Miroslaw Balka at Arsenal Gallery, Bialystok

Miroslaw Balka is part of the group show FOGHORN. THE THEME OF THE TRANSFORMATION IN WORKS FROM COLLECTION II OF THE ARSENAL GALLERY at Arsenal Gallery, Bialystok / March 15 – May 15, 2019

Mircea Cantor at Musee d’Arts de Nantes

This exhibition can trace its roots back to 1999 when Robert Fleck, Director of Postgraduate Studies at the École régionale des beaux-arts de Nantes, who was  appointed to the post of Director of the institution a year later, discovered the work of this student from the Academy of Fine Arts in Cluj during a trip to Romania. Mircea Cantor  was invited to pursue postgraduate studies in Nantes, where he spent several years. Twenty years later, the photograph All the directions forms the starting point for the exhibition.  aken on  the Île de Nantes in 2000, it shows the artist as a hitchhiker holding a blank sign conjuring up every potential destination. There is an element of defiance in  the picture, which was taken when the artist’s American visa application for a study trip to New York was rejected, and it is tinged with melancholy and a sense of  disenchantment. This duality lies at the heart of a large number of works by the artist, who refers to himself as an “artist of the world”, thus challenging notions of identity, ethics,  politics, and also contemporary reality with all its contradictions. Encompassing video, photography and sculpture, the exhibition brings together a group of recent and earlier  works. The video Adjective to your presence, shot in Tokyo in 2018, shows demonstrators carrying transparent placards. It engages in a dialogue with Landscape is changing, in  which demonstrators carry mirror placards reflecting the city of Tirana, where the film was shot in 2003. Produced in Romania and Nantes, and comprising work from his youth  and pieces from the body of experiments on which the artist is casting his gaze with the benefit of hindsight, the extensive selection of photographs assembled for the exhibition  presents previously unseen material putting in perspective artistic approaches adopted very early in his career by Mircea Cantor and the elements which subsequently became  central to his work. Traces and memories are placed in counterpoint in the Chapelle de l’Oratoire, illustrating the ambiguous Romanian word Înainte, which can mean both  “forwards” or “before”, depending on the context.

Naama Tsabar at Paul Kasmin Gallery, NY

Naama Tsabar will present her show Dedicated at Kasmin Gallery, NY / March 13 – May 4, 2019 / 293 Tenth Avenue, NY / Naama Tsabar employs performance, sculpture, and photography to subvert the gender roles historically associated with musicianship. In her upcoming exhibition at Kasmin, Dedicated, Tsabar further explores these themes by expanding the borders of movement and mastery of the female body.

Jonathan Monk at Meyer Riegger, Berlin

That’s About the Size of It  is Jonathan Monk’s solo show at Meyer Riegger / 15 March – 13 April 2019 / Opening on Friday, March 15, 2019, from 6 to 9 pm / On the occasion of the opening the works will be actived. For the duration of the exhibition further performances will happen each Saturday, from 2 to 5 pm. Jonathan Monk’s works often remake other artworks. They are also funny. For his exhibition at Meyer Riegger Gallery, the artist presents two new, small sculptures, which restage Tom Wesselmann’s (1931-2004) assemblage, ‘Bedroom Tit Box’ (1968-1970). A miniature, room-like tableau stuffed with out-of-scale models of domestic objects (including an ashtray holding a cigarette, an orange and a vase with vulva-like rose petals protruding from its rim), Wesselmann’s disturbing assemblage is activated by the insertion of a live female breast through a circular hole cut into its ceiling. In Monk’s humorous recasts, which also play on scale, Wesselmann’s tit-box remains intact save that a live penis is now inserted through each assemblage-roof instead (and when the penises are unavailable, then phallic-looking fruit). By substituting the female breast with the penis, Monk parodies Wesselmann’s fetishistic assemblage in which the female body is objectified, aligned with objects of female ‘domesticity’ and with the form of the artwork itself – a frequent trope in Wesselmann’s work. The exposed male appendage makes Monk’s works awkward; undermining rather than affirming masculinity. As reflected in the exhibition title – ‘that’s about the size of it’ – male size really does matter if you are a man though for different reasons than if you are a woman. Since the late 1990s Jonathan Monk has created artworks based on other artworks, referencing, in particular, the languages of conceptual and pop art.

Jonathan Monk at Kindl, Berlin

Under the title Exhibit Model Four – plus invited guests, Jonathan Monk continues his exhibition series, which began in 2016 as a kind of retrospective, and which he has conceptually expanded for the KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art / 10 March – 21 July 2019 / Opening: Saturday, 9 March 2019, 5 pm

Douglas Gordon’s “I had nowhere to go” in Newcastle

Douglas Gordon’s “I had nowhere to go” will be screened at Star and Shadow Cinema, Newcastle / March 10th, 2019 at 2.30pm

Douglas Gordon at Belvedere, Vienna

Douglas Gordon is participatin in Talking Heads: Contemporary Dialogues with F. X. Messerschmidt at Belvedere, Vienna / March 8 – August 18, 2019 / The Belvedere’s exhibition asks questions based around categories such as the psyche, perception, and (self-)reflection – whether this is in Lutz Mommartz’s filmic portrayal of an artist like Joseph Beuys or in the way Maria Lassnig perceived herself in her paintings. While Miriam Cahn often references violent current events in her faces, Anna Artaker’s work explores the archaic impression of the death mask. This multimedia exhibition focuses not on the individual face but rather on how it is “processed,” and on the head as a (vital) body part. Curator: Axel Köhne

Shilpa Gupta will be participating in the Venice Biennial

This year Shilpa Gupta will be participating in the Venice Biennial

Simon Fujiwara has been shortlisted for the 2019 Preis der Nationalgalerie

Dvir Gallery is pleased to announce that Simon Fujiwara has been shortlisted for the 2019 Preis der Nationalgalerie. Established in 2000 by the Freunde der Nationalgalerie, the Preis is awarded biennially and promotes young, important positions in contemporary art that reflect the internationality and vitality of the art scene in Germany. A joint exhibition of the four nominated artists’ work will be shown from August 16, 2019 to January 12, 2020 at Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin. Simon Fujiwara’s work takes multiple forms including theme park style rides, wax figures, robotic cameras, ‘make-up’ paintings and short films that address the complexity and contradictions of identity in a post-internet, hyper-capitalist world. Fujiwara often investigates themes of popular interest such as tourist attractions, famous icons, historic narratives and mass media imagery and has collaborated with the advertising and entertainment industries to produce his work in a process he describes as ‘hyper-engagement’ with dominant forms of cultural production. His work can be seen as a complex response to the human effects of image fetish, technology and social media on his generation. Photography by Reto Schmid for Numéro France, October 2018