Ocula Conversation Jess Johnson: Worlds Within Worlds Geometric patterns, anthropomorphic characters, architectural spatial environments, and relics of the ancient world appear throughout Jess Johnson's artworks.Johnson's solo art-ventures began in drawing, but her long-term collaborative relationship with animator Simon Ward brings her drawings to life in videos and virtual reality. The animator has...
Ocula Conversation Melati Suryodarmo: Performance Art as Trigger In 2012, Melati Suryodarmo opened Studio Plesungan in her native Surakarta, also known as Solo, the historic royal capital of the Mataram Empire of Java in Indonesia. Suryodarmo had returned to Indonesia from Germany, where she studied Butoh and choreography with Butoh dancer and choreographer Anzu Furukawa, time-based media with avantgarde...
Ocula Report Lagos Biennial 2019: Stories from Africa’s most Populous City 15 Nov 2019 : Jareh Das for Ocula Under the direction of Folakunle Oshun, the second edition of the Lagos Biennial (26 October–23 November 2019) includes works by over 40 Lagos-based and international artists, architects, and collectives. Curated by architect Tosin Oshinowo, curator and producer Oyindamola Fakeye, and assistant curator of photography at the Art Institute of...
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...
Exhibition view: Lorna Simpson, Darkening, Hauser & Wirth, 22nd Street, New York (25 April–26 July 2019). © Lorna Simpson. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
Exhibition view: Lorna Simpson, Darkening, Hauser & Wirth, 22nd Street, New York (25 April–26 July 2019). © Lorna Simpson. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
Exhibition view: Lorna Simpson, Darkening, Hauser & Wirth, 22nd Street, New York (25 April–26 July 2019). © Lorna Simpson. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
Exhibition view: Lorna Simpson, Darkening, Hauser & Wirth, 22nd Street, New York (25 April–26 July 2019). © Lorna Simpson. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
Exhibition view: Lorna Simpson, Darkening, Hauser & Wirth, 22nd Street, New York (25 April–26 July 2019). © Lorna Simpson. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
Hauser & Wirth is pleased to present Lorna Simpson Darkening, the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery in New York. Debuting a suite of new large-scale paintings, the exhibition finds Simpson returning to and building upon themes and motifs at the centre of her practice: explorations focused on the nature of representation, identity, gender, race, and history. For more than 30 years, Simpson’s powerful works have entangled viewers in an equivocal web of meaning, drawing upon techniques of collage through the use of found materials, often culled from the pages of vintage Jet and Ebony magazines. In Darkening, Simpson continues to thread dichotomies of figuration and abstraction with vast and enthralling tableaux that subsume spliced photos and fragmented text, abstracted beyond comprehension. Equally arresting and poetic, the paintings engage viewers with layers of paradox, capturing the mystifying allure of an arctic landscape in inky washes of blacks, greys, and startling blues.
Related Press Lorna Simpson Searches for Meaning in the Arctic Ice Hyperallergic : 20 June 2019 In the poem 'Ode to Meaning' by Robert Pinsky, the speaker traverses the sundry terrains in which meaning might be found and sifts through the many guises it might take on. What a reader has to conclude coming to the end of the poem, is that meaning is a fugitive thing, sometimes here, and sometimes there, winking in and out of existence, and...
