Eliana Willis

More stories

  • 200 Shares119 Views

    in Exhibitions

    ‘Innovation Is Not Repetition’: Living Legend Gaetano Pesce on His Boundary-Pushing Furniture Design and ‘Mass-Produced Originals’

    Gaetano Pesce—the pioneering artist, industrial designer, and architect—is the subject of the exhibition “Dear Future” (through March 31) at the Future Perfect gallery in Los Angeles. Constituting a wide swath of the octogenarian’s life-affirming works, the exhibition sits comfortably in the storied Goldwyn House, the gallery’s new L.A. flagship and historic Hollywood mansion that once belonged to film producer and art collector Samuel Goldwyn.
    “Dear Future” is an intriguing title for a show. Pesce, an Italian native who now calls New York home, certainly has a lot to tell the future, having been a leader in the design and architecture space for over five decades. So he has sprinkled the Goldwyn House with a variety of objects from his oeuvre—that is, topics of conversation he’d like to bring up with the future. These include lively new works, re-editions of iconic designs, and rarely seen historic pieces.
    “The future is a beautiful moment,” Pesce told Arnet News, speaking of the future in the present tense. “I would like to tell the future that everything is possible, and we should give thanks for that. My work is something that people can smile about. It is a very cheerful and colorful show—and with a very positive message.”
    Installation view of Gaetano Pesce’s “Dear Future” exhibition. Photo: Rich Stapleton. Courtesy of the Future Perfect gallery.
    Pesce emerged from the Italian Radical Design movement of the 1960s. The Florence-based group of designers and architects produced era-defining furnishings and products that looked to youth culture and the personality-driven ethos of the art world at the time. It was a forward-looking rebellion against the consumer-oriented industrial perfection of 20th-century Modernism.
    Pesce was an eager participant in this blurring of boundaries between art, design, architecture, and a pop sensibility. As the gallery’s founder David Alhadeff said, “If Modernist architecture and design disregarded the individual and attempted to standardize the human spirit, Pesce’s life’s work has been to upend prescriptive modes of thinking—a form of counter-design that favors incoherence, unpredictability, eccentricity, and originality.”
    Pesce would often imbue the effervescent style of his work with social critique. His first and perhaps best-known furniture series, “Up,” was released in 1969 with manufacturer B&B Italia, centered around a large reclining chair dubbed La Mamma. The chair’s generously curved contours were inspired by the fertility goddess Venus of Willendorf. Yet, its attached ottoman resembling a ball and chain underscored society’s supplication to the patriarchy. This was Pesce’s comment on women’s rights at the height of second-wave feminism.
    Gaetano Pesce with B&B Italia, UP 5-6, in cork. Courtesy of the Future Perfect gallery.
    “The story of that chair is fantastic,” Pesce told Artnet News, “because that was a time when I was thinking that a piece of furniture can displace a political point of view. It was about the prejudice of men, the insecurity of men, the stupid ways men treat women. Not only was it a political work, it was also the beginning of design as expression, the beginning of design entering the field of art. It had become figurative.” In “Dear Future,” Pesce included a new edition of the chair made from recycled bottle corks sourced from Italy, one of only two that have been made.
    Gaetano Pesce, Square Airport Lamp. Photo: Elizabeth Carababas. Courtesy of the Future Perfect gallery.
    Uniformity had become anathema to Pesce’s philosophy, as seen in the crudeness of his striking Square Airport Lamp (1986/1994), a light sculpture consisting of a flexible rubber membrane studded with small light bulbs. Although made from a mold, no two lamps are alike, due to the imperfections that arise from the hand-mixing and pouring of colored urethane.
    Pesce committed to creating what he called “mass-produced originals” that centered human touch, like his ongoing “Nobody’s Perfect” chair series (2002/2019–present). Cast by hand without standardized colors or dimensions, and poured freeform by the artist himself, each chair is unique.
    Gaetano Pesce, Nobody’s Perfect chair. Photo: Elizabeth Carababas. Courtesy of the Future Perfect gallery.
    “I have been saying this since I was still in school and made a manifesto about it,” Pesce explained. “I think copied material is the past. We are living in a period of uniqueness that is possible because we have the technology to make all-new objects. The first company that helped me realize this was Cassina. We did a series of chairs called ‘Sit Down,’ where each piece was similar to one another but not exactly the same. This is always more and more possible, because technology is refined all the time.”
    “Innovation is something that helps people live better,” he continued, “and discover new things, to think differently from one day to the next. Innovation is not repetition.”
    Gaetano Pesce, Multicolored Lamp with Rocks (2022). Courtesy of the Future Perfect gallery.
    Pesce’s insistence on originality is again expressed in his more recent “Multicolored Lamps with Rocks” series, cast in resin from stones collected by the artist himself, reminiscent of the meditative act of stacking stones into piles. Two of these appear in the show, as do Pesce’s series of pliable, amorphous resin vases, some seeming to ooze like molten lava, while others appear to grow feet or tentacles.
    Installation view, River Table (2012) in foreground. Photo: Rich Stapleton. Courtesy of the Future Perfect gallery.
    Another theme in Pesce’s work has been humankind’s relationship to nature. For “Dear Future,” he included River Table (2012), a rare item from his “Six Tables on Water” series, a collection of six monumental waterscapes representing an ocean, lagoon, pond, puddle, river, and lake. With thick legs reminiscent of tree trunks, River Table’s clear surfaces evoke water’s transparency or cloudiness, with patches of darker pigment suggestive of chemical pollutants.
    “Water is alive, it’s a pure element; We mustn’t pollute it,” Pesce said of this piece. “Design can be a way to say, ‘be careful, we are destroying something precious.”
    Part of “Dear Future,” Pesce’s theoretical letter to an unknowable time, is to send a special message to young people, the designers and architects of tomorrow. “Each of us has something inside,” he said. “Young people should not look too much to magazines or follow this or that. It is important to understand what they have inside—that inside is unique. They have to express that. This is the future.”
    “Gaetano Pesce: Dear Future,” through March 31, 2023, Goldwyn House, Los Angeles (by appointment only: 323-202-2025).

