Kaleidoscope

VISITJana Euler’s exhibitionat Galerie Neu, Berlin

Redazione — Wed, 22 May 2013 16:56:26 +0000

Last year, the counterintuitive results of a study were published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology under the title “The Virtues of Gossip.” The article touted the ability of gossip to reinforce social norms as well as to designate deviants within a social sphere. The lines between norms and outliers are recurring themes in the paintings of Jana Euler, whose current exhibit at Galerie Neu in Berlin is titled “Dirty Gossip Rain” or “From private to public painting and the streetlight on the way.” The dual titles might point to the German-born painter’s way of working—technically and thematically—with superimposition or, if you like, her studied, manneristic, almost Outsider-art equivocation among multiple realities. A brief index of the imagery in Euler’s gratifyingly bizarre paintings: two hazy, airbrushed-looking tigers fiercely nuzzling in a field, overlain with a perspectival study of a room; a series of three eyes, the final one looking like it’s swallowed a car’s rear-view mirror; a man in a skin cap hopelessly doing laps in his bathtub. Their motifs are clear to us from the history of the unconscious—“eyes,” “rooms,” paranoid perspectives. But here, Euler presents a view that—like a Surrealistic Mobius strip—remains outside and inside at once. Like all gossip, the works would be fatally comic if they weren’t somehow also so blissfully sad. (Pablo Larios)

Jana Euler’s exhibition at Galerie Neu will run through June 1.

VISITHenri Chopin’s exhibitionat Supportico Lopez, Berlin

Redazione — Mon, 20 May 2013 13:43:01 +0000

In the early ‘50s Henri Chopin threw all of his poems in a bag and then he burned it on the bank of the Seine: this was his first act of poetry. Founder of the Poésie Sonore movement, film-maker, publisher of Revue OU, sculptor, painter and typographer, this eclectic French poet was above all “an inner space explorer,” as his friend William Borroughs stated. Swallowing a small microphone, Chopin discovered the body as a factory of unceasing sound from which he created his well-known “audiopoems”: multilayered compositions of sounds that he materialized with electricity, going beyond the traditional verbal dimension of poetry and opening it up to a spatial one. His research came to touch the body cavities as ancestral synesthetic depths where there are no words but the purest and most basic units of sound, which he then assembled in a poetry of the internal spaces. Similarly, in his typewriter poems Chopin extracted the micro-particles of the language (i.e. the letters) in order to highlight their serial and conventional status as geometrized and predetermined sounds. For example, in La Crevette Amoureuse (1967-1975), his manuscript presented by Supportico Lopez, Chopin developed the narrative and the visual plot in a dynamic thickening of types that also generates ERnest MARiette, the pointy main characters, with a constant trespassing of the senses. Likewise the display, curated by architects Kuehn Malvezzi, unfolds the 146 pages of Chopin’s typewriter poem in a sculptural structure, adding a cinematographic uniqueness to the whole. (Bianca Stoppani)

Henri Chopin’s exhibition at Supportico Lopez (Berlin) will run through June 8.

