Paula Cooper Gallery – Sarah Charlesworth

Organizing her practice in distinct yet closely interconnected series, Charlesworth is known for her conceptually-driven and visually alluring photo-based works that subvert and deconstruct cultural imagery. The exhibition focuses on a pivotal period in which she merged the photo-conceptual strategies of her early education with those of quotation, appropriation, and re-photography that would come to define the Pictures Generation. “I’m exploring a level of unconscious engagement in language, a covert symbology … a personal as well as a societal confrontation,” Charlesworth stated in an interview in 1990. “A symbolism is attached to particular images, becomes marked in the unconscious. To exorcise it, to rearrange it, to reshape it, to make it my own, involves unearthing it, describing it, deploying it in form, and then rearranging it.”¹

In her earliest series, Modern History (1977-79), Charlesworth examined the contextual significance and complex structures that underlie images reproduced in the media. Comprised of twenty-six prints, the work Herald Tribune, November 1977 (1977) presents copies of the newspaper’s front page over the course of one month—each systematically excised of all text so that only the paper’s masthead and images remain. Emergent from the sequence of redacted pages are striking visual patterns, which reveal cultural hierarchies imbedded in the media. They implore viewers to consider what is deemed “news,” how this directly and indirectly affects one’s understanding of society, and what role images play in communicating these ideas.

Galerie Lelong – Michelle Stuart

Stuart is widely celebrated as a pioneer of land art with her groundbreaking hybrid uses of earth, drawing, and photography in the 1960s and ’70s. In recent years, Stuart’s photography has developed into a crucial part of her practice and garnered international recognition. Central to the exhibition is a new work, These Fragments Against Time (2018), which combines photography with found objects and sculptural forms. At the fore is a collection of anthropological curiosities that compare the work’s looming images of cosmic observation with the passage of time, life, and death, that animal bones and fossils evoke. As is true of much her work, Stuart personally traveled to a site, collecting materials that became part of the piece. Stuart recalls, “We hired a sailboat, The Jupiter, and its crew, and we sailed it thirty miles out to sea offshore of the Carolinas in order to photograph the solar eclipse as it was passing out into the Atlantic.”

Similarly, Flight of Time (2016), from which the exhibition takes its name, intersperses found photography with the artist’s own images to coalesce a myriad of movements in nature, from entomology to botany. Originally exhibited at the 57th Venice Biennale, VIVA ARTE VIVA in 2017, this will be the first time the work is shown in the United States. Stuart also confronts challenging questions about human behavior in the Anthropocene epoch. In While We Went About Etherized(2012) and Landscape of Evil (2008-11), Stuart interweaves images of war with primal scenes in nature.

Printed Matter – Bookstore

Marlborough Contemporary – Mark Hagan

“This exhibition is a love letter to Mexico and is dedicated to the artists, artisans and factory owners who have helped me make art there over the years. Especially José Noé Suro, who invited me to his ceramic factory in Guadalajara back in 2012. I draw inspiration daily from our exchanges and dialogues. Also to Alfonso Muñoz Cruz, Victor Alfonso Muñoz Rivera, and César Alba Hernández for their indispensable assistance with this new obsidian sculpture, which shares its title with that of the exhibition, named after the fantastic and far-roaming Paleolithic giants that are continually being unearthed throughout Mexico, 271 of them to date”. — MH

This exhibition marks the New York debut of Hagen’s new series of monochromatic relief paintings, which have been in development over the past two years. These works—originally inspired by the geometric folded paper experiments of Josef Albers at the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College—start as full-sized, precisely folded paper objects that are then punctuated by catastrophes, that is, violent interruptions of their visual logic with self-affirming crumples and intentional distortions introduced by the artist’s hand, opposing their objectivity.

From these paper originals the artist makes latex molds, inverted forms that are then “painted-in,” layer after layer with colorfully pigmented, inchoate acrylic pastes, which harden into casts of these dimensional structures. The result is the production of self-reflexive objects whose repetitive casting is mirrored in its image of repetitious facets and patterns. The use of molds, in effect, results in the creation of works that are both gestural yet serialized, discreet yet continuous, linear and cyclic, autonomous yet something apart of a totality that is forever “in-potentia.”

Gagosian – Georg Baselitz

There have always been portraits throughout art history. But more important than the subject has always been the artist himself. . . . I call this exhibition Devotion because the people I portray here are especially meaningful to me.
—Georg Baselitz

A pioneering Neo-Expressionist, Baselitz employs raw, painterly gestures to create visceral compositions with an intense emotional charge. By continually reinterpreting artistic precedents—his own previous works included—he has returned the figure to a central place in painting while expanding the very definition of abstraction.

Baselitz’s interest in portraiture emerges from his fascination with memory and its inconsistencies, as well as his observation that every painting—even a portrait of another person—is the artist’s self-portrait. At the Kunstmuseum Basel, he saw Henri Rousseau’s The Muse Inspires the Poet (Marie Laurencin and Guillaume Apollinaire) (1909) and assumed that the depicted couple was Rousseau and his wife—only to discover later that the painting shows the poet Apollinaire and his muse, painter Laurencin. This realization gave rise to a new line of inquiry for Baselitz. Over the past year, he has intensified his ongoing engagement with images of the past, producing paintings and drawings based on artists’ self-portraits. As he works, in paint or ink, he recalls the effects of each portrait and captures them in his own unique style.

