Beate Ermacora Knihy

Global interconnectedness due to the growing movements of travel and migration, and to more and more complex flows of goods and data, raw materials and capital has made often ambivalent changes to the reality of life in very diverse regions of the world. The international group exhibition Worlds in Contradiction – Areas of Globalisation is devoted to artists whose work traces these global contexts and impacts in diverse thematic fields.0The exhibition takes particular care to avoid an exclusively eurocentric perspective on the phenomena examined by the artists and aims to elucidate them from multiple standpoints. The political, social and cultural, as well as aesthetic perceptions and critical inquiries into the processes of globalisation, will employ such varied media as film, video, photography and sculpture, taking on the one hand a sociological and documentary approach, and on the other a metaphorical, symbolic and poetic angle.00Exhibition: Galerie im Taxispalais, Austria (23.5.-2.8.2015)

Finnish artist Robert Lucander, who investigates the interplay between painting and photography, selects his source snapshots and portraits from magazines, cheap novels, books and album covers. His figures are traced and shaded in pencil on wood, where he uses the grain to suggest depth. They are then framed in richly contrasting solid, unshaded enamel, so that a flat blue silhouette of a model's tousled hair frames his face precisely drawn over the wood grain, or a pair of carefully penciled arms are crossed upon a flat cerulean blue background. Of his practice he says, "I use industrially manufactured acrylic paint without experimenting, I just follow the instructions on the tin." Cocktail International encompasses works dating from 1989 to 2005, from Lucander's early abstract phase through those signature wooden panel paintings to his latest watercolors.

Swiss artist Daniele Buetti is notorious for his defaced photographs of supermodels, which feature scars, tattoos and disenchanted fragments of text. Buetti has been questioning the socially determined constructs of beauty and the commodification of sexuality and glamour since the 1980s. His altered photographs--large-scale C-prints on aluminum or light-boxes--have messages like "How much is my body worth?" and "What shall I hope for?" scrawled across them in electric colors. Buetti also often energetically scratches out or draws over portions of the image in a manner that recalls the destructive doodling of a truculent adolescent. Maybe You Can Be One of Us focuses on Buetti's recent drawings, videos, sculptures and installations. In these newer pieces, the fashion models give way to enigmatic illustrative symbols, such as two disembodied hands conjuring a puff of smoke. This publication accompanies an exhibition of new work at the Swiss Institute for Contemporary Art in New York.