Willkommen: Hier finden Sie die deutsche Fassung des Briefes aus Berlin

Welcome to the Letter from Berlin!

This month we take Ann Veronica Janssens’ two exhibitions in the south of France and her project at the Panthéon in Paris as point of departure to present exhibitions in France, Italy and at the Adriatic Coast, as summer traveling season has begun. We also include recently opened exhibitions in Berlin and hope you will join us next week for the opening of Summer ’22, a group exhibition with works by Sarah Buckner, Ann Veronica Janssens, Sojourner Truth Parsons, Cemile Sahin, Julia Scher, Sun Yitian and Tao Hui. Ugo Rondinone's major exhibition at the Schirn in Frankfurt concludes our review. A podcast recommendation, Liam Gillick on the Bonn exhibition Color as Program, and a selection of recent books round up this month’s Letter from Berlin.

We hope you have a wonderful summer!

Ann Veronica Janssens’ work foregrounds the body’s perception of the world and itself in it. She often uses light, natural optical phenomena or glass as a medium. Beautifully made, her works exude the impression of great simplicity yet create vivid experiences of the act of seeing, evoking a heightened awareness of the changeability and fleetingness of the individual perception.

It comes as no surprise then that the light of the south of France, the Midi, which has held its own fascination for artists for centuries—think of van Gogh’s shock encountering its intensity, Cezanne’s glistening contours and Matisse’s bright color—plays a significant role in the conception of these projects. Both at Avignon’s Collection Lambert and the Fondation CAB in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Janssens engages with natural light, flooding the exhibition space, or in the latter, modulating it.

In her magisterial 2013 monograph on the artist, Endless Andless, art historian Mieke Bal speaks about the transformative experience of encountering Janssens’ work. To Bal there are important political implications in the way Janssens works can change how we see the world, ourselves and others in it, but there is also what she calls “an adventure of dazzlement.” Bal writes:

“Ann Veronica Janssens works with what escapes her, not to grasp it, but rather to experiment with its "ungraspability." In this respect, she is an artist with the attitude of a scientist—in the best of cases of scientific practice. She travels the world in order to attend events such as eclipses; historic and contemporary attempts to capture sun light and warmth; natural phenomena that increase the difficulty of seeing or, on the contrary, enhance what seeing is (such as the mist of volcanic Iceland); and artificial, experimental situations such as tests in laboratories. She seeks to push back the limits of perception, to multiply the participation of the senses in events of perception, and to turn the routine of drab, everyday life into an adventure of dazzlement. She does not resort to representation. Instead, in her work, Janssens creates the conditions for a passage from one reality to another.” (Mieke Bal, Endless Andless, Bloomsbury, 2013. For ordering information see below.)

—Isabelle Moffat

Ann Veronica Janssens
entre le crépuscule et le ciel
Collection Lambert
5 Rue Violette
84000 Avignon
Through October 9, 2022
www.collectionlambert.com

This spring/summer 2022 Ann Veronica Janssens was invited for a dual exhibition at the Collection Lambert and the Fondation CAB (Saint-Paul-de-Vence). In Avignon she has created an installation on the first floor of the Hôtel de Montfaucon that responds to a previously unseen selection of artworks by Dan Flavin, on show in the ground floor gallery spaces. In Saint-Paul-de-Vence, at the other extremity of Provence, she has created a situation in which her work mirrors the Avignon installation and resonates with the history of the two exhibition sites.

The project was conceived between France and Belgium, over the course of long conversations during journeys on the roads of southern France, driving from one end of Provence to the other, through landscapes affected by climatic variations. The shifting, heady Provence light was a constant presence, influencing the experience of the spaces envisaged for the exhibitions and the route connecting them.

The title of the project emerged quite naturally from the singular work of poetry La Postérité du Soleil, fruit of the meeting of René Char, Albert Camus, and Henriette Grindat on the Luberon roads, not far from the Papal City. The presence of light in these photographs and texts, its affect upon the land, objects, and beings, whose existence it reveals, would constitute the starting point of a new journey in the company of the artist and her work in the galleries of the Collection Lambert and the Fondation CAB.

