Untitled (bowery), 2012
C-print, Courtesy the artist, Galerie Neu, Berlin, and Reena Spaulings Fine Art, NY

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Pretty Vacant, at Reena Spaulings, New York, January-February 2012

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Untitled, 2010

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Untitled (Dumpster Dino), 2011, Inkjet print, 70 x 100 cm
Untitled (Dumpster 10547), 2011, Inkjet print, 70 x 100 cm

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Installation View at Galerie Neu, 2011

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Poster Painting, 2008
wallpaper glue, paper, approx. 90×58×10 cm

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all: Poster Painting, 2010, wallpaper glue, paper, approx. 90×58×10 cm

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Unheimlich Manoeuvre, 2007
Installation of everything in the artist’s apartment
Dimensions variable

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RUMPFFLACHEN UND PLUNDERERBANDEN, Bonn, 2010

RUMPFFLACHEN UND PLUNDERERBANDEN, Bonn, 2010

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Untitled (Trashcan), 2010

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The artist KLARA LIDEN installing her show at the New Museum
photo: JASON SCHMIDT

all images courtesy of the artist and their respective galleries

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This may, the Swedish-born KLARA LIDÉN  is making her American museum debut with a solo exhibition entitled Bodies of Society at the New Museum in New York.

Trained in art and architecture, LIDÉN (born in Stockholm in1979) often uses architectural interventions, hijacked materials, and the folds and fabrics of cities she passes through to explore the physical, psychological and social limits of the spaces we inhabit.

Part of me is this poor architect dealing with the problem of existing structures in the city, part of me is this amateur dancer or performer who wants to return ideas of rhythm to the activity of building, or of re-appropriating the built environment. – KLARA LIDÉN

➝ Bodies of Society is on view through July 1, 2012.

transcription from a video of SFMOMA archive, 1995, San Francisco
from Nero Magazine Issue 27, Autumn 2011

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JAY DEFEO was a mixed-media artist working in the San Francisco area from 1950 to 1989. The Rose (1958–66) is her most famous work and took almost eight years to complete. Massive in scale, layered with nearly two thousand pounds (approximatively one ton) of paint, the overpowering painting was already famous before its first exhibition in 1969 at the Pasadena Art Museum. It was next exhibited in San Francisco, then stored at the San Francisco Art Institute, where it languished for twenty-five years before a historic conservation restored it to public view. The Rose now resides in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

[The Rose] passed through several stages,each one of them valid. There was a kind of archaic version at six months; then followed  a very developed geometric version which gradually transformed itself into a much more organic expression. Curiously, this stage got thoroughly out of hand at one point (baroque), and I managed to pull it all the way back to the final “classic” Rose. I suspect that even if I had had the space to spread out these ideas on separate canvases, the work would have proceeded on a single format alone, in as much as I felt the painting had to experience its own life-span in time. – JAY DEFEO, 1978

Pro Choice, 2010
gouache on canvas and foamcore, archival inkjet print, aluminium, glass, tape
108 x 155 cm

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Bonjour Tourist (Josefin & Catharina), 2012
gouache on canvas and foamcore, archival inkjet print, aluminium, glass, tape
108 x 155 cm

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Bonjour Tourist, 2012,
gouache on canvas and foamcore, archival inkjet print, aluminium, glass, tape
108 x 155 cm

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Newscaster, 2010
gouache on canvas and foamcore, archival inkjet print, aluminium, glass, tape
108 x 155 cm

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Untitled, 2012
gouache on canvas and foamcore, aluminium, glass, tape
59,5 x 84 cm

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Black Friday, 2012
gouache on canvas and foamcore, aluminium, glass, tape
108 x 155 cm

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WILL BENEDICT & JULIE VERHOEVEN
Bread & Butt, at Galerie Meyer Kainer ,Vienna

all images courtesy of the artist, Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna and Neue Alte Brücke, Frankfurt am Main

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Ten things you need to know about WILL BENEDICT:

1. he is an american artist
2. who lives and works in Vienna
3. he studied at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena (1999–2004) before reaching Frankfurt am Main and the Städelschule in 2004
4. he made a name for himself in 2008 with a series of artworks titled Post Card which turned painting into a kind of stamp
5. more recently his works rely on various combinations of gouache paintings and cut-out studio portraits, mounted in customized aluminium and foamcore frames
6. these works includes large photographic portraits of people seated behind desks, or couples having dinner and small paintings in the corners that look like the small boxes of news program containing capsule descriptions of current events
7. his strange carefully crafted photo-hybrids explore the gaze of individual lives within their cultural contexts, often triggering absurdities and misinterpretations
8. since 2008 he runs the exhibition space Pro Choice with LUCIE STAHL
9. he is having solo exhibitions at Gió Marconi in Milan and at Galerie Meyer Kainer in Vienna with JULIE VERHOEVEN (both exhibitions on view until June 16, 2012)
10. he will also curate an exhibition Commercial Psycho at Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York in June 2012

Salon de Meubles (publication), 2010

Osmoses, 2010

Multicolour Wellness Tower, 2011
in collaboration with RAOUL ZOELNER

Monumenta, 2011

Socles, 2011

Appartment Quartier de l’horloge, 2011
in collaboration with TRAVIS BROUSSARD for the bookshelve

Cleaning chair, 2009

Authentic Sources Furniture, 2011
photography: CLAS EBELING

all images courtesy of CLEMENCE SEILLES

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The work of French designer CLEMENCE SEILLES blurs the line between design and applied art. Through the use of objects, performances, installations and illustrations, she experiments with material, process, production techniques, ideas and philosophies defining a very personal aesthetic.

CLEMENCE SEILLES is also the founder of NoisyChronic, a web platform on sounds that first appeared in 2003 as an open source mailing list through her Gmail account to exchange sourced music and clips. NoisyChronic remains active today.

She studied at the school of art and design in Reims before reaching London and the Royal College of Art. During her studies, she spent several months in Rotterdam at Atelier van Lieshout. In october 2008, she attended JERSZY SEYMOUR’s design workshop. She also designed the HBC café in Berlin. CLEMENCE SEILLES lives and works in Berlin.

And good news: Injections, Projections by CLEMENCE SEILLES opened a few days ago at Galerie Torri in Paris and is on view until June 23, 2012.

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all drawings from the book 177 mal grosse Sehnsucht und grosse Angst
published by Vexer Verlag, 1997

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MONIKA DILLIER is a Swiss artist based in Basel, best known for her drawing practice, with changing formats and techniques. Dedicated to the observation and graphic appropriation of her immediate everyday world, she does not want to document but to capture images marked by objective and subjective elements, current and past meanings, or particular contexts.

And good news: MONIKA DILLIER – Bücher + Hefte 1986-2012 is currently on view at Stampa Galerie in Basel through May 19, 2012

MICHAËL BORREMANS, a Knife in the Eye, 2009, 52 mn
directed by GUIDO DE BRUYN

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A Knife in the Eye (2009) is an intimate and insightful documentary about MICHAËL BORREMANS and his work.

Directed by GUIDO DE BRUYN, the film enters into a captivating dialogue with the artistic accomplishments of BORREMANS whose enigmatic paintings and works on paper invent impressive, confusing and odd visual worlds in which he deals with the absurdity of human existence. Apart from his suggestive narratives, he also creates sculptures, miniature worlds, monuments and video – oscillating between reality and fantasy, fascination and irritation.

If you haven’t seen it yet, then it’s high time to catch up (ps. click on the “cc” button on the bottom right of the video for english subtitles)!

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found via 

from the series das (to Inger Christensen), 2008-2009

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from the series das (to Inger Christensen), 2008-2009

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all drawings untitled, 2012

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Rotes Zimmer, 2011–2012

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Rotes Zimmer, 2011–2012

from the series das (to Inger Christensen), 2008-2009

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from the series das (to Inger Christensen), 2008-2009

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from the series das (to Inger Christensen), 2008-2009

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from the series das (to Inger Christensen), 2008-2009

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Biennale di Venezia 2009 ‘das (to Inger Christensen)’ 33 parts, drawings on paper and photographs. Photo : ANNETTE FISCHER/CHRISTOPH KERN

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portrait of SILVIA BÄCHLI at Biennale di Venezia 2009
Photo : ANNETTE FISCHER/CHRISTOPH KERN

all drawings courtesy of the artist

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Swiss artist SILVIA BÄCHLI has developed her drawing practice over the course of three decades, working on sheets of white paper, of different sizes, qualities and tones, and using Indian ink, charcoal, gouache or pastels.

Using the body and its movements as a starting point, her work spreads into everything that can be considered part of the realm of feeling. In this way she presents a reality made up of fragments and impressions. The result is not just painterly moments; the drawings often seem to capture, as if in film stills, a cinematic look way of looking at bodies and things or their details, at landscapes, gestures, structures, and processes. Story telling without an actual beginning or end, just a visualization of a moment captured in time.

The everyday and normal seem to constantly bewilder me, seem to keep posing new questions: what do fingers look like? (Study closely.) What do feet look like under a chair? (Imagine something without seeing it.) The best drawings are when I can put myself physically into my perception, when I can feel myself into it. What places are there that can’t be filled out? How does the back feel? (Looking from within.) What did I walk past yesterday? (Recalling a route, walking and standing still.) What do diffuse thoughts look like? (Groping through a fog.) What does one remember and where are the white spots? Where does virgin soil begin? What can be depicted when avoiding sensationalism? What remains without TV reality, summit conferences and a woman with a heart? What do the majority of minutes consist of? My drawings are beams of light cast onto careless, insignificant motions, fusions of objects, overpaintings of once commenced and since abandoned figurations, noises, notions; continents between what is closest by. Drawing is experimenting, groping one’s way and playing. My work is like speaking out loud. – SILVIA BÄCHLI in conversation with HANS RUDOLF REUST, 2007

In the year of 2009 BÄCHLI was representing Switzerland at the Biennale di Venezia. Her installation ‘das‘ (that) consisting of 33 drawings and photographs in the Swiss pavilion was an homage to the Danish writer Inger Christensen. And good news: far apart – close together, her last solo exhibition is currently on view at the Kunstmuseum Sankt Gallen through May 13, 2012.

HAROON MIRZA, \|\|\|\| \|\|\
exhibition view at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, May 2012
Photo: Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, GUNNAR MEIER

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A characteristic of HAROON MIRZA‘s installations is that you hear them before you see them, listening to them by approaching the space in which they take shape. And the exhibition entitled \|\|\|\| \|\|\  at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen is no exception. Part of a series of works with which MIRZA is exploring the idea of site-specificity, \|\|\|\| \|\|\ exploits architectonic properties of the exhibition space reducing the installation to its essential, physical components.

The artist creates three minimalist sculptures with these light chains in the primary colours red, green and blue, which are stretched between columns and walls in the first and last rooms. The sounds which the lights generate when going on and off are amplified many times and transported to the middle exhibition room, where they will be heard as a rhythmic composition. MIRZA is thus transforming the Kunst Halle into a new wave walk-through installation.

HAROON MIRZA (*1977, London) graduated from the Winchester School of Art (Fine Art Painting) and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Painting & Drawing). Subsequently he studied Fine Arts at the Chelsea College of Art & Design as well as Critical Practice and Theory at Goldsmiths College. He now lives and works between Sheffield and London. In 2011 he won the Silver Lion Award at the 54th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale and in 2010 he was awarded the Northern Art Prize. He is represented by Lisson Gallery, London.

\|\|\|\| \|\|\  by HAROON MIRZA is on view at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen through July 1, 2012.

all images from the project Elastique
© JENNIFER ABESSIRA

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The creative act is no longer the act creation: instead it’s the choosing, collecting, ordering, cutting and pasting of the extant; it’s about having favorites and displaying them, commenting on them, using them as parts.

The ongoing project Elastique by JENNIFER ABESSIRA is all about the subtle acts of choice: she ambitiously juxtaposes a wide range of images, that she has found or has photographed herself, based on iconographic representation, shape, colour, position, surface perception, but also on the reference of the objects described by the artist. With a combination of nature, women’s bodies and psychedelic textures, she’s able to come up with beautiful photographs that will leave you wanting more.

And good news: her work will be part of the exhibition Irreconciliable (curated by GUY YANAI) from May 12 to June 14, 2012 at the Spaceship in Tel-Aviv, where she lives and works.

from X-Men/Malcom X (After Marvel Comics and Malcom X), 1997
comic book covers and book pages mounted on rag board, 23.2 x 15.3 cm

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By Any Means Necessary, Trapped (After Malcom X), 1985
serigraph on book page, 14 x 22.6 cm

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Study for Invisible Man (After Ralph Ellison), 1995
tempera on book pages, 20.3 x 12.7 cm

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from the Golden Horn Drawings (After Franz Kafka), 1986
graphite, watercolor, gold and silver paint on book pages, 20.2 x 13.3 cm

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A Journal of the Plague Year (After Daniel Defoe), 1988
animal blood and pencil on book page, 17 x 12.7 cm

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from the Temptation of Saint Antony-Other Voices (After Gustave Flaubert), 1989-1990, powdered pigment, india ink, alcohol, watercolor, turpentine and xerograph on rag paper, 28 x 21.6 cm

all images courtesy of the artist and their respective galleries

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TIM ROLLINS & K.O.S. (Kids Of Survival) have been collaboratively drawing and painting on book pages since 1982. They have used texts that are fundamental to Western culture and have developed a visual synthesis that preserves a memory of spontaneous associations with the original text. Glued onto canvas, the pages of these same texts become the support for medium and large-scale pictorial works, and for a series of works on paper.

We were making illuminations inspired by the narratives and movements of the carpet of text underneath. They are categorically not illustrations, but something more integrated. – TIM ROLLINS

Frieze New York opens this week at Randall’s Island and one of the works on view at Frieze’s Projects Program is a 40-foot table installed beneath a canopy of large oak trees, where TIM ROLLINS & K.O.S. will conduct their first open workshop for children and youths. Using watercolors and inks, a vast painting-collage will be created on a musical score of FELIX MENDELSSOHN’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (full details here).

Sang d’Encre, 2009
from a series of six photographs, 40 x 40 cm
courtesy of the artist

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Nine things you need to know about ISMAÏL BAHRI:

1. Born in Tunis in 1978,
2. he studied at the Tunis Institute of Fine Arts,
3. and at the Sorbonne in Paris where he got a Ph.D in Arts
4. his works take various forms, going from drawing to video, from photography to installations
5. for each of his projects he develops a framework that allows him to observe and capture subtle and ephemeral phenomena
6. he uses ordinary familiar objects such as milk, paper, glasses, bowls, pins, strings but he has a predilection for ink that he uses as an element of appearance and infusion: In Sang d’encre for instance, I drop small doses of ink on the skin; it starts infiltrating the pores, the wrinkles and cracks. This graphic approach cannot be dissociated from organic secretions. I explore the body through its cracks as if I would draw from the inside of the skin itself in order to reveal a hidden interiority
7. in his work, you can often find the precision of a repeated, elaborate, filmed, scrutinized movement, but this precise movement initiates a flight and carries in itself the germs of the immeasurable
8. and good news: his next solo exhibition will open on Thursday 3 May 2012 at Les Filles Du Calvaire in Paris
9. he now lives and works between Paris and Tunis

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La Cura, a series of intimate performances for Milan Design Week, April 2012
all images: ALESSANDRO MARIA NACAR

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Notes on American Performance (detail) Athens,  February 2012
at the exhibition Notes on American Performance at T293, Naples, 2012

Notes on American Performance, installation at T293 Naples, 2012

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Notes on American Performance, Athens, February 2012
at the exhibition Notes on American Performance at T293, Naples, 2012

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Notes on American Performance, Performance at T293, Naples, April 4, 2012

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Notes on American Performance, installation at T293, Naples, April 5 – May 25, 2012
all images courtesy of the artists and T293, Naples
Photography by MAURIZIO ESPOSITO

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Previously featured on WFW, CALLA HENKEL and MAX PITEGOFF opened earlier this month their new solo show at T293 in Naples, where acrylic, resin and glass cocktails along with texts under the title Notes on American Performance 2012 printed on aluminum sculptures, are dispersed throughout the gallery.

