Customizing Language
Curated by Idurre Alonso and Selene Preciado
January 7 – February 14, 2016
LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions)
Los Angeles, CA, USA

Customizing Language critically examines how language reflects geopolitical realities. The project approaches language as a tool to reflect power relations, hierarchies, social differences, and historical problems, as well as a cultural system of belonging that can indicate the loss or reconfiguration of certain kinds of identities. The participating artists engage local and historical issues by using experimental language to create a dialogue with the audience, exploring issues of “custom” as cultural tradition, U.S. Customs as an immigration agency, and lowrider customization in popular culture.

• Happenings

Artists: Cyrcle, Jan Kaláb, Ox, Rero, Andrey Zignnatto, and Aníbal Vallejo.

TRANSBORDER
January 30 – February 28, 2016
Fabien Castanier Gallery
Los Angeles, CA, USA

The exhibition centers around artists who challenge the idea of boundaries within art, both physical and ideological borders. Each artist presents new work for TRANSBORDER, examining the transitory elements of shape, color, form, and context within art making. The group exhibition takes a survey of how the language of both abstraction and figurative form can be conveyed throughout vastly different corners of the world.  Across borders of both time and space, these artists have created connectivity and conversation through creation.

From the curator
This exhibition aims to bring together, in a single physical space, artists from five nationalities, while also focusing on the artists’ variations in approaches, practices and techniques. So why did I want to bring these artists together in the same space and time? But also, why Transborder?

Firstly, art is for me a pretext for meetings and travel. Art is above all a human adventure. However art is also a coming together of objects, materials, and works that evoke an “emotional shock” that drives viewers to evolve ideas, perceptions, life trajectories and constructs of reality. I ask you to search your memory for a time that you, as a viewer, experienced a work by an artist you did not know, yet you sensed an inexplicable vibration. That same sensation in that precise moment has driven my desire to curate Transborder, to evoke these emotionally compelled experiences in viewers.

I have the feeling that what unites us all is the fact that we are all in the “fold”, i.e. that we have decided to place ourselves consciously or unconsciously to the limit of inside and outside as Michel Foucault suggested. “We must escape the alternative of outside and inside: we must be the border.”

TOP: Jan Kaláb | Black Planes, acrylic on cut-through canvases, 44 x 48 in. (112x121cm)

• Happenings

Artists: Omar Barquet, José Bedia, Jorge Méndez Blake, Carlos Cárdenas, Los Carpinteros, Enrique Martínez Celaya, Eugenio Dittborn, Gonzalo Fuenmayor, Carlos Garaicoa, Guillermo Kuitca, Gilda Mantilla, Moris, Vik Muniz, Oscar Muñoz, Damián Ortega, Liliana Porter, Sandra Ramos, Pablo Rasgado, Camilo Restrepo, Graciela Sacco, Ana Tiscornia, José  A. Vincench, Ishmael Randall Weeks, and many others.

A Sense of Place – Selections from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection
Curated by Patricia Hanna and Anelys Alvarez
December 3-6, 2015
Mana Contemporary
Miami, FL, USA

Despite the fact that these artists are working in a globalized society, where technology and communication transcend physical boundaries, many continue to construct personal and cultural identities by exploring ideas that are specific to their own experiences and places of origin. The show will examine the idea of building such an identity; how artists use abstraction, architecture, politics and memory to carve out a sense of place; and how these concerns are reflected in Pérez as a collector and in Miami as a developing city. Artists in the show include a mix of well-known and emerging art stars from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay, including: Omar Barquet, José Bedia, Jorge Méndez Blake, Carlos Cárdenas, Los Carpinteros, Enrique Martínez Celaya, Eugenio Dittborn, Gonzalo Fuenmayor, Carlos Garaicoa, Guillermo Kuitca, Gilda Mantilla, Moris, Vik Muniz, Oscar Muñoz, Damián Ortega, Liliana Porter, Sandra Ramos, Pablo Rasgado, Camilo Restrepo, Graciela Sacco, Ana Tiscornia, José  A. Vincench, Ishmael Randall Weeks, and many others.

Jorge M. Pérez was named one of the most influential Hispanics in the U.S. by TIME magazine, and is considered a visionary for his contributions to South Florida’s cultural and artistic landscape, as well as his integration of world-class art into each of his real estate developments.

A Sense of Place is being held at Mana Wynwood Convention Center, 318 NW 23rd Street, Miami, Florida.

• Happenings

Artists: Fariba Abedin, Adela Andea, Soledad Arias and Lorraine Tady.

The Weight of Light
December 5, 2015- January 2, 2016
Rudolph Blume Fine Art / ArtScan Gallery
Houston, TX, USA

The visible light spectrum is quite dramatic and holds all the colors that humans can see; a beam of white light is made up of all the colors. Visible light is composed of photons, which are the most abundant particles in the universe. These weight-less particles have the ability to form a stream or wave-like pattern that makes up the wavelengths of the Electromagnetic Spectrum. Contrast of hue, in painting, enables the painter to establish the interplay of luminous forces. Black and white are the artist’s strongest tools to express darkness and light, but with the advancement in harnessing different light particles, neon and LED lights are new and exciting instruments.This exhibition explores and juxtaposes the visual parameters of light as a physical presence and asa symbolic conjecture.

Soledad Arias’ work has been exhibited extensively in museums throughout the US and South America. Her wall based neon sculptures engage the viewer with mostly trivial, yet emotionally charged words like “white lies” or “like you i forgot”. The impact of the brilliant luminescence and the halo effect of the neon writing potentially transforms the immanence and perception of these phrases.

• Happenings

Artists: Iván Argote, Arocha + Schraenen, Lothar Baumgarten, Matthew Buckingham, Elena Damiani, Adler Guerrier, Jorge Pedro Núñez, Edgar Orlaineta, Laercio Redondo, Matheus Rocha Pitta, Sergio Vega.

The Devil is in the details
Curated by Jesus Fuenmayor
September 17 – November 20, 2015
KaBe Contemporary
Miami, FL, USA

The title of the exhibition “The Devil is in the details” pretends to point towards the details’ appearances in a work of art that unexpectedly allow viewers to comprehend the work (and even history) in a different way, even when this reading betrays our expectations or completely twists a work’s initial intention. Instead of just speaking about how important the use of historiography is for this group of artists, the show draws attention to what Roland Barthes used to call the “Punctum.” That is, that detail in an image (or work) that escapes its own structure, shooting out like an “arrow” towards the viewer. The artists selected for this exhibition have turned to the representation of history not just as material itself but also as means by which to criticize how history is constructed. They are not just interested in the past tense or simply reviving archival strategies, but in putting the past in relation to the present and the future, creating overlapping temporalities that bring disparate moments together. scottrade site down

• Happenings

Artist: Gabriel Sierra

Numbers in a Room
September 20, 2015 – January 4, 2015
Sculpture Center
New York, USA

By modifying and extending the guiding information of the exhibition space, Sierra will restructure the lower level galleries, effacing and confusing distinctions between the architecture, the institution, and the works that comprise the exhibition. The combination of alternative and existing floor plans, signage, and objects in the space all refer to the codes for viewing and maneuvering through the context of an exhibition.

Increasingly layered in Sierra’s presentation, the various structures comprising an exhibition in an institution create a mirroring effect, where each thing recalls another thing. This indexical accumulation makes it unclear exactly where the exhibition begins and ends, bringing into question the semantics of the various navigational prompts within art institutions. The exhibition structure asks that the visitor adjust to its new form.

Sierra (born 1975, San Juan Nepomuceno, Colombia) is based in Bogotá, Colombia and has had solo exhibitions at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (2015) and Peep-Hole in Milan (2013). Recent group exhibitions include the 56th Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2013); The Ungovernables, New Museum Triennial, New Museum, New York (2012); and the 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011).

• Happenings

Artists: Pablo Accinelli, Edgardo Aragón, Juan Araujo, Felipe Arturo, Nicolás Bacal, Milena Bonilla, Paloma Bosquê, Pia Camil, Bevenuto Chavajay, Marcelo Cidade, Donna Conlon & Jonathan Harker, Nicolás Consuegra, Minerva Cuevas, Elena Damiani, Mariana Castillo Deball, Ximena Garrido-Lecca, Federico Herrero, Voluspa Jarpa, Runo Lagomarsino, Adriana Lara, Engel Leonardo, Valentina Liernur, Mateo López, Renata Lucas, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Nicolás Paris, Amalia Pica, Pablo Rasgado, Pedro Reyes, Adrián Villar Rojas, Gabriel Sierra, Clarissa Tossin, Carla Zaccagnini.

United States of Latin America
Curated by Jens Hoffmann and Pablo León de la Barra
September 18, 2015 – January 3, 2016
Museum of Contemporary Art
Detroit, MI, USA

The exhibition United States of Latin America brings together more than thirty emerging artists from Latin America, many of whom will be exhibiting in the United States for the first time.

The show is based on an ongoing conversation between two curators, Jens Hoffmann and Pablo León de la Barra, who for a number of years have exchanged research and information about artists, artworks, and the overall development of the art world from Mexico to Argentina and the many countries in between. The exhibition is an extension of this dialogue into the galleries of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit via artworks suggested in dialogue format.

United States of Latin America features a wide range of works in a variety of mediums, for instance a series of photographs about housing in Havana, a film about the effects of gang violence in Mexico, sculptures reflecting on the involvement of the CIA in Latin American dictatorships, drawings of historical monuments from the future, a floor map about the selling of Brazilian rubber to the United States, boulders from a Colombian river that have been turned into flip-flops, and paintings about the interplay of modernist houses, tropical vegetation, and utopian architecture. The individual artworks touch upon themes such as geography, history, urbanism, memory, colonialism, architecture, war, modernism, social inequality, regionalism, and power. Given how Latin America’s realities oscillate between the colonial and the contemporary, between severe economic hardships and enormous financial expansions, between flourishing democracies and suppressive dictatorships, and between great progress and immense regression, the exhibition presents an intentionally fragmented survey, a deliberately disjointed overview, of the region and the art being made there. It allows the viewer a glimpse into a reality that may seem geographically near, but is in many ways far away and unfamiliar.

The curators invited a number of writers and curators from throughout Latin America to contribute to a glossary of terms that articulate the region’s historical landscape and conceptual syntax. This glossary will be published in the exhibition catalogue along with a conversation between the curators, texts on all of the artists, images of the exhibited artworks, and a roundtable discussion featuring a number of curators based in Latin America.

Developed in collaboration with Kadist Art Foundation, United States of Latin America is curated by Jens Hoffmann, MOCAD senior curator at large, and Pablo León de la Barra, guest curator. A range of public programs and educational activities will run concurrently with the exhibition, including a public conversation with the curators, lectures by some of the participating artists, film screenings, and performances.

• Happenings

Artist: Marco Maggi

Unfolding
September 10 – October 24, 2015
Josée Bienvenu Gallery
New York, NY, USA

Like in the Venice pavilion, Maggi separates the two basic elements of drawing. He draws with paper on the walls in the main space, and presents an installation of pencils in a separate area. “Drawing is a dialogue with a superficy and a certain superficiality. It is a superficial discipline that allows oneself to take distance from the depths of thinking in order to de-multiply an empathy for the insignificant. Drawing for me is like writing in a language that I don’t understand. I don’t believe in messages or ideas. Ideas have the tendency to become fixed and aspire ultimately to the status of ideology.” (Marco Maggi, 2015)

A portable kit composed of thousands of elements cut-out from self-adhesive paper becomes an insignificant alphabet folded and pasted onto the walls during the months preceding the exhibition. The diminutive papers are disseminated or connected following the traffic rules and syntax dictated by any accumulation of sediments. Some areas throughout the gallery are infected with color, the edge of the wall in red, blue or yellow, like the margins of a misprinted sheet of paper. The colonies of stickers on the walls enter in dialogue with the light upon them. Myriads of shadows and infinitesimal incandescent projections aim to slow down the viewer. The main ambition of the project is to promote pauses and make time visible.

In Putin’s Pencils, ten pencils are pointed against the wall, held by the tensions of bowstrings, ten arrows ready to be projected. The trajectory of these Soviet era color pencils is frozen, almost going backward in time. Leading to the project room, a ladder made of Fanfold, the already obsolete perforated computer paper, grows upward and downward from two dimensions to three-dimensional space in a symbiosis of hardware and software. Inside the room, two individual panels of cutout stickers face each other. Another wall installation, Stacking Quotes (Black Cachet), suspends bound sketchbooks with fragments of colored stickers pressed within their pages. These small referential stickers act as words cut out from a larger message, recoding the original context.

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. This year, he represents Uruguay at the 56th Venice Biennale, on view through November 22. His first monograph was published on this occasion. Maggi’s work is also on view at the concurrent exhibition Déplier Marco Maggi at Galerie Xippas, Paris. In 2013, he received the Premio Figari (Career Award). Selected exhibitions include Drawing Attention, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO (2015); Embracing Modernism: Ten Years of Drawings Acquisitions, The Morgan Library & Museum, New York (2015); 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.

• Happenings

Artists: Claudio Vera and Martin Pelenur.

Primordial Meditations
September 17th – October 24th, 2015
Artemisa Gallery
New York, NY, USA

It is embedded in human nature to be thoughtful and innovative for survival. Collectively, a dialogue surrounding this concept is excavated from Vera’s and Pelenur’s parallel bodies of work, to raise thought provoking questions that are inherent to humanity’s progression on earth, as well as, within society. How can humanity move forward in connection with the land, and how does one’s consciousness allow this process to unfold? Such primordial concerns with existence have continued through ancient times into contemporary civilization. To investigate Vera and Pelenur in this vein brings to light the association of physical and cerebral conditions, which are key to the balancing act that humanity must perform throughout time.

• Happenings

Monochrome Undone
SPACE Collection

Curated by Cecilia Fajardo-Hill
October 24, 2015 – April 1, 2016
SPACE, Irvine, CA

Artists: Ricardo Alcaide, Alejandra Barreda, Andrés Bedoya*, Emilio Chapela, Eduardo Costa, Danilo Dueñas, Magdalena Fernández, Valentina Liernur, Marco Maggi, Manuel Mérida, Gabriel de la Mora, Miguel Angel Ríos, Lester Rodríguez, Eduardo Santiere, Emilia Azcárate, Marta Chilindrón, Bruno Dubner, Rubén Ortíz-Torres, Fidel Sclavo, Renata Tassinari, Georgina Bringas, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Thomas Glassford, José Luis Landet, Jorge de León, Bernardo Ortiz, Martin Pelenur, Teresa Pereda, Pablo Rasgado, Ricardo Rendón, Santiago Reyes Villaveces, Mariela Scafati, Gabriel Sierra, Jaime Tarazona, Adán Vallecillo, Horacio Zabala.

The monochrome as a focus in the SPACE Collection began in a spontaneous form and soon became a systematic field of research. This exhibition is about the contemporary monochrome in Latin America. The monochrome is one of the most elusive and complex art forms of modern and contemporary art. If we think about its origins or meaning, we find that the monochrome is many contradictory things. The monochrome is neither a movement nor a category; it is not an “ism” or a thing. It may be painting as object, the material surface of the work itself, the denial of perspective or narrative, or anything representational. The monochrome may be a readymade, a found object, or an environment—anything in which a single color dominates. The monochrome can be critical and unstable, especially when it dialogues critically or in tension with modernism. This exhibition is organized into four different themes: The Everyday Monochrome, The White Monochrome, The Elusive Monochrome and The Transparent Monochrome. These themes have been conceived to create context and suggest interpretations that otherwise might be illegible.  These may overlap at times, pointing to the multiplicity of content in many of the works. The unclassifiable and variable nature of the monochrome in Latin America today is borne of self-criticality and from unique Latin contexts, to exist within its own specificity and conceptual urgency.

To purchase the catalogue click here.

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El monocromo, como enfoque de SPACE Collection, comenzó de forma espontánea y a poco se convirtió en un campo de investigación sistemático. Esta exposición trata sobre el monocromo contemporáneo en América latina. El monocromo es una de las formas de arte más elusivas y complejas del arte moderno y contemporáneo. Si reflexionamos acerca de sus orígenes o su significado, nos encontramos con que puede albergar muchas cosas contradictorias. El monocromo no es un movimiento ni una categoría; no es un “ismo” ni una cosa. Puede ser la pintura como objeto, la superficie material de la obra, la negación de la perspectiva o de todo lo representativo o narrativo. El monocromo puede ser un readymade, un objeto encontrado, un cuadro o un ambiente: cualquier cosa definida como una superficie cromáticamente uniforme donde un solo color predomina. El monocromo puede ser crítico e inestable, especialmente cuando se dialoga críticamente o en tensión con el modernismo. Esta exposición está organizada en cuatro temas: el monocromo cotidiano, el monocromo blanco, el monocromo elusivo y el monocromo transparente. Estos temas han sido concebidos a fin de crear un contexto y sugerir interpretaciones que de otra manera podrían ser ilegibles. Éstos pueden superponerse a veces, apuntando a la multiplicidad de contenidos en muchas de las obras. La naturaleza indeterminada, inclasificable y variable del monocromo en Latinoamérica hoy en día es producto de la autocrítica y de los contextos propios, para existir dentro de su propia especificidad y urgencia conceptual.

• Projects

Artist: Magdalena Fernández

Magdalena Fernández
Curated by Alma Ruiz
October 3, 2015 – January 3, 2016
MOCA Pacific Design Center
West Hollywood, CA, USA

Magdalena Fernández is the first major museum exhibition of the artist’s work presented in the United States. Organized by Alma Ruiz, Magdalena Fernández features six videos and one site-specific installation at MOCA Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood. A well-known and influential Venezuelan artist, Fernández has built her practice upon the foundation of Latin American modernist abstraction that took root in her native country at the beginning of the 20th century. Fernández’s multidisciplinary work incorporates light, movement, and sound, following traditions established by renowned compatriot artists Gego (1912-94), Alejandro Otero (1921-90), and Jesús Rafael Soto (1923-2005). Fernández’s artistic practice is deeply connected to the natural world, especially the tropical fauna and flora of Caracas, as well as to formal modernist sensibilities. Her extensive background in graphic design—acquired as a student at the Instituto de Diseño Fundación Neumann, and later as a designer in the studio of minimalist Italian architect-designer A.G. Fronzoni (1923-2002)—has greatly influenced the visual, sensorial, and experiential aspects that distinguish her work.

The artist has stood out as one of the most innovating artist of contemporary geometric abstraction. Her multidisciplinary work conjugates light, sound and contemporary criteria of space and use of materials, with some formal concepts of the traditional legacy of optical and geometrical abstraction. Fernández’s video-artistic practice explores the possible relations between abstraction and nature. In her work, the artist proposes a dialogue of visual and sensorial perceptions with space, transforming geometry and abstraction into nature for the senses.

Image: Magdalena Fernández, 1pmS011, 2011, video installation, dimensions variable, photo by Ricardo Jiménez, courtesy of Centro Cultural Chacao and the artist. Sayago & Pardon Collection.

• Happenings

Artist: Marco Maggi

Drawing Attention
June 19 – November 1, 2015
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art
Kansas City, Kansas, USA

At the center of this exhibition, featuring Uruguayan artist Marco Maggi, is his ambitiously scaled paper installation Great White Dialogue (2000) which reveals an encoding of the world in macro and micro, linear and aerial perspectives. From a distance, the stacks of thousands of sheets of paper (24,549 total) that are set out in a grid onto the floor suggest a landscape, circuit boards, or an architectural model for an imagined city. Viewed more intimately, delicate sculptural forms have been cut and raised from the top layer of paper, creating shadows that extend along the paper’s surface. The perplexing abstract language of Maggi’s tiny incised paper sculptures promotes longer viewing time and shifts our bodily relationship to an intimate viewing experience.

Accompanying Maggi’s sculptural installation is a related two-dimensional work, Global Myopia (2001), made by carefully pressing into aluminum foil. The network of impressions made to the malleable metal’s surface acts as the artist’s method of drawing, developed from his interest in the printmaking technique of plate etching.  He creates a patchwork of lines that impart a sense of movement across the surface of the piece. The pairing of these works emphasizes Maggi’s ability to call attention to the transformation of everyday materials he often uses, such as coated office paper, aluminum foil, apple skins, and plexiglass, as detailed and poetic expressions of the expanded language of contemporary drawing.

Marco Maggi was born in Montevideo, Uruguay. He earned his MFA from the State University of New York, New Paltz, and had his first solo museum exhibition at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in 2001. Maggi is representing Uruguay with a site-specific installation of paper and pencils, Global Myopia II, on view through November 22, 2015, at the Venice Biennale in Italy. The Uruguayan pavilion is one of the twenty-nine national pavilions located in the Giardini della Biennale.

• Happenings

Artists: Raquel Rabinovich, Jule Manna, Linda Mary Montano.

7 Hour Collaborative Glandathon: Dance, Pray, Bless at Nancy Donskoj’s
August 29, 2015
The Storefront Gallery
Kingston, NY, USA

A SEVEN HOUR EXPERIENCE GIVING GRATITUDE TO THE 7 GLANDS

Actions:

. Manna will move and dance for seven hours

. Montano will pray sounds for seven hours

. Rabinovich will give offerings (mud drawings) from her hands to everyone for one hour (6-7pm)

Each hour will reference one of the seven glands.

Image: Raquel Rabinovich, “Emergences (Hudson River)”, 2012-2014, Series: Emergences, Site-Specific Sculpture, On-site stones, Dimensions variable, Lighthouse Park, Port Ewen, New York, USA, Collection Town of Esopus, Photo credit: Camilo Rojas.

• Happenings

Artists: Alberto Conrcuera, Bill Abdale, Carlos García Noriega, Diego Sierra Alta, Federico Martínez, Isauro Huizar, Ivan Krassoievitch, Javier Barrios, Jerónimo Reyes, José Luis Rojas, Juan Caloca, Karian Amaya, Laura Meza Orozco, Mario Navarro, Mauricio Cadena, Morelos León, Pablo Dávila, Paola Cortázar, Rolando Jacob, Sebastián Vizcaíno, Sofia Byttebier, Sofía Echeverry, Xavier de María.

SALÓN ACME
August 22 and 23, 2015
Wythe Hotel
Brooklyn NY, USA

Salón ACME is a platform that exhibits the work of new and established artists, either Mexican or foreign, encouraging the country’s artistic production.

• Happenings

Artists: Amadeo Azar, Daniel Barroca, Matt Bua, Onyedika Chuke, Annette Cords, Marcelo Moscheta, Zach Rockhill, and Lauren Seiden.

Name It by Trying to Name It
July 17 – August 30, 2015
The Drawing Center
New York, USA

Initiated in 2014, Open Sessions is a new program at The Drawing Center through which a large group of artists consider their relationship to drawing as medium, process, and metaphor. Working together over a two-year period, Open Sessions artists participate in ongoing studio visits and discussions, punctuated by small group exhibitions at The Drawing Center, as well as other self-organized shows in New York and abroad.

Name It by Trying to Name It: Open Sessions 2014-15 includes all artists in the program, giving the first floor of the museum over to an exploration of contemporary drawing, encompassing performance, video, sculpture, and installation, as well as traditional drawing forms. The show’s numerous collaborations, in which ideas and materials are shared, emphasize the medium’s flexibility and process-oriented nature. The exhibition will evolve over its six-week run, as some artworks enter and exit in two-week cycles, while others remain constant throughout the show’s run. Taken as a whole, Name It by Trying to Name It presents a window into nearly two years of thinking about drawing.

• Happenings

Artists: Regina Aprijaskis, Emilia Azcárate, Valerie Brathwaite, Feliza Bursztyn, Marta Chilindrón, Mirtha Dermisache, Diana de Solares, Noemí Escandell, María Freire, Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt), Anna Bella Geiger, Mercedes Elena González, Ana Mercedes Hoyos, Elizabeth Jobim, Judith Lauand, Ana Maria Maiolino, Marta Minujín, Mercedes Pardo, Liliana Porter, Margot Römer, Lotty Rosenfeld, Ana Sacerdote, Fanny Sanín, Adriana Santiago, Mariela Scafati, Antonieta Sosa, and Yeni & Nan.

Folding: Line, Space & Body / Latin American Women Artists Working Around Abstracion
Curated by Aimé Iglesias Lukin
July 9 – August 21, 2015
Henrique Faria Fine Art
NY, NY, USA

Folding is the action through which a line turns into a figure, a plane becomes tridimensional, and a painting becomes an object. And beyond all these actions, we see how representation becomes presentation.

Since the historical avant-garde, the quest for an art that transcended the representation of reality has led artists to create abstract art and to focus on the material objecthood of a painting or sculpture. This exhibition presents the work of Latin American women artists from the 1950s through the present day, showing the different ways in which they worked with abstraction and geometry to explore the space of the artwork and that of the spectator, as mediated by the body.

Latin American abstraction has gained recognition worldwide in the last decade. Exhibitions like “Inverted Utopias,” curated by Mari Carmen Ramírez and Héctor Olea in 2004 and “The Geometry of Hope,” curated by Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro in 2007, presented the diverse abstract movements that developed in the Post War Latin American metropolis, from Joaquín Torres García and Escuela del Sur in Montevideo, to Arte Concreto Invención and Madí in Buenos Aires, the Ruptura group in São Paulo and the work of Alejandro Otero and Jesús Rafael Soto in Caracas.

In all of these avant-garde scenes, women artists gained—not without struggle—a place of recognition and a social circle in which they could develop their profession with relative tolerance. Still, except a few exceptions like Gego, Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape, it is mostly male artists we see represented in museums and art history books. This exhibition does not intend to resolve that problem, which is of a much larger scale, but aims to present some of their production and to explore the formal and creative connections among this diverse group of artists from the continent. This show also chooses to escape the historical understanding of abstraction, which is referred to here not as the Post-war movement but more broadly as a creative strategy that has continued through the decades. In this way, Judith Lauand’s planimetric work of 1960 can be seen alongside the contemporary pyramidal sculptures of Marta Chilindrón, and the use of the grid in 1950s and 1960s abstraction can be observed in Anna Bella Geiger’s video Passagens II from 1974 or in Emilia Azcarate’s Sudoku series from 2009.

The earliest-made piece in the show is that of Uruguayan artist María Freire, who co-founded in 1952 the group Arte No-Figurativo along with her husband José Pedro Costigliolo, Antonio Llorens and other artists. Works like Composición vertical (1956), show her interest in orthogonal compositions and planar superimpositions, which along with her use of line demonstrate her interest not simply in abstraction and space but more specifically in dynamism. In a similar spirit, but resulting in a very different work, Judith Lauand’s Concrete 178 (1960) presents a flat geometric composition, in monochrome grays, that through a careful use of lines and planes suggests a volumetric and angular surface. Known as the “Dama do concretismo,” Lauand was the only female member of Brazil’s Grupo Ruptura, and created unique works through a very personal use of geometry, mathematics and space.

In contrast, Mercedes Pardo’s acrylic painting Untitled (c. 1975) explores space recession not through line but using color fields. The Venezuelan artist, who was a pioneer of abstract art in Venezuela along with her husband Alejandro Otero, focused on a sensorial use of color in abstract compositions to achieve the autonomy of painting. Along with Pardo, the other representative of geometric abstraction from Venezuela in this exhibition is Margot Römer, whose triptych from the series Plomos Despojados (1995) uses the panel subdivisions to present three variations of a rectangular structure by alternating the color distribution. A similar emphasis in color is seen in Acrylic No. 7, painted in 1978 by Colombian artist Fanny Sanín, who creates a complex arrangement of intersecting rectangles of different purple hues. This simple alteration of tone in one color still allows Sanín to create a rich composition of receding planes that suggests rhythmic movement and dynamism. Indeed, movement is directly incorporated in Essai de Couleur Animée, a film made by Ana Sacerdote in between 1959 and 1965 in which she interposes geometric chromatic compositions, animating their shapes.