    More Trending Stories:
    A Wall Street Billionaire Shot Himself in His Family Office. His Death Is Reverberating in the Museum World, and the Art Market
    Researchers in Vietnam Discovered That Two Deer Antlers Languishing in Museum Storage Are Actually 2,000-Year-Old Musical Instruments
    ‘That Little Piece of Energy Is Magnified’: Artist Wangechi Mutu on Honoring the Spirit of the Natural World in Her Fantastical Works
    We Asked ChatGPT About Art Theory. It Led Us Down a Rabbit Hole So Perplexing We Had to Ask Hal Foster for a Reality Check
    ‘Innovation Is Not Repetition’: Living Legend Gaetano Pesce on His Boundary-Pushing Furniture Design and ‘Mass-Produced Originals’
    Hit Mockumentary ‘Cunk on Earth’ Offers an Absurdly Comic Take on World History. Here Are 5 Things It Gets Right About Art
    A Photographer Who Found Instagram Fame for His Striking Portraits Has Confessed His Images Were Actually A.I.-Generated
    After Sending ‘Girl With a Pearl Earring’ Out on Loan, the Mauritshuis Has Hung an A.I. Facsimile in Its Place. Fans Are Not Happy
    Archaeologists Believe a Piece of Flotsam That Washed Up on a New York Beach Could be Part of an 1821 Shipwreck
    Follow Artnet News on Facebook: Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More

  • 200 Shares149 Views

    in Exhibitions

    Artist Paul Kremer Co-Created His Latest Series of Abstract Floral Paintings With an Unlikely Collaborator: ChatGPT

    From its title, “Blooms,” Paul Kremer’s latest series of paintings, which will anchor his new exhibition at Library Street Collective, seems every bit organic in name, subject, and nature. Featuring abstract variations of flowers, each biotic in form and bold in color, the canvases recall Color Field hallmarks as much as Henri Matisse’s cut-outs—squaring with and expanding on the Houston-based artist’s visual language. 
    But while these “Blooms” were created with his standard tools—paints, paintbrush, canvas—Kremer also had in his corner a new collaborator: ChatGPT, the A.I. large language model.
    “I wanted a fast way to manipulate shapes and color palettes,” he told Artnet News. “I realized that ChatGPT could help me brush up on my basic coding skills, allowing me to develop a suite of online tools to import drawings and color palettes, and generate new ideas.”
    Installation view of “Paul Kremer: Spring” at Library Street Collective. Photo: PD Rearick, courtesy of Library Street Collective.
    Developed by OpenAI, ChatGPT, in its most recent iteration, GPT-3, has been made relatively accessible as a conversational A.I. platform. The model has been trained on a massive corpus of text data scraped from the internet, which means users can interact with it to source answers to burning questions or, more often than not, to generate natural language material, from high-school essays to rap lyrics.
    Kremer leveraged the model’s generative capabilities in the exploratory phase of “Blooms,” getting it to produce changeable compositions based on inputs of various shapes and colors. To facilitate this process, he teamed up with artist and programmer Leander Herzog to develop software that would enable him to easily feed, randomize, and manipulate the model’s outputs.
    Paul Kremer, Bloom 09 (2023). Photo courtesy of the artist’s studio and Library Street Collective
    Using the customized software, he said, “I can select and manipulate individual shapes from various sets of random shapes and adjust their position, size, and rotation. I can drag and drop colors onto these shapes and even randomize colors derived from my own color palettes.”
    These experiments would then inspire new approaches to his latest series of paintings. “The outcomes often surprise me and spur on new ideas,” he added. “I save and refine these files, then redraw and paint them on canvas.”
    The use of digital tools as part of a creative process—and even creating those tools through the process, as in the case with “Blooms”—befits a self-taught artist with a background in web design. But more so, it builds on the conceptual framework that has informed Kremer’s creative practice.
    Installation view of “Paul Kremer: Spring” at Library Street Collective. Photo: PD Rearick, courtesy of Library Street Collective.
    Born in 1971, Kremer has been noted for his Minimalist abstractions of everyday forms in paintings that maximize color to channel expressive and lively immediacy. His artistic work, which he began in the 2010s, has not been without digital intervention, whether through his use of Google image searches or photoshop manipulations. (For what it’s worth, Kremer is also behind the wildly viral Tumblr site, Great Art in Ugly Rooms.) 
    “Making tools based off of my paintings to create variations of those paintings has been a part of my past and will always be a part of what I do,” he said. “I don’t want my art to be stuck in either the digital or physical world. I see the idea of both feeding off of each other as my art.”
    That Kremer has now availed himself of A.I. makes sense considering the explosive popularity of the technology and with it, generative art. His use, he clarified, is strictly that of an “art-making tool,” as opposed to an art-generating machine.
    He explained: “I am not asking [the A.I.] to create paintings in my style; I’m asking it to display my art in certain ways so that I can manipulate it.”
    Installation view of “Paul Kremer: Spring” at Library Street Collective. Photo: PD Rearick, courtesy of Library Street Collective.
    While there’s been a growing chorus of voices against A.I., which Kremer characterizes as “a certain fear / dismissiveness / snobbishness” toward the technology, for him, there remains creative potential in “using new tools for otherwise ancient practices.”
    He points to a round silicone coaster he owns, which could be bent into different shapes to cast interesting shadows—certainly visual fodder for one of his canvases.
    “I want to create a digital tool that helps me instantly visualize many variations of that. I might paint these images or even recreate these forms into large-scale silicone sculptures that people can manipulate themselves,” he said. “How do I do that? Why not start with A.I.?”
    “Paul Kremer: Spring” is on view at Library Street Collective, 1274 Library Street, Detroit, March 4–April 26, 2023. 
    Follow Artnet News on Facebook: Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More

