Artforum.com: Fiona Banner Critics' Pick

An unflattering view of a power suit’s trousers greets visitors to Fiona Banner’s exhibition: aqueous gray lines diverge down a big Day-Glo orange sheet to form Pinstripe Bum Face, 2015. If the intrepid financiers who steered the 2008 banking crisis sought unregulated waters, Banner finds premonitions of our recessional present in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899). The novel opens on a dusky River Thames; Orson Welles set his unrealized screen adaptation on the Hudson—both waterways opened the world’s oceans to the West’s colonizing, commercial capitals. It is not lost on Banner that these waters now conceal the gangly fiber optics that keep both cities at the mouths of more ephemeral trade.

Upstairs is a salon hang of posters and prints incorporating Conrad quotes and ISBN numbers, as if posing the shadowy Company that sends Marlow after Kurtz as a venerable publisher of art books. Among them are a graphite rubbing of a brass placard that reads Power, 2016, and Thames and Hudson Nude, 2012, a silk screen of a woman’s silhouette beside a page of Welles’s script. On a nearby plinth sits a copy of Banner’s own Heart of Darkness, 2015, a September issue–size magazine lavishly illustrated with glossy shots of London’s financial district taken by Paolo Pellegrin, a conflict photographer. In the HD video Phantom, 2015, a drone tracks a copy of Banner’s book as strong winds push it across a parking lot. Its pages—flapping to shreds—flash a colonnade, a revolving door, and a spread of waves.

For Conrad, madness follows mere corruption. For Banner, this holds true. In Mistah Bag, 2015, the phrase “Mistah Kurtz he not dead”—the artist’s revision of Conrad’s famous line—appears in gold serif on a black plastic shopping bag. The body may be buried, but the spirit still sails.

— Travis Diehl

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art Magazin: Ana Prvacki

Aktuell überschätzt: Das Original! In L. A. verkauft die Künstlerin Ana Prvački für viel Geld die Schattenwürfe berühmter Kunstwerke – thanks to Marcel Duchamp

Dass auf unserer Gegenwart der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit ruht, ist eine häufig bemühte Metapher, die man eigentlich nicht mehr hören mag. Nur in der Kunst, wo gern alte Ideen re­cycelt werden, lässt sich so eine abgegriffene Erkenntnis noch in Gold verwandeln. Ana Prvački jedenfalls hat das mit dem Schatten wörtlich genommen und stellt in der 1301pe-Galerie in Los Angeles die Schattenwürfe berühmter Skulpturen aus: Michelangelos David, den Schreitenden von Alberto Giacometti, Constan­tin Brâncusis Endlose Säule und natürlich auch Marcel Duchamps Fahrrad­Rad. Nicht die Skulpturen selbst, wohlgemerkt, sondern nur die Silhouetten, die sie auf dem Boden oder an der Wand hinterlassen. Die 1976 im ehemaligen Jugoslawien geborene Künstlerin nennt ihre neue Werkserie Stealing Shadows und bedient sich dabei natürlich ganz bewusst einem der größten Erfolgsmodelle der Moderne: dem Prinzip des Readymade (siehe auch Seite 34) und dessen Wiedergänger Appropriation Art. Größe und Material der Schattenwürfe sind variabel – auf Wunsch können sie auf den Boden aufgemalt oder als ausgeschnittener Filzbelag erworben werden. Der Preis der »gestohlenen Schatten« ist hingegen nicht verhandelbar. Er bemisst sich am Wert des Originalwerks und soll exakt ein Prozent des Preises sein, den die jeweilige Skulptur auf einer Auktion erzielt hat, so hat es die Künstlerin verfügt. Der Schatten von Louise Bourgeois’ Bronzespinne beispielsweise ist mit 281 650 US­Dollar ausgezeichnet, weil eben dieses Werk letztes Jahr bei christie’s für das Hundertfache versteigert wurde. Stolzer Preis für den Umriss eines Kunstwerks, den man mit Taschenlampe und Photoshop auch selber herstellen könnte. Aber wer so denkt, hat eben Marcel Duchamp nicht verstanden. Nicht das Werk zählt, sondern die Idee, lautet das Mantra der Moderne. So gesehen liegt Prvačkis konzeptuelle Schattenkunst ganz weit vorn. Denn wer will sich in unsicheren Zeiten noch mit zentnerschweren Skulpturen belasten? Oder wie die Künstlerin sagt: »Auch wenn es eine sehr einfache Idee ist, ist sie doch sehr wertvoll. Dünnere Dinge zu machen sollte sogar mehr Wert haben als große Dinge.«

- Ute Thon

Glasstire: Top Five: Ann Veronica Janssens

1. Ann Veronica Janssens
Nasher Sculpture Center (Dallas)
January 23 – April 17

An exhibition of works by Brussels-based artist Ann Veronica Janssens. For this show, Janssens has created sculptures that play with the eye, in which viewers “encounter shifts in surface, depth, and color, challenging perception and destabilizing their sense of sight and space.”

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New York Times: Ann Veronica Janssens Casts Strong Beams at Bortolami

The work of Ann Veronica Janssens, a British artist who lives in Brussels, precipitates the heightened optical and spatial awareness similar to that of Light and Space but without the often attendant fuss that seems antithetical to the movement’s less-is-more, dematerialized aesthetic. At least as seen here, in her first solo show in the United States, Ms. Janssens’s efforts avoid the more grandiose Light and Space hallmarks, including the immaculate built-out environments, computerized light shows and viewers removing their shoes. The results are less immersive, but more thought-provoking.

At Bortolami, Ms. Janssens, who has shown in Europe since the early 1980s, presents six eye-teasing works. The most immediately arresting is a thick layer of aqua-blue glitter, spread on the floor. About the size of a kiddie pool, it is lush and dazzling and flashes shades of green and yellow as you circumnavigate it, almost as if its surface were moving.

