03/02/2014

Will Benedict – Picture In The Picture

Will Benedict (b. 1978, Los Angeles. He currently lives and works in Vienna) is a versatile artist, who uses different media to create hybrid and complex images and installations that have been defined as “picture in the picture”. After making a name for himself in 2008 with the series Post Card – out-and-out post cards with address, scratched notes and short ironic messages, where small paintings turned into a kind of stamp –, Benedict focuses on various combinations of gouache paintings and cut-out studio portraits, glued and mounted on foam core panels and aluminum frames. Pro Choice (2010), Black Friday (2012) or Bonjour Tourist (2012), are just some examples of his unusual and hardly contextualizable compositions, that represent people, friends and models: they were asked to pose in front of paintings and photographed alone or in couples, seating behind a table or office desk, having dinner, reading the newspaper, smoking, or gazing at each other.



Benedict then prints the photographs life-size, cuts and glues them to the original foam core panel, creating visual hypertexts, in which the background paintings looks like windows overlooking weird landscapes. Building numerous and different layers of reading, the artist faces contemporary issues – from the global tourism to the broadcast journalism, passing through the social networking –, going beyond the established conception of painting, exploring its nature to combine and overlay different media.

Describing his current show at Halle Für Kunst, entitled TV Dinner: The Narcissism of Minor Differences, Mr. Benedict says: “A slight breeze rustles through wheat fields while bright yellow women look into tiny pots. Things are the same but different. You can’t see radioactivity. The TV is still on but nobody is watching. Behind the televisions are newscasters blocked from view. Directly above the newscasters at billboard height (high up) are various paintings, a meat factory, a painting of the inside of the body (which in my mind is brown), a painting of Tarzan’s loin cloth. It’s soiled. Another bleak brown horizon. But this is also an active place. Within all this stillness there is a ghost of activity. A young woman with a turtle tattoo leans back in a chair twirling her hair while a 12-legged Monsanto chicken hovers overhead.”

Besides this repertoire of “collages”, the exhibition features a new series of videos depicting a photoshoot by Benedict and Julie Verhoeven, with video inserts by Tom Humphreys and David Leonard. One more week to see the show, which will run until February 9th 2014.


Monica Lombardi 
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27/01/2014

Darren Almond – To Leave a Light Impression

The White Cube Gallery, in London, hosts an exhibition of Darren Almond‘s new works (b. 1971, Wigan, UK). The British artist exploits different media – including photography, film and sculpture – to present landscapes that recall the sensibility of romantic paintings. In To Leave A Light Impression, Almond displays once again his typical atmospheres full of poetry, with a strong intimistic power, that open new perspectives and digs into memory. The fil rouge that links the two series entitled Fullmoon and Present Form, as well as the six pairs of small cylinder-shaped bronze sculptures featured in the show, is the connection between human beings and the moon, along with the concept of time, analyzed as a “here and now” concept and as the measure of the cultural sedimentation.


The bronze sculptures represent, through his initials, the relative weight of one of the astronauts who went to the moon, while Fullmoon consists of photographs that have been taken by Almond over a period of 13 years, using long exposure to point out the details of the wild, exotic and natural panoramas captured in Patagonia, Tasmania and Cape Verde, during full moons. These volcanic rocks, depicted in large-scale images – with a unique pictorial attitude and a classical composition – join the standing, vertical stones of Present Form, shot in the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides: they were supposed to have been used to determine the moon phases. The stillness of the rocks, sometimes covered by vegetation and pervaded by an unusual light that mixes up night and day, and the men’s need to control the passing of time – as in Tide (2008), where 600 clocks aligned on the wall to register the relentless passage of time – are part of Darren Almond’s poetics and research, which leads to a deep and touching meditation.



To Leave A Light Impression, the latest exhibition of one of the greatest artists featured in Sensation (1997-1999), in the legendary opening of Saatchi’s collection, in the Venice Biennale (2003) and winner of the prestigious Turner Prize, among the others, will run until April 13th, 2014: it is definitely worth a visit!

Monica Lombardi 
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13/01/2014

Michael E. Smith At CAPC

Michael E. Smith’s (b. 1977, Detroit) research is strictly connected to the concept of remaining; to the relics of our fast and wasteful culture, which doesn’t worry about the future and, most of the time, forget to take care of the world and its undelayable ecological and economical issues. Once again, with the exhibition at CAPC – Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, the American artist shows his aptitudes to steal abandoned things from their limbo and confer them a new life.

Analyzing peoples’ essential needs, Smith thinks over functions and identities of objects to achieve peculiar structures that reflect human beings’ lifestyle, getting along without their physical presence. Thanks to a special ability of playing with materials, the artist turns t-shirts, hats, bottles and other everyday life items into abstract creations, with a strong evocative power. Resins and PVC foam give things a rigid and irregular shape and contribute to evoke the sense of their precariousness, vulnerability and abandonment.


Dragging the objects far from their normal places, Smith makes us reinterpret them in a completely different way. Without judging, and exploiting the surroundings using them as an important – but still minimalist – part of the work, the artist helps us to do a very useful act: observe what is usually left aside, ignored by most of the people, letting our own imagination flow free.

For those who will not have the time to visit the show before February 16th, but would like to, no worries: the exhibition will be reinterpreted at La Triennale Milano in March 2014. See you there!


Monica Lombardi 
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30/12/2013

Year-end Exhibitions

Another year is over and the new one is about to begin. In a flash we’ll be catapulted in our working and leisure – hopefully pleasant – routine. But, in the meantime, taking advantage from the long break offered by the Christmas holidays, we have done a tour around Italy to give you some art highlights. Our path starts in Trento at Mart, currently one of the most lively institutions in Italy with a broad spectrum of events; then we move to Bergamo at GAMeC – Galleria D’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, where Sources in the Air, an exhibition curated by Alessandro Rabottini and Andrea Viliani and devoted to David Maljkovic (b. 1973, Rijeka, Croazia), will be on view until January 6th 2014.


At Palazzo Reale, in Milan, there is a variety of shows to visit, maybe a bit expensive, but you can pick among Kandinsky, – if you still don’t have enough – Andy Warhol, Pollock and The Irascibles, the masterpieces from Centre Pompidou, and the marbles by Rodin; going to the south, at the hibernated MAMbo, The Studio of Giorgio Morandi by Tacita Dean, while the sleeping MAXXI in Rome, among others shows, displays the museum’s collection through a show with more than 200 works and 70 artists such as Christian Boltansky, Maurizio Cattelan, Alfredo Jaar, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Paul Mccarthy, Nobuyoshi Araki, Adrian Paci – with a solo show in Milan too, at PAC, Contemporary Art Pavilion -, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Gerhard Richter, Kara Walker, Lawrence Wiener, just to mention a few.



We close our art itinerary in Naples, at Madre Museum for Vettor Pisani’s retrospective entitled Eroica / antieroica: una retrospettiva, curated by Andrea Viliani and Eugenio Viola. The first retrospective of the contemporary Italian artist, whose artistic research was among the most significant during the ‘70s and consists of drawings, collages, installations, paintings, performances inspired by several disciplines.

With the New Year, we hope to get more and more suggestions from private and public art institutions, which help us to keep our editorial plan always updated and diversified. Many thanks to all the people that are following us. We hope you all have an amazing New Year!

Monica Lombardi 
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23/12/2013

The never-ending ‘70s

The decade of the ‘70s has never lost its fascination. Even many years later it keeps on influencing and attracting people of every age, around the world. As one of the most complex and controversial decades, there has always been a lot of talk about this extraordinary moment. It was a fervent historical period, focused on important social issues that gave birth to a new way of conceiving images.

These were years characterized by a radical upset, cluttered with negative events, such as the energetic crisis, and also with original injections in music, cinema, dance, literature and visual arts. The tendency to change in all fields started during this time and had a strong effect on the intellectual environments, which were extremely prolific and raised meaningful themes that deserved to be discovered. Like in other Countries, also in Italy the political and social climate was tense, those were the so-called Years of lead, overfilled of violence and, even now, shrouded in mystery. The Italian artistic core was Rome, the ancient capital able to reinvent itself as an experimental centre, where a plurality of coexisting languages, the place where Arte Povera (literally Poor Art), the Roman School, Conceptual Art, Analytic Painting, Post Minimalism, Narrative Art and Trans-avant-garde come across, and private and public art institutions sustained each other. The show entitled Anni ’70. Arte a Roma, hosted at the Palace of Exhibitions and curated by Daniela Lancioni, retraces the contributions of around 100 artists from the ‘70s, featuring 200 of their most significant works. Throughout their connections and analogies, the pieces – which goes from painting to photography, and from sculpture to installation –, are displayed without a chronological order, following different topics (androgyny, incest, gender, otherness, the affirmation of word and its refusal).


