Contemporary Art and Culture
Paul Loughney’s collages resemble daydreams where seemingly unrelated elements coalesce into a fantastic mindscape where body parts, typography, geometric shapes, and hints of architectural elements scramble into unique environments that are oddly believable despite their quirky nature.
Continue reading “Paul Loughney – Consequences of Competing Narratives at Vorderzimmer”
Plumas, featuring Deborah Kruger’s recent work, is PRPG.mx’s premiere show in their newly expanded exhibition and residency space in Mexico City. In this sculptural installation, curated by Micheal Swank, Kruger focuses on the extinction of Mexican bird species, the death of Mexican indigenous languages, and the impacts of climate change on migration.
Continue reading “Deborah Kruger – Plumas at PRPG in Mexico City”
How can artists unmute themselves and make work in creative dialogue with each other while they experience forced solitude at faraway places? How can collaborative practices be reinvented in social isolation? And how can virtual and chance encounters between strangers can lead to the making of jointly authored images and objects? The un/mute project, initiated by EUNIC New York and Undercurrent, the independent exhibition space in DUMBO, was an attempt to probe these questions by inviting 32 artists to work across borders, languages, and media, while sharing the global experience of the Covid-19 pandemic at distant locations, under varied social circumstances, and in cultural contexts.
Continue reading “Remote Work”
In Rebecca Welz’s recent sculpture series, the sculptor reflects on the global phenomena of people who have been displaced from their homes due to a wide range of hardships—political, economic, climate change. The steel structures in her Displacement series represents a quest for safety and belonging. This body of work is featured at the June Kelly Gallery through January 4th, 2022.
Continue reading “Rebecca Welz – Displacement at June Kelly”
New York based artist Juan Hinojosa collects found objects from everywhere he passes by. A toy snake, a wooden bird, a Good Luck charm, fragments from advertisements and billboards—find their way into his intricate compositions, creating altogether layered sculptural assemblages and intricate two dimensional collages. In both dimensional and flat formats, Hinojosa’s vocabulary is grounded in Pop aesthetics with a tint of Surrealism. Through super vivid colors and elaborate graphic shapes he depicts imaginary worlds where extravagant shrines and hybrid flowery creatures become a convincing presence. When you get closer, you can most likely trace where they came from.
Continue reading “Juan Hinojosa: Ensemble Iconographies”
Baris Gokturk’s installations are intricate, layered, and admirably ambitious in both meaning and form. The Turkish born New York based artist asks the big questions – what is his role as an artist, individual, immigrant within the larger context of a world in crisis? In All Saints he exhibited at the Boiler space at the ELM foundation he combined imagery of dance and fire into a monumental installation.
Continue reading “Baris Gokturk: Danse Macabre in Public Spaces: Painting Euphoria and Madness in Times of Crisis”
Brooklyn-based artist Evan Paul English uses a small viewfinder to discover compelling compositions within the fabrics he collects and enlarges them to abstract paintings of different scales, working across painting, sculpture, murals, and wallpaper. VIEWFOUND, his current solo exhibition in Brooklyn, features work along these lines and is on view at 324 5th Avenue through December 6th, 2021. Presented by Salt Gallery in collaboration with ChaShama, the show includes eight new works that translate American vintage floral design into paintings, referencing gender, sexuality, and class.
Continue reading “Evan Paul English – VIEWFOUND at Chashama”
In Jon Bunge’s exhibition, Presence, at the Bonsack Gallery of John Burroughs School in St. Louis, Missouri, 23 sculptures, moving and turning in invisible air currents, appear to float inches above a hardwood floor. Made from the branches of trees, they evoke both a sense of mystery and a clear expression of the universe’s forces. Eight more works are included in a display case outside of the installation.
Continue reading “Jon Bunge’s Presence at the Bonsack Gallery”
Joseph Fucigna is a multi-media artist whose work is rooted in process, play and the innate qualities of the materials used. Through experimentation, and innovation, he creates sculptures, paintings and drawings that are known for their power to transform materials, ingenuity and odd but compelling subject matter. His one-person show, DRIP-DROP, TICK-TOCK, HERE + NOW, was originally scheduled to open at the Housatonic Museum of Art in Bridgeport, Connecticut in September 2018. Due to water damage from a fire above the space, it was rescheduled for September 2020, and postponed a second time due to COVID. At this time the exhibition opens for the third time on October 28th and runs through December 10th, 2021.
Continue reading “Joseph Fucigna: DRIP-DROP, TICK-TOCK, HERE + NOW at the Housatonic Museum of Art”
During the past year of the pandemic, Michal Gavish used her background as a scientist to research and draw on the sub-microscopic struggle between viruses and our body. Throughout this year of isolation, she became absorbed with the science and imagery of these biological attackers facing body defenders, the antigens against the antibodies. Imagining each virus from its initial exponential expansion to its final abrupt elimination, she sketches and experiments with color-field displays generated by genetic research. Her visual search incorporates mixed media in which she adopts the color-coded language of molecular modeling that she has learned as a chemist.
Continue reading “Ballad of Spread – Michal Gavish at Delaware Contemporary”