Ocula Conversation Almine Rech-Picasso Goes Global French gallerist Almine Rech-Picasso opened her first space in Asia on Shanghai's historic Bund in July this year, bringing her eponymous gallery's total locations to five. The Shanghai gallery occupies roughly 4,000 square feet on the second floor of the three-storey Amber Building, a beautiful warehouse space, originally occupied by the Central...
Ocula Report From the Gallery to the Streets: Home Works 8 in Beirut 8 Nov 2019 : Nat Muller for Ocula There's an inside joke amongst the team of Ashkal Alwan, The Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts: that every time an edition of its biennial forum on cultural practices is planned, a national crisis happens. The eighth edition of Home Works was no different: it opened on 17 October amidst the most devastating wildfires that Lebanon had witnessed...
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...
The recent works I’ve made, or the shift that has occurred, say from working on canvas to perspex and other materials, has allowed a new dimension in the works, both spatially and conceptually. I feel as though the new paintings are much more intimate as opposed to purely reflecting what the viewer sees or projects. Of course the artist is complicit in the work, the audience does not merely create the work, nor activate it but in a sense the work is completed when it is being experienced - the paintings are extremely difficult to document, so, like performative works, they must be experienced in person.
I’ve worked with perspex and acrylic sheets since the early 1980s—by melting, adding pigments, painting directly on the surface and using various chemicals to manipulate the materials. The paintings have developed the sense of the viewer in the work, to the point where they are a crucial element to each work. These works don’t exist unless someone’s looking at them. All you have to do is try and take a photograph of one without trying to appear in it and it’s impossible. What the viewer sees on first glance is not a flat image, but a surface first manipulated by time and space (intentional distortion) prior to concentrated chemical conceptual manipulation that then traps , if you like, the viewer not only in the gaze, but in the work itself ... If my work is a kind of “mindscape”, or Hubble image, it is not because they are depictions, that is, because they are paintings of an image of ideas, the places we live, or deep space, but because they harness the same entropy—the same chemical reactions—across the surfaces that play out across the universes.
To convey a element of luxury at an art fair could be seen as theatre! Another earlier work from the Neon Parc exhibition also used furs. Some paintings have employed shattered glass sprayed or in piles across the paintings surface instilling in the viewer a sense of diamonds or stars glistening in a void. But luxury itself, as an aim or concept is not anything I have intentionally worked to achieve. It is only of interest to me in the sense of perhaps the view from the painting ... laying in the gutter looking up at the stars …
Artist Profile Dale Frank Controversial and uncompromising in his penchant for offbeat and confrontational gestures, Australian contemporary artist Dale Frank has divided critics and public alike over the past three decades. His practice is wide-ranging—from documentary films to eccentric performances—but today Frank is best known for his large-scale biomorphic abstract paintings and reflective resin paintings that challenge traditional notions of the medium.
Beginning to attract attention while still in his teens in the late 1970s, Frank spent ten years in Europe and the United States, returning to Australia in 1988. The beginning of his career was dominated by performance-based work; a notable early example took place in the late 1970s in Italy, where gallery-goers were presented with the then-teenage artist's legs and leather shoes dangling through a hatch in the ceiling.
Later in his career, Frank began exploring sculpture and installation and, eventually, painting. His current painting method involves pouring and brushing on several layers of thick varnish and colour pigments or clear resin, which sometimes embed colour glitter and studio detritus. These distinctive paintings do not depict anything identifiable, but rather are an exploration of different materials, movements and colours. Occasionally, he also includes readymade and industrial elements, such as construction foam, automotive paint, brightly coloured artificial hair (Dale dug another hole [2017]) or silver foil air-ducts (She was a collector of the best Art even though she relied on Emirates points to maintain her lifestyle [2018]). Given their unusual materials, Frank's paintings are not static objects; the materials can settle, react and produce structural changes even once they have left his studio. In recent years, the artist has replaced his usual canvas surface with Perspex, its reflective nature adding another layer to the work.
