Raf Simons offers an elegant post-punk collection combining the retro feeling of a postwar look with absolute modernity. With no limits to his creativity, the designer unveils sophisticated volumes with a mix of geometric graffiti, madras prints, metal stud decorations as well as archive “Isolated Heroes” prints from his 98/99 collections
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Buscemi has teamed up with French retailer colette on the 100MM “Blue Palm.” Using colette’s signature blue hue, Buscemi’s latest mid-top entry features a unique, all-over palm print and 18K gold accoutrements on the tongue, midfoot and heel. Additional details include a dual-branded, vegetable-tanned interior and an original vulcanized sole unit.
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Since the late 1980s as a student at Düsseldorf Art Academy, Baer has maintained a singular practice in dialogue with the history of painting, orchestrating confrontations between disparate visual traditions on her canvases. Trompe-l’oeil renderings, appendages and incisions to the literal surface of the canvas, and atmospheric fields of paint constitute the complex spatial logic of Baer’s compositions. Baer’s studiously painted motifs—deli meats, currency, and brick walls are among the representations that have recurred in her body of work—follow the modernist fixation with the quotidian, but also tether the works to traditional representation. In the works on view, liquor bottles act as a mimetic anchor, receding and advancing, dissolving and materializing again—flirting with the notion of a stable pictorial system.
Opposite – Überlieferung verpflichtet, 2014
Exhibition runs through to January 16th, 2016
Greene Naftali
526 West 26th Street
8th floor
NY 10001
New York
Pearson uses a range of methods and media to create works that offer a meditative experience by way of an extreme sensitivity to materials. His practice originated in photography, and by experimenting with the formal limits of the medium, Pearson has constructed a visual vocabulary that has expanded into sculptural materials such as gypsum cement, bronze, steel, and clay. On the occasion of this exhibition, Pearson will be presenting two bodies of work: Plaster Positives and Etched Plasters. These works simultaneously embody qualities of sculpture and painting and use subtle
relief to employ both seemingly infinite detail and a broad spaciousness. The work is built by way of repetition in both method and movement, with each pour and mark made by hand. The structure of Pearson’s practice results in a subtle interplay between individual works that eventually resonate as a harmonic whole.
Opposite – Untitled (Etched Plaster), 2015
Exhibition runs through to January 16th, 2016
Marianne Boesky Gallery
509 West 24th Street
NY 10011 New York
USA
A key figure of Tokyo’s Anti-Art Movement in the late 1950s, Kudo’s performative paintings and installations marked the beginning of his preoccupation with the impact of nuclear catastrophe and the excess of consumer society associated with the post-war economic boom. Relocating to Paris in 1962, Kudo gained recognition for his Happenings, but this exposure to the European intellectual scene also intensified his aversion to the modern agenda. This manifested in the biomorphic sculptures and assemblages that Kudo produced from 1963, in which he sought to expose the limitations of the modernist and humanist values that defined the post-war era.
In his cube series, small boxes contain decaying cocoons and shells revealing half-living forms – often replica limbs, detached phalli or papier-mâché organs – that merge with man-made items. These sculptures were intended as a comment on the individualistic outlook and eager adoption of mass-production which he found to be prevalent in Europe. The mutations are unnatural and impotent – a product of a post-apocalyptic world in which the synthetic triumphs over nature. The cube exteriors are painted as die, a nod to the idea that it is the random forces beyond our control that dictate life, rather than individual agency as western philosophy teaches.
Opposite – Votre Portrait T, 1965 – 1966
Exhibition runs through to February 26th, 2016
Hauser & Wirth
Limmatstrasse 270
8005 Zürich
Switzerland
The retrospective features over 75 vintage black and white prints spanning Draper’s career from the 1950s – 1980s. Kamoinge Workshop, the seminal and enduring black photography collective, is finally having its moment in the spotlight. The new publication and accompanying exhibition, Timeless: Photographs by Kamoinge (Schiffer), commemorates the 50th anniversary of the group and presents a survey of its important and wide-ranging work. Steven Kasher Gallery is proud to be a part of this renewed and long-overdue interest the work of these important photographers.
Given the current political and racial climate, where tensions run high, this revived interest in Draper and Kamoinge are timely. In the New York Times, Maurice Berger writes, quoting Draper, “‘We speak of our lives as only we can,’ Mr. Draper wrote about the personal and individualistic perspective of Kamoinge’s African-American photographers, and the book affirms that with a multifaceted, richly textured and global view of the black experience. Today, even as media depictions of people of color continue to rely on negative stereotypes and clichés, these pictures resonate with complexity.”
Opposite – Boy and H, Harlem, 1961
Exhibition runs through to February 20th, 2016
Steven Kasher Gallery
521 West 23rd Street
New York
NY
10011
