Terry Winters, Cricket Music, 2010. Oil on linen, 88 x 112 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery.

Comprised within two of Matthew Marks Gallery’s Chelsea locations, Cricket Music, Tessellation Figures & Notebook presents Terry Winters’ most recent paintings and collages to make their debut in the United States. In an impressive selection of 14 large-scale paintings, Winters’ patterned canvases display brilliantly pigmented tessellations in an array of lattice structures. Also working from a fascination with knot theory, the works posses a lyrical movement by virtue of meticulously layering both pictorial form and coloration. However, with a method such as this – the multiplication of form and layering of paint – gives way to a meditative process that rather than articulates depth, which the paintings insinuate, flattens the composition and renders it irrevocably horizontal.

Terry Winters, Notebook 30, 2003-11. Collage, 11 x 8 ½ inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery.

The viewer is immediately confronted with works such as Tessellation Figures (6) and Tessellation Figure (7) (2011) that appear pleasant largely due to an accomplished placing of complimentary colors, which is not convincing enough for me. While Tessellation Figures (6) is vaguely reminiscent of – though in a blown-up, pixilated version – Henri Matisse’s The Goldfish (1912) or Claude Monet’s Nymphéas (1920-26), this work and others unfortunately verge on the decorative. Similar to his older works, Winters’ paintings depict a fluid intermingling of organic and scientific phenomena, where abstract form takes on the uncanny appearance of figuration. Though in works such as Tessellation Figures (4) the abstract-figurative conglomerate seem oddly unsuccessful. However, Winters does successfully develops a language of formulaic process that harnesses both the notion of the natural and the mechanical, for example in Cricket Music (2010) where he masters the fluidity of sound in abstract form.

Terry Winters, Notebook 120, 2003-11. Collage, 11 x 8 ½ inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery.

In the gallery’s additional space, Notebook presents a series of small-scale collages conducted from 2003–2011. As never exhibited in the States, these works reveal the sketchbook-style process essential for the artist. Made up of layered found images – many of which exist on transparencies – the Notebook collages depict the same integration of figurative and abstract, natural and mechanical that informs Winters’ paintings.

Terry Winters, Tessellation Figures 6, 2011. Oil on linen, 80 x 76 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery.

This array of serial works offers a likeness to Winters’ paintings, especially noting the range of color and abstraction. Found images, often from newspaper leaves, act as a backdrop upon which a printed transparency is laid. Here, Winters touches upon the very genesis of abstraction: taking two recognizable images and through a simple process of manipulation, he dictates that which becomes illegible and detached from discernable visual cues. Winters’ tessellation paintings work within the same bounds, whereby the mosaic-esque formation of elements can be recognized and indecipherable all at once.

Most noteworthy, however, is that the collage works possess a more curated sense of color placement, as many pieces are monochromatic and as a series it is better off for the lack of the vast assemblage of color. It is obvious that the Notebook series proves to be a necessary element to the Tessellation Figures and the rest of Winters’ paintings, as it provides a much-needed depth to the exhibition as a whole. Winter’s exhibition will be on view through April 14, 2012 at Matthew Marks Gallery.

Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011, from Gagosian Gallery website, 28 January 2012. Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.

First things first – I despise the premise of the show. But I do respect the audacity it takes to try and pull something like this off. This was never the show intended to ignite respect and admiration for Hirst – that show is slated to open at Tate Modern this spring. The Complete Spot Paintings instead feels more like a scientific experiment, one of Hirst’s macabre vitrine works spun out into real-life testing grounds, intended to divide the camps into those who follow and those who resist.

For a few moments, let’s try and separate the works from the madness that surrounds them.

Damien Hirst, Levorphanol, 1995, household gloss on canvas. © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2012, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery. Photographed by Prudence Cuming Associates.

I am willing to admit that I have always had a soft spot for these paintings. As a wide-eyed student, before learning about Hirst and his tyrannical rule over British contemporary art, I found myself lusting after a candy-coloured work in New York, instantly hooked by its simplicity and destabilising aesthetics. On a canvas of undulating colour with nowhere for the eyes to rest, I found the spots both agitating and enlivening. Dabbling in pharmacology at the time, I was determined to make sense of the work by doing what humans do best – comparing it to that which I already knew well. My inherent drive to find meaning in chaos lost out in the end – in this case, the art didn’t have anything groundbreaking to say about science, nor science about the art. The relationship between the colours, the arrangement and the title was simply one of randomness and chance. It was a matter of order being imposed upon disorder – a fundamental truism of both science and art.

The spot paintings are nothing more than colour, calculations, sheer surface and mass production – Hirst’s dissociative attempt at being more like a scientist, in the way that Andy Warhol wanted to be more like a machine. The paintings stand alone as visually intriguing and brutally honest – they do not purport to have any answers or be something they are not. Hirst is not trying to save contemporary art any more than the pharmaceutical companies are trying to cure cancer – it doesn’t suit either of their ends.

The Compete Spot Paintings, as a public spectacle, is positively cringe-worthy. I believe, however, that the paintings, as paintings, are quite good. Yes, perhaps it is a bit of nostalgia that kicks in, but there is something about sitting in front of the work that I still find invigorating.

I, for one, am quite happy to be seeing spots.

Bibiana Suárez, Aves raras (mexicanos) no. 1 / Strange Birds (Mexicans) no. 1, 2005-2011, archival inkjet print on aluminum panel (map courtesy of the University of Chicago’s Special Collections), 24 x 24" & Bibiana Suárez, Aves raras (mexicanos) no. 2 / Strange Birds (Mexicans) no. 2, 2005-2011, archival inkjet print (map courtesy of the University of Chicago’s Special Collections), 24 x 24"

2012 has arrived and it can mean only one thing: the apocalypse. Will the End Times be ushered in by the Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar reaching its end date? We can’t be sure until late December! What has become painfully certain, however, is that we are in an election year. And, while the economy looms large on the minds of most Americans, immigration is not far behind. Will America eventually choose a candidate who would grant “amnesty” (read: anything resembling legal status or *gasp citizenship!) to the millions of undocumented people living and working in this country, ushering in the likely demise of the U.S.? Or, will we the people elect a man patriotic enough to send all the illegal Cuban, Chinese, Honduran, and Southeast Asian immigrants back to where they came from; namely Mexico? The fate of the country and the soul of freedom hang in the balance!

