A review of Cole Sternberg´s Exhibition "Departed for the curve" @ Praz Delavallade

 

Cole Sternberg
a boisterous stream in a boulder-choked channel, 2019
mixed media on linen

 

text by Stella Peacock-Berardini

Cole Sternberg scratches against the cheek of humanity, inviting the ideals of people in, while simultaneously belittling or questioning our existence, present and future. Sternberg's work provides a sort of kaleidoscopic effect veiling over images or winding paths and curves throughout the works, almost as if to represent the blurred lines and alternative routes our future plays as we grow in our society. It is not quite misanthropic, but provides skeptic views around human life itself, in examples such as the titles, but what may we say ourselves and the flock?,  and questions he proposes in other pieces. Within this show, he provides a distinct visual of how little we, as humans, really are, in which these curves of nature stand taller and stronger then we have been for centuries. We idolize these monuments throughout earth, while we simultaneously destroy them. This ironic analysis of nature's play within the avaricious mindset of the world today provides a start into deeper queries or fascination with the environment, especially considering current climate change worries. It proposes this idea, what if nature fought back, what if it already is? In, by reason of the high hills, the long green hills and thick wilderness juxtapose the wet, layered rocks that compete with the humans attention, the rocky wetlands win that battle, as the people consume nature's beautiful curves and ridges. The hard surfaces and towering landscapes devour the humans in, who stand miniscule compared to the surrounding land, enthralled by the natural entertainment of water rushing past, and the breeze through the rugged trees. A milky storm blue encloses this piece, as a film between the lives of the humans in the work, and the enjoyers of this piece. As the audience, we interrupt this moment between a family and the vast wilderness, becoming a part of the phenomenon once again, fascinated by the view we have been seduced by, unaware of our effect on the future of this landscape, or ignorant of our effects at the very least. The meandering and complex lines or curves in this show as well, which shape the pieces with its x-ray appearing layer in parts of the work, summons you in deeper, unsure if we are staring at a birds eye view of a lengthy canyon or the grips of a pterodactyls claws. The abstraction of the images provided in this show, allows Sternberg to reference and evolve common ideals and values of our cultural identity. It provides a memory you may relate with, or find yourself creating fictitious familial trips, yet also questioning the consciousness of people, and our ability to reflect on the intersectionality between the industrialization of the world, and the earth we have molded to our needs, for better or worse. How or will we depart from the trends of destruction we became attuned too? Sternberg pleases the eye with this work, and positively disrupts the human mind with fears we wish to avoid. Departed for the curve will be on view until July 30, 2022 at Praz Delavallade.

 
 

A Forsaken Place: Andrea Zittel's A-Z West Is A Laboratory For The Future →

Andrea Zittel
A-Z Wagon Station customized by Giovanni Jance
2003
Powder-coated steel, MDF, aluminum, Lexan,cushions, iPod Nano, headphones, solar iPod chargers
91 x 82 x 57 inches
© Andrea Zittel, Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles


The desert is an unforgiving, but magnetic landscape. Agnes Pelton, Georgia O'Keeffe, Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, and many more artists have all been drawn to the desert of the American West. Its barrenness, its potential, its raw heat, its solitude, and liquid mirages all provide a contemplative and hot combination of all the right ecosystemic ingredients for artists to experiment and conceive of cosmic ideas. Even the word desert is alluring: it comes from the ecclesiastical Latin root desertum, which means a “forsaken” or “abandoned” place. Lately, though, the desert has become less a quirk of America’s multifold topography and more a frightening, but beautiful prelude to an arid, lifeless future on Earth. 

