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Michael Marson
IRRIVERENT WONDER
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Michael Marson
THE DINNER GUESTS
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Michael Marson
SCENT OF HERITAGE

Exhibition

// 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

MoMa

New York

11.6.2016 – 12.2.2017

 

© Nan Goldin. Courtesy the artist.

 

  / by Kim Poorters /

// THE AESTHETIC OF DISAPPEARANCE //

Hungarian born artist Rita Ackermann presents her most recent series The Chalkboard Paintings alongside a selection of early works that first gained her widespread acclaim in the New York art scene of the early 90s.

 In the drawings, collages and paintings on display, the artist continues her trademark superposition of images, characters and narratives, whilst adding a new layer of erasure. Rendering nearly invisible the overall image, the nymphetish girls who have featured in her paintings since the very beginning remain ever so desirable and enigmatic as our favourite objects of desire. 

 Rita Ackermann - The Aesthetic of Disappearance

Malmö Konsthall

Malmö

22.10.2016 – 22.01.2017

 

 © Rita Ackermann. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

 

 / by Kim Poorters /

 

// THE GREAT AMERICAN WEST //

In 1956, at the age of 18, Ed Ruscha left his home in Oklahoma and drove a 1950 Ford sedan to Los Angeles, where he had been accepted to Chouinard Art Institute. His trip roughly followed the fabled Route 66 through the Southwest, which featured many of the sights that would provide him with artistic subjects for decades to come.

Currently on display at San Francisco’s de Young are over eighty works revealing the artist’s fascination with the evolving landscape and iconic character of the “American West” in symbolic, evocative, and ironic renditions. Key to several of his best-known paintings and prints, these include works depicting gasoline stations, others commenting on LA and the film industry, as well as those in which a word or phrase is the sole subject.

Independently of the exhibition but released coinciding with it, Los Angeles’ MOCA has commissioned a short-length documentary about Ruscha’s extraordinary body of work: Ed Ruscha: Buildings and Words.

Ed Ruscha and the Great American West

de Young

San Francisco

16.7.2016 – 09.10.2016

 

 © Ed Ruscha. Courtesy the artist and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

 

/ by Kim Poorters /

// ORDER TO CHAOS //

ROSEGALLERY presents a solo exhibition by Belgian artist Dirk Braeckman, his first on the US West Coast.

Focusing on ordinarily unobserved details that are often lost in shades of gray, Braeckman’s photographs reflect an atmosphere of sensual ambiguity and intimate solitude. His images are characterised by the use of black and white, analogue photography and are part of a lengthy process of post-production manipulation in which the photographer prints and re-photographs his images. Deviating from conformal darkroom techniques, the artist continues editing the images’ surface through the use of different resources, such as brushes and sponges to spread the developer in stripes and planes across the paper. The resulting photograph is a unique piece.

 “Photography is, for me, an almost obsessive attempt to scan, in my own way, everything around me, everything I meet, driven by the desire to give order to chaos. With or without a camera.”

 Dirk Braeckman has recently been selected to represent Belgium at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017.

Dirk Braeckman

ROSEGALLERY

Santa Monica

13.4.2016 – 13.8.2016

 

 © Dirk Braeckman. Courtesy ROSEGALLERY.

  

/ by Kim Poorters /

// CIUDAD JUÁREZ PROJECTS //

David Zwirner presents Ciudad Juárez projects, an exhibition displaying a group of recent works by Francis Alÿs. Made in and about Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, a once prosperous border city that in recent years has been devastated by drug-related violence, the artists’ works on display date between 2010 and 2015.

 Home to the Belgian artist since 1986, Mexico City has since provided a rich setting for his varied actions and works which are often characterised by a distinct poetic and imaginative sensibility towards anthropological and geopolitical concerns, and centred around observations of, and engagements with, everyday life.

  In the works on view the artist does not offer solutions, but rather poses open-ended questions, in particular related to the role of the artist in a time of a national crisis in an area affected by violence and crime.

Francis Alÿs - Ciudad Juárez projects

David Zwirner

London

11.6.2016 – 5.8.2016

 

© Francis Alÿs. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York/London.

