Rowena Hughes

GALERIE RENNER PRINZ
Margaretenstraße 9
January 25–March 10

Rowena Hughes, Possible Lines of Flight, 2011, screenprint on glass, two found book pages, 27 1/2 x 34”.

Rowena Hughes’s work addresses the infinite possibilities of chance within sets of predefined parameters. Her current solo show, “From the Slopes of the Curves,” incorporates pages with photographs from 1950s-era textbooks on architecture and photography, which she employs for their translative potential from object, to image, and to reproduction into academic volumes. With an eye toward the material reality of the books themselves––the paper is perceivably worn and used––the London-based artist layers the pages with drawings and screen prints; these abstract, geometric forms appear in dialogue with the pre-existing elements in the found compositions. Staircase shows a Baroque architectural interior in which an overlaid Mobius strip both distorts and corresponds with the internal, perspectival logic of the book’s image, while superimposed lintels in Pillars Swaying (both works 2011) hint at a natural trabeation that connects a group of cypress trees.

Evoking the writings of Georges Perec and the Oulipo group, who disagreed with the Surrealists’ automatism, Hughes is concerned with indeterminate, creative permutations that are possible within a particular mathematical range. For example, in Flight & Infiniteness, 2009, continuous silhouettes of ascending fowl overlap with the cadenced typography of a dictionary page of words that begin with I. The numbered pages and worn edges conjure the physical and visual repetition of reading. Behind these metrical compositions lies the ever-present potentiality of the precarious: In Possible Lines of Flight, 2011, an unsecured pane of glass, balancing on nails jutting out from the wall, pins down a page showing a photograph of a Russian dancer suspended in air. Within the limitations that Hughes chooses to set her scenarios, entropy, creation, and transcendence are all viable outcomes.

— Julian Elias Bronner

“AIR Sri Lanka”

KRINZINGER PROJEKTE
Schottenfeldgasse 45
March 30–May 20

View of “AIR Sri Lanka,” 2012.

This exhibition features works from an international group of artists, all made during individual residencies in Ahungalla, Sri Lanka, between January 2008 and February 2012. The curatorial gambit of art eco-tourism and on-site developmental aid is made clear via a slide show near the gallery’s entrance, which functions both as the retreat’s promotional material and as documentation of the works in situ (mostly scattered among minimalist lodgings surrounded by palm trees).

The French anthropologist Marcel Griaule once scolded his fellow Parisians for insisting that real “primitive” artifacts only encompassed objects completely unspoiled by Western mundane leftovers, and for dismissing syncretic items that incorporated things like scraps of railway and empty Chianti bottles. Inversions of this can be found in Hans Schabus’s reed of cardboard toilet-paper rolls (Flora, 2012) and the Sri Lankan brooms that by slight alteration, are fashioned into cheerful fetishes in Marcus Geiger’s Ohne Titel (Besen) (Untitled [brooms]), 2010. Meanwhile, colonialist subtexts are parodied in a small faux-archival sepia portrait depicting the artists and local residency staff posing with Geiger’s tourist shams.

Navin Thomas presents a strangely stoic black installation that incorporates mirrors made of Claude glass in his untitled piece from 2010. A small black mirror often used for eighteenth-century picturesque painting, the Claude glass narrowed down a landscape’s features and palette. In Thomas’s piece, the glass is engraved with the words THINGS WHICH ARE ALIKE, IN NATURE GROW TO LOOK ALIKE. This nonplussed me enough that I had to google it, only to learn that it’s a quote from Nobody—the Native American character in Jim Jarmusch’s indie hit Dead Man—confirming my hunch that it had something to do with issues of postcolonial representation.

— Daniel Horn

Urs Fischer

KUNSTHALLE WIEN
Museumsplatz 1
February 17–May 28

Urs Fischer, Untitled, 2011, paraffin wax mixture, pigment, steel, wick, dimensions variable.

Urs Fischer’s exhibition “Skinny Sunrise,” which spans fifteen years of work, won’t wow as previous exhibitions have—there is no hole in the floor, no house of bread. Fischer is known for his excavation and alteration abilities, for his talent of turning the viewing experience into a carnivalesque activity, but this exhibition is impressive for more subtle reasons: It provides a chance to see the artist’s concerns beyond monumentality. While unsettling the stability of a space in a grand way can throw the viewer for a loop, masking any potential aesthetic an artwork may have, that sort of bravado is absent here. Instead, “Skinny Sunrise” inspires new ways of encountering sculpture, prompting questions about the breakdown or magnification of materiality, and what that has to do with the space in which an artwork is perceived.

