Fine Art - August 2023
Fine Art - August 2023
A new edition of the classic book by Yoshitomo Nara first published in 1999, 'Slash with a Knife'
has it all: striking paintings that return the viewer's gaze, whimsical drawings and doodles, and
sculptural works that breathe life into diverse materials and spaces. Nara's signature caricatures
range from adorable and sweet in appearance to grouchy, chiding, or just plain sinister. Some of
them hold knives. Nara first emerged in the art world during Japan's pop art movement in the
1990s, and although the imagery of Japanese manga and anime is often mentioned in reference
to his work, he deftly subverts this interpretation through a juxtaposition of evil and innocence.
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Published in conjunction with an exhibition of work by the Los Angeles-based visual artist Sayre
Gomez at Sifang Art Museum in China, 'Enterprise' features paintings and sculptures in a
presentation that explores several major themes in his oeuvre, showcasing the range of his
innovative practice. From epic technicolour vistas and dazzling natural phenomena to bleached
advertising signs and degraded street furniture, the contemporary city is explored as a tangled
mesh of conflicting realities. Recurring metaphors are often used in Gomez's work as part of the
artist's investigation into the role of context in the distribution and legibility of images in the 21st
century.
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Presupposing that accidents produce technologies, this book inquires into the forms of power and
authority that accidents materialise. For instance, what are the specific accidents of artificial
intelligence, machine learning, and pattern recognition systems? And what insights can accidents
give about the technology that generates them? Perhaps we can reverse this thinking and see
"accidents" as extended forms of functionality, which may be undesired but not entirely
dysfunctional. With contributions by philosopher Sjoerd van Tuinen, researcher and cultural
theorist Erik Bordeleau, conceptual artist and hacktivist Paolo Cirio, software artists Driessens &
Verstappen, and others.
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Exploring and re-imaging photography and sculpture, Kruithof has placed the interaction,
collaboration and relationship between people and their (natural and/or technological)
surroundings at the core of her practice to create liberating and disturbing artworks. Be Like
Water is both textual and visual, enriched with the purpose of focusing in on her work and the
fluidity of her practice. This volume is a retro-perspective; by combining and mixing works in an
anti-chronological and anti-thematic way, Kruithof presents a newly evolved narrative that
interweaves complexity and multiplicity with fun and play, and at the same time leaves room for a
critical reinterpretation.
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This book is a tool. An invitation to become allies, to raise questions about the complexities and
opportunities of an earthly site-specificity. It is a call for an alliance with plants. Plants allow us to
tell sometimes painful stories and penetrate the stratification of history. Their roots inhabit it, and
their seeds sprout, giving new meanings to it. The intensity and violence of enduring colonialism
and its extractive processes imperil the planet. This is nowhere more dramatically apparent than
in Democratic Republic of Congo. Here, Ex Situ embraces what arises from a locality, listening to
it, learning from it, understanding its importance, and sharing it. The project aims to repair an
ecosystem, and to act beyond the global economic system, including its values, narratives,
teachings and institutions that produce our identity-driven, consumerist, nationalist societies.
Acting with the culture of remedial plants, tilling the detritus of toxic ecosystems, and regenerating
them, Ex Situ proposes cultivating a new sensibility of radical care.
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This large volume presents 365 collages by French artist Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux, produced each
day over a period of one year, between 2021 and 2022. The works appear on paper or
cardboard, often with markings or written text added by the artist using different mediums,
including graphite, coloured pencil, felt pen, pastel, acrylic paint, and ballpoint pen. From classic
films and celebrities, artworks, children's books, and illustrations pulled from old books, to vintage
pornography, advertising, and photos drawn from the media and popular culture, collectively the
images form a sprawling anthology of human expression, all with a pervasive or explicit
undercurrent of sexual metaphor.
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First monograph of the African-American artist, renowned for her representations of black
femininity, whose spectacular pop patchworks deconstruct and recompose the everyday
feminine/masculine relationship in its domestic dimension, with seven essays and an
interview.Tschabalala Self (born 1990 in Harlem, lives and works between New York and New
Haven) is an artist who builds a singular style from the syncretic use of both painting and
printmaking to explore ideas about the Black body. She constructs depictions of predominantly
female bodies using a combination of sewn, printed, and painted materials, traversing different
artistic and craft traditions. The formal and conceptual aspects of Self's work seek to expand her
critical inquiry into selfhood and human flourishing.
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The texts, ideas, instructions, and art projects gathered in this book reflect on our relationship
with the earth and the lessons we can derive from it. The contributions not only urge us to
respond to the pressing issue of climate emergency, but also remind of certain neglected or
unlearned ways in which we can engage in dialogue with the earth. What they have in common is
the question of how we can shape a more ecological and just future.
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Daniela Comani – AZ
Danilo Montanari Editore 2023 ISBN 9791280750150 Acqn 33715
Pb 19x28cm 256pp col ills £41
The multimedia work of Daniela Comani engages in a dialogue about history, gender, language,
and identity. Using photography, text, and installation, she works with both manipulated and
appropriated media images and the performance of the self, as in the work 'It Was Me. Diary
1900-1999', where she rewrote the history of the 20th century in female first person, or the series
'New Publications Edited by Daniela Comani', where she manipulated book titles of classic
novels, changing the gender of the protagonist. Using "gendering" as an artist strategy, Comani
challenges stereotypes, history, identity, and the interpretation of the language. This catalogue
has been published on the occasion of the exhibition 'YOU ARE MINE' at Galleria Nazionale
d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome, October 17, 2022 - February 26, 2023.
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Friuli Venezia Giulia, territory of contrasts, is the object of the story by Nicola Toffolini who has
chosen water as the main theme to delineate the boundaries and itineraries of his region: by
means of this element that models and is modelled, a landscape takes shape and is continuously
transformed through natural and anthropic occurrences, in the attempt to capture the elusive
complexity of the natural, a private 'mental map' that reflects the relationship with one's
environment. What attracts Toffolini are the powerful architectures tied to the utopias of
modernism: this fascinating terribilita is yielded in drawings, completed by the poetic texts of the
Friulian artist Eva Geatti who presses past the visual via poetry with a potent, evocative, and
lunar physical presence. The lines of the drawings delineate fragile and violent horizons marked
by the forms that water takes on as it expands onto the plains of Friuli, filling basins, transforming
the earth even when it becomes invisible, swallowed inside the cavities of the Triestine Karst. The
sublime that the artist grasps in viaducts, water towers, and dams acquires a symbolic state in
'utopian landscapes': gigantic molochs are grafted onto the arid setting that welcomes them,
projecting the shadow of the present onto a shore of the future.
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To follow the first edition published in 2020, the expanded second edition of The Royal Tour
features recent work from Vincent Namatjira. These paintings, shown on the inside covers,
continue the artist's thematic exploration from the original Royal Tour suite. Despite finding their
bearings amidst the pillars of colonialism, power and First Nations identity, Vincent Namatjira's
paintings are almost impossibly light and personal in their candour. Wranglings with race, politics
and the empire coalesce with humour, humility and personal history. We grin as much as we
grimace.
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