Angela Bulloch, Liam Gillick, Matthew Angelo Harrison, and Liesl Raff will participate in the 15th Gwangju Biennale in South Korea, which will feature 31 pavilions throughout Gwangju, including in Yangnim-dong and Dongmyeong-dong. The Biennale will host creative artistic entities from around 30 countries, cities, and institutions. These exhibitions will not only resonate with the Pansori soundscape of the 21st century but will also create a rich tapestry of sights and discourse by showcasing diverse perspectives.
Ugo Rondinone will be awarded the 15th Robert Jacobsen Prize of the Stiftung Würth. The award ceremony will take place on September 5, 2024, at 7 pm in the Carmen Würth Forum in Künzelsau, Germany. This is also the opening of his presentation solar spirit at Museum Würth 2 and in the Sculpture Garden, which will be on display from September 6, 2024 to March 23, 2025.
Liesl Raff presents a performative exhibition titled Club Liaison in the Austrian Pavilion at the LEEKANGHA Art Museum: an immersive installation which serves as a setting for a programme of live performances by Austria based and South Korean artists.
Ugo Rondinone’s triumphant thirty-year retrospective at the Kunstmuseum Luzern is an ode to Switzerland’s majestic overlapping mountains and verdant terrain. “Cry Me a River” ranges from his early to most current work, reflecting themes that have been a consistent inspiration.
Galerie Eva Presenhuber is proud to announce the representation of Vienna-based artist Liesl Raff. Liesl Raff's sculptures explore the nuances of physical and social interactions through a profound appreciation of diverse materials and persistent experimentation. Her work features a semiotics of materials that begins where words fail. Recently, she has used natural rubber to showcase its adaptable and shape-shifting properties. Standing near or within Raff's pieces, you experience a transition into a warm, cozy, and calm state, feeling a sense of dependability and safety. Her sculptures integrate seamlessly with their surroundings, promoting contact and interaction.
Daniel Palmer, chief curator at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia, spoke with painter Shara Hughes about her Zurich exhibition, Tree Farm, which features Hughes's new horizontal tree paintings and ceramics. They also discussed her upbringing in Georgia and her invitation to her father to display his work in a cabinet next to the gallery.
It's snowing, the sun is setting, a storm is brewing – Ugo Rondinone's expansive exhibition cry me a river at Kunstmuseum Luzern invites viewers to immerse themselves in both his art and the elements. At the heart of the artist's work is the overwhelming beauty of the landscape and the power of nature. Rondinone, who lives in New York, grew up in Brunnen on Lake Lucerne and is now returning to his home country to present a major retrospective.
Josh Smith is a multi-talented artist: he is not just a painter. Since the pandemic, he has appeared on Instagram as an ambassador for the art world. He also hosts a regular series on YouTube called "Studio News". During the broadcasts, he sometimes talks about his artistic creative process - in some editions, he simply remains silent. Now Smith is presenting a series of 16 new canvases with his first eponymous exhibition in Vienna.
At her pop-up in the Melina Merkouri Art & Concert Hall, sponsored by the Pappas Family Collection and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, the industrious Tschabalala Self drew crowds of tourists and locals to The Bigger Picture. This triple-screen video (until 2 July) revisits, rather than documents, Sounding Board, the play with music (by Boney M) that she contributed to the 2021 Performa Biennial.
Louisa Gagliardi captivates collectors with her unique paintings that explore the tension between online and real-life existence. Her works feature slick, serene yet uneasy scenes with avatars that evoke a sense of ennui. Using a laborious digital process, she prints sketches on glossy PVC surfaces, creating a surreal, sci-fi allure. Gagliardi's background in graphic design influences her industrial technique, and her works reflect themes of hyperconnectivity and isolation. Influenced by artists like Fernand Léger, her art combines reflections and trompe l'oeil effects, aiming to immerse viewers in otherworldly, dream-like realms.
Drawing from nuanced forms of joy, Black artists, whether residing in Africa or within the vast African diaspora, have pursued a spectrum of visual vocabularies that encompass the experiences of Blackness – of being Black; of living within Black cultures and navigating the complexities of representation and visibility. In doing so, they have intentionally explored the poetics of Blackness in a way that subverts reductive tropes. They explore Black subjectivity and Black consciousness through figurative painting as part of a historical continuum. Join curator Koyo Kouoh as she discusses these vocabularies and histories – surveyed and celebrated in the exhibition When We See Us, A Century of Black Figuration in Painting, currently on show at Kunstmuseum Basel – with artists Kudzanai-Violet Hwami and Tschabalala Self.
Amidst a world rapidly changing under the weight of climate change, the exhibition I Feel the Earth Whisper at Museum Frieder Burda invites us to contemplate the fragile beauty of the natural world and our profound interconnectedness with it. Through the installations of Bianca Bondi, Julian Charrière, Sam Falls and Ernesto Neto – including sculpture, painting, video and photography – the show curated by Patricia Kamp and Jérôme Sans, invites us to reflect upon our relationship with the forests and unique ecosystems of the planet, and to rekindle our historically rooted role as guardians of these vibrant living spaces.
Born and raised in Harlem, New York, Tschabalala Self (b. 1990) pushes the traditional boundaries of painting with her innovative use of pigments, textiles and printmaking methods. Infusing her work with her experiences as a Black American woman, Self deconstructs and reimagines Western portrayals of the Black body. In the video, Self discusses her artistic practice and her solo exhibition, Around the Way, which opened at EMMA in May 2024. The colourful displays in the exhibition evoke the metropolitan landscapes of Harlem and the atmosphere of its domestic interiors. Tschabalala Self is the seventh artist to join InCollection series of exhibitions co-produced by EMMA and Saastamoinen Foundation.