Untitled, 2011, is a life-size, colored wax candle sculpture of Fischer sitting at a table. As the work slowly melts, the figure’s head, which originally looked slyly at the floor, lumps forward onto the table—an amusing self-effacement, or Fischer’s play on “all that’s solid melts into air”? Comic effect aside, it engages the viewer’s perception of a changing space through the delightful disappearance of the object in it. Elsewhere, in a large, mechanical piece, Untitled (Branches), 2005, two silver-colored branches with melting candles on their ends are suspended by chains and swung in overlapping circles, creating a messy Venn diagram on the floor. Like the medieval-looking exit installed nearby, Untitled (Door), 2006, this work gives us a possible outlet from tortuously serious large-scale sculpture through its steady, droll movement. Fischer may have a reputation as a master of grand gestures, but as these works reveal, he also possesses a delicate, balanced touch, like a butterfly on the horn of a croissant.

— Aaron Bogart

Daan van Golden

WIELS CONTEMPORARY ART CENTRE
Avenue Van Volxemlaan 354
January 28–April 29

View of “Apperception,” 2012. Center: Buddha, 1971–73.

It is hardly surprising that “Apperception,” Daan van Golden’s retrospective, begins with a painting of a golden Buddha’s head who greets visitors with a friendly smile. Not only is the work a play on van Golden’s name, which could be roughly translated to “of gold,” but the Buddha also perfectly reflects the painter’s temperament: perpetually serene, detached, and untouched by passing fads. His major breakthrough, in this respect, came in the 1960s. Before then, van Golden had painted large, abstract compositions, in the spirit of Franz Kline. While living in Japan for a few years, however, he changed course radically. From then on, all forms of self-expression were taboo, and his paintings took their content directly from reality: a checkered handkerchief, Japanese wrapping paper, a newspaper photograph of Fats Domino––all ascetic in their precision and perfect in every detail. He would only paint when he believed that the act of observation and the painting could truly add something to the reality. He was never prolific. Van Golden preferred to travel, always in search of exceptional, eloquent images.

So this “big” van Golden exhibition is actually quite small, but highly concentrated. Since the 1970s, van Golden has focused mainly on isolating meaningful details in the work of artistic predecessors such as Alberto Giacometti, Henri Matisse, and Jackson Pollock. In Pollock’s drippings, for instance, he has discovered all sorts of astonishing figures, from a Russian sergeant major conversing with another man to a fox with an erection talking to a masked being, images that show up in two works (from 1995 and 1996) in his “Study Pollock” series. Van Golden’s intention is not to suggest that there are hidden references in Pollock’s work, but to show that viewers who can truly liberate themselves from the maelstrom of received ideas will reap a wealth of visual and conceptual rewards. And this is precisely what happens in van Golden’s own work. Rarely do visitors leave an exhibition so enlightened.

Translated from Dutch by David McKay.

— Hans den Hartog Jager

Ariella Azoulay, Aïm Deüelle Lüski, Eitan Efrat and Sirah Foighel Brutmann

STUK KUNSTENCENTRUM
Naamsestraat 96
April 17–June 3

Ariella Azoulay, Civil Alliance, Palestine, 1947–48, 2012, still from a color video, 48 minutes.

This exhibition gathers work by four Israeli artists who engage with the photographic image as a tool for critical reflection. The show’s centerpiece is Ariella Azoulay’s Civil Alliance, Palestine, 1947–48, 2012, a video making its world premiere here, which portrays people of mixed Palestinian and Jewish background dressed in mid-twentieth-century clothing. Gathering around a circular table, the group recites short stories in Arabic and Hebrew about civil contracts and agreements achieved between January 1947 and May 1948 in Mandatory Palestine. These narrated fragments testify to a joint civilian will to imagine a peaceful coexistence.

Azoulay provides a larger context for Civil Alliance via mostly black-and-white archival photographs and short texts installed on the projection room’s exterior walls. Titled Potential History, 2012, the sequence begins with a contemporary color photograph of an encrusted wooden box that was looted from the former Palestinian village of Deir Yassin. Now in Azoulay’s possession, the box becomes a tool not only to claim the “right not to be a perpetrator” (as she explicitly seeks to give it back to its rightful owner), but also to urge for forgiveness and promise.

While rendering visible traces from an erased historical moment, the images included in Potential History put reigning hegemonic discourse in perspective. So do Aïm Deüelle Lüski’s sixteen abstract photographs, which primarily explore historical phenomena, such as lost Palestinian villages or the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. Made using four cameras that Lüski constructed, which expose negatives through peepholes often as small as a pinprick, they bear the physical traces of their unconventional process. The photographs thus become modest testimonies to an extremely complex political reality and call for imagining a nonconflictual, shared future. Eitan Efrat and Sirah Foighel Brutmann’s video Printed Matter, 2011, delicately intertwines personal histories with this debate. This helps the visitor to discover a similar connectedness between the private and the public in Potential History and Civil Alliance: The table, at first only a metaphor for bringing people together, transforms into a space that organizes profound geopolitical divisions before subsequently becoming a Pandora’s box.

— Hilde Van Gelder

Michael Kvium

NILS STÆRK
Ny Carlsberg Vej 68
March 16–May 5

Michael Kvium, Tail to Tail, 2012, oil on canvas, 8' 2 1/2" x 19' 8 1/8".

