REENA SPAULINGS – LIFE AT SEA

Posted on 2020-04-20

The high-viz yellow image of two peasant girls is based on a Camille Pissarro painting we used to visit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The anarchist-Impressionist made many paintings and drawings of laborers shown in moments of rest, napping, spacing out, gossiping and just being there in bucolic landscapes. Awkward croppings and intimate angles make these figures of not-working workers float strangely against harsh, multicolored fields. Here, one figure sits wedged in the painting’s lower left corner as the other leans on her hoe.
They are seen chatting together against a tilted rectangle of cultivated land, with the horizon pushed back almost as far as it can go. The empty space between the girls, imagined now as a sort of viral gap, full of potential communication, is echoed by an extra area of blank neon yellow to their right. We named our painting New Models after the Berlin-based website and podcast.

Opposite – New Models (after Pissarro), 2020

Exhibition runs through to April 25th, 2020

Galerie Neu
Linienstraße 119 abc
10115 Berlin
Germany

www.galerieneu.net

  

ARNE MALMEDAL

Posted on 2020-04-20

Since the late 1980s, Malmedal has explored the problems around figure / ground / image / frame in several large paintings that were mainly executed in earth colors with clear references to the natural world. These works were shown at Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo in 1994 together with monochrome paintings on fiberglass scrim, canvases framed by a window-like grid, and paintings where a boxy frame structure was fully integrated into the painting. This exhibition manifested his position in the Norwegian art scene as a vital and experimental abstract painter with a playful look at the history of the medium.
In the paintings from the early 2000s, light became an important motif for Malmedal. He was preoccupied with portraying color as pure light, resulting in images where a monochrome field
resides in a spatial arrangement framed by a white surface, reminiscent of American artist James Turrell’s light installations. Several of these works were central to Malmedal’s
retrospective exhibition at The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo, 2003, demonstrating his delicate treatment of color and its’ associations with nature and light
and its’ own materiality on the canvas.

Opposite – Installation view

Exhibition runs through to April 25th, 2020

Galleri Riis
Arbins gate 7
NO-0253 Oslo
Norway

galleririis.com

  

THE JOHN ARMLEDER AND ROB PRUITT SHOW

Posted on 2020-04-13

Featuring a joint show with influential Swiss artist John Armleder, and new works by American postconceptual artist Rob Pruitt, the space is launched with jovial and conceptual tone; equally elucidating on the architectural gravitas of the gallery’s surroundings. John Armleder will present a series of iconic works that embody the necessary playful statements that are key in the artist’s multi-layered practice: colorful, abstract and geometrical reflections around the notion of space. On the other hand, Pruitt’s signature tongue in cheek wit mystifies melancholy and layers of separation by analyzing the infinite, and increasingly relevant, semiology of squares, screens and tokens.

Opposite – Installation view

Exhibition runs through to April 30th, 2020

Massimo De Carlo
Viale Lombardia 17
20131 Milan

www.massimodecarlo.com

  

IDA EKBLAD – A DEEP MEDICINE

Posted on 2020-04-13

Ida Ekblad explains that she has tried to copy in oil what she recently achieved in her signature puff and plastisol works. In oil there is another world of pigment. Ekblad uses the highest quality paint with no fillers, pure cold pressed linseed, which makes the colors extremely varied. Puff turns matte when heated and dried, but these oils are saturated and shiny, vibrant, almost freaky.

Opposite – PSYCOTRONIC MICROWAVE, 2020

Exhibition runs through to July 31st, 2020

Galerie Max Hetzler
57, rue du Temple
75004 Paris

www.maxhetzler.com

  

ETEL ADNAN – PLANÈTES

Posted on 2020-04-13

Etel Adnan has always been interested in cosmology, the relationship of planets and stars with each other, butabove all their interaction with Earth. Her first poem, written when she was still living in Lebanon, evoked the link between the sun and the sea. In the 1960s, in California, she was fascinated by space exploration. When Gagarin died, she wrote A Funeral March for The First Cosmonaut and the publishing house founded by her
friend Simone Fattal was named The Post-Apollo Press, in tribute to the Apollo missions organised by NASA.

Opposite – Planète 9, 2019

Exhibition runs through to May 6th, 2020

Galerie Lelong & Co.
13, rue de Téhéran
75008 Paris

www.galerie-lelong.com

  

DEBORAH BROWN – PARTS UNKNOWN

Posted on 2020-04-06

Deborah Brown’s paintings begin in her imagination and explore her own personal truth. Women, stripped of their protective and identifying clothing, navigate familiar landscapes as if in a dream. Their nudity makes them seem simultaneously vulnerable and powerful, as if they have returned to elemental or archaic origins.

The female protagonists occupy a variety of spaces—walking on an ominous beach, journeying through the forest, paddling canoes, far from the quotidian activities of civilization. The presence of canine companions implies a departure or exile from a domestic setting, as well as an unseen threat that might require their protective services. Using the ever-complicated but recognizable nude female form, at times expressive, in others stoic, the artist manages to capture a moment of internal analysis still unresolved, leaving the viewer to ponder the impending story-line.⁣⁣⁣⁣

Opposite – Climber, 2019

Exhibition runs through to May 9th, 2020

GAVLAK
340 Royal Poinciana Way, Suite M334
FL 33480
Palm Beach

www.gavlakgallery.com