The solo exhibition 'Leiko Ikemura - Metamorphoses' at the Nordic Watercolour Museum | Nordiska Akvarellmuseet in Skärhamn, Sweden presents a comprehensive survey of Leiko Ikemura’s watercolours, tempera paintings and ceramic sculptures. 

Atmospherically, Leiko Ikemura’s art is naturally reminiscent of surrealist Odilon Redon, German expressionists and Louise Bourgeois’ trendsetting work. But Ikemura has found her own magical style – dreamy, poetic and vibrating with subtle metamorphoses as if nothing were fixed, as if all things were constantly in the process of becoming, of transforming. Over time she began to return to her Japanese roots, where the soul of nature thrives in daylight and the darkness of night. Ikemura’s enigmatic work portrays strange beings, animals, plants, minerals and architectural details that melt together and gradually morph as the image emerges. Figures with ethereal bodies evolve in a dreamy, nature-filled setting. People become plants. Plants become animals. Animals become amorphous figures and abstractions. From abstractions, new life is born, and everything begins again. A characteristic Japanese sense of the spirit of nature, which inspires everything, echoes throughout Ikemura’s artistic world. Transformations are a primary focus in everything she creates. 

Encompassing everything from the artist's earliest pieces to his most recent work, the exhibition 'Christian Boltanski - Lifetime', jointly organized by the National Museum of Art, Osaka, the National Art Center, Tokyo, and the Nagasaki Prefectural Art Museum, is the first full-scale retrospective of Boltanski's career to be presented in Japan. While looking back at a variety of Boltanski's efforts from the '70s to the present, the retrospective is based on the artist's idea of creating an installation for a space - or he suggests, "presenting an exhibition as a single work of art." The exhibition will serve as an introduction to Boltanski's magnificent world of art, which he began making over 50 years ago and continues to create today.

Based on his interest in the development of human history and cultural anthropology, Boltanski garnered attention for a large number of works in which he combined everyday objects such as biscuit tins with photographs and documents to create links to his own memories as well as those of others.
In the '80s, Boltanski began producing installations that utilized light, including the Monument series (1985-ongoing). These altar-like structures, made out of photographic portraits of children and light bulbs, dealt with religious themes. This led to works such as Altar to the Chases High School (1987), an altar consisting of face shots of Jewish students who enrolled in a Vienna high school in 1931 that were illuminated with light bulbs. As this technique of displaying a collection of portraits evokes images of genocide, specifically the mass murder of millions of Jewish people in Nazi Germany, it has prompted a great deal of controversy. For Boltanski, whose father was Jewish, the Holocaust is something with deeply personal significance. In works such as Personnes (2010), made up of countless articles of clothing piled up in the vast Grand Palais in Paris, Boltanski has used a variety of methods to address themes such as history, memory, death, and absence.

The exhibition «Bernardí Roig. Todos los icebergs son negros. Films 2000-2018», curated by Nekane Aramburu, is a project conceived from Es Baluard Museu d’Art Modern i Contemporani of Palma, where it was presented last spring, and that now expanded and reformulated, the Ministerio de Cultura y Deporte opens to the public in Tabacalera.

This exhibition encourages the investigation, analysis and revision of the complex universe of the artist from the presentation and decoding of his audiovisual work, displayed in an exciting scenographic disposition, as an initiatory journey between the appropriation and recreation of his images and visual constructions.

His audiovisual work is the surface on which the fundamental lines of his creative process that always starts from drawing solidify in movement. It is a synthesis of a faceted universe, a baroque of cultured metaphors that through a certain narrative reveals its obsessions and the obstinacy to combat the in-communication of the human being in front of a destiny condemned to extinction.

On this occasion, to overcome the challenge of exhibiting in Tabacalera, the artist has recorded the film «La Joie de Vivre» in the Tabacalera spaces, which is materialised in a large multi-channel installation at the entrance of the exhibition. Bernardí Roig has called a group of women as a tribute to the first women’s union group, Las cigarreras; rebellious, passionate and independent that united the precariousness of the condition of working woman to fortify it.

