Hello New York! Hello September!
We are glad to present to you our monthly exhibition digest.
Hope to meet you there.
So, let's start with Dia.
Dia: Beacon Foundation presents an exhibition of Sam Gilliam’s early work from the 1960s and 1970s. He is one of the most important figures in American abstract art he emerged from the Washington, DC, cultural scene in the 1960s alongside Truitt. Setting himself apart stylistically from Washington Color School painters, with whom he is often associated, the artist incorporated a beveled edge and experimented with suspension as two distinct methods of working with canvas.
September 21 the big day in New York! Museum Day is an annual celebration of boundless curiosity hosted by Smithsonian magazine. Participating museums and cultural institutions across the country provide free entry to anyone presenting a Museum Day ticket: 100 museums opening their doors in New York, plus 30 in Jersey. All you have to do is register and download a voucher from the Smithsonian museum. Let us know where you are going and we would like to make a company.
Hauser & Wirth presents ‘Personal Private Public’, which is a group exhibition exploring the idea of the inner life in three main themes: introspection, intimacy, and voyeurism. Contemplating the ways in which we reflect upon ourselves and others, the works on view oscillate in tone from moments of gentle privacy to voyeuristic intrusions, each addressing the power of observation through realms of their own making.
Beginning September 19, 2019, Luxembourg & Dayan will present Piotr Uklański: Ottomania, an exhibition of works from the artist’s new series of large-scale paintings inspired by the complex Orientalist heritage of Poland, his country of origin.
In Ottomania at Luxembourg & Dayan, Uklański’s paintings acknowledge the fraught history of colonialism within his Old Master iconography while simultaneously highlighting the reciprocal exchanges that fueled the centuries-long European craze for things Islamic. It is interesting to note that Poland did not develop a superiority complex with respect to those distant civilizations; it’s people never colonized nor conquered Muslim lands, but were instead colonized by other European powers as well as Russia and fled as refugees to Ottoman controlled territories in the 18th century. These paintings recall the Ottoman Empire not as a cultural underdog, but as a hegemonic political and cultural superpower, and bring to the surface repressed socio-political content as well questions about the scopophilic pleasures of portraiture as a genre.
Another group exhibition of works by Pope.L, Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Cheyenne Julien and Tschabalala Self that explores the different ways in which corporeality is envisioned and depicted within the spatial confines of the two-dimensional picture plane is pleased to present by Mitchell-Innes & Nash 'Embodiment'.
The works in this exhibition show, through the respective viewpoints of its authors, not only the spaces inhabited by real or symbolic figures but also the complex and multidimensional identities, ideals and anxieties embodied by them. In this, there is in each of these works the incarnation of the “other”—an image of alterity that, paradoxically, is also a mirror that reflects back on the viewer. The worlds we see through these distinct, flattened windows are and are not, at the same time, our own.
Author: Irina Chistikina @iraira.me