Jia Aili – Gagosian

The work of the Chinese artist Jia Aili (1979 in Liaoning) possesses an unparalleled intensity. Whether reflecting on China’s inauguration of the atomic bomb or the first satellites in 1970, the theme of Aili’s oil paintings is the dramatic transformation of Chinese society over the past 50 years. 

Ian Cheng: BOB – Gladstone

BOB advances Cheng’s use of simulation to focus on an individual agent’s capacity to deal with surprise: the subjective difference between expectations and perception. Over the course of its lifetime, BOB’s body, mind, and personality evolve to better confront the continuous stream of life’s surprises, and metabolize them into familiar routines. Crucially, BOB incorporates the tutoring influence of the viewer to help offset BOB’s temptation to only satisfy its immediate impulses and childhood biases. As BOB dies many deaths – whether through failures of personality, bad parenting, random accident, or a life well lived – BOB may become synonymous with a reoccurring pattern of behavior, common across all BOB lifetimes, thereby manifesting the undying eternal characteristic of a god.

BOB features a unique model of AI composed of a congress of motivating “demons” and an inductive engine capable of learning rule-based beliefs from sensory experiences. Each demon functions as a micro-personality who obsessively attempts to fulfill its own micro-story. An eater demon forages for the food, a flight demon evades the threat, an explorer demon seeks that which lacks beliefs, among many others. Together the demons compete with one another for control of BOB’s body. The controlling demon operates under the premise that progress = minimal surprise: the smallest difference between the beliefs required by its micro-story and its current sensory perceptions. Great surprises upset BOB, causing emotional upheaval, but in turn signal BOB to update its beliefs. Over its lifetime, BOB may learn to apply its beliefs onto even the most outlandish stimuli, choosing to infer even a bad first impression and avoid being thrown into chaos in the present, but at the cost of further surprisal in the future.

Viewers who wish to influence BOB’s life may do so via BOB Shrine, a free iOS app available worldwide. Once downloaded, opened, and named, BOB Shrine allows viewers to publish patterns of stimuli to BOB, as well as caption their stimuli with a parental directive. BOB Shrine then automates the production of stimuli for BOB to choose without any further necessary engagement from the viewer. In return, BOB deposits special rewards to shrines it judges to be trustworthy parental forces. Visit https://bobs.ai/ for more details.

Jennifer Steinkamp – Lehmann Maupin

The centerpiece of the exhibition is Steinkamp’s Impeach (2019). Previously exhibited as a printed billboard in “Jam, The Billboard Creative,” a public art project organized by Mona Kuhn and Alex Prager in Los Angeles in 2017, Impeachhere bursts to life as a digital animation for the first time. A mash-up of stage diving fruit, especially peaches, plunging themselves against an invisible wall, the work hints at the possibility of a new spring for America should the titular political and legal process be set in motion, as well as the destruction left in the wake.

Also featured in the exhibition is Blind Eye 3 (2018). One of a suite of animations inspired by the landscape that surrounds the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts—the site of a major exhibition of Steinkamp’s work in 2018—this panoramic projection depicts a monocular frontal view of a dense forest of birch trees. The title references what it like to see with an eye closed and the characteristic ocular scars that are left behind when branches fall from a tree, somewhat resembling an uncanny gaze. As the trees sway—sometimes quite violently, sometimes in concert—their leaves fall, revealing an implied sense of depth. But this process unfolds, as is the case in all Steinkamp’s works, without beginning or end; while the allusion to the changing seasons is clear, Blind Eyeexists outside linear narrative, in a continuous moment.

Beyond its natural imagery, Blind Eye is also, in its nod to famous precedents in the paintings of Gustav Klimt and Vincent Van Gogh, emblematic of Steinkamp’s consistent application of art-historical reference. The other works in the exhibition reveal comparable influences; in Womb (2018) for example, the artist establishes a connection with Dutch Golden Age still life painting. Womb is an interactive VR installation that allows the viewer-participant to manipulate (and collide) projected 3-D fruit by using a handheld controller. The work’s title alludes to fruit as a plant’s defacto ovaries, extending Steinkamp’s longstanding interest in the female oriented function of seeds, spores, weeds, and, more broadly, the blossoming of complex and far-reaching ideas from the most outwardly simple origins.

A third work, Retinal (2018) was made in direct response to architect Steven J. Holl’s design for an addition to the Bloch Building of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri (it was featured in “Open Spaces,” an exhibition curated for the museum and surrounding Swope Park by Dan Cameron in 2018). Discovering that Holl refers to the structure’s windows as “lenses,” Steinkamp produced an eye-like animation that hints at the translucent, refractive appearance of optical veins. The work’s drifting clusters of green, pink, and purple forms have the slick look and acidic coloration of candy, while the amorphous shapes and busy, all-over composition forge links to biomorphic and expressionist abstraction.

In gathering significant works originally created in the context of major exhibitions, Impeach offers a valuable reminder of the breadth and ambition of Steinkamp’s practice, and of the important historical position she holds as one of the first artists to experiment with constructing imagery—including color, texture, and movement—by wholly digital means. By simulating natural movement in cycles that are at once familiar seeming and entirely unique, Steinkamp conjures the uncanny impression of artificial life. To this existing element of internal contradiction, the present exhibition’s title adds an allusion to current social and political tension—and the hope of eradicating the corruption.