Provocative titles are often important to Frank's paintings, for example: Roslyn is the difference between Qantas gold and platinum or He always bought funeral insurance for all his boyfriends (both 2018). Sometimes the titles themselves are lengthy, self-contained narratives, with no apparent connection to the works to which they are attached. These lengthy interludes disrupt attempts to read specific meanings into the paintings themselves.
Interactive performance and installation remains an important part of Frank's career. In 1995, in lieu of showing paintings, the artist staged a disco—including fog machines and a mirror ball—at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney, and titled the exhibition Dale, I'm only dancing. For his 2018 installation Ghost Story at the same gallery, Frank covered the walls and ceilings in reflective Mylar fabric lit with LED lights and presented petri dishes containing his personal bacteria, which grew into a dangerous state in agar.
Dale Frank was the subject of a major retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, in 2002. He was selected for the Biennale of Sydney in 1990 and 2010, and in 1984 he was included in the Aperto section of the Venice Biennale. His works are held in major private and public collections worldwide, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Kunsthaus, Zürich; and the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York. In 2005, Frank was awarded the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize from Bendigo Art Gallery.
Art Fair Art Los Angeles Contemporary 2016 Art Los Angeles Contemporary, the International Contemporary Art Fair of the West Coast, returns for its seventh edition on January 28 to 31, 2016, at The Barker Hangar, Santa Monica, California. ALAC anchors Los Angeles's pivotal weekend in the contemporary art calendar.
The fair brings together over 70 established and emerging galleries, and a roster of independent publishers, hailing from over ten countries. The list of exhibitors includes a cross-section of Los Angeles galleries, reflecting the fair's long-term presence in its home city.
Gallery Pearl Lam Galleries Founded by Pearl Lam, Pearl Lam Galleries is a driving force within Asia’s contemporary art scene. With over 20 years of experience exhibiting Asian and Western art and design, it is one of the leading and most established contemporary art galleries to be launched out of China.
The three gallery spaces of Pearl Lam Galleries in Hong Kong and Shanghai represent an increasingly influential roster of contemporary artists. Chinese artists Su Xiaobai and Zhu Jinshi, who synthesize Chinese sensibilities with an international visual language, are presented internationally with work now included in major private and public collections worldwide. The Galleries has also introduced leading international artists, such as Leonardo Drew, Jenny Holzer, Carlos Rolón/Dzine, and Yinka Shonibare MBE, to markets in the region, providing opportunities for new audiences in Asia to encounter their work. Pearl Lam Galleries encourages international artists to create new work which engages specifically with the region, collaborating to produce thought-provoking, culturally relevant work.
Gallery Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery
Since 1982, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery has been committed to the advancement of the most serious and innovative forms of contemporary art. Through its exhibition program the gallery has supported work that is challenging and at the forefront of contemporary art practice. The gallery has always featured new work in a range of media, from painting and sculpture to photography, performance, installation, video and other electronic media arts.
The gallery has always followed a policy of nurturing artists through their careers, acting as a primary dealer for their work. Opening with a group of largely unknown artists, the gallery has consistently seen its stable develop into some of Australia’s most renowned practitioners. The gallery currently represents over thirty highly esteemed artists, who have had significant shows and whose works are held in major collections nationally and internationally.
Ocula Insight Liliana Porter’s Theatre of the Absurd 1 November 2019 Liliana Porter delights in dissonance, which she stages in assemblages that place a host of recognisable characters in unlikely companionship, from rubber ducks and plastic soldiers to porcelain figures of Chairman Mao and Elvis Presley. In some scenes, minuscule figures perform colossal tasks: painting a human-sized chair, for instance, or an...
Ocula Insight Christina Ramberg and the Making of Husbands 25 October 2019 The Making of Husbands: Christina Ramberg in Dialogue is an apt title for this exhibition at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin (14 September 2019–5 January 2020), which revolves around the work of Chicago Imagist Christina Ramberg. Borrowed from a BBC documentary, the title implies that gender roles are constructs, which occupied...
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...
Ocula Insight At first glance, Gao Weigang's International Standard (2018) looks like a regular wooden frame—rectilinear, with a cross bisecting each of its four sides, almost resembling the generic windows from children's drawings—except that it has been coated in 24-karat gold leaf. International Standard belongs to 'The International Standard', a...
