Sampling at the Contemporary Arts Center

Be ready to spend a few hours at the Contemporary Arts Center to discover or rediscover twenty-four artists from far places like China, South Africa or closer to home Louisiana, gathered for Prospect.3: Notes for Now. The works were selected by Frank Sirmans, the Artistic Director of the biennial (now officially a triennial), due to their power to incite a reflection on "the everydayness and the strangeness of the world around us, to bridge fissures in the past-present and to imagine the possibilities of an interconnected future".
The three floors at the CAC are filled with paintings, videos, photographs, installations, and the visit can start or end anywhere. Each artist is assigned an area, with the exception of Analia Saban whose works are randomly dispersed throughout the exhibition. I started in the oval room where Yun-Fei Ji's wall paintings depict a modern tale of population displacement and urbanization on a backdrop of droughts, starvation, pollution and political corruption. On the second floor, two geometric abstract painters set across each other initiate a conversation. McArthur Binion's paintings are characterized by monotonous colors and labor intensive repetitive marks on the canvas. They represent erasure and rebirth through delicate compositions, legacies of the menial work.  Hayal Pozanti on the other hand, transforms the dullness of technology into a new language of organic shapes, bringing life and fantasy to a boring reality. Following these, Douglas Bourgeois's figurative paintings seem easy to interpret. Like a magician, he transports common souls into a perfect world of artificial happiness and transforms their dreary surroundings into fantastic landscapes. Next, Sophie Lvoff and Lisa Sigal are focusing on the local scene, respectively with photographs and through architectural adventures.
Tank, 2014, Glenn Kaino's installation is attracting visitors with corals in clear water glowing in a bluish light. A lengthy wall text describes the work and provides a cue to the title. The cumbersome technology required to keep the corals alive undermines the project which is focused on the oceans' pollution, especially by the military, a subject somewhat off the exhibition's theme. The show gets back on track with Joe Ray's work, a thought provoking juxtaposition of symbols followed by the images from Thomas Joshua Cooper, a photographer of light.
Among the four videos displayed (two on second and two on the third floor) Mohamed Bourouissa's Temps Morts, 2009, held my attention with its depiction of grey, fuzzy, pixelated Paris's outskirts, reflecting the malaise of marginalized populations. On the same floor, one can see Felliniesque photographs from Pieter Hugo, staged scenes by Pushpamala N., the Cyndy Sherman of India, or the installation from Manal Al Dowayan, a historical view of a culture born from the oil boom.
Leaving through the first floor, one cannot miss the installation from Lucia Koch, giving a new outlook on the street through colored glass. The works selected to represent Theaster Gates in the hall include Civil Tapestry-4, 2011, an accumulation of fire hoses previously used during civil unrest, and two monochrome paintings made with tar and rubber playing with the light reflections.
The number of works and artists make such exhibition challenging for the viewer. Political with Charles Gaines, poetic with Thomas Cooper, feminist with Pushpamala N., epic with Yun Fei-Ji..., but one realizes that the works have been selected carefully to fulfill the goals clearly stated by the curator.

photographs by the author:

"The Family Drone", 2014, Hayal Pozanti
"TC/0168.13 (Anthropophagst Wading in the Artibonite River", 2014, Firelei
"Mood Disorder", 2014, Lucia Koch

P.3, P.3+ at the Saint-Claude Art District

The pink labels from Prospect.3, Prospect.3+ and even P.9 (see photograph at the end of the post!) are also spread in the Saint-Claude Art District. Regardless, my monthly tour included all the galleries, as usual: Antenna, The Front, Barrister's Gallery...

I arrived just on time to see the performance from Robyn Leroy-Evans at The Front. A slumped mannequin and a couch were the only props under the trees in the gallery's backyard. Was I early? The conversations faded and we waited, sitting in rows of chairs, gazing at the red dress rolled up around the upper half of the mannequin. The silence was interrupted by an occasional dog's bark. It was a quiet Sunday afternoon. Was the artist late? An imperceptible quiver livened up the dummy's belly and grew to a regular, deep breathing. One leg rose slowly followed by the second leg. They looked like the appendages of a strange creature, floating gently, anchored to a red inert piece. After a few variations, they came back to rest. This was the end of an hypnotic, fascinating, half-hour performance, Body Sculpture II. In her practice, Leroy-Evans is not only the actor, she is also the eye behind the camera. Using the self-timer, she photographs herself wearing bright clothes from head to toes, sculpting her body in different poses to become an attractive flower, a venomous plant or else, surrounded by nature. Her works with those of  Naomi Shersty and Ryn Wilson are displayed in one room for Oppositions and Parallels. The exhibition brings together the three photographers who share "a mutual fascination with the relationship between environment and self". The adjacent area is filled with photographs from Edna Lanieri, incorporated in two new works, ŚuĐina and Ricordare. They represent a ritualistic approach to death, heavily influenced by the artist's Italian roots. Leaving the gallery, Lee Deegard's installation is a reflection on destruction, rebirth, healing, through nature. Her photographed landscapes are connected by yellow lines filled with energy and life. They meet on the grey floor of the gallery which alludes to an interstate, a scar left by human intervention on the natural world.

On St Roch Avenue, Staple Goods offers a one woman show with Suspension of Disbelief , a display of Cynthia Scott’s latest work. Forget carving, chiseling or pedestals, Scott's sculptures float in space and invade the gallery like alien ships, each carrying a different message. Scott gets her supplies at the Dollar Store and creates brightly colored compositions to deliver somber news. Following her previous body of work related to the oil spill disaster in the Gulf, this time, she is addressing a wider audience, voicing her concerns about our planet’s future with six sculptures hanging from the ceiling. Race relationship, transgenic food, food supply, overpopulation, she tackles grave subjects with wit and humor. For example, the transgenic apples fall to the ground below a dead canary, the doll-size pink gown is surrounded by pink kitchen sponges, black and white king cake babies are piled up in a half earth globe. Scott's message is simple and clear. She does not have answers, but her work keeps raising burning issues.



