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    Visiting Yayoi Kusama’s Sprawling New 70-Year Survey Is Like Stepping Inside a Frenzied Tik-Tok Feed… in a Good Way

    There are only a handful of living artists as well known as Yayoi Kusama. The 92-year-old’s colorful hair and stern gaze in photos is as recognizable as her mirrored funhouses and spot-covered installations, which have made her one of the most in-demand artists in the world.
    But a major new retrospective at Gropius Bau in Berlin looks beyond that span of famous work. “A Bouquet of Love I Saw in the Universe,” which opened today (but will temporarily close again due to a new lockdown), has recreated eight exhibitions that mark less-recognized turning points in the Japanese artist’s career.
    The indexical approach sheds light on the enduring complexities that hide in plain sight in Kusama’s obsessively painted and warping world. Though pleasurable for all the senses, a plunge into Kusama’s work offers little reprieve from the anxieties and shifting realities outside. Each decade of her oeuvre is packed with frantic energy and emotion. Boundaries are crossed, one’s psychological stamina is tested. There is a sort of endlessness to each installation that creates a frenzy of seeing as chaotic and constant as a TikTok feed.
    Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirror Room — Love Forever (1966/94). Courtesy: Ota Fine Arts.
    The exhibition spans Kusama’s 70-year career, starting chronologically with her childhood in Matsumoto, Japan, where she had her first shows. Earlier pieces, many from the artist’s own collection, ring with a similar intensity to later works, but young Kusama was more somber. A lonely pair of trees is swallowed up by an ominous landscape in the 1950 painting Accumulation of the Corpses (Prisoner of Depersonalization).
    Revelations about abusive episodes from her childhood filter in a restaged version of her 1963 show “Aggregation: One Thousand Boats,” which was originally held at the Gertrude Stein Gallery in New York. The row boat, dressed up with Kusama’s signature stuffed phalli, touches on the artist’s self-described “fear of sex” that resulted from watching her father’s affairs at the behest of her mother. It is a disturbing story that importantly complicates the crazed landscapes of bulging sculptures that appear in the following rooms.
    There was a frenzy of touch in her 1960s and ’70s happenings, and her recreated exhibition “Love Room,” originally shown in The Hague in 1967, exemplifies Kusama’s utopian visions of blending boundaries between herself, others, nature, and the universe. She paints dots on naked visitors who move around the room in a recording from the opening.
    “I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of endless time and the absoluteness of space, and be reduced to nothingness,” Kusama once said.
    “Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective,” installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau. Photo: Luca Girardini.
    On the wave of that 1970s mood, the artist returned home to Japan but found the hippie revolution would not rise up there in quite the same way, the exhibition panels explain. With the jubilance of the times somewhat subsided, the artist leans into the prevailing anti-war politics that marked the post-Vietnam war era. In Japan in 1977, she made a series of work that cast an unrelenting look at the horrors of war, collaged paintings with mixed photos from Vietnam and World War II. That same year, Kusama committed herself to a psychiatric facility, where she still lives and works today.
    Of course, there’s a healthy dose of early and late Infinity rooms, the ultimate Kusama crowd-pleasers that, thanks to sensitive curating, are given an intellectual rigor. The artist’s first room, from her show “Peep Show or Endless Love,” in New York in 1966, features two small boxy “holes” that you can stick your head into, while someone else pushes their own face through another hole across the way. Together, socially distanced at the Gropius Bau, you can stare at each other, and into a never-ending optical illusion at the same time.
    It struck me all as a bit of a pharmakon. While Kusama offers a dazzling escape from mundanity, the feelings of the world are turned on and tuned up when you step inside it. Decades later, the artist still seems to know our own vices better than we do.
    “Yayoi Kusama: A Bouquet of Love I Saw in the Universe” is on view at the Gropius Bau, Niederkirchnerstraße 7, Berlin, April 23–August 15.
    Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective, Installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau Photo: Luca Girardini
    “Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective,” installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau. Photo: Luca Girardini.
    “Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective,” installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau. Photo: Luca Girardini.
    “Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective,” installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau. Photo: Luca Girardini.
    “Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective,” installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau. Photo: Luca Girardini.
    Yayoi Kusama, The End of Summer (1980). Courtesy: Sammlung Goetz, Munich.
    “Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective,” installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau. Photo: Luca Girardini.
    “Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective,” installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau. Photo: Luca Girardini.
    “Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective,” installation view, 2021, Gropius Bau. Photo: Luca Girardini.
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    in Exhibitions

