Daniel Rozin | Sol
New York
February 8 – March 17, 2019
In his latest exhibition at Bitforms the effects of climate change are causing lakes to warm faster than the oceans and air, leading to a vast increase of dried riverbeds. As the gallery points out:
“Cracked Mud (2019) emulates this environment with a large-scale floor installation. A barren landscape illuminated by a glowing sun is suddenly transformed into dynamic, undulating motion by sensors that transmit the observer’s gestures into gradual ripples across the ceramic landscape. The work performs as both an interactive and generative experience through programmed periods of activity. Although the artwork is intrinsically mechanical, the rippling effect gracefully echoes the fluidity of nature. Rozin’s ceramic fragments marry the handmade qualities of natural materials with the exactitude of kinetic technology.”
Sunset Mirror (2019) is a screen-based software mirror that displays a sunset in a time-lapse sequence. When a viewer approaches the piece, their image is recreated on screen by a manipulation of the sunset. The timing of the sunset can further be controlled by the viewer’s proximity to the screen.
Read more here.
Visit Bitforms gallery here.
Visit the artist’s website here.
Simone Leigh | Loophole of Retreat
New York, NY
April 19 – October 27, 2019
An exhibition in New York by artist Simone Leigh, Loophole of Retreat, will be on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Leigh’s presentation will encompass a suite of sculptures and a sound installation, as well as a text by the renowned historian Saidiya Hartman that will be available as a broadsheet. Selected by a jury of international critics and curators, Leigh is the twelfth artist to receive the biennial prize, which was established in 1996 to recognize significant achievement in contemporary art.
Over the course of a career that spans the mediums of sculpture, video, and social practice, Leigh has continuously and insistently centered the black female experience. Her sculptural forms, rendered in materials leading with ceramic and bronze, unify a timeless beauty with valences that are both deeply personal and piercingly political. Summoning the ancient archetype of the female nude and inflecting it with vernacular and folk traditions, Leigh merges the human body with domestic vessels or architectural elements, evoking the immeasurable labors of care and protection that have historically fallen to women.
Read full article in Art and Object here
See timeline on the Hugo Boss Prize here
Visit the Guggenheim here
Steven Young Lee | APEX
Portland, OR
February 23 – August 11, 2019
Taking inspiration from two significant works from the Museum’s Korean collection of 19th-century Joseon dynasty art, Steven Young Lee reconsiders these objects with a contemporary twist. For the APEX exhibition series, Lee visited the Museum this past summer to research objects in the Korean collection and specifically to focus on Dragon Jarand Tiger and Magpie, a common theme in Korean folk painting. At once fascinated by the excellence of these objects, Lee overturns these pristine examples in his own practice—perfection becomes failure, classical motifs become popular characters, and elegance resides with kitsch. They are objects in navigating Lee’s own experience in Korean-American, cross-cultural identity and upbringing.
In the context of these new bodies of work, Lee will be adding an older installation from 2005, of a pagoda of rabbits. The work stems from Lee’s evolving awareness of his place in the Chinese zodiac: Having first believed himself to be born under the zodiac sign of a rabbit, only to learn in his visits in East Asia that he is really a tiger, Lee turns the imagery into a preoccupation of form—a tower of many taunting rabbits.
PAM
Read more of the article here
Visit Lee’s website here.
Visit Archie Bray here.
Miquel Barceló
Faenza, Italy
June 1 – October 6, 2019
The International Museum of Ceramics will present, Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river an outstanding solo exhibition to the Spanish artist Miquel Barceló. The exhibition in Faenza, curated by Irene Biolchini and Cécile Pocheau Lesteven, is the first anthological event devoted to his ceramic production, from his debut to nowadays, a special project created by the artist for the MIC.
Barceló, multifaceted artist, able to match different artistic languages, is mainly known to the public for his pictorial-gestural research and his closeness to the group of the Italian Transavanguardia and to the German Neo-expressionism. In the early 1990s, during his long stay in Mali, he made his first earthenware works through the ancient technique “dogon”. From 1996, he again began ceramics in his birth isle, Mallorca, where, still today he still creating his works.
Visit the Museum here.
Visit the artist’s website here.
Read Cfile.Daily posts about the artist here.
Ian McDonald | In No Particular Order
Bloomfield Hills, MI
January 19 – March 10, 2019
In No Particular Order at the Cranbrook Art Museum features new work made within Ian McDonald’s first year as Artist-in-Residence and Head of the Ceramics department at Cranbrook Academy of Art. The exhibition, seen as more of an installation (superbly realized by curator Jon P. Geiger ) is strong, clean, precise and quietly winning. As curator Geiger states, “he is able to create a seamless relationship between parts, pieces, objects, and the space between”.
Andrew Blauvelt, the museum director sees in this debut exhibition at Cranbrook Art Museum, another exhibition from design history:
“In 1934, architect Philip Johnson, as the first Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, debuted his pioneering exhibition Machine Art. Composed of hundreds of examples of industrially produced machines, objects, and mechanical parts, the show announced the arrival of modern industrial design as an art form deserving of museum study and appreciation. Relieved from their ordinary functions and removed from their everyday contexts, these products were now visually consumable as objects—beautiful forms delineating a new, emerging landscape of modern life.”
The exhibition’s success dispels skepticism at McDonald’s appointment as Artist-in-Residence replacing Anders Ruhwald in 2017. Everyone was expecting a more obvious superstar. In hindsight McDonald met all requirements. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States, Europe and Japan and appeared in numerous publications including Art Forum, Wallpaper magazine, and The New York Times. He has a successful career and is represented in New York by Patrick Parrisch. Lastly, and his aesthetic dovetails neatly into the Cranbrook aesthetic roots, on the cusp of art and design. Good choice.
