On the occasion of our current exhibition Bernd Koberling » Malerei 2003 - 2018 « running through 26 January, 2019 this wonderful watercolour, 'Untitled' 2014 is currently available in the Tagesspiegel Weihnachtsauktion / Tagesspiegel Christmas Auction. 

Koberling creates his watercolours – a technique that he continues to use to this day - during his annual visits to Iceland. This unique and extraordinary landscape exerts a special influence on the artist and has been an important subject of his painting since the 1960s. The fissured, rugged fjords of the eastern coast of Iceland have become the artist’s second studio since 1977, every year for several months. Here he brings to paper in flowing colours, his impressions of the volcanism and water abundance of the island's landscape. 

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. 

‘Leiko Ikemura - Female genesis’ is currently on view at the Neue Galerie Gladbeck, running through 11 January, 2019.

The solo exhibition includes a selection of paintings, paper works and ceramics from Ikemura’s recent work, in which landscape, the process of transformation, and the transition between human and natural creatures emerge as recurrent motifs.  

“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.

Kimsooja is part of the exhibition 'Persona Grata' running at The Musée national de l'histoire de l'immigration and the MAC VAL - Musée d'art contemporain du Val-de-Marne through 20 January. On view is Kimsooja's lightbox that showcases a photographic print of an image extracted from the artist's performance 'Bottari Truck - Migrateurs 2007-2009'. The exhibition aims at raising awareness and fostering debate around issues related to migratory flows. Kimsooja is among more than 30 artistic testimonies questioning the notion of hospitaliy, national fold, and behaviours of rejection. In 2007, in residence at the MAC VAL, Kimsooja realised the Bottari Truck - Migrateurs performance which led her, on a Peugeot pick-up, from Vitry to Paris. This journey commemorated the 'Sans Papier' Movement at Église Saint Bernard where immigrants without papers protected themselves in the early nineties. 

The Perfect Kiss, presenting more than one hundred works, is the first retrospective exhibition by James Lee Byars (Detroit 1932 - Cairo 1997) in Belgium and simultaneously also a tribute to Byars as a European artist, a Belgian artist, even an Antwerp artist. Byars traveled for ten years between New York and Kyoto before arriving in Europe in 1969, invited by Anny De Decker and Bernd Lohaus for an exhibition at the Wide White Space Gallery in Antwerp (April 18 - May 7 1969). Byars quickly became part of a group of artists and art lovers around this groundbreaking gallery - Joseph Beuys, Marcel Broodthaers, Jef Cornelis, Nicole and Herman Daled, Isi Fiszman, and many others - and became a prominent figure in the European art scene with participations in five documenta's from 1972 until his death. 

The nomadic performance and installation artist James Lee Byars challenged the post-war art world with a poetic attitude animated by three separate motifs: the question, perfection and death. His search for utter purity of intention and expression was bolstered by a desire to form a direct, and thus impersonal, understanding of the world, in this way transcending the Western romantic notions of self-expression and genius. His oeuvre is an idiosyncratic mix of the meditative, the theatrical, the participatory and the aesthetically 'perfect'.

The Perfect Kiss presents works in different genres and media (painting, sculpture, installation, video, performance and text), with a focus on Byars' presence in Belgium from 1969 to 1994, with works such as Two in a Hat, Mask and Dress, 75 in a Hat, A Pink Silk Airplane for 100 and The World Question Center (all from 1969), The Black Book (1971) and The Perfect Love Letter (1974). The beating heart of the exhibition is a selection of never-before-seen letters from Byars to his friends in Belgium.

The title of the exhibition refers to a performance that was presented frequently and worldwide, including in Brussels (1974) and in Antwerp (1976), and forms an inviting gesture after the Greetings from the Eurasian exhibition of 2017 which examined Joseph Beuys' activities in Antwerp. 

Curated by Lotte Beckwé. 

Image: James Lee Byars, 'The Unicorn Horn in the white circle', 1984, at KEWENIG Berlin, on view in The Perfect Kiss at M HKA. 

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.

