Odd Nerdrum’s Primeval Dreamscapes
April 12th, 2012
By Kiša Lala
Dying Couple - 1993 273.5 x 245 cm © Odd Nerdrum Courtesy of Nerdrum Institute
Look at My Beauty, oil on canvas, 75 x 69 inches © Odd Nerdrum, courtesy of Forum Gallery, New York, NY
In an exhibition of new works at New York’s Forum Gallery, Norwegian artist Odd Nerdrum continues on his solitary and divergent path defying art historical labeling with large-scale paintings that flood the dim hall with an amber-glow.
The somber and frigid landscapes of Nerdrum’s worlds are mythical terrains, biblical deserts within which medieval travelers, bards, amputees, alien marauders, muses and ascetics roam. These desolate landscapes are reminiscent of Icelandic plains with their remote glacial calm or hostile barren lands pitted from volcanic turbulence. His figures often float unanchored in this melancholic dream space without reference to historical past or present – and their journey through this emotional realm is implicit with tragic, violent and spiritual narratives.
Swaddled babies, pregnant women, naked elders and hermaphrodites often appear in this transitional space with a sheen of purity, inhabiting the comatose landscape like Spartan sleepwalkers. Even maimed, bleeding and defecating, they appear to be in repose or deep sleep, their conditions seen as if through a distant, unearthly gaze.
Man Bitten By Snake 1992, 267.5 x236.5 cm - © Odd Nerdrum - Courtesy of Nerdrum Institute
On the World’s Stage: A Chat with Kehinde Wiley
April 10th, 2012
By Kiša Lala
Kehinde Wiley's Benediter Brkou (The World Stage: Israel), 2011, oil and gold and silver enamel on canvas. Private Collection. © Kehinde Wiley. Courtesy Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, California.
Quick-and-easy snapshots have replaced the grand, gilt-framed portraits of Renaissance masters. Kehinde Wiley explores the rift between mug shots and the lofty style of past portraiture to see how we represent ourselves at any given time. I met the artist to talk about his series, The World Stage, which began with portraits of people from the BRIC nations of China, India and Brazil and led to his portraits recently of Israeli men now being exhibited at the Jewish Museum in New York.
Femme Piquee Par Un Serpent, 2008 - From Series: Down - Oil on canvas 102 in x 300 in Copyright Kehinde Wiley, Courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery, New York
Pomp and Circumstance
Wiley greeted me at his loft in SoHo with a mob of whippets at his heels in a setting that might have accompanied a Raffles in 1920s Macao. Wiley’s focus on the black man has been to some extent a play on his own self-identity. His Nigerian father had abandoned his mother, a UCLA grad in linguistics before Wiley was born. Being second born amongst twins he was named Kehinde in the Yoruba language. Wiley too, has inherited an academic fluency and gift for articulating his work with perfect lucidity.
While raising her family as a single parent, Wiley’s mom subsidized her income by selling used furniture, faux-classical riffs on French antiques. These and trips to L.A. museums where he’d glimpsed Gainsboroughs and Constables, and a visit to an art camp near St. Petersburg at age eleven that includes a visit to the Hermitage, developed Wiley’s early taste for baroque fantasy. “It was hard-wired in from early on. It was a general sense of the world being tangible, a type of escapism,” he recollects.
After graduating from Yale, he moved to Harlem where the hip-hop street style inspired him to make art that was popular enough to enable him to travel the world for it. “Some of the things that were in the work, I started to see echoed all over the world, in the streets of Mumbai, Beijing, Sao Paolo and Lagos. It was a very black American aesthetic but altered, based on local temperature.”
Kehinde Wiley, Mukat Brhan (The World Stage: Israel), 2011, oil and gold enamel on canvas. Private Collection. © Kehinde Wiley. Courtesy Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, California.
Sleep from Series: Down Sleep, 2008 - © Kehinde Wiley Oil on canvas 132\
The Capture of Juliers, 2006 - From series: Rumors of War Oil and enamel on canvas 84in x 96in Copyright Kehinde Wiley Courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery, New York, Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, California, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago and Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris
Macho Men & Harlem Bling
Wiley’s focus has been the alpha-male with a post-modern twist on the grand hegemony of kings and dukes primped in finery. “It’s letting bare the emperor’s clothes. Generally those paintings are about white men beating their chest and announcing to the world how magnificent they are. These are beautiful paintings, but they’re also ridiculous in many ways. So the project lays that bare.”
