Paris: John Giorno

August 11, 2017 butterfly

Cahier d’Arts in Paris presents a series of prints of the works by New York artist John Giorno, as well as four new painting poems until the end of August.

Part of the New York underground scene in the mid sixties, John Giorno was the main actor in Andy Warhol’s first film ‘Sleep’ in 1963. He was also very close to the ‘beat’ movement and to William S. Burroughs. His main concern at the time was to make poetry accessible to popular culture.

In 1965, he founded Giorno Poetry Systems, a non-profit organization that started several musical groups and also became a label that published about forty albums. In 1968, he created Dial-a-Poem, a mass telephone service (in fact the first of its kind) that offered poems to the people who dialed the number and received millions of calls. Giorno has published a dozen collections of poems, as many albums, video works, and has given many performances since the past forty years.

A portfolio of recent works of the artist is illustrated in the last issue of the magazine Cahiers d’Art 2016-2017 and presented at the Palais de Tokyo.

View the full set of pics here

John Giorno – Cahier D’Arts
Until end of August
14-15 rue du Dragon 75006 Paris

London, Shows

London: Ashley Bickerton – Ornamental Hysteria

August 6, 2017 butterfly

NewportStreet Gallery is currently showing a retrospective of works by US artist Ashley Bickerton.

‘Ornamental Hysteria’ spans more than three decades of Bickerton’s career and features 51 works, including a significant display of new and previously unexhibited pieces. It is the artist’s first UK show since 2009 and runs throughout all six spaces at Newport Street Gallery.

Bickerton moved to New York in 1982 and after working as a painting assistant to Jack Goldstein, he emerged as a key figure on the newly exploding East Village art scene. Within the context of the culture of commodification sweeping America he rose to prominence as part of an amorphous movement that was branded ‘Neo-Geometric Conceptualism’. Alongside artists such as Haim Steinbach and Jeff Koons, Bickerton endeavoured to reframe the practice of art production in response to the new, seductive mechanisms of desire at work in society.
Bickerton abandoned New York in 1993, eventually settling in Bali, where he still lives and works.

Throughout his career, Bickerton has challenged what we consider or define a painting
Multidisciplinary artist, Ashley Bickerton uses a variety of medium, from photocollage, digital image, paint and sculpture to create technical assemblages on the themes of opposition and duality: representation and reality, creativity and commodity, nature and artifice, idyll and apocalypse.

The gallery 1 presents a critique of contemporary consumer culture and the commodification of the ‘art object’ via steel and aluminium wall-mounted ‘Culturescapes’ from the ‘Logo’ and ‘Non-Word Word’ series.

The monumental 5 Snake Heads in the Gallery 2 showcasing a five-bodied, technicoloured serpent is a parody of the mythological figure of a self portrait of the artist.

Colourful paintings like ‘Smiling Woman’ based on distorted and retouched photographs, illustrate models, family members and friends with heavy make-up as an overtly satirical and lurid vision of life on a generic Pacific / Caribbean island.

Galleries 3 and 4 feature Bickerton’s ‘Sea’ and ‘Landscapes’ – offering a tragic view of the devastating impact of man on the ecosphere.

View the full set of pics here

https://vimeo.com/215645083

Ashley Bickerton – Ornemental Hysteria
Until 20 August 2017
Newportstreet Gallery London

Paris, Shows

Paris: Okuda – The Dream of Mona Lisa

August 1, 2017 butterfly 1 Comment

Anna Dimitrova from Adda Gallery and Montana Gallery and Valériane Mondot from Taxie Gallery join forces to celebrate a collaborative new gallery ADDA & TAXIE and present a monographic and the first Parisian exhibition of Spanish artist OKUDA SAN MIGUEL called ‘The Dream of Mona Lisa’.

Inspired by the city of Paris, according to Okuda, the enigmatic Mona Lisa dreams of human figures and muses of the great classic masters. Being a creator and contemporary master, Okuda interprets these icons through his own surrealist prism using intense psychedelic colors and geometric harmonies.

Blending rainbow geometric landscapes with organic shapes, headless animals, figures, and personal iconography, his works produces mental stimulation and visually pleasing content. The artist continuously tries to balance the gray scale with his vibrant palette, using colors as a symbol of life and nature and the latter as a symbol of cement, death, dust and the material of classic sculptures.

In his latest series, Okuda San Miguel expresses his own vision of what the human being is made of. Humans are confronted with their roots, between its natural and ideal part, represented by trees and different types of animals and the capitalist society, represented by bricks. Showing us the world where human beings and animals are created equal, the artist distils his own personal vision of God. This conceptual research is the result of his journeys and continuous contact with different environments. The artist sums up the contradictions between existentialism, universe, infinite, freedom, modernity and the meaning of life as an inextinguishable thirst.

View the full set of pics here

In parallel Okuda painted a monumental portrait of Mona Lisa in the 13th District of Paris (covered here)

Okuda -The Dream of Mona lisa
Adda & Taxie Gallerie
Until 29 August
35 Avenue Matignon, Paris

Paris, Shows

Paris: Xu Zhen – Civilization Iteration @Galerie Perrotin

July 28, 2017 butterfly

‘Civilization Iteration’ is the first solo exhibition of Chinese artist Xu Zhen at Galerie Perrotin in Paris, showcasing Xu’s important series of works since 2013 when he started a brand in his own name. Iteration refers to the way of achieving a desired result through repeated feedback. The exhibited series shows how an artist, amidst increasing globalization and networking of art, can approach the future of art with his own formula.

As early as 2001, Xu participated in the 49th Venice Biennale, then the youngest Chinese artist to exhibit works at this international art event. Having made a name at 20 as an artist, he has since created a large number of works based on his own consciousness. In 2009 he decided to establish the art creation enterprise MadeIn Company in Shanghai. Since then his works have been produced in a corporate fashion and his “artist” identity has been plunged into the center of controversy. Meanwhile, Xu’s creative focus has begun to shift to the relationship between art and business.

From the “individual artist period” when he concerned himself with the consciousness of identity, to “Xu Zhen brand”, Xu has moved on to repeatedly examine the current culture and transition as a reflection of the tremendous changes in human history over the past decades. Admittedly, the extension of consciousness unleashed by the Internet has eliminated temporal and spatial disparity. Yet, in the process, cultural learning in the traditional sense has been destroyed by information overload, giving way to recurrent cultural stagnation and dysfunctional standards. The information highway makes one feel unreal, and boundaries between meaning, values and reality gradually blur. In the course of time, after endless destruction and reconstruction, the boundless reformulations and iteration are opening up a new paradigm for civilization in the present.

The Rmn – Grand Palais moulding workshop is a little-known source of inspiration and a production workshop for artists searching for the classical canons (Xu Zhen today, Klein 50 years ago, Picasso and Dali 70 years ago, Rodin a century ago, etc.). After the Winged “Victory of Samothrace” inverted on the head of Buddha exhibited at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in winter 2015-16, the Perrotin gallery is currently presenting several works by Xu Zhen, two of which include reproductions from the Rmn – Grand Palais moulding workshop: “Aphrodite Holding Her Drapery” and “Belvedere Torso” from the “Eternity” series.

XU Zhen – Civilization Iteration
Galerie Perrotin
Until 29 July
76 rue de Turenne 75003 Paris

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Paris: Lek & Sowat

July 21, 2017 butterfly 1 Comment

The 400 square meters of the contemporary art space of the Pavillon Carré has been transformed by the duo of artists Lek and Sowat. Invited by Elise Herszkowicz from Art Azoï, they have created immersive installations from the floors to ceilings. Through their multidisciplinary approach both artists invite the viewer into their urban, experimental and subversive universe through ephemeral wall paintings, stained-glass windows made of urban furniture, installations built from the ruins of the previous exhibition, as well as photos from their practice at Mausolee (see here), Lasco project at Palais de Tokyo (see here) or residency at Villa Medicis and movies like Traces Directs (watch here) which is part of the permanent collection at Centre Pompidou.

By investing this new place, they continue to push the boundaries of traditional graffiti and mix their architectural abstractions. Impressive and captivating, their work fits perfectly into the history of the Pavillon Carré and surroundings as it offers great art accessible to all. For street artists, accustomed to urban exploration (Urbex), industrial ruins and illegal interventions, Lek and Sowat raise questions about the paradoxes of the institutionalization of urban art and its legitimity. Is having a self-taught and independent art practice enough to constitute a “circonstance attenuante” (mitigating circumstance)? Through this multidisciplinary exhibition, Lek and Sowat invite us to reflect on the place of street art in art history.

In parallel the prolific duo experimented with the techniques of the silver print for Polka Magazine to reinvent the works of another duo, Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre (published in Polka # 33). They also produced a large fresco of interpellation by Emmanuel Macron from the images of twelve photographers (Issue Polka # 38)