CULTURETV Gallery blog

"Immoral Facts & Fables" Galerie Caprice Horn, Berlin

2008-10-06T18:30:00.000-07:00

“Immoral Facts & Fables” presents the work of sixteen artists who use fable imagery and fictitious characters to investigate forms of modern life and identity. The artists included in the exhibition, work in a variety of media and techniques such as photography, installation computer generated animation and collage.

A modern course, the exhibition contains haunting images of darkness and ambiguous space (Edgar Martins, Alfonso Brezmes, Robert Gligorov), solitary figures (Nadine Rennert, Sunil Gupta), references to childhood (Sarah Small, Meghan Boody), mythical creatures (Tae Hun Kang, Yun-Sun Jung), multiple attributes to fable and tale (Chul-Hyun Ahn, Li Wei, Stehn Raupach, Tae Hun Kang).

Traditionally fable and moral are not separable. They strive for the improvement of human conduct, at discovering personal and social identities. The modern day fable foregoes moral, the common sense is missing. The work of these artists communicates culture as operating between the real and the imagined, past and present time. By doing so, they question the ongoing process of myth-making and story-telling.

The Art World, Feinkost, Berlin

2007-12-24T17:12:00.000-08:00

The Art World

Ad Reinhardt, Alan Phelan, Balthasar Burkhard, Ben Gavin, Charles Gute, Christian Jankowski, IRWIN, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Matthieu Laurette, Pablo Helguera, Rainer Ganahl, REP Group, SOSka Group, et al.

November 25 to January 10.

PATRICK HUGHES THE PRINTS IN BETWEEN until 17.11.07 Flowers Graphic, London

2007-10-21T12:52:00.000-07:00

The artist adopts a variety of different motifs in these works - stars, roses, rainbows, hearts, eggs, ghosts, phones, cocks, crosses and keyholes appear in various guises whilst themes of paradox and oxymoron remain a fixed preoccupation.

This exhibition features two rainbow prints - a recurring image in his work. In his use of the rainbow Patrick Hughes, was interested in making substance of an experience - something evanescent made permanent. With his opaque, fixed rainbow he continually approaches the idea of creating something tangible out of a chance happening. In Colour Process 1984, the rainbow curls into an early computer screen, and in Falling Blossom 1984, the confetti, already a paper confection of images of bows, bells, hearts and horseshoes, happens to fall into a rainbow arrangement. Stardust 1983 and Paper Roses 1985 (pictured above) use this same notion of solid light. This idea was first developed in Hughes' Sunshine 1974 in which a beam of solid yellow light pours itself as an object through a window.

The set of eight prints published in 1986 - Beach Heart, Cobweb, Egg in the Sky, Ghost on the Line, Jigsaw, Keyholes, Telephone at the Door and This Way Up originate from watercolours made by the artist during a move towards a more fluid working method. This period of experimentation led to Hughes' 'reverspectives' - an ongoing series of 3D constructions on the theme of reverse perspective for which he is perhaps best known. We also see the beginnings of this body of work in the etchings of 1988, Bend in the Road, Highways and Byways and The Republic of the Road where infinity takes centre stage. A rich source of paradox, infinity lies at the back of Hughes reverspectives as they always seek and sometimes find the ubiquitous vanishing point.

DREAMS AND ILLUSIONS: The Photography of Lynn Goldsmith

2007-10-09T18:22:00.000-07:00

What is real? What is true? What separates truth and fiction? These are the questions asked by the highly-acclaimed and multi-talented photographer Lynn Goldsmith in her works on view at the Contessa Gallery.

The Contessa Gallery at is excited to bring to collectors and the general public the art of the famous photographer whose works have appeared on the covers of such magazines as LIFE, Newsweek,Time, People, Rollingstone etc. Lynn Goldsmith’s subjects have varied from entertainment personalities to sports stars, from film directors to authors, from the extra-ordinary to the ordinary man on the street. Her thirty years of photography have not only been an investigation into the nature of the human spirit, but also into the natural wonders of our planet.
She is recognized as an acclaimed portrait photographer who worked with such people as Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, Bob Dylan, Frank Zappa, The Police, Miles Davis and countless others. During her creative career she experimented as a director, and a recording artist, but lately she has turned the lens on herself in a new series of photographs entitled “In the Looking Glass”.In this work Goldsmith uses the artificial environment as a seed for a narrative that she then brings forth by transposing her own visage into the scene thus mixing the real and imaginary worlds into one that is both and neither. As she describes it,“I want my work to help enlighten me. I’m interested in multiple meanings and a kind of ambiguity that frustrates any attempt to pin it down... I wanted to take what I had learned in my career to show how we are made up of multiple selves”.
The resulting images feel, at first glance, deceptively familiar. Many of the scenes still closely mimic
advertising displays they were originally based upon but have a heightened surrealistic quality. Others echo familiar fairytales and myths. They possess the unsettling strangeness of the ordinary subtly transformed nto a new unknown quantity.
The “characters”, as Goldsmith refers to her fictitious selves, hover in a space between the animate and the inanimate, between subject and object.
Also on display will be several of Goldsmith’s rock mosaics, another of her signature media. To create them,she assembles over 2000 individual photographs into extraordinary portraits (based on a Chuck Close grid.

Haluk Akakçe until 06.10. GALERIST, Istanbul

2007-09-30T15:34:00.000-07:00

Haluk Akakçe, who is known for digitally generated videos that draw from painting, sculpture, and architecture and often feature emotion-inducing sound tracks, is one of the best-known contemporary Turkish artists. His time-based works are caught in a cycle of endless transformation, their abstract details changing with an almost somnambulistic rhythm that moves between the seductive and the threatening. In this exhibition, the artist engages an unusual subject: the meaning of the word definition, which, he posits, has shifted from the rigidly codified to the fluid. Akakçe translates language into his characteristic floating shapes, complementing his video works with drawings and wall reliefs—each an attempt to condense the “constant changes” he identifies into a single object. The forms of the classical media in the exhibition range from severe to gentle, keeping the viewer at a distance. The videos, on the other hand, pull one ineluctably into their visual world. Their floating, slowly mutating shapes encourage in the viewer associative reveries, which are frequently interrupted by violent visual moments. Does this represent the static aspect of definition coming apart? If so, this change in its meaning would, unequivocally, entail a kind of liberation—and the optimism of such a promise is experienced throughout this visually and conceptually convincing exhibition. Sabine Vogel Artforum

Sara Sze until 22.09. Victoria Miro Gallery, London

2007-09-09T14:06:00.000-07:00

The installation – Sze’s first with the gallery – spans both floors. The work on the ground floor is new to the gallery, while the piece on the second floor incorporates a reconfiguration of a recent work – Tilting Planet – initially shown at Malmö Konsthall, Sweden. Since the late 1990s Sarah Sze’s signature sculptural aesthetic has presented ephemeral installations that penetrate walls, suspend from ceilings and burrow into the ground. Creating immense, yet intricate site-specific work the artist utilises a myriad of everyday objects in her installations – cotton buds and tea bags; water bottles and ladders; light bulbs and electric fans. Each piece is subject to Sze’s careful consideration of every shift in scale between the humble and the monumental, the throwaway and the precious, the incidental and the essential. In this new body of work Sarah Sze organizes space as if it is a remnant of human behaviour discovered by accident. The formal construction of the pound-store objects as rafts, nests, tents, and escape routes mimics the necessities that emerge from various survival mechanisms and states of refuge. Like an entire ecosystem, these individual objects participate in larger systems of interaction performing a role beyond their commonplace function.

Anne Berning CAC Malaga until 19.08.07

2007-08-05T15:57:00.000-07:00

CAC Málaga, the centre for contemporary art run by Málaga City Council, presents the first solo exhibition at a Spanish museum or art centre by the German artist Anne Berning. Her theme is the world of painting and the stereotyped way in which it is classified in art books and catalogues, explored through the painted spines of large books in which the artists appear according to the pictorial style they represent. The exhibition, which will be open at CAC Málaga until August 19, comprises a site specific painting installation accompanied by a series of other paintings exploring the same theme.

Under the title “Encyclopaedic incompleteness”, CAC Málaga presents this show by Anne Berning, featuring a series of superb paintings exploring the way this well-known German artist sees art.

According to Fernando Francés, Director of the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, “In her painting, Anne Berning seeks to provoke a reaction to the phenomenon of the visual that confronts society today. Anne Berning presents her work as an open, changing reality in which parts can be added, moved or removed as the society surrounding the work advances.”

Taking as her point of reference the archives of art history, Anne Berning works with such different materials as photographs and films. In her view, today’s art requires a preliminary critical analysis of non-contemporary art. In Berning’s own words, her paintings are “a kind of collection of fragments, contrasts, lists and parallels.”

Rorschach Shopkeeper Works－Ken Lum, Tang Contempary Art, Beijng

2007-07-01T09:53:00.000-07:00

Ken Lum: Rorschach Shopkeeper Works is the last of a series of three exhibitions held in Tang Contemporary Art Centre in Beijing. Similar to the preceeding shows Surplus Value (June 2006) and Accumulation (September 2006), this exhibition tries to question the relevance of artistic creation and the value of the individual in Chinese high-speed consumer society, its possibilities to define itself aside from the logic of the market. While 揝urplus Value?looked at the art work in particular in an environment where art is considered a kind of indicator for and factor of social and economical productivity, 揂ccumulation?searched for a space of artistic intervention free from dominant discourses, putting forth the aspects of communication and cooperation as a major potential of artistic creation. In Rorschach Shopkeeper Works, his first solo show in China, Ken Lum now reflects upon the question of identity related to the production of images - signs - in urban society, thus focusing on the constitution of the subject.

New Directions from China Plug.in, Basel

2007-06-03T12:03:00.000-07:00

Group show with media art from China Zhang Peili, Geng Jianyi, Huang Shi, Miao Xiaochun, spylab, Wu Juehui, Jin Jiangbo, Lu Yang. Curator: Zhang Ga The Exchange between Artists from China and Switzerland was made possible by the generous support by Pro Helvetia. Curator’s statement The rapid development of media and communications technologies in China in recent years and the increasingly extensive exchange and dialogues prompted by various international new media art exhibitions and symposia in the Mainland have sparkled new inspirations in art making among Chinese artists. No longer satisfied with mere mental perception and a transfer of meaning confined within a singular and closed environment, many Chinese artists have in the past few years ventured out to experiment with a participatory art experience and to renegotiate space and time with audiences to explore an open system that expends the production of meaning, in which chance and instability, vulnerability and possibilities emerge as the contingent mirror image of the complexity of contemporary life. Employing sensing devices, network schemes, telecommunications protocols and other technologically enabled media, these artists, much like their global peers, set out to advance the legacy of social interaction advocated by the Fluxus and the Happenings, with tactile interactivity and indeterminate offspring. Though familiar to their western counterparts insofar as technologies are concerned, the new works from China inherit a particular sensibility that alludes to social critique and reflection on the very tradition to which all these artists are indebted and suggests an evolving tactile aesthetic that is deceptively alien from the Chinese cultural tradition, yet its allegorical embeddedness and nuanced emotive resonance reveal an amorphous kinship with the past and leave much to be imagined. “New Direction from China” is the first attempt to bring an exhibition of Chinese artists working exclusively in the area of new media to the European audience. The exhibition is comprised of works from both established as well as emerging artists from Mainland China. By presenting a body of exemplifying works, it is my hope to introduce to the West a glimpse of the new direction of artistic endeavor from China, though nascent, yet already manifesting great potential and refreshing vitality. The exhibition is conceived to inspire active dialogues among media art communities and to embark on a discourse of the open art work seen from culturally and historically disparate contexts and traditions. Zhang Ga

Francois Chaignaud until 09.06 Yukiko Kawase, Paris

2007-05-28T15:34:00.000-07:00

Francois Chaignaud (b. 1983, lives and works in Paris France. He began at 7 dance classes at the Conservatoire National de Région in Rennes, continued at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse (CNSM) in Paris, from which he graduated in 2002 with honors "outstanding". He started collaborating with various choreographers such as Boris Chamatz, Emmanuelle Huynh and Gilles Jobin... Since 2004 he has performed on different stages at Fondation Cartier, La Générale, or private apartments. He is currently (2006-2007) working with Cécilia Bengola on the project PAQUERETTE. In addition, he studies for an Master in contemporary art history at Paris X. You can further reach him on his blog: http://reliefsouterrain.blogspot.com/

KILLING TIME: An exhibition of Cuban artists from the 1980s to the present

2007-05-17T18:15:00.000-07:00

Killing Time, curated by Elvis Fuentes, Yuneikys Villalonga, and Glexis Novoa, focuses on the work of over seventy contemporary Cuban artists that have approached the subject of time. “The Revolution has been a symbolic intervention on Cuban Time. In return, time has shaped discourses of and on the Cuban Revolution,” said curators. Time patterns: Rewriting History, Productive Journey vs. Free Time: From Diversion to Subversion, and Aging and Decaying: An Archaeology of Utopia, are some of many subjects explored in different media, including performances, installations, photographs, videos, drawings, paintings, sculpture, murals, prints and ephemera. This exhibition spans from late 1970s to the present, and provides a timely context for Cuban artists whose work has had little or no exposure in the United States. Many of these artists have metaphorically recorded some of the tensions in the cultural, social and political landscape of the past three decades, and have often been dismissed by the official discourse on the Island or stereotyped by narrow conceptions of identity. A special section of the exhibition features the origins of Performance and Conceptual art in Cuba, through original works and documentation materials never before shown in the United States. In addition to the exhibition, this show will include extensive public programming and a catalogue.