On the first floor of the Hôtel de Montfaucon, Ann Veronica Janssens has chosen to reveal the twenty-six windows that punctuate the route of the visitor, letting the light traverse the space from one side to the other. Through a series of sculptures, installations, and floor paintings, in which light is experienced in different states – reflected, absorbed, captured, transformed – situations in which our affected bodies and minds constantly navigate between contemplation and immersion, Ann Veronica Janssens invites us to an experience in which the tension between dissolution and resolution is indefinitely reinvented, beside us and with us. “Her use of light as a tool, material, science and symbol of the space that we share takes us out of our routine relationship with it”, to borrow the words of Mieke Bal, and invents the possibility of new relationships, in perpetual renewal.

By naming the Saint-Paul-de-Vence installation 5766 chemin des Trious – the exact address of the exhibition – Ann Veronica Janssens follows happily in the footsteps of certain key artists of the 1960s and 70s new avant-garde, of whom the Fondation CAB holds some important works. Giving the precise location of the activation, the encounter, and the experience in store, as the title of the exhibition, is to summon memories of Stanley Brouwn’s actions or sculptures (notably the portraits he makes using a metal rod exactly the same size as the subject); On Kawara’s Date Paintings and Locations in which the lone statement of geographical coordinates invites us to mentally visualise a determined site; or even the raw materiality of Dan Flavin’s light installations, whose famous mantra “It is what it is,” brings the work back to the exact reality of its presence, alongside us, in the spaces it occupies.

The exhibition’s catalogue of both exhibitions is published with Actes Sud editions.

Ann Veronica Janssens
23:56:04
Panthéon
Place du Panthéon
75005 Paris
Through October 30, 2022
www.paris-pantheon.fr

23:56:04, a new site-specific work by Ann Veronica Janssens is on view through October 30 at the Panthéon in Paris. Installed underneath the landmark’s dome, the work invites the visitors to rediscover the historical site and its architectural space.

For 23:56:04, Ann Veronica Janssens placed a large-scale mirror on the floor beneath the constantly swinging Foucault pendulum – a scientific device demonstrating the Earth’s rotation that was introduced to the building’s interior in 1851. The mirror reflects the moving pendulum as well as the monumental architectural features of the Panthéon, its dome, friezes, balustrades, colonnades, and frescoes.

This deep, almost abyssal reflection submerses the visitors into the majestic volume of the building and stages the physical effect of vertigo. With this minimal yet impressive architectural and perceptual intervention, the artist seeks to newly reconfigure visitors’ experience of this great Parisian monument.

A catalog is forthcoming.

artmonte-carlo 2022
Booth 08
Grimaldi Forum
10, Avenue Princesse Grace
98000 Monaco
Through July 16, 2022
Further information

Join us at our booth at artmonte carlo where we present works by Angela Bulloch, Etienne Chambaud, Simon Fujiwara, Liam Gillick, Ann Veronica Janssens, Isa Melsheimer
Philippe Parreno, Sojourner Truth Parsons and Ugo Rondinone

At l'Esplanade, Angela Bulloch's outdoor sculpture Pentagon Totem: High Five is on view throughout the fair.

If you wish to receive a dossier, or should you have any questions about our presentation at artmonte carlo, please contact Julia Séguier seguier@estherschipper.com

Sculpture Park
With Gabriel Kuri and Isa Melsheimer
Domaine du Muy
83490 Le Muy
Ongoing
www.domainedumuy.com
Only by appointment: info@domainedumuy.com

In the Sculpture Park of Domaine du Muy works by Gabriel Kuri and Isa Melsheimer are on view by appointment.

