JAVIER MARTIN – LIGHTS APPROPRIATION

Posted on 2022-01-03

This exhibition encourages self-reflection. Martin uses sophisticated visual elements to stimulate the viewers curiosity, to let them question what may be hidden behind the lights and what blinds us.
Through excellent artistic skills Martin combines painting and collage in order to detect the transformation of the natural daylight, and places it in a powerful battle with the artificial light. He takes us on a journey from poetic sunsets to sunrises, dark night skies and graceful twilights, and creates new allegories of natural light. These works allow us autocritical questions: How strong is the blindness that comes from favoring unimportant things? Is a clear sight hindered by something or are we intentionally covering our eyes?

Opposite – Blindness Timeless Light 3, 2021

Exhibition runs through to February 26th, 2022

PULPO GALLERY
Obermarkt 51
82418 Murnau am Staffelsee
Germany

www.pulpogallery.com

  

ANNE-MIE VAN KERCKHOVEN

Posted on 2022-01-03

Zeno X Gallery presents the retrospective exhibition Placenta Saturnine Bercail by Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven (b. 1951 in Antwerp). Historical and new works illustrate her forty-year collaboration with Zeno X Gallery. A substantial publication presenting an overview of all her exhibitions in the gallery with images from the archive will be released to coincide with this exhibition.
Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven has collected a large database of images of women in various stages of undress. The poses, gazes, attributes and camera angles are usually very stereotypical. These clichés are occasions for her to connect the underlying meanings of the images with other, sociopolitical dimensions of society. Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven likes to look for the tension between word and image. Since images of women are regularly used to sell certain goods, Van Kerckhoven got the idea to also sell abstract ideas or concepts by juxtaposing them with images of women: “As my alter ego ‘HeadNurse’, I took ninety-six female images from my database and connected them with words from texts on internal self-organization, thermodynamics and knowledge representation. Through the systematic use and reuse of images of women – from the first nude magazines to the sexual revolution– I activated a five-step alchemical process, starting from thinkers in the baroque to Nietzsche.”

Opposite – Spiegel (Mirror), 1987

Exhibition runs through to February 26th, 2022

Zeno X Gallery
Godtsstraat 15
2140 Antwerp
Belgium

www.zeno-x.com

  

WANG KEPING – METAMORPHOSES

Posted on 2022-01-03

Metamorphoses, Wang Keping’s site-specific exhibition, unveils the artist’s most recent body of work: a group of eight majestic, fire-patinated cypress-wood sculptures. This never-before-seen corpus is the product of three years of work, marking a creative renewal in the life of the 73-year-old sculptor, since moving to his Vendée studio in the spring of 2019.

Located between the beaches of the Atlantic Ocean and the national forest of Longeville, an old naval warehouse has been transformed into a creative hearth, allowing Wang Keping to work on a new scale and to carve his sculptures out of very large logs – century-old cypress and oak trees – in a hand-to-hand struggle, where human manipulation is measured up against the power of nature.

Opposite – Léda et le Cygne, 2019

Exhibition runs through to March 12th, 2022

Galerie Nathalie Obadia
91, rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré
75008 Paris
France

www.nathalieobadia.com

  

ARGHAVAN KHOSRAVI – TRUTH BE TOLD

Posted on 2021-12-27

Most of the female figures that are depicted in Khosravi’s works are prevented from moving freely. They often seem trapped in a nightmare in which they are unable to run away: their legs are stuck in the concrete floor or deep holes; their wrists and arms are tied; their voice suffocates under water or in a bucket covering their head. One woman disappears behind drawn curtains, others seem to have burnt their fingers on something they were not allowed to touch.

At the core of the exhibition is THE BATTLE, a work that Khosravi built from several massive wooden panels, and which is the most complex work within the group. Its triptych composition is reminiscent of a medieval altar piece. This quality is combined with imagery based on Persian miniature painting: a battle scene moving from the outer right and left edges of the largest, horizontal panel to the center. The central, vertical panel shows the body of a woman, who is wearing an elegant blouse.

Opposite – The Curtain, 2021

Exhibition runs through to February 20th, 2022

KÖNIG GALERIE
St. Agnes – Alexandrinenstr, 118-121
10969 Berlin
Germany

www.koeniggalerie.com

  

CHUNG EUN-MO

Posted on 2021-12-27

The work of Chung Eun-Mo (*Seoul 1946) is based on profound knowledge of Modernism, especially the work of the early abstractionists. Like Malevich and Albers, she is fascinated by mathematical and chromatic harmonies and the mutable effects of light on them. Born in Seoul, in the mid-1960s she moved to New York, where in 1980 she obtained a Master of Fine Arts degree at the Pratt Institute, after which she went on to perfect her geometric painting style. Towards the end of the 1980s she chose to live in Italy, first in Rome, then Torre Orsina in Umbria; since 2019 she lives in Milan.

The bond of Chung Eun-Mo with Italy is strong and long-lasting, her art reflects aspects of Italian art history, but also the atmosphere of its ancient civilization, architecture and landscape. Many of her works are abstract and poetic recreations of places she has seen and experienced, sequences or conglomerates of shapes and colors with a strong evocative power.

Opposite – April, 2015

Exhibition runs through to March 13th, 2022

Monica De Cardenas
Via Francesco Viganò 4
20124 Milan
Italy

www.monicadecardenas.com

  

RAOUL DE KEYSER – WORKS ON PAPER

Posted on 2021-12-27

De Keyser’s drawings and watercolors are a crucial part of his oeuvre. They offer an intimate glimpse into the artist’s thought process and work method. The drawings are only rarely conventional studies: they are often a reaction to his own paintings, but they can also stand on their own.
De Keyser’s works from the 1970s are characterized by his exploration of materials (pencil, chalk, watercolor, ink, graphite, gesso, etc.), types of paper, and techniques (such as scratching, rubbing and smudging). The work process itself gradually became the subject of the oeuvre, with hesitations and ‘mistakes’ increasingly being admitted into the works.

Opposite – Untitled, 1980

Exhibition runs through to January 22nd, 2022

Zeno X Gallery
Leopold De Waelplaats 16
2000 Antwerp
Belgium

www.zeno-x.com