Andrea Zittel fits into the historical canon of artists lured to these forsaken and abandoned landscapes—abandoned by time and most botanic nature—but she isn’t so much a land artist as she is an artist of the land. Like the late artist and sculptor Noah Purifoy before her, Zittel is not a visitor—she is a guardian of the desert’s inexplicable potential as a testing ground for future civilizations who might live in a world that is going through a rapid process of what geologists call desertification.  According to scientists, over a third of the world is going through this process, and every year 120,000 square kilometers of land turns into an actual desert. Studies show that if global carbon emissions aren’t curbed, much of the Earth will become a desert by 2050. Read more. Originally published in Autre’s Biodiversity Issue, FW 2021

Dennis Osadebe Looks To Heritage For Answers To The Future In MODERN MAGIC @ König London

With the starting point of the influence of Black culture, the works of Dennis Osadebe’s MODERN MAGIC present themselves like a theatre filled with visual challenges and rich experimentation. Viewers are given a front-row seat to an unfolding show as Osadebe’s painted characters take on the role of performers captured amid moments of magic; their masks symbolic of divine protection. Abstracted architectural spaces are lit by variegated sources, along with exaggerated shadows, and heightened perspective, to create an atmosphere of a dreamlike stage. Drawing from a wellspring of metaphysical, Surrealist, and Renaissance painting, Osadebe conjures a realm where viewers can only question the location of the powers that be.

Lavish cultural motifs reflect Osadebe’s fascination with craftsmanship. References to the Magic 8 Ball are found throughout the paintings and act as a point of focus for Osadebe’s first-ever conceptually guided sculptural installation, with objects employed as vessels aimed at preservation. These include the traditional Nigerian fan — a ubiquitous, accessible object, necessary for everyday life — highlighted by a pristine, symbolic framing that celebrates its cultural significance. This one motif is exemplary for Osadebe’s take on preservation, which looks to heritage for answers to the future, consciously speaking of Blackness and its pivotal role in shaping contemporary culture.

Osadebe’s radical approach to self-portraiture manifests his philosophical basis for contemporary Nigerian art, fusing Western techniques and indigenous traditions to construct a new paradigm for the evolution of art. As said by prolific Nigerian painter Ben Enwonwu, “It is setting the clock back to expect that the art form of Africa today must resemble that of yesterday otherwise the former will not reflect the African image.”

MODERN MAGIC is on view though July 16 @ König London 259-269 Old Marylebone Road

Naima Green Performs Rituals Of Intimacy In "A Sequence for Squeezing" @ Baxter St In New York

A Sequence for Squeezing is a solo show of lens-based work by 2021 Baxter St Workspace Resident Naima Green. Featuring new and recent photographs, as well as a recent video work, the exhibition continues Green’s practice of collaborating with her community to create intimate portraits and record personal scenes of play, exploration, and pleasure. Focusing on the experiences of Black, Brown, and Queer individuals, the exhibition builds on and expands the themes of Green’s previous work, exploring water as a site for pleasure and freedom, the sensuality of enjoying food, and the rituals of intimacy. 

On the back wall of the exhibition, a giant vinyl double-exposed image of the Rockaways serves as the  backdrop for Green’s video work The Intimacy of Before. The Rockaways — and water — are an important  reoccurring site in Green’s life and work, and water is featured across much of her new work, even if as a  subtle suggestion. At Baxter St, the Rockaways frame Green’s intimate video self-portrait, a sensual  exploration of self the artist shot in her apartment during the early days of the COVID pandemic. The audio  from the video, including the sounds of waves and Green’s own voice, becomes a soundtrack to the exhibition  as a whole, asking, as she does in the video, “Is it too much to want a tender and complete intimacy?” 

A Sequence for Squeezing is on view through July 23 at 126 Baxter St

Suspended in Memory: Read Our Interview Of Veronica Fernandez →

Standing in front of Los Angeles-based artist Veronica Fernandez’s paintings you may start to feel as if you’re part of a fever dream or someone else’s past life regression. They are raw and autobiographical, a place where the viewer is invited to float through fragments of extremely personal memories while being entertained by the various textures and materials Fernandez has thoughtfully arranged in each work. There are painterly aspects that divide you from reality, yet it still feels as if you're walking into someone else's actual space and you’re welcome to stay as long as you’d like. 

The paintings are in essence a mapping of her family lineage, their struggles and their persistence captured through the lens of old photographs passed down from her grandmother. Through these photographs, Fernandez is navigating her own identity as it relates to her childhood and her closeness to family. She manipulates these images to tell a story of adolescence that most of us couldn’t comprehend and yet she finds strength in these memories, weaving them into a narrative about what it means to call somewhere home and to make a place for yourself. 

