Very special Wurzeltod® friend Alex CF is back from touring with his countless bands and being an incredibly possessed tentacled mastermind unstoppable creative force, he has some fantastic things lined up for you.

First up is the joyous announcement of his 2nd London solo show which will be opening this Thursday, August 9, 6.30 PM (RSVP HERE!), at the best location I could possibly imagine for his creatures, namely the veritable Old Operating Theatre located in the time capsule roof space of the Baroque St. Thomas’ Church. It’s one of the oldest surviving operating theatres on earth and to have it filled with Alex‘s cryptozoological specimens is an absolute curatorial masterstroke.

So if you’re in London in August, I’d say FUCK THE OLYMPICS! and go climb the beautiful old spiral staircase to the Old Operating Theatre to be enchanted by Alex‘s phantasmagorical chimerae.

You can find all the details for the show below. Tell your friends about it.

Fetal skeleton by Alex CF, 2012

In other news that would make the Elder Gods jealous, Alex has just released an entirely hand-cast, hand-painted action figure of the dark lord, Monsieur H. P., himself.

Limited to 50 figures only, Lovecraft comes with a comic, a shirt and a screen print, all created by Alex, in a black magnetic sealed box.

You can see all the details here (where you can also see images of the figures in production). To order directly, please click here.

H. P. Lovecraft action figure set by Alex CF, 2012

Opening: Aug 9, 2012, 6.30 PM, RSVP HERE!

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I’ve often raved about Berlinde‘s art on here - in fact, her work even invades my everyday life as arty backdrop - so I’ll spare you the superlatives but instead just want to make you aware that if you’re Melbourne-based, you now have less than a week left to catch her fascinating We Are All Flesh show at the ACCA.

In case you were wondering: Yes, Berlinde did have a show with the same title three years ago at Hauser & Wirth in London but it seems that different and lots of newly commissioned works are on display in Melbourne.

If you’re not yet familiar with her work, the 15-minute interview below offers a great introduction into her vision, process and technique but of course will neither replace the olfactory, visceral and epidermic qualities of the wax, skin, hair and fabrics she uses for her sculptures, nor explain the necrophiliac alchemistic ways in which she can turn branches into limbs, tree trunks into fresh corpses by masterfully applying an organic colour palette (pinks for skin, off-white for adipose tissue, greys/greens/blues for the circulatory system) onto wax with which she can control, halt and synthesise transformation, decay, death.

If you’re not in Australia but in.. who knows.. Turkey, you can also catch her Wound show at the ARTER Space for Art in Istanbul until August 26 where she has inspired Vincent Dunoyer to dance Bruyckeresque choreographies in the exhibition space surrounded by her sculptures.

Details for the Istanbul show can be found here. The information below is for the ACCA exhibition.

On show: Jun 2 – Jul 29, 2012

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Hi. I guess I’m back. Let’s see whether I can still werq dis blog, yo.

In case you were wondering, I’ve been mainly hanging out over on FB (yes, yes, I know… stop looking at me like that – it just so happens that most of my online contacts are over there and it’s just been too convenient to stay in touch). Anyway, just like most other anti-social online platforms, I’m using FB in a very unusual and actually useful way so if you care about getting a more daily dose of Wurzeltod®, you can subscribe to its public updates.

I’ll try to do a better job at mirroring my FB posts to my Twitter like I used to do in the past for all those of you who rightly boycott FB, but let’s face it, it’s just not in my nature to ever be concise enough to tweet successfully.

I have also fed the forum with loads of new content, so go check it out and please note that a lot of the posts are NSFW. I can highly recommend the Symbiosis/Parasitism/Mutual Decay, the Eros & Thanatos as well as the Eyeballs thread. They make me happy. Yes they do.

Flickr update is also imminent, btw, maybe this news is of interest to those of you who still mainly remember me for sporting industrial insulation tape on nipples and other shit we used to do on Fotolog in the early noughties for reasons I now ABSOLUTELY cannot remember.

NEVER MIND.. on to more important matters now: Art that doesn’t suck. We’ll start with painter, sculptor and engraver genius Max Klinger.

Brahmsphantasie, Opus XII: Abduction of Prometheus by Max Klinger, etching, 1894 – click to enlarge

Max Klinger. We had him here back in 2008 with two examples from his magnificent dream-inspired Paraphrases about the Finding of a Glove series from 1881.

