MUST-SEE ART EXHIBITIONS | FEB 2017
By Nicole Bray, Contemporary Art Consultant | info@mercercontemporary.com
Katharina Grosse
Katharina Grosse
January 19, 2017 – March 11, 2017
Gagosian Gallery
555 West 24th Street, New York
If you follow Klaus Biesenbach (Director of MoMA PS1) on instagram you will have seen the house completely painted by Katharina Grosse at Rockaway beach. Following recent installations at the 56th Venice Biennale, the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, and MoMA PS1, she is finally getting her first gallery show at Gagosian, and boy, did she knock it out of the park. Over the past year she has been creating large scale paintings, done with her brilliant, vibrant signature palette and spray-painted technique along with monumental sculpture.
Adrian Ghenie
Adrian Ghenie: Recent Paintings
January 19, 2017 – February 18, 2017
Pace Gallery
510 West 25th Street, New York
Ghenie’s beautifully grotesque abstract figures have continued to mature for the Romanian artist. Ghenie blurs the line, often literally, between abstraction and figuration, as he tests the limits of representational painting. Exemplified by the three self portraits included in the exhibition, Ghenie exhibits his skillful brushwork and paint handling ability through the work’s facial obscurations executed in saturated yellows, pinks, and oranges. The resulting images are unexpected and unsettling at times, reminding us of the captivating and psychotic nature of Francis Bacon’s portraiture.
Richard Mosse
Heat Maps
February 2, 2017 – March 11, 2017
Jack Shainman Gallery
513 West 20th Street, New York
In the chaotic and polarizing new era of Brexit, Marine Le Pen, Donald Trump and other signs of a radical shift to the extreme right, this project charts the refugee crisis unfolding across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Mosse has documented refugee camps and staging sites using an extreme telephoto military-grade camera that can detect thermal radiation, including body heat, at great distance. The camera is used against its intended purpose of border and combat surveillance to map landscapes of human displacement. Reading heat as both metaphor and index, these images reveal the harsh struggle for survival lived daily by millions of refugees and migrants, seen but overlooked, and ignored by many. These monumental size photographs reveal intricate details of life in the camps, scanning the photograph from one end to another reveals every form of basic emotion and interaction.
artREAL contributor Nicole Bray is the founder of Mercer Contemporary and guides private and corporate clients through each step of acquiring, selling, managing, and displaying artwork. She received her Masters in Contemporary Art (Hons.) from Sotheby’s Institute of Art, New York. She was the recipient of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Emerging Curator Fellowship 2015, and has worked at both an Auction House and for a distinguished private family. If you would like to contact Nicole, or if you are interested in starting your own collection, please email her at info@mercercontemporary.com or visit www.mercercontemporary.com.