New PARKETT 76
with Julie Mehretu, Yang Fudong, Lucy McKenzie
www.parkettart.com
Parkets unparalleled explorations and investigations of important international contemporary artists by acclaimed writers and critics continue in vol. 76, featuring Julie Mehretu, Yang Fudong and Lucy McKenzie.
With a socially subversive agenda, Julie Mehretu paints a picture of an infrastructure gone awry. Her various marks and abstract gestures synthesize upon the canvas with emotive density and universality. They have the immediacy and drama of a large-scale abstract expressionist painting, but also the slow meditative thrust of Leonardo da Vincis intimate, ecstatically charged tidal drawings. The many layers that make up the transparent skin of her paintings are bound and highly structured, yet seem to be flung into motion. Texts on Mehretu are written by Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, Chris Abani, and Madeleine Schuppli.
In the frozen situations encountered in Yang Fudongs images, the viewer must always ask: will the protagonist survive? Yet survival may be too logical an outcome; Fudongs narratives read more like brief, melancholic confessions, solidly enigmatic and deeply poetic. He sees his abstract cinema as a non-describable collision in ones heart. Fudongs radiant images have a determined clarity that stems from not taking the revolutionary and communicative power of art for granted. Texts on Fudong are by Marcella Beccaria, Yuko Hasegawa, and Zhang Wei.
Over the last decade, Lucy McKenzie has been umbilically attached to Glasgows underground art scene, slowly rising to international prominence. Guided by her elegant draftsmanship, and synthetic intuition, she continuously undermines her own adopted faux-authenticities, accumulating a host of borrowed visual rhetorics. Amidst recognizable impersonal facadesfrom Tintin; to socialist mural projects; to flat geometric, Mackintosh-ian modernismMcKenzies work reveals an in-your-face sexual provocation, as well as the more subtle sense of an underlying utopian agenda. While her work may at a glance seem dismissively provincial, it quickly percolates to reveal just how daring, intelligent, and accurate her work really is. Texts on McKenzie are written by Neil Mulholland, and Bennett Simpson, plus a discussion between the artist and Isabelle Graw.
In addition: Trevor Smith on Robert MacPherson; Philipp Kaiser on Johanna Billing; Johanna Burton on Rachel Harrison; Vincent Pecoil on Olivier Mosset; plus additional texts by Hans Rudolf Reust (Les Infos); Matthias Haldemann (Cumulus from Europe); Bill Arning (Cumulus from America); Mark Welzel (Balkon); and an insert by Steven Shearer.
For more details on the new Parkett and the editions by the three artists as well as for subscriptions and back issues please go to www.parkettart.com
Online you also find information on the new Parkett box with 170 color postcards of all editions made by artists for Parkett since 1984.