At the occasion of Prospect.3, the University of New Orleans-St. Claude Art Gallery is hosting The Propeller Group with Christopher Myers. The video from The Propeller Group titled The Living Need Light, And The Dead Need Music, 2014, is about funeral practices in Vietnam. The scenes have been selected carefully to a point of craftiness. In parallel, Christopher Myers presents Shrine, an installation which includes spotless musicians' uniforms and shiny modified instruments that will never be played. The point of the project is to find common funeral practices between New Orleans and Saigon, "two cities, two cultures mirroring each other but worlds apart". The artists could have documented grief, emotions on both sides and their expressions through music and common rituals.

Gentrification...not yet

photographs by the author:                                                                                                 

"Body Sculpture II", Robin Leroy-Evans                                                                  

View of "Suspension of Disbelief" from Cynthia Scott at the Staple Goods     gallery,                                                                                                               

View of the exhibition at the UNO-St. Claude Art Gallery                         

Abandoned house on  St. Claude Avenue                                                       

On my way, I saw this venue on St Claude Avenue, a reminder of the area's frail recovery.

Beyond Reality

Colored marbles shine on a dark blue to black background, the largest surrounded by an almost perfect circle of smaller ones, in a carefully staged composition. Every details of the magnified objects are represented with minutia, including tiny speckles of air bubbles caught in the clear glass, bright dots of light glaring on the surface or curvy shadows reflecting on a mirror. These subtleties would not be detectable if one was looking at the real things, but the viewer is looking at an enlarged copy of a photograph, painted with oil on canvas.
Cat's Eye and the Best of  'Em, 1993, from Charles Bell is the introduction to Photorealism: The Sydney and Walda Besthoff Collection, an exhibition taking place at the New Orleans Museum of Art, dedicated to an art form which developed in the late sixties.  Gathering artists who use diverse techniques and never met, lacking a manifesto, photorealism is not considered an art movement. The word was coined by the art dealer Louis Meisel in 1969 to describe a new style born from photography. He also established a definition for the term which includes five criteria. The first and foremost is "using a camera and photographs to gather information". More than seventy five works from the first, second and third generation of photorealist artists have been selected for the show.
The first section Reflections of America, includes works from the first generation of American artists like Charles Bell, Robert Bechtle, John Baeder, Richard Estes, Ron Kleemann and more. The themes are centered around Americana in the sixties: diners, gas stations, neon signs, cars, trains... Each artist is represented by several paintings which highlight their style like Estes's reflections in storefronts, Bell's toys and pinball machines or Baeder's diners. The erasure of all signs of life in the compositions is remarkable. The streets are clean, the buildings are flawless and the shiny cars or motorcycles have never been used. The works depict a perfect middle class world, a distorted reality fit for an advertisement. Even Randy Dudley's industrial landscapes made in the late 90's or 2000's are sanitized. The next area, Idyllic Landscapes, involves a younger generation of international artists who embraced photorealism in their practice. The paintings of Piazza San Marco, 2010, from Raphaella Spence or Le Pont au Change, 2006, from Bertrand Meniel look like detailed postcards representing lifeless scenes including tourists. The Western landscapes from Richard McLean bring us back to America with several views of stereotyped pastoral Western landscapes filled with cowboy hats, horses and ranches. Across, several periods of Don Eddy's work are displayed with a store window, a paradisiac island and several of his latest airbrushed landscapes spread on multiple canvasses. He is followed by the English artist Ben Johnson whose practice focuses on architecture and the reconstruction of reality, piece by piece, rejecting human interference in his compositions.
Chuck Close's portraits are taking over the last area dedicated to The Human Figure. Since the late sixties, the artist has concentrated on the genre perfecting a unique technique to represent himself or his friends. In the same area, So Yeon, 2012, from Hyung Jin Park clashes with Close's pixelated renditions. His image of  a half-face creates mystery while the unnatural softness of the skin, the creases of the lips, the replication of the smallest details, reflects a search for human perfection. This is also DeAndrea's goal with his Seated Blonde, 1982, the only sculpture included in the exhibition. In Sweet Tooth, 1988, D. J. Hall catches the happiness of the moment through the commercial smile of a mother-daughter pair surrounded by sun, sand and sea. Yigal Ozeri veers toward romanticism in his composition Untitled: Megan and Olga in the Park, 2010 and Ben Schonzeit toward advertisement in Honey Tangerines, 1974, and Aubergine, 2009.
Due to the number and variety of artists, from a younger generation like Roberto Bernardi to classic masters like Bell or Estes, and the number of works included in the exhibition, the visitor will get a historical perspective of photorealism.
Along the visit, one realizes that photorealism is not only realist, it is also idealist in its search for perfection.

photographs by the author:

"Tony's (Colorado Springs)", 1980, John Bader
"M. Raphael Silver", 1975, Don Eddy
"Seated Blonde", 1982, John DeAndrea
"Cat's Eye and the Best of 'Em", 1993, Charles Bell

From Gauguin to Calan, P.3 at the NOMA

The visit for Prospect.3 should start at the New Orleans Museum of Art, on the second floor, where the visitor can find the nexus of the biennial, Paul Gauguin's painting Under the Pandanus, 1891. The title of Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, 1897, another work from Gauguin, would better summarize "the search" which is going to propel the visitors around New Orleans in the next few months. Gauguin is found next to Degas in the gallery. The two artists mingled while in Paris and, upon his return from New Orleans, Degas encouraged the restless artist to move to the Crescent City. Gauguin ended up in Tahiti and even further, the Marquesas Islands, in his search for exoticism and himself. Degas reported to the dealer Ambroise Vollard: "I advised him to go to New Orleans, but he decided it was too civilized. He had to have people around him with flowers on their heads and rings in their noses before he could feel at home."
The next P.3 artist, Tarsila do Amaral is represented with a painting and three drawings. Upon her return from Europe, the artist traveled in Brazil with the poet Oswald de Andrade, looking for the primitive and indigenous in her country. Os Anjos, 1924, is a naive but provocative painting representing mestizos as angels. One can find the influence of Fernand Léger in the tubular bodies and of her childhood in the colors baby blue, pink, she "adored as a child". The Brazilian artist was a member of the Anthropophagic Movement, and the sketches are related to one of her most famous work, Anthropofagia, 1929.
Jeffrey Gibson's search translates into a dichotomy in his works. From Choctaw and Cherokee descent, he "modernizes" traditional material like raw hide, beads, mixing them with fluorescent light or metal, and in the process westernizes the American Indian culture. He is represented by half a dozen iconic works appropriately displayed next to the golden cabin from Will Ryman, titled  America, 2013, part of the permanent collection.
Two abstract expressionist landscapes from Ed Clark and one of his oval paintings are next to a work from Joan Mitchell belonging to the permanent collection. The american artists became friends in Paris. Mitchell, who lived in France most her adult life, meets the criteria for P.3. In one of his essays, John Ashbery states: "she voluntarily became an apatride, not an expatriate". Alma W. Thomas did not choose to leave her birthplace. She was uprooted during her childhood from her native Georgia to Washington, D.C. with her family, to flee the racial violence. In the three paintings selected for P.3, she depicts nature with her characteristic brushstrokes and vivid colors. She was a member of the Washington Color School.  
Huguette Calan, another female artist, was born in Lebanon, taught in France and is currently living in California. Her body-landscapes are filled with sensuality and poetry.
The paintings from Frederick Brown are first and last, decking the Great Hall. Musicians have been selected among his portraits which include folk heroes, religious figures and more. Music is a dear theme in New Orleans, however, I could not find the link with P.3.

