"Gem Fletcher chats to Catherine Opie. Known for her powerfully dynamic photography that examines the ideals and norms surrounding the culturally constructed American dream and American identity. She first gained recognition in the 1990s for her series of studio portraits titled Being and Having, in which she photographed gay, lesbian, and transgender individuals drawn from her circle of friends and artists. Opie has travelled extensively across the country exploring the diversity of America’s communities and landscapes, documenting quintessential American subjects—high school football players and the 2008 presidential inauguration—while also continuing to display America’s subcultures through formal portraits. Using dramatic staging, Opie presents cross-dressers, same-sex couples, and tattooed, scarred, and pierced bodies in intimate photographs that evoke traditional Renaissance portraiture—images of power and respect. In her portraits and landscapes, Opie establishes a level of ambiguity of both identity and place by exaggerating masculine or feminine characteristics, or by exaggerating distance, cropping, or blurring her landscapes.

Catherine has just released a new monograph – published by Phaidon, the book is organised in three themes: people, politics and place – the core tenants of her artistic investigation. It’s presented non-chronologically, a curatorial strategy she has been experimenting with for the last decade., which teases out connections between seemingly incongruent bodies of work. The result is a book with such a dynamic visual narrative, you can return to it again and again and see something new.

In the episode we talk about everything from visual strategies, audiences in the digital age, self-doubt, road trips, bearing witness, empathy, belonging and so much more. What is remarkable about Catherine is the ways in which she has the ability to shapeshift as an artist, to show a multiplicity of inquiry, queering the medium over and over again." - Gem Fletcher/'The Messy Truth' Podcast

To listen to the podcast click here

Tomorrow, 25 May at 12:30pm (London time) Alexandre da Cunha will be live from his studio with Ben Roberts (Artistic Director @brightoncca) for the launch of a new series, Process and Practice. 

For the inaugural presentation Brighton CCA invite you to an informal conversation with Alexandre about his practice, working during lockdown and upcoming projects, as he prepares for a major new exhibition of work opening at Brighton CCA on 6 August 2021. 

The conversation will be broadcast live on Zoom with the opportunity for questions at the end, however spaces are limited and booking is essential.

Process and Practice is a series of informal presentations with artists focusing on what they’re working on right now.

Click here to book

Cecily Brown in conversation with Francine Prose, Yale Center for British Art

Date: 21 May 2021, 5 pm (EDT)

To register clik here

59 artists from 27 countries including 15 new site-specific works commissioned by NEON will be featured in the group exhibition Portals, opening on 11 June in the renovated spaces of the former Public Tobacco Factory – Hellenic Parliament Library & Printing House, as part of the collaboration between the Hellenic Parliament and NEON.

Steve McQueen: Ashes

Turner Contemporary, Margate, England

Exhibition dates: 18 May - 12 September 2021

Ashes (2002–2015) is a two-channel video installation by artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen. It is composed of footage filmed by McQueen over ten years, on two separate visits to the Caribbean island of Grenada — a former French and British colony that achieved independence in 1974.

To book tickets click here

Alexandre da Cunha: 'Duplex,' Brighton CCA, Brighton, England

Exhbition dates: 6 August - 2 October 2021

Brighton CCA is pleased to present Duplex an exhibition of new works by Brazilian artist Alexandre da Cunha curated in collaboration with Jenni Lomax. This is the artist’s first solo presentation in a UK public institution for 10 years.

Duplex is an articulation of da Cunha’s engagement with cultures of consumption, reuse, materiality and art history. Central to da Cunha’s practice is the ready-made and specifically, how perceptions of objects are affected by place, time and the results of labour. Da Cunha’s complex and subtle process of transforming materials and images create encounters with everyday objects that disentangle the instinctive responses inherent to particular materials, endowing the works with alternative modes of understanding; so cotton becomes marble, mops become tapestry, construction tools become mysterious relics and mundane objects echo art historical precedents. The result is a vibrant dialogue about the history and function of symbols and material in society, from park benches and umbrellas to cement mixers and beach towels.

The presentation echoes the form of a processional route through the galleries, so visitors encounter objects and motifs presented and revisited much as the artist approaches objects and materials in his work. In this respect the exhibition speaks to its location; resonating with connections to a familiar past. Visible from the gallery windows is Brighton’s North Gate, a stone arch built for the royal procession to pass through at the opening of the Brighton Pavilion, while each year the Brighton Pride march – the largest in country – also passes in front of the gallery windows. Duplex engages with these histories as movements through time and culture of the city; reappropriating old signifiers and embracing a more contingent, yet confident present.

In June, as a precursor to Duplex, da Cunha will launch Brighton CCA’s inaugural Summer Commission, with a public artwork that will be on display until August. This is will be the first artwork in a series of annual temporary public commissions by invited artists to be held each summer.

Bruce Conner. Light out of Darkness

Museum Tinguely, Basel, Switzerland 
5 May - 28 November 2021

The exhibition Light out of Darkness references a solo exhibition project of the same name for the University Art Museum at Berkeley, California, in the 1980s. By no means the least of the reasons why it never actually took place was Conner’s refusal to compromise in his dealings with institutions, whose rules for artists he would not accept. The title «Light out of Darkness» emphasizes the experimental character of Conner’s filmic output, which in his early works, especially, resembles a brilliant probing of human perception. The symbolic dualism of light and darkness stands for the artist’s propensity to think in opposites and metaphors and for his mysticism.

For almost 40 years, Catherine Opie has been documenting with psychological acuity the cultural and geographic identity of contemporary America. This unique artist monograph presents a compelling visual narrative of Opie's work since the early 1980s, pairing images across bodies of work to form a full picture of her artistic vision. With more than 300 beautiful illustrations and made in close collaboration with Opie, the book marks a turning point in the consideration of this artist's work to date.