From our friends at Beautiful/Decay, today we bring you a look at the work of artist Katharina Fritsch, whose giant blue rooster Hahn/Cock (2013) was unveiled on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, London, earlier this year. Though Fritsch’s work is often quite funny, author Pauli Ochi notes: “Fritsch’s sculpture is also deeply unnerving.” This article was originally published on October 25, 2013.

Katharina Fritsch. Company at Table, 1988; polyester, wood, cotton, paint; 140 x 1600 x 175 cm.

Katharina Fritsch is a German-born artist who transforms quotidian objects and mundane figures into something new. Using manipulation of scale and color along with repetition, Fritsch’s sculptures are usually hand-molded, cast in plaster, reworked, and then cast again in polyester. Her time-consuming process creates results that are uncanny and strange.

Interested in psychology and the expectations of visitors to a museum, Fritsch’s work appeals both to the popular imagination and a more conceptual thought process. One of Fritsch’s most popular works, Rattenkönig/Rat King (1993), a circle of black polyester rats that stand 12 feet tall, was included in the 1999 Venice Biennale. Both funny and frightening at the same time, works such as Rattenkönig/Rat King border on reality and illusion. Much of Fritsch’s work has an unsettling, often religious association that is deeply psychological. Fritch’s sculptures tug at our deepest fears and most vivid dreams.

Read the full article here.

From our sister publication Art Practical, today we bring you a review of Facundo Argañaraz‘s solo exhibition Tonight Tonight at Highlight Gallery in San Francisco. Author Danica Willard Sachs notes that with the paintings in this new show, Argañaraz is “riffing on the monochrome… [and] grace is not found in presentness, but in confrontation.” This review was originally published on October 28, 2013.

Facundo Argañaraz. Passenger II, 2013.
Acrylic, direct-to-substrate print , and brass fitting on aluminum composite panel; 48 x 61 inches.

A traditional narrative of art history culminates with Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood.” In this essay, Fried declares the end of painting at the monochrome: the complete distillation of painting to its most basic elements. For Fried, the monochrome marks the purest of aesthetic experiences as the viewer finds transcendence in the eternal present. In Tonight Tonight, Facundo Argañaraz questions the relevance of this history to contemporary art practice by employing industrial processes and found images to create deceptively clean-looking works that confound the viewer’s efforts to discern a deeper meaning. Argañaraz enters this historical conversation obliquely in the exhibition statement, referencing a quote from Jorge Luis Borges’ 1980 essay, “The Thousand and One Nights.” Borges contends that this historical tale acts as a metaphor for our paradoxically eternal yet evolving collective history. Tonight Tonight anchors the artist’s process and imagery in the familiar and industrial to argue for a contemporary rethinking of the monochrome.

Read the full article here.

It would be easy to come to Li Songsong’s show at Pace London with certain assumptions, projections, and ideas about the last ten years of contemporary painting from China. Assumptions informed by how galleries have vulgarly packaged Chinese contemporary art as a struggle for freer (market) expression. Projections on what it means for an artist to make a painting in post-Deng Xiaoping‘s China. Ideas built around an understanding mostly gathered from following the influx of Chinese painters into the western art market through glossy adverts and the occasional review in art mags. At the very best, one might think that there is a prerequisite for implied political critique in the narrative surrounding contemporary art being produced in China.

Li Songsong. Guests Are All Welcome, 2013; Oil on canvas, 120cm x 120cm. Li Songsong: We Have Betrayed the Revolution, 2013; Courtesy Pace Gallery.

Now, going to see a show with a title such as We Have Betrayed the Revolution won’t help dispel things either. If you try to make sense of this show with this particular Manchurian filter of accumulated misunderstanding—as I did—it will upset you in the way that an internet purchase fails to meet one’s expectations. This is mostly due to using the wrong filter to understand this work, but also is partly due to a Western misunderstanding of Li’s narrative device of appropriated historical and pop culture imagery. Anyone from the People’s Republic of China will understand the references—or so I’ve been told—but for the outsider it’s a curve ball to nostalgia-ized painting. Clear the mind of expectation and you’ll quickly realize that you received a much better deal. Li is a painter’s painter and it’s apparent that he loves his craft.

Read More »

In the mid-2000s, Wynne Greenwood‘s video persona sparked an adolescent idolatry in me that really started everything. In Tracey + The Plastics, Greenwood’s three-person electro-pop band, she played all the characters, performing live shows in conversation with pre-recorded projections of herself. Watching Greenwood essentially talk to herself through Tracy, Nikki, and Cola, I was delivered a vision of the millennial queer future in which we now routinely commune with our fantasy selves through the veil of the screen.

Wynne Greenwood. Pink Head, 2013; ceramic and acrylic paint; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and Soloway.

For us, Wynne Greenwood was a kind of star of the lo-fi, DIY riot grrrl scene, and during my undergrad days in Seattle—one of the hotbeds of West Coast riot grrrl culture—I was lucky enough to take a workshop with her called “Video, Performance, and Identity.” For Wynne, doing it yourself was closely linked to doing what’s inside of you—keeping the work you make close to yourself both in the means of production and in the material you focus on. Greenwood makes music and performance, she says, to “practice culture-healing.” Her videos present an intoxicatingly simple mix of self and self-fantasy.