At first, the Prospect.3 exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art seems spotty, but after some consideration, the works embedded in the permanent collection offer a platform to look at the landscape from Asher Durand or the boxes from Joseph Cornell with new eyes. This is what the biennial is also about.






photographs by the author:

"Os Anjos", 1924, Tarsila do Amaral
"Quiver", 2012, Jeffrey Gibson
"Sunrise", 1973, Huguette Calan

Dazzling, Newcomb Art Gallery

 Un Monumento às Fantasias Descartadas ( A Monument to Discarded Fantasies) from Andrea Fraser is a festive introduction to the Prospect.3 show at the Newcomb Art Gallery on the Uptown Tulane campus. The site specific work is an accumulation of left over beads, baubles, clothes, feathers, garlands from the Rio Carnival and the heap of abandoned objects instills melancholy. Assuming it is intentional, the Christmas tree shaped composition refers not only to Mardi Gras but also to the quasi secular celebration taking place two months before. However, the pile of shiny, decorative, lifeless objects feels contrived. Soiled, crushed, shattered trinkets would bring spontaneity and genuineness to the installation.
Monir Farmanfarmaian's works shimmer along the walls, surrounding the center piece. The geometric wall sculptures ally the sobriety of minimalist shapes and the richness from the glitter to reach a perfect mixture of Islamic inspired motives and minimalist influence, defying all categorization. Farmanfarmaian has perfected the techniques of cut mirrors, mosaics and reverse glass painting to create the mainly monochrome, silvery works, activated by the viewer's reflection: a successful amalgam of East  and West.
In keeping with her quest, Ebony Patterson fills a room with a new body of works created for P.3. Mixing paint, beads, glitter, flowery wallpaper, she stages black bodies lying in a lush nature or overtaken by raucous celebrations. The human form dissolves in the luxurious vegetation or the party's decorations. Primal calls lead to Mardi Gras festivities or a search for paradise in a communion with nature. Paterson keeps us guessing and wandering in her celebratory landscapes.


Black is for funerals. According to Hew Locke, black is also for parades. In his site specific installation The Nameless, mythical heroes drawn with cords and beads on a starry background, come alive on the four walls of the room, encircling the visitor. Referring to our collective memory, childhood's nightmares or fairy tales, the overpowering figures (about twice my size) are a mixture of symbols, cultural and historical references like the demon with angel's wings or the Medieval warrior riding a lion. In a new world, the pageantry of semi-gods brandishes Kalashnikovs, the symbol of modern weaponery.

Each artist is presented with a concise informative wall text and if their works are influenced by diverse backgrounds, the curator found a common discussion.The exhibition  is a reference to a 1959 show organized at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Totems not Taboo, about the dichotomy of objects. 
Flawless, dazzling!


photographs by the author:

"Un Monumento ás Fantasias Descartadas" ( A Monument to Discarded Fantasies), Andrea Fraser
with on each side, wall sculptures from Monir Farmanfarmaian
"...shortly after 8- beyond the bladez", Ebony Patterson, 2014
"The Nameless", detail, Hew Locke

Savoring Prospect.3

After a long week-end of parties, galas, talks, for the opening of Prospect.3, it is time to look back or ...forward. Blogs, newspapers' articles, interviews, all eyes were on New Orleans the past few days. Groups of visitors came trailing curators, crowds gathered at the Ashe Cultural Arts Center to see Kerry James Marshall's Storefront, walked along the river to get a glimpse of Tavares Strachan's barge floating on the dark waters and selfies went on Facebook. Many looked official wearing their pink P.3 tag. But who had time to appreciate fifty-eight artists with works located in more than fifteen locations? This does not account for the P3+ venues and satellite shows. I was among the first visitors at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art to see Basquiat on the Bayou with a reservation from 10 till 10:30 on Saturday, then crossed the street to look at the works from more than twenty artists at the Contemporary Art Center. My next stop was at the New Orleans Museum of Art and  on the  way back, the Newcomb Art Gallery on the Tulane campus. Add a visit at the McKenna Museum of African American Art followed by a walk through the Joan Mitchell Center Gallery... Exhaustion was around the corner.
After this gluttonous start, I feel like savoring Prospect.3 over the next few months. I will delight in writing about each venue, an ambitious project, but this is how to appreciate the artists, the Biennale, the city. After all, I have all the time... I live in New Orleans, and I belong!

photographs by the author:

"Tank", 2014, Glen Kaino
"Untitled (Cadmium)", 1984, Jean-Michel Basquiat

Ed Clark at Prospect.3

Edward Clark was born in 1926 in the Storyville section of New Orleans. After living a few years in Baton Rouge, he moved with his family to Chicago.

In 1943, at the age of 17, he left high school and enlisted in the Air Force during the height of WWII. Upon his return, he studied at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1947 till 1951 and the following year at L' Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. While abroad, he was profoundly influenced by the tachist Nicolas de Staël. His early works are characterized by his unique push-broom technique and the monumental scale of his paintings.
After spending five years in Paris, he came back to the United States and lived in New York City where in 1957 he exposed a shaped canvas at the Brata Gallery, an innovation at the time. The first known of the sort was made in 1968 during his sojourn in France. He experimented with different techniques during his career like working on paper with dry pigments, inspired by the "pouring sand" technique of the Pueblo tribe of the American Southwest.