ARTISTS

Francis Acea, Pavel Acosta, Jairo Alfonso, All Stars Team, José Luis Alonso Mateo, Alexandre Arrechea, Arte Calle, Magdiel Aspillaga, Juan Pablo Ballester, James Bonachea, Ricardo Brey, Saidel Brito, Tania Bruguera, La Campana Group, María Magdalena Campos Pons, Iván Capote, Yoan Capote, Consuelo Castañeda, Nilo Castillo, Sandra Ceballos & Espacio Aglutinador, Raúl Cordero, Arturo Cuenca, Ángel Delgado, Felipe Dulzaides, El Soca & Fabian, Enema Collective, Henry Eric, Antonio Eligio Fernández “Tonel”, José A. Figueroa, Coco Fusco, Carlos Garaicoa, Fernando García, Pavel Giroud, Alejandro González, María Elena González, Juan-si González, Abdel Hernández, Hexágono Group, Tony Labat, Francisco Lastra, Glenda León, Alejandro López, Rafael López Ramos, Janler Méndez, Manuel Mendive, Beverly Mojena, Maritza Molina, Glexis Novoa, Antonio Núñez, Ernesto Oroza, Cristina Padura, Alain Pino, Humberto Planas, Segundo Planes, Provisional Group, Aldo Damián Menéndez, Ernesto Pujol, Rigoberto Quintana, Ritual Art-De Group, Rubert Quintana, Fernando Rodríguez & Francisco de la Cal, René Francisco Rodríguez, Carlos Rodríguez Cárdenas, Joel Rojas, Yali Romagoza, Lázaro Saavedra, Leandro Soto, Ezequiel Suárez, T&T, José Ángel Toirac, César Trasobares, Hárold Vazquez, Aaron Vega Granados, Liudmila Velasco & Nelson Ramírez de Arellano, José Ángel Vincench, Ramón Williams.

Martin Creed until 29.07 Hauser & Wirth, London

2007-05-08T06:32:00.000-07:00

A major solo exhibition by MARTIN CREED. The show will feature an extensive selection of new work, including monumental wood and metal sculptures, film, paintings and a composition for chamber orchestra which will premiere on the opening night. MARTIN CREED's work is known for its elemental directness, economy of means and friendly, deadpan absurdity. ‘My world is a soup of thoughts, feelings and things all mixed up together. Working is a way of trying to cope, to separate the soup and escape; to get from the inside out.’ Creed forms pared-down exaggerations, expressionistic gestures distilled and refined to an extreme point. Rigorous geometry and rhythmic structures create frameworks within which things can move freely and change. Work No. 329, in which half the volume of the exhibition space is filled with balloons, is a kind of ultimate sculpture, constantly in flux, which takes the shape of the space it is in and the people interacting with it. Exhilarating and unpredictable, it is typical of Creed's hard-edged, soft-hearted minimalism. For MARTIN CREED art is ‘always a background to people; colours and shapes brought alive in their use by people’. Creed was born in Wakefield, England in 1968, and grew up in Glasgow, Scotland. He lives and works in London and Alicudi, Italy. He has exhibited extensively worldwide, and in 2001 won the Tate's Turner Prize for ‘The lights going on and off’. This last year has seen him touring with his ‘Variety Show’, a theatrical production which combines words, music and dance — most recently showing in New York with the Public Art Fund. His first film, ‘Sick Film’, was premiered last October in London. He is currently working on an architectural project for the London Library. Following Coppermill Creed has a solo survey show at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College in New York, opening Saturday 7 July, and a solo show at Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin beginning 5 October. In addition, Creed is working on an extensive publication that will present a survey of his oeuvre. Reproducing every one of his works, and with comprehensive essays by Germaine Greer and Massimiliano Gioni, MARTIN CREED COMPLETE WORKS 1986—2007 will be published by STEIDL Hauser & Wirth this winter. Creed performs regularly with his band, and they can next be seen at Goldsmiths College Student Union, London, on 11 May. MARTIN CREED is the last of three exhibitions held at Coppermill, Hauser & Wirth’s East End space. The exhibition follows from Christoph Büchel’s Simply Botiful, October 11 2006 – March 18 2007, and Dieter Roth / Martin Kippenberger, May 26 – August 27 2006.

Modern Solitude - Group Show until 19.05, Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam

2007-04-27T15:32:00.000-07:00

Group exhibition with:
Eylem Aladogan, Natalia Benedetti, Job Koelewijn, Gabriel Lester, Renzo Martens, Shana Moulton, Magali Reus and Berend Strik

'However, contrary to what Nietzsche had in mind, no new values arose to take the place of the rejected Christian doctrines. As a result, we now live in a fairly nihilist society: we have thrown off the yoke of Christian dogmas, but what has replaced them is little more than a vacuum.'
Michel Houellebecq, Elementaire deeltjes, Singel Pockets, 2004. p.80

The individual is the greatest good of our age - in fact it has become our modern religion. That is a consequence of modernity; it is one of the fruits of emancipation and Enlightenment. In our time, however, it is becoming increasingly clear that there is another, potent and unexpected side to this individualism. For the modern individual is solitary: a solitude that does not just imply singularity or loneliness, but that can exist precisely amid a pluralist world. It is this multiformity, or perhaps the lack of direction and inconsistencies of the present-day world, which are at the root of modern solitude.

The exhibition Modern Solitude deals with various facets of the modern individual's solitary existence. These facets include the urge to inject meaning into life through spirituality, sexuality and physicality - which cannot ultimately fill the void - and the impossibility of ever experiencing 'the other', because of the great differences in ways of life. But most important of all is the instrumental approach to others, to nature, and to everything that can provide life with purpose, as a result of which present-day human beings are thrown back on their own resources. The freedom that modernity promises proves to be a solitary freedom.

Jean Lowe at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, LA

2007-04-09T07:33:00.000-07:00

For her third exhibition at the Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Jean Lowe stages another parable of cultural criticism. Several freestanding bookcases made of enamel paint on papier-m�ch� house over 200 books also made of enamel paint on papier-m�ch�. With fictional titles such as Achieve and Maintain a More Powerful Delusion and The Taking of South Coast Plaza, or in some cases real titles such as The Power of Positive Thinking (remapped onto what looks like the cover of a romance novel) and Contemporary Genocide, Lowe�s installation takes us from the humorous to the dire through the perilous micro-economies of desire and self-worth that frame the complacency of our hyper-individualized consumer culture. Elsewhere in the gallery four landscape paintings in enamel on masonite lift us out of the mire of our individual concerns only to bump us up against the ceilings of the mega-stores that nurture and contain them. In the project room a series of large, beautifully rendered, three-dimensional mandala paintings surround a baby grand piano that doubles as an ice chest.

Collage until 22.04 Chinese Contemporary Gallery, Beijing

2007-04-03T07:10:00.000-07:00

Beijing's emergence as a global city has given rise to some of China's boldest architecture and most innovative advertising. In Collage, Chinese Contemporary Gallery will show the works of four of Beijing's most prominent architects and advertisers, Ma Yongsong, Wang Yonggang, Yang Haihua and Zhou Rong. Ma Yongsong, best known for his design of the Absolute Tower in Mississauga, Canada, has created a rainbow for this exhibition. With this rainbow, he hopes to reunite urbanism, technology and human emotion. Wang Yonggang's work, New Taihu Stone, boldly redesigns the Taihu stone and addresses the ways in which modern architecture structurally redefines and reinvents traditional architectural forms. Yang Haihui takes a comical turn in his work, "Audio and Visual Aids." His performance will provide viewers with a self-administered audio-visual test in the form of plates flung like discuses against a concrete wall. Lastly, Zhou Rong playfully critiques the construction of and the motivation behind Beijing largest and most important urban landmarks in his works, Shang-Jing Banquet and Shang-Jing Sketch

Trevelyan Clay until 03.03. Neon Parc Gallery, Melbourne

2007-02-21T17:39:00.000-08:00

Profound Statement Trevelyan Clay

2007
Oil on linen
168 x 137 cm
Neon Parc Gallery, Melbourne

Aaron Morse until 10.03. ACME, Los Angeles

2007-02-13T17:47:00.000-08:00

AARON MORSE Born 1974 in Tucson, AZ Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA EDUCATION 1998 MFA, The University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH 1996 BFA, The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2006 Guild and Greyshkul, New York, NY 2005 ACME., Los Angeles, CA 2003 Origins, ACME., Los Angeles, CA 1998 Tangeman Gallery, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH 1999 Designs for Storybook, Film, Animation, 840 Gallery, The University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH 1996 Tyrant Figures, Union Gallery, The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2005 The General’s Jamboree, Guild and Greyshkul, New York, NY Liquid Los Angeles: Currents of Contemporary Watercolor Painting, Pasadena Museum of California Art, Pasadena, CA L.A. Times, Bernard Toale Gallery, Boston, MA 2004 Art on Paper, Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC American Stars n’ Bars, Chapman University, Orange, CA Some Forgotten Place, Matrix 213, UC Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA Nature, Mark Moore Gallery, Santa Monica, CA 2003 Women Beware Women, curated by David Rimanelli, Deitch Projects, New York, NY ACME. @ Inman, Inman Gallery, Houston, TX Inside Scoop, Geoffrey Young Gallery, Great Barrington, MA Miles Coolidge, Kevin Hanley, Darcy Huebler, & Aaron Morse, ACME., Los Angeles, CA California 10 Contemporary, Judy Saslow Gallery, Chicago, IL International Paper, UCLA Armand Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA Papers, ACME., Los Angeles, CA 2002 New Art from L.A., Marvelli Gallery, New York, NY

Philippe Parreno The Ultrasonic Scream of the Squirrel until 10.03 Aire de Paris

2007-02-04T07:58:00.000-08:00

Air de Paris is pleased to be presenting a solo exhibition by Philippe Parreno that includes the photographs of his performance with a ventriloquist, luminous labels and the Stories are Propaganda installation created with Rirkrit Tiravanija. These works index a language close to that of dreams, together with forms drawn from world of entertainment and its magic. On 18 September last, in place of an exhibition at Air de Paris, you may have been present at Parreno's The ultrasonic scream of the squirrel. For an hour Studio 28, with its Jean Cocteau décor, was host to Parreno's "exhibition" with ventriloquist Ronn Lucas. After showing his skills, Lucas questioned the artist about what had brought them together. The exchange led to a "retroprojective" sequence for which Parreno chose to read two of his texts, The Underground Man and Alien Seasons. The performers' voices mingled disturbingly as the performance provided a staging of their meeting and, notably, of the form a joint work takes in raising the question "who's speaking?" This event was conceived as a studio situation, an experiment out of which something would ultimately emerge. Parreno opted for still photography as the best way of distancing an event by pointing up the silence, the audience and the staging. In the room on the left a flashing label showed the two performers in close-up as they read The Underground Man, while the text appeared on another label. The reading of the image and the reading of the text are subjected to different light rhythms that stimulate the memory process and give the viewer the chance to project his own stories into the work. Already shown at the Lyon Biennale in 2005, Stories are Propaganda is a film made with Rirkrit Tiravanija. It was shot in Guangzhou, China's most urbanised area, and its images conveying their wanderings and their thoughts sets the film's strangely melancholic tone. "This is a journey through an infinite urban landscape. A series of banners setting up fragments of a parallel world, a feeling of suburbia. [...] Information's that glows before fading away." As in Fade to Black, the reading time is limited, each image being quickly replaced by the following one. The film is made up of stills - a TV show, an albino rabbit, a snowman made of sand... - and the sound is the voice of a child recalling the good old days, "Before cappuccino and sushi and ruccola went global / When every second person was not a hero / Before music became our soundtrack..." In the installation the dated codes of the cinema - a manually operated red velvet curtain - are immediately contradicted by the title, a graffito sprayed directly onto the curtain. At the end of the film the curtain is drawn and the viewer can leave with a head full of images, stories and memories.

