Starting Saturday, 14 March, our galleries in Berlin and Palma will temporarily close for the general public.
We remain reachable for you via phone and e-mail and hope to open our doors again soon.
Bernardi Roig’s work "Der Italiener (The cow)“ is part of the 10th Luminale taking place from 12 to 15 March in Frankfurt/Main and Offenbach.
This year the Biennial for Light Art and Urban Design focuses on artistic works under the central theme "Digital Romantic“ and shows 110 installations by international artists. Roig’s work is exhibited at the festival center, the Instituto Cervantes in the former Amerika-Haus.
"Aeternum", Sean Scully's first exhibition in Switzerland in 20 years, runs through 10 March at Forum Paracelsus in St. Moritz. It focuses on Scully's abstractions inspired by Classical Greek and Roman architecture like his paintings and pastels of 'Dorics'. The show is curated by Oscar Humphries.
During PREMACO Ghada Amer offers material proof, by means of the phrase couched in enormous letters of red resin ―“Hoy el 70% de los pobres en el mundo son mujeres”―, that women are the most marginalized group, even in developed countries. By introducing her work into the urban context, literally and symbolically, the artist claims her right, and the right of all women, to occupy the public space in a fully political dimension.
Zazil Barba, Pedro Cabrita Reis, José Dávila and Maria Taniguchi re-signify objects and, in doing so, open up the possibility of a symbolic language, of a process of initiation that briefly suspends mundane reality, giving way to doubt, surprise, and even joy.It is in this quest for the extraordinary that the last of the tribes finds itself (although the concept obviously alludes to a larger group). It is here that there seems to exist a fragment of hope in a world from which empathy and compassion are all too often absent.
"Cabrita - A Roving Gaze" takes place exactly 20 years after Pedro Cabrita Reis's first exhibition at Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art. It presents one single large-scale installation which has been especially conceived for the museum's architecture. While intersecting with the artist's life, the work reflects on the role of the museums and is completed by photographs of the artist's works from 1999 to today as well as objects, drawings and documents.
KEWENIG congratulates Christian Boltanski on his retrospective exhibition 'Faire son temps' at Centre Pompidou in Paris.
More than 50 works are on display, 35 years after his first exhibition at the French museum. Conceived by the artist himself as one site-specific installation, 'Faire son temps' takes the viewer on a journey through 5 decades of Boltanski's oeuvre.
Sean Scully is taking over Pablo Picasso’s former studio, the Château de Boisgeloup in Normandy, where Picasso regularly stayed between 1930 and 1937. “Celtique“ spreads over a chapel and a dovecote adjacent to the historic studio. The exhibition presents new sculptures and paintings, including works of the Madonna series – his most recent figurative series.
The exhibition ‘dark goes lightly’ by Liliane Tomasko at Château La Coste brings together 13 new acrylic on linen paintings that with their vivid bright colours explore the line between the conscious and the subconscious. For many years now, Tomasko’s oeuvre has been affected by an intensive investigation of dreams, the unconscious and the emotions.
The Nagasaki Prefectural Art Museum will host "Lifetime" - the third and last station of Christian Boltanski's retrospective in Japan - from 18 October 2019 through 5 January 2020. Encompassing a variety of significant works spanning the French artist's 50-year career, the exhibition is conceived as one site-specific installation.
The conceptual artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov create fantastical spaces that they call ‘total’ installations. Sketches and drawings for their famous installations such as "The Toilet" realised at the IX Kassel Documenta 1992, "The Palace of Projects" permanently installed at the Zeche Zollverein, and "The Red Pavilion", which was exhibited at the 45th Venice Biennale 1993 are included in the exhibition among many other ideas built on paper.
Eleuthera marks Sean Scully’s return to figuration, after forty years focusing solely on abstraction. In this series of works Scully translates portraits of his son into large scale compositions on aluminium. The exhibition in CAC Málaga is the second iteration of the show - after a first presentation at the Albertina Museum in Vienna over the summer - encompassing more than forty paintings, drawings and photographs.
