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“Homo Economicus” at Cabinet

February 20, 2012, 10:45 am
Written by Forrest

Artists: Ayreen Anastas & Rene Gabri, Pavel Büchler, Zachary Formwalt, Franck Scurti, Andreas Siekmann, Mona Vătămanu & Florin Tudor

Venue: Cabinet, London

Exhibition Title: Homo Economicus

Curated By: David Bussel

Date: January 27 – March 3, 2012

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Cabinet, London

Press Release:

Homo Economicus is the title of a two-part group exhibition at Cabinet Gallery and Mehringdamm 72, Berlin which looks at the relations between art and labour through an exploration of political economy. The artists at Cabinet are Ayreen Anastas & Rene Gabri, Pavel Büchler, Zachary Formwalt, Franck Scurti, Andreas Siekmann and Mona Vătămanu & Florin Tudor and unnamed others.

Those at MD72 are Art & Language (with The Red Krayola), Bernadette Corporation, Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge, Andrea Fraser, Luca Frei, Golden+Senneby, John Knight, Mladen Stilinović́, Mona Vătămanu and Florin Tudor and Mierle Laderman Ukeles.

The term Homo Economicus, or economic man, is derived from a classical model of economics developed by amongst others Adam Smith, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill. It posits a so-called ‘rational’ or self-interested actor whose primary function is to utilise and maximise all possible things, situations and others for its own benefit, well-being and prosperity. As the subject of free market economics under capitalism, this ‘essence’ of man is to be understood as paradoxically ‘natural’ and socially constructed, suggesting a historical determinacy overlaid with a kind of economic realism. This destiny then, although ostensibly beyond the reach of ethics, is arguably the ethical subject position of modern times, the essence of the political as the force behind the (social) conditions of production.

At Cabinet, the works on view visualise or materialise the role of economics in relation to art, the artist or to labour in general, picking it apart through the production of individual or collective histories. The exhibition reflects upon the temporal insurgence of the unequal spatial occupations of neo-liberal capitalism as its focus, with its attendant programme of post-Fordist operations of financialization, deregulation, privatisation and the production of debt as modes of capital accumulation.

For the exhibition at MD72, the term Homo Economicus is strategically imposed upon a group of works that either point to or embody junctures of economic realism focusing upon the role of the artist and/or her labour. It problematises the very definitions of and between aesthetic labour and the role of the artist herself: the self-employed, creative worker whose life and production are her work.

By looking at various institution-critical productions, the ‘work’ of both exhibitions is then to reflect upon the convergence of artistic labour with the persistence of so-called ‘Homo Economicus’ as a corpse – the ethical subject – under the decentered regime of zombie capitalism, with its transnational flows of capital, and what possible political consequences and political resistances this horizon might engender.

Link: “Homo Economicus” at Cabinet

Posted in Andreas Siekmann, Ayreen Anastas & Rene Gabri, Cabinet, Europe, Exhibitions, Franck Scurti, Group Show, London, Mona V?t?manu & Florin Tudor, Pavel Büchler, Spaces, United Kingdom, Zachary Formwalt | Tagged art, Art news, artist news, Avant Garde, contemporary art, Installation Art, Street Art, studio visit, Urban Art | Comments Off

Week in Review: February 19, 2012

February 19, 2012, 10:45 am
Written by Forrest

Welcome to Week in Review, our Sunday round-up of the last 7 days of activity here at Contemporary Art Daily. Please subscribe to our RSS feed, follow us on Twitter, follow us on Tumblr, and become a fan on Facebook.

This week’s featured exhibitions:

Joanne Greenbaum at Shane Campbell

Kaoru Arima at Misako & Rosen

On Kawara at David Zwirner

Olivier Foulon at dépendance

Jean-Frédéric Schnyder at Swiss Institute

Günther Förg at Greene Naftali

Sam Samore at Capitain Petzel

Gerhard Nordström at Malmö Konsthall

George Ortman at Algus Greenspon

Kaspar Müller at Gasconade

Have an excellent week.

