Month: September 2025
Art: Concept is pleased to present Nina Childress’s second solo exhibition.
Passionate about cinema and its icons, the artist has created a series of paintings entitled Casting. Continuing her technical research, Nina Childress uses iridescent pigments and chameleon pigments to create scenes and portraits in motion that question the nature of the gaze and the position of the viewer. The viewer becomes an actor in their perception of the image, with colours subtly varying as they move in front of the canvas. Cinematic framing, off-screen effects and striking expressions evoke the world of the big screen.
On the occasion of the exhibition, we will screen the video portrait of Nina Childress directed by Olivier Garouste, made possible with support from the ADAGP Fund.
Ulla von Brandenburg’s multifaceted and multi-layered work is characterised by a multimedia practice that finds its characteristic expression in expansive, site-specific installations. The forms of expression and methods of theatre are an important starting point: the artist creates stage-like settings from architectural set pieces and curtains, in which films, drawings, sculptural objects and textile works enter into a complex interplay with dance, performance and song. The boundaries between inside and outside, reality and illusion become blurred. The cultural-historical and philosophical currents of modernism form the frame of reference for von Brandenburg’s works. Diverse references to literature and art history, circus, anthropology and spiritualism, among others, create a dense associative cosmos. Embedded in a loose narrative, her works reflect fundamental conditions of human existence and social coexistence, be it the relationship between the individual and the group or the constitutive significance of role-playing games and rituals.
The exhibition at the Wilhelm-Hack-Museum presents a comprehensive overview of current works from the last five years. In addition, a new work has been created by the artist especially for the presentation in Ludwigshafen, focussing on her examination of the traditions of geometric abstraction. The interplay of body and space, movement and perception is an essential component of Ulla von Brandenburg’s artistic strategy; in this sense, the artist transforms the exhibition space with colours and fabrics into an immersive course that leads visitors into fantastic, sensually tangible spaces of experience and allows them to become part of the staging.
Ulla von Brandenburg, born in Karlsruhe in 1974, lives and works near Paris and in Karlsruhe. From 1995 to 1998, she studied scenography and media art at the University of Arts and Design in Karlsruhe, and from 1998 to 2004, fine art at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg. Ulla von Brandenburg has been a professor of painting and graphic art at the Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe since 2016.
Curator: Dr. Astrid Ihle
Flesh Flowers assembles the work of over seventy artists and more than two hundred pieces from the Tony and Elham Salamé Collection. Borrowing its title from one of Miriam Cahn’s works in the collection, the exhibition delves into the complex intersections of bodies and paint, with a particular focus on the work of women artists in the collection.
This show marks the tenth anniversary of the inauguration of the Aïshti Foundation exhibition space in Beirut, and it is the first major presentation since the Foundation’s programs were interrupted by the recent war.
The works in the exhibition combine abstraction and figuration to complicate relationships between form and content, medium and meaning, subjectivity and otherness. In an era saturated with digital images and disembodied data, these artists simultaneously reassert and question the physical materiality of painting. Each artist approaches the canvas as a site of intense negotiation: between the raw immediacy of the gestural mark and the emergence of recognizable forms; between the tangible presence of the body and its fractured representation in a hyper-mediated society. Screens, pixels, vectors, and networks intersect with anatomies, stains, traces, and fluids in an intense conflation of the carnal with the digital. Abstraction gives way to fleeting suggestions of flesh, or conversely, figurative elements dissolve into fields of pure color, texture, and information.
Summer News / Noticias de Verano is a bilingual book by Tania Pérez Córdova with three carefully edited texts that create a unique, mesmerizing narrative with the power to transcend any chronological linearity and specificity. Pérez Córdova stages a collective reading from this book as part of the closing celebrations for Viaje a la luna.
Summer News / Noticias de Verano is a project that began in 2019 during Tania Pérez Córdova’s residency on the island of Favignana in Sicily, Italy. It emerged as a response to the generalised feeling of paralysis in the face of world events, and a more personal meditative focus on the passage of time. During the month Pérez Córdova was on the island, she compiled and transcribed all the news she found in local and international media, stripping them of all specificity. In this way, the events were transformed into a collection of micro-stories—tragic, terrifying, and comical—that framed the passage of time normally destined for artistic production. The text also functioned as a reflection on the capacity for intervention in the face of the horror and injustices we witness as readers, which contrast with everyday life. Similarly, Federico García Lorca (the focus of the exhibition on view) understood the power of language.
In 2022/2023, as part of the artist’s solo exhibition Generalización at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, Pérez Córdova decided to once again collect the news stories framed by the exhibition’s duration, as a way of acknowledging the world’s events unfolding outside the protected walls of a contemporary art exhibition. And once again, for the second iteration of Generalización at the Sculpture Center in New York City, the artist began a new period of collection and transcription that culminated in a new section of the text.
Summer News / Noticias de Verano is co-published by Juan de la Cosa (John of the Thing) and the Wattis Institute.