Dennis Hollingsworth was born in 1956 in Madrid, Spain. He currently lives and works in Tossa de Mar, Spain and New York, USA.
When looking at the works of Hollingsworth, the viewer is caught up in the illusion of witnessing the actual moment of its creation. Lively brushstrokes, thick paint and its scraped traces, shadows; the diverse textures created not only by ready-made brushes but also by palette knives, squeegees, and cardboard tools created by the artist seem to speak of Hollingsworth’s overbrimming artistic curiosity and the pleasure he takes in his practice. By using practices such as “wet on wet”, or applying paint to a still-wet field, Hollingsworth believes he will be able to recover an art which not only ‘fully realizes theory’, but further possesses ‘body’ in itself. The exhibition will present the richly woven world of his paintings.
His work was exhibited in 1999 at the Kunsthalle Basel as part of the group show ‘Nach-Bild’, which also featured artists Richard Hamilton and Laura Owens. He continues to exhibit all over the world including in Germany, Holland, France, Spain, New York and Los Angeles.

Following from her debut with Albareh at Art Dubai 2013, the Lebanese artist returns with her signature paintings, investigating transgressions effected on the human body as a consequence of violence and anxiety. A vision drawn out of what she calls the “orgy of Beirut”, inspired by a number of readings in film, philosophy and literature, her work does not spare us the unmediated sight of horror. Yet the vision is fragmentary; absent elements complete the vision and compete with the imagination in encoded signals

Initially informed by the Lebanese Civil War, the work of remembrance and the labor of missing are here transformed within the frame, into a search for an object and a subject located as forever absent. The canvas is in this exhibition not a mere format but a marker of visual impossibilities. Kurkdjian has adopted the most external point of view: What does it mean to be seen? Her investigation has shifted from pure experience and story-telling towards reception and perception. Once the subjects have been exposed and their interior revealed, how do these personae perceive themselves?

Rather than merely informing us about the process of bodily reconfiguration, Kurkdjian’s characters withdraw their gaze from us. The uncanny characters are everything but absent, imprisoned behind and within a frame, being constantly observed and yet always on flight, aware of their omnipresence and demanding to be ransomed.  The animated creatures are aware of their precarious position and accordingly, turn their gaze in reverse, reaching out for the unknown, suspended in the boundlessness of a place we cannot reach, being prey of an ambiguity, sometimes lustful, sometimes repulsive. 

If flight from the public crime of being seen is not possible, then a full closure ensues and the visual field disappears, leaving us with an incomplete syntax of the artist’s intentions. Speaking of flight and enclosure, the paintings examine the limits of the canvas as a site of personal expression and open up warm spaces for intimacy and exposure. Annie Kurkdjian retains her singular combination of humor and moral seriousness, and her acute preoccupation with the traces of history left on the body. “Flight and Enclosure” is a temporary window that can disappear at any time, leaving us far behind in the dark.

About Annie Kurkdjian

Annie Kurkdjian (born in Beirut, Lebanon, 1972, lives and works in Beirut; recipient of the “Johayna Baddoura Prize” 2012) ,living through the turbulent years of the Lebanese Civil War, studied fine arts and psychology at the Lebanese University, and theology at St. Joseph’s University. Kurkdjian has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including Gallery Sader, UNESCO, Salon Sursock, Royal School of Arts London, Biennale Arts Hors Normes in Lyon, amongst others. Since 2005, she has held solo exhibitions at the Goethe Institut 2005, Centre Culturel Français 2006, Surface Libre 2007, Zico House 2008, Atelier 109 2010, and Espace Bertin Poirée 2012. Annie Kurkdjian’s work has been showcased in Art Dubai and Menasa Art Fair (Beirut) in 2013 

Meem Gallery is pleased to announce Amar Dawod’s first solo exhibition in Dubai, displaying twenty-six mixed-media works by the artist. The exhibition is dedicated to the mystical writings of Mansur al-Hallaj, the famous Sufi thinker, writer and teacher who was executed in 922 for heresy. Drawing specifically on al-Hallaj’s celebrated Kitāb al-Tawāsīn(The Tawasin) as a point of departure for this series, Dawod represents his understanding of the eleven verses of The Tawasin in vivid and muted colours. His compositions demonstrate the careful interaction between line, abstract form, attention to detail and collage in his rendering of figures, angels, and patterned patchwork backgrounds. The exhibition’s catalogue will feature essays by the artist, Stephen Hirtenstein, Louai Hamza Abbas, and Suhail Sami Nader, as well as a full English translation of The Tawasin.

