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Louise Charlier / Joséphine Topolanski
"Là où le ciel tremble"May 16 – July 11, 2025
KOMMET
14 rue Mortier
Lyon
www.kommet.fr

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Text: Ma‍nor Grunewald

‍In the exhibition “Timeline Samples” at Berthold Pott Gallery in Cologne, Belgian artist Manor Grunewald revisits his own painterly archive, reconfiguring earlier works through processes of sampling, reproduction, and self-referencing. By integrating techniques from both amateur painting manuals and digital printing technologies, his practice interrogates the circulation of visual knowledge and the construction of artistic authorship — turning painting into a recursive, self-referencing system. In this conversation, Grunewald reflects on how the studio informs his decisions in exhibition-making, how intuition and iteration shape his process, and how the boundaries between professional and pedagogical image economies begin to dissolve.

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ON VIEW >

Malte Zenses
"Durchhalten galore! Pinturas para perros."
Sperling in collaboration with Pequod Co. (CDMX)
10.05 - 28.06, 2025
(new address!)
Enhuberstrasse 680333 Munich
https://www.sperling-munich.com/

Louise Charlier and Joséphine Topolanski
LÀ OÙ LE CIEL TREMBLE
Curator: Émilie d’Ornano

Perception meets Disruption: A brief conversation about life
By Misal Adnan Yıldız

Malte Zenses presents nine new paintings and three sculptures at Sperling’s new location at Enhuberstr. 6 in Munich-Maxvorstadt. One of them carries a warning: “- Life is brief”. The titles of these paintingscontain many references, from Aschenputtel (the folk tale known as Cinderella) to the Berlin living legend and pioneer of queer cinema and activist Rosa von Praunheim, or from Robin Hood, associated with“taking from the rich and giving to the poor“, to hedonism, the philosophy that proposes pleasure instead of pain. They evoke unexpected meanings, inviting the viewer to engage their imagination and connecton an individual and personal level. These works seem to speak directly to their audience through thewords and expressions embodied in the square film frame, much like watching TV with subtitles.

Unlike many artists who focus on surface-level aesthetics, Zenses’ paintings demand from their potentialviewers to engage with the underlying forms, narratives and themes. The three sculptures, titled “Bad”,“Garten”, and “Küche” (in English: bathroom, garden and kitchen) whisper about our relationships withdomestic spaces, zoning, and the new idea of home.

As someone who had been following his work and admiring his perspective, I was excited to dive deeperinto his artistic logic. When we met for the first time, he was wearing a basecap with a clear message onit: “civilist”. Meanwhile, in Istanbul, the street protests had just been sparked by the imprisonment of themost powerful opponent and the people’s choice presidential candidate – and this “civilist” was inpreparation for three shows in a row between continents. Our second meeting in his studio felt like agenuine connection that transcended the superficial realm of social media, first world problems, and peerpressure etc. His artistic imagination, sense of humor, and narrative politics resonated with me on aprofound level, especially during a transformative period in my life. As written on his canvas: “- but Ithought it only fair to give you a sporting chance."

Zenses’ presence felt like a breath of fresh air in an era marked by the uncertainty. For many reasons, hewas the right ‘German’ among a few left around me especially in this politically polarized climate and darktimes. In one of his paintings, it says: “- Sit up and look at the TV.” Silence is not on our side these days if you are not a bio-deutsch citizen in this country, whether you are a migrant, in exile or a refugee. In the USA, trans and LGBTQ+ individuals are added to the target groups by the alt-right, and the Gulf of Mexico is renamed."

And that is what you will always be.”During our conversation, he referred to a small book with a green cover and the accompanying exhibition at Kunstverein Nürnberg as a defining moment in his artistic development: “in tyrannis”. With Zenses, Ishare an interest in the same term, which I would like to explore further: Anonymity. One of oursimilarities is that we both think, relate and engage by looking at streets, parks, the waste economy,hunger, poverty and possible forms of upcycling, sharing and connecting. His sculptural forms made fromfabric and found materials reflect the uncanny positioning of figures in the gallery space. These forms,similar in size to human bodies, remind me of the silenced, muted and unseen crowds, the underdogs,the people on the street. One can identify with them when walking alone on windy nights in Berlin. In another of his paintings we read: “- Because that is what you are.”