YSP presents Sean Scully: Inside Outside, the largest-ever presentation of sculptures and first exhibition of sculpture and painting in the UK by the Irish-born artist.

Exploring concepts of landscape and abstraction with human experience, the exhibition unites sculpture with important recent paintings on aluminium, together with works on paper. Drawing out ideas pertinent to the singularity of YSP and its landscape, this is a poetic, robust experience that embraces the Park’s topography and Scully’s exceptional vigour, as well as his belief that in life and art there is perpetual discovery.

The exhibition presents an artist at the height of his powers. Aged 72, it is evident that there is no curtailment of Scully’s energy, drive and vision. Keenly aware of the labour that dominated the lives of his mining family, Scully’s practice is one of great rigour and toil, his output prodigious. For YSP he has made new paintings and sculpture – resolutely contemporary works that will integrate an inclination towards geometry with the romantic sincerity of landscape painting in the historical tradition.

Displaying over 70 works, this solo exhibition presents Ghada Amer's recent experimentation with ceramics that further develops her career-long investigation of paradoxical construction, sexuality, and power dynamics. 

On the occasion of this exhibition, KEWENIG will publish a comprehensive catalogue at DISTANZ, including texts by Justine Ludwig, curator of the show, and Britta Schmitz, curator at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, as well as an interview with the artist by Sebastian Preuss, deputy editor in chief of Weltkunst magazine.

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.

The Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome opens its spaces to the EMST collection, the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, to present the joint project 'La verità è sempre un'altra - dialogo tra due collezioni' / 'Truth Is Always Something Else - A dialogue between two Collections' including more than 20 works from the EMST Collection. The exhibition is hosted within 'Time is Out of Joint', the current set up of the Galleria Nazionale's permanent collection, from 21 September through 11 November. 'La verità è sempre un'altra' is the third edition of the EMST series entitles 'EMST in the World' and focuses on 17 influential artists of the Gruppo Sigma, a historic movement founded in Rome in 1959 by several Greek artists.

Most of the artists presented in the exhibition have a deep connection with Italy, a place that they chose either for their education or for their artistic research and, as a result, the influence by the social, political and cultural situation in Rome, during their stay in the city, is obvious on their work. The similarities and differences that emerge through the juxtaposition of the works, also depend on the spectators’ interpretation and perception.

Kimsooja's installation of 6 Bottari was especially produced in 2005 for the artist's solo exhibition at EMST, Athens, and recently travelled to Italy to be exhibited at Rome's National Gallery. 

“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.

INTRIGUING UNCERTAINTIES highlights the significance of the narrative in contemporary art that focus on singular socio-cultural constellations as well as specific and situational meanings, based on anthropological considerations. 

The realm of darkness, chaos and fear is part of our anthropological reality and it is the artist’s role to disclose these hidden forces. The artist, through his radical imagination, elaborates disturbing and destabilizing improbabilities that reflect and shed light on the complexity of human existential experience and character.  These uncertainties and improbabilities have the power to liberate the viewer’s imagination and invite the viewer to engage more readily with artworks on an emotional and intellectual level. Indeed, this was the view of Edmund Burke, a philosopher whose brilliant essay was one of the very first inquiries on the aesthetic power of uncertainties and ‘expressive obscurity’ to free our imagination, create figures and forms of improbability and connections between different realms of experiences. Through the visual narrative of obscurity, uncertainty and improbability, the artists of this exhibition bring the viewers on a journey to through the multifaceted nature of human existential experiences and an extremely complex, destabilizing but also intriguing and fascinating poetic universe.

The exhibition include art works  by artists like: Anya Belyat-Giunta, Günter Brus, Tony Cragg, Gianni Dessi, László Fehér, Andrea Fogli, Erich Gruber, Veronika Holcová, Marine Joatton, Tibor iski Kocsis, Nina Kovacheva, Juul Kraijer, Dirk Lange, Denisa Lehocká, Iris Levasseur, Felice Levini, Christian Lhopital, Andrei Molodkin, Alois Mosbacher, Muntean/Rosenblum, Hermann Nitsch, Dennis Oppenheim, Piero Pizzi Cannella, Bernardi Roig, Serse, Barthélémy Toguo, Sandra Vásquez de la Horra…among others.

