Shuvinai Ashoona

Work from her oeuvre.

“Inuk artist Shuvinai Ashoona’s fantastical drawings inject surreal visions into depictions of contemporary Inuit life, overturning stereotypical notions of Inuit culture while capturing the dramatic changes it has experienced in recent history. Ashoona produces her work at the Kinngait Studios, a community-run art-making cooperative incorporated in 1959 as the artistic arm of the West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative. The humans who populate the domestic and quotidian scenes depicted in her pen-and-pencil drawings are joined by mermaids, human-animal hybrids, and fantastical sea creatures. Surreal details signal spiritual, cosmological, or phantasmatic forces in delicate coexistence with the everyday. In the two new works included here (both 2021), humans and animals both cohabitate and merge: in one drawing, a woman with a platypus mouth and webbed fingers reclines on an ice flow as a poncho-wearing, tentacled walrus confronts his own reflection; in the other, human figures are ambiguously enveloped by, costumed as, or walking alongside chimerical creatures. Ashoona’s merging of social experience, fantastical iconography, and narrative composition is infused with Surrealism’s mining of the subconscious and provides a simultaneously vivid and phantasmagoric vision of life in her community.” – Ian Wallace

Seriously.

Group Exhibition Curated by Nana Bahlmann currently up at Sprüth Magers London.

Seriously. features the work of Bas Jan Ader, Keith Arnatt, John Baldessari, Massimo Bartolini, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Lynda Benglis, Helen Chadwick, Robert Cumming, Thomas Demand, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Braco Dimitrijević, Cao Fei, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Ceal Floyer, Tom Friedman, Dan Graham, Rodney Graham, Scott Grieger, Aneta Grzeszykowska, Sigurður Guðmundsson, Andreas Gursky, Barbara Hammer, Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, Rebecca Horn, Douglas Huebler, Birgit Jürgenssen, Astrid Klein, David Lamelas, Louise Lawler, Natalia LL, Sarah Lucas, Urs Lüthi, Tom Marioni, Anthony McCall, Jonathan Monk, Peter Moore, Bruce Nauman, Joshua Neustein, Dennis Oppenheim, Géza Perneczky, Sigmar Polke, Charles Ray, Andrea Robbins and Max Becher, Ulrike Rosenbach, Thomas Ruff, Ed Ruscha, Cindy Sherman, Stephen Shore, Santiago Sierra and Franz Erhard Walther, Roman Signer, Laurie Simmons, John Smith, Martine Syms, Robert Therrien, Rosemarie Trockel, Keiji Uematsu, Ger van Elk, Mark Wallinger, John Waters, Gillian Wearing, Carrie Mae Weems, William Wegman, Hannah Wilke, Stephen Willats, and Christopher Williams.

“Conceptual photography is often regarded as self-serious and academic. Yet, since the very inception of conceptual art in the 1960s, many such artists have strategically employed humour to provoke and meaningfully engage the viewer, as well as challenge visual norms. Despite being humorous, this work remains intellectually rigorous and profound.

Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are pleased to present Seriously., a group exhibition curated by Nana Bahlmann, featuring over a hundred conceptual photographs, print media, and select films ranging from the 1960s to the present, which expose the absurdities of our world and its representations. Through visual wit, subversiveness, and even outright slapstick, these photographic experiments offer humorous conceptual investigations of how images are constructed and interpreted. Employing a range of strategies, from masquerade and role-play to the construction of inexplicable scenarios, unexpected juxtapositions, and idiosyncratic sculptural compositions, these works reveal the farcical and fantastical within the visual realm. In reframing our visual world through satire and playful mimicry, they create space for both reflection and amusement.

The exhibition unfolds across a range of thematic clusters, from explorations of self-portraiture, the built and natural environment, and everyday objects (and sometimes combinations thereof). As visitors move through each room, they encounter groupings of artworks that invite questioning and reimagining of societal norms, gender identity, and the role of the artist. However, a prominent recurring motif that thematically bridges such groupings together is artists citing or parodying the work of their fellow artists. Peter Fischli and David Weiss’ eccentric Equilibres (1984–86), which are included in the show, are rephotographed in Thomas Ruff’s Zeitungsfotos (Newspaper Photographs, 1990–91), also on view here. Jonathan Monk jovially makes reference to Louise Lawler and the artist duo Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose unexpectedly humorous work is presented. Satirising Cindy Sherman, Thomas Demand, and Andreas Gursky, as well as their contemporaries, John Waters’ Art Market Research (2006) merrily documents hysterical reviews of the work of artistic peers that are exhibited alongside Waters’ comical critique.

