Mark Westall founder & editorial director of FAD Magazine picks five exhibitions to see as you jet around the world. Featuring New York, Paris, Berlin, London & Singapore the places and exhibitions to see for the Jet-Set this Autumn / Fall.
1 Thomas Houseago: Night Sea Journey
Lévy Gorvy Dayan has just opened Thomas Houseago: Night Sea Journey, a major exhibition that sees the artist pushing boundaries—material and psychological—as he sprawls intricate visions across three floors of the gallery’s Beaux-Arts townhouse.
Night Sea Journey marks Houseago’s first exhibition in New York City in ten years. It showcases new paintings and sculptures that realize the artist’s recent battles with trauma, from which he emerged with a greater understanding of his powers. The result is a raw odyssey from darkness to light that culminates in a symphonic room-spanning tapestry on the gallery’s skylit top floor, created en plein air in Malibu, like the rest of the exhibition. Night Sea Journey includes a film on Houseago directed by Andrew Dominik and produced by Saul Germaine, PJ van Sandwijk, and Paul Kahil.
Thomas Houseago: Night Sea Journey – October 19th, 2024 Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York
2 Peter Kogler
Peter Kogler is a pioneering artist in the field of computer-assisted creation. Employing cutting-edge technology for the past thirty years, the artist has made use of a series of recurring motifs, materialized in different forms: bi- and tri-dimensional prints, sculpture, furniture, wallpaper, lighting fixtures, collages and other installations. Since the start of his career, his iconography has been made up of ants, brains, terrestrial globes, lightbulbs and wavy lines, and is a metaphor for networks, the constant stream of information and social ties.
Peter Kogler – Nov 2nd, 2024, Galerie Mitterrand, Paris
3 Albert Oehlen: Schweinekubismus
Known for his exploration of the means and methods of art, Albert Oehlen often applies self-imposed formal constraints to critically examine the history and conventions of contemporary art, whilst giving himself something to paint against. He combines expressive gesture with a surrealist attitude, overriding the search for constant forms and meanings.
In his paintings, Oehlen takes up details and isolated themes from existing groups of works, including the tree motif which has fascinated the artist as a form and system since the early 1980s, the ‘John Graham Remixes’ (1997–ongoing), the ‘u.b.B.’ paintings (2020–2022), and the ‘Ömega Man’ series (2021–ongoing). This marks an inward-facing shift in Oehlen’s practice as his paintings become self-referential. Here, the act of transferring the images into a new state is of greater importance than the source material. There is no separation between abstraction and figuration, improvisation and control; there are only the endless possibilities of the medium.
The majority of the paintings are rendered with a grid-like structure, giving the works the appearance of mosaic pictures. The images’ fragmentation varies: some grid-patterns are more regular, while others vary in size and shape. This interruption of the surface provides a reference to the title of the exhibition, which translates to ‘Pig Cubism’. By breaking up the pictorial motif, the Cubists created a way of coding human space in the context of its radical flattening. A group of four large Untitled paintings can be seen as a particularly pronounced form of this structured fragmentation. Reworking the same source in different distortions, the paintings encompass the self-imposed constraints within which the artist operates.
Albert Oehlen, Schweinekubismus, – 2nd November 2024, Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin
4 Ahren Warner: i love you, you say / i know, they say
Earlier this month, Season 4 Episode 6 celebrated the opening of i love you, you say / i know, they say, featuring Ahren Warner’s new body of velvet photographic works and complementary three-channel film.
The photographs might seem to document intimate or ecstatic moments, they are in fact quite painstakingly, and artificially, constructed: composited and manipulated from multiple still frames of film footage to produce images that advertise the calculated artifice of their own hedonism, emotion and seemingly raw experience.
Ahren Warner i love you, you say / i know, they say – October 5th 2024, Season 4 Episode 6, London
5 Lin Aojie Playing it Safe in 2023, Praying for Wealth in 2024
The exhibition brings together recent works by the artist, showcasing witty insights gathered from his observations of the art industry, the society, and the world at large.
Marking his debut exhibition in Southeast Asia, the self-proclaimed Southeast Asian artist (Lin is based in Guangzhou) was inspired to adapt the iconic political cartoon “The Situation in the Far East” with a contemporary twist to create his new iPad painting “My Global South”. His distinctive style is perfectly demonstrated through the cartoon-like aesthetics, historical references, layered symbolisms, as well as reflections and observations of the art world and its relations to the wider society. These elements continue to manifest themselves across the other works in the exhibition in various forms.
As the exhibition title suggests, the works presented reflect the human condition as perceived by the artist, most notably through the pair of video works created this year and last. A series of conversations across the two videos reveal the inner desires and the fundamentals of human nature, with “Ultimate Super Dodgy Talk” (2024) hidden within the gallery and only accessible to the ones who are brave enough to take the extra step.
Lin Aojie Playing it Safe in 2023, Praying for Wealth in 2024- Nov 10th, 2024, ShanghART, Singapore
