Born on May 1, 1968 in Bordeaux, France, Alain Laboile is a photographer and father of six. In 2004, as he needed to put together a portfolio of his work as a sculptor, he acquired a camera, and thus developed a taste for macrophotography (more…)
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Mandy El-Sayegh
Artist
In her paintings, table vitrines, immersive installations and videos, Mandy El-Sayegh creates layered anthologies of found text and images from a variety of sources. These include newsprint, advertisements, aerial maps, anatomy books and her father’s Arabic calligraphy, which take on unexpected new meanings through proximity. Set adrift from their original contexts, these fragments become open to multiple readings that are personally, socially or politically determined and undermine the supposed objectivity of language and media. Moving between material, corporeal, linguistic and cultural frameworks, El-Sayegh highlights the constant flux of meaning that is shaped by environment and individual experience.
By emphasizing the boundaries of her chosen medium, El-Sayegh draws attention to the systems that determine how information is categorized, contained and understood. She creates ‘quasi-archives’ in her table vitrines, suggesting associations and references through the objects’ placement in a shared, delineated space. In her Net-Grid canvases, overpainted grids simultaneously structure and obscure the detritus of popular culture. These paintings also reference the primacy of the grid in modernism, which El-Sayegh found alienating: ‘I felt that there was a whole set of systems that I did not know, like a joke that I didn’t get’. Instead, she creates ‘forms [that] bring about questions of legitimate and illegitimate readings of culture and context’, as well as the implicit power structures that determine who legitimizes such readings.
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Chantal JoffeArtist
Chantal Joffe brings a combination of insight and integrity, as well as psychological and emotional force, to the genre of figurative art. Hers is a deceptively casual brushstroke. (more…)
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The Last HumansAlienation in the Anthropocene
We have fundamentally altered the earth’s ecosystem by disrupting the natural rhythm of our planet and in doing so have created a new chapter in the evolution of Earth and a new stage of uncertainty.
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Lars TunbjörkPhotographer
Whether creating an acid portrait of Sweden, representing the nightmarish world of business offices, tapping into the desolate uniformity of petrified, petit-bourgeois neighborhoods, Lars Tunbjörk has totally forgotten his black and white beginnings.
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The Post-War DreamJourney into the Anthropocene
In the late summer of 2016, I spent six weeks in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region where I documented the transformation of some of the most influential cities in the region: Ordos, Hohhot, and Baotou. While looking back on the images I had taken, I was unexpectedly reminded of post-war Italian cinema (more…)
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Women in AbstractionOct 22, 2021 – Feb 27, 2022
The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents Women in Abstraction, an exhibition sponsored by the BBVA Foundation that shares a new vision of the history of abstraction from its origins to the 1980s through the works of more than 100 female artists that span visual arts, dance, photography, film, and decorative arts. (more…)
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The Shadow PandemicViolence against Women in Times of Covid
The U.N. has designated November 25th as International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. By truism, this is a proposition that states really nothing beyond what is implied by its terms… (more…)
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On Hannah ArendtEight Proposals For Exhibition
Richard Saltoun Gallery’s year-long program On Hannah Arendt: Eight Proposals for Exhibition looks to one of the most important thinkers of the post-war generation (more…)
