Teresa Margolles: El asesinato cambia el mundo / Assassination changes the world

Reviews of Teresa Margolles at James Cohan.

Kate Green for Frieze
Colby Chamberlain for Artforum
Christian Viveros-Fauné for Artland
Susan Breyer for The Brooklyn Rail
Johanna Fateman for 4Columns
Siddhartha Mitter for The New York Times

At James Cohan, New York, sculptures made from materials collected at crime scenes indict a system of violence and exploitation 

For Teresa Margolles’s first major exhibition in New York since 2002, when she filled a gallery at MoMA PS1 with the vaporized water ordinarily used to wash corpses (Vaporización (Vaporization), 2001), the Mexican artist presents potent sculptural and photographic objects that render visible the inscription of institutionalized violence on both bodies and land along the US-Mexico border. In a gallery located just a mile from Wall Street – the symbolic heart of world financial markets – on an island that colonists swindled from the Lenape, ‘El asesinato cambia el mundo / Assassination changes the world’ links violent exploitation along the borderlands to current and historical states of exception as well as the conditions of late capitalism.

At the entrance, the first of two pieces titled Receipt (all works 2020) – a stack of take-away posters – usefully locates Margolles’s critique. The titular paper slip, enlarged here to fill the poster, evidences the artist’s US$6 purchase of ammunition at the Walmart store in El Paso where, in August 2019, a shooter massacred 22 people, mostly Mexican-Americans. The poster format, which echoes Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s ‘stacked’ works of the 1990s, is a miss: what does it mean to circulate, free of commentary, the image of a legal arms deal? More effective, however, are two related framed works: the original receipt, small and fragile, alongside an exquisite photo of two-dozen red and silver bullets, piled like the bodies they are sold to slaughter (Super Speed / El Paso, Texas). more at Frieze.com

Ramiro Gomez: "RAMIRO GOMEZ'S "ALL ABOUT FAMILY" (2014) ACQUIRED BY THE SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM"

RAMIRO GOMEZ'S "ALL ABOUT FAMILY" (2014) 

ACQUIRED BY THE SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM

Charlie James Gallery:

The gallery is thrilled to announce the acquisition of Ramiro Gomez's "All About Family" by the Smithsonian American Art Museum - Museum purchase through the Lichtenberg Family Foundation. Originally executed in 2014, "All About Family" comes from a series of seventeen large-scale magazine pieces that Ramiro made in 2014-2015. For this body of work Ramiro would collect the magazine pages he wished to interrupt and work with MILK Studios, Hollywood to scan, enlarge, and print the magazine ads archivally and at scale. When the prints were completed Ramiro painted his domestic figures into the magazine scenes. No magazine images were ever used more than once in the series, all are unique pieces. 

The gallery wishes to thank Jim and Julie Taylor for their generous and longstanding support of Ramiro and his work, and for their willingness to make this piece available to the Smithsonian - without their enthusiastic cooperation this wouldn't have happened. We also wish to thank E. Carmen Ramos from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, who has followed Ramiro's career for many years and was instrumental in making this acquisition happen.  

Congratulations Ramiro!

Sable Elyse Smith Responds to the Rigged Logic of the US Criminal Justice System

Sable Elyse Smith - A recent exhibition at Carlos/Ishikawa, London, conjured an experience of being controlled within a carceral capitalist state.

It is 2020, 2.3 million Americans live inside prisons and at the centre of Sable Elyse Smith’s solo exhibition, ‘Or the Song Spilling Out’, stand two metal sculptures: Riot I and Pivot II (all works 2019). Both comprise six long rods, affixed via a plate to each of the faces of a central cube, from which they radiate in perfect symmetry. Each rod terminates in a circular disk, riveted in four places. The forms have an institutional quality and, in fact, the sculptures reference standard-issue prison furniture.

More at Frieze.com

“8033 Days” (2018)

digital c-print, suede, artist frame

48 x 40 in

Teresa Margolles

Teresa Margolles: Teresa Margolles: El asesinato cambia el mundo / Assassination changes the world, James Cohan, New York, January 10 - February 29, 2020

James Cohan is pleased to present El asesinato cambia el mundo / Assassination changes the world, an exhibition of new work by Teresa Margolles, on view from January 10 to February 29 at 48 Walker Street. This is the artist’s debut solo exhibition at James Cohan. The gallery will host an opening reception with the artist on Friday, January 10 from 6-8 PM.