 

  / by Kim Poorters /

// 82 PORTRAITS AND 1 STILL LIFE //

The Royal Academy of Arts presents an exhibition of recent portrait paintings by David Hockney, executed over the last couple of years in the artist’s Los Angeles studio. Considered by Hockney to be seen as one single body of work, each portrait is painted on the same sized canvas, in the same time frame of three days, and shows his subjects seated in the same chair, against the same vivid blue background.

  An intimate snapshot of the LA art world and the people who have crossed his path over the last two years, his sitters include friends and family, office staff, fellow artists, curators and gallerists such as John Baldessari and Larry Gagosian.

David Hockney - 82 Portraits and 1 Still Life

Royal Academy of Arts

London

2.7.2016 – 2.10.2016

 

 © David Hockney. Courtesy the artist.

 

 / by Kim Poorters /

// Long Live Punk //

2017 marks an anniversary, and not the least. It’s been 40 years since PUNK knew its heydays.  London will celebrate appropriately all year and Sir Paul Smith kicked it off with an exhibition with Derek Ridgers, music and event photographer at venues like the Roxy or The Marquee in the late seventies.  

He captured the essence of this movement in his book and on this shirt designed by Paul Smith himself in honour of this exhibition.

Self expression is key and Punk did just that.

 

"Forty Years of Punk"

Paul Smith, 9 Albemarle Street, London, W1S 4BL

From 10th June 2016 to 13th June 2016

 

 

/ by Gaelle Van Lede /

 

 

// THE PERFECT MEDIUM //

In collaboration with the J. Paul Getty Museum, the LACMA presents The Perfect Medium, a major retrospective examining the work and career of Robert Mapplethorpe with over 300 of the artist’s works on view.

0rganized in five thematic sections and galleries, the travelling exhibition brings an overview of Mapplethorpe’s early drawings and collages of the late 60’s, his first Polaroids of the 70’s pointing out a recurring interest in the (self-) portrait, from the provocative glimpse he offered throughout the 70’s and 80’s into an urban gay culture and an intriguing community of fetish and nudity, to the commissioned portraits from the mid 80’s onwards.

Rarely seen correspondence, books, and other ephemera demonstrate Mapplethorpe’s personal connections to his sitters, his ability to manage a successful studio, and his ambition to elevate photography to the status of art, and together with the works on display provide insight into such key genres as portraiture, the nude, and still life.

Independently of the exhibition but coinciding with it, HBO presents Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures, the first feature-length documentary about the artist since his death, and the most comprehensive film on his life and work to date.

Robert Mapplethorpe - The perfect Medium

LACMA & J. Paul Getty Museum

Los Angeles

20.3.2016 – 31.7.2016

 

 © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.

 

  / by Kim Poorters /

// A RETROSPECTIVE //

Foam presents a major retrospective exhibition of the work of German artist Helmut Newton featuring over 200 of his photographs, ranging from monumental photos to vintage prints from the Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin.

 Influenced by the social change that took place in the 1970s, an era of female emancipation and looser sexual morality, the depiction of women and underlying themes such as power, violence, eroticism and desire became key to both his commercial work for French Vogue and the portrait photography for which he is best known.

 All too aware that eroticism, seduction and desire primarily amount to a game of perception and of displaying an unattainable reality, his women are powerful, seductive, dominant, and often nothing less than intimidating.

Helmut Newton - A Retrospective

FOAM

Amsterdam

16.6.2016 – 4.9.2016

 

 © Helmut Newton / Helmut Newton Estate.

 

  / by Kim Poorters /

// IMITATION OF LIFE //

With close to 120 works drawn primarily from the Eli and Edye Broad collection, Los Angeles’ new contemporary art museum The Broad presents a comprehensive survey of the work of groundbreaking artist Cindy Sherman.

  From early film stills to rear projections and films, the exhibition focuses primarily on the artist’s engagement with the stereotypes of 20th century popular film industry and of celebrity. Featuring as her own model playing out female stereotypes in a range of personas, environments and guises, the artist raises questions about identity, representation and the role of images in contemporary culture.

