How Cringe Culture Is Appearing in Contemporary Art https://ift.tt/lJoqHyk

The Australian siblings and filmmaking duo Dan and Dominique Angeloro, known as Soda Jerk, created the film Hello Dankness (2023) earlier this year, a work composed entirely of samples from other films and advertisements to narrate the sociopolitical landscape of the United States from 2016 to 2021. The piece opens with an unedited, extended version of Kendall Jenner’s 2017 Pepsi advertisement, “Live for Now.” In that commercial, the model is seen leaving the superficial environment of a fashion photo shoot to join an “authentic” protest, filled with young creative types marching together and bonding over their shared love for equality…and Pepsi.

Jenner, presumably emboldened by the radical politics of consumerism and its ability to cross political bridges, gives a Pepsi can to a riot officer in this commercial. The exchange is meant to signal a break in decades of police brutality that can only be accomplished through the offering of a soft drink, a Pepsi, specifically. For Soda Jerk, the commercial marked the arrival of “cringe culture” as the leading social norm of 21st-century media. Contemporary artists, as respondents to the sociocultural times they live in, have begun to respond to cringe culture and incorporate it into their practices.

According to Andrew Paul Woolbright, an artist, curator, writer and gallery director of Below Grand, cringe, as a 21st-century cultural sentiment, is a response to the performance of sincerity that emerged through reality television, social media, and post-9/11 nationalism. The more we began to watch others perform authenticity, the more awkwardness became a central feeling of the 21st century.

Contemporary artists like Boo Saville, Christine Wang, Carrie Schneider, and others are making art that encapsulates the feeling of cringe. The work itself might induce cringe or it may reference encounters that evoke cringe across popular culture through celebrities and political figures, from Mariah Carey to Angela Merkel. These artists’ paintings and photographs demonstrate that cringe might be the most contemporary subject in our midst.

Actress, 2022
Boo Saville
TJ Boulting

Single Set of Eyes (I don't know her), 2023
Carrie Schneider
CHART

But what is cringe, exactly? The word cringe describes feelings of awkwardness or acute embarrassment, most often from the way that a person acts or interacts with others. Cringe may arise due to the performance glitches, like when Ashlee Simpson awkwardly danced off-stage during her 2004 Saturday Night Live performance after lip-syncing to the wrong song.

Artist Christine Wang, whose paintings incorporate internet memes, popular personalities, and text, defines cringe as “secondary embarrassment that involves two people: the subject who judges and the object that is judged to be cringe,” she told Artsy. “The first person or point of embarrassment is the object of my cringe. The second person, myself feeling cringe, is the subject in the sense of the word—I am subject to the feelings of embarrassment for the first person.”

Galadriel, the character played by Cate Blanchett in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, where she shows the future to Frodo through a water bowl. What makes the scene memeable is Blanchett’s deadpan delivery and intense eye contact. Wang’s painting further intensifies this through her mixture of acrylic and oil paint that creates a near-photorealistic reproduction of the image. As close to reality as Wang’s paintings appear, they never quite feel seamless, thus producing an uncanny feeling that adds to the cringe factor.

“Cringe allows me to have sympathy and aversion towards the cringey person at the same time. I feel fear and I identify with cringe,” Wang explained. “Cringe culture also involves the internet, and my work is about how the internet recontextualizes images of celebrities within a meme format. Cringey people don’t think they are embarrassing, but when their images are recontextualized and circulated, the cringe becomes cringey.”

Voice's Owner (I don't know her), 2023
Carrie Schneider
CHART

In a similar fashion, Carrie Schneider’s painterly photographs of popular icons that share either the same first or last name as the artist, recontextualizes how these figures have emerged in memes or in GIFs. In her series “I Don’t Know Her” (2023), which was featured in her solo exhibition of the same name at CHART earlier this year, Schneider recontextualizes a popular GIF of singer Mariah Carey. The artist rephotographs—still by still—Carey’s infamous “I don’t know her” response to a reporter when asked about the work of Jennifer Lopez in the early 2000s via a makeshift ultra-large camera on photo paper.

“I don’t know her” is the epitome of awkward as Carey blissfully smiles while shaking her head “no,” as the reporter tries to get her to say more. In the 20 years since that cringe encounter, the sequence has become the ultimate sign of what Schneider defines as a “feminine refusal.” For Schneider, the “I don’t know her” response was Carey’s way, through awkwardness, to refuse to be baited by the press to deliver a scathing remark that would have made headlines; hostile press surrounded Carey at the time, as she was recovering from a nervous breakdown. In this light, cringe can actually be seen as an opportunity for audiences to find a deeper meaning within the performance, like uncovering Carey’s agency in that awkward moment.

