Danh Vō Kurimanzutto

Danh Vō, Untitled (Les Grandes Voyages) 25, 2014-2015, Kurimanzutto

Danh Vō  was born in 1975 in Bà Ria, Vietnam and he currently lives in Mexico City. Through a body of personal work inspired also by historical and political events, Danh Vō probes into the inheritance and construction of cultural conflicts, traumas, and values. When Vō was a child, his family fled Vietnam and settled in Denmark: their assimilation to European culture and the political events that prompted their flight are intrinsic to his artistic investigations. His work sheds light on the relation between the inseparable elements that shape our sense of self, both through collective history and private experience. Exhibiting objects based on the ready-made principle is a characteristic artistic strategy of Danh Vō; through objects charged with symbolism that retains the sublimated desire and sadness of individuals and entire cultures, he examines how meaning changes with context. Danh Vō’s work, enigmatic and poetic, deftly avoids didacticism as he explores the power structures behind liberal societies and the fragility of our nation-state notions.

His most important exhibitions include: Danh Vō, CAPC Bordeaux (2018); Danh Vō:Take My Breath Away, Guggenheim Museum, New York and SMAK Copenhagen (2018); Ng Teng Fong Roof Garden Commission series: Danh Vō, National Gallery Singapore (2016-17); Banish the Faceless / Reward your Grace, Palacio de Cristal del Retiro, Madrid (2015); Ydob eht ni mraw si ti, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany (2015); Danh Vō: Wād al-ḥaŷara, Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2014/2015); Danh Vō: We The People (detail), Faurschou Foundation Beijing (2014); We The People, commissioned by Public Art Fund for the Brooklyn Bridge Park, New York (2014); I M U U R 2 (Hugo Boss Prize), Guggenheim Museum, New York (2013); Chung ga opla, Villa Medici, Rome (2013); Fabulous Muscles, Museion – museo d’arte moderna e contemporanea di Bolzano, Italy (2013); Go Mo Ni Ma Da, Musée de’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2013); We The People (detail) 2010-2013, Art Institute of Chicago, United States (2012); Vō Danh, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2012); JULY, IV, MDCCLXXVI, Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany (2011); Hip Hip Hurra,  SMK- National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen (2010); Les fleurs d’intérieur, KADIST, Paris (2009); Danh Vō Where the Lions Are, Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2009); Package Tour, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2008).

His work has also been included in group exhibitions such as: Stories of Almost Everyone, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, United States (2018); Stepping into the Unknown, National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan (2018); Question the Wall Itself, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, United States (2017); Everything you need to know about the FY foundation: an exhibition, Frank F. Yang Art and Education Foundation | YOU Space, Shenzhen, China (2017); Versus Rodin: bodies across space and time, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (2017); Shame: 100 reasons for turning red, Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, Dresden, Germany (2017); Collected by Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2016); Good Dreams, Bad Dreams – American Mythologies, Aishti Foundation, Beirut Libanon (2016); Sculpture on the Move 1946 – 2016, Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland (2016); The Precarious, The Menil Collection, Houston, United States (2015); Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist as Collector, Barbican Centre, London (2015); The Ungovernables, New Museum, New York, (2012); Thatʼs the Way We Do It, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2011); Heroes, Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Torino, Turin, Italy (2011); Strange Comfort, Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2010); Morality – Act II: From Love to Legal, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, The Netherlands (2009); Preis der Nationalgalerie für junge Kunst 2009, Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2009); Jahresgaben 2008, Kunstverein München, Munich, Germany (2008); The California Files: Re-Viewing Side Effects of Cultural Memory, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2007), among others.

Katy Grannan Fraenkel Gallery

Katy Grannan, Tierney, Desert Hot Spring, CA, 2018, Fraenkel Gallery

Katy Grannan was born in 1969 in Arlington, Massachusetts and she was first recognized in 1998 for an intimate series of portraits of strangers she met through newspaper advertisements. Grannan worked for years throughout the northeast and produced several different series entitled Poughkeepsie Journal, Morning Call, Sugar Camp Road, and Mystic Lake, each referring to a local newspaper source or secluded location.  Grannan’s process and the consequent images are informed by her own childhood in the American northeast.  Each photograph is imbued with secrecy, desire, and hidden intentions.

With her move to California in 2006, Grannan photographed “new pioneers,” people who, like herself, encountered something very different from the mythological “West” with its promise of eternal summer and personal reinvention.  Instead, these new settlers face the end of a continent and the potential for failure as they struggle to define themselves under the scrutiny of the relentless Western sunlight.  The Westerns explores the relationship between aspiration and delusion – where our shared desire to be of worth, to be paid some attention – confronts the uneasy prospect of anonymity.

