Eric Mack creates tactile assemblages—constructed from a dynamic combination of used textiles, worn clothes, moving blankets, and torn rags, alongside photographs and pull-outs from books and magazines—extend and transform the notion of painting. His use of color, form, and material as elements in a compositional lexicon, along with his principal medium of stained or dyed fabrics, declare his investigation of painting, while the way his compositions occupy and transform space are evidence of their sculptural nature.

He will be joined in conversation by Jessica Gatlin, Assistant Professor, Print and Extended Media, University of Maryland.

For more information, please click here. 

Image: Eric N. Mack

Photo credits: Kyle Knodell / New York Times

Investigating the sexual politics of space, Olowska critically engages with representations of the female body in this three-day performance event inspired by the particular aesthetic of the soft-core pornography magazine Viva and the museum’s American sculpture court.

Naughty Nymphs in the Courtyard of the Favorites is the fourth installment of Iterations, the Art Institute’s multiyear series of new performance commissions. 

Image: Paulina Olowska, Emmanuelle, 2020

Photo credit: Courtesy of the artist

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

France-Lise McGurn (born 1983) is a Glasgow-based artist who predominantly works with painting to create layered installations that incorporate the gallery walls, floors and ceilings.

"In Emotia" is a derivative term which suggests a state of being, simultaneously emotional and in motion. Mcgurn’s figurative painting and wall drawings evoke bodies and limbs overlapping and interacting in ambivalent spaces, at parties, in night clubs, on streets or lying in bed either side of paper thin walls. Cities and bodies, are constantly moving and shaping each other, a sentiment which McGurn evokes through the shifting forms and gestures of her metropolitan figures. Often the works themselves overlap from canvas to wall to floor, creating energetic compositions which suggest intimacy, ecstasy, sexuality, violence and loss.

For more information, please click here. 

Image:  France-Lise McGurn, Easy Emotia, 2019

Photo credit: Courtesy of the artist 

During the opening weekend of Up to and Including Limits: After Carolee Schneemann exhibition, there will be a live performance of Paulina Ołowska’s large-scale outdoor work, Slavic Goddesses (2017/2019), drawing inspiration from modernist utopias in America and Eastern Europe to prompt reflections on feminism and consumerism. 

For more information, please click here. 

Image:  Paulina Olowska, Zaria The Warrior Goddess of Beauty, 2014

Jeffrey Stark, New York presents Nationale a solo presentation by Eric N. Mack.

Event Details
Saturday, November 23, 2019, 2 pm             

Dia:Beacon
3 Beekman Street
Beacon, New York

Free with museum admission. Space is limited and offered on a first-come, first-served basis.

Installation view: Sam Gilliam, Double Merge, 1968, Dia:Beacon, New York, 2019. © Sam Gilliam/Artists Rights Societ New York. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York

Objects Recognized in Flashes is the title of a group exhibition focusing on approaches to the surfaces of photographs, products, and bodies in a greatly digitalized society. As the interface between optics and object, these seductive and ambiguous surfaces make relations between aesthetics, imagination, and material seem highly dubious, as also are the economies that underlie these relations. The exhibition was conducted in close cooperation with the artists Michele Abeles, Annette Kelm, Josephine Pryde, and Eileen Quinlan, who are actively and broadly involved in the final planning and selection of works.

Installation view: Objects Recognized in Flashes, Michele Abeles, Annette Kelm, Josephine Pryde, Eileen Quinlan. Works by Michele Abeles, Eileen Quinlan, Michele Abeles

Photo credit: Klaus Pichler © mumok

Beacon, NY – July 18, 2019 – On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Mel Bochner’s first Measurement Room, Dia Art Foundation has commissioned the artist to create a new, large-scale work from the series this fall at Dia:Beacon in Beacon, New York. Bochner’s Measurement Room: No Vantage Point opens November 9, 2019, at Dia:Beacon and will remain on view for a year.

