February Art Guide - Milan

Recommendations of what to see in the Milan art scene this month by our local guide, Sara Cattaneo. Discover even more on a private tour.

I. 

Exhibition: Stephan Balkenhol
Artist: Stephan Balkenhol
Venue: Monica De Cardenas Galleria
Dates: Until March 10th, 2018

Galleria Monica De Cardenas presents a solo show of Stephan Balkenhol, one of the most interesting contemporary sculptors. The works of Balkenhol are made using an ancient technique: he brings out his figures by gouging them out of a tree trunk. The artist makes neutral figures; the absence of any distinctive sign aims to honour every man.
A beautiful exhibition of one of the most fascinating sculptors around.

Courtesy Galleria Monica De Cardenas, Milano
credit Andrea Rossetti

II. 

Exhibition: Memoria
Artist: James Nachtwey
Venue: Palazzo Reale
Dates: Until March 4th, 2018

Palazzo Reale hosts the first stage of the international tour of Memoria (Memory), a solo show which contains a large selection of James Nachtwey’s works. Nachtwey, who is universally considered the successor of Robert Capa, presents two hundred images taken from the most significant reportages made in his thirty-five year career. 
A rare exhibition that allows us to reflect on war through the eyes of the one of the major contemporary American photographers.

III. 

Exhibition: The Measures of Memory
Artists: Alejandro Cesarco
Venue: Galleria Raffaella Cortese
Dates: Until March 2nd, 2018

In this solo exhibitions, Cesarco reflects on the possibilities of memory through different methods of investigation. The artist uses a framed archival ink-jet print and 8mm film transferred to digital in order to immerse the viewer in a melancholic universe, where he reflects on the different relationships that bind us to others and the role of the memory in these connections.
An intimate exhibition that gives us the opportunity to empathize with the artist and reread in his stories a bit of ours.

Courtesy of the artist and Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milano
Credit Lorenzo Palmieri

Take an art tour in Milan to discover more!

February Art Guide - Munich

This month we have many interesting openings in Munich, here are my choices to share with you! To visit these exhibitions or learn more about the art scene in Munich take a tour with Sofia.

I.

Exhibition: Falling Light
Artist: Chen Wei
Venue: Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle
Dates: Until April 7th, 2018
Opening:  February 8th, 2018

To kick off the 50th anniversary of Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle the rising position of Chinese artist Chen Wei and Thomas Ruff will be presented. The works shown in Chen Wei’s new exhibition Falling Light unite the motifs and issues of his oeuvre of the past several years and develop them further: urban spaces devoid of people, stage-like settings with strong lighting effects, wet ground, sporadic individuals or just their hands in scenes of isolation, symbolically charged elements, like the sparkling coins. The unfinished crops up in the half-laid paving stones in Fresh Paint, while what has been and gone is expressed in Fragment through the tiled floor of a late-night bar, across which are strewn the shards of broken bottles, the remains of a party. Promise is the theme of Sharing Apartment, in which the open door and the warm light behind it evoke, in conjunction with the emptiness of the room in the foreground, an uncanny atmosphere.

II.

Exhibition: 
Artist: Thomas Ruff
Venue: Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle
Dates: Until April 7th, 2018
Opening: February 8th, 2018

Since 2014 Thomas Ruff has been working on his Negatives, a series in which he converts the typical sepia tones of early photography into cyan tones, thus not only harking back to the cyanotypes of yesteryear but also, and more importantly, transforming the positive back into its negative form, a process that raises the “means to the end”, namely the tonally reversed, negative image as the prerequisite for the ultimate photograph, to the status of an artwork in its own right. Within this series, Thomas Ruff has developed a new cycle of photographs titled neg◊lapresmidi which will be shown in the forthcoming exhibition in its entirety. In a sequence of 25 photographs, Thomas Ruff follows in the tracks of the dance legend Vaslav Nijinsky (1889-1950).

III.

Exhibition: 55 | Wohnzimmer - Gert Weber Meets Old Friends
Artist: Various Artists
Venue: Galerie Max Weber Six Friedrich
Dates: Until March 10th, 2018

Gert Weber meets old friends is the first exhibition on the occasion of the 55th anniversary of the gallery with furniture by Gert Weber and art works by Andreas Schulze, Peter Zimmermann, Georg Baselitz, Imi Knoebel, Siegfried Anzinger, Stephan Huber and others.

