This Week in Venice
Henry Taylor
Darren Bader
Ryoji Ikeda
Enrico David
Yun Hyong-keun
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La Biennale di Venezia
58th International Art Exhibition
May 11-November 24, 2019
Henry Taylor
Participates in
May You Live In Interesting Times
Curated byRalph Rugoff
Describing his painting practice as "voracious," Taylor populates his work with an enormous diversity of subjects, from the destitute to the dazzlingly successful. Whether through intimate portraits of family and friends, or politically-inflected group scenes that splice together different geographies and histories, Taylor's aim is to honestly portray the reality of Black experience and the often-iniquitous workings of American life. The work presented in May You Live In Interesting Times gives a small sample of Taylor's expansive purview.
In a new triptych, Taylor brings together three different histories in order to create one compelling scene: the first panel is based on a portrait of Toussaint Louverture, leader of the Haitian revolution; the second panel, a tribute to Glenn Ligon's Remember the Revolution #1 (2004) from his celebrated series of Richard Pryor paintings; and the third panel is based on a photograph taken of mourners outside a funeral service for Carol Robertson, one of four girls killed in the 1963 16th Street Baptist church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama.
Taylor lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions include the floaters, High Line Art, New York, NY (2017); This Side, That Side, The Mistake Room, Guadalajara, Mexico (2016); They shot my dad, they shot my dad!, Artpace, San Antonio, TX (2015); and a retrospective at MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY (2012). His work has been featured in group exhibitions in museums worldwide including the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2017); Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA (2017); Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent, Belgium (2016); Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, Norway (2016); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2016); Hammer Museum at Art + Practice, Los Angeles, CA (2016); Camden Arts Centre, London, UK (2016); Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY (2013); Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA (2013); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2012); Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (2011); and the Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL (2011).
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Darren Bader
Participates in
May You Live In Interesting Times
Curated by Ralph Rugoff
Darren Bader studied filmmaking and art history at NYU (BFA, 2000). He lives and works in New York and in transit. Bader's conceptual hobbyhorses include: word works, pairings, impossible sculpture, misattribution, object fetishism, and trash sculptures. His exhibitions are often collaborative in nature, exploring and questioning the interconnectedness of seemingly disparate objects through complex (re)arrangements, surprise juxtapositions, and absurd associations.
Institutional solo exhibitions include (@mined_oud), Madre, Naples, Italy (2017-2018); Meaning and Difference, The Power Station, Dallas, TX (2017); chess: relatives, High Line Art, New York, NY (2017); light (and) regret, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Germany (2015); Where Is a Bicycle's Vagina (and Other Inquiries), or Around the Samovar, 1857, Oslo, Norway (2012); and Images, MoMA PS1, New York, NY (2012). Awarded the Calder Prize in 2013, Bader has taken part in numerous group exhibitions and biennials including: Stories of Almost Everyone, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2018); .com/.cn, K11 Art Foundation Pop-up Space, Hong Kong, China (2017); One, No One and One Hundred Thousand, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria (2016); 13éme Biennale de Lyon: La vie moderne, Lyon, France (2015); Under the Clouds: From Paranoia to the Digital Sublime, Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, Portugal (2015); Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2014); Antigrazioso, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2013); Empire State, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, Italy (2013); Greater New York, MoMA PS1, New York, NY (2010); and To Illustrate and Multiply: An Open Book, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2008).
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Ryoji Ikeda
Participates in
May You Live In Interesting Times
Curated by Ralph Rugoff
One of Japan's leading electronic composers and visual artists Ryoji Ikeda focuses on the essential characteristics of sound and light by means of both mathematical precision and mathematical aesthetics. Ikeda has gained a reputation as one of the few international artists working convincingly across both visual and sonic media. He elaborately orchestrates sound, visuals, materials, physical phenomena and mathematical notions into immersive live performances and installations. Alongside of pure musical activity, Ikeda has been working on long-term projects through live performances, installations, books and CDs such as 'datamatics' (2006-); 'test pattern' (2008-); 'spectra' (2001-); 'cyclo,' a collaborative project with Carsten Nicolai; 'superposition' (2012-); 'supersymmetry' (2014-); and 'micro | macro' (2015-).
Ikeda's audiovisual installation data.tron [WUXGA version] was featured in part I of Parergon: Japanese Art of the 1980s and 1990s, curated by Mika Yoshitake, a two-part exhibition at Blum & Poe Los Angeles that opened in the spring of 2019. His experimental concert 100 cymbals premiered in conjunction, presented at the LA Phil in partnership with the Getty.
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Enrico David
Represents Italy
After participating twice in past iterations of the International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Enrico David is representing Italy for the first time this year. His artistic practice has strong ties with memory and the past, both in content and in form. Through his works David presents personal and collective recall, expressing a vast range of emotional states. His work reflects a cultural background that is Italian both in its aesthetic and historico-artistic references, and in materials typical of the tradition of craft, yet reflect a practice matured over the course of years spent abroad, commencing in London where he still lives today. While including a number of works from the past, which will be revisited and updated for Venice, the selection of works on view is made up largely of new productions. From life-size anthropomorphic figures in bronze to small objects and paintings, all these works have been conceived by David specifically for the exhibition.
Blum & Poe's solo exhibition with David in 2018 featured sculpture and hanging fiber works, two facets of the artist's expansive practice that also encompasses drawing, painting, and installation, germinating from the artist's interest in the psychic and corporeal properties of transformation and adaptation.
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Yun Hyong-keun
A Retrospective
Curated by Kim In-hye
Palazzo Fortuny, Venice, Italy
May 11-November 24, 2019
This first European retrospective dedicated to Yun Hyong-keun has been organized in collaboration with the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) in Seoul and is curated by Kim In-hye, a leading expert on the work of the Korean master. The decision to present Yun Hyong-keun's work in Venice is also based on the conviction that his art is in harmony with this city of land and water.
Born in 1928 in Cheongju, North Chungcheong Province, Yun Hyong-keun lived through one of the most traumatic periods of Korean history, suffering great misfortune related to Japanese colonial rule, the Korean War, and the postwar dictatorship. Yun endured four political incarcerations, one for which he was sentenced to death by firing squad, miraculously escaping execution. Only after surviving these harrowing incidents did the artist fully commit himself to making art in 1973, at forty-five years old.
Upon dedicating himself to painting, Yun established his own distinct artistic world, which he called the "gate of heaven and earth." In the definitive series of works that he began in the 1970s, the artist used a wide brush to apply thick blocks of paint to canvases of plain cotton or linen, using deep blue (representing "heaven") and umber (representing "earth"). With these works, Yun succeeded in permeating the values of Korean traditional aesthetics with a lexicon of international contemporary art.
Upon dedicating himself to painting, Yun established his own distinct artistic world, which he called the "gate of heaven and earth." In the definitive series of works that he began in the 1970s, the artist used a wide brush to apply thick blocks of paint to canvases of plain cotton or linen, using deep blue (representing "heaven") and umber (representing "earth"). With these works, Yun succeeded in permeating the values of Korean traditional aesthetics with a lexicon of international contemporary art.Eleven years after his death, this exhibition explores Yun's life and art with unprecedented range and depth, introducing many details and perspectives that have yet to receive such attention. Most notably, the displays feature a wealth of personal materials that have never been publicly shown, including early drawings, a large archive of photos, and strikingly honest excerpts from Yun's private journals. The exhibition is filled with dark and poignant paintings that capture the shattered national psyche of their time, highlighted by the works that Yun furiously painted in the wake of the Gwangju Massacre (1980).