THE IRRESOLUTE
Indeterminacy has been defined by many artists and theorists as the vibrant heart of the “poetic act,” the stumbling block to “illumination.” “Nothing is more hostile to the concept of beauty than the desire to give the mind a determined form,” wrote Friedrich Schiller in the 18th century, while in the middle of the 19th […]
PERSONA
“All the world is a theatre, and all men and women are but actors in it.” To this famous line by William Shakespeare,1 we are tempted to add an existential question that many philosophers and artists have taken up: who are we beyond the role we play and beyond our appearance? The complexity of this […]
KATARZYNA WIESIOLEK
Intimate space Beyond their breathtaking virtuosity, Katarzyna Wiesiolek’s drawings have a disturbing, almost tactile presence. One might be afraid of cutting oneself by grabbing one of her broken glasses or of getting dirty by sitting on her moldy plastic garden chair; one might want to pull on the cord of the blind with its misaligned […]
NADEZDA NIKOLOVA
Elemental Forms Nadezda Nikolova (b. 1978, Serbia) is a Croatian-Bulgarian-American artist based in Oakland, California. She studied 19th-century phototrophic (light energy capturing) printing processes at the University of Kentucky and the George Eastman Museum. Having learned the old photographic techniques so prized and reused today, she produces photograms on wet collodion plates (called tintypes). Imaginary […]
THOMAS DEMAND, THE ART OF TROMPE-L’OEIL
France – Paris The first major retrospective of the German photographer and sculptor is on show at the Jeu de Paume, presenting his photographs of life-size reconstructions. Since the 1990s, Thomas Cyrill Demand has been questioning the viewer’s relationship to the image and to time. His photographs reconstitute places through significant events, media episodes, or […]
THE GATES OF POSSIBILITY, Art & Science Fiction
“Science fiction is the subversive agent of doubt […] Under the guise of anticipation, it sheds light on current societal and scientific developments and trends, holds out the hope of a world re-enchanted by the power of our imagination and makes us dream of transforming utopia into reality.”1 From Sandy Skoglund’s fluorescent green Radioactive […]
GREGORY CHATONSKY, DOUBLE GLOVE
France – Paris Having made the web the breeding ground for new narratives hybridizing the real and the virtual via artificial intelligence, Gregory Chatonsky seems to have opened the Pandora’s box of our post-modern world: delegating to the “artificial imagination” the composition of his dystopian visions, the artist seems to have sold his soul to […]
BRUCE NAUMAN : NEONS, CORRIDORS, ROOMS
5,000 square meters of corridors and lighted rooms, tunnels, neon sculptures… The Pirelli hangar has been transformed into a labyrinth of lights. An ideal place to experiment with the multimedia research initiated by Bruce Nauman in the mid-1960s, interacting with the visual, bodily, luminous, and sound perception of space. Organized in collaboration with the Tate […]
HANS OP DE BEECK : THE QUIET PARADE
After the abandoned campsite frozen in a gangue of grey paint installed in a shed hangar at the last Lyon Biennial (We were the last to stay),1 a new gigantic immersive installation with the appearance of a city by Hans Op de Beeck has taken over the spaces of the Amos Rex Museum in Helsinki. […]
SUSA TEMPLIN / NICK DAWES : LAYERS UPON LAYERS
By superimposing photographic images of fragmented architectures assembled by interlocking and misalignment, transparency and chromatic and luminous interference, Susa Templin delivers a kaleidoscopic vision of space. Discovered on the stand of the Anita Beckers gallery in Paris + by Art Basel, her compositions, displayed under plexiglass, have immediately seduced us for the harmonious softness of […]