The city of Poitiers, France, invites Kimsooja to create a dialogue between the history and architecture of its remarkable patrimonial buildings and contemporary artworks. Kimsooja occupies the architecture of places like the Palace of the Dukes of Aquitaine or the Saint Louis Chapel with her works nourished from themes of travel, displacement and uprooting.
Her works with nomadic accents such as "Bottari Truck - Migrateurs" (2007) resonate with fifteen other international guest artists, whose works echo her own practice and infiltrate city life, such as Subodh Gupta from India, Tadashi Kawamata from Japan, France’s Thomas Ferrand or Congolese artist Sammy Baloji.
An associated program will be organised in Poitiers and Grand Poitier around this invitation to Kimsooja and her universe. Punctuated by showcase events, unique meetings and events in public spaces, Traversées \ Kimsooja invites to a new experience of the city, based on devious ways and reversals of perspectives.
Traversées \ Kimsooja is the foundation event for the Palace Quarter Project, a long-term heritage, cultural and urban planning project, which is expected to take ten years to complete. It is an invitation to (re)discover these iconic buildings and an opening to the world, through contemporary artistic offerings.
Musja unveils “Who is afraid of the dark?“ the first part of The Dark Side – a three year program curated by Danilo Eccher. Through a series of unexpected experiences and encounters with large scale installations, the viewers are invited to figure out their own reaction when confronted to tactile sensations, magical rituals or theatrical visions, including works by several artists such as Christian Boltanski, Monica Bonvicini, Gino De Dominicis, Gianni Dessì, Flavio Favelli, James Lee Byars, Robert Longo, Hermann Nitsch, Tony Oursler and Chiharu Shiota amongst others.
The novel "Don Quixote" by Miguel de Cervantes is the only chivalry novel in history that four centuries later keeps being translated and published every year. The so-called "first novel of history" is actually a work about the long-awaited, experienced and suffered life, like any human life, that’s why it's a deeply democratic story.
In his installation "Video," set up in the basement of the Instituto Cervantes, Bernardi Roig puts the human figure as the conceptual center of his multimedia works: sculptures, installations, videos and drawings. Roig's creations are about body restriction and visual impairment. He creates a vibrant vitality by working between a seemingly traditional sculpture and conceptual minimalism.
This first International Contemporary Art Biennale in Rabat is dedicated entirely to women artists and is set across significant cultural sites in Rabat. It brings together 63 artists and artist collectives from 27 different nationalities and disciplines. Together with academicians, art historians and filmmakers they focus on a unifying theme: Creation. The biennale also calls for the public to consider values of openness, tolerance and parity. Ghada Amer participates with a new garden installation entitled 'A oppression creates a state of war'.
This publication selects one moment from the great oeuvre of Imi Knoebel: 1989. A year of upheavals. The year that brought the fall of the Wall.
From 1988, Knoebel was working on a new series of works, the “Schattenräume” (“Shadow Spaces”). Five of these works created until 1989 were called by the artist—the title adhering to the chronology—“Schattenraum 1–5.” To the two subsequent “Schattenräume 6 and 7,” Knoebel gave a new thematic title: “daß die Geschichte zusammenbleibt” (“So That History Remains Together”).
Thirty years later, this publication is presenting “daß die Geschichte zusammenbleibt – Schattenraum 6” in the context of this important group of works; it looks back at Knoebel’s early oeuvre and to works that give evidence of the artist’s concise realization of his pictorial concept. (Carsten Ahrens)
'Why Should I Hesitate: Putting Drawings to Work‘ at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA) in Cape Town covers over forty years of William Kentridge's artistic production (1976 – 2019) including early works, as well as newer pieces on view for the first time in South Africa.
Christian Boltanski’s installation ‘Animitas’ can be seen and heard at Sculpture Park Hellbrunn in Salzburg. The bell project was first shown in 2014 in the Chilean desert, subsequently in different locations in Japan, Scotland, Canada and Israel. The installation ‘Animitas’ in Salzburg consists of 120 Japanese chimes, each attached to spindly sticks – with each wind breeze producing a delicate sound, which Boltanski calls the “music of the souls”. Until now, these installations have been destroyed upon conclusion of a exhibition. However, the Salzburg version is expected to reside until September 2020, and appear in other locations after that.