Take a private art tour in Munich to discover more!
 

February Art Guide - Jerusalem

Recommendations of what to see in the Jerusalem art scene this month by our local guide, Jenna Romano. Discover even more on a private tour.

I.

Exhibition: Form the Light, And Create Darkness
Artist: Israel Rabinovitz
Venue: Jerusalem Artists’ House
Dates: February 3 - April 7 2018

I have not yet been, but for anyone who is living in or visiting Israel, I think it’s important to learn about and challenge the ethos of Israeli Zionist culture. Using raw materials - ‘souvenirs’ made from olive wood, ancient loca fragments, rusty relics, etc. - Rabinovitz introduces questions about locale and localism, about the symbolic meanings of real and fabricated archaeology and about the validity of Israeli rituals in social and cultural contexts.  

IMAGE Israel Rabinovitz, "No Title", 2013, mixed media. 

II.

Exhibition: Feminine Aggressiveness: A Work in Progress
Artist: Lecture by Shir Aloni Arari
Venue: Art Cube Artists Studios
Date: February 12,  2018. 

There is what seems to be a perennial dissonance between the words ‘female’ and ‘empowered’. Often looked upon as unnatural, females who exhibit external aggressiveness are perceived as extreme and ‘masculine’ - but there is a trending reformulation of the complex representations of female empowerment. This lecture will look at examples from pop culture and contemporary art, touching of questions of gender power relations, maternal ambivalence, education and initiation, aggressive and creative impulses.

 IMAGE: South, Sharon Polianke, etching on metal plate.

III.

Exhibition: On The Corner of HaNeviim and Shivtei Israel
Artist: Sharon Polianke
Venue: Jerusalem Print Workshop
Dates: On view until February 28, 2018.

This exhibition is really an ode to the art of printmaking. Sharon Polianke, a masterful printmaker currently living in Tel Aviv, turns the print workshop into a map and archaeological site that pays tribute to the location of the gallery itself. Using a variety of printing techniques, Polianke exhibits work that evoke themes of history and memory, but also allude the the techniques themselves and the artists own love for the medium - ultimately linking the collective and historical with the mental and the personal. 

IMAGE Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, Theatrical release poster, by Reynold Brown

Take an art tour in Jerusalem to discover more!
 

February Art Guide - Vienna

Recommendations of what to see in the Vienna art scene this month by our local guide, Itai Margula. Discover even more on a private tour.

I.

Exhibition: GÜNTER BRUS Unrest after the Storm
Artist: Günter Brus
Venue:  Belvedere 21 Haus
Dates: February 2nd to August 11th, 2018

Belvedere 21 holds a retrospective exhibition of the Austrian artist Günter Brus on the occasion of his 80 years anniversary. Curated by Harald Krejci, the comprehensive show sheds light on the different stages of his artistic career. If in his early work, Günter Brus used the body as the basis for the painterly process, in his later performances and actions the body served as the screen onto which he projected his critique of society. Probably his most recognizable work “Wiener Spaziergang” from 1965 - a high point also in the Wiener Aktionismus history as well – will always remain a landmark in the Viennese consciousness. 

Photo: Ludwig Hoffenreich © Günter Brus

II.

Exhbition: From the inside to the outside
Artists: Carola Dertnig, Ashley Hans Scheirl, Martha Wilson, Kristin Oppenheim, 
Markus Schinwald
Venue: Galerie Crone Wien
Dates: January 17th to March 3rd, 2018 

Galerie Crone opened its second location in Vienna in the fall of 2015. The current show featuring prominent Austrian and international artists brings together artists who deal with the body as a means of expression, platform, or tool of their artistic creation. Categories such as age or gender are questioned as well as beauty ideals or social conventions. Martha Wilson’s work ‘Makeover: Melania (2017)’ for example, makes use of the digital image altering techniques, which not only allow her face to be transformed in that of Melania Trum within seconds, but also points out to the erasure of age through contemporary post production techniques.

Photo: Ashley Hans Scheirl © Ernst Herold 2016

III.