While many of the artists included in this exhibition are traditionally associated with humour, such as John Baldessari and William Wegman, others are not. Humour is subjective; what one person finds funny may not resonate with another, depending on the context in which the object of hilarity is presented. Not all of the works included in this extensive exhibition were necessarily intended to be humorous by the artists who made them, nor will every viewer perceive them as such. Yet, in the context of an exhibition focused on humour, the underlying wit and clever punning within these works becomes apparent.

Humour is more than entertainment; it’s a powerful socio-political tool that acts as a lens through which to understand the strange or illogical aspects of our times. Seriously. celebrates this complexity and invites its audience to engage, think, and laugh.” – Nana Bahlmann

Trisha Donnelley

Work from an Untitled Exhibition (2019)

“In 1974, the CIA green-lit a 350-million-dollar cover-up operation to salvage a sunken Soviet sub from the depths of the Pacific Ocean. Hidden in plain sight, the top-secret rescue spawned the “Glomar response,” crafted to elude journalistic inquisition: “We can neither confirm nor deny the existence of the information requested but, hypothetically, if such data were to exist, the subject matter would be classified and could not be disclosed.” The slogan is now ubiquitous, parroted by everyone from Kylie Jenner to the NYPD, but Trisha Donnelly remains its most fascinating artistic partisan. Donnelly’s solo exhibition at Matthew Marks, characteristically opaque and sans press release, collects six new untitled sculptures alongside three blurred projections. Formally, the series of marble plinths that populate the gallery take up the legacy of minimalism — but unlike its adherents Judd and Serra, whose well-known industrial processes are part and parcel of their work, little is known about Donnelly’s fabrication methods. Her undecipherable slabs were, at some point, pulled from quarries. Probably in Italy, the gallery assistant tells me. I’m unable to verify, which is maybe the point: taking Judd’s assertion that methods are irrelevant so long as they result in art’s logical extreme, Donnelly lays an inscrutable series of objects before us and insists that in this pure absence of didacticism we make for ourselves what we will. Donnelly’s exhibition invites a meditative form of curiosity. The absence of a structuring narrative invites close viewing in its stead, drawing attention to the sculptures’ juxtaposing surfaces: flawless smoothness, serrated grain. In the front room, a dim digital image appends three scattered granite hunks, clustered according to an unknowable logic. The works are spaced atypically, quietly resisting the linear standardization of minimalism past and proper. During the day, the surrounding projections are barely discernible; once the sun sets, the sculptures are lit dimly by design. Only part of the show is fully visible at any given time — another subtle jab at the precision of Donnelly’s progenitors? Perhaps. We can neither confirm nor deny.” – Adina Glickestein for Flash Art

David Hartt

Work from Naturphilosophie.

“Galerie Thomas Schulte presents Naturphilosophie, an exhibition of new works by David Hartt. For his second solo exhibition at the gallery, Hartt expands
on an ongoing body of work, continuing his engagement with themes related
to dominant systems of knowledge and representation, and corresponding
processes of marginalization and displacement. Reproduced as photogravures
or translated as tapestries, the works comprise images of plants photographed
at various sites in northern Europe —in the Netherlands, Sweden and Germany.
Bringing these peripheral, non-human agents into focus, the images reflect
on how our environment, and the life present in it, has been shaped by human
activity and ideals of the past—as well as their resonances today.

The sites visited and photographed by Hartt for the works on view—among
them, the historic university cities of Leiden, Uppsala and Göttingen—were
informed by the work of artists and early naturalists active there, primarily,
but not exclusively, during the 18th century. Through mostly close-cropped,
nondescript views, however, locations are kept from being fully identifiable in
the images. Their titles are the primary indicator, parenthetically noting the
city and date of the photograph, as well as the scientific names of the plant
species featured in it. Documents of a place and a specific moment in time, they
also refer to and enact a process of naming. Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus,
known as the “father of modern taxonomy” for having formalized the binomial
nomenclature system in 1753, is also associated with three of the cities in which
the photographs were taken. The presence of such figures puts the images in
dialogue with European artistic and intellectual traditions in and around this
period—a period also marked by European colonization and its effects, including
the movement of flora, fauna and human communities.” – Galerie Thomas Schulte

James Richards

Work from Fevers.

“Sometimes, there is a fever to perception—a heat that builds when an image lingers too long, when a sound worms its way beneath language. Nothing is stable here, only fragments: half-memories, soft violence, quiet ecstasies. Images stutter, flare, recede. Looking does not lead to clarity but a kind of exposure. Fever, after all, is not an illness but a response—a regulated shift in the body’s set point, an internal decision to raise the heat. In fever, the body’s own systems intensify, working to defend and to heal, but also to open and purge—turning inward and outward at once.