Sean Scully is widely regarded as the master of post-minimalist abstraction. Revolutionising abstract painting with his grid systems of intersecting bands and lines, his artwork uses the shapes and forms of concrete geometry, infused with a lyrical emotion. In this retrospective exhibition, Scully revisits his early works which reveal the origin of his continued fascination with stripes and the spaces in between. Scully was a prize winner in the John Moores Painting Prize in 1972 and again in 1974. The opening of the exhibition coincides with the opening of the John Moores Painting Prize 2018 and Liverpool Biennial 2018.

Santo Tirso has for many years been a significant public piece by Pedro Cabrita Reis, held at the 6th International Symposium of Sculpture of Santo Tirso, in 2001, at the invitation of Alberto Carneiro. This emblematic sculpture refers to a theme that has always been present throughout his vast work - the "house" - and how the understanding of this question can lead us to a deeper knowledge of the artist's thought and practice.
Indeed, in the overwhelming majority of the works, almost all of them unpublished, which Cabrita Reis brings to this exhibition, he goes through many forms in an intricate web of ideas and forms that offer the viewer a discovery or even a reading in permanent crossings and contaminations of materials and objects of immediate recognition by any person and which, being abandoned by their possessors, by apparent loss of immediate utility for them, are attentive, obsessive and carefully collected by the artist in his studio, according to time and will, new life, now full of meanings, historical, philosophical, political and also poetic.
Pedro Cabrita Reis also conceived a large piece in the long corridor of the Abade Pedrosa Municipal Museum in which he suggests a very particular reading / discovery / experience of the workshop where he has been working since 2006 in Lisbon, near the Tagus.
The exhibition will be open to the public from July 3 and, on the same, a catalog will be edited with texts by Álvaro Moreira and Miguel von Haffe Peréz, to be published at the end of the exhibition.

Curators Chloé Hipeau-Disko and Frédéric Legros have chosen two works by Ghada Amer and one installation by Kimsooja to be presented at the 8th edition of this biennale of contemporary art in Melle, France. The Biennale is entitled « Le Grand Monnayage » and focuses on themes like value and exchange as well as the history of Melle's former silver mines and coin production. Kimsooja's installation ,A Laundry Woman' (2017) will be on view in the XI century Saint-Pierre cathedral together with Ghada Amer's sculpture ,Roche-Coeur' (2018). Ghada Amer will also be presenting her outside installation ,Love Grave' (2003-2018).

Bernardi Roig will be present at the 38th edition of Art Festival Watou in Belgium with his work Sperma Infinitum. The festival combines the work of several contemporary artists and poets on specific locations throughout the village Watou. The main theme for this year is about longing and consolation. The exhibition will be displaying several stories on the never ending unstable equilibrium of the human longing. 

The Cabrita Reis section in the EDP Foundation Art Collection is the first big exhibition on Pedro Cabrita Reis’s collection, which was acquired by EDP Foundation in 2015. The exhibition covers a vast and significant array of works, focussing particularly on a reflection about the initial and founding moments of the careers of Portuguese artists – an approach which gave the exhibition its title – and whose careers have been cemented over time.

Participating artists:

Carlos Bunga, Rosa Carvalho, Nuno Cera, Vasco Costa, Pedro Gomes, Paulo Mendes, António Olaio, Rodrigo Oliveira, Noé Sendas, João Tabarra, Vasco Araújo, Rui Calçada Bastos, Rui Moreira, Francisco Queirós, Luís Nobre, Paula Soares, João Pedro Vale, Pedro Cabral Santo, João Paulo Feliciano, João Louro, Ana Pinto, Carlos Roque, Rui Toscano, Rui Valério, Paulo Brighenti, Hugo Canoilas, João Ferro Martins, Gil Heitor Cortesão, Sílvia Hestnes Ferreira, José Loureiro, Francisco Tropa, Joana Vasconcelos, Jorge Queiroz, Armanda Duarte and Miguel Palma.

