SHOWnews: Your Weekly Art Bulletin
Artist Dominique White Heads To Whitechapel Gallery For 'Deadweight' Exhibition In Collaboration With Max Mara
When I interviewed Dominique White last year, she told me something that's stuck ever since. 'My work is very much a destructive process with a poetic afterlife'. Of course, I have no doubt many artists would choose to describe their work this way if given the opportunity but there's something different about White. Firstly, she's won the 9th edition of Max Mara's Art Prize for Women and secondly, she's one of the few artists I've had the pleasure of speaking with who isn't fragile about their work - which she needn't be, especially when considering the robust nature of her nautical-inspired large-scale installations, that are as poetic as they are fierce. After last year's announcement declaring Dominique White the official winner of the Max Mara's Art Prize for Women, the artist is back for good with a sizeable exhibition at East London's Whitechapel Gallery titled Deadweight, a new body of work developed during a six-month residency in Italy. Less about the physical associations of the sea and more aligned with the political, Deadweight's focus is on creating new worlds for ‘Blackness' that separates the old from the new, which makes this exhibition a must-see, especially when you consider how rapidly the country has plummeted into political turmoil. To find out more about Dominique White, read our previous coverage here.
Deadweight runs at Whitechapel Gallery in London from 2 July until 15 September 2024.
What Happens When You Connect Art With Nature and Technology? Scorpios Beach Club Finds Out
Building off last year's success, the celebrated cultural initiative Scorpios Encounters returns for an even better line-up, equipped with an art program that unites contemporary artists and musicians through a series of artworks and live performances centring around the convergence of technology and the natural world by posing the question: 'can humans leverage the power of machines to better understand, preserve and harmoniously coexist with nature?' Artists involved include Joseph Klibansky (whose work dabbles in immersive video sculpture and machine-aided fine art prints), art collective Random International who have worked on an interactive generative installation and Sougwen Chung - recently named TIME100's Most Influential People in AI - who will present a live atelier performance showcasing her innovative drawing practice.
Taking place at Scorpios Mykonos and the newly opened Scorpios Bodrum from July to September, this year's Scorpios Encounters looks to the future to propose a new way of making engaging and fulfilling art. Need a second to think? You're already behind. Prints and digital artworks are available for purchase here.
Scorpios Encounters runs at Scorpios Beach Club between 18 July and 8 September, 2024.
Artist Chantal X.W. Presents LUCKY STAR, LOVE YOU FOREVER at Soho Revue Gallery
Straight off the back of her three-month Revue Studios residency, artist Chantal X.W. presents her exhibition Lucky Star, Love You Forever, marking Soho Revue's first official exhibition dedicated to installation and performance. Casting an introspective lens on the space between subject and objecthood, Chantal X.W.'s aims to answer the artist's own proposed question: 'What happens when a girl is reproduced and passed through different aesthetic registers, from Hollywood screens to a street lightbox to paper bags?' Drawing from a range of influences and different representations of Asiatic femininity including vintage Manga as well as performances from 1960s stars Anna May Wong and Nancy Kwan, Chantal X.W. intricately weaves historical interpretations of different objects, people, places and faces in order to explore the meaning of desire and its sentimental attachment. Overly cute without being in your face, the exhibition acts as a modern day protest song for those looking to subvert society's sexist gaze.
LUCKY STAR, LOVE YOU FOREVER is open to the public at Soho Revue Gallery until 3 August.
René Magritte’s Legacy and the Surrealists of Today
Artistic mediums collide as do fantasies, inspirations and tributes to the great dame of surrealism René Magritte in this explosive show of sublime beauty that brings together the best surrealists of modern times including Guy Bourdin, Laurie Simmons, Charlie Engman and more. Bridging the realms of photography, painting, sculpture, mixed-media, and generative art, the exhibition in question - Apple of Discord at Louise Alexander Gallery - invites viewers to look beyond the surface and engage in a visual conversation that defies the superficial, just like Magritte did with Ceci n'est pas une pipe. Cue artwork that is as playful as it is delightful and of course, surreal. Artists involved in the show means its line-up is just as glorious as the artwork involves as the likes of Rachel Maclean, Beth Frey, Cathrin Hoffmann and Oda Jaune come together in an outstandingly strong female artist line-up. Plan to be in Sardinia this summer? You know what to do. Come on, what's not to miss.
Apple of Discord opens to the public at Louise Alexander Gallery in Sardinia on 5 July and will remain open for the rest of summer until 8 September.
Saatchi Yates Presents New Work by Artist Nokuhanya Langa
There's something to be said about the colours painters use and how such choices are a reflection of their inner mood... and no, we're not just talking about Mr Van Gogh and his famed love of yellow. It sounds obvious but painters who constantly use blacks and darker shades tend to be more solemn in their outlook. Take Rotterdam-based artist Nokuhanya Langa for example, whose latest collaborative exhibition with video and performance artist Bruce Nauman at Saatchi Yates explores such ideas by creating paintings that are reminiscent of our solar system (black painted backgrounds with scatters of paint that resemble stars floating adrift) slashed with Tumblr-esque words and phrases like 'Make Me Happy' and even more depressively, 'Better Staying Alive In Case Things Get Better'. The works, some of which are based on the process of heartbreak, are strategically placed next to many of Nauman's more famous video art pieces, including the ever-popular Violent Incident, which is pretty self-explanatory; we'll say no more. Generally speaking, Langa’s sculptural canvases (she makes them herself by stuffing frames with expanding filibuster foam normally used in home renovations) comment on contemporary post-internet culture, highlighting themes of futility, alienation, and online identity. Here, all three come into play - and when mixed with Nauman's equally sincere (and yet marvellously humorous) works, something truly magic happens.
Noku/ Nauman at Saatchi Yates is open to the public until 16 August.
The British Isles As Seen Through Jamie Hawkesworth's Lens
Jamie Hawkesworth's exhibition The British Isles may not be this week's news in art (it opens on the 11 July) but our excitement over it very much is. Why? Hawkesworth's latest exhibition at Huxley-Parlour Gallery marks the first public presentation of his thirteen-year project featuring images of the landscape, architecture and inhabitants of Britain - all through the eyes of one of Britain's greatest photographers. Which means one thing: this show has been 13 years in the making and the wait is finally over (or at least it will be next week).
Rather than taking a 'pensive look' at who makes up the British Isles, Hawkesworth imbues his images with a certain generosity and dignity; overall painting a picture of his home country that is at once idyllic, yet realistic focusing on the landscape as much as its inhabitants. Serene, gentle and never overstated, Hawkesworth's images will always shine bright above the rest of the pack and for that reason, the SHOWstudio office are counting down the days before we can bask in our Hawkesworth obsession.
The British Isles at Huxley-Parlour Gallery will be open to the public from 11 July - 10 August.
Shanti Bell's New Sculpture Exhibition The Room That Shared at MAMA
Tackling the unexplored spaces of the family dynamic, Shanti Bell's new sculptural exhibition at Mama - The Room That Shared - is an ode to the liminal space existing between person and object, friend and foe. By working to bring abstract concepts into the realm of experiential sculpture, Bell's exhibition turns the intangible into tangible, using a physical object (in this case, her own) as a tool to quantify love - particularly the kind felt in familial spaces. Looking to realise different relationships into physical objects that we can nestle into, play with and relax on, Bell experiments with the idea of confinement when it comes to the infinite, giving range for interaction with oddly-shaped objects we never thought we needed.
The Room That Shared opens at MAMA on 5 July for three days only.
Beauty and Ugliness Go Hand in Hand in New Exhibition at Cob Gallery
How ugly can ugly get? How do we measure beauty? What if the ugly turned beautiful and vice versa? These are all questions posed by artist Kate Lyddon in her new comically brilliant show Sagger, Sinker, Wrinkler. In this specially commissioned body of work, Lyddon looks at the often overlooked coexistence of beauty and ugliness through an interrogative lens of female ageing. Contrasting this natural process (that excludes no one, not even Joan Collins) with societal expectations of beauty, the outcome is a series of bright, humorous and high-spirited paintings that exist as an emotional response to the polarity of pictures that have run rampant in tabloids and C-grade magazines for far too long.
Sagger, Sinker, Wrinkler at Cob Gallery opens 11 July until 10 August.