Gabriel Kuri's Untitled (100%), 2011, is composed of four parts, each of which represents a quarter of a circle. Together, they form the '100%' referred to in the title. The position of the elements is important because the artist imagines them in both a realistic and symbolic dimension. Some are placed one against the other, piled on top of each other, stacked or grouped together. Kuri's metal sculptures create a link between the formal language of modernist sculpture, and the conventions of representing economic and statistical data in curves, pie charts and other diagrams.

Isa Melsheimer, Domestic Landscape and Affinities, 2014, is a work created by formwork, a technique more common to the construction of buildings which involves filling a mould with cement. Its multi-level form includes flat surfaces on which plants or objects could be placed, or members of the public may sit down. The composition of the work recalls the Brutalist architecture of the 1960s and 1970s. The work forms part of the artist's research into architectural forms, and more specifically the legacy of modernism and its descendants.

Echo2: a Carte Blanche to Philippe Parreno with Arca, Nicolas Becker, and Tino Sehgal
Rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris
Through September 26, 2022

as part of

Une Seconde d’éternité
With Ryan Gander, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno,
Anri Sala, Tino Sehgal, among others.
Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection
Through January 2, 2023
www.pinaultcollection.com

For Echo2, Philippe Parreno has transformed the Bourse de Commerce Rotunda into an almost weightless territory, one that is outside of the world, outside of time. In it he brings together different temporalities and climates—the present of a summer season and the undefined future of a winter to come. The various elements become indistinct and intermingled: air and light; past, present, and future; and reality and fiction, generating new kinds of sensations affecting the visitors’ bodies and bending the structure towards an immaterial state.

For this new season bringing together summer and winter, the need for the here and now, and the search for the infinite, elusive though it may be, Une seconde d’éternité (A Second of Eternity) takes visitors on a journey inspired by the question and experience of time, through a selection of artworks from the Pinault Collection.

Lines of Flight
With Isa Melsheimer
Centre international d'art et du paysage
Vassivière Island
Through November 6, 2022
www.ciapiledevassiviere.com

Lines of Flight, with Isa Melsheimer, is a collective exhibition around ideas of movement across territorial and political boundaries. Drawing together natural and anthropogenic processes, the works on view question notions of native and non-native species, climate change, and voluntary and involuntary migrations. From 19th-century scientific expeditions that facilitated imperial expansion, to the transnational movement of plants, to the passage of migrants through territories, the exhibition proposes a series of encounters between plants, animals and humans in all our varied states of restlessness.

Isa Melsheimer has conceived of a new Wardian Case for the exhibition.

Angela Bulloch
Perpendicular Paradigm
Musée d'Arts de Nantes
10 Rue Georges Clemenceau
44000 Nantes
Through August 30, 2022
www.museedartsdenantes.fr

Under the title Perpendicular Paradigm, Angela Bulloch's major solo exhibition of new and recent work continues at the Musée d’arts de Nantes through August 30. Reconstructing the constellations in the starry sky above the museum at the 2021 summer solstice, the artist has installed Firmamental Square, a monumental Night Sky work, in the museum's atrium.

Geometric sculptures made of wood, metal or synthetic marble populate the exhibition spaces along with their shadow wall paintings. In addition, a new two–channel video animation presents a 3D version of the very exhibition on view, showing a slice of a meta-reality, an exhibition within the exhibition with two invented characters roaming the exhibition; one is apparently human and the other is a planetary system made up of elements of the artist's work.

A catalog of the exhibition has been published by Bernard Chauveau – available here.

burn shine fly
Ugo Rondinone

Extended through September 24, 2022

Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista
San Polo, 2454
30125 Venice
Vaporetto: San Tomà
Tuesday – Saturday, 11am – 6 pm

At www.burnshinefly.com you can also find Ugo Rondinone's descriptions of the works included in this solo presentation at the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evengelista.

Here his text on the figures suspended in the chapel.

