YAYOI KUSAMA

Posted on 2016-05-30

Yayoi Kusama’s lifelong exploration of the self’s relationship to the infinite cosmos has given rise to a highly influential career in which she has continuously innovated and re-invented her style. For the exhibition at the Wharf Road galleries, she has created three mirror rooms: Pumpkin’s Infinity Mirrored Room, Chandelier of Grief and Where the Lights in My Heart Go, all of which place the viewer within a universe of varying proliferating reflections.
New paintings displayed alongside these immersive rooms continue an enduring preoccupation with multiplying polka dots and dense scalloped ‘infinity net’ patterns – Kusama’s obsessive repetition of these forms on canvas, which she has described as a form of active self-obliteration, responds to hallucinations first experienced in childhood. The pumpkin, another motif that she has returned to throughout her career, is also present in the form of new polished mirror sculptures.

Opposite – All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins, 2016

Exhibition runs through till July 30th, 2016

Victoria Miro Gallery
16 Wharf Road
N1 7RW
London

www.victoria-miro.com

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BROOK ANDREW – THE FOREST

Posted on 2016-05-30

For The Forest, Brook Andrew will present a selection of exclusive artworks from original archival sources of the his own collection – the SUNSET series for example- and from reproductions of the Museum of Archeology and Anthropology of Cambridge as well as the Musée du Quai Branly, where he has been awarded a residency as a Photography Residencies Laureate. The source images are then reproduced, worked on, painted over, resized, screenprinted and complemented with neon lights, collages, and other various objects.

The artist firmly believes he is an artist of the world, not defined by one place. Though his mixed cultural ancestry such as Scottish, Irish, Jewish and Australian Aboriginal, informs his practice. His interest in a post-colonial context, the many lineages that forged his identity and shaped his arts practice, is indeed a strong platform to compare the histories of the Asia Pacific with those of the rest of the world relying on ideas of comparisons to other international concerns raised by artists such as Christian Boltanski and Jenny Holzer. The Wiradjuri pattern –recurring in Brook Andrew’s work- comes from the Aboriginal woodcarvings (dendroglyphs) of New South Wales, home state of the artist’s mother, and has inspired the artist’s black and white hypnotic pattern. On another hand, the Sapelli wood he uses for his frames evokes the sudden scarcity of this African resource after it fed the business of modern furniture in fashion back in the 1950’s.

Opposite – Sunset VI, 2016

Exhibition runs through till July 23rd, 2016

Galerie Nathalie Obadia
3 rue du Cloître Saint-Merri
75004 Paris
France

www.nathalieobadia.com

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CHRISTOPH PÖGGELER – PARADISE

Posted on 2016-05-30

Christoph Pöggeler’s latest paintings from his Düsseldorf studio in this solo exhibition titled Paradies, the German word for paradise, derived from the ancient Eastern Iranian word pairi-daeza, a place of eternal harmony. The show pivots around a composition with the same title, a 122x216cm piece of wood on which a broad strip of blue sky is painted above a partially interrupted section of fence. The artist‘s preference for painting on wood was evident in last September’s group exhibition at Positions in Berlin, when his works such as Schwarze Löcher (2014) and Alte Zypressen (2014) demonstrated Pöggeler’s preference for working on material that has had a life of its own. Remarkable is the fact that sky and fence are meticulously portrayed in a Dürer-like old master’s style, whereas the rest of the tableau is left unpainted, leaving the natural grain of the wood to speak for itself.

There are objective contrasts, abstract contradictions and still harmonies in Pöggeler’s style. Diptychon (2016) shows two nudes on separate pieces of wood. A more reserved young male is painted onto the surface of a vertical plank whereas a bolder young female seems to spring out of a splendidly marked circular piece of wood. The background surface of natural wood with its innate design is embellished only in part by the artist’s soft yet precise painterly strokes. Comparing this new piece with Pöggeler’s Schwarze Löcher, of well-clad businessmen depicted on a rough, used table top, one is again reminded of Neue Sachlichkeit or New Objecivity, the short intense period of realistic painting during Germany’s Weimar Republic that arose in reaction to expressionism.

Opposite – Paradise, 2016

Exhibition runs through till July 2nd, 2016

MAERZ CONTEMPORARY
Potsdamer Strasse 67
D – 10785
Berlin
Germany

www.maerzcontemporary.com

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