Artist Talk

John Bock and Lars Eidinger, moderated by Georg Imdahl
Filmed at Sprüth Magers, Berlin
December 11, 2023

In the conversation, Bock provides an insight into his artistic practice and explains some of the works in the current exhibition in our Berlin gallery. Viewers will also gain an impression of the background and approach to the collaboration between Bock and Eidinger – from art historical references such as Joseph Beuys to questions of visibility and invisibility in his work, illustrated with vivid examples.

Bock’s solo exhibition Ex-Ego-Gynt is on view through January 27, 2024.

Click here to watch the conversation.

Screening

Peter Fischli David Weiss
Artist’s Film Club: Fischli Weiss
Screening of the two Fischli Weiss’ films The Point of Least Resistance (1981) and The Right Way (1983)
Institute of Contemporary Arts – ICA, London
Wednesday, January 31, 2024, 7pm

ICA London will show Peter Fischli and David Weiss’ films The Point of Least Resistance (1981) and The Right Way (1983), which are a fusion of humor, philosophy, visual storytelling, and pivotal works in the artists’ oeuvre. This screening brings together these two early works, which explore the intricate balance between reality and fantasy, art and life, through the creative perspectives of these influential artists.

Fischli and Weiss’ first UK solo exhibition took place at ICA in 1988. Their current solo show at Sprüth Magers, London, is on view through February 3, 2024.

Exhibition

Cao Fei
O futuro não é um sonho
Pinacoteca de São Paulo, São Paulo
Through April 14, 2024

Cao Fei: o futuro não é um sonho is the Chinese artist's first solo show in Latin America and presents four groups of works with themes that analyze how the rapid societal changes of the 21st century, fueled by the intensive use of technologies, has been affecting subjectivity and human experiences.

The overarching themes of the exhibition are: “Manufacturing and globalization”, “The past and present of the virtual world”, “Memories of socialism and sci-fi” and “Urbanization and dystopia”, with the objective to introduce Cao's practice to the Brazilian public with a range of works spanning the past 20 years of her career.

Exhibition

Hanne Darboven
Hanne Darboven – Writing Time
Menil Drawing Institute, Houston
Through February 11, 2024

The exhibition at the Menil explores three defining motifs of Hanne Darboven’s work on paper – abstract drawings, date calculations, and monumental installations. The display culminates with Inventions that Have Changed Our World, 1996, an enormous set of over 1300 individually framed sheets that incorporates all the hallmarks of her practice and how they reverberated and evolved over the decades of her life.

Exhibition

Astrid Klein
between silent lines
FUHRWERKSWAAGE, Cologne
Through January 20, 2024

Opening: Sunday, November 12, 2023, 11am
with an introduction by Prof. Dr. Stephan Berg

Astrid Klein's solo exhibition between silent lines at Fuhrwerkswaage, Cologne merges and presents central themes of her artistic work in a way that is both sensual and conceptual: the relationship between image and text, the principle of collage, the critical reflection on the depiction of women, and the creation of visual worlds that do not only inhabit but also redefine space. For the first time in an institutional context, paintings from her so-called Bulb series are exhibited, along with neon sculptures and a large-format rug—all media that have been essential components of the artist's multifaceted oeuvre since the 1990s and early 2000s. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog with a text by Stephan Berg, director of the Kunstmuseum Bonn.

Site specific Installation

Barbara Kruger
ART WALL 13 – Barbara Kruger
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
Through January 28, 2024

For more than 40 years, Barbara Kruger has been a consistent, critical observer of contemporary culture. In the early 1980s, Kruger perfected a signature style of words and images extracted from mass media and recomposed into memorable, graphic artworks. Rigorously composed, her works have occupied a range of media and spaces, including walls, billboards, video projections, and an array of consumer products. Since the 1990s, Kruger has also created large-scale installations of her text-based art, transforming lobbies, elevators, and buildings with her signature aesthetic and pointed content. Continuing in this vein, Kruger will create a brand-new work for the ICA that speaks, as her work has done for more than four decades, to contemporary social and political dynamics.

