Author: Diana d'Arenberg Parmanand

Julie Curtiss 朱莉·柯蒂斯

Hair, both beautiful and abject, ornamental and beastly, is a semiotic system that holds a powerful attraction for French-born, Florida-based artist Julie Curtiss. Born and raised in Paris, Curtiss studied at l’École des Beaux-Arts and then at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Dresden before making her way to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Arguably, the Chicago imagists of her alma mater, like Christina Ramberg – to whose work Curtiss’ is often compared – and her years working as a studio assistant to both Jeff Koons and Brian Donnelly (aka KAWS) have informed Curtiss’ aesthetic, with its vibrant colours, cartoonish figuration and smooth, skilfully rendered lines. It’s a highly stylised visual language that helped her work get noticed on Instagram and reach stratospheric heights of success in the art world. But unlike Kaws’ Happy Meal cartoons and figurines, Curtiss’ work is personal, a deep dive into the female psyche and femininity through Jungian archetypes. Bitter Apples, Curtiss’ first exhibition at White Cube Hong Kong, brings together works across varied media, including …

Haim Steinbach

Published by Diana d'Arenberg Parmanand

tin drum / White Cube / Hong Kong /Sep 14 – Nov 12, 2022 / Four horizontal display shelves line the exhibition walls of White Cube’s ground floor gallery. The open shelves are lined with groupings of objects – rubber dog chew toys, robots, spaceships and monsters, metal Star Wars lunch boxes. The display is reminiscent of a child’s bedroom, with cherished objects lined up on shelves in a way that may be cryptic to an outsider but hold personal meaning to the child. Angular and wedge-shaped, the shelves and the objects are all in a palette of black and red, sitting in stark contrast against the white walls. Two geometric, black and red toy cars sit beside a snowman-shaped black dog chew toy atop a red and black shelf. The work, El Lissitzky II-4 (2008-2012), references the Russian artist who cofounded the suprematism movement. Allusions to the Russian constructivist movement are echoed throughout the four shelf arrangements, creating a formal visual cohesion. ‘tin drum’ – named after a 2011 work, tin drum, in the exhibition, …

Cerith Wyn Evans 凱裡斯·懷恩·埃文斯

Published by Diana d'Arenberg Parmanand

Since the 1990s, Welsh conceptual artist Cerith Wyn Evans has created work about language, perception and representation. The artist skilfully weaves in elements of the musical, literary, philosophical and cinematic, resulting in exhibitions that are densely layered and at times even cryptic, and that have won him acclaim from international institutions such as the Tate Britain, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris and Austria’s Kunsthaus Graz, and participation in numerous biennales and triennials. His most recent exhibition at White Cube Hong Kong, …)( of, a clearing, featuring installation, sculpture, painting and sound, continues his exploration of the visual and the aural, the relationship between them and the things that lie in between. Using the work of several modern artists as a point of departure, Wyn Evans creates a series of pieces that refer to seminal moments in art history theory, in particular Lucio Fontana’s Concetto Spaziale aesthetic (1947–68), which erased the boundaries among architecture, painting, sculpture and the fourth dimension within art, which cubist artist Max Weber described as “the consciousness of a great and overwhelming …

Sherrie Levine 谢丽·利文

Published by Diana d'Arenberg Parmanand

Hong Kong Dominoes / David Zwirner / Hong Kong / Sep 4 – Oct 13, 2021 / American artist Sherrie Levine’s recent exhibition Hong Kong Dominoes at David Zwirner in Hong Kong comprised six bodies of work that span three decades of the artist’s career.Levine rose to prominence as a member of the Pictures Generation, a group of artists based in New York in the late 1970s and 80s. Originally trained as a printmaker, this has continued to influence her work, of which multiple images and mechanical reproduction form the foundation. The artist chooses, reproduces and re-presents the works of dead white male artists as her own – works in the past have appropriated Walker Evans, Matisse, Brâncuși and Duchamp – undermining and calling into question concepts like authorship, originality and authenticity, and our fetishisation of these values and of certain works of art. Several works in the current exhibition make reference to modernist works. In the group of 22 watercolour on paper drawings After Henri Matisse (1985), Levine recreates and presents a sequence of …

Bruce Nauman 布魯斯·瑙曼

Published by Diana d'Arenberg Parmanand

This year marks the 80th birthday of American artist Bruce Nauman. Following on from a recent Tate retrospective is Presence/Absence at White Cube, the first exhibition in Hong Kong for the pioneering video artist, featuring five works: two single-channel pieces, from 1999 and 2001; and three dual-screen projections made in 2013. The artist is present in all but one of them. Many of Nauman’s earlier works are about time and endurance: his own as an artist, as he pushes himself to physical limits; and the audience’s, as they try to sit through videos of maniacal clowns (Clown Torture, 1987), and of the artist performing mundane tasks. In one of several early videos from 1968, we see him bouncing off the wall (Bouncing in the Corner I), making the viewer dizzy in the process. In another, Walk with Contrapposto (1968), he walks back and forth in a narrow corridor, exaggeratedly swinging his hips side to side. Similarly, in Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square (1968), he places one foot in front …