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The DART Board: 01.15.2015

By Peggy Roalf   Wednesday January 15, 2025

Thursday, January 16, 6-8 pm: Simphiwe Mbunyuza | UMTHONYAMA at Kordansky

Mbunyuza’s work stems from a personal and spiritual exploration of long-performed ritual and iconography associated with the Xhosa people of the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. Throughout his practice, the artist has developed a unique approach to his materials, in which he’s able to achieve uncommon textures and glazes that highlight his grasp of both the material itself and the processes and temperatures in which clay is fired. Each sculpture incorporates distinct markings in the shapes of houses, animals, garments, and ridged or stippled patterns, arranged in large swaths and demarcated by contrasting colors and impressed linework.

The exhibition takes its name from a term used to define the rectangular section within a family’s livestock enclosure where familial rituals take place. By designating this space as a kind of divine site, it maintains the spiritual potency, so that reinterpretations of the physical space may retain some of that sanctity. The physical and intangible aspects of the umthonyama work together to help participants attune to their ancestors. 

The artist channels an intuition-led process to guide him through every stage of making. Work is completed in response to impulses whenever they arise so that, in a way, the circumstances of each piece’s creation carry a divine quality in and of themselves. The physical manipulation of clay—paired with subconscious or overt visions and ideas—moves the artist to create unique works rich with color and deeply rooted in cultural meaning.

David Kordansky Gallery, 520 West 20th Street, New York, NY Info

 

 

Fridays, January 17, 24, 31, 5-7pm: Discover Your Inner Artist at Hamilton Fish

Dive into the world of creativity with Professor Ed Murr from F.I.T. (watercolor above) as he guides you through a fun and engaging nature-painting series. Each week, you’ll explore a new medium and bring the beauty of the outdoors to life on your canvas. Whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned artist, this workshop is perfect for everyone!

What to Expect:
Week 1: Flow with Watercolors
Week 2: Play with vibrant Tempera Paint
Week 3: Sketch and shade with Watercolor Pencils

All supplies are provided—just bring your enthusiasm and a love for art! Don’t miss out on this creative journey. Register here Registration ends on 1/17/25 at 05:00 PM
Email: 
Ahmad.Sarwary@parks.nyc.gov

Hamilton Fish Recreation Center, 128 Pitt Street, New York, NY Info (212) 387-7689

  

 

Thursday, January 23, 6-8pm: Krishna Reddy | Heaven in a Wildflower at Print Center

This exhibition, the first monographic exhibition in New York on the late Indian artist Krishna Reddy in over 40 years, brings together over 50 prints alongside key sculptures, ephemera, and working materials on loan from the artist’s estate in order to demonstrate Reddy’s material and conceptual approach to the groundbreaking viscosity printmaking technique he developed in the 1950s and 60s.

Krishna Reddy (1925–2018) is best known as a master intaglio printmaker who was instrumental in developing a process called viscosity printing, which allows an artist to print a multi-colored image from a single printing plate. Krishna Reddy: Heaven in a Wildflower highlights this innovation by considering the philosophical underpinnings of the artist’s kaleidoscopic art and inventive approach to his creative practice. 

Contextualizing his prints with drawings, sculptures, and the artist’s own retrofitted tools and working materials, the exhibition coalesces around the major themes Reddy explored in his work and traces the trajectory of a sensitive intellectual primed by his education and life experiences to consider the world with unique openness and curiosity. Heaven in a Wildflower emphasizes how this experimental approach to printmaking did not simply signal an interest in technical innovation, but was borne of a desire to find interconnectedness in the world, to look closely with a mind free of preconception, and to always consider the essence of a creature, plant, being, material, and idea.

The Print Center, 535 West 24th Street, New York, NY Info

  

 

Thursday, January 23, 6-8pm: Mia Enell |  Disco To Death at Bienvenu Steinberg

Enell is best known for paintings and drawings that depict the eccentricities of her inner life. In traditional Scandinavian fashion, Enell summons the dark humor of her Swedish roots in order to grapple with expressing that which is typically somber. When Enell flattens the imagery of taboos on her canvas, they become comic parables and make truth more digestible. 

Visions and haiku-like phrases inspired by dreams and the life of the unconscious are at the heart of Enell’s work. A strange relationship of word and image is in play. Her paintings seem to freeze images from an ongoing flow of free association: a horse covered in eyes, a split meat-bed, a woman in deep pain, a crying tree, a flock of flying butts… “I often wake up late at night with clear visions or words that later develop into a painting. At times the work is automatic. The paintings are distilled and simplified, but open up if you spend time with them."

Bienvenu Steinberg & C, 35 Walker Street, New York, NY Info

 

 

Jamuary 29: George Condo l Pastels at Hauser & Wirth and Spruth Magers

George Condo’s two-part exhibition, ‘Pastels,’ spanning galleries at both Sprüth Magers and Hauser & Wirth, offers a glimpse into the artist’s creative process and unbound inventiveness through the medium of pastel. Condo’s new works challenge the limits of improvisation within this medium—spontaneously deploying gesso, fields of color and dramatic pastel gestures, all without the benefit of preparatory sketches—to express various states of the human psyche. The artist embraces the act of abstraction within a figural framework in novel ways, materializing the fragmented, elusive nature of ineffable thoughts and feelings.

The presentation at Hauser & Wirth comprises a new series of puzzle-like portraits, which the artist has dubbed his ‘bizarre characters,’ their visages simultaneously splintered and affixed by bright geometric planes. The jagged electricity created by the faceted compositions of these works signals the complex and often conflicted nature of the mind.

At Sprüth Magers, Condo presents frenzied color compositions alongside a series of new black-and-white pastels that incorporate deliberate drips and spatters of colored pigment. Here, overlapping and intersecting shapes that might typically suggest figurative elements forego any reference to the human face, emphasizing instead the gesture, line and rhythm of their making. With such titles as Centrifuge, Open Forms, No Direction Home,and Chaotic Combustion, these recent paintings evoke fluidity and tumult—Condo’s reflection, perhaps, on his ricocheting innermost feelings and thoughts.

Hauser & Wirth: 134 Wooster Street; Spruth Magers: 22 East 80th Street, New York, NY Info 

 

 

Looking Ahead: January through April, Black Earth Study Club at Swiss Institute

On the occasion of Nolan Oswald Dennis's forthcoming solo exhibition, overturnsSI is pleased to present the Black Earth Study Club, a series of transdisciplinary public programs that will reflect on Black metaphysics, anti-colonial pedagogy, digital futures, and land dispossession. Bringing together artists and scholars predominantly from the African continent and its global diasporas, these events aim to create a temporary space of conviviality, sociality, and collective learning.

Here is a sampler of program events:

Languaging the End of the World with Denise Ferreira da Silva and J. Kameron Carter 

Saturday, January 252PM 

To inaugurate the public program series, theorists Denise Ferreira da Silva and J. Kameron Carter will deliver a pair of lectures that delve into the irruptive, world-unmaking capacities of Blackness, as figured in the unruly grammars of Black poetics.

Land as Verb with Andros Zins-Browne, Kyle Mays, Quito Swan, Saba Innab and Zoé Samudzi

Saturday, April 12 2PM 

Concluding the Black Earth Study Club, this event departs from photographer Santu Mofokeng’s proposition to consider land as a verb instead of a noun. Foregrounding this renewed orientation to land as a kind of geo-politics, scholars Kyle Mays and Quito Swan, artist and architect Saba Innab, and critic Zoé Samudzi will offer critical explorations of land dispossession in a planetary context.

Swiss Institute/Contemporary Art, 38 St. Marks Place, New York, NY Info


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