McDermott & McGough Please don't stop loving me ! until 15.03 Galerie Jerome de Noirmont, Paris

2007-01-28T10:01:00.000-08:00

Please don’t stop loving me !, the gallery’s 4th personal McDermott & McGough exhibition, will present, in exclusivity, the latest paintings by the couple of dandies who constantly define our contemporariness society through images resurfacing from the past. Like their deliberately historically accurate photographic work, their painting draw inspiration from the metaphorical value of images that live on in our collective subconscious. This new exhibition is the counterpart of the exhibition early in 2006 at the Cheim & Read Gallery in New York on the theme of hidden sexuality with canvases only portraying men. In this new series, the subjects are only women, the artists wishing to present here a feminine vision of life, more spiritual than the first: My inspiration was from « B » female film stars. Most who never made it and 1950’s romance comic books. But this crying, desperate women series is not about actresses, film or kitsch. Its not a nostalgic look to what was. I feel the moment that these images are frozen in (the film still or comic drawing), is about change, an opportunity to take pain, heartache, fear and desperation to another realm of possibilities. Somewhat how the Buddhist’s see order in chaos. This new series of some 15 paintings is constructed according to the same iconographic structure, similar to that of comic strip plates, confronting or juxtaposing portraits of women, scenes from Hollywood films or sentimental comic strips of the 1950s, in a paradoxical duality, underpinned by the contrast between realism and fiction, between black and white and colour. Fixed on canvas and cut off from the narrative context from which they stem, showing desperate women, all paintings have a strong dramatic impact that the artists intensify by choosing highly evocative titles: With an anxious heart, Now after all those things you told me, There wasn’t a thing left to say, How could it end like this ?... The design of the canvas, its image and its story seem to be based on Magritte’s interpretation of words and images, on the fragmentation and the mystery of its images. Considering that all periods cohabit the present, McDermott & McGough refuse the diktats of contemporary time and “live” in the period that they feel to be the most favourable, that is to say the late 19th and early to mid 20th centuries. They invite us to share their vision of the illusion of time as they recreate the atmosphere of a specific period. They take us with them in their travel back in time through a scrupulous and meticulous reproduction of vintage documents to give their works the greatest possible authenticity, like a lost treasure miraculously preserved in a buried world. They go as far as giving dates to their images from the period, such as here: 1963, 1965… McDermott & McGough make the Freudian undercurrents of American society in the 1950s resurface in this exhibition. Behind the appearance of a world of idealised beauty there is hidden despair, solitude, murder and adultery, things that make you tremble. In these paintings, women are beautiful, well dressed, in lush interiors, but living in deep sadness – all this beauty seems, suddenly, about to fall apart… The artists give us their vision of this traditional American theme, in the same way as the current TV series Desperate Housewives. In the image of Pop Art but paradoxically always through a very contemporary theme, McDermott & McGough examine in this exhibition America’s marriage of spic-and-span consumerism with sex and violence.

Victor Grippo until 04.02. Camden Arts Centre, London

2007-01-14T09:52:00.000-08:00

This is the first ever large-scale exhibition in London of the work of influential Argentinean artist Victor Grippo (1936 - 2002). His sculptures and installations transform everyday materials through alchemical power. The humble potato (a universal food of the poor) becomes a symbol of dormant energy in Grippo's hands and represents the potential of suppressed peoples. Originally trained as a chemist, Grippo emerged as a painter and engraver in the politically-charged climate of 1950s Argentina. caption: Victor Grippo, Naturalizar al hombre, humanizar a la naturaleza, o Energia vegetal, 1977, Fundacion Victor Grippo, copyright the artist, courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York.

Brazilian Acquisitions Sandra Gamara, Galeria Lema, Sao Paulo, Brasil

2007-01-07T09:09:00.000-08:00

Sandra Gamarra, peruvian - the artist has become known for having created her own imaginary museum - LiMac - (Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Lima) - where she explores and appropriates herself of the works of others, making her own previous selection. In this exhibition, LiMac presents at Galeria Leme some of its recent acquisition - works by brazilian artists.

The idea around this show is not to make a resume of brazilian contemporary art. The exhibition of these works seek a new dialogue, through the same medium - painting - signalising other areas of encounter and disencounter.

Gamarra has painted pages from catalogues and books compiling the works of distinct artists such as Sandra Cinto, Vik Muniz, Leda Catunda, Iran do Espírito Santo, Nelson Leirner and various others.

"Video Killed the Painting" until 03.02.07 , Yoshiko Matsumoto Gallery , Amsterdam

2006-12-28T12:53:00.000-08:00

Yoshiko Matsumoto Gallery is pleased to present ‘Video Killed the Painting’, an exhibited curated by Bart de Koning Gans, which will be on view from December 27, 2006 until February 3, 2007.Our language of immediacy has made us hungry for quick imagery, however video art teaches us to 're'-observe by taking our time to look. True it is very annoying when it is bad but when it is good the reward is worth the wait. Video forces us to view, listen and take time to adjust. Paintings and sculptures can more easily be divided into bad and good with a brief glance, yet with video it demands your time. This exhibit features 4 video artists whom interpret various stages of the human mind and its behavior.

Ed Templeton , Tim van Laere Gallery, Antwerp (B)

2006-12-26T16:44:00.000-08:00

Templeton’s Time Machine

Ed Templeton (°1972) documents his life, and the lives of the people around him, in a rich stream of images - images of himself and his wife, Deanna, in their day-to-day lives, and images of others (usually youths), at home in Orange County (California), or during the many tours he makes as pro-skateboarder and artist. Photography is a significant constant in his work, but, in recent years, paintings and drawings have started to take an ever more prominent place in the oeuvre.

Templeton likes to present his photos, drawings and paintings in a non-hierarchical manner, large quantities all mixed up together at once. He’ll often hang clusters of works in the shape of “image clouds”, against a coloured background on which are yet more painted clouds. In these installations, the to and fro of the clouds feels like a metaphor for the appearance and disappearance of images, like those of a traveller acquiring countless new impressions every day. In Templeton’s way of seeing we also recognise something of the fascination of the passer-by, the transient, gripped, at some unexpected moment, by the “extraordinary of the ordinary,” the exceptional and surprising existential qualities of daily life.

Raised in the “New World”, his photographic work shows him to be, primarily, a chronicler of both the day-to-day life of urban American youth and the not-so-day-to-day life of the, frequently very young, touring pro-skateboarders. Sexuality and vulnerability are recurring themes and the way in which they are portrayed is a testament to deep empathy: “Nothing human is foreign” seems to be the motto. It is fascinating to realise that, probably, it is precisely this humanist glance that gives these images that not-so-day-to-day quality.

Human vulnerability is also an important theme in Templeton’s paintings and drawings. This particularly applies to the works populated by zombie-like human figures, who seem to have escaped from some medieval tableau of the Last Judgement. Which brings me to another observation, namely that, even though his more realistic portraits undoubtedly display an affinity with the work of David Hockney, many of the qualities of Templeton’s paintings evoke 15^thcentury paintings by figures like Hans Memling, Hieronymus Bosch and Rogier van der Weyden. That this isn’t just an unconscious fascination for Templeton, is apparent in, among other things, his recent experiments with painted tryptich panels and the emergence of photographs of 15th century paintings and sculptures in his work. But, for me, more important than these formal references is the intrinsic relationship between Templeton’s work and the work of his 15th century predecessors in the “Old World”- a relationship I would like to describe as a profound and timeless engagement with the universal parameters of being-human - and that his work is miles away from the cold, aloof intellectualism of much contemporary mainstream art.

the new baroque until 13.01,07 Nice & Fit Gallery, Berlin

2006-12-17T14:45:00.000-08:00

THE NEW BAROQUE
Anton Stoianov, Nate Peter, Jan Bünnig, Fawn Krieger, Simon Rühle,
Ralf Dereich, Sophie-Therese Trenka-Dalton, Frederic D. Baroque’s inventions (17th century) include multiple viewpoints, waves coming from the East, from Greece, Rome, Classical (modern), Goth, the Romanesque (11th-12th century). Material excess, individualism, religious ecstasy, big hair, curves, the collapse of the frame, repetition ad infinitum, counterpoint, contraposto are also invoked. Allegory, illusion, theater, mechanics, façade/interior, also. the new baroque? A tail without the cat, Babylon (Iraq), Tiepolo, tape, Grace Jones, wings, forest, Penthouse, unorthodoxy, anarchy, ascension and descension. “The baroque artist knows well that hallucination does not feign presence, but that presence is hallucination”, (Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque”, 1993.)

South African Art Now until 06.01.07 Michael Stevenson´s Gallery, Cape Town

2006-12-10T15:10:00.000-08:00

Michael Stevenson's annual exhibition of South African art is an unrivalled event on the collector's calendar, and this year will run throughout the holiday season. For the first time in 11 years, the exhibition will focus exclusively on the work of contemporary artists, in recognition of the increasingly high profile of the gallery's artists.

Among the major works on exhibition will be a huge shark-shaped drum by Samson Mudzunga, a performance piece and new mixed media works by Nicholas Hlobo, recent sculptures by Wim Botha, a large-scale wall painting with glass roundels by Conrad Botes, and Anton Kannemeyer's Alphabet of Democracy shown in its entirety for the first time. Photographic works include previously unseen photographs of the Congo's Mai Mai militia by Guy Tillim; Pieter Hugo's portraits of boy scouts in Monrovia, Liberia; recent colour South African landscapes by David Goldblatt and new portraits by Zanele Muholi. Mustafa Maluka, Deborah Poynton and Tracy Payne will all show new paintings.

Parallel to this is an exhibition of recent ceramics by Hylton Nel, whose idiosyncratic works are sought after by collectors across the world. This year he will be showing a series of plates which are wall-hung in particular patterns, inscribed with his characteristic quirky and polemical images and phrases. Also on exhibition will be new vases and small sculptures.

These exhibitions take place at the end of an extremely successful year for the gallery's artists. Among their achievements, David Goldblatt won the Hasselblad Prize for 2006; Guy Tillim was awarded the first Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography by Harvard University; Pieter Hugo was named the Standard Bank Young Artist for 2007; Churchill Madikida's 2006 Standard Bank Young Artist exhibition embarked on its national tour; Nicholas Hlobo won the Tollman Award for 2006 and Zanele Muholi was awarded the first BHP Billiton/Wits University Visual Arts Fellowship. Berni Searle has survey exhibitions at the Johannesburg Art Gallery and the Contemporary Art Museum at the University of South Florida in Tampa, USA. Tillim, Goldblatt and Wim Botha are included on the international touring exhibition Africa Remix which was seen in Tokyo and Stockholm this year. Conrad Botes showed on the Havana Biennale and Hugo, Tillim and Mustafa Maluka were selected for the São Paulo Bienal.

LIU JIANHUA - Anomalous thoughts, Galleria Continua, Beijing

2006-12-03T06:52:00.000-08:00

This exhibition features Liu Jian Hua, who commenced the evolving process of nurturing his aesthetic development and métier as a sculptor early on in his career. Subsequently he succeeds in refining several of his signature motifs that are embedded in his entire body of works. The purity of line created by the use of white porcelain ceramics and his alertness to his mercurial environment render artworks that are artistically and socially relevant.

Liu Jian Hua’s artworks present an unflinching illumination of the all too intimate relationship between materialism and humanity. These questions and issues that are raised in his artworks are for instance evident in works like “Do You have an answer?” This artwork is a mixed-media piece wherein Liu Jian Hua uses both stainless steel sculpture and technology to create a singularly unique work. A projection of text comprised of rhetorical questions is tantamount to the stainless steel books themselves. This work has the goal of stimulating the viewer’s own insights on the current state of contemporary Chinese Society. These are questions that penetrate the fabric of day-to-day modern Chinese life. They also suspend our former assumptions on contemporary Chinese society for the more important issues it raises, such as how Modernity and rapid urbanization are defined within the specific context of Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, or any other major Chinese Cosmopolis?

