Boston, MA – On the 20th anniversary of the Obey Giant campaign, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston opens the first museum survey of Shepard Fairey, the influential street artist who created the now iconic Obama poster. Stickers and posters of the artist’s work have appeared on street signs and buildings around the world as part of a guerrilla art campaign of global scale. Featuring over 80 works, Shepard Fairey: Supply & Demand traces the artist’s career over 20 years, from the Obey Giant stencil to screen prints of political revolutionaries and rock stars to recent mixed-media works and a new mural commissioned for the ICA show. In complement to the exhibition, Fairey will be creating public art works at sites around Boston. On view at the ICA from Feb. 6 to Aug. 16, 2009, Shepard Fairey: Supply & Demand is accompanied by an expanded, limited-edition box set of Supply & Demand, the retrospective publication of the artist’s work, in addition to exclusive limited-edition prints only available at the ICA Store.

Shepard Fairey: Supply and Demand features work in a wide variety of media – screen prints, stencils, stickers, rubylith illustrations, collages, and works on wood, metal and canvas. These works reflect the diversity of Fairey’s aesthetic, displaying a variety of influences and references such as Soviet propaganda, psychedelic rock posters, images of Americana, and the layering and weathering of street art. While his visually seductive imagery draws in his audience, Fairey uses his work as a platform to make statements on social issues important to him. The artist explains his driving motivation: “The real message behind most of my work is ‘question everything.”

Initiated by former ICA assistant curator Emily Moore Brouillet and developed by guest curator Pedro H. Alonzo, the retrospective exhibition examines prevailing themes in Fairey’s work including Anti-War/Peace, Leaders of Change, Hierarchies of Power, Music, Excesses of Capitalism, and Activism.

Ica Boston

OBEYGIANT

MARTIN SOTO CLIMENT

Michael Benevento is pleased to announce the Los Angeles solo debut of
Mexico City based artist Martin Soto Climent.

Martin Soto Climent’s work incorporates found objects whose functionality is
rendered useless and often salvaged from off the street. Soto Climent
assembles familiar components, laden with symbolism, with an interest and
belief in their potential as practical, conceptual, performative, and more
often then not human. Drawing on an implied cultural lexicon, Climent nimbly
reconfigures these insinuated associations with wit and receptivity. There
is an anthropological quality about his work, a nostalgic factor, which
draws on the aura of an object’s function in both a utilitarian and
psychological sense. Soto Climent believes in the possibility of objects;
these formal compositions incorporate the artist’s preoccupation with design
as well as a penchant for surrealist precursors. Leather gloves, women’s
high heel shoes, emptied glass bottles, and Venetian blinds are just a few
of the evocative materials he arranges and manipulates, pushing them to the
limits of their structure for a temporal and meticulous convergence.

Most of the materials Soto Climent incorporates are found in his home of
mexico City. Several works included in this exhibition are comprised of a
palette generated from the two sites of Soto Climent’s Mexico City and the
legendary Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.

In his Blinds series, he works with 11 venetian blinds salvaged from a large
abandoned bank located on La Brea. The blinds are modified into elegantly
designed shapes, taking each blind to the limit of its structure. They are
turned onto themselves, fanned out and poised, twisted, and suspended in
every direction. There is a performative quality, a carefully choreographed
dance that Soto Climent engages with these otherwise mundane artifacts. They
also function as a viewing mechanism, as they part and close, revealing to
the viewer an intimacy and availability to observe through the grooves,
gaps, and layering of each aluminum fold.

In the back room of the gallery are suspended two shattered car windshields,
one in front of the other. Each has been overlaid in gold leaf, as if
preserving whatever violent action caused the cracked glass. Responding to
the history of Hollywood, these windshields conjure a sexually driven
experience of past glamorous icons, as well as the California Gold Rush of
the 1850’s, which drew thousands of people with dreams of wealth and fame,
but often led to disappointment and greed.

The smaller assemblages, inspired by transvestites, bring together debris
from the street with their bright, exaggerated props. A hot pink patent
leather heel of a shoe suggestively pokes out from a tied and hung garbage
bag on the wall, while the synthetic brown curls of a cheap wig hang limply
from a gold-gilded framed bag – a treasured homage to whomever dawned the
headpiece previously. Also included in this inspired series is a cowboy
hat, well worn and molded into appropriate folds. Soto Climent has placed a
pair of brown stockings around the lower half of the hat – they hang freely
– turning this accessory often associated with macho images of the Wild West
and cowboys into the feminine folds of a woman’s genitalia and torso.

Benevento Los Angeles

A Winter’s Tale
17 January 2009 – 13 April 2009
A Tribute to Karen Blixen

The exhibition A Winter’s Tale at Gl Holtegaard takes the spectator on a journey into the dreamlike forms of winter and the most poetical expressions of contemporary art. With Karen Blixen’s famous collection of short stories ‘Winter’s Tales’ as its point of departure, the exhibition presents an interpretation of the classical Bildungsroman – in the form of new Danish and Nordic art.

It is with both humanity and the impressive natural beauty of the Nordic countries in view that Gl Holtegaard will be opening its doors for the exhibition A Winter’s Tale in January. With Karen Blixen’s famous tales of the human condition as its point of departure, the exhibition lights up a number of poetical works by contemporary Danish and Nordic artists, whose common denominator is to be found in love of the landscape and of nature.

For both Blixen and the visual artists, the impressive natural beauty of the Nordic countries plays an important role. While nature for Blixen is often fundamentally realistic and fateful for the main characters of the stories, nature among the artists in A Winter’s Tale manifests itself as a conception populated by images of the human imagination. At A Winter’s Tale one encounters nature in the form of impressive installations, films, photographs and paintings.

