This Week’s Must See Art Events: Dad Art, Cigarettes, and Graveyards

Matt Bollinger’s paintings are characterized by a cinematic approach to storytelling. His tableaus are set-dressed with details that hint at a narrative, or figures positioned to suggest a brief pause between actions. This latest series is an autobiographical look at the mundanities of family life, which will likely be oddly more interesting than it sounds.

This show’s a curious one. Kour Pour is known for his insanely-intricate paintings inspired by Persian rugs and tapestries. They take a long, long time to complete and there’s quite a backlog demand for his work (there are stories of collectors arguing over pieces Stefan Simchowitz has Instagrammed). This new series is purportedly also inspired by Orientalism, but couldn’t be more different. These new abstract paintings are a reference to the European fascination with Japanese art (really?), but they just look like so much trendy work we’d see at NADA. Is this a case of an artist changing his practice to accommodate demands from the market? It remains to be seen, but Pour’s a talented painter and we’ll be following his story as it develops—for better or for worse.

Berlin-based artist Jorinde Voigt is best known for large-scale drawings often likened as either scientific diagrams or musical scores. The fine ink lines mimic the staves and note heads of a composer’s hand-written notations, but splashes of gold leaf disrupts the codified language, revealing a level of introspection at play. The recent drawings, being shown at David Nolan alongside older works, sees Voigt expanding into different spectrums and raw material: the soft pinks, reds and greens in the Jungian thought diagrams of “Observations in the Now” (2015) capture different emotional states, another uses body contact with paper as a starting point for pencil-drawn outlines filled in by colour pigments applied with cloth.  

Brush up on your afterimage effects and color relativity, or at the very least, have your own little Black Mountain College teachable moment. Fritz Horstman, the Artist Residency and Education Coordinator at The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, gives a free workshop Albers’ color theory. The workshop, part of the programming for the Drawing Center’s current exhibition, Drawing Dialogues: Selections from the Sol LeWitt Collection, considers the impact Albers’ theory had on artists featured in the show.  

Even in our micro-era of badass all-women group shows, Frida Smoked stands out as the most badass of all-women group shows. It’s a celebration of women artists and their love of cigarettes. Smoking was once considered a men’s-only vice, and now it’s obviously frowned upon for other, more valid reasons. But whatever, it looks cool, and it’s the one thing the East Coast’s art scene will always do better than L.A.

Artists: Genesis Belanger, Anne Doran, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Ilse Getz, Irini Miga, and Amanda Nedham

What does artwork about “being a 43-year-old artist whose window to fulfill conventional notions of youthful genius long ago closed” look like? We’re not entirely sure, but we’re told it will involve a video tribute to “art dads”, stained glass, and a sociological gaze toward the art world.

Rhizome’s annual Seven on Seven conference pairs seven fine artists with seven members of the tech industry to collaborate on a project of their choosing. The results could be artworks, product prototypes, software, or utopian ideas. Their collaborations are presented this Saturday at the New Museum. It’s often a really fun event.

This year’s keynote speaker is Astra Taylor (filmmaker, writer, and activist)
And the pairings are as follows:

Filmmaker, artist, and writer Miranda July & Paul Ford, writer and cofounder, Postlight
Video artist Hito Steyerl & Grant Olney Passmore, cofounder, Aesthetic Integration
Installation artist Jennifer Steinkamp & Rana el Kaliouby, founder, Affectiva
Artist and writer Claire L. Evans & Tracy Chou, software engineer, Pinterest
Rapper Junglepussy & Jenna Wortham, staff writer, New York Times
Artist Trisha Baga & Mike Woods, founder, White Rabbit VR
Artist Ingrid Burrington & Meredith Whittaker, founder, Google’s Open Source and Security Research Group

Borna Sammak’s everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach to sourcing or creating imagery is a strange play on notions of filtering. One work might be an overwhelming sea of neon. But Sammak also has a knack for finding the uncanny in the mundane and translating little bits of cultural detritus to something fun to look at. That might mean a fibers piece, digital collage, painting, photograph, or sculpture. Whatever the medium, and whatever the content, it usually weirdly works.

As the title suggests, this seemingly jam-packed group show is all about proximity of unlikely pairings. Organized by Essye Klempner and Elisa Soliven, thirty-two small sculptures will be displayed on a single table in a grid. This might sound like a totally crazy premise for an exhibition, but we’re optimistic about it—the roster includes some great artists including Conor Backman, Esther Ruiz, and Elizabeth Ferry.
Artists: Trisha Baga, Conor Backman, Katherine Bradford, Nicholas Buffon, Robin Cameron, Lauren Clay, Kiran Chandra, Onyedika Chuke, Elizabeth Ferry, Stacy Fisher, Marley Freeman, Elizabeth Jaeger, Kristen Jensen, Michael Kenney, Hein Koh, Elisa Lendvay, Christina Leung, Marie Lorenz, Lee Maida, Shari Mendelson, Nicholas Moenich, Irvin Morazan, Sophie Naess, Keiko Narahashi, Esther Ruiz, Claudia Pena Salinas, Sally Saul, Nancy Shaver, Ben Suga, Talwst, B. Wurtz, Sun You, Tamara Zahaykevich

How have we never heard of William Holbrook Beard? He was a late Nineteenth Century painter (known?) for scenes of wildlife acting like humans and pastoral landscapes. Think dancing bears and monkeys having a Victorian tea party. What does he have in common with Jean-Michel Basquiat? They’re both buried in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood cemetery, along with plenty of other artists. For $30, you can join Hyperallergic’s Allison C. Meier on a guided tour of the historic cemetery. It includes a stop at Beard’s unmarked grave, to which a statue of a bear was added.