  • 263 Shares179 Views

    in Exhibitions

    The Largest Touring Immersive Art Experience Is Bringing 50 Burning Man Style Sculptures to Las Vegas Before It Hits the Road

    Forget animated light projections. Transfix, the latest in immersive art experiences, will bring 50 interactive, kinetic, illuminated artworks—including pyrotechnics—to Las Vegas, in the first stop of a planned tour that will bring monumental, festival-style works to cities across the U.S.
    The project is the brainchild of Michael Blatter and Tom Stinchfield of New York marketing agency Mirrorball. They originally conceived of the idea during the pandemic as a free, COVID-friendly event staged in Brooklyn Bridge Park that would support artists who normally made work for large-scale festivals like the Burning Man gathering in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert.
    “These things shouldn’t be gathering dust in a warehouse—they should be out on the road, they should be installed somewhere where people can enjoy them and be as inspired by them as we are,” Stinchfield told Artnet News.
    “Most of the artists who make these big pieces for these events are only doing it out of passion, which is really beautiful. But afterward, it’s often out of their pocket to bring it back to wherever they may live, and store it in a warehouse or their studio, and they end up losing money,” he added. “It’s a very niche market to to sell a piece of art that’s five stories tall!”

    [embedded content]

    Stinchfield and Blatter actually met years ago through a mutual friend who suggested Stinchfield might benefit creatively from accompanying Blatter on one of his annual trips to Burning Man.
    “Michael said, ‘I’m not gonna take some random person to Burning Man.’ We had lunch, and about a week later we were sharing an RV in the desert,” Stinchfield recalled.
    The Brooklyn Bridge Park project to showcase the kind of art they encountered there never came to fruition. But it did become the basis of the business plan for Transfix, which the duo likens to a high-production value rock tour for experiential art.
    They hope that Transfix will help create a broader audience for the ambitious, large-scale works created for Burning Man and other similar events. (Only half of the art was originally created for the Nevada gathering.)
    Christopher Bauder & KiNK, AXION. Photo by Ralph Larmann, courtesy of the artist and Transfix.
    “This is art that was never created within the existing museum and gallery infrastructure,” Blatter told Artnet News. “This art is gigantic, it’s illuminated, some of it’s fire-breathing—it’s certainly not traditional museum-style art.”
    Transfix aims to create a new source of income for this kind of work by paying participating artists a rental fee for their artworks.
    “We can give artists predictable income, and free up space in their studios while giving these pieces a place to be seen and recognized by the masses,” Stinchfield said, noting that many of the artists they approached were so eager to stop having to store these works that they would have happily lent them for free.
    The Las Vegas edition will open at Resorts World in April, and will run through at least September—although that could be extended if things go well.
    Marco Cochrane, R-Evolution. Photo courtesy of the artist and TRANSFIX.
    There will be works by artists such as Marco Cochrane, Foldhaus Collective, Christopher Schardt, Playmodes, HOTTEA, and Kevin Clark. The largest work is Christopher Bauder and KiNK’s Axion, a 10,000-square-foot illuminated sonic experiential installation that has never been shown in the U.S.
    “We’re taking the underbelly of a 747 to fly that piece over here from Berlin,” Stinchfield said.
    Works will be on view in 130 shipping containers in a sprawling 200,000 square-foot outdoor venue, with two-story viewing platforms to experience the monumental art from multiple vantage points—plus 10 bars where you can grab a drink. (Exploring the entire maze-like exhibition is expected to take about two hours.)
    “It will be a great place to hang out and experience art in a whole new way,” Blatter said.
    Pablo González Vargas, ILUMINA. Photo courtesy of the artist and TRANSFIX.
    If Transfix’s ticket sales prove profitable, the proceeds will be used to commission new works for future residencies, with plans for stops in Los Angeles, Miami, New York, and Chicago.
    “I’ve been participating as a sculpture artist at Burning Man since 1999, and I can tell you Burning Man creative culture is a gold mine of large-scale art. We pioneered massive, immersive and experiential art out there in that dessert,” Kate Raudenbush, whose 25-foot mirrored pyramid As Above, So Below is one of the inaugural works at Transfix, told Artnet News in an email.
    She’s tired of being told that displaying her monumental works for free will provide valuable “exposure,” and is eager to create even bigger and more ambitious projects as Transfix takes off.
    “I’m already dreaming up new ideas!” Raudenbush said.
    “The ultimate goal is to build a creative ecosystem where people can be inspired by this art, but also give artists space to create,” Stinchfield added. “What we’re most excited about is writing that first check to an artist commissioning a piece that they’ve dreamed of their whole life that nobody would ever fund.”
    Follow Artnet News on Facebook: Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More

  • 213 Shares109 Views

    in Exhibitions

    Collect Fair Opens in London, Offering Unique Craft and Design Objects by Contemporary Artist-Makers Around the World

    Now in its 19th year, Collect Art Fair returns (March 3–5) to Somerset House—the impressive neoclassical structure on the banks of the Thames—showcasing unique contemporary craft and design from close to 40 international galleries representing more than 400 living artist-makers. The fair attracted over 9,100 visitors in 2022.
    “Collectors, interior designers, art advisors, and enthusiasts will be vying with arts institutions, such as the Victoria & Albert Museum, to buy and commission contemporary craft across disciplines and materials,” according to fair organizers. Fair-goers will discover works spanning ceramics, glass, lacquer, jewelry, metalwork, textiles and fiber, wood and paper, as well as reused, repurposed, and recycled materials.
    Collect 2023 at Somerset House in the U.K. Photo: David Parry. Courtesy of Collect 2023.
    A number of galleries from South Korea and Asia will be returning post-pandemic. “We’ve always had very good representation of Asian and East Asian work,” said Isobel Dennis, Fair Director at Collect, to Artnet News, “While collectors will still be seeing incredible work across a range of materials, I think it’s the subtleties and the richness of these cross-cultural influences that will be really exciting for audiences both on and offline.”
    This year’s Collect also presents an opportunity to acquire work from makers who’ve been incubated by the Loewe Foundation, including Healim Shin (Siat Gallery, South Korea), Keeryong Choi (Bullseye Projects, USA), and Jaiik Lee (Gallery Sklo, South Korea), among others.
    Keeryong Cho, presented by Bullseye Gallery. Photo: David Parry. Courtesy of Collect 2023.
    Since 2017, Collect has worked with the online marketplace Artsy.net. The partnership came into its own in 2021 when the pandemic forced the closure of the physical fair. “Artsy provided us with a way to host the entire fair virtually online without having to build all the infrastructure ourselves,” Dennis said. The hybrid model quickly established itself as another ‘new normal’ with Collect becoming Artsy’s top performing fair of 2021.
    Xanthe Somers, presented by Galerie REVEL. Photo: David Parry. Courtesy of Collect 2023.
    “What we’ve seen—even last year as the world opened up—is our traffic has remained pretty consistent with that year,” Jennifer Pratt, Director of Fair Partnerships Team at Artsy, revealed. This growth is attributed in part to a new generation of collectors who have the confidence to purchase online. “What’s really cool is that young collectors are beginning to buy works that perhaps they didn’t even know existed before,” Pratt observed.
    Collect Art Fair, March 3–5, 2023, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 1LA, United Kingdom.