More understated are two modest sheets of corrugated aluminum that jut out from two walls, tilting upward, a little like awnings. They seem to levitate, delicately shaded on their undersides and glowing on top, as if harboring concealed lights. Actually, the aluminum is covered with platinum leaf, and each piece is fittingly titled “Moonlight,” which is, of course, all reflected. A narrow portion of vertical blinds, titled “California,” also seems lighted from within but is simply covered with gold leaf. The show culminates in a room where seven spotlights with pink gels form a circle on one wall while a haze machine lends heft to their crossing beams, which cast a lotuslike pattern on the opposite wall. These pieces might weaken if seen separately, but together their trick-free, low-tech magic is refreshing.

- Roberta Smith

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Wallpaper: Shadow play: artist Ana Prvački satirises the art market with new works in LA

The artist Ana Prvački has imagined the shadows of some of the world’s most famous (and expensive) artworks. Staged at 1301PE, Los Angeles, 'Stealing Shadows' is both a comment on the position of physical production in contemporary art practice and its 'preoccupation with ephemera and mischievous urges', and a critique of the commercial engine of culture. 'Shadows are in the spirit of the moon, they change depending on time of day and the season – just like the art market,' Prvački notes.

Prvački – known for her performance work on consumer aesthetics, gestures and etiquette – has been mulling over the idea since 2007. It comes to fruition following a publication that the artist released last year with the ICA Singapore, a catalogue of her ‘uncomfortable imagination’. In order for the exhibit to work in reality, all of the pieces Prvački selected had to be inscribed on the collective cultural conscience – so that they could be recognized in flat format. This process of eking out iconic contemporary works is revealing in itself, but Prvački is also asking the viewer to contemplate very directly how value is attributed to art, pricing her stolen shadow works in relation to the original. 'Stealing shadows of famous masterpieces and selling them at one per cent of their auction price is both tactical and economical. I think it is a timely project and audiences are really ready to talk about the economy of the art market, the one per cent, the value of art and ideas.'

But can you get your hands on a stolen shadow? The artist explains that she can custom design them to fit any space, and in a variety of formats that range from digital projection, painting or graffiti, or as an animated shadow that moves through a space as an umbra, penumbra or antumbra. 'There is something very poetic and elegant about shadows – I think the subtle yet very graphic nature of shadows appeals to our psyche. There has been great dialogue with artists, collectors, dealers, and copyright lawyers at the exhibition!'

-Charlotte Jansen

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KCRW: Edward Goldman on Kirsten Everberg

http://www.kcrw.com/news-culture/shows/art-talk/art-of-war-and-peace

"The exhibition of paintings of LA-based artist, Kirsten Everberg, at 1301 PE Gallery will slow you down and put you in a quiet, meditative mood. Everberg traveled to Sweden to the remote island of Faro, where famous film director, Ingmar Bergman, lived for most of his life. Inspired by the architecture and interior of his house, she created a series of oil and enamel paintings, abstract and representational at the same time. The pale light of Nordic White Nights fills the rooms. Everything looks realistic, but strangely mysterious. Stepping close to the paintings, one discovers the elaborate texture of individual brushstrokes, as if enamel and oil are still wet and continue to slowly drip down the canvas"

"One large painting offers a glimpse of Bergman's library, with hundreds of books cramming the shelves. Each book is created by a single brushstroke" at least that is the impression one gets. And this multitude of books and exquisite brushstrokes makes one dream about Bergman's Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, Cries and Whispers, and Fanny and Alexander"

http://www.kcrw.com/news-culture/shows/art-talk/art-of-war-and-peace

Ana Prvacki: Thirty Shades Of White at Praz Delavallade Paris

Thirty Shades Of White

28 November 2015 - 23 January 2016

Artists: Pierre Ardouvin, Robert Barry, Lisa Beck, Oliver Beer, Florian Bézu, Ulla von Brandenburg, Matthew Chambers, Martin Creed, Trisha Donnelly, Thomas Fougeirol, Fernanda Gomes, Julian Hoeber, Shila Khatami, Jiri Kovanda, Rodrigo Matheus, Fabien Mérelle, Julien Nédélec, Camila Oliveira Fairclough, Laurent Pernot, Ana Prvacki, Joe Reihsen, Ry Rocklen, Analia Saban, Yann Sérandour, Florian Schmidt, Sergio Verastegui, Marnie Weber, Lawrence Weiner, Zoe Williams, John Wood & Paul Harrison

PRAZ-DELAVALLADE
5, RUE DES HAUDRIETTES
F-75003 PARIS

More info here.

http://www.praz-delavallade.com/exhibitions/upcoming/192/pressrelease/1.html

Diana Thater in The Wall Street Journal

Film and Video Artist Diana Thater's First Retrospective at LACMA

Known for projects that explore nature and the cosmos, Diana Thater is the focus of Los Angeles County Museum of Art's largest exhibition focused on a female artist

By Carol Kino

IT'S A SMOGGY DAY in Los Angeles, and the artist Diana Thater is walking up the steep, winding path toward the Griffith Observatory, one of the city's most recognizable landmarks. Passing a gauntlet of tourists snapping photos with selfie sticks, Thater, 53, says she realizes the destination seems cliché. But as a self-avowed movie buff who creates film and video installations, Thater is also clearly reveling in the moment, pointing out the James Dean statue, the best place to get a shot of the Hollywood sign and the precise location on the observatory steps where Sal Mineo's character bit the dust in Rebel Without a Cause. "When I was a child I was obsessed with movies," says Thater. "I must have seen thousands." (Perhaps that's the inspiration for her severe bob, which is reminiscent of the hairstyle of silent film star Theda Bara.)

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