Category: Journal

Writings on art by Jurriaan Benschop

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Maria Spyraki in Athens

The palette of Maria Spyraki’s series Non-Cognitive Memory Structures (2020–24) belongs to nature as we know it from trees, stones, sky, and earth. The browns, grays, and greens, mixed with gradations of white and black, form an easy pathway into the paintings. They are balanced colors, not loud, and if we imagine the work placed in a landscape, it would probably blend in. Yet we are not looking at actual landscape paintings. The works are earthbound and rooted, but also light, conceptual, and mindful. How do these aspects fit together on the same surface?

Once we shift the attention from color to form and to composition, we cannot immediately identify a clear-cut scene or subject matter. Now the paintings look less familiar. Some circular forms resemble pebbles, or are they bubbles? There might be trees, with fog, but none of this is really confirmed. Associations easily shift. More generally, one could say that organic-looking shapes meet geometric forms. Just as an intuitive way of working meets with a systematic approach to painting. A grid shows up in several of the works and is key to keeping things in place. In painting III the grid is prominent, the main motif, while in painting IV it is almost invisible, hidden in a haze of color. In VII it comes out in dots. The grid cuts the surface into compartments, like a building that has multiple windows, each containing life with differences in style and appearance, yet all made of the same substance. The structure allows for multiplicity within a single painting.

Some shapes seem animal- or humanlike but have not manifested fully as any identifiable creature; in other cases, the shapes look more like plants. We see life when it is still embryonic and fluid, in growth. On the other side of the spectrum, some forms seem to be the result of a process of aging, form losing its substance and appearance. In the center of IX, a mummified figure is floating. Mummies relate to ancient times, pay respect to a valuable past life. Yet the artist does not tell a history about a certain person or place. Rather, she has collected impressions, observations, memories, processing them in the act of painting. She has given all that she has found a home within the structures she has laid out in the paintings.

Some forms are reluctant to identify themselves, others are more explicit. If we reflect on what these paintings are about, it is the process of collecting and accommodating experiences that comes to the fore, rather than the specific forms the experiences take. It is about mapping out layers of memory, offering cross sections of life, yet in an intuitive way. The artist paints from life – not just from observation, but also in a deeper sense, in looking into the dynamics of growth, of birth and death, and of how time defines and changes the appearance and experience of things. This can explain the different layers and compartments in the paintings, each being occupied.

The paintings are like a motherboard containing memories as they are stored and stacked inside of us. It is not about personal memory here, not about specific things that happen in our own lives, but rather about how collective psychology, biology, geology – the whole environment as it has developed, really – leaves an imprint on every human being, defining limits and possibilities. The work is not solely focusing on life’s outward beauty and appearance, but also paying honor to its layered and complex inner reality, things that are inescapable. We see ambivalent forms that could indicate life fading away, or the start of something that is just about to appear.

Between 2022 and 2024 I visited Maria Spyraki several times in her studio in Athens, while she was working on the Non-Cognitive Memory Structures. The text is a result of discussing the series of paintings with the artist. Spyraki was trained as an architect but switched to painting which is now her main practice.

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Waarom een schilderij werkt

boek cover Waarom een schilderij werkt

In dit boek wordt het werk van tientallen hedendaagse schilders voorgesteld. Daarbij komt steeds de vraag aan de orde: Waarom werkt dit schilderij? Op wat voor manier heeft het betekenis en kan het overtuigen? Het zijn vragen die onder meer voortkomen uit de behoefte om te kunnen navigeren in het veelvormige landschap van de schilderkunst van nu, waarin verschillende stijlen en houdingen naast en door elkaar bestaan.

Enerzijds lijkt tegenwoordig alles te kunnen, en is het aanbod van kunst groot, maar anderzijds vindt niemand echt dat alles kan. Bij kunst horen noties over wat top is en talent, over wat progressief is, kritisch of ter zake, of wat aan kracht verloren heeft. Daarbij heerst in de kunst, net als in andere domeinen, een strijd om aandacht; velen willen gezien wor- den of iets tonen, en zowel kunsteigene als afgeleide motieven spelen daarbij een rol.