Schneider noted that she is thinking of “I don’t know her” as “a structure of social entrapment, where there is no good (useful, productive) way out, so the only answer is to drop out.” She added, “[Carey’s response] is meta while being completely and totally germane on the street. Her simple refusal operates on multiple registers which is why it struck a chord with so many of us, and has continued to resonate for so long.”

Jesse Firestone, curator at Montclair State University Galleries, similarly explains that cringe can be examined as the “punctum,” as described by Roland Barthes, of many artists’ practices, as a means of resonating with the viewer. In all of the above insights, cringe is felt or explained through the individual’s ability to feel cringe, to recognize their awareness and ability to respond to art and media based on how they feel about the work.

Like the Pepsi ad and per Wang’s and Schneider’s work, cringe is often recontextualized or identified by others across everyday media. Cringe is not a space of outright mockery, nor is it a gimmick. In fact, Firestone warns against the situation where “cringe is the sole focus of an artist’s practice, rather than a mode they engage with.” Instead, as the curator concludes, cringe in art can be considered “a way to remind us of some of the most raw human emotions [available]: Failure, accountability or lack thereof, and shame.”

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For Contemporary Artists, Trompe L’Oeil Is about Much More than Tricking the Eye https://ift.tt/mUNE6sp

Waiting For My Sunshine, 2023
Jeremy Shockley
The Hole

The Duck, 2023
Anne Carney Raines
Soho Revue

In his Natural History, Pliny the Elder recorded a contest of skill between two artists. According to the ancient work, Zeuxis painted grapes so realistic that birds attempted to pluck them from the vine, but when he tried to draw aside the curtain concealing his competitor Parrhasius’s work, he discovered that the curtain itself was the painting: Zeuxis may have fooled the birds, but Parrahasius had fooled his fellow man.

This painterly illusion came to be known as trompe l’oeil, its aim “to deceive the eye through various pictorial techniques and optical effects that allow a visual distraction in which the viewer takes an active part,” explained María Eugenia Alonso, technical curator of “Hyperreal: The Art of Trompe l’Oeil,” which was on view at the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid last year. This technique allows the viewer to experience a series of experiences, she said: “from the initial deception to the final discovery that he has been deceived.”

Cône noir, 2023
Daiya Yamamoto
Galerie Taménaga

Sillon du temps, 2022
Daiya Yamamoto
Galerie Taménaga

Renaissance artists who knew their Pliny emulated the technique, but it was in 17th-century Holland that trompe l’oeil became an independent pictorial genre that would continue to be cultivated well into the 19th century. Although it then fell out of favor in Europe, it was revived in the same century by North American artists, and continues to be used by artists with varying effects in the 21st century.

We may like to think that we are not as easily fooled as the ancient Greeks, but in the age of AI-created artworks and deep fakes, that’s not necessarily the case. Indeed, artists who are working with trompe l’oeil today are perhaps not trying to deliberately confuse us, but rather encourage us to look carefully at the world around us and question what we see.

Painter Daiya Yamamoto blends the heritage of Flemish masters with the purity of Japanese aesthetics to create exquisite, minimalist works. In a recent solo show at Galerie Taménaga, his photorealistic works often focused on subjects that are not considered conventionally attractive: a gardening tool, or flowers in bud rather than full bloom, for example. Painted as if taped to the canvas or suspended from fine twine, the result is sublime.

mt masking tape, 2020
Daiya Yamamoto
Mottas

In mt masking tape (2020), Yamamoto even succeeds in turning strips of eau de nil masking tape into a work of astonishing meditative beauty. The space around the subject is always a vital part of the composition, giving room to contemplate the objects he has rendered in such remarkable detail and encouraging us to question our preconceptions of what is and isn’t worthy of admiration.

Tape also features in the work of German painter Jochen Mühlenbrink: shiny, brown parcel tape. In a play on the 17th-century tradition of realistically portraying the back of the painting, Mühlenbrink paints his parcel tape holding together sheets of bubble wrap, which appear to be wrapped around a canvas. Elsewhere, it is arranged in random abstract patterns.

LMP, 2023
Jochen Mühlenbrink
Gether Contemporary

J'MWP, 2023
Jochen Mühlenbrink
Gether Contemporary

In works like WP (2023), part of a recent solo show at Gether Contemporary, Mühlenbrink turns the canvas into a misted window, complete with finger-drawn graffiti; the resulting drips appear to cut through the fogged-up glass as they slide down the pane. They are so phenomenally lifelike that even the artist’s colleagues and gallerists have been fooled, but mere deception is not his aim, he told Artsy—it is the distance between painting and viewer that allows for the suspension of belief that fascinates him.

