Xinyi Cheng surprend par ses visions doucement perverses de la masculinité occidentale. Et incarne par extension la relation pacifiée à l’appropriation culturelle d’une nouvelle génération d’artistes chinois à la culture visuelle décloisonnée. – Ingrid Luquet-Gad
See more artworks by Xinyi Cheng here: xinyichengart.com
See more artworks by David Hominal here.
There is a crisis with regard to Representation. They are looking for Meaning as if it was a thing. As if it was a girl, required to take her panties off as if she would want to do so, as soon as the true interpreter comes along. As if there was something to take off.
Marlene Dumas, The Artwork as Misunderstanding, 1991.
Read more about Black Square here.
See more artworks by Gillian Carnegie here.
“I want [the paintings] to have an old, modernist feel, but also looking at abstraction, not from a Greenbergian perspective… but from a nostalgic perspective… it’s adding a more personal perspective… the way we see an image is a little different than a generation before us… because of what media we grew up with.” – Russell Tyler
See more works by Russell Tyler here.
I like real art. It’s difficult to define REAL but it is the best word for describing what I like to get out of art and what the best art has. It has the ability to convince you that it’s present – that it’s there. You could say it’s authentic… but real is actually a better word, broad as it may be. – Frank Stella
Learn more about Frank Stella here.
Sometimes when you dream, you know that you are almost awake and dawn is on its way and yet you get stuck in a nightmare that keeps on repeating itself. Images of different times spinning around your head in a frenzy, forcing you to go round in endless labyrinths of the past, sometimes dressed-up as the future. Or is it the other way around? Gothic versions of stories you’ve once read somewhere, pictures you saw or tales you’ve been told in the dark. – Marlene Dumas
See more works by Natasja Kensmil here. Also see this exhibition.
Mostly, though, paint functions as a medium of resistance for Ligon; it occludes visibility and threatens form. Nowhere is such deletion more explicit than in Untitled (Cancelation Prints) (1992 and 2003), where a flesh-coloured ‘X’ overtakes the entire white image field, demarcating the distance between the construct of whiteness and the pinkness of most European skin. This obliterating impulse equally manifests in Self-Portrait, the inky, black surface of which is visibly scratched and gouged. Such signs of refusal emphasize how Ligon’s numerous self-portraits are invariably exercises in effacement and retraction. – Leora Maltz-Leca
See more works by Glenn Ligon here.
Paintings may be pictures, but they are always objects. The blatant materiality of Sergej Jensen’s canvases made them seem part of the interior architecture of Neu’s gallery. Jensen has consistently had an ambivalent relation to the spaces in which he shows his work. Previously at Neu, he arranged mats on the floor that resembled his patchwork paintings, converting the gallery into a pseudo-living room, the paintings into decor that satirized the convention of a “high-art painting” show. – Mark Prince
See more artworks by Sergej Jensen here.
In 1959, Bob Law lay in a Cornish field and wondered how to describe the space he was in. His solution was a series of drawings in which figurative elements – such as trees or houses – are arranged along a doddery pencil line at the perimeter of the paper. A year later, Law had distilled this approach to his signature device: the rectangular perimeter alone, bounding empty space, sometimes accompanied by a date, a title or his name, always in block capitals. – Jonathan Griffin
See more artworks by Bob Law here.
Alex Hubbard’s latest New York solo show, “Somebody had to do it,” combined the cerebrally slapstick and the delightfully inscrutable… Hubbard reaches or steps into the image, moving slowly and with great seriousness as he balances everyday objects, one atop another, to form a rickety tower, until the lot collapses with a bang. – Brian Boucher
See more artworks by Alex Hubbard here.
“Elizabeth Taylor in a landscape, painting nature’s beauty and the caress of the smirking sun over the mountains” est le titre d’une de ces icônes, un petit format à l’huile sur bois qui donne son nom à l’exposition. La star y figure en peintre du dimanche dans un décor idyllique des grands espaces américains. Appliquée, elle pose son pinceau sur sa toile. On est dans le vif du sujet : l’acte de peindre et l’industrie des images. “Comment est-ce qu’une image peinte peut parler d’autre chose que d’elle même ?” interrogeaient récemment Ida Tursic et Wilfried Mille au Collège de France. Leurs peintures, visibles à la galerie Almine Rech, donnent l’esquisse d’une réponse. – Mathilde Urfalino
See more artworks by Ida Tursic & Wilfried Mille here.
In his recent work Manor Grunewald has made a dual turn, pushing his paintings in two seemingly opposing, but in fact intimately related directions. Towards a washed out, nearly empty field, on the one hand, and towards a full, image-laden one on the other. – Alex Bacon
See more artworks by Manor Grunewald here.
