Artist Rirkrit Tiravanija is serving free curry at his Hirshhorn installation. We asked him to explain why.

Rirkrit Tiravanija | by Sadie Dingfelder | Washington Post

Does contemporary art make you hungry? Then you’re going to love the Hirshhorn’s new exhibit, “Rirkrit Tiravanija: Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Green.” The installation, which opens Friday, serves up three colors of Thai curry to lunchtime visitors, who can dine while watching area art students sketch images of political protests on the gallery walls. (Visitors can even assist with the drawing if they’d like.)

Tiravanija, a Thai artist who grew up in Thailand, Ethiopia and Canada, is known for including communal elements like dining and group drawings in his installations. Often, he even cooks the food himself, as he did for the original 2010 manifestation of this piece in Bangkok. In the Hirshhorn version, the food will be catered by local restaurant Beau Thai, and visitors can try the curries (while supplies last) Thursdays through Sundays, 11:45 a.m.-1:30 p.m., through July 24. We talked to Tiravanija to learn what he hopes people take from the piece, besides a full belly.

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Kerry Tribe 'Exquisite Corpse' at Wisch Family Gallery

Anderson Collection at Stanford University

16 May – 29 July 2019

The Anderson Collection will be presenting two films by Los Angeles–based visual artist Kerry Tribe. The first, Standardized Patient (2017), on view from February 28 through May 6, explores issues of performance, communication, and empathy by investigating the interactions of standardized patients, or “SPs”—professional actors playing the roles of patients—and medical school doctors-in-training. The video was commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and informed by close collaboration with the Standardized Patient Program at Stanford University Medical School.

The second video installation, Exquisite Corpse (2016), on view from May 16 through July 29, traces the fifty-one-mile Los Angeles River from its origin in the San Fernando Valley to its terminus at the Pacific Ocean, over the course of fifty-one minutes. Throughout the journey, Tribe presents glimpses into the flora, fauna, communities, and neighborhoods intersected and impacted by the ever-changing river.

Together, these works—considered by Tribe as “documentary adjacent”—highlight Tribe’s ongoing inquiry into life sciences and medicine, memory, language, and consciousness.

During her time on campus through the Presidential Residency on the Future of the Arts and Stanford Arts Institute, Tribe will teach two courses: one during winter quarter, titled Art in the Age of Neuroscience, and the other during spring quarter, titled Practice and Critique. Tribe’s films and installations have been exhibited widely, including at the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, and most recently, SFMOMA, where her work was the subject of a solo exhibition.

This exhibition is organized by the Anderson Collection at Stanford University. We gratefully acknowledge support from Museum Members and the Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson Charitable Foundation.

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Jack Goldstein | Disappearing – California, c. 1970

The Modern

Fort Worth, TX

10 May - 11 August 2019

In 1971, Chris Burden disappeared for three days without a trace. That work, entitled Disappearing, gives its name to this exhibition, which examines the theme of disappearance in the works of Burden and his contemporaries in 1970s Southern California, Bas Jan Ader and Jack Goldstein. Loosely affiliated, these three artists shared a common interest in themes of disappearance and self-effacement, which manifested in works that were daring and often dangerous. In 1972, Jack Goldstein buried himself alive during a performance, while Chris Burden’s often self-harming works explored the limits of pain. During Bas Jan Ader’s tragic last work, In search of the miraculous, 1975, the artist vanished while crossing the Atlantic in a small sailboat, never to be seen again. Responding to cultural pressures like the Vietnam War and the nascent field of feminist art, the artists poignantly used “disappearing” as a response to the anxiety of the 1970s.

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Jorge Méndez Blake: Amerika

Jorge Méndez Blake | Brooklyn Rail | by Colin Edgington

The reds of the brick wall call out to me as I enter the gallery. I want to feel the gritty texture, the red that beckons in my mind both the clay of the earth and of blood. At 33 feet long, its foreboding presence is an affront to the space, cutting through like national borders do through the landscape. The bricks range from deep maroons to warm-tinged tones, many of which are stained with white as if washed with the calcium of bones. A wall is an indifferent object that creates difference around it, impeding movement and obscuring vision. The top of the wall reaches to about my eye level and I can see the word “Imagine” from Dread Scott’s Imagine a World Without America peeking over from the other side.