Museo Novecento inaugurates the first solo exhibition in Italy of the Chilean artist Sandra Vásquez de la Horra (Viña del mar, Chile, 1967, curated by Rubina Romanell.
The exhibition, in the Room space, continues the cycle of exhibitions by female artists begun with Maria Lai and later with the duo Goldschmied & Chiari. Vásquez de la Horra, student of Jannis Kounellis and Rosemarie Trockel, has been awarded with important prizes such as the Prix de dessin Daniel & Florence Guerlain. The exhibition at the Museo Novecento is a unique opportunity to observe a body of work belonging to the production of recent years. In addition, some works have been created specifically for the occasion, after the artist was inspired by the works of Mario Sironi in the permanent collection.
The CCK is once again one of the venues of the International Biennial of Contemporary Art of South America (BIENALSUR). In this edition, 'Infinitud' exhibition is presented, built in of a selection of videos on landscapes belonging to the Es Baluard Collection - Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Palma, Spain. Twelve artists from different latitudes address the space - continuous, infinite, inescapable - which they take to underline, reinvent or intervene in search of diverse aesthetic and political readings.
The participating artists are Lida Abdul, Irene de Andrés, Robert Cahen, Bouchra Khalili, Marcellvs L, Michael Najjar, Bernardí Roig, Francisco Ruiz de Infante, Amparo Sard, Javier Vallhonrat, Marcelo Viquez, Wolf Vostell.
The exhibition «Infinitud. Colección Es Baluard» is made up of a selection belonging to the museum collection, made by Nekane Aramburu, its Director until March 17, 2019, and Diana Wechsler, Artistic – Academic Director of BIENALSUR.
The exhibition 'Disturbing Narratives' witnesses empathy, sensibility, imaginative richness and radically freed phantasy, with which the artists of our days are approaching on the unlimited complexity of life and history. They don’t tell us anecdotes, they are not “story-tellers” but they create poetically powerful, deeply touching, often enigmatic, mysterious, dramatic metaphors, which reveal the disturbing perspectives and frightening darkness behind the surface of normality. At the same time the artist’s works manifest hope and empathy, the liberating power of consciousness of the “real”, the enthusiastic value of the truth. In this sense, all the unusual and disturbing images, all the surprising, strange, extremely vivid, almost aggressive, burning and torturing, profoundly de-stabilizing moments and irritating shapes of improbability and uncertainty work like liberation, they take us back to ourselves, show us hidden roads, which are directing us to the “real”.
Among the participating artists are Anya Belyat-Giunta, Candice Breitz, Erro, Andrea Fogli, Chen Chie-Jen, Kendell Geers, Gary Hill, William Kentdrige, Urs Lüthi, Andrei Molookin, Herman Nitsch, Orlan, Bernardi Roig, Rosemarie Trockel, Sandra Vásquez de la Horra…
Peabody Essex Museum presents the North American premiere of Kimsooja's major performative installation titled 'Archive of Mind', in which the artist invites the audience to participate and reflect on the act of making. Visitors are encouraged to sit at a 19-meter-long elliptical wooden table and sink into the experience of forming a lump of clay into sphere. The repetitive act of rolling clay introduces a polarity between the symmetrical forces of the participants' palms, transposing their state of mind into matter and matter into void. Through the course of the exhibition, thousands of clay spheres are generated through small, individual gestures that reveal the emotional traces of their makers and cumulatively generate a complex array of texture, scale, and tone. 'Archive of Mind' is part of Kimsooja's body of work in which everyday actions are transformed into moments of meditation or transcendence.
After presenting 'Animitas' (2014) and 'Animitas (Blanc)' (2017) at Espace Louis Vuitton München in 2017, the Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo shows the two last chapters of Christian Boltanski's Animitas' series.
