Naoto Kawahara
“Ouroboros”

Taka Ishii Gallery is pleased to announce our fifth solo exhibition “Ouroboros” with Naoto Kawahara. Around five new paintings will be shown in this exhibition.

In 2005 Taka Ishii Gallery hosted Kawahara’s “NU” exhibition. Kawahara then participated in the group exhibition “Attention to Detail” (The FLAG Art Foundation, New York) curated by Chuck Close in 2008. Kawahara will also participate in the group exhibition “Diana und Aktaion: Der Verbotene Blick auf die Nacktheit” (Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf) this October. He has been active internationally and his works have attracted increasing attention in recent years.

“This time, I worked as though painting an unorthodox Vanitas while thinking about the ominous atmosphere in daily life and the compelling instinct that enables us to constantly forget and paralyze it. Although my expression is realistic, rather than depicting the subject itself, I hope to express it like an image emerging in the mind.”
Naoto Kawahara

In this solo show entitled “Ouroboros” (referring to a serpent that formed a circle by swallowing its own tail, and a symbol of Ancient Greece), Kawahara quotes the works of Munch, an artist whom he feels “paradoxically depicts images of death, whilst also expressing life through themes such as sexuality and puberty.” In this exhibition he reexamines these paintings, which are infused with both energy and despair.

Kawahara has produced distinctive realist paintings that precisely reproduce photographs of people and landscapes drawn from his surroundings or scenes from films. In recent years, he has been creating paintings that reinterpret scenes extracted from classic masterpieces by artists such as Dürer, Balthus and Rembrandt. Through such “re-envisioned paintings”, Kawahara pursues the theme of “creating a sense of déjà vu through the repetitive use of old masters’ themes, while reflecting on archetypes of images valid today,” and presents this theme in his exhibition.

Taka Ishii Gallery

Shok

The exhibition includes the following artists: Slater Bradley (USA. Lives in New York), Nina Canell (SE. Lives in Dublin), Leif Holmstrand (SE. Lives in Malmö), Sture Johannesson (SE. Lives in Falsterbo), John Kørner (DK. Lives in Copenhagen), Runo Lagomarsino (SE. Lives in Malmö/New York), Ariane Müller (AT. Lives in Berlin), Mia Joo Rosasco (DK. Lives in Copenhagen), Franz West (AT. Lives in Vienna), Frida Yngström (SE. Lives in Göteborg), Ahmet Öğüt (TR. Lives in Istanbul) and Stina Östberg (SE. Lives in Göteborg).

The word Auto-Stop is Spanish and refers to the transportation form that is gained by standing by the roadside and asking people for a ride to travel a short or long distance. Also known as hitchhiking.

Auto-Stop is a project organised by Malmö Konsthall, but the main exhibition will take place in the public space outside of Malmö Konsthall.
During June 2008, members of Malmö Konsthall staff will hitchhike with artist works, perform artist instructions, hand out texts or simply hitchhike with the artists themselves in the southern part of Sweden.
The project is an attempt to look at how art is made, looked at and works, information and stories distributed. The staff of Malmö Konsthall will work hands-on with each artist project and mediate the works, meaning and its (possible) travel.

Each work will be hitchhiked with for two days. What route does the works/hitchhikers take? That depends on possible artists instructions for distinations or simply where the driver, that picks up the hitchhiking personnel, takes us.

All works in the projects, instructions and works are made for Auto-Stop. Due to the condition of the project, weather, transportation and hitchhiking in general, we can not say where the works can be seen whilst on the road – only the following starting points in the outskirts of Malmö:

Konsthall

Co Lab

Neil Farber

Iconoclast Editions is pleased to present a new series of unique works by Neil Farber. Taking a simple but expressive drawing style reminiscent of children’s book illustrations, Farber explores the area between childhood fantasy and adult realities. The artist has created a world populated by an odd cast of characters of waif-like children, and other creatures, combining innocence with a complicated and often foreboding sense of the absurd. Indeed, it is out of these contradictions that Farber’s dark humor emanates. For this series, Farber creates a hospital scene where an older man is speaking to a bed-ridden child. The basic elements in the scene are executed as a silkscreen print with Farber’s handwritten message inside a word bubble and the man’s hand-painted shirt design providing the unique and varied element to each piece.
Farber’s work has been exhibited at the the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Musee Art Contemporain Lyon, France; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH; American Museum of Natural History, New York; The Drawing Center, New York; Seoul Museum of Art, Korea; Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT

Iconoclastusa

Taka Ishii Gallery







Old Victheatre

The gallery AVANTHAY CONTEMPORARY is pleased to announce the invitation and participation of the artist

The artist Jaishri Abichandani, who is represented by Gallery AVANTHAY CONTEMPORARY Zurich, has been invited to show selections from her “Reconciliations” project in the Tea Pavillon at the third Guangzhou Triennial.

The series “Reconciliations” uses appropriated imagery from various international cities to create imagined utopian spaces and landscapes in order to explore and subvert historic, geographic and political boundaries. The photographs bring together disparate spaces based on real or imagined relationships – some of historic or current conflict (New York and Tokyo, Lima and Santiago, Ramallah and Jerusalem), some bound by political ideology (Havana and Pyongyang) or former colonies (Mumbai/London). The complete project has been shown in the Queens Museum of Art N.Y. until March 23rd, 2008.

Avanthay Contemporary

Wonderland Art Space is proud to present Helle Mardahl and her first solo show in Denmark ” A Royal Orgy Of Consumption”

Wonderland Online