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 What Objects Can Do: on Jiro Takamatsu by William Corwin BOMB : 29 August 2017 Takamatsu's approach to sculpture can be summed up by paraphrasing John Lennon: sculpture is what happens when you're busy looking at other things. This survey of the artist's sculptural works made between 1961 and 1977 presents an obsession with the things that objects can do, rather than the objects themselves. Takamatsu starts at the very edge...
Related Press In 1970s Japan, a New Art of Experiments, Edgy Photos, and Big Ideas Hyperallergic : 19 September 2015 There are certain exhibitions in which some or many of the works on display are so interesting, provocative, or well-made that they somehow manage to surmount whatever restrictive or overwrought critical-theoretical trappings their organizers have erected around them, defying the analytical filters through which they are meant to be considered and...
Related Press Seeing beyond Jiro Takamatsu's shadows The Japan Times : 19 May 2015 Jiro Takamatsu: Trajectory of Work is taxonomic, breaking down everything in the artist's oeuvre into relatively neat successions of projects and including his paintings and sculptures, copious sketches and the marginalia. Even the catalog seemingly calls for a scientific approach, this exhibition being the opportunity to 'conduct objective and...
