Category Archives: Shows

Paris: INTI ‘Profane’ at Galerie Itinerrance

March 27, 2018 butterfly

Chilean artist INTI retuns to Paris for a third solo show called ‘Profane’ at Galerie Itinerrance, featuring new paintings and an impressive site specific installation.

For years Inti kept on traveling all around the world to paint murals . His wall paintings often show the Kusillo, a character originated from the south-american carnival, or figures coming from religious imagery. These intense creations organized through rich and meaningful compositions allow him to approach social issues. The artist draws symbols from different cultures and various fields, he takes them out of their context to give them a new meaning by juxtaposition.

For «Profane», Inti selected a dozen of his murals he recently executed across the world from Lisbon to Miami and China. Based on the subjects represented on each of them, he adapted his artistic practice to the size of the canvas and changed some elements to better clarify his intention.

Inti also created an immersive installation by covering the floor with stencilled skulls while a spectacular Pietà sit prominently in the center of the gallery space.

This 8.5 feet high installation is the result of a long work for Inti who experimented with a new medium. It took him 6 months of work and 12 hours a day to finish it. Beyond a technical challenge, Inti managed to represent in volume a traditional figure of religious iconography and reappropriated it with his own codes.

Through this new body of work, Inti addresses various issues , like the conflicts between science and religion, with a critical eye without expressing a definitive answer. The same way he spreads numerous iconography and symbols in each of his paintings, he injects in his compositions a multitude of elements and leave the spectator free to interpret them. «Profane» transcribe very well the journey Inti experienced since his last exhibition. His numerous travels can be felt through his openness to the world and his sensitivity.

«Profane» challenges us to reflect on the banality of our beliefs and dogmas, as opposed to the delicate, ephemeral and natural beauty of life.‘ – Inti

View the full set of pics here

Inti – ‘Profane’
Until 31 March 2018
Galerie Itinerrance
24bis boulevard du Général Jean Simon
75013 Paris

London, Shows

London: Glenn Brown – ‘Come to Dust’ at Gagosian Gallery

March 17, 2018 butterfly

The Gagosian Gallery is currently showing “Come to Dust,” the first major exhibition by British contemporary artist Glenn Brown in London since 2009.

For Brown, the past and present are treasuries of raw material, offering countless images, titles, and techniques to be combined, appropriated, and deconstructed. Based on art history, as well as of literature, music, and popular culture, Brown creates complex and sensuous works of art that are resolutely of our time.

The title of exhibition, is inspired by a song in Shakespeare’s play Cymbeline, which evokes the ineluctability of death. Multidisciplinary artist, the exhibition features oil paintings, drawings in period frames, grisaille panel works, etchings, and sculptures.

Sources include Rembrandt, Delacroix, Greuze, and Raphael, as well as Abraham Bloemaert, Francesco Mancini, Gaetano Gandolfi, Elisabeth Le Brun, and Bernardo Cavallino.

In Brown’s oil paintings, hybrid figures painted in intricate swirls reveal the sumptuous potential of oil paint. While these paintings give the illusion of corporeal volume and fullness, closer scrutiny reveals the surfaces to be smooth and flat.

Rather than using paint to depict skin with observational exactitude, Brown presents translucent brushstrokes revealing the flesh and muscles beneath the surface.

The choice of picture frames adds an additional layer to the richly layered visual anachronism. Inverting the normal order of image-making and framing, Brown treats the frames as readymades, creating drawings in response to the particular colour, size, design, and narrative detail of each. Thus, the drawings and the frames are integral to each other.

In the exhibition, an entire room of recent drawings is hung salon-style, some mounted in elaborate Renaissance gilt and carved wooden frames.

The sculptures are very impressive, elaborate masses built from precisely placed strokes of very thick oil paint. In some of them, the cold, sensuous curves of nineteenth-century bronze statues are still visible but engulfed by growths of pulsating, gravity-defying oil paint. The contrast between the cold, hard metal with the soft, luscious paint is highly captivating.

“Come to Dust” immerses the viewer in Brown’s enigmatic world. The figures and forms of history mutate, overtaken by hypnotic colours and light. Transforming the allure of Old Master paintings and drawings, bordering on profanity, Brown tells a much darker and more complicated story, fit for our times.

View the full set of pics here

Glenn Brown – Come to Dust
Until 17 March 2018
Gagosian Gallery
20 Grosvenor Hill
London W1K 3QD

Paris, Shows

Paris: Jean Charles de Castelbajac – I Want

March 1, 2018 butterfly

Multidisciplinary artist and internationally successful fashion designer Jean-Charles de Castelbajac (also known as JC/DC) is currently presenting a solo exhibition titled ‘I Want’ at Magda Danysz Gallery in Paris.

