Happenings

Artist: Aníbal Catalán

The Land, The Space, The Square
February 6 – April 13, 2014
Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art
Boulder, CO, USA

Anibal Catalan: The Land, The Space, The Square presents a series of site-specific installations, paintings, video works, drawings and digital prints by Mexico City-based artist Anibal Catalan. Trained as an architect, Catalan creates new spaces using a variety of artistic methods and media. Stimulating dialoge between different media, he combines environments that exist amid two and three dimensionalities. Catalan redefines, or more appropriately, dissolves conventional notions of interior and exterior spaces. His works are unorthodox manifestations of architectural ideas oscillating between metaphysical explorations of urban space and real concern for environments we inhabit.

Catalan cites the 20th-century Russian avant-garde movements of Suprematism and Constructivism as important influences on his work. He adopts different aspects of each movement’s visual language and utopian sentimentalities through his integration of architecture, design and art. The title of the exhibition, The Land, The Space, The Square, is a specific reference to Suprematism—an abstract movement that utilized basic geometric forms and a limited color palette to emphasize pure artistic feeling over the visual depiction of an object. “The Square” is a direct reference to Russian artist Kazimir Malevich’s famous paintings of squares created in the early 20th century.

To accompany this new series of paintings, Catalan has created a large wall painting that spans the West Gallery. Using acrylic paint, he invents architectural landscapes on various surfaces. Bold color constrains and expands the spaces of the wall or canvas. The wall painting becomes a backdrop for the large sculptural installation that hangs between the columns of the main gallery. Made from industrial materials and fluorescent lights, it becomes a three-dimensional extension of the wall painting. Fragmented geometric shapes build layers of flattened area with implied dimensionality, and materiality dissolves to liberate the space. The viewer is invited into a shifting construction—one that is not closed or strictly defined, but open to multiple perspectives and interpretations.

Anibal Catalan was born in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico in 1973. He lives and works in Mexico City. Catalan studied fine arts at La Esmeralda in Mexico City from 2001-2006 and attended the School of Architecture at Anahuac University from 1993-1997. His work has been exhibited internationally in both solo and group exhibitions including CAN Seoul, CAN Beijing, MARCO Contemporary Art Museum (Monterrey, Mexico), MASS MoCA, Museo de Arte Moderno (Mexico City), Les Rencontres Internacionales Paris-Berlin-Madrid (Centre Pompidou, Museo Nacional Reina Sofia), and Haus der Kulturen der Welt HKW. Catalan was the recipient of the prestigious Mexican FONCA Creator’s Grant 2011-2013. Most recently, he has been awarded a major commission with the Denver International Airport. The Land, The Space, The Square is the first solo museum exhibition of Anibal Catalan’s work in the United States.

An article about this exhibition is here

Artist: Marcius Galan

Como dobrar uma bandeira como desdobrar
March 20 – April 26 2014
Silvia Cintra + Box 4
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

“The movement back and forth (fold and unfold) appears in the construction of the title as well as the assembly work on the wall, where the sequence can be read as expansion or contraction. This circular motion suggests a place suspended between a position taken (unfold a flag) and a sense of powerlessness and apathy facing a dark socio-political landscape (fold a flag),” says Galan. And yet, the work deals with the paradox of infinite geometric division of a plane, in other words, with the premise that we can theoretically divide the area into two equal parts infinitely.

Artist: Alexis Minkiewicz, Diego Atucha, Irina Kirchuk, Joaquin Boz, Maximiliano Ocampo Salinas, Ramiro Oller, Santiago Rey, and Sofia Wiñazki

Curator: Philippe Cyrulnik
March 20, 2014
Zavaleta Lab Arte Contemporáneo
Buenos Aires, Argentina

Artist: Sandra Gamarra

What Made us Modern / Crisp Images in a Humid Environment
March 22 – May 3, 2014
Galería Leme
São Paulo, Brazil

The Madrid-based Peruvian artist, founder of the fictitious and virtual museum LiMac, will present at Galeria Leme What Made us Modern / Crisp Images in a Humid Environment, her fourth solo exhibition in São Paulo.

Given the current promise of modernization in Peru, to be understood as the real presence of the state in the country and therefore as a right to citizenship for each individual, this exhibition reflects on what happened in Peru during the first era of the uncompleted modernity and on what signified its posterior lack of concretization.

“An attempt to make crisp images in a humid environment” is how the sociologist Aníbal Quijano describes the impossibility to do vanguard poetry in Lima, which can also be extrapolated to the field of visual arts. The crisp images to which Quijano speaks of refer to machines, to the industry and to the new ideas that, in a city like Lima, without nearby industries and without technical development, were impossible to create and disseminate. This moist environment not only refers to the real humid climate of Lima but also to the “social humidity” that is the product of the yet ongoing effervescence of an imposed nationalism, the vapors of a slowly cooked multiculturalism and the permanent oxidation of the social processes.

