Marlene Dumas, The Martyr (2002-04). All images via Art Observed.

The Pinault Collection’s Palazzo Grassi presents Open-End this summer, a major monographic exhibition of work by Marlene Dumas, the Cape Town-born artist renowned for her portraiture exploring the depth, breadth and intensity of human emotion. Coinciding with the 59th Venice Biennale, the solo-exhibition features over 100 works from 1984 to 2021, including previously unseen paintings such as Persona (2020). Curated by Caroline Bourgeois and the artist herself, open-end spans 33 rooms across two floors of the 18th-century Pinault Collection space alongside the Grand Canal in Venice. (more…)

Joseph Beuys, Untitled, 1954. All images courtesy of Aidan Chisholm for AO.

Alongside the 59th Venice Biennale, Palazzo Cini presents a retrospective exhibition dedicated to Joseph Beuys, the acclaimed German-born artist, teacher and theorist. Curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, director of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini Institute of Art History, and presented in conjunction with Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, Joseph Beuys: Fine-limbed is displayed on the second floor of the Campo San Vio, the museum and former home containing the historic art collection of Italian patron Vittorio Cini (1885-1977). Featuring thirty eight works with particular attention to Beuys’s early artistic development and drawings, this solo-exhibition explores his engagement with the body as a malleable conceptual and formal framework. (more…)

Leonora Carrington, The Chair: Daghda Tuatha dé Danann, 1955. All images courtesy of Aidan Chisholm for AO.

Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity marks the first major international exhibition focusing on Surrealist engagements with magic, alchemy and the occult. A two-part exhibition first on display at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice before traveling to Museum Barberini in Potsdam, Surrealism and Magic features approximately 60 works from more than 40 international museums and private collections. The exhibition coincides with the theme of the 59th Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams, which draws its title from the otherworldly book by Leonora Carrington, the English-born painter and storyteller whose work features prominently in both the Guggenheim show and the main exhibition of the Biennale. (more…)

Eddie R. Aparicio, Holbein En Crenshaw (Washington Blvd. and Crenshaw Blvd., LA, CA) (2018), all images via Aidan Chisholm for Art Observed

Hauser & Wirth presents “The New Bend,” a group exhibition exploring the intergenerational legacy of quilting as a gendered, raced and classed mode of social practice. Curated by Legacy Russell, Executive Director & Chief Curator of The Kitchen, the exhibition brings together twelve contemporary artists engaging with the Gee’s Bend Alabama quilting tradition: Anthony Akinbola, Eddie R. Aparicio, Dawn Williams Boyd, Diedrick Brackens, Tuesday Smillie, Tomashi Jackson, Genesis Jerez, Basil Kincaid, Eric N. Mack, Sojourner Truth Parsons, Qualeasha Wood, and Zadie Xa.

Tomashi Jackson, Among Fruits (Big Shane and the Farmer) (2021)

The New Bend renders apparent the enduring influence of the Gee’s Bend quilters, underscoring the weighty historical role of Black American women including Sarah Benning (b. 1933), Missouri Pettway (1902-1981), Lizzie Major (1922-2011), Sally Bennett Jones (1944-1988) and Mary Lee Bendolph (b.1935). Rooted in the hamlet of Gee’s Bend along the Alabama River in Wilcox County, this textile tradition extends from the 19th and 20th centuries to the present era, with contemporary artists mining the visual rhetoric and technical framework of quilting, while paying homage to the collective ethos of the communal practice. “The New Bend” highlights contemporary engagement with the Gee’s Bend legacy to posit the centrality of this tradition within Modernist art historical narratives of abstraction.

Coinciding with the 20th anniversary of the pivotal exhibition “The Quilts at Gee’s Bend” at The Whitney Museum of Art (2002-2003), “The New Bend” attests to the continued relevance of this textile practice in the context of twenty-first-century digitization. Russell evokes the rhetoric of digitization and computation to understand the cooperative networks enacted through quilt-making today, in this era of the Web 2.0 marked by the proliferation of participatory platforms within the decentralized internet domain. “The New Bend” does not position textile art as a reversion to the handmade in our digital era, but rather harnesses the rhetoric of computation and coding to appreciate the layered dynamics of quilting as simultaneously personal and communal, conjuring collective memories while perhaps envisioning alternate futures. In Qualeasha Wood’s work, the artist reflects upon the dynamics of surveillance and control within non-neutral digital infrastructures to explore the polemics of hypervisibility of Black female subjectivities.Ctrl+Alt+Del (2021), views the dynamics of surveillance and control within non-neutral digital infrastructures to explore the polemics of hypervisibility of Black female subjectivities.

Qualeasha Wood, Ctrl+Alt+Del (2021)

The gallery statement underscores the legacy of Gee’s Bend extending beyond art historical discourse: “What the quilters of Gee’s Bend reveal via their transformative cooperative work is that they are both artists and technologists, contributing simultaneously to art history, as well as to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) practice. This duality exists in the work of each artist featured in this exhibition and many more beyond who continue to grow in this tradition.”

