Marc-Antoine Fehr – The Walk of the Blind Man

Von: St.Moritz Art News 31. Juli 2020

Villa Flor, S-chanf, 1. August – 10. Oktober 2020.

https://www.villaflor.ch/veranstaltungen

Die kleine Geschichte der ST.MORITZER PLAKATE 1894- 2021

Galerie 10 St.Moritz, St.Moritz, 17. Oktober – 15. Dezember 2020. Wie gut waren Segantinis «Marketing skills»? Ein Champagnerglas, der perfekter Schnee, oder doch die menschenleere Natur, ein kristallklarer sonniger Himmel und Ruhe? Wofür steht St.Moritz? Und was packt man auf ein Plakat um Gäste aus aller Welt nach St.Moritz zu locken? In der Ausstellung «Eine kleine Geschichte der St.Moritzer Plakate» trifft Kunstgeschichte auf junge einheimische Künstler. Drei Teilbereiche gliedern nämlich die Ausstellung: ein Geschichte Teil arbeitet die Geschichte der kommerziellen St.Moritzer Plakate seit dem 19. Jahrhundert auf und mündet im „nächsten Jahr“ 2021, mit dem Projekt der Manufaktura Engiadina.Im Sommer 2020 initiierte die Manufactura Engiadina ein Wettbewerb das St.Moritz Sommer Poster 2021 zu entwerfen. Alle 17 Beiträge, darunter das Siegerposter, werden dem St.Moritzer Meister Giovanni Segantini gegenüber gestellt. Teil 3: der Segantini-Fund: 2007 hatten Mario Häfliger und Marius Hauenstein auf dem Dachboden der Evangelischen Kirche St.Moritz eine Kiste gefunden, in der seit über 100 Jahren zwei Original Plakate von Giovanni Segantini im Dornröschenschlaf schlummerten. Die Geschichte dieses Fundes wird mitsamt der Hängung eines der beiden Segantini Plakate der Öffentlichkeit herangeführt. Die Ausstellung ist ein Projekt der Manufactura Engiadina und wurde von Carolin A. Geist und Virginia Fleming kuratiert.
Seeing Touch

