DANIEL RICHTER – I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER

Posted on 2018-09-03

This group of large-scale oil paintings constitutes the next experimental step in a visual language which the artist has developed throughout his career. Since his formative years in Berlin as an assistant to Albert Oehlen, Richter’s paintings have synthesised art history, mass media, politics, sex and contemporary culture into ever-changing pictorial worlds.
Richter’s current style, which oscillates between figuration and abstraction, represents a radical departure from his former approach to painting, both in terms of subject and form. Lines of crayon-oil contour patches of colour to reveal body-like shapes in seemingly pornographic poses: spread legs, arched backs, grasping hands and wide-open mouths can be deciphered. Richter explains: “My concern is with the surface, this flat, tangled, never-changing scheme of figure constellations, in and out”. The figures seem to levitate and collide. The cannibalising shapes convey a sense of abstraction, which is reinforced by the background’s subtle gradations of colours.

Opposite – They thenmen took over then, 2018

Exhibition runs through to September 28th, 2018

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac
Ely House
37 Dover Street
W1S 4NJ London

www.ropac.net

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JUSTIN JOHN GREENE – WELCOME TO OUR MESS

Posted on 2018-09-03

This new suite of paintings offers a panorama of a sun-washed, tragicomic barbeque with scenes set against the background of an oddly utopic neighbourhood, in which themes of conflict and romance are paramount.

In these works, subject matter drawn from Greene’s personal surroundings – portraits of friends and family, plant-life and scenery from his life in Southern California – are juxtaposed with fictional elements that recall stylistic approaches and imagery drawn from other paintings, murals, films, and advertisements. His paintings present a collision of art-historical styles, referencing a diverse group of influences, including Baroque genre painting, social realism, Diego Rivera’s murals, Stanley Spencer’s religious paintings and R. Crumb’s satirical and scathing cartoons of American life. In these paintings, the artist brings together these numerous and seemingly disparate allusions in a series of tableaux. Greene stages the idea of the backyard barbeque as a mythical vision and reveals a tension between the imaginary and the real, the spiritual and the mundane, propaganda and truth. While his style evokes a sense of realism, his subject matter propels the viewer into another realm, at once strangely familiar and completely alien.

Opposite – Welcome to Our Mess, 2018

Exhibition runs through to September 28th, 2018

Simon Lee Gallery
12 Berkeley Street
W1J 8DT London
UK

www.simonleegallery.com

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MICHEL FRANCOIS – UNE HETEROTOPIE

Posted on 2018-09-03

François transforms seemingly uncomplicated objects and materials, or traces of past events, into deeply resonant carriers of meaning. His sculptures can be seen as explorations of cause and effect, and the ways in which simple gestures can change the status of an object or have important consequences.
Une Hétérotopie presents new video installations and a series of related sculptural works. The exhibition derives its title from Michel Foucault’s notion of the heterotopia: a space of otherness that is both physical and mental. Such places, which function as counter-sites that simultaneously represent, contest, and invert other real sites within a culture are “capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are inthemselves incompatible.” Various echoes and mirroring ripple throughout the exhibition.

Opposite – Souffle perdu (couple / after party version), 2018

Exhibition runs through to September 15th, 2018

Carlier I Gebauer
Markgrafenstraße 67
D-10969 Berlin
Germany

www.carliergebauer.com

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