Charline von Heyl: Snake Eyes at Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.

Charline von Heyl, P., 2008. Acrylic and crayons on linen, 208.3 x 188 x 3.8 cm. © Charline von Heyl. Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Gift, Adam and LeeLee Kimmel, 2016

Charline von Heyl

Snake Eyes

Hirshhorn Museum

Independence Ave SW &, 7th St SW, Washington, DC 20560

8 November - 27 January, 2018

The largest US museum survey of this pioneering artist to date, Charline von Heyl: Snake Eyes features more than thirty large-scale paintings that reveal the artist’s considerable influence in the field of contemporary art.

One of the most inventive artists working today, von Heyl has earned international acclaim for continually rethinking the possibilities of contemporary painting. Her cerebral yet deeply visceral artworks upend longstanding assumptions about composition, beauty, and narrative. Drawing inspiration from a vast and surprising array of sources—including literature, pop culture, metaphysics, and personal history—von Heyl creates paintings that are seemingly familiar yet impossible to classify, offering, in her words, “a new image that stands for itself as fact.”

In studios in New York and Marfa, Texas, von Heyl combines a rigorous, process-based practice that demands each painting develop through the act of painting, itself. The spellbinding results invite you to explore a unique visual language, exuberant and insistent.

Organized in collaboration with the Deichtorhallen Hamburg, this major multinational exhibition highlights the artist’s groundbreaking artistic output since 2005, including recent works that point to new developments in her constantly evolving practice. Together, Snake Eyes shines an international spotlight on one of today’s most dynamic painters and demonstrates the vitality and limitless possibilities of painting.

Curated by Hirshhorn Senior Curator Evelyn C. Hankins and Dr. Professor Dirk Luckow, general director at the Deichtorhallen, with curatorial assistance from Sandy Guttman.

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Ann Veronica Janssens: Ann Veronica Janssens at De Pont Museum, Tilburg

Picture by Andrea Rosetti, courtesy Esther Schipper, Berlin

Ann Veronica Janssens

Ann Veronica Janssens

De Pont Museum

Wilhelminapark 1, 5041 EA Tilburg, Netherlands

10 November - 31 March, 2018

Light, color and space are the fundamental materials used by Ann Veronica Janssens (Folkestone, 1956). With these intangible phenomena she creates 'sculptures' that make the invisible visible. Architecture is, by nature, static; whereas light and color remain changeable. That is what Janssens investigates while, throughout the process, she experiments and sets people and things in motion. Her work, based on sensory perception, demands the active involvement of the viewer.

With her interventions Ann Veronica Janssens turns the museum's 'white cube' into an indefinable space filled with colorful mist. Despite the presence of light, we need to grope to find our way. The disorientation makes us wonder: just how big is this place? And – am I alone? Gradually the limits of the space become discernible, and people begin to loom forth in it. The artist challenges us and puts our senses to the test. What are we actually seeing and experiencing here?

In an interview from 2016, Janssens tells about growing up in Kinshasa, spending her days there tinkering and observing a great deal. Her father was an architect, and her mother worked in an art gallery. In the local museum she became acquainted with African art. Architecture, art and the idea of experimenting and observing were part of her early surroundings. Simple discoveries, such as reflections of light that appear on a smoothly polished train rail or while mixing a vinaigrette, frequently prompt a new series of works. The initial attempts begin on a small scale, in her studio, but then she seeks the support of technical specialists in order to achieve the effect that she has in mind. But as Janssens emphasizes in her interview, chance also plays a role in the realization of her work.

We can, in any case, conclude that Ann Veronica Janssens evokes wonder with works that are unusual and ordinary. It’s a bit like the experience of an airplane traveler taking off on a dreary grey day and then passing through a dense layer of clouds. In the luminous white surroundings where patches of fog rush by, points of orientation such as above/below and far/close disappear. Once the plane has risen above the clouds, sunshine abounds. There the bright blue sky offers endless vistas, while an occasional cloud floats by. A Janssens exhibition feels like a rite of passage: ordinary phenomena suddenly assume magical power.

