Giuseppe Stampone

PROMETEOGALLERY BY IDA PISANI
Via Giovanni Ventura, 3,
January 21–March 6

Guiseppe Stampone, Repeat, 2010, still from a color video, 5 minutes.

Through a range of references that allude to gambling, as well as to Fra Angelico, the first solo exhibition by the Milan-based artist Giuseppe Stampone, “The Rules of the Game,” evokes a casino, where the game of chance is a metaphor for the dynamics of everyday life. The show, curated by Marco Scotini, includes slot machines, a baccarat table at which there is a large chair that seems like a throne, a video, and other game-related devices. The artist offers, in sum, a spectacle of failure. The theatrical charge is intensified in the sole video, Repeat, 2010, which is inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1975 film Salò. Shot in Naples (the city-symbol of intrigue) in the sixteenth-century Palazzo Cellamare, the work follows the movement of four men wearing tailcoats who sit and rest their heads on a table. A female figure, dressed in white, appears behind them and then turns to reveal her pregnant belly to the viewer. Stampone orchestrates the theme of the game as a mechanism for exploiting fortune, in a balanced miscellany of languages where the artist condenses uneasiness, a sense of tragedy, and melancholy.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Paola Nicolin

Urs Lüthi

MACRO - MUSEO D'ARTE CONTEMPORANEA ROMA
Via Reggio Emilia 54
December 17–April 5

Urs Lüthi, “Just Another Story About Leaving” (detail), 1974–2006, twenty-five black-and-white photographs, each 24 x 16 1/2".

Urs Lüthi’s latest exhibition short-circuits the artist’s practice in an infinite play of references and self-quotations. The show, curated by Luca Massimo Barbero and Elena Forin, is a panorama that opens onto Lüthi’s life and work, which has always questioned the boundaries between public and private spheres and the limits of art. “Just Another Story About Leaving,” 1974–2006, a photographic series that gives the exhibition its title, is emblematic of Lüthi’s modus operandi, where his central concern is self-representation and transformation, typical of poetics pertaining to the “body as language” but exaggerated by an ironically self-referential narcissism that activates a disturbing artistic-existential voyage. The work brings to mind the identity-related nomadism that, since Duchamp and Claude Cahun, has passed through the territories of art––I am thinking here of artists such as Cindy Sherman, Luigi Ontani, and Orlan.

There are various residual traces of the artist’s body in the show, as in Autoritratto a mani vuote (Self-Portrait with Empty Hands), 2009, a sculpture that draws on the iconography of the religious figure with certain destabilizing elements: distressing posture, clown’s nose. The piece inhabited various places in Rome before being definitively “consecrated,” at the end of a physical and metaphoric journey, at MACRO, where it now stands. Here as in the rest of the show, Lüthi’s aesthetic strategy embraces the space of the double, yet he implies a paradox that never leads to a definitive result and ceaselessly acts in the reconfiguration of an equilibrium, of an encounter and relationship––intermittent but always different––between viewer and work, between those who see and that which is seen.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Eugenio Viola

“Gallery, Galerie, Galleria”

NORMA MANGIONE GALLERY
Via Matteo Pescatore 17
January 15–March 13

View of “Gallery, Galerie, Galleria,” 2010. From left: Adam McEwen, Untitled (Closed), 2003; Bedwyr Williams, Rupert Fetlock Gallery, 2008; Adam McEwen, Pay 1/2 Price, 2009; Kirsten Pieroth, Midnight, 2006–2010; Nina Beier, Stabiles Non Finito, 2009; Alek O., Desk, 2010.

On the floors, in room after room of this exhibition, are small piles of reddish powder—the result of perforating the gallery’s brick walls. The work, Nina Beier and Marie Lund’s Autobiography (if these walls could speak), 2009, evokes the exhibition history of this new Turin gallery. (The holes themselves were made in places where works were installed in the four previous shows.) In contrast to these actions, an object that seems precious––a minuscule white model of a building, contained in a drop of amber-colored resin––provides an object of wonder. Tomas Chaffe’s Lithuanian Gold, 2008, depicts the multistory building within which the Tulips and Roses Gallery in Vilnius, Lithuania, is located. The surprises in this show continue with a miniature of the door that recalls the famous Wrong Gallery, which was once in New York. The work is one of an edition of five hundred created by Andreas Slominski in 2004, in memory of the action that led him to use that original door as a dining table.

