JIRI GEORG DOKOUPI

Posted on 2015-02-02

Comprised of large-scale works on canvas from the artist’s Soap Bubble Paintings series, the exhibition demonstrates Dokoupil’s continuously varied experiments with non-traditional media and chemical processes. As a founding member of the Cologne-based Mülheimer Freiheit and Junge Wilde (“Wild Youth”), a group of young artists in the late 1970s, he rejected the reductive, austere, and unapproachable nature of Minimal and Conceptual Art during this time in favor of a more animated style and saturated palette.

The first Soap Bubble Paintings were developed in the early 1990s by creating alchemical compounds fusing pigment and soap in various proportions. Dokoupil stages dynamic areas of tension between chemistry and art as the traces, now consisting of soap-lye enriched with metallic pigments and diamond dust, accumulate in the form of two molecular layers and result in translucent bubbles. The resulting organic forms settle on the canvas with calculated spontaneity, displaying holographic tendencies and shifting perspectives. Seeking to reinvent traditional painting techniques, Dokoupil’s pictures are aesthetically bold and dynamic yet conceptually rigorous.

Opposite – Pokupis, 2014

Exhibition runs through to February 7th, 2015

Paul Kasmin Gallery
515 West 27th Street
New York
NY 10001

www.paulkasmingallery.com

  

ELODIE ANTOINE – DELIQUESCENCE

Posted on 2015-02-02

Assembled in a central space are sculptures shown for the first time, and this constitutes the heart of the exhibition as much from a visual as from a metaphorical point of view. These anthropo-morphic forms of braided and sewn hemp, draped over a store-dummy’s tripod or miming a sitting position, are at once intriguing and disquieting: the long blond tresses topped by a diadem, midway between a Disney-princess from the Rapunzel era and the burqa. This play of attraction and repulsion is a constant in the work of Elodie Antoine: as ‘soft’ as they are, her emblematic forms in felt preserve the trace of the sharpened blade that sliced them, that revealed their entrails. Hemp is a new material for the artist. She chose it precisely to create a contrast between the stereotypical image of softness associated with long blond hair, and a coarse texture. The status of these objects is intentionally am-biguous: we find them enumerated in different shapes, affixed to the house’s walls like trophies.

Opposite – Oil rigs, 2014

Exhibition runs through to March 7th, 2015

AEROPLASTICS contemporary
32 rue Blanche
1060 Brussels
Belgium

www.aeroplastics.net

  

BURTON X FRYE – SNOWBOARD BOOT

Posted on 2015-02-02

Burton team up with the Frye Company, and have set out to recreate their best-selling Harness Boot. The NEW women’s Burton x Frye snowboard boot gives a nod to city fashion while boasting our proven technology and performance. Similar in flex to the Starstruck Boa, the collab features USA-made Horween leather and the Boa Coiler closure. Also featues 3M Thinsulate Insulation and Sleeping Bag heat-reflective foil.

www.burton.com
www.thefryecompany.com

  

KEN SCHLES – INVISIBLE CITY/NIGHTWALKS

Posted on 2015-02-02

In 1983, Ken Schles moved into an apartment on Avenue B in the East Village. His windows were boarded up because his landlord said that junkies could steal the gates with a crowbar. This worked to Schles’s advantage – he set up a darkroom. Life moved at a tumultuous pace. Downstairs, a woman with three kids was a heroin addict and dealers used her apartment as a shooting gallery. The city shut down the boiler in the building, which was spewing carbon monoxide. With scenes like this playing out daily right outside his doorstep, Schles found gripping subject matter in and around the neighborhood.

The exhibition presents images from both Night Walk and Invisible City, revealing a provocative narrative of lost youth and a private view of an irretrievable downtown New York as Schles saw and experienced it.

Among the highlights of the show is Drowned in Sorrow, 1984, depicting a shabbily glamorous woman in a short dress, torn stockings and heels, lying across a couch while talking on a corded telephone. The headline of the Village Voice on the plank wood floor reads ‘Drowned in Sorrow.’ In Limelight (Suzie Streetwalker, Ellen Kenneally, Nick Egan and Johnny Dynell), 1983, Schles captures the nightlife of his time as a woman in white sits on a ledge, vacant and alone with a drink in her hand, while three club denizens in the foreground chat and laugh. In Burning Building with Moonrise, 1984, neighbors stand and watch as a tenement goes up in flames with the full moon rising above the urban landscape.

Opposite – 4th of July (Independence Day), 1984

Exhibition runs through to March 14th, 2015

Howard Greenberg Gallery
The Fuller Building
41 East 57 Street
Suite 1406
New York
NY 10022

www.howardgreenberg.com

  

ORI GERSHT – ON REFLECTION

Posted on 2015-02-02

Gersht interacts with three Jan Brueghel the Elder’s floral paintings from 1606, now in Vienna’s Kunst Historisches Museum. For Gersht, Brueghel’s painting and the city of Vienna embrace a certain sense of exuberant decadence and imperialism. A metaphor he connects to our own time.

The mirror is a main element of this new body of work. By its nature, it raises the question of what is real and what is perceived as real. Gersht begins by recreating with silk flowers an exact replica of Brueghel’s floral paintings. The replica is placed in front of a tempered glass mirror. The mirror is subjected to electrical charges. On explosion, the glass brakes apart and falls away into a cascade of mirrored shards. To capture the event, Gersht positions side by side, two large format digital cameras, focusing them on two different optical planes: one focusing on the glass surface of the mirror, the other – focusing three meters away on the vase of flowers reflected in the mirror.

This approach allows Gersht to capture simultaneously two contrasting views of the same event. One camera captures the materiality of the mirror and the fractals created by the crackled silver on the back of the glass. While the other camera captures the illusion of the disintegrating flowers reflected in the mirror. Each camera captures an alternative reality, questioning the relationship between photography and a single objective truth.

This new body of work represents a fundamental shift from the earlier Blow Up photographs in which the object itself (the still life) was photographed as it shattered. In On Reflection it is the image (the illusion) as contained on the mirror surface that is explodin

Exhibition runs through to March 14th, 2015

CRG Gallery
548 W 22nd St
New York
NY 10011

crggallery.com

  

ZIAD ANTAR – UNTITLED LIMITS

Posted on 2015-02-02

In the face of the porosity of boundaries, his discourse aims to inscribe itself in a dynamic interaction of places, cultures, memories and disciplines. These boundaries are always present in his photographs, videos and sculptures, yet how does he manage to address, through multiple back-and-forth movements, the outside space (public space) and the inside space (private space), past and present, otherness and identity? It is through this interaction that boundaries are opened up, that all identity processes turn towards the unsettling of national and regional boundaries, that governing bodies crumble before the dissemination of signs and artistic discourse.

In addition to new and never before exhibited works from the series ‘Cactus’, ‘Intensive Beirut’ and ‘Lebanese Policemen’, the show will include the videos ‘WA’ (2004), ‘Des Oliviers’ (2013) and ‘Saïda’ (2013) as well as works from previous series entitled ‘Beirut Bereft’, ‘Portrait of a territory’ and ‘Expired’.

Opposite – Mirador Beach Hotel, Khaldé, 1963, 2009

Exhibition runs through to February 28th, 2015

Almine Rech Gallery
20 Rue de l’Abbaye
1050 Brussels
Belgium

wwww.alminerech.com