Dawod has drawn influence from the works of al-Hallaj since his early years in Baghdad, during the mid-1970s. At the Institute of Fine Arts, where the artist received his diploma in 1979, Dawod attended the lectures of the late artist Shakir Hassan Al Said, whose theoretical ideas on art were strongly derived from Sufi thought (most notably his theory of the One Dimension). For Dawod, the ideas of al-Hallaj resonate ‘because of the inherent desire of painters to traverse the self and overcome or deny it in order to completely ascend to where God declares His presence through the signs that have influenced many of the Sufis’ minds, including al-Hallaj.’ Each work in this series is titled after one of the eleven verse titles of The Tawasin, which include:

The Ta-Sin of the Prophetic Lamp
The Ta-Sin of Understanding
The Ta-Sin of Purity
The Ta-Sin of the Circle
The Ta-Sin of the Point
The Ta-Sin of Endless-Time and Equivocation
The Ta-Sin of Divine Will
The Ta-Sin of the Declaration of Unity
The Ta-Sin of the Self-Awarenesses in Tawhid
The Ta-Sin of the Disconnection-from-Forms

Though Dawod’s works are not a literal translation of al-Hallaj’s ideas, he has noted that the Sufi thinker’s often complex style of writing has affected the approach to his art practice:

‘This unique style has inspired my artistic perspective and its approaches, thus enabling me to rebel against the method and conditions of what is called “pure painting”, in addition to enhancing my ability to focus on my individual style and artistic practice. Today’s art should, therefore, open new horizons for interpreting its formal and connotative spheres which are expanding all the time.’

Amar Dawod
Biography

Amar Dawod (b. 1957, Baghdad) studied at the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad, receiving a diploma in graphic art in 1979. Many years later he travelled to Łódź, Poland, to study graphic art at the Art Academy, where he received an MA in the subject in 1987. In 1991, he studied animation at the Animations House in Eksjö. Dawod has held solo exhibitions in Sweden, Poland and Jordan including Gallery Linjen, Västervik; Falun City Library, Falun; Art Academy, Łódź; and Karim Gallery, Amman. He has participated in numerous international group exhibitions including Graphics Triennial 11, Kraków, 1986; Relief, Plan, Images, Centre de la Gravure et de L’image imprimee, La Louviere, 1994; A propos de ‘La Resurrection’ de Piero della Francesca, Musee du Petit format, Sansepolcro, Tuscany and Viroinval, 2003; Contemporary Iraqi Book Art, University of North Texas Art Gallery, Denton, Texas, 2005–2008 ; Contemporary Iraqi Art, Pomegranate Gallery, New York, 2007; and Art in Iraq Today, Meem Gallery, 2011. His awards include Mention Honorifique, Krakow, 1984; Mention Honorifique, Kraków, 1986; and Graphics Triennial Award, Fredrikstad, 1989. He lives in Västervik, Sweden.

Michel C. Zoghzoghi’s photographic focus is on the “endangered”.  From the tigers of India to the polar bears of the Arctic, From the mesmerizing landscapes of Africa to the last tribes of the Masai Mara, he has traveled the world in search of the vanishing beauty our planet still has to offer.

llana incorporates an intelligent sensitivity into her abstract artworks, often weaving contemplative sociological questions into her mixed media and watercolor pieces. With titles
like, “Pause for Thought,” “The Art of Lightness,” and “Hi!” llana asks deep questions wrapped in shrouds of frivolity and fun.

