Emerging Artists

Iwona Blazwick
Elizabeth Price. At the House of Mr X (2007), shown at London’s MOT gallery, is a film that allows us to glide invisibly through someone else’s house, our gaze floating around Modernist objets d’art, resting on 1960s upholstery or drawn by the lustrous gleam of glass vases, mirrors and picture windows. Price will continue her subtly beautiful explorations of collections and museums in a film project that will come together over the coming year. I can’t wait to join her on the next tour.

Connie Butler
Highlights included paintings by Richard Aldrich at PS1 and Marc Foxx; videos by Mircea Cantor at Yvonne Lambert and elsewhere; Pawel Althamer’s grassy path and Silke Wagner’s monument to Nazi insanity and human salvation in Sculpture Projects Muenster 07. Mario Garcia Torres’ video about memory and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, at the Venice Biennale, was one of the highlights of the Italian Pavilion.

Richard Flood
With only three films to his name, director Darren Aronofsky still qualifies as an emerging artist. The Fountain (2006) was a critical and commercial disaster, but please take a look. It was a dazzlingly experimental film of incredible physical beauty and gorgeous narrative liquidity. There’s no such thing as too ripe.

Gary Garrels
Los Angeles just gets better and better as a city that attracts and nurtures young artists. A highlight this year was the first solo exhibition of Ruben Ochoa at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects hot on the heels of a solo project at LAXART. For this show Ochoa filled a small corner gallery with an installation of steel rebar, generally invisible inside new concrete constructions but here made into a tender yet tough matrix seen through a thin door.

Martin Herbert
Karla Black’s sculptures set up a hard-to-match reference point – Eva Hesse – before asserting their individuality through fine detailing and a nervy aesthetics of awkwardness. Clunie Reid’s blow-ups of doctored pop culture images and smaller photo-collages always feature one element too many to be pleasurable and vacillate between convincingly righteous anger and audience-baiting. Alexandre Singh, meanwhile, posits strange attractors at the heart of commercial culture, as in The Marque of the Third Stripe (2007), a labyrinthine installation that fictionalizes a devil’s bargain in the career of German sportswear baron Adolf ‘Adidas’ Dassler.

Matthew Higgs
Oslo-based Lars Laumann has miraculously found something original to say about popular culture. His recent video Morrissey Foretelling the Death of Diana (2006) – shown at both White Columns, New York, and as a part of 2007’s ‘EAST international’, which I co-selected with Marc Camille Chaimowicz – is a virtuoso visual essay compiled from existing footage that takes the form of a paranoid conspiracy theory, and which appears to ‘prove’ that Morrissey somehow anticipated the death of Princess Diana. Like Mark Leckey or Jeremy Deller, Laumann takes iconic subjects as a departure point for a more complex examination of the larger forces at play in our culture.

Chrissie Iles
For her show ‘Newsroom 1986–2000’ at New York’s Mary Boone Gallery, Aleksandra Mir and a team of assistants drew images in the gallery every day of 200 front pages of the Daily News and the New York Post from 1986 to 2000. Visitors were able to experience the process of making the art as the drawings moved from the table onto the wall, shifting the exhibition into a form of social exchange. Meanwhile, Urs Fischer dug out the floor of the space at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York, to create a barely navigable crater for his exhibition ‘You’. Echoing Michael Heizer’s earthwork Munich Depression (1969), made for Heiner Friedrich’s Munich gallery, the literal void of ‘You’ confronts what many fear the current market excess is in the process of creating. London-based Marc Camille Chaimowicz’ ground-breaking installation Celebration? Realife (1972), one of the most important British art works of the 1970s, has re-emerged, receiving long overdue scholarly attention in a book published in June by Afterall/MIT Press.

Udo Kittelmann
With ‘American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar’ (2007), New York photographer Taryn Simon has received a striking amount of coverage not only in art magazines but also in publications focusing on academic and social themes. This is a significant point, as her photographs represent a new take on the question of art’s socio-critical and political potential. She goes a long way towards restoring my faith in photography.

