Arndt Art Agency is very pleased to collaborate on a solo exhibition at Sprovieri Gallery in London by one of Australia’s most acclaimed living painters, Ben Quilty. Entitled “THE EMU MAN”, this curated selection of works includes recent figurative and expressionist paintings that directly reference the environment of Covid lockdowns and the Australian landscape via the artist’s characteristic impasto painting style.

9 July - 21 August 2022

Artists JC Jacinto and Zean Cabangis meditate on the ebb and flow relationship between a person and a place. The acts of observing, discovering, documenting and constructing their surroundings become an act of blurring the lines between space and being. The immersion in a place becomes an immersion of thought, and within these thoughts, new places are formed.

JC Jacinto invents places that his mind wishes to inhabit, creating paintings loosely based on images of crystals as seen through a digital microscope. The miniature landscapes inside these crystals defy physics and other laws of nature, some elements floating, crudely put together, with no organized direction. Following characteristics in nature, with the least intrusion possible, he reshapes his landscapes, removing orientation and randomizing perspectives. Jacinto’s interest in the internal structures of crystals stem from his ongoing fascination with a search for balance in the human-nature-universe dynamics. His past works investigate and experiment with fossilized wood, plastiglomerates, mycelium and bio waste. Through the
study of naturally occurring changes, he reflects his sense of being and thought as intrinsically linked to participation in a place, never a singular entity existing on its own. Jacinto recently built a second home in the countryside as an attempt to actualize this theory: “I wanted to create a version of myself as a space: me as a literal piece of land, constantly evolving with nature’s assistance.”

Whilst Jacinto’s work gazes down into the rocks, the landscapes of Zean Cabangis appear to be focused upward onto the trees. Cabangis’ latest body of work departs from his more geometrically arranged mixed media collages of printed transfer images, mainly of manmade structures and landscapes cropped and scaled in varying degrees. His latest series is almost devoid of manmade structures and is dominated by more painterly techniques. In recent years, he relocated from a studio in the middle of a gritty, overpopulated and overbuilt urban area to one deeper into the lush tropical countryside, where he often cycles and explores the terrain. He traverses dark and dense jungles, through which pinpricks of light shine through, abuzz with tiny life forms, nature’s energy glowing and pulsating. His paintings, albeit still layered with photo transfers, have grown more abstract and expressive, capturing the flow of windblown trees and leaves, as if moving without pause, walking while thinking, in directions led purely by curiosity and instinct.

As the artists respond to their physical environments, they simultaneously build internal worlds as mysterious and unfathomable as their natural surrounding, becoming one with it. As Jacinto muses, “I started to look at the body as a home, a vessel that we occupy temporarily. And from there I realized that actual places are not too different from our bodies after all. Places are not just concrete, wood and steel beams, just as we are not only flesh, skin and bone. Places can store information too... (They) are living, and our relationship with them goes beyond shelter and function. Places can mold us as much as (another person) would.”

-- Text by Stephanie Frondoso


Zean Cabangis (b. 1985 in Tayabas, PH) is a Filipino contemporary artist whose practice combines photographic documentation and painting to create multi-layered works which explore interconnections within the mundane. Through emulsification, Cabangis transfers images from photographs he takes during bike rides on to canvas. He intentionally takes rides without purpose or destination and asks himself, “Where am I going?” Repeatedly and without arriving at an answer. It is through his production that connects his physical body to representative imagery. He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting at College of Fine Arts, University of the Philippines. Having won the prize of Most Outstanding Thesis of 2006, he graduated from his BFA program in 2007. Cabagnis has had solo exhibitions at Artinformal, Silverlens, and Now Gallery in Manila, Philippines. He has also participated in group exhibitions at Gravity Art Space; Salud Bistro Gallery; Blan Gallery; Kaida Gallery; Cubao Expo; and The Cultural Center of the Philippines among others. Furthermore, he has received recognition for his work through the Ateneo Art Awards, the Cultural Center of the Philippines, and University of the Philippines. Zean Cabagnis lives and works in Laguna, Philippines.
 
JC Jacinto (b. 1985 in Pasig, PH) is a Filipino contemporary artist whose practice explores the human to universe dynamic by making references to organic material as well as the context in which these may be found. In his practice, Jacinto has been slowly moving from painting mostly organic subjects to using actual organic materials for his new take on painting. His interest in the autonomous life of rocks, trees, and minerals and their inherent capacity to record their lives and the passage of time figure prominently in recent works such as in his twin exhibitions I Skip Stones Across Eons (2019) at Artinformal and The Arrow That Pierced Time (2020) at Taipei Dangdai in Taiwan. He received his arts education from the University of the Philippines. In 2014, he completed a residency at the Abu Dhabi Art Hub. In 2019, Jacinto was shortlisted for his show, A Crack in Everything for the Fernando Zobel Prize in the Ateneo Art Awards.


At Bode Projects
Rheinbeckhallen
Rheinbeckstr. 31
12459 Berlin

Arndt Art Agency is pleased to announce a solo exhibition presented at the Auckland Art Gallery by Gilbert & George.

Often controversial, sometimes cheeky and always questioning, British artists Gilbert & George have been creating art together ever since they met in 1967 at one of London’s leading art schools. From the very beginning, they have appeared as subjects in their own art and shared a belief in ‘Art for all’.

For Gilbert & George anything – and everything – is a potential subject matter for art. They have peered closely at the big questions of life: religion, sex, violence, hope, addiction and death. Through their films and ‘LIVING SCULPTURE’, they have challenged taboos, fought artistic convention and taken a fresh look at the way we live now. From their own bodies to their long-time home in London’s East End, nothing is too personal or too forbidden for these two artists whose work is a portrait of life today.

Developed exclusively with Gilbert & George by Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, The Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland Exhibition brings together existing and new work from the 21st century to look back over a joint career that has courted controversy, challenged the status quo and championed alternative views. Exhibiting work direct from Gilbert & George’s own personal collection, it brings some of the most exciting of British art to New Zealand for the very first time. Please note: This exhibition's dates are subject to change. Please check back for the latest information.

Photography credit: Jennifer French, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki

Arndt Art Agency is pleased to announce Rodel Tapaya's solo exhibition at The Drawing Room, Manila.

May tenga ang lupa, may pakpak ang balita (The land has ears, the news has wings) is an aphorism that reminds us not only that contemporary realities have ancient roots but also that nonhuman actors matter in telling the story. In Rodel Tapaya’s own words, it is these stories that give us existence: “… myths and folktales are our ancestors”. The labyrinthine genealogy of folklore runs through these paintings to show us the fine line that separates imagination and falsehood. These works occasion contemplation of how massive disinformation is built upon a maze of folklorism that confuses our way of interpreting and remembering.
 
While the word tenga commonly means ‘ears’ in Tagalog, in other  Austronesian languages, it also means ‘center or middle’. Later on, it came to mean the half of a particular whole or the curve of a street or landscape. The word tenga thus points to the centrality of the organ of hearing and balance to the corporeal and environmental conception of our ancestors. (1)

The idea that even animals and objects can listen and transmit private thoughts endures in our current age of surveillance capitalism; a time when unregulated social media increasingly threatens human autonomy and civil society. The works in this exhibition offer a glimpse into this unfolding crisis by retelling the version of events from history but in the shape of fables where animals take on human roles and plead with the reader to uncover the truth from the satire.

The main figure in the painting is Macario Sakay, who commanded the remnants of the revolutionary forces during the Philippine-American War. Sakay anticipated how the battle would rage on long after they were dead in the frontier of historical revisionism. Here, he is reimagined with eyes in his long hair and spread out wings that recall the iconic gesture of the man in Goya’s Third of May, 1808. Like that man, Sakay remained defiant in the face of execution. His face in this painting shows anguish that is more worried than terrified. Asserting his humanity, Sakay stood in the gallows and appealed to fellow prisoners: “But I want to tell you that we are not bandits and robbers, as the Americans have accused us, but members of the revolutionary forces that defended our mother country.” By painting Sakay as a bird of freedom and political awakening, the painter carries out the aspiration in his last words: “May our independence be born in the future”.
 
(1) In some Tagalog translations of the Bible, it replaces the penultimate verses of Ecclesiastes 10 (..a bird on the wing may report what you say).

Photography credit: Anjo Lapresca

Exhibition dates: 22.04. - 15.05.2021
Exhibition venue: Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles

Arndt Art Agency is pleased to announce a solo exhibition presented at Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles by Ben Quilty.

The new suite of works continues the artist’s thematic examination of masculinity and violence in Western communities.
 
Based on drawings of young men training for a fight, Quilty’s paintings contain surreal forms set against bare, apocalyptic backdrops.  Each work contains a central figure who stands, sits, or falls in a shallow foreground.  Like actors on a stage, they command the compositions, offering an abundance of energy, motion, and color before their outdoor backdrops, which resemble the harrowing vastness of sandy, unpopulated beaches or the desert.  The series of portraits began as the artist considered the violent riots on the beaches of Sydney in 2005.  Following the riots, travel warnings were announced in countries around the world, and Muslims were targeted relentlessly, encouraged openly by members of the government and the media.  As Quilty explains, “blood on the beaches was a haunting reminder of the first blood spilled on the same beaches when British ships first made contact with indigenous Australians two and a half centuries ago.”
Quilty’s men are monstrous and misshapen.  Certain features of their anatomies are blown out of proportion, such as the thumbs-up in The War Crime; while others are misplaced, such as the foot emerging from an arm in The Senator.  These grotesque configurations are redolent of Francis Bacon’s cursed subjects, who contort violently, collapsing in on themselves and into the materiality of paint.
 
It is impossible to cleave apart Quilty’s approach to content and form in The Debate.  The figures disintegrate into formlessness, caught in rushes of violence. In The Diplomat, for instance, a cluster of thickly-applied parallel lines in the right margin of the painting suggests ferocious movement.  Here, Quilty borrows a photographic mode of indexing motion: the blur captured by a camera’s shutter speed.  Just as the haziness of motion blur in a photograph emphasizes the materiality, rather than transparency, of the image, Quilty’s Guston-like impastoed paint emphasizes the mediation of his images and imparts a sense of fleshiness to his surfaces.
 
Colonization, violence, and masculinity have long concerned the artist, who joined the Australian Defense Force in 2011 as an official war artist tasked with interpreting the experiences of Australian service personnel.  And in 2016, Quilty traveled to Greece, Serbia, and Lebanon with Australian writer Richard Flanagan to produce art that captured experiences of the refugee crisis.  He found that the photographs he took while dispatched did not adequately capture the feel of the experiences, and therefore turned to paint.  As the artist notes, “Men continue to fight each other.  Diplomacy is a dying art. Hacking, punching, spitting our way into the 21st century.”

Ben Quilty (b.1973, Sydney, Australia; lives and works in Sydney) holds the Doug Moran Portrait Prize, the Prudential Eye Award for Contemporary Art, and the Archibald Prize.  He has had solo exhibitions at Saatchi Gallery, London; Cairns Art Gallery, Australia; Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane, Australia; Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, Australia; and Arndt Agency, Berlin, Germany.  In 2019, Quilty had his first major survey exhibition across Australia at the Art Gallery of South Australia, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.  Ben Quilty’s work is represented in many public Australian collections that include: the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; among others.

Arndt Art Agency is pleased to stage the presentation of a seminal work by leading Australian artist Patricia Piccinini, best known for her transgenic menagerie of disturbing, hyperrealistic creatures. Constructed from silicone and fiberglass, these hybrid sculptures investigate the potential rise of new and troubling developments through the advance of biotechnology and genetic manipulation.

Exploring concepts of what is “natural” in the digital age, Patricia Piccinini brings a deeply personal perspective to her work. Patricia Piccinini is one of Australia’s most acclaimed contemporary artists whose startling sculptures examine the connections between science and nature, art and the environment. Audiences are drawn to Piccinini’s “hyper-realist” sculptures because they appear so real, yet they are creatures of the artist’s imagination developed to consider a strange new world of artificial or mutant beings derived from experimental biotechnology. From the mapping of the human genome to the growth of human tissue and organs from stem cells, Piccinini’s art charts a terrain in which scientific progress and ethical questions are intertwined. Created using a combination of materials such as silicone, fibreglass and human hair, Piccinini’s sculptures are familiar yet fantastical in their depiction of possible future species and their interaction with human beings. Often confronting yet endearingly vulnerable, her sculptures give form to her fascination with the relationship between the ‘natural’ and the ‘artificial’ while asserting the power of social relationships, love and communication. Piccinini’s work is fundamentally about the human condition, despite the quasi-human appearance of her sculptures. The artist sees them as ‘beautiful rather than grotesque, miraculous rather than freakish. Both impressive and disconcerting, these sculptures intimate that humans can manipulate but not control life or evolution.

Entitled "Kindred", the project takes its name from the title of the spectacular sculpture on display within Gallery 10. Here the artist's characteristic employment and fusion of human and animal traits within her work is embodied: An orangutan-like mother gently holds her two babies. Forms are fluid here, as Piccinini probes the boundaries demarking artificial from natural, human from the posthuman. She leaves viewers with no easy answers, suggesting the borders are unstable, mutable and in flux, thus encouraging further investigation from her audience. With this universal embrace and maternal scene, "Kindred" is emblematic of Piccinini's interest in creating empathy in the audience.

Artist quote: "The idea that we as humans are uniquely and fundamentally different from other animals is a cornerstone of how humans have traditionally seen ourselves. It is this specialness that allows us to exploit the environment and other beings around us so completely. However, both genetic analysis and observation is now showing how small that difference really is. We see common DNA everywhere and common behaviours in many other animals, especially in primates. Like us, orangutan mothers keep their children close and educate them over many years. If I want my children to eat vegetables, I just tell them I am their orangutan mother. In this work, we see three unique individuals each set at a different point on a continuum of greater or less animalness. However, the point is not their difference, it is their connection.”

Kindred has previously been exhibition in the following important exhibitions: Curious Affection, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia (2018) (solo);  Future and the Arts: AI, Robotics, Cities, Life - How Humanity Will Live Tomorrow, Mori Museum, Tokyo, Japan (2019) (group); The XXII Triennale di Milano, Broken Nature, Palazzo dell Arte, Milan, Italy (2019) (group); En Kaerlig Verden, Arken Museum, Copenhagen, Denmark (2019) (group); Through Love, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Melbourne, Australia (2018) (solo); Omfamna Framtiden, Boras Museum of Art, Boras Sweden (2020) (solo); and Curious Imaginings, Vancouver Biennale at the Patricia Hotel, Vancouver, Canada (2018) (solo).

About the Artist:
Born 1965 in Freetown, Sierra Leone, Piccinini was selected to represent Australia at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003. She holds the position of Enterprise Professor in Art at University of Melbourne, Australia. She has received the following awards: Lifetime Achievement Award, Melbourne Art Foundation (2014), New York Residency, Australia Council (2006), New York Residency, Australia Council (2006), New York Residency, Australia Council (2006), International Cultural Exchange Program, Arts Victoria (2002), New Media Fellowship, Australia Council (2002), Arts Development grant, Arts Victoria (1999), Tokyo Residency, Australia Council (1998).

Selected solo exhibitions include: A Miracle Constantly Repeated, Rising Festival, Melbourne, Australia (2021), Patricia Piccinini: Embracing the Future, Kunsthalle Krems, Austria (2021), Patricia Piccinini: The Instruments of Life, Kai Art Gallery, Tallinn, Estonia (2021), Between the Shadow and the Soul, Helsinki Taidehalli, Helsinki, Finland (2020), Omfamna Frantiden, Børas Museum of Art, Børas, Sweden (2020), A World of Love, Arken Museum, Copenhagen, Denmark (2019), Curious Affection, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia (2018), Patricia Piccinini, Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco, USA (2018), Conscienceness, Kibla Portal, Kibla, Slovenia (2017), ComSciencia, CCBB Brasilia, Brasilia, Brazil (2016), Patricia Piccinini, Yu-Hsiu Museum of Art, Caotun, Taiwan (2016), Like Us, Newcastle Art Gallery, Newcastle (2015), Piccinini at Hosfelt, Artinternational, Istanbul, Turkey (2015), ComSciencia, CCBB Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2015), Another Life, University of Quebec Art Museum, Montreal, Canada Relativity, Galway International Arts Festival Gallery, Galway, Ireland (2015), The Touch of Another, Warrnambool Art Gallery, Warrnambool (2014), Structures of Support, Canberra Museum and Gallery, Canberra (2013), Hold me Close to your Heart, Arter Space for Art, Istanbul (2011), Once Upon a Time…, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (2011), Not as we know it, Haunch of Venison, New York (2010), Relativity, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth (2010), Patricia Piccinini, Leeahn Gallery, Daegu and Seoul (2010), Recent Work, Byblos Art Gallery, Verona, Italy (2009), The Place Where It Actually Happens, Yvon Lambert, New York (2008), Piccinini, Perc Tucker Regional Gallery, Townsville (2008), (tiernas) Criaturas/(tender) Creatures, Artium, Vitoria-Gasteiz (2007), Hug: Recent Works by Patricia Piccinini, Frye Museum, Seattle; Des Moines Art Center, (2007), Des Moines Double Love Knot, Lismore Regional Gallery, Lismore (2007), In Another Life, Wellington City Gallery, Wellington (2006) Unbreaking Eggs, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, Nature's Little Helpers, Robert Miller Gallery, New York (2005), We are Family, toured to Bendigo Art Gallery, Bendigo (2004), We are Family, Australian Pavilion, 50th Venice Biennale, Venice (2003), We are Family, toured to Hara Museum, Tokyo (2003), Love Me Love My Lump, Monash Centre and Dryphoto Gallery, Prato (2003), Call of the Wild, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2002), The Breathing Room, The Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo (2001), Superevolution, Centro de Artes Visuales, Lima (2001), Swell, Artspace, Sydney, Australia (2000), Plasticology, NTT InterCommunication Centre, Tokyo (1999).

Selected public collections include: National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC, USA, Thomas Olbricht Collection, Berlin, Germany, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia, Monash University, Victoria, Australia, Newcastle Regional Art Gallery, New South Wales, Australia.

Arndt Art Agency is very pleased to present a solo presentation entitled "Free Fall" by one of Australia's most visible contemporary painters, Ben Quilty, at Cromwell Place, London.

Widely known for his thick, gestural oil paintings Ben Quilty has explored a range of themes throughout his career. Apart from his role as an artist, he is also known as an Australian social commentator. From the dangerous coming of age rituals of young Australian men, to the complex social history of his country, he is constantly critiquing notions of identity, patriotism and belonging.

At its core, Quilty’s practice is inextricably linked to his own apprehension – as a male, as an Australian, and as a world citizen. A truly self-reflexive practice. Quilty packs a punch with brazen, gutsy pieces that impart a sense of social responsibility while presenting judgement and constant evaluation; ultimately of our existence and treatment of each other.

In recognising Australia's relationship to the United Kingdom as a former British colony, Quilty's exhibition Free Fall focuses on the geographical relationship of Australia internationally — as the world's largest island and smallest continent — and the historical consequences of violent encounters originating from the frontier wars with his nation's indigenous people that have served as a foundation in shaping a national psyche.

This curated selection of medium to large scale paintings, sugar lift etchings and a major sculpture, are a culmination of works produced during recent pandemic times and lockdown environment. Free Fall continues to explore Quilty's exploration of Australian cultural identity and the darker sides of island life within his artistic practice.

By acknowledging the bloody, mass murders that have occurred on Australian soil and utlising Australia's beaches as a backdrop for his works, Quilty channels a sinister element of Australian identity and history in this show. An inward-looking racist nature is revealed and conveyed through his figurative compositions that appears to rear its ugly head in the face of difference and what is perceived as a threat beyond the waters and periphery of Australia’s island paradise.

The artist cites Sydney's Cronulla riots and historical figures such as the Australian explorer, John Batman, that make up a shameful, often forgotten and ignored past centring around male conflict and inherent violence. Many of his paintings in this show are based from life drawings of male sitters and reference material sourced from Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) fighters and work by the late American Realist painter George Bellows depicting boxing figures locked in combat.

The artist comments: "To make paintings of men punching the life out of each other feels like an apt response to being alive in 2021”. In this way, Quilty continues to pose important questions about contemporary humanity and consider our shortcomings in an effort to positively make a path towards progress.

About the artist:
Born, Sydney, Australia in 1973, Quilty lives and works in Sydney, Australia. Quilty won the Doug Moran Portrait Prize in 2009 for his painting of Jimmy Barnes, There but for the Grace of God Go I, no. 2. In the same year, Quilty was named runner-up for the Archibald Prize for the same portrait. He then won the Archibald Prize – Australia’s most prestigious portrait painting prize – two years later for his portrait of Margaret Olley. Quilty won the 2002 Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship, the 2007 National Self Portrait Prize, the 2009 Doug Moran National Portrait Prize, the Prudential Eye Award for Contemporary Art in Singapore in 2014.

In 2011 Quilty was attached to the Australian Defence Force (ADF) observing their activities in Kabul, Kandahar and Tarin Kowt as an official war artist. His task was to record and interpret the experiences of Australian service personnel who are deployed as part of Operation Slipper. After his return, Quilty spent six months producing work for the Australian War Memorial's National Collection. Such work is in the tradition of war artists that began in World War I with artists Arthur Streeton, George Lambert and Frederick McCubbin. The resulting body of work was exhibited in 2013 at the National Art School Gallery, Canberra. In the same year, Quilty was awarded Australia’s most prestigious portrait painting prize The Archibald Prize for his iconic portrait of the late Australia artist, Margaret Olley. In 2014, he was selected as the winner of the Prudential Eye Award, Singapore, and invited to become the first Australian to hold a solo exhibition at Saatchi Gallery in London. In 2016, Quilty was invited by World Vision Australia to travel to Greece, Serbia and Lebanon with esteemed Australian author, Richard Flanagan, to witness firsthand the international refugee crisis. This global topic was explored via a series of key works as a result of his experiences abroad in addition to the publication Home: Drawings by Syrian Children (2018) produced by Penguin Random House featuring a collection of drawings by Syrian children reflecting on their forsaken homeland.

Quilty’s work has been widely exhibited in a number of significant national and international exhibitions. Recent solo exhibitions include: The Entangled Landscape, Cairns Art Gallery, Cairns, Australia (2021),  Still life after the virus, Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane, Australia (2020), 150 Years, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, Australia (2020) and The Difficulty, (A3) Arndt Agency, Berlin, Germany (2019). In 2019, Quilty staged his first major survey exhibition across Australia at the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide entitled ‘QUILTY’, followed by a tour to Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), Brisbane, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.

Ben Quilty’s work is represented in public Australian collections that include: the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the Art Gallery of South Australia,  Adelaide; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Newcastle Regional Art Gallery, NSW; the Bendigo Art Gallery, VIC; Tarrawarra Museum of Art, VIC; the Australian War Memorial, Canberra; and the Australia Parliament House Art Collection, Canberra.

THIS IS AMERICA brings together 36 artists, US and foreign-born, who have chosen to call the United States their home. Primarily featuring works created in 2020 and 2021, this exhibition reflects a global sense of precarity and provides a kaleidoscopic view into a country plagued by injustice and inequality. Representing a cross-section of experiences, the artworks included in THIS IS AMERICA contend with a range of issues from housing insecurity and the opioid epidemic to domestic violence and police brutality.

The issues tackled in this exhibition are seemingly disparate, yet all represent aspects of the American experience. Bringing together a multiplicity of perspectives, THIS IS AMERICA offers a variegated view into the political and cultural melting pot that is the United States today.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue published by DISTANZ, Berlin including more than thirty statements written by the contributing artists as well as thematic essays by Kathy Battista and New York Times best-selling author Roxane Gay.

Participating Artists: Farley Aguilar, Daniel Arsham, Cristina BanBan, Alex Becerra, Sharif Bey, Coady Brown, Zoe Buckman, Chloe Chiasson, Will Cotton, Timothy Curtis, Christina Forrer, Genevieve Gaignard. Mark Thomas Gibson, Alfonso Gonzalez Jr., Jameson Green, Caleb Hahne, Asif Hoque, Jarrett Key, David Leggett, Tony Marsh, Shona McAndrew, Louis Osmosis, Alina Perez, Cleon Peterson, Pat Phillips, Patrick Quarm. Kelly Reemtsen, Brie Ruais, Ilana Savdie, Mira Schor, Sojourner Truth Parsons, Raelis Vasquez, Charles Edward Williams, Peter Williams, Cosmo Whyte, Hiejin Yoo.

Online Exclusive
Presentation dates: May 6-15

Arndt Art Agency is pleased to present a curated selection of works by the following artists for the online edition of Art Fair Philippines 2021:

Del Kathryn Barton
Bianca Kennedy
Eko Nugroho
Manuel Ocampo
Rodel Tapaya
Ben Quilty

Curated by Matthias Arndt
Exhibition dates: 22.04. - 15.05.2021
Exhibition venue: Tang Contemporary Art, Hong Kong

Arndt Art Agency is pleased to announce the exhibition “Random Numbers,” presented at Tang Contemporary Art, Hong Kong by Rodel Tapaya. Following the artist’s previous exhibitions staged at Tang Contemporary in Bangkok “Nirvana: Tropical Rebirth: Pannaphan Yodmanee, Rodel Tapaya, Heri Dono” (2018) and his major solo exhibition “Myths and Truths” (2018) at Tang Contemporary in Beijing, his first exhibition at Tang Contemporary in Hong Kong “Random Numbers”, (2021) showcases Rodel Tapaya’s most recent body of work that he had commenced in 2019: the series of “Scrap Paintings”.
 