The case of Regina Aprijaskis exemplifies the difficulties of being a woman artist and of combining work and personal life. The Peruvian artist was developing a fruitful career and became interested in abstraction in the 1950s and 1960s after two trips to New York, but abandoned painting in 1970 following the coup d’état in Peru two years earlier, to work alongside her husband in his factory. Her 1996 acrylic painting Negro, rojo y blanco demonstrates how her interest in geometric abstraction stayed intact after a 26-year hiatus, at the same time the choice of the Peruvian flag’s colors seems to speak directly about her country’s political and social struggles.

Other works in the show leave color aside and refer to the white monochrome also with the means of exploring geometry and space.  That is the case of Ana Mercedes Hoyos’ 1970s series Atmósferas, where subtle variations of white hues suggest surfaces on the canvas. Similarly, Anna Maria Maiolino’s Light Image (1971) depends on a simple square embossing on paper to invoke the tradition of the monochrome. The square is also the theme of Gego’s Dibujo sin papel 79/14, made in 1979. Famous for her Reticuláreas, or net sculptures, in this work the Venezuelan artist uses wire and metal to frame a piece of the wall, allowing the shadow to become part of the work, continuing the integration of work and exhibition space that allowed her work to spatially affect the spectator.

The relationship between the gallery space and the visitor’s body became a main topic of interest for artists in the late 1960s, notably within Minimalism and among Western artists, but similar creative inquiries were being made in Latin America. Argentinean artist Noemí Escandell created sculptural projects such as Rectangles and Squares and Volumes, Bodies and Displacements, both from 1966, in which basic geometric shapes are combined in odd dispositions to affect the tridimensional perception of the object. In Venezuela, Antonieta Sosa was doing similar work with pieces like Stable-Unstable (1967/2014), which put into question geometry and the laws of gravity while simultaneously presenting organically aesthetic objects.

The body would later be presented directly, rather than invoked, in the work of artists such as Liliana Porter and Yeni & Nan. The Argentine is represented with her 1973 work Untitled (Line), in which her finger is photographed as interrupting a line, one that transcends the frame of the work onto the real space of the wall. In the Polaroid series Cuerpo y línea (1977), the Venezuelan duo Yeni & Nan position their bodies along the geometric designs of a tennis court, evolving the linear and geometric tradition of their home country to include performance and body art.

The urban space is also the canvas chosen by Brazilian conceptual artist Anna Bella Geiger, whose video Passagens II (1974) shows her body creating diagonal trajectories in the grid-like formation of the steps of a stairway. In a similar approach, Lotty Rosenfeld’s ongoing series Geometría de la línea, begun in 1979, intervenes the infinite number of broken white lines that divide a road with intersecting, transversal lines, in a formal but also powerfully political performance associated to her participation in the CADA group protesting the dictatorship in Chile. The relationship between geometry and power is explicit in Marta Minujín’s The Obelisk Lying Down (1978). The work, created for the first Latin American Biennial in São Pablo, presents the geometrical structure of the famous monumental form lying down, allowing spectators to walk through it in a democratizing and desacralizing gesture.

In the exhibition we also encounter more expressive uses of abstraction, where experimentation with materials led to more free-flowing forms. This is the case of Mirtha Dermisache’s graphisms from the 1970s, where the lines drawn by the Argentine artist sinuously move to create abstract texts. The abstract sculpture Untitled (1981) by Colombian artist Feliza Brusztyn, who in 1967 created the famous series of motorized sculptures Las histéricas, also combines dissonant materials into visually striking, amorphous objects. Trinidanian artist Valerie Brathwaite opts for anti-geometric shapes in her Soft Bodies, a series initiated in 2011, where the hanging and floor fabric sculptures play fluidly between the borders of figuration and abstraction.

After all these decades, geometry is still very much present in the work of younger artists. Sometimes the continuity takes place by claiming geometric abstraction directly, like Mercedes Elena González’s series September 1955 (2014), which re-conceptualizes the cover of the inaugural issue of the art and architecture magazine Integral to reevaluate the legacy of modernism in Venezuela. Others adapt geometric abstraction into new formats, like the wood piece Untitled (Free Construction No. 1) (2005) by Diana de Solares. In the case of Elizabeth Jobim’s Wall (2015), geometric shapes invade the wall and floor, overlapping each other and creating optical layers. Emilia Azcárate’s Untitled (Sudoku), from 2009 takes the grid of that game as influence and codifies numbers into colors, allowing her to create a meditative abstraction that juxtaposes the game’s problem with its solution. Formally opposite to this grid but equally colorful is Adriana Santiago’s Untitled from the series Maracaibo (2015), which combines pompoms into a frame in a playful and appealing tactile composition. The work of Marta Chilindrón retakes the tradition of dynamic planes and shapes of Gego and Lygia Clark but includes color as a key part of her manipulable works such as 27 Triangles (2011). Finally, Mariela Scafati goes back to the original questions of abstract painting in her works Tu nombre completo and Nueve minutos exactos, both from 2015, which literally –through bondage ropes— and conceptually –by transforming them into objects— tense the possibilities of what a painting can be: not a representation but an object, a body itself.

These interactions between the artwork, its surrounding spaces and the bodies that interact with it are present through the sixty years in which these artworks were created. The formal explorations initiated by the historical avant-gardes have not, as proven by the younger generation, exhausted themselves. This group of women artists from Latin America offer a wide range of answers to these questions, all personal but also collective. The line and the plane not only folded but became the body, expanding the shape of art above and beyond.

Aimé Iglesias Lukin

• Happenings

Artists: Conrad Bakker, Constantin Boym, Kendell Carter, Jordi Colomer, William Cordova, Elmgreen & Dragset, Fernanda Fragateiro, Terence Gower, Brian Jungen, Olga Koumoundouros, Jill Magid, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Dorit Margreiter, Josiah McElheny, Edgar Orlaineta, Gabriel Sierra, Simon Starling, Clarissa Tossin, Barbara Visser, and James Welling.

MetaModern
May 30 – August 30, 2015
Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art
Scottsdale, AZ, USA

The fresh and provocative artworks presented in MetaModern refer literally and conceptually to modernist design objects of the mid-century. These historic objects have gained the status of icons. It is a testament to their enduring power that they now catalyze a generation of artists too young to have experienced modernism firsthand.

The notion of modernist design and architecture had its genesis in Europe, particularly during an intense decade of experimentation at the Bauhaus beginning in Weimar, Germany, in 1919. Function and utility were the school’s ethos, while the use of modern materials, honesty of form, and an embrace of abstraction were its hallmarks. World War II shifted the activity to this side of the ocean, as European practitioners, including Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Richard Neutra emigrated to the United States and joined the faculties of American architectural schools. Modernism was held as truth by the generations of students they trained: emerging in the 1960s and ’70s, these young designers felt they had arrived at a place beyond style. Modernism was the pure and true mode in which to design everything from typography to furniture to architecture.

When architects, those removed by several generations from the birth of modernism, came to maturity as designers––Frank Gehry, Charles Moore, and Robert Venturi––they challenged all that modernism had embraced. Their vocabulary included fanciful embellishment, applied color, decorative patterning, and references to historical styles.

Now, over 90 years after the revolution at the Bauhaus, modernism continues to spark a passion in designers and collectors. The prices of signature objects of the classic modernist era are soaring, and its buildings are being restored and valued as historical monuments. Although vintage Eames rockers have been integrated into contemporary high-end living rooms, they are quite different in these new eclectic contexts. Similarly, artists who incorporate iconic modernist designs in their work today often produce recombinations and modifications that result in an entirely unique mix––or meta, meaning beyond, changed, self-referential, and abstracted from another concept. Using classic elements in new configurations, these artists are making original works of art that comment on the claims of the past in light of the complexities of the present.

The artists in this exhibition, most of whom were born in the 1960s, adopt the actual vocabulary of the modern movement to question the content of its style and its relationship to history. Their work challenges the tenets of modernism head on. Often ironic and witty, the works in this exhibition offer a thoughtful critique of innumerable issues that extend across the fields of design and history.

• Happenings

Artists: Ana Bidart, Linus Bill + Adrien Horni, Jonathan Callan, Jacob El Hanani, Dario Escobar, and Julianne Swartz.

Summer Hang
Through August 12, 2015
Josée Bienvenu
New York, USA

Ana Bidart explores the possibilities and more so, the impossibilities of drawing. She brings found objects together in space and across time, and her works establish a tangible record of ephemeral relationships encountered. With Disappointment she reconstitutes meaning in the potential interaction between a compass, that does not draw, and a coiled wire, that is precariously suspended.

Swiss artists Linus Bill and Adrien Horni create collages and paintings with powerful aesthetics, bold gestures and brave dimensions. Bill and Horni produce work by assembling smaller collages, which later become part of a larger collage. They only determine a final result after countless trials and manipulations to the images (physically and digitally). With NY P.5 TL, the pair continues their ongoing explorations of process, form, and presentational strategy by combining inkjet printing, silkscreen, painting, drawing, and assemblage.

Jonathan Callan explores the relationship of disembodied knowledge to embodied experience and materiality, working with publications – books, maps, and photographs – as a source material.Entertaining is made up of 72 separate pages from a cookbook, isolating a single dish or ingredient on each page and removing everything else with sandpaper. Together the dishes (though legible as food when close up) appear as strange planets or discs in space. Some of the dishes are isolated and then completely removed, leaving a ghostly blank. Along with all the pieces where a single aspect of a page is highlighted, Entertaining explores the illustrative notion of the self, the removal of context and the substitution of a painterly space. In fact the background can often seem rendered with pastel or even fresco, and Callan likes to think of Entertaining as a composition of drawings.

Jacob El Hanani’s work draws upon the tradition of micrography in Judaism, a technique utilized in decoration and transcribing holy texts. El Hanani creates highly intricate works, like Circle and Line, through the painstaking repetition of minuscule marks repeated thousands of times using ink on paper or canvas. He draws these images without magnification; in order to reduce eyestrain, he rests every ten minutes. The end result is a work of extraordinary detail that appears to be a pattern from a distance, and speaks of the passage of time and the link between the microscopic and the infinite.

Dario Escobar is renowned for his sculptural re-contextualization of everyday objects. His work explores concepts of cultural and historical hybridity ultimately attempting to reexamine Western art history from a Guatemalan perspective.  Reticula, part of Dario Escobar’s “ultramoderno” project commenting on the failed utopia of modernism in Central America, 50 pool triangles made in Taiwan becomes a relief, and its composition follows a modern grid. Escobar’s work, characterized by the use of materials charged with historical and symbolic meaning, is articulated in a minimalist language like in Yellow Composition, a linseed oil drawing, and the wall sculpture.

Julianne Swartz’s sound works explore the entanglement of subjectivities and sensations through multilayered arrangements. In Alma’s Blanket Israel, sounds are harvested from the everyday: fragments of recordings from people, nature, instruments and environments. Some are intimate, some generic, some identifiable, and some obscure. These sounds, entwined together, weave in and out of aural focus to make a symphonic collage. The dense textile of woven and knotted, colored electrical wires, forms a series of functional circuits that distribute four channels of sound to the numerous speakers interleaved in the weaving.

• Happenings

Artists: Paweł Althamer, Julieta Aranda, Matthew Barney, Kevin Beasley, John Bock, Carol Bove, Ernesto Caivano, Mariana Castillo Deball, Maurizio Cattelan, Trisha Donnelly, Shannon Ebner, Simon Fujiwara, Ellie Ga, Gerard & Kelly, Simryn Gill, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Rachel Harrison, Camille Henrot, Juliana Huxtable, Rashid Johnson, Matt Keegan, Agnieszka Kurant, Mark Leckey, Lee Bul, Zoe Leonard, Glenn Ligon, Sharon Lockhart, Nate Lowman, Mark Manders, Ryan McGinley, Josephine Meckseper, Zanele Muholi, Iván Navarro, Catherine Opie, Gabriel Orozco, Laura Owens, Katie Paterson, R. H. Quaytman, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Xaviera Simmons, Taryn Simon, Alexandre Singh, Agathe Snow, Ryan Trecartin, Danh Vo, Sharif Waked, Jonas Wood, and Haegue Yang.

Storylines: Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim
June 5 – September 9, 2015
Guggenheim Museum
NYC, NY, USA

Visual art has always been closely associated with storytelling. In Western culture, painting and sculpture initially evolved to illuminate narratives of religion, patronage, and power. Over the centuries, genre scenes, still lifes, and portraits—often created as intricate allegories for religious or historical subject matter—became popular as the narrative role of art expanded. In the twentieth century, with the advent of abstraction as a radical break with the past, many artists associated with the avant-garde rejected the figurative and, hence, eliminated explicit narrative content. In the United States and Europe, this tendency culminated during the 1960s and 1970s in Minimal painting and sculpture that foregrounded geometric abstraction and in Post-Minimalism’s examination of process and materiality. The 1980s witnessed a resurgence of figurative art, much of which harked back to expressionistic styles of the 1920s and 1930s.

During the 1990s, a generation of younger artists embraced the concept of storytelling to articulate the politics of identity and difference, investing both abstract and representational forms with narrative content. Storylines opens with key examples from that decade, which serve as thematic anchors and highlight the museum’s own exhibition history. Most of the works on view, however, were created after 2005 and offer an expansive view of the new paradigms for storytelling forged during the past ten years to communicate ideas about race, gender, sexuality, history, and politics, among other trenchant themes.

Bringing together over one hundred works from the Guggenheim’s contemporary collection, Storylines examines the diverse ways in which artists today engage narrative through installation, painting, photography, sculpture, video, and performance. For these artists, storytelling does not necessarily require plots, characters, or settings. Rather, narrative potential lies in everyday objects and materials, and their embedded cultural associations. In projects created through extensive research, acts of appropriation, or performance, the artists in Storylines uncover layers of meaning, turning to individual experience as a means of conveying shared stories, whether real or fictional.

The recent narrative turn in contemporary art cannot be separated from the current age of social media with its reverberating cycles of communication, dissemination, and interpretation. Seemingly every aspect of life is now subject to commentary and circulation via digital text and images. These new narrative frames highlight the roles that each of us can play as both author and reader, foregrounding the fact that meaning is contingent in today’s interconnected and multivalent world. As a means of celebrating this dynamic, the museum has invited writers to contribute reflections—in prose or poetry—on selected works in Storylines. Engaging the rich historical relationship between literature and art, the resulting polyphony signals the diverse interpretive potential that lies within each object on display. Visitors may access these texts using the Guggenheim app or in booklets located throughout the museum.

• Happenings

Artist: Lucia Koch

Lucia Koch, let there be a set X
July 10 – September 4, 2015
Christopher Grimes Gallery
Santa Monica, CA, USA

Throughout her career Lucia Koch has become known for her interventions within existing architecture, either through her use of sculpture, photography, video or colored filters. In this, her second exhibition with the gallery, she will intersect the entire space with a gradient printed on fabric — something that moves in space but is constant, subtle, transformative and never repeating. In addition, ordinary windows will be replaced with colored panels disrupting one’s expectation, and images of small, empty containers enlarged to architectural scale disassociate the photographs from their references and challenge how we relate to space. Through all of these strategies, Koch elevates basic elements of architecture to effect change in one’s immediate atmosphere and physical surroundings.

Lucia Koch (b. 1966, Porto Alegre, Brazil) lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil. She has recently participated inProspect 3, New Orleans, LA (2015), curated by Franklin Sirmans; Cruzamentos: Contemporary Art in Brazil, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2014); A Sense of Place, Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco, CA (2014); and Re-emerge: Towards a New Cultural Cartography, 11^th Sharjah Biennial, United Arab Emirates (2013). She has been included in the 11th Biennale de Lyon, France (2011); 27th Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (2006); 2nd, 5th and 8th editions of the Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brazil (1999, 2005 and 2011); and the 8th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, Turkey (2003). Her work has been included in such exhibitions as, Another Place, Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, Brazil (2011), andWhen Lives Become Form, Yerba Buena Center for Arts, San Francisco, CA (2009), which was also on view at Contemporary Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan (2008). Koch’s work is in the collections of such institutions as Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil and Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Brazil, among others. In 2016 she will be the subject of a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

• Happenings

Artists: Waltercio Caldas, Lygia Clark, Raymundo Colares, Adriano Costa, Alexandre da Cunha, Amílcar de Castro, Willys de Castro, Antonio Dias, Marcius Galan, Fernanda Gomes, Jac Leirner, Rodrigo Matheus, Paulo Monteiro, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, Mira Schendel, Tunga, and Erika Verzutti.

Empty House Casa Vazia
Jun 27 – August 28, 2014
Luhring Augustine
NYC,  NY, USA

• Happenings

Artists: Claudia Alvarez, Afruz Amighi, Rina Banerjee, Christian Ruiz Berman, Sanford Biggers, Cui Fei, Leonardo Drew, Rashawn Griffin, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Wenda Gu, Ginny Huo, Tamiko Kawata, Iván Navarro & Courtney Smith, Kambui Olujimi, Cecilia Paredes, Soo Sunny Park, Yinka Shonibare, Nari Ward, and Ishmael Randall Weeks.

New Ways of Seeing: Beyond Culture
May 10 – July 12, 2015
Dorsky Gallery – Curatorial Programs
Long Island City, NY, USA

New Ways of Seeing: Beyond Culture features works by emerging and seasoned artists of African/ African American, Asian/Asian American, Latino/ Hispanic, and Middle Eastern heritages who are changing and expanding the vocabulary and agendas of the art world by injecting ideas from their world cultures and experiences. These proactive artists utilize materials and imagery in innovative ways that address themes including race, gender, ritual, craft, and language. Their materials often challenge existing associations and subvert expectations. They break down barriers to create new mythologies. Their works conflate the local and global, past and present, fact and fiction. These artists are “transcending the limits of individual cultures.”1

The phrase “New Ways of Seeing” acknowledges that many past and present interpretations of culture are flawed, incomplete, or even false. As we know, scholars from ancient to Post-Colonial and Postmodern times had different views and agendas, often excluding women. In another direction, cultures borrow from, adapt, and change each other in myriad ways.

• Happenings

Artists: Kim Allen, Kari Altmann, Marcela Armas, Jeremy Bailey, Diego Berruecos, Zach Blas, Mariana Castillo Deball, Marcelo Cidade, Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker, Sterling Crispin, Debora Delmar Corp., de_sitio, Claudia Fernández, Francisco Fernández, Radamés “Juni” Figueroa, LaToya Ruby Frazie, Melissa Furness, Coco Fusco, Marcius Galan, Anna Bella Geiger, Cristóbal Gracia, David Hartt, Karl Haendel, Sarah Anne Johnson, André Komatsu, Robert Longo, Jorge Macchi, Laleh Mehran and Chris Coleman, Erick Meyenberg, Adam Milner, Nuria Montiel and Fernando Palma, Daniel Monroy Cuevas, Aliza Nisenbaum, Fernando Ortega, Bernardo Ortiz, Adam Pendleton, Tania Pérez Córdova, Jorge Satorre, Joaquín Segura, Matt Scobey, Skawennati, Eduardo Terrazas, and Ryan Trecartin.

NOW!
July 14–August 30, 2015
2015 Biennial of the Americas
Denver, CO, USA

The 2015 Biennial of the Americas is the third iteration of this international festival of ideas, art and culture in Denver, Colorado. The theme of the 2015 Biennial of the Americas is NOW! Today we stand on shifting ground, with one foot in a new geological era and one foot lingering on the structures of the past. The 2015 Biennial of the Americas will dive deep into our present circumstances, seeking to understand contexts, conditions, and challenges across the western hemisphere today.

Artistic program
Artists featured in the 2015 Biennial of the Americas from North, South and Central America and the Caribbean create visual art, music and dance in response to current issues and questions. They address specific situations where they live, as well as concerns shared across borders such as violence, environmental issues, technology, and social justice. Mexico City will form a particular focus in the program following the Biennial of the Americas Mexico City Summit held in June 2014.

Program highlights
The artists in the central exhibition of the Biennial of the Americas, Now? NOW! at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver capture complexities of now in the Western Hemisphere. The exhibition Oíd el Sueño de una Palabra / Listen to the Dream of a Word at the Biennial Pavilion in Downtown Denver results from a collaboration facilitated by Mexico City curatorial collective de_sitio. They invited a group of practitioners from different disciplines to interact with Museo Comunitario del Valle de Xico, a small, yet exemplary community organization in a marginal outskirt southeast of Mexico City. Vis-à-vis: Biennial Ambassadors Residency Exhibition at McNichols Civic Center features four ambitious new projects by artists Matt Scobey (US), Melissa Furness (US), Cristóbal Gracia (Mexico) and Daniel Monroy Cuevas (Mexico) developed through the 2015 Biennial Ambassadors Program. Aimed at nurturing creative links and deepening artistic dialogue across the Americas, the program focused for 2015 on connecting Denver and Mexico City through a series of ten-week residency exchanges run by contemporary art organizations ArtPlant and SOMA. Major public commissions by Mexico-based artists Erick Meyenberg and Marcela Armas examine the connection between Denver’s present, past and future.

Opening week festival and arts professional preview
July 14 to 19, all-day programming precedes evening symposia, and late night events celebrate the opening of Biennial venues. New this year is the Biennial Pavilion, a site for talks, workshops and performances, programmed with events throughout the summer.

Other highlights include a week-long residency of public performances and workshops by Brazil’s Companhia Urbana de Dança, presented in collaboration with the Newman Center for the Performing Arts, and a rare presentation of Matthew Barney’s latest film, River of Fundament, co-presented by the Clyfford Still Museum and Denver Art Museum. Biennial Night @ Civic Center, a major outdoor music and performance festival, features appearances by Jeremy Bailey (Canada), Black Violin (US), Wonderbound (US), and others.

The Artistic Director and Curator of the 2015 Biennial of the Americas is Lauren A. Wright.

Image: Robert Longo, Full-Scale Study for Five Rams (Ferguson, Hands Up: November 30, 2014), 2015. Charcoal on unique digital pigment print in 3 parts, 104 x 150 inches. Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York.

• Happenings

Artist: Clarissa Tossin

Unmapping the World -Book release & Conversation with Michael Ned Holte
June 13, 2014
Samuel Freeman Gallery
Los Angeles, CA, USA

Unmapping the World is organized around a set of works produced by Clarissa Tossin over a period of five years during artist residencies, and commissioned by Brazilian and North American art institutions. These works manifest the development of a poetics that employs a wide range of strategies in order to address contemporary issues. Tossin’s objects, videos, and installations explore a broad and intricate spectrum of desires, impasses, and utopias, while also establishing their own expressive logic, above and beyond these topics.

Driven by the curiosity of the artist-anthropologist, Tossin’s works are formed through analysis of the politics of space and urban spaces, as well as interrogations into the mappings and discourses of power, relationships of consumption and identity, circulations of symbols and ideas, and the role of architecture—particularly that of Brasília, a modernist monument that she has come to call ‘home.’

The book is bilingual, in English and Portuguese, and includes texts by Moacir dos Anjos, Michael Ned Holte, and Guilherme Wisnik. The publication has been made possible by a fellowship from the California Community Foundation.

• Happenings

Artists: Felipe Mujica, Margarita Azurdia, Jorge González, Ana Maria Millan, Javier Tellez and Johanna Unzueta.

A reherasal by Felipe Mujica and Johanna Unzueta
June 10, 2015
ISCP -International Studio & Curatorial Program
Brooklyn, NY, USA

Artists and Beta-Local collaborators Felipe Mujica and Johanna Unzueta will present original artworks and documentation of work by Margarita Azurdia, Felipe Mujica, Jorge González, Ana Maria Millan, Javier Tellez and Johanna Unzueta in ISCP’s exhibition galleries. The exhibition will reveal contrasts between Geometric Abstraction, with its idealistic and formalist characteristics, and more personal, exotic and political forms of expression. Works include a video of a flying body crossing the US-Mexico border in a semi-circle trajectory, a ceramic turtle resting over a neo-geo-style cube, and a group of photographs of Minimal-like sculptures and paintings with the artist fashionably posing next to them, among others. This presentation is a prelude “test-drive” or “rehearsal” for an exhibition scheduled for later this year in Santiago, Chile at Die Ecke Arte Contemporáneo.

• Happenings

Artists: Esvin Alarcón Lam, Ricardo Alcaide, Darío Escobar, Gianfranco Foschino, Juan Fernando Herrán, Harold Mendez, Gabriel de la Mora, Ronny Quevedo, and Ana Maria Tavares.

Líneas de la Mano
May 12 – July 3, 2015
Sicardi Gallery
Houston, TX, USA

Featuring artists from Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Venezuela, Líneas de la mano (lines of the hand, lifelines) takes as its premise the idea that geometries connect the quotidian moments of our daily lives. Indeed, a line connects two points, A and B, start and finish, end and beginning; lines are defined by this function of connection, even as they continue to move past the points they connect

The artists in the exhibition use the languages and conceptual frameworks of modernism and abstraction to suggest poetic connections: between people, between historical referents, between political experiences, and between places. The line as connector becomes a way of skillfully addressing fraught histories, and of weaving a set of relationships. Líneas de la mano also considers the tactility of each object. The works exhibited demonstrate a strong relationship to materials and their histories, from the scrap metal of Guatemalan buses, to the thick, sooty texture of an archival photograph transferred to aluminum, to the fabric retrieved from vintage radio speakers.

The exhibition title playfully alludes to palmistry; the connection is meant to highlight the actions of the hand, implicit in the creation of the work. Astrologer, numerologist, clairvoyant, and palm-reader Cheiro (William John Warner, 1866-1936) writes, “the hand… denotes the change going on in the brain, even years before the action of the individual becomes the result of such a change.”  Read in a different context, it is a compelling statement about the artistic process.

• Happenings

Ana Belén Cantoni
The Soft Gesture

The Wooden Floor
Santa Ana, California

The Soft Gesture, a commission by the Sayago & Pardon collection, is the title of a large-scale installation by Colombian artist Ana Belén Cantoni, created specifically for The Wooden Floor, Santa Ana, CA. Inspired by the students’ testimonies of how art and dance empower their everyday lives, Cantoni evokes the human body and its potential for individual growth within communal coexistence by the usage of simple materials that remind the cycles and processes of transformation through movement (cloth and wooden clothespins, as well as ink and graphite on cotton). The Soft Gesture is a vision towards the awakening of primal associations and the creation through physical connections.

Download the catalogue here.

—

El gesto suave, una comisión de arte de la colección Sayago & Pardon, es el título de la instalación a gran escala de la artista colombiana Ana Belén Cantoni, creada específicamente para The Wooden Floor, una organización sin fines de lucro que capacita a jóvenes de bajos ingresos a través del baile y programas académicos y familiares en Santa Ana, California. Inspirada por los testimonios de los estudiantes sobre cómo el arte y la danza estimulan sus vidas diarias, Cantoni evoca el cuerpo humano y el potencial de crecimiento individual dentro de un entorno comunitario a través de la utilización de materiales comunes (tela y pinzas de madera, así como tinta y grafito sobre papel de algodón) que nos recuerdan los ciclos y procesos de transformación a través del movimiento. El gesto suave sugiere asociaciones primarias por medio del color (rojo y negro) al tiempo de invocar las fuerzas creativas de conexión física y social.

