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Summer is the season for emerging art. From group shows packed with up-and-coming names you’ve probably never heard of (but will know very soon) to trial balloon solos by artists freshly added to bigger galleries’ rosters, it’s high time for the art world to take in a fresh crop of talent.
Przemek Pyszczek’s studio may only be a 20-minute ride on the train from Berlin’s Alexanderplatz, midway along a line most frequented by the Easy Jet-set on their way back and forth from Schönefeld Airport for sleepless weekends of bad drugs and great music. But the kilometer-long stretch of warehouses in Schöneweide which used to house East Berlin’s most important power station and now, in part, Pyszczek’s sundrenched atelier is a Berlin those hoards—and, for that matter, most of those who populate the city’s increasingly booming city center—rarely see.
This is Ossi country, untouched by the city’s newfound, relative economic prosperity of tech firms and startups of all colors, and thus relatively unchanged since the wall came down, save the stoppage of the whirring turbines that employed the micro-region’s residents. It’s a fitting setting for the 30-year-old, Polish-born, Canadian-raised, Berlin transplant to create works that trace his home country’s transition since the fall of the iron curtain and an ongoing journey to rediscover his own past.
2015 Artadia prize winner McArthur has held her own in a slew of group exhibitions this year—perhaps the best of which being her summer show at Vienna’s Galerie Emanuel Layr, alongside Gaylen Gerber and Jim Nutt, where her polyurethane foam block is the evolving centerpiece of the exhibition. Over time, the block’s color will fade and the form will weaken as elasticity is lost—a contingency that is, in fact, one of the best parts of the work. Come November, look for McArthur’s work in “Unorthodox” at the Jewish Museum in New York.
Syms describes herself as a “conceptual entrepreneur,” which turns out to be a catch-all for a culturally engaged practice that cuts across mediums (video, installation, language), platforms (lectures, museums, publishing, the internet), and into deeply entrenched issues of identity, social injustice, and digital culture. For the New Museum Triennial earlier this year, Syms presented S1:E1 (2015), an installation that surfaced narratives of race in America by mining pop culture. This September, Bridget Donahue will host Syms’s first New York solo show, “Vertical Elevated Oblique.”
X-rays meet acupuncture in this L.A.-based artist’s new solo exhibition at High Art in Paris. In past work, Jacoby has borrowed from early images by German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen—inventor of the X-ray—and at the beginning of the summer, his sculptural, wall-mounted door handles, hung with X-ray film, were arguably one of the strongest presentations at LISTE.
Pitta maps the transformative, alchemical properties of nature’s elements in installations and outdoor interventions where fire, water, and air take center stage. After exhibiting in São Paulo, Copenhagen, and Milan over the past several years, Pitta made his U.S. solo debut at Marianne Boesky this past spring. This summer, he shows new stills from an entrancing short film (which premiered at the Seattle Art Museum in June) that flips footage of a uneven seascape upside down, so that sky supports water in a dizzying inversion of environmental hierarchy.
Since her debut solo show at Magician Space in Beijing in 2013, Guan Xiao has risen to an international stage through a lexicon of camouflage patterns, light boxes, handcrafted sculptures, and readymades, meshing past and future in installations and videos to make sense of her surroundings. For The Documentary: Geocentric Puncture (2012), which featured in the New Museum Triennial, tripods, sculptures, and kaleidoscopic backdrops were cast together to stage what appears to be a tripartite set. The work is emblematic of Guan’s overarching practice which assembles disparate objects and cultural signifiers, hinting at their significance but leaving it up to her audience to fill in the blanks.
Videos depicting Reynaud-Dewar dancing in the nude, painted red, through Fondazione Querini Stampalia—currently streaming at the Venice Biennale—are a reminder of the French ballet dancer-cum-artist’s best-known works, which have seen her whirl through the New Museum and Karma International, among other locales. A looping video of Reynaud-Dewar donning black body paint and enacting the choreography of cabaret icon Josephine Baker is but one reason to stop into her solo show at C L E A R I N G this summer.
No doubt, the window-breaking machine at Berlin’s PSM gallery (On the Impossibility of Criticism, 2010) will grab your attention as bricks barrel through panels of glass. But Furman, the young Brazilian artist behind the piece, will hold it for much longer. For this group exhibition, Furman’s work brings anger and civil disobedience into the gallery cube, channeling it into to a game that is at once playful and impactful, bestowing a lingering and visceral sense of the environment around violent political activism.