    More Trending Stories:
    Researchers in Vietnam Discovered That Two Deer Antlers Languishing in Museum Storage Are Actually 2,000-Year-Old Musical Instruments
    A Photographer Who Found Instagram Fame for His Striking Portraits Has Confessed His Images Were Actually A.I.-Generated
    Archaeologists on Easter Island Have Discovered a Previously Unknown Moai Statue Buried in a Dried-Out Lake Bed
    Two Curators Tried to Find Out If Salvador Dalí Really Painted This Strange Seven-Foot Canvas. They Ended Up Solving an Even Bigger Mystery
    Art Industry News: A California Court Revives a Lawsuit Over a ‘Disrespectful’ Marilyn Monroe Statue + Other Stories
    The Dutch Are Going Wild for a Reality TV Show Where Artists Compete to Paint Vermeer’s Lost Masterpieces
    What I Buy and Why: Filmmaker Ku-Ling Yurman on Her Mission to Collect Works by Women and Her Prized Jewelry Pieces
    So-Called ‘Open Editions’ Are Suddenly Reigniting the Wintry NFT Market. Here’s Why They’ve Become So Popular With Collectors
    Marginalia Uncovered in Leonardo’s Famous Codex Arundel Suggests the Renaissance Polymath Theorized Gravity Before Galileo
    Follow Artnet News on Facebook: Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More

  • 200 Shares119 Views

    in Exhibitions

    The U.K.’s Asian-Focused Esea Contemporary Museum Reopens With a More Diversified Staff and Program—But Skepticism Lingers

    The light was back on and jovial chatter was heard again at the corner of Thomas Street in the U.K.’s Manchester this month. After a long hiatus, one of the most prominent centers dedicated to Chinese contemporary art in the west has reopened its doors with a new identity that embraces much wider East and Southeast Asian roots.
    Esea Contemporary opened with a group exhibition called “Practise Till We Meet,” which was a demonstration of the center’s determination to start all over again. Featuring an ensemble of ethnically East and Southeast Asian artists presenting bodies of work that explore the diasporic experience, as well as trauma, this modest exhibition is a deliberate move to bid farewell to its past life as the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art.
    The venue went through a major overhaul following the art community’s allegations of institutional racism (the center’s former management team and its board of trustees was dominated by white names) that nearly got the non-profit defunded. But some are not sure the institution has gone far enough.
    “Practise Till We Meet” (2023) installation view, at Esea Contemporary. Photo courtesy Jules Lister.
    The launch event also coincidentally coincided with the re-opening of the Manchester Museum after a £15 million ($18 million) facelift, which now includes the U.K.’s first permanent gallery dedicated to South Asian art. Although London remains the largest home to Asians, according to a 2021 census, the region that encompasses Manchester also has one of the highest presence of Asian populations in the U.K. Asians, including Chinese and other Asian ethnicities, are among the second biggest ethnic groups in Manchester.
    The selection of works and artists in Esea’s debut show “Practise Till We Meet,” curated by the Guangzhou-based independent curator Hanlu Zhang, can be interpreted as a statement for the center’s direction. Although most of the works on show are not new, they address current, unresolved issues facing many in the Asian diaspora.
    Koki Tanaka, Vulnerable Histories (A Road Movie) (2018), commissioned by Migros Museum of Contemporary Art. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Jules Lister.
    Memorable works include Koki Tanaka’s Vulnerable Histories (A Road Movie) (2018), a multi-channel video installation that charts the discrimination, violence, and trauma experienced by the Korean diaspora in Japan, descendants of Korean migrants who came to the country during various wars. The honest discussion about their psychological struggle with their hybrid identities is particularly moving.
    A colorful series of photos—Matter Out of Place (2017-2018), Souvenir (2018), Unhide Diego Garcia (2018)—by the Manchester-based Audrey Albert, a native of the island of Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean, who has Chagossian origins. With these poignant works, she introduces the audience to the lesser known history about her displaced roots.