26. September – 15. November 2020, Galerie Hauser & Wirth, St.Moritz. Curated by Giorgia von Albertini, this exhibition sheds light on a group of intergenerational artists from the gallery’s program and beyond whose work can be understood through a wide range of bodily approaches that often supersede the visual. The presentation takes inspiration from Helen Molesworth’s seminal essay ‘Duchamp: By Hand, Even’ (2005), which explores the haptic qualities of Duchamp’s hand-made works versus his ready-mades. The artists in the presentation span different generations and practices and offer a variety of artistic modes that bring about tactile engagement and embodied responses. Participating artists include Phyllida Barlow, Louise Bourgeois, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Eva Hesse, Simone Fattal, Sylvie Fleury, Anna Maria Maiolino, Piero Manzoni, Dieter Roth, Pipilotti Rist, Martin Soto Climent, and Not Vital. The use of unorthodox materials often leads to a blurring of the borders between object, sculpture, and painting, and is exemplified in the work of a number of artists in the presentation. Piero Manzoni’s (1933-1963) abandonment of color and revolutionary approach to unorthodox materials in his Achromes was aimed at a pure and unmediated engagement with surface, texture, and form. In foregrounding an engagement with palpable material, Manzoni set aside the conventions of pictorial composition in favor of literal materiality. The multimedia artist Dieter Roth (1930-1998), motivated by considerations of ephemerality and processes of construction, deconstruction, and accumulation, used transient materials in his art, including detritus from his life. These concerns culminated in Roth’s later works, such as ‘Kartonabfälle’ (1986), a series made with discarded cardboard from his studio. Phyllida Barlow (b. 1944) is also concerned with making sculpture from leftovers. Known for her colorful, large-scale installations, she uses a variety of materials, including plaster, cement, and plywood, which evoke construction and a perpetual state of transformation. Throughout her career, Pipilotti Rist (b. 1962) has always prioritized the viewer’s engagement in her experimental video and installation works. Rist’s idea to print video stills on wood, in this case a still from her first feature film Pepperminta (2009), is an attempt to use the organicity of the wood to give the video still a living and tactile form. As shown in the works of these four artists, unusual materials spark our curiosity and desire for tactile engagement. Foto: Achrome, Piero Manzoni, approx 1961. A second group of works in the exhibition centers on abstract bodily forms, all of which elicit visceral responses as they directly refer or relate to the body. The pioneering Polish artist Alina Szapocznikow (1926-1973) radically reconceptualized sculpture as a vehicle for exploring and declaring bodily experience. Casting body-parts from real-life, she shifted from a representation of the human body to a tangible imprint of it. Eva Hesse (1936-1970) is best known for her colorful relief sculptures, where her first radical break from two-dimensionality of the picture plane into a space where object, sculpture, and drawing were to mix ineluctably. Related to her reliefs are a series of mechano-morphic drawings from 1965, two of which are included in this exhibition. The drawings depict shapes that inflate and deflate, with details of joints and articulations often blown up out of proportion. Louise Bourgeois’s (1911-2010) sublimated her emotions and traumas into her art, and understood art-making as a way to fathom the depths of her unconscious as well as a process of psychological release. With its visceral marks and colors, ‘À Baudelaire’ (2008) combines the organic with the human, as flowers are fused with phalluses and vulva-like forms. Simone Fattal’s (b. 1969) sculptural work often bears the traces of the artist’s hand. Constructing a world that emerges from history and memory, her figures are rendered with just enough detail to be discernible as individuals, revealing Fattal’s preoccupation with the persistence and fragility of human form. In contrast to the avant-garde and earlier generations of artists who radically wanted to break from the past, several of the younger artists included in ‘Seeing Touch’ consciously reference art-history by either developing pre-existing artistic strategies, or humorously referencing them. Anna Maria Maiolino (b. 1942) has talked about the art of the past as a series of traces or residues on herself. Berlinde De Bruyckere (b. 1964) draws from traditions of the Flemish Renaissance. By layering existing histories with new narratives, she creates a psychological terrain of pathos, tenderness, and unease. Not Vital (b. 1948) deploys strategies of both minimalism and surrealism, infusing the former with soulfulness, and advancing the latter with wit and formal precision. The faux-fur used in Sylvie Fleury’s (b. 1961) colourful Cuddly Paintings is a way for her to humorously confront the art historical precedent of monochromatic painted squares for which male artists were glorified. Martin Soto Climent (b. 1977) has recently begun to work on a series entitled Gossip; the wall-objects that form part of this body of work consist of mirrored wooden boxes reminiscent of Donald Judd’s units. Yet they are far from minimalist: inside each box, pantyhose are arranged in seductive three dimensional formations that reference the body and lure the viewer into a web of fantasy and desire. By expanding our understanding of what lies beyond the visual, we are able to access a world that operates through tactile, psychic, and affective resonances. Seeing, then, is not a purely mechanical and rational mechanism, but a metamorphosis. (Text Hauser & Wirth Gallery)
Evelyne Axell: Body Double

Curated by Anke Kempkes and Krzysztof Kościuczuk With Special Participation of Sylvie Fleury Muzeum Susch, Susch, 1. August – 6. Dezember 2020. Text by the Gallery: „Muzeum Susch presents Body Double, a retrospective exhibition of the Belgian Pop-Surrealist Evelyne Axell (1935-1972). With her original feminist approach in the 1960s Axell became one of the pioneers of Pop Art in Europe. Her distinct body of work is populated by an all-female universe, transcending the established iconography of Pop Art at the time and reclaiming the discourse of women’s sexuality. Evelyne Axell’s career was tragically cut short by her untimely death in a car accident, at the early age of 37. Subsequently, her contribution to early feminist art and Pop Art was left out of the dominant narrative of art history, alongside her fellow contemporaries such as Pauline Boty, Rosalind Drexler, Kiki Kogelnik, and Dorothy Iannone, who have received a long overdue recognition only in recent years. Co-curated by Anke Kempkes, international curator, art historian and art critic and Krzysztof Kościuczuk, artistic director of Muzeum Susch, this exhibition will present an overall of sixty exhibits spanning the broad spectrum of the artist’s entire oeuvre. Body Double brings together a large selection of collages, drawings, relief paintings, sculptures, filmic and photographic works – many of which have not been on view in decades. Axell experimented with novel artificial materials, such as her signature technique of car enamel paint on plastic. This exhibition is the largest museum retrospective of Axell’s work staged outside of her native Belgium, after an exhibition organized at Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach in 2011. As a special contribution, the exhibition features the prominent installation Marcel et Robert (2009) by Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury, entering into a cross-generational iconographic dialogue with Axell’s work. The rotating disk forming the base of Fleury’s work is designed as a giant Pop-coloured target mirroring the concentric composition in Axell’s painting The Wall of Sound (1966). Evelyne Axell, The Champions (Les Championnes), 1966, courtesy Collection Philippe Axell, copyright ADAGP, ProLitteris 2020, Photo: Paul Louis Born in Belgium in 1935, Evelyne Axell began her career as a charismatic theatre and film actress. She also authored the script for the 1963 movie Le Crocodile en Peluche, which portrays the prejudice faced by a multi-ethnic couple in Brussels as the Belgian colonial rule was coming to an end in the Congo. Taught for one year by the Belgian Surrealist René Magritte, Axell abandoned acting and turned to painting in 1964. She processed the contemporary vocabulary of Pop Art through a feminist reading of Surrealism expanding the radical legacy of her female Surrealist forerunners. Axell’s daring work was met with derision by the male-dominated scene of art critics at the time, which prompted the artist to sign her works solely with her last name ‘Axell’ to elude any gendered associations, a move shared by many female artists and writers in the first half of the 20th century. Body Double highlights various political themes in Axell’s work, situating her iconography in the international movements of the 1960s and early 70s. As an active witness of the era of sexual liberation, Axell focused on a female body freed from past conventions of depicting femininity. Throughout her work, Axell forged a signature iconography of empowered female nudes inhabiting the sphere of utopian homosociality. In her only public interview in 1969, Axell stated, ‘…The most extraordinary beings I ever met were almost all women, I find women most exquisite. They are everything at once: voluptuousness, luxury, frivolity, tenderness, courage, greed and total selflessness. That is to say the synthesis of the weaknesses and strengths of mankind’. The exhibition Body Double highlights the recurring motif of ‘the double’ in Axell’s compositions. Frequently based on the artist’s own image, identical female nudes appear as kindred gatekeepers gracing portals to a territory of unbeknown promises. Fragmented portraits impart the condition of the female ‘split self’. There are also female ‘homoerotic twins’ – typically absorbed in an embrace, a kiss, or in explicit love-making. Mirrored multi-ethnic female nudes – as in Axell’s cinematic experiment Noire et Blanche (1966/7) – constitute yet another aspect of the ‘double’, resonating with the nascent post-colonial emancipation and the ‘Black is Beautiful’ cultural pride manifestations during the Civil Rights movement at the time which Axell supported. In the wake of the May ‘68 events Axell was – alongside fellow artist Marcel Broodthaers – in the frontline of counter-cultural activities in the Belgian art scene. In 1970 she joined the local campaign against the imprisonment of the U.S. feminist activist and Marxist thinker Angela Davis, one of Axell’s female idols to whom she dedicated two portraits. Another aspect of ‘the double’ in Axell’s work appears in her vision of the ‘bio-botanique’ (Axell, 1970): exotic animals become alter egos, tropical vegetation consumes the body, and surreal beastly hybrids inhabit an alternative sphere of ‘bio-cultural companionship’. In the devouring embrace of the Le Homard Amoureux (Lobster in Love, 1967) the shape of the female nude merges into a human-crustacean union. Axell explores this new universe ruled by the dynamics of metamorphosis in her early 1970s ‘Paradise’ series where the female figure is dissolving in the composition – ‘Gradually she loses her voice. Then memory. And, finally, the reason’ (Axell, Poem, 1972). She erotically unites with plants and animals and is transformed into a botanical entity. The rich iconography of the Body Double culminates in one of Axell’s most prominent works La Grande Sortie dans l’Espace (The Great Journey into Outer Space, 1967), a futuristic vision of a pagan dance where identical cosmonautic nudes float in an abstract space: a zone ruled by female sensuality. It is the artist’s Arcadian vision of a joyful, anti-authoritarian future dimension. Evelyne Axell’s work remains highly evocative today in its transgressive iconography, feminist agenda and utopian outlook.“
CLAUDIA LOSIAs hands remember