At least that would seem to be the choice as presented by the Republican candidates during the never-ending cycle of G.O.P. primary debates. The language surrounding immigration, espoused by the candidates as well as other jingoist hardliners, has become so vitriolic and so reduced that hyperbole strategically crowds out any sober dialogue that addresses the complexity of the issue or pathos for the individuals most effected by immigration enforcement.

Bibiana Suárez’s exhibition entitled Memoria (Memory) at the Hyde Park Art Center attempts to catalyze that discussion through playful moderation. Tracing the influence of Latino culture in America, Suárez expresses hope and frustration while eluding anything that would resemble rhetorical bombast. The show is such a disarmingly tempered analysis of themes of Pop culture representations, identity, labor, and the dynamics of integration that it takes all the steam out of this hot button issue.

Bibiana Suárez, Ai pledch aliyens no. 1, 2005-2011, acrylic paint and digital transfer on aluminum panel, 24 x 24 inches

In order to create her large-scale installation of mixed media paintings and ink-jet prints, Suárez borrows the format of the game “Memory” in which players selectively turn over cards placed face down in order to find pairs of matching cards. The gallery walls are filled with one hundred and eight “playing cards” sized 23.5 inches by 23.5 inches with images depicting maps, body parts, historical images, or various phrases in English, Spanish, and Spanglish. Text boxes featuring an assortment of inclusive and derogatory names for the Latino Diaspora are meant to depict the “backs” of the playing cards. The game aspect of the installation invites viewers to seek connections within the available images. It also serves as a metaphor for the ever-shifting boundaries of integration within American culture as well as the gamesmanship of the national debate.

Bibiana Suárez, Mariel 1980, 2005-2011, acrylic paint on aluminum panel, 24 x 24 inches

Certain matches, such as two images titled Yo quiero no. 1/ I Want no. 1 and Yo quiero no. 2/ I Want no. 2 depicting the Chihuahua from mid-90’s Taco Bell ads, have already been made on the north and south facing walls. Not all of these combinations are identical matches, however. Conceptual matches add nuance to the artist’s themes. For example, Negrita tejaricana/ Black Texarican, an image of a brown faced, dark haired girl is matched with Blanquita tejaricana /White Texarican, the same girl with blonde hair and pink skin. Through these types of expanded connections, Suárez is able to shape a broader conversation about innocence and identity.

The exhibition does a good job of cataloging the checkered history of Latino representation throughout American popular culture, from Desi Arnaz and West Side Story to Speedy Gonzales and the Frito Bandito. These elements are presented dispassionately, as things that exist for better or worse. Their influence on how America understands Latino culture, and the message that is being reverberated back to that culture is left up to the viewer to decide. The more urgent aspects of Latino identity are treated in a similar manner. Two black and white images titled Campamento de trabajadores emigrantes después del fuego no. 1/ Migrant Labor Camp After Fire no. 1 and Campamento de trabajadores emigrantes después del fuego no. 2/ Migrant Labor Camp After Fire no. 2 depict burned bodies lying in the remains of a makeshift labor camp. Suárez acknowledges tragedy and suffering as part of the experience of Latinos without expressing any grand political statements about labor, poverty, or social justice. The artist walks a fine line between making political art and utilizing more conceptual archiving strategies adept at bypassing authoritative editorializing.

Bibiana Suárez, Pulmones / Lungs, 2005-2011, acrylic paint on aluminum panel, 24 x 24 inches

And maybe in the end that is the best course for creating a quiet space for contemplation about a decidedly loaded topic. Rather than strive to assemble an artistic broadside capable of matching the grandiosity of the apocalyptic language that surrounds the immigration debate, Suárez offers viewers a place to reassess and possibly heal. Memoria (Memory) may be a sober show, but it is also hopeful. The match for a piece titled Corazón herido/ Wounded Heart is a panel called Corazón cosido/ Sewn Heart.

Memoria (Memory) will be on view at Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, IL through March 25.

Damien Hirst, "Isonicotinic Acid Ethyl Ester," 2010–11. Household gloss on canvas, 99 x 147 inches. Image courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.

When Lady Macbeth said “Out, damn’d spot!” she was referring to stains of blood, not brightly-colored enamel paint, but I’m sure there are more than a few art critics out there who echo her thought this month. The reason? What to make of “Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings 1986–2011”, now on view at eleven Gagosian galleries worldwide.

The spots at Gagosian LA range from the size of a ladybug to the size of a car door, and the canvases stay proportional, meaning that huge spots live on huge canvases, and vice versa.  The enamel colors are glossy and bright and yet flat, to such an extent that at the opening, I had several conversations that followed the ‘why spend your time laboring over what a computer can do’ track.

Damien Hirst, "Cefaclor," 2009. Household gloss on canvas, 21 1/8 x 16 3/8 inches. Image courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.

Perhaps the most unique perspective came from an art consultant, who professed his love for one painting in particular—a smaller piece in the second room that had actually been painted by Hirst (Hirst turned the labor of painting the spots over to his assistants in 1993). The spots on this canvas are slightly less uniform, the paint just a bit more uneven, and I swear you can see holes where the point of the compass bit in.

Over 300 paintings – about a quarter of the entire series – will hang from Gagosian walls in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rome, and Hong Kong for the next thirty-or-so days. Those who plan to visit all the galleries can register for “The Complete Spot Challenge”. Present yourself and your photo ID at all eleven Gagosians while the paintings are still up, and receive a limited-edition spot print, “dedicated personally to you.” One nice touch: the print has not yet been created, so it really will be personalized for the winner.  One winner equals one print.  Ten winners equals ten prints.

Damien Hirst, "Betulin," 2005. Household gloss on canvas, 72 x 72 inches. Image courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.

There are also two unmentioned challenges here. First, find something new to say about a series of repeated dots, and then, second, pick a side. The reviews vary, from “passé” to something along the lines of ‘enjoyable after you’ve moved past your initial reluctance’. To side with Hirst and Gagosian means you are pro-spectacle and (perhaps) dragging out the dying gasp of an over-inflated, lumbering beast of an art market. The other side is best represented by Christopher Knight at the Los Angeles Times, who wrote that it’s picture of the “new world order — abstract, interchangeable portraits of post-millennial trade.” The viewpoint I like best, however, comes from Blake Gopnik, at The Daily Beast, who insists that the eleven-gallery exhibition is actually the largest painting ever made, spread out across the globe like, well, a series of spots across a canvas.

Do with that what you will.

Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, Crepusculum, 2011. Photo from Video, 29:00 mins / ed. 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2011 Photo Jirí Hroník.

Comprising only a large installation at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Gabríela Friðriksdóttir’s Crepusculum – Latin for “twilight” or “dusk” – is a mixed-media, polyphonic, physical exploration of metaphysical structures that govern the human psyche, and speculates that an enigmatic and irrational system of signs, meanings and forms counterbalances the deceptively ordered exteriors of our existence.

Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, Crepusculum, 2011. Photo from Video, 29:00 mins / ed. 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2011 Photo Jirí Hroník.

Above all, it is an experiential and tactile show that prioritises evoking a multitude of emotions over engaging the intellect. A large, white spherical entity around which alchemic instruments are scattered sits on a pile of sand; music seems to leak out from all sides of the wall, surrounded by glass-protected ancient Icelandic calfskin parchments that record supernatural accounts of a medieval Scandinavian world inhabited by witches, trolls and dragons. The installation is populated with elemental components of the earth such as dust, dough, fire, blood, burlap and fur, but also overlaid with textures that are fur- or hair-roughened. An accompanying video bolsters the already-surreal installation as a narrator weaves a showy mythological universe with his droning words: a man guts slimy fish, a figure lithely unfolds itself out of clay “legs” and “helmet”, a figure wrapped in tattered cloths hikes laboriously across a sandy wasteland with another strapped to his back towards the self-same spherical entity.

Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, Crepusculum, 2011. Photo from Video, 29:00 mins / ed. 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2011 Photo Jirí Hroník.

Crepusculum’s allusive and mystical atmosphere appears to be as much a personal aesthetic journey as it is a collective memory of Iceland’s histories. Materially, the exhibition is about Friðriksdóttir’s continued creative experimentation with diverse materials and media that has been in part influenced by the breadth of Swiss/German Dieter Roth’s artistic processes and vocabulary. Friðriksdóttir’s starting point for Crepusculum is rooted in her own dreams – intangible tendrils of thoughts that bleed into each other are first allowed to drift unassisted into esoteric realms and subsequently thematically developed through a combination of simple sketches, sculpture and film. The overall effect is an imagistic universe comprising a choir of overlapping voices, an aggregate of signs and diverse earthy components, but it is hard to see beyond Crepusculum as an oracular endeavour to present nebulous connections to sexual psychology and pop culture while casting light on deconstructing traditional patterns of narratives located within Norse mythology .

Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, Crepusculum, 2011. Photo from Video, 29:00 mins / ed. 5 + 2 AP. Courtesy of the artist © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2011 Photo Jirí Hroník.

But Crepusculum is also Friðriksdóttir’s personal re-imagination of a time in Iceland when folklore, gods and magic were fundamental tenets of existence, and where elaborate stories of creation were punctuated by moments of horror, melancholy and unquestioning didacticism. Augmenting her exhibition are twelfth century manuscripts and almanacs loaned from the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies in Reykjavík for the first time; such is the reinforcement of the historical investment in Iceland’s national cultural heritage and the revelation of the intense grip that these traditions and mythology still have on twenty-first century Icelandic culture. Perhaps then, for Friðriksdóttir, this is simultaneously a profound ambassadorial undertaking on behalf of the Icelandic people, a cultural burden so complex that it could only be presented in ambivalent spaces as metaphysical considerations.

***

Gabríela Friðriksdóttir: Crepusculum will be on show at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt until January 8, 2012.

Feodor Voronov, "Insurgent", 2011, 48 X 48", Acrylic, marker and ball-point pen on canvas. Courtesy the artist and Mark Moore gallery.

Catherine Wagley: This morning, a friend and I were talking about abstraction that’s transcendent, but transcendentally funny, like kick-ass stand-up. I thought of you, and pulled up your “Pellucid” painting on Google as an example. It’s seriously crafted, seriously systematic, but doesn’t take itself that seriously. How’d you start working with words?

Feodor Voronov: I started working with words about one year after graduate school. I most of all wanted to step away from grad school work, which started to feel dated, short sighted and just way too safe. I initially was attracted to just the raw physical power of text, and I attempted a few pieces where I would build these circular patterns by first translating words into ancient runes and then using the result to begin the process of building a composition. Pretty soon, I realized this was all too cautious and gimmicky. So I decided to see what would happen if I just put an English word in the middle of the canvas and forced myself to deal with it being there. It seemed too simple and really goofy, but, for me, this move began a project that is now going on its third year.

CW: You told me about finding and printing out that huge list of 1000+ words–what was it called again? Something along the lines of “words that will make you sound smart but not pretentious.” That’s still your source, right?

FV: Yes, this list is my source for the current word paintings. It is a list that is supposed to enable you to write with greater accuracy and not sound too wordy. I don’t think it is really important what the list is. It’s just there and I choose from it. I scan the list and grab words that look good at the moment. I do not consider the meaning or sound when doing this, in fact, I don’t even know many of the words but I do look them up in the dictionary for my own self betterment. My interest lies primarily in their shape, look and compositional capabilities. (The meaning is something I can’t truly control and my relationship to it is pretty much on the same level as the viewers’).

CW: Yeah, I think that’s what I was digging for: “compositional capability.” It reminds me of the other term you use from John Rajchman’s book, “operative formalism.” You’re honing in on units you can work with, that can work for you. In fact, I have a really hard time picturing you tossing something out or giving up on it because it failed–do you ever do that?

FV: No, nothing is lost, ever. I just keep going until a certain point of compromise is reached. You can always bring something back to life even if you have to bury it first. I’ve got nothing to hide so restarting something is kind of pointless. I’d rather make work directly over the so-called failure, even if it is just for a point of comparison.

CW: That’s what I like about the painting of yours in my living room: the underpainting and over painting that looks more like competent problem solving then inspiration. Are you still working on raw canvas?

FV: Yes, I work on raw canvas all the time. I do not like the idea of priming a surface and getting it all ready for the act of painting. I prefer to treat it sort of like paper, where you just take it and begin working on and with it right away. Why negate the possibility of the surface by covering it in white? The act of priming is incorporated into the actual process of painting and becomes about the culmination of the marks working together to transform a given surface. Maybe I’m over thinking it; basically, priming is part of the work and gessoing a canvas to me is unnecessary.

Feodor Voronov, "Ironic", 2011, 26 X 36", Acrylic, marker, spray-paint and ball-point pen on canvas. Courtesy the artist and Mark Moore gallery.

CW: Do you like Kenneth Noland? He was a raw canvas guy.

FV: I admire his work, but he’s not someone I look at regularly.

CW: I remember, in this interview with Diane Waldman from ’77, he said he and Morris Lewis really tried to learn from Pollock but Pollock was too emotional for them, and when Frankenthaler (another raw canvas fan) came along, that was a relief. She made painting about material. Then, talking about why he initially painted his Chevron circles on mostly 6 foot squares, he said, “It turns out certain picture shapes don’t allow you to use different kinds of quantity distributions of color for different expressions.”

Maybe that’s obvious–that the shapes you choose to paint limit other choices you can make if you’re going to compose a painting effectively–but his worked looked the way it did because he really thought about stuff like that. Do words with certain shapes, maybe something with lots of round vowels in it, pose problems for you?

FV: Sure, each word is a new problem in itself. I don’t tailor the surface dimension to a particular word simply because words can be broken apart and rearranged to fit different compositional situations, which basically means there is more than one solution and that is both very exciting and challenging. But that is a big part of what the work is about: problems and solutions. I welcome problems because you cannot have solutions without them. I don’t play favorites and will not disregard a word because it has too many a’s in it, for example. I just deal with it.

CW: I like that — “I do not play favorites.” How many works have you done on paper, using Raymond Carver text? I imagine, like, “Where I’m Calling From”, being more angular than, say, “Cathedral.” Can you even sum it up like that: rounder, more angular?

FW: Well, I actually haven’t worked from those. I have done several pieces from “Will you please be quiet, please?”, both on canvas and paper. The results all looked fairly different. The pieces were really based on the rhythmic flow of words and how that can be physically restructured into a different visual situations or arrangements. But this is still just a side project at the moment.

Feodor Voronov, "Stupor", 48 X 48", Acrylic, marker and ball-point pen on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and Mark Moore gallery.

CW: The truth is, I’d probably rather no one know where the text comes from in your work, which means that question may’ve been counterproductive. I just like that you read Carver.

FV: Yeah that was a sticky one. It’s like a side conversation that wants to wander off into other worlds, so may be a scratch…

CW: You said earlier you wanted a project that wasn’t short-sighted, was more sustainable, but wasn’t safe. I want to understand that better. Sustainability and long-sightedness seems safe to me; still, I don’t feel your paintings are safe.

Or maybe this is what I mean: there are artists who do “projects”– Steven Bankhead did that painting show informed by Malcolm McLaren, or Whitney Bedford’s new paintings are all expressly about the moment a storm gathers. Then there are artists — Rebecca Morris, Peter Voulkos, Jasper Johns (though he’s gotten drier over the years) and you, I guess — looking for something to keep them going for a long time. Where does that urge come from?

FV: “Inner necessity” according to Wassilly Kandinsky. No, really, we have to make work and fit our lives in or around it, and that’s it.

Bujnowski’s work has been called flat, but I don’t think that’s quite right.  Like the artist himself, the work is unassuming but hides a conceptual—and sometimes emotional—depth.  He is concerned with thinking his way through many projects, from painting as a psychological protection from ubiquitous icons to the reuse of rejected works as a way to talk about failure.  Bujnowski’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as the Neuer Kunstverein Wien (Vienna), the Rubell Family Collection (Miami), and Sprüeth Magers (Berlin).

Rafał Bujnowski, Lamp Black Hexagon (1), 2008. oil on canvas 112 x 116.5 cm

Bean Gilsdorf: Tell me about the work you created for this exhibition.

Rafał Bujnowski: This piece is a memorial dedicated to Jan Gluszak Dagarama.

BG: The futurist architect…

RB: Yes. I learned about this guy from Dawid Radziewski [one of the curators].  He showed me Dagarama’s sketches and drawings, and he asked me to do something to commemorate him.  So I decided to do a very normal memorial plaque that hangs on the wall in the town center.

BG: In public space…

RB: Yes, looking very normal like many others, like you’d find for generals, philosophers, writers, etc.  But it has a hidden part, a thermometer and a temperature control so that it stays at 37.5 degrees Celsius, which is the temperature of a sick body.  It’s a metaphor for the work Dagarama did, because his projects came from a fevered imagination.  It’s a very simple metaphor.  But it’s the only monument for him in the world, and otherwise a monument to him might never exist.

BG: Do you feel like this work connects to the other work that you’ve done, the modernist canvases and the delicate fog paintings and so on?

RB: The connection is tradition and a historical way of thinking. But I’m not really a fan of any period in history, or even any music band!  It’s not in my nature to be a fan of anything specific. There’s always both good and bad.  It’s easier to be an expert…it’s easier to be a fan.

Rafał Bujnowski, Lead Window, 2011. Window, glass, lead 136 x 121 x 7 cm, 56 x 125 x 11 cm

BG: And you choose the difficult way?

RB: It’s not my choice.  It’s a consequence of how I think… Right now I’m working on these stained glass panels [exhibited in the Frieze Art Fair, London, 2011]. They’re like a window when someone has thrown a stone at it.  The project is about how to repair this window with art tools and art materials, art thinking and strategies.  I thought it would be funny to do the classic stained glass technique on a broken window.  And after I started this work I heard about the London riots, and on the internet every second picture of the riots was a broken window.  So now they are commentary.  I’m playing with the technique of old masters and using it now. But in general I’m not very reflective about my work, it’s more intuition.  I look for links between one thing and another.

BG: With this country’s religious architecture, and all the stained glass windows in the churches, I might think that you were making a statement about the religious culture of Poland.

RB: Because for you the stained glass represents church culture, Catholic culture…maybe that’s right.

Rafał Bujnowski, How to Draw the Pope, 2001. Oil on canvas, 120 x 120 cm

BG: And some of your other work takes religion as a subject, like How to Draw the Pope.  Do you consider yourself to be a Polish artist?  Do you think about your national identity as an artist?

RB: No, I’m not a Polish artist beyond the literal.  Maybe I’m sensitive for the things that are in my homeland, but it’s hard to be blind to your own neighborhood, yeah?  How to Draw the Pope came about because I was working in Wadowice, the town where the pope was born.

BG: So you’re very affected by your environment?

RB: I had to do it!  It was like it was attacking me, every store window had a pope accent, a pope poster, a pope gadget. It’s like a living museum.  It was self-defense!  Put any artist in Wadowice and he would react in some way…or move out!  So it’s not my strategy.

BG: And a lot of your work is black, white, and gray, a limited palette, very somber.  Is that also intuition?

RB: I don’t have a feeling for color.  It’s too big a responsibility for me.  But I’m addicted to buying color oil paints, I have a huge box, they’re waiting for the proper moment.  It’s like an obsession.  Maybe someday I will open them.

With a surrealistic quality that is more Švankmajer than Dali, Alsoudani’s work fragments inorganic structures and fleshy bodies, abstracting them at times to a point of non-recognition, in a dynamic compendium of the most intriguing grotesqueries.

Ahmed Alsoudani, Untitled, 2011, charcoal and acrylic on canvas, 152.4 x 130.8cm. © Ahmed Alsoudani. Courtesy Haunch of Venison.

One of the things I admire most about Alsoudani’s work is the lack of pedantics – all ‘Untitled’ (a registrar’s nightmare), they never force-feed the viewer, but rather allow you to delve into their chaos only at the depths which you can handle. Layering raw graphite drawing with polychromatic painting that at times approaches a cartoonish nature, the works have a slightly uneasy quality about them -  a tension inherent within the medium that continues through to the subject matter.

Ahmed Alsoudani, Untitled, 2011, charcoal and acrylic on canvas, 152.4 x 134.6 cm. © Ahmed Alsoudani. Courtesy Haunch of Venison.

The subject here is war – the pain and suffering we inflict on one another in conflict – which seems to be an inseparable constitution of human civilisation. Following in the footsteps of Goya and Picasso, Alsoudani conveys the atrocities of war through the price paid in the traumatisation of the individual – in particular the psychological repercussions of warfare.

Alsoundani attempts to capture the results of war on the people who live in those circumstance – not just in numbers and the corporal consequences of injury and death – but the unseen and internal effects on the psyche.

Ahmed Alsoudani, Untitled, 2011, charcoal and acrylic on canvas, 222.3 x 161.3 cm. © Ahmed Alsoudani. Courtesy Haunch of Venison.

But like many of us, Alsoudani is outside of the physical battlegrounds, having left Iraq during the first Gulf War. While his work may evoke the psychological fragmentation and suffering inflicted on those who live within and through conflict, it much more accurately encapsulates the way those outside of combat zones experience warfare. Removed from the front lines, and in the absence of crossfire, one occupies the position of spectator. War is fed to us through images and narratives – fragments of people and places plucked out and rearranged in a tableaux of aftermath. This experience of war  becomes a mélange of signs and symbols – a hyperreality without a referent.

Ahmed Alsoudani, Untitled, 2011, charcoal and acrylic on canvas, 81.3 x 76.2 cm. © Ahmed Alsoudani. Courtesy Haunch of Venison.

Chaotic and in a state of disarray, in Alsoudani’s work pieces of bodies meet planes of colour, and reach varying levels of recognisable portraiture. Others simply dissolve into charcoal post-humanoid figures. These are images of war and there is a language to be learned here – look as close as you can handle and take away what you will.

Amy Sillman, Installation View "Thumb Cinema," courtesy Capitain Petzel, 2011

Amy Sillman’s new suite of paintings at Capitain Petzel are large and spatial, with an airiness well-suited to the glass paneled façade of her new Berlin gallery. Sillman’s latest canvasses still have the brute gestural force of a paint-conjured “id,” but also possess a kind of nimbleness and play alluded to in the exhibition’s title, Thumb Cinema.  Her palette is quiet, with lavender and forest greens evoking visions of British dales and naked Roccoco picnics.  A sense of solidity rarely appears in these works, replaced instead by misty shapes and raucous lines, which recall the rhythmic playfulness of Kandinsky or Mondrian.

The comic (in both senses of the word) aspects of Sillman’s paintings are belied by the massive size and scope of their Abstract Expressionist roots.  Sillman’s work is made more powerful because it diminishes the self-seriousness of AbEx, instead extolling the sensual, personal and indulgent mark.