The artwork “Floating Object” is likewise a piece that evokes a myriad of interpretations pertaining specifically to the forum of Chinese political life. A floating glass sculpture of an island is set against the projected backdrop of Eastern Asia; the island being a clear representation of Taiwan. When viewers venture in for a closer look at the glass Taiwan, mini ceramic sculptures of pandas are seen inhabiting its terrain. This artwork in fact has significant correlations to actual events. Pandas, one of the most prominent symbols for China were given to Taiwan as a political gesture to promote more friendly ties. Like his other works, the interpretative dialogue remains open for viewers to arbitrate a meaning on their own.

“Reflection-Mirror Illusion”, made from white porcelain celadon, is a 12 metre long sculpture depicting the hyper-cosmopolitan skylines of Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen. This piece is hung on a white wall, with site-specific spotlights to render a silhouette effect. The sculpted buildings, upon closer examination, are in fact crooked, to symbolize the fact that they are a mere reflection of the west. Like a true reflection, the silhouette is temporary and transient, giving the overall piece an ominous veneer. This piece exudes again highly relevant issues such as massive rapid urbanization and its effects on traditional Chinese architecture and modernization.

“Beijing Olympic Commemoration” is a painting by Liu Jian Hua that satirizes a photograph taken during the Olympic games in Greece, with the intention of dedicating a pastiche to the German painter Gerhard Richter.

Time and again, Liu Jian Hua’s artworks delve into subjects that are at the heart of current Chinese culture. The visual and cognitive experience of viewing a Liu Jian Hua work is immediate, and often evocative of the animated and multi-valent relationships between people and their surroundings. Through his sensitivity and powers of observation that are evident in his works, Liu Jian Hua comments lucidly on the changing world.

Liu Jian Hua is exhibiting for the first time with Galleria Continua in Beijing. His presence confirms the continuation of Galleria Continua’s mandate of preserving and nurturing the dialogue between the east and the west.

Yinka Shonibare, MBE , Stephen Friedman Gallery, London

2006-11-26T13:00:00.000-08:00

Stephen Friedman Gallery is pleased to present Flower Time, an exhibition of new work by British artist Yinka Shonibare, MBE. Flower Time is Shonibare’s first major presentation of work in London in several years. The exhibition includes a new film, sculptural works and a large painting installation.

Over the past ten years Shonibare has gained critical acclaim for his work, which mines the rich history of societal and class self-identification expressed through the genre of eighteenth and nineteenth century portraiture. The artist typically investigates political and social histories, drawing from his own experience and dual upbringing in the UK and Nigeria to create a complex and cosmopolitan response to post-colonial debate. In previous works, the artist has reconfigured iconic imagery from the canon of western art history with both a playful and ironic touch. Working in sculpture, film, photography and painting, the artist is best-known for his tableaux scenes where characters are dressed in spectacular period costumes and props created from his signature material – a type of Indonesian designed fabric, produced in the Netherlands that has become popularly assimilated in West Africa.

The title work of the exhibition, Flower Time, is inspired by a hand-made bouquet of flowers composed of roses, orchids, anemones and ivy fashioned out of the Dutch wax printed fabric. This delicate work is somewhat a momento-mori and establishes the melancholic tone of the exhibition – described by the artist as a response to the current global political climate. Considering the violent clashes of identities and beliefs taking place in the Middle East and beyond, the artist asks “can art evolve absolutely oblivious to our time of extreme trauma?”, or “can dealing with trauma be a valuable solace?”.

Odile and Odette (2006) is a new film made in collaboration with the Royal Opera House and choreographer Kim Branstrup. Here, Shonibare re-imagines a classical episode from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, where the lead roles engage in a close dialogue of gestures and movement. Odile and Odette are characters which embody ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and are traditionally danced by a sole performer. The artist transforms this classical part into a complex and subtle interplay between two dancers in which the duality of the characters is played out in racial difference. Mirroring each other’s expression on either side of an ornate Baroque frame, Shonibare suggests that their movement is both estranged and united.

The figure of the dancer is mirrored again in Flower Cloud (2006) – a surreal sculpture in which a life size ballet dancer in full costume balances atop a nuclear mushroom cloud. This apocalyptic vision is a totemic and powerful icon for the exhibition, bringing together Shonibare’s diverse concerns and situating the exhibition as a highly personal protest and a lament for the flower power of a previous era.

Black Gold is an installation composed of a series of round black and gold painted canvasses presented on a viscous black ground, suggesting that these works have emerged from an oil spill. In previous wall painting installations, the artist has engaged with the specific history of abstract painting of the late twentieth century. The title of the work poetically refers to the rich and potent qualities of the surface of these oil paintings and their derivative source that has become such a fundamental and contested resource in recent years. Black Gold also carries an implication about the politics of oil, mineral and metallurgical extraction and refers to the exploitation by British imperialists in Southern Africa up until the collapse of the Apartheid regime.

During the course of the exhibition Shonibare will also be participating in Alien Nation at the ICA, London (17 November 2006 – 14 January 2007). In 2007 the artist will present a major new commission at the South Bank Centre, as the inaugural commission in a series of flag-works shown on a 65ft flagpole on Jubilee Gardens – initiated by Hayward Gallery Director, Ralph Rugoff. This will be followed by an artist’s talk at the Hayward Gallery. Also in 2007, the artist presents newly commissioned work at the V&A for Uncomfortable Truths – the shadow of slave trading on contemporary art and design (20 February – 17 June 2007), an exhibition marking the bicentenary of the outlawing of the British slave trade. In April 2007, Yinka Shonibare will present a major new site-specific work Jardin d’Amour at the Musée du Quai Branly, Paris.

ANDRES SERRANO

2006-11-19T08:01:00.000-08:00

the PAC of Milan is celebrating the creative genius of a great interpreter of our times, Andres Serrano, with a dual appointment: the exhibition Salt on the wound, curated by Oliva María Rubio, in co-operation with La Fábrica of Madrid, a selection of some of his most significant photographs taken in the last twenty years and the exhibition, The Morgue, curated by Alessandro Riva in cooperation with Tomaso Renoldi Bracco, ten works never shown before and taken from a controversial series of photographs of 1992 with the same name. These macabre and shocking images, long kept hidden by wish of the artist himself, are now being displayed exclusively, for the very first time, in Milan. A cursed and highly provocative artist, this is the image that Serrano has always created of himself. In reality, on closer analysis, his works appear complex and rich in subtlety. The rebel genius par excellence, Serrano expresses his criticism in the subtle dichotomy that underlies his photographic images, unblemished and flawless, terrifying and transgressive; he refuses imitations of the contemporary world and illustrates its inner disturbances and manias. The photographs of Andres Serrano (New York,1950) have never ceased to depict the most controversial and polemical subjects of the convulsive world in which we live since he first started his work at the beginning of the nineteen eighties. Religion, fanaticism, the human body, xenophobia, illness and death have all been subjected to his meticulous attention in series like Bodily Fluids, The Morgue, Nomads, Ku Klux Klan, The Church, A History of Sex etc. What seems a provocation manifests as a vocation: that of addressing subjects and issues which concern us as human being by means of images which are also distinguished for their beauty. Beauty is an essential component of Serrano’s work. This artist uses it to intensify the tension that seduces his spectators with the forbidden fascination of taboo subjects. Serrano has in fact confessed that his objective as an artist has always been that of beauty: “I believe that it is necessary to seek beauty even in the least conventional places or in the candidates you would least suspect. If I don’t encounter beauty I’m not capable of taking any photos”. The effectiveness of his images is similar to that of advertising mechanisms, the declared use of Caravaggesque lighting, the bright colours, the precision of the titles and, above all, the use of concise but always eloquent language. Serrano has no specific interest in the photographic process; he is rather a formalist who identifies strongly with the traditions and with the great masters of baroque painting, defining himself as a religious artist of the past with contemporary ideas. His compositions are rigorous and allegorical symbols appear in each of his series of photographs. He constructs elaborate tableaux which adopt the quality and the virtuoso mannerism of the great seventeenth century painters. Serrano never censors his photos and never indulges in compromise. By moving on the thin line that separates the sacred from the profane, the moral from the immoral, the licit from the illicit, Serrano’s works have avoided the limitations of mere decorativism. The artist goes beyond the confines of what is permitted, in both the personal and the social sphere, to entice and surprise his viewers, putting images before them, which on first impulse would make them close their eyes if they weren’t presented in an attractive and picturesque fashion.

Guy Allott until 16.12. F.A.Projects, London

2006-11-11T14:55:00.000-08:00

The exhibition showcases a series of new paintings and sculptures by the artist, including the painting series Landscape Spaceship, which explore ideas of the primitive, innovation and the visionary.

Whimsical and intriguing, Allott’s works allude to the grand narrative of Western civilisation exploring the preoccupation with discovery, conquest and edifice that continues to hold such prevalence in contemporary society. The artist’s paintings and sculptures present a fantastical merging of the philosophies of science and culture that not only offer a critique of historic social beliefs but also has great resonance for an investigation of the contemporary.

The Landscape Spaceship series depicts a motley collection of anthropomorphic exploration structures that physically owe as much to 19th Century illustrations of innovative prototypes for journeys into the air and sea, as they do to early 20th century science fiction novels. The spaceships presented in these works are the antithesis to the slick high tech constructs of modern space travel: made from wood and metal, the structures are reminiscent of amateur prototypes of new inventions. Presented in anonymous but palpably foreign locales, the landscape of this other world references the historical landscape works of European artists struggling to articulate the alien landscapes of the New Worlds. The use of such a traditional visual language as a means to evoke the unfamiliar is further inferred in the very decoration of the spaceships themselves, as each ship is decorated with a quaint pictorial scene that is at odds with the barren and desolate surrounds. In constructing a representation of the unknown the comparison to the familiar is inevitable but ultimately misleading. It reveals more about the society it is communicating to than the subject itself. Guy Allott’s fictions then create a space, which enables a rethinking about the present as much as an investigation of the past.

For this exhibition, Allott also shows low-tech sculptural constructions in painted cardboard and wood, which echo the investigations of the paintings and introduce parallel subject matters, heraldic motifs and narratives which similarly conflate the historic and the futuristic.

Guy Allott is currently a finalist for the John Moores 24, at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Recent exhibitions of the artist include Jesus Loves You Cooling Spot, One in the Other, London; Jagsalon, Kreuzberg Kunstraum/ Bethanien, Berlin in 2006; Jagsalon, Kunstverein Ettlingen, Germany and Drawing200, The Drawing Room, London in 2005; and Guy Allott, Neil Hamon, Claire Pestaille, IZO, London; The Great Unsigned, Zoo Art Fair, London in 2004; and the solo exhibitions Summerpaintings, the miracle agency, London in 2001 and Ein Tag Stüle, Luna International, Berlin in 2000.

DANIEL RICHTER until 30.11. Grimm Fine Art, Amsterdam (NL)

2006-11-09T17:33:00.000-08:00

Daniel Richter until 30.11. Grimm Fine Art.

NAFAS BEIRUT until 17.11 Espace SD, Beirut

2006-11-05T07:32:00.000-08:00

The multimedia exhibit includes more than 40 artists of different backgrounds, hailing from around the world. These works are reactionary; they were made out of an urge. To highlight a few, they are raw as seen in the 12-poem piece of Wissam Nouchi entitled "Remember to Forget Beirut". They are emotional as Sintia Karam, trapped outside of Lebanon wanders around Berlin hoping that somehow her footsteps would take her straight back to Beirut. All the way from Australia, Maissa Alameddine and Fadia Kisrwani Abboud, create an installation entitled "Return to Sender," in reaction to the millions of Israeli flyers that were dropped on Lebanon. Lina Hakim creates an installation in homage to her real heroes of the war: the teenagers she met while volunteering at a shelter. Zena el-Khalil paints a portrait of Hassan Nassrallah as seen through her eyes. Raed Yassin displays his daily adventures with Nabil Fawzi, a.k.a. Superman. Maria Kassab's delicate drawings portray her downward spiral into darkness and depression. And already, some find themselves moving on as Rowina Bou Harb reveals in her blank white canvas entitled, "Don't Feel Like Talking Anymore, I Almost Forgot What I Felt."

