Bold Tendencies Is A Cultural Hub in London That Exemplifies the Dream of Urban Adaptability

text by Lara Monro

Bold Tendencies is a cultural community hub located within the rooftop spaces of a multi-story car park in the heart of Peckham. Established in 2007 by contemporary art gallerist Hannah Barry, the not-for-profit organization has rooted itself within the bones of the local community and is recognized for taking culture and civic values seriously through a mix of standalone education and community initiatives. 

What was initially a bold arts project has turned an unlikely structure into one of the city’s most exciting public spaces. With breathtaking panoramic views of London and an accompanying (and very popular) bar, Frank’s, Bold Tendencies exemplifies the dream of urban adaptability. Sitting somewhere between pop-up and permanence it has harnessed a thriving cultural presence in a once dead, dark space. 

Sharon Eyal and L-E-V perform OCD LOVE at Bold Tendencies in 2019. © Susan Bingham

Over the past sixteen years, the hub’s cultural program has attracted 2 million+ visitors. It has commissioned 128 artworks to date, including Richard Wentworth’s silvery curved floor painting, Agora (which comes from the Greek term for a gathering place) as well as the gaping ghoulish fairground-style painted mouth of artist Matt Copson. Bold Tendencies also boasts award-winning live programs of music, dance, opera and readings, including performances by the internationally-renowned choreographer Sharon Eyal. And, let’s not forget to mention the car park’s bubblegum-pink, Instagram sensation, stairwell; an artwork in itself by Simon Whybray. 

Bold Tendencies’ 2023 Summer program, Crisis, includes artworks by Emory Douglas, Jenny Holzer, Kahlil Robert Irving, Sandra Poulson, and Abbas Zahedi. The live program opened with the Philharmonia Orchestra performing The Planets by Gustav Holst, and after the success of the award-winning production, The Endz, The Multi-Story Orchestra’s Young Creatives performed Routes. Set in Peckham, Routes is inspired by the musicians’ personal experiences of growing up in the borough. It is directed by Abi Falase, with music led by singer-songwriter Frances Lobo and composer Kate Whitle. The Multi-Story Orchestra is made up of a group of exceptionally talented young musicians renowned for their innovative and boundary-pushing approach to music-making. 

Manchester Collective, known for their innovative and daring collaborations, presented a one-off, double program of German composer and conductor, Richard Strauss’ final masterpiece, Four Last Songs, paired with Metamorphosen, a haunting work of rhythmic and melodic complexity for string orchestra written towards the end of the Second World War in 1945. To accompany the mesmerizing scores leading soprano, Ruby Hughes, beautiful (and haunting) voice reverberated off the car park’s exposed concrete frame, leaving hairs standing on the back of necks. 

Most recently, Bold Tendencies welcomed Irish chorographer Oona Doherty to their public programme for the first time with Hope Hunt, an ode to strength and vulnerability, hitting and swerving at extreme stereotypes of cultural and social class. Based in Belfast, Oona studied at London School Of Contemporary Dance, University of Ulster and Trinity Laban (BA Honors and Postgraduate in Contemporary Dance Studies). Doherty’s distinctive, visceral, and intense performances highlight her rare ability to connect a gesture with the web of emotions that sustain it. She explains, “my work attempts to play with the barrier between the flesh and the soul, the audience and the stage; to share a kinetic experience. I’m motivated to explore states of pure metaphysical honesty. To bring the sex, the punk, the romance and the chi back into the body, the black box, the white cube, and Ireland.’’ 

Still to come, Caleb Femi will present Stone Seed, an immersive live performance that celebrates the power of Peckham to rebuild and reclaim what has been lost in a rapidly changing socioeconomic landscape. Finally, the 21-year-old Swedish-Norwegian violinist, Johan Dalene will perform four pieces—chosen specially for performance in the concrete space—alongside his regular performance partner, award-winning British pianist Nicola Eimer. With music by Arvo Pärt, Francis Poulenc, Sam Wu, Edvard Grieg, Dalene’s program explores the crises of our time with extreme virtuosity and sensitivity. 

Book tickets for all up coming events via the Bold Tendencies website.

JP Munro's Overworld Captures the Extremity of the Southern California Wilds @ Broadway in New York

 
 

Broadway presents Overworld, a solo show of new paintings by Los Angeles artist JP Munro.

