BORDERS Exhibition

BORDERSfb BORDERS, an exhibition of nine American artists currently on Fulbright grants in Europe, is being curated by myself and co-curator and artist Trevor Amery. Exploring the notion of geographical and cultural boundaries, the BORDERS Berlin Fulbright Exhibition is the first-ever exhibition of Fulbright grantees. It coincides with the German Fulbright Commission’s Berlin Seminar, which brings together current grantees in all disciplines, and it gives the visual artists a chance to present their work to each other, the Fulbright community, and Berlin. We’re in the 20-day countdown, and I’m really psyched about how it is all coming together and that the good folks at Staycation Museum are hosting us.

Please check out the exhibition website and Facebook invitation and, if you’re in Berlin March 19th, I hope you will join for the exhibition opening!

Process and Play: Alem Korkut

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In this temporary exhibition at the Split Art Gallery, the elements of process and play in Alem Korkut‘s work came to the forefront. The installation of slingshots, above, are at once reminiscent of childhood games and of walking through landmines. In addition to the playfulness on display, Korkut, currently living and working in Zagreb, also notably uses new media in his sculptural and installation artwork.

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I also enjoyed his merging of video and drawing, both in Birds and in Vibradrawings. In both, the end result is the product of traces of things, be they birds or chalkballs, and the course chartered is one of chance, not predetermined by the artist.

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His drawings also highlight process and sequence. Above, a series of photographs taken from a 360-degree point of view of a city square are mirrored by his chalk drawings below. The sheer number of images suggest a full, time-aware narration of the scene, almost like a film. The graphite sketches below also build on each other sequentially. In the first installation image, the drawings are in a linear row where each selects a landscape element to finally form a composite image. Beyond the row of them in the next gallery, you can see a large woodcut of the final composition of this artfully composed scene.

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Planking and Hitchcock: Paintings by Attila Szucs

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Attila Szucs‘ recent show of paintings at Erika Deak Gallery focused on planking, the recent social phenomena where people lay stiff as boards in incongruous places. The painter often starts from images from the media or photos and surrounds them with emptiness, here applied to people planking. I don’t think the works convincingly suggest an existentialist vacuum, if that was what Szucs meant to imply, and to me the figures remain ridiculous rather than some kind of metaphysical argument about the place of the individual in the universe. Perhaps the association of planking with humor is just too strong in my mind.

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However, his paintings are wonderfully executed. The large canvas of the Hitchcockian blonde, my favorite work in the show, on all fours suggests as much. Her conventional femininity, anachronistic in its hairstyle and clothing, becomes vulnerable, the direct gaze impenetrable. Her shadow double mirrors the outline of the room she occupies.

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