"Immoral Facts & Fables" Galerie Caprice Horn, Berlin

“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

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

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

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

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

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

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.”