FERTILITY

Posted on 2011-09-26

Fertility, in all its literal or metaphoric meanings, is cyclic and timeless. At its most basic, to be fertile is to bear fruit-whether humans making children or the land producing crops. In a broader sense, fertility speaks to inventiveness, abundance, possibilities, ideas. Involved in the show are works from Marina Abramovic, Jonathan Borofsky, Louise Bourgeois, Tracey Emin, George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Otto Mueller, Pablo Picasso, Auguste Rodin, Andres Serrano and Daniel Spoerri.

Grouping works dating from the late 19th century to the contemporary moment by eleven artists, the show looks at its theme from many angles – factual and symbolic, erotic and tender, visceral and humorous. The contemporary artist Marina Abramovic immediately commands attention with the assertiveness of her female imagery. Abramovic’s 2005 chromogenic print “Women in Rain #2,” taken from her video piece “Balkan Erotic Epic,” shows traditionally dressed village women in a field lifting their skirts and thrusting their exposed vaginas to the heavens. In equal parts startling and comic, the image is part of Abramovic’s exploration of ancient Balkan beliefs in the power of human genitalia to ensure the fertility of the land.

Opposite – Louise Bourgeois, Pregnant Woman, 2008

Exhibition runs through to October 29th, 2011

Side by Side Gallery Akim Monet GmbH
Potsdamerstrasse 81b
10785 Berlin

www.alminerech.com

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CHRIS BARNARD – TOWARD TRINITY

Posted on 2011-09-26

Toward Trinity continues Chris Barnard’s personal and passionate exploration of the gap between the visible and invisible aspects of military representations and war time realities. Questioning the systems that celebrate destructive force and technological achievement, and the subversive measures used to eclipse the darker side of imperialist motives, Toward Trinity offers a fresh exploration of power and spectatorship.

It is an examination of contemporary American culture – one that is increasingly in a state of militarization and perpetual war – questioning the underlying structures of power that are framing the discussion and our understanding of these issues. Barnard implicates the role of art and visual culture in the process of social conditioning, exposing strategies that paradoxically disguise while also disclosing information.Employing techniques and mechanisms inherent to different pictorial traditions, such as history painting (popularly utilized to glorify imperial conquests), American 19th-century landscape painting (used to invoke Manifest Destiny, an ideological dominion over the land), and European religious paintings (produced to convey reverence and incite obedience), Barnard’s new work addresses the contentious relationship between the veneration of the American military-industrial complex and the ecological damage and human suffering caused by it.

Exhibition runs through to October 15th, 2011

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
2685 S. La Cienega Boulevard
Los Angeles
CA 90034

www.luisdejesus.com

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GREG DRASLER – ON THE LAM

Posted on 2011-09-26

Drasler, in these highly polished uncanny paintings, constructs the elsewhere and disruptions of travel as if reinventing the wheel. With auto interiors, patterns and suspended objects, the manifold directions of the imagination is a back seat driver steering into bursts of symbolic coincidence. The objects have the capacity of vehicles and the vehicles are all interior. Littered with cameras, trailers, books, tents and a ski lift, the paintings remain unusually vacant yet preoccupied. This pile up of instruments, tools, patterns and apparel accumulates and reads as words in a sentence, a visual sentence, which is the painting.

Taking its title from the largest painting in the show the exhibition insinuates encampment as a destination. On the Lam (70 x 160 inches) is crowded with trailers, tents and wagons that attract with a variety of doors, windows, vents and flaps. In the constructed panoramic sky, complete with camp fire plume, hovers a bicycle wheel, either spun out or loosened from its sprockets. In the place below, where the rubber hits the road, the painting gives us means-to-move and places-to-be.

Opposite – Rain Dance , 2011

Exhibition runs through to October 15th, 2011

Betty Cuningham Gallery
541 West 25th street
New York
NY
10001

www.bettycuninghamgallery.com

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