Now 88 years old, he was recently featured in a New York Times articles and states: "No matter what  I do, there's not a day that I am not an artist."
During Prospect.3, his work can be seen at the NOMA.

                                      

"Louisiana Red", 2004, Ed Clark

(photograph by the author)

Basquiat at Prospect.3

Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1960 from an Haitian father and a Puerto Rican mother. Early on, he visited museums with his mother and following an accident in which he was severely injured, she bought him the Gray's Anatomy book to distract him. Unfortunately, she suffered from a severe mental illness and was committed to a mental institution. From then on, Basquiat was raised by his father and his parents separated. He ran away at 15 years old and was eventually banned from home, living in the streets and supporting himself with small jobs like selling T-shirts. He never had a formal training but started to draw at an early age and did not graduate from high school.  He started to spray paint buildings in 1976 signing his graffiti .SAMO (same old shit), the project went on for two years and was featured in the Village Voice. In 1979, SAMO IS DEAD, a graffiti on the walls of Soho buildings announced the end of the project.

Basquiat by then was becoming famous, appearing on television shows. He also formed the rock band Test Pattern (renamed Gray later) and performed in nightclubs. In 1980, under the umbrella of the Annina Nosei gallery he had a first solo show followed by an article in Artforum in 1981 which brought his works to the art world's attention. He was affiliated with Neo-Expressionism. In 1982, he traveled to Italy, then worked for Larry Gagosian during a stay in Venice, CA, far from his NYC roots and friends and from 1983 till 1985 worked with Andy Warhol on series of collaborative paintings. But the artist became more isolated and depressed, overtaken by his heroin addiction. The death of  Andy Warhol in 1987 precipitated a down spiral of Basquiat's life who died in August 1988 of a drug overdose. Julian Schnabel portraits the artist in the film "Basquiat" in 1996. An exhibition of works from Jean-Michel Basquiat will take place during Prospect.3 at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans.  The Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris presented a major retrospective of his work in 2010.

                                                   "Zydeco", 1984, Jean-Michel Basquiat


photograph by the author

Escape at the UNO Gallery

Kyle Bravo: Drawing on the Wall, the latest exhibition at the UNO Lakefront Campus Gallery, starts with a site specific work, a giant self-portrait, iconic for the artist who has livened up diverse spaces in New Orleans in the past, most recently The Front in the Saint-Claude Art District. Three massive white pedestals or separation boxes become a background for the cartoonish personage outlined in black, dressed in blue pants, loose T-shirt and wearing tennis shoes. Childish, "cool", he brings us on another adventure. This time, the playful hero takes a big jump, floating in space, disappears, sucked into another dimension. The last panel is white, empty. The rest of the story is on the other side where we can see him fall, head first, like a modern Icarus without wings, his  escape thwarted by... the laws of gravity.
Further, Kyle Bravo depicts landscapes of lines arranged in plaid like motives, in secondary warm yellowish colors or primary red and blue. The works are flat, without visual effects unlike Op art, but create an overwhelming, suffocating illusion of confinement. The obsessive pieces provide no way out, and the eyes cannot find a focal point to rest on.  One can take a step back and look at it as a plaid version of works from the Pattern and Decoration movement well represented in New Orleans by Robert Gordy.
Two portraits complete the exhibition, digitized drawings rendered in a larger scale, the male and female sitting on opposite side of a skiff surround the viewer who becomes the subject they are both drawing....unless they are drawing each other.
The piece again conveys a sense of confinement and could refer to the inescapability of life or loneliness, the personage appear so close in the same boat, but so distant with their lowered gaze.
The exhibition which appears lighthearted at first gains in depth as it progresses, bringing a thread to a conversation which includes also time. The drawings on the wall will disappear covered with white paint at the end of the show.
"A drawing is simply a line going for a walk." said Paul Klee...
and more adventures with Kyle Bravo.

photographs by the author

Music and Visual Art, two artists at Prospect.3

Terry Atkins

Terry Roger Adkins ( 1953-2014) was born in Washington, D.C., into a musical household. His father sang and played the organ, his mother was an amateur clarinetist and pianist. As a young man, Mr. Adkins planned to be a musician, but found himself drawn increasingly to visual art. He earned a B.S. in printmaking from Fisk University in Nashville (1975), followed by an M.S. in the field from Illinois State University (1977) and an M.F.A. in sculpture from the University of Kentucky (1979). A sculptor and saxophonist, his interest in music permeated the conceptual artist's career as illustrated in his genre-blurring pieces, combinations of visual art, spoken-word performance, video and live music. At his death, he was Professor of Fine Arts in the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania.
Early in his practice, he collected found objects with “an animistic approach to materials where you feel that they have more than just physical mass. There’s a spirit in them."
His sculptures were often inspired by, and dedicated to, historical figures, from musical heroes like blues singer Bessie Smith, guitarist Jimi Hendrix or composer Ludwig van Beethoven to the writer and activist W. E. B. Du Bois and the abolitionist John Brown.

He performed music throughout his career, forming the Lone Wolf Recital Corps in 1986, with which he performed widely and even forged immense, curious instruments like a set of 18-foot long horns he called arkaphones.
Atkins stated about his work: “My quest has been to find a way to make music as physical as sculpture might be, and sculpture as ethereal as music is. It’s kind of challenging to make both of those pursuits do what they are normally not able to do.”