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.

After the major solo show CCC has dedicated to Ghada Amer in 2000, the artist returns to France with a double exhibition:

In the Galerie Noire, her recent images will be honoured while in the Nef, a major interior garden commissioned in 2000 will be reactivated. Consisting of thousands of cactuses in different shapes and colours, it draws a virtuous pattern on the nave's floor. This hostile garden, first shown at CAC, reflects on the great tradition of American post war paintings. It is a different way to experience this motive and to question stereotypes of male, female, romantic flowers etc.

The Hardelot Chateau, in Condette in France’s Pas de Calais region, is showing a previously unpublished exhibition of landscape photographs by Nan Goldin.

These are real contemporary landscapes, sensitive and thoughtful, taken during her many journeys across the world, passing through the United Kingdom and France. Nan Goldin opens her secret garden to us where each photograph is a personal story. This series is evidence of her growing interest in self-knowledge, an introspective journey that continuously enriches her. Today she invites us to share her private photographic journal in search of freedom and immortality and offers us a personal reading of nature, a journey into the contemporary imagination.

Similar landscapes were shown earlier this year at KEWENIG, Berlin in the group show Pedro Cabrita Reis, Nan Goldin, Justin Matherly.

The Israel Museum takes great pride in presenting a retrospective exhibition of the oeuvre of Christian Boltanski, has long been a notable figure on the international art scene. Since the 1970s his art explores mechanisms of commemoration via objects and photographs that people have left behind. Over the years he has investigated memorial rituals and relics in various religions and societies, integrating them with his own memories to challenge his viewers with universal questions: if and how it is really possible to remember? In what ways can images promote – or perhaps impair – memorialization?

This exhibition present seminal early works as Ombres, Monument, and Autel, together with recent large-scale installations, and several new site-specific projects created specifically for this retrospective. One of the newly created works is the video Animitas, 300 wind bells that was filmed in the cliffs overlooking the Dead Sea, at a dramatic site located exactly at sea level. Brought together into a powerful whole, these products of decades of creativity carries local and historical significance while posing human questions beyond place and time.

MDC Museum of Art and Design (MOAD) is Miami Dade College's flagship institution dedicated to the presentation and exhibition of visual art and design, housed within the National Historic Landmark Freedom Tower at Miami Dade College in Downtown Miami. MDC MOAD provides its patrons and visitors access to unique cultural, historical and educational exhibitions that enrich the greater community while building and preserving an expansive permanent art collection, Freedom Tower archives, and newly established design collection.

The mission of MDC MOAD is to provide open, critical, and collaborative frameworks for artistic experimentation and interdisciplinary risk-taking that explores the intersections of art, design, and other art forms with cultural action. The Museum advances Miami Dade College's core values, contributing to the intellectual life of the college, engaging students and audiences from the community and the world beyond.

Kunsthalle Rostock is delighted to present Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, one of the most important international artist-couple of our time and worldwide pioneers of Conceptual Art. On this occasion two major projects will take place in Rostock: the exhibition TWO TIMES with works of different periods will be on view at the Kunsthalle, while the SHIP OF TOLERANCE will drop anchor at the city harbour.

Worlds Otherwise Hidden features the work of three international artists who interpret the complexities—both beautiful and challenging—of cultures shaped by migration, immigration, displacement, and exile. Nevin Aladağ (b. 1972), Kimsooja (b. 1957), and Nari Ward (b. 1963) combine and transmute specific objects, designs, and symbols from divergent cultural contexts in their video and sculptural installations. They explore issues of fractured geography, creating new space for dialogue and revealing worlds otherwise hidden.

Korean-born, New York–based artist Kimsooja synchronizes public and private identity and experience as she brings attention to the potency of everyday objects and actions, and the memory and narrative therein. Using designs, icons, and colors from all of the world’s national flags, without hierarchy or political prejudice, Kimsooja’s installation To Breathe—Zone of Nowhere creates a visual canopy where national differences exist on an equal plane. 