Descarga el catálogo aquí.

• Projects

Artist: Richard Garet

Sounds of Times Square
June 1 – 30, 2015
Times Square Arts
NYC, NY, USA

For this “Midnight Moment” project Richard Garet proposes to use sounds captured from the area of Times Square as a tool to generate a visualization of the sonic environment. Then the artist will remove the audio leaving just the moving image signal creating an experience of sound through vision that would change and pulsate according to the properties of the sonic composite. The viewer then is pulled into lavish landscapes of continually reconfigured color and mood.

“In my processes establishing the material is key, and from there it becomes a reductive process where a vast number of possibilities and outcomes are explored until the work reaches proper momentum, purpose, and significance. Moreover, objectifying the ordinary and reinventing the character of found mundane things in life is very interesting to me.” -Richard Garet

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• Happenings

Artist: Clarissa Tossin

How does it travel?
May 29, 2015
Samuel Freeman Gallery
Los Angeles, CA, USA

How does it travel? brings together photographs, sculptures, prints, and site-specific works that analyze movements and their resulting displacements and transformations. She tracks materials, ideologies, and bodies that travel by foot, by car, by plane, and by her own hand. Using two primary nodes, Brazil and the United States, Tossin finds generative ground in transpositions that yield compelling misregistrations.

• Happenings

Artists: Magdalena Atria, Ricardo Rendón, Mariángeles Soto-Díaz, Rubén Ortiz Torres, and Antonio Muñiz.

Multifarious Abstraction
Curated by Cecilia Fajardo-Hill
June 20 – July 25, 2015
Fabien Castanier Gallery
Culver City, CA, USA

Multifarious Abstraction is an exhibition that questions traditional understanding of the nature of abstraction as a modern field separate from reality. The five artists participating in Multifarious Abstraction present conceptually challenging, loaded and sometimes political explorations of abstract vocabularies in art, which point to unique ways to experience and think on contemporary culture. The five artists are from Latin America, where the division between high and low culture is not as central or as marked as in The United States and Europe. The abstraction proposed here moves away from modernist utopian ideals and pure aesthetics, to dialogue with industrial and popular culture, daily life, inner struggle, politics and gender.

Magdalena Atria is exhibiting free abstract compositions entirely made with plasticine. The artist, who has developed an extensive oeuvre with this material, addresses painting through a material which is malleable, fragile, common and familiar, to produce slowly complicated surfaces that embody “tension between the rational and the emotional, between the personal and the collective, between the existential and the banal, the formal and the symbolic.” Atria attempts to connect the ideal, manifested through abstraction, with the daily and existential dimensions of concrete reality.

Antonio Muñiz is an artist who explores by an intuitive method ways to free the mind and perception from predetermined responses. He employs fumage, a technique for producing organic forms with a burning candle at varying angles and distance from the canvas, thus creating an uncontrolled compositional structure. Muñiz pursues the “gray area”, a multidimensional space that is both symbolic and psychological and deconstructs conditioning dualities such as black/white, outsider/insider, and right/wrong. The artist states: “The gray area is a non-judgmental, non-linear space where we allow ourselves to interact with our environment, breaking free of duality and of conditioned responses.”

Ricardo Rendón’s work is informed by his interest in traditional trades and materials, which are for the artist places of “creative learning”. He states: “My work is presented as a system of questioning of the creative practice, of the execution, productive realization and notion of work.” His mediums range from industrial materials, to sand paper, felt and leather; and his techniques from perforating, cutting, nailing, grinding, sanding, gluing, to welding. For Multifarious Abstraction, the artist exhibits work from the two series: Work Area and Lighting Circuits, with materials such as copper and industrial felt. He transforms a plumber’s purposeful and precise procedure for joining copper tubes into the method for creating free standing sculptures which reflect both on traditional knowledge and on contemporary art’s expansive possibilities.

Mariángeles Soto-Díaz uses the language of abstraction as a way to materialize and connect ideas. Her work explores critically the legacies of modernism, echoing the particular modern historical traditions of Venezuela in dialogue with modernity and abstraction in contemporary culture. For this exhibition she will be showing the site-specific installation The Pink Elephant in the Room, to insert into the White Cube the discussion of gender and racial inequality in the art world. As the artist explains: “The Pink Elephant in the Room addresses the ‘invisibility’ of these issues through indulging in the color pink as a feminist statement while also re-signifying upon the language of abstract painting.”

Rubén Ortiz-Torres is a multidisciplinary artist who goes back to the late 1980s. His work, whether it be photographs, paintings, movies or sculptures, is informed by a hybrid and original combination of popular and mass culture. One of the key references in his work is the low rider and car industry cultures. In his recent work, he experiments with the auto industry’s most recent advances in car paint. For example, his piece Womb Envy (2014), is made with urethane and thermochromic paint and high-density foam. This orange piece in the shape of a pregnant tummy, when touched with your fingers, becomes marked temporarily in yellow on the work’s surface. His black Mexican and American flags made with urethane and chromo-luminescent paint, exhibited in the show, refer on the one hand to modern issues of anarchist ideology, and on the other, to how these national symbols, especially in the context of recent events in Mexico and the USA (The Baltimore riots), may allow the political minority standpoints in contemporary society to be embodied.

Cecilia Fajardo-Hill is a British/Venezuelan art historian and curator. Fajardo-Hill specializes in modern and contemporary art with a focus in Latin American art. She has a PhD in Art History from the University of Essex, England, and an MA in 20th Century Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, England. From 2005- 2008, Fajardo-Hill served as Director and Chief Curator for CIFO and the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection, and from 2009-2012 served as Chief Curator at the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) in Long Beach, CA. Presently, Fajardo-Hill is guest curator at the Hammer Museum, the Chief Curator of the Sayago & Pardon Collection and Abstraction in Action, and a visiting scholar at the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. She is currently based in Los Angeles, CA.

• Happenings

Artist: Cipriano Martínez

Failed Geometry
February 15 – May, 2015
Viloria Blanco Gallery
Miami, FL, USA

Solo exhibition by Cipriano Martínez.

• Happenings

My latest body of work is the result of an unrelenting research of materials and supplies. In an almost casual and brief gesture, I transform myriad of objects, gathered from everyday life, and compile them into different arrangements and situations. I attempt to give order by measuring my time, my work and my possibilities with certain materials and objects – obsessive repetition allows me to develop unique and personal systems. The work reveals in itself the process of its making, its failure or triumph.

I face every work with curiosity and try to understand how I can intervene the least to achieve the most. I look for an inner logic to my process that might lead the viewer to apparent conclusions.

I like to think of my work as an organized world that welcomes chaos and embraces the power of simplicity.

En los últimos ańos mi trabajo se enfoca en una continua investigación de materiales. En un gesto casi casual, transformo una infinidad de objetos, recolectados de la vida cotidiana y los compilo en diferentes arreglos y situaciones. Intento crear orden por medio de sistemas que me permiten medir mi tiempo, mi trabajo y mis posibilidades con ciertos materiales y objetos. La repetición obsesiva me permite crear sistemas únicos y personales. El trabajo revela en sí mismo el proceso de su elaboración , su fracaso o triunfo.

Me enfrento a cada trabajo con curiosidad y trato de entender cómo puedo hacer mínimas alteraciones para obtener máximos resultados, como puedo crear una lógica interna que pueda conducir al espectador a aparentes conclusiones.

Me gusta pensar en mi trabajo como un mundo organizado que acoge el caos y celebra el poder de la simplicidad.

Selected Biographical Information

Education / Training

• 2001-2007: MFA, Academy of Fine Arts, Prague, Czech Republic.

Prizes / Fellowships

• 2015-2016: Keyholder Residency Program, Lower East Side Printshop, New York, United States.
• 2000-2007: Scholarships – Master’s Study Program, Embassy of the Czech Republic, Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Montevideo, Uruguay.
• 2008: Chateau, Centre for Contemporary Art FUTURA, Czech Republic.
• 2004: Informal Architecture Workshop/Marjetica Potrc, Salzburg International Summer Academy, Hallein, Austria.

Solo Exhibitions

• 2014: “Measuring in Spears“, Berloni Gallery, London, England.
• 2014: “Rak on Tur”, Brno House Of Arts, G99, Brno, Czech Republic.
• 2013: “Uno“, Subte-Centro Municipal de Exposiciones, Montevideo, Uruguay.
• 2011: “Tres/Three/Tri”, Galerie Ferdinanda Baumanna, Prague, Czech Republic.
• 2010: “Things named after numbers”, Ps122, New York, USA.
• 2010: “Dos”, Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo, Montevideo, Uruguay.
• 2008: “Part-time artist”, AM180, Prague, Czech Republic.
• 2006: “Some girls wander by mistake”, Galerie Mladych, Brno, Czech Republic.
• 2004: “Thanks for coming”, Galerie im Alcatraz, Hallein, Austria.
• 2004: “Jelenovi pivo nelej (Czech palindrome)”, Foundation for Contemporary Art, Gallery Jeleni, Prague, Czech Republic.
• 2003: “The things made by people”, Foundation for Contemporary Art, Gallery Jeleni, Prague, Czech Republic.

Group Exhibitions

• 2014: “Tunnel and Lighthouses“, Wallspace Gallery, New York , USA.
• 2014: “Hin Mah Too Yah Lat Kekt”, Gallery AMU, Prague, Czech Republic.
• 2013: “5X5 Castelló 2013, Premi Internacional d’art Contemporani, Espai d’art Contemporani“, Espai d’art Contemporani,  Castelló, Spain.
• 2013: “Global Locals”, Gallery NTK, Prague, Czech Republic.
• 2012: “Vistas”, University of Maryland, Maryland, USA.
• 2011: “Prague Biennale 5”, Prague Biennale 5, Prague, Czech Republic.
• 2010: Circulo de Bellas Artes, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain.
• 2009: “Melting the Pot”, Czech Cultural Center, New York , USA.
• 2009: “Pocket Utopia, Two-week residency program “, Pocket Utopia, Brooklyn, USA.
• 2008: “Move on”, Futura Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague, Czech Republic.
• 2008: “When I was a little boy, I used to play with  girls”, Galerie U Bílého jednorožce, Klatovy, Czech Republic.
• 2008: “Contemporary Czech Cubism”, Old town City Hall Gallery, Prague, Czech Republic.

Publications

• Silvina Arismendi, Planked Boutique (Paris: Onestar Press).
• Berloni Gallery, Measuring in Spears (Berloni).
• Jiri Ptacek, “For The Perfect Stranger: Home Inside Out“, Fotograf Magazine, 2012.
• “The Things Made by People”, Fotograf Magazine, 2008.
• Karel Cisar, “Silvina Arismendi”, Labyrint Magazine, 2008.
• Jiri Ptacek, “Silvina Arismendi”, Umelec Magazine, 2004/2.

Collections

• Collection of Estee Lauder Companies Inc., New York, USA.

• Artists

Artist: Pablo Rasgado

Ellipsis
May 9 – June 6, 2015
Steve Turner Contemporary
Los Angeles, CA, USA

The show features five bodies of work from the last seven years. Rasgado’s works deal with such natural phenomena as gravity, light and energy along with their attendant results—time and ephemerality. He uses a variety of familiar materials—drywall, glass, tape, florescent bulbs, dirt, spiderwebs—to focus on that which is just beyond ordinary perception. In a sense, each work is a clock, recording decay and change over time. Deceptively simple, the works constitute a compendium of phenomena just beyond the grasp of material experience.

Pablo Rasgado (b. Zapopan, Jalisco, Mexico, 1984) has had solo exhibitions at Steve Turner, Los Angeles (2011, 2012 & 2014); Arratia Beer, Berlin (2012 & 2014); OMR, Mexico City (2013); and Museo Experimental El Eco, Mexico City (2011). He has also had work in group exhibitions at CAM Raleigh (2014); The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2013); Ex Magazzini di San Cassian, Art Collateral Events, 55th Venice Biennale (2013); Herzlya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel (2013); Museo Carrillo Gil, Mexico City (2012); and Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City (2010). His work is owned by public collections including Wattis Foundation, San Francisco; Perez Art Museum, Miami; Jumex Collection, Mexico City; and The Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He lives and works in Mexico City.

• Happenings

Artist: Richard Garet

META-residue: input, material, space
May 8-31, 2015
Studio 10
Brooklyn NY, USA

The title of the exhibition “Meta-residue: input, material, space” deals with the perception of time, its affects and reception of materiality and space, mediated through the idea of meta-residue identifying the essence of what once was but is no longer tangible. This phenomenon is all around us. Not only as content and evidence of life but also as the mechanics that filter into aesthetics through constructs that are created in response to the felt world.

Image: treating pictures like wire 2, 2015, mixed media, 12″ X 18″.

• Happenings

Artist: Ivelisse Jimenez

Else-weres
April 9 – May 31, 2015
Diana Lowenstein Gallery
Miami, FL, USA

Solo show by artist Ivelisse Jimenez.

Image: Blind Enough #4, 2010, Mixed media on canvas, 54 x 48 in. (137.16 x 121.92 cm)

• Happenings

Artists: Miguel Andrade Valdez, Julieta Aranda, Kader Attia, Elena Bajo, Otto Berchem, Monika Bravo, Fernando Bryce, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Heman Chong, Elena Damiani, Marlon de Azambuja, Milagros de la Torre, Aleksandar Duravcevic, Nicole Franchy, Richard Garet, Kendell Geers, Pedro Gomez-Egaña, Radamés Juni Figueroa, Lucia Koch, Annette Lemieux, Jose Carlos Martinat, Jo Ractliffe, Rivka Rinn, Santiago Roose, Susan Siegel, DM Simons, Antonio Vega Macotela, Sergio Vega, and Zoé T. Vizcaíno.

THEOREM. You Simply Destroy the Image. I Always Had of Myself
Curated by Octavio Zaya
May 3 – August 1, 2015
Mana Contemporary
Miami, FL, USA

Several artists from far-flung locations such as Peru, Brazil, and Norway, are traveling to Mana to create their installations on-site. The artists address the hypothetical question ‘what if?’ – as inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1968 film Teorema – contemplating a world turned upside-down, where social tensions can be amplified to the point of poetic subversion, achieving possible transcendence.

Image: Miguel Andrade Valdez, Encofrado Construção III, 2015.

• Happenings

Artist: G.T. Pellizzi

Before Completion
January 10 – February 14, 2015
Harmony Murphy Gallery
Los Angeles, CA, USA

The works in this exhibition are inspired by Hexagram 64 of the I Ching (Book of Changes), colloquially referred to as Before Completion. This section of the ancient augury Chinese text addresses the moment of clarity and illumination in the creative process that exists after a work is resolved, but before it is finished.

This exhibition will feature site specific wall drawings, sculptures, as well as interior and exterior light pieces. These works utilize the materials and vocabulary of buildings-in progress and construction sites, such as snap lines, plaster, plywood, etc., as metaphorical representations of the construction of any work of art. Referencing Flaubert, who famously said: “Books are not made like children but like pyramids.

G.T. Pellizzi was born in 1978 in Tlayacapan, Mexico. He studied philosophy at St. Johns College and graduated from The Channin School of Architecture at the Cooper Union. From 2001-2011, Pellizzi co-founded and has been involved in various art collectives, including The Bruce High Quality Foundation, with whom he has exhibited at the Whitney Museum of Art, PS1 MoMA, Centre Pompidou, PAC Murcia, and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and various art galleries in New York, Zurich, Berlin and London. In the past year he has participated in exhibitions at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, the Museo del Barrio in New York, the Biennial of the Americas in Denver, and at L&M. Gallery in Los Angeles. Pellizzi lives between New York and Mexico.

• Happenings

Artists: Basma Alsharif, Jordi Colomer, Patricia Esquivias, Emiliano Rocha Minter, Barbara T. Smith, Sergio De La Torre, and Clarissa Tossin.

In Search of an Exit
April 7 – May 3, 2105
Curated by the MA class of 2015: Lucia Fabio, Samantha Greggs, Daniela Lieja, Selene Preciado, Heber Rodriguez
Heritage Square Museum
Los Angeles, CA, USA

The works in the exhibition present situations where individuals or groups of people find themselves in a space and have to negotiate their existence within pre-established and external conditions. Inspired by Jean Paul Sartre’s 1944 play No Exit, the exhibition considers themes of time, existence, freedom, and collectivity through time-based work. The structure of a given environment is a pervasive yet ever-evolving stimulus of human behavior capable of catalyzing a spectrum of reactions, from cultural resistance to immersion. The works in this exhibition, a selection of video installations, sound works, and performances, address the adaptability of the human condition in response to external circumstances.

The exhibition will take place at the Heritage Square Museum—a living history museum featuring nineteenth-century buildings from Southern California—a choice of location that highlights the human impulse to preserve artifacts. As the characters in No Exit questioned the peculiarity of their surroundings (a Second Empire-style parlor room), the twenty-first-century artworks stimulate a similar assessment of the three Victorian-era houses into which they are placed. The unique setting additionally highlights the prevalence of the built environment and the effects of architecture as preoccupations for many of the artists in the exhibition.

• Happenings

Artists: Jane Benson, Alberto Borea, Ángel Delgado, Javier Téllez, Lan Tuazon, Jorge Wellesley.

Mobility and Its Discontents
March 6 – May 30, 2015
The 8th Floor
NY, NY, USA

The exhibition examines the dynamics of mobility and its physical, psychological, socio-economic, geographic, and political boundaries. Mobility and Its Discontents signals a shift in the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation’s mission, now focused on broadening public access to artistic and cultural activities in New York City. Featuring artists from Venezuela, Peru, the United Kingdom, and the Philippines, alongside two Cuban artists from the Shelley and Donald Rubin Private Collection, the show brings the Rubins’ dedication to contemporary Cuban art into conversation with a wider artistic community, reflecting the diversity of New York’s cultural life. The works in the exhibition convey experiences of separation, isolation, and distance, experienced on both a local and global scale, in sites such as the United States-Mexico border, New York City’s financial district, and Havana, Cuba. Collectively, they contribute to a dialogue about the barriers encountered in contemporary life, suggesting possibilities for transformation enabled by connectivity and increased access.

Image: Alberto Borea, “Wall Street”, 2013

• Happenings

Artist: Luis Roldán

Eidola
April 2 – May 16, 2015
Henrique Faria Fine Arts
NY, USA

A skull can be read as a ruin signifying the vanity of human existence, the inevitable transitory splendor of human life. Ruins are crumbles of our material world, abandoned fragments, hollowed out of the divine spirit that once animated them.

Images give us hope, that particular hope of accessing the world without limits. Images create a special bond with death, as if the birth of the image could both suppress and sustain life. Or even be exchanged for a life. The human skull, this faceless death mask, this skeletal residue with its empty stare that once animated a human face, is an image, an emblem, an allegorical representation of a history, a montage out of which is read, like a picture puzzle, the nature of human existence, its spirit. Yet it is also the figure of its greatest natural decay, the transformation of the body into corpse, and then, into dust.

But what is really remarkable of the skull as image is the effect it has on recognition. It looks like a figure with something missing; it is at once a body and its ghostly double. It is a cadaver, just as the French theorist Maurice Blanchot notes: “He is, I see this, perfectly like himself: he resembles himself. The cadaver is its own image”.

But all that isn’t so odd after all. Body and image are to resemble each other the same way a shape resembles its mold, emptiness resembles what surrounds it, or an observation or a thought translates into a painting or a sculpture.

Luis Roldán’s ever mutable urge to rescue ruinous objects from their fate by imposing upon them new destinies is, in truth, the task of all artists: that of embodying one’s observations. In the poem “Eidolon”, Walt Whitman suggests that the drive of human creativity is that of issuing eidola. In ancient Greek literature, an eidolon (plural: eidola) was an image, a double, a phantom, a ghostly apparition, a spirit-image of a living or dead person. For the Romans, the same type of spectrum was known as simulacra.

The gathered objects in Roldán’s new piece, Eidola, used to be hat molds. They were the volumes that shaped hollow felts into hats. They stood in the place of the head, like soulless wood brains —as the one Pinocchio must have had— constantly searching for another fragment to attach itself to, in pursuit of completeness.

Eidola is a legion of sculptures searching for idols and a band of paintings searching for corporeality. In other words, it’s an arrangement of elements that emphasize what is left of them, or, rather, what is missing. The sculptures and paintings organized in the exhibition space are fragments that invite us to continue completing, enlarging, augmenting, researching the myriad hypotheses that might justify their existence. But mostly, their purpose is to provoke our imagination, to make us creators of stories and narratives by suggesting an interplay between observation and materialization, surface and volume, void and being, possessions and desires.

Split surfaces, pieces in halves and fragments, invoke a certain fear that appears when we stand in front of an open body. It might be the fear not only of having to acknowledge the fragility of life, its brevity, but also the fear of probing and questioning the indivisibility of the human body. In Eidola, surfaces stop being the intangible frontier between interior and exterior. Roldán exposes the colorful fleshiness of the parts, and renders, as a visible residue, the delimitation among individuals.  These objects are fragments, as we are also fragments, constantly searching for an other who, even if not exact, will complement us, shape us, and make us whole.

Again, it is not about the independence of parts, but how they come together. Striping down the surfaces, opening a gap, creating a tension between paintings and sculptures, doesn’t come from a preoccupation with dissection that seeks to rescue some essence. On the contrary—and this is just an intuition—Roldán grants some sheen to these objects, covering their surfaces with brightness and color, creating new bonds and points of contact that will, in return, renew our gaze over mundane things.

Eidola is a response to constraints and a seizing of opportunities. Despite the use of found objects, Roldán’s representation of the external world becomes a much more complex thing. He shakes objects loose from their attachments and bestows new meanings upon them. Meanings that point toward absolute acts of poetic intuition, producing a text written with our own words, yet one which appears suddenly from a place beyond language.

For despite these attempts of interpretation, Eidola will remain a mystery, a resilient friction. These artworks will resist analysis and interpretation; they will not offer relief or closure. We will not be able to dismantle the mystery, at least not until we cash-in on their stubborn materiality. We cannot tear the mystery into pieces. Art invites and resists interpretation. This is what constitutes art and this is how it reveals the extent of our world yet to be encountered.

In fact, there is nothing to comprehend. The pleasure that derives from these objects comes not only from the beauty with which they have been invested, but also from their essential quality of being present, surrounding us, staying with us, completing us. Here is a traffic and an economy of properties: the object hides its essence, the essence hides in the attributes, but the attributes render visible the object in a grammar of intuition and anticipation, and above all, in a grammar of the encounter.

Perhaps, in a broader sense, we all depend on the images and thoughts that others have produced, what others have encountered for us. We have no easy way of distinguishing a genuine thought from those that have been borrowed or suggested by others. However, it is our good fortune to be able to enjoy them once we encounter them. As it is our fortune to continue imagining alternative realities, meanings.  Indeed, this is what a fragment calls for: to continue its creation, to invent its match, its double, to complete it.

Democritus did say that our attitudes and emotions give off eidola, but that they are too thin for us to detect them, except when we are asleep, as they enter our dreams.

Mariangela Méndez

Luis Roldán (Cali, Colombia, 1955) studied Art History at the École du Louvre (Paris), engraving at S.W. Hayter (Paris) and Architecture at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Bogotá, Colombia). He has exhibited extensively at institutions internationally. A selection of solo shows include: Expiación, Fundación Gilberto Alzate Avendaño, Bogotá (2014); Presión y flujo, Galería Casas Reigner, Bogotá (2014); Mechanical Ventilation. Interactions with Willys de Castro and Other Voices, Henrique Faria, New York (2013 and 2011); Transparencias, Museum of Modern Art, Medellín (2011); Continua, Sicardi Gallery, Houston (2007); Acerca de las estructuras, Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, San José, Costa Rica (2006) and Permutantes, Sala Mendoza, Caracas (2005). Selected group shows include: the First Biennial of Cartagena, 2014; the Tenth Monterrey Biennial, 2012; the 53^rd Venice Biennale, Latin America Pavilion, 2009; and Dibujos, Museum of Modern Art, Buenos Aires (2004). He has won numerous awards such as the Luis Caballero Award (Bogotá, 2001) and the National Award in Visual Arts (Colombia, 1996). His work is included in important collections such as Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Museo del Barrio and Deutsche Bank Collection, New York; FEMSA Collection, Monterrey; Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami and the Museums of Modern Art in Buenos Aires, Bogotá and Medellín. He lives and works both in New York City and Bogotá.

Image: Eidola (detail), 2015, Oil on wood, Dimensions variable.

• Happenings

Artist: Pia Camil

Frieze Projects 2015
New York, USA

Pia Camil has conceived a project that will function as a portable environment. Inspired by Hélio Oiticica’s Parangolé – a series of capes, flags and banners made to be worn as ‘habitable paintings’ – Camil’s project will consist of a series of wearable fabrics distributed freely to the fair’s visitors.

Camil’s pieces of fabric are designed to allow for various versatile uses including clothing – such as robes or ponchos – and more utilitarian functions – such as picnic blankets, table cloths and sheets. Disseminated within the context of the fair, Camil’s fabric pieces will require the direct participation of the viewers, quietly emphasizing one of the main characteristics of the experience of art fairs, where the act of looking at art is often as important as the act of looking at others and distinguishing oneself from them.

• Happenings

Artists: Milton Becerra, Esteban Blanco, Carola Bravo, Monika Bravo, Tania Candiani, Fernando Carabajal, Consuelo Castañeda, Othon Castañeda, Eduardo Costa, Juan Raúl Hoyos, Pablo León de la Barra, Gonzalo Lebrija, Alberto Lezaca, Gabriel de la Mora, Atelier Morales, Ronald Morán, Bernardo Olmos, Ernesto Oroza, Gamaliel Rodríguez, Rafiño, Leyden Rodríguez-Casanova, Mariasun Salgado, Sergio Vega, and Viviana Zargón.

Affective Architectures
Curated by Aluna Curatorial Collective
Closing reception March 28th, 2015
Show ran from December 6, 2014 – February 15, 2015
Aluna Art Foundation
Miami, FL, USA

Amidst the flood of banal images, what artworks created through an inter-subjective dialogue with the architecture or the spaces inhabited by artists, have the power to move us and remain in our memory? This question was the point of departure in Affective Architectures, an exhibition curated by Aluna Curatorial Collective (Adriana Herrera and Willy Castellanos), and presented with the collaboration of the Instituto Cultural de México in Miami. The opening will be on December 6 at the headquarters of Aluna Art Foundation and the show will run until February 15, 2015.

Twenty three artists from Mexico, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Spain display specular visions of the architectures that are, or were, mirrors of the failed dreams of modernism in the continent, but they also reveal the potential reserves of creativeness that often manifest themselves in the midst of chaos or necessity.

Walter Benjamin, who left the legacy of a perspective of the world around him that was as critical as it was poetic, used to say that architecture was the oldest of arts because the human need for shelter is timeless. And yet, immersed in the architectures that model our cities, we perceive them absentmindedly, without discovering to what extent they contain and alter the acts of our existence.

For Benjamin, criticism was a matter of “the right distance”. The works exhibited reflect an affective gaze on the cities inhabited on the border between the public and the private: they are re­counts of the steps that have been walked, testimonies of having got lost, but also of groping for a way out. Many images, going against the wish to “do” or build characteristic of modernism, reveal the wish to “undo” or “deconstruct”, and track the past and the present of large cities, posing questions about what may be possible.

