TOM HUNTER

Posted on 2015-03-02

Tom Hunter is perhaps best known for his alluring and beautifully composed images of the marginal in society, specifically in the neighbourhood of Hackney, East London, home to the artist for the last 20-30 years. Hunter’s honest depiction of life in the bars, the streets and halls of Hackney, far from being voyeuristic, reveals the drama and the dignity of ordinary lives. What is special about these varied scenes of seedy or borderland London is how they wear the garment and authority of art history. Each photograph references a painting in the collection of the National Gallery, London and, more generally, the artist’s deep admiration for the quiet, mysterious interiors of Johannes Vermeer’s 17th C. Delft, for example.

Axis Mundi & Bathing Places, Dublin Bay are produced in a medium size and photographed using a large-format, pin-hole camera. They are as close as the artist has come to shooting pure, romantic landscape subjects. Nature is seen at its most exposed and elemental, possibly at dawn. The pin-hole camera, like a “ heavenly portal “ lends a drama and distortion that magnifies the subject and lifts it out of the ordinary. The bending horizon, the even grey Dublin light, the pull of the ample sea, the bursting pink light on the English horizon gives both series a timeless and ageless dimension. Heaven and earth are joined in these images in a cosmological declaration.

Opposite – Inner Circle, 2013

Exhibition runs through to March 28th, 2015

Green On Red Gallery
Park Lane
Spencer Dock
Dublin 1
Ireland

www.greenonredgallery.com

  

ESKO MÄNNIKKÖ – TIME FLIES

Posted on 2015-03-02

Time Flies, is a selection of works by Finnish photographer Esko Männikkö. The selection is drawn from the artist’s current museum retrospective, which originated in Finland at the Kunsthalle Helsinki and is travelling to Collezione Maramotti, Italy; Huis Marseilles, Amsterdam; and Gothenburg Museum of Art, Sweden. Männikkö was previously the winner of the 2008 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, the first time a Finnish artist has been recipient of this prestigious award.

As a self-taught artist, Männikkö counts few stylistic precedents or influences, and though his interest in the residue of everyday life is the foundation of his image making, his formalism lends itself to metaphoric or existential modes of interpretation. Time Flies includes a range of images – abandoned cars, cemetery portrait sculpture, discarded family photographs – whose subjects bear witness to the passage of time and serve as a poignant meditation on the inevitable collapse of all material things, human or inanimate. In the Time Flies retrospective catalog essay, art historian Liz Wells suggests that Männikkö’s imagery moves “from social documentary towards a more expressionist formal aesthetic, and from the more specifically located to a more generalized engagement with the nature of existence.”

Exhibition runs through to March 14th, 2015

Yancey Richardson Gallery
525 West 22nd Street
New York
NY 10011

www.yanceyrichardson.com

  

HREINN FRIDFINNSSON – ECHOES AND REFLECTIONS

Posted on 2015-03-02

Friðfinnsson is considered by many the father of Icelandic conceptual art. As a reaction to the Abstract Expressionism of the 1960’s Friðfinnsson returned to the extraordinary qualities of the Icelandic topography and atmosphere that had traditionally been represented in landscape painting. His focus was on the most ephemeral and fleeting qualities of the world around him: light, reflection, wind, water, the passing of time. He also embraced other subjects of transient nature; for years he has collected the secrets of strangers, re-enacted unlikely myths, made artworks of borrowed materials (a sculpture of his neighbor’s door, photographs of his cousin’s horses), appropriated the wares of industrious spiders, saved and pressed Autumn leaves picked up in the early 1980’s. Friðfinnsson’s response to these inscrutable subjects developed into works characterized by a lyrical, stark poetry, an exquisite lightness of hand and an often self-diminishing humor.

In the exhibition Friðfinnssonn returns to his mythical House Project – a project based on the story of an old eccentric Icelander who intended to built a house inside out. In 1974 Friðfinnsson built the house based on the story in a remote area of the Icelandic volcanic tundra. Inversed, the wallpaper, curtains and framed pictures hanging on the outside, the house thereby contained the whole world, except itself. Since 1974 Friðfinnsson has returned to the work and developed new chapters in the life of the house thereby maintaining the mythology around it and adding new layers.

Opposite – Illustration, 2015

Exhibition runs through to April 2nd, 2015

Galerie Nordenhake Stockholm
Hudiksvallsgatan 8
SE-113 30 Stockholm
Sweden

www.nordenhake.com

  

PASCALE MARTHINE TAYOU – BOOMERANG

Posted on 2015-03-02

The first solo show in London by Cameroon-born, Belgium-based artist Pascale Marthine Tayou. The exhibition will include new work made specifically for the Serpentine and introduces audiences to a range of works that serve as powerful expressions of individual and national identity in an age of inescapable global consumption.

The exhibition will see the Serpentine Sackler Gallery populated by a diverse mix of sculptural forms that demonstrate Tayou’s unique visual language based on archetypes, made and found objects and traditional craft. Mysterious human forms and fantastical beasts – such as the 100 metre snake of Africonda – incorporate materials such as cloth, wood, plastic, glass, organic matter and consumer waste combined with an artisanal skill. Tayou, who began studying law before deciding instead to become an artist, began exhibiting in the early 1990s – a time of political and social upheaval across West Africa. With works often produced in situ, Tayou is renowned for combining found and discarded objects and materials, often sourced locally with a skilled and playful sense of craftsmanship.

Opposite – Octopus, 2010

Exhibition runs from March 4th to May 17th, 2015

Serpentine Sackler Gallery
West Carriage Drive
Kensington Gardens
London
W2 2AR

www.serpentinegalleries.org

  

PALERMO – WORKS 1973-1976

Posted on 2015-03-02

Although often associated with particular twentieth century art historical practices and discourses—including abstraction, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art—Palermo’s diverse body of work defies easy classification. Throughout his brief and influential career, Palermo executed paintings, “objects,” installations, wall drawings, and works on paper that addressed the contextual and semantic issues at stake in the construction, exhibition, and reception of works of art. His handling of form, color, and composition comprises a complex and experimental investigation of aesthetic concepts and of the semiotic possibilities of visual language.

The exhibition will include significant examples of the artist’s objects, a self-coined category of work comprised of three-dimensional forms that hang or lean on a wall and seem to simultaneously occupy the realms of both painting and sculpture. Among these works is Objekt mit Wasserwage (Object with Spirit Level), 1969-1973, a shaped canvas that incorporates a leveling tool, thereby physically referring to the construction and installation of the artist’s work, while also pointing to the surrounding architectural and exhibition context.

Opposite – Osten-Westen III (East-West III), 1976

Exhibition runs through to April 11th, 2015

David Zwirner
519 & 525 West 19th Street
New York
NY 10011

www.davidzwirner.com