Illusions Diva Belleza y Felicidad Gallery, Buenas Aires (AR)

2006-10-31T13:29:00.000-08:00

ILLUSIONS by Diva from October 14th to November 20th at Belleza y Felicidad gallery

CHRISTOPH RUCKHÄBERLE until 4.11. Kanton/Feuer Gallery LA (USA)

2006-10-28T16:26:00.000-07:00

In addition to the new body of work exhibited at Kantor / Feuer Gallery a billboard of one of Ruckhäberle’s prints will be displayed on the roof of the gallery. The theme of billboards carries throughout the show. In one of the paintings, several figures are displayed and placed in front of a billboard. In others, the images in the prints included in the exhibition appear on the billboard in the painting. This provides continuity in the show where all things circle back into the primary idea.Christoph Ruckhäberle was born in 1972 in Pfaffenhofen, Germany. He received his MFA from Hochschule fur Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig, Germany with professor Arno Rink. Ruckhäberle has had previous solo exhibitions at Zach Feuer Gallery, New York and Galerie Kleindienst, Leipzig. He has also been included in exhibitions at the Prague Biennial, MASS MoCA, the Cleveland Museum of Art and Museum der bildenden Kunste, Leipzig.

Liu Ye: Temptations

2006-10-24T15:12:00.000-07:00

Sperone Westwater is pleased to announce the U.S. debut of the Chinese painter Liu Ye. Born in Beijing in 1964, Liu Ye studied industrial design and mural painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts before moving to Germany to pursue an MFA at the Fine Arts University in Berlin. His work has been exhibited extensively in China and Germany, and is well represented in the Uli Sigg Collection of contemporary Chinese art in Switzerland, but has never before been shown in North America. Sixteen new paintings will be on view in the artist’s first exhibition in New York.

Liu Ye’s lush canvases, painted in primary colors, reflect the "forbidden" imagery passed down from his father, who was a children's book author during the Cultural Revolution, when political censorship controlled all visual and written materials. Young girls with small bodies and large moon-like faces populate these paintings, schoolgirls dressed in matching green skirts and white blouses and sporting uniform haircuts, and slim, semi-nude women who carry whips which allude to a darker sexual truth behind their youthful façades. According to art historian Pi Li, “Liu Ye’s work implied the arrival of a new era concerned with invidualism and the self.” Indeed, in the mid-1990s, when Liu Ye returned from his studies in Europe, China was transitioning into a market economy and these changes manifested themselves in many ways, including increased artistic freedom and a general shift from collectivism to individualism. Liu Ye’s paintings reflect this changing national legacy with their myriad references to both popular "pulp noir" and classical Chinese landscape traditions. As a result, the richly atmospheric canvases seem nearly timeless, their pictorial language belonging simultaneously to the past, present and future.

Liu Ye spent most of the 1990s in Europe, first in Germany and then in Holland, where he spent time as an artist-in-residence. It was here that the artist first encountered works of art by Mondrian and Vermeer, two artists whose use of color, line and composition would inform Liu Ye’s own paintings throughout his career. The cast of characters in Liu Ye’s work often find themselves standing in front of a Mondrian painting, an object which the artist identifies as “a balanced, graceful and pure picture that projects a sense of serenity.” However, despite their cheery primary palette and varied art historical references, Liu Ye’s paintings have a darker undertone. In “Night,” a topless young girl sits ensconced in a sea of dark blue wearing only white underpants and one red shoe; in “Sword,” two identical young girls face each other across a blood red vista, each with dagger in hand. There is a strong sense of innocence lost in these paintings, no doubt the result of growing up in the throes of Mao’s China where childhood was controlled and often compromised.

The realities of his youth led Liu Ye to become fascinated with the imaginary world of fairy tales, and three works inspired by the stories of Hans Christian Andersen are included in the exhibition. “I have an equal passion towards both fairy tales and philosophy,” the artist has written. “Fairy tales are illusioned and sensational whereas philosophy is about strict and rational thinking. My paintings ramble between these two opponent spheres.” However, Liu Ye’s work is about more than simply the juxtaposition of east and west, history and national identity; indeed, the artist has found his own artistic idiom by presenting the obvious and mixing recognizable symbols and signs with elements of surprise, subversive humor, and absurdity.

Chenfei and Luohiu until 12.11 Tokyo Gallery , Beijing

2006-10-19T18:50:00.000-07:00

Chenfei and Luohiu until 12.11 Tokyo Gallery , Beijing

Marcelo Pombo Ruth Benzacar Gallery, Buenos Aires (ARG)

2006-10-13T05:01:00.000-07:00

Hay un verso en La Tempestad, de Shakespeare, que resume uno de los puntos centrales del budismo: “Estamos hechos de la materia de los sueños”. Para el Gran Vehículo o Mahayana (la corriente esotérica del budismo) el universo nos presenta continuamente formas, colores, olores, sonidos y sensaciones, pero detrás de esas apariencias no hay nada. El universo es ilusorio y vivir es soñar.
Muchos artistas produjeron sus obras a partir de esa creencia: detrás de las apariencias no hay nada. Pero las conclusiones que sacaron fueron múltiples y contradictorias: tan ricas como el arte. Entre esos artistas se encuentran los maestros del ukiyo-é o “pinturas del mundo flotante”. En el Japón del siglo XVII hablar de “mundo flotante” era la forma irónica de referirse al “mundo doloroso”, que era la expresión con la que se nombraba al plano terrenal, el del dolor, en el budismo. “El mundo flotante” es una reivindicación mundana de los efímeros placeres de la vida cotidiana.
A comienzos del siglo XIX, Katsushika Hokusai -el último gran maestro del ukiyo-é- quedó fascinado al descubrir la perspectiva en las primeras pinturas occidentales a las que tuvo acceso. Entonces comenzó a estudiar a los artistas franceses del siglo XVIII; en especial, Watteau y Fragonard. Ese descubrimiento de un arte totalmente diferente influirá en su obra, pero de una manera tan sutil que es casi invisible: sus grabados (como los de la serie “36 vistas del monte Fuji”) entremezclan genialmente la perspectiva occidental con la organización formal de la tradición pictórica japonesa. También su trazo se hace más abstracto y fluido, siguiendo las esfumaturas rococó de Fragonard.
Cumpliendo casi un círculo perfecto, sus grabados llegaron rápidamente a Occidente y fueron admirados por los impresionistas franceses. Desde entonces su influencia se hará sentir en ambos lados del mundo y su obra será citada por muchos: desde el Matisse de comienzos del siglo pasado hasta el Warhol de los 60. Y, más en espíritu que en estilo, está en las entrelíneas de las obras que Marcelo Pombo viene pintando desde hace unos años. Especialmente, en las que presenta en esta muestra.
Sin inspirarse directamente en los artistas del ukiyo-é, los cuadros de Pombo tienen cada vez más el sabor de la sabiduría del “mundo flotante”. En ellos se celebra la inevitable levedad de todo lo humano. Como un Hokusai de las pampas, Pombo devela que estar hechos de la materia de los sueños no es impedimento para gozar de la belleza. Y como en el caso de Hokusai, Pombo encuentra en los trazos esfumados de Fragonard el estímulo para dejarse llevar por el delirio de la forma.
En algunas de las leyendas budistas el mundo literalmente flota. Lo sólido se apoya y se desvanece en el agua, que a su vez se desvanece en el aire. Hay un chorrear de las iluminaciones que termina uniendo todo con todo. En esta serie de Pombo el agua y el aire aglutinan las imágenes, sostienen los paisajes, diluyen los fondos.
Hokusai fue de la imagen plana a la perspectiva. Pombo sugiere una perspectiva que se desvanece en puro plano frontal. Cada uno de sus cuadros es un fogonazo. Un disparo o una iluminación. No hay una historia que conocer o un secreto que develar sino un entregarse al goce de la forma, como en la Gran Ola, de Hokusai: ¿Importa saber en qué suelo se apoya el árbol que sostiene a los músicos? ¿De qué sueño proviene esa cabeza enjoyada? ¿Y esa trama de piedras que semejan una tela escocesa? El Bodhisatva feliz lo sabe. En el mundo acuático -en los pequeños placeres y dolores de la vida cotidiana- lo que importa es flotar.
En la obra de Pombo todo flota, todo fluye. Y algo se eleva: es el globo de mimbre, esa invitación estática al viaje psicodélico (por lo demás, un Pombo de pura cepa, que retoma la tradición de objetos que viene realizando desde los 80). Ese globo recargado de falsas joyas tan hermosas, ese globo es la más pura invitación a despegarse
del suelo, a fluir y flotar a la vez. A dejarse arrastrar por la vida. Ruth Benzacar Gallery

Catalina Estrada opening 19.10 Iguapop Gallery, Barcelona (ES)

2006-10-08T03:55:00.000-07:00

Colombian artist Catalina Estrada shows her works in Iguapop Gallery, Barcelona. The show opens on the 19th of October.

Miriam Wania until 7.10 Berlin

2006-10-06T07:43:00.000-07:00

At Galerie Lena Brüning, Berlin until 7.10.

Armen Eloyan until 14.10. GALERIE BOB VAN ORSOUW, Zurich (CH)

2006-10-01T13:07:00.000-07:00

Armen Eloyan’s large-format impasto paintings, presented here in his first solo exhibition in Switzerland, have sinister, cryptic titles like Disaster and Bend Over. Though they are painted in dark colors, their dense content is always leavened by irony or wry humor. Familiar cartoon characters—Mickey Mouse, Pettersson and Findus, and a figure that looks like Scrooge McDuck—populate the canvases of this thirty-nine-year-old Armenian, who lives in Amsterdam and Zurich. These characters have ended up in very strange places, among them a dark field, where a demented Mickey tramples another character. It is a battlefield straight out of Goya; behind Mickey a white rabbit lies in its own blood, an arrow piercing its heart. There is also an oppressive interior, in which a leather-clad dominatrix bends over an anonymous figure lying on a bed. Though these bodies are often suggested by only a few brushstrokes, their corporeal presences and the thickly applied paint are very powerful. In contrast, other sections of the paintings—usually open windows or television screens—are painted thinly and somewhat brightly, like peepholes onto a more noble world. Eloyan loves a theatrical performance: Executing his paintings is a fiercely physical, intense act, and his figures always seem to be on stage, positioned according to the laws of classical perspective. The enigmatic details, hidden among the shadows of the display-cabinet curtains, reveal themselves only after two or three looks. Anna Schindler Artforum

Jim Lambie Anton Kern Gallery NY

2006-09-29T02:10:00.000-07:00

Alan Uglow at CCNOA (Brussels)

2006-09-21T03:44:00.000-07:00

The Center for Contemporary Non-Objective Art (CCNOA) is pleased to present an exhibition by British-born, New York-based artist Alan Uglow. A series of recent photo silk-screens and a freestanding painting continue Uglow's practice of isolating and abstracting elements from a primary context and representing them through analogous forms.

While best known for monochromatic paintings concerned with the edge and the literal frame of the picture-support, Uglow's body of work also includes photography and site-specific installations. Along with an emphasis on structure, materiality, and the reducing of forms to their constituent elements, his diverse artistic practice is marked by a lifelong fascination with the game of football. The spatial arrangement of the football pitch is partly the source for the rectangular, bisected fields in his Standard paintings, for example--a syntactical similarity present in his work since the late 60s.

Uglow's recent work continues this connection through forms drawn from stadium architecture and re-presented through a rigorous process of abstraction. A photograph of a tunnel from the Müngersdorfer Stadion in Cologne (Germany), which players use to enter and leave the pitch, is turned into a site-specific photo-silkscreen. Uglow subjects this image of a functional, built structure to a myriad of painterly choices about color, flatness, and tonality, turning it into a minimal still-film.

Similarly, Uglow turns a "Goal Wall", an object used by footballers for shooting practice into a freestanding painting, the aluminum panel is stabilized with metal supports behind the panel. Toward the top left corner and the lower right corner two circles, slightly larger than a football have been cut out, this emphasizes the built quality of the painting an aspect of Uglow's best-known Standard paintings. In both cases, as in the bulk of Uglow's work, the emphasis on framing and materiality highlights the object's relationship to a context beyond its purely formal boundaries.

Alan Uglow was born in Luton, England, in 1941. His work has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions in Europe and North America, as well as in group shows worldwide. He has lived and worked in New York City since 1969.

Sleep Sleep Brett Murray 27.09 - 28.10.06 Joao Ferreira Gallery, Cape Town

2006-09-19T16:31:00.000-07:00

Brett Murray started this body of work ('Sleep Sleep') in 2005. When speaking about the body of work Brett commented that, 'I consciously didn't constrict or frame what I was doing into a thematic straight jacket. My intention was to use different materials and processes and to allow for awkward jumps and associations between one group of ideas to the next in order to see where this would lead me.' Working in this way Murray has used a variety of media including bronze, paintings, prints, plastic cut outs and photographs.

