Sculpture (Sculpture)

As with so many other colonized geographies, the ways in which violence has become a natural and expected component of Santo Domingo reflects the forced friendship between the beneficiaries and residues of Modernism. What distinguishes these two communities? What separates them?

Painting (Painting)

A combination of planning and improvisation, control and lack of control, this painting is typical of Amm’s work. With its intimations of the sublime and reference to the works of Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko this painting extends the Romantic and modernist traditions in a perceptive way. These are subtle, slow, delicate paintings that evolve over a period of time—the product of long periods of contemplation.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Part-skyscraper, part-pyramid, part-citadel, this unfinished and ragged twelve-story building stands, incongruously, among the industrial environment of Limete. Towering above this desultory landscape and defying gravitational laws and urban zoning rules, this uncommon architectural proposition forms one of the strangest and most enigmatic landmarks of the city. A giant question mark, it begs for profound reflection on the nature of the city, the heritage of its colonial modernist architecture, the dystopian nature of its infrastructure, and the capacity for utopian urban dreams and lines of flight that it nonetheless continues to generate.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Ciprian Muresan asked a group of protagonists to wear a monk’s robe and copy a certain number of artworks and texts from exhibition catalogues. Here it is no longer the Bible that is reproduced but works by Malevich, Mondrian, Beuys, Duchamp. These artists represent a certain form of utopia in art and are themselves quasi-mythical figures.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Jaali – Horizontal references religious practices in Hungary that were considered as a civil disobedience throughout the 1950s. In their text associated to the work the artists state: “My ancestors on my father’s side were rather elegant Hungarian noblemen—lots of churches, lots of religious education. My parents went to church as a form of civil resistance.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Leyla Stevens’s two-channel video Patiwangi, the death of fragrance is an immersive video installation that addresses erased histories. In the left channel, set in a fine museum storage facility, art conservators unfurl and inspect modernist Balinese paintings, prints, and sculptures. In the right channel, Javanese-Australian dancers, Ade Suharto and Melanie Lane, echo each other’s movements.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Many of Araujo’s works depict reproductions and Libro Ponti II is a recreation of a book on Italian architect Gio Ponti. Ponti designed the Villa Planchart a private, modernist house in Caracas, Venezuela, which at the time it was built in 1956, reflected the emergence of a class increasingly globalized, both culturally and economically. Araujo’s replica of the book thus refers to the role and visibility of Venezuela in circuits of global cultural production.

Photography (Photography)

Gutmann’s photographs Untitled Nob Hill and From the North Tower of the Golden Gate Bridge are some of the oldest pieces in the Kadist Collection and serve as historical anchors for many of the more recent works. Distinctly modernist in style, the photos depict two of San Francisco’s most recognizable sites—the affluent neighborhood of Nob Hill and the iconic Golden Gate Bridge—through extremely estranged angles and balanced compositions. Moreover, these two images are representative of Gutmann’s work inasmuch as they epitomize two of the photographer’s visual obsessions: the automobile and the city of San Francisco.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Although seemingly unadorned at first glance, Yang Xinguang’s sculptural work Phenomena (2009) employs minimalist aesthetics as a means of gesturing towards the various commonalities and conflicts between civilization and the natural world. Comprised of rudimentary planks of wood hammered together into a rectangular form, Yang’s work uses reclaimed materials from everyday life and seems deliberately in conversation with Arte Povera, the art movement that originated in Italy during the late 1960s where practitioners produced art from found and common materials as an act of resistance against the decided commercialization of the art world through market economies. Yang, by extension, pays close attention to his materials in attempt to release the forms within them rather than impose his own.

Installation (Installation)

Adam Smith