Charline Von Heyl’s Paintings Treat Structure Like a Game

Charline Von Heyl | Cultured Mag | by Gaby Collins-Fernandez

Within moments of arriving at “Snake Eyes,” Charline von Heyl’s retrospective at the Hirshhorn, a guard asked me if I knew the secret to Melencolia (2008), a painting divided into numbered squares, many of which are blocked by a large, orb-ish mass. Every row and column had to add up to 34, he said. “Do you want to know the numbers that you can’t see?” he asked me. “I’ve been looking at it for a while, so I figured it out.” He told me and I immediately forgot. I wanted to ask the guard what those numbers meant for him, literally hidden and yet illuminated: if they helped to pass the time, if he imagined away the globe in the center of the painting in order to place each numeral in its logically required square, which seemed to me a madness. Of course, madness is Melencolia’s gray moon, the primordial and almost Chagall-ish vortex hearkening back to Dürer’s etching of the same name and the bad luck of black bile. An artist wants to conjure the spirit and finds that they have tools only to measure that desire.

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Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane

Fiona Connor | E-Flux

In an age marked by mass migration, technologically accelerated dislocation, and rapid urban development, notions of home and belonging need to be imagined anew. At once located and displaced, how to live together is one of the crucial questions of our time. These ideas have even greater urgency in settler-colonial contexts where notions of ownership have very real consequences historically and in the present. Artists in this exhibition—Zanny Begg, Heman Chong, Fiona Connor, Megan Cope, Brian Jungen and Duane Linklater, Joar Nango,Christian Nyampeta, and Amie Siegel—present works focusing on the conceptions, creations, developments, and experiences of home as they are affected by colonialism, urban development, and gentrification. Ultimately, a growing population, changing climate, and dwindling natural resources demand that we re-imagine what our shared future can look like.

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“Mapping Space: Recent Acquisitions in Focus” at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center

Uta Barth | Blouin ArtInfo

The  J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, is hosting “Mapping Space: Recent Acquisitions in Focus,” an exhibition exploring how photography in the last few decades has been used to survey geographic spaces. The exhibition is on view through July 14, 2019.

“Photography’s dynamic relationship to the landscape can be traced to the origins of the medium when the camera offered a revolutionary method for recording the world,” the museum says. “The 19th century witnessed a range of approaches, from land surveys that systematically documented the topography of unsettled regions, to artistic depictions of nature’s majesty that rivaled landscape painting. Beginning in the 1960s, many artists sought novel approaches to representing their surroundings by incorporating personal, critical, and symbolic references to their work.”

“Mapping Space: Recent Acquisitions in Focus,” focuses on this aspect of photography in the current century with a selection of recently acquired works by works by five contemporary photographers — Robert Kinmont, Wang Jinsong, Richard Long, Mark Ruwedel, and Uta Barth.

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MMCA exhibition ‘Vertiginous Data’ questions neutrality of tech

SUPERFLEX | The Korea Herald | By Shim Woo-hyun

Not many artworks on show at museums have price tags attached to them, but Rachel Ara’s installation work does. The large tech installation, a mass of devices and black cables, updates in real time its value on a screen in red neon numbers.

This seemingly “overcalculated and overcomplicated” tech-sculpture by Ara, titled “This Much I’m Worth,” is part of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art’s latest exhibition.

Showcasing experimental works by 10 artists and artist groups, “Vertiginous Data” at the MMCA attempts to suggest that seemingly objective data and technology are not neutral as they bring about various social, economic and ethical issues.

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Jorge Pardo Continues to Redefine What It Means to Live With Art

Jorge Pardo | Surface | By Alexxa Gotthardt

The artist's exploration into the intersections among design, painting, sculpture, and everyday objects has resulted in a colorful and enchanting style that stands out for its originality.

In 1990, Jorge Pardo staged his first solo exhibition, in a garage tucked into a West Hollywood alley, filling it with carefully crafted replicas of common tools: wrenches, a ladder, a splicer. But none of them worked. Even then, fresh out of graduate school, Pardo was challenging perceptions of fine art and functional objects. This project, and his subsequent work, exuberantly broke barriers between sculpture and design, form and function, art and life.

Eight years later, MOCA Los Angeles invited Pardo to mount a show. Instead, he built a home, opened it to the public, and then moved in. Most recently, the Cuban-American artist designed a hotel, L’Arlatan in Arles, France, swathed with 500 of his own paintings applied directly to doors and tables rather than walls.

New York’s Petzel Gallery recently showcased Pardo’s early work, spanning the late-1980s and 1990s. His sculptures and wall-mounts emphasize a natural inclination to subvert expectations about art, design, and lived space. And much like the rest of his oeuvre, they celebrate plurality. Assumptions, he seems to say, are ambiguous and constantly changing.

