Cheryl Donegan: My Plastic Bag / John Russell: DOGGO

Cheryl Donegan: My Plastic Bag

My Plastic Bag is Cheryl Donegan’s first comprehensive exhibition and refers to Scenes + Commercials, an exhibition organized by American curator Johanna Burton at the New Museum in New York. In its condensed form, Scenes + Commercials pinpointed the difficulty of understanding Donegan’s work in established discourses, thus offering an explanation as to why her work has remained subversive until today. In this regard it is interesting to note that Donegan has largely been seen as a video artist even though she is also a painter. In her practice, the artist confronts painting with new media, its modes of production and circulation and its immateriality. She does so with a persistence and pleasure that taunts the professionalism and production values that have come to dictate the art (and our lives) in the last two decades. This results in an art that is knowledgeable, but chooses to undermine its knowledge. It is based on a rare casualness that shows itself to be searching to trace the place of art as a spot that may have been lost a long time ago.

Donegan’s works will be shown in 2018 at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, curated by Bill Arning, and at the Aspen Art Museum, curated by Heidi Zuckerman. A catalog will be published on the occasion of all three exhibitions. 

John Russell: DOGGO

The first institutional exhibition of John Russell outside of Great Britain presents six newly rendered, large-format paintings, nine sculptures, a series of drawings and a newly produced full-length feature film. Russell’s art is hard to pin down, as one is overwhelmed without being able to quite figure out why. It is not against or for something, it is not symbolic or realistic, it is not cynical, ironic, or serious, it is not painting or sculpture, it is not figurative or abstract, it is not apocalyptic, romantic or dystopic. Whatever words you will choose to describe his works, they are the opposite as well. We are invited to figure out how to approach art beyond these useful but worn out dichotomies. We get lost to invent other languages for understanding, and to work out how art might “do something” and have some force, aesthetically and/or politically.

On occasion of the exhibition at Kunsthalle Zürich, John Russell’s new book DOGGO is published by Miami-based press [NAME].