Fever is the body’s rebellion, an insistence on its own agency. It signals not just intrusion or injury, but the body’s refusal to remain neutral—to stay cool and contained. In the heightened temperature of fever, the senses sharpen. Colors burn brighter, sounds penetrate deeper. Periphery becomes urgency, each sensation a small blaze. In the heat, we glimpse not just what threatens us, but what quickens us—what makes us feel most alive.

All this while we wait for it to break. The fever dream continues to hum, thick with the half-light of unsteady revelations. There is no stillness here, only a restless unfolding, the strange rupture of thresholds dissolving and reforming in endless succession. In a fevered state, the air seems to shiver, each breath a flicker of something not quite nameable. The fever does not so much end as recede, leaving in its wake a landscape of outlines—edges that glow, ripple, and refuse to fade. In the fever’s morning residue, the world leans closer, more alive in its fractures and flux….” – Grazer Kunstverein

Joëlle Tuerlinckx

Work from EL CASO DE L(A CASA) MUSEO(A).

“The work of Joëlle Tuerlinckx (Brussels, Belgium, 1958) challenges us on such seemingly abstract issues as space and time, although translating these concerns into the viewer’s experience within the exhibition space and the temporalities it contains. By assuming and transforming the legacy of conceptual art, performance, practices stemming from institutional criticism and sound installations, the artist displaces and converts protocols and devices, museum work teams, their voices and actions into the raw material and agents of her production. El caso de l(a casa) museo(a) (The Case of the [House] Museum) is an exhibition designed as a kind of disconcerting retrospective in which Tuerlinckx brings together historical works alongside recent proposals that are themselves traces and records of previous works and exhibitions.

After several visits to the museum and extensive conversations with its teams, Tuerlinckx constructed a symphony that acts as a network of echoes and resonances; a multilingual sonic palimpsest triggered by several voices reading the texts and statements suggested by the artist, as we hear them spontaneously respond to questions she asked them about their work and the functioning of the institution…” – Artium Museoa

Precious Okoyomon

Work from To See the Earth Beyond the End of the World.

“Precious Okoyomon – poet, artist, and chef – stages sculptural topographies composed of living, growing, decaying, and dying materials, including rock, water, wildflowers, snails, and vines. For Okoyomon, nature is inseparable from the historical marks of colonisation and enslavement. In their work, plants like kudzu – a vine native to Asia that was first introduced by the US government to farms in Mississippi in 1876 as a means to fortify erosion of local soil, which had been degraded by the over-cultivation of cotton, and then turned to be uncontrollably invasive – become metaphors for the entanglement of slavery, racialisation, and diaspora with nature, nonetheless holding the capacity for change and revitalisation. In their new work for The Milk of Dreams, To See the Earth before the End of the World (2022), titled after a poem by Ed Roberson, Okoyomon’s sculptures are set against a field of wild growth; here kudzu appears again in the midst of a network of rivers and sugar cane, the latter of which the artist’s grandmother grew in her backyard when Okoyomon was growing up in Nigeria. Much like kudzu, sugar cane is a plant whose very essence is saturated with the economic and historical circumstances of the transatlantic slave trade. Following the play Monsieur Toussaint by Édouard Glissant, whose native Martinique was once one of the world’s largest producers of sugar, Okoyomon’s installation attempts to invoke a politics of ecological revolt and revolution.” – Madeline Weisburg

Hanne Lippard

Work from her oeuvre.

“Hanne Lippard (*1984, Milton Keynes/UK, lives and works in Berlin) has been using language as the raw material for her work for the last decade, processing it in the form of texts, vocal performances, sound installations, printed objects and sculpture. The artist has developed a practice that lies at the confluence of spoken and written word, wherein she appropriates content from the public sphere, chiefly from online sources or from the field of advertising, to investigate how the rise in digital communication and mediation is reprogramming our relationship to language. Lippard intertwines found text with her own material, which she then manipulates through a variety of devices, such as repetition, the shifting of intonation, or the exploitation of homonyms, in order to formulate musings on contemporary life.

She draws upon themes including questions of bodily and mental wellbeing, self-optimization, and living through the lens of social media. By consciously picking at the seams of her found and fabricated texts, Lippard makes us acutely aware of the fragility of language as a tool for conveying meaning and sense. She exposes its flaws, its oddities, its double entendres, and its potential for misinterpretation through series of calmly obsessive utterances that bear an affinity to the iconoclastic literary experiments of the Dada movement.” – Lambda Lambda Lambda

Daniel Gustav Cramer

Work from 11 Works.

