Hasta La Ideas

A mad tea party of paintings

Initially catching our eye at the recent NADA NYC fair, Michael Bauer has made an impression in the European art market for years with his energetically moody compositions. The German artist recently set up shop in New York, and in celebration of his move from Berlin to NYC he is holding his first solo show at Lisa Cooley Gallery, dubbed “H.S.O.P. – 1973“.

Bauer spent much of 2012 experimenting with collage and drawing, a practice that has invigorated his new paintings with what the gallery calls an “openness, dynamism, lightness and mischievous humor” not seen in his previous work. Still, certain elements from his early career remain, most notably his small, meticulous markings and his predilection for highlighting and obscuring physical deformity. According to the Saatchi Gallery, “Bauer uses the qualities of abstract painting as a deviation of representational portraiture, allowing the media to replicate the characteristics of physical matter.”

Even as his compositions become tighter and more centralized, Bauer seems consumed with making figurative elements from the marking of his medium. He describes the work in “H.S.O.P – 1973” as “portraits of gangs, families, music bands, collectives, or mobs—a grouping of characters revealed through the occasional eye or profile emerging from shadowy abstraction. Flat, crisp, bright, patterns usually provide the structure from which these organic nebulas originate.”

The title for the exhibition is a little obscure, and Bauer calls “H.S.O.P.” an “arbitrary reference” to the Hudson River School of painting, and because there’s a foot or foot-like shape in each painting, the accompanying numbers indicate European shoe sizes. The other elements aren’t quite so random. Bauer adds circular shapes to the corners to make them more like playing cards, with each painting like a “character in an unfolding cast, a mad tea party of sorts.”

”H.S.O.P. – 1973” is on view at Lisa Cooley Gallery through 17 June 2012.

Magnetized paintings expose eerie abstractions

Bulgarian artist Georgi Tushev creates magnetic landscapes, his forms simultaneously recalling nebulous cells and galactic moonscapes to strike a precarious balance between painting and sculptural art. With a body of work that ranges from pixelated paintings of vintage porn stills to portraits of Victorian-style rock stars, Tushev now presents “Ace of Spades“, a collection of new work at the Fitzroy Gallery in SoHo that explores the exotic landscapes of his signature look.

Tushev begins by taping the perimeter of his canvas to create a kind of sealed holding tank into which he pours oil paint with a high concetration of iron before exposing the black soup to a high-powered magnet. After the paint smokes and settles, bizarre formations settle on the canvas. The result is a combination of skillful artistic control and sheer chance, leaving circular fields of monochromatic topography.

For his works on paper, the artist likewise magnetizes watercolor paint, allowing the forces to separate his material into pure blacks, grays and whites. Concentric rings come together to create spectral forms which seem to reveal ghostly portraits, protean nuclei and terrestrial craters within the arrangement of pigment on canvas.

“Ace of Spades is on view at the Fitzroy Gallery through 13 July 2012. See Tushev at work in this video, and find more images from the exhibition in our slideshow

Fitzroy Gallery

77 Mercer Street

New York, NY 10012

Collective memories of China’s Great Famine reinterpreted for the stage

Two years after Memory I, famed documentarian Wu Wenguang and choreographer Wen Hui are back with a new performance that challenges the boundaries of art to reconnect people to a disappearing past.

In the summer of 2009, the pair began work on a documentary film project to chronicle the events that took place during the “Great Chinese Famine” between 1959-1961. By the summer of 2010, they had 21 people participating in the “Folk Memory Project”, and in the last two years they’ve recruited more than 40 participants—mainly film and dance students—for the second installment, Memory II: Hunger. They set out to visit the countryside and collect memories of living witnesses of the famine, one of the darkest periods of Chinese history that unfortunately has remained an empty page in modern history handbooks. More than 500 interviews recount the memories of grandparents and elders in 14 provinces and 67 villages and with the project Wu and Wen have created a visual encounter with ancestral roots and family recollections that has seldom been presented.

The five-hour multimedia stage performance spans recorded videos, photos, dance and acting. The stream of memory flows from the actors’ words and movement and the action on the screen, through the interviewers as firsthand witnesses to the audience. They pull onlookers into deep contact with memory, recalled feelings and experiences of the past.

