Introduced to you through our interview, from Saturday on our friend and Milan-based artist Marco “Pho” Grassi will show his latest works at Circle Culture Gallery Hamburg (read his interview with IWISHUSUN here). The solo show which is titled [Plù-ri-mo] will overview his most recent artistic research by displaying a selection of multiple materials (“Walls”), ceramics, works on paper  (“Monotypes”), as well as his new “Rayographies” – even though he variegates materials, concepts and techniques, at the second glance all seem to be connected with each other and keep a coherent aesthetic. No matter what media Grassi has chosen, the used material enters into a direct dialogue with its medium provided.

The “Walls” series which Grassi started in 2012 is composed of found objects and detritus from urban public spaces that he utilises as a subsurface for his strong and expressive abstract paintings. The artist also presents a new series of ceramics which were crafted in collaboration with the famous crocker Marco Tortarolo in 2013. As with ceramics, the “Monotypes” paper works – also part of the exhibition - emphasize the intrinsic need of the artist to commence a dialogue with different materials. Furthermore, Grassi introduces two selected “Rayographies” of his most recent project called “Le Grand Verre” that were produced in collaboration with the artist Matteo Bologna.

If you are in Hamburg, make sure you don’t miss the show! Check out a preview of his exhibited works here.

When our friend as well as curator and founder of Circle Culture Gallery, Johann Haehling von Lanzenauer recently opened his new gallery space it turned out to be reunion of friends and supporters of IWISHUSUN: after twelve years Circle Culture has moved to Berlin-Tiergarten opening its third gallery space at a former warehouse on Potsdamer Straße and presents “POTSE 68″, a group show celebrating their new space and 23 artistic positions from Italy, Iceland, Mexico, USA, Germany, France, Austria and the UK, among them Jaybo Monk, Marco “Pho” Grassi and Kevin Earl-Taylor. You can check out their exhibited works below and read their interview here.

1 & 2: Marco Pho Grassi - read his interview with IWISHUSUN here.

3 & 4: Jaybo Monk – read his interview with IWISHUSUN here.

5: Aaron Rose - read his interview with IWISHUSUN here.

6: Kevin Earl-Taylor – read his interview with IWISHUSUN here.

Photography: Maria Ebbinghaus. Intsagram photography: Teresa Koester for IWISHUSUN.

Amsterdam’s Kallenbach Gallery is currently the site for Jaybo‘s new show “The Space Between”. For the first time our friend and supporter (check out his interview with IWISHUSUN here), the Berlin-based artist Jaybo Monk holds a solo exhibition in the capital of the Netherlands which shows an entirely new body of work made on paper, wood and canvas. 12 works, some paper sketches and 3 small installations are on display from this day forward – “The Space Between” not only offers the very unique opportunity to see Jaybo’s first ample experiments with oil as his artistic working material but also to witness an artist’s history in the making: the focus on poetry gets more and more important and so Jaybo’s paintings are accompanied by poems; a poem related to the title of the pieces which is the basis of every work comes along with every painting: “first with the automatic writing of the morning, then put in place around midday” and from afternoon to the evening he would paint on canvas or wood or paper.

It all started with this poem:

Let’s hope that we all are lucky and don’t live in countries that are war-torn! In any case, even if we grew up and live in peace, pictures of violent conflicts come along with our daily lives, our media and news coverage, art and exhibitions. All day, every day. In this age of seemingly permanent global warfare, the experience of violent conflict is continually restaged in visual culture – regardless of its particular communication medium, whether films, documentaries, mainstream journalism or user-generated media, all of them serve as “the ideological, consensus-building theater of conflict.” Based on this fact, the new international group exhibition “An I For An Eye” at the Austrian Cultural Forum New York brings together different artistic reactions to the ways in which media representations of violent conflict are increasingly rendered through an individualised or even banal perspective.

“An I For An Eye” which will open in mid-September features artists who work in different regions and from within different contexts,

all sharing a particular focus on personal and distributed media, the cinematic, and the contemporary culture of spectacle. Using a number of strategies, these artists deconstruct—and contest—the affective means by which violent conflict is presented, imagined, experienced, and consumed.

 . . . Seen most clearly through the intimate renderings of soldiers, agents, and politicians, the identificatory power of the personal overwhelmingly occludes the broader constructs of the political. The artists in AN I FOR AN EYE foreground this complex politics of attachment, detachment, and affect in their counter-representations of conflict.

Curated by Stamatina Gregory & Andreas Stadler. Visit acfny.org for more information.

Artists: Wafaa Bilal, Anetta Mona Chisa & Lucia Tkáčová, Ad Van Denderen, G.R.A.M., An-My Lê, Rabih Mroué, Isabel Rocamora, Gerhard Rühm, Larissa Sansour, Dread Scott, Tarzan & Arab, Sharif Waked, Christoph Weber, Anna Witt.

AN I FOR AN EYE, Counter-Representations of Geopolitical Conflict, 18 September 2013– 06 January 2014, Austrian Cultural Forum New York (ACFNY).

Image: Isabel Rocamora, Still from Body of War (2010), 16 mm transferred to HD, single channel color projection, stereo, 20:49 min. Courtesy of Galeria SENDA, Barcelona (Spain).

Do it! Manchester Art Gallery and several artists currently invite their visitors to help make new art by taking part in an evolving exhibition created from a series of instructions which were written by artists that invite you to different things to do at the gallery and at home. Initiated by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist with artists Christian Boltanski and Bertrand Lavier 20 years ago, “do it” has been enacted in 50 different places, making it the widest-reaching and longest running “exhibition in progress” ever to occur. And great emphasis is put on participation at all times: Celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2013, this new exhibition at Manchester Art Gallery premieres 70 brand new instructions. “do it 2013″ brings together a new generation of contemporary artists with artists who have been involved in the first experiments too.

Dozens of instructions have been written by international artists. You can now pick an instruction from the selection and join in by uploading your own response on the doit2013.org website. In addition to artists like Ai Weiwei, Adrian Piper, Tracey Emin and Richard Wentworth artist and widow of John Lennon, Yoko Ono, takes part in “do it 2013″ as well and asks us to circulate a picture of our smile to say, “Hello. How you doing?” Take part in it here!

do it 2013, 5 July - 22 September, Manchester Art Gallery and Manchester International Festival, in collaboration with Independent Curators International (ICI), New York.

Picture: Screenshot / doit2013.

Young Berlin-based artist Clemens Behr‘s new installations “SPLITTER” are currently on display at Gestalten Space in Berlin. In “SPLITTER”, Behr remains true to his concept of site-specific works that are characterized by the use of found material and remind us of collages which have become three-d. Deconstructing and rearranging, Clemens Behr’s methods fluctuate between these extremes, but always manage to create new interesting compositions in the style of a contemporary Dadaism, which serve as reflections of his visual impressions of a given surrounding.

By playing with both destruction and construction, the artist raises questions about ephemerality and permanency, and in the same way, his work facilitates a dialogue between our perceptions in the second and third dimensions. Against this background, the importance of photography to Clemens Behr’s work becomes even clearer—thanks to photography, his spatial, walk-in installations can become striking cubistic images after the original structures have been destroyed. Alongside his temporary site-specific interventions, “SPLITTER” also presents a number of durable objects.

Within the framework of his exhibition at Gestalten Space, the German publishing house present a video interview. In this Gestalten.tv interview, Clemens Behr reflects on his visions in spatial design, his own visual vocabulary, and his free-spirited, performance-like design process.

Don’t miss ”SPLITTER” at Gestalten Space, Sophie-Gips-Höfe, Sophienstraße 21, 10178 Berlin, until 4 August 2013.