His work is held in numerous public collections, including those of Tate Modern, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.

link to Artsy

Frederick J. Brown

Frederick J. Brown (1945-2012) was born in Greensboro, GA and grew up on Chicago's South Side surrounded by musicians like the blues men Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters who were family friends. Brown attended Chicago Vocational High School (CVS) and studied architecture. After learning the fundamentals of architecture, Brown attended Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois (SIU). Brown graduated from Southern Illinois University in 1968 with a Bachelor's degree in Art and Psychology. At SIU Brown was also an assistant instructor of art and was included in the University's 1968 group exhibition. In 1970 Brown had his first one-man show at the Illinois Bell Telephone Gallery in Chicago. During that period, he traveled to Europe and in 1970 settled in SoHo where he mingled with other artists and musicians. In 1972-1973, he directed and produced "Be Aware", a show combining visual art, dance and poetry. For a time in the 1980's he lived in China, where he taught in Beijing at the Central College of Fine Arts and Crafts, a sojourn that ended with a retrospective of his work at the Museum of the Chinese Revolution (now the National Museum of China) in Tienanmen Square. Brown's exhibition was considered a success and made him the first Western artist to exhibit his works at that venue. Furthermore, during this time Brown was the subject of a short film which aired on Chinese national television and documented his first visit.
Influenced by the German Expressionists and Abstract Expressionists like Willem de Kooning, who was his mentor for a time, the artist is best known for his hundreds of figurative portraits of jazz and blues musicians. He also produced works with religious, historical and urban themes. In 1993, Brown unveiled "the Assumption of Mary" at Xavier University of Louisiana.The painting is currently the largest religious work of art on canvas at three-stories tall. A year later Brown unveiled "the History of Art", a series of 110 paintings chronicling the progression of art through human history, through his own personal interpretation, now included in the permanent collection of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.  

 His work is represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Mo.

Brown called music “the catalyst for much of what I do” and often worked on a portrait while listening to the subject’s music.

  

Waiting for Prospect.3, four artists

Firelei Báez

Firelei Báez was born in 1980 in Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic, to Dominican and Haitian parents. She immigrated to the United States at the age of nine. Báez received a B.F.A. from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, NY, in 2004, attended the Skowhegan School Of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME, in 2008 and graduated from Hunter College, NY, with a M.F.A. in 2010. She has held residencies at The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace, The Lower East Side Print Shop and The Bronx Museum’s Artist in the Marketplace and presently lives and works in New York, NY.

Artist's Statement:

"My artwork consists of paintings, drawings and prints that regard my physical self, my personal history, and Caribbean folklore. Caribbean folklore allows for malleability in the creation of the self, but I find my status as an Afro-Latina in the United States static and limiting in comparison. In response, I try to disrupt the current system of social categorization through the creation of characters that refuse definition. As more people become multiracial, skin tone is no longer a sufficient signifier. Growing media presence and more commonplace interactions via technology in our daily lives reduce each individual to a small part of a larger demographic. I use symbolically loaded scenarios to metaphorically illustrate the multiplicities and hypocrisies that make up the current discussion about race and class within popular culture."

Ebony C Patterson

Ebony G. Patterson is a Jamaican artist born in Kingston in 1981. She has taught at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica, the Sam Fox College of Design & Visual at Washington University in St. Louis. She has taught at the University of Virginia and is currently an Assistant Professor in Painting at the University of Kentucky. She lives and works in Lexington, KY and Kingston, Jamaica.
Her work includes paintings, drawings, collages and recently she added photography, installation and performance. The female body as an object is the subject of her early works with her "Venus", a search for "beauty through the use of the grotesque but visceral, confrontational and deconstructed."
One of Patterson's most recognized body of work, is a series entitled "Gangstas for Life," which explores conceptions of masculinity within  dancehall culture and subjects related to this, like homosexuality within a predominantly homophobic culture, race, stereotypes and beauty.
 She has shown her artwork in numerous solo and private exhibitions, such as Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art, Brooklyn Museum, (2007). National Biennial, National Gallery of Jamaica,(2006,2008,2010),Ghetto Biennale , Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Rockstone and Bootheel, Real Artways, (2010) Wrestling With the Image, Museum of the Americas,(2011)

link to National Gallery of Jamaica blog


Tavares Strachan


Tavares Henderson Strachan (born in Nassau in 1979) is a contemporary, conceptual artist whose multi-media installations investigate science, technology, mythology, history, and exploration. He lives and works in New York City and Nassau, Bahamas.
Initially a painter, Strachan earned his Associate of Fine Arts degree from the College of the Bahamas in 1999. In 2000, he moved to the US to enroll in the glass department at the Rhode Island School of Design and completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 2003. Strachan went on to earn his Master of Fine Arts degree in Sculpture from Yale University in 2006. In 2006, Strachan joigned the international art scene with his piece titled "The Distance Between What We Have and What We Want" which involved a 4.5 ton block of ice from the Alaskan Artic displayed in a solar-powered freezer in the courtyard of his childhood elementary school. The work was later exhibited at Miami Art Basel and the Brooklyn Museum.
Strachan developed further the themes of exploration, displacement and the idea of pushing the body’s physical extremes, with a four-year, multimedia body of work "Orthostatic Tolerance" which documented Strachan’s experience in cosmonaut training at the Yuri Gagarin Training Center in Star City, Russia and experiments in space travel conducted in Nassau under the Bahamas Air and Space Exploration Center (BASEC), the artist’s version of NASA for his native country, with photography, video, drawing, sculpture and installation.
Last year a 20,000-square-foot overview of Strachan’s work from 2003–2011, subtitled Seen/Unseen,was presented at an undisclosed New York City location and was closed to the public. Tavares Strachan: seen/unseen is fully documented with a forthcoming catalogue, designed by Stefan Sagmeister. Strachan’s solo exhibitions include Orthostatic Tolerance: It Might Not Be Such a Bad Idea if I Never Went Home Again, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA (2010); Orthostatic Tolerance: Launching from an Infinite Distance, Grand Arts, Kansas City, MO (2010); Tavares Strachan: Orthostatic Tolerance, the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (2009); Where We Are is Always Miles Away, The Luggage Store, San Francisco, CA (2006); and The Difference Between What We Have and What We Want, Albury Sayle Primary School, Nassau, The Bahamas (2006).
In 2013, Tavares Strachan represented The Bahamas in the country’s first national pavilion at the 55th International Venice Biennale.

link to Artsy
link to Prospect.3


Antonio Vega Macotela

Antonio Vega Macoleta was born in Mexico-city, Mexico, in 1980. He attended the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas, Mexico City, Mexico and obtained his BA in 2005. In 2011 he was accepted for a residency at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
The conceptual artist worked several years with the inmates of a prison in Mexico City and set up a "time exchange project" which resulted in a Series of works called Divisa , 2006-1010, a reflection on the concept of time. He also produced series like The Ungovernables for the Second New York Triennial, at the New Museum in 2012,
He participated in several group exhibitions, the latest at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Summer 2014.

