Insider Editorial - Select News from the World of Art and Design

Video still from a performance by Swedish artist Ingela Ihrman. A person donned in a purple fig costume divides itself in two halves as if a knife was cutting through the fruit. The cut exposes the fleshy interior of the fig. The halved fig l...

We are looking forward to Ingela Ihrman's ucoming show at Malmö Konsthall, the most comprehensive exhibition to date. Sophie Tottie's work from the '90's to present is featured in a beautiful new book published by Art and Theory Publishing and in Rome we're invited on a journey - afterall, according to the curator Fabio Sindici, all the places you can imagine are real. With art by Luca Di Luzio and designed by stage designer Valentina Rocca, a visit to Journey Analogue takes us a destination where time have stood still, the charming bookshop Antica Libreria Cascianelli. Design studio Taller Tarapaca just opened a new showroom in the Sacred Valley - a must when traveling in Peru, and out West, Los Angels based Miguel Starcevich declares "I Am Not A Dead Artist". And we are delighted to welcome CHART into our portfolio. CHART is the leading Nordic cultural event that has taken the concept of the artfair above and beyond.

Textile wall piece and water colors by artist Miguel Andrade Valdez, Edilberto Chair, Diana Ortega Garagatti for Taller Tarapaca.

Heritage meets Contemporary inTaller Tarapacá's New Showroom in the Sacred Valley
Taller Tarapacá’s design has a strong focus on material and craft, combined with clean, architectonic lines and a minimal esthetic. Their design combines heritage craft with contemporary designers. The first exhibition features chairs such as the Silla de Pie by artist Miguel Andrade Valdez and architect Diana Ortega Garagatti, The Edilberto Chair by Ortega Garagatti, together with designer Paula Cermeño León’s Bodegon ceramics and woven carpets designed by Miguel Andrade Valdez. The showroom will also host pop-up shows of artists and artisans.Look out for artist Miguel Andrade Valdez who is showing a set of water color drawings that inspired a line of wall hangings. During its opening hours, the showroom welcomes walk-ins to take a closer look at and to order Taller Tarapacá‘s sculptural designs, and it is also open by appointment for groups, design lovers and buyers of interior design. Where: Taller Tarapacá's Showroom is located next to the Sonesta Hotel Posadas del Inka Yukay on Plaza Manco II 105, Yucay 08665, Urubamba-Cusco, Peru.

Handwoven textile work by Peruvian artist Miguel Andrade Valdez, The textile is made using a small watercolor drawing of a halved avocado that has been turned into an imaginary landscape with a few steps and a trapezoid window.

Link to LOOKBOOK

Malmö Konsthall to Open Major Show with Ingela Ihrman
In a playful way, Ingela Ihrman’s work explores what it means to be human. With humour and sincerity, she lifts questions concerning identity and belonging by looking at different life forms and how we relate to one another. She focuses on strong emotions connected to everyday life, such as lust, longing and loneliness. Where: Malmö Konsthall. Dates: September 30 2023 - January 14 2024. More information TBA.

New Book by Artist Sophie Tottie Published by Art and Theory Publishing 

SOPHIE TOTTIE: AiWHEtL (catalogue and related works)

The world is always inevitably changing. At the same time, we humans look for patterns and regularities. AiWHEtL revolves around doing and thinking as a process of understanding, in which the result essentially cannot be owned but remains in constant change. (Sophie Tottie)

In Sophie Tottie’s recent work re-workings of previous work, for example material and leftover products like paint and brush cleaner is incorporated and reused in new work. Tottie’s works function as prisms that weigh, measure, and materialize something that seem to belong to an inner, intangible reality but which manifest themselves in an outer material and physical existence.

The work in AiWHEtL* circles around the act of learning, where one main question is not what it is about but how it works. The book includes four texts that discuss Tottie's work from the 1990s up to the present – a work that is not a conglomeration of facts and an end point, but which remodels through actions, ongoing contemplation and re-evaluations of what has been said and done. 