VISIT“Hi From California”at Freedman Fitzpatrick, Los Angeles

Redazione — Thu, 16 May 2013 13:42:11 +0000

It all began on a full moon night in the Californian desert, a few miles away from Joshua Tree National Park. Former Tanya Leighton gallery director Robbie Fitzpatrick and writer Alex Freedman, both dressed in custom suits, hosted a pre-opening party for the launch of their gallery in Los Angeles that featured a Native American-inspired ritual of burying artworks packed in suitcases into the ground. Nestled in what used to be a medical clinic in a Hollywood Boulevard strip mall, Freedman Fitzpatrick presents an opening group exhibition reflecting the owners’ involvement in an emerging European scene and who, from Berlin through Zürich and London, have formed a reunion of artists sharing a sense of generational community. The press release of the exhibition “Hi from California” is composed by Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff, founders of the Berlin hangout Times, and reflects a personal narrative that seems to grasp a reunion of long-time friends and collaborators. The presented works comprise a wall-size erotic/organic painting by performer Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, a series of black resin puddle sculptures by Londoner Marlie Mul, and an in-situ pipe-sized installation by Zürich-based Mathis Altmann. As to extend notions of disciplines and media, fashion designer Nhu Duong exhibits a pair of gloves in the front window, while Swiss artist Hannah Weinberger conceives a sound piece accompanying the set-up. Deliberately defined as a Los Angeles commercial gallery, yet experimenting in the style of a European non-profit space, Freedman Fitzpatrick clouds the clues and announces upcoming collaborations with Tobias Madison and Lucie Stahl. (Martha Kirszenbaum)

“Hi From California” at Freedman Fitzpatrick, Los Angeles, will run through June 1.

VISITKatja Strunz’ exhibitionat Berlinische Galerie

Redazione — Tue, 14 May 2013 14:51:35 +0000

Paul Virilio describes the shrinking of the earth as an atopian experience in the moment of the invention of the vehicle. This “telluric contraction” was an important point of departure for Katja Strunz when conceptualizing her solo show at Berlinische Galerie, which opened during this year’s gallery weekend. For “Drehmoment (Viel Raum, wenig Zeit)” (“Torque (Much Time, Little Space)”), only two large black metal objects were necessary for the artist to tame the big entrance hall of the museum’s ground floor exhibition space. The minimalistic sculptural installation demonstrates the artist’s very different approaches towards an investment in the materiality of things, their aging processes, and particularly how they can stand in for a literal folding of space and time. The aluminum object almost blocking the way into the gallery resembles a huge crumpled-up piece of paper, whereas the constructivist steel sculpture towards the back is a gigantic but accurately folded strap, simulating the broken chain of an undefined industrial machine. When smoothed out, it is supposed to fit the exhibition space perfectly. For Strunz, the fold eliminates or solidifies space, the surface gets stored in the resulting relief, and the moment of time gains importance instead. But in its slackness the precision, scale and heaviness of the steel folds provokes a certain kind of disappointment compared to the radiating energy of the randomly crumbled aluminum sculpture. The juxtaposition is virtuously staged by Strunz in this show. (Kathleen Reinhardt)

Katja Strunz’s exhibition at Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, will run through September 2.

LISTEN TOThe Focus Group’s new album“Elektrik Karousel”

Redazione — Fri, 10 May 2013 15:00:54 +0000

The Focus Group is the brainchild of Julian House, musician, co-owner of the Ghost Box music label (by whom this record is released) and designer associated with the London-based creative firm Intro. The album Elektrik Karousel (2013) follows in the style of The Focus Group’s previous installment, We Are All Pan’s People (2007)—after a parenthetical collaboration with the cult band Broadcast in 2009, Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age—in imagining the soundtrack of an alternative Great Britain, where the course of time freezes in the late ’70s and goes back and forth to the late ’60s. The compositions strongly rely on a sampling technique in which source material—bucolic ballads, psychedelic music, melodic jazz and jingles from old-time television shows—metamorphoses into a fractioned soundscape. House has perfected a formula for his aural collages, using elements of the sound library as magical components to evoke Italian Giallo films, old-school British horror movies and Czech surrealism. The music on Elektrik Karousel would normally fall within the definition of “hauntology” hyped by bloggers few years ago, but could also be described as “archive psychedelics”: the artist here is a facilitator for the emergence of the hidden and the latent in the history of recorded sound. The resulting estrangement comes from an artisanal combination of layers of the familiar. (Francesco Tenaglia)