The exhibition comprises two enduring strains of the artist’s practice: exacting plein-air landscapes and altogether fantastical tableaux populated with a pantheon of mythical figures.

The landscapes gather their formidable power from the artist’s almost psychedelic level of observation and commitment not just to surface effect but to transmitting an experiential dimension to the canvas. A viewer immediately senses the endeavor of creating these hard-fought works amidst the beauty and extremity of the Southern California wilds. We feel each craggy outcropping of rock, every bristling shank of cactus,and the dramatic sprawl of a live oak as if in real-time and with a spiritual magnification that is unique to encounters with nature.

The figure-centered works would, at first, seem to sit in uneasy relation to the landscapes, but soon reveal themselves as an apt inversion of the former’s exteriority—fiction in place of hard fact. Picture book royalty, Norse deities, and their attendant lusty concubines inhabit mystical realms and cavort in a matrix of meticulously layered black and brown oil paint. Like a conceptualist take on William Blake, these characters hold our attention as both protagonists of the painting and somehow witnesses to its creation.

As the exhibition shifts between disciplined observation and freestyle world-building, Munro completes an expository circuit of the act of painting itself

Overworld is on view Tuesday–Saturday, 11AM–6PM through July 28th at Broadway, 375 Broadway, New York

Judit Reigl's First Museum Solo Exhibition in Germany Is Presented Posthumously @ Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin

 
 

To commemorate the centenary of Judit Reigl’s birth and the acquisition of three main works by this Hungarian-born French artist (1923 – 2020), the Neue Nationalgalerie is presenting her first-ever solo exhibition in a German museum. The Nationalgalerie is the first public collection in Germany to own works by this important painter closely associated with the French Art Informel movement in the 1950s.

This overview of Reigl’s career showcases a major figure in European art from the second half of the 20th century. On view are sixteen, mostly large-scale paintings from Reigl’s painted oeuvre ‒ works both abstract and figurative. The artist began her studies at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in Budapest. In 1950, the rise of Stalinism led Riegl to flee her homeland and settle in Paris. Although her early, mostly dream-like paintings were still indebted to Surrealism, she turned to lyrical abstraction at the start of the 1950s. Figurative elements are repeatedly found in Riegl’s paintings. In the mid-1960s, they would culminate in the male torsos in her Man series.

Judit Reigl
Man, Tripychon (1967-1969)
Oil on canvas 232.4 x 199.4 cm; 241.3 x 198.1 cm; 232.4 x 208.3 cm,
Fonds de dotation Judit Reigl, promised gift Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin© Fonds de Dotation Judit Reigl

Judit Riegl’s work will be on view through October 8th at Neue Nationalgalerie, Potsdamer Str. 50, 10785 Berlin.

Justin Urbach Uses Silicon to Unveil the Symbiotic Relationship Between Man and Machine @ Max Goelitz in Berlin

Justin Urbach’s Fractal Breeze is a three-channel video installation that addresses transformation processes in the digital age as a fragmentary sci-fi narrative.

In Fractal Breeze, two characters move on the borders of virtuality and reality in a metafictional representation of our technological future. The starting point for the video work is silicon, which is used to manufacture microchips and upon which the artist reflects in its many stages of production. In the form of wafers, thin reflective information carriers, silicon enables crossing over into a hybrid world in which virtual spheres increasingly materialize and the characters experience a new physicality. Through the symbiotic connection of body and technology, a transhuman circuit is formed that refers to social developments and the multidimensional processes of raw material extraction and energy storage.

The artist creates a multimedia installation in which the wafers merge into real space as sculptural objects and information carriers. Still blank in the film, in the exhibition they are engraved with body-related data of the actors, collected through MRI scans, 3D scans and motion capture. Fractal Breeze was realized in collaboration with specialists and researchers from the semiconductor and film industries, as well as the medical field, in order to unite these diverse branches. The music produced especially for the project was created in collaboration with musician and sound artist Jonas Yamer.

Fractal Breeze is on view through July 29th at max goelitz gallery, rudi-dutschke str 2610969 Berlin

Alfredo Jaar Indulges In Radical Pessimism with "The Temptation to Exist" @ Galerie Thomas Schulte

For over four decades, Alfredo Jaar has used photography, film, installation, and new media to create compelling works that examine complex sociopolitical issues and the ethics and limits of representation.

