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Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan “PROTOTYPES” at The Drawing Room, Singapore


Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan, “Transportables (After In-Habit Project Another Country)”, 2012. Detail. Courtesy the artists and The Drawing Room, Manila/Singapore

Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan
PROTOTYPES
18 January – 24 February 2013
at The Drawing Room, Singapore

In PROTOTYPES, husband and wife Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan turn full circle on works and ideas they have been developing at the dawn of their artistic tandem. They represent the sort of identity molded in the manner of hyphenation – geographically, socially and artistically. Because their lives have been a matter of displacement and mobility that surface in the themes that surround their work: repatriation, ephemerality and the contemporary language of engagement. In the same light these themes further resonate through the format of vernacular aesthetics as well as pastiche as the product of making do in the conditions surrounding the locality where they set their temporary base in.
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Douglas White “Song of the Roustabouts” at Galerie Gabriel Rolt, Amsterdam


Douglas White, Elephant Tent, 2012. Unfired clay, jute, wood, steel, rope. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Gabriel Rolt

Douglas White
Song of the Roustabouts
19 January – 23 February 2013
at Galerie Gabriel Rolt

Douglas White’s “Song of the Roustabouts” is an exhibition of sculptural works including the eponymous large-scale installation made from over 1,000 kilos of wet clay suspended by a strange system of ropes, pulleys and wooden poles. The work, which the artist will construct on-site in the large open space of the gallery, recalls a haunting encounter White had more than a decade ago.
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Elena Damiani “La Historia Se Descompone En Imágenes, No En Historias (History Decomposes Into Images, Not Into Narratives)” at Revolver Galeria, Lima


Elena Damiani, La Historia Se Descompone En Imagenes, No En Historias, 2012. Installation view. Courtesy of the artist and Revolver Galeria

Elena Damiani
La historia se descompone en imagenes, no en historias
(History is decomposed into images, not into narratives)
30 November 2012 – 20 January 2013
at Revolver Galeria, Lima

Elena Damiani’s “La Historia Se Descompone En Imágenes, No En Historias (History Decomposes Into Images, Not Into Narratives)” is a collection of collages, sculptures and video, which evoke the experiences of the ‘wanderer’. Reworking images found in photographic archives, the exhibit is composed by a series of objects arranged in isolated landscapes. They invoke a certain solitude and longing, and yet they are also tranquil and deeply satisfying. The artist invites her spectators to roam through a deserted territory where landmarks of a not so distant past are sprawled across the landscape serving as a reminder of the time that has come to pass.
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B.Wurtz at White Flag Projects, St. Louis


Image courtesy the artist and White Flag Projects

B. Wurtz
8 September – 15 December 2012
at White Flag Projects, St. Louis

B. Wurtz’s understated sculptures formalize banal articles of daily life, rendering unlikely expressive value from an austere vocabulary of found materials. Wurtz eschews the transformative artistic gesture, achieving a heightened awareness of the everyday by emphasizing each elements essential nature, investing his assemblies with equal measures of profundity and wit. [read the full text here]
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Phyllida Barlow “…later” at Hauser & Wirth, NY


Phyllida Barlow, untitled: upturnedhouse, 2, 2012. timber, plywood, scrim, cement, polystyrene, polyfiller, paint, varnish. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

Phyllida Barlow
…later
5 November – 22 December 2012
at Hauser & Wirth, New York
Opening on Monday 5 November 2012, 18.00 – 20.00

For more than forty years, the urban environment has preoccupied Phyllida Barlow and provided a fecund source for her process-oriented sculpture. Construction debris, signs, fences, and discarded objects are the sorts of unloved materials she adopts, assembles, and paints colorfully and crudely into sculptural forms that are simultaneously menacing and playful, overwhelming and delicate. Incorporating intimately scaled objects and enormous forms alike, her jammed-to-the-rafters installations actively engage viewers by drawing them among, under, and around obstacles in much the same way that the city does on a daily basis. Barlow explains that she is compelled by ‘the way things are replaced, destroyed, and covered over very quickly’ in the world around us, to fashion analogs for the joys and fears of everyday life. ‘The work,’ she has said, ‘is completely about the fragility of existence’. [read the full text here]
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Art Marathon: Art Souterrain 2012

Montreal is well known for its underground city. During the long Canadian winter, people get around the city’s downtown area, from one tunnel to another, without ever going out into the frosty air. Between 25 February through 11 March Montreal’s underground city was hosting the fourth edition of Art Souterrain (Subterranean Art, in French), a contemporary art event inaugurated in 2009 by Frédéric Loury, director of Galerie [SAS]. This year Art Souterrain showcased 140 art projects, including installations, photography, video, performance and permanent public art, all under the theme of “Passageways”. Art Souterrain has been expanding the number and volume of projects every year, to now in its fourth edition it covers over seven kilometers of underpass, with invited artists from as far as Paris and Calgary. Here are some works that caught our imagination.
 


Mathieu Grenier “Dans le Cube Blanc (O’Doherty) / Inside the White Cube”
 


Nathalie Quagliotto “Maturity Bend”
 
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Highlighting the overlooked – In conversation with Valérie Blass


Photo by Nat Gorry

Montréal artist Valérie Blass is currently showing her solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montréal, featuring new works as well as more from the past four years. Blass produces hybrid objects by employing various sculptural techniques – casting, carving, modelling, assemblage and more. Her creative point of departure is always about the materials, which range from the hand-made to the industrially fabricated. In exploring the aesthetic connections between techniques and style, her work deals with confrontations of forms and negotiates with multiple sources of meanings. As a result, her art is playful, humorous and idiosyncratic yet often evokes disturbed, sinister and cynical connotations. M-KOS interviews Blass during the opening of her exhibition.

MKOS: Valérie Blass, this is your first solo museum exhibition, how long have you been preparing for that?

Valérie Blass [VB]: For about a year I’ve been working on new pieces, I’m also showing a few older works from the past three or four years. This show was hard work because some of my recent pieces went to art fairs and sold immediately, and I never saw them again. It was hard to produce so many works that could amalgamate together and be consistent. [Curator] Lesley Johnstone helped me to put the show together but I still found it difficult because I never did this before, to create affinities between my recent and not so recent work.
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Review: Richard Serra “Junction/Cycle”

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.
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Review: Berlinde De Bruyckere – The poetic beauty of ephemeral existence

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.
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Review: Sculpture – Ludisme

Currently on view: Montréal
Sculpture – Ludisme at Galerie SAS
9 June – 13 August 2011

Patrick Bérubé “Lies” (2010) Wood, Plexiglas, water jet cutting, clay and plant. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie SAS

Derived from the Latin verb ludere, to play, Galerie Sas has appropriately titled its current exhibition of three-dimensional works. Sculpture-Ludisme assembles art pieces by Patrick Bérubé, Catherine Bolduc, Éric Cardinal, Laurent Craste, Marc Dulude, Peter Gnass, Fred Laforge and Karine Payette in this playful, surreal and wildly chromatic show that comfortably straddles the line between serious and over-the-top. While all the works genuinely represent the approach of each artist, overall this show is delightfully coherent.

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