Poltern Newsletter 016
2 June 2022
Welcome to the sixteenth Poltern Newsletter 📨
This month’s issue includes a press release for the ongoing exhibition, Destinations/Departures (April 28 - 14), curated by Poltern’s own Victoria Horrocks; a roundup of the May NYC art fairs with a closer look at some favorite works on view by Anna Ghadar; an updated call to papers to kick off the summer ☀️
If you have any questions or comments, please reach out to us by responding to this email or writing us at polternmag@gmail.com.
Thank you for being here.
The Poltern Team
Destinations/Departures: Nick Farhi, Sophie Kovel, Hyoju Cheon
Curated by Victoria Horrocks, Ho Won Kim, and Carlota Ortiz Monasterio
April 28 - June 14, 2022
Nick Farhi: Emptied Pails April 28 to May 12
Sophie Kovel: Happy Hours May 13 to May 26
Hyoju Cheon: Mapping without Scale June 1 to June 14
If you’re in New York City, don’t miss the chance to see Destinations/Departures at Iron Velvet Gallery, on until June 14. Destinations/Departures is a six-week rotating exhibition exploring the home as a dynamic space of movement, where the limits between the private and the public, the local and the global, the personal and the political, are constantly being negotiated. Through three two-week solo shows of artists Nick Farhi, Sophie Kovel, and Hyoju Cheon, the exhibition probes the diverse ways in which the domestic interweaves the individual, the collective, the political, and the cultural. It will be on view from April 28th through June 14th, 2022.
In Destinations/Departures each artist establishes a unique and intimate dialogue with the domestic space of the gallery. Conceiving home not merely as a place of dwelling, but as one of mobility—of destination, transit, and departure—the three presentations suggest diverse modes of inhabiting the world. First, Nick Farhi rendered seemingly commonplace domestic objects as extraordinary presences through an innovative use of oil and pastel on aluminum. Then, Sophie Kovel’s bold conceptual interventions visualized how mass media and systems of power institute ideologies that shape our perceptions, serving as instruments of social control. Finally, Hyoju Cheon’s site-specific installations and performances respond to her physical surroundings and investigate how bodies traverse built environments.
Although Nick Farhi: Emptied Pails and Sophie Kovel: Happy Hours have passed, there is still time to see Hyoju Cheon: Mapping without Scale. In the show, Cheon considers how the home affects the bodies that inhabit it with a series of ceramic and insulation foam objects. Set in the domestic setting of the gallery, these interventions consider the home to be contradictory. Despite being a place where one may spend much of their time, the domestic space is often overlooked. Inconspicuous nooks in walls, floors, and corners are the points of departure for Cheon’s installations. The site-specific works presented in the exhibition map these unnoticed spaces to emphasize their presence and materiality. The artist will be staging a performance on June 8, at 7pm EST. A closing reception and performance will take place on June 14, between 6-8pm EST.
In their distinct projects, Farhi, Kovel, and Cheon each convey an experience of being at home that is marked by multiplicity, movement, and interconnection. In blurring the public and the private, Destinations/Departures hopes to be its own journey to reconceptualize one’s sense of “home” in the world.
Iron Velvet hours: Monday - Sunday (by appointment only).
About Nick Farhi
Nick Farhi (b. 1987, New York) utilizes installation and still life painting to connect people, places, and things. Through research, histories and relationships to one another are addressed and given a meeting place. Desperate, lush, and seismic shapes are made from confabulated memory and happenstance in the artist’s practice, arriving to a number of cross-figural dialogues and polemics reflecting current events. Farhi has exhibited his work both domestically and internationally, at outposts such as the Kirkland Gallery of the Harvard GSD, the Mana Museum of Contemporary Art, Bill Brady Gallery, Galleri Golsa, Karma International, and A Gathering of the Tribes, among others.
To view the preview for Nick Farhi: Emptied Pails, click here.
About Sophie Kovel
Sophie Kovel (b. 1996, Los Angeles) is an artist, writer, and translator. Gleaning and undermining iconographies of power, fascism, and white supremacy that can take banal and overlooked forms—on flagpoles, doormats, postcards, wrapping paper, and real estate holdings—Kovel reckons with the surfaces and structures that hold up American ideology. Recent exhibitions include Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Demark; VERY Project Space, Berlin; and the Jewish Museum, New York. Kovel has spoken on panels and symposiums at universities and institutions including Columbia University and the Brooklyn Public Library. Her interviews and criticism have been published in Artforum, BOMB, the Brooklyn Rail, Frieze, Spike, and elsewhere.
To view the preview for Sophie Kovel: Happy Hours, click here.
About Hyoju Cheon
Hyoju Cheon (b. 1994, Seoul) is an explorer and researcher who collects movements. Her multimedia practice–often casting a space, an object, or a body in motion–responds to the conditions of a site. Her work documents bodies as they move through space, draws their trajectories, and archives the material traces they leave behind. Hyoju has exhibited her works in Seoul at Project Broom, Dongsomun, Meindo, Gallery Imazoo, and Gaon Gallery; and in New York at the Lenfest Center for the Arts, the Abrons Arts Center, among others.
To view the preview for Hyoju Cheon: Mapping without Scale, click here.
About the Curators
Destinations/Departures is a collaboration between New York-based curators Victoria Horrocks, Ho Won Kim, and Carlota Ortiz Monasterio, who are currently pursuing a critical and curatorial studies program at Columbia University.