    Sculptor Alex Da Corte Brought a Bright Blue Big Bird to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Rooftop—See Images Here

    In the 1985 film Sesame Street Presents: Follow That Bird, Big Bird gets kidnapped by a traveling circus. Its owners paint him blue, cage him, and force him to sing the song “I’m So Blue” for their audience.
    Thankfully, Big Bird seems to have made his escape in Alex Da Corte‘s new roof garden commission for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He perches in all his feathered glory atop a crescent moon and clutches a ladder as he floats through space, balanced atop a fully functioning Alexander Calder-style mobile. The ladder suggests that he is not stranded, and that he has the ability to end his isolation.
    “It’s a surrogate for where we are collectively at this moment, kind of contemplating a future and not knowing what we’re facing—really, a sense of vulnerability,” Shanay Jhaveri, the museum’s assistant curator of international Modern and contemporary art, told Artnet News. “It’s about this idea of looking out at new horizons.”
    The sculpture, As Long as the Sun Lasts, is named for a Italo Calvino’s short story about intergalactic travelers searching for a planet to call home.
    Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    “Alex began the project at the height of the pandemic,” Jhaveri said. “He thought the work should speak to the future and also encapsulate our own sense of vulnerability and confronting uncertainty.”
    The 40-year-old artist chose to paint Big Bird’s feathers blue not only because of the Sesame Street film, but also in reference to the Muppet’s Brazilian cousin, Garibaldo, who Da Corte watched as a child in Venezuela, as well as the color’s traditional associations with sadness.
    The piece’s melancholic feel is offset with a sense of whimsy, with the base of the mobile built to look like the interlocking plastic walls of a Little Tykes Outdoor Activity Gym—another ’80s relic. It’s signed with Da Corte’s take on Calder’s signature monogram, and the number 69, in reference to the year of the moon landing, the first episode of Sesame Street, and when Da Corte’s father immigrated to the U.S.
    Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    “Alex wanted to touch upon the liveliness and the unpredictability that is so much at the heart of Calder’s practice, but also the playfulness,” Jhaveri said.
    Fabricating the piece was a challenge, from producing Big Bird’s 7,000 individually placed aluminum feathers to achieving the perfect balance of the mobile, which spins gently in the breeze.
    “It was very important that it had to move, but not be mechanized,” Jhaveri said. “It had to be something that  responded to the air currents and moved intermittently, because in life, things happen intermittently—it’s not instant.”
    See more photos of the work below.
    Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view. Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view. Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view. Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view. Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view. Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view. Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view. Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts for the 2021 Roof Garden Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installation view (detail). Photo by Hyla Skopitz, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    “The Roof Garden Commission: Alex Da Corte, As Long as the Sun Lasts” is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, April 16–October 31, 2021. 
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    in Exhibitions

    ‘When You’re Isolated, You Hear More’: Watch Artist Lynn Hershman Leeson Describe How a Frightening Illness Transformed Her Art

    When artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson was five months into her pregnancy in 1965, she developed breathing problems stemming from cardiomyopathy, and was forced to finish out her nine months confined to the hospital, living inside an oxygen tank. Spending most of her days alone in the hospital, the artist became acutely aware of her fragile state.
    “When you are experiencing the threat of death, you become so aware of time,” Leeson says in an exclusive interview with Art21 as part of the New York Close Up series, “that’s really a gift, to become so sick early in my life.”
    In the interview, which premiered as part of the tenth season of Art21’s show Art in the Twenty First Century, Leeson recounts her early work in the 1960s and ’70s, and how it was inspired by her health problems.
    During her recovery, Leeson took a night course in wax casting at UCLA, where she began creating casts of her own face. As her breathing improved, she decided to add a sound element to the resulting works. “When you’re so isolated, you hear more,” she tells Art21. Ultimately, the wax sculptures featured both sounds of the artist’s breathing and dialogue.
    When the artist was invited to show in a group exhibition at UCLA, she included a selection of the talking wax sculptures, which proved unnerving to observers. “Within two days, the museum closed the show. They said ‘Media isn’t art.’ ‘Sound isn’t art.’”
    Production still from the Art21 “Extended Play” film, “Lynn Hershman Leeson: Drawing Breath.” © Art21, Inc. 2021.
    But that institutional rejection actually prompted Leeson to keep working. She describes the experience as “the best thing that happened to me,” adding, “the cultural experience of having your voice suppressed has made having a voice really important to what I do.”
    In June 2021, the New Museum in Manhattan will present the first solo museum exhibition of the artist’s wide-ranging video and sound work in “Lynn Hershman Leeson: Twisted.”

    Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s New York Close Up series, below. The brand new 10th season of the show is available now at Art21.org. The artist’s solo exhibition, “Lynn Hershman Leeson: Twisted” will be on view at the New Museum from June 2021.
    [embedded content]
    This is an installment of “Art on Video,” a collaboration between Artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of newsmaking artists. A new series of the nonprofit Art21’s flagship series Art in the Twenty-First Century is available now on PBS. Catch all episodes of other series like New York Close Up and Extended Play and learn about the organization’s educational programs at Art21.org.

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    Olafur Eliasson Just Flooded Switzerland’s Fanciest Museum With Pond Water and Invited Wildlife Inside—See Images Here

    Museums are generally secure spaces, hermetically sealed off from the outside world and its fluctuating temperature, humidity, and light—not to mention its winds, rains, and wandering birds.
    But the Danish–Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson has removed those barriers in an ambitious new project at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel.
    For the project, titled Life, Eliasson has flooded the museum’s outdoor pond, letting it flow inside by having the institution’s exterior glass facade removed.
    The museum, now only a shell, is left open to the elements—and it is also open to visitors around the clock, day and night, until July.
    The artwork “is never the same and it will continue to transform throughout the duration of the exhibition,” Sam Keller, the director of the Fondation Beyeler, told Artnet News.
    “What is surprising is the great variations of emotions, reflections, and interactions of visitors… The [health] crisis has revealed new layers of meaning and has made obvious how strongly our lives are entangled with other humans and non-humans alike.”
    The show (which features uranine, a non-toxic dye and compound the artist first used in 1998, when he poured it into various rivers) looks a bit like a wet reinterpretation of the artist’s acclaimed exhibition at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark in 2014, where he redrew the museum by installing a stoney riverbed inside.
    In Basel, a breeze blows through Renzo Piano’s building from the museum’s gardens, as dwarf water lilies, shellflowers, and water ferns float in bright green water throughout the space.
    After a year in which much of the Western art world spent its time living behind screens, the shows offers a visceral experience to those who can attend.
    But it also gives those still mostly engaging with art online—such as this writer—a chance to see the show by way of five live-streams.
    By blending the boundaries between the virtual and the actual, Eliasson said the exhibition becomes more visibly entangled with the world: “This entanglement is our way of being.”
    See more images of the show below.
    Olafur Eliasson, Life (2021). Installation view: Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, (2021). Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles. © 2021 Olafur Eliasson. Photo: Pati Grabowicz
    Olafur Eliasson, Life (2021). Installation view: Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, (2021). Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles. © 2021 Olafur Eliasson. Photo: Pati Grabowicz
    Olafur Eliasson, Life (2021). Installation view: Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, (2021). Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles. © 2021 Olafur Eliasson. Photo: Mark Niedermann.
    Olafur Eliasson, Life (2021). Installation view: Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, (2021). Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles. © 2021 Olafur Eliasson. Photo: Pati Grabowicz
    Olafur Eliasson, Life (2021). Installation view: Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, (2021). Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles. © 2021 Olafur Eliasson. Photo: Pati Grabowicz
    Olafur Eliasson, Life (2021). Installation view: Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, (2021). Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles. © 2021 Olafur Eliasson. Photo: Pati Grabowicz
    Olafur Eliasson, Life (2021). Installation view: Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, (2021). Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles. © 2021 Olafur Eliasson. Photo: Mark Niedermann.
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    in Exhibitions

    After Initially Declining to Participate, David Hammons Unexpectedly Added Never-Before-Seen Works to His Drawing Center Show