For more information, please click here. 

Installation view: Mel Bochner, Measurement Room: No Vantage Point, 1969/2019, Dia:Beacon, Beacon, New York. © Mel Bochner. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York, courtesy Dia Art Foundation, New York

Asia Art Archive’s annual auction offers over seventy works generously donated by artists, galleries, and collectors, among them Sarah Crowner.

In partnership with Christie's, a preview exhibition of the artworks on auction will be held on 11, 14 to 17 October, with the reception taking place on the evening of 14 October. Kindly register here to attend the preview reception. Online and absentee bidding begins on 11 October at 12:00pm HKT and ends on 2 November at approximately 11:00pm HKT. 

For more information, please click here.

Image: Sarah Crowner, Double Tiger, 2019

On the occasion of Marnie Weber and Justin John Greene’s exhibition at Simon Lee Gallery New York, we are pleased to invite you to a Hallowe’en walkthrough with your docents for the evening: writer Dean Kissick and artist and writer Paige K. Bradley.

Too many shows these days are allowed to pass into that good night, sans recognition or echo from the chorus. We say no more! Journey uptown for an evening of deep iconographic contemplation and excavation of the clues and crumbs in these paintings, which may guide us towards the new folklore, pagan rituals, and ghosts—among other specters—that haunt us, but perhaps more importantly haunt Los Angeles, a city at the dark heart of the 21st-century American gothic. And really what is art about, if not worship of powers we can’t control, a chilling sense of unease, and the conspiracy that hides in plain sight as we recklessly speed by it?

Image: Justin John Greene, The Righteous, 2019

Jessica Lang's Garden Blue combines the beauty of nature and dance. The striking costumes and interactive sets were designed by Brooklyn artist Sarah Crowner. This unique collaboration is described as “sculptural and lyrical” by DanceTabs’s Marina Harss.

Sarah Crowner's inspiration for the set of Garden Blue was a Samara, also known as a Maple Seed and Helicopter Pod. A samara is a type of dry fruit where one seed is surrounded by double-winged papery tissue that catches wind and helps carry the seed away from the tree. 

For more information, please click here.

Image: Scene from Garden Blue
Photo credit: courtesy of the American Ballet Theatre
Photography: Rosalie O’Connor

TWO x TWO for AIDS and Art is an annual contemporary art auction held in the Richard Meier-designed Rachofsky House in Dallas, benefiting two organizations--the Dallas Museum of Art and amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research.Thanks to the phenomenal support of the dealer and artist community, corporate sponsors, and Dallas patrons, TWO x TWO for AIDS and Art's annual benefit gala dinner and art auction has raised over $84 million in its 20-year history in support of amfAR's AIDS research initiatives and the DMA's contemporary art acquisition program. 

For more information, please click here. 

For gala information, please contact Melissa Ireland at melissa@rachofskyhouse.org

Image: Clare Woods, Amnesia, 2019

The compositions of Eric N. Mack are gleaned from the wardrobe. The support (a body) is absent. Materials are configured to linger in space. Collaged textiles are arranged with balletic precision. Aspirational forms emanate. Arrangements are irrational and tentative. Choreographed elements are grafted into space and suspend from architecture. Billowing assemblages are accessed from a range of perspectives, around and under sewn silhouettes. The X, Y, Z axis distorts into forms of expression, violating systems of symmetry. Flattened panels of varied pattern and texture create collapsible volumes. The material palette is holed, dyed, manipulated, sometimes painted onto. Its utility function temporarily drained. Not quite painting or sculpture, the artwork is radically transient. The compositions pirouette out from the rectilinear constraints of painting into a space of auxiliary. 

For more information, please click here.

