Journal:
In pictures: melancholy fountain, curtain call and a broom with a view at Art Basel’s Unlimited
Bunny Rogers, Self-portrait as Clone of Jeanne d’Arc (2019), Société: “It’s great to have a new work that was created for Unlimited. This piece has the classic format of the portrait gallery and you also recognise iconographic references to popular culture, like the Silence of the Lambs poster. Read more on The Art Newspaper.LINEBREAK
Conceptual art goes molecular with works you can smell but can’t see, and one that ‘sees’ you
Sean Raspet is a 38-year-old conceptual artist in Detroit who used to work with hair gel. These days, his material of choice is even more unconventional. He has literally stripped his practice down to the molecular level, as he considers the role of art in an age dominated by global capitalism, environmental concerns and quantum leaps in technology.LINEBREAKHis first Hong Kong solo exhibition is called “New Molecules and Stem Cell Retinoid Screen”, a literal description of the two works he has brought to Empty Gallery’s minimally lit space. Read more on South China Morning Post.LINEBREAK
Les ordinatrices – Lu Yang
Read in French in La Gaîté Lyrique Magazine.LINEBREAK
Scented Trip: Sean Raspet
Raspet is an artist; flavor and fragrance chemist; and cofounder of the algae-based food company nonfood. He did not primarily train as a scientist, but developed a visceral interest in chemicals, and in the chemistry and materiality underlying the built environment and the economy at large, as a result of looking into the material conditions of our present times. Read more on Mousse Magazine. LINEBREAK
Kaspar Müller at Vleeshal, Middelburg, the Netherlands
“Kaspar Müller: Allegiance & Oblivion” is on view at Vleeshal in Middelburg, the Netherlands, through Sunday, June 30. The survey, curated by Roos Gortzak, brings together work made over the past decade and is the Swiss artist’s first institutional show in the Netherlands. See more on ARTNEWS.LINEBREAK
Lu Yang was named winner of the BMW Art Journey Award
Through the BMW Art Journey Award, Lu will travel through Indonesia, India, and Japan to study traditional and contemporary dance, with the ultimate goal of reinterpreting the movement she witnesses through robotics. She said in a statement, “This is not just an art journey. It will be a wonderful start for me to open a new chapter of my creation.” Read more on ARTNEWS.LINEBREAKGianni Jetzer, the man behind Art Basel’s supersized Unlimited exhibition
Contemporary works still dominate, though, and Jetzer highlights the youngest artist in his show, Bunny Rogers (born 1990), who brings a new series of 15 computer-generated self-portraits that explore the ambivalent reactions to the 1999 Columbine High School massacre incorporating the artist’s discovery of a teenage subculture that obsesses about the shooters (Société gallery). Read more on Financial Times.LINEBREAK
The Most Important Young Galleries in the World
At first, it seemed like purely a provocative stunt: At Frieze New York in 2016, the gallery Société had a solo booth by the artist Sean Raspet consisting of fridges filled with Soylent, which the dealers were giving out for free. But as is often the case with Société, there was more than met the eye. Raspet was hired by Soylent to create a new flavor that would be “abstract” in the way that his edible and smellable work usually is—making the meal replacement drink both the medium and message for the artist. Gallery founder Daniel Wichelhaus has built one of Berlin’s most exciting art spaces by pushing his artists to expand their platforms. Read more on Artsy.LINEBREAK
Art Basel Highlights
Société’s Unlimited presentation is dedicated to an installation by Cultured 2017 Young Artist Bunny Rogers, “Self-portrait as Clone of Jeanne d’Arc.” For years, the artist has made work about the 1999 Columbine shooting. Here, she continues that series with 15 self-portraits that combine her own presence with that of Joan of Arc. Read more on Cultured.LINEBREAK
These Are the 7 New Galleries to Keep an Eye On at Art Basel
Berlin-based Société Gallery has chosen to focus its presentation on works that explore the impact of digital life on society. Bunny Rogers’s Neopets, sculptures of digital animal companions, asks us to consider the divide between real life and cyber life. Read more on AD.LINEBREAK
Vienna Biennale: “Hysterical Mining” in der Kunsthalle
Mit der US-Künstlerin Trisha Baga wird ein gefragter Millennial präsentiert. Die New Yorkerin steuert zur Schau Keramiken in Form eines Toasters oder eines Mikroskops, Ölfarben auf Wackelbildern und ein 3D-Video bei. Read more in German on der Standard.LINEBREAK
Seeing China Through Art, Not Politics
There was “Electromagnetic Brainology” by Lu Yang, a dizzying installation of godlike animated figures and “Expected Departure,” by Leung Mee Ping, featuring X-rays of dozens of airline sick bags the artist had collected over years of travel. (…) Read more on The New York Times.LINEBREAK
Petra Cortright – Pink_Para_1stchoice – Times Square
Pink_Para_1stchoice is a little-shown companion work to Cortright’s DRK PARA. The video is constructed using multiple chains of standard-issue webcam filters, all running as the artist watches herself in the computer screen while singing along to a song we cannot hear. Come view the work nightly in May from 11:57pm-midnight at Times Square.LINEBREAKArtvisor’s Frieze New York 2019 Highlights
Lu Yang‘s disorientating and fantastical visions at Société‘s booth also drew crowds who seemed more intent on new discoveries than the standard blue chip material that this year’s fair calendar has supplied the already crowded art world circuit since the start of the year. Read more on Artvisor.LINEBREAK
10 exhibitions not to miss at this year’s Gallery Weekend Berlin
Société presents a series of works that question the semiotics and cultural symbolism of contemporary objects in the exhibition Why Always Me? by Swiss artist Kaspar Müller. Müller investigates the tropes and myths that define modern culture with a display of motifs that range from kitsch to highly stylised. Read more on Sleek.LINEBREAK
Innocence Impossible: Bunny Rogers
Bunny Rogers’s practice depicts the impossibility of pure innocence. It concerns topics ranging from school shootings to the agency of nonhuman animals, the sexualization of children, and the romanticization of dying young. This essay traces the persistence of these themes through her expansive body of work, focusing on her deployment of cute objects as both material and metaphor. Read the full essay by Emily Watlington on Mousse Magazine.LINEBREAK
As Above So Below, a Fragrance by artist Bunny Rogers and Régime des Fleurs
As with the sculptural elements of Roger’ exhibition, the smell of the Régime collaboration evokes moist unearthing; used to mark a space, it is the cool, muted dredges of a satin slipper run amuck on a zombie’s muddied twinkle toes. Read full interview on Fragrantica’s website.LINEBREAK
Der Wille, verwundbar zu bleiben. Die 7. Art Basel Hongkong verknüpft den asiatischen mit dem westlichen Kunstmarkt.
Im Sektor für Entdeckungen jüngerer Positionen präsentiert Wichelhaus die 1984 in Schanghai geborene Multimediakünstlerin Lu Yang mit der halluzinogen-parodistischen Inszenierung „Cyber Altar“ aus einer Fünf-Kanal-Videoarbeit und vier Leuchtkästen. Read in German on Der Tagesspiegel.LINEBREAK
Our 5 favorite booths at Art Basel Hong Kong
Dazzling electric blazes, Manga dream girls, rainbow iridescent walls and forms closing in from every direction—step into Shanghai artist Lu Yang’s illusion cube and enter a dimension of her own making. Read more on Cultured.LINEBREAK