Here, we catch Pardo at his studio in Yucatán, Mexico, where he sheds light on his multidisciplinary, inquisitive practice.

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Bjarke Ingels’s New Galeries Lafayette Fuses Historic and Contemporary Styles in Paris

SUPERFLEX | Architecture Digest | By Nadja Sayej

The famous department store has received a modernist revamp

Though it was once a bank, a stately Art Deco building on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, in Paris, has been transformed into a sleek, modern shopping mecca designed by Danish architect Bjarke Ingels. The new Galeries Lafayette Champs-Elysées, which opened this past weekend, is a sprawling 70,000-square-foot space made of marble, glass, and steel.

In a statement, Ingels called the project a “pragmatic utopia,” mixing minimalist function with extravagant beauty. The rose-hued marble in the interior fits in well with the romantic City of Light and is peppered with gold-lined touches that are spread throughout the space’s four floors.

What exactly is a “pragmatic utopia?” According to Ingels, it’s a type of architecture that steers clear of boring white boxes. It also avoids what he calls “the naive utopian ideas of digital formalism.” Here, he fuses convention with concept, tapping into his personal motto: “Yes is more.”

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‘Making a Painting More Alive’: Charline von Heyl’s Hirshhorn Museum Survey Is a Master Class in Abstraction

Charline von Heyl | ArtNews | By Phyllis Tuchman

Charline von Heyl’s career has experienced some dramatic ups and downs over the past year. A solo show of her latest paintings made a big splash when it opened the New York art season last September. The effusive critical notices attracted crowds to Petzel gallery in Chelsea. Two months later, “Snake Eyes,” a survey of 36 works by von Heyl from 2005 to the present, debuted at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. However, when the federal government shut down, the show got caught in the crosshairs. With the closing date for the exhibition looming, it looked as if many people wouldn’t get the chance to see the work on view, which had been lauded by many reviewers. But, wonderfully, when the Hirshhorn reopened along with other local institutions, its leadership extended it through April 21.

“Snake Eyes” is a compelling exhibition by an intriguing painter. German-born and New York–based, von Heyl, 59, executes work that deserves to be experienced in depth. It’s easy enough to admire one of her canvases or collages at an art fair, but by not seeing lots of them in one venue, you miss the opportunity to be dumbfounded by the variety of ways she solves aesthetic problems.

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Jorge Méndez Blake at Travesía Cuatro

Jorge Méndez Blake | Wall Street Journal International

19 Oct 2018 — 23 Mar 2019 at the Travesía Cuatro in Guadalajara, Mexico

This exhibition originates from an archive image: The architect Luis Barragán eats an apple while taking a walk through the site that will later be known as the “El Pedregal” residential complex in Mexico City. The image shows an indefinite landscape made out of volcanic rock, eventually it will be covered up and delimitated with concrete walls and other construction materials. The photo shows a primeval land, a newly discovered Garden of Eden. The apple, a Western symbol of fresh beginnings (good or bad), functions as a certain poetic premonition that resonates along with the fertility of the volcanic soil.

Jorge Méndez Blake creates a timeless bridge between the modernist seedlings that Barragán planted within his volcanic garden in the 1940’s and one of his first residential projects in Guadalajara, the Casa Franco built in 1929. The artist uses the checkerboard design of the original floor of this house and reproduces it through the walls of the residence and as a departure point for other works of tautological nature.

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Why is artist ana prvački licking the façade of herzog & de meuron's de young museum?

Ana Prvački | designboom | by Philip Stevens

In 2017, Ana Prvački became artist in resident at the de young museum in San Francisco. Designed by Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron, the building features a copper façade that is based on a pixelated image of a tree canopy. ‘I am quite fascinated by the copper facade of the museum,’ Prvački explains. ‘I did some research about copper and was intrigued to learn that copper is an essential trace mineral necessary for our survival, yet it is a mineral our body does not produce by itself. having a little lick of the de young could be a very generous gesture — democratic, free, and nourishing.’

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Mixing Art, Activism and Science. And Some Tropical Fish.

Superflex | New York Times | By Lisa Abend

COPENHAGEN — Somewhere in the desert outside Palm Springs, Calif. a new drive-in movie theater is opening. It’s a simple structure, not much more than a screen mounted on a few bubblegum-color pillars, with no concession stand and very limited programming. In fact, the cinema shows only one film, and that film is about fish.

Commissioned for the Desert X exhibition that opens Feb. 9 and runs through April 21 at various sites in the Coachella Valley, the theater — called “Dive In” — is an installation by the Danish artist collective Superflex and forms part of their larger project “Deep Sea Minding.”

“Dive In” responds to the prospect of rising sea levels by imagining a future in which coastal cities are submerged, and their inhabitants are fish. Blending art, science, and activism, it is a sly meditation on climate change, as well as an excellent primer on how Superflex, founded in 1993, has managed to remain relevant, even crucial, through 25 years.