Posted in Spaces, Week in Review | Tagged art, Art news, artist news, Avant Garde, contemporary art, Installation Art, Street Art, studio visit, Urban Art | Comments Off

Kaspar Müller at Gasconade

February 19, 2012, 5:15 am
Written by Forrest

Artist: Kaspar Müller

Venue: Gasconade, Milan

Exhibition Title: Stand-up!

Date: January 27 – February 25, 2012

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Gasconade, Milan. Photos by Alessandro Zambianchi.

Press Release:

After moving to Los Angeles in Autumn 1989, Martin Kippenberger bought a 35% share in ownership of an Italian restaurant called Capri in Venice, California. The artist’s obsession with the Ford Capri, an American car that took the name of the most cinematographic Italian island, is an open secret. More than enjoying the pleasure offered by cultural mash-ups, Kippenberger was interested in eating a plate of spaghetti Bolognese every day. It goes without saying that this is not the place to discuss the quality of an Italian recipe prepared by (supposedly) American cooks for a German palate (who called spaghetti “noodles,” sic.) Kippenberger ate his spaghetti sitting always at the same table, and every person who entered the restaurant couldn’t but see him.

In 1989 Kaspar Müller was a child. He was born in 1983, in Schaffhausen, a town in northern Switzerland near the Rhine Falls. In the house where he lived with his parents, the TV was in a cabinet that Müller had to open in order to watch the colours chasing each other on the display. After the beginning of his career as an artist in the years 2000, he has been participating in many exhibitions in commercial galleries, institutions and non-profit art spaces, mainly within Switzerland. In June 2011, sitting in a café in Zurich’s railway station, in front of a tomato soup, Müller has accepted the proposal of a solo exhibition in the non-profit art space Gasconade in Milan.

The Gasconade project took its first steps in January 2011, during a phone call between the space’s founder and Federico Vavassori, when the two speakers were more than 400 miles far from each other. Eight months later Vavassori opened his commercial gallery, with which Gasconade shares its office and exhibition space, alternating their parallel programs. The word gasconade appeared in the founder’s notes in a list including the words braggadocio and rodomontade. Since these terms are all synonyms of bombast, it is presumable that the founder was interested in concepts which had nothing to do with the idea of “lightness.” Besides, Vavassori says that in the previous Autumn the founder had read the book L’uccello e la piuma. La questione della leggerezza nell’arte italiana by Luca Cerizza (Vavassori himself read that essay in only three hours, taking advantage of the fact that his friend and future gallery-mate had forgotten a copy of the book in his car.) It is logical to conclude that Gasconade was born out of the purpose of setting apart, with no hesitation, the experiences discussed by Cerizza, focusing on the younger generation of local artists.

The domain www.gasconade.it was bought eight days after the above-mentioned meeting with Müller. Since then, the Swiss artist (who was wearing a black suit during the meeting, not because he was supposed to go and visit his parents, but because he had spent the night in a cocktail bar without, however, making remarkable romantic conquests) has been aware that his exhibition would be an exception proving the rule, a necessary transgression of Gasconade’s precise aim at promoting the work of mostly Milan-based young artists. After all, Müller likes rules, but he likes breaking them even more. The group of works that the artist has presented in his exhibition focused on the human side of art production, at a time when dematerialization and outsourcing of production processes exert an increasingly higher influence on creativity. As most of his artists peers, Müller is part of a category known as “post-studio” artists. Although in some of his works he uses the techniques of applied arts, this happens because technique is a human knowledge; it represents the chance to show off a virtuosity that machines are unable to reproduce. More than fifty blown glass bowls have been lined up along a rope installed in the exhibition space. Focusing on the differences among the bowls rather than on their similarities, Müller precisely decided how and where to place each item, so that the complexity of the work itself has been constantly compromised by the singularity of the elements that composed it. The artist has been gently replying to the expectations that common onlookers have on works of art: he tend, indeed, to formalize a conceptual process in a product endowed with aesthetic and monetary value. After all, glass bowls are transparent, fragile, charming; and they hang on the spectators’ heads.