    David Hammons has made a surprise intervention in a show of the artist’s influential “Body Prints” series at the Drawing Center. 
    More than two months into the show’s run, the artist has added six never-before-seen prints from his personal collection—including one made this year of a dark, spectral figure that appears to be wearing a mask. (The addition happens to make a misnomer of the show’s title, “Body Prints, 1968–1979.”)
    David Hammons, Untitled (2021). Courtesy of the artist.
    Drawing Center director Laura Hoptman had organized the show without Hammons’s participation, or what she called the artist’s “benign neglect” in the introductory essay to the exhibition catalogue. So it came as a surprise when she received a call from Hammons a few weeks ago with a plan to send more art.
    But then again, it wasn’t that surprising. “This is what he does,” Hoptman tells Artnet News, explaining that while Hammons rarely participates in the process of putting together shows of his older work, he will often put his stamp on them after the fact. (At every stop in her career, including stints at MoMA, the Carnegie Museum, and the New Museum, Hoptman has proposed solo shows to the artist, and each time he has declined.)
    Installation view of “David Hammons: Body Prints, 1968–1979,” at the Drawing Center, 2021. Courtesy of the Drawing Center.
    Hoptman describes the gesture as an “intervention,” but that’s not Hammons’s own term. “I think we lack the language for what this is,” Hoptman says. And when asked if she had any insight into the intentions of the famously elusive artist—whether he intended the move as a playful rejoinder to curatorial decisions, or a correction, perhaps—she simply laughed and said “No!”
    Considered to be among the most important works of his career, Hammons began his series of “Body Prints” in the late ‘60s by greasing himself up with margarine or baby oil, pressing himself against a piece of paper or other material, and then spreading charcoal or powdered pigment on the imprint. What emerged was a powerful index of the Black body—sometimes sensual, sometimes trapped.
    David Hammons, Untitled (1976). Courtesy of the artist.
    Whereas other artists had applied paint to their bodies in the past, Hammons’s more visceral technique was all his own. “It was a formidable innovation,” New York Times critic Will Heinrich wrote recently. “Instead of the vague, if graphic, smudges a painted body would produce, these soft-edged, X-ray-like images caught every last detail. They look less like ordinary artworks than like the Shroud of Turin.”
    Until this month, Hoptman and her team believed that Hammons hadn’t made any “Body Prints” since the end of the ’70s. That he had continued the work, and was willing to show it, proved to be more of a revelation than the “intervention” itself. 
    “I think it’s an exquisite and moving reminder of the fact that his genius is still alive,” says Hoptman, who has on many occasions referred to Hammons as “the greatest living artist in the United States.”
    “I don’t see it as a revision of his history, but rather an assertion of the artist’s voice in the making of that history,” she said. “I think that’s something that Hammons has always stood for and that, as a curator, I deeply respect.” 
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    in Street Art

    “#PRLOVE” and “MANATEE” by ROA, in Puerto Rico

    Internationally renowned artist ROA is painting his animal murals in a roadtrip across Puerto Rico. He has completed over 15 murals and has just finished his largest on the Isla de Cabras; an infant manatee with an adult skeleton.His initiative #PRLOVE, seeks to generate awareness of the animals and to celebrate the biodiversity of Puerto Rico. It highlights the individual animals that live here and the biologists and contributors that work to preserve the species and environment.#PRLOVE is an ongoing effort with many potential facets and programs and is produced in partnership with Puerto Rico’s Elegel Group. It is supported by Coqui Charities and is in collaboration with natural resource agencies, NGO’s and independent groups, including DRN, Conservación ConCiencia and the Caribbean Manatee Conservation Center.The 160’ x 25’ mural on the World War II concrete gun battery Fort Amezquita, on the edge of Isla de Cabras, is ROA’s largest to date in Puerto Rico and marks the 15th piece done by the artist here. Other murals painted across the Island with the help of NGOs and experts in wildlife conservation include the crested toad in Guánica and the Puerto Rican parrot in Utuado (both produced in collaboration with the Department of Natural and Environmental Resources); the tiger shark in Río Grande and the lionfish in Naguabo (both done in collaboration with Conservación ConCiencia.The manatee mural was painted with insight provided by experts from the Manatee Conservation Center, the financial support of Coqui Charities and the assistance of the Municipality of Toa Baja, which holds jurisdiction over Isla de Cabras.Street artist Roa is a muralist from Ghent, Belgium, he is primarily known for his strong obsession for animals and rodents. He often combines life, death, and life after death in his murals, which quickly distinguishes him amongst traditional muralists. His animals are painted to include skeleton and internal organs, making the sight even more realistic.Internationally, ROA has created over a 1000 murals on the streets of cities across Europe, the United States, Australia, Asia, New Zealand and Africa.Take a look below to see more photos of “#PRLOVE” and “MANATEE”. More