VISITAleksandra Domanović’s showat Tanya Leighton, Berlin

Redazione — Thu, 09 May 2013 17:03:44 +0000

At her first solo show at Tanya Leighton, Aleksandra Domanović investigates technological advances and feminism in her native former Yugoslavia. Her research into the nation’s technological evolution shows that Yugoslavia was far more advanced than most Eastern European countries. In the gallery Domanović showcases a series of mechanical hands the artist fastidiously crafted from 3D models and then cast in various materials, including bronze. The portrayed hand is a duplication of the Belgrade Hand, a limb created in the ’60s by Yugoslav scientist Rajko Tomović as one of the earliest attempts to give artificial limbs a sense of touch. One of the hands in the gallery blooms out of a wall holding a baton, a reference to the Relay of Youth ceremony that used to take place in former communist Yogoslavia. The majority of the other hands, however, are placed vertically on top of Plexiglas plinths pointing upwards. On one pedestal, the artist has placed images from Donald Cammell’s Demon Seed (1977), a film whose premise details a young woman impregnated by Protheus, an artificial intelligence portrayed with a Belgrade Hand. Elsewhere in the gallery, Domanović presents a print of a lifelike Belgrade Hand adorned with fleshy mechanics, behaving like a representation of mankind’s slow evolution towards AI technological singularity. (James Shaeffer)

Aleksandra Domanović’s show at Tanya Leighton, Berlin, will run through June 30.

VISIT Michael E. Smith’s showat KOW, Berlin

Redazione — Wed, 08 May 2013 15:00:23 +0000

The works in Michael E. Smith’s solo show at KOW are not easy to find sometimes. Loosely scattered throughout the eccentric gallery space, they are almost hiding from view in plain sight, as if it has been an enormous endeavor to get to their current positions, lurking around corners and on the ceiling, luring the viewer into coming closer. For this staging of an unearthly world of objects, the Detroit artist completed site-specific works during the installation process, employing his signature mix of all kinds of different materials, from day-to-day industrial objects like plastic bags or furniture, to undefinable organic materials. Whereas other artists working with similar materialities often go the route of visual overkill through amassing and clustering, Smith heads in the opposite direction, exposing the vulnerability of these strange compositions when simply left by themselves. The hybrid material fusions of Smith’s works often have a direct relationship to the body—be it the t-shirt spanning a large bowl, the chair in the window bearing a plastic excrescence underneath its seat, the hood of a sweatshirt stuffed with black plastic or a bundle of feathers. Through their familiarity as everyday objects they create an uncanny intimacy, forcing themselves upon the viewer in their disturbing materiality that lies in between life and death. (Kathleen Reinhardt)

Michael E. Smith’s show at KOW, Berlin, will run through July 21.

VISITMichel Majerus’s exhibitionat Michel Majerus Estate, Berlin

Redazione — Tue, 07 May 2013 15:17:40 +0000

The mysterious and reclusive Berlin gallery/showroom neugerriemschneider spread itself thin across three different locations during the city’s colossal Gallery Weekend. Exhibiting solo projects by Isa Genzken and Billy Childish, neugerriemschneider dedicated a large space in Prenzlauer Berg to the late Luxembourger artist Michael Majerus. Majerus, whose rising career was cut short in a tragic plane crash in 2002, has exhibited with neugerriemschneider before. Known for his large-scale colorful paintings that combine paint with digital alterations, Majerus made a career out of carrying Pop Art into the 21st century. At neugerriemschneider last weekend, the gallery exhibited several pieces that each seemingly respond to singular Pop Art titans of the previous century. A large black shark printed on pink cloth hung on one wall brings to mind Sigmar Polke. Another painting in the back recalls the collaged canvases of James Rosenquist, while an additional triangular work mimics a colorful Kenneth Noland or early Judy Chicago. Towards the entrance, however, a giant print of a magazine advert featuring King Kong adorned with Christmas decorations predicts later works by Kelley Walker. While a lot of retrospectives can show how dated work can become after an artist’s death, Majerus’s showcase at neugerriemschneider proves that some bodies of work can survive well after their creator’s passing. (James Shaeffer)