Central to the project are photographs taken in Athens in February 2012, which showed the artists lounging in luxury hotels while the country below rioted. During the show’s opening, the hanging of framed photographs was billed as a performance. Working with performances, texts, and photographs, CALLA HENKEL and MAX PITEGOFF reveal a novel and personal point of view, in all its nuances, from the most sensual to the most suffering.

Notes on American Performance is currently on view at T293, Naples through May 25, 2012.

Alternate Colour Schemes for Sewage Works, 2011
ink, wash, pencil and watercolour on paper, 31 x 41 cm

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Nile Foliage, Ornamental Designs For The Framing Of Doors, 2008

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Canary Wharf, 2007
ink on paper, 26.8 x 23 cm

Reconstruction of facade of charing cross station, 2006

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Grand Latrine in the French Manner, 2011
ink, wash on paper, 67 x 102 cm

Design for the Ornamentation of Middle Class Houses, 2011
ink and watercolour on paper, 4 parts

Large Building with a Courtyard, 2005
ink and gouache on paper

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First and Second Hangs of Pre-Columbian Antiquities at the Metroploitan Museum, 2009, ink and guache on paper

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First and Second Hangs of Pre-Columbian Antiquities at the Metroploitan Museum, 2009, ink and guache on paper

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Teatro Alessandro Scarlatti, 2011
wood, color, 350 x 300 x 300 cm
exhibition view at the Garden of Forking Paths, guest project on the Froh Ussicht estate, owned by the Blum family in Samstagern, Zurich (May-October 2011)

all images courtesy of the artist and their respectives galleries

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The works of PABLO BRONSTEIN address the relationship between architecture, behaviour and power. His drawings in pen and ink on paper, which combine a wide variety of stylistic approaches, ranging from Renaissance draftsmanship to Modern design and which often represent utopian buildings that convey a sense of the absurd, are what first brought the artist to attention. However, his installations and performances are also key elements of his oeuvre, and extend the artist’s exploration of architecture into the realm of space and action.

I am not an architect, and these drawings are not plans, concept sketches, or designs, but rather imitations of designs.(…) If my work aims at a confrontational subversion, it would be directed more toward the sections of the art world that push for a particular aesthetic despite claims to be interested in the concept. If I’m being a little thuggish about it, I could summarize encountering much hostility from people wanting their conceptual art to look like ‘conceptual art,’ or their political art to look like ‘political art’. – PABLO BRONSTEIN in conversation with TIMOTHY HULL

Loess 1 (detail), 2012
7 ceramic elements, dimensions variable

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Loess 1 (detail), 2012
7 ceramic elements, dimensions variable

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Loess 1 (detail), 2012
7 ceramic elements, dimensions variable

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Loess 1, 2012
7 ceramic elements, dimensions variable

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Loess 2, 2012
ceramic, dimensions variable

all images courtesy of the artist

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Loess ( /ˈloʊ.əs/, /ˈlʌs/, /ˈlɛs/, or UK: /ˈlɜːs/) is an aeolian sediment formed by the accumulation of wind-blown silt, typically in the 20–50 micrometre size range, twenty percent or less clay and the balance equal parts sand and silt that are loosely cemented by calcium carbonate. It is usually homogeneous and highly porous and is traversed by vertical capillaries that permit the sediment to fracture and form vertical bluffs. The word loess, with connotations of origin by wind-deposited accumulation, is of German origin and means “loose.” It was first applied to Rhine River valley loess about 1821. – wikipédia

Loess is the title of a series of totem-like sculptures created by French artist MARION VERBOOM whose work is often inspired by the structures and forms in the built environment and topography that surrounds her.

Fabricated from ceramics with a combination of layers of textures and colors, these pieces resemble sleek, rectangular columns or pillars establishing VERBOOM‘s interest in making sculptures with dimensions that relate to the human body in ways similar to architectural barriers and monuments.

Between pure geometrical form, art historical resemblance and utopian architecture, her sculpures and drawings isolate element (any detail or ornamentation) such as cornices, flying buttresses, which become through a change of skill, layout or rendering of matter, the basic unit for her work.

And good news: these sculptures are currently on view in Paris at Primo Piano (solo exhibition, on view until May 13, 2012) and at Galerie Dominique Fiat (part of the group exhibition MAN MADE, through May 3, 2012).

Sgt Foley, from the series First Person Shooter
© THIBAULT BRUNET

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This collection was produced during a training session in an American camp in Afghanistan. Far from the activity of the shooting ranges and explosions, I strided along the area looking for other soldiers. I first encountered them playing basketball, bodybuilding or just sitting, far away from the restlessness of missions. I then took pictures of them from a close point of view, and then further away. I busted these synthetic faces looking for a light. A trouble remains present. All the elements of the reality of war are here, but we can sense a strange sensitiveness in the looks. The marks of horror and suffering are on the soldiers’ faces, but yet beyond this hyper realistic anthropomorphism, we can also feel a kind of vague indifference… - THIBAULT BRUNET about the series First Person Shooter

THIBAULT BRUNET is a virtual war photographer. Since 2007 he found his subjects in the world of video games, capturing  black-and-white portraits of soldiers, war-torn landscapes and views from within dilapidated buildings, all without leaving the comfort of his home in Lille, France.

These games are inspired by American popular, historical and political culture. They involve getting through missions — murder, blackmail, theft and escape, enemy liquidation, bombing or even the occupation of territories such as Afghanistan. I chose to explore these games against the natural will of my avatars, the one that the usual player would use. I chose to do it as a photographer. (..) These pictures were taken over the course of my walks in these virtual universes. The slow motion of my walks led me to explore the spaces that are usually forgotten by players — the outskirts of barren and industrialized areas.

By presenting images that are not photographs but screenshots of computer renderings, THIBAULT BRUNET‘s work invites skepticism about the representation of reality in general. His art is a reflection on the new boundaries between truthfulness and falsehood, between reality and its avatars, by means of the continuous progress of technology that blurs their frontiers.

And good news: his first solo exhibition has opened a few days ago at 4RT Contemporary in Brussels: the series First Person Shooter, along with some work from his latest series Paris: In the Aftermath of War, are on view through May 19, 2012.

all images from the series SP 67, la strada della Tramontana Scura
© ROBERTO SCHENA

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Marconi, 2003
Indian ink, 102 x 73 cm

Aktion KIR, 1999
1000 m, Ø 11 mm

Tanz, 2006
Indian ink, 100 x 70 cm

Untitled, 2009
Metal, wood, gloss paint, 163 x 31 cm

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Rom III, 2000
Indian ink, 84 x 59 cm

Labyrinth, 2006
Indian ink, 100 x 70 cm

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Schichtung, 2009
48 discs, Metal ∅ 124 cm

Rauschen II, 2004
Indian ink, 73 x 50 cm

Untitled, 2005
Indian ink, 102 x 73 cm

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Mantel, 2004
48 discs, iron, ∅ 1.24m, 14.97 x 13.83  cm
installation view at Centre PasquArt Biel

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Rätsel, 2007
collage, 28 x 22 cm

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Rondellen, 2009
Aquatinta , 29.7 x 19.7 cm

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Untitled, 2002
monotype on paper, 102 x 73 cm

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Aktion St. Petersinsel, 1990
wood, textile, 582 x 108 cm

all images courtesy of the artist

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PETER GYSI is a Swiss artist who conceives works of art that are fundamentally geometric and architectonic. From objects and sculptures to installations and drawings, his work explores the notion of concept and experiment, plan and chance, humour and seriousness.

Using precise, measured formats such as grids and modules, his 2D and 3D pieces relied on the circle as the basic unit for his explorations of space, time, form, volume, repetition, sequence, and variation.

I am driven by all kinds of things and sensations: the fascination of the physical act, the aesthethic effect of a pattern, ornaments – the leaves of trees, printed fabrics, paper, touch, India ink, texture, quirks of perception, the personal imprint, vibration and power through repetition, melodies; the complexities of structures that arise from the multiplication of simple, mostly like elements; exponential change through addition and/or substraction; the fugue, the structure, the in-between; fields or tension between plan, chance and idea; the experiment, the unpredictable, the how and the why, the directness of drawing, the many impulses from the history of drawing… – PETER GYSI in conversation with ULRICH LOOCK, August 2010

WFW in the first issue of Disegno, April 2012
ISBN: 978-889-071-211-1
www.disegnomag.it

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Here is a short glimpse into the feature dedicated to WFW in the new magazine Disegno: la nuova cultura industriale that has been released a few days ago in Milano, just in time for the Salone Internazionale del Mobile.

Initiated by STEFANO CASCIANI (critic, designer, writer and for many years editor of domus magazine), Disegno: la nuova cultura industriale is the first monographic review on paper, in Italian and English, entirely dedicated to the global scene of design and its interaction with contemporary industry. It aims to bring well written and beautifully presented editorials to a wider audience, not just to industry insiders, but also to those who have an interest in reading and examining the cultural aspects of mass production and of the technologies that define the new artificially built world from a new perspective.

And good news: Disegno: la nuova cultura industriale is now available via Books Import in Milano.

Oh, and by the way, I just filled the WFW Flickr with some Milano pictures!

Assembly Instructions (The Pledge- Alfredo Arias), forty seven
framed inkjet ultrachrome archival prints and dotted pencil lines, 2011.
Courtesy: Sprüth Magers, Berlin London; Art:Concept, Paris; Monitor, Rome.

Assembly Instructions (Concerning The Apparent Asymmetry of Time: Painting), detail, 2010
Assembly Instructions (Concerning The Apparent Asymmetry of Time: Painting), detail, 2010
Assembly Instructions (An Immodern Romanticism), 2009, collectin Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Assembly Instructions (Concerning The Apparent Asymmetry of Time: Painting), detail, 2010

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Assembly Instructions (The Pledge- Alfredo Arias), forty seven
framed inkjet ultrachrome archival prints and dotted pencil lines, 2011
Courtesy: Sprüth Magers, Berlin London; Art:Concept, Paris; Monitor, Rome

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Assembly Instructions (The Pledge- Alfredo Arias), forty seven
framed inkjet ultrachrome archival prints and dotted pencil lines, 2011
Courtesy: Sprüth Magers, Berlin London; Art:Concept, Paris; Monitor, Rome

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Assembly Instructions: The Pledge
exhibition view at art: concept, Paris, October-December 2011

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The Pledge, 2011
courtesy the artist, art:concept, Paris; Monitor, Rome

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Assembly Instructions, The Pledge, Leah Kelly, 2011
Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers Gallery, Berlin

The Pledge, Simon Fujiwara, 2011
courtesy the artist, art:concept, Paris; Monitor, Rome

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Eight things you need to know about ALEXANDRE SINGH:

1. born in 1980 in Bordeaux, France,
2. he was brought up in Manchester before studying Fine Art at the University of Oxford, UK
3. he now lives and works in New York
4. his work primarily relies on the narrative conventions of storytelling, artfully manipulating words and imagery while playing with conventional narrative techniques and literary genres
5. the resulting pieces – spanning sculpture, collage, video, installation and performance – delve into diverse disciplines such as science, pseudo-science, industry, magic, business or art history; each element is linked to another producing unexpected congruencies and points of intersection
6. In his intricate, modular crossbreeds of installation, film, theatrical performance and sculpture, linear time routinely collapses, reality and fictions from diverse temporal points meet and meld, tales frequently swallow their own tails and the viewer performs the role of dazed, delighted navigator - MARTIN HERBERT
7. and good news: Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art (Rotterdam) is going to present the on-site realization of The Humans, a theatrical play that aims to ‘create a new world’ by SINGH
8. this project, on view from 26 April to 28 October 2012, came into being after seven years of correspondence between ALEXANDRE SINGH and DEFNE AYAS, Witte de With’s newly appointed director

Untitled, 2012
Ceramic, 45 x 58 x 27 inches

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all images courtesy of the artist and MOCA

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Commissioned by curator NEVILLE WAKEFIELD to make a piece for the George Herms: Xenophilia exhibition at Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art last year, MELODIE MOUSSET created a ceramic blanketed figure attempting a yoga pose in Downward Dog and taking inspiration from the relief ornamentation of FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT’s Ennis House in Los Feliz, Los Angeles:

It’s not the house, it’s the pattern. I have this thing, like in THOMAS PYNCHON novels, where I see signs and I have to follow them—even if the signs are totally absurd. I saw the pattern and it felt like I was discovering it before anybody else. - MELODIE MOUSSET

Watch MELODIE MOUSSET in the Ennis House taking a clandestine swim and working on the piece, here

XSYST, 2011
63 x 48 in, black-and-white photographs
Courtesy of the artist and Wallspace, NY; Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco; Kaufmann Repetto, Milan

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EKS, 2011
63 x 39.16 in, black-and-white photographs
Courtesy of the artist and Wallspace, NY; Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco; Kaufmann Repetto, Milan

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EKSIZ, 2011
63 x 42 in, black-and-white photographs
Courtesy of the artist and Wallspace, NY; Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco; Kaufmann Repetto, Milan

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XIS, 2011
63 x 48 in, black-and-white photographs
Courtesy of the artist and Wallspace, NY; Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco; Kaufmann Repetto, Milan

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all images from the website project Language is Wild, 2012
courtesy of the artist and DIA Art Foundation

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all images from the website project Language is Wild, 2012
courtesy of the artist and DIA Art Foundation

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Shrouded Monument (Polaroid), 2008 
Courtesy of the artist; Wallspace, New York; Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco

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all images from the website project Language is Wild, 2012
courtesy of the artist and DIA Art Foundation

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Sculptures Involuntaires, 2006
Courtesy of the artist

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Best known for her photographic and sculptural investigations of language, SHANNON EBNER has long been interested in exploring both visual and textual modes of representation.

For her first web-based artwork, Language Is Wild,commissioned by Dia and made in collaboration with New York-based designers KLOEPFER-RAMSEY, EBNER has composed an interactive sequence of still images prompting exploration of various combinations of language and image. Utilizing the cursor as a means to “rest” and “unrest” images moving continually across the screen, Language Is Wild asks us to negotiate with the work using a simple binary: “YES” or “NO. The project is online since April 12, 2012, here

SHANNON EBNER was born in 1971 in Englewood, New Jersey, and received her BA from Bard College in 1993 and her Masters of Fine Arts in 2000 from Yale University School of Art. Most recently she has participated in the Whitney Biennial, New York (2008); the 6th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2010); and the Venice Biennale (2011). Solo projects include MoMA PS1, New York (2007), and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2011). This spring Ebner’s work will be shown at MoMA, New York, in the exhibition Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language. She lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

LOOK, I’M BLIND, LOOK, 1998-1999
68,5 x 69,3 x 2,7 cm (27 x 27 1/4 x 1 1/8 in.)
exhibition view at Centre PasquArt, Biel (Switzerland), 14 April 2012
photo © WFW

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Serenity, 2009
Music by Vernon & Burns
2-D Animation, 3:04 min

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Discovered in the last issue of Slanted Magazine (#17), BENEDIKT RUGAR is a german illustrator and animator based in Berlin, best known for his delightful illustrativ and visceral world.

Over the past several years, he has illustrated various magazines as NEON, Kinki or brand eins among others. His website definitely worth a look if you like your illustration with a filthy dose of the absurd.

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ONLAB Summer School 2011
all images by LAUREN THORSON
more images of the workshop 2011 here

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It’s that time of year again, when you have the possibility to take part in the Summer School of ONLAB in Berlin. After a successful first summer school last year on the topic chronology of a failure, the graphic design agency ONLAB reiterates for two weeks in October on a topic related to cities and people.

The work flow will be similar to last year: the 20 participants will be divided into small groups, which develop the different sections and chapters of the publication. NICOLAS BOURQUIN and THIBAUD TISSOT will closely coach the participants with the support of an editorial board. The result will be a publication that will be printed and exhibited on the last day of the workshop. In addition to that, a public conference with international speakers will be held, as well as daily presentations by external professionals.

There is still one thing you need to know: the application deadline is April 16th 2012, so send your CV and portfolio to ONLAB, now!

Evidence No 2, 2009
archival pigment print, 46 x 58 inches
© ANGELA STRASSHEIM

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American photographer ANGELA STRASSHEIM also goes to the sites of real crimes, in her case homes in which violent acts and murders have taken place at some point in the past.