“Depending on the scale, you have a specific distance when the painting says ‘stop.’ When you come closer you kind of begin to look behind the scenes, you are drawn into the details, but you cannot see the composition in your viewing field anymore,” Mühlenbrink said, noting that to fully appreciate the magic of his works, they have to be seen in person.

Having always considered herself a still-life painter, Josephine Halvorson said that trompe l’oeil eventually “found her.” “As someone painting from life, my ambition has always been to transcribe the experience of being then and there to a painting,” she said. Halvorson’s work includes a series of windows and doors created at the same scale as the architecture of the Villa Medici, where she took part in a residency at the French Academy.

Night Window, July 30-31, 2015, 2015
Josephine Halvorson
MASS MoCA Benefit Auction

Woodshed Door, 2013
Josephine Halvorson
Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

For Halvorson, trompe l’oeil “is not about illusion, deception, or trickery. It’s more about getting to know something, sensitizing oneself to it through proximity, through touch, through looking closely, and through description. In other words, a kind of training ground to see what is real through the simple practice of looking,” said the artist, whose work has been featured in solo exhibitions at ICA Boston and Storm King Art Center. “I found myself getting closer to my subjects to sensitize myself to their surfaces in hopes of discovering the lives embedded in the objects themselves.”

Emerging London-based painter Anne Carney Raines takes a very different approach, using her background in painting theater backdrops to confront the artificiality of the picture plane, as well as, perhaps, our own existence. In interviews, Carney Raines has noted that there is a lot of theater going on in our everyday lives, be it political, on social media, or in the acting out of fake news. In paintings such as Whisky Throttle (2022) or The Duck (2023), she creates dreamlike scenes that the viewer feels almost compelled to reach into.

Whiskey Throttle, 2022
Anne Carney Raines
Alma Pearl

Breuer , 2018
Isidro Blasco
Simões de Assis

In its focus on the nature of representation, trompe l’oeil also offers a new way to see other art historical movements. For example, a recent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art traced the impact of this beguiling technique on Cubism, comparing the ideals and goals of these two traditions. This influence spills over into contemporary artists, too: Cubism is a major influence on Isidro Blasco’s trompe l’oeil constructions that are composed of multiple photographic images of the same space.

Like a Cubist painting in 3D, a work such as Breuer (2018) by Blasco breaks up and reassembles its subject, allowing us to view it from numerous perspectives, which, oddly, can feel more like a realistic experience of perception than a single plane. “You can look at an object and get a lot of different feedback from it. You don’t just see one thing,” Blasco told Artsy. Since our current state of mind and past experiences will always affect how we relate to a place or object, “Cubism reflects a little better what we perceive when we open our eyes,” he said.

As contemporary artists continue to question the aesthetics of realism—and indeed, what is real and what is not—trompe l’oeil is still one of the most vital and compelling techniques in an artist’s toolbox.

Browse available works in the collection “Contemporary Trompe L’Oeil.”

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Why Small Galleries Are a Vital Force in the Art Ecosystem https://ift.tt/V71pABq

Small galleries are the heart of the art world, and are uniquely positioned to unlock direct access to their local art scene. They also play a vital role in shaping the broader art world, providing collectors and institutions with the opportunity to discover and support emerging artists and galleries.

But the costs of running a gallery can be more pronounced for small galleries, where simple administrative costs can become a make-or-break issue. At London-based NıCOLETTı, gallery director Camille Houzé emphasizes that location can also impact the overall budget. Houzé mentions the difficulties that come with running a gallery in the U.K., which is currently dealing with high inflation and Brexit-related issues such as increased shipping costs. These factors have affected what type of installation work the gallery can accomplish: Ambitious, large-scale works require inventive techniques, can come at the cost of the gallery, and can often puzzle collectors. “One of the challenges we face as a young gallery is to support radical practices—or artists working with mediums that collectors are less used to acquiring,” Houzé told Artsy.

One of the ways in which this tension can be alleviated for such galleries is to have their emerging artists partner up with multiple galleries, especially larger ones who may be able to support their ambitious installation goals. KJ Freeman of New York–based gallery HOUSING echoed a similar sentiment when discussing her reason for partnering with Karma to support the work of Nathaniel Oliver: Both galleries would get to work with the emerging artist, giving him an increased platform to reach newer collectors.

But for some galleries, building these partnerships, as well as with collectors and the local community, can be difficult. Having a space in a small town without a knowledgeable collector base takes a lot of hard work and optimism to be successful, noted Richard Lally, founder and director of Espace Lally, which is based in Béziers, a commune in southeastern France. “Getting noticed and attracting a steady stream of visitors can be tough, particularly if the gallery is located in a less frequented area or lacks a strong online presence,” he said. Lally is combatting this by working more with a more locally focused program of artists and increasing his online sales to bring in new collectors.