I visited Fernandez in her studio as she put the final touches on her first solo exhibition entitled When you hold onto my spirit, will you let your spirit grow?  at Sow & Tailor in Los Angeles. Read more.

Moving Past Giants: Read Our Interview Of Artist Devon DeJardin →

Devon Dejardin sits in front of a couch, arm resting on the cushion, looking into the camera.

text by Stella Peacock-Berardini

Devon Dejardin’s exploration of art may have started from the humble encouragement of a sugar daddy psychic, but it has grown into a journey of healing and reflection that continues to drive his success in the art world. Within his cubist-influenced style of work, Devon Dejardin, an LA-based painter, processes through the elements of life demanding answers to all of its most urgent lingering questions. Dejardin employs his work as a way to unpack and understand the entropic nature of the universe through his lens of belonging, going deeper into the storms he's faced that brought him to the clear sky of his creation. This 29-year-old, self-taught artist originating from Portland juggles depression and anxiety within the creative realm and expresses his gratitude for the therapeutic release his art supplies to himself and its viewers. His newest project, Giants dives into this preconceived idea of spirituality and shifts its narrative to his ideas surrounding the guardians of the world, those that protect, aid, and grow in strength and vulnerability within the boundaries of our world. His art, huge in size, mimics the ideas of giants and how they are commonly perceived, yet it develops further than that. These feelings, or challenges in life, such as sadness or grief materialize as giants, but represent the deception life can have on us all. We sat down with this artist to explore his influences, conceptions around his work as a whole, and his first New York solo exhibition at Albertz Benda. Read more.

How Do You See The Now: Read Our Interview Of Artist Jillian Mayer →

RACHEL ADAMS: When I think about your work, I often see objects that provide assistance. Slumpies help your body adjust to the onslaught of technological devices, sculptures that become flotation devices, and the works in our show TIMESHARE were prototypes for living in a future where you couldn’t go outside–a fountain that doubles as a hydroponic garden, blueprints for life underground, etc. How do you see this new glasswork fitting into the idea of assistance?

JILLIAN MAYER: I have always loved the appeal of any object that does more than one thing. Whether it be a mop that can convert to a broom, a reversible clothing item, or anything else that fits into the  “Well that’s not all…” rhetoric. I love to think of these items as suggestive and simultaneously insecure and self-aware of their limit if they could only be one thing… that objects have to try to justify their existence as well as place amongst your other objects. Along with pressure for us to perform many tasks, our items are not excused from this weight. There is only so much room in our lives so these objects plead the case for their acceptance. Read more.

Nadia Lee Cohen "HELLO, My Name Is" Opening At Jeffrey Deitch Gallery and Private Dinner in The Hollywood Hills

Friends gathered for the opening of Nadia Lee Cohen "HELLO, My Name Is,” the artist’s first major solo exhibition in the United States, now on view at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery. After the opening, friends gathered at the home of Jeffrey Deitch in the Hollywood Hills for a private dinner. photographs by Aaron Sinclair, Becky Hearn and Myles Hendrik

Lust, Aliens and Summer Nights: Aryo Toh Djojo's Crepuscular World Stuns and Frightens

Aryo Toh Djojo’s world is a crepuscular world where the distant buzz of alien spacecraft whirs like a high voltage transformer, arcing between coils with the secret blue language of electricity. This is also the language of Djojo’s paintings, which were recently on view at Sow & Tailor in Los Angeles. They are hard to pin down, they are elusive and evocative, which makes them hit that spot between nostalgia and eroticism. This is your brain on UFOs, weed, and the hot magnesium flash of lust. Inside the hinterlands of Djojo’s hyper-realistic airbrushed canvases, there is the feeling of eternal summer, but also alien abduction, which could be seen as a metaphor for the amnesia of youth—for the forgetting of yesterday to live for today.