Waarom een schilderij werkt gaat, behalve over de vraag hoe we naar schilderijen kijken en hoe ze werken, over de vraag hoe we over kunst schrijven en spreken. Wil taal over kunst iets betekenen, dan moet ze ermee in evenwicht zijn, niet topzwaar of overdreven, maar passend bij de kunst die aan de orde komt. Er zijn zichtbare aspecten die kunnen worden aangekaart, zoals het beeldmotief, de compositie, het kleurgebruik en de manier waarop de verf wordt aangebracht. Maar er zijn ook onzichtbare factoren: de drijfveren, het wereldbeeld, de herkomst of de visie van de kunstenaar. In dit boek worden deze aspecten onderzocht en met elkaar in verband gebracht. Het gaat om wat je ziet in schilderijen, maar ook om de houding en de ideeën die erachter liggen.

Het boek gaat in op het werk van Rezi van Lankveld, Louise Bonnet, Peter Doig, Helmut Federle, Beverly Fishman, Daniel Richer, Victoria Gitman, Martha Jungwirth, Andreas Ragnar Kassapis, Kerry James Marshall, Lara de Moor (coverbeeld), Marc Mulders, Kaido Ole, Paula Rego, Jessica Stockholder, Anna Tuori, Matthias Weischer en vele anderen.

Waarom een schilderij werkt is verschenen bij uitgeverij van Oorschot Het boek kost 25 euro en is verkrijgbaar in Nederlandse en Vlaamse boekwinkels, bijvoorbeeld bij Copyright in Gent, Boekhandel Robert Premsela in Amsterdam, Museum Voorlinden in Wassenaar, Kunstmuseum Den Haag en Broese in Utrecht. Het kan ook hier via deze website besteld worden.

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The Nature of Abstraction

exhibition beyond the line with works by sean scully and stefan gierowski

An exhibition in Warsaw brings together the work of Sean Scully and Stefan Gierowski.

In 1945, the year that Sean Scully was born in Dublin, Stefan Gierowski, aged 20, enrolled at the art academy in Krakow, making his first steps into the arts. In the subsequent years, he navigated stylistic possibilities, looking with interest at avant-garde art movements from the West, but also facing the demands as phrased by the communist regime in post-war Poland. Art should be for the people, an idea that Gierowski would not disagree with per se, but how it should look was another question.


Scully and Gierowski grew up in different contexts in western and eastern Europe (Scully also went to the US, which influenced his painting), but as their respective artistic lives developed, both came to embrace abstract painting. They never met in person, but a recent exhibition at the Fundacja Stefana Gierowskiego in Warsaw brought the works of the two together, creating a dialogue (posthumously, for Gierowski) Beyond the line, as the title of the show indicated. It turned out to be an exhibition that made you think about the nature of abstraction and how it can relate to our present lives.


Curator Joachim Pissaro speaks in his introduction about the abstract movement, but one might wonder if it is a movement (or style) at all. Painters may use the same type of geometric forms, squares, lines, or color bands, yet works can have different motivations and impacts. In the case of Scully and Gierowski, there are such shared formal interests as the line and its widening to a band or other shape. They both also work with just a handful of elements to make a painting. But the temperaments underneath, and how the forms come out and take life on the surface, seem quite different. If two people wear the same type of coat, it does not mean they will look alike.


Scully has noted that an abstract painting cannot really be for or against something. One cannot appropriate an abstract painting to illustrate something based on subject matter or narrative. For Gierowski this must have been a critical advantage, as it created distance to the official socialist realist style that the political establishment in Poland identified with. The painting spoke in other ways – through surface, paint application, color, light, and sense of balance. But maybe even more importantly, art for him was about something you cannot really grab, an abstract quality in the sense of “not tangible.”


The absence of what can be named or identified has made abstract painting suitable for spiritual or mystical readings. Just as in religion, where the essence, or God, cannot be depicted, the very essence of an abstract painting cannot be extracted. It resides within the painting. That is, if it works at all. This does not mean that abstract painting leans automatically towards the spiritual. It seems to be a matter of where the artist directs his attention. A work can also be focused on optics and perception, or it can present a structural model aimed at understanding the world through the metaphor of forces at play. Throughout the exhibition, such options present themselves, activating the question in what capacity does a painting work, and also, when exactly does it come alive. The answers keep changing.


