculpture material, because it resists my every effort to control it, because its timeless nature contrasts with the of-the-moment high-tech means I utilize to shape it, because it is a challenge to make something of it more beautiful than it is in its natural state. »

While remaining true to his formal approach, with Matthew Barney / Barry X Ball Dual-Dual Portrait, Barry X Ball pushes back the limits of his practice by creating a striking sculpted piece in two tones. There is an extreme tension between the intimacy of the conversation and the repulsion and terror inspired by the javelin tearing the flesh of the truncated busts: between the bulk of the marble and the precise refinement of the delicately chiselled flesh of the two men, inspired by Italian Mannerist ceremonial armour. Matthew Barney / Barry X Ball Dual-Dual Portrait, 2000-2009 Italian Portoro Marble, Portuguese Gold Marble, stainless steel, various other metals stone. stone / shaft assemblies: each 139.7 x 13.3 x 20.3 cm, stone figures: each 55.9 x 13.3 x 20.3 cm.

The artist, who composes titles for his works in the form of prose poems, shaping his sentences as he models his sculptural portraits, offers the viewer a description – sometimes clinical, sometimes poetic – of his installation :

This work is the most recent example of the exotic-stone portraits that have occupied me for the last 15 years. It was realized through a complex technical process incorporating photography, life-casting, Forton-plaster and clay hand-modeling, 3-dimensional digitization (laser-scanning), digital modeling, computer-controlled stone milling, and hundreds of hours of hand stone carving / polishing. The resultant sculpture pays reverent homage to its historical antecedents. I hope it is also completely new.

The installation incorporates paired exotic marble figures, stainless steel impalement shafts, delicate web-like rigging, and specific lighting. With the figures’ violently-penetrated labial / vulval appendages hovering above a floor-shadow rosette, a subtle bi-sexual interplay is established. The interpenetrating radiating cable funnels of the twin martyrs (“Saints Barry and Matthew [Ball and Barney] in Ecstasy”) are modeled on both Gothic pendentive vaulting and the Brooklyn Bridge suspension system. While projecting a singular, excruciating intensity, a surreal stillness, verging on the sinister, suffuses the hyper-detailed doubled double figures. Their effusive bas-relief shrink-wrapped scarification, composed of fanciful decorative elements, animal forms, religious symbols (Islamic, Jewish, and Christian), escutcheons, and dome-like rivets, reflects a world of influences and lends a bi-millennial retrospective sweep to the work, intented as a conceptual / technical tour de force. The work’s complexity is echoed in its expansive, clinically-poetic title.

Barry X Ball, February 2012.

Link: Barry X Ball at Nathalie Obadia

Artist: Francesco Joao Scavarda

Venue: Gasconade

Exhibition Title: The Opposite of the Opposite Opposite of the Opposite

Date: April 14 – May 12, 2012

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Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Gasconade, Milan

Press Release:

In a recent interview during the Italian TV show “Quelli che… il calcio”, Marina Abramović explained to the presenter Victoria Cabello that in her art “a knife is a knife, blood is blood.” Enlightened by her Method, we could say that in the art of Francesco Joao Scavarda (b. 1987, Milan) painting is painting, concrete is concrete.

Scavarda grew up between the Brazilian state of Pará, at the foot of the Amazon rainforest, and the coast of Lago Maggiore in Nothern Italy. The scenarios evoked by these two places coexist in the artist’s soul without causing any conflict, but rather favoring the development of a peacefully holistic, generalistic, globalized vision. The art of Scavarda comes out of the Empire, and within the Empire it finds its own raison d’être. We can say so because at the end of the day there is no clash when listening to Francisco “Chico” Buarque along the Autostrada dei Laghi, or dancing to a Basic Channel production in a club in São Paulo.

On any decent long-haul flight, you can watch a Walt Disney or Matt Groening cartoon; and  while in the past the appropriation of comics and other popular figurative languages by “high” art has caused a sensation, in the era of globalization the continuous migration of figures in the flow of visual production is nothing more than small talk. If we wrote that Prada’s latest menswear collection betrays a reference to the art of John Wesley (whose retrospective exhibition was held at Fondazione Prada in 2009), or shows that Mrs. Prada is familiar with the art of Alistair Frost, most of you would take these statements with a grain of salt and conclude that Aloha shirts are simply back into fashion.

Similarly, we could write that the art of Scavarda follows the tradition of Pop Art, especially in its European declination—the art of Thomas Bayrle, Peter Roehr, Sir Eduardo Paolozzi, where icons serve the construction of more complex images… But such a statement should be taken with a grain of salt as well, as the artist’s concern isn’t to comment on the ordinary, the popular, the trivial, but rather to wallow in the universal visual imagery. In other words, it’s like drinking Heineken just because it’s the world’s most widely consumed beer.

