Sculpture (Sculpture)

Martinez’s sculpture A meditation on the possibility… of romantic love or where you goin’ with that gun in your hand , Bobby Seale and Huey Newton discuss the relationship between expressionism and social reality in Hitler’s painting depicts the legendary Black Panther leaders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. By using Carrara marble, a material usually associated with heroic public sculptures, Martinez casts the history of African-American revolutionaries into the artistic tradition of monumentality. Like the artist’s earlier work included in the 1993 Whitney Biennial, an interactive piece made up with pins that read, “I CAN’T IMAGINE EVER WANTING TO BE WHITE,” A meditation on the possibility… continues Martinez’s effort to expose cultural contradictions and increase public awareness.

Photography (Photography)

For I use to eat lemon meringue pie till I overloaded on my pancreas with sugar and passed out; It seemed to be a natural response to a society of abundance (1978), also known as the Bodybuilder series, Martinez asked male bodybuilding competitors to pose in whatever position felt “most natural.” They are obviously trained in presenting their ambitiously carved physiques, but their facial expressions seem comparatively unstudied. Against a bare white background, the men appear unexpectedly vulnerable, caught between performance and rehearsal, public and private. While they present themselves deliberately as exemplars of strength, they also inadvertently expose something about the value system that underlies their endeavors—whatever drove them to keep building by tearing tissue, and whatever makes flexing feel like the most honest pose possible.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

If Only God Had Invented Coca Cola Sooner! Or, The Death of My Pet Monkey

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Her work Al final del arcoiris (At the end of the rainbow, 2015) is a bundle of bills from Chile, Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, arranged by color to form a tight spiraling rainbow held close with a rubber band. Here, Martinez uses these various currencies to gesture towards questions of capital and value, the accumulation of wealth, and regional economies. Beneath the surface of her playful visual propositions, Martinez asks us to consider not only the monetary costs of international goods, but also the real, human consequences of a global economic culture that privileges some and devastates others.

Painting (Painting)

As he investigates the forms that slavery took through different events that occurred during the sixteenth century in the Huasteca region of Mexico, Noé Martínez tells, in a non-linear narrative, the history of human trafficking in Relación de tráfico de personas 1525-1533 I (Study of Trafficking of Persons 1525–1533 I) . Both the departure of Huasteco Indians from the Americas, and the arrival of Africans from Cape Verde, Angola, Congo and Mozambique unravel in Martinez work as a story that has remained sealed in the colonial archives, and that continues under different guises in contemporary times. Relación de tráfico de personas 1525-1533 I is part of a series made of interventions in tanned leathers that refer to the exchange of human beings for pack animals and cattle in the Caribbean Sea.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Her 2015 work Orión is a black flag-like cloth with glow-in-the-dark symbols embroidered in the shape of the constellation. In the place of stars, Martínez has substituted the logos of international corporations and entities that use stars as their symbol; celestial navigation commanded by the logic of international corporations. Easily spotted is the smiling face of the Carl’s Jr. / Hardee’s logo, the three-pronged Mercedes-Benz emblem, Walmart’s six-pointed asterisk, and the starry cluster of the Subaru shield.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

escenario chacana by Claudia Martínez Garay is a sculptural work composed of a frame-like structure that contains a series of ceramic pieces. It references the Chakana, an Andean cross that encompasses the different levels of existence (known as Pachas) and sacred elements contained in the Indigenous cosmologies of the region. It often appears in the geometrical motifs of textiles and ceramics.

Painting (Painting)

Daniel Boyd’s work WTEIA3 is part of a series of paintings that reference the stick charts used by indigenous communities on the Marshall Islands. These charts were made in order to navigate the Pacific ocean by canoe and thus crucially depict ocean swell patterns. These highly individualised maps were rarely intended for mass use but instead for memorising, and transmitting between the community, the maps were not taken to sea but instead memorised in advance.