““A thing that we see at a certain point in time, a book that we read not only remains forever tied to whatever was around us, but also remains faithfully bound to the person we were at that time.” Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

In his second exhibition at Sies + Höke, Daniel Gustav Cramer (born 1975 in Neuss) explores the translations of transient experiences of the present and how they are always linked to the images of our memory. For the individual, experienced stories, narratives and interpersonal encounters are what make time palpable as a subjective entity. His works reflect these personal relationships to time that take place in fleeting experiences with people and nature and that can combine as fragments of memory to form a more comprehensive view of the world.

In Eleven Works Daniel Gustav Cramer presents the spatial constellation of his works between various fixed points that link distant geographies, their landscapes and direct contacts with their residents. One of the starting points is a series of four photographs, Eyjafjörður (2018), which show various colorings and transparencies on deep blue. Their location is explained by a brief text that describes how the original film negatives have been taken by a man who lives in Iceland. During his trips onto the fjord, for several years he shot underwater photographs, and archived their resulting negatives and contact sheets. With these images, the man unconsciously mapped the space between the two shores of the fjord, with his childhood home on the one side and his current place of residence on the other. Daniel Gustav Cramer’s display and their contextualization unfolds a structure of memory that goes beyond the visible water formations. As frozen moments, the photographs attest to the crossing of actual distances by the small boat drifting across the fjord as well as the intersection of past and present.

Observing the subjective perception of time and its interweaving with memory is a recurring theme linking the artist’s works presented in this exhibition. As a factual system of order, his works refer beyond their material being to something that can rather be felt than seen. In Landscapes (2017), he shows a series of shelves housing book objects. On the first pages of the books, landscapes, certain locations and environments are described in brief texts. The following pages are left blank. Using minimal means, sentence after sentence, layer after layer, landscape scenes are revealed, while the blank pages lend the evoked images an expanded spatial dimensionality. The series Dust (2017) consists of table objects that contain piles of paper made of marble dust from Carrara. The materiality of marble appears here in its smallest, most fleeting particles and merges with the flexibility of a sheet of paper. The immaterial white and the geometric reduction amplifies the impression of the sculptures being physical forms of a moving conceptual space, between the memory of mountains, the quarries in Carrara and the human desire to record what has been experienced. An underlying tension emerges in the photograph Todtnauberg (2018), for which the artist visited the village in the Black Forest where Martin Heidegger once wrote his main work Being and Time (1927). Hardly identifiable as an actual location in the flurry of snow, the image of his hut attests to the inconsistency and diffuseness of philosophical interpretations.

In another way, the work Rainbow (2016/2018) undertakes a material intervention in the concrete architecture of the gallery. Following the artist’s instructions, the three bearing columns of the space were painted in nine different colors in a certain order, one color after another. The last layer was set as a white RAL, so that the changes are only recognizable in the traces of paint on the edges and corners.

Finally, Daniel Gustav Cramer presents his film work Orrery (2012), which on several levels mirrors the photographs taken in Iceland. The film recounts a personal exchange between the artist and a man he met in the course of his travels. For three conversations, the artist sought out the man in his home near Melbourne where he works as a manufacturer of planet machines, an eighteenth-century craft that has virtually died out today. In the film, the artist reports of his encounters in the house through text, environmental sounds, and shots of interior scenes of the man’s workshop. With ellipses and flashbacks, he thus creates an interweaving narrative that makes clear that individual temporal perception fails to run in a linear and chronological manner. In the process, the film evokes childhood as a site of origin – from pebbles, that were once arranged playfully in a circle in the garden to the completion of an orrery made of ivory spheres that models the elusive trajectories of celestial bodies.

In this exhibition, Daniel Gustav Cramer moves back and forth between various time lapses within the microcosm and the macrocosm, between the ocean and outer space, the singular experience of a transient moment and traditional story telling. They are gaps in his system of order that activate the power of memory and thus create new narratives. Like explorers, we intuitively fill these gaps through what we learned from our own experiences.” – Simone Neuenschwander

Agnieszka Polska

Work from Birds in Space.

“For a bird to fly in outer space, it would have to hold its breath. It would have to fight Earth’s gravity. It would have to endure a temperature of -270°C. It would have to bathe in radiation, unprotected by Earth’s magnetic field. It would have to live without water and food. It would never be able to come back, because it would burn in the atmosphere. It would have to really want to be free.” – Agnieszka Polska