Exhibition: Guy Mees. The weather is quiet, cool and soft
Artists: Guy Mees
Venue: Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz
Dates: February 1st to April 29th, 2018

Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz dedicates its first exhibition of the year to Guy Mees (1935–2003), a leading figure of the Belgian avant-garde, in the first exhibition in Austria to focus exclusively on his work. A member of the “New Flemish School” he was in touch with an international network of artists affiliated with the neoavant-garde from Europe, Japan, and North and South America. The exhibition curated by Lilou Vidal features different phases in Mees’ career to shed light on his intuitive and conceptual approach from the beginning of the 1960s to his last works from the 2000s. The selected works allow an overview of his ideas of mutability, fragility, and the expansion of pictorial space into real space.

Photo: Exhibition View © Jorit Aust

Take a tour in Vienna to discover more! 
 

February Art Guide - Warsaw

Recommendations of what to see in the Warsaw art scene this month by our local guide, Zuzanna Zasacka. Discover even more on a private tour.

I.

Exhibition: Sarkis. Angel Rainbow
Artist: Sarkis
Venue: Zacheta Gallery
Dates: Until February 18th, 2018

An exhibition of one of the most important classics of the 20th and 21st century art. Born Sarkis Zabunyan, in 1938 in Istanbul, Sarkis is an Armenian conceptual artist. He studied painting and design at the Mimar Sinan University in Istanbul, and since the 1960s has lived and worked in Paris. He was one of a dozen young artists invited by the curator and art critic Harald Szeemann to participate in the exhibition Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form (Works — Concepts — Processes — Situations — Information), at the Kunsthalle Bern (1969), which presented a new vision of contemporary art.
In his work, Sarkis metaphorically touches on the most important problems of today’s world. He is fascinated by both contemporary visual culture and the richness of tradition and history of non-European cultures, which have been excluded or marginalised for years. The basic elements in the structure of his works and ideas are constituted by the concepts of memory and identity. In Zachęta, in collaboration with people working locally at the exhibition, the artist has built and manipulated three important elements of his work: light, word, and context of place. This Zachęta exhibition will present 21 sentences, selected by our team and hand-written in Polish by Zachętas employees, then made into neon signs. 

Sarkis_Angel Rainbow_exhibition view_Zachęta_photo by Marek Krzyżanek

II.

Exhibition: Rachel Poignant. Generations
Artist: Rachel Poignant
Venue:  Xavery Dunikowski Musuem of Sculpture „Królikarnia“
Dates: Until February 18th, 2018

The sculptures of Rachel Poignant, though abstract and unique, resemble forms we know: shells, stones, cookies or the avant-garde works of the constructivists. They are anachronistic—they do not seem to belong to the time in which they originated, reaching both the remembered past as well as the imagined future. They are reminiscent of remnants of 20th century modernism extracted from the ruins of our world by archaeologists of the civilizations that will come after us. 
What connects Rachel Poignant (b. 1986) to Poland is her teacher and mentor, Anka Ptaszkowska. Ptaszkowska, an eminent curator and art critic, works only with outstanding artists. She was the initiator of many unconventional artistic events, which connected the Polish art world with Western Europe. Also this time, Ptaszkowska, convinced of the extraordinary talent of Rachel Poignant, has initiated a Polish-French collaboration.

Rachel Poignant

III.

Exhibition: Gallery of Polish Design
Venue: National Museum in Warsaw 

This time I will exceptionally recommend the permanent exhibition, but freshly open. The NMW has something special in store to mark the end of 2017. Polish applied arts will be on permanent display in the Gallery of Polish Design, showcasing the most important pieces from the early 20th century up to the present day.

The Nataiona Museum’s new permanent gallery shows the numerous approaches to design prevalent throughout the various decades and artistic circles – from the Zakopane milieu, Krakow Workshops, “Ład” Artists’ Cooperative and modernists in the “Praesens” group, through the post-war reconstruction period, Social Realism, the Polish thaw and post-1956 modernism – when Polish applied arts developed with the greatest dynamism – to the finest examples of contemporary design. A separate mention will be given to aspects of industrial design, design for children and ethnographic design.

Gallery of Polish Design

Take an art tour in Warsaw to discover more!