Solange Knowles has now revealed their creative partnership with the PUMA x Solange Disc Collection. Three up and coming NYC creatives were tapped to create these sneaker colourways, artist Hisham Baroocha and designers Gerlan Jeans and William Okpo. It’s the first time the silhouette has been made specifically for women.
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Splaying wood panels with exuberant spray paint and slapdash neon tubing, Holmes’ unapologetic methods elevate the still life, the reclining nude figure, and even poetry from their traditional banality to culty, fetishistic status. With the gestural fluidity of Twombly and the poetic dexterity of Basquiat, his intuitive, swaggering practice reveals eccentric florals, brazen silhouettes, glowing prose, and monumental “TH” initials – an arresting display of drunken ego and flexing machismo, rife also with subtle romanticism and raw honesty.
Behold a psychedelic underworld where smears, splatters, and drips of paint coalesce into familiar form, swooping petals and blinged-out physiques that oscillate between the manual prowess of representation and the improvisational violence of abstraction. Pure gesture takes center stage and distills form down to its bare essence, crowned by keyed-up frames in fluorescent hues and brilliant lights. With all the virtuoso of graffiti and John Hancocks loud enough to proverbially piss their territory, each work simultaneously binges on its own sense of power and exercises mature restraint.
Exhibition runs through to March 1st, 2014
Mike Weiss Gallery
520 West 24th Street
New York
NY
10011
Markus Oehlen is one of the outstanding representatives of the Neue Wilden movement, which was especially active in Germany during the 1980s, and used a punk style that stood in opposition to minimalism. The aim was to attack the high-browed nature of minimalism with a style of painting that is based on instinct and gesturally emphasizes the wild, spontaneous, obsessive and sensual. The pictures on large canvasses convince through their radical approach to painting.
Oehlen has continuously developed his work and, in parallel with painting, also works on sculptures and musical projects. His new works are increasingly inspired by the perceptual experiments of Op Art, with printed image interferences that occur in grid-like patterns above and below the layers of the picture. Along with forms that are oriented toward computer aesthetics, this brings an aspect of serialism to the images. It can be understood as a humorous and ironic commentary on the expressive nature of painting and – in retrospect – on the Neuen Wilden movement itself.
Markus Oehlen’s complex, layered pictures are composed of a plethora of found images, shapes and distorted painterly elements which, taken out of their previous context, take on a new function and meaning. By rearranging the individual compositional elements of the canvasses in the context of art, Markus Oehlen creates surreal still lifes that were not originally so intended, playing with the notion of randomness and suggesting strange narratives.
Opposite – Dark version #1, 2014
Exhibition runs through to March 6th, 2014
Gerhardsen Gerner
Fru Kroghs brygge 4
Tjuvholmen
N-0252 Oslo
Norway
The glossy enamel paintings on aluminum depict abstracted images of the internal components of the Large Hadron Collider, which lies in a tunnel seventeen miles in circumference deep beneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland. TOMPKINS’s otherworldly paintings reference the line and symmetry of Gothic rose windows of European cathedrals.
Rose windows functioned as microcosmic depictions of universal order where the uniform geometry of the subdivided circle denoted sacred unity. Similarly, the inherent harmony of structure of the Large Hadron Collider inspires modern curiosity and ruminations on the universal makeup of things, connecting perceived relationships between contemporary theories of physics with timeless concepts of the human condition and spirituality.
The inspirations for Tompkins’s paintings stem from his engagement with the tropes and language of the medium’s history. Tompkins’s interest in both the language of painting and contemporary theories of visual culture attract him to what he interprets in the images as a loose visual connection to painting’s history and the medium’s influence as a visual communicator. The paintings play upon the idea of revealing the unseen and invoke the notion of a disjunctive relationship between observation, representation and interpretation.
Opposite – Super Collider v. 9, 2013
Exhibition runs through to March 9th, 2014
DCKT Contemporary
21 Orchard Street
New York
NY
10002
Norwegian singer Annie and Norwegian visual artist Bjarne Melgaard have shared “Russian Kiss”, their protest song and short film aimed at Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime and its anti-gay laws.
Melgaard invited the photographer and director Richard Kern to direct the movie; famous for his collaborations with Marilyn Manson, Sonic Youth, Indochine and Is Tropical. On short notice Kern and his team joined forces with Annie and Melgaard.
TweetFor his current exhibition Struth presents a new series of pictures in which he again penetrates key places of human imagination in order to scrutinize the landscape of enterprise, invention and digital engineering as well as the complex hidden structures of advanced technology–image makers and industry–in relation to culture and history. Taking an archetypal site for the creation of cultural dreams and imagination, one group of pictures depicts panoramic views of Disney’s theme parks in Los Angeles–an iconic place of imagination and one which has globally shaped human fantasy. A second compelling and dynamic group of works investigates new sites of technology, and provides a continuum into the charged backdrops of science and industry and our shared contemporary reality.
Struth writes, “With the previous body of work my interest was initially stimulated by a strong and painful discrepancy. It is clear that the contemporary human imagination is more easily fired by the pyrotechnics of science and technology rather than by the difficult, and perhaps now historically discredited, negotiation of political ideals. I wanted to open the doors to some of these unseen places in order to scrutinize what our contemporary world—what we—create, depicting plasmaphysics and chemistry, ship- and oil rig-building, space shuttle repair, architecture, etc., as what our minds have materialized and transformed into sculpture. Most of these machines, tools, and objects are the results of closed-group activity, yet they affect us strongly without us ever being able to really see them.”
Opposite – Hot Rolling Mill, ThyssenKrupp Steel, Duisburg, 2010
Exhibition runs through to February 22nd, 2014
Marian Goodman Gallery
24 West 57th Street
10019 New York
USA