Sillman gestures coyly towards the monolith of man-painting by digitally altering a Nancy cartoon for her exhibition poster.  In the cartoon we watch as the loveable girl scamp discovers a painter in the heady process of CREATING and then, duly impressed, offers him some (rather phallic) candy through a hole in the wall.

Although Sillman’s paintings sometimes read as the residue of an instinct-driven process, she is clearly an able draftsman who investigates the immediacy of mark with informed skill, giving primacy to whatever instrument she has on hand.  She underlines these corporeal interests by giving the paintings titles like TEETH and MOUTH among others.

The sensualized mark-as-body idea is made literal with three charcoal drawings that are more direct in their headless, mirrored figuration and recall Primitivist interpretations of the female form.  There is a brutality to these untitled works which, when taken with the pieces downstairs form a larger historical riff on the tropes of modernism.

Amy Sillman, Installation View "Thumb Cinema," courtesy Capitain Petzel, 2011

Alongside her paintings and charcoal drawings, Sillman presents a new animation titled Pinky’s Rule along with a room full of printed stills, specified to be sold only for the price required to make them; 43 dollars.  In recent shows Sillman has displayed zines, posters and CDs with her paintings, offering up a democratic gesture that implicitly contradicts the idea of painting as luxury totem.

Sillman’s animation, made on her iPhone is a departure in medium if not in visual language.  The stills from Pinky’s Rule are arrayed across a back room, covering almost all of the available wall space and blanketing the viewer in double bodies, eyes and orifices, blooming and spewing with joyous pixelated abandon and completing a pleasure-centric vision that feels whole and exciting.

Christine Ay Tjoe, The Famous One from Lucas, 2011, Installation view. Photo: Edward Hendricks.

A biblical parable tells of a wayward son who leaves home for a distant land after demanding his inheritance from his father. Squandering his riches quickly, he repentantly returns to his father’s house hoping to be hired as one of his father’s servants but find instead, his father’s unexpected kindness and forgiveness. Christine Ay Tjoe’s current site-specific show The Famous One from Lucas # I at the Hermès Art Space references this well-known narrative of prodigality, articulating the interdependency of loss/gain and despair/hope through soft-fabric sculptures constructed out of goose-feathers, tulle fabric, stockings and industrial felt.

Christine Ay Tjoe, 24 of Us 65, 2006, Mixed Media and Glass Box, 65.5 x 50 x 6 cm.

Attempting to sublimate the profound personal workings of hope and despair into rituals of healing and rebirth has been a recurrent theme in Tjoe’s artistic practices. Unlike what we’ve come to expect from many contemporary Asian artists who respond to political or social change, Tjoe’s sensibility veered off this course early on. In 2003, her installation Santa/Satan at the CP Open Biennale was an acerbic critique of government authorities encumbered by bureaucracy and its trappings. But at some stage, her artistic gaze had turned inward, probing out suitable platforms on which questions of the transcendental could be raised. “I’m interested in the relationships between theology and humanity, which give rise to perceptions on the range of human emotions, motivations and experience,” she writes in an email interview, when asked if there were indeed, fundamental questions about art and religion that she had always sought to answer. “It relates to universal human experiences and emotions such as joy and grief and human expressions in extreme situations – this is something I’ve been curious about and continually investigate in my works.”

Christine Ay Tjoe, Santa/Satan, 2003, Installation, mixed media, 80 x 52 x 37 cm.

Steered by spiritualistic meditations and cosmological perspectives, her works are unsurprisingly attuned to the allegorical and the symbolic, utilising ephemeral spaces and fragmentary images that comment on the irreducible essence of flawed human nature. Lama Sabakhtani Club (2010) compares the tragic scale of loneliness and anguish to Christ’s ordeal on the cross in a series of installations assembled by strings, nails and fabrics. In Interiority of Hope (2008), Tjoe’s imagines the psychological state of the criminal Barabbas – the man Pilate released instead of Christ at the demand of the people – as one caught between the joy of his release and the unrelenting guilt of the crimes that he committed. In both shows, the forms of her work often appear as impressionistic renderings of complex lines or as misshapened entities whose purpose remain ambivalent. They share an allusive and elusive quality that often suggests that materials from without exist only to reveal the malleability and flux found within, elucidating an artistic vision that treads dangerously close to rehashing Renaissance humanist patterns of self-knowledge and its limitations.

Christine Ay Tjoe, Barabas Lights no. 07, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 170 x 135 cm.

The Famous One from Lucas # I continues Tjoe’s exploration of materiality as metaphor for the esoteric nature of the human condition. Textiles are primarily transformed into both familiar and non-familiar objects – a worn-out sofa and a teddy bear being the more recognisable ones –, their surface textures and form adding, according to Tjoe, an interesting dimension of sensation especially for the object art she creates. But like wanderers in a labyrinthine environment, it is hard to tell where The Famous One from Lucas # I starts and ends, despite Tjoe’s assertion we are walking through memory markers (displayed as physically undefined objects along cocooned walls) that express the journey of one’s life. We know the show’s conceptual starting points: the sheer greyness of the human psyche dictates that hope and despair are faces of the same coin, defined by their relation to one another. Yet the lack of linearity in its atmospheric spaces, soft curved walls and winding pathways seems to scope out a more cosmic intersection of nature and nurture; it introduces into the visitor experience a hint of the tenuous boundaries separating the cerebral and the emotional, the past and the present, the spiritual and the carnal.

Christine Ay Tjoe, The Famous One from Lucas, 2011. Photo: Edward Hendricks.

The physicality of the work reflects its metaphorical framing; we inexplicably find ourselves wandering in its pathways numerous times, beginning where we end, ending so that we could start once more. In this visual text, we can participate in the shameful indulgence and repeated transgressions of prodigality while simultaneously walking the passage of redemption and liberation.