His bronzes describe children's toy-like animals as thinly veiled attacks on notions of incompetence, greed and buffoonery. There is a series of large plastic drawings of 'sleeping' heads describing a kind of a somnambulist funk. Murray has also produced a group of photographic self portraits which have the facetious title 'New Beginnings', and has painted a Zen-like series of portraits of his 'favorite' politician's arse-holes. In addressing issues of war Murray has produced a series of re-worked Cardies style images. This body of work also includes a few text based works and some paintings which are based on 50's neo-colonial book covers.

TONY OURSLER

2006-09-15T12:20:00.000-07:00

TONY OURSLER at Jensen Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand until 14.10.06.

Oursler's Influence Machine: The Pathology of Projections & Cynical Spiritualism By Carlo McCormick

Shamen and priests, doctors and healers, scientists and seers, alchemists and astronauts, artists and tricksters all: each with their different agendas, all after the same old riddles, conjuring the unknowable as manifest with the consensual authority, chicanery and conceit of their esoteric crafts. For this post-evolutionary ape¹s first proto-cultural gestures, be it looking to the skies for the face of god or painting in the caves to visualize the magic of a successful hunt, the need for answers is of the same root as our capacity to make up our truths as we go along. And when you¹re wielding generalities, speculations, superstitions, and methodologies that are at best myopically reductionist, as the validating proof of some trans-substantial cosmological certainty, well, you best have some skills in the sleight of hand and work in gestures that are grander than the practicalities of life itself. We are by nature a rather skeptical species. Yet, of all God¹s creatures we are certainly the only ones who across all cultures have believed in an invisible, absolutely irrational, supernatural, spiritualist dimension. Tony Oursler, one of those rare exceptions who seemingly has not been wired to make such leaps of faith, is hardly a believer. And his art is not really concerned with God or gods per se. Most likely such deep theological issues would be a little too silly for him. What Oursler¹s The Influence Machine is more about, is the curious, seemingly inexplicable, aspect of the mind to invent these metaphysical forces, and to believe in them. The art in this for Oursler is not some divine spirit, but the very human capacity to project these images into the ether, void of existence, in such a way that they suddenly become apparent.

Lest the very idea of talking to such an unrepentant atheist as Tony Oursler about spirituality in his art seems the visual equivalent of looking for the face of Elvis in a moldy piece of bread, consider that he was born Fulton Oursler III. That would make his grandfather, Fulton Sr., the author of The Greatest Story Ever Told , a broad popularization of The Bible (if ever there was an oxymoron), that became an enduring best-seller in America. Fulton Sr., a long-time editor for the likes of Liberty Magazine , and the very successful True Crime , a magazine which he co-founded, authored some hundred-plus books in his lifetime, but it was his Greatest Story that proved to be his greatest success, a biblical epic of such proportions that Hollywood itself could not resist turning it into one of the most successful stories of the life of Jesus ever to hit the big screen The movie version, directed by George Stevens, arrived in 1965 with a star studded cast including Max Von Sydow, Telly Savalas, Dorothy McGuire, Charlton Heston, Jose Ferrer, Claude Raines and Van Heflin. Big budget and monumental, at some 225 minutes long, this pompous spectacle remained for many generations the closest most Americans ever got to actually knowing the Bible. And then Junior, Tony¹s dad, after a long career as editor and vice president of the immensely popular magazine Reader¹s Digest , went on to be the founding editor of Angels on Earth, where every month readers were regaled with Œtrue stories¹ of divine intervention and the kind of blessings that come with faith. Still being published and widely read today, Angels on Earth offers up stories based in faith through angelic intervention, stories in which these celestial spiritual bodies literally would come down to our material world to guide and assist those in great need..

This abiding sense of faith, at once so abstracted in Tony¹s own work, is to his creative process ³an inherited mantra guardian angels and devils almost like a mental illness.² In as much as Tony Oursler¹s vision is honed by scrutiny and doubt - his lens a kind of super acute analytic tool his long-standing fascination with the psychological topographies of image, form and narrative must intuitively stem from this familial and greater social dementia of belief. Like some prodigal child who has deliberately thrown out the transcendental map that has been passed down in his family for generations, Oursler has danced in self-imposed exile around the proverbial garden always on the outside, but still looking in, forever staying away, but never too far from the cloying embrace of religion¹s comforting and complacent home. ³It¹s intense², Oursler admits, ³you can¹t get rid of it.²

The legacy here is certainly much more than an aesthetic armature of denial. To enjoy how that which ³you can¹t get rid of² plays out in Tony Oursler¹s early single channel video work, consider how his hilariously amateur puppet shows relate to the crude programming of old Christian television children¹s shows. Think of Davey and Goliath, a claymation cartoon that doubled as Bible-story lessons, which ran throughout America as early morning children¹s television programming, or for the great aficionados of pop oddity, try out the obscure treasure of Ventriloquist Children¹s TV shows, a la Jimmy and Rusty, or Marcy, and countless others that had their heyday in the early to mid-Seventies on local affiliates and regional stations as a truly perverse form of Bible story-lessons, featuring some ventriloquist (usually a woman) with a dummy child on her knee, explaining the parables and moral truths of the good book. For Oursler, this kind of absurdity takes on greater relevance in the light of the fact that the first television broadcast was of a ventriloquist. Oursler still has his fun, but in his mature work produced since the mid-Eighties, his jaded punk sarcasms of yore have been replaced by greater complexities of information manipulated through ever more baroque fantasy structures and paranoid delusions. Kind of like the evolution of most religions, you may be thinking. It is certainly these fantasy structures, socially inherited or physiologically inherent, that fascinate Oursler, and provide the strongest link between his oeuvre and the outstanding dominant body of contemporary spiritual practice. Growing up Catholic, or as he describes it, ³believing in a system that¹s not there², what Oursler learned from a family of church-based storytellers is a particular kind of inflection, a way of conjuring disembodied forms and fleshing out the immaterial. In such a way, we can see these same kinds of spiritual parable strategies employed by Oursler in his most renowned body of sculptural work, when he projects actual human faces on rag dolls making us see what¹s literally not there in a humbuggeried suspension of belief. These are narrative devices and representational strategies he uses, not simply because they make good art (hell, in a world where ³a sucker is born every minute², they are the essence of show biz itself), but because they are at the heart of contradictions around which all his pictorial issues revolve. Tony Oursler as an apparent heir to the new genres of Seventies art, is concerned with process more than product, and when he tricks us into seeing things that aren¹t there, or pushes our emotional buttons, he¹s not doing it to manipulate us so much as to help us understand the formal ways in which these kinds of manipulations can occur.

Premiered in New York during America¹s anachronistic pagan holiday of Hallow¹een a sort of hyper-commercialized celebration of the dead replete with witches, skeletons and all manner of cartoonish morbidity and in London in the waning days of Fall into Winter, itself a seasonal metaphor for life¹s mortal transience, Oursler¹s The Influence Machin e was in every way a public haunting. The artist here is himself going further than creating an elaborate multi-media spook house (though it does clearly enjoy some of those elements), he¹s revisiting the ways in which such apparitions act as ephemeral transmissions between the frailty of existence and the vast unknown of death. For believers and non-believers alike, the notion of life after death cannot help but have an irresistible appeal. For Oursler, whose art and ideas maintain a brutal existentialism (not to be confused here with nihilism, which is far too depressing and negative for Oursler, who prefers to regard all this with a greater sense of humour and pleasure), the fashions by which we collectively imagine some continuance after this brief futile dance upon Earth are perhaps an even greater mystery than life itself. Even with the modest comforts of secular humanism, the position that Oursler is willing to accept, a here today gone tomorrow, worm-food spiritless biological absolute, is mighty hard to take, as is, without compromise. Don¹t we all need some sort of construct of ulterior being, a grand master plan to give sense and solution to why we are here in the first place? Every culture across all times and environments has imagined its own vision of guiding forces and constructed its elaborate rituals for death and burial. As different as all religions may be, in the end, doesn¹t their existence in every isolated facet of human consciousness or corner of this planet tell us that we all need this embrace to keep our very sense of self in the harsh cold of always immanent demise? By not particularly buying into to this shared yet differentiated universal language of immortality, Tony Oursler it would seem must take his own curious comfort in enjoying the absurdities of how this psychological need has become a mutant set of undead signifiers for a culture at the end of history. He relishes in the particulars, but it is the phenomenology of our self-deceit as a whole that fascinates him and informs his art.

The Influence Machine , a multi-projection, mock environment of ghostly apparitions and talking lamps, is a glorious celebration of the huckster spectacle. However, unlike most who parlay in eerie trickery, Oursler gladly parts that red velvet curtain to reveal the modest means behind the mighty Oz. Rooted in the primary gestures of performance art, Oursler minds neither those aspects of self-referentiality nor process as visible, quotable elements of a new media formalism. Essential to this development in Oursler¹s installation work is his ongoing construction of an ever-more elaborate timeline, in which he has been carefully plotting the trajectory of such illusory projections. He enjoys phenomena in and of itself, but what he is really after is a larger map of the phenomenology as a holographic model of human desire and dread. In relation to the Christian texts of his paternal branch, he draws a comparison between religion and art in how both ³think about things that aren¹t there and make them concrete, using an associative quality that¹s super poetic to read objects in multiple ways.² Thus, as the iconography of the church allows us to read the divine or the devil in all manner of objects from the material world, be it gems, stained glass, vanitas, momento mori or even dogwood trees (from many of which this artist has borrowed imagery and ways of seeing things in his earlier pieces), Oursler can follow this kind of medieval symbolism as metaphysical allegory with the awareness that this still happens today in both art and religion. For this artist be it the way in which Abbe Suger found the face of God in gems and stained glass, or how American folkloric Biblisms have it that since the wood used to crucify Christ was from a dogwood tree you can see in it¹s flowers both the nail hole and the blood, and in its stunted growth the curse that this tree will never grow to a size capable of supplying another crucifixion it is ³the wonderful paranoia in how they read all this symbolism² that informs his manic layering of visual information and symbolic meaning.

The multiple meanings that Oursler invests in The Influence Machin e then are spawned from his investigations in what he calls ³magical thinking², an aspect of consciousness he is concerned with less for its capacity for magic than its basic transmission of social and individual psychology.

Drawing extensively from his obsessively researched timeline, Tony Oursler will freely employ the strategies, all that abracadabra, now you see it now you don¹t, smoke and mirrors prestidigitation, of proto-cinematic projections, as an investigation into the arcane roots of his supposedly new medium and an intervention into the mysticist causes for all these extraordinary effects. From Gaspar Robertson¹s moving image theater of the 1780¹s conjuring the devil in a Parisian crypt, to Kircher¹s camera obscura, running parallel yet divergent to its age of Enlightenment, Oursler takes those shadows out of Plato¹s Cave and does the whole phantasmagorical light show of evolving technology¹s increasingly more sophisticated projections. And more than simply the quasi-scientific charlatan¹s way of conjuring the worlds beyond, the way in which Oursler distills this technology is in itself a life after death, a mode of reproduction in the simulacra, of living on through what has been made, that is at the heart of The Influence Machine . Technology is its own post-human Golem here, not so much the persistence of spirit as the interminable machine. Be it all the ways that technology cheats death, from perpetual simulation to more simply scaring the begeesus out of people, the ways in which television¹s constant reminder/rebroadcast of death acts to invoke some personal victory over it (this time) for the viewer, or the immediate, nearly concurrent rise of spirit photography that accompanied the birth of this seminal medium of mechanical reproduction Oursler understands how the mystery of every technological innovation has brought with it a deeply superstitious sense of possibility in terms of communicating with the dead.

It is a rapping, a communication with loved ones no more, a bridge between life and death. It is a hoax, a loss and its need that is so great that it would have to bear its own witness. It is a dimmed light, a thrown voice, a disembodied sound, a rising table or a mysteriously scrawled message. It is The Influence Machine the casting of spells, the mesmeric hypnosis of a more than willing subject, the suspension of disbelief we all make every time the lights dim and the film starts to roll. It is the projects, personal and cultural, we all make when we face the dark unknown. In the end, perhaps, it¹s not really that Tony Oursler does not believe in God, it¹s more like he believes so dearly in the power of the mind, the spirit of invention, the psychology of imagination and the stubborn will of faith, that he would rather attribute this transcendental power to humanity itself than the inevitably flawed fantasies of our own myopic cosmologies.