During the rehearsals of Memory II, we had the chance to meet and talk to Wu Wenguang and Wen to learn more about the project.

You launched Project Memory in 2009. Memory I focused on the Cultural Revolution while Memory II is about the Great Famine. How did you begin exploring these dark periods of Chinese history?

At the very beginning, Wen Hui wanted to recall some memories of the time when she was young and she started dancing. Her first encounter with dance was during the Cultural Revolution: her very own experience and her growth is linked to that wave of red culture. The first and most well-known ballets were about revolutionary culture. At the beginning, it was more a reflection on personal memories. When we started doing interviews, we never limited our focus to the Cultural Revolution and the Great Famine.

The eldest we met were not necessarily talking about a specific topic or period, they were telling us about their more vivid experiences. These two phases of Chinese history became secondary topics that we present in our performance, the core of which is memory. That’s also a reason why Memory, or the Folk Memory Project, is an ongoing process that doesn’t end in a performance. We hope we can develop and shape the project through the difficulties we encounter.

How is Memory II different than the projects you did before?

Before we used to work on art pieces in which the performance was the ultimate goal, but Memory II is a social project. Dance, documentaries and other art forms simply became tools. This is something we didn’t plan. We involved so many young people and have been working with them. They go to their villages to seek history, to find an intimate link with the past, to discover their roots. The process of recalling is a process of self-discovery. We did art for so many years and we don’t think that art can change society. Now we probably can’t change the world but at least we can change ourselves. I used to think that I had nothing to do with the countryside, but in China if you go back five generations, everyone is from the countryside. Our approach aims to truly understand the place we all come from, to understand who we are, and this is the most important point.

The portrait of the Great Famine you depict in your performance goes far beyond the “official version”. Don’t you think this could put you in danger in a country like China?

Being a documentarian means that you don’t get satisfied with the public and the official version. You look for details you usually don’t find. In our history handbooks—the one we use in our performance was published in 2002 but the new one has just changed a few words—30 years of history are told in a single page, in a few lines. We look for what is behind common knowledge, we try to understand how the people really lived.

Memory II: Hunger had its premiere at CCD Workstation in Beijing on 1 May 2012. The next performance is scheduled for 18-19 May during Wiener Festwochen Festival in Vienna.

NADA debuts its first NYC art fair with a rooftop marketplace

Popping up in Miami during Art Basel for nearly a decade now, New York-based NADA (New Art Dealers Alliance) brought the show closer to home this year. The non-profit wisely timed their alternative art fair to run alongside the NYC debut of Frieze, London’s major art event that drew dealers and collectors from all over the world to Randall’s Island for the first time. NADA offered a great antidote to the frenzy of Frieze, taking place in a four-story building in Chelsea that made good use of the rooftop with a Phaidon book booth, coffee shop and a showing from Artis—a nonprofit that supports contemporary Israeli artists.

Instead of presenting work in a booth, Artis hosted The Artis Shuk, a playful rendition of traditional Middle Eastern marketplaces, or shuks (also known as souks). Works from more than 20 artists were available for sale, but unlike in the gallery booths at the rest of the fair, prices were listed on small cards displayed next to each piece. Most were less than $500 and all the proceeds went to the Artis Grant Program, which awards more than $125,000 to artists and nonprofits every year.

The undeniable standout at the shuk was an untitled sculpture of a glass of Turkish coffee sliced in half by Gal Weinstein. Turkish coffee, known in Israel as “mud” coffee, is an iconic Middle Eastern image. “Coffee can act as an invitation to a conversation or as reprieve from routine. Shown using the scientific visual language of a cross section, it also speaks to the gap between the efforts to analyze the Middle East and its complex reality,” explains Weinstein.

Another highlight, “Rolodex” by Zipora Fried is a real Rolodex the artist found. Fried went through it page by page and covered up all the names and numbers with archival tape, emphasizing the sense of loss that a discarded history of a person’s entire network would represent. Fried’s work often features covered faces as well as “drawings so dense they rebuff any illustrative meaning” and sculptures that are altered to deprive them of their functionality.