Zenses’s studio is a treasure trove of creativity and inspiration reflecting his artistic vision. His archive ofmaterials documents the patterns of our zeitgeist and serves as a rich pool for his artistic thinkingincluding film stills and screenshots ranging from 1960s Hollywood to obscure Indie productions; Berlinnewspapers from the 1970s to the present day; subcultural references to music and literature such asstickers, napkins, found notes; second-hand clothes and photographs (found, bought, or taken by theartist), moreover his archive includes the journals of his ongoing drawing practice.What you will see in this exhibition is a careful rendering from a long process of living and working for abetter perception: “- you shall get what is coming to you.”

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Becky Tucker
22 May - 30 July, 2025
Galerie Fabian Lang
Obere Zäune 12
Zurich, Switzerland

https://fabianlang.ch/

on Becky Tucker's exhibition at Galerie Fabian Lang:
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Parts of the walls are soaked in colour. Figures and other beings sit around or present themselves. They put themselves on show. They almost pose. Or crawl beyond the frames and display cases, out onto the gallery floor, where they have been turned into stone while on the run.

It is the world of the Quarry. The word translates to the prey, the hunted or the pursued. But it is also the technical term for a bonanza or clay pit or a mine. What one encounters in the room is a world populated by fictitious or reinvented, extinct creatures. Created from ceramics and glazes by Scottish artist Becky Tucker. It is no coincidence that the word is also reminiscent of the pseudonym of a sci-fi character or a rare single-celled organism.

The colour on the wall is not just any colour. If you look carefully, you will see that it resembles the colour of the fabric that connect the neck and torso of the figures. The unique bright indigo colour is the result of a special process used by the artist. Indigo has been used for this purpose since prehistoric times. It is considered to be one of the oldest plant dyes for textiles, with the oldest known examples from Peru dating back to 4200 BC.

Normally, indigo dyes a colour that appears dark blue to purple to the eye - but through a unique process, Tucker has extracted the pigment called indirubin from the tree leaf to create the light purple colour. Purple has long been associated with nobility and opulence, as it is rare in nature and the pigment is notoriously difficult to obtain (e.g. Tyrian purple is extracted from murex snails). But the colour chosen here is far from a deep, rich hue, which in turn destabilises this association and instead plays with themes of the otherworldly. ‘I’m interested in coupling ancient and futuristic aesthetics. Ceramic is often associated with earth tones, which are very muted and natural, whereas this colour is very synthetic almost sickly.,’ says Tucker.

The immersive environment elevates the works from objects to inhabitants of their own environment. What are the beings looking for here? The wall colour speaks a language, conveys a feeling. It is a portal that teleports these special beings into the present or the future.

The influence of costume and armour on Becky Tucker's artistic style is obvious. However, Tucker goes even further back in the history of our planet when she reinvents extinct creatures, medieval-looking armour, suits or ornaments. The search for the Quarry began with a book called My Mind To Me A Kingdom Is by Paul Stanbridge, as Tucker explains. It begins with the story of the exploration of Doggerland - a now-submerged landmass in the North Sea where various artefacts have been found. ‘This led me to deepen my interest in archaeology and ancient artefacts, but also to think about mapping connections through time. A cornerstone of my practice is looking for references from very different cultures, eras and aesthetics. I am interested in finding out what connects material practices and understanding patterns of creation.

The depiction of creatures and figures can be found all over the world, thousands of years and thousands of kilometres apart, with very different symbolic and functional purposes. From the German ‘Lion Man’ and the ‘Venus of Hohle Fels’ (both circa 38,000 BC) to Chinese Zenmushou tomb guards from 600 AD to Zuni fetishes from around 650 AD, it's clear that the depiction of creatures is enduring and important. ‘For me, it's not really about the animal, it's about the history of the objects and the cultural symbolism.’

A very special mysterious radiance emanates from the works. It is not entirely clear where this comes from, whether it is the strikingly careful details or the glazed splendour of colour. Or perhaps it is the fact that you have to dare to approach them, that you are drawn to them. Like with a vampire, you are deterred and yet at its mercy. The interplay of attraction and repulsion. Cuteness and the formidable have a magical effect. Like a good horror film. One acts out of an irrepressible fascination for the exploration of the known unknown. The term anachronistic artefact has become established in Tucker's work.

For some of the fictional creatures with human hands, it is unclear whether they have reached the final form of their development. A symbiosis of the past and the fictional, fossilised in the moment of an evolutionary transformation.