For Scully, as Pissaro describes in the catalog, art was a respite from early on, offering beauty and calm in a turbulent, poor, and streetlife reality. When Scully attended school, the encounter with art presented an escape in the best sense of the word, a way out of trouble, offering moments of recuperation and hope for something else. This interest developed and manifested later on in Scully’s work, for instance in the chapel he decorated for the Hortensia Herrero collection in Valencia, a sacred space with a combination of paintings, glass, color, and light. This aspect of Scully’s work is certainly not the only one – the artist is also earthbound, relating to the color and shapes of a building or of landscapes, enjoying the physical existence and structures he observes, as can be sensed in works such as Taped Painting Cream and Black (1975), where strips of tape create a woven pattern on the surface, and Grey Wall (2019), which suggests a stacking of stones or otherwise constructive elements. Scully’s paintings seem to be the result of working through complexities to attain a sense of order and simplicity, and this feels like an important part of what the artist has to offer. He has cleared things up.


In Gierowski’s case, it seems that part of the work starts from an interest in how color relations work out, how they might or might not create the illusion of space, or evoke a certain lightness. More than Scully, Gierowski stretches his palette from the deepest dark to the very bright, including some loud and cheeky colors. Seeing the works he made over a half a century, it struck me how fresh and crisp some of them look, like Painting DCCXXVIII (1998), for example, while others appear more dated, or belong to what was “going around” at the time Gierowski made them. There are quite a few cases where he transcends his time, which gives his work great appeal. Abstraction, it seems, offered him a ticket outside his time and cultural context, and also across borders, even if he did not have much possibility to travel.


Gierowski appears to have been an analytical and cautious painter who carefully studied modern movements such as Futurism and Surrealism, taking what fit his interests in how to create movement with only abstract forms, or how to create space through color contrasts. There is a lot of attention in the handwork, the brushstroke, the treatment of surfaces, and the construction of the painting. Yet all that seems to happen with the objective of making paintings that at some point forget all about their physical existence and take off, so to speak, getting wings and becoming metaphysical reflections.


The different temperaments of the painters come out when you focus on how differently the light shines in their works, Scully’s more muted and melancholic, and staying closer to natural colors, Gierowski’s looking for the whole spectrum. In terms of brushstroke and speed, on the other hand, Scully has more bravado and brings in grand gestures. Both painters created a discipline that works with a set of formal limitations (which is one aspect of their abstraction), within which they expand, finding freedom and infinity. Scully often works in series, exhausting a certain motif through repetition, whereas Gierowski was less inclined to series but committed to making a different painting with just a little shift in approach, changing only one of the parameters.


Paradoxically, in the end it does not matter that much if the paintings of the two artists look similar in terms of composition, or if they use the same shapes. It is not at that level where they merge in the mind or experience of the viewer. It turns out that the abstraction is a quality situated inside the work, more so than being an outer identifier. It is something that might make the painting shine, or transmit a feeling of unity, or lift the spirit; it cannot really be fixed or pointed at. And it is not something that comes out successfully in every painting; it has to be conquered or met with by the artist. The real mystery is when an abstract painting transcends its formal appearance, and appears relevant to life. The whole universe might be in there, and yet you cannot prove one thing.

This text was first published on Arterritory on 28 November 2024.

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Book ‘Why Paintings Work’

Why Paintings Work book cover

In ‘Why Paintings Work’ Jurriaan Benschop navigates the diverse landscape of contemporary painting. He introduces the work of dozens of painters and asks: Why do these paintings work? In what ways do they speak to the viewer? He considers both the visible aspects of painting, such as the depicted motif and the application of paint, and the concepts, beliefs and motivations that underlie the canvas.

‘Why Paintings Work’ is not just about how we look at paintings, but also about finding a language that suits the art and viewing experience of today. Throughout the book different themes come up, while looking at the work of contemporary painters, such as nature, the body, touch, movement, identity, memory and spirituality.

