Tatiana Trouvé

KUNSTHAUS GRAZ
Lendkai 1
February 6–May 16

Tatiana Trouvé, Untitled, 2008, bronze, black patina, 106 x 88 1/2 x 69".

Tatiana Trouvé, an artist who was born in Italy, grew up in Senegal, and studied in France, now lives in Paris and has become an important player on the international contemporary scene. One of her early works, Rock, 2007, a large boulder with locks scattered across its surface, appears as a familiar image (reminiscent of mussels) and yet also seems completely bizarre. Such uncanny, paradoxical combinations also characterize her exhibition in Graz. With simple materials, Trouvé transforms the show into a landscape. One can meander through a “forest” of metal trees whose branches are tied with leather. Nearby are black rods that mimic the supporting columns of the gallery space; Trouvé’s sculptures are at once props and constraints. Sometimes thick, sometimes slender, the vertical lines squeeze the space and impart a gloomy atmosphere. Yet the questions remain: What is the architecture here, and what is the installation? What is fiction, what reality? The latter theme also runs through Dino Buzzati’s science-fiction novel Il grande ritratto (The Big Picture, 1960), which lends its title to the exhibition.

A rope hovering magically in midair has apparently stopped the force of gravity, two elevators can only be reached through miniature doors, and fine metal wires speak of high-voltage tension––even when no electricity flows. Again and again, the artist succeeds in driving the self-evident into the absurd and, along the way, building the intrusive architectural features of the exhibition space into her installation. Thus emerges a magnificent drawing of space that causes the “Friendly Alien”––as the Kunsthaus Graz is also called––to disappear into the work.

Translated from German by Diana Reese.

— Sabine B. Vogel

Dorothee Golz

CHARIM GALERIE
Dorotheergasse 12
March 4–April 10

Dorothee Golz, Holbein vor Cy Twombly (Holbein Before Cy Twombly), 2010, color photograph, 57 x 48".

Dorothee Golz is well known for her humorous drawings of women whose social roles she intensifies to the point of absurdity. Take, for instance, Telekinetische Haushaltsbewältigung (Telekinetic Housekeeping), 2002, which depicts three women juggling pots, brooms, and coffee cups. Similarly, in a new series of works, the artist uses digital manipulation to investigate historical images of women. These pictures begin with famous Renaissance-era portraits, from which Golz isolates the head of the subject and then transposes it into a contemporary, sometimes highly provocative, context. One of Memling’s Madonnas is inserted into a group of punks; Holbein’s Anne of Cleves sits bare-breasted in a designer chair. The surroundings, clothing, and sitters’ poses speak to the image of today’s woman, while the shy, inward glance of the historical ladies reminds us of the previous isolation of women. The historical development of the gaze becomes especially explicit in Der Perlenohrring (The Pearl Earring), 2009. Golz depicts the young girl from Vermeer’s painting of the same name in a kitchen: She holds a teapot in her hand and looks at us with surprise in a scene that falls between domesticity and reserved public affection. If Golz’s portraits of women are characterized by deep contradictions, her men are astounding for the enormous self-confidence their faces offer. Whether the boy from a Holbein who stands in front of a Cy Twombly or the face from a Dürer whose body leans nonchalantly with a girlfriend against a graffiti-covered wall––the gestures, hairstyles, and even hats and headgear fit seamlessly into the new context.

Translated from German by Diana Reese.

— Sabine B. Vogel

Manon de Boer

JAN MOT
rue Antoine Dansaertstraat 190
February 12–April 10

Manon de Boer, Dissonant, 2010, still from a color film in 16 mm, 10 minutes 23 seconds.

Following Manon de Boer’s examination of silence and memory in 2008’s Two Times 4'33"—a performance of John Cage’s 4'33" presented with and without recorded sound—the 16-mm film Dissonant, 2010, the centerpiece of this exhibition, is a similar investigation of music and memory. Depending on when one enters the screening room, one will see either dancer Cynthia Leomij improvising alone in the studio only to the sound of her heavy breathing, a black screen as de Boer changes the film in her camera every three minutes, or Leomij listening to an excerpt of Eugène Ysaÿe’s Sonatas for Solo Violin, with the camera fixed closely on her face to direct attention to the slight twitches of her head, as well as to her expression of intense concentration, seemingly an attempt to imprint the music in her mind.