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    in Street Art

    “Stay Tuned…” Group Exhibit at WOAW Gallery in Hong Kong

    WOAW Gallery presents its inaugural group show “Stay Tuned…” at their new gallery space, 9 Queens Road Central, Hong Kong. This exhibition is curated by a long-time friend of the gallery, Sasha Bogojev from Juxtapoz Magazine. The exhibition is viewing from 9th April –9th May, 2021.Staying tuned was at the same time never easier and never harder than it is nowadays. With fast and direct access to any news source, archive, store, or any person anywhere on the globe, the challenge of following something through has never been greater. And in the world of arts this means immediate access to artists’ studios, galleries, or museums globally, and the ability to closely observe the evolutions of new styles, births of new aesthetics, developments of new techniques, and first-hand experience of unraveling art history.In this regard, WOAW Gallery joined together five artists, Bas De Wit, Rhys Lee, Shannon Peel, Christopher Regner and Aaron Elvis Jupin, whose practices are not only keeping up with the current times, but are hinting about things to come. The purpose of WOAW Gallery is to provide a platform for artists, curators and collectors to appreciate art. So, stay tuned…Christopher Regner, Hercules’ Party at his Cool Dad’s”, 2021Providing a counterbalance to the aforementioned artists, US-based Christopher Regner is using air brush to create assemblage-style portraits made out of disparate reference imagery .Interested both in the technical limitations and possibilities of growingly popular artistic tools, the artist from American Midwest keeps developing new ways of blending unrelated visuals in order to explore struggles with masculinity in the context of lacking a comprehensive role model. Through such practice he is fully utilizing the flatness and plasticity of the technique, while constructing most uncanny jumbles filled with personal, historic, as well as pop-culture references.Bas De Wit, “In funny memory of … Apollo #2″, 2020Dutch artist Bas De Wit has been creating grotesque, surreal objects and settings through appropriation of almost organic characteristics to his sculptural references to Greek columns, Roman bust statues, or canvas paintings. While bent pillars or deflated and twisted effigies feel otherworldly from a distance, his technical experimentation with the properties and possibilities of the multicolored polyester results in endless layers of colors and textureswhich open up upon closer inspection. This whole approach is informed with the interest to comment on the transience of culture and a glorification of irrational thought while present the humorous perspective on the struggle of humanity and the drag of the everyday.Rhys Lee, “Apple Tree”, 2021Rhys Lee’s paintings are crashscenes of his graffiti past colliding with deep appreciationand respect for classical painting. Mixing his immediate approach with curiosity for technicaland contextual exploration, the Australian artist is creating heavily textured works that carryscars of his resolute and vigorous mark-making. Filled with references to both grafficonography and most traditional tropes, the artist is frequently re-painting chosen composition in an effort to explore the ways it changes with a different technical approach or setup.Shannon Peel, “Face Plant with sunflower”, 2020Lee’s NY-based fellow countryman and a long-time friend, Shannon Peel, has recentlystarted developing his own painterly practice in which he reinvents the traditional formatsthrough subtle animation of otherwise inert motifs. His ongoing body of work Still Alives andFace Plants quite literally inserts life and dynamics to typically inanimate subjects, all while referencing both his graff roots and some of the most recognizable artistic genres. Through the use of dedicated repetition the artist is exhausting the subject matter, switching the focus towards technical experimentation and discovery.Aaron Jupin, “Like to think, I am a man”, 2020Working with the same technique, but utilizing its qualities towards the other side of the aesthetic spectrum, LA-based Aaron Elvis Jupin constructs believable renderings of impossible realities. His masterful employment of airbrush enables him to construct mostrealistic scenes which turn the familiar mundane snapshots into the unthinkable extraordinary. With a focus on depicting almost tangible surfaces and frequent use of black negative space, he lures the focus onto a familiar object which instantly warps into a somewhat Dali-esque mirage of it self through an attribution of ludicrous qualities.Curator Sasha Bogojev is a contributing editor/European correspondent at Juxtapoz magazine. Born in Croatia and currently living in The Netherlands, over the years he has contributed to various international publications and media outlets, collaborated with artists on monographs/books/catalogs, and has curated a number of gallery shows worldwide.Scroll down below to view more photos of the exhibition. More

