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David Zwirner inaugurates new London venue with Luc Tuymans


Luc Tuymans, Allo!, 2012. Oil on canvas. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner Gallery

David Zwirner opens his new gallery in London today inaugurating with Luc Tuymans exhibition Allo!.

The exhibition comprises a series of paintings entitled Allo! initially inspired by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), but in the end drawing more visual references from the final scene in the 1942 film The Moon and Sixpence, itself an adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s eponymous novel from 1919. Tuymans’s convoluted interest on the topic enacts a general negation of modernism and Hollywood’s longstanding idealization of the artist as a romantic savage. This will be Tuymans’ ninth solo show since joining David Zwirner in 1994.
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Flirting with Death


Jacob Kassey, Xanax (Diptych). 2011. Courtesy the artist, art : concept, Paris and ICA, London. Photo by Marc Bowler

M-KOS editor Oli Sorenson’s text “Flirting with Death – Dispatching along 19th to 21st Century Painting” is featured in the latest issue of esse arts + opinions themed on The Idea of Painting.

Painting has suffered at least a half dozen major existential blows since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, starting with Hippolyte Delaroche declaring “from today, painting is dead” in 1839, when he first set eyes on daguerreotypes. From this precedent, debate still abounds today as to whether photography, with its more effective means of documenting events and immortalizing faces as well as democratizing the whole imaging process – and now allowing anyone to embrace the once elitist talents of painters when a point-and-click camera – has killed off painting.

There must be more to painting than the territories claimed by photography, since it certainly hasn’t lost any of its appeal to audiences, nor has it lost any market value. On the contrary, painting seems evermore the dominant commodity for commercial galleries, art fairs and auctions. Of the ten top-selling artists at auctions worldwide, nine are painters. Each time painting is declared dead, more kudos and columns are dedicated to the deceased. If violent scenarios make for good television, perhaps the same is true in the art world. Today so many paintings adorn the walls of art institutions that one is tempted to wonder if this art form was ever under serious threat, or if all this death talk was just an elaborate marketing campaign. […]

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Transforming the Earthling – in conversation with
Janet Werner


Janet Werner in front of her painting “Crying Eyes” (2011). Photo by M-KOS

Montreal based painter Janet Werner is currently showing a new body of work within Parisian Laundry’s main space. Throughout her painting career, Werner has been engaged with the genre of portraiture, focusing primarily on female figures. She collages and transforms images from fashion magazines, popular culture and naïve painting, to invent altered personalities with these source materials, in addition to creating new narratives. Werner plays out a tension between fiction and reality to question notions of beauty, often by distorting and messing up the posing women. The resulting paintings not only astound by their sense of scale, composition and color, but also draw the viewer into the inner psyche of Werner’s counterfeit characters. Werner talks to M-KOS about her new exhibition, and of the ways she produced her latest body of work.

M-KOS [MKOS]: Can you tell us about your choice of title “Earthling” for this exhibition at Parisian Laundry?

Janet Werner [JW]: [laugh] The reason I’m laughing is because it was so hard for me to come up with a title, I really struggled. It was one of the first titles I thought of, but I kept looking and looking. Titles are extremely difficult for me. But in the end I went with it. What was your question, why did I use the title?

MKOS: Yes, does it have to do with the people in the paintings?

JW: Well, I feel like the work is existential in nature and when you take an existential position you usually think of it in terms of: I’m here right now, on earth, at this moment. But to call it Earthling is like taking a different perspective of that same experience. It was as if they were aliens but in fact, it’s us, if you looked at us as though we were aliens. I was just thinking of the beings who are cast here, in these paintings.
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Review: “No News” is good news for Wanda Koop

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 News”, 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.
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Review: John Currin – Controversial ambitions of a master painter

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.
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Review: With the Void

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.
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Review: Showing Stuff in a Big Room

Mathieu Lefevre: Showing Stuff in a Big Room
at Galerie Division, Montréal
25 June – 31 July 2011

Mathieu Lefevre “Face Plant” (2011) oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Division

Mathieu Lefevre at Galerie Division is effectively “Showing Stuff in a Big Room“. Whereas unpretentious exhibition titles often suggest modesty in the artist, Lefevre is putting some big cards on the table, playing against the plausibly inescapable boundaries of conceptual art. This show claims a much wider appeal than the usual art world’s initiated few, fighting conceptual dreariness with the weapon of humor.

Nearly all clustered on a single wall of Division’s main space, the works range form classic tableaux to three-dimensional painting-sculptures. By way of over-crowding Lefevre seemingly instills some sort of democracy amongst his works. Taken individually, each art object is as painfully entitled as a dated comedy club one-liner: a large black canvas, covered in feathers (“Tarred and Feathered”); a swath of white paint on a bare canvas, on which is penciled less is more (“More or Less”); an indistinct shape protruding into an unpainted, stretched canvas (“Trash Can Disguised as Contemporary Art”). The literal and figurative collide in many of his works to illustrate commonly known ideas in art, and thus reach a second level of understanding, which does question how many of a wider audience will ultimately “get it”.
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R.I.P. Lucian Freud (1922–2011)

“Standing by the Rags” (1988-89) oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Estate of the artist.

Only just a few weeks ago did the world bid adieux to Cy Twombly, one of the greatest painters of the post war era. And now sadly this week, another great painter of the same period has passed at the age of 88, Lucian Freud drew his last breath on Wednesday at his home in London. While Twombly expanded the boundaries of Abstract Expressionism, Freud, in turn, re-appropriated figurative portraiture. Over a 60-year strong artistic career, Freud remained unyieldingly faithful to his genre of choice and was often compared to old masters such as Titan, Rembrandt, Ingres and Monet.
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Review: Parisian Laundry’s New Post-New summer show

Currently on view: Montréal
Summertime In Paris at Parisian Laundry
23 June – 30 July 2011

Luc Paradis “Stick Out There” (2010) oil on canvas, 60 x 84”. Courtesy of the artist and Parisian Laundry

Parisian Laundry is now showing its annual summer exhibition entitled “Summertime In Paris”, double Dutch busted with generous servings of themes: “Kindling” and “Post-New”. Five artists from Canada and America have been selected this way to spark a fire from beyond the realms of novelty.

“New” has long been overused as an adjective and oversaturated the pages of art press releases for decades. Lost in its significance and barely identifiable, art audiences still irresistibly seek newness, almost as a reflex behavior. Parisian Laundry fuses this with an equally vacuous term to create “post-new”, a humorous neologism that perhaps will ignite the whimsical attitudes of Summertime in Paris artists.

Luc Paradis creates uncanny and fantastical scenery in his paintings, such as “Stick It Out There” (2010), its undulating mountains and valleys, coveting a factory-like building alone by the cliff of a fictional wilderness. “Pleasure Park” (2011) also depicts a fun place to go to, with the familiar theme park attractions teasing our desire to take on a ride. But the surroundings of the park are submerged in darkness, tensing up the atmosphere as if an undetected danger was about to pounce and shatter an innocent moment of glee.
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