Délit de Faciès 2 , 2013
Fatima Mazmouz
ESPACE LALLY

Marie, Mère de Dieu, 2021
Laura Labri Laborie
ESPACE LALLY

Some galleries are abandoning a brick-and-mortar practice altogether. Curator and gallery director Storm Ascher runs a nomadic practice with Superposition, which stages shows in temporary spaces. “Once considered a niche concept, the nimble model has now permeated art discourse, and I’m very optimistic about this,” said Ascher. “I think this rising generation of gallerists exemplifies a new level of sophistication unparalleled in history.”

Lally echoes Ascher’s points that small galleries are, sometimes out of necessity, creating more flexible spaces as a way to attentively meet the needs of their artists and maintain their business. For Espace Lally, its former brick-and-mortar spaces were ecologically and geopolitically constructed. Lally opened the gallery in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1992, which followed the 1991 coup-d’etat and embargo placed on the country. Its original location closed in 2000 and reopened in 2010, only to be severely damaged by the catastrophic earthquake that year. Espace Lally has begun again in Béziers in 2020, and while the reception to the shows with artists such as Fatima Mazmouz and Laura Labri Laborie have been well received, it has been a long road for the gallery.

Art fairs are another key way for galleries to meet new collectors and institutions. Houzé emphasizes that small galleries tend to exhibit more ambitious works at fairs as they are willing to take a risk on an artist’s vision, while Ascher asserts that larger entities like museums depend on the presence of small galleries in these spaces during the fairs as they are critical sites for discovery.

For example, museum acquisitions made during fairs are often in support of emerging artists, like when the Brooklyn Museum acquired a Diedrick Brackens tapestry from Various Small Fires at Frieze New York in 2019. Small galleries are routinely utilized as a discovery tool, as they are more closely connected to their local art scene.

“Small galleries have historically played a significant role in the art world by providing emerging artists with exhibition opportunities and acting as platforms for experimentation and creativity,” said Lally. “They often have more flexibility in showcasing unconventional and niche art compared to larger, more established institutions.”

Matrix Vegetal; comparto mi espíritu con tu flor, 2021
Patricia Dominguez
NıCOLETTı

Some years doing just that, being much More, 2022
Naïla Opiangah
Superposition

Ascher echoes Lally’s position when stating what Superposition’s mission. “Our mission-driven programs are borne out of personal struggles and experiences that have galvanized us to create a transformative impact,” she said. “It’s grounded in a genuine love for the art community, our culture, and a willingness to shoulder the burdens that artists face as they reshape perspectives or reflect their time period.”

Small galleries also tend to forge tighter bonds with their artists. For Houzé, small galleries are a source for discovering new artists and supporting their practices. “A young gallery has the capacity to give voice to artists coming from more diverse backgrounds, as well as to ask questions and promote discourses that may have been sidelined,” he said. “To ensure its sustainability in the future, we need the support of press, collectors and institutions.”

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5 Collectors on the Artwork That Shaped Their Collection https://ift.tt/dzeXa5N

For many collectors, the artworks they purchase can stand as representations of themselves, reflecting their views, artistic preferences, values, and overall appreciation of artistic expression. This makes selecting pieces a personal experience: Each purchase is a distinctive endeavor that requires much thought and research, but is also considered in terms of shaping one’s art collection as a whole.

Artsy spoke with five prominent collectors who shared the stories behind the specific artworks that have played a key role in building their collections.

Michael Sherman

Producer, Los Angeles

For the film producer Michael Sherman, building an art collection has become a familial undertaking. “My house is my sanctuary. It’s my personal space where my wife, my daughter, and I live on a daily basis,” he told Artsy. “So when we walk around the house, we want to experience joy when we see the work in the house. We want to be able to share the stories of the artists with people who come over and celebrate them, and the beauty that they’ve created.” Sherman’s desire to share the stories behind the artworks of his collection means that he makes a concerted effort to learn about an artist’s history firsthand, and meet them if the opportunity arises. “One thing I do is I spend a lot of time meeting artists and getting to know them. I collect based on the artist and their story,” he said.

It is this effort that led Sherman to make one of his first prominent art purchases, Simone Leigh’s Meredith (2009). Crafted from stoneware raffia and steel, Meredith is the physical representation of Leigh’s reinterpretation of Edgar Degas’s sculpture Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen (1879–81). A leading artist working today, Leigh uses the mediums of sculpture, installation, and video to explores the themes of historical and contemporary racism in the U.S.