Through extensive researchs, ANGELA has mapped out the exact locations where violent and horrific crimes were perpetrated. She convinced new owners and tenants to revisit the unnoticed and unseen past. Ambient light, long exposures and a chemical spray called “Blue Star” render the remnants of blood visible by activating the physical memory of blood through its contact with the remaining proteins on the walls even after they have been thoroughly cleaned and repainted.

all images from the series Visiting Jane, 2009 – 2010, Los Angeles
Inkjet prints, 110 x 72 cm
© VIRGINIE REBETEZ

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Connecting identity, history, and memory, VIRGINIE REBETEZ uses photography as a means of exploration, as a tool that allows her to have a different meaning and interpretation of the elements that surround us.

With a series of self-portraits entitled Visiting Jane, VIRGINIE REBETEZ goes on the hunt for crime scenes where people died and who have not yet been identified. The work was produced over a two-year period (2009–2010), during which the artist travelled in the Los Angeles county researching and documenting the locations and the belongings of the deceased.

But her photographs stretch beyond mere documentation: brimming with radiant light, unsettling atmosphere and sinister implications, they are carefully staged tableaux imbued with mystery.

This series has been compiled in a book which contains pictures and extracts from the Police archives, and will be published in a Swiss magazine, Georges (released 16 April, 2012). Additionally her work will be part of the group exhibition The Breath On Our Back in the PhotoforumPasquArt, Bienne (Switzerland) from 14 April (opening) to 17 June, 2012.

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all images © ESTELLE HANANIA and CHRISTOPHE BRUNNQUELL

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A few days ago, a new exhibition opened at Paris’ 12mail gallery, documenting the work of ESTELLE HANANIA and CHRISTOPHE BRUNNQUELL.

ESTELLE HANANIA is a French photographer who quickly gained recognition after her graduation in Fine Arts in 2006. Since then, her photographs have appeared in Vice, The Wire, Exit, Sang Bleu and Capricious, among others, and she has been commissioned by fashion brands including Maison Martin Margiela, Opening Ceremony, Issey Miyake and Zucca. In 2008, she began her ongoing collaboration with CHRISTOPHE BRUNNQUELL, a compulsive artist, always working on some drawings, sculptures and crazy pieces 24 hours a day.

Ambiguous scenarios of violence, dramatic states of mind, and wild glees, their photo-performance projects bear witness to an extraordinary radicality.

➝ HANANIA & BRUNNQUELL , La Guerre du Feu on view through June 1, 2012 at 12mail / Red Bull Space in Paris.

Baptiste, Paris 2012
© EMMANUELLE TRICOIRE

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EMMANUELLE TRICOIRE is a French photographer who worked for music magazines, her first body of work documented the upcoming underground music scene in New York City where she only shot in the streets, proclaiming “the streets were her studios”. Wanting to evolve not only as a photographer but as an artist, she completely detached herself from that scene; desiring to get closer to the people that she was shooting and get to know them personally in order to tell much deeper stories through her images.

And good news: EMMANUELLE TRICOIRE will be exhibiting her latest project on the 13th of April, entitled: XIII. at En Face (2 Rue Jacquard) in Paris from 19:00.

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found via

A Piece Dance Alone, 2012
photo by MELANIE HOFMANN
pictured is ALEXANDRA BACHZETSIS and ANNE PAJUNEN

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A Piece Danced Alone, 2011
Installation view at Chisenhale Gallery, London
photo: MARK BLOWER

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A Piece Danced Alone, 2011
Installation view at Chisenhale Gallery, London
photo: MARK BLOWER

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ALEXANDRA BACHZETSIS is an artist, performer and choreographer whose work examines the techniques of choreography, expressions of performing arts, and forms of scenic behavior. Taking interest in the codes defining gestures, both in everyday life and on stage, her work scrutinizes the use of gesture and movement in terms of the mutual influence between expressions of “popular culture”, such as romantic comedies, TV soap operas or hip-hop video-clips and of “high culture”, such as ballet, modern dance and performance.

A Piece Danced Alone confronts the audience with a series of micro-performances – each involving an interpretation of specific physical instructions executed by two identically dressed performers – BACHZETSIS herself and dancer ANNE PAJUNEN- who, as if learning and stealing from each other, exchange and gradually modify the elements of each one’s individual choreography .

I am interested in a duality in dance: the mystery of human expression on one side and controlled material organized by routines and rules on the other. This can be compared to the difference between articulated verbal and physical languages that constitute the presence of an individual. It’s the search for these constituent elements of personality that drives me to make work.

Through technical devices, such as video, projections, or a mirror wall, I try to make the audience aware of what they are looking at while they’re watching the performers dance or strip or move or talk. I confront the audience with their own voyeuristic gaze. The audience gains presence through the fact that my shows are clearly directed towards them — made for and of the audience’s watching. – ALEXANDRA BACHZETSIS in conversation with CATHERINE WOOD for Kaleidoscope magazine #14, Spring 2012

And good news: A Piece Danced Alone will be on view at the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art on the 25 and 26 of April 2012, at the Shedhalle in Zürich on May 11 2012 and at the Kaserne in Basel from the 30 of May until June 3, 2012. Additionally her latest project, Flirt, will be premiered at the Theaterhaus Gesnerallee Zürich on May 22.

ALEKSANDRA DOMANOVIĆ, From yu to me
at Kunsthalle Basel, from 01 April to 27 May, 2012

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Untitled (30.11.2010), 2010
3 x 7500 A4 pages, inkjet print, each 75 x 21 x 29.7 cm

19:30 (stacks), 2011
4 x A4 and 2 x A3 pages, inkjet print, various dimensions

Marina Lučica, 2012
9000 A4 pages, inkjet print, 75 x 21 x 29.7 cm

Plitvice, 2012
7500 A4 pages, inkjet print, 75 x 21 x 29.7 cm

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Bubanji Fist Relief, 2012
mdf, tadelakt
160 x 55 x 20 cm

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Prilep Nymph, 2012
styrofoam, tadelakt
290 x 190 x 190 cm

Portrait (messing), 2012
inkjet print, framed
200 x 145 cm

all images © WFW

portrait (Kilim), 2012
inkjet print, 137 x 190 cm
courtesy the artist and Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin

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The first solo exhibition in Switzerland of ALEKSANDRA DOMANOVIĆ opened a few days ago at the Kunsthalle in Basel. The artist’s works questions the complex ways how the digital culture has fundamentally changed our landscape of information and our notion of public space, mostly in her native country, the former Yugoslavia.

The exhibition shows a series of new sculptures (pieces coated with Tadelakt, a finishing material typical of the North African country) as well as further developed versions of previous works like her paper-stacks (2009 and ongoing). Her video works aren’t outdone: Turbo Sculpture (2012) is projected onto a monumental screen occupying one of the main spaces of the ground floor.

All these works are closely connected with her own experience and the history of her native Yugoslavia whether she is investigating the phenomenon of what she has dubbed Turbo Sculpture, constructing modest steles out of printer paper emblazoned with digital distortions of images from pre- and postwar life, or making semi-autobiographical forays into the rave scene that united the youth of the balkanized Yugoslavian territory, DOMANOVIĆ addresses the ways in which we attempt to heal the wounds of history.

➝ ALEKSANDRA DOMANOVIĆ, From yu to me, at Kunsthalle Basel, from 01 April to 27 May, 2012

Kostërrc, 2011
Soil, grass, metal container, 230 x 600 x 400 cm
Installation view “Statements”, Art Basel 2011, with Chert, Berlin

Bourgeois Hen, 2009
drawing on paper

The places I’m looking for, my dear, are utopian places, they are boring and I don’t know how to make them real, 2010
Wood, iron, various materials, 13 x 11 x 8 meter circa
Installation view 6th Berlin Biennial for contemporary art, Berlin, June 2010

They are Lucky to be Bourgeois Hens II, 2009
Wood, paint, electricity, chickens, 550 x 150 cm circa
Installation view, solo exhibition at Contemporary Art Center, Pristhina

The cabin where he spent the night was so small that anyone who wasn’t a child or a dwarf couldn’t lie down full-length inside it, 2011
Wood, straw, 500 cm ø 300 cm
Installation view “Struktur & Organismus”, Muhldorf in der Wachau, 2011
photo: eSeL.at

Astronauts saw my work and started laughing, 2011
Wood, strings, metal, soil, beans, 280 cm ø 180 cm
Installation view from “Based in Berlin”, Berlin, 2011
Photo: AMIN AKTHAR

Astronauts saw my work and started laughing, 2011
Color print photograph, 30 x 50 cm

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Astronauts saw my work and started laughing, 2011
Wood, strings, metal, soil, beans, 280 cm ø 180 cm

Can we do something together, just this and then free forever, 2011
Metal, wood, glass, color pigment, 200 x 90 x 60 cm
Installation view “Petrit Halilaj”, solo exhibition at Kunstraum Innsbruck, 2011

Because it is for you my Dear, and the Sky doesn´t see you and we can fall. Yes I am doing it for you, to see if you are free too, 2011
Site specific installation, iron, plastic, 12 painted panels, wood, motor

all images courtesy the artist and Chert, Berlin

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Ten things you need to know about PETRIT HALILAJ:

1. he was born in Kostërrc, Skenderaj-Kosovo, in 1986
2. at the age of thirteen, he fled with his family to Albania
3. later he was able to study art at the Brera Academy in Milan
4. he gained the art world’s attention thanks to the project They Are Lucky to Be Bourgeois Hens, 2008 (three versions of which were shown in Istanbul, Berlin and Pristina), his participation in the Berlinbiennale with house and chickens in 2010, as well as his installation Kostërrc at Art Basel 42 in 2011
5. his practice  – sculptures, installations, pen or ink drawings – is built around his own biography and life situation
6. and raises questions as to everyday codes and conventions, to identity and integration or to unwritten boundary lines between cultures and social groups
7. he uses simple materials such as earth and wooden slats, but also live chickens and found objects from the archives of vanished museums in Kosovo, to construct/reconstruct places or objects dedicated to his memories, his family or other people close to him
8. the recollection only has meaning as long as it remains the same as reality, and it only remains the same as reality as long as reality remains the same as itself. In a glass case, in a new nest – PETRIT HALILAJ for Domus, November 2009
9. today, he lives and works between Pristina, Bozzolo (Mantova) and Berlin
10. and good news: he will create a new project for the Kunsthalle Sankt Gallen (Switzerland) on view from 21st July to 23rd September, 2012

Arrangement #14 (Blumen), 2008

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Lilly Pads #2, 2006

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Lilly Pads #2, 2006

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Die Blaumann-Akademie (Cornelius), 2008

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Arrangement #7 (Blumen), 2005

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Arrangement #9 (Blumen), 2008

all images courtesy the artist 

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After her masculine portraits of wrestlers and young men in military uniforms, American photographer COLLIER SCHORR worked on a project called Forests and Fields, where she documented life (real and imagined) in the small German town of Schwäbisch Gmünd. When she started making flower pictures she wanted to make portraits of something that escaped nationality and identity, but that kept an idea of the “pose” and a kind of struggle between the subject and the photographer – so she uprooted the flowers and transported them to another location, tied them and watched them die.

There’s something illicit about the “Blumen” photos, a literal trespassing. In order to get the flowers, I have to go into strangers’ gardens and yards to steal them. Then I have to go someplace that’s not my place and build this thing; within minutes, the flowers begin to wilt, changing shape and color. And inevitably, the wind blows them down. It takes about six minutes to construct a structure. It’s the perfect illustration of the term deracinated. I like that about it, the clarity of its purpose. It’s the opposite of arranging a still life in a studio with a table—and unlimited time. Here, you tie a flower to two or three sticks and hope it stays up. After I take the picture, I take a step back and look at this little theater or shrine to nothing that I’ve built and then tear it down. The picture is a document of a public sculpture or an act of vandalism.

I made the first “Blumen” picture after looking at MAPPLETHORPE’s Pictures book. I was struck by how much freedom MAPPLETHORPE was able to extract from his model’s restraint—that in tying up and cropping his models, he appears to be able to work with people as forms. I never thought about my flowers as related to his (which I saw as annoyingly erotic); I thought of them in relationship to bondage. I wanted to make the flowers more aggressive and ironic and less docile and sensual. – COLLIER SCHORR for Artforum

More recently she trained her lens on fashion photography, portraying women in preparation for a forthcoming book.

untitled, 2011
© BEA FREMDERMAN

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BEA FREMDERMAN is visual artist based in Chicago who works with photography and video. Her photographic explorations rely on ubiquitous ideas and places to construct alternate realities within our commonplace objects and situations.

Creating results of irony, surprise and ambiguity, each individual shot by BEA FREMDERMAN challenges the existent visual language of photography and deals with the ways in which our image-based culture experiences itself.

The suburban nightmare pertains to placelessness. It is within subdivisions where individuality, desire and freedom homogenize to form a synthetic reality. As one dwells in this maze, a false sense of freedom delineates all that is true. From the confines of the office cubicle to the sovereignty of the home, urge is suppressed and ennui sets in. Relief is found in leisure but the temporary escape is nothing more than a cul-de-sac; placing one right where they started. Those who fear placelessness see the artifice and resist information. ” – BEA FREMDERMAN

Knave, 2011 
oil on canvas, 200 x 120 cm
courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

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Six AM, Wednesday, 2009, oil on canvas, 200 x 120 cm
11 pm Friday, 2010, oil on canvas, 200 x 130 cm
11pm Saturday, 2011, oil on canvas, 200 x 120 cm
Conspiracies, 2010, oil on canvas, 140 x 190 cm

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Any Number of Preoccupations, 2010, oil on canvas, 160 x 200 cm
Doves, 2009, oil on canvas, 200 x 120cm
Piano, 2009, oil on canvas, 180 x 160 cm
Kingfisher, 2011, oil on canvas, 70 x 76 cm

all images courtesy the artist and their respective galleries

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The work of LYNETTE YIADOM-BOAKYE is quite abstract even though her paintings allude to traditions of European portraiture. In fact, these characters are only pure fictions, they’re not portraits, instead they are a composite of her imagination and of people who don’t exist. Occasionally there are small traces of specificity, such as clothing or hairstyles, but largely the figures and scenarios appear unfixed to any clear associations of race, class, gender or location. The resulting collection of paintings become essays and documents between her reality, history, and imagination.

Painting for me is the subject. The figures exist only through paint, through color, line, tone and mark-making. (…) They don’t share our concerns or anxieties. They are somewhere else altogether.

LYNETTE YIADOM-BOAKYE was born in London in 1977. She studied at Central Saint Martin’s School of Art 1996-97, Falmouth College of Art 1997-2000 and the Royal Academy Schools 2000-03. She began exhibiting her paintings in 2001 in group shows, and was selected for John Moores 23 and Bloomberg New Contemporaries both in 2004. In 2006 she received a Painting Fellowship from The Arts Foundation and won a deciBel Visual Arts Award. Her most recent solo exhibitions include Notes and Letters, at Corvi Mora, London (2011); Any Number of Preoccupations, at Studio Museum Harlem, New York (2010); Essays and Documents, at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York (2010); at Gasworks, London (2007). Recent group exhibitions include The Ungovernables, at New Museum Triennial, New York (2012); A Terrible Beauty is Born, at 11th Lyon Biennial (2011); Secret Societies, at Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2011)

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Effects & Affects: The Alphabet
with CHARLES ATLAS, RUEDI BECHTLER, TRISHA DONNELLY, CÉDRIC EISENRING, PEPE MORENO, PAT O’NEILL, JAN VORISEK, JENNIFER WEST
all photos © WFW

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The exhibition Effects & Affects: The Alphabet explores the connection between comics and contemporary art, and depicts this link between the two art genres based on visual qualities such as the handcrafted design, illustrative and onomatopoeic effects, appearance and abstraction, image and language.

The chosen works are deliberately diversified – wall projections alternate with works on paper and objects - in order to showcase the multimedia-based richness of the thin border between comics and art.

Effects & Affects: The Alphabet has been curated by Swiss artist TOBIAS MADISON and critic/curator MARTIN JAEGGI. The exhibition is running through April 1, 2012 during the Fumetto Festival. You can see some of my other Fumetto pictures here.

