Art Spiel – Page 58 – Contemporary Art and Culture

July 28, 2022December 30, 2022

Hew Locke: The Procession at the Tate Britain
by Melissa Stern

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Each year The Tate Britain commissions a large-scale art installation for the iconic Duveen Galleries at the museum. This is a vast space, an art-filled hall, more than a typical gallery that winds its way down the center of the museum on the first floor. This year they tapped the Guyanese-British artist Hew Locke whose visual musings on migration, history, national identity and ritual are well known in the British art world. Locke has long worked these themes, but never on such a scale. It is a wildly ambitious vision that embraces his interests and presents a fully developed Universe.

July 25, 2022December 30, 2022

The Baroness at Mimosa House London
by Art Spiel

Art Spiel Photo Story

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (c. 1921-22), George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division, LC 5677-2. From digital scan of photograph.

The Baroness at Mimosa House in London is a group exhibition dedicated to Dada artist, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874–1927). The exhibition manifests the ongoing influence of the Baroness on contemporary artists and poets, showcasing artworks and performative contributions created in homage to Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven or influenced by her radical work and effervescent personality. The show questions the legacy of Dada poetry and performance today, in a feminist and queer dimension in particular. How can artists navigate the art world, politics and society while creating a work which resists and disrupts the conventional canon? Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven becomes a role model and inspiration for international artists of different generations and media of work.

July 21, 2022December 30, 2022

The Lands of Kats Kill
by Hovey Brock

The Lands of Kats Kill is the second in a series of three interrelated experimental pieces that combine graphics, text, and hyperlinks based on themes coming out of my Crazy River project, for which I gave an interview on this website on May 16th. Crazy River takes a wide-angle view of the climate crisis, ranging from my own climate grief to an in-depth focus on the many causes and effects of rapid environmental changes on the West Branch of the Neversink in Ulster County. In this piece I investigate the idea of the Catskills as a region, and an incongruous bundle of contradictions and coincidences. The Lands of Kats Kill weaves three timelines together: the geologic, the historical, and the personal. This structure repeats throughout my Crazy River project. The previous piece in this series, Invaders, took apart the idea of invasive species. The following will explore the concept of the Golden Spike in stratigraphy as fact and metaphor.

July 18, 2022December 30, 2022

Jodi Hays – The Find at Night Gallery in LA
by Jac Lahav

In Conversation with Jodi Hays and Night Gallery

Installation image courtesy of Night Gallery and Marten Elder

A new show at Night Gallery in L.A. explores feminine conventions in painting. Large cardboard assemblages counter the traditional stretched canvas by repurposing a commonplace consumerist material. The Find is Jodi Hays’s first solo show in L.A. and a poetic contemplation on space, landscape, and material. Working in layered and dyed cardboard, Hays creates subtle landscapes reminiscent of long drives down winding roads. These works are odes to the quotidian, evoking both nostalgia and references to femininity, while straddling the line between painting and assemblage. Contributor Jac Lahav sat down with artist Jodi Hays and Night Gallery to talk about the show.

July 16, 2022December 30, 2022

Showings in Four Dimensions
by Carson Woś

*Showings in Four Dimensions* (installation view L-R), Darius Yektai, *Waiting For Death Or Slavery: After Delacroix*, 2022, Elise Ansel, *Celestial Lounge Chair*, 2021, Darius Yektai, *Untitled Falling Flowers*, 2021 & Kyle Hittmeier *Natural Le Coultre*, 2022. Photo: AB NY Gallery

As soon as the formula codified that a contemporary artist could reach a new level of institutional engagement once they proclaimed their inspiration from generations of art historical masterpieces, the flood gates opened to practitioners solely deploying references to the canon to project their careers farther and faster. With encyclopedic museums refreshing their image by aligning themselves with the success of the contemporary art world’s darlings, by connecting their creative process to roots foregrounded in the rich mire of historical artworks, new publications and programming surfaced. Notably The Artist Project at The Metropolitan Museum of Art was launched in 2015, and most recently even the gilded age indulgence of The Frick Collection created their exhibition series Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Masters at their temporary home on Madison Avenue.

July 14, 2022December 30, 2022

Yikui Gu and Eustace Mamba at Commonweal
by Art Spiel

Featured Project: with gallerist Alex Conner

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Description automatically generated with medium confidence — Image from the opening of the exhibition at the gallery

For its final exhibition of the gallery year, Commonweal in Philadelphia is featuring mixed media works by Yikui (Coy) Gu & Eustace Mamba, whose imagery and use of material create layers of multi faceted cultural cues, prompting a nuanced glimpse at the complexity of American identity. The exhibition runs through July 30th, 2022.

July 11, 2022December 30, 2022

Eric Wolf: When There is a Solid Fog on the Lake
by Etty Yaniv

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Description automatically generated — Eric Wolf, Mooselookmeguntic Lake, 2016, ink on paper 22” x 30”. Courtesy of Pamela Salisbury Gallery

Eric Wolf’s landscape paintings are made with ink on paper and reference nature—water, sky, trees. In their sharp light and dark shapes they resemble woodcut, linoleum prints or even highly contrasted black and white photographs, but the more you look at them, the immediacy of the painted ink comes through—from the artist’s direct observation of nature, through his mind, to his hand—in a magical transformation ink flowing on paper fibers becomes river and white floating shapes become clouds.

July 7, 2022September 12, 2022

David Konigsberg at Carrie Haddad Gallery
by Louisa Pancoast

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Description automatically generated — Carrie Haddad Gallery, Hudson, NY – My Own Backyard, a group show featuring work by David Konigsberg on view through July 31^st (image courtesy of Carrie Haddad Gallery)

Traditional, yet innovative; reflective, yet distant, David Konigsberg’s landscapes and still lifes are rife with double-backs and unexpected turns. A self-proclaimed “solitary wanderer,” Konigsberg gathers imagery and visions from long walks through the Catskills, through surrounding terrain, and through his own backyard. He views all as equally minute and equally monumental, from a peaked horizon to a burst of petals collected from his garden. This confluence of near and distant perspectives creates an almost literary quality; the intimacy of first-person voice jockeying with the scope of an omniscient narrator. David’s paintings resist a certain aboutness, allowing simultaneous narratives to proliferate across the bodies of his canvases, culminating in an emotional sucker punch.

July 4, 2022December 30, 2022

Alicia Piller – Weathering Climates
by Etty Yaniv

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Description automatically generated — Alicia Piller in her Inglewood studio.

LA based artist Alicia Piller creates multi layered sculptures and installations in which material, media, form, and color metamorphose into alluring environments filled with cultural, political, and biographic references—latex balloons, sycamore seeds, silkscreen images fuse into a cosmos with visually complex and open ended layers of meaning.

June 27, 2022December 30, 2022

Water Conversations, The Goddess Brigid, and Mayflies
by Susan Hoffman Fishman

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Description automatically generated — *49^th Uranium Mining Legacy, Remembrance Day and Action Day*, Navajo Nation, Grants Mining Belt, New Mexico, USA, July 12, 2018 .

Irish visual artist and researcher Anna Macleod has spent the last 15 years exploring the environmental, economic, spiritual, political, and scientific aspects of water through interdisciplinary collaborations, performance, public interventions, and socially engaged activism.