// CALVIN KLEIN FW17 IN LIVE STREAMING //
// THE BALLAD OF SEXUAL DEPENDENCY //
Over the course of 25 years (1979-2004) and through numerous cities (New York, London, Berlin, and beyond) photographer Nan Goldin closely followed and documented the daily life and encounters of the friends, family, and lovers that she would come to describe as her ‘tribe’.
“There is a popular notion that the photographer is by nature a voyeur, the last one invited to the party.But I’m not crashing; this is my party. This is my family, my history.”
In what would become a visual diary of urban life throughout the eighties, an era scared by AIDS and drug addiction, she acurately lay bare issues of gender roles, the insatiable longing for intimacy and understanding, and the struggle between independency and interdependency within the concept of the couple and relationships.
“In my family of friends, there is a desire for the intimacy of the blood family, but also a desire for something more open-ended. Roles aren’t so defined. These are long-term relationships. People leave, people come back, but these separations are without the breach of intimacy. We are bonded not by blood or place, but by a similar morality, the need to live fully and for the moment, a disbelief in the future, a similar respect for honesty, a need to push limits, and a common history. We live life without consideration, but with consideraition. There is among us an ability to listen and to emphasize that surpasses the normal definition of friendship.”
The Ballad of Sexual Dependency was first published in 1986 as a series of images and stories and has, through the experience of change and loss, become into a visual imprint of a memory, one story without an end.
The installation currently on view at the MoMa presents a slide show of some 700 portraits sequenced against a music soundtrack prepared by Goldin’s friends, from Maria Callas to The Velvet Underground
Nan Goldin - The Ballad of Sexual Dependency
New York
11.6.2016 – 12.2.2017
© Nan Goldin. Courtesy the artist.
/ by Kim Poorters /
// BREUER’S LINES //
On March 18, 2016, the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art celebrated the public opening of its new space dedicated to modern and contemporary art in Marcel Breuer’s iconic 1966 Whitney museum on Madison Avenue and 75th Street. The controversial upside-down ziggurat made of granite-clad concrete had undergone a careful renovation maintaining the building’s unique character and preserving the aesthetic of its weathered areas.
“Outside, it is expression; inside, only proportion. It stands back and lets you see the pictures.”
New York photographer Bill Jacobson has documented the building with the Whitney’s permission in late 2014, in the in-between days after they moved out, and before it was restored into The Met Breuer. His photographs are carefully composed into diptychs focusing on Breuer’s muted space stripped of its pictures: concrete walls, slate floors, cast-cement ceilings, bronze doors and fixtures.
Bill Jacobson - Lines In My Eyes
New York
2014
Lines In My Eyes (945 Madison Ave.) #104/96//#12/63//#89/35//#57/56//#99/51//#17/19//#15/83.
© Bill Jacobson. Courtesy the artist and Julie Saul Gallery.
/ by Kim Poorters /
// THE ART OF COLLAGE //
Paul Kasmin Gallery presents a selection of works by artist Robert Motherwell showing the unprecedented diversity of approaches in the artist’s lifelong exploration of the medium of the collage.
The works on display illustrate the harmonious coexistence of media and disparate techniques in the artist’s work, from intuitive tearing methods and the introduction of ready-made objects into the composition, to the layered painting of its underground. 27 of the plates on show are reproduced in an accompanying publication.
Robert Motherwell - The Art of Collage
New York
14.4.2016 – 21.5.2016
© Dedalus Foundation, Inc. Licensed by VAGA,New York, NY.
/ by Kim Poorters /
// LOST DOWNTOWN //
The Peter Hujar exhibition features over twenty portraits by the late photographer, predominantly in black and white and taken with a medium format camera in the intimacy of his studio or familiar indoor spaces where he could quietly compose his pictures in a one-on-one with his models.
Ranging from casual acquaintances to close friends and intimate lovers, his portraits offer a fascinating glimpse into New York City’s downtown scene of the late 70’s and early 80’s, a coterie of artists, performers, drag queens, misfits, writers and musicians living on Hujar’s Lower East Side blocks.
“That Downtown is forever gone. Time, gentrification, disease and death took their toll. But before it vanished, its extravagant cast sat for Peter Hujar’s camera – and is now alive again in front of our eyes.”
// NO LIFE LOST //
De Bruyckere’s largest and most ambitious work to date, created in collaboration with novelist J M Coetzee for the Belgian Pavilion at the 55th Venice Art Biennale in 2013, travels to New York. The darkly beautiful ‘Kreupelhout – Cripplewood, 2012 – 2013’ forms the centrepiece of an exhibition of recent sculptures and works on paper by the acclaimed Belgian artist.
Working with casts made of wax, animal skins, hair, textiles, metal and wood, she renders haunting distortions of organic forms, wounded and scarred, reflecting on man’s fundamental search for transformation, transcendence and reconciliation in the face of mortality.
Parallel to the exhibition and inspired by the works created for it, contemporary dancer Romeu Runa presents the performance piece ‘Sibylle’, his second collaboration with Berlinde De Bruyckere. After meeting at Belgian choreographer Alain Platel’s company les ballets C de la B in 2010, Runa went from posing for a sculpture to an unanticipated and intimate performance, adding another dimension to De Bruyckere’s series of sculpture and drawing with ‘Romeu, my deer’ in 2013.
Berlinde De Bruyckere – No Life Lost
New York
28.1.2016 – 2.4.2016
© Berlinde De Bruyckere. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
Pictures of Runa’s performance ‘Romeu my deer’, 26th October 2014, S.M.A.K, Ghent, by Kim Poorters.
/ by Kim Poorters /