With sixteen new works at Galerie Presenhuber, Vienna, American artist Josh Smith on treating his paintings like puzzles and his Instagram channel as a work of art.
"The plants in Shara Hughes’s mind-bending paintings export the viewer far from reality. The American artist’s forms seem to be plundered from the depths of her imagination. Towering trees are depicted in spidery strokes of yellow, green and orange (Wits End (2024)), or with vibrant, fluffy blue dots embellishing their branches (What Nerve (2024)). Her works are often so loaded with energetic marks and organic forms that the background and foreground converge, leading to a rich tangle of dynamic visual material."
Shara Hughes is an American painter based in Brooklyn, and is known for her lush, vibrant, imaginative landscapes. These do not root in any outside reference, but rather in her exploration of shape, form and light. The narrative in her work is subtle; it is open to interpretation, but ultimately deals with the nature of her actions, reactions and emotions. Hughes calls her mostly large and vertical canvases invented or psychological landscapes – offering a colorful, kaleidoscopic vision of a painter’s interior.
Premiering in Zurich this week at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Tobias Pils: Happy Days marks the seventh solo show the artist has had with the gallery and presents a new body of work that highlights his signature style. On view June 7–July 20, 2024, the exhibition is comprised of two large-scale triptychs, a suite of eight paintings, and a bronze sculpture.
"Doug Aitken is an American artist known for installations that span a wide spectrum of media and genres; they may include video, print media, photography, sculpture, sound, and performance. Aitken wants to make the traditional definition of art more accessible to a much more comprehensive and connecting meaning. The viewer is invited to move through his large-scale works, either by walking around huge screens, stepping on a train, or even swimming through mirrored sculptures – to name but a few of his immersive projects."
Fresh out of the shower from Vienna, Josh Smith introduces his solo exhibition Studio News (24 May–20 July 2024). Fish, palm trees, and the Grim Reaper ('I mean that was a really bad one') have all graced the New Yorker's gestural and colour-rich canvases over his 20-year career. This time, it's bats: 'They're like birds, just way cooler.'
For their second instalment of ReCollect! at the Kunsthaus Zürich, Oslo based artists Matias Faldbakken and Ida Ekblad have hung one of their favourite works from the collection, Francis Picabia’s Cure-dents (Toothpicks, c. 1924), opposite four painted bronze sculptures by Ekblad. Faldbakken has then ‘measured’ the distance between Picabia and Ekblad using a VHS-copy of the 1983 splatter film1 Stage Fright. The second installation is on view in the Chipperfield building of the Kunsthaus.
Around the Way features multi-material paintings and sculptures by Tschabalala Self, whose works will together form colourful spatial displays in EMMA’s concrete-dominated exhibition space. Self’s art often deals with the intersections of race and gender. The artist draws from her personal experiences as a Black American woman. She depicts bodies that are both exalted and objectified in Western imagery and art history. Through repetition, deconstruction and distortion of this imagery, she creates a new kind of narrative about the Black body.
Nick Byrne from King Kong Magazine interviewed Torbjørn Rødland, whose photographic works are a moveable feast for the eyes. The subject matter is caught in the moment, but starts to alter in the imagination. Changing and warping, sneakily shapeshifting, his photographs give the illusion of reality, when in fact the realism of the images are just a shudder away from the surreal.
Matthew Angelo Harrison was interviewed by Nick Byrne for King Kong Magazine on his new show American Ghost. The artist speaks about blending resin, 3D tech, and memorabilia to encapsulate personal and societal memories. He explores the connection between opposing elements in life, drawing from his African American upbringing in Detroit's industrial landscape. His pieces merge Fine Art and Industrial Design, conveying powerful messages about identity and society through carefully chosen objects and innovative techniques.
The High Line's Moynihan Connector Billboard features Loosie in the Park (2019) and Patience (2022) by Tschabalala Self. Loosie portrays a Black woman in a Harlem park, smoking a single cigarette ("loosie"), reflecting on bodegas' cultural significance in Black and Latino communities. Meanwhile, Patience depicts a Black woman blending into her domestic setting, exploring themes of home and gendered labor. Both artworks encapsulate Self's exploration of community pillars like bodegas and the psychological dimensions of domesticity, respectively, showcasing her distinctive style and thematic depth in capturing Black female experiences.
Museum SAN presents BURN TO SHINE, a solo exhibition of works by Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone. With over forty works of sculpture, painting, installation, and film featured in the museum’s three main galleries, as well as the Nam June Paik Hall and the outdoor stone garden, BURN TO SHINE offers the most comprehensive presentation of the artist’s oeuvre in Korea to date. In contrast to the broad spectrum of medium and visual language that individual works employ, however, the exhibition, as a whole, gravitates toward themes that remain at the core of Rondinone’ s artistic practice spanning over three decades – the cycle of life, and relationship to nature that fundamentally define our human condition and experience.
The Bourse de Commerce exhibits a portion of Peter Fischli David Weiss's Suddenly this Overview (1981-2012) installation. This clay-based work humorously explores human history through hand-modeled sculptures, accompanied by the film The Least Resistance (1981). The duo's first sculptural epic utilizes raw clay to create 76 figurines with captions serving as punchlines, offering a playful and thought-provoking blend of absurdity and universality. In the Auditorium, the experimental film The Way Things Go (1987) is screened.
Heinz Schütz interviewed Matthew Angelo Harrison for KUNSTFORUM International, stating: "The encapsulation of traditional African sculptures plays a central role in Matthew Angelo Harrison's work. Transparent, futuristic-looking plastic boxes preserve what has been encapsulated. With their purist minimalist aesthetics, they act like "coolers" that contain and dim down the once cultic-magical and highly expressive in a modernist way. What began as an exploration of Harrison's African-American roots points beyond and becomes a commentary on the present."