Installation view. All images via Galerie Neu.

Rose Painting, the second solo show of Norwegian-German artist Yngve Holen, was recently on view at Galerie Neu in Berlin through July 14. This exhibition presented a series of rims, ‘gutted’ from five different sports utility vehicles and then 3D-scanned, scaled to a diameter of two meters, and optimized to be milled in CLT (cross-laminated timber). The resulting objects are flower-like wooden constructions that feature symmetrical lines organized around a center point. Rose Painting addresses the formal design languages of a utility object, questioning the fetish object and psychosocial design that punctuate the objects that clutter wealth distribution.

The role of ornamentation in the above questions is central to this exhibition, which emphasized the process of creating the art object as much as the art object itself. The press release states, “Rims are typically made of aluminum, a material whose ambivalent value bears, on the one hand, the symbolic aura of modernity, while on the other, the ‘stain’ of a cheap substitute.” The artist’s choice to reproduce these rims in cross-laminated timber, this form is exaggerated in a form that is typically understood to be more valuable, traditional, and environmentally sustainable. In this way, these forms point to the symbolic and economic conditions of their proliferation, since the crisis of functionalism in the 1960s, and seek to “ride out the increasing aerodynamics of the contemporary chassis.”

The reimagined rims are products of technical woodcarving, a process that expose the milling traces, tears, and cracks of an industrially prefabricated resource sculpted by a machine. With their rescaled form, the rims present these blemishes as a ‘natural’ byproduct, pointing to the current schizophrenic relationship to automobiles that strives for optimized car use and reduced emissions, while continuing to fetishize and covet the SUV. In a sense, the SUV epitomizes the frenzied materialistic collecting of ornaments and materials behind car culture. The large-scale vehicles are extremely popular despite their high consumption of gas and the danger they pose to other drives and pedestrians, as well as their inutility in the suburban or residential contexts in which they are frequently found.

The design and possession of the SUV, like that of rims, illustrates the complex mechanisms of ornamentation, style, and economics motivating the circulation and production of automotive accessories. The title of this exhibition points to the function of the ornament to embellish an object, as well as invest it with value and suggestions of worth. The craftmanship implied in the title and objects of the exhibition stand in interesting and not entirely opposing relationship to the industrial processes of mechanical production implied by the rim.

-A. Corrigan

Related Links:

Exhibition Page [Galerie Neu]

Ozem Altin at Berlin Biennale, via Art Observed

With summer in full swing, the Berlin Biennale has opened in the German capital, bearing the title We Don’t Need Another Hero.  Referencing Tina Turner’s song from 1985, the show points to a moment before the major geopolitical shifts still rippling across the globe. Read More »

Installation view. All images via the Gagosian Gallery.

Prototypes of Imagination, an exhibition of new work by Katharina Grosse, is on view at the Gagosian Gallery through July 27, 2018. Grosse is well known for her in situ paintings that respond to the environment in which they are produced, typically with explosive color rendered directly onto architecture, interiors, and landscapes.  Employing bold colors and ambitious movement, her works test the limits of boundaries and redefine space. Her mold-breaking paintings and intricate constructions have challenged the contained space of the canvas and, in this exhibition, the boundaries between imagination and reality.

The artist’s use of an industrial spray gun has provoked comparisons of her work with street art or graffiti, as she coats the objects in her path, at times the walls and windows of the exhibition space, with bright color. These works can be seen as a meditation on the subjective and immersive experience of painting, as Grosse integrates events and experiences that emerge during the construction process into the artwork. In Prototypes of Imagination, Grosse seeks to “try out—and dramatically compress—the characteristics of reality” by building prototypes that can be reenacted and applied to other endeavors.

As in prior shows, a single gigantic painting on loose cloth is at the center of this exhibition. The huge expanses of loose cloth that Grosse works on in the studio allow the artist to respond to the specific architectural conditions in which the work will be housed. Grosse can paint beyond and in response to the frame of the gallery, from the location of her studio. In this particular example, the work hangs from the ceiling, resembling a hulking organic form, almost breathing with vibrant, pulsating color and the spectral silhouettes that interlock and fade into each other. The work reveals inverted chromatic zones produced by stencils of vaguely biomorphic form, as well as painterly gesture balanced with a dizzying array of overwhelmingly vibrant layers that suggest spatial and temporal transformation.

The other works in this exhibition, oriented around this centerpiece, are presented on stretched canvas and reveal a parallel effect of layered or scrambled form that tessellate and slide into each other. These pieces are punctuated by shifts in chromatic temperature, as well as forms created by stencils, folds, or other tools. These spaces of opacity or negative space are interrupted by solid geometries or ambiguous transparencies, creating a kaleidoscopic experience of color and movement that possesses a rhythm all its own. As the press release states, “each composition bears intimate traces of its creation,” thereby acting organically upon the limits of pictorial logic and showing the viewer the potentially hypnotic power of an encounter in the field of vision.

-A. Corrigan

Related Links

Exhibition Page [Gagosian Gallery]

Installation View. All images via Anna Corrigan for Art Observed.

Tatiana Trouvé’s One Day for Eternity is on view at the König Gallery in Berlin through July 8. This is the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. In this piece, Trouvé continues her exploration of memory, material, and space. The work is the most recent installation in a series entitled Les Indéfinis, which addresses the myriad transformations that an artwork undergoes, morphing from an idea into material, from material into an object of circulation. Read More »

Installation View. All images via Blain Southern.

Now through July 14, Blain Southern London presents America My Hometown, an exhibition dedicated to the formative years of Edward Kienholz’s career in mid-century America. The works in the exhibition span the years of 1954-1967, at which point Kienholz was living and working in Los Angeles. This historical period was hugely significant for the position of the United States and the spread of capitalism globally, to which Kienholz responded directly in his work. The pieces produced by the artist during this time reflect a concern with the political turmoil and social anxiety that marked the political and social circumstances in which he lived.

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Melissa Brown, Swamp, 2018, courtesy Derek Eller Gallery

“The fantasy that reality is changeable: it’s what keeps us alive,” writes Melissa Brown in an anecdotal text for the press release of “Between States,” her first solo exhibition at Derek Eller Gallery in New York. Brown describes a road trip from Tennessee down south to Summerville, Georgia to visit outsider artist Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden, a kitschy wonderland of mosaics and mirrors, the folk art equivalent of Antoni Gaudi’s Park Güell.

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Difference Engine (Installation View), via Jodie Berman for Art Observed

Meandering into spaces of contradiction and surrealist juxtaposition, artist Cory Arcangel has put on his curator cap for a show organized in collaboration with Art21’s Tina Kukielski, organizing an exhibition of works centered around modernity and technology, and framed equally by ideas of potential and hazard. Read More »

Anish Kapoor, Untitled (detail) (2018), via Art Observed

Currently on view at Kamel Mennour’s Paris exhibition space, artist Anish Kapoor has brought a strikingly powerful body of works, mixing styles and forms through a range of pieces to explore a unique and detailed perspective on humanity.  Much like previous works for the artist, twisting desire, power and image through rigorous visual systems, the show presents the viewer and work as inextricably linked, bound together through their shared states and momentary acts of convergence.

Anish Kapoor, Untitled (2018), via Art Observed

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