Galleria Monica de Cardenas, Zuoz, 25. Juli – 29. August 2020. Text by the Gallery: „The exhibition by Claudia Losi speaks of departures and destinations, of passages on the earth: an imaginary and imagined pilgrimage between the history of humankind and the personal concerns of the artist. To restore a connection with the earth, in this very fragile ecosystem, suggests a different idea of identity that stems from feeling a bond with other life forms. Losi’s works are musings on origins and cyclical transformation in nature, „solidifications“ of moments of life between permanence and impermanence, which reveal themselves to the eyes of the visitor in silent transit through small stations, where it is possible to linger and ponder. The materials used by the artist for her works are bearers of an ancient, patient handiwork: iron, bronze, wood, silk, ceramics. The forms come together and overlap to bear witness to the constant process of evolution that rules in nature: the Sfere (Spheres) in wood release boughs and limbs in an eternal dance, as happens with the forms of animals in the hollows of the vases of Gesti Dentro (Inner Gestures). An invitation to consider a state of „naturalness“ in which living beings have no barriers of species. Her works are choral and personal geographies in which an “ecological action” leads to the rebirth of what has been lived, or also simply imagined: the Lingue foglia (Leaf Tongues) bring out collective stories of humankind, presenting themselves as little theaters with scenes of travel and hunting, in which the protagonist is the mutual relationship between human and animal. The eye (represented) and the gaze (evoked and suggested by spirals and circles) are recurring subjects in the artist’s practice. Poli Antarctici (Antarctic Poles), a large embroidery produced through patient group effort, links back to the idea of a large aquatic iris. In Gesti Dentro the collapsing of vases onto one another suggests the figure of a whirlpool, while the background incorporates deep blue glazes that remind us of the waves of the sea. Here again, the eye is engraved on the sandstone sphere placed in a fishing net (Pietraocchio) and the embroidery with horsehair of the planet Earth (Sferamondo), taken from an illustration by Athanasius Kircher, amplifies the connection between macrocosm and microcosm: everything is recalled and rejoins in a sort of Panic energy in which we feel we are engaged, to look inward and to look more closely. In the end, there is the need for protection that has accompanied human history from its origins: Asking Shelter, the impossible house-refuges, but also the crowns of thorns (Le sue mani insegnarono pazienza / The hands taught patience) and the series of small Amuleti (Amulets), shaped over the last three months of isolation day after day, are artifacts that act as good omens, keepers of positive energy. There is beauty in survival and fertility in hope. You must change your disposition, not your sky (animum debes mutare, non caelum), Seneca wrote to Lucilius.– Marina DacciClaudia Losi was born in 1971 in Piacenza, where she lives and works. Recent solo exhibitions include MAMbo, Bologna, 2020; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, 2019 and Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, 2016. She has also shown work at La Maréchalerie, Versailles; the MAXXI Museum, Rome; MAGASIN, Grenoble; Royal Academy, London. In 2008 she had a solo show at Museo Marino Marini, Florence, and at the Stenersen Museum, Oslo. In 2007 she took part in the Sharjah Biennial 8, United Arab Emirates, and in 2016 at the Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art, China. From 2004 to 2011 she developed the Balena Project: the mythical account of a fin whale made in actual size in fabric, which traveled the world involving people and imaginaries at each passage. The project will be narrated in a special publication titled The Whale Theory, programmed for the start of 2021.“ http://www.monicadecardenas.com/claudia-losi-as-hands-remember/
Engadine Mon Amour, Fotos by Peter Vann

Galerie Peter Vann, S-chanf, 25. Juli – 5. September 2020. Fotos by Peter Vann. www.galeriepetervann.com
Francesco Clemente: 7-23 2020, Pat Steir: Paintings From The East, and Bob Colacello: On The Road.

