CHRIS GAROFALO – PRECIOUS FRAGMENTS

Posted on 2017-12-25

For over thirty years, Garofalo has worked with clay to create ceramic sculptures inspired by the flora and fauna of the world’s oceans, desserts, and jungles. Garofalo applies multiple glazes to render authentic-looking skins or shells, so distinct that they appear to have grown themselves. The forms and patterns might recall creatures that exist in life, but all of the sculptures are born out of Garofalo’s imagination and transcend standard scientific classification. Theories of evolution and metamorphosis are fundamental to Garofalo’s practice, and as such, the sculptures come alive in their environments, breathing, stirring, and continuing to grow.

Opposite – ho phatloha ho hoholod, 2017

Exhibition runs through to January 20th, 2018

Rhona Hoffman Gallery
118 North Peoria Street
Illinois
60607 Chicago

www.rhoffmangallery.com

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RITA ACKERMANN – TURNING AIR BLUE

Posted on 2017-12-18

‘Turning Air Blue’ extends through two galleries and doubles as an organic continuation of Somerset’s rural setting. The exhibition starts in the Rhoades gallery, which features a body of work titled The Coronation and Massacre of Love. The paintings here are large-scale compositions on canvas primed with chalkboard paint, on which washes of white chalk and green and blue pigments have been applied. These Abstract Expressionist-like works are reminiscent of actual chalkboards in a classroom, covered with unintentional erasures and marks, yet they have been conceptually executed by multiple deletions of figurative drawings and landscapes. By way of these gestures, the revenant outline of the erased drawings often emerges into the foreground. The final picture is a record of these movements.

Exhibition runs through to January 1st, 2018

Hauser & Wirth Somerset
Durslade Farm
Dropping Lane
Bruton
Somerset
BA10 0NL

www.hauserwirthsomerset.com

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HERNAN BAS – INSECTS FROM ABROAD

Posted on 2017-12-18

Hernan Bas’s expressionist and highly detailed figurative paintings are openly inspired by late-nineteenth-century decadent art and literature, as well as the concurrent symbolist and decorative style of the French group Les Nabis. While they are aesthetically grounded in the iconography of the male androgynous dandy, the young protagonists of his oneiric visions are usually portrayed alone or in small groups within descriptions of pure flânerie.
Whether confined in the intimacy of a genre scene or lost in the vertigo of a dense, lush, romantic-like landscape, they inhabit a fantasized world of implicit eroticism and ambiguous sensuality. Always appearing as if suspended in time, between adolescence and adulthood, they embody the fragile in-between state that the artist refers to as “fag limbo.” With a flamboyant palette and a refined touch, Hernan Bas overall masterly revisits and reinterprets all the categories of classical painting from a seemingly melancholic yet often humorous and witty, homoerotic perspective.

Opposite – Unlike other members of his species, camouflage is not in his favor (detail), 2017

Exhibition runs from January 18th – March 11th, 2018

Perrotin
Piramide Building, 1F
6-6-9 Roppongi
Minato-ku
Tokyo

www.perrotin.com

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