On View

For Cuban-born artist Tania Bruguera, there is no distinction between art and activism: her work, which is grounded in civic engagement and furthers the idea of art útil (using art as a utility or tool) is manifestly political.
In an exclusive interview with Art21 filmed in 2015, the artist discussed her project Immigrant Movement International, formed to help immigrants empower themselves and their communities through art.
By using art, the members “grow and understand how to work from their fear—with the limitations they have put on themselves once they enter this country,” she explains in the video, which aired as part of Art21’s Extended Play series.
The video includes testimony from another contemporary artist, Aliza Nisenbaum, who has earned acclaim for her intimate portraits, many created through Immigration Movement International. She also helped tutor members of the community.
Nisenbaum, who was born in Mexico City and now lives in Brooklyn, is inspired by the mural painting projects that defined a generation of artists in her native country.
“A lot of these women… hide in some way… because they are undocumented,” Nisenbaum tells Art21. “I was trying to give a sense of agency to the women… in terms of finding their voice, in terms of art and basic English skills.”
Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s series Extended Play, below.
[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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Artist Heather Phillipson’s long-awaited sculpture for London’s Fourth Plinth has been unveiled in Trafalgar Square.
Originally slated to be installed in March, the coronavirus outbreak postponed the artist’s big moment until today, July 30.
The sculpture depicts a towering pile of whipped cream topped with a great red cherry, an absurdly large fly, and a functioning drone. The drone casts live images to a website set up by the artist, providing a sculpture’s-eye view of one of London’s most heavily trafficked squares. An accompanying audio-collage by the artist is also available online.
“I’m honored to have been selected to make work for such a significant public site, and to see THE END scaled up for its ultimate size and context—one in which the surrounding architecture and its population are participants in a mis-scaled landscape,” Phillipson said in a statement. 
Heather Phillipson’s THE END sculpture for the Fourth Plinth is unveiled in London. Photo by David Parry/ PA Wire.

While the sculpture was conceived long before the current global crisis, its title, THE END, seems especially resonant. But as Phillipson told Artnet News in an interview earlier this year: “It feels like, politically, entropy has been happening for a long time now.”
The sculpture’s whipped cream, piled high and on the verge of collapse, is a gesture towards the excesses of globalized society; and the drone, situated not far from the Houses of Parliament, is a comment on institutionalized surveillance..
The sculpture will be in place until spring 2022, and is the 13th public art project to grace the Fourth Plinth since the program began in 1998. Among recent commissions in the series was Michael Rakowitz’s contemporary recreation of a lost ancient Assyrian guardian sculpture that was destroyed by Islamist extremists in 2015.
Phillipson is the third woman after Rachel Whiteread and Katharina Fritsch to be commissioned in the series. Her work is also the first to be accessible to those with hearing and visual impairments, with a braille panel on the plaque including a tactile image of the work, and an audio description of it available online.
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As galleries and art institutions around the world begin to reopen, we are spotlighting individual shows—online and IRL—that are worth your attention.
“Alec Egan: August” at Anat Ebgi, Los Angelesthrough September 5, 2020

What the gallery says: “The exhibition title alludes not only to the hottest apex of the year, when everything is at its most combustible, the ‘dog-days’ month that ends summer, but to a proposed conclusion before the start of something new.
“Since 2017, Egan’s practice has focused on creating oil paintings of the interior of a singular imagined house. Typically, Egan’s exhibitions are constituted around one ‘key’ painting—often of dominant scale—that depicts one room, such as a bathroom, living room, or bedroom, full of domestic details, which then becomes the conceptual fodder for the remaining works in the show. Although this project has been ongoing, the recent quarantine at home has cast a new light on Egan’s meditations on the domestic.
“The key painting in ‘August’ is Changing Room, where, using an ad nauseum approach, Egan layers a cacophony of sentimental patterns. The effect is simultaneously grounding and disorienting. References abound, from the personal to Victorian wallpapers, to vintage Laura Ashley upholsteries, as well as boldly colored travel posters that are reminiscent of the ’60s. The room has an air of mystery and concealment. Curtains hang heavily from their rods in a strange wild garden, perfumed by dewy roses. What is happening in the stillness of this house? Who or what is hidden behind the privacy screen?”
Why it’s worth a look: Staring at one of Alec Egan’s paintings is like entering a strange vortex in which shapes and colors jockey for your attention.
In the midst of his luscious, floral-laden wallpaper and upholstery patterns though, distinct forms coalesce for a well-earned respite. A brown grocery bag filled with perfectly ripe fruit is a symbol of the nostalgia that permeates all of Egan’s work, which he creates based on half-formed memories mixed with cultural sources.
Another example is in the brown leather work boots that appear in one painting, a reference to Van Gogh’s well-worn peasant shoes. In Egan’s painting, the red laces are formed by thick caterpillars of paint, squeezed straight from the tube and sitting atop the canvas, distinguishing them from the flat geometric pattern of the rug that recalls Édouard Vuillard’s Japanese-inspired prints.
Other paintings in this suite of 14 works depict traditional “California” scenes, though the artist’s artistic influences range widely. Impossibly candy-colored sunsets anchored by palm trees are reminiscent of Alex Israel’s work, crossed with the movie poster for the cult surfing classic Endless Summer (1966). In Egan’s study of cresting waves, the individual water droplets and spewing foam recall Hokusai’s Great Wave.
All in all, it’s a feast for the eyes.
What it looks like:

Alec Egan, Changing Room (2020) [detail]. Courtesy of the artist and Anat Ebgi.

Installation view, “Alec Egan: August” at Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles.

Installation view, “Alec Egan: August” at Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles.

Installation view, “Alec Egan: August” at Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles.

Alec Egan, Bag of Fruit on Ottoman (2020). Courtesy of Anat Ebgi.

Alec Egan, Bag of Fruit on Ottoman [detail] (2020). Courtesy of Anat Ebgi.

Alec Egan, Before the Sea (2020). Courtesy of Anat Ebgi.

Alec Egan, Flower in Bottle (2020). Courtesy of Anat Ebgi.

Alec Egan, Flower in Tea Pot (2020). Courtesy of Anat Ebgi.

Alec Egan, Dawn Palms (2020). Courtesy of Anat Ebgi.

Alec Egan, Palms at Deep Sunset (2020). Courtesy of Anat Ebgi.

Alec Egan, Oven Mitt, Mango, and Bottle (2020). Courtesy of Anat Ebgi.

Alec Egan, Storm Wave (2020). Courtesy of Anat Ebgi.

Alec Egan, Storm Wave (2020). Courtesy of Anat Ebgi.

Installation view, “Alec Egan: August” at Anat Ebgi. Courtesy Anat Ebgi.

Alec Egan, Bathroom (2020). Courtesy of Anat Ebgi.

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Traveling is off limits for many people right now, but art can offer a window into new places and experiences.
One artist for whom travel is integral is Leonardo Drew. Despite an early life spent tethered to his neighborhood in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and a career formed on the basis of that localized experience, Drew eventually made his way beyond his city, traveling to Peru, Cuba, Spain, Switzerland, and Japan in quick succession.
“If you allow your antennas to reach out,” Drew says in an exclusive interview with Art21, “you’ll find what it is you need for this part of your journey.”
Drew’s practice relies heavily on being in the studio, where he creates massive sculptures from materials that he has transformed by oxidizing, weathering, burning, and manipulating objects. From sifting through landfills to amassing piles of hay bales and cotton, Drew’s work is rooted in the physical. 
“The art is fed by experiences” he tells Art21, explaining that while he was in Japan, he learned techniques for naturally dying fabrics.
“I went there to physically learn,” he says in the video, which originally aired as part of Art21’s Extended Play series. “But actually, spiritually learning was a whole other thing.” 
Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s series Extended Play, below.
[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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As galleries and art institutions around the world begin to reopen, we are spotlighting individual shows—online and IRL—that are worth your attention.
“Clotilde Jiménez: The Contest” at Mariane Ibrahimthrough August 22

What the gallery says: “THE CONTEST unravels Jiménez’s own queer imagination to physicality. The works grapple with his deeply personal and once estranged relationship with his father, a bodybuilder and boxer. Jiménez adopts the boxer and bodybuilder as motifs, recalling early ideas of the body, specifically the Black male body.
Placed within each ‘pose’ or boxing ring, the large scale boxers and body builders brawl, their positions mighty, next to bronze sculptures of heads with colorful boxing headgear. He finds beauty in the color and sculptural physicality of boxing headgear and the groin protector that transforms the body into something strong, powerful and guarded.”
Why it’s worth a look: For his first solo show at star gallerist Mariane Ibrahim’s Chicago gallery, Honolulu-born, Mexico City-based artist Clotilde Jiménez is quite literally tackling notions of masculinity and Blackness.
In these works, you can really feel how the artist has infused the works with his personal understanding of what it means to be a strong man—delicate painted flowers adorn the furniture incorporated in some works, and swaths of pattern cut out and pasted onto the canvas provide another layer when juxtaposed with the shaded contours of the muscled bodies. His juxtaposition of unexpected materials and charged forms makes for images that wrestle their way in your head.
What it looks like:

Clotilde Jiménez with his sculpture, Orange Boxer (2020). Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim.

Clotilde Jiménez, Always on Guard (2020). Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim.

Installation view, “Clotilde Jiménez: The Contest” Courtesy of Mariane Ibrahim.