Descendants or not of that social force, raised in their high-heeled shoes, naked and full of carnality inhabit their generous bodies with fullness. They are splendid presences, signaled by life and filled with graffiti, tattoos and scars. There, in Tabacalera, as in Matisse’s painting «La Joie de Vivre», they pursue, occupy and expand those spaces with their laughter, hugs, confidences and raids, harassed and filmed by a drone; that eye with wings.

The exhibition is part of the 30th anniversary celebrations of the IVAM and showcases works of national and international artists, all produced in 1989, and linked to some of the most important events of this historic year that ended an era defined by the Cold War and the confrontation between the pro-Soviet dictatorships and Western democracies. It focuses on the fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening of the Soviet bloc; the AIDS crisis and the cultural wars related to the wave of conservatism that flooded the United States and Europe; the beginning of the end of the Apartheid regime in South Africa and the development of the concept of multiculturalism prior to globalisation. 

Curated by Sandra Moros and Sergio Rubira, in collaboration with Fundació Banc Sabadell.

Featuring more than 210 works the large-scale solo exhibition 'Our Planet Earth and Stars' at The National Art Center Tokyo presents a comprehensive insight into Leiko Ikemura's artistic career. 

Covering some four decades of work, Leiko Ikemura explores a wide range of media including painting, sculpture, drawing, watercolor painting, printmaking, photography, and video, while depicting various aspects of creation and change as well as the latent potential for these things. Ikemura’s singularly ambiguous vision, exemplified by her integrated landscapes populated with young girls, spirits, small fantastic hybrid creatures, people and animals, easily assumes different forms from one image to the next. Her work conveys the unyielding notion that as living beings we should strive to accept the diverse existence of all things exactly as we find them. Alternatively infused with humor, affection or pain, it is precisely the modest and introspective quality of Ikemura’s art that makes it such an incisive critique of today’s more and more stifling society.  In recent years Ikemura has turned to large landscape paintings to manifest primordial narratives on a mythic scale. 

The artist's works offer a critical perspective on the human conflict with one's surrounding-largely media-based-influences. Figures sculpted in polyester resin combined with fluorescent tubes characterise this motif in Roig's work and form the focus of the present exhibition. The cold neon light resembles the flood of light-based images brought about by the digital revolution. Roig is concerned with the loss of social and individual identity, and with the loneliness perhaps caused by the lack of direct communication. We see humans who experience light as a burden. Light is shown as oppressive, as demanding too much of the human senses, as the dark side of excess. 

“Igloos”, an exhibition dedicated to Mario Merz (Milan, 1925–2003)—one of the most relevant post-war artists—brings together his most iconic group of works, the igloos, dating from 1968 until the end of his life. Curated by Vicente Todolí, and realised in collaboration with Fondazione Merz, the exhibition spans the whole space of the Navate of Pirelli HangarBicocca, placing the visitor at the heart of a constellation of over 30 large-scale works in the shape of an igloo: an unprecedented landscape of great visual impact. A key figure of Arte Povera, Mario Merz investigates and represents the processes of transformation of nature and human life: in particular the igloos, visually traceable to primordial habitations, become for the artist the archetype of inhabited places and of the world, as well as a metaphor for the various relationships between interior and exterior, between physical and conceptual space, between individuality and collectivity. These pieces are characterised by a metal structure coated in a great variety of common materials, such as clay, glass, stone, jute, and steel—often leaning or intertwined in an unstable fashion—and by the use of neon elements and wording. The exhibition provides an overview of Mario Merz’s work, of its historical importance and great innovative reach: gathered from private collections and international museums, the igloos will be displayed together in such a large number for the first time.

The Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow presents an exhibition by Viktor Pivovarov, one of the founders of the Moscow Romantic Conceptualism movement.