Paraphrasing what Gerhard Ritcher termed “the question of position”, each of the participating artists approaches inhabited architectures based on a constant negotiation between closeness and distance. They observe, without indifference —from the closeness of affectivity, but also from the distant perspective of memory—, architectures that contain ‘life deposits’, stored memories of life experiences in spaces, which often fuse with social histories everywhere in the world.

Affective Architectures functions as a mirror reflecting our biographies within the failure of the grand narratives in Latin American and Caribbean cities, but also as a window into alternative passages: strategies of the imagination that may allow us to reinvent our ways of inhabiting the world.

About the Instituto Cultural de México en Miami (Mexican Cultural Institute in Miami): The Instituto Cultural de México in Miami (ICMM) projects the wealth and diversity of the millenary culture of that country in Southern Florida. In addition to fostering the acquisition of knowledge on Mexico’s history, literature, cinematography and dramatic arts, it assigns special relevance to the new artistic trends and generations that are successfully developing in Mexico and that, due to their acknowledged quality, have achieved a solid projection at the national and international level.

• Happenings

Artist: Pedro Tyler

Extensa
March 24 – May 2, 2015
Sicardi Gallery
Houston, TX, USA

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 Extensa continue 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.

• Happenings

Artists: Kevin Appel, Carlos Bunga, Gianfranco Foschino, Veronika Kellndorfer, Lucia Koch.

Kaleidoscope: abstraction in architecture
March 21 – May 16, 2015
Christopher Grimes Gallery
Santa Monica, CA, USA

From its beginnings in the early 20^th century the legacy of abstraction is rooted in social and political utopias. Today, abstraction as an artistic strategy has reinvented itself for the 21^st 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.

• Happenings

Artists: Delia Cancela, Eduardo Costa, Ushio Shinohara, Keiichi Tanaami, as panelists for the talks.

International Pop
April 11–August 29, 2015
Curators: Darsie Alexander with Bartholomew Ryan
Walker Art Center
Minneapolis, MN, USA

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.

• Happenings

Artists: Amadeo Azar, Daniel Barroca, Lea Cetera, Youmna Chlala, Onyedika Chuke, Alexandra Lerman, Harold Mendez, Marcelo Moscheta, and Ronny Quevedo.

Open Sessions: Drawings in Context/Field
March 7, 2015
Queens Museum
NY, USA

Encompassing practices in video, photography, drawing and sculpture, this exhibition is focused on the notion of ‘field/context’ as a political, historical, spatial, and technological construct.

In order to analyze contexts and fields artists utilize various modes of making. The artists presented do not attempt to resolve or locate their practices within any given mode of representation. Encompassing practices in video, sound, photography, drawing, performance and sculpture the works herein negotiate with spaces both ambiguous and direct.

The participating artists in Open Sessions: Drawings in Context/Field are members of the Open Sessions program at The Drawing Center, which fosters a dynamic, ever-evolving conversation with new drawing practices and practitioners, viewing drawing as an activity rather than a product. The exhibition is organized by Onyedika Chuke, a participant in Queens Museum’s Artist Studio Program and The Drawing Center’s Open Sessions participant.

Schedule of Events:

1-4pm: Video Screenings, in the Theater on 2nd Floor

4-7pm: Opening Reception, Community Partnership Gallery

Note: There will be a free shuttlebus making loops from under the Mets/Willets Point 7 Train Stop and the Museum from 4:30-7:40pm.

• Happenings

Artist: Fabián Burgos

Stay in Space
February 12 – April 4, 2015
Alejandra von Hartz Gallery
Miami, FL, USA

The graphic representation of the visible spectrum of light, shows us a line with 4 colors fused, in order: violet, blue, yellow and red. Upon multiplying the lines and assigning each one a color on a scale greater than 140 colors, creates a more energetic relationship with the space. The paintings of “Stay in Space” are composed of a 140 (approximately) color palette. These colors change their hues and tones as they are being prepared. On, or “in” this mesh of lines, a group of straight lines and diagonals are drawn that cut the gentle flow of colors, to build more hard geometric shapes. This contrast is again involved in space, but this time, registers it mentally.

These paintings are accompanied by others decidedly more concrete in their geometry (“Blue Spiral”, “Endless blue”, “That network”), which confirms the persistence of Burgos in working space in a sensitive and symbolic way: symbolic in terms of space as an optical game of “truth and falsehood”.

To this insistent work on the preparation and search for colors, Burgos adds their distribution on the surface of the canvas. Sometimes the method used is intuitive; other times, mathematical (application of rule of three on the square root), a simple mechanism that Burgos uses as a random instrument to switch longer fragments of colors with other shorter ones.

Through this means a reading of blocks and forms is established, which calls every viewer to interpret with his own subjectivity. One can see in that weave of colors: spectral shapes, numbers, letters, or any other interpretation that one gives the works, like a misty narrative. However, the contrast of forms and the permanence in space, is what really occupies Burgos.

Finally, Burgos expresses once again his identification with and admiration for some Latin America’s mid-20th century geometric artists. He involves himself with them and establishes a dialogue as of today, with the differences and particularities that the passing of time imposes. In “Stay in Space” he pays a tribute to the Ecuadorian artist Manuel Rendón (Despues de Rendon, 2014).

Fabian Burgos was born in Argentina in 1962, where he currently lives and works. He is a self-taught artist and participated in Atelier Felipe Noe (1987-85), Atelier Ahuva Szlimowicz (1988-1987) and Fundacion Antorchas Scolarship organized by Guillermo Kuitca (1993-91), all them in Buenos Aires. Selected Solo Exhibitions include: Instante Eterno. Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Buenos Aires (MACBA), 2014; Comiéndose a Raúl, Galería Vasari, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2013; Abstracta, Galería Dabbah Torrejón, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2010, and Conferencia de Prensa, Galería Alejandra Von Hartz, Miami, USA, 2007. Selected group exhibitions are:Recovering Beauty: The 1990s in Buenos Aires. Blanton Museum of Art. Houston. Texas, 2011; Art First, Colección MACBA Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Buenos Aires, Fundación Pablo Atchugarry, Manantiales, Punta del Este, Uruguay, 2011; 4 Museos + 40 Obras. Muestra Itinerante de Colección MACBA; Arte en el Plata, Intervención artística sobre la fachada del Edificio del Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina curated by Inés Katztenstein and Eva Grinstein, 2009; Geometrías dislocadas, Burgos, Door, Siquier, Sala Mendoza, Caracas, Venezuela, 2009; All Boys, en el Rosa x 6, Rosa Galisteo Museum, Santa Fe, Argentina, 2009; Escuelismo. Arte argentino de los 90, MALBA Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2009; Pintura Latinoamericana Contemporánea (in Guayaquil Coleccions), MAAC Museo Antropológico y de Arte Contemporáneo, Guayaquil, Ecuador, 2008.

He is currently developing large commissioned murals for the SLS Hotel and Brickell Heights project to be completed in Miami in 2015.

• Happenings

Artists: Audra Wolowiec, Brenna Murphy, Chris Woebken & Sascha Pohflepp, Ellie Irons, Erin Sexton, Genevieve Hoffman, Jess Rowland & Margaret Schedel & Kevin Yager, Melissa F. Clarke & Sue Ngo, Nanu Al-Hamad & Miriam Simun, Natalie Jeremijenko & xDesign Team, Phillip Stearns, Richard Garet and Trish Mackenzie.

Systematic Sampling
January 8 – 22, 2015
Stream Gallery
Brooklyn, NY, USA

Systematic Sampling examines how artists contend with emerging ecologies in a series of art works and performances situated on the continuum between “technology” and “nature,” often exploring this inextricable link. The diverse group of artists all share a proclivity for using research methods and information-parsing in their process towards meaning-making.

Some artists make use of existing scientific and technological systems in their processes, some question these systems, while others work in parallel, devising entirely new forms of ‘sampling’ to produce knowledge. What are the systems that artists are putting in place as they explore emerging ecologies? And what is the “data” that comes forth?

Systematic Sampling explores these questions with a collection of inventive art works that uncover hidden systems and emerging signs of life. A wide range of mediums are represented including sound, light, painting, video, installation and sculpture. Curated by Melissa F. Clarke and Miriam Simun.

Live performances will take place at both the opening and closing events.

Image: Brenna Murphy, “Embodied Entitiy”, 2013.

• Happenings

Artists: Matisse, Mondrian, Schiele, Pollock, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Twombly, Kippenberger, Dumas, Maggi, and many more.

Embracing Modernism: Ten Years of Drawings Acquisitions
Curated by Isabelle Dervaux
February 13 – May 24, 2015
Morgan Library & Museum 
New York, USA

In 2005, the Morgan Library & Museum embarked on a new program of drawings acquisitions with the goal of bringing to the present a collection that was known for its Old Master and nineteenth-century holdings. During the ensuing decade the institution put together a formidable collection of modern and contemporary drawings, representing a wide range of artists and movements. Embracing Modernism: Ten Years of Drawings Acquisitions, opening February 13, features more than eighty works from the collection and explores the dynamic creativity that revolutionized the medium in our time. The exhibition runs through May 24.

Embracing Modernism includes work by artists from Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, and Egon Schiele, to Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Susan Rothenberg, Martin Kippenberger, and Marlene Dumas. The exhibition is divided into five sections. Each focuses on a particular departure or shift in emphasis in modern drawing—such as the approach to the use of the line—that sets it apart from its antecedents. The exhibition is organized by Isabelle Dervaux, Acquavella Curator of Modern and Contemporary Drawings at the Morgan, who has led the museum in this area since 2005.

“The Morgan’s decision to collect modern and contemporary drawings underscores its belief that artists of our day are part of a long continuum that celebrates the primacy of the medium,” said Peggy Fogelman, Acting Director of the Morgan Library & Museum. “Embracing Modernism presents an extraordinary collection of works by some of our greatest artists. The Morgan is deeply grateful to the collectors and donors who helped build our collection over the last decade and make possible an exhibition such as this.”

Exhibition Sections

The Autonomy of the Line

An essential component of drawing from its origins, line took on a new role in the twentieth century as artists eschewed naturalistic representation. Liberated from its descriptive function— as the outline of an object or a figure—line achieved greater autonomy. Drawing became, in Paul Klee’s words, “an active line which moves freely; a walk for a walk’s sake, without aim.” The sheets by Matisse, Mondrian, Pablo Picasso, and Saul Steinberg in this section show them investigating the expressivity of the line, whether continuous or broken. During the 1960s and 1970s, artists such as Sol LeWitt and Agnes Martin eliminated any remaining illusionistic function of a line on a ground with the adoption of the grid format, in which the line is a basic modular unit.

More recently, contemporary artists have used the line to visualize aspects of man’s relationship to the world in dense, labor-intensive drawings. Examples include Giuseppe Penone’s extension of a fingerprint into growth rings of an ancient tree, or Marco Maggi’s nod to the electronic age with an intricate network of nearly invisible incisions.

Gesture and Trace

Drawing as a gesture—the record of physical engagement—is central to twentieth-century expressionist tendencies. It reflects a conception of art as a direct, spontaneous experience as seen in the work of Cy Twombly, Michael Goldberg, and Joan Mitchell. But the gesture can also be more automatic, calling into question the traditional notion of the hand of the artist. The Surrealist Max Ernst was the first to explore the technique of frottage (rubbing) to create unexpected patterns intended to stimulate the viewer’s imagination. During the 1960s, the technique was revived in process drawing—drawing as the trace of an action independent from usual artistic practice—as in Robert Overby’s rubbing of his studio wall.

Contemporary artists’ fascination with the use of chance has led them to rely more and more on unconventional modes of drawing. Gavin Turk, for instance, produced his elegant Rosette by placing a sheet of paper in front of the exhaust pipe of his van before starting the engine.

High and Low

In the modern era, the interplay between art and popular culture considerably broadened the range of drawing styles available to artists. Inspired by commercial illustrations, comic books, graffiti, tattoos, and posters, artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Ed Paschke, Red Grooms, and Martin Kippenberger gave their drawings a new kind of energy At the same time their work questioned the very nature of what constitutes “artistic” drawing as opposed to any other form of mark making.

The use of non-traditional art material was another way to bridge the gap between art and everyday life. Following the lead of the Cubists, who first introduced fragments of newspapers and labels in their papiers collés, Kurt Schwitters created collages from scraps of contemporary urban culture: ads, ticket stubs, candy wrappers, torn packaging. The practice has remained a vital form of expression to the present day as can be seen in the collage books of John Evans and the poignant compositions of Hannelore Baron.

Everyday Objects

Although the depiction of everyday objects has a long tradition in the genre of the still-life, the range of items deemed worthy of the artist’s attention has expanded in modern times, as attested by the cigarette-butt, ice cube, soup can, and portable electric heater in the drawings on view in this section by artists including Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist. Artists also explored new modes of representation, notably in compositions that favor odd cropping and extreme close-up, largely influenced by photography and film.

From Melancholia to Schizophrenia

Nowhere is the disruption of the academic tradition in modern art more visible than in portrait and figure drawings. Liberated by photography from the necessity to produce a likeness, and stimulated by psychoanalytic revelations about the complex inner life of individuals, artists set out to render emotions and mental states with unprecedented immediacy. Various formal means— fragmentation, distortion, exaggeration, awkward poses and cropping—were used to convey sensations and feelings, from the psychological tension of Walter Sickert’s bedroom scene to Anne-Marie Schneider’s vision of a schizophrenic bus passenger who imagines himself in the luggage rack.

Self-portraits offer particularly rich territory as artists used drawing to probe their most intimate psychological states and lay bare on paper their fears and anxiety. Examples in this section include work by Egon Schiele, Lucas Samaras, Philip Guston, and Maria Lassnig. Others, such as André Masson, Jackson Pollock, and Steve di Benedetto, relied on a range of visual metaphors—including the labyrinth and other intricate patterns—to conjure the workings of the unconscious.

Image: Marco Maggi, Too Close too Far, V, (Detail) 2001, Pencil on clay 36 x 24 inches.

• Happenings

Artist: Clarissa Tossin

Streamlined: Belterra, Amazônia / Alberta, Michigan
January 16 – April 26, 2015
MOLAA Project Room
Long Beach, CA, USA

In a video installation, Clarissa Tossin brings together two Ford Motor Company towns: Belterra, a rubber plantation village in the Brazilian Amazon Forest, and Alberta, a sawmill town in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Built concurrently in 1935, each town provided, respectively, rubber and wood for the manufacturing of the Model T in the United States. The installation establishes a sense of place, highlighting how specific cultural characteristics inhabited and changed these equivalent, pre-planned towns.

• Happenings

Artists: Ana Bidart, Jonathan Callan, Beth Campbell, Martí Cormand, Elena Del Rivero, Marco Maggi, Stefana McClure, Lauren Seiden, Sérgio Sister, John Sparagana, and Julianne Swartz.

The Suspended Line
January 10 – February 14, 2015
Josée Bienvenu Gallery
New York, NY, USA

The Suspended Line includes a series of intense tensions and ethereal suspensions: thoughts suspended in submerged books, knitted music sheets, perforated porcelain towels and socks, gold leaf constellations, fatigued newsprint, disjointed bricks: the works in the exhibition challenge the division between two and three dimensions and Newton’s law of universal gravitation.

Ana Bidart’s work is concerned with the possibilities and impossibilities of drawing, in space and across time. She explores nomadic and hyperactive art forms by bringing to life found objects: the formally exquisite yet intrinsically disposable or the materially precious but casually discarded. With Disappointment she reconstitutes meaning in potential interactions between two found objects. Born in Montevideo in 1985, she lives and works in Mexico DF.

Jonathan Callan explores the relationship of disembodied knowledge to embodied experience.  The books that form the footprint of Range are forever held in sedimentary layers that will never be opened. Knowledge is often thought to precipitate down through history and accumulate as the sum of many human additions, but here the plaster, like snow, sprinkles down in mountain peaks denying access to the books under the weight that covers them. Born in Manchester in 1961, he lives and works in London.

Beth Campbell creates works that challenge the notion of a physical world beyond our perception. Drawing upon philosophy, phenomenology and psychology, Campbell choreographs space, crafts uncanny objects, and maps thought. In Campbell’s installations and recent sculpture, what appears at first glance to be a facsimile of the everyday will reveal startling complexity: forms repeat and stutter, interiority is externalized and the familiar becomes strange. Born in 1971 in Illinois, she lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Martí Cormand’s work is a testimony to the degradation of certainty. For the past two years, he has been investigating the notion of conviction by observing and rendering iconic works of the conceptual art movement  “When no one has too many certitudes any more, processes become essential. I have nothing urgent to communicate, no absolute convictions. I investigate the certainties that others had in the 1960s and 1970s. My favorite subject is the study of conviction” (Martí Cormand).  Born in Spain in 1970, he lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Elena del Rivero’s works are rooted in estrangement and recollection. Work and daily routine often intermingle in her oeuvre to become one. In most of del Rivero’s work, delicacy and a sense of loving attention coexist with a feeling of neglect and abandonment. In Wound, a hint to Fontana’s Concetto Spaziale, the punctured 24k gold leafed paper surface, bears the tool of its making with a needle and a thread, left over hanging in the center of the work. Born in Valencia, Spain in 1948, she has been living in New York for the last 30 years.

Marco Maggi’s drawings and sculptures 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. Marco Maggi divides the act of drawing.  Born in Montevideo in 1957, he lives and works in New York and will represent Uruguay at The 56th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia this year.

Distillation of time and obliteration of information characterize Stefana McClure’s drawings and sculptures. All of her work involves translation, transposition and reconstruction as music is changed into text, and text is turned into image. The Planets (op. 32), is a spectacular symphonic suite scored for large orchestral forces and a wordless chorus, written by Gustav Holst between 1914 and 1916. The 192 page score has been sliced and rejoined as continuous lengths of paper yarn and each of the seven movements have been knitted back together again. McClure unveils and reveals the visual fabric of The Planets (op. 32): drawings to a symphonic suite by Gustav Holst as she translates and transposes the synesthetic structure that connects music and image. Born in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, she lives and works in New York.

Lauren Seiden’s work explores the essential elements of process and materiality through an intuitive and intimate layering of graphite, breaking down the surface and transforming the paper into a physical, textural and structural form, further expanding upon the notion of drawing as painting and painting as sculpture.  The act of folding strengthens the structure while weakening the surface allowing for necessary manipulation of the material in order to maintain stability. These dualities of strength and fragility are encapsulated within a process that, like the work itself, strikes a balance between the internal and external. Born in 1981, she lives and works in New York.

Sergío Sister’s work stands at the edge between painting and sculpture. The Ripas, ladrillos, pontaletes appropriate the names of the manufactured products from which they are derived. Sergío Sister’s work relates to the US tradition of minimalism and to the Neo-Concrete movement of the 1960’s in Brazil. Many bridges can be drawn between Sister’s attempts to incorporate three-dimensional space and Mira Schendel’s Sarrafos or Willys de Castro’s Objectos Activos. Made of wooden beams dressed in canvas, Sisters ladrillos investigate surface and depth through subtle color dislocations. Born in São Paulo in 1948, he lives and works in São Paulo.

For more than a decade, John Sparagana has been working with found magazine images as his primary material.  His work has developed into a full-fledged investigation into the way information is presented and disseminated visually within contemporary culture. Born in 1958 in Rochester, New York, he lives and works in Houston and Chicago.

With lightness and gravity, Julianne Swartz places equal importance upon negative space, ambient sound, interruptions of sculptural line, and the interface between outside and inside. Her work encourages a quizzical reconsideration of our relationship to our body, to each other and to our surroundings. Lean, a steel rod defies reason as it leans towards a wall but doesn’t touch it, pushing the limits of physical gravity very literally, while exploring gravity metaphorically, in reference to the limitations, fragility and endurance of the body, and the weight of human relationships. Born in Phoenix, AZ in 1967, she lives and works in Kingston, New York.

Image: Elena Del Rivero, Wound, 2014, 24k gold leaf on punctured abaca paper, needle, thread, 11.75 x 11.75 inches

• Happenings

Artists: Nathan Green, Laura Vandenburgh, Pablo Rasgado.

Constructs
January 17–March 1, 2015
Curated by Rachel Adams
Disjecta Contemporary Art Center
Portland, OR, USA

Constructs introduces a collection of works that address the interactions between scale, architecture and the body. Each artist will create new site-specific pieces, ranging from the calculated and Op-Art inspired abstraction of Nathan Green, to the cascading cut-out paintings of Laura Vandenburgh, to the calculated wall excavations of Pablo Rasgado.

Nathan Green (b. 1980) lives and works in Dallas. He received his BFA in 2004 from the University of Texas at Austin.

Pablo Rasgado (b. 1984) lives and works in Mexico City. He holds a BFA from the Autonomous University of the State of Morelos, Mexico.

Laura Vandenburgh (b. 1962) lives and works in Eugene. She holds an MFA from Hunter College, New York, and a DVM and BS in Zoology from the University of California, Davis.

• Happenings

Nadie sabe para quien trabaja
November 19 – December 16, 2014
M. Edeler & Sons
Brooklyn, NY, USA

Nadie Sabe Para Quien Trabaja was created as a sculptural installation that was activated in a performance-dinner that took place on November 12th, 2014. The work on view is a large-scale two-part sculpture, the conjoined work of Courtney Smith and Iván Navarro.

• Happenings

Artist: Ricardo Alcaide

Displacement
November 20, 2014 – February 5, 2015
Alejandra von Hartz Gallery
Miami, FL, USA

Displacement: The act of displacing, or the state of being displaced; a putting out of place.

The exhibition reflects how to transcend the memory of modernism and intends to rebuild the ruins and remnants through fictional construction and new compositions with architectural references.

As a continuation of moving and relocating —displacing— objects, and based on my experiences and perceptions of how society functions and deals with industrial problems caused by modern living conditions in densely populated cities, my recent work has created different parallels through the combination of principles of modernist architecture and the precariousness that manifests itself in ordinary day to day living, while still working as a continuation of previous dialogues, from shelter for individuals to social solutions, revealing the “progress” in society as a vague and rapidly losing shape.

Living and working in Sao Paulo over the last years—and after more than a decade in London, and previously in my hometown of Caracas— is an experience that still informs my practice and has been strongly influenced by architects like Gio Ponti, Carlos Raul Villanueva and Lina Bo Bardi, for example, all of whom projected a great spirit of forward thinking and an extraordinary sense of aesthetics—something that I cannot avoid to express myself. Latin-American architecture, or even generally speaking, is not only as a reference for my work but also as a way of living, a day by day personal exchange that affects the way I think, I function, and interact with the world.

The work for this first solo show in Miami at Alejandra Von Hartz proposes a dialogue between all these areas observations -the balance between the formal aesthetics of modernism and the utopian impossibility- captured within the combination of found objects and the abstraction (out) from them, as in the Settlements installation: a construction built out of found disposed objects, next to a display of a small group of bronze sculptures of crushed cardboard boxes and other rejected material.

From a recent series ‘Intrusions’: a painted photograph is included; Land Of Order, an image of Brasilia’s iconographic -perfect modernism- interrupted by geometrical elements.

To complete the group of works, dismantled painted panels are the most recent, industrial paint on mdf board, they retain a memory of a disassembled shelving unit, from which all elements have been removed to reveal only the divided sections of the back wall. Here it’s the ‘action of deconstruction’ in the actual process that counts as the most relevant point for this work. An abstract recreation of construction that reveals the uncontrolled and imprecise condition to reflect —once again— about the failure of progress associated with modern aesthetics within my discourse, what could be perceived formally as an abstraction. Perhaps the necessity to synthetize the visual elements as an aesthetic resource in my work, is almost like “the supremacy of pure artistic feeling” expressed in Malevich’s Suprematism, but despite that, what lies behind are the anecdotes and symbolic shapes from today’s hard reality.

Ricardo Alcaide
November 2014

Ricardo Alcaide was born in Caracas in 1967. He currently lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil.   Recent exhibitions include: Settlements, Baro galeria, São Paulo; The Language Of Human Consciousness, Athr gallery, Jeddah. Saudi Arabia; Donde Hay Protesta Hay Negocio, Galería Agustina Ferreyra, San Juan de Puerto Rico (2014); Solo Project, Curated by Jose Roca. Pinta NY Art Fair, New York; Incidental Geometry, Project Room – Josee Bienvenu Gallery, New York; Visão Do Paraiso: Pensamento Selvagem, curated by Julieta Gonzalez and Pablo Leon de la Barra, Rio de Janeiro; From Disruption To Abstraction, New Art Projects Gallery, London (2013); Prototipo Vernacular, Oficina #1, Caracas, Venezuela; Optimismo Radical, Josee Bienvenu Gallery, New York (2012). His work is part of the following collections: Sayago & Pardon, Los Angeles, CA. LIMAC Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Lima, Zabludowicz Collection. London. Colección Fundación Cisneros, Caracas. Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo. Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas.

• Happenings

Artist: Mauro Giaconi

Revuelta (Revolt)
December 1, 2014- February 13, 2015
Dot Fiftyone Gallery
Miami, FL, USA

Mauro Giaconi will exhibit “REVOLT”; a series of moving sculptures based on the ephemeral site-specific mural “Volver a Girar” done at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico in May 2013. By deconstructing the mural and wall fragments detached from its walls, Giaconi launches a poetic exploration on detachment, fragility, rupture and social breakdown.

By accepting the possibility of loss, of an end, Giaconi provokes a spatial reconfiguration of the memory of a static image. Its traces are then used to evoke past events and erect upon its ruins a dreamlike environment, which by stirring the past builds a future, in order to turn again.

As part of the exhibit, he will be showing his new video LÍNEA TRANSVERSAL, (Transversal Line), in the video-room and a collection of recent drawing in the project room.

Mauro Giaconi was in born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1977, he lives and works in Mexico City. He studied Architecture in the Buenos Aires University (U.B.A.) and Fine Arts in the Prilidiano Pueyrredon National School of Fine Arts (E.N.B.A.P.P), getting in 2001 the degree of National Painting Professor. Since then, his work has developed in the sculpture field, Installation and drawings, has been the major focus in his investigation and development. During 1998 and 1999, he worked on mural painting and historic buildings restoration. In the artistic teaching field he imparted class in the Prilidiano Pueyrredon National School of Fine Arts, in Buenos Aires, Argentina in the year of 2002. At 2011 was teacher in the Autonomous University of the State of Morelos, in Cuernavaca, Mexico. He is co-founder of Obrera Centro, an non profit and independent art space in México City. He received the first Philips (Argentina) Award for young talents, Mention of the jury, and the honor mention in the National Drawing Salon, was selected for the First and the Second award ArteBA-Petrobas. He participated as scholarship holder during 2010 in the Center of Artistic Investigation (CIA , Buenos Aires),  then he attended to the artistic residences, Bémis Center for Contemporary Art (Omaha, Nebraska) and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (Skowhegan, Maine) in 2013; and in 2014 he participate in Art Omi International Residency (NY). He has exhibited in various solo shows and group shows in Buenos Aires, Mexico City New York, Boston, Miami, Marseilles and Switerzland. Including: ¨Temporada de Plomo (Lead Season) in Arroniz Gallery (Mexico City), “Partir“ (depart) in the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires), “Immense Parellel“ in Dot Fiftyone (Miami),  “Panorámica, Paisaje, 1969-2013“ (panorama, landscape, 1969-3013” in Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes (Mexico City) and “AQULLA” in Gallerie HO in Marseilles.

