highlike

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker

アンヌ·テレサ·ドゥ·ケースマイケル
АННЫ ТЕРЕЗЫ ДЕ КЕЕРСМАКЕР
Quatuor N°4

The movement vocabulary of “Quartet No. 4” (originally part of a longer evening, “Bartok/Annotations”) is simple, with elaborations on walking and turning movements that incorporate everyday motion (smoothing hair, opening out the hands, a quick unpolished handstand) and folk dance-like skipping, hopping and heel-clicking jumps.

HIROAKI UMEDA

holistic strata
Tokyo-based choreographer and video artist Hiroaki Umeda creates mesmerizing visual environments for his visceral solo works, appearing as a fine-spun swirl of movement in a digital storm of light and sound—an elusive figure, by turns frantic and still, awash in pulsating electronic waves. In a program of acclaimed companion pieces, Haptic and Holistic Strata, Umeda’s distinctive dance vocabulary draws on a range of butoh, ballet and hip-hop. He conceives his interdisciplinary events as a sensorial whole, creating the beats and sonic textures as well as the entrancing video and lighting effects. Designed to elicit primal emotion, Umeda’s work is minimalist and radical, subtle and violent, abstract yet precise, and thrillingly physical.

CLAUDIA COMTE

HOW TO GROW AND STILL STAY THE SAME SHAPE
If Comte’s sculptures are rooted in the naturalness of biomorphic forms, her mural interventions transform surfaces into optical sequences and infinite graphic signs with a digital age aesthetic. The monochromatic vocabulary that invests all her work brings her visually close to the abstraction of Sol LeWitt, Bridget Riley and even John Armleder, an artist with whom she studied. On the occasion of her exhibition at Castello di Rivoli, Comte has carried out a gigantic mural intervention consisting of eleven individual wall paintings specially designed for the galleries on the third floor of the historic residence. Also inspired by some eighteenth-century decorative motifs present on the ceilings and walls of the main museum building, the work develops repeated modules through space.

ANGELIKA LODERER

Angelika Loderers work is refering to the basic research of form and space. She uses fragile, everyday materials that are derived from the vocabulary of domesticity and combine them with sort of traditional sculptural techniques. In the process the play between chance and control defines the aesthetics of her work. The experimenting with attidudes – via a very specific amalgam of materials, shapes and objects- brings forth a new, metaphysical result. “In transience, fragility and decline, I see the formal expressions to which I refer in my designs, and which to some extent provide the framework conditions for my processoriented work. From the abundance on offer, however fragile and vulnerable in composition, the elements fall into place, becoming worthless once again when dismantled.”

Lauren Gregory

Triptych
FILE ANIMA+GAMES RIO 2015
Lauren Gregory’s work has been described as primal — drawing from the vocabulary of early human cave paintings, she instinctually always paints with her fingers. Working quickly in oils, she records surprisingly precise images of her live portrait subjects, commemorating the tenderness of their brief human connection.

MIAO XIAOCHUN

МЯО СЯОЧУНЬ
缪晓春
مياو شياو تشون

The large-scale nine-panel installation, Microcosm, is based on Hieronymus Bosch’s 15th century masterpiece, The Garden of Earthly Delights. Microcosm is an imaginative reinvention of the sumptuous landscape of sin, salvation, and tawdry visions of those who never made it to paradise. The structure and narrative pattern of Bosch’s triptych, such as the architecture of heaven, earth and hell, as well as the basic forms of Bosch’s pictures, have been preserved in Miao Xiaochun’s work. But new digital means and computer technologies have allowed Miao Xiaochun to explore a contemporary visual vocabulary. He abolishes the traditional fixed single-point perspective aesthetic, instead favoring the Chinese tradition of multiple points of view in a single landscape.

TERRY HAGGERTY

British-born artist Terry Haggerty, who currently lives and works in Berlin, is known for his paintings that express the formalist vocabulary of abstraction in a new way. Light-colored stripes alternate with darker ones to form regular, often horizontal arrangements, which also have a pattern like quality due to their dense structure. The special thing about them is, that Haggerty breaks this linear formation at the edges of the painting by bending the lines in a different direction as the boundaries of the painting would support. His method transforms the structure of the painting into a illusory perception of three-dimensionality within the image. The surface seems to continue beyond the boundaries of the picture and reflects the illusion of a third dimension back onto the pictorial motif.

Marc Swanson

Marc Swanson (American, b.1969) works in diverse media, including sculpture, drawing, collage, photography, video, and installation. The artist employs a refined range of materials, relying on a concentrated vocabulary of wood, glass, textile, naturally-shed animal antlers, and precious metals. He often juxtaposes “high” and “low” materials in the same work: rhinestones, gold and silver chain, and black mirrored panels meet lumberyard two-by-fours and white cotton t-shirts coated in latex.

