HIPKISS Pit Land (Against Sea), curated by Monika Koencke Amorosa, until March 29 at Delmes & Zander

Installation view of the Hipkiss-show "Pit Land (Against Sea)", Delmes & Zander, Cologne
Photo: Johannes Post

SPEED 2 at Malmö Konsthall with works by Horst Ademeit and Adelhyd van Bender beside others

Image: Adelhyd van Bender, drawing from folder #52, 1999 -2014. © Delmes & Zander, Cologne.

SPEED 2
JAMES RICHARDS & LESLIE THORNTON
with works by Horst Ademeit, Tolia Astakhishvili, Adelhyd van Bender, Bruce Conner, Emily Feather, Terence McCormack, Vi Khi Nao, Thomas Zummer and Jens Thornton
16.03 – 26.05.2019, Malmö Konsthall

James Richards / Leslie Thornton, SPEED 2 opened on the 15th of March 2019 at Malmö Konsthall. This is the second iteration of the exhibition, following its first presentation at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart and takes the form of an expanded version, commissioned with Künstlerhaus and realised in dialogue with the spaces of Malmö Konsthall.

SPEED 2 comprises three major new commissions by James Richards and Leslie Thornton, alongside a show-within-the-show convened by Richards with works by Horst Ademeit, Tolia Astakhishvili, Adelhyd van Bender, Bruce Conner, Emily Feather, Terence McCormack, Vi Khi Nao, Jeff Preiss, Jens Thornton and Thomas Zummer.

In the making of SPEED 2, Richards and Thornton have been concerned with specific psychic and temporal states, rushes of interconnectedness and scientific wonder, as well as a sense of ecological dread and paranoia. The oscillation between an ordering impulse, and the relinquishing of control is a central feature of SPEED 2, one that returns in the exhibitions’ different modes: cinema screening, video mural, sound installation, study room and group show.

Many of the works in the group exhibition were made against a backdrop of apprehension and self-destruction during the Cold War, with its at times uncanny resonances with the present moment. The atmosphere contains an obsessive energy, a recurring fascination with rays, mind altering effects and rituals and the systematic sorting and recording of experience. It is sense of frantic repetition and labour, which van Bender described as ‘Divine Drudgery’, a spirit also present in Bruce Conner’s psychedelic inkblot drawings.

There is an impulse of collaboration that brought about SPEED 2, one shaped by the artists’ joint residency at CERN. This center for nuclear research became a working-site and a space for thinking artistically – the largest machine in the world, seeking the smallest particle, a combination between the epic and the mundane that recurs in the logic of SPEED 2. The exhibition comprises discrete and individual new works, from Richards’ large-scale video mural Phrasing and Thornton’s cinema installation Cut from Liquid to Snake, to the wall text and video installation Sheep Machine Redux, conceived for the spaces of Malmö Konsthall. It is a body of work developed from the artists’ individual practices but also from the third mind of collaboration, a channeling of and at times conscious unsettling of each other’s sensitivities. The basic biographical contrasts between Richards and Thornton are apparent: gender, age and sexuality are all points of difference. What has drawn them together is an inclination they seem to share: that of grabbing charged material, and without apparent judgement or moralising, filling and emptying it. There is an attuned pitch for locating and unsettling any received and comfortable meaning. And at the same time, they produce works with a highly specific sense of the contemporary moment and the urgencies that it presents.

Curated by Fatima Hellberg and James Richards with Matt Fitts

Commissioned by Malmö Konsthall and Künstlerhaus Stuttgart


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SPEED 2
James Richards / Leslie Thornton

Ausstellungseröffnung, Malmö Konsthall
Freitag, 15. März, 18–21 Uhr


James Richards / Leslie Thornton, SPEED 2 eröffnete am 15. März 2019 in der Malmö Konsthall. Es ist die zweite Version der Ausstellung nach ihrer Präsentation im Künstlerhaus Stuttgart. Dieser erweiterte zweite Teil wurde zusammen mit dem Künstlerhaus in Auftrag gegeben und im Dialog mit den Räumlichkeiten der Malmö Konsthall umgesetzt.

SPEED 2 besteht aus drei eigens für die Ausstellung produzierten Arbeiten von James Richards und Leslie Thornton, sowie einer von Richards zusammengestellten Ausstellung-in-der-Ausstellung mit Arbeiten von Horst Ademeit, Tolia Astakhishvili, Adelhyd van Bender, Bruce Conner, Emily Feather, Terence McCormack, Vi Khi Nao, Jeff Preiss, Jens Thornton und Thomas Zummer.

