Ocula Report Sharjah Biennial 14: Leaving the Echo Chamber 15 Mar 2019 : Stephanie Bailey for Ocula In Meiro Koizumi's three-channel video installation, The Angels of Testimony (2019), the central frame features an interview with Hajime Kondo about his time as a solider of the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The conversation centres on war crimes perpetrated in China, including the beheading of Chinese prisoners for...
Ocula Conversation Diana Campbell Betancourt Diana Campbell Betancourt is a curator working predominantly across South and Southeast Asia. Since 2013 she has been the founding artistic director of the Samdani Art Foundation and chief curator of the Dhaka Art Summit in Dhaka, Bangladesh, a transnational art event that has grown in size and scale ever since its first edition in 2012. Backed by...
Ocula Report Chinternet Ugly at Manchester’s Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art 7 Mar 2019 : Mike Pinnington for Ocula China, home to 802 million internet users, is subject to sophisticated online censorship. This shrouded state of affairs, unsurprisingly perhaps, serves to reinforce stereotypes around conformity elsewhere. Any realm, digital or otherwise, subject to such strict scrutiny must necessarily be bland and uncritical, right? I was mulling over such...
Almine Rech Gallery opened its doors on April 1st, 1997 in the 13th arrondissement in Paris. The gallery was founded on a minimal and conceptual axis, representing artists such as James Turrell, John McCracken and Joseph Kosuth. In addition to its stable of internationally recognised, mid-career and emerging artists, it has always been the gallery's mission to continually seek out and include new artists in its programme. The gallery has held longstanding relationships with artists like John McCracken and James Turrell and has since started working with and representing artists such as Günther Förg, Alex Israel, Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, Julian Schnabel, Taryn Simon and DeWain Valentine, among others. In 2006 the gallery moved to a larger two-floor space in the Marais district and in 2008 inaugurated a second 1,000 square metre exhibition space in Brussels. In March 2013, Almine Rech Gallery launched its new Paris space at 64 rue de Turenne. In June 2014, Almine Rech Gallery opened a gallery in London on Savile Row, Mayfair. In October 2016, the gallery moved from Savile Row to a larger space on Grosvenor Hill, Mayfair. The 400 square metre gallery opened with a solo exhibition by Jeff Koons. Almine Rech Gallery also opened in Manhattan's Upper East Side—the gallery's first exhibition space in the US—at the end of October, 2016. The New York gallery's inaugurating exhibition was Calder and Picasso.
Johan CretenVulva Small Purple Hart, 2017 Glazed stoneware turquoise/purple, partially gold lustre
Ocula Photolog Frieze Los Angeles 15 February 2019 'Frieze Los Angeles largely focuses on contemporary art and celebrates the exceptionally dynamic culture of Los Angeles and its global contributions to the visual arts. Frieze Los Angeles joins Frieze New York, Frieze London and Frieze Masters at the forefront of the international art fair calendar, celebrating Los Angeles' position as a global...
Ocula Photolog Art Basel in Miami Beach 2018 6 December 2018 'This year, over 200 of the world's leading international Modern and contemporary art galleries display artworks by over 4,000 artists, including paintings, sculptures, installations, photography, film, video, and digital art.' –Art Basel in Miami Beach (6–9 December 2018).
Ocula Photolog West Bund Art & Design 2018 9 November 2018 'With a strong selection of returning exhibitors, the 2018 edition welcomes 87 galleries in the Galleries section, among which 39 are participating for the first time.'– West Bund Art & Design (8–11 November 2018).
Ocula Photolog FIAC Paris 2018 19 October 2018 'For the 2018 selection, held in Paris from 18 to 21 October, FIAC brought together 195 galleries from 27 countries in the nave and exhibition rooms of the Grand Palais. The fair presented the finest examples of artistic creation since the turn of the twentieth century; modern masters through to the latest trends, notably represented in the...
Related Press From Monumental to Microscopic, These Works Changed the History of Art in Japan Frieze : 13 March 2019 Curated by Mika Yoshitake, Parergon: Japanese Art of the 1980s and 1990s forms a corollary to her 2012 Blum & Poe exhibition Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono-ha, which presented a much-needed introduction to a group of postwar Japanese artists whose works have now been aligned with more recognizable Western European movements such as Arte...
Related Press Jasper Johns and the Question of Meaning The New Yorker : 4 March 2019 More words may have been written about Jasper Johns than about any other American artist who isn't Andy Warhol. Critical verbiage spumes in the wake of a sixty-some-year career (Johns is eighty-eight) that began with revolutionary paintings of flags, targets, sets of numbers, and maps—or, per a standard paradox, paintings that virtually are...
Related Press Jeff Koons is putting a new shine on the Ashmolean Wallpaper* : 13 February 2019 Jeff Koons is back. The American artist and art commerce kingpin has just opened his latest show at Oxford's Ashmolean, the world's oldest public museum. Seventeen significant works – 14 of which make their first appearance on UK soil – span the artist's career and radically distinctive oeuvre including Equilibrium, Antiquity and Gazing Ball in a...
Related Press In his shiny surfaces, Jeff Koons reflects the vanity of our age Apollo : 12 February 2019 The first image to greet the visitor at the entrance to this exhibition, arranged across three galleries in Oxford's Ashmolean Museum, is a life-sized photo portrait of Jeff Koons in his New York studio. Standing on a plinth, he gazes out at the viewer, one hand holding a deep-blue glass sphere that, like the mirror in the 'Arnolfini Portrait',...
Related Video & Audio GÜNTHER FÖRG: A FRAGILE BEAUTY Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam : 25 June 2018 The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam presents a major survey of the work of German artist Günther Förg (1952–2013). 'A Fragile Beauty' explores the work of a rebellious artist whose oeuvre embodies a critical, witty, yet rigorous and penetrating critique of the canon of modern art.
Related Video & Audio Taryn Simon on the art of mourning and how social media is shaping grief Wallpaper* : 17 April 2018 Having gathered professional mourners from around the world to perform their laments in New York in 2016, artist and erstwhile Wallpaper* Guest Editor Taryn Simon is now bringing her groundbreaking artwork to London, opening this evening. We caught up with Simon in midst of rehearsals to talk about grief, performance and ephemerality.
Related Video & Audio George Condo The Artist at Work Louisiana Channel : 14 December 2017 The mind of American artist George Condo has been referred to as a place where 'Picasso meets Looney Tunes.' Watch him at work in his New York-studio where he draws and paints his take on a 19th-century painting by Manet.
Related Video & Audio George Condo Interview: The Way I Think Louisiana Channel : 2 November 2017 'I kind of draw like you’re walking through the forest, where you don’t really know where you’re going, and you just start from some point and randomly travel through the paper until you get to a place where you finally reach your destination.' Condo studied music theory at college, but soon realised that it was too formal and rigid for him, and...
