THOMAS RUFF

Posted on 2015-04-27

Thomas Ruff is one of the internationally most renowned photographers. One is immediately captivated by the original prints of his photographs, which have always been subject to technological advancements. Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle presents two series that reference one of the oldest genres of the arts: nudes.

Propelled by his curiosity and his conceptual photography practice, the scholarly artist Thomas Ruff has always created something new in each of his series.

In his series of “nudes,” Thomas Ruff takes on the classical subject of the female nude for the first time in his career. Upon considering how a nude photograph might look in his own artistic mode of expression, Thomas Ruff conducted research in the then rather novel internet, eventually stumbling upon pornographic websites with low-resolution images. His first “nude” was inspired by his interest in the structure of these digital images and in processing the pixel structures. Today, his “nudes” are well-known all over the world – and Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle presents various examples and forms of his digital nude photography in this exhibition. Thomas Ruff is renowned for constantly developing original methods and expanding traditional concepts of photography. His most recent series, “Negatives,” is no different. In it, he references the beginnings of the medium using photographs from the nineteenth century. Consisting solely of shades of blue, the new set of works recalls the cyanotype – a technique for producing photographs made famous by the natural scientist Anna Atkins, who used it to make a precise record of various plants. Pictures of artists’ studios, portraits, and nudes were some of the key visuals on the historical nineteenth-century photographs Thomas Ruff acquired. He scanned these old photographs, digitally inverted the color scale, and created blue-tinted photographs in the size of the original negatives.

Opposite – nudes ck02, 2012

Exhibition runs through to June 6th, 2015

Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle
Amalienstraße 41
80799 Munich
Germany

www.galerie-schoettle.de

  

APOLLO 8 X 10

Posted on 2015-04-27

APOLLO 8 x 10, is an exhibition showcasing pictures taken on pioneering NASA explorations beyond the earth’s boundaries. These missions remain unrivalled in their ability to extend our understanding of our cosmos and of photography’s artistic and scientific values.
APOLLO 8 x 10 hosts photographs taken on both manned and unmanned NASA missions, presenting an exciting selection of vintage prints from Apollo as well as Viking, Pioneer, Gemini, Skylab and other missions.

Opposite – Commander Cernan Getting on Boardof the Lunar Rover”, 1972, December, NASA Apollo 17 Harrison Schmitt

Exhibition runs through to May 15th, 2015

Daniel Blau
51 Hoxton Square
London
N1 6PB

www.danielblau.com

  

TORSTEN SLAMA – LE RESTE PARFAIT

Posted on 2015-04-27

Slama suspends the rules of physics in favor of his poetic imagination. In Slama’s world, floating geometric shapes can effortlessly co-exist with modernist architecture and sci-fi landscapes. His subjects are consistently architectural and mechanical, and noticeable absent of humans. Is this a utopic world better off without humans, or more unsettling, is this a post-apocalyptic world erased of humanity? One is never quite sure.

Opposite – Torsten Slama, Second Order Christian Worship Centre, 2013

Exhibition runs through to May 31st, 2015

Marc Jancou
63 Rue Des Bains
1205 Geneva
Switzerland

www.marcjancou.com

  

ANDREW GBUR

Posted on 2015-04-27

The artist employs a dramatically reduced visual vocabulary to evoke in crude but instantly recognizable terms the human visage. Form remains consistent throughout the body of work: a crescent indicates a smiling mouth, a rough triangle stands for the nose, and two almond-shapes suggest eyes. Each element is rendered in an opaque coat of vivid pastel, the portraits limited to just a few shades of color. Rather than evincing sweetness or warmth, the simplicity, symbolized smile and warm, beautiful palette carry a sinister quality; more jack-o-lantern than smiley face, the portraits explore the potential for misleading and deception inherent in visual signage.

The facial features float in unpainted white, offset by jagged blocks of color on either side. This blank field, upon close inspection, seems to indicate the head – however its vacuousness is more striking than any representational characteristic. The colored blocks end geometrically before the canvas’ edge, allowing the virginal emptiness to bleed to the edge and form a border around the image. Gbur’s destabilizing treatment of negative and positive space further explicates a non-mimetic relationship to their supposed subject matter: the pictorial template serves as fluid iconography, semantically voided, bolstering the painting’s surface.

These works pay clear tribute to Warhol’s screen-printed portraits, envisaging their underpaintings with the surface layers of detail stripped away. The eerie perfection of formal repetition, subtlety of coloristic variation and austerity of the material application endow them with an estranged, almost mechanical quality. The resultant pictures are halfway between Henri Matisse and Blinky Palermo. In spite of their child-like rendering and seemingly innocuous, familiar subject matter, the paintings read as alienating and vaguely impenetrable, corrupted pictographs charged with a kind of lecherous hunger. Confronted with these faces, one cannot help but wonder: what’s in a smile?

Opposite – Untitled, 2015

Exhibition runs through to May 31st, 2015

Team (bungalow)
306 Windward Avenue
Venice
Los Angeles
CA 90291

www.teamgal.com

  

TRACEY EMIN – EGON SCHIELE

Posted on 2015-04-27

The Leopold Museum will present the first comprehensive exhibition in Vienna featuring more than 80 works by the British artist Tracey Emin (born in 1963), a leading figure of the “Young British Artists”. Tracey Emin, a superstar and enfant terrible of contemporary art, will engage in a fascinating artistic dialogue, as she will not only present her own works but will also incorporate a personal selection of drawings by Egon Schiele into the exhibition. This exploration of the Austrian Expressionist’s oeuvre allows Tracey Emin to venture into unchartered territory with her art and to draw interesting parallels.

Tracey Emin’s pictorial language is direct and trenchant. Her art is an art of exposure and her own biography provides her with an inexhaustible source of inspiration. Her titles form an integral part of her works and speak of unrequited love, suffering, longing and desire.

The exhibition at the Leopold Museum affords insights into the various techniques and materials used by Tracey Emin and features acrylic paintings, gouaches and videos, installations made from neon lamps, wood, metal and textiles as well as photographs and bronze sculptures.

In her candid and sometimes sharp-tongued oeuvre, which is shaped both by tragedy and humor, Tracey Emin lays bare her own hopes, humiliations, failures and successes.

The themes of provocation and sexuality repeatedly surface in Tracey Emin’s work, as her oeuvre is firmly rooted in the tradition of feminist discourse.

Opposite – Humiliated, 2013

Exhibition runs through to September 14th, 2015

Leopold Museum
MuseumsQuartier
Museumsplatz 1
1070 Vienna
Austria

www.leopoldmuseum.org

  

AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON

Posted on 2015-04-20

With S.H.I.E.L.D. destroyed and the Avengers needing a hiatus from stopping threats, Tony Stark jumpstarts a dormant peacekeeping program, Ultron: a self-aware, self-teaching, artificial intelligence. However, his plan backfires when Ultron decides that humans are the main enemy and sets out to eradicate them from Earth, leaving it up to Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, the Hulk, Black Widow and Hawkeye, along with support from Nick Fury and Maria Hill, to stop him. Along the way the Avengers encounter the powerful twins Pietro and Wanda Maximoff, as well as a new entity, the Vision.

In theatres April 23rd, 2015

marvel.com