In 2009, I made casts of 14 nude dancers in contemplative positions. The bodies were made with a mix of soil and transparent wax. The soil was sourced from all seven continents. Last year, I started a new video installation called ‘burn to shine’. Its shows 18 dancers dancing around a fire in the desert from sunset to sunrise. Similar to the Greek mythology of the phoenix, the immortal bird that cyclically regenerates, the dancers merge with the fire and obtain by sunrise a new life cycle. The seven flying bodies are also casts of dancers. Their bodies are camouflaged as cloudy skies. The flying body-clouds mark the end of a trilogy where the human body merges with the natural elements: soil, fire, water, and air. - ugo rondinone

A fully illustrated exhibition catalogue will be published by Skira in Fall 2022.

Glasstress 2022 – State of Mind
With Ryan Gander
Berengo Studio
Fondazione Berengo Art Space
Campiello della Pescheria 4
Murano, Venice
Through November 27, 2022
www.berengo.com

In a world of continual change, of constant upheaval, and unexpected turns how do we make up our mind? Glasstress – State of Mind presents the seventh edition of the famed exhibition of contemporary art in glass. Originally launched back in 2009 as a collateral event of the Venice Biennale the exhibition has continued to attract international artists and designers eager to experiment with the medium of glass.

Uncombed, Unforeseen, Unconstrained
With David Claerbout
Conservatorio di Musica Benedetto Marcello, Venice
Parasol Unit at 59th Biennale Arte di Venezia
Through November 27, 2022
www.parasol-unit.org

For the duration of the 59th Biennale Arte di Venezia, through 27 November 2022, Parasol unit presents Uncombed, Unforeseen, Unconstrained, a group exhibition of works by eleven international contemporary visual artists at the Conservatorio di Musica Benedetto Marcello in Venice.

The exhibition brings together diverse and thought-provoking works and includes some interdisciplinary collaboration between music and visual art. The artists, Darren Almond, Oliver Beer, Rana Begum with Hyetal, Julian Charrière, David Claerbout, Bharti Kher, Arghavan Khosravi, Teresa Margolles, Si On, Martin Puryear, and Rayyane Tabet, all work in different media to address a disparate range of topics. Yet, common to them all is a deep concern for our world and a preoccupation with a comparable phenomenon that in scientific terms is defined as entropy, that is the measure of disorder, randomness, and unpredictability within a system.

Anri Sala
Transfigured
GAMeC
Palazzo della Ragione
24129 Bergamo
Through October 16, 2022
www.gamec.it

Adopting an operating method exploited previously on other occasions, for his solo exhibition Transfigured at the Palazzo della Ragione, Anri Sala interprets the architectural context “not as a mere container but as an active organ.” In the artist’s view, every physical space may enshrine values and memories that, from time to time, interaction with the artwork may reactivate. In the case of the Sala delle Capriate, this dynamic is further developed (with a sort of amplification of the effect) in relation to the centuries-old history of the building—the first municipal palazzo in Italy, then transformed into the Palace of Justice under the Republic of Venice—and the ancient frescoes it contains.

Projected onto a 16-meter long suspended screen, Time No Longer focuses on the image of a record player floating in a space station. Anchored only to the electrical power cable, the turntable plays a new arrangement of Quartet for the End of Time: the composition by French musician Olivier Messiaen, considered to be his most famous musical work, composed in captivity. During World War II, Messiaen (1908-1992) was captured in Verdun and taken prisoner in a German camp. It was during this time that he wrote Quartet for the End of Time, presenting it for the first time in 1941—together with three other musicians who had also been imprisoned—before an audience of only prisoners and guards. In particular, for the creation of Time No Longer, Sala drew inspiration from the quartet’s only solo movement, “The Abyss of the Birds,” written for clarinet and played by his Algerian comrade and musician Henri Akoka.

On the occasion of the exhibition, the first volume of a new series of essays will be published by NERO and GAMeC, linked to the exhibition projects staged at Palazzo della Ragione in Bergamo. The author of the first essay will be the French philosopher and musicologist Peter Szendy.