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Fiona Connor: Closed for Installation

Sculpture Center

Long Island City, NY

29 April - 29 July 2019

Los Angeles-based artist Fiona Connor remakes overlooked everyday objects, including bulletin boards, park benches, community noticeboards, doors of closed down clubs, real estate signs, municipal water fountains, and so on. She is interested in where these objects come from, what they are made out of, who makes them and for whom, as well as the relationships that the artist initiates and maintains in order to reproduce and re-present the objects as works of art.

For her new commission at SculptureCenter, Connor is producing a set of intersecting works that bring together the artist’s investment in the various operations of sculpture in an expansive field of production, maintenance, and display. In the gallery, she shows a number of bronze pieces that replicate tools required to install an exhibition, such as a measuring tape, a paint tray, a dolly, and scraps of cardboard. Nearby in an apartment in Long Island City, the artist arranges for an annual window cleaning, in perpetuity.

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Jessica Stockholder: Stuff Matters

Centraal Museum Utrecht

19 April - 1 September 2019

This summer, Centraal Museum presents Jessica Stockholder: Stuff Matters. Jessica Stockholder (USA 1959) came to fame in the early 1990s with colourful and picturesque as well as monumental installations. In her work, Stockholder combines all sorts of everyday items – ranging from umbrellas and cushions to furniture and lamps – to form an overwhelming composition. Through her playful manipulation of form and colour, she is able to transform the entire room.

With her open-minded approach to the world, Stockholder aims to disrupt our usual view of the items and materials that surround us daily, and to subvert our notions regarding what’s worthwhile and worthless.

In this exhibition, Jessica Stockholder acts as both artist and curator. In addition to a retrospective of her oeuvre, she applies her unique perspective to select objects from the museum’s various collections. The exhibition Jessica Stockholder: Stuff Matters will run from 19 April to 1 September 2019.

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There’s a New Exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery That Both Art and Film Buffs Will Love

Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press | The Guide Liverpool

As seen on screen: art and cinema (31 May to 18 August 2019) features work by artists including Fiona Banner, Anthea Hamilton, Hardeep Pandhal and Sam Taylor-Johnson. The exhibition considers the influence of cinema on art across more than 20 artworks. The works represent a broad range of media, including screenprints, photography and film.

As seen on screen showcases Merseyside-born artist Fiona Banner’s The Desert; a five metre-wide screenprint which retells the epic 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia. The large scale of the artwork brings to mind the experience of gazing up at a cinema screen.

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Charline Von Heyl’s Paintings Treat Structure Like a Game

Charline Von Heyl | Cultured Mag | by Gaby Collins-Fernandez

Within moments of arriving at “Snake Eyes,” Charline von Heyl’s retrospective at the Hirshhorn, a guard asked me if I knew the secret to Melencolia (2008), a painting divided into numbered squares, many of which are blocked by a large, orb-ish mass. Every row and column had to add up to 34, he said. “Do you want to know the numbers that you can’t see?” he asked me. “I’ve been looking at it for a while, so I figured it out.” He told me and I immediately forgot. I wanted to ask the guard what those numbers meant for him, literally hidden and yet illuminated: if they helped to pass the time, if he imagined away the globe in the center of the painting in order to place each numeral in its logically required square, which seemed to me a madness. Of course, madness is Melencolia’s gray moon, the primordial and almost Chagall-ish vortex hearkening back to Dürer’s etching of the same name and the bad luck of black bile. An artist wants to conjure the spirit and finds that they have tools only to measure that desire.

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Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane

Fiona Connor | E-Flux

In an age marked by mass migration, technologically accelerated dislocation, and rapid urban development, notions of home and belonging need to be imagined anew. At once located and displaced, how to live together is one of the crucial questions of our time. These ideas have even greater urgency in settler-colonial contexts where notions of ownership have very real consequences historically and in the present. Artists in this exhibition—Zanny Begg, Heman Chong, Fiona Connor, Megan Cope, Brian Jungen and Duane Linklater, Joar Nango,Christian Nyampeta, and Amie Siegel—present works focusing on the conceptions, creations, developments, and experiences of home as they are affected by colonialism, urban development, and gentrification. Ultimately, a growing population, changing climate, and dwindling natural resources demand that we re-imagine what our shared future can look like.