In the series of gouaches on canvas we are presenting tonight, Scavarda examines the recurring figurative languages produced by the so-called “First World”. The representational technique of aerial perspective, theorized by Leonardo da Vinci but also recurring in traditional Oriental landscape painting, is the starting point of this body of work. “Adunque tu, pittore, – wrote da Vinci – quando fai le montagne, fa’ che di colle in colle sempre le bassezze sieno più chiare che le altezze, e quanto vòi fare più lontana l’una dall’altra, fa’ le bassezze più chiare; e quanto più si leverà in alto, più mostrerà la verità della forma e del colore.” (Manuscript A, around 1492)

Scavarda consents to the multiplication of points of view: planes slide on ach other, perspectives are distorted, the imitation of reality is pursued with the awareness that nothing is more real than the commonplace. In Au hasard Balthazar, Robert Bresson tells the troubled love story of Jacques and Marie from the point of view of a donkey: through Balthazar’s eyes—eyes that don’t know any culture—human behavior is abstracted in one-to-one dynamics regulated by the most earthly impulses. As in Bresson’s film, in the art of Scavarda every personal experience is generalized and its representation inevitably entails the recourse to figurative clichés.

Facing the magma of globalized images, Scavarda avoid any highbrow interpretation, and prefers indeed to dice with them. No more dispersion. Let’s make a new start. Scale, rotate, skew, distort, warp (or: Surf it / scroll it / pose it / click it / cross it / crack it / twitch / update it.)

Link: Francesco Joao Scavarda at Gasconade

Artist: Martin Westwood

Venue: The Approach, London

Exhibition Title: Boneus

Date: March 22 – May 13. 2012

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Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of  The Approach, London

Press Release:

The Approach is pleased to announce an exhibition of a new sculptural works by Martin Westwood.

Westwood has populated the gallery space with a grouping of sculptures that take as their source material types of superfluous, peripheral objects that are readily found in everyday day life. Plucked from the realms of office industry, commerce and travel, he chooses forms that have evolved to perform highly specified functions. Shown as press casts and exaggerated reproductions of the originals, the surrogates of an inflatable travel pillow, the parcel shelf of a car, boxes of A4 office paper, thick sheets of partition glass used in banks or post offices, a charity collection box and puff pastry. One step removed from the original, the replicas, when elevated to the status of art object, are tinged with a precious, surreal quality. The viewer is not encouraged to believe that these are stand-ins in terms of function. Westwood renders them devoid of any purpose other than sculptural, highlighting their tentative place within a new system of objects. He simultaneously draws attention to the both the original objects’ loss of function and their newly attained value as artwork.

As sculptures, with parts cast and made in clay, polyester-resin, fibre-glass and glass, they appear rudimentary, at once both blatant and secretive, dwelling in an outpost of whimsy. The oven baked casts of puff pastry act in an almost parasitic way, twisting and unfolding over, under and through the surface of the sculptures, to create an aesthetic link in what could superficially appear to be a motley assortment of objects. Heavy-duty grey vinyl flooring, an industrial, membrane surface that feels oddly at home in the gallery achieves a similar effect. It is a carefully considered ‘neutral’ platform upon which these sculptures convene, redundant in terms of industrial use, but because it supplants the original natural wooden floor of the gallery, it conveys the same dummy-like blankness that is akin to the cast and reproduced objects which compose the sculptures themselves.

Throughout ‘Boneus’, Westwood departs from previous practice by relaxing a self-imposed tradition of making work laden with more readily apparent layers of narrative. This departure is perhaps emphasised by the conspicuous lack of a more literal figurative element, which is often found in his previous bodies of work. In turn, the work’s interpretation has become more open ended and the figurative element is transferred to the viewers themselves. The sculptures’ arrangement purposefully rejects the familiar centeredness of a viewing subject by placing the works in a gathering reminiscent to a stage set. The placement works against a traditional curatorial model, which chicanes the viewer into predetermined paths around the space and instead, forces us to confront a set of strangely connected works head on. As a group, they have effectively separated themselves from the audience, meaning that one is forced to choose between butting a way in or remaining a voyeur. Once navigated, we are embroiled in the artist’s ultimate concerns with the relationship between the objects themselves rather than that of the object to viewer, or object to space. The relations they set up between themselves appear obtuse, perverse, enigmatic and riddled with secrecy. As objects, that Westwood describes “as riddled with noumenal difficulties that collapse into their own economies”, they exist as fossilised monuments to the experience and memory of the contradictory phenomena of exchange.

Martin Westwood’s recent exhibitions include: Supermen made you but only superfluity will release you, Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam (2012); These Hands Are Models, Stanley Picker Gallery (2011); Der Menschen Klee, Kunst Im Tunnel, Dusseldorf (2011); Acute Melancholia, Studio 44, Stockholm (2010); Comma13 (Hysteresis), Bloomberg Space (2009); Silt Inter Lace, Approach W1 (2008); Prospects and Interiors: Recent Acquisitions of Sculptors’ Drawings, The Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, 2008; Martin Westwood, The Approach (2007); Art Basel Statements (2006); fade held Art Now, Tate Britain (2005).

Link: Martin Westwood at The Approach