For Sherman, Meredith is an example of how the pieces and artists that form his collection tell their “stories from different spaces and angles, and whether it be from joy, pain, trauma…you know, experiences.”

Anne Huntington Sharma

President of Huntington Learning Center, Philanthropist, Producer, and Curator, Sioux Falls, South Dakota

Anne Huntington Sharma’s career is as multifaceted and diverse as her art collection. The president of Huntington Learning Center is also a curator, documentary producer, and philanthropist, and she also serves on the Guggenheim’s International Director’s Council.

For Huntington Sharma, each individual piece of her art collection serves as a bookmark for the different chapters of her life. “I started collecting in my early twenties. Now I’m in my late thirties,” she told Artsy. “The collection has matured with me.”

Rather than look at a personal timeline mapped out by social media, Huntington Sharma can look at her art collection and see how specific pieces reflect what stage of life she was in at the time of their purchase.

The artistic timeline that exists within Huntington Sharma’s collection also illustrates explorations through artistic expression. Pieces include Urs Fischer’s NFT Chaos #26 (2021) that serves as a modern interpretation of the Venus of Willendorf statue, which was estimated to have been first made some 25,000–30,000 years ago. Then there is Brian Bress’s Striped Angles on a Norfolk Island Pine (2015), which uses the tools of a high definition single-channel video, framed monitor, and player to present a dance in a continuous sequence across in an interactive, meditative experience for viewers.

Another key piece of Huntington Sharma’s collection, which explores the history of different art mediums that have evolved from modern technologies, is David Hockney’s The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate East Yorkshire2011 (twenty eleven)-31 May, No 1 (2011).The piece is a part of Hockney’s series of digital paintings on his iPad. The British artist first created landscape on canvas in 2007 with his iPhone, and then in 2010 began to use his iPad and Stylus as art tools. Hockney recognized that the iPad gave him the ability to digitally paint and draw, while also allowing people to see each stroke and layer he added to a piece after it was printed on a large scale.

“One of the beautiful things about collecting is seeing art and all its forms evolve,” said Huntington Sharma. “I’m all for experimentation and pushing boundaries and seeing what’s possible. It all makes me realize that time is our biggest commodity.”

Mark Hilbert

Namesake Donor and Founder of the Hilbert Museum of California Art at Chapman University, Orange, California

When selecting a new piece of art to add to his collection, there are three specific qualities that property investor Mark Hilbert looks for. “It has to be beautiful and have an interesting composition,” he said. “Most importantly it has to tell a story. It goes back to something that my wife said early on in our collecting career. I brought home a landscape and it was an ocean scene. She looked at it and she said, ‘You know, it’s a very interesting ocean scene, but if it had people in it, it’d be a lot more interesting.’”

Phil Dike’s Sunday Afternoon in the Plaza de Los Angeles (1939) is a key piece of Hilbert’s collection and a prime example of a scenic oil painting that illustrates a narrative frozen in time. “The very first thing that I noticed about it was the beautiful color. He was a color coordinator,” Hilbert noted of the late American painter. “This was painted around 1940. America was not in the war yet. So there were a lot of people that were both for the war and a lot of people against the war. You see that it was one of those particular political groups in the foreground. There’s a woman with a baby, and that happened to be Phil’s wife [with their] son, Woody.”

This particular piece by Dike also reflects an early theme of Hilbert’s collection: a love for California and the vastness of its landscapes. “There are so many different parts of California with the ocean, with the mountains, with the deserts and everything in between,” he told Artsy. “You have beautiful parks like Yosemite. You have the redwoods.”The painting is one of more than 1,000 pieces that Mark and Janet Hilbert donated to the Hilbert Museum of California Art at Chapman University in Orange, California, and serves as a visual history of California’s landscapes and artists. Its large body of work, which consists of watercolors, drawings, and oils, is so vast it can “do shows for the next 20 years, and never have to duplicate a theme,” joked Hilbert.

Queenie Rosita Law

Founder and Director of Q Art Group, Hong Kong

It was during a 2018 visit to the Ludwig Museum in Budapest that Queenie Rosita Law first discovered the Ukrainian artist Artem Volokitin. Law was drawn to the “powerful energy and raw intensity” of Volokitin’s work. Her response to his work only intensified after learning of his practice: The artist’s body of work is a reaction to the violence and turmoil taking place in his native Ukraine, with his more recent work depicting images of violent explosions.

Volokitin’s painting Operating Manual (2018) became a springboard for Law’s collection, acting as a flame that fuels the passion and focus of her art collection. “Because of this piece, I started the whole journey of collecting Central and Eastern European contemporary art, and dedicated my time to research and discovering them,” she said.