The exhibition’s title makes a reference to a book by Emil Cioran, one of the artist’s favorite writers. A dark, subversive thinker, Cioran was the poet of pessimism. A philosopher who was always on the verge of suicide, he once said: “If I didn’t write, I could have become an assassin. Writing is a matter of life and death. Human existence, at its core, is endless anguish and despair, and writing can make things a bit more bearable. A book is a suicide postponed.” For Cioran, failure permeates everything. Great ideas can be stained by failure, and so can art and the human condition. “No longer wanting to be a man” he is dreaming of another form of failure he wrote. “The universe is one big failure, and not even poetry can succeed in correcting it.”

For Jaar, art is the impossible answer to an impossible question: how do we make art when the world is in such a state? In the gallery’s main space, an immersive experience is created with a large, red neon work, where the words of the stoic philosopher Seneca take center stage. Seneca strongly believed that if we have the essentials and a strong inner spirit, we can radically accept and endure any circumstances. Eschewing the presence of other objects, the room is entirely illuminated with a dense red light, building an atmosphere of poetic uncertainty, mirroring the unease of contemporary times. The philosopher’s emblematic phrase glimmers in the space, reacting to the tyranny of the white box space and filling it with an idea—a model for thinking about the world.

Jaar’s second part of the exhibition fills the second, smaller gallery space with more than 50 works from a diverse group of artists, including Bas Jan Ader, Rosa Barba, Angela de la Cruz, Valie Export, Yoko Ono, Zanele Muholi, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, and more. Here, the artist has tried to create what he calls “a space of resistance, a space of hope.”

The Temptation to Exist is on view through August 12th at Galerie Thomas Schulte, Charlottenstraße 24, 10117 Berlin.

Avery Wheless Celebrates the Vulnerability of Being in a New Environment with "Precipice" @ Katikía in in Monemvasia, Greece

Katikía presents Precipice, an inaugural residency exhibition of LA-based artist Avery Wheless. The exhibition was completed during the artist’s time in Monemvasia, Greece. Kicking off in Athens, Wheless explored ancient Greek art history and uncovered the emerging contemporary art scene within the capital's numerous galleries and artist studios. While creating her own body of work, Wheless produced an art curriculum that she taught at the town's local public elementary school. She worked with students and introduced them to a new approach to painting. The exhibition will be displayed in a historical seaside ruin built into the cliffs along the Castro—a medieval town—for the residents and visitors of Monemvasia to view. 

The movement of bodies in Wheless’s energetic and tender paintings originate from Wheless’s history with dance, particularly ballet. Delicate movements command power and space while exploring the complexities of personal and social impacts of the female form.

“My works are often a reflection on how I relate to others. They explore how I see myself and take up space, finding comfortability while often feeling exposed and vulnerable. In this residency, I have experienced what it means to be removed, but also present in an unfamiliar environment. While observing people, I interact and engage, but also have an extra level of outsiderness as a viewer. It's been interesting to be seen by new people in a new place, while taking in new information, colors, landscapes and attitudes. There is also an obvious part of me which feels removed from those at home. I have been extremely aware of the precipice of transition that I feel myself in. Unsure of what is next while experiencing what I am unaccustomed to. I am grateful for a fresh space and place of unknown to explore. I have been processing a mix of reverence and grief of letting go and acknowledging the beauty of reconnecting with myself."

Precipice celebrates being vulnerable within a new environment. Many of the paintings are from scenes I have experienced here. Whether food, people, colors or landscape, I have pulled from my surroundings as an observer. Some works I have painted myself into. In these pieces I am involved, yet removed. The resulting images celebrate and mourn the capacity to hold and be held. They are a processing of what it means to exist within my body while acknowledging there is a falling apart while simultaneously being held together--thinking about how this relates to water and its capacity to suppress, but also buoy. How water allows us to float and be supported while touching everything and nothing at once. These works allow an openness to magic and spiritual awareness that is easy to find when things are fresh and new.”

