Shara Hughes fearlessly combines styles and colors. Whether sunset, nuclear fusion or tree nursery, with her luminous motifs, the artist succeeds to put contemporary painting under a strong current. A visit to her studio in Brooklyn by Lisa Zeitz.
The Norwegian artist and author Matias Faldbakken will be opening a new solo exhibition at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Waldmannstrasse, on February 7, 5 – 8 pm. On the same evening, he will also be presenting his sixth novel ‘Armes Ding’ (btb 2024, translated from Norwegian by Maximilian Stadler) at the Literaturhaus Zürich. The conversation will be held in English. Selected passages will be read in German.
The invisible becomes visible in the visual worlds of Kenyan artist Chemu Ng'ok, which are on view at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Waldmannstrasse, Zurich, until January 25, 2025. Clara Zimmermann from WELTKUNST met the artist for a conversation about her time after university, the power of community and colorful umbrellas.
Acting as reflections of the artist and viewer, the paintings of Swiss artist Louisa Gagliardi intend to capture internal and emotional worlds while mirroring the rapid developments in technology that shape our visual and social landscapes. Their liminal status—in between digitally crafted and physically constructed—addresses issues of self-curated identities while simultaneously navigating art historical narratives. On the occasion of her solo show Whereabouts at Eva Presenhuber in Vienna, Claire Koron Elat sat down with Gagliardi to discuss why we seem to be more confident when we’re children, cringing over old work, and being forced to be pessimistic.
What becomes progressively clear is that the show does not aim to group, nor unify struggle. Resistance is rather shown in its dynamic and differentiated dimensions, articulating through its multiple sites, landscapes, spaces and infrastructures. The exhibited artworks allow resistance to reverberate and resonate: within silence, noise, music and distant echoes alike.
In September 2025, the mumok in Vienna will present a solo show by the Austrian artist Tobias Pils. Curated by Manuela Ammer, it will be the most comprehensive presentation of the artist's oeuvre to date. Along with an overview of his painterly works of the last decade, it also highlights the artist’s extensive drawing practice. A site-specific mural, which references both the transitory and the spatial dimensions of Pils’ work, is also part of the show.
Adam Pendleton will open his solo exhibition Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Spring 2025. This landmark exhibition will highlight Pendleton’s unique contributions to contemporary American painting and serve as an anchor for the Museum’s 50th anniversary celebration. The exhibition will feature new and recent paintings from multiple bodies of work alongside a new single-channel video work.
Louisa Gagliardi has established herself as one of the most interesting voices on the Swiss contemporary art scene. In her works, which combine traditional painting techniques and digital technology, she explores themes such as identity, how society is changing, and the relationship between the individual and their environment. For her solo exhibition at MASI Lugano – the first in a Swiss museum – the artist will be showing a series of new works, paintings and sculptures in a site-specific presentation designed for the LAC's lower ground floor.
“I wanted to make something aggressively non-linear, using sound and music to express things that hard language couldn’t,” Doug Aitken said of his latest work Lightscape. The artist’s cinematic and sonic exploration of Southern California’s myths, histories, and potentialities, told through a series of interwoven but disjointed scenes, debuted as an hour-long film last Saturday, November 16, at the Los Angeles Music Center.
Lightscape is an innovative multimedia artwork created by the artist Doug Aitken in collaboration with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Master Chorale. It’s a modern mythology propelled by music that asks the questions, “where are we now?” and “where are we going?” Lightscape is a shapeshifting act of contemporary storytelling that unfolds in various stages: a feature-length film, a multi-screen fine art installation, and a series of live musical performances. Following its concert premiere at the Walt Disney Concert Hall on November 16, Lightscape migrates to the Marciano Art Foundation in the form of a multi-screen art exhibition
Learn more here.
The Aspen Art Museum is pleased to present Ugo Rondinone's first major institutional show in the Western United States in a career spanning over three decades. The museum’s second-floor gallery is recast as a prismatic arena where fluorescent, lifelike sculptures of dancers sit at rest and in waiting. In his practice at large, Rondinone is celebrated for expansive installations, working with photography, painting, poetry, outdoor sculpture, and neon rainbow signage. His visual vocabulary often incorporates the natural and primordial world, wherein rocks, clouds, trees, and the sun are recurrent motifs.
For decades, there have been close links between the histories of art and shop window display. Besides Jean Tinguely, many other artists, such as Tschabalala Self, have designed pioneering window displays. Conversely, window displays frequently feature as a motif in artworks or serve as a stage for performances and actions. The exhibition will explore this eventful relationship from its beginnings to the present day, while artistic interventions in shop windows in Basel extend the show into public space.
Carroll Dunham and Laurie Simmons present a new retrospective exhibition at the Consortium Museum in Dijon. The exhibition offers an opportunity to see two significant bodies of work created by both artists over the past thirty years. Envisioned as a “marriage” of two monographic exhibitions, it brings together twenty works by each artist.
Shara Hughes has created a selection of vibrant new paintings in dialogue with the narratives of the Met Opera’s upcoming 2024-2025 season, including Antony and Cleopatra, Moby Dick, The Queen of Spades, and The Magic Flute. The project is curated by Dodie Kazanjian is on view through June 2025.