Watch a short video about her work in the Danish Louisiana Museum here.

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SUPERFLEX: Artist Talk for European Union Mayotte at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

SUPERFLEX: European Union Mayotte, installation view, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, September 7–December 30, 2018. Photo: Dusty Kessler.

SUPERFLEX

Artist Talk for European Union Mayotte

Thursday October 25, 2018 at 6:30pm

Exhibition On View Until December 30, 2018

Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

3750 Washington Blvd, St. Louis, MO 63108

Bjørnstjerne Christiansen—one of three members of the Danish art collective SUPERFLEX—discusses the group’s multidimensional practice and the video installation European Union Mayotte with CAM Chief Curator Wassan Al-Khudhairi.

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Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles Review: Fiona Connor at the MAK Center

Fiona Connor, Closed Down Clubs (2018) (installation view). Image courtesy of the artist and MAK Center. Photo: Esteban Schimpf.

Fiona Connor at the MAK Center

Beyond mere entry and exit, not much thought is given to the doors through which we pass every day. Closed Down Clubs, New Zealand-born, Los Angeles-based artist Fiona Connor’s latest exhibition, invited contemplation of the larger significations of such mundane portals. Housed at the MAK Center’s Mackey Garage Top (a sleek and airy space above a garage behind a Rudolf Schindler house), Connor’s exhibition was comprised of nine freestanding doors installed in a staggered, parallel formation, each emblazoned with printed or hand-written signs announcing the recent closure of the businesses to which they were once attached.

Like virtually all of Connor’s work, each of the sculptures included is a meticulous replication of an actual object. Having previously assumed such forms as bulletin boards, drinking fountains, and architectural infrastructure, her works are typically adorned with artist-drawn or screen-printed stickers, posters, or pamphlets to faithfully match the original reference as closely as possible. As relics of shared space, her works often bear traces of obsolescence or fatigue, expounded through the artist’s fastidious duplication of objects’ apparent wear or corrosion. Closed Down Clubs was no exception—one could sense the traffic that Connor’s chosen doors had experienced in their past lives, as seen in suspended animation (such as where sullied hands cumulatively left their mark in instances of worn-o paint or accumulated grime). With such minute attention to detail, Connor’s work offers a verisimilitude so precise that it could easily be mistaken for the real thing, which begs the question: why laboriously recreate an object that could simply be appropriated?

Unlike Danh Vo or Cameron Rowland, two artists whose use of the readymade foregrounds the compelling personal and political histories of their chosen objects, Connor’s work is a deft repetition of the real. Indeed, her readymade-once-removed production is a fiction residing in tandem with reality—meaning we are meant to understand that her work is a facsimile of lived experience at a particular place and time. With this, Connor mobilizes the deceptive surface of artifice not only to underscore the often-overlooked aesthetic qualities of quotidian objects, but also what they communicate about the societies in which they function.

By Thomas Duncan

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Jorge Pardo: Display for the Musée des Augustins

Jorge Pardo: Display for the Musée des Augustins

Jorge Pardo

Published by Hatje Cantz

Ed. Thierry Leviez, text(s) by Thierry Leviez, Rémi Papillault, Rémi Parcollet, Charlotte Riou, contributions by Stephen Prina, Jorge Pardo

Exhibition: Musée des Augustins, Toulouse, on permanent display

Hardcover, 160 pages, 171 ills.

ISBN 978-3-7757-4462-1

Extraordinary museum displays: Jorge Pardo’s “Gesamtkunstwerk” in Toulouse

At the invitation of the Toulouse art festival “Printemps de Septembre”, the Cuban-American artist Jorge Pardo (*1963) has developed a new display for the collection of Romanesque art at the Musée des Augustins in Toulouse. This collection—the world’s largest collection of Romanesque sculpture—is unique for its coherence with its well-preserved ensembles of capitals. Pardo produced a kind of “Gesamtkunstwerk” that has instantly become an iconic feature in the city and has now been adopted as the permanent display. This book includes an introduction to the collection of Romanesque sculptures at the museum, an illustrated history of its ever-changing presentation since 1830, an extensive survey of Jorge Pardo’s specific works for museums as well as a brief history of remarkable exhibition designs for museum collections throughout the 20th century.