In her current two-channel video and accompanying sculptural installation at Soloway, Greenwood continues her practice of multiplying herself through video as she presents, quite literally, “more heads.” The show offers a pared-down continuation of one of Greenwood’s consistent motifs: repetitive images of herself integrated into self-drawn landscapes. These spaces are often dotted with disembodied cartoon heads that lie like boulders or rocks on the floor; sometimes Greenwood draws these cartoon heads on her own body. At Soloway, the heads in her videos are haunted by their abandoned, tangible counterparts, displayed in the gallery’s back room.

Read More »

Three powerful women dressed in patterned sundresses, jewelry, and club-ready makeup are seated on a jumble of printed fabrics, fake flowers, and gold spray-painted fruit. Their pose is a familiar one, mimicking Edouard Manet’s scandalous—at the time—Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe (1862-3), except in this one all posers are clothed, female, black, and staring at me as though they were sussing me up—trying to discern my intention in looking at them and disturbing their plastic picnic. This is Mickalene Thomas’ Le dejeuner sur l’herbe: trois femmes noires (2010) and it is a perfect example of the focus of this show: the dialogue between existing images and the new or supplemental image archives being created by artists.

Mickalene Thomas. Le dejeuner sur l’herbe: trois femmes noires, 2010; C-print; artist proof 2/2; 48 x 60 inches. Courtesy of the Artist, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Lehmann Maupin, NY and Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

In GLYPHS: Acts of Inscription, there are several different ways that the artists interact with the concept of the African Diaspora. Working in photography or video, the artists use images as “acts of inscription,” real or imagined, to change, re-imagine, or fill in the gaps of the “visual archives that constitute history, popular iconographies, and artistic canons.”[1]

The first approach is documentary, to give visibility to a group that isn’t adequately represented in popular culture or art historical canons. An anchoring piece in the show is W.E.B. Du Bois’ original counter archive: The Paris Albums 1900, a series of portraits commissioned for his award-winning American Negro Exhibit in the 1900 Paris World Exposition. This was groundbreaking; first and foremost, it was the first time Black Americans were allowed to represent themselves at a world’s fair. A mere generation after emancipation, Du Bois presented graphs, data, and maps showing the history and changes in education, literacy, and patent- and land-ownership along with some 500 photographs depicting the lives and communities of African Americans at the turn of the century. These images were transgressive because they presented a positive image of an emerging black middle class—doctors, lawyers, teachers, and students—images that Du Bois said, “hardly square with conventional American ideas.”[2]

Read More »

Help Desk is an arts-advice column that demystifies practices for artists, writers, curators, collectors, patrons, and the general public. Submit your questions anonymously here. All submissions become the property of Daily Serving. Help Desk is co-sponsored by KQED.org.

Could you tell me the best way for a newcomer to select an appropriate art consultant in the first place? It appears to be almost impossible in this economy to get into a gallery without the proper help. I have just completed a series that would probably be better suited to an institutional setting, i.e. a winery or a business. How do I find someone to help me place this series?

Okay, so you have two issues: you want to “get into” a gallery (i.e., become a represented artist), and you want to find a permanent home for a series of works. The problem here is that you’re assuming these two goals have one solution: an art consultant; and I’m sorry to tell you that this is not how things work.

Paulina Olowska. Cake, 2010; Oil on canvas; 69 x 49 inches.

In all likelihood, an art consultant cannot help you become represented by a gallery. A consultant’s job is to place artwork with clients. Most consultants work with galleries, but the flow is almost always uni-directional: that is to say, the consultant gets work from a gallery, and not the other way around. But just to make sure my hunch was correct, I asked Maria Brito—author and art advisor, and an “authority on why, where, when and how to display and mix contemporary art…in any environment” (that’s from her bio)—and this is what she said:

“As an art advisor, my company is set up to provide support to our clients (the collectors) in selecting the right pieces for their own collections. I try to understand my client’s goals as much as possible and to work closely with them to reach their objectives. I work mostly with galleries that I trust and like and whose artists’ works I’m really interested in introducing to my clients. I’m also always meeting new galleries in art fairs or through invitations that they send. I’m always open to seeing new art and meeting new people, but I rarely place the work of an unrepresented artist directly from his/her studio; it has happened maybe a couple of times in the past four years. It is not a matter of talent or the quality of the works, it is mostly that my clients feel more comfortable dealing with a gallery and having that kind of back-up when spending money on art.”

Read More »

Shotgun Reviews are an open forum where we invite the international art community to contribute timely, short-format responses to an exhibition or event. If you are interested in submitting a Shotgun Review, please click this link for more information. In this Shotgun Review, M. Rebekah Otto reviews The Guantanamo Bay Museum of Art and History at the Worth Ryder Art Gallery.

Adam Harms. Performing the Torture Playlist, 2012; found digital video; 59-minute loop. Courtesy of the Artist.

The Guantanamo Bay Museum of Art and History posits that the eponymous detention facility on the U.S. military base in Cuba closed permanently in 2012, and a museum subsequently opened on its premises. The fictive museum, conceived and created by Ian Alan Paul, intends to “remember the human rights abuses that occurred while the prison was in operation.” [1] The Guantanamo Bay Museum of Art and History Satellite Exhibition curated by Paul and recently on view at the Worth Ryder Art Gallery of the University of California, Berkeley included works that evoked the awe, indignity, and sorrow of the Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility (Gitmo). For example, in Adam Harms’s Performing the Torture Playlist (2012), amateur performers sing karaoke-style renditions of the American pop songs used to torture Guantanamo prisoners.[2] While such constituent works of the Guantanamo Bay Museum of Art and History are compelling, they are not predicated on nor directly address the supposed closure. Instead, they feel more relevant to a prison that’s still active than to its remembrance.

Read More »