Eliana Willis

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    in Exhibitions

    Mexico City’s Frida Kahlo Experience Takes ‘Frida-Mania’ to Its Logical Final Form: Dreamy Animation and Inspirational Quotes

    Would Frida Kahlo have liked “Frida: La Experiencia Inmersiva,” the snappy immersive-art experience currently at the Foro Polanco in Mexico City? I can’t definitely say no. Kahlo was a complicated person, obsessed with promoting a personal legend but also passionately politically concerned.
    What does Kahlo’s leap to immersive-art status suggests about contemporary “Frida-mania?” “Frida: La Experiencia Inmersiva” has the stamp of approval of the Kahlo family itself (as does “Immersive Frida Kahlo,” another Frida attraction open at cities across North America). Keep in mind, though, that that’s the same arm of the family that announced last year it was planning a Frida Kahlo and Family Metaverse (supposed to launch in Q2 of this year, but so far quiet).
    About 45 minutes in length, this immersive Frida experience fills two large chambers (there is also a side chamber with extra selfie ops, kids activities, and interactive, Frida-themed games). The walls are animated with high-res, super-scaled projections featuring swirling images culled from Kahlo’s Greatest Hits, from the Two Fridas (1939) to the Broken Column (1944) to her funny final painting, a still life of a watermelon with the words “Viva la Vida” (Live Life!) carved into it.
    Images are animated and repeated so that crowds can enjoy versions of the same show wherever they roam in the galleries. Foliage sprouts and moves. The atmospheres of her paintings change from day to night.
    The giant central figures are occasionally overrun by tides of paintbrushes, human hearts, chairs, or nails. Sometimes these animated swarms leave only the eyes of Frida or Diego Rivera peeking out, unintentionally evoking that meme of a frozen Homer Simpson sinking backwards into a hedge in embarrassment. Warm, twinkly music plays.
    Frida Kahlo’s Portrait of Diego Rivera (1938) projected within Frida: La Experiencia Inmersiva. Photo by Ben Davis.
    A smattering of Kahlo quotes on the soundtrack provide an atmosphere of biographical communion. These hit the familiar, big beats of Frida lore: the accident that left her in pain for life, her all-consuming passion for Diego, her shame at his affairs. It ends with a quote, spoken in the tone of a wise and mischievous grandmother: “No vale la pena irse de este mundo sin haberle dado tantito gusto a la vida” (something like: “It’s not worth leaving this world without getting a little pleasure from life.”)
    Like “Immersive Van Gogh,” which it closely echoes in style, “Frida: La Experiencia Inmersiva” does the job it sets out to do just fine—providing an efficiently spectacular version of visual art mythology and a family-friendly break in the air conditioning. Just as Vincent Van Gogh has been refined by media culture into his most marketably simple idea of “tortured genius,” so Frida Kahlo has been refined down to “passionate woman.”
    An animation of Frida Kahlo’s The Wounded Deer (1947) in Frida: La Experiencia Inmersiva. Photo by Ben Davis.
    This particular immersive Frida doesn’t really make much of an effort to tell Frida Kahlo’s actual story—but then, the new Batman movie doesn’t bother to re-tell Bruce Wayne’s origin story either. The whole point of contemporary IP-driven blockbuster media is to feed you stuff that’s so familiar that you don’t have to do the work of learning about it. Instead you can just enjoy watching it creatively re-interpreted.
    In Mexico City, Frida Kahlo is more than familiar, of course. Dolls and tchotchkes with her likeness are sold everywhere; she gazes out from murals and T-shirts, in cutesy cartoon form. But there’s also plenty of Frida easily available that gives a sense of the tougher, less marketable political side that almost every modern-day version of “Frida-mania” seems hellbent on burying in kitsch.