The 16th edition of Vestfossen KunstLaboratorium, Oslo. Curated by Demetrio Paparoni, the international exposition ‘Contemporary Chaos’. The show wants to emphasise the multiplying of artistic driving forces by focusing the attention on artists coming from all over the world, including areas which once were considered absolutely peripheral. The opening of new markets and the effects of the digital revolution have progressively brought about such an amount of information on art issues and events deemed important, while being often just ephemeral, to thwart every attempt of critical-theoretical grouping. The linguistic chaos deriving from the language superimposition is thus a phenomenon going beyond the overcoming of movements and trends recorded since the Eighties of the 20th century.

Starting from the premise that finding a unitary tissue in the scene of contemporary art would be absurd both in the West and in the East, the exhibition denies the existence of global linguistic models. Differently from what happened with Modernism, present-day art doesn’t plan the future but analyses the present, focusing on the “here and now.” In the intricacy of languages that Contemporary Chaos takes into account along the four floors of the huge building which was once a cellulose production plant, the remarkable presence of painting, usually marginalised in great international exhibitions, has a great significance beside videos, photos, sculptures and installations. The exhibition include art works by artists like Daniel & Geo Fuchs (Germany), Daniele Galliano (Italy), Timothy Greenfield-Sanders (USA), Nunzio (Italy), Tony Oursler(USA), Bernardí Roig (Spain), Andres Serrano (USA), Doug and Mike Starn (USA), Liliane Tomasko (Switzerland), Ruprecht Von Kaufmann (Germany), Wang Guangyi (China), Wang Qingsong (China), Peter Welz (Germany) and Yue Minjun (China) among others.

This spring Louis Vuitton is publishing four new titles in the Travel Book Collection. The books in this series offer a modern view of travel, both real and virtual, they provide us with an intellectual, emotional adventure and are also works of art in themselves. They are produced in collaboration with the young and talented, as well as with recognised artists from all over the world, including illustrators, animators and cinematographers. Each city, country or place is shown here exactly as the artist saw it.

The ‘Tales of Prague’ project allows us to see the romantic and poetic Prague through the eyes of Pavel Pepperstein, one of the most celebrated figures in contemporary Russian art. Some 70 watercolours and collages shown in the exhibition represent Prague as a mystical city in which Gothic spires and the sculptures of David Černý combine with the vivid impressions and memories of an artist who first journeyed here at the age of fourteen and later, in the mid-1980s, studied at the Prague Academy of Arts. Both the ancient legends of the Golem as recounted by Gustav Meyrink and the works of Franz Kafka find reflection in Pepperstein’s ‘Tales of Prague’.

Curated by Hervé Mikaeloff

The project, conceived as a retrospective, aims to analyse and review the complex universe of Majorcan artist Bernardi Roig (Palma, 1965) based on the presentation and decoding of his audiovisual work. The pieces will be installed in an exciting scenic arrangement, emphasising the initiatory journey between appropriation and recreation of his images and visual constructions.These works tell us about an insatiable and nonsensical sisyphic absurd where the solitary figures of each of the videos act, caught in the repetition of gestures, in a sameness spiral. Either carrying a lamp on his back, sewing his mouth forever, spinning with a spotlight on his head without being able to get out of the claustrophobic spaces of rationalism, climbing a mountain constantly to never reach the ruins of the language philosopher’s cottage, or trapped between laughter and the aphonia of mute insults. 

The Landline series makes reference to the edge of land. Scully has removed almost all vertical forms from the works to create, in his own words, “a side-to-side motion”. The horizontal band becomes the central motif, mirroring land as it meets sea and air – but far from serene, the works capture movement and energy, showing an increased freedom of brushstroke. Scully’s loose horizontal bands mimic the repetitive yet wholly unpredictable rhythm of the sea, embracing its overlap, irregularity and discontinuousness.