With an interview between Stephen Prina and Jorge Pardo.

Jorge Pardo: Hotel L'Arlatan Opening 12 October 2018

From Antiquity to the present day, L’Arlatan has endured through many centuries. Its rebirth this autumn heralds yet another glorious new chapter in its history.

About L’Arlatan

As early as the Middle Ages L’Arlatan was recognised as being Arles’ most lavish hôtel particulier - a grand townhouse - and now, thanks to the exceptional vision of artist Jorge Pardo, it is making an outstanding début on the modern stage. A gigantic 6000 square metres of mosaic now adorns the hotel with an explosion of colour, light and contemporary design.

Hotel Website

how to spend it, Jorge Pardo: A long weekend in Arles and the Camargue with Maja Hoffmann

Maja Hoffmann at L’Arlatan hotel, which opens in October | Image: Tina Hillier

Arles’ old town is home to a world-class pâtisserie and a prominent bookshop

Culture is everywhere in Arles. I’ve almost always had something to do with Les Rencontres de la Photographie, the international photography festival that was founded there in 1970 and has been expanding greatly since it was revamped in 2002. What originally motivated me to renovate the former train depot at Parc des Ateliers – and build [experimental museum complex] Luma there – was partly a lack of quality spaces to show large-scale photography exhibitions or host creative events for Les Rencontres.

In the past few years I’ve really noticed some exciting energy in Arles. Creative people are coming to the city to settle down and make something special – like the owners of Le Collatéral, an incredible B&B in a former church that’s often used for artistic projects and events. Everywhere you look there is something curious, from digital art to a bespoke, snake-shaped table. It’s more of an experience than a hotel. Of course, L’Hôtel Particulier and Hôtel Jules César are very well known five-star properties in Arles. L’Hôtel Particulier was one of the first to add new life to the old city – they took over an 18th-century building and created a little oasis, with a swimming pool and beautiful garden – and the Jules is an institution that was redone beautifully a few years ago by Christian Lacroix. I myself never meant to be a hotelier, but ended up one due to the fact that I am occasionally asked to save old buildings. Ten years ago I opened Hôtel du Cloître, which I asked India Mahdavi to design and still today the interiors feel very modern. The most recent hotel project, L’Arlatan [which opens in October], is just as much of an artistic project as it is a hospitality one. Almost from the beginning, I knew I would ask Jorge Pardo to design the interiors; he did every surface and piece of furniture, and there are more than 30 different coloured and patterned tiles used for the floors and walls. It’s like a Gesamtkunstwerk.

By Gisela Williams

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Wallpaper*: Maja Hoffmann and Jorge Pardo on creating a remarkable Provençal retreat

In 1888, Vincent van Gogh, ravaged by heavy drinking and disillusioned with life in Paris, found refuge in Arles, intent on creating an artists’ commune. ‘L’Atelier du Sud’ would, he hoped, become a laboratory to experiment with colours and light, repositioning the Provençal city as a centre for artistic production. But the project ended abruptly the same year, after a series of violent quarrels with his friend Paul Gauguin – the only artist who had responded to the invitation – drove the Dutchman to a mental breakdown, during which he famously cut off part of his own ear.

Despite its failure, the ideals behind l’Atelier du Sud left an indelible mark on Arles which, some 130 years later, may get its artist colony after all. Designed by the Cuban-born American artist Jorge Pardo, l’Arlatan – a hotel and artist residence, housed in a 15th-century palace once belonging to the Counts of Arlatan de Beaumont – is set to become a hub for the international intelligentsia brought to the city by the newly established contemporary art centre, Luma Arles.

