Merlin Carpenter’s solo exhibition, archive élastique, takes as its point of departure the Synagogue de Delme’s location, the road running through the village, on which numerous trucks and wide loads circulate. As the Synagogue is located at the roadside, the artist had proposed to transform the exhibition space into a warehouse or archival storage space, in which one finds thousands of boxes, awaiting transportation. Right in front of the synagogue entrance is a forklift, parked and ready to load the pallets into lorries for hypothetical delivery. But since no forklift of this kind can enter the exhibition space, the vehicle is doomed to wait outside.

Prelude: Melancholy of the Future brings together works by artists associated with MDD, either in the past or the future. The exhibition – the last at MDD before the museum’s renovations, until summer 2021 - considers the current challenge of anticipating on a future while the past itself is under scrutiny.

Known for her multi-disciplinary practice that engages installation, performance, sculpture, ceramics and textiles, Mai-Thu Perret derives inspiration from a range of twentieth-century avant-garde and radical art movements, including Dada, Constructivism and Bauhaus design. Occupying two floors of Le Portique, Mai-Thu’s solo exhibition Les Étangs is a presentation of new ceramics, patchworks and paper lanterns. Ten large ceramic pieces, evoking leaves of waterlilies, line the floor of the Portico, transforming the space into a vast imaginary body of water.

Lydia Yee is Chief Curator at Whitechapel Gallery, where she recently curated Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium (2020) and Is This Tomorrow? (2019) and oversaw commissions by Ulla von Brandenburg (2018) and Leonor Antunes (2017). Yee has previously held positions in the UK and US as Curator at Barbican Art Gallery and Senior Curator at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. She was also co-curator of Frieze Talks (2018–19) and British Art Show 8 (2015–16).

Merlin Carpenter’s “Paint-It-Yourself” display is to be seen as a systematic production and delectation of the materiality of a surface liberated from representation. It suggests that the tension of the painting process is already present when all is on view are eight primed canvases and a box placed in the middle of the room full of ready-to-use oil paint tubes.

This fall, Magazzino Italian Art opens a special exhibition examining the formal, conceptual, and procedural affinities in the work of Mel Bochner, Alighiero Boetti, and Lucio Fontana. Curated by Bochner in collaboration with Magazzino, the exhibition marks the first presentation to consider the American artist’s extensive, yet overlooked, engagement with the practices of Fontana and Boetti, as well as with Italian art at large. Bochner Boetti Fontana offers, through the artist’s perspective, a number of resonances between his work and that of the Italian and Italian-Argentine artists: an exploration of systems, language, and materials; and a sense of irony and humor, often and especially shared by Arte Povera and Conceptualism, as all these works opened the work of art onto the space of display. 

RED LIGHT presents a selection of works from the Norlinda and José Lima Art Collection, having as a common point the approach to sexuality, unfolded in multiple topics, both presented in a counterpoint complement and in a jarring confrontation: the representation of the body, male and female nudity , eroticism, fantasy, desire and pain, object and subject, pleasure and domination, the places of female representation, the male gaze, voyeurism, exhibitionism and self-representation in art.

Curated by Bronia Iwańczak

The multiple sources which McGurn refers to in the initial stages of her work most recently include films of the 70s and 80s, fashion illustration, advertising, pop stars and glamour photography. The generic features of the figures, accentuated by their repetition across the wall paintings, conveys a sense of intimacy or familiarity open to multiple readings. She also is inspired by people she encounters, studying their movements, mannerisms and hand gestures.

Busan Biennale 2020 examines the city and tries to expand the various spectrums of a metropolitan through artistic expressions. At Busan Biennale 2020, ten fiction writers and one poet were invited to write on the characteristics of the city of Busan as a conceptual basis for selecting the artists, each responding through new commissions and existing works within the context of the exhibition. The authors—which represent different generations, genres, and writing styles—have each created and written fictional layers around and about the city, some with direct reference to Busan, others through indirect and ephemeral urban tales involving the locale. Mixing past, present, and future, the artists and writers involved in Words at an Exhibition — an exhibition in ten chapters and five poems use Busan as a backdrop in ways that create a narrative that simultaneously combines reality, history, and imagination through experiences of contemporary fiction, a focus on soundscapes and film works, as well as paintings, photographs, sculptures, and site-specific installations.

Simon Lee Gallery presents a special project in collaboration with Vasily Klyukin. Throughout his practice, which spans architecture, design, literature and sculpture, Klyukin has sought to eternalise the intangible. The Russian-born, Monaco-based artist is concerned with humanity and the natural world: patterns and systems found within nature, as well as human emotion and memory.

The Zënza Sëida Cultural Association and the Biennale Gherdëina are proud to announce the inauguration of the 7th edition of the Biennale Gherdëina on Saturday, August 8th, 2020 across the public space of Ortisei, Val Gardena, in the picturesque landscape of the Dolomites, the celebrated UNESCO Heritage Site.

Curated by Ana Rito and Hugo Barata

When applied to the curatorial situation, the concept of the constellation accounts for the dynamic definition of the relations formed between all those involved. On the one hand, it denotes the different contexts in which each obtained their previous meaning and function (which then change as a result of this transfer from other times and places into the specific new encounter). On the other hand, it implies that those involved and their participation are also characterized by temporalities of their own—historicity, sequence, duration, timing, rhythm—creating a corresponding dynamic in their interrelations.

