This Week: Francesco Clemente, Mystical Trees, and the IFPDA Print Fair

Francesco Clemente: Beauty Without Witness at Lévy Gorvy

New works by Francesco Clemente will go live in the Lévy Gorvy viewing rooms from May 15-29. Clemente painted the exhibition’s 12 watercolours at home in New York during self-isolation. ‘The key image that I had in mind was the image of the shifting line where the water touches the land, the shifting line of separation, the ambiguity of the shore,’ Clemente said. He relates it to ‘the body as the gap between the inner world and the outer world’.

Botanical Mind Online at Camden Art Centre

Camden Art Centre’s Botanical Mind exhibition brings together works spanning 500 years, from references to Yggdrasil, the tree that connects the nine worlds of Norse mythology, to new commissions. One such commission, by Adam Chodzko, is an algorithm that scans images of undergrowth for ciphers from a secret language, the Lingua Ignotae, invented by the 12th Century Christian mystic Hildegard von Bingen, and speaks them, giving a voice to the vegetation. While the physical exhibition has been postponed until later this year, its digital expression is rich in resources, including podcasts, films, texts, images and audio, which will continue to grow over the coming weeks.

not cancelled Catches on in Europe, Chicago and Dubai

An effort to take local art scenes online is rapidly expanding after successful editions in Austria and Germany. not cancelled Vienna brought together 14 galleries for an online event in April that was quickly followed by a second edition in Berlin. The initiative, created by digital design firm Treat Agency, is now spreading to other parts of Europe, the US and the Middle East. Organised by Sariev gallery in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, and LambdaLambdaLambda in Pristina, Kosovo, not cancelled East x South will gather 17 galleries including Galeria Plan B in Cluj, Romania, and Öktem Aykut in Istanbul, Turkey, from May 12-19. The event will move to Chicago May 15-22, the Netherlands May 17-24, and Dubai, May 19-26.

Edward Hopper at Fondation Beyeler

Closed for weeks, art institutions’ fevers have begun to break. Fondation Beyeler in Riehen, Switzerland, reopened 11 May with its Edward Hopper exhibition extended until July 26. Other museums that have recently reopened include: the Kunstmuseum, Bern, whose El Anatsui exhibition has been extended until autumn; Korea’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, which has partly reopened its four museums in Seoul, Gwacheon, Deoksugung, and Cheongju; and the Hong Kong Museum of Art, which partially re-opened last week, extending its show A Sense of Place: from Turner to Hockney, which includes 76 works drawn from the Tate, London.

IFPDA Fine Print Fair Goes Live

The International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA), which represents 150 members in 12 countries, launches its online fair from 13 May to 13 June, with hundreds of works by artists including Jenny Holzer, Gerhard Richter, Chuck Close, Jake & Dinos Chapman, and Hiroshi Yoshida. The spring fair was originally slated to take place at Javits Center, New York. —[O]

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Main image: Francesco Clemente, 4-13-2020 (2020). Watercolor on paper. Courtesy Francesco Clemente Studio. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging.