Hi there!
We know dark evenings and the end of daylight saving time can be confusing, but do not fret: we have selected five shows that will make you want to end your afternoon stroll through fall leaves with a nice and cozy gallery visit. If you are still art-hungry after that, make sure to download our app and check out the Top Picks for your city.
Happy fall y'all!
The Exhibitionary Team
1. Ugo Rondinone at Gladstone Gallery, New York
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Ugo Rondinone – drifting clouds (installation view). Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York
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Reanimating ordinary objects, Rondinone creates a lyrical world in his Neo-Romantic style where he explores dichotomies such as exterior-interior, expansion and intimacy, organic and artificial into temporal sites of self-reflection addressing themes of philosophical tension. The large-scale sepia drawings of wooded landscapes on view at Gladstone Gallery are reminiscent of Romantic landscape painting and seem to extend the tradition of a wandering draughtsman into the present day. Seducing the viewer into darkness, these drawings recall nature’s central role in the Romantic conception of the sublime. A second exhibition running parallel at the galleries' 21st Street location shows a monumental sun sculpture by Rondinone, a single ring of gilded bronze, cast from encircling tree branches with twigs binding the sun to the ground, even as it seems to hang in the air. On view in both spaces are also a series of window sculptures. Metal casts of 19th-century window casings each named after Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings (including Drifting Clouds, where the exhibition takes its name from) reiterating the idea of exterior-interior and touching on ideas of isolation with the opaque window panes.
Gladstone Gallery, 515 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011
Gladstone Gallery, 530 West 21st Street, New York, NY 10011
2. Gregor Hildebrandt at Wentrup, Berlin
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Gregor Hildebrandt – Ein Zimmer im Raum (exhibition view). Courtesy Wentrup, Berlin, photo: Trevor Good
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The points of departure for Gregor Hildebrandt’s seventh solo show at Wentrup are the title “Ein Zimmer im Raum” (which references poet Rainer Maria Rilke) and a black and white photograph depicting the artists view from his bed towards the ceiling. We follow the artist’s gazes into the supposed void and find a wholly imaginary world. Using old recording techniques which transfer romantic themes in a contemporary way, the artist’s seemingly simple view of the interior room develops a universe of its own that can be separated into elemental parts, which are then pulled back together. The gallery walls are covered in structured ingrain wallpaper (which was typical for West Germany in the 1970s into which Hildebrandt was born) reiterating the atmosphere of bedroom walls and thus emphasizing the idea of a room within a room. The central work of the exhibition is a monumental colorful panel painting, formed out of more than 600 multi-colored vinyl records that were cut apart to almost 7,500 triangles and then reassembled like a mosaic. In a different work, the backs of the compact cassette cases form a reverse projection of the view from the bed: the artist lies dressed in bed, lost in thought, gazes back, which seemingly stands in dialogue to the aforementioned black-and-white photograph of the ceiling.
Wentrup, Tempelhofer Ufer 22, 10963 Berlin
3. AA Bronson & General Idea at Maureen Paley, London
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AA Bronson & General Idea (installation view). Courtesy Maureen Paley, London
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The show opens precisely 50 years after AA Bronson, Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal first met in 1968. Their collaboration as the Canadian collective General Idea led to countless shows and temporary public art projects. The exhibition features paintings and wallpaper from General Idea’s best-known work Imagevirus, which reappropriated Robert Indiana’s work LOVE. It substituted the letters L-O-V-E with A-I-D-S, keeping the same visual arrangement and color composition; they used the mechanism of viral transmission to investigate the term as both word and image. The Imagevirus series took the form of paintings, sculptures, postage stamps, magazine covers and posters with its resonance and importance still felt to this day. AA Bronson has worked and exhibited as a solo artist, and as a healer, an identity which he also incorporates into his artwork. His best-known project is perhaps the series of performative healing rituals and séances, Invocation of Queer Spirits (2008–09), for which he collaborated with Toronto artist Peter Hobbs to stage spiritual experiences.
Maureen Paley, 21 Herald Street, London E2 6JT
4. “A Journey That Wasn't” at The Broad, Los Angeles
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Ragnar Kjartansson: The Visitors, 2012. Courtesy The Broad, photo: Coley Brown
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The exhibition “A Journey That Wasn’t” explores complex representations of time and presents more than 20 artists including Bernd and Hilla Becher, Andreas Gursky, Pierre Huyghe, Anselm Kiefer, Sherrie Levine, Sharon Lockhart, Paul Pfeiffer, Ed Ruscha and others. Time itself is a fragile concept that is quantifiable, but also immaterial, unfixed, and often perceived through emotion. The works on view destabilize variables often assumed as given or constant, offering new modes to assemble meaning. In Pierre Huyghe’s work A Journey That Wasn’t – which also gave the show its title – we see footage of an expedition to the Antarctic circle. Central is the perceptual changes of time, which in the case of Huyghe’s work is both real and simulated. The work of Ragnar Kjartansson, The Visitors, is a nine-channel video projection that features several people each on their own screen arranged as if in a painting. Nuancing our assumptions about linear time, the different panels employ a variety of devices such as rhythm, repetition, duration, artifice to investigate and distort the viewer's perceptions, memories, and emotions.
The Broad, 221 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90012
5. Anthea Hamilton at Secession, Vienna
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Anthea Hamilton – The New Life (installation view). Courtesy Secession, Vienna, photo: Sophie Thun
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For her first solo exhibition in Austria, British artist Anthea Hamilton has taken over Secession’s central space for which she developed an immersive site-specific installation. Hamilton has turned the space into her own, covering it all over in Hamilton tartan, mimicking the square grid design of the glass ceiling and space itself. Into this setting, she has placed a number of individual sculptures which function like props for stories that remain to be told. The artist's interdisciplinary interest in performance is evident in her sculptural assemblages that have tableau-like qualities and evoke comparisons to stage sceneries or film sets. Her work is rooted in wide-ranging research spanning from fashion, Japanese Kabuki theater or 1970s disco to art-historical references like Art Nouveau or radical Italian design. When she creates physical, larger than life realizations of images that she has collected in her research, the artist addresses the issue of how we perceive the world around us – regarding visual language and space as well as concerning the spectacle.
Secession, Friedrichstrasse 12, 1010 Vienna
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