Precipice is on view by appointment through August at Katikía

Immaculate Heart of Margaritaville, A Group Exhibition Curated by Devendra Banhart @ Nicodim Los Angeles

Curated by Devendra Banhart, “A prayer for my four-to-six nuclear families, for my ever-expanding universe of friends and lovers, for consciousnesses that may or may not exist beyond our postmodern El Dorados and Shangri-Las where dead dreams go to die twice:

May this sea moss gel cool the fire within in me that burns with unfiltered desire for epiphany in a pornographic desert;

May we all find a Six Flags for our unmet oral and spiritual needs;

May we all discover a Cartier diamond bracelet in the Bloomin’ Onion we snuck into the hot yoga session at the Cheesecake Factory;

May we all find comfort within our own place in Margaritaville—that sacred temple, that archetype for a freedom that exists somewhere between legitimacy and artifice that urges us to leave behind the very sacred temple that is selling us the dream to leave it all behind;

May we all attend the vernissage for Immaculate Heart of Margaritaville and bask in the ordinary magic, this orgy of authenticity buried in the most profane of structures.”

–Adapted from Out of Body: The Bortz Metzger Memoirs, R. Driblette, editor. Penguin Books Ltd, 2002

Immaculate Heart of Margaritaville is the top floor of the romantic wing of the capitalist nightmare, a fever dream manifested during a midday nap on a bed of ashwagandha-tipped nails with an ecstatic, honest, and truthful international coterie of artists, many of whom have never shown in the United States before.

In celebration of the closing, noted, lubricated, hole-istic tantric gurus Devendra Banhart and Ben Lee Ritchie Handler will lead the gallery in a guided meditation. Please bring a yoga mat and a clear head. The event will double as release party for a limited-edition t-shirt for the exhibition. July 29 from 3–6. Space is limited, please arrive a bit early.

Immaculate Heart of Margaritaville is on view through July 29th at Nicodim, 1700 S Santa Fe Avenue, #160, Los Angeles, CA 90021

Takashi Murakami's "Understanding the New Cognitive Domain" @ Gagosian

Understanding the New Cognitive Domain, an exhibition of work by Takashi Murakami focused on his monumental paintings, is on dislpay at the gallery in Le Bourget. The exhibition features five such works plus others in smaller formats and several sculptures. This is the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery in France.

The exhibition marks the debut of a monumental new 5-by-23-meter painting by Murakami based on the iwai-maku, or stage curtain, that he produced for the Kabuki-za theater in Ginza, Tokyo, in celebration of Japanese Kabuki actor and producer Ichikawa Ebizō XI’s assumption of the name Ichikawa Danjūrō XIII, Hakuen. (Kabuki stage names, which specify an actor’s style and lineage, are passed down through generations; the Ichikawa family has a roughly 350-year history.) The November 2022 unveiling of Murakami’s design, which was commissioned by film director Takashi Miike, coincided with the first performance of Ichikawa Shinnosuke VIII in the November Kichirei Kaomise Grand Kabuki Theater program.

Also on view is another extended-format painting, Dragon in Clouds – Indigo Blue (2010), which Murakami produced in response to eccentric Japanese artist Soga Shōhaku’s Dragon and Clouds (1763). Shōhaku’s work is a multi-panel Unryūzu (cloud-and-dragon) painting in which the titular creature appears as a Buddhist symbol of optimism and good fortune. Murakami’s painting, like Shōhaku’s, uses a restricted palette and is spread over several conjoined sections. Graphic swirls allude to Shōhaku’s expressive use of ink and suggest the dragon’s flight, combining with its flared nostrils and serpentine whiskers to evoke turbulent motion. Dragon in Clouds – Indigo Blue also resonates with contemporary Japanese visual culture, particularly the video game Blue Dragon, while its vast scale revives the visceral and psychological impact of Shōhaku’s masterpiece.

Also on view are several “lucky cat” paintings that reference the artist’s recent NFT projects, and other works featuring Murakami’s iconic smiling flower motif—including a two-meter rainbow neon sign—in which the artist again employs a retro-digital variant on his influential Superflat aesthetic. His ever-proliferating cartoonlike blossoms function as immediately recognizable and infinitely flexible icons that may be at once ornamental and symbolic, directing the viewer toward intertwined themes of identity, representation, and technology.

Understanding the New Cognitive Domain is on view through December 22 @ Gagosian Le Bourget 26 avenue de l’Europe. Every Saturday during the exhibition, Gagosian shuttle buses will run gratis between Le Bourget Gare RER (exit 1: Place des Déportés) and Gagosian Le Bourget every twenty minutes from 2 to 6pm. No reservation required. 

