Happenings provides references on art events, exhibitions, biennales, art fairs and festivals, with a focus on Abstraction in Action artists and post-90s abstraction from Latin America.
The work of Bernardo Ortiz (Bogota, 1972) explores the territories of drawing, writing and typography, and crosses the delicate boundary between the work of art that is created by writing and the drawing that is part of a larger narrative: the daily practice of an artist.
For this exhibition at MAMBA, Ortiz produced an architectural structure specially for the occasion, in order to enable the development of works and drawings. The visitor will go through the installation discovering the poetic operations of an artist obsessively dedicated to making possible new links between text and image, leaving aside all grandiloquence to emphasize the importance of small daily artistic gestures and its potential for transformation.
Screen Memory
April 28, 2016 – June 11, 2016 Galerie Burster
Berlin, Germany
Richard Garet’s artistic approach is characterized by an interdisciplinary interweaving of various media such as sound, moving image, expanded photography and multimedia performance. By activating sensorial, physical and psychological stimuli, his works draw the observer’s attention to the processes of perception and time.
Garet’s work was featured in the first sound art exhibition by the Museum of Modern Art of New York, MoMA; soundings: a contemporary score in 2013, with Garet being selected to join the show as one of the sixteen most innovative artists working with sound as a medium today. Recognizing his work solely in the genre of sound art however will certainly not satisfy to describe his oeuvre on the whole.
In screen memory, his very first solo show at galerie burster – and his first solo show in Europe – Garet‘s selected body of work extracts his interest in experimenting with mixing media and material, shifting borders back and forth within various media and beyond, hovering between digital and analogue – in order to create an aesthetic, sonic, above all immersive perceptual experience.
With installative choreographies such as seen in untitled series painting semiotics or with digital-print series such as activated void, Garet refers to his background in visual art – he studied painting in New York in the nineties – but remaining true to his artistic approach he consequently transfers his pictorial experience into a digital context: The layering buildup and the relationship to malleability and materiality find themselves now translated into various ‚new‘ media such as sound, video art and installation to name a few.
Si tuvieras que elegir entre patria o libertad, ¿qué escogerías? Es la invitación que hace la nueva muestra de M100, que reflexiona de forma crítica y aguda sobre el patriotismo, el nacionalismo y el populismo, que siguen provocando conflictos étnicos, políticos y religiosos. Guerras, refugiados y terrorismo.
Si por un lado el patriotismo es el amor hacia lo propio, las raíces y la tierra, el nacionalismo es una ideología agresiva que rechaza todo lo foráneo.
La exposición, una co-producción con el Museo COBRA de Ámsterdam y el MoCCA de Toronto, tiene a la vez dos puertas. Una de la patria y la otra de la libertad, que harán que cada visitante haga su propio recorrido. Himnos nacionales, banderas, héroes y uniformes son manifestaciones visibles de los sistemas políticos. Estos y otros símbolos son utilizados por los artistas en esta reflexión.
Ballena
April 12, 2016 – until June
Curated by Martín Craciun Centro Cultural Dodecá
Montevideo, Uruguay
Martin Pelenur will open his new solo exhibition Ballena (Whale) at Dodecá Cultural Center in Montevideo. Curated by Martín Craciun the exhibition encompasses a new series of painting within a site specific installation. The intervention transforms the exhibition space into a machine to produce and display an exercise about repetition and time.
“Oh, my. So the whale swallowed all of you, too? My goodness. ”
– Geppetto talking to Pinoccio
A sequence of industrial materials and processes are obsessively sorted. The idea that the experience of paying close attention may result in a pleasurable activity in any context is quite relative. The truth is that visual intelligence is very important in the time of accelerated circulation of images. Therefore deceleration, along with the slowdown in time and perception are key strategies to study things in detail. As enunciated by Gustave Flaubert, God is in the details[1]. – a world of original information, graphics and forms, of synchronicity, of veil and reveal arrhythmias.
Pelenur transform the exhibition space into a workshop, a lab. He creates a system of materials, forms and processes. Pelenur´s blue whale is time and form; is it possible to control the outcome on the basis of catalysis? how to become a dabbler of chemicals and repetitive processes, a master of failure and controlled indeterminacy?. Varnish is here a physical medium to mold and shape, a vehicle for content and ideas. The challenges of life in art as its content are introduced by the artist.
The exhibition is an exercise that intends to translate into the exhibition hall Pelenur´s universe, with its timeframes and temporalities. The installation is a machine for producing and thinking. His personal challenge is to generate sufficient and structural thickness – micron varnish, accumulated in countless layers resting for weeks erected in industrial elements.
Pelenur has been dedicated to develop a sustained experiment on painting. He constantly seeks to modify his approach, resisting the comfort of trends and maintaining the freshness of a practice that he is passionate. Every experience nourishes the next to generate inputs for his next move.
[1] The phrase was attributed throughout history to Voltaire, Flaubert, Aby Warburg and Mies Van der Rohe.
DIDERÓTICA
April 9th, 2016 -May 31st, 2016 Jorge Mara-La Ruche
Buenos Aires, Argentina
DIDERÓTICA is a double tribute, or an “appreciation”, as specified in the subtitle of the exhibition. On the one hand, the figure of famous French philosopher and writer Denis Diderot (1784 1713) is celebrated, creator, animator and editor of one of the most ambitious and influential intellectual endeavors of the human spirit, L’Encyclopédie (1751 -1772). On the other hand, the exhibition celebrates a color present in all the works on display: red.
There is no direct, causal link between the life and work of Diderot and the color red. The encyclopedic – who was perhaps the first great art critic in history – does not even have any explicit mention of red in his writing. It could be surmised that the color red is usually used to mark or highlight something and Kirin uses it to reveal details or aspects of the work from Diderot. The fact is that Kirin dreamed about this writer he admires in reds and it is known that dreams have a mysterious logic of their own. Some of the works on show are recreations made by the artist of the wonderful illustrations from L’Encyclopédie. Kirin recreates, draws, copies and pixelates these images and intervenes with red, or rather with variations of the range of this color that is so powerful and symbolic. Kirin uses vermilion, cadmium, scarlet, cinnabar and several shades of red, as Michel Pastoureau says in his Dictionary of colors, “… it is the color par excellence, the archetypal color, first of all colors “. Kirin had already used a single color in some previous pictorial series: Negro de marfil (2004) or black-white dialogue in Entrelíneas (2014), both of which were exhibited at the Jorge Mara – La Ruche Gallery. In both exhibitions there is an illustrated catalog.
In this series Kirin continues developing variations on geometric shapes, sometimes large in size. Along with these, there are smaller oils on paper, showing a kind of weaving or linking of graphic signs evocative of ancient, archaic alphabets with a singular poetic content: pure pictorial representations without further reference than their own mystery.