    Isaac Chong Wai, Two-Legged Stool (2023), commissioned by Esea Contemporary. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Jules Lister.
    Liu Weiwei’s mixed media project Australia (2017) tells the story about the artist’s younger brother Liu Chao, who is adamant about emigrating to Australia. Although the project was created nearly six years ago, Liu Chao’s determination to leave his native China echoes today amid the recent “run movement” in the country, which is seeing Chinese people fleeing their home country.
    Berlin-based Hong Kong artist Isaac Chong Wai presents Two-Legged Stool (2023), the only new work commissioned by Arts Council-backed Esea Contemporary. The work, which creates an optical illusion of a stool that appears to be two-legged from one angle, and three-legged from another, references the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s 1980s remarks about the complicated relationship between China, the U.K., and Hong Kong. “There have been talks of the so-called three-legged stool. [There are] not three legs, only two legs,” he had noted. The work is shown alongside Chong’s acclaimed video series Rehearsal of the Futures: Is the World Your Friend? (2018), which depicts the slow body movements seen in protests and the police’s tackle of demonstrators.
    While the show attempts to serve as a platform for diverse narratives, and while efforts have been made to be inclusive (the curator’s statement in Chinese is printed in traditional Chinese characters, which are used in Hong Kong and Taiwan, rather than simplified characters adopted in mainland China), some members of the East and Southeast Asian communities in the U.K. that Artnet News spoke with remain skeptical about the center’s re-launch.
    A viewer admiring Audrey Albert’s work Matter Out of Place on show at exhibition “Practise Till We Meet” at Esea Contemporary. Photo: Jules Lister.
    The new Asian presence in the institution’s leadership appears to include members who are predominantly of Chinese heritage. “What about the representation of other cultures from East and Southeast Asia on the management level? I would prefer to wait and see what they are going to do next,” said one Manchester-based East Asian culture practitioner who declined to be named.
    In response to such concerns, an Esea Contemporary spokesperson said they “welcome the community’s engagement and reflection to help us achieve what we are setting out to construct: a platform for the ESEA art community at large.”
    “We plan to work with a diverse range of guest curators across future projects, as well as continuing efforts to grow our board of trustees, staff team and artistic advisory panel,” the Esea spokesperson told Artnet News.
    There is reason for optimsim; the center’s director Xiaowen Zhu is busy cooking up big plans for the coming year. Two more shows have been planned, and she is looking into diversifying the center’s programming to include more live, in-person events.
    “No terminology is perfect in terms of representation. We hope we are doing the right thing. We are also figuring things out along the way,” said Zhu. “People’s excitement and curiosity are definitely very encouraging for us.”
    More Trending Stories:
    Whoops! A Clumsy Art Fair Visitor Shattered a $42,000 Jeff Koons Balloon Dog Sculpture in Miami
    Art Industry News: A Secret Deal on a ‘Hybrid’ Repatriation of the Parthenon Marbles Is Underway + Other Stories
    A 1,100-Year-Old Hebrew Bible, Missing Only a Few Chapters of Genesis, Could Fetch Up to $50 Million at Auction
    Here’s What We Know About ‘Moss and Freud,’ the Upcoming Film About the Friendship Between Kate Moss and Lucian Freud
    Archaeologists Digging in Iraq Have Located the Remains of a 5,000-Year-Old Tavern—As Well as a ‘Beer Recipe’
    Art Industry News: Native American Activists Urge Developers to Stop Digging at Archaeological Site in Miami + Other Stories
    An Ornament of a Baby, Purchased for $2 by a Bargain Hunter, Turns Out to be a Rare Porcelain. It Could Earn $36,000 at Auction
    Valuations: Zuzanna Ciolek, Director of UTA Artist Space in Los Angeles, on Underrated Artists and Overrated Luxuries
    See the Majestic Shots of Dolphins, Whales, and Stingrays That Won a Major Underwater Photography Competition
    Follow Artnet News on Facebook: Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More