    Go to see Diego Rivera’s famous mural cycle at the Secretariat of Public Education. In it, there’s an image called In the Arsenal, from 1929, centered on the image on Frida in a red worker’s shirt, with a Communist red star on it, handing out guns to the workers. The Soviet flag flaps behind her.
    Diego Rivera, In the Arsenal (1929). Photo by Ben Davis.
    Even at the underwhelming, over-touristed Frida shrine that is the Casa Azul, where they sell all manner of inoffensive Frida merch, they still preserve her bed complete with the five photos that looked down on her at night, like saints watching over her sleep: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. When I was there for my timed-ticket slot, the American tourist in front of me was loudly angry to discover that Frida was a Marxist. “You know, I read this shit in college—but I’m a grown man now, and it’s not cute anymore!” he snapped at his girlfriend.
    No one is going to have any similar unwanted epiphanies during “Frida: La Experiencia Inmersiva,” which is sponsored by a bank, Citibanamex.
    Defending the “political Frida” from the “commercial Frida” is by now its own critical trope. But the subject of Frida’s politics is also a knotty one, and I wouldn’t trust Citibanamex or its immersive art engineers with its intricacies. Usually, it runs in the direction of a simple heroization of the “political Frida.” But her politics were complex and contradictory. For instance, Frida was an anti-Stalinist, and then an ardent Stalinist by her final days. (She returned to the Mexican Communist Party, Hayden Herrera argues, because its vision of a muscular, actually existing world Communism offered an image of strength that served a psychic function for her as her own body failed.)
    Frida Kahlo’s The Broken Column (1944), animated in Frida: La Experiencia Inmersiva. Photo by Ben Davis.
    You might actually be able to create an immersive show that gave a sense of Kahlo’s complexity—but this would require some creativity and thoughtful engagement with history, which would risk harshing the audience’s mellow. It would also require breaking with some of the emerging “immersive art” clichés, which favor free-floating atmosphere and pre-digested storytelling.
    The intro text that greets you outside “Frida: La Experiencia Inmersiva” all but says that it expects its audience to mainly come to the show primed by the 2002 Salma Hayek movie, Frida (which, incidentally, some Mexican critics criticized at the time for its glammed-up Hollywood treatment of the artist). It states:
    There are many paths that lead to the world-renowned Frida Kahlo: the medical path, the scientific path, the historical path, the biographical path, and the emotional path. Ever since the Hollywood movie came out, it is this last path that has led the largest number of people from around the world to Frida Kahlo: it has moved them and awakened them to great empathy.
    And now, this multimedia immersive experience is here…
    What does this mean—taking the “emotional path” into Frida, as opposed to the “biographical” or “historical” paths?
    Maybe because we’re already talking about how present-day Hollywood processes art, my immersive Frida experience made me think of an article by critic Alison Willmore, who asked recently in Vulture: “is Jane Austen just a vibe now?” Willmore looks at the contemporary “Jane Austen industrial complex” (but specifically the new Netflix Persuasion) and how a set of tropes—“bonnets, walks in the countryside, sessions of piano playing in the parlor, a vague sense of a stuffy British accent”—have come to crowd out the intricate psychological and social observations that have made Austen’s actual books so lasting.
    “Frida: La Experiencia Inmersiva” in Mexico City makes me think that immersive experiences are possibly best understood as agents of a similar process—or maybe what happens when this process takes its final form. They are a preeminent contemporary technology of vibe-ification.
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    in Street Art

