A different use of chalk as a medium at the Armory. I’m on the train to Philadelphia at the moment for a work conference, so just a quick post. Chalk and pins L, 2010 by Pascale Marthine Tayou was up at the Galleria Continua booth at the Armory. More about the artist on the gallery’s website. By the way, if you have a reccomendation about where to get a Philly cheese steak sandwich near the city center area, please let me know!
Whew, the art fairs have ended. I was laid low with a stomach bug for most of it, but I did get to catch a bit of Armory, SCOPE, and Volta (which was more than enough, thankyouverymuch). To begin with my new favorite: printermaker Jens Schubert was represented by Galerie Kleindienst in one of the solo-artist booths at Volta. These colorful, densely layered prints filled me with glee. I really enjoyed looking at them; I thought the compositions were fantastic and allusive; I even liked the planets, above, which are very much not my thing. In a word: awesome. Bonus points for the textured plastic floor you can make out in the photograph below.
“With the vivid and impasto variegation of his paintings, the striking forms and particularly with the repetition of motifs Schubert`s formal language sometimes reminds the viewer of folk art. Masks, animal motifs, floral and architectonic elements, as well as abstract ornaments are interwoven to puzzling and mythical figures. Not a realistic depiction or story telling is decisive, but the expression focuses on a strong emotional charge of the pictures. The prints are extremely complex. Either Schubert compiles varied motifs on one plate or he puts several layers above one another on his large size prints, so that different individual motifs form a new figure.” –Volta website
Yinka Shonibare MBE’s has some new works up at James Cohen Gallery in Chelsea through March 24th, although what you see in the photos above are rather like the sides to the main dish hidden in the back. In the interior room, the video Addio del Passato is screened on the wall and the great soundtrack to it drifts back into the outer rooms.
The video features a black woman in African-print but traditional European-style clothes in some Roccoco European palace singing the opera Traviata. The storyline is that the character of Frances Nisbet, Lord Nelson’s estranged wife, sings an aria from the last act of Verdi’s Traviata, which dovetails into some of Shonibare’s previous work in London about Lord Nelson. What Shinobare is interested in is the distance and irony between imperial Britain’s history and the present as well as emotions like longing and passion. Honestly there is a lot going on in the video and his work in general, and I had do some more research. The short video below is some great background from Art 21.
Also on view in the gallery are his suicide portraits, reworkings of famous death portraits with the subjects wearing the African print cloth and the sex/fetish objects, with their historically accurate attributes also somewhat reworked by the artist. Shinobare uses the same fabric in all of these work because although we think of it as African, it is actually a Dutch reworking of Indonesian batiks.