By BenoÎt Loiseau

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Artforum Review: Jack Goldstein "Under Water Sea Fantasy"

Jack Goldstein, Under Water Sea Fantasy, 1983–2003, 16 mm, color, sound, 6 minutes 30 seconds.

By Jan Tumlir

Online at Artforum

Glasstire, Jessica Stockholder at The Contemporary Austin: Props, Assists and Situations

Installation view: Jessica Stockholder at The Contemporary Austin at the Jones Center

Jessica Stockholder 

Relational Aesthetics

The Contemporary Austin

Jones Center

700 Congress Avenue, Austin, TX 78701

September 15, 2018 - January 13, 2019

Props, Assists and Situations: Jessica Stockholder at The Contemporary Austin

The promotional photographs for Relational Aesthetics, Jessica Stockholder’s show at The Contemporary Austin at the Jones Center, share some compelling features with the works themselves — they confuse the eye. It’s no accident. 

“I don’t think in volume,” Stockholder says, “I think graphically.” The sculptures themselves are described not as installations, but as three-dimensional paintings, or in some cases, “situations.” Stockholder’s propensity for working from a graphic, two-dimensional idea creates an interesting life cycle to the work, which transitions repeatedly from two-dimensional thought experiment to a three-dimensional model from which a full-scale work is rendered, and then to documentation photographs. In most instances this last phase might feel like convention, or bureaucratic necessity, but with these works, one wonders if the resulting images are actually nearer the artist’s original impulse than the structures themselves. Or perhaps it’s just another iteration of a persistent theme in Stockholder’s work — every element’s success is dependent on another element.

Stockholder routinely manipulates a viewer’s perception of space though materiality and composition, and refers to many of her works in Relational Aesthetics as “assists.” These forms range from bundles of sticks to unwieldy sheets of metal that appear to be waving in the wind, or heavy-gauge metal screens supporting miniature works of art by other artists. Each of these assists are in turn supported by a prop, which is strange reversal of expectation — or is it function, or is it semantics?

By Tatiana Ryckman

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Ann Veronica Janssens: "My main material is light" at Kiasma

Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Petri Virtanen

Ann Veronica Janssens

My main material is light

Kiasma Museum Of Contemporary Art

Mannerheiminaukio 2, 00100 Helsinki, Finland

12 October - 13 January, 2018

Light art by Belgium-based artist Ann Veronica Janssens fills the galleries on the two top floors of Kiasma in Janssens’ first solo show in Finland.

Janssens has been fascinated by light and associated phenomena ever since she was a child. Many of her works are based on light interacting with liquids, fog, reflecting surfaces and the surrounding space. Janssens seeks to heighten our awareness of these fleeting sensory phenomena.  

In her art, Janssens explores ordinary physical phenomena in highly visible ways. She often finds inspiration for her works in lucky coincidences.

Bicycling on the Fifth Floor

One of the highlights of the show is chromed bicycles that visitors can ride in the large gallery on the fifth floor of Kiasma. Janssens wants to offer the cyclists and other viewers a completely new experience of the space, drawing attention to the transparent materiality of the light and air around us.

Other works in the show includes Orange Sky Blue, a landscape of light that is visible outside the museum from Mannerheimintie, and Untitled (White Glitter), consisting of glitter strewn about the gallery floor at random.

Janssens likes to use surprising materials in her work, such as paraffin oil and reflective surfaces.

Minimal and Subtle

Janssens typically uses only a few materials in her works. For her, art consists not of an object but an experience evoked by light, colour, sound and movement.

The minimalist works invite visitors to move around them and examine them from different angles, to sharpen their senses and to be surprised. Not everything is what it seems at first.  