  • 175 Shares99 Views

    in Exhibitions

    ‘Affecting’ or ‘Passionless’? Critics Are Divided on David Hockney’s Newly Opened Immersive Light Show

    If ever there were an artist seemingly made for the animated projected art craze popularized by Immersive Van Gogh, it would seemingly be David Hockney. The octogenarian British artist has engaged with technology for decades, and was an early adopter of the iPad, which he’s used to make a large portion of his work since its release in 2010.
    But the fact that Hockney creates digital art himself—and was personally involved in the production—hasn’t necessarily translated to an effective digital art show, according to early reviews of “David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away),” his new exhibition at Lightroom at London’s King’s Cross.
    The show is the brainchild of 59 Productions, a British design company for theater and opera that reached out to Hockney about the idea back in 2019. As the idea came together, Nicholas Hytner, former artistic director of London’s National Theatre, was brought on as executive producer.
    The 50-minute light show is meant to span Hockney’s six-decade career, replete with a bombastic soundtrack by the American composer Nico Muhly and narration by the 85-year-old.
    David Hockey at Lightroom. Photo by Justin Sutcliffe.
    Designed to feel like a cinematic experience, the exhibition is a departure from similar vehicles capitalizing on the work of Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet, Frida Kahlo, Gustav Klimt and other giants of art history, according to Hockney.
    “They’re dead,” the artist told the New York Times. “I’m a living artist, so I’ve come in and actually done things.”
    Whatever Hockney’s done, however, it might not be enough to get reluctant art critics on board the immersive art train.
    “David Hockney Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away)” at Lightroom, London. Photo by Justin Sutcliffe, courtesy of Lightroom.
    “There’s too much that disappoints and irritates. You don’t really get a feel for much of the best of his work,” Ben Luke wrote in the Evening Standard. “Neither do you get a feel for the materiality of the media he extols; somehow the luscious beauty of paint, its very stuffness, gets entirely lost when blown up this big.”
    “There is not a single real work by [Hockney] here to catch your memory and hold on to your soul,” Jonathan Jones—a critic always ready with a hot take—wrote in the Guardian. “Without real art, this entertainment goes the same way as all the other immersive exhibitions of art icons: into the weightless, passionless dustbin of forgetting.”
    Even some of the positive reviews have been conditional. The Telegraph’s Alastair Sooke dubbed it “a coup of entertainment: accessible, affecting, and, technically, executed with panache,” but admitted the somewhat “vainglorious” project “isn’t a work of art—or, rather, it’s as much one as, say, a deluxe coffee-table book or high-end documentary exploring Hockney’s oeuvre.”
    David Hockney viewing a scale model for “Bigger & Closer” created by 59 Productions. Seen on the walls are a projection of August 2021, Landscape with Shadows. Photo courtesy of Mark Grimmer.
    But whatever the critics may think, it may be time for them to get used to seeing artworks projected at a monumental scale, turning paint and canvas into an immersive, ever-shifting display.
    “Hockney has always embraced new technologies and been quick to explore their potential in his art, from the unforgettable Polaroid works (possibly the best ever use of that form) to experiments with perspective through cameras, pieces created with film, video, iPad, Instagram and more,” Jan Dalley wrote in the Financial Times. “This is the latest iteration, and even at a distance we can sense the artist having fun with it. Perhaps even old-schoolers like me will be won over.”
    See more photos from the exhibition below.
    “David Hockney Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away)” at Lightroom, London. Photo by Justin Sutcliffe, courtesy of Lightroom.
    “David Hockney Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away)” at Lightroom, London. Photo by Justin Sutcliffe, courtesy of Lightroom.
    “David Hockney Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away)” at Lightroom, London, featuring A Bigger Grand Canyon (1998). ©David Hockney.Collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
    “David Hockney Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away)” at Lightroom, London, featuring The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty eleven). ©David Hockney. Collection of the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Musée national d’art moderne – Centre de création industrielle.
    “David Hockney Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away)” at Lightroom, London, featuring Gregory Swimming Los Angeles March 31st 1982. ©David Hockney.
    “David Hockney Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away)” at Lightroom, London. Photo by Justin Sutcliffe, courtesy of Lightroom.
    “David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away)” is on view at Lightroom, 12 Lewis Cubitt Square, London, February 22–June 4, 2023.
    Follow Artnet News on Facebook: Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More

