Exhibitions | New York, November 2017

Perhaps the most outstanding November exhibition in New York, was 'Geta Brătescu. The Leaps of Aesop’, a comprehensive series of works by to the 91 year-old Romanian conceptual artist–presented in the Chelsea space of the Hauser & Wirth Gallery. Brătescu works spans in multiple forms– from two-dimensional media (drawing, collage, engraving, textiles, photography) to film, video, performance and artist books and "mines themes of identity, gender, and dematerialization, often drawing from the stories of literary figures and addressing the symbiotic relationship between art making and working environments.  From Magda Radu's essay:

The exhibition ‘The Leaps of Aesop’ tracks the many implications generated by Aesop, the writer of the ancient fables, who, in Geta Brătescu’s system of thinking, becomes a playful and mischievous character and can be regarded as a metaphor for the condition of the artist. Right after the fall of the Communist regime in Romania, Geta Brătescu declared Aesop a symbol of ‘everything that stood against totalitarianism.’ But Aesop, like Medea, is a sign encompassing so many overlapping meanings that his literary embodiment is transcended and endlessly modulated in the artist’s practice. Aesop is, above all, an agent of freedom, the entity responsible for sparking the creative process in the studio. His leaps are so many movements of the mind, while his undisciplined nature channels the creative energy in countless directions. Aesop is a catalyst of ideas, rejecting the barriers between genres. His characteristic irreverence constitutes the ferment that pushes the artist to experiment in a plethora of forms of expression: drawing, collage, object, printing techniques, experimental film, performance, and animation.

On view at the first floor of the 22 Street building of Hauser & Wirth (former home of the Dia Foundation) were sculptures and drawings by David Smith (1909-1965) presented in an exhibition titled 'Origin & Innovations' focusing mainly on works creating around the 1930s.

Another remarkable exhibition was at the Lévy Gorvy Gallery: 'Ileana Sonnabend and Arte Povera' presenting other outstanding examples of the Italian movement, curated by Germano Celant. The exhibition included works by Mario Merz, Jannis Kounellis, Giovanni Anselmo, Pierpaolo Calzolari, Gilberto Zorio and Michelangelo Pistoletto.

Exhibitions | NYC, Gabriel Orozco: thinking in circles

Gabriel Orozco: thinking in circles

Marian Goodman Gallery

24 West 57 Street

November 5-December 21

Exhibitions | Alighiero e Boetti

  “Do you know why dates are so important? Because if you write, say, ‘1970’ on a wall, it seems like absolutely nothing, but in thirty years’ time . . . Dates have this beauty: the more time passes, the more beautiful they become.” 

"Mi Fuma il Cervello"

MoMA hosts Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan, a retrospective, organized in collaboration with the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid and the Tate Modern in London, of works by Italian artist Alighiero e Boetti (1940–1994). Boetti was one of the representatives of the Arte Povera, a movement which similarly to conceptualism and minimalism was making use of common every day materials as well as incorporating thought process in the artwork.

Boetti was often incorporating reflections and aphorisms in his work:

“First of all I prefer thought. This is the basic thing. I really think manual skill is secondary. . . . It’s taking things from reality. Everything, however small and humble, always has a beginning and stems from reality.”

“I went to a supplier of building materials. It was thrilling to see the wonderful things that were there! Seeing all these materials filled me with such crazy enthusiasm, in the end it turned to nausea! But still, some of the best moments in Arte Povera were hardware shop moments.”

“For me, the work on the embroidered maps achieved the highest form of beauty. For the finished work, I myself did nothing, in the sense that the world is as it is (I didn’t draw it) and the national flags are as they are (I didn’t design them). In short, I did absolutely nothing. What emerges from the work is the concept.” 

“I have done a lot of work which presents a visual disorder that is actually the representation of a mental order. It’s just a question of knowing the rules of the game. Someone who doesn’t know them will never see the order that reigns in things. It’s like looking at a starry sky. Someone who does not know the order of the stars will see only confusion, whereas an astronomer will have a very clear vision of things.”