Featured at Prospect.3

Tarsila do Amaral 


Tarsila do Amaral (1886-1973) was born in Capivari, a small town in the countryside of the State of São Paulo. She grew up in a wealthy family of farmers and landowners who grew coffee and was encouraged to pursue higher education despite being a woman. As a teenager, she traveled to Spain with her parents and was noticed to have talent reproducing artworks she was exposed to.
In 1916, she studied sculpture in São Paulo with Zadig and Montavani and later drawing and painting with Alexandrino, all respected conservative teachers. In 1920, she moved to Paris and studied at the Académie Julian and with Emile Renard. Returning to São Paulo in 1922, she joined Anita Malfatti, Menotti Del Picchia, Mário de Andrade, and Oswald de Andrade modernist artists who had just organized  the Semana de Arte Moderna ("Week of Modern Art"). They became  the Grupo dos Cinco and their goal was to integrate Brazilian culture into modern art. Now known simply as Tarsila, the artist was described as "the Brazilian painter who best achieved Brazilian aspirations for nationalistic expression in a modern style."
During a brief return to Paris in 1923, Tarsila was exposed to Cubism, Futurism, and Expressionism while studying with André Lhote, Fernand Léger, and Albert Gleizes. European artists were also finding inspiration in African and primitive cultures and Tarsila applied the same model in her practice, integrating her own country's indigenous forms with modern styles. While in Paris, she painted one of her most famous works, A Negra (1923). The painting marks the beginning of her synthesis of avant-garde aesthetics and Brazilian subject matter. She returned to Brazil at the end of 1923, traveled with the poet Oswald de Andrade and illustrated his book of poems entitled Pau Brasil published in 1924. She also made drawings of the various places they visited gathering ideas for future paintings. During that same period, she rediscovered the colors she "had adored as a child" and the hues became more vibrant on her canvas. Her initial painting from this period was E.C.F.B.(Estrada de Ferro Central do Brasil), (1924) which is a reflection of her interest in industrialization and its impact on society.
Tarsila married Andrade in 1926 and they traveled  throughout Europe. She also had her first exhibition in Paris and the positive reviews highlighted her use of bright colors and tropical images.
While in Paris, she was exposed to Surrealism and upon her return to Brazil, Tarsila began a new period where she began incorporating surrealist themes into her nationalistic art. She was in sync with the artistic movement in Brazil which strove to appropriate European styles and influences and developped an art typical of Brazil. Collaborating closely with Andrade, her first painting representative of this period Abaporu (1928), "Man Who Eats" was featured on the cover of Andrade's manifesto Anthropophagite Manifesto, which called Brazilians to create their own style and culture.  Another famous work, Antropofagia made the following year was in the same vein. In 1929, the artist had her first solo exhibition in Brazil and in 1930, she participated in exhibitions in New York and Paris. That same year saw the end of Tarsila's marriage and her collaboration with Andrade.
In 1931, she traveled to the Soviet Union where her works were exhibited at the Museum of Occidental Art in Moscow. There, she discovered the poverty of the Russian people and their struggle to survive and upon her return in Brazil in 1932, incorporated social themes in her work  like in Segundo Class (1931) which features impoverished Russian men, women and children. She was even emprisoned for a month, suspected of communist sympathies.
In 1938,Tarsila finally settled permanently in São Paulo where she spent the remainder of her career painting Brazilian people and landscapes. She also wrote a weekly arts and culture column for the Diario de São Paulo, which continued until 1952.
Her legacy includes 230 paintings, hundreds of drawings, illustrations, prints, murals, and five sculptures, but more important is her influence on the direction of Latin American art.The Amaral Crater on Mercury is named after her."


Lucia Koch

link to Prospect.3 blog 
link to the artist's website 
link to Artsy
link to biography (Christopher Grimes Gallery) 
link to statement 



Remy Jungerman

Remy Jungerman (1959) was born in Suriname of mixed parents with roots in Europe and Africa. He first studied art at the Academy for Higher Arts and Cultural Studies, Paramaribo (Suriname) then after moving to Amsterdam in 1990, at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. He presently lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Going back to his Afro-Surinamese-Dutch roots has brought him to find inspiration in his trans-cultural experience which he is expressing through his collages, sculptures and installations and art has become his "vehicle for considering what it means to be a global citizen, someone believing in the potential of art to raise social consciousness and inspire cultural awareness".

Staging traditional materials and objects in different contexts, he challenges the established notions of their representation within Western society. "By using the three-dimensional cube, grids and other geometric forms and combining them with traditional objects, this gives me the opportunity to question modernism from a different angle. By doing this, I create a reference to the traditional and the modern."

 Since his first group exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Jungerman has participated in several solo and group exhibitions worldwide.
His work has been acquired by various institutions and private collectors worldwide among which: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, MMKA Arnhem, Museum Het Domein Sittard, Zeeuws Museum Middelburg, ARC Collection Amsterdam, Droog, NY USA, the Rennies Collection Vancouver.
Private Collections in the USA, Canada, Suriname, Cuba, Brazil, Great Britain, Spain, Italy, Germany, France, Belgium and The Netherlands.

link to website
link to interview

The objects/elements never die, symbolically, in the artwork. By using these elements in contemporary art, they do change from their religious meaning but the new context might serve to enrich the way we look at them – allowing us to see them from a different perspective. Even traditional religious forms are changing over time because of their flexibility, especially Diaspora Afro-traditional religions and their attributes. - See more at: http://arcthemagazine.com/arc/2014/05/inspired-from-within-an-interview-with-remy-jungerman/#sthash.ogGz0iFs.dpuf

The online exhibition I curated for the March 2014 edition of the Dutch art magazine Mister Motley gave me the opportunity to see that not much has shifted in my ties to my rich Surinamese heritage, in the aesthetics I gained from the surroundings in which I grew up and in what I have learned at art schools. - See more at: http://arcthemagazine.com/arc/2014/05/inspired-from-within-an-interview-with-remy-jungerman/#sthash.ogGz0iFs.dpuf

With creating artworks I have the possibility and freedom to use objects and materials from a traditional context – mixing them to give other aesthetic meanings. By using the three-dimensional cube, grids and other geometric forms and combining them with traditional objects, this gives me the opportunity to question modernism from a different angle. By doing this, I create a reference to the traditional and the modern. - See more at: http://arcthemagazine.com/arc/2014/05/inspired-from-within-an-interview-with-remy-jungerman/#sthash.ogGz0iFs.dpuf