It is, however, her super-original Plexiglas cube creations that lead us into territory that is fresh, intoxicating and especially aesthetically rewarding. Every piece is thoughtfully designed,
and has a strong but distorted kaleidoscopic quality. Each presents a stimulating Statement by incorporating topical objects as facsimiles of herbage or automobiles. These incorporations act as sparks with which to ignite a sonorous investigation of our social patterns within the context of fantasy inspired art.

Ilana Levitan studied interior design and architecture in Munich, worked as an architect Richard Meier New York, as a designer at Dakota Jackson and as an illustrator at the
Earth Struck Corporation, before she turned to painting and trained under Professors Hans Daucher and Markus Liipertz.

The Nathalie Obadia Gallery is delighted to exhibit Xu Zhen by MadeIn Company for the first time in Brussels, three years after his solo show in Belgium, at the SMAK in Ghent, during Europalia China.

Considered as the most original and most inventive artist of the young Chinese art scene in the wake of the previous generation with Cai Guo Qiang and Zhang Huan, Xu Zhen has gathered round him some twenty associates who have voluntarily opted to remain anonymous for the benefit of the group. Together, they take a critical stance that cocks a snook at today’s political, economic and cultural world which, according to its detractors, has yielded to the sirens of mass communication that numb the mind. MadeIn Company wants to stir the conscience of that world. It demythologises art and artists by providing an alternative blueprint for creativity where the strength of the group takes precedence over individual endeavours.

This attitude, which goes against the conventional rules of the art market, is a risk taken by Xu Zhen and his colleagues, who in turn enjoy greater freedom – a fragile concept, let us not forget, in the Middle Kingdom.

The synergy of MadeIn Company, which in a way is reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s Factory, is rooted in the end of the 1990s. Its initiator, Xu Zhen (born in 1977) left the benches of the Shanghai Arts & Craft Institute to produce his first subversive works (videos at the outset) that jostled the powers that be at once through the disturbing violence of their images. Regularly censured in China as pornography, his videos became the talk of the town, elucidating why Ai Weiwei and Feng Boyi invited the young Xu Zhen to take part in the memorable exhibition entitled Fuck Off which was held at the same time as the third Shanghai Biennale in 2000.

En 2005, Xu Zhen was one of the artists invited to exhibit in the first China Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The artist, who had not lost any of his critical edge on contemporary so- ciety, produced his most famous work to date entitled 88481.86, which refers to the height of Mount Everest from which he subtracted his own height.

Whereas the solo show of Xu Zhen by MadeIn Company at the Ullens Centre for Contem- porary Art (UCCA) will be held in Beijing as of January 2014, the exhibition at the Nathalie Obadia Brussels will showcase, as of November, works of various forms and inspirations, which reflect the diversity of bursting energies that compose the collective.

It features a series of large “paintings,” woven in part, in a baroque aesthetic that creates a conscious contrast with the real subversive point of view on the history of humanity. These compositions maliciously mix the iconographic repertoires of China and the West from images collected on the Internet. The works thus combine sensual materials (fabric, feathers, sequins, leather, pearls, etc.) with a patchwork of images composed of traditional Chinese prints, medieval illuminations, 19th century French caricatures, and even an exotic and fantastical bestiary. The entire series borrows the epic verve of the large tapestries from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Symbols of power and wealth in olden days, such hangings provided efficacious propaganda decors. While preserving this political aim in its works, MadeIn Company transforms the meaning completely to scoff at the dominant ideologies of the contemporary great powers.

In response to the paintings, imposing hieratic sculptures erected like totems in the centre of the gallery, prolong, in their way, the effort to demystify imperial, military and colonial pro- paganda. Four large fetishes, taller than 2 metres, that reclaim the canon of African tribal statuary, are decked with the symbols of the oppressor: a kepi, a soldier’s helmet, a colonial hat and an officer’s cap – all of which have one thing in common: they are too small for the heads that they cover. A simple but efficacious manner to denounce the illegitimacy of tyrannical powers over religious and cultural minorities – as does the altar dedicated to the Buddha painted yellow. Here, MadeIn Company points the finger at the Chinese imperia- lism that is victimising Tibet.