Carol Yinghua Lu
‘The Renegade Painting’, at Star Gallery, was Beijing artist Wang Yifan’s first solo show. It comprised paintings with hand-written texts of his name, an intimate account of his relationship with his former girlfriend and a surreal street fight scenario done in oil and acrylic on black canvas. Though seemingly random in content, Wang’s paintings are consistent in format, and subtly minimalist in execution.

Midori Matsui
Organized by four curators – Natsumi Araki, Noi Sawaragi, Kazuo Amano and Naoki Sato – ‘Roppongi Crossing 2007: Future Beats in Japanese Contemporary Art’ was a survey of current artistic trends at the Mori Art Museum. The show gave voice to the latent dream of Utopia shared by young Japanese artists; catastrophic images, bionic bodies, optical illusions and other space-age phantasmagoria reflected their inheritance of a cyberpunk imagination. The show also included works by artists from the 1960s and ’70s – precursors of the future dreams and genetic crossovers with subcultures that continues today.

Francis McKee
In Ireland, Bea McMahon’s videos have an offbeat rhythm that belies her razor sharp understanding of contemporary science while David O’Kane’s animations have a freshness and technical expertise that reinforces their formal interests. In Tel Aviv, Reuven Israel’s sculptures have a virtual quality – a six month process of layering paint onto wood takes each piece into unreal territory. In Scotland, Catherine Street and Aileen Campbell have established themselves, working across visual and performance boundaries. In London, Anna Barham’s work is increasingly authoritive.

Joanna Mytkowska
Katerina Sedá’s work in Prague There Is Nothing There (2003) consisted in organizing a daily routine for the inhabitants of a small Czech village so that they performed the same tasks they do every day, only together. A similar issue was raised by her project in documenta 12: For every dog a different master.

Hans Ulrich Obrist
Chinese artist Chu Yun made an impact with his first solo exhibition at Vitamin Creative Space in Guangzhou. My fellow curators and I selected his piece Constellation no.2 (2006–7), for the exhibition ‘China Power Station: Part II’, held at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo and carried out in collaboration with the Serpentine Gallery, London. Immersed in a darkened room, the viewer encounters a landscape of flashing lights. Gradually, however, it emerges that the lights stem from a strange laboratory displaying a collection of old electric appliances, amassed by the artist at flea markets in China, which are all set on ‘pause’ or ‘error’ mode. Chu Yun’s next big project is a performative piece about Baruch Spinoza.

Sean O’Toole
As South Africa is a country gripped by political factionalism and lingering racial divisions, it is apt that collectives impressed the most this past year. Amongst these, the Dead Revolutionaries Club, a loose collective of strategically placed young black artists, curators and intellectuals, continue to pose probing questions. Less earnest in their activities are AVANT CAR GUARD (ACG). Not only has this trio of young white males danced on the grave of revered/reviled landscape painter J.H. Pierneef, they also symbolically buried Kendell Geers. ‘We have issue with him authoring the South African experience remotely,’ stated ACG’s Michael MacGarry. ‘He isn’t relevant here anymore.’
 
Adriano Pedrosa
Marcellvs L. is a Brazilian video artist who has recently moved to Berlin. His ‘Rhizome’ series comprise mostly single-sequence shots in which the video camera is held still, at times drifting in and out of the subject: a seemingly ordinary moment, a detail or fragment, of city life. Recently he has been developing more ambitious video installations, which are full of delicate takes and revelations on time, progression and life itself.

Mark Sladen
Associates, the gallery in east London that was the brainchild of artist Ryan Gander, came to the end of its one-year term in the autumn. The brief was to show 12 solo exhibitions by emerging artists – highlights included work by Alice Channer and Sean Edwards – thus giving them exposure as well as all the profits from sales. The project generated a great sense of community while offering a simple but effective model of self-organization.