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“Mapping Space: Recent Acquisitions in Focus” at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center

Uta Barth | Blouin ArtInfo

The  J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, is hosting “Mapping Space: Recent Acquisitions in Focus,” an exhibition exploring how photography in the last few decades has been used to survey geographic spaces. The exhibition is on view through July 14, 2019.

“Photography’s dynamic relationship to the landscape can be traced to the origins of the medium when the camera offered a revolutionary method for recording the world,” the museum says. “The 19th century witnessed a range of approaches, from land surveys that systematically documented the topography of unsettled regions, to artistic depictions of nature’s majesty that rivaled landscape painting. Beginning in the 1960s, many artists sought novel approaches to representing their surroundings by incorporating personal, critical, and symbolic references to their work.”

“Mapping Space: Recent Acquisitions in Focus,” focuses on this aspect of photography in the current century with a selection of recently acquired works by works by five contemporary photographers — Robert Kinmont, Wang Jinsong, Richard Long, Mark Ruwedel, and Uta Barth.

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MMCA exhibition ‘Vertiginous Data’ questions neutrality of tech

SUPERFLEX | The Korea Herald | By Shim Woo-hyun

Not many artworks on show at museums have price tags attached to them, but Rachel Ara’s installation work does. The large tech installation, a mass of devices and black cables, updates in real time its value on a screen in red neon numbers.

This seemingly “overcalculated and overcomplicated” tech-sculpture by Ara, titled “This Much I’m Worth,” is part of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art’s latest exhibition.

Showcasing experimental works by 10 artists and artist groups, “Vertiginous Data” at the MMCA attempts to suggest that seemingly objective data and technology are not neutral as they bring about various social, economic and ethical issues.

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Jorge Pardo Continues to Redefine What It Means to Live With Art

Jorge Pardo | Surface | By Alexxa Gotthardt

The artist's exploration into the intersections among design, painting, sculpture, and everyday objects has resulted in a colorful and enchanting style that stands out for its originality.

In 1990, Jorge Pardo staged his first solo exhibition, in a garage tucked into a West Hollywood alley, filling it with carefully crafted replicas of common tools: wrenches, a ladder, a splicer. But none of them worked. Even then, fresh out of graduate school, Pardo was challenging perceptions of fine art and functional objects. This project, and his subsequent work, exuberantly broke barriers between sculpture and design, form and function, art and life.

Eight years later, MOCA Los Angeles invited Pardo to mount a show. Instead, he built a home, opened it to the public, and then moved in. Most recently, the Cuban-American artist designed a hotel, L’Arlatan in Arles, France, swathed with 500 of his own paintings applied directly to doors and tables rather than walls.

New York’s Petzel Gallery recently showcased Pardo’s early work, spanning the late-1980s and 1990s. His sculptures and wall-mounts emphasize a natural inclination to subvert expectations about art, design, and lived space. And much like the rest of his oeuvre, they celebrate plurality. Assumptions, he seems to say, are ambiguous and constantly changing.

Here, we catch Pardo at his studio in Yucatán, Mexico, where he sheds light on his multidisciplinary, inquisitive practice.

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Bjarke Ingels’s New Galeries Lafayette Fuses Historic and Contemporary Styles in Paris

SUPERFLEX | Architecture Digest | By Nadja Sayej

The famous department store has received a modernist revamp

Though it was once a bank, a stately Art Deco building on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, in Paris, has been transformed into a sleek, modern shopping mecca designed by Danish architect Bjarke Ingels. The new Galeries Lafayette Champs-Elysées, which opened this past weekend, is a sprawling 70,000-square-foot space made of marble, glass, and steel.

In a statement, Ingels called the project a “pragmatic utopia,” mixing minimalist function with extravagant beauty. The rose-hued marble in the interior fits in well with the romantic City of Light and is peppered with gold-lined touches that are spread throughout the space’s four floors.

What exactly is a “pragmatic utopia?” According to Ingels, it’s a type of architecture that steers clear of boring white boxes. It also avoids what he calls “the naive utopian ideas of digital formalism.” Here, he fuses convention with concept, tapping into his personal motto: “Yes is more.”