Among the artists featured in this book are: Nikos Aslanidis, David Benforado, Louise Bonnet, Glenn Brown, Maria Capelo, Peter Doig, Béatrice Dreux, Helmut Federle, Beverly Fishman, Elisabeth Frieberg, Victoria Gitman, Veronika Hilger, Martha Jungwirth, Andreas Ragnar Kassapis, Kristi Kongi, Mark Lammert, Rezi van Lankveld, Michael Markwick, Kerry James Marshall, Lara de Moor, Matthew Metzger, Marc Mulders, Kaido Ole, Jorge Queiroz, Fiona Rae, Daniel Richter, Jessica Stockholder, Marc Trujillo, Anna Tuori, Matthias Weischer, Paula Zarina-Zemane and Gerlind Zeilner.

The book contains 284 pages with more than 100 illustrations in color, paperback 14 x 20 cm, in English. Published May 2023 by Garret Publications, Helsinki. Bookshops order through Idea books in Amsterdam *** ISBN 9789527222171 *** Individuals can ORDER A COPY through this website by filling out the order form HERE Delivery time in Europe is about one week, outside Europe two weeks approximately.

In these shops or institutions the book is already available:

E U R O P E Athens: Booktique; Hyper Hypo, Alyki, Paros: Cycladic Arts, Amsterdam: The American Book Center, Stedelijk Museum, Utrecht: Broese, Bath, UK: Magalleria, Berlin: Do You Read Me?, Uslar & Rai, Helsinki: Suomalainen; Prisma, London: Art Data, Münster: Extrabuch, Riga: Zuzeum, Stockholm, Göteborg: Adlibris, Vienna: Giese und Schweiger,

U S A Houston, TX: Basket Books, Boston, MA: ICA Store, Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Stories, Ooga Booga, Santa Barbara: Chaucers Books.

Worldwide online order through Walter König (Germany, Austria), Art Data (United Kingdom) or through the website you are currently visiting.

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Tamuna Sirbiladze in Vienna

Tamuna Sirbiladze painting at Belvedere 21 in Vienna

Eight years after her death, the Belvedere 21 in Vienna is organizing a retrospective of Tamuna Sirbiladze, an artist who grew up and attended the academy in Tbilisi, Georgia, and came to Vienna in 1997 for further study, where she subsequently stayed. Sirbiladze died at the age of 45 from cancer, a biographical fact that is hard to ignore when visiting the exhibition, especially toward the end, where the work from her later years is displayed, created as an ode to her young children and also to a childlike way of drawing or painting. The works made with oil pastels are partly abstract but also depict natural motifs such as the pomegranate, a symbol referencing her homeland. The works were created with the awareness of her approaching death, a fact that is hard to forget.

However, the late works represent just one facet of an oeuvre that showcases various approaches to painting. In the preceding rooms, a series of works can be seen in which the artist enters into dialogue with historical painters she found interesting, such as Velázquez or Caravaggio, thus exercising her stylistic mobility. Earlier, she had engaged in dialogue with the work of Martin Kippenberger and Andy Warhol. There is a curiosity in the way Sirbiladze approaches and tries everything. Although not every result is equally interesting or unique, it comes across as authentic artistic exploration.

The works where Sirbiladze is most explicit and found her own voice were created between 2005 and 2009. By then, she had freed herself from (Soviet) conventions she grew up with, had gone through a period of experimenting with digital media, and returned to painting human figures, particularly women. At this point, she seems to hit her stride and make a breakthrough, reclaiming the female body from the male-dominated art history. In terms of content, she has a strong driving force: she determines how the woman is depicted. The works are quickly made, energetic, and bold. The titles sometimes indicate what they are about, such as Kotzen (2005), Suicide Painting (2007), and My Rapist (2006). In Unter den roten Sternen/Cubic Rubic (Communist) (2005), a woman is depicted sitting on a toilet. These are scenes where, in real life, the door would be locked, but here, transformed into the domain of painting, the door is opened. The artist succeeds in painting all of this without it necessarily coming across as provocation. The play of color and line gives the scenes a dynamic and lively effect. At the same time, the work contains a dimension of realism in the sense of: this is how it is, this is a woman’s body, or part of life as she perceived it, and that gives the work an almost factual persuasive power. During this period, Sirbiladze is stylistically free, and her work does not directly remind one of others.