Is art the creation of a single person or really the result of collaboration, conversation, and work from multiple individuals? This is one of the central questions at the crux of the work of young British artist Kate Cooper.
Cooper first made her name as part of Auto Italia South East, an artist-run space founded in south London that has, over time, evolved into an artist collective. During the eight years of its existence, Auto Italia’s exhibitions, events, and performative works projects have often been politically charged. Their conversational and performative works have examined issues around labor, creation, and experience in and outside of art production. Cooper’s own pieces outside of Auto Italia also address some of those same themes: capitalism and commercialism, in particular.
After making waves at Slade Art School, where she won the Barto Dos Santos Memorial Award in 2014, Keeley currently enjoys her first solo exhibition, courtesy of London’s Supplement gallery. In three-dimensional wall works that layer painting, screen printing, and laser cut wood, Keeley reimagines architectural scenes that exude the stylistic serenity of a deserted museum gallery or a modernist Frank Lloyd Wright abode.
Farhi’s diverse painting practice has grabbed collectors attention this year from shows at Bill Brady—where cobalt, sky-inspired canvases hung on the walls while a riot of plastic buckets formed an installation at the center—and Neochrome, where the artist showed off his flair for the figurative, offering up photorealist paintings of windbreakers and basketball sneakers, finished with a soft lens. In spring, Farhi had a solo with United Artists, Ltd. in Marfa—featuring his well known “Wine Paintings,” abstract oil paintings that look like the haphazard product of a wine spill—and come late July, a painting that appears to be a well-used drumhead will be shown at London’s Jonathan Viner. In 2016, a show with DUVE Berlin and a duo with Grear Patterson at Rod Bianco in Oslo are on the horizon—and for Farhi, one of the brightest young artists working in his field, we expect even more to come between then and now.
A fierce case of artist’s block kept Lee from pursuing an active practice upon graduating from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Instead, she spent a decade working in fashion. A return to ceramics set her career back on track, beginning with a group show at Martos Gallery in 2014—thanks to some encouragement from friend and curator of the show, Eddie Martinez. This summer, her exuberant ceramics—wheel-thrown and manipulated vessels and hand-built masks, covered with texture, gesture, and a spirited approach to glazing—feature in a slew of group shows from Jonathan Viner in London to Anonymous Gallery in Mexico City.
Pariset first gained steam by manipulating digital fashion and beauty advertisements, dunking them in fishtanks, cutting them into strips to make lawn chairs. The Berlin-based French artist continues to create her own means of communication, most recently exploring the hospitality industry. For Pasta Hostis II (2014), featured at the Palais de Tokyo last year in “Inside China: L’Intérieur du Géant,” which will be reprised in Shanghai later this year, she strung over a dozen wire racks tangled with a variety of cooked pasta to the ceiling, with lights interspersed, casting hypnotic shadows on the surrounding walls.
From a second-floor studio in Brooklyn that overlooks the warehouses and scrap yards that skirt the Gowanus Canal, 26-year-old Dennison assembles sculptures that resemble urban core samples or creatures spawned from detritus. She scours the city’s streets and stockrooms for materials ranging from office chairs and synthetic foliage to deli coffee cups. The forms that result—like concrete columns sprouting rebar and mobilized by plastic wheels—are anthropomorphic, post-apocalyptic expressions of her metropolitan surroundings.
Scherer is perhaps best known for his 3D-printed sculptures that average online images of British actress and feminist activist Emma Watson to imagine nudes that range from depicting her as a piece of stately bronze statuary or a disrobed harajuku girl (at Berlin’s Galerie Guido W. Baudach last year) to a pale-pink, smoking mermaid perched on a fountain (at Art Basel Parcours this summer). For his summer show in Dublin, the Swiss Art Award-winner returns to an earlier series, which sees hair products used to manipulate a patch of fake sod into more painterly constructions concealed behind perspex. As with the Watsons, the works poignantly pull artificial—and more often than not online—approximations of IRL interactions into physical space and let the viewer decide whether or not to be seduced.
Gardner’s paintings—mostly of women with angular coiffes lounging or socializing in patterned environments—fuse topsy-turvy perspective, geometric abstraction, and smooth edges reminiscent of digital 3D modeling. In both portraits and still lifes, Gardner repeats and remixes motifs tied equally to everyday life and to the history of painting. His alluring, pictorially complex arrangements of smoldering cigarettes, houseplants, bare breasts, and painting palettes are being noticed in the U.S. and abroad alike (including a booth that sold out within hours at LISTE) and feature in shows in New York and London this summer.
