Courtesy of the artist.

My name is Ugo Mainetti. I am an autodidact painter, I’m from Valtellina and I am the father of four children, two daughters and two sons. I came into the world without whimpering on May 5th, 1945 in a little district called Valle in the commune of Tartano. I was born into a peasant family of sound principles. I was the second-born son of four children. My bent for painting has revealed itself ever since I was a child. During the time I had been helping my parents in the field and upon casting a glance at my first primary school textbook, I realized that a whirling sense of dreams, emotions, and fantasies was originating in me. I expressed it through painting on and with any available material. My first painting Burnt Mountains dates back to 1957.

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Courtesy of the artist.

Early on discovered the art in my life and this passion grew with me. Figurative, passionate—by nature I am colorist and experimentalist, carrying for my works, small experiences in my day-to-day, trying to represent everything that exists around me and inside me. I am always in love with art, always wanting more, looking for new horizons and new challenges in order to do more, through art that goes into my soul!

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Courtesy of the artist.

My work draws upon the century-long tradition of handmade sculpture. I would describe my pieces as visceral; the sculpting technique I use when working with clay reveals a flesh-like quality. As such, my work has everything to do with the materiality of life. My sculptures wear the heaviness of being; their surfaces reveal every sign of corrosion that originates in the confrontation of the body’s skin to the abrasiveness of time and life itself. Often larger than life, they are turned inward; silent and introverted, their reticent pose heightening the expressiveness of the emotion they hold captive. These works scream in silence.

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Courtesy of the artist.

Painting for me is a need; a way to express myself and at the same time to play and experiment with different colours and forms and in that process communicate what I feel. I like to draw and paint and work in different media, oils, acrylics, ink, and collage. In each media I find different challenges and each time I learn new things. I always return to oil painting because the colours and textures I can get are infinite; I am identified with it. My themes are women and their different roles in society; space and architecture in that space; the ocean and sea shells. Sometimes a piece comes out “a la prima” other times it requires hardwork! Sometimes, after that hard work I do not like it and have to say , “next.” “Every concession is a lie,” Leslie Lee, my dearest professor, told me. I have to be satisfied with every piece of work.

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Image courtesy of Gagosian Paris.

Piero Golia was introduced to Abraham Lubelski shortly after he arrived in New York. He was instantly given his first opportunity to exhibit at Broadway Gallery as well as contribute to the design and editorial side of NY Arts Magazine. Piero has since catapulted to the upper crust of the art world, and has been featured in shows all across the globe alongside some of the largest art stars of today. His latest body of work, a promising series including a number of clever miniatures, is set to open tomorrow, February 28th at Gagosian Paris. We continue to follow his dynamic, independent, and whimsical views of society and ourselves as we wish him as always the best. A significant number of Golia’s early drawings remain part of Abraham Lubelski’s personal collection.

For more information click Here.

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Image courtesy of Blain|Southern

Featuring: Bruce Nauman, Jannis Kounellis, Max Neuhaus, Lawrence Weiner, and Gilberto Zorio.

ANALOG
November 30, 2013 – February 1, 2014

Blain|Southern
4 Hanover Square
London
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Image courtesy of Campagne Premiere

Featuring: Pep Agut, Eric Baudelaire, Matthew Buckingham, Marianna Christofides, Simon Fujiwara, Vittorio Santoro, Shira Wachsmann

Campagne Premiere
Archaeologies of the Future 2
November 16 2013 – January 4 2014
Campagne Première GmbH
Chausseestrasse 116
D-10115 Berlin Germany
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Image courtesy of Lisson Gallery

Featuring: Art & Language, Tony Cragg, Angela de la Cruz, Richard Deacon, Ceal Floyer, Ryan Gander, Shirazeh Houshiary, Peter Joseph, Anish Kapoor, John Latham, Richard Long, Jason Martin, Haroon Mirza, Jonathan Monk, Julian Opie, Richard Wentworth

Lisson Gallery
Nostalgic for the Future
November 15, 2013 – January 11, 2014
27 Bell Street
London
lissongallery.com

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Recent work by Adam Chodzko. Image courtesy of the Benaki Museum.

You’ll see; this time it’ll be different is a site-specific working by the renowned UK artist. It takes place within the framework of the series “Artists in Dialogue with the Benaki Museum”, a collaboration with the British Council, which started in 2011 and aims to bring together artists from Greece and Britain.

For his project, Adam Chodzko stages a retrospective exhibition of imaginary Benaki Museum posters from the near future, installed along the liminal space of the Pireos building’s ramp. Through this poster series, the Benaki Museum is seen to have spread into surprising and awkward venues across Greece, ending up scattered and yet whole. Accompanying this collection of future exhibition posters is a video which documents the various ‘private collections’ that have been custodians of these records of the museum’s activities. Revealing a series of ordinary domestic spaces where these posters have hung – and acquired their ‘aura’ from traces of age and use – we see that, rather than originating from official and national sources, they are on loan from diverse, remote and unexpected places.

