Marilyn Minter Paintings from the 80s
31 March – 30 April 2011
Team Gallery
New York, U
www.teamgal.com

Marilyn Minter’s paintings took the world by storm at the 2006 Whitney Biennial when, after thirty odd years of showing in New York, she became an overnight sensation. This exhibition presents paintings from two bodies of work: the 1986-87 series Big Girls/Little Girls, built from imagery with an almost journalistic remove, alongside works from her 1989 Porn Grids, which capture women and men engaged in what the porn industry refers to as “money shots.” All of these paintings fed off the discourses most dear to the New York art world of the eighties: appropriation, feminism, commodification, and the body.

Dana Lixenberg Set Amsterdam
25 March – 29 May 2011
Foam
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
www.foam.org

In Set Amsterdam, Dana Lixenberg portrays the city in a series of landscapes and interiors. These photographs depict Amsterdam as a kind of film set, fashioned by its current and former residents. The absence of people in the images turns the viewer’s gaze to the space itself and to the myriad details which define these environments. Only traces of human activity hint at inhabitants and at lives fully lived. Lixenberg was inspired to make these photographs after being commissioned to create actors’ portraits for a television series A’dam – E.v.a. (Amsterdam and many others).

Mathew Weir
25 March – 7 May 2011
Alison Jacques
London, UK
www.alisonjacques.com

Mathew Weir’s new exhibition presents in painting and sculpture a distinctive meditation on violence and constraint, as they can be enacted on the mind as well as felt on the body. Taking inspiration from a range of literary, historical and psychoanalytic accounts of domination and suffering (and the release from such bonds, in emancipation or death), Weir’s practice explores these themes in objects and images, constructing an uncanny and visceral visual experience which begins where language has either stopped, or failed.

Dr. Lakra
29 January – 9 May 2011
Museo Amparo
Puebla, Pue. México
www.museoamparo.com

Jerónimo López Ramírez is a self-taught illustrator and tattoo artist who signs his work as Dr. Lakra. This alias reflects the artist’s tendency towards rebellion – “doctor” is a title that commands respect, while “lakra” is Spanish slang for a delinquent and a play on the word lacra, which translates as a scar or a blemish. Lakra scours flea markets and bookstores around the world for surfaces to draw upon, including vintage prints, magazines, postcards, movie posters, and photographs. These materials are often politically and culturally charged, including portraits of politicians, seductive imagery from advertisements, and Mexican pop cultural figures like Pedro Infante and lucha libre wrestlers. Like revered Mexican illustrator José Guadalupe Posada, who is known for his iconic Day of the Dead imagery, Lakra marries the comic and the macabre in order to try and challenge traditional social structures and mores.

Cyprien Gaillard
The Recovery of Discovery
27 March – 22 May 2011
Kunsthalle Berlin, Germany
www.kw-berlin.de

Preserving a monument goes hand in hand with destroying it. In order to preserve architecture, cultural monuments and relics, they are often re-located, allowing urban displacement to arise—leading to the disappearance of the concept of autonomous geography and archeology. The dislocation of a monument does not only alter the history of its original location, but also leads to a radical re-interpretation of the monument itself. For his exhibition at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, Cyprien Gaillard has created a new work containing complex implications, which will only be revealed through an act of complete defiance. Similar to public amnesia, lost in the hopeless interaction with the monument, the gradual destruction becomes a part of the aesthetic of resistance.

Michael Sailstorfer: Raum und Zeit
26 March – 3 July 2011
SMAK
Ghent, Belgium
www.smak.be

Untamed absurdism, rebellious poetry and melancholy humour characterise the sculptural work of Michael Sailstorfer. Everyday objects, such as lamp posts, police cars and bus stops, are transformed into ‘useless’ images with a purely aesthetic value. Meaning is generated by means of traditional sculptural processes, thereby enabling the everyday itself to become sculpture. Sailstorfer has an eye for the formal qualities of objects, but he also leaves room for fiction, imagination and romance. He injects life into soulless things, makes trees fly and houses breathe.

Jeremy Millar
26 March – 7 May 2011
CCA, Glasgow
Scotland
www.cca-glasgow.com

This exhibition by celebrated artist Jeremy Millar provides a rare opportunity to bring disparate sculptural, photographic and video pieces together with new commissions, such as the shocking, life-size cast of the artist, Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man (The Willows). Millar is fascinated by the history of culture, especially at those points when a particular idea, or piece of work, is beginning to emerge or is coming to an end. In using a broad range of aesthetic approaches, Millar aligns his practice with that of others who came before him in the hope that the past might be reactivated within the present. ‘Most often, the first question asked of art is “what does it mean?” I suspect the more important question to ask is “what does it do?”, even if it seems like very little, or nothing at all.’ Jeremy Millar

Chantal Joffe
19 March – 21 April 2011
Victoria Miro
London, UK
www.victoria-miro.com

This show of new and recent paintings by Chantal Joffe centres around a powerful group of seven large-scale paintings in which the artist has restricted her palette to dark tones of black, red, blue and white. The works offer complex fictional portrayals of the artist’s heroines painted chronologically and moving towards us in time from the 1840s. As well as conceptual explorations of representations of female icons, the works also engage with key moments in literature, painting and feminist history.

Henry Taylor
19 March – 7 May 2011
Blum & Poe
Los Angeles, US
www.blumandpoe.com

In Henry Taylor’s work, the line between art and life is often indistinguishable; freely commingling intensely personal figurative paintings with totemic assemblage sculpture. Taylor has developed a unique visual dialect wedded to the downtown-Los Angeles community he calls home, addressing his subjects with the ease of an insider and the hand of an outsider. Taylor’s nuanced portraits shed a sentimental light on near and dear friends, family members, lovers and heroes, both dead and alive, real and imagined. They are non-hierarchical, generous and democratic likenesses of the people most central to his life and thought, with equal emphasis placed on a portrait of his niece and nephew in relaxed pose or larger than life statuesque representations of Serena Williams or Jackie Robinson.

Cuba in Revolution
11 March – 24 April 2011
Garage Center for Contemporary Culture
Moscow, Russia
www.garageccc.com

‘Cuba in Revolution’ presents over 250 original photographs that explore the visual legacy of the Cuban Revolution of 1959. The exhibition features works from over thirty photographers from Cuba, the United States and the USSR, and gives a unique insight into one of the most spectacular political events of the twentieth century. The exhibition shows the tremendous influence of photography in recording and also encouraging the revolutionary movement in Cuba. It includes important images of pre-Revolutionary Cuba by Constantino Arias, Raúl Corrales, René Burri, Burt Glinn and classics by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Alberto Korda, his 1959 portrait La Niña de la Muñeca de Palo (Girl with a Wooden Doll) and his seminal portrait of Che Guevara titled Guerrillero Heroico (Heroic Guerrilla) from 1960.