“The young man is divine. In his promise lies my joy, as for me, I am a sorrowful being; only what I struggle for suffices in my work,” wrote Lyonel Feininger to art historian Alois J. Schardt in 1930 about his then 20 year old son, T. Lux Feininger. Though unique in his practice, the younger and arguably lesser known Feininger’s admiration for his father’s practice is palpable in Moeller Fine Art’s first ever showing of the pair’s work side by side. (more…)
When not producing a set for the Staatsballett Berlin or painting pseudo-sexualized Germans, Berlin-based artist Norbert Bisky, tries to hop on the first plane to Brazil whenever possible. In the last year alone, Bisky headed down to Sao Paulo and Rio five times. However, until his latest exhibition, “Paraisopolis” (through April 13 at Berlin’s Galerie Crone), the country remained outside of his artistic purview. The results, a return to abstraction and a toning down of sexuality in exchange for culture politics, are rather surprising. One might have expected the country to send Bisky even more fervently towards his all-baring proclivities. He spoke with Alexander Forbes about why that wasn’t the case, society’s obsession with violence, and what Europeans can learn from Brazilian culture. (more…)
Entering “Meanwhile,” Nathan Hylden’s third solo show with Johann Koenig (through April 13), one might think they forgot to hang up the work. All eight of the L.A. based artist’s paintings are confined to a single wall on the gallery’s right. On each successive aluminum-based painting, the shadows of a plant and stool move further and further to the right, suggesting temporal change. Due to their apparent setting in a studio it is as if they are documents of process rather than process itself. The result is a post-modern riddle of sorts: if the artwork is only a document of its own creation, and recording of process for the pure sake of having a process, does the artwork itself need to exist at all? Considering the response to this new series — bot the Whitney and the Stedelijk Museum have purchased a piece out of the show — the answer is resoundingly yes. Alexander Forbes spoke with Hylden about this self-reflexive tendency, making arbitrary paintings, and the studio as subject. (more…)
There is something rather uncanny about Noa Eshkol’s work. Her highly disciplined dance practice moves not to music but to a ticking metronome and exacting motions of the body as prescribed through a notation a universal notation system she developed with architect Abraham Wachman. Her carpets trace layers of history through unadulterated scraps of fabric found either in her home country of Israel or through the travels of her friends.
In two exhibitions at Vienna’s Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary and New York’s Jewish Museum, Los Angeles based artist Sharon Lockhart has delved through the deceased Eshkol’s archives, working hand in hand with the dancers who continue her practice every day to both document their work and put the two nodes, dance and collage, in conversation. Choosing only dances set to 120 beats per minute, the metronome rings out through the spaces while the dancers move in video projections through what might be most easily described in appearance as a slow and rhythmically disciplined form of yoga or tai chi. (more…)
Wolf Hamm’s paintings are not particularly fashionable. They’re loud in color, cartoonishly figurative in form, and poetic in concept. But, such questions of contemporary trend don’t seem to phase the 38 year old who shows with Dusseldorf’s Beck & Eggeling. He does his best sketching on copper plates after all. Of paramount importance, however are more elemental and existential subjects: the family, the struggle between nature and urbanity, and finding the human within technology to name a few.
Most recently, Hamm has put these questions forth in a series of eight monumental acrylic on acrylic pane paintings — his preferred mode of expression — that take up the seasons as a means of partitioning human life into four segments. Having recently completed the spring section of the series, Hamm says that he’s still exploring what the second half of his eight year long project might look like but that, as a totality, the work should serve as an allegory of human societal development as much as it does an individualistic narrative.
For the first in a recurring series of studio visits, Alexander Forbes sat down with Hamm to discuss the productive limitations of painting from front to back, the visual DNA he picked up from summers in Finland, and the dangers of taking one’s knowledge for granted. (more…)
Coinciding with the Vienna Art Week, Francesca von Habsburg gathered top artists, gallerists, musicians, and a slew of Vienna’s art students together in the sixteenth district to fête the ten year anniversary of her foundation, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21). Peaches and Chicks on Speed performed while guests danced on hospital beds until the wee hours, Habsburg not hesitating to be in the thick of it all despite her daughters’ protestation that her dancing embarrasses them.
