No sense of place, only a mirror for reflection With the perception of the surroundings as a framework, the exhibition takes its point of departure in a number of sculptural and pictorial depictions that examine the body's interaction between locality, reality and reflection. The outside world is placed both as a central and peripheral background, which concretely and metaphorically links images to a changing environment. From registrations, observations, and recollections to processed materials and compositions, the works connect an inner space with an exterior, and cast light on the borders that both separate and attach the body to its milieu. This examines a number of conditions that relate, for example, to architecture, movement and nature, and which deal with the transition between a physical and an abstract environment, where subjective perspectives are related to the construction of the surroundings.

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http://www.marlboroughcontemporary.com/exhibitions/appendix-2019

Appendix: an appendage. An adjunct to something larger or more important. Appendage: a limb of an animal or a stem on a plant. The appendage of an insect (an antenna or a leg segment) may be removed and grow back. The tails of many lizards may grow back if removed due to injury or if detached during flight from a predator. The appendix of a book is the information that does not serve the main body of the text. It grows out of the back of a book like vestigial organ. This exhibition is a small addendum to a much larger concurrent solo exhibition by Ansel Krut—a section of additional matter at the physical tail end of the gallery space.

The organ named appendix is itself vestigial. Extruded from the large intestine, this worm-like pouch serves a dubious role in maintaining gut flora, but is only noticed when it becomes inflamed. Once useful to early humans in the digestion of rough foliage, the appendix serves no measurable purpose in modern humans.

A group exhibition is a type of appendix. Each work once belonged to a larger body, but in the group show lives on as a vestige, detached from its original context. Each artwork must be trained to grow new connective tissue with adjacent objects and form a new whole. The objects in APPENDIX were chosen based on their potential to react with one another in this way.

The central artwork in APPENDIX is a 1948 canvas by Grandma Moses, titled The Trashers.It is a scene of New England farmers operating a grain thresher, and—like so many of Moses’ paintings—a story of human bodies working as a whole to reach an end result—a holiday well celebrated, a field well harvested, a destination reached safely.

Surrounding The Thrashers are artworks I like to think of as vestigial organs. Each work places an emphasis on that which is missing, or that which is to be desired. My hope is that each work forms a covalent bond not only with The Thrashers but to one another to create a sort of sapient, covalent whole like the one Grandma Moses envisaged.

— Todd von Ammon

Sie machen was sie wollen

26.04. - 26.05.2019

Boris Georgiev Gemäldegalerie der Stadt Varna

ul. Lyuben Karavelov 1

9002 Varna, Bulgarien

Institut fuer Bienenzucht - The house of endless joy

mit

Hans Bellmer

Beth Collar

Stanislava Kovalcikova

Jiri Kovanda

Rune Mields

Max Ruf

Andreas Schmitten

Markus Selg

Ruslan Daskalov - The house of moonlight

mit

Anders Clausen

Ruslan Daskalov

Sabrina Fritsch

Roshni Grunenberg

Thomas Grünfeld

Melissa Hopson

Vladimir Ivanov

Julian Kirchner

Tsvetan Krastev

Sarah Kürten

Gerhard Merz

Olga Pfeffer

Lukas Schmenger

Kiril Shivarov

Andreas Schulze

Philip Seibel

Vanko Urumov

Mélange - The house of nature

mit

Lilah Fowler

Eva L´Hoest

EXC - The house of her

Domenico and Francesco Pizzigani, The Pizzigani portolan, 1367

Beth Collar - Daddy Issues

Matt’s Gallery and CGP London are delighted to present a collaborative commission of new work for Dilston Grove by Beth Collar. The commission builds on an on-going relationship that in previous years has produced exhibitions by Graham Fagen, Matt Stokes and Richard Grayson. 

Beth Collar, whose exhibition Thinking Here Of How The Words Formulate Inside My Head As I Am Just Thinking took place at Matt’s Gallery in May 2018, will produce a new body of work for the modernist former church. The project began with an interest in a group of ecclesiastical terracotta sculptures by Niccolo dell’Arca in Bologna whose uncanny, not-quiterightness is compacted by their depictions of ‘extreme feminine emotions’ – feelings that are hard to stay in the room with. 

For Collar terracotta is a material bound together with these images of screaming women. While immersing herself in a laborious and extended process of making, Collar was able to think through this entanglement, allowing works to emerge, with one leading to another, feeding back into her research. This exploration expanded to the early church, the Northern European tradition of cadaver tomb effigies, body horror and medical teaching aids, crafting an array of corrupted anatomical and organic objects: parasitic plant life and human tissue connected through dream logic. Skin and cloth become indivisible – rendered anatomically alike, connected or fused. Support structures appear as vernacular architecture. 