Spirou, 2010
resin
photo © WFW

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Ten things you need to know about French comic artist YVES CHALAND:

1. he was born on 3 April 1957
2. he published his first comics at the age of 17 in the fanzine Biblipop
3. thereupon, he studied at the art school in Saint-Etienne,
4. where he founded his first fanzine L’Unité de Valeur in 1976 together with LUC CORNILLON
5. in 1978 he started his collaboration with the magazine Métal Hurlant
6. he created the characters Bob Fish, Adolphus Claar and Freddy Lombard
7. in 1982 he took over the drawing for The adventures of Spirou & Fantasio
8. together with TED BENOIT, SERGE CLERC and FLOC’H, he contributed to the revitalisation of the Ligne claire
9. he died on 18 July 1990 in a car accident
10. Fumetto is currently showing the first comprehensive retrospective in the Germanspeaking countries

Sein erster zweistelliger Geburtstag (His first double-digit birthday), 2010
© ANJA WICKI

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It’s that time of year again: the city of Luzern in Switzerland devotes itself to the art of comics from the avant-garde and independent scene by both national and international artists.

ANJA WICKI is one of the Swiss artists presented during this edition of Fumetto who likes to tell stories via animations or illustrations which begin seemingly peacefully but often end in catastrophe:

At the beginning, man, animal and nature are one with each other or have at least set up a partnership of convenience. But then there are the machines. With WICKI they are never intrinsically menacing, on the contrary: they are clean, under control, functional. Their functionality becomes more suspect when they produce a new best friend from a guinea pig, cut down an entire forest in a dream or make a dolphin out of a freshwater fish. Admittedly, the operations always work, but sooner or later they are revealed as abuse.

Additionally she has been supported by the Festival by enabling her to release her first publication entitled Hast du das Meer gesehen? (Have you seen the ocean?).

➝ Fumetto is running until April 1, 2012 throughout the city of Luzern. For those of you who can’t make it either because you are too far away or you didn’t get a slot, you can see some of my other Fumetto pictures here.

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all images from the series Double Bind, 2010
courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias Gallery, London

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For his latest project, Double Bind (2010), American artist LEIGH LEDARE arranged a trip to a remote country house where he spent four days photographing his ex-wife, MEGHAN LEDARE, whom he had divorced five years before. Two months later, his ex-wife returned to the same location, this time with her current husband, ADAM FEDDERLY, a photographer. He also documented her for four days.

The result of this doubled process is about thousand images in total, both strangely intimate and strangely similar, sharing a certain erotic ambiguity and encompassing voyeurism: The question becomes how a person is bodied forth into the world by another’s gaze, LEDARE says, how one person gives another permission to be a certain way, to be a certain person for that moment. It’s dealing with this impossibility of the shift in the relationship and the inability to acknowledge certain feelings and potential desires that may still be very present.

Working with photography, archives, film and text, the focus of LEIGH LEDARE’s practice lies in an investigation of how we are formed as subjects, not merely at the level of identity but at the level of our projected desires, motivations and aspirations. His famous photographic essay Pretend You’re Actually Alive (previously published on WFW) already pushed photography to its limit by capturing his unusual relationship with his mother.

And good news: in 2012, a survey of his work is planned at WIELS in Brussels, stay tuned!

Diptych Words and Views I
Words and Views I-II Fragmente einer Sprache der Liebe
Diptychon, Berlin 2012
277 x 140 cm, coloured Ingres paper, pencil, ink on paper

 

 

 

Diptych Words and Views II
Words and Views I-II Fragmente einer Sprache der Liebe
Diptychon, Berlin 2012
277 x 140 cm, coloured Ingres paper, pencil, ink on paper

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detail from Piece For Words and Views I – XXXVI
Installation View 36 drawings, Berlin 2012,
ca 3 m x 24 m

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Piece for Words and Views XXXIII, 2012
colored vellum, ingres paper, pencil and ink on watercolor paper
80 x 180 cm

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Piece for Words and Views XXXVI,
2012 colored vellum, ingres paper, pencil and ink on watercolor paper
80 x 180 cm

all drawings courtesy of the artist

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I mentioned the work of Berlin-based artist JORINDE VOIGT before, and with two shows opening this month, the first at David Nolan Gallery in New York and the second at Lisson Gallery in London, and being one of the three nominees for the 2012 Guerlain Contemporary Art Foundation’s drawing prize, she has manifestly matured into one of the best artist who attempts to measure the invisible in intense algorithmic detail.

Employing concepts and terms from subjects varying from music, to philosophy, to mathematics, her large-scale drawings which incorporate color, form, movement, melody, rhythm, imagination, notation and collage, evoke the atmosphere of a rare moment, depicting the multiplicity inherent in concepts of time, space and speed.

ROLAND BARTHES’ book, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments inspired VOIGT to create a series of 36 collaged drawings entitled, Piece for Words and Views (see above). Each drawing contains collage elements cut to represent words and ideas in Barthes’ book, thus recreating the central tenets of semiotics: signifier and signified. These representations are then linked to elements such as melody, rotation speed, and a new elaboration of the concept of time: the day before yesterday, yesterday, today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow → ∞, repeat/year.

JORINDE VOIGT’s work can be seen at David Nolan Gallery in New York until April 28, 2012  and at Lisson Gallery, London, from March 21 to April 28.

We Are Silently Illiterate
exhibition view at Wien Lukatsch, September – October 2011

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We Are Silently Illiterate
exhibition view at Wien Lukatsch, September – October 2011

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Like a hundred mirrors, I reflect your body, 2011
Papier maché, aluminium wire, laser prints
300 x 285 x 130 cm

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Entropology, 2009

Estas Ruinas que ves (These Ruins you see), 2006
courtesy: Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Messico City

Kaleidoscopic Eye, (exhibition view), 2009
courtesy: courtesy: Kunsthalle St. Gallen, St. Gallen

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Do ut Des, (exhibition view), 2010
courtesy: Koelnischer Kunstverein, Cologne

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Estas Ruinas que ves (These Ruins you see), 2006
courtesy: Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Messico City

Books, sandblasted, dimensions variable

Part of the installation “Between you and the image of you that comes to me”

Il filo e le tracce , 2011
Aluminium and papier maché structure
88 x 87 x 80 cm
Courtesy of the artist

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Mémoire Interlope, 2010
From the collection of stones of Roger Caillois,
held at the museum of Natural History, Paris

all drawings from the book: Mariana Castillo Deball & Roy Wagner , Coyote Anthropology: A Conversation in Words and Drawings published by Hatje Cantz
all images courtesy Wien Lukatsch and the artist (unless stated otherwise)

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MARIANA CASTILLO DEBALL‘s work examines historical fragments, documents, and objects in a new light. She takes on the role of amateur archaeologist as she works with found objects and fragments that she reproduced, damaged or falsified; even though it is clear that her view is not obscured by a reverence for ancient cultures. Rather she analyses the role of objects and the media for their storage as tools of modern cultural production to revitalize the aura of these objects: I’m interested less in the meaning of the artefacts than in the way people treat them, how they are manipulated.

During her research, she looks for institutions that house collections, classifications, catalogues and (re-)presentations of cultural assets, such as libraries, museums and archives, and which represent a symbolic classification of the world. After the process of collecting and selecting information, she creates site-specific installations, objects, photographs, video and audio-works, that reflect upon fictional encounters with objects and places.

MARIANA CASTILLO DEBALL was born in 1975 in Mexico City. Her works were shown in solo shows at the Museum of Latinoamerican Art, Long Beach, Cal. (2010), Kunsthalle St. Gallen (2009), Museum Carrillo Gil, Mexico City (2006), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the Center for contemporary art, Maastricht (both 2004), a. o. She participated in the 54th Biennale di Venezia (2011), ars viva 09/10, Migros Museum, Zurich (2010), group shows at Tate Modern, London (2010), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, ICA, London, de Appel, Amsterdam (2009–10), the Athens Biennial (2009), and Manifesta 7 (2008). She now lives and works in Berlin.

And good news: MARIANA CASTILLO DEBALL will participate at the dOCUMENTA (13) and she will have a solo exhibition this autumn at Zurich’s Haus Konstruktiv for winning the 2012 Zurich Art Prize.

When Dreams Work, 1992
oil on canvas, 228 x 305 cm

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Life Without Thought, 2011
oil on linen, 152.4 x 203.2 cm

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The History of the Boudoir, 1991 
oil on linen, 160 x 213.4 cm

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The Boundary of Luck and Providence, 2011
oil on linen, 191 x 305 cm

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The Consequence of Idealism in an Imperfect World, 2011
oil on linen, 152.4 x 203.2 cm

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The Commerce of Dreams, 2011
oil on linen, 152.4 x 203.2 cm

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Exclusive Expression, 2007
oil on linen, 190.5 x 254 cm

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exhibition view at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris, January- February 2012

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Book cover Jonathan Lasker
published by Cheim & Read (2007)

all images courtesy of the artist

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Last Friday, the exhibition The 80s opened at Galerie Thomas Schulte in Berlin with works by New York artist JONATHAN LASKER.

Born in 1948 in Jersey City, LASKER studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York. He continued his studies at the California Institute of Arts (CalArts) which was during the ‘70s a bastion of young conceptual artists who had a tendency to dismiss painting as a naïve pursuit and a lifeless art.

JONATHAN LASKER, an ardent believer in the vitality of painting as a medium for artistic expression, rebelled against the pervasiveness of conceptual art: It started as a response towards minimalism and the position that painting found itself in at the end of the 70s, which was a situation where on the one hand you had conceptual artists who opposed painting altogether and thought painting was thoroughly dead; and on the other the last really successful body of painters that almost declared they had ended painting. They painted the last possible most reduced painting you can make which would be a minimal painting, the flat surface. So to me as an artist was like how do you reinvest the picture plane with metaphor, maybe narrative or maybe not narrative, to talk about picture making and put it in the way that shows the consciousness of the elements of making a painting, and that’s how I began this body of work.

Through his unique approach to abstract painting, he gives new breath to painting by introducing basic pictorial elements such as lines, colours, and textures.

My work originates with notions of form which then become ideas. Originally, I wanted to engineer a visual object which operated in a manner that I did not know before. Basically I was looking for a visual event which would satisfy my own sense of vision. That’s a formal issue. Once I created that image, then I started inferring what it meant. (…) My interest in composition has actually been three-dimensional. I often think of these biomorphic shapes that are laid down on top of the grounds of my paintings as being picture puzzle elements that I can grab and lift off the canvas and hang on the wall for a second. Just let them sit there on a coat hanger totally separate from what’s happening on the painting ground. And the drawing element is also very separate—those three elements are, conceptually in the third-dimension.

For the past thirty years, JONATHAN LASKER has been committed to producing bold and enigmatic abstract paintings. His current show at Galerie Thomas Schulte in Berlin, summarises his early works of the 1980s by showing some pivotal works from that period. The show is on view until April 21, 2012.

from the exhibition Miss Austen Still Enjoys Photography
at Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf
on view until 9 April 2012
images courtesy of the artist and Kunstverein Dusseldorf

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Ten things you need to know about JOSEPHINE PRYDE:

1. she is an artist who lives between London, and Berlin
2. where she is Professor for Contemporary Photography at the University of the Arts since 2008
3. working mainly through photography, her work also encompasses a great variety of media and incorporates the format of the exhibition itself
4. her pictures are frontal, precise, factual and often close-ups of objects
5. but in excess of their formal structure that allows for comparisons to the methods of documentary, fashion and advertising, they convey something beyond the naked representation of objects
6. being elusive is part of an iconoclastic strategy of resisting and critiquing mainstream culture and society, which makes her work politically subversive
7. her first solo exhibition took place in 1995 at Berlin’s Galerie Neu
8. this year, the exhibition Miss Austen Still Enjoys Photography at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen is her first retrospective – in a museum context – of her photographic and artistic oeuvre over the past two decades
9. this retrospective thus becomes the object of her new work which has been conceived especially for this event
10. Miss Austen Enjoys Photography will be continued towards the middle of 2012 at the Kunsthalle Bern

Muffin, 2010
Stained-glass, 60 x 60 cm

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Fries, 2010
Stained-glass, 60 x 60 cm

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Burger, 2010
Stained-glass, 60 x 60 cm

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I Love Phallocratie, 2009
Stained-glass in a wood lighting box, 160 x 95 x 35 cm

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Mitraillette, 2010
Stained-glass, 120 x 60 cm
all images courtesy MÉLANIE LECOINTE

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In the Middle Ages, the liturgy was narrated through stained glass windows, which took the place of the written word for the illiterate population. Constructed and illuminated like a visual echo of these windows, the stained-glass works by French artist MÉLANIE LECOINTE kick these decorative and propaganda ornaments from the vernacular culture by using contemporary iconography with references to the everyday life, politics or advertising.

Additionally she also uses the ancient practice of stained-glass to create sculptures and installations in their own right. Through these appropriations, she not only questions the meaning of tradition and authenticity but also the aesthetic concepts of kitsch and the modern ideal.

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found via Julie Crenn

Those Crazy Insides by BEN WHEELE
UK, 2008, 7 min 26 sec

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Grew up in Ditchling, a small village near Brighton in the UK, BEN WHEELE is an artist and animator recently graduated from the Royal College of Art, with an MA in Animation.

As his previous work, Those Crazy Insides combine a world of exoticism and disturbing humour with lush experiments in textures and colours: Deep in the recesses of an exotic netherworld, mischievous events take place. Submerged into the depths of imagination itself, a declassification of logic commences – things slip out of their systems and typologies altogether to co-inhabit a new digestible and diaphanous reality. Succulent and bizarre, gentle yet dangerous, ‘Those Crazy Insides’ is a sci-fi nature documentary of what really might be ‘inside’.

And good news: his latest film Decoration (2011) will be released online in full soon. Meanwhile his first solo exhibition called Antiquity Bonk is currently on view at The Sunday Painter gallery, in Peckham (south London) through April 8, 2012. Stay tuned!

FATUMA OSMAN & TOBIAS MADISON
installation view, Sammlung Haubrok, Berlin, 2012

DARKSIDE – Don’t give me the silent treatment, 2012
AAll Nippon Air, 2012

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Gel Galaxy VC Digitalise Africa Now! Dimension variable Beocenter 2
The inescapability of the fact that there is a pricetag attached to our friendship (detail), 2012

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Hospitality, 2012

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Let’s make our bodies explode internationally (2012), AAll Nippon Air (detail),  AAll Nippon Air (2012)

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still from Fatuma Osman, 2012
5 channel digital video projection, sound

all images courtesy Karma International, Zürich & Sammlung Haubrok, Berlin

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For the exhibition at Sammlung Haubrok in Berlin, Swiss artist TOBIAS MADISON has developed with SIMON BURGUNDER, a young fashion designer from Switzerland, a line of clothes and accessories for her sculptural works. The print designs are based on installations and detail views of previous exhibitions and a single bamboo stick that was taken from an invitation for an Issey Miyake fashion show.

Cut-out-left-overs from a recent project by a fashion designer who used drawings of mine to make fabrics based on them taken out of and to a world where surface becomes meaning is people, they are the other side of the framing that keeps them together and from falling apart, the dresses. therefore if what was cut out would be people, these are the not-people. the not-people are being watched or they play in front of by projectors who show them who they really are. themselves. they are being animated in a play with video cameras taped on projectors recorded by video cameras. feedback. As a cinema-director I decided to not make any new work but to animate what is surrounding me: friends, art, people, business, love, a film made for Zurich, everything is self-illuminating, anger, You are all a part of it. - TOBIAS MADISON

And good news: you still have three days to view this exhibition at Sammlung Haubrok in Berlin. Additionally he is having his first Canadian solo show at the gallery Tomorrow in Toronto, on view until 21 March, 2012.

Stay on WFW and read more about TOBIAS MADISON!

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images from contemporary art daily and Karma International

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Monument to Revolution, 2012
study for the 4th Marrakech Biennale

courtesy of the artist

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On the 29th of February of 2012, the Marrakech Biennale launches its fourth edition, HIGHER ATLAS, curated by NADIM SAMMAN and CARSON CHAN, featuring a number of young artists including JON NASH, KARTHIK PANDIAN or ALEKSANDRA DOMANOVIC among others.