Painting (Painting)

Parrot Drawings or Paintings look like children’s drawings and seem quite innocent. The parrot in both the Garden of Eden and the harems are associated with the symbol of purity and innocence. These symbols are found in Renaissance painting, especially in the Annunciations or the Virgins and child and later in Flemish portraits.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Birdstones is a series of flat concrete slabs made from moldings of different shapes, each with two small holes. They stand vertically in space in a precarious stance. Heavy by the density of the concrete, they are also airy and floating.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

To make the video installation Soft Staycation (Gaze Track Edit) , the artist, playing the role of ‘job creator’, hired a group of unemployed and expat freelancers through Craigslist to watch a 30 minute compilation of national tourism ads. These ads, which are generally sponsored by various publicly funded tourism boards and screened in airports for example, were found on the Internet by Keller. He used a gaze-tracking camera to measure the eye movements of the people participating in the experiment.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Illusion of Everything (2014) follows an unseen pedestrian as he navigates the Australian city of Melbourne’s dense and intricate network of laneways. The video begins with the pedestrian traversing a seemingly idyllic ivy lined stone and concrete thoroughfare. As his pace begins to accelerate, the camera follows him with greater urgency, slowly settling and become stable again as his pace decelerates.

Installation (Installation)

In the hologram “Mano con hojas” (”Hand with Leaves”, 2013), nature is portrayed simultaneously as an interconnected system of processes and the essence of the universe. A change in the understanding of nature challenges the understanding of our own natures. The visual metaphor of the human hand enmeshed and inextricably entangled with leaves suggests that humans cannot be divorced from nature, and moreover that they are always engaging with the problematic of overtaking nature or being overtaken by it.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The artist films a horse dressage session at night, in a dimly lit manège. In this video the artist recalls the importance of traditional equestrian portraits in Spanish painting and relates to the repetitive passage between the rider and the mount. This effect of repetition is accentuated by the video played in a loop and the fixed framing of the image shot from the ground, with body posture and dressage themes as a method for training and obedience.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material. For this project, Oppenheim procured the original glass negatives, which had been damaged over time, from the archives of this newspaper. She then printed the negatives as is, highlighting the multitude of physical flaws that had ‘spoiled’ the negatives.

Photography (Photography)

The Royal House of Allure is a name of a safe house on mainland Lagos where members of the queer community in need of boarding, due to various circumstances, live together. These houses are more than just places of survival; they are a physical embodiment of radical queer expression that encourage solidarity. The Royal House of Allure was initially conceived following an investigation of how social media influences celebrity culture.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

David Gustav Cramer’s are composed of simple, descriptive texts accompanied by found photographs, letters or other materials. The elements juxtaposed in each work operate like the lines of a Haiku. It is the tension between them that opens space for thought.

Painting (Painting)

Federico Herrero’s energetic paintings reflect his experiences on the streets of his native San José, Costa Rica, and in the surrounding tropical landscape. Rooted in Central American folklore, politics, and culture, his works often move beyond the canvas onto the wall or into the streets. In Á rbol y Pelicao (Tree and Pelican, 2009), a tree with cartoonlike creatures drawn in pen beside it emerges from a field of bright swaths of color.

Installation (Installation)

Good life (2007) is an installation displaying letters, documents, photographs and objects from a man named Joseph Carrier, and appropriated by artist Danh Vo. The installation features a series of small square vitrines, inset, dark and precisely spot-lit. Inside these are framed photographs, mostly black and white, of young Asian men, taken, as the titles on the neat brass name plates tell us, in Vietnam in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Towhead n’Ganga, enclosed in darkness, lorded over by the sexualized folded high priestless form reflects many of Kelley’s works, in both its compositional and semantic qualities. The drawing on wood, the popcorn mixture, and the title all manifest a bumpy fullness, a “more-is-more” conflation between supposedly eternal spirituality and everyday stuff. The work’s title points to a serious timelessness completely belied by the materials.

Painting (Painting)

The five works included in the Kadist Collection are representative of Pettibon’s complex drawings which are much more narrative than comics or cartoon. The images allude to recurring topics, such as the superhero (present both in Untitled Superman and No title without the comics ), a book cover (his literary sources), or a mushroom cloud. Inspired by the writings of William Faulkner, Daniel Defoe, Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce, Pettibon’s sophisticated, witty drawings combine image and text to explore the gamut of American popular culture.