Created as part of a series following the 2014 annexation of Crimea, Volokitin was influenced to experiment with painting light as a physical phenomenon. “This work is a powerful display of struggle, tension, and hope,” Law shared with Artsy.

The essence of Volokitin’s piece, which she purchased in 2019, “documents the cruel beauty of an explosion: a difficult contradiction that the artist has experienced time and again as part of reality,” explained Law.

“He could never be certain when looking into the sky if the light was going to be a joyous celebration of fireworks, or an explosion from air strikes. The juxtaposition between explosion and fireworks looks frighteningly beautiful, yet it conveys a kind of living in the everyday reality that is overwhelmed with aggression.”

In 2014, Law founded Q Art Group. It is made up of three different enterprises that each provide its own artist platform for international audiences to discover, collect, and create art. These three enterprises include Q Contemporary, a nonprofit art center in the heart of Budapest; Double Q Gallery, a contemporary art gallery located in Hong Kong; and Q Studio, a multidisciplinary art studio concentrated on creating and commissioning custom artworks.

“I am constantly on the lookout for emerging talents and historically overlooked artists, and only collect what I believe in. Atrem is truly a master of painting light and shadow,” she told Artsy. “You can clearly see a heightened awareness of oil paint as a medium with the brilliant use of colors, and the influence of hyperrealism comes from his traditional Ukrainian academic training. That first purchase was part of my evolution as a collector and so it will remain important as long as I collect.”

India Rose James

Curator, Artist, Gallery Director of Soho Revue, London

India Rose James’s relationship with art has been a lifelong endeavor. “I can’t pinpoint exactly when I began collecting art,” she said. “Even while in college, I was collecting art pieces from fellow artists I met at school.” James’s personal taste in art is evident in the pieces that line the walls of her home and her London gallery, Soho Revue.

“My taste in art is very vast,” she told Artsy. “I don’t have one specific art medium that I collect. Sometimes it really comes down to the emotion that is sparked by a certain piece.” One key piece in James’s collection that provokes such an emotional response is a print of Howard Hodgkin’s Gate (2014).

When speaking about this print, James highlights the colors and layering of this artwork. “I love the different shades of green in this print.”

This print is an example of Hodgkin’s use of carborundum printmaking, a collagraph process where an image is created on the printing plate by applying an abrasive grit. To complete the piece, a damp piece of paper is placed on top of the plate, which is then run through a printing press. The pressure of the printing press transfers the ink from the recesses of the plate onto paper.

This form of printmaking allowed Gate’s rich shades of emerald to be seamlessly weaved with the tone of Indian yellow that Hodgkin selected for the piece. Hodgkin was well aware of the emotion his abstract work could conjure. In 1976, he told the critic David Sylvester that “I paint representational pictures of emotional situations.”

The influence of this piece is reflected in the overall body of James’s art collection, as well as the artworks she curates for her Soho gallery. The works do not pertain to one specific art medium, rather, they transcend any labels of a specific art category or status. James searches for works that are emotionally stimulating and influence people to analyze their own personal narratives. “Soho Revue is a gallery space where I can support emerging artists and give them a platform,” she said. “I like the gallery to have a diverse mix of styles and themes, so there is something for everyone who visits.”

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How Istanbul Gallery THE PILL® Became a Trendsetting Force https://ift.tt/QqMJt5W

When Suela J. Cennet moved from Paris to Istanbul in 2013 to open her own gallery, the space she found in the city’s historic Balat neighborhood had a pill-like interior. It was this unlikely architectural characteristic that prompted a series of thoughts for the philosophy major, who was born in Paris and had just graduated with three master’s degrees from the city’s prestigious Sciences Po institution.

“I thought about the role of the pill and its connection to the truth in The Matrix,” Cennet told Artsy. “Art is a search for truth, but the space also made me think about the invention of the birth control pill which is essentially an anthropological rupture, a form of freedom in the form of a pill.”

Cennet named the space THE PILL®, in homage to these physical and metaphorical connotations.

A contemplative first step into her venture was also backdropped by a sociopolitically tumultuous environment in her family’s hometown. The violence and despair of the Gezi Park Protests in Istanbul that same year had swept the cultural sector, and many of Cennet’s peers had discouraged her from opening a commercial space. “I wasn’t French enough in France, and in Turkey, I wasn’t fully Turkish,” she recalled.

Dotted with colorful houses and a history of Greek and Jewish communities, the Balat neighborhood by the Golden Horn was a charming yet unconventional choice to start an art business. “The idea of a gallery became a symbol of resistance,” she added. It turned out to be a risk that paid off. THE PILL®’s inauguration with French artist Daniel Firman’s solo exhibition in January 2016 saw long lines that were unusual for the quaint neighborhood, partially thanks to the show’s central massive elephant sculpture.