Vito Schnabel Gallery St.Moritz, St.Moritz, 23. Juli – 5. September 2020. Text by the Gallery: „Vito Schnabel Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of three new summer exhibitions at its St. Moritz space: Francesco Clemente: 7-23 2020, Pat Steir: Paintings From The East, and Bob Colacello: On The Road. This trio of exhibitions presents important paintings and photographs by three iconic New York-based artists and friends who are part of the gallery’s program. 7-23 2020 will present four new large-scale paintings made by Francesco Clemente in the months of April and May of this year during the coronavirus quarantine in New York City. While the artist is acclaimed for his unique ability to render imagery that transcends time in an ongoing exploration of spirituality and identity, the works on view in this exhibition find him engaging this specific moment, deploying his distinctive figurative language and vibrant palette to capture the emotional experience of a global pandemic. Inspired by Japanese ukiyo-e prints, Clemente has dated each work in a bold, stamp-like rectangle, a new motif in his renowned oeuvre. The date itself becomes integral to the imagery in each in the painting, as Clemente counts each day passed in quarantine with a different visual expression of isolation, love, loss, and the passing of time. The final work in the series, titled 5-26 2020, depicts a chameleon and a butterfly—predator and prey. Here, Clemente alludes to both the coronavirus pandemic, in which society’s most vulnerable have suffered the most, and the current political unrest in the United States. Clemente’s paintings are being presented alongside a focused exhibition of six new paintings by his friend and neighbor Pat Steir. During the quarantine, they have spent time together in the shared garden adjoining their respective MacDougal Street homes in the West Village. Since Clemente and his wife Alba were introduced to Steir in the early 1970s by their mutual friend Kathan Brown, the founding director of Crown Point Press, Clemente and Steir have enjoyed a long, ongoing dialogue about art, life, and the ways of the world. Steir’s exhibition Paintings From The East features the latest paintings from her critically admired Waterfall series, an ongoing body of work begun in the 1980s. Completed at the end of 2019, these paintings on view at Vito Schnabel Gallery extend Steir’s ongoing exploration of intention and chance, gravity and control. While Steir’s signature technique of pouring, dripping, and throwing paint onto the canvas removes pure determination of the outcome, she creates the parameters for her work by controlling the colors, sizes, and gestures of her works. The Waterfall works begin with the artist applying multiple layers of different colors onto the canvas. Shades of green peak through the deep blue of Untitled XXVII, 2019 (Taipei), yielding a web of vertical lines of vibrant, altered versions of the original hues. After such a base is completed, Steir holds a wide brush dipped in paint against the upper part of her canvas, allowing the pigment to flow downwards, guided only by gravity. The works in Paintings From The East immerse viewers in the veils and skeins of optical effects that come from Steir’s conceptual approach, a process rooted in her studies of Daosim and her early influential friendships with avant-garde composer John Cage and artist Sol LeWitt. The third summer exhibition at Vito Schnabel Gallery is Bob Colacello: On The Road, a small selection of black and white photographs Colacello made in the 1970s and ‘80s during his travels as editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview. In those years, Colacello seemed to go everywhere and anywhere, from Warhol’s Montauk compound, to Valentino’s Gstaad chalet, and from West German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s residence in Bonn, to the deepest Amazon jungles. In 1976, Colacello acquired a Minox 35 EL, the first miniature camera capable of making full frame 35 millimeter photographs. “It was like a spy camera” says Colacello, “I’d keep it in my inside jacket pocket, and take it out when I saw someone interesting doing something interesting.” On The Road is Colacello’s second exhibition with Vito Schnabel Gallery. Last year, the gallery presented over 170 photographs at its space in New York. The gallery will be open Tuesday – Saturday, from 2-6pm and by appointment. Virtual tours of all three exhibitions will be available online. About the Artists Francesco Clemente Francesco Clemente was born in 1952 in Naples, Italy. He studied architecture at the Università degli Studi di Roma, La Sapienza in Rome in 1970, before turning his focus instead to art. In 2002, Clemente was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Clemente’s work has been presented at numerous international institutions, including Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Royal Academy of Arts, London; Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Bologna; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; Sezon Museum of Art, Tokyo; Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli; and Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. His work is featured in many prominent museum collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Miami Art Museum; Kunstmuseum Basel; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao and New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Clemente lives and works in New York, Chennai (formerly Madras), and Varanasi, India. Pat Steir Pat Steir was born in 1940 in Newark, New Jersey. She studied art and philosophy at Boston University and received her BFA from the Pratt Institute in 1962. She is a founding board member of Printed Matter Inc., New York, and the feminist journal, Heresies. She was also a board member of Semiotext(e). Her work has been the subject of major institutional exhibitions and projects including: The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C; Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York; Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio; Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; The Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; Des Moines Art Center, Iowa; Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; …