Previously featured on WFW, ALEKSANDRA DOMANOVIC needs no introduction. For this Biennale, she has built an abstract geometric fist recovered with tadelakt (a typical Moroccan limestone finishing) emerging from the ground to a height of more than four metres and modelled on an existing monument from ex-Yugoslavia that was built in 1963: It’s an abstract modernist monument from the series state-commissioned constructions that were all monuments against fascism. It symbolises three raised fists, so it’s a good symbole of the revolution and resistance, and that can be combined with what’s happening currently in the Arab world.

Monument to Revolution is currently on view in the Moulay Abdeslam Cyber Park in Marrakech until the 3rd June 2012.

And good news: ALEKSANDRA DOMANOVIC will have a solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Basel from 1st April to 27 May, 2012.

from the series THAT’S NOT ME, 2001-2009
© NURI KOERFER

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That’s Not Me is a photographic essay by Swiss artist NURI KOERFER taken between 2001 and 2009 in Rüschlikon, Geneva, Montauk, Tabo, Ahmadabad and Shanghai.

The series shows NURI on holiday or in her home posing alongside dead animals or part of animals which she found on strolls and promenades and subsequently positioned in front of the camera, like for a souvenir photo. With humor approaching the surreal as well as the melancholic, she imitates the structure and form of the unfortunate creatures, playfully fools around with them, therefore establishing a dialogue with them, which turns the slightly macabre aftertaste of the images into genuine amusement.

This project has been compiled in a book entitlted That’s Not Me published by Kodoji Press in 2010 and available via Printed Matter.

And good news: NURI KOERFER is currently presenting a new body of work – including wooden sculptures and a collage series – at Oslo 10 in Basel, until April 29, 2012.

Untitled 19 (3:00 pm – 8:30 pm, February 4, 2012), 2012
Plexiglas, Tambour, Everlast boxing wraps, string

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Untitled 19 (3:00 pm – 8:30 pm, February 4, 2012), 2012
Plexiglas, Tambour, Everlast boxing wraps, string
Exhibited in “The Ungovernables”, 2012 New Museum Triennial, New York

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JULIA DAULT and her sculpture Untitled 20 (1:00 pm – 5:30 pm, February 5), 2012
photo by DOUGLAS FRIEDMAN

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Untitled 17 (11:00 am – 4:00 pm, January 20, 2011), 2011
(Foreground) Untitled 18 ( 4:00 pm – 9:00 pm, January 20, 2011), 2011
Plexiglas, Formica, Everlast boxing wraps, string
Exhibited in Making is Thinking at Witte de With, Rotterdam, NL (2011)

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Untitled 17 (11:00 am – 4:00 pm, January 20), 2011
Plexiglas, Formica, Everlast boxing wraps, string

all images: courtesy of the artist

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Eight things you need to know about JULIA DAULT:

1. she is a Canadian artist and critic
2. she lives and works in New York,
3. where she teaches regularly at Parsons
4. her body of work comprises sculptures and paintings
5. engaging with tangible material, her practice explore the limitations and the contingencies of gesture, time, and material
6. for her site-specific sculptures, she manipulates unconventional and commercially available materials that she transforms into fat curves and cylinders binded with nothing more than rope or nail
7. additionally the titles of her sculptures include a time stamp of the period of time and the day she made it
8. her work is currently on view in the exhibition The Ungovernables at the New Museum’s Triennal, until April 22, 2012.

Reduction, 2011, 70 x 48 in
torn, folded, bleached chromogenic prints

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Reduction (detail), 2011, 70 x 48 in
torn, folded, bleached chromogenic prints

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Partial Tear, 2011 / Replaced, 2011
Small Zip, 2011
Pinkish, 2011 / Revolt, 2011
After Sound Of Its Own Making, 2011
all images: torn, folded, bleached chromogenic print, dimensions variable

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Diamond Hole, 2011, 20 x 20 in 
torn, folded, bleached chromogenic print

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Ponderings, 2011
Chemically altered chromogenic print, 30 x 40 in

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Vestiges, 2011
Chemically altered chromogenic development print
48″ x 70″

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Snapshot, 2011
Synthetic Polymer Varnish on Bleached Chromogenic Development Print
50.8 x 61 cm

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Lamassu Oblique, 2011
Synthetic Polymer Varnish on Bleached Chromogenic Development Print
76.2 x 50.8 cm

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Paper Fragments (& Fig. 1.12), 2012
Paper fragment (& Fig 2.9), 2012
Paper Fragments (& Fig. 4.17), 2012
all images: book page, Acrylic Glazing, Bleached Chromogenic Print

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Paper cuts, Half hole (happy), 2012
Carved chormogenic print, 88,9 x 114,3 cm 

all images courtesy of the artist

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Through a series of bleaching, cutting, and folding techniques, the work of American artist CURTIS MANN attempts to expand the boundaries of the medium of photography as a way to understand photograph as something impermanent, fallible and extremely malleable.

I was originally a mechanical engineer. At my engineering school in Ohio, we did a lot of testing and manufacturing materials, mostly metals. That was the basis for learning. So when I arrived at photography, my instinct was to deconstruct the material, to take apart and reconfigure it, to understand photographs as physical matter. The process comes very much from trial and error: I was figuring out how to manipulate and remove surfaces through sanding, tearing, burning, and eventually, bleaching. In fact, when I finally tried a little Clorox bleach from under my kitchen sink, I was amazed at how fast it worked. As soon as you splasha little of the chemical on photography paper, the layers of emulsion start to melt away before your eyes. Six years later I’m still using bleach as a destructive and creative tool. – CURTIS MANN in conversation with CARMEN WINANT

By painting on found photographs with a clear varnish and then bleaching away unprotected portions of the image, new and abstract meanings are sought from appropriated snapshots, travel photographs, and artist documentations (Paper Fragments is from a series of images of GORDON MATTA-CLARK himself at work in the studio). As a result, the photograph is physically and contextually altered oscillating between image and object, photography and painting, real and imagined.

And good news: Almine Rech Gallery is currently presenting the first solo exhibition of CURTIS MANN in Paris, on view until 7 April, 2012.

Second good news: CURTIS has a tumblr!

Das Türkise Zustandsgrab, 2010
Ink, watercolour, pencil, pen on textile, ca 420 x 420 x 230 cm. 
Regionale – The Village Cry, Kunsthalle Basel

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detail of Das Türkise Zustandsgrab, 2010

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Aerophone 412.22, 2008
courtesy of the artist and Balice Hertling, Paris

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Die Gruppenhöhle, 2011
Textile, wood, mixed materials, ca 380 x 335 x 270 cm
Fondazione Pastificio Cerere, Roma

Ausdrucksmoment im Blauen Zimmer, 2009-2011
Pastel on paper, textile, metal, mixed material, ca 380 x 330 x 250 cm
Fondazione Pastificio Cerere, Roma

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Instrumente, 2008/2009
Pencil on wood, metal, textile, guitar strings, organic material
ZR Der Exhibitionistische Bartpinguin, 2009
Textile from mattress cover, zipper, 278 x 234 cm. „modernmodern“, Chelsea Art Museum, New York

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Schrank und dessen Leben,
exhibition invitation at Balice Hertling, Paris (2012)

ZR Autswaus O, 2008
Textile, zipper, pastel on paper, plant, ca 270 x 250 cm

ZR Silberesel, 2010
Textile, zipper, ca 600 x 600 cm
“Fruits, Flowers, and Clouds 2011″ MAK, Vienna

ZR Der Exhibitionistische Bartpinguin, 2009
Stoff, 310 x 200 cm

ZR Blechschubladen, 2009-2011
Ink on textile, wood, tincan, plexi, Raku-ceramic, material, variable dimensions
„Tableaux“ Le Magasin, Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Grenoble 2011

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ZR Garten des Erschöpften, 2011
Textile, zipper, variable dimensions
Installation in the garden of Istituto Svizzero di Roma, Rome

all images courtesy of the artist

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Ten things you need to know about RETO PULFER:

1. He was born in Bern, Switzerland in 1981
2. He now lives and works in Berlin
3. His body of work is a mix of sculpture, performance, installation and sound
4. Before taking on a specific form, his installations originate from stories that have been invented where the characters’ roles are defined by the language or by simple image associations and can, as a game of structures, change exactly as it happens with moods
5. Flexibility is inherent to his choice of materials – paper, fabrics, textiles equipped with zippers, among others – while fluidity is evoked by recurring aquatic colours like blue and turquoise
6. He speaks about his own work in terms of a game, which is reflected in his use of materials, the system in which some elements reappear and change, the made-up words and puns in the titles of his works: Quite some titles of works give technical information: if a work has ZR in its title it means it is made with zippers and parts of it can be detached and attached in several ways. Such as the following mostly textile works: ZR Boot, ZR Der Exhibitionistische Eulenpinguin, ZR Autswaus O, ZR Potzwaus, ZR Innenzelt, ZR Der Exhibitionistische Bartpinguin, ZR Fliegzeug, ZR Spotwaus
7. In 2011, he was artist in residence at Swiss Institute in Rome
8. Der Themenkatalog is his first monographic catalogue published in 2010 by Archive Books
9. His solo exhibitions include  “Die Kammern des Zustands”, Fondazione Pastificio Cerere, Rome (2011), “Die Vertretung des Erschöpfen”, Istituto Svizzero di Milano, Milan (2011). His group exhibitions include “Wunder”, Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2011), “Tableaux”, CNAC Le Magasin, Grenoble (2011), “Animism”, Kunsthalle Bern, Extra City Kunsthal and M HKA Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerpen (2010), “The Object of the Attack”, David Roberts Art Foundation, London (2009), “modernmodern”, Chelsea Art Museum, New York (2009)
10. The parisian gallery, Balice Hertling will present RETO PULFER at the upcoming edition of Art Basel Statements in June 2012

from The Larry Project
Mirrored Staircase Inversion (San Bernadino)
installation view, 2011
Image courtesy of the artist

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KAARI UPSON‘s The Larry Project, is a multi-disciplinary investigation into the life of a man she has never met. It all started in 2003, when UPSON returned to her childhood neighborhood in San Bernardino, California, to check on her parents’ house as wildfires were raging through the area. She ended up going into the semi-abandoned McMansion across the street. Inside she photographed nearly every corner of the house and discovered a number of boxes of personal items left behind by the owner, LARRY (his name is not LARRY but for legal reasons, she’s not allowed to reveal his true identity, nor his previous addresses, his current whereabouts , his age, nor any of the other intimate biographical details).

These documents became the backbone of a project where identities were created, swapped, interfused, and finally exorcised: When I was trying to kind of hijack his life and put it together, I was researching how you could assess who somebody is. LARRY has become more fiction than fact, and UPSON’s relentless investigation of the minutia of his life offers extraordinary insight into the mind of the artist herself.

For the final stage of her Larry project (see above), she returned to the site of LARRY’s former home and dug into the ground replicas of the twin staircases that had once led from the entrance hall to his bedroom. She then poured in gallons of pink latex, and dragged the resultant skin back to her studio, where it now rests, sagging on wooden armatures, awaiting an uncertain future.

KAARI UPSON earned her BFA (2004) and MFA (2007) from California Institute of Arts, in Valencia, CA. She lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

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source: JONATHAN GRIFFIN

Speedway
all images © MARTINA HOOGLAND IVANOW

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Speedway is one of the first series by Swedish photographer MARTINA HOOGLAND IVANOW which took her through Germany, Finland, Mongolia, Siberia and Sweden. The result is a series of approximatively two hundred images all focused on the highly precarious sport of speedway racing and the people that turn out to watch them.

As her recent series, each of her images are imbued in a dark mesmerizing aesthetic which conveys in her images a heightened presence as real as it is poetic: I’m not aware of constructing a technique, lighting a selection of subject are choices that every photographer makes, that combined to make a personal statement. If I choose a very soft lighting, it is to capture something that’s very hard to take in.

And good news (to be confirmed!): the series Speedway is going to be published. Meanwhile her first book Far Too Close has been released last year by SteidlMACK.

all images © GABRIEL MAURON, PASCAL GRECO

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Ratrak
published by Verlhac Editions (2012)
52 pages, 20 pictures, 42 x 27 cm
333 copies, limited edition, manually numbered
ISBN : 978-2-916954-66-0

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GABRIEL MAURON and PASCAL GRECO explored Swiss alpine sceneries at night between 2009 and 2010 to capture fascinating large-scale photographs shrouded in darkness and seemingly inhabited. Images where the landscape and the machine become the protagonists.

By means of the ratrak and its headlights, this project questions the representation of our familiar winter sport environments with a central interest in the manipulation of light which is skillfully used to frame and isolate their subjects. Even if the ratrak is not in the picture, the machine stays present in order to show the elements of the landscape and their context. With his precise framing, light not only illuminates objects in front of the camera and makes them visible to the viewer – it becomes an agent of its own right, pushing the narrative forward.

The result is a series of fourty large-scale photographs whose twenty have been compiled in a book published by Verlhac Editions with a run limited to 333 hand numbered copies. Additionally Ratrak has been exhibited at Krisal Galerie in Geneva earlier this year and will be on view at Abstract Galerie in Lausanne from 19 April to 19 May, 2012.

Make sure to visit http://ratrak333.blogspot.com/ for more informations about the book and the series

Sunburn in Naples, 2010
© BREA SOUDERS

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American photographer BREA SOUDERS has just been shortlisted for the 27th edition of Hyères International Fashion & Photography Festival. If you are not familiar with BREA SOUDERS, she is a NYC-based photographer, who already has a few interesting series under her belt.

Sunburn in Naples is one of the images created during BREA’s residencies in Europe where she continued a personal project based on the experience of living as a foreigner in a place where she has ancestry. Such as her Sunburn in Naples, her portfolio has a certain sense of mystery and time passing, see more of her work here.

Die Bühne (The Stage), 1999
oil on canvas, 240 x 400 cm
Courtesy Centre PasquArt, Bienne

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Jakobs Traum I (Jacob’s Dream I), 1997
oil on canvas and audio tape , 200 x 300 cm
Courtesy Centraal Museum, Utrecht

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from top:
Zornige Sackträger, 2010, oil on canvas, 200 x 300 cm
Sauve Qui Peut, 2010, oil on canvas, 100 x 140 cm
Künstler, 1995, oil on canvas, 60 x 40 cm
Untitled (7.10.09), 2009, watercolour on paper, 40.9 x 30.8 cm
Zorniger Sackträger (4.09.09), 2009, watercolour on paper, 40.9 x 30.8 cm
Zorniger Sackträger (4.09.09), 2009, watercolour on paper, 40.9 x 30.8 cm

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Zum Schlaf/ Joseph, 1993
oil on canvas, 120 x 150 cm

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Entrée, 1995
watercolor on paper, 146 x 194 cm
Courtesy Ausgleichsbank Bonn

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Tambour, 2010, oil on canvas, 100 x 150 cm
Tambour (Nov. 2009), 2009, watercolor on paper, 86.5 x 109.3 cm

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Fond 2009, 2009, watercolor on paper, 79 x 110 cm
Party (17.08.09), 2009, watercolour on paper, 46 x 60.8 cm
Untitled (28.07.09), 2009, watercolour on paper, 46 x 60.8 cm
Atelierbesuch (5.11.09), 2009, watercolour on paper, 77.2 x 106.7 cm
Untitled (28.07.09), 2009, watercolour on paper, 46 x 60.8 cm
Orgie (1.08.09), 2009, watercolour on paper, 30.8 x 40.9 cm

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Antonia, 2002
oil on canvas, 200 x 250 cm
Courtesy THOMAS HUBER

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Since his very first exhibition in 1982 at the Künstakademie of Düsseldorf, Swiss artist THOMAS HUBER has created an amazing body of work which confronts observers with existential questions on art, its reception and its perception. HUBER’s pictures are striking for their large dimensions and range of colors and shapes where the radical figures, the utopian landscapes and the monumental architectures cohabit in two dimensions.