Anthony Akinbola, Jubilee (2021)

Basil Kincaid, Four Eyes One Vision (2021)

Entering the intimate, second-floor space of the Chelsea gallery, viewers encounter Dawn Williams Boyd’s The Right to (My) Life (2017), a mixed media tapestry capturing an anti-abortion rally. This vibrant figurative work situates textile art as a mode of political intervention, conjuring the legacy of quilting as a mode of political conscious-raising amidst the Civil Rights Movement, particularly following the emergence of The Freedom Quilting Bee in Rehoboth, Alabama in 1966. Anthony Akinbola builds upon the sampling tactics of Gee’s Bend quilters through his use of the Du Rag, a vernacular emblem of Black American culture, in his Jubilee (2021). From the architectural paneling of Eric N. Mack’s boy on the edge of the shoreline in DES HOMMES ET DES DIEUX (2018) to the incorporation of soil from a former potato field in Tomashi Jackson’s Among Fruits (Big Shane and the Farmer) (2021), the vibrant works in “The New Bend” are enmeshed within a creative network encapsulating rich cultural heritage.

Dawn Williams Boyd, The Right to (My) Life (2017)

Diedrick Brackens, survival is a shrine, not the small space near the limit of life (2021)

– A. Chisholm

Related Links:
Exhibition Page [Hauser & Wirth]
Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers [Souls Grown Deep Foundation]

Anicka Yi, In Love With the World (2021) All images by Aidan Chisholm for Art Observed.

Setting forth her floating biomorphic machines, artist Anicka Yi has reinvigorated Turbine Hall as visitors return to the iconic London site after a two-year pandemic-induced pause. The latest Tate Modern Hyundai Commission, In Love With the World explores the nexus between nature and technology, integrating the biological and the algorithmic. (more…)

Leilah Babirye at Gordon Robichaux, via Art Observed

Art-goers descended upon Cipriani South Street in the newly renovated Battery Maritime Building last week for the much anticipated 12th installation of the Independent Art Fair, which opened in New York on September 9th. Formerly located at Spring Studios in Tribeca, the fair has garnered a reputation as a reliable source of fresh talent, and took up new residence  this year within the spacious corridors of the historic waterfront locale at the lower tip of Manhattan.

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Wendy Red Star at Sargent’s Daughters, via Art Observed

This past weekend, New Yorkers flocked to the Javits Center, not for COVID-19 vaccinations, but rather for the much-anticipated Armory Show, which made its return after last year’s cancelled edition, and which marked the first major art fair in the United States since the pandemic struck. In the wake of lockdown, following an extended period of postponed events and online viewing rooms, eager art-goers packed into the Javits Center, where the fair is now located. In the spacious, newly renovated convention center along the Hudson River, the fair presented more than 150 booths, with more than 40 international galleries. Serving as a fixture of modern and contemporary art, the fair kicked off the New York art world’s busiest week of the season—Armory Week. (more…)

Ashley Lyon, Mother (Installation View), via Art Observed

For the second edition of Upstate Art Weekend in the Hudson Valley, Elijah Wheat Showroom presented “Tender Temper,” a solo exhibition featuring ceramic works by the artist Ashley Lyon that explore the complexities of motherhood. Foregrounding the human figure, Lyon enacts enlarged, fragmented representations of maternal bodies, placed into surreal positions that complement the elaboration of surreal, disjunctive narratives. While these corporeal sculptures are rooted in the ultra-personal and often tender domain of the maternal, the truncated and generalized forms simultaneously operate with a universal quality. Lyon, who sculpts entirely by hand rather than using life-casts, harnesses the materiality of clay to imbue the surfaces of the bodily forms with a tactile quality, her direct intervention evident.

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Martin Roth, From 2017-2021 Martin Roth transformed a ruin into a garden for a plant concert (2021), via Art Observed

Throughout the course of his artistic practice, the late Martin Roth channeled nature as an active creative agent, using plants and flowers as instrumental collaborators in his practice. In 2017, Roth envisioned the transformation of an abandoned nineteenth-century historical structure into an immersive public garden, a “plant concert hall.”  Though the artist passed away before the enactment of his project, the Newburgh, New York-based Strongroom—a non-profit arts organization—executed his plans this summer. Strongroom presented the site-specific installation during the second installation of Upstate Art Weekend 2021, the three-day self-directed event celebrating the arts in the Hudson Valley.

Martin Roth, Installation View (2021), via Art Observed

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Hugo Montoya, How ya like me now? (2019), via Art Observed

For the second installation of Upstate Art Weekend, the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) presented a collaborative exhibition at Foreland, a new contemporary arts campus in the Hudson River Valley. Co-organized by curator Jesse Greenberg of JAG Projects, NADA x Foreland showcased works from over 100 artists presented by 81 galleries, nonprofits and artist-run spaces selected through an open call. While celebrating the rich cultural legacy of the Hudson River Valley, Upstate Art Weekend aimed to cultivate community and collaboration in the wake of lockdown, as the art world begins to reopen. While exhibitors ranged from Dubai to Guatemala City to Bucharest, NADA x Foreland focused on artists from New York State, with particular attention to the Upstate region. The works were not displayed in booths, but rather arranged together within the newly restored Civil-War-era spaces of the Foreland campus on the bank of Catskill Creek. (more…)