Adam Chodzko considers the museum as an emotional and idiosyncratic living being, which becomes increasingly hybrid and integrates into daily life. He imagines the moment where it reflects on its recent activities and challenges us to reconsider and deconstruct stereotypes regarding both its audience and its exhibits. This process leads us to make assumptions about who a museum might be for and who defines the meaning and value of a nation’s culture and thus takes responsibility for preserving and promoting it.

In the spirit of the ‘Artists in Dialogue with the Benaki Museum’ programme, the installation You’ll See; This Time it’ll Be Different thus reflects on the role of the museum in the representation of history, memory, knowledge and tradition, as well as on the conditions of viewing and on the relation between artistic production and the institutional space of its reception.

Chodzko’s work is the third project realized in the framework of the ‘Artists in Dialogue…’ programme. In its inaugural year (2011), UK artist Andy Holden engaged with the context of the Benaki Museum’s ancient Greek and Roman sculptures, while in 2012, Greek artist Antonis Pittas created a sensory installation using the interior ramp of the Benaki Museum’s Pireos Street building.

Adam Chodzko was born in London in 1965 and today lives and works in Whitstable, Kent, UK. He studied Art History at the University of Manchester and Fine Art at Goldsmiths College. His context-specific works in a wide range of mediums, from videos to installations, performance and painting, focus on the intersections between fiction and reality and on the traces of reality shifts in objects, places, but also audiences and networks of people. For this particular project he was mostly interested in using archival material from the Benaki Museum to imagine a transposition of roles among the custodians of works of art, but also of their meaning outside a certain context, and speculate on the potential of the intuitive reactions they trigger.

Text courtesy of the Benaki Museum

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My impression, however, in moving through the two-level group show was that the artists in the gallery’s meandering lower level were engaged in a more interesting and urgent discussion about a virulent kind of masculinity that is proving to be not just failed but fatal to the long term existence of our species.

The spirit of this debate is embodied, literally, in the works of the Moscow collective, Tanatos Banionis, a commando band of artists/tattooists who employ Japanese warrior lore to illustrate narratives—now permanently etched into the flesh of their models—that detail a militarized movement away from the temporal self toward a more venerated, higher-Eternal Being.  Seen historically, this often obligatory journey was best achieved through selfless acts of sacrifice, for country of course, though with grave consequences to what was left smoking in the rear.

It is those consequences that seem to be the real talking point of this exhibition.  The idea finds its thesis in Ultra Violet’s printed manifesto, “Killing is the ultimate crime…,” where mid-declarative the question is posed: “Is the membrum virile a tumescent weapon of mass destruction?”  The query could easily be a direct response to Tanatos Banionis Divine Wind, a seventeen minute video installation that weaves images of feminine submission with relentless male aggression—the latter in a maniacally ironic nod to honor, duty and lasting glory, with the interim between duty and glory being assuredly terminal.

Tanatos Banionis, Untitled, 2013. Digital C-print. Image courtesy of Rox Gallery

Exemplar of the heroic arc is the Japanese kamikaze, the renowned and exceedingly feared WWII fighter pilots who time and again gave their lives for country by missiling their planes, and themselves, into enemy warships. But to what end? The Moscow collective’s five large-scale digital prints, all Untitled, suggest instead that what endures is the unconquerable Feminine, in particular an Earth that absorbs and abides until at last it snuffs the annoyance out. In other words, the membrum virile is and will continue to be a singular weapon of destruction that may very well lead us to our doom, but the Earth will journey onward nevertheless, remnants of ourselves left as mere markings on her back.

Symbols of Earth, the women in the five prints similarly submit their backs for engravings not of their own design but for the artistic and political purpose of Tanatos Banionis. In this way they become kamikaze-like in offering forth their flesh for a greater good beyond themselves. On each are inscriptions exclusively of war—samurai, Empire commanders, supplicant infantry in rivers of blood–all sanctioned by the overseeing eye of an Imperial Sun. Meanwhile, our view of the women is always from behind. They do not sanction such action, nor should we infer complicity in their passive stance. As with Earth, theirs is an energy more untamed and lasting, and ultimately far more feral, than the gunshot will of historical man.

This argument is supported in the negative by artists such as Jack Greer and Dave Schubert. Greer’s photographic tryptic, The Incredibles, depicts a Manson-like trio who represent a strain of masculinity gone wholly awry, an assessment that in no way excludes the central figure of a hoodied, silver-toothed woman with “GOD” thickly tattooed onto her forehead. Faint hope that these three will ever act as caretakers of their communities or the planet, though we can be sure they will take freely from both. While Schubert’s C-print blowup of Dash Snow in a tub of polaroids, cigarette at lips, eyes faded to a milky glaze, shows an equally enervate masculinity drained of any ability to nurture or protect. On the contrary, the image speaks of a type of male who offers little more of himself than documents of indulgence, and who will consume to near pathology until all else, though first himself, is gone.

By Christopher Hassett

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