The history of a work of art, of an exhibition, of an art space is based on the aspirations of a number of people. During youth, ambition cannot be set apart from daily actions. Sometimes it is in contrast with the process that professionalizes passions, some others it accelerates it. By quoting Bruce Nauman, Müller wrote to Gasconade’s founder that “The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths.”In The New Spirit of Capitalism Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello argue that the claim (emerged during the 1968 riots) of a better consideration of the role played by individuals at their workplace has been assimilated by capitalism, which plans people’s daily lives according to perspectives of professional success. In such a context, is it still possible to laugh at our failures? Is it still possible to display them on a stand-up stage? Müller’s exhibition, the artist’s first one in Italy, has astonished spectators leading them to ask: should art play any role in contemporary society or should it rather represent a place where roles do not exist? Some people wondered whether love is still possible, some others what they would do the day after.

Link: Kaspar Müller at Gasconade

Posted in Europe, Exhibitions, Gasconade, Italy, Kaspar Müller, Milan, Spaces | Tagged art, Art news, artist news, Avant Garde, contemporary art, Installation Art, Street Art, studio visit, Urban Art | Comments Off

George Ortman at Algus Greenspon

February 18, 2012, 5:15 am
Written by Forrest

Artist: George Ortman

Venue: Algus Greenspon, New York

Date: January 14 – February 25, 2012

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Algus Greenspon, New York

Press Release:

Algus Greenspon presents George Ortman, Constructions: 1949 – 2011, an exhibition surveying 62 years of the artist’s work, opening Saturday, January 14 and running through Saturday, February 25. A reception for the artist will be held on the day of the opening from 6 to 8pm.

George Ortman’s painted constructions of the 1950s and early 1960s are pioneering works. Their reductive geometry and modular color were widely seen as being at the forefront of young artists move away from abstract expressionism. Writing about the Whitney’s Young America 1960, Hilton Kramer noted that “There is only one artist [in the exhibition] who is equal to a museum showing: that is Mr. George Ortman.” Indeed, Ortman’s work was a particular inspiration to Donald Judd who saw it at the Stable Gallery and repeatedly cited its importance as an antecedent: “[In 1959] George Ortman was doing his best reliefs and had been working along that line for some time. Their worth has never been adequately acknowledged.” (Local History, Arts Yearbook 7, 1964)

In many ways Ortman’s early work forms a missing link between post-war abstraction and the geometric art of the 1960s. As such it fits neatly beside the occult assemblage of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Lee Bontecou in a progression away from abstract expressionism towards something concrete and revelatory. Judd remarks in his seminal essay on the development of the new art of the 1960s, Specific Objects that “The work of Johns and Rauschenberg and assemblage and low-relief generally, Ortman’s reliefs for example, are preliminaries.” (Arts Yearbook 8, 1965) Interestingly, Ortman shares with Johns and Rauschenberg a type of quotidian surrealism, as well as ties to Dada. Ortman’s link to post-war Surrealism originates in his studies at Stanley William Hayter‘s Atelier 17 in New York in 1949. The Dada connection comes via Duchamp, and is evident in the parallels between Ortman’s formal geomancy and chess. As Judd observes: “[Ortman’s constructions] seem to be games or models for some activity and suggest chance, from much through little, controlled and uncontrolled, operating on things both related and unrelated. They are one of the few instances of completely unnaturalistic art. They are concerned with a new area of experience, one which is relevant philosophically as well as emotionally.” (Local History, Arts Yearbook 7, 1964)

