GEISHA

Posted on 2014-10-20

After the succesfull photo exhibition ‘Hail the People’ from Jimmy Nelson, the Rijkmuseum Volkenkunde asked Kossmann.dejong to design a new temporary exhibition: ‘GEISHA’.

Modern objects from a geisha house in Kyoto, together with the unique historical collection of the Rijksmuseum Volkenkunde are the fundaments of the presentation. Prejudices about this style icon of the Japanese elite culture will be taken away and the visitor will get a look behind the usual closed doors of geisha.

Exhibition runs through to April 6th, 2015

Kossmann.dejong
De Ruyterkade 107
1011 AB Amsterdam

kossmanndejong.nl

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GHOST OUTFIT

Posted on 2014-10-20

Ghost outfit, is a group show of work by Dan Flavin, Robert Janitz and Ralph Eugene Meatyard. Organized by Todd von Ammon, the exhibition will run from 19 October through 16 November 2014. Team is located at 83 Grand Street, between Greene and Wooster. Concurrently, our 47 Wooster Street space will host tl;dr, an exhibition by Cory Arcangel.

ghost outfit weds three artists who, despite generational gaps and disparate media, share a concern with material and conceptual duplicity. The pieces in the show use light and light-sensitive material to provide moments of both literal and figurative masking, in which an object’s surface acts simultaneously as barrier and point of access. Content and medium disguise one another, rendering the subject the camouflage itself – as well as the resulting obscurity.

Dan Flavin’s fluorescent sculptures resist corporeal definition: a piece’s intangible glow undercuts its own object-hood, posing unanswerable questions of where the work begins and ends. The act of illumination serves here to cloud perception, rather than to clarify, materializing new spaces and disrupting existing ones.

Robert Janitz’ oil paintings here take the same rough form: milk-white wax brushed in wide swaths to hide slightly visible black underpainting. Their composition recalls the streaks left by a squeegee on a pane of glass but, while window-washing serves to enhance transparency, Janitz’ brushstrokes create and foreground opacity, cloaking the painting with, of all things, its own paint.

Alchemic black and white photographs by Ralph Eugene Meatyard utterly confound their subject matter. The inexpensive plastic of a child’s toy appears identical to a tombstone’s weathered granite, while blurred streaks of light obscure the very water that reflects them. The artist’s camera acts directly counter to traditional expectations of the medium, seeking to shroud and transfigure, rather than to show or document.

Opposite – Dan Flavin, Untitled (to Bob and Pat Rohm), 1969-70

Exhibition runs through to November 16th 2014

team (gallery, inc.)
83 Grand Street
New York
NY 10013

www.teamgal.com

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RICHARD PRINCE – NEW FIGURES

Posted on 2014-10-20

The found photographs in the “Cutouts” and “New Figures” evoke the sex pictures mothers once called ”dirty,” but whose children would become the social revolutionaries of the Woodstock Generation; the drawn lines, pale colors, and collaged shapes look back further to Picasso’s elegant lines and Matisse’s scissor-snipped collages, before American art went Pop and life turned electronic. Some of the girls are covered with drawn bodies, another’s arms morph into geometric or schematic appendages in a freehand combination of image, design, and drawing. They also reveal an artist—perhaps the best of his generation— with the technical and artistic freedom to create an unexpected art from an earlier era’s techniques into one that is easily as good and yet wholly contemporary.

Early on Richard Prince explained his “rephotographs” with an alteration of American poet Ezra Pound’s modernist dictum, circa 1914, “Make It New,” in the phrase, circa 1980, “make it again.” Pound’s “it” expressed a modernist’s fedupness with “tradition”; Richard’s referred to modernism’s newness seen through the lens the television and space age. He always looked for subjects that hadn’t been co-opted by art, like jokes, car parts, and B-girls, then creating memory images with familiar photographs and objects as if someone or something else had made them. He made it look easy and natural, which is what television watchers and moviegoers wanted: an art made with the casual élan of Zorro sword-tickling a “Z” on Sargent Garcia’s blouse; an art that combined originality and the suspension of belief as in film’s special effects. The “New Figures” and Cutouts” combine ease, confidence, and special effects. More than that, they project a more complex and more diffident ego from Matisse or Picasso’s, in a manner more complex than their pictorially reductive modernism. Richard achieves newness using today’s complex imaging methods.

Exhibition runs through to December 12th, 2014

Almine Rech Gallery
64 Rue de Turenne
75003 Paris

www.alminerech.com

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DEATH BECOMES HER – A CENTURY OF MOURNING ATTIRE

Posted on 2014-10-20

This Costume Institute exhibition explores the aesthetic development and cultural implications of mourning fashions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Approximately thirty ensembles, many of which are being exhibited for the first time, reveal the impact of high-fashion standards on the sartorial dictates of bereavement rituals as they evolved over a century.

The thematic exhibition is organized chronologically and features mourning dress from 1815 to 1915, primarily from The Costume Institute’s collection, including mourning gowns worn by Queen Victoria and Queen Alexandra. The calendar of bereavement’s evolution and cultural implications is illuminated through women’s clothing and accessories, showing the progression of appropriate fabrics from mourning crape to corded silks, and the later introduction of color with shades of gray and mauve.

The Anna Wintour Costume Center’s Carl and Iris Barrel Apfel Gallery orients visitors to the exhibition with fashion plates, jewelry, and accessories. The main Lizzie and Jonathan Tisch Gallery illustrates the evolution of mourning wear through high-fashion silhouettes. Examples of restrained simplicity are shown alongside those with ostentatious ornamentation. The predominantly black clothes are set off against a stark white background and amplified with historic photographs and daguerreotypes.

Exhibition runs through to February 1st, 2015

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue
New York
NY 10028-0198

www.metmuseum.org

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