Installation view, “Clotilde Jiménez: The Contest” Courtesy of Mariane Ibrahim.

Clotilde Jiménez, Pose no. 4 (2020). Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim.

Clotilde Jiménez, Pose no. 5 (2020). Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim.

Clotilde Jiménez, Pose no. 6 (2020). Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim.

Installation view, “Clotilde Jiménez: The Contest” Courtesy of Mariane Ibrahim.

Clotilde Jiménez,, Shadow Boxer (2020). Courtesy of the Artist and Mariane Ibrahim.

Installation view, “Clotilde Jiménez: The Contest” Courtesy of Mariane Ibrahim.

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Mega-gallery Hauser & Wirth is giving recent art-school graduates whose IRL MFA shows were cancelled a spotlight with two exhibitions in Somerset and Los Angeles.
The gallery will host the graduate exhibitions over the next four months, the first at its artist residency studios, the Maltings in Bruton, in Somerset; and the second at its Book and Printed Matter Lab, in Los Angeles this fall.
Hauser & Wirth is offering technical, curatorial, and marketing support to the students for both shows.
Ten recent graduates from four universities in the South West of England will present work in Somerset in an exhibition titled “In Real Life,” which will run from July 29 through August 2.
The artists included are Melody Addo, Betsy Bond, Samantha Davies, Kamila Dowgiert, Juliet Duckworth, Louise Hall, Lauren Horrell, Lilith Piper, Madeline Rolt, and Connor Vickery-Gearty. 
“This has been a remarkable time for our final year students,” Natasha Kidd, head of the Bath School of Art & Design’s fine art program, said in a statement.
“The degree shows were postponed—the assessments took place online, whole shows compressed into pdfs. Tutorials took place through ‘hangouts’—into an array of domestic spaces. Washing lines, hallways and even greenhouses became the site of making work—pet dogs, parents/partners or the odd passer-by on their daily exercise became the audience.”
Louise Hall, 13 Dead, Nothing Said (2020). Image ©Louise Hall. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

“Providing support and a platform for artists emerging at this current moment is crucial,” says the Kent-born artist Anj Smith, who is among the artists who are contributing to the gallery’s education program. “Art has long been at the forefront of cultural progress and we need inspired, thoughtful voices now more than ever.”
The gallery is also partnering with Cal State LA to include works by MFA graduates from the 2020 class in the Los Angeles exhibition in the fall.
The project is part of the gallery’s philanthropic initiative, #artforbetter, which includes effort to support educational institutions.
“A deep-rooted commitment to education and professional development has always been at the heart of the gallery and embedded in each exhibition,” gallery cofounder Manuela Wirth said in a statement.
“It’s important to us that we remain connected to the wider creative community and artistic energy surrounding each gallery location, enabling new generations of talent to thrive by creating meaningful partnerships and support networks.”
See images of student artworks below.
Kamila Dowgiert, 24/5 (2020). Image ©Kamila Dowgiert. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

Melody Addo, Chocolate Pudding (still frame) (2020). Image ©Melody Addo. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

Juliet Duckworth, Apple Path – November 2019 (2019 – 2020). Image ©Juliet Duckworth. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

Betsy Bond, Landscape Exhibition Space (2020). Image ©Betsy Bond. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

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Remember when, seemingly overnight sometime during those first few weeks of quarantine, companies shoehorned uplifting messages of solidarity and hope into their TV ads, without ever neglecting to peddle their products?
“We’re here for a reason, and it’s bigger than selling cars,” began a Ford commercial that otherwise was just a Ford commercial.
“Now’s the time for us to show off our strength,” a Michelob Ultra ad inexplicably declared. 
For pop appropriationist Julia Wachtel, who for four decades has been mashing up mass-media images on painted canvases, the discordant tone wasn’t new. 
“That’s the COVID advertisement—which is what advertising has always been,” she tells Artnet News.
After filming snippets of commercials, reality shows, and other bits of TV, the artist created a series of short videos exaggerating this tonal tension to trippy, often humorous effect.
In one, footage of a NASCAR pit stop is intercut with shots of an electric toothbrush cleaning a corn cob. In another, a low-budget bible commercial is set to polka music. 
A still from one of Wachtel’s videos. Courtesy of the artist.

The films—her first stab at the medium—will premier weekly on Thursdays on Perrotin gallery’s Instagram. (Wachtel’s work is also included in “The Secret History of Everything,” a group show on view at the gallery’s New York location.)
They’re short and lo-fi and have a distinct, one-step-forward, two-steps-back rhythm. They’re silly, but they’re still underscored by a languid, late-capitalist sadness—like when you find yourself watching informercials in the middle of the day. 
In short, if Wachtel’s paintings were to come to life, they’d look a lot like this. 
And that makes sense, considering their origin. Not long after quarantining at her home and studio in Connecticut, Wachtel ran out of the custom-made canvases she uses for her painted work. So she decided to try her hand at video. 
The process was humble. In a habit she likens to fishing, Wachtel would turn on the TV and simply started surfing, using her phone to record little clips along the way.
After she had reeled in enough material, she would load it into iMovie and start experimenting. Eventually she graduated to Adobe Premiere, but was sure to maintain the sketch-like quality—a balance she learned to strike with her painting. 
A still from one of Wachtel’s videos. Courtesy of the artist.