House & Garden Is A World Of Domestic Bliss @ Stroll Garden In Los Angeles

Conceived as a singular installation, House & Garden welcomes viewers into a home of domestic items rendered in clay by Analuisa Corrigan and a garden of working ceramic fountains by Lily Clark, complimented by live plant vignettes created by Alice Lam of A.L. BASA. In recontextualizing the familiar, the artists invite a moment of pause to reengage our senses and reconsider our relationship to often overlooked elements of the everyday, both domestic and elemental. Corrigan creates organic, figurative forms that unite material exploration and personal expression. Corrigan’s pieces are deceptively labor intensive, taking up to a month to make. After sketching and prototyping, each is carefully built up through a coil technique, then dried and sanded to achieve the desired silhouette. The resulting work feels simultaneously robust and delicate.

Whereas Corrigan works intuitively, Clark’s process embraces precision, reflecting her interest in engineering. After drafting a design, she rolls slabs of clay and cuts using a template, then carefully joins the seams. The surface is left unglazed to contrast with the water’s luster. For her large-scale fountains, Clark incorporates stones that she spent six months sourcing from the Whitewater quarry just outside of Palm Springs, fine tuning the design to achieve her desired water flow and sound. Clark’s fountains are arranged within an “indoor garden” by Alice Lam, whose Los Angeles-based creative studio A.L. BASA specializes in sculptural floral installations. Lam’s site-specific design references Buddhist Zen gardens created around works by Isamu Noguchi, as well as plants that are representative of California’s biodiversity. Immersive and temporal, House & Garden contemplates notions of interior and exterior — both somatic and psychological, experienced and subjective.

House & Garden is on view through June 11 @ Stroll Garden 7380 Beverly Boulevard.

 
 

Kate MccGwire Mines Tension Between Nature & the Manmade World In Undertow @ galerie Les filles du Calvaire in Paris

Known for her muscular, writhing forms made with feathers, and reminiscent of Classical sculpture and creatures from mythology, Kate MccGwire’s works explore dualities of aesthetics, being simultaneously seductive and repulsive; form, being both organic and abstract; and movement, appearing fluid yet being static. As she has noted, “I am interested in the interplay of opposites which runs like a leitmotif through everything I do. It is as if the work needs that tension to create its own internal equilibrium; it is an expression for me of the duality I see all around me and the materials I choose need to be able to physically embody this.”

Influenced by the cycles, patterns and currents of water, these works explore conflicting relationship between nature and the manmade world. Observing the dichotomies of nature on her daily wild swims and walks, MccGwire makes work inspired by visual rhythms and sequencing observed in flowing water, but also its rupture, control and diversion through human interference with dams and weirs.

The artist’s process of creation begins with the intense and repetitive method of collecting and preparing the feathers, each of them carefully examined and classified according to its size, shape and natural color. In a compelling and meditative process, MccGwire arranges the feathers to mimic the overall form and patterning of the pieces informed and inspired by the anatomy of birds’ wings. Discarded, impermanent and overlooked materials have always fascinated the artist. In her piece TAINT she contrasted lead sheet with intricately arranged feathers, creating an anaemic, skin-like surface. In the visceral forms of UNDERTOW, the artist is seduced by the beauty, flow, power and turbulence of flowing water and ultimately drawn to the danger that lies beneath the surface.

Undertow is on view through May 7 @ galerie Les filles du calvaire 17 rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, 75003 Paris

 
The Artist holding a feather in her hand and sitting over an art piece.

Kate MccGwire
Making of SASSE/SLUICE, 2018
Photo : Jo Scott

 

Linda Stojak Paints Memories Like Ghosts In It's ok to do nothing @ Lowell Ryan Projects In Los Angeles

 
 

Linda Stojak’s It’s ok to do nothing is a series of solitary female figures painted in an ambiguous space between identity and anonymity. While personal in nature, these works allow for a range of interpretation and emotional response. Stojak’s works conjure a feeling of remembrance and the uncertainty that can come when time has passed—layers of memory that shift with a perspective that only age and time can bring. They are enigmatic renderings of women, lushly executed and textured by the build up of paint—methodical applications with the palette knife, layers of washes, and considered brushstrokes. A kind of burnishing effect emerges that creates a luminous glow in the surfaces. Each painting provides a journey for the viewer, but within the realm of this expressionist figurative painter there is also the emergence of a portrait—unfinished, evolving and transforming. Stojak’s figures are often incomplete in nature. The eyes, or often the whole face, smudged or blurred creating a feeling of recalling the memory of a loved one, while the shape of the hair, the color of lipstick or gesture of the body remain—a floating image or “stillness” as Stojak says. “These paintings deal with moments in time where you cannot move forward and you cannot move backward.” The figures read less as individuals, but instead as timeless memories that hover on the canvas like ghosts.