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‘Making a Painting More Alive’: Charline von Heyl’s Hirshhorn Museum Survey Is a Master Class in Abstraction

Charline von Heyl | ArtNews | By Phyllis Tuchman

Charline von Heyl’s career has experienced some dramatic ups and downs over the past year. A solo show of her latest paintings made a big splash when it opened the New York art season last September. The effusive critical notices attracted crowds to Petzel gallery in Chelsea. Two months later, “Snake Eyes,” a survey of 36 works by von Heyl from 2005 to the present, debuted at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. However, when the federal government shut down, the show got caught in the crosshairs. With the closing date for the exhibition looming, it looked as if many people wouldn’t get the chance to see the work on view, which had been lauded by many reviewers. But, wonderfully, when the Hirshhorn reopened along with other local institutions, its leadership extended it through April 21.

“Snake Eyes” is a compelling exhibition by an intriguing painter. German-born and New York–based, von Heyl, 59, executes work that deserves to be experienced in depth. It’s easy enough to admire one of her canvases or collages at an art fair, but by not seeing lots of them in one venue, you miss the opportunity to be dumbfounded by the variety of ways she solves aesthetic problems.

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Jorge Méndez Blake at Travesía Cuatro

Jorge Méndez Blake | Wall Street Journal International

19 Oct 2018 — 23 Mar 2019 at the Travesía Cuatro in Guadalajara, Mexico

This exhibition originates from an archive image: The architect Luis Barragán eats an apple while taking a walk through the site that will later be known as the “El Pedregal” residential complex in Mexico City. The image shows an indefinite landscape made out of volcanic rock, eventually it will be covered up and delimitated with concrete walls and other construction materials. The photo shows a primeval land, a newly discovered Garden of Eden. The apple, a Western symbol of fresh beginnings (good or bad), functions as a certain poetic premonition that resonates along with the fertility of the volcanic soil.

Jorge Méndez Blake creates a timeless bridge between the modernist seedlings that Barragán planted within his volcanic garden in the 1940’s and one of his first residential projects in Guadalajara, the Casa Franco built in 1929. The artist uses the checkerboard design of the original floor of this house and reproduces it through the walls of the residence and as a departure point for other works of tautological nature.

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Why is artist ana prvački licking the façade of herzog & de meuron's de young museum?

Ana Prvački | designboom | by Philip Stevens

In 2017, Ana Prvački became artist in resident at the de young museum in San Francisco. Designed by Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron, the building features a copper façade that is based on a pixelated image of a tree canopy. ‘I am quite fascinated by the copper facade of the museum,’ Prvački explains. ‘I did some research about copper and was intrigued to learn that copper is an essential trace mineral necessary for our survival, yet it is a mineral our body does not produce by itself. having a little lick of the de young could be a very generous gesture — democratic, free, and nourishing.’

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Mixing Art, Activism and Science. And Some Tropical Fish.

Superflex | New York Times | By Lisa Abend

COPENHAGEN — Somewhere in the desert outside Palm Springs, Calif. a new drive-in movie theater is opening. It’s a simple structure, not much more than a screen mounted on a few bubblegum-color pillars, with no concession stand and very limited programming. In fact, the cinema shows only one film, and that film is about fish.

Commissioned for the Desert X exhibition that opens Feb. 9 and runs through April 21 at various sites in the Coachella Valley, the theater — called “Dive In” — is an installation by the Danish artist collective Superflex and forms part of their larger project “Deep Sea Minding.”

“Dive In” responds to the prospect of rising sea levels by imagining a future in which coastal cities are submerged, and their inhabitants are fish. Blending art, science, and activism, it is a sly meditation on climate change, as well as an excellent primer on how Superflex, founded in 1993, has managed to remain relevant, even crucial, through 25 years.

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Philippe Parreno combines 20 years of footage to create ‘film of films, a seance of cinema’

Philippe Parreno | Wallpaper | By Tom Seymour

When Philippe Parreno was a teenager, he and his friends would sneak their way through the back door of an adult movie theatre in one of the seedier parts of Échirolles, a rough suburb of Grenoble, southern France. The backstreet XXX dive was called Cinema Permanente, because porn played all day, all night.