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Luis Gispert’s New Readymades and Knockoffs
April 6th, 2012
© Luis Gispert - Wishbone (2012), a fake gold chain intersects a Hans Wegner chair, Courtesy of OHWOW Gallery
OHWOW is staging a new exibition of Luis Gispert’s sculptures and photographs in a show entitled ‘All Oyster, No Pearl,’ that promises to be a departure from his last series of tricked-out cockpits and opulent car interiors.
Gispert’s previous works have explored how tribalized cultures permeate society creating new hybrid aesthetics. In his MOCA exhibition a couple of years back and again at Mary Boone gallery in 2011 (“Decepción”) he explored fanciful visions of amped-up car interiors, lowriders, customized chasis and embellishments often associated with hip-hop car culture. He married these bespoke interiors within unexpected landscapes to create an alien immersive experience.
© Luis Gispert, “Burberry BMW,” 2011.
Luis Gispert's "Fendi Caprise," 2011, C Print © Luis Gispert
Luis Gispert Sprouse Gouse 48" by 86" C-print 2011 © Luis Gispert
Body Architect
April 4th, 2012
Hook and Eyes, LucyandBart - a collaboration between Lucy McRae and Bart Hess
Lucy McRae and Bart Hess have been bending and revising the body with simple low-tech alterations. Their works builds on fashion forms combining it with everyday technologies like safety-pins, Q-tips.
Bart Hess has been exploring the effect of new materials on the body using animation and photography. And Australian artist, Lucy McRae was trained as a ballerina, which has helped her to become a visual architect of the body, playing with its symmetry to create alien yet organic deviations. Together they play with the human silhouette, the body grows fur or gills, attenuates, hyper-extends, balloons or shrinks. Their work is also inspired by new developments in genetic manipulations & plastic surgery.
Evolution, a Lucy McRae and Bart Hess collaboration
Hunt For High-tech (above)
Chlorophyll Skin is a film experimenting with color, movement, absorption and the body – using Q-tips
A mini music video made by Lucy McRae for a forthcoming book and DVD entitled Black material with music by Spencer Product in collaboration with Champagne Valentine
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ARTURO VEGA
April 2nd, 2012
By Bobby Fisher
Arturo Vega © Bobby Fisher
Arturo Vega wants to be canonized. First Order as Saint Arturo…“Save The Bowery, Bring Back Crack!” Half a block away from where Punk rock’s womb lies is now the mid-life crisis that is John Varvatos. While paparazzi picnic across the street from the Bowery Hotel, waiting to pounce on anything reeking of Hollywood, Arturo is thriving in ‘The Ramones loft,’ which is 1500 sq feet of pure Punk history. Since 1974 Vega has been making art there relating to his 22 years as creative director to The Ramones.
Some 38 years ago a skinny kid from Queens popped his head in the door and said, “Hi I’m Dee Dee, I like your music,” and the rest is history.
Arturo Vega © Bobby Fisher
Arturo Vega © Bobby Fisher
Mapping Dark Matter
March 30th, 2012
A landscape charted from the rise and fall of the stock market. Michael Najjar 'High Altitudes,' Hangseng-80-09, © Michael Najaar
Michael Najjar 'High Altitudes', Dow Jones 80-09, © Michael Najaar
Artists with access to data from the medical, financial worlds, astronomy labs, global weather stations and geo-tagging services are now mapping data to create visual representations that make us think of invisible dimensions in tangible ways. Michael Najjar is the first artist scheduled to go to outer space on the Virgin Galactic flights in 2013, and intends to work with NASA to collate data to create art projects based on space travel. Artist Katie Paterson has worked in conjunction with an astrophysics lab to create art based on the qualities of darkness in the universe.
Michael Najjar’s art focuses on the ‘telematic society,’ mapping information technologies that invisibly drive societies. Using financial data from the fluctuations of stock markets, he’s created mountainscapes that reference the Dow Jones and Nikkei indices. The series simulates the development of global stock indices over the last 20-30 years integrated within the visual backdrop of the Argentinian landscape. He creates fictive realities and renders alternative utopias that may aid our imagination in envisioning new futures.
