#whatiftheworld

[sheltiechicago]

Sharing, Connecting, Healing

Lakin Ogunbanwo, Let it Be, 2016, Archival ink-jet print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag, 119 x 79.5 cm, Edition of 10, Image courtesy of Lakin Ogunbanwo and WHATIFTHEWORLD

There’s Light: Artworks & Conversations Examining Black Masculinity, Identity and Mental Well-being, a landmark publication from author and conceptual artist Glenn Lutz (b. 1988).

#lakin ogunbanwo #photographer #artist #hahnemuhle photo rag #whatiftheworld #there's light artworks & conversations examining black masculinity identity and mental well-being #publication #glenn lutz #let it be

[somdyala]

Zangomva Eliweni, 2022

Ochre, Red Oxide, Karoo Soil and Rock on Canvas 

113.5 X 79.5 CM

#Hlathi #Lisa #Jambase #sanzanza #Zangomva Eliweni #ADAMAH #Inga Somdyala #WHATIFTHEWORLD

[guy60660]

Lungiswa Gqunta | Whatiftheworld Gallery | Financial Times

#whatiftheworld gallery #lungiswa gqunta #art #design #financial times

[camrnnnnn]

A gallery I decided to visit. I’m gonna miss Cape Town for the month I’m gone👨🏻‍🍳

So stressed about results

#wishmeluck #whatiftheworld

#art #gallerywall #artgallaries #contemporary art

[distinktionsfetzen]

Check out Dan Halter, Things Fall Apart (R200 Mandela Cantenary Edition) (2023), From WHATIFTHEWORLD

[xtruss]

Baring It All: Breasts Take Center Stage At This Major Exhibition

— By Jacqui Palumbo | Monday April 22, 2024

"Breasts" runs from April to November at the 60th Venice Biennale international art exhibition. Eva Herzog

(CNN) — What is one of the earliest and enduring subjects in art and media — as well as one of the most censored? Breasts. First carved large onto small “Venus” figurines some 25,000 years ago as totems of fertility, they’re now seen (or hidden) as a potent symbol of desire, motherhood, feminism, sexism, beauty ideals, defiance, controversy or illness, depending on context.

And these are all themes explored broadly in the exhibition “Breasts,” a robust survey on display at the 60th Venice Bienniale. Hosted at the Palazzo Franchetti, the show includes artworks by household names such as Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe and Salvador Dalí, as well as early-career artists including Anna Weyant, Chloe Wise and Lakin Ogunbanwo. Divided into five rooms against the building’s art deco designs, the artworks are meant to be in conversation with one another — and with exhibition-goers — according to the show’s curator Carolina Pasti.

“It’s very intimate, so it’s perfect for international artists to develop a dialogue with each other,” she said in a video call.

One of the first juxtapositions visitors encounter is between the exhibition’s earliest work, an early 16th-century Madonna and child by Bernardino del Signoraccio, and a self-portrait by Sherman which depicts the artist draped in prosthetic breasts and a pregnant belly. Both images of motherhood feature exaggerated anatomy — the baby Jesus in Del Signoraccio’s panel painting exposing his mother’s rigid bosom, while Sherman displays a hyperreal silicone torso in her riff on the Raphael painting “La Fornarina” — and sets the stage by showing how Renaissance artists have continued to influence our attitudes around breasts today.

Left: Bernardino del Signoraccio, "Madonna dell' Umiltà," ca. 1460-1540 Courtesy Flavio Gianassi/FG Fine Arts Ltd. Right: Cindy Sherman, "Untitled 205," 1989 Cindy Sherman

From there, the show winds through painting, sculpture and design, photography, commercial advertising and video art, exploring the ways that breasts have been seen and represented through both the male and female gazes.

“It goes back to cave paintings — we’ve always been fascinated with the human form, and particularly the female form, which has this incredible allure and mystery,” said the artist Teniqua Crawford, who is exhibiting a delicate rendering of the breast as landscape. “Artists keep going back to it.”

“It’s been a wonderful moment to contemplate my own relationship with the meaning of breasts,” she added of the show.

“Breasts” was staged, in part, to promote breast cancer awareness, and marks a partnership with the medical research non-profit Fondazione IEO-MONZINO, which will receive a portion of its catalog sales. It’s a theme apparent throughout the show, with a vivid pink staging and backdrops inspired by the color of the cause. That includes a passageway designed by Buchanan Studio, “Booby Trap” which is draped in pink fabric and features 35 anatomical lights from above.

And the opening night treats? All according to the theme, of course, with suggestively shaped chocolate bon bons and burrata.

