The Pixel Palace

The Pixel Palace: "The Pixel Palace is a project by Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle, UK. It is designed to embrace new partners from a range of artforms and creative industries, looking at the future of cinema"

Birgit Megerle: Soft Skills

Birgit Megerle – Soft Skills
February 14th 2009 – March 21st 2009

Beginning on February 14th, Galerie Neu will show new paintings and collages by Berlin-based artist Birgit Megerle. In the main room of the gallery, Megerle’s paintings of a carpet, decorative metal grating and geometric wall paneling evoke a strange interior space. In the triptych panel painting, Megerle layers a geometric Op-art design on top of loosely applied, gestural strokes and skeins of paint. In the paintings of the metal screen and carpet, she similarly combines formal elements of geometric abstraction with references to design history (the carpet is based on a pattern designed by Bauhaus artist/designer Gunta Stölzl). These works furnish the setting for an elusive crime mystery, accompanied by an original piano soundtrack. Megerle’s narrative is, however, implied and her paintings deal with ideas of atmosphere and staging rather than with one specific story. In another triptych, two women painted in Grisaille tones frame a stylized metal screen. A further figure, a youngman, kneels in another painting, seemingly absorbed in the examination of a chandelier. Both of the women are framed by monochrome, gray backgrounds; their bodies correspond to one another in terms of scale and posture and both figures direct their gaze toward the viewer. Although their eyes are shadowed, they appear to contemplate not only the viewer but also the resolution of Megerle’s implied mystery, or problem. Through their near to life-size scale and palette, these ambivalent figures fluctuate between stillness (the gray implying statue) and confrontation. Their clothes locate them in the past: one wears a knee-length skirt, the other an androgynous vest and knickerbockers. The latter holds a pipe, a traditionally masculine accoutrement and also the classic attribute of a detective. The two women thus appear to form a detective duo, combining a dandy-like elegance with a play on traditional gender roles and depictions.
In the final painting of the ensemble, Megerle paints a deliberately collage-style representation of a stage. On the stage is a man dressed in a costume reminiscent of Russian avant-garde costume design.
In the audience (echoing the viewer) and seen from behind, a woman stands looking on. Here, Megerle again interweaves gestural, formal marks with the illustrative figures. The elements that populate the rest of her installation (staging devices, pattern, characters) appear united in this work, teasing out a thread between flatness, illusion, painting and mystery.

Birgit Megerle: Soft Skills - 17.02.–11.04.2009 - Galerie Neu

Les Enfants du sabbat 10

"Les Enfants du sabbat 10
du 4 mars 2009 au 3 mai 2009"

10 artistes issus de l’école nationale des Beaux-arts de Lyon et de l’école supérieure d’art de Clermont Communauté .. un cycle annuel d’exposition du Creux de l’enfer avec la jeune création issue et proche de son territoire, et qui anticipe par des formulations plastiques ses sensibilités à l’heure d’un monde nouveau. Un temps fort très apprécié des publics, composant avec tous les registres de la création actuelle, peinture, sculpture, installation, vidéo, et une mine de prospection pour les professionnels de l’art.

4 mars - 3 mai 2009 vernissage le mardi 3 mars 2009

Frédéric Bouglé, directeur du Creux de l’enfer / Yves Robert, directeur de l’École nationale des beaux-arts de Lyon Sylvain Lizon, directeur de l’école supérieure d’art de Clermont Communauté

Les Enfants du sabbat 10 (le Creux de l’enfer)

Audio, video, disco

AUDIO,VIDEO, DISCO
24 JANUARY – 26 APRIL 2009

Kunsthalle Zürich, is pleased to present «Audio, video, disco», an international group exhibition featuring artists Nina Beier and Marie Lund, Claire Fontaine, Luca Frei, Sharon Hayes, Sturtevant, and Cerith Wyn Evans, curated by David Bussel.

By looking at various formations of revolutionary dissent – social movements, identity politics – the artists in the exhibition reflect on the grammar of history as a series of soft configurations of acts, events, and correspondences in counterpoint to today. This act of negotiation, the analysis of revolutionary history as an unending process, freighted with a sense of mistrust and doubt, is the thematic departure of the exhibition.

Although they engage with different manifestations of the past and the discourses that produced them, the works in the exhibition interrogate the very positions they seek to occupy as art objects, excavating and re-inscribing symbols and codes, engendering further narratives about narratives. Embedded in these historical folds, however, are repressions and erasures around meetings of aesthetic and political acts, where the artist in effect has option to "betray" his or her object of inquiry, pervert or undermine its ostensible origins and authenticity, in an effort to rethink it. Histories – both personal and collective – are interrogated, inscribed with a sense of occlusion at the centre, and then presented as a disassembled formation of yet another evanescent moment in time. By reimagining histories of protest in linguistic and visual form, the artists engender ways of rethinking the past through a double détournement, a repetition or redistribution of the already recoded, without returning it to an originary "Primal Scene" in time or space.