TOGETHER. Interact – Interplay – Interfere
with Ari Benjamin Meyers
Kunst Meran
Laubengasse 163
39012 Meran
Through September 9, 2022
www.kunstmeranoarte.org

After more than two years of the pandemic and social distancing, Kunst Meran returns to celebrate and critically investigate togetherness and different forms of social interaction. The exhibition explores the divergent ways in which community is expressed through art. On the one hand it brings together works that show that we can go beyond our individual selves and achieve significant aims as a group, while on the other addressing the tendency of groups to suppress diversity and individuality. During the exhibition the audience is invited to leave its comfort zone and take an active role, experiencing community in a direct way.

Curated by Judith Waldmann, the TOGETHER. Interact – Interplay – Interfere includes works by Adrian Piper, Anna Maria Maiolino, Ari Benjamin Meyers, Bart Heynen, Brave New Alps and MAGARI, Christian Niccoli, Daniel Spoerri, Francis Alÿs, Franz Erhard Walther, Hannes Egger, Isabell Kamp, Jivan Frenster, Karin Schmuck, Marina Abramović and Ulay, melanie bonajo, Norma Jeane, Officinadïdue, Rirkrit Tiravanija, SPIT!, Tania Bruguera, and Yoko Ono.

Il video rende felici (Video Makes You Happy. Video Art In Italy)
with Rosa Barba
Palazzo delle Esposizioni di Roma
Via Nazionale, 194
00184 Rome
Through September 4, 2022
www.palazzoesposizioni.it

Video Makes You Happy - Video Art in Italy, curated by Valentina Valentini, is an exhibition split between two venues, the Palazzo delle Esposizioni and the Galleria d’Arte Moderna, that focuses on the production of art videos and arthouse cinema in Italy between the late 1960s and the start of the new millennium.

The exhibition unfolds amid the myriad formats on display ranging from single-channel video to video installations, multimedial videos, interactive videos and apparatuses designed to review the works’ productive and historical processes. The project involves over 100 artists who, over the past sixty years, have used the electronic and digital device in its multiple aspects as a priority medium for audiovisual research and experimentation.

Promoting exemplary and pioneering initiatives, Italy has always been an artistic and cultural focal point for video experimentation in terms of variety, quality and international scope.

Afterimage
With Thomas Demand
MAXXI L’AQUILA
Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo
Piazza Santa Maria Paganica, 15
67100 L’Aquila AQ
Through February 19, 2023
www.maxxilaquila.art

On July 2, Afterimage, an exhibition curated by Bartolomeo Pietromarchi and Alessandro Rabottini opened at MAXXI L’AQUILA. It features 26 international artists from different generations and includes newly commissioned pieces and site-specific installations, historical works belonging to the MAXXI Collection together with monographic rooms, with works spanning from the 1960s to the present day. Afterimage is a meditation upon memory and metamorphosis and looks at the unpredictable forms – both material and metaphorical – in which what has vanished silently endures within spaces, bodies, and meanings. Encompassing a wide variety of media, Afterimage includes contemporary and historical experimentations in photography and film, spatial interventions, paintings, and sculptures, and explores the intersections of fragmented iconographies, mutable materials, perceptual memories, and morphing bodies.

Afterimage includes works by Francis Alÿs, Francesco Arena, Stefano Arienti, Benni Bosetto, Mario Cresci, June Crespo, Thomas Demand, Paolo Gioli, Massimo Grimaldi, Bronwyn Katz, Esther Kläs, Oliver Laric, Tala Madani, Anna Maria Maiolino, Marisa Merz, Luca Maria Patella, Hana Miletić, Luca Monterastelli, Frida Orupabo, Pietro Roccasalva, Mario Schifano, Elisa Sighicelli, Paloma Varga Weisz, Danh Vo, Dominique White, He Xiangyu.

The title of the exhibition refers to the optical illusion of the residual image, which happens when a visual stimulus generates an impression on the retina that remains even after the stimulus has disappeared, as happens, for example, with the camera flash.