Teresa Margolles investigates the social and aesthetic dimensions of conflict by infusing artwork with material traces of violence and loss. For this exhibition, she has created a new body of sculpture, photography, and installation that contends with the underlying causes of death and ongoing trauma on both sides of the Mexico-U.S. border. Assembled in collaboration with communities affected by violence, the objects on view examine shared experience to underscore mutual accountability within a context of commemoration and collective mourning.

(more at James Cohan)

Korakrit Arunanondchai: The Young Artist Seducing the Art World with Haunting Films

Article: Korakrit Arunanondchai: The Young Artist Seducing the Art World with Haunting Films

Like a ghost straddling the realms of the living and dead, Korakrit Arunanondchai mediates his Thai and American identities. His work explores problems that have touched both his native country, and more intimately, his Thai family. The 32-year-old artist is having a big year, across four continents. His newest film, a collaboration with artist Alex Gvojic, titled No history in a room filled with people with funny names 5(2018), is on view at the Venice Biennale through November.

The three-channel film features news footage of last year’s Tham Luang rescue in which divers saved a Thai soccer team from a cave where they’d been trapped for weeks—spliced together with shots of the artist playing a laser harp amidst an eerie ensemble in a forest, a dance by the performance artist boychild, a veterinarian primed to operate on a rabbit, and the artist’s grandmother in a hospital bed. Green lights flash throughout different segments, loosely binding the disparate elements.

“The new piece is about invisible systems,” Arunanondchai said. “Things that feel like ghosts, and occupy certain spaces of superstition. I wanted to acknowledge that as real, even if it’s a story. Storytelling is real. It’s part of reality-making.” (more at Artsy)

For Araya, cc: Jeff Koons (2014)

Alex Becerra Opening: Waldeinsamkeit

Waldeinsamkeit

Opening

June 21, 2019

19 - 21 h

Exhibition

June 22 to August 3, 2019

Alex Becerra’s picture planes are often heavy with shiny, massy forms of oil paint occasionally revealing gessoed canvas and often depicting classical subject matter such as still lifes or nudes. The practice of draftsmanship is integral to his process and in this body of work, the highlighting of graphic elements such as drawing and sketching in oil paintings is reflective of Becerra’s commitment to the essence of this classical medium. His work happily complicates the history of European modernism while referencing Chicano aesthetics of his native Los Angeles at the same time.

Alex Becerra (*1989) lives and works in Los Angeles. His work has been shown at Artist Curated Projects (Los Angeles), the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Shane Campbell (Chicago). His work has been covered in the Los Angeles Times, Frieze, Zoo Magazine, and Modern Painters. Becerra is a member of the music band Los Tres Pericos.

***

Alex Becerras Gemälde weisen oft glänzende, reliefartige Flächen aus Ölfarbe auf, die gelegentlich das rohe Leinen enthüllen und oft klassische Motive wie Stillleben oder Akte darstellen. Die Zeichnung ist stets integraler Bestandteil seines Prozesses und spiegelt durch die Hervorhebung grafischer Elemente wie Zeichnen und Skizzieren in den Ölgemälden die Bedeutung dieses klassischen Mediums wider. Seine Arbeit verkompliziert humorvoll die Geschichte der europäischen Moderne und verweist gleichzeitig auf die Chicano-Ästhetik seiner Heimatstadt Los Angeles.

Alex Becerra (*1989) lebt und arbeitet in Los Angeles. Seine Arbeiten wurden unter anderem in Artist Curated Projects (Los Angeles), im Hammer Museum (Los Angeles) und Shane Campbell (Chicago) gezeigt. Sie wurden in der Los Angeles Times, Frieze, Zoo Magazine und in Modern Painters vorgestellt. Becerra ist Mitglied der Band Los Tres Pericos.

Torey Thornton

Article: Consumer Reports: Torey Thornton

(artnews.com)

Torey Thornton is a Brooklyn-based artist whose mixed media painting-centric practice has recently spread to include installation and sculpture. The artist was included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial and has staged solo exhibitions at the Albright–Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York; Stuart Shave/Modern Art in London; Shane Campbell in Chicago; Moran Moran in Los Angeles; and Karma in New York. His most recent exhibition was “Sustenance Traversing Foundational Urgencies (STFU [some])(Re-Faux Outing),” earlier this year at Essex Street in New York.