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    in Exhibitions

    The Guggenheim’s New Show of All-Star Photoconceptualists Questions Official Records and How We Depict the Past

    “Fake news” will be a tempting aperture through which to approach “Off the Record,” a new group show at the Guggenheim that looks at the ways in which artists consider, critique, or otherwise manipulate “official” documents of history and state power. 
    It wouldn’t necessarily be wrong to take that tack. But it’s not what was on curator Ashley James’s mind as she organized the show—her first since becoming the museum’s first full-time Black curator in 2019.
    “I’m less interested in speaking to the specificities of our contemporary historical moment than in thinking about a certain position in relationship to history as such,” she tells Artnet News over the phone. She pauses as construction noises from the show’s installation clang behind her.
    “It’s about a point of view,” she continues as the din dies down. “It’s about a kind of posture toward history and documentation that is something that’s applicable to the past, to the present, and to the future. It’s more about a methodology.”
    Sara Cwynar, Encyclopedia Grid (Bananas) (2014). Courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
    Heavy on photoconceptualism, “Off the Record” comprises some 25 works—all but one of which were pulled from the museum’s own collection—from artists including Sadie Barnette, Sarah Charlesworth, Hank Willis Thomas, and Adrian Piper. It’s a group that represents a wide swath of generations, interests, and artistic practices. What unites them here, explains James, is a shared “skepticism of received history.”  
    But how that sense of skepticism manifests in the work varies with each artist. For Sara Cwynar, represented in the exhibition by three pieces from her 2014 Encyclopedia Grid series, it’s an intellectual exercise. Taking a cue from the John Berger classic Ways of Seeing, the artist has culled various pictures of the same subject (bananas, Brigitte Bardot, the Acropolis) from multiple encyclopedias and rephotographed them—a process that shows us, without judgment, the representational quirks and biases of the supposedly objective resources. 
    Sadie Barnette, My Father’s FBI File; Government Employees Installation (2017). Courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
    Lisa Oppenheim, meanwhile, sees creative potential in the document’s deficiency. For a 2007 photo series, the artist reimagined details redacted from a group of Walker Evans’s Great Depression-era negatives, which were hole-punched to prevent publication. Oppenheim’s own small circular photographs, paired next to Evans’s originals, read as a kind of revisionist history—albeit one that is just as flawed as its source material.
    Other examples are more charged, such as prints from Carrie Mae Weems’s iconic 1995-96 series “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried,” in which the artist appropriates ethnographic photos of enslaved people to show how photography was used to reinforce racial inequality. Each is paired with a pointed phrase: “DESCENDING THE THRONE YOU BECAME FOOT SOLDIER & COOK,” reads one.
    Hank Willis Thomas, Something To Believe In (1984/2007). © Hank Willis ThomasPhotography. Courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
    Like these examples, almost all of the artists in the exhibition draw on material from generations past. But that’s not to say that the show doesn’t have something to say about the contemporary moment, James points out—even if its message has little to do with the Trump era specifically. 
    Best exemplifying this is the one work in the show that doesn’t belong to the museum’s collection: a 2020 wall-hung assemblage by Tomashi Jackson, in which an archival print of President Lyndon B. Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act is overlaid with paint and campaign materials for a 2018 gubernatorial race. 
    It’s a piece that literally fuses the past with the present, the “official” with the unofficial. And it alludes to another theme that ties together the various pieces in the show: “power,” says the curator, ”whether that power is because of the institution itself or power in a narrative that has been received in a certain way over time.” 
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