Trevor Smith
Luca Vitone came clearly into focus for me at this year’s Sharjah Biennial. Three large raw canvases had been exposed to the elements in various locations around Sharjah over the preceding months, building up accretions of stains and grime while slowly decomposing in the heat, wind and sun. Vitone chose to install these canvases in a modest one-room building and courtyard in the emirate’s historical district which he restored for the occasion. Rebuilding a humble small stone structure while nature was allowed to take its course bore witness to the critical power of humility and constructive action.

Polly Staple
On a recent trip to Tel Aviv a number of youngish artists stood out, several more or less well known on a more international stage: Miri Segal, Michal Helfman, Ariel Schlesinger, Sharon Yaari and Nelly Agassi. Some Glasgow-based artists working across a variety of media are also developing interesting projects: Charlie Hammond, Laura Aldridge, Torsten Lauschmann and Duncan Campbell. In London Associates Gallery, a project directed by Ryan Gander and produced by Rebecca May Marston, presented a diverse programme of young artists and contributed a good-humoured dynamic and experimental energy to London’s art scene.

Eugenie Tsai
Kalup Linzy and Shaun Leonardo, whose lip-synched duet in Lollipop (2006) is already a classic, are two artists worth watching. Their star presence as performers makes their explorations of gender and race provocative and compelling. Clifford Owens is someone else to check out. Seher Shah and Fay Ku both make large-scale, highly finished, drawings. Shah’s draughtsmanship reflects her training as an architect; Ku constructs narratives that often centre on female protagonists. I am also curious to see what Duke Riley, known for projects outside the institutional framework (such as a renegade bar in Fort Tilden on the Rockaway peninsula in Queens, New York) will do this spring.

Jan Verwoert
With critical discourse in art gravitating towards content-heavy works during the 1990s, we risked losing our sense of appreciation for the politics of abstraction. Polish artist Michal Budny takes a critique of urban space to a level of abstraction where the established meanings of architectural forms are eroded and their shapes come to evoke a feeling of sheer potentiality. Made from folded paper or cardboard, his sculptures sometimes approximate the dimensions of architectural models and at other times fill the entire gallery. Budny shows that you may have to go abstract to grasp what space can really be and do.

Anton Vidokle
Berlin-based Natascha Sadr Haghighian has developed a fascinating avoidance of individualized authorship. She was recently invited to present her first solo museum show at MAMbo in Bologna and, in keeping with her approach, the exhibition entitled ‘The Solo Show’ will be a collaboration with Uwe Schwarzer, an artist who runs Mixed Media – a Berlin-based firm that produces works by more established artists. The two have conceived a fictional artist whose work will be fabricated by Mixed Media, an elegant move that will shed light on the conditions of production for some of our most successful artists and on the nature of artistic authorship.

Kit Wise
In Melbourne some great work was shown by Matthew Griffin, especially his punchy, post-punk solo show ‘We Get Tricks’ at the Uplands Gallery. Bianca Hester’s ‘Provisional Devices for the Production of a Propositional Living Space’ at Gertrude Street was another wildly imaginative investigation of space. Alex Pittendrigh produced more scenes of pathological ornamentation in Blu-Tack at the new space Murray White Room, while Laresa Kosloff extended her extraordinary investigation of the dynamic human form at Apartment and Ocular Lab. Raafat Ishak’s unremittingly elegant semi-figurative paintings of ships, stadiums and dolphins, a meditation on power and beauty at Sutton Gallery were also up there with the best of them.

Catherine Wood
Wolfgang Tillmans’ London project space Between Bridges has continued a fascinating succession of shows with marginalized figures from the 1960s and ’70s, Charlotte Posenenske and Charles Henri Ford following on from David Wojnarowicz and Sister Corita Kent. It’s been great to see attention given to the cryptic glamour of Guy de Cointet and Jiri Kovanda’s everyday gestures of resistance, and to learn about hidden histories of Polish art from the 1970s via Lukasz Ronduda’s ‘1,2,3 Avant Gardes’, which revitalized the significance of the artistic strategies of Natalia LL, Zdzislaw Sosnowski, Pawel Kwiek and others in relation to artists working in the present.