Viewing articles from 2017/10

Edel Assanti, 74a Newman Street, London W1T 3DB

Marcin Dudek: Steps and Marches

Marcin Dudek: Steps and Marches, Edel Assanti

The personal nature of this work speaks to Dudek’s practice more widely. Over a number of years, he has been exploring group behaviour and crowd control through the context of the stadium, posing questions about responsibility and autonomy while working through his own past. Review by Kaitlyn Kane

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Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Museumpak 18, 3015 CX, Rotterdam, Netherlands

Academy of Tal R

Academy of Tal R, Installation view

Academy of Tal R offers the first in-depth exploration into the artistic journey of one of the most visually exciting painters of our time. Featuring roughly 170 works, consisting of new pieces made especially for this exhibition and work spanning the past twenty years, this mid-career retrospective is the largest survey of his oeuvre to date. Academy of Tal R highlights how, from the outset, the artist has been a storyteller with a special eye for the overlooked, hidden and repressed spaces of modern life.

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Catharine Clark Gallery, 248 Utah Street, San Francisco, CA, 94103

Chris Doyle: Hollow and Swell

Hollow and Swell, Installation view

Hollow and Swell, an exhibition of new animations and watercolors by Chris Doyle. The works mark the conclusion of Doyle's extended response to Hudson River School painter Thomas Cole's iconic five part series, The Course of Empire (1833 - 1836), which depicts a single landscape as it transitions from a pastoral setting to a dense metropolis that finally, through conflict and overpopulation, deteriorates to a site of overgrown ruins. Doyle's work considers the impacts of digital technology on a rapidly proliferating cultural landscape.

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Tyneside Cinema, 10 Pilgrim Street, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 6QG

Chto Delat?: The New Deadline #17 Summer School of Orientation in Zapatism

Chto Delat? The New Deadline #17 Summer School of Orientation in Zapatism

Following its world premiere in Newcastle and with its current run at the Tyneside Cinema ending on the 29 October, 2017, Russian artist collective Chto Delat?’s new film, The New Deadline #17 Summer School of Orientation in Zapatism, will tour to the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) in Mexico City. Compelling and highly charged, the film wrestles with the vast question of what it is to revolt, whether to look forward or backward and how to maintain a noble, non-egoist movement. Review by Chloe Hodge

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Kestle Barton, Manaccan, Helston, Cornwall. TR12 6HU

Togetherness: Notes on Outrage curated by South Kiosk

About Togetherness: Notes on Outrage installation view

In a converted Cornish farmstead situated just ten miles from the southernmost point of mainland Britain, a group show, Togetherness: Notes on Outrage, curated by London gallery, South Kiosk, that started out in London in the summer offers a considered response to – and celebration of – architecture critic Ian Nairn’s 1955 edition of Architectural Review, entitled Outrage. Review by Trevor H. Smith

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Various locations, Coventry

Coventry Biennial of Contemporary Art

Bermuda Collective, Alcoholism '65

The walk from the station establishes the context for this first biennial: hoardings and lightboxes promote Coventry’s bid to be the UK’s City of Culture in 2021. In parallel the council has promised ten years of support for cultural growth regardless of the bid’s outcome. For artists and curators in the city, here was an opportunity, not just to take stock of what has recently been achieved, the partnerships already instigated, but to begin plotting the parts they will play in the years to come. Review by Kit Webb

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Isabella Bortolozzi Galerie, Schöneberger Ufer 61 10785 Berlin, Germany

James Richards: Mouth Room / Crumb Mahogany

James Richards, Mouth Room, 2017, courtesy the artist and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin

There are no images or videos to look at – only the nakedness of the sounds flooding the floor. Vibrations seemingly emerge from nowhere, as suspended spirits floating then dissipating in the air like icy breath. Review by Giulia Ponzano

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University of Brighton Gallery, 154-155 Edward Street, Brighton BN2 0JG

Natasha Caruana: Timely Tale

Natasha Caruana, from the series, Timely Tale, 2017

Based on the theme of excess, ‘Timely Tale’ invites the audience into the private world of the artist’s mother, Penny. Caruana examines the difficulties of her mother’s life, as she deals with decisions regarding her health, her love of expensive designer clothes and the search for ‘Mr Right’. Review by Fiorella Lanni

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Institute for Contemporary Art Boston, 25 Harbor Shore Drive Boston, MA 02210

Dana Schutz

Big Wave

Dana Schutz is among the foremost painters of her generation and is part of a group of artists leading a revival of painting today. Her distinct combination of figuration and abstraction, expressive colour palette, and her use of imagined and hypothetical scenarios are unique among her contemporaries. The artist’s work captures the frenzy, tension, vulnerability, and struggle of life today, as her subjects actively manage, even fight, both the limitations of the canvas and their depicted environments.

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Bonington Gallery, Nottingham Trent University, Bonington building, Dryden Street, Nottingham, UK, NG1 4GG

It’s Our Playground: Artificial Sensibility

Installation view

A solo exhibition of new work by Paris-based artist duo It’s Our Playground (IOP), comprised of Camille Le Houezec and Jocelyn Villemont. Artificial Sensibility continues the duo’s ongoing reflection on artificial intelligence – when technology mimics human cognitive behaviour. Artificial Sensibility reveals a hybrid learning process of automated principles of recognition and basic human methods of education.

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The Edge, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY

Parallel (of Life and) Architecture

The edge parallel (of life and architecture) installation view 1

It would be easy to label Parallel (of Life and) Architecture, currently on show at The Edge gallery, Bath, as part of the growing trend for Brutalist revivalism and fanaticism. But far from a familiar fetishisation of the movement, this is exhibition is ambitious, setting out to engage with the ideas of Alison and Peter Smithson, the husband and wife architectural duo who were central to the development of British Brutalism. Review by Stan Portus

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Alexander Gray Associates, 510 West 26 Street, New York NY 10001

Polly Apfelbaum: The Potential of Women

  Polly Apfelbaum: The Potential of Women, installation view, Alexander Gray Associates (2017)

In Polly Apfelbaum’s first show at Alexander Gray Associates, The Potential of Women, the artist borrows both the title and central design symbiology from the decades-old symposium’s accompanying publication. Her appropriation of this essentialist feminine image, denoted as such by the suggestion of a bob haircut, signals a further call to equity while contemplating the scope of modern identity politics itself. Review by Torey Akers

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