DaWire

Michel Majerus (1967-2002) used everything from art historical references, popular culture, video games, television and corporate logos to construct his paintings. He was born in Esch, Luxembourg but worked in Berlin until his untimely death in an airplane crash in 2002.

Sebastián Vallejo’s paintings are inspired by the light and colors of the Caribbean, where organic and inorganic forms collide and transpose each other creating a visually engaging display of light and form.[...]

André Butzer, who was born in 1973 and today lives in Rangsdorf near Berlin, has achieved an international reputation with works that he describes as “Science Fiction Impressionism“. The colours and their use, which is sometimes lavish yet still very controlled, distinguish these works from the very first glance.

Transmission (2010) is a film and photographic series by Swedish artist Maria Friberg that deals with concepts of masculinity, power and progress. For this project, Friberg has photographed a series of automobiles from underneath to reveal some of their mechanical components.

William Powhida‘s work can be considered an angry response to the movers and shakers of the art world and its hierarchical structures. But they are also well executed pieces that include, drawing, painting and critical writing, a far cry from the more common ‘hate art’ that we can easily find among frustrated artists and critics alike. In fact, Powhida, a self-proclaimed ‘reformed art critic,’ used to write for The Brooklyn Rail for years before venturing full-time into his own artistic practice.

What a week! Photography, sculpture, performance and today finally painting makes the cut for our series Sexual Deployment: The Body as Method for Discourse. Through these different mediums, we have seen how women use their bodies as a sculptural object, but also as a metaphor for larger political and social issues. Mexican artist Ana Teresa Fernández also utilizes the body in her performance-based work to explore issues related to women and sexuality.[...]

Performance art lends itself to the utilization of the body as a resource, a space for discussion and a mechanism for discourse. Regina José Galindo is a Guatemalan performance artist that uses her body to denounce social and political injustices, but also to address issues related to sexuality and women.[...]

For today’s installment of Sexual Deployment: The Body as Method for Discourse we present work from artist Janine Antoni. Antoni utilizes her body as both a mechanism for making art and an art object. Antoni sculpts with her teeth and even paints with her hair, exploring the physicality of the body as well as social and cultural constructions of femininity.[...]

The title Sexual Deployment is taken from Michel Foucault’s seminal work The History of Sexuality, where he analyzes the politics of power surrounding our approach to sexuality. In it, Foucault defines what he calls ‘the deployment of alliance’ and ‘the deployment of sexuality,’ two opposing systems that address sexuality in completely different ways and where power is a game that centers on the body.[...]

We want to provide our readers with more than just news on artists and exhibitions, that’s why once a month we will bring you one full week dedicated to a particular theme or subject, presenting contemporary artists within a curatorial, conceptual or theoretical framework. Sexual Deployment: The Body as Method for Discourse presents five women artists that use their bodies as a political and social space to address issues of sexuality, feminism and femininity.[...]