Painting (Painting)

The five works included in the Kadist Collection are representative of Pettibon’s complex drawings which are much more narrative than comics or cartoon. The images allude to recurring topics, such as the superhero (present both in Untitled Superman and No title without the comics ), a book cover (his literary sources), or a mushroom cloud. Inspired by the writings of William Faulkner, Daniel Defoe, Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce, Pettibon’s sophisticated, witty drawings combine image and text to explore the gamut of American popular culture.

Installation (Installation)

Corey McCorkle’s 2016 installation Pendulum is developed around the Cavendish family and their role in importing bananas to Europe. Cavendish bananas were named after William Cavendish, the 6th Duke of Devonshire. In 1834, Cavendish received a shipment of bananas from Mauritius, and developed these bananas in the greenhouses of Chatsworth House with his gardener Sir Joseph Paxton, and were later given to missionary John Williams to take to Samoa.

Installation (Installation)

Sweet Jesus is a sound installation by Lutz Bacher that consists of a found recording of James Earl Jones’ iconic voice reciting biblical genealogy from Matthew, Book 1. Lutz has edited the recording by slowing it down slightly and adding background sound from the same recording. In Lutz’s edit, these are all the names of the ancestors of Jesus leading up to Joseph, but she leaves Jesus out of it, then reverses chronologically.

Installation (Installation)

This work emphasises Kitty Kraus’s involvement with process, with alchemical transformations associated with Post-Minimalist aesthetics, Arte Povera, Joseph Beuys and Robert Smithson. The loss of form or its dissolution is at the heart of the series of lamps encapsulated in blocs of ice with liquid progressively spreading on the floor. The bulb is embedded in the ice.

Painting (Painting)

The five works included in the Kadist Collection are representative of Pettibon’s complex drawings which are much more narrative than comics or cartoon. The images allude to recurring topics, such as the superhero (present both in Untitled Superman and No title without the comics ), a book cover (his literary sources), or a mushroom cloud. Inspired by the writings of William Faulkner, Daniel Defoe, Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce, Pettibon’s sophisticated, witty drawings combine image and text to explore the gamut of American popular culture.

Painting (Painting)

His Deck Painting I recalls the simplistic stripes of conceptual artist Daniel Buren, or the minimal lines of twentieth century abstract painting, but is in reality a readymade, fashioned from repurposed fabric of deck chairs. Alexandre da Cunha reinvents found objects in surprising ways that combine the material characteristics of Arte Povera with the concerns and techniques of painting. Da Cunha’s work often features flags—either as a found material per se or as a constructed form—that reflect the artist’s interest in issues of nationality, governmental politics, allegiance, and culture.

Painting (Painting)

The five works included in the Kadist Collection are representative of Pettibon’s complex drawings which are much more narrative than comics or cartoon. The images allude to recurring topics, such as the superhero (present both in Untitled Superman and No title without the comics ), a book cover (his literary sources), or a mushroom cloud. Inspired by the writings of William Faulkner, Daniel Defoe, Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce, Pettibon’s sophisticated, witty drawings combine image and text to explore the gamut of American popular culture.

Painting (Painting)

The five works included in the Kadist Collection are representative of Pettibon’s complex drawings which are much more narrative than comics or cartoon. The images allude to recurring topics, such as the superhero (present both in Untitled Superman and No title without the comics ), a book cover (his literary sources), or a mushroom cloud. Inspired by the writings of William Faulkner, Daniel Defoe, Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce, Pettibon’s sophisticated, witty drawings combine image and text to explore the gamut of American popular culture.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Pudic Relation between Machine and Plant shows a looped scene where a robotic hand touches a “sensitive plant” — Mimosa Pudica, a species characteristic for closing on itself when touched. The name of the plant was derived from Carl Linnaeus sexual taxonomy of plants: pudica referring both to the external sexual organs, shyness and modesty. In a poem written by Erasmus Darwin (Charles Darwin’s grandfather) titled The Loves of the Plants (1789), this plant is associated, jokingly, with British Botanist Joseph Banks’s famous sexual adventures during his botanical expedition to the tropics.