#contemporary-painting

#contemporary-painting

Murni or I Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih, to go by her full name was a Balinese artist who shrugged off all the norms and expectations that life chucked at her and instead made art with total abandon. By the time she died aged 39 in 2006, taken by ovarian cancer, she'd left behind a body of ultra-simple, mega-bold, hyper-colourful painting that functions as a testament to a life lived honestly, independently and very, very hornily.

Water, for Rawles, is never neutral. In the lineage of scholars like Christina Sharpe and Saidiya Hartman, the artist considers water to be a charged site and vessel for memory. Along with references to texts by Audre Lorde, Octavia Butler, and Albert Camus, among others, she presents this philosophical grounding as a way to consider the inevitability of change and how transformation can inspire hope. "What is the artist's role in moments of crisis?" she asks.

I love how welcoming the Bay Area arts community is. As a self-taught artist, I didn't have much guidance on how to initiate my work being shown in galleries. I started by showing up at openings hoping to meet and engage with other artists. I've noticed how kind and supportive everyone has been, and I've made genuine friendships along the way,

The sculpture that we have here in Dolores Park is pretty chill, like, 'Oh, I did it. Everything is over,'

Earlier this year, we took a tour of the V&A East Storehouse, the Victoria and Albert Museum's vast new complex in East London. This week, it opens the David Bowie Centre, a space dedicated to the music icon. It is the permanent repository of thousands of items from Bowie's archive, which are on display and also available for personal study. Ben Luke explores the displays at the centre with the curator, Madeleine Haddon.

Themes+Projects presents Light Bodies, a solo exhibition by Bay Area artist Bill Kane.

In Bless Babel, each painting builds around a singular central niche, suggesting the absence of a subject. Confronted with this vacancy, the viewer finds themselves at the center of Kleberg's geometric abstractions. Influenced by architectural and ritualistic spaces, the works in Bless Babel investigate the tropes through which conception is framed by institutional or personal belief. Kleberg's paintings are not interested in objective truth, but rather in how belief transforms our relationship to space and objects.

Like a snippet of an overheard conversation in passing, each of the paintings provide a piece of a narrative or a fleeting feeling made physical within Wang's compositions. Largely devoid of human figures, their work often feels like the viewer has just arrived in the instant everyone has left - cigarette butts or a lingering trail of smoke trailing behind.

Hiroya Kurata's paintings isolate the quiet intensities of the everyday, depicting figures often alone in moments of drift or stillness, amidst gently distorted environments.