Now the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Strasbourg is presenting a vast range of his engravings in a show called Max Klinger – The Theatre of the Bizarre which, as the title suggests, hopes to focus on how Klinger was forever driven by dream imagery and the relentless search for ways to visualise the cryptic, the elusive, the primordial, the eldritch, the uncharted, the subconscious.

Strasbourg hasn’t sent me the press login through yet but with the museum’s graphic arts room housing nearly 200 of Klinger’s engravings, I can guarantee you that you will find some fantastic oneiric trouvailles at this retrospective.

Details below.

Rettungen Ovidischer Opfer, Opus II: Erstes Intermezzo by Max Klinger, etching, courtesy British Museum London – click to enlarge

On show: May 15 – Sep 16, 2012

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Girl With Monkey by Colette Calascione, oil on panel, 36 x 24 inches, 2011 – click to enlarge

I haven’t mentioned Colette Calascione on here in over 6 years now which has to do with a general lack of shows and then her website disappearing into the Abyss ov thee Deepnet.

At any rate, Colette has made up for it all by currently having a solo exhibition at Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York showing works from the past six years.

Her works are as allegorical as ever – maybe now a bit more clear-cut and marblelike and the backdrops and backgrounds often even more dazzling in complementary colours and more complex in industrial detail.

Indeed, it almost feels like she has broken the time/space continuum and time travelled back to Christian Schad‘s studio together with Jared Joslin and Alex Gross to indulge in some decadent art deco japonism and probably to visit a cabaret or the Grand Guignol.

Good to see she’s back.

Her solo show will close tomorrow, April 21, so don’t miss it if you’re in New York. All details and links below.

Alia by Colette Calascione, oil on panel, 14 x 11 inches, 2009 – click to enlarge

On show: Mar 15 – Apr 21, 2012

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Announcements of new Heffernan shows (thank you, Phantasmaphile!) are always a good excuse for me to go for a dive in the endless pool of her archived works – and realise that Booty (see image above and below) remains my favourite series to date.

And although I’m not entirely sure which of her flora-and-fauntastical self-portraits will be on show at the Infinite Work in Progress solo show, the well-chosen title and the fact that there’s over 20 works on display both suggest that the probability that you’ll get to see something from the Booty series is mathematically speaking relatively high.

I know I normally tend to post free exhibitions here but yes, I would still say that it’s worth the $12 (OUCH, Y THOUGH?!) admission fee.

Details below.

Self Portrait as Spill by Julie Heffernan, 2007, oil on canvas, 68 x 60 inches – click to enlarge

On show: Feb 16 – May 13, 2012

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I don’t think I ever had a) an exhibition announcement for Overland Park, Kansas and b) so little information on a show as there seems to be neither preview nor press release for Allison Schulnik‘s Nerman Museum show so I guess it’s just an uhmm.. exhibition of Allison Schulnik‘s video work? Yay. ¬_¬

From the three images on the museum website, all I can gather is that more recent works will be on show as the pictures are all stills from her Mound video that the museum recently acquired and which you can see below.

So if you’re planning to check it out, do share your impressions so I can update this post.

On show: Jan 13 – Apr 1, 2012

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To be perfectly honest with you, I would even post about this show if I didn’t like a single artwork on display other than Fake Death Picture (The Death of Chatterton) (top) because channeling my favourite accidental (?) suicide painting of all time will always get you a mention on here.

Oh, wait, and there’s that… that fucking machine… err… pardon me, Anti-Hysteria Device (bottom). Yeah.

For Addio del Passato, British-born Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare has once again worked with his signature fabrics and created beautifully lavish costumes in bold colours and absolutely delectable opulent interiors achieving a gorgeous chiaroscuro of fabrics, textures and complexions so rich that you’re almost forgetting you’re actually looking at scenes of death. Well, at least a series of photographic re-enactments of famous death and suicide scenes of art history.

Overall, I will have to admit that I preferred the works from Yinka‘s Goya phase but you know me – I just like to complain.

Btw, if you missed Yinka‘s beautiful Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle on Trafalgar Square’s Forth Plinth, you might be able to see it at the National Maritime Museum in future if their campaign to save it from being sold is successful. Meanwhile, Elmgreen and Dragset have put a semi-nude very camp golden boy ridin’ a poneh in its place and I’m of course always very pleased about any kind of prepuberty sleaze in public squares.

