contemporary art blog
Having nearly reached the end of this long chain of events that constituted 2011, M-KOS took a moment to review the past 12 months with a few invited art professionals, to reveal some of their most memorable exhibitions. Do you agree with their choice or have more to suggest? Come share with us which exhibitions have captured your thoughts the year.
Happy Holidays!
Continue reading “The Memorable Exhibitions 2011”
Currently on view: Montreal
Wanda Koop: No News
at Galerie Division
19 November 2011 – 12 February 2012
Wanda Koop “Friendly Fire (No News Series)” 2011, Acrylic on canvas, 79.5″ x 119″. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Division
No news is good news as we say, to suggest we only hear of a particular place or situation when something bad is happening. This is symptomatic of the deeply-rooted western narrative traditions which center on dramatic tension, taking origin in Greek tragedy but very much actualized in contemporary mass media. In other words, happy feelings tend to signal the end of a story. In this line of thought, Winnipeg artist Wanda Koop’s new painting series entitled “No Newsâ€, feeds on contradicting these assumptions with her catchy pictures.
Koop’s current show at Montréal’s Galerie Division traces a continuation from previous series such as Green Zones (2003–09), manipulating images from daily TV news reports which she constantly scribbles down on post-it notes to later transfer onto canvas. The artist’s use of painting justly draws enough distance with broadcast technologies to establish a discourse of critical awareness that would seem uneasy via video art. But the electric colors, graphic overlays and fragmentation of the painted surface into multiple storylines nonetheless confirm a vocabulary pertaining to television.
Continue reading “Review: “No News” is good news for Wanda Koop”
Currently on view: New York
Maurizio Cattelan: All
at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
4 November 2011 – 22 January 2012
Maurizio Cattelan “All” (2011) Installation view. Photo by M-KOS
On the pay-what-you-wish evening we visited Guggenheim Museum, a long queue of people coiled around the block before flocking in to see Maurizio Cattelan’s current retrospective “Allâ€. Precisely 128 works were hung from a ring at the top of the central rotunda, ranging from veristic wax figures, taxidermy animals, witty photographs, paintings and sculptures, spanning the breadth of Cattelan’s productions over the last 20 years. Instead of a predictably chronological order, the works were randomly placed, in an untidy but well mastered balancing act. The Italian artist literally turned the notion of a museum exhibition on its head, bypassing the use of the institution’s cloistered display areas to transform his retrospective into an expansive site-specific installation.
Continue reading “Review: Maurizio Cattelan – Puppet master pulling “All” the strings”
Currently on view: Montréal
Shilpa Gupta: Will we ever be able to mark enough?
at Darling Foundry
5 October – 4 December 2011 (extended)
Curator: Renée Baert
Shilpa Gupta “Will we ever be able to mark enough?” Installation view at Darling Foundry 2011. Courtesy of the artist and Darling Foundry. Photo credit: Guy L’Heureux
In a rapidly globalizing world, intensified human migrations have brought issues of identity, culture and homeland to the forefront of many’s political agenda, and with them the fears and insecurities of change. Shilpa Gupta’s exhibition Will we ever be able to mark enough? at Darling Foundry sharply addresses some of our most recurrent anxieties for the issues above, particularly regarding border security. The Mumbai artist worked in collaboration with Montreal curator Renée Baert to present her first Canadian solo show, a selection of recent pieces as well as pivotal new works, created specifically for this show.
Unfortunately unavailable to personally set up the exhibition, the artist however did invest much fervor in her selection of signature works. Before even entering the exhibition, a row of six color photographs greet us, hanging on a brick wall across the street from the Foundry. All one and a half meters in diameter, each square image captures the upper body movements of dark skinned figures, arms flailing and faces blurred by slow shutter photo effects. In stepping outside the institutional space of the gallery, Gupta continues her ongoing practice of confronting her images in public settings, usually reserved for advertising purposes. As opposed to the latter’s focus on instantaneous communications, Gupta draws a more complex worldview.
Continue reading “Review: Shilpa Gupta – Will we ever be able to mark enough?”
Michelle Deignan: Posing as a Subject Amongst Subjects
at Maria Stenfors, London
16 July – 29 October 2011
Michelle Deignan “Microphone” (2008) Unique lambda print. Courtesy of the artist and Maria Stenfors.
Michelle Deignan’s London solo exhibition at Maria Stenfors Gallery entitled “Posing as a Subject Amongst Subjects†incorporates video installation, 16 mm film projection and photography. The installation occupies most of the exhibition space, Journey to an Absolute Vantage Point (2011) fits a two-channel video work onto a double-sided screen projection, the back-to-back videos playing off each other in treatment and in form. One side proffers a black-and-white violin, cello and piano trio performing the soundtrack of Deignan’s installation, while the other projection presents a postcard-like color shot of Berlin’s Schloss Charlottenburg (Charlottenburg Palace) and its surroundings, the scene of the story unfolding herein.
Continue reading “Review: Michelle Deignan- Journey to an absolute vantage point”
Currently on View: New York
Richard Serra “Junction/Cycle”
at Gagosian Gallery, W 24th Street
14 September – 26 November 2011
Richard Serra: Junction / Cycle. Installation view. Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery. Photo by Rob McKeever.
