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 artist’s new immersive event centres on a projection of a film by Rafael Ortega, with actors narrating an abstract language of sounds, conceived by Amalia Pica. The film depicts a performance of Pica’s work A ∩ B ∩ C: a constellation of different configurations and intersections of shape and colour. The performance continues the process of layering from the original work: from object, to performance, to film, returning again to performance.
Pedro Tyler transforms metal rulers into installations that connect the sculptural object with the history of philosophy. The exhibition opens with a reception on Tuesday, March 24, from 6-8 pm with the artist.
Tyler looks to the intersections of philosophy and religion, sculpture and knowledge. “Extensa has to do with the idea of immensity,” he writes. With his installation Principio y Fin (Beginning and End), Tyler bends sections of metal measuring tapes, turning them into the symbol for infinity. Connecting each piece, the linked chain emerges from the wall and splits into several strands, which connect to the ceiling.
The installation and sculptures in Extensacontinue the artist’s ongoing investigation of systems of measurement as metaphors for the immensity of the universe. The artist writes, “Making sculpture is providing matter with form, organizing the space in which we move. How then to make an inanimate body transmit thought and emotion? According to Descartes, body and thought are quite distinct. He maintains that there are only two things: the extended thing (bodies, measurable space) and the thinking thing (the immaterial, thoughts, ideas and intuition). And inside the thinking is perfection and infinity, that is, God. But if each body is infinite within itself, are we not saying, like Spinoza, that God is in everything?”
Image: Pedro Tyler, “Beginning and End”, 2014, Variable dimensions.
The painting fallen, and the collapse of Rome
March 18 – April 25, 2015 Galerie Thomas Schulte
Berlin, Germany
“The painting fallen, and the collapse of Rome“ is Dueñas’ second one person show with the gallery after succeeding impressively with his installation in the gallery’s Corner Space in 2012.
From its beginnings in the early 20th century the legacy of abstraction is rooted in social and political utopias. Today, abstraction as an artistic strategy has reinvented itself for the 21st century, and the fragmentation of form is a common denominator within the majority of the works featured in this exhibition. Kevin Appel’s (United States) paintings explore the relationship between physical space, architecture and the painted image. Using photographs as a ground on which to build his painting, he applies layers of paint that act as screens, compressing the perceived space between the built environment and nature. The act of looking through one element to another, or the blocking of one impenetrable layer by another and mediating our perception of nature and our encounter with the exterior world has become a signature of his painting. Appel’s work is in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, among others.
While Appel’s approach to abstraction is to collide several planes of visual information, Veronika Kellndorfer (Germany) reveals the subjectivity of space and the ephemeral nature of seeing. Her photographs of the glass facades of modernist architectural landmarks are silkscreened onto large glass panels. The works conflate internal and external environments and invite the viewer to uniquely experience their own surroundings. Kellndorfer has recently completed a site-specific commission for the Architekturmuseum, Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, where she is presenting large-scale works for the Lina Bo Bardi 100 survey show open through February 22nd. Her work is included in the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA, Hammer Museum Los Angeles, CA, and Pier 24 in San Francisco, CA, in addition to several European institutions.
Lucia Koch (Brazil) challenges the viewer’s perception and experience of space using diverse tactics within architectural settings. In addition to a video and one of her large-scale photographs of the interior of a small coffee bag, Koch will present a wall structure made of aluminum and colored acrylic panels that filter natural light. Through planar interventions, the wall connects different spaces and environments. In 2016 Koch will be the subject of a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
International Pop, a groundbreaking historical survey featuring some 125 works from more than 13 countries on four continents that chronicles the global emergence and migration of Pop art from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s. Organized by the Walker and on view April 11 through August 29, International Pop will travel to the Dallas Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art through 2016.
Among the most broadly recognized phenomena of postwar art, Pop was strikingly nomadic, spreading not only through Britain and the United States but also Japan, Latin America, and both Eastern and Western Europe. From its inception, Pop migrated across borders, seizing the power of mass media and communication to reach a new class of viewers and adherents who would be drawn to its dynamic attributes. Yet, as this exhibition reveals, distinct iterations of Pop were developing worldwide that alternatively celebrated, cannibalized, rejected, or transformed some of the presumed qualities of Pop advanced in the United States and Britain. While Pop emerged in reaction to the rise of a new consumerist and media age, it also emerged in specific socio-economic contexts that inflected its development and reception: from postwar Europe to the politically turbulent United States to the military regimes of Latin America to the postwar climate of Japan with lingering United States occupation to the restricted pop cultural palette of countries in East Central Europe.
Curated by Darsie Alexander with Bartholomew Ryan
Curatorial consultants: Erica Battle, Hiroko Ikegami, Godfre Leung, Luigia Lonardelli, Ed Halter, and María José Herrera
International Pop Cinema
The exhibition includes an ambitious dedicated in-gallery cinema program curated by Ed Halter of Light Industry, Brooklyn.
Opening day talks, April 11
Livecast on the Walker Channel
Introduction
Speaker: Darsie Alexander (lead curator, International Pop)
The Internationality of Pop
Panelists: Erica Battle (associate curator, Philadelphia Museum of Art), Dávid Fehér (associate curator, Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest), Hiroko Ikegami (associate professor, Graduate School of Intercultural Studies at Kobe University, Japan), and Christine Mehring (department chair and associate professor of art history, University of Chicago)
Moderator: Darsie Alexander
Argentine Pop and Its Dematerialization
Panelists: Delia Cancela (artist, Buenos Aires), Eduardo Costa (artist, Buenos Aires), and María José Herrera (director, Museum of Art, Tigre)
Moderator: Bartholomew Ryan
Tokyo Pop
Panelists: Hiroko Ikegami (associate professor, Graduate School of Intercultural Studies, Kobe University, Japan), Ushio Shinohara (artist, New York), and Keiichi Tanaami (artist, Tokyo)
Image: Antonio Dias, O meu retrato (My Portrait), 1966.