The gallery’s sophomore show with Paris-based artist Eva Nielsen—a university friend of Cennet’s—received an Artforum review and cemented the gallery’s position in the art world. Its neatly blended international and local program would also grab the attention from the likes of the New York Times and Art in America; and it has participated in several art fairs such as Untitled Art, ARCOmadrid, Expo Chicago, 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair, and Paris Photo. Last year, the Paris-based book publisher JBE Books released a book that chronicles the gallery’s seven years as a commercial space, placing a strong emphasis on curatorial experimentation.

Reversal, 2021
Eva Nielsen
THE PILL®

“I never wanted to be perceived as a foreign gallery,” Cennet said of her international scope and her personal identity as the French-born daughter of Turkish parents with Balkan heritage. (The dealer underlines that being fluent in several languages “and feeling comfortable speaking about art in different environments” has been immensely beneficial in maintaining a global outlook.) Besides an “organic connection with the local context,” she said that another key thread in her program is “asking the questions that shake our generation.”

It’s a broad attitude that is reflected in THE PILL®’s program which includes Lisbon-based Leyla Gediz, a key figure in Turkish contemporary art who has so far opened three shows at THE PILL®; as well as young Vienna-based Turkish mixed-media artist Aykan Safoğlu; France-based artists Apolonia Sokol and Soufiane Ababri; and Mexico City–based Pablo Dávila.

Cennet always had a determined future in the arts—perhaps before she realized it. While immersing herself in anthropology, art history, and philosophy during her studies in Paris, she had always found herself hanging out with artist friends, including Nielsen, in the bohemian Saint-Germain-des-Prés district. “Then, I thought the only way to be involved with the art community was to be a practicing artist,” she said.

Collaboration, 2017
Leyla Gediz
THE PILL®

After graduating, she worked in public policy with a focus on the cultural field which led to a realization for other potential paths. The idea of an art gallery started to blossom when Cennet was working for the Cultural Ministry of France, and her time there would come in handy when a collector asked for her help with closing a deal at Galerie Templon. What was planned as a 15-minute meeting to finalize a sale turned into a four-hour session, which ended with a job offer from Daniel Templon. The seminal dealer was looking for a sales director while expanding his gallery. “I was 26 and knew I was going to open my own gallery at some point, but I had no plans to start my path yet,” she said. Although she reminded Templon three times at that initial meeting that she had no experience in running a gallery, the seasoned gallerist convinced her to stay.

Between working with artists like Kehinde Wiley, Jim Dine, and Will Cotton at Templon, she further sculpted the idea of opening her own gallery. “Daniel was so generous with me in terms of teaching how to run an art business while I was upfront about my plan to eventually run my space,” she recalled.

Phase Painting III, 2021
Pablo Dávila
THE PILL®

Bedwork, 2020
Soufiane Ababri
THE PILL®

Besides the aesthetic exhilaration of being close to the Bosphorus strait with THE PILL®, Cennet assumed a transhistorical thread in fluidity, cleansing, and reformation, all embodied in the expansiveness of being by the water. “[My] mobility is anchored in Istanbul—I could easily move to other ports but also be in the center of my own diasporic self,” she said. “I am a fruit of many exiles between my life between France and Turkey and my family, which started in Yugoslavia. I am a result of many migrations.”

Between solo shows with international artists and art fairs around the world, movement is also a theme for the gallery. “We have loyal collectors who follow us everywhere and we meet new ones at different fairs,” Cennet added. A fundamental part of the gallery’s success has been Cennet’s friendships with her artists, some of whom she studied with, met through overlapping circles, or by “being a part of their process and even seeing that our conversations help shape their practices.” On the operational level, the gallery runs with a handful of employees, including curator Asli Seven as the head of curatorial research, while expanding its staff based on projects in various scales.

After summer, THE PILL® will launch the new season with participation in the art fair Contemporary Istanbul in late September along with a solo show of Ababri at its gallery timed for his solo presentation at the Barbican in London. Later in the year, a booth at Untitled in Miami will coincide with an institutional solo show of Sokol in Copenhagen, which also coincides with a new documentary on the artist by Danish filmmaker Lea Glob.

The idea of a pill still resonates with Cennet about her venture, like the first day she stepped into the space which would transform into an embodiment of her philosophy. A time capsule, a metaphor for the truth, or a symbol of bodily empowerment, THE PILL® contains many meanings and experiences for the dealer. “The gallery is a space for creation and being in Balat in Istanbul [which] essentially and unintentionally makes it also a place of resistance,” she mused.

