MATEO LÓPEZ – DRAWINGS

Posted on 2021-03-29

In March of 2020, after six years in Brooklyn, NY, López returned to his native Bogotá to wait out the quarantine. The familiar act of putting graphite to paper was a comfort in a moment of uncertainty. In his own words, “I just need time, a table, and I can start drawing. When we started quarantine, I was drawing like mad. Like everyone, I felt very emotional. I was trying to release that.”
The included drawings are part of an ongoing installation-based series titled “Old Ideas Stuck in Corners,” begun in 2015. The series consists of a modular reconstruction of a wall made out of multiple pine panels tacked with a myriad of works on paper that are continually rearranged and replaced over time. While the wood partition is currently located in the artist’s vacant Brooklyn studio, López’s works on paper exist as an ever-evolving creative action representative of his studio process. López’s multifaceted practice spans diverse fields of study, from architecture and design to educational theory and dance. These varied conceptual interests take form in works on paper, sculpture, site-specific installation, and performance. López’s latest drawings revisit the fundamentals of his background in technical draftsmanship and architecture by using ‘line’ as a point of departure.

Opposite – Bricolage, 2021

Exhibition runs through to April 24th, 2021

Casey Kaplan
121 West 27th Street
10001
New York

caseykaplangallery.com

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CHLOE WISE – THANK YOU FOR THE NICE FIRE

Posted on 2021-03-29

In this series, Wise proposes scenarios of simulated familiarity, where smiles, hand gestures, and utterances are at odds with underlying realities, such as widespread uncertainty, willful ignorance, growing inequality, and aspirational notions of “unity” that reinforce a status quo. Underneath (or alongside) the comfort of platitudes resides the chaotic potential of the abject.
In Baudrillard’s experimental travelogue America (1986), he cross-examines the American smile in postwar America and its own travel within Reagan’s America:

“The smile of immunity, the smile of advertising: ‘This country is good. I am good. We are the best’. It is also Reagan’s smile – the culmination of the selfsatisfaction of the entire American nation […] Smile to show how transparent, how candid you are. Smile if you have nothing to say. Most of all, do not hide the fact that you have nothing to say nor your total indifference to others.”

Opposite – All that free speech is very expensive, 2021

Exhibition runs through to April 24th, 2021

Almine Rech
39 East 78th Street
NY 10075
New York

www.alminerech.com

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JESSICA RANKIN – THE NOSTALGIA FOR THE INFINITE

Posted on 2021-03-29

Known for her large-scale embroideries, collages and watercolours that combine celestial maps and landscapes with text, Rankin’s recent works focus more specifically on the language of painting. While her earlier embroideries could be read within a historical tradition of landscape painting, Rankin’s new paintings can be situated within the trajectory of abstraction.

This new body of work developed in the aftermath of the 2016 US election. A period of personal struggle for the artist, in these works Rankin focuses on ideas of desire, joy, intimacy and tenderness and how, in an age of political and social turmoil, these states can forge a space for resistance. In particular, Rankin was inspired by the way marginalised sectors of society – including queer people or people of colour as well as women – are able to maintain identities and relationships and forge a place in the world, in the wake of increasing social conservatism.

Opposite – Strange Currents, EA, 2020

Exhibition runs through to May 1st, 2021

White Cube
144-152 Bermondsey Street
SE1 3TQ
London

www.whitecube.com

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RACHEL EULENA WILLIAMS – SILK COTTON SNOW

Posted on 2021-03-22

This new collection of works demonstrates Williams’s continuous evolvement in her visual language and critique of colour and material, with each visceral piece breathing a renewed vitality into the gallery space.

Titled in relation to the recent snowstorms in the US, the works were conceived in the winter, apparent in the cool hues of blue and lilac that are interrupted by warm fluorescent oranges. Williams describes snow as a metaphor for this series: a middle ground of water, neither aqueous nor frozen yet possessing a transformational, near spiritual quality.

Opposite – Dark Clay, 2021

Exhibition runs through to April 24th, 2021

The Modern Institute
14-20 Osborne Street
G1 5QN
Glasgow

www.themoderninstitute.com

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HANS-PETER FELDMANN

Posted on 2021-03-22

Encompassing works from across Feldmann’s nearly five-decades long career, this survey show includes sculpture, photography, installation, collage, the appropriated image and found object.

Feldmann’s work dissolves the borders between art and life, blurring distinctions between conventionally high and low culture to discover unexpected, humorous outcomes that often verge on the absurd, and which challenge his viewers’ aesthetic sensibilities. One consistent strand of his practice sees the artist appropriate and modify historic oil paintings, mined from auctions, second hand shops and markets. Disrupting long-held assertions of the artist’s role as a unique creator, Feldmann systematically reconstructs existing images and objects to reflect on representation, with such subtle, humorous interventions as the addition of a red nose to a portrait, or by painting over the subject’s face to create a trompe l’oeil cut out.

Opposite – Collages

Exhibition runs through to May 8th, 2021

Simon Lee Gallery
304, 3F The Pedder Building
12 Pedder Street, Central
Hong Kong
China

www.simonleegallery.com

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LÉOPOLD RABUS – LES PROPRIÉTÉS DES CHOSES

Posted on 2021-03-22

When I asked myself how we name and classify the living and all that surrounds us, I was referred to a popular medieval scientific book by the 13th-century Franciscan monk Bartholomaeus Anglicus On the Properties of Things. The book deals with 19 things and dedicates a large portion to birds, such as partridges and storks. The author bestows on each subject what seems to be a stamp of approval, a seal of the divine. For example, saints will speak to the trees and the birds, and the birds respond.
This is not the case in Frans Snyders’ painting Concert of Birds (1629-1630), in which the artist uses an Aesop fable to bring together a wide variety of exotic and native birds on the same tree. Here the treatment of the animal kingdom turns into an encyclopedic and colonial manifesto. A perfect witness of the Baroque period, this way of categorizing is still found at museums today, for example in my neighboring village where I admired a collection of naturalized birds. It is a strange feeling to see these birds all next to each other, losing all singularity and merging into a neat species, arranged on their classifying trees! These trees capture only a tiny part of what this or that bird was in its environment.

Opposite – 8 oiseau, 2020

Exhibition runs through to May 1st, 2021

Wilde
24 Rue du Vieux-Billard
CH – 1205 Geneva
Switzerland

wildegallery.ch

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