Exhibition

David Lamelas
I Have to Think About It. Part II
Fondazione Antonio Dalle Nogare, Bolzano
Through February 24, 2024

The Fondazione Antonio Dalle Nogare presents I Have to Think About It, the first Italian retrospective exhibition of the Argentinean artist David Lamelas. Since the 1960s, Lamelas’ conceptual practice has ranged from installation to sculpture, drawing, photography, film, video, sound and textual works, addressing the defining contexts and conditions of our perception. This is the second part of the exhibition, the first of which opened in May 2023, and features a new configuration of works.

Exhibition

Senga Nengudi
Dia Beacon, New York
Through early 2025

Dia Art Foundation will present a long-term exhibition of work by Senga Nengudi, which will open at Dia Beacon on February 17, 2023. Sculptures and room-sized installations made between 1969 and 2020, including recent acquisitions for Dia’s permanent collection, will be on display. This long-term exhibition of Nengudi’s work will be accompanied by a performance program and publication, revealing the multiplicity of her practice.

Commission

Pamela Rosenkranz
Old Tree
High Line, New York
Through September 2024

Sprüth Magers congratulates Pamela Rosenkranz whose monumental sculpture Old Tree was selected for the third High Line Plinth commission in New York, to be unveiled in spring of 2023. The bright red and pink imaginary tree animates a myriad of historical archetypes wherein the tree of life connects heaven and earth while also closely resembling the complex networks of the human circulatory system. Located on the High Line—an urban park built on a relic of industry—and selected from among over 80 international proposals by artists from 40 countries, Old Tree raises questions about the real while simultaneously highlighting a breakdown of the boundary between nature and artifice.

Exhibition

Ed Ruscha
ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN
The Museum of Modern Art – MoMA, New York
Through January 13, 2024

“I don’t have any Seine River like Monet,” Ed Ruscha once said. “I’ve just got US 66 between Oklahoma and Los Angeles.” ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN will feature over 250 objects—including paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, artist’s books, films, and installations—that make use of everything from gunpowder to chocolate. Exploring Ruscha’s landmark contributions to postwar American art as well as lesser-known aspects of his six-decade career, the exhibition will offer new perspectives on a body of work that has influenced generations of artists, architects, designers, and writers.

Exhibition

Cindy Sherman
Anti-Fashion
Deichtorhallen Hamburg – Sammlung Falckenberg, Hamburg
Through March 3, 2024

For almost 50 years, the American artist Cindy Sherman has been making fashion and its depiction a theme of her work. Her interest in the fashion world shows a subversive attitude toward what it represents. Through humor and staging, her pictures become parodies of fashion photography: they show figures that are anything but desirable and thus contradict all conventions of haute couture and the usual ideas of beauty.

Exhibition

John Waters
John Waters: Pope of Trash
Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, Los Angeles
Through August 4, 2024

John Waters: Pope of Trash is the first comprehensive exhibition dedicated to the artist’s contributions to cinema. The exhibition delves into his filmmaking process, key themes, and unmatched style. Works on view include costumes, props, handwritten scripts, correspondence, scrapbooks, photographs, film clips, and more, revealing the nuances of independent filmmaking and the ways in which Waters’s movies have redefined the possibilities of independent cinema.

Exhibition

Thea Djordjadze, Rosemarie Trockel
ROSEMARIE TROCKEL / THEA DJORDJADZE
Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich
November 12, 2024–April 27, 2025

The Lenbachhaus will present a collaborative work by the artists Rosemarie Trockel (b. Schwerte, 1952) and Thea Djordjadze (b. Tbilisi, 1971). Djordjadze was Trockel’s student at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1998 to 2001 and the two have maintained a close artistic relationship ever since, realizing numerous joint projects and exhibitions. In their practice, they explore a range of themes relevant to contemporary art. They engage with the creative process and examine its prerequisites, traditions, freedoms, and limitations. The boundaries of art as a concept are questioned, as is the exhibition space as a framework for representation.
In their exhibition at Lenbachhaus, the artists want to delve into the conception of beauty and challenge established aesthetic conventions, taking inspiration from reflections by the poet Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud’s opening lines from "Une saison en enfer" (1873) provide a leitmotif for the artists’ approach: "One evening I sat Beauty on my knees. And I found her bitter and I reviled her."