Complementing the Donaueschingen Music Festival, Museum Art.Plus is showing works by Angela Bulloch (b.1966) in the 2-Raum. Bulloch, who is recognised as one of the so-called ‘Young British Artists' who shook up the British art world in the 1990s, works in a wide range of media. Her main interest are systems, patterns and rules. In Donaueschingen, the artist presents a number of sound-activated drawing machines that respond to the sound of music. Although viewers are not privy to the sound, they witness the visualisation of music.

For more information, please click here.

Image: Angela Bulloch, Elliptical Song Drawing Machine: Peacock Blue, 2018

Paulina will perform "Abeceda", inspired by the book entitled “ABECEDA” by Karel Teige - a key figure of the Czech avant-garde who created the experimental “moving alphabet” in 1926 in cooperation with Milca Mayerova.

For more information, please click here.

Image: Paulina Olowska's Performance, Alphabet, Galerie Meerrettich, Berlin, Germany

On the afternoon of Saturday, October 12, 2019, a conversation between Paulina Olowska, Clément Dirié, Natalia Sielewicz, curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw where she recently organized the show Paint, Also Known as Blood: Women, Affect, and Desire in Contemporary Painting, and French critic and cultural writer Elisabeth Lebovici will propose a polyphonic interpretation of the exhibition stemming from their own experiences and research.

12pm, Simon Lee Gallery, London
Please note this event is free to the public, but booking is required: events@simonleegallery.com

On the occasion of its re-opening after extensive renovation work, the Museum of Modern Art presents a retrospective of work by the painter Hans Hartung (1904-1989).

This retrospective is built around a tightly focused selection of some 300 works from various collections – French and international, public and private – and most notably the Hartung-Bergman Foundation. This tribute is a follow-up to the Museum’s acquisition of a group of four works by Hartung in 2017.

For more information, please click here. 

Installation view: Huns Hartung, La fabrique du geste, Musee d'art Moderne, Paris, France

Photo credit: © Raphaël Chipault

For this 18th edition of the Nuit Blanche in Paris, Thanks for Nothing invites to the City of Science and Industry a major figure of contemporary art: the Italian Michelangelo Pistoletto , famous for its founding inscription in the movement arte povera from the 60's as well as for his participative works. On the evening of October 5, the artist will perform two more of his performances that will engage visitors: the first,  Sculpture Walk , will invite the public to roll in space a sphere made of compressed newspapers, while Third Paradise will encourage them to form a human chain outdoors, as a collaborative and symbolic drive for solidarity. The ecological stake of the latter is explicit: for each participant in the performance, a tree will be planted. 500 people are invited to participate in the event, which can be registered now by clicking on this link. 

For more information, please click here. 

Image: Michelangelo Pistoletto, Magazzino Performance, Magazzino Italian Art, New York, 2017

Photographer: Alexa Hoyer

Angela Bulloch’s new site-specific installation for MAAT’s Oval Gallery combines the artist’s research on three-dimensional perception, time and virtuality with the spatial and acoustic characteristics of this singular exhibition space. The project will include a set of new video works, integrating multiple projections, virtual reality, avatars and 3D animations. The installation also features some of the artist’s most iconic pieces, such as her geometric stacked columns and wall paintings, besides works that explore  3D animation, interpassivity, role playing and matters of conscience. In the same line of previous interventions at the Oval Gallery, Angela Bulloch now brings to this space a unique proposition which integrates new digital technology and contemporary art.

For more information, please click here. 

Installation view: Angela Bulloch, Anima Vectorias, MAAT, Oval Gallery, 2019

Photography: Bruno Lopes

Photo credit: courtesy of EDP Foundation

Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama is the recipient of the 2019 Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography. The award ceremony will take place in Gothenburg, Sweden on October 13, 2019. A symposium will be held on October 14, followed by the opening of an exhibition of Moriyama’s work at the Hasselblad Center, and the release of a new book about the artist, published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König.

For more information, please click here. 

Image: Daido Moriyama, Coffee Shop, 1984

Photo credit: © Daido Moriyama / Courtesy of Simon Lee Gallery and Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo