London: Festival Iminente 2017

July 20, 2017 butterfly

This Summer, a European cultural invasion hits the heart of Brexit Britain as the very first UK edition of Festival Iminente opens at London’s Old Truman Brewery. A two-‐day festival of explosive and experimental Portuguese art and music, Festival Iminente brings the soul of Lisbon to the heart of London, following its successful debut in the Oeiras region of Lisbon in September 2016.

Curated by Portuguese artist Vhils and Lisbon’s Underdogs Gallery, Festival Iminente not only offers Brits mourning Brexit a chance to immerse themselves in the most innovative new music and art from Portugal but also enlists some of Europe’s most creatively exciting artists to invade the capital with their best work. The Old Truman Brewery on Brick Lane, London will overflow with art from a line-‐up of Europe’s hottest visual artists, creating immersive and in some cases, political pieces tackling the state of Europe and the current human condition. Enter through European Border Control, policed by Portuguese interventionist artist Mais Menos and prepare to party in an alternative European Union of art, music and creativity.

Artists include: Add Fuel (POR), AKA Corleone (POR), Andre da Loba (POR), Ben Eine (UK), Bordalo II (POR), Conor Harrington (IRL), Draw & Contra (POR), Halfstudio (POR), Mais Menos (POR), Mar (POR), Pixel Pancho (IT), Sick Boy (UK), The Caver (POR), Vhils (POR), Wasted Rita (POR)

The 93 Feet East live music venue gives a platform to urban underground musicians from across Europe, but with a strong Portuguese flavour. Full line up: 28th July: DJ Glue (PT), DJ Kking Kong (PT), DJ Big (PT), Francis Dale (PT), Slow J (PT), DJ Ride (PT), Shaka Lion (PT), Batida (PT/AO), DJ Nigga Fox (AO) 29th July: DJ Glue (PT), DJ Big (PT), Cachupa Psicadélica (CV), Chullage (PT), Halloween (PT), Scuru Fitchadu (CV), Novelist (UK), Rita Maia presents Migrant Sounds (PT), LV & Joshua Idehen (UK), DJ Firmeza (PT)

Festival Iminente combines the best new music with new art in an experience of intense collective intimacy, with food trucks and a bar that only accepts Euros. We’ll see you there. *****************

FESTIVAL IMINENTE -‐ 28 & 29 JULY, 2017 BRICK LANE YARD & 93 FEET EAST OLD TRUMAN BREWERY 91 BRICK LANE LONDON E1 6QL

Tickets on sale at www.buytickets.at/iminentefestival
Afternoon £10, Evening £15
www.festivaliminente.com

Paris

Paris: Chiharu Shiota ‘Destination’ @Galerie Templon

July 17, 2017 butterfly

Following her eye-catching project at the Bon Marché Rive Gauche in Paris in early 2017, Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota is returning to both Galerie Daniel Templon‘s spaces with a spectacular site-specific installation and a series of new sculptures.

She has likened her artistic practice with yarn to that of a calligrapher. It’s a fitting parallel: Chiharu Shiota trained in painting before gravitating toward three-dimensionality. Having studied in Braunschweig, Germany, under Marina Abramović, she moved to Berlin in 1997 where she lives today. Her immersive environments and intricately wrought objects, enigmatic yet deeply physical, are the results of painstaking labor.

Her protean artistic practice explores the notions of the body, temporality, movement, memory and dreams. Her site-specific installations are often the theatre for performances designed by the artist to engage mentally and physically with viewers.

‘Destination 2017’, is a site-specific, room-engulfing labyrinth that has the sprawl of an uncontrollable fungus, a haywire cat’s cradle, or a webbed cathedral in red. Like her installation The Key in the Hand, 2015—made from second-hand keys ensnarled in massive amounts of scarlet string for the Japan pavilion at the Fifty-Sixth Venice Biennale—the work engages directly with the volume of its surroundings.

She explains: “I have been using boats since my exhibition at the Japan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2015; I wanted to create one oversized boat representing the topics I have touched on in my most recent works. Ships carry people and time. They feature a defined direction, with no other choice but to keep moving forward. Though we may not know where we are heading, we can never stop. Life is a journey of uncertainty and wonder, and the boats symbolize the bearers of our dreams and hopes.”

A huge 5-metre boat, the frame of its hull resembling a human skeleton, floats in a sea of red yarn. Following on from this environment, the Skins painting are depicting ambiguous yet poetic representations of the body, its surface, its networks of connections.

A series of yarn sculptures envelops various objects, such as a chair and loose papers floating in space, creating an ensemble that raises the metaphysical questions that face us as humans, the difficulty we have understanding the world, and the complex relations that link us.
‘During humanity’s early years, death used to be connected to human life’s destination. It could be easier to find an answer to the question of our purpose in life. We were more aware of the creative process and the different steps along the way. Nowadays, we build and create on a massive scale, including things we don’t need, with no clear goal in sight, at a vertiginous speed…’

View the full set of pics here

To mark Le Havre’s 500-year celebration, from May 27 to October 8, 2017, Chiharu Shiota will be presenting Accumulation of Power, a site-specific installation at the famous St. Joseph Church in Le Havre designed by architect Auguste Perret.

Chiharu Shiota – Destination 2017
Until July 22
Galerie Daniel Templon
30 rue Beaubourg, Paris

London

London: Harland Miller – One Bar Electric Memoir

July 10, 2017 butterfly

UK artist Harland Miller, renowned for his satirised Penguin paperback paintings, is returning to the White Cube this summer for a new exhibition called ‘One Bar Electric Memoir’. Featuring two series of paintings, the works on show are a continuity of Miller’s investigation into the relationship between viewer, text and image.

The first series of large-scale works is based on Miller’s extensive archive of psychology and social science books, dating from the 1960s and ‘70s. Characterised by their bold and colourful abstract covers, these books embraced a positive attitude and the possibility of ‘fixing’ disorders through a process of self-help. The geometric cover designs reminded of contemporary abstract paintings but also provided a foil to the darker aspects of social neurosis addressed by the books’ content.

In another series of fictional book cover paintings, Miller depicts the outlines of letters in a range of typefaces and colours, intersected or layered over each other to create short, enigmatic words such as ‘Up’, ‘If’, ‘Ace’, ‘Pot’. With their bold, saturated colours, these paintings reference American abstraction and, in particular, Robert Rauschenberg and Ed Ruscha’s use of vernacular signage and motifs.

The shapes stand out from the saturated mute backgrounds, as do the paired fictional but witty titles such as Reverse Psycology Isn’t Working, 2017. In both series of paintings Miller uses his own name as author. The inclusion of his own name, not only alludes to his authorship of both image and text, but to the fine line that exists between fiction and reality.

View the full set of pics here

Harland Miller – One Bar Electric Memoir
Until 9 September 2017
White Cube, Mason’s Yard, London

Uncategorized

Paris: Okuda paints monumental Mona Lisa

July 4, 2017 butterfly 1 Comment

Spanish artist Okuda is brightening up a nineteen storey building in Paris by giving it a contemporary makeover. Using more than 450 spraycans, Okuda painted one of Europe’s tallest murals at 50 metres (164 feet) high by 15 meters wide during less than five days.

‘The City of Paris and Mona Lisa are intricately linked, so it was a natural choice’. The street artist wanted to pay tribute to the French culture and to the iconic portrait at the Musee du Louvre.

Internationally known Okuda is a surrealist pop artist with a psychedelic universe, his subjects are very colourful and this artwork is no exception.

With zebra hair and a rainbow cubic face, the reinterpretation of Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece, also known as La Gioconda, depicts a standing woman in a starry sunset, with a bird on her shoulder and carrying a handbag. The handbag is decorated with repetitive patterns, reminiscent of a famous French luxury brand, as a nod to Paris as capital of Luxe and Fashion.
The multi-cultural-skinned woman is illustrated by different types of colourful fabric from dots, stripes and stars like different parts of the world.
While we have seen many reinterpretations of this famous portrait, it is also very unusual to see the Gioconda standing, we discover here the rest of her body with curvy shapes, standing in rainbow waters.
We were lucky to join Okuda on his cherry picker during the painting process, so here are some pics or the work in progress.

This modern colourful portrait celebrates Paris with culture, luxe and fashion but also its population from a multicultural background and diversity.

The project in collaboration with By Night Gallery and Ink and Movement was inaugurated by Jerome Coumet, Major of the XXIII District in presence of many local residents.

Photos credit: Butterfly Art News
View the full set of pics here

Come back again soon for our coverage about Okuda‘s Parisian solo show ‘ The dream of Mona Lisa’ at Adda & Taxie Gallery running until the end of August at 35 rue Matignon.

Paris, Shows, Street

Paris: Ludo ‘I’ve been missing you’ Solo Show

June 30, 2017 butterfly

French artist Ludo is returning to Paris after five years with a new solo show namely titled ‘I’ve been missing you’ at Magda Danysz Gallery.

After extensive travelling, creating installations in New York, monumental walls throughout the world and institutional projects, like at the Power Station of Art Museum in Shanghai, Ludo invites us for a journey through his multi-faceted works, whether photographs, paintings, drawings or sculptures.

In this exhibition LUDO also presents an installation made up of an army of fireflies whose phosphorescent light dazzles and envelops while letting emerge a certain question about the relation of man to technology. Hybrid creatures emerge from the artist’s imagination with botanical precision using a colour palette ranging from grey to his signature green.

The images of LUDO explore the environment, the future, the space, the human. His biotechnological creations come to colonize the three levels of the gallery and plunge us into a chimerical universe where we find the passions and multiple inspirations of the artist.

In parallel to the show, wandering through the streets of Paris in the 20th and 11th district, visitors can discover some of the artist’s latest creations, from a snake to a ‘BeeLice’ and a Grim Reaper.