A Winter’s Tale takes the form of a sequence of works that take the public from visible reality into the world of the fairytale. Like the characters in Blixen’s tales, the works convey the experience of a situation in themselves, but at the same time are woven into a larger narrative. It is this exchange between reality and conception, between self and the world, that A Winter’s Tale sets in motion.

Artists:
Thomas Bangsted, Peter Callesen, Nathalie Djurberg, Benny Dröscher, Marianne Grønnow, Eva Koch, Christian Lemmerz, Ulrik Møller, Palle Nielsen, Allan Otte, Torbjørn Rødland and Tove Storch.

Gl. Holtegaard

Carasi

New stuff from Frodo Mikkelsen, check it out, very nice…
Frodo Mikkelsen
Galleri Wolfsen

Galleri Signe Vad – I skabet ….. Præsenterer:

Jørn Zoega

Beach Space
Visuel betragtning og undersøgelse af strandrummet og menneskenes søgen mod denne plads.

Signe Vad
Galleri Signe Vad

It is with great pleasure that bendixen contemporary art invites you to the opening reception of our group show – Happy New Year(s).
As the exhibition title states, the gallery and its artists would like to welcome 2009 in a positive atmosphere.
We would also like to use this occasion to thank each and every one of you; collectors, Art Institutions, Foundations and guests, who have followed and contributed to the continuing success of the artists and the gallery. A progress – which in just 3 years have given us a positive and noticeable position abroad as well as in Denmark.
Due to a deliberately ’thorough’ selection of artists, we are now positioned with a number of leading individualists. Therefore it is only naturally that we now, for the first time, make a particular show with this group of artists.
Instead of listing all the activities, each and every artists of the gallery will be participating in this year, we would like to refer to our News bloc at the gallery website. This bloc will update you on all relevant activities and link you to other relevant websites.

– Welcome to new and exciting initiatives in 2009.

Maiken Bent, Anders Bojen & Kristoffer Ørum, Lars Christensen, Lena Johansson, Ferdinand Ahm Krag, Toru Kuwakubo, Eva Larsson, Johan Nobell, Torben Ribe, Marika Seidler, Jonas Hvid Søndergaard and Alexander Tovborg

Bendixen Art

The South London Gallery presents a new film work by Danish collective Superflex entitled Flooded McDonald’s. Despite their international track record over the past 15 years, this will be their first solo show in London. From large-scale installations, through to long-term process-based projects and, more recently, films, Superflex’s work is founded in economic and political awareness. They create works inspired by the points where definitions and possibilities of art become blurred.

Flooded McDonald’s is a new film work in which a convincing life-size replica of the interior of a McDonald’s burger bar, without any customers or staff present, gradually floods with water. Furniture is lifted up by the water, trays of food and drinks start to float around, electrics short circuit and eventually the space becomes completely submerged.

Flooded McDonald’s is Superflex’s second film, the first, entitled Burning Car, 2008, made in the wake of the civil unrest in Paris and Copenhagen in 2007, shows a dead-pan observation of a car going up in flames. Both films avoid the high drama of disaster movies, but never quite echo a documentary style, making their position within established frameworks of cinematic genres or of artists’ films intentionally ambiguous. Without being didactic, Flooded McDonald’s hints at the consumer-driven power and influence, but also impotence, of large multinationals in the face of climate change. Without pointing the finger at anyone, the film questions with whom ultimate responsibility lies.

Superflex describe their practice as the provision of ‘tools’ which affect or influence their social or economic context. Previous projects include paying visitors to enter their exhibition, the development and marketing of a new beverage – Free Beer – and the production of a self-sufficient, portable biogas unit to provide energy for a family. Their projects are often rooted in their particular local context and invite participation from the visitor. Superflex work outside traditional art contexts collaborating with designers, engineers, businesses and marketers on projects which have the potential for social or economic change. As such they remain difficult to pigeonhole yet continue to be innovative in their approach to engaging with current issues.

South London Gallery

Ken Kagami “TOYS“A”SS”

Taka Ishii Gallery is pleased to announce our third solo exhibition with Ken Kagami,
“TOYS“A”SS”. This latest exhibition will feature several sculptures made of plastic and
plush toys. Kagami’s debut solo exhibition, “MILK MAN” included drawings and sculptures presented
in the viewing room of Taka Ishii Gallery (2003); Kagami’s second exhibition “penis” took
place in gallery.sora. (2005).

Kagami’s distinctive works are characterized by their simple expression of conflicting ideas.
Pure and virginal plastic and soft toys created for babies and children are boldly combined
with objects, which represent sex, violence and excrement. These two worlds, which
naturally never crossover, merge and transform objects into giggle-inducing, amiable, yet
bizarre pieces of art which invoke a horrific, natural human instinct. This is achieved
through Kagami’s sharp sense of color, form and pure ideas.
“Toys look indecent and sexual to me.” Ken Kagami
Kagami’s work humorously confronts social taboos and has received glowing reviews not
only in Japan, but also overseas. His international solo exhibitions include “SNOOPee” at
The Journal Gallery, New York (2008) and “HELLOWIEN” presented by KRINZINGER
PROJEKTE in Vienna (2006). Kagami’s work has also inspired San Francisco based
independent rock group, “Deerhoof” (KILL ROCK STARS) and has served as stage,
costuming and album concept material.
Kagami often uses skulls as a primary means to express his ideas; however, he
concentrates on plastic and plush toys for this exhibition – as the title “TOYS“A”SS” implies.

Taka Ishii Gallery
Ken Kagami

Signe Vad
Positions of Infinity
15 January– 21 February 2009
 
PL Gallery