For over a generation, Sean Scully has been considered one of the world’s leading abstract painters. Born in 1945 in Dublin and raised in London, he now lives between New York and Germany. Scully’s work draws on the diverse historical and cultural influences of places that, at different times, have been profoundly important to him. He has taken inspiration from many cherished, varied elements of European culture (ranging from the harmonic ideals of ancient Greek architecture to the vernacular design of stone walls in rural Ireland) as well as Islamic art, architecture and history. Scully has also successfully responded to – and built on – the legacy of abstraction in the United States. His commanding, internationally recognisable style of abstract art combines considerable painterly drama with great visual delicacy. 

The Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo is presenting Medley, a monographic exhibition dedicated to French artist Bertrand Lavier. This exhibition has been produced in the framework of the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s “Hors-les-murs” program, showcasing previously unseen holdings of the Collection at the Espaces Culturels Louis Vuitton in Tokyo, Munich, Venice and Beijing, thus carrying out the Fondation’s intent to realize international projects and make them accessible to a broader public.

Opening on April 11, 2018 the Japanese-swiss artist Leiko Ikemura will present a selection of recent works in dialogue with photographs and films of her very close friends Wim and Donata Wenders as part of the exhibition series im Atelier Liebermann. In so doing Ikemura reflects on the creation and origin of her works, focusing on the artist's most sacred and private space, the studio.

Courtesy the artist and Stiftung Brandenburger Tor, Berlin

Photograph: Frank Sperling, Berlin

In the 1950s and 60s, a colourful collection of inhabitants of Bamako, capital of Mali, posed for Seydou Keïta (1921-2001, Mali).

People visited Keïta’s studio to have their picture taken at their best: wearing extravagant dresses made from wonderful textiles with splendidly formed headdresses, or posing in a modern Western suit with a bow tie, leaning against a motorcycle, or with a radio tucked under their arm. His oeuvre reflects a portrait of an era that captures Bamako’s transition from a cosmopolitan city in a French colony to the proud capital of independent Mali.

Keïta’s remarkable archive of over 10.000 negatives came to light in 1992 after a discovery by André Magnin, the then-curator of Jean Pigozzi's contemporary African art collection. Modern prints were printed from the negatives with Keïta’s collaboration, allowing his work to be introduced to the art world. International fame quickly followed. The exhibition in Foam consists of signed modern prints, and a large selection of unique vintage prints.

Seydou Keïta – Bamako Portraits is part of an exhibition series about photo studios, presented by Foam in recent years. This series is based on the growing interest in ‘vernacular photography’ and its acknowledgement of social-historical and artistic value.

The exhibition was developed in collaboration with the Contemporary African Art Collection (CAAC) – The Pigozzi Collection.

Foam is supported by the BankGiro Loterij, De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek, the City of Amsterdam, Delta Lloyd, Olympus and the VandenEnde Foundation.

Image: Seydou Keïta, Untitled, 1954  © Seydou Keïta / SKPEAC courtesy CAAC - The Pigozzi Cellection, Geneva

The title of the exhibition, 'Vita Duplex', underscores the intrinsic duality of the artist's work, its continuous vacillation between reason and emotion, past and present, light and darkness, order and chaos — an inspiring creative tension. Born in Europe, Sean Scully moved to the United States in the 1970s and became an American citizen in 1983, so that his work spans the contributions to fine arts originating on both sides of the Atlantic: albeit rooted in the European tradition and history, it also reflects Scully’s keen interest in Abstract Expressionism, Action Painting and Minimalism.

With some 130 paintings, drawings, watercolours, pastels, lithographs and photographs, the exhibition offers a comprehensive panorama of Scully’s output and inner universe, revisiting abstract art through his unconventional approach to colours, shapes, space and light, creating works that mirror his philosophical opinions on art, society, ethics, metaphysics and human nature. The works exhibited at Kunsthalle Karlsruhe were created between the 1960s until today.

