Happenings

Artist: Marco Maggi

Global Myopia II
May 9 – November 22, 2015
Uruguay Pavilion at the Venice Biennale
Venice, Italy

Marco Maggi will represent Uruguay at the upcoming Venice Biennale, opening to the public on May 9 and on view through November 22, 2015. The Uruguayan pavilion is one of the 29 national pavilions located in the Giardini della Biennale. Marco Maggi’s drawings, sculptures and installations encode the world. Composed of linear patterns that suggest circuit boards, aerial views of impossible cities, genetic engineering or nervous systems, his drawings are a thesaurus of the infinitesimal and the undecipherable. Marco Maggi’s abstract language refers to the way information is processed in a global era, and his work challenges the notion of drawing itself. For the 56th Venice Biennale he will present Global Myopia II, a site-specific installation of paper, stickers and pencils on the inside of the pavilion, and a large floating sculpture on the outside.

Saying that the world is myopic sounds depreciative: a planet without perspective, moving forward without any clear sense of direction. Marco Maggi, on the contrary, claims and prescribes myopia as the extraordinary ability to see from very close. Nearsightedness allows one to focus carefully on invisible details, it challenges the acceleration and the abuse of long-distance relationships characteristic of our era. After a farsighted 20th century with solutions for everyone and forever, it is time to stimulate our empathy for the immediate and the insignificant.

In Global Myopia II, paper and pencil, the two basic elements of drawing, get separated and the act of drawing is split into two stages. A portable kit composed of 10,000 elements cut out of self-adhesive paper becomes an insignificant alphabet that the artist will fold and paste onto the walls during the three months preceding the biennale. The diminutive papers are disseminated or connected following the specific traffic rules and syntax dictated by any accumulation of sediments. The colonies of paper sticker on the walls enter in dialogue with a custom lighting track provided by Erco. Myriads of high-definition shadows and infinitesimal incandescent projections will aim to slow down the viewer. The only ambition of the project is to promote pauses and closeness.

Born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1957, Marco Maggi lives and works in New Paltz, NY and Montevideo, Uruguay. His work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Latin America in galleries, museums, and biennials. He is represented by Josée Bienvenu in New York. In 2013, he received the Premio Figari (Career Award). Selected exhibitions include Functional Desinformation, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, Sao Paulo, Brazil (2012); Optimismo Radical, NC-arte, Bogota, Colombia (2011); New Perspectives in Latin American Art, 1930–2006, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2008); Poetics of the Handmade, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2007); Fifth Gwangju Biennial, Korea (2004); VIII Havana Biennial, Cuba (2003); 25th Sao Paulo Biennial, Sao Paulo, Brazil (2002); and Mercosul Biennial, Porto Alegre, Brazil (2001). Public collections include The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; The Drawing Center, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis; Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach; El Museo del Barrio, New York; Cisneros Collection, New York; and Daros Foundation, Zurich.

The 56th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia is directed by Okwui Enwezor, curator, art critic and writer, and the Director of the Haus der Kunst, Munich. The Uruguayan Commissioner is artist Ricardo Pascale and the project is curated by Patricia Bentancur, Senior Curator and New Media Director at the Centro Cultural de España in Montevideo (CCE), a leading space for Iberoamerican art.

Image: Marco Maggi, Putin’s Pencils, 2014. Soviet era color pencils and bowstrings. Image courtesy of the artist and Josée Bienvenu Gallery.

Artists: Mariella Agois, Alberto Borea, Jorge Cabieses, Casari & PPPP, Valentino Sibadon, Miguel Aguirre, Haroldo Higa, Edi Hirose, José Luis y José Carlos Martinat, Musuk Nolte, and Patrick Tschudi.

Señalamientos
Curator: Jorge Villacorta
April 23 – May 23, 2015
Lucía de la Puente Galería de Arte
Lima, Peru

Celebrating 20 years of the gallery. Group exhibition.

Artist: José Dávila

Actos tectónicos de duda y deseo
February 27 – April 30, 2015
Travesía Cuatro
Madrid, Spain

Las piezas que conforman esta exposición remiten a las nociones de equilibrio y balance, las cuales son generadas en el momento de abandono en el que dos fuerzas que permanecían en conflicto, finalmente ceden. Este instante de aparente neutralidad es también la presencia simultánea de todas las posibilidades. El artista pretende extender esta condición de indeterminación aprovechando el conocimiento técnico, que en su uso común busca maximizar la eficacia de los materiales, Dávila en cambio, los convierte en entidades inútiles. Las herramientas estructurales son empleadas con fines meramente poéticos. La lucha interminable de lo arquitectónico en contra de los efectos de la gravedad es sintetizada a través del uso de materiales industriales, destinados para la construcción, para crear estos sistemas de fragilidad, que carecen de profundidad y han quedado recluidos a su extensión superficial; amenazados por la fractura y la interrupción de las relaciones de fuerza y las estructuras de tensión que los constituyen y les otorgan autonomía. Estas obras obligan a reconsiderar el significado de lo escultórico. Desafían la frontera que separa al contenido del contenedor, para efectuar una expansión espacial que modifica por completo la experiencia arquitectónica. Rosalind Krauss denomina lo anterior como el fenómeno propio de las estructuras axiomáticas, constituidas por la fusión de la arquitectura con la no-arquitectura. Lo anterior implica la introducción de formas ajenas que rechazan toda incorporación funcional, problematizando las obviedades del campo donde se ubican, para así reclamar una presencia propia. Las especificidades de los materiales llevan a cabo un desdoblamiento del espacio por medio de una serie de transparencias y reflejos. El carácter pictórico de los cinchos contrastando con las placas despliega un conjunto de líneas referenciales que ayudan a visualizar la delicada comunicación entre las superficies y sus correspondientes puntos de apoyo.