“I consider space to be a material. The articulation of space
has come to take precedence over other concerns. I attempt to
use sculptural form to make space distinct.”
– Richard Serra
Richard Serra has filled Gagosian’s 2500 square foot New York Gallery with two recent monumental works for his current show “Junction/Cycle”. Both “Junction” (2011) and “Cycle” (2010) are winding compositions of 13 foot tall curved and leaning slabs of weatherproof steel. Together, they transform the vast gallery into a maze of corridors, hidden clearings and unexpected exits.
Continue reading “Review: Richard Serra “Junction/Cycle””
Currently on view: Montréal
Berlinde De Bruyckere
at DHC/ART, Montréal
30 June – 13 November 2011
“Les Deux” (2007) Courtesy Galleria Continua, San Gimignano / Beijing / Le Moulin
The air is somber and solemn at DHC/ART gallery, where life-size sculptures of human and equestrian carcasses are lugubriously arranged in a clinically white exhibition. An unsettling sense of disquiet has taken over the space, as if we have just witnessed the inexorable reality of a public execution. Belgian artist Berlinde De Bruyckere uses the physical body as a vessel, a receptacle to endure violence, pain, suffering and ultimately death, the body as a theater that lays bare the trials of our human condition.
“Les Deux” (2001) displaces the gallery into a veterinary morgue, in laying out two sculptures of full-grown horses on a purpose-built scaffold. These ostensibly simulate real animals, such that one expects the stench of fresh road-kill to arise. Not quite real, however these were cast from actual corpses and subsequently covered with genuine hides and manes, hand stitched together. The equine faces are featureless, eyes, nostrils and mouth have been sown shut, to accentuate our perception of an enormous lifeless mass. Throughout the ages, horses have symbolized power, glory, strength and freedom, the noble beast long ago domesticated by humans has served in as many campaigns for civilization, as for pillage and war. Now channeled through De Bruyckere’s vision, the horse has become an emblem for the aftermath of powerlessness and desolation.
Continue reading “Review: Berlinde De Bruyckere – The poetic beauty of ephemeral existence”
Currently on view: Montréal
John Currin
at DHC/ART, Montréal
30 June – 13 November 2011
“Sno-bo” (1999) © John Currin. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery
DHC/ART premiered John Currin with a first retrospective exhibition in Montréal for the American painter. Looking back at the last two decades of his works, displayed chronologically from the lowest level up to the top forth floor of the DHC/ART building, Currin has evolved from somewhat naïve painterly techniques to more recent attempts to rival old-master virtuosities, via provocative erotic themes. Willingly putting high and low brow genres into conflict, he is well known for painting women with disproportionally large breasts, tiny feet and padded bottoms. Currin appropriates kitsch and other popular forms of imagery from mass media consumer culture, to entangle their mercantile origins with satire, caricature, fiction and fantasy. These surprisingly modest-sized canvases also overflow with art historical reference that somehow add gravitas to evermore prodigal pictorial effects, in high contrast to his deliberate choice of shallow subject matter, trespassing on ideas beauty and desire.
Continue reading “Review: John Currin – Controversial ambitions of a master painter”
The Fox
at G Gallery, Toronto
14 July – 20 August 2011
Artists: Oskar Hüber (Germany), Yam Lau (Canada), Sophie Nys (Belgium) and Kevin Rodgers (Canada). Organized by Kevin Rodgers
“The Fox” Installation view at G Gallery, Toronto 2011.
In 1924 began a romantic liaison between 35-year-old husband, father and Marburg University philosophy teacher Martin Heidegger, and Hannah Arendt, his 18 year-old student. By 1933, Heidegger had joined the Nazi Party and Arendt, a jew, fled to France to escape religious persecution. Utilizing these accounts and more as premise, G Gallery in Toronto exhibited last month the work of four artists. Oskar Hüber, Yam Lau, Sophie Nys and Kevin Rodgers sparsely filled the brightly lit white space of G Gallery with emblematic objects, videos and installation works.
Continue reading “Review: The Fox”
With the Void
Stephen Andrews, Pierre Dorion, Dara Gellman
at Diaz Contemporary, Toronto
14 July – 27 August 2011
Dara Gellman “Reaching Out” Single channel video projection with stereo sound, 8mins loop, four MDF projection screens. Courtesy of the artist and Diaz Contemporary
“We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.†* This month Diaz Contemporary adorned its walls with works that, at first glance, echo ghostly epitaphs from the glorious manifestos of American abstract painters. On closer inspection the three-person show, made up of Stephen Andrews, Pierre Dorion and Dara Gellman, rises beyond the oppositions between figurative and non, into velvety sensory aesthetics. Similarly, when Color Field painters favored abstraction in the 1950’s, their focus, according to Clement Greenberg, was on illumination and openness: they elevated the potential of color to its apex via painterly techniques, large-scale formats, and thus rendered barren and featureless pictures to keep an open-ended subject matter. While clearly in continuation with this visual vocabulary, the works of With the Void journey to the limits of the representational tableau, and even reach out to confer with other media.
Continue reading “Review: With the Void”