    “Street Chronicles” Group Exhibition at UrbanBreak, Seoul, South Korea

    Urban & Street Art Fair, URBAN BREAK 2022, marks its third anniversary this year. URBAN BREAK drew attention with 15,000 people attending in 2020, the first year alone. Last year, despite COVID-19 at its peak, 40,000 people visited the fair, thereby solidifying its status as one of the most prominent fairs.Rom Levy, director of StreetArtNews, co-planned the Special Exhibition of International Street Artists. Entitled Street Chronicles, the exhibition is showcasing the works of artists who were the pillars of street art techniques, concepts and different styles.STREET CHRONICLES retraces a side of Urban Art history bringing the streets of NYC and London to Seoul.Street art was considered vandalism when protesters during wars and political corruptions used the walls of their cities to comment on political and social issues with slogans and graffitis. What was initially regarded as vandalism has since become a significant art form. Murals and other forms of street art are renowned for their beautification of cities, raising awareness, and standing as witnesses to history.This proposal includes Banksy, whose identity remains anonymous to the day. His politically charged works provoke alternative viewpoints, encouraging revolution in the art world, making him one of the most controversial street artists. Banksy’s work has been breaking down the boundaries and expectations of street art critics, using many different street art mediums and styles. Banksy began his graffiti practice inspired by Blek Le Rat, one of the most prominent artists in Street Art. Inspired by what he saw in New York during his visit in 1971, Blek Le Rat started creating artworks across the streets of Paris in 1981. He primarily used stencils in his practice. His first stencils were black rats running along the walls throughout Paris. In 1983 he began to paint life-sized stencils, which became his trademark alongside his rats and have influenced generations of street artists worldwide.Also included are other notable Urban artists such as D*Face, Shepard Fairey and Invader, who all contributed to the development of the art styles and mediums. Alongside artists from the newer generation who weave the connection between street art and the wave of the new contemporary, such as Roby Dwi Antono, Andrew Hem, Lonac and Andrew Schoultz. Their work bridges contemporary art aesthetics with illustrative figuration. For example, Andrew Hem incorporates atmospheric and richly textured narratives in a vivid palette of twilight blues invigorated by fields of deep red and specks of golden light. Spirits are evoked through the visionary presentation of remembrances and dreams of his haunting impressions of civilisation and landscapes. While Andrew Schoultz’s work has a visual approach to social and political commentary. His enormous murals, paintings, installations and sculptures are heavily patterned, creating an intense and mesmerising vision of current events.Street art is dedicated to bringing art to the people, raising awareness about political and social issues, and portraying the truth of reality.‘I want the characters of the paintings to walk out of the museums to give them back to the people of the city.’ -Blek Le Rat.Tickets for URBAN BREAK 2022 are sold at KRW 20,000 for general admission and at KRW 100,000 for VIP admission. Those who have purchased VIP tickets can enter early from 12:00 pm to 3:00 pm prior to the exhibition to be open on July 21st, 2022, at 3:00 pm. Venue will be at COEX Hall B, Seoul, South Korea.You can book your tickets to this year’s Urban Break at their website. More