From 26 July to 18 October 2020, the three visual art museums at the banks of the river Leie — Museum of Deinze and the Leie Region (Mudel), Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in collaboration with Sint-Martens-Latem, and Roger Raveel Museum — join forces to present the 7th edition of the Biennial of Painting. Under the title Binnenskamers (Inner Spaces), this edition of the Biennial focuses on the interior within the tradition of art history and contemporary practice.

Works by Chris Huen Sin Kan will be exhibited at the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens.

Artists Gary Simmons and Yuval Pudik join forces on a unique limited edition in support of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles and WordsUncaged, 'Simmons/Pudik, ACLU United States Constitutions 2020’.

This $250 unique edition of 50 is available for purchase now with all proceeds being donated equally between Black Lives Matter Los Angeles and WordsUncaged. 

SOLD OUT

On Sunday 5 July at 6 PM BST / 1 PM EST / 10 AM PST Gary Simmons will be in conversation on Simon Lee Gallery's Instagram Live with Tobias Tubbs, Chief Ambassador of WordsUncaged, a Los Angeles-based organisation that facilitates art, narrative therapy and new media workshops throughout the state correctional system in California. Please visit our Instagram to hear them in discussion about the key themes of freedom and democracy that are explored in Gary's forthcoming exhibition at Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong, opening Friday 3 July.

The international art project ROHKUNSTBAU is celebrating its 25th edition titled „Tenderness. About Common Living“. This year’s summer exhibition features artists that have been part of ROHKUNSTBAU in the last 25 years – ROHKUNSTBAU 2020 will be a celebration of coming together, of reunion.

Known as a master of snapshots, Moriyama Daido, one of Japan’s preeminent photographers, began his career in the 1960s. His grainy, high-contrast style, which came to be described as “are, bure, boke” (rough, blurry, out of focus), sent shockwaves through the photography world. Over the years, Moriyama has held large exhibitions at museums in a host of different countries, and received countless international photography prizes, including the 2019 Hasselblad Award, and today, 55 years after his debut, he remains active at the forefront of the art world.

In 2016 the Companhia Nacional de Bailado (CNB), the National Ballet Company of Portugal, performed “Quinze Bailarinos e Tempo Incerto” (Fifteen Dancers and Changeable Tempo), a ballet created and directed by João Penalva in collaboration with the choreographer Rui Lopes Graça. The performance is available to watch on the CNB website until 3PM, Friday 10 April. 

FRIDAY FOREVER the new album from Everything is Recorded is available now. Feat. Infinite Coles, Aitch, Berwyn, Maria Somerville, Flohio, James Massiah, Kean Kavanagh , Penny Rimbaud and A. K. Paul. 
Artwork by Toby Ziegler.

The Musical Brain is a group exhibition, including works by Mai-Thu Perret, that reflects on the power music has to bring us together. The exhibition is named after a short story by the Argentine contemporary writer César Aira, and explores the ways that artists use music as a tool to inhabit and understand the world. The featured artists approach music through different lenses—historical, political, performative, and playful—to create new installations and soundscapes installed throughout the park.

For more information, please click here.

Installation view: Mai-Thu Perret: Grammar and Glamour, Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe 2019

Photo: Stephan Baumann, bild_raum

Pigskin sandals, commissioned by Festival Cumplicidades, presents a new version of João Penalva’s work Wallenda, from 1999, in which the artist whistled the entirety of The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky. 

In this live performance version, combining voice with video projections, texts and recorded sound, João Penalva juxtaposes the history and process of his enterprise with the experience of dancers who were interpreters of the recreation of the 1913, original Nijinsky choreography of The Rite of Spring, by dance historians Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer for the National Ballet of Portugal, in 1994.

With Annabelle Barnes, Catarina Lourenço and Brent Williamson, dancers from the National Ballet of Portugal, and Rui Lopes Graça.

Image: João Penalva 

Unbound brings together a multigenerational group of artists, among them Eric N. Mack, whose work takes an inventive and experimental approach to abstraction. Using Kobena Mercer’s definition of ‘discrepant abstraction’ — hybrid and partial, elusive and repetitive, obstinate and strange, including almost everything that does not neatly fit into the institutional narrative of abstract art as a monolithic quest for purity, Unbound explores the continued legacy of black artists who have utilized abstraction as a nonconformist visual language, and a lens through which social and political realities can be understood.

For more information, please click here. 

Installation detail: Unbound, Zuckerman Museum of Art, Kennesaw, GA, 2020

Photo: Mike Jensen

To coincide with Simon Lee Gallery London's exhibition France-Lise McGurn: Percussia, there will be an artist talk at the gallery: France-Lise McGurn in Conversation with Katy Hessel, Curator, Art Historian, @thegreatwomenartists

The talk will take place Saturday 25th January, 12 PM, Simon Lee Gallery, London

Please note this event is free to the public, but booking is required: events@simonleegallery.com

Image: France-Lise McGurn, Fish, 2019