Takashi Murakami

Maureen Paley</a> is pleased to present Liam <a target="_blank" href=https://www.mutualart.com/Exhibition/Takashi-Murakami/"/Artist/Liam-Gillick/394EEC7B36E3E211">Gillick’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery, The Sleepwalkers. The exhibition features five artworks from the 1990s and 2000s and a recent film from 2021 shot in Korea. All the works stem from his interest in the aesthetics of our socio-political infrastructure – the zones of strategy, negotiation, projection, and scenario-thinking – that are the backdrop to daily life in post-industrial society.</p><p>The works in the main gallery are bound together by Introduction (2002), a text that wraps mid-height around the walls. Three plinths carry pieces that relate to an ongoing critique of systems of mediation and soft control within a neo-liberal context. McNamara Setting (1994) focuses on the role of an advisor or political strategist, comprising mid-century men’s business apparel heaped into an airport security tray along with fake snow, working torches, cigarette packets, and various strategy papers. (The What If? Scenario) Spatial Definition Device #2 (1996) is a cardboard box full of many coloured ribbons, one of a number of artworks proposed that offered the tools to create permeable borders or loosely define zones of activity. The third plinth displays Redaction (2005), an oversized glass filled with Polish Pure Spirit. These glass works were often situated in exhibitions to function as a visualisation of a fiction brought to life.</p><p>The second room includes Discussion Island Liability Platform #4 (1997) alongside The Sleepwalker (2021). The Discussion Platforms are a series of abstract structures Gillick created from the mid 1990s often intended to operate in areas otherwise unsuitable for the display of traditional artworks, overhanging a space where the idea of a semi-autonomous zone of exchange might be theorised and enacted. The Sleepwalker (2021) is a film made during two weeks of isolation in a traditional Korean house, featuring a series of rooms surrounding a walled courtyard, in the Bukchon Hanok Village, Seoul. The soundtrack is four early recordings of Bellini’s opera “La Sonnambula” where the protagonist reveals the truth of her feelings while sleepwalking. The film was made at various random moments over two weeks, yet the various shots are cut together to create the illusion of logical time despite it being the result of a fractured production process.</p><p><br></p>" />

Hodges. This is the American artist’s fourth exhibition at the gallery. Through materials, images, forms and gestures, reflecting on intimacy, history, values and casuality, Hodges invites an enquiry into our relationship to time, its measures, and meanings.</p><p>Extending through the gallery, composed of found materials, carved marble and oil painting, in varied ranges of scale and tonality, this new body of work resonates with whimsy, humility, foreboding and mystery to highlight themes of beauty, fragility and impermanence.</p><p>Rendered in white marble and painted bronze, the familiar, modest gathering of intimate belongings to be discovered in Craig’s closet have been captured in time. Even as they speak of the specific world, and the specific life in which these objects – clothing, keepsakes, closed forever containers – were brought together, they seem to now transcend their temporal materiality.</p><p>Of this work, Hodges writes: “For those of us with the good fortune to have a place to hang our things, a closet is a magical container, a collection of materials, arranged by each of us, that can, at a glance, reveal our cares, desires and even our deepest secrets. Within a closet time is frozen, and in what is kept there fragmented into contrasting visual and conceptual rhythms, meters and durations. Things accumulated and arranged, carefully stacked and aligned are juxtaposed with the quickly thrown down or casually abandoned to be taken care of later or simply forgotten. Out of this dense setting narratives blossom and come alive – looking in we’re reminded of who we are, where we’ve been, the hopes, treasures and dreams we hold. It’s there in boxes concealing our heart’s contours, scribbled messages on folded notes and cards, photos, records, files – all the stuff we’ve saved for reasons each item embodies, and all the choices made are there as well in this often hidden holding space, the closet.”</p><p><br></p>" />

Galerie Max Hetzler, London</a>, is pleased to present Open Studio &amp; Empty Spaces, an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Carroll <a target="_blank" href=https://www.mutualart.com/Exhibition/Takashi-Murakami/"/Artist/Carroll-Dunham/17A94FFF651FC061">Dunham. This is the artist’s fifth presentation with the gallery, including two duo shows, and the second in the London space.</p><p>Dunham has developed a unique pictorial language encompassing painting, drawing, printmaking and sculpture over several decades. Engaging line, colour and form to activate his energetically charged works, the artist creates a fantastical universe populated by humanoid figures who seem to exist outside the limitations of time and place. These long-haired, unclothed specimens have been an ongoing primary subject in Dunham’s oeuvre over the last fifteen years.</p><p>The exhibition presents eight large-scale paintings from 2024 and ten drawings from 2023, which centre around the artist’s studio. In Dunham’s ‘Open Studio’ paintings, an earthling sculptor on an unknown planet is visited by two purple denizens – one male, one female. Highly schematic, the works offer a culmination of the compositional principles the artist has been exploring for more than five decades: archetypal bodies, framing devices, marginalia and isometric space construction. Within his wood-panelled studio, the sculptor makes his objects, as the purple nudes look on bemused. The crisp geometry of the interior scene is at odds with its surrounding landscape. Demarcated by a curved, planetary horizon line, the space is littered with curly cubes and swirling lines, in a state Dunham describes as a 'conflation of mechanical and organic things’.</p><p>The paintings are divided into four daytime and four nighttime scenes. In the former, against a bright blue sky, seven blackbirds swoop around the studio space. In the latter, set within the celestial array, a dog comes to visit. In these works, different levels of the gaze are at play: the animals observe the humanoids, who watch the sculptor, who contemplates his own creation. In turn, we – the viewer voyeur – adopt the role of outsider looking in. In a few of the works, the dog looks out directly towards the viewer meeting our gaze. Dunham’s careful choreography provides insight into his subjects’ complex internal world, while his colour choices expose and question stereotypes concerning race, ethnicity and human nature. Denoting a sense of otherness, the vibrant purple in the present series is inspired by science-fiction and mythology.</p><p>The influence of Dunham’s drawing and printmaking practice is evident in the bold outlines, flat planes of colour, areas of transparency and layering, and distinctive curvilinear lines. ‘Everything I do is built from lines,’ the artist states. ‘Even the birds, which are really just sheets of paint. The blackbirds start out as line drawings and then I take a big brush and paint them. The whole thing is a structure of lines. And it goes down to a really microlevel like the way I draw hair.’ For Dunham, image-making has always been a matter of method (the how) over subject (the what). In these works, he seeks an to approach painting which is analogous to the playful experimentation of his drawing technique.</p><p><br></p>" />