At a public talk at the 2019 International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), Parreno bashfully admits that watching the illicit movies acted as inspiration. In the dark, as the images writhed and morphed without sense of beginning, middle and end, so he formed his idea of what art should be. ‘We were always so alert, because we were scared of getting caught,’ he remembers. ‘But my sense of time became warped in the movie theatre. I started to think a permanent cinema is a beautiful idea.’

Parreno is here to present his new feature film, No More Reality Whatsoever, a combination of 20 years of disparate footage taken from dozens of art projects and edited together to create a ‘film of films, a seance of cinema’. The artist, who is 55, has the words ‘do so’ tattooed on his left wrist, a reference to the hypnotherapist Milton Erickson. He is soft-spoken, drinks tea over coffee, is dressed as if he might leave the cultured environs of the film festival for a quick hike along the canals of Rotterdam, and has a dry, self-deprecating sense of humour…

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Infinite Cinema: At The International Film Festival Rotterdam

Philippe Parreno | The Quietus | By Robert Barry

Nobody does 3D quite like Philippe Parreno. The French artist’s No More Reality Whereaboutsopens with the close-up face of Ann Lee, the anime character bought by Parreno and his compatriot Pierre Huyghe back in 1999. She self-referentially explains to us her own back-story (“I was bought for ¥46,000, paid to a design character company, K-Works…”), but, wearing 3D glasses, we see her face glitch and distort. Where a James Cameron or Joseph Kosinski might use the polarised glasses to more fully immerse their audience into their respective film worlds, to create a fuller, more lifelike cinematic experience; Parreno does exactly the reverse, using the stereoscope effect to jar and disturb, a high-tech verfremdungseffekt which feels like it is fucking directly with the cortical pathways between the eye and the brain.

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SUPERFLEX: We Are All In The Same Boat

The Museum of Art and Design at Miami Dade College

15 November 2018 - 21 April 2019

The first museum survey of the critically acclaimed Danish collective SUPERFLEX in the United States, this exhibition focuses on the group’s humorous and playfully subversive installations and films, which address the economy, financial crisis, corruption, migration, and the possible consequences of global warming. The exhibition’s title envisions passengers together in a ship at sea, and a set of shared risks that may put them in danger. Our own collective danger implies a collective responsibility and a need to collaborate so that our ship does not capsize.

Increasingly during the last two decades, global warming and climate change have been discussed and debated, and the consequences of human impact, interference, and possible triggering of the twenty-first century’s climate changes have recently echoed within the art world in a more activist way. Art has always responded to issues in the real world, and SUPERFLEX has been at the forefront of artists who grapple with many of these pressing subjects. SUPERFLEX was founded by Bjørnstjerne Christiansen, Jakob Fenger, and Rasmus Nielsen in 1993, and since then the three artists have gained international recognition for their DIY and activist approaches.

We Are All in the Same Boat includes a group of videos, sculptures, and installations selected for their relevance to the history, present, and future of the City of Miami. The works reflect upon the position of Miami from the perspectives of art, finance, climate, and a fictional, if plausible, future. The topics of water, migration, refugees, and the economy inevitably drive the conception of the exhibition. We Are All in the Same Boat includes the American debut of a number of the works in the show, several of which have been newly reimagined for our city.

SUPERFLEX is known for its interest in unifying urban spaces and commenting on society through art. The artists describe their practice as providing “tools” that affect or influence a social or economic situation. The group often roots its projects in their particular local contexts and outside of traditional art contexts, collaborating with designers, engineers, businesses, and marketers on projects that have the potential for social or economic change. The projects remain difficult to pigeonhole, yet innovative in their approaches to current issues.

The members of SUPERFLEX have used their position as artists to pose questions of political, economic, and environmental behavior and responsibility. In the words of the exhibition’s curator, SUPERFLEX’s “works are meant to create political awareness, generate discussions, and help us think and act.”

Organized by MOAD, SUPERFLEX: We Are All in the Same Boat is curated by Jacob Fabricius, Artistic Director of Kunsthal Aarhus. Support for SUPERFLEX: We Are All in the Same Boat is provided by the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, this.nordic, Funding Arts Network, the Danish Arts Foundation, and the Florida Department of State Division of Cultural Affairs.

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