It’s ok to do nothing is on view through May 7 @ Lowell Ryan Projects 4619 W. Washington Boulevard.

Transmundane Economies: Queerness, Spirituality & Heritage Overlap in the Work of Theodoulos Polyviou →

 
 

Theodoulos Polyviou is an artist whose practice explores the multilayered spaces where queerness, spirituality, and cultural heritage overlap across physical and digital worlds. Often utilizing virtual reality (VR) technology, Theo’s work also features architectural and sculptural elements, text, and sound, resulting in installations that are at once intellectually deep and sensuous to experience. He has participated in numerous exhibitions and residencies throughout Europe, and has a forthcoming project in Lecce, Italy, later this year. I met Theo on the occasion of his recent exhibition Transmundane Economies at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, where he has pursued a long-term artist residency. As an art critic, I’m usually hesitant and skeptical regarding the experience of art in virtual reality. But I found how Theo uses VR in Transmundane Economies to construct a “ritual space” that conjoins queerness, religion, and Cypriot cultural heritage to be profound and compelling. So I’ve met with him again to find out more. Read more.

Barbara Kruger Survey Decodes The Powers That Be @ Sprüth Magers In Los Angeles

The work of Barbara Kruger—bold, trenchant and unmistakable—has made an indelible mark not only on contemporary art of the last four decades, but also more broadly on everyday visual culture. She developed her concise, forthright aesthetic in the early 1980s, and since then has deployed it across myriad forms, from small-scale tactile objects to monumental public facades. Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers present this exhibition of new and historical works by Kruger at the Los Angeles gallery timed with her major exhibition, Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You., on view across Wilshire Boulevard at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (March 20–July 17, 2022).

As visitors enter the gallery, they first encounter Kruger's large-scale triptych, Untitled (Never Perfect Enough) (2020). The format of the appropriated image, in tandem with the added text, recalls the practice of phrenology, a nineteenth-century pseudoscience in which the shape and size of people's heads was thought to determine their character and mental abilities—and often used historically to argue for white supremacy and class distinctions. Kruger's triptych updates this urge to divide, categorize and control, situating these long-standing human pursuits squarely in the present while simultaneously picturing the connections between "beauty" and the punishing regimens that accompany it.

A group of twenty collages from the 1980s, related to some of Kruger's early and best-known works, completes the exhibition. The artist refers to these objects as "paste-ups," the term for cut-and-paste mockups used in the field of graphic design, which reflects Kruger's time as an editorial designer for Mademoiselle magazine and her work designing book jackets and picture editing in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Displayed together, Untitled (Never Perfect Enough) and Kruger's collages span the artist's career both temporally and conceptually. They offer compelling insights into her process and practice, and they illustrate the many ways in which her work has infiltrated our understanding of mass media and the power structures that control and manipulate contemporary culture.

Barbara Kruger is on view now through July 16 at Sprüth Magers, 5900 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles.

Kour Pour Disrupts Notions of Cultural Hybridity In New Homes, New Places @ Gallery 1957 in London

 
 

Based in Los Angeles, artist Kour Pour's creative processes, source material, and painting techniques stem from a wide range of cultures and histories. His experience as an immigrant and biography are the foundation of his work, reflecting his transitory heritage; Pour is of British and Iranian descent and grew up in a mixed-race household - but the artist is also newly American, having been granted citizenship during the pandemic. As a child, Pour spent considerable time in his father's carpet shop, memories of which have become a central component of his practice. These cultural threads inform his work and add to a wide range of visual languages; the interplay of form and content becomes a way for Pour to convey meaning in his art. He draws inspiration from visual traditions that include Persian carpets, medieval Islamic manuscripts, Chinese paintings, and ukiyo-e prints, among others.