These imposing, hulking sculptures are actually made of polyurethane foam – a light malleable material, similar to the accessories of stage sets, which MadeIn Company uses to underscore the following paradox: The massive appearance of these sculptures contrasts with the fragility of the material — an ever so symbolic metaphor of the social and political systems in place.

On stage at the Nathalie Obadia Gallery – Brussels, Xu Zhen and his “troupe” perform the Human Comedy for us.

The exhibition at the Nathalie Obadia Gallery – Brussels will be held in parallel with the Lyon Biennale, where MadeIn Company will be showing an important installation entitled, Movement Field, at La Sucrière.

MadeIn Company has exhibited in many international institutions, including the Pinchuk Art Centre in  Kiev (2013), the 7th Asia Pacific Triennal of Brisbane (2012), the Kunsthalle in Bern (2011), the Minsheng Art Museum in Shanghai (2010), the Busan Biennale (South Korea) in 2010, the SMAK in Ghent (2009), the PS1 in New York (2006), the Venice Biennale (2005) and the MOMA in New York (2004). 

Beginning November 8, 2013, The Bruce High Quality Foundation (BHQF), whose installations, videos, paintings, sculptures, and performances simultaneously celebrate and critique art’s social history, will present Meditations, a single exhibition of new work in two Manhattan locations.

Meditations will be open to the public at the viewing spaces of Mark Fletcher and Vito Schnabel, art impresarios whose unconventional operations – each has a semi-private venue with irregular exhibition schedules, geographically independent from the city’s art gallery districts – echo the alternative nature of The Bruce High Quality Foundation’s practice.  The exhibition is described by BHQF as “a meditation on the historical relationship between works of art and the consolidation and dispersion of political power.” Through the sculptures, painting, and video on view in Meditations, the artists will use the visual language of antiquity to explore the ways objects have served as manifestations of power, and to investigate how preservation, historicizing, and collecting practices reveal and obscure other paths of influence and manipulation.

I.  Meditations of the Emperor
At Mark Fletcher’s space at 24 Washington Square North, BHQF will present “Meditations of the Emperor,” a human-scale recreation of the Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius, the ancient Roman bronze statue dating to 175 C.E., known as the only fully preserved bronze statue of a pre-Christian Roman emperor. The original bronze, which depicts the philosopher king as a merciful conqueror, resides in Capitoline Museums of Rome.  This ancient bronze is said to have served as the model for the Equestrian Statue of King George III of England that stood in New York City’s Bowling Green until 1776, when it was dismantled and converted into musket balls for use by George Washington’s army in battles of the American Revolutionary War.

At Mark Fletcher, the Foundation’s version of the Equestrian Statue will be rendered in high-density foam, plaster, burlap, gold leaf, two-channel video, and car speakers on a powder coated aluminum base. Televisions replace the heads of the emperor and his horse, broadcasting a video essay inspired by Marcus Aurelius “Meditations,” a collection of notes Aurelius wrote to himself, recapitulations of the Stoic philosophy by which he lived. The artists’ video is a montage combining hundreds of found video clips and quotations tracing a course between formal figurations of power through the ages, and a young woman’s monologue about her everyday confrontations with powers beyond her control. The sculpture and video will be accompanied by a large-scale painting depicting the ass of Aurelius’ horse. According to BHQF, “Meditations of the Emperor” explores “the desire of those in power to be simultaneously loved and feared, and the empathic fantasy of talking to animals.”

II.  Selections from the Greek and Roman Collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art
At Vito Schnabel’s space at 43 Clarkson Street, BHQF will present a group of 26 new sculptures from the its ongoing initiative to recreate, in homemade Playdough modeling clay, every object housed in the Greek and Roman antiquities collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Among the works on view at Clarkson Street will be 1:1 scale replicas of antiquities, some dating to the era of the original Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius. These new objects –  each one will carry a paper replica of its corresponding Metropolitan Museum inventory tag – include portrait busts, vessels, shards, and a nearly full-scale lion that is a stand-in for the classical Greek “Marble Statue of a Lion,” a sculpture dating to ca. 400-390 BC.

