VernissageTV (May 8, 2023) – The opening reception of the Swiss artist Stephan Hostettler. Stephan Hostettler was born in 1988 in Unterseen, Switzerland.
After training as a metalworker, he attended the preliminary design course in Bern and graduated from the specialist class for graphics in Biel. He presented his works for the first time in 2019 at the Jungkunst exhibition in Winterthur. Hostettler lives and works in Bern.
“At its core, my work is about how we humans live or could live in this world. It offers a humorous but critical perspective on our actions as a society and aims to trigger discussions that contribute to a positive development. I wish for a world in which we treat each other with respect, we live with nature, take care of it and in which no one has to live in fear.”
Stephan Hostettler Solo Exhibition in Bern (Switzerland). Vernissage, May 6, 2023.
François Ghebaly Gallery, New York City (April 27, 2023) – François Ghebaly is proud to present Station by Matt Bollinger. Ithaca-based artist Matt Bollinger works from a complex interdisciplinary base: as painter, draftsman, animator, and elegist, he creates work that straddles the projects of both visual art and narrative fiction.
His stories, by and large, are of America’s rural working class–each is told through a bricolage of memory, family history, direct observation, art-historical research, and literary invention. For his latest exhibition, Bollinger chronicles the semi-fictional inhabitants of a rural central Missourian community, offering in the process ruminative, disillusioned vignettes of the real ‘American Dream.’
Matt Bollinger, Brothers V, 2022.
Spanning the far wall, Uncle Dave (2023) is the most ambitious work in Bollinger’s show–with its impressive vertical dimension, some eight feet-tall, the painting acts as an anchor to the New York gallery space, drawing the eye in and upward. The work depicts three sanitation workers surrounding the bright yellow cab of a dump truck. Framed by wildflowers underfoot and the scintillating glare of another truck’s headlight, the men are shown in progressive life stages.
Matt Bollinger, Cape Hollow II, 2022.
At the far right, the youth holds a rake and stares listlessly out of view. The middle-aged man, partially obscured, gestures forward with a lighter and a yellow traffic flag, while the eldest is positioned above the other men and descends from the cab, directly confronting the viewer’s gaze. The work’s triadic symbol of labor, class, and the passage of time ––alongside compositional affinities, somewhere between Courbet and religious genre painting ––underscores many of the themes latent both in the exhibition title and in the artist’s work at large.
Left to right: Gerald Cassidy, Cui Bono?, about 1911. Collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art: Gift of Gerald Cassidy, 1915 (282.23P). Gerald Cassidy, Midday Sun, North Africa, 1920s.
Denver Art Museum (March 27, 2023): Artworks in Near East to Far West: Fictions of French and American Colonialism(through May 29)present a range of representations from sympathetic to stereotyped. Indeed, racialized stereotypes such as the “Noble Savage” and odalisque (a woman in a female-only domestic space, or harem, who is often overly sexualized in European art) circulated throughout French Orientalism and western American art.
Acknowledging the ongoing harm of such representations, we knew that we needed to make space for diverse perspectives: essentially, to make room for the voices too often repressed or ignored in the artwork.
The exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel presents 113 works, from Shirley Jaffe’s early abstract expressionist works to the geometric paintings that are characteristic of her late oeuvre.
Born in New Jersey in 1923 as Shirley Sternstein, in 1949, the artist, now Mrs Jaffe, moved to Paris. Following her short-lived her marriage to the journalist Irving Jaffe, the painter decided to remain in France. Having soon established herself in the city, she held regular contact with the American “art expats” Norman Bluhm, Sam Francis, and Joan Mitchell, who had relocated to Paris somewhat later.
Her work dating from this period may be attributed to Abstract Expressionism, a form that sought to draw exclusively from its own resources and which consisted primarily of wildly applied fields of colour and gestures. Although, for the art market at the time, this amounted to a success formula Jaffe nevertheless decided to strike out in a different direction.
Musée d’Orsay (March 23, 2023) – Édouard Manet (1832-1883) and Edgar Degas (1834-1917) were both key players in the new painting of the 1860s-80s. This exhibition, which brings together the two painters in the light of their contrasts, forces us to take a new look at their real complicity.
Edgar Degas’s Édouard Manet et sa femme (around 1868-69). Manet was unhappy with the “deformation” of his wife Suzanne’s features and cut her face out of the paintingKitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art
It shows what was heterogeneous and conflicting in pictorial modernity, and reveals the value of Degas’s collection, where Manet took a greater place after his death.
A comparison of artists as crucial as Manet and Degas should not be limited to identifying the similarities in their respective bodies of work.
Admittedly, there is no lack of analogies among these key players in the new painting of the 1860s-80s when it comes to the subjects they imposed (from horse races to café scenes, from prostitution to the tub), the genres they reinvented, the realism they opened to other formal and narrative potentialities, the market and the collectors they managed to tame, and the places (cafés, theaters) and circles, whether comprised of family (Berthe Morisot) or friends, where they crossed paths.
SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANKFURT (March 22, 2023) – From March 23 to May 29, 2023, the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt is presenting a major solo exhibition by the Turner Prize winner Elizabeth Price (b. 1966), including both new and recent works that are being shown for the first time in Germany.
The artist creates moving-image works, composing visuals, text, and sound to form spatial installations that restage cultural and sociopolitical events and focus attention on largely unnoticed stories. Price’s moving-image works are grounded in a conceptual approach.
Elizabeth Price (b. 1966) makes the transformation of digital works visible. The artist creates moving images, composing visuals, text, and sound to form spatial installations that restage cultural and sociopolitical events and focus attention on largely unnoticed stories. The SCHIRN is presenting a major solo exhibition of this winner of the Turner Prize, including both new works and others that are being shown for the first time in Germany.
Each of her video works is the result of meticulous research and a wide-ranging examination of archives and collections of material. Over the course of her digital appropriation, Price develops new narratives from art objects and documents of historical events. A recurring topic is the changing world of work as a result of digitalization, the migration of manual work to emerging countries that pay low wages, and the increase in information work, office activities, and administration. The SCHIRN is showing two extensive installations, each with two corresponding videos, as well as four video lectures created during the coronavirus lockdown which provide insight into the artist’s working process. Price’s videos defamiliarize the past until it is no longer recognizable, replacing it with new, seductive, and anarchic energy.
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