Everything is Alive: SHRINE Los Angeles presents Ross Simonini's "Tales"

Ross Simonini, The Ties, 2023, milk paint on muslin in walnut frame. Image courtesy of SHRINE.

Ross Simonini’s Tales is currently on view at SHRINE Los Angeles. In his work, Simonini completely intertwines art with life. He uses every body part to write, draw and paint—eradicating the divide that often lies between the artist and the canvas. It’s this corporeal process that begs the hidden unconscious to appear.

All of Simonini’s beings signify and relate to an understanding of the world through animism—a universal concept that every single thing is alive and animated. The confounding narratives that drift into focus in his paintings include virtually all beings from the animate to inanimate. Simonini sees and feels the life inside everything.

Tales is on view through August 19 at SHRINE, 538 N. Western Los Angeles, CA 90004

 
 

Hermès Presents A Spectacularly Oneiric Poetic and Cinematic Performance In Los Angeles

Hermès invites audiences travel to an imaginary universe created for the house by Belgian duo, director Jaco Van Dormael and choreographer Michèle Anne De Mey, together with the Astragales dance company. The performance is an invitation to take flight and see your dreams take shape in an ode to oneirism. This work metaphorically illustrates the lightness that is omnipresent at Hermès: in the delicate hands of the house’s craftsmen sewing with two needles at once; in the elegance of materials, and in the subtle notes of a perfume. It is an experience which sparks the imagination, designed by artisans of dreams,” says Pierre-Alexis Dumas, Hermès Artistic Director. Click here to book a session.

Persons Projects Examines the Influence of The Helsinki School Perspective @ Both of Their Gallery Spaces in Berlin

Persons Projects’ summer exhibition, The Helsinki School Perspective, is presented in both gallery spaces Lindenstr. 34 and 35, featuring a selection of artists, all of whom had pivotal roles in the beginning of the Helsinki School. The exhibition is dedicated to the historical aspect, exploring how these artists use the photographic processes as a voice for abstraction and a tool for interpreting their emotional landscapes. The Helsinki School platform was created by Timothy Persons in the 1990s, who became inspired by his experience with the Open Studio Concept that was popular during his graduate studies in the mid-1970s in Southern California. It grew to become the most extended sustainable educational platform of its kind consisting of six generations of selected MA students originating from the University of Art and Design, Helsinki, Finland. There are now more than 180 monogram books and 6 volumes of the Helsinki School book that have evolved from this program. This exhibition is curated to reintroduce a new perspective on the conceptual roots that built The Helsinki School.

Part 1 features work by Niko Luoma, Ea Vasko, Mikko Sinervo, and Nanna Hänninen. In Part 1, we experience four different approaches to how these selected artists use the photographic process to abstract a moment in time, the passage of a day, a memory of a specific place, or the interpretation of a historical painting.

Part 2 features work by Anni Leppälä, Janne Lehtinen, Miklos Gaál, and Ilkka Halso, artists who form a unique image that transcends how we interpret our personal, social, and ecological landscape seeing through a Nordic approach to nature.

Niko Luoma
Self-Titled Adaptation of Le Rêve (1932), (2015)
From the series Adaptions
Archival pigment print, Diasec
193 x 155 cm
© the artist, courtesy: Persons Projects

Niko Luoma
Self-Titled Adaptation of Caryatid (1913), (2018)
From the series Adaptations
Archival pigment print, Diasec
128 x 103 cm
© the artist, courtesy: Persons Projects

The Helsinki School Perspective is on show July 1st to September 9th at Persons Projects, Lindenstraße 34-35, 10969 Berlin

Benjamin Slinger Explores the Trickle Down of Role Player Games @ London's Darren Flook Gallery

 
 

Benjamin Slinger presents Dungeon Inc., their first solo show of sculpture, found objects and wall-based works at Darren Flook in London. In Dungeon Inc., the artist builds upon their previous work with science fiction and strike action and here links role player games and the birth of the new economics of the ‘80s, an economic revolution the consequences of which are still being lived with and built upon today, into their own world of references and laws.

