International Art News

Fabián Marcaccio: "Child Soldier Structural Canvas", 2011, pigmentierte Tinte auf Leinwand, Aluminium, Alkydharz-Farbe, Silikon, Foto: © LehmbruckMuseum, Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris

Until June 17, 2012 – LehmbruckMuseum
Fabián Marcaccio, born in Rosario de Santa Fe in Argentina in 1963, has been living and working in New York for more than twenty years. He became known in Germany, first and foremost, for his solo exhibitions at the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart (2000), the Kunstverein Köln (2001) and for his participation in the Documenta XI (2002).

Since the early 1990s Fabián Marcaccio is concerned with questioning and expanding the classical concept of painting. In his “Paintaints” – a neologism formed from the terms “painting” and “mutant” – the concepts of painting, sculpture and object art are fused. The continually increasing sculptural tendency of his works has been recently condensed into large figurative tableaus, “Structural Canvas Paintants”, due to whose outstanding sculptural quality he was awarded the Bernhard Heiliger Award for Sculpture. In his new group of works Marcaccio seizes on contemporary subjects from politics, economy and society. Among them are globalisation, bank crashes, transsexuality, genetic engineering and terrorism as well as the role of the media. In “CNN-Paintant”, for example, he shows the frazzled body of a reporter working for the Cable News Network that lies on the floor and thus points to the never-ending infotainment culture of war, blood and horror that informs our visual everyday life. Like in a kind of modern history painting, Marcaccio tells about contemporary historical moments or events but asks his spectators to question their verisimilitude.

LehmbruckMuseum

Jamie Baldridge "The Hindenburg Signal Ballet" Pigment print 2011

7th of May 2012 to 15th of June 2012  – Carbon 12 – Gallery
Carbon 12 proudly presents “Versus”, an exhibition of new works by Jamie Baldridge and Bernhard Buhmann. Buhmann returns to Dubai after a brilliant first solo exhibition at Carbon 12, in 2009 and it is Baldridge first “solo” in the Middle East.

It’s the golden age of struggle: occupy everything; lex talionis; welcoming to the jungle. Acceleration and demise go hand in hand; the hamster’s wheel leaves no room for imagination and introspection.

This is what we need and this is what they do. Baldridge’s meticulously composed images assembled from hundreds of digital photographs. “Existing in a state of quivering potentia, swirling somewhere in a sparkling electric reservoir, waiting to be brought into the light of day”, the very personal darkroom of one’s unconscious abyss.

Bernhard Buhmann "Heldenplatz" Oil on canvas 2011 200x185 cm

Buhmann’s magnum opus sucks the viewer directly into a narration, full of marvel and wonder, a parallel universe, an alternative reality, full of buskers and jesters, where rivers flow upstream and clocks go backwards, the irrational, the unexplainable. A place “where not only time is out of joint”.

Baldridge’s and Buhmann’s contemplative, at first glance almost unearthly approach to their respective media is very investigative, in subject and form alike. Their struggle is universal, their matters ubiquitous; the artist as the alchemist or the artist as a prophet.

Baldridge and Buhmann oeuvres are deeply rooted within art history. Hieronymus Bosch, as a very early example, where overall composition and detail are in constant dialogue, not only reflecting world views and belief systems, but deconstructing and reconstructing the semantics themselves. Inner urge as their impulse, friction as their motif. Fighting against, fighting with, fighting for. This is VERSUS.

Jamie Baldridge, born in 1975 in Louisiana, is a professor of photography at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, USA.

Bernhard Buhmann, born in 1979 in Bregenz, Austria, is the winner of the STRABAG Art Award 2008.

Carbon 12

Roy Lichtenstein. Masterpiece, 1962. © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein, Agnes Gund Collection

May 16–September 3, 2012 – The Art Institute of Chicago
This exhibition, the first presentation of the full scope and breadth of Roy Lichtenstein’s career since his death in 1997, aims to offer a new, scholarly assessment of the work of this foremost Pop artist. Lichtenstein is an artist whose work is widely known, reproduced, copied, and parodied—he is an artist that we seem to know well but in fact the true diversity and complexity of his oeuvre is little understood.

Roy Lichtenstein – Girl With Hair Ribbon – Oil and magna on canvas – 48 x 48 inches; 121.9 x 121.9 cm – 1965 The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation

Presenting over 130 paintings and sculptures, as well as over 30 little- or never-before-seen drawings and collages, this exhibition gives full consideration to all periods of Lichtenstein’s career, including but not limited to, pre-Pop expressionist work, classic Pop Romance and War cartoon paintings, Mirrors, Brushstrokes, Explosions, Artist’s Studio paintings, late nudes, and Chinese Landscapes. Special consideration is given to Lichtenstein’s relationship to art historical sources, ranging from Picasso and Cubism through Surrealism, Futurism, German Expressionism, and the American West.

Roy Lichtenstein. Ohhh…Alright…, 1964. © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Private Collection.

Finally, the exhibition offers an examination of the artist’s use of alternative media like Plexiglas, Rowlux, and perforated steel in an attempt to broaden the understanding of his art beyond the strictly canonical early Pop paintings.