However, as the state had not been capable to concretize its proper modernization, its unfulfilled promise became the breeding ground so that years later terrorists groups began to emerge in the country during the 1980´s and 90´s. This violence was necessary, so that Peruvians began to see themselves as a multicultural and a plural society.

Utilizing the iconic “Homage to the Square” paintings by the artist Joseph Albers as a starting point, images of the terrorist violence of the 80´s in Peru has been included in an almost invisible manner. To reveal themselves, it is necessary to get close to the painting, a contrary movement to what modern paintings proposed. Similarly, the series that is named after the exhibition title, What Made us Moderns, consists of 10 paintings that creates a gradient of grey and have the exact same measurements of the concrete blocks of which the gallery is made of. In such a way, the works surrender themselves to the architecture and, in the artist’s vision, live with it in a fully modern act. If we look at them from far away, this gradient made out of a Kodak scale of grey coexists without friction with the architecture. But in each corner of the paused, measured and clinic monochromes, a set of pictures appear and break this transition. These images tell us about a constant that is of capital and latent permanence.

The videos entitled “Abstractions”, “Natural Landscape” and “Ashes to Ashes” are three reflections on the delicate relation between the pre-Columbian heritage, the rural present and Western culture in the light of the promises of development and modernization.

Sandra Gamarra was born in Lima, Peru, in 1972. She lives and works in Madrid. Her work has been featured in numerous exhibitions, including the shows Setting the Scene, Tate Modern, London, UK (2012); At the Same Time, Bass Museum of Art, Miami, USA (2011); XI Bienal de Cuenca, Cuenca, Ecuador (2011); Fiction and Reality, MMOMA, Moscow, Russia (2011); Arte al Paso, Colleción Contemporanea del  Museo Arte  de Lima, Estação Pinacoteca, São Paulo, Brazil (2011);  29ª Bienal Internacional de São Paulo, Fundação Bienal, São Paulo, Brazil (2010); 53ª Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy (2009). Her work is in private and public collections such as MUSAC, León, Spain; MoMA, New York, USA and Tate Modern, London, UK.

Artists: Courtney Smith & Iván Navarro

Mellowdrama
March 7 – 15, 2014
Hotel Particulier / The Armory Show
New York City, NY, USA

Hotel Particulier is pleased to present an experimental and collaborative artwork between artists Courtney Smith and Iván Navarro entitled MELLOWDRAMA. The artists will curate events and performances in collaboration with Hotel Particulier and Emilie Baltz for a full week during and following the Armory Show.

A “stage” will be created in the space by Courtney Smith, illuminated by Iván Navarro and activated, occupied and transformed by the different performances, musical events and participations by the artists’ guests as well as a series of staged dinners curated by Emilie Baltz. During the day, Hotel Particulier curated shop will take center stage with a special collaboration with AHAlife.

The stage will be unveiled on the evening of March 7th with a reception and experimental musical performance conceived by Iván Navarro. The following nights will involve a series of staged dinners entitled traces, curated by Emilie Baltz, gathering 20 guests around an eating experience that uses the stage/table as canvas, tracing the interactions of guests by engaging them in a hands on dinner. On closing night March 15th, the stage will be activated through a series of performances by novelist, academic and cultural critic Barbara Browning and her guests.

Courtney Smith is known for her furniture-based sculpture and her investigation into the physical and psychological construction of interior spaces through the deconstruction of the elements that compose them, and Iván Navarro is widely recognized for his innovative work addressing the complex implications of transformation and transference of electrical energy through his ingeniously crafted luminous sculpture. Both artists are based in Brooklyn.

Smith and Navarro have collaborated regularly since 2005, and have exhibited their joint work in various galleries and museums, including the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston, and most recently at the Goethe Institute in Nairobi.

Both Courtney Smith and Iván Navarro are exhibiting work in The Armory Show 2014 with Baró, the São Paulo-based gallery that represents both artists, both their individual and collaborative work.

Iván Navarro (Chile, 1972) is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Navarro’s work transcends its Minimalist roots by employing mass-produced materials to build powerfully symbolic objects that effectively infiltrate the domestic realm they mimic. His socio-politically charged sculptures in neon, fluorescent or incandescent light double as functional elements, integrated in the physical space they inhabit. His work has been shown in museums and galleries all over the world, including his participation in the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, and in such venues as The Hayward Gallery, London; The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; MOCA Goldman Warehouse, Miami; Whitney Museum at Altria, New York; Witte de Witt, Rotterdam, Caja de Burgos, Spain, Towner Art Museum, Eastbourne UK, among many others. He is also the creator and director of the music label Hueso Records.