'Field of Vision : Beijing'

2006-09-09T16:42:00.000-07:00

Beijing New Art Projects, situated in the fashionable 'Factory 798' Art District of Beijing, is the venue for the first Asian staging in the 'Field of Vision' global art project. 'Field of Vision: Beijing' presents a freeze-frame slice through the multiple perspectives of the many real and imagined contemporary Chinas. This immense wall-based installation is constructed from a skillfully edited assemblage of uncensored 'visual blogs' collected worldwide over the Internet following a highly successful call for submissions.'Field of Vision: Beijing' is the result of a year long collaboration between Chinese photography and performance artists the Gao Brothers and German artist Stephan Hausmeister, currently based in the UK. The Beijing field, like all other geographical instants in this ongoing global series, reflects a unique local situation at a fixed point in time, including its relationships to global issues and perceptions, both positive and dissonant. Invitations to produce further 'Fields' at key locations in Berlin, Sofia, Belfast and Bangkok have been received, with each planned as a new and unique unfolding in the map of contemporary perceptions, both global and local, that chart our steps into this uncertain century. The final artwork resulting from the 'Field of Vision' gallery event appears as an on-line version on the ever expanding project website, where visitors can navigate across the entire surface of the work and zoom in on the selected focus points to explore in detail the vast field of diverse viewpoints. All images are identified by the name and country of the contrib! utor, and many are accompanied by small personal statements that add to the depth and fascination of the artwork. Events: 'Field of Vision: Beijing' opens at 15:00 on Saturday 16 September, also celebrating the re-launch of the newly renovated Beijing New Art Project's gallery space. Construction and installation of 'Field of Vision : Beijing' takes place as a live event from 9 - 14 September with gallery visitors welcome to view the emerging 'field'. Progress updates and live-audience reporting will appear on the project website throughout. A symposium at 15:00 on Friday 15 September will include video interviews with Chinese artists, artist's talks, and an open discussion. These presentations are the result of an ongoing critical investigation into the current boom in Chinese artistic production, and in the position of Beijing specifically - including the rapid emergence of the 'Factory 798' Art District into the international limelight. Through a diversity of content and views the symposium will raise and challenge a number of critical perspectives on China and the West today, highlighting the need for critical debate supporting the 'internal' perceptions of Chinese cultural producers, alongside issues concerning 'Orientalism' and the internalization of Western views of self, Eastern 'Occidentalism', and state absolutism and the 'absolutism' of capitalist exchange-value. Opening: September 16 at 15:00 Symposium: September 15 from 15:00 – 18:00 http://www.field-of-vision.net/Beijing Beijing New Art Projects 798 Art District, 4 Jiuxianqiao Road Chaoyang District, Beijing 100015 China T / F China: +86 – [0]10 – 84566660 Curators: Gao Brothers, China; Marcel Hager, Germany; Stephan Hausmeister, Germany / UK Symposium host: Malcolm Ferris, University of Hertfordshire, UK Alison Dalwood - Cang Xin - Feifei Lu - Han Bing - Helen Marshall - Ji Shengli (Hei Yue) - Kazuaki Tanahashi - Lao Liu (Tian Yi Bin) - Liu Fei - Ma Han - Miao Xiaochun - Michael Wright - Paul Dacey - Sam Jury – QingQing - Ye Fu ...and another 160 artists from 23 different countries, submitting more than 900 images for the Beijing field. A first preview of all images submitted until August 15 is visible at www.field-of-vision.net/Beijing/Raw, images collected later than August 15 will be published by September 14.

A Yellow Box in Qingpu: Contemporary Art and Architecture in a Chinese Space

2006-08-30T13:47:00.000-07:00

A Yellow Box in Qingpu:
Contemporary Art and Architecture
in a Chinese Space

Date: 6th Sept to 6th October, 2006
Venue: Xiao Ximen (Minor West Gate),
Qingpu Town, Shanghai


EVENING PARTY

Time: 19:00-22:00 6th September 2006
Venue: Ruins of Qingpu Cement Factory
Programs: Music + Mixed media performance

Yellow Box is a project initiated by the Visual Culture Research Centre of China
Academy of Art. Its purpose is to investigate issues about contemporary art,
creativity and culture of connoisseurship in response to the modern white cube.
This project intends to investigate issues of connoisseurship and display that are
embedded in Chinese traditional spaces; meanwhile it also intends to reinterpret
traditional literati spirit in light of contemporary art. In 2005, the first
exhibition of Yellow Box subtitled Contemporary Calligraphy and Painting in
Taiwan was held at the Taipei Fine Art Museum. That exhibition experimented with
solutions for displaying the subtlety of literati art within the sterile ??white
cube?? by either building mediating structures or setting up viewing procedures.
Based on that exhibitions experiment, the present Yellow Box project continues
the research in exhibition practice by studying contemporary art and architecture.

Daniel Buetti 19.08-11.10 Conny Dietschold Gallery, Sydney

2006-08-18T12:11:00.000-07:00

For anyone whose knowledge of Daniele Buetti’s work is limited to the big portraits of top models with scarred faces or bodies, the pieces on display in this exhibition offer a different, more fundamental facet of his work. The glamorous side of the images has given way to the minimalism of installations whose apparent hermetic nature contrasts with the immediate nature of the message in the large photos. The same applies to the work on paper, the dark colours and very graphic appearance of which is far removed from the aesthetics of fashion magazines. Yet these pieces are a key to understanding the protean work of Daniele Buetti. In his previous work, in the case of the names of the big couturiers or of big multinationals, the simulated tattoos contribute to the demystification of canons of beauty and of the corresponding marketing strategies (G. Carmine). While the critical dimension of this approach is clear, the simplicity of the means applied to develop it is perhaps less so. However, this refusal to access “rich” materials, upheld by Buetti, is to be found in the pieces he will be showing in this exhibition: the video installations consist of second-hand chairs and tables, while the work on paper is produced using an inkjet printing process. There is a symbolic dimension to this formal relationship: the entire work of Buetti - photographs, luminous boxes, installations, sculptures, objects, etc. - illustrates the artist’s perception of what he calls the “Comédie humaine”, the huge freak show of our lives.

The series Is My Soul Losing Control? reflects the need to achieve a more intimate knowledge of ourselves and of others: these hands and bodies produce and exchange energy flows which illuminate and transcend the grey or brown background against which they stand out. Daniele Buetti proceeds by producing a collage of elements, some of which he has drawn himself, with others taken from various sources. The transposition of the composition in a digital printout confers the final unity. The representation of the vital energy is borrowed quite naturally from the punctuation pattern used by the artist for his light installations. According to one commentator of his work, the artist is here engaged in “experimentation concerning formal possibilities of image production”. His videos form part of a similar approach: they are more “images in movement” than actual films. The very special way in which they are exhibited naturally influences the way the viewer looks at them. Buetti considers that the aim is to achieve unity between the sculpture which, quite literally, underpins the images, and vice-versa - without commenting on one or other. The simplicity of the materials used for the “base” are echoed in the studies of the fixed scenes, such as that of the swimming-pool where nothing happens: an empty moment which depicts the idea of waiting or expectation. The artist approximates this image to that of the young boy in the sand whose face is hidden by a diving-mask, and who seems to be struggling like a wounded swan. An isolated individual before a kind of hut brings about a feeling of “uncanny strangeness” in the onlooker (Freud, das Umheimliche), but who seems for a while to be frightened by us. Waiting is expressed here, too, waiting for a meeting with the other, a meeting that may not occur. The mask is not surprising here: this idea of physical deformation, which is grotesque in the original meaning of the term, was already found in Le Grand Rhume (Marseilles, 2004), an installation in which a huge, hyper-realistic nose seemed to have pierced the ceiling and dripped endlessly on the floor of the room. The plastic ball that goes forward and backward without any apparent logic represents the drunken ship on which a human comedy that is both comic and tragic is being played out.

P.-Y. Desaive, 2006

Shane Cotton 15.08- 02.09 Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland (NZ)

2006-08-13T14:15:00.000-07:00

In this exhibition of new work by one of New Zealand’s most scrutinised artists, Shane Cotton carries us with him on a continuing journey of discovery, uncovering the history of cultural exchanges between Maori and Pakeha. In examining the past, Cotton also presents us with the possible futures that face the people of New Zealand today. “Indeed, he has a great talent for enabling one to see, hear and feel very distinct and collective developments of a people, a place and a time.” (Ngahiraka Mason in Charles Green (Ed.), 2006 Contemporary Commonwealth, National Gallery of Victoria, 2006, p.56.)

Throughout his career Cotton has developed an ongoing set of symbols and icons with which to present his stories for them to be read and deciphered. Two recent developments have been the reoccurring depiction of Hongi Hika, and a dense backdrop of calligraphic text. Birds also continue to populate Cotton’s works, symbolising the strong belief by Maori of birds as a spiritual guides and messengers.

Hika first appeared in a series of paintings Cotton developed for an exhibition in Australia. By following in the steps of Hika’s original voyage to Australia in 1814, Cotton felt it timely to include Hika as an important historic reference in his work. While in Australia, at the request of Samuel Marsden, Hika replicated his portrait, including his moko, by carving it on a fence post. Now held in the collection of the Auckland Museum, Cotton works from photographs of this historic relic, transporting Hika’s image into new “heavenly” realms. “Cotton’s painting immerses Hika in an ocean of deep black; the colour of harmony where all colours merge and become one. He paints Hika bathing in stunning hues of blue.” (ibid., p.59.)

It is easy to relate this image of Hika to that of the Maori shrunken heads that frequent Cotton’s paintings. The subject of Maori shrunken heads is a loaded topic. During the early European settlement of New Zealand in the 1800’s demand for these objects was strong, and they became scattered far and wide throughout Europe. Today, as some of these and other important objects are repatriated, the debate continues as to how they should be treated. Due to this, many of them are taken into museum storage, never to be viewed or displayed to the public. In turn, Cotton views his illustrations of such objects as a chance to breathe new life and vitality into these ancestors.

Text has always been intrinsic to Cotton’s densely narrative paintings. The script in these new paintings emulates the original handwritten copy of the English alphabet made by Hika while on his voyage from New Zealand to Australia. By referencing Hika’s trans-Tasman travels, at a time when Cotton himself is undertaking his own trans-Tasman explorations, Cotton endeavours to put himself in Hika’s shoes, making reference to issues of cultural displacement and the treatment of foreign cultures as novelties.

As always, these recent works from Cotton are highly thought provoking and informative. As Cotton states, “I’m not really trying to teach people, I’m trying to tell them what I’ve found.” (Shane Cotton quoted in Jim and Mary Barr, “Mana from Heaven”, World Art , no. 15, 1997, p.63.)
Visit the site.

The Charms of Lincolnshire´´ Grayson Perry until 13.08. Vitoria Miro Gallery, London

2006-08-11T07:15:00.000-07:00

Grayson Perry was born and grew up in rural Essex. Living and working in London the artist's practice has largely dealt with metropolitan themes. The Charms of Lincolnshire allows Perry the possibility to think and create work about the countryside. This is not a historical exhibition about Lincolnshire. It focuses on the Victorian era and themes that have a strong emotional charge for the artist such as death, childhood, religion, folk art, hunting and the feminine. From thousands of items in the collections Perry has selected categories of objects around each theme and in response to them has created new works, including pots, ceramics, embroidery, photography and for the first time pieces in cast iron.

"My initial idea was to focus these themes around an unknown artist, a mentally ill (Victorian) farmer's wife driven insane by the loss of her children. Her ghost and those of the children haunt the choices and works I have made for the show."

The centre-piece of the exhibition is a hearse dating from 1880, which inspired the artist to create a cast iron child's coffin entitled Angel of the South. He describes it as both a non-triumphal monument to the countless victims of empire building in the Victorian age and the north of England's technological dominance. The coffin bears images that relate to medieval cathedrals and Benin Bronzes from West Africa - part of the developing world - "the south",
where today premature death is still pre-dominant amongst children.

The title for the exhibition The Charms of Lincolnshire invokes a bucolic cliché of National Trust England (Perry has even designed the ubiquitous souvenir tea towel), whilst also suggesting that the items exhibited are talismans of some forgotten, arcane, rural voodoo.

"The biscuit tin idyll of cosy village Britain is luckily in the past, for it was a candlelit back-breaking, sexist, tubercular child-death hell. The ghosts of long-ago children flicker in the dead-eyed familiars of wax, porcelain and wooden dolls I have chosen and in the stitches of the samplers worked by young pious hands".

The Charms of Lincolnshire was first exhibited at The Collection, Lincoln in February 2006. The Collection is a critically acclaimed, £12 million new museum in Lincoln. Designed by Panter Hudspith Architects, it opened in 2005.