  • 188 Shares99 Views

    in Exhibitions

    The Big-Budget Sharjah Biennial Tackles Postcolonial Fallout With Beauty, Sentimentality, and a Sense of Triumph

    In Billy Sings Amazing Grace (2013), Theaster Gates, renowned archivist and lesser-known vocalist, wails and croons in a darkened auditorium alongside the white-haired and stoic soul singer Billy Forston. In its profound sonic resonance, their video performance of improvisational gospel is one of many highlights in “Thinking Historically in the Present,” the recently opened 15th edition of the Sharjah Biennial.
    Like the show as a whole, the piece is a work of intimate, visceral storytelling, in both mournful and celebratory turns. Featuring about 300 works from more than 150 artists and collectives, including 70 new commissions, the excellent “Thinking Historically” is biennial director Hoor Al Qasimi’s homage to the late and well-loved Okwui Enwezor, who was originally appointed curator before his passing in 2019.
    In her catalog essay, Al Qasimi reflects on Enwezor’s groundbreaking decolonial legacy, citing his 2002 approach to Documenta 11 as “a lodestar in my curatorial consciousness.” Validating artists outside the canon’s narrow purview, his work had offered her a glimpse into a wider world of possibilities, unhindered by “the social myopia” of Eurocentrism.
    Theaster Gates’s Billy Sings Amazing Grace (2013). Photo: Janelle Zara
    Nodding to Enwezor’s decentralization of Documenta 11 across five cities, the Sharjah Biennial spans five towns across the emirate, in venues that include the polished galleries of the capital city, and the peeling classrooms of a disused kindergarten along the coast.
    A full generation since Enwezor’s groundbreaking exhibition in Germany, the participating biennial artists contend with what are now-familiar themes: the aftermath of empire, foreign extraction, and slavery among others. 
    “Thinking Historically” is a welcome antidote to the academic tropes of recent biennials, some of which, like the Berlin and Istanbul Biennials in 2022, were filled with research-based projects with few formal merits. In the rich textures of works like Ibrahim Mahama’s monumental tapestry, A Tale of Time/Purple Republic (2023), or the gnarled, blackened branches of Doris Salcedo’s Uprooted (2020-2022), form is the defining feature, not an afterthought in service to a predetermined message. (Their scale, which is grand, also indicates just how well-funded this biennial is.) 
    Ibrahim Mahama’s A Tale of Time/ Purple Republic (2023) Installation view: Sharjah Biennial 15, Kalba Ice Factory (2023). Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation. Photo: Motaz Mawid
    Like many biennials, Sharjah’s exhibition is video-heavy, ranging from the heart-wrenching simplicity of Erkan Özgen’s Wonderland (2016), a searing account of the Syrian Civil War, to the sumptuousness of Isaac Julien’s immersive black-and-white cinematic installation, Once Again… (Statues Never Die) (2022). The show’s weaknesses lie in concept-forward paintings that suffer from a lackluster handling of paint, or photographs of state-inflicted strife that rest too comfortably in a photojournalistic lane. There is notably little, if any work that directly addresses Emirati exploitation of migrant labor.
    Yinka Shonibare’s Decolonised Structures (2022), a series of British imperial statues cloaked in the Dutch wax patterns of West African fabrics, succinctly captures the limits of a now-rote approach to dismantling the West. While its cosmetic intervention sits on the surface, the colonial legacy remains underneath, whole and untouched. 
    Other artists have moved beyond centering the colonizer, aspiring to deeper points of introspection. In Nosferasta (2022), a comically absurd and brilliantly acted 32-minute feature, artists Adam Khalil, Bayley Sweitzer, and the Rastafarian musician Oba frame colonization as a profoundly internalized malady, frequently perpetuated by the colonized themselves. For their Rastafarian protagonist, colonization is akin to vampirism, and Christopher Columbus is a literal vampire. The true villain of this story, however, is the fraught pursuit of assimilation.
    Doris Salcedo’s Uprooted (2020-2022). Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Juan Castro Photoholic
    The assimilation theme recurs in various acts of self-erasure, including the portrait series Léthé (2021), in which photographer Mama-Diarra Niang beguilingly dissolves her subjects’ distinguishing features into a smooth, faintly recognizable haze.
