Art Out: Martine Gutierrez, Gillian Wearing, Christian Marclay
Martine Gutierrez, Body En Thrall, Blonde Bra, 2020, chromogenic print
© Martine Gutierrez, courtesy of the artist, RYAN LEE Gallery, New York, and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Martine Gutierrez: Half-Breed
Fraenkel Gallery | November 18, 2021 - January 29, 2022
Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to announce a new exhibition Martine Gutierrez: Half Breed. Acting as both subject and producer, Gutierrez explores the multiplicity and complexity of identity in a series of pop-influenced narrative scenes. The exhibition, which takes its name from Cher’s 1973 album, will include selections from three recent photographic series, Body En Thrall, Plastics, and Indigenous Woman, the 124-page magazine for which Gutierrez acted as muse, model, photographer, and art director, creating every element from fashion spreads and ads to an editor’s letter. A Berkeley native now based in Brooklyn, Gutierrez joins Fraenkel Gallery’s roster this fall. (Ryan Lee Gallery will continue to represent the artist in New York.) This will be her inaugural show with Fraenkel Gallery. Indigenous Woman presents images in the glossy, seductive style of fashion and advertising photography, reimagining the tropes of those genres with wit and nuance. In the project, which was shown at the 2019 Venice Biennale, Gutierrez carves out a place for herself, trying on fluid identities that touch on race, class, gender, and sexuality. As she has noted, “No one was going to put me on the cover of a Paris fashion magazine, so I thought, I’m gonna make my own.” The exhibition includes selections from Neo-Indeo, a fashion editorial in which Gutierrez wears Indigenous textiles, some of which belonged to her Mayan grandparents, paired with vintage and designer items in a personal, multicultural version of high fashion.
Gillian Wearing, Me: Me, 1991. Gelatin silver bromide print, mounted on aluminum, 20 3/16 x 17 1/16 in. (51.3 x 43.4 cm). © Gillian Wearing, courtesy Maureen Paley, London; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles; and Regen Projects, Los Angeles
Gillian Wearing: Wearing Masks
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum | November 5, 2021 - April 4, 2022
From November 5, 2021 through April 4, 2022, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents Gillian Wearing: Wearing Masks, the first retrospective of Wearing’s work in North America. Featuring more than a hundred pieces, the exhibition traces the development of the British conceptual artist’s practice from her earliest photographs and videos to her latest paintings and sculptures, all of which explore the performative nature of identity. Gillian Wearing’s profoundly empathetic and psychologically intense photographs, videos, sculptures, and paintings probe the tensions between self and society in an increasingly media-saturated world. Over her three-decade career, Wearing has focused equally on her own self-portraiture and on the depictions of others, testing the boundaries between the private and public, questioning fixed notions of identity, and frequently anticipating the cultural transformations wrought by social media. Throughout her works, mask serve as both literal props and metaphors for the performances each of us stage every day as individuals and as citizens.
Christian Marclay,Untitled (Death), 2020, Digital chromogenic print
80.4 x 60.4 cm | 31 5/8 x 23 3/4 in. © the artist. Photo © Christian Marclay
Christian Marclay
White Cube Paris Office | Novemeber 18, 2021 - December 21, 2021
White Cube is pleased to announce a solo presentation of work by Christian Marclay at the gallery’s office at 10 avenue Matignon in Paris, featuring new collages, photographs, works on paper and video.
Since the 1980s, Marclay has focused on the subject of sound, through video, sculpture, painting, works on paper and performance, often using pre-existing materials and sampled elements from art and popular culture. As Douglas Kahn has written, Marclay’s work exhibits a ‘willingness to pursue sound where it is ostensibly silent, harboured in the private audition of thought or registered in normally more mute materials and representations.’ (from Christian Marclay, UCLA Hammer Museum, 2003)
Marclay's new collages made during the 2020 lockdown, draw a parallel between the anxiety and pent-up frustration of the pandemic and the heightened emotive states of comic and manga portraiture. Exploring the relationship of sound to image, through a process of sound mimesis, the works converge the visual and aural realms. Screaming mask-like faces, pervaded by a deafening silence, are composed out of torn and cut fragments from manga, comic books, movie stills or images sourced from the internet and combined with onomatopoeic words. In Face (Blue Electric), a densely layered collage of comic strip sounds, in tones of blue and yellow, resolve into a screaming, wild-eyed head, the whole suggestive of buzzing energy. While in Face (Thorns), a medusa-like head is shaped from sinuous, hook-like words.