Visit Cranbrook Art Museum here
Visit the artist’s website here
Visit his dealer Patrik Parrish here
Magdalene Odundo |The Journey of Things
Wakefield, UK
February 16 – June 2, 2019
Kenyan-born Magdalene Odundo OBE is one of the world’s most esteemed ceramic artists. This major exhibition at the The Hepworth Wakefield Musuem, Magdalene Odundo The Journey of Things, curated by Andrew Bonacina, brings together more than fifty of Odundo’s vessels alongside a large selection of historic and contemporary objects which she has curated to reveal the vast range of references from around the globe that have informed the development of her unique work.
Designed by architect Farshid Moussavi, the exhibition is a dynamic journey through these diverse inspirations. Objects include British studio pottery; ancient vessels from Greece and Egypt; historic ceramics from Africa, Asia and Central America; ritual objects from across the African continent; Elizabethan dress and textiles; as well as sculptures by artists including Edgar Degas, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore and Auguste Rodin who have influenced Odundo’s art.
The exhibition is organized in partnership with the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts.
In the Guardian Review, Hannah Clugston writes:
“From China to England, people gather around them to socialize. And yet, as these examples demonstrate, a traditional Chinese teapot with its dark exterior and weighty clay is very different from a Staffordshire stoneware iteration. Under its little lid, a teapot encapsulates all the things Odundo loves about ceramics. They have an unusual form, they can be made using various techniques and materials and they are functional. But, above all, they are objects infused with centuries of tradition. These interests are the driving force behind the exhibition, which unites more than 50 of Odundo’s works plus a large collection of ceramics, photographs, paintings, textiles and sculptures that have influenced her during her 40-year career.”
Read the full review here.
Visit Hepworth Wakefield Museum here.
Morten Løbner Espersen | Terra Nova
Brussels
February 22 – March 30, 2019
Morten Løbner Espersen’s latest exhibition, Terra Nova, with Pierre-Marie Giraud continues his voyage of discovery.
Ever since Morten Løbner Espersen’s education in the early 1990s learning the traditional rules of mastering his craft he has been breaking those rules. Lobner Espersen’s taste for experimentation has led him to question and deconstruct all of the principles he learned in his training. Obsessed by the concept of ornament, he has made of simple shapes his objects of choice: bucket-like vessels, moon jars and classic necked vases onto which he applies thick coats of glazes layer by layer, firing after firing. Fascinated by the versatility of his medium the artist works towards his goal “to master glaze errors to perfection” embracing the unexpected as the inherent consequence of his choice of materials.
Visit the exhibition here.
Anna Silver | Silver Splendor: The Works of Anna Silver
Pomona, CA
March 9 – August 25, 2019
Silver Splendor: The Art of Anna Silver examines over forty-five years of studio work and tracks the creative evolution of Silver from her origins to her current role as a beacon of painterly aesthetics in the field of modern and contemporary art. This exhibition will bring together over seventy works, including recent works in glass, and rarely seen monoprint drawings.
Celebrated for her vibrant and multi-layered abstract paintings on clay, Silver continues the Abstract Expressionist tradition of non-objective mark making, spontaneity, and emotive use of color. Silver’s process, however, is more intuition than improvisation. She applies her glazes with measured physicality, skillfully coaxing bold, gestural drawings to float against backdrops of luminous pigment.
AMOCA
Read more about the exhibition here
David Hooker | Bees: An Exhibition
Grand Rapids, MI
March 7 – April 27, 2019
Bees: An Exhibition at the Covenant Fine Arts Center Art Gallery with ceramic installation by David Hooker and works on paper by Craig Goodworth is explained in Hooker’s raison d’être:
“This project started with a dead bee I found on the sidewalk. Picking it up and carrying it in my hand as I walked, I found myself asking “What kind of bee is this? How did it die? And finally, a sculptor’s question, “I wonder if I can make a mold from it?”
That series of questions started me on a journey. It started with artistic questions and wound its way through environmental, philosophical, and even theological ones. I found myself thinking about process and purpose, beauty and fragility, sustainability and responsibility. Ultimately it was journey about a greater understanding of both the bee and myself.
A labyrinth is designed for a meditative journey. They have often been used as a means for contemplation. While there are many ways to approach a labyrinth, it is common for the journey to labyrinth to be focused inward; while the journey out focuses on your relationship to the world and to those around you.
Visit David Hooker’s website here.
Mark Manders | Tilted Head
New York
Mar 6 – Sep 1, 2019
Mark Manders’ Tilted Head is a work of fiction. It has the appearance of unfired clay combined with everyday objects but in fact is made entirely of cast bronze. The cracks and fissures that cover its surface imply an organic process of drying and decay, yet its metal form is fixed. It might suggest an incomplete model, abandoned in the artist’s studio, if not for the fact that its colossal size and civic location lend it the air of a grand monument. Eyes shut, the androgynous figure’s mask-like features are at rest, undisturbed by an abrupt slice through a third of its face. The unfinished side of the head is held as if in a splint by wooden planks, one tied with rope. At the back, chairs and a suitcase, all slightly reduced in size, protrude from a mass of formless material. These shifts in scale, unexplained objects, and trompe l’oeil bronze effects alter our perception and spark the imagination.
Manders (b. 1968, The Netherlands) has been interested in the human figure throughout his career, and is particularly fascinated with the head, which he sometimes depicts detached from the body and juxtaposed with different elements. These heads are always stylized representations rather than individualized portraits. His approach creates a paradoxical sense of both immediacy and timelessness, of something newly made with fresh clay yet belonging to the traditions of classical statuary.
Public Art Fund
Read more here.
Read earlier post about Marc Manders here.
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