Marking his first solo exhibition at Galerie Chantal Crousel, artist Matias Faldbakken brings together a series of installations that unify drawings from 2017 to 2021 alongside a series of various groups of lacquered bricks, some locally sourced, others originating from Norway. The artist, who has often explored notions of antagonism and conflict, charging his works with a sort of disruptive, confrontational energy, here turns that notion towards the act of drawing itself. Read More »
| Comments Off on Paris -Matias Faldbakken, “Beaten Ink, Upset Brick, Downcast Charcoal” at Chantal Crousel Through February 5th, 2022 | |
Chris Martin, Gold Teeth for Lance De Los Reyes (2021), via Anton Kern
On view this month at Anton Kern Gallery in New York, artist Chris Martin presents a body of new works that continue the artist’s luminous, colorful approach towards the painted canvas, and the continued relationships of scale that flow through so many of the artist’s works. On view on the first floor of the gallery space, a series of large-scale canvases and a smaller painting made in tribute to the late Lance De Los Reyes, present night skies, washes of color and surreal moments of explosive energy in a set of explorations of energy and space.
Chris Martin, Seven Pointed Star (2018-2020), via Anton Kern
Images and depictions of the cosmos are a uniting thread among all of the paintings: inky night skies, planets, constellations, stars, and moons, continung a relationship between deep space and the landscapes in the near field. The artist, who has long drawn inspiration from time spent in the Catskills, where he would follow patterns and movements in the land and its wildlife, here takes those same iconographies and applies them towards unique expressions of space.
Chris Martin, Untitled (2019-2021), via Anton Kern
The influence is clear in all of these new works, a number of which were painted in his Catskills studio. The five paintings in the gallery’s back atrium are all atmospheric skyscapes—some seeming to directly depict the constellations and night sky of the open woods and fields. It is not only nature found in these works, but the influence of Brooklyn, music, and pop culture are also evident—in Telescope Sphinx in Outer Space, for example, Martin’s painted galaxy is populated by collaged images of Greta Garbo as the Sphinx, sailors, mushrooms, frogs, birds, musicians, and pot leaves—among others—creating humor and play in the cosmic heavens.
Chris Martin, Telescope Sphinx in Outer Space (2019-2021), via Anton Kern
Martin’s work has long negotiated this peculiar space between the spiritual, the natural, and the pop cultural ether that seems to hold and envelope so much of his approach towards the image. Rather than place these notions in opposition, his pieces here present a fusion of all inputs, a harmony of inspiration that seems to place the distant vistas of outer space, the internal reveries of solitude, and everything between, on equal footing.
On view this month at two of Galerie Perrotin’s Paris exhibition spaces, artist Yves Laloy’s work gets an expansive and exploratory review, marking the first major exhibition since a 2004 retrospective at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rennes. Unifying a series of private loans for the show, the exhibition marks an unprecendented look at the architect-turned-painter and his kinetic, colorful painterly constructions. Read More »
| Comments Off on Paris – Yves Laloy: “VISION” at Galerie Perrotin Through March 12th, 2022 | |
Robert Gober, Waterfall (2105-2016), via Matthew Marks
This month in New York, Robert Gober makes his return to Matthew Marks Gallery, bringing forth new drawings and sculptures made from a wide variety of materials including wood, resin, acrylic paint, cotton fabric and running water, all the works in the exhibition were made in Gober’s New York studio over the past five years. A continuation of Gober’s expressive and illusory body of work exploring politics of the body, memory and time, his most recent show presents a series of new constructions running along similar conceptual avenues.
Robert Gober, Waterfall (detail) (2105-2016), via Matthew Marks Read More »
| Comments Off on New York – Robert Gober: “Shut up.” “No. You shut up.” at Matthew Marks Through January 29th, 2022 | |
Chris Daze Ellis, Is This Seat Taken? (2020), via PPOW
On view this month in New York, P·P·O·W has compiled a body of new works by Christopher “Daze” Ellis, the longtime graffiti writer and painter who came up among a new generation of taggers who began their work during the late 1970’s, and who would be among those who earned early recognition by the New York gallery scene during the 1980’s. Combining a selection of significant works from the 1980s and early 1990s with a series of new paintings and sculptures, Give It All You Got chronicles a lifelong dedication to portraying the lifeforce of New York City and commemorating those who were a part of what it once was. Read More »
| Comments Off on New York – Chris Daze Ellis: “Give It All You Got” at P•P•O•W Through February 12th, 2022 | |
Yves Scherer, Le Cerisier (2021), via Eva Presenhuber
On view this month at Galerie Eva Presenhuber’s New York outpost artists Yves Scherer and Louisa Gagliardi present separate bodies of work unified by the gallery space, creating a subtle and enigmatic discourse on reality, perception and culture. Across a set of sculptures and paintings, the show is a striking meditation on the two artist’s work, and the unexpected but compelling linkages between them.