View video of exhibition here

• Happenings

Artists: Emilia Azcárate, Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck, Cecilia Biagini, Sigfredo Chacón, Emilio Chapela, Eduardo Costa, Willys de Castro, Diana de Solares, Marcolina Dipierro, Eugenio Espinoza, Jaime Gili, Mathias Goeritz, Juan Iribarren, Bárbara Kaplan, Ramsés Larzábal, Raúl Lozza, Beatriz Olano, César Paternosto, Alejandro Puente, Luis Roldán, Osvaldo Romberg, Joaquín Torres García, and Horacio Zabala.

Dirty Geometry
December 2 -7, 2014
Curated by Osvaldo Romberg
Mana Contemporary
Miami, FL, USA

Dirty geometry has existed throughout 20th century art although not in a manifest way; it implies a subversion of the laws of logical rigor, systemism and utopian modernism that have pervaded geometry since Kandinsky. In his milestone book Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky argues against geometry as decoration; instead, he promotes geometrical painting as a spiritual tool. The quest of the spiritual, of a balance between the mind and intellectual order constituted the fundamental idea behind geometric art. Geometrical abstraction was used in different times, as we see for instance in Kandinsky’s compositions, in the rigorous nihilism of Malevich’s “Black on Black”, and in the concrete iconography of Max Bill.

Through my concept of “Dirty Geometry,” I want to undermine the rigid, global imposition of geometry that has dominated from the beginning of the 20th century. Of course, other artists have already played with this approach more or less consciously: Rothko when he broke the grid, Frank Stella with his Cone and Pillars series from the eighties.

However I came to realize that Latin-America offers the most prominent examples of “Dirty Geometry.” First, this might be explained by the often rudimentary absorption of the center by the periphery, as peripheral access to major art trends has long been mediated by art reproductions, and perceived through local cultural prisms. This is even truer in Latin-America where most countries lacked a radical and contemporary art scene. Secondly, in Latin America one always finds forms of political and existential resistance against the values of neo-liberalism embodied by the center.

“Dirty Geometry” will question different aspects of American, Russian and European abstract art such as the imposition of polished finish on paintings, the compositions and the purity of its lines, classical applications of colors inherited from the Bauhaus, Concrete Art, etc.

In the forties for instance, the Latin-American group MADI challenged the format of the canvas, the relation between two and three dimensions, etc. In the sixties the Latin-America group of Kinetic Art in Paris challenged the static geometry produced by artists such as Vasarely and Herbin, and introduced movement, light and shadow to abstract art.

I would therefore suggest that Latin-America has proceeded to elaborate a kind of creolization of the dominant geometrical art; this is a recurrent phenomenon in other fields of Latin-American culture, and we encounter it in religion, education, food, inventions, etc.

The more figuration moves away from reality and representation, the more it needs to resort to theory in order to retain legitimacy. Geometry as we traditionally conceive it can only be legitimized by a tight, rigid theoretical framework. “Dirty Geometry” is therefore a rebellious attempt to break from all theoretical frameworks and thus invent a geometry that would be free from theory. This is a dirty war, one that we could define as “below the belt”.  George Bataille believed that “divine filth” brings about true eroticism; likewise, I would suggest that it is possible to bring about an eroticism of geometry through dirt.

• Happenings

Artist: Jaime Gili

Ornament and Barricade
November 20, 2014 – February 5, 2015
Alejandra von Hartz Gallery
Miami, FL, USA

Only after doing it three times and approaching a fourth, I realized that for exhibition titles, large projects, or even a series of paintings; I have repeated a dialectical formula that recreates links between Europe, European minds, and the coasts: South America or its local counterparts. I did it, for instance, when, for an exhibition in Winterthur, I placed Max Bill at Henri Pittier´s Park in Venezuela, and also when I completed the story of Gio Ponti on the Venezuelan coast and Reverón in the Mediterranean, for a series of paintings.

I was about to work on Carlo Scarpa, an obvious candidate as he built the Venezuelan pavilion at the Venice Biennale—which has always fascinated me— when I recognized the formula and tried to avoid it; perhaps even the pavilion commission lacks the anecdote that justifies a wider story.
And yet, Scarpa´s story and use of concrete and structural ornament keeps on fascinating me, and he has, indeed, been present in my mind when developing the current series of works. Of course, painting is slow, and the works here also contain elements from the previous series, the 2013 series which was a utopian homage to a fictional meeting of Armando Reverón and Gio Ponti. That series had some elements, like the thin stripes, that are still present in these works. Made in summer 2014, these paintings actually lie somewhere between winter 2012 and February 2014. So even if Scarpa was in the studio, also present at the party were Ponti and Reverón. And in the real world, miles away, the protests on the streets of Venezuela were starting; they unavoidably entered the mix.

Guarimba is a Venezuelan word that could be translated as “makeshift barricade to block roads by people who stay around it protesting loudly”. Guarimbas were very active in spring 2014 on the streets of Venezuela as a way of protest to block normal life against the regime. Many youth have been detained around them and then imprisoned and tortured thereafter. There are no glimpses of freedom yet and few other ways to protest.

Now imagine the doors of the studio as a barricade that only lets some things come through. But the barricade is a response to what is happening. The gates are also the work, the work is a final guarimba that decides what can and cannot enter in it. A filter that is in itself a response to what is happening. Painting is a political act, but it is also slow.

Jaime Gili
London, September 2014

Jaime Gili was born in Caracas in 1972. Studied first in Caracas, at a tropical Bauhaus that failed to change the country, never mind the world; later at the University of Barcelona, where he learned to be a painter but nobody was there to witness, and finally at the Royal College of Art in London, the city where he found his voice as an artist, paradoxically, based upon the Venezuelan modern tradition that he carried within. He has exhibited widely in Europe and the Americas and works mainly in London, but also in Barcelona and Caracas. He has created large commissions in public and private buildings integrating painting in architecture, in England, the US and Venezuela. He is currently developing his second largest one, a mural for Baltus House, a Condo in the Miami Design District, which will be ready in 2015.

• Happenings

Artist: Gabriel de la Mora

Lucíferos
October 30 – December 21, 2014
Sicardi Gallery
Houston, TX, USA

In Gabriel de la Mora’s most recent body of work, he uses fire-making as a vehicle for reconsidering geometric abstraction. Striking thousands of matches against the red phosphorus-covered paper on the sides of matchboxes, de la Mora collects the used strikers and arranges them in compositions that create repeating patterns, rectangular grids, and minimalist constructions. The resulting imagery evokes two distinct historical moments. On the one hand, the enigmatic geometries are suggestive of Minimalist paintings from the 1950s and 1960s. And, on the other, the used object, marked by the act of striking matches, insistently presents another story: that of the industrialization of fire through the invention of matches (originally called Lucifers). By pairing these two narratives, de la Mora presents a new series of questions about abstraction and vision, invention and industrialization.

Gabriel de la Mora (b. 1968, Mexico) studied architecture before completing his M.F.A. at Pratt Institute, New York.  His solo exhibition Lo que no vemos lo que nos mira, curated by Willy Kautz, is currently on view at Museo Amparo in Puebla, Mexico.  He has had solo exhibitions at NC-Arte, Bogotá, Colombia; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, Mexico; Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA), Long Beach, California, USA; and the Art Museum of the Americas, Washington, D.C., among other museums. This is his third solo exhibition at Sicardi Gallery.

Gabriel de la Mora’s work is included in important public and private collections, including Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, CA, USA; Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA), Long Beach, CA, USA; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), Houston, TX, USA; El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY, USA; Colección Ella Fontanals-Cisneros, Miami, FL, USA; Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City, Mexico; Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico; Art Museum of the Americas, Washington, D.C., USA; among many others.

• Happenings

Artist: Diana de Solares

Present 2: Alma Ruiz presents Diana de Solares
November 1 – December 13, 2014
Josée Bienvenu Gallery
New York, USA

The gallery presents a series of guest-curated exhibitions in the project space. For its second installment, curator Alma Ruiz presents the work by Guatemalan artist Diana de Solares.

Born in Guatemala City in 1952, Diana de Solares lives and works in Guatemala City. Recent exhibitions include: “Las correcciones/The corrections” the 9.99 gallery, Guatemala City (2014); “XIX Bienal Paiz “ Arte Centro Graciela Andrade de Paz, Guatemala City (2014); “Prótesis” [Prosthesis], Piegatto Arte, Guatemala City (2013); “En Tránsito” [In Transit], Sol del Rio Arte Contemporáneo, Guatemala City (2013); “Ensayo” Edge Zones, Miami, FL (2005); “Index miami”, Edge Zones, Miami, FL (2004); “En el filo”, Museo de Arte Moderno de Mérida “Juan Astorga Anta, Mérida, Venezuela (2003); “Picturing the female body”, The Latin Collector Gallery, New York, NY (2002); “Diana de Solares y Juan Paparella” Schneider Gallery, Chicago, IL (2000).

• Happenings

Artist: Marta Chilindrón

Expand // Fold // Collapse //
November 3 – December 5, 2014
Curated by Susanna V. Temkin and Katharine J. Wright
The Great Hall Exhibitions, Institute of Fine Arts
New York, USA

Embracing the instability of perspective and form, New York artist Marta Chilindron (b. 1951, Buenos Aires) creates manipulable sculptures in transparent and colored acrylics.  Adapted from such basic geometric shapes as spheres, cubes, and pyramids, her artworks conceal their identity as complex, kinetic constructions.  Constructed from multiple panels connected by hinges, Chilindron’s sculptures are charged with transformative potential that, when activated by the viewer, cause the works to expand//fold//collapse.

An heir to international constructivism, Chilindron’s artworks recall the influence of such artists as Naum Gabo, Lygia Clark, and Donald Judd.  However, to this tradition Chilindron adds her own investigations based on her interest in the dynamism and mutability of life.  Controlled by the viewer yet mediated by their constructed forms, her artworks transform shape, shift from the second to the third dimension, and extend and contract into space.  Magnified by the chromatic interplay caused by the effects of light, these changes underlie the core of her artistic practice.

Providing a dramatic contrast to the ornate interior of the Duke House, seven works by the artist will be on view in the lobby and vestibule of the Institute of Fine Arts  for the Fall 2014 Great Hall Exhibition.  Focusing on Chilindron’s engagement with idealized geometric forms, these works, executed between 2006 and 2014, will show the diversity of the artist’s practice, ranging from table-top objects such as the curvilinear Helix (2011) to her large-scale Cube 48 Orange (2014).  This latter work represents Chilindron’s expansion into immersive sculptural environments, and is being shown in New York for the first time since its debut in the Encounters exhibition at Art Basel Hong Kong, held in spring 2014.

• Happenings

Artist: Alberto Borea

We Are All Gone
October 10 – November 12, 2014
Y Gallery
New York, USA

Continuing with his research on cartography, urban identity and the relation between center and periphery, the artist presents a group of works derived from recent explorations. Borea takes the position of an “archeologist of the contemporary” who rescues the materials and used objects which are “residues of civilization“. These artifacts are undergoing a creative process leading to innovative results featuring the artist´s unique vision about ruins and progress.

A cage that is broken and open, “We Are All Gone” shows the tautness derived from the concept of “contention”. This sculpture works as an expanded drawing. Chaos, transgression and geometry coexist in the paradoxical nature of this piece.

In “Haus”, the german word for house, the artist recycles and transforms four doors of New York City taxi cabs. The resulting object is a hybrid device sharing the characteristics of a living architectural structure and a moving vehicle. Permanence and transition are concepts in dialogue in these four works, which are settled on the exploration of what has been called heterotopic spaces.
“Immigration”, on the other hand, is a sculpture made with a metal cement trowel and wheels that the artist found in the streets of Lima. This object is a strong statement about  roots, transit, migration, and art as a social and spiritual practice. For “Self-portrait”, Borea works with the idea of souvenir and global identity. The bottle with an Inca portrait named Biondi is attached to a corn broom, this combination of two different things leads to the creation of a new object. This innovative device shows the different layers of cultural information and manipulation, leaving for posterity a new sort of “huaco”or totem.

The transitional nature of existence is an underlying conceptual principle common to all the works in the show. They are the result of a sensitive reaction to the contemporary and its physical expression, manifested in the combination and manipulations of objects leading to new metaphorical artifacts.

Alberto Borea lives and works between New York and Lima. His work is characterized by the continuous displacement and use of diverse media and materials. He attended residencies and fellowships including Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, (Fundacion Cisneros de Patricia de Phelps), Art Omi International Residency 2009, Vermont Studio Center (Jackson Pollock Krasner Fellowship), International Studio and Curatorial Program NYC (ISCP), Sculpture Space, Utica, NY, Default Masterclass in residence, Lecce and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC).  Borea’s work has been shown in diverse exhibitions in Europe, Latin America and the U.S. including Queens Museum of Art in New York City, Museo del Barrio in New York City, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (Cisneros Fontanals Collection), Dublin Contemporary, Museo Laboratorio in Italy, Art Museum of the Americas in DC, and Museo de Huelva in Spain.

• Happenings

Artists: Allora and Calzadilla, Carla Arocha and Stéphane Schraenen, Laura Belém, Jorge Méndez Blake, Leyla Cárdenas, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Jose Dávila, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Moris, Oscar Muñoz, Daniela Ortiz, Pablo Rasgado, Santiago Sierra, Melanie Smith, and Agustina Woodgate.

Limited Visibility
Curated by Patricia Garcia-Velez Hanna and Natalia Zuluaga
October 3, 2014 – January 4, 2015
CAM (Contemporary Art Museum) Raleigh
Raleigh, NC, USA

Voluntary omission, erasure, withholding, and concealment: these are the methods the artists in Limited Visibility employ in order to draw attention to that which is missing. The representations of absence such as the missing object of labor in Allora & Calzadilla’s sandpaper composition or the cutouts in Jose Dávila’s photographs play a key role in this exhibition as they determine, border and define the void they surround. What we see in these images, paintings, and installations is what is not there: each work absents presence and presents something absent. Seer, seen, and unseen come together here to evoke the haunted sensation of searching and looking. Though the aims of each of the works in this exhibition are different—from a demand for political representation to the materialization of an otherwise ephemeral moment—the artists in Limited Visibility draw our attention to the omitted, giving it a kind of determination or persistence that is hard to ignore. In each case, the viewer is required a certain amount of belief to fill in that which is not visibly available—these are not riddles, but questions with actual answers in the form of artworks.
Patricia Garcia-Velez Hanna and Natalia Zuluaga

Image: Top – Left to Right: Jorge Méndez Blake – Hotel Monturiol, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer – Make Out, Jose Dávila – Topologies of Belief, Allora & Calzadilla – Shape Shifter. Bottom – Left to Right: Laura Belém – Temple of One Thousand Bells, Santiago Sierra – 89 Huicholes, Moris – Miradas I

• Happenings

Artists: Regina José Galindo, Patrick Hamilton, Anibal López A-1 53167, Ana Mendieta, Teresa Margolles, Alejandro Almanza Pereda, José Guadalupe Posada, and Jorge Tacla.

• Happenings

Artist: Iván Navarro

The Music Room
With Hueso Records
MoMA PS1, NY Art Book Fair and Printed Matter
New York, USA

Iván Navarro with Hueso Records is pleased to present The Music Room, at the NY Art Book Fair presented by Printed Matter, at MoMA PS1, opening Thursday September 25th from 6 to 9 pm. Room #S201.

The Music Room is a self-contained project room within the fair, where visitors are invited to listen to musical recordings pressed onto vinyl, at a single central playing station, controlled by one record handler. Inspired by the 1958 Bengali film by the same title (Satyajit Ray’s The Music Room), the installation seeks to create a sensorially rich environment conducive to the experience of listening. Records, selected from Hueso Records’ collection, are played one at a time and the sound is transmitted into the atmosphere through a pair of hand-built speakers. The interior, designed by artist Courtney Smith, is a wall-to-wall padded spongy lounge, with reconfigurable foam alleys, terraces and alcoves where listeners can curl up and contemplate. The Music Room wall space will contain a wrap-around display of the records and various types of publications that Hueso Records is presenting – a combination of HR productions, guest participations, and its private collection of music made by artists.

The Music Room is a multi-disciplinary, collaborative project that celebrates the creation of music both formal and informal, and in such is particularly interested in music made by artists who are not necessarily musicians. It will feature a collection of historic recordings by visual and performance artists, as well as recordings of live performances and experiments that are otherwise forgotten, among them are recordings by Lawrence Weiner, La Monte Young, Martin Kippenberger, Rita Ackermann / Dave Nuss, Christian Marclay and many more. Other categories presented in The Music Room are visual and conceptual artists who use music as their primary medium, or collaborations between visual and musical artists, or performance artists whose work involves music. Among the many artists, musicians and artist non-musicians whose work is presented in The Music Room are New York-based Cecilia Vicuña, Rio-based Jarbas Lopes, London-based group Tetine, Chile-based Mario Navarro, and New York-based collective Angel Nevarez & Valerie Tevere. Finally, Hueso Records’ own publications will also be presented, among them vinyl releases of music by Alvaro Peña, Atom™, Tunde Adebimpe, and Leonino aka Jorge Gonzalez.

Hueso Records is a music label conceived and run by visual artist Iván Navarro. HR began releasing recorded projects in Brooklyn, NY in 2006 as a way of independently publishing music made in collaboration for Navarro’s sculpture and video works. The label quickly expanded to include an ambitious program of finding and releasing historic Chilean music that was never produced at the time of its original recording such as the Pinochet Boys from 1988, Electrodomesticos from 1990, Minimal Technology from 1994 and Acid Call from 2007. HR developed a division called “Undefined Records”, publishing the music of non-musician artists and thinkers, but balances this by publishing creative and experimental projects with established professional musicians. HR currently works with artists and musicians in the US, Chile, Brazil, France, Germany and England.

• Happenings

Artists: Esvin Alarcón, Marcius Galan, Elena Damiani, and Jorge Pedro Núñez.

Spatial Acts, Americas Society Commissions Art
October 7, 2014
Americas Society
New York, USA

The exhibition Spatial Acts: Americas Society Commissions Art features works of artists Esvin Alarcón Lam (Guatemala, 1988), Elena Damiani (Peru, 1979), Marcius Galan (Brazil, 1972) and Jorge Pedro Núñez (Venezuela, 1976), who were selected to be part of Americas Society’s new initiative to commission an in-situ artwork especially conceived for the David Rockefeller Atrium, located in the organization’s landmark building in Park Avenue. The four artists will participate in a panel discussion with Manuel Cirauqui, writer and assistant curator at Dia Foundation, and Gabriela Rangel, curator and director of Visual Arts at the Americas Society.

At the beginning of 2014, a Nominating Committee put together a list of nineteen artists from the Americas who were invited to submit proposals for the David Rockefeller Atrium. During the second stage of the process, a selection committee designated four semi-finalists whose recent works are gathered in this group show. The name of the winning artist will be announced in November. The permanent piece will be placed in an adjacent section to the entrance of the Americas Society’s visual arts gallery, whose history includes the first U.S. exhibitions of many artists from the Americas. The artwork will serve as a testament to the tradition of the Americas Society’s Visual Arts program and its commitment to foster creativity and experimentation for the engagement of diverse audiences.

• Happenings

Artists: Bank og Rau, Hector Canonge, Anibal Catalan, Charlie Citron, Cesar Cornejo, Einar & Jamex de la Torre, Blane de St. Croix, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Ira Eduardovna, Glenda & Jesse Drew, Angela Freiberger, Marlon Griffith, Pablo Helguera, Debby & Larry Kline, Arun Kumar, JaeWook Lee, Mary Mattingly, Saul Melman, Yunmi Her, Oyvind Renberg & Miho Shimizu, Margaret Noble, Don Porcella, Mei Xian Qiu, Jose Hugo Sanchez, Zachary Royer Scholz, Adriana Varella, Alex Villar, Theis Wendt.

Beyond Limits, Postglobal Mediations
October 4 – November 15, 2014
San Diego Art Institute
San Diego, CA, USA

Curated by SDAI Executive Director Ginger Shulick Porcella and Brazilian curator Denise Carvalho, this exhibition will demonstrate that the future of the arts lies on a borderless, multidimensional circuit of experimentation. Featuring both local and international artists, “Beyond Limits” will bypass all borders that create hierarchies or limit the exchange of ideas. The exhibition will feature a series of lectures, performances, and video screenings.

“Beyond Limits” is an exhibition in which artists have envisioned a world without boundaries—whether physical, racial, technological, or psychological. “Beyond Limits” will bypass all national representations and increase the focus on a multinational, multicultural, multi-identity, multimedia, and multi-language based society. This exhibition is held in tandem with the international Mediational Biennale, occurring in parallel exhibitions in distinct international venues and museums including the Mediations Biennale in Poznan, Poland; Museo de la Ciudad, urugual; Petah Tikva Museum in Israel; MareArticum—Baltic Contemporary Art Biennale, Nakanajo Biennale, Japan; and the Kunsthall Fuast in Hanover, Germany.

• Happenings

Artists: Shuvinai Ashoona, Jamison Chas Banks, Raymond Boisjoly, Andrea Bowers, Matthew Buckingham, Adriana Bustos, Johanna Calle, Luis Camnitzer, Liz Cohen, Minerva Cuevas, Blue Curry, Agnes Denes, Juan Downey, Gianfranco Foschino, Futurefarmers, Anna Bella Geiger, Andrea Geyer, Frank Gohlke, Pablo Helguera, James Hyde, Deborah Jack, Yishai Jusidman, Leandro Katz, Irene Kopelman, Miler Lagos, Glenda León, Ric Lum, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Gilda Mantilla & Raimond Chaves, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Jason Middlebrook, Ohotaq Mikkigak, Kent Monkman, Patrick Nagatani, Florence Miller Pierce, Fernando Palma Rodríguez, Marcel Pinas, Edward Poitras, Marcos Ramirez ERRE & David Taylor, Kevin Schmidt, Allan Sekula, Melanie Smith, Charles Stankievech, Clarissa Tossin, and Antonio Vega Macotela

Unsettled Landscapes
July 20, 2014 – January 11, 2015
Santa Fe SiteLines, New Perspectives on Art of the Americas
Santa Fe, NM, USA

Unsettled Landscapes looks at the urgencies, political conditions and historical narratives that inform the work of contemporary artists across the Americas – from Nunavut to Tierra del Fuego. Through three themes – landscape, territory, and trade – this exhibition expresses the interconnections among representations of the land, movement across the land, and economies and resources derived from the land.

• Happenings

Artist: Amadeo Azar

Patience is a Mine Field
September 11 – November 4, 2014
Alejandra von Hartz Gallery
Miami, FL, USA

An artist who wishes to introduce himself to a new context draws a map. He places the pieces in such a way so that we can understand the new fragments in the landscapes of those that preceded them, establishing a mental cartography where to hear one’s questions in reverse.

This exhibition is in the spirit of a retrospective in the sense of steering our sight both backwards and forwards so as to perceive the totality of his ideas. What does an Artist do when he creates a work? He formulates a plan. In this case to take the technique to the extreme so that it collapses. To become an expert in the tradition of the pictorial ingredient -this time the watercolor- in order to betray that capacity until it all but disappears.

Image: “Rusakov Club”, 2014, 132 photocopies on call, 84.65 x 128 inches. Edition 1/3

• Happenings

Artists: Ana Bidart, Martí Cormand, Elena del Rivero, Darío Escobar, Sérgio Sister, and Adam Winner.

Provisionals
August 7 – September 6, 2014
Josée Bienvenu Gallery
NY, USA

The title refers to a term coined by Raphael Rubinstein* in 2009 to describe an ongoing trend:  Provisional paintings, “look casual, dashed-off, tentative, unfinished, self-canceling”. They “demolish their own iconic status before they ever attain such a thing.” Their genealogy includes Robert Rauschenberg’s “cardboards” of the 1970s, Raoul de Keyser, Christopher Wools, Mary Heilman and extends to a younger generation of artists who have been working across the map from Berlin to Bushwick and Mexico City, qualified as “the new casualists” by artist and critic Sharon L. Butler*.  The exhibition connects three generations of artists whose work oppose to the monumental, the official, and the permanent to embrace the off-kilter and the awkward in a playful combination of deliberation and indecision.

Dario Escobar’s Blacksmith Paintings are based on two absences: the absence of the painted object and the absence of the subject who painted it. Part of a larger body of ‘self-generated’ or ‘performative’ works, the painting in the exhibition documents the back wall of a blacksmith workshop in Guatemala city.  A blank canvas, stapled to the backdrop wall used to spray paint metal objects, accumulates layers and layers of paint residue. The painting is executed unknowingly by blacksmith workers without direct intervention of the artist’s hand whose only decision is to pick-up the work after a certain time. The result is a condensed and effortless journey through the main painting movements of the last century – from 1960s color field painting, to Latin American geometric abstraction, minimalism, pop, and street art, depending on the day-to-day order of business at the shop.

Elena del Rivero’s Letter from Home in Cerulean is a monument to domesticity and its monstrosity. It is a giant canvas hanging from one nail in the corner, just like a dishcloth in a kitchen. The process starts with the traditional blue pattern of a European dishcloth made with stitch-like brushstrokes, followed by staining and altering the surface with dirt from the studio floor, coffee from the breakfast table, or leftover paint smudged on the surface.  Like in most of del Rivero’s work, delicacy and a sense of loving attention coexist with a feeling of neglect and abandonment.

In Pasaportes, Mexico based conceptual artist Ana Bidart examines access and identity. The paintings are a record of her last two years working as an artist’s assistant, her time spent packing and labeling the works of other artists. Incorporating the vocabulary of tracking numbers and of various discarded materials, the paintings allude to various techniques of mechanical reproduction to explore traces left of relationships. Silkscreening, xeroxing, and photoshopping are done here in a low-tech, low-key way, by directly applying objects to the canvas (bubble wrap, footprints) and rubbing the surface with solvents in large areas of grayish brushstrokes.

Martí Cormand’s work is a testimony to the degradation of certainty. For the past two years, he has been investigating the notion of conviction by observing and rendering iconic works of the conceptual art movement  “When no one has too many certitudes any more, processes become essential. I have nothing urgent to communicate, no absolute convictions. I investigate the certainties that others had in the 1960s and 1970s. My favorite subject is the study of conviction” (Martí Cormand).  With no effort to hide its labor and adjustments, the work in the exhibition, a rendering of Yoko Ono’s 1964 Grapefruit, dissects its own process by showing the three stages to a finished painting. As if scanned at three points during its making, it becomes a self-amused and unassuming work that does not invite any transcendental reading.

Most of Sérgio Sister’s work stands at the edge between painting and sculpture. The small monochromatic paintings, from 1995 – 2010 included in the exhibition, convey a sense of calculated tentativeness. The individual paintings, made with an unflashy handling of paint can be re-positioned into distinct groups and assemblages, within a skillful game of subtle tonal variations.

Adam Winner’s paintings are concerned with multiple forms of imperfection. Made with a palette knife, in layer upon layer of oil, gesso and linen, the paintings expose their own accidents and mistakes, laying bare the seams, showing ripped linen strips and frayed edges. Winner’s paintings of imperfect gestures are imbued with a feeling of permanent self-doubt. They embrace a sense of their own failure yet reveal an intimate familiarity with the materials.