The current exhibition starts with Ortman’s first construction, Beginnings (1949), done while in Paris on the GI Bill. Beginnings clearly shows the artist’s assimilation of surrealist influence, taking Cornell’s boxes in a new, abstract constructivist, direction. Journey of a Young Man (1957 is a sententious work marking Ortman’s transition from surrealism to purely geometric constructions. Like all of Ortman’s art it belies a furtive narrative figuration undergoing an analytical progression towards pure abstraction. Tales of Love (1959), the largest work in Ortman’s breakthrough 1960 exhibition at Stable Gallery, is the apogee of the relentless, reductivist constructions that Judd found so inspirational. Blue Diamond (1960) is Ortman’s most widely reproduced work and was a centerpiece of Toward a New Abstraction, the important 1963 exhibition at the Jewish Museum that defined then emerging post-painterly tendencies. (Here Ortman took equal place alongside Ellswoth Kelly, Frank Stella, Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland.) In the 1970s, as a faculty member at Cranbrook Academy near Detroit, Ortman’s work acquired a riveting elegance. Constructions such as Woodward (1974) and Eye (1977) have the unified formal presence of the best post-war abstraction to come out of New York.

In the late 1980s and 1990s Ortman turned his eye toward Detroit, seeing in the city’s tragic decay themes that were familiar to him from his work at the Tempo Playhouse, the theater he cofounded in 1953 that was the first in America to present plays by Ionesco and Genet. Pilgrim and Jefferson Avenue are two major constructions from this period. Stark in their use of silver, white and graphite, they have a lucid mechanical ferocity bearing interesting comparison to the work of Lee Bontecou. Most recently, fascinated by the geometric possibilities presented by the intersection of four inclined planes, Ortman has been working on an ongoing series of free standing pyramidal forms.

Throughout his career, Ortman has made Imitations based upon classical and modern masterpieces. Included here are drawings for Heartbeat, Ortman’s first (1962) Imitation based on Matisse’s Piano Lesson, and a group of drawings from his study of Paolo Uccello’s Battle of San Romano (1965). These drawings emphasize the figurative and symbolic foundation of Ortman’s art, demonstrating the mechanics of his abstraction and showcasing his extraordinary talent as a draughtsman–an interesting aside for a geometric abstractionist shared by others of his generation such as Ellsworth Kelly.

George Ortman was born in 1926 in Oakland, California. In the early 1950s Ortman showed at the cooperative Tanager Gallery on Tenth Street, then in 1957 and 1960, at the Stable Gallery. Throughout the 1960s Ortman showed at the Howard Wise Gallery. The artist had a one-person exhibition at the Walker Art Center in 1965. In 1970 Ortman left to teach at the Cranbrook Academy in Michigan and stopped exhibiting in New York. The current show is George Ortman’s third exhibition since returning to New York in the 1990s. In 2001 this gallery presented a cycle of paintings from the 1980s based on Georges Seurat’s Models, and in 2006 an exhibition of 4 constructions and new cast sculptures.

Link: George Ortman at Algus Greenspon

Posted in Algus Greenspon, Exhibitions, George Ortman, New York, Spaces, United States | Tagged art, Art news, artist news, Avant Garde, contemporary art, Installation Art, Street Art, studio visit, Urban Art | Comments Off

Gerhard Nordström at Malmö Konsthall

February 17, 2012, 5:15 am
Written by Forrest

Artist: Gerhard Nordström

Venue: Malmö Konsthall, Malmö

Date: December 17, 2011 – February 26, 2012

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Malmö Konsthall, Malmö

Press Release:

Born in 1925, Gerhard Nordström has taken a clear stand for much of his career against the abuse of power and the destruction of the environment. In his art he depicts in a direct and unavoidable way social injustices and the consequences of consumer society. He made his big public breakthrough in the early 1970s with a suite of paintings entitled Sommaren 1970 (The Summer of 1970), which are now regarded as some of the most important examples of 20th-century Swedish art.