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Edge of Visibility (Group Exhibition): Fiona Banner and Philippe Parreno at IPCNY

Philippe Parreno, Vermillon Sands, 2004

Fiona Banner and Philippe Parreno

Edge of Visibility

IPCNY

508 W 26th St, New York, NY 10001

4 October - 19 December, 2018

1301PE is pleased to announce that Fiona Banner’s Top Gun (1966) and prints from Philippe Parreno’s 2005 book Fade to Black including A Penny for Your Thoughts, Website, 2006 (2013), A Wise Chinese Monk Shitting Light, Lamp Prototype For Alejandro Jodorowsky 2006 (2013), and Vermillon Sands, 2004 (2013), will be on view from October 4th to December 19th, 2018 as part of the exhibition Edge of Visibility at International Print Center New York.

Edge of Visibility, curated in conjunction with the September-October issue of the journal Art in Print by its editor-in-chief Susan Tallman, focuses on low-visibility strategies in printmaking. With over forty works spanning the 17th century to the present, the exhibition features laborious microengravings and subtle watermarks to evanescent images printed with UV-reactive inks.

“Viewing,” says guest curator Susan Tallman, “is at the heart of this exercise—what it means to see, physically, metaphysically, socially, and politically.” In Philippe Parreno’s Fade to Black (2005), visibility and its opposite take on intimations of mortality: in normal light, the prints appear to be solid rectangles of color; when the lights are switched off, however, phosphorescent images bloom, only to die off into darkness until they are recharged.

The often laborious, multi-step processes inherent to printmaking allow artists to maintain visual clarity before subverting this visibility in the final image. Examples include the highly-detailed, nearly imperceptible details of Chris Ofili’s multi-layered, opalescent Black Shunga (2008-15), or Walid Raad’s refined Views from Inner to Outer Compartments (2013).

The visual hurdle posed by low-visibility prints urges viewers to be more conscious of their sight upon entering the exhibition space. Rare historical works of virtuoustic micrography by Levi David van Gelder, Johann Michael Püchler, and William Pratt, use minuscule text to create images, escaping the conventional dichotomy of text and image. Matthew Kenyon’s Notepad (2007) and Fiona Banner’s Top Gun (1996) bring the tradition of micrography into the present.

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Diana Thater: True Life Adventures Launches Art on theMART

True Life Adventures at Art on theMART

Diana Thater

True Life Adventures

Opening Saturday September 29 at 6:30pm 

On View September 30 - December 30, 2018

Art on theMART

Upper Wacker Drive between N. Wells St.  and N. Franklin St.

& The Jetty and Confluence areas on The Chicago Riverwalk

between Wells and Lake St., Chicago, IL 60654

On Saturday, September 29, 2018, pioneering new media artist Diana Thater will present a site-specific program of digital artworks entitled True Life Adventures during the large-scale public unveiling event of Art on theMART. Spanning the river façade of Chicago's theMART, the public installation will be the world's largest permanent digital art projection.

The film explores the plight of animals living in imminent danger of poaching in Kenya. In scaling images of flora and fauna to the size of theMART’s façade, Thater explores the intersection between the time-based and spatial dimensions of the moving image. Thater manipulates video projections, light, color and architecture to transport viewers around the world.

“For the Art on theMART opening program I’ve made a short film titled True Life Adventures. It collages together live footage of wild animals living in the Chyulu Hills near Mount Kilimanjaro in Kenya. My work focuses on nature and the remaining last bits of wildlife that we’re lucky enough to still have. Perhaps we can inhabit a space where these fragile creatures and understanding is part of our world. I want to bring them to Chicago as a kind of big splash of the wild in the midst of a great city," says Thater.

“The work is not narrative and linear - it is simultaneous - with multiple images inhabiting the screen at once, all moving in different directions at the same time. The accompanying soundtrack was all recorded live in Kenya, to further the exotic but peaceful story of elephants, zebras and giraffe in their native habitat.”

