Category: Art

Malaga, a province in the south of Spain, is well known as an often frequented, laid back holiday destination. The tourism boom over the past few decades has left the region markedly changed; in ways that are both good and bad. Fitz demonstrates this matter-of-factly through her photo montages: “The partial loss of the community of the once bustling fishing village is illustrated by the visual isolation of the houses”, she explains. Each of her images takes elements of buildings and landscapes from the towns of Pedregalejo and El Palo and layers them on top of one another. The composite houses stand without neighbors, backdropped by the ocean and sand. This striking separation makes the unusual character of the buildings more apparent and serves to cast them as the intriguing protagonists of Fitz’s story. The strange, multi-level houses are designed to look both real and unreal; a reference by Fitz to the “authentic experiences” presented to and imbibed by, tourists visiting these towns.

‘City’ is Heizer’s magnum opus; the culmination of a lifetime of work and, even in its unfinished state, the largest piece of contemporary art in existence. It is also one of the most secret. Situated in an area called Basin and Range in the Nevada Desert, its geographic isolation coupled with Heizer’s solitary existence means that few have ever visited the site, and that very little is known about it.

The project began in 1970, when Heizer hired a pilot from Las Vegas to help him find a property in the depths of the desert. It was on a flight that he came across Garden Valley in Basin and Range; backdropped by mountains, the site is isolated, but not inaccessible; its red earth arid, but not barren. Imperatively to Heizer, it was also cheap to procure. Work on ‘City’ started there 1972, and has been ongoing ever since.

‘City’ consists of five phases; each of which is composed of constructions collectively titled “complexes”, a term borrowed from archaeology that refers to ancient buildings. Together, the five phases will create a fortress of buildings and abstract sculptures that measure one and a quarter miles in length, and over a quarter of a mile long. It is a megalithic artwork that draws upon the monumentality of sites from civilizations past—Angkor Wat, Chichén Itzá, Easter Island, Giza. With ancient Mesoamerican ruins as his model, Heizer’s pioneering work merges Land Art and architecture on an incomprehensibly large scale.

When approaching ‘City’ from its desert surrounds, the concrete structures and earthen monuments that it comprises lay hidden from view, revealing themselves incrementally—and never in full. The size and arrangement of the work means that viewing it takes time and effort, you have to move around and outside of ‘City’ and its various complexes in order to understand it. “I think size is the most unused quotient in the sculptor’s repertoire because it requires lots of commitment and time”, Heizer remarked in a 1999 interview with The New York Times. “To me it’s the best tool. With size you get space and atmosphere: atmosphere becomes volume. You stand in the shape, in the zone.”

Much like the great sites of the Yucatan from which Heizer derived early inspiration, ‘City’ is is a fortress: its central plaza has been constructed below ground level, keeping it protected from the outside. “The sculpture is partly open because, rather than put you in a box, I want you to be able to breathe. But I also want to isolate you in it”, Heizer remarked to Michael Kimmelman in an interview in 1999. It is comprised of mastaba-like rises of earth that surround an internal area made up of pits and passageways. Here, steles protrude hundreds of feet above the earth and angular arms that jut from trapezoidal mounds of red rock.

Unlike much Land Art, ‘City’ is not designed to bend to the will of the weather; Heizer has built it with the intention of it lasting long after he leaves this earth. “In the end I’m lucky it took this long”, he commented in a 2015 interview with The New York Times. “Over the years we saw how the thing stood the test of time, what didn’t work, what had to be rebuilt, what happened when the valley flooded, in different climates. It’s like a handmade object now, erased, redone, adjusted, not just fabricated. It’s part of nature, here for the millennia.”

As ‘City’ enters its 50th year of construction, Heizer—now 75—has marked 2020 as the date of project completion. Until that time, we cannot ever know what it is truly like. Instead, we can only mythologize the unseen ‘City’, elaborating on the stories from the few who have witnessed it, and the handful of photographs that follow below.

Pezo von Ellrichshausen designed the angular structure as an echo of its surroundings; its polished stainless steel exterior reflected and distorted the historical context in which it was constructed. To balance the lightness of the structure’s glistening exterior, the architects designed a dark interior: Consisting of an unclad steel grid frame that opened to the sky, the internal structure was both literally and aesthetically weighty. With the addition of this mirrored architectural sculpture, the 370-year-old Milanese palazzo warped into itself, merging with the ‘Echo Pavilion’ to become one.

Art historian, and co-founder of niche, Nele Heinevetter shared her advice for those walking the streets of Berlin this weekend. The first, Raphaela Vogel’s ‘Vogelspinne’ at BQ: an exhibition that uniquely combines performance, film, and sculpture, and which opens tonight (April 26th). The second, Frieda Toranzo Jaeger’s ‘Deep Adaptation’ at Galerie Barbara Weiss; an exhibition exploring technology across different mediums. The third at ChertLüdde, from Berlin-based, Venezuelan-born artist Sol Calero and Conglomerate, an artist collective comprised of Sol Calero, Ethan Hayes-Chute, Derek Howard, Christopher Kline and Dafna Maimon. The fourth is Nigin Beck’s ‘Yeki Bud Yeki Nabud’, a title that translates to mean One was there and on was not there, or  There was one and there wasn’t one’—a common opening line to Iranian fairy tales.

Named after the psychological test that analyzes patients through their perception of ink blots, the show occupies a 279-square-meter warehouse in Dumbo, a neighborhood in New York City. The exhibition consists of a unique interpretation of a psychiatric hospital; the warehouse space has been fitted out with white inflatable floors and walls in an aesthetic style that references the padded walls of confinement rooms in asylums. Once visitors propel their way through the bouncy castle, they are confronted by Hendry’s reimagining of Rorschach ink blots as a series of hyperreal color drawings or ‘squish paintings’. Hendry’s irreverent exhibition can be viewed at 202 Plymouth Street in Dumbo, Brooklyn, until the 21st of April 2019.

Recent finished works include ‘Tulip Noire’ and ‘Tulip Crème’, circular slabs of smashed black and cream colored marble. These sculptures are examples of Cascales Alimbau’s interest in the Japanese art of Kintsugi; to work with broken, shattered, or irregular materials and embrace their marks of wear as valuable. Cascales Alimbau has also created ‘Seda’, a limited edition series of sculpted glass objects with contorted forms. “Glass is a material in which hardness and fragility coexist in balance”, explained Cascales Alimbau. “During the molding of the piece it broke and repaired itself, creating a scar of glass that becomes a beauty trait”. This propensity to see beauty in the broken, epitomizes the artist’s tendency to revere authenticity above perfection.

“Her sculptures are a giddying mix of surface, mass, and volume, situated precariously on the verge of physical “Her sculptures are a giddying mix of surface, mass, and volume”impossibility”, reads a statement on the artist’s website. In an era where graphic design and digital manipulation dominate our visual worlds, one could be forgiven for assuming these works are rendered. Yet Elise’s sculptures are entirely real, it’s her engagement with, and manipulation of, various physical materials that pushes her work to the edge of realism. “She draws the viewer into a deliriously disorientating world, where intriguing sculptural shapes connect and collide,” continues the description. Bulbous forms made from plaster, fiberglass, wood, or stone resin, are affixed together to create compositions reminiscent of the machinery in Willy Wonka’s fictional factory. As the viewer’s gaze spans the works, “angle, curve, surface, and dimensionality merge to form an unlikely symmetry”.

The contribution of Danish art collective Superflex to this year’s edition is a coral reef inspired installation titled ‘Dive-In’; a reference to the history of the location, and the dangers of rising water that we face due to Climate Change. With a color palette and texture that draws as much from Palm Springs as it does from coral, the luminous pink monolith was designed to be “equally attractive to human and marine life”. Rasmus Nielsen, one-third of Superflex, is a freediver, whose work in the South Pacific with marine biologists led to the bright color choice for the installation. The pink of ‘Dive-In’ is the color that encourages coral growth. In an interview with Desert Sun, Neville Wakefield, the artistic director of the biennial, explained, “The Superflex piece is sort of a strange anticipation of what the valley would look like or be like, submerged again, and what kind of architecture we’d leave behind that would encourage marine life to re-inhabit it”. Until the conclusion of Desert X (April 29, 2019), weekly screenings are being held at the site, projected against the coral-like mass. You can find the movie schedule here. Entry to Desert X is free.

Plucked from abandoned sites around the city by the artist herself, the work features succulents, ivy, mosses and wild sage, most of which will be returned to their original habitat when the exhibition concludes. Those that remain will bring a touch of the outdoors to the Jil Sander offices, in the form of a modular garden. The installation was commissioned to coincide with Milan Design Week 2019, in celebration of a new collection from Jil Sander+ that has been made for life spent outside. The exhibition is running from the 9th until the 14th of April, and is open daily from 10am to 8pm.

Founded in 2012 by artists Søren Aagaard, Ditte Boen Soria, Steffen Jørgensen, Anna Margrethe Pedersen and Merete Vyff Slyngborg, YEARS is a collaborative project, exhibition, office and workspace (as their website explains). The collective publicized their recent exhibition ‘I don’t want to live, I don’t want to die’ with a poster featuring a cat peeling an onion; a reference to Schrödinger’s cat, the paradoxical thought experiment from 1935 in which a cat in a box is considered as both alive and dead until it is observed. This poster is telling of the exhibition’s witticism, which makes clever commentary on the concept of art and artist. In ‘I don’t want to live, I don’t want to die’, the six rooms of Den Frie—a wooden pavilion designed by Jens Ferdinand Willumsen in 1989—are utilized as stages for a performance that asks what it means to create. Each of the rooms features beds; some are neatly made with white sheets, some appear slept in, while others are upended or covered in latex duvets. In this setting, YEARS ponder whether one is an artist simply because they make work; what makes art art, and not merely a hobby?