“Tail to Tail” offers a comprehensive account of Michael Kvium’s work today, revealing his commitment to tenets that have dominated his artistic practice for the past several decades. While Kvium’s work has increased in clarity and color—his paintings from the 1980s and ’90s were chaotic, consistently hued in dark browns, whereas the new ones are a bit brighter—he still confronts taboos and grotesqueries of modern life, and always with a taste for the macabre.

The back room of the exhibition features forty-five small, square watercolors, all part of the 2011–12 series “Short Stories.” Beautifully arranged in a frieze, these present characters and symbols typical in Kvium’s art—naked deformed bodies, fried eggs, and puppets—and thus seem to function as a diary of his ideas and motifs. In the gallery’s main room are eight new oil paintings, one of which is a diptych titled Tail to Tail, 2012. The work portrays a grinning, red-dressed Catholic cardinal who points to the sky (his domain) and a black-dressed judge who points his finger toward the viewer, into the world (his domain). These two characters, connected by a rat tail, are grotesque, eerily illusionistic representations of degenerate authorities. This eerieness continues in a sequence of three paintings, collectively titled The naked eye on a well dressed lie, 2012, that speaks to the absurdity of human existence. They are hung like a triptych; the left-hand one portrays a skeleton in a black mantle holding a plate with dirty yellow lemons, while the middle one shows a priest gripping a child. On the right, a bald ballerina—interestingly possessing Kvium’s features—holds a pile of feces. A gifted technician, Kvium creates paintings and watercolors that make a strong first impact but whose shock quickly disappears. This seems to be an inevitable outcome of his mannered style: Despite the macabre subjects, his art is sociable and enjoyable.

— Tom Hermansen

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller

KIASMA MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART
Mannerheiminaukio 2
February 17–May 20

View of “The Murder of Crows,” 2012.

Crows are said to gather around the dead, their black shapes presaging the flight of the soul. The collective noun for a grouping of these birds is “a murder of crows,” the assonant association between the words underlining their connection with death. This is the departure point for Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s 2008 installation named for such a flock, a work that features a room of chairs populated with ninety-eight loudspeakers, through which words, sound, and music are played to create what the artists describe as “a film without images.”

Unlike a visual image, which reveals itself instantly, sound discloses itself sequentially, and in this case, the disclosure is that of Cardiff, describing three nightmarish dreams. Her voice comes through an old-fashioned loudspeaker that sits atop a central table, while other sounds emerge at different points around the room, passing from speaker to speaker, so that footsteps appear to ring out, moving and echoing through the space, at times seeming to surround one completely.

Cardiff’s narrated dreams are interspersed with noises of machinery, slamming doors, barking dogs, the sawing of wood. Music plays: a Russian army choir, opera, a Tibetan prayer, a lullaby, and as each sound section engages, different moods are inflected. The entire sound work is also haunted by the cawing of crows, which, taken together with the exhibition title, inspires the sense that death is close. It is entirely appropriate that the narration is a sequence of dreams, because as with a dream, the immersive experience of The Murder of Crows is one in which feeling is intensely felt, and yet meaning is fleeting: out of reach, but only just.

— Gemma Tipton

“Abstract Further Abstraction”

CONTEMPORARY GREEK ART INSTITUTE
9 Valaoritou
February 2–April 7

Eugenia Apostolou, Disembodiment, 2011, oil on canvas, 20 x 20”.

Though positioned within the context of Greece’s politically charged present, this exhibition of six artists, curated by Maria Marangou, leaves politics at the gallery door placing abstraction and material interaction at its thematic core. Nevertheless, an unavoidable tension seeps in from the frenetic standstill that is Athens today. Aemilia Papaphilippou’s Fixed in Flux II, 2009, a frenzied video combination of television static, grids, and moving lines contained within a screen, contrasts with the paced, material metamorphosis of Eugenia Apostolou’s Disembodiment, 2011, a series of five canvases covered in thick, laboriously layered slabs of magenta-colored oil paint peeled back like flesh. The two works suggest opposite poles of immobility and motion, between which lies the middle ground of Margarita Myrogianni’s Deterioration, 2012, a photographic diptych of moistened clay blocks with chunks that have been pulled out, apparently only moments ago. Here, the artist’s invisible hand—the unseen compositional gesture—is both embedded in the materiality of the clay and contained within the photograph as temporal freeze-frame, perpetually caught in the present moment.

The containment of creative impulse and material interaction mediates a palpable sense of immediacy in the works in the exhibition. Exemplary of this is Kostas Sahpazis’s Palm, 2012, a Minimalist object made from layers of found materials (plastic, wood, and leather) in uniform shades of gray. A considered composition that achieves aesthetic simplicity, it shows how material disparity—and its accompanying tensions—might be mediated compositionally so as to manifest surprising beauty. Indeed, it is an affirmation that though transient, the action of composing matter into form can activate the transformative potential even of things deemed broken and worthless. Such an approach might provide some hope to the current situation in Greece—transcending material need not be a practice limited to art, after all.