Included in the exhibition is the artist’s new cycle of paintings ‘Moscow, Moscow!’ (2017), as well as his acclaimed album ‘Dramatis Personae’ (1996) and little-known albums ‘If’ (1995) and ‘Florence’ (2005–2010). The exhibition is accompanied by a sound installation from surviving audio tapes of lectures by Merab Mamardashvili, Alexander Piatigorsky, other great philosophers and writers whose life and work are closely linked to the artist’s creative path.

Like other figures of the Moscow Conceptualist movement, Viktor Pivovarov makes a remarkable connection between the visual and verbal fabric in his art. This interweaving of the fantastic and realistic produces a new metaphysical dimension in Pivovarov’s works, which are always tied to a specific time, place and highly articulated psychological situation. With an easy sleight of hand the artist transforms the most serious things into a merry carnival accessible to everyone and dependent on the spectator’s own register of perception.

"... I tried to convey the universal energy that united the Moscow artists and poets who created the postwar Moscow myth, to convey what Mamleev describes as the ‘passionate desire to go beyond the boundaries of ordinary human consciousness, which felt like a prison," says Viktor Pivovarov.

The exhibition title ‘Moscow Album’ explains the basic principles of the conceptual approach. The form of this album implies obligatory ‘attribution’ of the drawings, while the traditional, comfortable intimacy and a special, familiar atmosphere permeated with humor can be discerned in all the series included in the exhibition.

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.

This major touring exhibition focuses on Kentridge’s large-scale film installations including O Sentimental Machine (2015) and The Refusal of Time (2012), an immersive work exploring the technology of time-keeping and string theory, created in dialogue with physicist Peter Galison. A display of new and recent tapestries, works on paper and artist books will accompany the film projections, presented within an environment designed by Kentridge’s long-term collaborator Sabine Theunissen.

Combining drawing, tapestry, music and film projection as well as sculpture, this major touring exhibition draws on sources as broad as early cinema, China’s Cultural Revolution, opera, scientific theories of time and space and the generative qualities of nature and creativity.

Thick Time is co-organised by Whitechapel Gallery, London, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Museum der Moderne Salzburg and the Whitworth, The University of Manchester.
William Kentridge: Thick Time at the Whitworth is supported by a Jonathan Ruffer Curatorial Research Grant from Art Fund.

“I think of land, sea, sky. And they always make a massive connection. I try to paint this, this sense of the elemental coming together of land and sea, sky and land…stacked in horizon lines endlessly beginning and ending…” – Sean Scully

A major highlight of the 56th Venice Biennale, Sean Scully’s acclaimed Landline series makes its U.S. debut at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Featuring never-before-seen artworks from the renowned series, Sean Scully: Landline presents a dramatic shift in the work of one of today’s most influential artists. With thick, gestural brushstrokes and loose bands of color, the Landline paintings show Scully’s transition away from his earlier hard-edged minimalism to his current, more expressive style, a style that no doubt elicits the beauty and brilliance of the natural world. 

Spanning a variety of media—including watercolor, oil painting, and sculpture—the works in the exhibition showcase the artist’s remarkable ability to deepen, mystify, and vary his relatively limited repertoire of motifs—largely comprised of vertical and horizontal stripes. With gestures toward the land, sea, and sky (and the indistinct lines between them), the works navigate the elemental relationships that compose our world, and in doing so reveal the sublime character of those interactions. Together, the works will transform the Hirshhorn’s Second Level inner-circle galleries into an unceasing current of color and energy.

This exhibition debuts more than twenty years after the Hirshhorn opened Scully’s first mid-career retrospective in 1995, a pivotal exhibition that cemented his status at the center of contemporary painting. Building on the narrative of this 1995 survey, Sean Scully: Landline affords viewers the opportunity to witness the next step in Scully’s artistic evolution, one that continues to impact the greater landscape of contemporary abstract art. Following its Hirshhorn debut, the series will travel to the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, in Spring 2019.

Curated by Stéphane Aquin, Chief Curator with curatorial assistance from Sandy Guttman.

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.