Adam Carr, the curator of the show, has staged an examination of the history of the art gallery, and of the ways in which artists have probed the very idea of the institution. Carr has involved thirty-six artists, both well known and emerging. Employing a curatorial method that seems in between those of a theater director and a cultivated philologist, he has constructed an exhibition that is refined but not lacking in twists. It includes not only works but also documents, ephemera, and relics of events that have shaped history. These are arranged inside display cases, juxtaposed with works created specifically for the occasion, or site- and situation-specific pieces conceived by artists for other galleries. The important examples gathered here include both those related to the pictorial wall interventions that Daniel Buren created in 1968 for the Galleria Apollinaire in Milan and those connected to Michael Asher’s impressive 1973 sandblasting of the spaces of the Galleria Franco Toselli, also in Milan.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Marco Tagliafierro

“Old Ideas”

KUNSTMUSEUM BASEL, MUSEUM FÜR GEGENWARTSKUNST
St. Alban-Rheinweg 60
January 16–March 14

View of “Old Ideas,” 2010.

Leonard Cohen originally called Dear Heather, his 2004 album, Old Ideas, a nod to its assemblage of literary and musical influences of yore. This month, the title—with the ardent wit and meaning of its original application intact—is taken up by the Berlin project space Silberkuppe (led by Dominic Eichler and Michel Ziegler) for a group show in Basel that engages numerous oldies—institutional critique, ideas of materiality and the built environment, feminist and queer theory—to surprisingly fresh effect. The exhibition’s crispness might have something to do with the breadth of its artists, who radically diverge in materials, gender, nationality, and age (Gerry Bibby is 31, Janette Laverriere an excellent 101) yet together make a cogent, inspired argument for the relevance of some old ideas—with all new works.

The Gegenwartskunst’s sunken, living-room-like first floor features a lean constellation of works that walk the line between design and utility. Laverriere’s interior-design sketches and abstract drawings are lit by a series of black triangular wall lamps, while nearby, Josephine Pryde’s print-covered photo tubes jutting off the wall in a neat row look more impressive—given enough space, they actually fill it—than I’ve seen installed elsewhere. A standout, Bibby’s sculptural parade of collapsed panels covered in concrete and text sprawls along the floor like a languid, encrusted, and glittery sentence, taking the idea of concrete poetry to the cleaners. Above this elegantly motley crew, Dirk Bell’s light box Panikearth, 2010, its middle four letters in emphasis, hovers like an anticonsumerist speech bubble.

Down the hall, the works seem more site-specific: Phyllida Barlow (making her museum debut here at age sixty-five) has built in situ an outsize architectonic structure that is equal parts ’60s-era gas station and bushwhacked UNICEF shelter. Its crusty surface features a vocabulary of gestural marks that gloriously apes modernist painterly mark making and perhaps critiques it: The marks simply cover the tracks of the structure’s making. Across the hall broods Karl Geiser’s magisterial bronze Cyclist, 1928–34, while the subject of Shahryar Nashat’s expert film upstairs charts the movement of the bronze from storage to museum, and the camera, at waist level, catches the art handlers’ own sculptural qualities. The film is a campy, elegant riot, like the exhibition itself, which makes the case that old ideas are never so new again as when placed in the right hands, young or not.

— Quinn Latimer

Lorna Macintyre

KUNSTHAUS BASELLAND
St. Jakob-Strasse 170,
January 21–March 21

Lorna Macintyre, Neil, 2009, four gelatin-silver prints, stainless steel, 18 7/8 x 24 3/8".