  “Often when I draw I use both of my hands. Normally I am right-handed. When I draw with my left hand it is a kind of conversation with myself exploring the positive and the negative, the ego and alter ego, the order and disorder and mounting it on paper. It is as if on one hand there is Alighiero and on the other, Boetti.”

Exhibitions: New York | Worldmaking at the Whitney

A pleasant surprise from my yesterday visit at the Whitney Museum. As perhaps an answers (at least in my personal interpretations) to the "making worlds" of la Biennale, three exhibitions were a real proposition of worldmaking as an artist's re-creation of realities.

• Dan Graham: Beyond is the artist's first retrospective of work spanning from the mid-1960s to the present. Dan Graham's work includes conceptual art, video and film installation, performance, site-specific sculpture, as well as musical collaborations. His installations are involved with with visual perception: the ambiguos relationship between the perceiving subject and subject of perception re-creates reality and makes ever-changing worlds where the viewer becomes active participants to the world making creations

June 25-October 11, 2009

• Lucinda Childs: Dance presents the material that choreographer Lucinda Childs, composer Philip Glass, and artist Sol LeWitt generated for Dance, the perfomance commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1979. The perfomance represents a world created by the intersection of movement, sound and images in one of the most complete and harmonious interactions ever presented.

• Photoconceptualism, 1966-1973 has to be found in the museum mezzanine, and presents series of photographs from the Whitney’s collection. Photography and his conceptualization is presented in a combination of different two-dimensional media, in the works of artists of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The exhibition includes work by Mel Bochner, Adrian Piper, Bruce Nauman, Michael Heizer.
  

  May 22-September 20, 2009

  
  

Exhibitions: Yang Fudong at Marian Goodman, NYC

Yang Fudong is one of the most visionary artist to have come out of China in memory. An icon, a master, whatever—he is hailed. But he has stayed very much resident in China, as if his goal is to devote his life to the exploration of his own people, the Chinese ideas, the mystery and majesty that defines his birthplace. He understood that this cannot be done from a distance, that he must remain, observe, ponder, and synthesize that which he has experienced in order to arrive at something of meaning worthy of an artistic contribution.

In his latest show, East of Que Village, 2007, Fudong has reached his mark. This touchingly transcendent exhibition exposes a China far off the beaten path in some ways, but in a deeper way, not so far at all. Fudong knows that what is really to be appreciated about China is the fact that even in the midst of a billion residents, there is an enormous, palpable isolation and chill that pervades everything: the landscape, the buildings, the institutions, and the people. They are lonely in a way that perhaps can only occur because they are so absolutely surrounded by others. It is one of life’s greatest ironies, and one that Yang Fudong appreciated and managed to capture in this deeply compelling, rich array of photographs.

The works have dogs as their subjects. Dogs wander the landscape, in search. In search of what is not clear, but that is another of the ironies displayed resplendently in Fudong’s depictions. In the dogs’ eyes is another perspective on China, one that underscores the frigidity that encapsulates the culture with an edge bordering on soullessness. Here dogs wander a junk heap in clouds of smoke, there a solitary dog ambles down a long, barren road. The quality of the photographs, although superb, is irrelevant, so strongly infused is each with the emotion of non-emotion, the overflowing of emptiness.

Fudong did not take the easy path in his interpretation of life in China. He avoided the shots of people, weathered and worn, laid low by burdens, which have become so commonplace. In a sense, one ponders how much of the work is autobiographical and what Fudong pulled out of his own history to offer up to his audience. This is a China we would not easily find in the midst of our touristic traversing. But it is the true China. Fudong’s work gives us a chance to develop an intimacy that might guide us in our travels to discover the more authentic threads of what gives the Chinese mentality its uniqueness apart from the rest of the world.

Fudong was trained as a painter at the renowned Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou. But he outgrew that media as a child outgrows shoes, and he strode confidently into the world of film and video, which seems not only a natural progression, but a necessary one. While Fudong the painter was commendable, Fudong the photographer is astonishing. The work is an introspective combination of the psychological, philosophical, historical, and emotional components of China that lay it open for all to see.

Yang Fudong is indeed the visionary. How a propos that the show is presented at the Marian Goodman Gallery, where visionary art is de rigueur. 24 West 57th Street, NY, NY.