Trufa / Ensamble Estudio
via: ArchDaily
images: Roland Halbe
When addressing me, a small boy, he used the plural of the second person--not in the stiff way servants did, and not as my mother would do in moments of intense tenderness, when my temperature had gone up or I had lost a tiny train-passenger (as if the singular were too thin to bear the load of her love), but with the polite plainness of one man speaking to another whom he does not know well enough to use "thou."
link: Nabokov's Speak, Memory
Riverbed
Riverbed -- Olafur Eliasson at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Denmark)
images: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
All empty squares
"It’s tempting to read these formidable tensions and turbulences into the paintings: to convert the grid into a closet or cell, a system of traps or an endless maze. But Martin was adamant that personal experience had nothing to do with her works. In her copious writing she was formidably insistent about what meanings they did and didn’t contain: they did not embrace ideas, and certainly not personal emotions or biographical elements. She was passionately opposed to critical readings, going so far as to cancel a prestigious retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 1980 because they insisted on a catalogue. The paintings were the thing: the paintings and the sublime responses they engendered in the viewer."
"Over the years, a surprising number of Martin’s paintings have been vandalised. One viewer used as their weapon an ice cream cone. Another attacked with green crayon, while at a show in Germany, nationalists hurled rubbish. The grids in particular seem to attract embellishment. Martin herself thought it was narcissistic, a kind of horror vacui. “You know,” she said ruefully, “people just can’t stand that those are all empty squares.” "
link: Agnes Martin: the artist mystic who disappeared into the desert
images: Zwirner & Wirth
"The exhibition begins where Meessen’s research for this project first began: an investigation of experiments carried out by the French psychologist André Ombredane in the Belgian Congo. Meessen came across films from the 1950s documenting Ombredane’s experiments carried out in the Congo, including some intended to test “the mental level of black folk.” Taking these films and the questions they raise as his starting point, he developed a larger inquiry into the role of abstraction in the development of both Modernism and colonial history. The title Patterns for (Re)cognition obliquely references the tests that measure the brain’s capacity to identify and memorize abstract shapes, hinting that the operation of recognition (by whom, for whom, and according to whose criteria?) needs to be questioned."
Patterns for (Re)cognition -- Vincent Meessen / Thela Tendu // via Contemporary Art Daily
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