HUBER‘s art is also deeply bound up with writing and language, and the artist conveys the origins of a piece via speech. As both the architect of his paintings and a film director-illusionist, he offers a total art that goes beyond painting and verges on installation. His texts and speeches combine fictional stories, autobiographical episodes, waking dreams, philosophical considerations, reflections on the role of art and the artist in the world today, funny anecdotes and ironic remarks, and through them he transmits a kind of “user’s manual,” seeking to improve painters’ artistic know-how and viewer’s reading know-how.

THOMAS HUBER‘s retrospective at Mamco, Geneva is currently the most fascinating exhibition in Switzerland. Organized chronologically, the exhibition You are here comprises just under three hundred paintings. Distributed over forty exhibition rooms on four levels of the museum, the works are presented as the artist had designed and created them to be shown, accompanied by their corpus of sketches, plans, models, texts or speechs.

The images above don’t do these wonderful works justice. Come see them in person: You are here is on view at Mamco in Geneva until 6 May, 2012!

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The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter) #1: The Birth of the New Year, 1994
The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter) #2: Fecundity, 1994
The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter) #4: The Dawning of Sexuality, 1994
all: acrylic on wood panel, 62.5 x 40 in.

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The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter) #3: What’s Limp in 3D is Erect in 2D, 1994, acrylic on wood panel, 62.5 x 40 in.

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Study for the Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on The Winter), 1994
collage on paper, 10.5 x 14 in.

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The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter) #5: Summer’s Rage, 1994
The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter) #6: Fall, 1994
The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter) #7: The Descent, 1994
all: acrylic on wood panel, 62.5 x 40 in.

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The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter) #10: The Decay of Year-End, 1994
acrylic on wood panel, 62.5 x 40 in.

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The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter) #9: Snow on the Temples, 1994
The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter) #11: The Giving Old Man, 1994
The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter) #12: Death, 1994
all: acrylic on wood panel, 62.5 x 40 in.

all images: Courtesy of MIKE KELLEY, and  Jablonka Galerie, Cologne

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I decided to go back to my originating trauma- my student training- and I took all these drawings, which are perversions of Hoffmanesque compositional principles that I did in college, and I re-learned to paint that way. In trauma literature the part you can’t remember or the time of trauma is called ‘missing time,’ and then you recover it. So I re-learned to paint in this manner and did a series called the ‘Thirteen Seasons’ in this regressive manner. – by the late MIKE KELLEY

The Thirteen Seasons (Heavy on the Winter) is a series of paintings on wooden panels done in the mid-1990s which go back over MIKE KELLEY‘s youthful paintings. His student pieces created under the tuition of HANS HOFMANN (as both painter and teacher, HOFMANN had an enormous influence on the Abstract Expressionists and the following generation—the two generations that produced MIKE KELLEY‘s teachers at the University of Michigan) were reworked using the latter’s push-pull method of creativity allied to KELLEY‘s stated belief of his own childhood abuse – which he infers is similar to the painterly abuse he received from HOFMANN.

My own abuse was my training in HANS HOFMANN‘s push-pull theory. All the formal qualities in the organization of these works are patterned on that kind of formalist visual-art training which I see as a kind of visual indoctrination. These paintings are done in the manner of my student works. Hoffmanesque push-pull theory is also the base organizational principle of the buildings in ‘Educational Complex’ and even the sculptures that attend them. Everything else is a kind of social gloss added on top of that, taken from various cultural categories.

MOCA Grand Avenue in Los Angeles has mounted a just-opened exhibition, up through April 2, devoted to MIKE KELLEY whose recent death shaked the art world. Additionally, a major retrospective exhibition is being planned for the reopening of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, later this year, which will travel to the MOCA in 2014.

Untitled (Visco 2000), 2011
Inkjetprint, Polyurethan
167 x 122 cm

Image courtesy of Galerie Mezzanin, Vienna

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German artist LUCIE STAHL creates high-definition scans of everyday objects negotiating the passage from junky oddities into significant oddments.

STAHL arranges various found objects, ranging from magazine advertisements to scraps of wood and high-heeled shoes, powdery substances, liquids and short texts found or written by the artist and typed on white paper. These objects are placed on a scanner where they are captured two-dimensionally and then blown up to large-scale inkjet prints, which she covers with a thick coat of polyurethane and fixes to the gallery walls – unframed, like posters – in groups of four or more. – by BETTINA BRUNNER

LUCIE STAHL (1977) lives and works in Vienna. Since 2008 she runs the exhibition space Pro Choice with WILL BENEDICT. Recent solo exhibitions include Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna (2011), Kölnischer Kunstverein with BĚLA KOLÁŘOVÁ (2011) and Kunstverein Nürnberg (2009) and the group exhibitions Flaca, curated by TOM HUMPHREYS, Portikus, Frankfurt am Main (2011), Schrippenkönig mit p?, curated by THOMAS BAYRLE, Galerie Mezzanin, Vienna (2011), An Image, Kaleidoscope Project Space, Milan (2011). Additionally she was the recipient of the BC21 Art Award in 2011.

And good news: she will present her work in 2012 at Dependance, Brussels and at Gio Marconi, Milan. Till then you can pick her book Plakate Posters released last year by bom dia boa tarde boa noite.

STERLING RUBY, Soft Work
at Centre d’Art Contemporains, Geneva
from 24 February – 22 April 2012
all images © WFW

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For his first solo exhibition in Switzerland – that opened a few days ago at the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva,  Los Angeles based artist STERLING RUBY (1972) toys freely with a series of large-scale installations of soft sculptural works designed especially for this exhibition.

RUBY makes art of myriad forms which includes ceramic vessels, enormously phallic polyurethane stalagmites, minimalist cubes “defaced” by graffiti, photographs painted with red nail polish or video works. Alternately raw and elegant, degraded and ballsy, his works depict a fascination with the repressive overtones of minimalism, architecture and the history of abstraction.

Coming from an artist known for working in an excess of media, STERLING RUBY‘s current exhibition in Geneva is surprisingly single-minded. In fact, the exhibition focuses on a significant part of his body of work that has not received specific attention until now. Pillows, blankets and quilts are transformed from objects of comfort into sculptural objects that hint at the possibility that safety and security are an illusion. He also used his soft sculptural material to transform threatening or aggressive subject matter into playfully pop-like form. However, just as his previous exhibitions, it is all about overwhelming the viewer with objects, color and surfaces.

RUBY’s vocabulary is constantly mutating and expressing danger, as in the animal kingdom where the evolutionary expression of bright colors distinguish a poisonous creature. Similarly, in a manmade environment florescent colors are used to warn or avert, to caution or police, to highlight or even to castigate, as with the choice of a florescent orange uniform for a prisoner. Color is sometimes easy to overlook, yet considering his formal choices RUBY proves to be a well-versed student of that artistic tradition. – by STEVEN PULIMOOD for 032c #20

Soft Sculpture is currently on view at Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva until 22 April 2012

Archizines exhibition at SpazioFMGperl’Architettura, Milano
on view until 23 February, 2012
all images © WFW

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ARCHIZINES is a touring exhibition and ongoing research project which celebrate and promote the alternative and independent architectural publishing from around the world. Spanning photocopied pamphlets to print-on-demand newsletters, as well as beautiful magazines, the exhibition enables to discover and to read each magazine in situ, while video interviews with their creators are also there to help guide the visitor through each publication’s world and concept.

From 27 January to 23 February, the exhibition travels to SpazioFMGperl’Architettura in Milan, showcasing 60 titles from 20 different countries.

At the finissage tomorrow on 23rd February at 19:30, SpazioFMGperl’Architettura and Domus are hosting Archizines Live –  a lecture to explore the changing nature of architecture publishing in the digital age with ELIAS REDSTONE (curator of Archizines), LUCA MOLINARI (critic and curator SpazioFMGperl’Architetura) and JOSEPH GRIMA (director of Domus magazine), along with other Italian and foreign guests, at 121 + LIBRARY EXTEMPORANEA, Via Savona 17/5.

For those of you who can’t make it either because you are too far away or you didn’t get a slot, an accompanying catalogue has been published by Bedford Press!

SensualObjects by CHRIS TIMMS

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SensualObjects is an abstract animation by CHRIS TIMMS that examines contemporary art by use of purely artificial imagery. SensualObjects is made of synthetic geographical forms, where relations and changes of shapes, patterns, colors, geometries and motions become the narrative and the protagonists!

SensualObjects is also a tumblr filled with soft colors, glossy, organic gifs!

CHRIS TIMMS (b.1984) studied at the National College of Art and Design and the AKI University, Netherlands. He is a founding member of the Good Hatchery in Offaly, he undertook M.O.O.N., a public project hosted by The Black Mariah, C.I.T Crawford, and the Cork Artists Collective during a residency in The Guesthouse, Cork. More recently he has featured his work at  Super Art Modern Museum (SPAMM), a virtual museum that opened its door a few months ago.

The Sequel, 2011
Bronze, Courtesy of Laura Bartlett Gallery, London

exhibition view at Kunsthalle Mulhouse, February 2012
photo © WFW

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The objects created by Danish artist MARIE LUND are conceived like processes or evolutive forms which frame a number of temporal and material concerns. These sculptures, whose surfaces have been systematically reworked, altering their initial shapes to the point of a certain abstraction, looks at the permanence and transformation of objects; the way materials are modified by human or how they are weathered by time.

‘The Sequel’ (see above) is a bronze cast of mould of a previous sculpture by the artist, a figure of a bird carved into. Here, bronze, the most weighty and eternal of materials, depicts a shell with its core missing, a bird that has flown. ‘The Sequel’ has captured nothing but the silhouette; it is a sculpture of an absent sculpture.

Additionally MARIE LUND and NINA BEIER have been producing work collaboratively since 2004 while also pursuing their own individual practices. Together they use a range of media including photography, video, performance and sculpture.

And good news: MARIE LUND‘s work is currently part of the exhibition ‘L’Entre-Deux: Des Savoirs Bouleversés‘ at Kunsthalle Mulhouse until 29 April, 2012

LA Look, January 2010
Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA, US

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LA Look, December 2009
South La Cienega Blvd, Inglewood, CA, US

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LA Look, March 2010
Santa Ana Fwy, Route 101, Downtown Los Angeles, CA, US

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LA Look, February 2010
Mildred E.Mathias Botanical Garden, UCLA, Westwood, CA, US

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LA Look, February 2010
Mildred E.Mathias Botanical Garden, UCLA, Westwood, CA, US

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LA Look, March 2010
Los Angeles River, Glendale, CA, US

all images © NICCOLÒ MORGAN GANDOLFI

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Born in Washington, DC in 1983,  NICCOLÒ MORGAN GANDOLFI studied visual art in Milan and Venice. After having completed his doctorate with a photographic project titled Aesthetics of Survival in 2009, he spent one year in Los Angeles City, where he portrayed a kind of spontaneous nature that fragments the city’s rigid structure. The result is a series of images that have to reckon with the essence and mythology of the city, with an architecture made up of empty spaces and with fiction.

These images have to deal with the city’s multiple dimensions, keeping in mind that there are always two ways to photograph Los Angeles: one way, and it’s opposite. – ALESSANDRA PRANDIN

NICCOLÒ MORGAN GANDOLFI lives and works between Bologna and Los Angeles.

(Untitled), 2012

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(Untitled) detail, 2012
courtesy of THOMAS KOENIG

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Swiss artist THOMAS KOENIG weaves sculptural installations developped from an intuitive process of playing with anything that catches his eye and triggers a sculptural response; having the right shape, color or volume. As a result, his working materials and subject matter are to be found everywhere; his aim is to divert materials from their prescribed functions, inventing ways of making these things improper again and thus, inhabiting a new reality.

THOMAS mainly works with sculpture although he also realizes performances, drawings and paintings, which are often incorporated in his installations.

And good news: THOMAS KOENIG is currently having a new solo exhibition entitled NEVER TRUST A MAN WITH NO CELLPHONE at Aad Galerie, Geneva until February 25, 2012. Stay tuned!

from the series Replaying the mistake of a broken hammer, 2011
polish steel rod subjected to an interrupted process of tempering, 6 cm x 130 cm
installation view at Liste Basel, 2011

Beginning with the first thing that comes to mind, 2011
photograms on photographic color paper using the gently burning spores of the mossplant Lycopdium
installation view at Fluxia Milano, 2011

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from the series Lycopodiumprints, 2011
photograms on photographic color paper using the gently burning spores of the mossplant Lycopdium

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from the series Lycopodiumprints, 2011
photograms on photographic color paper using the gently burning spores of the mossplant Lycopdium

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from the series Lycopodiumprints, 2011
photograms on photographic color paper using the gently burning spores of the mossplant Lycopdium

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Launching Rocket Never Gets Old, 2012
installation view at Camden Arts Centre

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Launching Rocket Never Gets Old, 2012
installation view at Camden Arts Centre

all images courtesy RAPHAEL HEFTI

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The relationship of object to image is not my point of departure. I’m interested more broadly in the properties of materials. Museum glass originally is designed as an invisible object, almost a non-object that you aren’t supposed to notice. By adding several layers of this ant-reflective coating the original malfunction of the material is reversed. The coating breaks the light, which then appears as colour, depending on the ambient light. Some of them are transparent, some of them are very opaque. What does one see when the work is in front of the window? I’m exploring how the works are interacting with the qualities of the space they’re in. – RAPHAEL HEFTI in conversation with PHYLLIDA BARLOW, December 2011

Swiss artist RAPHAEL HEFTI has been using photography as a starting point to explore his wider curiosity about the history of materials and sites of scientific discovery. His practice implicates a kind of alchemy, whether he be forming steel poles as fragile as glass, growing mushrooms in the dark room or illuminating entire mountainsides. Coming from a technical background with a keen interest in how things are made and what things can do, HEFTI sets-up scientific experiments which challenge industrial fabricators and ultimately divert objects from their original state.

HEFTI completed his MA at the Slade School of Fine Art in 2011 and his recent solo exhibitions include 327 Different Sounds at Coalmine Galerie, Winterthur, Switzerland and Beginning with the first thing that comes to mind at Fluxia, Milan (both 2010).

And good news: HEFTI‘s new solo exhibition entitled Launching Rockets Never Gets Old is currently on view at Camden Arts Centre in London through March 18th, 2012.

detail of a prototype by RONAN & ERWAN BOUROULLEC
from the exhibition Album at Vitra Design Museum Gallery, Weil Am Rhein (Germany)
photo © WFW

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Album, the first solo exhibtion devoted to the work of RONAN and ERWAN BOUROULLEC stopped at Vitra Design Museum last week. The exhibition (which will run until June 3rd 2012) presents a panorama of their activity through a trove of inspirational and preparatory drawings, sketches, and prototypes.

Album, which first made its debut at l’Arc En Rêve Centre d’Architecture in Bordeaux in 2011, highlights a part of design that most people are never faced with – the laborious and sometimes tedious creative process, full of doubts and crumpled up paper.

➝ RONAN and ERWAN BOUROULLEC – Album at the Vitra Design Museum Gallery, Weil am Rhein, Germany, until June 3rd 2012

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all images © NICOLAS PARTY

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With painting as his main activity, NICOLAS PARTY works with the theme of very simple, everyday objects that magically come to life onto different surfaces – paper, canvas, walls and objects. Hailed as painter, illustrator, and graffiti artist, the praxis of Swiss artist NICOLAS PARTY is an earnest investigation into painting techniques and art historical sources.

These objects tend to lose all the connotations of meaning, displaying themselves in a surprising way, revealing their specific, mysterious nature as objects: immobile, defined by precise forms, volumes and colors that enter into relationships with other objects and their limitless background pattern.

PARTY’s solo exhibitions include, ’Still Life, Gold and Peeling Paint‘, Remap 3, Athens, 2011; ’Charlotte‘ (in collaboration with STEPHANE DEVIDAL), Doll, Lausanne, 2011; ‘Elephants at the Woodmill‘, The Woodmill, London, 2011; ‘Elephants, spoons and sausage rolls’, Le Rez de Chaussee, Glasgow, 2010; and ‘New Work Scotland’ Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, 2010. Also in 2010 he collaborated with JOANNE TATHAM and TOM O’SULLIVAN on the screen-printed publication, ‘DUST’. Born in Switzerland in 1980, he now lives and works in Glasgow.

