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NEXT

Angela Dufresne
Cat On a Hot Tin Roof

NEXT Art Fair Brings Cutting-Edge Solo and Special Projects to Chicago and Introduces 100,000 USD West Collection Prize

Invitational exhibition of emerging art at Merchandise Mart April 25 - 28, 2008

http://www.nextartfair.com

NEXT, a new invitational art fair installed on the 7th floor of the Merchandise Mart, Chicago, April 25-28, 2008, to complement the 28th Edition of Art Chicago 2008, offers curatorial visions of some of the most important developments in contemporary art.

Featuring special artists projects, NEXT features, among other presentations, scores of works by 08 Whitney Biennial participants, including those of artists Matthew Brannon, Omar Fast, MK Guth, Ruben Ochoa, Amanda Ross-Ho, Eduardo Sarabia, Melanie Schiff, and Javier Tellez.

NEXT also includes solo shows and large scale works by established and up-and-coming artists like Erik Benson, Ian Burns, Graham Dolphin, Marcel Dzama, Jeremy Earhart, Orly Genger, Isca Greenfield-Sanders, Stefan Hirsig, Graham Hudson, Marco Maggi, Fabian Marcaccio, Fahamou Pecou, The Royal Art Lodge, Peter Sarkisian, Ricky Swallow, Monique van Genderen, Leo Villarreal and Bucksbaum Award Winner Mark Bradford. Also participating are Venice Biennial veterans AES+F and Guy Ben-Ner; Berlin Biennial artist Suzanne Winterling; Beijing Biennial standout Eri Itol; Istanbul Biennial artist Taiyo Kimura; and Saatchi Collection painters Dan Bayles, Katherine Bernhardt, Angela Dufresne and Angelina Gualdoni—among many other highly innovative artists and artist collectives.

Additionally, NEXT will play host to several major art installations. Among these, the U.S. debut of The Slow Inevitable Death of American Muscle, a major sculptural work by Brooklyn-based artist Jonathan Schipper (courtesy of Pierogi Gallery)—which consists of two automobiles engaged in a real-life, controlled head-on collision.

NEXT is also pleased to announce a special exhibition of the West Collection, one of America’s premier private holdings of contemporary art. Housed inside NEXT’s exhibition floor and curated by Paige West and Lee Stoetzel, the exhibition “Versions of Reality” highlights both emerging and established work by artists in the collection, such as Sebastiaan Bremer, Margarita Cabrera, Chris Jordan, Robert Lazzarini, Joan Linder, Juan Muñoz and Vik Muniz. NEXT is also proud to announce the inaugural version of the West Prize, a 100,000 USD acquisition prize to be distributed among 10 artists, with an additional individual cash prize of 25,000 USD in addition to a West Collection acquisition.

Other highlights will include:

- New Insight, an exhibition curated by former Documenta Curator and Renaissance Society Director Sussane Ghez.

- Young London Gallery Invitational: David Risley, Domobaal, Fred, Hales Gallery, Houldsworth, Madder 139, Man & Eve, Mummery Schnelle, One in the Other, Paradise Row, Rachmaninoff’s, Rokeby, Seventeen.

- Leipzig Gallery Invitational: ASPN, Dogenhaus, Emmanuel Post, Fillip Rosbach, Laden Feur Nichts, Maerzgalerie.

- Young Berlin Invitational: Arratia/Beer, duve Berlin, galerie5213, galerie davide gallo, Galerie Koal, Galerie Metro, Galerie Birgit Ostermeier, Galerie Zink, Goff + Rosenthal, Herrmann & Wagner, Jarmuschek und Partner, Klara Wallner, Kunstagenten, Kuttner Siebert Galerie, loop - raum für aktuelle kunst, MyVisit, Nice & Fit, Wernicke, Wohnmaschine.

- Over 15 Private Collection Tours with shuttle bus service provided for attending dealers.

- Private Openings (selection) at Renaissance Society, Smart Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art (reception for new Director Madeleine Grynsztejn) and Art Institute of Chicago (Tours of New Renzo Piano Contemporary/Modern Wing under construction).

- Curator/Critic/Collector Panels – featuring David Adjaye, Holly Block, Dan Cameron, Toby Devan Lewis, Sarah Gavlak, Dominic Molon, Wangechi Mutu, David Pagel, Cydney Payton, Nancy Portnoy, Franklin Sirmans, Jerome Stern, Paige West, Joan Young and many others.

- Nightly Private Lounge sponsored by Stop Smiling Magazine.

Organized by critic/curator Christian Viveros-Fauné and dealer/art fair organizer Kavi Gupta, and advised by a support team from the Merchandise Mart Properties (The Armory Show, Art Chicago, Volta Show) led by Paul Morris, NEXT is a unique model for experiencing the best of contemporary art. Organized for collectors, curators, critics, dealers, artists and art enthusiasts, the fair represents the NEXT step in the innovative presentation of contemporary art.

Christian Viveros-Faune
Curatorial Advisor, NEXT
646.641.9732
cvfaune@earthlink.net

Tallinn Art Hall

ORLAN: Post-Identity Strategies
April, 16 - May, 18, 2008

Curated by Eugenio Viola, Reet Varblane

Tallinn Art Hall
Vabaduse Square 6
10146 Tallinn

http://www.kunstihoone.ee

The exhibition is produced in collaboration with Michel Rein Gallery in Paris.