Art on theMART will be a first-of-its-kind, curated digital art installation across 2.5 acres (two football fields) of theMART's river façade. The installation's first season will include four contemporary, digital artworks by artists Thater, Zheng Chongbin, Jason Salavon, and Jan Tichy, using 34 projectors to illuminate building's exterior. Art on theMART marks the first time a projection of its size and scope will be completely dedicated to digital art with no branding, sponsorship credits or messaging. The City of Chicago and theMART have partnered to manage and curate the projected artwork for the duration of a thirty-year agreement. The inaugural installation will be on view for two hours each evening beginning at dusk Wednesdays through Sundays, September 30 through December 30, 2018.

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KERRY TRIBE: "EXQUISITE CORPSE" SCREENING AT DESCANSO GARDENS FOR THE GROUP EXHIBITION "LA REINA DE LOS ÁNGELES"

Exquisite Corpse Trailer

Kerry Tribe

Exquisite Corpse Screening for La Reina de Los Angeles

Descanso Gardens

1418 Descanso Dr, La Cañada Flintridge, CA 91011

Thursday, October 4, 7pm

Without the Los Angeles River, there would quite simply be no Los Angeles. While the precise geography is unknown, historians have estimated it’s changed course at least nine times in the first half of the nineteenth century alone. La Reina de Los Ángeles will present a discussion of our current relationship with water, using the Los Angeles River as an entry point. Through contemporary art works, documentary films, historic materials and special programming, La Reina de Los Ángeles will explore the history, infrastructure and community around this critical resource.

Originally screened in 2016 at the CURRENT:LA Water Public Art Biennial, Exquisite Corpse is a 51-minute film that traces the 51-mile length of the LA River from its origin to its ocean terminus, capturing its varied landscapes, neighborhoods, creatures, and communities along the way. The film is presented as part of the La Reina de Los Ángeles exhibition curated by Debra Scacco at the Sturt Haaga Gallery.

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Blouin: Jorge Pardo's Creative Confusion

Jorge Pardo is the kind of artist whose practice is hard to neatly fold into a single sentence, unless it’s a run-on. He has reinvigorated, and fully furnished, a 19th-century hacienda in the northern Yucatan jungle, “Tecoh”; added Minimalist yet vivid decor into a liturgical parish in Leipzig; suffused undulating forms into the Latin American Galleries of LACMA; sprinkled bubblegum-bright tiles throughout the ground floor of New York’s Dia building; created towering public sculptures in Liverpool whose stalks were punctuated by illuminated Plexiglas spheres. His impactful early work was a single-story residential structure at 4166 Sea View Lane made for the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA, which he later moved into.

Born in Cuba and raised in the US, Pardo’s home base for the past 10 years has been Merida, Mexico. This locus has influenced Pardo precisely because “there’s not a lot of art here,” he said. The polychromatic work he produces can evolve without distractions in the immersive tropical context (barring his regular jaunts to New York City to see his daughter).

His relationship to pattern — the optics he fashions using a vibrant palette — is based on perpetual experimentation. Rearranging and rearranging paint chips in a way that imbues an inherent playfulness, “I’m always looking at color relationships,” he said.

On the phone from his studio, the affable Pardo refuses to intellectualize his work, recognizing instead the meandering curiosity that motivates his creativity. He studied at Art Center College of Design in California (Mike Kelley was one of his advisers) but, he countered, “I read so much theory when I was a kid, it was ridiculous,” adding: “we were forcefed.” Instead: “I tend to privilege what I was thinking, not necessarily what I was trying to achieve,” he said. “I don’t like the artist being an ‘authority.’” Although his aesthetics evoke something beautiful and whole, cohesion is not his priority. “I wanted to make an object that would resist a certain critical formalization,” he once told author Lane Relyea during an interview. “I wanted to make a work that would impose a lot of different critical modes.” He reiterated: “I’m not particularly interested in formal questions — I don’t know how to believe in that.” As an artist, “your only contract with the viewer is to literally just show them something,” he said.

