Recessed.space

CERITH WYN EVANS GLOWS IN MAAT, LISBON

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https://recessed.space/00311-Cerith-Wyn-Evans-MAAT-Lisbon
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Cerith Wyn Evans has quietly become one of the most important British artists, quietly working his practice across film and sculpture since the 1980s while YBA artists and louder voices took centre stage. Over that time, however, he has been picking up important shows and awards, including the 2017 Tate Britain Commission for which he created an enormous vortex of white neon light. That work has now been installed in the Amanda Levete-designed MAAT in Lisbon, so Will Jennings went to see it and other works in the solo presentation.

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Some exhibitions seem like they can be picked up and placed into any modern art gallery and have the same impact as anywhere else. The concept of the white cube space is, after all, one of abstracted uniformity, where character, context, and any depth beneath the meticulous surfaces is hidden so as to not distract from the singular message of the inhabitant artworks.

Sometimes, artists or exhibitions seem perfectly paired for a space, and the meaning of both art objects on display and the surrounding architecture marries. This often happens within an historic or classical setting, where messages of new works juxtapose or mingle with an historic narrative, but at MAAT – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology alongside the River Tigus outside the centre of Lisbon a thoroughly contemporary space makes the perfect setting for a solo exhibition by Welsh artist Cerith Wyn Evans.

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THE HOUSE AS SELF-PORTRAIT: JOHN SOANE’S WORDS THROUGH AN ARTISTIC GAZE

An 1812 text by John Soane in which the architect imagines his own home as a fictional imaginary looked back on from the future was the starting point for an exhibition organised by artist Charlotte Edey and gallery Ginny on Frederick. Rochelle Roberts visited Frieze No. 9 Cork Street to find an array of works from artists & architects who use spatial fragments to create new narratives.

Read & See More at:
https://recessed.space/00309-Crude-Hints-Towards
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In a manuscript written in the summer of 1812 and titled Crude Hints Towards an History of my House, architect Sir John Soane imagines his house as a ruin. The manuscript, which was never published during his lifetime, takes the form of a fiction about Soane’s house, which would later become the Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London. Just like Soane’s real home, the house in the text is fragmentary and metamorphic, not quite one thing or the other. The fictional narrator, writing from the future, wonders who might have occupied such a house: “Whilst by some this place has been looked on as a Temple, others have supposed it to have been the residence of some Magician, & in support of this opinion they speak of a large statue placed in the centre of one of the Chapels, which they say might have been this very necromancer changed into Marble.”

A recent exhibition at Frieze No. 9 Cork Street, Crude Hints (Towards), brought together artists working across painting and sculpture to explore how architecture and space can act as reciprocals of meaning using Soane’s text as a vehicle through which to do this. Organised by artist Charlotte Edey and gallery Ginny on Frederick, there is a strong emphasis on materiality, the fragmentary and the uncanny.

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THE OROBIE BIENNIAL PUTS ART INTO THE BERGAMASQUE PREALPS

Turning the idea of an art biennial on its head, GAMeC’s two-year long cycle of cultural activity spreads creative responses to the local all across the pre-Alps region around Bergamo. Will Jennings visited the closing projects of the durational event includes a range of responses including a Maurizio Cattelan urban intervention, a transformed cave & even a tiny architectural project on a mountaintop.

Read & See More at:
https://recessed.space/00308-Orobie-Biennial
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Last summer, recessed.space visited Bergamo and the surrounding landscape to explore the artworks presented as part of The Orobie Biennial. It was exciting to see a project, subtitled Thinking Like A Mountain, that didn’t simply put art into a white-walled gallery, but was meaningfully embedded into the rich landscapes, towns, and communities across the pre-Alpine region. It was so great, in fact, that we thought we would return a year later.

“A biennial in consecutive years?” you may ask? Fair, but this isn’t a normal Biennale – instead of popping up once every two years, curator Lorenzo Giusti instead created an event that lasts for two years, comprising a series of overlapping cycles that allow the time and space to explore the wide terrain across the various municipalities that make up the Province of Bergamo in Lombardy. Designed to explore issues of sustainability and community through works that respond to the sites rather than simply helicoptering in existent pieces (though there is some helicoptering, more of that later), Giusti hopes that the event presents a new kind of biennial, one less focussed on flashy one-off events and more rooted in a developmental relationship between institution and context.

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