Post-Identity Strategies is an exhibition devoted to ORLAN’s works, a multi-medium and inter-disciplinary artist, who, as a protagonist, has journeyed through the most important art movements from the mid-sixties to now as an extraordinary protagonist.

Her work moves beyond the many “posts” and “isms” of art history, and her unique style has always been that of a complex, irreverent, ironic, blasphemous, iconoclastic artist, for whom the provocation of flesh, the reverse of the body, art and life, the constant oscillation between the real and the virtual, the play of identity, reach the heights of poetry.

From the artist’s reinterpretation of Judeo-Christian iconography, based on a depth study of the Baroque metaphor in general, and of Bernini’s Saint Theresa in particular, ORLAN creates an “hagiographic” declension of the Body Art, investigated through a kind of alter-ego: Saint ORLAN, who will be symptomatic of her artistic journey.

In the surgical-operation-performances of early nineties, her identity research is “reincarnated” to present the climax of a long cognitive process. ORLAN transformed the operating room into an artist’s studio where an artwork was produced, thus inaugurating the mutating paradigm of contemporary art - a progressive return to “bodily” themes - in a direct relationship with new technologies and biotechnologies, a new trend where the French artist once again appears at the front. The appropriation of plastic surgery as a creative art form, both as subject and object of the performance in which the “oeuvre-action” integrates the artist’s body, marks the passage of Body Art into Carnal Art in
ORLAN’s work.

In the Self-Hybridization series (Pre-Colombian, African and the more recent ones on Native Americans), ORLAN continues and extends her journey through infinity of possible physical identities. By using various canons of beauty and aesthetics from different times and places, the artist creates “living” totemic figures, almost tangible in their virtuality, fascinating in their disturbing appearance and seductive in their artificial otherness.

Calouste Gulbenkian
Cultural Centre

Turn into bright light
Copyright: João Paulo Serafim (MIIAC)

IMPROBABLE MUSEUM
of the Image and
Contemporary Art
JOÃO PAULO SERAFIM
23 April to 6 June 2008

Calouste Gulbenkian
Cultural Centre
51, avenue d’Iéna, 75016 Paris
T : 01 53 23 93 93,
du lundi au vendredi de 9h00 à 17h30

http://www.gulbenkian-paris.org

The Calouste Gulbenkian Cultural Centre in Paris presents the work of the Portuguese photographer João Paulo Serafim. Consisting of fifty photographs in various formats and two videos, the exhibition forms part of a project previously unseen in its entirety, to which the artist has given the name of the Improbable Museum of the Image and Contemporary Art (MIIAC).

MIIAC is a fictitious entity that João Paulo Serafim began to develop in a more systematic fashion in 2005. Serafim explores the symbolic and legitimising power of museum spaces and galleries, also displaying a great fascination with the relationship of scale between architects’ models and the reality that they miniaturise.

Its echoes can be found in his work entitled Prowler that shows the interiors of furnished houses lit in such a way as to suggest a series of inhabitable atmospheres. In their game of different scales, they incorporate the ambiguity that is peculiar to photographic enlargement. They are scenes that do not immediately reveal the model from which they had originated and which, in the final analysis, tests our apprehension of a certain space based on a physical relationship shaped by optics. Later those “inhabitable atmospheres” would be developed into the series Home Sweet.., exploring that “intrusive” perspective in what was an openly family-based context.

This first cycle of works dedicated to the very act of observation itself, set out along a path onto which the spectator projects himself in accordance with a game of scales, is taken to new consequences in the MIIAC project. The House has become the Museum and the objects that formerly gave it the intimate atmosphere of a family home are now photographs that João Paulo Serafim has taken himself or chosen from his vast private collection of images and which come both from his own family album and from collections of anonymous people that he either discovered or bought while on holiday.

MIIAC functions as a temporary corollary of a photographic research that is centred on photography itself and on its new home: the Museum. This has now become the setting for the artist’s photographic production, legitimising his creative strategies of appropriating and transforming images, whilst also revealing the process in the final result and reinforcing the myriad roles performed by their author: he is the photographer, but also the archaeologist, the archivist, the curator and the manager of images that are sometimes fixed, sometimes in motion.

Serafim’s Improbable Museum is, in the end, an enormous room to be used for testing the freedoms of the image and the imagination. And it not only calls upon the history of art and photography, but also upon the artist’s personal story. In it we find a highly diversified group of culturally shared allusions and we also encounter strangely familiar images, where anonymous people lend themselves to poses that immortalise a given moment of conviviality, or else figure in other genre settings – as in the various portraits – setting in motion a series of representations of an affectionate nature that link the spectator to his own memories.

MIIAC thus becomes the quintessential place of personal but shareable memories, providing the setting for a whole body of work that is immediately and ontologically linked to its own space of presentation. To think the image – either fixed or in motion – from an image – as is the case with the “figure” of the museum as a fictitious convention: this is the challenge presented to us by João Paulo Serafim’s Improbable Museum, in which we already find ourselves.

Curator : António Pinto Ribeiro

Press contact: jasmin.uhlig@gulbenkian-paris.org , 01 53 23 93 78