Lakin Ogunbanwo "Untitled (2 girls)," 2013 Courtesy Whatiftheworld

Top: Teniqua Crawford, "Fragment Horizon," 2024 Todd White Bottom: Anna Weyant, "Chest," 2020 Courtesy private collection, Europe

Left: Allen Jones, "Cover Story," 2015 Courtesy the artist/Galleria d'Arte Maggiore Right: Allen Jones, "Cover Story," 2015 Courtesy the artist/Galleria d'Arte Maggiore

Top: Laura Panno, "Alfabeto del corpo (Ceramica Blu)," 1990 Courtesy the Artist Bottom: Christopher Bucklow "Tetrarch (Claudia-Schiffer)", 2010 Christopher Bucklow

Giorgio de Chirico "Nudo di donna," 1930 Courtesy private collection, Turin

Louise Bourgeois "The-Reticent Child," 2005 Courtesy private collection, Italy

Masami Teraoka, "Breast on Hollywood Hills Installation Project," 1970 Courtesy Catherine Clark Gallery

#Style #Art #US 🇺🇸 | CNN | News 🗞️ #Breasts | Exhibition #Jacqui Palumbo

[callangreciaonline]

Cosmic Disco Exhibition Text(not shit this time, in fact very very good*)

WHATIFTHEWORLD is pleased to present Cosmic Disco, Callan Grecias’ first presentation with the gallery. 

The pantheon of characters in Callan Grecia’s Cosmic Disco are aspirational figures. The men have big muscles, the women have voluptuous curves and the gender-fluid demi-gods are magnetic. Everyone has great hair. Nakedly sensual, they are hanging out, looking cool and engaging in leisurely, pleasurable, instagrammable libations.

The imagery that the South African artist Callan Grecia channels is both contemporary and ancient and he dips into the span of the Western art canon, the work of contemporary African artists, the Hindu pantheon and the internet image economy. He allows us to see the method of the construction of his painterly worlds: they are mystical and otherworldly but they have been informed as much by the lens of his experience of living in the real world as by his imagination, and the aesthetic luxuriousness of the paintings contains clues that reveal a more serious and worldly underpinning. Grecia is a Durbanite whose eye has been formed by both Kwa-Zulu Natal’s natural tropical abundance and his Indian cultural heritage and at the heart of his drive in conceptualising Cosmic Disco was a desire to pay homage to the images of Hindu gods in the paintings he was surrounded by at his family home but had paid little or no attention to. He says “I was stuck for a long time only really looking at the west, so it was a good way of extending my sphere of investigation.” The works are a kind of visual speculative fiction and propose an alternative universe or a Utopian future. At the same time, they contain cues that reveal the artist’s global consciousness, his upbringing in a country with a violent and divisive past and his urge to redress an art historical focus whose eye rested primarily on the West. This particular combination of the difficult and the sublime is potent because it makes the inventive joy of these Utopias even sweeter by complicating them. 

Born just prior to the Born Free generation of post-1994 South Africa, Grecia is part of a generation of South Africans emerging with a confident, assertive and questioning identity. In his studio practice, Grecia allows the visual to lead and trusts this process to prompt an ongoing stream-of-creation where he draws from his own particular narrative and imagination. He often works intuitively and quickly and swaps between lateral and critical thinking. The studio process begins with drawings on paper and he extends and expands these to large-scale colour-saturated paintings. He has collections full of images drawn from everywhere and everywhen with his magpie eye. He has a headful of imagery, he has notebooks full of palimpsests of drawing and overdrawing: Callan Grecia stands at his own nexus of historical time and place, speculative fiction, art history, internet image saturation, decolonisation, childhood cartoons, Hindu prayers and fashion brands. He is a creator of demi-gods and otherworlds, shape-shifting, gender-fluid, dynamic figures that shimmer and flicker with bursts of esoteric symbols. Their immediate environments are sparsely graphic and defy placement – could be a dance floor, could be a temple wall. Their formats pulse with visual energy,  the surface animated by line drawings of visual symbols drawn over, behind and into the figures. He squeezes his compositions by drawing in an additional line frame which sits inside the edges of the format and this intensifies the crammed space and allows some aspects of the drawings and paintings to push up against this inner frame and some to burst out over it as if the energy in the works cannot entirely be contained. His thinking is astute and unpredictable and he brings this quality into his drawings and paintings – it’s a trick that the artist loves playing where he configures and reconfigures graphic cyphers, characters and emissions, slippery in meaning and mercurial in intention. This slipperiness is not to confound the viewer or deny access to the works but is a visual device of the artist meant to subvert the idea that we can assign specific meaning to specific visuals, and which instead opens up Grecia’s fabricated worlds to readings of layers of shifting meaning and endless reinvention. In an initial look at Grecia’s works, symbols and cyphers may evoke particular meanings  but in looking longer, it is clear that there is a multiplicity of meanings and that these motifs become more open-ended and interconnected. Backing his hyper-referentiality are the actual facts of his context: the conditions of his time and place.