Ontani’s Pinocchio, the Investigation by Joseph Kosuth (The Eighth Investigation, Proposition #4’, 1971), Lombardo’s project death notes (Progetto di morte per, 1970), the run to the Rubedo by Luca Maria Patella (Verso la Rubedo, 1970), Penone’s Tree (Albero, 1970), the Androgyne by Vettor Pisani (L’androgino – carne umana e oro), 1972 Boetti’s Creation made of paper laid on canvas (Mettere al mondo il mondo, 1972-1973), and Woodman’s portrait of Rome (Roma, 1977) are exhibited together to coin a further historical narration of the symbols of an artistic decade of transformation.


All the works, conceived by Italian and international artists, were created and presented in Rome during the ‘70s and were able to travel through time, being nowadays incredibly contemporary. If you are interested in contaminations and post-modernity and have the fortune to go to Rome in the next few months, do not forget to go visiting Anni ’70. Arte a Roma, which will run until 2nd March 2014.


Monica Lombardi – Many thanks to the Palace of Exhibitions’ Press Office 
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16/12/2013

The Irreverent Sarah Lucas

There has been a lot of talk, and rightly so, about Sarah Lucas (b. 1962, UK) recently. The sculptures of the wildest among the Young British Artists (YBAs) were exhibited first at the 55th Venice Biennale. Then, an important retrospective celebrating her works just ended at the venerated White Chapel Gallery, in London (SITUATION Absolute Beach Man Rubble), while another exhibition entitled NOB – from the word “knob”, which can mean a round door handle, but colloquially is synonymous with penis –, along with the bad guys of art Gelitin at the Secession in Wien is still on. After a period of silence, Lucas comes back, proving that she hasn’t lost her edge and, above all, her ability to cause a stir.

The artist, who became famous during the 90’s as one of the most outstanding YBAs, made us used to works – mainly sculpture, photography, collage and installation – rich of humour and metaphors of sex and death that challenge a self-righteous society. Using everyday materials such as furniture, clothes and foodstuffs, Sarah Lucas has developed a personal and outspoken poetic full of repressed or ignored erotic desires, grotesque and sometimes offensive images, with ridicule stereotypes and conventions in an impudent way.

Social norms and gender roles are criticized through irony and visual puns. In Au Naturel (1994), the breasts are replaced by melons, while oranges and a cucumber stand for penis; in Prière de Toucher (2000) a small hole in a t-shirt of an androgynous body left a half-view of a nipple; in the series of Self-portraits that range from Eating a Banana (1990) to the more recent Human Toilet Revisited (1998), the artist posed simultaneously tough and abject, macho but female, creating an image of defiant femininity: “I’ve been musing on the penis, artwise, since the early nineties. Initially it was an antidote to all the tits and bums we seem to be bombarded with daily. It could also have something to do with the fact that I don’t, personally, have one. In any case I found it to be a perfectly self-contained sculptural form, ‘pregnant’ with meaning. A totem”.


Coming from a background where the question “is it art?” was often in people’s minds, the British artist always gives an answer creating works with immediate effect, accessible and irreverent at the same time. NOB will run until January 19th 2014, if you end up in Wien and you feel like doing something aggressive and brazen, just pop in, you won’t regret it!