Thornton’s mega-Consumer Reports week covers a full seven days and takes place during a studio move. U-Haul vans are rented, the Jennifer Lopez movie The Cell is watched, and rare Beanie Babies are researched. Speaking of research, there is an investigation into the confusing art of “Tinder Blanks” and plenty of Shazam-ing, often to no avail. All that and plenty more below. —John Chiaverina (continued)

Jordan Nassar: American-Palestinian Artist Jordan Nassar Examines The Crossovers of Culture, Identity and Tradition

Article: American-Palestinian Artist Jordan Nassar Examines The Crossovers of Culture, Identity and Tradition

(harpersbazaararabia.com)

Following his first exhibition in the Middle East at The Third Line, New York-born and based Palestinian artist Jordan Nassar talks to Katrina Kufer about orienting his practice around tatreez, giving back, and amending political views from an experiential standpoint

The crossovers of culture, identity and tradition resonate within artist Jordan Nassar. A second-generation American whose Palestinian family immigrated to New York in the early 1920s and quickly assimilated into their new home, Nassar admits internalising a pronounced struggle about political and cultural perspectives. “I felt conflicted because I grew up in a Jewish neighbourhood with specific understandings, but at home, my father, a psychiatrist, had been doing human rights work dealing with PTSD in the West Bank since the 1990s,” he says. “I was confused because I had two sets of information presented to me and it was hard to navigate.”

(more)

Sable Elyse Smith: An Artist’s Bond with Her Imprisoned Father

Article: An Artist’s Bond with Her Imprisoned Father

Sable Elyse Smith’s expressive powers are both subtle and direct. One is to imbue a shadowy side into an otherwise crisp, nonchalant aesthetic that combines photography, text, neon, and video installation. Another, found in her filmic montages, creates connective tissue between pop/internet culture and autobiographical experience. Here, she nods stylistically to a black cinematic genealogy that includes Arthur Jafa, the LA Rebellion generation, and media-artist peers interested in an emotional and empathic confrontation with the black experience as images of violence on black bodies proliferate. Among her most compelling strengths as an artist, as attested by Ordinary Violence, her solo exhibition at the Queens Museum, is the way she wrestles with the father-daughter bond.

And wrestle she must; the work in this show is marked by her father’s 19-year incarceration — the majority of her life — which has left an indelible absence. Though he goes unnamed, we are told in the introductory wall text of their relationship and the length of his time served to date. She writes in the show’s epigraph: “And violence can be quotidian, like the landscape of prison shaping itself around my body. The images are made so that I can see me. I am haunted by Trauma. We are woven into this kaleidoscopic memoir by our desires to consume pain, to blur fact and fiction, to escape.”

The possibility of escape certainly does not come for him, or entirely for her, though many visitors enjoy the privilege. The “we” who are “woven into this kaleidoscopic memoir” suggest the tenacity of father and daughter to endure separation and, more broadly, speak to the many black communities and communities of color, immigrants, and the poor, disproportionately riven by the prison system. Continued at: hyperallergic.com

From Cluj to the world: Plan B gallery’s Mihai Pop on Adrian Ghenie, Berlin, and the rise of Romanian art

Article: From Cluj to the world: Plan B gallery’s Mihai Pop on Adrian Ghenie, Berlin, and the rise of Romanian art

(Art Basel)

Plan B is at a turning point. Romania’s most prominent contemporary art gallery left its first space in Cluj’s old Paintbrush Factory and is now restoring a former mansion in the center of town. In many ways, the move is indicative of Plan B’s extraordinary journey. The gallery started in 2005 as a project space founded by a group of artists, including Mihai Pop and Adrian Ghenie. Ghenie soon became one of the most sought-after painters of his generation, and Plan B’s unique roster of conceptualists and neo-figurative painters quickly secured its place on the international circuit. The opening of a second space in Berlin was also decisive. ‘It was very important to be permanently located in a functional art scene,’ recalls Pop in this new installment of Meet the Gallerists.

The new Cluj space won’t open to the public for another couple of years, but its scale alone shows that Plan B has lost nothing of its ambition. The cavernous brick building will allow not only for the presentation of major exhibitions by gallery artists but also function as a research platform and archive for Romania’s recent cultural past. ‘It’s the opposite of a white cube,’ explains Pop. ‘You have to go deep into the belly of history and into the belly of the house. So it’s the perfect space for the turn we want to give to Plan B in Cluj.’

Plan B will exhibit in the Galleries sector at Art Basel Hong Kong 2019.