Pour's creative point of view disrupts simplistic notions of cultural hybridity, appropriation, and originality. New works on view at Gallery 1957 see the artist creating silkscreen prints based on imagery from illustrated texts of the Persian epic Shahnameh [The Book of Kings] by the poet Ferdowsi (977-1010 CE). Presenting the works with the text boxes redacted - a comment on the artist's inability to speak his mother tongue and the universal limitations of language - the shape of the canvases eschew the art-historical square. Called 'extractions', the series expands on the artist's ongoing interest in mixing visual culture across boundaries and borders, with the 'redacted' pieces reminiscent of the shaped canvases of American Minimalists such as Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly. In other works, Pour explores the cultural exchange of tiger imagery across China, Korea, and Japan, creating and recreating works inspired by different contexts across bright canvases reminiscent of Western Pop art.

Kour Pour: New Homes, New Places is on view now through April 30 at Gallery 1957 1 Hyde Park Gate London SW7 5EW.

 
A Studio with 3 paintings against a wall, 2 of them with gold tiger designs and the middle is a sprawl of animals.

Kour Pour in Studio. Image courtesy the artist and Gallery 1957.

 

Lydia Maria Pfeffer Takes Us to Queer, Jungian Worlds In Lily of the Valley @ Ochi Projects In Los Angeles

 
 

Lydia Maria Pfeffer presents new paintings that depict a queer cast of characters as well as their seductive and strange worlds. Drawing inspiration from mythology, shamanism, and anthropomorphism, Pfeffer playfully revels in art historical motifs and religious iconography. Set against earthly and other-worldly backdrops, the occult-like figures in this series dwell in both familiar and celestial landscapes. Pfeffer’s fantastical worlds are inhabited by bold figures who embody queer sensuality, femme kinship, and gender fluidity, through the expressive language of painterly symbolism.

With a cheeky nod to the sexualized female figures of Austrian Expressionism, like those of Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka, Pfeffer similarly charges her subjects with a raw femme sexuality that verges on the grotesque. However, unlike these historical representations of the sexed femme body—so often fraught with the confines of modernity and the male gaze—Pfeffer’s specters are fully self-realized. They refuse the bounds of their own frames. Connecting familiarity with fantasy, and femininity with ferocity, Pfeffer’s works hover above the axis of desire itself. Lily of the Valley rejects painting’s inherited traditions of the patriarchal gaze and boldly asserts the power of a self-actualized queer eroticism.

Lydia Maria Pfeffer is in conversation with Trulee Hall in our forthcoming Body Issue. The following is an excerpt from the full interview:

LYDIA MARIA PFEFFER: I do believe there's a spirit world out there, and I do believe that everything is alive, and I mean that down to the soil. When I make these paintings, they are almost a weird channeling. Of course, it’s my subconscious that creates these images. But, I start painting with some washes or lines, then the figure develops, who then invites the other figure, and they're all grabbing each other and taking each other to the party. It's almost like I’m asking, “Alright, who else do you want? What else do you want? Oh, you want a little thing there? Okay, cool. Who else is coming to the party? Okay. There she is.” I'm almost being told what to do. It takes an openness, and a willingness to trust yourself, and trust the process. You go in and give yourself entirely over to the painting. Often, I paint the entire thing, and I have no idea what's happening. There's a lot of Jung’s idea of collective unconscious in there, which says that your fears and your desires are predetermined. These archetypes that we all embody determine what we fear, or revere, or need, or want in order to develop.   

TRULEE HALL: I totally relate. I also use the channeling. I get the mood right. I have a canvas, I got my music going, and the rest just unfolds. I don't think it through ahead of time. Sometimes I'll start with one idea or an inspiration, but it's a relationship with the work. In your case, you're very brave, and you're also unapologetic. Your work comes from a very authentic place and it really jumps off the canvas. I don't even think of them as paintings because they just seem to exist. It feels like it flew out of you; like it's supposed to exist.   