And good news: NICOLAS PARTY will have a solo exhibition at Gregor Staiger Galerie in Zürich this spring (14 April – 26 May 2012). Additionally his first monograph has been released last year by The Modern Institute.

Nos Années Sauvages, 2009

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We are coming through in waves, 2009

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Do not gentle into that good night, 2009

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Epilation porcine au service de l’art, 2008

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It is actually a matter of posology, 2009

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Tell Barbara that it is gold, 2009

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Don’t play with art, it’s food, 2008

all drawings © KIM SEOB BONINSEGNI

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KIM SEOB BONINSEGNI (born in Seoul in 1974) has engaged, in the past decade, in a complex practice that does not distinguish between art production, curating, writing, and publishing. Additionally he uses a wide range of mediums to crystallize a network of objects, shapes, and images in which he connects the language, the power of the market, the consumption with his personal history.

I like to focus on his ink-on-paper comic-like drawings, a sophisticated mash-up of global pop-culture with disturbing, ironic and ambiguous captions:

Kim is not opposing the system in general through heavy attacks with raw sounds or obscene imagery. It is not an opposition against the political or cultural or social establishment. (..) It is an opposition against the meaningless of new visuals, even if they are successfully sold out. – by WOLF GÜNTER THIEL

KIM SEOB BONINSEGNI is represented by Guy Bärtschi Gallery in Geneva and KARMA International in Zurich.

He lives and works in Geneva, Switzerland.

all images © ARI MARCOPOULOS
All the artworks in this story were presented in a show entitled DJED at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery (September- October 2011)

Right now there is a thrill of getting right into the creative bowels of a studio; a voyeuristic insight that will lead you to places gravitating towards the world of raw, un-styled visual story-telling (a far cry from the polish of conventional editorial shoots). So, thanks to ARI MARCOPOULOS, the Amsterdam-born photographer took pictures of his atelier visit of the iconic artist MATTHEW BARNEY in his studio in Long Island City (New York) a year ago. At the time, BARNEY was preparing his exhibition entitled DJED at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery, a show based on myths from ancient Egypt:

Matthew Barney’s studio is located along the East River, in an industrial part of Long Island City. He and his assistants dug a hole in the floor of his studio, jackhammering the concrete. Matthew wanted to build an Egyptian death chamber below his studio in order to film in it. But while they were digging, it became clear that the water table was too high, making it impossible to create an underground space. In addition to the water, there was oil and a terrible smell. It seemed wiser to close the hole.

The flooding in the photograph occurred during Hurricane Irene. Together with the artist Keith Edmier, I’d spent the night at Matthew’s place, where we waited for the storm to pass. The storm didn’t live up to the hype on the news. The next morning, though, we went to check the studio and saw that it was flooded, which was slightly traumatic. He lost a few things, but not many. We canoed around in the studio, surveying the situation. - by ARI MARCOPOULOS

Make sure to catch the entire series published in the last issue of Purple Magazine !

Sketches for Overpopulation—Clothes, 2000
From a series of 30 drawings, pencil and watercolour on paper, 40.5 × 30 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel, Kupferstichkabinett, 2003

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Seven things you need to know about RÓZA EL-HASSAN:

1. born in Budapest, of Hungarian and Syrian Origin,
2. she has been since the mid-1990s, one of Hungary’s most prominent contemporary artists
3. her work includes drawings, sculptures, objects, installations, performances and videos as well as curatorial and social projects
4. in 1993, she was invited to participate in the Aperto section at the Venice Biennale, where she designed the Hungarian pavilion in 1997
5. her work reflects an ongoing quest for her own identity as well as the scene of a critical engagement of fundamental questions about artistic autonomy, political relevance, and aesthetic aspirations
6. after a retrospective of her work at Műcsarnok Kunsthalle (Budapest) in 2006
7. the Kupferstichkabinett (Department of Prints and Drawings) of the Kunstmuseum Basel presents a first survey of her graphic work entitled In Between Drawings and Objects, on view from 11 February to 20 May, 2012

Regiopark – Studiolo Furniture, LORENZO BERNET and YANNIC JORAY
exhibition views at Kunsthalle Palazzo, Liestal (Switzerland)
on view until 18 March, 2012
all images © WFW

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Regiopark – Studiolo Furniture is the first institutional solo show by Swiss artists LORENZO BERNET and YANNIC JORAY. Together they have created a series of furniture for the alternative space STUDIOLO. Opened last year in the Zürich suburbs at the former atelier of sculptor MARIANNE OLSON, STUDIOLO aims to confront artistic production with it‘s reception.

Featuring works blurring the line between sculpture, installation and design, their collaboration questions the singularity of the unique art object, and what individual creativity, ways of exchange and conveyance can make possible. Exploiting the possibilities but also conditions of design and production, BERNET and JORAY have created a series of elements that can be used to adapt the space to the events Studiolo will host, while all contributing to the creation of one large installation which is currently on view at the Kunsthalle Palazzo.

Regiopark – Studiolo Furniture is currently on view at Kunsthalle Palazzo, Liestal (Switzerland) until 18 March 2012, then the furniture will be used at Studiolo, Zürich.

The Catch, 2011
Acrylic, plastic net on canvas 130 x 90 cm

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The Catch, 2011
Acrylic, plastic net on canvas 140 x 100 cm

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The Catch, 2011
Acrylic, plastic net on canvas 160 x 115 cm

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The Catch, 2011
Acrylic, plastic net on canvas, 140 x 100 cm

all images courtesy the artist, and Laura Bartlett Gallery, London
from the exhibition Rest On Your Belly In The Mud, April-May 2011

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SIMON DYBBROE MØLLER works in a wild array of media including installation, collage, sculpture and video. His works are linked and questioned by means of diverse references to art, design, architecture, literature and music. He is interested in the failures and peripheries of recent art history and he combines individual fragments in order to construct new references or to underscore forgotten protagonists and byways.

SIMON DYBBROE MØLLER (born 1976 in Aarhus, Danemark) lives and works in Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include Hello at Fondazione Giuliani, Rome (2011), O at Francesca Minini, Milan (2011), The Nightmare of Reason at C1, Kunsthalle Göppingen (2011), Rest On Your Belly In The Mud at Laura Bartlett Gallery, London (2011) and Flotsam and Jetsam at Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe (2011).

Ryan, Tucson, AZ
photo by JIM GOLDBERG

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Last year, Magnum photographer JIM GOLDBERG took part in a road trip throughout the American southwest along with five fellow Magnum photographers. From May 12 to May 26 2011, PAOLO PELLEGRIN, SUSAN MEISELAS, ALEC SOTH, MIKHAEL SUBOTZKY, JIM GOLDBERG and GINGER STRAND went from San Antonio (Texas) to Oakland, in California for a project entitled Postcards From America.

1750 miles.

By means of photographs, notes and collected objects, they documented their experience including solo investigations of topics such as gun culture or sex trafficking and improvised collaborations between the photographers. This experimental project is presented in a numbered box that includes a book, a selection of bumper stickers, a newspaper, two fold-outs, three cards, a poster and five zines (available here).

The second Postcards From America project is scheduled to begin this April in Rochester, New York. Stay tuned!

Week, 2012 (by CEVDET EREK)
mono sound, 3 min, sound system, 1 folded horn, 2×3-way loudspeaker, 30 band graphic equalizer, amplifiers, crossover, white molton, aluminium, truss system, wood. exhibition view at Kunsthalle Basel, 13 January to 4 March, 2012
photo © WFW

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HANNAH WEINBERGER, Grand Opening Soundtrack, 5 min.

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When You Leave, Walk Out Backwards, So I’ll Think You’re Walking In, 2012 (by HANNAH WEINBERGER), exhibition view at Kunsthalle Basel

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Poster When You Leave, Walk Out Backwards, So I’ll Think You’re Walking In
photo © WFW

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Right now, the Kunsthalle Basel is showing two solo shows - When You Leave, Walk Out Backwards, So I’ll Think You’re Walking In by HANNAH WEINBERGER and Week by CEVDET EREK - which deal with ephemeral formats such as live sound and performance. Both are immersive experiences where music and sound fill the exhibition space and their visual impact derives solely from the arrangement of loudspeakers while curtains installed alongside the walls assure the absorption of echoes.

One of the artist presented is CEVDET EREK (see above), a Turkish artist who studied architecture at Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts in Istanbul and who has also been involved since early on in Istanbul’s music scene.

His installation, entitled Week (2012), features a totemic column of a sound-systemis located in the centre of the space. The beat (samples of acoustical drum sound) is stripped bare and functions as a diagram; rather than aural seduction taking control over the visitor’s body and soul, it is used as a simple, almost graphical representation, the minimum of sound. The sound of the piece is composed as an aural “grid” made of seven beats based on the unnatural and human-made division of the week, and its inner units – seven days. These seven days are played in several different versions combined in one loop, in EREK’s Week. Make sure to watch an excerpt here!

Swiss artist HANNAH WEINBERGER has produced twenty-two hours of sound for the installation. Eleven loops are played on the eleven channels the artist installed in the galleries and, given their varying lengths the result is a spatial layout of sound, constantly shifting through the exhibition spaces. The Grand Opening Soundtrack (above) devised as an invitation to the opening offers a foretaste of the various loops in the show.

When You Leave, Walk Out Backwards, So I’ll Think You’re Walking In by HANNAH WEINBERGER is on view until March 18th, 2012 while Week by CEVDET EREK finishes on Sunday March 4th, 2012. This is not to be missed!

from the series Holden, 2011

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from the series Les Battements, 2011

from the series Holden, 2011

from the series Les Battements, 2011

from the series Les Battements, 2011

Spiner, 2009
steel, wire, cloth, plaster, wood glue, filler, paint, glitter

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NOW I DO CHARITY, HUMANOSOROUS, BAUMARKT BIBLE SONGS OF PRAISE

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Grand Stands, exhibition view, Die kleine Improvisation
at POLNISCHE KUNST HEUTE, Stadsgalerie Kiel, June 2010

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Tuberous Hubris,2010, from the series GRAND STANDS
steel, clay, gloss paint, plaster, 184 x 140 x 49cm

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Too Heavy for a Joke, 2011,  oak, brass, steel, 20 x 20 x 188 cm
That’s how they’re harvested, 2009, steel, rigid foam, resin, filler, MDF
That’s how it’s delivered, 2009, wood, steel, rigid foam, resin, filler, matt paint

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—–exhibition view at Zak Branica Gallery (Berlin), Gleaning the Gloss, 2009

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THIS IS MY SONG, DON’T SING ALONG

all images courtesy the artist, and their respective gallery

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Subtly and with ease, KASIA FUDAKOWSKI creates objects, sculptures and installations which are like characters transforming the gallery into a great forest of delicious and sinuous forms that while invoking surrealist associations, at the same time recall abstractly figurative forms in the midst of identifiable gesture.

KASIA FUDAKOWSKI (1985) studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford University, England. She presented her first solo show at Zak Branicka, Berlin in 2009. Last year, she participated in “Villa Tokyo”, with Chert gallery and “Comedy Club, Säule für Arfika”, curated by MICHA BONK, in Curvystrasse, Berlin. KASIA FUDAKOWSKI lives and works in Berlin.

I really suggest you to pay a visit to KASIA‘s tumblr
http://scattercushion.tumblr.com/ where each scultpure, when clicked, has a corresponding video link. Surprising!

sketch by REE MORTON, 1974
from the book The Mating Habits o f Lines,
Sketchbooks and Notebooks of Ree Morton (2000)

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In the late 1960s REE MORTON abandoned a secure middle-class existence as a nurse, wife and mother of three in order to pursue artmaking and created a remarkable body of work in less than a decade, before dying in a car accident in 1977, at the age of forty-one.

Spontaneous, personal and direct, she used words and sentences, situations and topographies and transformed these into playful installations drawings, paintings or objects:  She was one of the artists who gave us permission to take the specific events of our lives and directly transmute them into art. There is a ritual quality to her work that makes it appear as if she were creating memorials to certain experiences, and to the people and places she loved. - CAROL DIEHL

The Mating Habits of Lines – Sketchbooks and Notebooks of Ree Morton (2000) - an outstanding publication about the written material the artist left behind - is a must for long time fans or those fresh into her work!

from my studio
Oslo, 2010

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Untitled (ABMB Navy), 2011
Leatherette on wooden stretcher, wooden frame

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Untitled (Documentation is everything # 04), 2008

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heavenly hiirani tiger lily
at freddy knox projectspace, 2009

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Untitled #25, 2010
polymer clay  3 x 3 cm

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Untitled #22, 2010
polymer clay  2.5 x 2cm

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Untitled #50, 2010
polymer clay  2.5 x 2.5cm

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Untitled #57, 2010
polymer clay  3 x 2.5cm

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Untitled #60, 2010
polymer clay  3.5 x 4.5cm

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Melbourne-based artist MATT HINKLEY creates tiny polymer clay sculptures, held out from the wall on long pins, which confound the eye in their meticulous patterns and rhythmical textures. He also applies his distinct, highly refined hand renderings to materials including newspapers, graph paper and found objects.

HINKLEY completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts at the Queensland College of the Arts in Brisbane in 2000 and has exhibited across such spaces as the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art @ Mirka at Torlano, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Artspace, Sydney and the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art. In 2009 he exhibited at Frieze Art Fair in London through Neon Parc.

And good news if you are living in Auckland, New Zealand, you have a few days (til January 28th,2012) to view these tiny sculptures in the group show Big Refrigerator at Hopkinson Cundy

Claque & Shill, 2011
Pencil on paper, meera white granite, 36 x 46 x 4 cm

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Claque & Shill, 2011
Pencil on paper, spluga green granite, 48 x 36 x 4 cm

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Installation view, Claque & Shill at Gasconade, Milan, 2011

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Claque & Shill, 2011
Pencil on paper, absolute black granite, 36 x 46 x 4 cm

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Installation view, Claque & Shill at Gasconade, Milan, 2011

Claque & Shill, 2011
Pencil on paper, eucalipto green granite, 48 x 36 x 4 cm

all images courtesy Gasconade, Milan
photos by ALESSANDRO ZAMBIANCHI

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ANDREA ROMANO‘ small-scale pencil reproductions of photo portraits of KENNY, a Royal White Tiger, are in a word ambiguous. Due to inbreeding, Kenny was mentally retarded and had physical handicaps, which aren’t striking at first glance but which, however, let you unsure, whether to ascribe these deformities to the animal or if they have been altered in some way by the artist’s hand.

Going even more into this idea of ambiguity, the title of the show Claque & Shill hints the feeling that something is unreliable: the claque is a group of people who are paid to applaud or deride a performance and thereby attempt to influence the audience. The shill is someone who purposely gives onlookers the impression that he or she is an enthusiastic independent customer of a seller and encourages other onlookers or audience members to purchase a particular good or service. Claque and shill infiltrate into a group in order to orientate the taste of its members and manipulate the perception of a phenomenon.

By making use of remote, sometimes antagonistic material, ROMANO’s work consistently questions the notion of origin, and the relationship between one’s identity and one’s work blurring the line between reality, perception and representation.

Claque & Shill by Milan-based artist ANDREA ROMANO was the first ever solo show at Gasconade, a newly nonprofit art space in Milan (directed by MICHELE D’AURIZIO and LUCA CASTIGLIONI), which is devoted to present Milanese artists born in the 1980s. And the good news is that the second solo show at Gasconade will present the work of KASPAR MÜLLER from 27 January to 25 Febuary, 2012 (opening the 26th January!), more info via http://www.gasconade.it/

exhibition view at Giti Nourbakhsch, April – May 2011
photo © WFW

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Six things you need to know about BERTA FISCHER:

1. she is a german artist who lives and works in Berlin
2. most of her works are cut from transparent acrylic glass or sheer PVC film
3. then bent and folded like anarchic origamis
4. in these sculptures, the cut edges of the Perspex sheets concentrate incident lights, creating glowing lines that subvert the sculptural outer form
5. however, her latest work (see above) explores new materials and their properties such as intertwined colored plastic nets, cotton and latex
6. her work has been exhibited throughout Germany, including solo shows at Giti Nourbakhsch (Berlin), Hammelehle & Ahrens, Projektraum (Köln) and Galerie Reinhard Hauff (Stuttgart) among others

all images © MAX PITEGOFF, CALLA HENKEL

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CALLA HENKEL and MAX PITEGOFF are both American living and working in Berlin where they curate an art/bar space called Times. Additionally they creates together a multifaceted body of work including performances, texts, photographs and installations in which everything seems mysterious and perpetually in motion.