"Artist Chase Hall paints his canvases with coffee, making large-scale works that examine mixed-race identity in America. Now, on the eve of the biggest show of his career, Hall is reconciling his fractured past with his blindingly bright future."
Tin Jobber (2024) by the Canadian artist Steven Shearer in the 2024 iteration of The FLAG Art Foundation's Spotlight Series. The Spotlight Series includes a new or never-before-exhibited artwork paired with a commissioned piece of writing, creating focused and thoughtful conversations between the visual arts and authors, critics, poets, scholars, and beyond. A text by filmmaker and writer Durga Chew-Bose accompanies Shearer's presentation.
"It isn’t hard to get Chase Hall talking. Having grown up with a mother in and out of rehab and a father in and out of jail; attended eight schools before the age of 16; and achieved an enviable degree of fame for an untrained 31-year-old artist, Hall has a lot to say."
This year, for the first time, Fluxus Art Projects, an organisation created in 2010 by the Institut français du Royaume-Uni, awards a prize at Art Basel Paris, supporting talent from the British art scene and promoting the artists’ visibility internationally. The prize of €15,000 is shared between the artist and the gallery exhibiting their work at Art Basel Paris.
Galerie Eva Presenhuber is proud to announce the representation of Nairobi-based artist Chemu Ng'ok, alongside Central Fine, Miami, and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg. On Friday, November 15, 2024, Echoes, her debut solo exhibition with Galerie Eva Presenhuber will open at Waldmannstrasse, Zurich.
"One recent evening, not far from the perfectly preserved bedroom of William S. Burroughs and a vintage Orgone Accumulator set up to capture esoteric energies, the late poet and artist John Giorno could be seen reciting the quizzical line “God, please fuck my mind for good!” He was present in the form of footage from a documentary from 1995, but the occasion was more timely: a 50th-anniversary celebration of Giorno Poetry Systems, a nonprofit that has been the impetus for some intriguing activity of late in downtown New York..."
Science/Fiction - Une non-histoire des Plantes traces a visual history of plants linking art, technology and science from the 19th century to the present day. Bringing together over 40 artists from different eras and nationalities, the exhibition compares historic photographic works such as Anna Atkins' cyanotypes, Karl Blossfeldt's inventory of plant forms and Laure Albin Guillot's microscope experiments, with works by contemporary artists such as Sam Falls.
In Oscar Tuazon's first solo exhibition in Austria, the US sculptor presents works that merge natural and industrial materials like wood, stone, metal, and concrete, creating structures that blur the line between functional architecture and sculpture. Drawing inspiration from eco-efficient and utopian designs of the 1960s and 1970s, Tuazon explores how these architectural models can apply to contemporary issues of space and self-sufficiency. The exhibition also includes his ongoing "Water School" project, which addresses global struggles over access to land, water, and infrastructure.
The Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris presents Les Fleurs d'Yves Saint Laurent in Paris. This spontaneous dialogue between the arts and different eras continues with the work of Sam Falls throughout the exhibition. The patterns and colors of his reconstructed take on nature blend harmoniously with those seen on the haute couture pieces. In the clothing of Yves Saint Laurent, as in the paintings of Sam Falls, flowers transcend time and remain eternally in bloom.
"They look like cyborg animals carrying a burden as precious as it is mysterious: a phalanx of creatures with long, straight metal legs, on whose pelvises sharp-edged cuboid blocks rest like inorganic bodies. The cubes are transparent or semitransparent and enclose objects whose contours are sometimes clear, sometimes less so."
Ugo Rondinone's diverse art is in demand all over the world. Lisa Zeitz, Editor in Chief of Weltkunst, visited him in his new apartment in Paris and talked to him with him about stones, lightning and Caspar David Friedrich.
For Doug Aitken’s first monographic exhibition in Turkey, Naked City at Borusan Contemporary, artworks covering the period from 2006 to 2024 are exceptionally brought together to create a site-specific journey through the architecture.
Whale Song, a new public artwork by Jean-Marie Appriou, will be unveiled at Boston’s Central Wharf Park on September 14. Curated by Pedro Alonzo, the artist’s historical and mystical perspectives on whales invite the public into a conversation about how the natural world has shaped us and vice versa. Incorporating three aluminum sculptures into his composition, Appriou melds myth and nature across time while gesturing to historical reckonings and mystical revelations.
Liesl Raff is known for her sculptural works with latex; she works with and alters these materials to create spaces, atmospheres and situations. She studied stage design in Graz and then sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. In 2024, she will design the Austrian pavilion at the Gwangju Biennale and will also produce a new work for the Lyon Biennale. In both exhibitions, Raff will be creating a collective moment, to be shared by the visitors when entering her installations; be it a club or a corridor.
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.
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.
On the cover of Numéro art 15, now on newsstands, the two artists Ugo Rondinone and Tarek Lakhrissi form a striking duo. Their four-handed work can be seen in the new Reiffers Art Initiatives mentoring program exhibition, from October 16 to December 1.