Lily of The Valley is on view through April 30 at Ochi Projects 3301 W Washington Blvd, Los Angeles

Xinyi Cheng Gives Us All The Uncanny Feels In Seen Through Others @ Lafayette Anticipations in Paris

The constellation of subjects and scenes captured in Xinyi Cheng’s evocative paintings are drawn from her encounters. From a tiny dog called Monroe staring at a bone on a red carpet to a man in leopard-print boxer shorts on a sofa speaking on the phone, her works unravel complex emotions, desires, and dynamics that permeate contemporary life. Cheng’s expressive use of light and colour help conjure feelings, reveries, and impulses that reside within our everyday experiences of being in the world. Beyond a false softness, these new works represent her reflection not only on what it means for us to coexist, but on what it means to be human. In an often enigmatic atmosphere of dreams and solitude, the characters depicted by the artist sound like unexpected tributes to the moderns such as Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas or Caillebotte.

For Cheng’s first major institutional exhibition in France, the presentation brings together over thirty existing works from 2016 to 2021 spread across the whole building. Shown in unfamiliar groupings, they open up novel correlations and understandings within her oeuvre.

Seen Through Others is on view now through May 28 at Lafayette Anticipations – Fondation Galeries Lafayette, 9 rue du Plâtre, Paris

Watch Barbara Kruger's "In Violence" (2011) On The Occasion Of Her Survey @ LACMA & Solo Exhibition @ Sprüth Magers In Los Angeles

In Violence (2011) was presented in Commercial Break, a group exhibition curated by Neville Wakefield at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art during the opening week of the 54th Venice Biennial. Eleven years later, in the midst of a continuing war in Ukraine and numerous global humanitarian crises, Kruger’s use of novelist, critic and political activist, Mary McCarthy’s quote: “In violence we forget who we are” is an increasingly potent reminder.

Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You is on view through July 17 @ LACMA 5905 Wilshire Blvd. Her solo exhibition, Barbara Kruger, is on view across the street through July 16 @ Sprüth Magers 5900 Wilshire Blvd.

Keith Rivers Curates A Chameleonic Group Show In Courage Before Expectation @ FLAG Art Foundation In New York

Courage Before Expectation is a group exhibition curated by former NFL linebacker turned art patron Keith Rivers. Inspired by quotes that intersect Rivers’s life in sports and his love of contemporary art, the exhibition explores the pursuit of dreams and unlikely trajectories. In these works we see artists taking perilous leaps of faith like they were Mikhail Baryshnikov—born to soar with grace and land with a quiet sense of control. All of them masters of varied media, what connects these artists is not so much material as it is mutable. We see sculptures from Sonia Gomes who left her career as a lawyer to become an artist, and from Thaddeus Mosley who was formerly a postman. There are paintings by Etel Adnan whose practice didn’t start until the age of thirty-four due to early admonishment from her mother. Known primarily for his representational paintings that challenge centuries of Black erasure within the canon, here we see rare photographs by Kerry James Marshall that possess his signature conundrum wherein the the figure is ever so slightly lit, creating an abjection that exemplifies a common African American experience while opening our eyes to a world of nuance. We bear witness to Philip Guston’s infamous transition into figuration, a perilous career risk at the time, which is so easily forgotten given the eventual triumph of its outcome—such that his previous abstractions are hardly remembered. This is a curation of artists who manage to clear the channel, so to speak, allowing any residual negative self-talk to recede dutifully into the background, leaving space for their most authentic expressions in the foreground. Rivers feels a kinship with these artists who show us how to be chameleonic without pretense or artifice. They change form at will with aplomb because it is their nature to do so.

Courage Before Expectation is on view through June 4 @ FLAG Art Foundation 545 West 25th Street, 9th Floor New York

 
 

Read A Conversation Between Artists Torkwase Dyson & Derek Fordjour From Our FW20 Sitting Issue →

TORKWASE DYSON In your work, there are so many different movements. I’ll say acrobatics. To quote Brand Nubian a little bit, “acrobatics over beats.” 

DEREK FORDJOUR I really like the notion of the acrobatic. As you talk about the dexterity of bodies and being pushed, I think about the presence and absence of bodies in your work. This is really a big part of my attraction to your thinking and your work as it relates to mine, is the absence of the depiction of the body, but your keen awareness of bodies in space. I wanted to know from you: where is the body centered in your thinking absent from depiction of the body? Read more.