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RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA: "THE DIVINE COMEDY" FOR PUBLIC DAY AT FONDATION BEYELER

Rirkrit Tiravanija

Public Day: The Divine Comedy

Fondation Beyeler

Baselstrasse 101, 4125 Basel, Switzerland

Sunday, September 16th, 2018, 12 - 6pm

Rirkrit Tiravanija invites to join a metaphorical journey through a participatory hell. Loosely and abstractly based on Dante's "Commedia".

Sunday, September 16, 12 – 6pm, included in the museum admission.

RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA

“I AM NOT INTERESTED IN LEAVING THINGS BEHIND, BUT IDEAS.”

Video: Bloomberg, “Brilliant Ideas”

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Forbes: Charline von Heyl, New Work At Petzel Gallery, New York

Charline von Heyl, The Language of the Underworld, 2017. © 2018 CHARLINE VON HEYL. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND PETZEL, NEW YORK.

Charline von Heyl

New Work

Petzel Gallery

456 W 18th St, New York, NY 10011

September 6 - October 20, 2018

2’10” (two minutes, ten seconds)

Before uttering a word of his introductory remarks for the June 2018 opening of Charline von Heyl’s Snake Eyes exhibition at the Deichtorhallen (Hamburg), John Corbett, the Chicago gallerist and music champion nonpareil, lifted his smartphone to the mic and played a 2’10” free jazz piece by the Norwegian trio Moskus (Musk Ox). The piece was Fjesing (Emoticon) from their album Mestertyven (Master Thief). Corbett’s intent was to get the audience’s attention and to just, simply, make them take the time to focus on what they were hearing, experiencing. It was a lesson in mindfulness, presentness. In his remarks, Corbett spoke about his relationship to poetry as well, saying, “I read poetry the way I listen to improvised music. It’s not so important to interpret an improvisation as it is to experience it. . . at full scale. No abstract; no précis.”

Linking the experience of engaging with von Heyl’s paintings to listening to this piece of music, Corbett added, “Charline’s paintings take time, too, but because they are paintings, people sometimes do walk past them, remark on their beauty, and move along.” But . . . and this is a huge caveat . . . von Heyl’s paintings defy conventional notions of beauty, the same way they flout traditional categorization. They are not, in her words, abstract paintings, nor are they figurative. Instead, they are “non-representational” paintings, which occupy an in-between space. To see von Heyl’s paintings always requires openness and total surrender. You have to look, move on, return and look again. This is a cycle of seeing the work on your own terms.

By Clayton Press

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SUPERFLEX: Western Rampart at Køge Station for TRANSIT/KØS Museum of Art in Public Spaces

PHOTO: For SUPERFLEX in the making of Western Rampart ©KØS Museum for kunst i det offentlige rum

SUPERFLEX

Western Rampart (film, Køge Station Bridge, 2018)

September 13 - November 13, 2018

Køge Station

4600 Køge, Denmark

The artist collective SUPERFLEX has produced a brand-new film for the TRANSIT. Addressing the largest border construction in Danish history, Western Rampart is based on the Western Rampart of Copenhagen as a historical construct. The rampart was part of Copenhagen’s inland fortifications, designed to protect the capital of Denmark against invading forces. It was built west of Copenhagen in 1888-92, stretching all the way from Køge Bay in the south to Utterslev Marsh in the north. With its wide-ranging topography, the rampart crosses several present-day borders between the city councils in the region west of Copenhagen, including Copenhagen itself, Brøndby, Rødovre and Hvidovre. The work is exhibited at Køge Station, the terminal of the E line that cuts through this exact area.

As SUPERFLEX show in the film, the Western Rampart is not only of interest from a historical perspective. It is also linked to a series of contemporary issues, such as the ongoing attempts to define, delineate and maintain borders. Western Rampart’s focus on the negotiation of borders or boundaries is also present in the work itself with its intersection of fact and fiction and its mix of documentary footage with more visually experimental and associative sequences. SUPERFLEX have used drones to produce the film, exploring – like several other works in the exhibition – mobile methods, i.e. methods used to investigate phenomena in flux that are themselves on the move. The members of SUPERFLEX – Jakob Fenger (b. 1968), Bjørnstjerne Christiansen (b. 1969) and Rasmus Nielsen (b. 1969) ­– were born in Roskilde, Copenhagen and Jelling, Denmark, respectively. They live and work in Copenhagen.

