Ronchini Gallery is pleased to present Hashtag Abstract, a group exhibition that brings together new works by international artists Oliver Clegg, Richard Höglund, Christopher Kuhn and Kasper Sonne. For his inaugural exhibition as a curator, London based collector Kamiar Maleki presents work exploring trends and current developments in abstract painting.
 
Hashtag Abstract explores the phenomenon of news traveling fast in the digital era and the impact of social media as well as the power of the individual as a critic. Addressing how trends emerge organically, Hashtag Abstract invites the viewer to interact with the works through social media in a critical and engaging way, moving beyond the barrier of mere observation and advocating the power of the image as a tool of engagement.
 
Los Angeles based painter Christopher Kuhn’s works combine gestural abstraction with geometrical designs.  Kuhn’s recent paintings depict a multitude of techniques within a canvas referencing the changing and fast-paced art world. For his new work at the show Kuhn studies the techniques and devices that Old Masters employed, such as the 17th century Dutch painter Gerrit Dou, in creating the illusion of depth while accentuating the flatness of the picture plane. Brooklyn based, Danish artist Kasper Sonne’s works are also examples of divergent trends. His work of revolves around conceptual strategies, invoked with a certain sense of poetics, melancholia and doubt. Sonne explores how individual and cultural references influence the way we read the world around us, and how meaning is determined by the viewer's own active construction. British born, New York based Oliver Clegg uses figuration for his basis of abstraction.  Deconstructed figures take on new meaning as they become abstracted.  Paris based Richard Höglund’s works use language and mark making as a starting point for his works, turning linear forms into melodic abstract compositions. 
 
Hashtag Abstract demonstrates the current diversity and range of techniques within the genre of contemporary painting. The artworks become the triggering element for a debate around the very definition of a trend and whether anything is really trending.

Mazzoleni London is pleased to present an exhibition of works by Italian conceptual artist Alighiero Boetti from 5 June – 31 July 2015. Curated by Rinaldo Rossi and Corinna Turati, the exhibition re-creates Il Muro, a specific wall from Boetti's Piazza di Sant’Apollonia flat in Rome that the artist filled with a hang of objects he found inspiring.
 
Displaying art and artefacts selected by Rinaldo Rossi - a friend, collaborator and long-time assistant of Boetti – the exhibition pays tribute to the artist and provides an intimate glimpse into his life through cards, unseen photographs, drawings, handwritten letters and found objects. Contextualising the artist’s work within the realms of his private life and giving insight into his thoughts, inspirations and curiosities, Il Muro adds to the appreciation of Boetti’s oeuvre. The exhibition presents a rare opportunity to view works from several important stages in the artist’s life, including many which have never before been publically exhibited.
 
Alighiero Boetti, was born in Turin in 1914 and died in Rome in 1994. Boetti was a key member of the Arte Povera movement and is one of the most influential Italian artists of the twentieth century. Working in his hometown of Turin in the early 1960s, alongside young artists such as Luciano Fabro, Mario Merz, Giulio Paolini, and Michelangelo Pistoletto, Boetti used simple materials associated with the city’s growing industrial economy in radical new ways.  He made work using postage stamps, biro pens and magazine covers and later became globally recognised for his colourful embroideries of world maps and iconic photographic self-portraits. The first Arte Povera artist to be acknowledged with a solo exhibition at Tate Modern (2012), Boetti continues to have a significant impact on younger artists today.

How would you draw a picture of the Internet; through the machines and ‘their’ language that broadcast and store ‘our’ messages, or through the affect and power relations that those messages and their movement produce?

Presented as part of the year-long Art In The Age Of… exhibition series, Art In The Age Of… Planetary Computation investigates how quantification, telecommunications, and our ever-expanding information apparati not only inform contemporary artistic production, but also how contemporary art can hold a mirror up to these processes and formations. The participating artists explore the fissure between literal infrastructure—code, machines, wires, and other like-vocabularies—and the subjective socio-political interactions fostered by using these devices. Guided not only by what can be seen on the computer screen, and the various other black mirrors we stare into day in and day out, this exhibition will also look at what happens behind these screens. Moving from objects to subjects, we ask, how do these positions impact daily life, or said in another way: what does it mean to be 'screened'?

Artists: Aram Bartholl, Rossella Biscotti, Nina Canell, John Gerrard, Femke Herregraven, Antonia Hirsch, Vanessa Hodgkinson, Trevor Paglen, Lucy Raven, Julia Weist, and others.

Art In The Age Of… Planetary Computation is the second iteration of the Art In The Age Of…, a three-part presentation series that investigates future vectors of art production in the 21st century.  Art In The Age Of… will run throughout 2015.