Rodel Tapaya is one of the most prominent contemporary Filipino painters working within the international art world today. Early in Tapaya’s career, he came to regional and global prominence through his now signature body of work, the “Folk Narrative” paintings. During this phase, the artist drew direct inspiration from pre-colonial mythology and Filipino folkloric tradition in order to fuse the otherworldly imagery with the impressions from the contemporary daily life. This enabled him to establish a unique contemporary, neo-traditional artistic form of myth-making. In these works, numerous pictorial fragments within muralist compositions are devoid of traditional perspective, and meticulously pieced together to form epic stories filled with allegorical references. Tapaya became renowned for his celebration of Filipino culture while communicating urgent universal ideas concerning civilisation, colonisation, capitalism and globalisation.
 
In this new exhibition, the artist’s overarching interest in reflecting upon ideas based in the common human experience continues as part of his artistic practice, as does his interest in presenting an interface between imagination and reality, but represents a  departure from his previous artistic investigations. The exhibition’s title takes direct reference from one of the artwork titles in the show that is among the curated selection of paintings ranging from monumental to medium-scale pieces. This exhibition exclusively explores the artist’s new phase of “Scrap Paintings” that investigates the concept and process of collage. The compositions comprise of semi-figurative illustrations involving a pastiche of objects set amid existential backdrops and miscellaneous elements that appear anonymous and expressive.
 
Collage has not only become a preliminary creative process for the technique that Tapaya employs in the series “Scrap Paintings”, but it is also the central theme to his work as whole: “I find myself using the cut-out pieces, pasting, erasing some details, I feel that I am “painting”. In that small, almost illustration-like scale and stage — almost like a small diorama scale — I find myself creating the whole artwork. That seed will then be transformed into a larger scale. The discipline and challenge for myself when working in this way is to not to leave the collage work unfinished, but consider it as a complete work unto itself with a vision that it will become larger than life when translated almost photo-realistically through painting.” Such innovation and internal deconstruction of one’s own reflective thinking processes in order to critique, question and thus advance one’s creative oeuvre is the testament to Rodel Tapaya’s artistic significance, evident in this important new body of work that continues to garner him international acclaim.

Exhibition dates: 03.11 - 11.12.2020, Venue: Pavilion Gallery, Cromwell Place, London, Presented by Arndt Art Agency

Arndt Art Agency is delighted to be part of the inaugural exhibition program at Cromwell Place, London, for the landmark presentation “The Possibility of an Island: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia”.

This show aims to provide an introduction for Western audiences into the incredibly vast, diverse and extremely vibrant contemporary art landscape of Southeast Asia and the Asia Pacific Region. Curated by Arndt Art Agency founder, Matthias Arndt, this in-depth focus is the result of a decade-long exploration into the innovative creative figures within an array of vibrant contemporary art scenes arising within countries such as the Philippines, Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, Singapore and Australia.

Participating artists: Zico Albaiquni, Zean Cabangis, Abdul Abdullah, Marina Cruz, Kawayan de Guia, Nona Garcia, Mella Jaarsma, JC Jacinto, Yeo Kaa, Danie Mellor, Eko Nugroho, Alvin Ong, Handiwirman Saputra, Svay Sareth, Rodel Tapaya, Natee Utarit, Entang Wiharso, Pannaphan Yodmanee.

Arndt is an expert in Southeast Asian contemporary art having edited and produced a range of major publications and exhibitions, such as “SIP! Indonesian Art Today” (2013), “ASIA: Looking South” (2011) and “WASAK! Filipino Art Today” (2015). He organised monographic exhibitions for many leading Southeast-Asian artists and recently worked as a Curatorial Advisor on the recent group exhibition “Contemporary Worlds – Indonesia” (2018) at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra and is a member of the “Asia Pacific Acquisition Committee" of the Tate. The Agency’s innovative international advisory and global artist management model was conceived in 2015 in response to the shifting needs of the arts industry and is thrilled to join forces as a founding member with Cromwell Place; a revolutionising organisation within the art world. Sharing an awareness of the need for innovation and new ways of working outside of traditional gallery formats, Cromwell Place serves as an ideal platform and partner for the agency’s broad range of international curated projects.

“The Possibility of an Island” includes key artists from specific regions who are celebrated extensively in their own countries. In many cases, this exhibition represents the individual artist’s debut on the London stage. These creative positions are united by the fact that they originate from islands; thousands of archipelagos, surrounded by water. The incredibly diverse cultural threads and languages located within the distinct artworks in the show are held together by this commonality that is communicated inherently within their lived experiences in order to express their differences and similarities. In grappling with these similarities, distinctions and physical borders, Britain is a unique location by which to discuss and gain perspective from abroad about such topics.

Existing as an island also is of huge importance in relation to the way the United Kingdom also expresses itself and deals with its close neighbours across the water. The British are keenly aware of the challenges and opportunities that an island status provides: protection and safety from outside influences, but also understanding the necessity of trade, engagement and exchange with partners across the world. These complex discussions engage directly with a Western approach towards Southeast Asia and Pacific regions from the view of the colonist, the explorer and the invader, while also investigating the concept of bringing civilisation and culture to areas deemed in need. And thus, the connection between Southeast Asia and England is directly addressed.

By virtue of the manifold artistic offerings within this unique presentation, the rich and complex art from Southeast Asia is acknowledged while a reassessment of the Western art world’s Euro-American lens is called into focus. For all press enquiries contact: Rachael Vance, rachael@arndtartagency.com

Exhibition dates: 11.09. – 15.10.2020, Presented by Albertz Benda, NYC & Arndt Art Agency, Berlin

OPENING: Friday 11th September, 12 - 8pm, during Berlin Art Week and parallel to Gallery Weekend Berlin 2020

Arndt Art Agency is pleased to announce New York-based artist Timothy Curtis' debut solo exhibition in Europe entitled "Temporary Decisions: Inkblots and Bikes" presented in collaboration with Albertz Benda, New York as part of GALLERY WEEKEND BERLIN and BERLIN ART WEEK 2020.

"Temporary Decisions: Inkblots and Bikes” will be on view from the 11th of September to the 15th of October at Arndt Art Agency’s premises in Fasanenstraße 28. “Serving an excessive term of twenty years parole and probation, I never feel quite comfortable or free. My requests to travel out of the USA to attend exhibitions in several different countries over the past four years - including Japan, Barcelona, Taiwan, South Korea and now Berlin, Germany - have been denied over and over again.” (Timothy Curtis, July 2020)

Curtis’ latest body of work is a reflection on the recent COVID-19 lockdown in New York City. Responding to this new confinement, the artist has revisited practices similar to those he used while incarcerated. In 2002, after disobeying a judge’s orders to appear in court numerous times, Curtis was subjected to Rorschach tests over the course of a five-hour psychological evaluation. While he no longer recalls his answers, the impact of the evaluation remains. In 2010, two years into an eight-year prison sentence, Curtis discovered that Hermann Rorschach had been a practicing artist prior to becoming a psychiatrist. Understanding the inkblots as artwork, Curtis began painting inkblot faces during this time.
 Engaging in a self-directed study of art history within prison, Curtis also learned of artists such as Fernand Léger and Georges Braque depicting the bicycle as a symbol of freedom. This also resonated with Curtis personally, as he had been a bike messenger for many years. He started creating “Bicycle Systems” of bars, bicycle tubes, forks, and chain rings to represent the conflicting feelings of freedom and confinement he experiences to this day while being one of seven million currently on parole, probation, or subject to the control of the United States Correctional System.

Throughout his experiences with the prison system, Curtis has been sustained by art’s ability to create freedom and peace of mind, even in the most trying situations. While the works in “Temporary Decisions: Inkblots and Bikes” are deeply personal, their interpretations are left entirely to the viewer.

About the artist:

Timothy Curtis was born in 1982 in Philadelphia, USA. He is a self-taught artist who currently lives and works in New York City. Since establishing a focused studio practice in 2015, Curtis realised his first solo exhibition in November 2017 at Kaikai Kiki’s Hidari Zingaro gallery in Tokyo, Japan, curated by Takashi Murakami. Curtis held his first solo show in New York with albertz benda and was featured in the landmark group exhibition “The Pencil is a Key” in 2019 at the Drawing Center, New York, alongside artist icons such as Gustave Courbet, Egon Schiele, Otto Dix and Max Ernst. In 2021, he will stage the exhibition “City as Studio” curated by Jeffrey Deitch, K11, Hong Kong in 2021.

Arndt Art Agency is pleased to announce "Heavenly Bodies in the South", a joint exhibition with artists Qin Qi and Rodel Tapaya.

The title is a description of the subject matter in the two artists' works, but it is also a metaphor for the exotic feeling and romantic imagination that permeates the exhibition.

Qin Qi represents a new mode of painting in China and, since 2013, he has refined them leaning of history painting through the fusion and application of multiple artistic styles and the adaptation of different stories. Exotic subjects and the grand tradition of Romanticism have come to characterize his work.

A representative of artists born in the Philippines in the 1980s, Rodel Tapaya draws on the myths and legends of his country, finding power in folk tales and natural landscapes, responding to reality, and illuminating the circumstances and social affairs of the people of the Philippines using traditional stories.

The two artists draw on history and they both have a special interest in natural landscapes and local customs. They depict forests, oceans, mountains, rivers, lakes, animals, and plants, as well as heavenly bodies at night, fresh dew in the morning, or the sunny glow at dusk. However, their versions of nature and history and their stories and forms take different paths through northern ice and snow and in southern sun showers. As a result, these heavenly bodies are exotic to one another, but they also symbolise another starry sky in reality, a never-before-seen universe removed from the present. Today, these heavenly bodies meet in the south.

Exhibition dates: 1 June - 31 July 2020, Curated by Rachael Vance

ONLINE EXHIBITION #2

As a continuation of the agency’s series of exclusive, curated online exhibitions, we remain committed to bringing you closer to our artists, allowing our audience to gain access to pieces across our international network in Europe, the USA, Asia and the Pacific Region.

In acknowledging the global scope of the current uncertainties faced by each of us as individuals and as a community during the COVID-19 pandemic, AAA presents its second online exhibition that speaks directly to the challenges we are contending with as a result while presenting new ways of seeing in response.

EXCLUSIVE ONLINE EXHIBITION WITH ARTSY

Participating artists: Jumaldi Alfi, Stephan Balkenhol, Joseph Beuys, Sophie Calle, Carla Chan, Isaac Chong Wai, Günther Förg, Isa Genzken, Uji 'Hahan' Handoko Eko Saputro, Paul Hutchinson, Julije Knifer, Jannis Kounellis, Alicja Kwade, Heinz Mack, Marin Majic, Patricia Piccinini, Sopheap Pich, Chiharu Shiota, Nedko Solakov, Maria Taniguchi.

With the urgency of the world’s attention centered on protecting our lives at a scale we have never known, it can be difficult to put creative practice in perspective. We believe there is nothing more grounding than artistic practices that inspire us and project a future beyond the current crisis. With the drastic measures and restrictions to our daily lives, we want to continue to connect with you our audience and establish circular communication between our artists during the extraordinary circumstances that we find ourselves in. While social-distancing, self-isolating and working from home, the coming weeks and months will be unprecedented for all of us. With many housebound, it is now more than ever so important to maintain communications. In recent years, art has become accelerated and often short-lived.

The current circumstances force us to slow down. It is a chance to catch our breath. We want to share something positive from these constraints and turn our attention to those who inspire us, rather than find unnecessary distraction in extrospection. The group online exhibition RESET provides insights into the current creative musings from our network of artists who are experiencing the unprecedented opportunity to pause with a sense of quiet in the face of such turbulence. To reorient, recalibrate and distill ideas: to reset.

In this way, the artists presenting new works have been able to increasingly reflect, contemplate and find strong focus. To get back to basics. Whether this be exploring the current societal shifts and associated reactions and emotions, or to experiment with an aspect of their practice they have always wanted to, or perhaps to investigate innovative adaptions or dialogues with previous projects or series’. Notions of distance, separation, disturbance, introspection and change are located within the pieces.

Aside from new pieces, historical works by artists conveying ideas of artistic re-invention that connect with such opportunities of the current moment also complement this curation. The show shares an array of very personal observations by a selection of contemporary artists with our international audience in order to connect and share a range of positions and provide clarity. RESET reinforces the importance and value placed on the role of the artist within society in being able to expound and tap into unique perspectives in order to imagine potential futures beyond our current experiences. It is our intention that this exhibition will provide a renewed sense of solidarity during such an exceptional moment in history.

ONLINE EXHIBITION #1

In a new series of exclusive online exhibitions curated by the agency, we are excited to bring you closer to our artists, allowing our audience to gain access to pieces across our international network in Europe, the USA, Asia and the Pacific Region. This new virtual format aims to respond to the topic of sustainability in an effort to lessen our carbon footprint while still allowing the presentation of significant content leading to important cross-cultural artistic dialogue. This concept is in keeping with the agency’s dynamic agency model that aims to continue to work in new ways within the contemporary art world landscape. In doing so, we will include a special selection of artists and their artworks in dialogue with each other for a limited amount of time in one place.

EXCLUSIVE ONLINE EXHIBITION WITH ARTSY

Participating artists: Absalon, Khadim Ali, Del Kathryn Barton, Roberto Chabet, William Cordova, Marina Cruz, Andi Fischer, Stefanie Gutheil, Yeo Kaa, Douglas Kolk, Misheck Masamvu, Eko Nugroho, Julian Rosefeldt, Kaloy Sanchez, Rodel Tapaya, Ben Quilty, Entang Wiharso.

"Cyclops, you asked about my famous name. I’ll tell you. Then you can offer me a gift, as your guest. My name is Nobody. My father and mother, all my other friends— they call me Nobody."

Through a curated selection of contemporary artist’s works, this online exhibition explores the concept of identity, home and the sense of belonging in an era of globalisation and the pervading omnipresence of social media. In doing so, each artist uniquely questions who we are, by engaging in discourse concerning gender, nationality, identity and attachment.

Taking its inspiration and point of departure from Homer's epic Greek poem, “The Odyssey”, the exhibition “My Name is Nobody” cites the character Odysseus’ lie to the giant man-eating cyclops Polyphemus. When asked of his name, Odysseus instead tells the giant his name is "Οὖτις", which means "nobody" as a ruse in order to escape being eaten alive. As the story goes, upon his homecoming after a 20 year-long journey, he returns disguised and is only recognised by his faithful dog, Argos.

This notion of identity cover-up and the projection of self is at the heart of the selected works within the show. Various works within the exhibition examine the notion of “home” and the German word “heimat” (meaning native or home country) and what this means in an increasing globalised world. The revolutionising advent of social media and its role in mirroring social networking and interaction through technological advances is also explored in relation to identity politics. Here, the ramifications of such an emphasis on the associated focus of being in the here and now, yet also everywhere and nowhere are also considered.

AAA acknowledges the importance of projecting an online presence through digital channels such as social media and online content outlets. In this way, we wish to provide this branch of our operations as a further promotional outlet for our artists reinforced by curatorial contextualisation and critical insights. While digital platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, and messaging channels such as WhatsApp, Viber and WeChat are becoming an increasingly crucial part to our visual understanding and exploration of the world, we as an art agency aim to utilise this as a foundation for the inclusion of our own brand of curatorial content.

The agency is pleased to announce Marianne Boesky Gallery's exhibition Xenia: Crossroads in Portrait Painting, a show that explores the resurgence of portraiture as an incisive platform through which to consider the nature and meaning of identity.

As our globalized society becomes increasingly marked by emigration, resettlement, and technological interconnectedness, so too have notions of the self become exponentially fractured and complex. Through the work of seventeen artists, Xenia: Crossroads in Portrait Painting captures the ways in which artists are leveraging the power of the portrait to express these intricacies, exposing the relationship between identity, place, and shifting social norms.

The exhibition will be on view from January 11 through February 15, 2020, across both of Marianne Boesky Gallery’s Chelsea locations at 507 and 509 West 24th Street.

Participating artists: Polina Barskaya, Amoako Boafo, Cristina Canale, Somaya Critchlow, Ndidi Emefiele, Maria Farrar, Nona Garcia, Cindy Ji Hye Kim, Doron Langberg, Otis Quaicoe, Laura Sanders, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Rodel Tapaya, Salman Toor, Hannah van Bart, Robin F. Williams, Chloe Wise.

Xenia: Crossroads in Portrait Painting will feature new and recent works by a wide range of artists, including Polina Barskaya, Amoako Boafo, Cristina Canale, Somaya Critchlow, Ndidi Emefiele, Maria Farrar, Nona Garcia, Cindy Ji Hye Kim, Doron Langberg, Otis Quaicoe, Laura Sanders, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Rodel Tapaya, Salman Toor, Hannah van Bart, Robin F. Williams, and Chloe Wise. The group of artists were born and currently live across five continents and over twenty countries, many having relocated by choice or necessity. Across their vivid and insightful portraits, the individual is depicted as both of singular and communal experience, and as reflecting multiple signifiers of acceptance, displacement, environment, consumerism, and cultural references. In instances, the figure is amputated, aggregated, and multi-acculturated; it is shown within empty expanses and amongst other bodies and objects. Yet despite the spectrum of perspectives and the various formal and conceptual approaches, the artists’ visions are united by a central sense of humanity.

This connection is also encapsulated in the exhibition title, which takes its name from the ancient Greek concept of “xenia” or “guest-friendship”. This notion is mentioned in Teju Cole and Fazal Sheiekh’s 2019 book, Human Archipelago, and refers to the extension of generosity to visitors from afar. Together, the artists’ work speaks to the multicity of factors that shape identity—thus highlighting that “otherness” is purely notional. And at the same time, the act of painting another being can be seen as an act of xenia itself.

“Throughout art history, portraits have served as indicators of social values and personal circumstances. The incredible reemergence of the genre speaks to its ongoing power to reflect our perceptions of ourselves and the world we occupy. I find particularly fascinating the depth and diversity of approaches contemporary artists are taking to portraiture, and the way that their work so aptly encapsulates the complexity of identifying who you are and where you’re from today. Xenia offers a sampling of some of the most exciting voices reshaping portraiture within contemporary practice and speaks to art’s incredible ability to connect with social and political dialogues,” said Marianne Boesky.

All images courtesy: The artists and Marianne Boesky Gallery

Gilbert & George have created art together as one visionary, artistic entity since 1967, when they met at Saint Martins School of Art in London. Recognised by institutions and collections worldwide for their groundbreaking, fiercely independent and influential art across diverse mediums, they continue to produce confrontational, richly emotive and thought-provoking art that, more than fifty years later, pushes into ever-new territory.

Sprüth Magers is honoured to début Gilbert & George’s PARADISICAL PICTURES, a new group of thirty-five major pictures that mark the artists’ first solo exhibition in Los Angeles in nearly two decades.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Gilbert & George conceived an approach to art-making that explored modern morality, human frailty, the city and the natural world through commonplace yet intensely emotional imagery—an ART FOR ALL, in their terms, that could resonate with people from all walks of life. Under cover of their deceptively straightforward visual language, they have tackled critical, provocative subjects that tap into the deepest drives of contemporary society, particularly centred on urban life, including hope, fear, sex, religion, corruption, violence, racial tension, patriotism, addiction and death. Amid these intense topics, complexity and empathy are ever-present, as are the artists themselves.

At the start of their career, Gilbert & George declared that they were “Living Sculptures,” artworks in their own right, and images of their suited, respectable-looking persona have circulated through their art ever since. Though their guise is one of a conservative pair of modern citizens, paradoxically, the messages in their art strive for openness, inclusivity and the freedom to express oneself as one chooses. The art of Gilbert & George has always comprised a “love letter,” in their words, to a multi-cultural, multi-faith, mass-technological, sexually open, volatile, moral, mundane and fantastical modern world. Their pictures open the viewer to self-examination and to a renewed questioning of their place in the world.

Gilbert & George appear across the many panels of the PARADISICAL PICTURES, meandering through a violently vivid array of psychedelically coloured natural forms, including flowers, leaves, petals, fruits, tree limbs and branches. Individually, each picture presents a mesmeric world unto itself, replete with lush surfaces and vibrant hues, but likewise filled with references to aging and exhaustion. Together, they comprise an overwhelming, compelling yet ambivalent concept of paradise: gorgeous, abundant and attractive, yet elsewhere resolutely nightmarish.

As the critic Michael Bracewell writes in the exhibition’s catalogue, the PARADISICAL PICTURES present “a world in which atmosphere doubles as event—a quality shared with the films of Alfred Hitchcock or early animated films by Walt Disney studios. Their heightened, saturated, violent, cloying colours convey hallucinogenic portent, unease—like musty-sweet sleeping gas.” In certain pictures, Gilbert & George seem to merge symbiotically with the natural world. In GREENLY, their disembodied eyes, noses, and mouths emerge, ghost-like, from layers of pressed leaves. Looking directly outward, but not quite catching the viewer’s eye, they appear entranced as they meld with the fields of mint and acid green that surround them. In other pictures the environs engulf the artists, threatening to overtake their tired bodies. The desiccated stamen and petals in REST take on insectile properties, reaching toward the artists as they lie uncomfortably on thick wooden benches. Hardly a typical scene of rest and relaxation, the dried plants’ enlarged scale and grasping tendrils look like something out of a horror movie, while the chromatic display of deep reds and oranges, bright yellows and greens, and electric blues, purples and pinks add an incongruous rainbow of optimism to the fraught scene.

Throughout these pictures, and in Gilbert & George’s art in general, references emanate from disparate eras of cultural history, including nineteenth-century Romanticism and the pop milieu of science fiction and comic books. In ON THE BENCH, giant portraits of the pair flank the edges of the composition, mimicking sentimental picture-making of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or even the coupled aristocratic portraits of earlier painting traditions. Toward the center, that regality is countered by smaller-scale representations of the artists slumped over on a park bench, passed out perhaps from fatigue or drunkenness. Frequently the butt of their own jokes, the artists repeatedly portray their persona in a laughable light, negating the myth of artistic genius and presenting themselves as fallible seekers of knowledge.

Their droll dance moves in DATE DANCE illustrate this self-mocking tone, while the dried dates that join them in motion recall the scatological auras of the artists’ challenging NAKED SHIT PICTURES of the mid-1990s. No object is necessarily as it seems in the PARADISICAL PICTURES’ strange, mind-altering vistas. Though the specific imagery in Gilbert & George’s art stems largely from the areas around their studio in London’s East End, the context of Southern California—deeply political and attuned to contemporary social issues—is an engaging one for their PARADISICAL PICTURES in particular.

The hallucinogenic palette and focus on natural forms such as leaves, fruits, and flowers, for example, aligns productively with California’s history as an important breeding ground for the bohemian, environmentalist and civil rights movements from the 1960s onward; and the cinematic nature of Gilbert & George’s pictures, which flow from one to the next, building an uncertain tale of paradise, calls to mind the dream-worlds, characters and impulses of the Hollywood film industry. As the artists move through these dense and richly coloured vistas, they carry the viewer with them on their allegorical journey to another, and possibly higher, plane of existence.

Gilbert & George (b. 1943, San Martin de Tor, Italy; b. 1942, Plymouth, United Kingdom) met in 1967 as graduate students at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London and have worked together ever since. Recent solo exhibitions include those at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2019), Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2019), Helsinki Art Museum (2018-19), Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest, Hungary (2017), Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania, Australia (2016), and Museum of Modern Art, New York (2015), Nouveau Musée National de Monaco (2014); Diechtorhallen Hamburg (2011); Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art, Poland (2011), Kröller-Müller Museum, the Netherlands (2010), De Young Museum, San Francisco (2008), Milwaukee Art Museum (2008), Brooklyn Museum, New York (2008); and Tate Modern, London (2007). In 2005, Gilbert & George were the focus of the British Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale.

Their work has also been included in group exhibitions worldwide, including most recently at The Warehouse, Dallas (2017), The Jewish Museum, New York (2016), The Drawing Center, New York (2016), Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein (2014), Nottingham Contemporary (2014), Institute of Contemporary Art, London (2013), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2013), Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar (2012), Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (2012); Hong Kong Heritage Museum (2011), and Kunsthaus Zurich (2011). All images courtesy: Gilbert & George and Sprüth Magers Gallery

Arndt Art Agency is pleased to announce Rodel Tapaya's solo exhibition “On the Benefits of a Crowded Space” which represents his first gallery exhibition in the Philippines in almost a decade.

Despite his initial desire to have a “simple show”, a restless mind and varied impulses led to comfort in multiple forms. Likening that notion to horror vacui or Kenophobia - fear of the empty, Tapaya proceeds to ask “how much do we understand tight, crowded spaces?”, Tapaya fills the entire gallery spaces of Artinformal Makati with works on different grounds. He breaks down his process by focusing on scraps of many varieties. First are paper cutouts that form small, colourful collages, which are then translated into large acrylic paintings that parallel the use of odd shapes and materials in informal dwellings. These are echoed by a series of collograph prints using random scraps combined with burlap - the patterns and textures of which become odes to vernacular habitation. That same burlap is revisited in paintings as an attempt to define the countless, unrecognisable faces that populate these urban spaces.

Bookends to this exhibition are two singular works: a cast concrete sculpture of found coconut lumber scraps, and a monumental painting that straddles folk mythology and harsh reality. All strung together by insights into the human condition vis-a-vis human habitation, Tapaya occupies all three galleries of Artinformal Makati to propose a treatise with his exhibition "On the Benefits of a Crowded Space."

Rodel Tapaya (b.1980) is one of the most active artists in Southeast Asia today. His breakthrough came when he was awarded the coveted Top Prize in the Nokia Art Awards, which allowed him to pursue intensive drawing and painting courses at Parsons School of Design in New York and the University of Helsinki in Finland. He completed his studies at the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts. At the heart of his practice is the ongoing amalgamation of folk narrative and contemporary reality within the framework of memory and history. Utilising a range of media — from large acrylic on canvasses to an exploration of under-glass painting, traditional crafts, diorama, and drawing — Tapaya filters his observations of the world through folktales and pre-colonial historical research, creating whimsical montages of his characters.

Official opening hosted by the Australian Embassy Berlin: 
Friday 11 October, 6 - 8 pm
Artist talk: Join us at 7.30 pm for an exhibition walk-through with Ben Quilty and Matthias Arndt

Special opening hours during CHARLOTTEN WALK: 
Friday 27 September, 6 - 9pm



Special opening hours 
during BERLIN ART WEEK
: 11 -15 September, 10 - 6 pm




Arndt Art Agency is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in Germany by Ben Quilty, one of Australia’s most acclaimed living visual artists.

Quilty’s debut solo presentation in Germany includes a suite of new figurative paintings produced in his characteristic bold, abstract expressionist style. Best known for his gestural oil paintings, Quilty explores notions of identity, trauma and humanitarian causes through his practice that serves as a reflection of current social and political events. His figurative compositions are conveyed via a distinctive, sculptural impasto painting technique that bring his subjects to life. Boldy smeared and slapped onto his canvases, Quilty’s pictures examine the process of painting itself while summoning his subjects with a palpable physicality.

Often conveying jarring, unsettling or confronting visual depictions, Quilty explores the problematic relationship between the personal and the cultural and in doing so, aims to challenge commonly held assumptions. Apart from his work as a visual artist, he has assumed the role as a highly visible Australian social commentator, utilising his voice as an artist to incite and campaign for social change. Investigating topics as varied as the current global refugee crisis to Australia’s complex social history, Quilty aims to critique and question notions of identity, patriotism and belonging. As Quilty states: “My work is about working out how to live in this world, it’s about compassion and empathy but also anger and resistance. Through it I hope to push compassion to the front of national debate.”

Included in the show, Quilty examines the position and role of the straight white male figure in society and flawed masculinity in an effort to critique notions of himself and fellow men. Utilising imagery of figures such as Santa Claus and prominent international and Australian politicians as props, power structures and privilege are explored. Here, his subjects are depicted as threatening, grotesque, contorted, amalgamated and mutated. Set amid surrealist backdrops, an apocalyptic global turmoil and imbalance is suggested. One of the artist’s recurrent self-portraits is also included within the selection of works, acting as a reference point and anchor for Quilty’s own psychological state and anxiety concerning world affairs.

About the Artist:

Born in Sydney, Australia in 1973, Quilty lives and works in the Southern Highlands NSW, Australia. In 1994 he completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts majoring in Painting at the Sydney College of the Arts, Sydney University, followed by the completion of a certificate in Aboriginal Culture and History at Monash University in 1996. In 2001, he completed a Bachelor of Visual Communications at the School of Design at the University of Western Sydney, and in 2015, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters, University of Western Sydney. In 2011, the Australian War Memorial commissioned Quilty to travel to Afghanistan as Australia’s official war artist. The resulting body of work was exhibited in 2013 at the National Art School Gallery, Canberra. In the same year, Quilty was awarded Australia’s most prestigious portrait painting prize The Archibald Prize for his iconic portrait of the late Australia artist, Margaret Olley. In 2014, he was selected as the winner of the Prudential Eye Award, Singapore, and invited to become the first Australian to hold a solo exhibition at Saatchi Gallery in London.

In 2016, Quilty was invited by World Vision Australia to travel to Greece, Serbia and Lebanon with esteemed Australian author, Richard Flanagan, to witness firsthand the international refugee crisis. This global topic was explored via a series of key works as a result of his experiences abroad in addition to the publication Home: Drawings by Syrian Children (2018) produced by Penguin Random House featuring a collection of drawings by Syrian children reflecting on their forsaken homeland. Quilty’s work has been widely exhibited in a number of significant national and international exhibitions.

Most recently in 2019, Quilty staged his first major survey exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide entitled ‘QUILTY’, followed by a tour to Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), Brisbane, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. Ben Quilty’s work is represented in public Australian collections that include: the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Newcastle Regional Art Gallery, NSW; the Bendigo Art Gallery, VIC; Tarrawarra Museum of Art, VIC; the Australian War Memorial, Canberra; and the Australia Parliament House Art Collection, Canberra. The opening reception is generously supported by the Australian Embassy Berlin

Opening ceremony: 8 August, Thursday, 10 am (RSVP required)
Venue address: ASEAN Gallery, The ASEAN Secretariat, 70A Jalan Sisingamangaraja, Jakarta 12110, Indonesia

Participating artists: Chong Ai Lei, Marina Cruz, Zean Cabangis , Jigger Cruz, Heri Dono, Yeo Kaa, Fadilah Karim, Yuree Kensaku, Loi Cai Xiang, Eko Nugroho, Uji 'Hahan' Handoko Eko Saputro, Kaloy Sanchez, Phattharakon Singthong, Lugas Syllabus, Rodel Tapaya, Savanhdary Vongpoothorn, Entang Wiharso.

Arndt Art Agency is pleased to announce this project as part of ASEAN's Golden Jubilee. This great achievement as an organisation has been its pivotal role in maintaining peace, stability, and prosperity in a region that was threatened to be torn apart during the Cold War-era conflict. So successful has ASEAN been in fact that it was suggested that ASEAN receive a Nobel Peace Prize (1).

Certainly as ASEAN enters into its next 50 years and beyond, political, economic, and social challenges will become ever more complicated, requiring resistance to the tidal pull of global forces and stronger cooperation between all Member States (2). Artistic expression, and its ability to engage the imagination more readily than facts and opinions, can be a potent force for change in the Information Age. The establishment of a new ASEAN Gallery to "[promote] awareness of universal ideals as well as the realities we all have to live with” (3) is timely considering the increasingly polarised global political situation we face today.

The Gallery offers a unique opportunity to share the vision of an ASEAN identity, bringing the lands, languages, religions, and races of Southeast Asia into the heart of the new ASEAN Secretariat building. In the midst of the dismantling of colonialism in the region and the emergence of modern Southeast Asian states in the early twentieth century, artists vigorously debated between competing ideologies. In tribute to these "Great Debates" (4) of the past, "Shifting Tides" - the first exhibition in the new ASEAN Gallery - convenes a group of artists who raise questions as to what it means to be part of ASEAN within prevailing political, cultural, and personal narratives.

Eko Nugroho's "The Deaf Costume and Colonize" serves to counter both the history of Indonesia's violent post-colonial past and present-day internal rivalries threatening to fracture its hard-won democratic freedom. In a work co-created with weaving communities in Jogjakarta, graffiti-like slogans mask a uniformed figure armed with a sword and standing over a disembodied torso. It is Nugroho’s warning to the nation that freedom is not a given and may fall victim anytime to an internecine revolt that seeks to do away with the current system and "re-colonise" Indonesia from within.

Heri Dono's "The Party of a Democracy & Pancasila Country" continues to explore contemporary politics, specifically the recent Indonesian election. Dono's clown-like characters are placed on a stage representing opposing political parties. Using theatre and illusion as an allegory, Dono draws our attention to the proliferation of fake news and intolerant attitudes prevalent in contemporary political discourse, not just in Indonesia but also across the globe.

Entang Wiharso's "Unburied History" is a monumental aluminum sculpture that expresses the deep historical and contemporary divisions associated with ideological and physical borders. A marching line of armed police and military figures intertwine with trampled figures, tongues, and intestines, creating a violent and imposing tableaux. Wiharso, who lives a transnational existence between Indonesia and the US, highlights the challenges of immigration and increasingly hermetic sovereign nations.

Savanhdary Vongpoothom's "Resound 1" is a reflection of her diasporic experience having migrated to Australia as an eight year old from Lao PDR in 1979 after the Vietnam War. Fusing traditional weaving styles with the geometric compositions characteristic of modern abstract art, Vongpoothorn incorporates elements of Theravada Buddhism into repetitious, painted, and punctured canvases. The meditative exercise of puncturing the canvas by burning is synonymous with Buddhist notions of creation and destruction but is also an aesthetic and material reference to the design of Laotian weaving (5).

In Jigger Cruz's "Dear Robert, I rest and combine but I fell asleep" the canvas becomes a conceptual and physical struggle to rewrite his identity. By taking a classical painting and destroying the image with thick applications of paint and violent intrusions to the surface, the work becomes a battle-ground of hegemonic ideas and histories: "Cruz's mark making is therefore not random and gratuitous but rather a challenge to the painting's neutrality, a questioning of its assumed innocence. The painting is a text; it speaks, and its message can be interpreted, among other things, as the reification of a series of cultural and political truths. Its very existence is a proclamation, and thus a provocation: one that Cruz has decided to confront face-to-face. Cruz's mark making speaks, too, but not as a lone voice. Rather, it speaks over and against the discourse that is responsible for its marginalisation. His peripheral painting moves from outside the frame onto the canvas in order to interrupt and transform dominant art-historical discourse." (6)

The series of works by Loi Cai Xiang were conceived in a hospital bed while he was recovering from surgery. He recalled the irony of his condition as he witnessed children playing happily outside, perceiving how vastly different two people's experiences could be while inhabiting the same space. The looming spherical forms in his paintings, marked by cracks and fissures, encroach on environs familiar to Loi. The benign environments infiltrated by these strange orbs illustrate opposing forces in Loi's own struggle to reflect on his own dualities and to establish a sense of himself and of belonging. Loi, "likened this [struggle] to the tendency of humans to veer between extremes, viewing scenarios as black or white. His perspective was that we become accustomed to being taught what was right or wrong, good or bad, moral or immoral. And yet, reality itself was not so clearly defined." (7)

Southeast Asia has a sophisticated history of combining tradition with new ideas and concepts while forging its own unique path through periods of renewal. The new ASEAN Gallery can exemplify these qualities and be a powerful ally for Southeast Asian artists. "Art can rise to the challenge of illuminating and driving change, rather than merely describing disturbing realities… Southeast Asian art [operates] to make sense of and sometimes activate this re-ordering world, their corralling of allusion and subtext providing structure to works that fulfill a public calling." (8) Within this selection of artworks are preoccupations with domestic and international politics, transcultural experience of migration, postcolonial reconstruction of history, and the nature of truth. As the many voices of Southeast Asia continue to gather in this space to deepen our understanding of the world and humanity, so too will the ASEAN Gallery awaken to its position as an arts and cultural institution for the future. _________________________________________________________________ (1) Mahbubani, Kishore and Sng, Jeffery, The ASEAN Miracle: A Catalyst for Peace, p. 7. (2) Lee, Hsien Loong, speech at the ISEAS 50th Anniversary Lecture on 13 March 2018. (3) https://asean.org/asean/asean-secretariat/asean-gallery/ (4) Sabapathy, TK, “Developing Regionalist Perspectives in South-East Asian Art Historiography”, in The Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art. p. 14. (5) https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/138.2015/ (6) Ramsay, Benny Nemerofsky, “A Mark from the Periphery”, in Jigger Cruz, P. 91. (7) Lim, Deborah, Loi Cai Xiang: The Spectrum of Reality, P. 3. (8) Lenzi, Iola, “Conceptual Strategies in Southeast Asian Art: A Local Narrative”, in Concept Context Contestation: Art and the Collective in Southeast Asia, P. 23.

This major exhibition of contemporary Indonesian art showcases 20 of the most exciting emerging and established artists from Bali and Java’s key artistic centres of Bandung, Yogyakarta and Jakarta. It is a landmark presentation of Indonesian Contemporary Art, the largest, held by an international Institution and includes 27 acquisitions and commissions of major new work for the National Collection of Australia, accompanied by a comprehensive publication.

Matthias Arndt was delighted to work on this project as curatorial consultant and advisor to the National Gallery and its curatorial team, lead by Jaklyn Babington, Senior Curator Contemporary Art and Head of International Art and Carol Cains, Senior Curator of Asian Art.

Participating artists: Zico Albaiquni, Akiq AW, Faisal Habibi, Hardono, FX Harsono, Mella Jaarsma, Adi ‘Uma Gumma’ Kusuma, Jompet Kuswidananto, I Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih, Eko Nugroho, Octora, Yudha 'Fehung' Kusuma Putera, Tita Salina, Tisna Sanjaya, Uji 'Hahan' Handoko Eko Saputro, Handiwirman Saputra, Albert Yonathan Setyawan, Melati Suryodarmo, Agus Suwage, Julian Abraham 'Togar', Tromarama, I Made Wiguna Valasara, Entang Wiharso.

Arndt Art Agency is pleased to announce a selection of artworks from a German Private Collection with a prime focus on portraits and human figure in contemporary art.

Participating artists: Khadim Ali, Del Kathryn Barton, Sophie Calle, George Condo, Tony Cragg, Rainer Fetting, Thomas Hirschhorn, Hannah Höch, Douglas Kolk, Alicja Kwade, Eko Nugroho, Rodel Tapaya, Liu Xiaodong.

Group exhibition featuring works by MARINA CRUZ and RODEL TAPAYA presented by Pintô International

Venue address: MAC (Musica Arte e Cultura), piazza Tito Livio Caro 1, Milan, Italy

Arndt Art Agency is pleased to announce the inclusion of Marina Cruz and Rodel Tapaya in Pintô International's project: Living Earth: Contemporary Philippine Art. This show features the works of over 25 contemporary Philippine artists. The exhibition seeks to bridge the distinct yet interconnected national histories of the Philippines and Italy, creating a dialogue of artistic exchange around humanistic themes: homeland, migration, identity.

The exhibition will be on view from May 6-May 12 at Milan’s cultural organisation MAC. The exhibition is co-curated by Luca Beatrice, curator of the 2009 Italian Pavilion of the Biennale di Venezia, and Patrick D. Flores, Artistic Director for the forthcoming 2019 Singapore Biennale and formerly the curator of the 2015 Philippine Pavilion of the Biennale di Venezia.

As a point of departure, this exhibition begins with the work of Leon Pacunayen (b. 1934), a Perugia-based Philippine artist who immigrated to Italy in the 1960s. “Mountains that hug the earth, skies that are open, and clouds that float.” These are the words used to describe Pacunayen’s sensitive watercolours by gallerist Lyd Arguilla, who in the sixties in Manila founded the Philippine Art Gallery, then the country’s nerve-center of modernism.

Pintô International’s exhibition in Milan acknowledges Pacunayen’s artistic contributions, and seeks to reveal the lingering conversation between Pacunayen and Philippine contemporary art. This dialogue encompasses many territories both within and beyond the Philippine national border and brings to light the pervading global influence of Italianate artistic technique. Pacunayen’s moody, atmospheric approach to painting, and his somber palette, can be identified in much Philippine art today yet also adopts the technical lineage of sfumato and chiaroscuro pioneered as early as the Italian Renaissance.

Arndt Art Agency is pleased to present this exhibition as part of a Space Swap with STATION, Melbourne.

ARTIST TALKS: Join us at Arndt Art Agency, Berlin, for a light brunch on Sunday 28 April from 11am, followed by a series of facilitated artist talks: 12–1pm: Clare Milledge and Marian Tubbs in conversation with Juliette Desorgues 2–3pm: Daniel Boyd and Zac Langdon-Pole in conversation with Willem de Rooij 4–5pm: Gareth Sansom in conversation with Peter Churcher

Participating artists: Daniel Boyd, Zac Langdon-Pole, Clare Milledge, Tomislav Nikolic, Gareth Sansom, Marian Tubbs.

Ruler, rete takes it’s title from two elements of an instrument called an astrolabe, historically used by navigators and astronomers to identify and locate celestial bodies. An astrolabe consists of a round plate containing a two-dimensional projection of the Earth’s latitudinal lines, upon which rests another circular feature called the rete, which contains the locations of stars and planets. Over that, a straight ruler pivots around to line up with measurements that are marked along the edge of the plate. The manner in which the ruler and rete function illustrates a notion common to the exhibiting artists: that of establishing means of understanding and interpreting profound source material of physical, historical or emotional realms.

The combined polyphony of Gareth Sansom’s narrative paintings and Marian Tubbs’ digital paintings fused into aluminium or illustrate two artists grappling with the legacies of a modernist art historical vernacular and the contemporary proliferation of images via screen based media. Clare Milledge and Tomislav Nikolic offer more intimate explorations of shamanism and memory through painted glass panels and meditative colour field paintings: way-finding tools chartering alternative doctrines and emotive states.

In the highly charged works of Daniel Boyd and Zac Langdon Pole, protean legacies of colonisation, routes of memory and simultaneous histories will play out through series of works bearing Boyd’s distinctive pointillist technique and Langdon-Pole’s poignantly altered objects.

Designed to function as a series of visual conversations throughout the gallery spaces, Ruler, rete showcases six contemporary Australian and New Zealand artists working at the forefront of contemporary artistic enquiry. 

Curated presentation of selected works from South and South East Asia

The exhibition „Far Away So Close!“ features works by 4 South- and South East Asia Artists: Khadim Ali from Afghanistan and Sydney, Eko Nugroho and Entang Wiharso from Indonesia and Rodel Tapaya from the Philippines.

With the title borrowed from German Film Director Wim Wenders´ Fantasy Film „Far Away So Close!“ and the song the Rockband U2 contributed to the soundtrack, the main topic of this presentation is Distance and Proximity. In 1993 when the film came to the movies, the western world was still Euro-US-Focused - the end of the cold war, German re-unification and the new times and freedom in the countries of the former Iron curtain. Our geography and geopolitical situation today has changed fundamentally and our focus shifted from the US and Europe towards the „new“ countries, markets and cultural landscapes in the Asian-Pacific Region. The question about where the centre ends and and where the periphery starts is being re-defined as we speak. And who says, there is only one center and what does „periphery“ mean? The debate has just begun.

In contemporary art, some of the most dynamic new areas and creative centers are in South- and South East Asia. Whilst extremely successful in their home markets from the very beginning, it took nearly a decade and the groundwork of few professionals promoting South- and South East Asia Art, putting it into a larger context, for the larger global audience to acknowledge this new art landscapes. Afghanistan, Indonesia and the Philippines, where the four protagonists of this exhibition are from, are no longer far away, from the Western and Pacific perspective.

In regards to physical distance and in regards to these countries presence in the global media - our politics, economies and our stories, therefore our cultures are interwoven. South- and South East Asia, with almost one billion people, not only represent a substantial part of the worlds population. They also represent the youngest societies - so our present and our future is potentially connected - not "far away, but so close". Each of the four artists in the show deal both with their own regional culture, ancient myths and the manyfold issues in today's life in Afghanistan, Indonesia and the Philippines.

Their work is politically engaged, critical and community driven and at the same time the artists find their own expression and unique voice in the chorus of the current global discourse in contemporary art. The artist communities and professionals within South- and South East Asia start to collaborate and exchange ideas, concepts and most important share their dynamics in order to build a stronger network within this most dynamic art landscape. South East Asian Art, is getting its recognition and exposure in the West, notably with the nomination of the Indonesian Artist Collective ruangrupa, as Artistic Directors of the next Documenta Exhibition in 2022 - „Far Away So Close!“ acknowledges and celebrates this growing momentum with four of the leading artists from South- and South East Asia.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

KHADIM ALI
Born 1978, Quetta, Pakistan - Lives and works in Sydney, Australia After growing up in Pakistan as a refugee, Afghan artist Khadim Ali was trained in classical miniature painting at the National College of Arts in Lahore and in mural painting and calligraphy in Tehran. Rich in traditional and modern motifs of Eastern and Western art-historical references, Ali’s paintings tell stories about loss (of his own cultural heritage and of human values) and about how meaning shifts as words and images are twisted through ideological adoption. Ali’s recent work focuses on the relationship of Afghanistan to refugees who have relocated to his home country. Following the style of miniature painting, specifically that which uses the technique of neem rang (half-colour), Ali employs traditional production methods.

EKO NUGROHO
Born 1977 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia - Lives and works in Yogyakarta, Indonesia Eko Nugroho is one of the most acclaimed members of the young generation of Indonesian contemporary artists. He is part of the generation that came to maturity during the period of upheaval and reform that occurred in the wake of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the subsequent fall of the Suharto regime and the transition to democracy in Indonesia. Nugroho is deeply engaged with the culture of his time and is committed to making socio-political commentary in his work. Nugroho grew up in Java and resides in one of the island’s major art centres, Yogyakarta. His works are grounded in both local traditions and global popular culture. In particular, he has cited the influence of traditional batik and embroidery styles. There is of course also a powerful inspiration from contemporary street art, graffiti and comics.

RODEL TAPAYA
Born 1980 in Montalban, Philippines - Lives and works in Bulacan, Philippines At the heart of Rodel Tapaya’s work is his ongoing amalgamation of folk narrative and contemporary reality within the framework of memory and history. Utilising a range of media — from large acrylic on canvasses to an exploration of under-glass painting, traditional crafts, diorama, and drawing — Tapaya filters his observations of the world through folktales and pre-colonial historical research, creating whimsical montages of his characters. Each work has its origin in Tapaya’s reflections on a particular time or place that possesses an enduring resonance, from its correspondence with the formalistic and psychological implication of the grid in his earlier works to protracted ventures which excavate and interpret myth and folk aesthetics. Inherent in the work is a tension between objective investigations of art and the subjectivity of perception and experience, providing his work with an enigma that comes from the impossibility to paint a story without revealing inflections made by the painter’s hand.

ENTANG WIHARSO
Born 1967 in Tegal, Central Java, Indonesia - Lives and works in Rhode Island, USA and Yogyakarta, Indonesia In Entang Wiharso’s work the artist’s own personal experiences are embedded with a strong examination of the predominant socio-political conditions of his home country. To him, creating work is a way of understanding the human condition, of heightening our ability to perceive, feel and understand human problems like love, hate, fanaticism, religion, and ideology. “I depict the condition of humans who are often divided by complex, multilayered political, ethnic, racial, and religious systems: they co-exist yet their communication is limited and indirect. Figures are interconnected by intuitive as well as intellectual linkages, including ornamental vegetation, tongues, tails, intestines, animal skin patterns, fences and detailed landscapes.“ (Entang Wiharso, 2011).

Arndt Art Agency and albertz benda are thrilled to present sing blood-wings sing by trailblazing artist Del Kathryn Barton, whose recent institutional exhibitions have positioned her as one of the leading artists in Australia.

The artist will debut her largest bronze sculpture to-date, alongside monumental work on canvas and her iconic portraits, immersing viewers in her intricate portrayals of motherhood, femininity, and desire. In the sculpture ‘here she HEAR,’ Barton translates stylised forms of her highly sought-after paintings into bronze. The elongated limbs and ears sprouting from throughout the body elevate the figure to the status of a goddess-like character. Comprised of five panels and over 30 feet in length, sing blood-wings sing (2017) was the centrepiece of Barton’s 2017 retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Inspired by the 1963 Peter, Paul and Mary song, Puff the Magic Dragon, the work is a testament to fantastical creativity untempered by age and a celebration of the simultaneous vulnerability and fierceness of youth. Each panel depicts humanoid characters with an abundance of eyes, limbs, and breasts fused with plant life, fauna, and abstract forms. The works in the exhibition have a sacred quality. Not only do the scale and paneled format of the paintings recall altarpieces, the subjects themselves evoke comparisons Byzantine icons – luminous figures devoid of perspectival depth and surrounded by jewel-like detailing

Barton’s oeuvre is an exuberant homage to the multifaceted nature of womanhood – from sensually distorted bodies to nurturing mothers - all aspects existing simultaneously within each work.

About

Del Kathryn Barton Born in 1972 in Sydney, Australia, Del Kathryn Barton is one of Australia’s most acclaimed artists working today. Barton received her BFA from the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney in 1993. She is the only woman to have twice won the prestigious Archibald Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2008, 2013) and in 2017 she had her first major retrospective, ‘The Highway is a Disco’ at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Recent solo presentations include Del Kathryn Barton, Asia Now Paris, Paris (2019), Del Kathryn Barton, UNTITLED, Art Basel Miami Beach, Miami (2018), r u a bunny? albertz benda, New York (2017); the highway is a disco, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2017), Del Kathryn Barton: The Nightingale and the Rose, The Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, Australia (2016); and the highway is a disco, ARNDT Gallery, Singapore (2015).

She has participated in many group exhibitions, among them Like-ness, albertz benda, New York, USA, (2016); Dark Heart, Adelaide Biennale of Australian Art, Adelaide, Australia, (2014); Theatre of the World, Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania, Australia, (2012), Lightness and Gravity, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia, (2012); Freehand: Recent Australian Drawing, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, Australia, (2010/11); 2009 Wynne Prize for Landscape, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, (2009) Half a World Away: Drawings from Glasgow, Sao Paulo and Sydney, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Centre, Buffalo, New York, USA (2002).

Her work is found in the collections of Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia; The Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH; and the Tiroche deLeon Collection, Tel Aviv, Israel, among others.

Opening: Thursday 24th January 2019, 6-9pm

Arndt Art Agency is pleased to announce the solo presentation of works by Carla Chan in Singapore.

Carla Chan (b.1989) is a contemporary artist based in Berlin and Hong Kong where she obtained her bachelor degree in Fine Arts from the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. She works with a variety of media including video, installation, photography and printmaking.

Much like the never-ending development of new technology Chan considers media art as a medium with infinite possibilities for artistic expressions. Born in the post-digital era, she is influenced by computational thinking in her artistic research. She invents different methods of capturing and recomposing in her photographers and moving images.

In her works, she often plays with the ambiguity between forms of nature and the digital realm, toying with the blurred boundaries between reality and imagination, figure and abstraction. Her style is minimal and often a dash of Chinese flavour can be found.

Arndt Art Agency is pleased to announce Marina Cruz's solo presentation in Vienna in 2019.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Read between the lines…(of the fabric) an idiomatic expression, to discover a meaning hidden or implied, it also means to be attentive to the clothes that used to be ordinary objects that were witnesses to the wearer’s lives back in mid-20th century. I work with the material of found objects as subject matter, clothing of my mother and her female siblings. These dresses and clothes are made by my grandmother for them. I am amazed of how these clothes were kept. In today’s fast fashion, people see clothes as almost disposables but during my grandmother and mother’s time they are very cared possession.

I look into clothes, not just as material to protect oneself from elements but a map to look into hidden meanings almost like a diary but not through words… When I paint the clothing bigger than life; the lines, patterns, designs, creases, remnants of wear and tear of the fabric emerge. As I look into the lines of threads, that my late grandmother made for my mother and her siblings, I also discover a lineage of family ties and personal history or herstory. Women made dresses, clothed by women, worn by women and now I make paintings to continue the narrative.

Arndt Art Agency is pleased to present a new body of works by German artist Marin Majic.

In Marin Majic’s show titled ICH UND ICH, he loosely explores the myth of narcissus as well as the closely associated psychological condition. The subject is never seen in its entirety, and only reflection becomes the thread. Using and evolving the traditional tropes of landscape painting, he plays with the borders of subject and object as all matter dissolves into a sum greater than its part.

The surfaces’ hypnotic effect challenges the viewer not to lose themselves in the work and begs the question of where the self-stops, and our shared consciousness begins. This effect is achieved using concentration of detail which become increasingly visible with proximity drawing the viewer closer. Grey layers of gesso create the chalky surface that is sand-able. After each layer of paint, the work is honed down and control over the outcome is irretrievably lost. The image becomes blurry and the under-painting at one point complete. In the next phase of the process, the under-painting now leads the creator, as he attempts to reconnect the left over traces with the original aim.

Allowing obstructing and destruction into his process reminds him that perfection isn’t the goal, rather a sensation and tone. The work itself feels more alive that way, the artist says. In the final stage he uses color pencils drawing on top- intersecting, juxtaposing and melding with their surroundings – defining the ripples of the water from its murky depths. The delicateness of the pencil and the chaotic roughness (of the paint beneath), create tension and nuance.

Together the works build on each other and where the figure once was able to be discerned – only water is left as the dissolution of self has been completed and perhaps - all that is left of narcissus – is surface? Combined, the works are an exploration of the limits of self-knowledge and the subsequent feelings of irrationality and uncertainty we find ourselves mired in…the mystery of self eternally outside ones grasp – both entrancingly beautiful yet also alluring encompassing a sense of the foreboding and effervescent danger.

About the artist:

Marin Majic (1979, Frankfurt am Main) studied from 2004 to 2010 at the Academy of Visual Arts in Zagreb. Since 2008 he has participated in solo and group exhibitions in Germany, Croatia and the USA, as well as New Fragments 6, Gallery Mali salon, Rijeka, Croatia (2009), After the Fall, Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekskill, New York, USA (2010), After the Fall, The Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville TN, USA (2011), Love: The First of the 7 Virtues, The Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekskill, USA (2015) or NGORONGORO, Gallery Weekend Berlin, Germany et al. Solo exhibitions include Marin Majic, Marc Straus Gallery, New York, USA (2016), Nursery, Arndt Berlin, Germany (2014) or Marin Majic, Marc Straus Gallery, New York, USA (2013).

Opening Friday November 3rd, 2018

Arndt Art Agency is pleased to announce a solo presentation of work by Rodel Tapaya at Tang Contemporary, Beijing in November 2018.

Born 1980, Rodel Tapaya lives and works in Bulacan, Philippines and is considered one of the most important Filipino painters of his generation and one of the most active artists working in Southeast Asia today. In his work, he conveys important stories of his country, the people and topical local societal issues from the Philippines that intertwine traditional storytelling within a contemporary context.

As all great storytellers do, he draws connections between the imagined and the real, history and the present day, and myth and current events. As a figurative painter, Tapaya’s intriguing literary-based compositions transcend beyond their local context to universal situations and are reminiscent in style to painters from the German Expressionist tradition such as Neo Rauch, Max Beckmann, as well as finding parallels in the painterly developments of artists such as Daniel Richter and Peter Doig, among others. Utilising a range of media — from large acrylic on canvasses to an exploration of under-glass painting, traditional crafts, diorama, and drawing —Tapaya filters his observations of the world through folktales and pre-colonial historical research, creating whimsical montages of his characters.

Each work has its origin in Tapaya’s reflections on a particular time or place that possesses an enduring resonance, from its correspondence with the formalistic and psychological implication of the grid in his earlier works to protracted ventures which excavate and interpret myth and folk aesthetics.

Speaking about the symbolism in Tapaya’s work and further associations, Jaklyn Babington (Senior Curator, Contemporary Arts Practice – Global, National Gallery of Australia) comments “by drawing inspiration from pre-colonial mythology and Filipino folkloric tradition, Tapaya meticulously pieces together numerous pictorial fragments, fusing the otherworldly with the real, in a visual grappling with contemporary politics, social and environmental issues. Tapaya has been exhibiting for over a decade and has established an intriguing literary-based visual practice, unique in its Filipino perspective yet striking for its participation in the rich history of Hispanic narrative painting. His flat application of paint, cramped figurative compositions and mix of decorative surface with political messaging immediately evokes the work of the Mexican muralists and surrealists such as José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Frida Kahlo. However, in a constructed knotting of the social, political and environmental issues of Filipino life, Tapaya’s work illuminates a complicated contemporary existence. And, as with the great social narrative painters before him, the local issues grappled with are often of global significance.”

For Myths and Truths the artist will present a range of monumentally scaled paintings alongside medium scale works, an installation piece and film. The artist speaks about his solo project: “A French anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss, founder of Structural Anthropology once said, “I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operates in men’s minds without their being aware of the fact.” This exhibition is about the exploration of the dichotomy between scientific truths and the rich mythical stories from my country, The Philippines. As Levi-Strauss believed that myths are not simply a random construction of primitive beliefs or backward mentality instead myths are pseudo-histories. They provide the raw material for a systematic analysis of how humans unconscious mind works. As a young boy, I was told of a story about a giant named Bernardo Carpio who attempted to end the battle between two fighting mountains, however in the end he got buried as a prisoner inside those mountains, in the cliff in Montalban, Rizal, northern part of the Philippine to be exact. We believe that whenever there are tremors and earthquakes, people believed that Bernardo is trying to escape. I always believed this story as a fact. And it became the seed of my fascination about myths and folktales in my country. In this new body of work, I have created forests, mountains and landscapes, familiar yet otherworldly. The elements in the myths are juxtaposed with present conditions prevailing in contemporary society. As humans we tend to see ourselves as giants and gods that can control nature but in the process creating our own ‘earthquakes’ and disasters. It is interesting for me to find connections and relations of myths and the present stories on ecological perspectives, combined with the consequences of humans insatiable desires resulting to man-made disasters.” Rodel Tapaya, October 2018

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Rodel Tapaya was awarded the coveted Grand Prize in the Nokia Art Awards in 2001, which allowed him to pursue intensive drawing and painting courses at Parsons School of Design in New York and the University of Helsinki in Finland. He completed his studies at the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts.

Selected solo exhibitions include: Urban Labyrinth, Ayala Museum, Manila, Philippines (2918), Rodel Tapaya. New Art from the Philippines, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia (2017), Rodel Tapaya, Galerie der Stadt Sindelfingen, Germany (2016), "ICA Off-Site: Hong Kongese" (2015), curated by Gregor Muir, Alia Al-Senussi and Abdullah AlTurki at Duddell’s Hong Kong, "Bato-Balani" at the Ateneo Art Gallery, Quezon City, Philippines (2014), "Cloudland" at the Art Hongkong, Hong Kong (2012), "Prism and Parallelism" at the BENCAB Museum, Baguio City, Philippines (2012), "Flowers of the Tongue" at the Vargas Museum, UP Campus Diliman, Quezon City, Philippines (2010) and "Mythical Roots" at the SOKA ART Center, Beijing (2009).

Selected group exhibitions include: 15th Asia Arts Festival, Ningbo Museum of Art, Ningbo, China, Terra Incognita, Hilger BrotKunsthalle Vienna, Austria, Passion and procession. Art of the Philippines, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, Pinto: Manhattan Manila, West Village, NYC, USA, 20th Biennale of Sydney, Sydney, Australia (2016), "June a Painting Show, Sadie Coles HQ, London, UK (2015), Bisa: Potent Presences at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila, Philippines (2011) and Thrice Upon a Time: A Century of Story in the Art of the Philippines at the Singapore Art Museum, Singapore (2009).

His work is held in the following international museum collections: Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia, Mori Art Museum Collection, Tokyo, Japan, The Hori Science and Art Foundation, Nagoya, Japan, SAM - Singapore Art Museum, Singapore, Bencab Museum Collection, Benguet, Philippines, Ateneo Art Gallery Collection, Manila, Philippines, Pinto Art Museum, Philippines, Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (Central Bank of the Philippines).

Arndt Art Agency presents two curated artist presentations at Asia Now Paris: Artist Project: Del Kathryn Barton (A104) & Artist Project: Yeo Kaa (SP4)

Arndt Art Agency is pleased to present two curated solo presentations by one of Australia's leading contemporary artists, Del Kathryn Barton and one of the rising stars of the Filipino art landscape Yeo Kaa during Paris Art Week in October 2018.

Del Kathryn Barton The two-time Archibald winner – Australia’s most prestigious portrait painting prize – is best known for her highly detailed and vibrant figurative paintings that draw upon strong female figures and personal and idiosyncratic musings concerning desire, sex, motherhood and the natural world. Her organic compositions encompass a multitude of stippled dots in varying sizes that convey inner spaces where living organisms vibrate beyond their own skins in a miasma of matter. Humans, animals and plants are unbound from their traditionally observed categories in Barton's post-human environs. These beings that inhabit Barton’s pieces are hyper-aware and often reveal erotically charged fantasy worlds.

Here, viewers are invited to explore a landscape where everything is fecund and alive. Where no part of the picture plane is without adornment, and no figure or creature is less charmed than any other. In her new series of works for Asia Now Paris 2018, Barton places the female figure in focus. Populated by precisely painted "she beast" creatures, the artist presents a selection of large and small-scale paintings accompanied by two major bronze sculptures that extend her imaginative, creative vision in three-dimensions.

About the artist:
Born in Sydney, Australia in 1972, Del Kathryn Barton is widely recognised as one of Australia's leading figurative painters of her generation. Barton graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the College of Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales in 1993, where she was subsequently appointed as lecturer in drawing. Barton was awarded The Archibald Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney – Australia’s most prestigious Portrait painting prize - twice in 2013 and 2008 . Additionally, she has been nominated for a range of awards that include the Dobell Drawing Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2007) and The Sulman Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (1995).

Barton produced the acclaimed film animation “Oscar Wilde’s The Nightingale and the Rose”–a haunting adaptation of Wilde's short story about the price of love – that made its world premiere at the 2015 Berlin International Film Festival. Her film received critical acclaim and was awarded the Film Victoria Erwin Rado Award for Best Australian Short Film. Most recently she produced the short film “RED” (2016) starring Cate Blanchett that premiered at the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia. RED explores the mythological notion of the female spider as the creator of the universe, and the unusual sexual cannibalism of the Australian Redback Spider. Female power and complexity collides with the innocence of the child, and primal nature of the spider in a surrealist celebration of sex, birth, death and cannibalism.

Del Kathryn Barton selected group exhibition participations include: Australia Now: mad love, Arndt Art Agency, Berlin, Germany (2017), Like-ness, Albertz Benda, New York, USA (2016), Express Yourself: Romance Was Born for Kids, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia (2014), Dark Heart, Adelaide Biennale of Australian Art, Adelaide, Australia (2014), Theatre of the World, Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania, Australia (2012), Lightness and Gravity, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia (2012), Freehand: Recent Australia Drawing, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, Australia (2010/11), 2009 Wynne Prize for Landscape, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia (2009), Half a World Away: Drawings from Glasgow, Sao Paulo, Brazil and Sydney, Australia, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Centre, Buffalo, New York, USA (2002).

Her numerous solo exhibitions include: the highway is a disco, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia (2017) r u a bunny?, Albertz Benda, New York, USA (2017), Del Kathryn Barton, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia (2017), RED, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia (2017), The Nightingale and the Rose, Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), Melbourne, Australia (2016), the highway is a disco, ARNDT, Singapore (2015), Electro Orchid, RoslynOxley9 Gallery, Sydney, Australia (2014), The Nightingale and the Rose, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, Australia (2012), the stars eat your body, Kaliman Gallery, Sydney, Australia (2009), the whole of everything, Karen Woodbury Gallery, Melbourne, Australia (2008) and thankyou for loving me, Karen Woodbury Gallery, Melbourne Australia (2005).

Yeo Kaa Known for her eye-candy colours and figuration style reminiscent of cartoons and animations, Yeo Kaa is a young Filipino artist whose themes and subjects in her work contrast sharply from the pop vibe evoked by her imagery. A graduate of Advertising from the College of the Holy Spirit in Manila, she has exhibited widely in the Philippines and has participated in international residencies, in Jogjakarta, Indonesia, and Haukijarvi, Finland. She is particularly interested in dark themes such as depression, suicide, and anxiety, among others, both drawn from personal experiences as well as general observations of human tendencies.

For her presentation at Asia Now Paris the artist will present an installation comprising a range of small scale paintings and works on paper produced on her recent AAA PROJECTS SUMMER RESIDENCY in Berlin. For this project, Yeo Kaa brings her distinctly candid portrayal of dark themes and sensitive realities in vivid and bright palette to the world of materialism and consumerism. In this exhibition, she confronts an individual’s desire to acquire material things, to possess something through purchase, in a straightforward manner. She paints random subjects from her usual repertoire, but this time highlights the process of exchange between an art’s monetary value and the purchasing power it creates.

She declares in each work the mutual benefit between the artist as a creator driven by an aspiration to own a certain commodity, and the consumer who turns this into a reality through the purchase of the artist’s work. This upfront take on the relationship between art and the culture of consumption in a capitalist society works both as an honest commentary and a parody of the sale and circulation of objects, whether art objects or consumer items. It also implicates the artist, so often distanced from the commercial nature of the production and consumption of objects, as someone who also actively takes part in its dynamics. It strips the artist of exemption from the inevitable grip of the market and capital.

About the artist:
Born in 1989, Palawan, the Philippines, Yeo Kaa lives and works in Manila. Her selected solo exhibitions include: "Anxious Lustless Pechay", Arndt Art Agency, Berlin, Germany (2018), “Sorry Sorry Sorry - Art Fair Philippines”, Arndt Fine Art, Manila, Philippines (2018), “Alone but Not Lonely”, Yavuz Gallery, Singapore, Singapore (2018), “For My Mother”, Blanc Gallery, Katipunan, Philippines (2018), “Distressful Satisfaction”, Office for Contemporary Art, Yogyakarta, Indonesia (2017), “2:55AM”, Secret Fresh, Manila, Philippines (2016) and “Okay”, Artinformal, Mandaluyong, Philippines (2015).

Her work has been included in the following recent group exhibitions: “Got Paper?”, Ruci Gallery, Jakarta, Indonesia (2018), “Origins – Art Cube Gallery”, Manila, Philippines (2018), “Terra Incognita”, Hilger BROT Kunsthalle, Vienna, Austria (2017), “CHAINTEETHTENSION IV”, Secret Fresh Gallery, Manila, Philippines (2017), Yavuz Gallery at Art Basel, Hong Kong (2017), “SELF”, Secret Fresh Gallery at Art Fair Philippines (2017), “The Extension of Medium”, Nunu Fine Art, Taipei, Taiwan (2016), “CHAINTEETHTENSION III”, Secret Fresh Gallery, Manila, Philippines (2016), “Colorum”, Vargas Museum, Manila, Philippines (2016), “Phosphenes”, Secret Fresh, Manila, Philippines (2016), “Blank”, Secret Fresh, Manila, Philippines (2015) and “You Are Here”, Vinyl on Vinyl, Manila, Philippines (2015). Her latest residency in 2017 was at the Office for Contemporary Art, Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

Opening Friday October 12th, 6-8pm

Arndt Art Agency is pleased to announce a solo presentation of work by Australian artist Khadim Ali in October 2018.

Within this new body of work the artist has produced a new series entitled “Actors”. This series dictates the imagery of romance between war and actor through the role of “Actors”. The two are inseparable. Whether actors dictate war or war dictates actors, the blend creates the aesthetics of violence, destruction and ruination – in the presence of the absent people. In a land, fertile with blood and bones of humans, the unrepeatable historical wars resemble the contemporary conflict.

The narrative of virtue and glory, good and evil, remain the immortal characteristics of the on-going war in the artist’s homeland. Every inch in the tapestry of land-of-conflict is weaved with weapons, to defend its cause that has become so complex and unidentifiable. It is only in the vein of the country that one realises the actors-of-war are dominant, and the physicality of weapons, deadly. Brutality is the only primary legacy of truth. Beneath the skin of the society, a bleeding generation of conflict exists – the invisible actors that pay the cost, through blood and loss. They recite meaning from the poems of a lost history. They sing the songs of actors from a ‘heroic’ past. They make love with the story of war. In this series, the artist illustrates the domination and transition of actors and weapons in the aforementioned conflict. But what viewers do not see, and, what the artist hopes to convey, are the invisible actors on whose skin this brutality, killing, and bloodshed take place. The actor is thus embodied, as a transitioning, breathing, colourful portrait that represents the complexity of conflict.

About the artist:

Born 1978, Quetta, Pakistan. Ali lives and works in Sydney, Australia. After growing up in Pakistan as a refugee, Afghan artist Khadim Ali was trained in classical miniature painting at the National College of Arts in Lahore and in mural painting and calligraphy in Tehran. Ali’s family is from Bamiyan (Hazarajat region) where in 2001 the colossal sixth-century Buddha statues were destroyed. The Shahnameh (Book of Kings) was read to Ali by his grandfather and its illustrations were his first lessons in art history. Ironically, its hero Rostam became appropriated by the Taliban. Rich in traditional and modern motifs of Eastern and Western art-historical references, Ali’s works tell stories about loss (of his own cultural heritage and of human values) and about how meaning shifts as words and images are twisted through ideological adoption. Ali’s recent work focuses on the relationship of Afghanistan to refugees who have relocated to his home country. Following the style of miniature painting, specifically that which uses the technique of neem rang (half-colour), Ali employs traditional production methods.

Khadim Ali earned a BFA at the National College of Arts, Lahore, Pakistan in 2003 and Master of Fine Arts, College of fine Arts UNSW, Sydney, Australia in 2013. He has earned Western Sydney Arts Fellowship in 2016. Ali has exhibited in recent solo exhibitions that include: Fragmented Memories, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, Australia (2018), The Arrival, Milani Gallery, Brisbane, Australia (2016), Transitions / Evacuation, ARNDT, Singapore (2015), The Haunted Lotus, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia (2013) and Rustam, Rohtas2 Lahore, Pakistan (2009). Recent group exhibitions include: Enough خلاص Khalas, University of New South Wales Galleries, Sydney, Australia, Waqt al-tagherr: Time of Change, ACE Open, Adelaide, Australia (2018), The National 2017 – New Australian Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia (2017), NSW Visual Artist Fellowship Exhibition, Art Bank Gallery, Sydney, Australia (2017), Mythologies of the Oppressed, Rohtas 2 Art Gallery, Lahore, Pakistan (2016) and Refugees, Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Sydney, Australia (2016). Ali’s work was featured in the shared Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009), Venice, Italy, in Documenta 2013 (2012), Kassel, Germany, The Asia Pacific Triennial 5, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia (2006) and the presentation No Country: Contemporary Art for South East Asia at the Guggenheim, New York, USA (2013).

His work is held in numerous public collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; British Museum, London; Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan; Foreign Office, Islamabad; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; and Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane.

Opening: Friday 14 September, 6 - 8 pm

Arndt Art Agency, is pleased to announce the first solo presentation of work by Philippine-based artist Yeo Kaa in Europe in September 2018, presented with the kind support of the Embassy of the Philippines, Berlin in September 2018 following her AAA PROJECTS SUMMER RESIDENCY.

Yeo Kaa takes a turn in her explorations of the monsters that torment the human psyche and plays on disruptions to bodily craving for pleasure in her latest solo show. The works confront female loss of sexual drive due to stress and anxiety through metaphors and references to the body. The word “pechay” in the title refers to Chinese cabbage, one of the euphemisms for female genitalia in her local slang, and is described in a state when it ceases to respond to self-pleasure. Images of sex toys, underwear, and a girl in nude seemingly in distress nonchalantly open up discussions on desire and sexuality.

In this instance of loss of lust, the works indirectly become the artist’s outlet, a purging akin to an orgasmic experience that restores the body and mind’s natural vitality and responsiveness of the senses. Known for her eye-candy colours and figuration style reminiscent of cartoons and animations, Yeo Kaa is a young Filipino artist whose themes and subjects in her work contrast sharply from the pop vibe evoked by her imagery. A graduate of Advertising from the College of the Holy Spirit in Manila, she has exhibited widely in the Philippines and has participated in international residencies, in Jogjakarta, Indonesia, and Haukijarvi, Finland.

She is particularly interested in dark themes such as depression, suicide, and anxiety, among others, both drawn from personal experiences as well as general observations of human tendencies. This presentation is curated by Ruel Caasi in collaboration with The Working Animals Art Projects.

About the artist

Born in 1989, Palawan, the Philippines, Yeo Kaa lives and works in Manila. Her selected solo exhibitions include “Sorry Sorry Sorry - Art Fair Philippines”, Arndt Fine Art, Manila, Philippines (2018), “Alone but Not Lonely”, Yavuz Gallery, Singapore, Singapore (2018), “For My Mother”, Blanc Gallery, Katipunan, Philippines (2018), “Distressful Satisfaction”, Office for Contemporary Art, Yogyakarta, Indonesia (2017), “2:55AM”, Secret Fresh, Manila, Philippines (2016) and “Okay”, Artinformal, Mandaluyong, Philippines (2015).

Her work has been included in the following recent group exhibitions: “Got Paper?”, Ruci Gallery, Jakarta, Indonesia (2018), “Origins – Art Cube Gallery”, Manila, Philippines (2018), “Terra Incognita”, Hilger BROT Kunsthalle, Vienna, Austria (2017), “CHAINTEETHTENSION IV”, Secret Fresh Gallery, Manila, Philippines (2017), Yavuz Gallery at Art Basel, Hong Kong (2017), “SELF”, Secret Fresh Gallery at Art Fair Philippines (2017), “The Extension of Medium”, Nunu Fine Art, Taipei, Taiwan (2016), “CHAINTEETHTENSION III”, Secret Fresh Gallery, Manila, Philippines (2016), “Colorum”, Vargas Museum, Manila, Philippines (2016), “Phosphenes”, Secret Fresh, Manila, Philippines (2016), “Blank”, Secret Fresh, Manila, Philippines (2015) and “You Are Here”, Vinyl on Vinyl, Manila, Philippines (2015). Her latest residency in 2017 was at the Office for Contemporary Art, Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

Arndt Art Agency is pleased to present this exhibition as part of a Space Swap with STATION, Melbourne curated by Luisa Bosci.

OPENING: SATURDAY 28th JULY 2018, 5 – 7 PM STATION GALLERY, MELBOURNE 9 ELLIS ST, SOUTH YARRA

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ARTIST TALK: THURSDAY 2nd AUGUST, FROM 6 PM
Alicja Kwade in conversation with Dr. Simon Maidment (Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, National Gallery of Victoria) and Dr. Simone Slee (VCA Art Research Convenor, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne), with opening remarks by Matthias Arndt (Founder, Arndt Art Agency (AAA)

Venue: Clemenger Auditorium, NGV International 180 St Kilda Road, Melbourne (Entry via the Education entrance).

Free event, bookings essential via the NGV website. Organised in collaboration with the National Gallery of Victoria and the Victoria College of the Arts.

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As part of the official program of Melbourne Art Week, Arndt Art Agency is delighted to present AU, a group show of leading contemporary artists from Europe, Asia and Australia. Participating artists: Khadim Ali, Daniel Boyd, Marina Cruz, Mikala Dwyer, Uji 'Hahan' Handoko Eko Saputro, Jeppe Hein, Thomas Hirschhorn, Alicja Kwade, Danie Mellor, Julian Rosefeldt, Gareth Sansom, Nedko Solakov, Rodel Tapaya, Danh Vo, Jorinde Voigt.

Curated by Australian Director, Luisa Bosci, Au, focuses on the materiality of gold, while also exploring its layered associations. Gold is strongly connected to ideas of currency, value systems, and wealth, but is also underpinned by notions of alchemy, divinity and avarice. Assembling both existing and newly commissioned works by 15 Australian and international artists, Au will present Melbourne audiences with some of the leading contemporary art practitioners as they delve into all things auriferous in nature.

AU will be exhibited at STATION, Melbourne as the first part of an exchange with Arndt Art Agency Berlin. STATION will be exhibiting a curated exhibition of gallery artists at Arndt Art Agency in Berlin on Fasanenstrasse, 28 - one of the oldest art precincts in Berlin - during the internationally celebrated Gallery Weekend Berlin in May 2019. Luisa Bosci Luisa Bosci is the Director of the Michael Buxton Collection, one of the most significant collections of Australian Contemporary Art. Her role encompasses both curatorial work, as well as the recent delivery of Buxton Contemporary, a new purpose-built museum to house the Michael Buxton Collection through a philanthropic donation in excess of $30 million. Bosci was also Director of SPRING1883, a hotel-based, boutique art fair from its inauguration in 2014 to 2016. She has a Masters of Art Curatorship from the University of Melbourne and is part of the Buxton Contemporary Committee of Management. Recent exhibitions include ‘Hiding in Plain Sight – A Selection of Works from the Michael Buxton Collection’, Bendigo Art Gallery, 18 July– 27 September 2015 and ‘History Problem’, The Australian Club, 1 February – 29 April 2016.

Arndt Art Agency (AAA) Au will be the fourth group exhibition of international contemporary art by international art expert, Matthias Arndt in Australia. The presentation follows the successes of the Migration series group exhibitions in Sydney and Melbourne in 2012 that showcased museum quality works by European and North American contemporary masters to Australian audiences. Arndt Art Agency based in Berlin, Germany, works across a broad range of curated exhibitions in collaboration with international museums, galleries, private collections and artists. AAA also provides private and institutional advisory worldwide in addition to the management of a select group of artists.

For all press related requests, please contact: Rachael Vance, Director, Arndt Art Agency rachael@arndtartagency.com

An open house will be held on the 30th of June from 11am - 6pm at 80 Chay Yan Street #04-04, Singapore 160080. Admission is free. Other viewings will be by appointment only.

Arndt Art Agency is proud to present Vacancy, an exhibition of artwork from across the globe to be held in Singapore. Inspired by the Chambres d’Amis exhibition curated by Jan Hoet in Ghent, Belgium in 1987, Vacancy brings together - for the first time in Singapore - a vast number of renowned artists under one roof. Participating artists: Kawayan de Guia, Ben Eine, Nona Garcia, Loi Cai Xiang, Alasdair Macintyre, Dawn Ng, Eko Nugroho, Jonathan Olazo, Ruben Pang, Man Ray, Gerhard Richter, Julian Rosefeldt, Dimitris Tzamouranis, Entang Wiharso, Aya Uekawa, Yeo Kaa.

The exhibition space, a walk up apartment in the heritage district of Tiong Bahru, invites audiences to experience the artworks under intimate circumstances. Singapore has enjoyed a renaissance in the arts sector from art fairs, galleries, and museums. Vacancy seeks to disrupt the current exhibition landscape and add the final piece in the arts ecology, our homes and our everyday lives.

Opening | Friday | April 27 2018, 6 – 8 pm

Opening Hours during Gallery Weekend Berlin Saturday & Sunday I April 28 & April 29 2018, 11 am - 7 pm

Presented with the kind support of the Embassy of the Republic of Indonesia and part of the official program of ASIA-PACIFIC WEEK BERLIN 2018.

Arndt Art Agency is pleased to present acclaimed Indonesian artist Eko Nugroho's solo exhibition “Plastic Democracy” at Arndt Art Agency Berlin upon the occasion of Gallery Weekend Berlin 2018.

Nugroho is part of a new generation of Southeast Asian artists intent on forging a unique Indonesian visual language and avenue for expression, deeply rooted in themes derived from everyday life. As Lisa Catt, Assistant Curator, International Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia, furthers: “From the very outset, Nugroho understood that the movement and energy of everyday life — its histories and traditions, its comings and goings — were fundamental to both his process and ethos as an artist. The streets of his hometown Yogyakarta not only offered a site of free and creative expression, but also of communication and exchange. It was here, outside the confines of the gallery and studio, that Nugroho found the potential to present art and the inspiration to make art which felt new and relevant. His ventures into public space as a young, emerging artist forged the way for him to develop a practice that was true to his sense of community and to his passion and skill as an artist.

As much as a set of formal constructs — those he lifted from the pages of his favourite comic books and punk music zines — a sociality and collectiveness informed his works, building itself into his practice, and giving rise to some of the most distinctive imagery in contemporary art today.” Characterised by plurality and taking many forms, Nugroho’s multidisciplinary practice investigates universal issues such as globalisation, human existence, corruption, cultural value systems and race through a critical, yet simultaneously humorous and playful lens.

His work is grounded in both local traditions and global popular culture. In particular, he has cited the influence of traditional batik and embroidery styles. There is of course also a powerful inspiration from contemporary street art, graffiti and comics. In this way, his punchy, vibrant graphic aesthetic is often utilised in public interventions in the form of community murals and large-scale embroideries that explore social culture. Nugroho’s unique ability to intertwine popular culture within the vernacular of contemporary art has elevated his practice to broad, international appeal.

Nugroho re-iterates this sentiment as he describes the central topic of his work as “modern life in urban areas”. The artist cites, “My work is very much informed by my background in street art and I have always worked a lot in public space and with the local community. Many of the figures in my work, for instance, are masked in some way. In Java, the mask is a very symbolic part of traditional culture, and the tradition of shadow theatre has been an important influence for me. By changing the heads of the figures I convey my interpretation; this is the picture I end up with.”

For his solo exhibition at Arndt Art Agency, the presentation will include a major site-specific installation in the form of a range of murals and a selection of characteristically vibrant large-scale manual embroideries and paintings. The works in the exhibition convey many recurring topics in the artist’s practice such as power structures, urban existence, freedom and truth exemplified in the following artwork titles “Nationalism v Nationalism”, “Make Humanism Great Again”, “Melihat Dengan Hati” (Seeing With the Heart), “Song of Whistleblower” and “Release Yourself to be Truth”. The sustained employment of visual motifs from his oeuvre to date such as cartoon-like, shrouded faces and figures are set against patterned decorative backdrops are also apparent in a range of key pieces. These visual environments in the works appear simultaneously at once as platforms for imagery to emerge from, but also engulf. Artist Statement "Plastic Democracy' speaks about the elasticity and dynamism of the transitionary process toward democracy – plastic after all is flexible, malleable but it is also man-made, synthetic.

Nugroho presents monochrome works reflecting on the perceived simplicity of democracy ‘on paper’, as a system. Black and white, right and wrong, true and false however in between black and white – black bleeds into white and white drips onto black in his canvases and embroideries to show democracy in Indonesia is far from simple. Eko reflects similarities in democracy globally, universally. Eko’s colour burst works, such as the 'Garden full of Blooming Democracy' series presents democracy as a sprawling garden – where politics, culture and religion grow alongside, in competition and entangle one another like climbing vines, wildflowers and weeds. Colours offset, clash and contrast; as diverse as international cultures and people. These colours are still contained in strong black lines, demonstrating the pressure of containment of so much diversity and difference in systems of democracy and questions if the strength of people without systems of democracy will ever be enough while we wait for these systems to stick."

Throughout Gallery Weekend Berlin, the artist will also stage a customised outdoor pop-up store by Eko Nugroho's art project DGTMB in front Arndt Art Agency’s premises in Fasanenstraße presenting a range of limited edition artist merchandise for sale.

About the artist

Born in 1977, Nugroho continues to live and work in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. He participated at the 55th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale in 2013 and at the Lyon Biennal, Lyon, France in 2009. Nugroho has held solo exhibitions that include: On Site: Eko Nugroho/ Wayang Boccor, Asia Society, New York, USA (2017), WAYANG BOCOR, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC, USA (2017), LOT LOST, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia (2016), LANDSCAPE ANOMALY, Salihara Gallery, Jakarta, Indonesia (2015), WE ARE CONCERN ABOUT NOTHING, Arario Gallery, Seoul, Korea (2013), at the Singapore Tyler Print Institure, Singapore (2013) at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France (2012), at the Peking Fine Art, Beijing, China (2009), at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland (2008) and at Artoteek, The Hague, The Netherlands (2005).

Significant group exhibition participations include: Honolulu Biennial, Shangri La, Museum of Islamic Art, Culture & Design, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA (2017), Luther und die Avant Garde, Old Prison Wittenberg; Berlin; Kassel, Germany (2017), IMAGINARIUM: to the End of the Earth, Singapore Art Museum, Singapore (2017), ARTJOG 9: Universal Influence, Jogja National Museum, Yogyakarta, Indonesia (2016),) Landscape Anomaly, Salihara Art Center, Jakarta, Indonesia (2015), ROOTS. Indonesian Contemporary Art, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt (2016-15), Encounters, Art Basel Hong Kong, curated by Alexie Glass, Hong Kong (2015), Move on Asia, at the ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany (2013), RALLY: Contemporary Indonesian Art, at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia (2012/2013), Fantasy Islands, at Espace Louis Vuitton Singapore (2012) and Something From Nothing, at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans (CACNO), New Orleans, USA (2008).

His works is held in major international collections such as: Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris, The Guy & Myriam Ullens Foundation, Singapore Art Museum, Singapore, Musée des Beaux-arts de Lyon, Artnow, International AAA Collection, San Francisco, USA, Arario Collection, Cheonan, Korea, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, Asia Society Museum, New York, USA.

Initiated by: Christian Achenbach, Jonas Burgert, Zhivago Duncan and Andrej Golder, John Isaacs, Andreas Mühe and David Nicholson.

Arndt Art Agency is pleased to announce the participation of the artists: Carla Chan, Gilbert & George, Jigger Cruz, Marin Majic and Marina Cruz in NGORONGORO II at Artistweekend, Berlin.

For the period of Berlin gallery weekend 2018 and the second time in its history the 6000 square meter studio spaces of Lehderstrasse 34 will host an incredibly diverse exhibition of paintings, sculpture, multi media, installation, film and photography, in which artists invite other artists to exhibit in the context of this studio environment, thus returning the viewer to the very place of art’s genesis.

Opening | Wednesday | March 21 2018, 6 – 8 pm

Arndt Art Agency is pleased to announce Kaloy Sanchez's solo exhibition in Berlin.

If you weren’t around, I’d probably be someplace way the hell off… You’re the only reason I’m around, practically.” - J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

There is a uniquely farcical and tragic quality in Jean Paul Sartre’s depiction of an afterlife presenting it in a mundane situation, a characterisation that can easily be substituted with the living’s own present realities. In his play “No Exit,” three strangers are locked up in a room with no way out, enduring each other’s proclivities and nuisances for the rest of eternity – personifying hell through others.

In Kaloy Sanchez’ solo exhibition, the idea of confinement and fleshing out the ‘self’ is further explored and paralleled through his studio practice. His works conjures the mundane process of an artist gazing into his subjects, intently capturing every detail until they dissolve as mere objects; as models waiting to be transferred on a canvas; as skin sacks full of bones brought to life with every brush strokes and markings on a cloth. The tone and theme are exhumed through his depiction of the room – the artist’s studio.

In each painting, we get a glimpse of the unfurnished walls and pavement enclosing the room as if resembling a bare containment space. Sitting individuals pose within this space, caught up in their own thoughts and devoid from the outside world where nothing and everything changes at the same time. Sanchez’ approach to his nude portraiture eliminates the romantic ideation of the body with his signature painting style and by allowing his sitters to take a naturalistic stance.

The paintings somehow take the viewers inside the individuals’ personal place within their intimate moments but present us the irony that they are knowingly being seen; gazed at and observed with their entirety. Sanchez also allows himself to be vulnerable and exposed, posing as one of his subjects and depicting the privacy in his studio with no one to look at except for objects found within the room.

“No Exit” provides us a microcosmic representation of our society. The notion that “familiarity breeds contempt” is set in isolation but can be expanded in a worldview where the anonymous everybody injects an insight into our lives. Tethered in reality subsumed from personal introspection, both Sartre’s and Sanchez’ depiction of ‘others’ allow the audience to reflect on the implications of one’s self to people around them. The series of works challenges viewers to see pass the surfaces of the skin with all its flaws and see through the personhood within a body – to see the self within.

About the artist

Kaloy Sanchez was born 1982 in the Philippines. He studied at the University of Philippines, Diliman and holds a BFA, Major in Studio Arts. Recent solo exhibitions of the artist include “Oh the Unspeakable Things”, at ARNDT Singapore, Singapore (2014), “Nausea”, at West Gallery, Quezon City, Philippines (2013) and “Ring Around the Rosie”, Manila Contemporary, Makati City, Philippines (2012). He has also participated in numerous group shows such as “Manila: The Night is Restless, The Day is Scornful”, ARNDT Singapore, (2014), “Secret Rooms & Hidden Motives by Jason Montinola and Kaloy Sanchez”, Valentine Willie Fine Art, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (2012) and “Imagining Identity: 100 Filipino Self Portraits”, Finale Art File, Makati City, Philippines (2012).

Curated Booth #46

Arndt Art Agency is pleased to announce its participation at Art Fair Philippines 2018 with a curated exhibition of works by: Participating artists: Kawayan de Guia, Jigger Cruz, Marina Cruz, Eko Nugroho, Alwin Reamillo, Rodel Tapaya and an artist-solo-project by Yeo Kaa.

We look forward to welcoming you to our Curated Booth #46.

Opening | Friday | February 23 2018, 6 – 8 pm

Co-presented by the Ayala Museum and Arndt Art Agency, Urban Labyrinth features 18 new works by one of the leading artists in Philippine contemporary art.

This collection of large-scale paintings, works under glass and on paper, and video, teeming with fantastical characters and hypnotic imagery, depict the complexity of life in informal urban settlements in the Philippines. Tapaya’s body of work is the amalgam of close and almost investigative observations of his milieu, careful meditations on Philippine social issues, and diligent study of the research and writings of historians, anthropologists, and philosophers.

Lauded for seamlessly weaving the folk and the contemporary, for employing multiple indistinct vanishing points in one enormous plane, Tapaya’s canvases blur our conventions of time and space. His imagery and composition recall scenes from the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, 16th-century Netherlandish artist, and Botong Francisco, Angono modernist muralist. But the landscape or genre in Tapaya’s work cannot be described as gardens of earthly delights or joyful pastoral vistas. The visual lifeworld created by the artist is populated by ghoulish, surreal, ambiguous but identifiable characters, wreaking havoc or engaged in the mundane, among a cast of hundreds in his larger tableaux or isolated in his smaller paintings. Through the artist’s mediation, they are simultaneously otherworldly and familiar, conjuring our own anxieties, troubles, and folly.

In Urban Labyrinth, Tapaya does not simply depict poverty as a hapless condition, but an independent state where people live their lives and engage with one another. The viewer sees both the economic and the social layers, formed and delineated through the alliances or tensions between Tapaya’s characters, portraying a more intricate picture of destitution. Meanwhile, the two “Folk Narrative” paintings included in the exhibition depict the cultural attitudes that sustain these poor living conditions. In the end, they serve the same purpose as the myths and fables they appropriated: to allow us to discover ourselves and the valuable lessons in our allegories.

"In this exhibition, I tried to explore similar themes from Looban, an exhibition of works on burlap I presented in 2008 depicting the life and humour in Manila’s slums, specifically from observations of an area called Krus na Ligas neighbouring the University of the Philippines compound in Quezon City. In Urban Labyrinth, I am expanding the original idea to tackle not just humour, but the deeper, buried aspects of life in the slums—from looban to kaloob-looban (innermost self). I am trying to show the complexities of Philippine informal settlements in general: the dreams of people hailing from the provinces which led them to find their luck in urbanised environments, and the conditions and problems they face that entangle and entrap them in a labyrinth of difficulties which they may not be able to find a way out of. For this show, I present five different series of works. First are the “Urban Landscapes,” backdrops which showcase the physical attributes of slums. The organic, unfinished feel of the works directly represent the randomness and unfinished construction of houses in these areas. Second, there are the “Folk Narratives,” paintings that discuss very complex or sensitive contemporary issues using mythological imagery. Third, there are the works under glass, where I employed a reversed painting process, portraying everyday scenes in these communities. Fourth, there are works on paper that, like the reversed paintings, show round-the-clock happenings in the looban, featuring a diverse cast of characters in ambiguous settings. Lastly, there is a single video work about the plight of an overseas Filipino worker (OFW), fashioned after the Filipino vampire, the manananggal."
- Rodel Tapaya, February 2018

Opening | Thursday | January 18 2018, 6 – 8 pm

Arndt Art Agency is pleased to present Nona Garcia's solo exhibition at Arndt Art Agency Berlin.

The artist and Ambassador, H.E. Melita Sta. Maria-Thomeczek, of the Embassy of the Philippines, Berlin will be present during the opening Presented with the kind support of the Embassy of the Philippines, Berlin.

Nona Garcia’s paintings acknowledge the painted image as a product of transference between source and surface. The artist has persistently explored this line of enquiry since the early 2000’s as indicated in her diptych entitled “See Saw” (2000). The painting illustrates a chainsaw wrapped in cloth paired with its more intrusive counterpart: an x-ray of the same object mounted on light box. What was apparent in this pivotal work was the artist’s willingness to take on ontological concerns seldom tackled in figuration, specifically the painted object’s inherent physical properties vis-à-vis its transformation through representation. In this past work, which now serves as foreshadowing to the present, the painted object is situated as a thing both ‘hidden and seen’ through dual channels of depiction, thus exploring both its essence as image and as an object that occupies our sense-perception, particularly our desire to know what lies beneath.

The nature of representational painting is once again problematised through Garcia’s new set of works, which follows the same direction of inquiry about the thing represented and an underlying reflection on representation itself. In acknowledging what is for the artist the true process of painting—essentially appropriating an object from the known world and applying its image on a surface from essentially the same source—Garcia suggests a commonality that engages conceptually beyond the limits of the ‘painting as illusion’ while simultaneously embracing the same mode.

In Planted, Garcia once again attempts to synthesise the image/object divide – the thing represented against its presentation in actuality, through illusionistic painting reminiscent of trompe-l’oeil techniques. By using wooden veneers as a substitute for conventional canvas, the painted images, achieved by applying oil on wood, invite us to reflect immediately upon the attributes derived from their physical existence.

The objects depicted—a carved reindeer head, a toy rifle, fruit and leaves, a broomstick, indigenous utensils and relics—are derived mostly from the same organic source which is wood, or the substance of trees. This implies a beholden intimacy, a union that brings us to a kind of natural cycle which is able to co-opt the processes of painting. With this new series, Garcia transcends beyond the painted image and incorporates the qualities of the surface itself. The wooden surface provides its own unique grain, which in turn becomes an attribute to the form—a part of the composition as a whole. This quality of being ingrained—of depicting wood on wood, of representing the substance alongside its physical organic qualities— serves as a pledge in order to reveal further ‘truths’ via painting. The show Planted could be seen as a testament to the materiality of painting; in presenting something which could also serve as “real” beyond mere illusionism or photorealism.

In another large-scale work, Garcia paints a pile of branches in the middle of the Gobi Desert. The question “what is real” now becomes “what is possible,” as the towering structure of twigs and brushwood appear unaccounted for, arising out of nowhere—without signs of any nearby forest. Planted. Which in another context could also allude to a setup, or a hoax, tempting the viewer to believe the possibility of such a scenario, with the artist serving as its instigator: conflating the possibilities of illusion and disillusion within painting.
— Cocoy Lumbao

About the artist

Nona Garcia was born 1978 in Manila, Philippines. She studied at the University of the Philippines, Diliman, QC College of Fine Arts and holds a BFA, Major in Painting. Garcia lives and works in Baguio. The Philippine artist recently staged the solo exhibition “Recovery” at the Bencab Museum in Baguio City, Philippines in 2014. Selected institutional group exhibitions include: “Passion and Procession: Art of the Philippines”, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia (2017), “5th Anniversary Special Presentation: Revision I”, Mind Set Art Center, Taipei City, Taiwan (2015), “Prague Biennale”, Prague, Czech Republic (2009) and “3rd Fukuoka Triennale“, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan (2005).

Opening | Thursday | October 16 2017, 6 – 8 pm

Arndt Art Agency is pleased to announce the group exhibition Indigenous Australia: Masterworks from the National Gallery of Australia.

The National Gallery of Australia (NGA) and me Collectors Room Berlin present a survey of significant traditional and modern art by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, providing an insight into one of the ‘oldest, richest and most complex’ cultures in the world (Franchesca Cubillo). ‘Indigenous Australia: Masterworks from the National Gallery of Australia’ opens in Berlin on 17 November.

The NGA hosts the most extensive collection of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artwork worldwide. Franchesca Cubillo, NGA Senior Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art, aims to further the international recognition of these multi-faceted creative traditions. Exploring works from the early 19th century, ‘Indigenous Australia: Masterworks from the National Gallery of Australia’ encompasses not only the iconic traditional Indigenous works from these early periods, but also explores the rich diversity of contemporary practice in Australia right now.

While paintings form the core of the exhibition, they are accompanied by videos, sculptures and installations. The collection reflects Aboriginal culture’s deep spirituality in its connection to country. The religious mythology of the Dreaming holds an important place in many of the works, producing images of intricate patterns belonging to particular regions while works such as ‘Meeting the White Man’ (Tommy McRae) remind us that there has been great upheaval and change for these cultures throughout past and recent history.

Some, sensing the ongoing transformation, used the medium of artistic expression to document their people’s ways, preserving them for future generations by portraying mythology and ancient rituals. Consequently, many of the modern works deal directly with issues arising today in Aboriginal society: Identity, politics, and sharing the complex history. This ongoing process of change is reflected in the arrangement of pieces throughout the exhibition.

Many early works, showing natural phenomena and the land, are painted on bark using natural earth pigments, and so intentionally share a direct connection with the area they portray. Later on, more frequent exchange between Aboriginal and western culture led to the integration of new styles and increasing diversity: For example, beginning in the 1970s, artists of the Papunya community adopted acrylic paint on canvas as a new medium to share the ancient stories of their ancestors. Others came to adopt western watercolour landscape painting techniques as early as the 1930s.

Works from the 1980s onward utilise ever wider variations of media and styles, but retain in their core the central themes of nature, land, and community – spiritual and political alike – and remain deeply rooted in their culture’s styles and traditions. A catalogue accompanying the exhibition ‘Indigenous Australia: Masterworks from the National Gallery of Australia’ was published; 140 pages, texts (d/e) by Wally Caruana and Franchesca Cubillo, 85 color illustrations.

Opening | Thursday | October 16 2017, 6 – 8 pm

Arndt Art Agency is pleased to announce Del Kathryn Barton's solo exhibition The Highway is a Disco.

Two-time Archibald prize-winner Del Kathryn Barton is being celebrated in the largest ever exhibition of her work to date at NGV Australia. Del Kathryn Barton: The Highway is a Disco will feature 150 new and recent works by Barton, including her famed kaleidoscopic portraits, a never-before-seen large-scale sculpture in homage to her mother and Barton's short film RED, starring Australian actress and Academy Award-winner Cate Blanchett.

‘With a practice spanning art, fashion and film, Barton’s psychedelic images reveal her personal responses to the human experience. She is one of Australia's most popular artists, renowned for her highly intricate and distinctive hybrid forms, that break down boundaries between humans and nature’, said Tony Ellwood, Director, NGV.

This show is deeply personal for Barton with the debut of her new sculpture, at the foot of your love, which has been created in response to her mother’s terminal illness. Completed in 2017 and comprised of printed silk and Huon pine, the sculpture is reflective of Barton’s reoccurring themes of motherhood and nature. Featuring a wooden conch shell and an enormous silk ‘handkerchief’, the work is symbolic of Barton’s grief for her own mother.

Comprised of five panels and over 10 metres in length, sing blood-wings sing is Barton’s newest and largest painting to date. The painting features a female-focused reimagining of the 1963 Peter, Paul and Mary coming-of-age song, Puff the Magic Dragon. Barton often listens to the folk tune whilst working in her studio as a symbolic reminder to maintain her childlike curiosity through her artistic practice. Barton’s interpretation of the song and its meaning is depicted by four breasted, rainbow coloured dragons. In her signature style, she blurs human, mythological and animal representations in art, encouraging her audience to see how imagination and desire can test traditional forms.

The exhibition will also feature Barton’s acclaimed film RED, where Cate Blanchett plays a mother re-enacting the redback spider's deadly mating ritual, alongside actor Alex Russell, Sydney Dance Company's Charmene Yap and Barton’s own daughter Arella. In RED Barton conveys the strength of women, the visceral power of female sexuality and encapsulates Barton’s multiple interests in feminism, nature and the maternal figure.

About the artist:

Born in Sydney in 1972, Barton graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney, in 1993. She won her first Archibald prize in 2008 for her self-portrait with her two children and then again in 2013 for her portrait of Australian actor Hugo Weaving. All images courtesy: The National Gallery of Victoria

Opening | Thursday | October 26 2017, 6 – 8 pm Presented by albertz benda, New York and DISTANZ Publishers upon the occasion of the artist's monographic book launch

Arndt Art Agency is pleased to present a solo exhibition by German artist, Rainer Fetting.

This exhibition is presented in collaboration with albertz benda, New York and DISTANZ publishers upon the release of the artist’s new publication “Rainer Fetting”.

The show includes thirteen new paintings spanning the last three years from 2014 to 2017. The majority of works depict landscapes and countryside scenes taken from the artist’s base of Sylt, further complemented by imagery derived from time spent in the United States.

The central theme of the sea and coastal environments, implicit in the show’s title "Taxis, Monsters and the Good Old Sea” is located in pieces such as "Surfer, Sylt" (2016) and “Seestück-Gischt” (2015) illustrating treacherous waves and figures surfing. These works reflect the artist's strong bond with the North Sea. With a base on the northernmost island of Germany in the Frisian archipelago, Sylt, the enclave is known for its distinctive shoreline and rugged conditions. Works such as "Dance on Ocean Beach" (2015), "Palmtrees" (2015) and "Taxi South Beach" (2015) include motifs taken from travelling within the United States.

Fascinated by the scenery and energy surrounding Florida’s beaches, Fetting has captured these impressions on canvas. Palm trees are juxtaposed with the image of a glaringly yellow taxi rich in colour, that contrast with the quieter, soothing mood of the horizon lines of the other works. The illustration of cows in pastoral settings is a new development in the artist’s practice. Represented in three works throughout the exhibition, the outer forms of the animals appear blurred, allowing them to seemingly merge with their surrounding landscapes. The artist uses various techniques such as: the application of lacquer in order to emphasise its materiality and paint squeezed directly from the tube onto the canvas, in addition to the free pouring of paint. In this way, various technical possibilities refer to the respective subject, aiming to enliven a sense of alienation within each composition.

Connecting to the exhibition’s title further, a “monster” lurks in the painting "clown in car / landscape" (2016). Here, audiences are presented with an unsettling scene of a clown with a menacing expression staring out of the rear window of a car upon an apocalyptic setting.

About the artist:

Born in 1949 in Wilhelmshaven, Germany, Rainer Fetting studied at the Academy of the Arts in Berlin. Together with Helmut Middendorf, Salomé, and Bernd Zimmer, Fetting founded a gallery and performance space at Moritzplatz that became an epicenter of the Berlin’s musical and visual counterculture in the 1970s and 80s.

Fetting participated in numerous influential exhibitions, including: Zeitgeist (1982) at the Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin; Von hier aus Zwei neue deutsche Kunst in Düsseldorf, Messe Düsseldorf, (1984), An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture at the MoMA, New York, (1988); Refigured Painting – The German Image 1960–1988 at the Guggenheim Museum, New York (1989); and Portrait Now, National Portrait Gallery London, UK (1993).

Recent highlights include: Painting Forever! Keilrahmen, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2013) and work included in the permanent exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof Ostflügel and Sammlung Marx, Germany (2016). In 2011, the museum Berlinische Galerie honoured the artist with an extensive solo exhibition.

His work is included in the collections of the Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany; Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris, France; the Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany; and The Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles, CA among many others.

Arndt Art Agency is pleased to present the solo presentation "Breathing Patterns" by Marina Cruz and book launch at ASIA NOW Paris Art Fair 2017 (9 Avenue Hoche, 75008, Paris, France), (Curated Space A104).

Philippine artist Marina Cruz explores the central topic of dress brought to life through masterfully executed oil paintings. Her works explore ideas concerning fragility, beauty and memory via imagery of clothing. Cruz's motifs feature handmade family heirloom dresses and fabric that draw upon ancestral connections.

Bearing the story of manual craftsmanship and the invisible wearers’ imprint on garments, Cruz's paintings allude to, yet are devoid of the human figure. Her compositions allow for close analysis of sections of material such as its patterning, its folds, its flow and rhythm, but also its imperfections; the tears and edges that highlight the fabric’s construction.

Born in 1982, in Bulacan, Philippines, Marina Cruz completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts. Cruz was awarded Grand Prize Winner at the Philippine Art Awards in 2008 and has since exhibited widely throughout the Asia-Pacific region at institutions such as: the Mind Set Art Center, Taipei, Taiwan; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; The Lopez Museum, Manila, Philippines; and the Metropolitan Museum of Manila, Philippines. In 2017, a monographic publication "Breathing Patterns" was published by DISTANZ publishing house surveying the artist's practice.

Opening Reception: Thursday, September 14, 2017, 6pm, As part of "curated by_vienna 2017"

Arndt Art Agency is pleased to announce the group exhibition "Terra Incognita" curated by Matthias Arndt at BROTKunsthalle in Vienna in September 2017.

Participating artists: Khadim Ali, Del Kathryn Barton, Zean Cabangis , Jigger Cruz, FX Harsono, Mit Jai Inn, Eko Nugroho , Patricia Piccinini, Ben Quilty, José Santos III, Yudi Sulistyo, Melati Suryodarmo, Agus Suwage, Rodel Tapaya, Entang Wiharso, Yeo Kaa.

The group exhibition is part of the gallery festival curated by_Vienna that includes a program of curated exhibitions in museums, art centers and galleries throughout Austria’s capital. Supported by the Vienna Business Agency in order to promote cooperation between Viennese galleries and international curators, curated by_Vienna’s projects run in parallel with viennacontemporary art fair.

About the Exhibition:

Terra Incognita unites a selection of leading artists from the South East Asian and Pacific regions. This vast area includes some of the most prolific and vital art communities – such as Indonesia and the Philippines – that hold tremendous potential due to their burgeoning art markets and museum landscapes, specifically in Australia. Despite being regionally celebrated, art from Southeast Asia and the Pacific remain "unmapped" and off the radar from larger international audiences, museums and the art market art large.

Terra Incognita, by definition is "a place, subject, or situation that you are not familiar with” or “a place that has not been discovered or that is unknown”. The reasons for this phenomenon are manifold and divergent for each region. In Southeast Asia, despite vital market activity, the lack of state institutions supporting contemporary art beyond the region, and lack of commercial gallery infrastructure with access to the international market are some of the contributing factors. Australian contemporary art has simply suffered from what Australians refer to as the "tyranny of distance".

Despite ambitious private collecting schemes and strong support by the most active state museums, accompanied with the rise of a new generation of the philanthropist, Australian contemporary art is yet to be fully discovered on a global level. Therefore, there are extremely exciting discoveries and artistic positions to be found.

Terra Incognita brings together a selection of leading artists from Indonesia, the Philippines, Cambodia and Australia, working in a variety of media. Citing reference to the thematic frame of the 2017 edition of curated by_Vienna “Icon, Codes, Significance: Language, text, and poetics in the visual arts”, the selection of artists are connected by their common "utopian spirit" inherent in universal artistic creation. Taking the point of departure that art can change the world and transform perspectives, each artist isolates issues and obstacles within our civilisation in the 21st century. By telling stories, these distinct voices impart unique creative outlooks for audiences. These narrated tales lead viewers on possible paths beyond chaos, trouble, pain and inequality.

Commissioned by Hilger BROTKunsthalle, Terra Incognita is organised in collaboration with AAA.

About the Curator:

Matthias Arndt is a seasoned contemporary art expert who ran his successful global gallery business more than two decades. Active in the Asia-Pacific region since 2010, and with his gallery in Singapore since 2013, Arndt became an early supporter of Southeast Asian art in the West. He has arranged in excess of 30 exhibitions presenting major positions of Southeast Asian art in galleries and institutions worldwide. Arndt also published monographs of artists from the region and thematic books, such as "SIP! – Indonesian Art Today" (2013) and "WASAK! Filipino Art Today" (2015). Together with his wife Tiffany Wood, Arndt founded the Art Agency "Arndt Art Agency (AAA)" that is currently involved in the "Australia Now 2017" festival in Germany and also organises BERLIN MASTERS, the talent and support platform for Berlin based artists that occurs annually during Berlin Art Week. Matthias Arndt is a member of the Asia Pacific Acquisition Committee of the TATE in London and received the French Medal “Les Arts et Les Lettres”. – Matthias Arndt/AAA January 2017

Arndt Art Agency is pleased to announce its collaboration in the group exhibition: "Passion and procession: art of the Philippines, Celebrating the diverse and vibrant art of the Philippines", presented at the The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.

Participating artists: Santiago Bose, Marina Cruz, Alfredo Esquillo Jr, Nona Garcia, Renato Habulan, Geraldine Javier, Mark Justiniani, Alwin Reamillo, Norberto Roldan and Rodel Tapaya.

Passion and procession brings together painting, sculpture, video and installation works from ten contemporary Filipino artists, revealing their very personal responses to faith, history, politics and life in the Philippines. The works draw on folk mythology, family archives, nature and religious ceremony to reconsider established narratives of history and nation.

The artists have used found as well as ritual objects, plant specimens and symbols of precolonial histories to address the ambiguities of faith and science, social inequality and relationship to place. In doing so, they demonstrate a belief in the potential of art to inspire, heal and effect social change. Accompanying their works is a selection of textiles and sculptural objects from the Philippines given to the Gallery in 2005 by Dr John Yu and Dr George Soutter. All images courtesy the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Opening Reception: Tuesday, June 6 2017, 6 – 9 pm

Panel Discussion: AUSTRALIAN CONTEMPORARY ART: NOW, Tuesday June 6 2017, 6 pm David Elliott (Curator), Krist Gruijthuijsen (Director, Kunst-Werke, Berlin), Matthias Arndt (AAA founder), Del Kathryn Barton (mad love curator and artist), Alexie Glass-Kantor (Executive Director, Artspace Sydney)

Realised through the direct support of the Australian Government as part of the cultural initiative Australia now 2017 – a year-long program celebrating Australian arts, culture, science and innovation across Germany.

Arndt Art Agency is pleased to present the group exhibition “mad love” that provides a contemporary image of current Australian art within the context of Germany and Europe.

Participating artists: Brook Andrew, Del Kathryn Barton, Pat Brassington, Dale Frank, Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, Patricia Piccinini, Ben Quilty and Paul Yore.

The exhibition “mad love” has been able to be realised through the direct support of the Australian Government as part of the cultural initiative Australia now 2017 – a year-long program celebrating Australian arts, culture, science and innovation across Germany. Held at Arndt Art Agency’s premises in Berlin, the show is curated by leading Australian artist Del Kathryn Barton. Barton's personal selection of prominent Australian visual artists each engage with ideas surrounding instinct, innate urges and the corporeal. Artworks included will consist of paintings, sculpture, mixed media, photography, and works on paper.

“Body as pleasure. Body as machine. Body longing, always longing. Hungry body, filthy body. Body to run. Body to deny. Thinking body. Muscle Body. Body as instrument and song, as instinct towards life. Body light. Body dark. Evolutionary body, dinosaur body. Plastic body. Colour body. BODY as unmitigated surges of light and energy, just briefly, but oh, such, such love……… mad, mad love.”
- Del Kathryn Barton, September 2016

For further information about AAA and Australia now, contact Rachael Vance, rachael@arndtartagency.com or visit the Australia Now website: http://australianow2017.de/

Exhibition Catalogue Essay: With eyes wide-open
Beate Scheder

A glance that changes everything. In André Breton's essay "L'Amour Fou", the protagonist is "the man with the lashes of a sea urchin, who, walking on a blue street for the first time gazes up to the woman who is to be everything." Love is, in Breton’s work, a phenomenon of encounter, the product of a mysterious correlation of conditions, and results, at least in this case of mad love, in an unmitigated desire that cannot be objected. It is telling that 80 years after its original publication Del Kathryn Barton (* 1972) entitles a group exhibition of contemporary Australian art "mad love", the name of the English translation of Breton's text. In fact, how Barton describes her curatorial concept, is reminiscent of Breton's principle of objective chance: "It was important to me to work within a framework that felt true to my creative heart and not overthink it. I was so hoping the show would be an unapologetically outrageous, visceral, figurative show.” A strange little song of the body and of love had burst out of her and she had forced herself to not change anything about it. The Surrealists called this Écriture automatique (automatic writing).

Barton describes it as follows: “Body as pleasure. Body as machine. Body longing, always longing. Hungry body, filthy body. Body to run. Body to deny. Thinking body. Muscle Body. Body as instrument and song, as instinct towards life. Body light. Body dark. Evolutionary body, dinosaur body. Plastic body. Colour body. BODY as unmitigated surges of light and energy, just briefly, but oh, such, such love......... mad, mad love.” With these lines, she contacted a number of artists who are united by their radical approach of working representationally. Brook Andrew, Pat Brassington, Dale Frank, Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, Patricia Piccinini, Ben Quilty, Paul Yore and Barton herself, form a cross-section, or better, a subjective snap-shot of contemporary Australian art.

Barton states that she hadn't thought further about what image of Australian art she wanted to convey; instead, she states that each individual artist offers insights into the mysteries of the human condition. Contemporary Australian art is still considered to be a blind spot. This may also be due to the fact that the art scene and market “Down Under” is comparatively young.

Only since the mid-1970s, after the establishment of the Australia Council, did artists and art in Australia receive sufficient official recognition and support, so that structures were able to form and a linking with the global art world took place. The Sydney Biennial was founded in 1973. In 1978, Australia participated in the Venice Biennale for the first time. The artists in “mad love” are of different ages, indigenous and non-indigenous, affected by multiculturalism, women and men, heterosexual and queer. In a kaleidoscope-like manner, they not only illuminate Barton's theme of the body, but also relate to questions of our time, both private and political, with a perspective that is local as well as global.

The examination of the colonial past and the postcolonial present runs like a common thread through the work of Brook Andrew (* 1970). The artist, who himself comes from the First Nation of Wiradjuri, works with images taken from anthropological archives. By picking up and enlarging individual portraits of the nameless, he provokes a new perspective of both history and the individual. This is also reflected in the abstract, colourful paintings of the late Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori (1924-2015), that tell of the bond between Aboriginal people and landscapes. In contrast, cultural cross-references meet in Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran’s (* 1988) ceramic sculptures.

Influences from Sri Lanka, where Nithiyendran was born, merge with elements of Christian and Hindu culture as well as pop references all the way to an idolatrous queer New Age mythology. Paul Yore’s (* 1987) wild patchwork pieces appear to be equally eclectic. They imitate the hectic image and information flow of the digital age and link it with an ancient textile craftsmanship.

The visions of Ben Quilty (* 1973) are much gloomier. His "Last Supper" series is a disconcerting compositional parable on the state of the world, marked by his journey to Syria in January 2016. Dale Frank (* 1959) also operates on the borders of representation and abstraction as well as painting as a whole. He has more recently extended his practice to three-dimensional works. Painting, he argues, could no longer be merely painting: “Painting today must live with its own contradictions, in the ugliness of its own beauty, and in the beauty of its own impossibility.”

Pat Brassington's (* 1942) access to beauty is similarly radical, but her implementation is completely different. "You're So Vein" (2005) and "In search of the marvellous" (2013) are the cryptic series titles, of which excerpts are shown in the exhibition. We see deformed or mutated body parts staged like fetishes.

Barton’s practice is present in two works. Populated by precisely painted beings, they seem to stem from an erotically charged fantasy world. “and stain through hair and flesh…….. and stain through fur and flesh…….., 2017”: A child-woman with bulging eyes stares out of the canvas, while the puppy that sits on her, watches her fixedly, she holds it upright like a small person. “Seeing is crucial, as their oversized eyes show“, wrote Julie Ewington in her monograph on Barton and her creatures' iconic wide-open eyes. Once again, the picture could be the key scene in a female connoted Amour Fou (obsessive passion or crazy love), if the women directed her attention to it. Finally, the "plastic body" of Barton's Écriture automatique materialises in Patricia Piccinini’s (*1965) work.

Similar to the Surrealists in painting or photography, she wanted to show things that were more transcendental than realistic – even if it at times employing existing species’ such as the Blobfish in her piece "Eulogy" (2011). The artist herself describes her hyper-realistic sculptures as a collision of speculative fiction with probability, thereby resembling Bretons idea of objective chance. What unites the nine artists in all their diversity is the authenticity and autonomy of their visual language. This is determined by their origin – the ancient culture of Australia's native inhabitants, the moving history and present of the continent, the specific living conditions there – as well as by the examination of an art history still strongly influenced by Europe. They take us on a journey to the other end of the world and prove why it's time to take a closer look at Australia in the globalised art world.

Opening | Friday | April 28 2017, 6 – 9 pm

GALLERY WEEKEND BERLIN 2017 OPENING HOURS:
FRI 28 APRIL 11 AM - 7 PM
SAT 29 APRIL 11 AM - 7 PM
SUN 30 APRIL 11 AM - 7 PM

Arndt Art Agency is pleased to present a solo presentation by acclaimed UK artist, Christopher Le Brun, coinciding with Gallery Weekend Berlin 2017. This exhibition is the second solo show with Arndt after his 2016 exhibition at Arndt Fine Art in Singapore, and is presented in collaboration with Albertz Benda, New York.

Now Turn the Page features new oil paintings, and mixed media works on paper. With a career spanning almost four decades, Le Brun is regarded as one of the leading European painters of his generation. Having exhibited extensively throughout Europe and the United States, the show represents the artist’s first solo presentation in Berlin in almost a decade.

Dr. Barbara Rose writes: “…the current paintings … create mysterious images that marry surface with underpainting. In this new group of works we are intensely aware of the processes of erasure or obscuring by layering on paint, either with a palette knife or a variety of brushes. In some instances, the point of the knife has been used dramatically to draw into or cut away the surface. In this way the tension between covering and revealing that has always been an essential characteristic of Le Brun’s work……. continues to play a paramount role, creating drama and mystery as forms or images and passages are veiled.”1

The centre piece of the exhibition comes in the form of a commanding 4.4 m. wide painting, "The Herald's Note" (2016). With its concentrated areas of warm reds, yellows and vibrant blues this crowning achievement provides a dynamic symphony that unites all the elements of Now Turn the Page.

On Saturday 29th there will be a piano recital by Annie Yim of MusicArt London within the exhibition, featuring the music of Scriabin, Schoenberg, Rachmaninov and Debussy which has inspired the artist but also a recent commissioned composition by Richard Birchall, itself based on a painting by Le Brun. The performance is accompanied and interspersed by a conversation between artist and performer about painting and music which considers the many points of rich imaginative contact between musical and painterly composition.

About the Artist:

Born in Portsmouth UK and trained at the Slade and Chelsea Schools of Art in London, Christopher Le Brun first gained public notice as the emerging bright star of English painting through his presence in Zeitgeist, the 1982 Berlin exhibition curated by Christos M. Joachimides and Sir. Norman Rosenthal at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, which introduced Neo-Expressionist figuration to an international audience.

He was a prize-winner at the John Moores Liverpool exhibitions in 1978 and 1980, and included in the Venice Biennale in 1982. He worked in Berlin during 1987-88 as guest of the DAAD artist’s programme. Between 1990 and 2003 he served as a trustee of the Tate and subsequently of the National Gallery, a period which saw his involvement in the radical developments of Tate at Bankside, Liverpool and St. Ives. In recent years he has been a trustee of the Dulwich Picture Gallery and the Royal Drawing School, which he helped to establish in 2000.

In the same year he was elected Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy. He was elected President of the Royal Academy in December 2011. He is the 26th President since Sir Joshua Reynolds and the youngest to be elected since Lord Leighton in 1878. Early in his career, he employed image, symbol and mythology at a time when Minimalism and formalist painting were in the ascendant.

His work was then grouped with the painterly drama of an older generation that included Germans like Lupertz, Kiefer and Baselitz, but also the thoughtful landscape based abstractions of Per Kirkeby. In the intervening years it has become apparent that Le Brun has created a substantial and independent oeuvre that owes no clear debt to school or movement, such is his ability to renew and rethink for himself the central concerns of painting today. Many writers have nevertheless recognised that his work represents the spirit and continuity of European painterly romanticism.

1. Dr. Barbara Rose, Composer, Windsor Press 2017

For press information and interviews please contact: Rachael Vance rachael@arndtartagency.com

Arndt Art Agency is pleased to announce Rodel Tapaya's major solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

Speaking about the symbolism in his large triptych The promise land: the moon, the sun, the stars, a newly commissioned work for the NGA, Rodel Tapaya says, 'In some way, I realise that old stories are not just metaphors. I can find connections with contemporary time. It’s like the myths are poetic narrations of the present. Sometimes, the present events are so hard to grasp that they could be mistaken as a myth, or folktale, just to enable people to cope'.

Tapaya has been exhibiting for over a decade and has established an intriguing literary-based visual practice, unique in its Filipino perspective yet striking for its participation in the rich history of Hispanic narrative painting. His flat application of paint, cramped figurative compositions and mix of decorative surface with political messaging immediately evokes the work of the Mexican muralists and surrealists such as José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Frida Kahlo. However, in a constructed knotting of the social, political and environmental issues of Filipino life, Tapaya’s work illuminates a complicated contemporary existence. And, as with the great social narrative painters before him, the local issues grappled with are often of global significance.

Tapaya’s commission for the NGA is a work of epic scale befitting the complexity of its subject matter. The painting brilliantly presents three separate yet interconnected narratives across a ten-metre triptych. ‘My challenge to myself is always … how to make a huge work complex in composition and detail yet with harmony and unity, inspired by stories of past, true or not, from myths, legends and current events’, he says. It is an impressive example of his internationally celebrated folk-narrative style: ‘old stories’ reimagined and reimaged for a contemporary audience. By drawing inspiration from pre-colonial mythology and Filipino folkloric tradition, Tapaya meticulously pieces together numerous pictorial fragments, fusing the otherworldly with the real, in a visual grappling with contemporary politics, social and environmental issues. He explains, ‘I try to weave them in one continuum, and hopefully people find the narrative by their own journey through the maze. I also hope people see how challenging it is to make a mural-like scale of work with complexities of content and composition. It involves editing, emphasising and including subtleties in the imagery, concepts and themes to enrich the interpretations.'

In The promise land: the moon, the sun, the stars Tapaya reimagines a creation myth from the Moro-Isolan tribe in Mindanao. A great winged creature (Buwan), whose face is divided by a crescent, stares out at us, her red-feathered form perched against the black of the night sky. A ferocious warrior (Araw), holding his kalis (sword) aloft, is shrouded in the red and orange of a burning flame. He appears to send a flickering and crackling heat in all directions, while the stark white face of a Lumad (indigenous) figure, dressed in traditional textiles of the Bagobo tribe, bleeds profusely, spilling a dark red blood across the scene below. This compelling work features alongside newly created paintings, sculptural installation and works on paper in Rodel Tapaya: New art from the Philippines, the artist’s first solo exhibition in Australia.

Jaklyn Babington Senior Curator, Contemporary Arts Practice – Global (Extract from Artonview, issue 89, Autumn 2017)

All images courtesy the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

The exhibition will open for the inaugural Galerie Rundgang Charlottenburg 2017 on Friday the 27th of January 2017 from 6-9pm.

Artists included: Christine Ay Tjoe, Gianni Colombo, Jigger Cruz, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Isa Genzken, Thomas Hirschhorn, Karsten Konrad, Heinz Mack, Maha Malluh, Sopheap Pich, Maria Taniguchi, Franz West, and Xu Zhen (MadeIn Company).

Arndt Art Agency (AAA) is pleased to present the exhibition NO IMAGE that includes a curated selection of works sourced from private collections and artist studios. This group show unites key high-profile emerging and established contemporary artists from Asia and around the world who formally work with abstraction in their practice. Thus, the exhibition focuses on current global trends of abstraction in contemporary artistic creation.

Independently, each artist employs differing approaches and visual languages that initiate parallel inter-cultural conversations. Refusing familiar and figurative content, participating artists from countries ranging from China, to the United States, Europe, South East Asia and the Pacific region present unique artistic expressions in a range of media.

Opening | Friday | November 25 2016, 6 – 9 pm

Arndt Art Agency is pleased to present Marina Cruz’s first solo exhibition which represents the artist’s European debut.

Mend and Amends presents Filipina artist Marina Cruz’s new body of work in the form of six medium to large-scale oil on canvas paintings.

The Philippines is renowned for its strong painting tradition established by classically trained artists such as Juan Novicio Luna in the 19th century, and later, Fernando Cueto Amorsolo in the 20th century. Belonging to new generation of contemporary Philippine artists, Cruz continues this trajectory purporting a striking realist technique through the articulation of precise brushstrokes and detailing.

Having completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts, Cruz has sustained her investigation into the formal qualities of painting since being awarded the prestigious Philippine art prize the Ateneo Art Award in 2008.

Cruz’s central topic of dress via painterly surfaces enlivens connections to Italian Renaissance painting, such as in the work of Duccio di Buoninsegna and Giotto di Bondone from the early 14th century who featured figures draped in material articulated via sinuous lines and shapes in brilliant colours. The artist cites the influence of Classical painters from the 17th century such as Dutch Master painter Rembrandt and Flemish Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens as inspiration during formative years spent at art school.

Here, textiles were inextricably paired with that of the human figure, tied to the the tradition of portraiture. The abstract forms of the garment suggested the body of the wearer beneath. Drawing upon this legacy steeped in art history, Cruz’s work is concerned with this interplay between the formal realist qualities of painterly depiction and that of the intangible connection of the life of the invisible wearer.

Known for her interest in exploring ideas concerning fragility, imperfection, beauty, authenticity and memory, this preoccupation with clothing was inadvertently triggered when discovering a range of family heirlooms. Cruz elaborates: “This exhibition is a continuation of my artistic practice on looking closely at the use of fabric as a surface and symbol of a person. I carefully observe the relationships of fabric and skin, as object and subject, its forms and textures, sensual and beautiful amidst imperfections and flaws. This fascination with textiles began fifteen years ago. At that time I was looking at various materials, blankets and clothing, and found my mother and siblings’ baptismal dresses. It was a pivotal moment. I observed that the garments and babies’ dresses were so beautiful, yet damaged. They became brittle over time. It made me reflect on how small my own mother was. Touching the garments and smelling their unique scent gave me goosebumps. Imagining my mother so fragile and tiny as a baby was both magical and surreal. I began utilising the dresses as a subject matter, and in the process I was able to learn about my family history.”

Cruz’s paintings allude to, yet are devoid of the human figure. Most commonly featuring details of fabric that fill the entire frame of her canvases, there is a definitive exclusion of a figurative presence in these musings. In a rare instance, Cruz provides an overview of an entire garment in Mend Me (2016) within the show. Featuring a delicate rippled pink dress splayed on a black background, the work acts as an index and anchor, tying together her new suite of paintings. Evident in these new pieces, Cruz’s work oscillates between representation and abstraction.

Akin to still life paintings, the works are distinctly object-based, yet highly concentrated. Examining the depiction of clothing—specifically dresses—its form and textural qualities, the artist’s formal compositions allow for close analysis of sections of material and its condition due to wear and tear over time. The artist’s ability to isolate details in fabric such as its folds, its flow and rhythm, but also its imperfections; the tears and the edges that display the fabric’s construction, is striking.

For example, seams and individual threads are discernible in the piece Intertwining Rings and Threads (2016). In Whites and Blues Torn and Mended by dragonflies (2016), Just balls, and atoms, and planets and a hole (2016), and Red Petals Swirling (2016), printed imagery is masterfully brought to life across the ripple of woven textiles, of coloured dragonflies, balls of yarn and flora. In White on White of laces and linings burning shadows (2016) the artist demonstrates her dexterity with the paintbrush in illustrating the intricacies of lace.

Cruz further elucidates her creative process providing an insight into the conceptual underpinnings of the works in Mend and Amends: “in the process of painting these dresses, I deconstruct them. I frame it for the viewer, focussing on a particular detail. The flaws, imperfections, torn and stains are all part of the aging process which both the garment and the wearer cannot avoid. In the meditative and challenging process of painting, one needs to come to terms and accept that the vulnerabilities are part of the beauty, like certain elements of personal history, one need not to dwell on the negatives, but rather, make amends.

Press Enquiries: Rachael Vance, rachael@arndtartagency.com

Opening on the 27th of November, 2016 from 12-2pm

The artist will be present along with the following keynote speakers: Dr. Bernd Vöhringer (Lord Mayor of the City of Sindelfingen), Michael Bauer (Head of Production and Location Responsibility Mercedes-Benz Sindelfingen), Otto Pannewitz (Director of Galerie der Stadt Sindelfingen), and Dr. Alexander Tolnay (Former Director of the Neuen Berliner Kunstverein).

Arndt Art Agency is pleased to announce its collaboration with the Galerie der Stadt Sindelfingen.

Leading Filipino artist Rodel Tapaya presents a new suite of paintings in his debut solo museum exhibition in Germany entitled "Bright-Coloured Buttlerflies" at the Galerie der Stadt Sindelfingen. In this exhibition, Rodel Tapaya draws upon inspiration from myths and tales, depicted with a vibrant palette in a range of complex compositions. His artistic practice is characteristically intertwined with references to age-old stories presented within a contemporary context.

"Butterflies are full of symbolism and supernatural meanings in different cultures. In the Philippines, a black butterfly means a departed loved one visits, while when bright-coloured butterflies enter your home, they signify good luck and good fortune."
– Rodel Tapaya, November 2016

Arndt Art Agency is pleased to announce the group exhibition "CHIMÈRES: VISIONS OF SOUTH EAST ASIA", curated by Matthias Arndt and Hervé Mikaeloff, during Asia Now Paris 2016.

Participating artists: Jigger Cruz, Marina Cruz, Eko Nugroho, Manuel Ocampo, José Santos III, Rodel Tapaya, and Entang Wiharso.

Political Chimères, social and religious Chimères, South East Asia is a changing world and this platform offers you a map of creation from Indonesia and the Philippines. ASIA NOW wants to cast light on artists from this little known scene and their symbolic overtones, bright colours, new takes on popular myths and subversion of objects – these artists offer fanciful works that suggest themselves to you.

Hailing from island populations and strongly influenced by their geo-political history, this area developed a mythology which became the ground in which to anchor themselves. They created characters that are funny and mysterious and that reveal an unusual mental universe. We conceived this platform as a reverie and as a treasure hunt into artists universes, which are alluring, diverse, and corrosive.

The route of Chimères essentially revolves around the artwork of José Santos III whose Manila cobblestones represent a road that leads to nowhere and the need to be guided towards the unknown. The Philippine artist Rodel Tapaya, offers a large canvas which propels us into founding sacred myths and Jigger Cruz whose paintings evoke a primitive memory. Manuel Ocampo revisits two large paintings of still life, while Marina Cruz erases the boundaries between photography and painting. The works of iconic Indonesian Eko Nugroho develops original and humorous visual imageries of the human figure through three beautiful embroideries. Lastly, the sculptured wall pieces of Entang Wiharso which are inspired by Indonesian base-reliefs.

Works from private collections spanning the past three decades of the artist's oeuvre

Arndt Art Agency is pleased to present a solo presentation by one of France’s most acclaimed living artists Sophie Calle.

The exhibition comprises a survey of works from the artist’s oeuvre sourced from private collections spanning the period from 1980 to 2012.

Sophie Calle will hold a public interview with Thomas Seelig at C/O Berlin Foundation, Berlin, following the opening of her solo exhibition at AAA. The interview will take place on Saturday the 1st of October at 6pm and marks the opening weekend of the EMOP Berlin - European Month of Photography 2016.

A Sophie Calle Text Reading will be held at Arndt Art Agency on 04.11.2016. Performed by Ayumi Paul (Violinist), Stephanie Eidt (Reader, actress) and directed by Thomas Ostermeier.

Calle’s exhibition “VIEW OF MY LIFE” is one of many projects undertaken with AAA founder Matthias Arndt, and represents a longstanding relationship that began in 1995 with Sophie Calle’s first solo exhibition “Les Tombes” with Arndt & Partner, Berlin. Since then, Calle has held a further seven solo exhibitions with the gallery that have included: “The Detachment - Die Entfernung” (1996), Arndt & Partner, Berlin, “De l’obéissance - Über den Gehorsam” (1999), Arndt & Partner, Berlin, “The Gotham Handbook” (2002), Arndt & Partner, Berlin, “The True Stories” (2004), Arndt & Partner, Berlin, “Works from 1983-2003” (2005), Arndt & Partner, Zurich, “Where and when? Berck/Lourdes / Où et quand? Berck/Lourdes” (2009), Arndt & Partner, Berlin, and “North Pole”, ARNDT, Berlin.

At its centre, Calle’s artistic practice is one that makes statements on human nature from a detached standpoint. Fascinated by the interface between the boundaries of private and public spheres and methods of perception, this curiosity has led the artist to explore particular patterns of behaviour, somewhat like a psychologist or investigator. Very often, these inquiries, utilise her own life—both lived and imagined—as the source of inspiration.

Regarded as a photographer first and foremost, Calle’s interest in working with imagery in order to tell a story has also extended to text and film-based works, installation, sculpture and performance. Oscillating between the abstract and the referential, her compelling, highly personal pieces are often part of larger series’ that relate to specific events and experiences, while also pointing beyond them. In this way, Calle enlivens tensions between documentation and the intangible, reality and fiction.

Much of her work has become known for seeking to comprehend vulnerable and uncertain scenarios. For example, this is embodied in her works included in the exhibition: “Juge / Judge, X”, (2007), and “Historienne du XVIIIème / Historian of the eighteenth century, Arlette Farge”, (2007). Taken from the series “Prenez soin de vous” (Take care of yourself), originally presented at the 2007 Venice Biennale, these works represent an autobiographical projection of one of Calle’s intimate experiences into the public domain. The title of the series is taken from the final sentence of a break-up e-mail from a boyfriend that Calle received in June 2004. From this experience, Calle asked 107 women of all ages to interpret the e-mail and comment on it. A type of therapy. Images of the women reading the letter are captured accompanied by their own responses in text.

An earlier autobiographical work that continues the artist’s signature snapshot aesthetic in the show is the piece “The view of my life”, (2010), that is part of Calle’s “The Autobiographies” series. Beginning in 1988, this deeply personal body of work comprises recorded moments taken from everyday scenery. Here, Calle visually maps anecdotal memories and fantasies from her adolescence through to adulthood. These works seize upon photography's fundamental ability to seemingly capture the passing of time and immortalise memories. This piece displays the peaceful view from of Calle’s bedroom window looking out onto a pasture. The vista is an unremarkable one of grasslands with a weeping willow visible on the left and bulls grazing further afield. It is a view that the artist has internalised and photographed “more often than any other object or situation”.

Ritual is another key element in Calle’s practice that is located within the sculptural vitrine entitled "BIRTHDAY CEREMONY" (1986)" (1980) included within the show. The museological storage unit contains various personal items given to Calle on her birthday in 1986 such as: a subway map of New York City, pair of shoes, kaleidoscope, watch and a comic strip, among others. Driven by an insecurity that people may neglect to remember her birthday, Calle began to collect the birthday presents she was given each year, marking an annual ceremony. This ritual developed into the realisation of a series of installations aimed to transform personal ritual into public display. She also held yearly dinner parties over over a fourteen-year period to ensure that her birthday was remembered. Guests brought gifts, tokens of love and affection, which were displayed in glass-fronted cabinets as a constant reminder of this affection. This ‘ceremony’ raises questions about the meaning of these objects, the way relationships are maintained, and the manner in which we construct our identity. The accompanying artwork text elaborates: “On my birthday I always worry that people will forget me. In 1980, to relieve myself of this anxiety, I decided that every year, if possible on October 9, I would invite to dinner the exact number of people corresponding to my age. I did not use the presents received on these occasions. I kept them as tokens of affection. In 1993, at the age of forty, I put an end to this ritual.”

The inextricable connection between life and art remains an ongoing drive within Calle’s work. Her work “Is it better”, (2012) in the exhibition references her visit to Berlin in 2012 and touches on one of the artist’s key topics: that of absence. The three-part work that includes a colour photograph, picture postcard, and framed text is connected to Calle's work “The Detachment” (Die Entfernung) (1996), whereby she visited places in Berlin where symbols of the communist East Germany had been removed after unification by the new Berlin City Parliament. She asked passers-by to describe the objects that once filled these empty spaces and then photographed the absence and replaced the missing monuments with their memories. In “Is it better”, Calle documents how Berlin faces its history and its correlation of memory and personal identity, making audiences aware of "the complex way in which we perceive reality—and to the equally complex way in which history and the present are interwoven." For this work Calle asked passers-by about the removed Palast der Republic (Palace of the Republic of the GDR) and if they find the empty space "better". Narrated personal memories of the German Democratic Republic period are included in the text.

Opening | Friday | April 29 2016, 6 – 9 pm

Arndt Art Agency is pleased to present a solo presentation in Berlin by José Santos III in cooperation with Art Informal.

In Distance between two points, Jose Santos III, through his art, channels the remarkable attributes found in passage—of the movement that takes place between origin and destination. Here, via motif and design, the artist uncovers the most fundamental quality where most pathways spring forth: the line and its straightforward motion between two points, and consequently, in its manifestation through actual space, which is the road.

The road, in Jose Santos III’s current work, which is a combination of paintings, prints, found objects, and sculpture, acts as the consequence of all lines and the passages relegated to this most essential quality in drawing: the transit from point A to point B. Although this movement would always assume a linear stance, or a ‘linearity’ that would confine our viewing of the object as it forces us to traverse across its space from one point to another, it is an idea which Santos aims to revive. This linearity is a condition, which has been lost through the very loose and liberal nature of viewing almost all plastic arts that Santos has placed back into the equation. By shaping his canvases into elongated panels of paintings, stretching at a distance of almost five meters, images are connected from one end to another. We see this in his paintings entitled, Passing through A, Passing through B, and Crossing over yellow and black stripes. The long canvases are stretched out like a timeline, with imagery that can be viewed while progressing from one side to the next. From point A to point B. This allows for a kind of narrative to unfold through time. But is it really a story which the artist sets out to achieve?

We look at the images from these paintings and what we see are objects strung together. Some are recognisable: as parts of walls, gates, and barriers—the kind usually found in the streets and old highways of Manila. There are also objects that seem to be part of torn-down houses or abandoned vehicles. As the viewer traverses across the length of the painting in transit, the images shift in a changing view akin to being on the road. The images transform into a caravan of objects that appear to travel with the audience.

The road, in Jose Santos’ practice signifies change. The orientation for viewing his paintings forces us to experience this changing view and thus, time becomes an essential element in this experience. As a result, we come closer to the activity of “reading” a painting; the same way a piece of literature unfolds through time. Although Santos’ paintings can be viewed from a single vantage point, their structure offers the possibility to plan one’s own journey—walking from our own prescribed origins: from left to right, from east to west. The work entitled High road, which consists of image transfers of different parts of a pavement on more than two hundred resin casts emulating the shape of debris, encapsulates the notion of transit in this show. Here, the form of the road itself achieves transformation and is transmitted into a different context. Inside the space of the gallery it becomes a representation of detritus, like one encountered on a voyage. These ruins are lined up to echo the structure of the road leading us to ponder on fragments of our lives that we share with the road’s own fragments every time we move from one destination to another.

The same can also be seen in the work Things we keep along the way, which is made up of various found objects. Domestic objects and personal items, ranging from discarded materials to significant totems are all engulfed in white paint. Embodying the entire concept of “traversal”, they are lined on the floor, mirroring the structure of a pedestrian lane. As if signifying a warning or acting as a guide, they provide the ‘break’ from the single-mindedness of a particular journey. As memento mori, they collectively act as a reminder of transient crossings, as signposts from one side to the other.

In a three-channel video, in collaboration with filmmakers Chuck and Aimee Escasa called What happens in between, each screen shows a wheel rolling in and out of the frame at different intervals. The action signifies movement and change. The same wheel is shown, but the quality of the scene is altered at each take, presenting the illusion that the same object accumulates its own imagined distance, thus reinforcing the idea of transit as relative to the perception of change.

In Distance between two points, the audience is not only presented with the idea of passage, whether through imagery or the arrangement of objects, but also encouraged to accommodate the act of traversing via engagement with Santos’ work. By drawing upon objects and materials sourced from urban environs commonly unassociated with high art, the space becomes transformed into points of departures and arrivals. Enlivening travel and movement, Santos metaphorically investigates the roads we take throughout our lives, and impressions and objects we accumulate along the way.
- Cocoy Lumbao, April 2016

About the artist:

José Santos III was born in Manila, Philippines in 1970 where he currently lives and works. He received his BFA from the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts where he also taught for several years. His early paintings have a "dreamlike" quality not for their subject but for their convincing veneer of naturalism, which comes into contradiction with our own real-life order. Santos' narrative works reflect a strong cryptic iconography. Whether it's about telling stories through his figurative paintings and drawings or tracing histories through his still life compositions in collage, painting, assemblage and installation works, their messages are oftentimes elusive and impenetrable, opening up possibilities for interpretation.

In his more recent works, Santos continues his explorations of objects not only to uncover their histories but more so to obscure our perception and understanding of these everyday things. In 2000, he was chosen as one of the Thirteen Artists Awardees by the Cultural Center of the Philippines. His works have been exhibited in Denmark, Malaysia, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Bangladesh and New York.

Heinz Mack: Review and Outlook | A Special Selection - Hommage to his 85th birthday

Opening | Thursday | February 25 2016, 6 – 8:30 pm

This solo exhibition is a cooperation between the galleries Samuelis Baumgarte, Bielefeld, Arndt Fine Art, Singapore and Arndt Art Agency, staged on the occasion of the artist's 85th birthday.

A 124 page catalogue accompanies the exhibition with an essay surveying Heinz Mack's artistic career entitled "Heinz Mack and the "zero hour" of German art history" written by art historian Prof. Uwe Fleckner.

Heinz Mack is considered as one of the most significant figures in German art and is a founding member of the iconic ZERO group. The show at ARNDT Singapore represents a significant cross-section from the artist's oeuvre with works dating from 1958 to 2015 in a variety of media.

About the artist:

Born in 1931 in Lollar, Germany, Heinz Mack studied Art and Education at the National Academy of Arts, Düsseldorf, as well as Philosophy at the University of Cologne. In 1956, together with Otto Piene and Günther Uecker, he founded artist group ZERO which gained international recognition. Besides his participation at Documenta II (1959) and Documenta III (1966), he also represented The Federal Republic of Germany at the XXXVth Venice Biennale in 1970. In the same year he was invited to Osaka, Japan, as a visiting professor. He also became a full member of the Berlin Academy of Arts, holding membership until 1992.

Heinz Mack has been honoured with major awards including the Art Prize of the City of Krefeld (1958), the Premio Marzotto (1963), the 1st Prix arts plastiques at the 4th Paris Biennale (1965), 1st prize in the international competition Licht 79 in The Netherlands (1979), the Große Kulturpreis des Rheinischen Sparkassen-Verbands (1992) and the Cultural Prize of the city of Dortmund’s arts council (2012). He also received the Grand Federal Cross of Merit with Star of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2011.

In 2015, Heinz Mack was unanimously voted an honorary member of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf by the academy's senate. In recent years, numerous retrospective exhibitions and academic publications have been devoted to the ZERO movement that include "ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s–60s", a world touring exhibition that commenced at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in Autumn 2014, travelled to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin in 2015.

The central theme of Heinz Mack’s art is light. Sculptures and pictures are the media of his multifaceted oeuvre. The exceptionally diverse complete works include sculptures made of different materials: light-stelae, light-rotors, light-reliefs and light-cubes. His practice also involves paintings, drawings, India ink, pastels, graphics, photography and bibliophilic works. Another important aspect of Mack’s work is the design of public spaces, church interiors, stage settings and mosaics. His works have been shown in nearly 300 solo exhibitions and are housed within 136 public collections.

Del Kathryn Barton is one of Australia’s leading figurative painters, widely recognised for her distinct aesthetic and enduring obsession with fertility and the psychology of relationships.

Recently expanding into the moving image, RED is the artist’s directorial debut into short film. Featuring Cate Blanchett, RED is a surrealist cinematic offering and a savage tale of female power inspired by the mating rituals of the female Australian Red Back Spider.

Launched at the Art Gallery of South Australia, this was the premiere of RED in Australia. Presented by the Art Gallery of South Australia Contemporary Collectors and supported by Adelaide Festival. Images courtesy the Art Gallery of South Australia

Opening | Saturday | December 5, 2015, 12 - 6 pm

Arndt Art Agency is pleased to announce the landmark exhibition WASAK! Filipino Art Today, curated by Norman Crisologo and Erwin Romulo.

Exhibiting artists: Zean Cabangis, Annie Cabigting, Buen Calubayan, Louie Cordero, Jigger Cruz, Marina Cruz, Kawayan De Guia, Alfredo Esquillo, Ian Fabro, Nona Garcia, Pow Martinez, Manuel Ocampo, Alwin Reamillo, Norberto Roldan, Kaloy Sanchez, José Santos III, Rodel Tapaya, Tatong Torres and Ronald Ventura.

A publication has been published by DISTANZ Verlag to accompany the exhibition. The underlying motivation of the exhibition and accompanying publication in Berlin is to shed light on the fascinating contemporary art landscape in the Philippines.

WASAK! explores Filipino contemporary art, in the hope of providing an emblematic contextual compendium for western audiences. Signalling the first instance of its kind, WASAK! thus offers snapshots of current artistic practices from the Philippines, uniting a selection of its leading protagonists across generational lines, genres, and media. All of the 19 participating artists included have witnessed the social and political upheaval of Philippines’ recent history.

Most of these artists spent their maturation grappling with local events that have transpired such as: natural disasters like earthquakes and floods; political unrest in the form of coup d’état and calls to presidential impeachments; political ineptitude in the form of corruption and briberies; and longstanding bouts with poverty and urban overpopulation. This selection of artists have nurtured, or at least, directed their ideas into the reality that is Manila, the nation’s capital, from where most of the country’s bizarre undulations spring. Although much of their work is inspired by their own localities, these artists continue to seek their place among the rest of the world.

Through the jumble and mess of their own ground zero—which is a country of broken histories, a nation of lush influences, and a people constantly having to live despite of something—their art continued to become, individually, more diverse and yet collectively, as a single exploded view. ‘Wasak’ is a Filipino word that means “in ruins.” When used in the vernacular, it means “wrecked,” or as a more encouraging interjection—it can also mean “going for broke.” It is a term that signals a hazard. In this field of scattered landscapes, of broken narratives and loose continuity, what then could be ascribed as Philippine Art?

The artists represented in WASAK! have come from the different potholes this gap has created, which explains the varying degrees how their work tries to explain not only a locality, but their own place in art history. In a 1979 essay, one of the most influential Filipino art critic, Leo Benesa, asked the question: “What is Philippine in Philippine Art?” Knowing how any kind of art from any other place cannot escape the influence of the Western canon, he settled with a more optimistic response in implying that the intention of the artist to paint well is what makes them Filipino: “Painters first, and bearers of message, second,” he concluded.

The majority of the artists in the show have chosen painting as their primary medium, with a few exceptions that have dealt primarily with assemblage and sculpture. In looking at their paintings, trying to find out what special place they hold, we can follow Benesa’s prescription—to look at the form first, and then deal with the message later. To try to understand, before anything else, that their intention is to do something which is relevant for them, before handing out a prognosis that casts them as representatives of an aesthetic sensibility, a socio-historical period, or worse, a movement.

The 19 artists covered in WASAK! provide us with an opportunity to experience the different directions they have wandered into—a chance to view a small course of history that is finding its way into the arts.

“Roots. Indonesian Contemporary Art,” is an exhibition of contemporary art from Indonesia.

The exhibition “Roots. Indonesian Contemporary Art“ will be held on the occasion of Indonesia’s appearance as the Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2015 and is a co-production with the National Gallery of Indonesia in Jakarta, under the auspices of the Ministry of Education and Culture of the Republic of Indonesia.

Participating Artists / Artist Collectives: Joko Avianto (*1976 in Yogyakarta (ID), lives in Bandung); Jompet Kuswidananto (*1976 in Yogyakarta (ID), lives in Yogyakarta); Eko Nugroho (*1977 in Yogyakarta (ID), lives in Yogyakarta); and Tromarama, founded in 2004 by Febie Babyrose (*1985 in Jakarta (ID)), Herbert Hans Maruli (*1984 in Jakarta (ID)), and Ruddy Alexander Hatumena (*1984 in Bahrain (ID)), all live in Bandung (ID).

Jompet Kuswidananto, Eko Nugroho and Tromarama, three of the best-known Indonesian artists and artist collectives of the younger generation, will each be given a broad platform to present new works in the Frankfurter Kunstverein’s interior space.

Joko Avianto has been invited to create a site-specific bamboo installation for the facade. Indonesia ranks as one of the most populous countries in the world and unites many different ethnicities, languages, religions, and cultural influences in the more than 17,000 islands comprising the archipelago. Under Dutch colonial rule, which lasted for nearly 350 years, Indonesian culture experienced severe socio-cultural upheavals. A modern, westernised society had emerged by the middle of the twentieth century. The effects of a prolonged struggle for independence and political instability still reverberate in the tension permeating today’s society.

The four artists belong to a generation that experienced the most significant period of changes in Indonesia’s contemporary social and political situation first-hand. While part of the change brought about during the 1998 post-reformation transition, the artists’ work creates the distance necessary to take a critical stance. Their work grounds short-term change within a deeply rooted, complex socio-cultural tradition in which the tension between traditionalism and modernity, nationality and internationality, locality and globalism, universality and plurality becomes apparent.

Rodel Tapaya is one of the leading Filipino visual artists of his generation and belongs to the most acclaimed artists in Southeast Asia today. Due to exposure in international exhibitions and success in important regional art contests his works have gained renown and critical endorsement. He broke out in the art scene by earning the prestigious APB Foundation Signature Art Prize in 2011. Tapaya’s first one-man exhibition at the Ateneo Art Gallery in Philippines - the country’s premier modern and contemporary art museum - is currently on display until April 2014. Tapaya’s first solo exhibition in Europe The Chocolate Ruins will open at ARNDT Berlin from March 15, 2014 and will be on display until April 26, 2014.

Rodel Tapaya's main piece at ARNDT's primary location in Berlin resists blatant interpretation. In his expansive painting, The Chocolate Ruins, the blend of thematically related images impresses a conflated disquiet and a sense of simultaneous ironies. Speaking in the reconstructed and often esoteric language of folklore¬ - myths and legends and their transfer in barbershop talk and current events - his works resurface age-old wisdom to comment on our contemporary life. All the images are visually connected by parts of the cacao plant, scattered across the canvas, each one dedicated to the three major disasters that has devastated the Philippines during the past year; a magnitude 7.2 earthquake, Supertyphoon Haiyan, and the scandal over widespread misuse of congressional funds.

Chocolates are easily a substitute for anything that corrupts, be it money, beauty, or tradition; an insinuation to its prominent role in the bittersweet aspirations and decline of Imperial Spain's colonial rule over the Philippines. Other elements in the tragic tableau show vestiges of church ruins, makeshift shelters, storm clouds with faces, and helpless men.

As our living and thinking increasingly adapt to the unremitting charge of information, artists like Rodel Tapaya have developed an ability to isolate particular parts of this dissonance and arrange them in fresh dramatic combinations. Tapaya has an awareness of the world as one would an ancient storyteller with insight developed in the context of the events that have altered into other things, and explores the implication of these dynamic and inexhaustible symbols and narratives in relation to one another. In a time and place when these myths and legends have become ruins as well, of national identity, the painter looks not to new discoveries to catalogue the human condition, but rather pathways among the thicket of things already known to our ancestors and his nation's literary heritage.

A publication - surveying his oeuvre of the past 10 years - edited on the occasion of Tapaya’s solo show Bato-Balani at the Ateneo Art Gallery, Quezon City, Philippines will be launched during the Art Fair Philippines and also presented at the Berlin opening of The Chocolate Ruins

SIP! INDONESIAN ART TODAY / SENI RUPA INDONESIA KINI
The past three generations of Indonesian Contemporary Art

The exhibition "Sip! Indonesian Art Today" and the accompanying publication results from ARNDT’s recent focus on Southeast Asian art and the new Asian and Pacific art markets. Over the past four years Matthias Arndt has worked in Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia. His research, the past shows of Southeast Asian artists and the opening of ARNDT Singapore, the Asian showroom and office of ARNDT, makes Matthias Arndt one of the leading experts for contemporary Indonesian and Southeast Asian Art in Germany and Europe.

The exhibition "Sip! Indonesian Art Today", curated by Enin Supriyanto, is the 10th show dedicated to Southeast Asian art ARNDT is hosting in Singapore, Australia, Great Britain and Berlin. The 150 page publication "Sip! Indonesian Art Today" edited by Matthias Arndt and published at DISTANZ Verlag (ISBN 978-3-95476-007-7) is available in all bookstores.
The public talk "The last three decades of artistic production in Indonesia: 25 years of Cemeti Art House and the status of curating.” with Enin Supriyanto (curator) and Mella Jaarsma (artist), moderated by Katerina Valdivia Bruch (curator / critic) will take place at ARNDT Berlin on 27 April 2013 at 4 pm.

The exhibition presents over 40 works from all artistic mediums, painting, sculpture, installation, photography and film, by 16 contemporary artists from Indonesia. They belong to a larger community of artists who are actively shaping Indonesia’s dynamic developing contemporary art scene. If we consider their age and career development, the artists here represent 3 generations of contemporary art practice dating back from the late 1970s: beginning first with FX Harsono, one of the proponents of the Indonesian New Art Movement (Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru) founded in 1975 followed by a group of artists who emerged at a time when Indonesia was undergoing major socio-political transformations in its strive towards democracy during the late 1990s (Agung Kurniawan, Agus Suwage, Mella Jaarsma), the post-Reformasi (Reformation) generation of artists (Christine Ay Tjoe, Entang Wiharso, Rudi Mantofani, Handiwirman Saputra, Eko Nugroho, Syagini Ratna Wulan and Arin Dwihartanto Sunaryo), and finally a generation of artists who have been active in the past decade, sophisticated operators of their own careers in a more or less stable and democratic Indonesia (Wedhar Riyadi, J. Ariadithya Pramuhendra, Wiyoga Muhardanto, Indieguerillas and Tromarama).

The generational differences do not only represent differing socio-political experiences in connection with the development of Indonesia’s society in the past three decades but also illustrates the differing socio-political contexts of the artists observations and artistic approaches that have changed and altered over the years.

The word “Sip” in Bahasa Indonesia may be a simple and modest one but it is full of meaning. While the origin of this word is unknown, it is a word that is used by nearly everyone every day. “Sip” is the briefest way to state that something – whether an art work, an event, an experience or anything – is good, of good quality, super or outstanding even. Like this word, and like the process of our ongoing global culture, we do not question the origin of an idea, but we consider how this idea can continue to grow and contribute to the interaction and civilisation of the world. In a way, we can say that ‘Sip’ has no such thing as exotic cultural background, neither stereotypical cultural baggage. Whatever the case, the meaning is clear: good, great, outstanding.

ARNDT Berlin is proud to present its inaugural exhibition of 'LONDON PICTURES' by Gilbert & George. This monumental body of 292 pictures is the largest series yet created by the acclaimed British artists. 19 pictures will be shown in Berlin.

For five decades, to international acclaim, Gilbert & George have been making art that is visionary, shocking, relentless, moral and richly atmospheric.

In these new ‘LONDON PICTURES’ (2011) Gilbert & George present an epic survey of modern urban life in all its volatility, tragedy, absurdity and routine violence. Brutal and declamatory, these brooding and disquieting pictures have been created from the sorting and classification by subject of nearly 4000 newspaper headline posters, stolen by the artists over a number of years. In their lucidity, no less than their insight into the daily realities of metropolitan life, the ‘LONDON PICTURES’ are Dickensian in scope and ultra-modern in sensibility.

Drawing directly on the quotidian life of a vast city, the ‘LONDON PICTURES’ allow contemporary society to recount itself in its own language. Within the townscape of this moral audit, Gilbert & George appear to pass like ghosts and seers, alternately watchful and distracted, as though their spirits were haunting the very streets and buildings that these pictures describe. The ‘LONDON PICTURES’ seem to comprise a great visual novel, revealing without judgment the ceaseless relay of urban drama, in all its gradations of hope and suffering.
Michael Bracewell, 2012

Gilbert was born in the Dolomites, Italy in 1943; George was born in Devon in 1942 and both live and work in London. Together they have participated in many important group and solo exhibitions including 51st International Venice Biennale (2005), Turner Prize (1984) and Carnegie International (1985). They have had extensive solo exhibitions, including Whitechapel Gallery (1971-1972), National Gallery, Beijing (1993), Shanghai Art Museum (1993), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1995-1996), Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1998), Serpentine Gallery, London (2002), Kunsthaus Bregenz (2002), Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover (2004-2005), Tate Modern, London, Haus der Kunst, Munich (both 2007), Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, Philadelphia Museum of Art (both 2008), ‘Jack Freak Pictures’, CAC Malaga, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels (all 2010), Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Kunstmuseum Linz (both 2011) and Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art, Gdansk (2011-2012).

A catalogue documenting all 292 of the ‘LONDON PICTURES’ with an essay by Michael Bracewell will accompany the exhibition.

Artists: FX Harsono (Indonesia), Geraldine Javier (Philippines), Eko Nugroho (Indonesia), Ugo Untoro (Indonesia), Natee Utarit (Thailand), Agus Suwage (Indonesia), the artist group Vertical Submarine (Singapore) and Entang Wiharso (Indonesia).

“Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia have developed one of the most exciting art scenes I have encountered in recent years worldwide. In ‘ASIA: Looking South’ I want to share both the magic and energy of this new art from Southeast Asia and my enthusiasm for it with an international audience.”
Matthias Arndt

The exhibition “ASIA: Looking South” presents during the Asia-Pacific Weeks over 30 works of art by some of the most important contemporary Southeast Asian artists: FX Harsono (Indonesia), Geraldine Javier (Philippines), Eko Nugroho (Indonesia), Agus Suwage (Indonesia), Ugo Untoro (Indonesia), Natee Utarit (Thailand), the art collective Vertical Submarine (Singapore) and Entang Wiharso (Indonesia).

This exhibition at ARNDT, with visiting curators Jean-Marc Decrop and Richard Koh, gives an overview of the diversity of these new artistic statements from Southeast Asia. The artists’ concern with socio-cultural and political themes is striking.

Five of the eight artists exhibited come from Indonesia. A culturally and religiously diverse country with the world’s fourth highest population, Indonesia has experienced great change over the last 20 years following the onset of globalization, as have other Asian nations. Contemporary Indonesian art both bears witness to these changes and questions them.

Agus Suwage’s (*1959) work is concerned with the self portrait and with the question of how ethical positions can be maintained. His works take account of social tensions and political repression in his environment, but remain poetical nonetheless. At the same time, he takes up themes such as vanitas and transience.

The works of Entang Wiharso and Eko Nugroho are rooted in the Indonesian way of life, where human beings grapple with earth and nature, complex rites and faith:

Entang Wiharso’s (*1967) “Temple of Hope” is a contemporary variation of the traditional Indonesian Wayang shadow puppet theater. Punched metal panels, lit from the inside, cast shadow scenes of contemporary society and its props onto the wall.

In contrast, the world of Eko Nugroho (*1977) is more distanced, more humorous and more ironic. It is the expression of a young, popular culture fuelled by the media, the internet, comics, science fiction and futuristic novels. Pithy, pointed texts complement his graphic drawings.
Nugroho has a store in Yogyakarta where he sells small objects taken from his artistic world. These affordable items mean his art is able to participate in the spheres of the everyday and pop culture that the objects themselves make reference to. A replica of this store will be shown as part of the exhibition “ASIA: Looking South”.

FX Harsono (*1949) is concerned with questions of identity and national consciousness in the light of globalization and of ethnic and religious multiculturalism. At the heart of the artist’s work lies his examination of his Chinese roots, of how his ancestors adapted to their environment and of their cultural repression. His works bear witness to a vanishing culture.

Uncanny, half-human and half-animal creatures are to be seen in Ugo Untoro’s (*1970) drawings. His current sculptures and installations consist of reassembled, deformed horse skeletons and skins. The audience is reminded of strange creatures subjected to and deformed by violent pressure.

Natee Utarit (*1970) lives and works in Bangkok. In his works, he explores various genres of Western art such as still lives or landscape painting. Many of his works refer to Caravaggio, Courbet and Titian. Fairy tales and fiction used to tell national narratives are an important theme in Utarit’s work. His artworks use Thai symbols in a monochrome color scale as well as toys that mirror Thai society.

Geraldine Javier (*1970) is part of a new generation of young Filipino artists. Her immediate sources are film and photography. She tells individual stories influenced both by the international media and by local pop culture. Death, misery, emotional violence and dysfunctional relationships are recurrent themes in her work. Her world is fed by complex, sluggish thoughts, hints and quiet tension.

Vertical Submarine is an independent art collective based in Singapore, made up of three members: Joshua Yang, Justin Loke and Fiona Koh. The group was founded in 2003. Its name derives from the word “subvert”, reversed to “vert-sub” and finally expanded to “Vertical Submarine”. The group’s works were first shown in local exhibitions. These complex installations showed everyday objects coupled with texts, using a lot of humor.

The overview exhibition “ASIA: Looking South” is the first of a series of exhibitions presenting important Asian artists to the international public in Berlin. ARNDT will open temporary exhibition spaces and present international and Asian artists in “Pop-Up Shows” in the Pacific region.

The Indian artist Jitish Kallat creates with this exhibition a fantasy image of the living conditions of Mumbai’s inhabitants. His grotesque-surreal, partial ironical works capture the psychological strains of the mega-metropolis and describe the morbidity that lies behind the enormous economic and social changes in India.

“Eat or to be eaten” is the question. From the encrusted relief surface of the gigantic, oversized kerosene stove Annexation bizarre, apelike creatures stare attentively or even provokingly atus. Other creatures rather look like rats clinging to something edible with their claws. Some monsters are even devouring each other. Kallat points metaphorically at the daily struggle for food that is constantly intensifying, food is getting scarce and prices are being raised.

The two large triptychs surrounding the sculpture visualize the same struggle. Little people, cars and busses are swarming through the hair of the persons waiting for their luggage on the pictures Baggage Claim. Beige blotches have formed beneath the mouths of the bronze gargoyles, which were inspired by those which spout out rainwater at Victoria Terminus inMumbai,. From there a black, oily substance is leaking out, its borderline is comprised of delineating factories, houses and water towers. This new civilisation, fallen from heaven, has already infected the speech bubbles and the language of the people waiting respectively.Nevertheless or just because of that the people waiting remain in apathy. The great city’s inferno literally goes to their heads.

The backlit photography Condition Apply is reminiscent of the diagrams in schoolbooks, which illustrate the orbit of the moon or other planets. On closer observation chapattis, Indian flatbread, can be identified, representing the phases of the moon. The basic food is in an unreachable distance. Where darkness should subside only bread crumbs can be seen.

With the photo series Chlorophyll Park Kallat literally pulls the rug out from under Mumbai’s chaotic traffic. Lawn is covering the surface of the roads. Though the numerous vehicles don’t leave any traces in the fresh green, nothing and nobody moves. The grass is only growing.Time comes to a fairy-tale like standstill. For a moment Kallat succeeds in disrupting the daily struggle for life.

Jitish Kallat (*1974) is represented in major exhibitions of contemporary Indian art. For instance: “The Empire Strikes Back: Indian Art Today”, Saatchi Gallery, London (2010), “Chalo!Indien: Eine neue Ära indischer Kunst”, Essl Museum – Kunst der Gegenwart, Klosterneuburg, Austria, and Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (both 2009). Among others the Sherman ContemporaryArt Foundation, Sydney (2008) dedicated him a solo show, and until January 2nd 2011 his site specific work Public Notice 3 can be seen at „The Art Institute of Chicago“. Next to his engagement as an artist he is publishing scientific texts in art related magazines and catalogues.

Tell Me Quando, Quando, Quando …
In her artistic explorations of perception, memory, and the search for identity, Sophie Calle doesn’t merely trace others’ footsteps; she includes her own life as well. The ritualistic staging of situations is a primary motif in all her work. In an approach akin to journalistic research, the data and evidence she collects are presented in texts reminiscent of log entries and quasi-documentary photographs. On a formal level, she works with the juxtaposition of images and text; on the content level, with the interweaving of reality and fiction.

The exhibition of Calle’s new works Où et Quand? Berck and Où et Quand? Lourdes includes photographs, texts and videos as well as various artifacts and neon lettering with the names of the two eponymous French towns. At the outset of her project, Calle approached the fortune-teller Maud Kristen and asked her where she should go and when. Kristen hesitated at first but then agreed to lay down travel itineraries for Calle after consulting the cards. The first destination she specified was the seaside resort of Berck in northern France and the second was Lourdes, the famous pilgrimage site. While traveling, Calle regularly checked in with Kristen by telephone to receive new instructions. The various texts describe their sessions in Paris and provide detailed accounts of each trip, including railway schedules and routes; and they record the artist’s experiences and thoughts along the way. They are supplemented by photographs, souvenirs and video recordings of conversations with people she encountered on her travels.

By submitting to the instructions of someone else – in this case, a complete stranger – the artist links her fate to that of another human being and seems to – in a sense – hand her life over to that person. Thus the project touches on questions of dominance and subordination, authority and obedience, self determination and other-directedness. Calle describes her motivation as follows: “I proposed that Maud Kristen predict my future so I could face it and reduce its momentum somewhat.” It is the same desire that drives people to read their horoscope every day or turn to astrology shows on TV for counsel – the desire to know what lies ahead and thus feel they have some control over their own life.

Sophie Calle’s works are statements both on human nature and on the nature of art, in which she playfully challenges and shifts the boundaries between the two. Her works are at once referential and abstract, referring to specific events and experiences and pointing beyond them at the same time. By exploring life in all its facets and continually juggling antitheses such as documentation and invention, fact and fiction, reality and show, she sets out to provoke reactions and communication.

The artist grapples with methods of perception and identification by portraying life in all its diversity, handing over all the problems and questions to the viewer – and thereby, closing the loop, back to life itself – to find the answers. Calle’s works are distinguished by the directness of her formal approach, her narrative skill, the conceptual enrichment they undergo over the course of their creation, and their power to draw in the observer with all his or her abilities and experiences. The uncertainty expressed in her works is what makes them so compelling. Uncertainty is almost always unsettling. It is inefficient, unproductive, and sometimes even dangerous. Hybrid in nature, these works resist classification, like life itself. Sophie Calle wouldn’t have it any other way.

Text: Barbara Heinrich

Arndt & Partner are delighted to present the first solo show by Josephine Meckseper in Berlin.

Josephine Meckseper has been living in the United States since the beginning of the 1990s and has since maintained a notable critique of the internal and foreign political occurrences in her chosen home. This summer, the European public gained an impression of the election campaign machine during “election year” when Barak Obama made his appearance at Berlin’s Victory Column. The significance of this election year and the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war are reflected in the exhibited work of the New York-based artist.

Meckseper transforms the commercial zone of the gallery into a conceptually politicised territory. Through her radical signature use of display systems and commodity structures, she exposes the flaws of US politics since 2001.

One should pay particular attention to the quiet, low-key symbols in the exhibition. Vis-à-vis the display cabinet entitled Fall of the Empire is the inconspicuously effective work with the working title Walker. A walking frame adorned with a fox tail, a bible and an oil canister. A provocative, almost absurd reference to the injured, returned war veterans, as is the logo of the Blackwater Group, America’s largest private security and militia firm, that campaigns with the slogan: “American’s Veterans Serving America…Again!” In her Film 0% Down she refers to the militaristic advertising rhetoric of the automobile industry and lays open their crude sales tactics used during the war. Meckseper also picks up on this theme in her collages on canvas. Images of American cars still wrapped in plastic and apparently unused play ironically upon a car-centred American society that is so willing lead by the automotive industry.

Meckseper skilfully re-contextualises and dissects the phenomenon of American society, in particular through the incorporation of the rhetoric and strategies of politics and advertisement in her work.

Born in Lilienthal, Germany, Josephine Meckseper studied at the California Institute of the Arts, California and at the Universität der Künste, Berlin. She lives and works in New York. In addition to successful solo exhibitions, for example at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart (2007) and the Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen (2008), she has also taken part in numerous national and international group exhibitions including; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (1999), at the Frankfurter Kunstverein (2003), at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, und at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (both 2006). Currently her work can be seen in the exhibition New Photography 2008: Josephine Meckseper and Mikhael Subotzky in the MoMA, New York (until 05.01.2009).

Jonas Burgert divides the artistic community. In one camp, devoted fans consider that after long years of theoretical overload they have been vindicated in their conception of art as sensory experience beyond the reach of logic; in the other, entrenched opponents see art’s reversion to historicist and diffusely psychologistic allusions as a betrayal of Modernism.

Unquestionably, art with history in its rear-view mirror has arrived. Setting the pace is Neo Rauch, who – rather in the spirit of the Renaissance – stylizes the ruins of a socialist world slumped in melancholy decay, with aimlessly roaming figures that do not belong to it, and Jonathan Meese, who deploys the trash of history with its gory myths, power players and spiritual heroes as the stage on which his cryptic scenes are enacted. And then there are the many contenders haunting the borders of kitsch to invoke nostalgia and the romantic beauty of bygone days – reduced in Matthias Weischer’s case to the elegiac simplicity of his depiction of interiors. In a sense, all this is appropriation art, which – after the borrowings from/adaption of modern everyday culture by artists like Jeff Koons, Richard Prince and Barbara Kruger – now has recourse to historical and art-historical topics/facets/issues long believed to have been definitively discarded.

This, then, is more or less the starting basis – and approximation is inevitable, given the diversity of postmodernist thinking – when focusing on the art of Jonas Burgert. He is a protagonist of an approach which studiously avoids reference to current issues in society and cultural theory thereby actually drawing attention to them.

In his catalogue essay accompanying the Geschichtenerzähler [Storytellers] exhibition at the Hamburger Kunsthalle (2005), Christoph Heinrich suggests that to appreciate Jonas Burgert one needs to be a lover of opera, of that intricate web of music and words, visuals and atmosphere and character and emotion, born on the cusp between Renaissance and Baroque, a public event in which people sing at each other as they wage war, and pontificate endlessly on what is moral, or on Ultimate Truths. I have no problem with opera being pigeonholed between Renaissance und Baroque, nor with the notion that Jonas Burgert – comparable here with Meese but unlike Rauch – is seeking to free up a space for his own performance. But I do find it strange that Heinrich here adduces opera at all. Turning away as it does from the worldly to the sublime, and actually originating in the period round 1600, opera as I understand it is a Baroque form of expression. Burgert’s work picks up on strands of Late Renaissance thought, particularly Mannerism, from the end of the 15th and the 16th century, and on the work of the principal artists concerned: Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Brueghel the Elder and El Greco, all of whom brought the Dionysian principle of a chaotic, orgiastic universe into direct confrontation with the Apolline values of the classical Renaissance. The grotesque, the distorted, the gestic provide the subject-matter of this art; the stages on which it plays are the commedia dell’ arte and the Carnival. The principal roles in it go to the garrulous and the wily, victims and villains, the downtrodden, the guilt-ridden and the wretched, demons, harlequins, fools, animal-humans and human-animals. And the two principal dramas constituting the repertoire of this theatrum mundi of an inverted, topsy-turvy world are: the Apocalypse and the Last Judgment.

Jonas Burgert is not a history painter, and his studies of the grotesque are not social criticism. It was some time ago that the grotesque came forward from its original position on the margins, as counter-culture, to occupy the centre of a society in love with spectacle, there to be taken over completely and become the property of inscrutable hierarchies and exploitative systems. The artist’s œuvre as a life’s work? – forgotten. Artists of today’s generation see themselves as the cool-headed strategists behind the operating system Art, that regard the new no longer as the utopia of a better and juster world, but as a criterion of the success of a global culture industry, with its art fairs and auctions month after month, over 50 biennales and triennales, and its plethora of touring exhibitions on view at museums and exhibition centers. The artists conform to the trends or resist them – which of course is when they become sought-after victims.

It is not possible to detach Burgert’s work from its context in the art business, and yet the artist himself seems unimpressed. He is without hang-ups, easygoing, has a pleasant manner and plenty of self-confidence, and could not care less about marketing strategies or the emotions of people who look at his pictures. His anachronistic references to the wild fantasies of the grotesque have put him in a position to run his affairs at a distance from the current debate on social practice. He represents a young generation which repudiates our society’s pressure for functional conformity and success, withdrawing instead into worlds that it defines for itself. Burgert made his decision on artistic grounds, and on that account the pronouncement in the Book of Revelation may set him in perspective: “So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.” Lukewarm Jonas Burgert emphatically is not; his internal thermostat (to adapt a remark made by Werner Büttner about his friend, that exemplar of an outsider, Martin Kippenberger) lacks an intermediate setting.

Harald Falckenberg (first published in: Jonas Burgert, exhibition catalogue, Produzentengalerie Hamburg, 2006)

Arndt & Partner is pleased to present its fourth solo show of the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn, to mark the opening of the Third Berlin Gallery Weekend.

Thomas Hirschhorn's sculptural constructions and environments are famous for transporting knowledge and information by alienating the usual means of presentation and skewing our perspective on things. To achieve this, Hirschhorn frequently favours elaborate, expansive installations, seemingly chaotic structures that use everyday materials that are nonetheless symbolically charged. Hirschhorn's spatial assemblages are skilful stagings of the imperfect, wild associative landscapes whose energies are intended to inspire thought, as Hirschhorn himself stresses: "I don't want to make interactive art, I want to make active art, work that activates the brain." The result are installations where the beholder has to engage with signs, symbols, and memories, and which change our perspective on the possibilities of art and life.

In Hirschhorn's new work "Stand-alone", which will extend over all four rooms of our Gallery 1st Floor, the beholder also is confronted with the richness of visual materials that is so typical for the artist, materials that make connections between apparently unconnected things. Kicked-in doors, sofas and armchairs wrapped in tape, are made equal by their wrapping and placed next to each other. Cardboard fireplaces, old electronic devices, wood, clocks, books, and other documents form a spatial collage, the purpose of which is "to create a new world from elements of the old one." Without pretension and exceedingly cleverly, Hirschhorn succeeds in creating a sense of profusion, chaos, and the potential of conflict that goes hand in hand with the experience of current life worlds.

In his latest exhibition, Thomas Hirschhorn is showing a three-dimensional realisation of his plan "Where do I stand? What do I want?" (which is available for visitors of the gallery) that thematises the question of the artist's own position, possibilities of giving form, and independence in terms of content. "How can I make a work that doesn't in any way subject itself to historical facts? And how can I make a work that touches the beyond of history (which I live in)? How can I make work in the current - my historical field - make a super-historical work?"
Faithful to his unique way of giving form, the confusing architecture of his latest installation follows its own artistic logic. And if apparently excessive demands are raised to a principle of form giving, this is informed in Hirschhorn by a concept, because "chaos is the world in which I live, and chaos is the time in which I live," as he explains. Art, on the other hand, for him is a tool "to get to know the world, to confront it, to experience the age in which I live."

The choice of materials is also a conscious political decision. The cheap product packaging materials of the consumer goods industry for Hirschhorn are an appropriate, stringently used means of expression for his socially critical art. In them, his resistance against cultural grievances is articulated, as is a revolt against capitalism's desires, which Hirschhorn translated into a state of permanent creative anarchy. Available in every household, because of their everyday familiarity they avoid any appearance of exclusiveness, and thus underline the inclusion of the beholder which is so important to Thomas Hirschhorn: "Stand-alone is, as always, made for a non-exclusive audience, and as always, I want to include without neutralising, I don't want to exclude anybody."
With "Stand-alone", Thomas Hirschhorn once again reveals his ability to translate, through his aggressive visual worlds, political ideas and philosophical language into an accessible understandable language, to create reference and literally create new spaces for ideas and engagements. The result are art productions that make no aesthetic claims, but instead call for confrontation and dialogue about existing conditions, and which the New York Times considers "some of the best being made today."

Thomas Hirschhorn was born in 1957 in Berne; from 1978 to 1983 he was a student at the Schule für Gestaltung in Zurich. Since the mid-1990s, he has gained international acclaim for his installations, and today he is considered one of the most important artists of his generation. He has been living and working in Paris since 1984. His works have been shown in countless solo and group exhibitions. He conceived and realised more than 50 works for public spaces.

Arndt & Partner are pleased to present the first solo show of Yayoi Kusama in Berlin, and to announce the inclusion of this position into the gallery programme.

With her colourful installations, pictures and objects Kusama - one of the most multifaceted and internationally successful female artists in Japan - has been a sensation since the 1960s. The artist covers her world entirely with brightly coloured dots: entire rooms, furniture and people melt into a whirlpool of "Polka Dots".

Yayoi Kusama, born in 1929 in Japan, belongs to a generation of artists who in the 60s and 70s aspired to an increased awareness in order to achieve political, social and sexual freedom. She made an early break from the traditional Japanese way of life. In 1957 she went to New York in order to study at the "Art Students' League" and emigrated to the USA in 1960 where she lived, first in Seattle and then in New York. In 1966 she adopted American citizenship. In 1974 Yayoi Kusama returned to Japan, where she still lives and works. She is represented worldwide in the most important international museums.

The multiplicity of Kusama's work is constantly surprising. Alongside the net and trellis-like structures and dots, which often lend her work a Pop-Art aspect, she developed three-dimensional protuberances which play on the symbolism of the phallus. With their psychologically inspired formal language and their soft, fabric-like, flesh-coloured nature, these objects are among the first soft sculptures. Kusama calls these objects "Sex Obsession".

They are combined with everyday objects to form assemblages and then coated in gold or silver. The broad ranging and representative selection of works at Arndt & Partner comprises one of her soft sculptures, as well as a series of paintings including "Infinity Nets" from 2005, which in its monochrome colouring is exceptional for Kusama. In addition, she is showing the installation "Narcissus Garden" - a sea of polished steel balls executed in 2004.

This work represents another focal point in her oeuvre. Kusama produces entire rooms and objects out of mirrors, in which the observer and the environment melt into one another. They reflect into infinity, in order, finally, to dissolve. Thus, Kusama's installations seem to have neither a beginning nor an end. The obsessive repetition of a motif creates a hypnotic effect on the observer, who cannot escape its magnetic pull. The current works and motifs appear as fresh and original as those of the 60s. There is something childlike about Kusama's world, something dreamy, something liberating, but which tells also of the pain of not being able to escape death.

Yayoi Kusama is currently represented at the exhibition "Berlin -Tokyo / Tokyo - Berlin" at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, with two installations from 2004 (7.6. - 3.10.2006). Recently her works were exhibited in the following exhibitions in Europe: "Summer of Love" at the Kunsthalle, Vienna, and "Zero - Internationale Avantgarde der 50er und 60er Jahre" at the museum kunst palast in Düsseldorf. Parallel to her the solo exhibition at Arndt & Partner Berlin, which has been realised in cooperation with Robert Miller Gallery, New York, Kusama will also be showing at the Singapore Biennale (4.9. - 12.11.2006).