The starting point of the exhibition was Slinger’s research into role player games and the discovery that in the midst of mass privatisation and creeping monetisation ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ wobbled through a licensing issue which caused a stir in the tabletop gaming world, the ownership of one's own fantasies seemed more and more tenuous. From that idea of capitalisms intersection with the personal and apparently private - which had been very present in Slingers last exhibition at Karin Guenther in Hamburg, Slinger started to conceive of a place where the politics of Reagan and Thatcher intersected with the games of imagination. Slinger merges the semiotics of civil disobedience, gameplay & collectables, and proposes political hyperbole as fantasy, economics as mysticism & politics as feudal warfare. Feudal CEO warlords, Reaganite Druids, Wallstreet Paladins fill the crevices where neoliberalism and capitalism break apart. As the artist stated “Dungeon Inc. is a psycho-political installation that plays with the implications of socio-political happenings and their pop cultural hangovers via cues from medieval fantasy role playing games.”

Dungeon Inc, like a game, leaves clues and cross references, Obama’s Oval Office door is perfectly recreated as conceptual painting, a figure lies on the ground, face covered with a sniper's mask wearing a President Bush election T- shirt. A lenticular scan of a Reagan character from Spitting Image and walls lamps made from Financial Times mugs, Republican memorabilia and fake candle light electric bulbs. In the office space Slinger has installed two works which are collections of trading cards, US presidential and role-playing games. The exhibition creates a whole, but a fractured and complex one, relating as it does to our private fantasies, the roles we play and world economics it feels appropriate that there is no neat resolution to this game.

Dungeon Inc. is on view through July 8th at Darren Flook, First Floor, 106 Great Portland Street, London

Will Cotton's "Trigger" @ Galerie Templon in Paris

 
 

Twenty years after his very first exhibition in Paris, New York painter Will Cotton, known for his depictions of sweets and cakes, is back on the walls of Galerie Templon with a subtle and quirky exhibition: Trigger.

In this new show, Will Cotton continues to reflect on pop culture and American myths. His 2020 series The Taming of the Cowboy, about the hyper-sexualisation of childhood and gender representations, featured ultra-masculine cowboys battling with pink unicorns. Will Cotton now introduces the cowgirl, an archetypal feminist figure, as voluptuous as she is provocative. With humour, she takes the opposite direction to the artist's usual female characters, pushing the gender boundaries further and blurring the relationship between the sexes as well as LGBT struggles and the notion of queerness.

The title of the exhibition is inspired by a notion that has become a political concept in the US: the trigger. It refers to the safe spaces created by the liberal left on American campuses in recent years. Trigger warnings are intended to prevent situations that could lead to post-traumatic stress disorder. However, in an America torn apart by the controversial issue of carrying weapons, the artist wonders if it is possible to dissociate it from the trigger of the firearms defended tooth and nail by the conservative right.

Will Cotton thus invents a world that mirrors our schizophrenic societies. His grandiose landscapes, with their cascading sweets and candy floss, are home to ambiguous scenes, playful but potentially disturbing or even explosive. A commentary on the opulence of an idealized America, Cotton's art is also a means of questioning the power of painting itself. The fluidity between great painting, timeless myths, advertising imagery and pop icons acts as a metaphor for the contradictions of our time.

Trigger is on view through July 22 @ Galerie Templon 30 Rue Beaubourg Paris.

Tina Born's Communal Dreamscape "Gonfanon" @ Laura Mars Gallery

Tina Born
Detail from 60 Jahre träumen (60 years of dreaming) (2023)
Excerpts from a collection of texts, DIN A4 papers, ballpoint pen, glass, metal, wood
approx. 300 x 40 x 3 cm
Copyright by the artist. Courtesy Laura Mars Gallery, Berlin

For her 4th solo exhibition at the Laura Mars Gallery, Tina Born presents an expansive installation entitled Gonfanon. The impetus here is dreams—those "hallucinatory" events that take place when the body is at rest. Evading clear interpretations and conclusions, but creating spaces for interpretation and, as it were, those "snippets" that we often only remember after the dream event, the artist arranges sculpture, found and built objects as well as excerpts from a collection of texts. The latter (60 Jahre träumen, 2023) are Born's own dream notes, which she collected over the years and now assigns to dates spanning a period of 60 years. Based on Arthur Rimbaud's statement, "I am another / I am another" or "I am many." Tina Born, in a further step, asked sixty people from her environment to transcribe these notes in their respective handwriting.

 
 

Gonfanon is on view until July 29th at Laura Mars Gallery, Bülowstraße 52, 10783 Berlin

Doing Time @ South Parade Gallery in London

In 2012, Juan Betancurth asked Benjamin Fredrickson to go to Colombia and photograph Betancurth’s mother handling a set of sculptures he had made for her. Betancurth, who was then living in New York, had not been home for eight years.