Grannan’s Boulevard marked the beginning of a lengthy series of “street portraits.” These photographs appear to be made without the subjects’ knowledge, but are in fact, spontaneous collaborations between Grannan and strangers met on the streets of San Francisco and Hollywood (and later throughout the Central Valley).  Boulevard and the subsequent series, 99, unfold as an enormous procession of humanity – a danse macabre of marginalized and powerless members of society. 

Barbara Wagner & Benjammin De Burca Fortes D’Aloia

Barbara Wagner & Benjamin De Burca, Grupo La Mafia (From Swinguerra), 2019, Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel

Barbara Wagner was born in Brazil and Benjammin De Burca is from Germany. They both live and work in Recife, Brazil, and are represented by Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel.

The duo recentley transformed the Brazilian Pavilion in 58. Biennale di Venezia (May 11th – Nov 24th) into a huge installation for the film Swinguerra. Swinguerra was specially commissioned for the ocasion. The work is a hybrid form of a musical documentary that creates an ambiguous space where fictional and documentary dimensions are blended, creating a third territory of language. Wagner’s photographic work focuses on the popular body and on how ordinary people present their bodies to a supposedly interested public. Her work has been exhibited around the world, is held in international collections and has been published in monographs. Since 2011 she has been collaborating with Benjamin de Burca. Their work has featured at festivals and in exhibitions including at VideoBrasil, the Panorama de Arte Brasileira and the Biennale, all in São Paulo, and at the 2017 Skulptur Projekte Münster. Their shorts include CINEMA CASINO (2013), SET TO GO (2015), YOU ARE SEEING THINGS (2017), BYE BYE GERMANY! A LIFE MELODY (2017), and their latest, HOLY TREMOR (2018).

Barbara Kruger Sprueth Magers

Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Stripez), 2019, Sprueth Magers

Barbara Kruger was in 1945 and She is an American conceptual artist and collagist. Most of her work consists of black-and-white photographs, overlaid with declarative captions, stated in white-on-red Futura Bold Oblique or Helvetica Ultra Condensed text. The phrases in her works often include pronouns such as “you”, “your”, “I”, “we”, and “they”, addressing cultural constructions of power, identity, and sexuality. Kruger currently lives and works in New York and Los Angeles.

Addressing issues of language and sign, Kruger has often been grouped with such feminist postmodern artists as Jenny Holzer, Sherrie Levine, Martha Rosler, and Cindy Sherman. Like Holzer and Sherman, in particular, she uses the techniques of mass communication and advertising to explore gender and identity. Kruger is considered to be part of the Pictures Generation.

Kruger’s first dealer was Gagosian Gallery, with which she did two shows in Los Angeles in the early 1980s. In 1986, she was the first woman to join the prominent contemporary art gallery of Mary Boone and has had nine solo shows there since. Kruger is also represented by Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago; and Sprüth Magers Berlin London and L&M Arts in Los Angeles. In late 2011, her 1985 photo of a ventriloquist’s dummy, Untitled (When I Hear the Word Culture I Take Out My Checkbook), was sold at Christie’s for a record $902,500.

Supreme, a skateboard and apparel brand established in 1994, have been accused of taking their logo, the white word “Supreme” on a red box, from Kruger’s signature style. James Jebbia, founder of Supreme, has admitted that the logo was taken from Barbara Kruger’s work.

Hans-Peter Feldmann Galerie Mehdi Chouakri

Hans-Peter Feldmann, Sex Doll, Glerie Mehdi Chouakri

Hans-Peter Feldmann was born in 1941 in Düsseldorf, Germany. Feldmann’s approach to art-making is one of collecting, ordering and re-presenting. He has conducted over the past four decades a profound investigation into the influence of the visual environment on our subjective reality.

Feldmann is a compulsive collector and appropriator of found images and everyday ephemera and he doesn’t describe himself as an artist. His works have an aesthetic and conceptual simplicity. Feldmann intentionally bypasses the rules of the art market and high culture by making unsigned, undated works and limitless editions. Similarly, his artworks and exhibitions remain untitled, thereby allowing the works to speak for themselves. In doing so he resists commodification and commercialisation – making his work purely about the value of the art itself. He is of the democratic belief that art cannot be owned and that it is purely the viewer’s personal experience of the work that engenders its worth.