Im Entstehungsprozess um SPEED 2 beschäftigten sich Richards und Thornton mit einer Reihe psychischer und zeitlicher Zustände, einem rauschartigen Verbundensein und wissenschaftlichen Staunen sowie einem Gefühl ökologischer Verunsicherung. Das Oszillieren zwischen ordnendem Impuls und Kontrollaufgabe zieht sich als wiederkehrendes Merkmal durch die diversen Ausstellungsmodi von SPEED 2: Kinovorstellung, skulpturale Videowand, Soundinstallation, Lesesaal und Gruppenausstellung.

Viele der in der Gruppenausstellung vertretenen Werke entstanden vor der Kulisse dunkler Vorahnungen und drohender Selbstzerstörung in der Ära des Kalten Krieges, wobei sich nicht selten unheimliche Parallelen zur Gegenwart auftun. Die vorherrschende Atmosphäre birgt eine obsessive Energie, eine wiederkehrende Faszination für Strahlung, systematische Gliederung und Aufzeichnung von Erfahrungen sowie für bewusstseinsverändernde Effekte und Rituale. Dieses Gefühl fieberhafter Wiederholung und Arbeit, das van Bender als „göttliche Schinderei“ beschrieb, kommt auch in Bruce Conners psychedelischen Inkblot Drawings zum Ausdruck.

SPEED 2 entstand angeregt durch einen Impuls zur Kollaboration, der aus dem gemeinsamen Arbeitsaufenthalt der Künstler_innen am CERN hervorging. Das Zentrum für Nuklearforschung wurde zu einem Ort für das gemeinsame künstlerische Arbeiten und Denken – die größte Maschine der Welt, welche die kleinsten Teilchen erforscht, eine Kombination aus dem unbegreiflich Großen und dem Alltäglichen, die sich in der Logik von SPEED 2 wiederfinden lässt. Die Ausstellung enthält eigenständige Arbeiten, darunter Richards‘ großformatige Videowand Phrasing und Thorntons Kino-Installation Cut from Liquid to Snake, sowie die Wandtext- und Videoinstallation Sheep Machine Redux, welche speziell für die Räumlichkeiten der Malmö Konsthall konzipiert wurde. Alle Arbeiten sind aus den individuellen Praktiken der Künstler_innen und zugleich im Geiste der Zusammenarbeit entstanden – manchmal Bündelung, manchmal durchaus bewusste Störung der gegenseitigen Empfindungen. Die Biografien Richards‘ und Thorntons unterscheiden sich in so wesentlichen Punkten wie Geschlecht, Alter und Sexualität. Jedoch vereint sie die Neigung, sich aufgeladenes Material anzueignen und es ohne offenkundige Wertung oder Moralisierung zugleich aufzufüllen und zu entleeren. Sie sind aufeinander eingespielt, jegliche Form anerkannter, bequemer Bedeutungen aufzuspüren und zu erschüttern. Dabei produzieren sie Arbeiten mit einem höchst spezifischen Sinn für den gegenwärtigen Moment und die mit ihm verbundenen Dringlichkeiten.

Kuratiert von Fatima Hellberg und James Richards mit Matt Fitts

Im Auftrag von Malmö Konsthall und Künstlerhaus Stuttgart

Visit the website of Malmö Konsthall.

SPEED 2 /James Richards, Leslie Thornton and more at Malmö Kosthall

Image: Horst Ademeit, 551, 11.04.1992, inscribed polaroid (detail). Courtesy the Estate of Horst Ademeit / Delmes & Zander, Cologne.

 

SPEED 2 /James Richards, Leslie Thornton and more at Malmö Kosthall opening on the 15th of march. Curated by James Richards, Fatima Hellberg and Matt Fitts. In collaboration with Künstlerhaus Stuttgart.

 

(...) This second iteration which follows the exhibition at Künstlerhaus, comprises four new commissions: James Richards' video mural 'Phrasing'; Leslie Thornton's cinema installation, 'Cut from Liquid to Snake', alongside the jointly developed multi-channel sound piece 'Pocket call' and the wall text and video installation 'Sheep Machine Redux', conceived for the spaces of Malmö Konsthall. These elements are presented around a display of works by Horst Ademeit, Tolia Astakhishvili, Adelhyd van Bender, Bruce Conner, Emily Feather, Terence McCormack, Vi Khi Nao, Jens Thornton and Thomas Zummer, alongside a new presentation of Richards and Thornton's first collaborative piece 'Crossing' (2016). SPEED 2 is realised in collaboration between Künstlerhaus Stuttgart and Malmö Konsthall.