See more from CALLA and MAX at their website: http://sb95.com/

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found via reform.lt

How Can I Resist U by FATIMA AL QADIRI
Video: SOPHIA AL-MARIA 

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A few weeks back, WFW featured FATIMA AL QADIRI, a New York-based Kuwaiti visual artist and composer who has recently released a record called Genre-Specfic Xperience. For each track on the EP, she specifically chose to work with different visual artist not known for directing music videos. And the xperience wouldn’t be complete without the – freshly released – video How Can I Resist U by SOPHIA AL-MARIA.

‘How Can I Resist U’ is a love letter to London in general and Dubstep (before it wobbled) in particular. ‘Lenden’ as it’s known has become a historic site of pilgrimage for wealthy Arabs seeking the forbidden fruits of sex, drugs and alcohol.  Interspersed with Youtube footage of Ma’alaya dances specific to Gulf countries like UAE and Oman–the super cars, dancing girls and brutalist council estates in the video are part of the down-and-dirty dream that a trip to London signifies for Khaleejis (Gulf Arabs). The color of the video is based on an infamous Arab royal’s custom ‘Gulf Blue’ Koenigsegg CCXR that terrorized the streets of the city’s posh neighborhoods.

The result is thoroughly disturbing, but totally groundbreaking! Make sure to watch more Xperience videos here

Art for Modern Architecture (Homage to Ellsworth Kelly)
The New York Times (Week of February 21st to February 27th 2005)

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Art for Modern Architecture (Homage to Ellsworth Kelly)
The Times (Week of February 14th to February 19th, 2005)

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Art for Modern Architecture (Homage to Ellsworth Kelly)
Herald Tribune (Week of November 30th to December 1st, 2004)

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Art for Modern Architecture (Homage to Ellsworth Kelly)
Herald Tribune (Week of November 30th to December 1st, 2004)

all images courtesy the artist

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MARINE HUGONNIER - whose work includes films, photography, works on paper, books and performance – explores the relationship between text and image, between the descriptive and deceptive qualities of visuals and language. For her, the image always carries the promise of an excess of meaning, a resistance to its subjection to a purpose of commerce, propaganda and ideology – in short, the spectacle.

Art for Modern Architecture (2004–ongoing) investigates the role of the image, its abilities and its limitations and reverses the process by obstructing the press images on the front page of a week’s worth of newspapers (the series include The New York Times, The Times, Die Tageszeitung, Le Monde, The Herald Tribune, The Neue Zürcher Zeitung and Al Ayaam) with collages made of cutouts from ELLSWORTH KELLY’s book Line Form Color.

ELLSWORTH KELLY claimed that art was to be made for public spaces and buildings, thus establishing the modernist utilitarian project of art serving modern architecture. This project renews KELLY’S ideas and re-elaborates them within another medium, that of a newspaper, the ‘architecture‘ of which frames everyday life.

MARINE HUGONNIER (born in Paris) lives and works in London. She has exhibited internationally including solo shows at Malmö Konsthall, Sweden(2009), Villa Romana, Florence, Italy (2009), FRAC Champagne-Ardenne (2009), Max Wigram Gallery, London (2010), Nogueras Blanchard, Barcelona (2011) and Fortes Vilaca, Sao Paolo (2011) among others.

KERSTIN BRÄTSCH / ADELE RÖDER «VORAHNUNG [UNITED BROTHERS AND SISTERS]»
exhibition views at Kunsthalle Zürich, November 2011 – January 2012
all images courtesy of Kunsthalle Zurich. Photos by STEFAN ALTENBURGER

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Lately, DAS INSTITUT duo – KERSTIN BRÄTSCH and ADELE RÖDER – have filled the low-ceilinged, Baroque rooms of the Museum Bärengasse in Zürich (the Kunsthalle Zürich’s temporary home during the renovations) with twenty-three installations, including reworked and fragmented elements from the architecture of the previous exhibition at the Kunsthalle, light elements and a new project with UNITER BROTHERS (EI ARAKAWA and TOMOO ARAKAWA).

This exhibition manifested a sense of constant flux and mutation. Their images moved freely from posters/magazine advertise-ments to textile patterns, from paintings on transparent polyester films to abstract light elements or from doodling books to digital motifs. The whole dealing playfully with the authenticity of artistic creation, the value and utility of art, and our material world which did not encompass the image but rather resided within it.

Founded in 2007 as an import/export agency , DAS INSTITUT is an ongoing collaboration that creates hybrid forms of artistic production and reproduction through painting, design, and performance. In September 2009, the Swiss Institute presented the duo’s first solo exhibition in New York. More recently they had solo exhibitions at BaliceHertling, Paris (2009), Hermes und der Pfau, Stuttgart (2009), Centre d’Art Contemporains du Parc Saint Léger, Pougues-les-Eaux (2010), Art 41 Statements (2010) and New Jerseyy, Basel (2010) among others. Additionally DAS INSTITUT was part of the 54th Venice biennale last year (2011).

DAS INSTITUT is the Volksgarten obstructed by venetian blinds

DAS INSTITUT is a gaze with multicoloured shades

DAS INSTITUT is simply not knowing his own name

DAS INSTITUT is a character in various roles

DAS INSTITUT is an open roof deck

DAS INSTITUT is a mouldy pond

DAS INSTITUT is a seaweed

DAS INSTITUT is same old same old

DAS INSTITUT is Räder und Brötsch – KERSTIN BRÄTSCH and ADELE RÖDER in conversation with BEATRIX RUF.

The exhibition at Kunsthalle Zurich is unfortunately now closed but I suggest you to read the interview of BRÄTSCH by MAURIZIO CATTELAN here!

Stock, 2011
285 pallets, acrylic
installation view at Centre PasquArt, Bienne
courtesy of the artist
photo © WFW

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Stock is a monumental installation created especially for the Salle Poma at the Centre PasquArt in Bienne (Switzerland) by Swiss artist GILLES PORRET. As his previous work, this installation questions the colors, their combination, their significations and their effects by using 285 wood paletts of 11 different colors.

In addition to his personal work, GILLES PORRET works as as curator. He also teaches drawing and painting at the ECAV (Ecole Cantonale d’Art du Valais) since 1997. He published in 2009 a monograph entitled Synthétiques with the Infolio editions.

And good news: Stock is currently on view at Centre PasquArt, Bienne (Switzerland) through January 22nd, 2012.

Untitled, 2011
© PETER PUKLUS

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Six things you need to know about PETER PUKLUS:

1. he is fine art / editorial photographer living and working in Budapest, Hungary
2. where he graduated in 2009 from the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design
3. since then he has never ceased to capture everything he gets in front of his lens
4. nevertheless a single picture or one medium is not enough for him to capture his daily life
5. thus most of his pictures are accompanied by videos with the same subject set in the same interiors documenting the formation of his still pictures
6. and good news: two books – One and a Half Meter and Handlook to the Stars - are going to be released in 2012 (more info here)

Exhibition view Vom Aussersten Rand der Bedingung, 2009
at Galleri Christina Wilson, Copenhagen

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Parallet Welt (schwarz/rot), 2009
kaiser idell lamps, two mirrors
83 x 45 x 45 cm

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Parallet Welt (rot/rot), 2009
kaiser idell lamps, two mirrors
83 x 45 x 45 cm

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detail of Vom zukünftigen Hintergrund unter anderer Bedingung betrachtet, 2010
mirror, 60 x 77,5 cm

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Vom zukünftigen Hintergrund unter anderer Bedingung betrachtet, 2010
mirrors, each 60 x 77,5 cm

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Watch, 2008
japanese wall clock, mechanical with gong, convex glass, mirrored

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Nissan ( Parallelwelt 1 + 2), 2009
two Nissan Micra, dimensions variable
installation view Grenzfälle fundamentaler Theorien at Johann König, Berlin, 2009

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Palette, 2006/2009
mahogany wood, shellac, wood stain
14 x 100 x 118 cm

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Broken away from common standpoints, 2010
steel plate, glass, two parts
dimension variable

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Transfer massereicher Körper ( Kaiser idell/aubergine), 2010
two kaiser idell lamps, mirrors
80 x 60 x 60 cm

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Andere Bedingung (Aggregatzustand 6), 2009
steel, copper, glass, mirror, iron, broomstick, seven parts
dimensions variable

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Andere Bedingung (Aggregazustand 6), 2009
copper, brass, steel, wood, mirror, six parts

all works courtesy ALICJA KWADE and Johann König, Berlin

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The work of ALICJA KWADE (born in 1979 in Katowice, Poland) involves our assumptions about reality and the way we conceive it. Through her sculptures—as well as in her installations, photographs and films, she tries to make the invisible visible, the inconceivable conceivable. Often composed of everyday items, KWADE’s works explore and question subjects like economic systems and powers (coal/gold), social agreements on the value and authenticity of objects, and philosophical notions about the character of time, the structure of reality, and the meaning of history.

We construct our reality, come to agreements, accumulate knowledge, experience things…Reality is not absolute but merely an accidental coincidence of events taking place at the same time – ALICJA KWADE in an email to KATHRIN MEYER, February 2010

ALICJA KWADE received the Piepenbrock Price for Sculpture in 2008, which was followed by recent exhibitions at the Hamburger Bahnhof—Museum für Gegenwart (2008), Galerie Christina Wilson, Copenhagen (2009), Johann König, Berlin (2009),  Museion at Peep-Hole, Milan (2010), Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover (2010), Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster (2010) and finally at the Kunsthaus Langenthal (2011). She lives and works in Berlin.

And good news: her first monograph has been released recently by Distanz Verlag

We seem to have entered a parallel world…

on my short sleeves (detail), 2009
stained wood, thumbtacks, men’s t-shirt and record sleeves
Three panels, each 61 x 121,9 cm

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on my short sleeves (detail), 2009
stained wood, thumbtacks, men’s t-shirt and record sleeves
Three panels, each 61 x 121,9 cm

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Patterned After Pleasure, 2011
wool and wool blend blankets, shirt, jacket, steel tacks, steel push-pins on stained plywood, 159 × 121 x 10 cm
image courtesy of Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London

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Installation view at Modern Art, London, 2011
image courtesy of Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London

Last Night, 2011
wool and wool blend blankets, steel tacks on stained plywood, 182 × 182 x 10 cm
image courtesy of Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London

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Dirty Pink, 2011
wool blankets and upholstery pins on plywood, 181,6 x 181,6 x 10,2 cm

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Blanket details in his studio

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Installation view at Modern Art, London, 2011
image courtesy of Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London

Schygulla in Blue, 2011
wool and wool blend blankets, steel tacks on stained plywood, 182 × 182 x 10 cm
image courtesy of Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London

all images courtesy of the artist

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TOM BURR‘ work – photographs, drawings, sculptures and installations – investigates how the built spaces bind and control people as well as allow them degrees of comfort and security. Enthusiasm for the almost libidinous quality of surfaces and materials, his work gives embodiment to abstract shape imbuing his forms with suggestions of character . More recently he has been meticulously fastening blankets of various sizes, colors and textures with upholstery tacks to large, 6-foot-by-6-foot wooden panels:

These objects describe proximities and distances, some banal facts and some fantasies, and they somehow make up a practice. They’ve all been used, sat on, opened or closed, worn and worn out; they’ve reached the limits of their domestic tenure, stretched to their breaking point, even, then retrieved, revived, and somehow reconstituted, into the considered formation of some thing. – TOM BURR for Art Forum, September 2010

Currently based in New York, TOM BURR was born in 1963 in New Haven, Connecticut. His work has been shown widely in Europe and the United States. Recent shows include Felt Under Fingers (2011) at Almine Rech Galerie in Brussels, Gravity Moves Me (2011) at FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, and Mixed Use, Manhattan: Photography and Related Practices, 1970s to the Present (2010) at the Reina Sofia Centre of Art in Madrid.

And good news: if you are in Turin (Italy), you can view his exhibition Promiscuous Pleats at Franco Noero Gallery until February 28th, 2012

all images © SYNCHRODOGS (ROMAN NOVEN & TANIA SHCHEGLOVA)

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Meet SYNCHROGODS, two inseparable photographers from Ukraine who have worked with names like Harper’s Bazaar and Urban Outfitters. Just like their photographic works, ROMAN NOVEN and TANIA SHCHEGLOVA are young, fresh, wild and vibrant:

We try not to shoot in the context of the cities we live in (these are two provincial cities of Ukraine that make us unemployed because of what we shoot). We always try to make the most of what is around, make friends with the director of the theatre or just find a distant place in the middle of the frozen lake. But all these locations do not reflect our style dramatically. - TANIA SHCHEGLOVA for Dazed Digital, 2011

Turbo Sculpture (english), 2010
video essay, 18: 29 min
courtesy of the artist

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Turbo Sculpture is a video essay by ALEKSANDRA DOMANOVIC which questions the emergence of a new kind of public art in ex-Yougoslav republics: due to the lack of sufficient reference points or a younger history, monuments to heroes of pop culture like BRUCE LEE, BOB MARLEY or ROCKY BALBOA have been erected in many places that were at war for over a decade in the 1990’s.

What interested me about the “turbo sculptures” in the former Yugoslavia was precisely the lack of any apparent local connection to the figures honoured. The inhabitants of Zitiste, in northeastern Serbia, had no immediate link to Rocky Balboa or Sylvester Stallone or Philadelphia, but still they decided to build a monument to Rocky. They believed the character represented noble values which are universal, and also that it would bring media attention to a remote Serbian village, which it did.

The term “turbo sculpture” did not actually exist before – I coined it for the video. But it was a logical continuation of postwar Eastern European genres such as turbo TV and turbo folk and turbo architecture, all of which are based on exaggerations and random amalgamations of the local and global. – ALEKSANDRA DOMANOVIC in conversation with DEAN KISSICK

Born in Serbia and brought up in Slovenia, ALEKSANDRA DOMANOVIC‘s work often takes references to the techno movement which played a unifying role for the young postwar generation in former Yugoslavia. ALEKSANDRA now lives in Berlin, where she spends most of her time making art and showing it both on the internet and in galleries around the world. Additionally she has been blogging along with OLIVER LARIC, CHRISTOPH PRIGLINGER and GEORG SCHNITZER on VVORK.com since 2006.

And good news: Turbo Sculpture is currently part of the exhibiton HOTAVANTGARDEHOTHOT at Oslo 10, Basel until February 12th, 2012

Balustrade, 2010
Steel, paint, PVC
337.8 x 177.8 x 25.4 cm / 133 x 70 x 10 in
Photo: THOMAS MUELLER

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Nine things you need to know about MONIKA SOSNOWSKA:

1. she was born in Ryki, Poland in 1972
2. after graduating in painting from the Fine Arts Academy in Poznan
3. she finished her studies in Amsterdam at the Rijksacademie van Beeldende Kunsten
4. she first achieved international renown in 2003 with The Corridor, an intervention that formed part of the Arsenale exhibition of the 50th Venice Biennale
5. in 2007 she represented Poland with a massive installation entitled 1:1 at the 52nd Biennale in Venice
6. for the exhibition at Hauser & Wirth (New York) in 2010, she has created a series of site-specific sculptures which are inspired by the emergency stairwells that scale the sides of old buildings (see above)
7. dismantling and manipulating each elements of the stairwell, she has giving each component its own autonomous sculptural identity parasiting our perceptions
8. more recently she has been announced as one of the finalists for the 2012 Hugo Boss Prize
9. she lives and works in Warsaw

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found via vvork

Standstelle und Gelbe Säule, 1981
coton, wood, 235 x 160 x 40 cm, 2 pieces

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Zentriert, 1965 / Über Arm, 1967
Kope zu Kopf über Kopf, 1967 / Kopf Leib Glieder, 1967

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28 Standstellen Zeichnung, 1967 / Ort Zeit Innen Aussen, 1967
Kreuz Bewegungsraum, 1967 / Rahmen Wege, 1967