In the work the Dark Ages function as a signifier of plastic time, somewhere in the past that we use in our minds to anchor ourselves into the world. Here we find the archetypal pilgrim, the apocryphal figure of Prester John (a priest-king who was said to rule an Eastern Christian kingdom) and the biblical Antichrist – figures whose arrival is held in a constant state of imminence, and yet never fulfilled. 

Historically women’s art has often been read as confessional and seen through the lens of the micro: the autobiographical, the domestic and the emotional. The multi-purpose pop-psychological phrase ‘Daddy Issues’ is wielded to diminish, disparage and negate an ‘emotional’ aspect of a person’s character, and most often through this, to subjugate and manipulate women. This title openly courts the potential for Collar’s work to be read through this lens. Daddy Issues is both a send up and an earnest homage. The question of whose daddy issues are being addressed is kicked between the protagonists; a universal, transhistorical daddy; the absent daddy; the big other or the propensity for man to rely on and bow to outside forces. Even dads have daddy issues. 

The exhibition is supported by the Arts Council England, The Henry Moore Foundation, Paul & Louise Cooke Endowment and Southwark Council.

Download the Press Release.

Lynette Smith writing in Art + Australia and touching on my work The Island Of The Dead

Worlding It Otherwise Or Else at the Bärenzwinger on KubaParis:

https://kubaparis.com/worlding-it-otherwise-or-else-baerenzwinger/

Leopoldine at Sans Titre (2016) on Artviewer

http://artviewer.org/leopoldine-at-sans-titre-2016/

http://www.gr-und.de/2019/02/when-sick-rule-world.html

When the Sick Rule the World

February 16th to 15th of march 2019

opening hours: Thursday to Saturday 4-7 pm

with : Beth Collar, Marek Delong & Anna Slama, Nschotschi Haslinger, Ville Kallio, Painting Clubb feat. Viktor Timofeev, Lauryn Youden

Curated by Christina Gigliotti

As part of the exhibition, a performance by Lauryn Youden will be held on Saturday, March 9th, from 5pm

“When two sick bodies come together their desperate hearts open, it is lovely to watch them...” (1)

The exhibition When the Sick Rule the World is inspired by an essay by the same title written by Dodie Bellamy. Within her writing, Bellamy often calls attention to the unjustifiable and increasingly unsustainable living conditions that late-capitalism has imposed on present-day reality. It is the unrelenting objective of the hegemonic powers in place to ever-expand and maintain dominion over those who can be controlled, and to rid society of that which is considered undesirable, unattractive, and unhealthy. Whatever or whoever falls into this category is systematically hidden away or eradicated either by authoritative forces or incessant self-regulation.

For the human subject, the pursuit of wellness is mandatory. In Bellamy’s When the Sick Rule the World, the topic of physical and mental health comes to the fore. Bellamy imagines a reality in which those existing in the underbelly of society are finally accorded agency, integrity and freedom of expression–no longer condemned because of their inability to conceal their differences and conform to norms that have been beset upon them. In a similar vein to Bellamy’s text, the exhibition When the Sick Rule the World presents artworks that have spawned from visions of alternative realities or narratives in which sickness and health, birth and decay are leveled, accepted, perhaps even exalted. The enigmatic figures depicted in the works of Nschotschi Haslinger can often be seen embracing their eerie surroundings, content and relaxed in actively caring for one another or themselves, despite the jagged scenery. Her ceramic creatures appear inflamed with animation, having only just emerged from their underworld. Similarly spawning, the work of Marek Delong and Anna Slama depicts a kind of fantastical birthing scene of an alien or crustaceous being. The collaborative work between Viktor Timofeev and Painting Clubb deals more closely with the relationship one has with the material or collective body. Painting Clubb consists of many authors – the resulting work depicts characters and gestures emerging from a thinly veiled layered textile surrounding a cryptic message in an alphabet created by Timofeev reading “My relationship with my body has changed”. In Beth Collar’s work, attention is directed to the fragility and instability of the human body in its surroundings– her figure is both supported and impaled by their crutches. In a similar effect, Lauryn Youden’s sculptural cane doubles as potential weapon of self defense, engraved with the phrase “I build my house on the heads of my enemies”, as part of a ritual for courage written by Luisa Teish. Her mixed-media altar is an altar for the ill, comprised of healing or medicinal materials and ingredients. Finally, Ville Kallio’s video work Plumber’s Crusty Paradise introduces us an anthropomorphization of human waste in the form of a living “fatberg” also known as the Patron Serpent of Planetary Computation and Feces, who energetically parallels the human mind to that of a sewer system.

(1) Dodie Bellamy, When the Sick Rule the World, 2015