Ocula Conversation Pierre Huyghe: The Artist as Director Pierre Huyghe is a producer of spectacular and memorable enigmas, with works that function more like mirages than as objects. Abyssal Plain (2015–ongoing), his contribution to the 2015 Istanbul Biennial, curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, was installed on the seabed of the Marmara Sea, some 20 metres below the surface of the water and close to...
Ocula Report MoMA Expansion: Once the Modern, Always the Modern 29 Nov 2019 : Mohammad Salemy for Ocula In the early decades of its existence, New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), founded in 1929, transformed from a philanthropic project modestly housed in a few rooms of the Heckscher Building on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, to an alleged operating node in the United States' cultural struggle during the cold war, and one of the...
Ocula Insight | Video Hans Hartung and Art Informel at Mazzoleni London (1 October 2019-18 January 2020) presents key works by the French-German painter while highlighting his connection with artists active in Paris during the 50s and 60s. In this video, writer and historian Alan Montgomery discusses Hartung's practice and its legacy.Born in Leipzig in 1904, Hans...
Related Press Bosco Sodi: Heavens and the Earth at Blain | Southern, Hanover Sq (London) Arte Fuse : 26 March 2019 Sodi (b.1970 Mexico City, MX) is predominantly known for his roughly-textured relief paintings. In this new series he brings together two contrasting colours in the same composition for the first time, in reference to universal notions of opposing forces.
Related Press Mix master: Bosco Sodi stages his first solo show in L.A. to dramatic effect Wallpaper* : 1 September 2016 Eight years ago, working in his studio in Barcelona, Bosco Sodi accidentally dropped a bucket of his sawdust, pigment and binder mixture on the floor. ‘I didn’t have time to clean it because I had to leave for vacation,’ he recalls. ‘When I came back it was all cracked, but I liked it.’That accident became the...
Related Press KAI SCHIEMENZ | THE IMPORTANCE OF ABSENCE HausMag : 2 June 2016 German Artist Kai Schiemenz uses art to pose social questions about space and architecture, and our relationship within them. Working with a range of mediums; from computer graphics, installations, and sculpture - the artist subverts our customary ways of seeing. Browsing at Art basel Hong Kong, the Hausie team was struck by the colourful and...
Related Press Neo World (Dis)order Post-ism : 16 October 2015 For three decades German artist Neo Rauch has been one of the leading figurative painters of his generation creating works that offer up a window onto a strange world. It’s a world that operates according to its own laws, a world that is at once familiar with its bucolic scenery and sometimes industrial landscapes, and yet completely alien,...
Related Press Ákos Birkás: The Shadow of the Other ArtReview : 1 April 2015 As you'd expect, the generous proportions of Eigen + Art's Leipzig HQ are ideally suited to show large canvases by the gallery's well-known stable of German painters (among them Martin Eder and Neo Rauch). If those artists are renowned for both their provocations and their technical ability, then, on the evidence of this, Ákos Birkás's tenth show...
Related Press Carsten Nicolai Art Review Asia : 30 April 2014 Artist and electronic musician Carsten Nicolai was born in Karl-Marx-Stadt (now known as Chemnitz) in East Germany and received his first solo gallery exhibition while studying landscape design in Dresden. Influenced by scientific reference systems and mathematics, Nicolai's work crosses between visual and sonic media, often making manifest the...
Related Press A short history of Galerie EIGEN+ART Ran Dian : 27 April 2013 EIGEN+ART emerged in 1983 as an unofficial gallery project in the private loft of Gerd Harry "Judy" Lybke at Körnerplatz in Leipzig. The name is a play on "eigen" (to own") and "einzigartig" (unique). The artists he showed, including Neo Rauch, were active in the non-government (i.e. doctrinally mandated) sphere,...
Related Press Who Is Nicola Samorì? HuffPost : 1 November 2012 Nicola Samorì is the 35-year old Italian artist who first captured my attention approximately three years ago, when I happened upon a two-sentence mention of his work on the Juxtapoz website.
Related Press Ricarda Roggan | KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany Frieze : 1 October 2008 Ricarda Roggan began her career by photographing spare constellations of furniture in dank, grey rooms, or piled up in isolated dark spaces underneath transparent plastic tarps. There has always been a sense of forlorn isolation in her still lifes, beginning in those cramped rooms in which she took great care to place old tables and chairs in just...