Though Leomij’s precise and commanding movements are compelling to watch, her percussive breaths are de Boer’s focus. The disjunction between the three viewing experiences forces one to fill in the blanks; when the film’s images cut to black, the artist places both the audience and the performer in the same imaginary space, where viewers are made to continue Leomij’s dance with their memory, just as Leomij must re-create the music with hers. As the film loops without a title or credit sequence, one can never be quite sure where the cycle begins and ends, or when the real music is finished and the recollection of it starts.

— Lumi Tan

Felix Gonzalez-Torres

WIELS
Av. Van Volxemlaan 354,
January 16–April 25

View of “Felix Gonzalez-Torres,” 2010. From left: “Untitled” (Passport), 1991; “Untitled” (Golden), 1995.

A joyful insouciance accompanied the opening of the first large-scale Felix Gonzalez-Torres exhibition in Brussels, with gallery-goers posing for pictures in front of mounds of candy, seemingly, through the haze of a communal sugar high, unable to view the work as anything other than a Pop hoax. There was no apparent meditation on what the piles might mean or, more important, what it means to take from them. Yet reflection often takes place after the fact, so we can be hopeful that this monumental resurrection of Gonzalez-Torres’s oeuvre will spur at least some introspection on finitude and consumerism.

The next day I returned to the gallery to view the works in relative solitude. Curator Elena Filipovic has installed a selection that spans all aspects of the artist’s career—not just crowd-pleasers. Among other surprises is “Untitled” (A Portrait), 1991/1995, in which isolated, apparently detached phrases flash across the screen, forming an antinarrative that seems to mimic the fluctuations of consciousness: a white-blood-cell count, a silver ocean, a distant war, a hateful politician, a simple death. Even more striking is a series of black-and-white photographs printed on jigsaw puzzles: the shadows of two men, presumably the artist and his lover, across a wall in Paris; a piece of an indecipherable handwritten love letter. Gonzalez-Torres was an artist for whom fragmentation was not merely a technique for showcasing modernist ideas of consciousness but also a lived reality—a way of saying, “Nothing lasts forever, here’s what we can preserve for now.” (For now is key in reference to so many of Gonzalez-Torres’s works, in ways that the artist could have never imagined. In the coming years, incandescent lightbulbs will be phased out of circulation, which may not render the artist’s light installations extinct but will at least permanently alter them.)

On March 5, artist Danh Vo will stage a sort of curatorial intervention, reinstalling the entire exhibition to effectively create a new one. The same thing will happen when the show travels to Basel’s Fondation Beyeler in May, with Carol Bove intervening midway through, and next year at the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt am Main, with Tino Sehgal.

— Travis Jeppesen

Eva Kotátková

HUNT KASTNER ARTWORKS
Kamenicka 22
January 13–March 7

View of “Eva Kotátková,” 2010.

In Eva Kotátková’s exhibition “Controlled Memory Loss,” the Prague-based artist uses maquettes, photographs, drawings, videos, and staged performances to plan and document domestic experiments in which individuals attempt their own reeducation through dysfunctional do-it-yourself craft projects and Situationist dérive. Black-latticed vertical panels and stacked parallelepiped modules transform the gallery into a familiar psychogeography, recalling the prefab high rises, or paneláky, in the Czech Republic, which huddle in the suburbs around the rocky hillside of Hradčany, Prague’s district of noble and historic buildings.

In Kotátková’s wooden models and pen sketches, human figures are rendered as paper dolls and button-eyed scarecrows, effigies that viewers are encouraged to imagine maneuvering around the installation like a Choose Your Own Adventure epic or a large three-dimensional board game. Yet in this deconstruction of the domus and its social function, the show seems to slip into a parody of liberalism and its participatory strategies. Index cards that invite viewers to respond to the situations illustrated in the cluster of sculptures become a kind of farcical apology that caricatures calls for transparency and accountability, imitating the pseudodemocratic methods of contemporary advertising. Despite evoking the strategies and tactics of Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1980) and Constant Nieuwenhuys’s New Babylon (1959–1974), any commitment to probing behavioral conditioning here falls short, simply reducing itself to a comic spoof of the inevitable reversion to deep-seated axioms.

— Emily Verla Bovino

Jenny Marketou

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART
Vas. Georgiou Β’ 17-19 and Rigillis street
January 28–March 8

Jenny Marketou, Red Eyed Sky Walkers, 2007–, mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation view.

