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...
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...
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...
Alex Hubbard (b. 1975, Tolego, Oregon) is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work encompasses video art and painting, exploring the boundaries of each via a cross-examination that invigorates both media in new and inventive ways. Constructed along parallel lines, his videos and paintings explore composition, mass, colour and depth of images in unexpected ways. Avoiding a single point of focus, Hubbard constructs his videos in layers, engulfing the viewer with bold colours, performative gestures and evolving, all-over compositions in which movement is multi-directional and time appears to be non-linear. Often described as 'moving paintings', the videos are a record of physical creation and destruction, with the hand of the artist tangible, and sometimes visible, in the frame.
In counterpoint to the videos, Hubbard’s paintings often suggest a mechanical means of production. Fields of colour in fibreglass and resin are interrupted with richly pooled, dripped and poured paint. Working with fast-drying materials, such as epoxy and latex, the artist is forced to act quickly, embracing chance happenings and revelling in the autonomy of his chosen media. Such anti-hierarchical materials and techniques provide a corollary to the DIY aesthetic of the video works. And through this deconstruction every traditional opposition of the formal language of painting is opened up: figure and ground, material and illusionistic depth, the horizontality of production and the verticality of display.