Nordström began his artistic career at a young age. As a fourteen-year-old he became a student, at Skånska Målarskolan in Malmö. Three years later he was accepted into the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, where he studied for several separate periods of time during the years 1943 to 1949. At the student exhibitions he was noticed and appreciated by critics, who regarded him as a young and talented painter. Despite his successes with painting, it was graphics that came to play a central role for Nordström during the 1950s and ’60s. The 1950s’ experiments with colour and form led him to eventually regard painting as empty stylising, with too narrow a focus on geometry and abstraction. His belief that painting was an insufficient form of expression caused him to experience an artistic crisis.

Graphics became the turning point Nordström needed to progress in his artistry by offering him a freer relationship with art. Instead of focusing on the set of problems associated with the act of painting, he could concentrate on the black-and-white colour scheme and the possibilities it offered for creating form and volume. During the 1950s, his graphic works featured a Cubist style, which gradually became more and more abstract. In the 1960s, the political message became increasingly prominent in his graphic works, and the contents became more important than the form. With pictures like Hjälten (The Hero), Maktspelet (The Power Game), Konsumentupplysning (Consumer Information), and Kunskapens frukt (The Fruits of Knowledge), Nordström depicts the brutal and meaningless aspects of military ideals and war. He does so as directly and plainly as Francisco Goya did 200 years earlier in his graphic works Los Desastres de la Guerra (The Disasters of War).

At the end of the 1960s, at the same time as he was working as a graphic artist, Nordström also began to use painting as a way to criticise war and its futility. To do this, he created anti-militaristic “wall charts”, whose clear, pedagogical imagery resembles that of the wall charts formerly used in schools. In his paintings he linked images with texts, such as quotations from military instruction manuals, to make his message even clearer. In this way he succeeded in conveying the total absurdity and inhumanity of all forms of warfare.

Nordström’s anti-militaristic message recurs even more strongly in his suite of paintings entitled Sommaren 1970. Moved by images from the American Life magazine’s reportage on the Vietnam War and the Song My massacre in 1968, he decided to depict such ruthless violence in a way Swedes had not previously experienced. War and its terrible consequences have never been so present to us as in these paintings, set in an environment we recognise. At the heart of the idyllic Swedish summer landscape we see mutilated bodies, dead women and children – the result of completely incomprehensible cruelty and violence.

Nordström’s political and social commitment is also reflected in works that depict our environment and mankind’s impact on it. Whilst these works are not as direct in their criticism as those in which he depicts war and cruelty, they take a clear stand against the environmental destruction and wastefulness that threaten our natural world. These works include a series of paintings in which he depicts one of the most crucial prerequisites for our survival – the soil.

Gerhard Nordström was born in 1925 and lives and works in Ystad. He taught at the Forum art school in Malmö from 1964 to 1987.

Link: Gerhard Nordström at Malmö Konsthall

Posted in Europe, Exhibitions, Gerhard Nordström, Malmo Konsthall, Spaces, Sweden | Tagged art, Art news, artist news, Avant Garde, contemporary art, Installation Art, Street Art, studio visit, Urban Art | Comments Off

Megan Wolfe’s Reformation: Movement in Color -a Patron of the Arts Online Gallery Project written by Maria Anderson with photos by Michael Cuffe for Warholian

February 16, 2012, 2:37 pm
Written by LyricaGlory

For Megan Wolfe, dry media has always felt more natural. “It’s easier to fall into,” she says, “while painting has always felt like more of a process.” A San Francisco-based artist known for her avian subject matter, Megan has long worked on hyperrealist, graphite drawings inspired by her own migration from Mississippi to sunny California. [...] Continue reading →

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Günther Förg at Greene Naftali

February 15, 2012, 10:45 am
Written by Forrest

Artist: Günther Förg

Venue: Greene Naftali, New York

Date: January 19 – February 18, 2012

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Greene Naftali, New York

Press Release:

Greene Naftali is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by Guenther Foerg, marking the first gallery presentation of the artists work in New York in over a decade. This exhibition, comprised of twelve large-scale paintings completed from 2007 to 2009, is Foerg’s first at the gallery. His work has been shown at Galerie Max Hetzler, Galerie Gisela Capitain, and Galerie Barbel Grasslin as well as major museums including the Stedelijk Museum, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and Kunsthaus Bregenz. Foerg’s work was last exhibited in New York at Luhring Augustine in 2000.