Dávila propone una exégesis de la tradición minimalista y de la historia del arte en general, recurriendo a una especie de lenguaje críptico reservado a la naturaleza de los objetos, que desafía la comprensión y las categorías de la mirada subjetiva. Las esculturas permanecen como gestos intermedios, entre la destrucción inminente y la permanencia. El trabajo de Dávila aborda la cuestión sobre los límites de los valores instrumentales mediante el uso de materiales comunes para crear esculturas, objetos e instalaciones. Con frecuencia, la naturaleza de estos materiales se acerca tanto a la construcción de la arquitectura como a la producción artística formal, que suscriben su trabajo a los principios acuñados por el Minimalismo y el Arte Povera. Dávila también ha manifestado un especial interés en el uso y ocupación del espacio, temas que han estado presentes a lo largo de toda su carrera.

Su obra ha sido expuesta en el Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo MUAC, Ciudad de México; Caixa Forum, Madrid; MoMA PS1, Nueva York; Kunstwerke, Berlín; San Diego Museum of Art; Museo de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; MAK, Viena, Fundación / Colección JUMEX, Ciudad de México; Bass Museum of Art, Miami; Museu do Arte Moderna, Sao Paulo; The Moore Space, Miami; NICC, Antwerp, entre otras; y ha aparecido en publicaciones internacionales como Cream 3, ed. Phaidon, 100 Latin- American Artists, ed. Exit y Megastructures-Reloaded, ed. Hatje Cantz. Dávila ha recibido el apoyo de la Andy Warhol Foundation, la Kunstwerke residency en Berlín y el Premio Nacional para jóvenes artistas del Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (FONCA) en 2000. Además fue fundador de la Oficina para Proyectos de Arte (OPA), en Guadalajara, México.

Artist: Iosu Aramburu

Demasiado pronto, demasiado tarde
Curated by Alba Colomo
April 15 – May 30, 2015
Centro Cultural Británico de San Juan de Lurigancho
Lima, Peru

Muestra individual de Iosu Aramburú (Perú)

La exposición se apropia de la mirada del novelista J. G. Ballard y hace un recorrido por el imaginario urbano de la Lima de mediados del siglo pasado. En la muestra, los edificios se diluyen hasta volverse ruinas o fantasmas y ser reclamados por su entorno.

El artista exhibirá fotografía, pintura, dibujo y una instalación interactiva en el jardín del centro de estudios.

Artists: Richard Serra, Phyllida Barlow, Christian Jankowski, Nicolas Feldmeyer, Cipriano Martinez, Levi van Veluw, David Rickard, Livia Marin, Richard Schur, Liv Fontaine, Knopp Ferro.

Weight for the Showing
Curated by Paul Carey-Kent
April 23 – June 16, 2015
Maddox Arts
London, UK

Of the many competitors for our attention when we look at a work of art – meaning, narrative, form, colour, gesture, scale, sound, movement – its weight is not generally high in the list, heavy as much sculpture and some painting may be (Bram Bogart’s super-thick applications or Analia Saban’s container canvases come to mind). Indeed, although WEIGHT FOR THE SHOWING is themed around weight, all the works have other interesting agendas, most notably perhaps the frequency with which they skew logic and the zest with which they engage with art history.

Some artists playfully substitute the heavy for the light or vice versa: Gavin Turk’s bronze bin bags are well known, Andreas Lolis has made marble look very like card or polystyrene; Fishli & Weiss fashioned all manner of items out of polyurethane; and Sarah Sze recently made rocks out of photographs of rocks, which she showed alongside real boulders. Others have used surprisingly-weighted items, e.g. Andrew Palmer attaches rocks to paintings, and Aselm Kiefer fixes anything from soil to submarines to his canvases; Damien Hirst’s ping pong ball pieces might be the opposite end of that scale.

Such play is allowed here, but the show concentrates more on two other aspects: the relative weight of elements within or between works, which latter may be down to evident heaviness of mark, or else be a matter of ‘feeling’ heavy or light for no obvious literal reason; and the metaphorical association of weight with seriousness and being weighed down by troubles or history. There’s no neat division, but Barlow, Rickard, Schur, Ferro and Martinez are perhaps more in the first category; and Serra, Jankowski, Marin, Feldmeyer and Fontaine in the second.

Enough weight may also lead to collapse. Nietzsche worried about the possibility of Eternal Return, in which we’re doomed to repeat events for eternity, making existence a heavy burden, given the impossibility of escaping the cycle. Buddhism provides a potential way out of that by embracing the cycle, as does Milan Kundera when, assuming in contrast that such a cycle is impossible, he holds that ‘life which disappears once and for all, which does not return is without weight…and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime…means nothing’. Decisions are then ‘light’ – they do not tie us down – but meaningless and potentially empty. That isn’t entirely welcome either, hence the ‘the unbearable lightness of being’. A more pragmatic view would be that we’re in the space between the baggage of the what’s gone and the disintegration to come – but the interim phase may last a while yet, and we might as well enjoy it. Just so, there’s plenty of wit in these works, that raise interesting issues but also help visitors to enjoy a few minutes of the gap.

Image: Christian Jankowski, Heavy Weight History (Ronald Reagan), 2013 – b/w photograph on baryt paper, 140 x 186.8 cm, ed.1 of 5+2 ap