See the the event on facebook.
Visit the website of Malmö Konsthall.

No Love Without Pain - Albrecht Becker at the Independent New York

Images: Installation view of "No Love Without Pain", Independent New York, 2019

 

NO LOVE WITHOUT PAIN Albrecht Becker 

Independent New York

March 7 - 10, 2019

It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives. (Rosa von Praunheim, 1971)

In the fall of 1935, Albrecht Becker (1906-2002) is arrested and imprisoned for three years by the Nazis for violating Paragraph 175, the penal code that outlawed homosexuality in Germany until 1994. Five years later he signs up for the military service and is transferred to the Russian front. Here he begins to tattoo his own body and discovers the pleasures of pain. After the war Becker is introduced into the German flm industry, where he becomes one of the most prominent set designers and flm architects of the late 1950s to 1980s, working on over a hundred flm productions, some of which awarded with prestigious flm prizes.

Albrecht Becker begins his photographic self-portrayal in the early 1930s and continues to explore his body and his sexuality without apologies in an increasingly self-determined way for decades to
come. Hundreds of photographs taken over a period of forty years show an equivocal mise-en scène in which Becker engages in role play on multiple levels: He stages performative scenes and presents his body as a sculpture or uses it as a canvas, which he paints on, adorns and dresses up. He places himself in carefully composed flm sets and becomes the lead character, director, screenwriter and cameraman all at once. Permeated with a wry and witty theatricality, his self-portraits tell stories of seemingly irreconcilable versions of himself, an interplay between the sophisticated, dapper gentleman and the sexually empowered individual.

The photographic documentation is accentuated by the technical processes of post-production manipulation: Becker takes control of his physical transformations, and modifes his body through the very manipulation of the image by applying experimental techniques such as photographic duplication, multiple-exposure, mirror refection, collage and reworking the material. In a clever game of deception arising from different layers of medial-representation, his photomontages recall the work of Pierre Molinier in the way that they play with viewer's sense of orientation. Capturing simultaneity in one static image, his photomontages render the impression of movement as seen in Eadweard Muybridge's early photographic studies in motion.

A pioneer of body modifcation, Becker's work situates his body as a site for mutable and constant transformation: good or bad, accidental or intentional, he carries the results of his physical explorations with a grandeur bordering tongue-in-cheek exaggeration evocative of an attitude familiar from such contemporaries as Genesis P-Orridge. The continuity of his self-refection renders a complex, almost cinematic study that records the changes from middle- to old-age life and body. In this, it lucidly addresses the themes of time, mortality, sexuality and fetishism that are at the core of Becker's oeuvre. But his work is also an appeal to tolerance, to letting one be, thus gaining new signifcance in our times of rising radicalization and intolerance, in a growing climate of fear in Europe and beyond.

Becker has been the topic of several flms and his testimony as a gay man in Germany of the 1930s- 40s is featured in Rosa von Praunheim's documentary flm Love and Torment - Albrecht Becker (2005), in Hervé Joseph Lebrun’s Albrecht Becker, Arsch Ficker Faust Ficker (2004), as well as in Epstein and Friedmann's Paragraph 175 (2000). An interview with Becker is included in the visual history archive of the Shoah Foundation, an organization founded by Steven Spielberg for the remembrance of the Holocaust. James Richards’ video contribution to the 57th Venice Biennale (What Weakens The Flesh is The Flesh Itself, 2017) takes as a point of departure the photographic archive of Albrecht Becker. The exhibiton is made possible by the kind support of the Collection Hervé Joseph Lebrun.

ArtNews writing about Albrecht Becker at the Independent New York

Image: Albrecht Becker, 1979, untitled, 20.5x18.5cm, Copyright Hervé Joseph Lebrun, Courtesy Delmes & Zander

Claire Selvin writing for ArtNews about Albrecht Becker at the Independent New York

(...) Becker, who became a celebrated set designer in Germany following World War II, took hundreds of performative self-portraits over the course of 40 years, beginning in the early 1930s. The images, which function as meditations on the artist’s body and sexuality, often incorporate illusionistic elements and techniques like mirrors, photographic duplication, multiple-exposure, and collage. Having frequently utilized the transformative powers of make-up, costume, and decoration in his work, Becker, who died in 2002, is considered in the vanguard of art involving body modification.

