CHEN ZHOU – BLUE HOLE

Posted on 2018-07-16

Projected in four-channel HD digital, it features a female protagonist lost inside a blue cave, her mobile phone providing the only connection to the outside world. Two other young girls search for a friend lost in a forest, while they discuss the loneliness they experience in the virtual world. Their search stirs up childhood memories, taking them back to an earlier time when, although their paths had crossed, they had been unable to recognise each other’s faces.
Blue Hole describes a world where we are all connected and disconnected at the same time, exposing how the small space between the real and the virtual world remains the only place where alienation can be kept at bay. The ubiquitous social media network is mistakenly seen as a haven within our reach, our phones a ‘hole’ that beckon with the faint glow of a blue light. Chen suggests that beneath our modern exterior we are all simply restless, isolated souls attempting to express our feelings and signaling for help via electronic gadgets. Blue Hole draws inspiration from social media platforms, in particular a public WeChat account that the artist came across which records the dreams and thoughts of a Millennial teenage girl.

Opposite – Installation view

Exhibition runs through to August 25th, 2018

Matthew Marks Gallery
1062 North Orange Grove
90046 Los Angeles
USA

www.whitecube.com

  

EMERSON WOELFFER – FORTY YEARS

Posted on 2018-07-09

A prominent figure linking Abstract Expressionism to Los Angeles, Woelffer was a highly influential artist, educator, and mentor to a generation of Los Angeles artists including Ed Ruscha, Mary Corse, Joe Goode, Larry Bell, Llyn Foulkes, and Allan Ruppersberg. Woelffer stands out as one of the most historically significant artists in Los Angeles by bringing an international discourse to what was a growing art community.
Emerson Woelffer (1914 – 2003) was born in Chicago to a middle class family. After studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago he joined the WPA Arts Program in 1938 followed by a job in the U.S. Army Air Corps topographical survey program. In 1942 Woelffer was hired by Lászlo Moholy-Nagy to teach painting, photography, design, and sculpture at the recently founded New Bauhaus in Chicago. During this time Woelffer developed his interest in Surrealist automatism through drawing and playing the drums in jazz groups, two activities that sustained Woelffer’s painting practice the rest of his life.

Opposite – Untitled, 1977

Exhibition runs through to September 1st, 2018

Ibid
670 S Anderson Street
(entrance on Sunrise St)
CA 90023
Los Angeles

ibidgallery.com

  

MARTHA DIAMOND

Posted on 2018-07-09

A lifelong New Yorker, Martha Diamond has spent decades breathing in, recording, and understanding the spaces, light, and memory of the city. Those experiences are her guide. Diamond grew up first in an apartment on the 11th floor of a building in Stuyvesant Town, Manhattan. She remembers looking out a window and seeing, across a circular courtyard, only the geometry of other buildings; later, her family lived in Queens. Her father, a doctor, would take her with him in his car on his Saturday rounds to patients, and Diamond remembers the sense of cavernous space she felt down the avenues and streets of the island. Another memory: Her grandparents lived in Silver Lake, Staten Island in a fourth floor apartment with a brick balcony. Martha would walk out on the balcony: First came the reservoir, then a long road, then the Goethals Bridge to New Jersey. One shape, then a space, then another, and then more shapes.
One thing, and then another. Then another.

Opposite – Grisaille Cityscape No. 2, 2007

Exhibition runs through to July 27th, 2018

Galerie Eva Presenhuber
39 Great Jones Street
NY 10012 New York
USA

www.presenhuber.com

  

FRANCES STARK – TEEN O.P.E.R.A.

Posted on 2018-07-09

A solo exhibition of new work by Frances Stark including “The Magic Flute.”

Opposite – Installation view

Exhibition runs through to September 1st, 2018

Gavin Brown’s enterprise
439 W. 127th Street
10027 New York
USA

www.gavinbrown.biz

  

SARAH FAUX – PUCKER

Posted on 2018-07-02

Comprised of new paintings in oil as well as canvas collages, “Pucker” encompasses Faux’s longstanding reflection on the female body and intimacy experience, while highlighting her recent experiments with color, materials, and composition. In her paintings, Sarah Faux merges the seemingly disparate strands of figurative representation and gestural abstraction to construct sensual situations where raw female bodies drift in a state of liminality. That the protagonist is always female, only occasionally in the company of the other sex, is the artist’s modus operandi in this body of work, a deliberate response to an artistic tradition in which the female form is often subjected to fetishization and objectification. But rather than taking a combative position to opt for affirmative representation, Faux conjures bodies that revel in the private moments of a beauty routine, as in Wet Mirror and Broad Daylight and Thin Air (both works 2018), or in erotic bliss, as in White Smoke Rose (also 2018). These invocations of willing consumption—of beauty products and eros—complicate what female agency means in today’s neoliberal world.

Opposite – Wet mirror, 2018

Exhibition runs through to July 23rd, 2018

Capsule Shanghai
1st Floor, Building 16, Anfu Lu 275 Nong
Xuhui District
200031 Shanghai
China

capsuleshanghai.com

  

MARY HEILMANN – MEMORY REMIX

Posted on 2018-07-02

Grounded in the soul of California, Mary Heilmann’s work draws from her memories of the distinctive colors and lines of the West Coast’s landscape and surf culture. Throughout a childhood accompanied by the radio’s ubiquitous soundtrack, Heilmann often watched the ocean tumble to the shore, rode the ‘mountain waves’ at Manhattan Beach, and read Allan Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and Walt Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass,’ which stoked her great admiration for poetry, jazz, and the idea of the Beats. Under these influences and through the deceptively simple means of painting – color, surface, and form – Heilmann physically manifests nostalgic impulses, memories, and allusions to popular culture that remain accessible on both personal and universal levels. In this way, her work transcends the seemingly opaque structures of geometrical abstraction by infusing it with the content of daily life.

Opposite – Mint Table, 2012

Exhibition runs through to September 23rd, 2018

Hauser & Wirth
901 East 3rd Street
90013 Los Angeles
USA

www.hauserwirth.com