    In the video As British as a Watermelon (2019), Zimbabwean-born, British-based artist mandla rae shares shamed confessions, including the origins of scars both physical and mental, and the self-erasure of mispronouncing one’s name for European ears. “How colonized do you have to be to look at an African baby and call it Bridget?” they ask, handling the titular fruit with alternating tenderness and disquieting brutality. 
    Echoing Al Qasimi’s commemorative sentiments, homages to beloved predecessors abound, in monuments and imaginary museums, or Isaac Julien’s protagonist, captivatingly written as a composite of philosopher Alain LeRoy Locke and literary heroes Langston Hughes, Aimé Césaire, and James Baldwin. Throughout, the refusal of erasure amounts to asserting one’s place in history; it is honoring lineage, especially the legacies that the official record elides.
    Isaac Julien’s Once Again… (Statues Never Die) (2022). Photo: Janelle Zara
    Gabriela Golder’s surprisingly charming Conversation Piece (2012) is ostensibly a tribute to the artist’s mother, veiled in the cool irony of two 10-year-olds reading The Communist Manifesto. “What does the bourgeoisie have to do with the discovery of America?” they ask their grandmother, Golder’s mother and former militant of the Argentine Communist Party. Her response exudes a commanding wisdom as she gently and convincingly dismantles the myth of discovery. 
    These works stop just short of excessive sentimentality, arguably the Sharjah Biennial’s most compelling feature. Sentimentality eschews drier forms of institutional critique, which lately feel expressly designed as punitive history lessons for white audiences. Rather than attempt to solve the ills wrought by centuries of empire, artists here lean into art-making as a restorative, generative process, one more adept at asking questions than answering them. 
    My personal favorite works tap into spiritual traditions, as in Gates’ wailing hymnal, or Carrie Mae Weems’ The In Between (2022-2023), a shrine that features a small library of Enwezor’s books and a vessel that appears to sail into the afterlife. Michael Rakowitz’s Borrowed Landscape (30.3193 ° N, 48.2543 ° E) (2023) was ostensibly a large-scale, loose reinterpretation of the Passover Seder, performed in a dust-blown field of decapitated palms in the desert town of Al Dhaid.
    Michael Rakowitz’s Borrowed Landscape (30.3193 ° N, 48.2543 ° E) (2023). Photo: Janelle Zara
    As Rakowitz read from an iPad to a crowd of several hundred people, he passed around objects culled from eBay that recalled the long-lost belongings of his family. Its simplicity was decidedly polarizing, but the performance struck me as a moving dedication to histories one can no longer access. The title’s coordinates refer to a site in Iraq where his family’s date trees stand similarly mangled as the palms that surrounded us.
    The artist designated this site as “a place to contemplate another,” speaking of the hyphen as metaphor, a suture between disparate points, but also between the “irreconcilable binaries” of his identity as an Iraqi Arab-Jew. He ended the piece with the biblical task of supplying an enormous crowd with roasted fish—masgouf, a national Iraqi dish dating back 3,000 years. When denied the right to return, to speak one’s history aloud and to share it with others is what keeps it alive.
    The Sharjah Biennial is on view until June 11, 2023.
    Follow Artnet News on Facebook: Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More

  • 113 Shares149 Views

    in Street Art

    A New Wall by Sebas Velasco in Sarajevo, Bosnia

    Sebastián Velasco was born in Burgos, Spain in 1988. He got a Masters degree in Painting from the University of the Basque Country in 2016. Velasco started drawing when he was a child but it was only in 2004 that he began to paint in the street. He paints figurative images, mostly using oil, acrylic, spray paint and pencils.  His photographic, expressive brush stroke style reveals a precise academic technique that contrasts sharply with the rawness of the street content in his works.  In that sense, many of his canvases act as a window for us into everyday moments where strangers are caught in the act with their writer friends.  During these moments, darkness has become increasingly more important.A new wall was recently made during Velasco’s last trip to Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina.Take a look at more images below and check back with us soon for more updates. More