Ultimately, if we think of all that we do as a form with which to improve society, and with it ourselves, all of it is social work. But it is social work that not only aims at achieving bearable levels of survival but also at guaranteeing an autopoietic system that eventually has its own sound dynamic and then doesn’t need us anymore.”
Fragments from an email conversation, Sophie Tottie and Luis Camnitzer, 2021

Texts: Mårten Arndtzén, Magnus Bons, Connie H Butler, Luis Camnitzer, Sophie Tottie

Design: Jöran Rammhällen, Sophie Tottie
2023, English, softcover

120 pages, 21,5 x 27,7 cm
ISBN: 9789198672091
Order from Art & Theory Publishing

(* The title is an acronym of the sentence “As if We Had Everything to Learn” from the text: ‘Lygia Clark: A Space Open to Time’ by Cornelia H. Butler, published in the catalogue for Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948-1988, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2014.)

One of the oldest bookstores in Rome, the Antica Libreria Cascianelli, is a treasure chest of rare books, objets d’art, antiques and prints — a true collector’s paradise unfolding in a décor essentially unchanged since the early XIXth century.

A Roman Journey at Antica Libreria Cascianelli
An artist obsessed with maps, flags, the footprints of space and time. An antique bookshop in the heart of Rome that looks as popping out from Balzac’s novel The Magic Skin. An art curator and travelling reporter who thinks that all the places you can imagine are real. The exhibition Journey Analogue comes from this combination of people and places. Luca Di Luzio artworks transforms Antica Libreria Cascianelli - just behind Navona square and beside the entrance of the archaelogical site of Domitian Stadium – in a contemporary wunderkammer, with the help of stage designer Valentina La Rocca (Libreria Cascianelli co-owner) and art writer Fabio Sindici. The title pays homage to Renè Daumal’s unfinished novel Mount Analogue, a surrealist chronicle of an impossible journey. The result is an art installation conceived both as hide and seek game and exploration in a parallel universe. The maps that Di Luzio creates with the imprints of his anatomy plays with ancient travel books; the fake animal skins maculate in printed geographical contours of real  countries wink to exotic stuffed birds, relics of centuries old travels; captions are substitued by poetry fragments similar to the erratic thoughts of an imaginary traveller.

"This solo show of Luca Di Luzio is at halfway between a classic exhibition and an immersive art installation formed by accurately selected works put in relation with the old volumes, maps, posters of an antique Roman bookshop. The idea, with Di Luzio and Valentina La Rocca, co-owner of Antica Libreria Cascianelli, was to create a symbiotic, even if temporary, association between a young artist and an atmospheric place full of precious objects and oddities, on the border line between art and literature, rationalism and freed imagination". (Fabio Sindici, Curator)

Installation view of Italian artist Luca Di Luzio's show, A World Analogue at Antica Libreria Cascianelli in Rome, curated by Fabio Sindici.

Where: Antica Libreria Cascianelli, Rome. Dates: Until May 3, 2023

Los Angeles based artist Miguel Starcevich in his studio wearing one of his customised I Am Not A Dead Artist Tees.

I Am Not A Dead Artist - Meanwhile in L.A. 
Miguel Starcevich is an artist living in Los Angeles. He often works with people in his studio, and, during live sessions, create and photograph three-dimensional collages on the wall made of tape and cardboard. Installation, sculpture, film and performance are part of his process that draws from memories of childhood. Known as a photographer of beauty and talent such as Snoop Dogg, Ozzy Osborne, Chris Brown, John Legend, and Courtney Love for Capitol Records, Sony and Def Jam, and published in Vogue Italia, Penthouse and Flaunt Magazine to name a few, he has also shot film stars like Dustin Hoffman, Danny Houston, Taraji P. Henson and Sophie Turner. Parallel to this career he has been working with his art for more than 15 years. Based in Koreatown, he focuses on his new series and have a filmwork, shot in the desert outside L.A., coming up. Find out more on the artist's website.

Last but not least...

...we are delighted to welcome CHART into our select portfolio of clients!
We love Copenhagen and we love CHART. Stay tuned for news about the leading Nordic cultural event that has grown into a celebration of arts and an editorial platform. Building on Copenhagen’s strongholds of art, design, and architecture CHART explores artistic crossovers and bring the arts community together in all its diversity and have developed the concept of what an art fair could be. Where: Copenhagen Dates: August 24-27, 2023.

CHART is the leading Nordic art event and a new editorial platform. CHART brings together dedicated individuals and inspiring professionals to impact the future of the arts community in the Nordics and beyond. CHART is located at Charlottenborg, home of The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and Kunsthal Charlottenborg, in the heart of Copenhagen.