Ocula Conversation Sandrine Colard on the 6th Lubumbashi Biennale The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the largest Francophone nation in Africa with vast resources and nearly 80 million inhabitants, is a place where commodities play a vital role in the national economy and the country's significance on the world stage. This is the context from which the 6th Lubumbashi Biennale (24 October–24 November...
Ocula Report From 20 to 21 July 2019, Artspace Sydney held a two-day symposium that brought artists in conversation with leading curators, writers, activists, academics, diplomats, and journalists from across Asia. The symposium was the final chapter of the 52 ARTISTS 52 ACTIONS exhibition, publication, website, and Instagram project. Instigated and...
Ocula News We Are Our Infrastructure, Argues Newly Announced Shanghai Biennale Chief Curator 13 December 2019 The Power Station of Art will make a fitting location for Andrés Jaque, whose past projects expose the politics concealed by buried pipes and managed cables. Spanish architect, writer, and curator Andrés Jaque has been named the chief curator of the 13th Shanghai Biennale, which will take place at the Power Station of Art (PSA) from 13 November...
Ocula Insight 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...
Established in 1996, Thomas Erben Gallery focuses on rediscovering and introducing artworks that expand or deviate from the media usually associated with an artist.
The gallery’s founder, Thomas Erben, entered the art world professionally as an art dealer in 1989 and led the gallery on an evolution that saw it journey from exhibitions in his private space at 476 Broome Street in SoHo to a dedicated space in 2000 on West 26th Street in New York.
Thomas Erben Gallery showcases local American and international emerging and established artists. African American avantgarde artist Senga Nengudi, among others, has been represented by Erben since the mid-1990s. Nengudi’s exhibition Wet Night—Early Dawn—Scat-Chant—Pilgrim's Song (1996) was the first Thomas Erben Gallery exhibition to grace the Broome Street space. Through the mid-2000s, whilst maintaining connections to up-and-coming local New York artists, the gallery has come to represent a range of international artists including Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller, Rose Wylie, Elaine Stocki, and Tom Wood. From the 2000s, by taking on artists such as Aditi Singh and Nadia Khawaja the gallery has drawn closer connections to contemporary art from India and Pakistan.
Ocula Photolog Art Basel Miami Beach 2019 6 December 2019 'In Art Basel's American show, leading galleries from North America, Latin America, Europe, and Asia show significant work from the masters of Modern and contemporary art, as well as the new generation of emerging stars. Paintings, sculptures, installations, photographs, films, and editioned works of the highest quality are on display in the main...
Ocula Photolog Independent New York 2019 11 March 2019 'Independent New York's selected participants represent the art world's most creative and inspired curatorial visions from a cross-section of emerging, mid-career and established programs from around the world. Independent is curating a forum that is an authentic reflection of the gallery landscape and encourages innovative approaches to fair...
Ocula Report Shanghai Art Exhibitions to See: The Lowdown 2 Nov 2018 : Sam Gaskin for Ocula There is no official Shanghai Art Week, but the term has nevertheless entered the lexicon of the city's contemporary art community. It's especially apt this year, with the firmly established West Bund Art Fair (8–11 November 2018) and Art021 (9–11 November 2018) taking place the same week that the 12th Shanghai Biennale opens at the Power Station...
Related Press Mike Cloud Invents a New Kind of Portrait Painting ARTnews : 13 November 2019 As is usual for Cloud , his new works-arrangements of exposed stretcher bars and paint-slathered canvas—are as much relief sculptures as paintings. 'I've always felt that there was a really strong formal noise created by the format of painting,' Cloud told me as we walked through the exhibition. 'If you have a big, rectangular, unbroken...
Related Press Painting As Portal: Mike Cloud Interviewed by Sheryl Oppenheim BOMB Magazine : 13 November 2019 When I learned to paint fifteen or twenty years ago, the dominant ideology was late modernism. In that ideology, painting was a territory where each painter staked a small aesthetic claim. There was room for all the painters because we dug downward in search of formal riches rather than moving outward into one another’s territories. So one painter...
Related Press Painting Outside the Safe Zone Hyperallergic : 26 October 2019 Paintings are social structures, which is why their inherited authority needs to be short-circuited as part of the artistic process. That is our job as cultural producers. Remarkably, most paintings that appear on the walls of the best galleries (and also the striving ones) aren't interested in doing that. Instead, we are awash in whole-hearted...
Related Press Dona Nelson's Paintings Make Every Dimension of the Canvas Relevant Art in America : 15 October 2019 The paintings that Pennsylvania-based Dona Nelson has been making in the most recent years of her nearly five-decade career are commonly referred to as double-sided, but that description is incomplete and limiting. Nelson does engage the canvas's front and back in a rich, reciprocal relationship, but the sides matter, too.