Stefan Brüggemann is keen on thinking up titles. So far he has compiled a list of 1,271 of them (‘Show Titles vol. #1’, 2000–6), creating for himself an index of imaginary exhibitions. One might begin, then, with the title of the present show: ‘Soap Box (A Decorative Form of Nihilism)’. A ‘soap box’ would suggest political declarations, the arts of rhetoric and public address, perhaps even the pathos of outmoded ideals. ‘A decorative form of nihilism’? Well, what else can one do with non-belief but inhabit it, display it as a mark of distinction, covering the walls with parerga abutting onto nothing in particular? We might describe Brüggemann first as a rhetorician of emptiness. But, working in the tradition of the dandy, he has also succeeded in dramatizing boredom, which opens ‘soap box’ to a rather different, more private set of connotations. – Tim Stott
See more artworks by Stefan Bruggemann here.
Jeremy Demester: D’origine gitane, que le jeune artiste (né en 1988) revendique à travers son art et ses voyages, il travaille sur le rapport de l’homme avec le monde, la nature et les mythes fondateurs. En collaboration avec ses amis philosophes, scientifiques, artisans, qu’il appelle La Demestria, il est à la recherche d’une expression du sacré, questionnant une présence spirituelle de la nature. En 2015, il avait participé à une résidence d’artiste au Bénin, où, avec l’aide des enfants du quartier, il avait développé une série de toiles exposées actuellement à la galerie Max Hetzler. Les invitant à « peindre avec le mouvement de nos corps », les enfants étaient appelés, au rythme des musiques locales, à danser autour des toiles, y jeter de la peinture, les porter, les soulever, afin d’y projeter une énergie insouciante. Refusant l’emploi de la logique et de la raison, Jérémy Demester laissait ensuite les toiles exposées à la tourmente des éléments naturels, énergisant les pigments. Il retendait ensuite les toiles une fois incarnés de cette puissance. – Maximilien Renard
See more works by Jeremy Demester here.
See more artworks by Kenji Shibata here.
See more works from Paul Czerlitzki here.
Brice Marden made these paintings using a mixture of oil and beeswax. The works make you want to claw and scoop into them, not so much to destroy as to ingest them. – Mark Godfrey
See more works by Panos Tsagaris here.
Comme beaucoup d’enfants j’aimais et j’aime encore après avoir regardé le soleil en face fermer les yeux très fort et laisser s’imprimer sur les paupières les couleurs qui subsistent suite à cet éblouissement. Faire remonter à la surface du tableau les sensations colorées de ces choses vues ou tout juste aperçues à travers le pare-brise de la voiture, ou en levant la tête au cours d’une marche. Restituer ces brefs émerveillements du quotidien, c’est mon désir de peintre.
En quelque sorte une « mémoire d’aveugle » comme le dit Jacques Derrida.- Gérard Traquandi
See more artworks by Gérard Traquandi here.
Intense moments of perception with the subtleties and grandeur of nature—and they are often one and the same—are among the most potent and lasting archetypes of Beauty and Transcendence which we, citizens of the post-industrial world, still experience. These moments—a small flower blossoming, a spider web, a chrysalis, the arousal from sleep of hidden faunae, a call from an unseen and unknown animal in the distance, the scent of coming rain, among countless others—offer an inexhaustible source of inspiration.
Forests & Boutonnières is a large-scale project that looks for new social possibilities between spectators and artworks. I will base the project on the essence of the primeval forest and the sharpness with which the urban shaman must confront it. It will draw on the tension between human and natural history. The works will explore ideological projections onto landscape and how they shape our experience of the beautiful and transcendent. As do all artworks grounded in reference to nature, the rebirth of shadowy zones, forgotten tales, and vestigial histories will impact the process and the images which result. One counterpoint is inevitable. Human history is cyclical; peace and war, oppression and freedom, the reign of collective and individual values, reign of worldly and spiritual ideals—these recurrences find their parallels in the cycles of nature across seasons as well as millennia.
The project will honor Monet’s Nymphéas, a large-scale oval installation at Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris while keeping a contemporary perspective and approach. The project consists of different works around the subject of the primeval forest and the city jungle, but one piece in particular will consist of four large-scale paintings measuring 2 meters high (6.5 feet). Two of the canvases will measure 3 meters wide (9.8 feet) and two others will be assembled to form a 9 meter wide painting (29.5 feet). They will form an octagon in which the spectator will be immersed.
Rudolf Stingel has made a career dancing around the idea of painting. He skirts its authority by looking at its components, its physical identity, its visual language and its history. – Michelle Grabner
See more artworks by Rudolf Stingel here.
From a distance the densely worked surfaces resemble the smoothness of enamel. Yet the painterly experiment of London-based German artist Silke Otto-Knapp could have taken quite a different turn: after all, it’s not so far from garden landscapes, atmospheric light, tangled leaves and teeming meadows to the Impressionist ideal. Otto-Knapp came to prominence as a painter of land- and cityscapes in which vegetation – rendered in heated colours and with an almost naive clarity – was rendered in a manner far removed from the often-clichéd illusionism of the landscape genre. – Catrin Lorch
See more by Silke Otto-Knapp here.