There is a certain silence in the work of Clara Ianni—not a still, removed kind of silence, but a rather tense one, like a pregnant pause before a storm erupts. Her work embodies a latent state of violence that creeps to the surface every now and with polished manners rather than aggression. We meet in a warehouse in the south side of São Paulo as night falls. She shares this space with a group of fellow artists whose works, or fragments of them, are strewn about the floor. Hers is a desk in the corner, on which sits a MacBook Air and nothing else. The sparse surroundings look like an old factory gutted and devoid of everything but a hard concrete floor and whitewashed walls. They match her work—bold and brash in content, understated in form.
Still Life or Study for Vanishing Point was the first of her pieces to really strike me. Nine sheets of steel hang on the wall grouped in three parallel rows, three plaques in each of them, forming a grid. One could mistake it for some kind of posthumous Donald Judd, except it’s pierced by bullets. When she first did this piece four years ago at the Museu da Pampulha, in Belo Horizonte, local police officers were called in to shoot at these skins of metal. Ianni just installed the same piece at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, asking German police contribute to what she calls “an archeology of ammunition.”
Lucky for those who learned of von Bismarck through his much-talked-about installation at Art Basel Unlimited—where he lived in the center of a spinning concrete disk, complete with a desk and bed—this spirited, limit-testing style permeates through his practice. For his summer solo show at Marlborough Chelsea, von Bismarck turned the traditional act of landscape painting on its head. Travelling to a far-flung Mexican desert, he slathered cacti, stones, and sand with a fresh coat of paint. He documented the cheeky process, rooted in a play on words, in videos and photographs that are now on view at Kunstverein Gottingen.
Kline had an explosive 2015, garnering an appearance in the inaugural exhibition of the new Whitney, an installation in the New Museum Triennial, and a smattering of gallery cameos in Berlin, Paris, Glasgow, and New York. This momentum shows no signs of ebbing. The politically minded artist, who uses internet and pop culture as fodder (his Teletubbies turned riot police will make an impact on kids and adults alike), contributes a digitally manipulated video of Whitney Houston to Pilar Corrias’s current exhibition and will present solo show at Modern Art Oxford later this summer.
It’s no news that Moscow-born artist Kantarovksy is an excellent painter. But with Happy Soul (2014), his first-ever animation, which screened this summer at Art Basel Unlimited, Kantarovksy entered a world fusing film and figurative painting (think playful narratives, set to a cappella Motown, projected onto a painting of a nude man) where he’s set the bar very, very high. What’s more, Kantarovksy donned the artist-as-curator hat for “NO JOKE,” a summer group show with Tanya Leighton (where he’ll have a solo show in February 2016) and come August, his work will be shown in the Ljubljana Biennial.
By mining digital image technologies and their various, seemingly magical trappings, New York-based Citarella keeps photography at the crux of his multimedia practice. He has sutured C-prints of clouds, color gradients, marble plinths, and nude bodies together in wall-scale installations and three-dimensional metal grids—pastiches that visualize the networked quality of image culture and hinge on the transfigurative power of editing tools and digital dissemination.
The New York art world is buzzing over Bruder, whose tondo paintings have skipped from Brooklyn to Queens to Chinatown, and are now the subject of one of the Lower East Side’s best summer exhibitions, at 247365. Bruder’s circular paintings, a shape meant to echo the magnifying glass he used to examine each work’s subject—including a grinning peach and a bucolic, half-upside-down village—are both charming and surreal, and have already turned many a head.
With Chanel makeup smeared across the fabric of woolen suits and nude women painted head-to-toe, wandering through Peres Projects’s Berlin space, Bolivian-American artist Huanca brilliantly jabs at ideals of female power and beauty, and cultural norms—particularly those of the corporate exec. Meanwhile in Paris, you can find Huanca’s work in a group show at Galerie Valentin through the end of the July. (If you can’t make either show, the #DonnaHuanca hashtag is worth a spin to catch snaps of the performances.)
Pop culture and design love to appropriate grossly stereotypical elements of perceived Native American cultures learned from normalized racially insensitive media portrayals such as the “Piccaninny Tribe” in Disney’s Peter Pan.
Deep beneath the City headquarters of Bloomberg lies the Mithraeum, a painstaking restoration of an ancient Roman site of worship
William Blake’s years living in West Sussex and his dream of Britain as a druidic battleground of good and evil.
A stunning palace of art hidden within what first appears as simply a rather nice Kensington townhouse
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