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The Famous One from Lucas #I was on show at the Hermès Art Space until November 27; this article could not have been completed without the contribution of Christine Ay Tjoe herself in an email interview and the support of Hermès Art Space and the Singapore Tyler Print Institute.

Richard Kraft, installation view from "Something with Birds in It" at Charlie James Gallery. Courtesy Charlie James and the artist.

I am in Wisconsin this week. My uncle picked me up at the airport Monday, and, within minutes, had reminded me that Madison was filled with nothing more than zombies and liberals—I’d come in to the Madison airport, but he and my grandmother live an hour’s drive out—and had asked me if I’d become a Valley Girl yet. “It’s just a matter of time,” he said.

He couldn’t remember what I did in California, so I told him. Had I ever seen a real Van Gogh, he wanted to know, or something Gaugin made before getting all wrapped up in that Tahitian business? And had I heard of Owen Gromme, who was one of those naturalist right up there with Remington? I hadn’t heard of Gromme, but I was in luck, my uncle told me: my grandmother’s independent living home is full of them.  Apparently, a local priest, the priest who said my grandfather’s funeral, had owned and donated a gaping number of Gromme prints to the Oak Park Senior Home, and now they hang across from the elevator, next to the stairs, on the walls of the TV room. “Before I even let you see your grandma, I’m giving you an education,” my uncle said. “The way he painted shadows, you can tell what time of day it was.”

Owen Gromme, "Goshawk attacking Mink"

The Grommes are quite good, and sometime violent, which is my favorite kind of nature painting—the painstaking, lush rendering of a hawk swooping down after it’s prey, or those majestically detailed scenes with snow on the ground mired by a mound of gore or blood. Gromme, as I’ve just learned, was the son of a Wisconsin outdoorsmen who took a job as a taxidermist at the Field Museum of Chicago at the age of 21, around 1917 or so. He then did the same thing at the Milwaukee Public Museum, where he’d spend all of his career, eventually becoming head of the birds and mammals department. All the while, he was painting anatomically precise birds, and pretty much only birds.

Richard Kraft, installation view from "Something with Birds in It" at Charlie James Gallery. Courtesy Charlie James and the artist.

Being here among the Grommes has reminded me of Richard Kraft’s show, set to close this weekend, at Charlie James Gallery in Chinatown in L.A., initially just because of its title: Something with Birds in It. There are not that many birds in Kraft’s work, and those that are there are either simplified and loose, not anatomical, or pared down and precise classroom illustrations.  If it’s installation weren’t so carefully controlled, the show could even pass as a group show, since Kraft takes on so many different styles, from Walker Evans’ inspired photographs to drawings suited to children’s books. This show, according to Kraft, is all about polarities and frictions and fluidity.

The artist set out to show how different kinds of expression and reflection can coexist, how preciousness, violence and nostalgia can visually come together. Which, if you pull back and really look, might not be so different from what Gromme was doing. So why am I more likely to think about Something with Birds in It then nature-praising renderings by a Wisconsin taxidermist-turned-curator? Could it just be that Kraft steps outside himself and lets you know that he knows he’s maneuvering between complicated ideas about how the world works? Probably, and that’s why many of us end up in the contemporary art world; we want to foreground ourselves and acknowledge the problematics of perception. If you look at Kraft’s images, you can’t tell what time of day it is at all.

Katarzyna Przezwanska, Ornament, 2010. Building decorations, emulsion, conservator

Bean Gilsdorf: Some of your projects respond to Modernism. How did that part of your work begin?

Katarzyna Przezwanska: I think it was natural because in Poland there are a lot of Modernist buildings, it’s our natural environment. It’s also disappearing and underrated.

BG: And for one of your projects, you worked with your own space, your own apartment.

KP: Yes, I designed it to be a space that is functional, by using visual divisions done with color. It’s an artwork, but it’s alive. It’s not fixed or finished, so when I need to change something, I do it. It’s an open project. In my work, the colors usually come from the surroundings of the project. In every project each color has a meaning or a story. It’s not always necessary that the viewer has to know why, but when I know it, it works better.

Katarzyna Przezwanska, Desk, 2010. Aluminum, blockboard, enamel, acrylic paint.

BG: You made a fountain for the exhibition Tarnow: 1000 years of modernity, now exhibited in the lobby of the Centrum Kultury in Moscice. Is that work site specific or could it go anywhere?

KP: No, I wouldn’t put it anywhere, I wanted it to be in a space that people use. Initially I wanted to put it outside, but it wouldn’t work because of the wind and other things. Before the [Centrum Kultury] building was renovated there were some nice pools outside, so I thought it would be good to bring water back to that space. The building has very big windows, so I used some of the ochre and green colors that you see in the surrounding area, a synthesis of the environment.

Katarzyna Przezwanska, Fountain, 2011. Concrete, polyurethane paint, water.

BG: Your projects involve color, design and function. In their initial conception, do you think only about the visual aspects, or do you think about the materials? Do you conceive of projects in terms of craft, or just in terms of their visual nature, or are those things together for you?

KP: I think about these things together, but it’s hard for me because I didn’t study these subjects in school. For example when I was designing the desk for myself I had to check and re-check every measurement, every dimension, to make sure it would be comfortable to use.

BG: And do you think of yourself as a Polish artist, as a global artist, or do you not think about it at all?

KP: I don’t think about it at all, but I do think only a Polish audience or people who know the specific aesthetic of Eastern Europe might pick up on some things in my work. It’s not of central importance that you get those things, but the understandings of my work might differ, other people will get other things from my work…not everything that I planned, but it’s always like that.

Katarzyna Przezwanska, Bench, 2009. Pallet, emulsion paint, garbage bags, hay.

BG: What’s in your future?

KP: In the future I would like to do more projects that are useful. For example I would like to work with architects to make things that are less pure artwork created for the gallery and more like creating a city landscape, or a building interior, or furniture or clothes. Things that are closer to use. I consider the art world to be a bit too hermetic.

Alex Spremberg, Chroma Flow (Object E), enamel on cardboard works on table, 2011, Courtesy of the artist and Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts

Alex Spremberg’s current exhibition at Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts is an exploration of the limits of painting and a meditation upon the throwaway materials that pervade contemporary life, specifically the omnipresent cardboard box and the printed newspaper. Wrong Angles is, ostensibly, a painting exhibition, but despite the polychromatic riot of surfaces dripped and marbled with industrial paint, Spremberg reveals a preoccupation with the formal properties of objects and the overlooked aesthetic systems which construct our experience of consumer items: food, household goods and even information.

In the series Chroma Flow, Oblique Objects and Conference, the artist has reconfigured the cardboard box by disrupting its standard right-angled (or orthogonal) construction. Rejecting the restrictions of the 90-degree join, Spremberg has sliced and folded along the diagonal, with the increasingly complex polygonal variations offering an alternate angularity to the familiar box. The surface of each form has been meticulously, painstakingly, covered by layer upon layer of colored enamel paint, and they sit boldly upon plinths constructed from stacked cardboard boxes painted white. Through these devices, Spremberg debases the conventions of museum display while elevating the humble cardboard box to the status of art object; this celebration of the utilitarian could be read as a parody of modernist abstraction. However, Spremberg’s fascination with the physical and optical properties of paint transcends any ironic intent; these works address in equal measure the process of applying paint to a surface and the desire to invest a painting with the presence of an object.

Alex Spremberg, Thrills and Spills (March), Digital print, 2011, Courtesy of the artist and Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts

Reflecting Spremberg’s serendipitous approach, the photographic works that comprise the series Thrills and Spills were inspired by the process of making the box works. Having used sheets of newspaper to protect the surfaces of the studio while painting the objects, and upon observing the resultant drips and slicks that obscured the newspaper images, Spremberg discovered startling compositions in which the variegated paint both disrupted and distorted the original photograph. However, this description of Spremberg’s ‘collage paintings’ doesn’t convey their potential as interventions upon the found image or as a further play on the oft-unregistered ‘packaging’ that accompanies and constructs consumer life.

In Wrong Angles, Spremberg transforms everyday objects through strategies of fragmentation and obfuscation. These objects are divorced from their original purposes to varying degrees, and the ensuing effect is one of estrangement and elevation, which sees the coded aesthetics of consumer packaging simultaneously rejected and redeemed by the act of painting.

Iwan Effendi, The Crane Song, 2011, Acrylic on canvas, 100cm x 150cm. Image Courtesy of Yavuz Fine Art.

The joy and plight of many contemporary, Western-centric cultural practices today is the recognition that artistic shouldering of the collective burden of history does not necessarily attribute any value to the work. At worst, it is unfashionable and counter-productive to contemporary discourse; at best, it provides a vague notion of plurality and diversity that benefits a particular portion of the arts patronage. On the contrary, contemporary Asian art’s transformative power and value in the region, almost always lie in the recollection of the memories of post-war political independence, the marvel at socio-economic progress and sorrows of rapid industrialization.

In 1965, Indonesia found itself once again at a political crossroads after having endured an extended period of political instability since securing independence from Dutch colonial rule. In the twilight of President Sukarno’s rule in 1965 marked by bitter ideological conflict and political polarization, a coup at the end of September triggered a widespread wave of violence that brought General Suharto to office for over 3 decades. Generations removed from these events after 5 decades, the suppression of dissident artistic voices in the Suharto’s iron-fisted rule mean that contemporary Indonesian artists have only in recent years, begun their cathartic response to the trauma.

Eye of the Messenger by Iwan Effendi at the Yavuz Fine Art Gallery is such a response, interrogating the construction of Indonesian history in political upheaval of the 1960s and ultimately acknowledges that the socio-cultural and political discourses surrounding these years are cultivated, cultured and fabricated. As Walter Benjamin wrote, the craft of storytelling, does not aim to convey the pure essence of the thing, like information or a report, [but instead] sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring it out of him again. Similarly, a desire to contribute his own gesture of political resistance and social commentary underlies Effendi’s surrealistic images through a combination of word-and-image binary that is part-storytelling, part-myth and part-reality.

Iwan Effendi, Long Lost Memories, 2011, Acrylic on canvas, 70.5cm x 150cm. Image Courtesy of Yavuz Fine Art.

Iwan Effendi, The Bird Who Feeds The Fish, 2011, Acrylic on canvas, 70.5cm x 150cm. Image Courtesy of Yavuz Fine Art.

“Here I tell you, my friends,” Effendi writes in his catalogue, “a story where history was buried.” A large green tree with all-seeing eyes dominates Treasure Hunt (2011); The Crane Song (2011) is a diptych of opposing colours of blue and orange tones composed of a man who wears eyes as his cloak; Long Lost Memories (2011) is a piece of bulbous objects, bird eggs and birds that peer disconcertingly into nothingness. “But thank god, our eyes can’t lie,” Effendi further remarks. Ocularity and perception feature prominently in his canvases; the physical eye, and by extension, the visual experience, is used as a cautionary metaphor because of its ability to fall prey to yet simultaneously, resist manipulations.

Iwan Effendi, Eye of the Messenger 2011, Installation View. Image Courtesy of Yavuz Fine Art.

The works in Eye of the Messenger are ironic and multi-layered: dismembered, colourful body parts float in the dimensional space of the canvasses and are tacked onto each other. They can’t be contained by the boundaries of canvas, spilling out of the seams and onto the surrounding white walls. Unlike the luminous simplicity and crack-quality of flat-faced satiric drawings that invite ridicule and laughter, Effendi’s cartoonish works cry out like multiple voices in a Greek tragedy clamouring to claim their own truth. In this context of use, reception and exchange, Effendi’s works accrue a varied interpretive history of – and perhaps even grant absolution to –those who have found finally regained their silenced voices.

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Eye of the Messenger is on show at the Yavuz Fine Art Gallery until 13 November 2011.