Gerwald Rockenschaub

The work of the Austrian artist Gerwald Rockenschaub, born in Linz in 1952, has been associated with Neo-Geo since the early 1980s, when a group of young artists concentrated on the formal vocabulary of the abstract avant-garde. Neo-Geo permeated the aesthetics of American minimal art with the consumeristic position of pop art. Rockenschaub’s art cannot be simply categorised in any particular style, however; in his animations, foil pictures, objects and site-related installations, he refers in equal measure to ideas and positions of modernism and to phenomena of everyday culture.

JAN VERCRUYSSE

Les Paroles

According to Jan Vercruysse, art no longer has a place in this world. As a result, he seeks, through his work, a new place for art and new conditions in which to work. His earliest photographic works recreated historical subjects, such as self-portraits, still lifes and mythological scenes. Gradually, he evolved a sculptural vocabulary of narrow rooms, empty frames and bases without objects. The sacred spaces created by Vercruysse in these works are known as Chambres or Tombeaux and represent the artist’s last-ditched attempts to create art that refers only to itself. His later works, such as plaster pianos, blue Murano glass musical instruments and bronze and ceramic turtles, achieve a perfect equilibrium between conceptual conviction and aesthetic concerns, and also reflect a real pleasure of making.

WIM VANDEKEYBUS & ULTIMA VEZ

MENSKE

Even the standing room only tickets have sold out, and the raging mass of disappointed kids looks like they may start a riot: the atmosphere before Ultima Vez’s performance is akin to a rock concert. Choreographer superstar Wim Vandekeybus’s company has toured the world with their trademark vocabulary of acrobatic, extreme, often violent movement, soaked in multimedia and energetic music. Menske (meaning approximately ‘little human’), their latest work, has all the typical flaws and qualities of classic Vandekeybus. On the conservative end of political intervention, Menske is an explosive concoction of brash statements about the state of the world today, a sequence of rapidly revolving scenes of conflicting logic: intimist, blockbuster, desperate, hysterical. The broad impression is not so much of a sociological portrait, but of a very personal anguish being exorcised right in front of us, as if Vandekeybus is constantly switching format in search of eloquence. Visually, it is stunning, filmic: a slum society falling apart through guerrilla warfare, in which girls handily assume the role of living, moving weapons. A woman descends into madness in an oneiric hospital, led by a costumed and masked group sharpening knives in rhythmic unison. A traumatised figure wanders the city ruins dictating a lamenting letter to invisible ‘Pablo.’ Men hoist a woman on a pole her whole body flapping like a flag. “It’s too much!” intrudes a stage hand, “Too much smoke, too much noise, too much everything!” And the scene responsively changes to a quiet soliloquy. At which point, however, does pure mimesis become complicit with the physical and psychological violence it strives to condemn? Unable to find its way out of visual shock, Menske never resolves into anything more than a loud admission of powerlessness.

SHIRO KURAMATA

倉俣 史朗
glass chair

Shiro Kuramata’s approach to designing objects reflects the atmosphere of innovation in postwar Japan. By 1970, Kuramata had introduced alternative materials such as acrylic and glass into his furniture, which played on traditional ideas of materiality and form.Transparency, the appearance of weightlessness, and a Minimalist vocabulary quickly became his signature aesthetic. In 1976, Kuramata designed Glass Chair. Its reductivist and planar form reflects his interest in geometry as well as the effect of light as it transforms and illuminates the glass. Kuramata, like many of his Japanese contemporaries, looked to Western culture for inspiration. In particular, the sculptures of Donald Judd and Dan Flavin influenced Kuramata’s furniture designs of the 1970s, such as Glass Chair.

PAUL MCCARTHY

بول مكارثي
保罗麦卡锡
פול מקארת’י
ポール·マッカーシー
폴 맥카시
Пол Маккарти
Train, Mechanical
“Train, Mechanical, is a fully-automated mixed-media work in which the sculpted likeness of George W. Bush engages in serialized bestiality with a number of pigs. The manufactured ménage-à-trois is completed by a lateral, third-party pig, who penetrates the fore-facing pig in the ear (a sexual maneuver described by Christopher Walken in an SNL skit as “Shin-Shee-Shin-Shee”). The piece functions as both a political satire and a parody of popular amusement park rides like Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean. With “process as sculpture” as a subtext, McCarthy addresses nuanced cultural mechanisms in a vocabulary which retains essential, playful relevance to the practice of art making”. S.Humphrey

JULIUS VON BISMARCK & BENJAMIN MAUS

perpetual storytelling apparatus
The “Perpetual Storytelling Apparatus” is a drawing machine illustrating a never-ending story by the use of patent drawings.The machine translates words of a text into patent drawings. Seven million patents – linked by over 22 million references – form the vocabulary. By using references to earlier patents, it is possible to find paths between arbitrary patents. They form a kind of subtext.New visual connections and narrative layers emerge through the interweaving of the story with the depiction of technical developments.The “Perpetual Storytelling Apparatus” is a drawing machine illustrating a never-ending story by the use of patent drawings.The machine translates words of a text into patent drawings. Seven million patents – linked by over 22 million references – form the vocabulary. By using references to earlier patents, it is possible to find paths between arbitrary patents. They form a kind of subtext. New visual connections and narrative layers emerge through the interweaving of the story with the depiction of technical developments.