— Stephanie Bailey

“The Magic Circle”

LORAINI ALIMANTIRI GAZONROUGE
8 KYKLADON
March 10–June 2

View of "The Magic Circle," 2012.

Entering this exhibition is like walking into somebody’s house, a feeling that is expertly cultivated in Loraini Alimantiri and Christoforos Marinos’s curatorial ode to Greek modernism. Made by fifty Greek artists (as well as three philhellenes), 120 works spanning the entire twentieth century and beyond inhabit—along with objects, furniture, books, plants, and posters—a small, modernist house and studio that acts as a historical and conceptual frame. Designed by an associate of Le Corbusier, Aristomenis Provelenghios, this house has served as a home and work space for various trailblazers, beginning in 1957 when it was constructed as a studio for sculptor Jeanne Spiteris-Veropoulou. For those associated with the building whose works are also on view in the exhibition, like ex-tenant Diohandi, “The Magic Circle” is both a homecoming and a time warp. Some of the names of these former residents are documented in a book (on the living room bookshelf) from which this exhibition takes its title. The volume contains reviews by Alekos Drakos of most of the solo and group shows featuring Greek artists that took place in Athens from 1961 to 1964.

Through this community of objects, the historical and the contemporary meet in a celebratory gathering of sorts, evident in the upstairs salon, where ceramicist Ira Triantafyllides’s two malformed animal sculptures from 1960–70 come alive juxtaposed against Tula Plumi’s 2010 ceramic, almost feline form. Nearby, Kostas Roussakis’s 2012 wooden coffee table meets Nikos Tranos’s 1997 cardboard sofa to create a space in which the many stories surrounding this enchanting show might be shared—like when, four days before the opening, octogenarian artist Michalis Katzourakis, so taken by the curatorial concept, hand-delivered a frying pan containing a glass-shard-and-resin omelette for the kitchen, to supplement his works already installed in the office and bathroom. It’s stories like these that make this exhibition feel somehow familiar, like a home worth spending time in.

— Stephanie Bailey

Rita Ackermann

LUDWIG MUSEUM - MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART
Komor Marcell u. 1, Palace of Arts
November 19–March 18

View of “BAKOS,” 2011–12.

“BAKOS,” Rita Ackermann’s first major survey in her hometown, is also the artist’s family name. The exhibition, which focuses on paintings produced in the past three years, reads like a rhapsody of expressive and artistic growth. At the heart of the show is Fire by Days, 2011, a sequence of paintings animating the show’s central gallery, where rich, conflagrant reds overlay with dynamic indigo hues. Here, large scarlet splashes become gazing visages, which in turn transform to sinuous feminine figures. Both expressive and hazily delineated, the paintings conjure a mood that is as uplifting as it is haunting.

A highlight of the show is Ackermann’s clever use of spray paint, particularly in the paintings Candyman II and Behind da Rainbow, both 2010. In each piece, she merges layers of graffiti with textured brushstrokes. The result is a seductively contrasted surface, which leads one to wonder whether digital rendering was employed.

Her synthesis of virtuality and physical manipulation is also apparent in Warfilms, 2011, a three-part multimedia installation that documents an individual’s experience navigating videos from a computer desktop. In one projection, separate videos of Mu’ammar Gadhafi and Paul Virilio are played concurrently in a single screen, and the user’s cursor will occasionally pause and rewind a video or drag one video’s frame to overlap onto the other. Similarly, another projection contests a promotional video for Michael Jackson’s HIStory album with a YouTube clip of a flash-mob dance in Budapest’s Heroes’ Square. Each piece in the installation displays multiple films at once, and their individual narratives are interrupted by the computer user’s own action. For the viewer, these pauses and rewinds hinder any effort to produce a singular, cohesive understanding of what is being shown. The figures in these projections emerge and diminish between cursory hand strokes in analogous fashion to the shadowy, overlapping figures that materialize and disappear in Ackermann’s paintings. These duplicities of subject and character manifest as unifying threads throughout the artist’s career. “BAKOS” presents Ackermann aligned in her vision, while dispersed across varied media and selves.

— Nicolas Linnert

Rebecca Digne

JEANINE HOFLAND CONTEMPORARY ART
De Clercqstraat 62
March 10–April 21

Rebecca Digne, Mains, 2010, still from a color film in 16 mm, 1 minute 15 seconds.

Rebecca Digne’s exhibition “Mains” demonstrates her subtle mastery of detail. Four small-scale works, three short films, and a slide show all feature ultrabrief moments that lodge inescapably in your mind. Take Matelas, 2008, a black-and-white video that runs just over a minute and features an overturned mattress rolling around the screen. For just a moment, an arm emerges from it, creating a gripping image that forces one to piece together a narrative and thus delve deeper into the work. What otherwise might be banal aspects of the film become of interest: the corridor in the background, for example, as it might suggest where the mattress has come from; whether the arm is a man’s or a woman’s—or do these even matter? The minuscule becomes of utmost importance as one grapples with the footage, attesting to Digne’s capacity to build layers of meaning with the sparest of material.