Monica Lombardi 
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18/11/2013

Haim Steinbach | The Window

The National Gallery of Denmark has just inaugurated The Window, a solo show dedicated to the international acclaimed artist Haim Steinbach (b. 1944, Rehovot, Israel, american citizen since 1962), well-known for his interest in creating new systems through the use of ordinary objects. Leading figure of an art developed during the ‘70s, based on pre-existing material, the artist selects both desirable items and everyday life things, getting them from different fields. Shelves, walls, display cases hosts linear installations made of plastic toys, knick-knacks, wood ledges, panels, steel pipes etc. characterized by methodical and almost obsessive sequences; a personal and unique order that Steinbach investigates to give objects other ways of existing, or other meanings related to their own intrinsic factors combined with diverse frames of references. As he says: “I am taking real objects out of our world — I don’t make them, I don’t have someone to fabricate them, I don’t put a little signature on them, I don’t paint them, I don’t place them upside down and I don’t lick these objects. They’re just objects — you can lift them off the shelf, throw them on the floor, re-arrange them, or even put other objects on the shelf.”


So, how the object is displayed takes on a fundamental role in the artist’s poetic, who prefers heterogeneous combinations connected to social and anthropological aspects, always influenced by emotional parts. Steinbach makes use of minimal art’s strategies where differences and repetitions, along with logical sequences, are highlighted in their aesthetic and structural value. For this exhibition, set up in the x-rummet, the danish museum’s experimental space for contemporary art, the artist gathers artworks from the SMK’s collections, such as a Degas’ dancer or a Matisse’s Interior with Violin, together with common goods, treating all of them as cultural artifacts connected through an unconventional visual and philosophical concept. Changing the common criteria, usually used by museums and art institutions, Steinbach introduces a radical re-think of set-ups, that goes beyond the chronological and thematic boundaries to advance a more spontaneous, but refined approach. The Window will run until 23rd February, 2014.



Monica Lombardi – Pictures courtesy of Jakob Fibiger Andreasen from the SMK press office, pictures © Anders Sune Berg. 
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11/11/2013

Artissima 2013

Artissima, the most prominent italian art fair, has just closed its doors after three intense days full of activities impeccably orchestrated for the second time by Sarah Cosulich Canarutto. To celebrate its 20th birthday, the event focused on the importance of experimentation and internationalization, following and accentuating a path already taken in the previous editions.

The fair involved 190 galleries from 40 different countries arranged according to the five usual sections: the Main section, which hosted “big names” of contemporary art such as the hipsters’ art leader, Massimo De Carlo, but also Analix Forever with the unconventional skateboards by Mounir Fatmi, Chert, Gregor Podnar, Eleni Koroneou and her partner/artist Helmut Middendorf, Marie Laure Fleisch, Francesca and Massimo Minini, Lia Rumma, the always good Raffaella Cortese presenting a harmonious overview of her great roster and the discovery of the day, Leto gallery with a curious solo show by Honza Zamojski.


Among the New Entries, we cannot avoid mentioning M+B, Los Angeles – before we said leader, now we can say hipsters’ art king -, BWA Warszawa, Podbielski, On the Move; Present future, the curatorial section dedicated to emerging talents presented by their galleries, with artists such as Josh Faught at Lisa Cooley gallery, Nora Schultz at Isabella Bortolozzi, the french artist Caroline Achaintre (Arcade) and Fatma Bucak (Alberto Peola), who won “ex aequo” the illy Present Future award respectively displaying playful and sinister pot pieces and a humorous video inspired by the Beckett’s theatre; last but not least, Art editions and Back to the Future, the section committed to show artists active during the ‘60s, ‘70s and, from this year, ‘80s that seems to prove itself as one of the most interesting part of the whole fair.

As we started off, Artissima has just ended and in order to make a review, what we can say is that it was neither good nor bad. Yes, it was a clear, perfectly set up edition with a beautiful, super contemporary graphic design that has fully satisfied our aesthetic expectations, but honestly didn’t really thrill us and left a little disappointed. Before leaving Torino, we slipped down the GAM where, from the works by Renoir, to the Vitrine by the young and talented Driant Zeneli, passing through the Ideal Standard Forms curated by Anna Colin and the significant works of the permanent collection, we eventually felt saturated and fulfill; just the time for a glass of wine and then back to Milan. See you next year… maybe!

Monica Lombardi. Pictures courtesy of Piotr Niepsuj 
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04/11/2013

Dieter & Björn Roth | Islands

Hangar Bicocca in Milan is opening tomorrow a huge exhibition dedicated to the career of Dieter Roth (Hannover, 1930 – Basel, 1998), one of the most versatile artists of the 20th century, entitled Islands and realized thanks to the collaboration of his son and close collaborator Björn and with the curatorship of Vicente Todolì. The retrospective, conceived with the support of a group of Icelandic friends and artists – he got married with an Icelandic student and his two primary bases of activity were Iceland and Basel –, will present more than 100 works of the Swiss-German emblematic figure, retracing his main paths of research.