Details below.

Anti-Hysteria Device by Yinka Shonibare, MBE, 2011, Dutch wax printed cotton textile, wood, metal with motor, 30 3/8 x 41 x 18 7/8 in. (77 x 104 x 48 cm), photograph: Stephen White – click to enlarge

On show: Feb 16 – Mar 24, 2012

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Ah, I missed the glorious opportunity to tie this post in with my recent article on Hisaji Hara – it would have been a very smooth and insightful transition as both Nazif and Hisaji sure are experts in the complex inner workings and psychopathologies of Balthusesque girlhood.

Nazif has a particularly great eye for all those (mind) games girls play and he uses the anachronistic form of the tableau vivant as his artistic modus operandi and way to study these games.

They’re not too overcrowded tableaux though so every single protagonist becomes an integral part of the plot. The girls strike pathos-laden meandering poses reminiscent of distant art history – to mind come motives such diverse as the Pietà, the Deposition from the Cross, the Incredulity of Saint Thomas, Salome, even the Raft of the Medusa, Liberty Leading the People and famous death scenes from Jacques-Louis David’s Marat to Henry Wallis’ gorgeous Death of Chatterton. I could go on. I want to go on as this is exactly what makes Nazif‘s work so very rich but I’m afraid I’d never get to an end.

The Turtle Charmer by Nazif Topçuoğlu, c-print, 167 x 120 cm, 2011 – click to enlarge

The details of the scenes are staggering too and always spot on: We see seductively parted lips, extruding collar bones, golden glowing skin – youth doesn’t come much more beckoning than as it’s captured in Nazif‘s work.

It’s also fascinating to observe that his group scenes never seem staged, but narrated; his girls are never exposed but embedded; they are not vulnerable and exploited but self-conscious and very much in charge of the scene – in one sentence: They have definitely grown up.

In a way, it could be argued that Nazif is just as much a director or a choreographer as he is a photographer because getting these nuances right is something that has a lot to do with understanding every single bone and muscle of the body and face – and that’s also precisely what gives his tableaux a very painterly, very warm, very intimate, very incarnate and very baroque atmosphere.

I know it’s probably rather unlikely you are in the United Arab Emirates right now but if you ARE, do go check out his very comprehensive solo show at Green Art Gallery in Dubai until March 5. Details below.

Introspection by Nazif Topçuoğlu, c-print, 120 x 168 cm, 2010 – click to enlarge

On show: Jan 11 – Mar 5, 2012

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Director/writer team Gisèle Vienne and Dennis Cooper have been working as a pair on theatre projects since 2004 and are now presenting a series of haunting productions, puppets and portraits at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Their show Teenage Hallucination evokes uncanny memories of the Chapman Brothers‘ army of creepy mutant girls (particularly the brothers’ recent hybrid girl army with THEY TEACH US NOTHING swastika hoodies).

However, Gisèle‘s Olimpias are a lot less grotesque and hyperreal than the Chapman‘s creations but more cracked and broken in their appearance and there’s a subtle sense of mutilated and traumatised individuality in her adolescents’ intimidated stares and serious outfits.

© Gisèle Vienne, via Dennis Cooper’s blog – click to enlarge

39 dolls will be on show as an installation accompanied by a beautifully shot photographic documentation of Gisèle‘s work with and on them.

Also on show will be Gisèle‘s and Dennis‘ newest theatrical piece which was produced in collaboration with Stephen O’Malley of SunnO))) fame (working on sound as well as wall drawing designs) entitled Last Spring: A Prequel (a trailer has not emerged yet, sadly, but will be added to this post later).

© Gisèle Vienne, via Dennis Cooper’s blog – click to enlarge

But that’s still not all because Teenage Hallucination is part of a festival at the Centre Pompidou that’s packed with talks, presentations and screenings with other artists, filmmakers and authors and this coming Sunday promises to be particularly interesting/provoking with a presentation of Peter Sotos’ Mine Kept and Pierre Dourthe (Hans Bellmer author) discussing The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death.

The full programme of festival events is here. It’s quite intense if not slightly insane. Teenage Hallucination itself has opened tonight and will remain on view until March 12. Further details below.

On show: Feb 22 – Mar 12, 2012

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