TRANSIT is a major research-based exhibition project produced by KØS Museum of Art in Public Spaces. TRANSIT explores transit sites – some of today’s most controversial and crowded public spaces – and the many people who pass through them. Experience art at stations, on the E line, and in an international exhibition at KØS.

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The New York Times, Jorge Pardo: A Hotel Where Every Room Is a Work of Art

One of Pardo’s painted doors, inspired by a Japanese scroll painting from the Langen Foundation. Credit Céline Clanet

The artist Jorge Pardo designed the interiors of L’Arlatan, which opens next month in Arles, France.

The artist Jorge Pardo makes work that not only lives outside the confines of the traditional white cube but also interrogates notions of space and setting and our place within them. One of his best-known pieces dates to 1998, when, for a show with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, he designed a single-story house in the city’s Cypress Park neighborhood and filled it with objects of his own making. Once the exhibition closed, Pardo moved in. “I’m essentially appropriating architecture,” says Pardo, who now lives in Mérida, Mexico, in another structure that could be considered both art piece and functional living space — a “birdcage in the jungle” complete with a hand-painted mural and ovoid pendant lights.

Starting next month at L’Arlatan hotel in the Provençal city of Arles, France, for which Pardo designed the interiors, guests can live like the artist. The hotel is owned by Maja Hoffmann, a Swiss entrepreneur and art patron who grew up outside Arles in the Camargue. She is partly responsible for reviving the area, once a source of inspiration for Vincent van Gogh (and recently, the setting for Gucci’s 2019 resort collection), with her forthcoming 20-acre cultural center, Luma Arles, as well as the 19-room Hôtel du Cloître, a former convent reimagined by India Mahdavi. Hoffmann’s new hotel, set in a 15th-century palace, is nearby, mere steps from the Rhône. From the start, Hoffmann knew she wanted Pardo — with whom she’s worked before — to be the one to fill the hotel’s dark and neglected rooms with, as she says, “lightness and joy.”

By Gisela Williams

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SUPERFLEX: European Union Mayotte at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

SUPERFLEX, European Union Mayotte (still), 2016. Two-channel video installation (color, sound), 9:42 minutes, 3:54 minutes. Courtesy the artist.

SUPERFLEX

European Union Mayotte

September 7 - December 30, 2018

Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

3750 Washington Blvd, St. Louis, MO 63108

Founded in 1993 by Danish artists Jakob Fenger, Bjørnstjerne Christiansen, and Rasmus Nielsen, the collective SUPERFLEX challenges the role of the artist in contemporary society and explores the nature of globalization and systems of power through a diverse and complex practice. SUPERFLEX describe their works as “tools,” suggesting multiple areas of application and use. At CAM, the SUPERFLEX film installation European Union Mayotte reflects upon migration, the dream of another life, and the front border of the European Union. Mayotte, an island in the Indian Ocean north of Madagascar, is part of the Union of Comoros, one of the four Comoros Islands that were once part of a French Colony. Mayotte has maintained close cultural and political ties to France, and in 2014 was acknowledged as part of the EU, making it the Union’s outermost region.

The installation consists of two projections, one pictures a scene of a single boat in the ocean, sometimes with passengers visible, the other follows the production of a small fiberglass fishing boat on Anjouan, an island situated only 70 kilometers from Mayotte. In these small boats, people from Anjouan and the surrounding islands of the Comoros risk dangerous and illegal journeys in the hope of reaching Mayotte—in effect, the EU—journeys that have caused death by drowning for thousands of people.

SUPERFLEX: European Union Mayotte is organized for the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis by Wassan Al-Khudhairi, Chief Curator.

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