A certain nostalgia also plays a part in the story. Atlas, Anthem and Harbinger are telling titles. If you look Anthem in the eye, you might think the black tears were meant for us and the tragedy of our time. All three figures are hybrid messengers - simultaneously from the past and the future - whose tears hold up a mirror to us. Atlas, from the Greek, ‘he who shoulders the world’ and thus has to bear it, endure it; Anthem, who sings a hymn to what once was, and Harbinger embodies the messenger who announces what is yet to come. Perhaps they are themselves the bearers of nostalgia for what once was, and regret where humanity is heading.

Tucker's works are shape and genre shifting, creating a fascinating bridge between the focus on making in terms of the rich history of the material, its fragility but also its longevity, and the expression of a zeitgeist-angst. Through them, one embarks on a path of exploration and yet feels transported into a new experience through a primal force.

(Written by Fabian Lang)

For his first solo exhibition at Bradley Ertaskiran, David Armstrong Six premieres a new body of sculptural work composed entirely in basswood and charred basswood. Evolving out of a studio-based activity predicated on daily experimentation and intuitive thinking, the new sculptures are the result of what the artist indexes as “a protracted conceptual arc”, suspended over the course of the past four years. What finally arrives as the work, gets “rehearsed” in the studio, often through drawing and writing, as speculations upon gesture, seriality, mutability, and perception. There is a capricious curiosity aggregated by the artist over time, towards the build, and surrender, to muscle-memory.
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Precedents may be gleaned from the postmodern choreography of Merce Cunningham, who often relied on dancers’ deeply ingrained physical memory of movements, allowing them to perform complex, sometimes seemingly random sequences with fluidity and precision. Or, from the late 19th century photographic experiments of Étienne-Jules Marey, whose attempts to study movements in air were articulated by the propulsion of smoke through wind tunnels. The artist defers to the freestanding and wall-based sculptures as “creatural flows within an omni directional book of longing”. Installed as a scenographic envelope within the main gallery, lie down with holograms thus generates a pliable script, which invites the viewer into a collaborative dimension of interference wavelengths, apparition, and experiential play. There is no fixed symbolism or vantage point here. Rather, the sculptures reveal entity incrementally; both individually and collectively, as nascent matter, in a perpetual state of becoming.
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David Armstrong Six (b. 1968, Belleville, ON) lives and works in Montreal. His work has been exhibited internationally since 1997, including at Night Gallery (Los Angeles), Nikolaj Kunsthall Gallery (Copenhagen),during the Quebec Triennial at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (Montreal) as well as at WhiteColumns (New York). He has also presented his work in solo exhibitions at the Darling Foundry (Montreal),the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (Toronto) and the Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin). In 2011, he was a finalist for the Prix Louis-Comtois. Armstrong Six’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Global Affairs Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Hart House Collection– University of Toronto, among others. For the past five years, David Armstrong Six has been working on public sculpture commissions in cast bronze: most notably 'les passagers', which were recently installed at the Brossard station on the REM train line in Greater Montréal.

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"Radius: The Gaze Beyond Vision"
curated by Jacek Sosnowski
February 21 - March 28,2025
‍Lumen Travo Gallery
Lijnbaansgracht 314
Amsterdam
info@lumentravo.nl

lumentravo.nl

Photo Credit: Giovanni Nardi.
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Radius: The Gaze Beyond Vision makes a powerful statement in the discourse on the ontology and epistemology of machines as witnesses to the human condition. It explores themes of surveillance, war, and the evolving aesthetics of these phenomena through the lens of primitive, almost analog sound and visual technology. This work delves into the cognitive presence of drones and the unsettling implications of their dual role as both observers and participants.

The journey began in 2016 when footage was captured via a homemade drone navigating a restricted zone amidst a devastated landscape in the Arabian desert. Forbidden to physically enter the area, the artist (Ibrahim Quraishi) relied on drone technologies to pierce the barriers Of surveillance culture. This creative subversion revealed a chilling portrait of ecological and human tragedies interwoven with the mechanisms of war. Transformed into video a series of initial test pieces and interactive installation, Radius 1 & 2 transcend the common discourse about the use of omni-looking drone technology and narrate about the human need to contain violence in a symbolic frame, which works to carry the burden of stupidly, blunt, and unnerving realities of death and suffering as it happens.