Exhibition

Nancy Holt
Circles of Light
Gropius Bau, Berlin
March 22–July 21, 2024

Over the course of five decades, Nancy Holt explored how we perceive our environment and how we attempt to understand our place on the surface of this planet. From March 2024, the Gropius Bau presents Circles of Light, the artist’s most comprehensive survey exhibition in Germany to date. It includes film, video, photography, sound works, concrete poetry, sculptures and expansive installations as well as drawings and documentation from over 25 years.

In her artistic practice, Nancy Holt reimagined site-specific installations and ways of working with natural and artificial light. She began focusing on ecological aspects at an early stage and incorporated the earth’s rotation, astronomy, time and space into her sculptures, constantly challenging us to look beyond what we think we know. Holt’s working process will have a particularly tangible presence in the exhibition at the Gropius Bau through texts and recordings by the artist.

Exhibition

Jenny Holzer
Light Line
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, New York
May 17–September 29, 2024

This exhibition will present a reimagination of Jenny Holzer’s landmark 1989 installation at the Guggenheim. Climbing all six ramps of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed rotunda to the building’s apex, the new manifestation of Holzer’s electronic sign extends and builds upon the artist’s vision from thirty-five years earlier. The site-specific work will transform the building with a display of scrolling texts from her earliest series of truisms and aphorisms to more recent experiments with language generated by artificial intelligence. Holzer’s iconic use of the written word throughout her career has long captivated audiences around the world and this solo exhibition will feature little known examples of Holzer’s work spanning her career from the 1980s through today.

Exhibition

Anne Imhof
Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz
June 8–September 1, 2024

Anne Imhof is one of the most important contemporary artists of our time. Her signature artistic expression is rooted in performance pieces, where casts of androgynous figures navigate the space with a captivating blend of impassive poise and elaborate choreography within an immersive audio-visual experience. This dynamic interplay, underscored by the inclusion of ubiquitous and iconic elements of fashion, photography, and an amalgamation of subculture and popular culture, creates an atmosphere reminiscent of post-apocalyptic isolation.

Within the austere confines of Kunsthaus Bregenz, Anne Imhof ushers in a compelling transformation. In this enigmatic creation, a paradox unfolds, taking the shape of both a barricade and a proscenium. For the KUB exhibition, Imhof will focus on painting and sculpture, which form the crux of her artistic practice, mirroring the fluid evolution of her performative works. The human figure now assumes an allegorical presence, offering a heightened sense of Imhof’s trademark exploration of the human condition.

Exhibition

Barbara Kruger
THINKING OF YOU. I MEAN ME. I MEAN YOU.
Serpentine, London
February 1–March 17, 2024

THINKING OF YOU. I MEAN ME. I MEAN YOU. at Serpentine South is Kruger’s first solo institutional show in London in over twenty years. It features a unique selection of installations alongside moving image works and multiple soundscapes. The exhibition is the UK premiere of Untitled (No Comment) (2020). This immersive three-channel video installation explores contemporary modes of creating and consuming content online. In the work, Kruger combines text, audio clips, and a barrage of found images and memes, ranging from blurred-out selfies to animated photos of cats.

Exhibition

Otto Piene
Paths to Paradise
Museum Tinguely, Basel
February 7–May 12, 2024

Otto Piene (1928−2014) aimed high with his art: to shape a more harmonious, peaceful, and sustainable world. His expansive view explored new media and projected aesthetic forms and experiences into new spatial realms.

Structured thematically, the monographic exhibition Otto Piene: Paths to Paradise traces his utopian vision as expressed in works from his most significant series and projects in conversation with his lifelong practice of sketching. Together these works reveal Piene’s use of sketching and drawing in both narrow and broad, literal and figurative senses, and provide an expanded definition in connection to a visionary practice that embraced the application of new technology.

Exhibition

Marcel van Eeden
Museum für Photographie Braunschweig, Braunschweig and Mönchehaus Museum, Goslar
February 18–April 21, 2024

Presented concurrently at both Museum für Photographie, Braunschweig and the Mönchehaus Museum, Goslar, this two part exhibition will show both drawings and photographic work based on the rubber printing process of early photography, some of which have been realized especially for the exhibition with references to Braunschweig and Goslar, among other places. Taken in the present, the motifs of these seemingly painterly photographic works, like the drawings, appear as artistic interpretations of historical moments. Marcel van Eeden undermines an uncritical belief in historical factuality and uses the power of suggestion and imagination in combination with actual historical moments.

close
Your message has been sent.