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    in Exhibitions

    The Head of Documenta Has Resigned Amid an Ongoing Antisemitism Scandal

    Sabine Schormann, director general of Documenta, has resigned from her post. The quinquennial exhibition’s nonprofit parent company, Documenta gGmbh, announced the decision on Saturday.
    According to the statement, the Documenta board and Schormann reached a mutual agreement on “short notice” after a meeting on Friday evening. The news comes after months of allegations of antisemitism came to a boiling point two days after the opening on June 18, when viewers became aware of anti-Semitic imagery in a prominent artwork by Indonesian collective Taring Padi.
    The announcement on the weekend came on the heels of a statement Schormann issued on Tuesday, July 12, that sought to clarify how Documenta and the curators had handled an unfolding controversy that began in January when members of the artistic team and some artists were accused of anti-Semitism.
    “A lot of trust has unfortunately been lost,” the board said in the statement confirming Schormann’s departure. A search is underway for an interim director for the exhibition, which is just 30 days into its 100-day run.
    The supervisory board also recommended appointing an expert advisory board consisting of scholars of contemporary anti-Semitism in the German and global contexts, as well as on postcolonialism. The advisory board should be “responsible for the initial stocktaking of the processes, structures, and receptions” surrounding the exhibition. According to the statement, an investigation should include indications of possible anti-Semitic imagery and the promotion of “Israel-related anti-Semitism… with due regard for the fundamental right to artistic freedom.”
    Art lovers look at the large covered painting People’s Justice (2002) by the Indonesian collective Taring Padi, covered with black cloth, on Friedrichsplatz. Photo: Uwe Zucchi/dpa.
    Documenta 15, which was organized around the Indonesian word lumbung, which means a communal rice barn, focused on collective practices. With more than 1,500 participating artists, the show itself received generally positive reviews, including from Artnet News’s Ben Davis, who wrote that “the particular network-of-networks that Ruangrupa has pulled in genuinely feels like it knits together artistic scenes that are vital and under-known.”
    Despite the achievements, since January, the 15th edition of Documenta, which takes place every five years in Kassel, has been embroiled in controversy over allegations of anti-Semitism since January when an anonymous blog post on the Alliance Against Antisemitism Kassel website accused members of the artistic team and some participating artists of supporting the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions movement. Ruangrupa said the allegations were “bad-faith attempts” to delegitimize them.
    A talk set to take place in April that would address antisemitism and anti-Muslim racism was canceled after the Central Council for Jews in Germany accused the talk’s organizers of bias.
    Meron Mendel, director of the Anne Frank Education Center, speaks on the topic of “Anti-Semitism in Art” at a panel organized by the Anne Frank Education Center and the supporting organization documenta gGmbH. Photo: Swen Pförtner/dpa via Getty Images.
    Then, in June, just days after the official opening, it emerged that two antisemitic characters were in an artwork in the show. In Taring Padi’s publicly installed work, one could see a caricature of a Jewish orthodox man, with sidelocks and bloody fangs, donning a hat emblazoned with the Nazi SS symbol. Alongside that character, there is a depiction of an Israeli Mossad soldier as a pig. The work was immediately covered up and then removed. Both Taring Padi and the curators of Ruangrupa apologized. The large artwork dates to 2002 and was made to criticize the Suharto regime. It contains hundreds of characters, including demons and animals, as well as KGB and Australian intelligence officers.
    The controversy did not quell after the removal of the work, called People’s Justice. An emergency panel was brought together on June 29 to discuss antisemitism in art. Less than two weeks later, artist Hito Steyerl, who was showing in the exhibition, pulled out of the show claiming that there was a “refusal to facilitate a sustained and structurally anchored inclusive debate around the exhibition, as well as the virtual refusal to accept mediation.” That same day Meron Mendel, the head of the Anne Frank Educational Institute in Frankfurt who had been brought on as an advisor to the exhibition in the wake of the scandal in June around Taring Padi’s work, also resigned.
    Schormann had just a week ago rebuked statements made by Mendel, who told German media that Documenta was not active enough when it came to redressing in the wake of the revelations about People’s Justice. She said that the artists feared external panels would lead to censorship and that participants “saw themselves under general suspicion” and threatened in part because of their origin, skin color, religion or sexual orientation.
    In the wake of Schormann’s statement, a spokesperson for Germany’s Culture Minister responded that the narrative given by the director general was “not accurate” and Roth “was very surprised and alienated” by it. In an interview after Schormann’s resignation announcement, Roth commented that it “right and necessary” and that “reappraisal” of the exhibition and consequences can now take place.
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    in Exhibitions

    ‘There Aren’t Any Reasons for Painting. That’s What’s Special’: Watch Artist Christopher Le Brun Walk Through His Latest Body of Work

    British artist Christopher Le Brun recently celebrated his 70th birthday, but despite having been painting for decades, the artist remains as deeply curious about why he paints and where his inspirations come from as when he started. In fact, in his London home and studio, the artist keeps a framed drawing he made in his younger years, the dash-like passages in the sketch echoing the mark-making in his most recent gestural canvases.  More