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Ad Minoliti’s Playful Geometric Abstractions Explore Nature’s Queerness https://ift.tt/PpkGswd

There’s abstraction, and then there’s figuration: so the traditional binary goes. But labels have a way of putting people in boxes. Throughout their career, Argentine artist Ad Minoliti has tried to break down such boundaries in their paintings, installations, and sculptures that draw on queer theory to create a new understanding of these terms.

“My work is basically a formula of putting geometry with something else in order to break traditional, geometric abstraction: to take the geometry out of the white cube,” they said in a recent interview. As their work is increasingly honored with shows in those “white-cube” institutions (for example, Tate St. Ives and Baltic Gateshead’s jointly commissioned show “Biosfera Peluche” in 2021–22), this approach becomes particularly notable. Selected by Artsy in 2018 as part of The Artsy Vanguard, and representing Argentina at the 2019 Venice Biennale, the artist’s star has continued to rise.

Now, in a new series of works, on view as part of “Geometries of the Forest,” on display through August 20th at Peres Projects in Seoul (their first show in Korea), this “tension between abstraction and figuration” that they refer to is reaching new audiences. Later this year, on October 28th, the same series will be transformed into an even more immersive installation for Minoliti’s solo museum exhibition at Kunstpalais Erlangen in Germany.

It’s a childlike, playful show, with black, gestural figures dotting the gallery’s walls between Minoliti’s bright, geometric paintings. Fungi, which Minoliti sees as representing something between animals and plants, were also a strong inspiration for the show. “We have flora and fauna…mushrooms are like a third field of living beings,” they said. “I love this reference of breaking the binary, because nature is queer.” Dainty, toadstool-like mushrooms can be seen throughout the show, for example.

Elsewhere, the gallery’s walls feature an undeniably cute mouse, which could be taken from any children’s book or cartoon. But in Minoliti’s paintings, the references are more oblique. Here, characters are not overt representations, but rather can be seen through the eyes that interrupt the slices of pure color on their canvases. “I was already working with geometrical figures as monsters, goblins, fairies,” said Minoliti. “It’s a simple way to add animism.”

This personification of the bold, sharp shapes in their canvases helps Minoliti dissolve that obstructive line between figuration and abstraction. Work titles also create a sense of characterization: Frog (2023), for example, is a meter-square painting predominated by the amphibian’s dark green hue. “It’s a little bit of a game—you see what you want to see,” they said.

Across their oeuvre, the artist has a distinctive color palette, juxtaposing pastels with clear, bright primary shades. Often, colors are chosen for their political implications. The green, for instance, threaded through Minoliti’s abstract canvases, refers to the shade used by the abortion rights movement in Argentina; black, baby blue, and pink are a reference to the Black trans flag. They also look at color trends in interior design when putting together a palette, often from decades past.

Queer and feminist theory has been another important touchpoint throughout their career. Minoliti is particularly interested in the theorist Donna Haraway, whose rejection of harsh boundaries chimes exactly with their point of view. And yet the artist isn’t interested in weighing down the viewer in academic references, rather evoking such ideas in an accessible, almost naive style. Minoliti’s work explicitly reaches out to the viewer in welcoming, bright colors and engaging figuration to make its point.

Nap, 2023
Ad Minoliti
Peres Projects

Sand, 2023
Ad Minoliti
Peres Projects

When creating such work, children’s literature and cartoons are an important source for the artist. For this latest show, they mined inspiration from an Argentine how-to-draw book from the 1950s. While its content is outdated (depicting, for example, racist stereotypes of Indigenous people), Minoliti was inspired by its simplified, geometrical way of thinking about the world—a visual language that is instantly accessible. “These were the pedagogical mechanisms used when I was a child,” they said.

But there is a hidden layer within the simple, playful way that children learn: Gender is embedded into almost everything. “Dolls; toys; coloring books, even” reflect “society’s expectations of gender,” they said. Minoliti’s work welcomes the viewer, expressing the fun and comfort of childhood, and avoiding tired, stereotyped gender roles.

Educational settings, they noted, tend to become less and less inclusive as we grow older: “When you start in kindergarten, you have this warm, welcoming, soft environment to learn, or you learn by playing,” they said. “What happens if we switch, so that you can go to a space where you have intrinsically academic content, in theory, but at the same time, you have the tenderness or the warm environment that you have in the kindergarten? Why not?”

Minoliti’s artworks, with their soft-play aesthetic, are a way for them to express themes that are often politicized, opaque, and difficult. As they put it: “Painting is like an open door to talk about something else.”

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