Digne’s attention to detail plays out in other forms as well. Consider the way she displays Matelas: The film is shown on a screen that blocks passage to an adjacent area of the gallery. Nearby Handcuffs, 2010, is screened on an angular television that has a metal box–like quality, which, incidentally, perfectly matches the event in the film: a hand locking a pair of handcuffs. These touches summon the feel that viewer is as locked into the exhibition as the events are into the films, which play in endless loops. The video Mains, 2010—which seems almost like a feature film, as it is the only work that contains more than one camera position (there are four)—enhances this feel. We see a man with shoulder-length hair holding his hands in the air; his palms are remarkably dirty. By selecting a man who looks vaguely like Jesus (who is often depicted performing this same signal), Digne isolates the gesture and subtly emphasizes its ambiguity: Whether his aim is surrender or warning is decidedly unclear. Though the footage may be sparse, Digne shows that in the right combination even the tiniest, almost invisible actions can overflow with meaning—as long as both the artist and the spectator have an eye for it.

— Hans den Hartog Jager

Meiro Koizumi

ANNET GELINK GALLERY
Laurierstraat 187-189
March 24–May 12

Meiro Koizumi, Defect in Vision, 2011, still from a two-channel video installation, 12 minutes 9 seconds.

The people of Japan very rarely saw their emperor—that is, until the country lost the Second World War and the Americans thrust Hirohito and his family into the public eye. The earliest result of this policy was a photo series in Life magazine, “Sunday at Hirohito’s: Emperor poses for first informal pictures.” Suddenly the world was confronted with an emperor who visited “ordinary” Japanese people and went for walks in the garden with his wife. The island nation’s god had become a man.

But did that matter? The main question posed by Meiro Koizumi’s exhibition “Defect in Vision” is how much influence the eye, or visibility, has on a person’s notions of the world. A book based on the Life series is on display, as are photographs of the emperor over which Koizumi draws brains and other organs, emphasizing Hirohito’s “humanization.” A still more important element, however, is the large two-channel video installation Defect in Vision, 2011, which depicts a Japanese man and woman in traditional dress having a meal. They discuss the war (“There will be a full-scale attack on Americans in Okinawa”), the use of kamikaze pilots, and their desire to visit a hot springs resort in the mountains after the conflict is over. Only gradually does it become apparent that both are blind—and that changes everything. But what their sightlessness signifies, and what it meant to the Japanese people to be led during the war by an invisible ruler who was a god to them, are questions left unanswered by Koizumi. The fact that the blind diners often handle their chopsticks and food awkwardly is no more than a subtle hint. Meanwhile, Koizumi brings home the importance of the gaze, of every glance—and of the crucial way in which our memories and worldviews are formed by the act of looking.

Translated from Dutch by David McKay.

— Hans den Hartog Jager

Charles Avery

GRIMM GALLERY
Keizersgracht 82, 1015 CT, Frans Halsstraat, 1072 BR
April 5–May 19

Charles Avery, Untitled (Design for tree no. 2 for the Jadindagadendar), 2012, acrylic, ink, pencil, and gouache on paper, 86 5/8 x 119 1/4".

Since 2004 Charles Avery has been working on his ever-more elaborate Islanders project. On display now at the gallery’s two locations in Amsterdam are works made over the past six months. Considerable focus is given to the large drawings depicting “The Island,” his fictional world (and its inhabitants)— from the Jadindagadendar, the Central Park of Avery’s island, to the Qoro-Qoros, the miasmic doldrums of mounds and pools that separate the island from its colonizers Triangland. Here Avery’s sovereign draftsmanship is visible in the sweeping lines that mark a figure’s bodily presence, the disposition of the characters’ expressions, and, most poignantly, the stark contrast between these subjects and the intricate lines that depict the island’s environment. But these drawings are only one aspect of the Islanders Project. In this show there are scale models on display—including a full-size exemplar of a weeping tree—along with wallpaper; advertisements from around the island; a film-projection of shadows of mothlike insects, named the Dihedra, native to the lands; and, finally, a film and full-scale fossil of a sea monster that inhabits nearby waters.

Each work in this installment of the Islanders Project has been created with the utmost care. The works are interrelated, but even when viewed individually, they instill a sense of fantastic lore. The fact that Avery has continued to develop such an authentic adventure over such an extended period of time is impressive. Moreover, his talent for doing so with fantastic vision and a variety of techniques is truly remarkable. Like many good adventure raconteurs, Avery makes us wonder what moment in his eccentric tale we find ourselves in, and where it will go from there.

— Huib Haye van der Werf

Angela Bulloch

WITTE DE WITH CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ART
Witte de Withstraat 50
January 21–April 9

Angela Bulloch, Anarchy, 2004, gouache on wall, dimensions variable.

