Art In The Age Of… Planetary Computation
How would you draw a picture of the Internet; through the machines and ‘their’ language that broadcast and store ‘our’ messages, or through the affect and power relations that those messages and their movement produce?
Presented as part of the year-long Art In The Age Of… exhibition series, Art In The Age Of… Planetary Computation investigates how quantification, telecommunications, and our ever-expanding information apparati not only inform contemporary artistic production, but also how contemporary art can hold a mirror up to these processes and formations. The participating artists explore the fissure between literal infrastructure—code, machines, wires, and other like-vocabularies—and the subjective socio-political interactions fostered by using these devices. Guided not only by what can be seen on the computer screen, and the various other black mirrors we stare into day in and day out, this exhibition will also look at what happens behind these screens. Moving from objects to subjects, we ask, how do these positions impact daily life, or said in another way: what does it mean to be 'screened'?
Artists: Aram Bartholl, Rossella Biscotti, Nina Canell, John Gerrard, Femke Herregraven, Antonia Hirsch, Vanessa Hodgkinson, Trevor Paglen, Lucy Raven, Julia Weist, and others.
Art In The Age Of… Planetary Computation is the second iteration of the Art In The Age Of…, a three-part presentation series that investigates future vectors of art production in the 21st century. Art In The Age Of… will run throughout 2015.
Opening May 1 | Robert Motherwell: Opens
"We have only to look at the force of one of the Opens...to feel the complexity of observation the painter requires of himself and the viewer." *
"...a subtle but firmly asserted spatial ambiguity that gives the picture a deep resonance and an aura of mystery."**
Robert Motherwell, Untitled (In Orange with Charcoal Lines). c. 1970 Acrylic and charcoal on canvas. Image courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York.
Andrea Rosen Gallery is delighted to announce a comprehensive exhibition of Robert Motherwell's seminal Open series. The gallery has an ongoing commitment to timely presentations of historical material, in this case highlighting a point in the artist's trajectory when a confluence of institutional, intellectual, and market attention brings renewed appreciation to a significant body of work. The gallery is particularly interested in creating historical exhibitions that expand the reading and understanding of an artist's work. While Motherwell's significance may have been perceived primarily through the gestural Elegies, presenting the Opens now not only allows us to compare these masterworks against the present-day focus on abstraction, but also encourages us to reconcile the breadth of Motherwell's rigor and clarity. They are undeniably fresh, beautiful, and bold.
Typically composed as single-color surfaces on which he has painted three charcoal lines, the Opens were a primary occupation for Motherwell from 1967 through the 1970s, and briefly into the 1980s. Although it has been common practice to locate Motherwell alternately within the histories of midcentury American painting and Minimalism, the Opens exemplify the cerebral, content-fueled character that sets his work apart: the fragmentary rectangles offer an intense conceptual engagement with dualities of interior and exterior, and with perceptions of nature and space.
Coinciding with the centennial of Motherwell's birth, the exhibition comes amid a groundswell of appreciation of his significance. In 2012, the Dedalus Foundation (founded by Motherwell in 1981) and Yale University Press published a major catalogue raisonné of Motherwell's work. The Art Gallery of Ontario and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York have also produced remarkable studies on Motherwell in recent years, and the Opens themselves are the subject of a dedicated collection of essays and scholarly criticism published in 2010. In February of this year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York opened an exhibition of Motherwell's monumental paintings, collages, prints, and illustrated books drawn from its holdings and those of the Dedalus Foundation.
*Mary Ann Caws
** Jack Flamm
Absolute Art Gallery Bruges has two Chinese artists, Zhuang Hong Yi and Lu Luo.
Both are inspired by Chinese culture and traditional techniques to better mingling Western elements and create mixed works, reciprocal passages from one world to another.
The large three-dimensional floral fields Zhuang Hong Yi combine rice paper, Chinese ink and acrylic.Dynamic mixtures of textures and colors, tactile and delicate universe, they carry in their traditional Chinese substrates references to Western Impressionism but also contemporary conceptualism. The works of Zhuang Hong Yi oscillating between pure and controlled planning emotion. They are both meditation and color on analyzing the nature and form.
Lu Luo, she finds the source of his creations in traditional Chinese opera costumes. Cut out and pasted on the canvas, antique kimono becomes an icon with a multiplicity of viewpoints. The artist skillfully uses a wide variety of European processes and sometimes incorporates costumes in scenery painted in homage to some great masters of Western painting, as Matisse.
Exhibition Zhuang Lu Hong and Luo
From 1 to May 31, 2015 at Absolute Art Gallery
Open from 11 to 18.30, also on Sundays and public holidays
Closed on Wednesdays