Paul Chan, A drawing as a recording of an insurrection (Installation View)
In 2021, a mob of protestors stormed the U.S. Capitol, creating a wealth of now enduring images of a country in the midst of political and cultural strife. The images, something of a modern media collage, were at times surreal and unsettling, at others comical and bizarre, underscoring the United States’s modern crossroads of political and social identification. These images became the inspiration for artist Paul Chan, whose work A drawing as a recording of an insurrection, a massive double-sided illustration interpreting the day’s events, is on view now at Greene Naftali.
Arturo Kameya, Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, but dogs just want to go to outer space (2021), via GRIMM
On view at GRIMM this month in New York, artist Arturo Kameya presents a body of works unified under the title En esa pulga se mezcla nuestra sangre / In that flea, our blood mixes. Featuring a range of new works that expand beyond the narratives explored in the artist’s multimedia presentation currently on view in Soft Water Hard Stone, the New Museum Triennial, the show continues Kameya’s investigation of the plasticity of history and time, revisiting events and narratives through perspectives that are at times contradictory, and through the lens of the personal memories of his upbringing in Lima, Peru.
| Comments Off on New York – Arturo Kameya: “En esa pulga se mezcla nuestra sangre / In that flea, our blood mixes” at GRIMM Through January 15th, 2022 | |
Lutz Bacher, The Betty Center (2010), via Buchholz
In 1976, the artist Lutz Bacher was approached to be interviewed for a volume of artist interviews, a young artist who had adopted a masculine, German-sounding pseudonym that covered her work in an air of conceptual mystique. Accordingly, the interview proved to be something of a challenge, breaking apart the artist’s concepts and motives in a manner that would ultimately force some of her underlying concepts into the light of critical appraisal. This awareness led Bacher to try something different, interviewing herself around one of her long-running fascinations, the assassin of President Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald. Delving into the conspiracies around Oswald and his convenient murder, the interview was then printed over with a series of photostatic prints.
Lutz Bacher, The Lee Harvey Oswald Interview (Negative) (1976-78), via Buchholz
This work, which would ultimately be called The Lee Harvey Oswald Interview, delves into the collective memory of this formative national trauma, and whose story continues to vex skeptics of the official narrative to this day. In the following decades, Bacher would reiterate The Lee Harvey Oswald Interview in different formats, including not only the photostats, but also as live multimedia performances in the ‘80s. The work is presented this month at Galerie Buchholz in New York this month, gathering all versions of the Interview together for the first time, including the positive and negative photostats, the performance and video versions, materials from the 1984 performance, its appearances in her publications, and a series of pasteups.
Lutz Bacher, The Lee Harvey Oswald Interview (Positive), (1976-78), via BuchholzLutz Bacher, The Lee Harvey Oswald Interview (Positive) (1976-78), via Buchholz
Each iteration was considering a new, unique version of the work, with the artist introducing various threads and variations on the understanding of the interview and her interests in both Oswald and the obfuscation of her own identity in turn. In Oswald, Lutz would find something like a cypher for her own conspicuously displaced subjecthood, and an example of how unknowability can provoke desire, intrigue, and speculation. In the Interview, she focuses on theories of Oswald having body doubles, and much in the same way, her work ultimately takes on a series of those same body doubles, mirror images of the work that seem to function in unspecified variations.
Lutz Bacher, The Lee Harvey Oswald Interview (Negative) (1976-78), via Buchholz
Taking the artist’s work as a jumping off point to explore her formative ventures into identities and bodies, generative projects and the hazy, nuanced understanding of the artist as operator and creator, the show is a fascinating look into Bacher’s work. This is perhaps best seen in The Betty Center, the preserved collection of her writings, sketches, and collected materials, assembled in a series of binders the artist has designated a work in its own right. Musing on the full scope of her work, the show seems to look at Bacher from both her early works, and her final pieces.
The show closes February 5th.
– D. Creahan
Read more: Lutz Bacher at Galerie Buchholz [Exhibition Site]
| Comments Off on New York – Lutz Bacher: “The Lee Harvey Oswald Interview” at Buchholz Through February 5th, 2022 | |
