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Tamed With a Frame: Sebastian Black
The work in 24-year-old, New York-based painter Sebastian Black's debut solo show, "The Playful Paw-Strokes of the Wilderness," sounds simple. At Chelsea's Kathleen Cullen Fine Art, he will show paintings of dogs comprising two gentle drooping curves that form a docile pet with long, flat ears. The enclosed space is filled with a patchwork of triangles, horns, and candy-colored pizza slices. Black's paintings have a thick, rich surface, and the longer you look at them, the more the shapes lend themselves to re-configuration as different characters, particularly a female nude. The experience of looking at Black's paintings is like Magic Eye or the primordial scene: you can only see the naughty truth, once the the puppy's nose is revealed as a swatch of pubic hair. Black's friend and mentor, Adam McEwen, asks him why it's necessary to tame his paintings:ADAM MCEWEN: How many of these dog paintings do you think you have made so far?
SEBASTIAN BLACK: I think there are 11 or 12, only eight of which I am comfortable wrapping up and saying, "I'm done." And then there are a lot of other similar ones-dog piles of them.
MCEWEN: What do you call the paintings, when they're in the studio?
BLACK: Puppies.
MCEWEN: Are there grown-ups?
BLACK: These are the kinds of dogs that kids draw, and which would be young themselves, with big soft eyes and floppy ears.
Poster Pop: Rupert Goldsworthy
Painter, academic, curator, gallerist and author Rupert Goldsworthy gets most enthused by signage, the cult of charisma and the melding-and clashing-of cultures in urban space. Taking the iconography of radical histories as his starting point for many of his large, poster-style paintings, the English-born artist brings together faintly familiar figures of old that were used as tools for propaganda, with his own text, rococo patterning, Ben-day-like dots and copied signs from Islamic food shops in Berlin, military graves and mass media. The juxtaposition feels far from a mere mishmash of appropriated imagery; it's the tracking of the history of images that is central to the work. Goldsworthy has previously run eponymous gallery spaces in Berlin and New York. His recent solo show, "New Paintings" at Ritter/Zamet Gallery in Whitechapel, East London, explored the continuity and contraditions of an aspiring post-racial Berlin today.LAURA K JONES: Your large-scale paintings here are all on brown wrapping paper. Why not canvas?
RUPERT GOLDSWORTHY: I like the tactile quality of wrapping paper, and its ruggedness. I like the excessiveness of the size. A work at this scale on paper feels relaxed and intimate in a way that canvas doesn't. I wanted the works to live and breathe on their own terms, to feel expansive, not cramped.
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Enter the Fold: Katja Strunz
Berlin-based artist Katja Strunz tantalizes viewers with her adaptations of modernist forms—dangling abstract geometries in configurations on the wall, or subtly altering found examples of Twentieth Century design. Strunz's paper plane-like metal metal works zoom across walls, but the artist's interests ultimately exceed the gallery, and the history of the square she's crumpling. One recent show has seen the artist's first sustained effort at outdoor work, and without any literal architecture to deconstruct. On the eve of Strunz's forthcoming solo show, opening September 3 in Cologne, she discusses the secret histories folded into her materials.STEPHEN RIOLO: "Im Geviert" the title of your current solo show at the Saarlandmuseum Saarbrücken, calls up thoughts of Heidegger, an ordering of form and nature.
KATJA STRUNZ: The concept for the show came from the fact that I was asked to do outdoor sculptures. I normally work with interior room structures. My last show in Berlin, at Contemporary Fine Arts, was called Einbruchstellen ("Points of Rupture"). Although these works were abstract in form they had a concrete relationship to interior spaces, like cracks in a wall or pieces of broken plaster falling from the ceiling. The whole show had to do with objects breaking in from the outside and a lot to do with decay.
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Xavier Veilhan: Motion on The Mount
Following a well-received installation of recent sculpture at Versailles last year, Lyon-born, Paris-based artist Xavier Veilhan was invited to the U.S. this summer to present a similar showing—on a much smaller scale—at The Mount, Edith Wharton's landmark estate (which she designed and built in 1902) and museum in Lenox, Mass. "Interacting with History: Xavier Veilhan at The Mount," on view through October 31, features eight indoor installations by Veilhan in various mediums. Some of the pieces are somewhat hidden in the elegant mansion: in small alcoves, a staircase window or the upstairs bathroom. For instance, one small, striking sculpture, Amish Vibration (2009), occupies an empty early Twentieth-Century icebox, to quite jarring effect.The show provides an intriguing overview of Veilhan's recent works, and a fine occasion to re-visit the extraordinary location. While in New York City en route to the Berkshires for the show's opening, the artist visited Art in America magazine's managing editor, David Ebony, to talk about some recent projects and preoccupations.
DAVID EBONY: In the news pages of the June-July issue of Art in America, there's a reproduction of your sculpture Vibration, which comprises a very shaky-looking horse and wagon, shown at this summer's World Expo in Shanghai. What was it like participating in that exhibition?
XAVIER VEILHAN: There were difficulties getting things shipped to China, so we wound up fabricating the piece there. It was all kind of crazy. Shanghai is interesting, but it's maybe better for business than for art. I think Beijing is better for art. Beijing's art district looks like SoHo 15 years ago. It's interesting because you're aware that what you are seeing at this moment is about to disappear forever. It's all changing so fast.
Progress Performed
One of two works in Tino Sehgal's recent exhibition at the Guggenheim in New York featured one male and one female actor, straddling one another on the museum's rotunda. As they changed positions, his hand reaching up her back or her face grazing his, artists Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly recorded the movement comprising The Kiss (2006) in real time. The performance was—unsurprisingly, considering Sehgal's past as a dancer—rather tightly choreographed. The artists' auditory score of the work sounds something like this: "Her right knee on floor standing on left foot, his left knee on floor standing on right foot, facing each other, his right hand around back of her neck..." At that time, Gerard and Kelly were completing the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, and found the work's gender-specific pronouns problematic. They re-performing the work at Volta Art Fair, among other locations, using a couple or trio of homosexual males, re-titled You Call This Progress? (2010).
This same score is the foundation for the artists' most recent work, performed at The Kitchen in New York. Ideological Formation (2010) opened with Gerard and Kelly's recorded Sehgal score, played over the black box sound-system. Three variously sized, mass-produced white boxes lay on a bare stage, two of them concealing dancers. Moving across the floor and interacting on stage, the two boxes finally tipped over and two dancers spilled out. The choreography that followed integrated simple, pedestrian movements, militaristic drills, and gestures that evoked voguing. About midway through the dance, the sound of Kelly's voice reading the score was overwhelmed by Madonna's song "Material Girl," inflecting the work with the pop star's paean to consumerism and materialism. The queer politics that marked You Call This Progress? were here broadened, vis-à-vis a Minimalist vernacular, to question the confluences of identity, capitalism, and commodification.
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Oil on Canvas, Courtesy Hauser & Wirth
The colorful, phantasmagorical canvases of Jakub Julian Ziolkowski are full of imaginar