The Foundation describes “Selections from the Greek and Roman Collection” as  “a portrait of an institution.” They have written, “This is not about the birthplace of democracy or its mannered second act in Roman imperialism. It is about how we experience a public art collection in an era when the interests of continuous commercial consumption have ridden roughshod over our capacity for public memory.”

Hauser & Wirth is proud to present an exhibition comprising two new series of works by artist Roni Horn. Opening 11 November 2013, ‘Everything was sleeping as if the universe were a mistake’ will fill the gallery’s West Chelsea space in Manhattan with large format drawings and two multi part sculptures that continue Horn’s exploration of the nature of perception, memory, and identity. The experiential quality of Horn’s glass installations link the relationship of time to space and light. Employing the formal devices of pairing, repetition, and doubling, Horn challenges the viewer to reconcile the eye and the mind. ‘Everything was sleeping as if the universe were a mistake’ will be on view through 11 January 2014.

Upon entering the gallery’s soaring sky lit, wood-ceilinged space, viewers will encounter ‘Untitled (“A dream dreamt in a dreaming world is not really a dream, says classical Chinese wisdom, but a dream not dreamt is”)’ (2013), a sculpture comprised of ten cylindrical cast glass elements rendered in hues of violet and bathed in the glow of natural light. At the opposite end of the gallery, visitors will find ‘Untitled (“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance”)’ (2013), a counterpart of the violet glass sculpture but in subtly shifting shades of chamomile, chartreuse, and lime.

Separated but palpably connected, the two sculptures invite comparison and contemplation of accepted notions of ‘likeness’ and ‘difference’. Reflecting the changing natural light from apertures in the ceiling above, Horn’s sculptures partner with the weather and the constant cycles of time to manifest her binary experimentations with color, weight, and lightness, and solidity and fluidity.

Literary themes surge and resurface throughout much of Roni Horn’s oeuvre, and are present in both her sculptures and her drawings on view at Hauser & Wirth. ‘Untitled (“A dream dreamt in a dreaming world is not really a dream, says classical Chinese wisdom, but a dream not dreamt is”)’ makes reference to prose in Canadian poet Anne Carson’s publication ‘Plainwater’; meanwhile ‘Untitled (“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance”)’ references a passage from Shirley Jackson’s novel ‘We Have Always Lived in the Castle’. Incorporating lines from literature, Horn’s titles offer a narrative portal through which to enter her work, while still retaining an open and inexplicably ambiguous quality.

In the gallery’s central space, visitors will find a room containing Horn’s new series of large- scale drawings. This group of works exudes a powerful physical presence, abetted by its resolute color and handling of form. A meandering line roams freely across the surfaces of these drawings, suggesting an outline and relating this new work indirectly to Horn’s recurring theme of landscape. Here the artist manages to achieve both exquisite complexity and a masterful reduction of forms.

The element of drawing has been an integral part of Roni Horn’s artistic practice for thirty years. She has said, ‘If you were to ask me what I do, I would say I draw – this is the primary activity and that all my work has this in common regardless of idiom or material’. Presented in juxtaposition with Horn’s sculptures, these wall-mounted works traverse boundaries between two and three dimensions to challenge conventional definitions of ‘drawing’. Rendered as identifiable geometric forms and abstract volumes in both sculpture and drawing, Horn’s art engages new means to push forth investigations of multiplicity and perception.

About the Artist

Roni Horn was born in 1955 and lives and works in New York. Recent major solo exhibitions include ‘Selected Drawings 1984 – 2012′, Hauser & Wirth Zürich, Switzerland (2012); ‘Photographien / Photographic Works’, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany (2011); and ‘Well and Truly’, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2010). In November 2009, Horn’s comprehensive survey exhibition, ‘Roni Horn aka Roni Horn’ opened at Tate Modern and travelled to Collection Lambert in Avignon, France (2009); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York NY (2009); and The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston MA (2010). Horn’s works are featured in numerous major international institutions and collections including the Guggenheim Museum, New York NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York NY; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago IL; Tate Modern, London, England; Kunsthalle Hamburg, Germany; Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland; and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France.