An example of how Grecia pulls this together can be seen in this tumble of imagery, inference, meaning and interconnection: the stars in the works and all the different ways in which Grecia uses them: the end of a caduceus, the end point of eye rays, the flash of a cigarette ember, the dazzle of an offering, a floating superpower, the twinkles of light from a cosmic glitterball. I think of Callan Grecia himself who wears wings on his sneakers and of his shoe obsession … the Nike swoosh  which immediately invokes the Nike footwear brand, and could also evoke (from the word Nike) the ancient Greek winged victory, and from this, with the image of wings in mind, the various wings in the artworks become more evident. There are wings on shoulders like extra hands, and winged ankles invoking Hermes and Garuda and other flighted beings. In consideration of this, it becomes clear that there is another prominent motif linked with wings that appears and reappears in these compositions, often centrally: the Myna bird. This bird species, named in English after its Hindi name, is native to India and came to South Africa in 1860 on ships from India bringing indentured labourers to work on sugar cane farms, a bird known for its intelligence and mischievousness. Grecia says: “They came here with us on the ships and they’re classified as an invasive alien species in SA. Just like us. That’s why some have the antennas too. I like that we had company. They’re like ancestors in these paintings to me.” 

We could see Grecia’s works as generators of meaning, where we consciously allow our own personal and historical references to inform the meaning that we derive from what we see – in the knowledge that the artist is making a rich and complex set of indices for us to play with, to connect, to create our own meaning in relation to the artist’s. The symbols and visual cues in Grecia’s paintings come from a deeply personal space, yet spiral out to contain a wider and profound context. This is part of the pleasure of the paintings and drawings, the artist’s mercurial, illusionist, trickster-thinking ability to provoke such multiplicities of meaning which are able to describe the artist’s own worlds, inner and outer, that spin a web of references which catch the viewer with the familiarity of shared cues, shared aspects of history and knowledge and invites them to share in the divinity of our best selves in the great Cosmic Disco.

Text by Tanya Poole*

[ronaldmuchatuta]

This weekend I will be participating in the inaugural 40 under 40 exhibition hosted by   @whatiftheworld_gallery X @kronecapclassique featuring 40 artists under the age of 40. The exhibition is hosted at the historic Twee Jonge Gezellen estate in Tulbagh, the home of Krone Cap Classique. VENUE Twee Jonge Gezellen Wine Estate Twee Jonge Gezellen Estate Road Tulbagh TIME 10:30 - 14:00 DATE 25 September 2021 #ArtFromAfrica #AfricaPresent #contemporaryafricanart #contemporarypainting⁠ #ronaldmuchatuta #artandculture   #beautifulbizarre   #creativeuprising  #konst #atelier #kunst #artcurator   #whatiftheworld #krone #tweejongegezellenestate #tulbagh https://www.instagram.com/p/CUHqk6QKfty/?utm_medium=tumblr

#artfromafrica #africapresent #contemporaryafricanart #contemporarypainting #ronaldmuchatuta #artandculture #beautifulbizarre #creativeuprising #konst #atelier #kunst #artcurator #whatiftheworld #krone #tweejongegezellenestate #tulbagh

[toutpetitlaplanete]

Michael Taylor - Vampire Sunset, 2016

#Michael Taylor #art #contemporary art #Whatiftheworld Gallery #whatiftheworld

[miachaplin]

#mia chaplin #oil on canvas #whatiftheworld #under a boiling river #painting #oil painting

[thethinginthebag]

So glad to see @athipatraruga get a complete installation @thearmoryshow #athipatraruga #whatiftheworld #armoryshow #contemporaryafricanart #artist #contemporaryartist #tapestry (at The Armory Show)

#armoryshow #athipatraruga #contemporaryafricanart #artist #tapestry #contemporaryartist #whatiftheworld

[sheltiechicago]

African Artists: From 1882 to Now

Michele Mathison, “Breaking Ground” (2014), steel and enamel, 203 × 104 × 40 centimeters.

Photo © the artist, courtesy Michele Mathison and WHATIFTHEWORLD

#michele mathison #artist #sculptor #sculpture #breaking ground #steel and enamel #whatiftheworld #art #african artist

[somdyala]

Ralashiwe, 2022

Red Oxide and Homesoil (Komani) on Canvas 

113.5 X 79.5 CM

#ADAMAH #ukhokho #Inga Somdyala #WHATIFTHEWORLD

[yohguysimpson]

Lungiswa Gqunta

LAWN 2016 Wood, broken bottles, and petrol 242 x 122 x 28 cm

I found this a lot of fun. even though it is razor sharp broken glass its still got a playful element to it. I guess that’s why its called LAWN. you just want to play on it. 

#whatiftheworld

[aprpresents]

#whatiftheworld gallery

[distinktionsfetzen]

Check out Dan Halter, Things Fall Apart (£50) (2021), From WHATIFTHEWORLD