Art Positions

The Art Positions sector is a platform for a single major project from one of their artists, allowing curators, critics and collector to discover ambitious new talents from all over the globe.

For Art Positions Arratia, Beer (Berlin) will feature an installation of sculptural works by Fernanda Fragaterio which both re-thinks and pays homage to the collaboration between the two lovers and colleagues, Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich, a textile designer who taught interior and furniture design at the Bauhaus.

For Art Positions, Josée Bienvenu Gallery (New York) presents Obverse & Reverse, a sculptural installation by Dario Escobar. Born in Guatemala, he explores concepts of sculptural, cultural, and historical hybridity. Revisiting the tradition of the Penetrable, Obverse & Reverse is made of soccer balls sewn together, forming an organic structure wrapping around and infiltrating the booth. The irregular shape of the construction operates almost like a fractal object demultiplying and growing exponentially in an obsessive manner. The skin of the soccer ball sewn in reverse is no longer glossy and polished- rather, it is rough and reminiscent in texture and color of its animal origin.

For Art Positions, Casas Riegner Gallery (Bogotá) mounts a solo show by Gabriel Sierra. With a single installation Sierra explores the concept of the functionality of objects and how humans have surrounded themselves with constructed tools that seem to make easier the way in which we live today. It is a reflection on art, design and current affairs.

Christinger De Mayo (Zurich) mounts a solo show with an installation by chilean artist Johanna Unzueta. Transformation is a central motive in Johanna Unzueta's body of work. Her felt pipe system should be understood as a subtle questioning of the fabric of reality, a search for a truth behind the truth.

At Art Positions Figge von Rosen (Köln) presents Judi Werthein's video installation "La Tierra de los Libres" for which Colombian musicians had been asked to perform the "Star-Spangled Banner". However, they changed the lyrics so they would fit in with their own music. Werthein thereby addresses cultural translation and creates new meaning by linking the national anthem to the cultural and political reality of today's Latin America, but also to the transformation in time of the revolutionary history of the USA as contained in the original poem as opposed to what the country now represents.

Foxy Production (New York) presents Hany Armanious' The Mystery of the Plinth, a sculptural installation that furthers the artist's explorations of casting as a means of generating meanings. The work centers on the function of the historical model as a small-scale recreation of a place or object, and its support, the plinth or pedestal, whose conventional function is to determine viewing access. It sets a scene where a hive of activity has been disrupted: history has intervened, interrupting the flow, causing production to be abandoned and allowing remnants to deteriorate. History is also the work’s ostensible subject-matter, specifically of the origins of Western culture in ancient Greece.

For Art Positions, Labor (México) presents an installation of Héctor Zamora. By materializing a wind rose made of the four cardinal directions, the four ordinal directions, and the eight further divisions, Zamora continues to explore his interest for air, playing on the visibility/invisibility of its geometries.

For Art Positions, Proyectos Monclova (México) presents an installation by François Bucher (Colombian artist based in Berlin), a constellation of photographs video and documents from two expeditions to what the artist has termed "The Photographic Plateau" – a mountain in Perú, that was photographed and studied from 1952 - 1960 by Peruvian esoteric author Daniel Ruzo. The rock formations in the plateau are purported to be sculptures from a 4th humanity, designed to be perceived from a specific angle and in relation to the the long and short cycles of the sun. H.S. Bellamy, author of The Atlantis Myth, described this figuration as the "two and a half dimensional".

Simon Preston (New York) will present Crushed by the Hammer of the Sun, by LA-based artist Kara Tanaka.  The movements of this mechanized sculpture, are based on the dance of the Turkish Whirling Dervishes’ Sema ceremony, a ritual in which participants spin counter-clockwise for several minutes until they transcend their bodies and fluctuate simultaneously between multiple realms of existence.  Using sculpture, text and drawing, Kara Tanaka drives a wedge between the possibility of human transcendence and the rituals devised for attaining it.

UNTITLED (New York) – For his presentation at Art Positions, Los Angeles based artist Phil Wagner will show a project from his latest body of work - the result of a painter's hand making a foray in the world of object-making. Wagner's work employs scavenged materials found in the streets of Downtown LA on painterly backdrops of linen and hemp to create a new language that questions the idea of what a painting should look like.

ZieherSmith (New York) presents a major new triptych by Eddie Martinez. Following the historical tradition of paintings form last suppers to vernacular banquets, Martinez unites his love of still life with figuration in his grand scene. A banquet table, strewn with his signature detritus, spans the length of the three canvases and is populated by a gathering of his reoccurring figures. His aggressive brushwork melds these elements into pure abstraction at moments, while the emotional tone treads the line between elation and darkness.