A well-known figure in the 1980s, Foerg is a key member of an influential generation of German artists including Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen, and Georg Herold. His distinct investigations into the Bauhaus and Modernism take painterly issues into the realms of architecture, sculpture, and photography to reflect on both individual experience and historical memory. Foerg took the Cologne school sensibility, associated with an embrace of ironic distancing, to his own ends by pursuing an intellectual painting practice that offers the possibility of subjectivity and autonomy, stating that abstract art today is what one sees and nothing more.

The recent paintings in this exhibition mark a stylistic departure from Foerg’s signature lead paintings of the 80s, which have been widely exhibited in the US. His commitment to pure painterly abstraction coupled with a longstanding dialogue with Minimalism is evident in the canvases on view. By reducing the act of painting to its most elemental gesture, monumentalized on a human scale, Foerg activates his floating, rhythmic brushstrokes with a physical presence. His vibrantly colored marks are repetitive yet singular, doing away with shape and focusing instead on the total abstraction of the brushstroke.

The nuanced dynamism of the three gray paintings included in this exhibition speaks to Foerg’s skillful use of color. The limited palette of these works, which the artist has likened to erased chalkboards, suggests a tension between presence and absence that challenges our threshold of perception. Foerg’s visually rich compositions explore intricacies of color and mark, addressing classical issues in painting while testing the limits of pictorial composition.

Guenther Foerg was born in Fussen, Germany in 1952 and studied at the Akademie der bildenden Kunst, Munich.

Link: Günther Förg at Greene Naftali

Posted in Exhibitions, Greene Naftali, Günther Förg, New York, Spaces, United States | Tagged art, Art news, artist news, Avant Garde, contemporary art, Installation Art, Street Art, studio visit, Urban Art | Comments Off

Jean-Frédéric Schnyder at Swiss Institute

February 15, 2012, 5:15 am
Written by Forrest

Artist: Jean-Frédéric Schnyder

Venue: Swiss Institute, New York

Date: November 23, 2011 – February 26, 2012

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Aargauer Kunsthaus Aarau and Swiss Confederation, Federal Office of Culture, Bern.

Press Release:

Swiss Institute is proud to present a solo show of Jean-Frédéric Schnyder (born 1945, lives in Zug, Switzerland) in the United States. Despite his long and successful career the Swiss artist has remained relatively unknown beyond European borders. At Swiss Institute Jean-Frédéric Schnyder will exhibit a series of small format landscape paintings LANDSCHAFT I-XXXV (1990/91) as well as the recent video installation Corso Schnapsparade (2009).

In 1969 legendary Swiss curator Harald Szeemann invited the 24-year old artist to participate in the seminal group show When Attitudes Become Form at Kunsthalle Bern. Three years later Szeemann also included him in Documenta 5 in Kassel. During this time Schnyder shifted from object-based art to painting. As a self-taught artist he always envied painters for having a proper job. “Coming home with rosy cheeks after painting en plein air makes you entirely happy,” states the artist with a chuckle. But he also appreciates painting as a form of expression, which for many people is a synonym for art.

For the series Wanderung (Hike) exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1993, he hiked along the entire Swiss national highway from East to West and painted 119 vistas of the traffic, portraying Switzerland in a previously unseen manner. Schnyder knows how to challenge painting through a conceptual approach and with ironic distance. He deliberately undermines traditional positions with a tongue in cheek attitude.