Frankfurt’s Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung will feature a both comprehensive and unusual exhibition project involving one of the internationally most important contemporary artists by staging a solo show paying tribute to William Kentridge (b. 1955) in thirty-two of its rooms in 2018. The South African artist, who is at home in multiple artistic disciplines, has been invited to bring his works into dialogue with the holdings of the house’s sculptural collection that spans five thousand years. The exhibition comprises more than thirty, partly space-filling installations exemplifying the range of Kentridge’s approach.

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.

Curated by Giovanni Iovane this site-specific installation by Kimsooja highlights an original dialogue with the architecture and pictorial decorations of the history of art. 

To Breathe / Breathe reflects the external sunlight of seven windows and oculi of the Chapels and creates, through the refraction of the rays and the spectrum of colors filtered by special films, an environment in which the body of the spectator is a participant of a revelation experience. The light of day, from south east to northwest, moves slowly through the variations of the visible color spectrum, creating a space, a sort of "third heaven" for the viewer of these consecrated and spiritual places.

KEWENIG is delighted to announce the final instalment of SEAN SCULLY | FACING EAST, the artist's solo exhibition, curated by Olga Sviblova, which was first presented at the MAMM - Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow from 03 November 2017 until 11 February, 2018 and will now open at The Marble Palace, at the State Russian Museum on 3 March until 9 May 2018. There will be an offical inauguration of the exhibition in the presence of the artist on 21 March. It is the first exhibition of his work to be presented in Russia and showcases 30 paintings and works on paper spanning his 50 year career. A catalogue has been published by Palace Editions on the occasion of the exhibitions.

The exhibition presents new works on paper by renowned South African artist William Kentridge (b. 1955), inspired during the writing of his Norton Lectures, which he delivered at Harvard University in 2012. In more than 75 linocut prints based on ink sketches and printed on dictionary and encyclopedia pages, Kentridge revisits a familiar personal iconography, including coffee pots, typewriters, cats, trees, nudes and other imagery, exploring a thematic repertoire that has appeared in art and stage productions throughout his long career. The prints, which shift from identifiable subject matter to deconstructed images of abstract marks, form juxtapositions with the underlying text that suggest skepticism about the creative process and knowledge construction. 

Zone of Nowhere will be the first Australian solo exhibition by internationally acclaimed, South Korean-born multimedia artist Kimsooja.

For more than 30 years Kimsooja has dedicated her site-specific works to cultural and political issues facing our world. Kimsooja is perhaps best-known for her use of bottari – the traditional Korean bedcover used to wrap and protect personal belongings – as a symbol of structure and connection.

Heavily influenced by Buddhism, Zen, Confucianism and the age-old role of the artist as shaman, she creates lyrical installations that draw inspiration from everyday activities. The result is a practice that brings together the physical and the metaphysical. The exhibition will feature a new large-scale installation created especially for PICA’s vast central gallery space as well as an associated public art project on the streets of Perth.

Presented in association with Perth Festival

A major retrospective presented across the Hatton Gallery and the Laing Art Gallery. This major retrospective exhibition revisits two seminal sites in Scully's career: Newcastle and Liverpool, and demonstrates the remarkable confidence of Scully’s earlier works and his continued fascination with stripes and the spaces in between.

Blending art and science to produce a spectacularly immersive experience, William Kentridge’s The Refusal of Time is a five-screen, room-sized installation using animation, live action, and music to question conventional notions of time and history. The Wex is proud to be the first cultural institution in the Midwest to present this work.

Debuting to international acclaim at Germany’s documenta 13 in 2012, The Refusal of Timeoriginated from Kentridge’s ongoing conversation with Peter L. Galison, a professor of the history of science at Harvard University, whose research into the work of Albert Einstein and 19th century French mathematicians informed Galison of the concept that lived time is relative rather than universally fixed. From this, Kentridge developed a work that draws on the propulsive theatricality of his grand opera productions to address a running theme in his fine art practice: the impulse of Western countries to colonize the bodies and souls of non-Western cultures, with special reference to his native South Africa, where Kentridge still lives and works.

