International Art News

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.

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)

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

From May 1 to Jul 24, 2012 – Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung’s innovative explorations of materials and process-based abstract painting make her one of Chicago’s most promising emerging artists. Fresh from her New York gallery debut, the artist presents new paintings that incorporate collage, found objects, and sculptural elements in unexpected ways that push the work beyond traditional notions of painting. BMO Harris Bank Chicago Works: Molly Zuckerman-Hartung is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition.

Molly Zuckerman-Hartung was born in 1975 in Los Gatos, California, and grew up in Olympia, Washington. She received her BA in 1998 from the Evergreen State College in Olympia and her MFA in 2007 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago . She is a co-founder of Julius Caesar, an artist-run exhibition space in Chicago and is currently an adjunct instructor at the School of the Art Institute and Northwestern University.

Museum Hours

June 5th, 2010 to July 3rd, 2010 – Aschenbach & Hofland Galleries

PLATINUM  METRE

ronald de bloeme
olaf holzapfel
koen delaere
michiel ceulers
bas van den hurk
tatjana doll
wendy white
alivia zivich & nate young

curated by koen delaere

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Gerhard Hofland asked me to curate a show at his gallery space in Amsterdam and I immediately thought of  making a show about painting.
I have been involved for ever so long with painting , falling in and out of love with it and in again.
The title of the show is Platinum Metre after an interview with Paolo Virno: The dismeasurement of art.  In this interview he argues that every time art comes up with a new form, the old ways to measure this form don’t function anymore: “It is as if the platinum metre bar kept in Paris to define the standard length of a metre suddenly measured 90 or 110 centimetres.”  Herein he sees a linkage between the artistic avant-garde and the radical social movement: “They both would like to explain that the old standards are no longer valid and to look for what might be new standards”. “Avant-garde art proved the impotence, the inadequacy, the disproportion of the old standards through a formal investigation. The common ground of art and social movements is never about content”. So for Virno the most revolutionary point in contemporary art is to be found in the formal side; for him this leads to ”new ways of living and feeling.” I like this direct link in his thinking between living and feeling and the formal . Nowadays it seems that if you want your work to be seen as engaged with the world you have to use either a lot of black paint or be very clear and illustrative.

I first asked Wendy White whose work I like because of the empty unpainted canvas space in it and the intuitive and human approach to the whole idea of painting. That immediately brings me to Michiel Ceulers who also recently described paint as a humane material to work with and I asked my friend Bas van den Hurk whose work looks really improvised and nonchalant but is totally imbedded in a programmatic research of the autonomy of painting. All of them working consciously with ‘flaws’ and ‘ faults’ . In that way the ‘faults’ and ‘drips’ in the works of Roland de Bloeme and Tatjana Doll are not that far away although each of these artists work within a totally different idiom. Ronald mixing pop and hard edge and Tatjana using idols from art history and objects like cars and fire extinguishers. With their works I have a long relationship through our mutual friend Joep van Liefland and his art space Autocenter in Berlin. Ronald suggested to invite Olaf Holzapfel and through my friend Peter Fengler who runs artspace De Player in Rotterdam I came in contact with the work of Alivia Zivich and Nate Young.
I see all these artists connected in a way which is both formal and engaged, both humane and autonomous, totally full of life and platinum.

Koen Delaere 2010  Gallery Hours