Angela Bulloch is well known for questioning the informational status of art, and undoubtedly, the works on view in her current survey exhibition reveal an examination of the place and purpose of an artwork (and therefore the artist) in our exceedingly nonlinear information age. How can artists organize, re-present, and therefore influence the changing perceptions of contemporary society? It is no small task.

In the exhibition, three seemingly independent “Drawing Machines,” from 2011 and 2012, perform a systematic choreography of marking lines on the gallery wall, but they are in fact activated by specially commissioned music and the presence of visitors. On the same floor, a small collection of her emblematic “Pixel Boxes,” installations created in 2003, 2004, and 2005, re-present television programs and films in their most reduced form: pixels. But certainly the standout works here are the wall murals that cover the entire third floor––which form part of her ongoing “Rules Series.” These present an imposing take on the regulations, definitions, and limits of societal infrastructures; incorporating materials that range from the rules that were given to Bulloch after she accepted an invitation from the British government to an evening that honored cultural producers to a selection of statements on political anarchy, each of these monumental wall paintings is a skillful collage of information.

Bulloch is adept at providing the viewer with striking amounts of information, but her works are so intricate that it is difficult to fully grasp or process this knowledge and take it out of the museum. Do intelligent artworks that flirt with engagement have an obligation to permeate society or may their breadth be circumscribed by walls of the institution without compromising their effectiveness? The fact that this question pops up over and over again in this show, in a world inspired by new forms of engagement, makes this exhibition truly worthwhile.

— Huib Haye van der Werf

“Tro-pi-cal”

AKERSHUS KUNSTSENTER
Storgt. 4, Lillestrøm
March 31–May 6

Irit Batsry, Set (detail), 2003/2012, mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation view.

It opened with a blast. During this exhibition’s vernissage, the New York–based band and art collective HARIBO performed an uproarious concert in the garden of this art center in Lillestrøm, a peaceful town ten minutes from central Oslo. The remnants from the gig––a poster and props––are now in the show, which primarily features videos and installations that are much less punk and carnivalesque.

Curated by Geir Haraldseth, “Tro-pi-cal” features work by a range of international artists and is far from a straightforward examination of Brazilian art, serving rather as an investigation into how a country can become enmeshed in its own cultural myths to the point of fictionalization. (“Alternative Orders,” a concurrent show at the art center, presents a historical survey of work made in Brazil from 1960 to the present and is curated by Guilherme Bueno.) At the heart of “Tro-pi-cal” is Irit Batsry’s new adaptation of her sprawling, site-specific video installation Set, which has not been exhibited since it was made for the Whitney Museum in 2003. Installed in a dark room, five projections show behind-the-scenes-footage from the Brazilian movie Madame Satã, directed by Karim Ainouz. The 2002 feature portrays the story of Rio de Janeiro’s legendary drag artist João Francisco dos Santos, aka Madame Satan. Throughout the room, small Plexiglas screens are placed so as to interrupt the beams of the projectors and make the moving images multiply and appear on several surfaces; they evoke the way memories become distorted in one’s mind over time. Indeed, Set delivers a powerful punch of tropical fever.

— Johanne Nordby Wernø

Melvin Moti

KUNSTHALLE LISSABON
Avenida da Liberdade 211
February 9–April 28

View of “Echo Chamber,” 2012.

In the accompanying brochure for this exhibition, Melvin Moti states that the show ventures “way out of [his] comfort zone.” This statement may seem surprising in light of the fact that his latest work dials into the same basic coordinates that have characterized Moti’s output thus far, namely his poetic investigations of obscure people and episodes from history. Here, Moti concentrates on Ludwig Gosewitz, a Fluxus artist whose best-known works are astronomical diagrams transformed into geometric abstractions. Some pieces in tempera from this body of work appear in the show alongside Atlas Eclipticalis (all works cited, 2012), Moti’s wall drawing that links a seventeenth-century diagram of the brain with a star chart.

From astronomy to astrology, and from art history to the history of science: “Only connect,” E. M. Forster’s famous motto, could also be Moti’s. The work that gives the show its title, Echo Chamber, however, in part avoids this creative formula, and it justifies Moti’s statement about the experimental nature of the show. It consists of a table that holds a dozen miniature “celestial bodies,” finely executed in blown glass. While Gosewitz also made blown glass sculptures, and was a professor of glass art in Munich, Moti’s do not try to resemble these, nor do they reproduce celestial bodies that actually exist. They are imaginary creations that “echo” the astronomical references of the exhibition. Indeed, Echo Chamber is a work that falls outside the usual confines of Moti’s output because it is object-oriented (and very seductively so), and because the creative impetus of the piece clearly prevails over any conceptual or erudite framework. It is precisely for this reason that the work has a freshness and freedom that is almost new to Moti’s output. One hopes that his successful “transgression” will soon be followed by many more.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Simone Menegoi

Bruno Cidra

GALERIA BAGINSKI
Rua Capitão Leitão, nº51 - 53
March 21–May 12

View of “Flecha,” 2012.