After touring public spaces and venues in Basel, Cleveland, and Seville, Jenny Marketou’s site-specific multimedia installation Red Eyed Sky Walkers, 2007–, has found temporary residence in her birthplace. Part of Athens’s National Museum of Contemporary Art 2010 commissions program and curated by Daphne Vitali, this fourth adaptation follows the exact same formula as the previous versions, giving the work its two-part structure: Outside the building, ninety-nine red weather balloons equipped with wireless spy cameras parade across the peristyle, capturing images, while indoors a rather noisy large projection on a split screen fuses low-res videos of riots with those of the real-time surveillance images of the exterior.

Cleverly inventive in its transposition of the urban landscape to the ferocious mediascape, Marketou’s work incorporates an element of vintage violence. Although the liveliness of the Walkers lies in the fine tuning between playfulness, cruelty, and social commentary, as well as in evocative references to Nena’s famous 1984 pop song, Monty Python’s The Flying Circus (1969–74), and Mike Figgis’s Timecode (2000), it is the audience’s enthusiastic reaction that makes the difference. Judging from the signs that adorn the peristyle’s walls (“We kindly ask you not to take away and mistreat the balloons. It is a work of art”), it is highly unlikely that the balloons will survive until the show closes. Ironically, this unorthodox form of engagement contributes to the artist’s objectives, challenging any preconceived expectations and shifting the attention to the behavioral variety a public artwork must always take into consideration.

— Christopher Marinos

Bjarne Melgaard

ASTRUP FEARNLEY MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
Dronningensgt. 4 pb 1158 Sentrum
January 21–April 25

Bjarne Melgaard, Untitled, 2000, oil and collage on canvas, 6' 6" x 20'.

Rarely does an artist have two separate but identically named museum exhibitions on view in the same country at the same time. This winter, Bjarne Melgaard’s opening of “Jealous” at Oslo’s Astrup Fearnley was swiftly followed by a seemingly improvised show with the same title at the Bergen Kunstmuseum. The Oslo exhibition is Melgaard’s first retrospective, an extensive presentation spinning backward in time around a centrally placed axis of new large-scale paintings.

Melgaard, a Brooklyn-based Norwegian artist who has become notorious for explicit, homoerotic, and violent imagery, as well as his fascination with extremes including Norwegian black metal, steroids, and man-boy love, has always worked with autobiographical references. Yet with the inclusion of photographic self-portraits, his works from the past fifteen months explore his identity in even more explicit ways: Large photorealistic paintings that faithfully reproduce personal—and quite average—snapshots taken by Melgaard have been treated with the artist’s characteristically sketchy, loose drawings and dark, diaristic jottings.

The installation Greenland. A novel, 2008/2010, is a condensed museum of the history of his personal and artistic paths, combining details from his older work, like sculptures of black-metal scenesters, with more of the intimate imagery. Though the piece has previously been on view at Greene Naftali Gallery in New York, its newest incarnation comes across as radically different, taking on site-specificity through its successful juxtaposition and play with a nearby sculpture: a permanently placed Anselm Kiefer that could otherwise easily have proved obtrusive.

— Johanne Nordby Wernø

“The Calm Before the Storm”

WINZAVOD CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ART
4-th Syromyatnicheskiy lane, 1, bld. 6
February 18–March 28

Sigalit Landau, DeadSee, 2005, still from a color video, 11 minutes 37 seconds.

How can one characterize “the calm before the storm” in a place where the storm is always raging? This is the question driving curator Vardit Gross’s selection of Israeli video art in this exhibition, which seeks to submerge viewers in a state of perpetual suspense. A constant, controlled raveling and unraveling underlies Sigalit Landau’s luscious DeadSee, 2005. The work centers on an image of the artist floating in the Dead Sea, tucked tightly within a coil of watermelons (some partially engorged, to a gloriously sensual effect). As the spiral unwinds, Landau is dragged along with it, clinging to a strand of melons, her body buoyed by the saline-saturated waters.

The fifteen other works on view convey processes of accumulation and saturation, which dissipate or dissolve, rather than resolve. Ultimately a celebration of life on the brink, the exhibition, which is sponsored by the Russian contemporary art foundation marka:ff, is beautifully installed within the long, dark passageways of the former wine cellar. Light from the projections reflects off the tiled walls and curved ceilings, countering the cryptlike atmosphere, while further enhancing the theatrics of works like Ori Gersht’s Pomegranate, 2006, a classical still life disrupted by the slow-motion explosion of a bullet in a pomegranate; Uri Nir’s 00 02 09, 2009, in which the artist injects a jellyfish with his own blood; and Yael Bartana’s Trembling Time, 2001, with its sudden, crippling silence.

— Kate Sutton