Working in a somewhat similar vein, Naomi Safron Hon seems to revel in making objects useless. “Straining, Mixing, Grating” and “Cement Grater”, two of her clay-clotted kitchen tools, were on display at the shuk. Hon uses these objects to symbolize how politically-motivated creation and destruction impact our daily lives, but on a more basic level, the delightful way the clay oozes out of the implements is aesthetically quite satisfying.

“D.I.Y: Fold Your Own Skull” is a kit by Itamar Jobani that you can use to construct a 3D skull from paper or plastic sheets. The pieces come pre-cut and pre-scored—all you need is glue. Jobani didn’t just want to make a cute rainy day project, he wanted to engage the buyer in a hands-on, art-making process.

Yan Pei-Ming captures past and present in five large-scale paintings

The first thing Yan Pei-Ming said while presenting his new exhibition, “Black Paintings” at David Zwirner was “I aspire to be an artist, period. Not a Chinese artist.” Though born in Shanghai, the artist is now based in Dijon, and speaks French—not Chinese—through a translator. “My work,” he continued, “does not have a ‘made in China’ feel to it. I’ve always tried to speak in a universal pictorial language.”

Pei-Ming certainly has a knack for choosing subject matter with a global reach. In the past, he’s gained notoriety for his large, monochromatic portraits of people like Lady Gaga, Bernard Madoff, Michael Jackson and Maurizio Cattelan. In this show, however, you won’t see many familiar pop-culture faces, save for Muammar Gaddafi in the work “Gaddafi’s Corpse”, which is hard to discern without reading the title first. In “Pablo”, Pei-Ming shows Pablo Picasso as a huddled young boy wearing large men’s shoes, an imagined memory of the great painter playing dress-up, perhaps, in his father’s clothing. “Exécution, Après Goya”, a bright red homage to Goya’s “The Shootings of May Third 1808“. The show’s title, says Pei-Ming, is “derived from a late series of wall paintings by Goya, since transferred to canvas. In these works, not originally intended for public view, the Spanish artist offers haunting visions of humanity’s darker side.”

“When Goya worked he had to work from his imagination, but in my case I’m working from documentation” says Pei-Ming, referencing the artist’s historical paintings. “We’re surrounded by photographs and documents that attest to what has happened and I use that as source material.” Though it’s doubtful that much original source material was needed for “Pablo”, it’s still true for most of Ming’s work, including his dark interpretation of the Acropolis, which he describes as “the cradle of Western civilization and democracy.” Titled “All Crows Under the Sun Are Black!”, Ming mounted it first in his show, as his way of putting “it in dialogue, face to face with art in the contemporary world,” he says.

“Moonlight” is another monochromatic gray painting depicting an immigration over rocky waters, illuminated by brushstrokes of white moonlight on the waves. Painted in much the same style as “All Crows Under the Sun Are Black!”, it too is a landscape that features a barely discernible outpost on the dark horizon, but the Acropolis is so dark it almost fades into the feverishly painted background. If you’ve ever seen a picture of the Acropolis you know that it’s huge and white, the centuries-old pillars standing strong on their flat-topped perch above Athens—and at night it’s lit up like the Lincoln Memorial. Here, Ming has shrunk it down and killed the lights, blending it so thoroughly into the background he seems to almost be wiping it from history itself.

“Black Paintings” marks a departure in Ming’s work not only from his focus on contemporary culture but also in his point of view. Instead of traditional portraiture, we see his figures splayed out, crouching on the ground or facing a firing squad. They’re not only shown in scene, in a narrative, but as part of a larger historical context, one that’s not pinned down to a specific moment in time. Instead of immortalizing a cultural icon at the height of their fame, Ming is depicting history in progress. He goes back in time to moments history may have overlooked in an attempt to connect the recent and distant past, and though he makes his point of view clear in the subjects he chooses to paint, those choices don’t represent a distinctly Chinese or even Eastern perspective, but one that’s uncompromisingly universal.

“Black Paintings” runs through June 23, 2012 at David Zwirner.

David Zwirner

525 W. 19th St.

New York, NY 10011