The multidisciplinary creative practice of Dieter Roth consists of poetry, design, painting, drawings, sculpture, assemblages, film and video, the most famous prints, books and multiples. His experiments include the use of different tools, furniture elements, monitors, and above all organic materials, which contributed to creating unusual works such as the multiples of plastic toys covered with chocolate or sugar, the variations on printed postcards, as well as the series of artists’ books culminated in Literaturwurst (Literature Sausage), a book filled with paper in place of meat.

This show will present Roth’s original studio, The Studio of Dieter and Björn Roth, rebuilt exactly as it was with all the objects that made it: lights, ashtrays, paint cans, brushes…; the Economy bar, a real café that will be open to all visitors, changing according to its exploitation during the show; the well-known Selbstturm (Self tower), 5-meter towers with shelves full of myriads of self portrait sculptures made of chocolate (4.000 kg of dark chocolate); and the memorable Solo Scenes, a film created in the final years of the artist’s life, of himself going about his daily activities, more than 100 monitors recording every single moment of his dailiness.

After representing Switzerland at the Venice Biennale in 1982, and reaching numerous international contemporary art temples worldwide – his works were displayed at some editions of Documenta Kassel, at the MACBA Barcelona, the Ludwig Museum, the Schaulager in Basel and MoMA in New York –, at last Dieter Roth’s art gets to Milan and, no matter what, Islands is worth a visit!

Monica Lombardi 




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14/10/2013

Adrian Paci | Lives In Transit

The anthological exhibition that PAC – Contemporary Art Pavilion in Milan -, dedicated to Adrian Paci (born in 1969 in Scutari, Albania), curated by Paola Nicolin and Alessandro Rabottini, is a show that leaves its mark. It is an emotionally touching experience, which retraces the different stages of the Albanian artist’s work, from the ‘90s, when he came to Italy, to the present day, reflecting his main subjects and his personal poetic vision.


Videos, photographs, drawings, paintings and sculptures are all artistic devices through which Paci creates narrations full of suggestions and social reflections, they are vehicles to explore the issues of politic transformation, wait, loss, nostalgia, memory, displacement, and above all, the strenuous research of a reference point; that cultural identity-seeking, which goes beyond the boundary lines and the physical movement by humans from one territory to another.

The exhibition path opens with Secondo Pasolini, I Racconti di Canterbury (2010), a huge wooden reel, depicted with scenes inspired by The Canterbury Tales directed by Pasolini – a homage to the relationship between painting and film in the works by the Italian intellectual – and goes on with Secondo Pasolini (Decameron, 2007) and Passages, a series of gauches, acrylics and watercolours on paper, board and clay all characterized by the close affinity and interconnection with the film. Paci’s acquaintance with painting pervades also his videos and photographs such as Centro di Permanenza Temporanea (2007), where he amazingly portrayed men walking to a flight ready to take off (one of his well-known pieces); The Encounter (2010), where the artist gets in contact directly with his audience shaking the hands of a long row of people gathered in an old square; and the powerful Electric Blue (2010): a 15 minutes videos telling the story of an Albanian filmmaker secretly providing tapes to a porn theatre to get money for his family, who decided, after the outbreak of the Kosovo war, to overwrite the sex tapes with scenes of slaughters and bombardments. It gives someone pause for thought when later, replaying one of the tapes, the young man discovers that fragments of pornography persist between war sequences.


The exhibition features also The Column (2013), a video installation that talks about the mining of a marble block from a Chinese quarry and its further manufacturing within a boat on a trip towards Europe for the production of a classical Western column by a group of Asian workers: a strong metaphor of the current transformation of traditions and cultures.

Lives In Transit is an emblematic example of the synthesis of the arts; an exhibition that, thanks to the direct, authentic (maybe due to its autobiographical part), symbolic, simply reliable artist’s approach, makes a lasting impression.


Monica Lombardi 
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