Read the whole article.

Albrecht Becker / VICE

Tim Geyer writing about Albrecht Becker for Vice Magazine "Albrecht Becker survived WWII to become a pioneering photographer"

"Becker was proud of his sexuality, his body and his experiments, even those that failed – including one that left his penis permanently disfigured. This is one of the reasons the art world has rediscovered his work. From the 7th to the 10th of March, 2019, Becker's photographs will be shown at the Independent Art Fair in New York"

Click here for the article.
www.vice.com

Jesuys Crystiano at the Fundação Arpad Szenes – Vieira da Silva in Lisboa.

 

Jesuys Crystiano in the exhibition "Lusofolia. Insane Beauty", curated by Antonio Saint Silvestreat at Fundação Arpad Szenes – Vieira da Silva in Lisboa.

Jesuys Crystiano is shown in the exhibition "Lusofolia. Insane Beauty", curated by António Saint Sivestre at at Fundação Arpad Szenes - Vieira da Silva in Lisboa, opening on the 21st of March. With works from the Treger Saint Silvestre art collection the exhibition is organized in partnership with the Centro de Arte Oliva in São João da Madeira.

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“Art Brut”, the last artistic discovery of the 21st century, is the fad of biennials, museums and international art fairs, but it is yet to become popular in our country.

Portuguese “Art Brut” authors still live in “terra incognita”, apart from Jaime Fernandes, and for that reason we have decided to assemble about twenty “Brut” artists from the Portuguese-speaking world, bringing Portugal, Brazil and Angola together, and introducing them collectively for the first time.

The starting point will be Jaime Fernandes (1900-1969), the Portuguese artist from Covilhã who was committed to Miguel Bombarda Hospital, where he created his work, which is part of all international “Art Brut” collections.

Unfortunately, few pieces by this artist are left in Portugal, some in the Gulbenkian Foundation collections, others in our own collection, and some pieces still in in the hands of private collectors.

We will also introduce works by Portuguese artists Manuel Bonifácio, who lives in London, siblings Manuel and Ana Carrondo, Jaime Fernandes, Daniel Gonçalves, Ti Guilhermina, Rui lourenço, Carlos Victor Martins, Artur Moreira, José Ribeiro, Serafim Barbosa, Brazilian artists Albino Braz, Jesuys Crystiano, Evaristo Rodrigues, Marilena Pelosi, Camilo Raimundo and José Teófilo Resende, alongside precious drawings by unknown Angolan artists. It is the third time that the Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva Foundation has the audacity to host exhibitions from Centro de Arte Oliva, Treger/Saint Silvestre Collection, the only museum dedicated to this artistic field in the Iberian Peninsula.

António Saint Silvestre

Read more about TSS Collection and Fundação Arpad Szenes – Vieira da Silva 

"Outliers and American Vanguard Art" at Lacma, Los Angeles

Type 42 (Anonymous), Ava Gardner, mixed media on photography, 1960s-1970s, 8,3 x 10,8 cm

Type 42, Morton Bartlett and Eugene von Bruenchenhein are part of the show "Outliers and American Vanguard Art", curated by Lynne Cooke at LACMA, Los Angeles until March 17, after it was shown in the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. in 2018.

LACMA hosts the West Coast presentation of Outliers and American Vanguard Art, the first major exhibition to explore key moments in American art history when avant-garde artists and outliers intersected, and how their interchanges ushered in new paradigms based on inclusion, integration, and assimilation. The first part of the exhibition illustrates how the early history of American modernism, especially the first years of the Museum of Modern Art, championed folk art and self-taught artists before the ascendance of abstract expressionism. The second section begins in the late 1960s when artists affiliated with the Chicago Imagists and West Coast assemblage practices became the leading advocates for outliers and visionary artists. The third section shows the continued impact of outlier practices on contemporary art.

The exhibition features over 250 works in a range of media by more than 80 self-taught and trained artists such as Henry Darger, Sam Doyle, William Edmondson, Lonnie Holley, Greer Lankton, Sister Gertrude Morgan, Matt Mullican, Horace Pippin, Martín Ramírez, Betye Saar, Judith Scott, Charles Sheeler, Cindy Sherman, Bill Traylor, and Kara Walker.

Read more on the homepage of Lacma.