His mother is holding the sculptures as if they were a surrogate for her absent son. Her touch is tentative and meditative; but the sculptures are erotic and perhaps even menacing. They have the familiarity of household utensils but with the suggestion of fetish toys. The distance from which the artist conducts the encounter is a metaphor for the time that he has been away and remote from his mother. The experience is vicarious for both mother and son.

Doing Time by Juan Betancurth, Tristan Higginbotham, Georgina Hill, Garrett Lockhart, Stephen Polatch, Melanie Smith and Lucía Vidales is on view through July 8th at South Parade, Enclave 9, 50 Resolution Way, London

Izumi Kato's Homunculus Monsters Interrogate the Nature of Our Mortality @ Perrotin Paris

For any connoisseur of Japanese art, the ambiguous phenomena that have characterized Izumi Kato's work for more than two decades may seem familiar. Yet there is never any complete correspondence, only omnipresent echoes, the distinctive signs of a highly singular artistic universe.

Since the 2000s, Kato’s "untitled" sculptures, paintings, and drawings have featured hybrid figures (their limbs and breath producing vegetal or human shoots), budding flowers (often lotuses, the Buddhist flower par excellence, a symbol of purifying transformation plunging its roots into the mud), and other beings (human heads or homunculi hanging from bodies like clusters of ganglia). In the latter case, the multiplication is truly “monstrous;” the lotuses don’t proliferate. But they spring from an exhalation that evokes another type of Japanese art, the He-Gassen emaki (literally "fart scroll"), some of which show yokai fighting in a mad battle of winds (like the "Shinnô scroll" in the Hyôgo History Museum). The strange small creatures that spring up like ganglia from the larger figures also recall battles against monstrous animals, like the heroic struggle against the giant tarantula Tsuchi-gumo, at the end of which thousands of human skulls emerge from the spider’s severed neck. The play of mirrors between Kato's work and Japanese art creates limitless perspectives.

The distinctive appearance of his faces, with their enlarged eyes, often without pupils, the whole shaped by nose and mouth, the impression of being covered with ritual makeup, all this has numerous echoes in the fantastical prints produced in the 19th century, during the latter part of the Edo period and the Meiji era of Imperial Japan (1868-1912). Kato's work must be considered in relation to Utagawa Kunyoshi’s prints (1797-1861), one of the masters of the genre. In the work of Kunyoshi, the yokai are startling hybrids with bulging eyes, large jaws, and strange faces that seem like theatrical masks.

Looking at the hand-and-footless limbs of Kato's “characters,” one is reminded of Ichiyusai Kuniyoshi’s playful prints of "demon-shaped plants" (1844-1847). Yet, what sets Izumi Kato's creatures apart from all this pleasant, swaggering bluster is their silence. His work is characterized by a seriousness absent from the other works.

The totemic immobility of Izumi Kato's painted and sculpted works is strikingly melancholic. These figures are endless questions, beyond any specific place or time, as Japanese as they are ours, wherever we are. They challenge our gaze, drawing us in, interrogating what makes us mortal.

Izumi Kato is on view through July 29 @ Perrotin 76 Rue de Turenne.

Cary Kwok @ Herald St In London

 
 

Cary Kwok presents new works at Herald St, which are currently on view at their Museum St premises. The show features a suite of acrylic and ink paintings encased in artist’s frames, which present quiet moments suffused with tenderness. Still lifes of domestic items, portraits of gazing men, and sublime landscapes are rendered in a soft, dreamlike realism, marking a change in mood while continuing imagined, cinematic narratives which have pervaded Kwok’s practice. Installed among these is a functional light switch by the artist mimicking vintage Bakelite styles, its phallic toggle continuing the humour and eroticism of his earlier work.

The intimate vignettes in the exhibition unfold like scenes in a movie. Storytelling lies at the heart of Kwok’s work, inspired by the period films he watched as a child and his continued passion for the genre. His paintings are akin to film stills and details of sets – even when devoid of characters, the carefully accentuated objects and directed lighting hint at events unravelled and actions to come. In one work, a looming head casts a shadow on a warm burling wood grain near wisps of smoke drifting from a lit cigarette, resting in an ashtray and gently smudged with lipstick. The same pink gloss is found on the rim of a wine glass in another piece, with raking light revealing the gleaming translucence of an opened wine bottle sitting just out of the frame. When conceiving these works, Kwok sets a scene in his head, referencing directors he admires, continuing plotlines from his own previous compositions, and playing out fantasies in his mind.