But the formal logic of painting is not the one through which she thinks and talks about the works. 
“I listen to a lot of hip hop and rap and have since 1979 when the Sugarhill Gang came out with the first rap song,” she says, citing Kendrick Lamar as a particular hero.
“If you think about scratching or sampling and the building of overlapping layers of beats and melodies, there is a visual equivalent. For me, that’s very inspirational.”  
There’s another layer between the canvases and the videos too, one that the artist is still reconciling. 
Through the act of painting, Wachtel says, she’s undermining the ocean of images from which her material comes.   
“I’m extracting out of that, and locating images in history,” the artist says. “They become objects that are made at particular moments. They’re physical things that will stay in their current form. It’s about making static something that reflects a condition that is fundamentally time-based.”
And then, after finishing her fishing expedition, she throws her catch back in the water. 
“I’m swimming with the devil now.”
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As galleries and art institutions around the world begin to reopen, we are spotlighting individual shows—online and IRL—that are worth your attention.

“Grace Weaver: Steps” at James Cohanthrough September 12, 2020
What the gallery says: “In her striking portrayals of the tragicomic everyday, Grace Weaver examines the charged social and cultural conditions that underlie self-concept, intimacy, and individual experience. Depicting elastic-limbed figures that collide on street-corners and tumble down steps, Weaver’s new paintings turn an incisive yet empathetic eye onto the self-conscious performativity and precarious footing of her contemporaries. In her work, the body itself becomes scenario: playful, sweeping lines and dense planes of luminous color act as linguistic elements, each directing [their] own physical weight and affect onto her female subjects.
Weaver’s paintings are an exploration of what she terms a ‘theater of public life’… These scenes allow her to build an audience within the painting, creating a chorality within the picture plane. The cast of characters, like Weaver, are as much subject to performing a strata of social anxieties as they are to wryly observing them.”
Why it’s worth a look: Weaver’s deft drawings and charcoal studies, which are full of lyricism and emotion, recall Eadweard Muybridge’s landmark 19th-century motion-study photographs, with each erasure marking another aspect of the body’s movement through space.
The paintings that result from Weaver’s many preparatory works are flattened with color, but not diminished in affect: the bright orange and hot pink of the female characters, outlined almost as animation cels, are hilarious and heartwarming. The balloon-shaped extremities and accordion-pleated skirts of some figures are reminiscent of Olive Oyl’s elasticity, and the tight-lipped portrait Choker II calls up an image of Daria, the surly heroine at the heart of MTV’s animated sitcom. Both are models of imperfect, fallible women—all the better for their foibles.
The “Steps” noted in the show’s title could be a simple reference to the physical flights of stairs the subjects clumsily traverse. But it could just as easily be an allusion to the steps of performance, the process of maturity, and the many hurdles of simply going about life.
What it looks like:

Grace Weaver, Affront (2020).© Grace Weaver 2020. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle.

Grace Weaver, Misstep (2020). © Grace Weaver 2020. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle.

Grace Weaver, Droop (2020). © Grace Weaver 2020. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle.

Grace Weaver, Limbo (2020). © Grace Weaver 2020. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle.

Grace Weaver, Study for ‘Limbo’ (2020). © Grace Weaver 2020. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle.

Grace Weaver, Transfer (2020). © Grace Weaver 2020. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle.

Grace Weaver, Step (2020). © Grace Weaver 2020. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle.

Grace Weaver, Choker II [detail] (2020). © Grace Weaver 2020. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle.

Grace Weaver, Stunt (2020). Courtesy of James Cohan Gallery.© Grace Weaver 2020. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle.

Grace Weaver, Crying (I, Upwards) (2020). © Grace Weaver 2020. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle.

Grace Weaver, Confrontation (2020). © Grace Weaver 2020. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle.

Grace Weaver, Crying (II, Downwards) (2020). © Grace Weaver 2020. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle.

Grace Weaver, Shame (2020). © Grace Weaver 2020. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle.

Grace Weaver, Sunshower (2020). © Grace Weaver 2020. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle.

Grace Weaver, Choker I (2020).  © Grace Weaver 2020. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle.

Grace Weaver, Split Leap (2020). © Grace Weaver 2020. Image courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York. Photo by Phoebe d’Heurle.

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