• Happenings

Artists: Mariángeles Soto-Díaz, Ricardo Alcaide, Emilia Azcárate, Juan Pablo Garza, Jaime Gili, Dulce Gómez, Esperanza Mayorbe, Ana María Mazzei, Teresa Mulet, Susana Reisman, Luis Romero, and Fabian Salazar.

Unsettled Primaries -Project by Mariángeles Soto-Díaz
Online gallery launch on August 23, 2014
Torrance Art Museum
Torrance, CA, USA

The Venezuelan flag features horizontal bands of the primary colors, yellow, blue and red, occupying equal parts in its rectangular composition. It is said that Francisco de Miranda, the Venezuelan transatlantic revolutionary known as “The First Universal Criollo” who inititated the process that would lead to the independence of Venezuela and Latin America, conceptualized the Venezuelan flag for independence after exchanging ideas about color theory with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Europe. While this is only one myth among many surrounding Miranda’s inspiration of primary colors for the flag, the story still resonates with Miranda’s interdisciplinary and philosophical interests, which are well documented in his extensive journals chronicling encounters with Europe’s leading intellectuals, artists and politicians.

For this project, Mariángeles Soto-Díaz invited Venezuelan artists to choose and interpret a set of open instructions to make an abstract work with equal distribution of primary colors. The instructions were meant as a productive challenge to the artists, particularly in light of the volatile political climate in Venezuela today and especially the many conflicts surrounding the use of the national flag in recent years.*

This experimental abstract project is a proposition put forth to think through many questions: Is it possible to reconcile formal and political meanings on a plane of simultaneity? Can color help us activate a shared experience of ambiguity and nuance, or are the established “universal” primary colors, an essential discovery in color theory, always mired in nationalism or flag-waving for Venezuelan artists? Is viewing art through the screen of a computer while imagining its materiality in real space a new kind of phenomenological experience? For individual artists, can a simultaneous performance of instructions interpreted in different parts of the world feel like a collective gesture?

Unsettled Primaries explores the potential of making something charged, tired and familiar new again, examining settled meanings. As in past projects directed by Soto-Diaz under the umbrella of her entity Abstraction At Work, Unsettled Primaries rests on the underlying premise that there is a conceptual and ambiguous border in the notion of abstraction that encroaches upon and even overlaps with symbolic representation, underscoring the uncomfortable fuzziness and fluidity of meaning in subject matter.

NOTE

* In 2013, as the two major candidates for presidential elections dressed in primary colors, government officials forbid the opposition from using them in their campaign despite the fact that the flag and its colors in various configurations were being used by the incumbent presidential candidate and precisely in that context. The rationale used by government officials was that using primary colors was an inappropriate use of patriotic symbols as per the Constitution passed in 2006 revising the Ley de Bandera Nacional, Himno Nacional y Escudo de Armas de la República Bolivariana Venezolana and/or the Supreme Justice Tribunal’s own judgment.

• Happenings

Artists: Olga de Amaral, Eric Baudart, Carlos Betancourt, Chris Burden, James Lee Byars,Elmgreen and Dragset, Dario Escobar, Sylvie Fleury, Cyprien Gaillard, Patricia Hernandez, Glenn Kaino, Alicja Kwade, Sherrie Levine, Kris Martin, Fernando Mastrangelo, John Miller, Martin Oppel, Ebony G. Patterson, Todd Pavlisko, Robin Rhode, Cristina Lei Rodriguez, and Rudolf Stingel.

Gold
August 8, 2014 – January 11, 2015
Bass Museum of Art
Miami, FL, USA

This exhibition is exploring how gold has been used in the past, present, and how it is referenced today by contemporary artists, both physically and conceptually. Works in this exhibition include historical objects from the permanent collection, painting, sculpture, video, photography, and design.

Image: “Untitled (McDonald’s Cup)”, 1999, Carboard, plastic, gold and pigments, 9 x 3 1/2 in. Collection of Vivian and Ken Pfeiffer.

• Happenings

Artists: Carlos Aires, Mark Hogensen, Leigh Anne Lester, Rigoberto Luna, Francisco Merel, Ann-Michele Morales, Ricardo Rendón, Ansen Seale, Xochi Solis, and Jason Villegas.

Flatland
July 11 – October 11, 2014
Curated by Patty Ortiz
Museo Guadalupe
San Antonio, TX, USA

In a time of globalization, transcultural movement and the leveling of world commerce, economists believe that today the earth could be perceived as becoming flat. They have used this metaphor to describe the world economy. This condition can also be utilized in describing transcultural movement. With the ease of cross migration, cultures are continuing to collide at a more rapid rate. The globalization of culture, ideas and artistic practice is creating a new balance, interface and flat playing field.  Artists further the notion of “flatness” by the appropriation of popular imagery from their own and other cultures. The exponential growth of digital communication has accelerated this process. The universal presence of the actual flat screen monitor has brought about a flat screen mentality. Yet artists are able to juggle their ethnicity, cultural experience and global views to create works that are multilayered and distinct. The presenting artists of FLATLAND are at the intersection of cultural form, process and meaning in this emerging flat world.

Images: Installation view, courtesy of the artist.

• Happenings

Artists: Pablo Jansana, Evan Nesbit and Letha Wilson.

Summer Exhibition
July 9 – August 8, 2014
Eleven Rivinqton
NYC, NY, USA

Eleven Rivington’s summer schedule includes two group shows-work by three late abstractionists at the gallery’s Rivington Street Space (Moira Dryer, Elizabeth Murray and Alan Shields) and, to balance it out, mixed-medium works by three emerging artists around the corner on Chrystie Street. Letha Wilson is probably the best known of the group; her photo-sculpture hybrids incorporate landscape snapshots and concrete, the outcome resembling a geological cross-section. Evan Nesbit’s large-scale paintings seemingly vibrate off the wall, their nubby surface texture achieved by forcing brightly colored acrylic paint through stretched burlap. Rounding out the show are Chilean-born Pablo Jansana’s crisply geometric photo, wood and aluminum compositions.

This exhibition has been mentioned by Art in America magazine as one of the must-see 5 shows in NYC. To read more about it visit Art in America.

Image: “Waitress 2”, 2014, Ultrachrome 4880 inkjet, aluminum, fiber glass, plexi, fluted poly pro and enamel, 24 x 18 x 5 in. (61 x 45.7 x 12.7 cm)

Image: “Waitress 3”, 2014, Ultrachrome 4880 inkjet, aluminum, fiber glass, plexi, fluted poly pro and enamel, 24 x 18 x 5 in. (61 x 45.7 x 12.7 cm)

Image: “Waitress 1”, 2014, Ultrachrome 4880 inkjet, aluminum, fiber glass, plexi, fluted poly pro and enamel, 24 x 18 x 5 in. (61 x 45.7 x 12.7 cm)

• Happenings

Artists: Marta Chilindrón and Graciela Hasper.

Dialogues
July 10, 2014
Sicardi Gallery
Houston, TX, USA

In Dialogues, both artists explore geometry and transparency within their respective practices. Chilindron’s brightly-colored acrylic sculptures range from 12-inch cubes to almost 6-foot high movable trapezoids and spirals. Hinged together, these works can be reconfigured into variations on each shape, creating an interactive conversation with the viewer. Hasper’s untitled acrylic paintings on canvas also take geometry as their starting point. Overlapping and repeated shapes in a palette of bold colors are layered to allow for surprising juxtapositions and vibrant relationships between forms. Hasper’s paintings, like Chilindron’s sculptures, are not fixed in space; they can be installed vertically or horizontally, or changed over the course of the exhibition.

Dialogues places these exquisite constructions and paintings in counterpoint with one another, pointing out their conceptual and aesthetic points of intersection.

• Happenings

Artist: Pia Camil

The Little Dog Laughed
July 12 – August 23, 2014
Blum & Poe
Los Angeles, CA, USA

Camil presents three interrelated bodies of work — a large-scale hanging curtain, paintings, and ceramic vases — which are inspired and based on abandoned billboards found around Mexico. Camil appropriates elements, such as strips of color or fragments of a letter or number, and transforms public advertisements into intimate household items, emphasizing the dysfunctionality of a mass consumer lifestyle with a playful but critical gesture.

The title for the exhibition derives from John Fante’s novel Ask the Dust, where Arturo Bandini, a struggling writer based in Los Angeles during the Depression, publishes an insignificant short story titled The Little Dog Laughed.  The story’s publication offers Bandini a glimpse of success. Interested in the main character’s false sense of self, Camil delves into the relationship between the personal and public in a modern dystopia.

A large hanging curtain, which typically references domestic and interior space, partially covers the entrance to the gallery and alludes to the idea of a theater backdrop or spectacle (the word for billboard in Spanish is espectacular). In the middle of the room, a large billboard-like structure functions as both a transparent screen and a shelving unit. Upon closer inspection, handmade ceramic vases become visible through the sheer canvas.

The paintings, like the curtain, are created using hand-dyed and stitched canvas, which has often been related to the so-called feminine. Though shapes and colors are repeated, each piece is uniquely constructed in an artisanal manner in order to decelerate the process of massive cultural production. In The Little Dog Laughed, Camil engages with an abstract image in different ways, uncovering the symbols and messages encoded in the cultural landscape.

Pia Camil (b. 1980) lives and works in Mexico City. She has a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art. In November 2014, she will complete a commission for the plaza of the Museo Jumex in Mexico City. She has exhibited internationally, including at ARTIUM, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain; the Biennial of the Americas, Denver, CO; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain; and Universidad de Guanajuato, Guanajuato, Mexico.

• Happenings

My work is characterized by the continuous displacement and use of diverse media and materials. The openness towards these media helps me defining the development of an artistic proposal, where the object’s time and history take a fundamental importance within the plastic discourse.

I am interested in the relation between different cultures and histories, between the so-called center and its periphery.

The concepts related to ruins and progress are part of my interests as an artist.

Raised in Lima in the 80’s during the Peruvian civil war influenced my practice and my relation with the objects and their symbolism.

The position of distance about cultural, economic and social events constitute an important part in the process and execution of my projects.

I find myself attracted to the residues of civilization and in mapping and conceptualizing these materials for my work.

Mi trabajo se caracteriza por el uso y continuo desplazamiento de diversos medios y materiales. La apertura hacia estos medios, me ayuda a definir el desarrollo de una propuesta artística, en donde el tiempo y la historia del objeto cobran una importancia  fundamental en el discurso plástico y en su proceso.

Me interesa la  relación entre distintas culturas e historias, entre el llamado centro y la periferia. Los conceptos relacionados con la ruina y la promesa de la modernidad son algunos de los intereses conceptuales en mi práctica.

Haber vivido en Lima durante la guerra interna de los años ochenta ha influido en mi práctica como artista así como en mi relación con los objetos y sus simbolismos.

La posición de distancia ante fenómenos culturales y económicos constituye una parte importante en el proceso y en la ejecución de mis proyectos.

Estoy atraído por los residuos de la civilización y en la idea de mapear y resignificar estos objetos en mi trabajo.

Selected Biographical Information

Prizes / Fellowships

• 2011: Sculpture Space Residency, Utica, United States.
• 2013: Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC), New York City, United States.
• 2010: International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP), New York City, United States.
• 2009: Pollock Krasner Grant, VSC, Vermont, United States.
• 2009: Art OMI, New York, United States.
• 2008: Fundacion Cineros de Patricia de Phelps, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, United States.

Solo Exhibitions

• 2013: “La Naturaleza de la Defensa”, Galeria Lucia de la Puente, Lima, Peru.
• 2012: “Because of Construction”, Y Gallery, New York, United States.
• 2009: “S/T”, Galeria Isabel Hurley, Malaga, Spain.
• 2008: “Residencia”, Espacio La Culpable, Lima, Peru.
• 2008: “Ruinas y Ciudades”, Galeria Lucia de la Puente, Lima, Peru.

Group Exhibitions

• 2014: “Permission to be Global“, Museum of fine Arts Boston, Boston, United States.
• 2013: “Queens International“, curated by Hitomi Hiwasaki and Meiya Cheng, Queens Museum, New York City, United States.
• 2013: “The Name, The Nose”, curated by Raul Zamudio, MuseoLaboratorio, Citta San Angello, Italy.
• 2012: “New York”, Art Museum of the Americas, curated by Paco Cano, Eva Mendoza and Jodie Di Napoli, Washington DC, United States.
• 2012: “Tracing the Unseen Border” curated by Ian Coffre and Omar Lopez Chahoud, La Mama Gallery, New York City, United States.
• 2011: “Dublin Contemporary“, curated by Jota Castro and Christian Viveros Faune, Earls Terrace, Dublin, Ireland.
• 2011: “El Museo Biennial, The S files“, curated by Elvis Fuentes and Rocio Aranda Alvarado, Museo del Barrio, New York City, United States.

Collections

• Madeira Corporate Services Collection, Portugal.
• CIFO, Cisneros Fontanals, Miami, United States.
• Coleccion Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, New York, United States.

• Artists

Artists: Juan Capistrán, Danielle Dean, Harry Dodge, Lecia Dole-Recio, Kim Fisher, Judy Fiskin, Magdalena Suarez Frimkess & Michael Frimkess, Mariah Garnett, Gerard & Kelly, Samara Golden, Piero Golia, Marcia Hafif, Channing Hansen, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, James Kidd Studio, Barry Johnston, Kchung, Devin Kenny, Gabriel Kuri, Caitlin Lonegan, Los Angeles Museum of Art, Tala Madani, Max Maslansky, Emily Mast, Jennifer Moon, Brian O’Connel, Harsh Patel, Marina Pinsky, Public Fiction, Sarah Rara, A.L. Steiner, Ricky Swallow, Tony Greene: Amid Voluptuous Calm, Clarissa Tossin and Wu Tsang.

Made in L.A. 2014
June 15 – September 7, 2014
Curated by Connie Butler and Michael Ned Holte
Hammer Museum
Los Angeles, CA, USA

The Hammer’s biennial exhibition Made in L.A. 2014 features works by 35 Los Angeles artists with an emphasis on emerging and under recognized artists. It debuts recent work and new painting, installation, video, sculpture, photography, and performances created specifically for the exhibition. The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive hardcover catalogue, as well as a full roster of free public programming.

• Happenings

Artists: Alighiero Boetti, Chris Burden, Ray and Charles Eames, Harun Farocki, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Hikaru Hayakawa, Yumi Kori, L十 (PAK Sheung Chuen, WO Man Yee, LEE Soen Long), Liu Wei, Reanimation Library, Jessica Rylan, Tavares Strachan, Clarissa Tossin, Lawrence Weiner, and Wong Kit Yi.

Bringing the World into the World
June 15 – October 12, 2014
Queens Museum
New York, USA

Bringing the World into the World is an exhibition of international contemporary art about the experience of the act of seeing, and is inspired by the largest object in the Museum’s collection, the Panorama of the City of New York, a 9,335 sq.ft. scale model of the New York City’s five boroughs. Recapturing the lure and the wide-eyed amazement triggered by this historical artifact, Bringing the World revisits the panoramas—the 18th Century crowd-pleasing spectacle of 360-degree circular paintings—and their concepts and roles in the development of visual culture. The exhibition features a diverse body of works exploring the formal, conceptual, and psychological principles of panoramas as devices of wonder and the many ways in which we see, imagine, and comprehend worlds both familiar and unfamiliar.

Organized by Hitomi Iwasaki, Director of Exhibitions/Curator

• Happenings

Artists: Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Carlos Amorales, Armando Andrade Tudela, Alexander Apóstol, Tania Bruguera, Luis Camnitzer, Mariana Castillo Deball, Alejandro Cesarco, Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker, Adriano Costa, Minerva Cuevas, Jonathas de Andrade, Wilson Díaz, Juan Downey, Rafael Ferrer, Regina José Galindo, Mario García Torres, Dominique González-Foerster, Tamar Guimaraes, Federico Herrero, Alfredo Jaar, Claudia Joskowicz, Runo Lagomarsino, David Lamelas, Gilda Mantilla and Raimond Chaves, Marta Minujín, Carlos Motta, Iván Navarro, Rivane Neuenschwander, Gabriel Orozco, Amalia Pica, Wilfredo Prieto, Paul Ramírez Jonas, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Gabriel Sierra, Javier Téllez, Erika Verzutti, and Carla Zaccagnini.

Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today
June 13 – October 1, 2014
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
New York, USA

Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today reconsiders the state of contemporary art in Latin America, investigating the creative responses of artists to complex, shared realities that have been influenced by colonial and modern histories, repressive governments, economic crises, and social inequality, as well as by concurrent periods of regional economic wealth, development, and progress. The exhibition presents contemporary artistic responses to the past and present that are inscribed within this highly nuanced situation, exploring the assertions of alternative futures.

Organized by Pablo León de la Barra, Guggenheim UBS MAP Curator, Latin America, Under the Same Sun features works by 40 artists and collaborative duos from 15 countries. The artworks are organized around five themes: “Conceptualism and its Legacies,” “Tropicologies,” “Political Activism,” “Modernism and its Failures,” and “Participation/Emancipation.”

• Happenings

Artist: Eduardo Santiere

Inter-Spaces
June 26 – August 1, 2014
Henrique Faria Fine Art
New York, USA

Today, most of us are quite comfortable with Google maps, and the ease with which we are able to shrink our search from a continental scope all the way down to a street view in a matter of seconds. The enhanced clarity that comes with each click of the mouse leads us to greater detail and ultimately to something we can easily relate to. In a similar way, one can easily become sucked into a drawing by Eduardo Santiere, graduating from an appreciation of the work as a cosmos on paper to getting lost in the most minute mark. The difference is that the map search takes us on a linear journey from macro to micro, whereas Santiere offers up every layer simultaneously, an entire world where neurons and Neptune are treated as equals.

Biologically, our brains are not wired for a non-hierarchical understanding of our world, either real or imagined, and we can’t help but impose some organization, even subconsciously. The smallest detail in any given quadrant of one of Santiere’s works—each blot, elliptical form, scratch or puncture— is arguably as significant as any other, or even as important as the piece in entirety. So while we may be programmed to organize these disparate parts into a global whole, something about his unique treatment of the forms forces us to look and perceive each part in a multi-textural way.

Santiere claims that he finds truth and beauty through the process of drawing. Without going from pre-conceived images, but rather allowing imperceptible traces and a kind of automatic marking process to guide him, he comes to a composition that vibrates with life. Once he turns these works out into the world, each of us digests that energy in a different way. The elements of his drawing have been likened to cells, computer circuitry, musical notation, outer space, utopian urban plans and dreamscapes, to name only a few. One thing each of these interpretations has in common, however, is growth or movement.

Santiere’s largest work to date, titled Inter-Space is unique in that he sticks to graphite solely, removing the color that is an integral part of much of his work. As the name implies, we see a complex web of stipple dots and clusters that conjure galactic bodies and constellations, seen in reverse negative. The individual dots seem to be magnetically drawn together at certain spots, perhaps slave to a pattern or rhythm of some unknown origin. It is somehow both violent and balletic, with markings that look to be the result of forceful contact with the paper, yet when viewed as a group seem to float and dance across the page.

In another series in the exhibition, titled Symphonies, we have a fairly encyclopedic sampling of Santiere’s gestural vocabulary. In particular, his “scratching”, as he calls it, is the result of his careful manipulation of the paper’s surface. This treatment creates a kind of relief that is similar to the burr created in the dry-point etching technique. The use of graphite and colored pencils adds yet another layer. In music, the term simultaneity is used to describe musical texture that occurs at the same time instead of in succession. In this musically-inspired series, it seems Santiere has visualized this construct.

Santiere’s incredible ability to render life and energy, both as whole forms and as individual stimuli, offers us a rare opportunity to experience art in a rich, textured way. Whether we are imagining our universe or an imaginary microscopic universe that exists on a speck of dust within our planet, experiencing simultaneity in art.

Ginger Gregg Duggan and Judith Hoos Fox, curators

Image: Eduardo Santiere, “Blind Date” (Detail), 2010, Graphite, colored pencil and scratching on paper, 11 1/8 x 15 in. (28.3 x 38 cm)

• Happenings

Artist: Omar Barquet

Ghost Variations
June 18 -20, 2014
Performance: June 17, 2014
MAAS Performance 
Long Island City, NY, USA

“Ghost Variations” is an interdisciplinary proposal launched in 2012 by artist Omar Barquet (Chetumal, México 1979), comprising a sequence of five projects organized like the movements of a symphony, as well as a series of five subprojects generated from experimental collaborations understood as “fugues”. Together they pose an analogy to the distinct evolutionary phases of a hurricane, emulating its intensities and movements, like the sketch of a spiral shape, mainly reflecting on the perception of time through the transformation cycles of a landscape.

2nd Fugue: The Groans of White Noise, brings forth an environment of tension which occurs at a sonorous and performatic level, carrying the spectator’s imagination into the most intense part of a hurricane. It is a project which is based in the emotional and physical tensions experienced in this phase of the meteorological phenomenon, occasionally verging on moments of delirium and using the acceleration of the pulse of the breath as patterns to elaborate the evolution of intensity.

This sonorous action also uses as reference a few fragments of the poems of Licofron, El Obscuro, where he constructs a labyrinth of associations around the ravings of Cassandra, Greek mythological character and Trojan princess.

This epiphany of catastrophe articulates a connecting link in which madness constitutes a repetition of certain phrases of the poem in a sort of mantra, whose progressive acceleration and intensity drift into meaninglessness, generating a confused and dense state, similar to the most intense phase of the storm creating a soundscape. The performance and sound experimentation will be in collaboration with sound and visual artist Richard Garet, and with experimental musician Javier Barquet. Both artists are based in New York City.

5th Fugue: The Broken Poem, is an action taken through video, based on a phrase from a poem by Paul Éluard. It is conceived from fragments of broken chairs, articulating a sculptural typography which quotes the poem slowly, and in fractures. Simultaneous to the projection of these phrases, there is a mound created randomly with the remains of the broken chairs, on a floor soaked with water, corresponding to the flood – the final phase of the Ghost Variations project sequence. Both these fugues depict an analogy of the storm and the chaotic nature of thought, where human emotionality manifests as an unstable and complex phase of the renewing energy of life cycles – a breath which changes in intensity, and as such, the state of things.

Omar Barquet was born in Chetumal, México, September 10th 1979. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from ENPEG La Esmeralda, in México City. He has exhibited in various national and international forums, in cities like New York, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Lima, Miami, Basel, Madrid and México City. He is a founding member of the Segundo Piso art collective, composed of Augustin Gonzales, José Luis Landet y Moris. He was the recipient of the Jóvenes Creadores Arts and Culture Fund National Grant, as well as the Arte Actual Bancomer MACG Grant. In 2009, he obtained a two-month residency in Capacete, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In 2010, he performed his solo show REVERB, at the Museo Experimental El Eco, and in 2011 was commissioned to develop the LAPSES installation for the brand Hermés Paris – México. In 2013 he completed his residency for Casa Tomada art ists, which concluded with his solo show, entitled Ghost Variations’ 1st Fugue: “The Flock”, in Kunsthalle, Sao Paulo. For the second half of 2014, he is preparing a series of solo shows starting at the MACAY Museum in Mérida, Yucatán, a residency for his first solo show at Mandragoras Arts Space in New York, and a solo project at 123 Space in México City.  Since 2013, he collaborates in GRAMA RUINA, a visual and sound experimental collective with Fernando Soberanes, Javier Loyola, and Xavi Cunilleras.

• Happenings

Artists: Carla Arocha- Stephane Schraenen, Antonio Asis, Paulo Castro, Sigfredo Chacón, Adriana Jebeleanu and Jorge Pedro Núñez

En blanco y negro
April 2014
Kabe Contemporary
Miami, FL, USA

En blanco y negro is a group show featuring works by six contemporary artists. The works that comprise this exhibition display a diverse array of techniques: drawing, painting, photography and sculpture, dating from 1969 to the present. The common thread that bonds these pieces evoke a distinct vocabulary of mass, line and texture utilizing black and white materials.

• Happenings

Artist: Dario Escobar

Broken Circle
May 18 – August 27, 2014
Curated by Alma Ruiz
CAFAM Museum
Los Angeles, CA, USA

Guatemalan artist Darío Escobar famously repurposes sports equipment to construct compelling sculptures and installations that convey movement and geometry. For his first solo museum exhibition in Los Angeles, he will create a site-specific installation composed of approximately 1,000 red bike reflectors that will be attached to the wall in undulating and rotating patterns. The mural-like wall installation resembles a large scale drawing activated by light and the visitor’s own movement through the gallery space.

• Happenings

Artists: Horacio Zabala & Eduardo Kac

Spaces of Repression and Liberation
May 15 – June 21, 2014
Henrique Faria
New York, USA

Spaces of Repression and Liberation is a dual exhibition of historical works by Horacio Zabala and Eduardo Kac. Both artists were working during tumultuous periods, one in Argentina and the other in Brazil, near the end of dictatorial regimes. As societal and political limitations bore down upon civilians, artists sought alternative modes of creative expression as a means to continue developing artistically while, importantly, responding to the harsh realities of their current situation. Through their different series of works, Zabala and Kac explore the effects that authoritarianism, censorship and violence had on the body, identity and individuality.

*Image: Horacio Zabala, Anteproyecto de arquitectura represiva, 1973. Pencil on paper, 12 3/5 x 18 in. (32 x 45.7 cm) each. (Detail)

• Happenings

Artist: Marco Maggi

West vs. East
May 10 – June 28, 2014
Hosfelt Gallery
San Francisco, CA, USA

Uruguayan artist Marco Maggi fills more than 6,000 square feet of exhibition space with miniscule drawing and sculptures that are virtually invisible except for the shadows they cast. Glance around the exhibition and you’ll see little but vast white space. As you slow down and really look, you’ll discover astonishing density, precision, beauty and wisdom. With this warehouse-scaled, site-specific installation of inconspicuous objects, Maggi hopes to change your perspective, forcing you to examine what you think you know, and revealing it inadequate.

Marco Maggi is renowned for virtuoso drawing and innovative applications of common materials uncommonly used in art-making. His tightly-packed, inscriptive encryptions have been compared to microchips, satellite imagery and archaic alphabets. But there’s more to the work than technical skill and formal allure. Maggi continues to use blindness as a metaphor for our inability to digest the mass of information in the information age; our incapacity to see through the half-truths of mass media; our ineptitude at considering the perspective of ‘the other’; our incompetence at focus; and our unwillingness to take the time to learn.

Maggi’s art is awe-inspiring, but he makes you work for it. He compels you to move around until the light catches the glint of graphite or casts a shadow from a delicately carved slice of paper. He forces you to look obliquely at his tiny megalopolises, to gaze into security mirrors, even to crawl around on the floor. Having you physically change your position to decode his artwork is a metaphor for viewing the world from a different perspective – through someone else’s eyes – and, literally, someone else’s eyeglasses, in the case of one of the pieces in this exhibition. It’s only by changing your viewpoint that you gain insight.

The content and context of this exhibition are geopolitics. We read or see second, third or fourth-hand reports of events that don’t make sense, happening in places we’ve never been, between cultures we don’t understand. How can we begin to comprehend our world? Maggi says, “Focus is not the object or the subject, but the time between the object and the viewer. I am interested in the pace of the viewing process.” By slowing the viewer, Maggi hopes to evoke empathy and hence consciousness.

