Cura 29
Cover by Alex de Corte
art
Frieze Issue 204
Frieze Magazine
Issue 204
June – July – August 2019
Three novelists delve into the past to unearth the present. Lucy Ives considers the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, ‘What you needed to survive in 1969 was, apparently, not the straight and narrow. What you needed was fiction. And guilt’; César Aira recalls his childhood in Coronel Pringles and his mother’s overbearing fixation on cultural refinement; and Heike Geißler pens a new work of autobiographical fiction that reflects on our exasperated age of news cycles, scandal and movement.
Plus, 32 reviews from around the world, including reports on two New York shows that chart Lincoln Kirstein’s legacy. In London, two exhibitions showcase Channa Horwitz and Emma Kunz’s play with reason and repetition, at the Lisson Gallery and Serpentine Galleries.
Cover image: Buzz Aldrin deploys Apollo 11 experiments on the surface of the moon (detail), 1969, photograph taken by Neil Armstrong with a 70mm lunar surface camera. Courtesy: NASA
SLEEK 60
The last four decades have been a rollercoaster in self-care jargon. Type “self-care” into Amazon, and hundreds of books appear with cloying names like You Are a Badass and Women Who Love Too Much. It’s easy to forget in our era of millennial self-care-as-a-badge-of-honour, that in the Seventies, it was a buzzword for the desperate. Despite self-care now being one of the most popular hashtags on Instagram, as a chaotic 2018 looms to a close, the idea of bubble baths or cancelling plans as routes to self-actualisation is beginning to look a little shallow.
In this issue of SLEEK we wanted to explore self-help. But instead of recommending the perfect perfume or the best film to watch for a night on the sofa, we’re casting a side-eye at a worrying cultural phenomenon.
FEATURING
- Photographer and Instagram icon Nadia Lee’s portfolio looking at our contemporary obsession with the self
- “Just Listen” an exploration of the work of human rights investigator and audio artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan
- Man Booker prize longlisted author Sophie Mackintosh’s self-help inspired short story
- An essay on “The Cult of Self-Care” by Kieran Yates
- Profiles on the London artists fighting austerity and elitism in the art world
- An interview with Los-Angeles based artist Martine Syms on her prodigious 2018 and her upcoming exhibitions in 2019
- A profile on the religious influencer @jstlbby, beloved by the likes of Grace Wales Bonner and Naomi Campbell
- One of SLEEK’s favourite photographers Ruth Ossai’s exclusive cabinet portfolio “9ja” shot in Lagos, Anamabra and Enugu State in Nigeria
Martin Eder — Parasites
Martin Eder — Parasites
Hardback
2018
148pp 315 x 240 mm (13 x 10 inches)
Text by Hugh Allan and Jane Neal
Conversation with Thomas Girst
Published by Other Criteria Books
ISBN 978-1-906967-96-3
Martin Eder’s paintings are dominated by a shifting palette of vivid colour and hyperreal depictions of contrasting textures. His subjects, which range from oversized pets to nude men and women, question received ideas of value, taste, and ‘high’ and ‘low’ art. Published to accompany the largest solo exhibition to date for the German artist, held at Newport Street Gallery, London (September 2018 – January 2019), this hardback presents a selection of Eder’s work from the past fourteen years, with installation shots. Also included is text by Jane Neal and curator Hugh Allan, and a conversation between Eder and author Thomas Girst.
Eric Fischl — If Art Could Talk
Eric Fischl: If Art Could Talk
Mousse Publishing
2018
English
128 pages
Hardcover, 20 × 25.5 cm
ISBN: 9788867493326
Texts by Peter Doroshenko, Eric Fischl
“I am one of the first generation artists who grew up in the suburbs. We grew up, post-WWII, in an ascendant America in which the suburbs was its utopian manifestation. We came into our art maturity painfully aware of the disconnection between what was promised and what was delivered.”
—Eric Fischl
Eric Fischl (New York, 1948) is one of only a handful of contemporary painters who regularly, though by no means exclusively, employs sourced images, culled from the internet, newspapers, and magazines, to inform his paintings. The artist then adds his own photographs and blends a final ensemble of information and storytelling. No kings or generals or momentous battles move across Fischl’s canvases, and most of his subjects are quotidian rather than grandiose—suburban bourgeois families, art world mongers and awkward social interactions. In his works, communication is nonexistent and boredom is pervasive. The book, published on the occasion of a solo show held at Dallas Contemporary museum, includes more than 120 painting reproductions and a conversation between Eric Fischl and Peter Doroshenko.