The exhibit is designed with layered projections, soundscapes, and a dynamic interplay between the observer and the observed. The visitors introduce noise to the world of communicating machines. They introduce aberration to a static or stoic world of the digital realm. In Radius: The Gaze Beyond Vision, the installation moves beyond traditional visual frames, employing sound as a vehicle for transmitting images and interpreting the drone's perspective. What does the drone "see," and how might it "think" in the space it occupies? These questions lie at the core of this work, where the focus shifts from mere observation to active engagement with the drone’s potential cognitive realm inside a pneumatic, structure that is all-encompassing, inflatable, and stabilized by pressured air.

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ON VIEW >

Rodrigo Valenzuela
MUECAS
‍25.02 - 28.03 2025

Galerie Kandlhofer, Brucknerstraße 4,
1040 Vienna
www.kandlhofer.com
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Photo Credits: Manuel Carreon Lopez
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‍Text:
Bringing together works from his New Land and Garabatos series, along with the ceramic Muecas sculptures, this exhibition continues Valenzuela’s critical examination of the socio-political landscapes that shape human experience. His research-driven practice often focuses on the struggles of labourers, the persistence of historical injustices, and the potential for collective resistance. By isolating familiar forms and placing them in unexpected contexts, Valenzuela challenges the framework of collective memory, creating a compelling narrative around power and the ongoing struggle for agency.
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Both his photographs and sculptures operate through translation - of medium, appearance, and context - blurring distinctions and allowing elements to dissolve into one another. His Garabatos series, in particular, presents ambiguous sculptural installations within interior spaces, unsettling the possibilities and limitations of non-verbal communication. Organic and industrial structures are pieced together to create compositions reminiscent of makeshift stages or abandoned machinery. This series stems from Valenzuela’s research into Latin American subcultures and music scenes during the dictatorship years, following Operation Condor - a CIA-led initiative aimed at suppressing socialist movements in South America by coordinating military regimes. Using archival images, magazines, and films, Valenzuela isolates bodily gestures, transforming these documentary sources into a distinct visual language. By recreating and photographing these movements as abstract sculptures, he conjures a reflection on collective memory and the visceral expression of suppressed voices.
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His Muecas series features white ceramic sculptures cast from his own hands, posed in contorted, ambiguous gestures and mounted onto aluminium pipes and metal armatures. Inscribed on their surfaces are marks — chiselled dots, lines, and shapes - suggesting the presence of an unspoken or developing language. For Valenzuela, these gestures embody a "motion of desire," forming a lexicon of human expression that often goes unnoticed. By framing these works as attempts to communicate from a place of powerlessness, the Muecas contribute to a broader vocabulary of struggle and resilience.
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The New Land series examines historical narratives such as Manifest Destiny and the Homestead Acts - policies that fuelled westward expansion while reinforcing white European-American supremacy. Created using a labour-intensive toner transfer process on raw canvas, these landscapes reference the bureaucratic burdens endured by immigrants, becoming metaphors for resilience and resistance. Incorporating photographs taken in the Atacama Desert in Chile and the American West, Valenzuela layers these images with hand-drawn elements and acrylic paint.
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Valenzuela’s work constructs a powerful meditation on power, memory, and resistance. He underscores the intersections of history, identity, and labour, prompting viewers to reconsider the forces that shape social and political realities. In his practice, he blends archival aesthetics with the dynamism of performance, subverting the traditional role of galleries and museums as spaces of canonised beauty and knowledge. Instead, he advocates for a more egalitarian and intuitive approach - one that prioritises lived experience and bodily wisdom over institutional authority.
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ON VIEW >

Olga Migliaressi-Phoca
DIRTY DANCING
‍14.02. – 29.03.2025

Gabelsbergerstraße 51
80333 Munich
Tel 49 89 51 11 00 15
gallery@brittarettberg.com

brittarettberg.com
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Images: Courtesy Britta Rettberg & Olga Migliaressi-Phoca / Photos: Dirk Tacke

Text: Glowing pink in an Eighties font that’s uncannily familiar with cinematic nostalgia and teen romance, the word DIRTY’s heavy associations are remixed with levity as the rose-tinted aura of its rendering in neon spills glowing through the galleries with unsettling implied commentary. Quoting from the 1987 film about social norms and abortion written by Eleanor Bergstein, this headline work of Olga Migliaressi-Phoca’s exhibition Dirty Dancing immediately locates us within the realm of pop culture — a high-low field in which life meets illusion — a shiny man-made world beset with human flaws and endless folly: the dance.

