Italian contemporary art gallery Gagosian in collaboration with American artist Sarah Sze presents her first gallery exhibition following the artist’s participation in the Biennale di Venezia in 2015. The exhibition which is being hosted at the Gagosian headquarters in Rome, features a collection of Sze’s works which unites intricate networks of objects and images across several dimensions and mediums, from sculptings to paintings, drawings, printmakings and video installations. Sze’s Timekeeper series, a video installation which began in 2015, transforms the oval gallery of the Gagosian into an immersive environment that is part sculpture and part cinema. The exhibition acts as a form of Plato’s Cave, which confronts the viewer from simultaneous points of view and includes people, animals, scenes and abstractions in motion, flickering and orbiting randomly. In the paintings, her nuanced sculptural language adapts to the conditions of the flat support. In delicate yet bold layers of paint, ink, paper, prints, and objects, the three dimensions of bricolage are parsed into the two dimensions of collage. Here, colour draws its substantive energies as much from the innate content of found images from paint and ink. The artist is set to add her first outdoor stone sculpture to the exhibition in November, which will feature a natural boulder split open like a geode. Each of the two revealed cuts will have a sunset sky embedded in its surface, alluding to both the images perceptible in gongshi and the heavenly subjects of renaissance paintings. The exhibition will end it’s course on January 12, 2019.
It takes 98 seconds for artist Richard Phillips to transform troubled actress Lindsay Lohan into a modern Hollywood venus. In his intensely poetic film portrait, Lohan emerges from a sparkling blue Malibu mansion pool dripping sex, vulnerability and glamour. A modern Bardot in a white bikini, whose image is bigger than ever. The film is a love-letter that transcends the tabloid drama and turns her into an untouchable star.
Richard Phillip’s Lindsay Lohan premieres June 1 in Commercial Break until June 5, as part of the 54th Venice Biennale. gagosian.com
Artist Taryn Simon’s work is a fascinating blend of photojournalism and art photography. Often taking the form of a visual inventory, she’s famed for her meticulous research and crisp photographic execution.
Among her projects, the 2007 book, An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar delved into America’s secret places such as a nuclear waste storage facility in Washington State to a cave where a sleeping black bear and its cubs are monitored by biologists studying hibernation,
Her new show at the Tate Modern is no less obscure, or engrossing. A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters is a complex genealogy of family histories. Four years of research that took just two to photograph, the installation traces a series of 18 family bloodlines, each with its own individual story.
The opening chapter centres on a living Indian man who gives the project its title, having been declared dead in official records. Other real life characters include an Iraqi man who was apparently employed as Saddam Hussein’s son’s body double and a member of the Druze religious sect in Lebanon who believes in reincarnation and re-enacts remembered scenes from previous lives. It’s a magnum opus that’s not to be missed.
A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters is at Tate Modern, London, 25 May to 6 September. tarynsimon.com
Caption: Excerpt from Chapter IV, A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters a. Gold-plated Iraqi Al-Kadissiya sniper rifle seized by members of the American Defense Intelligence Agency during a search of Uday Huessein’s palace in Baghdad. The inscription on the gun transalted from Arabic reads: “A gift from the president of the republic, Mr. Saddam Hussein.” Saddam Hussein produced gold-plated weapons for use on ceremonial occasions and as gifts. Defense Intelligence analysis Center, Bolling Air Force Base, Washington, D.C. b. Latif Yahia impersonating Uday Hussein. Undisclosed location, Ireland.
Caption: Excerpt from Chapter VI, A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters 51. No. 326, 27 May 2009. Inglewood, Queensland, Australia.
52. No. 327, 27 May 2009. Inglewood, Queensland, Australia.
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