Louisa Gagliardi at Dawid Radziszewski Gallery
Swiss painter Louisa Gagliardi’s works have some digital and a bit surreal feel to them, and not without a reason. She paints using a computer, and then prints the paintings out on vinyl. Finally, she applies several layers of materiality to them, ranging from nail varnish to gel medium. Gagliardi also draws from the codes of contemporary graphic design and advertising.
Judith Bernstein (The Box, Los Angeles) at Foksal Gallery Foundation
For half a century, Judith Bernstein has created expressionistic drawings and paintings confronting gender and political injustice. At Foksal Gallery Foundation the artist, who just recently got full credit for her works, shows some of the paintings drawing from explicit bathroom drawings revealing some of the subconscious fantasies of their creators. Thy are accompanied by the drawings of hardware screws morphing into giant penises.
Karol Radziszewski & Marina Faust (Gianni Manhattan, Vienna) at BWA Warszawa
Karol Radziszewski works with film, photography, installations and creates interdisciplinary projects. His archive-based methodology, crosses multiple cultural, historical, religious, social and gender references. Since 2005 he is publisher and editor-in-chief of DIK Fagazine. Founder of the Queer Archives Institute.
Karol Radziszewski’s project presented during FOAF at BWA Warszawa spans a series of paintings drawn from Radziszewski’s childhood illustrations, serving as a commentary on the political events taking place in Poland at the turn of 1989/1990 – as only a nine-year-old could. The scaled up drawings has been transferred straight from his sketchbooks onto the canvas: the iconic SOLIDARITY symbol, the heroes of those times set within a scene peopled by the typical juvenile imaginarium: mermaids, animals and princesses.
Marina Faust’s practice originated in documentary photography before collaborating with Martin Margiela for almost 20 years. She also worked in interior photography and is an active contributor for the French art Magazine FROG.
Nicholas Cheveldave (Emalin, London) and Isaac Lythgoe at Piktogram
In Isaac Lythgoe’s objects dreams and the subconscious create temporal and fictional distortions. Lythgoe works in various media, his practise considers consciousness and its distortions through storytelling. Isaac Lythgoe graduated from the Royal College of Art, lives and works in London.
Canadian artist Nicholas Cheveldave’s practice engages the ways in which the image economy of Western consumer culture generates and controls both an understanding and the communication of identity.
Shana Moulton (Gregor Staiger, Zurich) at Wschód
At Wschód, Zurich-based Gregor Staiger gallery presents couple of videos by Shana Moulton. Her videos are built around her kitschy alter ego, Cynthia, a character the artist developed during graduate school. She describes Cynthia as “a tool for me to figure out my own ambiguities or ambivalence about things in the world, to help me deal with them with a little humor and perspective.”
Invernomuto (Pinksummer, Genoa) at Leto Gallery
The focus of the duo’s work is the study of subcultures and their byproducts via a range of media: video, sound, sculpture, performance and publishing. By making use of oral traditions and minor histories, the duo studies the root of these forms, weaving them in with fictional narratives. This practice plays a fundamental role in the artistic process, which underscores the superficial and imaginative nature of reality – the duo’s main source of inspiration.
A key element of the show at Leto Gallery is the video titled Vers l’Europa deserta, Terra Incognita, which deconstructs models of creating identity among suburban youth groups throughout Europe. Incorporating a melancholic sound layer and a precise focus on the visual aspects of self-presentation, this project considers the human need to belong to a particular community.
The exhibition is rounded out by a fragment of the installation Med T-1000, part of the platform known as Black Med initiated by Invernomuto for Manifesta 12. In creating a sculpture referencing the iconic Sicilian vase, the duo expanded upon a romantic tale that unfolded during the Moorish domination in Sicily in the 11th century. In mixing historical and contemporary circumstance, this project stands as a metaphor for today’s issues related to migration, set upon the Mediterranean Sea.
Isabelle Fein (Galerie Parisa Kind, Frankfurt am Main) at Pola Magnetyczne
As part of “Friend of a Friend Warsaw”, Galerie Parisa Kind is showing a selection of Fein’s works at Pola Magnetyczne Gallery.
Isabelle Fein studied at the HfG in Offenbach. She has had solo exhibitions at the Fort Gansevoort Gallery and the Jack Hanley Gallery, both in New York, and participated in numerous group exhibitions, including the Kunsthalle Nürnberg, the Halle für Kunst Lüneburg, and the Kindl in Berlin. This year she will present a group of works in the exhibition “Paint so known as blood” at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. As part of “Friend of a Friend Warsaw”, Galerie Parisa Kind is showing a selection of Fein’s works at Pola Magnetyczne Gallery.
Flo Kasearu (Temnikova & Kasela, Tallin) at Raster Gallery
Flo Kasearu is the founder of a private house museum, which together with the adjoining garden constitutes the site and subject of her artistic activities. Kasearu addresses art institutions—museums and schools—in her own contrary fashion, inviting their staff to work on her Tallinn estate. Her installations, performances and actions also concern problems of nationalist rhetoric and the presence of women in culture.
At the exhibition at Raster Gallery she presented a specially created installation as well as works from her series Startup (2018), made from stones left over from the construction of the Korean Garden project in the yard of the Flo Kasearu House Museum in an exchange with the Gwangju Biennale (2016).