Immaterials - data between visibility and invisibility : Courtesy of Onformative.com
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The Crème de la Crème of a Century of Photography
March 27th, 2012
Loretta Lux. The Drummer, 2004 © Loretta Lux, courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York Shared Vision: The Sondra Gilman and Celso Gonzalez- Falla Collection of Photography
In a new exhibition entitled, Shared Vision, Aperture gallery is showing a collection of photography featuring two hundred iconic images from the past one hundred years.
Covering an entire century in a group show is an ambitious task. The digital democratization of photography in the last ten years alone makes curating a finite number of works a challenging task. To make the task a little less daunting Aperture is fortunately culling from an already refined body of work, the private collection of Sondra Gilman and Celso Gonzalez-Falla, widely lauded as one of the preeminent collectors of photography in the world.
Jerry N. Uelsman. Untitled, 1996 Jerry N. Uelsman, © Jerry N. Uelsman Shared Vision: The Sondra Gilman and Celso Gonzalez-Falla Collection of Photography
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Carnival – African Style
March 23rd, 2012
'Three boys become Pa Wowo—painted, coconut-leaf-skirted peasants who personify poverty,' photographed by Phyllis Galembo in in the Haitian port city of Jacmel. © Phyllis Galembo
Phyllis Galembo’s love for masquerade began early as a child while trick-or-treating from her home in Long Island where she was raised, and led to her passion for collecting Halloween costumes for fifteen years. In 1985 she travelled to Nigeria to photograph some of the ceremonial robes used for traditional religious rituals and then on to Haiti to study the shamanistic clothing used in the practice of voodoo rituals.
Galembo is particularly interested in the use of masks for spiritual transformation, and has traveled extensively in the African diaspora to document carnivals held in Benin, Ghana, Sierra Leone and Burkina Faso among others. African costumes invoke deities and spirits of ancestors and are often used during initiation ceremonies.
© Phyllis Galembo
A water buffalo spirit. Photograph by Phyllis Galembo in Sierra Leone. © Phyllis Galembo
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Interview: A Mind Safari with Stargazer Not Vital
March 20th, 2012
By Kiša Lala
Artist Not Vital in Agadez, Niger - Mekafoni. Camel, 2003 - Courtesy of the artist and Sperone Westwater Gallery New York
Raised on the dizzying slopes of the Engadine region in Switzerland, nomadic artist Not Vital takes delight in alighting on equally liminal perches on the new Pangaea of the 21st century, peppering the planet with sculptural architecture from Patagonia to Agadez. Vital and I had a conversation about his migratory life while circling the artifacts of his recent peregrinations exhibited at Sperone Westwater gallery. Though his creations arise from emotional encounters and passionate collisions with other cultures, they are often born smooth and shiny in their egg-like perfection. Linked to Vital’s personal journeys, they become vehicles for an idea and transport one - which is the underlying root meaning of the word metaphor.
House to Protect Against the Wind, Agadez, Niger - © Not Vital. Courtesy of the artist and Sperone Westwater Gallery
Read more of Not Vital’s travels
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Every Painting in One and More
March 17th, 2012
Every… William Turner postcard, 2005 digital chromogenic print mounted on aluminium 40 x 50 inches (101.6 x 127 cm) edition of 5 with 2 APs - © Idris Khan, Courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery
Idris Kahn’s works are composites from scanned and digitized images of other sources, like every painting of Caravaggio’s or every William Turner painting at the Tate. These are combined in layers, then digitally retouched to synch in brightness and variations to form a single composite C-print. The culminating image seems to filter the essential aspects of these master-painters’ use of colours and forms into a signature template of their style.
Using the same technique for layering paintings, Khan has also combined every page of the Qur’an, and every Beethoven sonata, every Bernd and Hilla Becher spherical gasholder, into a single print. Every photograph taken from his travels in Europe (below) or ‘Every Photograph Taken in Portugal with My Ex-Girlfriend’ appear like compressed memories. The layers appear like ghost imprints, palimpsests of time that result in a painterly affect – as though they were erased and redrawn by a single hand.
Buckingham Palace, London, 2012 - © Idris Khan Courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery - digital silver bromide print mounted on 4 ply museum board and Dibond image: 30 x 40 inches (76.5 x 101.5 cm)
Every... photograph whilst traveling in Europe, 2003 © Idris Khan, Courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery digital chromogenic print mounted on aluminium 28 x 28 3/4 inches (71.1 x 73 cm) edition of 10 with 2 APs