Witte de With

Both are inspired by Chinese culture and traditional techniques to better mingling Western elements and create mixed works, reciprocal passages from one world to another.

The large three-dimensional floral fields Zhuang Hong Yi combine rice paper, Chinese ink and acrylic.Dynamic mixtures of textures and colors, tactile and delicate universe, they carry in their traditional Chinese substrates references to Western Impressionism but also contemporary conceptualism. The works of Zhuang Hong Yi oscillating between pure and controlled planning emotion. They are both meditation and color on analyzing the nature and form.

Lu Luo, she finds the source of his creations in traditional Chinese opera costumes. Cut out and pasted on the canvas, antique kimono becomes an icon with a multiplicity of viewpoints. The artist skillfully uses a wide variety of European processes and sometimes incorporates costumes in scenery painted in homage to some great masters of Western painting, as Matisse.

Exhibition Zhuang Lu Hong and Luo 
From 1 to May 31, 2015 at Absolute Art Gallery 
Open from 11 to 18.30, also on Sundays and public holidays 
Closed on Wednesdays

Absolute Art Gallery

The Whitechapel Gallery presents the first UK retrospective of American artist Christopher Williams, one of the most influential artists working with photography and the production and display of images.
 
Christopher Williams’ recent photographs reveal the unexpected beauty and cultural resonance of commercial, industrial and instructional photography, and also adopts their production methods. Often working in collaboration with set designers, models and technicians, the resulting technically precise photographs recall imagery from 1960s advertising, the Cold War era, as well as the histories of art, photography and cinema. However, closer inspection reveals that flaws and aberrations which would usually be removed in production or postproduction, such as a model's dirty feet or a bruise on a ripe apple, remain in the final images. Williams also sees the photographs themselves as part of a larger system of display which includes exhibition design, walls, books, posters, videos, vitrines, and signage, and uses these elements playfully within the exhibition.
 
The Production Line of Happiness brings together over 50 photographs from Williams’ 35-year career, and is on show from 29 April 2015. Five new works never seen before in the UK go on display including a pristine image of a broken Citroen car headlight, an image influenced by British and European Pop art. The photographs are displayed in an architectural installation specially conceived by the artist and inspired by histories of display. Temporary walls come from art institutions in the Rheinland region of Germany, where Williams currently lives and works and are both a reference to and a partial reprisal of a 2009 exhibition at the Bonner Kunstverein made in collaboration with Austrian artist Mathias Poledna.

whitechapelgallery.org

Part I - Performances: 24 – 30 April, 2015, 7pm each night
Part II - Exhibition: 7 May – 20 June 2015 

Autograph ABP presents Whip It Good: Spinning From History’s Filthy Mind, the first UK solo exhibition by Danish-Trinidadian artist Jeannette Ehlers. 

Presented in two parts, seven evening performances in the gallery followed by a seven-week exhibition, Whip it Good: Spinning From History’s Filthy Mind retraces the footsteps of colonialism and maps the contemporary reverberations of the triangular slave trade via a series of performances that will result in a body of new ‘action’ paintings. 

Jeannette Ehler’s practice takes the form of simple actions, which erase, enhance or animate historical spaces, raising complex questions about memory, race and colonialism. In Whip It Good, Ehlers fiercely confronts national and personal histories in an effort to critically reimagine and challenge racist systems of power and domination. 

During each performance, the artist radically transforms the whip - a potent sign and signifier of violence against the enslaved body - into a contemporary painting tool, evoking within both the spectators and the participants the physical and visceral brutality of the transatlantic slave trade. Deep black charcoal is rubbed into the whip, directed at a large-scale white canvas, and – following the artist’s initial ritual - offered to members of the audience to complete the painting. 

However, the themes that emerge from Whip It Good trace beyond those of slavery: Ehlers' actions powerfully disrupt historical relationships between agency and control in the contemporary. The ensuing ‘whipped’ canvases become transformative bearers of the historical legacy of imperial violence, and through a controversial artistic act re-awaken critical debates surrounding gender, race and power within artistic production. What the process generates for the artist, is an intensely focused space in which to make new work as part of a cathartic collaborative process. Ehlers seven newly produced paintings will then be displayed in the second part of the exhibition, Spinning from History’s Filthy Mind, from May 7 through to June 20, alongside a selection of earlier moving image works made by the artist. 