Kunsthalle Zürich

Roma Contemporary Art

"Dopo il grande successo della prima edizione torna, ROMA - THE ROAD TO CONTEMPORARY ART. 2 – 5 APRILE 2009
Confermata la formula vincente della scorsa edizione: l’affascinante contrasto dei capolavori d’arte contemporanea accostati alla magnificenza dei palazzi storici romani; una formula inedita che tanto ha suggestionato galleristi, collezionisti, curatori, giornalisti e appassionati che lo scorso Febbraio hanno ritrovato il gusto di ammirare l’arte in un’atmosfera nuova."

Roma Contemporary Art

Threshold

Threshold: Forging Narratives in South Asian Contemporary Art

February 19 – March 31, 2009
Opening Reception Thursday, February 19, 6-8 pm

New York, NY, February 3, 2008 – Aicon Gallery New York presents Threshold: Forging Narratives in South Asian Contemporary Art, a group show of contemporary artists represented by the gallery. While narratives of the emergence of Indian art have circulated for some time (in particular from auction houses and art fairs), another stage is now being reached: the appearance of large-scale survey shows at museums around the world. This winter sees Indian Highway at London's Serpentine Gallery, and Chalo! India: A New Era of Indian Art at Japan's Mori Art Museum. This is a pivotal moment in the construction of a new object of knowledge, as curators, writers and galleries articulate what will become part of art history. Yet India, with its multiplicity of languages, its multi denominational make-up and its vast contradictions, has a certain resistance to any straightforward process of being 'produced'. How then to build in a corrective that both constructs a discourse yet is reflexive; that produces knowledge whilst placing a question mark next to it?

It is this spirit of a simultaneous proffering of knowledge whilst questioning that very knowledge that underpins the work of Waseem Ahmed, Jayashree Chakravarty, Reena Saini Kallat, Abir Karmakar, Bose Krishnamachari, Baiju Parthan, Justin Ponmany, Imran Qureshi, Talha Rathore, Indrapramit Roy and T.V. Santhosh, the eleven artists on view in Threshold. A number of the works use misrecognition as a trope, or undermine initial, cursory readings – these include Talha Rathore's Subway Series and the works of Imran Qureshi. Others offer personal, intimate visions of subjectivity and identities, such as Reena Kallat's Stamp Works and Abir Karmakar's self portraits, in place of any grand sweeping statement about what this new object of knowledge, 'Indian Art' might be. The inclusion of artists from Pakistan questions that very term anyhow.


Upcoming Exhibitions at Aicon Gallery New York
Anandajit Ray, April 2 – May 9, 2009
Sakti Burman, May 14 – June 16, 2009
Debanjan Roy, June 11 – July 18
South Asian Diaspora, July 24 – September 5

Aicon Gallery - Contemporary Asian Art

Fortunato Depero

"I Musei Civici di Venezia aprono le celebrazioni per il centenario del Futurismo - che culmineranno nella grande mostra al Correr del giugno 2009 - con una preziosa anticipazione, dedicata a Fortunato Depero (1892-1960)."

Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia

André Tempel “Visitors“

ANDRÉ TEMPEL - VISITORS 27 February - 28 March 2009"

The Gallery Birgit Ostermeier is looking forward to present André Tempel’s exhibition “Visitors“.

André Tempel, Visitors IV, 2009, dim. variable, plastic, cable clip, grave vase

André Tempel uses industrial manufactured mass-products, such as garden hose, colorful plastic-buckets, green rain barrels, grave vases, cable retainers for his sculptures and plastic interventions. All of these objects have their polymer plastic production in common. According to their serial production, he stacks and connects them to new shapes, reduces the individual elements to their serial shape and creates new structures. Arranged by André Tempel, these omnipresent products are ascribed to new meanings. While these products are only noticed for their function as containers or for carrying liquids in everyday life, André Tempel moves them to the foreground through their outer shape and design.

In this exhibition, André Tempel dedicates himself to the phenomenon “visitors“. The constellation of three sculptures in a field-like composition transforms the exhibition room into an intergalactic visitors space. The exhibition’s visitor meets alien-like mutations made of gymnastic balls, grave vases and cable retainers. The sculptures are held in a minimalistic clarity and persuade at the same time through their ironic attitude.

Coined through minimalism and irony as well, André Tempel presents, besides his sculptural work, figurative drawings for the first time. The, in Din A4 format, shown drawings emphasize the struggle for survival in everyday life of man and women.

André Tempel, born 1970 in Schwedt an der Oder, lives in Dresden where he also graduated. He recently showed in national and international group shows at the Kunstvereinen Leipzig (2006), the Kunsthalle Bergen (2007) in Norway and the Stadtgalerie Kiel (2008). At the moemnt his works can be seen in the Städtische Galerie Bietigheim-Bissingen until the 13th of April. In 2010 the Museum Junge Kunst in Frankfurt Oder will present recent works in a solo show.

Galerie Birgit Ostermeier Berlin