Goodman Gallery recently launched an online video programme of William Kentridge's films on their website, whilst concurrently showing this set of sculptures for their online viewing room with Frieze Art Fair 2020.
As a member of the South African Resistance Art movement in the 1980s, Kentridge's practice has since been grounded in the struggles and emotions of post-apartheid South Africa. In 1999, an exhibition of Kentridge's work went on view at London's Serpentine Gallery, and he has since had countless solo exhibitions worldwide.
Cursive comprises 40 bronze sculptures, or 'glyphs', many of which have been used across Kentridge's previous projects. With each glyph representing a different symbol, the sculptures can be rearranged as one wishes, allowing a multitude of memories and influences of different cultures and periods to interact.
Simon Lee Gallery showed this Chris Huen Sin Kan painting for Frieze Art Fair 2020 online viewing rooms.
With a style described as 'en plein air—hereto indoor', Chris Huen Sin Kan's paintings consistently feature his dogs, wife, and children in his home and studio in Yuen Long, Hong Kong.
Through his use of diluted oil paints, Huen creates scenes with varying degrees of precision and colour, while his continuous brushstrokes reflect the smoothness of the calligraphic line.
Vibrant and chaotic, yet cohesive and organised, Huen's scenes align with his interest in the 'specious present', a theory first put forward by E.R. Clay to describe the present as being a cumulative experience of many moments.
Speaking to Ocula Magazine Editor-in-Chief Stephanie Bailey in April 2020, Huen noted, 'I selectively depict the more uneventful moments in my daily family life. The less interesting and exciting moments tend to escape our attention'.
A group exhibition titled After Image and curated by Robert Spragg, was presented at Mamoth in London (26 September–28 November 2020).
The show takes as its starting point the writer David Joselit's text on how painting can theorise the circulation of commoditised images, presenting us with a group of young U.K.-based conceptual painters working in this mould.
This is one of two similar Joseph Yaeger paintings in watercolour on primed canvas included in the show. Yaeger uses his own photographs, together with films stills, news media, and sourced images as triggers for his works. These images are then transformed through their displacement and the act of painting.
Memory clearly plays a role in Yaeger's watercolours as we are provided with a fleeting glimpse of a moment in time but cracks in the paint or visible underpainting often reveals, in his own words, 'time moving through the image'.
Tavares Strachan at Marian Goodman Gallery was another highlight from Art Basel 2020 online viewing rooms.
Cutting through art, politics, and science, Bahamian artist Tavares Strachan's practice reintroduces marginalised objects and peoples into the cultural canon, inspiring a curiosity of the world in the process.
The Encyclopedia of Invisibility (2018–ongoing) is an ongoing project that weaves through the artist's initiatives, containing over 15,000 entries—from B-movies to mythological creatures and historical figures. It is the backbone to his current exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery, In Plain Sight (8 September–24 October 2020), an immersive presentation of sculptures, explosive paintings, and other elements that bring figures swept from collective memory to the fore.
In Before the Fire (2020), a labyrinth of references includes a photograph of American novelist, poet, and activist James Baldwin taken in 1963—the year his non-fiction work The Fire Next Time was published—in the foreground.
PPOW Gallery are showing this wonderful Ramiro Gomez painting in their Art Basel 2020 online viewing room.
West Hollywood artist Ramiro Gomez's paintings on cardboard powerfully evoke the predicament of America's Latinx workers, many of whom continue to work in the jobs other Americans don't want to do.
Only in his early thirties, the artist's practice usually involves being out and about, shopping, going to restaurants and bars, and visiting art museums, but, he says, 'always with an eye toward those maintaining everything.'
Gomez himself was a nanny for a Los Angeles family, while his father is a truck driver for Costco and his mother works as a janitor. The keenness of Gomez's social observation has been acknowledged in articles by publications including The New York Times Magazine, and through his addition to the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
We highlighted the Erika Verzutti solo booth at Alison Jacques Gallery for Art Basel's 2020 online viewing rooms.
Brazilian artist Erika Verzutti's biomorphic sculptures lay bare the process of their making, emphasising the tactile qualities of her materials.
This relief, entitled Naked, features her recurring egg motif set within a concave, shell-like form. Shapes taken from nature are transformed through their rendering in bronze and clay, together with a playful arrangement that imbues the work with a surrealist quality.
Verzutti's sculptures seem to come alive through ambiguous allusions to body parts, teasing us with sexual innuendo.