Drawing on film, photography and video, Ehler’s moving image works weave facts and images into potent triggers for forgotten memories or lived experiences. Waves (2009), a manipulated photograph and looped video projection, presents a hypnotic mediation on the trade in humans across the Atlantic. In The March (2012), Ehlers uses the portal of the past to reflect on herself the present. Inspired by one of the landmark events of the American Civil Rights Movement, namely the Right to Vote March of 1965, when 600 African Americans marched from Selma to Montgomery, Ehlers combines 3D animation scans of her brain with a haunting soundtrack of chanting voices. In so doing, she poetically references her own rise to political consciousness, with a powerful historical moment of defiant collective action. Off The Pig (2012) represents an ode to liberation struggles and the civil rights movement, and features the voices of Angela Davis, Huey Newton and the Black Panthers – here, the juxtaposition of militant voices and frantic chanting produces a rousing, hallucinogenic mini-documentary. Black Bullets (2012) is greatly influenced by the Haitian revolution led by Toussaint Louverture and shot at the Citadel in Haiti. In The Invisible Empire (2009), Ehlers provocatively places the figure of an elderly migrant (the artist’s father) as the protagonist of a sculptural video piece that highlight pertinent issues such as the plight of those caught up in human trafficking and modern day slavery. Using an archaeological approach to history, Ehler’s dreamlike eulogies to freedom and resistance force us to think about global liberation and the collective well-being of marginalised people in the world today. 

Whip It Good: Spinning From History’s Filthy Mind is guest-curated by Karen Alexander. 

‘Performing Whip It Good over seven days will be both physically and mentally challenging. For me, this act represents a personal attempt to identify with a brutal past while trying to make sense of the present.’ - Jeannette Ehlers, 2015 

‘Jeannette Ehlers fearlessly unmasks the pain and sorrow of black lives, while also celebrating occasional triumphs, as she reinterprets colonial cultural histories and reimagines them in the realm of the visual.’ – Karen Alexander, 2015 

Whip It Good was originally commissioned in 2013 by The Art Labour Archives in Berlin.

The exhibition's title 'Spinning From History’s Filthy Mind' is borrowed from the poem 'Black Bullets' by Krista Franklin.

Rivington Place London | Free Entrance (Please register here)

David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of recent paintings and pastels by Lisa Yuskavage, on view at 533 West 19th Street in New York.

Yuskavage’s works merge popular culture and a deep engagement with the history of art. Widely associated with a re-emergence of the figurative in contemporary painting, she has always maintained the primacy of color, with her narratives intricately based in her use of paint. In this new selection of works, atonal and prismatic spectrums appear as personifications of themselves, and her characters become like embodiments of various tones.

The exhibition takes its conceptual and chronological point of departure in Hippies, a painting from 2013 of five intersecting nudes. Behind a pale woman, four male figures fan out from her on either side, almost like a Hindu deity, each a different hue. The rainbow-like effect is reminiscent of the cangiantismo technique advanced in the Renaissance, in which tonal variations were used to indicate the presence of the supernatural in otherwise realistic subject matter. The effect is achieved against a muted, neutral background—here a dark landscape—where grisaille, an almost monochrome color scheme, is applied.

Richard Woods has built an international reputation for his signature architectural transformations, painting and sculpture that fold the history of the decorative arts, functional design and graphic language into intoxicatingly witty plays with image and surface. His architectural interventions are chiefly concerned with the re-surfacing of existing structures, proposing an absurd twist on the cult of home improvement and DIY aesthetics. 

For Chapter, Woods has created Inclosure Acts a new exhibition that is inspired by both the history of the building – sited as it is on a former cattle market – and by the Acts (1604-1914) that radically transformed open fields and common land in the countryside. Wall-based works reference the suburban in a series of monoprints. Based on hard-edged renditions of Mock Tudor decoration, the paintings are suburbia meets Neo Geo – the past made future.

In the café, Woods’ works Bad Bricks are beautifully simple sculptures made from wood and resembling cartoon bricks. Their vibrant colours, bright white mortar and thick black edges offer a joyous celebration of these most mundane of building materials.

Ian Stevenson takes over KK Outlet’s gallery exhibition space during April 2015 with Click Here to Unsubscribe. Ian’s a London based illustrator, quick witted, with an irreverent stance. He paints on rubbish, takes the piss and has exhibited at Tate Modern. Expect brand new, never seen before, illustrative works from this pencil wielding linear master.

Turning trash into treasure, Ian’s work is both engaging and enlightening. Influenced by his immediate surroundings, everyday life and the TV from which he reflects the reality of living in the 21st Century. Ian re-directs his twisted and joshing take on the world to create distorted characters, murals, alternative slogans, animations, sculptures, customised photographs plus anything from coffee cups to record sleeves.

A recent collaboration with Russell Brand, to promote his book Revolution, saw Ian’s artwork on the Village Underground’s wall in Shoreditch. A larger than life sized mural, jam-packed with blissful characters and hilarious, satirical slogans.

The exhibition's grand opening is going to be a blast!
The beer is free. Everybody is invited. See you there.

LISSON GALLERY