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    in Street Art

    “Madzarevic” by Wuper Kec in Ekaterinburg, Russia

    Serbian artist Dejan Ivanovic presented his work in Ekaterinburg at the STENOGRAFFIA international street art festival. He has been working under the pseudonym Wuper Kec since 2007. The mural is placed in Ekaterinburg at Malysheva str., 56A. It is the second art object by a foreign author this year.The work is done in the realism style. The art object resembles oil on canvas. Wuper Kec depicted a man peeling an apple against a carpet. He often saw carpets on the walls in Russian apartments. “This is an interesting tradition for me. I was inspired by the Soviet era, Soviet oil paintings. I like the style of that time,” said Wuper Kec.The work was named Madzarevic in honor of the man depicted on the mural. The father of the artist’s friend  is the protagonist. Dejan often came to visit him, and the man shared his life stories. Therefore, the author decided to capture an important person in his work in Russia. Wuper has taken a photo of the future main character. «It was important for me that he did not pose. He behaved the way he does every day. I wanted to show an ordinary person in his usual environment,» the artist noted.The author has chosen the apple to create a bright center at the work. Dejan made the figure of a man lighter, while the carpet was made in dark colors. Wuper analyzed several carpets to create an exact image of the Russian carpet. Then he combined the elements he liked and created his own version of the carpet on the wall, using blue, red, and muted yellow. As the result, the Wuper’s work in saturated colors stands out from the gray walls of surrounded houses. Thus, Dejan’s work puts together vivid images from the two countries, and integrates them harmoniously into the urban space.Wuper Kec visited Ekaterinburg and took part in the STENOGRAFFIA festival for the first time. Dejan became a street artist 15 years ago. He started creating realistic murals 5 years ago. He has a lot of graffiti, tags, as well as large-scale art objects: portrait and genre art. The artist combines painting and street art. Wuper creates about 13 paintings on canvas and about 8 murals in a year. More

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    in Exhibitions

    The Frick’s First-Ever Solo Show for an Artist of Color Will Pair Barkley L. Hendricks’s Stylish Portraits With Its Fabled Old Masters Collection

    For the first time in its 87-year history, Frick Collection will present a solo show dedicated to an artist of color—the late portraitist Barkley L. Hendricks. In September 2023, around a dozen works by the artist, best known for his life-size, full-length paintings of Black Americans, will hang alongside works by Rembrandt, Van Dyck, and other European masters in the collection’s temporary home, Frick Madison.
    The show, titled “Barkley L. Hendricks: Portraits,” is organized by Frick curator Aimee Ng, and Antwaun Sargent, the influential director at Gagosian, who will act as consulting curator. An illustrated catalogue with contributions from creatives including Kehinde Wiley, Derrick Adams, Jeremy O. Harris, and Toyin Ojih Odutola will accompany the exhibition.
    Barkley L. Hendricks, Steve (1976). © Whitney Museum of American Art, licensed by Scala/Art Resource, NY.
    Hendricks was an accomplished photographer as well as painter, and his keen eye and warm personality “made everyone feel like a photographer’s model,” according to Anna Arabindan-Kesson, assistant professor of African American and Black diasporic art at Princeton University. This was translated through the portraits he often made from still photos, with the friends and family members who were his subjects dressed to the nines in the hottest fashions of the time, radiating pride and charisma on the canvas.
    There are similarities between Hendricks’s subjects and those depicted by Old Masters, such as Lawdy Mama, a 1969 painting of the artist’s cousin, whose afro hairstyle set against an arched gold-leaf background recalls the early Italian Renaissance religious panels in the Frick’s collection.
    Similarly, in Hendricks’s striking portrait of Steve, the slight gradations of the man’s white trench coat and pants can be compared to the detailed draping of garments in Jan van Eyck’s works, including The Virgin and Child with St. Barbara, St. Elizabeth, and Jan Vos. Meanwhile, a reflection of arched windows can be seen in the 1970s subject’s sunglasses, alluding to those that appear in the 15th-century Flemish painting.
    Barkley L. Hendricks, Woody (1973). © Barkley L. Hendricks. Courtesy of the Estate of Barkley L. Hendricks and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
    In recent years, the Frick has been branching out of its traditional wheelhouse to show work by contemporary artists like Salman Toor and Jenna Gribbons, in the exhibition “Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Masters.” But the long-overdue inclusion of work by a wider diversity of artists, and the political and social issues that come with it, may rankle with some longtime visitors, the curators acknowledge.
    “There are traditionalists who don’t think there is a place for artists of color because that is not what the Frick has been traditionally doing” curator Aimee Ng told the New York Times. But she added: “Our young fellows group is bigger than it has ever been. That tells me we are going in the right direction. I don’t want to alienate people who have been with the Frick for 40, 50, 60 years. I do want to bridge the historic collection and other art.”
    “Barkley L. Hendricks: Portraits at the Frick” will be on view at the Frick Madison from September 21, 2023, through January 7, 2024.
    Barkley L. Hendricks, Northern Light (1975). Barkley L. Hendricks, Blood (Donald Formey) (1975). Barkley L. Hendricks. Courtesy of the Estate of Barkley L. Hendricks and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
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    in Street Art