Paying tribute to small roadside altars honouring the dead, Animitas is initially an outdoor installation which consists of 300 Japanese bells on spindly sticks, echoing the configuration of the stars on the night of Boltanski’s birth: September 6, 1944. The first version of the installation was set in the most arid desert of Atacama (Chile), repeating the celestial archway as seen in the Southern Hemisphere on that date. The same configuration was later reinterpreted on three other sites: on the island of Teshima in Japan (La forêt des murmures, 2016), on Quebec’s Île d’Orléans (Blanc, 2017), and near the Dead Sea in Israel (Mères mortes, in the fall of 2017). Doomed to disappear with time, these installations blend Boltanski’s personal history with the stories of the places themselves, and thereby with those of thousands of souls. The video of each installation of Animitas, filmed in a single shot from sunrise to sunset, is presented in conjunction with a grass and flower bed that naturally evolves with the passage of time and people over the course of the exhibition, while the bells’ gentle tinkling evokes, according to the artist himself, “the music of the stars and the voices of the floating souls”.
'Jannis Kounellis', curated by Germano Celant, is the major retrospective dedicated to the artist following his death in 2017. Developed in collaboration with Archivio Kounellis, the project brings together more 60 works from 1959 to 2015, from both Italian and international museums, as well as from important private collections both in Italy and abroad. The show explores the artistic and exhibition history of Jannis Kounellis (Piraeus 1936 – Rome 2017), establishing a dialogue between his works and the eighteenth-century spaces of Calle Corner della Regina.
'Rothko in Lampedusa' is an independent exhibition in partnership with UNHCR taking place during the 58. Venice Biennale. The exhibition reflects upon the migrant crisis utilising a poignant artistic language. The common thread weaving throughout the exhibition is Mark Rothko, the artist who escaped from the repressive regime of the Russian Empire in the beginning of the 20th century. If this particular refugee had not been able to explore his artistic potential in his host country, we would not have his extraordinary artworks today. The exhibition therefore intends to create a dialogue between established contemporary artists and five younger refugee artists, who will be hosted in residency in the city of Venice. Amongst them are Adel Abdessemed, Majid Adin, Ai Weiwei, Christian Boltanski, Rasha Deeb, Mohamed Keita, Dihn Q. Lê, Nalini Malani, Abu Bakarr Mansaray, Richard Mosse, Bnar Sardar Sdiq, Ali WakWak, Hassan Yare and Artur Żmijewski.
Curated by Walter Vanhaerents and Vincent Verbist, 'The Death of James Lee Byars' on view at the church of the Santa Maria della Visitazione features works by James Lee Byars and Zad Moultaka. The show allows the public to reconnect with one of James Lee Byars’ most iconic installations, which the artist created in Brussels exactly 25 years ago and which has been part of the Collection since 1996. In addition, the audience is invited to discover the creation by Lebanese artist and composer Zad Moultaka that directly engages with Byars’ work and has been specifically commissioned for this occasion.
Works by Bernardi Roig are on view in the sixth edition of 'Glasstress'. 'Glasstress' is a project by Adriano Berengo to further his mission of marrying contemporary art and glass. Artists of all disciplines from sculptors to musicians have been invited to collaborate with the maestros in creating art in glass. Launched in 2009 as an official collateral event of the Biennale di Venezia, today it is the world’s leading showcase of this collaboration of craft and creativity, forging a new trajectory for glass and a new path for contemporary artists.
Curated by Vik Muniz & Koen Vanmechelen 'Glasstress' brings together leading contemporary artists from Europe, the United States, Latin America, India, and China in an exhibition exploring the endless creative possibilities of glass. To celebrate 10 years of 'Glasstress' and 30 years of Berengo Studio, the exhibition goes back to its historical roots on the island of Murano.
The sixth edition of GLASSTRESS brings together leading contemporary artists from Europe, the United States, Latin America, India, and China in an exhibition exploring the endless creative possibilities of glass. To celebrate 10 years of GLASSTRESS and 30 years of Berengo Studio, the exhibition goes back to its historical roots on the island of Murano. It will be the third time that Ilya & Emlia Kabakov participate with an impressive installation in the former glass furnace.
Sean Scully’s exhibition 'Long Light‘ at the Villa e Collezione Panza in Varese brings together over 60 works from the early seventies to the present day: from acrylics to the black monochromes, up to the Madonna and Landline series of the last few years.
On March 1, the 7th Annual Award of The Art Newspaper Russia took place. 2018 winners in categories “Museum of the Year”, “Exhibition of the Year”, “Book of the Year”, “Restoration of the Year” and “Personal Contribution” were announced at the Gostiny Dvor.