Art Institute of Chicago

Rona Yefman, Girl on Her Elephant (Detail), 2002 © Rona Yefman, Courtesy Rona Yefman und/and Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel-Aviv

From May 04th to September 02nd, 2012 – Kunsthalle Wien
Clear the ring for the world of acrobats, clowns, and exotic animals! Presenting a number of contemporary works of art, the exhibition The Circus as a Parallel Universe offers an introduction into the universe of the circus and highlights a wondrous place full of knowledge of the world, surprises and sensations, a place of poetry, but also of excitement, confusion, and unease.
The circus as a parallel world has become a projection surface in film and literature, but also in the fine arts. fascinated with the circus, its forms, and its practice, Peter Blake has created his own personal company of acrobats and fabulous circus creatures, for example. Federico Fellini has made the circus the subject of numerous films, and Charlie Chaplin’s figure of the tramp transcends the norms of social life. Ulrike Ottinger’s works confront us with the circus as a metaphor of an utopian perspective in which its sphere features as the gentle twin of revolution. Besides animals and acrobats, it is primarily the figure of the clown whose complexity oscillating between good and bad, funny and sad has always inspired the arts. Reaching far beyond the actual fringes of the circus’s ring, the exhibition assembles international artistic positions that thematize the world of the circus outside the big top and draw on its figures, forms, and metaphors.

Daniel Firman, Nasutamanus, 2012 Courtesy Galerie Perrotin, Paris © Daniel Firman, Foto/Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli

Participating Artists:
Diane Arbus, Matthew Barney, Julien Bismuth, Rhona Bitner, Peter Blake, Olaf Breuning, Bernhard Buhmann, Alexander Calder/Carlos Vilardebo, Charlie Chaplin, Clifton Childree, Charles & Ray Eames, Federico Fellini, Daniel Firman, Thilo Frank, Jeppe Hein, Roni Horn, Anna Jermolaewa, Anna Kolodziejska, Tomasz Kowalski, Patricia Leite, Zilla Leutenegger, Ulrike Lienbacher, Jonathan Monk, Bruce Nauman, Ulrike Ottinger, Marion Peck, Ugo Rondinone, Julian Rosefeldt, Joe Scanlan, Elisabeth Schmirl, Deborah Sengl, Cindy Sherman, Simmons & Burke, Kristian Sverdrup, Javier Téllez, Joe Wagner, Martin Walde, William Wegman, Nives Widauer, Erwin Wurm, Rona Yefman

Kunsthalle Wien Museum

Vera Klute - Its coming out of my ears - fountain, plaster, pump, bucket, water, dimensions variable, 2011

From 7 May 2012 until 19 June 2012 – Butler Gallery – The Castle
The Butler Gallery reads like a latrine in the  context of Vera Klute’s work––especially considering the artist’s ‘pissing ear’ work at the far end of the Kilkenny art space entitled It’ s coming out of my ears. The grey tiled floor and series of ‘alcove galleries’ force the viewer to walk to the right and look to the left. Unavoidably, the art works are given a serial and segregated presentation, while the artist tries to form a cohesive hole. Saying that, the staccato architecture is perfect for Klute’s work, which presents the body as a series of disconnected bit-parts; divine and maybe not so divine.

Vera Klute - Its coming out of my ears (detail), - fountain, plaster, pump, bucket, water, dimensions variable, 2011

You almost have to break down her art practice into genus and species: drawings and paintings are also present. In each disconnected space of the gallery the viewer is presented with a limb, limbs or internal organs, that are being manipulated by kinetic or digital means. A series of large drawings hang volutes-like from the ceiling with a top heavy composition of what can only be read as cherubim. However, the composition crops the heads of the figures, suggesting decapitation or Icarian hubris. The latter seems to fit Klute’s playful fabrications, which suggest the daring of science and technology to play God through cybernetic experiments…(James Merrigan)

Vera Klute - Its coming out of my ears (detail), - fountain, plaster, pump, bucket, water, dimensions variable, 2011

From oil paintings of dead creatures to a pair of mechanical spoon-wielding hands, Vera Klute also does film installations and precise pencil drawings, as in Public Pool, which hangs ceiling-to-floor to give an underwater view of headless bodies in bathing suits, arms and legs flailing.

German-born, Dublin-based Klute makes art that is often uncanny and often absurd, driven by a dispassionate fascination with how humans function.
Klute consistently jolts viewers out of any sense of certainty about the nature of things with a show that is part science experiment, part psychological challenge. It deliberately raises more questions than it answers, which is just one of the reasons it works.

Gallery Hours

Sarah - Alex Katz, 2012 - 104 x 99 cm-41 x 39 inch - Lithograph on paper Edition: 60

From May 12 to July 06, 2012 – Galerie Fluegel-Roncak
On view are paintings and prints, mostly from the last 15 years with his famous portraits and landscapes.
Alex Katz was born in 1927 on July 24th in Brooklyn/New York and is one of the most important artists of american contemporary and pop art. His works are in all major museums around the world including Albertina/Vienna or MOMA/New York.
He developed his own kind of painting by producing iconic, cool effective images of life in the wealthy leisure class, and of natural idylls. In a further step, he reproduced, reflected, and reduced his motifs in his prints, which retained the planes of deep, radiant color that characterize his paintings.
Alex Katz celebrates his 85th Birthday on July 24th 2012.

Galerie Hours