At Swiss Institute, Schnyder exhibits Landschaft (Landscape) I-XXXV (1990/91) a typical example of his vision of painting. After finding a subject, he usually examines every possibility in his imagination without doing any preparatory drawings. The common denominator of this series is the archetypal small house treated in 35 small-sized oil paintings. From the hut of Hansel and Gretel to suburban architecture with a Swastika-lit sky, the modality of a small world is investigated by painting. “I do not care which associations my paintings provoke. Swastika, cruxifix and sugar cubes are just motives which are interesting to paint. To apply color—this is what painting is about, right?—is for me the common thread.” Schnyder’s manifesto is purely nonchalant, a balancing act between humor, kitsch and a persiflage about Western art.

Also on view is Corso Schnapsparade (Liquor Parade, 2009) an animated film featuring a highly eccentric procession. Small wooden horses pull trailers loaded with miniature versions of Swiss liquor bottles. The horses and trailers are cut in wood by Schnyder himself with painstaking craftmanship. The scenery has a childish or almost naïve element that is instantly contradicted by the presence of hard liquor. The soundtrack from the well-known film Sissy further enhances the grandeur of the parade. Schnyder’s Liquor Parade at once celebrates and ridicules festival culture and its rituals.

The exhibition has been made possible with public funds from Kanton Zug.

Link: Jean-Frédéric Schnyder at Swiss Institute

Posted in Exhibitions, Jean-Frédéric Schnyder, New York, Spaces, Swiss Institute, United States | Tagged art, Art news, artist news, Avant Garde, contemporary art, Installation Art, Street Art, studio visit, Urban Art | Comments Off

Olivier Foulon at dépendance

February 14, 2012, 10:45 am
Written by Forrest

Artist: Olivier Foulon

Venue: dépendance, Brussels

Exhibition Title: Stehimbiss

Date: January 1 – February 14, 2012

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of dépendance, Brussels

Press Release:

In Autumn 1865 Gustave Courbet stood at his easel in Trouville, Normandie and painted James Whistler’s model and lover Jo, looking at herself in a mirror as Jo, the Beautiful Irish Girl. Soon after a collector requested the portrait of Jo. Courbet stood at his easel, made a copy of the painting, sold the original and kept the copy. Soon after a collector requested the portrait of Jo. Courbet stood at his easel, made a copy of the copy of the painting, sold it and kept the copy of the painting. Soon after a collector requested the portrait of Jo. Courbet stood at his easel, made a copy of the copy of the painting, sold it and kept the copy of the painting.

Link: Olivier Foulon at dépendance

Posted in Belgium, Brussels, Europe, Exhibitions, Olivier Foulon, Spaces, dependance | Tagged art, Art news, artist news, studio visit | Comments Off

On Kawara at David Zwirner

February 14, 2012, 5:15 am
Written by Forrest

Artist: On Kawara

Venue: David Zwirner, New York

Exhibition Title: Date Painting(s) in New York and 136 Other Cities

Date: January 6 – February 11, 2012

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, New York

Press Release:

David Zwirner is pleased to present the exhibition On Kawara: Date Painting(s) in New York and 136 Other Cities, on view at the gallery’s 525 and 533 West 19 th Street spaces. The exhibition will feature over 150 works selected by the artist, comprising a seminal presentation of his renowned date paintings from 1966 to the present (known collectively as the Today series).

Spanning both of the gallery’s exhibition spaces at 525 and 533 West 19th Street, the exhibition will address the temporal and geographical scope of the artist’s continuing practice, which is characterized by its meditative approach to concepts of time, space, and consciousness. Date paintings from each year since the inception of the Today series will be brought together in an expansive, evocative installation: a comprehensive selection of works painted in New York will be displayed in one gallery, while the second exhibition space will be devoted to the presentation of works painted in almost all other cities ever visited by the artist.