Cindy Sherman – Imitation of Life

The Broad

Los Angeles

11.6.2016 – 2.10.2016

 

 © Cindy Sherman. The Broad Art Foundation. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures.

 

  / 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

The Met Breuer

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 /

// I CRIED BECAUSE I LOVE YOU //

Lehmann Maupin and White Cube present ‘I Cried Because I Love You’, a joint exhibition by Tracey Emin taking place across both gallery spaces in Hong Kong and marking the artist’s first solo presentation in Greater China.

“I look at myself, and I paint myself, but they’re portraits of my mind, of my deepest thoughts.”

For this major project, Emin has envisaged a continuous exhibition of painting, embroidery, and neon across two spaces that reflect the diversity of her challenging and deeply poetic work across a wide range of media. She draws on subjects that are intimately bound up with her own biography, recalling events, dreams or emotional states in works that are starkly honest and personal, yet familiar and universal.

Tracey Emin - I Cried Because I Love You

White Cube HK

Hong Kong

21.2.2016 – 21.5.2016

 

© Tracey Emin. Courtesy of Lehmann Maupin and White Cube.

 

 

/ by Kim Poorters /

// VERTIGO //

With the works of young Japanese photographer Daisuke Yokota currently on show, Antwerp gallery Stieglitz19 presents a generation of artists who are radically experimenting with photography, bookmaking and other media.

  Vertigo, a series of highly processed black and white images of skies, nudes and abstract buildings and rooms, originates from snapshots to which the artist applied various techniques and interventions to create deformation, imperfection, and visual noise: he photographs, develops, prints, photographs the resulting images again and again, and continues experimenting in his homemade darkroom by developing film in boiling solutions, leaking light, or leaving deliberate scratches.

Daisuke Yokota

Stieglitz19

Antwerp

3.4.2016 – 22.5.2016

 

 

© Daisuke Yokota. Courtesy the artist and Stieglitz19.

 

 

/ 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

Paul Kasmin Gallery

New York

14.4.2016 – 21.5.2016

 

 

© Dedalus Foundation, Inc. Licensed by VAGA,New York, NY.

 

 

/ by Kim Poorters /

// FROM A TO K //

Currently on view at Museum M is a carefully curated selection of works by Brussels-based artist Aglaia Konrad. In this first major solo-exhibition both older and recent oeuvres are shown side by side to reveal a diversity of work, and a newly commissioned site-specific intervention by the artist and an accompanying book presented.

 Spanning a production of over 20 years, the artist uses photography and film to document, and sculpture and architecture to translate her research into the modern city, its public space and buildings, and their transformation.Through extensive travels, she has brought together a vast archive of images documenting urbanity in such diverse cities as Sao Paulo, Beijing, Chicago, Dakar, Tokyo, Cairo or Shanghai.

Aglaia Konrad – From A to K

Museum M

Leuven

29.4.2016 – 18.9.2016

 

 

© Aglaia Konrad. Courtesy the artist and Museum M.

 

 

/ by Kim Poorters /

// RETROSPEKTIVE //

C/O Berlin presents the first retrospective exhibition of the work of US photographer and artist Stephen Shore. Including over 300 pictures, of which some are shown here for the first time, the curators shed light on the most significant aspects of the photographer’s oeuvre and his unique contribution to the culture of photography.

“I wanted to make pictures that felt natural, that felt like seeing, that didn’t feel like taking something in the world and making a piece of art out of it.”

A regular at Andy Warhol’s Factory between 1965 and 1967, Shore went on to explore and document the unspectacular in everyday situations and banal objects, unremarkable landscapes, and faceless places.Making use of the medium of photography as an instrument of perception, his photographic series record, preserve, and reflect on those traces of human life that are normally considered unworthy of representation. 

Stephen Shore - Retrospektive

C/O Berlin Foundation

Berlin

6.2.2016 – 22.5.2016

 

 

© Stephen Shore. Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York & Sprüth Magers.

 

 

/ by Kim Poorters /

// SO FAR / SO CLOSE //

Jean-Baptiste Bernadet opens tonight at Almine Rech Gallery with what appears to be no less than 3 exhibitions, centred around an impressive panorama of 12 colourful, site-specific paintings in the artist’s Fugue series.