Hito Steyerl
Virtual Leonardo's Submarine

grey) (area – space for contemporary and media art
Korčula Town Museum, Korčula
July 17 – 25, 2022
7pm–9pm
www.sivazona.hr

During the Locarno Film Festival, Steyerl's Virtual Leonardo’s Submarine will be on view at
Il Rivellino, Locarno
August 3 – 13, 2022
www.locarnofestival.ch

Hito Steyerl's Virtual Leonardo's Submarine can be experiences at the Korčula Town Museum in July and in August during the Locarno Film Festival. Also in Locarno, on Thursday, August 11, 1.30pm Hito Steyerl will discuss her work during an open public conversation with USI Locarno Film Festival Professor for the Future of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts Kevin B. Lee at the Forum @ Spazio Cinema.

The VR experience of Virtual Leonardo's Submarine is a reworking of Leonardo’s Submarine, originally conceived in 2019 as a video environment for the 58th Venice Biennale.

Upon entering the virtual space, viewers find themselves floating under water, surrounded by fish, seaweed, and coral. The artist’s avatar, outfitted in full PEOPLE gear, swims alongside. Leonardo’s Submarine is projected on three virtual curved screens that surround the viewer. The three-channel video draws a parallel between Leonardo da Vinci’s primitive submarine—first sketched in the early 16th century—and Leonardo S.p.A., formerly Leonardo-Finmeccanica, an Italian global high-tech company and one of the key players in aerospace, defense and security. Leonardo S.p.A, partially owned by the Italian government through the Ministry of Economy and Finance, has supplied weapons used by the Turkish armed forces against civilians in Syria and sold war planes to Saudi Arabia.

Steyerl embarks the viewer on a metaphorical journey aboard Leonardo’s vessel. Venice’s laguna, palazzi and skies, generated by Artificial Intelligence video processing, flow dreamlike and foreign, while a voice-over speaks of technology, power, corruption, art and warfare, topics that the artist has explored thoroughly over the last years.

Manifesta 14
With Ugo Rondinone
Various locations, Prishtina
July 22 – October 30, 2022
www.manifesta14.org

For Manifesta 14, Ugo Rondinone brings forth an object of “beauty and contemplation” in one of Prishtina‘s most frequented public gathering spaces – Adem Jashari Square – at a time when monuments the world over are being troubled for their entanglement with ideologies.

One of the key pillars of Manifesta, the European Nomadic Biennial, is its strong focus on urban development within its Host Cities. For Manifesta 14 Prishtina 2022, the Turin-based office CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati has developed an Urban Vision for Kosovo’s capital city structured around innovative, open-source urbanism methodology and the use of A.I technology to analyse public spaces in Prishtina.The Urban Vision informs how Manifesta 14 will take shape within the local context, but most importantly it is commissioned to develop how the city of Prishtina could be transformed by reclaiming public space by its citizens.

Under the title, It matters what world worlds world: how to tell stories otherwise, the programme was co-developed with the Manifesta 14 team by Creative Mediator Catherine Nichols in close collaboration with local collectives, artists, scholars, architects and activists. Across parcours consisting of 25 different iconic locations in Prishtina – from the brutalist Palace of Youth and Sports to the Ottoman period Great Hamman – Manifesta 14 will bring artistic and urban interventions and a seven-floor thematic exhibition. The biennial programme will feature over 100 participants from over 30 countries, who will present exhibitions, events, performances and interventions in public spaces across Prishtina.

Tresor 31
Techno, Berlin und die große Freiheit
with Hito Steyerl
Tresor Berlin
Köpenicker Str. 70
10179 Berlin
Through August 28, 2022
www.tresorberlin.com

Techno, Berlin und die große Freiheit is a personalised, audio-led exhibition-experience taking place in Kraftwerk. Through films, sculpture, archival objects and photography the exhibition explores the three decade long story contextualising techno’s ‘big bang’ in Berlin the early 90s. Specific historical conditions created the external circumstances for this movement to explode at that place and at that time. The exhibition examines Tresor’s winding journey in context - from its pre-history in the unusual economic and social conditions of West Berlin to its transition into the cosmopolitan capital city of today. Through archival material and artworks, combined with a spatialised headphone audio-system, Tresor 31’s exhibition explores the personal narratives that underpinned techno culture since its beginnings as an artistic and social movement.