The exhibition is titled Not Cool but Compelling, named after a 2011 drawing, which is an apt title for the artist’s attitude. Or at least, the exhibition presents an oeuvre that does not try to be cool but emerges from urgency and shifting interests. The fact that it sometimes becomes cool nonetheless is partly due to the current momentum, with attention to female perspectives and imagination. Just before her death, the artist had her first solo gallery show in New York, which could have been a breakthrough to a broader audience. That moment has now arrived in her adopted homeland of Austria, albeit posthumously.

The exhibition is curated by Sergey Harutoonian for Belverdere 21 in Vienna and is on view till 11 August 2024

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Aubrey Levinthal in Berlin

Aubrey Levinthal painting, exhibition Cloud Cover Berlin

Subject is a paradoxical matter in painting. What is depicted may seem to be the first thing to talk about – three figures swimming, people waiting for the bus – yet it is the last thing that matters when identifying what is special about a painting. In the case of Aubrey Levinthal’s exhibition Cloud Cover in Berlin, the subject matter might be described as scenes of domestic and urban life. The Philadelphia-based painter takes what she sees in her hometown as motifs to work with in the studio, whether it is a swimming lesson, a commuter trip, a dinner party, or a view of a snowy landscape.  What lingers in the mind, though, is not the action she observes, but  the ambivalent atmosphere of scenes and the texture of situations as they are captured through color, light and paint application.

Levinthal seems to have one hand in the present day, considering the images of city life, the window signs or a t-shirt print, and the other in art history, for instance, in the late 19th century. The works of Honoré Daumier come to mind in the way that Levinthal sharply characterizes her figures, while the spatial effects of flattened planes of color are reminiscent of Pierre Bonnard’s or Edouard Vuillard’s paintings. With many grays, whites, and browns, the palette and mood in most of Levinthal’s works is muted, but often one strong accent color is included to give contrast, such as the bright red in Coat Zipper, or the large yellow couch in M + C (Blanket). Such color constellations seem important for creating balance and organizing each painting, maybe even more so than the actual scene that is depicted.

The most complex work in the exhibition is the last one made for the show, Head Lights (Bus Stop). Here, the tilted perspective makes the sidewalk, the light beams of the approaching bus, the pit in the road, and the two waiting figures seem close and upfront to the viewer, different layers presented with equal intensity. Thus, the work is more about evoking the presence of an environment as experienced in an individual than about the outward appearance of things. Interestingly, despite the muted (in this case, grayish and rainy) palette, the works never fail to come across as a celebration of the visible world and an invitation to look with attention at how details, color, and light interrelate and together make up the patchwork of life.

Cloud Cover by Audrey Levinthal is on view at Haverkampf Leistenschneider in Beriln from 26 April till 15 June, 2024. On the occasion of the exhibition a publication was presented with texts by Dorothea Zwirner and Russell Tovey.

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Venice national pavilions

Iva Lulashi, painting in Albanian pavilion, Venice, 2024

The national pavilions offer, more than the Biennale’s main exhibition ‘Foreigner Everyhwere’, the excitement of seeing a cross section of contemporary art, layered in conception and with relevance for what is happening now. The various presentations are not necessarily connected, as every country had its own path to Venice, selecting one or multiple artists. Therefore, it is hard to discuss this part of the Biennale as one exhibition. However, what unites all exhibitors is their platform on the global stage provided by Venice. The question of how artists approach this opportunity and whether they can handle it, becomes part of the quality of the work. Below are ten pavilions that made a lasting impression on the author, while overt political commentaries are avoided and instead imaginative approaches are presented, tailored to the specific site of the building, the city or the Biennale.

(…)

Germany chose two artists, Ersan Mondtag and Yael Bartana, for the pavilion who both make a firm appearance, albeit without their contributions complementing each other. I found Bartana’s Light to the Nations to be the most captivating. The centerpiece, Farewell, is a 15-minute-long science-fiction film depicting people performing a ritual dance in nature before they leave Earth in a spaceship to save themselves and humanity. This Generation Ship has large round cylinders, each representing a different sphere of life such as learning, living and healing. Its form is based on the sephirot diagram, the main image of the Kabbalah, the Jewish mystic tradition. The film presents messianic narrative that, as is often the case in Bartana’s work, teeters on the brink of Romantic kitsch while closely resembling a religious movement in its aspirations and aesthetics. Her work exudes controlled pathos, grand gestures, and technological precision. The urgency of the science-fiction narrative lies in the question that may easily arise when reading the news today: Isn’t it time to consider an escape? Or perhaps more profoundly: Is escape even still possible?

(…)

In the Albanian pavilion, Iva Lulashi presents her works on a 1:1 scale model of her apartment in Milan, recreated within the Arsenale. The walls are arranged accordingly, the furniture and windows left out, providing a white-cube setting for a series of paintings united under the overarching theme Love as a Glass of Water. The figurative paintings show scenes of desire, the moment before or after making love, and other experiences, from a female perspective. Part of the works are based on erotic or pornographic footage that is then modified during the painting process. The domestic floor plan delivers a shelter where the works can have the intimacy and focus that the artist wishes to be the context for her work. At times this creates the feeling of looking at something you are not supposed to see, as with the painting of two female figures and a male, all naked and looking down, presented in a narrow tiled room that at the artist’s home must be the bathroom. A perfect example of how the presentation is part of the painting’s meaning.

(…)

The Croatian pavilion stands out as one of the most endearing spaces at the Biennale, serving not only as an exhibition venue but also as an artist studio for Vlatka Horvat, who invites artists from around the world to contribute small art pieces. However, these contributions come with a unique condition: they must be personally couriered by someone planning to travel to Venice, eliminating the need for additional shipping, and highlighting the environmental concerns associated with large-scale events like the Biennale. The works received by Horvat are displayed temporarily alongside her own pieces inspired by walks through the city where she captures memorable sights and moments and reimagines them through collage and drawing on photography. What Horvat achieves is a space of concentration, where looking at works and discussing them happen on an intimate, almost domestic scale. This contrasts in a positive sense with the spectacle of the Biennale, with its long queues and dense exhibition areas, plus the loud drums of major galleries hosting so-called collateral events across the city. Here, art-making takes on a more personal and improvised dimension, emphasizing the interconnectedness of artists. Moreover, the rotating display of works includes contributions from artists not officially representing a country.

Read the full report, with a selection of 10 pavilions, on Arterritory

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​​Venice Biennale 2024: Is It about Art or the Maker?

Foreigners Everywhere, Venice Biennale 2024

Visiting the Venice Biennale’s main exhibition Foreigners Everywhere means encountering many different conceptions of art making – or safer would be to just say “making.” A recurrent question while navigating the exhibition is “What am I looking at?”

I speak about ownership with a member of an aboriginal clan in Australia who is present at the Arsenale. “If you ask me for my jacket, I have to give it to you, because we are related,” he says. What is earned in his community, for instance through selling paintings, is shared; there is no hierarchy between people, or animals. One of their painters, Naminapu Maymuru-White, was invited to present at the Biennale a series of bark paintings that show animal and celestial motifs, and are based on centuries-old stories. The practice requires the maker to follow patterns of depiction as they have been passed down. They are meant to invoke old wisdom, and to connect the earthly sphere with heaven, the ancestors with the present. “When I go back, I don’t have a room with nice art works, I look into the eyes of a crocodile,” the man tells me, picturing the ferocity of nature back home, far from the city. “Do you eat animals?” I ask him. “Sure, and they eat us.”

The textiles, paintings, videos, sculptures, and other artifacts presented at this year’s Biennale are made for particular reasons, though not necessarily as art. What supposedly connects all the makers in the exhibition is that they are in some way foreign, be it indigenous, refugee, queer, or otherwise outside the mainstream – that is, in the eyes of curator Adriano Pedrosa, who leads the São Paulo Museum of Art. He has chosen mostly makers who originally come from the global South, and given them full stage. Thereby he focuses on the one hand on the 20th century to show how modern art has developed in different regions in the South, producing slightly different variations on vocabularies such as abstraction in painting. On the other hand, the focus is on current practices in all their diversity.