Through a new multi-series sequence of signature mirror works, Migliaressi-Phoca takes us into a disorientating hall of unanswerable questions and irresolvable contradictions using the powerful punk and postmodern tool of collage. By rearranging everyday symbols into her mirrored frames, the artist repurposes well-known signifiers with meanings of her own. The established language of every sign she employs, whether actual words or the visual language of fonts and branding, is understood yet undermined by its new context within her work. Sometimes this directly generates instant new meanings, and at others it conjures more of an unnerving sense of something strangely familiar yet inexplicably different. Implications are layered and provocations slanted via the nuance-layered prism of these witty, ironic compositions.

Migliaressi-Phoca quotes from across the broad spectrum of a globalised mainstream iconography we all know. She co-opts the luxury branding of Chanel and Givenchy, the headline font of Vogue magazine, and the tourism slogan “I love New York”. Chanel becomes Change; Vogue becomes Vague. These twists both confront how much meaning we all inadvertently invest into brand associations and encapsulate how language itself works. Beyond being amusing, this pithy wordplay functions by revealing the absurdity of established social priorities, undermining the gloss of projection that gives luxury its mirage and lends cultural symbols their power.

While actioning their important business of reflecting and re-inflecting the cultural tropes within society, these artworks nevertheless possess their own unapologetic glamour, employing the endless seduction of the mirror and eliciting the same sense of desire that’s cultivated by the iconography they quote and reframe. The CHANGE triptych proposes a triple structure for reflection in relation to the human units of self, family, and society. Each of the three works within it features the word Change in the Chanel logo font, against hand-drawn illustrations of concentric circles, a single house, and multiple rooftops, overlaid onto gold and silver. The simultaneously personal and vast notion of change spirals outwards from our introspective private experience, through the intimate containers of our homes, and into the wider world. We grasp that change must come from within through the kind of lean concision possessed by the most potent of pop art works as the trio embodies just how moving the artist’s aphoristic method can be.

Pop culture’s pervasive language is a milieu so familiar to us that its symbols are akin to contemporary gods; ever present and revered. Migliaressi-Phoca’s diptych of twin works SOMETIMES YOU WIN and SOMETIMES YOU LOSE, borrows the Nike swoosh back from the brand’s adoption of the ancient goddess’ name from Greek mythology in a pair representing success and failure. The artist’s rendering of the swoosh here mimics, respectively in each piece, a smile and a scowl, riffing on the theme of success in sport and in life, Nike being the goddess of victory. The lightness of the work — its illusively mirrored surface, quotidian insignia and low-tech organic paint patterns, appears casual, counterintuitively serving to emphasise the richness of its comment as it echoes through the gallery and subsequently in the mind.

To make her mirror works, the artist employs professional glass techniques, creating a new patina across each mirrored panel using acids and a dose of chance, before scratching and engraving the glass to paint the iconography. Although varying, each piece is produced over about a month, sometimes sitting for longer as the series around it develops. Their handmade character seems to draw out the sympathetic texture and human vulnerability wrapped shinily in each work’s symbolic adage.

Today’s exhibition looks both backwards and forwards in time, referencing and reworking historical and timeless symbols that echo through our collective psyche, while also indicating ahead to a future in which we might wonder how much has really shifted. In new iterations for her VAGUE COVER STORIES sequence under the pertinent title THE FUTURE IS VAGUE, the artist makes this most clear by quoting from the now-dated but much-loved Flower Power movement, as Allen Ginsberg called it. Lyrics of popular songs from the Sixties and Seventies resurface tweaked, throwing their newly warped statements out into the ether where they hang liminally between bitter irony and resiliant idealism: The Beatles wonder, “Is love all you need?”, while the romance of David Bowie’s “‘Heroes’, just for one day” is amplified by its everlasting relevance. These poignant phrases are the cover stories inscribed across giant issues of Vague magazine dated 2067 and 2077, each 100 years after the iconic songs were released. Bob Marley’s “No cry” on the 2074 issue vibrates densely with the endless depths of female suffering described in the original song, speaking to the empathetic feminism and relatable narrative foregrounded by the original Dirty Dancing film. As she synthesizes these vintage references into searing works for today, Migliaressi-Phoca confronts some of humanity’s unavoidable truths, smoothly using humour, surface and depth to bear witness with a wink.

Text by Kasia Maciejowska

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