'...'
with Isa Melsheimer
TROPEZ
Sommerbad Humboldthain
Wiesenstraße 1
13357 Berlin
Through August 19, 2022
www.tropeztropez.de

For their yearly summer exhibition, TROPEZ, a space for art inside the public pool Sommerbad Humboldthain, is featuring a group exhibition with works by Ana Alenso, Grit Burmeister & Franzi Kleinert, Samira Hodaei, Lungiswa Gqunta, Isa Melsheimer, Nadim Vardag, Shira Wachsmann, Mara Wohnhaas.

Outdoor sculptures and (video) installations translate the effects of various crises and social injustice into tangible images. ... responds to the speechlessness in the face of current world events and quotes the three dots familiar from messenger services that appear whenever the person on the other side is writing. What could we answer?

Opera Opera. Allegro ma non troppo
with Rosa Barba
Palais Populaire
Unter den Linden 5
10117 Berlin
Through August 22, 2022
www.palaispopulaire.db.com

With Opera Opera. Allegro ma non troppo, the PalaisPopulaire is showcasing an art form that is as controversial as it is beloved—and an elementary aspect of Italian culture. Opera, whose name derives from the Italian word for “work,” is a theatrical genre in constant flux that has always staged the process of creation, work, and doing through imagination and creativity. Opera reflects the drama of life and unites all kinds of disciplines, from music to poetry, from design to choreography, from painting to acting, film, and performance. Conceived by MAXXI, the National Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome and featuring thirty protagonists of international art, the exhibition pays homage to opera from the perspective of contemporary visual art and architecture.

Ugo Rondinone
LIFE TIME
Schirn Kunsthalle
Römerberg
60311 Frankfurt am Main
Through September 18, 2022
www.schirn.de

The Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt has dedi­cated a large survey exhi­bi­tion entitled LIFE TIME to Ugo Rondi­none with key paint­ings, sculp­tures, and video works from the artist.

Ugo Rondi­none adds a poetic dimen­sion to everyday objects and phenomena. In typi­cally mini­mal­istic arrange­ments, he puts a tree, a clock, the sun or a rainbow in new contexts by means of repe­ti­tion, isola­tion, or reduc­tion, creating atmos­pheric ambi­ences. Devised specif­i­cally for the Schirn, his new instal­la­tion extends along the entire length of the gallery and into the Rotunda.

The exhi­bi­tion LIFE TIME combines funda­mental themes that have shaped the work of the concep­tual and instal­la­tion artist for the past thirty years: time and tran­sience, day and night, reality and fiction, nature and culture. Rondi­none has repeat­edly referred to the iconog­raphy of Roman­ti­cism in his works and used quotes from liter­a­ture and pop culture. The starting point of his multi­media oeuvre is the trans­for­ma­tion of the outside world into a subjec­tive, emotional inner world. He develops expe­ri­en­tial spaces in which the viewer actu­ally becomes part of the exhibitions and their immer­sive struc­tures.

Color as Program
With works by Rosa Barba, Angela Bulloch,
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Hito Steyerl and more
Co-Curator and exhibition architecture by Liam Gillick
Bundeskunsthalle Bonn
Through August 7, 2022
www.bundeskunsthalle.de

The central theme of Color as Program is the artistic preoccupation with the affective and representative power of color. More than ever before, the meaning of color has become a complex construct of social conventions. The visual arts play a central role in the exhibition – not least because of their capacity to open up abstract spaces of thought.

The tour through the exhibition and its associative approach are integral to the overarching concept, which is further enhanced by the expansive site-specific architecture developed for the large central gallery by the artist and co-curator Liam Gillick.

Listen to Liam Gillick's podcast about the exhibition here.