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Philippe Parreno combines 20 years of footage to create ‘film of films, a seance of cinema’

Philippe Parreno | Wallpaper | By Tom Seymour

When Philippe Parreno was a teenager, he and his friends would sneak their way through the back door of an adult movie theatre in one of the seedier parts of Échirolles, a rough suburb of Grenoble, southern France. The backstreet XXX dive was called Cinema Permanente, because porn played all day, all night.

At a public talk at the 2019 International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), Parreno bashfully admits that watching the illicit movies acted as inspiration. In the dark, as the images writhed and morphed without sense of beginning, middle and end, so he formed his idea of what art should be. ‘We were always so alert, because we were scared of getting caught,’ he remembers. ‘But my sense of time became warped in the movie theatre. I started to think a permanent cinema is a beautiful idea.’

Parreno is here to present his new feature film, No More Reality Whatsoever, a combination of 20 years of disparate footage taken from dozens of art projects and edited together to create a ‘film of films, a seance of cinema’. The artist, who is 55, has the words ‘do so’ tattooed on his left wrist, a reference to the hypnotherapist Milton Erickson. He is soft-spoken, drinks tea over coffee, is dressed as if he might leave the cultured environs of the film festival for a quick hike along the canals of Rotterdam, and has a dry, self-deprecating sense of humour…

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Infinite Cinema: At The International Film Festival Rotterdam

Philippe Parreno | The Quietus | By Robert Barry

Nobody does 3D quite like Philippe Parreno. The French artist’s No More Reality Whereaboutsopens with the close-up face of Ann Lee, the anime character bought by Parreno and his compatriot Pierre Huyghe back in 1999. She self-referentially explains to us her own back-story (“I was bought for ¥46,000, paid to a design character company, K-Works…”), but, wearing 3D glasses, we see her face glitch and distort. Where a James Cameron or Joseph Kosinski might use the polarised glasses to more fully immerse their audience into their respective film worlds, to create a fuller, more lifelike cinematic experience; Parreno does exactly the reverse, using the stereoscope effect to jar and disturb, a high-tech verfremdungseffekt which feels like it is fucking directly with the cortical pathways between the eye and the brain.

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SUPERFLEX: We Are All In The Same Boat

The Museum of Art and Design at Miami Dade College

15 November 2018 - 21 April 2019

The first museum survey of the critically acclaimed Danish collective SUPERFLEX in the United States, this exhibition focuses on the group’s humorous and playfully subversive installations and films, which address the economy, financial crisis, corruption, migration, and the possible consequences of global warming. The exhibition’s title envisions passengers together in a ship at sea, and a set of shared risks that may put them in danger. Our own collective danger implies a collective responsibility and a need to collaborate so that our ship does not capsize.

Increasingly during the last two decades, global warming and climate change have been discussed and debated, and the consequences of human impact, interference, and possible triggering of the twenty-first century’s climate changes have recently echoed within the art world in a more activist way. Art has always responded to issues in the real world, and SUPERFLEX has been at the forefront of artists who grapple with many of these pressing subjects. SUPERFLEX was founded by Bjørnstjerne Christiansen, Jakob Fenger, and Rasmus Nielsen in 1993, and since then the three artists have gained international recognition for their DIY and activist approaches.

We Are All in the Same Boat includes a group of videos, sculptures, and installations selected for their relevance to the history, present, and future of the City of Miami. The works reflect upon the position of Miami from the perspectives of art, finance, climate, and a fictional, if plausible, future. The topics of water, migration, refugees, and the economy inevitably drive the conception of the exhibition. We Are All in the Same Boat includes the American debut of a number of the works in the show, several of which have been newly reimagined for our city.

SUPERFLEX is known for its interest in unifying urban spaces and commenting on society through art. The artists describe their practice as providing “tools” that affect or influence a social or economic situation. The group often roots its projects in their particular local contexts and outside of traditional art contexts, collaborating with designers, engineers, businesses, and marketers on projects that have the potential for social or economic change. The projects remain difficult to pigeonhole, yet innovative in their approaches to current issues.

The members of SUPERFLEX have used their position as artists to pose questions of political, economic, and environmental behavior and responsibility. In the words of the exhibition’s curator, SUPERFLEX’s “works are meant to create political awareness, generate discussions, and help us think and act.”

Organized by MOAD, SUPERFLEX: We Are All in the Same Boat is curated by Jacob Fabricius, Artistic Director of Kunsthal Aarhus. Support for SUPERFLEX: We Are All in the Same Boat is provided by the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, this.nordic, Funding Arts Network, the Danish Arts Foundation, and the Florida Department of State Division of Cultural Affairs.

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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

De Pont Museum

10 November - 31 March, 2018

Picture by Andrea Rosetti, courtesy Esther Schipper, Berlin

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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