About Iron Velvet
Iron Velvet is a project gallery space led by Young Jeon. The gallery takes its name from the phrase Iron hand in a velvet glove. Located in an apartment on the Upper East Side of New York City, Iron Velvet invites artists to create a site-specific installation responding to the residential space. Additional programming will be made available, such as artist-led workshops and an accompanying parallel online exhibition highlighting research on the exhibiting artists in the metaverse space.
Connect: Instagram & Twitter @__ironvelvet__
For further inquiries, please contact: ironvelvet.art@gmail.com
NYC Spring Art Fair Review
by Anna Ghadar
After a stretch of admin following May fairs and auction week(s), I present to you an overdue post-memorial-day-weekend roundup of NYC’s Spring art fairs. Given it was the first spring in the city that things felt slightly “back to normal” with the return of fair presentations, presentors really brought out some gems. I’ve compiled a few of my favorites here for you; please excuse any odd angles or inopportune lighting…
The Independent at Spring Studios
The whimsical, colorful, and sometimes twisted little paintings by Ulala Imai at Karma’s Independent booth were a favorite of mine. Imai (b.1982, Kanagawa, Japan) is an early/mid-career still-life painter who has a substantial cult following. The meticulousness and care the artist puts into her cheerful imagery is refreshing, inviting, and even a bit tongue-in-cheek. I feel like a fan girl with how much I wax on about Karma’s programming, but everything they do is seriously lovely.
An honorable mention to whatever this rocking Chihuly-esque alien baby cradle is. I have no further details on this work other than that I love it and am remiss to say I didn’t take down the cataloging or booth information. If you know any details about this piece, please respond to this email!
TEFAF at the Armory
TEFAF is arguably one of the most classically beautiful fairs, with wonderful works on view to boot. A personal favorite work of mine was this Milton Avery (b. 1885, New York, United States; d. 1965, New York, United States) at Kasmin Gallery’s booth. While this work wasn’t the star of the presentation, and Avery’s “market” (for lack of a better word) is not particularly buzzy right now, this portrait encompasses everything I love about the artist’s practice: pastel hues, loving brushstrokes, and inexplicably soft yet angular structure within the work. Seeing Girl and Teacup gave me a nostalgic rush back to when my mother, who was a painter, and I used to visit museums and take note of all the Avery paintings on view (the Phillips in DC has some good ones). My mother gravitated towards his portraits, like the one on view at Kasmin’s booth, while I sought out landscapes with rectangular cows, which are probably less desirable on said “market.”
Honorable mention: This punctured Lucio Fontana at Tornabuoni Arte. While Fontana’s slashed paintings are cemented in the modern canon, the artist’s punctured work is a bit quieter. There were one or two other punctured Fontanas on view at this year’s TEFAF NY, which I didn’t take photos of, but I’d be curious to know if they were all made during a short period. I’d also be curious to know what the backs of these look like––to see if these have the same supporting structures behind each little hole.
NADA at Pier 36
Noelia Towers (b. Barcelona, Spain) at de boer gallery’s NADA presentation was so striking. I wasn’t familiar with Towers’ work prior to visiting this booth but, after these paintings piqued my interest, I looked into her wider body of work and it’s evident that her elegantly subversive self-portraits nod to personal struggles, such as chronic illness, and often feature fetishistic imagery. These notions inform the mysterious, corporeal, and vulnerable elements of her works on view at de boer. The artist’s practice at large gives rich context to her more subtle works on view at NADA and definitely leaves me excited to see what’s in store for the future of this early-career artist.
Frieze at the Shed
One of the most striking booths at this year’s Frieze NY was the dark and pained, yet sentimental, work by the Georgian artist Karlo Kacharava at Modern Art London. The artist was born in 1964 and died in 1994 from an aneurysm (possibly a complication from suffering blunt head trauma). In his short 30-year life, his brief career encompassed painting, poetry, theory, and art criticism, as well as a short army draft in Serbia. Kacharava’s work explores themes of quotidian life in the Soviet Union during the Glasnost era of the 1980s and the post-Soviet upheaval of the 1990s.
The gallery’s Frieze presentation, which corresponded with the 2021 exhibition at their London gallery, Karlo Kacharava: ‘People and Places’. As the curators of the show so aptly described, “There is an articulated dissonance between the need to establish a ground of one’s own whilst acknowledging an anxiety of influence from a slowly leaking, sprawling, forbidden and exotic word centered on individual expression and self-actualization.” [1]
[1] https://modernart.net/exhibitions/karlo-kacharava/press-release
Anna Ghadar is an art advisor currently based in NYC. She recently completed her MSt in the History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of Oxford.
We are pleased to announce an OPEN CALL for submissions to Poltern: Contemporary Issues in Art History.
Poltern is a monthly digital resource that offers a platform for overlooked art histories, up-and-coming artists, and under-the-radar arts features. This arts platform was founded by master's students at the University of Oxford to bring academics, art lovers, and everyone in between together to spotlight short-form writing concerning studio, written, and performing arts.
We publish in sections for exhibition reviews, artist features, interviews with art world professionals (including practicing artists), and arts-related creative writing. If you have something you’re keen to share, please email us at polternmag@gmail.com to submit your writing. We can’t wait to work with you.
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