Born in Montevideo, Uruguay, Marco Maggi lives in New Paltz, New York. His work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Latin America since 1998. His work is in major public and private collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Daros Collection, Zurich; Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection, New York; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Sao Paulo; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

*Marco Maggi, “Stacking Quotes”, 2014, Cut paper, bound notebooks, shelf

• Happenings

Marcolina Dipierro
Interrupted Line

Harris Center for the Arts
Bank of America Art Gallery
Folsom Lake College

The space as a constructive tool — the line as a guide to navigate it. Interrupted Line is the first solo show by Argentinean artist Marcolina Dipierro (1978) on the West Coast. With works from the Sayago & Pardon Collection, Interrupted Line addresses the multiple ways in which space can be modified, altered, or interrupted with just a line, in a playful mode that resembles how life can be transformed or disturbed by everyday experiences. Dipierro works with a series of “objectual pieces” that consists of basic geometric elements: volumes, planes and lines made with simple materials. The use of linear forms made with acrylic, wood and paper collages is a constant in her works displayed at the gallery space.

Download the catalogue here

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El espacio como una herramienta constructiva — la línea como una guía para navegar por él. Línea Interrumpida es la primera exposición de la artista argentina Marcolina Dipierro (1978) en la Costa Oeste de Estados Unidos. Con obras de la colección de arte Sayago & Pardon, Línea Interrumpida aborda las múltiples formas en las que el espacio puede ser modificado, alterado o interrumpido con apenas una línea, en un modo lúdico que asemeja cómo la vida puede ser transformada o interrumpida por las experiencias cotidianas. Dipierro trabaja con una serie de “piezas objetuales” que consisten en elementos básicos geométricos: volúmenes, planos y líneas hechas con materiales sencillos. El uso de formas lineales realizadas con acrílico, madera y collages en papel es una constante en sus obras expuestas en el espacio de la galería.

Descarga el catálogo aquí

• Projects

Artists: Leonor Antunes, Alexander Apóstol, Alexandre Arrecha, Felipe Arturo, Alessandro Balteo Yazbek, Alberto Baraya, Carlos Bunga, Los Carpinteros, Jordi Colomer, Livia Corona, Felipe Dulzaides, Magdalena Fernández, Fernanda Fragateiro, Carlos Garaicoa, Mario García Torres, Terence Gower, Patrick Hamilton, Quisqueya Henríquez, Diango Hernández, Andre Komatsu, Runo Lagomarsino, Pablo León de la Barra, Maria Martínez-Cañas, Daniela Ortiz, Jorge Pardo, Manuel Piña, Ishmael Randall-Weeks, Mauro Restiffe, Pedro Reyes and Chemi Rosado-Seijo.

Beyond the Supersquare: On Modernism
May 1, 2014 – January 11, 2015
Bronx Museum
Bronx, NY, USA

The indelible influence of Latin American and Caribbean modernist architecture on contemporary artists will be explored by The Bronx Museum of the Arts in the exhibition Beyond the Supersquare, on view May 1, 2014 through January 11, 2015. The exhibition features 30 artists and more than 60 artworks—including photography, video, sculpture, installation, and drawing—that respond to major Modernist architectural projects constructed in Latin America and the Caribbean from the 1920s through the 1960s. Beyond the Supersquare examines the complicated legacies of Modernist architecture and thought—as embodied by the political, economic, environmental, and social challenges faced by countries throughout Latin America—through the unique perspective of artists working today.

The exhibition represents the culmination of a four-year research initiative at the Bronx Museum spearheaded by Executive Director Holly Block and Independent Curator María Inés Rodriguez. Many of the exhibition themes have grown out of a three-day conference held at the Bronx Museum in October 2011, during which artists, architects, urban planners, and scholars convened to discuss the enduring impact of Modernist architecture and ideas in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Beyond the Supersquare explores how contemporary artists from Latin America, the Caribbean, and other regions have responded to the aggressive rise of Latin America’s urban centers and the ways in which those urban areas have evolved since the mid-20th century. Also examined is the social critique of political, social, economic, and environmental issues in Latin America and the Caribbean, including unstable economies, ad hoc urbanism, militarized police forces, and rapidly exhausting natural resources. Exhibition designer Benedeta Monteverde of Mexico City has worked closely with the two curators to generate the exhibit plan for the galleries at the Bronx Museum.

Beyond the Supersquare will be accompanied by a volume, co-published by The Bronx Museum of the Arts and Fordham University Press, featuring original scholarship by noted Latin American architects, historians, and curators. Beyond the Supersquare: Art & Architecture after Modernism in Latin America will include material presented at the Museum’s 2011 Beyond the Supersquare conference led by Ms. Block and Ms. Rodríguez. The advisors for the conference were Carlos Brillembourg (Carlos Brillembourg Architects), Felipe Correa (Somatic Collaborative and Harvard Graduate School of Design), Ana Maria Duran (Estudio A0), Belmont Freeman (Belmont Freeman Architects), Jose Lira (University of Sao Paulo), Ligia Nobre (Independent Curator), and Pedro Reyes (Artist).

The volume will also include an image-rich folio highlighting artworks from the exhibition. Drawing from architectural projects of the 1940s to the 1960s, as well as from socially engaged artistic practices of the present day, the anthology will examine the consequences of the heroic and utopian ideals popular in architectural discourse during the Modernist era, which are evident in the vastly uneven economic conditions and socially disparate societies found throughout the region today

• 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

• Happenings

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.

• Happenings

Artist: Thomas Glassford

Afterglow
March 13 – April 19, 2014
Sicardi Gallery
Houston, TX, USA

The exhibition consists of Glassford’s large-scale sculptural installation of the same name and a series of recent works on paper. Afterglow (2010) is built from the artist’s signature industrial materials: golden aluminum rods support transparent tubes filled with fluorescent liquid. An abundance of green Plexiglas “leaves” spring from the tubing, creating an environment that alludes to tropicalia while hinting at a futuristic, man-made landscape.

Originally commissioned by Mexico City’s Museo Experimental El Eco, Afterglow was shown at The Galleries at Moore College of Art & Design in 2013 for its debut in the United States. The piece suggests a synthesis of nature and geometry: Glassford engages with the human need to structure the organic. Afterglow‘s shape is informed by the architecture of jungle gyms, forms that simulate nature while using exact proportions. The scaffold-like installation, covered with invasive tropical growth, invites viewers to walk through it and move around it, an experience which evokes childhood exploration.

Born in Laredo, Texas, Thomas Glassford studied art at The University of Texas at Austin, where he received his BFA. He moved to Mexico City in 1990. His work is in several important public and private collections, including The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Jumex Collection, Mexico; The Diane and Bruce Halle Collection, Arizona; Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Artes, MUCA, Mexico; CIFO Foundation, Miami; Des Moines Art Center, Iowa; and many others.

• Happenings

Selected Biographical Information

Education / Training

• 2002-2007: Bachelor Architecture, Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, NYC, USA.

Solo Exhibitions

• 2013: “Financial Times“, Mary Boone Gallery, New York City, USA.
• 2013: “The Red and the Black“, Y Gallery, New York, USA.

Group Exhibitions

• 2013: “Neo Povera“, L&M Gallery, Los Angeles, USA.
• 2013: “Come Together: Surviving Sandy“, Dedalus Foundation, New York, USA.
• 2013: “Une Exibicion Sans Textes“, Jeu de Paume, Paris, France.
• 2013: “La Bienal: here is where we Jump“, El Museo del Barrio, New York City, USA.
• 2013: “Draft Urbanism“, Biennial of the Americas, Denver, USA.

Publications

• Nathlie Provosty, “In Conversation“, The Brooklyn Rail, February 2014, 2-5. (Article).
• Chloe Rosetti, “Financial Times“, Artforum, January 2014 (Article).
• Ann Binlot, “Graphic Design“, The Economist, January 17, 2014 (Article).
• Holland Cotter, “A Constellation of Identities“, The New York Times, 13/6/13 (Article).
• Thomas Mitchell, “Guilt Complex: Selling Painting by the Square Foot“, Hyperallergic, 1/6/13 (Article).

• Artists

Marcolina Dipierro

….. In Circle
February 15 – April 5, 2014
Alejandra von Hartz Gallery
Miami, FL, USA

For her first solo show at the Gallery and in the USA, Marcolina Dipierro has immersed herself with the investigation of the possibilities and potentiality of the circular form. To show its formal visual and perceptive infinity while identifying dialogues of direction, attitude, limits, volumes, and folds.

In her practice, Dipierro explores the unlimited possibilities that SPACE offers as the support of art work, as a constructive tool of the creative instance, and as a protagonist.

“Object” pieces of elemental geometric lines (volumes, planes and shapes), elaborated in simple materials that enter in direct dialogue with the walls and floor, establish formal ties with the shadows and the materials of the same,  rendering subjective the superficies and  the tridimensional.
The series of works that Dipierro presents for this occasion reflect on the formal continuity of the circle and its respective quadrature as constituent members of the geometrical universe:

Continuity in time
Continuity in reflection
Continuity in shadow

Born in Chivilcoy, Buenos Aires, Argentina, holds a Fine Arts Degree from the National Fine Arts School “Prilidiano Pueyrredón” in 2000. Amongst her solo and group exhibitions: Color y Consecuencias, site-specific light intervention at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Rosario, Argentina – MACRO (2007); Projections, Les dix ans du 19, Centre Régional d’ Art Contemporain de Montbéliard, Paris (2007); Ficción Encendida, CCEBA, Spanish Cultural Center at Buenos Aires (2009); Planograf, Zabaleta Lab-Arte Contemporáneo (2010); en ángulo, Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2011); “en cuadre “, Jorge Mara La Ruche Gallery, Buenos Aires (2012). She was recipient of the Scholarship FONCA-CONACULTA for the Program of Artistic Residencies for Ibero American and Haiti Creators in Mexico (2009) and was awarded the National Fund for the Arts Scholarship (2013). Dipierro lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

• Happenings

Emilia Azcárate

Liminal
February 13- March 22, 2014
Henrique Faria Fine Art
New York, NY, USA

The works belonging to the series of the Gohonzon are highly complex, since their composition is articulated as an interpretation both of symbology and inconography on the basis of a structuring of the original Gohonzon. The Gohonzon is considered as equivalent to the Treasure Tower, an allegorical tower described in the Lotus Sutra that emerges from the center of the earth during the ceremony of the air to represent our potential for spiritual illumination or Buddhahood. The artist is especially fascinated by this tower, and combines its allegory with the form in which she recreates the Gohonzon, which is constructed in an abstract fashion out of compositions of circles that are associated and superimposed.

The Practicables, Postales, and the Gohonzon series can be read as an abstract articulation of the intangible process of awakening the Buddha inherent and latent inside us. According to the artist, they lay emphasis on the transit from the Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo to reality, from effect to cause and vice versa. All these works share the concept that every moment of every day encloses an eternity of concentrated value. Their singularity lies in their rootedness in the artist’s life, offering us a personal, intimate, and private experience that might be described as profoundly human. These three series are now brought together on the occasion of the exhibition at Henrique Faria Fine Art, the motive for this publication, giving us an opportunity to appreciate this vital conductive thread in the work of Emilia Azcárate.

Extract from Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, “Full Emptiness and / or the Inconclusive Infinite”, in Emilia Azcárate, Liminal, Madrid: Turner, 2014

• Happenings

Pedro Tyler

Galpón del Molino – Pueblo Garzón
February 1 -7, 2014
Galería del Paseo
Punta del Este, Lima, Peru

Refernces to measure are primarily a distraction, the implicit agreement on what is calculated, is an allegory. Imperfection is the artist’s vast territory; imposing to it a form is his challenge. Tyler lets the mind loose mocking accuracy. Pedro uses measuring instruments as a simple and recognizable way to support his inner world.

• Happenings

Artists: Adel Abdessmed, George Afedzi Hughes, Gustavo Artigas, Chris Beas, Mark Bradford, Miguel Calderon, Mary Ellen Carroll, Carolyn Castaño, Petra Cortright, Stephen Dean, Dario Escobar, Leo Fitzmaurice, Generic Art Solutions, Douglas Gordon, Andreas Gursky, Hassan Hajjaj, Lyle Ashton Harris, Satch Hoyt, Nelson Leirner, Nery Gabriel Lemus, Alon Levin, Amitis Motevalli, Antoni Muntadas, Oscar Murillo, Philippe Parreno, Paul Pfeiffer, Robin Rhode, Ana Serrano, Dewey Tafoya, Andy Warhol, Wendy White, Kehinde Wiley

Fútbol: The Beautiful Game
February 2 – July 20, 2014
LACMA
Los Angeles, CA, USA

The exhibition examines football—nicknamed “the beautiful game” by one sports commentator—and its signficance in societies around the world. As a subject, football touches on issues of nationalism and identity, globalism and mass spectacle, as well as the common human experience shared by spectators from many cultures. Celebrating the sport on the eve of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, the exhibition includes approximately thirty artists from around the world who work in video, photography, painting and sculpture. Two room-sized video installations—Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, by the artists Philippe Parreno and Douglas Gordon, and Volta by Stephen Dean—anchor the exhibition. Other works by artists including Miguel Calderon (whose 2004 video Mexico v. Brasil represents a 17-0 victory for Mexico), Robin Rhode, Kehinde Wiley, and Andy Warhol provide a sense of the miraculous possibilities of the sport as universal conversation piece.

• Happenings

Artists: Juan Fernando Herrán, Kevin Simón Mancera, and Jaime Tarazona

Gestos Urbanos | Urban Gestures
January 16 – February 22, 2014
Johannes Vogt
NY, USA

• Happenings

Artists: Richard Garet, Robert Henke, Emma McNally, David Linton, Phoenix Perry, Bethany Shorb

f(glitch)
February 10th – March 29th
Simon Center for Geometry and Physics
Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA

Noise. Error. Glitch.

• Happenings

Artists: Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck, Hercules Barsotti, Willys de Castro, Jaime Davidovich, Guillermo Deisler, Mirtha Dermisache, León Ferrari, Héctor Fuenmayor, Anna Bella Geiger, Leandro Katz, Gerd Leufert, Luis Roldán, Osvaldo Romberg, Eduardo Santiere, Horacio Zabala.

Drawings from the South of America
January 24 – February 8, 2014
Henrique Faria Fine Art
New York, NY, USA

*Image: Horacio Zabala, “Terra Ignota”, 1973, Ink on paper, 36.4 x 82.4 cm

• Happenings

Aníbal Catalán: The Land, The Space, The Square
February 6 – April 13, 2014
Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art
Colorado, USA

Anibal Catalan: The Land, The Space, The Square is the first solo museum exhibition in the United States by Mexico City-based artist Anibal Catalan. The exhibition presents a series of site-specific installations, new paintings, video works, drawings and digital prints that will be displayed in the museum’s West and East galleries. Anibal Catalan was born in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico 1973 and lives and works in Mexico City.

• Happenings

Artists: Greta Alfaro, Julia Chiang, Richard Garet, Pryce Lee, Naama Tsabar and Dustin Yellin

They Sicken of the Calm Who Know the Storm
Curated by Maureen Sullivan
January 16 – February 15, 2014
Fridman Gallery
New York, NY, USA

Beautiful danger, living life to the extreme, broken dreams and endless cycles of incurable hope and pain, screaming on the inside, pulsating with a palpable energy…

These are ideas and emotions evoked by the six artists – Greta Alfaro, Julia Chiang, Richard Garet, Pryce Lee, Naama Tsabar, Dustin Yellin – featured in the exhibition THEY SICKEN OF THE CALM WHO KNOW THE STORM, curated by Maureen Sullivan and presented at FRIDMAN GALLERY, January 16 through February 15, 2014.

Richard Garet’s electrified color-rich moving image “paintings,” created through sound then silenced, cannot be stifled. Julia Chiang’s white chains triumph beauty over function, made all the more implausible by their handmade fragility. Greta Alfaro’s films lure one in with sedate serenity. But the underlying anxiety, created mostly by our own challenges with stillness and yearning for action, is soon realized in a frenzied gluttony, leaving only the remains of the day in its wake. Dustin Yellin’s explosive and collapsed illusions are suspended, dissected and trapped forever in sliced layers of resin. Naama Tsabar plays with signifiers of danger and enjoyment, things that are slick and seductive then fall apart. Here white sheets – the material of dreaming, escape ladders, and Molotov cocktails – slowly absorbs liquor from bottles of alcohol creating a disorienting multisensory – and potentially combustible experience. Pryce Lee shows in NY for the first time with a new 9-piece shattered mirror work created specifically about an incident in the city – the 2012 Empire State Building Shooting. Capturing the randomness, violence and fragility of life, the innocent bystander suffering for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, the work reflects us destroyed and whole.

• Happenings

Omar Barquet
Night Tide

Pinta, NY

For the Abstraction in Action project commission at PINTA NY 2013, I proposed the creation of an ephemeral collage mural made with fragments of various failed tests of xylography, offset and photocopy prints, which were the result of several processes and treatments of digital and analog deterioration, providing a memory to these materials and emphasize the idea of interference. I find an interesting connection between the formal languages of Concretism and technical-scientific diagrams related to space, landscape, sound, time, and nature, as languages that take on abstraction, often with contradictory purposes, but from their intersections I saw the possibility of articulating different proposals with diverse mediums and focused on revising the dynamic landscape as a mental scene. Given the dimensions and duration of the commission, I considered that the project would function as an abstract composition which describes a sequence of changes in the pulsations of a night tide. The materials will be subjected to a process of graphic experimentation. The installation and de-installation of the stand will be extended as a circular process, generated from the fragmentation and rearticulation of three scientific encyclopedia’s back covers—their collage feel will be translated to the scale of the stand. — Omar Barquet

Download Brochure

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Para la comisión de un proyecto de Abstracción en Acción para Pinta NY 2013, propuse un collage mural efímero realizado con fragmentos de distintas pruebas fallidas de impresión
en xilografía, offset y fotocopias resultantes de distintos procesos y tratamientos de desgaste, tanto digitales como analógicos, que otorgan una memoria sobre estos materiales y enfatizan la idea de interferencia.

Encuentro una interesante conexión entre los lenguajes formales del Concretismo y los esquemas técnicos de ciencia relativos a espacio, paisaje, sonido, tiempo y naturaleza, como lenguajes que asumen la abstracción con objetivos en muchas ocasiones contradictorios, pero que
en cuyas intersecciones vi la posibilidad de articular distintas propuestas con medios igual- mente diversos y enfocadas a revisar el paisaje dinámico como escena mental.

Por las dimensiones y duración de la comisión, consideré que el proyecto funcionaría como una composición abstracta que des- cribe una secuencia de cambios en las pulsaciones de la marea nocturna. Los materiales serán sometidos a procesos de experimentación gráfica y todo el montaje y desmontaje del stand, será entendido como un proceso circular generado desde la fragmentación y rearticulación de tres contraportadas de una enciclopedia científica cuyo sentido de collage, será trasladado a la escala del stand. — Omar Barquet

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• Projects

Gala Berger
Wordings

Curated by Marina Reyes Franco
The Wooden Floor, Santa Ana, CA, USA

Three years ago, Gala Berger met Lin Hsuan. The patinings that Berger developed afterward, shown as part of the Sayago & Pardon collection at The Wooden Floor, seem playful and abstract yet also tell a story of migration, translation, diplomatic issues, postal bureaucracy and language. The 88 works that make up this exhibition are part of a larger bid at grasping the Chinese language-so visual, poetic, conceptual-through her own art. Painting on Mao bianzhi paper, a tool used at Chinese schools to teach traditional calligraphy, Berger attempts an intuitive approach to language. Part repetitive task, part painting as social practice, Berger knows she can, at best, be a mere translator, but that doesn’t stop her from trying.

Download Brochure | View E-book

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Gala Berger conoció a Lin Hsuan hace tres años. Las obras que Berger creó posteriormente, actualmente expuestas por la colección Sayago & Pardon en The Wooden Floor, parecen lúdicas y abstractas, sin embargo, cuentan, además, una historia de migración, traducción, burocracia postal, y de trabas diplomáticas y lingüísticas. Los 88 trabajos que componen esta exhibición, son parte de un esfuerzo superior para comprender el idioma chino-tan visual, poético, conceptual-a través de su propia obra. Pintando sobre papel Mao bianzhi, que es utilizado en las escuelas chinas para enseñar técnicas de caligrafía tradicional, Berger intent acercarse intuitivamente al lenguaje. Parte tarea repetitiva, parte pintura como práctica social, Berger sabe que puede, como mucho, ser una mera traductora, pero eso no le impide intentarlo.

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• Projects

Most part of my work explores the metaphorical capacities of space and our relation to it through his wide- ranging practice which includes installation, sculpture, photography and video. Using abstract geometry to delineate the political and social implications of his chosen environments, deconstructing the codes of objects established through everyday use. Whilst these configurations are always executed with graphic simplicity, the works are in fact complex material experiments that interrogate the functions, limits and frontiers of space and by extension, the socio-political systems which reside therein.

Traducido del inglés

La mayor parte de mi obra explora las capacidades metafóricas el espacio y nuestra relación con él mediante la amplia práctica que incluye instalación, escultura, fotografía y video. Utilizando geometría abstracta para delinear las implicaciones sociales y políticas de ambientes elegidos, deconstruyendo los códigos de los objetos establecidos mediante el uso cotidiano. Pese a que estas configuraciones son siempre ejecutadas con gran simplicidad, estas obras son de hecho complejos experimentos materiales que interrogan las funciones, límites y fronteras del espacio, y por ende, los sistemas socio-políticos en los que residen.

Selected Biographical Information

Education / Training

• Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado – FAAP.

Prizes / Fellowships

• 2012: Gasworks International Residency Programme, London, UK.
• 2012: Pipa (Prêmio Investidor Profissional de Arte), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
• 2011: Cifo – Cisneros Fontanals comission Prize, Miami, USA.
• 2009: Prêmio aquisição SP-Arte/Iguatemi – aquisição para Pinacoteca do Estado, São Paulo, Brazil.
• 2004: Bolsa Instituto Iberê Camargo/Visiting Artists Program – School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, US.
• 2003: Bolsa Faap/Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, France.
• 1995: Prêmio Michelangelo de Pintura, São Paulo, Brazil.

Solo Exhibitions

• 2013: “Diagrama”, NC-Arte, Bogotá, Colombia.
• 2013: “Geometric Progression”, Inside the White Cube, White Cube, London, UK.
• 2011: “Imóvel/Instável”, Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo, Brazil.
• 2010: “Area útil: área comum”, Galeria Silvia Cintra + Box 4 – Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
• 2009: “Seção Diagonal [Diagonal Section]”,Galeria Box 4, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
• 2008: “Geometria Informal”, Galeria Pedro Cera, Lisbon, Portugal.
• 2008: “Área Comum”, Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo, Brazil.
• 2005: “Arquipélago”, Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo, Brazil.
• 2004: “Fundo Falso”, Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo, Brazil.
• 2001: “Sem Título”, Temporada de Projetos Paço das Artes, São Paulo, Brazil.

Group Exhibitions

• 2013: “My third Country”, Frankdael , Amsterdam, Netherlands.
• 2012: “Planos de fuga”, Uma exposição em obras – Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, São Paulo, Brazil.
• 2011: “An Other Place”, Galerie Lelong, New York, US.
• 2011: “Viewpoint”, Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation 2011 Grants and Comissions Program, Miami, US.
• 2011: “8^a Bienal do Mercosul”, Ensaios de Geopoética, Porto Alegre, Brazil.
• 2010: “29ª Bienal Internacional de São Paulo, “Todo homem tem um copo de mar para navegar”, São Paulo, Brazil.
• 2010: “Para ser Construidos”, Laboratório 987, MUSAC, Leon, Spain.
• 2010: “Pontos de Vista”, Instituto Inhotim, Brumadinho, MG.
• 2008: “Color into light”, Selections from the MFAH Permanent Collection, Museum of Fine Arts Huston, US.
• 2008: “Soziale Diagramme. Planing Reconsidered”, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Germany.

Publications

• Marcius Galan – Inside the White Cube, White Cube, London, 2013.
• Art Cities of the Future – 21st-Century Avant-Gardes, Phaidon press , London, 2013.
• Desenhos [Drawings]: A -Z: Coleção Madeira Corporate Services / Adriano Pedrosa (edição e org.); Soartes, Lisboa, 2006.
• Publicado pela Coleção Madeira Corporate Services.
• Contemporary Art Brazil TransGlobe Publishing Ltd, london, 2012.
• Desdobramentos da Pintura do séc. XXI – Editora Cobogó – Rio de Janeiro, 2013.
• 8a Bienal do Mercosul: Ensaios de Geopoética: catálogo / José Rocca (curadoria Geral).
• Porto Alegre: Fundação Bienal do Mercosul, 2011.
• Catálogo da 29a Bienal de São Paulo: Há sempre um copo de mar para um homem navegar / Curadores: Agnaldo Farias, Moacir dos Anjos. São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 2010.
• Panorama da Arte Brasileira 2007: Contraditório / Moacir dos Anjos (curadoria); Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, São Paulo, 2007.

Collections

• Museu Serralves, Porto, Portugal.
• Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil.
• Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo – MAM, SP, Brazil.
• Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro – MAM Rio, Brazil.
• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, USA.
• Coleção JUMEX, México DF, Mexico.
• The Zabludowicz Collection, London, UK.
• Coleção Madeira Corporate Services, Ilha da Madeira, Portugal.
• Centro de Arte Contemporânea Inhotim, Brumadinho, Minas Gerais, Brazil.
• Cifo, Cisneros Fontanals, Miami, USA.
• Instituto Figuereido Ferraz, Ribeirão Preto, São Paulo, Brazil.

• Artists

Extract from “A Touch of Anguish (or two peas in a pod and a self-serving gourd). A Conversation Bewteen Manuel Hernández, Cuauhtémoc Medina & Thomas Glassford,” In: Cádaver Exquisitio: Thomas Glassford, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico, 2006 (…) The work relates to questioning beauty, lowering itself to the banal and simplistic, which really is the issue of taste because beauty is simply a word based on fashion and the dictates of fashion. In case of art, it’s connected to collecting. For example, I collect containers made from bull’s scrota. As a collector of objects, I try to deal with banality and take it a step backwards from the personal –from corporeal provocation. When, for example, I see and Aster, obviously speaking in respect to sterility in this extreme, for me it’s related to the gourd. (…) I’m into the surface texture and wear of everyday street life, the influence it has on society, how it becomes a passing image in time, the aspect of its defacing one’s contemporary positioning or historic presence. If one waits long enough, what seems defacing becomes classic. (…) Art is a code or a way of encoding these kinds of anguishing thoughts. There isn’t a day when we can stop thinking about art since there isn’t a day when we can stop thinking about the wrinkle that keeps growing –the one we hadn’t noticed before- or about the spot we’re in or the breakdown we’re feeling, about the anguish of realizing we’re forty-something years old.”