29 July 1900: Umberto I of Savoy was assassinated by the anarchist Gaetano Bresci during a public ceremony. The lifeless body of the king, riddled with bullets, was taken to Villa Reale in Monza. In order to honour his memory, an Atonement Chapel to be erected near to the residence was commissioned by the king’s son Vittorio Emanuele III, who after this tragic event decided never again to stay in Villa Reale.

Starting from this event, Bernardí Roig has planned his show in the Serra della Villa Reale, a delicious place that hides a crime (of the past and present). Taking its inspiration from this regicide, the whole show turns around the hiding of a body, half-hidden in the vegetation. However, expert film-lovers will recognise this body as the corpse in the film Blow-Up, Michelangelo Antonioni’s masterpiece from 1966. The artist’s aim is an “anatomy of the crime” that corresponds to the very anatomy of the show and the figures that populate it.

For this occasion, the sculptures by Bernardi Roig will confront and dialogue with the naturalistic landscape, hidden among the vegetation and shrubs, forcing the viewers to follow an itinerary of research and discovery. Just as happens to the protagonist of Blow-Up, the visitors’ eyes will be invited to follow the clues of a story that has been thought of as a film/thriller, one in which the heroic act of looking dips into the memory and tries to disentangle itself among the twists and turns of the psyche.

Chateau de Chaumont will be hosting France’s first major exhibition devoted to Elger Esser, one of the Düsseldorf School’s prominent photographers.

The show will present a selection of works that the German artist made during his travels in the area of Chaumont-sur-Loire in the past years. Opening on November 18, this exhibition is an invitation to take motionless journeys to unexpected inner landscapes.

The exhibition, curated by the internationally curator and art historian Dr. Lorand Hegyi, features 34 contemporary artists from various countries and across different generations. These works suggest a strong belief in the ethical character and powerful mission of contemporary art to convey visual metaphors about human existence, through strong expressive language which reinforces and highlights the emotional, passionate and human character of contemporary art.

This exhibition focuses on the capacity and competence of contemporary art to transfer essential messages and existential revelations about life, truth, historical visions, ethical values, and anthropological constellations. In a historical period dominated by a sense of crisis, disillusionment, instability and disorientation, the artist has the power and the responsibility to send their messages about human perspectives, creating new connections between different fields and experiences and providing multiple systems of interpreting the complexity of contemporary reality. The exhibition included art works by artists like Marina Abramović, Arnulf Rainer, Gilbert & George, Bill Viola, Hermann Nitsch, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Liu Xiaodong, Bernardi Roig, Jannis Kounellis, Jan Fabre, Muntean/Rosemblum, Günter Brus, Wang Luyan, Gloria Friedmann, Luigi Ontani, Dennis Oppenheim and Urs Lüthi among others.

KEWENIG is delighted to announce SEAN SCULLY | FACING EAST, the artist's solo exhibition, curated by Olga Sviblova, which will be presented at MAMM - Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow from 3 November 2017 until 11 February 2018. It is the first exhibition of his work to be presented in Russia and showcases 30 paintings and works on paper spanning his 50 year career. The exhibition will travel to the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg from 3 March until 9 May, 2018. A catalogue will be published by Palace Editions on the occasion of the exhibitions.

Recognizing significant contributions in contemporary African art and philanthropy on the continent, this second annual event will honor the artistic achievements and generosity of individuals who are influencing the way the global community experiences the dynamic and diverse arts of Africa.

The theme of this year’s dinner is "honor, Inspire and Include." It will feature artists, speakers and honorees as part of the museum’s larger women’s initiative—a commitment begun in in 2012 and launched in 2017 to emphasize the creative voices of African women artists through the National Museum of African Art’s collections, research, publications and exhibitions. The 2017 artist honorees are Ghada Amer and Mary Sibande.

Every year since 1989, the Praemium Imperiale is awarded in five different disciplines - music, painting, sculpture, architecture and theatre/film and aims to celebrate artistic fields not covered by the Nobel Prize. El Anatsui, who is based in Nigeria, is the first Ghanaian to win the prize. The winners of this year’s Praemium Imperiale international art prize, awarded by the imperial family of Japan on behalf of the Japan Art Association, were announced September 12.