Category: Museums and Galleries

Dan Voinea’s ‘A Momentary Rise Of Reason’
At the Beers.Lambert Contemporary, London

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Romanian artist Dan Voinea uses his classical and realist style of painting to capture figures in a peculiar performance like state. The Gallery notes ‘Yet while technically realistic and anatomically correctly proportioned, the works are characterized as much by their apparent lack of realism: their fantastical tendencies, collapsing or nondescript environments and preference for magic realist narratives.’

‘A Momentary Rise Of Reason’ is on show until May 18th 2013. For more info, please visit Beers.Lambert Contemporary

Julie Mehretu’s ‘Liminal Squared’
At the White Cube, Bermondsey

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1st May – 7th July 2013

This is Mehretu’s first major solo exhibition in London and will feature new and recent paintings. Her large-scale paintings, which are built up in layers, employ a broad lexicon of drawing techniques together with a precise, muscular abstraction to investigate the intersection of politics, architecture and history and the way these forces shape the formation of our social identity.

This exhibition, which features five new works, centres around ‘Mogamma: A Painting in Four Parts’, The ‘Mogamma’ works, which were completed in 2012 shortly after the time of the Arab Spring revolutions, have evolved out of Mehretu’s investigations into how architecture and geographical space, particularly within urban centres, become sites for political and mythological projection. ‘I think architecture reflects the machinations of politics, and that’s why I am interested in it as a metaphor for those institutions. I don’t think of architectural language as just a metaphor about space, but about spaces of power, about ideas of power’, Mehretu explains.

For more info, please visit the White Cube Bermondsey

Japanese Woodblock Prints on show at Sanders, Oxford

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During the Oxford Art Weeks, which runs throughout May, Sanders of Oxford will be showing a collection of Japanese woodblock prints.

Yuki no Mukojima (Snow at Mukojima) featured above left, by Kawase Hasui (1883-1957) is known for his exquisite landscape prints. Hasui was one of the most prolific and talented shin hanga artists of the early twentieth-century. He designed over six hundred woodblock prints, mainly for the publisher Watanabe Shozaburo, although he also briefly worked for several other publishers. Many people feel that Hasui’s most original work was done at the beginning of his career. Unfortunately, the blocks for Hasui’s earliest prints were destroyed in the devastating 1923 Kanto earthquake and they were never reprinted. Consequently, Hasui’s pre-earthquake prints are among the rarest and most sought-after shin hanga.

See more from Sanders

Richard Patterson at the Timothy Taylor Gallery, London

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Richard Patterson, one of the YBAs to emerge in the late 1980’s, has only been seen occasionally in the UK since his move to the US. Visitors to the Timothy Taylor Gallery can see an overview of Patterson’s paintings over the past 15 years, Patterson’s paintings run the gamut of symbolic and cultural referents, from European art history to Japanese trucks, from Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders to Greek myth. Each painting for Patterson is a chance to engage with techniques and effect, but also on a philosophical level to make complex interconnections of meaning, image and making.

On show until June 1st. For more info, please visit the Timothy Taylor Gallery.

Lisa Yuskavage at the Greengrassi Gallery, London

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18th Apr – 15th Jun 2013

Lisa Yuskavage’s new paintings, on show at the Greengrassi Gallery, feature her signature curvaceous and curious female figures, harvesting the fresh, green landscapes by day and surviving the bleak darkness by night. The female figures owe something to the strong female workers of communist party propaganda posters, whilst their curvier form removes the overt strength from the references. Continue reading “Lisa Yuskavage at the Greengrassi Gallery, London”

Takashi Murakami in ‘Arhat’ at Blum & Poe, LA

8650458325_b3531061bd_zArhat, which derives its name from the ancient language of Sanskrit, translates to ‘a being who has achieved a state of enlightenment.’ On show will be large paintings, whose source imagery is drawn from an ancient tale of Buddhist monks confronting decay and death. Demonic monsters and decrepit monks in traditional robes and paraphernalia wander psychedelic landscapes. Standing tall and center amongst these large paintings will be a monumental new sculpture depicting a massive skull enveloped in flames, whose antecedents can be found in Buddhist statuary located in temples throughout Japan. The show also contains Murakami’s optimistic and bright, smiling flower faces with his dark and brooding skull imagery and self-portraits featuring Murakami and his beloved dog ‘Pom’.

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Via Hi-Fructose

What the inside of a shed looks like, pretty shedy

5187f6bd287748e8cb4a7652976cfeb6Whiteread’s sculpture is predicated on casting procedures, and the traces left on the sacrificial objects and spaces from which the final inverse form is derived. She casts from everyday objects as well as from the space beneath or around furniture and architecture, using single materials such as rubber, dental plaster, and resin to record every nuance.  Detached 1, Detached 2, and Detached 3 (2012) render the empty interior of a garden shed in concrete and steel. Cast from generic wooden sheds, the large-scale sculptures render negative space into solid form, and the prosaic into something fantastically disquieting.

On show at the Gagosian until May 25th 2013

Travis Louie in ‘Monsters on Their Day Off’
at Roq La Rue, Seattle

8635926627_68c65cbb14_cApril 12th to May 4th 2013

Travis Louie’s hypnotic “portraiture” is compelling for its blend of the hyper realistic with the blatantly unreal. Fantastical creatures gaze out from paintings so technically refined (using transparent layers of acrylic paint over a tight graphite drawing on a smooth flat surface) that they look uncannily like old photographs. Adding to the discomfiting presence these animal/monster like chimeras have are the human expressions- even if the creature in the paintings looks a bit bizarre, it also looks spookily familiar as well. Often in his work Louie seeks to create mythological ancestors…long-lost “relatives” captured in Victorian cabinet card/ tint type images.

His own interest in Noir imagery, German Expressionism, personal dream imagery, (not to mention B movie monsters!) as well as his recent discovery of old photographs of “human oddities” that were not from sideshow photographs, but rather photographs that documented that person’s “normal life” (i.e. the famous photo of John Merrick (The Elephant Man) dressed in formal evening wear for a night at the theater) all combined in this latest series of works to create an incredible series of portraits that you may just recognize elements of your own family members in!

8637033368_477127cd10_cFor more info please visit Roq La Rue Gallery

Pedro Reyes in ‘Disarm’ at the Lisson Gallery, London

w3p7hjkl27th March to 4th May 2013

Pedro Reyes creates musical instruments from firearms, including revolvers, shot-guns and machine-guns, which were crushed by tanks and steamrollers to render them useless. These were offered to the artist by the Mexican government following their confiscation and subsequent public destruction in the city of Ciudad, Juarez.

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For Reyes the process of transforming weapons into objects of positive utility “… was more than physical. It’s important to consider that many lives were taken with these weapons; as if a sort of exorcism was taking place, the music expelled the demons they held, as well as being a requiem for the lives lost.”

For more info please visit Lisson Gallery

Ravi Zupa’s ‘Colour Deficient’
at The Outsiders, Newcastle

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5th April 2013 to 4th May 2013

Colour Deficient examines not only the richness of colour, but also the hole left in our modern lives by a lack of spirituality.“Iʼm decidedly atheist, but feel tied to mythology,” says the artist, “and the show is partly about that conflict.” Raviʼs works are an amalgam of graphite, coloured pencil, india and coloured ink, latex and acrylic paint, watercolour, oil paint, chalk pastel, relief-block print (cut from traffic cones), silk screen and collaged paper. That the majority is painted in Raviʼs hand brings cohesion to the myriad contrasting styles, images and ages present in the pictures.

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For more info please visit The Outsiders