Ten years is a relatively small temporal slice considering her family’s four generations of art patronage and collecting. TBA21’s archive of commissions, projects, and exhibitions tells a quite different story, however, reading like something of a top-list of countless works seen in Austria, Germany, and across the world. Julian Rosefeldt’s “Trilogy of Failure”, Christoph Schlingensief’s “Animotograph” series, Sanja Ivekovic’s “Poppy Field” at Documenta 12, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller’s “The Murder of Crows”, Carsten Holler’s landmark 2010 exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof “Aufzugbett (Elevator Bed)”, and Walid Raad’s “Scratching on Things I could Disavow: A History of Art in the Arab World” from this year’s Documenta 13, are but a handful of TBA21’s illustrious output.
For Habsburg, it has been important to create a context in which she can operate freely, unrestricted by the structures of larger institutions, like her father’s Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum of Art. Though moving one step closer to such a permanent institution, establishing a compound-like home base for TBA 21 this spring in Vienna’s Augarten, speaking to ARTINFO’s Alexander Forbes about the past ten years and her outlook for the future, she remains steadfast in TBA21’s transcontinental, open approach. (more…)
For one year in three countries and four languages, Marinella Senatore brought together over 20,000 individuals to create a three part video opera called “Rosas”. In celebration of the project, the Italian artist presented it in two parts at Berlin’s Peres Projects this fall, the second half of which began with a parade of dancers down Auguststrasse and is on view through December 15. Though on a material level, that day will mark the end of this most ambitious and wide reaching of works, Senatore is intent that Rosas will continue so long as those involved, all non-professionals, continue to use the skills and experience gleaned from the opera in ways both big and small.
Surely, encapsulating such a project within a gallery was no easy task. And, in fact, gallery or not, Sentore suggests that the ‘product’ of her project could likely never be confined to TV screens, vitrines, a performance, or an installation. All four show up Peres’ gallery, but they are more index than object to an extent that makes the exhibition feel more institutional than that of a commercial gallery. ARTINFO sat down with Senatore to help negotiate these liminal areas between artistic disciplines, and to discuss how to activate public art for the people.
Despite being one of the most significant German painters and sculptors of the last century, Heinz Mack remains humble about his reception, laughing that he thinks New York forgot he existed until his show at Sperone Westwater last year. He will have an extensive retrospective at the Guggenheim next year along with the other Zero Group artists. In Berlin, until the end of February, one can see might be a small preview of that exhibition at ARNDT. Works spanning from his earliest exhibitions in the late 50s through this year, all straight from Mack’s studio and storehouses fill the entire gallery space. Alexander Forbes spoke to Mack while installation was concluding about that exhibition, the chance spiritual congregation that was the Zero years, and his take on the contemporary art world.
For “Concentricity Per Se” — on through November 3 at Blain|Southern’s Berlin outpost — Lawrence Weiner shows three new text-based wall works, each presented in English and German through the artist’s own translation, as well as sketches and mind maps of his process leading up to the works on view and the poster used to advertise the exhibition. It is a show that dramatically benefits from the gallery’s behemoth space, allowing the works to breathe in a way that they can’t in typically more cramped European gallery spaces. However, Weiner insists that for him, it really doesn’t matter, that having scribbled the words in the same manner on a cocktail napkin or the like, would have had the same conceptual effect.
Past an iron gate deep in Charlottenburg and down a narrow path, “Memory of Present,” the first exhibition of the coup de dés art series flips ones expectations of non-gallery group exhibitions in Berlin on their heads. Warehouse still smelling of a previous rave is exchanged for a mid-century villa on the Lietzensee complete with an indoor swimming pool now used for video art and glass walls that retract into the floor to open the entire façade onto the waterfront. The work of view is as understated as it is rigorous in thought and by artists with galleries and museum shows alike already under their belts. This is no replacement for the Berlin group show. But, perhaps it’s version 2.0.
In the past nine months Julia Greber and Saskia Neuman have taken a line of text and, along with Julia’s brother, Sebastian, developed it into a fully formed, though not over formulated exhibition of Berlin based artists and locally unseen outsiders alike. Kandis Williams, Chris Newman, Aron Flam, Amir Fattal, Cris Gianakos & Barbara Knight, Dodi Reifenberg, EVOL, Jimmie Durham, Meric Algün Ringborg, Satch Hoyt, Trevor Morgan, and maybe even David Hammons’ works came together in the rather surreal villa for the Sunday evening opening to an affect resembling that of a private collection where said collector has decided the furniture was too distracting from her art. ARTINFO Germany’s Alexander Forbes spoke with Greber and Neuman ahead of the opening about proto-surrealist poetry, how to take new steps in the Berlin art scene, and the difference between pleasing and pleasure.