The exhibition is presented in association with the Museums of Lincoln and the Arts Council.

Sarah Ciracì, ying yang bang until 25.09. Blindarte Contemporeane Napoli (I)

2006-08-02T14:47:00.000-07:00

One of the protagonist of the last Sarah Ciraci's works is the mushroom cloud. The explosions, consequent upon the use of nuclear weapons, are always filmed from media and spread to the collectivity, but as it often happens in the ambiguous contemporary information, the attention is focused more on the spectacularity of the event than on its consequences. The mushroom cloud is entered in the collective imagination, and the superficiality of its representation has mitigated its catastrophic image. The artist, conscious of that, depicts on canvas the same mushroom clouds spread by media, in this way she attests the use of the mass destruction's weapons. The original paintings permit the vision only if illuminated by ultraviolet light, in absence of it the canvas appairs as white monochrome. Sideways of the canvas little luminous led are mounted switching on and off, it makes visible repeated and continuous explosions able to involve the entire exhibition space, and able to track down in the collective conscience the last essence, the archetype, that is present in everything. Steming from the scientific research, as often in her works, Sarah Cirac®¨ investigates on the origins of the phenomenon and find the real cause in the atom, as the primary element and the generator, through the human handling, of disaster of Cyclopian dimension. In this way the little atom, or the Tao archetype that represents it, holds the important role that is due to itself, between the enhancement of its omnipresence, and the fear for the consequences that could originate from its improper use: " remember, you are an atom and an atom you could become again". The strong link with the scientific studies and the interest for the continual tecnological innovations draw the artist to present the new works with very original aestetical and formal solutions that characterize her role of technological art pioneer. Perhaps for these reasons the artist uses her works "to exorcize her and collective fears". The use of scientific and technological innovations can be considered a weapon, often handled by a few, able to have ripercussions on the whole comunity. If the huge catastrophes of the past are the confirmation of it, the worrying actual balances and the extraterrestrial presences threats, always more documented, do not promise us a reassuring future: ying yang bang!

CrossMediale 1 04.-28.08 Gosia Koscielak Studio & Gallery , Chicago USA

2006-07-30T12:05:00.000-07:00

CrossMediale 1

Austria – Germany – Japan – Netherlands – Poland – USA

An exhibition of American and International art in new media curated by Gosia Koscielak.

Exhibition Dates: August 4 – 28, 2006

Opening reception/vernissage: Friday, August 4th, 2006, 6:00 pm – 10 pm

Special events:

August 4th, 2006 6 - 10 pm
Annette Barbier and Drew Browning
You Are Here, Pure Data & GEM projection onto the exterior of the gallery building, visible from the Kennedy Expressway (I-94), near exit 48B (North Ave.)

August 4th and 25th, 2006 6 - 10 pm
La Bande Sans Fin electro-audio-visual performances

Participating artists:
Mark Baldridge, Annette Barbier, Hans Bernhard, David Blum, Drew Browning, Ben Chang, Miroslaw Chudy, Melinda Fries, Catherine Forster, Scott Kildall, Toshihiro Komatsu, Lizvlx, Zbigniew Oksiuta, Erik Olofsen, Richard Purdy, Silvia Ruzanka, Galina Shevchenko, UBERMORGEN, David Zerlin, La Bande Sans Fin.

CrossMediale 1 is an international exhibition focusing on new media art. The concept of the installation of this show allows the viewer to move freely between artworks produced in vr, photography, and video, amid images derived from quantum mechanics, cosmology, computer programming, and fractal geometry – as exemplified by the encaustic on wood pieces by New York artist Richard Purdy. Artworks included in this exhibition traverse media and concepts.

Chicago digital artists Ben Chang, Silvia Ruzanka, and Mark Baldridge present virtual reality works. Mark Baldridge’s vr work ChiSky is inspired by the paintings of Roger Brown, a Chicago Imagist, while Ben Chang’s vr work is a virtual kinetic sculpture based on permutations of pieces from the IKEA catalog

Video works are by Catherine Forster, Scott Kildall, Erik Olofsen, Galina Shevchenko, and Zbigniew Oksiuta. The exhibition includes a special video project, Spatium Gelatum (congealed space), by Zbigniew Oksiuta. This project, which examines dynamic systems that transfer information and energy through liquid medium, is a crossover of architecture, art, and the biological sciences. It was presented at the 2004 La Biennale di Venezia, the 9th International Architecture Exhibition and ArchiLab, La Ville à Nu, 6e Rencontres Internationales d ’Architecture d ’Orléans in France.

Erik Olofsen, and Toshihiro Komatsu display photographs. Dutch artist Erik Olofsen presents Mugshot photo as well as Shift, a video installation consisting of a double video projection of wooden shapes gliding over and past each other like drifting continents. The projections touch, causing the images to move from and towards one another. Sometimes both projections fall “into the fold” and create a new entity. The blank spaces–the emptiness in between–become as tangible as the saw-toothed wooden forms. The scale and perspective transform, hinting at geopolitical shifts.

UBERMORGEN presents the ART FID (2005) painting series, featuring digital prints on canvas, which portray, magnified on a monochrome background, the structure of round RFID chips. UBERMORGEN.COM’s focus on “the pixel as the molecule” and technology as a hidden demon relates also to the technology industries newest gadgets -- RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) chips are one of the leading technologies of the future: an identification system that can collect diverse information about the products it is attached to as well as the person that has made purchase of the product. The ART FID series was shown for the first time during ART 36 Basel, announced by a press release – a media hack in pure. UBERMORGEN.COM's style – talking about an experimental initiative by the same Art Basel: the introduction of the RFID technologies into the art system, providing visitors immediate access to information about all artistic works being presented, as well as access fot gallerists into the financial situation and the purchasing power of potential buyers. Recently reviewed in ARTFORUM, UBERMORGEN’s collaborative project GWEI—aka Google Will Eat Itself—tackles Google's dominance of the Internet. UBERMORGEN is an artist duo from Vienna, Austria–Lizvlx and Hans Bernhard–and represents contemporary European techno-fine-art avant-garde.

Special events include YOU ARE HERE, Pure Data & GEM projection by Drew Browning and Annette Barbier onto the outside of the gallery building at the 4th floor level and visible from the Kennedy Expressway (Interstate 94), near exit 46B. Further, two electro-audio-visual performances by La Bande Sans Fin, a Chicago based multimedia artistic team formed by David Zerlin and David Blum, will take place.

Ma Jun & Huang Min 29.07- 29.08 L.A.Gallery Beijng

2006-07-26T10:54:00.000-07:00

Porcelain is not a widely used media in
contemporary art, but its unique character shown in the art works of Ma Jun and Huang Min does make me believe that porcelain improves the variety of art greatly. Porcelain has been a symbol of Chinese art for more than one thousand years. On one hand, artists find porcelain a very important media because it carries the sense of history; on the other hand, it is a burden because of its great history. So in spite of the power of porcelain, porcelain may play a very weak role in modern art because of the limitation of the artists.


Ma Jun and Huang Min transformed the traditional taste of porcelain in their
recent works. In their works, porcelain is not only the form, but also the content.
Form and function meet in their works. When contemporary artists play with the
ideas of Chinese traditional culture, past and present are connected.

L.A.Gallery site

"Once upon a Time in the West - Part One" - Groupshow

2006-07-22T12:16:00.000-07:00

Cecily Brown, Christopher Wool, Dana Schutz, Daniel Richter, Raymond Pettibon, Georg Baselitz, Peter Doig, Tal R until

until July 29, 2006

CONTEMPORARY FINE ARTS
Berlin

Jack Pierson until 29.07 Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris

2006-07-19T13:46:00.000-07:00

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac presents an exhibition of new works by American artist Jack Pierson.

His photographic works have often been compared to images from road movies, movies whose rapturous race toward fulfilment have become etched into the American landscape. His favourite subjects are drawn mostly from his daily life as a contemporary artist: fragments of urban landscapes, still lives of ordinary objects, homoerotic nudes, evocative words worked into collages or transformed into neons. Far from simply seeking to create traditional variations on the American Dream, the artist seeks instead to explore the flip side of the concept, searching to express what he calls "the tragedy inherent in the pursuit of glamour".

'Bennie's Games' by Anita Van Tonder, Bell-Roberts Gallery, Cape Town

2006-07-18T10:52:00.000-07:00

This month Bell-Roberts hosts 'Bennie's Games' by Anita Van Tonder, a finalist for the Kanna award at the Klein Karoo Nasional Kunstefees earlier this year.

'Bennie's Games' comprises seven sculptural pieces each either accompanying a typical video arcade game or transformed to become such a game. By creating detailed and luridly kitsch renditions of notions of the ideal and stereotypical, van Tonder uses notions of play and competition to expose issues such as abuse of power and substances, media-induced obsessions with food, physical appearance, sex and excess.

Opens: July 19

Jessica Ciocci until 04.08 Foxy Productions, NY

2006-07-17T11:33:00.000-07:00

Ciocci's work explores the process of consumption through the examination of desire, incorporation and detritus. She appraises childhood as a time when individuals are psychically hardwired to consume, using a primitivist pig-like character as a primary motif to disarmingly critique the dynamics of demand, supply
and surplus.

Employing at times a junk-store aesthetic that revels in a world of bric-a-brac, the unwanted and hidden treasures, Ciocci delves into the psychology of our emotional attachment to popular symbols, characters and narratives. Key to her approach is a profoundly intuitive re-presentation of the all-too-familiar as
the uncanny.

A grandly–scaled fabric work combines everyday found textiles and repeated motifs, colors and patterning to produce an almost hypnotic effect that pushes figure and form to their limits. Together, diverse snapshot-like photographs - of Bart Simpson dolls, money blowing away on the street, a paper fish, an arm too close to the camera to be in focus - gel into a poignant, downcast whole. A series of collages, using fabric, paint, and found images of Barbie, pets and fairy tales, deftly explore the pleasures and terrors of the childhood experience. An animation-based print and a video use a flatness of texture and color, not unlike that of children's cartoons, to create bright semi-abstract character-scapes that are undercut by an almost claustrophobic disquiet. A large acid-hued knitted yarn piece, comprising a number of individual panels, appears to be a totem to the pig-like figure, to venerate it, or perhaps, acting like a gargoyle, to ward off its potential for harm.

Jessica Ciocci is a member of artists' group Paper Rad. Selected exhibitions with Paper Rad include: Green on Red, Dublin (upcoming, October 2006); PaceWildenstein (2005); Carnegie Arts Center, North Tonowanda, NY (2005); The ArtReview 25 at Phillips de Pury, New York (2005); Deitch Projects (Paper Rad & Cory Arcangel) (2005); Foxy Production, New York (2004); the Contemporary Museum, Honolulu (2003); Tate Britain, London (2003); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2003); the Institute of Contemporary Art, London (2003).

Jessica Ciocci and Paper Rad have received critical acclaim in a range of publications, including: The New York Times; ArtReview; Artforum; Art in America; Rolling Stone; Mute; Vice; Issue; and Select. Publications include “Internet Art” (Thames and Hudson, 2004), and an artist’s book designed by Ben Jones and Paper Rad (Picture Box, 2005). Jessica Ciocci and Paper Rad are online at www.paperrad.org

MISS MAO opening 14.07 Blacklist Projects , London

2006-07-12T02:13:00.000-07:00

“ Pinocchio was a persistent liar and in Mao's time it was told that the communist party was the mother of all people.”

MISSMAO celebrates the inauguration and opening of Blacklist Projects with a unique and diverse international collaboration. The exhibition marks the beginning of a new dialogue and debate between artists and curators examining modes and myths in an information driven age.The catalyst for the show, the Gao Brothers’ ‘Small Silver Idol’, is seen here for the first time outside China. ‘Small Silver Idol’ is one of a series of red, silver, goId and white idols originally made in mud before being cast in fibreglass, and ranges in size from 2-20 feet high. Prior to its journey to Europe, it was shrouded in sack-cloth to avoid confiscation during police inspections. In fact, until 2003 the Gao Brothers themselves were on a government blacklist and unable to leave China. In recent years, Gao Zhen, 50, and Gao Qiang, 44, both from Shandong Province, are part of a new wave of Chinese artists showing at an international level. Due to censorship laws in contemporary China, and as a response to cultural sensitivities, MISSMAO will change her clothes when she tours to Beijing in September 2006. Updates will be posted regularly on http://www.missmao.co.uk