 The sequence of rooms that form the gallery has been slightly altered on the artist’s request to visually separate three distinct sets of works, linked by a common use of a limited palette of vibrant primary colours, a large format, and a notion of ‘controlled chance’ in the process of creation, final selection, and presentation as a series. Through the layering of colour, material and technique the artist achieves a remarkable depth that draws in the viewer, both in the opening series of circular works composed of glazed enamel on lava-stone, the panorama of celebrated Fugue paintings, and a third, yet title-less series of canvases shown here for the first time.

Tonight’s opening at Almine Rech is one of several on the occasion of Brussels’ Gallery Night during which a number of galleries opens to the public on the occasion of this weekends’ Art Brussels and Independent events.

Jean-Baptiste Bernadet – So Far, So Close

Almine Rech Gallery

Brussels

20.4.2016 – 28.5.2016

 

 

Untitled (Fugue), 2016 © Jean-Baptiste Bernadet. Courtesy the artist and Almine Rech Gallery.

Details – Jean-Baptiste Bernadet for The Word Magazine.

 

 

/ by Kim Poorters /

// SIX SPECTRAL WORKS //

Peter De Potter presents his latest show entitled ‘Six Spectral Works’ in which a selection of images, both new or from his recent archive, are overlaid, layered and blended, and graphical elements and text added to complete them.

Referencing at once at the art historical techniques of the photomontage and spirit photography, his works also reflect and embrace the contemporary digital visual language often recurring in the Belgian artist’s larger oeuvre.

 Prominently active in the art world since the last six years, the artist has been producing art parallel to his 2000 - 2010 collaboration with fashion designer Raf Simons and has contributed to several publications through carte-blanche artist assignments and interventions. Most recently he designed the album-cover for Kanye’s latest album.

 

Peter De Potter - Six Spectral Works

NO.gallery

Brussels

20.4.2016 – 30.4.2016

 

 

© Peter De Potter. Courtesy the artist and NO.gallery.

 

 

/ by Kim Poorters /

// NATUR UND KONSTRUKTION //

Berlin Gallery Dittmar presents a selection of works by Austrian photographer Margherita Spiluttini.

 Although not an architectural photographer in the strictest sense, the artist has documented the works of a series of leading contemporary architects in numerous international magazines, book presentations and exhibitions.

 After a major exhibition at Cologne’s SK Stiftung Kultur earlier this year, she presents ‘Natur und Konstruktionen’ in which the interaction between architecture and landscape is questioned through the documentation of a series of ‘heroic’ man made interventions of different scales in the mountainous scenery of the Austrian Alps

Margherita Spiluttini

Natur und Konstruktion – Fotografische Untersuchungen.

Galerie Dittmar

Berlin

12.2.2016 – 23.4.2016

 

 

© Margherita Spiluttini. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Dittmar.

 

 

/ by Kim Poorters /

// ICONIC LAMPENS //

Starting today architecture and art lovers alike can book a 3-day stay in Lampens’ iconic House Van Wassenhove, conceived as an open-space shell made of concrete, wood and glass in which basic geometric shapes structure the interior: a circle for the sleeping area, a triangle for the kitchen and a square for the office.

 Designed and built for a teacher with a passion for contemporary art and architecture between 1972 and 1974, the house marks a highpoint in the Belgian architect’s shift from traditional architecture to a concrete modernism likened to the works of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, and to Japanese and Scandinavian architecture.

 After it was given on a long-term loan to the museum Dhondt-Dhaenens following the death of it’s owner in 2012, the house was carefully renovated in 2015 and opened to a residency program for artists, writers and researchers to develop their work in the calm of it’s concrete architecture, set in the region of the river Lys. Starting 2016 the house will additionally be opened for summer short-stays, as well as for occasional individual and group visits.

Juliaan Lampens – House Van Wassenhove

Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens

Deurle

29.4.2016 – 2.10.2016

 

 

© Juliaan Lampens. Courtesy museum Dhondt-Dhaenens. Photographs by Rik Vannevel.

 

 

/ by Kim Poorters /

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