Many contemporary artists make work that evokes the much-handled adjective poetic; surprisingly few, however, make use of actual poetry. Glasgow-based artist Lorna Macintyre falls into both camps, and with remarkable relish. The title of her latest exhibition, “Form and Freedom,” is gleaned from a William Carlos Williams phrase; many of the sculptures, photographs, and videos that compose it refer to T. S. Eliot’s seminal poems Four Quartets (1936–42) and The Waste Land (1922). When Macintyre’s works do not explicitly quote these texts, they make implicit reference to lyric poetry’s dominant themes: the seasons, the elements, and an ever-mysterious nature that is nearly noir in the darkness of its magic properties.

Four new sculptural works each embody an element: A series of interlocking copper triangles, dangling down a wall, stands for fire; one steel cable and one aluminum one, titled Words Move, Music Moves, 2009, descend from the ceiling like attenuated bolts of lightning and stand for air. Three short videos offer more literal poetic fragments: a shadow moving across a wall, as well as dappled blue and green foliage shimmering in the wind. The videos are saved from sheer preciousness by being sped up and looped; the intimacy of the caught moment is given levity by the jittery, jagged speed with which that moment must play on infinitely.

Not all Macintyre’s works are saved from tweeness. Several sculptures in various metals (a silver egg, driftwood painted gold) set atop rough wooden pedestals seem ripe for a Celtic seaside gift shop, with their alchemical referents and New Age titles. But Macintyre is discerning enough to often be sincere and surprising both. An installation of cyanotypes exemplifies this: A brown envelope, exposed to sunlight, offers shadowy dark blue forms; a large piece of paper, exposed to moonlight, results in a milky blue field streaked with starlike spots. Between these prints, a spare arrangement offers a blue photogram with a white circle burned into it, a glass, and a snapshot of a melon against a blue door. The work’s meaning is inseparable from its making and as carefully selected as words in a line of poetry. How to describe it? Poetic, indeed.

— Quinn Latimer

Alice Channer, Dagmar Heppner, Alicja Kwade, and Maria Zahle

BOLTELANG
Limmatstrasse 214,
January 16–February 27

Alicja Kwade, Fernwirkung (Afar), 2009, glass, wood, copper, brass, 55 x 59 x 12". Installation view.

Post-Minimalism was a kind of “feminizing of Minimalism,” curator Lynn Zelevansky has suggested. Though she was citing the movement’s investment in performance, process art, and Conceptualism, her observation might also be applied to numerous female artists working with Minimalist mores today—though they appear less interested in challenging its spartan formal strategies than in wedding them to materials that connote wittily feminine narratives. Such is the case with the four European artists whose works—citing fashion, design, and architecture—constitute this pithy, evocative group show.

Maria Zahle’s 90˚ Dip, 2009, features pieces of paper—dipped in azure paint—curling off the wall like swatches of the Caribbean. The arrangement mimes the gallery’s loose grid of windows opposite, a limber architectural allusion, and connects to Alicja Kwade’s Fernwirkung (Afar), 2009, in which an assortment of materials—green-tinged glass, a branch, poles of copper and brass—lean against the wall, gently bending before they hit the floor. This formal line is taken further in Alice Channer’s Concentration I, 2008, two attenuated works of knife-pleated gold lamé suspended from the ceiling. Delineating razor-sharp lines of dark gold against the air and along the floor, the works accompany Channer’s gorgeous drawings in “Dilate,” 2010, with their ash and gouache circles. Dagmar Heppner’s silhouette-like linocuts from vintage fashion plates (everything excised except for the clothes) and blue-lacquered fabric sculpture—its folds evoking a deflated witch—also distill the fashion world, editing its bodies out of existence.

Though the show invokes granddaddies like Richard Serra and John McCracken, closer in thesis seem grandes dames Roni Horn and Rosemary Trockel, their minimal formalism imbued with narratives that expertly enact or subvert gender expectations. BolteLang’s artists toe a similar line. If the figure is excised from their lean, lustrous works, it never seems far from their thoughts.

— Quinn Latimer