Traducido del inglés

Fragmento de “A Touch of Anguish (or two peas in a pod and a self-serving gourd). A Conversation Bewteen Manuel Hernández, Cuauhtémoc Medina & Thomas Glassford,” en: Cádaver Exquisitio: Thomas Glassford, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico, 2006 (…) La obra se relaciona con la cuestión de la belleza, rebajándose a lo banal y simplista, que es en realidad un problema de gusto porque la belleza es simplemente una palabra basada en la moda y lo que ésta dicta. En el caso del arte está ligada al coleccionismo. Por ejemplo, yo colecciono contenedores hechos de genitales de toro. Como coleccionista de objetos, intento considerar la banalidad y dar un paso atrás desde lo personal, desde la provocación corpórea. Cuando veo por ejemplo Aster, obviamente hablando sobre la esterilidad en este extremo, para mí está relacionada con el guaje. (…) Me interesan las texturas de las superficies y el deterioro de la vida urbana cotidiana, la influencia que tiene en la sociedad, cómo se convierte en una imagen que pasa en el tiempo, el aspecto de vandalizar nuestra postura contemporánea o presencia histórica. Si uno espera lo suficiente, lo que parece vandalizado se vuelve clásico (…) El arte es un código o una manera de codificar estas ansiedades. No hay día en el que dejemos de pensar sobre el arte porque no hay un día en el que dejemos de pensar en la arruga que sigue creciendo, la que no habíamos notado antes, o en el lugar en el que estamos o en la crisis que sentimos sobre la angustia de darnos cuenta que tenemos cuarenta y tantos años”.

Selected Biographical Information

Education / Training

• 1987: BFA, The University of Texas at Austin, USA.

Solo Exhibitions

• 2013: “SOLO Program: A Vision of Paradise”, ArtRio 2013, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
• 2011: “Pteridomania”, Sicardi Gallery, Houston, Texas, USA.
• 2010: “Xipe Totec”, Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco, UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico.
• 2010: “Afterglow”, Museo Experimental El Eco, Mexico City, Mexico.
• 2008: “Implosion is Compulsory”, Quint Contemporary Art, San Diego, California, USA.
• 2008: “Between Earth and Sky”, Sicardi Gallery, Houston, Texas, USA.
• 2006: “Cadáver Exquisito”, Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Artes, MUCA, UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico.
• 2004: “Thomas Glassford”, Finesilver Gallery, San Antonio, Texas, USA.
• 2004: “Pleasure Garden”, OMR, Mexico City, Mexico.
• 2004: “Desdoblamientos”, Galeria Principal de La Escuela de Artes. UAEMéx, Toluca.
• 2004: “Thomas Glassford”, Arcaute Arte Contemporaneo, Nuevo León, Mexico.

Group Exhibitions

• 2013: “México Inside Out: Themes in Art Since 1990”, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, Texas, USA.
• 2012: “Art Los Angeles Contemporary”, Quint Contemporary Art, USA.
• 2011: “¿Neomexicanismos? Ficciones identitarias en el Mexico de los ochento”, Museo de arte Moderno, Mexico City, Mexico.
• 2011: “Cimbra, formas especulativas y armados metafisícos”, Museo de arte Moderno, Mexico City, Mexico.
• 2011: “Cimbra, formas especulativas y armados metafisícos”, Museo de arte Moderno, Mexico City, Mexico.
• 2010: “Cosmopolitan Routes: Houston Collects Latin American Art”, MFAH, Houston, Texas, USA.
• 2010: “The Traveling Show y El Gabinete Blanco”, Fundación/Colección Jumex, Mexico City, Mexico.
• 2010: “Todo a Nada”, Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo MUAC, Mexico City, Mexico.
• 2010: “Efecto Drácula/Comunidades en Transfromación”, Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City, Mexico.
• 2009: “Hecho en casa: Una aproximación a las practicas objetuales en el arte mexicano contemporáneo”, Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City, Mexico.
• 2009: “Quint: Three Decades of Contemporary Art”, California Center for the Arts Museum, Escondido, California, USA.
• 2009: “Color Into Light:  Selections from the MFAH Collection”, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, USA.

Publications

• 2008: Salum, Rose Mary. “A Conversation with Thomas Glassford,” Literal: Latin American Voices, 40-43.
• 2008: Coffey, Mary K. Thomas Glassford: Between Earth and Sky, Sicardi Gallery exhibition catalog, Houston, TX, January 19-March 15.
• 2006: Perea, Barbara. “Thomas Glassford: Caváder Exquisito,” ARTLIES Magazine, Issue 51, Summer.
• 2004: Johnson, Ken. “Thomas Glassford and Claudia Fernández: Construcción,” Art in Review, The New York Times, January 9.
• 2003: Latchin, Leila. Photographer, Andy Bettles. “Border Crossing,” *Wallpaper, April, 123-127
• 2002: Pincus, Robert. “Reverberations & Echoes,” San Diego Union-Tribune/Night & Day, April 18, 42.
• 2002: Jusidman, Yishai. “Thomas Glassford,” Artforum, February, 136-137
• 2001: Adams, Beverly and Roberts, Brady. Phoenix Triennial, Phoenix Art Museum exhibition catalog, Phoenix, AZ, 38-40.
• 1999: Oles, James. “Thomas Glassford,” Poliester, 40-45.
• 1999: Buentello-Olivo, Mélida. “Thomas Glassford,” Chromaform, University of Texas San Antonio Art Gallery exhibition catalog, San Antonio, TX, 28.

Collections

• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas.
• Televisa Collection, Mexico.
• Gelman Collection, Mexico.
• La Colección Jumex, Mexico.
• The Bruce and Diane Halle Collection.
• Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Artes, MUCA, Mexico.
• Collezione “La Gaia”, Italy.
• Montblanc International Collection.
• CIFO Foundation.
• Jerry I. Speyer Collection.
• Neeley Collection.
• Vergel Foundation.
• Associacao Beneficente Alzira Denise Hertzog da Silva, Brazil.
• Colección Valdemarín, Madrid, Spain.
• Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo, Bajadoz, Spain.
• Art Center / Istanbul, Borusan Center for Culture and Arts, Turkey.
• Richard E. Peeler Art Center, DePauw University, Greencastle, Indiana.
• Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, Iowa.

Links

• Sicardi Gallery – Thomas Glassford
• Literal Magazine – A Conversation with Thomas Glassford
• Art This Week – Thomas Glassford

• Artists

My work is a platform of investigation where four lines of work converge. Arriving from different reflections on the idea of production and artistic product, I develop a personal questionnaire to resolve through concepts characteristic of art, beyond supports or specific media. The work begins years before its exhibition under a rigorous daily process –quotidian-­‐ where text and image start to determine the path of apparition of the object and, above all, a recognition of how far to go, so that both the construction process as well as the moments that follow the work: exhibit, documentation, collection, are conducive to a latent state of conditions. The first line of work then, runs and traverses over an Arbeit Journal (workbook) that is usually a container of written poetic acts, preparation drawings, synoptical paintings and new glossaries. In my work there is an interest in the belief that “The syntax is a quality of the soul”, as Paul Valéry said, so it substantially asks not a reading from the possible spectator, but a kind of co-­‐ responsibility from its own substance. My second and third lines to investigate are extremely formal, conceptual and plastic determinants from materiality and the inherent boundaries of each substance used. I try to meditate about sculpture, painting, drawing and photography from their humanistic affiliation, from its undeniable quality as anthropological links; which is why my work is a kind of tracking, punctual, specific, not of art history, but of gaps where, although special circumstances exist, an inexplicable and elusive emptiness evidences a human potential almost lost, forgotten. In these moments of rupture, these breaks on the folded surface of time and space are axes of my personal network, which has been formed 12 years ago. It allows me not only a congruent and organic structure between each work, but it favors territories mainly unique and close to my own entity. Around the idea of painting and sculpture, for example, the raw materials gesticulate their own resonance; they limit the scope of form that the tooling and hand dissect, while the drawing is that possibility of looking at what one desires, almost immediately, almost simultaneously to the desire, like photography. The last line of investigation is the one that defines the links. My work is a field of action for the spectator, an observatory, an inventory. The work is not hermetic but neither immediate. Requires and is required, softens up when seen, solidifies itself at the sight. In the meantime (sway), my interest is to proliferate –more than to explain-­‐ an interest for the questions. Try to make the spectator believe that we surely inhabit an enormous and indecipherable question, and as beings from that realm, we converse through questions, and not through answers, with things. This correspondence and exchange could explain the diversity of appearances in my work. It is not a reflex of a pretentious question. It is evidence of the simplest question that we haven’t been able to formulate. The art work, for me, is that one presence whose origin never distorts its aim, and whose aim extols every moment of its origin. It is my way to have a discussion and to generate bonds from small questions for a more and more extensive listing of answers

Mi obra es una plataforma de investigación en donde convergen cuatro líneas de trabajo. A partir de distintas reflexiones en torno a la idea de producción y producto artístico, desarrollo un interrogatorio personal a resolver mediante los conceptos propios del arte, más allá de soportes o medios específicos. El trabajo comienza años antes de su exhibición bajo un riguroso proceso diario –cotidiano-­‐ en donde texto e imágenes comienzan a determinar la ruta de aparición del objeto y, sobretodo, un reconocimiento de hasta dónde ha de detenerse, para que tanto proceso constructivo como los momentos que la a obra suceden: exhibición, documentación, coleccionismo, propicien un estado latente de condiciones. La primera línea de trabajo entonces, corre y atraviesa sobre un Arbeit Journal (libro de trabajo), que usualmente es contenedor de actos poéticos escritos, dibujos preparatorios, cuadros sinópticos y glosarios nuevos. En mi obra existe un interés en la creencia de que “La sintaxis es una cualidad del alma”, según Paul Valéry, por lo que sustancialmente solicita no una lectura del espectador posible, sino una especie de co-­‐responsabilidad desde su propia sustancia. Mi segunda y tercera línea a investigar son sumamente formales, determinantes conceptuales y plásticas a partir de la materialidad y los alcances propios de cada sustancia a utilizar. Intento reflexionar acerca de la escultura, la pintura, el dibujo y la fotografía desde su afiliación humanística, desde su innegable cualidad de eslabón antropológico; por ello, mi obra es una clase de rastreo, puntual, específico, no de la historia del arte, sino de las brechas en donde, si bien existen circunstancias particulares, un vacío inexplicable e inasible evidencia un potencial humano casi perdido, olvidado. Esos momentos de ruptura, esos quiebres sobre la superficie plegada del tiempo y el espacio, son ejes de mi red personal, que se ha venido conformando desde hace 12 años. Me permite no sólo una estructuración congruente y orgánica entre cada obra, sino que propicia territorios mayormente únicos y apegados a mi propia entidad. En torno a la idea de pintura y escultura, por ejemplo, las materias primas gesticulan su propia resonancia, delimitan en sí los alcances de la forma, que el herramental y la mano disecan, mientras que el dibujo es aquella posibilidad de mirar lo que se desea, casi inmediatamente, casi simultáneo al deseo, como la fotografía. La última línea de investigación es la que define: los vínculos. Mi obra es un campo de acción para el espectador, un observatorio, un inventario. No es una obra hermética pero tampoco inmediata. Exige y es exigida, se reblandece al ser vista, se solidifica en la mirada. En ese intervalo (vaivén), mi interés es el de contagiar -­‐más que explicar-­‐ el interés por las preguntas. Hacer creer que seguramente habitamos una pregunta enorme e indescifrable, y que como seres de ese paraje, dialogamos a través de preguntas, y no de respuestas, con las cosas. Esa correspondencia e intercambio podría explicar la diversidad de apariencias de mi trabajo. No es un reflejo de una respuesta pretenciosa. Es una evidencia de la pregunta más simple que no hemos sabido formular. La obra de arte para mí es aquella presencia que nunca tergiversa su fin, y cuyo fin enaltece cada momento de su origen

Selected Biographical Information

Education / Training

• UNAM, Licenciado en Diseño Industrial, Mexico City, Mexico.
• INBA La Esmeralda, Licenciado en Artes Plásticas, Mexico City, Mexico.

Prizes / Fellowships

• 2005-2006: Beca Jóvenes Creadores Mexico City, FONCA, CONACULTA.
• 2012: Beca Sistema Nacional de Creadores Mexico City, FONCA, CONACULTA.

Solo Exhibitions

• 2013: “Think Tanks (im-producción reciente)”, Arróniz Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, Mexico.
• 2010: “Speranza (Colectivo Viernes)”, El 52 (Galería OMR), Mexico City, Mexico.
• 2009: “Cannibal fantasy (reciprocity)”, KBK Gallery, Mexico City, Mexico.
• 2008: “The eye will learn to long a world beyond reach”, Trolebús Galería, Mexico City, Mexico.
• 2006: “Al principio siempre era domingo”, KBK Gallery, Mexico City, Mexico.
• 2004: “Star Border”, Galería José María Velasco, INBA, Mexico City, Mexico.
• 2004: “Elephant Island Workshop”, Galería Nina Menocal, Mexico City, Mexico.
• 1998: “Fragmentos de Circo”, Casa de Cultura Rosario Castellanos, Mexico City, Mexico.

Group Exhibitions

• 2013: “Rudimentum”, Christinger De Mayo, Zurich, Switzerland.
• 2012: “Poule!”, Colección Júmex, 
Mexico City, Mexico.
• 2011: “Now”, Colección Júmex, Instututo Cultural Cabañas, Guadalajara, Mexico.
• 2011: “Re-Cover”, Casa del Lago, Mexico City, Mexico.
• 2009: “Les Enfants Terribles”, Colección Júmex, Mexico City, Mexico.
• 2007-2009: “Escultura Social: A new generation of art from Mexico City”, Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, North Carolina, USA / Museo Alameda, San Antonio Texas USA / MCA Chicago USA.
• 2005: “Wunderkammer II: landscapes”, Galería Nina Menocal, Mexico City, Mexico.
• 2005: “Panoramic put off center”, X-­Teresa Arte Actual CONACULTA, Mexico City, Mexico.
• 2005: “Cheap & Chic”, Galería Origina, Mexico City, Mexico.

Publications

• 2013: Palabras sobre el mar incierto, Arte al Día Internacional 144, Santiago Espinosa de los Monteros.
• 2013: Tempest Fugit: The Sea In-between, Deborah Deboer.
• 2011: Cuadernos y márgenes, Editorial Acapulco.
• 2010: Les Enfants Terribles, Michel Blancsubé.
• 2009: The Simplicity of Art to the Significance of life, Britanny Titus.
• 2009: Nuevos ritos, Revista Poder, P.80-‐83, Adriana Herrera.
• 2009: Artista Caníbal, El Universal, Sonia Sierra.
• 2009: Árbol del Lenguaje, Excelsior, Patricia Cordero.
• 2006: Escultura Social (A new generation of art from Mexico City), P.97‐100, Julie Rodrigues Widholm.

Collections

• Fundación / Colección Jumex.
• Colección Steven & Solita Mishaan.
• Colección Teófilo Cohen.
• Colección Boris Hirmas.
• Jack Tilton Gallery.

Links

• fernandocarabajal.com
• Now: works Jumex Collection
• Interview with Fernando Carabajal
• Blog: The Simplicity of Art to the Significance of Life
• Mexartdb: Fernando Carabajal

• Artists

Abstraction in Action, a project by Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, is an interactive project born out of research on the contemporary production of abstract art in Latin America. For its launch at Pinta NYC, the project features a site specific installation by Mexican artist Omar Barquet. The artist presents “Night Tide”, an ephemeral collage mural made with fragments of various failed tests of xylography, offset and photocopy prints whose composition describes the changes in the pulsations of a night tide.

You can download the AIA publication by clicking Night Tide, Pinta 2013

• Happenings

Selected Biographical Information

Education / Training

• Diploma de Arquitectura, Universidad Nacional de Rosario, Argentina.

Prizes / Fellowships

• United States Artists Fellowship (USA Fellowship)  (2012 Nominees).
• South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship for Visual & Media Artist.
• Visiting Artist Fellowship -American Academy in Rome -New York City & Rome Italy.
• Visiting Artist – The Getty Center for the History of Art & the Humanities, Santa Monica, California.

Solo Exhibitions

• 2008: “The Absent City“, Museum of Contemporary Art, Madison, WI, USA.
• 2007:  “The Peace Project”, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Colorado, USA.
• 2003:  Miami Art Museum, Miami, USA.
• 2002:  The University of Miami, USA.

Group Exhibitions

• 2012: “Temporary Structures“, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, USA.
• 2011: “Time of Friendship”, Museum of Art of Fort Lauderdale, Fort Lauderdale, USA.
• 2006: “Brasil Ainda Moderno”, Palais de la Porte Doree, Paris, France.
• 2004: Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, Palm Beach, USA.
• 2004: Ogden Museum of Art, New Orleans, USA.
• 2003: Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York, USA.
• 2003: Centre International pour la Ville, l’Architecture et le Paysage, Brussels, Belgium.
• 2001: Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, USA.
• 2000: Foundation Pour l’Architecture, Brussels, Belgium.
• 2000: Institut Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, Arc et Senans, France.
• 1999: Museum of Contemporary Art, MOCA, North Miami, USA.

Publications

• 2013: Marie Claire, Criara, Silvia ‘Miami or not Miami’’,  March, Milano, Italy.
• 2011:  Summa + # 115, Behar, Roberto, “Miami:  Ciudad del Mañana”, Junio 2011. Edición en Español, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
• 2011: Wallpaper. McKenzie, Dominic, Miami Urban Renaissance, Design Fashion Art Life Style Digital Edition. London, United Kingdom.
• 2010: Barzon. Alfonso Corona Martinez, “Miami Stars, Una Conversacion Con Rosario Marquardt  Y  Roberto Behar.”  Buenos Aires, Argentina.
• 2010: The Austin Chronicle, Best of Austin 2010. Austin, USA.
• 2010: Architonic. Sokol, David. “Form Follows Fear: in conversation with R. Behar & R. Marquardt”, Zurich, Switzerland.
• 2008: Le Monde  3-29-08 Champenois, MIchele. “Flanerie a Miami”, Paris, France.
• 2007: Art Nexus,  Agosto 2007, Julieta Gonzalez, “Roberto Behar & Rosario Marquardt’s Journey into the City”, Miami, USA.
• 2007: Wallpaper Miami Guide. London, United Kindom.
• 2007: La Voz Nueva  5-03-07 Bain, Don. “A Peaceful Place for Denver”, Denver, USA.
• 2007: The Denver Post,  4-18-07, MacMillan, Kyle. “Art and Optimism in The Peace Project”, Denver, USA.

• Artists

I explore the materiality of language, the phonetic, visual and poetic dimensions of a text or a word as a two-and three-dimensional entity in the context of human relations. I am drawn to what lies among the uttered and the suppressed. For thinking dictates form, a line, an accent, the cadence of silence, all form narratives both in drawing and language. I expose the intersection of the aural and the visual, one where words, text and involuntary sounds are transformed into a visible, physical form. Eventually words are muffled, subtracted, removed from speech, configuring blocks or silent pauses. In acoustic wall #1 what appears like voiceless theater notations (images 1-2) confronts the viewer with vinyl text phrases (“she whispers to herself,” “quite loud this time,” “faint pause,” “stops herself”) which stretch across a twenty-seven feet wall. In phonetic neon [aha], 2011,(image 3) I distill down the excess of language to make apparent an unintentional sound. Aha outlines a sonorous pause, an involuntary gap in between words. Four, thirty-three, 2011,  (image 4) 1 minute=1 inch, evokes John Cage’s statement that silence is not acoustic, highlighting physically the activity of sound in an environment. Snippets (images 7-10) is a collection of videos of an average duration of 1 minute, of everyday situations that seem to have gone astray. An elevator stops between floors, a woman whispers to herself, a child fumbles for words.  Disembodied characters are aware of their absurd fate, while they do not exist except in the viewer’s imagination. Yet at the end it is all the same, what we don’t see is just as important as what we perceive. Technically these silent subtitled narratives that derive from my writing fade—in and out—on a black slate devoid or other images. Drawn from the video’s discarded sound, recorded words vibrate in inaudible patterns, becoming the graphic representation of the cadence of my voice.

Traducido del inglés

Exploro la materialidad del lenguaje, las dimensiones fonéticas visuales y poéticas de un texto o de una palabra como entidad bidimensional y tridimensional en el contexto de las relaciones humanas. Me atrae aquello que se encuentra entre lo pronunciado y lo reprimido.  Debido a que el pensamiento dicta la forma, una línea, un acento, la cadencia del silencio, todos conforman narrativas en el dibujo y en el lenguaje. Revelo la intersección de lo aural y lo visual; donde las palabras, el texto y los sonidos involuntarios se transforman en formas visibles y físicas. Eventualmente las palabras se reprimen, se substraen, se remueven del habla, configurando bloques de pausas silenciosas.   En pared acustica #1(acoustic wall #1), lo que aparentan ser notaciones teatrales sin voz (imágenes 1-2), confrontan al espectador con frases de texto en vinilo (“susurra a sí misma”, “muy alto esta vez”, “tenue pausa”, “se detiene a si misma”), las cuales se extienden a lo largo de un muro de más de ocho metros. En neón fonético [aha] 2011 (phonetic neon[aha])  (imagen 3), depuro el exceso del lenguaje para revelar un sonido accidental. Aha destaca una pausa sonora, un espacio involuntario entre palabras. Cuatro, treinta y tres, 2011 (four thirty-three)(imagen 4), 1 minuto = 1 pulgada, evoca la declaración de John Cage de que el silencio no es acústico, enfatizando físicamente la actividad del sonido en un ambiente.   Breves (snippets) (imagenes 7-10) es una colección de videos con una duración promedio de un minuto, de situaciones cotidianas que parecen estar fuera de control. Un elevador se para entre pisos, una mujer se susurra a sí misma, un niño balbucea en busca de palabras. Personajes incorpóreos se percatan de su destino absurdo, mientras que no existen excepto en la imaginación del espectador. Sin embargo al final todo es lo mismo, lo que no vemos es igual de importante de lo que percibimos. Técnicamente estas narrativas subtituladas silentes que provienen de mi escritura, se desvanecen (por dentro y por fuera) en un fondo negro, carente de otras imágenes. Procedentes del sonido descartado del video, palabras grabadas vibran visualmente en patrones inaudibles, convirtiéndose en representaciones gráficas de la cadencia de mi voz.

Selected Biographical Information

Education / Training

• MFA School of Visual Arts, NYC.
• BFA School of Visual Arts, NYC.

Prizes / Fellowships

• 2012: Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Fellowship Residency, Amherst, VA.
• 2012: The Fountainhead Residency, Miami, FL.
• 2010-2011: The Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation Space Program, New York.
• 2011: Nominated for the Rema Hort Mann Foundation grant.
• 2002: The Banff Centre for the Arts Residency, Alberta, Canada.
• 2000: MFA Fellowship School of Visual Arts, New York, NY.
• 1994: AIM Program, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, NY.

Solo Exhibitions

• 2012: “On AIR”, RH Gallery, New York, NY.
• 2008: “Snippets”, Sonja Roesch Gallery, Houston, TX.
• 2007: “Like you I Forgot”, Alejandra von Hartz Gallery, Miami, FL.
• 2003: “who, what, where”, Galerie Articule, Montreal, Canada.
• 2002: “who, what, where”, Banff, Centre for the Arts, Alberta, Canada.

Group Exhibitions 

• 2013: RH Gallery, NYC.
• 2012: Hunter College Time Square Art Gallery, New York, NY.
• 2011: RH Gallery, New York, NYC.
• 2010: Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand.
• 2009: RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.
• 2008: PS1/MOMA Center for Contemporary Art, LIC, New York.
• 2007: Non Objective, Sydney, Australia.
• 2006: Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia.
• 2005: Jersey City Museum, NJ.
• 2005: Alejandra von Hartz Gallery, Miami, Florida.

Publications

• Batet, Janet, “El Arte: Un lenguaje mas alla de la forma”, El Nuevo Herald, Miami, FL, September 10, 2013.
• Roniger, Taney, “On Air”, Soledad Arias, RH Gallery, New York, NY. On Verge, Alternative Art Criticism. July 6  2012.
• Kartofel, Graciela, “Notations: The Cage Effect Today”, Hunter College Art Galleries, New York, Art Nexus Magazine, Issue # 85 pages, 115-117, June, 2012.
• Bardier, Laura, “Soledad Arias”, RH Gallery, Arte Al Dia International Magazine. Issue #139, page 106, June, 2012.
• Tschida, Anne Knight Arts. Text based show expresses more than what words can say. May 4, 2012.
• Miranda, Carolina A. Soledad Arias, ON AIR. “This Week: Must-See Arts in the City.” WNYC (May 2, 2012).
• “Notations: The Cage Effect Today”, Exhibition Catalogue. Hunter College/Time Square Gallery, February 2012.
• Index Issue No. 2, September 2011, Melbourne, Australia, Edition of 50. Published by Justin Andrews.
• Garland Fielder, Soledad Arias, Gallery Sonja Roesch. Artlies Contemporary Art Magazine, Issue 61, Spring 2009, Houston, Texas.
• Literal magazine, Latin American voices, Soledad arias,Words vibrate, Pages 14-16, Volume 16. Spring 2009.
• Garland Fielder, “Critics’s picks”, Artforum online, Accrochage, Gallery Sonja Roesch, Houston, Texas, January 2009.
• When Art (or in what regard) a collaborative project initiated by Jannette Doyle. Socrates Sculpture Park, August 2007.
• Fontana, Lilia. Soledad Arias, Alejandra von Hartz Gallery, Arte al Dia International, Issue 119, page 119, june 2007.
• Edith Newhall, Traveling Show finds A World of Influences, ICA, Bartram’s Garden host works, The Philadelphia Inquirer.
• The Arts, p. 31  May 12, 2006.
• Reisman, Sara. Soft Sites, exhibition publication. Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadephia, April 2006.
• “Dynasty”, MC Gallery, New York, Essay for exhibition catalogue, 2006.
• Parish, Josh, Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens Tribune, page 22, volume 35 #34, Queens Culture 2005.
• Queens Tribune. “Float” Over To LIC for Socrates Exhibit., Page 25, volume 35 #31. August 4, 2005.
• Triff, Alfredo. City Views and Latin News. Miami News Times, volume 20, issue 3, p.52 April, 2005.
• Arteamericas, Exhbition catalogue, 2005. Miami, Florida.
• Fischer, Berit, “Memento: Soledad Arias and Madeline Djerejian”, New York Arts, International Edition, Vol. 9 No 12, p.84 January/ February 2004.
• Balcaen, Jo-Anne, “Who what where”, annual programmation catalogue, 2003-2004, galerie articule, Montreal, Canada.
• Acimovic, Kathy, The Link, Art in the Open, Soledad Arias’ exhibit is strewn about Montreal. Volume 24, issue 08, p.08. September 7, 2003.
• Woodley, Mathew. Montreal Mirror Arts. Talking Pennants. Art Listings Selection, September, 2003.
• Voir, Art listings, September, 2003, Montreal, Canada.
• Gilmour, Brett. Banff Centre artist challenges self-perception through Art. Banff Crag & Canyon, page 6, September 4, 2002.
• Sirmans, Franklin. “The S-Files”. Time Out New York. Issue No. 255, p.61 August 10-17, 2000. “The S-Files”. Curated by Deborah Cullen and Yasmin Ramirez. El Museo del Barrio, NY. Exhibition catalogue, p. 12, 2000.
• Escallon, Ana Maria,” A Visual Dialogue Through the Americas”, The Hickory Museum of Art, North Carolina, 1999.
• Escallon, Ana Maria,” Landscapes”,The Art Museum of the Americas, Exhibition catalogue, p. 18, 1997.
• Time Capsule, “A Concise Encyclopedia by Women Artists”, Performers and Writers, Creative Time, NY, 1995.
• “Artists in the Marketplace”, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Exhibition catalogue, Essay by Marysol Nieves, 1994.
• Cotter, Holland, New York Times, A Showcase of Artists learning their Business, August 19, 1994.

• Artists