Bruno Cidra’s current solo show is titled “Flecha,” Portuguese engineering jargon for “deflection”—that is, the degree a steel beam can be bent under tension. Cidra’s sculptures play with the limits of this idea, experimenting with and frequently intensifying it. Untitled (arrow), 2012, for instance, is a product of extensive research Cidra conducted to find the exact point where a beam of steel and paper would deflect—which it does at five feet and six inches—and naturally curve against the wall. He applied the same process to Untitled (vertical), 2012, cutting a similar beam until it was able to stand on its own without falling or bending. As is recurrent in his practice, Cidra both contradicts and explores the inherent characteristics of his elected material—steel—almost as if it were as malleable as clay or paper. Its innate rigidity is countered by the deformations Cidra imposes, while its strength is made fragile by the folds inflicted on the beam.

Nine sculptures are on view here, each based around a simple structure: a narrow beam upon which several layers of thick white drawing paper are glued. Throughout the span of each piece, Cidra forces the steel into several torsions, causing the work to become a three-dimensional line intercutting space. The white of paper fades against the gallery walls, enhancing the texture and color of the beam, while the twists of steel make the sculptures seem perpetually in motion—at times seeming to disappear or become black lines, much like stripes of marker on a sheet of paper.

— Filipa Oliveira

Rafel G. Bianchi

CENTRO GALEGO DE ARTE CONTEMPORANEA
c/ Valle Inclán s/n
March 30–June 24

View of “La bandera en la cima” (A Flag on the Summit), 2012.

The fourteen highest mountains in the world, known collectively as the eight-thousanders (peaks over 8,000 meters above sea level) and located in the Himalayan and Karakoram mountain ranges, stand as a challenge and an aspiration that beckons to many mountain climbers. The most ambitious adventurers dream of summiting all fourteen—a feat that takes many years to accomplish, often with considerable risk to the climber’s life. This risk is the subject of Rafel G. Bianchi’s current exhibition, “La bandera en la cima” (A Flag on the Summit). Here Bianchi creates a parallel between the tremendous work it takes to reach a mountaintop and the efforts inherent to every creative process. His own endeavor is, in its own way, a romantic yet arduous quest that has also taken him many years to complete.

Bianchi never went to the Himalayas. At the heart of the show are fourteen paintings, each depicting one of the eight-thousander mountains. He painted these in his studio in Barcelona using photographs as a reference, meticulously mimicking the images in a mechanical way. Then he uniformly covered each canvas’s surface with paint from different Pantone palettes. The result, although vibrant, is somewhat hermetic, and satisfies Bianchi’s formal interests while simultaneously opposing the romanticism of the iconography.

“La bandera en la cima” comprises, however, much more than a painting installation: The exhibition features elements ranging from drawings and photographs to films, videos, and a musical score by Antonio Ortega. Bianchi displays some of his research materials in vitrines as well as documentation of the whole process, which perhaps conveys its sheer absurdity.

— Javier Hontoria

“Abstract Possible: The Stockholm Synergies”

TENSTA KONSTHALL
Taxingegränd 10, Box 4001
January 12–April 22

View of “Abstract Possible: The Stockholm Synergies,” 2012.

This exhibition examines the abstract from multiple perspectives: formal, economic, and the contemporary artist’s “withdrawal strategies”––a manipulation of already existing spaces in order to create a “space apart” from the rest of society. Curated by Tensta Konsthall’s new director Maria Lind, the show inhabits revamped space (a triangulated design of energetic yellow and black) and cajoles visitors to reassess their rapport with abstraction as it applies to a changing world influenced by money, politics, and persuasion. Formal treatments of the concept are addressed via diverse media, as in Doug Ashford’s collage work Six Moments in 1967 # 1-6, 2011; José León Cerrillo and Sara Lundén’s The Wittgenstein Suite, 2012, a collaborative performance presenting pop songs honoring Wittgenstein; and Tommy Støckel’s styrofoam sculpture In My Mind This Goes On Forever, 2012.

Debates related to the justification of this exhibition’s “economic abstraction” component have surfaced due to conversations and works such as Goldin+Senneby’s Abstract Possible: An Investment Portrait, Goldin+Senneby with Thea Westreich Art Advisory Services, 2011. This piece features a confidential report withholding an estimate of all existing works in this very show, intended for the buyer’s eyes only, sold at Bukowski’s––an auction house founded by Lundin Petroleum that is at the center of serious human rights abuse allegations according to Kunstkritikk––at a fixed price of $18,000. This experimental gesture of selling works at fixed prices may be appreciated by those who find the art world off-limits, yet it invites one to consider how democracy (or lack thereof) relates to artistic production as clandestine commodity—or a universally accessible venue aspiring to transcend material forces. When is economic abstraction merely an escape hatch from admitting to a specific trajectory of funding? Logic often usurps metarhetorics; “Abstract Possible” tests the limits between ethics and art, inviting an audience to reassess how tactics might be altered to avoid being the elephant in the room.