The annual award of The Art Newspaper Russia is one of the most anticipated events in the art world, an acknowledgment of outstanding achievements in the field. The award highlights the past year's most significant events in Russian art both in Russia and abroad, as well as the work of patrons of the art in developing and preserving cultural heritage. The choice of winners was determined by both public response and the professional community's feedback.
EXHIBITION OF THE YEAR - “Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. “Not everyone will be taken into the future.” Tate Modern (London). The State Hermitage Museum (St. Petersburg). The State Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow).
The exhibition of Ilya Kabakov and his wife and co-author from the late 1980s onwards, Emilia Kabakova, is an inspiring example of international cultural cooperation. From the very beginning, the project was intended for three museums: Tate Modern, the Hermitage and the Tretyakov Gallery (with the support of Novatek). The organizers state that this exhibition is the first large-scale retrospective of the founder of Moscow conceptualism, who became famous in the world as the one who invented the “total” installation. The exhibition includes works created by Ilya Kabakov during the last 60 years, from the 1960s to today.
The name of the project refers both to the mid-1970s text by Kabakov and to the installation of the same name and encourages the viewer to discuss the role and place of art in our life. At each museum, the exhibition had its own structure, since space was a key concept for Kabakov. The artists had several hundred exhibitions at leading museums around the world, while in Moscow and St. Petersburg there had been shows of separate installations. But the project “Not everyone will be taken into the future,” where the artist's evolution was examined from an academic and comprehensive perspective, strengthened Ilya Kabakov’ status of a classic of contemporary art.
The most famous “born in the USSR” artist in the world, Kabakov seriously influenced the post-Soviet art evolution. The fact that his works have been extensively shown to Russian viewer, is especially important today when the society dramatically rethinks the Soviet experience, which received a universal existentialist interpretation in Kabakov’s oeuvre. Commemorating the exhibition, the creative couple donated Ilya Kabakov's Moscow workshop at Sretensky Boulevard to the Tretyakov gallery. The artist used to work there from the early 1970s to the late 1980s. Now it will be a museum devoted to the emergence of Moscow conceptualism and its heroes.
Christian Boltanski created a memorial dedicated to the people subjected to forced labor in the mines, huts and factories of the Saarland region during the Second World War. His memorial is installed in the Völklingen Ironworks, declared as a World Heritage site by UNESCO in 1994.
Boltanski's memorial intends to keep alive the memory of more than 12.000 people from different nations, who were brought to the Völklinger Hütte to work under discriminatory and inhuman conditions, causing the death of more than 260 foreign laborers. His installation, 'Die Zwangsarbeiter - Erinnerungsort in der Völklinger Hütte', represents an archive of memories, a room filled with countless archive boxes and a pile of black used clothes at its center. Accompanied by sound, the whispered names of the forced laborers resound from all corners of the room. In the 800 square meter ore shed of the Völklinger Hütte, Christian Boltanski has further grouped 91 lockers from all parts of the Ironworks site into a large installation, out of which spoken memories of former ironworkers reverberate.
Boltanski's work is a continuous confrontation with the cruelties of the last century. The Holocaust, the passage of time, the human attempt to forget and to be forgotten, but also his own past and childhood, are central themes of the artist's work.
KEWENIG is proud to present the most comprehensive catalogue on Ghada Amer's ceramic work. The book showcases pieces that Amer created during her residencies at Greenwich House Pottery, New York, in the years 2014 to 2017 as well as a photographic documentation of her most recent work in the studios of Cerámica Suro in Mexico. It is published through DISTANZ Verlag and contains texts by Justine Ludwig and Britta Schmitz as well as an interview with the artist by Sebastian Preuss.
Pedro Cabrita Reis's new installation is located in front of MAAT museum and consists of two illuminated aluminium towers and was commissioned by E.D.P. Foundation, Lisbon.
The Daniel and Florence Guerlain Drawing Prize, which has already showcased over thirty artists since its creation, this year pays tribute to three artists living in Europe. Their work will be on view at the Parisian Salon du Dessin, where the winner will be announced on the 22 March.