    “Whisper” by SATR in Mannheim, Germany

    This June/July 2022, Chinese artist SATR have traveled all the way from her hometown of Guangzhou in China to Mannheim, Germany.  SATR worked on her latest mural “Whisper” for the Stadt.Wand.Kunst mural festival.The large apartment building facade, pre-coated in a bold clean white was to be the basis of the captivating mural. SATR, who made her entry into the street art realm in 2013, has paved her unique path through the world by merging animals, a limited but bold color palette of predominantly black, white, red, and very few other colors, and an engaging transparent style that has a ghostly smokey appeal, in a technique that is reminiscent of Chinese brush painting done in the street art way.Originating from years of experimentation with transparent colors, her approach also shows a refined knowledge of equilibrium, successfully using positive and negative space in regard to the wall space she covers and that she leaves free of paint. An ideal working process for her as she took the qualities of the Montana BLACK, Montana GOLD and particularly the Montana GOLD Transparent colors cans to their limits. Opaque and transparent carefully juxtapose with each other in all her concepts, with the main focus always being animals. Tigers, lions, eagles, and wolves, to name a few, are all animals that have strong symbolic origins that find their way into SATR artworks. For Stadt.Wand.Kunst, it was a panther and a leopard.“Whisper”, the title of SATR’s SWK mural takes the viewer in various directions. Questions are raised the longer one ponders the mural. Why is a panther whispering to a leopard? Is this a trusted relationship between the two animal breeds that we are looking at? And as the artist herself explains, “the mural shows human emotions in the animal world”. A notion that is seldom raised in artworks on the street. The local residents of the Mannheim suburb Waldhof looked on in amazement as the mural took shape. Yet another milestone for SATR and the team at SWK, taking international street art to new heights each year.Check out below for more photos of the stunning mural.Photos by Alexander Krziwanie More

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    in Street Art

    Volery Gallery at CAN Art Fair Ibiza 2022

    Volery Gallery is pleased to announce its participation in Contemporary Art Now, Ibiza (CAN). The fair focuses on the Now and solely on the latest happenings in the contemporary art world.Volery Gallery’s main aim is to offer the Middle East exposure to the latest happenings in the international art world, exhibiting and collaborating with artists and galleries representing the New Contemporary wave.Volery will exhibit the works of six outstanding artists, Ana Barriga, Ms. Dyu, Britty Em, Franco Fasoli, Tosin Kalejaye and Putu Adi Suanjaya (Kencut). Their work has a common thread of questioning their surrounding environments and societies. Flat backgrounds, cartoon characters and colourful toys take over the space to raise questions and recall past experiences.The selection brings together the mischievousness, irony and humour of Barriga’s universe, where the artist is met with children’s toys and daily colourful objects from which unforeseen situations that do not fit the rules emerge. The ironic presentation of society in Ms. Dyu’s work is seen in her cartoonish display of characters interacting with their surrounding environment. The extraordinary trip Em’s work takes the audiences through her extravagantly colourful and playful work filled with patterns, symbolism and nostalgic objects. The dispute, conflict and discursive juxtaposition in Fasoli’s work in which he questions the questions already asked. The flat backgrounds in Kalejaye’s work, in conjunction with his vividly painted figures, he utilises his work to convey his opinions and impressions about the everyday Black experience in modern society. The stuffed toys and the buttoned eyes are recurring characters in Kencut’s work, reflecting and mirroring his past experiences from a young age that are embedded within his subconscious.You can book your tickets to this year’s festival at Contemporary Art Now’s website. More