— Jacquelyn Davis

Sarah Crowner

GALERIE NORDENHAKE | STOCKHOLM
Hudiksvallsgatan 8
March 29–May 6

Sarah Crowner,
 Kurtyna Teatru (after Maria Jarema) (Theater Curtain [after Maria Jarema]), 2012, fabric, paint, canvas, 19' 6" x 8' 6".

Sarah Crowner’s latest exhibition features paintings, sculptures, and an outstanding stage curtain based on a 1956 theater backdrop by the Polish artist Maria Jarema. As in her previous output, Crowner sews pieces of painted and untreated linen together to produce taut, geometrical patchwork canvases or drapey backdrops, which are often based on specific historical compositions.

While it is clear that Crowner deeply admires twentieth-century avant-garde artists such as Victor Vasarely and Lygia Clark—she has often adopted their vibrant colors, forms, and shapes—her new works depart from her earlier attempts to carry on a Constructivist tradition. Here Crowner seems to be learning by doing, experimenting with her own compositions rather than predicating her canvases on past exemplars (with the exception of the Jarema curtain). Indeed, Crowner’s predominant influences are avant-gardist instances where theater, music, dance, and art coalesce, as in Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s sculptural puppets or Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus theater workshop. Each painting is therefore a composition of her own, while also doubling a proposition for a backdrop to be used in a performance setting. Indeed, Crowner’s predilection for color and form make her stretched canvases well suited as proscenium paintings, and nothing would prevent them from being engaged in such extramural settings beyond the white cube. The implication that they could be viewed in different contexts is more than welcome.

— Theodor Ringborg

Thomas Broomé

GALLERI MAGNUS KARLSSON
Fredsgatan 12
April 19–May 20

Thomas Broomé, A Stone by Any Other Name, Would Weigh as Heavy, 2011, paper, engraved crystal, 10 x 12 x 8”.

Partially inspired by a three-month residency in the summer of 2011 at Hammars, Ingmar Bergman’s isolated estate on the Swedish island Fårö, Thomas Broomé’s latest exhibition seems to walk in the iconic director’s footsteps, with works that celebrate and reveal the intimate dwelling, room by room, as it appears in the films Hour of the Wolf (1968) and Faithless (2000). Most of the paintings in “The Guest” portray these spaces with thin, sketchy lines that emphasize the half-lit interior of this elongated house by the sea. The new video, Wanderer, 2012, with eerie score by Swedish pop star and songwriter Andreas Kleerup, examines the peculiar house as lights flicker on and off and demons await to haunt. Divisions between line and space, the illuminated and the obscured, public and private realms, and present and past recur throughout the show.

Not all of the works obviously coalesce, though. In the sculpture I Know It, Even if I Can’t See It, 2011, for instance, the hand-engraved message I WANTED TOO MUCH on a pinhead is made visible through a high-powered microscope. Such sculptural anomalies are not site-specific, ekphrastic responses like the Bergman-related pieces. This swerve from the exhibition’s trajectory creates a contrast between the abstract and concrete and is an invitation to investigate the gap between them. The fifteen-ton crystal that rests on a stack of white pages in A Stone by Any Other Name, Would Weigh as Heavy, 2011, thrives best in the realm of the real.

— Jacquelyn Davis

Nevin Aladağ

ARTER - SANAT IÇIN ALAN | SPACE FOR ART
Istiklal Caddesi No: 211, Beyoglu
April 6–May 27

View of “Stage,” 2012.

The latest in Arter’s new commissioned series of solo exhibitions is Nevin Aladağ’s “Stage,” six installations, made of brightly colored artificial hair, that mimic the look of stage curtains. The works frame the walls of the space and offer multiple outlets—a crimson, fringed opera-style drape; maroon pigtails reminiscent of an amateur theater prop; and an azure blue clownish bob—to provide for a variety of potential performances and audiences. References to women’s hair coverings, cloths, or wigs are often a clichéd and complex topic in Turkey. But Aladağ sidesteps this debate by composing an eccentric and playful scene, where fake tresses (usually a substitute material for real hair) replace the fabric that both conceals and also opens upon dramatic performance.

Concurrently, Aladağ is also exhibiting her work at Rampa. Here photographs, sculptures, and a video make evident Aladağ’s interest in performance as a structuring device for her output. Her physical works are not simply traces of performance, but interventions that result from or encourage action. A new piece produced for this show, Leaning Wall, 2012, is again an installation of colorful elements. Eighty-four ceramic body imprints in seven different pastel hues are hung across one length of the gallery and recall the holds of a climbing wall. Yet visitors are not invited to climb it; instead the more leisurely and sophisticated act of “leaning” is encouraged. Comical as it is to lean one’s face or shoulder into an imprint, there is more at issue here: With this work—as with the hair in “Stage”—Aladağ cleverly recomposes an existing bodily extension, in form and function, to draw the viewer into a curious play that is too enticing to refuse to be a part of.

This exhibition is also on view at Rampa, Şair Nedim Caddesi No: 21a, until May 26.

— November Paynter