Since the 70’s and 80’s Jean Charles de Castelbajac has been creating clothes integrating popular iconography from cartoon characters by Walt Disney to the iconic Snoopy, and collaborating with multiple brands, allowing him to mix tradition with modernity.
During his visionary exhibition in 2009 “The Triumph of the Signs” in London, he combined brand logos with iconic canvases of art history and has been pursuing this incursion by creating a new hybrid aesthetic, chaotic and iconoclastic.

By bridging the gap between art and fashion for over decades, Jean-Charles de Castelbajac has explored all sides of this universe of collaborations both as a fashion designer and as artist.

Through this new exhibition “I Want – The Empire of collaborations”, the artist closes the last chapter of this artistic path started in 2009 by exploring on the one hand the hegemony of this new collaborative empire and its contradictions, and on the other hand, arises as a curator of desynchronized collaborations provoked by the meeting of artists, different eras and styles: André Courrèges meets street artist Andre, while Picasso secretely meets with Keith Haring. Fashion designer Virgil Abloh (covered) of Brand OFF WHITE lost his ‘Virgility’ …

JC/DC presents a portrait of the ‘Apotres Modernes’ / ‘Modern Apostles and dresses the Genealogy of Fashion with all the links between Brands and Designers.

A Mickey Mouse shaped canvas titled Kazimir, Walt & Raymond contains references to Russian painter Kazimir Malevich, Walt Disney and Raymond Pettibon

On the first floor, a series of portraits illustrate brand collaborations and ironically plays on words: Le Coq40 / CAC40 , French Kiss/Kith, Lacaste (the cast) / Lacoste, L’or & Elle (Gold and her) / L’oreal), Hell/ Shell, L’EGO / UNIQLO…

Next to the portraits gallery, a Wall / Mall showcases branded shopping bags painted with portraits or poetic statements.

In parallel, the 68 years old artist never ceases to be a street art poet, and describes himself as a ‘Craieateur (playing on the words craie =chalks and createur = creator) leaving chalk drawings and quotes on the streets.

View the full set of pics here

Jean Charles de Castelbajac – I Want
Until 17 March 2018
Magda Danysz
Rue Amelot, Paris

London, Shows

London: JR ‘Giants’ at Lazinc Sacksville

February 15, 2018 butterfly

Ted Prize winner artist JR is currently displaying a solo exhibition titled “GIANTS” at Lazinc’s new flagship gallery in Mayfair, London.

The name of the presentation directly references the artist’s ongoing GIANTS project which made its debut during the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where he created enormous black and white prints of athletes jumping over Rio’s buildings, swimming in its ocean, and diving off its mountains like Greek titans. .

Even if pictures of the installations in situ might look good, it’s very difficult to recapture their impact. So to give some sense of the scale of the project in the gallery space settings, the viewer has to walk underneath the massive paper head and shoulders of Sudanese high jumper Mohamed Younes Idriss, fixed to scaffolding, just to get in.

At the same time, visitors can discover the artist’s process from start to finish with behind the scenes items like architectural plans that were created to support his large-scale installations, installation permits collaged into 3D-printed digital reliefs of the final images, and look at the artist’s digital photography techniques.

View the full set of pics here

JR – Giants
Until 28 February 2018
Lazinc Sackville
29 Sackville St.
Mayfair, London W1S 3DX
United Kingdom

Berlin, Shows

Berlin: Barbara Kruger ‘Forever’

December 10, 2017 butterfly

US artist Barbara Kruger, who initially inspired the logo for Supreme, has created an immersive installation called ‘Forever’ for the Berlin gallery Sprüth Magers. This exhibition marks exactly three decades since her first solo show at Monika Sprüth Gallery in Cologne.

The new site-specific work occupies all four walls and the floor of the gallery’s main exhibition space, with immersive room-wraps and several new vinyl works. Their boldly designed textual statements on the nature of truth, power, belief and doubt embody the distinctive visual language that Kruger has developed over the course of her forty-year career.

Since the late 1970s, Kruger has established herself as one of the most influential figures in contemporary art. Beginning with her earliest works, for which she combined language with mass media imagery culled from books and magazines, she has turned a critical eye toward consumerism, desire, political will, and the often-hidden mechanisms of power operating within contemporary society. In the mid-1990s, Kruger produced her first multichannel video works and room-wrappings, tapping into a long-standing interest in architecture and expanding the scale of her installations to envelop viewers in disorienting, but thought-provoking, environments. Her exhibition in Berlin extends these investigations, which are as timely as ever in a moment pervaded by pseudo-facts and alternative realities.

With ‘Forever’ Barbara Kruger takes a critical look at technology and humanity through her “bold textual statements about the nature of truth, power, belief, and doubt.” The exhibition transports viewers to contemplate iconic words typed in monochrome boxes and their connotations in relation to the wallpaper of the smartphone.