July 22nd, 2019
Marisa Merz, via Gladstone
Marisa Merz, the Italian sculptor whose enigmatic and intricate sculptural arrangements was a foundational part of the impact of the Arte Povera movement in the country and around the globe, has passed away at the age of 93. Merz, the only woman associated with the vanguard movement, blazed her own path through the landscape of post-war Italy, and founded a sculptural language that is enduringly important today.
The wife of Mario Merz, Marisa was born in Turin, Italy, in 1926, but little information on her early years persists. Yet her time at home during the 1960’s marked her first experiments with simple materials, working with sheets of metal and thread to create nuanced clusters of material and subtle engagements with her family life. Merz’s work maintained a sense of intimacy and love, tenderness and the human body, that marked her work as distinct from her contemporaries, and which has made her work enduringly resonant.
Marisa Merz, via Gladstone
She is survived by her daughter Beatrice, who heads the Fondazione Merz, and who told the NYT Style section in 2017: “I recently asked her how some of her works came about, what was the thought, inspiration, or approach behind them. She answered that she always and only did what she liked, and that every work originated from the pleasure of making it, from a spontaneous gesture or finding of a particular object or material.”
Read more:
Marisa Merz, Key Arte Povera Figure and Relentlessly Inventive Sculptor, Is Dead at 93 [Art News]
MARISA MERZ (1926–2019) [Artforum]
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July 18th, 2019
Jamian Juliano-Villani, Let’s Kill Nicole (Installation View), via Massimo de Carlo
Currently on view at Massimo de Carlo in London, Jamian Juliano-Villani’s new exhibition, Let’s Kill Nicole, seems to emphasize the same sort of alternating morbidity and innocence of an adolescent suggestion of violence. In the same way that a child might suggest death as a way of solving a minor dispute, Juliano-Villani’s works seem to balance a timeless, vivid energy with simplistic, even banal scenes and subject matter. Read More »
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July 17th, 2019
Wolfgang Tillmans, Greifbar 77 (2018), via Maureen Paley
Culling together a selection of new works and recent projects by Wolfgang Tillmans, Maureen Paley in London has opened an expansive and exploratory show that documents the artist’s multifaceted approach to image-making, featuring new and previously unseen works from the mid 1980s to the present day. Read More »
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July 16th, 2019
Gina Beavers, Cake (2015), via MoMA PS1
In her visceral, vexing, often grotesque paintings, New York–based artist Gina Beavers welcomes an experience of pop culture, and of the history of its depiction in modern art, as a swirling vortex of techniques and transformations. Using sourced digital images appropriated from social media and the Internet, Beavers’s work sees her repurposing the digital graphics into thickly layered compositions that border on sculpture. Hot dogs and hamburgers, human lips and sporting implements all burst forth from the surface of the canvas, a sort of exercise in both dimensionality and texture that underscore their strange abstraction, both from the original scene captured, and from the image’s prior home online. For her exhibition at MoMA PS1 this summer, the artist continues her explorations of these cultural formats. Read More »
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July 15th, 2019
Chris Ofili, Dangerous Liasions (Installation View), via David Zwirner
Currently on at David Zwirner’s 34 East 69th Street townhouse in uptown New York City, artist Chris Ofili is presenting a series of new works unified under the title Dangerous Liaisons. Referencing René Magritte’s eponymous painting of 1935, which Ofili explores in drawings that employ the compositional organization of the Surrealist’s work as a structure for his own rich and layered exploration of color and line, the exhibition underscores Ofili’s abilities as an expressive and emotive painter whose craft with the brush is complemented by his rich conceptual practice. Read More »
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July 11th, 2019
David Hammons, Untitled (2017), via Hauser & Wirth
Marking his first major exhibition on the West Coast in decades, artist David Hammons has touched down at Hauser & Wirth for a major summer blockbuster, an exhibition that underscores the artists’s expansive and challenging practice, and its ongoing discourse with the languages of race, wealth, politics and modern art that have been his hallmark over the course of his life. Remaining razor sharp in its ability to comment on and critique the various socio-cultural spheres his work moves through, Hammons’s show is a masterclass in subtle condemnation. Read More »
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July 10th, 2019
Jonas Wood, Still Life with Red Panels (2018), via Gagosian
Jonas Wood’s rapid rise in the past few years to representation at Gagosian seemed to happen almost overnight. But for followers of the Los Angeles-based painter, his ascension comes as no surprise. Wood’s impressive approach both painting and drawing showcases a masterful sense of patterns, perspectives and color, using figurative vantage points to arrive at beguiling images and innovative constructions of the picture plane. On view this month at Gagosian, a range of works from the artist underscores this ability, and delves ever deeper into his creative practice. Read More »
| Comments Off on New York – Jonas Wood at Gagosian Through July 19th, 2019 | |
July 9th, 2019
Alissa McKendrick, Untitled (2018), via Team
Painter Alissa McKendrick is presenting a solo exhibition at Team Gallery this month, bringing a selection of paintings to bear on the gallery’s project room series “Gallery B.” The artist, whose works mine a particular language between the surreal, figurative and narrative, makes for a refreshing summer entry in the gallery’s programming. Read More »
| Comments Off on New York – Alissa McKendrick: “Resentment” at Team Gallery Through July 26th, 2019 | |
July 3rd, 2019
Annette Messager, Sleeping Pacific (2017), via Marian Goodman
Artist Annette Messager has brought a series of new works to Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris this month, orchestrating a series of drawings and wall mounted works as well as her first video install, Lost in Limbos (2019). The show, continuing Messager’s incisive material inventions and impressive orchestration of varied states and conceptual operations, is on view through July 19th.
Annette Messager at Marian Goodman (Installation View), via Marian Goodman
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July 3rd, 2019
Oscar Murillo, Manifestation (2018-2019), via David Zwirner
Currently on view at David Zwirner London, artist Oscar Murillo has brought forth a selection of new works exploring both his past visual language and a range of expressive new iterations of his technique, delving into the visual history of his paintings as a shared exchange with both history and modernity. On view through the end of the month, Murillo brings out a new range of pieces and projects that underscore his continued engagement with the painted canvas. Read More »
| Comments Off on London – Oscar Murillo: “Manifestation at David Zwirner Through July 26th, 2019 | |
