Art Of The Day Weekly
#539 - from 17 January 2019 to 23 January 2019
Joana Vasconcelos, Branco Luz. Photo Gabriel de la Chapelle
IN THE AIR
Joana Vasconcelos, the delusions of grandeur
PARIS – Her exhibition at the Guggenheim Bilbao, that closed last November, set a new record of attendance with nearly 650,000 visitors, and the magazine on line “Politico” placed her among the 28 European personalities of 2019, next to Matteo Salvini, Pedro Sanchez, Jeremy Corbyn or Yulia Timochenko – who could be making a come-back in Ukraine. The Portuguese artist, born in Paris in 1971, exploits society’s consumer products with humor and cynicism, whether it’s hygienic tampons or pharmaceutical pills, making irons dance or putting feathers on helicopters. The artist is truly living her heyday. This week she will succeed Leandro Erlich in taking over the Bon Marché department store, where she has hung one of her immense characters in her special patchwork of various materials for which she holds the secret. She says it is a Valkyrie - a heroine known in particular for her warrior tendencies. Her though she has lost all harshness and has become softer, as if tamed by the materials that she is made of. She becomes kind and sensual. Let us imagine that this is a visual allegory of the situation on our continent – where authoritarian, nationalist, or racist declarations dwindle away and die out like wet sticks of firecrackers.
• Carte blanche à Joana Vasconcelos at the Bon Marché, from 17 January 2019.
EXHIBITIONS
Martha Hoepffner, Self Portrait in the Mirror, © Historisches Museum Frankfurt am Main, © Estate Marta Hoepffner.
Frankfurt was at its best during the roaring 20s
FRANKFURT – The festivities for the centennial of the Bauhaus movement started this week with a festival in Berlin. This will be followed by a series of exceptional exhibitions throughout all of Germany. This event in Frankfurt, one of the first in the calendar, captures the modernist atmosphere that prevailed in the city in the beginning of the twenties, when art schools, their professors and their students worked hand in hand with the officials to dream of urban development at a human scale. Posters, design, photographs, fashion: from shoes to the grills on the Adler car, everything contributed to a new, radiant future. But utopias do not always end well.
• Modernism in Francfort at the Museum Angewandte Kunst, from 19 January to 14 April 2019.
Dea Trier Morch, Vinterborn, linocut, 1976.
Dea Trier Morch, double face
HUMLEBAECK –The Louisiana Museum with its sculpture garden, the first in Europe, is well known. But the institution also gives importance to more fragile forms of art, in particular to graphic works. It currently pays tribute to Dea Trier Morch (1941-2001), a creator who is hardly known beyond the Scandinavian borders. She is the author of a successful feminist novel, Vinterborn, that was adapted to the screen, and she also contributed to an artistic group that was very much to the left in the 70s (Rode Mor). A graduate from the school of Fine Arts, with her efficient linocuts she presents two facets that seem impossible to reconcile: on one hand scenes of demonstrations, on the other moving moments of every day life such as mother and child scenes and well-behaved children.
• Dea Trier Morch. Into the World at the Louisiana Museum, from 17 January to 28 April 2019.
Grace Wales Bonner, the art of mixing
LONDON – She is one of the rising stars in the world of fashion, honored by the LVMH prize in 2016. Like many of her predecessors in this discipline- Karl Lagerfeld, Yves Saint Laurent or Christian Lacroix – she craves for the most varied forms of art. At the Serpentine, 27-year old Grace Wales Bonner plays the part of an orchestra director, inviting a great variety of friends and influences to build sanctuaries, or cabinets de curiosités, combining traditional black cultures and the latest tendencies of the 21st century.
• Grace Wales Bonner, A Time for New Dreams at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, from 16 January to 19 February 2019.
Dance, forever
MARSEILLE – What could be more natural than to dance? But it is not often seen in exhibitions. The Mucem tries to tear down barriers by combining Trisha Brown, Clément Cogitore, Jean-Luc Godard and Xavier Veilhan. All that is missing is the hypnotizing video of Lili Reynaud-Dewar when she danced around in the nude, her body all painted black, in the rooms of the Pompidou museum in Paris, bringing Josephine Baker back to life.
• On danse at the Mucem, from 23 January to 20 May 2019