The object-like paintings in the exhibition above all emanate a mood. A number are bathed in a palpable 1980s quotidian glamour, while others reveal a contemporary romanticism. Loaded with poignancy, the works blend personal musings and imaginative reveries. Through these glowing tableaus, Kwok encapsulates moments of wonder, magnifying emotions and revelling in the magic of details.

New works by Cary Kwok are on view through July 15th at the new Museum St Premises at Herald St, 43 Museum St, London

REALITYBYTES Warps The Virtual World @ panke.gallery in Berlin

REALITYBYTES is a web-browser plugin that substitutes images and photographs on cnn.com, thesun.co.uk and pornhub.com with AI-generated counterparts. 

The plugin blurs the boundary between AI-created and human-created images, delivering results that are both uncanny and humorous. At the same time, it provides a stark insight into the racism and biases deeply ingrained within AI, spotlighting AI's growing influence on image perception and representation. 

Next to this, a broadcast entirely authored by an artificial intelligence will be presented. The presentation not only probes the ethics and reliability of AI-generated content but also challenges us to question the integrity of the content we routinely absorb in this era where AI is omnipresent.

Lotte Louise de Jong is a media artist from the Netherlands with a background in film-making. Her work ranges from physical, digital and online installations to more traditional forms of narrative. Her practice addresses how we, as a society, view and shape our identity through mediated spaces like the digital world. The internet as a space for exploring intimacy has been the main focus of her past projects. She obtained a master’s degree in Fine Art and Design at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam in 2019. In 2020 she received an emerging artist grant from the Mondriaan Fonds. 

REALITYBYTES is available for download here and will be on view through July 8th at panke.gallery, Hof V, Gerichtstraße 23, 13347 Berlin

Pol Taburet's "OPERA III: ZOO 'The Day of Heaven and Hell'" @ Lafayette Anticipations

“OPERA III: ZOO ‘The Day of Heaven and Hell’” is Pol Taburet’s first solo exhibition in an institution. Born in 1997, the artist is presenting paintings as well exploring new mediums such as sculpture and installation. The works, many of which are new, create an itinerary that unfolds from scene to scene throughout the Fondation.

The exhibition unfolds over two acts around different passages between inside and outside, darkness and light, dreams and awakenings, which all evoke the times of birth and death, central themes in the work of Pol Taburet.

Creatures at the intersection of myths and cartoons, their quasi-human faces are attached to a child’s cart. Their closed eyes invite us into reverie. One room houses Belly (2023), a large fountain which symbolises fertility and immortality in many myths. Its rounded shape evokes the body of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, beauty, and sexuality. Here, the fountain is dried up and rusty, bearing the traces and weight of a time which seems to have caught up with it.

With My dear (2023), a dining room standing in the centre of the space, is erected like a temple to a deity, hidden under a large tablecloth, like the monster under a child’s bed. For Our Children (2022) deals with the theme of the fall and the opposition between celestial and terrestrial forces, with its female bodies fertilizing the earth, of which only the legs elevated by stilettos are visible. Reinterpreted biblical episodes offer a narrative that opens up new mythologies, anchored in the strangeness of everyday life. The Christian figure is found in Christ’s tongue (2021), a painting of a being spitting out a crucifix in a rejection of an entire belief system.

OPERA III: ZOO “The Day of Heaven and Hell” is on view through September 3 @ Lafayette Anticipations 9 Rue du Plâtre, 75004 Paris.

Rule, Britannia! Daniel Lee’s Expression Of Burberry Evolves With Its Spring 2024 Collection

Burberry’s 2024 collection by Daniel Lee is a revelation. According to the collection notes: “The focus remains on British wardrobe archetypes, cut closer to the body, on British motifs and the British outdoors.” The zeitgeist of the past and present merge in a beautiful tableaux of checks, argyle, houndstooth, and use of the iconic Equestrian Knight Design. All while remaining breathtakingly youthful and hopeful. More from the collection notes: “Water is pivotal in swan and duck prints, and the idea of water resistance and proofing.” Rule, Britannia!