For over four decades, On Kawara has created paintings, drawings, books, and recordings that examine chronological time and its function as a measure of human existence. The artist began making his now signature date paintings in 1966 in New York City, and continues to make them in different parts of the world. Following the same basic procedure and format, each of these works is carefully executed by hand with the date documented in the language and grammatical conventions of the country in which it is made (Esperanto is used when the ﬁrst language of a given country does not use the Roman alphabet). The artist has created a version of the sans serif typeface, which he uses to meticulously paint the letters and numbers in white on a monochrome surface. Each painting, when not on display, is encased in a cardboard box handmade by the artist. On certain days, a newspaper clipping from the city in which the painting is executed is selected and used to line the interior of the box.

The particular syntax with which any given date is recorded evokes speciﬁc locations and subtly reﬂects the regional differences that exist despite the universality of time. With works on display from over a hundred cities in more than thirty countries, the grammar of the paintings emerges as a code to be deciphered. The global dimension of the Today series is further evidenced by the local newspapers accompanying many of the works, whose headlines add to the virtually endless events encompassed by the given date recorded by Kawara (presentation binders with facsimiles of the newspapers clippings will be accessible for visitors to read)

New York occupies a central importance within the Today series as the city where the ﬁrst date painting was made (JAN. 4, 1966) and where the majority of the works have been executed. It also marks the location of three signiﬁcant paintings produced on the days surrounding the ﬁrst manned moon landing in July 1969 (JULY 16, 1969; JULY 20, 1969; and JULY 21, 1969); each presents the largest canvas size Kawara has used for the date paintings (61 x 89 inches). The actual newspaper clippings accompanying these works are exhibited alongside the paintings and offer a narrative component, with the headline of one reading “MAN WALKS ON MOON.”

Also on view will be one-hundred-year calendars: one from the twentieth century and another from the twenty- ﬁrst. Starting with the date of his birth, Kawara systematically marks each day of his life with a yellow dot on the calendars, and registers a completed date painting with a green dot (red dots signify that more than one painting was completed on that given day).

Japanese writer Lei Yamabe notes in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition that each date painting “is like a letter whose delivery has been delayed, or one might say that each work resembles a star.” Conversely, for each day in which a date painting is not produced, “Kawara is shut in the closed room of time, simultaneously alive and dead…[T]he ﬂickering between life and death, existence and non-existence, is transferred intact to the entire Today series made up of date paintings. This is because the series will be complete when Kawara’s body ceases to exist—when superposition ﬁnally collapses completely and Kawara has entered the irreversible phase of ‘death.’ Or conversely, because until that moment the series itself is a superposition of existence and non-existence.” (1)

On Kawara: Date Painting(s) in New York and 136 Other Cities will be accompanied by an eponymous, fully illustrated catalogue published by Ludion. Since 1999, Kawara’s work has been represented by David Zwirner, and On Kawara: Date Painting(s) in New York and 136 Other Cities marks his ﬁfth solo exhibition at the gallery. On Kawara is a prominent ﬁgure in contemporary art, and his work has been included in numerous conceptual art surveys from the seminal Information show at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1970 to 1965-1975: Reconsidering the Object of Art at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 1995-96. The artist’s work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at prominent institutions worldwide, including the Dallas Museum of Art in 2008. On Kawara: Consciousness. Meditation. Watcher on the Hills was a major solo exhibition, which traveled to a dozen international venues between 2002 and 2006, including the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, England; Le Consortium, Dijon, France; Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany; Institute of Contemporary Arts, Singapore; and The Power Plant, Toronto. A long-term installation of the artist’s date paintings is currently on view at Dia:Beacon in Beacon, New York.

(1) Lei Yamabe, “On Kawara’s Quantum Gravitational Body, or the Conﬁnement of Space-Time and the Liberation of Consciousness,” in On Kawara: Date Painting(s) in New York and 136 Other Cities. Exh. cat. (Antwerp: Ludion, 2012)

Link: On Kawara at David Zwirner

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