  In 2005 I returned to Suriname to bury my father. While there, I visited the ancestor altar of the Maroon heritage of my mother – I was born from mixed parents with roots in Europe and Africa. At that moment I realized the richness of my African roots and made the decision to do further research into that spiritual context. From that day, I knew my work would change. I knew it would take a more spiritual and religious direction, with a connection to Winti, which is an Afro-Surinamese traditional religion. I realized that there was so much aesthetic material from the practice of Winti, which I could connect to the knowledge I have gained from contemporary art, especially Modernism. All of the residue from the rituals seem like finished art pieces. The only thing I was missing was the “how” – how to make the link with contemporary art practice. - See more at: http://arcthemagazine.com/arc/2014/05/inspired-from-within-an-interview-with-remy-jungerman/#sthash.ogGz0iFs.dpuf

Visual artist Remy Jungerman was born in Moengo Suriname and his lived in Amsterdam since 1990. Through his collages, sculptures and installations he brings various materials, symbols, socio-historical contexts and locations in the world into communication with each other in order to address ideas of the local and the global. Jungerman’s work draws on Maroon culture in Suriname and the Diaspora, specifically Winti, which is an Afro-Surinamese religion.
His latest piece entitled “FODU: Ultimate Resistance” demonstrates his sustained engagement with the intersections of traditional religious practices and current trends in art. The work is now on display as part of the group exhibition Bezield: Seven Artists on Religion, Rituals and Death, which opened on May 10, 2014 at CBK Zuidoost, Amsterdam. The word “bezield” translates to “inspired” in English. I used this term as an entry point for talking with Jungerman about his art. In the interview, he pinpoints traditional and modern inspirations but he also identifies an inner stimulus – a source within him that acts as a ground on which his art is built.
- See more at: http://arcthemagazine.com/arc/2014/05/inspired-from-within-an-interview-with-remy-jungerman/#sthash.ogGz0iFs.dpuf

The online exhibition I curated for the March 2014 edition of the Dutch art magazine Mister Motley gave me the opportunity to see that not much has shifted in my ties to my rich Surinamese heritage, in the aesthetics I gained from the surroundings in which I grew up and in what I have learned at art schools. - See more at: http://arcthemagazine.com/arc/2014/05/inspired-from-within-an-interview-with-remy-jungerman/#sthash.ogGz0iFs.dpulink to websitelink to interview

Sculpting Tires

Chakaia Booker's latest exhibition Eradication: A Form of Obsession at the Newcomb Art Gallery on the Tulane University campus is the occasion to rediscover the artist, famous for her sculptures made with rubber tires. Following my first exposure to her work at the New Orleans Museum of Art, then an encounter at Art Basel Miami Beach and lately a daily walk by FOCI, an outdoor sculpture located on Poydras Street in New Orleans, I assumed that I knew the artist. After all, what else can be said in the monochrome medium? The conceptual artist's practice has been discussed, analyzed, interpreted and the metaphors about her work abound, alluding to forced labor, industrial revolution, racial differences, scarification,  consumerism, global economy, colonization, social disparities... The artist states her goal in the introduction to the exhibition: "...how broad, complex cultural transformations can continue to be expressed through common material".
At first sight, the visitor is drawn to a relief sculpture Color of Hope, 2010, a haptic landscape, harmonious construction made of rough material overtaken by curly pieces of rubber resulting in an organic composition, vision of generous opulence and growth surrounded by two intimate, smaller sized wall pieces Misleading Circumstances, 2005 and Masked Appeal, 2012.
The show includes also six sculptures in the round, and the visit becomes an aesthetically pleasing experience looking at Conversion, 2006, a strange animal built with pipes on one side and a rubbery, reptile-like material on  the other, Mixed Message, 2005, black ribbons flowing to the ground, like water out of a fountain, Wrench (Wench), 2001, an over-sized industrial tool featuring a boa feather for a handle or The Nest, 2003, evoking sexuality and birth with its feminine shapes. Privilege of Eating, 2012, goes straight to the point with two shovels representing the voracity of an opulent world  in contrast with the crumbled signs "private property", "no trespassing" embedded in the work, pieces of food carts, a broken door lock, symbols of a deprived world and its resulting marginalization.
The New Jersey hills in Booker's neighborhood are not made of white marble but piles of used tires which have become her medium since the 1990's, bringing analogy to speed, machinery and also pollution. Tearing, cutting, shredding, tugging, carving the tires, the artist's violent gesture to "deconstruct" is  followed by the act of conceptualization and creativity, transcending the material to "reconstruct". The sculptures offer a dialogue between feminine and masculine, roughness and smoothness, wealth and poverty... inviting deeper thoughts, addressing diverse issues with one medium she has transformed into a palette of colors and textures.
What makes the visit at the Newcomb gallery so compelling? The show offers a walk through almost two decades of the artist's practice in a space where the sculptures come alive under the soft natural light diffused through the ceiling and allows to discover the tactility and the depth of the work. An enlightening experience.

photographs by the author:

"Misleading Circumstances", 2005
Detail, "Mixed Messages", 2005
"Industrial Perpetousity", 2001

South of South America to P.3

Analia Saban

Analia Saban was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Following her undergraduate studies at Loyola University in New Orleans, LA, where she obtained a BFA in Visual Arts (2001), she attended the University of California, Los Angeles, where she earned her MFA in New Genres (2005) and was instructed by John Baldessari.  . 

In her early works, Saban reduced the works of Modernists like Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miró, and Henri Matisse into individual swatches of color, which she then cut out, copied, and rearranged.
Shes describes her own method of working as both artistic and scientific. She questions the tradition mean of painting, what makes a picture a picture and states: "I find pictures are endless at a micro and macro-cosmic level. I am interested in our relationship to technology, to structures and to architecture around us." She uses a spectrum of materials depending on the idea to be conveyed through the conceptual work. Hovering between painting and sculpture, she explores the potential of canvas as textile, stretcher bars as pieces of wood and paint as clay. She is using laser cutters, silicone molds, acrylic and photographic emulsion to apply marks to painted surfaces.