“I don’t know what I am looking at,” a gallery owner exclaimed, after having spent a day in the exhibition. Such a response could indicate excitement about meeting the unknown, but in this case it expressed frustration. The paradox with looking at something unknown is that it only resonates in the viewer if there is some level of familiarity about the discourse in which it could be discussed, be it about form or themes, about actions or concerns. It is the curator’s task to provide that frame-work, or direct the gaze through grouping and combining works. In Venice, though, a common base is not there; there is no aesthetic argument guiding the exhibition, which makes it very hard to compare things. Every work is a window to a world, even reflecting aspects that in the secular Western societies may be missed. But this requires the viewer to shift gears in every curve while going through the show: Is it craft, folk art, criticism, spiritual practice, political activism, or documentation? All of that can be found, and more.

(…)

Read the full review on Arterritory

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CAHH opens in Valencia

Mat Collishaw in Valencia

Should there ever be the need for an artist who can envision the apocalypse, Mat Collishaw would probably be the right man to call. This thought came up after I saw some of his work in Valencia, in the newly opened Centro de Arte Hortensia Herrero (CAHH), a private collection gone public, with an impressive list of artists, both Spanish and international. Collishaw is one of a handful who were invited to develop a site-specific work that would find a home in the renovated seventeenth-century Palazzo Valeriola in the center of town. In his work, there is often a sense of danger, be it violence, cruelty, or simply decay. But he presents his work in such a monumental and ingenious way that you cannot help looking. Like staring into a fire.

The CAHH was founded by Hortensia Herrero, a collector who, with her husband, Juan Roig, largely owns one of Spain’s supermarket chains. The headquarters of the company are close to Valencia, which is the reason the city is the focus of the cultural and entrepreneurial endeavors of the family. Not tax money, but grocery money coming back to the people.

Of the invited artists, Collishaw is probably the one who engaged most with the city, its tradition, and its history. For his Transformer (2023), he was inspired by the Fallas, Valencia’s yearly spring festivities accompanied by grand fireworks as well as the burnings of giant wooden ninots. These figures or characters are artfully built and carried in processions, after which they are burned. The fire stands for renewal, getting rid of (hated) figures; it is a centuries-old rite of spring. While in other cities, people might panic when they hear explosions, in Valencia nobody would believe it is war or an attack. It is just fireworks.

….

Read the full review online in the Brooklyn Rail, first published in Feb. 2024

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Lia Kazakou in Thessaloniki

Lia Kazakou, Untitled, 2024, detail

It has been eight years since Lia Kazakou presented a solo exhibition in her hometown of Thessaloniki. While her choice of motifs has largely remained the same – fragments of clothing, the front view of a dress, a single sleeve, the folds around a zipper – something has changed in the way she portrays them, imbuing the motifs with greater ambiguity. This development can be seen in the current exhibition titled Μύχια Ύλη, which could be translated as Innermost Matter. 

In a large work at the entrance (all works Untitled, 2023-24), a range of greens, from shiny pale to matte dark, coexist within a single canvas depicting a coat with a waistband, slightly opened. In a smaller work, a deep blue with dark shadows, light creating the impression of a film fragment. The fabric in the 15 paintings in the show is opulent, rich texture depicted in detail, with folds and the interplay of light and shadow. As the clothing is often portrayed close up, the viewer is denied the full picture or the appearance of the figure wearing the garment, with only a strip of skin hinting at their presence.

Throughout the exhibition, the motifs easily transition from their figurative origins into abstraction, from identifiable objects into patterns of parallel lines or gradations of colors. What initially seems like soft fabric may simultaneously evoke the touch of harder materials such as bone, wood, or metal. This material flexibility appears to stem from Kazakou’s increased freedom and confidence in handling her subject matter. Over the years, her motifs have gained intensity in color, accompanied by a heightened sense of plasticity. The motifs appear not just as garments, but as matter with an essence.

Innermost Matter is on view till 11 May, 2024 at Donopoulos IFA , 3 Agias Theodoras in Thessaloniki. The image shows a detail of Untitled, 2024, oil on linen, 110 x 70 cm.