For Horn, 2013 has amounted to an important year. In January 2013, Horn was awarded the Joan Miró Prize and JRP Ringier also published the first major publication to focus solely on Horn’s extensive drawing practice. Running concurrently with her show at Hauser & Wirth, Horn will present a solo exhibition at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt am Main, Germany on view from 12 December 2013 to 26 January 2014. Following in 2014, Horn will participate in the 19th edition of the Sydney Australia Biennale, ‘You Imagine What You Desire’.

“Let us not be deceived,” Bernard Baruch announced in 1947, “we are today in the midst of a cold war.” The walls may have come down over two decades ago, but there are numerous symptoms of Cold War antagonisms and unresolved issues in today’s political landscape: global powers attempting to colonize the world intellectually as well as economically, then resorting to concealed or overt violence where the propaganda machine is ineffective.

“Statute of limitations” is a legal term, describing the time frame during which affected parties can take action to seek justice after injury or damage. There is no time limit for seeking justice for large-scale international crimes — financial, technological, or cultural colonization, systemic corruption, invasions, war profiteering, war crimes, state sponsored terrorism and assassinations, or cyber wars. Yet these are the very crimes that, despite clear evidence of their damage, remain unacknowledged, normalized by social and political systems which condone them.

In the face of such systemic violence, this exhibition offers a statue of limitations: an anti-monument to human will, with all its limitations.

Nazgol Ansarinia’s work rebels against state logic and bureaucracy. Her operations take up official documents (NSS Book Series), as well as quotidian objects (Mendings), which become host to human anxieties and uneasiness about the times we live in.

The subjects of Holger Niehaus’s photographs are symbolic abstractions: a vanitas of oil and water, the motivations behind many a political and economical maneuver; a still life version of Kasmir Malevich’s Black Square of 1915 (A48), a radical avant-garde gesture overshadowed by the subsequent trajectory of Soviet socialism but still one of the most influential artworks of the twentieth century.

Judith Sönnicken’s anti-monuments suggest the recurrence of uneasy events. One is an image of a paradox (Statue of Limitation): a human-size empty pedestal — a claim to represent the act of limiting? The other gives physicality to the digital (Back Up), speaking to the anxiety of losing the digital tools that enable so many facets of our everyday life, and perhaps presaging a lost age ended by advanced digital, or nuclear, weapons.

Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck and Media Farzin take a 1950s-era US television program about current politics as the source material of their video (Chronoscope, 1951, 11 pm). By selectively reordering its conversations, the statements of various interviewees are weaved into a single dialogue. The result is a disquieting snapshot of early Cold War discourse and its resonances in the present day.

The Shaikh Ebrahim Center for Culture and Research opens its 2013/14 season with “Sea” an exhibition that presents Hala Al Khalifa’s latest works consisting of installation and video. In this body of work, the artist explores the legacy of pearl diving, and the rich yet dangerous relationship that was the life line for many families living on the shores of the Arabian Gulf. The dome mesh or the fish trap takes another form in which a conceptual re-interpretation takes it to another level, becoming a metaphor of entrapment.

This show is a tribute and a memorial for our ancestors who lost their lives at the sea and the legacy and heritage of pearl diving.

About Hala Al Khalifa

Born in London and raised in Bahrain, Al Khalifa is now based in Doha where she works at QMA in the Public Arts department while she develops alongside her work as an artist. After receiving a joint BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University of Boston, Massachusetts, she returned to Bahrain and joined the art department at the Bahrain University and continued her education to receive an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Arts at University College London.

Early in her career Al Khalifa had several solo shows in Bahrain, and later participated in numerous solo and group shows in London, Egypt, Kuwait, Sharjah, Tunisia and Qatar. Al Khalifa’s works are influenced by the names of the masters of contemporary Arab art and by her own views on life and experiences, she uses different mediums to express her artistic language.