Her work blurs the distinctions between mediums, using elements of painting, sculpture, photography, printmaking, and architecture in a way that reinvents the very process of art-making.
Saban has been included in a number of group shows, including at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Marco Museum in Spain, and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. 

Solo Exhibitions Her first solo exhibition was the same year while her success was solidified by subsequent solo exhibitions at Galerie Sprüth Magers Projekte, Munich (2007); Galerie Praz-Delavallade, Paris (2007, 2009, 2011); Thomas Solomon Gallery, Los Angeles (2009, 2011) and Josh Lilley Gallery, London (2010).
2013
Bathroom Sink, Etc., Spruth Maters Gallery, Berlin, Germany
Datum, Josh Lilley Gallery, London, England
2012
Gag, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York City, NY
2011
Derrames, 11x7 Galeria, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Dig, Gallerie Praz Delavallade, Paris, France
Grayscale, Thomas Solomon Gallery, Los Angeles
2010
Information Leaks, Josh Lilley Gallery, London, United Kingdom
2009
Light Breaks Out of Prism, Thomas Solomon Gallery@Cottage Home, Los Angeles, California
Living Color, Galerie Praz-Delavallade, Paris, France
2007
When Things Collapse, Galerie Praz-Delavallade. Paris, France
Wet Paintings in the Womb, Galerie Spruth Magers, Projekte, Munich, Germany
2005
Bit by Bit, Kim Light Gallery / Lightbox (Inaugural Exhibition), Los Angeles, California

link to Artspace
link to interview, The Huffington Post
link to Artsy

William Cordova

William Cordova was born in Lima, Peru and raised in Lima and Miami. He earned his MFA from Yale University in 2004 and his BFA from The Art Institute of Chicago in 1996. He currently lives and works in New York and Miami.

Artist's Statement:

"My work attempts to reconcile ideas of displacement and transition through the use of ephemeral residue and vernacular architecture that continually shifts and shapes what could be described as our contemporary situation."

Through his installations, collages, drawings and sculptures, he combines discarded materials to reconsider cultural, linguistic and economic differences, translating the reality of lived experience. Having lived in different countries like Peru, the United States, Europe, raised in different cultures, Cordova translates disparity and displacement through his work.
“Revealing the intersections between magical realism and social realism, he orchestrates collisions between ancient and recent histories, oral tradition and revolutionary texts to make way for an in-between, transitional, and ultimately transformative space.” (Rashida Bumbray)

Cordova's solo exhibitions include untitled (chicanas)>, LAXART, Los Angeles (2010); Laberintos, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York (2009); More than Bilingual, Fleming Museum, University of Vermont, Burlington (2009); Moby Dick, Artspace, San Antonio (2008); Pachacuti (stand up next to a mountain), Arndt & Partner, Zürich (2007); P'alante, Arndt & Partner, Berlin (2006); Drylongso (Pichqa Suyo), P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2006); I Wish It Were True, Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning, New York (2006); and No More Lonely Nights, Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami (2003).
Group exhibitions include Neo-HooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith, Menil Collection, Houston (2008); Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2008); Prague Triennale, National Gallery (2008); Street Level: Mark Bradford, William Cordova, and Robin Rhode, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, N.C. (2007); The Beautiful Game: Contemporary Art and Fútbol, BICA and Roebling Hall, New York (2006); Scratch, Studio Museum in Harlem (2005); and Utopia Station, 50th Venice Biennale (2003).

link to ARNDT
link to Artsy
link to Whitney Biennal 2008
 


David Zink Yi

David Zink Yi, born in Lima, Peru (1973) is a contemporary artist working primarily in video, photography, and sculpture. He obtained a Woodcarving Diploma at the Berufsfachschule in Munich, Germany, 1995-1998 and studied at the Kunst Akademie, Munich, Germany, 1997-1999 followed by the Universität der Künste, Berlin, Germany, 1998-2003
He currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

His work often deals with the idea of the body and stems from his Peruvian, Chinese and German cultural heritage. The artist has an interest in the relation between Latin music, the body and performance and has been quoted as saying the "body is the space and the medium in which the process of questioning of identity takes place."
Over the past few years, David Zink has worked within the ceramic tradition to create a series of sculptures modeled on Architeuthis, the deep-sea-dwelling giant squid, prominent creature in myths and legends.

Solo Exhibitions

2014 Johann König Gallery, ‘David Zink Yi’, Berlin, Germany

2013 Hauser & Wirth, ‘‘Why am I here and not somewhere else – Independencia II’, Zurich, Switzerland Kunstverein Braunschweig, ‘Why am I here and not somewhere else – Independencia II’, Braunschweig, Germany Kunstfenster der Deutschen Wirtschaft im BDI, Berlin, Germany

2012 80m2 Livia Benavides Gallery, ‘Angel, is it you?’, Lima, Peru
MALI Museo de Arte de Lima, Lima, Peru
Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, ‘David Zink Yi’, Berlin, Germany
2011 Hauser & Wirth, ‘Pneuma’, New York NY
Midway Contemporary Art, ‘HORROR VACUI’, Minneapolis MN

2010 MAK Gallery, ‘Manganese make my colors blue’, Vienna, Austria
Johann Koenig, ‘David Zink Yi’, Berlin, Germany

2009 Kunsthalle St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland

2008 Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, ‘David Zink Yi. Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Stipendium 2008’, Dusseldorf, Germany
Open Space / Art Cologne, ‘Roma 395’, Cologne, Germany

2007 Franco Soffiantino, Turin, Italy

2006 Johann König, ‘Geschlossen Kurve, bei der für jeden Punkt die Summe der Entfernungen konstant ist. Auslassung insbesondere inmitten von etwas’, Berlin, Germany
Museum Ludwig, ‘Independencia I’, Cologne, Germany

2005 Kunstraum Innsbruck, ‘Der soziographische Blick 12. David Zink Yi’, Innsbruck, Austria

2004 Hauser & Wirth Zürich, ’6 x Yta Moreno’, Zurich, Switzerland
Galerie Johann König, Berlin, Germany
Künstlerhaus Bremen, ‘Alrededor del dosel / Umgehen der Baumkronen’, Bremen, Germany

2003 Galerie Johann König, ‘De adentro y afuera’, Berlin, Germany

link to Artsy
link to MORFAE